Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690-1755 (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature)

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature

1. The Epistolary Novel Representations of Consciousness Joe Bray 2. Slavery and Augustan Literature Swift, Pope, Gay John Richardson 3. The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century Anxious Employment Iona Italia 4. Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 Anthony Pollock

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

Anthony Pollock

New York

London

First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pollock, Anthony, 1968– Gender and the fictions of the public sphere, 1690-1755 / by Anthony Pollock. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in eighteenth-century literature) A study of feminist and counter-feminist writing in the eighteenth century. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Feminism in literature. 2. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 3. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. English literature—Male authors—History and criticism. 5. Anti-feminism—Great Britain— History—18th century 6. Feminism and literature—Great Britain—History—18th century. I. Title. PR448.F45P66 2009 820.9'352209033—dc22 2008010905 ISBN 0-203-89108-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-99004-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-89108-2 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-99004-2 ISBN13: 978-0-203-89108-7

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

PART I Models and Countermodels of English Public Discourse, 1690–1714 1 2 3

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists: The Politics of English Publicness, 1690–1714

19

Neutering Addison and Steele: Aesthetic Failure and the Spectatorial Public Sphere

55

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform: “Manley,” Mandeville, and the Female Tatler

75

PART II Tory Feminism and the Gendered Reader, Astell to Haywood 4 5

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity

117

Voyeurism, Feminist Impartiality, and Cultural Authority: Haywood and the Addisonian Periodical

147

Notes Bibliography Index

185 217 225

Acknowledgments

A project of this kind inevitably benefits from more individual investments than can possibly be taken note of in a brief section of thanks, so this list is a necessarily incomplete accounting of its author’s many debts. In the earliest stages of conceptualization, some of the central ideas behind this book were shaped by the generous and incisive commentary of my graduate advisors and fellow graduate students in eighteenth-century studies at Cornell University, among whom I would single out for particular thanks David Alvarez, Anne Berger, Bonnie Blackwell, Rick Bogel, Cynthia Chase, Jonathan Culler, Jody Greene, Jen Hill, Peter Hohendahl, Donal McQuillan, Harry Shaw, and most especially Neil Saccamano, who has remained a model of interpretive acuity and intellectual vigilance long after my departure from Ithaca. Many of my colleagues at the University of Illinois have since provided invaluable suggestions as the manuscript gradually neared completion, and I am particularly grateful to Suvir Kaul, Trish Loughran, Curtis Perry, Julia Saville, and Ted Underwood for their patient and helpful readings. Bob Markley has been a committed and reliable guide throughout this process, and I am profoundly thankful for his continuing advice and encouragement. Much of the research and writing for this project was funded by a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Newberry Library (Chicago) and a Mayers Fellowship at the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA). I want to thank the reference and research staff at both libraries, and to acknowledge the ways in which the prospectus and chapter drafts of this book benefited from the close scrutiny of scholars in the intellectual communities of these wonderful archives—my thanks especially to Sara Austin, Matt Cohen, Jim Epstein, Betsy Erkkila, Lisa Freeman, Jim Grossman, Massimo Scalabrini, Ethan Shagan, and Jennifer Snead, all of whose questions and insights helped me to improve key points in the manuscript. I would also like to thank the script’s anonymous readers at Routledge for their kind words of support and their clarifying suggestions for improvement. Of course, any mistakes or oversights in the book are entirely my own.

viii Acknowledgments In more recent days, I have been fortunate in the efficient and detailed editorial assistance provided at Routledge by Erica Wetter and Liz Levine, both of whom have played crucial roles in bringing this project to fruition. An earlier version of Chapter Two originally appeared in ELH, and I would like to acknowledge The Johns Hopkins University Press as the original publisher of that material. Finally, I would like to offer my deepest appreciation to my family, for their longstanding and apparently infi nite support, and to Katy and Felix, for providing me with a home, wherever our adventures happened to take us.

Introduction

I. LEARNING TO CURTSY: GENDER, ENLIGHTENED PUBLICNESS, AND MANDEVILLE’S ALLEGORY OF READING In one of the extended footnotes to his Fable of the Bees (1705–14), Bernard Mandeville attacks the gently reformist periodicals of Addison and Steele in a way that might surprise many modern readers of the Tatler and the Spectator (1709–14).1 Describing the essayists’ “politeness” and “elegance” as a cover for their “ingenious sophistry,” Mandeville compares Steele’s rhetorical address to his reading public to the “tricks made use of by the women that would teach children to be mannerly.”2 For Mandeville, Steele’s hopeful accounts of human nature and of his audience’s potential for self-improvement should be viewed as “fulsome flatteries” and “abominable lies” by “anyone above the capacity of an infant.”3 To illustrate his point, Mandeville develops an allegorical scene in which Steele’s readers are represented by a young girl who is learning to curtsy: When an awkward girl, before she can either speak or go, begins after many entreaties to make the first rude essays of curtsying, the nurse falls in an ecstasy of praise: “There’s a delicate curtsy! O fine miss! There’s a pretty lady! Mama, Miss can make a better curtsy than her sister Molly!”; the same is echoed over by the maids, whilst Mama almost hugs the child to pieces; only Miss Molly, who being four years older knows how to make a handsome curtsy, wonders at the perverseness of their judgment and, swelling with indignation, is ready to cry at the injustice that is done her, till, being whispered in the ear that it is only to please the baby, and that she is a woman, she grows proud at being let into the secret and, rejoicing at the superiority of her understanding, repeats what has been said with large additions, and insults over the weakness of her sister, whom all this while she fancies to be the only bubble among them.4 At fi rst glance, Mandeville’s allegorical account of what it really means to participate as a consumer in post-Restoration English public culture seems

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Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

more confusing than illuminating, even at the rather pedantic level of trying to sort out the figures and their significance: Which little girl is supposed to represent Steele’s audience, Molly or the toddler (or both)? Which adult character in the scene represents Steele, the nurse or the mother (or both)? How can we describe the identity and aims of the scene’s apparently demystified narrator? Is it Mandeville himself, or is the narrator yet another bubble from whom we should distance ourselves? Moreover, what are the implications of Mandeville’s analogies—reader as little girl, writer as tricky woman—for our understanding of his culture’s gender politics? How compelling are these analogies, and what do we learn by attending to them? First, Mandeville’s image of public culture as a trick to inculcate manners into unsuspecting children offers an immanent critique, within early eighteenth-century English philosophical discourse, of what we now call the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere. Rather than a rational-critical discussion between presumed equals, Mandeville’s public sphere is a scene of regressive antagonism and competitive emulation in which readers vie to establish who among them can most convincingly reproduce the culture’s ideology of propriety. One need not import a potentially anachronistic interpretive model from modern or postmodern social theory (say, Adorno, Foucault, or Althusser) in order to understand the disciplinary aspects of enlightenment publicness. According to Mandeville’s allegory, reading Addison and Steele’s essays causes the public to introject a normative framework that will regulate their bodies (in the figure of the baby who must curtsy properly before she can “either speak or go”), their sense of personal identity (Molly becomes “a woman” through the whispers of her superiors), and the reproduction of a particular social order (Molly “repeats what has been said with large additions”). Like Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele often imagine reform-through-reading as a way of positively cultivating or redirecting ostensibly natural aptitudes and an innate human desire for benevolent sociability, while Mandeville views enlightenment as a kind of interpellation in which we are invited to identify with our social superiors through the force of eloquence. 5 My point is not simply to trump Addison and Steele with Mandeville, to replace one univocal reading of the period with another, but to recover a sense of the period’s ideological complexity by attending to perspectives that have often been left out of historical work on the early eighteenth century. Mandeville colorfully demonstrates that there was a language of deconstructive skepticism available within the period’s own self-understanding that co-existed alongside the apparently more confident, affirmative views of figures like Addison, Shaftesbury, and Steele, all of whom have been claimed as the era’s representative voices by a Whig historiography that is ideologically indebted to those figures. Precisely those systems of print publication and consumption that a long line of thinkers (from Addison through Kant to Habermas) have taken for granted as progressive, liberatory, and demystifying, were viewed by

Introduction 3 many of their contemporaries as a clever imposition, part of a larger political project whereby “the ambitious might reap the more benefit from and govern vast numbers with greater ease and security.”6 In many important ways, then, the debate over the politics of public communicative rationality that we now think of as a postmodern contest between Habermasians and Foucauldians recasts, in a new discursive register, arguments carried out at the very emergence of the early enlightenment public sphere: in an increasingly literate, information-driven English society with decreasingly effective censorship of printed material—particularly after the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695—who will control the circuits of media communication, to what cultural and economic ends, and with what implications for social and individual agency? At a more immediate, everyday level, how will this culture think about those practices—writing, reading, conversing, and spectating—that have traditionally been associated with the literary public sphere, who will be able to perform these activities, in what specific contexts, and with what effects? Mandeville’s allegory approaches these questions in a way that reveals a second complication for the Kantian–Habermasian take on enlightened public culture: the idea that there is never simply a unified public there to be addressed, but always a heterogeneous and internally fractured configuration of plural publics, multiple audiences that are to a certain extent produced and set in relation to one another by being addressed. While recent theorists of multiple audiences and counterpublics—critics like Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner—have focused on the way readers and writers construct their own identities in relation to a dominant model of publicness, Mandeville’s allegory implies that such distinctions are produced and managed by the culture industry itself.7 Mandeville represents the heterogeneous public as the opposition between Molly and the baby, each of whom is invited to identify with her social superiors through a different medium of affiliation; while Mama and the nurse encourage the baby to imitate mechanically the polite, external formality of feminine manners by praising her desire to behave as they do, they initiate Molly into the category of womanhood by “letting her in on the secret” that such praise of imitative inferiors is purely manipulative, a way of keeping them “pleased.” For Mandeville, Steele’s texts imply not a bourgeois public sphere but at least two distinct audiences, two publics. On the one hand, Steele has readers who take his false praise of their human potential at face value and are thereby duped into gradually making the moral equivalent of pretty curtsies, which might involve merely aspiring to embody the polished, urbane, and tasteful model of subjectivity idealized in Steele’s periodicals; Steele’s readers in this category might fail miserably (or humorously) in such aspirations to cultural superiority through imitation, but even that failure would mark the success of Steele’s project, since the key to what Mandeville calls “skillful management” (then as now) is getting people to want upward mobility rather than materially enabling that mobility.8 On the other hand, following Mandeville’s allegory, Steele also constructs

4

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

readers who see through the explicit surface meaning of his texts, a more select group who understand the usefulness of false praise for keeping their intellectual inferiors on the right track; as Mandeville points out, however, these less mystified readers themselves become bubbles by taking Steele’s praise of their comparative lucidity at face value, as if it were not (like the aforementioned praise of inferiors) also intended to keep them “mannerly” by reinforcing their identification with the papers’ cultural authority. In a sense, Mandeville’s text then produces yet another public for Steele, an even more demystified reader who (by reading Mandeville) has been let in on the secret about being let in on the secret. In Mandeville’s account, as “lawgivers” and “other wise men that have labored for the establishment of society” all know, the strategy behind having a public culture is twofold: first, you “introduce an emulation amongst men” by dividing the species into classes “vastly differing from one another,” and then you make each side of the antagonism feel praised above the other.9 Industrious and frugal middle-class readers can feel morally superior to the decadent and ostentatious nobility, while aristocratic readers can feel culturally superior to the money-grubbing bourgeois—since people who feel superior in this internalized way are both less likely to disrupt the current order, and more likely to buy periodical essays that tell them how great they are (becoming). Paradoxically, at this third order of demystification Mandeville sets in motion the same mechanism of emulation and distinction he sees in Steele, but he does so by calling attention to the mechanism itself.10 Unlike the emulative multiple audiences in Mandeville’s account, the counterpublics theorized by Fraser and Warner (among others) compete not to gain approval from the cultural guardians of a particular set of acceptable behaviors and values, but to articulate an alternative vision of ethical community in opposition to the dominant model, often by demonstrating the exclusionary and contradictory aspects of normative publicness. Again, what postmodern social theory would call self-consciously counterpublic discourses of this kind came into being at the inception of the bourgeois public sphere, largely by demystifying the false universality of Addison and Steele’s general public in light of the gendered hierarchy they both assume and perpetuate. In some of their controversial and widely read publications from the 1690s to the 1710s, Mary Astell, Delarivier Manley, and Bernard Mandeville counter the paternalistic values of the ascendant Whig cultural hegemony by insisting on the various forms of Whig hypocrisy, with specific regard either to the gender politics of education and marriage (in the case of Astell), or to the scandalous, pleasure-driven irrationality of ostensibly rational public conversation (in the cases of Manley and Mandeville).11 Though perhaps not intended to correct hypocrisy or to create a more equitable society for women, Mandeville’s allegory draws attention, fi nally, to this third-blind spot in the Kantian–Habermasian reading of enlightenment public-sphere discourse: its genderedness, the fact that its addressees are figured as feminine or feminized.

Introduction 5 It is significant that Mandeville uses childish female figures to embody Steele’s supposed ideal or proper consumer for printed goods in the literary public sphere. As Kathryn Shevelow points out in her analysis of the early periodical, many post-Restoration editors associated women with a number of qualities that made them a, if not the, logical target audience for their cultural commodities. Among these qualities, Shevelow lists women’s limited education, which necessitated a “style shorn of elaborate constructions and unexplained allusions”; women’s putatively large amount of “empty” leisure time, a condition male editors both idealized and problematized, since it left women prey to potentially wasteful or unsavory activities for which periodicals’ “respectable educational entertainment” would provide an “antidote”; and, fi nally, women’s presumed responsiveness to the literary combination of delight with instruction.12 In Shevelow’s account, by aiming their texts at women readers, early eighteenth-century periodical editors “established a common denominator for all reading levels, both male and female”—a claim that echoes Nancy Armstrong’s broader contention that the modern subject of print culture is “fi rst and foremost a female.”13 Shevelow’s argument fi nds ample support in Mandeville’s allegory of reading, in which enlightenment through public culture is essentially the process of learning “to behave oneself womanly”–in short, to read rightly is to become a woman, in accordance with the increasingly narrow, domestic ideal being developed by Addison, Steele, and others.14 Thus Mandeville’s text, far beyond his limited intention to prove the selfish motives behind ostensibly virtuous behavior, neatly lays bare a gendered dynamic at work in the early enlightenment culture industry. His allegory figures production and control over ethical ideology as an apparently benign form of masculinity: Steele’s self-effacing, charming, and polite sophistries that cajole us unconsciously into becoming what he apparently wants us to be. At the same time, however, the dissemination, enforcement, and reproduction of that ethos get imagined as the burden of women: after all, it’s not the harsh discipline of a tyrannical patriarch that Molly and the baby are made to internalize, but the gentle praise of women (Mama and the nurse) helping girls adopt a proper comportment and a more advanced self-understanding. The misogyny that conditions Mandeville’s choice to exemplify socially useful manipulation through the “tricks” women use in raising children unwittingly reveals his culture’s requirement that men’s disingenuous perpetuation of their own power must be simultaneously displaced onto the deceptive “fulsome flatteries” of feminized domestic discourse, and carried out as a strategy of manipulation between women who, in this scene, internalize and promote the ideology of female propriety without a man being present or even mentioned as the ultimate spectator they’re trying to please.15 In Mandeville’s account, Steele’s paternalistic control over public discourse gets effaced by the pervasive feminization and domestication of the act of reading, an act that is far from neutral in its aims and far from apolitical in its consequences.

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Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

II. WOMEN’S WRITING AND THE EARLY WHIG PUBLIC SPHERE: THE ARGUMENT Mandeville’s allegory of reading in early eighteenth-century English print culture clashes with many of the period’s myths about itself, just as it does with more recent public-sphere studies that have taken those myths at face value.16 To begin with, Mandeville indexes contemporary skepticism about Whig cultural authorities who often assert, as Steele does in Tatler 225 (September 16, 1710), that the universal principles of equality, inclusiveness, and rational critique are the very life of public discourse. Such principles have long been taken as representative of the post-Restoration English public sphere, in terms of both its practices and its self-understanding. Jürgen Habermas, for example, claims that the decades after the end of censorship (1695) mark the emergence of egalitarian discursive and material spaces in English culture, primarily the periodical press and the coffee-house culture associated with it.17 In these new arenas, according to Habermas, status distinctions between participants were temporarily bracketed so that discussions would be governed by the rationality of the better argument, rather than by the force of pre-existing power relations. But the work of Mandeville and others reveals how these normative principles functioned as a kind of pervasive fantasy or cultural fiction that served to perpetuate particular forms of hierarchy and exclusion. For Mandeville, the Whig public sphere promotes reading not as a form of socially consequential engagement, but as a means of getting readers to internalize a politically useful set of cultural norms. Moreover, Mandeville’s allegory emphasizes the extent to which the female reader troubles both Whig ideology and Habermasian theories of public discourse: in the figure of the girl learning to curtsy—imagined not as exceptional but as the paradigmatic addressee of early print culture—Mandeville found the perfect emblem for a public sphere characterized more by affective, administered identity-formation than by rational, heteroglossic dialogue. Analyzing a wide range of materials produced between the 1690s to the 1750s, from canonical political theory and feminist treatises, to the ephemera of the periodical press, to amatory fiction and the early sentimental novel, this book offers a new interpretation of the early English public sphere by focusing on the period’s conflicting models of reading and political subjectivity. By examining on the figure of the gendered reader, I revise current readings of the period in four significant ways. First, this study re-evaluates the era’s dominant model of publicness—the spectatorial paradigm of reading developed in Addison and Steele’s popular essay periodical, The Spectator (1711–14)—by contrasting the political implications of that model against the norms of the very Habermasian social theory that claims Addison and Steele among its precursors. Second, this analysis historically situates Addisonian publicness as a symptomatic attempt to fi nd a potentially neutral middle ground between two sets of existing discourses

Introduction 7 that threatened Whig hegemony from different directions: on the one hand, Addison and Steele wanted to contain the subversive force of competing models of reading and cultural production that emphasized participatory equality and political engagement in the publics they addressed—models developed by Mary Astell, John Dunton, Ned Ward, Delarivier Manley, and Bernard Mandeville—while on the other, they needed to overcome contradictions within Whig ideology that had emerged in the work of John Locke, Daniel Defoe, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury.18 Third, this study examines the implications of spectatorial publicness for the gender politics of post-Restoration England, arguing that the essay periodical provided a template for what would become novelistic discourse at mid-century: while Addison and Steele use the spectatorial public sphere as a way of appropriating useful aspects of Astell’s feminist attack on Locke, Samuel Richardson borrows Addison and Steele’s model to address the controversy over specular femininity that was generated by the fi rst two volumes of Pamela (1740). Finally, through readings of neglected journalistic work by Manley, Mandeville, and Eliza Haywood, the chapters in this book examine how the retrospectively hegemonic spectatorial model was vehemently contested by writers who attacked the false universality of the Whig public sphere and who offered feminist counter-models of cultural authority that have long been overlooked. Previous studies of the early eighteenth-century public sphere fall into roughly two camps. On the one hand, scholars have analyzed the potentially salutary socializing function of the English print market after 1695, focusing on the ways in which that culture either meets consumers’ demands and needs (Hunter), develops an early liberal model of polite sociability (Klein), or invents forms of dialogue which attenuate the political antagonisms that shook England in the previous century (Dykstal).19 On the other hand, several incisive feminist analyses (Armstrong, Mackie, Maurer, Shevelow) have interrogated how the forms of socialization promoted by public-sphere texts of this period—particularly the conduct book, the political treatise, the essay periodical, and the early novel—served as a means of regulating women’s behavior and delimiting gendered identities. This study borrows from the former camp its articulation of what Habermas calls the hegemonic eighteenth-century public’s self-interpretation, how that public represented itself to itself; like the latter camp, however, this book is concerned both with the ideological limits of the period’s predominant image of itself as open, tolerant, rational, and inclusive—particularly with regard to questions of gender, power, and agency—and with the development of alternative publics opposed to the hegemonic public described by Habermas. The following chapters build upon and extend the insights of the aforementioned feminist analyses in two ways. First, rather than emphasizing either the question of (female) authorship (Greene, Ingrassia, McDowell, Italia) or readership (Warner), I focus more broadly on the question of how these texts include an implicit theory of the public sphere within themselves,

8

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

how they represent not only acts of textual production or consumption, but also the psychological and social effects of print circulation in general.20 In part, I argue that what makes writers like Astell, Manley, and Haywood so subversive is not merely their significant reflection upon the status of the woman writer, but also their acute interrogation of the gendered values and norms taken to enable (and to be enabled by) enlightened public discourse itself. As a result, this analysis draws upon philosophical critiques of Habermas (Butler, Fraser, Mouffe, Žižek) to understand how early eighteenth-century representations of publicness functioned as a kind of shared cultural fantasy that could be put either to democratizing or to disciplinary ends (or both). In either case, the female writers I analyze demystify by drawing readers’ attention to the imaginary, political, and constructed dimensions of the emergent Whig public sphere. Rather than emphasizing the period’s cultural dominance by representative male authors like Addison, Steele, and Richardson, this examination draws upon the indispensable work of Catherine Ingrassia and Paula McDowell by focusing on how paternalistic Whig public discourse was developed in relation to powerful, proto-feminist theories of reading and cultural production being articulated by women like Mary Astell, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood. By analyzing these women writers’ work in genres and texts explicitly engaged with Addison’s and Richardson’s countervailing paradigms of authoritative male spectatorship and female narration, I offer a new account of the specific forms that Tory-feminist cultural critique could take. In so doing, this book restores to our understanding of early eighteenth-century print culture not only a contextualized account of the materials against which figures like Addison and Richardson constructed their influential essayistic and novelistic paradigms, but also a sense of how those paradigms were contested in their moment by popular texts that have been long neglected. Finally, like Helen Thompson’s work on the domestic novel, this study underlines the degree to which a wide range of early eighteenth-century texts articulate an immanent critique of the enlightened modernity they are often taken simply to promulgate. 21 In this respect, my readings of early eighteenth-century periodical literature use the contributions of Manley, Astell, and Haywood to complicate Habermasian readings of the period through a combination of archival historiography and close attention to issues of literary and aesthetic form. Scholarship on the ostensibly representative public-sphere documents of this period—almost all written by men—has overlooked the ways in which these texts allegorize both private acts of reading and their own public effects. Addison and Steele’s essays, for example, model conventional public-sphere activities—reading, conversing, spectating, and writing—in a more concrete way than Steele’s aphorisms about discursive equality might imply. Addison and Steele’s papers contain an account of their own production, reception, and effect: they aim not only to imagine but also to produce the general reader to whom they are addressed. Thus, Addison’s

Introduction 9 desire that his papers should create a nation of polite taste is both an epistemological claim about the relationship between reading and civility, and a political pronouncement about how print culture inaugurates a new kind of community. By exploring contemporary critiques of Addison and Steele, I demonstrate that there was nothing like a consensus in the period about the gendered values by which such a community should be characterized, even if practically every writer hoped that her or his own texts would create it. My methodological priorities also challenge Habermas’s conclusions about the eighteenth-century public sphere, and they clarify what sort of new community of readers Addison and like-minded Whigs hoped to create. While Habermasians rightly claim that many texts in the period offer maxims upholding a now familiar set of socializing values (politeness, benevolence, critical rationality), a close analysis of the narrative examples in Addison and Steele reveals that they routinely call into question the social effectivity of the virtues they are taken to endorse. Mr. Spectator, Addison’s narrator-figure and clearly a model reader for his audiences, does indeed use ethical-aesthetic good taste in judging the social scenes he watches but that judgment almost never leads to productive intervention. Addison and Steele generally model a practice of spectatorial reading in which a self-congratulating sentimental withdrawal from sociality compensates for the failure of a publicly consequential ethos that reading cannot effect. Thus, for Addison and Steele, the ideal reader–citizen in a nation of polite taste is a passive (they say “neutral”) culture consumer for whom aesthetic experience serves as a substitute for the kind of critical-political engagement idealized by Habermas and others. This study takes seriously Mandeville’s feminization of the ideal post-Restoration reader as a girl in need of guidance: the engendering of English public culture through political treatises, essay periodicals, and early novels invariably genders that culture’s readers, coding both their private subjectivities and the public spaces (textual and material) they should inhabit as properly masculine or feminine. Building on the work of Thomas Laqueur, Michael McKeon, Erin Mackie, Kathryn Shevelow, and Nancy Armstrong, I examine English anxieties about gender’s usefulness as a primary category for demarcating hierarchies of power and authority in eighteenth-century culture: gender troubles the ideological claims to discursive universality made by figures like Addison, Steele, Shaftesbury, and Richardson. 22 If Shevelow is right to claim that women readers functioned in the period as a kind of “common denominator . . . for all reading levels, both male and female,” it is nonetheless the case that to read correctly in this culture is to internalize the paternalistic spectatorial framework of judgment through which much of its public discourse gets narrated. 23 Armstrong’s provocative claim that the idealized subject projected by early eighteenth-century print culture is “fi rst and foremost a female” might usefully be qualified by saying that the ability to read like a woman in

10

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

this culture requires an identificatory detour through the ideological vantage point of a particular male narratorial field—one that was given its fi rst decisive formulation by Addison and Steele and then redeployed by Richardson as a way of containing and “overwriting” the subversiveness of amatory fiction in the discourse of the supposedly feminine sentimental novel from mid-century forward. 24 Finally, through readings of popular but overlooked texts from the period—including Dunton’s ground-breaking Athenian Mercury (1691–97), Astell’s feminist treatises (1694–1706), Ward’s raucous London Spy (1698–1700), the collaboratively authored Female Tatler (1709–10), and Haywood’s essay periodicals The Female Spectator and The Invisible Spy (1744–55)—I situate Addison’s and Richardson’s models of reading as powerful but symptomatic responses to English anxieties about public participation in English political life and, more specifically, about female agency and authority within the ostensibly more egalitarian social order of the early eighteenth century. By attending to these neglected works, this study reveals a contested field of early public-sphere discourse that has been obscured by the retrospective attribution of representative cultural authority to a remarkably small set of authors. Such a recovery enables us to see alternative cultural histories and gender paradigms that have been occluded by the assumption of Addison’s and Richardson’s hegemonic status in the two predominant genres of early eighteenth-century English print culture, and it restores a critical understanding of the pervasive presence of (Tory) feminist models of counter-publicness that are often ignored or reduced to their partisan political dimension. Chapter 1, “Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists: The Politics of English Publicness, 1690–1714,” examines the contested market for printed goods from the years just before the end of official censorship (1695) through the development of era’s most influential essay periodicals, the Tatler and the Spectator (1709–14). Looking closely at the work of Addison and Steele’s competitors, I demonstrate how the supposed inventors of the popular periodical actually appropriated crucial formal and thematic elements from already existing models of public-sphere discourse. Addison and Steele’s literary borrowing aims to achieve two related goals: they wanted to make their own spectatorial model of publicness more recognizable to consumers, and they needed to neutralize the unpalatable aesthetic and political dimensions of the more participatory models from the previous generation. Building on the work of J. Paul Hunter, Lennard Davis, and Helen Berry, this chapter focuses on texts by Dunton, Astell, and Ward—writers who, respectively, articulate dialogic, feminist, and embodied ideologies of publicness—to establish how these popular works from the 1690s provided Addison and Steele with the languages of audience participation, socio-ethical commitment, and street-level urban observation that made their work so appealing to readers of the next generation. 25 While on one hand, Addison and Steele

Introduction 11 needed to contain the oppositional (Tory) potential of Astell’s and Ward’s public-sphere models, they also wanted to distance themselves from other Whig paradigms of cultural authority. For Addison and Steele, other Whig ideologists like Defoe, Mandeville, and Shaftesbury articulate discourses of publicness that threatened to alienate large sections of the universal audience Addison and Steele hoped to create for themselves; their crucial innovation, I argue, was to purge already existing public-sphere languages of their emphasis on effective, localized praxis in the name of marketable but purely rhetorical gestures toward engagement and inclusiveness. In Chapter 2, “Neutering Addison and Steele: Aesthetic Failure and the Spectatorial Public Sphere,” I undertake a detailed account of the spectatorial model of public-sphere participation that Addison and Steele develop out of the competing discourses analyzed in Chapter 1. While the conventional Habermasian reading claims that the post-Restoration English public sphere idealized a form of conversational sociability focused on rational-critical debate, Addison and Steele insisted that their paradigmatic periodical the Spectator (1711–14), despite its print dissemination, should be thought of as a vehicle for privately consumed, imaginary visuality. The spectatorial dimension of their project, I argue, requires us to re-evaluate the longstanding image of Addison and Steele as confident promoters of Augustan values—decorum, good sense, politeness—by confronting the almost complete absence in their work of characters who exemplify these values. As readers’ surrogate participants in the disorderly public sphere, Addison and Steele’s editorial personae characteristically do not intervene in the scenes of irrational violence and tasteless idiocy that the papers report; rather, they prefer a resigned but self-satisfied withdrawal from engagement with the public: the Spectator essays represent not the successful, rational reform of English culture, but the repeated failure of their own attempt to effect such change. Building on the work of Terry Eagleton and Erin Mackie, I argue that the papers collaborate in the very production or performance of the disorder they describe, thereby creating an ideologically useful image of the public sphere as being beyond manageability.26 Viewed from this perspective, a new blueprint for the Spectator’s cultural project emerges: the papers begin by depicting a public world in desperate need of regulation, but their subsequent attempts to establish order end up allegorizing the failure and even the illegitimacy of their own disciplinary efforts. By establishing the unmanageability of the public sphere, the papers attain what I call their managerial moment: Addison and Steele imply that social reform is not feasible, but they redeem that impossibility by cultivating a spectatorial ethos that imagines its public impotence as both necessary and unfortunate. Drawing on both Slavoj Žižek’s concept of symptomatic political enjoyment and Peter Sloterdijk’s analysis of cynical reason, I argue that Addison and Steele stage the failure of their project in order to enable a neutering—a rendering ineffective—of their audience’s impulse to make ethics public; by enforcing a strict separation between an

12

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

irremediably antagonistic social realm and a compensatory private sphere of spectatorial culture consumption, Addison and Steele develop an influential, aesthetic model of English publicness that theoretically assuages the violence it cannot practically prevent. 27 Chapter 3, “Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform: ‘Manley,’ Mandeville, and the Female Tatler,” provides an extended cultural-political analysis of the Female Tatler (1709–10)—one of the most popular periodicals in Queen Anne’s England—as a consequential attack on Addison and Steele’s spectatorial model of polite publicness. Probably co-authored by Manley, Mandeville, and others, the Female Tatler diverges from Whig public-sphere ideology in three ways. First, Manley and her collaborators deflate their competitors’ reformist pretensions by showing how Addison and Steele obscure the profitable complicity of their own moralizing discourse with the scandalous behaviors they ostensibly want to correct. Far from promoting universal rationality, Addison and Steele get depicted as manipulators of the reading public who cynically divide their audience into two camps: the uninitiated masses who believe what Mandeville calls their “abominable lies” about human benevolence and perfectibility, and the select few who both see through and understand the political usefulness of this condescension. Creating another, more demystified public Manley and Mandeville ask readers to see through the ideology of seeing through, to appreciate the charlatanism and falsity of Whig cultural discourse. Second, the Female Tatler explicitly allegorizes the exclusionary mechanisms through which the Whig public sphere constitutes itself; it de-naturalizes the class-based elitism of the Tory positions with which Manley is often associated, and it articulates universalizable models of true wit and true quality based on the transformative potential of satirical education and the value of self-reflective disposition. Finally, the Female Tatler develops a female-directed, decentered model of cultural authority that trumps both the false egalitarianism of Addison and Steele’s appeal to participatory forms of conversation they never put into practice, and the false universality of their appeal to human capability when they so rarely position women as authoritative figures in their own work. By partially enacting the Whigs’ democratizing theories, and by offering models of female public-sphere activity, the Female Tatler actually practices the values Addison and Steele merely theorize. Following Astell, the Female Tatler demands that Whig moralizers defend women’s access to education and cultural production, so their critique of arbitrary power—the Habermasian goal of rationalizing domination—can be made more internally consistent, more than a hypocritical rhetoric intended to further the interests of mercantile men. Ultimately, Manley’s society of ladies serves as both a secular example of female counter-public conversation and a vehicle for attacking the contradictions in early liberal ideology. While the fi rst three chapters of this study analyze representations of general readership in post-Restoration print culture, the two closing chapters

Introduction 13 take up Manley’s and Mandeville’s more specific concerns about the cultural politics of female engagement in conventional public-sphere activities. Chapter 4, “Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity,” reads Mary Astell’s proposed female academy as a form of what Nancy Fraser calls “subaltern counterpublicness.”28 This analysis clarifies how both Astell’s social theory (1694–1706) and the Whig discourses opposed to it (in Addison, Steele, and Richardson) arise out of a close consideration of female specularity—women’s self-constitution in and through the normalizing gaze of patriarchal cultural authority. Using Judith Butler’s analysis of the relationship between the “subjection of desire” and the “desire for subjection,” I examine Astell’s attack on the way spectatorial identification encourages women to love their ideological chains. 29 For Astell, women’s public-sphere activities perpetuate their subordination, primarily by asking them to conflate their own separate interest with that of the men who deny them access to education, property, and power. Astell’s writing on female specularity—her Serious Proposal (1694/97) and the third edition of her Refl ections Upon Marriage (1706)—responds directly to Halifax’s influential Advice to a Daughter (1688), which forcefully promotes women’s self-subjection to the gaze of a benevolent father figure or a faultless husband. Astell’s project of de-specularizing her readers emphasizes the need for women to move from a visual to a discursive conception of their identity and social power: no longer imagining themselves primarily as the objects of a patriarchal gaze, Astell’s ideal readers become producers of politically engaged discourse in the literary public sphere. A decade later, in their papers on female education in the Tatler and the Spectator, Addison and Steele appropriate much of Astell’s de-specularizing rhetoric only to contain its subversive implications. Addison and Steele use Astell’s emphasis on female interiority to attack decadence and sumptuous display, but they leave masculine paternalism intact by avoiding any scrutiny of men’s determining interest in perpetuating the system of female education they deride, and they disavow the extent to which women’s psychic lives are governed by the authoritative spectatorial gaze itself. While Astell demystifies the political logic of specularity, Addison and Steele regulate femininity by reinforcing modes of visual identification: women should be specular for Addison and Steele, but only in a way that keeps them private, domestic, and silent. Chapter 4 closes by linking the essay periodical to the development of the sentimental novel, connecting Samuel Richardson’s response to critics of the fi rst two volumes of Pamela (1740) to the strategies Addison and Steele used against Astell. As James Grantham Turner has argued, both sides in the controversy over Richardson’s novel shared a preoccupation with the “external-spectatorial” bodying forth of his female protagonist.30 Despite Richardson’s apparent desire to render his heroine into pure textuality—empowering her by making her disembodied text the object of male desire and female emulation—readers’ responses support Kristina Straub’s

14

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

contention that Richardson’s 1740 edition remains implicated in the voyeurism he self-consciously claimed to oppose by thematizing it within the novel.31 I argue that Richardson’s continuation of Pamela (volumes three and four of the novel’s sixth edition [1742], packaged with the fi rst two volumes throughout the century) both reveals his debt to the Addisonian periodical and suggests how Pamela’s afterlife might limit the political force of women’s movement from specularity to discourse. Analyzing Richardson’s continuation in relation to anti-Pamelist materials produced in 1741, this section of the chapter establishes not only that Pamela’s sexualized specularity is central to the Pamela controversy, but also that Richardson’s ingenious strategy in addressing this problem from a gender-political standpoint is to transform his heroine into a female version of Addison’s Mr. Spectator. In the continuation, Pamela becomes a scholar, legal analyst, and cultural critic: she borrows Astell’s critique of male courtship rhetoric in her assessment of B as a suitor, her ethico-political judgment is consistently appealed to as a standard in aristocratic circles, she is asked to produce literary reviews and educational philosophy (a critique of Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education), and she explicitly connects her critical method with the practice of Addison’s Mr. Spectator.32 But the newly discursive Pamela produces an equivocal effect. While she unveils the gendered asymmetries in England’s marriage and educational systems, the authoritative Pamela cannot be imitated by female readers since her critique is enabled only by B’s radically exceptional goodness and tolerance. Moreover, she insists at all costs that women must prefer to suffer themselves than to be the cause of another’s suffering—a maxim that underwrites Richardson’s Clarissa (1747). Finally, the chapter assesses Mary Wollstonecraft’s unremarked appropriation of passages from the 1742 Pamela in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); Wollstonecraft’s borrowing here implies a genealogy for liberal feminism that would emphasize its proximity to the sentimental, paternalistic discourses it critiqued. Finally, Chapter 5, “Voyeurism, Feminist Impartiality, and Cultural Authority: Haywood and the Addisonian Periodical,” builds on recent scholarship on Eliza Haywood to offer a detailed account of how her journalistic work in the Female Spectator (1744–46) and the Invisible Spy (1755) problematizes the relationship established in Richardson’s continuation of Pamela between Whig feminism and the Addisonian observer.33 Haywood’s Female Spectator, I argue, engages the ethical dimension of her audiences’ reading practices by creating narratives in which a female victim is scapegoated as an object of derision or violence. Haywood contrasts the responses of male characters internal to the text against those of her own female editorial personae, thereby including the male gaze as a narrative source within the frame of her texts, rather than simply deploying that gaze as the unremarked textual frame in the way Addison and Steele do. Like Astell, Haywood develops readers’ inward detachment from the modes of spectatorship through which they are meant to identify themselves, and she

Introduction 15 exposes the role played by periodical and conduct literature in promoting women’s subjection. Through the Female Spectator’s vacillation between Addisonian paternalism and Astellian resistance, Haywood allegorizes the situation of female readers, conditioned to view themselves through the perspective of an authoritative male beholder from which they must vigilantly strive to distance themselves. Finally, by comparing her essays with her prose fictions from the 1720s (especially Fantomina and The City Jilt), I argue that Haywood remoralizes the moral essay by infusing it with resourceful female characters borrowed from amatory fiction, the very genre in which she had fi rst made her reputation and whose cultural power both the Whig periodical (Addison) and the sentimental novel (Richardson) attempted to contain. 34 By contrast, in her fi nal work—the Invisible Spy, a four-volume essay periodical that has received little attention—Haywood attacks not the careless practices of female readers but the authority of the Addisonian observer himself. By creating a male persona with the powers of invisibility (magic belt) and aural record-keeping (magic tablet), Haywood hyperbolizes the voyeuristic trope that had long structured the essay periodical as a genre. Haywood’s persona (Exploralibus) defends his voyeuristic powers by claiming that he will put them to public use, rescuing injured innocence rather than indulging in the Addisonian observer’s tendencies toward self-congratulating withdrawal. Not only does Exploralibus fail to fulfi ll this charter, Haywood underlines the interdependency between the authoritative male voyeur and the confi ned education of young women. In order to erase and restore his magic tablet, Exploralibus needs the breath of a thirteenyear-old virgin ignorant of sexual difference: he purchases a three-year-old girl and confi nes her to an attic where, with the assistance of a craven female servant, she is incarcerated for ten years. For Haywood, paternalistic public culture perpetuates not only its female subjects’ ignorance but the collusion of female authority figures in exacting their subjection—this concern connects Haywood’s work with the aforementioned texts by Astell, Manley, and Mandeville. Because of its self-blinded persona, the Invisible Spy functions simultaneously as a reformist periodical on the Addisonian model and as a satirical commentary on the voyeuristic male figure from whom that periodical derives its cultural power. Haywood presents readers not with the problem of constructing a viable feminocentric vantage point (as in the Female Spectator), but with the operations of a male spectatorial authority unable to reflect upon the repressive conditions of its own activity. Exploralibus is fi nally undone by an act of female solidarity: the virgin’s attendant drops a picture that introduces the girl to sexual difference, subverting an allegorically suggestive system of domination by having the jailer become the liberator. In terms of its wider implications for readings of the early eighteenthcentury public sphere, this study aims to achieve two goals. First, by recovering many of the popular texts by women writers in the period and by

16

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

reading them as serious engagements in contemporary debates about the nature of enlightened public discourse, I emphasize the confl ictual and fractured dimensions of a cultural period whose representative texts have often been read either as ideologically homogeneous—marking an era in which significant political debate was settled with the Hanoverian succession of 1715, leading to a period of relatively uninterrupted Whig hegemony—or as uncontestedly disciplinary, particularly with regard to the containment of women’s participation in public-sphere activities. Reading Astell, Manley, and Haywood as influential theorists of public discourse— rather than as merely reactive, isolated, or opportunistic voices capitalizing on the more open market for printed goods—renders legible the many alternative conceptions of engaged, feminist publicness that competed with the fiction of the equal and inclusive conversation promoted by the retrospectively dominant Whig writers (Addison, Steele, Shaftesbury, and Richardson) with whom scholarship on this period has often been preoccupied. Second, by examining the reactionary and self-contradictory qualities of these ascendant Whig ideas about gender, reading, and the politics of postRestoration print culture, this book helps to clarify precisely what forms early feminist critique could take during the decades immediately following the end of official censorship, in part by outlining the contours of the ostensibly benign, paternalistic masculinity these women writers subjected to ideological analysis and satiric ridicule. My larger aims, of course, are historically to de-center the familiar Whig paradigm by revealing the terms in which it constructed itself as central or normative, and to show how even the Whigs’ apparently confident self-presentation was itself a reactive strategy meant to contain the subversive women writers they relegated to the margins of early Enlightenment print culture—a reaction that betrays the cultural power of the very discourses it would dismiss.

Part I

Models and Countermodels of English Public Discourse, 1690–1714

1

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists The Politics of English Publicness, 1690–1714

In his introduction to the fi rst modern scholarly edition of Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers, Donald Bond describes a 1714 letter from Joseph Collet, deputy governor of the East India Company station in Sumatra, to his daughters back home in London. As Bond notes, one of Collet’s most urgent exhortations to his daughters focuses on their developing tastes as consumers in the early English public sphere: as a surrogate for his own instructions, “Next to the Bible,” he tells them, “study the Spectators.”1 Indeed, from the earliest days of their canonization as required reading for a cultivated English citizen, Addison and Steele’s essay periodicals have been figured as hyperbolically original and agential in a way that would explain the intensity of Collet’s paternal advice. Samuel Johnson, one of Addison and Steele’s most prominent eighteenth-century advocates, promotes a 1776 edition of their essays with a claim about what they invented and provided for their audiences; for Johnson, the Spectator in particular “supplied the English nation” not only with “principles of speculation” and “rules of practice,”2 but also, as Johnson would put it in his Life of Addison (1781), with the template for “an English style” (both in writing and in living), one that is “familiar but not coarse” and “elegant but not ostentatious.”3 To its credit, in Thomas Wallace’s account, the eighteenth-century reading public widely internalized the models of judgment set forth by Addison and Steele, evinced in their having “caught a taste for fi ne writing which has operated from that time [the 1710s] to the present.”4 Twentieth-century critics have considerably extended the scope of Addison and Steele’s influence over the English public sphere, with C. S. Lewis claiming in 1945 that the “sober code of manners under which we [English] still live today . . . is in some important degree a legacy from the Tatler and the Spectator.”5 Within eighteenth-century literary discourse it is not hard to fi nd explanations for how and why these periodicals attained this pre-eminent role in the English cultural imaginary. For the poet Edward Young, when taken seriously Addison and Steele’s essays initiate a self-perpetuating dialectic of aspiration and abjection in their consumers. As Young puts it in discussing the relationship between the Spectator and his own efforts at authorship, “I never read [Addison]

20

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

but I am struck with such a disheartening idea of perfection that I drop my pen”—yet Young both keeps reading Addison and keeps trying to write.6 In practically every critical assessment of their work, Addison and Steele function paradoxically as an inimitable “model for imitation,” to borrow Wallace’s words, and this longstanding appreciation of their essays has stabilized their reputation as a powerful, productive origin in English cultural history, a center against which the margins of that culture have been defi ned and often ignored.7 One of the primary tasks of this chapter is to complicate the central or original status of both Addison and Steele’s essay periodicals and the model of public-sphere activity they promulgate. To be sure, recent scholarship has done much to historicize the emergence of Addison and Steele’s periodicals. Brian Cowan, for example, has argued that the Spectator’s particular idealization of moderate politics, tolerant religiosity, and polite sociability should be viewed as an attempt to contrast their own Whig partisans favorably against Tory ideologues as “unreasonable fanatics”—a radically contextual response to the high Tory resurgence of 1709–14.8 While this differentiation from Tories is certainly an important part of what Cowan calls the “Spectatorial project,” it is equally true that Addison and Steele were trying to overcome problematic and contradictory approaches to public-sphere discourse being offered from within their own party. On the one hand, Whig fortunes had both benefited and suffered at the hands of Defoe’s strident and often inflammatory Review (1704–13), a periodical whose antagonistic and flagrantly partisan dimensions get consistently enacted and disavowed by Defoe in his revealing prefaces to the individually collected volumes for each year. While Defoe imagines himself as an unappreciated promoter of the “Christian principle of love to one another,” he demonizes his opponents with petulant name calling (as they do him), he self-righteously represents their differences as unbridgeable, and he claims a monopoly on the true meaning of public service.9 As he puts it in a relatively early paper from 1705, I understand persuading us all to be at peace with one another to be a public service, and doing good. These gentlemen [his political opponents] perhaps understand it another way; I am sorry for them. Without doubt they that believe intenstine discords, civil dissension, strife, and oppression the needful help to this nation’s happiness differ from me, and I from them; and I doubt shall always do so. If I am mistaken in the subject, I ought to be convinced that peace and union is not for the public good; that ’tis better for us to be pulling one another to pieces, tearing and destroying one another, and the like.10 At the end of Volume III, Defoe exemplifies what it means to “persuad[e] us all to be at peace” by depicting himself as a neglected would-be savior running about screaming “Peace!” to his opponents and “excit[ing]” others

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 21 “to lay hold of the madmen and take from them the wicked weapon, the knife with which they were going to destroy their mother, rip up the bowels of their country, and at last effectually ruin themselves.”11 Defoe troubles the validity of the public sphere’s most basic function, that of enabling productive debate between contrasting viewpoints; though he sums up his approach in the fi nal number of the Review (1713) as an attempt to oppose “cool argument” and “calm reasoning” to “party rage,” he generally imagines the conflict between positions in terms of violent physicality, and at one point expressly refuses to engage in dialogue with his critics—those “scurrilous, angry sons of emptiness”—by invoking “Solomon’s rule” that one should “answer not a fool in his folly.”12 In short, Addison and Steele had enough potentially “unreasonable fanatics” in their own party to contend with, to borrow Cowan’s phrase, men whose partisan image of the public sphere as an arena of irremediable and potentially useless contestation Addison and Steele needed to counter. On the other hand, the spectatorial project also aimed to develop a notion of enlightened public discourse that would be both more inclusive and more conclusive than the alternative Whiggish ideal articulated in Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis (1709). Lawrence E. Klein has analyzed the ways in which Shaftesbury develops a proto-Habermasian conception of “polite conversation” as a mode of discursive intersubjectivity that would overcome the limitations we have noted in Defoe’s more dogmatic approach to public speech; as Klein describes it, the characteristics of Shaftesburian conversation anticipate many of the enlightened virtues Addison and Steele’s periodicals would promote: “because [polite conversation] was critical, it undermined unwarranted assertions; because it was open-ended, it illuminated many areas; and because it was amiable, it encouraged further discussion of a similar sort.”13 As some recent studies of Shaftesbury have pointed out, however, this idealized discursive space was necessarily exclusive in Shaftesbury’s theorization of it, requiring a class- and gender-based elitism to defi ne itself. As Shaftesbury acknowledges, his writings on the openness of polite conversation defend “only . . . the liberty of the Club, and . . . that sort of freedom which is taken amongst Gentlemen and friends, who know one another perfectly well”; indeed, Shaftesbury describes the “restrictions” on his ideal discursive situation as “natural.”14 From the standpoint of social reformers like Addison and Steele, the exclusionary dimension of Shaftesbury’s model would alienate precisely those upwardly aspiring readers of the middling sort with whose interests the Whigs needed to align themselves.15 Moreover, the thoroughgoing skepticism of the ideal Shaftesburian conversation also undermined its usefulness for the “spectatorial” project Addison and Steele wanted to endorse, since to be internally consistent Shaftesbury’s skepticism would have to be applied to the very goals of public reform for which their essay periodicals were the vehicle. In Sensus Communis, Shaftesbury describes the perfect conversation as one in which “fi ne schemes [are] destroy’d” and

22

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

“many grave reasonings overturn’d . . . without offence to the party’s [sic] concern’d”; for Shaftesbury, the point of public discourse of this kind is not to arrive at a Habermasian, rational-critical, consensus-based truth, but to suspend the participants’ deep investment in their particular truth claims, “improv[ing] . . . the good humour of the company” by “br[inging] to nothing whatever had been advanc’d.”16 Addison and Steele fashion a hegemonic theory and practice of public discourse against reigning Whig ideologies by eschewing the extremes represented by Defoe’s strident, self-blinded partisanship, on the one hand, and by Shaftesbury’s elitist and corrosively skeptical “club” sociability, on the other. In contrast to their Whiggish allies, Addison and Steele produce essay periodicals that explicitly value discursive equality, audience participation through letter writing and a kind of question-andanswer format, and a potentially universalizable version of Shaftesbury’s “club” in the figure of Mr. Spectator’s group of coffee-house conversationalists, a group whose judgments and experiences readers are invited to share.17 In other words, Addison and Steele’s public-sphere model, when viewed contextually, should be seen less as an inventive origin than as a reactive attempt to contain disruptive or counter-productive ideologies within their own party. Moreover, the organizing tropes of their idiosyncratically reactive form of publicness—discursive equality (that might be universalized in terms both of gender and class), audience participation, and ethico-politically engaged urban sociability—could be described as a pastiche of themes and narrative structures borrowed from some of the most influential public-sphere texts of the 1690s, an aspect of literarycultural history that has been obscured by readings of the early English Enlightenment (like Habermas’s) that have sought its origin in ideologically comforting, recognizably Whig male writers like Addison, Steele, and Shaftesbury. In looking back to previous texts for elements of public-sphere discourse that would enable them to overcome the shortcomings of existing Whig approaches, Addison and Steele found source material in at least three very different but perhaps equally well-known authors from the first generation after censorship: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1691–97), which practically invented the question-and-answer periodical format that would later be modified into the more familiar structure of embedding readers’ letters in essays written for a more obviously editorial purpose; Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal (1694–97), which made the status of female education and female reading more explicitly an object of public criticism than had the more dogmatic conduct manuals of the later seventeenth century; and Ned Ward’s London Spy (1698–1700), which demonstrated the potential and versatility of the voyeuristic urban wanderer as a compelling narrative figure for the essay periodical.18 Of these three texts, by far the most significant amount of scholarly attention has been paid to Dunton’s Athenian Mercury as a kind of inaugurating force in early English print culture.19

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 23 Organizing his periodical as a forum for ordinary readers to pose often embarrassing, intimate, and complicated questions to a putatively learned society of gentlemen—the “Athenian Society,” actually comprised of Dunton and two other men who were brothers-in-law to him, Richard Sault and Samuel Wesley—Dunton created a highly participatory forum for public discourse in which readers themselves were essential to the very production of the texts they read. 20 Many critics have emphasized precisely this democratizing dimension of Dunton’s project: for J. Paul Hunter, the Athenian Mercury “responded to a need in the reading public to have its curiosity satisfied about a variety of practical and abstruse matters,” a public eager to “pay to hear itself puzzle out loud”; and for Urmi Bhowmik, Dunton’s earliest periodical performs the Habermasian function of “position[ing] public discourse as a medium through which law rehearsed its legitimacy in the eyes of the public” by enabling a forum for “examining the workings of law (natural, divine, human) through collective exchange and consensual inquiry.”21 Paying attention both to the Athenian Mercury’s formal innovations and to the content of the advice handed down by its editors, other scholars have focused on the tension between the periodical’s revolutionary potential and its disciplinary reality, particularly with regard to its female audience: as Kathryn Shevelow points out, while the “egalitarianism that is structurally implicit . . . within the epistolary framework of the Athenian Mercury signaled an important moment in the history of print culture,” this kind of “horizontal” relationship between readers and editors “was perpendicularly contradicted by the vertical or hierarchical relationship obtaining between suppliants and authorities.”22 In light of this fissure within the periodical’s political implications, Shevelow offers a dialectical reading of the Athenian Mercury as simultaneously making “involvement in textual production . . . accessible to those, including women, who were previously unable to speak for themselves in print,” and delimiting the “authority” of such female participants by placing their self-expression “within a context established by the authority of [male editors], which largely determined how her story—her subjectivity—was produced and read.”23 In a sense, the disagreement between scholars about the political significance of the Athenian Mercury signals the two major ways in which Dunton’s text prefigures the narrative and ideological strategies of Addison and Steele’s periodicals from the next generation. 24 On the one hand, Dunton’s emphasis on the possibility of dialogic publicness, indexed by the “structural egalitarianism” of the printed page on which the work of editors and correspondents is juxtaposed, provided Steele with a model and a marketing precedent for his claim in Tatler 225 that “equality is the life of conversation,” and for his and Addison’s repeated invitations for more letters from readers.25 On the other hand, the undeniably hierarchical relations of judgment that Dunton’s periodical establishes with its readers, particularly on matters of female conduct and domestic practices more generally, opens the cultural expectations tapped into by Addison and Steele

24

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755

in their insistence that their papers will be more “useful” to (and directive of) the “female world” than to any other readerly demographic, as Spectator 10 promises the paper will serve as a “proper employment” for women, one that will “divert the minds of my female readers from greater trifles.”26 Even at its inception, then, the periodical imagined itself not as a politically engaged horizontal conversation aimed at challenging the state; rather, the most popular public-sphere essayists often represented themselves as advisors about matters related to the private or intimate sphere of comportment and self-development. Against this narrative of Addison and Steele’s linear development or refi nement from Dunton’s periodical model, what the aforementioned texts by Astell and Ward allow us to see is not only how the dominant Whig public-sphere discourse of the early Augustan period borrows from sources in the 1690s, but also how those sources can function spectrally as alternative paradigms of publicness, offering both radically different analyses than Addison and Steele’s of the most pressing social problems in post-Restoration England and radically different answers to questions regarding public participation in English cultural life: who should be encouraged and enabled to read and write, what should such participants produce and consume, and with what potential social and subjective effects? What a comparative analysis of Astell and Ward against their Whig public-sphere successors reveals is a counter-intuitive but powerful combination of subversiveness and conservatism in texts whose appeal Addison and Steele wanted both to borrow and to re-direct.

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT AND FEMINIST COUNTERPUBLICNESS: THE HABERMASIAN ASTELL? Mary Astell stands out as in some ways the staunchest defender of women’s participation in early enlightenment print culture and the most acute critic of England’s actually existing public sphere. 27 In the brilliant preface she adds to the third edition of her Refl ections Upon Marriage (orig. 1700, 3rd ed. 1706), Astell claims that her publicly circulated treatise on the dangers faced by women entering the marriage market will aim “to correct abuses . . . because power and prescription seem to authorize them.”28 A kind of Habermasian feminist avant la lettre, Astell appeals to the political efficacy of public discourse to curb the excesses and to expose the contradictions of a paternalistic, masculinist Whig ideology that refuses to extend its own critique of absolute sovereignty from the state to the domestic realm. As she succinctly puts it, “If absolute power is an evil in itself and an improper method of governing rational and free agents, it ought not to be practiced anywhere,” since it is ultimately “more mischievous in families than in kingdoms” (RM 17). Anticipating the Habermasian notion that the public sphere should rationalize domination by holding the empowered accountable to the critical deliberation of the governed, Astell upbraids those who

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 25 “submit to authority when we should yield only to reason,” insisting that the way to “remove all doubts and answer all objections” in reasoned political argument is “not by affi rming, but by proving, so that every one may see with their own eyes and judge according to the best of their own understandings” (RM 7, 10). While Kant’s appeal to the public’s use of their own reason (in the famous essay “What is Enlightenment?”) blames his readers’ submissive backwardness on their own cowardice and “selfincurred tutelage,” Astell attacks the guardians of English order themselves for not allowing women “glasses” and “good arguments . . . to convince our understandings” (RM 10). 29 In Astell’s account, in fact, the problem is not that the public lacks the will or the confidence to participate in such deliberation: as she puts it, no subject “thinks the worse of his own understanding because another has superior power, [n]or concludes himself less capable of a post of honor and authority just because he is not preferred to it” (RM 16); rather, she argues that contemporary public deliberation itself is compromised by its arbiters’ illegitimate reliance on “custom,” “personal objections,” and falsely interpreted divine authority (rather than on wellreasoned proof) as the basis for deciding between contrasting truth claims (RM 10, 7). Combine this irrational method of debate with the fact that women as a sex are “kept in ignorance” and are made “to see such things as are only the discovery of men,” and you have a public culture that denies the majority of its participants “the natural right of judging for herself,” depriving them of “all the means of rational conviction” (RM 14, 10). In such a deeply flawed public arena, where the common practice is “to regard rather who it is that speaks, than what is spoken,” Astell decides to remain anonymous as the author of the Refl ections in the hope that “bold truths may pass while the speaker is INCOGNITO” (RM 7).30 According to Habermas, it is precisely by prioritizing spoken content over speakers’ identities that the early bourgeois public sphere emerges as an egalitarian, inclusive, and rational discursive arena. But Astell’s reluctance to come out from behind her screen of anonymity reveals that this Habermasian “bracketing” of speakers’ individuating characteristics (status, race, religion, gender) could function in the early eighteenth century not as an index of how impartial and reasonable public discourse had become, but as a defensive sign of that culture’s habitual practice of judging utterances on the basis of such personalizing considerations. For Astell, the recourse to personal objection functions primarily to prevent counter-hegemonic positions from being articulated and taken seriously; because Astell’s feminist critique of the new liberal order is exactly the kind of bold and “unseasonable” argument that “contradicts the principles and practices” of those who benefit from that order, it would risk easy dismissal by the reigning cultural authorities if a female author were to claim it as her own (RM 7). However, as Astell points out, what counts as persuasive or true in this public sphere is conditioned not only by the politically motivated interpretive standards of its (largely male) readers, but also by the prerogatives of

26

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those who speak on behalf of the dominant ideology. Through detailed analyses of how particular church figures warp sacred texts in order to claim divine sanction for women’s absolute and natural subjection, Astell’s preface repeatedly demonstrates how what gets produced as knowledge or truth depends radically on the interests of the producer. She reserves particularly sharp ire for those who use “skill in languages and the tricks of the schools [to] wrest [scripture] from its genuine sense to their own inventions” (RM 14). Moreover, Astell presents this understanding of the link between knowledge-production and personal politics as being not her own idiosyncratic belief but a widely shared understanding in her culture. Astell describes how “the generality” know that no man could have written the Refl ections, not because the things she writes are untrue or unconvincing, but because they know that any “man would have had more prudence and manners than . . . to have betrayed the arcana imperii of his sex” (RM 8). Indeed, the very subtitle of her fi rst major work—A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their true and greatest Interest. By a Lover of her SEX (1694)—emphasizes its author’s ideological situatedness and her clear political partisanship as the feminist analog of the patriarchal bias she attacks.31 In the Serious Proposal, Astell acknowledges that she is “as partial to [her] sex as [men] are to theirs” (SP 83), though her own explicit partiality draws peculiar strength from its commitment to universalize access to learning that had been confi ned to men by men on the basis of their own ostensible impartiality. Through this neat chiasmus—partiality/gender-specificity versus impartiality/universality—Astell manages simultaneously to offer an immanent critique of the ideology of “impartiality” (which we will analyze at more length, from different angles, in the works of Addison, Steele, and Haywood) and to plumb “partiality” itself as a political lever for reclaiming the value of “real” universality against its falsification by Whig-liberal paternalism.32 That is to say, Astell writes from an admittedly “partial” position in order to universalize access to public sphere discourse, just as her own gendered (perhaps feminocentric) analysis of that public sphere claims a certain political “impartiality” on the basis of her universalizing goals. Astell’s account of public discourse seems inhabited by a tension between two conflicting models of the relationship between private identity and rational deliberation: on the one hand, Astell endorses the Habermasian ideal that speakers’ personal characteristics and social positions must be bracketed or left out of consideration if we are impartially to assess what they are saying, while on the other hand her analytic procedure insists that it is important, as Nancy Fraser puts it, “to thematize inequalities explicitly” in order “to render visible the ways in which societal inequality infects formally inclusive existing public spheres.”33 It would be easy to argue that Astell fi nally favors the latter of these positions, given that her initial gestures toward bracketing the personal and remaining “INCOGNITO” are superseded almost immediately by a frank acknowledgment of

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 27 her femininity and its methodological consequences: that her address, far from having obvious universal appeal, “exhort[s] women” to have more realistic expectations of the married state, and that her conclusions will be at odds with those “proper only to masculine understandings” (RM 8, 9). At the same time, it is hard to read Astell’s opening judgment against the common practice of regarding who speaks over what is spoken as a mere rhetorical feint, since the preface as a whole is meant to establish both the universal human potential for understanding and the necessity (in a justly ordered society) that every individual be enabled to adjudicate truth through the exercise of their intellectual faculties. In Astell’s view, “sense is a portion that God himself has been pleased to distribute to both sexes with an impartial hand,” such that anyone might be able to generate persuasive argumentation through the properly educated application of their inherent capacities (RM 21). In a sense, Astell’s privileging of what is spoken over who speaks is both the enabling condition and the analytic outcome of her discourse, and as such it can’t be neatly discarded without undermining her other claims. Ultimately, there is a way to resolve this apparent contradiction in Astell’s public-sphere theory: Astell’s investment in bracketing the personal identity of participants in public debate comes from her Christian view of the current “lapsed state of mankind” (RM 15). In a fallen world, people generally misrecognize their true interest by choosing immediate sources of pleasure and power over the pursuit of Christian duty in the service of God; if, as Astell laments of her contemporaries, men are guided not “by their reason, but by their appetites, and do not what they ought but what they can,” then public discourse is inevitably corrupted because “the will and pleasure” of those in power comes to “stand for” reason itself (RM 15, italics in text), and “few minds [are] strong enough to bear what contradicts their principles” (RM 7). Indeed, our postlapsarian condition so impedes the progressive attainment of rational agreement in Astell’s public sphere that it bears closer comparison to the political vision of Carl Schmitt than to the Habermasian ideal; as Astell describes the situation, “though to tell the truth be the most FRIENDLY office, yet whosoever is so hardy as to venture at it shall be counted an ENEMY for so doing” (RM 7). If bearing truth into public discussion marks one by defi nition as an “enemy” to the reigning powers, then Astell’s insistence on authorial anonymity seems not only prudent but necessary under her current circumstances. In contradistinction to this corrupted mode of public interaction, Astell implicitly idealizes a properly Christian order in which scripture is scrupulously interpreted and conscientiously followed. In such a world, gender relations would reflect the apostle Paul’s placement of “the two sexes on a level” with a “relation . . . mutual” and “dependance reciprocal” (RM 13); educational opportunities (like the aforementioned God-given “sense”) would be “distribute[d] to both sexes with an impartial hand” (RM 21); and, consequently, women’s “industry and understandings” would be

28

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enabled in a way that would end men’s “tyrannous domination which nature never meant” (RM 31).34 Moreover, this more egalitarian, dutyoriented society would be peopled by women (and, by extension, Christian men as well) who could own their personal identities in public discourse, since the public use of reason would be promoted rather than demonized as a sign of one’s sociopolitical “enmity.” In the language of Fraser’s critique of Habermas, then, Astell’s ideal public realm would enable a “debracketing” of unequal status considerations, not in the name (as Fraser would have it) of thematizing inequalities more explicitly, but in light of the fact that inequality itself will have ceased to be ethically consequential. In Astell’s Christian framework, “it matters not much what part we act, whether of governing or obeying, provided we perform it well with respect to the world to come” (RM 14); that is to say, because Astell’s secular world is one in which we’re all simply “acting parts” while waiting in the foyer to a more important afterlife, her paradigm contains nothing like Fraser’s critical insistence that “social inequalities must be eliminated as a necessary condition for participatory parity” in the public sphere.35 However, Astell’s position cannot be described as simple quietism. While she often claims she sees no reason to “complain about the management of the world” (SP 227), it is precisely because so many husbands do not govern the private domestic sphere well with respect to the world to come that she feels obligated to publish her unseasonable Refl ections Upon Marriage in the fi rst place. Even if inequality itself need not be eliminated in the Astellian public sphere—since “God has placed different ranks in the world . . . for order and beauty’s sake” (RM 52)—men and women alike must respectfully enact their duties toward others in this world as a sign of their commitment to God’s will; thus, while Astell enjoins women in marriage to “submit” to their husbands with a litany of Christian (feminine) virtues—“humility and self-denial, patience and resignation” (RM 62)—she insists that “there is no manner of reason for us to degrade ourselves,” since “mutual . . . civility and respect at least” are entailed in the vows (RM 52, 54). In fact, Astell’s critique of actually existing marriage is based precisely on her understanding that the private sphere does not allow women the kinds of appeals to legal precept and rational, universally applicable authority that are idealized by and enacted within the Lockean (masculine) political public sphere. Astell famously juxtaposes the post-Lockean contractarian model of hegemonic, consent-based authority against “covenants betwixt husband and wife,” based on the fact that the latter, “like laws in an arbitrary government, are of little force” against “the will of the sovereign” (RM 52). As a result, there is a clear bifurcation within her text between a commitment to publicly revealing this arbitrary, irrational inequity in the domestic sphere, on the one hand, and an insistence that women be educated about that inequity in advance before they enter into a permanent arrangement in which a woman has “no security but the man’s

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 29 honor and good-nature,” on the other (RM 51). That is to say, Astell publishes her critique of marriage laws and customs with two goals in mind: fi rst, she wants to hold that entrenched form of patriarchal power to account, to rationalize domination in the Habermasian sense of making power conform to norms of procedural universality and rationality, however politically ineffectual her critique might prove given the degenerate functioning of the contemporary public sphere as she understood it; and second, she wants either to enable unmarried women readers to make a more informed choice about submitting to that as-yet-unrationalized form of domination, or to give married women a blueprint for how best to endure the heroic “martyrdom” they have undertaken “to bring glory to God and benefit to mankind” (RM 78). In short, Astell’s description of how to accommodate the inequities of the current marriage system cannot be considered an apology for that system. For all of her attempts to endorse wives’ “outward respect and obedience” with the compensation of their internal, mental freedom (RM 56), Astell fully acknowledges the potential impracticability (and even illegitimacy) of her own blueprint for obedient submission in light of her proto-Habermasian view of the proper relationship between rationality and power; conceding that “meer [sic] obedience . . . will be of an uncertain tenure,” Astell asks, “who can so constantly conquer her passions, and divest herself even of innocent self-love, as to give up the cause when she is in the right and submit her enlightened reason to the imperious dictates of a blind will and wild imagination” (RM 50)?36 Such thoroughgoing self-annihilation, required of married women only because they have no recourse to rational public authority, Astell refers to as a form of “madness” that registers the intractable contradiction between “the common privileges of mankind” and the current “order of the world” (RM 50, 56). In her later work, because she sarcastically fi nds her sex “not so well united” as to perform any meaningful collective action (RM 29), Astell’s only explicit solutions to this dilemma involve individual women obtaining the personal understanding and grace—a “truly Christian and well-tempered spirit”—to choose the best course for themselves either within or away from marriage (RM 78); after all, she concludes that “if [women] took time to consider and reflect upon it, they seldom would marry” (RM 78). As a result, there remains in her critical discourse an unresolved tension between her Christian promotion of women’s obedience out of their “sincere love of order” in the abstract (RM 58), and her barely muted insistence that the “order of the world” be rationalized. In her earlier work, however, and most especially in the two parts of her Serious Proposal (1694–97), Astell had articulated a way for women to negotiate the two competing injunctions she would have them follow (obey and reform) by establishing a women’s “monastery, or . . . religious retirement” (SP 73)—a critical, separate, and all-female public within the larger public sphere, an institutionalized space that would function along the lines of what Nancy Fraser would call a “counterpublic.”37

30

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In her influential definition of “subaltern counterpublics,” Fraser highlights their opposition to the dominant public sphere as “parallel discursive arenas where subordinate groups invent and circulate counter-discourses” with the goal of “formulat[ing] oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”38 From the opening pages of the Serious Proposal, Astell prioritizes women’s need to “debate their real interests” against the ideals of desirable femininity “offered by cheating hucksters” in masculinist public discourse (SP 51). As in Fraser’s model of counterpublicness, Astell wants to focus women’s attention on how they are made to conflate their own personal interests with those of the patriarchal system that denies them access to education and legal redress; she engages in what we might recognize as a kind of Gramscian critique of ideology, an analytic procedure that renders transparent the mechanisms through which (female) subjects’ consent is manufactured under early liberalism’s “new hegemonic mode of domination.”39 The “hucksters” to whom Astell disparagingly refers are those writers who successfully elicit women’s desire to become the kind of superficial, tractable, under-informed marriage commodities that will reproduce and maintain the emerging paternalistic bourgeois social order. As Astell remarks to her female readers, “nothing is of worser [sic] consequence than to be deceived . . . wherein [your real interest] consists,” and her remedy to women’s current state of delusion, promulgated by increasing numbers of widely consumed conduct books entering English public discourse, is to offer them an educational sanctuary wherein women might “break the enchanted circle that custom has placed us in” (SP 52, 55). Rather than unthinkingly becoming what most men would want them to be, women in Astell’s “retirement” will “quit the chat of insignificant people for [the] ingenious conversation” of their preceptors and companions; will trade “instructive discourses for idle tales” (SP 74); and will use their counterpublic arenas of speech and writing to “communicate useful knowledge” with the express purpose of developing their “deliberating and directive power[s],” since “she [who] understands amiss . . . wills amiss” (SP 76, 80). Astell’s proposed “retirement” also meets the second of Fraser’s defi nitional criteria for effective counterpublicness: however separate from the dominant institutions and spaces of the early liberal public sphere, Astell’s female heterocosm is “not separatist, but assumes a publicist orientation” in that it “understands itself as part of a potentially wider public.”40 In Astell’s account, her academy for women will function both as a “retreat from the world” and as a means of institutionally promoting “discipline . . . to fit [women] to do the greatest good in the world” (SP 72). In opposition to the reductive caricature of her ideas popularized by contemporaries like Damaris Masham, who accused Astell of endorsing an unmitigated withdrawal from the world against the Whig ideal of polite sociability, Astell clarifies the public orientation of her projected female community in both parts of the Serious Proposal.41 Masham’s critique of Astell has to overlook passages in Part One (1694) in which Astell insists that her retreat “shall

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 31 be so managed as not to exclude the good works of an active from the pleasure and serenity of a contemplative life”; rather, her ideal is that “by a due mixture of both [action and contemplation],” women in her academy will “retain all the advantages and avoid the inconveniencies that attend either” approach taken by itself (SP 76). Responding to Masham’s misreading of her project in Part Two (1697), Astell avoids whatever equivocation about her separatist tendencies that her critics had detected in the earlier work, saying directly to her female readers: “It is not my intention that you should seclude yourselves from the world” (SP 231).42 Because of its obvious anticipation of Fraserian counterpublicness, Astell’s more extended response to Masham and others is worth citing at length. Claiming that “a little attention to what they read might have convinced [her critics] that our institution is rather academical than monastic,” Astell continues, . . . [I]t is altogether beside the purpose to say ’tis too recluse, or prejudicial to an active life; ’tis as far from that as a Lady’s practicing at home is from being a hindrance to her dancing at court. For an active life consists not barely in being in the world, but in doing much good in it: And therefore it is fit we retire a little, to furnish our understandings with useful principles, to set our inclinations right, and to manage our passions, and when this is well done, but not till then, we may safely venture out. (SP 232, italics in text) Astell here describes the “dialectic” between the two primary functions of counterpublicness in which Fraser locates its “emancipatory potential”: the productive complementarity between its promotion of “withdrawal and regroupment,” on the one hand, and its usefulness as a “training ground for agitational activities toward wider publics,” on the other.43 It should also be said, however, that Astell views her own particular counterpublic as a more fully realized version of the ideals of the liberal public sphere against which it is pitted; as such, its ultimate goal is to produce adepts who re-enter the failed, self-contradicting arena of masculine publicness in order to reform it and to force it to live up to its own principles of inclusive civility, impartial judgment, and disinterested benevolence: for all of her interest in the world-to-come, Astell offers perhaps the most trenchant immanent critique of the emerging liberal order and a blueprint for its reform through politically effective counterpublicness.44 As she puts it in Part One, after they have “calmly and sedately observed and rectified what is amiss in [them]selves,” Astell’s acolytes will “promote a reformation in others” in the pathological public sphere, functioning as “antidotes to expel the poison in others, and spread a salutary air on every side” (SP 105). Her model of social reform aims to enact the practices of liberal civility not in a trickle-down fashion, whereby one identifies abstractly universal human interests and then hopes to promote such interests by applying theoretical principles in individual cases, but in a local-to-global

32

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model by which each woman expands her Christian ideal of affectively generated domestic responsibility outward to ever larger circles: as Astell famously puts it, invoking the spatial metaphorics of competing “spheres” familiar to us from critical social theory, “the whole world is a single lady’s family,” and her “opportunities for doing good are increased by her being unconfi ned,” allowing her “beneficence [to] move in the largest sphere” (SP 203). As a hopeful allegory for the effect her own Serious Proposal will have, Astell imagines how the “natural and unprejudiced sentiments of [her ladies’] minds,” through their disengagement from the prejudices and customary modes of perception that keep the age “prophane and profligate,” will prove more socially effective than “the elaborate arguments of the learned” (SP 203). Ultimately, Astell’s approach to politically consequential discussion and debate, an approach that is both theorized in and enacted as her Serious Proposal, stands as an example of the way her projected female academics will transformatively engage with the already existing public sphere—not least through her repeated invitations to her readers to offer either constructive critique of her “remedy” for women’s flawed education or alternatives to her solution. Near the end of Part One, for example, Astell describes her proposal as “but a rough draught and rude essay,” which she hopes will “give occasion to wiser heads to improve and perfect it”; that is to say, from its inception, Astell imagines her project as a necessarily intersubjective undertaking, something inevitably “imperfect” in its initial formulation, that will require the action of others’ “kind hands to perform and compleat it” (SP 112). Like a perfect exemplar of Habermasian publicness, Astell offers readers a concrete plan of action and an exhortation to keep the discussion moving forward; if some readers believe her proposed academy “will not promote the great ends [of piety and charity],” she concludes, “I shall think myself mightily obliged to him who will show me what will; for provided the good of my neighbor be advanced, ’tis very indifferent to me, whether it be by my method or by anothers [sic]” (SP 89). As a third and fi nal way of using Fraser’s theory of counterpublicness to understand the significance of Astell’s project, we can consider the Serious Proposal as an endorsement of what Fraser calls a “strong public”—one that is able to translate opinion into active decision-making—rather than a “weak public,” whose deliberative practice would be focused solely on opinion formation.45 For Astell, the public activities of reading, writing, and discussion must not be thought of as producing what she calls “truths merely speculative,” idle resolutions that “have no influence upon practice”; mere intellectual exercises of this kind, pleasing to the private imagination but publicly ineffectual, she describes as “an impertinent and criminal waste of time” (SP 143). Though we unfortunately have no record of Astell having read and reacted to Addison and Steele’s periodicals, one can only imagine the disdain she might have had for their “spectatorial” model of

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 33 reading and publicness: as we shall analyze at further length in the next chapter, for Addison and Steele, the ideal reader-spectator’s relationship to the world involves being “ever unconcerned” and “ever looking on new objects with an endless curiosity,” such that one “value[s] things only as they are the objects of speculation . . . just as they are what contribute to their amusement or the improvement of the mind” (S 4:98). The opening pages of Astell’s Serious Proposal, Part Two, index her frustration with just such an idle, self-absorbed, noncommittal public in the specific context of the reception her initial proposal had received three years earlier. The worst outcome of having published her ideas, in Astell’s estimation, would be “to fi nd [her book] received with some approbation, and yet no body endeavouring to put it into practice”; as she views it, if people merely disagreed with her, then that “would only reproach [Astell’s] own understanding,” but if the public essentially agree with her project but do nothing to forward it, then their reception of her text is “a shame to mankind,” a “plain sign that tho’ they discern and commend what is good, they have not the virtue and courage to act accordingly” (SP 119). What Astell fears is that the English public is already dominated by the reading practices Addison and Steele’s surrogate spectators would model to the next generation of print consumers, a public ready to cry at social ills but unwilling to push beyond that initial self-congratulating reaction to more substantial efforts at reform. Indeed, reading chronologically backward from Addison and Steele’s public culture to Astell’s, it becomes increasingly plausible to read the latter-day writers’ speculative spectatorial ideal as an attempt to contain the political potential of the readers Astell meant to mobilize. As Astell puts it to her own audience, “It is not enough to wish and to would it, or to afford a faint encomium upon what is beyond your power . . . the best commendation you can bestow on a book is immediately to put it in practice” (SP 120). Calling attention to the disjunction between readerly sentiment and political agency that has often characterized the liberal public sphere from this moment of its invention by the likes of Addison and Steele, Astell describes these quietist readers as “self-condemned,” saying to them rather bluntly, “your judgment reproaches your actions . . . you live a contradiction to your selves” (SP 120, italics in text). In Fraser’s terms, fi nally, Astell insists upon the need to connect deliberation and decision directly through the public sphere: both her projected academy (as a counterpublic) and the Proposal itself (as an engagement in the actually existing public realm) aim to model the philosophical and political legitimacy of “strong publicness” by directly converting discussion into action—her academy will function in this manner both with regard to its own internal workings and as an attempt to revitalize the atrophied inertia of the public external to it. Taking the public consensus about social reform as a given starting point, Astell asks in the concluding lines of Part Two, “[W]e’re all apt to cry out against the age, but to what purpose are our exclamations unless we go about to reform it? Not faintly and coldly

34

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. . . to still the reproaches of our consciences and to exalt us in our own imaginations . . . but with all our might” (SP 235, italics in text).

EMBODIMENT, TORY MASCULINITY, AND PUBLIC CRITIQUE: WARD’S LONDON SPY Based on his reputation both among his contemporaries and in current scholarship on post-Restoration England, Edward (“Ned”) Ward would not appear to be an obvious precursor to the polite, elegant, and tasteful musings of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Apart from the fact that Ward’s periodical writing was as much a popular sensation during his generation as the Tatler and the Spectator were in theirs, the marked differences in the tone, content, and ideological commitment of their respective writings make Ward and Addison unlikely subjects for fruitful comparative analysis. Even sympathetic assessments by Ward’s twentieth-century editors describe Ward’s work in terms that have perhaps never been applied to Addison. Ralph Straus introduces his own reprint of Ward’s London Spy (1698–1700)—the fi rst reprint in more than two centuries of Ward’s “sensationally successful” periodical—by calling the essays therein “ugly . . . rough, biased, in places unpleasant,” and so “undoubtedly . . . coarse” that they are sure to “offend even those not unaccustomed to the ruder tongue which our forefathers used”; moreover, in Straus’s words, the journalistic work of this “diverting old boy” could not be considered “of the fi rst or even the second class when judged from [a] literary standpoint,” clearly indicating the standpoint from which Addison’s essays have assumed preeminent representative status in Whig historiography on the post-Restoration period.46 Another of Ward’s early twentieth-century recoverers, Arthur Hayward, seconds Straus’s sense of the binary oppositions that have generally been used to characterize Ward’s relationship to the Whig periodicalists of the succeeding generation; as Hayward puts it, Ward “expressed himself with the directness of the four-ale bar rather than with the evasion and circumlocution of the teashop.”47 What two authors, fi nally, could be more at odds than Ward—a “staunch High Churchman” and “uncompromising Tory” committed to “violent political views”—and Addison, whose periodicals calmly and unerringly promote the ideals of religious toleration and (Whiggish) political neutrality?48 Despite these apparent and substantive contrasts, however, what Addison clearly found in Ward’s London Spy was a new model of the public intellectual, a more malleable vehicle for aesthetic and ethical engagement through street-level observational narrative than that found in Dunton’s rather narrowly conceived Night-Walker.49 For Ward’s periodical persona does more than merely offer readers a look at seedy, late-night London, though he undoubtedly does that as well; rather, the London Spy elaborates for the first time in English public culture the ideological potential of what I would

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 35 call that culture’s spectatorial ideal, exploiting the appeal of a politico-literary practice that serves the Habermasian function of representing the public to itself through the ethically framing mediation of an embodied observer capable of generating wide demographic identification. Ward capitalizes on the attraction of Dunton’s basic conceit, his idea that readers would want to hear about “face-to-face” encounters between a moralizing figure and the many prostitutes plying their trade in the familiar milieus of the metropolis, but he expands exponentially the possible applications of Dunton’s paradigmatic narrative structure. Perhaps Ward’s most important innovation was to have his critical observer de-familiarize by confronting the potential absurdity and idiocy of everyday English institutions and cultural practices whose conventional normalcy had come to be taken for granted by the very people who embodied and enacted them—in short, by his readers who, through the act of reading the London Spy, become both observing ethnographic subjects and the ethnographic object observed. Ultimately, of course, a comparative analysis of Ward and Addison is illuminating not only for what it shows us about the genteel Augustan periodicalist’s debt to his “coarse” Tory forerunner, but also for what Addison’s revisions of Ward’s narrative model reveal about the emergent liberal public sphere that the Spectator played a crucial role in inventing. As we shall see, Addison appropriates and transforms three key elements from the London Spy: Ward’s deployment of the anonymous observer as a new kind of public intellectual, his idea of the essay periodical as a vehicle for wide-ranging cultural critique, and his association of the critical observer with specific urban spaces and forms of sociability. The inaugurating conceit of the London Spy allegorizes the movement from one paradigm of intellectual life to another. Ward’s narrator describes himself initially as an academic type who, his “delight in . . . books” notwithstanding, has for seven years put himself through “tedious confi nement” in the country in a pseudo-Faustian search after knowledge that has left him both unsatisfied and hopelessly isolated; in the end, this would-be intellectual’s “diligent enquiry into the uncertain guesses of our forefathers” has made him no “Solomon,” but has merely “loaded [his brains] to no purpose, with as many tringum-trangums as are lodg’d in the whimsical noddle of an old astrologer.”50 Overcome by a sense of the outmoded uselessness of this kind of academic endeavor, the narrator decides to “br[eak] loose from the scholar’s gaol, [his] study” with a rationale and panache that are worth quoting at length: I resolv’d to be no longer Aristotle’s sumpter-horse, or like a tinker’s ass, carry a budget for my ancestors, stuff’d full of their frenzical notions, and the musty conceits of a parcel of dreaming prophets, fabulous poets, and old doating philosophers, but shifted them off one by one, with a fig for St. Au[gu]stin[e] and his doctrines, a fart for Virgil and his elegancy, and a t—d for Descartes and his philosophy; till, by this means, I had eas’d my brains of those troublesome crotchets,

36

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 which had rais’d me to the excellence of being half fool and half madman, in studying the weighty difference betwixt up-side down and top-side turvey, or to be more knowing in some such nicety than . . . my neighbors. (2)

Ward emphasizes that his narrator’s movement from the country to the city is not only a means of privileging one kind of discourse over another—he trades the “conversation of all my old calves-skin companions,” his books, for social interaction in London’s urban spaces—but a way of breaking free from traditional modes of knowledge-(re)production, dropping the metaphorical burden of the “budget” or leather sack overstuffed with the “frenzical notions” of those who have come before him, ideas that have made him “half fool and half madman.” The narrator hopes to restore himself to sanity by no longer carrying this baggage “for [his] ancestors”; instead, the Spy will exchange this practice of solitary reading overdetermined by the authority of others for the self-authorized experience of observing London life, with an eye to producing socially useful narratives “intended to expose the vanities and vices of the town” (2). Ward explicitly contrasts the practical benefit of this new mode of public intellectual activity against the function of more antiquated forms of scholarship, which promote only the social distinction of one’s appearing to be “more knowing” in irrelevant “niceties” than “the rest of [one’s] neighbors.” The cultural significance of the London Spy’s ideal of breaking loose from what he calls the “scholars’ gaol” can be measured by its re-emergence in Addison’s axiomatic claim in Spectator 10 that his papers will bring “philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses” (S 1:44). Like Ward thirteen years before him, Addison founds the legitimacy of his periodical enterprise on its enactment of a more utilitarian conception of intellectual activity and public discourse, one driven by the ethical aim of “recovering [readers] out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which the age is fallen” (S 1:44). But Addison’s liberation of philosophy from the closets and libraries of academe carries different socio-political implications from those imagined by Ward’s emergence from his bookish prison; even Addison’s self-description as a cultural authority who can rightfully “recover readers” from themselves harbors an assumption of superiority to his audience that is generally absent from Ward’s writing. While Ward intends to narrate scenes that will enable readers simply to “see by reflection” through the Spy’s surrogate “observation and intelligence” in order to come to their own ethical conclusions, Addison refers to a significant portion of his audience as “blanks . . . altogether unfurnished with ideas,” whom he advises “not to stir out of their chambers till they have read this paper” (S 1:46); moreover, Addison advertises his papers not primarily as a way to avoid Ward’s “vanities and vices,” but as a means “to distinguish themselves from the thoughtless herd of their ignorant and unattentive

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 37 brethren” (S 1:44). In short, although both writers commit their narrators’ intellectual endeavors to public effectivity by offering the reading of their papers as a substitute for their audiences’ personal experiences, Ward’s stated “design” is to offer narratives for his readers’ private consideration, while Addison provides his audience with both that content and the proper judgment they ought to have about that content, on the assumption that they are so “unfurnished with ideas” as to need such disciplinary direction.51 If Ward attempts to abolish the distinction—one promoted by traditional forms of “philosophy”—between the knowing and the ignorant, Addison merely translates that hierarchy between academic and lay readers into a new distinction within that broader public sphere between those who have internalized his narrator’s judgments and those who have not. 52 Ward’s periodical also furnishes Addison with the model of a narrative persona with potentially universal audience appeal. Dunton’s Athenian society prevents readers’ deep identification with them through their secrecy and their evident intellectual superiority as a fund of public information, while his Night Walker is a man with simply too narrow a set of preoccupations for many readers to recognize more than a delimited version of their own curiosity in him. Ward’s Spy, however, creates a much broader field for his audience’s affective bonding mechanisms through his almost compulsive habit of using similes and analogies to explain his appearance, his expectations, and his reactions to social scenes. Apart from his previously quoted self-comparison to “Aristotle’s sumpter-horse” and a “tinker’s ass,” during the six-page space of Ward’s preface “To the Reader” and the opening installment of the periodical (Part One, November 1698), the Spy describes himself as being successively like the following: a beau, a Puritan, a whore, a sow-gelder, Diogenes, an owl, an alchemist, Hercules, a Hatfield fiddler, a billiard ball, a chaplain, a parson, a pedagogue, a young deacon, a bumpkin, a greyhound, a miserly livery-man, a maggot, and a Quaker (1–6). Moreover, the Spy’s physician friend, with whom readers are also invited to identify as he is the knowing Virgilian guide of the Spy’s wanderings through this Dantesque London, is himself successively compared to a dancing-master, a young sheriff, and numerous other characters. In fact, the tavern-frequenting society of “town-sharpers” into which the Spy is initially introduced all inhabit highly theatrical identities that require their continual simulation of a wide range of roles and personae; Ward’s Spy presents himself as a man of protean affiliations in a world populated by Proteuses. In a sense, Ward’s text is pervaded by a tension between the metaphorics of his narrator’s identity, characterized by these protean tendencies, and his overarching desire to present himself as the stable, reasonable observer contrasted against the mad chaos of the people and practices he encounters. In fact, though, this tension could be said to increase the number and kind of readers who could easily identify with Ward’s persona, since he offers them a character who himself vacillates between different paradigms of identification.

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For all of the differences between their respective political commitments and their linguistic and personal styles, Addison’s Mr. Spectator and Ward’s Spy share precisely this bifurcation between their self-presentation as protean figures who can inhabit any number of social identities, on the one hand, and as substantive, predictable characters with consistent criteria of judgment, on the other. Even in the opening number of the Spectator papers, Addison depicts his narrator as a man who could blend in with many different sectors of London society: he frequents “most publick places” and meeting points of “general resort,” though he is careful not to offer a physical description of himself and insists that he haunts these cultural spaces in almost complete anonymity, claiming that “there are not above a half dozen of my select friends that know me” (S 1:3). Mr. Spectator mixes with a “round of politicians” at Will’s coffee house, just as often as he is “taken for a merchant” at the Royal Exchange, or “pass[es] for a Jew in the assembly of stock-jobbers” at Jonathan’s coffee house (S 1:3–4). In fact, Addison’s account of his narrator’s experiences at the Exchange in Spectator 69 greatly amplifies the breadth of Mr. Spectator’s potential cultural affiliations and specifies the psycho-social dynamic at work in his peculiar form of public “mixing” that could be called a kind of fl ânerie avant la lettre; Mr. Spectator models his own form of cosmopolitanism thus: I am infi nitely delighted in mixing with these several ministers of commerce, as they are distinguished by their different walks and different languages: Sometimes I am jostled among a body of Armenians: Sometimes I am lost in a crowd of Jews; and sometimes make one in a groupe of Dutchmen. I am a Dane, Swede, or Frenchman at different times; or rather fancy myself like the old philosopher, who upon being asked what country-man he was, replied, that he was a citizen of the world. (S 1:293–94) The closing reference to Diogenes (the “old philosopher”) explicitly connects Addison to Ward, inasmuch as Diogenes appears in the opening sentence of the London Spy as the very fi rst in the long list of people and things to which the Spy likens himself. As must be clear from these examples, however, the demographic for whom Addison promotes audience affiliation with his eidolon is much more socio-economically specific than the one Ward imagines, the latter being a group of men, women, and objects that includes potentially everyone and everything in the universe in its capacious appeal; even billiard balls and maggots are welcome in Ward’s public sphere. Addison, on the other hand, consolidates a delimited audience of both professional men engaged in politico-economic pursuits and the women who might have to care about the judgments of such men—perhaps with some attention to more aristocratic readers interested in the trading classes’ desire to appropriate some of their own tastes and manners, and also to literate members of the laboring

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 39 classes who might use Mr. Spectator as an example of a social type whose cultural norms they might successfully internalize. Moreover, even if Addison insists on the malleability of Mr. Spectator’s public appearance, readers are never allowed to forget the specific and inimitable socio-economic provenance that legitimizes his brief forays into imaginary identification: readers’ investment in Mr. Spectator’s judgmental norms would be difficult to separate from the fact that he was born to a “small hereditary estate” whose boundaries can be traced back to “William the Conqueror’s time”— an estate “delivered down from father to son whole and entire, without the loss or acquisition of a single field or meadow, during the space of six hundred years” (S 1:1–2); grounded historically in this Lockean fashion, with the bolstering additions of time spent at university and on the grandest of grand tours, Mr. Spectator possesses the kind of cultural capital one literally cannot buy, but he offers readers a way of viewing the world that those who do buy things (politicians, merchants, stock-jobbers, and their sons, wives, and daughters) can strive to imitate. Thus, while Addison borrows Ward’s model of the narrative persona with broad audience appeal, his readers’ relationship to Mr. Spectator is characterized more by internalization than by the kind of identification Ward’s text promotes. This difference between the authors’ respective approaches to the psychology of reading illuminates another crucial point of connection and distance between Ward’s and Addison’s narrators: if Mr. Spectator represents a form of cultural authority that circulates in the crowd without being of the crowd, Ward’s Spy remains thoroughly immersed in the multitudes he describes, however hard he might try rhetorically to distance himself from them. One of the most attractive aspects of the London Spy, especially for readers outside the metropolis then and for scholars of the period ever since, has to be Ward’s commitment to providing a detailed, occasionally graphic account of the Spy’s embodied experiences in London; Ward depicts the city as a site of overwhelming sensations that prove nearly impossible for him to apprehend in their entirety. The Spy describes his first entrance into London’s public spaces at night after a bout of tavern drinking: The streets were all adorn’d with dazzling lights, whose bright reflections so glitter’d in my eyes that I could see nothing but themselves. Thus walk’d amaz’d, like a wandering soul in its pilgrimage to heaven, when it passes thro’ the spangled regions. My ears were serenaded on every side with the grave musick of sundry passing-bells, the rattling of coaches, and the melancholy ditties of hot bak’d wardens and pippins that had I had as many eyes as Argos and as many ears as Fame, they would have been all confounded, for nothing could I see but light, and nothing hear but noise. We had not walk’d the usual distance between a church and an ale house but some odoriferous civit-box perfum’d the air, and saluted our nostrils with so refreshing a nosegay, that I thought the whole city (Edenburgh like) had been overflow’d with an inundation of sirreverence. By and by

40

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 came thundering by us a rumbling engine in the dark, which I took for a deadmongers waggon, laden with a stinking corps. . . . (26)

The wildness of Ward’s analogies—which refer to the same metropolitan street as at once a passage to heaven and a flood of excrement—matches the chaotic juxtapositions that structure his empirical observations in the city. Moreover, the intense ephemerality of the Spy’s external world suits and perhaps determines his experience of his own body’s sensory responses to that world: Ward’s narratives chart in fast-paced succession the Spy’s sensations of shock, pleasure, repulsion, laughter, exhaustion, thirst, hunger, and anxiety. Paradoxically, it is exactly this deeply subjective, embodied quality that gives Ward’s work the aura of objective realism that has led so many commentators to describe it either as an “intimate picture . . . [or] trustworthy memorial of London localities and manners,” or as a transparent rendering of “the seamy side of London life . . . exposed to view.”53 To a great extent, the London Spy’s cultural authority derives from this immersion in the minutiae of street-level urban observation, or, perhaps more precisely, from the dialectic of bodily immersion and speculative distance that his narrator establishes in describing immensely popular cultural phenomena like Mayfair (Part Seven), Bartholomew Fair (Parts Ten and Eleven), and the Mayor’s Procession (Parts Twelve and Thirteen). The combination of fascination and repulsion with which the Spy enters into Mayfair provides the blueprint for his subsequent engagements with “rabble” or “mob” culture; as a particular narrative and psychological bearing, this approach allows Ward both to render gritty quotidian events in graphic exactitude and to offer readers a corrective, normative position from which to judge such events. In a gesture that captures perfectly the Spy’s ambivalence regarding urban spectacle, he and his friend hire a coach from within whose sheltered confi nes they can take in maximum grotesquerie by having the coachman, in Ward’s figuratively suggestive language, “drive thro’ the body of the Fair” (171). 54 Ward’s Spy articulates his investment in a kind of meta-spectatorship, a desire to watch the watchers: the explicit purpose of “driving thro’ the body” is not to see the rope-dancers, apes, Merry Andrew shows, jigging highlanders, and puppet plays, but merely to gain a “better view of the . . . gazing multitude” (171). On the one hand, the Spy continually asserts his difference from the “stragling rabble,” that “unmannerly audience” whose ostensibly debased tastes can easily be linked to the fact that in the entire crowd of spectators, there is not one to be found “above the degree of a gentleman’s valet” (172–73); on the other hand, the Spy is unmistakably caught up in enacting the very taste he otherwise derides by offering his audiences only a thinly mediated version of the fair itself: what is the difference, one wonders, between “devoting” oneself to an idiotic show of monkeys mimicking rope-dancers, as the “rabble” do, and “devoting” oneself to the detailed watching of idiots watching monkeys, as the Spy does? Indeed, the very

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 41 scenes at which Ward meta-spectates—apes imitating humans, puppets mimicking living people, other costumed performers turning themselves and their audiences alternately into objects of ridicule—all emphasize the tenuous distinction between spectator and spectacle upon which the Spy unconvincingly insists. This fundamental tension that inhabits the Spy’s approach to urban observation—and one that produces exceptionally marketable essays—gets exploited and exacerbated by Ward in subsequent installments of the periodical when the Spy visits Bartholomew Fair and the Mayor’s Procession. As with his account of Mayfair, the Spy describes Bartholomew Fair as a sense-numbing scene of “astonishing confusions” from which he and his friend will seek out the appropriate spectatorial distance: from the window of an adjacent tavern, they will “over-look the follies of the innumerable throng,” who apparently have no qualms going “ancle deep into filth and nastiness, crowded as close as a barrel of figs, or candles in a tallow-chandlers basket, sweating and melting with the heat of their own bodies” in a seething corporeal cauldron of “uncleanly hides, mix’d with the odoriferous effluvia’s [sic] that arose from the singing of pigs and burnt crackling of over-roasted pork” (237). Though he calls the most popular shows “such a parcel of insignificant nonsense that none but a true unthinking English mob could have laugh’d,” the Spy and his friend leave the relative safety of the tavern in order to avoid “see[ing] nothing worth the pains [they’d] taken,” and thus “hazard [their] carcases” by “launch[ing] [them]selves into the tempestuous multitude” (239). Again, as with the essay on Mayfair, the Spy justifies his immersion in the crowd with only the fl imsiest rationale of wanting to get his money’s worth so as to guarantee that his readers get their money’s worth in buying the London Spy, but by merely transcribing the behaviors and tastes of an “audience of such fools” without offering any edifying critique of popular entertainments beyond the terms of a superficial and ultimately compromised snobbery, the Spy seems to traffic in precisely the low-toned culture he mocks. What separates Ward’s text from other reformist projects that promote what they would warn against is that he seems entirely aware that he is taking advantage of both halves of this cultural-critical dialectic. Though he calls the fi nal locations he visits in the fair an “epitomy of Hell” and a “rendezvouz of jilts, whores, and sharpers” permeated by the smell of “turpentine belches” as foul as “an old close-stool-pan” (264, 266), the Spy and his friend refuse to leave without making “a more nice inspection into the pomps and vanities of this wicked world” (267), because that is exactly what his readers want—not merely to “see” London but to “inspect” it, to offer an account that is at once pruriently, often repulsively detailed and marginally distinguished from what it describes in a way that enables maximum disavowal. As a result, over the course of the periodical the Spy’s forays into popular spectacle become increasingly profound and self-endangering: from the tidy interior of the coach

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through Mayfair, to the tavern window-gazing over and then the jostled walk through Bartholomew Fair, the Spy’s adventurous encounters with crowd culture culminate in his prophylactic mingling with what he calls the “unmannerly mobility” in attendance at the Mayor’s Procession. 55 Because he has been forewarned about the “hustles,” “affronts,” and “dirty assaults” he is likely to encounter amid the “wild pastimes and unlucky attacks” of the procession audience, the Spy and his friend “equip’d [their] carcases” under a kind of thick clothing he refers to as “our ancient Drabdeberries” (293). 56 Thus ensconced in their drape-like armor, the Spy and his friend enter the crowd in order to “star[e] at the spectators much more than the show,” preferring the mob’s “mad frolicks and whimsies” to the “grandure and gravity” of “my Lord-Mayor and his attendants” (293–94). Indeed, in their attire and their commitment to the revelry, the inspectors become indistinguishable from the inspected, offering up admiring descriptions of how the “industrious” and “ingenious rabble” devise myriad methods for thoroughly besmudging their social betters in the audience with various forms of excrement (295–96)—their “kennel ammunition” (294)—fi nally sewing up a leather apron fi lled with “sir-reverence” into a kind of soggy football, poked full of holes such that by throwing it around they manage to cover the “plebeian gentry” (and, presumably, themselves) with the foulest of refuse at the most glorious of pageants. In this context, when the Spy concludes the essay with a poetic stanza asserting that “wise spectators” behold the “Cits’ pomp” with “disdain” and “contempt,” this category of knowing observers must be taken to include not only himself, but also like-minded readers and the excremental rabble as a unified group (298). 57 While he clearly capitalizes on the marketability of Ward’s street-level observer, Addison’s revisions of Ward’s narrative paradigm reveal a great deal about the early liberal, Whiggish social order that the Spectator helped to bring into being. As we have already remarked of Addison’s audiences, the spaces that his narrator frequents are generally sequestered from the popular crowds that fill Ward’s essays; the relatively exclusive publics of coffee-house clubs, opera audiences, and the Royal Exchange organize Mr. Spectator’s itinerary through London society, rather than the fairs, processions, and feasts that preoccupy Ward’s Spy. While Ward is committed to depicting London from the gutter upwards, Addison offers his observations from the balcony above: if Ward provides street-level observation of quotidian experience, Addison specializes in mezzanine-level speculation about aestheticized matters of commerce and taste that always hovers at unmistakable remove “above” the things and people it views. Addison makes this difference axiomatic in his opening number: I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species, by which means I have made my self a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant and artisan, without ever meddling with any

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 43 practical part in life. I am very well versed in the theory of a husband or father, and can discern the errors in the oeconomy, business and diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as standers-by discover blots, which are apt to escape those who are in the game. (S 1:4–5) In Addison’s scheme, it is epistemologically advantageous not to be immersed in (or even clearly associated with) the cultural systems one analyzes—Mr. Spectator’s distance from practice and from others underwrites his authority rather than undermining it. One could never imagine Mr. Spectator wrapping himself in “drabdeberries” to watch plebeians hurl excrement during the Mayor’s Procession: those people, their bodies, and their culture receive precious little attention in the pages of the Spectator. These contrasting styles of observation in Ward and Addison also signal a difference in how their respective periodicals function as vehicles for cultural criticism. As Erin Mackie has pointed out, Addison spends the bulk of his analytical energy on the externals of polite behavior, not as a way to avoid producing profound and deep-seated social change but as a way to guarantee his papers’ ideological impact; for Mackie, in the essay periodicals of Addison and Steele, “[m]anners, taste, and style, not despite of but by virtue of their status as mundane, even trivial arenas of activity become all-important avenues of control . . . precisely because they are understood as nonideological and nonpolitical.”58 Important evidence in support of Mackie’s reading of Addison and Steele comes from Isaac Bickerstaff’s oft-cited assertion in Tatler 61 that “the greatest evils in human society are such that no law can come at [them]”: social reform cannot meaningfully be legislated through institutions in the Addisonian paradigm of public-sphere discourse, since the “greatest evils” require readers’ private self-transformation through their internalization of Mr. Spectator’s evaluative norms (T 2:83). In fact, most of Addison’s descriptions of public institutions involve unequivocal (if shallow) praise of their liberating power. Perhaps the most famous of these is Addison’s aesthetic appreciation of the Royal Exchange in Spectator 69 as a “scene of business” that provides him with such “a variety of solid and substantial entertainments” that he cannot “forbear expressing [his] joy with tears” at the sight of a “prosperous and happy multitude” trading their stocks and information (S 1:294). For Addison, the point of reading a paper like the Spectator is not to engage in public debate that will effect substantive change in English society with the Habermasian goal of rationalizing domination, but to internalize the belief that domination has already been made as rational and consensual as possible through the emergent institutions of Whig culture (contractarian government, an “uncensored” press, “free” trade, the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, and a more effective and equitable justice system, for example). For if the political and economic worlds have already been as usefully regulated as they can be, then the most important

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regulations public discourse can promote are those carried out privately and internally through acts of identity-forming culture consumption. 59 Ward’s commitment to viewing public institutions from the bottom up, as it were, provides his readers with a rather different sense of how prosperous and happy various English multitudes actually are or aren’t, and it fuels his urgent appeal for broad reforms that would require action at the highest levels of England’s political and religious hierarchies. Ward’s Spy demonstrates a concern for marginalized sectors of English society that Addison and Steele’s narrators never seem to notice at all, and he views their plight as both situational (rather than as the result of their inherent failings) and readily improvable. The pages of the London Spy are rife with evidence of the profound failure of England’s public institutions. As early as the second installment of the periodical, Ward has the Spy and his friend encounter a group of abandoned children who have taken up begging and, one assumes, other less gentle methods to procure themselves the barest subsistence; rather than blaming the children themselves or being repulsed by them, the Spy offers this assessment of their condition and its sociopolitical causes: What a shame it is . . . that such an infamous brood of vagabonds should be train’d up in villainy, ignorance, laziness, prophaneness, and infidelity, from their cradles, in such a well govern’d Christian city as this, where are so many grave magistrates and parish-officers whose care it ought to be to prevent such growing evils, and yet to suffer such a nest of heathens to be nurs’d up in blasphemy and contempt of religion under the very walls of their churches is certainly a scandal to our laws and a shame to those in authority. . . . Thus, thro’ the neglect of church-wardens and constables, from beggary they proceed to theft, and from theft to the gallows. (37) These gypsy children’s vagrancy is not, for Ward, a sign of their natural propensities: it is something they are “train’d” or “nurs’d up” to do by their sociocultural environment and the hypocrisy of those who could prevent their miseducation. While Addison and Steele spend their ink attacking women with political opinions and cross-gender equestrian costumes, Ward gives his readers a systemic critique of the corruption, ineptitude, and illegitimacy of England’s religious, legal, economic, and medical institutions—not solely on the basis of his oppositional Tory politics, but primarily because of the needless human suffering such failed institutions both cause and perpetuate. Ward’s use of the public sphere as a politically effective rational-critical arena can be called systemic inasmuch as he diagnoses problems with England’s legal institutions (for example) from their broadest intersection with London’s population at the level of the constableship all the way through the judiciary and into the prisons themselves—all of which are,

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 45 again, sectors of English life in which Addison’s Mr. Spectator takes no significant interest. Ward’s Spy moves directly from his reflections on the aforementioned “diminutive vagabonds” to a wider view of the constableship’s social effect, arguing that the officers of the law “often instead of preventing mischief, make it; by carrying honest persons to the counter [the city-court or its prison], who would fain walk peaceably home to their own habitations: and provoke gentlemen by their sauciness to commit those follies ’tis properly their business to prevent” (40).60 The Spy and his friend immediately become an example of how constables “occasion more disturbances in the streets than they hinder” (40), as they are nearly taken in for the friend’s “presuming to corrupt the King’s English” by using the word “surgeon” instead of “chirurgeon” to describe his profession, when asked to do so by the officer (38).61 Ward’s representation of constables has to be called more properly a critique than a satire, in that he does not share the Mandevillian view that corruption is inevitable and perhaps beneficial. From a perspective like that articulated in Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, which tells us that no calling is without deceit, constables like those Ward describes are a source of humor because of their hypocrisy; while Ward interests readers in his essays partly by taking advantage of this satirical potential, his unflattering depictions of legal officers are always framed by a narrative judgment that emphasizes not the Spy’s Mandevillian amusement but his ethical outrage. As the Spy puts it, [t]he suppressing of vice, and reforming of manners is, in the society, a most commendable undertaking. But except they take care to regulate their officers and prevent the daily abuses they commit, which are everywhere complained of, I fear the ill management of their mercenary people employed will be an injury to their project, and bring a very good design under a great disreputation, and hinder many persons from giving encouragement to that noble work which they would otherwise think worthy of their assistance. (364) For Ward, that is, if the “they” he refers to at the top of the legal hierarchy turn a blind eye to the “loose fellows” and “self-serving profl igates” they employ, then the marginalized of English society will continue to endure a system in which they are “not punish’d for their vice, but [for] being poor” (365). Once the Spy and his friend are thrown into a pretrial holding jail for drinking too late by a constable who had been out drinking even later the night before (81–82), Ward turns his critical eye toward the courts and the prison system, which fare no better under his narrator’s scrutiny than the constables had done. Of course, prisoners with money can pay to be separated from the “common side” of the jail, but the Spy insists on being put in with this lower “society,” both for the “diversion” that might be offered by that holding cell’s habitués, and explicitly to be able to “judge the better

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of confinement and the hardships of a prison” (83). Once inside, Ward’s Spy describes a truly Hobbesian, unsupervised, stinking space in which the right of the strongest prevails at all times, in the form of a brutality that sometimes leads to the ostensibly humorous cramming of excrement down the throat of physically weaker prisoners. Like the “ingenious rabble” from the Mayor’s Procession, the “pediculous [lice-ridden] inhabitants of these uncomfortable confines” prove themselves capable of remarkable wit by putting on an elaborate theatrical mockery of the “high court of justice” to which they will soon be forced to submit (86), perfectly aware that the court’s decisions will be made largely on the basis of the defendants’ (real or convincingly feigned) socioeconomic standing; not only do the Spy and his friend receive the preferential treatment of a hearty breakfast, like “every captive that has either money or credit” (88), but by persuasively arguing that they were acting as “gaugers” for the Queen when they were taken prisoner, they are immediately released (91), while a woman unable to pay the “unreasonable extortion” of a tally-man’s loan at one-hundred-percent interest faces possible execution in what the Spy calls “a scandal to the laws, and a shame to Christianity, that such indigent wretches should be so heavily opprest, contrary to all charity and justice, to satisfie . . . such unconscionable misers” at the heart of England’s emerging credit economy (89). However, Ward reserves his sharpest criticism for the punishment carried out at Bridewell, which the Spy (like others) visits in the capacity of a tourist, looking for “the diversion of seeing the leachry [sic] of some town ladies cool’d by a cat of nine-tailes” (129). Instead of enjoying the distanced, sadistic pleasure of watching inmates get flogged, however, the Spy approaches many of those confi ned in order to hear their stories. Our narrator is moved by special “mercy and compassion” to interview one particular prisoner who has wasted away into a “ghastly skeleton” of “terrible aspect,” an image of “death” itself (138); in the course of their conversation, the Spy learns that this man has remained imprisoned for months after the charges against him were dropped, only because he is unable to pay the legal fees required for release. Ward’s mouthpiece expresses his amazement that an institution like Bridewell, “design’d to prevent peoples falling into misery thro’ laziness or ill-courses, should now be so corrupted by such unchristian confinement as to starve a poor wretch because he wants money to satisfie the demands of a mercenary Cerberus when discharged of the prison by the court!” (138–39). Far worse, however, is the Spy’s account of how female defendants are lashed before a crowd of spectators at the apparently arbitrary behest of an “honourable citizen . . . mounted in the judgment-seat, arm’d with a hammer” who reminds Ward’s Spy of an auctioneer: with no legal representation and no witnesses present to vouch for her, one woman in particular is unanimously condemned to strip herself naked and receive a whipping in front of the court itself; the Spy expresses his revulsion thus: “Finding little knowledge to be gain’d from their proceedings, and less pleasure and

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 47 satisfaction from their punishments, my friend and I thought it better to retire, and leave them to flog on till the accusers had satisfied their revenge, and the spectators their curiosity” (141).62 Instead of simply moving on and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions (or not), Ward has the Spy’s friend ask this newcomer to London “whether this sort of correction is a proper method to reform women from their vicious practices, or not?” (142). Because it speaks both to the class-determined biases and genderdetermined cruelty of England’s judicial system and to the psychosocial dynamic perpetuated by its practices of incarceration, Ward’s response is worth quoting at some length; after stating his thesis that such a mode of correction “makes many whores, but . . . can in no measure reclaim ’em,” the Spy continues: If a [servant] girl of thirteen or fourteen years of age, as I have seen some here, either thro’ the ignorance or childishness of their youth, or unhappiness of a stubborn temper, should be guilty of negligence in their business, or prove headstrong, humoursome, or obstinate, and . . . take pleasure to do things in disobedience to the will of their master or mistress, or be guilty of a trifl ing wrong or injury thro’ inadvertency, [the master and mistress] have power at home to give them reasonable correction, without exposing ’em to this shame and scandal, never to be wash’d off by the most reform’d life imaginable; which unhappy stain makes them always shun’d by vertuous and good people, who will neither entertain a servant nor admit of a companion under this disparagement . . . till the poor wretch, by her necessity, is at last drove into the hands of ill persons and forc’d to betake herself to bad conversation, till she is insensibly corrupted and made fit for all wickedness. Secondly, I think it a shameful indecency for a woman to expose her naked body to the sight of men and boys, as if it was design’d rather to feast the eyes of the spectators, or stir up the beastly appetites of lascivious persons, than to correct vice or reform manners. (142) Ward’s concern here is to make domination more rational and just both at the level of the state—as the judicial system metes out rewards and punishments—and at the level of domestic service, where the “trifling wrong[s]” induced by young maidservants’ occasional “negligence” and “inadvertency” should never lead to their permanent marginalization. Moreover, unlike the spectatorial dynamic we analyzed earlier, according to which the Spy undermines his critique of popular entertainments by pruriently describing them in detail, here the Spy unequivocally rejects the sadistic voyeurism he decries: he leaves the whipping chamber without tapping its scenes of punishment for all their potentially scandalous value, and he offers a pointed argument against not only the juridical practices he witnesses but also the judges and audiences who participate in them.63

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Ward’s remarks about such public institutions must be seen as part of his broader interrogation of the emergent, post-Revolution Whig cultural and political climate of the 1690s. At several points in the London Spy, Ward creates opportunities for extended diatribes against the ascendant ruling classes or “new quality,” whom he claims lack the public spiritedness of their predecessors; instead of “imitating” the supposed “liberality” of those formerly at the top of England’s social hierarchy, those now in power indulge themselves in all manner of pleasure and self-promotion, like the Cits at whom the rabble hurl excrement during the Mayor’s Procession. In Ward’s account, rather than “relieving the distresses of their neighbors, supplying the wants of poor friends and relations, and (to the honour of themselves and country) giving charitable entertainment to strangers and travelers,” the new aristocracy disregard their role as “Heaven’s stewards to the poor” and preoccupy themselves with “whoring, gaming, and external foppery” (211–12). This dimension of Ward’s project has at least two significant consequences for our reading of how the London Spy helped to shape public-sphere discourse of the post-Restoration period. First, at the level of interpreting Ward’s works on their own terms, the Spy’s attack on the systemic problems of England’s public institutions suggests that we cannot simply view Ward either as a sensationalist worth reading for his intimate pictures of London’s seedy nightlife, or as a precursor to the periodical of “men and manners,” even if this is how Ward himself describes the drift of his paper’s last four installments (345). Both Ward’s sensationalism and his interest in “manners” derive from an overarching concern about what he would consider to be ethical relationships between and within England’s many “publics”: while Ward’s paper fails to match neatly what we have come to think of as Habermasian public discourse on the Addisonian model—due both to its rabidly oppositional, unapologetically partisan method, and to its often shocking content—the London Spy is far more democratic in its inclusiveness than the Addisonian periodical, and far more explicit about both its desire for public change and its attack on those Ward deems responsible for perpetuating the social problems he analyzes. Indeed, Ward’s inclusiveness and his activism highlight the second way in which this reading should open a revised understanding of post-Restoration English publicness: Ward’s populist priorities suggest that the very Addisonian model often viewed as representative of the period must be understood as a reactionary attempt to contain the subversive energies of Ward’s existing paradigm. In its context, Addisonian publicness functioned as an oppositional counter-model rather than as a self-asserting, inventive, already hegemonic set of values and practices. Addison’s attempt to articulate criteria of polite, sociable discourse, and an ostensibly universal, neutralized conception of the political as the (aesthetico-)ethical have to be seen as (at least in part) a response to previous claims that Whig publicness is irresponsibly self-indulgent and anti-populist; the idealization of a public figure like Mr. Spectator for his concerned but disembodied, nonpartisan

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 49 approach to manners and habits suits exactly the goals of Addison’s revision of Ward. To be sure, Addison’s promotion of English gentlemen’s (and polished tradesmen’s) ostensibly calm, reasoned discourse served radically contextual purposes in the wake of Whig political losses after 1710, as Brian Cowan has cogently argued.64 But the ideological work of Addison’s periodical is as much a matter of recuperating and redefi ning an already maligned paradigm of Whig publicness as it is of presenting a new model that would contrast well against strident Tory partisanship.65 For at the heart of the Addisonian, proto-Habermasian ideal of public culture lies a drastic attempt to rescue particular spaces, social types, and discursive models—those of the coffee house and its regulars—from the popular ridicule that widely consumed texts like Ward’s had been heaping upon them. From the paper’s opening numbers, Ward demonstrates a disdainful fascination with coffee-house culture, which he often contrasts negatively against what he views as the more open, robust culture of the tavern, though this opposition operates in what is by no means a consistent binary in the London Spy as a whole: even in Part One, the Spy’s friend introduces him to a tavern populated by “academical” fops over-concerned with the outward forms of politeness, men whose “slippery engines of verbosity coin’d nonsense with . . . facil fluency” (5). But even if the tavern crowds are not universally to the Spy’s liking, at least they sociably drink wine, rather than the “Mahometan gruel” or “soot-colour’d ninny-broth” served up in coffee houses (15), where the Spy finds a chaotic jumble of patrons each manically pursuing his own course in a whirlwind of frenzied, obnoxious, largely pointless activity. For Ward, the coffee house is a farcical social nexus inhabited by quacks, author-starving booksellers, and maggot-brained projectors, a place where there are always “some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling, and the whole room stinking of tobacco” (11). Coffee houses also function in Ward’s London as fronts for less-reputable enterprises, with perhaps the most remarkable among these being a brothel that calls itself the “Widows Coffee-House,” a place where the Spy’s opportunistic “physician” friend can minister to (and collect debts from) his variously unwell “female patients” (27); in this corrupted, mostly female space, the Spy encounters a confused juxtaposition of items that anticipates in a radically different socioeconomic register the clutter of Belinda’s toilet in Pope’s Rape of the Lock: “at the corner of a long table . . . lay a large old Bible open, with [the bawd’s] spectacles upon one of St. Paul’s epistles; next to it a quartern pot, two or three stone bottles, a rowl of plaister, and a pipe of tobacco . . . [while] over the mantle-tree, [could be seen] two bastard China dishes, a patch box, and a syrrenge” (28). Indeed, Ward’s depiction of the coffee house as a space of feminization, confusion, and nonsense in the fi rst two installments of his periodical captures the essence of the anti-Whig ranting that characterizes his subsequent treatments of 1690s public-sphere practices throughout the London Spy.

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Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Ward’s approach to coffee-house culture is that his critique arises from his pained sense that these public-sphere arenas lack what we could call Habermasian characteristics. Rather than engaging in robust debate about matters of public importance without fear of ridicule or retribution, the “Beau-Politicks” of Ward’s coffee house “retire” from the shared space of its “principal room” into other private “apartments,” where they can discuss “state affairs” without being “laugh’d at” (203). Instead of promoting the ideals of transparency and open consensus, the coffee house perpetuates secrecy and hierarchy by enabling “pension’d spies” to “whisper in the statesman’s ear . . . whilst lies are talk’d aloud” (205). Even the basic Habermasian goal of disseminating useful economic and political information is perverted in Ward’s account of public spaces, in which the only “knowledge” most seek is “how to dress”; indeed, Ward’s coffee house is comprised largely of “humane vultures” and their dialectical partners: “flatterers” meeting with “empty squires,” “gamester[s]” with “bubble[s],” and those who “plague” the state with those who “serve” it (206). Far from enacting the principles of rational-critical discussion with a practical, democratizing intent, Ward’s public sphere is dominated by those who “here [sic] without attention,” “believe without reason,” and “affi rm without probability” (290).66 While Ward implies the value of these conventionally Habermasian elements of public discourse by basing his satire on their absence from actually existing coffee-house culture, the Spy’s customary response to this problem does not involve the enactment of a productive counter-model for discussion; rather, Ward’s eidolon violently scapegoats effeminized coffeehouse types in the name of constructing a form of sociability he refers to as “more agreeable company”: company that shares his idiosyncratic beliefs about monarchy, religion, tavern culture, gender politics, and the meaning of public spirit (205). Ward counters the intellectually hollow banter and anti-populist politics of the coffee house not with more substantive and inclusive discussion, but with unquestioning self-assertion and affectbased, ideologically motivated group action. In a representative incident from Part Twelve, the Spy and his friend encounter a gathering of selfappointed “state politicians” at an Aldersgate coffee house, a small cabal whose admiration for “Geneva Christians,” the “Dutch Government,” and Cromwellian “common-wealth” constitutions is “legible in their looks, as if they had contracted their faces into lines and shrivels by looking awry upon monarchy” (276). Among these, one particular gentleman emerges as a public orator, loudly declaiming against “blind lovers of kingly power and episcopacy” in a way that, for the Spy, highlights his several animallike qualities: his diminutive size, which makes him too short to be a “compleat man” but “not short enough to be a monkey”; his fluttering tongue, which resembles a “wild bird trapan’d into a cage”; his “untunable” voice, which could be taken for “the whining of some puppy that wants the dug

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 51 in his dam’s absence” (276); and, fi nally, his ideological “justifying [of] the martyrdom of King Charles,” which suggests his similarity both to “a maggot bred in one of Shaftesbury’s t—ds” and to “a wasp with a natural propensity to sting and wound the memory of so unfortunate a family” (277). Rather than reporting the details of a debate that would make a rational argument from Ward’s perspective, the Spy merely claims to have offered his adversary such a witty “reproof” that the latter verges on “burst[ing] out into such an ungovernable flame” that “nothing could have quench’d [it] but a good cudgel” (277). Indeed, words function primarily as cudgels for the remainder of the scene, as the Spy and his friend “fed his passion with a supply of sharp reflections . . . till [they] had spur’d him at last to such a pitch of madness that he boil’d up into a ridiculous froth which rendered him a laughing stock to the whole company” (277); this discursive practice the Spy refers to as “us[ing] the scourge” in order to “pursue the battle to a compleat victory,” which the Spy achieves by forcing the orator to “run away” (278). Ward’s counter-model of public discourse, that is, merely replaces one form of forceful, othering rhetoric with another more sympathetic to “the pious martyr [Charles I] and his sons,” using the affective, anthropological dynamic of satiric ridicule to turn even those apparently aligned with the orator against him by playing on their desire to identify with whichever party happens to be holding the “cudgel” or “scourge,” as it were (278).67 However, the scapegoating and exclusionary mechanisms that defi ne Ward’s alternative form of publicness harbor a particular gender dynamic not captured by describing his practice in solely anthropological terms. For Ward constructs his idealized public against both the bestialized defenders of the revolution and, more insistently, the wide range of femininities that threaten the kind of cudgel-wielding, tavern-based, Tory manliness Ward promotes through the homosocial couple who narrate the papers of the London Spy. 68 In Part Nine, for example, Ward positively frames the Spy’s “porterly rudeness” of smoking and spitting against the social protocols adhered to in an upscale coffee house known particularly for the tidiness of both its spaces and its clientele (203). In intentional disregard of the “sweet-breath’d gentlemen” already installed at their tables (203), the Spy and his friend “puff on [their] unsavoury weed” in order to “separate the beaus from the more sociable party” (204)—the Spy’s entourage, of course—until fi nally the precursors of Addison’s famous coffee-house figure, the elegant “flaxen-wig’d spectators,” disdainfully retreat to a table near a large street-side window to watch the passers-by. The Spy’s antagonistic motives get furthered fortuitously by the arrival of an “old dumb Father Red-Cap” who stops on the walk outside to gather an audience for his “antick postures” and “apish gestures,” eventually deciding to mimic the very beaus the Spy had been trying to smoke from their habitual resort (204); setting himself up in the window next to the coffee-house gentlemen, the Red-Cap

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In tandem with the Red-Cap, Ward’s Spy manages to effect a significant social and ideological transformation within the public space of the coffee house in this scene: together, the Spy’s “porterly” but eminently agreeable smoking and the Red-Cap’s mob-pleasing dumbshow reassert the hegemony of a plebeian, crudely masculine sociability over the disturbing threat represented by the gentlemen’s “foppery” (203). The erasure of the polite, excessively tidy beaus figures as a kind of liberating restoration of a natural order of taste and behavior their artifice had attempted to stifle; as the “sparks” retire, the Spy’s smoking “had given encouragement to others to pluck out their boxes, and betake themselves to the like liberty” (205). When allowed to “be themselves,” that is, the other patrons reveal a natural affi nity for the Spy’s habits, pastimes, and sense of humor that their antagonists’ more elegant paradigm would displace. Of course, at the center of Ward’s concerns about what makes the gentlemen so unnatural—as is signaled by the many references to their “sweet breath,” their “house-wife’s” concern with cleanliness, and their interest in matters of fashion—is their ostensible gender-transgression. Ward refers to his antagonists early in the scene as a “gawdy knot of effeminate philoginians,” creating a paradoxically redundant shorthand description that signals to like-minded readers all they need to know about the threat posed by these men (204). For Ward, these gentlemen are so fond or admiring of women—so “philogynous”—that they have in fact unnaturally verged on becoming women themselves. Moreover, Ward’s prurient insistence on the men’s physical entanglement with one another in a kind of “knot” matches the potentially sexualized implications of his earlier claim that they are “always running their noses into the arse of a civet-cat” to fend off the foul smells of the London streets (203). Lest we should think this an isolated incidence of Ward’s gender-policing strategies, it is worth considering that Ward’s phobic account of coffee-house gentlemen echoes his treatment (in Part Three) of men in another typically Whig public-sphere arena, the Royal Exchange. While we noted above how Addison’s Mr. Spectator enjoys “mixing” and “jostl[ing]” with the agents on the Exchange, Ward’s Spy expresses his horror at being “jostled

Learned Oracles, Muck-Spattered Spies, and Academic Activists 53 in amongst a parcel of swarthy buggerantoes, preternatural fornicators . . . who would ogle a handsome young man with as much lust as a truebred English whoremaster would gaze upon a beautiful virgin” (68). Ward associates these sexualized traders with a particular set of socioeconomic types emergent during the period who are unmistakably the genealogical precursors of Addison’s heroic figures in the Spectator, both the eidolon and Sir Andrew Freeport; Ward links the “buggerantoes” on the Exchange to Whig political ideology based on their comfort among a “cluster of common-wealth’s-men”; to a cosmopolitan ethos based on the “confusedly jumbled . . . nations” of their various origins; and to a specific set of profitmotivated economic practices based on their unnatural “love [of] no body but themselves” and their willingness to “build their own welfare upon the ruin of their neighbors” (69).69 In this context, Addison’s idealization of Whig public-sphere spaces and their representative masculine types must be viewed as a reactive attempt to rehabilitate the forms of homosociality and economic activity so thoroughly denigrated by Ward’s astonishingly popular periodical from the previous decade. Finally, then, Ward’s populist, activist model of publicness relies upon a rather blatant array of categorical exclusions in order to construct itself. While Ward is deeply committed to social reform (like Astell) and to potentially “horizontal” forms cultural interaction and production (like Dunton), Ward explicitly demonizes precisely those emergent Whig social types who are often thought of as inaugurating such proto-Habermasian public-sphere ideals. Situating the work of Addison, Steele, and Shaftesbury against Ward’s widely disseminated ridicule of coffee houses and the Exchange ultimately makes the Whigs’ rejection of the more democratizing elements in Ward’s ideology much more historically legible than if we consider texts like the Spectator papers in a kind of privileged isolation, as if they simply provided the context for their own interpretation through their apparently scrupulous representation of that context. Ward’s public-sphere theory offers readers street-level populism and a trenchant critique of how major institutions fail to promote the public interest, but Ward defines his idealized social world through starkly exclusionary strategies, particularly targeting discourses and personalities marked as feminine and/or foreign.70 Addison’s model of publicness borrows from Ward’s urban, spectatorial narrative structure but purges his predecessor’s insistence on representing the lower strata of English society and the extent to which they are being failed by public institutions in the emergent early-liberal Whig culture of the late 1690s and early 1700s. In his efforts to create a nation of polite taste, Addison aestheticizes social problems as localized scenes of distress about which it is important simply to have the right affective reaction, and he recovers from Ward’s demonization public-sphere institutions crucial to the perpetuation of Whig economic and political hegemony—the Exchange and the coffee house, among others—and he re-imagines the masculine types associated with those spaces as the very embodiment of polite public-spiritedness. Moreover, Addison

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extends the dominion of such polite men into the private sphere of “feminine” domesticity, not through Ward’s crude insistence on male prerogative, but through the literary dissemination of gendered models of behavior that women (and men) can internalize through reading at the privacy of their tea tables; Addison thereby inaugurates a new model of cultural power as aesthetic and hegemonic, an identity-forming set of discourses experienced by interpellated readers as an empowering choice rather than as the kind of arbitrary or forceful impositions depicted in Ward’s coffee-house scenes. Addison and Steele recover Whig spaces and personalities from Ward’s denigration, they preserve but reform through “politeness” Ward’s hierarchies of gender, and they reject his activist populism, but their paradigm of publicsphere discourse would have been unthinkable without the influential blueprints provided by Ward, Astell, and Dunton.

2

Neutering Addison and Steele Aesthetic Failure and the Spectatorial Public Sphere

More than four decades after its initial publication, Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere remains an unavoidable starting point for studies of early eighteenth-century print culture. For Habermas, of course, the development of English coffee house culture and its periodical press marked the emergence of a potentially egalitarian discursive space, a realm governed more by the rational force of the better argument than by the institutional force of existing power relations.1 Extending Habermas’s argument, historian Lawrence Klein recently argued that figures like Anthony Ashley Cooper (Third Earl of Shaftesbury), Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele promoted an urbane ethos of sociability through their ideal of polite conversation, a form of dialogue that offered a “normative framework for human relations since its conventions implied the values of freedom, equality, activity, pleasure, and restraint.”2 For Habermas’s critics, on the other hand, this interpretation of the post-Restoration public sphere is compromised: either by the blind spots in Habermas’s theory itself—especially regarding issues of gender and class—or by the fact that Habermas’s Enlightenment publicness was managed by precisely those empowered Englishmen whose interests it was supposed to scrutinize. 3 But both Habermasians and their opponents leave unquestioned the claim that post-Restoration English writers imagined their public sphere as a form of dialogic, conversational sociability focused on “rational-critical public debate.”4 Addison and Steele, however, insisted that their paradigmatic periodical the Spectator (1711–1714), despite its print dissemination, should be thought of as a vehicle for privately consumed, surrogate visuality—a spectatorial model of publicness.5 Addison and Steele’s shift from a conversational to a spectatorial model of print culture undermines recent scholarly consensus about what these periodicalists hoped to achieve.6 As a representative reading, we can take Terry Eagleton’s view that Addison and Steele embody the earliest examples of criticism’s “substantive social function,” promoting social consolidation through their periodicals by “codifying norms” and “regulating practices”; as such, the spectatorial project is imagined to be that of “consciously educating a heterogeneous public into the universal forms of reason, taste and

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morality.”7 Though they would emphasize the critical function of the public sphere more than Eagleton does, Habermasians would agree that Addison and Steele register the early eighteenth-century desire for a particular kind of ethical social order and that their texts reflect a confident effort at reform. Erin Mackie has complicated the image of Addison and Steele as reformers by suggesting that, to succeed in the market, the essayists “depend upon” the same disruptive socioeconomic forces that they “warn against” in their papers; even so, Mackie still views Addison and Steele as deeply invested in getting readers to “do, say, like, and buy the right thing[s].”8 One task of this chapter will be to reconcile the longstanding idea of Addison and Steele as promoters of Augustan values—decorum, good sense, politeness—with the almost complete absence in their work of characters who exemplify these values.9 Critics often view Mr. Spectator, the eidolon of Addison and Steele’s periodical, as a model of the polite sociability he is taken to promote, a reading that equates Mr. Spectator with his creators’ public images. J. G. A. Pocock has noted that Addison and Steele, like many upwardly mobile mercantile Whigs in early eighteenth-century England, wanted to distance themselves from “new types of personality” that provided easy targets for Tory propagandists, personalities whose status depended upon a tenuous credit economy that made them seem “unprecedentedly dangerous and unstable”; as a result, Addison and Steele often claimed cultural patrilineage from a kind of neo-classical “Roman mythology”—with Cato as a model—in order to appear “self-mastered, stoic, and public.”10 Mr. Spectator occasionally wants to be this kind of figure, but his behaviors and inclinations are hardly those of the stable social hero. In Spectator 131, Mr. Spectator admits he “does not love jollity and what they call good-neighbourhood”; he makes “a very unsociable figure” during his visit to Sir Roger’s country estate; and he resolves to return to London “in order to be alone” amid anonymous crowds (S 2:20, 21). As readers’ surrogate participants in the disorderly public sphere, Addison and Steele’s personae characteristically do not intervene, they withdraw. Mr. Spectator repeatedly removes himself from urban scenes that threaten to overwhelm him. Even the editorial persona of the Tatler, the slightly more extroverted Isaac Bickerstaff, offers a rather limited assessment of what spectatorial judgment can achieve: he hopes his labors as cultural critic “can but wear one impertinence out of human life, destroy a single vice, or give a morning’s chearfulness to an honest mind,” as the minimal condition of his not having written “in vain” (T 2:278). This perking up of the coffee hour hardly matches Eagleton’s description of Addison and Steele’s “juridical technology” bent on “scourging deviation and repressing the transgressive.”11 Perhaps we can better account for Addison and Steele’s complicated relationship with the supposedly deviant elements in their culture by expanding on Mackie’s insight that their periodical papers rely on the subversive forces they want to contain. In fact, the papers collaborate in the very production or performance of the disorder they describe. Rather than

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encouraging social reform, the papers create an ideologically useful image of the public sphere as beyond manageability. In the readings that follow, a blueprint for their cultural project emerges: the papers begin by depicting a public world in desperate need of regulation, but their subsequent attempts to establish order end up allegorizing the failure, and even the illegitimacy, of their own disciplinary efforts.12 In an apparent paradox, by establishing the unmanageability of the public sphere, the papers attain what I would call their managerial moment: the papers imply that social reform is not feasible, but they redeem that impossibility by cultivating a spectatorial ethos that imagines its public impotence as both necessary and unfortunate. As I hope to prove, the ideal of spectatorial neutrality or of “standing neuter” is central to Addison and Steele’s cultural project (S 1:479). While previous readings emphasize Addison and Steele’s desire to reform contrary energies in early eighteenth-century England, I argue that the papers stage the failure of their public engagement in order to enable a privately conducted neutralization (in the sense of “render[ing] ineffective”) of their audience’s impulse to make ethics public.13 Addison and Steele enforce a strict separation between an irremediably antagonistic social realm and a compensatory private sphere of ethically legitimated spectatorship. In and through their periodical essays, they develop an influential, aesthetic model of English publicness that theoretically assuages the violence it cannot practically prevent.

VISION AND SOCIAL ORDER: THE SPECTATORIAL PROJECT John Barrell has shown how eighteenth-century British writers hoped to contain the growing fragmentation of their society by offering persuasive representations of it as still unified.14 As Barrell points out, only those who could be considered disinterested were deemed qualified to give an account of the social totality. Even magistrates and statesmen would not meet this standard of disinterestedness, since their perspectives were limited by the demands of their specific occupations.15 To be reliable, the ideal spectator must be a property owner free from any particular employment that might impede his (presumed male) view of the social whole. The eighteenth-century British gentleman, “having no need to follow any determinate occupation, had the potential to comprehend them all,” for only “those who perform no regular, determinate task can comprehend and describe the relations between such tasks.”16 Addison and Steele’s Mr. Spectator perfectly fits the bill: he possesses both a small hereditary estate and the leisured condition of “liv[ing] in the world without having any thing to do in it” (S 1:45). Mr. Spectator, however, generally does not describe himself as disinterested or impartial; Addison and Steele use the less common but more semantically suggestive term neuter to defi ne their eidolon’s viewpoint. In fact, Addison and Steele did not see neutrality and impartiality as synonyms, so

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the lexical choice is important. In the fi rst number of the Guardian (1713), often seen as simply a continuation of the Spectator, Steele distinguishes his new paper from its predecessors by declaring, “I shall be impartial, tho’ I cannot be neuter.”17 For Steele, neutrality demands more thoroughgoing detachment than impartiality. While impartiality requires that one avoid prejudice, it in no way precludes the articulation of judgment or the taking of sides. Remaining “neuter,” on the other hand, makes judgment a more difficult matter. In Spectator 117, which debates the legitimacy of belief in witchcraft, Addison upholds the value of “stand[ing] neuter,” which he defi nes as his refusal to “engag[e] his assent to one side or the other” (S 1:479). For Addison, such a “hovering faith as this, which refuses to settle upon any determination,” is necessary “to avoid errors and prepossession” (S 1:479). Not surprisingly, among the relevant contextual meanings of “neuter,” one fi nds the notion of “not declaring oneself on, or rendering assistance to either side” in a conflict.18 To be neutral, then, one must neither speak about one’s judgment nor make that judgment publicly effective or “engaged,” in Addison’s terms. Impartiality allows for a public statement of opinion that neutrality precludes; and, while impartiality effaces one’s private prejudices in the name of public declaration, neutrality marks the effacement of public declaration, regardless of private feeling. This conception of neutrality would seem to undermine the spectator’s role as social reformer. If the gentlemanly observer is not to make public declarations about matters of ethical import, then how are Addison and Steele to effect social change? The difficult doubleness of the spectatorial vantage point is clarified by a letter from a reader in Spectator 324, which describes Mr. Spectator’s procedure: “You have been pleased, out of a concern for the good of your countrymen, to act under the character of SPECTATOR not only the part of a looker-on, but an overseer of their actions; and whenever such enormities as this infest the town, we immediately fly to you for redress” (S 3:188). For the reader, both forms of neutrality that Addison and Steele idealize depend upon mechanisms of visuality: to be neutral requires that one act as a certain kind of “looker-on,” while to make others neutral is to engage in a managerial or legislative over-seeing. But how can Addison and Steele legislate without declaring laws? In other words, how can their personae remain neutral in the act of neutralizing others? Addison and Steele’s model of over-seeing must avoid both direct prescription and the disciplinary threat of exposing readers through surveillance; by offering to make ideal spectators of their readers, Addison and Steele mold their consumers’ practices of looking-on in a way that will conduce to social order apparently without coercion. Rather than harping on their readers, Bickerstaff and Mr. Spectator pitch themselves as agents of aesthetic education, giving readers an experience comparable to that offered by the theater. Early in the Spectator papers, Addison defines the spectatorial view as one that “considers the world as a theatre” and that “desires to form a right judgment of those who are the actors on it”

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(S 1:45, 46); as such, the papers function as a series of dramatic presentations meant to stimulate mechanisms of identification and repulsion, offering both theatrical characters and “right judgment[s]” about them. In Tatler 172, Steele’s Bickerstaff imagines himself as an unconventional tragedian, one who refuses to present audiences with “histor[ies] of princes, and persons who act in high spheres,” since such aristocratic drama would affect the average reader “only in a transient manner . . . as things fit rather to exercise the powers of our minds than to create new habits in them” (T 3:305, 305–306); instead, Bickerstaff’s simulated stage depicts “such adventures as befall persons not exalted above the common level,” so that his readers will view things that happen “to such as live and look like themselves” (T 3:306). Steele’s defense of drame bourgeois highlights its performative capacity to “create new habits” by acting upon readers’ predisposition toward visual modes of representation—their “prepossess[ion] with outward appearances” (T 3:306)—rather than criticizing or countering that tendency.19 By tapping into (or creating) his audience’s appetite for visual identification, Steele heightens the cultural force of his papers, creating new behaviors in his audience rather than offering up essays that transiently “pass through our imaginations” (T 3:305). Steele’s description of bourgeois spectacle is ideologically complicated. To begin with, the idea of “creat[ing] new habits” harbors some internal contradiction inasmuch as something new should not immediately be called habitual. Steele would have his theatrical representations initiate new identities in his audience members, identities at once unprecedented and somehow so deeply recognizable that they take root automatically, unconsciously in the spectating subject. Steele’s new spectators will not be particularly decisive or agential but will replicate (or become) new programming at the level of habit, repetitively consuming periodicals and identifying with those who “look like themselves” in the scenes they depict. At the same time, Steele downplays the power of his own texts by differentiating them from those “which writers form for the ostentation of their own force” (T 3:306). Still, his project clearly reverses the agential order implied by those aristocratic texts he criticizes, texts that emphasize the readerly activity of “exercis[ing] the powers of our minds,” while his own texts re-“create” minds that passively receive them. 20 This dramatic theory clearly carries out Addison and Steele’s project of neutralization according to the contextual meanings of that term. If to neutralize is “to render ineffective or void,” or even “to destroy,” then Bickerstaff’s idea of “creat[ing] new habits” in his audiences conduces to their being, in a sense, neutralized. 21 Viewing Steele’s bourgeois spectacle will negate the already existing properties in his spectators in the name of producing new characteristics and values; one’s previous identity is “render[ed] void,” as it were, and replaced with one whose operations will be less ethically noxious, derived from characters who “live and look like” us. We can make this point less abstract by examining the particular dramatic scene that follows Bickerstaff’s aesthetic theory in Tatler 172. This

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bourgeois tragedy stars a young Irish gentleman, Eustace, and his wife, the two of whom live together “in general with much ease and tranquillity,” though Mr. Eustace is secretly “impatient of rebuke” (T 3:306). During a spat between Eustace’s wife and her sister, Eustace falls into an “outragious passion on the side of the sister,” prompting his wife to “rally him for interposing.” As the evening continues, his wife’s rebuke “descend[s] deeper into [Eustace’s] thoughts” in a way that prompts the horrifying dénouement: Eustace stabs his wife to death in their bed, runs from the murder scene, and is fi nally shot by an officer of justice (T 3:307). Surely Eustace has a temper, but his more fundamental flaw, for Bickerstaff, is that he can neither be neutral nor contribute to the neutralization of opposed forces. 22 Steele makes it clear that Eustace’s thirst for partiality, his being “one of that sort of men who are never unconcerned at what passes before them” (T 3:306–07), directly precipitates the killing spree. In this light, the character with whom the audience should identify becomes evident only later: spectators must recognize themselves in the properly “unconcerned” author, a subject-position they do not see but without which no sight would be possible. For the spectacle to create new habits, the audience must fi nally inhabit the spectatorial viewpoint from which individual characters’ behaviors can be seen as excessively partial. We are made neutral by looking on through the neutral eyes of the apparatus. All will become spectators. But Addison’s and Steele’s spectators will do the seeing for you—leave the seeing to us, they say. Bickerstaff and Mr. Spectator often insist that ordinary citizens are easily led astray when left to their own aesthetic faculties. Take, for example, the Tatler essays warning about the dangers of reading newspapers. In Addison’s Tatler 155, Bickerstaff complains about an upholsterer whom he calls “the greatest newsmonger in our quarter,” a man who spends so much time searching out the latest periodicals that he is “much more inquisitive to know what passed in Poland than in his own family” (T 3:218). Struggling to obtain his own view of European politics, the upholsterer becomes “the ruin of his shop,” disrupting in his own small way the economic basis of England’s prosperity and social cohesion (T 3:218). Though Addison emphasizes the upholsterer’s reading habits rather than his vision, what Addison seems most troubled by is this ordinary person’s accession to a spectatorial position from which he (metaphorically) sees for himself by searching out information from a variety of sources.23 But rather than appealing to a nonvisual sense or to Habermasian conversation as a way of promoting legitimate sociality, Addison and Steele correct spectatorship with spectatorship. The problem with self-appointed spectators is that they “live more in a coffee house than in their shops” and have minds “so taken up with the affairs of the allies, that they forget their customers” (T 3:222). Far from viewing the early eighteenth-century public sphere as a site for the democratization of politics through rational discourse, Addison’s and Steele’s essays on their own print culture represent it as a subversive threat to the socioeconomic

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order and a locus of “the most incurable and ridiculous of all phrensies” (T 3:332); according to Bickerstaff in Steele’s Tatler 178, the newly cluttered market of periodical literature induces otherwise industrious citizens into a pathological curiosity, an “epidemick ill” that requires their medicalized containment in Bickerstaff’s own “Bedlam” (T 3:332, 336). All will become spectators, but only through the framing of the observations presented in the Tatler and the Spectator. As Mr. Spectator puts it in Spectator 10, to prevent citizens from incapacitating themselves, “I would earnestly entreat them not to stir out of their chambers until they have read this paper” (S 1:46). In effect, Addison and Steele build a community of readers who share the comprehensive view that the Tatler and Spectator papers produce. Several of the papers explicitly thematize how they provide a more complete view of social totality than that available to any of its individual participants. Spectator 454, for example, follows the insomniac Mr. Spectator through London for twenty-four consecutive hours, offering readers a synoptic view of how “men of six a clock give way to those of nine, they of nine to the generation of twelve, and [how] they of twelve disappear, and make room for the fashionable world, who have made two a clock the noon of the day” (S 4:99). If a Londoner appearing at noon is so different from another appearing at nine that they represent entirely different “people . . . born in different centuries,” as Addison puts it, then English society must need the spectator’s synthesizing viewpoint to discover its unifying principle (S 4:99). Mr. Spectator emphasizes that his papers should be consumed for their socializing visual effect; he explains that “the greatest pleasure [he] knows [he] receive[s] at [his] eyes” and that he is as “obliged to an agreeable person for coming abroad into [his] view, as another is for a visit of conversation at their own houses” (S 4:98). Mr. Spectator’s is not an ethics of dialogue, then, but an ethics of visibility, in which observing subjects become affectively “obliged” to those who enter their visual field: the social order imagined by these papers is maintained by its participants’ mutual connectedness as both observing and observed. Steele works through the implications of this aesthetic obligation in his essays on prostitution. Here he attempts to engage his readers’ “compassion” by criticizing “outragiously virtuous” citizens who rigidly distance themselves from streetwalkers (S 2:534). By analyzing “the oeconomy of whoredom” (S 2:535), Steele highlights the interdependence of “pampered vice in the habitations of the wealthy” and the “distressed indigent wickedness [in] the harbours of the brothel” (S 2:537). Following his idea of the periodical as a kind of theater, Steele makes his social critique more forceful by presenting readers with images of young women who have fallen into a life of prostitution; he paints a “slim young girl of about seventeen” with a “forced wantonness in her look and air” (S 2:534, 535), “eyes wan and eager” and a “dress thin and tawdry” (S 2:535)—a composite sketch that elicits “anguish of heart” from Steele’s narrator (S 2:535). In a follow-up

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essay, Steele prints a letter from a “Francis Courtly,” who complains that telling the “rich” and the “virtuous” about the “lapses” and “indigence” of others is “in a kind involving each of them in some participation of those disadvantages” (S 2:574). Of course, Steele’s point in the earlier essay was that there would be no such disadvantages without the exploitative participation of the empowered. Making visible the connection between fallen women and rakish aristocratic men—two ostensibly separate economic spheres—Steele builds an audience united by their identification with a surrogate spectator who models the proper affective reaction to images of violated women. However, what is the social significance of an obligation that arises from this kind of spectatorial identification? An answer can be found in the way Addison and Steele depict marital and labor relationships, two spheres that represent the stability, productivity, and reproducibility of English society. Bickerstaff begins Tatler 149 by lamenting how England’s “ill-natured husbands” undermine his glorious nation’s “publick happiness and liberty”; he describes such husbands as “private tyrants, against whom there neither is any law now in being, nor can there be invented any by the wit of man” (T 3:184). Bickerstaff then paints scenes of private distress, using the charged tableau of a young wife’s “eyes full of tears” to promote the ideal of “reciprocal complaisance” (T 3:184, 185). 24 In Spectator 137, Steele offers an extended argument for reciprocity in his response to a servant whose master is so “suspicious” that he spies on his employees (S 2:41); indeed, this master so “constantly watch[es]” the servants that they “differ no more in pleasure and liberty than . . . a gaoler and a prisoner” (S 2:41). Mr. Spectator offers a way out of this dialectic by admonishing masters who “cannot put themselves in the condition of the persons below them” (S 2:43). An ethos of placing oneself in the condition of those one observes gradually emerges as a crucial theme in Addison and Steele’s periodicals. The problem in each dyad—master–servant, husband–wife, rake–prostitute—is that the empowered half fails to view the other as an object of sympathetic identification and to understand their interdependence. For Addison and Steele, seeing the other properly becomes the aesthetic solution to a set of moral problems, a way of curing both the husband’s insolence and the master’s perverseness. Neutrality and reciprocity are fused in the spectatorial bearing toward others, the perceptual ground of a “reciprocal complaisance” that can guarantee English order. 25

THE ADVANTAGES OF SPECULATION: ADDISON’S AND STEELE’S ALLEGORIES OF NEUTRALITY If Addison and Steele rely on the power of ethical spectatorship to neutralize antagonism and to promote reciprocity, to what extent and in what ways do their papers imagine their project’s feasibility? That is to say,

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how realizable are these ideals made to seem by the papers themselves? To approach this problem, Mr. Spectator generally uses two different strategies; he either describes the characteristics of a properly neutral vision or he offers a narrative in which the achievement of a neutral position is the end goal. In rare cases, essays I would call allegories of neutrality, Addison and Steele employ both strategies at once: they provide a maxim by which the ideal spectator should be guided and a narrative example of that maxim in practice. While this formal structure—maxim, example, restatement—is common to much conduct literature of the eighteenth century and beyond, Addison and Steele use this convention rather unconventionally in that their essays consistently fail to achieve their ostensible aims of proof, reinforcement, and closure. To cite their maxims as evidence of Addison and Steele’s priorities, one must overlook countermovements in the papers that show the maxims failing by their own standards. We have already seen how the Spectator papers attempt to quell the increasing divisiveness in early eighteenth-century English society by showing how differences of opinion or interest can be reconciled at a higher level of generality. Chief among the disputes the Spectator papers wish to settle is that between the interests of land and trade. Much has been made of the papers’ advocacy of Whig positions on trade, but, as the opening of Spectator 174 clarifies, Steele aims less for the overthrow of land by trade than for the unification of the warring parties: There is scarce any thing more common than animosities between parties that cannot subsist but by their agreement: This was well represented in the sedition of the members of the human body in the old Roman fable. It is often the case of lesser confederate states against a superiour power, which are hardly held together though their unanimity is necessary for their common safety: And this is always the case of the landed and trading interest of Great Britain; the trader is fed by the product of the land, and the landed man cannot be cloathed but by the skill of the trader; and yet those interests are ever jarring. (S 2:185–86) Steele makes unanimity crucial not only to “common safety” but to his society’s very “subsist[ence].” Moreover, the reference to Livy’s “old Roman fable” makes England a human body, with land and trade functioning as individual limbs which haphazardly injure one another rather than understand themselves as parts of the same whole. The figure of anthropomorphism aims to accomplish a great deal here, implicitly positing the nation as the primary criterion by which bodies should be unified and defi ned—a political criterion that would replace and subsume the narrower economic affiliations of land and trade. But the figure also implies that the limbs of land and trade cannot unify themselves; rather, they must be reconciled by a perceptual agent that is simultaneously distinct from and dependent upon those limbs for its effectiveness. This ideal of a unanimous position, or

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neutral place, Mr. Spectator imagines as a figural brain able to perceive an interconnectedness to which the individual members are blind. On the one hand, the anthropomorphism effectively naturalizes the existence of such a position—every body has such a brain that directs its interdependent limbs. On the other hand, however, the figure also troubles that naturalization by requiring a further figuration: the idea of the individual members’ capacity for “sedition”; England is a body subdivided into parts that are themselves anthropomorphized, since, for a limb to be seditious, it too must be like a person with a brain of its own. The allegory of sedition in the old Roman fable—a commonplace of contemporary economic theory—undermines the very notion of a single, neutral position from which economic confl ict can be controlled and legislated because it insists on the embodied difference of the jarring interests it would harmonize. If the maxim that opens Spectator 174 subverts itself through a reliance on this complicated set of figures, then perhaps the exemplification of the maxim offers a more convincing image of the neutral unanimity England needs. Steele gives us a dialogue between factions, with Sir Roger speaking for land and Sir Andrew Freeport for trade, but the dialogue is no negotiation. It begins when Roger observes that “Carthaginian faith was a proverbial phrase to intimate breach of leagues” (S 2:186). Mr. Spectator quotes Roger’s excursus against trade: Carthaginians were the greatest traders in the world, and as gain is the chief end of such a people, they never pursue any other: The means to it are never regarded; they will, if it comes easily, get money honestly; but if not, they will not scruple to attain it by fraud or cosenage: And indeed what is the whole business of the trader’s accompt but to overreach him who trusts to his memory? (S 2:186) Roger fi nishes by asking how anything “great and noble” could ever be expected from those perpetually concerned about “ballancing books” and “watching expences”; he places the trader’s virtues of “punctual dealing,” “frugality[,] and parsimony” below a gentleman’s “charity to the poor” and “hospitality among his neighbours” (S 2:186). Freeport then defends the mercantile ethos on the basis of its public usefulness, explaining that the Roman proverb’s truth-value is compromised by the fact that “the Romans were [the Carthaginians’] professed enemies”; Freeport regrets that “no Carthaginian histories have come to our hands,” histories which would teach “proverbs against the Roman generosity in fighting for and bestowing other people’s goods” (S 2:187). Steele’s essay reveals how proverbs perpetuate antagonisms between different groups: in Freeport’s view, proverbs don’t argue for a position as much as they are written “against” others. The jarring between Freeport and Roger can be seen as the eighteenth-century repetition of an ancient antagonism rendered permanent through its proverbial formulation. Unanimity becomes impossible to imagine because

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these characters are not really in dialogue; their conversation presents two mutually exclusive monologues—one grounded in nobility and generosity, the other in “numbers” and industry (S 2:188). In fact, the men who represent the forces of land and trade are not really speaking at all; in a strong sense, they are being spoken for by proverbs that antedate their (hardly dialogic) conversation. Mr. Spectator uses a proverb to end the antagonism between land and trade, but the exemplification of his proverb describes an irreconcilable conflict between proverbs. After Freeport’s tirade against Roger, Mr. Spectator offers no account of how the differences between the two men might be mediated, no position of unanimous neutrality from which their disagreement might be resolved. 26 Having juxtaposed two mutually refuting arguments, he remains silent before the apparently irresolvable economic conflict they represent. In effect, the characters’ need to mediate difference through speech disrupts what Mr. Spectator hoped the purely visual might unify. It is one thing for Mr. Spectator to view the body of England as symbolically unified, but it is quite another to unify those interests practically through a dialogue in which both sides are allowed to speak. Acknowledging this incompatibility of the spoken and the seen, Mr. Spectator remains silent—conversation here only highlights the irremediable antagonism that spectatorship must assuage. Even at the level of the essay’s aesthetic rhetoric, anthropomorphism fails to produce unity from the outset, effecting a plurality of personifications within the body it would unite, while synecdoche fails in the exemplification by showing that Roger’s and Freeport’s different parts cannot be subsumed into a whole; the economic partialities of land and trade resist political unification in the body of England. Steele presents another allegory of neutrality in Spectator 454, the episode narrating a consecutive “four and twenty hours” in London. Here Mr. Spectator explains that the most “inexpressible pleasure” of observation is reserved for those who “value things only as they are the objects of speculation, without drawing any worldly advantage from them” (S 4:98). The ideal onlooker views the world as an aesthetic object that will amuse and instruct, while his negative foil sees only economic objects useful for projecting profit and loss. Even so, the benign spectator still uses a discourse of value and speculation that overlaps with the language of capitalism from which Mr. Spectator wants to distance himself. While “speculation” has a number of meanings in early eighteenth-century parlance, in the Spectator papers the term is most often associated with Freeport, for whom to speculate is to predict the outcome of an economic venture. Not surprisingly, then, Mr. Spectator’s visual apotheosis in this particular essay occurs at the Royal Exchange, London’s center for the trading of stocks, goods, and mercantile information. While the merchants focus on their own “hopes and bargains,” Mr. Spectator fi nds his “account” in “observing them in attention to their several interests”; Mr. Spectator concludes, “I, indeed, looked upon myself as the richest man that walk’d the Exchange that day;

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for my benevolence made me share in the gains of every bargain that was made” (S 4:102). Mr. Spectator never really distances himself from the language and practice of economics. Spectatorship makes him “the richest man” on the Exchange; he accumulates a wealth of “pleasure” through the operation of a “benevolence” that “ma[kes him] share in the gains of every bargain.” But what sort of benevolence takes a commission from the happiness of others? Summing up the essay, Mr. Spectator teaches us to “make every face you see give you the satisfaction you now take in beholding that of a friend,” since such a practice “will make all the good which arrives to any man an encrease of happiness to your self” (S 4:103). In accordance with his theories of social order, Steele’s benevolence involves the capacity to identify, to efface difference by substituting oneself for others under the aegis of friendship. Friendship, in turn, provides a visual pleasure indistinguishable from profit: one sees the face of the other, distinguishes that face as “friend,” and then identifies with that image as a source of “gratification” and “gains” (S 4:102, 103, 102). Finally, the discourses of aesthetics and economics collapse together in the terms “speculation” and “account.” What gets lost in this description of the spectacular exchange, of course, is loss itself. Mr. Spectator’s vision is a fantasy of pure accumulation without expenditure, in which he identifies only with those who profit and never with those who lose. His exchange enacts a scenario in which everybody who matters wins—the only losers are those without the “benevolence” to identify with profiting merchants in a way that would allow them access to a figurative share in others’ literal gain. In the end, Addison’s and Steele’s efforts to imagine a neutral spectator turn into allegories of neutrality’s impossibility. Their attempts to establish a detached position free from particular interest, a position from which the social realm can be viewed as a kind of aesthetic object (theater, scene, picture, and so forth), often reveal either a keen self-interest behind the mask of altruistic public concern or a world governed by intractable economic antagonism. Materialist readings of eighteenth-century literature have described how particular authors—Alexander Pope stands out as a common example—use aesthetic form to efface the economic circumstances and relations of production in the cultural context out of which their own literary works take shape. This attempt to aestheticize the economic marks the ideological moment of much Augustan literature, the moment in which mercantile capitalism and colonial exploitation are sublated into the image of a beautiful England, gilded and enriched by trade.27 Addison’s and Steele’s allegories work in the opposite direction, underlining the inescapably economic basis of the aesthetic moments they attempt to enact. The Spectator papers offer what I would call an econom(ic)ization of the aesthetic, a rhetorical gesture whose effects may appear to be critical or counter-hegemonic but which must be understood in relation to Addison’s and Steele’s broader cultural aims. The pure speculator who would eschew worldly advantage turns out to be the richest man at the Exchange, while

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the paper promoting a neutral, unanimous economic policy demonstrates the mutual disruption of the arguments it would unite. In each case, the aesthetic construction of a position beyond positionality is compromised by the economic conditions within which it would have to be articulated. 28 However, if neutrality appears impossible to exemplify, then what becomes of the ethical ideal of reciprocity so crucial to Addison and Steele’s ideal social order? From Mr. Spectator’s perspective, the reciprocity he recommended of others was hardly anything he could be expected to practice himself. On the one hand, Mr. Spectator often identifies sympathetically with those he observes, as in the “grand scene of business” at the Royal Exchange, where he is “infi nitely delighted” in becoming “a Dane, Swede, or Frenchman at different times,” or in “los[ing himself] in a crowd of Jews” (S 1:294, 293, 294). On the other hand, he rigorously prevents himself becoming the object of others’ vision and speech. In his opening essay, Mr. Spectator expresses his extreme displeasure at the idea of being exposed out of his “obscurity,” revealing that “the greatest pain [he] can suffer, is the being talked to, and being stared at” (S 1:5, 6). This visual asymmetry isn’t merely a topos meant to preserve his anonymity— it’s an ethos. In a visit to Sir Roger’s country estate, Mr. Spectator consistently evades others’ visual fields until the neighbors’ curiosity proves too strong; he returns to London, where he can “raise what speculations [he] please[s] upon others without being observed [himself] . . . enjoy[ing] all the advantages of company with all the privileges of solitude” (S 2:21). 29 The ideal of mercantile reciprocity in Addison’s and Steele’s many paeans to trade also reveals itself to be specious. In Spectator 69, on the Royal Exchange, Addison explains that just as reciprocal identification supposedly unites the British nation, international commerce unites the globe, ensuring that the world’s “several parts” have “a kind of dependance upon one another, and [are] united together by their common interest” (S 1:294, 294–95). For Addison, international capitalism enables a “mutual intercourse of good offices” through which the “gifts of nature” are “distribut[ed]” (S 1:296). Again, everybody wins. Addison describes the reciprocity of trade: Our ships are laden with the harvest of every climate: our tables are stored with spices, oils, and wines: our rooms are filled with pyramids of China, and adorned with the workmanship of Japan: our morning’s draught comes to us from the remotest corners of the earth: we repair our bodies by the drugs of America, and repose our selves under Indian canopies. My friend Sir Andrew calls the vineyards of France our gardens; the Spice-Islands our hot-beds; the Persians our silk-weavers, and the Chinese our potters. . . . Nor is it the least part of this our happiness, that whilst we enjoy the remotest products of the north and south, we are free from those extremities of weather which give them birth; that our eyes are refreshed with the green fields of Britain, at the

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Clearly, “we” benefit from commercial intercourse; the subjects that Addison’s fi rst sentence catalogs make his focus quite evident, as he glowingly describes “our ships,” “our tables,” “our rooms,” “our morning’sdraught,” and the repairing of “our bodies” (S 1:295). But what of our trading partners, who ostensibly gain as much as we do in this economic theory of “common interest”? In fact, as the second section of the passage makes clear, they (and the sites of their labor) become ours as well; they live among “our gardens” and “our hot-beds,” and they are “our silk-weavers” and “our potters,” all conspiring to “our happiness”—a situation in which “we enjoy . . . products” and are “free” (S 1:296). The passage closes symmetrically with a return to cataloging “our” repositories of foreign goods, though these repositories are no longer the displaced metonyms of our consumptive apparatuses (ships, tables, rooms), but are named as our own bodily orifices (eyes and palates). If our partners come out a bit behind in trading their “rubies” for our “wooll”—a trade suggested in the essay’s concluding paragraph—they can still be winners if they imaginatively identify with those who profit at their expense, following Addison’s logic in Spectator 454, which neatly anticipates the cultural logic of neoliberal globalization (S 1:296).30

JUST LOOKING: SOCIAL VIOLENCE AND AESTHETIC REDEMPTION Critics have read the spectatorial project as a public realization of Augustan ideals—common sense, decency, and polite taste—by referring to the essays’ maxims without analyzing either how those maxims fare in the examples or how the same principles might be contradicted in other papers. As we have seen, however, Addison and Steele’s rhetoric of social order is consistently compromised by a particular pattern of disintegration, in which neutrality and reciprocity replicate the forms of antagonistic partiality and asymmetry they are supposed to correct. The spectatorial project fails by its own standards, occasionally warning us that it can do nothing but fail. But what if this relentless repetition of ethical and political failure is itself the spectatorial project? The project begins by expressing the desire to unify English society through the ideals of polite neutrality and reciprocity. But the project harbors within itself a movement beyond that explicit desire, a countermovement that allegorizes the failure of the managing gesture. In that sense, the papers perform a critical function: they demystify the ruse of neutrality by unveiling the antagonism and appropriation hidden under its benign mask. In the same procedure, however, there remains what we might call

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an ideological residue: by having neutrality ineluctably fail, Addison and Steele suggest that there is no clear way to counter prevailing forms of violence, no ground for a critical practice that would not replicate the problems it wants to solve. Addison and Steele promote not the ideology of an order that pastes over society’s disruptive forces but the ideology of inevitable disorder, naturalizing historically specifi c forms of violence from which a narrowly delimited group of Englishmen benefits. The spectator’s image of English society reconciles the reader to the unfortunate irremediability of the self-interest that permeates public and private and that conditions gestures of friendship and enmity alike. What redeems such a violent world in the spectatorial scheme, fi nally, is our capacity to have the proper aesthetic reaction to it. If neutrality and reciprocity are necessarily compromised by self-interest, then the pis aller is to identify with the position of the detached, nonviolent spectator. Neither Bickerstaff nor Mr. Spectator can be accused of the forms of violence Addison and Steele bemoan: they don’t duel, they don’t beat their wives, they don’t hire prostitutes, and they don’t sully their hands with the dingy calculation of trade. They embody the spectatorial ideal of just looking, in two senses: they’re not hurting anybody because they’re only (just) looking, and because their look promotes the proper affective reaction to what they observe, it is an ethically legitimate (a just) form of looking. Addison and Steele use their vision of an irremediably antagonistic society to elicit the sympathetic response from readers that will help reproduce a rather disorderly English order; sympathy turns readers into passive spectators to a violent social scene about which nothing can ostensibly be done but which is palliated by their commiserating with the victims of that violence through an identification with the spectatorial viewpoint. In a myriad of examples from the Tatler and the Spectator, commiseration displaces ire, critique, or positive action as the proper response to an ethical dilemma. Remember that Mr. Spectator never suggests ending prostitution (an institution prompted by “desires which are natural to all”) or altering an economic system that makes sexual slavery a viable option for women; he asks only that we feel anguished “compassion” rather than disgust at the women so disenfranchised (S 2:534). 31 Violence is inevitable and unfortunate. But the pleasure of our commiserative reaction makes audiences complicit in and desirous of the violence they also abhor, to the extent that readers’ introjection of the spectatorial viewpoint removes any pretense to impartiality; one introjects not an impartial spectator but an inevitably partial perspective that can still be thought of as neutral to the extent that it makes no public declarations. As a result, readerly guilt here is not analogous to superego-induced guilt as traditionally conceived, a guilt forceful enough to produce neurosis because (in part) of one’s conviction that one could and should avoid having the shameful desires one has; rather, this guilt is always already assuaged by the knowledge that if we desire wrongly, we cannot desire otherwise.

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Addison and Steele’s procedure can be illuminated by comparison to Peter Sloterdijk’s account of how ideology works in post-Enlightenment modernity. Sloterdijk treats cynicism as the most recent and insidiously effective form of ideology in that cynics—unlike the mystified subjects of ideology in Marxian theory, who know not what they do—know very well what they are doing; they see through the ideologies to which they are asked to submit, but they behave as if they believed nonetheless.32 There are crucial differences, though, between Addison and Steele’s subjects of ideology and Sloterdijk’s cynics. While Addison and Steele’s readers know that the public sphere is irremediably riven by antagonisms for which neutrality and reciprocity are masks rather than alternatives, they are also called upon through the discourse of sentimentality to enact a subjective realm opposed to that violence; for Sloterdijk’s cynical subject, on the other hand, there is an absolute disjunction between knowledge and action. For Addison and Steele, in short, an ethics remains possible but affective and impotent, whereas for the Sloterdijkian cynic the category of ethics can only be another ideological ruse to be seen through. Addison and Steele’s treatment of prostitution serves as an excellent model for understanding the dialectic of pleasure and guilt in conditioning their audience’s response. Among prostitutes in the unmanageable public sphere, a gendered “we” can’t help but pleasurably satisfy “desires which are natural to all,” while in the private sphere we prove our ethical legitimacy by lamenting the condition of those at whose expense we take pleasure.33 We can better understand Addison and Steele’s procedure by comparing their simulated community of readers to what Slavoj Žižek has described as “solidarity-in-guilt”: their essays offer readers the double satisfaction of feeling both guilty and pleased in their engagement with the victims, and confi rmed in their own goodness by watching themselves have the proper reaction to another’s suffering.34 Žižek’s guilt-based community gets created by its members’ “participation in a common transgression”; in Addison and Steele, of course, this transgression involves the sentimental economy of pleasure and guilt modeled by Mr. Spectator himself in the face of social violence.35 But readers’ “identification with community” (through Mr. Spectator) requires not only the transgressive moment but also what Žižek calls “the fetishistic disavowal of [the] guilt” caused by the initial transgression.36 Addison and Steele’s most powerful example of such disavowal can be found in Spectator 11, which depicts Mr. Spectator’s reaction to the story of the English merchant Thomas Inkle, as told by another character (Arietta) holding forth in her salon. In the story, based very loosely upon a brief episode in Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), the shipwrecked Inkle is saved by an Amerindian woman (Yarico) whom he later sells into slavery.37 Upon hearing this narrative, Mr. Spectator produces “tears” that function as “applause,” and he withdraws from Arietta’s drawing room, overwhelmed by emotion (S 1:51). Steele offers no cognitive judgment,

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either about Inkle’s economic imperatives (linked explicitly to Freeport’s) or about his exploitative sexuality; rather, Mr. Spectator’s sentimental impotence emblematizes the ethical position of the privatized reader framed by Addison and Steele’s essays. Mr. Spectator’s tears are the sign of his complicated affective engagement with the scene of colonial exploitation. In part, Mr. Spectator participates in Inkle’s pleasure. Inkle begins as a surrogate for Addison and Steele’s readers in that he’s initially called “the European,” a paradigmatic masculine subject who “was highly charmed with the limbs, features, and wild graces of the naked American” and of whom “the Indian grew immediately enamoured” (S 1:50). By the end of the tale, though, Steele calls his character “Mr. Thomas Inkle,” a man more concerned with what “account he should be able to give his friends of his voyage” than with “the poor girl,” toward whom Mr. Spectator insists we should be “incline[d] . . . to commiserate” (S 1:51). Inkle’s transgressive pleasure turns into the reader’s complicit guilt by the essay’s conclusion. But when Mr. Spectator says that his tears can be “take[n] for” applause, he figures the recuperative turn toward self-congratulation that, for Žižek, signals the ideological basis of social and subjective consolidation. Reading Spectator 11 with the essays on prostitution, we begin to see the Žižekian “shared lie” that founds Addison and Steele’s community: the idea that the forms of violence that make us cry are the result of natural desires or ineluctable forces.38 In Žižek’s terms, Addison and Steele’s naturalization of violence is itself the “ideological fantasy” that perpetuates historicallyspecific forms of antagonism by “structuring social reality itself.”39 This link between spectatorial ethics and the aestheticization of violence helps us to read the most extended treatment of neutrality in the Tatler and the Spectator: Addison’s essay against the politics of “furious party spirit” in Spectator 125 (S 1:510). Addison bemoans the current “spirit of division” for the fact that it makes Englishmen “greater strangers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two different nations” (S 1:509, 5–10).40 Again, Addison’s solution is to offer the ideal of neutrality and to exemplify that neutrality in a way that undermines its conventional defi nition. Addison posits the paradoxical ideal of “an honest body of neutral forces”—a strategic “association” designed for mutual support “against the endeavours of those whom [we] ought to look upon as [our] common enemies, whatsoever side they may belong to” (S 1:512). This support group turns out to be a neutral army whose primary intent is to “single every criminal out of the herd, and hunt him down, however formidable and overgrown he might appear” (S 1:512). Scapegoating is both necessary because of the gargantuan proportions of its objects—who are not merely grown, but “overgrown”—and justified by the literariness of our neutral heroes who, when not singling people out and hunting them down, also “shelter distressed innocence” and “defend virtue, however beset”; these Quixotes will complete the aesthetic redemption of sociopolitical antagonism by teaching us “not any

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longer [to] regard our fellow subjects as Whigs and Tories” but to regard them novelistically (if not tautologically), to “make the man of merit our friend, and the villain our enemy” (S 1:512).41 Neutrality underwrites the two related goals of the spectatorial project: it both conditions the ineluctability of social violence and legitimizes that violence by promoting audience identification with a spectatorial position from which we can have a proper view of our common enemies. By coming to “consider the world as a theater,” an unmanageable theater of violence whose scenes appear in the Tatler and the Spectator, we accede to the management of the spectatorial eye (S 1:45). Our redemption here is aesthetic in several ways. First, the fantasy of violent social consolidation is always pitched as just that: a fantastic wish offered by Mr. Spectator, though he hardly appears to imagine its realization. Divisions within England cannot be quelled, though it may in fact become necessary to engage in some hunting down of enemies to prevent Civil War—as if such a practice weren’t itself an enactment of civil discord. But the redemption is aesthetic in a second way, to the extent that if scapegoating occurs, it can be recuperatively re-imagined as a literary event on the order of sheltering distressed innocence and defending virtue. The most ideologically efficacious aspect of the spectatorial project turns out to be its containment of readers’ political judgment about public antagonisms by transforming that judgment into a matter of private aesthetic response.42

CONCLUSIONS Addison and Steele do promote the ideals of decency and politeness, benevolence and compassion, but they relocate those values from the realm of ethical and political publicness to that of affective privacy. They refuse prescriptive discussion about public matters, and they back away from regulating even the domestic sphere. Steele abstains from declaring strictures against domestic violence because, as he puts it, “commerce in the conjugal state is so delicate, that it is impossible to prescribe rules for the conduct of it” (T 3:184).43 The ethical moment in Addison and Steele is neither public nor, in the strongest sense, intersubjective; rather, it occurs in the radically private, intrasubjective space of the spectatorial subject watching itself watching. In Addison and Steele’s model of reform, changes in their audience’s knowledge and behavior play a less significant role than previous scholarly work would suggest: reformed readers are asked primarily to change their mode of aesthetic reception. This receptive capacity has been mistaken as a public site (in part) because the periodicals’ privatization of spectacle for individual consumption blurs the distinction between public and private.44 The ruse of reader participation in the periodicals through letter writing, along with the narrators’ constant assurance that the images provided in the journal will

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substitute adequately for intersubjective experience, allows Addison and Steele to offer a simulated version of the materially effective publicness that their papers have been taken to both embody and promote. Again and again, Addison and Steele send readers home from coffee houses and public assemblies to consume their periodicals in the carceral Bedlams, as Bickerstaff puts it, of their shops, closets, and breakfast nooks. By administering a simulacrum of publicness to private consumers, Addison and Steele substitute aesthetics for ethics, promoting a model of quietistic sentimentality to readers whose fantasies of engagement compensate for their neutered powerlessness. Addison and Steele’s spectatorial model of publicness forces us to rethink the Habermasian reading of early Enlightenment print culture as conversational, rational-critical, and reformist. To be sure, Habermas claims to be discussing only the period’s “political self-understanding”—how the “audience-oriented subjectivity” of the early public sphere represented itself to itself—rather than the actually existing “legal institutions” of that sphere, whose theoretical principles of inclusive equality were “not realized in earnest.”45 But the archival materials strongly suggest that this public sphere’s political self-understanding was internally fractured. There was, in fact, not much agreement between prominent figures in the same social class—even in a narrowly delimited historical frame like 1709–1714— about crucial questions bracketed by Habermasian analysis: to what extent and to what ends should the public sphere function as a conversation among equals? What social effect should the consumption of publicly relevant texts ideally produce? What sort of agency does the reading public have? Whose public(s)? It’s hard to imagine what texts Habermas had in mind when he made his influential claims. Even Daniel Defoe’s acerbic Mr. Review, quintessential antitype to Mr. Spectator, abandons his would-be Habermasian commitments at the end of the Review’s decade-long run, concluding that he can “convince nobody by words.” 46 Defoe describes the English public sphere as a place where he has opposed “cool argument and calm reasoning to party rage . . . [though] the noise here is so great that no appeal to man, to reason or to conscience will reach your ears.”47 In what has become a truism about the period, Marjorie Nicolson has contrasted Defoe’s “opinionated” sincerity against Addison’s “remote cool sophistication.”48 For Nicolson, while Mr. Spectator “mildly shakes his powdered head” at social ills in essays written “for the joy of the contemplative man,” Defoe confronts “real problems of real people in a world much too busy to worry about Italian tenors and party patches.”49 Even so, by the end of his periodical’s run, Defoe capitulates to the very paradigm of publicness he abhorred: “I shall be a quiet spectator of those wretched abominable divisions that I can do no good in attempting to cure, and I shall be a silent mourner over the miseries of my country.”50 While Brian Cowan has contextualized Addison and Steele’s paradigm of nonparticipatory publicness as part of a strategic effort to make Whigs

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look more polite and stable than Tories after the Sacheverell debacle of 1709 and 1710, we still have to account for why the ideal of the reader as neutral spectator emerges dominant within and persists beyond that context. The popularity of this aesthetic model is indexed both by the reprint history of the early eighteenth-century periodical, in which the Tatler and the Spectator far outdo any of their competitors, and by the sentimental novel’s projection of the affective, quietistic reader from the 1740s onward.51 As Cowan points out, after 1714 Addison and Steele’s periodical writing “abandons the spectatorial strategy” to “return to more blatant partisanism.”52 I would suggest this movement marks the complementary halves of their overarching program: on the one hand, a pure politics promoting Whig economic ideology and colonialist activity, and, on the other, a more properly cultural or aesthetic project that simultaneously laments the socio-ethical effects of these economic praxes and devalues the ideal of public political action. The neutral spectator serves as a perfect model for culture consumers in an increasingly egalitarian social scheme because the passive, anonymous, visually oriented surrogate with no particular commitments (like Mr. Spectator) can appeal to a much wider demographic than more concretely embodied, discursive, and obviously opinionated personae like Bickerstaff or Mr. Review. Broad consumer appeal is also fostered by the minimal ethical demands of the neutral spectator—the idea that readers need not act but should merely react to social ills with aggrieved (and pleasurable) compassion. Perhaps their contemporary Bernard Mandeville best captures the essence of Addison and Steele’s project with his claim that “the wary magistrates preserve themselves” in public opinion by making people believe that “the government is always endeavoring, tho’ unable, to suppress what it actually tolerates.”53

3

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform “Manley,” Mandeville, and the Female Tatler

Between July 1709 and March 1710, in London’s crowded market for periodical literature there appeared thrice weekly a series of 115 essays under the opening title of the Female Tatler; By Mrs. Crackenthorpe, A LADY THAT KNOWS EVERYTHING. The most obvious marketing strategy of this paper’s self-presentation is that it imitates and complicates the title of Richard Steele’s highly successful periodical, the Tatler, which had begun its remarkable run a few months earlier in April of 1709.1 While precise authorship of the Female Tatler remains uncertain, recent scholarship has attributed substantial editorial credit to Delarivier Manley, perhaps best known for her Tory political writings and her amatory romans à clef. 2 Tempting but inconclusive evidence for Manley’s authorship comes from the fact that the periodical breaks off temporarily in the middle of its exceptionally long run just at the moment when Manley herself was taken into government custody under charges of libel brought about by her attack on the Whig administration in The New Atalantis (1709); in Female Tatler 51, the last number of the fi rst part of the series, Mrs. Crackenthorpe suggestively claims she so “resent[s] the affront offered to her by some rude citizens altogether unacquainted with her person” that she will “resign her pretensions of writing The Female Tatler” (FT 117).3 The paper picks up again later that very week, advertising on its title page that it is now “Written by a Society of Ladies,” without further mention of the “affront” to its original author figure (FT 119). Despite its new editorial format, the continuation of the Female Tatler addresses problems similar to those canvassed by Mrs. Crackenthorpe—a satirical treatment of aberrant manners, class distinctions, and gender categories—but it does so with slightly different emphases and styles from those characteristic of the paper’s opening run. Many scholars have taken this heterogeneity as an indication that the papers were eventually authored not by a single figure but by a loose collaboration of several writers, an idea that has generated much speculation about who might have assisted in or taken over authorship of the paper’s continuation from Manley. Of the prominent figures in English cultural life from the fi rst decade of the eighteenth century whose names have been brought forward as candidates,

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Susanna Centlivre and Bernard Mandeville have emerged as the most plausible: Centlivre appears as a central figure among the “society of ladies” in Female Tatler 69, providing readers with a behind-the-scenes account of the theater business and its gender politics, and several numbers clearly articulate Mandevillian ideas about trade, self-interested behavior, and human nature. In fact, according to M. M. Goldsmith, “Mandeville’s authorship of [thirty-two Female Tatler] papers is now universally accepted by those who write on Mandeville” (Goldsmith 1999, 46).4 Despite this thematic and stylistic heterogeneity, however, the Female Tatler offers its reading audiences a relatively coherent set of discourses about gender, reform, and public culture in post-Restoration England; as a result, this analysis will refer to “Manley” as the author figure behind the project of the Female Tatler, less to make an argument about the historical Delarivier Manley’s involvement than to emphasize the value of assuming that there was an ideologically unified editorial group guiding the periodical’s construction and self-presentation. 5 This approach allows us to understand the potential complementarity between two discourses in the early English public sphere that are often imagined to be opposed or at least discontinuous with one another: Mandeville’s skeptical materialism and libertine Tory feminism. Though they are activated by contrasting assumptions about human nature and social order, these two discourses merge in the Female Tatler’s idiosyncratic critique of the post-Restoration Whig public sphere, an illuminating immanent critique of early liberalism that deserves more appreciation than it has received.6 By situating the Female Tatler against the narrative and ideological strategies of that paper’s main competitors—Richard Steele and Joseph Addison—we can recover the subversive force of elements in the Female Tatler that have remained illegible to recent criticism; moreover, we can enrich our understanding of the degree to which the Addisonian model of public discourse was contested in the complex cultural milieu of Queen Anne’s England, for which the Tatler and the Spectator have retrospectively been taken as unproblematically representative.

PROTO-HABERMASIAN PRETENSIONS To begin with, the Female Tatler shares many of the Habermasian aims systematically elaborated in the essays of Addison and Steele. In many ways Manley outdoes her Whig counterparts by idealizing a public forum of discussion that will include contributions from both sexes and from an explicitly wide socioeconomic range. The Female Tatler offers readers direct access both to what the editor gathers from her capacious social network of sources, and to the issues debated in Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s drawing room. Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s authority derives from the diversity of her social gatherings; her salon provides “a true history of the world” that her

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 77 papers disseminate back out to the public from which her knowledge has been culled. She claims to be visited twice a week by “half the nation” in “a very great assembly of both sexes, from his Grace my Lord Duke to Mr. Sagathie the spruce Mercer in the city; and from her Grace my Lady Duchess, to Mrs. Top Sail, the sea captain’s wife at Wapping” (FT 1). Manley’s opening number catalogs the myriad urban spaces and social types whose inclusion in her journal guarantees its representative force: she will give readers more current cultural knowledge than they could ever obtain by personally attending discussions at meeting places and coffee houses. Her paper both models and substitutes for the forms of sociable discourse to be experienced at “White’s, Will’s, the Grecian, Garraway’s in Exchange-Alley, and all the India houses”; she provides readers with the unmediated words of “grave statesmen, airy beaus, lawyers, cits, poets and parsons, and ladies of all degrees,” citizens who are allowed a forum in which “each person delivers himself according to his talent”; and her salon discourse aspires to rise above scandal, to provide a “variety of conversation [that] affords general satisfaction” by discussing issues of public importance: “books are canvas’d, removals at court suggested, law cases disputed, the price of stocks told, [and] the beaus and ladies inform us of new fashions” (FT 2).7 Manley makes the Tatler’s claims about the value of open conversation less abstract and more practical by specifying who should be enabled to speak, what they should speak about, and what social impact this kind of public speech should have. In addition to promoting the dissemination of knowledge from variegated social milieus, Manley’s public-sphere paradigm would have salon discourse emulate the conversational forms employed by gentlemen “above the common level . . . that can not only talk good common sense, but can state an argument in any art or science and dispute with learning, judgment and force of reason” (FT 5). As in the Habermasian model, Manley’s commitment to the gentlemanly paradigm comes not from a belief in (aristocratic) men’s inherently superior intellectual faculties, but from a frank acknowledgment of the gender- and class-based limitations on access to the forms of education and self-development she feels are required for meaningful participation in rational-critical discussion. In Manley’s ideal scenario, women who have not had the opportunity to develop their analytical skills will be brought to do so more proficiently by participating in her salon: she wants “ladies to relish somewhat above mere tittle-tattle, and tho’ they want the benefit of profound learning, yet conversing with ingenious persons would so far improve their natural parts as to give ’em a more noble idea of things, and create in ’em at least a value for matters serious and instructive, which would stifle a world of scandal and detraction” (FT 5).8 If equality is the supposed life of conversation for Steele, diversity is the primary value in Manley’s synecdochal public: in the Female Tatler, readers will hear from or about a wide range of people in their culture, but always within a framework guided explicitly (rather than implicitly, as in the Tatler

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and the Spectator) by standards of argumentation borrowed from realms of discourse now dominated by gentlemen of a particular class and educational background. To be sure, Addison and Steele occasionally address the issue of diversity in their papers; as in the example of Spectator 442, their periodicals repeatedly invite participation from as many walks of life as possible.9 The difference between Manley’s and Addison’s approaches here is that while Manley’s editor figure builds her periodical from the alreadyexisting practice of diverse conversation in her mixed assemblies, Addison’s eidolon promotes diversity retrospectively as a compensation for the fact that he has been “tak[ing] up all the discourse” himself (S 4:4); for Manley, diversity functions as a precondition for her publishing enterprise, whereas for Addison it is an ideologically-motivated promise that somehow never quite materializes. Conversely, if Addison and Steele articulate the value of public-sphere equality in their essays but never really enact that value in their discursive practice, Manley’s narrator never makes any claims for the equality of participants in her salon, but her editorial practices foreground the comparable intellectual capability of her most exceptionally gifted conversants, regardless of their gender or class; that is, with Mrs. Crackenthorpe as the female adjudicator presiding over a discourse carried out in conventionally gentlemanly terms, Manley assumes the potential intellectual equality of women and provides a public-sphere forum within which women can enact that potential, while Addison and Steele abstractly idealize the equality of participants in the public sphere at the same time that they rarely depict women as authoritative discursive subjects themselves. In fact, the opening number of the Female Tatler implies that the authority of public-sphere institutions like Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s salon traditionally has been coded as a female mode of cultural power; she rejects the charge that she has “invaded [Bickerstaff’s] property by undertaking a paper of this kind” since, in fact, this kind of “tatling was ever adjudg’d peculiar to our sex” (FT 1). Another Habermasian dimension of Manley’s public-sphere theory that clarifies the function of equality in the Female Tatler has to do with the periodical’s reformist aims. While the discussions in Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s salon seem unlikely to have the immediate effect of democratizing England’s political system (and Manley never implies that they should), the consumption of her papers should catalyze a moral “reformation of mankind”—starting at the top of the social hierarchy, rather than at the bottom (FT 3). Manley wants “gently to correct the vices and vanities” that are “willfully” committed by those “of distinction”—the moral waywardness of precisely those “gentlemen” whose enlightened discourse her paper would emulate—because of the trickle-down mechanism of emulative corruption that their behavior sets in motion: Would people of rank proceed with honour, justice, and a nobleness of spirit, and let their actions, not their equipage, support the dignity

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 79 of their station, we might hope for a true Golden Age; but when we daily hear of unaccountable frolics committed by the better sort, we must expect those of inferior classes will imitate them in their habits of mind, as well as body. (FT 3) According to Manley, then, gentlemen whose actions belie their education will have the “privilege” of becoming the primary objects of satire in her papers, though she promises to spread the moral critique evenly with regard to class as well as to gender: “those of quality [will be] as liable to reflection as their inferiors,” just as “this paper is impartially to laugh at the foibles of both sexes” (FT 2, 9). Again, though, her method borrows from the satirical practices of gentlemen like Shaftesbury rather than from the strident sermonizing of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, a group she chastises for having hypocritically “made a trade” of social critique, commodifying the “serious advice” of “grave divine[s]” in a way that allows wayward gentlemen to regard their criticism as mere “impudence”; like her Whig competitors, Manley employs witty, “seasonable banter” to effect moral progress through her “ingenious tatler,” since “the only way to correct great men’s foibles is handsomely to ridicule ’em” (FT 3).10 However, there are three major ways in which Manley’s periodical diverges from the Whig cultural ideology articulated by Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele, three counter-Habermasian characteristics that unmistakably oppose her essays to the public-sphere model that has come to be considered representative of post-Restoration English society: (1) her commitment to a Mandevillian theory of human behavior, (2) her explicit allegorization of the exclusionary and disciplinary mechanisms through which the liberal public sphere constitutes itself, and (3) her establishment of several models of libertine feminist cultural authority in direct opposition to the paternalistic masculine arbiters of Whig society. The remainder of this chapter will consider these significant innovations by Manley and her collaborators, paying particular attention to their implications for her representations of gender, power, and the public sphere.

MANDEVILLIAN ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE FAILURE OF SATIRE In presenting Manley’s purposes to her readers, the Female Tatler’s opening number demonstrates the potential interdependency of two public-sphere discourses that are conventionally thought of as opposed to one another. On the one hand, as we have seen, Manley deploys the early liberal, Shaftesburian notion that social reform should be carried out through wit and ridicule: according to this ideal, the reflective work induced by satire can make the participants in public culture curb the disruptive, idiosyncratic excesses in their own behavior by re-awakening their ostensibly natural

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impulses toward benevolent sociability.11 On the other hand, Manley’s account of the forces that have necessitated her reformist intervention in public discourse relies upon a Mandevillian theory that human behavior is irremediably self-interested and driven by the pursuit of material pleasure and power, a hedonistic solipsism that conditions our activity not only in times of scarcity and chaos like those discussed in the “state of nature” sections of Hobbes’s Leviathan, but also under conditions of stability and prosperity. Mrs. Crackenthorpe argues that her papers will be especially useful to the public once “an honourable and lasting peace” to the War of Spanish Succession (then in its ninth year, and due to last five more) has been achieved, and “our news papers are laid aside”: [P]eace will produce plenty, plenty makes every body grow mercurial; and when a happiness so long wish’d for, and with such difficulty obtain’d shall, instead of promoting religion, virtue, and sobriety, so far intoxicate men’s minds as to draw ’em into pride, luxury, and all manner of ridiculous excursions, an ingenious tatler will conduce . . . to the reformation of mankind. . . . (FT 2–3) Of course, the English citizens with whose moral welfare Manley is so concerned have already committed themselves to the intoxicated pursuit of “pride, luxury, and all manner of ridiculous excursions,” even in advance of her imagined conditions of peace and plenty, which is why she’s begun writing in the first place; stability, that is, will not contextually produce but will merely exacerbate an apparently inherent human disposition toward the kinds of excessive, solipsistic behaviors Mrs. Crackenthorpe laments.12 As she says in her opening defense against the possible charge that she is “invad[ing] [Isaac Bickerstaff’s] property” by starting up a Tatler of her own, “more ridiculous things are done every day than ten such papers can relate”—there is so much idiotic behavior available to mock that there should be no competitive conflict of interest between Manley and Steele (FT 1). Ultimately, this introduction of Mandevillian anthropology into Manley’s public-sphere theory has significant implications both for the operation of her particular periodical and for the meaning of “reform” in post-Restoration English culture more broadly. To begin with, Manley’s peculiar combination of the Shaftesburian satirical method with a Mandevillian understanding of human behavior suggests that the task of the moralizing satirist will be potentially infi nite, doomed to failure—perhaps even self-undermining to the extent that consumers are motivated to buy the periodical less by the altruistic motive of moral improvement than by Schadenfreude, or the desire to see their fellow citizens publicly ridiculed. Indeed, Manley’s proto-Habermasian theorizing is accompanied from the start by essays that demonstrate how resistant her audience might be to the demands of rational-critical enlightened publicness. Even in the opening number, immediately after her positive account of the elevated aims her

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 81 salon “conversation” can achieve, Mrs. Crackenthorpe has to acknowledge that despite her efforts to the contrary, the discussion quickly degenerates into hypocritical, scandalous “little stor[ies]” (FT 2). This collapse from moralizing critique into low-brow scandal gets repeated within the structure of many essays when Mrs. Crackenthorpe obliges “readers” by including notices from them in the papers’ closing sections. A good example of this widespread problem can be found in Female Tatler 3, in which a discussion of how women attending “loftier” conversations can improve their taste for learned disputation devolves into a prurient note about how a young lady at Epsom has had to change lodgings because of a parrot who bawls out suggestive exclamations regarding the pretty “Captain Thumper” whenever she walks by (FT 5, 7). Similarly, Female Tatler numbers 14 and 16 depict morally edifying discussion either brutally interrupted or pre-empted by the idiocy of the participants: a “fanatical fop” (“Monsieur Gusto”) who is “more . . . monkey than man” (FT 36), in one case, and, in the other, a “regiment” of female gossips whose “discourse was an incongruous medley of sighs, clothes, husbands, and hypochondriacs” (FT 39). Mrs. Crackenthorpe acknowledges her audience’s taste for scandal as a possible obstacle to her goals, but one that can be overcome through the framing ethical reflections she offers up in every issue; while she admits her audience’s “intent in reading this paper might be only to fi nd some invidious reflection or [to] laugh at an idle story,” she insists that she can re-direct that primary source of interest in her paper by “divertingly . . . lead[ing] people into moral instruction” (FT 4). The problem is that, by her own account, such a conversion of Schadenfreude into morally improving reflection never gets achieved during the course of her periodical’s run. In number 56, for example, one of the editors (Lucinda) is visited by two “young gentlewomen” who complain “that the Female Tatler had left off taking notice of the scandal that was sent her,” and who further accuse the editors of “dullness, hackney writing, and several other things that displeased [Lucinda]”; the young women’s stupidity prompts the editor’s desire for revenge: Lucinda offers to tell her visitors “two true stories of scandal upon two [anonymous] ladies” under the guise of wanting the young gentlewomen’s “opinions whether [the stories] were worth publishing or not,” an offer which they readily accept, claiming that “nothing of scandal could come amiss to them” (FT 125). Lucinda’s “true stories” turn out to be thinlyveiled “characters” of the young women themselves, replete with unflattering details about their own courtship adventures. The moral point of this exercise, as Lucinda puts it, is “to see the different working this relation had upon the two cousins,” which is that each one rejoices when the other is the object of satiric ridicule, but falls into the “dumps” of “spite and anger” when she sees her own conduct reflected upon (FT 126–27). Manley allegorizes the consumption of the scandalous periodical by staging its direct psychological effect upon particular readers, both of whom are so caught up in identifying with or phobically distancing themselves from the satiric

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object that they never get the kind of analytical perspective on scandalous events that might be afforded through a cathexis with the satirist’s framework of judgment. Chloe and Celia remain mired in asking whether a bit of scandal is either entertaining or disheartening to themselves personally, rather than asking more “improving” kinds of questions about the cultural forces that produce scandalous behavior in general. However, Manley’s essay doesn’t actually encourage the young women to make that movement, nor does it suggest that such a movement is likely. Having been presented with their own reflection in the presence of Lucinda’s cultural authority, Chloe and Celia choose not to reform themselves but to hurl their tea dishes at one another in an all-out “attack” that ends in the utter disruption of Lucinda’s salon: a nearby dog winds up “miserably scalded” by the “thr[owing]-down” of a “boiling tea-kettle,” the tea table itself is “overthrown” by one of the young gentlewomen in chase of the other, until “the clatter of china, the screaming of one dog and the barking of another, joined to the loudness of the combatants, and the noise of [Lucinda’s] parrot . . . made such a hideous consort that I was glad to quit the room” (FT 128). Ultimately, this episode calls attention both to the failure of periodical literature to produce the kind of moral social effect its editors consistently claim, and to the absurdity of trying to engage typical audience-members’ reasoned participation in the construction of the essays themselves: though they are asked to produce a judgment about the stories’ suitability for public discourse, Lucinda’s readers simply produce more scandal for a periodicalist who concludes the essay not with any synthesizing moral reflection but with an admission of her own urgent need “to set down what had happened” because of its obvious marketability (FT 128).13 Meaningful, widespread reform becomes impossible in this context because of a mutually reinforcing dialectic between demand and supply, between the kinds of morally questionable materials people want to read and the kinds of distracting, enervating texts on offer in the early eighteenth-century English print marketplace, texts that create a demand for themselves simply because they are (or appear to be) desired by others. In Manley’s Mandevillian world, people read not so that they can get along but so that they can get ahead: her audiences participate in publicsphere activities (reading, spectating, conversing, writing) not to create a more ethical mode of English sociability but to gain an advantage (social, economic, real, or imagined) over their neighbors.14 Manley responds to this dynamic by playing both of its apparently opposed sides against one another: fi rst, as we have seen, she appeals to the (real or feigned) desire expressed by many in her culture that such a self-interested and vicious society should be reformed through the enlightened use of public-sphere spaces, technologies, and practices; but she also participates in and satirizes a post-Restoration print culture flooded with texts that promise special, socially useful knowledge to consumers eager to forward their own interests, thereby mocking the pseudo-rationality of the very public-sphere

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 83 commodities through which a democratizing, enlightened “progress” was supposed to emerge. To underscore this point Manley often pads the fi nal sections of her essays with fake advertisements for self-improvement manuals supposedly on the verge of publication. As with the products put forth in postmodern advertising, these fictional manuals, like “real” manuals on offer in the post-Restoration print market, refer implicitly to a skill that their particular demographic should want—specialized skills of literacy, communication, taste, or polite sociability—and that will be provided by the product being sold. In the case of Manley’s fake advertisements, however, the “skills” being sold are clearly satiric inversions of the “real” demands ostensibly being catered to by the products she parodies. Female Tatler 18 concludes, for example, with the announcement that “in ten days will be published, as supplement to Dr K—gs’ Art of Writing Unintelligibly, The Way of Speaking Unintelligibly, by a maid of honour to Madam Berry,” with a sample of the unintelligible speech to be found therein, consisting essentially of English words corrupted by Dutch or Hanoverian inflections that replace the letters “c” and “q” with a “kr” sound, and the letter “v” with “w” (FT 43).15 Similarly, number 85 advertises as “now in the press . . . [to] be speedily published,” the potentially “very useful . . . Art of Keeping a Secret,” with further promotional material that pokes fun at those who drop “copies of their clandestine works out of their pockets on purpose to discover the author accidentally” (FT 173, italics added). Contrary to the model of public-sphere production that accounts for the texts in the postRestoration marketplace as a simple reflection of consumer demand, Manley demonstrates a keen awareness within the context of how advertising could be used to create demand for texts (imaginary, or as yet not existent, in any case) by producing particular feelings of “need” in the culture consumer that the advertised text will then ostensibly meet. Through relatively sophisticated marketing techniques, appealing both to the usefulness and the hyper-novelty of their literary objects, public-sphere advertising could effect absurd consumer desires that were to be fulfilled in equally absurd fashion. Manley offers a particularly biting example of the mechanism at work here—of the gulf between real and imagined need, between promise and fulfillment in the culture market—in the installment for February 27 to March 1, 1710: There is now in the press, and will shortly be published, The Art of Impudence, with plain directions of how to attain all the advantages of study and experience at a very small expense; without loss of time or hindrance to business, very useful to all lazy and ignorant people, especially such as in less than a month would make miraculous improvements in the mysteries of physic . . . Originally written in Billingsgate, and Englished by Shameless Front M.A. fellow of Brazen College, in Newgate Street. (FT 189)

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My point here is not that readers in context would have taken this bitingly satiric advert at face value and looked for The Art of Impudence in booksellers’ stalls the following week, but that in Manley’s view, the postRestoration public sphere was pervaded (if not constituted) by irrational, emulative forms of consumer desire that advertising did not merely reflect but to a great extent invented. Lest we should think these fake advertisements reflect only Manley’s desire to satirize particular kinds of people—pseudo-scholars, scandalmongers, and nonnative speakers of English, for example—and not her thoroughgoing cultural analysis of the motives and effects of advertisement discourse, Female Tatler 58 attacks the marketing business as a wide-ranging social phenomenon that seriously impinges upon the rationality of public-sphere communicative practices. The essay begins as a consideration not of advertising per se, but of the value of clear linguistic expression and argumentation in public contexts. In a way that anticipates Addison’s famous intention (in the Spectator papers) to make cloistered philosophy come to “dwell” in coffee houses, the editor of Female Tatler 58, “Artesia,” notes that there is no qualification more commendable among the learned than the “easiness and plainness” with which they are able “to unfold the result of their studious thoughts,” thereby making “exalted notions of philosophy . . . useful to the public”; for Artesia, however, clarity of expression is important not only in philosophy, but in “all arts and sciences,” since “a man’s knowledge can do but little good either to himself or others if nobody besides himself is acquainted with his possessing of it” (FT 129). The essay then considers the Habermasian role of public papers and the advertisement sections “annexed” thereto as the primary means for “public spirited people” to communicate their knowledge and abilities to others who may fi nd them useful or necessary; in Artesia’s account, because of its significant cultural power, advertising should be considered not as an ancillary sub-genre of public-sphere discourse, but as a “compendious way of writing” that profoundly “informs our understandings” (FT 129).16 It is at this point, however, that Manley’s essay turns toward deflationary mock encomium as a way of clarifying her satirical intention. Artesia lauds the benefits of advertising to “the whole nation,” who are now fortunately “persuaded of the skill and many years experience of some [medical] artists that, but a little while ago, were altogether ignorant themselves of having either”; assuming the transparency of public communication in a way more naïve than the most dogmatic Habermasian might, Artesia extols the value of advertising through a hyperbolic rhetorical question: “what mortal,” she asks, “would believe that the [medical artists’] knowledge exceeded that of the whole college of physicians . . . if all the advices [in the papers] we daily receive from their own apartments did not so unanimously confi rm it?” (FT 129). Manley fi nally gets to the center of the problem by having Artesia articulate a skeptical take on advertising that the character herself does not agree with simply because “it is not probable”:

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 85 It is true, that those doctors commonly paying for the printing of the advertisements themselves, it has been hinted by the disingenuous (as if it was possible) that people might be hired to sign those certificates [vouching for the doctor’s skill in having cured them], and consequently that the truth of those cures was not much to be relied upon, and the advertising of them only a trick for quacks to get money. (FT 130) In short, Manley is acutely aware of the problematic confl ict between public-sphere texts’ ethico-political function as a means of communication for universal enlightenment and their economic function as a vehicle of manipulation for private profit, and she clearly reveals how appeals to the former often serve as an effective cover for the latter.17 Manley pushes her analysis of this problem further still by clarifying the connection between the kinds of mediated desires initiated by advertising, on the one hand, and the public taste for particular kinds of “unimproving” literary commodities, on the other. In the figure of the “city lady . . . of fashionable wit” in Female Tatler 98, Manley depicts a reader who stands in for a significant portion of her typical audience, readers whose consumer judgment is directed largely by what they take the judgment of others to be: they want what they suppose others want (the hyper-new, the hyperscandalous), only because others want it, though (paradoxically) this form of desire based upon imitation is supposed to be a mark of distinction, of what elevates their own aesthetic judgment above that of the common person. As Manley describes her, this lady can “no more smile at a sentence than like a handkerchief that was not of the newest invention,” she “drinks Mr Bull’s coffee and Mr Shepherd’s tea but because they are well spoken of,” and she immediately sets herself to asking Rosella and Emilia (the editors of this issue) what they hear from their correspondents and salon discussants about a wide range of matters, just so that she will know what to think of them herself (FT 186). Thus, when asked by Emilia how she likes the Female Tatler (and not knowing that she is speaking to one of its editors), the lady of fashionable wit again repeats what she takes to be the desire of others, referring in this case to that of “the Court”: because others “dote on scandal,” she must fi nd “the authors of the Female Tatler . . . as insipid as anything in print,” now that they have “set up for morality” (FT 187). Though she claims not to like their periodical, the lady’s response to Emilia and Rosella reveals that she is nonetheless one of their avid readers, and she offers a detailed criticism of their current project: This morality is a wicked mistake in writers. ’Tis monstrous and abominable [for them] to pretend we want their monitions . . . Pray who would give half a penny to read what they know already, or what they are certain they can never be the better for. Yet, if they are severe, ’tis on some general vice. They give one very rarely to know who they aim at, and that is what we hate. I love to fi nd an acquaintance exposed

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To emphasize the co-presence of fascination and repulsion within this paradigmatic reader’s view of the moral periodical, Manley has the lady go on to offer Emilia several gossipy stories about some of her acquaintances— just in case Emilia happens to “know any of the Tatlers [editors]”—stories about people who, though “as good people as ever lived,” are “so awkward that they would make admirable figures in the Female Tatler and oblige the town for two days” (FT 187). Fortuitously, of course, both the lady’s stories and her own attitude about the periodical end up immediately so obliging the town. One thing about the fashionable lady’s critique that should catch readers’ attention immediately is the way she slightly misrepresents the actual practices of the Female Tatler: as we have seen, whatever “morality” the periodical’s editors offer up gets delivered through ridicule, with precious little consideration about how or why the satiric objects “deserve it or not.” It is certainly true that the editors rarely (if ever) “give one to know [precisely] who they aim at”—Manley’s own recent brush with the law had undoubtedly clarified the potentially dire consequences of even obliquely naming names.18 Thus, under Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s direction, the ridiculed social types take on names borrowed from Restoration comedy— Mr. Coppywife, Charles Traffick, Lady Termigant, Beau Maypole, Mrs. Everchat—which highlight the potentially “scandalous” dimension of the periodical’s content, but the “society of ladies” continuation of the Female Tatler maintains the tradition of ridicule, using more general descriptive categories (such as, for example, the “lady of fashionable wit”) to clarify when particular readers should see their own reflection in the mirror of satire. In a sense, then, this lady’s reading of the periodical is itself one of the objects of satiric attention in Female Tatler 98, less for its misrepresentation of the paper than for its blindness to the mutually constitutive relationship between the discourses of “morality” and “scandal”: conduct can be considered scandalous (or not) only within a framework of moralizing judgment, provided here minimally by the Female Tatler’s editors as a kind of formally necessary precondition of their periodical enterprise, just as the social program of moral reform requires a continual supply of scandalous objects to legitimize its own disciplinary mechanisms. In short, readers like the lady of fashionable wit consume papers like the Female Tatler not in spite of those papers’ moralizing function but because of it. This problematic can be applied at a broader theoretical level as well, implicating the post-Restoration textual market as a whole in a perverse socioethical dynamic its participants are generally eager to disavow. If people never really “improve” morally, as Mandeville suggests, but merely sharpen their hypocritical ability to appear more virtuous or socially conscious than their equally self-interested neighbors, then what Manley

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 87 means by “reformation” has to be scrutinized more carefully than our conventional readings of the early public sphere would have it. There is a neat complicity at work between the apparently opposed sides of the Mandeville-Shaftesbury debate: the early liberal appeal to public reform might actually rely upon the endless production of aberrant behaviors that Mandeville’s anthropology both explains and supplies—the labor of wit needs idiotic objects to work upon in order to underwrite a socially “necessary” (but necessarily unachievable) project of moral progress, just as a more skeptical, materialistic ideology like Mandeville’s can legitimate itself through appeals to potential reform. In this context, the very mention of one’s reformist intentions can function as a marketing strategy for profitable self-promotion under the guise of social altruism—precisely that practice of “mak[ing] a trade” of social reform that Mrs. Crackenthorpe attacks as “hypocritical” in the opening number of the Female Tatler. However, Manley’s periodical cannot be charged with the kind of selfblinded hypocrisy that she and Mandeville made careers out of ridiculing in others, primarily because the Female Tatler “trades” less in reform than it does in the satirical deflation of reform projects themselves—projects whose impossibility Manley’s periodical both enacts and explains.19 In Female Tatler 39, Manley connects her assessment of the periodical’s social impact to the self-reflective proceedings of her major competitors, Addison and Steele; in the middle of an essay cataloguing examples of how (despite her satires) the mercantile “city quality” have “grown monstrous” from previously being merely “ridiculous,” Mrs. Crackenthorpe pauses to pose and to answer a conundrum at the heart of post-Restoration public-sphere discourse: “Now, would anybody suppose when Tatlers are daily published that people should be so horrid silly? But as the ingenious Mr. Bickerstaff [fictional editor of Steele’s Tatler papers] says—one may write to eternity, the world is still the same” (FT 89–90). For readers of these two Tatlers in the context, however, Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s assertion of philosophical continuity between her paper and Bickerstaff’s would be undermined by the obvious differences between the two editors’ respective responses to the failure of their periodical projects. Steele’s Bickerstaff characteristically assuages himself with the belief that English society might improve itself if people just tried a bit harder to bring out the better angels of their nature, and, even if it doesn’t improve, he can still cultivate the compensatory pleasures of a retired country life among a select group of friends. Manley, on the other hand, dives energetically back into the flood of idiocy from which she had momentarily emerged to reflect on the ineffectual nature of her periodical writing—her aforementioned question occurs in the middle of a paragraph, sandwiched between hilarious portraits of the undeservingly beknighted “Sir Richard Rhenish” and of “Mrs. Bustle,” the brazen social climber. Unlike the Tatler, the Female Tatler offers readers no compensatory feeling of exemption or distance from this culture of ignorant self-engrossment: for Manley, the proper response to the ridiculous is not

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pathetic withdrawal but more robust ridicule, especially if it sells, and especially if you don’t really believe that reform projects can work anyway.20 In this light, Manley’s reference to this particular line from Bickerstaff (“one may write to eternity”) draws attention to the potential hypocrisy of the latter’s stagy, sentimental rejection of a world from whose idiocy he directly profits. 21 In fact, Manley self-consciously assumes that her periodical’s reform project is doomed to failure, and she prescribes a perfectly Mandevillian solution for readers who worry about fi nding themselves satirized. In Female Tatler 42, for example, she begins with the now-familiar complaint to her audience that regardless of what she writes, “people do and . . . will go on their own way still”: “’tis none of my fault the world is not wiser, but these poor brains of mine work to no purpose” (FT 96). Though she then also offers the conventional Tatler-ian invitation to readers to “dismiss [their] follies” since “the end of satire is reformation,” her description of readers’ behavior asserts a tautological relationship between self-indulgence and “moral” reflection that Mandeville would certainly have appreciated (if, of course, he didn’t write it himself); Mrs. Crackenthorpe draws attention to a social type who “goes to church in order to be absolved of her sins, and sins again in order to go to church and be thought penitent” (FT 96). In this formula, the social-psychological function of institutionalized moralizing (like that found both in the church and in conduct-oriented periodicals) is not to induce substantive change in those who consume such moralizing, but to allow people gestures of reform that will distance them publicly from behaviors and attitudes they continue to promulgate in private. For readers who fi nd her scandalous portraits hitting a bit too close to home, she offers advice that clarifies her acute awareness of the tautological economy within which her own periodical participates: “if characters are drawn that are injurious to your reputations,” she explains, “what have you to do but to disown them, since every one of you might pass for wise and virtuous, would you not think yourselves reflected upon for being otherwise” (FT 96). Hypocrisy, as it turns out, is both an object of satiric attack and a socially functional response to such attacks—it is its own solution. The point, for Manley, is not that readers “be” just, equitable, virtuous or penitent, but that they respond to public promotions of those values in a way that will allow them to “be thought penitent” or to “pass for wise and virtuous.” According to Manley, this complicated interplay between moralizing institutions and vicious conduct operates and is understood in three different ways for opposing segments of her reading audience, whom she organizes hierarchically on the basis of their respective levels of ironic demystification—levels that correspond roughly to the tripartite division we analyzed in Mandeville’s allegory of public-sphere reading practices in the opening chapter (baby girls learning to curtsy; big girls who understand the function of learning to curtsy; and their female guardians, who ideologically deploy

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 89 mechanisms of emulation and distinction between themselves and the girls in a way that perpetuates a particular social order). In Female Tatler 41, Manley distinguishes two classes of readers from one another, and she does so in a way that implies the existence of a third positional category “above” the fray in which the other two types are engaged. First, she describes the vast majority of her audience—“the major part of the world” whom she also refers to as “the insipids”—readers who habitually “term a paper of this kind scurrilous, scandalous, and false, and talk of it with an imaginable liberty” (FT 94). Manley’s special disdain for these readers comes from their sheer ignorance. In this class can be found, on the one hand (type 1a), readers who, by assuming that they themselves are the satirical objects hinted at in the essays, react to them in a way that guarantees that others will view them as such; and, on the other hand (type 1b), readers from the various societies for the reformation of manners, whose vituperative commitment to “virtue” blinds them to the morally progressive purposes that motivate the satirical periodical as a genre. At one remove of demystification from these readers, Manley flatteringly describes the “few wise” in her audience, promoters of the early liberal notions that “people are sooner ridiculed than preached out of their follies,” that “more may be learned out of some plays than out of some sermons,” and that “a Tatler alarms the world into a circumspection” (FT 94). Manley refers here to enlightened, Whig-sympathetic readers who “understand” that the moralizing purpose of public-sphere satire justifies its dissemination of potentially scandalous material; for the “wise,” witty ridicule in public papers is neither personally motivated (see type 1a, above) nor morally corrosive (see type 1b, above), but gently corrective in its attempt to bring disruptive, excessive, and idiosyncratic behavior back into the fold of an homogenizing normalcy modeled by the rational-critical irony of the satirist him-/herself. However, if, as we have seen, Manley deflates for careful readers this Whiggish investment in the moral efficacy of satire, then the very distinction she makes here between the “insipids” and the “few wise” has to be understood as part of an even broader strategy of enlightening (or entertaining) her even “fewer wiser” readers—to radicalize the terms of her own initial distinction—about the mystifying liberal discourse of “enlightenment” itself. For Manley, the essay periodical functions exoterically (for the uninitiated majority) as a source of pleasing or mortifying scandal, a repository of personal attacks based on current social activity that are marketable because they cater to an ostensibly widespread taste for Schadenfreude—this is the situation of Chloe and Celia in Female Tatler 56 that we analyzed earlier. Esoterically, then, the enlightened Whig audience reads the periodical as a de-personalized, abstract, morally corrective reflection on particular forms of undesirable conduct, a narrative form that can discipline even naïve, exoteric readers by playing on their fears of public shame, since even these idiots are “alarmed into a circumspection,” as she puts it. But even these more “advanced” readers remain exoteric in relation to

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the true inner circle, who understand the symbiotic, mutually reinforcing dialectic between the supposedly “opposed” camps represented by the first two types—a dialectic from which the Female Tatler rather self-consciously profits, even in the act of exposing it. 22

EXCLUSION AND DISTINCTION IN THE WHIG PUBLIC SPHERE In her implicit attempts to defi ne who this “fewer wiser” group in her audience might be—and what qualifies them to think of themselves in this way—Manley clarifies the terms of both her distance from and her adherence to the early liberal public-sphere ideology being worked out by the likes of Addison, Steele, and Shaftesbury during the opening decade of the English eighteenth century. A cursory reading of the Female Tatler, informed by assumptions about Manley’s attitudes toward class distinctions based on her work as a Tory propagandist, might easily conclude that the differences between her periodical and those by Addison and Steele provide a neat example of the ideological shift in post-Restoration culture—analyzed in the work of Thomas Laqueur, Michael McKeon, Erin Mackie, and others—from class to gender as the primary marker of personal identity.23 While the “progressive” and forward-looking Addison and Steele are known for articulating the idea that there is a sort of “sex in souls”—perhaps as terse a formulation of gender essentialism as one could imagine—and for focusing on the sharply distinguished duties and spaces appropriate for men and women, Manley’s Tory cultural politics could be said to inform her more intensive concern with class hierarchies, with the idea articulated early on in Female Tatler 17 that “distinction of rank is highly necessary for the economy of the world” (FT 40–41).24 Indeed, Manley does spend a fair amount of time castigating those who cast aspersions on their social superiors, on those who affect aristocratic manners and tastes, and on those whose deceitful appearance (especially in dress) makes it so difficult to “make a right judgment” about their social position (FT 15). 25 In this paradigm, as opposed to that of the Whig, proto-Habermasian public sphere, there can and should be no bracketing of social identity for the participants in public discourse, since social position is viewed as the determining factor in deciding who speaks, what they speak about, and how their speech should be interpreted. As Mrs. Crackenthorpe puts it in Female Tatler 24, tradesmen’s wives should never “talk of plays and operas” in order to “pretend to wit” when it would be “more commendable in ’em to study weights and scales, debtor and creditor,” and the “obliging and submissive” morays required for managing a shop (FT 59). Though Manley does refer to “birth” as a major criterion for her own assessment of others’ personal value, she is always careful to qualify (and sometimes to subvert) that particular standard of value with others more

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 91 accessible to those with the energy and opportunity to pursue them; as a corollary, moreover, in Manley’s hierarchizing social taxonomy, birth alone cannot overcome other shortcomings deserving of ridicule—no idiot shall be left behind. In fact, birth and automatic forms of status often serve as a kind of false focus in her essays about social distinction. For example, even in Female Tatler 7 (on seeing through the “false appearances” of dress), while Manley begins by seeming most interested in how “the most rustical habit cannot hide the fi ne gentleman, nor the gayest embroidery give an [aristocratic] air to the clown,” her more developed claim in the essay is that, to people with cultivated powers of observation, “true wit and breeding”—characteristics neither reducible to nor necessarily dependent upon birth—will “discover themselves from the vain pretences of impertinence and fluttering assurance”; in the terms of this particular essay, “low” birth can be compensated for through at least two other categories of value, including “education” and, broader still, “disposition” (FT 15).26 Similarly, when she mocks trading people who affect aristocratic manners, Manley insists that her satire should divert not only those of “birth” but those of “education” as well (FT 57). 27 Finally, in her caricatural portrait of Beau Maskwell, the “dangling” coffee-house patron who lives off of aristocratic favors, Manley lists birth as only one term among other possible sources of personal value (none of which Beau Maskwell possesses): “’tis not material nowadays,” she laments, “whether a man has birth, fortune, wit, sense, religion, or morality; if the world stamps him a pretty gentleman, he passes current in all company” (FT 79). Birth, it seems, is valuable only for the other things it gives one a better chance of obtaining—primarily, the “true wit” that can come from the right kind combination of “education,” “breeding,” and “disposition.” Manley’s position here echoes her previous claims about the edifying potential of participation in “gentlemanly” forms of conversation and argument, even and perhaps especially if such conversation is presided over not by a gentleman but by a witty “lady” like Mrs. Crackenthorpe. This position also explains a number of passages that clearly contradict a reading of Manley as unequivocally interested in policing class boundaries, passages like the conclusion of Female Tatler 21, which argues that people of wit should improve their understandings by constantly aspiring to socialize with their betters: “a man of spirit and ingenuity entertains nobler ideas, his company is critically select, always with those above himself, and his modest assurance is both countenanced and encouraged” (FT 51). For Manley, what education ideally gives a person (regardless of their class- or genderposition) is precisely this “modest assurance”: a combination of learning or substantial self-development that justifies a certain level of “assurance” in one’s public self-presentation, enabled by an ironic awareness of at least three things: fi rst, an awareness of one’s own limitations, to keep oneself “modestly” within the bounds of those capacities; second, a clear sense of the evaluative social context within which one is operating at any given

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moment, to keep oneself from needlessly and unwittingly becoming the object of ridicule; and, third, an insight into the potential arbitrariness of that context’s evaluative standards, lest one submit too abjectly to those standards in a way that would undermine “assurance.”28 Like practically every form of education, then, Manley’s training in the arts of satiric wit does necessitate the internalization of a particular set of cultural norms through which subjective identity and social judgment must be mediated, but it also requires that one understand the contingency and malleability of those norms—something many well-born characters in Manley’s Female Tatler would be loathe to admit, since that kind of irony undermines the “naturalness” of their own cultural authority.29 However, this is exactly the kind of irony Manley dishes out in several numbers of the Female Tatler, essays that relentlessly demonstrate how the very efforts made by many in the privileged classes to highlight their superiority actually make them an appropriate object of ridicule. Female Tatler 25, for instance, lampoons fashionable ladies’ insistence that true refi nement is indexed by the number and intensity of one’s physical maladies: Mrs. Crackenthorpe singles out one high-born woman in particular who regularly regales her with “the whole history of her ladyship’s indisposition, her accesses, ragings, intermissions, mitigations and relapses” (FT 62). To bring Lady Wou’d-be around to a more reasonable and self-aware “modest assurance,” Mrs. Crackenthorpe questions the idea of refinement-as-indisposition by detailing the disastrous consequences of affecting illnesses one does not actually have: especially how “tampering with a good constitution” can bring on “real distempers . . . not easily to be worn off,” and how “even the physicians laugh’d at [the ladies’] impertinent ailings, encourag’d ’em only for the sake of their fees, and had publicly declared they got double the money by ladies that wou’d be sick than by those that really were so” (FT 62). Manley goes further still by having Mrs. Crackenthorpe articulate a definition of “true quality” to which a wide range of people might aspire: as opposed to “vain upstarts,” she argues, “true quality” think “affectation of any kind [is] nature’s ugliest monster,” and they are “so desirous to prolong nature and enjoy fortune’s benefits that noblemen frequently dress their horses, and ladies bustle early about their dairies to preserve [themselves] in a state of health” (FT 62). Two weeks later, in Female Tatler 30, Manley further deflates this kind of smug elitism by attacking those “women of quality” who claim to be “above” concerns about their reputation because of their rank alone, and who insist that they have “bequeathed” scandal and distraction (as unfashionable pastimes) “to the middle sort,” even though they spend their entire afternoons chasing after precisely those bits of gossip they have offered as a distinctively middle-class preoccupation: “their sole pleasure is to pry into one another’s concerns, suspect one another’s conduct, and carry little reflecting stories from one house to another” (FT 72). In response to a group of just such gossipy visitors to her own salon, Mrs. Crackenthorpe offers up what she calls some “blunt morality,” arguing to

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 93 them that “the levity and unaccountable proceedings of some great people every day renders honour less valuable in the esteem of the world, [and] that respect was now paid to true merit, and he that has wit, capacity, taste, and discernment is truly noble” (FT 73). If those of rank are not spared Manley’s corrosive satirical techniques, however, that is not to say that she undermines the very idea of hierarchy itself: Manley’s investment in categories of distinction such as “true quality” and “true merit” remains a forceful organizing tool in her particular brand of cultural critique, even if she recognizes that the act of distinction itself must be kept (if it can be) from lapsing into exactly that sort of complacent gesture of self-congratulation she despises in those she ridicules. Female Tatler 75 provides perhaps the best example of this complicated dynamic, whereby Manley relies on hierarchizing categories whose social and ethical implications she nonetheless wants vigilantly to interrogate. Emilia and Rosella (two of the “society of ladies” who take over from Mrs. Crackenthorpe in the papers’ continuation) make a trip out to Wapping—an east-end neighborhood populated by the “middling sort” and others—to pick up Emilia’s niece Sylvia, who has been sent to England by Emilia’s brother (referred to here as “Wealthy,” a “merchant in Virginia”) to be “polished” by her enlightened aunt. The two authoresses find Sylvia at the home of a Captain Swarthy Forecastle, the man who “freighted” the girl to England, where they are “entertained” by the captain and his family for several painful but retrospectively hilarious hours. Manley’s witty narrator unleashes a formidable series of familiar tropes to emphasize the distance between herself and her hosts, mobilizing a wide range of terms from colonialist discourse to make a rather obvious point about her own superior level of cultivation: she refers variously to her hosts as “animals,” “creatures,” and “beasts”; but these metaphors are made interchangeable with terms like “savages” and “inhabitants,” as if the witty sisters had left their native country by traveling only a few miles east of the city—indeed, she admits, “we fancied ourselves in Scotland” (FT 145–46). To be sure, Manley’s description of the captain’s household details the “backwardness” of its tastes and rituals from the perspective of a more polished Londoner: the captain “wipes his nose with his sleeve,” he boorishly dominates the conversation with his crude seaman’s talk of “French privateers” and his violent re-enactment of “an engagement” with same, while his wife regales them with stories of her coarse acquaintances and their drinking binges (preferring, as she does, “a sneaker of punch or a good can of flip” to “your t’other end of the town green tea . . . and your poisonable Bohee”), just as the cabin-boy presents the genteel ladies “with a swimming bowl of rum punch as if they designed we should have bathed in it” (FT 146). The very gestures through which this family attempts to exercise its civilized politeness (greetings, conversation, tea, and refreshments) end up demonstrating, at least to this satiric observer, their comedic “savagery.” Even so, a close look at the narrator’s disgusted terms of judgment suggests that Manley views Emilia’s reaction itself as worthy of satiric scrutiny.

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First, Emilia’s early acknowledgment that her own family relies on trade as a primary source of income and social power—remember her reference to the brother “Wealthy,” a colonialist “merchant”—should alert readers to the fact that Emilia’s robust commitment to distinction comes in large part from a desire to construct ranks within the trading class, rather than to insist on supposedly more self-evident boundaries between classes; it is the potential interchangeability of her own tastes and social forms with those of the Forecastles that motivates Emilia’s relentless disgust toward them. Proximity rather than distance prompts her need to enact through the work of satire those differences that would secure her own cultural superiority—cultural differences that must take the discursive form here, ironically enough, of ostensibly “natural” differences like those between species or races. For the Forecastles’ inferiority to be legible to Manley’s audience, that is, it is not enough that Emilia simply assert the crudeness of their faculties of aesthetic judgment—faculties whose relative weakness would indicate a difference from the witty narrator of degree rather than of kind; the “lower” echelons of the trading class must be bestialized in order to convey the desired distinction. But this kind of representational violence requires a mechanistic naïveté in the narrator capable of uttering it, a peculiarly elitist ignorance revealed in the terms of the utterance itself. If her narrators “fanc[ying them]selves in Scotland” weren’t enough to signal that we should warily regard their own potential ignorance, Manley’s account of the assumptions behind Emilia’s phobic rejection of the Forecastles makes it clear that the witty narrator’s own strategies of othering deserve at least as much critical evaluation as their satiric objects. From the beginning of the essay, Emilia indulges herself in a kind of solipsistic insouciance that should make readers careful about identifying with her frameworks of judgment. Complaining about the terrible condition of the road out from the city to Wapping, Emilia expresses her awareness that the uneven gravel “would have lamed the horses and tore the coach to pieces,” but she is immediately made “extremely easy” when she remembers that the horses are “not . . . our own” (FT 145). Emilia’s self-engrossment then leads to a series of suppositions and projections about the intellectual abilities of Wapping’s “inhabitants” that are never confi rmed in any way by the details of the ensuing narrative: she claims, fi rst, that, like the “native” characters in a ludicrous stereotype of cultural encounter in colonial contact zones, Wapping folks run out “at the sight of a gentleman’s coach as if a blazing star had appeared to them,” though these “inhabitants” are mostly seamen who have done far more international and intercultural traveling than the “polished” Emilia will certainly ever have done; and, later, that though they “may have heard of, but never saw” geese and turkeys, “they must certainly suppose [lark, teel, partridge, or pheasant—all fashionable dinner items] to be the names of foreign countries” (FT 145). But the detail that best confi rms this argument about Manley’s anti-elitist satire comes when Emilia and Rosella are ushered into the Forecastles’ “imitation of a house,”

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 95 where they fi nally encounter “a place like a parlour”; Manley describes how our two witty would-be colonial travelers in Wapping “stared at one another to fi nd that such animals have a notion of chairs and tables,” an idiotic response whose excessiveness begs the question as to which party in the narrative is more ignorant: the observed or the observers? Finally, Manley reveals again both the Mandevillian anthropology and the performative mechanisms of satire upon which her periodical enterprise has been founded: as Emilia puts it, because “children strive to be men, as strollers pretend to be actors, and as players personate gentlemen, we must allow everything that is human to have a sort of pride, which prompts them to emulate their superiors, and they ought to be endured, since an awkward imitation proves a diversion to those truly refi ned” (FT 145–46). In Manley’s Mandevillian world, in which every identity is a form of “personation” or “emulation,” even those who would exempt themselves from this logic of mediated desire—here, the “truly refi ned”—constitute themselves as a group only by scapegoating others “below” them as a kind of “diversion,” a term whose dismissive casualness obscures the gravity of the stakes at play here: Emilia’s anthropological claim makes exemption impossible, since “everything that is human” is subject to the logic she describes. Manley reveals the “refi ned” as a dialectically constructed category that necessitates the assumption of ignorant, diverting imitators in order to have any coherence at all—for the exceptional to persist in their social self-understanding, it’s not a matter, as Emilia misleadingly puts it, of “enduring” the awkward, but of requiring the existence of that subordinate category.30 In fact, the “truly” exceptional recognize themselves only in their shared identification with a judgment that someone else (in this case, Emilia) has authoritatively described as “refi ned.” Disidentify with Emilia at your peril, if you want to be thought “refi ned.” But, as Manley’s increasingly nuanced and self-reflective essay insists, thoughtless identification with Emilia is fraught with its own perils. As Emilia herself notes in describing her and Rosella’s reaction to their swarthy hosts: “the good nature of the beasts was (though very unwelcome) so superabundant that we were forced to be a little sociable or the ill-breeding had been on our side” (FT 146). The problem, as Emilia frames it, is that the mechanisms of distinction meant to establish one’s cultural superiority over the satiric object—the interpretive strategies that underwrite “true wit”—can themselves become a sign of one’s own “ill-breeding,” effectively blurring the very distinction they are supposed to enact.31 Manley’s point here is that mechanisms of distinction “can” reproduce the problem they are trying to solve rather than that they “must” do so, because Emilia herself (perhaps delusively) holds out the possibility that she and her sister, through their extension of tolerant sociability “downward” to their offensive hosts, have kept themselves on the “right” side of the good-/ill-breeding division in which they are so deeply invested. Manley’s essay questions not the epistemological legitimacy of distinguishing satiric

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judgments per se, but the ethical legitimacy of such judgments when their social consequences involve the kind of hypocrisy Emilia and Rosella stop themselves just short of committing by choosing politeness over unmannerly disgust in their interaction with the Forecastles. As we have seen, Manley’s Mandevillian theory of human behavior imagines distinction as a necessary component of the very economies of identity formation and culture consumption in which her periodical enterprise participates, even if specific distinctions themselves are inhabited by a contingency of which the “truly” witty should be vigilantly aware. But the identity categories deployed within the Female Tatler should be viewed as just that—as deployments or socially necessary constructions, rather than as inevitably binding ontological or essential characteristics. To take the example of the Forecastles for a moment, Manley might argue that they become the object of satiric ridicule in her essay because they do not embody the “modest assurance” she idealizes elsewhere in her papers: they behave with an assurance that is both unfounded, since it is not based upon education and ironic contextual awareness, and immodest, since it imposes itself upon others without regard for their contrasting tastes, and without questioning its own legitimacy. The Forecastles are ridiculous, moreover, not because they must behave the way they do, but because their socioeconomic position gives them access to alternative, more circumspect modes of self-understanding that they do not pursue—Emilia’s naturalizing colonialist tropes notwithstanding—in line with Manley’s commitment to the transformative potential of “education” for those who can attain it. For the Forecastles, that is, the kind of witbased self-fashioning to which “birth” did not provide them access could now be cultivated through two other categories of personal value—“education” and “disposition”—but the Forecastles persist in idiocy. The trick, for Manley, is to achieve a difficult balance between noting how people like the Forecastles do not meet her standard of “modest assurance” or “true quality,” on the one hand, and keeping that acknowledgment itself within the compass of an ethical politeness that does not lapse into becoming the very “ill-breeding” it critiques, on the other. We are now in a position to specify precisely how Manley’s periodical partially adheres to and partially distances itself from the public-sphere ideologies of Addison, Steele, and Shaftesbury. As we discussed in the opening chapter, in the work of Manley’s Whig competitors, there is an axiomatic tendency to validate universality, inclusiveness, and equality in an abstract way as the enabling ground of all rational public discourse, especially discourse of the periodical and philosophical kind in which those writers engage. Steele claims, for instance, that “equality is the life of conversation” in Tatler 225 (T 4:157), while Addison’s program for the Spectator papers involves both the democratizing effort to “bring philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses,” and the explicitly inclusive gesture toward involving women readers as vital participants in the public

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 97 culture he idealizes (S 1:44). Part of what makes Shaftesbury’s philosophy consonant with the work of these early liberal Whig periodicalists is his emphasis on the universality of the benevolent, natural human characteristics he analyzes—impulses and capacities involving sympathy, sociability, and the moral susceptibility to correction through self-reflective wit. What complicates these writers’ explicit theoretical frameworks, however, is the equally marked tendency toward mechanisms of exclusion and distinction in their more practical considerations: Addison and Steele are eager to keep women from engaging in forms of public-sphere activity outside of their “naturally” appropriate spheres of private domesticity and silent influence (S 1:346–49), just as Shaftesbury ends up insisting that the polite sociability and rational-critical conversation he upholds can be undertaken only by a highly select inner circle of like-minded gentlemen.32 Manley’s Female Tatler generally works in the opposite direction: her essays explicitly stage their mechanisms of exclusion and distinction as an anthropologically inevitable component of human sociability; at the same time, though, Manley both reveals the arbitrary instrumentality through which such distinctions get constructed, and she opens up avenues of potential identity formation and mobility—such as “education” and “disposition”—through which the modestly assured, wit-seeking reader can move from the exoteric realms of the “insipids” to the ever more esoteric circles of ironic cultural critique that her own periodical aims to create. A simplified account of the opposition at work here would say that Addison, Steele, and Shaftesbury idealize a public sphere characterized by rational universality and formal, participatory equality only as a cover for their profound (if mostly implicit) investment in hierarchies of gender and aesthetic taste that they generally imagine as natural or essential, while Manley naturalizes the sociopsychological necessity of exclusion and hierarchy only to make available more universally accessible categories of value—“true merit” as self-reflective wit and judgment—that destabilize and relativize many of the norms through which social distinctions get articulated in post-Restoration English culture.

FEMINIST COUNTERMODELS OF CULTURAL AUTHORITY Manley’s intervention in contemporary debates about gender distinctions is as detailed as the commentaries on birth, merit, and quality we have just analyzed, though the social implications of her gender ideology are much more direct than her thinking about class. While some of the early installments of the Female Tatler appear to align Manley with the strict boundary-policing strategies of gender representation that characterize Steele’s Tatler, the far more pronounced tendency of her papers is to interrogate the conditions of and constraints upon women’s participation in public-sphere activities, paying particular attention to the instrumental use of binaristic

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gender categories in Whig cultural politics. Perhaps the central organizing project of the otherwise heterogeneous Female Tatler essays is to present post-Restoration England with a range of female voices in opposition to the Whig-paternalistic, masculine model of cultural authority that was emerging as dominant by the end of the fi rst decade of the eighteenth century, primarily in the periodical personae of writers like Addison and Steele. The Female Tatler articulates its gender-political critique of this newly hegemonic Whig culture through four strategies: (1) questioning the strict gendering of public- and private-sphere activities and spaces then being undertaken by Whig periodicalists and conduct writers; (2) undermining the authority and “rationality” of synecdochal male readers and editors within post-Restoration public culture; (3) enacting a heteroglossic, horizontally contested model of public discourse against the singular, monologic, vertically authoritative model that already characterized the Tatler and that would become dominant from the Spectator papers into the later eighteenth century; and (4) offering a detailed analysis of women’s limited access to predominant avenues of education and cultural production, with careful scrutiny of the motivations behind and political consequences of such exclusions. While many early numbers of the Female Tatler appear to endorse the crisp separation of conventionally masculine and feminine activities enjoined by Addison and Steele, these few papers are more than counterbalanced by Manley’s overarching tendency to complicate and to question the function of such facile categories. The best examples one could cite as evidence of Manley’s investment in gender policing can be found in papers from July 1709, the series’ fi rst month in print. In Female Tatler 8, Mrs. Crackenthorpe satirizes the Trott sisters for “affect[ing] everything that’s masculine”—they pretend to wear shirts, periwigs, and cloaks, and, worse yet, “they’ll sit down tightly to a bowl of punch, and then scour the streets, break windows, and have so little regard to their own sex as to abuse every woman they meet” (FT 16). Conversely, Female Tatler numbers 3 and 9 apparently aim to keep men within the bounds of properly masculine behavior by ridiculing, in one case, “effeminate fops . . . who wear cherrycolored stockings and stitch’d waistcoats, and, in a counter-tenor voice, complain of vapors and the spleen” (FT 5–6), and, in the other, mercers who carry themselves so theatrically that they seem like “performers in the opera,” presenting themselves to female customers in such a fabulous way that “by their elegant address and soft speeches, you would guess ’em to be Italians” (FT 17). Female Tatler 5 analyzes both kinds of gender transgression, and blames such apparently aberrant behaviors not on character traits somehow ontologically inherent in foppish mercers and manly ladies, but on the careless education such people received from their parents. In this essay, the five baronets who have their own secret sewing circle, a certain Master Neddy who has “imbibe[d] all effeminacies” from his overprotective mother, and a Miss Jenny who has taken up fist-fighting

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 99 and hunting as a result of her “father’s dotage” all predictably embody the maxim that one is a “product of [one’s] education”; from their aberrance, Mrs. Crackenthorpe concludes that “if people had a right management of their children, Miss would mind her embroidery, and Sir Finical his books and manly diversions” (FT 12). All of Manley’s reflections here seem perfectly consonant with axiomatic statements about gender that can be found throughout the Tatler and the Spectator, perhaps most tersely articulated by Addison’s claim in Spectator 57 that “men and women ought to busie themselves in their proper spheres, and on such matters only as are suitable to their respective sex.” But there are significant differences between Manley’s analysis of these “proper spheres” and Addison’s: Manley insists on environmental explanations for gender-bending behavior, and she offers context-specific reasons for why such behaviors should be avoided (if they should be avoided at all). Of course, Addison and Steele’s essentialism by definition precludes them from talking about gender categories as malleable, historically constructed phenomena; Addison claims he borrows the aforementioned axiom from Homer, for instance, and he elsewhere approvingly cites Pericles on the importance of female silence and domestic seclusion. Plus ça change . . . Moreover, when they do discuss the influence of education on the gender characteristics of people in their essays, Addison and Steele tend to emphasize how a flawed upbringing produces not gender trangressions of the kind Manley analyzes, but girls who are excessively feminine and boys who are excessively masculine: over-investment in appearances and superficial female accomplishments produces a mindless, solipsistic coquet, on the one hand, while indulgent inattention to a boy’s intellectual development produces a brute, on the other (S 1:281–83). In Addison and Steele, when men and women invade one another’s gender-coded territories, there is usually no explicit reason given for such transgressive conduct beyond the postulation of a desire (on the transgressor’s part) to gain power, influence, or approval within the other sex’s “proper sphere” of judgment and action. Most instances of gender-crossing behavior in the Tatler and the Spectator involve women doing something threateningly manly: for example, women attempt to have their own political opinions and positions (S 1:346–49), they attempt to obscure their physical “flaws” through the application of cosmetics that make them appear like aggressive “Picts” (S 1:173–77), or they wear cross-gendered clothing that will make it possible for them to participate in equestrian sports (S 4:27–30). There are, of course, also foppish men who try to curry favor with women by being more feminine themselves—a method of which Addison and Steele decidedly do not approve—but by far the greatest threat to English society in the realm of gender stability, on their reading, comes from women invading spheres of activity conventionally deemed masculine. In the aforementioned Spectator 57, Addison himself has some difficulty specifying the nature of women’s transgression in such instances. His

100 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 fundamental argument is as follows: “If those speeches and actions, which in their own nature are indifferent, appear ridiculous when they proceed from a wrong sex, the faults and imperfections of one sex transplanted into another, appear black and monstrous” (S 1:242). But there is a contradiction at the heart of Addison’s attempt here to distinguish between gender crossings that should be thought of as merely “ridiculous” and those “black and monstrous” transgressions that (like a “sex transplant”) threaten the very fabric of the social order. In order to make his gender ideology seem generously liberal rather than dogmatically arbitrary, Addison posits a category of speeches and actions that are “in their own nature indifferent”— suggesting in an apparently universal way that anyone might undertake such actions without shame or calumny—but he then reveals that these ostensibly “indifferent” actions are always already gender-coded, in his explicit acknowledgment that all such actions can come from either the “wrong sex” or, implicitly, the “right sex.” In this light, there can be no such thing as a morally “indifferent” act with regard to its gendered provenance, since every action is always already sexed: thus, whenever women do something they might want to consider a form of universally legitimate behavior—like having a political opinion, presenting themselves to best advantage to attract the opposite sex, or riding a horse, to use the previous examples—they risk crossing the line that implicitly separates properly feminine behavior from those “black and monstrous” forms of self-promotion Addison is determined to keep women from adopting. Manley drastically reframes such gender crossings by linking them directly to misguided economic and educational motives, rather than to the sexual-political motives referred to by Addison and Steele, and she clarifies that her own critique of these “transgressions” is itself motivated by context-specific concerns (about politeness, industry, and authenticity) rather than by metaphysical concerns about the ontological “suitability” of each gender to a “proper sphere,” as in Addison’s formula. Because gender identity is a malleable product of education and environment in Manley’s scheme, rather than an index of “natural” personality traits as in Addison and Steele, the consequences of unconventional gender behavior are radically local and situational rather than systemic. To take up some of the examples from the Female Tatler that were mentioned earlier, Master Neddy’s mother unintentionally ends up effeminizing him through an overprotective approach to his education motivated by the economic desire to preserve this “heir to a great estate” from undue bodily harm: his effeminacy is not the sign of his desire to curry favor with women by unnaturally blurring boundaries, as he might be depicted in the Spectator; rather, it is the indirect by-product of his mother’s hypertrophied anxiety about maintaining the patrilineal inheritance. Neddy’s effeminacy, moreover, receives from Manley not the pathos of blackness and monstrosity it might get from Addison, but merely her concern that by having been kept out of customary forms of male–female sociability (which leads to his “lying with my Lady’s

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 101 woman till she begins to make complaints”), Neddy will never successfully enter the marriage market to preserve the family line but will need a wife “provided” for him (FT 12). The mother’s approach to his education, in other words, will undermine the very economic goal it was intended to achieve, and it’s this particular social consequence that Manley laments far more than Neddy’s putatively wayward masculinity. Similarly, the masculine Miss Jenny has been encouraged in her manliness to please a father who appreciates that she is a “girl of quick parts” so much that he “won’t have her spirit broke,” a phrase that allows Manley to foreground the psychic cost of Jenny’s being made more feminine: the very education that would ensure she “mind[s] her embroidery” would also “break her spirit,” whereas her persistence in a conditioned masculinity has only the satiric upshot of Manley predicting she will “certainly beat her husband” when once married (FT 12).33 As for the effeminate mercers in Female Tatler 9, Manley makes it clear again that these men behave the way they do not out of a disturbing crossgendered ontological identity that will subvert the “natural” foundation of sexual difference and the separate socioeconomic spheres founded thereon, but because their customers demand it. Manley blames the mercers’ conduct entirely on female shoppers, who not only “countenance” the salesmen’s foppery but actively promote it by inviting the mercers to socialize with them outside their shops, both for “collations” and for “be[ing] seen in hackney coach[es] with ’em” (FT 18). Moreover, the “negative” consequence of the mercers’ cross-gendered behavior that Manley focuses on has nothing to do with their disruption of “suitable” sexed behavior, but with the fact that their unfortunate combination of “beau and business” keeps them too distracted with the “conceited niceties” that superficially attract a certain kind of customer and not enough occupied with the substantial “industry” without which no business can succeed (FT 18).34 Again, as with Master Neddy’s misguided mother, the very strategy the mercers pursue as a way of solidifying their economic position threatens to undermine its own aims.35 Lest we view Manley’s reference to the mercers’ proper “sphere of industry” as a way of making public labor a properly masculine category to be defended from feminizing intrusion, we should remember her analogous treatment of female bar-keepers in Female Tatler 5. In that essay, Mrs. Crackenthorpe addresses a letter from “Andrew Allnight” complaining about the masculine “impertinence” of two particular female publicans named Rebecca Rhenish and Winifred Whitewine; though she acknowledges the women’s conduct as that of “pert amazons,” Mrs. Crackenthorpe explains not only that it is the economic context within which the women are situated—the bar-keepers’ “rattling, ringing, noisy profession”—that gives them “an assurance unbecoming the character of their sex,” but also that the way gentlemen like her perturbed correspondent address female publicans perpetuates the “problem” Andrew wants solved: as she puts

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it, “if men of estates would not treat them at the bar, and call ’em ‘dear’ and ‘jewel’—‘Thou blossom of a cauliflower,’ or worship ’em with ‘angel,’ ‘goddess,’ ‘cherubim,’ and such stuff; and sometimes lend ’em their chariots . . . Mrs. Rhenish and Mrs. Whitewine would know their proper distance” (FT 11). In Manley’s treatment of this relatively common complaint about female workers in conventionally masculine spaces like the coffee house and the tavern, whatever theoretical ideal of “propriety” readers like Squire Allnight might carry around in their heads is always trumped by the everyday practices of decorum and sociability in which people like the bar-keepers and their patrons engage.36 In other words, “proper distance” is established not by an abstract ideal but through actual patterns of interaction—because their patrons treat them with familiarity, in fact, Mrs. Rhenish and Mrs. Whitewine do know their proper distance from people like Squire Allnight, that is, not much. As Mrs. Crackenthorpe ironically puts it at the beginning of her answer to him, “’tis certain everybody ought to . . . have respect paid ’em suitable to their quality,” which, given Manley’s idiosyncratic and meritocratic defi nition of “quality,” is exactly what the female bar-keepers have been doing (FT 10). If these women’s level of “assurance” is “unbecoming” rather than “modest”—the ideal she elsewhere offers to readers— they are merely mirroring back to their aristocratic male patrons behavior that should equally be considered “unbecomingly assured”; this dynamic gets allegorized neatly in Manley’s diction here, in which she insists to the “men of estates” in her audience that the “reflection” she makes about the ethics of tavern interaction is “upon themselves” and not upon the female objects of their supposed disapproval (FT 11). Additionally, we should be careful to note that Manley describes the women’s assurance—the product of their socializing with “a variety of company,” which enables them to “pretend to a general knowledge” just as the editors of the Female Tatler do—not as “unbecoming” in itself or because it subverts “natural” gender difference, but as “unbecoming the character of their sex”; that is to say, the behavior that arises from the female publicans’ unusually “general knowledge” deviates not from an abstract standard of propriety but from a contingent, culturally determined “character” that women are supposed to embody—a confi ning set of norms whose arbitrariness, hypocrisy, and political consequences the Female Tatler is at pains to deconstruct. If these women should be more circumspect in their self-presentation, in Manley’s estimation, it is only for the practical economic reason that by “giv[ing] companies the obliging attendance they require”—which they are really already doing—they can prevent judgmental customers from needlessly “avoiding [their] shops” (FT 10–11). The examples that fi nally clinch this reading of Manley’s approach to gender-transgressive behavior, and most especially that of ostensibly immasculated women, can be found in the two Female Tatler essays that deal explicitly with the issue of female cross-dressing, numbers 33 and 37. In one of the brief notices attached to the end of the latter essay, Mrs.

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 103 Crackenthorpe reports one reader’s complaint against the gender-bending infractions of a “young lady” who went to a coffee house near Guildhall “in man’s clothes with . . . two ‘prentices, called for a dish of Bohee, smoked her pipe, and gave herself abundance of masculine airs” (FT 88). What most disturbs this unnamed reader, apparently, is not the mere fact of a woman appearing in the coffee house but the way her behavior draws attention to how gentlemanly coffee-house masculinity relies upon and becomes recognizable through a set of co-optable theatrical external signs. Manley’s description undermines the idea that such masculinity is defi ned primarily by its rational-critical Habermasian interiority, showing that it can be rather easily “personated” through a range of costumes and props, like the pipe, the tea dish, and specific airs; it is, potentially, an identity that one can “give oneself,” one that can be inhabited by those who lack the putatively natural or inborn set of characteristics supposed to defi ne the public-sphere gentleman—even the apprentices, who equally have no business spending their time and money in this way, can engage in this impersonation. Not only does Mrs. Crackenthorpe refrain from endorsing her worried reader’s disciplinary “desire,” she includes this notice at the end of an essay that details an idealized salon-style, mixed-gender excursion to Hampton Court that is planned and supervised by Mrs. Crackethorpe and a select group of other “ladies.” In this countermodel to a public-sphere arena dominated by easily parodied, blustery smoking gentlemen, Manley describes how the select, witty company are entertained and edified with a history of the theater by the actor George Pack, a man whose singular “modesty,” “brilliant conversation,” and “better principles” could never be impersonated—neatly turning the charge of inauthenticity away from the man who lives by mimicry and onto the supposedly more substantial gentlemen who defi ne themselves against such mere actors (FT 85). 37 Pack, of course, shares the proverbial floor on this excursion with Mrs. Crackenthorpe herself, who holds forth with an extended critique of the architecture at Hampton Court and of the neighborhood surrounding St. Paul’s, their collective discussion thus modeling a form of public-sphere activity in which there is no operative notion of distinctly gendered spaces and topics of discussion, and in which all participants are held to the same standards of wit and politeness. However, the gender-policing reader’s notice at the end of Female Tatler 37 is undermined by more than the immediate terms of its enunciation and its situation within an essay on substantive (vs. coffee-house) publicness, coming as it does only a week after Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s own foray into cross-dressing in Female Tatler 33. Manley’s eidolon decides to attend the anatomical “reading” of a human cadaver by a medical lecturer in the “public hall in Physicians College”; in order inconspicuously to “make one amongst [the crowd of men]” who will be in the audience, Mrs. Crackenthorpe “put[s] [her]self into men’s apparel” and makes haste

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to what she calls the “Royal Slaughter-house” (FT 76). Though she admits that she expects little enlightenment from the would-be anatomist based on the poor “Latin he had made use of in his bill of fare” (FT 76), Mrs. Crackenthorpe describes the lecture as a public-sphere scene pregnant with Habermasian possibility, though one not immune from the papers’ signature ironic deflation: A multitude of all degrees were gathered together, some to better their understanding, and others to be thought to have more than they had; some in search of occult causes, and others whose cause of coming was to be sought for. Lawyers, apothecaries, physicians, butchers, divines, surgeons, pedagogues, painters and drugsters were the persons our learned doctor was to give proofs of his great skill in anatomy to[.] (FT 76) However, while other auditors listen with rapt attention and “st[an]d a tip-toe” to take in every last bit of scientific knowledge they can, Manley’s eidolon fails to see the special insight in the doctor’s uncontroversial conclusion—delivered in the form of “an elaborate harangue which nobody understood any more than himself”—that the apparently hanged man had died “for mere want of respiration” (FT 76). As with many of her other sallies into potentially enlightening public forums, Mrs. Crackenthorpe removes her masculine attire and leaves the lecture early “out of all manner of patience at coming so far to return home again furnished with no more knowledge than I brought with me” (FT 77). For Manley, Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s cross dressing, like the masculine airs of the female publicans and the subversive young girl in the Guildhall coffee house, literalizes the self-immasculation that is the necessary precondition of these women having any substantial public existence at all: by defi nition, women who remove themselves from the exemplary, silent domesticity enjoined upon them by the arbiters of paternalistic early liberal Whig culture must take on an “assurance unbecoming the character of their sex.” What also comes through quite strongly in Manley’s treatment of female transvestism, as we have seen, is the vapid insubstantiality of much publicsphere activity from which women were generally excluded. Her critical treatment of the anatomy lecturer is part of a more generalized interrogation of the authority and rationality of representative male public-cultural figures, in part because she depicts her own project as consistently under assault from her male competitors and detractors. In Female Tatler 11, for example, she closes by acknowledging that “several ill-bred critics have reported about town that a woman is not the author of this paper,” a charge she dismisses by calling it “a splenetic and irrational aspersion upon our whole sex” by “a rough-hewn sort of [male] animals” who have had “recourse to learning, that they might equal [women’s] natural parts” (FT 25). Manley reserves more sustained satirical ire for those who try to drive her out of business by printing an ultimately unsuccessful rival

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 105 Female Tatler (stealing her persona, themes, and narrative frameworks) from August to November of 1709. The bulk of Female Tatler 35, under the displacing guise of a letter from a reader-turned-detective, is devoted to a lengthy caricatural portrait of the men Manley imagines to be her cheats: the fi rst part reveals the “assistant to the spurious Female Tatler” to be a slovenly man “sitting most magisterially in a dirty ale-house [near Billingsgate], surrounded by porters and watermen” who worship him as if he were “a conjurer,” based on his pretense to “universal knowledge” through “broken sentences” and meaningful nods and winks (FT 81); while the second section presents us with the author himself, another alehousedwelling, “surly, sullen, morose, splenetic old dotard” who spends his time “snarling at himself and cursing his company”—at which sight Manley’s investigative “reader” expresses his satirical shock that “such a monster should personate a young lady,” when he had “expected to have seen a glittering coquet” (FT 82). Apart from their spurious Female Tatler, these men’s greatest claims to cultural achievement involve a handful of poems in “Dr Saffold’s-Bills” and a plagiarized artistic “invention” for portraitsketching they’ve stolen from “the English translation of the Jesuits Perspective” (FT 82). For Manley, the public sphere is peopled significantly by talentless, unlearned hacks, men who impose their cult-like power on unthinking hordes of consumers unable to distinguish the external signs of erudition from its substance. While the satirical gesture of distancing oneself from presumably lowbrow writing is common to much periodical and poetic writing in postRestoration print culture, Manley goes farther with this trope by calling into question the authority of those self-styled tasteful cultural figures who deploy the high-low distinction, aiming particularly at the authors of the Tatler themselves.38 Indeed, Manley’s critique of the Tatler goes beyond pointing out its implicitly gendered character. Several papers, many of them attributed to Bernard Mandeville, accuse Steele’s paper of moral and intellectual fraudulence. In Female Tatler 108, for instance, the editor Rosella attacks the previous Saturday’s Tatler paper (number 147) for apparently “recommend[ing] a lie . . . twice told” through the Homeric story of how Juno deceived Venus (and seduced Jupiter) to recover her husband’s waning affections (FT 195).39 Rosella’s concern arises from the fact that a young lady in her salon had referred to this very issue of the Tatler as moral justification for “giv[ing] a loose to invention and amus[ing] the company . . . with that art which is vulgarly called lying,” calling Steele’s essay a “great authority for this latitude of discourse” (FT 194–95). For Rosella, it is unconscionable and revealing that such an influential cultural arbiter as “Squire Bickerstaff . . . [,] the [other] scene of [the dual Tatlers’] face,” should “palm a crime upon us for a moral,” and particularly a “crime” like that of manipulative duplicity, so often mobilized by anti-feminists as a sign of women’s “natural” unreliability and their need for disciplinary containment (FT 195).

106 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 However, perhaps the most complicated of the Female Tatler’s many critical jabs at the Tatler is to be found in Mandeville’s essay number 81, which begins with a letter from a female correspondent who initially appears to be the editor’s satiric target. Describing herself as an avid culture consumer au courant with the latest plays and operas, and who “read[s] the Tatlers both male and female as constantly as they come out,” this female correspondent asks the “society of ladies” for an explication of one particular word used by Steele’s Isaac Bickerstaff, a word whose meaning “puzzles [her] abominably,” though “everybody [else] seems pleased with it”: The word I mean is “Lucubrations.” I read it a hundred times before I could remember it, and for a good while used to call it “lubrications,” for which I was horribly laughed at by a gentleman of my acquaintance. Sometimes I have thought that it was smutty, and blushed at the hearing of it; but what is really meant, I ingeniously confess I don’t understand to this day. I know several of whom I might be informed, but everybody having it so current, I was always ashamed of appearing more ignorant than others. I would write to Mr Bickerstaff himself about it, but I doubt he is too high to take notice of such blockheads as myself. (FT 160)40 While Mandeville’s narrator (Lucinda) begins her reflection by making the female correspondent an example of how “most people are more ignorant than they care to appear,” she immediately redirects her satirical wit against the authors of the Tatler by confessing of the word “lucubrations” that “[she doesn’t] think it strange that anybody should not understand it,” given that even a voracious reader might never encounter the word in “ten or a dozen years” of study (FT 160). The editor then goes on to offer a detailed analytical defi nition of the term, which “in its large signification comprehends all manner of work that is done by candlelight . . . [,] but in its stricter sense . . . is by excellency applied to the works of the learned only,” who are assumed to work by night as well as by day and therefore “want some artificial light or other to see by” (FT 161).41 Rather than closing her essay by having dispatched this purely philological task, Mandeville’s female editor goes on to report a wide range of unflattering interpretations as to why Mr. Bickerstaff has apparently become so “fond” of an obscure word that has always been “a very serious one” only to make a “jest” of it. Doing so, she employs yet again the division of the public into three groups of varying levels of esoteric and exoteric knowledge that we saw both in Female Tatler 41 (see discussion above) and in Mandeville’s allegory of reading from his Fable of the Bees (in the introduction). Lucinda explains: The better sort are of the opinion that the Squire, being an airy, facetious man . . . would make the world believe that his papers were writ

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 107 off-hand, [and] has called his Tatler’s [sic] “Lucubrations” [in] derision of those sour, laborious pedants that have taken such wonderful pains and yet not been so diverting or instructive as himself. But others think that having used the word too often in the beginning, before he was aware, as soon as he saw it and found that others did the same, to prevent our thinking that he had been in error, he purposely seemed to grow more fond of it, and endeavored to persuade the world that he had all along designed it as a jest, and, by this stratagem they say that his incomparable genius of turning everything which way he pleases, he has gained our applause for what was in reality at fi rst a fault of his inadvertency. I know some Rosicrucians that will have it that there is a secret charm in the word, understood by none but the adepts, and that, in his way of conjuring by the magic force of it, the Squire has wrought some very strange things. (FT 161)42 At the end of this passage, Lucinda actually lists a fourth possibility—those who say that there is “nothing in [the word ‘lucubrations’] and that [Bickerstaff] only keeps it at his fi ngers’ ends as jugglers do their sticks to amuse the crowd” (FT 161)—but this group seems less like a separate category than like an extrapolation of the position held by the second group in the passage above, who believe Steele uses the term as a way of imposing on a miscomprehending public. Mandeville’s tripartite taxonomy, then, involves (1) truly idiotic readers who see Bickerstaff as a “conjurer” (recalling the charlatan who assists in the production of the fake Female Tatler—see discussion of Female Tatler 35 above)—these readers function in a particularly ironic way here since they view themselves as having the most esoteric knowledge when, in Mandeville’s scheme, theirs is by far the most exoteric reading of the Tatler; (2) slightly more enlightened (i.e., liberal, secular, Whig) readers who view Steele as thoroughly in command of his satiric diction, neatly distinguishing his own casually brilliant “diverting and instructive” writing from that of “laborious pedants”; and (3) still more enlightened (i.e., skeptical Mandevillian) readers who see through Steele’s rhetoric as yet another example of his fraudulent “juggling” act, which keeps audiences in a state of bemused but servile distraction in order to maximize his economic profit and his cultural authority. Because it gets delivered through Lucinda’s “letter,” Mandeville’s critique of the Tatler project seems aimed in part at Steele’s gendered division of his own audience into two hierarchical camps, a practice which belies his commitment to “equality” in so many abstract statements. On the one hand, for Steele, there are those with the education to understand the meaning of his keyword (“lucubrations”)—these readers are presumably mostly men with the linguistic and educational training to get it, though the detailed explication offered by Lucinda-the-etymologist certainly undermines that gender specificity. On the other hand, there are female readers like Lucinda’s correspondent who do not have the requisite education to be on the “inside” of

108 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 Steele’s esoteric circle—women who read mostly “plays and romances,” as the correspondent explains, but also conduct periodicals like “the Tatlers both male and female.” In Mandeville’s account, such women are made to feel like “blockheads” by Steele’s moralizing discourse, excluded both from participation in the periodical and from respectful consideration by it. On Lucinda’s reading, though, these privileged male readers themselves may actually be just as clueless as the correspondent, but less willing to admit it; that is, these pretentious male readers seem like the ultimate target for Lucinda’s initial comment about those who are “more ignorant than they care to appear.”43 Worse still for Steele, Lucinda’s account of public debate over his use of the word “lucubrations” suggests not only that there may be nothing substantial to “get” about Bickerstaff’s fetishizing diction— except, perhaps, the understanding that there’s nothing to get—but also that Steele uses the term to create the appearance of easy brilliance out of what is really his own “inadvertency,” mobilizing the external signs of erudition only to reinforce the feeling of intellectual dependency among his duped readership. Against the Tatler’s deployment of false erudition and distinction, Steele’s female audience attempts to create a safe counter-public space for intellectual discussion by directing their concerns to Manley and Mandeville’s more sympathetic female editor, a woman who unmasks Steele’s exclusionary strategies as a broadly understood and criticized phenomenon among London’s reading public.44 The exchange between Lucinda and her correspondent models a more inclusive, horizontal structure of public discourse than that evidently experienced by many female readers of Addison and Steele, and their printed dialogue arises expressly out of the need to oppose the misleading paternalistic cultural authority embodied in the Whigs’ periodical persona. To be sure, the Female Tatler does not refrain from all forms of division and hierarchy in the construction of its own reading publics; Manley’s editorial figures often take account of the varying levels of exoteric and esoteric understanding among the different segments of their audience. The difference, again, is that Manley hierarchizes on the basis of (potentially) universally accessible capacities like wit and politeness—capacities her own periodical aims to develop in her readers—rather than using inexorably “natural” gender characteristics to decide who will be on the “inside” of her club and who will not. Against Whig periodicals like the Tatler (and, later, the Spectator) which tap into and promote women’s regressive “fond[ness] of ridiculing one another,” the Female Tatler claims “impartially to laugh at the foibles of both sexes” (FT 9), though Manley’s editors make men the papers’ satiric objects about four times as often as they do women, perhaps to fulfill the papers’ project of “consult[ing] the honour and interest of the ladies with as much fervency as the male Tatler does that of the gentlemen” (FT 69). This readjustment of the satiric lens away from women’s foibles and onto men’s, moreover, functions as just one strategy in Manley’s arsenal for providing women with an education in self-reflective

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 109 cultural awareness that is at the center of her periodical’s mission; as Mrs. Crackenthorpe explains in Female Tatler 5, she is disposed to “extenuate . . . the frailties of [her] own sex” as situational and readily overcome: If a lady appears impertinently talkative . . . I impute it to her youth. Nature has given her a ready wit, which time and experience will ripen into a good judgment . . . [;] if a lady appears rustic, awkward, and illbred—what can be expected from a country education? Plays, drawing-rooms, and observation in company, will insensibly bring her into an easy method; or if an agreeable young creature is always setting her hair, altering her patches and practicing airs in a looking glass . . . matrimony will soon convince her she must have charms of mind as well as body to secure [her husband’s] heart. (FT 9) Manley nowhere expresses an equivalent level of concern about educating her male readers—though their particular idiocies fill the pages of the Female Tatler—and her periodical functions as a portable aesthetic substitute for precisely the kinds of guided “experience” through “drawingrooms” and “observation in company” that will give women readers not only those “charms of mind” useful for keeping a husband happy, but also those intellectual abilities that will enable them to contribute substantively to the enlightened public sphere in which she would have them operate. After all, Manley spends absolutely no time idealizing the quiet, exemplary private woman upheld by periodicals like Steele’s Tatler, which ran its famous series of essays describing the gradual but defi nitive domestication of Bickerstaff’s intellectually precocious half-sister Jenny Distaff almost simultaneously with the Female Tatler at the height of its own popularity.45 Rather, her periodical idealizes well-read witty women of modest assurance, figures of female cultural authority who can organize and participate in forums for intelligent sociability, and who are themselves authors competing with men in the post-Restoration print marketplace. The predominant exemplar of this enlightenment feminist ethos in the paper’s initial run, of course, is Mrs. Crackenthorpe herself, whose diverse and well-attended salon is the very condition of possibility for her periodical enterprise: her ability to plan and to guide significant discussions of Habermasian intent, despite the idiotic interruptions of her many disappointing visitors and correspondents, comes through in many of the early essays—perhaps most successfully in the excursion to Hampton Court described in Female Tatler 37 (see discussion above). In the continuation of the paper (after Female Tatler 52), though, this model of the single authoritative figure—a structure of authority that imitates exactly the monologic discourse of Bickerstaff in the Tatler, and which would become dominant in the periodical from the Spectator on into mid-century—gets replaced by a plural, internally contested, philosophically heterogeneous “society of ladies,” each of whom has her own distinct perspective and a particular set of “days” on

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which she is responsible for producing an essay, and each of whose contributions to the paper is considered equally valuable to the others.46 Unlike the increasingly unified Tatler and Spectator papers, which focus on the thorough elaboration of the editorial persona’s central thesis or maxim, the Female Tatler becomes more fragmented as it develops, actually staging significant debates between members of the society within and between papers.47 Thus, the Female Tatler essays become more internally heteroglossic as the paper continues, and there is no overarching editorial figure to adjudicate the positions taken by opposing authors; readers must decide for themselves which perspective they fi nd most persuasive, even if one character seems to get the better of the others in local contexts.48 The Female Tatler’s commitment to a more female-directed, heteroglossic model of cultural authority calls out both the false egalitarianism of Addison and Steele’s appeal to participatory forms of conversation they never put into practice, and the false universality of their appeal to the dignity and capability of human nature when they so rarely allow women access to positions of authoritative speech and writing in their own work. By partially implementing the democratization of judgment advocated by Addison and Steele, and by offering multiple paradigms of enlightened female public-sphere activity, the Female Tatler goes farther than its Whig competitors in actually enacting the values they merely theorize. Like Astell’s social theory, the Tory feminism of the Female Tatler papers demands that the Whig arbiters of post-Restoration English society defend women’s access to avenues of education and cultural production in a way that will make their critique of arbitrary power—the Habermasian goal of rationalizing domination—more internally consistent, to prove that their universalizing gestures are more than an opportunistic rhetoric intended to further the interests of mercantile men. Appropriating and modifying Astell’s ideal of the oppositional, all-female Christian academy, Manley’s “society of ladies” functions both as a secular, libertine example of female counterpublic conversation and mutual empowerment, and as a vehicle for revealing the contradictions within Whig cultural ideology.49 The Female Tatler relentlessly attacks this newly hegemonic ideal of publicness based on its unwavering relegation of women to secondary, subordinate roles in English cultural life. Several essays in the Female Tatler’s continuation directly refute Bickerstaff’s construction—in Tatler papers 81 and 84 (October 15 and 22, 1709)—of a masculinist “Chamber of Fame,” a memorial repository of history’s most virtuous characters, of which all twelve members were, as M. M. Goldsmith points out, “male and classical.”50 Bickerstaff goes so far as to anticipate feminist backlash against the exclusivity of his “chamber,” including in Tatler 84 the fictional, critical response of his own cousin (“Lady Whittlestick”), to which he responds by dismissively concluding that he would provide a “small tea-table” of fame for women if he thought there would be enough women to fill it (T 2:34). Over the next several weeks, nine Female Tatler papers, eight of them written by

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 111 Mandeville, project and then enumerate a female table of honor to subvert Bickerstaff’s claims.51 But these Female Tatler papers go beyond merely proving that women have historically achieved a great deal more than male writers have given them credit for—they offer a trenchant socio-political analysis of the continuing constraints upon women’s public intellectual activity, and they issue a kind of “call to literacy” to their female audience. In Female Tatler 88, for example, Artesia critiques Bickerstaff’s understanding of women’s place in the annals of cultural achievement by reminding her readers that “the writing of history has all along been engrossed by the men,” and that it is therefore no wonder that the historical record should promulgate the notion of masculine superiority; on Artesia’s reading, women’s exclusion from the tables of fame results from a tautological, male-perpetuated system in which only public political activity is memorialized at the same time that men “have always debarred [the female] sex from governing” (FT 176–77). But women’s marginalization from public life, Artesia points out in an unmistakably Astellian vein, serves merely as the logical endpoint of an educational program according to which women are “industriously kept from knowledge of arts and sciences” and are “laughed at” whenever they talk of political matters; comparing English women’s systemically enforced “ignorance” to that entailed by European “conquerors” upon the non-European societies they colonize, Artesia bemoans women’s “stupid” complacency toward a patriarchal dominion that secures itself by “complimenting [women] into idleness” and by distracting women with luxurious “trinkets”—“playthings,” as Artesia puts it, that women should see as the “consequences of [men’s] tyranny” rather than as the “tokens of their affection” (FT 177). In Female Tatler 111, Lucinda continues Artesia’s critique of the gender system by analyzing the way it impinges upon even her own exceptional status as a certain kind of female public intellectual. Reflecting on the long history of women being denied “letters” in the name of a natural fitness for “the cares and impertinence of human life,” Lucinda describes her own attempts to break with that history—her self-directed course of reading—as a necessarily private activity. Despite the public effectiveness of her written commentaries in the Female Tatler, Lucinda acknowledges that social expectations about gender mean that her intellectual autonomy can develop only in the radically isolated space of her “study,” surrounded by the only interlocutors who will allow her to speak freely: her “few honest counselors,” her “books” (FT 200–1). In Lucinda’s account, the wouldbe female intellectual can experience the open conditions of Habermasian debate only in a simulated conversation with imagined author-figures who are present to her only in the form of their civil (because silent) textuality; of her study, she claims, “Here ’tis I can differ in opinion without exposing myself to the storms of dispute. Here I can be instructed calmly and at leisure in truth and knowledge without being despised for my ignorance, or blamed for my curiosity” (FT 200).

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But in the closing paragraphs of this fi nal installment of the Female Tatler, Lucinda evokes the possibility of women’s meaningful self-emancipation from this consignment to silence and private domesticity. Addressing her readers as if they already were what she wishes them to become—a strategy also borrowed from Astell’s Serious Proposal—Lucinda claims that there are now an “almost equal number” of “female votaries” to learning as there are male, and that these women can “put in as good a claim to immortality as those who endeavor to disappoint their purpose, or divert their pursuit” (FT 201). For Lucinda, this movement toward intellectual self-development is part of a zero-sum economy in which women’s reading and writing necessarily displace a concern with the household duties that have been women’s traditional province; as she puts it, “The needle is justly quitted for the pen, and the spice box removed to make room for the scrutore; ask a lady for a receipt, she knows nothing of the matter, ’tis probable her servant may, but she desires you to read a pamphlet, and give her your thoughts how it is writ, and what you think is meant by those letters and dashes” (FT 201). It seems clear that the kind of rational-critical conversation Lucinda imagines women undertaking is, like much of the debate internal to the Female Tatler, constituted by an all-female group of participants—surely it is another “lady” whom Lucinda imagines would be “ask[ing] a lady for a receipt” in her example; participation is apparently also delimited by class, since the exchange between “ladies” excludes the “servant” who has taken over the domestic chores. Even so, such a feminocentric mode of critical engagement serves Lucinda as a necessary and substantial starting point for women’s broader participation in public intellectual life; after all, Lucinda has her “ladies” (perhaps in the company of their maidservants) discussing the most challenging public-sphere texts in their culture: “What a figure does [Swift’s] Tale of a Tub make on a toilet beyond a herbal, which, with a book or two of devotion, used to be our allowance?” (FT 201). Lucinda anticipates and defuses the critique many men would make of women’s learning by satirically acknowledging the “accidents” and potentially absurd behaviors women might fall into through an ill-considered preoccupation with “arithmetic” (which might lead to gambling) and “astronomy” (which might make women addicted to fortune-telling); of these occasional mishaps, Lucinda asks a much more fundamental question about the costs and benefits of women’s intellectual progress: “[W]hat are these trifles in comparison with invincible ignorance? Who would not rather mistake sometimes than never think at all?” (FT 202). Lucinda clarifies the social stakes of her argument in her closing juxtaposition of her own practices with the “fear,” “guilt,” and “silence” taken (positively) to characterize women of previous generations; she explains, “All that I have heard of women of our family, as worthy memory, is that they looked upon the ground when they spoke, were frightened at the appearance of a stranger, and fled to their several recesses. . . . [T]herefore I ventured to take my

Gender, Ridicule, and the Satire of Liberal Reform 113 own way” (FT 202–3). Through this emphasis on their female editors’ solidarity, self-direction, and commitment to publishing, “Manley” and Mandeville align the Female Tatler unmistakably with the Tory-feminist endorsement of female discursivity that will we will analyze in the remaining chapters of this book.

Part II

Tory Feminism and the Gendered Reader, Astell to Haywood

4

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity

In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler pays particular attention to the ways in which the “subjection of desire”—that is, the specific chain of objects and identifications through which we develop a sense of personal identity—comes to be inseparable from what she calls our “desire for subjection,” a kind of primary need to be affiliated with and subordinated to something or someone outside of and more powerful than ourselves.1 In Butler’s account, our very sense of self, that most apparently unique, intimate, and private of feelings, becomes unimaginable apart from the experience of its “dependency” on external forces; for Butler, this “dependency” itself functions paradoxically in that it “initiates and sustains our agency” at the same time that it delimits both the forms our agency can take and the effects that it can produce.2 One could make the case that the question prompting Butler’s postmodern political theory—how does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection?—is merely a recent, Foucauldian-psychoanalytic reiteration of the foundational problem out of which a recognizably feminist discourse initially emerged. In a post-Hobbesian generation deeply concerned to legitimate social and political authority through the consent of the subjected, a woman often considered the fi rst feminist writer in English culture, Mary Astell, focused her considerable analytic skills and her avowedly partisan political energy on precisely the question that bothers Butler: how is it, Astell effectively asks the female readers of her post-Restoration English culture, that we women have come not only to accept but actively to encourage a gendered political order in which we have so few choices and almost no legal redress for our grievances, a system whose inequities we perpetuate simply by acting on our own most intimately felt desires?3 How is it, to put it in a slightly different way, that those moments in which we feel ourselves most powerfully defining and promoting our own interests turn out to guarantee our permanent subjection to a social order bent on confining us to a domestic space in which we have little say and “no security but [our husband’s] honor and good-nature”?4 How is it that people so capable of rational, enlightened decision making should be so eager to deepen their own subordination to an irrational, arbitrary cultural system?

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ON LOVING ONE’S CHAINS: PLEASURE, SUBJECTION, AND DISCURSIVITY IN ASTELL The attempt to answer this question informs Astell’s work from her earliest forays into philosophical debate, her Serious Proposal (1694), to her still adamantly oppositional but more fatalistically resigned last texts, perhaps best exemplified in the pithy Preface she added to the third edition of her Refl ections Upon Marriage (1706).5 If in the earlier text Astell laments how women’s “natural desire to advance and to perfect their being . . . degenerates into [a] pride and mistaken self-love” easily manipulated by predatory male flatterers (SP 62–64), her later text focuses a bit more precisely on the problem of women who “love their chains and . . . discern how becomingly they set” to such an extent that they “think as humbly of themselves as their masters can wish” and “fi nd themselves born for slavery” (RM 29). How can we account for this perverse dialectic whereby women desire their own subjection, not in abstract theoretical terms (offered by much psychoanalytic work on this problem), but in a historically specific and culturally situated way? Astell’s complicated answer begins with the acknowledgment that the current system of gender relations is carried out not against the protest of the women who participate in it, but largely with their approval and encouragement. Astell offers several inextricably related reasons for this phenomenon: fi rst, women are encouraged from a very early age to feel that they can have no “higher design than to get a husband” (RM 65); moreover, in order to succeed at this central task, women constantly have to imagine themselves from the perspective of potential suitors. Women who organize their psychic lives in this manner must vigilantly interrogate themselves at all times: am I attractive enough, am I lisping correctly, did I just hit an incorrect note on the harpsichord, am I doing everything in my power to attract flattery from men and to offer flattery to those men, within the bounds of decorum and virtue? While women are made to think of themselves as taking charge of their lives by asking these questions, Astell insists that in order for such questions to seem legitimate, women must already have internalized men’s predominant criteria of judgment about them as if those criteria were of their own making. That is to say, on Astell’s reading, in order to succeed as commodities in the marriage market, women must systematically confuse their own values with those of the men who regard them, by placing themselves in the imagined position of their male beholders through an act of sympathetic identification and then leaving themselves in that position; fi nally, this identification ends up evacuating whatever independent sense of self they might have had before making that psychological leap into the male spectator’s head. As Astell addresses the problem to her female readers early on in the Serious Proposal, “[L]et us . . . not entertain such a degrading thought of our own worth, as to imagine that our souls were given us only for the service of our bodies, and that the

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 119 best improvement we can make of these is to attract the eyes of men. We value them too much, and ourselves too little if we place any part of our worth in their opinion” (SP 55). Twelve years and no new female academies later, Astell remains focused on the problem of women who “think as humbly of themselves as their masters can wish,” abdicating their own criteria of judgment in favor of what they believe men would think (RM 29). One of the primary reasons Astell had proposed an all-female academy was to allow women an institution in which to debate their “real interests,” since there is “nothing of worser [sic] consequence than to be deceived in a matter of so great importance” (SP 52). By enabling women to understand the distinction between what she sees as their “own” interests and those of the patriarchal system, this kind of feminine counter-public space would be the precondition for women taking a reasoned, informed approach to courtship and marriage. In Astell’s account, women are routinely “imposed upon” by “cheating hucksters” who keep women invested in their identification with the male gaze; staging the alternatives as bluntly as possible, Astell asks female readers whether it would be as advantageous “to consult with your dancing-master as with your own thoughts” (SP 52). Ultimately, Astell offers her project for a women’s academy as a (counter) public-sphere solution to problems initially created by women’s engagement in a number of corrupting, conventional public-sphere activities—conversation, reading, and spectatorship—all of which confi ne women to what Astell calls “the enchanted circle that custom has placed us in,” that male-sponsored worldview out of which women must “dare to break” (SP 55). For Astell, the root cause of women’s deluded enchantment lies in “the mistakes of our education, which . . . spreads its ill influence through all our lives” (SP 59–60). Taught, as we have mentioned, to spend all of their care on their external appearance, imagining what they look like from the perspective of male beholders, women’s “continual application to vanity . . . quite spoil[s] the contexture and frame of our minds,” thereby “render[ing] ourselves incapable of any serious and improving thought”; the apotheosis of Astell’s nightmarish account of this systematic miseducation prefigures later Augustan satires against women which imagine reified coquettes indistinguishable from the very fashion objects they fetishize: “our minds themselves become as light and frothy as those things they are conversant about” (SP 68). Astell’s understanding of this mechanism of internalization clearly anticipates some of the complexity of psychoanalytic theory, even if (unlike the latter) she rests her analysis on a faith in both the subject’s reason and the grace of God to disabuse the deluded of those passionate attachments and dependencies that contradict their “present interest” (SP 68). In the end, for Astell, self-correction becomes next to impossible once women become so “inur’d and habituated” to the “prejudicial” judgments and false principles by which they evaluate themselves that they “at last” take these false principles “for parts of our dear beloved selves, and are as unwilling to be divorced from them as we wou’d be to part with a hand or

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an eye” (SP 136). The greatest bar, then, to women’s enlightened promotion of their own interests, in Astell’s estimation, is their confusion of an externally imposed set of “prejudices” with their “dear beloved selves.” For Astell, this confusion comes about largely through the mutually reinforcing corruptions of conventional conversation and female reading habits.6 If, as Astell laments, it is “the want of an ingenious education that renders the generality of feminine conversations so insipid and foolish,” those conversations themselves strengthen women’s aversion to undertake a more serious course of reading that would make them “more agreeable and useful in company” (SP 80). Not only do women generally fail to be agreeable and useful in their supposedly polite sociability, in Astell’s account, but their discourse turns into “uncharitable and vain conversation,” bent on “doing mischief to one another” (SP 83); Astell draws particular critical attention to the problem of women being turned against one another in “feminine conversations” that promote “froth and impertinence[,] . . . censure and pragmaticalness” (SP 101), rather than a desire “to inform and instruct those of their own sex” (SP 83). Astell’s plea for more politically effective female solidarity begins with her proposed academy and continues through her later complaint about women being “not so well united as to form an insurrection” (RM 29). This penchant for scandal and backbiting is all the more lamentable for its being promoted to women by women in the conventionally “feminine” literary genres that substitute for a proper education. Astell reserves particular critical disdain for the “idle novels and romances”—she elsewhere includes “plays” among her list of despised literary forms—through which women come to “imitate . . . fashions and fopperies” (SP 83), the study of which makes female readers “a great deal more knowing but never a jot the wiser” (SP 81). The problem with women’s consumption of such literature is twofold: not only does it promote bad behavior; it also inhibits women’s ability to interpret critically the various manipulations they encounter in habitual conversation with men. Railing against the ways in which “venerable names” of “love and honour” are “wretchedly abus’d and affi xt to their direct contraries” in customary public discourse, Astell wonders how a woman encountering such terms can “possibly detect the fallacy, who has no better notion of either [term] than what she derives from plays and romances” (SP 63–64). Again, though, Astell’s solution involves a re-deployment of public-sphere resources to their rational-critical purposes rather than an ineffectual withdrawal from publicness altogether. For Astell, women need to trade in their novels and romances for rigorous training in the logical argumentation of “French philosophy,” so they can develop the more “informed, discerning mind” that would help them to “see through and scorn those little silly artifices which are us’d to ensnare and deceive them” (SP 83, 64). Women’s incapacity for critical hermeneutics renders them vulnerable on an almost hourly basis for Astell, who claims it has “become no easy matter to secure our innocence in our necessary civilities and daily conversations” (SP 93).

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 121 While Astell views the primary threat to women’s “innocence” in the Serious Proposal as the temptation to scandalous gossip, by the time she writes the Reflections, what the earlier text describes as a mere inability to detect the fallacies in men’s romantic rhetoric has become perhaps the most pernicious source of self-endangerment; the false and prejudicial worldview women obtain through literature and misdirected conversation makes them unable to read men’s “divers stratagems” and “ways of insinuating which vary with circumstances and the ladies temper” (RM 69), the linguistic means through which they “manage [a woman’s] self-love” (RM 71) with the ultimate goal of “get[ting] the poor woman into their power, to govern her according to their discretion” (RM 66). Astell warns her readers that the very mixedgender conversations supposed to mark the apogee of enlightenment culture should be considered a central vehicle for betrayal, subjection, and the enactment of masculine power, even and especially when such goals are explicitly disavowed by their male counterparts. It is precisely that “frequent and free conversation” between the sexes, so valued for its ostensibly moral socializing function, that Astell warns women to avoid with men: given the current state of women’s education, if one allows a man such discursive access, there is “no question but that his ingenuity and application will . . . get the ascendant over her” (RM 70). Perhaps the most perversely astute dimension of Astell’s critique is her deconstruction in advance of the sentimental masculinity that would become increasingly popularized during the eighteenth century as a positive alternative to both the insensitive, rakish libertine and the crass, exploitative tradesman. For Astell, when a man “appears with all the modesty and submission of an humble and unpretending admirer,” that is precisely when a woman should suspect that he “nourishes the hope of being lord and master” (RM 66): as she puts it most directly, a man’s “eagerness to avoid the suspicion, is a shrewd sign that there is occasion for’t [such suspicion]” (RM 68). While Astell takes it for granted that her female readers understand the importance of shunning men with bad reputations, she emphasizes that women must take still “greater caution . . . the more humble and undesigning a man appears” (RM 70). Given the imbalance between the sexes in terms of both their legal-economic power and their understanding of how the marriage market works, Astell insists that women be vigilantly suspicious of men who attempt to bracket or to obfuscate the inevitable asymmetry of their relationships; she draws particular attention to men who pursue “friendships” with women as a way of obtaining a “sacred character, which sets them above little aims and mean designs” in the minds of the unsuspecting women they pursue—after which point, Astell concludes, whatever “arguments a woman brings for continuing a man’s conversation prove only that she ought to have quitted it sooner” (RM 70–71).7 As many of Astell’s subsequent readers have attested, the potential problem with her approach is that by interpreting even men’s offering of modest, sentimental friendship as a refinement of strategic libertine manipulation, she effectively makes all conversation with men impossible to endorse.

122 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 While this reading of Astell is relatively easy to substantiate from numerous passages in the Refl ections, it misses the overarching point of both major works: the idea that it is women’s current conventional education that renders them unfit for mixed-gender conversation. The goal of both the Serious Proposal and the Refl ections is to provide women with the critical intellectual resources to help them navigate their unavoidable but potentially empowering encounters with men. Successful navigation, as we have said, requires that women be more incisive readers of the situations and discourses with which they are presented in quotidian spaces of sociability; more specifically, women’s reading practices must reverse the trajectory of identification we identified earlier, that process whereby women come to view themselves as their “masters” would wish by unconsciously internalizing men’s worldview such that it becomes inseparable from women’s “dear beloved selves.” Astell’s solution involves what I would like to call a systematic “de-specularization” of women, a removal of both literal women and conceptual femininity from the sustained scrutiny of normative male surveillance that women come to conflate with the promotion of their own “real interest.” Astell’s feminist discourse in the Serious Proposal begins, after all, with an attempt to relocate women’s sense of their selfworth from their visible, material exteriority to their ineffable, spiritual interiority; she invites women to render their personal beauty “lasting and permanent . . . by transferring it from a corruptible body to an immortal mind” (SP 51).8 In Astell’s account, the crucial ideological “transference” that women must effect in themselves is ultimately an exchange of one specular identification for another, a shift of women’s focalization from a worldly patriarchal perspective that views a woman in terms of her “adornation” (and her money), on the one hand, to the more acceptable spiritual perspective—the eyes of “him who cannot err”—which enables women to “consult . . . [their] own thoughts” and to “employ [their] care about that which is really [their] self” (SP 52–53, italics in text). Visuality functions in Astell’s solution in both a literal and a figurative way: when Astell admonishes women to “get out of that danger which a continual stay in view of the enemy . . . may expose them to,” she wants women both literally to limit and to deemphasize the extent to which they function as a vulnerable, objectified spectacle for male beholders, and she wants them to avoid unconsciously introjecting the “view of the enemy” as if it were substitutable for their own independent mode of perceiving themselves and the world. To clarify this latter point, Astell explicitly contrasts the “view of the enemy” with women gaining “an opportunity to look into themselves, to be acquainted at home and no longer the greatest strangers to their own hearts” (SP 73). Later, in the Reflections, Astell reveals the connection between the two halves of this problem in a slightly different way. Using visual terms to describe both women’s flawed education and its result, Astell claims that what women are shown of the world “weaken[s] and corrupt[s] their minds”; seems designed “to disturb, not to regulate

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 123 their passions”; and makes women “fit for nothing else but to act a farce for the diversion of their governours” (RM 65). In short, by being made to view the world in a particular way, women cause themselves to become a farcical spectacle for the perverse pleasure of those who gave them that flawed education in the first place. By revealing the partiality and the objectifying tendencies of the patriarchal worldview women have been made to internalize, Astell de-naturalizes the spectatorial procedure through which men become “governours,” and she allows women to understand their complicated relationship to that gaze as both its reified object and its false subject. One seemingly clear target of Astell’s critical preoccupation with female specularity would have to be Halifax’s influential conduct treatise, The Lady’s New-year’s Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688). While Halifax anticipates and agrees with Astell’s depiction of the libertine as an “enemy” who “lie[s] at watch” for unsuspecting female prey, he insistently idealizes female identity within the terms of a patriarchal scopic regime: from the text’s introductory section, the daughter is enjoined to turn herself into an “exact copie” of the “picture of a fi ne woman” drawn by the hand of her unquestionably “kind father.”9 His subsequent injunctions, not surprisingly, emphasize the girl’s need constantly to imagine how she is being perceived by others in various social theaters: in church, she is to avoid performing not only conspicuously “devout convulsions,” but also “inviteing glances” that might turn her into an ocular subject with desires of her own (AD 2:364, 365); with men, she is to offer up “looks that forbid without rudeness, and oblige without invitation,” making especially sure to have a “perpetuall watch upon [her own] eyes,” since “one careless glance giveth more advantage than a hundred words not enough considered” (AD 2:390); in company, she is enjoined to avoid laughing too loudly, remembering that “fools” are “always painted in that posture,” and that the “unnatural sound” of excessive laughter “looketh so much like another sex that few things are more offensive” (AD 2:391); and as a general principle, she is told not to appear very often in public places of any kind, since “men’s eyes” grow quickly “weary” of “daily faces,” such that their “sight is glutted with fi ne things [just] as the stomach [is] with sweet ones” (AD 2:405)—in this strangely synesthetic economy, if the daughter is to be properly devoured, she must hide herself from view to pique her suitors’ visual appetites.10 Correspondingly, the daughter’s own desire for ocular stimulation gets consistently redirected in terms of both its objects and its purposes. As Halifax explains, in order to prevent “neglect and disorder,” the daughter must not look abroad but must “turn [her] eyes inward” with the goal of “mend[ing] and prevent[ing]” her own faults (AD 2:397). Lest we mistake this moment of self-reflective scrutiny as a chance for the daughter to develop her own Astellian sense of self, Halifax is quick to clarify that any woman who is “employed in self contemplation” will be inevitably “mistaken . . . in her value by being her own appraiser” (AD 2:399). So by whom should the daughter imagine herself being “appraised”? By Halifax’s

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secular, very much embodied version of the divine “he who cannot err” in Astell’s philosophy: the abstract God-figure who functions in Astellian discourse as the enabling ground of a woman’s own thoughts is replaced in Halifax’s system by the “husband without faults,” a father-surrogate who “hath an eye so piercing, and seeth every thing so plain, that it is exposed to his full censure” (AD 2:373). The Halifaxian daughter never sees for herself in an unmediated way, but only through the “clear glass” of the patriarchal lenses provided for her (AD 2:374). Indeed Astell’s method in the Refl ections expands the Proposal’s project of de-specularizing the feminine by offering women an alternative vantage point from which to scrutinize masculinist ideology and behaviors. Her point is not simply to take women out of the critical gaze that has been brought to bear upon them, but to reverse that gaze by re-interpreting conventional masculine rhetoric from a perspective that values women’s “real interests.” Astell foregrounds the differences between what women are taught about courtship and marriage, on the one hand, and what she calls men’s “true sentiments [toward women],” on the other (RM 74). Astell describes the dire consequences of women’s mystified entrance into the marriage market: she narrates a common trajectory whereby “a woman who has been taught to think marriage her only preferment, the sum-total of her endeavours, the completion of all her hopes, that which must settle and make her happy in this world,” ends up finding “a terrible disappointment” when she “comes calmly to consider her condition . . . as it truly is” (RM 60). From Astell’s perspective, the worst aspect of women’s married “condition as it truly is”—and the aspect of married life most hidden during courtship—involves the gendered asymmetry of power that is couched in the marriage vows’ language of mutuality and consent. Though marital obligations are advertised to women during courtship as a guarantee of equal love and responsibility, Astell insists that “covenants betwixt husband and wife [are] like laws in arbitrary government,” offering women “little force” against “the will of the sovereign” (RM 52); as Astell puts it most directly, “a man enters into articles very readily before marriage . . . for he performs no more of them afterwards than he thinks fit” (RM 51).11 Ultimately, Astell aims to promote her female readers’ critical identification of masculine ideology rather than their mystified identification with that ideology. Her relentless focus throughout the Refl ections on reading men’s “real” thoughts, sentiments, and expectations beneath appearances emerges as a last-ditch strategy for dealing with the practical issues affecting women’s daily lives, given the failure of her proposal for a female academy that would have allowed women a respite for re-education in order to “safely venture [back] out” into the world (SP 232). In the later text, rather than giving female readers the theoretical “right prospect” on the world from the figurative “sacred mountain” of their academy (SP 97), Astell addresses women inescapably immersed in a world of men whose conversation proves opaque to interpretation, with the aim of teaching them

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 125 to translate that discourse into what she calls “plain English” (RM 44). Astell’s acts of translation—Astell also calls what she does here “rendering intelligible” or “put[ting] into sense” (RM 51)—function as the analog in her later work of the ideological “transference” she models and promotes in the Serious Proposal. Astell’s several exercises in the political translation of romantic rhetoric from masculine obfuscation to feminocentric sense provide at once the most humorous and socially consequential moments in her otherwise quite dour text. In her fi rst of such exercises, Astell unveils the “true sense of [the flatterer’s] heart,” by urging that “nothing is in truth a greater outrage than flattery and feign’d submission”; for Astell, the “plain English” of such deceptive language would be translated thus: I have a very mean opinion both of your understanding and virtue, you are weak enough to be imposed on, and vain enough to snatch at the bait I throw; there’s no danger of your finding out my meaning, or disappointing me of my ends . . . If for nothing else, you’ll serve at least as an exercise of my wit, and how much soever you swell with my breath, ’tis I deserve the praise for talking so well on so poor a subject. We who make the idols, are the greater deities; and as we set you up, so it is in our power to reduce you to your fi rst obscurity, or to somewhat worse, to contempt. (RM 44–45) In Astell’s account, men themselves understand that it is precisely women’s inability to translate and to interpret what is being said to them—“there’s no danger of [women] fi nding out [men’s] meaning”—that secures men’s discursive and material “power.” Astell later returns to this theme of rendering intelligible what men say to women, translating men’s courtship rhetoric of equality and reciprocity—which she describes as “many sounding compliments, words that have nothing in them”—into the “true meaning” of “what every man expects” from a wife: . . . an housekeeper, a necessary evil, one whose interest it will be not to wrong him, and in whom therefore he can put greater confidence than in any he can hire for money[,] . . . [one] who will do him that justice the ill-natur’d world denies him[,] . . . whose softness and gentle compliance will calm his passions[,] . . . whose duty, submission, and observance will heal those wounds other peoples opposition or neglect have given him. In a word, one whom he can intirely govern, and consequently may form her to his will and liking, who must be his for life and therefore cannot quit his service let him treat her how he will. (RM 50–51) In her reading of Astell’s Reflections, Helen Thompson argues that Astell promotes an “anti-romantic epistemology” for her women readers by elucidating a predictable narrative “destiny” for women who take the flattering

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suitor’s rhetoric at face value.12 As Thompson points out, Astell draws particular attention to the moment when men’s romantic “compliments” and “complaisance” reveal their true end, which is “to get the poor woman into their power” (RM 66). Crucial to the efficacy of Astell’s method here, I would argue, is her insistence on the issue of translation: the idea that women must be trained to read the real “meaning” of the suitor’s “address” (RM 66), primarily by scrutinizing and identifying masculine romantic ideology and making it (rather than themselves) the object of the critical gaze.13 In a sense, Astell invites her female readers to inhabit the male suitor’s perspective with self-conscious analytical detachment as a means of both preventing women’s unconscious adoption of that perspective, on the one hand, and unveiling the broader logic of identification that governs courtship, on the other. To avoid what Thompson describes as the Astellian fate of most wives, women readers must understand the “masculine wisdom” of suitors who temporarily adopt the conduct of an humble suitor, approaching the woman with “modesty and submission,” all the while they “nourish the hope of being master” (RM 66).14 On Astell’s reading, the male suitor succeeds by shrewdly inhabiting the perspective of the woman being courted, making himself into the man he imagines will be most pleasing to the women he approaches. Knowing from his own desire for mastery that “nothing pleases more than the being admired and humored” (RM 71)—or, put differently, that “nothing pleases like an intire subjection” (RM 61)—the suitor “may manage [the woman’s] self-love, and draw it over to his party” (RM 71), not by boorishly ignoring the woman’s desires but by strategically acting in accordance with those desires through a temporary identification with her point of view. The suitor manages his object by identifying with her. Moreover, the suitor’s temporary adoption of the servant position will later be referred to as the standard of subjection the woman must submit to after she agrees to marriage; as Astell points out, after marriage, the wife is expected to “strictly copy” the “pattern” of idolatry set by the man “in the time of his addresses” (RM 61), in the final act of identification and imitation which seals a woman’s Astellian fate.15 What Astell promotes in her readers, then, is the ability to imagine themselves in the position of the other ironically as men do, without ever losing sight of (and even as a way of furthering) their own interest. However, Astell’s strategy of “de-specularizing” the feminine requires more than women readers deconstructing these mechanisms of visuality and identification; as importantly, Astell emphasizes the need for women to move from a specular to a discursive conception of themselves and their social agency.16 As we have seen, Astell criticizes the corrupting influence of conventional public-sphere activities on women’s self-understanding, but she also imagines the possibility of women’s engagement in reformed venues of conversation, reading, and writing as a primary way out of their social function as objectified spectacles. In the Serious Proposal, she foregrounds the salutary role of women’s “debates” concerning their “real

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 127 interest” (SP 52), as well as the reforming influence of “ingenious conversation” and “instructive discourses” among their female peers replacing their current ocular preoccupation with “the vain pomps and pageantry of the world” (SP 74). She also recommends her academy to those women who want to create a more solid “foundation to build esteem upon” during courtship, for fear that their insipid “conversation shou’d lose and endanger the victory her eyes had gained” (SP 111). But perhaps the strongest part of Astell’s case for women’s movement from spectacle to discourse comes in her lengthy section of advice to potential women writers about how to present their ideas to the reading public. After discussing questions of style, Astell specifies a number of criteria for women to use when they analyze their own writing, criteria whose central aim is to maximize the ethicopolitical effect that women’s discourse should produce in their readers. In a remarkably self-reflexive passage addressed to readers whom she imagines will themselves be addressing readers, Astell tells her would-be authors that “we need only suppose our selves in the place of those we address to, and consider how such a discourse would operate on us, if we had their infi rmities and thoughts about us” (SP 193). In Astell’s scheme, writers who sympathetically identify with their readers do so by extrapolating how others might feel based on their own experiences as readers; that is to say, such writers project themselves outward into the position of others rather than engaging in the reverse dynamic of internalization we have seen Astell criticize elsewhere in her work. She bids her writing pupils assume that since “human nature is for the most part much alike in all,” they can conclude that “that which has a good effect on us, will generally speaking have the same on others” (SP 193). Moreover, because “human nature is not willing to own its ignorance,” writers must avoid “pride” and “positiveness” in the name of an “innocent compliance with [readers’] weakness”; thus, the most successful writers remove readers’ ignorance “without appearing to take notice of it,” transforming their audiences not with heavy-handed preaching, but by “permit[ting] ’em to fancy . . . that we believe them as wise and good as we endeavour to make them” (SP 193). No longer imagining themselves primarily as the object of the patriarchal gaze, Astell’s idealized readers are politically consequential participants in the literary public sphere: her readers become the productive subjects of a discourse that reforms others through a benign act of interpellation in which audiences unconsciously identify with the slightly better versions of themselves whom they are addressed as already being. At one level, it seems difficult to know whom she’s writing to here, since the audience that might put her writing tips into practice would in a sense have yet to be produced by her academy, and could hardly be taken for granted as an already existing demographic. But Astell’s approach here resonates with the interpellative overtones of her appeals, elsewhere in the Serious Proposal, to the idea that her readers already are as critically selfreflective and ethically engaged as her proposed academy seems intended to

128 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 make them. That is to say, Astell’s advice to would-be writers allegorizes the procedures of her own discourse: her extended second-person address to women in the Introduction to Part Two serves as a kind of apostrophe that would, through sheer tropological force, perform into being the audience Astell would like her readers to become. Based upon the controversial reception of Part One between 1694 and 1697, Astell opens Part Two by acknowledging the ideological chasm between what her readers actually believe and what she needs them to believe in order for her project to succeed. Though she claims to have “sufficiently established” the theoretical grounds of her proposed academy and “prov’d it feasible with the clearest demonstration,” the project would be doomed to failure if her women readers “will believe it impossible” (SP 121, italics in text). Astell’s emphasis on “will” in this formulation highlights not simply the fatalistic future-oriented temporality of women’s reluctance to empower themselves in the terms she has set out, but also the extent to which her project relies upon her female readers’ desires: if women want to think, as men would prefer them to, that their intellectual and agential betterment is impossible, then Astell’s arguments to the contrary will inevitably prove “weak and impertinent” because her wrongly desiring readers “make [such arguments] useless and defeat them of the end they aim at” (SP 121). Readers’ desires alone don’t make a convincing argument less correct, according to Astell, but they can strip that argument of its political effectivity by making it socially “useless.” Astell’s solution is to produce readers who will believe that her project is both possible and desirable by addressing them as if they already believed, I dare say you understand your own interest too well to neglect it so grossly and have a greater share of sense, whatever some men affi rm, than to be content to be kept any longer under their tyranny in ignorance and folly, since it is in your power to regain your freedom, if you please but t’endeavour it . . . No, Ladies, your souls are certainly of a better make and nobler temper, your industry is never exerted to pull down others but to rise above them, the only resentment that arises at your neighbor’s commendations is a harmless blush for your own idleness in letting them so far outstrip you, and a generous resolution to repair your former neglects by future diligence . . . You know very well ’tis infi nitely better to be good than to seem so, and that true virtue has beauty enough in herself t’attract our hearts and engage us in her service, tho’ she were neglected and despised by all the world. ’Tis this therefore you endeavour after, ’tis the approbation of GOD and your own consciences you mainly esteem. . . . (SP 121–22, italics in text) Astell goes on in this vein for considerably longer than should be necessary if indeed her readers are already what she pretends them to be, and she then spends several more pages distinguishing this group of women readers (idealized as “you”) from negative female countertypes (referred

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 129 to as “them”); Astell’s gently coercive reader positioning invites even those who would identify themselves with the group called “them” to return to the fold of the “you,” a fold in which she assumes they began and which they wouldn’t have left had it not been for the way they have been “barbarously us’d” by their guardians, who “neglected . . . their education and their greatest concerns” through a focus on “managing their fortunes and regulating their mien” (SP 124). If such coercions seem unpalatable to neoliberal conceptions of subjective autonomy, it is worth remembering that for Astell, ethical selfhood comes from patterning ourselves after the right examples: if personal identity is an effect rather than an origin, then our fi rst and only task is “to chuse out the most excellent . . . model on which to form ourselves” (SP 192). In this context, Astellian agency resides in patterning oneself after those who craft a cultural identity through the production of discourse rather allowing oneself to become the unreflective product of another’s gaze.17

MANAGING THE WILD THING: GENDER, POWER, AND VISIBILITY IN THE SPECTATOR In their papers on female education from the Tatler and the Spectator, Addison and Steele appropriate much of Astell’s “de-specularizing” rhetoric in their own address to their women readers. As was the case with Astell, one of the periodicalists’ primary concerns is to insist on women’s intellectual development as a way of making them more emotionally and spiritually self-sufficient. As Addison puts it in Spectator 15, “True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the fi rst place, from the enjoyment of ones self; and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions. . . . In short, it feels everything it wants within it self, and receives no addition from multitudes of witnesses and spectators.”18 For Addison, again like Astell, the development of female interiority is both a precondition for women’s “true happiness” in themselves and a means of preventing mistakes in courtship and society at large; Addison explicitly aims to reform women readers by enumerating “the numberless evils that befall the sex” from their “being smitten with every thing that is showy and superficial” (S 1:66). Addison bemoans women’s preoccupation with the “outside and appearance” of their male suitors, because a girl who has been “trained up” to be “more attentive to the superficial parts of life” makes herself vulnerable to seduction by men who are indistinguishable from the objects with which they adorn themselves; in Addison’s account, such a badly educated woman “is in danger of every embroidered coat that comes in her way,” her mind so weakened by glitter and display that “a pair of [men’s] fringed gloves may be her ruin” (S 1:67). But Addison’s critique extends to women’s fi xation on self-adornment as well, the degree to which women rely on the approving

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gaze of others for their sense of identity and self-worth. Echoing passages from the opening of Astell’s Serious Proposal, Addison warns women that only “false happiness loves to be in a crowd, and to draw the eyes of the world upon her”; rather than taking “satisfaction from the applauses she gives her self,” a woman who pursues false happiness is made happy only by “the admiration which she raises in others,” so much so that she “has no existence but when she is looked upon” (S 1:68). Addison and Steele’s debt to Astell becomes clearer still in the blueprint Steele offers—two months later in Spectator 66—as a solution to the problem of inadequate female education. In this essay, Steele’s Mr. Spectator responds to a pair of letters requesting his advice on the “fi ne breeding” of women: one by “Celimene,” a well-intentioned woman newly responsible for educating a “young country kinswoman” who is as yet “unform’d” as a result of her rural childhood; and one by the anonymous man—presumably Celimene’s husband—who has “made up and sen[t]” the missives to Mr. Spectator, and who expresses some skepticism that his wife’s notion of “fi ne breeding” may put their impressionable young charge “in a fair way to be spoiled” (S 1:281–82). The letter from Celimene seems clearly produced by Steele as a caricature of the women excessively “taken by outside and appearance” mentioned by Addison in Spectator 15. Desperate to instill in her country kinswoman a sense of women’s power as spectacle, Celimene criticizes the girl for “know[ing] no way to express herself but by her tongue, and that always to signify her meaning,” further lamenting that the girl is an utter “foreigner to the language of looks and glances” (S 1:281).19 By having Celimene refer to the girl as a “Belle Sauvage,” Steele figures the latter as emblematic of nature herself, so that when the girl “makes little or no improvement” during Celimene’s attempt to teach her “to sigh when she is not concern’d, and to smile when she is not pleas’d,” her apparently stupid recalcitrance to “fi ne breeding” indexes for Steele not an unfortunate ineptitude but an exemplary resistance to needless and unnatural refi nement (S 1:281). 20 Steele’s response to Celimene’s “dilemma” begins by claiming that the “general mistake” the English make in educating their daughters is that they “take care of their persons and neglect their minds” (S 1:282). In passages that read like direct transcriptions from Astell, Steele explicitly links young women’s lack of interiority to their educators’ insistence—even before a girl is “capable of forming one simple notion of any thing in life”— that attracting a husband should be the sole purpose of all female learning; Steele describes with mild satirical horror the constrained situation of the fi ne-bred girl: . . . [S]he is delivered into the hands of her dancing-master; and with a collar round her neck, the pretty wild thing is taught a fantastical gravity of behaviour, and forced to a particular way of holding her head, heaving her breast, and moving with her whole body; and all this under

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 131 pain of never having an husband, if she steps, looks, or moves awry. This gives the young lady wonderful workings of the imagination, what is to pass between her and this husband that she is every moment told of, and for whom she seems to be educated. Thus her fancy is engaged to turn all her endeavours to the ornament of her person, as what must determine her good or ill in this life . . . and from this general folly of parents we owe our present numerous race of coquets. (S 1:283) In Steele’s account, the collar and the dancing master’s “forceful” instructions about posture serve as the physical-material analog of the unnatural psychological formation the young girl undergoes by having all the “workings of her imagination” bent on pleasing this phantasmatic “husband” from whose perspective she must at all times imagine herself being beheld. As in Butler’s account of subjection, the young girl thus interpellated by an imagined suitor’s gaze must “turn” all of her energies both inward against herself and then again outward, in that her external appearance becomes an all-engrossing project upon which her very destiny, her “good or ill in this life” depends. The gravity of this problem gets belied by Steele’s terse, somewhat off-handed solution to “managing the wild thing mentioned in [Celimene’s] letter”: the idea that parents should simply follow a “middle way,” not overlooking the “young lady’s person,” but having much more regard for “the erudition of her mind” (S 1:283). If Steele acknowledges that he is “puzzled” by these reflections on female education and the deleterious effect of women’s focus on the gaze of the male beholder, his sense of bafflement may result from the contradictions internal to his and Addison’s incomplete appropriation of Astell’s critique of specularity. In effect, Addison and Steele want to incorporate Astell’s emphasis on female interiority into their own account of gender relations because that point in Astell’s philosophy dovetails with their own attacks on libertine decadence and sumptuous display; at the same time, however, Addison and Steele want to leave the ideology of masculine paternalism intact, which requires them to avoid any close scrutiny of men’s determining interest in creating and perpetuating the system of education they deride. Unlike Astell, who consistently foregrounds the power dynamics at work in her analysis of the spectatorial public sphere, Addison and Steele disingenuously avoid asking the most basic of questions: who benefits from the current models of female education, and why haven’t meaningful reform projects (like Astell’s) been pursued if reasonable men and women agree that change is necessary? Whenever they obliquely approach fundamental issues of this kind, Addison and Steele end up in (il)logical circles from which no sensible exit seems possible. If we look at Steele’s approach in Spectator 66 in this light, to take an example at hand, we can see that Steele’s rhetoric reveals that the girl being educated for a husband is clearly a victim of irrational forces beyond her control: she is “delivered into the hands” of another, fastened into a

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“collar” that will alter the shape of her spine, indoctrinated in “fantastical” manners, and threatened with “pain” if she fails to enact her masters’ normalizing directives with the utmost exactitude. Moreover, Steele’s language in the above-cited passage makes the girl’s subsequent fetishizing of self-adornment not the result of her own natural desires but the product of what others have “engaged” her to do to herself: exactly the logic whereby women come to “love their chains,” in Astell’s memorable formulation. But what sociological conclusion does Steele draw for his readers from this analysis of female education? Steele ends the paper by lamenting not the ways in which this flawed education evacuates feminine subjectivity (as Astell describes it), but the fact that it has produced a “numerous race of coquets”: willful, self-engrossed women who are not abject dupes of men’s romantic rhetoric but are rather too full of themselves to submit to the rules of courtship and accept the addresses of a single man. Indeed, Steele’s Tatler 107 describes a coquette as a woman whom men want to “gaze at . . . to the end of [their] being” though they repeatedly fi nd “her eyes fi xed on another.”21 Coquettish women undermine Addison and Steele’s masculinist spectatorial prerogatives both by refusing to internalize the gaze of their beholder and by enacting a desiring gaze of their own; the coquette discussed in Tatler 107 therefore “rejoic[es] in . . . the full tyranny of her charms” (T 2:383). There is a fi ne line, apparently, between the idealized woman of Spectator 15, who embodies the “true happiness” of “feeling everything she wants within herself,” and the coquettish woman who offends men by not needing their particular attention to make her “rejoice.” Read in this context, then, Steele’s concluding remarks in Spectator 66 leave readers in a “puzzling” situation indeed, since he ends up arguing that coquettish women are the primary beneficiaries of a system of education in which they otherwise function as mystified, passive victims. The discursive marks of Addison and Steele’s attempts to contain the critical force of Astellian feminism can be found practically every time they discuss women’s education; by “marks” I mean both the logical contortions that inhabit the manifest content of their discourse, as in the previous example, and the gaps and silences of what is unsaid in their essays, that which goes unanalyzed as the enabling condition of what Addison and Steele explicitly do say. Perhaps the most important component of the gendered dilemmas Addison and Steele confront that consistently seems to elude their scrutiny is the structuring role of the masculine spectatorial gaze itself. While it is undoubtedly true that Addison and Steele delineate particular male types— rakes, duelers, pretty fellows, beaus, and fops in particular—as the satirical objects of several papers, this very fragmentation within the category of masculinity keeps them from generalizing about men in the same way they do about women’s apparently universal “natural” weaknesses and dispositions. These masculine countertypes function as foils against which their own normative, reasonable, neutral or impartial perspective can be sharply defined, rather than as troubling signs of potentially inherent masculine tendencies

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 133 in which their own proclivities might be implicated. A brutal example of this procedure can be found in Spectator 275, which narrates Mr. Spectator’s imaginary attendance at the dissection of a beau’s brain. Addison’s anatomy of a particular kind of aberrant male psyche reveals much about a small (but apparently threatening) group of incompletely masculine men, represented here by the cranial contents of “the person to whom this [dissected] head belonged,” a man who was “cut off in the flower of his age by the blow of a paring-shovel, having been surprised by an eminent citizen, as he was tendering some civilities to [the citizen’s] wife” (S 2:573). Certainly Addison’s essay draws readers’ scrutinizing attention to the gaze of the beau—complete with a description of how his “ogling muscles were very much worn and decayed with use” (S 2:572)—and the preoccupations by which his gaze is informed, but it leaves out of critical consideration the often violently objectifying gaze of “eminent citizens” like Mr. Spectator himself. Look out for that paring shovel. As we have seen, by occluding the determining impact of the masculine gaze their papers promulgate, Addison and Steele often lapse into blaming female “nature” for behaviors they elsewhere account for as the product of a flawed education. Of course, these two “causes” of aberrant female conduct—nature and culture—need not be seen as contradictory or mutually excluding; in fact, if we analyze Spectator numbers 15 and 66 together, the potential complementarities of warped nature and warping nurture can highlight even more strongly the need for two vectors of paternalistic male supervision: on the one hand, male advisors must correct those corrupting tendencies in female nature (like their being taken in by showy appearances) by offering women an “erudition of the [female] mind” that will produce mental “virtues” that can then be expressed corporeally; on the other hand, men must also reform a conventional system of education that places too much emphasis on women’s exteriority, since that emphasis produces coquettes whose “mind follow[s] the appetites of the body,” in Steele’s phrase (S 1:283). Here, the misguided principles of “fine breeding” actually exacerbate depraved female bodily “appetites,” which then wreak their influence upon the mind; “good breeding,” by contrast, would harmonize the laudable elements of nature and nurture, “mak[ing] the mind and body improve together,” so that the young woman’s “gesture” will follow her wholesome “thought” (S 1:283). The ideal woman at the end of Spectator 66 “dances with all the elegance of motion imaginable,” not because she spends all her time focused on how she looks, but because of the “simplicity and innocence of her thoughts”; the ultimate test of this woman’s virtue, its socioethical payoff, is that “she raises in her beholders admiration and good will, but no loose hope or wild imagination” (S 1:283). In Steele’s account, male beholders figure as the passive playthings of the way a woman looks; men simply cannot be held to account for their own “loose hopes” or “wild imaginings,” since their psychic lives are governed entirely by the effect that specularized women

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have upon them—an effect for which the objectified woman is then made responsible, in spite of the fact that women will read later in Hughes’s Spectator 302 that for male spectators “beauty makes a virtuous woman really more virtuous” (S 3:79). In order to reverse the power asymmetry of the spectatorial dialectic in this way, to attribute agency to the object woman who has been produced by a conventional education aimed at meeting the demands of men on the patriarchal marriage market, Steele cannot examine either that marriage market or the men engaged in it as the source of the moral and ideological errors he laments in his culture. Astell’s account of the causal connections between female behavior, educational practices, and masculine judgment offers an alternative, significantly more coherent perspective. As she argues in the opening pages of her Serious Proposal: Women are from their very infancy debar’d those advantages [of education], with the want of which they are afterwards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them. So partial are men as to expect brick where they afford no straw; and so abundantly civil as to take care we shou’d make good that obliging epithet of ignorant, which out of an excess of good manners, they are pleas’d to bestow upon us! (SP 60) On Astell’s reading, men construct female education in such a way that they can then naturalize female backwardness as an inherent tendency in need of potentially infi nite remediation by, you guessed it, the men who created the systemic problems in the fi rst place. This perverse circularity, whereby female miseducation occurs at the behest of precisely the masculine cultural authorities who ostensibly bemoan it, must be left out of Steele’s account in order for his own public authority to seem persuasive. Moreover, another significant tension develops in Addison and Steele’s treatment of female publicness as a result of their reluctance to thematize the politics of their own spectatorial practices: in order to teach English women that they shouldn’t want to be spectacles, Addison and Steele constantly make spectacles of women in their own texts. Unlike Astell, whose strategy of “de-specularizing” women involves teaching female readers to distance themselves from and to reverse the gazes (literal and imaginary) of male beholders, Addison and Steele would have women internalize a particular kind of spectatorial gaze—ostensibly neutral, benign, and perhaps paternal—and make it “their own,” so that by policing themselves women can pre-empt their literal objectification by that gaze, especially as that gaze is deployed in the periodical essay. That is to say, while Astell wants to end the political logic of specularity by demystifying that logic and drawing attention to its operations in the name of Habermasian discursivity, Addison and Steele regulate femininity by relying on what they would consider morally salutary mechanisms of visual identification, however objectifying these mechanisms might be. For Addison and Steele, then,

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 135 normative female identity is and should be imagined as specular, as the product and result of male spectatorship; women should be “specularized,” but only in a way that keeps them appropriately private, domestic, silent, and hardly taken notice of by others in the public field of vision. They borrow the language of Astell’s critique of female specularity, not to do away with specularity altogether, but rather to re-inscribe and delimit the proper forms of visually-grounded feminine identification. Spectator 15 clarifies precisely how this dynamic of female visibility and spectatorial judgment works in Addison and Steele. The idealized Aurelia manifests the “true happiness” that needs “no addition from multitudes of witnesses and spectators”; thus, she “delights in the privacy of a country life, and passes away a great part of her time in her own walks and gardens” under the benevolent supervision of her husband, “her bosom friend,” who ensures that their family is under “so regular an economy, in its hours of diversion and repast . . . that it looks like a little common-wealth within it self” (S 1:68). Fulvia, on the other hand, represents the “false happiness” that “loves to be in a crowd, and to draw the eyes of the world upon her”; as a result, she feels herself “out of the world” when she is not out visiting others in “the ring, the play-house, the drawing-room,” or the “opera” (S 1:68–69). Worse yet, by calling “every woman of a prudent modest retired life, a poor-spirited, unpolished creature,” Fulvia encourages this desire for publicness in other women—a mimetic desire that Addison defuses immediately by putting Fulvia’s false self-understanding in the context of a larger field of masculine spectatorial judgment according to which Fulvia would be “mortif[ied] . . . if she knew that her setting herself to view is but exposing herself, and that she grows contemptible by being conspicuous” (S 1:69). If she only knew. Addison puts Fulvia on display in order both to show women how they should not want to be on display, and to make explicit the difference between the public woman’s “false” perspective on herself and the authoritative spectator’s “true” judgment of her, a judgment which female readers are invited to internalize. There isn’t anything necessarily contradictory about Addison and Steele’s use of the spectatorial gaze: they “negatively” objectify a certain kind of publicly oriented woman in order to promote female readers’ “positive” objectification of themselves through a gaze that will keep them in their proper sphere. As Addison succinctly puts it in Spectator 81, “Female virtues are of a domestic turn. The family is the proper province for private women to shine in” (S 1:349). Contradictions arise in their work only when they appear to disavow their reliance on specularity as a mode of discipline, a disavowal they routinely do engage in, as in their critique of feminized “false happiness” for having “no existence but when she is looked upon” (S 1:68). Even here, though, Addison and Steele could argue that women’s “feeling of existence” should come not from literally being “looked upon” (which is, after all, what Addison attacks in that particular essay) but from their imaginary, figurative self-objectification that gets mediated through

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their consumption of the periodical essay. The real tension I want to draw attention to here is that between Addison and Steele’s wholehearted use of the gaze as a regulative force, and their confl icted acknowledgment that literal and imaginary fields of vision can be put to radically different purposes than their own, particularly by women (like Fulvia and the coquet) who take seriously the idea that they can empower themselves by soliciting and manipulating the spectator’s gaze for their own ends. Like the power inhabiting discourse, the specular force field is a malleable, ductile modality of power that is vulnerable to multiple appropriations and reversals. Addison and Steele’s approach to that reversibility I would call hypocritical but not contradictory in and of itself. What is potentially contradictory and even self-subverting, however, is Addison and Steele’s almost compulsive fascination with femininity as spectacle: even if they relentlessly offer negative judgment about the women whose appearance in public Mr. Spectator scrutinizes and derides, their periodical essays end up being as much a testament to the power of female publicness as they are a critique of that power. In effect, Addison and Steele enact the very power of female publicness that their objectifying procedure is meant to suppress. As many recent critics have pointed out, the images of women in Addison and Steele’s essays are generally neither flattering nor liberatory, nor are they particularly representative of the reading-class women who made up a significant portion of the papers’ audience. One sees certain kinds of women in the Tatler and the Spectator—prostitutes, bawds, coquettes, prudes, Amazons, partisan zealots, and fashion flops— and only rarely any others. To be made visible, in this context, is to be made into a public spectacle, a scandalous aberration submitted to the normalizing correctives of a spectatorial gaze whose sense of “obligation” seems more synonymous with “regulation” than with reciprocity.22 Indeed, the asymmetry of Addison and Steele’s managerial procedures comes through in a number of contexts. In Tatler 149, for example, Steele foregoes strictures against domestic violence because, as he puts it, “commerce in the conjugal state is so delicate that it is impossible to prescribe rules for the conduct of it,” though six weeks later, in Tatler 172, he would describe in horrific detail the results of unchecked aggression in the private sphere through the tale of Mr. Eustace, who stabs his wife to death in their bed for a remark she had made over dinner (T 3:306–7). At the same time, Addison has no qualms banishing women from participating in political debate; for Addison, women are “too sincere to mitigate the fury of [their] principles with temper and discretion,” such that their public spirit always issues in “party-rage.” Addison offers no argument against women’s engagement in politics; rather, he recommends that his female readers consider one thing: that “there is nothing so bad for the face as party-zeal.” Addison offers a catalog of cosmetic disasters resulting from women thinking about politics, how it “gives an ill-natured cast to the eye, a disagreeable sourness to the look, [makes] the lines too strong, and [causes] a woman’s face break out

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 137 in heats”; he therefore graciously advises all of his “female readers, as they value their complexions, to let alone all disputes of this nature” (S 1:243).23 In Addison’s scheme, the female body itself revolts against a woman’s entry into the public sphere; in the cases of both domestic violence and party politics, the sight of the maimed or deformed female body becomes the site of intensive social regulation in Addison and Steele, in representations that attempt to contain the power of female publicness by figuring it as a threat both to the social order and to women themselves. The logic of Addison and Steele’s treatment of female publicness reaches its most extreme formulation in Spectator 81, a satirical treatment of women’s “party-zeal,” in which Addison describes women who publicly demonstrate their political allegiances by “patching” themselves with cosmetic silk rounds on either “the Whig or Tory side of the face.” Addison mentions in particular “a famous Whig partizan” named Rosalinda, who “has unfortunately a very beautiful mole on the Tory part of her forehead; which, being very conspicuous, has occasioned many mistakes.” If Rosalinda is “unfortunate in her mole,” another partisan called Nigranilla is “as unhappy in a pimple, which forces her, against her inclinations, to patch on the Whig side” (S 1:347). In each case, as with the “wild” girl’s reluctance to learn sighing and blushing in Spectator 15, women’s bodies signal the revolt of “nature” against their “unnatural” entry into the political public sphere, their recalcitrant moles and pimples being the scandalous sign of their aberrant desire for public engagement. Addison tells these stories of publicly embarrassed women as a pretext for citing an oration of Pericles; in the midst of praising the bravery of Athenian soldiers killed by Lacedemonians, Pericles asks women to “think it [their] greatest commendation not to be talked of one way or another” (S 1:349). Not only should women not physically appear in the public realm, but they should also not “appear” in public discourse. As we have seen, female publicness poses a vexing problem for Addison, in that his own paper’s success depends (in part) upon his repeated inclusion of women in the “public” discursive space of his own periodical, even if he draws women there only to erase them. The duality of Addison’s position here is further exacerbated by the examples of female publicness that immediately precede his reference to the Periclesian funeral oration. In one case, Addison cites the salutary public intervention of the Roman and Sabine women, the affective force of whose “tears and intreaties” ended the war between their respective countrymen, “prevent[ing] the mutual slaughter which threatened both parties, and unit[ing] them together in a fi rm and lasting peace” (S 1:348). Such public involvement by women is acceptable here because it manifests the partisanship of nonpartisanship, the political force of putting an end to the use of force. Strangely, Addison and Steele’s own periodical stages itself as just such a (“neutering”) nonpartisan intervention in English politics, “at a time when the country is torn with so many unnatural divisions, that if they continue, it will have been a misfortune to have been born in

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it” (S 1:348). In another case, Addison mentions Roman “Ladies” who sacrificed their rings and jewels to help their government pay for war. Like the previous example of the Roman and Sabine women, this public deed by women reflects the subordination of their individual thought or position-taking to the general interest of the country as a whole—women do not participate in debating or deciding the national interest, they just do what men tell them. Even so, Addison describes the Roman women’s sacrifice as being “so laudable an action in the eyes of their countrymen, that from thenceforth it was permitted by a law to pronounce publick orations at the funeral of a woman in praise of the deceased person, which till that time was peculiar to men” (S 1:349). In other words, women’s public activity here legalizes precisely the appearance of women in public discourse which the fi nal reference to Pericles sought to prevent, with the important qualification that the women who enter the public sphere must be dead in order to be “talked of one way or another.” Again, the question of whom or what should be allowed public representation leads insistently back to the deformed, blighted, or dead female body. 24 Astell argued for women’s self-removal from the early liberal public sphere through the construction of their own alternative counterpublic space in the religious retirement of her proposed academy; in Astell’s program, however, women’s withdrawal from publicness was intended as a temporary respite for re-education that would enable them to return to the corrupted masculinist public arena in order to reform it “with all [their] might,” as she puts it (SP 235). For Addison and Steele, on the other hand, the removal of women from public space functions not merely as a means but as an end in itself. As we have seen, they borrow Astell’s rhetoric of “de-specularizing” the feminine in order to promote women’s permanent self-withdrawal from public spaces and from public discourse altogether, a form of retirement that becomes increasingly privatized toward domestic invisibility and silence, or, put more precisely, toward forms of domestic visibility licensed by the surveillance of benevolent husbands and fathers. As the case of Emilia in Spectator 302 makes evident, women’s “humanizing” conduct in the proper sphere for private women to shine in does not involve discourse but should literally be limited to “shining”: Emilia reforms her wayward husband Bromius not through the “severity of lectures and admonitions,” but through her “silent example” (S 3:82). For Astell, conduct like Emilia’s becomes necessary only as a martyred last resort in a marriage system that women should be warned about entering in the fi rst place; Astell’s entire philosophical system is aimed at preventing women from the undesirable outcome of Emilia’s moral silence, by providing them with both institutional support for and a substantial defi nition of women’s interior development and its potential for political effectivity, not through spectacle but through discourse about women’s separate and real interests. In the Serious Proposal, Astell makes a distinction between writers who aim merely to “expose” women’s “failures” and those who

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 139 seek to “rectify” them, putting herself in the latter category based in large part upon her emphasis on language-centered modes of expression and argumentation (SP 56). In Astell’s terms, Addison and Steele could be said to “rectify” women’s behavior, perhaps contradictorily, by “exposing” it to public scrutiny, fusing the two functions that Astell, with her relentless insistence on “de-specularization,” intended to keep separate. Entering the print market with her periodicals a generation later, in the 1740s and 1750s, Eliza Haywood borrows from both the Astellian and the spectatorial paradigms in her approach to female publicness, rectifying women’s conduct and their reading habits by exposing the gender politics of spectatorial exposure itself.

SUFFERING SPECTATORS: FEMALE DISCURSIVITY AND THE PAMELA CONTROVERSY Before we turn to Haywood, however, it will be important to understand the afterlife of Addison and Steele’s strategy for containing the Astellian critique of female specularity, particularly because the dialectic of appropriation and displacement characteristic of early Whig responses to Tory feminist public-sphere discourse (analyzed above) helps us to specify the crucial points of connection between the early essay periodical and the proto-realist sentimental novel—a connection often asserted but rarely unpacked in studies of both genres. 25 Samuel Richardsons’s two-volume continuation of his wildly popular fi rst novel Pamela (1740) serves as a key text for gauging the persistence (and ideological usefulness) of Addison and Steele’s model of spectatorial publicness into the subsequent generation of conduct-oriented writers, and into the construction of novelistic discourse more generally. 26 Published as a stand-alone text in December 1741, and then again as part of the four-volume octavo sixth edition of the complete Pamela in May 1742, Richardson’s continuation reads like an elaborate, detailed, and transparently symptomatic response to the backlash against the original two volumes of the novel, a complex assault on Richardson’s text which dominated English print culture of 1741 in a way that has been variously described in recent scholarship as the “Pamela media event” or the “Pamela Controversy.”27 As James Grantham Turner has argued, for all of their apparent polarizations, both sides in the public-sphere controversy over Richardson’s provocative intersection of sexuality, representational technologies, and moralizing discourse share a preoccupation with the “scenic” or “external-spectatorial” bodying forth of his female protagonist, herself a woman apparently at pains both to keep her body inviolate and to keep herself from the eye of public (and private) scrutiny. 28 Despite (or perhaps because) of the sentimental heroine’s efforts to render herself into pure textuality— to accede to discursive and ideological power by making her disembodied

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text itself the object of male desire and female emulation, in Armstrong’s powerful argument—the predominant reactions of readers in the context support Kristina Straub’s contention that the fi rst two volumes of Richardson’s novel and the elaborate marketing strategies behind them remain deeply implicated in exactly the mechanisms of prurient, objectifying voyeurism he had supposedly set out to critique. 29 Perhaps the most revealing reader response of this kind can be found in the anonymously published Pamela Censured (April 1741), which takes the form of a kind of open letter to Richardson himself, accusing him both of having authored a text he disingenuously claims merely to have edited, and of promoting scandalous pornography under the cover of the framing letters’ claim that Pamela’s story promotes the cause of virtue and morality. Central to the censurer’s critique of Richardson is the idea that Pamela conveys “the most artful and alluring amorous ideas” because its author/ editor has not divested the text “of all images that tend to infl ame” (PC 2:13, italics in text). Lest we not understand exactly what kinds of images the censurer has in mind, we are quickly instructed that one of Richardson’s primary aims in the novel is to quell his own fears that “male readers should have no entertainment” in a story about the trials and tribulations of a maidservant, fears which justify Richardson’s repeated “contriv[ances] to give us an idea of Pamela’s hidden beauties, and very decently to spread her upon the floor, for all who will peep thro’ the door to surfeit on the sight” (PC 2:42). As many commentators have noted, the author of Pamela Censured takes the rather contradictory approach of replicating in his own text (and at great length) precisely those scenes and images he attacks Richardson for having delineated in the fi rst place.30 If we leave aside for the moment this question about the censurer’s implication in the potentially lucrative dialectic of scandalous and moralizing discourse we have already noted in other contexts, it is worth remarking that the censurer’s attack on Pamela explicitly focuses on Richardson’s reduction of his heroine to the specular object of sexualized gazes both within and outside the text itself—even if the censurer replicates that specularization in the very act of drawing attention to it. Like Astell, the censurer claims to be disturbed not by female specularity in itself but by the material effects of such specularization on male conduct and on the increasingly narrow conception of female identity it promotes. The censurer decries the behavioral implications not only of the images in Richardson’s text, but of the very conception of woman as image that the 1740 edition of Pamela seems unambiguously to promote, even through a series of discursive letters ostensibly penned by a woman herself. For the censurer, both the images in Richardson’s text and Richardson’s deployment of voyeuristic structures of narrative focalization initiate an unavoidable logic of imitation and repetition in both male and female readers alike; by relying for sensational effect on “the idea of peeping thro’ a keyhole to see a fi ne woman extended on a floor in a posture that must naturally excite

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 141 passions of desire,” Richardson paints images that “no youth can read without emotion” (PC 2:45). Earlier in the argument, the censurer had specified the “emotion” produced by Richardson’s images as a kind of sexualized “sympathy” that compels (young male) readers not to prevent or to put an end to the scenes they are made to witness, but to “wish themselves in such a situation” and “to rehearse some of the same scenes with some Pamela or other in the family” (PC 2:37); likewise, for the censurer, “modest young lad[ies]” can “never” read about the physical contact between Pamela and Squire B “but [their] own soft breasts must heave at the idea and secretly sigh for the same pressure” (PC 2:37).31 For female readers, the other side of internalizing this logic of specularity involves their imitation of Pamela’s strategic self-presentation as image, for the purpose of manipulating male desires that are founded (in part) upon the visual objectification of femininity. Referring primarily to the famous scene from the 1740 Pamela in which the eponymous heroine “trick[s] [her]self up” in her class-appropriate country garb (Letter XXIV), only to be accused by Squire B of having disguised herself to inflame his passions, the censurer claims that Pamela reveals herself to be as “cunning” and “knowing” about the sexual power of specular femininity as “the best bred town lass of them all could have done” (PC 2:46).32 On the censurer’s reading, Pamela emerges as both committed to and (occasionally) victimized by her own specularity—a woman whose theatrical resourcefulness recalls the heroine Fantomina of Haywood’s scandalous amatory fiction of the same name (1724), based on her knowledge that “beauties that might grow familiar to the [male beholder’s] eye and pall upon the passion by being often seen in one habit, thus varied take a surer aim to strike” (PC 2:50). The opening sections of Richardson’s continuation read like a systematic attempt to defend himself from the censurer’s critique of Pamela’s consistent specularization in the 1740 edition. Even if Thomas Keymer is right both in suggesting that Richardson’s moralizing “was demonstrably an approach to his own writing that he was capable of stepping outside” for the purposes of profit generating and “resourceful entrepreneur[ship],” and in pointing out that the passages objected to by the censurer were never expurgated from subsequent editions by Richardson himself, it is nonetheless important to note the extent and the specific aims of his effort to de-specularize Pamela in the continuation (PC 2:xvi)—not only because of the way Richardson’s procedures here illuminate his nuanced ideological relationship to Astell, Addison, and Steele, but also because these rarely analyzed third and fourth volumes were packaged together with the original two volumes of the 1740 edition in practically every major re-issue of Pamela for the remainder of the eighteenth century.33 For eighteenth-century readers and cultural critics, that is, Pamela was a more complicated document than the novel by that name that we conventionally study now: it was a four-volume text that included both Richardson’s controversially sexualized depiction of his heroine in the version we still read today and the

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correction or containment strategies of Richardson’s two-volume response to anti-Pamelists in the continuation. As a result, what it meant for other writers to defi ne themselves as Pamelists or Anti-Pamelists in the debates about Richardson that continued long after 1742—as well as what it meant for later eighteenth-century novelistic discourse to invoke Pamela either as a character type or as a set of narrative strategies and ideological positions—can only be properly understood in the context of the dialectical relationships established between Richardson’s continuation and the 1740 Pamela, on the one hand, and between the continuation and the AntiPamelist discourse that provoked it, on the other. As we have seen, at the heart of both of these dialectical relationships lies the tension in Richardson’s work between a sensationalist indulgence in the specularity of his female protagonist, and an ethico-political commitment to making his heroine a discursive, writing subject—this latter effort borrowing heavily from the rhetorics of female interiority and feminist textual production articulated nearly a half-century earlier by Mary Astell. In the third and fourth volumes of Pamela this tension takes the form of a transformation within Richardson’s strategic responses to the charges of anti-Pamelists like the anonymous author of Pamela Censured. Initially, Richardson spends many pages early in Volume III having his characters re-stage the “Pamela controversy” within the novel itself so that he can long-windedly explain why all of the racy scenes from volumes one and two were both morally salutary and aesthetically necessary—in other words, Richardson begins by attempting to defend Pamela’s specularity. Through a series of convoluted and fairly specious arguments presented by Lady Davers, Richardson both articulates and tries to mitigate Pamela’s own fears that the narratives of Squire B’s sexual assaults upon her will be viewed with an unacceptable “levity of eye” by the gentlemen in their social circle.34 Davers contends that the aforementioned gentlemen have been “commiserating” Pamela and criticizing B’s conduct as they read through the lascivious scenes of sexual misconduct, based on the maxim that “it must be a very ungenerous mind that can form any other ideas from what you relate than those of terror and pity for you” (P2 3:43, 44). But Daver’s aphorism is not borne out by the subsequent narrative, in which Simon, Jackey, and others continue to use the events of Pamela’s story as a rich source for double entendres, and Jackey himself attempts seductions of the maidservants that are entirely analogous to those undertaken by B (and which are ostensibly not to be imitated). Richardson’s far more effective innovation from a gender-political standpoint involves his thoroughgoing commitment female discursivity by the end of Volume IV, embodied most clearly in his effort to transform Pamela into a female working-class version of Addison’s own Mr. Spectator. In this respect, Richardson goes much further in his appropriation of Astellian feminism than Addison and Steele had done in the Tatler and the Spectator. While Addison and Steele’s periodicals acknowledge the

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 143 importance of female interiority, they never articulate a model of female textual production of the kind Astell idealized for the participants in her academy, and they remain invested in a strongly specular conception of female identity. Richardson, on the other hand, seems to arrive at a position of more complete disillusionment with this model by the end of the four-volume Pamela, as Pamela’s own defenses of the supposed pleasure of being constantly watched and scrutinized become more sparse, and as her confidence in her position as a public arbiter of taste and moral judgment becomes more secure. Though Pamela had technically always been a discursive subject from her initial forays into letter writing at the outset of the 1740 edition, the potentially insoluble ethical conundrum that Richardson had created for himself during the fi rst three volumes of the text is that her narratives seemed always to revolve around the representation of herself as a kind of victimized/idealized spectacle, so that the very discursivity intended as the antidote to the kind of specular female identity bemoaned by Astell became itself just another mode of specularization—as the texts from the Anti-Pamelist backlash amply attest. During the course of the continuation, Pamela begins as a producer of narratives explicitly intended to exercise the critical faculties of her social superiors—particularly in her accounts to Lady Davers regarding Pamela’s conduct in acceding to a position of relative power within the family and her own household, and in accommodating B’s temper and his tendencies toward waywardness—but she gradually comes to take on considerable authority within the microcosmic public sphere of the texts that get exchanged among her aristocratic family and their far-flung acquaintances. Rather than consistently subjecting herself to aristocratic scrutiny, that is, Pamela becomes a kind of “publick person” in her own right (P2 3:107), both through the moral force of her socially circulating judgments and through her role as the organizing locus of what becomes an ever-extended “family of writers and readers” (P2 3:55). Lady Davers finally has to admit that the dialectic of education and ennoblement has been reversed; Davers comes to believe that she herself shall be improved by writing to Pamela, just as Pamela “make[s] everyone that converses with [her] better, and wiser, and wittier too” (P2 3:54). By all appearances, Pamela becomes the productive center of a proto-Habermasian textual exchange network in which communally shared acts of literacy, self-expression, and judgment promote a universalized, discursively grounded transparency that bridges men and women, young and old, and (as her own example suggests) rich and poor—as Lady Davers euphorically puts it, Pamela’s public-sphere activities have “unlocked all [their] bosoms” (P2 3:55). Transforming herself from the fetishized object of scrutiny to the idealized source of culturally authoritative critical judgment, Pamela gradually absorbs the intellectual resources at her disposal in the leisured space of B’s estate (now hers) to become an admirably incisive scholar, legal analyst, and moral-cultural critic: her judgment about political and social issues is

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consistently appealed to as a standard in aristocratic salons, she is “commissioned” to produce lengthy works of literary criticism (including a biting analysis of Steele’s bourgeois comedy The Tender Husband) and philosophy (an extended assessment of Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education), and she explicitly claims to have borrowed the gravity of her critical practice from the “very good method which the ingenious authors of the Spectators took” in their Saturday papers (P2 3:249). In this way, Pamela serves as a kind of precursor to more extensive appropriations by women writers of the Addisonian paradigm of discursive cultural authority, such as Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–46). Indeed, Pamela emerges as a potentially subversive feminist critic in the closing sections of the continuation, stealing directly from Astell’s critique of male courtship rhetoric in her negative retrospective assessment of B as a suitor, and attacking conventional female education in terms taken directly (without explicit acknowledgment) from A Serious Proposal. 35 However, Richardson’s female Spectator, even from an Astellian perspective, produces an equivocal ideological effect within both his text and its reception-context. While she offers a thoroughgoing critique of her culture’s marriage-, courtship-, and education-systems, the ostensibly authoritative Pamela asserts that her capacity for such political analysis neither can nor should be imitated by her female readers, enabled as it is by the radical exceptionality of Squire B, whose Whiggish goodness and tolerance she continues to describe in either hyperbolic or disingenuous terms. Her own potentially feminist public-sphere discourse gets produced under the cover of B’s paternalistic protection, the fact that he himself is “so exalted above” Pamela in terms of his supposed moral perfections that he “cannot apprehend any inconvenience” personally from Pamela’s generalized critique of male behavior and expectations (P2 4:382). In other words, Pamela’s gendered social criticism can be uttered only at the cost of its never being practically applied to the person who necessitated her development of a critical position in the fi rst place. We could read Pamela’s tone here as ironic, of course, given that her laudatory remarks about B’s character are juxtaposed closely with his crass rejection of her divinely inspired desire to nurse their child and, more importantly, with his pursuit of extra-marital affections and adventures with the Countess; sarcasm of this kind would be in perfect keeping with her copious borrowings from Astell. However, Pamela’s remarks about B in this context resonate with her previous abdication of having any will of her own that would be distinguishable from B’s, let alone a will set in opposition to his determining/ enabling structure of demand. Richardson foregrounds Pamela’s investment in this conception of the inseparability of her identity and desire from B’s by making it the central point of Pamela’s rejoinder to Polly Darnford’s critique of marriage in general (and of B in particular) that opens Volume IV. Addressing Polly’s charges regarding B’s excessive insistence on his husbandly “prerogative” and Pamela’s “undue compliance” (P2 4:4),

Astell, Whig Publicness, and the Problem of Female Specularity 145 Pamela asserts that B’s generosity has created a marital environment in which she has “really had no will of her own to contend for” (P2 4:10). She cannot even imagine the possibility of another arrangement: “Can I have a will,” she ingenuously asks Polly, “that is not his?” (P2 4:9). 36 As we can recall from our previous readings of Astell, the radical purpose behind her idealization of female discursivity is that it enables women to articulate a clear sense of their real and separate interests. Just as Addison and Steele attempt to contain the subversive potential of female specularity by fi xing the parameters of the kind of paternalistic gaze their readers should internalize, Richardson manages to domesticate the radicalizing force of female discursivity by converting Pamela from a sexualized visual object who suffers the gaze of male spectators into a textualized discursive subject indistinguishable from the suffering in which her very discursivity originates. As a fi nal coda to this reading of the Pamela sequel, it is worth noting the ideological afterlife of Pamela’s critique of contemporary female education in a text often thought to be discontinuous with Richardsonian gender politics: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In the closing lines from one of the more stirring and memorable sections of Wollstonecraft’s second Vindication—Chapter IX, “Of the Pernicious Effects which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society”—she surprisingly shifts the ground of her argument from a detailed account of the culturally constructed dimensions of female “inferiority” to an appeal to the self-interest of her male readers.37 She anticipates the practical effects of her suggested educational reforms thus: Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would fi nd us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers. . . . We should then love them with true affection, because we should learn to respect ourselves; and the peace of mind of a worthy man would not be interrupted by the idle vanity of his wife . . . 38 Wollstonecraft’s rhetorical strategies and her very syntax here borrow heavily from one of Pamela’s more impassioned letters near the end of the 1742 continuation, a section of the novel in which Pamela tries to convince gentlemen who view women contemptuously that “for their own sakes” such men should “rather try to improve than to depreciate [women]” (P2 4:384). In Pamela’s account, the result of men’s reforming efforts in this regard would be that women “shall then make better daughters, better wives, better mothers, and better mistresses: and who . . . would be so much the better for these opportunities and amendments as our upbraiders themselves” (P2 4:384)? Pamela’s text here, in perhaps the most oppositional moment of her entire body of writing, reads like Wollstonecraft

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without the thesaurus—surely it is only necessary to repeat the word “better” five times in one sentence if you’re aiming to have a character write in the simple manner appropriate to her (original) class position. In terms both of its style and its substance, Wollstonecraft’s appeal differs little from Pamela’s: while Richardson’s protagonist seeks men’s help to make women “better and more suitable companions and assistants to [men]” (P2 4:380), Wollstonecraft defi nes women’s “emancipat[ion]” in terms of their becoming a “help meet for [men].”39 This ideological resonance seems unexpected, especially given the extent to which a later Wollstonecraft text like The Wrongs of Woman can so easily be read as a kind of belated anti-Pamelist novel—one that reworks the theme of a woman’s Gothic imprisonment by her master in order to promote not the Pamelistic Stockholm syndrome but the redemptive power of female solidarity under duress and a detailed critique of existing marriage and property laws. What the comparison of these passages from the second Vindication and the second Pamela forces us to reconsider, ultimately, is the relative proximity of Wollstonecraft’s mid-career feminism to mid-century paternalistic discourses of social criticism that insist upon the legitimacy (or at least the primacy) of certain kinds of male prerogative, and the relative distance of that feminism from the more stark oppositionality of Astell’s work—most particularly Astell’s unrelenting rejection of contemporary marital arrangements, her attempt to specify women’s real and separate interests (rather than couching her arguments in appeals to male self-interest), and her insistence on all-female collaborative action as the true ground from which women’s lives might be improved. In the end, Wollstonecraft’s address to men could be said to link her work more closely to Pamela’s husband-enabled notes of protest than to Astell’s radical separatism.40

5

Voyeurism, Feminist Impartiality, and Cultural Authority Haywood and the Addisonian Periodical

While recent work on early eighteenth-century print culture has witnessed a burgeoning interest in the important role played there by women authors, we still have no sustained comparative analysis of the relationship between the period’s most influential periodical—Addison and Steele’s Spectator papers (1711–14)—and Eliza Haywood’s permutations of the genre in the Female Spectator (1744–46), and the Invisible Spy (1755).1 Most studies of Haywood focus on her numerous popular novels of the 1720s, rather than on her periodicals;2 even the few essays treating her journalism often merely gesture toward the superficial resemblances between Haywood’s most widely read periodical and its predecessor.3 But Haywood’s engagement with Addison and Steele goes far beyond the structural similarities of the fictional spectatorial club, the inclusion of letters ostensibly written by readers, and the many socioethical concerns shared by the two periodicals. Haywood’s gendered reversal of Addison and Steele’s title and eidolon implies the antecedent journal was itself gendered under the guise of its supposed neutrality, and her appropriative re-deployment of their motifs serves as more than a mere marketing ploy. In a powerful passage from Book V of the Female Spectator, for example, Haywood draws attention to the central figure underwriting all of Addison and Steele’s periodical work, what she calls the “scrutinous” gaze of the male spectator: Men are so censorious, that they look on all those of our sex, who appear too much at public places, as setting themselves up for sale, and, therefore, taking the privilege of buyers, measure us with their eyes from head to foot; and as the most perfect beauty may not have charms for all who gaze upon her in this scrutinous manner, few there are, if any, who have not found some who will pass by her with a contemptuous toss, no less significant than the most rude words could be.4 Haywood’s periodical seeks to engage her readers’ spectatorial practices, their ways of seeing, by drawing attention to the performative force of the interpreting gaze. For if the male “look” can transform women who

148 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 “appear in public” into commodities “setting themselves up for sale,” as Haywood suggests, then her readers’ entry into the visual field of publicness is fraught with troubling ethical and political implications, even (and perhaps especially) when that visual field is confi ned to the imaginary domain of her privately consumed periodical narratives.5 The stakes of this visual enterprise are quite high; Haywood appeals to the universality of her female readers’ experience of the spectatorial objectification she describes: “few there are, if any,” who have not been dismissed from public legitimacy by the judging critical look of the buyer, whose “contemptuous toss” signals the woman’s erasure by a pre-linguistic gestural/visual exchange “no less significant than words”—the sentence upon her image itself remains an image, and needs not even be uttered to have its power. The community of critics built on the rejected woman-commodity in Haywood’s scheme need not be gender specific, in that even “the most perfect beauty,” the woman supposed to be the primary object of desire, “may not have charms for all who gaze upon her in this scrutinous manner”; rather than prompting desire for herself, she serves as a means of acceptably mediating the desire which spectators have to affiliate with one another, to be the “all who gaze” against which others are defi ned. That the “all who gaze” in Haywood’s text have a cultural anchor in the works of Addison and Steele seems evident in several ways. One could cite numerous instances of precisely the visual practice Haywood describes being enacted by Mr. Spectator in Addison and Steele’s papers, a character who contemptuously “turns [his eyes] to the thoughtless creatures who make up the lump of [the female] sex, and move a knowing eye no more than the portraitures of insignificant people by ordinary painters, which are but pictures of pictures.”6 Moreover, it can hardly be coincidental that Haywood calls the masculine gaze “censorious,” when Addison and Steele’s eidolon dubbed himself the great “Censor” of the British Isles, nor that a letter from one of Haywood’s readers in Book XV asks her to upbraid those men who, in the privileged locus of the Spectator club, “loiter away so many hours at coffee-house windows meerly [sic] to make their observations and ridicule everyone that passes by” (FS 2.3:103). The “scrutinous” gaze Haywood laments in Book V has a very specific literary and cultural history which her own periodical aims in many ways to unmask.

BEHOLDING ONESELF DELINEATED: THE FEMALE SPECTATOR AND THE SCRUTINOUS GAZE Eschewing Astell’s radical refusal of spectacle, Haywood’s Female Spectator takes up Addison and Steele’s conception of visibility as an agent of reform and deploys it for rather different social ends. In her opening number, she presents herself as the kind of woman who might well have been fodder for Addisonian spectacle in her earlier years, having “run through as many

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scenes of vanity and folly as the greatest coquet of them all.” Whereas Mr. Spectator’s judgment is legitimated by his distance from the transgressive behaviors he critiques, Haywood makes her persona’s scandalous immersion in “a continued round of pleasure” the basis of her ethical authority. She writes, “though the company I kept wasn’t well chosen for my interest or reputation . . . [it] furnished me with knowledge and enabled me . . . to see into the secret springs of action, to judge passions, and to distinguish those imperceptible degrees by which passion masters the heart and dominates reason.” In what amounts to a Mandevillian theory of literary value, Haywood’s Female Spectator promises that her essays will provide “publick benefits” through their disclosure of the now-reformed vices of her private history. This self-divulgence is the supply side of a periodicals economy driven, in Haywood’s account, by an universal readerly “curiosity” to be “made acquainted with others’ [private] affairs,” a curiosity which she will “regulate” through its “gratification” (FS 2.2:17–18). In order to meet such capacious demand for scandal, the Female Spectator goes so far as to “secure an eternal fund of intelligence” by placing an army of spies throughout Europe, such that “nothing curious or worthy of remark can escape [her]”; the Female Spectator threatens a total liquidation of the private sphere, vowing to “have all the secrets of Europe . . . laid open at one view” in her papers (FS 2.2:19). Like Addison and Steele, Haywood appears to rely upon the threat of public exposure as both an ethical and an economic strategy for her papers: the making visible of others’ affairs in her papers will stir demand by gratifying curiosity, and her readers’ internalization of the spectatorial viewpoint will conduce to their ethical regulation. On the surface, her program seems consonant with the hyper-visibility of enlightenment subjectivity described by Foucault’s reading of eighteenth-century culture.7 But the kinds of visibility endorsed (however hyperbolically) by Haywood’s Female Spectator are ultimately subversive or counter-hegemonic in their aims, rather than conducing to the institutional, carceral ends of Foucault’s Panopticism. Haywood specifies that her spies are to “penetrate the mysteries of the alcove, the cabinet, [and the] field,” spatial metonyms for military, political, and libidinal forms of institutionalized patriarchal power (FS 2.2:19). The Female Spectator’s prosthetic emissaries will not normalize and extend existing power relations, but rather will serve the potentially critical function of making those systems visible. Haywood aims to publicize scandal emanating from masculine private spheres far less often discussed than their feminine counterparts. The gendered inflection of Haywood’s insistence upon public visibility comes through in her critique of masquerading that makes up a significant portion of the periodical’s fi rst installment. Far from anticipating Terry Castle’s influential appreciation of eighteenth-century masquerade as a mode of suspending patriarchal structures, the Female Spectator criticizes such rituals, not because they are inherently licentious, but because they

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preclude the kind of mutual visibility she views as necessary for ethical recognition between men and women.8 Indeed, Haywood’s cautionary tale about masquerading revolves around mechanisms of visuality from the start. We are introduced to Erminia and her family, who move from the country to London so their son could “see more of the world . . . [but] still under [his parents’] own eye” (FS 2.2:40). Mimetic desire strikes the children immediately upon their arrival in London, as they see others talking about the masquerade, and “the eagerness they observed in others excited a curiosity in them” (FS 2.2:40). The parents fi nally allow Erminia and her brother to attend a masquerade, giving the son “a strict charge to be watchful over his sister, and never to quit sight of her”—to provide a vigilant surveillance that will make it “as if [the parents] themselves were present” (FS 2.2:41). The siblings lose sight of one another very early on at the party, and Erminia gets tricked into following a man costumed like her brother. The impostor carries Erminia away from the party to a remote house, rapes her, blindfolds her so she won’t be able to describe either her attacker or his locale, and then drops her off in “an obscure, dirty lane in the Strand, near the water side” (FS 2.2:42). For the Female Spectator, masquerade is acceptable only on the condition that before matters get out of hand, “everyone is obliged to pluck off his mask and own himself for what he is,” for without making private identity public there can be no basis for reciprocity and nonviolence (FS 2.2:33). In the figure of the young woman’s attacker, who acts out the voyeur’s fantasy of practically unlimited power by virtue of being an unobserved observer, one glimpses a sinister reading of Addison and Steele’s Mr. Spectator, shrouded in a studied obscurity from which he views “the thoughtless creatures who make up the lump of [the female] sex” (S 1:21), a man who understands the link between his invisibility and his power so well that “the greatest pain [he] can suffer” is “being stared at” (S 1:6). While the Female Spectator seems effectively to turn the tables on Addison and Steele’s spectatorial enterprise, she enacts two potentially incompatible models of the relationship between visuality and ethical regulation. On the one hand, the Female Spectator’s method performs a dialectic of inclusion and restriction, making visible the private vices of men like the violent masquerader as a way of containing their aggression through public disapproval. In this way, her periodical is a woman’s reversal of the shame-through-visibility paradigm deployed against women in Addison and Steele. At the same time, though, the affective logic of her periodical apparently requires her to keep readers focused on the violated, abandoned figure of the raped woman long after her attacker has disappeared from the narrative. Rather than pursuing Erminia’s attacker into “the alcove, the cabinet, or the field,” the Female Spectator spends more than half of her textual space detailing the agonies of Erminia in the wake of her violation. We are shown Erminia contemplating suicide, her family’s futile attempts to identify the house where she was attacked, and, fi nally, her

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begging permanently “to retire to an aunt . . . in one of the most remote counties in England.” Modeling the proper aesthetico-ethical response to a woman suffering, her family fi nds Erminia’s self-induced withdrawal from publicness to be “a noble way of thinking” and even her former suitor “could not forbear applauding what gave a thousand daggers to his heart” (FS 2.2:44). A certain kind of social order is restored over the erasure of the stained female body, removed from a community of spectators (the family members and the would-be suitor) united by their participation in an involuntary, sadomasochistic economy of pleasure and shame. In the suitor’s account, we cannot help applauding what stabs us.9 While Haywood wants to disrupt forms of patriarchal privilege and immunity, her periodical appears to replicate the structures of sentimentalist visuality which, as our reading of Addison and Steele demonstrated, both perform and bolster Augustan social order. How to account for Haywood’s evidently unwitting capitulation to her predecessors’ paradigm? One approach would be to say that because the Female Spectator wants to be “universally read,” her main business is to “hit [curiosity,] this reigning humour, in such a manner, as that the gratification it should receive from being made acquainted with other people’s affairs, should at the same time teach every one to regulate their own” (FS 2.2:18). But the affairs of others that readers find most affectively engaging have less to do with men behaving badly than with the women victimized by such men. Haywood gratifies readers’ curiosity (and sells papers) by situating readers to participate in precisely the kind of voyeuristic, unobserved observation whose gendered prerogatives she had sought to counter. In her first number, in fact, the Female Spectator describes her deployment of spies as a way of granting herself something more culturally “effectual” than even the “power of invisibility” or of “transport[ing her]self wherever [she] pleased” (FS 2.2:19). This reading of how Haywood’s texts align their readers with the appropriative, voyeuristic gaze would proceed by analyzing the focalizers in her narrative—those agents in the work who allegorize various modes of visual or readerly reception and who thereby offer positions of viewing to those outside the text. In the companion tale to that of Erminia, Haywood describes a “good husband’s stratagem” for curing his wife of her passion for masquerading. Because he wants to avoid “draw[ing] on himself the character of a churlish, or a jealous husband,” this man chooses to allow his wife to go masquerading, but arranges for a friend to dress up like him, a friend who will “slip into [his] place” at the ball and take his wife away to a predetermined locale unknown to her. The two male conspirators carry out their plan, which is essentially a staged or “fictional” version of Erminia’s “real” story, on the “poor . . . little suspecting Lady,” who shrieks in horror when it becomes clear to her that this companion is not her husband. As the “friend” unknown to the wife reaches the point in the script where he is to “struggle with her and endeavour all he could to prevail on her to unmask,” the husband is so “highly diverted” at his friend “so well act[ing] his part”

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that he “suffer[s] the farce to go on some time longer,” until the “excessive fright his wife was in oblig’d him to put an end to it.” The conspirators agree to act as though the incident had been purely accidental, and therefore forgiven, thereby showing what the Female Spectator calls “the discretion . . . to maintain inviolably the secret of the trick [they] had put upon her” (FS 2.2:34–35). These men are the only focalizers in Haywood’s text; the Female Spectator and her club offer neither commentary nor debate about the legitimacy of the husband’s stratagem. Indeed, the conspirators’ pleasure at the diverting farce they have enacted, a farce necessitated by the woman’s “immoderate” love of masquerade, invites readers’ identificatory participation in the fantasy of violent transgression which they simulate, and which is carried out by Erminia’s attacker. The distinction between the viewpoint of Haywood’s periodical apparatus and that of the invisible, aggressive voyeur becomes blurred. To the extent that Haywood builds a community of readers by theatricalizing imaginary transgressions about which readers are encouraged to keep a discreet silence, her papers are aligned with precisely those cultural norms they would subvert. Viewed from this perspective, it is hard not to agree with Shawn Maurer’s argument that the tales in Haywood’s Female Spectator “expose, but simultaneously sanction the new domestic roles” that had been adumbrated in earlier moral periodicals like those of Addison and Steele.10 Indeed, in light of her periodical’s apparent complicity with already existing models and ideologies of spectatorship, how can we read Haywood’s recycling of narrative conventions from Addison and Steele as contestatory in any significant way? One important difference between Haywood’s work and that of her predecessors that has been overlooked by recent scholarship on the Female Spectator is that Haywood draws attention to the ways in which men make spectacles of women, rather than naturalizing female objecthood or describing the specularization of the feminine as something women simply bring upon themselves, as Addison and Steele generally do. Looking at the aforementioned examples of masquerading women from the Female Spectator, for instance, both Erminia and the “immoderate” wife become spectacles as a result of male-directed plots and conspiracies; in fact, their desires can be called immoderate only in a world governed by such plots. As Haywood repeatedly points out, there’s nothing inherently corrupting about masquerades or women’s desire to attend them: she applauds the agreeable practice of “great families,” whose masquerades gather “a select company . . . disguised so as not to be known for a time to each other,” as occasions for wit and lively conversation. For Haywood, the problem lies in London society’s peculiar version of the custom, in which even “the most abandoned rake or low-bred fellow”—in short, anyone “who has wherewithal to purchase a ticket”—may enter the costumed fray, behave in an offensive manner, and “safe in his disguise go off without incurring either the shame or punishment his behavior deserves” (FS 2.2:33). In Haywood’s ideal scenario, as we have mentioned, “everyone is obliged to pluck off his

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mask and own himself for what he is,” and though the “he” of her formula can obviously be read as generic, referring universally to “everyone,” both her list of hypothetical offenders (“abandoned rakes” and “low-bred fellows”) and the specific characters in her periodical narratives who engage in “improper and indecent” behavior at masquerades (the anonymous rapist, the “good husband” and his friend) are all male.11 Female masquerading poses an acute threat for conduct moralists like Addison and Steele, not least because the practice allows women access to the spectator-position so coveted by men like Mr. Spectator himself, the position of the spectateur ignoré who sees others and mingles with them while remaining invisible or anonymous. Through her male focalizers’ critique of women who want to accede to such a position, especially in the prurient and terrorizing way that the “good husband” and his friend do, Haywood reveals the hypocrisy of Addison and Steele’s spectatorial ideology, according to which women should aspire to beautiful-but-notemasculating objecthood but should never become ocular subjects or agential spectacles on their own terms. In short, Haywood deploys these male focalizers in her narratives on masquerade not to encourage her readers’ identification with them but to make explicit the potentially sadistic, conspiratorial dimensions of a specific kind of male spectatorial ideal. If we push this reading a bit further, we might distinguish Haywood’s method from Addison and Steele’s even more sharply by saying that the voyeuristic “good husband” episode allegorizes the way in which paternalistic male spectators produce or solicit the female behaviors they want to punish; Haywood asks her readers to be aware of how they are being set up by identifying with a particular kind of apparently benign masculine viewpoint, one that explicitly desires to avoid seeming “churlish.”12 Interestingly enough, in the “good husband” episode, Haywood uses precisely the language of Astell’s Refl ections when Astell insists that what paternal education “shows” of the world to women makes them “fit . . . to act a farce for the diversion of their governours.”13 In this context, Haywood’s juxtaposition of the “good husband” narrative with Erminia’s tale, as if they were morally comparable or mutually reinforcing tales, seems meant to emphasize that the “immoderate” wife’s terror at the simulated rape should not produce the kind of titillation in readers that it might if that bit were published by itself, without being placed in the context of actually practiced masculine brutality. To engage in admittedly inexact scholarly surmise, it might be difficult for any of Haywood’s female readers to see the imminent threat of rape as a legitimate or proportionate punishment for the wife’s relatively innocuous desire to go to parties, particularly when we are told in the same text that such horrendous outcomes of male predation do in fact occur in her culture. Even if Haywood acknowledges that attacks like the one depicted in Erminia’s tale are “rare,” she insists that such violent acts are “much more [frequent] than is publickly known” (FS 2.2:45). As important, in Haywood’s text, such violence cannot be blamed upon

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young women like Erminia, but must clearly be attributed to the unseen, anonymous male spectators who stalk them. In addition to foregrounding of the role of male spectatorship in producing “immoderate” female behavior, Haywood also makes it clear that women get specularized for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with an inherently weak, corrupt, irrational, or domestic female “nature.”14 If Addison and Steele visually scapegoat women because of women’s “natural propensity” to be taken with the showy and the superficial—as well as to make themselves into a superficial display (like Fulvia from Spectator 15)— or because women’s bodies themselves naturally undermine their attempts to have coherent and publicly effective political opinions, Haywood takes Addison and Steele’s scapegoating mechanisms to new extremes only to reveal their spurious causality and their mercenary motives. By far the best example of Haywood’s method here is in the Female Spectator’s attack on the hoop-petticoat in Book XV. As Erin Mackie has brilliantly demonstrated, the hoop-petticoat serves in early eighteenth-century English culture as an “emblem of all that obscures masculine control of reproduction,” calling up “profound sociosexual anxieties” in a number of prominent essays in the Tatler and the Spectator, including Bickerstaff’s famous “trial” of the hoop-skirt in Tatler 116, which concludes with the petticoat being “executed by dismemberment,” as Mackie puts it.15 For Haywood to take up this particular theme as an object of critique, then, involves her direct engagement with an already established moralizing discourse against female publicness in the genre of the spectatorial periodical essay. Haywood’s Female Spectator takes up the conventional criticism of the hoop-petticoat as a threat to England’s domestic economy—an argument based on the hoop’s being a luxury commodity dependent upon foreign goods and labor for its production—but she reduces that criticism from the lofty heights of economic theory to the street-level perspective of “the fruiterer, fishmonger, comb and buckle-sellers, and others of those small chapmen,” the fragile structure of whose merchandising stalls, she claims, are “throw[n] down” or “indanger[ed]” by the “angular corners of such immense machines” as the “extended hoops [women] now wear” (FS 2.3:104). If part of Haywood’s satire against conventional critiques of the petticoat involves diminishing their threat to the economy from the level of the nation to that of the individual fruit stand, another part involves the hyperbolic augmenting of the petticoat’s dimensions in her suggestion that London’s ladies should “retrench a yard or two” of their fashionable hoops to prevent the inconveniences and embarrassments one “frequently beholds” them creating on the city streets—though there is precious little documentary evidence from the period of such tragic inconveniences as she suggests, and not even a single letter of complaint in her own periodicals from the victimized tradesmen she mentions. Haywood’s sharper rebuttal to those who bemoan women’s fashionable commitment to the hoop-skirt, however, comes during her description of

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one among “many very ugly accidents” caused ostensibly by the petticoat and, implicitly, by women’s “natural” but irrational desire to make public spectacles of themselves. Calling herself an “eye-witness” to the scene, the Female Spectator narrates the misadventures of a “young creature” in her “best cloaths,” highlighted of course by “one of those mischief-making hoops,” a hoop so gargantuan that it “spread itself from the steps of my door quite to the posts placed to keep off the coaches and the carts”: this young woman and her hoop-skirt get violently accosted by a flock of sheep as she attempts to pursue her course on foot. In the Female Spectator’s account, “an old ram” somehow ends up running “full-butt into the [pedestrian] foot-way,” whereupon his horns get “entangled in the [young woman’s] hoop”; the Female Spectator describes the dénouement of this incident with all the Schadenfreude it apparently deserves, In her fright [the young lady] let [the hoop] fall down, which still the more encumbered [the old ram], as it fi x’d upon his neck—she attempted to run, he to disengage himself—which neither being able to do, she shriek’d, he baa’d, the rest of the sheep echo’d the cry, and the dog, who follow’d the flock, bark’d, so that altogether made a most hideous sound—Down fell the lady, unable to sustain the forcible efforts the ram made to obtain his liberty; . . . never was fi nery so demolished. (FS 2.3:105) In this at least mildly prurient account of entangled hoops and horns— the counterpart to a woman’s complaint earlier in Book XV about a man with a “sword as long as himself, hanging dangling at his knee,” who gets his “ugly weapon hitched in the pink’d trimming of [her] petticoat” (FS 2.3:102)—we have what looks like a kind of sexualized specularization and scapegoating of female publicness that outdoes anything in the collected works of Addison and Steele. However, it is precisely in Haywood’s attempt to “outdo” the spectatorial mechanisms at work in Addison and Steele—through a process of excess, exacerbation, and parodic juxtaposition—that she foregrounds the gendered partiality and violence obscured by her predecessors’ claims to benign neutrality.16 Haywood’s scene of the hoop-skirt and the ram, like the scenes of aberrant female publicness in Addison and Steele, creates an audience of like-minded spectators who share the same negative judgment of the woman on display. As the Female Spectator describes it, “a crowd of mob . . . gather in an instant” around the spectacle of the “demolished” young woman, an angry audience that continues shouting at the girl “till she got into a chair, and was quite out of sight” (FS 2.3:105). As we noted in our analysis of Addison and Steele, the moralizing crowd’s goal is to get the fashionable, self-bedecking woman out of public spaces where she ostensibly does not belong, and to carry out these strategies of erasure until such women have been removed “quite out of sight.” But in Haywood’s

156 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 deployment of this convention, unlike in Addison and Steele, the cause of the woman’s specularization lies not in her self, but in her stars: the Female Spectator emphasizes the utterly random and contingent nature of the circumstances leading to the young woman’s “ugly accident,” highlighting how the “large flock of sheep” happened just “that instant” to be “driving to the slaughter-house,” and insisting that the soon-to-be-entangled ram was not following a predictable course but had been “put out of his way by some accident.” Rather than blaming the incident squarely on women’s supposedly natural propensities toward self-display, Haywood’s narrative reveals the complex network of extremely unlikely possibilities that had to conspire—there’s that word again—to turn the woman into a scapegoated spectacle. Though this section of Book XV begins in an Addisonian vein by pitching itself as a critique of female “vanity” and “affectation,” the Female Spectator’s more specific message to female readers during the narrative itself is merely a practical “warning to [her] sex, either to take chair or coach, or to leave their enormous hoops at home, whenever they have any occasion to go out on a Monday, or Friday, especially in the morning” (FS 2.3:105). Not only does the Female Spectator say nothing at all about female vanity, she doesn’t even issue a verdict against the hoop-petticoat in general; she suggests only that “enormous” hoops should be avoided during the few hours each week when markets of livestock might make the skirt less convenient, and even then the solution would not involve discarding the hoop, but would simply be to “take chair or coach” instead of walking. Far more consequential for the purposes of this argument, Haywood’s description of how the crowd reacts to the spectacle of the ram-besotted young lady serves as another means of creating critical distance between her readers and the reaction to female publicness promoted by Addison and Steele. First, by including the crowd’s reaction and its violent consequences “inside” the frame of her spectatorial tableau, Haywood allegorizes the material outcome of Addisonian spectatorship that her predecessors leave implicit in their own work by not drawing attention to the framing force of Mr. Spectator’s focalization and its tendencies toward building a particular kind of audience through introjection and identification. In short, Haywood demands that readers be conscious of the possible outcomes of their voyeuristic gazing, saying explicitly that “the rude populace” gathered about the young woman and “instead of pitying, insulted her misfortune” (FS 2.3:105). That is to say, she stages for her readers the multiple reactions and judgments they might have about the narrative she describes: you can either “pity” or “insult” a young woman who’s just been run over by a flock of wayward livestock; and you can conclude from such an incident either that women are so vain that they should be put “quite out of sight,” or that women should simply avoid walking in the city streets wearing hoop-petticoats in the morning on Mondays and Fridays. Either way, your judgment should be a matter of conscious reflection and decision rather than one of unconscious affective identification with a figure of cultural

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authority, and you should be aware of the clear material and political consequences of the judgment you choose to endorse. Like the mob, you can shout angrily and remove women from public, or, like the “driver” of the flock, who himself must take some responsibility for his wayward sheep, you can “pity” the woman’s accidental misfortune and “assist in . . . raising the lady” from her predicament (FS 2.3:105). Haywood offers readers this menu of options to choose from, while Addison and Steele let Mr. Spectator do their readers’ thinking, feeling, and judging for them.17 In fact, Haywood often stages the confl ict between perspectives not as the difference between theoretical reactions external to the Female Spectator—like the opposition between those who might “pity” the young woman and those who “insult” her—but as a series of vacillations within the Female Spectator’s own judgment. As we noted in the episode of the sheep stampede, the Female Spectator occasionally describes herself as wanting to promote a kind of Addisonian critique of female foibles, but her purposes are often undermined either by the details of the narrative supposed to carry out the satire against women or by the particular concluding commentaries she offers about the meaning of such narratives. Very often, too, these would-be Addisonian moments in the Female Spectator are narrated or governed by male moralizers internal to Haywood’s texts, episodes that are then framed by the female editor’s comments or juxtaposed with counter-narratives that call the Addisonian perspective into question—as with the paired masquerading stories of Erminia and the “good husband’s” wife. That is to say, Haywood stages the deployment of these Addisonian strategies as a way of making those strategies themselves the object of her readers’ attention, rather than neatly endorsing the Addisonian conclusions. Haywood analyzes the complicated relationship between her female eidolon and the characteristic moves that underwrite Addisonian authority as one fraught with ambivalence, confl ict, and incomplete intentionality. Haywood foregrounds these ideological tensions in a number of ways. First, she includes letters from women readers to the Female Spectator that call attention to the editors’ repeated failure to follow through with her commitment to offering observations from and for a female perspective on English cultural politics. One correspondent, “Leucothea,” expresses her anger, shared by “several others of [her] acquaintance,” that the Female Spectator “confi ne[s] all [her] satire to our sex, without giving one fling at the men, who . . . deserve it as much to the full, if not more than we do” (FS 2.3:102). Leucothea then carries out the reversal of perspective she calls for by lampooning vanity as not gender-specific but as a vice men “abound with in an equal degree” to women: If we have our milliners, mantua-makers, and tire-women to take up our time, have they not their tailors, barbers; aye, and their face-menders too, to engross as much of theirs?—Are there not as many implements on the toilet of a beau as there can be on one of the greatest

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Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 coquet among us?—Does he not take the same pains to attract, and is as much fond and proud of admiration?—Are not the men in general affected with every new mode, and do they not pursue it with equal eagerness? (FS 2.3:102)

Haywood has her imagined female readers themselves insist that masculinity can be as specular a construct as femininity, that Englishmen can make themselves as dependent on the gaze of others for their existence, and can be as taken with the showy outsides of things as Addison claimed women to be. For Leucothea, the Female Spectator’s reluctance to take up such issues forces her female readers to ask “if you are really as impartial as you would be thought” (FS 2.3:103). In response, the Female Spectator excuses her focus on women’s foibles by saying that, as a woman, she is “more interested in [women’s] happiness,” and that, as a “Female Censor,” she can’t imagine her writings would have “so much weight with the men as is requisite to make that change in their conduct and economy, which . . . a great many of them stand in great need of” (FS 2.3:104). The latter claim would have to seem at least a bit disingenuous to Haywood’s audience, given that the Female Spectator publishes many letters from admiring male readers, one of whom, in fact, describes himself as “but one among the million of [her] admirers” who has no doubt that her essays have a profoundly reforming “effect on many of [her] readers” (FS 2.3:151). As a result, the Female Spectator’s gesture here does not function in Haywood’s text as an indication of the author’s honest humility about her own cultural impact; rather, the Female Spectator stages how powerfully the impulse to identify oneself with masculine structures of narrative authority acts upon early eighteenth-century women writers who would accede to that authoritative position themselves. This problem seems particularly acute for women writers in a genre like the Addisonian periodical, the success of whose gendered moralizing discourse clearly conditioned the expectations of Haywood’s audiences. But, as the letter from Leucothea attests, not all readers’ expectations were conditioned in the same way by the generic history of the moral periodical: for Leucothea, if the Female Spectator is to be truly “impartial,” she must distance herself from the one-sided model offered by Addisonian spectators, who falsely impersonate impartiality by “loitering away so many hours at coffee-house windows, merely to make observations” on female passers-by (FS 2.3:103). The Female Spectator herself often echoes the concerns of readers like Leucothea about her own procedures. She indexes this pressure to conform to established models of authority in the genre by claiming of the story of the be-skirted girl and the wayward ram, a story whose ostensible message would fit nicely in an Addisonian periodical, that such incidents are “beneath the dignity of a Female Spectator to take notice of” (FS 2.3:105). Perhaps more tellingly, she then blames the inclusion of the story on her correspondent Leucothea, whose “earnestness . . . to have her letter

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inserted” in the periodical “led” the Female Spectator into her critique of the hoop-petticoat in the fi rst place. Like the false modesty of her earlier explanation about focusing on women, this account of why she attacks the hoop-skirt seems counter-intuitive at best and, at worst, unwarranted in its displacement of blame onto a female reader who was clamoring for stories satirizing male foibles rather than female affectation. The Female Spectator’s claim here makes sense only if Haywood is trying, as we have been arguing, to draw attention to the moves a female editor-narrator has to make in order to be considered “impartial” in the discourse of early eighteenth-century English public culture. Haywood’s narrator is caught in a peculiar double-bind: as a woman aspiring to cultural authority, she will not be thought “impartial” if she follows Leucothea’s suggestion and makes men a primary target of her satirical essays, since she could then be accused of virago-like gender-based partisanship; at the same time, her attempt to prove her impartiality by focusing on women’s aberrant behaviors ends up causing (some of) her female readers to consider her a sell-out, even if they remain “inclined to wish [her] well,” as Leucothea puts it (FS 2.3:102). The difficulty of her position is captured in Leucothea’s address to Haywood’s narrator as the “Female Moralizer”: can the Female Spectator successfully moralize while continuing to offer a perspective on manners that would remain distinctly “female”? Ultimately, Haywood’s story of the confrontation between Leucothea and the Female Spectator stages two irreconcilable conceptions of what it would mean to be an “impartial” figure of cultural authority, a conflict that makes explicit the cost, to an otherwise feminist intent, of generic or narratorial assimilation to a masculine paradigm. If I am to be “impartial,” implies the Female Spectator, then I can neither give my female readers the stories they want, nor offer observations from a feminocentric perspective; under these conditions, a “female moralizer” must see with the eyes of the Addisonian spectator. Read from this angle, one might reverse the terms of Maurer’s useful formula for understanding Haywood by saying that the Female Spectator “sanctions” conventional gendered roles in order to “expose” the contradictory basis and the cultural consequences of their construction, particularly for readers and writers of the periodical essay. That is to say, Haywood does not simply have her narrator endorse Addisonian gender arrangements as if they were naturally or inevitably legitimate; rather, the Female Spectator’s capitulations to convention are always staged as such, as a politically motivated deployment of one interpretive possibility among others, alternative viewpoints that might better articulate women’s “real interests,” in Astell’s phrase. By providing unrefuted feminist counter-readings within her text, and by having her female narrator reflect upon the tenuous conditions of her own authority, Haywood gives her readers a very different experience of gendered cultural norms than Addison and Steele do in their essays. Staging these multiple judgments in her text, offering up narrators and characters who vacillate between Addisonian ideology and

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Astellian resistance, Haywood explores the dynamic of complicity between female editors and male conspirators. As we have mentioned, the specifically Astellian dimensions of Haywood’s periodical have to do with their shared critique of unreflective female specularity and women’s internalization of a particular male vantage point. While Astell speaks in abstract terms about women’s confusion of male ideology with their own “dear beloved selves,” Haywood’s strategy for making female readers aware of this problem involves her inclusion of the male gaze as a narrative source within the frame of her texts, rather than simply deploying that gaze as the unremarked textual frame as Addison and Steele do. Whenever the female body is objectified as spectacle in Haywood’s essays, that objectification virtually always occurs at the behest of male agents internal to the narrative, and not as the product of the female editors’ unmediated vision. But despite these differences in method, Haywood’s allegories of male spectatorship end up echoing Astell’s emphasis on women’s need to detach their sense of self from the gaze of others and to look inward, to develop a sense of their own autonomous interiority that will enable them to regulate their public self-presentation to their best advantage, apart from being an end in itself. It is precisely this re-orientation of women’s attention from externality and specularity to conscious and occasionally ironic self-consolidation that Haywood upholds in opposition to the Addisonian moralizing of the male focalizers within her texts. An example will clarify what is at stake in Haywood’s method here. In Book XVII, the Female Spectator embarks on yet another apparent diatribe against female foibles, the bulk of which is to be carried out by proxy through a letter from a male correspondent referred to as “J. M.” Actually, J. M. has trouble deciding exactly what it is about women that he wants to satirize, and the long preamble to his story considers a number of predictable options—cosmetics, “artifices of the toilet,” excessive focus on person over mind, “aiming to please too much,” desire for flattery—before fi nally settling on what he calls “affectation,” and more particularly the effort of older women to present themselves as if they had the charms of a young girl (FS 2.3:152).18 To illustrate the idiocy of female affectation, J. M. narrates his several visits to a woman called Lysetta, someone whom a “friend” recommended to him as “a lady to whom the world gave no favorable character”: a widow with “a face far from handsome,” who is “so very fat that she might pass more for a Wapping landlady than a person of condition,” yet who has “the vanity to pretend to youth, beauty, and good shape” (FS 2.3:153). Why visit such a person in the fi rst place? The very set-up of the narrative indicates the perversity of its narrator, who will play the masochist to his friend’s sadism, just so Haywood’s readers can be edified.19 J. M. makes his point by contrasting his fi rst visit to Lysetta, during which she behaves “in the politest manner” such that J. M. verges on being “downright in love with her,” with a second visit, during which she proves herself such a “lump of affectation and impertinence” that she cannot carry on a

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coherent conversation (FS 2.3:153, 155). As it turns out, her fears about losing her fortune to a bankrupt fi nancier had given her an “infi nitely becoming” solemnity during their fi rst visit that disappears entirely: she “relapse[s]” into her former folly during the second visit because her estate had evidently been preserved; J. M. concludes for the Female Spectator’s readers that Lysetta’s fault lies in her failure to “distinguish between what would render her amiable or ridiculous, as it was really in her power to make herself either the one or the other” (FS 2.3:155). As progressive as J. M.’s formula may sound, the foregoing details of his own narrative deeply undermine the idea that women simply have it “in [their] power” to determine how they are perceived by male beholders. While Lysetta may perfectly well have been able to keep herself from committing the kinds of social “impertinencies” J. M. mentions, it remains unclear how she might avoid embodying the ostensibly repulsive physical characteristics that come to dominate J. M.’s increasingly Addisonian satire of her. To what extent, for example, would it be “in her power” to rid herself of “her arms, with two fists at the end of them, each of which was big enough to fell an ox”; or of her equally repugnant “shoulders which, indeed nature had placed pretty near the ears”; or of her disgustingly “plump and well-jointed fi ngers” that remind J. M. of a meaty “comb” for her curly hair (FS 2.3:155)? The very male spectator who exhorts Haywood’s female readers to be “well satisfied with themselves” ends up demonstrating the significant degree to which women in this specular culture are themselves made “miserable” or “happy” by the gaze of male beholders (FS 2.3:156). In light of what Juliette Merritt has called the “necessary specularity” of women in Haywood’s world, the solution for Haywood cannot involve women’s literal Astellian retreat from publicness but rather their development of an inward, critical distance from the modes of male spectatorship with (and through) which they are meant to identify themselves.20 Take, for instance, the female masquerader called “Diana” in Book V, a woman who enjoys such costumed events because “nature . . . has not been over curious in the formation of her [facial] features, and . . . the small-pox has rendered them yet less delicate” (FS 2.2:170). Knowing full well that “she never had a handsome thing said to her out of a vizard,” Diana makes the mistake of agreeing to unmask for the dominant male figure at a particular masquerade—a man called “Imperio” in Haywood’s account—who starts back upon seeing her face and cries out “‘Twill not do,” a phrase then echoed by others throughout the evening at her expense (FS 2.2:170–71). While a superficial reading of these passages might suggest that Haywood aligns her own readers with Imperio’s “scrutinous gaze,” the Female Spectator herself draws a quite different, far more practically useful conclusion for her audience: women must learn to manage their specularity with more circumspection. On Haywood’s account, “had [Diana] been mistress of resolution enough to have resisted . . . the commands of Imperio,” and had she ensured that “the advantageous part of her only [be] revealed,” then she

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would “doubtless have heard many praises of the charming Diana repeated afterwards in company” (FS 2.2:170–71). Far from lapsing into an uncritical acceptance of male scrutiny, Haywood closes this section of her essay with the charge that there is “no form so faultless but the enquiring eyes of wanton and ungenerous men may fi nd a blemish in [it]” (FS 2.2:172); the broader cultural problem, from Haywood’s perspective, lies in the male beholders, not in the women who are their specular objects: So many young charmers are continually springing up, and the men grow so excessively delicate in their taste, that beauty, in their eyes, seems to have lost all its bloom at sixteen or seventeen; and how great a stab must it be to the vanity of a woman, who, at five and twenty, fi nds herself either not married at all, or to a husband who regards her no otherwise than as a withered rose. (FS 2.2:174) Under circumstances such as these, in which they can neither remove themselves from the “scrutinous gaze” of censorious men nor control the judgments which animate that gaze, Haywood’s female readers are enjoined not to identify with the naïve ideology of someone like J. M. (for whom women simply “make themselves”), but “to regulate [their] own conduct and behavior” in a way that will most conduce to their own ends in a context conditioned by male spectatorship (FS 2.3:159). 21 That maxim is drawn from Haywood’s Astellian conclusion to Book XVII, a conclusion that frames and subverts the judgments that had been offered by the Female Spectator’s male focalizer in that section, none other than J. M. himself. Haywood offers the ideal of self-regulation, women’s turning inward to manage their public self-presentation, precisely as a contrast to the more predominant practice of women “endeavouring to expose all the faults of [their] acquaintance” (FS 2.3:159).22 However, Haywood’s critique of female specularity differs from and goes beyond Astell’s by exposing the specific role played by periodical literature itself in promoting women’s introjection of the authoritative male spectatorial vantage point. Though Haywood draws attention to this effect in many of the examples we have already studied, primarily by staging the complicated relationship between male focalizers and the female narrator-figure within her texts, her most explicit treatment of this issue comes in Book VIII, which focuses on a letter from “John Careful” on women’s “immoderate use of tea.” According to Mr. Careful, women’s devotion to their morning and afternoon tea leads to “the utter destruction of all economy,” and really should be seen as a “kind of debauchery . . . even more pernicious in its consequences than those which the men are frequently accused of” (FS 2.2:280–81). Careful’s rather incautious hyperbole should remind us of Haywood’s parodic critique of the hoop-skirt, which she appears to endorse only to deflate it. As Patricia Meyer Spacks points out, Haywood’s treatment of the tea-table connects her periodical to broader

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eighteenth-century discourses on the threat of “luxury”—here signifying “extravagant self-indulgence, particularly in imported products”—as “a destructive force in the culture.”23 In the end, however, the Female Spectator accepts as legitimate only the last of Careful’s three objections against the tea-table: not that it functions as “a loss of time and hindrance to business,” nor that it requires inordinate “expence” to many households, but only that it can lead to “dram-drinking” and a more general “ill-health” (FS 2.2:284). 24 Haywood includes (or invents) Careful’s letter to make this point about tea and ill-health, but also to draw attention both to the excessive claims made by male cultural critics like Careful and to the effects of those claims on the women who are their object. After Haywood’s highly deflationary framing reflections, it is hard to believe that she means readers to accept Careful’s central argument that “the regularity of the tea-table occasions a want of regularity in every thing beside,” or that tea-drinking creates social disorder comparable to that produced by male “debauchery” of the kind we have analyzed in this chapter (FS 2.2:282). As important, the Female Spectator comments on the potential effects of women readers encountering letters like Careful’s that are the stock-intrade of the moral periodical as a genre. Acknowledging that Careful has captured the affectation of many tradesmen’s wives “in so picturesque a manner that it is impossible to read him without imagining one sees the ridiculous behaviors he describes,” Haywood’s eidolon comes to a rather illuminating conclusion about the way a female reader might be altered by “seeing” from the perspective of the male spectator: “No woman . . . can, in my opinion, behold herself thus delineated without a confusion, which must occasion a thorough reformation” (FS 2.2:283). Here Haywood neatly adumbrates the logic of the moral essay periodical: female readers consume images of themselves being “delineated” from the vantage point of an excessively critical but authoritative male beholder in order to undertake a “thorough” but unwarranted “reformation” of their own conduct, when the solution she offers female readers is much simpler—that is, to develop what women have “within ourselves” (FS 2.2:284). As if to highlight again a point made earlier in this chapter, Haywood introduces her own remarks on Careful’s letter by admitting that “one half of [her] readers”—presumably women—”will expect [her] to be very angry” at her correspondent, but her “fi rm resolution . . . to maintain strict impartiality” in her periodical requires that she stay focused on problems that male spectators want addressed: to be “impartial,” again, the Female Spectator must articulate the judgment of those who think that women’s tea-drinking is a greater threat to social cohesion than any conceivable form of male “debauchery” (FS 2.2:283). For Haywood, then, women’s internalization of a confi ning cultural gaze occurs primarily through their consumption of the moral essay periodical, a genre that impinges much more significantly on their capacity for autonomous self-understanding than do the conventionally more corrupting

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genres of prose fiction such as romances and the kind of amatory fiction through which Haywood had established her own literary reputation. Haywood’s analysis of female specularity offers a more detailed account than Astell’s of the mechanisms by which women come to confuse a particular kind of paternalistic bias with their “own dear selves”: it is precisely through their reading of conduct books and moralizing periodicals, texts in which they “behold themselves delineated,” that female audiences come to identify with interests contrary to their own and to “love their chains,” even going so far as to demand in the public sphere, as Richardson’s Pamela does of B in the private sphere, more and more sweet injunctions from their cultural masters. But as we have seen, Haywood attempts to disrupt the logic whereby women’s reading of popular literary forms conduces to their own subordination in several ways: not only does she include the dissenting voices of unpleased female readers against the Female Spectator’s relentless need to be falsely “impartial,” but she also continually undermines the male focalizers internal to the periodical who are supposed to exemplify that spectatorial impartiality. Perhaps even more telling, Haywood acknowledges that the female transgressions supposedly merely reported by periodical literature should be viewed as the inventions of periodical narrators themselves—a marketing device to sell papers. In Book XIII, the Female Spectator exhorts her readers to ask themselves, whenever they are presented with scandalous tales of other women’s behavior, “May not these people tell me this on purpose to amuse me, and because they think it pleases me?” (FS 2.3:6). Viewed from this angle, representations of women’s aberrant behavior can be seen as fictions created by the male guardians of the periodical industry to promote sales and to legitimize their own disciplinary cultural authority. Haywood explicitly clarifies that this desire for authoritative reputation through the broadcasting of scandal is a particularly masculine, publicsphere phenomenon, carried out by “male-gossips” (even some who “affect to be great politicians”) who “run from coffee-house to coffee-house, and with a solemn countenance, whisper the imaginary secret, from one to another quite round the room” (FS 2.3:9). Women who uncritically consume the essay periodicals produced by such men, then, end up participating masochistically in their own subjection, conflating the “pleasure” of scandal with the painful confusion of “beholding themselves delineated.” By staging the Female Spectator’s narrative vacillation between Addisonian paternalism and Astellian resistance, Haywood allegorizes the situation of these female readers in early liberal print culture, conditioned by reading to view the world and themselves through the perspective of an authoritative male beholder from which they must vigilantly, consciously strive to distance themselves. To provide a model for this kind of internal distancing from the normative gender ideals held out by the conventional periodical, Haywood imports a resourceful female protagonist with strategies borrowed from

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amatory fiction into the very moralistic genre intended to contain and to discipline such characters. In Book XIV, the Female Spectator includes a lengthy narrative entitled “The LADY’S REVENGE,” sent in by one of her female readers. Ostensibly the true account of a “recent transaction” in London society, the story revolves around a woman called “Barsina,” who serves as a perfect example of the kind of woman Addison and Steele hoped to produce through their moral essays. The spotless Barsina, having “lived mostly in the country,” prefers her solitary reserve so much that she “seldom appear’d in any public place,” and although “she had an infi nity of wit, [she] chose rather to be thought to have none, than to expose it by speaking more than she thought consistent with modesty” (FS 2.3:58–59). Barsina ends up being approached by Ziphranes, a notoriously inconstant man of “modish accomplishments” whose identity is as specular as that of any female coquette, in that he spends his time “giv[ing] all his limbs and features such gestures as his glass inform’d him would be most becoming . . . [to] all the ladies he conversed with” (FS 2.3:58). 25 Through Ziphranes’s assiduous attention to her, bolstered by the advice of a near relation, Barsina eventually receives Ziphranes (now grown constant) as a lover and agrees to marry him. Having conquered Barsina’s heart, however, the unreformed male coquette sets his sights on another target and secures a second marriage offer of more “convenience” to himself, an arrangement of which he fails to inform Barsina until the last possible minute. Barsina betrays no outward perturbation at this news, but focuses on revenge: she invites Ziphranes to her house before his impending marriage for a fi nal farewell meal, at the end of which she informs him that she has poisoned the wine so that they can “die together, at least” (FS 2.3:64). Barsina stages all this in jest, of course, merely to see how Ziphranes will behave under the assumption that he has been poisoned; she keeps up the theatricality of her plot so far as to have a coffi n, supposedly bearing her dead body, brought out of her home and carried out of town in a hearse. 26 Unlike her narratives on masquerade, which remain focused on the female victims rather than unmasking their male assailants, here the Female Spectator leaves off talking about Barsina because “we must now follow Ziphranes” (FS 2.3:65). Indeed, Haywood’s readers reap the aesthetic benefits of this narrative choice: Ziphranes runs off immediately to a series of quack physicians, each of whom prescribes a more violent series of purgatives than the last. Haywood spares not a single graphic detail of the “glisters, cathartics, and diaphoretics” to which Ziphranes “readily submit[s],” until “to avoid death, he was brought even to the gates of it” (FS 2.3:66). Haywood’s narrative carries out a literal, physical evacuation of this already figuratively empty male coquette with all the perverse pleasure of the schemers from her amatory fictions. Like Glicera from Haywood’s The City Jilt (1726), Barsina overcomes what might be a wronged woman’s impulse to turn inward and withdraw from the harsh masculinist public world by which she has been mistreated; instead, as

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the Female Spectator puts it in her closing remarks commending Barsina’s behavior, she “assumes the spirit . . . [to] contrive some means to render the ungrateful lover the object of contempt,” rather than weakly “giving way to a fruitless grief which few will commiserate” (FS 2.3:70). But Barsina’s revenge is more targeted and refi ned than Glicera’s less discriminating hatred of the entire male sex. Barsina’s plot works not only because she “affects to appear passive” and mobilizes conventions of meek female behavior to provoke a certain kind of reaction from Ziphranes (FS 2.3:68), but also because of Ziphranes’s “conscious guilt” at having initiated the series of wrongs that drive the narrative forward (FS 2.3:63). 27 Unlike Addison and Steele’s female scapegoats, who get erased from public places but are guilty of nothing but the desire for some socially effective form of agency, Ziphranes gets punished in accordance with a more universally applicable ethical code that makes the “ungrateful” a just “object of contempt”; as Haywood is quick to point out, Barsina’s method receives approval not only from her friends, but “even the friends of Ziphranes could not condemn it” (FS 2.3:70). 28 In the end, Haywood re-moralizes the moralizing periodical essay by infusing it with the indomitable “spirit” of female resourcefulness borrowed from amatory fiction, the very genre whose cultural power the male-authored periodical was intended to contain. But if Haywood uses the Barsina–Ziphranes episode in the Female Spectator as a way of reversing the gendered logic of public-sphere specularity against a feminized male coquette, her fi nal spectatorial periodical project turns that logic against the ostensibly more substantial authority of the Addisonian observer himself.

THE VIRGIN IN THE ATTIC: HAYWOOD’S INVISIBLE SPY AND THE ADDISONIAN SPECTATOR Perhaps the strongest evidence of Haywood’s desire to subvert the Addisonian spectatorial paradigm can be found in one of her last periodical enterprises, the Invisible Spy (1755). In this work, Haywood abandons almost entirely the structure of the single, unified essay that Addison had perfected, and that Haywood herself had used only as a loose organizing device for the individual books of the Female Spectator. While the “chapters” of the Invisible Spy occasionally focus on a particular theme—jealousy, avarice, vanity, misdirected benevolence—such themes emerge only in retrospect, as the outcome of the chapters’ sometimes complicated narrative fictions, rather than as an a priori principle or maxim which the narrative will unproblematically exemplify. Often, too, Haywood will stretch a single narrative serially across several chapter installments, breaking off at particularly piquant moments designed to sustain readers’ curiosity from section to section. As in the Female Spectator, Haywood liberally infuses this moral periodical with narratives borrowed from amatory fiction of the

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kind she produced in the 1720s, stories with female protagonists negotiating engagements with multiple suitors or fending off unwanted and unsolicited interest from men in a wide range of private and semi-private milieus. Unlike the majority of her amatory fictions, however, the tales in the Invisible Spy revolve around women from divergent social and economic backgrounds; while many of the “heroines” here are taken from the privileged classes, Haywood quite often presents readers with the domestic plight of maidservants and private soldiers’ wives, women of the working classes who made up an increasingly large part of the reading audience for conduct periodicals and prose fiction as the eighteenth-century progressed. In order to account for her source material in the Invisible Spy, Haywood develops a narrative persona who combines the Female Spectator’s army of emissaries who pry into private spheres, on the one hand, with the ideal of the single, masculine, Addisonian spectatorial authority, on the other: through a series of supernatural devices about which readers must simply suspend disbelief, Haywood creates an eidolon who can go anywhere he likes undetected, and who can record everything he hears without any gaps or inaccuracies. As the narrator explains in the periodical’s initial installments, at one level, his goals are like those of Mr. Spectator and other conventional periodicalists: “to expose vice and folly in all their various modes and attitudes.”29 But Exploralibus’s invisibility enables him, like the Female Spectator’s spies, to penetrate into private spaces where people do not know they are being watched; if Addison’s Mr. Spectator can mock only those behaviors he sees in public places, or those private actions he hears about second-hand or through his correspondents’ letters, Haywood’s Exploralibus relies for his satirical effects on the distinction between his characters’ public self-presentation and their privately-expressed sentiments and personal traits. While both narrators are anonymous voyeurs in their cultural surroundings, Addison’s Mr. Spectator is a public fl âneur—people don’t necessarily know that he’s watching them, but he’s not hiding his presence in public and they aren’t hiding theirs—while Haywood’s Exploralibus offers readers a much more deeply transgressive experience, the feeling of breaking into people’s homes in their very presence, going entirely unnoticed and without any possibility of being held to account for the trespass. In light of its social and ethical implications, this is not a minor distinction, and Haywood feels compelled to justify her narrator’s considerable, potentially unchallengeable authority by assuring her readers that his power will be exerted for the public good. By virtue of his invisibility, Haywood’s narrator makes two claims about his purposes that Mr. Spectator, with his irremediable publicness, would never make. First, Exploralibus can “pluck off the mask of hypocrisy” from public characters in a way that no other narrator can, because he has access to both the private and public behaviors of those he observes, and is therefore in a unique position “to strip a bad action of all the specious pretences made to conceal or palliate it, and shew it in its native ugliness” (IS 1:16). Second,

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and perhaps more important, with his presence undetectable by others, Exploralibus has “the means to rescue injured innocence from the cruel attacks begun by envy and scandal, and propagated by prejudice and illnature”; moreover, the narrator’s capacity to “rescue” the “injured” refers not merely to his ability “to set both things and persons in their proper colours” by correcting inaccurate reputations promoted by “scandal,” but also more literally to his ability physically to intervene without fear of retribution when he spies “attacks” of a more material and violent nature (IS 1:16). Rather than withdrawing from scenes of social discord without getting involved one way or another—the characteristic approach of Addison’s Mr. Spectator—Haywood’s Exploralibus can bridge the gap between judgment and action, between aesthetic spectatorship and ethical practice, a gap whose significance Addison had obscured by conceptually fusing the two categories, effectively making judgment itself a suffi cient substitute for action. However, as the periodical develops over its eight lengthy “books,” Haywood’s more-perfect version of the Addisonian spectator as a figure of cultural authority ends up functioning quite differently than we are initially made to expect. In fact, even from his opening pages, Exploralibus reveals details about himself and the conditions of his employment that should make readers suspicious about his apparently benign self-image. On the one hand, it seems perfectly within the conventional realm of the fantastic for readers to accept that Exploralibus has somehow managed to come by a belt of invisibility and a “wonderful tablet” that engraves upon itself all of the words spoken in its presence; after all, what else would one choose as a personal gift from the “cabinet of curiosities” owned by a descendant from “the ancient Magi of the Chaldeans” (IS 1:2)? On the other hand, in light of the political dynamics of male spectatorship we have been analyzing in this chapter, it seems less conventionally fantastic for Haywood to insist that Exploralibus’s “tablet” cannot be erased, and therefore cannot be used by him, without the “breath of a virgin,” and one who “must exceed twelve years of age” at that (IS 1:8). As part of the basic conceit of the Invisible Spy, then, Haywood insists that male periodicalist spectatorship relies quite literally for its power and authority on the material control of female bodies. However, Haywood does not stop there. In his efforts to get the tablet erased, Exploralibus discovers that he cannot come across a twelve yearold virgin who also fulfi lls the second criterion required by the tablet: that is, that the girl must be ignorant of the difference between the sexes as well. To solve this dilemma, Exploralibus stumbles across the “lucky thought” of purchasing, “for a small sum of money,” a three-year-old girl from a “very poor widow”—a girl whom he can then “bring up and educate as I judged proper.” Exploralibus then describes at some length what he views as the “proper” education of the girl he refers to as “my little purchase”:

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I committed [her] to the care of an elderly woman, whose discretion I had experienced—I communicated to her the whole of my design, and instructed her how to proceed in order to render it effectual. The little creature was kept in an upper-room, which had no window in it but a sky-light in the roof of the house, so could be witness of nothing that pass’d below—her diet was thin and very sparing—she was not permitted to sleep above half the time generally allowed for repose, and saw no living thing but the old woman who lay with her, gave her food, and did all that was necessary about her. . . . To prevent her young charge from falling into any of those distempers which the want of exercise sometimes occasions, [the old woman] contrived to make a swing for [the girl] across the room, taught her to play at batteldor and shittlecock—to toss the ball and catch it at the rebound, and such like childish gambols, which both delighted her mind and kept her limbs in a continual motion. (IS 1:11) Haywood’s passage brings together several of the issues that have preoccupied all of the authors treated in this study. Primarily, of course, Haywood’s concern is to establish a clear relationship of interdependency between the prerogatives of the authoritative male voyeur and the confi ned miseducation of young women. In order for the male narrator to convey his observations to the public, he requires that a commodified, metonymic girl be locked in an attic, kept both from seeing for herself and from socializing with others to fi nd out about the world “outside,” starved, and distracted with physical activity so that she will have neither the knowledge nor the time to consider her situation and to voice any complaints about it. Paternalistic cultural authority, in this case, literally requires and perpetuates female ignorance; in order for Exploralibus to see and to convey his judgments, she must neither see nor have any judgments of her own, least of all regarding sexual difference and its social-psychological implications. But a second dimension of the nightmarish scene Haywood depicts at the outset of the Invisible Spy has to do with the collusion of female authority-figures in exacting and refi ning the male-sponsored subjection of other women—a problem discussed at length by Astell, of course, and reflected upon in Haywood’s Female Spectator as well, not to mention in Mandeville’s allegory of periodical-reading with which this study began. The old woman “educating” her young pupil becomes the first object of Exploralibus’s invisible observation, as he spies upon them to be sure that he has not misplaced his trust. And indeed he has not: he fi nds himself “highly pleased and diverted with the diligence of [his] good old woman,” who “not only obey’d [his] orders with utmost punctuality, but did many things of her own accord, which, though very requisite, [he] had not thought of” (IS 1:11). The result, of course, is that Exploralibus ends up with a thirteen-year-old virgin ignorant of sexual difference and therefore ready to enable his periodical enterprise to flourish, none of which would be possible without the complicit management of the “good old woman.”

170 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 Through Haywood’s brilliant if disturbing opening exposé of the conditions of possibility required by “neutral” voyeuristic spectators, Exploralibus turns out to be the fi rst and most often foregrounded character in the Invisible Spy to serve as the object of his own satirical goals: it is from his own face that the mask of hypocrisy is plucked by the periodical, which insistently and repeatedly reveals the divergence between his public selfpresentation as a “rescuer [of] injured innocence” and the private, material confi nement of a young girl that makes such a powerful public role possible for him. Though (and perhaps because) Exploralibus himself never remarks upon this irony and is apparently never let in on the joke, virtually every book in the Invisible Spy functions simultaneously as an authoritative, reformist spectatorial periodical on the Addisonian model, and as a satirical commentary on the voyeuristic male narrator-position from which that periodical derives its cultural power. Though, as we have noted, the Female Spectator achieves a similar kind of parodic structure by juxtaposing the judgments of male focalizers with those of the periodical’s female eidolon, here Haywood’s satirical structure is much clearer because she has entirely removed her female authority figures from within the frame of the periodical’s vision, thereby emphasizing the heuristic purposes of the male narrator who is both internal to the text and obviously distinct from her own authorial perspective. With the Invisible Spy, Haywood fi nally arrived at a periodical format that would achieve her goal of feminist critique but now through pure negation, presenting her readers not with the problem of constructing a viable feminocentric vantage point, but with the problematic and self-blinded operations of a male spectatorial authority unable to reflect upon or to avow the repressive conditions of its own activity. To bring this point home all the more clearly, Haywood provides Exploralibus with several occasions to engage in such potentially illuminating self-reflection by having correspondents confront the invisible narrator with their concerns about his undertaking. Haywood’s Invisible Spy takes an apparently radically different approach to representing audience participation than that used by Addison and Steele’s periodicals or even by Haywood’s Female Spectator. While the earlier periodicals regularly include letters ostensibly written by readers as a way of structuring the reflections of their narrative personae—rarely going for more than a few installments or sections without some attempt to make it look as though audience participation is crucial to their enterprise—Exploralibus confi nes the treatment of such letters to two of the sixty-eight chapters in the eight books of the Invisible Spy series, and even then does so begrudgingly and without any detailed reaction from himself. In the opening chapter of Book III, Exploralibus explains that he will include some letters he has received from “unrequested correspondents,” and that he does so only because he has “no other way of communicating my sentiments to the authors of them, and shall leave it to the public to judge impartially between us” (IS 1:185–86). In fact, though, Exploralibus never answers any of the letters (some of which

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are themselves quite involved) with more than a single sentence expressing simple disagreement with or disapproval of the correspondent’s viewpoint, and he never offers the kind of thorough argumentation for his own “sentiments” that would make it possible for “the public to judge impartially.” While some of the letters deal with silly topics and are clearly meant as satires upon their probably fictional authors—letters, for example, about how young bucks have a right to be “sovereigns of all public places,” or about how aristocratic gambling can be defended as a means of winning money to give to beggars—others articulate quite serious issues that deserve much lengthier treatment than they receive from Exploralibus, some having to do with English anti-Semitism and the recent legislation regarding the naturalization of Jews, and others with Exploralibus’s “want of politeness” in “prying” into women’s secrets in a way that reminds one correspondent of Swift’s excremental poems about female corporeality. For the purposes of my argument here, however, the most telling letters Haywood includes in the two chapters of reader correspondence are those that directly question the ethical legitimacy and the cultural authority of Exploralibus’s spectatorial practices. One particularly concerned reader confronts Haywood’s narrator with a revealing, if hyperbolic, tirade about the implications of his particular brand of voyeurism: I am shocked and scandalized beyond measure at your title, and so I believe is everybody else that hears it—What but the very Devil incarnate can have tempted you to assume one so ungracious to all degrees of people?—An invisible spy!—why, it is a character more to be dreaded than an excise, a custom-house or a sheriff’s officer—nay, than even a King’s messenger—human prudence has taught us to elude the scrutiny of all known examiners; but who can guard against what they do not see?—You may be at our very elbows without our knowing you are. . . . What therefore can you expect, as there is no other way of dealing with you, but to have your book damn’d the fi rst moment of its publication? (IS 1:190) To be sure, Haywood foregrounds the excessive aspects of this reader’s peculiar reaction, as he goes on to threaten Exploralibus with legal action against him for “libel” even if what he writes is true and to ask why he does not give his scrutinized victims the opportunity to “bribe [him] to secrecy” (IS 1:190); at the same time, the incensed reader’s paranoia effectively captures a sense of the unwarranted and “dreadful” invasiveness of her narrator’s invisible surveillance, a force that exceeds the power of all legal officers and that cannot be “guard[ed] against.” Haywood’s litigious correspondent de-familiarizes for her readers the voyeuristic trope at the heart of the spectatorial periodical as a cultural institution, suggesting that it is both unnatural and illegitimate for audiences to endorse through their own habits of literary consumption the presence (even figurative) of

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an unseen observer by whom they should always imagine themselves potentially being observed. The very aberrant “inclusion” of a letter like this one, that undermines the practices both of the genre as a whole and of the specific publication in which it appears, draws attention to the strange absence of equivalent letters on this topic from readers in previous essay periodicals. The repressed returns yet again in Book VII, when Exploralibus pauses to print two unsolicited letters from readers, one of whom asks basic questions that seem rarely to have surfaced in the history of the genre, and that remain unanswered in spite of their being asked here: “But pray, who set you up for a censor of your neighbors’ actions?—By what rule do you pretend to judge what is deserving reproof, and what is not so?” (IS 2:193) Had the voyeuristic underpinnings of the moral essay become so naturalized for readers in the early liberal public sphere that it had never occurred to anyone to question those underpinnings? Or, from the angle of an even more conspiratorial interpretation, was it precisely this kind of question that previous periodical “editors” had to keep out of their publications in order for their moral authority to remain intact, even if the vague worry of possibly being watched must have been an implicit part of what made such periodicals attractive to readers in the fi rst place? Finally, though, Haywood’s Invisible Spy interrogates the moral authority of the spectatorial periodical by highlighting the disjunction between Exploralibus’s reformist intent, clarified in the paper’s initial installments, and his actual conduct in specific circumstances. While he claims that his invisibility will enable him to “rescue injured innocence,” Exploralibus reacts more like Addison and Steele’s befuddled, ineffectual Mr. Spectator when he is faced with disturbing and violent social situations that require redress. Moreover, while Mr. Spectator’s dazed withdrawals from effective public action rarely have any obvious immediate consequences in the world of Addison and Steele’s essays, Haywood repeatedly insists that Exploralibus’s voyeuristic reluctance to act leads directly to negative outcomes in the lives of the women he watches. Numerous female characters in the Invisible Spy end up dying, having abortions, being sent to a nunnery, or reluctantly removing themselves from publicness as a result of Exploralibus’s failure to use his privileged position to correct the injustices and misinterpretations by which they are beset. Though he occasionally wrings his figurative hands over the terrible plights of these female protagonists, and sometimes writes predictably ineffectual (intercepted, lost, or even unopened) letters to give important parties the information they need to do justice, in many cases it never even occurs to Exploralibus that he could do something to help the women upon whom he spies, despite the robust ethical assurances he offers in the opening essays that constitute a kind of “charter” for his spectatorial project. A cinematic version of the tales in the Invisible Spy would undoubtedly prompt concerned audience members to shout “Do something!” to Exploralibus on the screen, as he stands by impassively watching women get tricked, lied to, beaten, or

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sexually assaulted. Exploralibus offers readers a potential mode of satisfaction unavailable in the omniscient, proto-realist third-person narrative forms that predominate in much of Haywood’s amatory fictions, texts that place readers in the position of the detached but all-knowing narrator who (like the Deist God) is able to feel for the characters whose plot s/he narrates without being able to do anything for them. In the Invisible Spy, however, through Exploralibus’s capacity for intervention, readers can have their own ethical desires acted upon within the narratives; in this light, Exploralibus’s relentless refusal to act foregrounds the degree to which Haywood’s female readers might disidentify with the particularly ineffectual paternalistic cultural authority he represents. We can clarify Haywood’s more specific concerns about the ethics of spectatorship by analyzing the textual details of Exploralibus’s reluctance to engage. Her erstwhile narrator’s paradigmatic moments of impotence typically involve him knowing something about a character’s situation that either the character herself does not know, or that those in a position of authority or responsibility over the female character would better promote justice with if they knew. In Book V, for example, when a superstitious woman named Lysetta is on the verge of being tricked into marrying a dashing schemer secretly in league with the fraudulent female fortune-teller who has become her primary confidante, Exploralibus describes himself as “extremely divided” regarding the ethical choices available to him in his privileged position: though sentimentally he “could not bear the thoughts of [Lysetta] becoming the victim of the base design concerted against her”—potentially the compounded loss of “her fortune, reputation, and eternal peace of mind”—he initially doubts that anything he might do or say would effectively alter her misguided marital choice, based on the fact that she had previously rejected the warnings of her friends and relations, who are deeply concerned at the haste with which she has fallen under the spell of the strange newcomers to her life (IS 2:31). Upon some reflection, however, Exploralibus realizes that the hard evidence he could offer Lysetta about her perilous situation would far outweigh the merely speculative anxieties of her family members: “I had it in my power, indeed, to inform her of much more than any of them could guess at; but then I could not relate [the details of what] I had been witness of without discovering at the same time the secret of my invisible belt” (IS 2:31–32). Haywood emphasizes this formula by having Exploralibus use it throughout the papers as a primary way of exculpating his inaction when similar situations arise. Later in Book V, for instance, when he has knowledge that could preserve the reputation of a woman named Aristella, who has been impregnated and exiled from her family by a man who will not publicly acknowledge that they are married, Exploralibus momentarily appeases his conscience by telling his readers, “I would have given almost anything but the secret of my invisible belt and tablets to have cleared Aristella’s innocence in the fullest manner . . . [but] there was no doing the one without the other” (IS 2:91).

174 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 Through Exploralibus’s musings on his own spectatorial agency, Haywood forces readers to consider the relationship between the “power” conferred by voyeuristic aesthetic experience, on the one hand, and the social practice of ethical intersubjectivity, on the other. As in the example above, Exploralibus generally figures this relationship as one of almost complete disjunction: it is precisely the isolated spectatorial position through which he comes to understand how justice might be effected that makes Exploralibus’s own just activity impossible. In order to preserve his ability to have voyeuristic experiences and to sell literary narratives to consumers through his periodical enterprise, Exploralibus cannot put his aesthetic position to ethical use. In this starkly binary either-or scheme, social powerlessness is the necessary condition of the spectating subject’s aesthetic pleasure and knowledge. Unlike Addison and Steele, who at least allow Mr. Spectator (and the readers who identify with him) to congratulate themselves on having the correct affective reaction to the injustices they witness through aesthetic representation, Haywood disrupts such smug sentimental closure in a number of ways. First, she insists on the immediacy of the injustices Exploralibus describes in a way that Addison and Steele do not for their own narrator. As we saw in our reading of Spectator 11, Steele displaces the problem of colonial violence both temporally and geographically by locating his tragic Amerindian heroine, Yarico, a half century in the past and a hemisphere away from his readers.30 For Yarico, as implicitly for the ethical issues raised by enslavement and economic exploitation, Addison and Steele’s readers can do little more than shrug and weep. In Haywood’s texts, however, the objects of the sentimental voyeur’s attention are located literally within his potential grasp and involved in situations whose outcomes he can rather obviously influence. This issue of spectatorial influence over the course of narrative events is the second of Haywood’s refi nements upon the Addison–Steele model of sentimental self-congratulation, and it significantly alters the way her readers are positioned to react to Exploralibus’s claims of irremediable impotence. The way Addison and Steele frame the issue of spectatorial ethics makes it hard for readers to expect much from Mr. Spectator: after all, what can he (or they) be asked to do about English involvement in the Caribbean slave trade? While they are perhaps less complicated from a geopolitical standpoint than the issues raised by Addison and Steele’s globalizing economic system, the ethical problems canvassed in Haywood’s Invisible Spy are no less serious for their comparatively radical locality (i.e., the violence done to a particular English woman in a particular social situation), and, more directly to Haywood’s point, such problems are potentially more amenable to cultural solutions as a result both of their relative immediacy and ubiquity, and of their appropriateness for representation in popular narrative forms, especially (as we have seen) through the plot structures that Haywood imports into the periodical essay from her earlier amatory and seduction fictions. By having Exploralibus stand by and allow terrible, preventable

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events to unfold right in front of him—an ethical choice legitimized only by his desire to continue to be able to watch—Haywood demands that readers ask themselves not only the hypothetical question “what would you do in this narrator’s-character’s uncommon situation,” but the much more practical question “what will you do when you are in this narrator’s-character’s all-too-common situation,” for example, that of knowing about dissimulation, slander, theft, assault, or domestic violence in your own neighborhood or social circles.31 Moreover, Haywood makes the stakes of answering such questions clearer than do Addison and Steele, by closing her narratives with an account of the consequences of Exploralibus’s spectatorial inaction: there are too many instances of this procedure in the Invisible Spy to mention them all here, but in Book II, for example, Isabinda ends up aborting her pregnancy and getting banished to a nunnery as the result of a series of misunderstandings Exploralibus could easily have set straight; in Book V, Aristella (mentioned above) dies during a miscarriage after having been disowned by her family, only because Exploralibus doesn’t want to relinquish his “belt of invisibility”; and in Book VI, Narcissa fi nishes her life in contrite retirement after being tricked into a marriage that Exploralibus fails to prevent.32 But perhaps the most graphic example of Haywood’s concerns about Exploralibus’s self-imposed impotence can be found, significantly enough, in the fi nal installment of this periodical project. At the end of Book VIII, walking home invisibly through Hyde Park after a late night out, Exploralibus stumbles upon Cleanthes (“a gentleman of good family, great worth, and opulent estate”) and his wife Aglaura (“a young woman . . . meanly born, more meanly educated . . . and of a reputation not quite unblemished”) engaged in rather heated dialogue about Aglaura’s recent public displays of interest in a particular young gallant. While Aglaura pleads her connection with the gallant in question is innocent enough, Cleanthes calls her an “abandon’d prostitute” and decides to punish her on the spot: threatening to cut off parts of her face if she resists, Cleanthes forces her to strip herself naked, after which he throws her into the Serpentine River and holds her head under water for minutes at a time “so that without being drowned she felt all the agonies which that kind of death inflicts” (IS 2:368). Aglaura survives this fury, only because Cleanthes becomes “weary’d . . . tho’ not glutted with the exercise of his revenge,” as the impassive Exploralibus never considers intervening in spite of her cries for help—“Is there no body near to save me!” she shrieks at one point—and in spite of the fact that his invisibility makes Exploralibus, in his own account, “equally free from danger as from fear” (IS 2:365–68).33 What is remarkable about this episode, for the purposes of my argument, is not only the graphic brutality of the misogynistic violence Haywood represents directly in the scene, nor even the explicit and repeated refusal on Exploralibus’s part to stop the beating even when he is directly asked to do so by the victim in the terms of her question to the apparently

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empty grounds of Hyde Park. Also important is the fact that Haywood stages alternative ways of reacting to Cleanthes within the narrative itself through Exploralibus’s mention (during the course of this installment) of other people in their shared social circles. There are at least two important things worth noting about these alternative spectators’ reactions in relation to Exploralibus. First, others are virtually universal in their negative judgment of Cleanthes’s approach to his wife, as “almost every one condemn’d Cleanthes . . . for his present ill usage of [Aglaura],” a condemnation based not on the extreme violence he enacts in the episode described above, but before that episode had even taken place, when the jealous Cleanthes had merely confiscated Aglaura’s jewels, “locked her into a garret, suffered no one to come near her,” and limited her diet to “food of the coarsest kind, and no more than would just suffice to keep her from perishing” (IS 2:363–64). These details were not hidden from the public, so the couple’s relationship became the subject of “much conversation in town”; in other words, when Exploralibus encounters them in his rambles around London, he already knows of Cleanthes’s capacity for violence and can hardly claim to have been caught off-guard by what he sees. The second noteworthy aspect of other spectators’s opinions here is that their judgment against Cleanthes’s actions does not require that Aglaura be considered an example of the kind of “injured innocence” Exploralibus claims it is his mission to “rescue” in the opening installments of the Invisible Spy. As a result of her own misbehavior as a married woman—an insatiable desire for “engaging new admirers” that prompts her to make “advances which would be shocking to repeat, to every pretty fellow she came in company with, even before the face of her much injured husband” (IS 2:362)—Exploralibus reports that “scarce any one pitied Aglaura,” but her reproachable conduct in no way justifies Cleanthes’s revenge in the eyes of other spectators; as one representative voice of public opinion puts it, “It is beneath the dignity of a man of sense or honour . . . to treat thus inhumanely a woman, how unworthy soever she may be, who is yet his wife” (IS 2:364). Haywood goes out of her way to make Aglaura a difficult character for her readers to sympathize with; Aglaura both actively pursues potentially illicit relationships with other men, and she lacks any offsetting virtues that might temper her audience’s judgment about her: Exploralibus describes her as having “little sense of the happiness she enjoys” during the early happy days of her marriage to the initially doting Cleanthes, and equally devoid of “affection or gratitude for the man who bestowed [such happiness] on her” by marrying so far beneath his rank (IS 2:362). Even so, Haywood clearly wants to make Cleanthes’s excessive reaction to his wife’s misconduct the critical focus of this particular installment, rather than the female misconduct itself, the narration of which would surely be much more titillating for her audience than the scenes of violence she chooses to include. In fact, there is far more discussion of the reasonable and legal options available to Cleanthes (besides

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imprisonment and beating) for curbing his wayward wife than there is of her innocence or guilt as an accused adulteress; as another representative voice of idealized public opinion asks, “If [Aglaura] really is guilty of having wronged his bed . . . why, on the discovery of her crime, did he not turn her out of doors?—why did he not sue for a divorce?” (IS 2:365). 34 These questions are left hanging in the air unanswered at the end of the essay, as if to suggest that the fact of Aglaura’s guilt is less relevant to readers’ judgment about her case than the undeniable and unjustifi able brutality of Cleanthes’s reaction to her. In the end, Haywood suggests, injured guilt is no less deserving of “rescue” than injured innocence—injury is injury—and Exploralibus fails to rescue either group. However, what comes through most clearly in Haywood’s depiction of this idealized and disembodied public opinion is that its consumption of narratives about other people’s lives is guided by principles of judgment (human dignity, standards of honor) and the desire to see those principles acted upon, rather than by more private, quietistic and aesthetic motives like Exploralibus’s endless desire to watch. While Exploralibus describes his own ethical and narrative practices as driven by a “natural curiosity” and by an agitated “impatience” to see how a situation will unfold (IS 2:366, 369), the representatives of Haywood’s idealized public sphere reveal that their primary interest in reading (or watching, or hearing about) others’ lives is to assess social behaviors in ethical terms, to decide what behaviors deserve condemnation or approval, and to determine what criteria might be brought to bear in making such decisions. In this idealized arena of literary and moral discussion, aesthetic experience and spectatorship should enable the social production of justice, not the self-indulgent pleasures of sentimental withdrawal. When Exploralibus witnesses Aglaura’s beating, he fi nds himself “astonished,” unable “to make any reflections upon it,” and “impatient” to see more action, action which fi nally overwhelms Exploralibus emotionally, as the sight of Aglaura locked up starving in her garret proves itself to him “a spectacle too moving—I could not bear it, but left the house immediately” (IS 2:369–70). This is not to say that Haywood’s ideal spectators should respond to narratives and scenes in a way that is entirely free from affect—even the representatives of public opinion here consider “pity” as a possible criterion for guiding their judgment (IS 2:364)—but that the feeling prompted by aesthetic motives should be framed within a broader context of communal decision making that promotes equity rather than being pursued for the sake of its own prolongation (under the name of curiosity, astonishment, shock, or impatience). An obvious question that arises from this reading of the spectators in Haywood’s fi nal installment of the Invisible Spy has to do with our sense of where her own authorial commitments might lie: more specific, how do we know that Haywood herself does not share Exploralibus’s doubts about the ethical efficacy of aesthetic experience? Why should we not take him as representative of her own trafficking in ethically questionable voyeuristic

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culture consumption, of her own desire, that is, to produce and sell salacious narratives to gratify precisely those illicit and anti-social elements in her public’s “corrupted” taste that this argument claims she means to counter? Does she agree with her own character, the cosmopolitan libertine Clyamon from Book IV, who argues that the “ideal spectator neither participates in folly nor obviously condemns” what she/he sees? Would she sympathize with Exploralibus’s idea that the best narrator is one who not only eschews participation in the scenes she witnesses, but who also has the “prudence” to “conceal [her] sentiments” on the matter at hand “without pretending to intrude [her] own opinion” (IS 1:125)? How could we know? One way of beginning to answer questions like these has to do, as we have seen, with Haywood’s insistence in both of her spectatorial periodicals on including within her texts a range of possible responses to the issues raised by the narratives they present. That is to say, Haywood almost never naturalizes or universalizes the response of her primary narrator, but always situates that response within a comparative context of alternative views, giving her readers a sense both of what motivates different kinds of aesthetic experiences and of the public consequences that follow from contrasting forms of spectatorship. Beyond the potentially slight evidence of the alternative public mentioned in the last installment of Book VIII, there are at least two other sections of Haywood’s text one might examine to get a sense of how her own priorities might specifically differ from those of Exploralibus and other characters who share his peculiar spectatorial tendencies. First, in an episode that stretches over several installments in Book VI, Exploralibus narrates his response to a kind of event that obviously preoccupied Haywood in her periodical writing—the story of a young woman tricked at a masquerade, from which she is then abducted and raped, with no way of identifying her attacker. The two protagonists of this particular narrative, Matilda and her husband Alexis, are personal acquaintances of Exploralibus—with the narrator having served as a kind of surrogate father to Alexis during the latter’s days as a schoolboy at Westminster—which makes the story all the more personally affecting for him and increases the likelihood that he’ll be willing to get involved on their behalf. While both the circumstances of the masquerade and the cunning strategy of the attacker make it impossible for Exploralibus to prevent the abduction, Haywood uses Exploralibus’s varying reactions in the abduction’s aftermath to stage the differences between ethically effective spectatorship and its sentimental, quietistic alternative. Immediately after he realizes Matilda has been taken away by a stranger and not by her own husband (both of whom dressed in the guise of a blue domine), Exploralibus lapses into the kind of fatal, voyeuristic inaction we have seen to characterize most of his narratives in the Invisible Spy: he fails to let Alexis know that he is present at the ball and able to assist him, despite the fact that Alexis obviously needs help and is trying to deploy as many servants as he can to search the city for his kidnapped wife. Instead,

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Exploralibus excuses his detachment by expressing discomfort with the idea of letting Alexis know he attended the masquerade when he initially turned down the invitation (how impolite would that be!), and by claiming that “there were no measures [Alexis] could take that night” that “would enable him to recover his dear Matilda” (IS 2:113–15)—a claim blatantly undermined by the fact that Alexis is at that very moment mobilizing both the public sphere (“every tavern and bagnio”) to get and disseminate whatever information he can, and the legal system (a nearby “justice of the peace”) to get a warrant “to search in all suspected places” (IS 2:114). Exploralibus simply cannot know in advance that these measures will prove fruitless, and his own refusal to help makes his prophecy seem a bit self-fulfilling. As compensation, Exploralibus assuages himself by looking inward to legitimate his spectatorial prerogatives: he laments, “my heart bled for [Alexis], and if I had been capable of offering him either advice or consolation, would not have kept at the distance I did”; instead of acting, he watches his tormented surrogate son from a position of insulated invisibility, driven by a curiosity merely “of seeing what event [Alexis’s] cogitations would produce,” until even that voyeurism proves so boring that he has “no inclination to follow either master or man on expeditions that promis’d so little success” (IS 2:113–15). Indeed, even the next morning, Exploralibus rises motivated not by outrage at what has happened and by the desire to see justice done, but by a more self-indulgent “impatience” to see the next part of the story (IS 2:116). In the ensuing decision that Exploralibus must make as to whether he should visit Alexis in his “visible or invisible capacity” for the dénouement of the narrative, Haywood clarifies what is at stake in differentiating between the voyeuristic spectatorial mode that dominates the periodical essay from its beginnings with Addison and Steele, on the one hand, and a mode of aesthetic reception that would conduce to ethical intersubjectivity, on the other. Exploralibus opts “to appear in propria persona”—without the protection of his belt of invisibility—and this choice, though it requires a brief moment of dissimulation from him toward Alexis since he must begin by acting as if he knew nothing of Matilda’s abduction the previous night, catalyzes a kind of ethical engagement on Exploralibus’s part that we see in no other episode in the collected Invisible Spy (IS 2:116, italics in text). Rather than droning on about the futility of all possible action to save or to find Matilda, when Exploralibus places himself in a situation of face-to-face reciprocal visibility with Alexis, he finds himself suddenly prompted by “common compassion and good nature . . . to make use of [his] utmost endeavours to assuage [Alexis’s] sorrows” (IS 2:119). Immediately, Exploralibus counsels Alexis against the inefficient strategy of sending servants out to every random tavern they can find, and he produces a more socially tactful and geographically comprehensive use of public-sphere institutions to achieve his friend’s aims: they write up an advertisement for the “daily papers,” describing Matilda in detail without naming her, and offering

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a reward to anyone who can say where she might have “alighted out of a hackney-coach in company with a gentleman in a blue domine between the hours of twelve and one at night,” further specifying a coffee house where the reward should be paid upon information received (IS 2:120–21). Understanding that this method will keep his family from the shame of public knowledge about the kidnapping (which is not mentioned in the ad), and that it is more likely to attract the attention of gratuity-hungry men who read such papers, Alexis’s “languid face” suddenly gleams with “a sudden dawn of chearfulness” (IS 2:120). The particulars of Haywood’s plot end up making these public-sphere strategies unrelated to the fi nal outcome of the story, but the larger point Haywood makes here about the ethics of spectatorship has less to do with the outcome of Exploralibus’s actions than with the fact that he acts at all: Haywood’s narrative emphasizes that there is something about the solipsistic pleasures of voyeurism that disables our “common compassion” and our willingness “to assuage [the] sorrows” of others, and that we must be vigilant to avoid immersion in forms of aesthetic experience that distance us from a sense of our ethical capacity. When his perception of them is mediated through his feeling of invisible immunity, Exploralibus’s lived quotidian spaces (and the people in them) take on an aesthetic dimension whose heightened immediacy, rather than making him feel more connected and responsible to others in his life-world, actually drives him deeper and deeper into the conviction that his isolated subjectivity can have no bearing on the social context in which it is situated. Against this model of spectatorship, Haywood contrasts not only Exploralibus’s brief awakening we have just discussed, but also the response of ordinary bystanders to a duel that takes place in Book III. Exploralibus plans to attend this foolish conflict between Leander and Aristus invisibly in order “to be spectator of the combat between them,” presumably willing to watch one or both of them be killed over nothing (IS 1:243). But alas, the voyeur oversleeps and misses the entire affair. As her character recovers from his quite serious wounds, Haywood offers us Leander’s direct testimony about the relationship between the duel and its unintended audience: “Some people, whose windows had a prospect of the artillery ground, saw the first of our engagement, and making all the haste they could to prevent the threatened mischief, arrived [and] beat down the sword of Aristus and placed themselves before me as a shield” (IS 1:247). Here is a model, not to be found in Exploralibus’s general practice, of ethical movement from mere passive spectatorship to the interventionist position of “deliverer,” as the agential crowd end up not only saving Leander’s life but also pursuing the offending instigator Aristus with their “reproaches” until he is finally “out of hearing” (IS 1:247).35 And who are these heroes? They are nameless ordinary people who put themselves at grave risk “to prevent threatened mischief” in their social world in a way far more easily available to Exploralibus, given that his invisibility makes him, as he says, “equally free from danger as from fear.”

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What emerges as a pattern within Haywood’s many narratives in the Invisible Spy, perhaps more clearly than in any of her other texts (however insistently those texts may imagine the effect of their own reception), is the extent to which spectatorial reaction to scenes of violence or injustice actually makes or unmakes the socioethical world Haywood’s characters inhabit. For the imperiled female (and less often male) protagonist of Haywood’s essay-periodical narratives, episodes end comically or tragically depending upon whether the spectators around that protagonist are prompted to act on her behalf when they have the knowledge and power to do so. As we have seen, Exploralibus’s general refusal to intervene in the scenes he witnesses begs this question of the spectator’s responsibility for creating justice; in Haywood’s texts this question is never satisfactorily answered or commented on by Exploralibus, but it pervades our response to the inexorable dénouements of her narratives, as her readers are made to watch, waiting to see if other spectators will rescue the injured when they have the chance. By staging the aesthetic reception of her own texts in such a foregrounded way, Haywood unmistakably implicates her readers’ own pleasure or pain in the ethical outcomes of the scenes they witness. Haywood forces readers to interrogate their own aesthetic practices: she demands both that readers ask themselves why they want to read or to watch, and that they attend to the ethico-political implications of their aesthetic experiences. To shape her readers’ self-interrogation, Haywood sets up sharp contrasts between different modes of aesthetic reception: a kind of reading motivated by impatience, curiosity, and the desire for pleasure, on the one hand, against one guided by principles of judgment and the desire for justice, on the other. As Haywood makes clear through Exploralibus’s transformation from the former kind of spectator to the latter in the Matilda–Alexis episode of Book VI (analyzed at length above), however, these modes of aesthetic reception should not be thought of as binary opposites. In a way that anticipates the allegories of spectatorship in Mary Wollstonecraft’s political novels, Haywood demonstrates how a mode of looking based on self-directed affect can develop into one that prompts just action, how solipsistic curiosity about the affairs of others can become the basis for effective ethical intervention in those affairs. Finally, Haywood closes off her potentially limitless spectatorial periodical with an account of how even more despicable modes of watching than that of mere voyeuristic impatience can be converted to ethical action with a feminocentric intent. As we have seen, Haywood shares with her predecessor Mary Astell a concern about women who watch other women with a sadistic desire to see them contained or brought low, a desire that is often mediated through women’s identification with a patriarchal (or at least male) perspective. In the case of the Invisible Spy, such sadistic female spectatorship serves as a part of the periodical’s enabling conceit in the form of the thirteen-year-old virgin’s ruthlessly effective grandmotherly guardian. Both this elderly woman and the virgin without whom Exploralibus’s

182 Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 narratives could not be transcribed disappear from the pages of Haywood’s periodical after its initial installments, only to reappear in the hasty note of “conclusion” that Exploralibus appends to the last chapter of Book VIII as a way of explaining why the Invisible Spy must come to an abrupt halt. Exploralibus’s brief account of his enterprise’s downfall is pregnant with implications and worth quoting in its entirety; he explains, Here, O reader! a total stop is put to my endeavours to oblige thee!— nature has baffled all my vain precautions to preserve my little virgin in her native purity—the woman whom I appointed to attend [the virgin] accidentally dropp’d from her pocket the picture of a very lovely youth—the girl, unfortunately for me, as well as for thee, took it up, was charm’d with it—sleep renew’d the pleasing image in her mind, and added life and motion to it—she dream’d that it was her bedfellow—that it kiss’d, embrac’d, and lay within her arms—so that in spite of all my cares, and without ever having seen the substance of a man, she has received an idea of the difference of the sexes. (IS 2:371) This remarkable passage traces at least two movements within Haywood’s text that seem significant for the overarching effect of her periodical, placed as this passage is in the privileged locus of closure; Haywood didn’t need to account for the end of her periodical enterprise at all, but since she chose specifically to end it this way, it seems worth analyzing what is at stake in the terms of her virgin’s sexual enlightenment. First, we have here an account of a young woman’s transformation from being the object of spectatorial scrutiny to the subject of her own spectatorial gaze—a transformation whose contours preoccupied Haywood from her earliest amatory fictions—and of the political consequences of that movement. In Haywood’s account, sexual identity gets initiated and becomes comprehensible through the female subject’s aesthetic encounter with “the pleasing image” of a potential “bedfellow”—an image that then takes on amplified “life and motion” when mediated through the subject’s aesthetic faculties of imagination and dreamwork. Here, too, the moment of the female subject’s becoming-spectator coincides with the moment of her liberation from the dungeon of the paternalistic culture industry, synecdochally represented by Exploralibus’s spectatorial periodical. The allegory here seems almost too plain: once she comes to “see” for herself—even if her “sight” is merely aesthetic, given that she has still not seen “the substance of a man”—this young woman is no longer available for simple use by the producers of conduct literature, though, as Haywood’s other texts make amply clear, to become a spectatorial subject is not necessarily to become a self-conscious and intentional agent within the culture industry or the marriage-and-courtship markets so often represented in that industry’s most influential texts. This fictional girl, “liberated” into her own sexual subjectivity, will now need attentively to read the Female

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Spectator as a guide to negotiating her desire within those aesthetic and material contexts. However, there is a second, equally important movement indexed in Exploralibus’s terse conclusion by the elderly female jailer’s decision to subvert the spectatorial periodical from the “inside,” as it were. By claiming “accidentally” to have dropped the picture of the “very lovely youth” where the naïve virgin might peruse it and take it up as her own, the good old woman brings down Exploralibus’s periodical without having to take the blame for it: Exploralibus ascribes his misfortune to the “nature” of a generalized feminine sexual appetite which has fi nally eluded his ability to control it, rather than to the intentional collusive action of women uniting to protect their interests. The text must equivocate about causality here, of course, written as it unavoidably is in the voice of Haywood’s ludicrously self-blinded narrator, but Exploralibus’s emphasis on the “accidental” quality of his downfall draws readers’ attention to what he would obscure: how is it possible that the same female guardian who (as we saw) began as a paragon of servile diligence in the interests of her master should suddenly be so careless as to lose control of an image that could put an end both to her master’s writing career and to her own employment? We can only speculate, but the old woman’s pleasures of personal profit and of sadistic identification against her female charge finally get outweighed by a sense of injustice that could only be produced through sympathetic identification with the young woman and against their collective jailer. In the closing lines of Haywood’s periodical, women put an end to an admittedly micropolitical but allegorically suggestive system of domination, acting in concert as a result of one woman converting her mode of spectatorship—the jailer becomes the liberator.36 Moreover, Haywood pushes her readers to consider their own identificatory investments regarding the young woman’s liberation. How complicit are her own readers, Haywood asks, with the aims and consequences of the spectatorial periodical and its cultural authority? Is the virgin’s release from bondage a misfortune, as Exploralibus suggests, “for me, as well as for thee”?

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. See The Tatler, ed. and intro. George A. Aitken, 4 vols. (1898); The Spectator, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (1965). 2. Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (1924, vol. 2): 53. 3. Ibid., 54. 4. Ibid., 53–54. 5. See Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (1999). 6. Ibid., 47. 7. See, for example, two of Nancy Fraser’s more influential essays: “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (1989): 109–42; “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” in Feminists Read Habermas, ed. Johanna Meehan (1995): 21–56. See also Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (2002). 8. Mandeville (1924, vol. 2): 51. 9. Ibid., 43–44. Of course, Mandeville’s explicit topic here is not the public sphere per se but the invention of “virtue.” The emulative effect he describes, however, has clear implications for the functioning of public-oriented discourses and practices. 10. The structure of reception Mandeville imagines here could be seen as a slightly more complicated version of the ideologically inflected distinction between exoteric and esoteric audiences analyzed by neoconservative political theorist Leo Strauss. For discussion, see Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953); Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952). 11. See Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (2002); Astell, Refl ections Upon Marriage, in Astell’s Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (1996): 7–80; [Delarivier Manley et al], The Female Tatler, ed. Fidelis Morgan (1992). 12. Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (1989): 32–37. 13. Ibid., 35; Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987): 66. 14. Mandeville (1924, vol. 2): 54. 15. For an account of how masculine authority extended into domestic spaces conventionally thought of as having been assigned to female direction in post-Restoration English culture, see Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (1998).

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Notes

16. For readings of the early eighteenth-century public sphere that are sympathetic to Habermas, see Lawrence Klein, “Enlightenment as Conversation,” in What’s Left of Enlightenment?: A Postmodern Question, eds. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill (2001); his book length study, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (1993); Scott Black, “Social and Literary Form in the Spectator,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (1999): 21–42; Michael Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the Spectator Papers (1985). 17. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1989). 18. See the selections of Defoe’s political journalism in The Best of Defoe’s Review : An Anthology, ed. William L. Payne, intro. Marjorie Nicolson (1951); Dunton [et al], Athenian Mercury (1691–97); Haywood, The Female Spectator, in Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, eds. Kathryn R. King and Alexander Pettit, 2 sets of 3 vols. (2001); Haywood, The Invisible Spy. By Exploralibus. 2 vols. (1755); Locke, The Selected Political Writings of John Locke, ed. Paul E. Sigmund (2005); Ward, The London-spy compleat, in eighteen parts. The first volume of the author’s writings, 4th ed. (1709). 19. In addition to the aforementioned texts by Hunter and Klein, see Timothy Dykstal, The Luxury of Skepticism: Politics, Philosophy, and Dialogue in the English Public Sphere, 1660–1740 (2001). 20. See Jody Greene, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730 (2005); Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (1998); Iona Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (2005); Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (1998). 21. See Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (2005). 22. In addition to the texts by Armstrong and Shevelow cited above, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990); Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1995); Erin Mackie’s treatment of this shift in the early periodical in her Market á la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (1997). See also the excellent collection of essays on gender and early print culture in Elizabeth Eger et al., eds., Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (2001). 23. Shevelow (1989): 35. 24. Armstrong (1987): 66. For more on the concept of “overwriting,” see William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (1998). 25. See J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (1990); Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1983); Helen Berry, Gender, Society, and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury (2003). 26. See Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to PostStructuralism (1984). 27. See Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (1994); Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. M. Eldred (1987). 28. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” (1989): 124. 29. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (1997): 19.

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30. James Grantham Turner, “Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela,” Representations 48 (1994): 73. 31. See Kristina Straub, “Reconstructing the Gaze: Voyeurism in Richardson’s Pamela,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 18 (1988). 32. For reference, see Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education: and, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. and intro. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (1996). 33. For incisive analyses of Haywood relevant to the issues raised here, see especially, Juliette Merritt’s study, Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators (2004); Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women (1993); the essays in Kirsten Saxton and Rebecca Bocchicchio, eds., The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work (2000); the more recent collection by Donald J. Newman and Lynn Marie Wright, eds., Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and the Female Spectator (2006). 34. See Haywood, Fantomina, in Fantomina and Other Works, eds. Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anne C. Patchias (2004): 41–71; Haywood, The City Jilt, in Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (1999): 83–120.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Quoted in Bond, editor’s introduction to The Spectator, 5 vols. (1965, vol. 1): xcv. In Bond’s estimation, Collet’s advice about his daughters’ reading would “doubtless be endorsed by most considering parents throughout the century” (vol. 1): xcv. 2. Johnson in the Public Advertiser, December 14, 1776; quoted and discussed in Bond’s introduction (1965, vol 1): xcviii. 3. Johnson, Life of Addison, in Johnson’s Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (2000): 676. 4. Wallace, “An Essay on the Variations of English Prose, from the Revolution to the Present Time” [1796], Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 6 (Dublin, 1797): 2, 58. 5. Lewis, “Addison.” Essays on the Eighteenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith in Honor of His Seventieth Birthday (1945), 7. 6. Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith Julia Morley (1918), 43. 7. Wallace (1797): 58. 8. Cowan, “Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere,” EighteenthCentury Studies 37 (2004): 357. For accounts of Addison and Steele’s work that focus on their permutation of gender ideology, see Erin Mackie, Market á la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (1997); Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (1998); and Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (1989). For a recent study that reads Addison and Steele as part of the early development of the literary professional, see Iona Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (2005). 9. From the Preface to Volume III of the Review (February 1706/7), in Defoe, The Best of Defoe’s Review: An Anthology, ed. William L. Payne, intro. Marjorie Nicolson (1951), 37. 10. From Defoe’s Review, Volume II, No. 54 (July 7, 1705); ibid., 19.

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Notes

11. Ibid., 36. 12. Ibid., 67, 26. 13. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (1994), 97. In Klein’s account, the conventions of Shaftesburian conversation “embodied the norms of freedom, equality, activity, and pleasure” (99). 14. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2 vols., ed. Philip Ayres (1999, vol. 1), 45, italics in text. For a reading of Shaftesburian conversation sympathetic to the one being articulated here, see Timothy Dykstal, The Luxury of Skepticism: Politics, Philosophy, and Dialogue in the English Public Sphere, 1660–1740 (2001). In Dykstal’s account, “the obvious point to be made about [Shaftesbury’s ideal] discursive realm is that it would actually be private, homogeneous, and ‘clubbable.’ The less obvious point is that because of its homogeneity, it would have little interest in seeing that the conditions that make its freedom possible are extended to other spheres and other publics” (104). Pushing this argument further still, Dykstal claims that Shaftesbury’s skeptical epistemology itself “depends upon a distinctive dissociation from the larger community” (104). For a reading of Shaftesbury’s elitism that de-emphasizes the arrogance of its exclusivity, see David Marshall, “Taste and Aesthetics (i)—Shaftesbury and Addison: Criticism and the Public Taste,” Ch. 28 in Vol. 4 of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (1998), 633–57. According to Marshall’s description of Shaftesbury’s public sphere, “if there is inequality here, it is that of an enlightened liberal republic in which people consent to be governed by an intellectual aristocracy composed of benevolent leaders who govern by persuading the public through reason” (641). Marshall examines the ways in which Shaftesbury’s theory of aesthetic reception upholds the potentially democratizing notion of “the reader’s inherent superiority” over authors and critics (656). 15. In fact, Shaftesbury’s theory of public discourse promotes a condescension toward just this kind of audience that seems to justify Mandeville’s allegory of reading that we examined in the introduction. As Shaftesbury puts it, “’tis real humanity and kindness to hide strong truths from tender eyes . . . by a pleasant amusement,” since ultimately it is “necessary . . . for wise men to speak in parables, and with a double meaning, that the enemy may be amus’d, and they only who have ears to hear, may hear” (1999, vol. 1): 39. 16. Shaftesbury, (1999, vol. 1): 41. I have benefited from reading David Alvarez’s analysis of the extent to which Shaftesbury is less interested in truth than in the rhetorical management of affect; see Alvarez, “Mary Astell’s Critique of Shaftesbury’s Liberal Tolerance in Bart’lemy Fair: or, an Enquiry after Wit” (unpublished manuscript, 2007). 17. As Iona Italia has described it, Addison and Steele promote the idea that “readers are part of [Mr. Spectator’s] club and share his values.” See Italia (2005): 90. 18. With regard to Ward’s innovation, as Maurer points out, Pierre Motteux had already established the format of the periodical as a kind of letter written from the capital to the provinces in his Gentleman’s Journal (1692–94) by adapting the basic conceit of the French Mercure Galant (1673–74 and 1678–79). For discussion, see Maurer (1998): 39–40. Ward borrows Motteux’s format to get his own periodical off the ground, but he then sheds this initial epistolary scaffolding, as it were, to produce more universally appealing essays based on urban observation in a way that rather obviously anticipates Addison’s Spectator papers.

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19. For illuminating analyses of Dunton, see especially Helen Berry’s book-length study, Gender, Society, and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury (2003), and her earlier essay, “‘Nice and Curious Questions’: Coffee Houses and the Representation of Women in John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury.” Seventeenth Century 12 (1997); Urmi Bhowmik, “Facts and Norms in the Marketplace of Print: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36 (2003); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (1990): 12–16; Gilbert D. McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1972); Stephen Parks, John Dunton and the English Book Trade: A Study of His Career with a Checklist of His Publications (1976); Shevelow (1989): 58–92. 20. For discussion of the historical background and significance of Dunton’s “Athenian” movement, see Hunter (1990): 12–16. Dunton functions for Hunter as a perfect example of the enterprising writer who capitalized on and fed the public’s “receptivity to innovation for its own sake” (14), a man whose “values, habits of mind, and cultural attitudes [were] feared by traditionalists” largely because his writing “indicated the way the culture was moving” (18). 21. Hunter (1990): 14, 13; Bhowmik (2003): 347. Ultimately, Bhowmik demonstrates the limitations of this Habermasian reading of Dunton by focusing on how the periodical was suspended for two months in 1692 for having considered a dilemma suggestively like that faced by James II in relation to his daughters, a situation that neatly reveals the paper’s need to exclude matters of state from its discussions (361–64). For an account of the Enlightenment public sphere that foregrounds how its very existence required its political impotence, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (1988). 22. Shevelow (1989): 79, 80. 23. Ibid., 79, 80. For another nuanced discussion of the tension between emancipatory and disciplinary elements in Dunton’s periodicals, see Maurer (1998), especially 6, 10–14, 34–39, and 47–60. Maurer’s reading illuminates the ways in which Dunton’s periodicals initiate public-sphere texts’ intervention into private, domestic matters, and the periodicals’ construction not only of a normative femininity but also of a chaste, patriarchal masculinity capable of self-regulation. For a reading of Dunton that emphasizes his acknowledgment of female commercial activity in the early book trade, see Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (1998): 25–26. 24. One theme that runs throughout much of the critical work on Dunton involves his initiation of ideologies and narrative techniques that get refi ned or congealed in the work of Addison and Steele. See Maurer (1998): 74; and see also Shevelow’s (1989) claim that while periodicals of Dunton’s era “did not push vigorously an essentialist concept of gender differentiation,” they “set into place the literary construction—the special and distinct category of experience, and to some degree of expression, labeled ‘feminine’—which would in later publications create a prescriptive image of women” (66). On a different matter entirely, Iona Italia (2005) notes a progression from the posing of “complex and tricky dilemmas” in Dunton’s periodical, questions which “seem to have been invented to test the editors’ ingenuity,” to the staging in Addison and Steele’s essays of questions “so schematic that it seems likely that many of them were written by Addison and Steele themselves to serve as exempla” (89); the implication of Italia’s reading, of course, is that Dunton’s periodical was more verifi ably and believably participatory than his successors’. For more on the relationship between

190 Notes

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Dunton’s periodical and the casuistical tradition, see G. A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (1971): 1–32. See George A. Aitken’s four-volume edition of The Tatler (1898, vol. 4): 157. Henceforth abbreviated “T” and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. See Donald F. Bond’s five-volume edition of The Spectator (1965, vol. 1): 46–47. Henceforth abbreviated “S” and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. Scholarship on Astell has gradually gathered momentum over the last two decades. For issues germane to this analysis, see especially Carol Barash, “‘The Native Liberty . . . of the Subject’: Configurations of Gender and Authority in the Works of Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fyge Egerton, and Mary Astell,” in Women, Writing, History: 1640–1799, eds. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (1992), 55–69; Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1 (1988): 24–29; the essays in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, eds. William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson (2007); Ruth Perry’s indispensable study, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (1986); Patricia Springborg, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (2005). See Astell’s third edition of Refl ections Upon Marriage, in Patricia Springborg’s edition of Astell’s Political Writings (1996): 7. Henceforth abbreviated “RM” and cited parenthetically in the text. Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” In The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick (1995): 1. For more on the constitution of cultural authority in Astell, see Catherine Sharrock, “De-Ciphering Women and De-Scribing Authority: The Writings of Mary Astell,” in Women, Writing, History: 1640–1799, eds. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (1992): 109–24. All references to the two parts of Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694/1697) are to Patricia Springborg’s edition (2002). Henceforth cited in the text and abbreviated as “SP.” Astell uses the politically charged figure of “enclosure” to describe the procedures by which men have restricted women’s access to knowledge and intellectual advancement (SP 84). Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (1989): 121. Helen Thompson locates Astell’s egalitarian gender ideology in her commitment to materialist physiology. See Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (2005). Fraser (1989): 121. For an alternative reading of this problem in Astell, see Mary Beth Rose, “‘Vigorous Most/When Most Unactive Deem’d’: Gender and the Heroics of Endurance in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and Mary Astell’s Some Refl ections upon Marriage,” Milton Studies 33 (1997). This solution contrasts starkly against the injunction “to please and to obey” (RM 57), the twin pillars of endurance in the Refl ections. Fraser (1989): 123. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 124. For discussion of Masham’s commentary in her Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696), and for discussion of Astell’s clashes with Masham and Locke, see Springborg’s “Introduction,” (2002): 17–40.

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42. One must acknowledge the separatist potential of this “sacred mountain” image (SP 100–3), but it could be argued that the mountain functions more like a complicated Archimedean vantage point on social ills like that imagined later in Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Pisgah vision” in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792/2004). For discussion, see Orrin N. C. Wang, “The Other Reasons: Female Alterity and Enlightenment Discourse in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Yale Journal of Criticism 5 (1991): 140–45. 43. Fraser (1989): 124. Astell explicitly discusses the “voluntary” and “free” nature of women’s participation in her project (SP 87–92). 44. Astell’s system is not without its own Shaftesburian exclusions (SP 84–87, 104– 8), but Astell discusses such hierarchies as necessity under an unequal social order and not based on the excluded’s “natural” incapacities (SP 199). 45. Fraser (1989): 134. 46. Straus, “Editor’s Preface,” in Ward, The London-spy: compleat, in eighteen parts (1924). 47. Hayward, “Editor’s Foreword,” in Ward, ed., The London Spy: the vanities and vices of the town exposed to view (1927): x. The association of Addison’s work with tea-equipages and coffee-houses is of course longstanding and based on the self-presentation of his papers’ eidolons; if Hayward—an unabashed Ward partisan—describes the characteristic tone of the Addisonian periodical as “evasive” and “circumlocutive,” he captures in a negative register the essence of the rhetorical strategies that defi ne “polite” Whig public discourse against its precursors. How ironic and telling it is, then, that Hayward should feel it necessary to remove all scatological and “rough” language from his edition of Ward’s text, with the goal of publishing the London Spy “for the fi rst time . . . in a form suitable for general reading”—an assertion that plainly reveals the continuing hegemony of an Addisonian conception of what is “suitable.” Moreover, Hayward’s claim that Ward’s text “loses nothing by expurgation” undermines the force of the distinction between the discourses of the “teahouse” and the “four-ale bar” that motivates his desire to produce a new edition of Ward in the fi rst place (x). 48. Hayward (1927): ix. 49. For more on the narrative persona of the Night-Walker, see Maurer (1998): 59–74; and James Grantham Turner, “Pictorial Prostitution: Visual Culture, Vigilantism, and ‘Pornography’ in Dunton’s Night-Walker,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 55–84. 50. Ward, The London-spy compleat, in eighteen parts. The first volume of the author’s writings, 4th ed. (1709): 1. All subsequent references are to this edition, with page numbers cited parenthetically in the text. 51. I emphasize that this is Ward’s stated “design” to draw attention to the fact that, his opening essay’s axioms notwithstanding, Ward forcefully imposes his own judgment on the scenes he narrates, as we shall have occasion to note. 52. Addison goes so far as to claim that his essays let readers “into the knowledge of one’s self,” turning the act of reading into a deeply transformative process of interpellation that goes far beyond any effect Ward imagines for his paper (S 1:45). 53. Straus (1924): ix; Hayward (1927): x. 54. Even the apparently trivial decision to hire a coach in the fi rst place brings Ward’s narrator to a detailed account of his vulnerable embodiedness. The Spy upbraids his friend for even mentioning a coach ride having already “suffere[d the] punishment” of riding in from the country in a vehicle that “made my bones rattle in my skin, and has brought as many pains about

192 Notes

55.

56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

me as if [I were] troubled with the rheumatism”; and again, upon arriving near Mayfair, it is the suffering of the Spy’s body that Ward foregrounds: the fair’s “harsh sound of untunable trumpets, the caterwauling scrapes of thrashing fiddlers, the grumbling of beaten calves-skin, and the discording toots of broken organs set [the Spy’s] teeth on edge, like the fi ling of a hand-saw, and made [his] hair stand as bolt upright as the quills of an angry porcupine” (171). “Mobility,” through its felicitous combining of the terms “mob,” “nobility,” and “mobile,” captures exactly Ward’s complicated appreciation of London’s crowd culture—noble in its Dionysian pursuit of pleasure without regard to manners and social forms, mobile in its teeming and resistless dynamic force, and mob-like in the threat that it poses to the hierarchical order Ward elsewhere begrudgingly defends. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defi nes “Drap-de-Berry” as “a kind of woolen cloth, coming from Berry in France”; from the examples of usage listed under this defi nition it becomes clear that Ward is referring to cloth that would have been used either for heavy curtains that would keep the sun out of interiors during warm months, or for riding coats and clothing that would “never wear out,” in the words of Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), a text exactly contemporaneous with the London Spy (OED, 2nd ed., 1989, s.v. “Drap-de-Berry”). Indeed, the Spy nearly becomes literally unified with the crowd through the crushing force of bodies smashed against one another jockeying for viewing positions; as he indelicately puts it, “I thought my intrails would have come out of my mouth . . . I was so closely imprisoned between the bums and bellies of the multitude that I was almost squeez’d as flat as a napkin in a press, that I heartily would have join’d with the rabble to have cry’d liberty, liberty” (294–95, italics in text). Mackie, Market á la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (1997): 19. For fuller discussion of this dynamic in Addison and Steele, see Chapter 2 later. Ward’s attack on constables is relentless. As late as Part Fifteen, the Spy continues his rant against these legal officers in his “character” of them as a social type. Here, the “reforming constable” is a “pimp” who “live[s] upon other people’s debaucheries,” and therefore “prays heartily that the world may grow more wicked, for one and the same interest serves him and the Devil”; by “squeez[ing]” prostitutes for bribes, the constable “mak[es] them twice as wicked as they would be by putting them upon fresh villainies to keep themselves from starving” (362). In Part Six of the London Spy, Ward uses the same logic to attack the College of Physicians; in the Spy’s account, the College all “rail mightily in their writings against the ignorance of quacks and mountebanks, yet, for the sake of lucre, they license all the cozening pretenders about town, or they [themselves] could not practice; which shews it is by their toleration that the people are cheated out of their lives and money; and yet they think themselves so honest as to be no ways answerable for this public injury. . . . Thus do they license what they ought carefully to suppress, and practice themselves what they blame and condemn in others” (129). On similar grounds, Ward offers a somewhat less convincing critique of the asylum at Bedlam—which he refers to as “a monument of the city’s shame and dishonour” (63)—in the third installment of the London Spy; while Ward often acknowledges the “hellish” conditions of the asylum’s inhabitants, describing them as “unhappy” and “poor object[s]” of compassion, his attack on the self-

Notes

63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68.

69.

70.

193

indulgence and “looseness of the spectators” who have come to stare at the mentally ill (and at one another) gets compromised by the Spy’s continual search there for new “remarkable figure[s] worth our observing,” patients whose ravings he can then transcribe “to entertain us” (64–67). Ward’s remarks here and in the foregoing analysis problematize Brian Cowan’s claim that Ward saw “little prospect that things could be better in the modern city” (349). See Cowan (2004): 345–47. In fact, Ward’s satirical attack on the Whig public sphere achieves renewed vigor by 1709, a date that is particularly suggestive for the argument being worked out here since it marks publication for Steele’s Tatler at the same time that Ward is bringing out both his scandalous, pamphlet-sized History of the London Clubs in two parts, and a greatly expanded version of this project in a thirty-two chapter octavo edition of The Secret History of Clubs. In the opening chapter of this latter text, “Of Clubs in General,” Ward clarifi es the specifi c dimensions of Whig ideology he aims to satirize by naming “the promotion of trade” and “the benefits that arise from humane conversation” as the “specious pretences” that every club or society uses as an apparently “reasonable plea for their unprofitable meetings” whose “general end . . . is a promiscuous encouragement of vice, faction, and folly” (Ward, The Secret History of Clubs: Particularly the Kit-Cat, Beef-Stake, Vertuosos, Quacks, Knights of the Golden-Fleece, Florists, Beaus, &c. with their Original: and the Characters of the Most Noted Members thereof [1709]: 1). Apart from these remarks about political and economic publics, Ward offers a similarly proto-Habermasian attack on the literary elements of this public sphere in his account of modern critics in Part Ten. For Ward, those writers who “most delight in criticism” are unfortunately “so curious in having the maidenhead of an error, that if a better judgment fi nds a fault which has had the good fortune to escape his censure, he will, if it be possible, fi nd a salve for that sore, and justifie the author ever here-after in that particular; and will make it appear there is more sense lies hid in those words than in all the book besides, tho’ he knows what he defends to be arrant nonsense” (226). For a treatment of the anthropological dimensions of post-Restoration satirical discourse, see Fredric Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (2001). For a discussion of the complicated interplay between coffee-house and alehouse forms of male sociability in eighteenth-century English culture, see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1992): 89–90. For more on economic, Whig masculinity as feminized, see Catherine Ingrassia’s discussion in her Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early EighteenthCentury England: A Culture of Paper Credit (1998): 3–4, 20–22, 173–74, n. 6. See also J. G. A. Pocock, “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of EighteenthCentury Sociology,” in his collection entitled Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History (1985): 113–14. Ward’s public-sphere ideology attempts to contain both effeminized men and women in general. While it would be illuminating to undertake a comprehensive study on women in Ward’s periodical, for the purposes of this discussion it is worth mentioning Ward’s deep anxiety about women’s confident, empowered presence in public spaces, and his scathing remarks about men who fail to take control over such women. In Part Eight, in his reflections upon the elegant crowd at St. James’s Palace, Ward comments upon the “majestic

194 Notes deportment of the female sex,” and he derides the “sheepish humility of their cringing [male] worshippers,” men who signify for Ward the extent to which “man had dwindled from his fi rst power and authority into pusillanimity and luxury . . . ha[ving] suffered deceitful woman to cozen him of his prerogative” (179); in Ward’s account, men who relinquish their “natural” dominance over women must themselves be seen as “effeminate,” “cowardly,” and even bestial in their willingness to “creep and cringe in dishonour to themselves, to [women] decreed by heaven their inferiors; as if their education had been amongst monkeys, who (as it is said) in all cases give the preheminence [sic] to their females” (180). Similarly, in Part Ten, Ward’s Spy reports on a performance of The Devil of a Wife in Bartholomew Fair—in whose audience there were “ten men to one woman”—as a salutary critique of women who keep their husbands under the tyranny of “petticoat-government,” since this play is aimed at teaching “good sober citizens . . . how to tame a shrew, and recover into their own hands the power and authority of their fore-fathers” (244–45). Thus, while Ward is more energetic than later Whig writers in attacking the physical abuse of women in domestic service and in the judicial system, his rhetoric of natural male superiority far exceeds any claims Addison and Steele would make on men’s behalf. For Addison and Steele, Ward’s anti-feminism codes as boorish and impolite, even if they are just as committed as Ward is to containing women in domestic, private spaces.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1989). My critique of Habermas is informed by Neil Saccamano’s “The Consolations of Ambivalence: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” MLN 106 (1991): 685–98. 2. Lawrence Klein, “Enlightenment as Conversation,” in What’s Left of Enlightenment?: A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill (2001): 158. For other readings sympathetic to Habermas, see Scott Black, “Social and Literary Form in the Spectator,” EighteenthCentury Studies 33 (1999): 21–42; Michael Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the Spectator Papers (1985). 3. For Habermas’s reception in Germany, see the fi nal chapter of Peter Hohendahl’s The Institution of Criticism (1982): 242–80; for a critique of Habermas on gender, see Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” in Feminists Read Habermas, ed. Johanna Meehan (1995): 21–56; for recent work that complicates Habermas by recovering the role of women in eighteenth-century English public culture, see Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger and others (2001); on Addison and Steele’s milieu, see especially Markman Ellis’s contribution to that collection—“Coffee-Women, The Spectator, and the Public Sphere in the Early Eighteenth Century”—in which Ellis argues that coffee-house culture “was often anything but quiet, polite and business-like” (31) and that it “proposes a fractured sociability riven by significant gender difference” (33). 4. Habermas (1989): 28. 5. Brian Cowan argues likewise that Addison and Steele’s influential periodicals are “not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics” but actually desire to “close off and restrain venues for public debate on political matters . . . to reign it in and discipline [such debate].” “Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2004): 345–46. Cowan reads Addison and Steele’s periodical as responding to a “crisis of

Notes

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

195

Whig political fortunes in the later years of Queen Anne’s reign,” a “specific means of reacting to the high Tory resurgence of 1709–14” (347); my point, however, is to understand the broader cultural implications of the spectatorial model of reading and publicness because of the model’s persistence beyond the context of Whig party fortunes in the early 1710s. This shift is marked in the very titles of their most influential periodicals, from the Tatler (1709–1711) to the Spectator. What Steele makes clear in the fi nal number of the Tatler, though, is that this move from dialogue to visuality had already taken place; thinking back on the function of the Tatler papers, Steele retrospectively describes the project as that of “fram[ing] . . . the least observed into an agreeable view” (The Tatler, ed. and intro. George A. Aitken, 4 vols. [1898], vol. 4:377). Hereafter abbreviated “T” and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to PostStructuralism (1984): 10. For Eagleton, the Spectator papers helped create the image of a “free [and] equal” public sphere (9), which was ideological in that it served to “mystify and idealize bourgeois social relations” (26), promulgating a sense of the public’s “imaginary unity with itself” by “replacing rancour with reconciliation” (22, 25). Erin Mackie, introduction to The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Mackie (1998): 3, 2. See also Mackie’s excellent book on Addison and Steele, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (1997), where she argues, in part, that Addison and Steele manage their readers’ practices of consumption in a way that reveals their own fascination with and reliance upon the fashionable, the deviant, and the transgressive. The few unequivocally positive characters one could point to in the Spectator turn out to be stock female figures—Aurelia (in number 15) and Statira (in number 41) are representative here—whose experiences are not narrated in any significant detail; rather, such figures are described as possessing a catalog of ostensibly positive attributes (cheerfulness, good humor, grace, and a preference for quiet retirement) that need not be exemplified because they are imagined as passive values. One exception to this formula can be found in the character of Emilia (in number 302), whose patient efforts to reclaim her wayward husband through “silent example” are narrated over several paragraphs—not by Addison or Steele, predictably enough, but by John Hughes. See The Spectator, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (1965, vol. 3): 82. Hereafter abbreviated “S” and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. Even so, Emilia functions as a kind of cipher for female readers to emulate, not through positive agency but through silence, self-erasure, and inaction. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (1985): 235. For an excellent reading of the contextual and historical afterlife of Addisonian stoicism, see Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (1999). Eagleton (1984): 12. As with the issue of positive examples, the few occasions when Addison and Steele’s disciplinary efforts succeed almost always involve a female figure internalizing the values of the paper’s male eidolon. As Kathryn Shevelow has demonstrated, the best example of this procedure can be found in the Tatler papers on Jenny Distaff (Bickerstaff’s half-sister), which chart her movement from assertive coquette to vigilant housewife, just as Bickerstaff would recommend to all female readers. See Shevelow’s indispensable study, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early

196 Notes

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

Periodical (1989): 116–29. I would also want to second Shevelow’s contention that women in the early periodicals are “metonymic for the non-elite public” in general (36); Addison and Steele’s promotion of sentimental, depoliticized reading practices is aimed at male and female readers alike, such that what I am here calling their “neutering” of audience response could easily be viewed as a kind of feminization, given the way femininity and quiet domesticity are mobilized in early eighteenth-century ideologies of gender. Even so, the specific strictures demanded of men and women in Addison and Steele’s domestic ideal are by no means equal in weight or similar in aim; as Shevelow judiciously puts it, “[T]he picture of male responsibility does not contain the same prescriptive urgency as that of female duties” (126). Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed., s.v. “neutralize,” 3a. The titles of Delarivier Manley’s Female Tatler and Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator suggest that Mr. Spectator’s gesture toward neutrality is also a way of obscuring that his own masculine position comes to seem universal or able to speak to/for both sexes. See the introductory chapter of John Barrell’s English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal Wide Survey (1983): 17–50. As Daniel Defoe puts it, a “scholastick education” and defi nite “trade” can “so fi x a man in a particular way, that he is not fit to judge of any thing that lies out of his way,” The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. K. Bulbring (1890): 216. Barrell (1983): 33, 34. The Guardian, 2 vols. (1714, vol. 1): 6. For more on this movement in Addison’s and Steele’s periodical work from neutrality to more active impartiality after 1714, see Cowan (2004). I will return to this distinction in the concluding section of this chapter. OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “neuter,” 2a. Steele’s aesthetic theory here relies on a psychologically effective mechanism governed by simile—similitude, identification, and substitution through the recognition of another as oneself—for the production of interpellative moments in his dramatic scenes. To be sure, activity and passivity are intermingled in Steele’s formula in that the typical aristocratic drama still does the “exercis[ing]” of our minds, whose “powers” are his sentence’s direct object. At the same time, aristocratic drama is imagined as the object upon which our powers are exercised, while bourgeois drama will “create” us anew. OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “neutralize,” 3a. For a detailed account of how post-Restoration periodicals promulgate the ideal of a masculinity that “(re)forms itself through the process of reforming women,” thereby establishing private domesticity as “an important locus of masculine control,” see Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (1998): 4, 3. As the example of Eustace implies, the construction of gender norms in Addison and Steele takes place (as Maurer points out) not only through “illustrations of men and women who exemplified these gendered ideals” but also through “portrayals of failure”—depictions of men and women who fail to adhere to gendered standards of propriety (19). Addison’s two injunctions to the upholsterer—run your shop efficiently but don’t seek out news for yourself—are at least mildly contradictory since one of the earliest functions of print culture was to provide merchants, investors, and goods transporters with the accurate information (political, infrastructural, agricultural, and so forth) necessary to their economic strategies. For more on this issue, see Habermas (1989): 14–26.

Notes

197

24. Steele often views the husband–wife dyad as a subset of the master–servant category—thus the significant overlap in his advice to the two different social sets. 25. The spectatorial ethos outlined here bears significant comparison with the moral philosophy of Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele’s contemporary, in whose work there is an equally remarkable tension between the idea of ethics as mere aesthetic bearing—see his claim that virtue “consists in a certain just disposition or proportionable affection of a rational creature towards the moral objects of right and wrong”—and ethics as a praxis whereby we make ourselves “useful to others” and “prosecute the public good.” Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times, ed. Philip Ayers, 2 vols. (1999, vol. 1): 208, 196, 225. 26. These details trouble Pocock’s claim that Addison achieves a “reconciliation of [England’s] diverse ‘interests’” (236). See also Pocock (1985): 235–38. 27. See, in particular, Laura Brown on Pope’s Rape of the Lock and WindsorForest in the fi rst chapter of her Alexander Pope (1985): 6–45. 28. This point complicates Eagleton’s reading of the link between interest and the public sphere in Addison and Steele. Eagleton writes that for Addison and Steele “[i]t is not . . . that the public sphere exists for the direct discussion of [economic] interests; on the contrary, such interests become its very concealed problematic, the very enabling structure of disinterested inquiry” (16). Addison and Steele highlight, rather than conceal, the irremediability of interested conflict, as a way of de-legitimizing the notion of disinterestedness. 29. Mr. Spectator’s unilateral economy of advantages and privileges gets staged in another of his country analogies, when he explains that the spectator’s visual field is like “a great field of game for sportsmen,” in which one “start[s] several subjects, and hunt[s] them down” (S 2:19). Mr. Spectator eats without being eaten. 30. Our commercialized others, whose labor produces the commodities we enjoy, are eaten or incorporated by the fetishizing grammar of trade narrative. Earlier in the essay, Addison’s famous description of how “the single dress of a woman of quality is often the product of an hundred climates” displaces labor into climate; moreover, the components of the dress appear rather magically in England, without the effort of any particular agent (S 1:295). 31. Women bear the brunt of the sympathetic burden in Addison and Steele; female victims in scenes of prostitution, domestic violence, and colonial exploitation often provide a nexus for a community of spectators sharing the proper reaction to others’ suffering. 32. See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. M. Eldred (1987). 33. Though the publicly active “we” here is obviously gendered, both sexes are invited to have a proper reaction to male licentiousness; the judgment about the conduct is universalizable, even if the conduct itself is not. 34. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (1994): 58. 35. Ibid., 55. 36. Ibid., 57. 37. For the sections of Ligon’s text upon which Steele based his essay, see Frank Felsenstein’s critical edition of the Inkle and Yarico material, English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World (1999): 55–80. 38. Žižek, Metastases (1994): 59. My analysis diverges from Žižek’s to the extent that his earlier work hypostatizes the idea of a radical or fundamental antagonism inevitably structuring the social field; see Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), “Introduction,” 1–7. For more on constitutive antagonism, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (1985); and Mouffe’s more

198

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

Notes recent argument for a politics of ineradicable contestation in The Democratic Paradox (2000). While I am sympathetic to their theoretical resistance to the possibility of a “fi nal resolution of confl icts,” I would not want these writers’ agonistic political ontology to naturalize or to obscure the interested contingency of particular, material, historically-specific forms of violence and exploitation (Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 2000:32). Žižek, Metastases (1994): 33. If the historical context of Addison’s remarks weren’t clear enough, he claims that when such division “rages in its full violence,” it “exerts itself in civil war and blood-shed” (S 1:510). The literariness of the figures in this particular essay is consonant with Steele’s descriptions of Inkle from Spectator 11, who is “the hero of [the] story,” a man with “a person in every way agreeable, a ruddy vigour in his countenance, strength in his limbs, [and] ringlets of fair hair loosely flowing on his shoulders” (S 1:50). This reading gives a sinister twist to Pocock’s notion that the “sociable role” of Addison and Steele’s techniques of observation “is more important than any role [they] could play as politically engaged activist[s]” (237). Bickerstaff makes a more sweeping claim to this effect in Tatler 61: “[T]he greatest evils in human society are such as no law can come at [them]” (T 2:83). See Tedra Osell’s contention that “essay periodical eidolons model and maintain a version of the public sphere that deliberately blurs the lines between text and reality.” “Tatling Women in the Public Sphere: Rhetorical Femininity and the English Essay Periodical,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38 (2005): 285. Habermas (1989): 29, 36. Defoe, The Best of Defoe’s Review: An Anthology, ed. William L. Payne, intro. Marjorie Nicolson (1951): 68. Ibid., 66. Nicolson, introduction to The Best of Defoe’s Review (1951): xx. Ibid., xix, xx, xviii. Defoe (1951): 67. See Bond’s claim that “no single collection of eighteenth-century prose has been oftener reprinted than the Spectator, at least during its own century and the nineteenth” (introduction to Spectator, vol. 1: v). Cowan (2004): 359. Though Addison and Steele’s later periodicals—especially the Guardian (1713) and the Freeholder (1715–1716)—are more explicitly Whig in orientation than the Spectator, they are continuous with the earlier works in their consistent devaluation of debate and public political action among their readership. This ongoing promotion of quietism is particularly noticeable in Addison’s Freeholder papers; in the wake of Whig victories at the polls in 1715, due in large part to growing fears of a Jacobite rebellion, Addison ironically uses strategies similar to earlier Tory rhetorics of passive obedience, nonresistance, and church vulnerability to consolidate Whig power under George I. As James Leheny argues, Addison’s Freeholder promotes reactionary policies (the suspension of habeas corpus, the impeachment of disagreeable Lords, and the extension of Whig authority through the Septennial Act) by “exploit[ing] the political potential of [the Spectator’s] moral and philosophical stances,” offering up “abstract essays on political issues like loyalty [that] appealed to the rationality of readers, fl attered their intelligence, and . . . created at least an illusion of magnanimity,” introduction to Addison, The Freeholder (1979): 27. Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (1924, vol. 1): 98.

Notes

199

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. In the opening sentence of the paper’s fi rst issue, the editor makes explicit reference to this marketing strategy by expressing her hope that Isaac Bickerstaff—the fictional editor of Steele’s periodical—“will not think I invade his property by undertaking a paper of this kind,” and by explaining that “to prevent mistakes which may happen by peoples’ enquiring for either of the tatlers, I shall publish mine the contrary days, viz. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” thereby allowing Steele’s periodical to be offered free of direct rivalry on the conventional days of its publication—Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, Female Tatler, ed. Fidelis Morgan (1992): 1. Henceforth cited in the text parenthetically and abbreviated “FT.” 2. For two recent, contrasting accounts of the paper’s authorship, see Iona Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (2005); M. M. Goldsmith’s “Introduction” to his edition, By a Society of Ladies: Essays in the Female Tatler (1999). While Goldsmith generally rejects the idea of Manley’s involvement in the Female Tatler in favor of attribution to the lawyer and playwright Thomas Baker, I tend to agree with Italia’s assessment that a “more convincing” case can be made for Manley on the basis of the paper’s tone and thematic preoccupations, even if there is, as Italia points out, “little specific external evidence to link [Manley] with the publication” (51). 3. Regarding Manley’s legal troubles, Fidelis Morgan cites a contemporary passage from Narcissus Luttrell’s A Brief Relation of State Affairs explaining that “the printer and publisher of the New Atalantis were examined touching the author, Mrs. Manley; they were discharged, but she remains in custody” (FT 118). 4. For a fuller account of the paper’s connection to Mandeville, see Goldsmith’s (1999) edition of the Lucinda-Artesia essays. 5. Even so, a convincing case for Manley’s involvement could be made by following up on Paula McDowell’s extensive treatment of Manley’s political writings in The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (1998). For Mc Dowell, Manley’s writings self-consciously attempt to influence public opinion, in part through their dissemination of “new models of political authority and political subjecthood” and their reflections on female authorial self-representation (220–21); if, as McDowell claims, Manley’s work deploys the “potential political instrumentality of women’s ‘perpetual Talk,’” a power that was “at once recognized and countered by her male political writing contemporaries,” then the ongoing conflict between the Female Tatler’s society of ladies and the Tatler’s editor Isaac Bickerstaff would seem perfectly to fit the pattern of Manley’s modus operandi, with the three female intelligencer-narrators of the New Atalantis serving as the novelistic analog of Manley’s multiple female periodicalists in the Female Tatler (222–23). For more on Manley’s work as a novelist, see Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (1992); Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (1994); John Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739 (1969/1992); Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (1986); Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (1989); William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (1998). For more on Manley’s political texts, see Ruth Herman, The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley (2003).

200 Notes 6. Even careful readers of the early periodical like Erin Mackie, Shawn Lisa Maurer, and Kathryn Shevelow have overlooked the paper’s subversive dimension. In their invaluable analyses of gender in the post-Restoration essay periodical, neither Maurer nor Shevelow gives any substantial treatment to the Female Tatler. See Maurer’s Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (1998), and Shevelow’s Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (1989), in which Shevelow claims that the “scandal-prone” Female Tatler made no particular effort to address a specifically female readership (212). Additionally, while Mackie appreciates the Female Tatler’s celebration of individual women’s wit and intelligence, she ultimately claims that the periodical “adheres to and indeed promotes the prevailing gender ideology of the time,” The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie (1998): 129. 7. Manley’s proto-Habermasian appeals to the value of audience participation, while not consistent, are numerous and varied. She attacks the editors of the British Apollo (1708–11), a rival periodical based on questions ostensibly written in by readers, for “answer[ing] very few questions but those of his own proposing and those too of his own commendation”; as a test case for her hypothesis, she demands that “Apollo . . . give the solution to one of the easiest of the ten mathematical problems lately sent him by the Reverend Mr H” (FT 74). Earlier, Manley refers to her female readers, “ladies [who] gave the fi rst reputation to this paper,” as “the only court of judicature to be applied to” in protecting her own essays from incursion by the “abortive” and “fi lthy” papers of a spurious counter-edition of the Female Tatler probably sponsored by Bragge, her publisher for the fi rst nineteen numbers before she granted rights to Baldwin (FT 48). 8. Manley’s commitment to the transformative potential of experience and education comes through in many essays, and not least in the opening paragraph of Female Tatler 5; for discussion, see “Feminist Countermodels of Cultural Authority” in this chapter. 9. See Donald F. Bond’s five-volume edition of The Spectator (1965, vol. 4): 52–54. Henceforth abbreviated “S” and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. 10. See, for example, Shaftesbury’s treatment of this issue in Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, published contemporaneously with the Tatler and the Female Tatler in 1709, in which Shaftesbury famously asserts: “Truth . . . may bear all lights, and one of those principal lights, or natural mediums, by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough recognition, is ridicule itself, or that manner of proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just raillery in any subject,” Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2 vols., ed. Philip Ayres (1999, vol. 1): 38. 11. For Shaftesbury’s discussion of these questions, see his Sensus Communis and his Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, both of which are included in Ayres’s edition of the Characteristicks, op. cit. For critical discussion, see Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (1994). 12. The Female Tatler further expresses its commitment to Mandevillian ideology in number 64, in which four different characters agree without contradiction that “luxury and extravagancy” better promote “the public welfare” than “the pernicious tenets of the Cato’s, the Seneca’s [sic] and other moralmongers that extol content and frugality, and preach against gluttony [and] drunkenness”—the essay concludes with the claim that those “who[,] by the

Notes

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

201

solicitous care they take of their backs and bellies, make money circulate[,] . . . are the real encouragers of every useful art and science” (FT 133–34). See also Female Tatler 107, in which the editor describes the stoic maxim that “Nature is contented with little” as “philosophy for swines,” endorsing instead the behavior of those who “[though] already possessed of the comforts of life, dare likewise aspire to the elegant conveniences of it, and spare no reasonable pains to obtain ’em”—all for the sole purpose of selfinterested personal “pleasure” (FT 193–94). Manley offers a similarly negative assessment of the “opinions” ostensibly written in by readers for inclusion in the Female Tatler. In number 7, she claims to have received in one day “above thirty letters, in all of which I could not fi nd one tolerable observation,” letters consisting entirely of “silly amours, petty refl ections, frivolous tales and scandalous aspersions” (FT 15). For a discussion of audiences’ desires and expectations in this context, see J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (1990). According to Fidelis Morgan, the “Madam Berry” of this passage refers to the retired actress Elizabeth Berry, who had herself instructed Queen Mary in the art of English elocution (FT 43, n. 100). If we look at the contextual meanings of the word listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Manley’s use of “compendious” to describe advertising as a form of writing appears significant to the genre’s public-sphere function in a number of perhaps contradictory ways: on the one hand, advertising’s compendiousness marks its public usefulness as a tool for enlightened communication in that it promises synthetically to “contain the substance [of a broad field of information] within small compass”; on the other hand, the OED notes another valence for the word that persisted at least into the second half of the seventeenth century, whereby “compendious” could mean “very profitable” (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “compendious”). One is tempted to wonder how readers of Manley’s periodical might have applied a trenchant analysis of advertising discourse like that found in Female Tatler 58 to their encounter with “real” advertisements at the end of each issue, many of which offered special insights about the “secret disease”; pitched the apparently extraordinary curing power of particular physicians and oculists; or recommended an astonishing range of purgatives, powders, and gargles for whatever might ail you. For examples, see Morgan’s edition (1992) of the Female Tatler, 219–24. At the same time, Manley allows the editors of the Female Tatler to come very close to engaging in personalized ad hominem forms of satire that verge on libel, at least with regard to the exposure of fictional characters within the essays themselves: think, for example, of the thinly-veiled stories told about the very women sitting in her salon in Female Tatler 56 (see discussion above), or even of the stories the fashionable lady tells Emilia for possible inclusion in Female Tatler 98, a case in which the character in the essay specifically “names” others to be scandalously ridiculed. For a more extended discussion of eighteenth-century notions of hypocrisy, see Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (2004). In a sense, Manley’s approach to the problem of human stupidity verges on misanthropy, while Steele’s benevolent understanding of human nature causes him to view his audience’s shortcomings with hopeful disappointment; for example, it is almost impossible to imagine Bickerstaff ever reaching the level of disdain Crackenthorpe articulates at the outset of Female

202 Notes

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

Tatler 46: “Notwithstanding the care, pains and trouble I have taken to admonish fools, fops, and knaves . . . my repeated endeavours have not yet had the desired effect, it having indeed created in me such an abhorrence for the whole race of man that I do not know when I shall be reconciled to them” (FT 105). Her misanthropy—if indeed we can call it that—comes back to her in the threats of physical violence, death, and blackmail she claims to have received from readers and correspondents (see Female Tatler numbers 41, 42, and 45). Real or fictional, the misanthropic and violent elements represented within Manley’s public-sphere discourse certainly index a difference between her periodical and Steele’s. Steele’s use of tenses in the Bickerstavian phrase that Manley quotes neatly demonstrates his equivocation about the possibility of reform: while the fi rst half of the sentence—“one may write to eternity”—imagines a conditional future in which a beleaguered, well-meaning periodicalist keeps up the fruitless Sisyphusian labor of enlightenment, the second half—“the world is still the same”—with its strange, grammatically unexpected insistence on the present-ness of failure, leaves open the unlikely but hoped-for possibility of future success, as if Steele were simply unwilling to commit to the fatalism of the logical (and Mandevillian) main clause, “the world will still be the same.” It is impossible to resist comparing Manley’s commitment to the analytics of esotericism to the appreciation by later eighteenth-century feminists like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu of similar strategies of distinction within religious discourse. For an excellent example, see Montagu’s conversation with the Islamic effendi Achmed Bey, in letter XXVIII of her Turkish Embassy Letters, ed. Malcolm Jack and intro. Anita Desai (1993): 62–63. For discussion, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990); Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” EighteenthCentury Studies 28 (1995); Erin Mackie’s treatment of this shift in the early periodical in her Market á la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (1997). See George A. Aitken’s four-volume edition of The Tatler (1898, vol. 3): 304. Henceforth abbreviated “T” and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. For Manley’s treatment of class distinctions in this light, see Female Tatler 6 (on actors who play and socialize with Lords), number 10 (on sycophants), number 24 (on tradesmen), number 26 (on class mixing at masquerades), number 39 (on the “prosperous vulgar”), number 48 (on disciplining servants), number 69 (on class-inappropriate dress), and number 75 (on “awkward” refi nement), among other examples. “Breeding” can of course be taken to mean “extraction or parentage” (and thus the equivalent of “birth”), though the OED examples of such usage date mostly from well before the Restoration; by 1709, the term referred most often to “the results of training as shown in personal manners and behavior; generally used for ‘good breeding,’ good or proper manners” (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “breeding”). Addison and Steele are particularly concerned to adjudicate breeding in this sense, especially the training of young girls—for discussion, see Chapter 4. “Disposition” as a category is situated in a slightly more complex relationship both to nature (as an inevitable, physically inflected condition) and to culture (as a process of training and cultivation that alters or displaces “nature”). The OED lists relevant contextual meanings of this term under its general defi nition as “the way or manner in which a thing has been disposed, or is situated or constituted”; thus, “disposition” can

Notes

27.

28.

29.

30.

203

refer either to something permanent and unchanging like the “natural tendency or bent of the mind,” sometimes imagined in “physical” terms, or to something more contingent and environmentally-conditioned like “inclination . . . frame of mind or feeling; [or] mood, humour,” as in the example the OED uses from the fi rst part of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, in which Gulliver claims to have awakened “with as melancholy a disposition as ever [he] had in [his] life.” Even more interesting for this discussion of Manley, Sterne uses the term “dispositions” in Sentimental Journey to describe the many skills that the servant (or gentleman’s gentleman) La Fleur has been trained up in, including “shav[ing]” and “dress[ing] up a wig a little” (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “disposition”). Moreover, just as other modes of validation compete with “birth” as a standard for Manley’s critical judgment, the supposedly automatic legitimacy conferred by “birth” is itself made suspect through satiric deflation in many essays. In fact, just before asserting that “distinction of rank is highly necessary for the economy of the world” in Female Tatler 17, Manley attacks not only “the prodigality of the inferior classes” but also “the sordid frugality of some great men, and the unaccountable extravagance of other [great men]”; in the end what she seems most concerned about is not a class-specific problem, but “in general, the deceitfulness of most men’s appearance” (FT 40–41). In this light, we must read carefully her later hyperbolic statements about the automatic value of “birth,” such as her insistence that “we ought to touch upon great people’s characters with the same consideration and awful respect as we approach their persons” (FT 41)—an utterance with several possible implications—or her opening claim in Female Tatler 24 that those “of birth” are “always condescending, pleasant and affable” (FT 57). Manley’s educational ideal doesn’t necessarily exclude the kind of practical education in a trade or profession that a middle-class person would receive, but it would undoubtedly have to be distanced from the kind of sentimental education geared toward piety and benevolent self-effacement that a woman might receive through conduct books. Mrs. Crackenthorpe herself equivocates about the former kind of education, proudly proclaiming in the short history of her family (Female Tatler 43) that “no Crackenthorpe was ever a tradesman” (younger sons being instead trained in “divinity, physics, and the law”), but later admitting that her ideal suitor would be “an ingenious lawyer” who has mastered both “vogue” and “business” in such a way that he “will not only get an estate, but knows how to preserve it”—a set of priorities that effectively blurs her pet distinction between “profession” and “trade” by revealing that the former is guided by the same imperative (economic profit) as the latter (FT 98, 110). While Manley generally treats cultural norms as contingent and malleable, it would be easy to show how some particular forms of exclusion remain apparently automatic and unquestioned in the Female Tatler. On questions of ethnicity and religious belief, for example, Mrs. Crackenthorpe can be exceptionally harsh and uncompromising; she unhesitatingly bans from her salon “impudent beau-Jews,” who “so far from being admitted into civil society, ought to be expell’d the nation” (FT 6)—a sentiment that foreshadows her later refusal to receive a courtship letter from a “Portuguese Jew” because she “smelled his letter at the door” (FT 110). Her apparent antiSemitism is nearly matched by her anti-Catholicism, which prevents Mrs. Crackenthorpe from accepting marriage to the perfect man only because of his religious beliefs (FT 109). One can draw a perfect contrast between the Tatler and the Female Tatler on this issue by juxtaposing Bickerstaff’s allegorical claim that “If there were no

204

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

Notes curs, I should be no mastiff”—in Tatler 115 (January 3, 1710)—and Artesia’s direct counter-claim in Female Tatler 96 (February 17–20, 1710) that “[Bickerstaff’s] being the greatest mastiff proves not that all the rest are curs.” There are other instances of this dynamic tension between the necessity of distinction and its potential illegitimacy in many numbers of the Female Tatler. In Female Tatler 39, for example, Mrs. Crackenthorpe complains, on the one hand, about how the “prosperous vulgar” take on so many airs that they are “hardly distingsuish[able]” from people of rank, while she also chastises the automatic and excessive response of “Lady Dainty,” a woman of rank who is so “apprehensive of everybody below herself” that she becomes ill at Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s salon “from smelling a tradesman’s wife in the room” (FT 91). As Shaftesbury reminds his interlocutor in Sensus Communis, “I am writing to you in defence only of the [conversational] liberty of the Club and of that sort of freedom which is taken among gentlemen and friends who know one another perfectly well” (36). For more on the status of “breaking” minds and spirits in Locke’s educational writings and post-Lockean theories of conduct, see Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (2005). It is important to note, too, that Manley does not single out these effeminate mercers as the only or even the most prominent brand of failed masculinity: the Female Tatler papers create a long catalog of ridiculous male types, including lecherous men who bother shop girls (number 11), a taxonomy of old fools (number 13), careless wits (number 22), the hybrid gentlemanmerchant (number 23), the sycophant (number 34), the libertine (number 50), the lovesick astrologer (number 82), and the wimpy captain (number 94). My point here is not to say that Manley’s approach to gender categories evinces anxieties only about economic issues, as if ideologies of gender and economics could be neatly separated, but merely to suggest that there is a significant difference of emphasis between her treatment of gender transgression and that found in the Tatler and the Spectator. For more on the cultural anxiety produced by female workers in taverns and coffee or chocolate houses, see Markman Ellis’s essay in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger and others (2001). For an illuminating discussion of marginalizing discourses about actors/acting in the period, see Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (1992). For excellent, influential accounts of the high-brow/low-brow boundary policing discussed here, see Paula McDowell’s Women of Grub Street, Pat Rogers’s Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (1972); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986). For the sake of argument, it is worth noting that neither Rosella nor the young lady distort Bickerstaff’s explicit intent in Tatler 147 of endorsing female pretences and concealments in the name of producing male sexual desire. Steele has Bickerstaff use the term lucubrations to describe his written reflections in the Tatler from the paper’s opening dedication to Arthur Maynwaring (who himself was the editor of the Medley, a Whig periodical that served as a counterpoint to the Tory Examiner during the mid-to-late opening decade of the eighteenth century); partially because of its awkwardness and its novelty, the term gained immediate circulation in English culture as the defi nitive way of describing individual Tatler papers and the intellectual labor from which those papers were produced. As a result of this currency,

Notes

41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

205

most reprints of the collected Tatler papers throughout the eighteenth century are actually entitled The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. “Lucinda’s” defi nition matches almost exactly that found in our own OED, which explains that the verb “lucubrate” means “literally, to work by artificial light” and (in its modern signification) “to produce literary compositons by laborious study” (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “lucubrate”); as for the noun form, “lucubration,” the OED’s two primary defi nitions concur with Lucinda again, describing the term as referring to “nocturnal study or meditation” and, hence, “literary work showing signs of careful elaboration” (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “lucubration”). As might go without saying, Lucinda’s reference to the secret society of the Rosicrucians, known particularly for their insistence on the esoteric nature of essential knowledge and wisdom, signals for this reader a clear and intentional sense of the exo-/esoteric distinction within the discourse of the Female Tatler—an internal formal awareness in the project that not only warrants but demands the attention to allegories of distinction in this periodical (and others) to which this analysis is committed. This claim about male readers being Mandeville’s satiric target in this essay and in the Female Tatler more generally is supported by both the second half of Female Tatler 81 and other numbers (82 and 85) from January 1710 that follow up on Lucinda’s analysis of male “lucubrations.” The second half of number 81, for example, treats a letter from a male correspondent (“Vario”) who, as a self-acknowledged “impatient fellow,” criticizes the general tendency among the Female Tatler’s editors toward sustained narrative and argumentation in their papers and asks that they therefore “not dwell for so long on a subject” since he can “much better endure nonsense, so it be short, than the best series of continued sense” (FT 162). The essay continues by offering an even more complicated subversion of the Tatler in which Lucinda treats supposedly too-generous readings of Homer as an unflattering allegory for how Steele gets credit for more than he should. Thinking on the “strange interpretations and various constructions that are always made of the words and sayings of great men,” Lucinda wonders about the practice of “sagacious critics” (Addison and Steele implicitly included) who have “gathered that [Homer] was a perfect master of all arts and sciences” in spite of the fact that his writing has the “outward appearance” of being merely “bombastic poems, full of ridiculous epithets, furbelowed similes and nauseous repetitions”; she concludes that “most commentators [take] more out of books than the author ever designed to put in them” (FT 161–62). For discussion of the Tatler’s Jenny Distaff papers, see Shevelow (1989): 116–29. There are six members of the “society of letters,” whose input M. M. Goldsmith (1999) divided into four groups, based on his theory that four different authors were involved in producing the continuation of the Female Tatler: the twenty-six Emilia–Rosella papers, the thirty-two Lucinda–Artesia papers attributed to Mandeville, and then three papers each by Arabella and Sophronia. As Goldsmith points out, “the notion of there being a society composed of various individuals” suggests that “the conception of multiple authors is built into the plan” of the continued Female Tatler, so there is “at least some ground for supposing that any additional authors could choose their own female name to write under” (41–42). Part of this “fragmentation” involves the inclusion of male figures, especially the figure of the corrosively skeptical “Oxford gentleman” in the essays by Bernard Mandeville, so that the conversations can never be read as exclusively female or preoccupied with binaristically “feminized” concerns.

206

Notes

48. This increasing diffusion of authority in the later papers of the Female Tatler is accompanied by an increasingly relativizing preoccupation by the female editors with the diversity of reception-contexts within which the paper circulates. On this issue, see especially numbers 82 and 98. 49. One point of the papers in this regard is also to offer examples of successful women in the literary public sphere outside the immediate circle of editors, women like Susanna Centlivre, whose most recent play (The Man’s Bewitched) is made the subject of debate in the author’s presence in Female Tatler 69, and who later explains to the ladies’ salon participants (at their request) “the nature of introducing a play into the house”; Centlivre remarks that it is “much easier to write a play than to get it represented” primarily because of the male-dominated politics of the London theater scene, an arena in which she (“though a woman”) is treated by producers and directors “in the masculine gender . . . with wrangling and confusion” (FT 140–41). 50. Goldsmith (1999): 55. 51. For further discussion of these papers, including an account of Mandeville’s reliance on Plutarch’s Mulierum Virtutes and the English translation of Pierre Le Moyne’s Gallery of Heroick Women, see Goldsmith (1999): 55–62.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (1997): 19. 2. Ibid., 2. 3. For the claim about Astell being such a “fi rst,” see Bridget Hill’s edition, The First English Feminist: Reflections upon Marriage and Other Writings by Mary Astell (1986); for a slightly wider historical frame, see First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578–1799, ed. Moira Ferguson (1985). 4. Astell, Refl ections upon Marriage, in Patricia Springborg’s edition of Astell’s Political Writings (1996): 51. Henceforth cited in the text parenthetically and abbreviated as “RM.” 5. All references to the two parts of Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694/1697) use Patricia Springborg’s edition (2002). Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text and abbreviated as “SP.” For recent studies of Astell’s work that are relevant to this analysis, see, in particular, Carol Barash, “‘The Native Liberty . . . of the Subject’: Configurations of Gender and Authority in the Works of Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fyge Egerton, and Mary Astell,” in Women, Writing, History: 1640 –1799, eds. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (1992): 55–69; Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1 (1988): 24–29; the essays in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, eds. William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson (2007); Ruth Perry’s indispensable study, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (1986); Patricia Springborg, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (2005); Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (2005). 6. Astell offers a rather less sanguine account of the supposed benefits of mixedgender conversation than many recent scholars of the early public sphere have done. See, for example, Lawrence Klein, “Gender, Conversation, and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, eds. Judith Still and Michael Worton (1993): 100–115.

Notes

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7. Female homosociality in the academy functions as the earlier antidote to these false relations and as a standard of mutual benevolence and care against which all male–female relationships should be measured (SP 97–100). 8. Astell here in some ways foreshadows the displacement of desire and selfhood away from the female body to less tangible manifestations of femininity in language and textuality analyzed by Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987). 9. George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, The Lady’s New-year’s Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter, in The Works of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, 3 vols., ed. Mark N. Brown (1989, vol. 2): 388, 389, 364. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as “AD.” 10. See also Halifax’s lengthy character sketch of the woman of artificial manners in the section on “Vanity and Affectation” (AD 2:398–402), who makes herself into a “scene” or a deformed “picture” to which the daughter must vigilantly “prevent [her own] resemblance” (AD 2:402). 11. Astell draws attention to the need for more systemic reforms to address this imbalance, since under the current arrangement a wife “puts herself entirely into her husband’s power, and if the matrimonial yoke be grievous, neither law nor custom afford her that redress which a man obtains” (RM 46). 12. Thompson, “Betsy Thoughtless and the Persistence of Coquettish Volition,” JEMCS: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 4 (2004): 106–7. 13. For the record, it is worth noting that Halifax’s Advice anticipates much of Astell’s extended warnings about men’s designing courtship rhetorics. From making the rather banal point that “men who say extreme fine things [to women] many times say them most for their own sakes” (AD 2:392–93), Halifax goes on to seal his argument with an unexpectedly striking olfactory analogy: “ . . . [A]s strong perfumes are seldom used but where they are necessary to smother an unwelcome scent, so excessive good words leave room to believe they are strewed to cover something, which is to gain admittance under a disguise” (AD 2:393). 14. Thompson (2004): 112. 15. Astell’s formulations here are not new to her philosophy but echo her earlier analysis, in the Serious Proposal, of men who “profess themselves slaves so long till at last they become their masters” (SP 109). 16. This emphasis on female discursivity and judgment marks Astell’s radical divergence from the Halifaxian paradigm of female identity, according to which women should only ever articulate an opinion once that opinion has already been articulated and approved by others—“confi rmed by the general voice,” as Halifax ironically puts it, given that in his scheme it is actually the ideal woman who merely echoes or seconds what others have already said (AD 2:397). Halifax knows that his daughter will not be able to “avoid giving judgment in [her] mind,” since “to distinguish is not only natural but necessary,” but he insists that for the purposes of preserving others’ good will, “it is necessary that [the daughter’s opinions] should be kept under very great restraint,” even if “it is neither possible nor fit to suppress them entirely” (AD 2:396). For contrasting readings of this dynamic in Halifax’s work, see Perry (1986): 160; and Thompson (2005): 39–40. 17. Astell complicatedly deploys the psychological structure of focalization here, since she essentially imagines readers trading one set of imitations and identifications for another. For more on Astell’s approach to these issues of selfconstruction through imitation, interpellation, and identification, see the Serious Proposal, 87–92 and 189–99. Butler would surely second Astell’s notion that there can be no subjectivity or subjectivation outside of such processes.

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Notes

18. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (1965, vol. 1): 67–68. All references to this text are hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and page number, with the text’s title abbreviated “S.” 19. In Celimene’s account, the girl also “means nothing by walking but to change her place,” rather than using it (as women apparently should) as a way of attracting men with that “easy motion” that produces “so irresistible a grace as if we mov’d to musick” (S 1:281). 20. In Steele’s essay, the wild thing is figured equivocally as both naturally resistant to refi nement and constraint, on the one hand, and badly in need of training against her natural preoccupation with outsides, on the other. 21. See George A. Aitken’s four-volume edition of The Tatler (1898, vol. 2): 383. Henceforth abbreviated “T” and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. 22. Steele has Mr. Spectator articulate what I would call an “ethics of visibility” in Spectator 454, in which Mr. Spectator remarks that he is “obliged to an agreeable person for coming abroad into [his] view, as another is for a visit of conversation at their own houses” (S 4:98). On my reading, Steele’s formulation here adumbrates a theory of how socioethical consolidation can be enacted through his readers’ mutual visibility to one another, a mutual visibility made possible and mediated by the apparatus of the periodical press. 23. These passages, taken from Spectator 57, are marshaled in the service of Addison’s central argument: “If those speeches and actions, which in their own nature are indifferent, appear ridiculous when they proceed from a wrong sex, the faults and imperfections of one sex transplanted into another, appear black and monstrous” (S 1:242). While he claims he will “not in this paper” concern himself about men taking on conventionally feminine “faults,” Addison is clearly concerned to prevent any and all forms of gender-crossing behavior: he opens the essay with satirical depictions of both a young gentleman who is far too preoccupied with fashions, and a “rural Andromache” who transgresses Addison’s gender norms by proving herself “one of the greatest fox hunters in the country” (S 1:241). Both of these characters are implicitly judged from the ethical principle Addison claims to borrow from no less a cultural authority than Homer, that is, “that men and women ought to busie themselves in their proper spheres, and on such matters only as are suitable to their respective sex” (S 1:241). 24. The internal contradictions of Addison and Steele’s treatment of female publicness, whose very attempts to erase women from publicity inevitably require women’s reinstatement there, bolsters Laura Brown’s claim that in spite of the “priority of the woman” in eighteenth-century English literary discourse, “the female does not automatically radicalize a formal structure or a cultural mode.” To a significant extent, this study is consonant with Brown’s call for a “politicized formal history” interested in “the dynamic relation between radical and conservative that marks the feminization of ideology.” See Brown’s article on “The Feminization of Ideology: Form and the Female in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. David Richter (1999): 223–40. 25. See, for example, Kathryn Shevelow’s provocative but unelaborated claim that the “logical conclusion to [her] account of the construction of feminine subjectivity in the eighteenth-century periodical would be an examination of the novel,” since “both Pamela and Clarissa are deliberately, ideologically inscribed with the conception of feminine virtue and feminine place in the world that had been elaborated in the periodical” (Women and Print Culture, 1989, 193–94). For other useful treatments of the link between

Notes

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

209

periodical and novelistic discourse in the eighteenth century, see J. Paul Hunter (Before Novels, 1990), Lennard J. Davis (Factual Fictions, 1983), Michael McKeon (Origins of the English Novel, 1995), and Shawn Lisa Maurer (Proposing Men, 1998). Among the dozens of studies concerned with Richardson’s Pamela, in addition to the several works addressed directly in the following pages, my reading has benefited most particularly from Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987); Miranda J. Burgess’s British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 (2000); Jenny Davidson’s Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (2004); Tassie Gwilliam’s Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender (1993); Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor’s Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (2005); Helen Thompson’s Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (2005); and William Warner’s Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (1998). For the former of these references, see William Warner’s Licensing Entertainment (1998), and for the latter, see the indispensable collection of materials to be found in Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor’s six-volume edition entitled The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740–1750 (2001), henceforth cited in the text by volume and page number and abbreviated “PC.” Turner, “Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela,” Representations 48 (1994): 73. See Straub, “Reconstructing the Gaze: Voyeurism in Richardson’s Pamela,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 18 (1988). In Straub’s nuanced account, Richardson’s text “call[s] attention to its own stagings of voyeuristic relations between Pamela and the other characters,” going so far as to have “Pamela comment on how others see her according to their own misogynistic assumptions about femininity” (420); even so, for Straub, Richardson’s “privileging [of] the reader’s view of Pamela as more reliable than her own . . . allows readers to relax . . . into a voyeurism which remains unexposed and unexamined because it is itself the means of exposing and examining cultural constructions of woman as observed object” (423). For an excellent discussion of this problem and its cultural implications, both in the 1740s and in subsequent literary criticism, see Keymer’s introductory remarks (PC 2:x–xvi). The censurer indexes the gravity of Richardson’s narrative procedures by claiming that the “sex” scenes in Pamela elicit rapturous “sentiments and desires worse than Rochester can” (PC 2:38). For the relevant scene in Pamela, see Thomas Keymer’s and Alice Wakely’s edition of the novel (2001), 54–59. Henceforth cited in the text and abbreviated “P.” For an interesting account of Astell’s persistence into Richardsonian novelistic discourse that goes into Richardson’s literary career after Pamela, see Leslie Richardson, “Leaving Her Father’s House: Astell, Locke, and Clarissa’s Body Politic,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005). [Richardson], Pamela: or virtue rewarded. In a series of familiar letters from a beautiful young damsel to her parents: and afterwards, in her exalted condition, between her, and persons of fi gure and quality . . . the third and fourth volumes, by the editor of the two fi rst. 4 vols. (London, 1742, vol. 3): 36. Henceforth cited in the text by volume and page number, and abbreviated “P2.”

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35. For Pamela’s discussion, see P2 3:378–80. 36. This commitment to the illegibility of her own will has significant practical consequences in shaping her experience of married life, as Pamela continues to uphold the idea, even in the face of the gendered injustices she describes, that for women it is better “to suffer one’s self than to be the cause of another’s suffering” (P2 3:214)—an aphorism Richardson develops at greater length in Clarissa (1747). 37. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (2004): 181. 38. Ibid., 186. 39. Ibid., 186 (italics in text). 40. Another obvious way to make this distinction would be to point out that Astell explicitly addresses her concerns not to men, but to one of the most powerful women in her society: “Princess Ann [sic] of Denmark,” in the 1697 dedication to Part Two of the Serious Proposal (SP 117–18), and later to England’s “GREAT QUEEN” (the same Anne again, of course) in the 1706 preface to the third edition of the Refl ections (RM 30).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. See, of course, Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (1989); Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (1994); as well as Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (1998); Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (1998). For studies about the broader problematic of gender construction in eighteenth-century print culture, see Erin Mackie’s Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (1997); Ellen Pollak’s The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Works of Swift and Pope (1985); Laura Brown’s Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1993); Terry Lovell’s Consuming Fiction (1987). 2. For interesting analyses of Haywood’s fiction and its context, see especially John Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700– 1739 (1992); Catherine Craft-Fairchild’s Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women (1993). These studies have been amplified and extended by the essays in Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work, eds. Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (2000). See also Juliette Merritt, Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators (2004). 3. Exceptions to this generalization include Ann Messenger’s chapter on Haywood in His and Hers (1986); Deborah Nestor’s articles “Representing Domestic Difficulties: Eliza Haywood and the Critique of Bourgeois Ideology,” Prose Studies 16 (1993), and “Virtue Rarely Rewarded: Ideological Subversion and Narrative Form in Haywood’s Later Fiction,” SEL 34 (1994). 4. Haywood, The Female Spectator, in Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, 2 sets of 3 vols., eds. Kathryn R. King and Alexander Pettit, (2000/2001, vol. 2.2): 171–72. All references to this text are hereafter cited parenthetically by set, volume, and page number, with the text’s title abbreviated “FS.” For an excellent set of essays analyzing this important text, see Fair Philosopher:

Notes

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

211

Eliza Haywood and the Female Spectator, eds. Donald J. Newman and Lynn Marie Wright (2006). Haywood’s formula captures the agential complexity of interpellation in her subjects’ visual fields: the gaze that turns the woman into a commodity attributes that agency to the woman herself (she “sets herself up for sale”), when in fact both parties have been structurally positioned as buyer and seller by their entry into an asymmetrical and overdetermined visual field. Looking makes buyers and sellers who do not make themselves. For a more elaborate account of this theoretical problematic, see Jacqueline Rose’s Sexuality and the Field of Vision (2005); Kaja Silverman’s chapter on suture in The Subject of Semiotics (1983): 194–236. Joseph Addison et al, The Spectator, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (1965, vol. 1): 21. All references to this text are hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and page number, with the text’s title abbreviated “S.” Here Mr. Spectator economically broaches the meta-aesthetic aspects of his own cultural practices and representations—the “people” he sees are always already (and perhaps only) “pictures,” if not, as in this case, “pictures of pictures.” The periodical press seems to be at least as much about itself as a mode of consuming and producing representations as it is “about” its ostensible subjects. See especially Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977). For an application of Foucault’s theory of enlightenment visuality to the development of eighteenth-century narrative technique and English legal structures, see John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary (1987). See Castle’s Masquerade and Civilization (1986). For a nuanced use of Castle’s (and other) theories of eighteenth-century masquerade in extended readings of Haywood’s novels, see Catherine Craft-Fairchild’s Masquerade and Gender (1993). Readers of Addison and Steele would be familiar with this conflation of applause and tears from, for example, Steele’s essay on Inkle and Yarico in Spectator 11. For discussion, see Chapter 2. Maurer (1998): 5. Haywood contrasts these masquerades with “our summer evenings’ entertainments,” like those at Vauxhall, which are not so liable to the kind of extreme immorality she criticizes: at Vauxhall, “every one appears with the same face nature gave him, and if intrigues are carried on, it must, at least, be with the consent of both parties” (FS 2.2:45). Here Haywood neatly adumbrates the connection between reciprocal identification and the “consent” that, for her, must underwrite any legitimate encounter between the sexes. Even within the text of Book I, Haywood highlights the problem of men attributing responsibility to women for the bad things that happen to them at masquerades. The Female Spectator mentions having spoken to a “witty” but “somewhat wild” gentleman of her acquaintance, a man who enjoys laughing at “prudes” of the upper and middling classes who are offended by their chance encounters with prostitutes at masquerade balls. While the gentleman’s moralizing focuses on how such encounters are a “just punishment” for hypocritical prudes who profess “austerity” in every other area of their lives, the Female Spectator emphasizes that this “punishment” comes about only because men like himself provide prostitutes with tickets to such events—something the “somewhat wild” gentleman had already confessed to be one of his “witty” enterprises. To which point the gentleman replies that he and his ilk “never” give masquerade tickets to women of their own families, so that if modest women are affronted at masquerades, “they must condemn themselves” (FS 2.2:33–34).

212

Notes

13. Astell, Refl ections upon Marriage, in Patricia Springborg’s edition of Astell’s Political Writings (1996): 65. Henceforth cited in the text parenthetically and abbreviated as “RM.” 14. Several critics have noted the terms of Haywood’s apparent ideological differences with Addison and Steele on the construction of gender difference as “natural.” While Steele offers the essentialist position in Tatler 172 that there is a sort of “sex in souls”—a distinction that then underwrites a radically binaristic conception of men’s and women’s social roles, since men’s and women’s souls “are made very unlike, according to the employments for which they are designed”—Haywood’s papers on female education posit the diametric opposite. In Book X, through the displaced voice of a female correspondent, Haywood writes, “There is, undoubtedly, no sexes in souls”; from the ground of this constructivist position, Haywood launches a program for educational reform based on the notion that women “are as able to receive and practice the impressions, not only of virtue and religion, but also of those sciences which the men engross to themselves, as they can be” (FS 2.2:355). For Haywood, women’s reformed education could involve training in the natural sciences and microscopy (FS 2.2:358, 2.3:85), as well as several hours a day reading in “histories, voyages, travels, and the lives of eminent persons” (FS 2.3:92). In light of Haywood’s extensive treatment of these issues, it is difficult to agree with Shevelow’s (1989) claim that the Female Spectator “did not discuss the topic of female education from a standpoint either theoretical . . . or practical” (168). Apart from the practical issues mentioned above, Haywood attacks the paternalistic ideology upon which women’s narrowly marital-domestic education was based, beginning with the claim from a female correspondent that it is “only the men, and the men of understanding too, who, in effect, merit the blame” for women’s “wrong education” (FS 2.2:354–55). The Female Spectator agrees with this correspondent’s assessment, and criticizes those men as unjust “who think that all the learning becoming in a woman is confi ned to the management of her family” (FS 2.2:356), fi nally arguing that women be allowed to develop “the talents with which [they] are born” (FS 2.2:361), since “knowledge can make the bad no worse, and would make the good much better than they could be without it” (FS 2.2:364). Furthermore, Haywood ends this section by having the Female Spectator acknowledge the controversial nature of what she’s just argued: “all this, I doubt, will be look’d upon as visionary, and my readers will cry that my business as a spectator is to report such things as I see . . . not present them with ideas of my own formation, and which, as the world now is, can never be reduced to practice—To which I beg leave to reply, that the impossibility lies only in the will—much may be done by a steady resolution—without it, nothing” (FS 2.2:366). The echoes between Haywood’s position here and Astell’s exhortation to the will of her female readers should be clear. 15. Mackie (1997): 143, 127. 16. It would also be possible to read Haywood’s excessive exacerbation of Addison’s sadistic scapegoating practices as a version of what Slavoj Žižek has described as a subversive “masochism . . . [that] is the necessary fi rst step toward liberation” from an exploitative structure of subjection. See Žižek’s essay, “The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link,” in Perversion and the Social Relation, eds. Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Žižek (2003): 117–119. On Žižek’s reading, gestures like Haywood’s, in which the subjected masochistically appropriates and stages the mechanisms of her own subjection, ultimately brings no “satisfaction” to the “sadistic witness,” since “the masochist’s self-torture frustrates the sadist”

Notes

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

213

by “render[ing] clear the simple fact that the master is superfl uous” (117, italics in text). For Žižek, the fact that “the hysterical knot of the libidinal investment of one’s own victimization can never be undone” creates a situation in which “the fi rst gesture of liberation is not to get rid of this excessive pleasure [in one’s own subjection], but to assume it actively” (118, 119). This psychoanalytic framework might illuminate the otherwise frustrating libidinal investments of Haywoodian amatory protagonists like “Fantomina.” Shevelow (1989) reads Haywood’s inclusion of multiple interpretive possibilities within her text as circumscribing the Female Spectator’s authority. For Shevelow, the contrasting or supplanting of the primary narrator’s judgment with the judgment of other characters “suggest[s] the relativity of moral judgment and qualif[ies] the dominance of the persona” (171). Though such qualifications help Haywood “break down altogether the hierarchical distance between writer and reader” by emphasizing that the Female Spectator and her readers “occupied the same relatively powerless position as women,” this move toward egalitarianism between women comes, on Shevelow’s reading, at the cost of accepting earlier male-authored moral periodicals’ “catalog of feminine frailties” as legitimate (168, 170). Shevelow concludes of Haywood’s periodical that its apparent repetition of gender categories from the work of Addison and Steele suggests that “it was not in the values it espoused, but in its method of espousing them that the Female Spectator differentiated itself from its tradition” (170). J. M.’s attempt to arrive at a touchstone for his misogyny leads him down several revealing and self-subverting paths, such as his insistence that he will “descend not so low” as to enumerate the “endless” physical artifices women use to ensnare men, at the same time that he does manage to “take notice of the curling-irons, the false-locks, the eyebrow-shapers, the pearlcosmetic, the Italian red, [and] any of those injudiciously called face-mending stratagems, [including] the studied leer, or the forced languor of the eye or the screwed-up mouth, or strained pout of the under lip, or a thousand other unnatural modes and gestures of the body.” Haywood’s ostensibly disinterested male observer does seem a bit obsessed here, perhaps not least because, as he acknowledges, he has “never yet been blessed with a wife” (FS 2.3:152). To clarify the sadomasochistic dimension of their encounter, Haywood has J. M.’s “friend” keep him at Lysetta’s home beyond what his patience could endure, purely out of “malice . . . to revenge the little credit [J. M.] had given to [the friend’s] character of this lady, who, indeed . . . merited much more than he had said, or that, in effect, was in the power of any words to describe” (FS 2.3:155). After which realization, of course, in perfect accord with a kind of Sedgwickian homosocial economy, they go off to a tavern together to bond. Merritt (2004): 58. In Book XVI, Haywood had drawn particular attention to the situation faced by many of the women in her own texts: the “truly miserable” position best emblematized by the “poor girl, who must continually be under the eye of a person invested with full power over her, [a person who is] resolved to approve of nothing she does, and [who] takes delight in fi nding fault” (FS 2.3:108). The ideal of self-regulation articulated in Book XVII resonates with Haywood’s lengthy treatment of solitude in Book IV, in which she discusses the various ways in which her female readers can develop a substantial sense of their own interiority as a kind of respite from their otherwise necessary specularity. Indeed, Haywood idealizes solitary reflection as the antidote to an epidemic “propensity

214

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

Notes of loving to be always in company” to which, in her estimation, “many young persons of both sexes owe their ruin” (FS 2.2:120). According to Haywood, in their “immoderate aversion to solitude,” many women make themselves unable to make sense of the specular worlds in which they operate or to approach conversation and sociability in a maximally intentional way: she encourages her readers to use solitary reflection as a means to “digest” retrospectively what has happened to them in their various social interactions, to develop the intellect necessary to becoming better conversationalists themselves, and to judge most effectively which of their “companions” most conduces to their substantial improvement as a human being (FS 2.2:120–21). In the end, she exhorts readers to “know [them]selves” and to “endure the fatigue of thought” so that they will not “deny themselves the greatest satisfaction a reasonable being can enjoy”: that of “retiring sometimes into themselves” (FS 2.2:135–36). Spacks, “Introduction” to her edition of Selections from The Female Spectator (1999): xv. She also undermines Careful by assuring her readers, on the basis of her own “spectatorial observation,” that the practice of excessive tea-tabling “is already very much declined,” both among “persons of quality” and among those who imitate aristocractic manners and modes (FS 2.2:284). Haywood rather cheekily cites a passage from Dryden’s Oedipus to bring home her point about the gendered dialectics of specularity through the example of Ziphranes: she quotes, “Our thoughtless sex is caught by outward form/and empty noise, and loves itself in man” (FS 2.3:58). Addison goes on at some length about this “problem,” for different reasons, in Spectator 128. Haywood may have borrowed the basic structure of the Barsina narrative from a story in Delarivier Manley’s Female Tatler 87 (1710), in which a young woman being kept as a mistress (by an aristocrat who plans to abandon her after his more class-appropriate marriage) uses the same theatrical stunt with “poisoned” wine to get him to marry her—with the help of a real clergyman—in what he takes to be their last living hours, only to discover he’s been tricked. All ends well in Manley’s version—everyone involved “applaud[s]” the “pious cheat” of her “honest artifice”—which is differentiated from Haywood’s by its focus on marriage as the woman’s goal, rather than revenge tout court. Compare this situation, for instance, with the title character’s conscious deployment of feminine character (stereo)types in Haywood’s amatory narrative Fantomina (1724), whose object is an unreformed and unreformable libertine named Beauplaisir; far from feeling any “conscious guilt” of the kind that plagues Ziphranes, Beauplaisir gets away entirely unpunished in the amatory narrative, at the end of which the title character’s mother returns to enforce the idea that the girl’s final fate—unwanted pregnancy and confinement to a French nunnery—is entirely her own responsibility. Twenty-odd years later, working in a more overtly didactic genre, Haywood’s critical goals seem to have changed significantly, even if her narrative strategies have not. In fact, one could say that Barsina merely provides the conditions of possibility for Ziphranes to punish himself. After all, she doesn’t actually do anything to him, but relies upon his being “conscious he deserved all the vengeance she could inflict upon him” to do the work of revenge for her (FS 2.3:69); thus, he himself seeks out the doctors who torture him physically, and later, in a delirious fit, his unconscious reveals “all that had passed between Barsina and himself” to all bystanders, and much to his later chagrin (FS 2.3:68). Haywood, The Invisible Spy. By Exploralibus, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1755, vol. 1): 16. All references to this text are hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and page number, with the text’s title abbreviated “IS.”

Notes

215

30. In fact, Steele carries out this ethical mediation in formal terms as well, by framing the narration of Yarico’s story in Spectator 11 as the end result of a series of retellings and adaptations: Mr. Spectator tells his readers a story recited by a character named Arietta, who herself acknowledges that she is “reciting” (in radically altered terms, as it happens) a story from Richard Ligon’s History of Barbados, which also acknowledges its own reliance on what Ligon was told by various witnesses in the Caribbean. Thus, for Steele’s readers, identification with Yarico must be mitigated by these several layers of narrative distancing, which only amplify the geographical and temporal issues we’re discussing here. 31. To compare Haywood’s procedures here to those of Addison and Steele, one might say that the most ethically pressing question Spectator 11 invites readers to ask themselves is, “What would you do if you were a cash-strapped would-be merchant who arrived at the Barbadian slave market with your Amerindian lover and someone offered you money for her?”—a situation in which perhaps very few of Addison and Steele’s readers might ever have been—while Haywood’s Invisible Spy asks her readers “What will you do when you know a woman in your neighborhood is being beaten?” 32. Actually, it would be unfair to Exploralibus not to mention his belated efforts to save Narcissa from her fate. As a way of “fully discharg[ing] what . . . honor and conscience represented as a duty,” Exploralibus fi nally writes a letter to Narcissa’s father explaining in convincing detail how she is being manipulated into a marriage under false pretences. While Haywood allows Exploralibus to “flatter [him]self with the expectation of seeing the next day treachery and deceit receive the mortification they justly merited”—as a result of his own rare intervention, no less—in the end, the delivery of his letter is delayed, the father learns only too late how his daughter has been tricked, and is left in the hopeless-but-sympathetic position of the paradigmatic reader framed by periodical literature of this period: as Exploralibus puts it, “if I, a stranger, could be so much affected [at the tale of Narcissa’s misfortune], what agony must rend the tender father’s heart,” as he reads Exploralibus’s letter (and as we read about him reading)? (IS 2:185–87). 33. His failure to consider what he might do seems particularly foregrounded here by its contrast with Exploralibus’s agonized reflections on his own potential for action throughout Books V and VI; see, for instance, the examples analyzed above, and the narrative of Matilda in Book VI. By Book VIII, it seems, Exploralibus has simply given up. 34. The question of whether Aglaura’s guilt as an adulteress is factual or socially projected upon her receives much indirect and inconclusive treatment during the course of the essay. Even those critical of Cleanthes’s behavior assume that there is “not the least room to doubt” that she has “wronged his bed” (IS 2:364), but at the end of the essay Cleanthes himself admits that he “ha[s] not proofs for a divorce” (IS 2:370), despite having spent a good deal of time spying on her, and despite the fact that by all accounts Aglaura “observed [not] the least degree of circumspection in her amours” and “took no pains to deceive him” (IS 2:362). 35. This outcome also serves as a nice counterpoint, for those readers familiar with Haywood’s periodical work, to the episode from the Female Spectator (discussed above) in which a woman in a hoop-petticoat is accosted by a herd of sheep and then chased “out of sight” by a sadistic mob of spectators. 36. Here female solidarity is mediated not through commitment to rational Christian publicness, as in Astell, but through initiation into sexual desire.

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Index

A actors, 58, 95, 103, 123, 201n15, 202n25, 204n37. See also theatricality Addison, Joseph, 1–2, 5–6, 8–16, 214n25; and the spectatorial model of publicness, 55–74; as competitor of the Female Tatler, 76, 78–79, 84, 87, 90, 96–100, 110; as critiqued by Eliza Haywood, 147–159, 164–168, 170, 172, 174–175, 179, 212n14, 212n16, 215n31; in relation to Ned Ward, 19– 24, 26, 32–39, 42–45, 48–49, 52–54, 191n47; on Astellian feminism, 129–139, 141–142, 144–145 Adorno, Theodor, 2 advertising, 83–85, 179–180, 201nn16–17 Advice to a Daughter (Halifax), 13, 123–124, 207n10, 207n13, 207n16 aestheticization, 9, 12, 43, 55–74, 168, 174, 177–182, 188n14, 193n62, 196n19, 197n25, 211n6 allegorization, 1–9, 11–12, 14–16; in Addison and Steele, 57, 60, 62–68, 211n6; in the Female Tatler, 79, 81, 88, 97, 102–103, 106–108, 205n42; in Haywood, 151, 153, 156–160, 164, 176–178, 181–183, 215n32; in Richardson, 142–143, 209n29; in Ward, 32, 35. See also metaspectatorship Althusser, Louis, 2 Alvarez, David, 188n16

amatory fiction, 10, 15, 75, 141, 147, 164–167, 173–174, 182, 213n16, 214n27. See also libertinism; novelistic discourse Amazons, 101 ambivalence, 157–158, 164 animality, 50–51, 81, 93–95, 104, 155–158, 192n54, 194n70 anonymity, 25–28, 38, 67, 74, 150– 154, 161, 167–183. See also authorship; voyeurism anthropology, 51, 79–90, 95, 97, 193n67. See also nature anthropomorphism, 63–65 anthropophagy, 197nn29–30 anti-feminism, 105, 110–111, 193n70 Anti-Pamelism, 13–14, 139–143, 146 anti-Semitism, 203n29 aphorisms. See maxims apostrophe, 128 aristocracy: in Addison and Steele, 57, 59, 61, 63–65, 196n20; in the Female Tatler, 77, 85, 90–92, 100, 102, 203n27, 214n26; in Haywood, 171, 175, 214n24; in Richardson, 143–144; in Ward, 38–39, 48–49. See also distinction; emulation; hierarchy Armstrong, Nancy, 5, 7, 9, 140 Astell, Mary, 4, 7–8, 10–16, 110–112, 148, 153, 159–162, 164, 169, 181, 190n32, 209n33, 212n14; on female specularity, 117–132, 134–135, 138–146; on the public sphere, 22, 24–34, 53–54 Athenian Mercury, The (Dunton) 10, 22–23 audience participation, 10, 22–23, 32, 47, 69–70, 72, 78, 81–82, 96,

226

Index

108, 127, 147, 152, 158, 165, 170–172, 178, 200n7, 201n13. See also public sphere; readers Augustanism, 24, 35, 56, 66, 68, 119, 151 authority, 4, 7, 10–13, 15, 23, 25, 29, 36, 39–40, 43, 134–135, 143–144; in the Female Tatler, 76, 78–79, 91–92, 95, 97–113; in Haywood, 149, 157–159, 162–164, 166–183. See also authorship (female) authorship (female), 7–8, 13–14, 26, 75–76, 98, 104–105, 109–113, 127–128, 139–147, 157–159, 165–166, 199n5, 205n46. See also authority

B Barker-Benfield, G. J., 193n68 Barrell, John, 57 Bartholomew Fair, 40–42 Bedlam (hospital), 61, 192n62 Berry, Helen, 10 Bhowmik, Urmi, 23, 189n21 bodies. See embodiment Bogel, Fredric, 193n67 Bond, Donald, 19, 187n1, 198n51 breeding, 91, 95–96, 130, 133, 141, 202n26. See also disposition; education Bridewell, 46. See also law; prisons Brown, Laura, 208n24 Butler, Judith, 8, 13, 117, 131, 207n17

C Castle, Terry, 149 censorship, 3, 6, 10, 43, 191n47 Centlivre, Susanna, 76, 206n49 Charles I (King), 51 children, 1–6, 44, 47, 61, 71, 93, 95, 99, 101, 104, 129–131, 155, 158, 160, 168–170, 182, 202n26, 204n34, 213n21. See also education Christianity, 27–29, 31–32, 34, 44, 46, 110, 119, 122–124, 128, 138, 202n22, 203n29, 215n36 City Jilt, The (Haywood), 15, 165 Clarissa (Richardson), 14, 208n25, 210n36 coffee-house culture, 6, 22, 38, 42, 49–55, 60, 73, 77, 91, 102–104, 148, 158, 164, 180, 191n47,

194n3. See also masculinity; public sphere; tavern culture; Whigs Collet, Joseph, 19, 187n1 colonialism, 19, 66–68, 70–71, 74, 93–94, 96, 111, 154, 174, 215nn30–31 commerce. See trade consent, 28, 30, 117, 124, 188n14, 211n11 consumption 2, 8, 12, 44, 67–68, 72–73, 78, 81, 96, 101, 120, 136, 163, 171, 177–178, 195n8, 201n12 coquettes: female, 99, 105, 119, 131–133, 136, 149, 158, 165, 195n12; male, 158, 165–166 cosmetics, 99, 136–137, 160, 213n18 cosmopolitanism, 38, 53, 67–68, 94, 178 counterpublics, 3–4, 7–8, 10, 12–13, 16, 24–25, 29–31, 33, 108, 110, 112, 119, 138, 188n14 Cowan, Brian, 20–21, 49, 73–74, 193n63, 194n5, 196n17 cross-dressing, 98–104 crowds, 38–44, 48–49, 52, 107, 130, 135, 155–157, 180, 192n55, 192n57 culture industry, 3, 5, 164, 182 cynicism, 70

D Davis, Lennard, 10 Defoe, Daniel, 7, 11, 20–22, 73, 196n15 demystification, 2–4, 12, 68, 88–89, 107, 134 Diogenes, 37–38 disavowal, 41, 70, 86, 121, 135, 170 discursivity, 13–14, 21, 78, 113, 125– 127, 129, 134, 136, 138–140, 142–145, 207n16. See also authorship; public sphere; salon disinterestedness, 43, 48, 57, 197n28. See also aestheticization; impartiality; judgment; neutrality disposition, 12, 80, 91, 96–97, 197n25, 202n26. See also breeding; education; nature distinction, 4, 36–37, 78, 85, 89, 93, 95–97, 108, 188n14; based on class, 90–92, 94, 102, 203n27, 204n31, 205n42; based on gender, 97–104, 107, 194n70;

Index between “high” and “low” cultures, 104–105 dress, 50, 90–91, 98–99, 141, 154–156, 197n30, 202n25. See also crossdressing; hoop-petticoats dueling, 69, 132, 180. See also masculinity; violence Dunton, John, 7, 10, 22–24, 34–35, 37, 53–54 Dykstal, Timothy, 7, 188n14

E Eagleton, Terry, 11, 55–56, 197n28 education 91–92, 96–101, 107, 203n28; of women 5, 7, 12–15, 19, 22, 27–30, 32–33, 77, 98, 107–109, 111–112, 118–139, 143–144, 153, 168–169, 203n28, 212n14. See also breeding; disposition; nature effeminacy, 49–54, 98–101, 194n70, 214n25. See also masculinity Ellis, Markman, 194n3, 204n36 Ellison, Julie, 195n10 embodiment, 2–3, 39–43, 63–65, 68, 122, 130–133, 136–141, 151, 154, 160–162, 168–169, 171, 191n54, 192n57, 207n8, 213n18 emulation, 2–4, 13–14, 19–20, 39, 78, 84, 89, 95, 140, 185n9. See also imitation; mimetic desire Englishness, 39, 41, 53, 61, 83, 98 equality, 6–8, 22–23, 55, 73, 77–78, 96–97, 104, 107, 110, 124–125, 188n13, 195n7, 196n12, 213n17 esoteric/exoteric distinction, 3–4, 12, 88–89, 97, 106–108, 185n10, 188n15, 202n22, 205n42 essentialism, 90, 97–100, 183, 194n70, 208n23, 212n14. See also anthropology; nature ethics: as active intervention, 9, 11, 15, 30–34, 36, 45, 48, 138, 157, 166, 168, 172–183, 197n25, 215n32; as ideological ruse, 70; as passive or aesthetic, 9, 11–12, 15, 33, 57, 61–62, 69–72, 74, 87, 168, 172–183, 197n25, 208n22, 215n33; of voyeurism, 167–183 excrement, 35, 40, 42–43, 46, 171

F Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 1–5, 45, 106

227

factionalism, 64, 71–72, 136–137 Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (Haywood), 15, 141, 213n16, 214n27 failure: of reform efforts, 3, 9, 11, 44, 57, 68, 79–90, 124, 128, 157, 172, 196n22, 202n21, 215n33. See also aestheticization; ethics; reform Female Spectator, The (Haywood), 10, 14–15, 144, 147–167, 169–170, 182–183, 196n13, 215n35 Female Tatler, The, 10, 12, 75–112, 196n13; spurious imitation(s) of, 104–105, 107, 200n7, 214n26 femininity, 1–3, 9–10, 13–14, 24, 27, 30, 51, 53, 98–103, 117–146, 149–183, 195n9, 195n12, 209n29, 214n27. See also authorship; education; homosociality (female); internalization; prostitution; public sphere; readers (women as) feminization, 135, 208n24; of coffee-house culture, 49–52; of reading and writing, 1–6, 9, 13, 24, 196n12, 205n47; of trade, 52–53, 98, 101, 193n69 flânerie, 38, 167 focalization, 122, 128–129, 140, 151–153, 156–157, 160, 162, 164, 170, 207n17 Foucault, Michel, 2–3, 117, 149 Fraser, Nancy, 3–4, 8, 13, 26, 28–33. See also counterpublics; public sphere Freeholder, The (Addison), 198n52

G gambling, 112, 171 globalization, 67–68, 174. See also colonialism; trade Goldsmith, M. M., 76, 110, 199n2, 205n46 Gramsci, Antonio, 30 Greene, Jody, 7 Guardian, The (Steele), 58 guilt, 69–71, 112, 166, 214nn27–28, 215n34

H Habermas, Jürgen, 2–4, 6–9, 11–12, 134, 143, 196n23; and the strategies of the Female Tatler, 76–78, 80, 84, 103–104,

228

Index

109–111; anticipated by Mary Astell, 24–29, 32; in relation to Addison and Steele, 55, 60, 73; in relation to John Dunton, 21–23; in relation to Ned Ward, 35, 43, 48–50, 53, 193n66. See also public sphere Halifax, Marquis of [George Savile], 13, 123–124, 207n10, 207n13, 207n16 Hampton Court, 103, 109 Hanoverian succession, 16 Hayward, Arthur, 34, 191n47 Haywood, Eliza, 7–8, 10, 14–16, 26, 139, 141, 144, 147–183 heteroglossia, 98, 109–110 hierarchy 4, 6, 23, 28, 36–37, 42, 45–46, 78, 88, 90–91, 93, 97, 102, 108, 110, 176, 191n44, 203n27. See also aristocracy; distinction Hobbes, Thomas, 46, 80, 117 Homer, 99, 105, 205n44, 208n23 homophobia, 52–54 homosociality: female, 15, 30, 75–76, 93, 112–113, 120, 146, 169, 181–183, 207n7, 215n36; male, 50–54, 148, 151–153, 213n19 hoop-petticoats, 154–156, 159, 162, 215n35. See also dress Hughes, John, 134, 195n9 Hunter, J. Paul, 7, 10, 23, 189n20 Hyde Park, 175–176 hyperbole, 84, 144, 149, 154–155, 162, 171, 203n27, 212n16 hypochondria, 81, 92. See also medical science hypocrisy, 86–88, 167, 170. See also Whigs

I imitation, 3, 20, 51–52, 75, 85, 94–95, 98–104, 109, 120, 126, 129, 140–142, 207n17, 214n24. See also emulation; mimetic desire immanent critique, 2, 6–9, 12, 26, 31 immasculation, 98–104. See also Amazons; cross-dressing; femininity impartiality, 25–27, 31, 57–58, 69, 79, 108, 132, 158–159, 163–164, 170–171. See also disinterestedness; ethics; judgment; neutrality Ingrassia, Catherine, 7–8, 193n69 Inkle-and-Yarico narrative, 70–71, 174, 211n9, 215nn30–31

internalization, 4–6, 9, 19, 37, 39, 43, 54, 82, 92, 118–119, 122–123, 127, 132, 134–135, 141, 145, 149, 160, 163, 195n12. See also introjection interpellation, 2, 54, 112, 127–128, 131, 191n52, 196n19, 207n17, 211n5 intersubjectivity, 21, 32, 72–73, 174, 179 introjection 2, 13, 69, 122, 156, 162. See also internalization Invisible Spy, The (Haywood), 10, 14–15, 147, 166–183 Italia, Iona, 7, 187n8, 189n24, 199n2

J Jews, 38, 67, 171, 203n29 Johnson, Samuel, 19 Judgment, 9, 19, 23, 31, 33, 37–40, 45–47, 56, 58–59, 70, 72, 82, 85–86, 90, 93–95, 110, 119, 135–136, 143, 148–149, 155– 157, 159, 162–163, 168–170, 176–177, 181, 193n66, 213n17. See also authority; taste

K Kant, Immanuel, 2–4, 25 Keymer, Thomas, 141 Klein, Lawrence E., 7, 21, 55, 188n13 Koselleck, Reinhart, 189n21

L Laqueur, Thomas, 9, 90 law, 28–30, 43–47, 62, 73, 121, 124, 143, 171, 176–177, 192n60, 198n43, 207n11 Leheny, James, 198n52 Lewis, C. S., 19 libertinism, 76, 79, 110, 121, 123, 131, 178, 204n34, 211n12, 214nn26–27 Licensing Act (of 1695), 3 Ligon, Richard, 70, 215n30 Locke, John, 7, 14, 28, 39, 144 London Spy, The (Ward), 10, 22, 34–54 lucubrations, 106–108, 204n40, 205n41

M Mackie, Erin, 7, 9, 11, 43, 56, 90, 154, 200n6 Mandeville, Bernard 1–6, 7, 9, 11–12, 15, 45, 74, 149, 169, 188n15,

Index 202n21; and the Female Tatler, 76, 79–90, 95–96, 106–108, 111– 113, 200n12, 205n47, 206n51 Manley, Delarivier, 4, 7–8, 12–13, 15–16, 75–112, 199n5, 214n26 marketability, 11, 41–42, 82–84, 87, 89, 140, 147, 149, 159, 164, 172, 177–178, 199n1 marriage, 13–14, 24, 27–30, 62, 100–101, 118–126, 134, 138, 144, 146, 151–152, 165, 173, 175–176, 182, 195n9, 203n29, 207n11, 210n36, 214n26, 215n34 Marshall, David, 188n14 masculinity, 5, 9, 14–16; in Addison and Steele, 62, 70–71, 132–133, 135, 196n22; in Astell, 121–125; in the Female Tatler, 77–79, 98–104, 110–111, 204n34, 205n43; in Haywood, 149, 151, 153–183, 211n12, 213n18; in Ned Ward, 49–54, 194n70. See also cross-dressing; effeminacy; immasculation; violence Masham, Damaris, 30–31 masochism, 14, 70, 145, 151, 197n31, 210n36, 212n16, 213n19, 214n28 masquerade, 149–153, 157, 161–162, 165, 178–179, 211nn11–12. See also anonymity; cross-dressing; theatricality Maurer, Shawn Lisa, 7, 152, 159, 185n15, 188n18, 189n23, 196n22 maxims, 8–9, 14, 63–64, 68, 99, 110, 142, 162, 166, 201n12, 210n36 Mayfair, 40–42, 192n54 Mayor’s Procession (City of London), 40–43 McDowell, Paula, 7–8, 189n23, 199n5 McKeon, Michael, 9, 90 medical science, 84–85, 92, 103–104, 165, 192n61, 192n62, 214n28 merit, 72, 77, 93, 97, 102. See also hierarchy; social mobility Merritt, Juliette, 161 meta-spectatorship, 40–42, 46–47, 65–66, 72, 211n6 metonymy, 68, 149, 169, 196n12 mimetic desire, 82–85, 95, 135, 150 mimicry. See emulation; imitation; mimetic desire

229

mobility. See social mobility Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 202n22 Morgan, Fidelis, 199n3, 201n15 Motteux, Pierre, 188n18 Mouffe, Chantal, 8, 198n38

N nature (human), 2, 27, 52, 69, 71, 76, 79–80, 92, 94–95, 97, 100, 102–103, 105, 108, 110, 127, 130–134, 137, 154–156, 159, 183, 194n70, 199n44, 201n20, 202n26, 212n14. See also anthropology; essentialism neutrality, 9–11, 48, 57–60, 62–74, 132, 134, 137, 147, 155, 170, 196n12. See also disinterestedness; ethics; impartiality; judgment New Atalantis, The (Manley), 75, 199n5 newsmongers, 60 Nicolson, Marjorie, 73 Night-Walker (Dunton), 34 novelistic discourse, 7–10, 13–15, 72, 74, 120, 139–146, 181, 199n5, 207n8, 208n25, 209n33. See also amatory fiction; Richardson, Samuel; sentimentality

O Osell, Tedra, 198n44

P Pack, George, 103 Pamela Censured (anonymous), 140–142 Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (Richardson), 13–14, 139–146, 164, 208n25 Panopticism, 149. See also Foucault, Michel; public sphere (as means of disciplinary regulation) paternalism, 13–16, 26, 30, 79, 98, 104, 108, 123–124, 131, 133–135, 138, 144–146, 153, 164, 169, 173, 182, 212n14, 213n21 performativity (discursive), 8, 11, 56, 59, 82–84, 95, 128, 147, 164 Pericles, 99, 137–138 physicians. See medical science Pocock, J. G. A., 56, 193n69, 197n26, 198n42

230 Index

Q

readers: as agents, 14, 32–34, 110, 182, 188n14, 196n20; as ethnographic objects/subjects, 35, 40, 81, 86, 95, 123, 163–164, 181–183; as incorrigible, 80–90; as participants in public dialogue, 22–23, 32–34, 76–79, 200n7; as pathologically obsessed, 60–61, 149; as potentially subversive, 6, 32, 60, 112, 183; as private or domesticated, 54, 71–74; as simulated community, 70–71, 143, 155; bourgeois, 4, 59; demands and needs of, 7, 82–84, 149; divided between esoteric and exoteric, 3–4, 12, 88–89, 97, 106–108, 185n10, 188n15; early feminist theories regarding, 8; laboringclass, 38–39, 112, 167; little girls as representative of, 1–6, 9, 168–169; men as, 108–109, 140–142, 145–146, 158, 163, 196n12, 205n42; women as, 5–6, 23–24, 76–81, 85–86, 96, 106–109, 111–112, 118–129, 134–137, 139–141, 144, 148, 153, 157–165, 167, 173, 196n12, 200n7, 213n22. See also public sphere reciprocity, 27, 62, 67–70, 124–125, 136, 150, 179, 197n29, 211n11 Reflections Upon Marriage (Astell), 13, 24–29, 118–126, 153, 210n40 reform, 1–2, 11, 21, 29, 31–33, 43–45, 47, 53–58, 72, 75, 78, 79–90, 127, 129, 131, 133, 138, 148, 158, 163, 167, 170, 172, 202n21, 207n11, 212n14. See also failure; public sphere Review, The (Defoe), 20–21, 73 Richardson, Samuel, 7–10, 13–16, 139–146, 164 Rosicrucians, 107, 205n42 Royal Exchange, The, 38, 42–43, 52–53, 65–67. See also colonialism; trade

quietism, 28–29, 33, 73–74, 177–178. See also sentimentality

S

Pope, Alexander, 49, 66 popular culture, 40–42, 47, 51–52 populism, 48, 50, 53–54 poverty, 44–48, 64, 143, 168, 171 prisons, 44–47, 168–170, 181–183 private sphere, 11–12, 24, 28, 32, 54, 57–58, 62, 71–72, 97, 99, 104, 109, 111–112, 117, 135–136, 138, 148–149, 164, 167–171, 194n70, 212n14 prostitution, 35, 47–49, 61, 69–71, 147–148, 175, 192n60, 211n12 public sphere: as agent of democratization, 12, 23–25, 27, 29, 31–32, 36, 48, 53, 78, 96, 110, 188n14; as corrupting for women, 119–126, 162, 168–183; as fantasy or cultural fiction, 6, 8, 71–72; as fractured or multiple, 3–4, 7, 48, 108, 156, 159, 176, 178; as means of disciplinary regulation, 3–4, 6–8, 11, 14–16, 23, 30, 37, 43, 55–57, 61, 103, 135–137, 149–164, 194n5; critique of early-liberal, 1–5, 12, 16, 24–25, 30–33, 44, 47–54, 75–113, 118–129, 148–183, 188n14, 193n65; feminist countermodels of, 12, 16, 24–34, 79, 97–113, 118–129, 159; Habermasian aspects of early-liberal, 2, 4, 6–9, 16, 21–23, 25, 29, 35, 43, 48–50, 53, 55–56, 60, 73, 76–77, 84, 90, 96, 104, 109–111, 120, 143, 188n14; institutions of, 43–44, 47, 49, 53, 179–180; partisan models of, 20, 48–49, 74; spectatorial model of, 6–7, 9–12, 15, 20, 22, 32–33, 35, 43, 55–74, 131, 139, 167–183. See also counterpublics; Fraser, Nancy; Habermas, Jürgen; readers

R rape, 150–153, 173, 178. See also masculinity; violence Rape of the Lock, The (Pope), 49

Saccamano, Neil, 194n1 Sacheverell, Henry, 74 sadism, 46–47, 153, 160, 181, 183, 212n16, 215n35. See also violence

Index salon: as conversational model, 70, 76–78, 81–82, 85, 92, 103, 105, 109, 111, 144 satire, 12, 15–16, 45, 49–51, 75, 79–96, 101, 104–108, 112, 119, 130, 132, 137, 154, 157, 159–161, 167, 170–171, 201n18, 203n27 Sault, Richard, 23 scandal, 4, 12, 47, 77, 81–82, 85–86, 88–89, 92, 120–121, 136–137, 140–141, 149, 164, 168, 171, 200n6, 201n13, 201n18 scapegoating, 14, 50–51, 53, 71, 95, 154–155, 166, 212n16, 215n35 Schadenfreude, 80–81, 85, 89, 155. See also sadism Schmitt, Carl, 27 scripture: interpretation of, 26–27 Secret History of Clubs, The (Ward), 193n65 Sensus Communis (Shaftesbury), 21–22 sentimentality, 9, 14–15, 33, 61, 70–71, 73, 88, 121, 139, 151, 174, 177–179, 196n12, 203n28, 215n32 separatism (female), 30–31, 146, 191n42 Serious Proposal to the Ladies, A (Astell), 13, 22, 26, 28–34, 112, 118–122, 124–128, 130, 134, 138–139, 144, 207n15, 210n40 servants, 47, 62, 100, 103, 112, 125– 126, 139–146, 167, 178–179, 182–183, 197n24, 202n25, 203n26 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of [Anthony Ashley Cooper], 2, 7, 9, 11, 16, 21–22, 53, 55, 79–80, 87, 90, 96–97, 188nn13–16, 191n44, 197n25, 200nn10–11, 204n32 Shevelow, Kathryn, 5, 7, 9, 23, 189n24, 195n12, 200n6, 208n25, 212n14, 213n17 simulation, 59, 70, 73, 111, 151–153. See also imitation; theatricality skepticism, 2, 6, 21–22, 76, 87. See also demystification Sloterdijk, Peter, 11, 70 sociability, 2, 7, 9, 11, 21–22, 30, 35–36, 48–50, 52, 55–56, 61, 80, 82, 93, 95, 97, 100, 102, 109, 120, 122, 194n3, 198n42, 214n22

231

social mobility, 3, 56, 97, 192n55. See also emulation; hierarchy; imitation; merit Society for the Reformation of Manners, 79, 89 solitude, 67, 129, 165, 213n22 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 14, 144 sovereignty, 28, 124 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 162–163 spectacle 40–41, 46–47, 58–61, 123, 126–127, 130, 134–136, 138, 140–141, 143, 148, 152, 155–156, 160, 177, 193n62 Spectator, The (Addison and Steele), 1, 6, 8–11, 13, 19–20, 24, 33–34, 38, 43, 53, 55–56, 58, 61–74, 76, 78, 84, 96, 98–100, 108– 110, 129–138, 142, 144, 147, 150, 154, 174, 204n35, 214n25 specularity, 13–14, 118–148, 152, 154– 156, 158, 160–162, 164–166, 207n10, 213n22, 214n25 speculation, 40, 42, 65–67, 173 Springborg, Patricia, 190n41 Steele, Richard, 1–13, 16, 19–24, 26, 32–34, 44, 53–54, 193n65, 204n40; and the containment of Astellian feminism, 129–139, 141–142, 144–145; and the spectatorial model of publicness, 55–74; and the work of Eliza Haywood, 147–156, 160, 165–166, 170, 172, 174–175, 179, 212n14, 215nn30–31; as critical target of the Female Tatler, 75–76, 78–80, 87, 90, 96–100, 106–108, 110, 201n20, 205n44 Stockholm syndrome, 146 stoicism, 56, 200n12 Straub, Kristina, 13–14, 140, 204n37, 209n29 Straus, Ralph, 34 subjection, 13, 15, 26, 117–118, 121, 125–126, 131, 164, 169, 212n16 subjectivity, 5, 9, 59–60, 70, 72, 123, 142–143, 145, 182 supernaturalism, 167–168 Swift, Jonathan, 112, 171, 203n26 sympathetic identification, 62, 66–69, 97, 118, 127, 141, 183, 196n19, 197n31

232

Index

synecdoche, 65, 77, 98, 182

T Tale of a Tub, A (Swift), 112 taste, 9, 19, 38, 40–42, 52–53, 55, 81, 85, 90, 93–94, 96–97, 143, 161. See also emulation; judgment Tatler, The (Addison and Steele), 1, 6, 10, 13, 19, 23, 34, 43, 56, 59–62, 69, 71–72, 74, 76–77, 87–88, 96, 98–99, 105–110, 129, 132, 136, 142, 154, 193n65, 199n5, 203n30, 204n35, 204n40, 205n44 tavern culture, 34, 37, 39, 41, 49, 51, 101–102, 105, 178–179, 191n47. See also coffee-house culture; masculinity; Tories; Ward, Ned tea-drinking, 82, 85, 93, 103, 110, 162–163, 214n24 theatricality, 37, 41, 46, 58–62, 72, 98, 103, 123, 141, 151–152, 165–166, 206n49, 214n26. See also actors; cross-dressing; imitation; masquerade Thompson, Helen, 8, 125–126, 190n34, 204n33 Tories: and early feminism, 4, 8, 10, 12, 75–76, 97–113, 139, 146, 193n70; socio-political ideology of, 12, 20, 34–35, 44, 49–54, 56, 90, 198n52 trade, 38–39, 42–43, 49, 52–53, 56, 60, 63–71, 76, 90–91, 93–94, 98, 101–102, 110, 121, 154, 163, 174, 193n65, 203n28, 204n31. See also colonialism; consumption; Royal Exchange, The translation, 125–126 transvestism. See cross-dressing Turner, James Grantham, 13, 139

U universality, 4, 7, 9, 11–12, 22, 26–29, 31, 37, 48, 55, 96–97, 100, 103, 108, 110, 132, 143, 148–149, 151, 153, 176, 178, 196n13, 197n33

V Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A (Wollstonecraft), 14, 145–146

violence, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 69–72, 82, 93–94, 133, 136–137, 150–153, 155–156, 168, 172, 174–178, 180–181, 215n31. See also colonialism; masculinity; rape virtue, 5, 61–62, 71–72, 80, 88–89, 118, 125, 128, 133–134, 140, 185n9, 208n25, 212n14 voyeurism 14–15, 22, 47, 140, 149– 152, 156, 167–183, 209n29. See also anonymity; ethics

W Wallace, Thomas, 19–20 War of Spanish Succession, 80 Ward, Ned, 7, 10, 22, 24, 34–54 Warner, Michael, 3–4 Warner, William B., 7 Wesley, Samuel, 23 Whigs: and containment of Tory feminism, 129–146; as reactionary, 48, 53, 195n5; conflicts internal to ideology of, 20–22; cultural hegemony of, 2, 4, 6, 9–11, 16, 24, 42–43, 48, 56. 98, 110, 198n52; historiography indebted to, 2, 16, 34; hypocrisy of, 4, 12, 24, 29, 48, 110, 153; recuperation of, 49, 53–54, 73–74; satires against, 49–54, 193n65; socio-political ideology of 6–8, 11–14, 16, 20, 26, 30, 34, 38, 53, 63, 73–74, 79, 96–98, 104, 110, 144, 188nn13–16, 191n47, 198n52. See also coffee-house culture; Habermas, Jürgen; public sphere; sociability wit, 12, 46, 79, 85–87, 90–93, 95–97, 103, 106, 108–109, 125, 152, 165, 200n6, 200n10 witchcraft, 58 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 14, 145–146, 181, 191n42 Wrongs of Woman, The (Wollstonecraft), 146

Y Young, Edward, 19

Z Žižek, Slavoj, 8, 11, 70–71, 212n16