The New Science and Women's Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein

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The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse

's Literary Discourse, Edited by Judy A. Hayden

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The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse Prefiguring Frankenstein Edited by Judy A. Hayden


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THE NEW SCIENCE AND WOMEN’S LITERARY DISCOURSE

Copyright © Judy A. Hayden, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11029–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The new science and women’s literary discourse : prefiguring Frankenstein / edited by Judy A. Hayden. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–11029–8 1. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 3. English literature— Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 4. Science in literature. 5. Literature and science—Great Britain—History—18th century. 6. Literature and science—Great Britain—History—17th century. I. Hayden, Judy A. PR113.N49 2011 820.9⬘36—dc22

2010035425

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


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CON T E N T S

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Permissions

xi

List of Contributors Introduction: Women, Education, and the Margins of Science Judy A. Hayden

xiii 1

1

Before Frankenstein Sarah Hutton

17

2

Hutchinson and the Lucretian Body Alvin Snider

29

3

Cavendish, van Helmont, and the Mad Raging Womb Jacqueline Broad

47

4

Conway: Dis/ability, Medicine, and Metaphysics Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker

65

5

Behn and the Scientific Self Karen Bloom Gevirtz

85

6

Astell and Cartesian “Scientia” Deborah Boyle

99

7

Centlivre: Joint-worms and Jointures Judy A. Hayden

113

8

Du Châtelet and the Rhetoric of Science Judith P. Zinsser

133

9

The Life of Burney’s Clockwork Characters Julie Park

147

Inchbald: Animal Magnetism and Medical Quackery Frederick L. Burwick

165

10


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vi

Contents

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Lee: The New Science and Female Madness Marjean D. Purinton

183

12

Barbauld: “Embryo Systems and Unkindled Suns” Dometa Wiegand

201

13

Grant: Gender, Genre, and Cultural Analysis Pam Perkins

219

Bibliography

235

Index

255


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I L LU ST R AT ION S

I.1

I.2

I.3

3.1

7.1

7.2 8.1

9.1

Minerva and the Sciences. From vol. 3, Oeuvres diverses de m. de Fontenelle (1728–29). Reproduced by permission of Special and Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida L’ Academie des Sciences. From vol. 3, Oeuvres diverses de m. de Fontenelle (1728–29). Reproduced by permission of Special and Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida The philosopher explaining the Copernican system to the Marquise. From Fontenelle’s, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, Vol. 1, Oeuvres diverses de m. de Fontenelle (1728–29). Reproduced by permission of Special and Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida Portrait of Margaret Cavendish. From the frontispiece of Cavendish’s World’s Olio (1655). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California From Edward Tyson’s essay on the Lumbricus Latus, Philosophical Transactions (1683). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California From the frontispiece to Francis Willughby’s De historia piscum. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California Du Châtelet figured as Inspiration, from Voltaire’s Elémens de la Philosophie de Neuton (1738). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California Vaucanson’s Tabor-player, Duck and Flute-player, from An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton (1742). Reproduced by permission of the History & Special Collections for the Sciences, Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, UCLA

7

8

10

48

120 121

136

154


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viii 10.1 12.1

Illustrations Portrait of Inchbald from European Magazine and London Review (1788). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California Plate 8 From Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1735). Reproduced by permission of Washington State University Libraries

166 205


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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

The idea for this collection began in the panels for the annual conferences of the Renaissance Society of America and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. From there this idea blossomed fully, but this text could not have f lourished without the generous help and support of several people and their institutions. I want to thank the University of Tampa first for their generous support through the David Delo Research Professor Grant, Dana Grant, and the Alumni Association Award, which provided the economic assistance to pull this collection together. I also want to acknowledge the superb professionalism of all the staff at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I particularly want to thank Steve Tabor, whose dedication and careful attention to detail helped to provide many of the images found within these pages. This is also an opportunity to extend my appreciation and gratitude to the Special and Digital Collections staff at the University of South Florida Library, who were of immense assistance in helping me locate the images from the Fontenelle Oeuvres. I also want to thank the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, UCLA, particularly Russell Johnson, librarian of History and Special Collections for the Sciences, who located and provided the wonderful Vaucanson image for the Burney paper in this collection. I want to thank all of my contributors for their collaboration and the intellectual energy they generated throughout the revision process. A number of people contributed to this book in various ways, and I want to acknowledge particularly Emma E. L. Rees of the University of Chester, Rosemary O’Day of The Open University, and Jessica Vazquez. Finally, but importantly, a collection such as this cannot come to fruition without the support of a good editor. I want to thank Brigitte Shull and Lee Norton for their assistance and advice in pulling all this together.


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PE R M IS SION S

Special permission to quote from the following texts has been graciously granted by the following: Lucy Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, by permission of Gerald Duckworth and Co., Ltd. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg, by permission of Broadview Press. Susanna Centlivre, The Basset Table (1705) and A Bold Stroke for a Wife, vol. 3 of Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights, ed. Jacqueline Pearson, by permission of Pickering and Chatto Publishers. Voltaire, Essai sur la nature du feu et sur sa propagation, from volume 17 of Les Oeuvres completes de Voltaire, by permission of the Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford. Anne Grant, Letters and Unpublished Extracts, by permission of the Edinburgh University Press, Special Collections Department.


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CON T R I BU TOR S

Sharon Alker is Associate Professor of English at Whitman College and currently Director of the Defoe Society. She has published articles on James Hogg, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Mary Brunton, Tobias Smollett, John Arbuthnot and Margaret Cavendish. She is coeditor of James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author (2009) and is currently working on a book-length study on war and literature in the long eighteenth century and a collection of essays on Robert Burns. Deborah Boyle is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston. She has recently published Descartes on Innate Ideas (2009). Other publications include “Fame, Virtue, and Government: Margaret Cavendish on Ethics and Politics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006), and “Margaret Cavendish’s Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy,” Configurations 12 (2004), as well as articles on Anne Conway, René Descartes, and David Hume. Jacqueline Broad is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Philosophy and Bioethics at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her main research area is the history of early modern women’s philosophy. Her works include Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (cowritten with Karen Green; Cambridge University Press, 2009). She is also coeditor of Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women, 1400–1800, with Karen Green (Springer, 2007). She has published various essays on Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, and Margaret Cavendish. Frederick L. Burwick is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA he taught courses on Romantic drama and directed student performances of a dozen plays. His research is dedicated to problems of perception, illusion, and delusion in literary representation and theatrical performance. His book, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (Penn State, 1996), won the Outstanding Book of the Year Award of the International Conference on Romanticism. He has been named Distinguished Scholar by both the British Academy (1992) and the Keats-Shelley Association (1998).


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Karen Bloom Gevirtz is Assistant Professor of English at Seton Hall University, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs. She has published on the origins of the novel, gender, and nonfictional prose. Her book, Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen, was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2005. The essay in this collection is an excerpt from a book she is writing on the relationship between natural philosophy and the early novel. Judy A. Hayden is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Writing at the University of Tampa. She has published numerous articles and essays on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, women’s writing and culture in the long eighteenth century, and on science and literature in journals such as Studies in English, Papers on Language and Literature, English, and Critical Survey. She has recently published Of Love and War: The Political Voice in the Early Plays of Aphra Behn Rodopi (2010). She is also editing a collection of essays on science and the travel narrative and coediting a second collection on early modern travel narratives to the Holy Land. Sarah Hutton is Professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth. Her research focuses on the Renaissance and Seventeenth-century literature and intellectual history, including the history of science and history of philosophy. Her areas of specialism include early modern women’s writing and the Cambridge Platonists. She has written Anne Conway, A Woman Philosopher (2004), and she has edited and coedited a number of volumes, including Benjamin Furly (1646–1714): A Quaker Merchant and his Milieu, Florence (2008); Platonism at the Origins of Modernity (2008); Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, and Legacy (2008); Newton and Newtonianism (2004); Women, Science and Medicine in Early Modern England (1997); and Platonism and the English Imagination (1994). Holly Faith Nelson is Associate Professor of English at Trinity Western University. She is particularly interested in early modern literature, gender studies, and Scottish Romanticism. She has published numerous essays in journals such as Studies in English Literature, Studies in Philology, English Language Notes, and Eighteenth Century Fiction. She has coedited The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth Century Verse and Prose (2000); Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum (2004); Eikon Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes (2005); James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author (2009); and Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory (2010). Julie Park is Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College. She has published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation and Studies in the Novel, and was coeditor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She is the author of The Self and It: Novel Objects in 18th-Century


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Contributors

xv

England (2010). Her current project, Interior Designs: Containing SelfConsciousness 1684–1814, explores the architecture of interiority in eighteenth-century England’s material culture and fictions. She is also editing “The Rise of the Novel, Redux,” a special issue for Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. Pam Perkins is Professor of English and Associate Head of the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba. She has most recently published on the poetry of Mary Byrne, on representations of travel in the fiction of Robert Bage, on urban tourism in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Edinburgh, and on Francis Jeffrey’s 1813 travels in America. She has edited a number of eighteenth-century texts, including Moore’s Zeluco, Elizabeth Hamilton’s Cottagers of Glenburnie and Other Educational Writing, and Isabella Kelly’s The Ruins of Avondale Priory. Her monograph Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment is published by Rodopi (2010). Marjean D. Purinton is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the University Honors College at Texas Tech University. She is the author of Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie (1994) and the forthcoming Staging Grotesques and Ghosts: British Romantic TechnoGothic Drama. She has published numerous articles on late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century drama, women writers, feminist theory, and pedagogical matters in journals such as European Romantic Review, Women’s Studies, Intertexts, The Wordsworth Circle, and Victorian Studies Alvin Snider is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He has published numerous journal essays and book articles on seventeenth-century literature and natural philosophy. Snider is interested in the position of literature against other forms of knowledge in the textual construction of meaning. He is the author of Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Milton, Butler (1994). He is currently completing a second book of cultural history, titled Nature’s Dominion: Writing English Bodies, 1660–85. Dometa Wiegand is currently Assistant Professor of British Literature at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on Coleridge and the history of the science of astronomy as well as mathematics, the practice of navigation and its relationship to empire, and the Romantic poetic imagination. She has published a number of essays on science and literature in Semiotica, The Coleridge Bulletin, and Semiosis, Energy, Evolution, and Development. Judith P. Zinsser is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Miami University, Ohio. She has published numerous book articles and journal essays. Her monographs include History and Feminism: A Glass Half Full (2005), and Emilie Du Châtelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (2007). A translation of a selection of Du Châtelet’s writings will appear


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Contributors

in the series The Other Voice of Early Modern Europe. She has edited Men, Women, And The Birthing Of Modern Science (2005) and Emilie Du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science (2006). She also coauthored the two-volume A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present (1988), which achieved international recognition. Zinsser has served as president of the World History Association and is a trustee of The Journal of Women’s History.


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I N T RODUC T ION

Women, Education, and the Margins of Science Judy A . H ayde n

The fair sex can leave Descartes’s vortices to whirl forever without troubling itself about them, even though the well-mannered Fontenelle wished to secure ladies a place amongst the planets. The attraction of their charms loses none of its force, even if they know nothing of what Algarotti has written for their benefit about Newton’s theory of gravitational attraction. —Kant, Beobachtungen1 After the work of Francis Bacon in the early modern period and following the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the establishment of the Royal Society in England, the “New Science” assumed an exceptionally important focus in English literary discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Richard Kroll has observed, “Changes in ideas about knowledge involved changes in ideas about language as a vehicle of knowledge.”2 In his History of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat argued that the aim of the new society was to correct the “excesses” of language, and to “return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words.”3 Excesses, digressions, and “swellings of style” would be rejected in favor of a plain and natural manner of discourse. “[O]f all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtain’d, than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World” (112). The repercussion of these ideas—although perhaps unintentional—was that this “native easiness” of the language of science offered accessibility to women. Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) noted this change, observing that in the past “our books of science were full of unintelligible jargon, and mystery veiled pompous ignorance from public contempt; but now writers much offer their discoveries to the public in distinct terms; technical language no longer supplies the place of knowledge.”4


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Judy A. Hayden

Nevertheless, to engage fully in the New Science necessitated the sort of understanding that accompanied a more detailed, masculine education. Women, who had long been denied the benefits of such learning, were curious about the explorations and discoveries that were reconfiguring societies’ perceptions of their world. While a rigorous education may have been viewed as necessary for young men, since without it they would become effeminate and prone to unnatural vices,5 women’s education was far less demanding and directed largely toward subjects such as music, dancing, household skills, and perhaps modern languages, which would fit them for their anticipated domestic roles. The quality and content of women’s education, combined with the fact that scientific societies, such as the Royal Society, were constructed on collegiate models, like Oxford and Cambridge, seem to have “over-determined” women’s exclusion from the New Philosophy.6 The purpose of female education was to construct “a virtuous, obedient, and pleasing wife, skilled in the ways of polite society and competent in domestic duties.”7 While women’s demands for a “masculine education” were no doubt alarming, they were also largely ignored. Although men may have feared that educating women would lead to arrogance and the usurpation of masculine privilege, women pointed out that the benefits of such an education would prove just the opposite. In fact, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), claimed that men’s neglect of women’s education was the cause of their lack of prudence: [T]hrough the careless neglects and despisements of the masculine sex to the female, thinking it impossible we should have either learning or understanding, wit or judgment, as if we had not rational souls as well as men . . . makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge, being employed only in low and petty employments, which take away not only our ability toward arts, but higher capacities in speculation, so as we are become like worms, that only live in the dull earth of ignorance, winding our selves sometimes out by the help of some refreshing rain of good education which seldom is given us, for we are kept like birds in cages, to hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to f ly abroad . . . and wanting the experience of nature, we must needs want the understanding and knowledge, and so consequently prudence and invention of men . . . .8 While one general concern of a too rigorous education was that it might exclude a young lady from the marriage market,9 a number of women suggested that, with a proper education, women would be happier, more virtuous, and less vain. Mary Wollstonecraft noted that given that women were “Confined in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but plume themselves.”10 Mary Astell (1666–1731) observed that men resented women tasting the “Tree of Knowledge,” which for too long they “unjustly monopoliz’d,”


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Women, Education, Margins of Science

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(83) but, she added, not only are “Women as capable of Learning as Men,”11 but such an education would also raise women’s thoughts above the vanity of which they were so frequently accused. Daniel Defoe supported this argument, pointing out in An Essay Upon Projects (1697) that: All the World are mistaken in their Practice about Women, for I cannot think that God Almighty ever made them so delicate, so glorious Creatures, and furnish’d them with such Charms, so Agreeable and Delightful to Mankind, with Souls capable of the same Accomplishments of Men, and all to be only Stewards of our houses, cooks, and slaves.12 And later in the eighteenth century Maria Edgeworth concurred, claiming that “[w]omen who have been well educated, far from despising domestic duties, will hold them in high respect; because they will see that the whole happiness of life is made up of . . . the punctual practice of those virtues which are more valuable than splendid.”13 The obstruction to women’s demands for education certainly troubled a number of intellectual and ambitious women, who desired to find fulfillment not only in learning but also in the communication of knowledge. In the “Introduction” to her collection of poems, Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720), asked: How are we fal’n, fal’n by mistaken rules? And Education’s, more than Nature’s fools, Debarr’d from all improve-ments of the mind, And to be dull, expected and dessigned; Wistfully she observed that if but one woman “. . . wou’d Soar above the rest, / With warmer fancy, and ambition press’t,” then perhaps things might be better for all women. But for moment, Finch recognized, “So strong, th’ opposing faction still appears, / The hopes to thrive, can ne’re outweigh the fears, / Be caution’d then my Muse, and still retir’d.”14 Bathsua Makin (c.1660–c.1675), related to mathematician John Pell and a noted mathematician herself, took a different approach. She pointed out that women were already engaged in the sciences in their daily household routines, and since they accordingly demonstrated considerable intellectual ability, a further education, and particularly in the New Philosophy, would not change the status quo in the relationship between men and women. For her children to bless her and her husband to praise her, Makin claimed, a woman requires knowledge in Arts and Sciences. To buy wooll and Flax, to die [sic] Scarlet and Purple, requires skill in Natural Philosophy. To consider a Field, the quantity and quality, requires knowledge in Geometry. To plant a vineyard, requires understanding in Husbandry: She could not govern so great a Family


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Judy A. Hayden well, without Knowledge of Politicks and Oeconomicks: She could not look well to the wayes of her Household, except she understood Physick and Chirurgery: she could not open her Mouth with Wisdom, and have in her Tongue the Law of Kindness unless she understood Grammar, Rhetorick, and Logick.15

In spite of Makin’s careful reasoning, however, the New Philosophy was perceived as a masculine purview. As Abraham Cowley observes in his ode “To the Royal Society,” which prefaces Sprat’s History of the Royal Society: “Philosophy, I say, and call it He, / . . . It a Male Virtu seems to me.”16 In her Serious Proposal, Mary Astell also reasoned that women’s education in the New Philosophy should not be problematic: “And why shall it not be thought as genteel to understand French Philosophy, as to be accoutred in a French Mode?” (83). In the eighteenth century, Maria Edgeworth ref lected further on these arguments, noting that chemistry is “not a science of parade; it affords occupation and infinite variety; it demands no bodily strength; it can be pursued in retirement; it applies immediately to useful and domestic purposes.”17 For different reasons, certainly, most of these women would probably have agreed to some extent with Richard Steele when he observed that “Were the Minds of the [female] Sex laid open, we should find the chief Idea in one to be a Tippet, in another a Muff, in a third a Fan, and in a fourth a Fardingal.”18 Teach them “Gardening, experimental philosophy, and literature,” Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) maintained, for this “would afford them subjects to think of and matter for conversation, that in some degree would exercise their understandings.”19 Mainstream society, however, was not convinced. In Number 79 of The Spectator, dated May 31, 1711, the author observes: “If we grant equality in the faculties of both sexes, the minds of women are less cultivated with precepts, and consequently may, without disrespect to them, be accounted more liable to illusion, in cases wherein natural inclination is out of the interests of virtue.”20 Women were more properly equipped with an education meant to prepare them for their role in service to the household. “Female virtues are of a domestic turn. The family is the proper province for private women to shine in.”21 Learned ladies and philosophical women, both in England and on the continent, were frequently satirized in print culture. The philosophical lady, Philaminte, for example, fared badly in Molière Les Femmes Savantes; the playwright presented her as a ridiculous woman who fails to take charge of her household as she chases madly after the fop-poet Trissotin, a pretender in scientific learning. An official newssheet, after the execution of Marie-Charlotte Corday (1768–93), who murdered Jean-Paul Marat, noted “She was a virago more brawny than fresh, graceless and dirty in her person as are almost all female philosophers and intellectuals.”22 Mary Astell was satirized by Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele in The Tatler for


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her treatise on the establishment of a “monastery” or retreat for learning for young ladies,23 and in The Six Days Adventure (1671) Edward Howard mocked those intelligent, independent women who determined they were as qualified as men to rule. On the other hand, “The semi-weekly Free Thinker, published from 1718 to 1721 and later bound into permanent three-volume sets, featured articles on natural history for the ‘philosophical girl’ who ‘did not aspire to masculine virtues’ but was above female capriciousness.”24 Women’s opportunity for intellectual enlightenment was significantly tied to the changes in the social and economic construction of the family and the work place—in other words, the private and the public spheres. Jürgen Habermas has observed that “[w]ith the emergence of early finance and trade capitalism, the elements of a new social order were taking place.”25 The “private” sphere of the family became separate from the “public” sphere of what Habermas refers to as a “depersonalized state authority.”26 By the seventeenth century, and certainly in England, “significant changes were taking place in the productive work of women in domestic life . . . . The direction of the change was to limit and curtail the married woman’s role as a partner, so that she became more dependent on her husband.”27 While the Elizabethan Emmanuel Lucar could record with pride on his wife’s monument that she could “speak of algorism, or account, in every fashion,” advantageous—and perhaps necessary— talents in a merchant household,28 social and economic changes in the seventeenth century began to dictate a different pattern By the eighteenth century, Michael McKeon observes, the distinction between “inside” work (female) and “outside” work (male) had come a long way “toward ossifying into the familiar, culturally ramified opposition between the domestic and public realms,” adding that “male domination and the subordination of women are constants in this long-term process.”29 The side effect of this, of course, was that “women were encouraged to enjoy timeconsuming busywork that would display a husband’s prosperity—keeping fresh f lowers on the table, candying small violets for the delight of guests, and embroidering needlework that they immediately unpicked to evade the charge of having idle hands.”30 As Schiebinger has discerned, these changes had a detrimental effect for women interested in the sciences, since the earlier household “laboratories” eventually moved into the “public sphere of industry and institutions” at about the same time that “the family moved into the private sphere of the hearth and home.”31 Women’s direct involvement in the sciences was hindered by “[t]he privatization of the family and the professionalism of science,” for women who had previously served as “invisible assistants to their fathers, husbands, or brothers” no longer found this possible since assistant positions “became reserved for those with public certification of their qualifications.”32 Thus, as science moved out of the household and into the universities and various institutions, an important avenue of access for women in this new knowledge began to close.


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Judy A. Hayden

On the European continent, the New Science did not usher in an immediate and absolute banishment of all women from intellectual pursuits, for the Italian academies of science at Bologna, Padua, and Rome did admit women. Women in Italy contributed to the transmission of knowledge, either through the salon or through texts directed to inform the gentlewoman.33 The salon in France had long been the recourse for men’s and women’s intellectual discussions. However, given that the French Académie royale des sciences was limited to only forty members, “the election of a woman would have displaced a man,” and, hence, women were excluded from the Académie, as they were in England from the Royal Society.34 Although “science” and/or “philosophy” may well have been rendered female (see Figs. I.1 and I.2), its study was largely considered the purview of men. Even so, in spite of the fact that women were typically prohibited from joining scientific and intellectual institutions, a number of them remained undeterred and actively continued to pursue an understanding of the New Philosophy. Public lectures were one method by which women could learn about recent discoveries and/or theoretical ideas; another was through informal discussions at home. Eliza Haywood (c.1693–1756) suggested that “philosophy can and should provide a vehicle by which women may assert themselves intellectually and publicly alongside men.”35 In The Female Spectator, Haywood’s “Philo-Naturæ” recommends natural philosophy as “a vehicle for escaping the confines of the female station,” and suggests a hands-on or practical approach: “As Ladies frequently walk out in the Country in little Troops, if every one of them would take with her a Magnifying Glass, . . . [t]hey would doubtless perceive Animals which are not found in the most accurate Volumes of Natural Philosophy.”36 Peter Dear points out that “[b]y the seventeenth century, the wide availability of printed books meant that any literate person could in principle gain access to sources of philosophical learning, at least in the appropriate vernacular.”37 Women might read the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society or other periodicals that addressed the new philosophy and advertised recent endeavors, such as the Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious or An Account of Books lately set forth in several Languages with some other serious Novelties relating to Arts and Sciences (1682–83), which offered a summary of sorts of general publications, books, and articles “in learned European journals.”38 A number of periodicals were addressed to women, such as The Athenian Mercury (1690–97), The Ladies’ Mercury (1693), The Ladies’ Diary: or, Woman’s Almanack (1704–1841), and Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–46). These journals offered advice on a number of topics, including manners, courtship and marriage, religion, natural science, and mathematics. Later in the eighteenth century, The Ladies Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, appropriated to their use and Amusement (1770–1832) and the Ladies Monthly Museum (1798–c.1828) supported women’s education and encouraged the study of science.39


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Figure I.1 Minerva and the Sciences. From vol. 3, Oeuvres diverses de m. de Fontenelle (1728-29). Reproduced by permission of Special and Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida.


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Figure I.2 L’ Academie des Sciences. From vol. 3, Oeuvres diverses de m. de Fontenelle (1728–29). Reproduced by permission of Special and Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida.


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Following Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s example from his text Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), in which a male “expert” in the Copernican system enlightens a Marquise during their evening walks in a garden (Fig. I.3), “women appeared with increasing frequency as the interlocutors in scientific treatises” written by men.40 In the later eighteenth century, texts such as James Lee’s Introduction to Botany (1760), used in at least one girls’ school, and William Wright’s An Introduction to Plain Trigonometry (1799)41 provided scientific and mathematical information for women. Benjamin Martin offered Young Gentlemen and Lady’s Philosophy (1750s) while James Ferguson published his Easy Introduction to Astronomy, for Young Gentlemen and Ladies (1768).42 Even some women, such as Elisabeth Carter, helped to provide texts for ladies’ edification. Carter translated into English Francesco Algarotti’s Il Newtonianismo per le Dame (Naples, 1737) [Newtonianism for the Ladies] as Sir Isacc Newton’s Philosophy Explained for the Use of the Ladies (London, 1739),43 while Margaret Bryan wrote A Compendious System of Astronomy (1797) and Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1806). Mrs. Priscilla Wakefield’s Introduction to Botany (1798) was written for women, and Jane Marcet wrote Conversations on Chemistry (1806) and Conversations on Natural Philosophy (1819).44 While some women may have been able to serve as helpmates to a male relative, such as the astronomer Maria Margarethe Winkelmann (1670– 1720), who was educated by her father and uncle; or Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), who acted as assistant to her astronomer brother William; or Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze (1758–1836), who married the chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and served as his laboratory assistant, and while some “philosophic” women may have been privileged to be part of a social elite that provided a means by which to engage their interests, such as Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle; Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706–49); and Lady Anne Conway, Viscountess of Conway (1631–79), these women still had to be mindful of their reputations. Curiosity was a dangerous thing, for, as Susan Scott Parish reminds us, owning curiosity compromised a woman’s virtue.45 Thus, in spite of the fact that as members of the social elite these women obliged male philosophers to take them seriously, or that, as Dear comments, “nobility routinely trumped femininity,”46 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, became known as “Mad Madge,” and Madame Du Châtelet felt concerned enough about her reputation to publish one of her main theoretical concepts under the guise of a textbook for her thirteen-year-old son. Nevertheless, women determined to educate themselves in the New Philosophy sought knowledge through published texts (such as works by Galileo, Hobbes, Harvey, and Descartes), through family friends and family contacts, and/or by attending public lectures, and they began to incorporate their newfound ideas in their writing. In various forms of literary discourse, including poetry, fiction, periodical essays, diaries, letters, journals, and even drama, women attempted to engage with scientific ideas.


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Figure I.3 The philosopher explaining the Copernican system to the Marquise. From Fontenelle’s, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, Vol. 1, Oeuvres diverses de m. de Fontenelle (1728-29). Reproduced by permission of Special and Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida.


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The essays in this collection explore the manner in which women writers dispute scientific ideas and theories and express their own reasoning. In chapter 1, “ Before Frankenstein,” Sarah Hutton remarks on the paucity of women who figure in the history of science. She argues that this has been explained in a variety of ways, ranging from the essential masculinity of science as a discipline to institutional antifeminism, but most of these theories lack a historically-nuanced understanding of science itself. Hutton points out the danger of focusing on the way in which women were excluded from science because, as she notes, exclusion preempts discussion by creating the impression that science had no interest for women. Hutton offers ways in which a historically informed account of the nature of early modern science and the conditions under which it was practiced can illuminate not only the restrictions placed on female participation in science but also the possibilities it afforded for women. In chapter 2, Alvin Snider claims that Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder borrows from Lucretius and incorporates early modern controversy about the human consciousness and the body. Hutchinson engages in materialism and the New Science to retell Genesis, intertwining religion and natural philosophy. Hutchinson also utilizes atomism in her poem, sometimes resisting it while at other points using its existence to provide an explanation of various phenomena. Hutchinson’s work, Snider claims, explores some of the most controversial ideas in the seventeenth century. Chapter 3 of this collection is Jacqueline Broad’s study of Margaret Cavendish’s response to the Flemish physician and chemist, Jan Baptiste van Helmont’s assessment of the womb. In his Oriatrike, or Physick Refined (1662), van Helmont argues that women are more inclined to madness, depression, and bewitching than men because of the inf luence of the “mad raging womb.” Cavendish appeals to common reason and experience, refuting van Helmont’s ideas about women’s role in “monstrous” births and denying that women are any more susceptible to madness and witchcraft than men. Broad’s study offers insight on Cavendish as well as provides an example of the way women used the new scientific method to challenge negative perceptions about their sex. While Margaret Cavendish frequently endured ridicule for her efforts to engage in and debate with early modern natural philosophers, Lady Anne Conway was figured as a “heroine pupil” by Henry More and a pioneering intellectual by Francis Mercury Van Helmont. Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker argue in chapter 4 that although Conway’s body becomes a medical space upon which a wide range of established and newly emerging theories of healing collide and are interrogated, she herself is hardly content to exist as a silent, passive object of either the medical and spiritual gaze or the anatomizing hand. She is an active and unyielding seeker of medical truth, devising her own theories of physic and articulating a distinct medical semiotics in order to restore herself (and sometimes others) to health. Through her reading of Henry More, René Descartes, and the


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Cabbala, Conway forges a metaphysical system in The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy that generates a distinct theory of matter and spirit, disease and salvation. In chapter 5, Karen Bloom Gevirtz argues that the narratives of Aphra Behn engage one of the central questions of philosophical debate of the New Science—the notion of the self. The observations of the experimenter were supposed to be objective, but could anyone, regardless of education and/or purpose, be truly objective? The concepts of observation and objectivity became “a part of the cultural consciousness” and found their way into a variety of genres; they were frequently debated by many authors, including Aphra Behn. In her prose narratives, Behn’s narrators, moving between active involvement in the text and standing on the margins, question the idea of self and identity. Through these narrators, Behn demonstrates the difficulty of observing and perceiving and, hence, achieving the reliability and authority demanded by the New Science. Behn’s literary experiments with the self, Gevirtz claims, helped to shape not only the development of the novel but what was to become science writing. Deborah Boyle argues in chapter 6 that for Mary Astell, the highest standard of knowledge is “science,” which she contrasts with terms such as “opinion,” “faith,” and “moral certainty.” Cartesian scientia requires the use of the pure intellect, utterly detached from the senses and passions. Astell emphasizes throughout her works that such detachment is simply not possible; rather, she allows that principles invoking concepts drawn from ordinary human life can be clearly and distinctly known and are as absolutely fundamental as axioms are to mathematics. Astell’s works exemplify her method of using clear and distinct perception in the service of “the Art of Well-Living.” In chapter 7, Judy Hayden suggests that in The Basset-Table, Susanna Centlivre neither mocks the Royal Society nor the New Science, as has been suggested, but rather that she celebrates female inquiry and “scientific” curiosity. When Centlivre does engage in the satire of the New Science, the ridicule is directed at the absurd virtuoso, whose interest in science is not to further knowledge but to establish a reputation for collecting. Coffee houses, ale houses, and the public markets were but a few of the places where science met spectacle in assorted “raree shows,” and Centlivre utilizes such a setting in A Bold Stroke for a Wife. The difference between the comical virtuosa (or scientific lady) in The Basset-Table and the ridiculous virtuoso in A Bold Stroke for a Wife, then, is a love of learning. In chapter 8, Judith Zinsser ponders whether all eighteenth-century writing (and perhaps all writing) is “fictive” in the sense that it is conceived of and described in prose, and if so whether it should be possible to view the scientific writings of Émile de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706–49), as literary. Du Châtelet thought the mixing of “science” and literature was an impossibility and saw her work as a contribution to the


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sort of knowledge created by reason and invention. Nevertheless, Zinsser investigates the rhetorical structures used in Du Châtelet’s Dissertation sur la nature et propagation du feu and discovers that she used a variety of rhetorical devices, familiar to all who read and wrote in the eighteenth century, including metaphor, analogy, and vivid imagery. Hester Thrale’s invocation of the camera obscura to describe Frances Burney’s character writing reveals a great deal about the eighteenthcentury valuation of visual technology as an experimental and creative form of subjective mediation. In chapter 9, Julie Park demonstrates that Burney’s approach to creating the characters in her novels derives from the same mimetic impulses that drove such men of science as Jacques Vaucanson to create his celebrated automata, mechanical equivalences for subjects in the natural world. This essay opens larger claims about the deeply scientific basis of mimesis—and in turn the deeply philosophical and aesthetic basis of science—in eighteenth-century England’s pervasive projects of realism and their assiduous imitations of subjective life. In chapter 10, Frederick Burwick explores Elizabeth Inchbald’s play Animal Magnetism as a critique of contemporary medical charlatanry and the sexual exploitation of women. Elizabeth Inchbald utilizes her play to satirize Franz Anton Mesmer and his followers’ medical practice known as “animal magnetism,” a forerunner of modern hypnotism. Animal Magnetism is a model of construction with vivid and witty dialogue, bold and brash in its comic critique on the exploitation of women. Although her play is set in France, Inchbald nevertheless implicates similar trespasses that were already stirring scandalously in London. In chapter 11, Marjean Purinton continues Burwick’s exploration of medicine and the theatre. Purinton observes that public instances of female madness were much in the cultural consciousness of the period in which Sophia Lee’s blank-verse tragedy Almedya: Queen of Granada was staged at Drury Lane in 1796. The play featured Sarah Siddons in the title role of a woman who succumbs to mental disease. This techno-gothic drama points to the complex relationships between medicalized theatre and theatricalized medicine. British efforts to make sense of madness in the New Sciences come to be center stage in Lee’s tragedy. In chapter 12, Dometa Wiegand argues that the huge expenditure of resources and national pride associated with James Cook’s first voyage (1768–71) to the South Seas had a deep and enduring effect on British writers, including women poets such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Taylor, and Charlotte Smith. Cook’s voyage was meant to support Edmund Halley’s mapping the Transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event occurring every 109 years. The seductive notion of understanding the solar system and demystifying the very heavens takes shape in the Romantic poet’s imagination as the metaphoric journey of the soul outward in nature and its return to the corporeal. In her essay, Wiegand investigates the interrelationship of the science of astronomy, the practice of navigation and


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Judy A. Hayden

its relationship to empire, and the development of the Romantic poetic imagination. In chapter 13, Pam Perkins explores ethnography in Anne Grant’s two books on Scottish Highland life at the end of the eighteenth century. She concludes that they offer a single writer’s treatment of the same subject matter in two very different ways—first in the conventionally feminine genre of the familiar letter and then in the more detached, impersonal form of what we might now call ethnographic essays. Perkins analyzes the ways in which Grant reformulates her work on the Highlands, moving away from personal narrative to an attempt at “methodical” cultural analysis. In exploring Grant’s Essays, Perkins draws on recent work on autoethnography and eighteenth-century ideas of how one should approach the study of “exotic” cultures to show that Grant was attempting to write something much more ambitious than an “excursive and miscellaneous” reminiscence of her Highland life. The women treated in this collection are remarkable and fascinating examples of women who integrated scientific material in their literary narratives. While a number of other women writers could certainly have been included here, given the size of a single volume, it was impossible to include them all. Nevertheless, this collection demonstrates the significant contribution made by “literary” women to both women’s history and the history of science. Notes 1. Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen and Erhabenen, in Kants Werke, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, 24 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900–19) vol. 2, 230, as qtd in London Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 271. 2. Richard Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 2. 3. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667),ed. Jackson I Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 113. 4. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, 4th ed. (London: J. Johnson & Co., 1814), 59. 5. Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1669–1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.3 (Spring 1995): 311. 6. Peter Dear, “A Philosophical Duchess: Understanding Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society,” in Science, Literature and rhetoric in Early Modern England, ed. Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 127. 7. Teresa Barnard, “Anna Seward’s ‘Terrestrial Year’: Women, Poetry, and Science in EighteenthCentury England,” Partial Answers 7.1 (2009): 11. 8. Margaret Cavendish, “To the Two Most Famous Universities of England,” in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), unnumbered pages. 9. Barnard, “Anna Seward’s ‘Terrestrial Year,’ ” 13. 10. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, new ed., intro. by Mrs. Henry Fawcett (London: Unwin, 1891), 98–9. 11. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 83. 12. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects [1697], Appendix B in Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies [1694], ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 275.


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13. Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, 62. 14. Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, “Introduction,” in Selected Poems of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Katharine M. Rogers (New York: Ungar, 1979), 5–7. 15. Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), Intro. by Paula Barbour, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Publication No. 202 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 35. 16. Abraham Cowley, “To the Royal Society,” in Sprat, History of the Royal Society, unnumbered pages. 17. Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, 52 and 66, as qtd in Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? 241. 18. As quoted in Kristin M. Girten, “Unsexed Souls: Natural Philosophy as Transformation in Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43.1 (2009): 61. 19. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 125. 20. The Spectator, with Notes and a General Index, New Edition (Philadelphia: J. J. Woodward, 1836), 128. 21. The Spectator, 132, No. 81, Saturday, June 2, 1711. 22. Eileen O’Neill, “Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy,” Hypatia 20.3 (Summer 2005): 195, n7. 23. See No. 32 of The Tatler, dated June 21–23, 1709. 24. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper, 1979), 273. 25. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (1989. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 14. 26. Ibid., 19. 27. Merchant, The Death of Nature, 150. 28. Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House. Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 115. 29. McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy,” 300. 30. Deborah E. Harkness, “Managing an Experimental Household: The Dees of Mortlake and the Practice of Natural Philosophy,” Isis 88.2 ( June 1997): 249. Michael McKeon also notes the increasing value placed on female idleness at the high social levels. See “Historicizing Patriarchy,” 299. 31. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? 245. 32. See Schiebinger’s chapter, “The Public Route Barred,” in The Mind Has No Sex? 245–64. 33. Paula Findlen, “Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy,” Configurations 3.2 (1995): 169. 34. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? 24. For her discussion of the various scientific academies, see particularly 20–7. 35. Girten, “Unsexed Souls,” 57. 36. Ibid., 58. 37. Dear, “A Philosophical Duchess,” 126. 38. Patricia Phillips, The Scientific Lady. A Social History of Women’s Scientific Interests 1520–1918 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 84. 39. Ibid., 119. The exact end-dates on these magazines are difficult to ascertain as magazines often merged with others or began a new series with a slight change to their titles and so forth. 40. Paula Findlen, “Translating the New Science,” 169. 41. Phillips, The Scientific Lady, 110 and 119. 42. Merchant, The Death of Nature, 274. 43. Ibid., 273–4. 44. Phillips, The Scientific Lady, 110 and 119. 45. Susan Scott Parrish, “Women’s Nature. Curiosity, Pastoral, and the New Science in British America,” Early American Literature 37.2 (2002): 200–1. 46. Dear, “A Philosophical Duchess,” 125 and 126.


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CH A P T E R

1

Before Frankenstein Sarah H ut ton

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gives vivid expression to what many regard as the evils of modern science—dehumanizing, destructive, mechanistic, malevolent—a monstrous, masculine birth of the male mind. This dystopian image of science struck a chord with her contemporaries and has dominated the scientific imaginary ever since. So powerfully has the image of Frankenstein captured the modern imagination that it is easy to overlook the fact that part of the impact of the story is derived from its novelty—certainly as far as literary writing on science is concerned. Mary Shelly was not the first woman to write science fiction, or to deal with scientific themes in her writings. But she is probably the first to create such a negative image. For when we look across women’s writing on science during the early modern period and across the eighteenth century, a very different picture emerges. It is striking that, by contrast with Mary Shelley, early modern women who wrote on scientific themes respond enthusiastically to their subject. Their writings demonstrate their receptiveness to science and recognition of the imaginative possibilities of contemporary scientific theory. Take, for example, the unpublished poet Hester Pulter, whose poetry interweaves astronomical motifs into her spiritual ref lections, registering her sheer delight at the marvels of the Galileian cosmos. An earlier example is Mary Sydney, Countess of Pembroke, whose knowledge of medicine and chemistry informs her translations of the psalms. Even Margaret Cavendish’s most acerbic criticism of the Royal Society cannot disguise her fascination with scientific investigation and discovery. The imaginative writing of such women conveys a positive view of science and the potential of scientific theories, testifying to their interest in all aspects of things scientific and their curiosity about new ideas. The writings of women such as Hester Pulter and Margaret Cavendish deserve to be studied for what they reveal about women’s engagement with science. This work celebrates their contribution to the literature of science.


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Sarah Hutton

To explore and celebrate women’s interest in science through their writings is not to be blind to the disadvantages women have experienced as practicing scientists, in comparison with their male contemporaries. If the literary history of science testifies to the participation of women, the history of science tells a very different story. Until recently, what might be called traditional histories of science made little or no reference to women. Latterly, gender-oriented histories have attempted to redress the balance. Even so, it is an unavoidable fact that the names of only a handful women grace the annals of the history of science. Even when celebrating those distinguished female names who have come to historical notice, there is no escaping the fact that a Madame Du Châtelet here, or an Ada Lovelace there, are exceptions that prove the lamentable rule that very few women have achieved recognition for their scientific endeavors. Worse still, the contributions of that tiny few have been undermined in various ways—by charges of plagiarism (as happened to Madame Du Châtelet) or historical erasure (most notoriously, Rosalind Franklin) or by being dismissed as aberrations of the female sex, such as Margaret Cavendish, who was famously regarded as an oddity and nicknamed “mad Madge,” a name that has stuck. Feminist historians have responded to these silences and to the distorted acknowledgement of women’s contributions to science by reconfiguring the history of science as a story of exclusion and misogyny.1 The absence of women from the history of science serves as compelling supporting evidence for the charge that science, in its very nature, excludes women, a charge that has become the dominant refrain of modern feminist critiques of the subject. Attempts to explain the absence of women have focused on the nature of science itself, which has come to be perceived as intrinsically misogynistic. A now widespread explanation for this is the view that science is a discipline that lost its way at its inception. That is to say, at the very time when it took on a modern form that is recognizably modern (the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century), science took a mechanistic turn. It is as if the ancestry of Frankenstein’s monster can be traced back to the experimental methods of the Royal Society. Although she does not make a link to Frankenstein, Carolyn Merchant’s now classic study The Death of Nature has done much to set the mould of this interpretation.2 Among those who have followed her lead, Evelyn Keller has done more than most to expose the gender prejudices of modern science and to argue for the intrinsic masculinity and misogyny of science as it has been practiced since the seventeenth century.3 The emblematic test case for the misogyny of science is Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who was famously invited to a meeting of the Royal Society but infamously never admitted to it as a member, despite her being a well-known female scientific virtuoso. The invitation extended to her by fellows of the Royal Society in 1677 has come to be seen as, at best, a patronizing and insincere gesture, the nearest the Society could bring itself to acknowledge the Duchess’s interest in science, without admitting


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her to its membership. Margaret Cavendish’s high-profile visit to that august representative of the New Science has become emblematic of the hostility of modern science to female scientific endeavor.4 The tale of the exclusion of women from the history of science stands in sharp contrast to what their writings reveal. For these show that women embraced the possibilities of science. This paradox is rendered more acute by the fact that much of the analysis of the misogyny of science centers on the imaginary. Much of the feminist case for the misogyny of modern science turns on analysis of metaphors. Evelyn Keller’s arguments in Reflections on Gender and Science have played a key role in establishing the centrality of metaphor for determining the gender-bias of science. Turning their attention to the origins of modern science in the seventeenth century, feminist historians have taken to task the rhetoric of those regarded as the harbingers of the New Science. Chief among these is Francis Bacon, who has been singled out for critique largely on account of his standing as the godfather of modern science. Bacon, as it happens, has endured a rather dubious reputation for another reason as well: the misuse of imagination. In the first half of the twentieth century he was lambasted for effecting a divorce between thought and feeling, the so-called dissociation of sensibility identified by T. S. Eliot. Even while his reputation as a master of prose fiction was being restored in the second half of the twentieth century, he was subjected to a new critique, this time in the feminist exposé of the misogyny of science that rendered the use of figurative language in science writing highly contentious. Bacon’s most notorious metaphor in this regard is the metaphor of enslavement, which occurs in his Temporis partus masculus (The Masculine Birth of Time). “I am come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.”5 Notwithstanding the fact that he uses this metaphor only once, and that too in an incomplete work that he never published, this metaphor has come to be regarded as solid evidence that all rational pursuits are intrinsically male. As Genevieve Lloyd puts it, “This metaphor of maleness is deeply embedded in philosophical articulation of ideas and ideals of reason.”6 It is now almost a commonplace among feminists that the Baconian project is masculinist, and that it is Bacon’s choice of sexual metaphor that betrays this.7 The rhetoric of the Royal Society reinforces this perception. For example, Abraham Cowley’s “Ode to the Royal Society,” which graces the front matter of the official history of the Royal Society by Thomas Sprat, celebrates the achievements of the Baconian legacy as masculine philosophy. “Philosophy, I . . . call it, He, / For . . . / It a Male-virtue seemes to me.” Likewise, Henry Oldenburg talks of the aims of the Royal Society as setting up “a Masculine Philosophy . . . whereby the mind of man may be enobled with the knowledge of Solid Truths.”8 And Robert Boyle seems to echo Bacon when, in his Some Considerations Touching the Usefulneses of Experimental Natural Philosophy, he asserts no less emphatically that the


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end of science is to dominate nature, which is conceived as feminine. “Physiology,” he writes, “teaches us to know nature, but also . . . in many cases to master and command Her.”9 The Merchant-Keller thesis has not gone unchallenged. Women historians of science have embarked on a review of these arguments, bringing historical evidence to bear that complicates the issues.10 Nevertheless, the feminist critique of modern science presents us with the further paradox that although early modern women writers celebrated science, their modern champions do not. Confronted with these contradictions, the first point I would make is historical. Generalizations about women’s relationship to science and the history of science are hazardous for the simple reason that before the nineteenth century the term “science” had not yet acquired its modern meaning. The term “science” still retained its Latin designation as knowledge in general. In disciplinary terms it had not separated from philosophy. It certainly had not yet acquired its connotations as a professional designation that it acquired in the nineteenth century. In fact the seventeenth-century term “natural philosophy” is probably a more accurate designation for the domain of enquiry that we now call science. Modern subdivisions of the sciences—biology, botany, zoology, physics, chemistry, and natural science—were not the subheadings in use for domains of enquiry whose contours were not sharply defined.11 With medicine, mathematics, and astronomy, which were rooted in the ancient curriculum, the case is different. Science in the modern understanding of the subject was not taught at seventeenth-century universities. It was only in the eighteenth century that sciences other than astronomy and medicine appeared in the curricula of institutions of higher learning. Seventeenth-century science was, after all, a discipline at the early stages of development. The contours of this early science were uncertain, its content was f luid, and its methodology was still a matter for debate. The Baconian agenda of the Royal Society included not just experiments to determine whether the vacuum existed but also investigation of such phenomena as ghosts and witches. Members of the public were encouraged to report phenomena, including monstrosities such as two-headed sheep. Generalizations about the relationship of women to science are further complicated by historical process. Whether we subscribe to the idea of a scientific revolution or not, a feature of this period is innovation and change. The conditions that conspired to obstruct female participation in science in the seventeenth century had changed by the eighteenth. Not only were there increased educational opportunities for women but, as several eminent female scholars have insisted, there also were plenty of evidence that the eighteenth century witnessed an increase in scientific literacy among women, even if historians of science has not always acknowledged this.12 A testimony to this is Leonard Euler’s letters to a German princess. The English translator, Henry Hunter, saw Euler’s letters as signaling a welcome change in attitudes to women and their education. He commented


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in his introduction that the book showed “female education conducted on a more liberal and enlarged plan,” an indication that women “are now treated as rational beings, and society is already the better for it.”13 Further evidence of a female readership for scientific writings in the eighteenth century is Francesco Algarotti’s recension of Newtonianism, Newtonianismo per le dame ovvero dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori (1737). This hugely popular work was republished many times and translated into many languages, including English. The English translation, Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the use of the Ladies in Six Dialogues on Light and Colours (London, 1739), was in fact the work of a woman, Elisabeth Carter. These last examples are clear evidence of women’s interest in, and knowledge of, science. It is evidence that comes not from élite institutions but from publishing history. Of course, to adduce such evidence does not explain how it came about that women could celebrate science in their writings when female participation was discouraged. Most analyses of the misogyny of science focus on women’s exclusion from membership of the new academies of science, such as the Royal Society in London and the Académie Royale in Paris, both founded in the mid-seventeenth century. What such analyses do not acknowledge is, first, that these new scientific institutions were not as secure at their inception as their royal status implies, though by the eighteenth century their insecure beginnings give way to the confidence of long-established foundations. Second, the Royal Society and other academies of science did not have a monopoly on sexism. It is, of course, undeniable that women were not admitted as members, although there was a move to admit women to the Académie Royale. However, restrictive social practices that excluded women were not solely the special prerogative of the institutions of science but were widely rooted in society as a whole. Women were, after all, excluded from universities as well as scientific academies. The educational disadvantages for women, in fact, went much further. Although female education became more widely available with time, women rarely received instruction at an advanced level. Domestic duties were always a hindrance to participation in intellectual life. As Damaris Masham famously remarked to John Locke, “Household affairs are the opium of the soul.”14 Third, it is not always acknowledged that the new scientific academies did not constitute the only sites of scientific advance. Membership of élite clubs such as the Royal Society or the Académie Royale was not a prerequisite for pursuing an interest in science. This applies to men as well as women. Not every male contributor to the history of seventeenth-century science was a fellow or academician; a notorious case is that of Thomas Hobbes, who was never elected to the Royal Society notwithstanding his important contributions to the new Natural Philosophy. There are, of course, many other ways of pursuing an interest in science besides being admitted to élite scientific institutions. And when we look at alternative locations beyond the institutional history of science, the evidence for


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female participation increases sharply. Women could and did attend the public lectures that became an increasingly popular forum for the New Science in the eighteenth century. Another new forum for science and culture was the salon. Salons were attended by women, and in some cases run by them. Interested persons could obtain instruction in science; for example, Mary Astell apparently took lessons in astronomy from the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed.15 And scientific societies for women were not unknown, an example being the Natuurkundig Genootshap für Dames, active in Middleburg in 1785.16 Italy can boast at least two women teachers of science: Laura Bassi (1711–88), who lectured at the University of Bologna from the 1740s to the 1760s,17 and Cristina Roccati (1732–97), who lectured at the Accademia dei Concordi, Rovigo, in 1754.18 The drawback of focusing on absence and exclusion is that it preempts discussion by creating the impression that science held no interest for women. To dwell on the misogyny of science makes it easy to overlook those ways in which women did succeed in engaging in scientific enquiry. But to restore women to visibility in the history of science requires more than simply reinserting particular individuals into the story. For just as focusing on institutions can give, at best, a partial view of early science, so also, concentrating on only the high-profile few among those women has the attendant disadvantage of ignoring their less famous colleagues. This holds true for men as well as women. Among the latter, Margaret Cavendish is a case in point: as an aristocrat and intellectual woman, she was atypical of women of her time. She was a blazing star, to be sure, one whose social daring brought her center stage for modern scholars, as it did for the London crowds that f locked to see her in the 1660s. But like all bright meteorites, she obscures more modest scientifically-inclined women. In order to understand women’s relationship to science we need to widen the domain of enquiry beyond the measurable fact of exclusion, beyond the iconic few. We also need to set aside presuppositions about the gendered character of science that precludes such exploration. This is not to deny the value of analyzing the gender prejudices of science and its institutions, but to defer judgment before other evidence is heard. To confine our investigations to the obstacles and disadvantages that female participation in science faced is to overlook the possibility that aspects of early science might in actual fact have made women’s participation possible. We therefore need to refocus our enquiry, and that requires reassessing the nature of early science. Without denying the incontestable gender disadvantages that faced women in all aspects of public life, it is relevant to consider how early modern science was hospitable to nonprofessionals and the extent to which it accommodated, even encouraged, the interest of lay participants, especially during the early years of the so-called scientific revolution. After all, new developments often create opportunities that traditions deny. Making allowances for the fact that rhetoric and practice


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do not always match up, there are two aspects of the New Science that we might consider to have the potential for social inclusiveness and communicability: first is its nonspecialist character, and second is the aspiration among early practitioners for accessibility. A characteristic of early science is what might be called its “amateur” aspect. At the élite end of the spectrum, that august promoter of the New Science, the Royal Society, was a club for gentleman amateurs. Lower down in this scale came the astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks, a clergyman by profession, who predicted, observed, and recorded the transit of Venus in 1639. Further down in this scale we can see that scientific investigation had artisan roots. The examples of genuine advancement in knowledge noted by Francis Bacon came from the technological domain of working men and included navigation skills, printing technology, and the invention of gunpowder. Bacon’s project to expand the horizons of knowledge, his “advancement of learning,” set out to incorporate the methods of these “empiricks.” The nonspecialist character of science also had its domestic aspect. Lynette Hunter has argued that the technologies and specialist knowledge required in the household economy were a model for the techniques and knowledge of the “new” experimental science.19 In fact, the term “kitchen physicke” was in use in the seventeenth century to denote the medical care practiced in the household by nonprofessionals.20 Additionally, of course, the household unit might provide opportunities for scientifically minded women. Such, apparently, was the case with Caroline Herschel and Margaret Flamsteed, the former was able to profit from and contribute to the astronomical scientific studies of her brother and the latter was able to do so for her husband. Monika Mommertz has recently argued that the family as a domestic unit might have a structural relationship to a scientific institution. It was “the culture of the astronomical household” that enabled Maria Margaretha Winkelmann to work with her husband Gottfried Kirch, astronomer to Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and that enabled her, furthermore, to continue to work with and for the Academy even after her husband’s death.21 The nonspecialist nature of early scientific enquiry also registers in the claims made for experimentation as an accessible means of investigation. The experimental method was upheld as an accessible, practical method of scientific enquiry. Newton himself proclaimed the accessibility of the experiments described in his Opticks. “A novice may easily try them,” he declared.22 Although it was unlikely that Newton had women in mind when he made this statement, the largest constituency of “novices” consisted of women. Furthermore, most interest in scientific investigation has always been found among individuals with more modest capacities than canonical figures such as Boyle, Hooke, and Newton. Although, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu astutely observed, “there are few heads capable of makeing Sir I. Newton’s calculations,” this did not mean that Newtonian science was beyond the comprehension of less gifted minds.


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As she pointed out, “the result of them is not difficult to be understood by a moderate capacity.”23 This view was echoed in the early nineteenth century by the eminent Scottish woman physicist Mary Somerville. In The Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), Somerville observes that a “complete acquaintance with physical astronomy” is only attainable by a few specialists, namely, those qualified “in the higher branches of mathematical and mechanical science.” Nonetheless, she insists that lack of such high-level expertise does not mean that the sciences are beyond the reach of more modest intellects, even if they duck the challenge: it is nevertheless true that sufficient skill in analysis to follow the general outline—to see the mutual dependence of the different parts of the system, and to comprehend by what means some of the most extraordinary conclusions have been arrived at,—is within the reach of many who shrink from the task.24 The intricacies of mathematical physics notwithstanding, the preferred language for communication in seventeenth and eighteenth-century science testifies to the aspiration to transparency that marks early modern science. By adopting the vernacular as the language of communication, the early academies of science broke with the erudite traditions of the universities, where Latin remained the norm for intellectual interchange. Members of the Royal Society even actively investigated how to make communication easier, through implementing the ideals of universal language and adopting a plain style. Early practitioners of the New Science declared their aspiration to accessibility, to conducting their business openly, and to sharing information and methods with others. Even if, in practice, the true “freedom” of openness came to be reserved for a socially-defined élite, communication with the wider world became structural in the early scientific academies through the office of secretary and the systematic maintenance of correspondence with their European counterparts. Furthermore, the genres of early scientific communication also implied openness. The tight conventions of reportage that obtain in the modern scientific paper had not yet been established. Newton’s Principia was held up as a standard and a model for disseminating scientific theory. But this was hardly the norm. Dialogue was Galileo’s preferred choice of genre for discussing the relative merits of the Copernican and Ptolomaic systems.25 Correspondence has already been mentioned. Dissemination through journals and translations was also important. Fiction too had its role as a vehicle for new ideas—a point not lost on Johannes Kepler and Francis Bacon, who embraced fiction as a means of promoting new models of thinking. The moon-voyage of Kepler’s Somnium brilliantly reversed perspectives on the moon and earth to promote the Copernican system. Bacon adopted and adapted Utopian fiction as a vehicle for promoting his reform of learning;


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his New Atlantis is the fictional equivalent of his New Organon. That early proselytizer of the New Science, John Wilkins, was quick to see the potential of fiction for the new, and therefore unfamiliar, ideas, by virtue of the paradox that absurdity is the hallmark of unfamiliar truth. He wrote in the preface to his Discovery of a New World. That a new truth may seeme absurd and impossible not onely to the vulgar, but to those also who are otherwise wise men and excellent Schollars; and hence it will follow that every new thing which seemes to oppose common principles is not presently to be rejected, but rather to be pry’d into with a diligent enquiry, since there are many things which are yet hid from us, and reserv’d for future discoverie . . . . Things are very hardly received which are altogether strange to our thoughts and our senses.26 It might be added that science at its cutting edge has always offered scope for imagination. Some would argue that scientific innovation requires an act of imagination. Even today the frontiers of conceptualization are prospected in figurative terms: black holes, worm holes, strings. The writings of women bear important testimony to women’s interest in, and knowledge of, science. Here, in their imaginative writing and in the translations they undertook, women hold their own alongside men as mediators of scientific ideas. Far from being mere passive, uncomprehending spectators, women show themselves in their writings to be informed, engaged celebrators of what science can reveal. Although Aphra Behn gives a self-deprecatory description of herself in her Preface to her translation of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (A Discovery of New Worlds), she nevertheless confidently criticizes Fontenelle’s account of Copernicanism, thereby belying her self-description as “a Woman, who is not supposed to be well versed in the Terms of Philosophy, being but a new beginner in that Science.”27 Furthermore, she roundly objects (as did Madame Du Châtelet) to Fontenelle’s deprecating presentation of the Marquise’s understanding of science by making her say “a great many very silly things” (77). Margaret Cavendish’s fictional The Description of a New World Called a Blazing World likewise testifies to her extensive knowledge of contemporary natural philosophy, every bit as much as her own writings on natural philosophy, such as her Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1666) or her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). Furthermore, as Margaret Cavendish was well aware, the value of science fiction is not just what it conveys about knowledge of science but precisely the imaginary possibilities it affords for speculating about science and systems of the world and communicating those speculations. As she writes in the prefatory “To the Reader” in her Blazing World, the work of reason (theorizing) is “laborious and difficult and requires sometimes the help of fancy, to recreate the mind.”28 Through the conjunction of imagination with her


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“philosophical observations,” she aims to “divert my studious thoughts, which I employed in the contemplation thereof, and to delight the reader with variety” (6). The tale she tells is an object lesson in scientific imagining. As the spirits tell the Empress in her Blazing World, “within the compass of the head or scull” Every human creature . . . may create a world of what fashion and government he will, and give the creatures thereof such motions, figures, forms, colours perceptions, etc. as he pleases, and make whirlpools, lights, pressures and muscles, and nerves . . . he may make a world of ideas, a world of atoms, a world of lights, or whatsoever his fancy leads him to. (72) Following the advice of the spirits, her protagonists invent and discard imaginary worlds, experimenting with different cosmologies—Epicurean, Cartesian, Hobbesian—finally settling on their own (73–5). In this way Cavendish’s tale illustrates the freedom of the scientific imagination, and she ends by inviting her reader to exercise similar freedom, so that “if they cannot endure to be subjects,” of her Blazing World, they may “create worlds of their own and govern themselves as they please” (109). Notes 1. See, for example, Londa Schiebinger, The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 2. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, Harper Row, 1980). On Merchant, see the articles in “Focus: Getting Back to The Death of Nature: Rereading Carolyn Merchant,” Isis 97.3 (September 2006), especially Katharine Park, “Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science,” 487–95. 3. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 4. Lisa T. Sarasohn, “Science Turned Upside-Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Huntington Library Quarterly 47.4 (Autumn 1984): 289–307; Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” English Literary History 64.2 (Summer 1997): 447–71. 5. Francis Bacon, The Masculine Birth of Time or Great Instauration of the Dominion of Man over the Universe, ed. and trans, Benjamin Farrington, in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon . . . . with New Translations of Fundamental Texts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), 62. 6. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason. “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1984; London: Routledge, 1992), viii. In her preface to the second edition Genevieve Lloyd states that were she to rewrite the book, she would put more emphasis on metaphor. 7. Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 52. Cf. also Helen Longino, “Subjects, Power and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. and intro. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (London: Routlege, 1993), 101. Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity. Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 105 and 127n.; Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 300–1; Susan Hekman, Gender and Knowledge. Elements of a Postmodern Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 115 and 120.


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8. “The Publisher to the Reader,” in Robert Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours . . . Experimental History of Colours (London: H. Herringman, 1664). 9. Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy . . . by Way of Invitation to the Study of It (Oxford: Printed by H. Hall for R. Davis, 1663), 19. Cf. Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays and Other Tracts . . . on several Occasions, 2nd ed. (1661. London: H. Herringman, 1669), “For some Men care only to Know Nature, others desire to Command Her,” 42. 10. See Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith Zinsser (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), especially Margaret Osler, “The Gender of Nature and the Nature of Gender in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” 71–85. See also my “Riddle of the Sphinx. Francis Bacon and the Emblems of Science,” in Women, Science and Medicine, 1500– 1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 7–28. 11. With these caveats in mind, I shall, nevertheless, use the term “science” in my discussion below. 12. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind has no Sex? 39; Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995). 13. Leonhard Euler, Letters of Euler to a German Princess, on Different Subjects in Physic and Philosophy. Translated from the French by Henry Hunter D.D., 2 vols. (London: Printed for the translator & for H. Murray, 1795). 14. Damaris Masham to John Locke, November 14 [1685], The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols., ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–89), vol. 2, 757. 15. Rob Iliffe and Frances Willmoth, “Astronomy and the Domestic Sphere,” in Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 248. 16. Dorothée Sturkenboom and Margaret C. Jacob, “A Women’s Scientific Society in the West: The Late Eighteenth-Century Assimilation of Science,” Isis 94.2 ( June 2003): 217–52. 17. On Bassi, see P. Findlen, “Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy. The Strategies of Laura Bassi,” Isis 84.3 (September 1993): 441–69. G. Berti Logan, “The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth-Century Italian Woman of Science,” American Historical Review 99.3 ( June 1994): 785–812. 18. Maria Laura Soppelsa and Eva Viani, “Dal Newtonianismo per le dame al Neutonianismo delle dame. Cristina Roccati una savante del settecento Veneto,” in Pina Tortaro (ed.), Donne filosofia e cultura nel seicento (Rome: CNR, 1999), 211–40. 19. Lynette Hunter, “Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters, 1570–1620,” in Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 89–107. 20. “Doe we not often see, that many men rise vp miraculously, as it were from death to life like Hezechias when all earthly helpes proue vaine and fruitlesse, euen by Kitchen Physicke?” Sir William Vaughan, The Golden Fleece . . . for the generall and perpeutall Good of Great Britaine (London: Printed for Francis Williams . . . , 1626). 21. Monika Mommertz, “The Invisible Economy of Science. A New Approach to the History of Gender and Astronomy at the Eighteenth-Century Berlin Academy of Sciences,” in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith Zinsser (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 159–78. 22. Newton, Opticks, or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (New York: Dover, 1952), 25. 23. Quoted in Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 524. Newton’s Principia’s reputation “was based on the authority of a few competent readers” and was difficult even for people like Locke and Halley; see Paolo Cassini, “Newton’s Principia and the Philosophies of the Enlightenment,” in Newton’s Principia and Its Legacy, ed. D. G. King-Hele and A. R. Hall (London: Royal Society; Port Washington, NY: Distributed by Scholium International, 1988), 35–52; see particularly 42. See also in this same volume E. A. Fellman, “The Principia and Continental Mathematicians,” 13–34. 24. Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (London: J. Murray, 1834), 4–5. 25. Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo [Dialogue Concerning the Two Great World Systems] (Fiorenza: Per Gio: Batista Landini, 1632).


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26. John Wilkins, A Discovery of a New World, or A Discourse Tending to prove, that ’tis possible there may be another Habitable World in the Moone. In 2 Bookes (London: Printed for John Maynard, 1640), 16–18. 27. Aphra Behn, “Preface,” in A Discovery of New Worlds, vol. 4, Seneca Unmasqued and Other Prose Translations, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 72. 28. Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called a Blazing World (1666), in Margaret Cavendish: Political Writing, ed. Susan James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6.


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Hutchinson and the Lucretian Body A lvin S nide r

In the midst of the violence and turmoil of the English Revolution, Lucy Hutchinson completed a translation into couplets of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Left in manuscript until its publication in 1996, it remains a significant accomplishment, both for its priority among English translations and for its authorship by a woman best known for the Protestant piety prominently on display in her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. As a thinker associated with some of the more rigid variants of Calvinism, Hutchinson seems exactly the sort of writer who would repudiate a classical poet infamous for his materialism and atheism. Hutchinson did indeed denounce the doctrines of her early Lucretian apprenticeship in a preface to her translation and also in a work only recently identified through internal and external evidence as hers: Order and Disorder. David Norbrook established the attribution of this retelling of the book of Genesis in part by demonstrating the many close parallels between it and her translation,1 without, however, fully considering the implications of this odd convergence of piety and philosophical materialism in a writer who supposedly preferred the role of dutiful wife to that of learned poet.2 Norbrook’s readings of Hutchinson tend to foreground the political dimension of her cultural situation; by treating her substantial body of writing as ideologically self-consistent, he can persuasively ascribe to Hutchinson both strict adherence to Calvinism and animosity toward radical republicanism.3 While these shorthand descriptions seem accurate enough in their way, Hutchinson’s vexed relation to Epicurean philosophy, a cornerstone of atheism, science, and libertinism in the mid-seventeenth century, suggests a somewhat different intellectual trajectory. Her dedication to interpreting Lucretius, whose denial of providence and divine creation she could not easily gloss over, testifies to a wide-ranging curiosity that ventured far beyond the polite philosophy of her day. Hutchinson’s interest in the ontology of an atomistic universe places her in the company of aristocratic women writers such as Anne Conway,


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Margaret Cavendish, and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who approached science through the study of philosophical texts and conversation in elite circles of learning, not through emergent institutions of scientific inquiry. Studies of the gendering of early modern science tend to situate the project of acquiring natural knowledge in organized communities, making access to laboratories, learned societies, universities, and scientific societies prerequisites for scientific endeavor.4 The exclusion of women from scientific academies, which never amounted to a total ban, did not prevent many from engaging the latest ideas through informal networks and industrious reading. Frenchwomen of the upper classes, called cartésiennes, mobilized René Descartes’s philosophy as a surrogate for the university education their gender barred them from acquiring, and Englishwomen likewise embraced Cartesianism for the apparent universality of its conception of reason. Hutchinson, however, looked to other printed sources for scientific knowledge, using her knowledge of Latin to overcome the liability of her gender. In one respect, her career anticipates the Enlightenment tradition of female learning that valorized scientific education while it also looks backward to the women humanists of the sixteenth century, with their investment in reading original sources and mastering difficult texts. As Jonathan Goldberg argues in The Seeds of Things, Lucretius plays a vital role in the materialism of the seventeenth century and “provides a significant matrix for understanding the philosophical commitments and embodied representations of English Renaissance writers.”5 Goldberg’s poststructuralist reading of Hutchinson foregrounds the interplay between identity and difference as a key to understanding her work (and also Margaret Cavendish’s, with whom he pairs her), while my own analysis draws on the history of the body to make its case. I follow Goldberg’s example in approaching Hutchinson’s Epicureanism as a fully engaged response to a strain of contemporary thought on materiality and sexuality, while avoiding altogether the problem of whether we can characterize her understanding of Lucretian atomism or ethics as “accurate” or “right.” In the first part of this essay, I argue that Lucretian physical theory belongs among the discourses that identify the body as a domain of knowledge and pleasure, placing sensation at the center of human experience. My reading of passages in books 3 and 4 of De rerum natura, the point at which Lucretius shifts from the theory of atomism to explore thought and sensation, highlights the poem’s insistence on the interdependence of body and spirit and the ref lexive nature of much of our physical lives. In Lucretius, everything, including the soul, gets explained in terms of an ontology of atoms and the void. An uncompromising materialist, he stresses the soul’s interactions with the body and makes the mind a part of the human anatomy, no different from a hand or foot. In this scheme of things, body, brain, and mind cleave together in mutual interdependence, or as Hutchinson phrases it, “soule and mind are linkt together soe / That


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from their union doth one nature f low” (3.142–3).6 Reading Hutchinson’s epic against such a theory that shaped her youthful imagination discloses why seventeenth-century writers, including the poet herself, warned against the seductions of Epicureanism. In 1679, when she published the first five cantos of Order and Disorder, Hutchinson had explicitly repudiated an outward allegiance to Lucretian atomism and philosophy, yet she never entirely disentangled her writing from it. Hutchinson’s hesitation to publish arose in part from the difficulty she experienced in assimilating elements of a materialist philosophy that had seeped into her retelling of Genesis. If another reader of Lucretius, John Milton, did not hesitate to weave heterodoxy, radical independency, and materialist philosophy into the text of his Christian epic, Hutchinson found the tension overwhelming and finally impossible to sustain. My argument is not simply that a residue of paganism adheres to Order and Disorder, visible just below the surface, nor that Hutchinson attempted but failed to bring Lucretius into line with her Christian beliefs. In the second part of this essay, I show that parallels run deeper than sporadic moments of intertextuality, that when Hutchinson departs from the Genesis narrative, she sometimes strays back into a Lucretian, speculative mode not fully compatible with her scripturalism. Order and Disorder borrows from Lucretius, I argue, in incorporating certain elements of its materialist account of perception and in its depiction of dreaming as a somatic state that reveals something crucial about the operations of the mind. Hutchinson situates her biblical epic in the midst of scientific controversies about the human body and human consciousness, in which a revived atomism offered a way to understand the puzzling relation of affect to physiology, and of the passions to physical drives. My larger claim, then, is that bodily sensation and consciousness become centers of theoretical ref lection in Hutchinson’s work, discussed in terms that borrow from natural philosophy as well as theology. A retelling of Genesis provided her with the means to engage contemporary materialism without abandoning an appearance of piety. It also offered a platform on which she could display considerable erudition while never exceeding the limits of decorum. By interleaving scriptural and philosophical texts, Hutchinson could remain virtuous, according to norms she had internalized, even while handling ideas considered ill-suited to the godly community to which she belonged. In short, I focus less on the biblical narrative itself than on Hutchinson’s digressions where religion and natural philosophy appear tightly intertwined, particularly in passages in which she considers the phenomenon of dream consciousness. The didacticism of De rerum natura and the moralism of Order and Disorder make different claims on the reader, despite a shared seriousness of purpose and tone between the two poems. Yet both poets take perception itself as a basic category of analysis in their writing, and both experiment with ways of representing the mind-body relation in metaphors that escape the contradictions of dualism.


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Alvin Snider Lucretian Receptions

In a recent assessment, Stuart Gillespie concedes that Lucretius “had less impact on English writers than any other major Latin poet,” but he goes on to document extensively how, by 1650, Lucretius “had been read and appreciated by an important minority.” 7 Accounts of Hutchinson’s Lucretius tend to downplay Hutchinson’s membership in this marginal group by focusing on her apparent Christianizing of atomism, her transformation of atheistic doctrines to justify withdrawal from society into a realm of self-regulated tranquility. Such an approach sorts well with scholarship on the humanist redemption of Epicureanism in the sixteenth century and the project of later writers such as Walter Charleton and Pierre Gassendi. Reid Barbour, whose English Epicures and Stoics provides the fullest account of English Epicureanism, highlights its inf luence on the politics and theological debates of the day.8 Barbour stresses the continuity of Hutchinson’s baptized Epicurus with earlier attempts to reconcile ethical hedonism and the good life. He sees Epicureanism as offering an ethical model for retreat from a society torn apart by war and religious zeal. In two essays on Hutchinson’s translation, Barbour senses the unresolved contradictions that stick to the translation and also suggests that Hutchinson only gave up on Lucretius and atomism when she finally convinced herself of the irreconcilable differences between Lucretius and Christianity. Unpersuaded by Hutchinson’s attempt to divorce herself from her labor as a translator, Barbour finds the rejection of the prefatory letter too weak a gesture to succeed in severing the bond between the Roman poet and his English translator.9 Hutchinson, it also seems fair to say, took up the work of translation as a way of coming to terms with the new medical and scientific theories disseminated throughout Europe at mid-century. The domestication of Epicureanism in England never entirely erased its associations with atheism, scientific materialism, and a cult of sensuality. At the same time, Epicureanism appealed to early modern readers for what Catherine Wilson describes as “its seamless integration of human beings into the rest of animated nature,” its emphasis on “human equality,” and for a range of other “philosophically and morally attractive features.”10 Seventeenth-century receptions of Lucretius could cut both ways at once. In 1675, the year that the first Earl of Anglesey received the manuscript of her translation, Hutchinson felt it necessary to renounce her intellectual investment in the project. In a letter to him, Hutchinson said that she would have consigned the book to the fire had not a copy “gone out of my hands” and turned up in circulation. She excuses herself for having “translated it only out of youthfull curiositie, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand,” having no inclination whatsoever to propagate any of its doctrines.11 Hutchinson decries the poem’s inf luence among her contemporaries and rounds on the wisdom of the ancients in general—in particular their challenges to God’s immateriality, unity, and omnipotence—yet


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remains a consistently faithful translator of all these theories. As Hugh de Quehen observes, Hutchinson’s version sticks very close to the original text, and “her failures, surprisingly few, only confirm the difficulty of the task.”12 Despite some blunders and inaccuracies—treated condescendingly by the Victorian classicist who first discovered the manuscript in the British Museum, Hugh Munro—her work compares favorably to English translations that appeared before John Dryden published five freely rendered extracts from Lucretius in 1685. When Munro wondered what motives could possibly induce the puritanical Hutchinson “to translate into elaborate verse the whole of a poem that develops principles so abhorrent from her own,” he neatly formulated the question that continues to dog discussion of her work.13 Hutchinson’s condemnation of atomism to Lord Anglesey and her shelving the manuscript for over twenty years suggest the widespread ambivalence toward Epicureanism that shaped its reception. Even as Lucretius underwent rehabilitation as a somewhat disreputable authority on perception and matter, the poem’s associations with libertinism resurfaced to undermine it. “Libertinism” in the later seventeenth century signified more than sexual license or reckless abandon; the term took in a wide range of texts, philosophical positions, and possibilities often associated with Lucretius. It never could entirely escape its associations, however, with subversion of an existing social and religious order. Hutchinson’s acts of self-distancing in the 1670s make good sense, coming from the widow of a former regicide who had put into manuscript circulation a foundational libertine text, yet avoid explaining what initially attracted her to the poem. Leaving the completed manuscript unpublished suggests that she never seriously intended to disseminate the doctrine among a wider, presumably Latinless, audience, but rather set to work in order to familiarize herself with the advanced thinking of her day, going back to the original and largely inaccessible sources. In translating these dangerous doctrines, Hutchinson followed Lucretius as closely as possible, doing nothing to wrest the Roman poet’s lines into sounding more respectful of conventional pieties. She well understood that Lucretius intended his materialism and rejection of ontology to strike at the heart of religious conviction, yet she did little to blunt the edge of his critique. Throughout her life Hutchinson gave serious thought to theology, and in her unpublished treatise On the Principles of the Christian Religion, addressed to her daughter, wrestled with the problem of how human beings, who understand everything through their interaction with the material world, could comprehend an incorporeal deity. She argues that since God exists as pure spirit, we should not derogate from His divine perfection by conceiving this meaning literally.14 Hutchinson implies that Christians, who apprehend and worship God internally and spiritually, run the risk of idolatry when they draw on their own embodied experience to express the nature of the divine. This limitation on our knowledge establishes a boundary between self and an absolute “Other”


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that no amount of loving devotion can breach. Like most of her contemporaries, Hutchinson understands human consciousness as something distinctive in the natural world, a phenomenon that demands explanation. That consciousness might exist apart from the physical and as part of the divine nature strikes her as a genuine problem, and it preoccupies her throughout her life. In a sense, she could not help but stumble on to Lucretius’s attempt to describe the mind-body relation in naturalistic terms and to make sensation the foundation of knowledge. Lucy Hutchinson’s entire life seems marked by an attempt to relate the physical and mental aspects of experience and to situate her writing at the intersection of the domestic and the sacral. At a time when dualist theories seemed badly compromised by natural philosophy, Lucretius offered a way out of the apparent impasse. In De rerum natura Lucretius contends that the conjunction of mind and body produces consciousness: body and spirit in themselves are powerless, and both depend on the other for continued existence. He repudiates any doctrine that would ground mind and body in separate substances or give the former priority, a position that accounts for the scandal of the poem as much as its atomism or even its frank representation of human sexuality. Lucretius provided an important source for materialist thinking about the body, no less inf luential than medical or anatomical treatises. Although a conceptually coherent view of the natural world did not easily jibe with belief in an incorruptible, permanent soul and divine creator, the materialist view itself might be prodded for its coherence and consistency. Hutchinson’s apprenticeship as translator initiated her in a tradition that saw human beings as material through and through and thought of matter as situated on a continuum. Translating Lucretius no doubt afforded the satisfaction of providing Hutchinson with an opportunity to step forward as “a markedly intellectual woman, who excels in classical as well as Biblical scholarship,” and to display a studiousness that runs “above and beyond the usual exhortations to pious reading.”15 In addition, for those who tried to make sense of the relation between mind and body, including Hutchinson’s younger self, Lucretius provided an indispensable guide. Book 3 of De rerum natura applies the atomic theory that Lucretius borrowed from Epicurus to outline an analysis of the mind-body problem. Lucretius first presents his argument for the mortality of the soul as an exercise in ethical persuasion, a sort of philosophical therapy intended to reject an attachment to life he considered deplorable, and to release his readers from the bonds of superstition. Human life, in the final analysis, involves beating a perpetual round of desire that leads nowhere and renders us utterly dependent on our bodies. To make his case, he must knit mind and body closely together and disabuse us of the wishful thinking that has the spirit take f light from the body at death to enjoy an eternal afterlife, or that finds something magical in human consciousness. In his system the body repeatedly asserts its


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power by drawing attention to the intensities of sensation and desire that fragment and dissolve the unity of the self. Such doctrines carried a whiff of heresy for Hutchinson, and led to a variety of unwelcome conclusions. Having established the inseparability of body and spirit, De rerum natura insists on the consequent mortality of the soul: Lastly bodies and soules joyntly enjoy Both life and health, joyntly their powers employ In vitall motions, neither can the mind Act aniething alone, from f lesh disjoynd, And when the soule hath left the bodie voyd The being’s dissolv’d, and all the sence destroyd. (3.579–84) These lines pronounce thinking as continuous with other physical processes, and bodily dissolution a reality from which nothing is exempt. Both mind and body derive their strength from their conjunction, and taken separately they have no power whatsoever. Lucretius deploys every philosophical and poetic argument at his disposal to demonstrate the inextricability of this linkage, making selfawareness inseparable from the body. The spirit, in his view, consists of fine-grained atoms that cross the gap between sensation and consciousness; it fuses thought and emotions (animus or mind) with a network of receptors distributed throughout the body (anima or soul). In a key passage, Lucretius makes the soul a part of the body like any other and diffuses sense throughout the body (3.98–107). Much of book 3 follows through on the implications of this stark realization that the soul cannot outlive the body, but here Lucretius contents himself with refuting the Platonic doctrine that the soul consists of “harmonious relations” (harmoniam in Greek) among various body parts. He mocks the doctrine as meaningless, a musician’s term devoid of sense, treating the importation as a neologistic outrage on good Latin diction. For Lucretius, mental phenomena have an atomic origin, just like everything else, and we need not appeal to principles beyond what we observe in the natural world that surrounds us. Soon after, Lucretius turns to a counterargument, the immobility and insensibility of sleepers, to refute the Platonists. Any theory that identifies the mind with a “harmonious state,” rather than situates it in the body, cannot account for the localized experience of pain or for changes that overtake us when “when soft sleepe hath the sence opprest” (3.118–21). Just as an amputated limb does not affect other healthy bodily parts, the mind continues to function during sleep even though it receives no stimuli from the external world. The mind interacts with the body because it has physical properties: no immutable nonphysical substance could achieve this. The idea of “a soule” present everywhere in the body yet metaphysically distinct from it cannot account for the complexity of cognition and volition. Lucretius uses dreaming as evidence that we think with and


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through our senses, and that even while dormant the body continues to control thought processes. The cognitive significance of sleep also figures in book 4 of De rerum natura, with its analyses of mental images, the senses, and involuntary action. The explanation of dreaming we find there concentrates on the physiology of sleep, not an analysis of dream content. Lucretius does not pose the Platonic (or Cartesian) question “How do I know I am not always dreaming?” or the Freudian question “What do dreams mean?” or the oneiromantic question “What do dreams portend?” Rather he wants to know what type of mentation occurs in the dream state. Always a skeptic, Lucretius strips the dream of its prophetic or magical power and transforms it into an epiphenomenon, a form of consciousness with no hidden purpose. Dreams have no hidden depth, but they do reveal something about how the mind interacts with external stimuli and the use it makes of stored knowledge. A dreamer’s experiences while asleep come as byproducts of the normal workings of brain and body and express our daily concerns involuntarily. Uncontrollable thoughts f ly into the brain and encourage lawyers to dream of cases and others to ref lect on their particular vocations or obsessions (4.1019–27). Images enter our minds unbidden, entering through the dormant body, and whatever occupies our waking moments also insinuates itself in our dreams. Thus, dreams represent nothing more than the side effect of habitual employment and of daily routine. Sailors navigate in their dreams, and the poet writes verses in his. Alternating between descriptions of how animals perform characteristic instinctual behaviors, even while fast asleep, and human examples, Lucretius describes kings who storm citadels in dreams, men who talk in their sleep, and boys who wet their beds. Hutchinson breaks off a description of adolescent men who experience nocturnal emissions (“youths who first attaine their manly age” (4.1083)), truncating the passage that provides Lucretius with a transition from his discussion of dream consciousness to an extended lecture on human sexuality. Yet even the expurgated version succeeds in conveying the logic of Lucretius’s analogy between human and animal behavior. The young men who have wet dreams do not express, as Freud might say, unconscious wishes through elaborately encoded dream work. Rather they release pent-up semen without the intervention of the conscious will. Dream consciousness reveals how closely mind and body work together. Dreams, in other words, have no particular purpose, yield no special knowledge, and contain no hidden mystery. Rather they demonstrate that our mental capacities depend on our bodies and that we need not invoke a higher power to explain them any more than we need to posit a higher intelligence to explain the origin of the universe. When it comes to dreaming, Lucretius keeps his distance from the Hellenistic views that loaded dreams with symbolic significance and imagined death as an outof-body experience similar to sleep—or, to change the idiom, that made the afterlife a state in which the mythical twins born of Night, Hypnos


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and Thanatos, merge into a single entity. The passage serves, as so many others in the poem, as demystification. Lucretius has no interest whatsoever in precognition or dreams as bearers of messages from the gods, but he takes up the problem of dreaming to show the tight interconnection of mind and spirit as a single substance. Here and elsewhere in the poem, Lucretius insists on the materiality of the soul and rejects the notion of a human essence that abides apart from the body. Dreaming Bodies Since the nineteenth century, if not before, critics have read De rerum natura as a poem divided against itself, arguing that Lucretius entertains doubts about his own atheism. Whatever merit this theory of “L’AntiLucrèce chez Lucrèce” might have (to kidnap the title of Henri Patin’s 1868 study), we find little evidence among Hutchinson’s English contemporaries of a reading that finds traces of religiosity in an avowedly antireligious poem.16 Many seventeenth-century readers, however, found much to admire in Lucretius’s text and considered themselves sufficient to resist moral contamination.17 Yet the earnestness of Hutchinson’s critique of Lucretius distances her from contemporaries such as Edmund Waller, whose poem praising John Evelyn’s translation of De rerum natura, book 1, assumes a smoothly cosmopolitan tone in describing a random Lucretian universe “Where Bodies freely run their course, / Without design, or Fate or Force.”18 By contrast, the preface to Order and Disorder glances back guiltily at Hutchinson’s Lucretian indoctrination, at how “the vain curiosity of youth had drawn me to consider and translate the account some old poets and philosophers give of the original of things.” She eventually considered these speculations so erroneous and blasphemous that she “found it necessary to have recourse to the Fountain of Truth, to wash out all ugly wild impressions, and fortify my mind with a strong antidote against all the poison of human wit and wisdom that I have been dabbling withal” (3). Yet despite this bout of ferocious self-criticism, in many passages of her epic we see telltale traces of the Latin poem, and not just in its turns of phrase and diction. As much as Order and Disorder strives to establish an impeccable Christian orthodoxy, it never entirely erases a materialist perspective. Lucretius denied all forms of teleology, identified the self with embodiment, and reduced human existence to what Hutchinson sees as an endless “progress of desire, / Which still, enjoyed, doth something else require” (3.33–4).19 None of Lucretius’s radical positions get uncritically reproduced in Hutchinson’s epic, but the poem repeatedly invokes the problems of embodied desire and knowledge. In it we find the autonomic and involuntary actions of mechanist physiology, located in the living, breathing bodies of Adam and Eve, and also in descriptions of dreaming that comment in a sophisticated way on the mindbody relation. We can now turn to these.


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Canto 3 of Order and Disorder describes the creation of Adam and Eve, following Genesis throughout but also drawing freely on other passages of Scripture. In lines that describe the creation of male and female bodies, Hutchinson follows the so-called Yahwist account of the Creation, giving priority to Adam and having the birth of Eve proceed from his rib. The birth of Eve from Adam’s side gets rendered in much less detail than the creation of the first man, in part because Hutchinson retains the masculinist perspective of her sources. At the beginning of the canto Hutchinson lists her biblical proof texts in the margin, but then strikes out into uncharted territory in lines that remain unsupported by citation, including a passage on the formation of the mental images, senses, and bodily functions. As God inspires spirit into the clay, man rises “above motion, sound and sense / To higher reason and intelligence” (3.17–18). Along with motion, sense, breath, and other signs of life, Hutchinson includes “those chief powers that are not lost in death” (3.25), as if to call negative attention to Lucretian teachings on the interdependence of body and soul. Comprising the entire universe and epitomizing the creation in his “frame,” the paradisal male body appears as something fabricated, its skin, “Like damask roses blushing through pure lawn. / The azure veins, where blood and spirits f low, / Like violets in a field of lilies show” (3.42–4). Under the poet’s admiring gaze, Adam’s skin appears as a sort of multilayered, naturalized fabric, with a pink woven f loral pattern showing through the transparent epidermal covering. Hutchinson emphasizes the conventional differences that traditionally made man superior to animals: he walks upright, has the use of hands and of speech, makes music, and so forth. At this point, Adam’s body undergoes dismemberment in a poetic blazon, a part-by-part description of head and of the four organs of sense. The head surmounts the body, first as the traditional seat of reason, but also as a site of fantasy and desire. Each of the organs of sense has an architectural function in supporting the fabric of the body: “upper windows” (eyes), “two ports” (hearing), “an arch i’ the middle of the face” (the nose), “the chief and beauteous gate” (the mouth). The tongue, placed within “this portal’s inner vault,” is the place where “sense meets its joys in taste.” Hutchinson, following her Latin model, makes vision a vehicle of the sexual drive: “Here Love takes stand, and here ardent Desire / Enters the soul, as fire drawn in by fire” (3.79–80). Like the sense of smell, sight has a tendency to mislead the knower: together the two senses bear false witness and “let all life-perturbing passions in, / Which with tears, sighs, and groans issue again” (3.85–6). The tongue possesses a similar double-edged power either to seduce or move listeners to hatred. In general, the body is a place where boundaries dissolve, where the interiority of the senses and exteriority of the environment get relocated, and where the barrier between inner and outer breaks down. Adam appears, then, as prototypically human in all his raw physicality. Hutchinson makes the embodied senses constitutive of personhood: the


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elaborately wrought architectural surfaces she describes locate the basis of Adamic subjectivity in sensation. She reads Adam’s bounded and delimited body as an epitome of the entire universe, a frame in which God has joined heaven and earth together so that the mind can extend beyond the circumference of the individual. Enclosed upon himself, Adam provides an emblem of a limited subjectivity that reaches to the infinite. His body remains permeable, a vehicle that transfers sensation from the external world to the inner self through eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Love and sexuality become metaphors of this receptivity, of the interchange of mind and body through the experience of erotic transformation. Although Hutchinson erects a barrier between body and soul, she insists on keeping Adam’s corporeality and autonomic physical responses in view at all times. The imagery does not emerge from her encounter with Genesis, but has roots in her reading of Lucretius on how human beings, no less than other animals, live in and through their bodies. Canto 16 of the poem retells the story of finding a wife for Isaac, of Rebecca at the well (Gen. 24.1–67), which Hutchinson mobilizes as an opportunity to moralize about love between the sexes. Even here, in the least likely of places, Hutchinson recalls Lucretius, whose attitude towards sexuality emphasizes the irrationality of the erotic drive. While Hutchinson would hardly recommend a stiff dose of misogyny as an antidote to love, the course favored by Lucretius, she shares his Epicurean emphasis on avoiding the snares of passion (16.275–88). The metaphors of “bosom,” “heart,” “breast,” and “f lame” in this passage might seem thoroughly dead to us, but in seventeenth-century physiology, they conveyed the idea that the whole interior of the body (heart, bowels, liver, blood, etc.) produced the realm of feeling and created the effect of our possessing an inner life. The secure and invisible interior space of the self gets assailed from without and “Reason” usurped from its sovereignty. Jonathan Goldberg notes that Hutchinson avoids translating the conclusion to Lucretius’s book 4, the passage on how images provoke sexual desire, “moving more quickly than Lucretius does to the solution represented by the couple where futile and illusory passion have been defused in favor of the wearing into each other that constitutes a happier coupling than that made and disturbed by the miseries of insatiate desire.”20 Hutchinson treats passion as an invasion and occupation, a chaos of feeling that claims for itself the name of “love” without justification and erects barriers between persons. The moral argument here, as elsewhere in the poem, revolves around disclosing some aspect of human experience as its opposite: desire masquerades as love, reason becomes powerless and abject, pleasure devolves into warfare, and bourgeois marriage becomes true passion. In this last reversal Hutchinson extrapolates from the Lucretian text a position that the Roman poet would not recognize, since he treats the institution of marriage as a necessary concession to the survival of the human race.


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Hutchinson figures heterosexual domesticity, which enjoins the expression of mutual desire and a measure of equality within matrimony, in the ideal marriage of a Hebrew patriarch, the chaste love of his courtship of Rebecca leading to a sort of companionate marriage. Lucretius advises his (implicitly) male readers at the conclusion of book 4 to avoid the snares of Venus, to cast off the blinkers that blind them to the f laws of the beloved, but also counsels them on the best sexual positions for getting children and explains how obliging manners can become an enticement greater than physical beauty. E. J. Kenney has argued that Lucretius rejects the illusions of romantic love in book 4 through a strategic warping of the characteristic language and idiom of amatory poetry, employing “the device of borrowing characteristic imagery in order to turn it back on it[s] originators and their too receptive readers.”21 This serves fairly well to describe Hutchinson’s own procedure of appropriating poetic language, including that of Lucretius, in a way that turns its meaning inside out. The undeniable sensuality of many passages in the poem, with their insistence on the body and its responses, often gives way to a fit of moralizing that emphasizes the limitations of the senses and the knowledge we derive from them. Hutchinson passes over the creation of Eve in relatively few lines, stressing instead Adam’s unconscious state during the work of secondary creation. To cloak the birth of Eve in mystery “the Lord did keep / All Adam’s senses fast locked up in sleep” (3.391–2), and in this suspension of voluntary function, Hutchinson detects a moral message, that “waking Providence is active still / To do us good, and to avert our ill / When we locked up in stupefaction lie” (3.459–61). Hutchinson gives Adam’s slumber a supernatural source and mystical meaning, one aligned with traditional thinking on dreams as revelation, but juxtaposes it with a somatic understanding of consciousness. Dream theory had various sources in the seventeenth century, including the naturalistic accounts in Aristotle, Hippocrates, and books 3 and 4 of Lucretius.22 To depict sleep as a locking up of the senses, a closing of the cerebral doors, is to adopt the idiom of Lucretius, just as using the Latinate term “stupefaction” draws the poem into the orbit of medicine and physiology. Lucretius, as we have seen, discusses how sleep overwhelms “the sence” as the body relaxes its hold, and something arises from within that animates the mind (3.118–21). This remains consistent with his view of the embodied mind, the theory that the spirit has a physical nature. P. H. Schrijvers has shown at length that Lucretius’s use of analogy is conditioned by his wish to give a physiological twist to metaphors traditionally used to advance dualist positions; book 3 includes many instances of this subtle method of reworking imagery “originally linked to a dualist theory of the soul.”23 Hutchinson, for her part, recovers a sense of sleep as a liminal state that accompanies the temporary evacuation of the spirit from the body, not to confront dualism directly but as a reworking of her own that makes a case for the oversight of a divine Providence when the body surrenders conscious control.


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In canto 19, Hutchinson describes Jacob’s dream of a ladder ascending to Heaven, which she prefaces with a digression on dreams that runs over fifty lines. This comes after she describes the day residues that link thoughts to particular occupations, encouraging soldiers to dream of “scaled forts, long marches, bloody fights,” sailors to dream of storms, planters to dream of their crops, and so forth (19.31–56). Some of these occupational groups also appear in Lucretius (sailors, soldiers, lawyers, scholars), but more importantly, Hutchinson stresses throughout the passage how waking thoughts can infiltrate our dreams without the mediation of the senses or the intervention of the conscious will. She outlines a theory where some dreams, replete with meaning, convey messages from another realm, and others arise from physical changes or the daily mental life. Hutchinson implicates dreams in the body, in physical symptoms that she represents as arising from the “temper,” thus making dreams the site of an intersection of philosophical and theological discourses. Dreams involve particular psychosomatic processes; they negotiate the distance between the immaterial heavens and the natural body, between the prophetic and the mundane, between the devil’s work and indigestion. Hutchinson connects dreams to prophecy and sees in sleep an emblem of divine providence. A vehicle of religious understanding, dreaming also figures in the poem as a state of mind in which spirit and soma appear to go their separate ways but actually work in concert. Canto 14 includes a retelling of King Abimelech’s dream, in which the King learns that Sarah is Abraham’s wife and half-sister, not his sister as Abraham claimed, and, under the threat of divine judgment, restores her unmolested to him (Gen. 20). Hutchinson interpolates a long digression on sleep, which begins with an imitation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (11.592–625) and sustains the allegory for about seventy lines, where it culminates in another discussion of dreams. Sleep, in this descriptive passage, rides in Night’s chariot, and subjugates all to his power, and provokes “strange fantastic apparitions” that suit “the brains where they reception had” (14.125–6). Lucretius speaks of the images or simulacra that stimulate a dreamer’s mind as like those that provoke thought, but more rarified than the atomic eff luences that stimulate vision (4.756–63). Images settle on the mind rather than the eyes and do not submit to the correction of the senses or the memory. As always, the puzzle at the heart of his system is the interaction of the material and immaterial, the logical impossibility of positing an immortal soul capable of perceiving the outside world. These and other passages in Order and Disorder draw on a philosophy of nature indebted to Lucretius, and, more generally, to early modern speculation on the relation of mind to body. Inserting these ideas into a Christian context, I have argued, did not necessarily strip them of their meaning. When Hutchinson speaks of the soul’s immortality and the body’s resurrection, she does so in the language of corpuscularian theory: “Our scattered atoms shall again condense, / And be again inspired with living sense” (5.253–4). Paul Hammond confirms the general outlines


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of my double-edged reading when he notes of the passage that “the first couplet is pure Lucretius, the second pure St Paul.”24 The lines, which describe what happens “when men out of the troubled air depart, / And to their first material dust revert,” follows hard on the heels of a description of childbirth (5.221–48). This emphasis on death and reproduction reminds us that although the body in Hutchinson’s epic has an abstract aspect, it sometimes bears the marks of sexual difference. Shannon Miller has argued that Hutchinson revises Genesis and Paradise Lost to counterbalance Filmerian and patriarchalist political theories, that the poem stresses the importance of maternity and female procreative power to government. She contends that Hutchinson rejects Lucretius’s gendering of creation as female (and Milton’s repression of the mother), first to de-gender nature and then to reestablish the maternal in Genesis’s account of human history.25 The body that Hutchinson represents here, however, figures as no more than a heap of “atoms” and operates in a basically mechanical way. The word atom often remains vague or even whimsical in seventeenth-century usage, sometimes signifying nothing more than an “animalcule” (a microscopic creature), or “a speck of matter.” As Hutchinson uses it in this evocation of bodily resurrection, however, the word takes on a slightly technical aspect. Her atoms behave in the prescribed Lucretian manner, falling, scattering, and getting compacted into larger bodies, where they become endued with “living sense.” The border between life and death falls athwart of these mysterious processes of dissolution and condensation. For Hutchinson, seeing the body as a multitude of swarming atoms need not rule out intimations of immortality. In the seventeenth century, mechanistic philosophy incorporated many different discourses, making for uneasy coexistence of atomism with the spiritualizing language we see in Order and Disorder. In her Poems and Fancies (1653), which Emma Rees reads as closely modeled on Lucretius, Margaret Cavendish devised a theory that combines atomistic concepts with the four humors (corpuscles thus take on square, round, straight, and spiky shapes, corresponding to earth, water, air, and fire). Cavendish’s approach to Lucretius, Rees argues, remains “characteristically eclectic,” intentionally written “against the grain of Lucretius’s argument” while assimilating its imagery.26 Hutchinson, too, uses atomism as fodder for her poem, resisting it on occasion, but also attending closely to the arguments that underpin Lucretius’s worldview. She understands how far the theory might carry a skeptic, and she also recognizes that Lucretian philosophy rests on a metaphor, an act of poetic imagination. Atoms remained unavailable to sense perception, their existence inferred by analogy: endowed with motion, atoms scatter within the bodies they compose, which in turn resolve into constituent parts. To theorize the atomic activity behind surface appearances was to provide an explanation for every phenomena and to admit no distinction between living and nonliving things. In this leap of the imagination resided a powerful conceptual tool. Even if we join Paul Hammond in doubting “whether we are supposed to register the


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Lucretian connotations of the language in Order and Disorder,” we cannot erase its presence.27 Hutchinson has driven the Epicurean tradition deep into the foundation of her poem where it bears the weight of the elaborate poetic edifice she has built upon it. Lucretius insisted that “soules and bodies have one birth and growth” (3.459), and mustered almost thirty proofs for the mortality of the spirit in book 3 of his poem. We have looked brief ly at some of these arguments, have seen the upshot of his premises that the soul no less than the mind “from equal little attoms springs,” that “minds and soules a constant league maintaine,” and that “bodies and soules are joyntly borne” (3.438, 427, 469). To move and interact with the body, the mind must have a corporeal existence: the soul cannot survive the death of the body any more than the mind can experience pain apart from physical sensation. To speak of an “incorporeal” soul makes no sense at all when everything that exists is either matter or the void; the soul, in short, develops, grows, and decays together with the body. Hutchinson could not reconcile these views with a picture of the human self that conceives of the soul as something weightless, unextended, and immortal, could not Christianize such doctrines in the same way that neo-Platonists could adapt ancient arguments for the priority of soul over body. Lucretius celebrated Epicurus for casting off the chains of religion, not a position obviously compatible with writing a poetic elaboration of the first book of the Bible. Rather than taking on the nearly impossible task of domesticating Lucretius, she renders his text with a scrupulous fidelity to its intention, and rather than consigning her earlier translation to the f lames, she kept it in circulation, professionally copied, with a cautionary letter appended to it. Hutchinson transposed Epicurean theories to a biblical context where her protestant commitments presented an inescapable critique of pagan philosophy, and, by extension, of contemporary materialism. Hutchinson’s poetry depicts the body in images that simultaneously renounce the f lesh for its susceptibility to sin and make it an object of fascinated attention. In a similar way, the poem makes its obeisance to gender norms a type of game, endorsing the subservience of women while performing the intellectual independence of its author. We cannot number Hutchinson among seventeenth-century writers who argued against the subordination of women, asserting their moral and rational equality. Her standing as Colonel Hutchinson’s wife drafted her into a particular public role and inevitably placed constraints on the choice of genres and subjects open to her.28 Turning these limitations on their head, Hutchinson looked to religion for the authority through which she could channel her creativity; Genesis provided the scaffolding on which she constructed a series of biblical vignettes with intercalated passages heavily dependent on her reading in philosophy. Lucretius not only offered a powerful model for analyzing the workings of the physical world—at a time when the study of nature held out new promise for self-understanding—but also a pattern for transforming abstract thought into poetry, of crossing the boundary


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between natural philosophy and the didactic epic. Hutchinson’s apparent act of self-suppression (her leaving fifteen cantos of the poem in manuscript) owes in part to the unreconciled contradictions that constitute her understanding of the physical world. That Hutchinson wished to distance herself from classical materialism (as well as from any suggestion of adherence to the latest intellectual fad) should come as no surprise. Like many other serious students of Lucretius in the seventeenth century, she sought to reassure the world that her labor as translator and poet posed no danger to the status quo. A sophisticated provincial such as Hutchinson, writing on the margins of intellectual life, might well take a dim view of cosmopolitan heterodoxy. Perhaps, as David Hopkins suggests, Hutchinson grew estranged from learned libertinism once it became tainted by a close association with the excesses of the Restoration court.29 In addition, Hutchinson could ill afford to arouse suspicion in the years after 1664, when her regicide husband had died in custody following his arrest for abetting a Fifth Monarchist rising. Nor can we altogether discount the possibility that her death intervened before she had brought the manuscript to completion. She had any number of good reasons for putting this work behind her. Even so, the poem itself, apart from its prefatory material, implicitly contradicts the notion that Christians can best secure religious certainty by insulating themselves from nonreligious forms of thought. The traditional injunction to “know thyself ” inevitably applies to knowledge of the human body, even if we remain largely unaware of our bodies’ internal workings and of mental processes that elude conscious control, such as dreaming. By the Restoration, it had become obvious that developments in medicine and natural philosophy demanded new ways of talking about the body and its experiences, and even poets would need to avail themselves of new models and metaphors. Despite her misgivings, Hutchinson diligently explored some of the most subversive ideas available to the seventeenth century, dipping her pen in a materialist philosophy intended to achieve human liberation from illusion by forcing our recognition of a mechanical universe that consisted of bodies and nothing else. Notes 1. David Norbrook, “Lucy Hutchinson and Order and Disorder: The Manuscript Evidence,” English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 9 (2000): 257–91. 2. Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 4, on teachings that carry the taint of “vain, foolish, atheistical poesy.” For the text of the poem, I cite Norbrook’s edition parenthetically by canto and line number. 3. See David Norbrook, “John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson and the Republican Biblical Epic,” in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 37–63, and his “Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Identity, Ideology and Politics,” In-Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1–2 (2000): 179–203.


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4. Londa Schiebinger, “Women of Natural Knowledge,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 192–205. 5. Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 5. 6. Lucy Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, ed. Hugh de Quehen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 7. Stuart Gillespie, “Lucretius in the English Renaissance,” in Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 242. Gillespie and Hardie provide extensive citation of earlier studies on the reception of Lucretius. For useful bibliography of editions and translations of the DRN, see Cosmo Alexander Gordon, A Bibliography of Lucretius, 2nd ed., ed. E. J. Kenney (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1985). I borrow the title of this section from Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), the latest study to detect a direct inf luence of Lucretius upon Milton. 8. See Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 9. See Goldberg, The Seeds of Things, 153–8, for a shrewd assessment of work on Hutchinson by Barbour and Norbrook. 10. Catherine Wilson, “Epicureanism in Early Modern Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, ed. James Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 286. Epicureanism became an authoritative and fashionable source of subversive doctrine soon after its introduction in the 1640s. According to Robert Boyle, once infected by Epicurean philosophy, his English contemporaries lost no time in invoking chance to explain the workings of creation and referring all the motions of matter “to the casual Concourse of Atoms.” See A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (London: Printed by H.C. for John Taylor, 1688), 160–1. 11. See Hutchinson’s remarks in Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius, 23–7. 12. Hugh de Quehen, “Introduction,” in Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius, 15. 13. H. A. J. Munro, “Mrs Lucie Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius,” The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology 4 (1858; reprint, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1970), 121. 14. Lucy Hutchinson, On the Principles of the Christian Religion, Addressed to Her Daughter (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1817), 18. 15. Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 182. 16. James J. O’Hara, Inconsistency in Roman Epic: Studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid and Lucan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 64–5; see also John G. Fitch, “Situated Knowledge: Responding to Lucretius,” Arethusa 34.2 (Spring 2001): 211–20. 17. Lucretius merited careful study from some devout English readers: Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College and sworn foe of atheism, copiously annotated his copy of De Rerum Natura, ed. Le Fevre, now in the British Library. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, ed. Tannegui Le Fevre (Saumur 1662). 18. Edmund Waller, “To His Worthy Friend Master Evelyn upon His Translation of Lucretius,” in John Evelyn, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus de Rerum Natura (London: Printed for Gabriel Bedle and Thomas Collins, 1656), n.p. 19. On Epicurean philosophy and restlessness, see the commentary in Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III, trans. P. Michael Brown (Warminster: Aries and Philips, 1997). 20. Goldberg, The Seeds of Things, 168. 21. E. J. Kenney, “Doctus Lucretius,” in Gale, Lucretius, 315. 22. See Manfred Weidhorn, Dreams in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 24–38; and Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 75–6. 23. P. H. Schrijvers, “Seeing the Invisible: A Study of Lucretius’ Use of Analogy in the De rerum natura,” in Gale, Lucretius, 283. 24. Paul Hammond, “Dryden, Milton, and Lucretius,” The Seventeenth Century 16.1 (Spring 2001): 166. 25. Shannon Miller, Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 107–35.


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26. Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 56. 27. Hammond, “Dryden, Milton, and Lucretius,” 167. 28. See N. H. Keeble’s essay, “ ‘The Colonel’s Shadow’: Lucy Hutchinson, Women’s Writing and the Civil War,” in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas Healey and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 227–47. See also Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 88. 29. David Hopkins, “The English Voices of Lucretius from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good,” in Gillespie and Hardie, Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, 255.


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Cavendish, van Helmont, and the Mad Raging Womb Jacque l ine B road

In April 1667, Mary Evelyn wrote to her son’s tutor, Ralph Bohun, describing a visit that she had paid to Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73). Evelyn reports that Cavendish was with the physician and natural philosopher Walter Charleton (1619–1707) and that he was “complimenting her wit and learning in a high manner; which she took to be so much her due that she swore if the schools did not banish Aristotle and read Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, they did her wrong, and deserved to be utterly abolished.”1 Evelyn left the meeting declaring that “Never did I see a woman so full of herself, so amazingly vain and ambitious.”2 Enthusiastically recounting the details of her philosophy, citing “her own pieces line and page,” Cavendish paused for breath apparently only in order to greet the arrival of new admirers. While Evelyn may have had a personal grudge against Cavendish,3 her detail about “banishing Aristotle from the schools” still rings true with our presentday opinions about Cavendish’s natural philosophy. The author of at least six original philosophical works who built her views upon her own “sense and reason,” Cavendish is widely regarded as an innovative (albeit, somewhat ignored and considered insufficiently inf luential) participant in early modern scientific discourse4 (Fig. 3.1). There is much in Cavendish’s philosophy that strikes the reader as modern or forward thinking in nature: she supports the separation of science and religion; she is a thoroughgoing materialist; she challenges the usefulness of supernatural explanations for natural occurrences; she denies the existence of witches and demons in the natural world;5 she supports reliance upon sense and reason rather than learned authority; and she is a defender of probabilism and antidogmatism in the development of scientific theory.6 On some of these points, Cavendish has a great deal in common with Thomas Hobbes,7 a thinker who had a tremendous inf luence on the development of modern philosophical ideals.


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Figure 3.1 Portrait of Margaret Cavendish. From the frontispiece of Cavendish’s World’s Olio (1655). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


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But if we look carefully at Cavendish’s writings, it is possible to disrupt the notion that Cavendish was going forward rather than backward in terms of scientific progress. In this essay, I examine Cavendish’s opinions about medicine and disease in her 1664 work, the Philosophical Letters: Or, Modest Reflections Upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy.8 This book is a collection of epistles about the opinions of “several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age,” addressed to an anonymous (and most likely imaginary) female correspondent. In this work, in an effort to make her philosophy more intelligible, Cavendish compares her ideas to those of the leading natural philosophers of her day: Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, Jan Baptista van Helmont, William Harvey, Galileo, Walter Charleton, and Robert Boyle—among other (unnamed) authors. Here I focus exclusively on her critique of the Flemish chemist and physician, Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577–1644), a reformer of medicine and science in early seventeenth-century Europe. In her Philosophical Letters, Cavendish provides an extended commentary on Oriatrike, Or, Physick Refined (1662), John Chandler’s English translation of van Helmont’s collected writings, the Ortus Medicinae, first published in Latin in 1648.9 Among Cavendish scholars, this critique has received little attention, despite the fact that out of all the figures in the Philosophical Letters, Cavendish devotes the most attention to challenging van Helmont and his philosophy (187 of 542 pages).10 This critique complicates some of our common perceptions about Cavendish as a natural philosopher and a feminist. In the first part of this essay, I show that in matters concerning medicine and “physick,” far from having Aristotle thrown out of the schools, Cavendish is strongly opposed to the questioning of ancient authority. She declares in Philosophical Letters that “it is better, in my judgment, to follow the old approved and practised way of the Schools, grounded upon Experience and Reason, then his [van Helmont’s] Paradoxical Opinions” (384). On the subject of the causation and treatment of diseases, she is a defender of the Aristotelian-Galenic medical tradition. In the second part, I examine an area in which Cavendish seems to be more in step with the modern way of thinking: her statements in defense of women. In Oriatrike, van Helmont argues that women are more inclined to madness, depression, and bewitching or enchantment than men because of the inf luence of the “mad raging Womb,” and he claims that the strong imaginations of pregnant women are responsible for birthmarks and birth defects in their children. In response, Cavendish appeals to common reason and experience in defense of women; she denies that women are any more susceptible to madness and bewitchment than men; and she refutes van Helmont’s ideas about women’s role in creating birth marks and producing “monstrous” births. For some scholars, this may reaffirm the view that Cavendish’s philosophy is significant for what it tells us about women’s attitudes toward science in the early modern period. Her writings reveal that when women


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engaged in natural philosophy, they were among the first to challenge traditional medical views about female inferiority. In the third and concluding part of this essay, I do not deny that Cavendish’s views are significant in the above respect, but I emphasize that, given her support for the Aristotelian-Galenic tradition, Cavendish’s attack on van Helmont’s prejudices about women are not necessarily as modern or as forward thinking as they might appear. In turn, however, Cavendish’s reluctance to part with tradition provides us with insight into the “changing of the guard,” or the gradual shift from the old worldview to the modern scientific approach in the seventeenth century. Cavendish on van Helmont’s Concept of Disease With his Ortus Medicinae, van Helmont presented a radical challenge to medical orthodoxy in early modern Europe.11 Completed before his death, this composite work was first published posthumously in 1648 by van Helmont’s son, Franciscus Mercurius (1614–99). Van Helmont the elder’s thinking was strongly inf luenced by Paracelsus (1493–1541), the founder of iatrochemistry (chemistry applied to the practice of medicine), and he was one of the earliest philosophers to challenge the dominance of the Aristotelian-Galenic tradition in the schools. Though van Helmont follows Paracelsus closely, he takes the challenge to traditional medicine further than his predecessor. While Paracelsus retains some of the materialistic concepts of the Aristotelian theory of elements (air, water, fire, earth), van Helmont completely rejects this theory as well as Galen’s corresponding doctrine of the four humors (blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile) and their qualities (hot, cold, dry, and moist). His message is blunt: the Aristotelian-Galenic approach to medicine is fundamentally f lawed, and those who continue to practice it are putting lives at risk. In Oriatrike, he argues that, by teaching ancient medical theory, the schools “have prostituted vain talkings . . . instead of the knowledge of Medicine” (47). Empirical evidence reveals that “the composition, connexion, qualities, effects of humours, and the diseases that are dreamed to arise from thence, are meer fictions” (1). The schools thus perpetuate a state of affairs in which physicians practice nothing but ignorance and deceit, and the art of healing has become nothing but “miserable butchery” (3). Van Helmont calls for a complete overthrow of traditional medicine. In his Ortus, van Helmont introduces a new terminology alongside a new observational approach to the understanding of nature and the human body. His goal is to take medicine beyond uncertainty and guesswork and to bring about a true art of healing based on empirical insight and chemical investigation. Allen Debus observes that some of the most extensive literary conf licts of the late sixteenth century were centered on the Paracelsian introduction of chemistry to medicine and that works on this topic far outnumbered


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even those relating to Copernican theory.12 In the mid-seventeenth century, van Helmont’s challenge to the medical curriculum was similarly controversial. From the 1650s onward, Helmontian ideas were widely debated in English intellectual circles.13 In 1650, Cavendish’s friend Walter Charleton promoted the discussion by publishing two English translations of van Helmont’s works, A Ternary of Paradoxes (1650) and Deliramenta Catarrhi (1650). Described as “the intellectual barometer” of his age,14 Charleton himself was one of many Helmontian sympathizers in England, including Robert Boyle, Marchamont Nedham, and Francis Glisson. But not everyone was supportive of van Helmont’s call for reform. Margaret Cavendish may have been a critic of Helmontian medicine from as early as the 1650s. She seems to have been familiar with Charleton’s publications, for in her Worlds Olio (1655) there are three essays that are strongly reminiscent of passages in Charleton’s translations.15 Though she does not explicitly attack van Helmont in this text, she clearly supports Galen’s theory of the humors. In the mid-1660s, the controversy between Galenists and Helmontians was at its peak in England. In 1664, Chandler’s translation of the Ortus was reissued with some minor alterations as Van Helmont’s Workes. Later in the same year, Marchamont Nedham’s Helmontian manifesto, Medela Medicinae, sparked a further pamphlet war on the topic of medical reform. And in the year of the Great Plague (1665–66), there were once again a number of polemical pieces on the subject of the relevance of chemistry to medicine. Cavendish published her extended critique of van Helmont amidst this background of heightened conf lict between Galenists and Helmontians. In the Philosophical Letters, she pays particular attention to van Helmont’s views on the true causes of disease. Walter Pagel singles out van Helmont’s ontological conception of disease as a forerunner of our modern-day concept. Unlike the Aristotelian-Galenic tradition, van Helmont approaches diseases as individual and classifiable objects and not mere “humoral imbalances” in the body. In his view, the primary cause of disease is not an internal disruption in the patient’s “complexion” or mixture of humors, but rather something external to, or separate from, the patient. For van Helmont, every individual possesses an archeus, or a vital principle that acts as an internal efficient cause. The archeus is the “designer” responsible for all change and generation within an individual and for regulating and directing an individual toward a certain end in accordance with a plan or an idea. A disease occurs when a foreign archeus enters into a given person and that person’s archeus is unable to dispel the uninvited guest.16 Cavendish supports van Helmont’s new ontological conception of disease. In her Philosophical Letters, she notes “I am of his mind, that a disease is a real and corporeal being” (350), and she believes that physicians should be trained to specialize in one disease rather than attempt to master a diverse range. But Cavendish does not support van Helmont’s theory of the causation of disease, and she dismisses his key idea of the archeus. For


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van Helmont, the archeus is essentially a spiritual principle that is capable of disposing matter to act in a certain way. It is not superadded to matter, but rather intermingled or fused with it such that spirit and matter together form an inseparable unit. As a materialist philosopher, Cavendish could not abide by such a hybrid concept. She accuses van Helmont of “setting a mans brain on the rack; for who is able to conceive all those Chymaeras and Fancies of the Archeus, Ferment, various Ideas, Blas, Gas, and many more which are neither something nor no-thing in Nature, but betwixt both” (238). She points out that “being not corporeal substances, I cannot imagine wherein their power should consist; for Nothing can do nothing” (239). Nature contains nothing “but what is substantially, really and corporeally existent” (242). It is impossible to conceive how van Helmont’s spiritual agent, the archeus, could act in nature. In her opinion, “animate Matter . . . is the onely Archeus or Master-workman, that produces all things, creates all things, dissolves all things, and transforms all things” (350). Van Helmont’s biggest “mistake” is that “he makes such a mixture of Divinity, and natural Philosophy, that all his Philosophy is nothing but a meer Hotch-potch, spoiling one with the other” (248). Cavendish is right to single out van Helmont as a deeply religious thinker. Like Paracelsus, van Helmont bases his chemical philosophy on a close, literal reading of the Bible, and he styles himself as a Christian philosopher pitted against the ancient “heathen” thinkers, Aristotle and Galen. On his own account, van Helmont decided to become a chemical physician following a divinely inspired dream or vision.17 In her Philosophical Letters, Cavendish seizes upon the absurdity that van Helmont’s knowledge of the soul comes to him from “Dreams and Visions . . . therefore it is no wonder, if his opinions be somewhat strange and irregular” (324); she adds that “to judg anything by a Dream, is a sign of a weak judgment” (325). Instead Cavendish supports a materialist explanation for disease: the humoral pathology of the Galenists. She defends the Aristotelian-Galenic doctrine of elements and humors, observing: I think it too great a presumption in any man, to feign himself so much above the rest, as to accuse all others of ignorance . . . for how is it possible that a single finite Creature should know the numberless varieties and hidden actions of Nature? Wherefore your Author cannot say, that he hath demonstrated any thing, which could not be as much contradicted, and perhaps with more reason, then he hath brought proofs and demonstrations. And thus when he speaks of Elements, that there are not four in Nature, and that they cannot go together, or encounter, it may be his opinion; but others have brought many reasons to the contrary, and I think with more probability. (246) Cavendish’s argument rests on the premise that, as a finite part of infinite nature, human beings are incapable of obtaining a perfect or infallible


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knowledge of nature’s works. In their explanations of natural phenomena, philosophers can only ever aspire to probable, rather than certain, hypotheses, and for this reason they must be wary of taking up dogmatic opinions. In future, new empirical evidence might reveal that their best hypotheses are in fact improbable or even false. Hence, Cavendish writes: I am very much troubled to see your Authors Works fill’d with so many spiteful reproaches and bitter taunts against the Schools of Physicians, condemning both their Theory and Practice; nay, that not onely the Modern Schools of Physicians, but also the two ancient and famous Physicians, Galen, and Paracelsus, must sufficiently suffer by him; especially Galen. (351) She accuses van Helmont of having “too great presumption, reliance, and confidence in his own abilities, and extraordinary Gifts” (351).18 So while Cavendish might support one of van Helmont’s most innovative ideas—the new ontological conception of disease—she is nevertheless a defender of the Aristotelian-Galenic tradition. Cavendish’s reasons for opposing van Helmont do not boil down to mere blind adherence to ancient authority. She questions his scientific credentials because his arguments are tainted with religious and visionary ideas and because she finds his spiritual principle of the archeus to be inconceivable. She challenges van Helmont because he does not observe a strict separation between reason and faith and because, in her view, he is wrong to permit supernatural or incorporeal explanations of natural physiological occurrences. She supports the Galenic theory of disease because there is reason to think that this is more probable than van Helmont’s new spiritualist theory. The new scientific ideals of probabilism and antidogmatism are called into battle to support the old guard rather than the new. Cavendish on van Helmont’s Views about Women There is one part of Cavendish’s challenge, however, that seems to be more in step with the modern rather than the ancient way of thinking: her criticisms of van Helmont’s negative views about women. Recent scholars argue that there is an implicit feminism in Cavendish’s philosophy of nature.19 Some maintain that this feminism consists in Cavendish’s challenge to the “masculine” mechanization of matter and motion and her own alternative “feminine” conception of nature.20 Others challenge the view that Cavendish’s philosophical writings have any obvious feminist content or feminist implications.21 In the Philosophical Letters, however, there is a potential source of feminist sentiment upon which scholars have yet to remark. In her critique of van Helmont, Cavendish appeals to common reason and experience in defense of women; she denies that women are any more susceptible to madness and witchcraft than men; and she


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refutes van Helmont’s ideas about women’s role in creating birth marks and producing “monstrous” births. These ideas are recognizably feminist to the extent that they challenge negative stereotypes about women’s intellectual and physical inferiority. In putting forward such views, Cavendish makes strategic use of her chosen genre: a collection of letters to a female friend. Though it is never explicitly stated, the addressee of Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters is obviously a fictional creation. Throughout the correspondence, Cavendish completely disregards the typical conventions of letter writing. Her letters are undated and without location; she never exchanges any personal details or topical news; and the quantity of letters is unusually large. There are no published replies, and there is no external evidence that Cavendish ever enjoyed a friendship, let alone a correspondence, with a like-minded woman philosopher. The correspondence serves as a convenient rhetorical device. To begin with, Cavendish claims that her main motivation for writing against van Helmont is that her anonymous lady friend has requested her opinions—Cavendish herself does not initiate the critique. And with her friend in mind, Cavendish does not express her views in “an Artificial Way, as by Logical Argument or Mathematical Demonstrations” (3), but rather in a clear, natural, and accessible manner. Fortunately, her correspondent possesses a “solid and wise Judgment” (245). Like Cavendish herself, this “friend” is thoughtful and inquisitive and sometimes even critical; she is also “very studious . . . in the reading of Philosophical Works” (141). The letters seem to represent Cavendish’s ideal of an intellectual exchange; they offer a free and liberal discussion of ideas governed by a spirit of open inquiry, kind criticism, and sympathetic friendship. Though her correspondent might raise questions and criticisms, she always does so in the spirit of obtaining the truth. “I am confident your Ladiship and I shall never disagree” (155), and “there being also such Sympathy betwixt your Ladiship and me, I think my self the happiest Creature for it” (297). This female friendship has a small but significant role to play in Cavendish’s criticisms of van Helmont’s views about women. Like Paracelsus, van Helmont maintains in Oriatrike that, in addition to those diseases suffered by a man, a woman must suffer from further aff lictions: “She is subject I say, unto so many Diseases as a Man, and doth again obey the same from the Being of her Womb” (609). Even when a woman is healthy, there is always the potential for her to succumb to the “fury” of her “mad, raging womb”: For even as there is a ferment or a be-madding fury in the Spittle of a mad Dog; an Idea, I say, which a little after doth make him that is bitten, Mad: So in some Simples, there is a sealifying faculty of Madness, and sealed in some Excrements being detained, or bred in the raging Womb; a madness of fury there is in them, which doth either propagate the madness conceived, on the off-springs, or perseveres with barrenness unto the finishing of their radical Fury. (608)


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Van Helmont’s opinions about women and their propensity toward madness are a natural extension of his spiritualist views about the causation of disease. Like any natural object, the womb possesses an archeus or a vital spiritual principle. The archeus of the womb does not inf luence the body by material means, such as exhalations and vapors, but through psychological ones, such as passion, fury, melancholy, and fear.22 While the ancients blamed the womb for its inf luence on the lungs and throat in cases of asthma, van Helmont regards the womb as exerting a cruel tyranny over a woman’s entire body. For this reason, the “remedies” of Galenic medicine are unhelpful to women. They do not require bloodletting, purging, cauterization, clysters, or issues; they require chemical treatments that will penetrate the blood and cleanse the body as a whole. The womb exerts such a strong inf luence because it gains control over a woman’s mind, and “oftentimes ref lects its fury on the very Powers of the mind . . . that it may boast of its absolute command over all things” (609). On this topic, van Helmont simply accepts the ancient view that, due to a difference in physiology, women possess weaker mental faculties than men and a greater propensity toward irrationality.23 In a chapter titled “Of Things Conceived, or Conceptions,” van Helmont claims that the inf luence of the womb means that women do as it were inchant, and infatuate, and weaken themselves. For they stamp Idea’s on themselves, whereby they no otherwise than as Witches driven about with a malignant Spirit of despair, are oftentimes governed, or are snatched away unto those things which otherwise they would not, and do bewail unto us their own, and unvoluntary madness. (607) To support his case, van Helmont cites a tale from Plutarch in which all the virgins on the Island of Chios spontaneously take part in a mass suicide. In a letter to her lady friend about van Helmont’s claims, Cavendish says that “I cannot but take exception in the behalf of our Sex” (248). In a half-serious tone, she upbraids him for failing to mention instances of “bewitching ideas” in men: [I]t appears that your Author has never been in Love, or else he would have found, that Men have as well Bewitching Ideas as Women, and that they are as hurtful to Men, as to Women. Neither can I be perswaded to believe, that men should not have as well Mad Ideas as Women; for to mention no other example . . . their Writings and Strange Opinions in Philosophy do sufficiently witness it. (244) For Cavendish, van Helmont’s dream-inspired philosophy confirms that men are susceptible to irrational ideas. She also points out that just as many men as women have committed suicide, if not more. On the basis of


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such evidence, she maintains that men are just as intellectually vulnerable as women when it comes to being enchanted, infatuated, or bewitched. Cavendish also rejects van Helmont’s belief in witches or men and women who act in confederacy with evil spirits and the devil. [T]hat there should be any such devillish Witchcraft, which is made by a Covenant and Agreement with the Devil, by whose power Men do enchaunt or bewitch other Creatures, I cannot readily believe. Certainly, I dare say, that many a good, old honest woman hath been condemned innocently, and suffered death wrongfully, by the sentence of some foolish and cruel Judges, merely upon this suspition of Witchcraft, when as really there hath been no such thing; for many things are done by slights or juggling Arts, wherein neither the Devil nor Witches are Actors. (298) Cavendish does not use explicitly feminist arguments to oppose the existence of witches, but she does highlight how philosophical views concerning women’s inferior mental judgment—or their susceptibility to bewitchment—can have pernicious consequences for women in real life. She takes the side of those many “good, old honest women” who have been wrongly condemned of witchcraft. In his discussion on the causes of disease, van Helmont also maintains that a woman’s imagination can have a powerful inf luence on the womb. On this topic, he once again follows Renaissance tradition. Paracelsus and others argue that a woman’s imagination has the power to generate birth marks and birth defects in her unborn child.24 But this theory also fits with van Helmont’s more general views about the central role of imagination in the causation of disease. According to van Helmont, the spiritual power of the imagination can translate into physical effects, such that if one has a morbid terror of the plague, for example, this can lead to one developing the disease itself. In the case of women, van Helmont’s favorite example in Oriatrike is of a woman who imprints the sign of a cherry on her foetus: To wit, let there be a Woman great with Child, which desires another Cherry, let her scratch her Forehead with her Finger; without doubt, the Young is signed in its Forehead with the Image of the Cherry, which afterwards doth every year wax green, white, yellow, and at length looks red, according to the tenour of the Trees. (615) Van Helmont attributes the cause of this birthmark to the “ideal entity” of the soul. All human beings have such ideal entities “lightly imprinted” on their understandings. But in a pregnant woman, the imagination is so greatly moved by her lust that these ideal entities can leave the understanding, travel throughout the body, and make an impression on the unborn foetus. On its journey, the ideal entity “assumes a middle Condition


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between Bodies and not Bodies” (786); it becomes like a light, “as if it were no longer a Body” and were tied “to no commands of Places, Times, or Dimensions” (786). In the Philosophical Letters, Cavendish rejects the claim that the strong desires and imaginations of women are responsible for birthmarks in their children. First, she dismisses van Helmont’s suggestion that ideal entities operate in pregnant women and that these entities print “a Cherry on the Child, by a strong Idea of the Mother” (335). [T]his Ideal Entity or servant of the Soul, hath troubled my brain more, then his Mistress the Soul herself; for I could not, nor cannot as yet conceive, how he might be able to be the Jack of all offices, and do Journies and travel from one part of the body to another, being no body nor substance himself, nor tyed to any place, time and dimensions. (335) Cavendish dismisses the notion of an “ideal entity” for the same reason she dismisses the idea of an archeus—because she cannot “conceive any thing that is beyond Matter, or a Body” (359). But she also appeals to common empirical evidence about women and children. In a letter against van Helmont’s spiritual conception of “ideas,” she writes: I dare say that there have been millions of Women, which have longed for some or other thing, and have not been satisfied with their desires, and yet their Children have never had on their bodies the prints or marks of those things they longed for: but because some such figures are sometimes made by the irregular motions of animate Matter, would this be a sufficient proof, that all Conceptions, Ideas and Images have the like effects, after the same manner, by piercing or penetrating each other, and sealing or printing such or such a figure upon the body of the Child? (277) Cavendish concedes that there may sometimes be an association between two events; for example, a woman may long for a cherry, and this longing may sometimes be followed by another event—the appearance of a cherry birthmark on the child. But this does not amount to an argument that such physical effects in the child are caused by “Conceptions, Ideas and Images” in the mother. All we can affirm in the case of a woman’s desire and a child’s birthmark is an occasional association, not a causal connection. Along similar lines, Cavendish rejects the claim that the strong imaginations of women are responsible for monstrous births. In Oriatrike, van Helmont recounts a story about a pregnant woman whose “inordinate Appetites” made her determined to witness a beheading at the marketplace. Shortly after the spectacle, the woman was surprised by “a travaile pain” and “she brought forth a mature Infant with a bloody Neck, whose


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Head no where appeared” (601). Cavendish observes: your Author rehearses some strange examples of Child-bearing Women . . . . I must confess, Madam, that all Creatures are not always formed perfect; for Nature works irregularly sometimes, wherefore a Child may be born defective in some member or other, or have double members instead of one, and so may other animal Creatures; but this is nevertheless natural, although irregular to us. (390–1) Cavendish puts forward a rival materialist explanation for “monstrous births” or children born with deformities—the “irregular motions” of nature. Unlike van Helmont and the ancient authors to whom he is indebted, she is reluctant to blame birth defects on the inordinate lusts of pregnant women or on some other psychological failing of the sex. To boost the plausibility of her materialist hypothesis, she appeals to the experiences of women themselves, observing that to have a Child born perfect in the womb, and the lost member to be taken off there, and so brought forth defective, as your Author mentions, cannot enter my belief; neither can your Author himself give any reason, but he makes onely a bare relation of it; for certainly, if it was true, that the member was chopt, rent or pluckt off the whole body of the Child, it could not have been done without a violent shock or motion of the Mother, which I am confident would never have been able to endure it; for such a great alteration in her body would of necessity, besides the death of the Child, have cause a total dissolution of her own animal parts, by altering the natural animal motions: But, as I said above, those births are caused by irregular motions, and are not frequent and ordinary; for if upon every strange sight, and cruel object, a Child-bearing-woman should produce such effects, Monsters would be more frequent then they are. (390–1) If there were a true causal relationship between a woman’s desires and a child’s birth defects, then we would see more monsters in nature than there are, but we do not. In sum, Cavendish challenges those prejudices about women that van Helmont inherits without criticism from his predecessors. She rejects the idea that the womb makes women more susceptible to madness, infatuation, and bewitchment than men; and she opposes the view that a woman’s imagination is causally responsible for birthmarks and birth defects in her child. Cavendish’s choice of genre plays a strategic role in her argument. To begin with, the correspondence provides a friendly forum in which to challenge received prejudices about women and to “take exception in the behalf of our Sex.”25 Furthermore, by continually praising the intelligence and wisdom of her correspondent, Cavendish provides the reader with an apt counterexample to van Helmont’s generalizations


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about the madness and irrationality of women. Tellingly, in her letter against van Helmont’s claim that women are vulnerable to bewitching ideas, Cavendish leaves the final word to the “solid and wise Judgment” of her female correspondent. Cavendish and Feminism Nevertheless, before we applaud the presence of “modern feminist sentiment” in Cavendish’s work, we should bear in mind that Cavendish supports the Galenic theory of the humors. Against van Helmont, Cavendish notes “I can see no reason, why Nature should not make several humors, as well as several Elements, Vegetables, Minerals, Animals, and other Creatures; and that in several parts of the body, and many several ways” (364). She writes “Truly, Madam, I should not be of such a mind, as to oppose the Schools herein so eargerly [sic] as your Author doth” (364). According to Galen’s humoral theory, women are inferior to men on account of their physiology: women are cold and moist, whereas men are hot and dry. Because of their coldness and moistness, women are prone to imbalances in their humors. Women are especially vulnerable to “the vapours,” a medical condition in which exhalations in the stomach or spleen rise up into the head, condense upon the skull, and thereby produce a mental imbalance in the brain. Although men were also thought to suffer from the vapors, a stereotypical association between women and the vapors can be found in the literature of the time. Underscoring their gendered nature, the vapors are also known as “Fits of the Mother” or “Hysterick fits.” In her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), Cavendish writes that “those Diseases that are named the Fits of the Muther, the Spleen, the Scurvy” are common “especially amongst the Females.”26 In the Philosophical Letters, Cavendish does not explicitly endorse the Galenic theory of sex difference, but in a preface to the Worlds Olio she openly subscribes to such a view. She says that “It cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily as Men, being of the Effeminate Sex, whose Brains Nature hath mix’d with the coldest and softest Elements.”27 She affirms that there is a natural difference between masculine and feminine brains, and that nature has given men clearer understandings than women. Cavendish thus supports rather than rejects a medical theory that promotes the idea that women are physically and intellectually inferior to men. We should be wary, therefore, of making any definite pronouncements on the feminist nature of Cavendish’s critique of van Helmont. To complicate matters further, it is not clear that van Helmont’s philosophy is thoroughly misogynistic in tendency. In his rejection of Galenic pathology and medicine, van Helmont actually paints himself as a champion of women. He opposes the doctrine of the vapors because anatomical evidence reveals that the brain is nourished by only a few slender veins and that there is simply no passage or channel whereby a vapor might


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enter. It is thus impossible for vapors to fume up from the stomach into the brain. Van Helmont condemns the traditional Galenic treatments for humoral imbalances, such as phlebotomy (bloodletting), cauterization, issues, clysters, evacuations, and purgings, claiming that the schools have not fully understood “the Disease of the Womb,” and they have therefore failed to heal their female patients. “Ah cruel wickedness, that would pacifie the furious or mad raging Womb, by a phantastical or imaginatory revulsion! Vain are the counsels, and helps of Physicians, which are adminstred without a knowing of the immediate Causes: For they know not how to apply a finger in the easing of the Malady, and they leave the whole burden on the Womens Shoulders” (613). Van Helmont also criticizes Galenic physicians for prescribing an impossibly strict diet, and then blaming a woman’s continuing ill health on her failure to stick to their prescriptions. He appeals to Jesus that he “have pity on Physitians, that hereafter they may take a meet care of the more harmeless, and miserable Sex, and may search after due Remedies” (613). By contrast, Cavendish is a strong supporter of traditional Galenic remedies.28 Despite the lack of empirical evidence, she affirms that the vapors are anatomically possible, “for Nature’s works are too curious and intricate for any particular Creature to find them out, which is the cause that Anatomists and Chymists are so oft mistaken in natural causes and effects; for certainly, they sometimes believe great Errors for great Truths (367–8).”29 Cavendish’s commentary on van Helmont thus presents several paradoxes to the modern reader. On one hand, she supports van Helmont’s new ontological conception of disease, but, on the other, she defends the old theory of humoral imbalances. She rejects van Helmont’s spiritualist concepts of the archeus and the ideal entity, but she does so only in order to uphold an ancient materialist tradition, the Aristotelian-Galenic theory of elements and humors. She is an advocate of the new probabilism and antidogmatism in science, but she turns these modern ideals against the chemical reformers in order to defend the old Scholastic way of thinking. And finally, Cavendish rejects the view that women’s physiology makes them susceptible to madness and irrationality; and she dismisses the theory that the strong imaginations of pregnant women are responsible for birthmarks and birth defects in their young. Yet, at the same time, she supports the Galenic theory of the humors—a theory that also promotes the physical and intellectual inferiority of women compared to men. Many scholars have highlighted the inconsistencies and incoherencies in Cavendish’s natural philosophy. With her views on medicine and disease, we are confronted with yet another set of contradictory beliefs. But rather than dismiss Cavendish as a muddled or unsystematic thinker, it is important to acknowledge that, by holding such conf licting positions, she is in keeping, rather than out of step, with the bulk of her contemporaries. If we look carefully at canonical figures of the period, such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, we can see that their writings do not make a


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definite break with the old way of thinking either. In the case of Boyle, his mechanical philosophy is discussed side by side with ancient alchemical concepts, and his new experimental science is developed in tandem with theological assumptions about God’s relationship to the natural world.30 In light of such complexities in Boyle and others, scholars have called for a “rethinking of the scientific revolution” in the period from roughly 1500 to 1700.31 Some have argued that, contrary to popular opinion, there was never a decisive rupture between the scholastic past and the new modern era in the scientific literature of the seventeenth century. Cavendish is not a canonical figure, but her writings do tell us something about the nature of intellectual change in the period that witnessed the so-called revolution. Her natural philosophy provides evidence of a change of thinking in her time, but not one that led in a direct, linear path to our present-day scientific and feminist concerns. She is receptive to modern ways of thinking but at the same time reluctant to abandon an ancient conceptual framework (Galenic medicine) until a more probable or plausible hypothesis presents itself. We should not think any less of Cavendish for this conservative stance. In her opinion, Helmontian chemical medicine was simply not a proven alternative. Without the benefit of hindsight, and given the available evidence in mid- seventeenth-century England, many of us would probably come to the same conclusion. On the topic of Cavendish’s natural philosophy and feminism, Deborah Boyle advises that “future scholarship should abandon trying to make [Cavendish] out to be a proto-feminist, and should focus instead on explicating and evaluating her arguments on their own terms.”32 I agree that it is unrealistic to expect Cavendish to resemble a modern feminist any more than we might expect Robert Boyle to resemble a modern scientist. But it would be hasty to stop searching for feminist themes in Cavendish’s philosophical writings. For one thing, Cavendish’s natural philosophy offers a unique insight into the often-difficult relationship between women and the emergence of science in the early modern period. In the Philosophical Letters, Cavendish demonstrates that, in a time when women were excluded from universities, coffee-houses, scientific institutions, and public collaborative enterprises, a woman could still envisage herself engaging in natural philosophy as part of a female “republic of letters.” Her book is also a reminder that when an early modern reformer of medicine simply reiterated ancient prejudices about women’s minds, a woman philosopher was there to take exception on behalf of her sex.33 Notes 1. Mary Evelyn to Ralph Bohun [April 1667]; in John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray, 4 vols. (London: H. Colburn, 1857), vol. 4, 9. 2. Ibid.


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3. See Frances Harris, “Living in the Neighbourhood of Science: Mary Evelyn, Margaret Cavendish and the Greshamites,” in Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 198–217, especially 200. 4. See Susan James, “The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7.2 ( June 1999): 219–44. 5. Jacqueline Broad, “Margaret Cavendish and Joseph Glanvill: Science, Religion, and Witchcraft,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A 38.3 (September 2007): 493–505. 6. Stephen Clucas, “Variation, Irregularity and Probabilism: Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philosophy as Rhetoric,” in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Stephen Clucas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 199–209. Clucas describes Cavendish as a “matchless representative of some of the most forward-thinking philosophy of her day” (207). 7. Sarah Hutton, “In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy,” Women’s Writing 4.3 (October 1997): 421–32. 8. Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, Philosophical Letters . . . By the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, The Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: privately published, 1664). 9. Jan Baptista van Helmont, Oriatrike, or, Physick refined . . . . by J.C. sometime of M.H. Oxon (London: Printed for Lodowick Lloyd, 1662); and Jan Baptista van Helmont, Ortus Medicinae . . . . ad vitam longam (Amsterdam: Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1648). Cavendish notes that she read her authors only “as I found them printed, in my native Language” (sig. B1v); she could read neither Latin nor French. 10. Several scholars mention Cavendish’s critique of van Helmont in passing. See, for example, James, “Philosophical Innovations,” 232–3. 11. On van Helmont, see Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine, Cambridge Monographs on the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and H. Stanley Redgrove and I. M. L. Redgrove, Joannes Baptista Van Helmont: Alchemist, Physician and Philosopher (London: William Rider and Son, 1922). On his impact on English science, see Antonio Clericuzio, “From van Helmont to Boyle. A Study of the Transmission of Helmontian Chemical and Medical Theories in Seventeenth-Century England,” The British Journal for the History of Science 26.3 (September 1993): 303–34. On early modern science and medicine, see Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York: Science History Publications, 1977). 12. Allen G. Debus, “Chemists, Physicians, and Changing Perspectives on the Scientific Revolution,” Isis 89.1 (March 1998): 74. 13. See Clericuzio, “From van Helmont to Boyle”; Jeremy Boss, “Helmont, Glisson, and the Doctrine of the Common Reservoir in the Seventeenth-Century Revolution in Physiology,” The British Journal for the History of Science 16.3 (November 1983): 261–72; and Anna Marie Roos, The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chymistry in England, 1650–1750 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007). 14. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975), 278. 15. See Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, “Of Heat and Cold,” “Diseases of the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter,” “Of Coughs,” in The Worlds Olio. Written By the Right Honorable, the Lady Margaret Newcastle (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), 183, 187, and 193–4. For these references, I am extremely grateful to Liam Semler. On Cavendish’s early engagement with Charleton’s works, see Liam Semler, “The Magnetic Attraction of Margaret Cavendish and Walter Charleton,” in Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, ed. Paul Salzman and Jo Wallwork (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming). 16. Pagel, Joan Baptista van Helmont, 141–98. 17. Van Helmont, Oriatrike, 14. 18. Cavendish continues her critique of van Helmont’s presumption in her later works. See Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 198 and 240; and Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World, in Political Writings, ed. Susan James, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39–42.


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19. See, for example, Lisa T. Sarasohn, “A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Huntington Library Quarterly 47.4 (Autumn 1984): 289–307; Rebecca Merrens, “A Nature of ‘Infinite Sense and Reason’: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy and the ‘Noise’ of a Feminized Nature,” Women’s Studies 25.5 ( July 1996): 421–38; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” English Literary History 64.2 (Summer 1997): 447–71. 20. Keller, “Producing Petty Gods,” 467; Merrens, “A Nature of ‘Infinite Sense and Reason,’ ” 427–8, 433; Rogers, Matter of Revolution, 177–211. 21. Eric Lewis, “The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish,” Perspectives on Science 9.3 (Fall 2001): 341–65, especially 345; and Deborah Boyle, “Margaret Cavendish’s Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy,” Configurations 12.2 (2004): 195–227. 22. On this subject, see Pagel, Joan Baptista van Helmont, 171–3. 23. On this topic, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life, Cambridge Monographs in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Concepts of Woman’s Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 24. See Maclean, Renaissance Notion of Woman, 41. 25. Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 243; italics mine. 26. Cavendish, Grounds of Natural Philosophy: Divided into Thirteen Parts: With an Appendix containing Five Parts, with an introduction by Colette V. Michael, facsimile reprint of 1668 edition (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1996), 151. 27. Cavendish, “The Preface to the Reader,” Worlds Olio, sig. A4r. 28. See Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 366–84. Cavendish does offer a brief qualification (286). 29. Ibid., 367–8. For the most comprehensive statement of Cavendish’s theory of the humors, see Cavendish, Grounds of Natural Philosophy, 104–61, especially 107; and for her theory of the elements, see 181–219. 30. See, for example, the essays in Robert Boyle Reconsidered, ed. Michael Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 31. On this topic, see Margaret J. Osler, “The Canonical Imperative: Rethinking the Scientific Revolution,” in Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–22. On the gender implications of the scientific revolution, see Margaret J. Osler, “The Gender of Nature and the Nature of Gender in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith P. Zinsser (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 71–85. 32. Boyle, “Cavendish’s Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy,” 227. 33. For their invaluable help in the writing of this essay, I would like to thank Patrick Spedding, Liam Semler, Jeremy Aarons, and Sandra Broad. I am also very grateful for the support of the School of Philosophy and Bioethics at Monash University, Melbourne. This essay was completed during my time as an Adjunct Research Associate at Monash in 2008–2009, and in the early stages of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in the same school in 2010.


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CH A P T E R

4

Conway: Dis/ability, Medicine, and Metaphysics H ol ly Faith N e l s on and S haron A l ke r

Although Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway are now recognized as the most significant female natural philosophers, or scientific thinkers, in seventeenth-century England, Viscountess Conway would have been troubled to find herself associated with the notorious Duchess of Newcastle. Unlike Cavendish, Conway neither sought public attention through publication nor presented herself as an authority on the old or the “New Science.” Among Conway’s correspondence, we find two letters from Henry More, the Oxford philosopher and theologian, that mock the scientific exploits of Cavendish.1 No doubt, Conway would also have scoffed at Cavendish’s attempts to style herself as a “great Philosopher” (237). Conway, unlike Cavendish, was readily inclined to cloak herself in the language of humility, often reminding More that she was not worthy of his good opinion of her. And yet, while Cavendish was making every effort to situate herself within the “gentlemanly culture” of the “New Science,” with little success, Conway managed to negotiate a place for herself within it without being perceived as a threat.2 It is by way of her physical disability—a degenerative neurological condition characterized by excruciating and protracted migraine headaches—that Conway initially finds herself participating in the scientific community, specifically in the field of physic or medicine. Her ailing body becomes an object of speculation, a case study by which noted early modern physicians, surgeons, and chemists test and record the success of new scientific procedures, just as it serves as an object of religious inquiry for spiritual healers seeking to cure her ailment, freeing her from her life as an invalid. In the writings of the period, Conway’s body becomes a medical space upon which a wide range of established and newly emerging theories of disease and healing collide and are interrogated. In this way, her body serves as a source of medical information in particular and, more generally, as a means by which to trace shifting approaches to the acquisition and organization of scientific knowledge in late seventeenth-century Europe.


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Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker

Conway, however, is not content to exist as a silent, passive object of either the medical and spiritual gaze or the anatomizing hand. It is true that she is viewed as an aff licted object—a disabled woman—in the writings of many men. Yet, as her letters indicate, she is an active and unyielding seeker of scientific truth, committed to devising her own theories of physic and articulating a distinct medical perspective with the intent of restoring herself, and sometimes others, to health. Moreover, her medical condition and the narratives through which she grasps and gives meaning to her suffering deeply inf luence her reading and writing of philosophical and scientific texts. Her embodied reading practices guide her interpretation of the works of Henry More, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, and others, inspiring her to devise a distinct theory of matter and spirit, disease and restoration, in her posthumously published metaphysical text The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. This essay seeks to establish Lady Anne Conway’s role in the evolution of early modern medical and metaphysical theories on the nature and treatment of disease and healing. Situating her writings within broader early modern medical dialogues, we will discuss both her ability to acquire the enviable status of respected natural philosopher amongst her male peers and the way in which she used that status to interrogate early modern concepts of disability. More specifically, we will deploy recent concepts emerging from disability studies to interrogate the role of patient-physician that Conway created for herself. The patient, the object of the emergent clinical gaze, seems to be the binary opposite of the physician, the diagnosing subject. Yet this was not necessarily the case. As Stephen Pender has argued in relation to John Donne, “[t]he sufferer and the physician have similar, conjectural tasks: reading mute, somatic signs, sifting and adjusting the non-naturals . . . in order to either determine states of illness or preserve . . . health.”3 Conway assumes this dual position, carving out a distinctly gendered space for herself by using personal bodily disorder and commotion, typically the mark of female fragility, to prescribe a new order of medical and metaphysical thought. Enabling the Intellect through Female Dis/Ability Conway’s intellectual aptitude led her away from the f lesh; by nature, she was drawn to words and the ideologies they transmitted. Francis Mercury van Helmont remarks of Conway, “Rather did she yearn for joys not to be known by the senses of the f lesh but by the mind.”4 Her fascination with language, natural philosophy, and theology is apparent in her letters and philosophical prose. In a letter written to her father-in-law in October 1651, she considers the extent and evolution of learning in ancient times, establishing the philosophical debt of the Greeks to the Egyptians (36–8). In a letter of January 26, 1653 to Henry More, her chief correspondent and advisor, she readily attacks atheism and earnestly awaits his response


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to philosophical questions that she has posed to him (70–1). Although her letters indicate a deep attachment to her husband and young son, before the latter’s untimely death, her passion is heightened in her writings most frequently when she records her response to the ideas inscribed in ancient and contemporary texts. However, Conway’s medical infirmity, which More refers to as her “tedious Malady” (96), does not permit her to distance herself from the body, as did so many learned women of the period, not least because of the familiar association of the female with the sinful f lesh. In her correspondence, in particular, it is evident that Conway has been compelled to exist as a self-consciously embodied subject. Writing to her husband in March 1656 about his recent sickness, she prays he soon escapes the acute and unyielding pain that marks her everyday existence (133). Her debilitating migraines and accompanying symptoms are described in brutal terms—they are “violent” and “terrible fitt[s]” from which she has “scarce enjoyed any respite” (148–9).5 Though it has been recently suggested that Conway was not, in fact, caught up with her medical condition, this is not the case. Illness and medical matters frequently surface in her letters and in those of her correspondents.6 She cannot disassociate from her disabled or differently abled body. The chronic pain that assaults her body imposes limits not only on her physical being but on her ability to interact in communities, intellectual and otherwise. As Sarah Hutton notes in her seminal monograph, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Conway “was prevented by ill health from participating in the high-society lifestyle to which her husband aspired . . . [F]or much of their marriage, she was confined at home by illness.”7 Yet, at the same time, the very nature of her disability allows her to transcend the social and cultural limitations imposed on the bodies of women and to participate in scientific communities without arousing the ire of members of these closed masculine circles. In part, this was due to the precise nature of Conway’s disability. Lennard J. Davis has pointed out that “[d]isability presents itself . . . through two main modalities—function and appearance.”8 In the “functional modality,” he notes, “disability is conceived of as an inability to do something—walk, talk, hear . . . and so on,” while the second modality relates to visual perception and involves a “specular moment” in which the “body of the disabled person is seen as marked by the disability.”9 It is this second modality, he suggests, that provokes “powerful emotional responses” that can include horror, fear, pity, and avoidance, and early moderns were not averse to giving voice to such sentiments.10 Derogatory descriptions and humor directed at the visually different body, such as that recently discussed by Simon Dickie in regard to the mid-eighteenthcentury jest book, were certainly circulating in the early modern period.11 Shakespeare’s Richard III, after all, is called a “lump of foul deformity” by Lady Anne Neville (I.ii.57).12 Such cruel language would later be directed at Alexander Pope by his enemies, one of whom described him “as a


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Creature not of our Original, nor of our Species,” his disabled body being treated as “a source of stigma.”13 Conway’s disability, in contrast, was bodily inconspicuous. While chronic migraines were debilitating, inf luencing her ability to function within society, they did not disturb the visual perception of her body.14 On the contrary, in fact, they served to intensify it in distinctly gendered ways. In an essay on fictions of defect that center on disabled female characters in the work of Eliza Haywood and Aphra Behn, Felicity Nussbaum notes that in both Behn’s “The Dumb Virgin” and “The Unfortunate Bride,” disability (in this case deafness and blindness respectively) can enhance the desirability of central female characters. “Defects need not render desire untenable,” she notes, although visual bodily difference is quite different.15 The sibling of the deaf Maria in “The Dumb Virgin” is a highly intelligent but “physically deformed daughter,” whose disruptive effects on visual perception lead her to end her life in “reclusive virginity.”16 The body of Conway, however, resembles the invisibly disabled bodies of Behn’s protagonists and as such retains its femininity, indeed possesses femininity in excess due to its fragility. Thus, it is not surprising that the ref lections of More and Thomas Willis on her degenerative condition do not merely linger over her brilliant mind and moral worth but also her striking physical beauty. Conway also appeals to men of science by performing what appears to be the ultimate act of passivity—offering her body to them as a text for analysis. Many physicians, representing a variety of medical paradigms, undertake the task. However, Conway’s physical fragility and her assumption of the apparently passive role of patient is ultimately deeply empowering, for she does more than simply present her suffering body for examination; her acceptance of their medical intervention is contingent on their intellectual engagement with her about their discoveries. Her body becomes the means by which she can access and contribute to circles of knowledge. Indeed, her response to the various cures she undergoes involves the evaluation of the efficacy of both established and emerging scientific models and methods. This is an authority Conway works to conceal behind veils of modesty, and it is also elided in the writing of the medical men who examine her. This is not to say that they disregard her intellectual abilities or moral worth. On the contrary, they openly extol her mind. In the preface to The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, More describes Conway as “that incomparable Person, the Lady Vis-countess Conway” whose “Excellent Personage” was rooted in her “singular Quickness and Apprehensiveness of Understanding.”17 Her intellect and piety, More explains, allowed her “to undergo those long and tedious Pains of her Head (which after seiz’d on her Body also) which otherwise had been plainly unsupportable to Flesh and Blood.”18 Her “Natural Genius” and “Christian Graces” permit her to engage, he continues, in “Physical, Metaphysical, or Mathematical Speculations” despite severe physical “Impediments.”19


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More elsewhere concludes that Conway’s virtuous response to her body, debilitated by a degenerative disease, has gained her national renown.20 Along similar lines, in his work on physiology and pathology, Willis suggests that Conway was “punished with this Disease” to offset her attractive appearance, wit, and expertise in “the Liberal Arts, and in all sorts of Literature, beyond the condition of her sex”; he explains that it is “as if it were thought too much by Nature, for her to enjoy so great endowments, without some detriment.”21 Such panegyrics to transcendent female perfection further ennobled through suffering are empowering to a degree. Indeed, they point toward an alternate way of imagining the disabled body. Helen Deutsch explains that two alternate models of reading bodily difference existed in the period: “The earlier paradigm viewed disability as a largely visual sign of deserved divine punishment for moral failings while the modern paradigm conceived of disability as ineffable identity in the familiar narrative terms we now recognize: a vehicle to a proof of inner worth, an obstacle to be heroically conquered by a randomly aff licted individual.”22 The modern paradigm may have emerged from the celebration of the suffering body in hagiographies and martyrologies. Conway’s physicians tended to read her disability through the filter of this heroic model of suffering. Her intellectual engagement and moral commitment become heroic acts that illustrate her endurance. Yet this discourse does not linger over or acknowledge the far more tangible material sense in which this particular patient was directing her own medical care, and, in effect, evaluating, monitoring, and interpreting her physicians. Navigating the “Winding Mazes and Meanders of Physick and Philosophy” Steven Shapin has demonstrated that the New Science was not a “single coherent cultural entity” but rather “a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world.”23 Conway’s complex configuration of her disability allowed her to recognize and negotiate this wide range of practices, many of which were experimental in the scientific field, and to formulate her own opinions on her medical condition and the scientific frameworks that informed particular diagnoses and treatments. In doing so, Conway assumes the position of physician-patient, one that is not uncommon among learned men in the period. More, for example, identifies himself as “both Physician and Patient” with respect to his own health in his correspondence with Conway (107). However, in employing in her letters the language of “medical semiotics and hygiene” in order to “probe and rectify” her body, Conway forges an unusual identity for herself as an early modern woman.24 Certainly, as Andrew Wear has demonstrated, a distinct “female culture


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of medicine . . . was a major component of the provision of medical care and treatment available in early modern England” since women’s household duties demanded significant knowledge of diseases and remedies.25 However, creating a textual repository of medical knowledge on the illness and treatment of the suffering body, recording the exchange of ideas on curative practices with “the Learned, and the unlearned,” and evaluating an expansive range of contemporary therapeutic practices, even in the private epistolary realm, was a far less common occurrence.26 Conway’s letters record and assess multiple ways of perceiving and responding to the disabled or injured body. For example, she is quite often drawn to Galenic humoural theory, which remained popular at the end of the seventeenth century. When reviewing possible treatments for a festering sore on her husband’s body in March 1656, she complains that Dr. Pridian’s care is inadequate, relying on humoural theory to make her case: “I never knew it held safe to use any such thing to repell a humour that appeared upon the f lesh with out first preparing the body for it by purging and other Physicke which you did not, I should be glad therefore if you would discontinue the use of it now . . . ” (132). Like many early moderns, Conway tends to conceive of f luidic balance in the body as a critical factor in maintaining health. She appears to have welcomed More’s description of her personal ailment and treatment plan in humoural terms. In the spring of 1653, More advises Conway that he has informed Dr. Ridgley that her illness is “mainly complexionall” (80). Intimating that Conway, like he, is of an “Intellectual complexion” (76), More proposes that her malady can be eased through the nonnaturals of diet and exercise, advising her to be of good cheer, to remain tranquil and patient in the face of physical pain and suffering, to eat foods known to produce blood that is cool and refined rather than melancholy, and to enjoy the fresh air as much as possible (75). More’s advice conforms to the principles of humoural theory. As Mary Lindemann explains, in “humoral medicine . . . [t]he best means of maintaining health was to practice moderation in all things, especially in the use of the six non-naturals: (1) air; (2) sleep and waking; (3) food and drink; (4) rest and exercise; (5) excretion and retention; and (6) the passions or emotions.”27 That Conway was drawn to this Galenic or classical model of medicine may be unsurprising given its rootedness in each unique suffering body. As she charts her course to health, Conway describes her medical care in personal terms. Hers is a patient-centered approach that attends to the experience of the individual. When her husband informs her that he believes a woman suffering from a similar condition has found relief in a new treatment, she responds by emphasizing the singularity of her illness. While she hopes to visit the woman to determine the positive outcome of the treatment, she laments in a letter to him in May 1657, “I should not imagine I were capable of the same successe, both because I am very confident I am much worse then any hath been of the same distemper, and because I am not able to take any more medicines . . . ” (142). So, too, in


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September 1664, when her husband seeks to procure an elixir for her that he has been told alleviates headaches, she responds, “I shall not be forward to make tryall of any medison . . . though others may have found releife by it, except our cases were perfectly the same . . . ” (226). Conway’s sense of her distinct disability, her specific “dis-ease,” is characteristic of classical medicine, as Hippocrates and Galen promoted a person-centered, holistic, and commonsense medical practice, rather than a disease-centered approach.28 While Conway, like More, adheres to an overarching Galenic model of medicine, she is not averse to taking advantage of new pharmaceutical discoveries and therapeutic approaches. In Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, Andrew Wear demonstrates that “[l]earned physicians quickly assimilated the new drugs into the traditional humoral medical system.”29 They also turned to new diagnostic and therapeutic models that helped to cure their patients. This is evident, for example, in a treatise composed by the early modern surgeon William Clowes, who argues that if he discovers “any thing that may be to the good of the Patients,” he “will not refuse it, but be thanke-full to God for the same,” whether it is the opinion of either “Galen or Paracelsus; yea Turke, Iewe, or any other Infidell.”30 While Conway never abandons Galenic humouralism entirely, she feels comfortable deploying a network of male friends and relations to discover any new medications or therapies, developed by those trained in classical medicine as well as those who repudiated it, which might render her fully abled. Conway’s foray into more modern treatments of disease led her to medical specialists in iatrophysics, including Robert Boyle, who, persuaded by the New Philosophy, perceived the body as a “machina carnis, a machine of the f lesh,” conceived of the patient in dualist terms, and often read disease and health in the language of matter and motion.31 However, more frequently, she was drawn to iatrochemists, Paracelsians, or van Helmontians who, like the mechanists, rejected classical medicine, but turned instead to alchemical, hermetic, and cabbalist texts in their search for truth about the workings of the human body. Unlike the medical mechanists, these iatrochemists envisioned the body and soul, matter and spirit, as intersecting and interacting forces that operate through a series of chemical processes. Conway’s willingness to submit to the sometimes experimental principles and practices of these new men of medicine often required her to depend on the authority of emerging specialists in the fields of, for example, anatomy, physiology, and chemistry. She frequently ingests their novel and dangerous medications and resigns herself to perilous surgery, rendering her more passive than she might wish. Writing of the transition in medical science at the time, Harold J. Cook observes, “the New Science could strengthen physicians’ claims to superiority over mere patients and practitioners. Medical materialists, for instance, could turn the classical advisor/client relationship into that of an expert controlling a passive recipient (patient) for his or her own good.”32 Such an evolution


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in healthcare undoubtedly diminished the authority and agency of the patient, a reality confronted by Conway on a number of occasions. Nevertheless, Conway’s relationships with medical men on the whole remain dialogic, as she chooses to consult or dismiss them based on her assessment of their diagnostic framework and remedies. As she remarks in a letter to her husband in September 1664, “I should be very glad to have some discourse with the physitians, if I were at London,” and her correspondence suggests that she believes herself as capable of discoursing on illness and cures as any medical professional (225). Not simply content to subject herself to a wide range of practices developed by established and emerging medical practitioners, she remains alert to all potential advances in medicines, experimenting with various substances, including tobacco and blue powder, if she has heard they have been beneficial to others with symptoms similar to hers (129). Conway makes every attempt to decipher the science behind such potential cures, asking her husband to discover, for example, the substance and operation of Dr. Johnson’s blue powder (129). As well as testifying to her growing expertise in a variety of medical approaches to the disabled body, Conway’s letters read like a litany of masculine failure. If Conway’s body is a text, then it is subjected to multiple misreadings. One of the earliest medical men to whom Conway turned for a cure was William Harvey, whose groundbreaking work on the circulation of the blood transformed the medical field. A relative of Conway, Harvey is a “transitional . . . figure” in the history of medicine, according to Roy Porter, who rightly identifies in his work a commitment both to “Aristotelian teleological principles” as well as to elements of mechanical philosophy.33 Despite Harvey’s reputation, Conway is keenly aware that she is not receiving adequate attention or treatment from him. To More, she writes in January 1653, “my frequent headaches continuing for all that Harvey hath . . . done to me will discourage me from trying many more conclusions with him” (71). Highlighting her agency as a patient, she informs More the following month that she will soon end her “tryalles of Dr Harvey,” in part because Harvey only “pretends” to scrutinize and “lay . . . [her] case to heart,” while actually focusing on his own serious case of gout (73). Her desire to find a more suitable doctor during this time is evident in her interest in Dr. Thomas Ridgley, who, she has heard, has knowledge of numerous “secrets in physicke unknowne to other physisians” (71). She notes that she might “try [test] him,” again emphasizing her function as active agent rather than passive subject (71). Ridgley, made a fellow of the College of Physicians in 1622, was a “chemical physician,” who accepted and applied many of the ideas of Jan Baptista van Helmont in his medical practice.34 However, his chemical remedies had little effect on Conway, so she moved away from the medical council of renowned, but aged, physicians, to younger men in the field, including the innovative Dr. Thomas Willis, another chemical physician who, according to


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Andrew Wear, drew on both classical and modern principles, successfully balancing “the old and the new in pathology / aetiology,” despite Jonathan Sawday’s description of him as “the high priest of mechanism.”35 A proto-neurologist intent on mapping the brain, Willis combined “his work on the dissecting table with his work in the alchemist’s library,” but this had little effect on Conway’s debilitating migraines, which Willis admits in his detailed published account of her case.36 While Ridgley and Willis were indebted to the chemical medicine of Jan Baptista van Helmont, none had more access to van Helmont’s secrets in physic than his own son, Francis Mercury van Helmont, to whom Conway also appealed for aid. The younger van Helmont was to play a significant role in Conway’s life. As Wear explains, Helmontian medicine relied on the association between religion and medicine, highlighting “divine enlightenment and Christian charity,” which would have certainly appealed to Conway, who was known for her piety and had received little relief from secular Galenic therapies.37 As early as November 1653, Conway had asked her brother to discover the whereabouts of certain medical men who might offer her a cure, and he assured her that he would contact Otto Tackenius, a professor of anatomy and editor of J. B. van Helmont’s writings, to ask him whether van Helmont’s son knew of any “great Cures” that might rid Conway of her severe headaches (86). Despite her brother’s conclusion that the young Helmont does not live up to his reputation, Conway decided to employ him in 1670, likely inspired by the Helmontian belief that all diseases were curable, unlike Galenic practitioners, who designated many diseases untreatable.38 Though van Helmont’s presence at her home, Ragley Hall, for the final seven years of her life gave her some psychological and spiritual relief, since his physic was not of a strictly scientific kind, he too was unable to discover a medicine that could cure her.39 The failures of medical science and of myriad physicians and practitioners who sought to read and respond to her disabled body could have had serious consequences. The dangers she faced from prominent members of the medical establishment, “the most skilful Physicians of her own Nation,” were often extreme.40 A series of nearly fatal episodes revealed that many of the remedies offered to her were often more dangerous than her disease.41 Her encounter with the chemist Frederick Clodius, an associate of Boyle and son-in-law to Samuel Hartlib, seems to have left her physically and emotionally scathed, More characterizing Clodius’s treatment of her as “foule and gross” in his letter to Conway in April 1654 (95).42 More recognizes the danger of such a “knave Physicion,” whose word can no longer be trusted, having unlimited access to Conway’s body (95). Clodius, however, was not the only medical figure to treat Conway inappropriately. She nearly died after taking “ointment of Quicksilver” prescribed by Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, royal physician, and “Mercurial Powder” by Charles Hues, a “noted Empirick” according


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to Willis.43 It may well be that such near-death experiences persuaded Conway to be more tentative in approaching surgical options. Though she traveled to France intending to have brain surgery, she ultimately opted for a less invasive procedure: an artery was opened and bled, again with no success. Tracing the Intersections of Body and Spirit Conway’s disappointment with the medical establishment led her to evaluate alternate models of health care. Such models were often grounded in spiritual or psychological belief. Conway could be skeptical of unconventional forms of medicine and writes that she is wary of fraudulent practitioners, counterfeit spiritual healers, and charlatans intent on selling her their miracle cures. Nevertheless, Conway was willing, on occasion, to take advantage of alternative medicine, even when her correspondents warned her against it, since she did not feel limited by the medical opinions of mainstream physicians. While Willis implicitly criticizes Conway’s eagerness to meet with and assess the opinion of both “the Learned and the unlearned . . . Quacks and old Women” in her pursuit of a cure, Conway’s desire to consider a wide spectrum of medical discourses and practices, whether articulated by religious men or elderly women, indicates not simply an urgent desire to alleviate her pain but also an inquisitive mind capable of assessing the medical benefits of a range of remedies and of forging her own eclectic medical model.44 Like Henry Vaughan, she appears to “honour the truth where ever” she finds it, “whether in an old, or a new Booke, in Galen, or in Paracelsus; and Antiquity . . . shall have as little reverence . . . as Novelisme.”45 Conway’s eclectic medical perspective fostered her responsiveness, for example, to the less orthodox aspects of Helmontian medicine, which took into account the spiritual and psychological state of the patient, arguing that the imagination of sufferers could diminish their pain or even cure their condition. Unlike More, van Helmont does not simply endorse the familiar early modern Christian response to suffering. More had already argued for a purely spiritual response to Conway’s illness, praising in February 1656 her “Christian resolution and patience” in enduring the torment of her illness (130). He ultimately suggests nearly two decades later that the disabling of her body has increased the likelihood of the purification of her soul, since “bodyes that are most vigorously in health are the most devouring sepulchers to swallow down the soul into and to bury all the nobler facultyes” (337). The Helmontian pycho-spiritual approach, on the other hand, is based on an iatrochemical view of the body as ruled by the archeus, “the chemical and spiritual governor of the body” that could be “disturbed” by “the power of the imagination,” thus generating a disease.46 The mind could, therefore, play a central role in causing or curing disability. In his poem


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on the love of pain dedicated to her, a work that seeks to explain the art of pain management through the anatomization of, and affection for, pain, van Helmont attempts to persuade Conway of the truth of his theory on the mind-body connection in overcoming disability.47 Conway’s belief in the intimate connection between the mind and body not only made her receptive to Helmont’s theory of pain management but also to the therapeutic possibilities of what we would now consider alternative forms of medicine, including spiritual healing. She actively engages her epistolary community in determining whether she should seek treatment from miracle workers, compelling them to assess methodologies from outside scientific circles. Conway first discourses with Henry More and the clergyman Robert Gell on the possibility of miracles occurring in the present day, referring in particular to a Mr. Coker, who has been celebrated as a healer by many (98–104).48 While Gell’s letter to Conway of May 26, 1654 indicates that Conway was having doubts that Matthew Coker’s healing gift was authentic, Gell assures her that he believes Coker is able to heal the diseased and disabled. Gell recognizes, however, that Conway’s “ judgment” in these matters is critical, suggesting that she “seriously . . . consider from what principle these works [miracles] can proceed” (99). More also engages Conway in a conversation about the performance of miracles in early modern England, proposing that Coker’s “blood and spiritts” are so “sanative and healing” that he is “infectiously healthfull”; in touching those aff licted with disease, Coker’s “spiritts run out of his own body into” theirs, thereby “actuat[ing] and purify[ing]” their “blood and spiritts” (101). Conway must have concluded that the theological and philosophical conclusions of Gell and More had merit because she later accepted the treatment of another renowned faith healer: Valentine Greatrakes. In Wonders no Miracles; or, Mr. Valentine Greatrates [sic] Gift of Healing Examined (1666), David Lloyd dismisses Greatrakas a manipulative deceiver: That notwithstanding the pretended vertue of his body, together with the pinching, rubbing and cutting of peoples Sores, and the peoples imagination fermenting the masse of blood, spirits, and humours . . . all that he can do, is to ease people a little by Pinching and Rubbing an humour from one place to another, which Mr. Stubbes takes some paines to prove Natural, Ordinary, and not at all Miraculous . . . .49 To this attack on his character, Greatrakes responds not only by setting forth his reputable parentage, upbringing, education, and employment, but also by tracing the genesis of his work as a healer. He explains that he “had an Impulse, or strange persuasion” in his “own mind . . . which did very frequently suggest” to him that he had been given the “gift of curing the Kings-Evil,” and that after telling his wife, who had some skill in surgery, of this divinely-inspired gift, he began to cure.50 It is likely that


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Conway prepared for treatment by a faith healer with a degree of optimism, especially since More reported that Robert Boyle had observed a great many of Greatrakes’s “performances” (273–4). However, this alternative medicine, rooted more in the devotional than the natural, did not improve her condition.51 Ultimately, when “no Remedy, or method of Curing” offered “Cure or Ease,” Conway not only relied on Helmontian pain management but also decided with van Helmont to convert to Quakerism, in which she found a degree of healing.”52 In Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas explains that the “sectarians were as great ‘enthusiasts in physick’ as they had been in divinity,” according to contemporaries.53 Quakers, Thomas continues, were fascinated by hermeticism, which certainly had medical applications, as the physician and poet Henry Vaughan argues in Hermetical Physick: or, The right way to preserve, and restore Health, a translation of Heinrich Nolle’s Systema Medicinae Hermeticae Generale. Conway fashions her encounters with Quakers in the language of healthcare rather than in the mystical discourse of hermeticism. In response to More’s suspicion and criticism of the sectarian group, Conway writes, “I must profess, that my Converse with them is, to receive Health and Refreshment from them.”54 In their suffering and the comfort that had “been experimentally felt by them under their great tryals,” Conway finds a measure of physical and spiritual relief (421). In fact, while she can abide few people in her bedroom, the centre of her world, she allows Quaker women, “lovers of quiett and retirement,” to enter her chamber because she finds in their stillness and sober fortitude in the face of illness or any other form of aff liction a kind of physical and spiritual shelter, which is far more profitable than the Stoic “discourses of resignation” with which she is often confronted (422). In many respects, Conway’s exposure to Quakerism permits her to “resignify” her body, reclaiming it to a degree from the scientific community to which she had granted it, and conferring upon it a new religious meaning.55 She conceives of her aff licted body as analogous to that of the tormented Quakers, “a suffering people,” who are “living examples of great patience” during “bodily sicknesse” (421, 422). Once in near solitude, her disabled body at the end of her life grants her entrance into a new spiritual and physical community, as she surrounds herself with fellow sufferers, replacing her maids with Quaker women who, like her, “cannot endure any noise” and who are privy to “true Inspiration” (422).56 Disability is no longer “fundamentally an individual problem,” but rather a collective exercise.57 Within this female-centered community, rather than masculine scientific circles, she finds that her disabled body is no longer “a defect or deficit . . . that medicine attempts to fix or compensate for.”58 Physical calamity becomes a vehicle of spiritual community, the f lesh and spirit intersecting to fulfill Conway’s lifelong quest for truth.


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Imagining Natural Philosophy through the Prism of Dis/Ability In her search for a cure, Conway’s willingness to “honour the truth” wherever she finds it—whether in an encounter with a book, a meeting with a physician, a trial of a medical procedure or drug, or interactions with faith healers or religious sectarians—resulted in an eclectic and holistic approach to medical principles and procedures. Her physical disability gave her the time, space, inclination, and authority to develop a heterogeneous approach to her medical condition that takes into account the complex intersection of matter and spirit and engages with medical practitioners of all leanings. The ideological framework that she develops to explain her conception of the body and soul within creation in The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy is informed by the reality of her embodiment, demonstrating an intimate relationship between medicine and natural philosophy in her works, as Sarah Hutton has insightfully discussed.59 As Hutton explains, it is arguable that Lady Conway’s “experience of pain was a significant,” though hardly the single, “determinant in the development of her mature philosophy.”60 Modern readers of Conway’s philosophical prose might expect excruciating pain to cause her to question her faith or to present the divine as a distant being unconcerned with the bodily suffering of his creatures. However, Conway’s metaphysical vision, rooted in Cabbalistic and Helmontian thought, is committed to the idea that all creation, human and nonhuman, emanates from and is infused with the divine, who is both a transcendent and immanent force; God, she writes, is “immediately present in all his Creatures and immediately fill[s] all things.”61 Although creation is marred by “Change” and “Corruptibility,” which would certainly engender disability and disease, Conway attributes such defects to the nature of the fallen world rather than to the brutality of the divine (15). In Conway’s metaphysical vision, God cannot, like a “Cruel Tyrant,” be accused of “Indifference of acting, or not acting” (15). By extension, he cannot be viewed as indifferent to her disability, as he is governed by “Infinite Wisdom, Goodness, and Justice” and seeks “to Heal, Cure, and Redeem his creatures”; even in punishing his creatures, God’s purpose, Conway proposes, is always “Medicinal” and curative (17, 45, 76). Therefore, despite her own bodily limitations, or perhaps because of them, Conway conceives of God in expansive and illuminating terms. Her “infinitely Good, Loving and Bountiful” God does not inhabit a “narrow . . . Habitation, as a few little Bees shut up within the limits of an Hive,” an apt metaphor for Conway’s confinement in a darkened bedroom, because he is free from “Darkness, or Corporiety [corporeality]” and desirous of creating the “World” and infinite “Creatures as soon as” he can (11, 21, 2, 18). It would seem natural for Conway to have chosen simply to align her immaterial soul with this God of “Spirit, Light, and Life” and to identify


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her aff licted f lesh with an inferior material world, especially since this would conform to the dualist vision of Henry More, while undermining the Hobbesian notion that God is “Material and Corporeal” (1, 148).62 However, Conway does not follow More’s lead in embracing a dualism that would divorce the spirit or mind from the body; rather she embraces the Christian vitalism or hylozoism of the van Helmonts that envisages all of created matter as alive.63 As Sarah Hutton and others have persuasively argued, Conway’s medical condition principally informs her metaphysical vision in terms of her perception of the relation of matter and spirit. They imply that her aff licted body—untreatable by contemporary medicine— causes her to focus so closely on the psycho-spiritual pain that attends her degenerating f lesh that she is obliged to reject a Cartesian dualism that distinguishes dead matter from a living mind or spirit. The interpenetration of spirit and matter, and the communion of injured body and aggrieved soul, is transparent when Conway asks, “Why is the Spirit or Soul so passible [subject to suffering] in corporal Pains? For if when it is united with the Body, it hath nothing of Corporeity, or a bodily Nature, Why is it grieved or wounded when the Body is wounded, which is quite of a different Nature?” (132). These rhetorical questions conclude with her anti-Cartesian assertion that “the Soul is of one Nature and Substance with the Body, although it is many degrees more excellent in regard of Life and Spirituality” (132). Conway’s attraction to the vitalism or hylozoism of the van Helmonts (itself heavily indebted to the Cabbala) is also rooted in the agency that such ideas offered to the diseased or disabled. If, as Francis Mercury van Helmont claims, diseases have spirits, they are invariably tied to the state of the soul because “the Body indeed” is “nothing else but an effect of the Spirit.”64 Conway echoes Helmontian thought on this matter when she concludes that “this distinction [between the body and spirit] is only modal and gradual, not essential or substantial,” and she describes the relation of the body and soul in the language of love and unity: “Therefore, I demand, What is the reason, That the Spirit or Soul so loveth the Body wherewith it is united, and so unwillingly departs out of it . . . . [Love] necessarily comes to pass by reason of that similitude they have one with another or some Affinity in their Natures” (81, 102, 103). Such a theory suggests that those who endure physical suffering are capable of altering their spirit in such a way as to effect a bodily metamorphosis—they are granted the ability to transform their external frame. Although Conway censures creaturely mutability early in the treatise, she later takes comfort in the fact that “daily experience teaches us that Creatures are changeable, and do continually vary from one State unto another,” as this principle buttresses her claim that the “Power . . . of changing” is an innate quality in all creatures, allowing them, “by continual augmentations” in their “Mutability” to “be advanced to a greater degree of Goodness, ad infinitum,” if they live virtuously (37, 59). While bodily aff liction is not desired, Conway argues that “Pain and Torment


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excites or stirs up” spiritual growth, which in turn brings about bodily conversion (87). This ideological framework erected in The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy allows Conway to cast aside the notion that her body is “dead Matter,” a theory that she dismisses as “a false Fiction or Chimæra,” and to envision the transformation of a person who “liveth a pure and Holy Life” on earth into an angelic being after death (96, 69). Such a metaphysical vision might be read, in some respects, as a fantasy of enablement, not one that is driven by “the imperative to normalcy” or “homogeneity,” “a narrow conception of health and embodiment” that associates the disabled body with shame, but rather one motivated by the desire to transmute from one state to another along a spectrum of being that f lies in the face of orthodox ontological binaries.65 Therefore, rather than seeing bodies in “a Manichean binary in contention with normality,” Conway is drawn to the notion of bodies intersecting, overlapping, and evolving.66 Her conception of matter and motion is described in the language of interconnection and inclusion. She maintains that “in the least Creature there may exist, or be comprehended[,] Infinite Creatures, which may be all of them Bodies,” just as she posits that “all Creatures from the highest to the lowest are inseparably united one with another, by means of Subtiler Parts, interceding or coming in between, which are the Emanations of one Creature into another, by which also they act one upon one another at the greatest distance” (20, 29). The painwracked body, in this philosophical scheme, is not insular and isolated, but rather part of an infinite community of intersecting dynamic bodies in the healing or restorative process of transformation. Conway’s metaphysical system, described by Henry More after her death as “Fragments of that incomparable Person, the Lady Vis-countess Conway . . . written in a Paper-Book, with a Black-lead Pen, towards the latter end of her long and tedious Pains and Sickness,”67 does, as Hutton claims, stand in its own right as a distinct “philosophy of nature and a philosophy of religion, a cosmology and a theodicy” that significantly impacted the thought of the German philosopher Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz.68 However, it might also be read as the inspired offspring of a woman who chose to interpret the written texts of natural philosophers such as More, Hobbes, Descartes, and van Helmont, and the oral texts of sectarians such as the Ranters and the Quakers, through the filter of her disabled body. Conway’s philosophy, in a sense, interacts with, yet moves away from, medical (mis)readings of the body toward philosophical and imaginative models of interpretation that allow her to see her body not as lacking, in terms of its inability to perform certain functions, but as engaged in constant transformations into various states of being—as immensely abled and creative and as possessing considerable agency. Francis Mercury van Helmont advises in The Spirit of Diseases; or, Diseases from the Spirit that “they who earnestly apply themselves to the search of Truth, might at last extricate themselves out of the winding Mazes and Meanders


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of Physick and Philosophy,” and this is what the writings of Conway suggest she accomplishes during the course of her life.69 While taking the way of the spirit and the imagination in her philosophy—thus extricating herself from the labyrinth of physic and the limitations of the New Science—Conway remains deeply committed to the notion of an enriching embodiment that allows her to validate the worth of the disabled female body and to envision it in a holistic relationship with a sharp intellect and virtuous spirit. Notes 1. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, ed., The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642–1684 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 234, 237. All further references to letters from, to, or about Conway are from this edition unless otherwise noted. 2. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 407. 3. Stephen Pender, “Signs of Interiority, or Epistemology in the Bodyshop,” The Dalhousie Review 85.2 (2005): 229. 4. Quoted in Grace B. Sherrer, “Philalgia in Warwickshire: F. M. van Helmont’s Anatomy of Pain Applied to Lady Anne Conway,” Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958): 205. Although this Latin poem is unsigned, Sherrer presents a compelling case for F. M. van Helmont as its author. Sherrer’s prose translation is quoted here. 5. For a lucid account of Conway’s place in the history of the diagnosis and treatment of migraines, see John Pearce, Fragments of Neurological History (London: Imperial College Press, 2003), 123–77, especially 125–55. 6. In “Women, Writers, Sufferers: Anne Conway and An Collins,” Literature and Medicine 18.1 (1999): 1–23, Sarah E. Skwire argues that Conway is not preoccupied with her illness, yet she finds that Conway refers to her medical condition in 66 percent of her extant letters, which does not include Conway’s remarks on the illnesses of her family members and friends. 7. Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 27. 8. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), 11. 9. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 11–12. 10. Ibid., 12. 11. Simon Dickie, “Hilarity and Pitilessness in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: English Jestbook Humor,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.1 (2003): 1–22. 12. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Richard the Third, in Shakespeare’s Histories, ed. David Bevington (New York: Pearson, 2007), 652. 13. John Dennis, A True Character of Mr. Pope and His Writing (London, 1716), quoted in Sharon L. Snyder, “Infinities of Form: Disability Figures in Artistic Traditions,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: The Modern Language Association, 2002), 177, 178. 14. It is true that Conway was scarred by smallpox in her thirties. In February 1661, her husband writes: “she is very much pitted, and they are deep, her right Eye is also a little sunk, and somwhat lesse then the other. It hath likewise made her complexion a great deale worse then it was” (quoted in Hutton, Anne Conway, 121). As bodies marred by smallpox were common in the period, Conway’s pitted complexion would not cause her to be viewed as disabled, and, as Raymond A. Anselment explains, “the physical destruction” that it wrought “did not readily symbolize” negative “social or moral meaning.” See his The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 193. As Conway was well married before contracting smallpox, the physical consequences of the disease also did not threaten her social or economic standing.


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15. Felicity Nussbaum, “Dumb Virgins, Blind Ladies, and Eunuchs: Fictions of Defect,” in “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body, ed. Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 41. 16. Ibid., 36, 39. 17. Henry More, “Preface to the Reader,” The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, in Richard Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr. Henry More . . . to which are annex’d Divers of his Useful and Excellent Letters (London: Printed and sold by Joseph Downing, 1710), 203, 204. 18. Ibid., 204. 19. Ibid., 204, 205. 20. Nicolson, Conway Letters, 1. See also Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11. Lindemann explains that certain illnesses were sometimes viewed as “a mark of special religious merit and moral virtue.” 21. Thomas Willis, “Of the Headache,” in Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, Which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man (London: Printed for Thomas Dring, 1683), 121–2. While this passage has been read as evidence of a misogynist medical establishment—and no doubt this reading has merit—the emphasis on Conway’s exceptional form and substance, and her illness, attributed to nature rather than to God, is not linked with moral deficiency. 22. Helen Deutsch, “Exemplary Aberration: Samuel Johnson and the English Canon,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, 198. Here Deutsch relies on the research of Lennard J. Davis, “Dr. Johnson, Amelia, and the Discourse of Disability in the Eighteenth Century,” in “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body, 54–74. 23. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), quoted in Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 79. The title of the subheading for this section of the essay comes from Francis Mercury van Helmont, “The Preface to the Reader,” in The Spirit of Diseases; or, Diseases from the Spirit Laid open in some Observations Concerning Man and his Diseases (London: Printed for Sarah Howkins, 1694), sig. A4r. 24. Pender, “Signs of Interiority,” 229. 25. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47; see also “The Popularization of Medicine in Early Modern England,” in Wear’s Health and Healing in Early Modern England: Studies in Social and Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 17–41. 26. Willis, Two Discourses, 122. 27. Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 10. 28. Roy Porter, “What is Disease?” in The Cambridge History of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80; Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: How the Enlightenment Transformed the Way We See Our Bodies and Souls (London: Penguin, 2004), 50. 29. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 72. 30. William Clowes, “The Epistle to the Reader,” in A Right Frutefull and Approoued Treatise, for the Artificiall Cure of that Malady called in Latin Struma (London: By Edweard Allde, 1602). Our attention was drawn to Clowes’ statements on this subject by Allen G. Debus, “Medicine and Alchemy: The Chemical Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution,” in The Scientific Revolution, ed. Marcus Hellyer (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 171. 31. Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 51. 32. Harold J. Cook, “Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of ‘The Clever Politician,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas 60.1 (1999): 101. 33. Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 52; see also Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 73–4. 34. William Birken, “Ridgley, Thomas (c.1576–1656),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/47340, accessed August 17, 2010. 35. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 257 36. Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It Changed the World (London: William Heinemann, 2004), 121–2. In Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, Wear explains that Willis diverges from the Helmontians insofar as he “asserted, as did many Galenists and virtuosi, that anatomical research was necessary in medicine” (362).


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37. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 34, 354. Jan Baptista van Helmont drew heavily on Paracelsian medicine, so the schools are closely related. 38. Ibid., 375. In a letter of November 19, 1670 to Conway’s husband, F. Howpert writes that he is greatly encouraged to learn that van Helmont believes that Conway’s condition may be curable (324). 39. Van Helmont does manage to relieve some symptoms experienced by Conway. In November 1671, More mentions a letter written in Conway’s hand that reports that her stomach ailment has been eased by medications given her by van Helmont (348). 40. Willis, Two Discourses, 122. 41. For a historical account of the overmedication of chronic migraine sufferers, including Conway, see C. J. Boes and D. J. Capobianco, “Chronic Migraine and Medication-Overuse: Headache through the Ages,” Cephalalgia 25.5 (2005): 378–90. 42. For more on Clodius, see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 257–68. 43. Willis, Two Discourses, 122. 44. Ibid. 45. Vaughan, “The Translator to the ingenious Reader,” in Hermetical Physick, in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 548. 46. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 370. 47. Sherrer, “Philalgia in Warwickshire,” 200. 48. Matthew Coker brief ly mentions some of his notable miracles in A Short and Plain Narrative of Matthew Coker (London, 1654), which he claims were all performed by “the Finger of God” (6). He is simply an agent through which the divine works to “cure . . . desperate diseases in men, women, and Children” (6). 49. David Lloyd, Wonders No Miracles, or, Mr. Valentine Greatrates [sic] Gift of Healing Examined (London: Printed for Sam Speed, 1666), 44. 50. Greatrakes, A Brief Account of Mr. Valentine Greatraks, and Divers of the Strange Cures by him lately Performed (London: Printed for J. Starkey, 1666), 2B. 51. Conway’s husband reports to Sir Edward Dering on June 20, 1660 that while Greatrakes is an admirable and honest man, he has not improved Conway’s health (274). 52. Willis, Two Discourses, 122. 53. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971; London: Penguin, 1991), 322. 54. Quoted in Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr. Henry More, 199. More was particularly concerned with the perceived affiliation between the Familists and the Quakers. In her letters to More in November 1675 and February 1676, Conway distances Quakerism from Familism and suggests that the Quakers will benefit from conversations with him (408, 421). In “Anne Conway, Early Quaker Thought, and the New Science,” Quaker History 96.1 (2007): 24–35, David Byrne argues that “Conway recognized what More did not: that she, the Quakers and More were on the same team. [The] Quaker emphasis on spirit and light offered ammunition against deist and atheist ideas too” (29). 55. Snyder, “Infinities of Form,” 178, 194. 56. Conway still maintains a critical distance when assessing the medical benefits of the Quakers, whose impact she can establish only after testing them, she advises More in February 1676 (422). 57. G. Thomas Couser, “Signifying Bodies: Life Writing and Disability Studies,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, 110. 58. Ibid., 110. Couser suggests that when disability is no longer seen as a “deficit in the individual body,” it becomes clear that it “needs to be addressed not in the individual body but in the body politic” (112). Conway’s alliance with the Quakers, a religious body considered defective or deviant, certainly raises the issue of the need for social and cultural change, a frequent refrain in Quaker writings. 59. Hutton, “Of Physic and Philosophy: Anne Conway, F. M. van Helmont and SeventeenthCentury Medicine,” in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). See also Hutton’s Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 140–55. 60. Hutton, “Of Physic and Philosophy,” 229.


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61. Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (London, 1692), 39. All further references to The Principles are from this edition. For an in-depth account of the ideological foundations of Conway’s natural philosophy, see Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse’s editorial introduction to The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially xv–xxxiii, and Hutton’s Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher. 62. In “The ‘Other’ Anne Finch: Lady Conway’s ‘Duelogue’ of Textual Selves,” Essays in Arts and Sciences 26 (1997): 15–26, Pamela K. Gilbert suggests that Conway’s rejection of dualism is all the more surprising given the fact that she was “educated as a Cartesian” and notes that Conway’s critique of Cartesian thought might facilitate contemporary feminist attempts “to reintegrate the body into a feminist theory of subjectivity” (17, 18). 63. Stephen M. Fallon notes that vitalists held “that life is a property traceable to matter itself rather than to either the motion of complex organizations of matter or an immaterial soul” (Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991], 111). In “The Duchess and the Viscountess: Negotiations between Mechanism and Vitalism in the Natural Philosophies of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway” (In-between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1–2 [2000]: 125–36), Stephen Clucas describes Conway’s vitalism as hylozoic, based on Ralph Cudworth’s definition of hylozoism as “the Life and Perception of Matter” (125). 64. F. M. van Helmont, The Spirit of Diseases, 3. 65. Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson, “Introduction,” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, 7. 66. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 157. 67. More, “Preface to the Reader,” 203. 68. Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 220; see also 233–5. 69. F. M. van Helmont, “The Preface to the Reader,” The Spirit of Diseases, sig. A4r.


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CH A P T E R

5

Behn and the Scientific Self Kare n Bloom G evirtz

An astounding number of watershed events occurred in the period between 1660 and 1700 in England, the establishment of a national institution for pursuing science not least among them. The intellectual tumult in Europe during the seventeenth century produced, in 1662, the chartering of The Royal Society, which was dedicated to the search for knowledge to be used for the benefit of humanity through a particular movement in natural philosophy called the “New Science,” also known as experimental philosophy. As part of the Royal Society’s efforts to secure greater respect and a larger following for its methods and conclusions, its fellows engaged in a public campaign to make those methods and conclusions mainstream. Such efforts, including Robert Hooke’s spectacular Micrographia (1665) and Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), had mixed results in terms of public approval, but they were successful in terms of bringing the ideas and methods of experimental philosophy into the cultural mainstream. Other innovators, including dramatists and prose writers, picked up these ideas and used them for the literary developments of the time. One such author was Aphra Behn (c.1640–89). Her narratives reveal a profound interest in the concerns and methods of natural philosophy and demonstrate how the ideas, methods, and rhetorical challenges of the philosophical debates directly inf luenced the emerging novel’s interests and form. The battles in seventeenth-century philosophy involved all aspects of its practice, including whether knowledge was discovered or invented; whether theorizing or experiment should come first; whether experiment should be used at all and, if so, how; and what the proper techniques and qualities were for the person pursuing natural philosophy. Underpinning one of the central debates—the role of experimentation—was a question of the self. According to experimental philosophers, knowledge was discovered when a data set generated by a replicable experiment or series of experiments produced a conclusion whose simplicity and completeness


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made it morally as well as intellectually undeniable. To generate this data, the experimenter had to observe objectively his experiment, deriving his ideas from what nature had been compelled to yield up from the experimenter’s workings.1 As Timothy Reiss points out, such ideas about what a person could do and his position outside the natural order created a new sense of “personhood” or “who-ness,” of how one knows who one is.2 For the premodern person, Reiss writes, “There was no idea of a self free and independent in its will, intentions and choices; none of a separate, private individual,” and this notion was still an odd one in the midseventeenth century. Furthermore, the construct of an “objective” observer carried within it the notion that humans are autonomous creations, the “idea that consciousness precedes or is otherwise apart from public interpersonal exchange, sociopolitical activity and all forms of material activity and event” and that we are all “self-contained isolated individuals.”3 But accepting the idea that any human, however educated and well-intentioned, could be truly objective was no easy task, especially for the philosophical sons and daughters of Francis Bacon. Descartes solved the problem of individual unreliability by maintaining that “representations attain the status of knowledge not only by being correct but also by carrying certainty.”4 Experimentalists found another solution: witnessing by other, objective observers. The individual thus subjected his discovered knowledge to the collegial, impersonal examination of others, and once accepted by those observers, that knowledge entered into the collective consciousness. In addition to the debate over whether such a self could exist and be reliable, there was the additional challenge of representing in writing the experimental process, including the experimenter. Traditional genres for transmitting knowledge proved inadequate, leaving philosophers in a generic vacuum. Stephen Clucas and Lynette Hunter demonstrate that for generations women had been sharing empirical findings via oral networks, such as within households and from mother to daughter and via genres such as recipe books, but their methods of transmission could not serve the institutionalization of scientific knowledge, if only because they were associated with women.5 Genres traditional to natural philosophy proved no better, as leading proponents of experimental philosophy, such as Robert Boyle, found. As Jan Golinski explains it: In contrast to the dominant forms of the discursive tradition which he criticised, Boyle’s experimental essays were narrative, as opposed to exhaustively methodical; suggestive, rather than conclusively demonstrative; and subjective, in the sense that they included personal and circumstantial details which would not be thought relevant by many subsequent scientific writers.6 In fact, Boyle tried several genres, such as narratives for New Experiments (1651), dialogue for The Skeptical Chemist (1661), and epistle for Experiments


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and Considerations Touching Colours (1664). With this kind of generic breakdown, there was plenty of room for innovation in presenting the method, findings, and the experimenter who accomplished them in writing. John T. Harwood notes that Hooke’s Micrographia, like Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, “struggled with the problem of communicating new knowledge—of finding an adequate language and style for discourse within and outside the community,” resulting in rhetorical and formal innovation in Hooke’s text.7 Despite such problems, and thanks in part to the Royal Society’s determined efforts to publicize its work, the observing self whose narration of past witnessed events could produce a reliable account and accurate insight into the workings of nature became a part of the cultural consciousness, and many writers took up the challenge of writing that consciousness.8 From natural philosophy, the discussion of the self, including its nature, its role in the natural order, and its representation became part of a cultural conversation, and it is no surprise that the nimble mind and sensitive ear of Aphra Behn should pick it up. Behn was not alone, certainly. Like Thomas Shadwell, whose play The Virtuoso (1676) satirized the less rigorous end of the experimental continuum, Behn mocked the pretensions of many of the New Science’s practitioners in her play Emperor of the Moon, produced in 1687, the same year that Newton’s Principia was published.9 Her interest was not simply commercial, however, although she was not a natural philosopher like Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.10 In her translation of Bernard de Fontenelle’s A Discovery of New Worlds (1688) from French, Behn adjusted the text, demonstrating not only a strong understanding of his ideas and their consequences, but also the larger implications of the ideas, methods, and structures shaping natural philosophy. She supplied a verse prologue to Thomas Creech’s translation of Lucretius. Her friends and lovers read the work of Boyle, Hobbes, and others; she knew Thomas Sprat personally. As for her own work, it not only ref lects a familiarity with the ideas of philosophers from Lucretius to Thomas Hobbes, but also demonstrates an independent, critical application of those ideas in fresh contexts.11 The reliable, witnessing self, who could produce absolutely authoritative accounts of events, appears in the content and the form of a variety of narratives. “Scientific” texts from the seventeenth century reveal that the natural philosophers themselves were not sure how to construct this authoritative, observing self. One set of authors, such as William Harvey and Robert Hooke, emphasized the physical self as a witness to establish with readers the sense of being co-witnesses and the reliability of the person reporting his findings. In On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1621), Harvey emphasized the empirical, rather than the scholastic or theoretical, elements of his work, that is, the experiments and the experience of the experimenter. Harvey opens with a dedication repeatedly referring to his colleagues in the Royal College of Physicians as his


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witnesses, and he uses the word “observed” ubiquitously. Harvey employs the first-person point of view, sometimes erupting emotionally, exclaiming at one point, “Good God!”12 His experiments are not just visible, they are physical events. “Experimenting with a pigeon upon one occasion,” he reports: after the heart had wholly ceased to pulsate, and the auricles too had become motionless, I kept my finger wetted with saliva and warm for a short time upon the heart, and observed that under the inf luence of this fomentation it recovered new strength and life, so that both ventricles and auricles pulsated, contracting and relaxing alternately, recalled as it were from death to life. (32) Here Harvey’s description of the workings of the pigeon’s body also involves the sense of his own body: the wet finger, the saliva that wetted it, and the implied little gesture of Harvey touching fingertip to tongue. Harvey’s treatise thus consistently imposes the reality of a person performing the work on the presentation of the findings. This physical sense also helps balance the community’s acceptance with the individual’s work and interpretation, and the material reality of experimental natural philosophy with its intellectual component. Similarly, Hooke depends on the first-person singular from the opening of his work, and, like Harvey, his dedication emphasizes the community that helped produce the data and then the book. Hooke refers to his “sincere hand and faithful eye” in describing the method and findings presented in Micrographia. Harwood suggests that Hooke used the commentaries to create a persona of the ideal scientist, “as undogmatic, as a Baconian, as an orthodox Christian, and as a follower of the mechanical philosophy.”13 Like Harvey, Hooke could be amusing and characterful, and he used the active voice to convert the Micrographia’s “voice” into the sense of a being, a being who was really doing the experiments.14 Behn’s narratives of the 1680s also conjure this strong sense of a person. Her narrators are involved emotionally in their stories. They indulge in deliciously nasty interjections. At the end of “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” when Philadelphia’s villainous brother has finally been thrown into debtor’s prison, the narrator remarks that “finding no Money coming, nor having a Prospect of any, the Marshal and his Instruments turn’d him to the Common Side, where he learnt the Art of Peg-making, a Mystery to which he had been a Stranger all his Life long ’till then.”15 In “The Adventure of the Black Lady,” the narrator introduces the “Vermin of the Parish, I mean, the Overseers of the Poor, who eat the Bread from ’em,” and plays on their proper name, the “Overseers of the Poor (justly so call’d from their over-looking ’em).”16 Behn’s narrators also provide moral evaluation, opposing “white Devils” to “the dear, sweet creature” in “Unfortunate Happy Lady” (43), or pointing out that the unworldly but honorable “Black Lady” is a “fair Innocent (I must not say foolish)


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one” (4). Like a “Hooke” or a “Harvey,” Behn’s narrators know their material and take it seriously, performing that expertise and investment to banish doubt about what they recount. With the notable exception of the narrator of Oroonoko, who I will discuss later, the material existence of the narrators of the earlier stories is only tentatively established and cautiously used, however. Certainly these narrators possess a remarkable knowledge of the events and the characters who live them. They possess a depth of knowledge far beyond that of any character as they report on characters’ emotional states, on private dialogue, on history during a prolonged absence, and on duplicitous behavior. This knowledge is not tied to the material existence and resultant experiences of the narrator personally, however. For example, the narrator of the “Unfortunate Happy Lady” opens by announcing, “I cannot omit giving the World an account, of the uncommon Villany [sic] of a Gentleman of a good Family in England practis’d upon his Sister, which was attested to me by one who liv’d in the Family, and from whom I had the whole Truth of the Story” (37). While this announcement seems to be designed to establish the reliability of the narrator’s account, it also is a report of a report, “one who liv’d in the Family”; and, in an environment where authority and eyewitnessing is so important, such an equivocal position is worth noting. Similarly, the narrator of “The Adventure of the Black Lady” introduces her story with “About the Beginning of last June (as near as I can remember)” (3). Here, again, Behn draws on the idea of the authority of the eyewitness only to undercut it with a dubious memory. What else might this narrator not quite remember? Although such narrators may claim the authority of intimate knowledge, they also serve to point out the ways in which even an eyewitness can be unreliable. This uncertain embracing of the present, observing narrator suggests an exploration rather than acceptance of natural philosophy’s concept of the reliable, objective, actual observer. After all, Behn’s experience as a woman bears little resemblance, if any, in many cases to the descriptions of human existence and concerns by Thomas Hobbes or John Locke. Behn’s fiction uses techniques generated by experimental philosophy’s notions of self, but it does so to question the self: what it is, what it means to be “inside” or “outside” oneself or events or a culture, and what the impact is of experience on interpretation—of others, of events, of oneself. From her position on the margins, she interrogates the implications and assumptions of these ideas, particularly as they pertain to experience and to gender. Toward this end, Behn’s fiction often uses autobiographical interjection to destabilize rather than to establish firm authority. In The History of the Nun (1689), for example, the narrator interrupts the exposition with details of her own life. I once was design’d an humble Votary in the House of Devotion but fancying my self not endu’d with an obstinacy of Mind, great enough to secure me from the Efforts and Vanities of the World, I


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rather chose to deny my self the Content I could not certainly promise my self, than to languish (as I have seen some do) in a certain Aff liction. (265)17 But the narrator then questions that decision: “tho’ possibly, since, I have sufficiently bewailed that mistaken and inconsiderate Approbation and Preference of the false ungrateful World, (full of nothing but Nonsense, Noise, false Notions, and Contradiction) before the Innocence and Quiet of a Cloyster” (265). The story continues from there, uninterrupted by further personal testimony. The content of this interjection works thematically with the primary narrative. Isabella, the young woman who joins a cloister at thirteen without realizing that she is capable of great passion, eventually f lees the convent, marries, thinks she is widowed, remarries, and murders both first and second husbands to retain the best that the world has to offer: wealth and the “fame” accorded to an unblemished reputation. Like the narrator, Isabella makes a decision that she regrets later. That the narrator and Isabella make different decisions that turn out to be the wrong one suggests that it is not the decision but the deciding that is at issue. Neither Isabella nor the narrator fully appreciated the nature, especially the benefits of either existence or even her own nature; consequently, they both come to rethink their interpretation of the data and conclusion. Behn emphasizes in the primary narrative the importance of the position from which Isabella made her decision. Her father, hoping that she would become a nun, entered her into a cloister when she was two years old. Although when Isabella turns thirteen, he and his sister, the abbess, supposedly offer her every opportunity to decide her future for herself, the position from which she judges—inside the cloister, with nunnery life the norm—means that the comparison is uneven, between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Hence, while her father supposedly tried to make the choice fair, by normalizing one empirical reality, he made the other alien. Similarly, although the aunt was charged with offering Isabella an uninf luenced choice and although the aunt genuinely thought she was doing so, in reality she provided information that would encourage Isabella to choose the convent. As the narrator observes, “the Abbess was very well pleased, to find her (purposely weak) Propositions [not to become a nun] so well overthrown” (268). Anxious as they are to secure a position on the margin for Isabella to observe both sides—she resides in a convent, but often goes out, for example—her father and aunt are not successful in doing so. In terms of experimental philosophy, neither those arranging the experiment nor Isabella in experiencing it could possibly be objective or detached from the experiment itself. By pairing Isabella’s choice with the narrator’s, who decided in favor of “the world” from within it, Behn challenges the ideas that positionality can be engineered to achieve detachment from the circumstances being observed and that observation can


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be uninf luenced by desire (in the case of the father and the aunt) and/or familiarity (in Isabella’s case). Behn’s Oroonoko (1689) provides a larger, more complex exploration of the issues of the reliable self raised by experimental philosophy during these years. As with earlier stories, an autobiographical exposition opens the narrative and raises issues within the primary narrative and in conjunction with it. The claim that “I was myself an eyewitness” has provoked numerous attempts to prove or disprove the veracity of this claim.18 It seems safe to say at this point that the historical Aphra Behn did do some of what the narrator claims, but it is very unlikely that she did it all. As a result, the narrator’s claim that “I was myself an eyewitness to a great part of what you will find here set down” cannot be taken as a statement of reality, but as a statement of both historical and fictional truth: Behn might not have been this witness, but the narrator was. From the beginning, then, Behn introduces the possibility that the “I” of recorded experience and the “I” that endured the experience are not the same. This disjunction between narrator and author, between narrator’s experience and author’s experience, is augmented by the materiality of the narrator. Unlike the essentially disembodied narrators of Behn’s shorter fiction, Oroonoko’s narrator possesses a history, a family, a body, a wardrobe, and so on. This gift of a body ought to enhance the reliability of the narrator’s tale, its accurate factuality, but instead granting the narrator a physical self also gifts her with the burdens of physical existence. Her weak constitution, for example, “being myself but sickly, and very apt to fall into Fits of dangerous Illness upon any extraordinary Melancholy,” directly affects her ability to know, and thus she leaves Oroonoko at a crucial moment because she is too ill to remain with him (207). Similarly, her female body also forces a certain experience on her, as it causes her to “f ly down the River, to be secured” with the other English women (198). Behn extends this idea to the narrator’s experiences as well. Her absences at crucial moments challenge her claims to inf luence and to importance and, therefore, her credibility. She claims that Oroonoko promises not to hurt her, “and as for myself, and those upon that Plantation where he was, he would sooner forfeit his eternal Liberty, and Life itself, than lift his Hand against his greatest Enemy on that Place” (176), but she f lees when his revolt begins (198). At the end, she says she could have saved him from whipping and execution, but she is conveniently absent when action is called for on these occasions, since “taking Boat, [she] went with other Company to Colonel Martin’s, about three Days Journey down the River” (207). As a result, she must recount the report of others who are not Oroonoko, although this is a source unacknowledged in her claims to authority at the start of the narrative. Behn’s point that the physical reality of the body necessarily affects the ability to perceive and interpret data might seem at odds with the rhetorical posturing of Harvey, Boyle, or Hooke, but it is consistent with a different strand in the conversation in natural philosophy about representing


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the self. Rather than emphasize the reliability of the person engaged in the observing, as Harvey or Hooke do, prose like Isaac Newton’s in the Principia renders the investigator bodiless. Developed over the twenty years prior to the Principia’s publication in 1687, Newton’s style de-emphasizes the body of the experimenter in order to emphasize the objectivity and factuality of the data and conclusions. There is a first-person speaker, but he appears rarely if commandingly. Instead, Newton weakens the focus on a particular individual with other points of view, such as the firstperson plural: “These quantities of forces, we may, for the sake of brevity, call by the names of motive, accelerative, and absolute forces.”19 Newton’s primary rhetorical posture, however, is a passive but definitive voice. Although Newton reiterates the three “quantities of forces” in a firstperson plural, he introduces these quantities in a third-person declarative statement: “The quantity of any centripetal force may be considered as of three kinds: absolute, accelerative, and motive” (4). Certainly the implication of Newton’s rhetoric, that the body of the experimenter is unimportant, was consistent with the view of the body taken by many fellows in the later years of the seventeenth century.20 Much of Newton’s body-less rhetoric anticipates what David Locke calls “agentless prose,” the “official” voice of science. This prose is characterized by the passive voice, nominalization of words (“analyze” becomes “an analysis,” for example), no value judgments, an emphasis on rationality, and a syntax designed to communicate only with other experts. While works like Newton’s Principia do not possess all the attributes identified by Locke, they are, as he notes, originary prose.21 Compared with the point of view in works like Hooke’s in Micrographia, they demonstrate a different set of priorities in establishing the sense of the objective observer, and they suggest that, as Behn points out in her own explorations of the embodied observer, the affect of the material reality of the observer must be acknowledged, even if it cannot be delineated. Oroonoko also takes up the question of witnessing by using the “virtual witnessing” of the narrative’s audience. Experimental philosophers may have been extremely careful in writing about the self in the text, but they were careful also to put the reader in a particular position, where he became what Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer call a “virtual witness” to their work. In Micrographia, Hooke’s magnificent images put his audience at the scope-end of the microscope, and his meticulous descriptions, as devoid of speculation as possible, recreate the experience of mentally recording while observing.22 Shapin and Schaffer extensively document Boyle’s rhetorical and visual techniques for establishing himself as a certain kind of authority so his readers would become a certain kind of audience: witnesses to his experiments.23 Behn’s works, however, seem to reject the notion that a readership is the same thing as a viewership. As a playwright and poet as well as a prose writer, Behn certainly knew how different genres worked, particularly how a performance-based medium like drama differed from a text-based


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medium like prose narrative. Behn’s opening paragraphs of Oroonoko are richly visual, such as the extended, detailed description of the indigenous Surinam people, or the quick, vivid descriptions of fauna, such as the “little rarities, as marmosets, a sort of monkey as big as a rat or weasel, but of a marvelous and delicate shape, and has face and hands like an human creature” and the “Cousheries, a little Beast in the Form and Fashion of a Lion, as big as a Kitten, but so exactly made in all Parts like that Noble Beast that it is it in Miniature” (130). Oroonoko’s descriptions also self-consciously appeal to the visual memory of her readers through allusions to England and the London theater, such as the famous “Dress of the Indian Queen” (130). The significance of vision appears throughout the narrative, including its failure. The “misplaced” interjection about Imoinda’s scars, “I had forgot to tell you that those who are nobly born of that Country, are so delicately cut and razed all over the Fore-part of the Trunk of their Bodies” (174), emphasizes who can see (the narrator), who cannot (the audience), and the dependence of the audience on the narrator for these details. The same holds for the descriptions of the natural world in Surinam, including her note that “in a Word, I must say thus much of it; That certainly had his late Majesty, of sacred Memory, but seen and known what a vast and charming World he had been Master of in that Continent, he would never have parted so easily with it to the Dutch” (178), or of Africans, as when she says, “And I have observ’d, ’tis a very great Error in those who laugh when one says, A Negro can change Colour: for I have seen ’em frequently blush, and look pale, and that as visibly as ever I saw in the most beautiful White” (145). In moments like these, the emphasis on the narrator’s having seen something that the audience cannot questions the replicability and therefore the accuracy of her testimony. Similarly, the narrative but nonvisual end contrasts with the abundant description of the opening, underscoring that the narrator has not actually seen Oroonoko’s execution. While the tale opens exhorting the reader to take the part of the narrator in lamenting Oroonoko, in the end, the narrative makes clear the reader’s difficulty in joining the narrator. The reader’s and the narrator’s experiences cannot be the same, Behn’s story insists, although her narrator seeks to render them congruent. Behn enhances the unreliability by emphasizing the narrative as the product of this narrator. The opening passage both asserts absolute fidelity to the tale as it was presented or really happened, and it acknowledges editing. “I do not pretend, in giving you the History of this ROYAL SLAVE, to entertain my reader with the adventures of a feign’d hero,” she announces to open the story, adding, “nor, in relating truth, design to adorn it with any accidents, but such as arrived in earnest to him: And it shall come simply into the World, recommended by its own proper Merits, and natural Intrigues” (129). These “proper Merits and natural Intrigues” constitute “enough of reality” to make it credible and entertaining, but the word “enough” suggests that “reality” can be quantified, even in a


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story purporting to be absolutely authentic. Furthermore, the narrator notes that although she is reproducing the story entirely and faithfully, she also is “omit[ting], for Brevity’s Sake, a thousand little Accidents of his Life, which . . . yet might prove tedious and heavy to my Reader” (129). Her omissions and commentary also suggest that her view is only one view; other characters, such as Imoinda, Trefry, or Byam, would have a very different interpretation, but also, crucially, very different access to facts, as they were observers from a different position. Behn raises this point when the narrator points out how little Oroonoko liked her religious teaching, but how much Imoinda appreciated it (175). This nebulous, editing narrator is certainly no objective observer, despite her claims. She clearly has a partiality toward Oroonoko, calling him a “great Man” from the start and a “mangled King” at the end (129, 208). In fact, despite her claims to absolute reliability because she is an eyewitness, she declares that she writes with a particular agenda: to justify and immortalize Oroonoko. Nor can she reliably process data. She has ample evidence that Oroonoko is a man of his word, but she cannot accept that. When “he assur’d me that whatever Resolutions he should take, he would act nothing upon the White people” (176), he makes a promise he keeps, as his rebellion intends escape, not revenge. But the narrator, who has seen and heard him make this promise and has had ample additional evidence of his veracity and honor in comparison to that of the Europeans, still picks up and runs when he launches his revolt. Why does the narrator not trust Oroonoko? Perhaps, like the captain who kidnapped Oroonoko, she cannot avoid a cultural bias: that people lie, no matter what their ethical framework.24 She also has an additional agenda, which is to justify her own views. Hence, while it might still be imaginable that someone— although not this someone—could be an objective observer of events, Oroonoko suggests that the textual representation of those events requires interpretation, and that therefore the text itself cannot be objective, whatever the mind-set of the individual during the observation. Of course, Behn’s narrator is no coherent self any more than she is an objective observer. While we have a sense of her as a material person, with physical details such as her dress, her family, her constitution, and even the cut of her hair and her hat, she does not give the reader an equally definitive sense of her character. In the long paragraph where the narrator explains the rising tension between Oroonoko and the white male authorities, the narrator also replicates these tensions between herself and Oroonoko. “They” kept promising to let him go until Oroonoko distrusts “them,” so “I was obliged, by some Persons who fear’d a Mutiny” to speak on their behalf, which the narrator calls “giv[ing] him all the Satisfaction I possibly could” (175). The pronoun confusion reveals the narrator’s own confusion about her identity and suggests either multiple and conf licting identifications, or a changeable self. She identifies with women, with Christians, and with the classically educated (175), but she also distinguishes herself from the other Englishwomen by bragging about


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the manner in which Oroonoko calls her his “Great Mistress” and from the African women by blaming them during the revolt (176; 194–5). In part, this equivocal self is a ref lection of her social indeterminacy as the daughter of the late governor, but the narrator’s multiple ways of defining herself also engages the ideas of the unified self initially posited by experimental philosophy. This ambiguous self-positioning suggests that, like Isabella and the narrator of The History of the Nun, the narrator does not perceive herself consistently or understand herself thoroughly. Furthermore, the narration of Oroonoko proves itself a paradox, as the narrator strives for complete understanding of and centrality to events while at the same time trying to preserve partiality and marginality. As her opening indicates, she seems to believe that she has seen everything, that she has presented the unvarnished truth, and that her narrative presents facts that can stand on their own. According to Oroonoko, it is not possible ultimately to be the objective, impartial observer that the New Scientists describe, and it is a fallacy to think of oneself so. The narrator is both in the middle of everything and on its margins as observer, both a part of primary groups (and there are several) and uncomfortably unlike them. She cannot be pinned down, yet the ideas of reliability introduced by experimental philosophy require that, without a set identity, a person cannot be acknowledged as an authority. Behn’s narrators question the idea of self and achieving objectivity, reliability, and authority, but Behn is not writing to refute experimental philosophy. She uses the ideas debated in natural philosophy to explore the self and the possibilities for narrative that uses the self as part of its concerns. Behn’s art in Oroonoko, then, is a hall of mirrors, with the possibilities of an authentic self constantly receding before us. Furthermore, she points out the inevitable imaginative component required to construct meaning from the data of the senses, or, in narrative terms, to integrate experience with the self. By century’s end, these ideas were decreasingly considered one of the issues in natural philosophy; therefore, they were less tied to experimental philosophy and increasingly available for writers to use for different, albeit related, purposes. As Jacqueline Pearson explains, Behn has her female narrators humbly accede to the view that female creativity should be confined to certain fields, but this transparently ironic humility does not so much accept the conventional limitations as draw mocking attention to them. “History” may be the locus of a specifically male authority, but male “authors” are mocked by implication for the imperfectness of their authority.25 While Pearson speaks of “history” here, an exploration of Behn’s oeuvre shows that this formulation may be understood more broadly. For Behn, the claims of experimental philosophy as the norm and the truth are problematic at best. They are also, however, fascinating, offering ways into the


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question of what it means to be an experiencing, thinking self and how that self, and its tangled existence, is represented in writing. In Behn’s narrative fiction, readers can see an author outside natural philosophy taking up the ideas of the New Science and the rhetorical challenges generated by those ideas. The notion that a person can stand intellectually and emotionally beyond events, can therefore recount those events entirely reliably, and can use those events to present a credible explanation of the natural world (including humanity) appears to have been a compelling question. For fiction’s writers, however intellectual or mercenary their goals, the entry of these ideas into the common consciousness, the popular discourse, offered significant opportunities for thought and text. Behn’s narratives provide a valuable view of this process and a starting point for understanding how these ideas about the self helped shape the novel and, on the other side of the equation, what would become science writing. Notes 1. There is a long-standing discussion of the image of nature and the characterization of the experimenter’s activities during this time, beginning with scholars’ examination of Francis Bacon’s language in the New Organon and New Atlantis. See, for example, Sarah Hutton, “The Riddle of the Sphinx: Francis Bacon and the Emblems of Science,” in Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1997), 7–28; Margaret J. Osler, “The Gender of Nature and the Nature of Gender in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith P Zinsser (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 71–85. 2. Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 3. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe, 3, 20. 4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 144. 5. Stephen Clucas, “Joanna Stephens’s Medicine and the Experimental Philosophy,” in Zinsser, Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, 141–58; Lynette Hunter, “Women and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Zinsser, Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, 133–5; Lynette Hunter, “Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters, 1570– 1620,” in Hunter and Hutton, Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society, 89–107. 6. Jan V. Golinski, “Robert Boyle: Skepticism and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Chemical Discourse,” in The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987), 64–5, 69, 68. Emphases in original. 7. For a more extensive discussion of Boyle’s work compared to traditional chemistry books of that time, see Golinski, 58–82; John T. Harwood, “Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia,” in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge [England]; Wolfeboro, NH: The Boydell Press, 1989), 121. 8. J. Paul Hunter contends that Robert Boyle’s efforts to popularize experimental philosophy created a cultural incubator for the novel, observing that his “pedestrian commitments make him important in the history of taste, desire, and ideas, for his fuzzy categories and refusals to make distinctions are in fact responsible for popularizing ways of thinking crucial to the reception of novels” (276). He adds that, “It was Boyle who played the leading role in creating this epistemology of ordinary life. The key texts are The Christian Virtuoso (1690–91) and the odd collection of meditations prefaced with a kind of theoretical justification—the collection that Swift


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scoffed at but paid parodic homage, the Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects of 1665” (278). While the rich confusion of late seventeenth-century natural philosophy may have contributed to the emergence of the novel, this confusion cannot be attributed to a particular author, but rather to dilemmas facing natural philosophers about their ideas and their representation of those ideas in print. See J. Paul Hunter, “Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2.4 ( July 1990): 275–91. Many aspects of the New Science and its rhetorical conf licts, not just the self posited by its practitioners, appear in the culture, particularly literature from the 1660s forward. Playwrights satirized the New Science, poets wrote about magnetism, and Defoe’s narratives drew on Baconian principles. As late as 1726, Jonathan Swift could lavish significant scorn on the experiments and experimenters of the Royal Society in Gulliver’s Travels. See Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) and Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Al Coppola demonstrates that in Emperor of the Moon, Behn goes beyond the original play, Arlequin, empereur dans la lune, to infuse her text with ideas from the New Science and to link drama and natural philosophy. Al Coppola, “Retraining the Virtuoso’s Gaze: Behn’s Emperor of the Moon, the Royal Society, and the Spectacles of Science and Politics,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41.4 (Summer 2008): 481–506. Cavendish’s work in natural philosophy has garnered significant attention of late. Biographies examine this aspect of her work to varying degrees; see Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by her Pen (New York: Perseus Publishing, 2003); and Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). Other scholars have explored specific aspects of her philosophical work. See, for example, Sujata Iyengar, “Royalist, Romanticist, Racialist: Rank, Gender, and Race in the Science and Fiction of Margaret Cavendish,” ELH: English Literary History 69 (2002): 649–72; Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” ELH: English Literary History 64.2 (1997): 447–71; Judith Moore, “Twentieth-Century Feminism and Seventeenth-Century Science: Margaret Cavendish in Opposing Contexts,” Restoration 26.1 (Spring 2002): 1–14; B. R. Siegfried, “The City of Chance, or, Margaret Cavendish’s Theory of Radical Symmetry,” Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue (May 2004): 1–29; Hilda L. Smith, “Margaret Cavendish and the Microscope at Play,” in Zinsser, Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, 34–47; Elizabeth A. Spiller, “Reading Through Galileo’s Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading,” Renaissance Quarterly 53.1 (Spring 2000): 192–221. Sarah Goodfellow, “ ‘Such Masculine Strokes’: Aphra Behn as Translator of A Discovery of New Worlds,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 28.2 (Summer 1996): 229–50; Line Cottegnies, “The Translator as Critic: Aphra Behn’s Translation of Fontenelle’s Discovery of New Worlds (1688),” Restoration 27.1 (Spring 2003): 23–38; Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: The Dial Press, 1980), 141, 168, 187, 182; Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: Pandora, 2000), 290–4. William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, trans. Robert Willis (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), a translation of Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Frankfurt, 1628), 18. Harwood, “Rhetorics and Graphics in Micrographia,” 138. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Jo Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665). Aphra Behn, “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), vol. 5, 57. Aphra Behn, “The Adventure of the Black Lady,” in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), vol. 5, 8, 9–10. Aphra Behn, The History of the Nun; or. The Fair Vow Breaker, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (1915. New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), vol. 5, 265. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (1915. New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), vol. 5, 129. For a more extensive discussion of the autobiographical elements in Oroonoko, see Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, and Todd, Secret History. Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte, 1729; ed. Florian Cajoli, 1934. 2 vols. Vol. 1: The Motion of Bodies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 5.


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20. Clucas describes a series of experiments performed on a recipe developed by Joanna Stephens for curing gall stones, pointing out that one after the other, the experimenters tested the medicine on themselves and others without considering the impact of the body on the results of the experiment. Clucas, “Joanna Stephen’s Medicine,” 149–50. 21. Locke actually uses the Principia to illustrate part of his argument about the dispassionate passive voice associated with science, comparing its style to Harvey’s Treatise. He greatly prefers Harvey’s style to Newton’s. However, given that the Opticks and the Principia were both written over the same period of time, Locke’s argument, that the scientific “voice” gets more alienating to ordinary readers the more established science becomes, seems contradicted by this example. A better explanation in the difference between the rhetorical posturing of the Principia and the Opticks would be the continued generic difficulties experimental philosophers faced when writing up their own method and conclusions. See David Locke, “Voices of Science,” The American Scholar 67.3 (Summer 1998): 104, 108–09. 22. Hooke is quite explicit in the Preface, in fact: “If therefore the Reader expects any infallible Deductions, or certainty of Axioms, I am to say of my self, that those stronger Works of Wit and Imagination are above my weak Abilities; or if they had not been so, I would not have made use of them in this present Subject before me . . . .” Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Jo Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), n.p. 23. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Including a Translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris, by Simon Shaffer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 60–9. 24. Robert Chibka suggests that the cultural differences between Oroonoko and the English, including the narrator, is largely the willingness to manipulate truth. “Europeans continually maintain power over Oroonoko by a twofold mechanism,” Chibka writes, “they lie and assume that he does the same. He, by the same token, remains powerless because he tells truth and assumes that they will do the same.” Robert L. Chibka, “ ‘Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman’s Invention’: Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30.4 (Winter 1998): 520. 25. Jacqueline Pearson, “Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn,” Part 1, The Review of English Studies 42.165 (February 1991): 43. Emphases in original.


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Astell and Cartesian “Scientia” D e borah B oyle

In 1694, Mary Astell (1666–1731) published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, in which she advocates establishing a “Monastery” or “Religious Retirement” for women to provide them with a “convenient and blissful recess from the noise and hurry of the World” (73).1 In 1697, she published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, subtitled, “Wherein a Method is offer’d for the improvement of their Minds.” As various scholars have noted, this “method” has much in common with the method advocated by Descartes, as well as by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole in their 1693 Logic or the Art of Thinking, which itself follows a Cartesian path.2 And it is not just in her epistemology that Astell seems Cartesian; she also endorses Descartes’ dualism of mind and body. Like Descartes, Astell links this dualistic ontology with a conception of method in which a thinker seeks certain knowledge by eschewing the information provided by the senses (what Descartes calls “adventitious ideas”), focusing instead on the deliverances of reason alone. Descartes calls this absolutely certain knowledge “scientia,” while Astell calls it “science.”3 Descartes’ concern with the pursuit of scientia is announced at the beginning of his Meditations, where he observes that he is seeking something “stable and likely to last” in the sciences [scientiis], rather than the shifting, potentially doubtful knowledge that he had until then possessed.4 For Astell, too, the highest standard for reasoned knowledge is “science,” which she contrasts in A Serious Proposal Part II with “opinion,” “faith,” and mere “moral certainty” (149). As with Cartesian scientia, this “science” is to be attained through clear and distinct perception (168–9).5 Yet Astell’s account of science diverges from Cartesian scientia in interesting ways; she is more sensitive to the role that the body and its passions play in the acquisition of knowledge, and she sees a place for scientia in ordinary life, not just in the “rarefied exercise” of the pure intellect.6 Furthermore, Astell links Cartesian dualism in a novel way with the concept of “separate spheres.” In Christian Religion, she clearly endorses


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the claim that men are more suited for active lives, while women “ought to be Retir’d,” living in the private sphere (296). Yet Astell holds that life in the public sphere leads to a sort of machinelike life, in which the body operates without the involvement of the intellect. In linking retirement at home with the life of the mind, Astell suggests that the intellectual pursuit of truth reunites mind with body. Descartes on Scientia and Astell on Science In her Serious Proposal Part II, Astell identifies various types of understanding. Despite the echoes of Descartes throughout Astell’s epistemology, her language here actually recalls Locke’s distinctions in Book IV of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke identifies three main types of knowing, which he calls intuitive, demonstrative, and sensitive; he also refers to faith and opinion, which he notes fall short of knowledge.7 All of these have parallels in Astell’s discussion. For Locke, intuitive knowledge is immediate, requiring no process of reasoning, and is maximally certain (531). Knowledge acquired by reasoning differs from intuition, Locke says, insofar as it involves deducing claims from other claims. Reasoning comes in two varieties. If the relations between the ideas involved in the reasoning are “plainly and clearly perceived,” then the reasoning is demonstrative or “scientifical” (532, 534). However, if these relations are uncertain and merely probable, then, Locke argues, we have merely “Faith, or Opinion” (537).8 Interestingly, Locke stresses that demonstrative or “scientifical” knowledge need not only be about mathematics; moral truths regarding “the Foundations of our Duty and Rules of Action” are potential candidates for demonstration (534, 549). In Serious Proposal Part II, Astell structures her discussion of knowledge around the same categories as Locke. First, there is knowledge of selfevident first principles, acquired by “intuition” (149). There are, Astell writes, only a few such principles; everything else has to be inferred through some process of “Reasoning and Deduction” (149). Here she identifies three “modes” or types of reasoning, which she calls “science,” “opinion,” and “faith.”9 In her initial discussion of these three forms of reasoning, Astell claims that all three involve deduction from premises, but differ either in the confidence with which one can draw the conclusion, or in the “degrees of Clearness and Evidence in the Premises from whence the Conclusion is drawn” (149). Thus when a conclusion is correctly drawn from absolutely clear, evident premises—a case in which the thinker can have complete confidence in the conclusion— the knowledge thereby attained is called “science.”10 If the premises are less certain, or the conclusion does not seem to follow necessarily, then, Astell notes, one’s thinking is a form of “opinion.” If the premises are drawn from some authority (rather than being clear and evident to the thinker herself ), then one possesses “faith.” The authority may be a


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secular one, but if the authority is God himself, then the knowledge is “divine faith.” A few pages later, Astell adds another element to her discussion of the distinction between science, opinion, and faith, observing that “as Science Demonstrates things that are Seen, so Faith is the Evidence of such as are Not Seen” (150) and that while “Faith is a Dependance [sic] on the Credit of another, in such matters as are out of our View . . . . the Objects of Science are things within our View, of which we have Clear and Distinct Ideas” (151). When Astell writes that an idea is (or is not) “in our view,” she is not referring literally to vision; that is, she is not claiming that science is about empirical matters while faith is about the nonempirical. While Locke had explicitly asserted that sensory information about the external world can legitimately be called a form of knowledge (537–8), Astell maintains that “we’re more properly said to be Conscious of than to Know such things as we perceive by Sensation” (150). Unlike Locke, then, she does not conclude that sensation is a form of knowledge. Thus, when Astell remarks that science concerns things “in our view,” she must mean something else. I suggest that Astell is alluding to the Cartesian notion of clarity. Quoting Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, she observes that an idea is “ ‘Clear which is Present and Manifest to an attentive Mind’; so as we say we see Objects Clearly, when being present to our Eyes they sufficiently Act on ’em and our Eyes are dispos’d to regard ’em” (172). To say that science concerns things “in our view” thus likely means that it concerns things of which we have clear ideas. In this regard, faith concerns matters of which we do not have clear ideas. Astell has been taken by several commentators as rejecting Lockean empiricism in favor of a Cartesian epistemology. For example, Joan Kinnaird describes Part II of A Serious Proposal as “little more than an elaborate exposition of Descartes’ Discourse on Method.”11 Patricia Springborg describes it as containing both a “devastating” critique of “Locke’s sensationalist psychology” and “one of the most brilliant disquisitions of the age on Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas and the possibility of moral certitude.”12 Certainly, Astell rejected Lockean empiricism, as evidenced by her unwillingness to call sensory information knowledge. And she seems, at first glance anyway, to be following in Descartes’ footsteps in her accounts of clear and distinct perception and scientia. After all, she quotes Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy in order to define clarity and distinctness, and her characterization of “science” in A Serious Proposal, Part II, seems purposely to recall Descartes’ claims about scientia. Knowledge in a proper and restricted Sense and as appropriated to Science, signifies that clear Perception which is follow’d by a firm assent to Conclusions rightly drawn from Premises of which we have clear and distinct Ideas. Which Premises or Principles must be so clear and Evident, that supposing us reasonable Creatures, and free from Prejudices and Passions, (which for the time they predominate


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as good as deprive us of our Reason) we cannot withhold our assent from them without manifest violence to our Reason. (149) She also claims that “Science is the following the Process our Selves upon Clear and Evident Principles” (151), another echo of Descartes. Yet despite some striking parallels between Astell’s claims about science and Descartes’ account of scientia, Astell does diverge from Descartes in important ways. To see this, however, requires a closer look at Descartes’ accounts of scientia and clear and distinct perception. Descartes introduces the concept of scientia in the opening paragraph of the Meditations, where the meditator contrasts knowledge that is “stable and likely to last” with the “highly doubtful” set of beliefs he has so far embraced (2:12). This contrast recurs at the end of the Fifth Meditation, in which the meditator maintains that ignorance of God leads not to “true and certain knowledge [veram & certam scientiam],” but rather to “shifting and changeable opinions [vagas tantum & mutabiles opinions]” (2:48), a form of knowledge that he elsewhere characterizes as “cognitio.” For Descartes, scientia is a state of absolutely indubitable knowledge. For Descartes as for Astell, scientia is acquired when one’s perception is so clear and distinct that one cannot help but assent to the truth of that perception. And what are clarity and distinctness? Astell appeals to Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, where he defines a clear idea as “present and accessible to the attentive mind,” while a distinct idea is not only clear but also “so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear.”13 For both Descartes and Astell, a clear perception is one in which the idea is present to the thinker’s mind, and a distinct idea is one in which the contents of that idea are also present to the mind. This account presupposes that some ideas contain other ideas; for example, the idea of a triangle contains such ideas as “angle,” “three,” “line segment” and the proposition that its angles add up to 180 degrees. If the idea of a triangle is clear, it is obvious to the mind; if it is distinct, then the thinker also perceives the other ideas which that idea contains. On this account, shared by both Descartes and Astell, an idea can be clear without being distinct, but distinctness presupposes clarity.14 A paradigm example of a clear and distinct perception is Descartes’ recognition that he exists; “I could not but judge that something which I understood so clearly was true; but this was not because I was compelled so to judge by any external force, but because a great light in the intellect was followed by a great inclination in the will” (2:58–9). The “great light in the intellect” is the faculty Descartes calls the “natural light,” our ability clearly and distinctly to perceive certain innate truths with pure reason alone. Scientia, then, includes metaphysical truths. Descartes also suggests we can have this kind of certainty about mathematical claims and about the most fundamental principles of natural philosophy.15 However, for Descartes, empirical claims that we might today characterize as belonging


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to “science” would not count as forms of scientia. He would say that their dependence on observation, experiment, and the reports of the senses render them merely probable. Nor would beliefs about how we ought to conduct ourselves in daily life be candidates for scientia, according to Descartes. Descartes certainly allows that reason plays a role in discerning the best courses of action in life.16 Yet in no text of which I am aware does Descartes characterize knowledge regarding the conduct of life as susceptible of the highest degree of clarity and distinctness, in the way that mathematics or metaphysical truths may be known. Indeed, in the Discourse on Method, he suggests that while perceptions about practical actions should be treated as if they were clear and distinct, they in fact are often dubious (123).17 Cartesian scientia, then, requires maximally clear and distinct perception. And to attain this degree of perception requires a certain kind of detachment from the body. As Descartes explains in his Principles of Philosophy, the human mind is constantly bombarded with sensory information, producing “adventitious” ideas; we are generally so preoccupied with these impressions that we only rarely turn our attention to our innate ideas. While clear and distinct perception of these innate ideas is possible, the distractions of sensory ideas, which are very “lively and vivid” (2:52), cause most thinkers simply not to attend to their innate ideas.18 Achieving these maximally clear and distinct perceptions thus requires a thinker to turn his attention away from sensory-inspired ideas. This necessitates repeated acts of will since thinkers have a tendency to lapse back into sensory-based thinking. In fact, the Meditations can be read as an exercise in training the will to focus the intellect on innate ideas for a sustained period of time. As the meditator cultivates his skill at turning away from adventitious ideas, however, he is able to perceive more of his innate ideas and to perceive them more clearly and distinctly. Descartes typically uses the Latin word abducere (to lead away from) to describe how the mind turns its attention away from bodily caused, adventitious ideas.19 In English translations of Descartes, this word is often rendered as “withdrawing” or “detaching” the mind from the body, but it is important to note that Descartes did not think the mind literally detaches itself from the body during such perception; rather, the mind “turns [convertat] towards itself ” (2:51), so that the body is ignored rather than somehow detached from the mind. In his suggestions that we can ignore the body and its sensory perceptions through acts of will, Descartes is, arguably, overly optimistic about how easy this is: one simply has to meditate for a while, and clear and distinct perception will follow. In a 1643 letter to Descartes, Princess Elisabeth poignantly wrote: . . . the life which I am constrained to lead does not leave enough time at my disposal to acquire a habit of meditation in accordance with your rules. Now the interests of my house, which I must not


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neglect, now some conversations and social obligations which I cannot avoid, beat down so heavily on this weak mind with annoyance or boredom, that it is rendered useless for anything else at all for a long time afterward.20 In reply, Descartes advised attempting this sort of exercise for only a few hours a year.21 His reply reinforces the idea that clear and distinct perception requires such a rigorous control of the body that it cannot be achieved in the course of ordinary living. Achieving Cartesian scientia may be accessible to the masses insofar as it does not require formal education or book-learning,22 but it nonetheless requires the time and resources to engage in a process of turning away from sensory and practical action. I do not mean to present Descartes as completely ignoring the ways in which mind and body are intertwined. Some recent scholarly work has sought to situate Descartes in relation to the neo-Stoic moralists of the early seventeenth century and argues that while the neo-Stoics advocated freeing oneself from passions, Descartes himself did not do so.23 For example, Descartes stresses in the Passions of the Soul (a work that Astell herself mentions in a note to A Serious Proposal Part II [218]) that the passions are not to be eliminated, but properly governed (1:348). Nonetheless, while Descartes does allow that the passions and senses have an appropriate role to play in ordinary life, he thinks that in the pursuit of metaphysical and mathematical truths, the passions and senses are to be abjured. Astell’s Refashioning of Cartesian Scientia: The Objects of Science As we have seen, Descartes holds that scientia is possible regarding mathematical truths, metaphysical truths, and certain fundamental first principles of natural philosophy. For Descartes, the standard for scientia is high in that it requires not just somewhat clear and distinct perception (for some degree of clarity and distinctness is possible even in sensory perceptions), but the highest degree that humans can achieve, leading the will spontaneously to assent to the truth of the proposition being considered. Astell agrees that science requires a high degree of clear and distinct perception. The question is, what sorts of things does she think can be known with this sort of clarity and distinctness? Descartes often holds up mathematics as a paradigm of clarity and distinctness and thus of scientia. Astell agrees with Descartes that we can have scientific knowledge of mathematical truths. She does not have a great deal to say about mathematics, but in a passage in The Christian Religion Astell characterizes mathematics as a science: No body will call the Mathematicks an obscure and mysterious Science, and yet it proposes Theorems, which will appear as Abstruse


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and Mysterious as any Doctrine in the Gospel, to those who know nothing of that Science, nay even to such as have some smattering in it. (49) One might expect that Astell would agree with Descartes that our knowledge of metaphysical truths—truths about the existence of God and the soul—can be scientific, assuming one has accepted these truths on the basis of one’s own rational examination, not merely on the basis of authority. However, a passage in A Serious Proposal Part II suggests that she does not hold this view. For Astell, objects of science are those things of which we may have clear and distinct ideas, but she also maintains that we can never have distinct ideas of either the soul or God: . . . we may have a Clear, but not a Distinct and Perfect Idea of God and of our own Souls; their Existence and some of their Properties may be Certainly and Indubitably Known, but we can’t know the Nature of our Souls Distinctly, for Reasons too long to be mentioned here, and less that of God, because he is Infinite. (172–3) Astell does not deny that we can have a clear idea of God. However, as we saw earlier, Astell holds that scientific knowledge requires possession of a clear and distinct idea of the thing in question; her claim that we lack a distinct idea of God would seem to rule out truths about God as candidates for science. It is perhaps unsurprising that Astell would maintain that we cannot have a distinct idea of God, for if God is infinite, then the idea of God presumably contains an infinite number of other ideas, and no finite thinker could perceive them all. Still, one might have expected that Astell would hold, as Descartes does, that clarity and distinctness can come in degrees; in this manner, even if the idea of God can never be completely distinct to a human thinker, it can nonetheless be made more distinct through meditation. If this were Astell’s view, then knowledge of God and the soul could be candidates for science. Yet, there is additional evidence that Astell does not think metaphysical truths about the nature of God and the soul are known through science. Interestingly, in a discussion in A Serious Proposal of our knowledge of the existence of God, she observes that it “may be discern’d by Intuition” (180). Strictly speaking, this is not “scientific” knowledge because, as we have seen, science involves a process of drawing conclusions from clear and distinct principles, while intuition is an immediate clear and distinct perception of some truth (149, 151). Nonetheless, truths perceived by intuition are known with as much certainty as the truths perceived by science, so they are just as (if not more) indubitable. If the point is whether metaphysical truths are indubitable, Astell agrees with Descartes that they are; if the point is whether such truths should be described as known “scientifically,” Astell apparently disagrees, at least in A Serious Proposal.


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However, it is possible that Astell changed her mind on this. Passages in The Christian Religion, published eight years after Part II of A Serious Proposal, suggest that she thought metaphysical claims about God’s existence, as well as other religious and moral truths, could be known scientifically. Curiously, in this work, Astell herself never explicitly draws on her earlier categorization of “science,” “opinion,” and “faith” to characterize our understanding of such truths.24 The closest she comes to using the language of A Serious Proposal is to say that many of these religious truths are knowable through “Reason”: “Reason brings us to the Knowledge of God and to a Belief of all his Revelations” (98). However, since Astell had identified three basic types of reasoning in A Serious Proposal, of which science was just one, this passage may not seem to establish that religious truths are known through science. However, in Christian Religion, she clearly uses the term “Faith” differently than she had in A Serious Proposal,25 and she also evidently uses “Reason” in a narrower sense than in A Serious Proposal. Consider the following passage: “Reason can judge of things which she can comprehend, she can determine where she has a compleat, or at least a clear and distinct Idea” (14). Given her claims throughout Christian Religion to be establishing religious and moral truths on the basis of “Reason,” she must think that we have clear and distinct ideas of the concepts from which these truths are deduced. Thus the Serious Proposal criteria for science appear to be met in that religious truths in Christian Religion are not deduced by appeals to authority, but are deduced, by reason, from clear and distinct starting points. Would Astell agree with Descartes that we can have scientia about the fundamental principles of natural philosophy? In general, Astell seems to have had little interest in natural philosophy. She has almost nothing to say about seventeenth-century scientific discoveries or the naturalphilosophical theories then current, and in her descriptions of what the women in her proposed “Monastery” would study, she does not mention natural philosophy. However, in Part II of the Serious Proposal, Astell does refer to “Physical Truths,” and it is clear from this passage that she agrees with Descartes that the principles of natural philosophy are candidates for scientia. As she puts it, we should not “make that a matter of Faith which indeed belongs to Science, by adhering blindly to the Dictates of some famous Philosopher in Physical Truths, the Principles of which we have as much right to examine, and to make deductions from ’em as he had” (116). However, Astell does not seem to think it important for people to study such things; in The Christian Religion, she writes, “it seems to me, that the Contemplation of Extension, even tho’ it be Intelligible Extension, is not so Perfective as Metaphysical, Moral, and Divine Contemplations” (29). This perhaps explains her own lack of attention to natural philosophy. It is truths about morality and religion that Astell considers the most important (170). Thus the “science” that Astell advocates is primarily knowledge of


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religious and moral truths—and this latter category is one that Descartes seems not to include as potential candidates for scientia. Astell’s Refashioning of Cartesian Scientia: The Role of the Body One reason Descartes did not mention moral truths as candidates for scientia may have been their reliance on experiences and perceptions provided by the senses. As we have seen, Descartes believed that the pursuit of clear and distinct perception requires turning away from the deliverances of the senses. While Astell emphasizes the need to direct the mind away from the senses and the passions in order to achieve clear and distinct perceptions, her prescriptions fall short of Descartes’. Certainly there are many passages in Astell’s works that echo Descartes’ prescription to lead the mind away from the senses. In A Serious Proposal, Astell says we must “withdraw our Minds from the World, from adhering to the Senses” in order to achieve clear and distinct perceptions (161). In The Christian Religion, she says that “the main business of those who aspire to Perfection, a very laudable and necessary Ambition, is to throw off the prejudices of Sense” (105). Yet she does not, as one commentator has suggested, maintain that women should see themselves as “disembodied minds.”26 In fact, Astell recognizes that such disembodiment is simply not possible. A close look at her texts shows that she allows that one can have clear and distinct perception—and thus “scientific” knowledge—without such detachment. In one important passage in Part II of Serious Proposal, Astell writes that “Contemplation requires a Governable body,” which, she says, means that “[t]he Animal Spirits must be lessen’d, or rendred more Calm and Manageable; at least they must not be unnaturally and violently mov’d by such a Diet, or such Passions, Designs and Divertisments as are likely to put ’em in a ferment” (161). The mind must govern the body, but she does not argue that the mind must be detached from the animal spirits or the body in general. In fact, she does not even seem to suggest that the mind should ignore the body and its perceptions, as Descartes does. We can neither Observe the Errors of our Intellect, nor the Irregularity of our Morals whilst we are darkned [sic] by Fumes, agitated with unruly Passions, or carried away with eager Desires after Sensible things and vanities. We must therefore withdraw our Minds from the World, from adhering to the Senses, from the Love of Material Beings, of Pomps and Gaieties. (161) At first glance, Astell appears to advise thinkers to engage in a Cartesianstyle method of turning the intellect away from all sensory perceptions to contemplate truth. But note that she does not, in fact, condemn all


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sensory perceptions, just the “unruly Passions” and “eager Desires after Sensible things and vanities.” She does not advocate turning away from the senses, but from “the World.” Moreover, her recommendation against “adhering” to the senses is surely weaker than would be a recommendation to turn away from the senses altogether. According to this passage, then, contemplation and scientific knowledge do not require that one pay no attention to sensory perceptions (160). Another passage a few pages later also seems, at first glance, to suggest a complete withdrawal from the senses, for she says that to improve the mind we should “withdraw our selves as much as may be from Corporeal things, that pure Reason may be heard the better; to make that use of the senses for which they are design’d and fitted, the preservation of the Body, but not to depend on their Testimony in our Enquiries after Truth” (164). But note that Astell maintains merely that our withdrawal from the senses should be “as much as may be”; and it may well be that complete withdrawal is impossible. In that case, partial withdrawal of the mind from the senses is all that is required. Finally, in A Serious Proposal, Part II, Astell suggests that the pursuit of certainty and science actually involves certain passions. In order to “oppose the incursions of sense,” Astell observes that human reason needs “the assistance of an inward and Spiritual Sensation” (144–5); that is, we need a “lively relish of our true Good,” which she identifies as God.27 Improving the mind also requires that one “be passionately in Love with Truth” (164). Similarly, in one of her letters to John Norris, written in 1693 and published in 1695 as Letters Concerning the Love of God, Astell describes herself as having “courted Truth with a kind of Romantick Passion.”28 Rather than eschewing passion, Astell suggests that it has an important role in the pursuit of scientia. In sum, Astell’s use of Descartes’ epistemology leads her to a somewhat different conception of scientia than Descartes endorses. Descartes recognizes the role of empirical, bodily experiences in the acquisition of natural-philosophical truths, but holds that these cannot be known with scientia. Scientia is possible regarding metaphysical, mathematical, and natural-philosophical first principles. To achieve it, he advocates a method in which the mind operates without attending to ideas derived from the senses. Astell, on the other hand, agrees that mathematics and the fundamental principles of natural philosophy can be known scientifically. She also, at least in Christian Religion, appears to agree with him that metaphysical truths about the soul and God’s existence can be known scientifically. However, she goes beyond Descartes in holding that religious and moral principles about human sins and obligations can be known scientifically. Furthermore, Astell’s conception of scientific knowledge does not require the same degree of separation of mind from body that Cartesian scientia requires. Finally, while the propositions known with Cartesian scientia are of central importance for philosophical understanding, they play a relatively


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small role in ordinary human life, even in a life focused on the pursuit of truth. For Astell, the pursuit of scientific knowledge is to be used in what she calls “the Art of Well-Living.” “Well-living” requires knowledge of religious and moral truths, and these truths are scientifically knowable; for Astell, then, science plays a central role in ordinary life. Astell’s description of what life would be like in her proposed “Monastery” for women provides us with a model of this “Art of WellLiving,” which involves studying “the Divine Will and Law, that so we may be Conformable to it in all things” (142–3). It is thus equivalent to the “Christian Life,” which “requires a clear Understanding as well as regular Affections” (70). The well-lived life has two components: knowledge, or “Right Believing,” and virtuous actions, or “Holy Living” (82). Both components would play a role in life in Astell’s seminary. For a stated portion of [time] being daily paid to GOD in Prayers and Praises, the rest shall be employ’d in innocent, charitable, and useful Business; either in study (in learning themselves or instructing others . . . ) or else in spiritual and corporeal Works of Mercy, such as aiding the poor and healing the sick. (84) Such “well-living” need not be restricted to the residents of institutions like Astell’s monastery. In describing the life of these residents, Astell takes herself to be providing a model for women outside such places, too. This is clear from Part II of her Serious Proposal, in which she suggests that the method she advocates there may be followed even before her proposed monastery is built (126). Dualism and the Notion of “Separate Spheres” For Descartes, the notion of scientia is closely connected to dualism, for the pursuit of scientia requires turning the mind away from the body and focusing on the deliverances of pure intellect. So far, I have been concentrating on how Astell revises the Cartesian notions of clear and distinct perception and scientia, so that, in her account, bodily perceptions are to be governed, but not ignored, in the pursuit of science. I turn now to Astell’s creative use of Cartesian dualism. Astell links Cartesian dualism in a novel and interesting way with the concept of “separate spheres” for men and women. The concept of separate spheres of activity for men and women reached its zenith in the mid-nineteenth century, extolled in handbooks for women and in poems such as Coventry Patmore’s “Angels in the House” and Tennyson’s “The Princess.” Yet the notion of separate spheres, justified by beliefs in the fundamentally different natures of men and women, had existed long before the Victorian era. Aristotle had maintained in the Politics that women, possessing permanently stunted deliberative faculties,


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were unsuited to life in the public realm.29 The notion of separate spheres was clearly alive in Astell’s day. Writing in 1705, Damaris Masham referred to “that division of Cares of Humane Life, which ought to be made between a Man and his Wife,” whereby women are naturally suited to the care of children.30 Astell, too, endorses the idea that men and women are naturally suited for different “spheres” of activity. She explicitly asserts in The Christian Religion that men are more suited for active lives, while women “ought to be Retir’d,” living in the private sphere (296). Indeed, in this text she even refers approvingly to The Gentleman’s Calling and The Ladies Calling (2), two seventeenth-century works on the virtues appropriate for men and women. The Ladies Calling proclaims that a married woman is to be a wife, a mother, and a “Mistriss, the inspection of the family being usually her Province.”31 Yet despite her acceptance of the traditional distinction, Astell does not value the public sphere more than the private, for women or for men. In A Serious Proposal, she suggests that activity in the public sphere puts people in a “continual hurry” and that this kind of life makes people live in a “mechanical” way, like “Machines” (94). In The Christian Religion, too, she condemns those who “forget themselves so far as to be plung’d into the Cares of a Busie [life],” focused on the affairs of the world (114). Those who do this, she suggests, are living like “brutes.” For someone as well-versed in Cartesian concepts as Astell, this is striking language. According to Cartesian dualism, a human being is composed of two fundamentally different substances, an immaterial soul (whose essential attribute is to think) and a corporeal body (whose essential attribute is to be extended). The substance of the human body is thus no different, in its essence, from the substance of any other physical object, and, like all other physical objects, it behaves mechanically. The human body, considered on its own, is thus essentially a machine, and many of its functions (such as respiration, blood circulation, and digestion) occur in a purely mechanical fashion. However, Descartes emphasizes that in a living human being the corporeal substance constituting the human machine is always “intermingled” with a soul (2:56). Descartes claims in Part 5 of his Discourse on Method, that nonhuman animals lack souls, and thus their actions resemble those of machines (1:140–1). Astell herself clearly endorses Cartesian dualism, writing in A Serious Proposal that “Humane Nature consists in the Union of a Rational Soul with a Moral Body” (210). Given this, and given her obvious familiarity with other elements of Cartesian thought, her references to machines and brutes are significant. What they suggest is that Astell viewed active life in the public sphere as causing a sort of disembodiment—not a disembodiment in which the mind operates without the body, but a disembodiment in which the body operates without the mind. In public life, she seems to propose, the role of the mind is reduced so much that the body seems to be operating without it.


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In proposing her “monastery” or “seminary” for women, Astell clearly suggests that a life of retirement, out of the public sphere, is the better one. And she does link such retirement at home with the life of the mind and with the pursuit of reason (94); the pursuit of science is to be done in the private sphere. But, as we have seen, Astell does not see the pursuit of science as requiring disembodiment of the mind; rather, it involves the proper regulation of the body. Thus Astell argues that leaving the “busy” life of the public sphere and retiring to a private realm to pursue truth actually reunites mind with body. Whether she thinks this is possible for men seems to be an open question: men may have to be resigned to living life, at least some of the time, in a “hurry.”32 Notes 1. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 73. 2. Margaret Atherton points out that Astell’s rules for reasoning resemble those of Descartes. See Margaret Atherton, “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason,” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 24. Patricia Springborg points out the inf luence of Arnauld and Nicole on Astell. See Springborg, “Introduction,” in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies by Mary Astell, ed. Patricia Springborg (Broadview: Peterborough, Ontario, 2002), 31. 3. Although the rest of this paper will elaborate on Astell’s notion of “science,” it should be noted that it was not until the nineteenth century that this term acquired its current meaning of “branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws.” See the Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “science,” 5b. In the seventeenth century, “natural philosophy” was used to designate those disciplines we would now call “science.” 4. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12. For the Latin, see Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. 7, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin/ C.N.R.S., 1957–76; reprint, Paris: Vrin, 1996), 17. 5. See also Mary Astell, The Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (London: Printed by S.H. by R. Wilkin, 1705), 14. 6. The characterization of Cartesian scientia as a “rarefied exercise” comes from Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 46. 7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 536–8. For a clear discussion of Locke’s account of knowledge, see David Owen, “Locke on Reasoning,” Chapter 3, in Hume’s Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 8. See also 655, where Locke discusses probability. 9. She also mentions a fourth type, “moral certainty,” which is achieved through “proofs” that rely on a mixture of science and faith. It is thus of a “compounded Nature” (149). 10. Patricia Springborg writes that “Astell has no objections to science, which she discusses at great length in A Serious Proposal, Part II.” See Astell, Serious Proposal, Part I, 105n3. Springborg understands Astell’s reference to “science” in the same sense in which we use the word “science” today. However, what we now call “science” would have been known as “natural philosophy” in the seventeenth century (see note 3). 11. Joan Kinnaird, “Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism,” Journal of British Studies 19.1 (Autumn 1979): 62. 12. Springborg, “Introduction,” 35 and 21. 13. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 207–8.


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14. Springborg gets this backward in her Introduction to A Serious Proposal and in her recent book on Astell. See Springborg, “Introduction,” 8 and Springborg, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 109. 15. For further discussion of Cartesian clarity and distinctness, the natural light and innate ideas, see Deborah Boyle, Descartes on Innate Ideas (London: Continuum, 2009). 16. For example, see his letter to Princess Elisabeth, September 1, 1645, in which he describes “the true use of our reason in the conduct of life.” See The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, trans. and ed. Lisa Shapiro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 109. 17. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, 123. For the original French, see Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres, vol. 6, 25. 18. As he puts it, “our mind is unable to keep its attention on things without some degree of difficulty and fatigue; and it is hardest of all for it to attend to what is not present to the senses or even to the imagination.” See Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, 220. 19. See, for example, Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, 8–9. 20. Letter from Elisabeth to Descartes of June 10, 1643, in Shapiro, Correspondence, 67–8. 21. Letter from Descartes to Elisabeth of June 28, 1643, in Shapiro, Correspondence, 70. 22. This point has been emphasized by several recent feminist interpreters of Descartes’ work. See, for example, Atherton, “Cartesian Reason,” 27, and Lloyd, Man of Reason, 44. 23. Lisa Shapiro, “Volume Editor’s Introduction,” in The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 30. 24. By this point, Astell’s differences with Locke had become more pronounced; since her threefold categorization of science, opinion, and faith recalls Locke’s distinctions, Astell may not have wanted to associate herself with Locke by invoking that categorization in The Christian Religion. 25. In this text, faith describes a particular set of beliefs with a particular content, and not (as in A Serious Proposal) a method by which beliefs may come to be held. See Christian Religion, 124. 26. Cynthia Bryson, “Mary Astell: Defender of the ‘Disembodied Mind,’ ” Hypatia 13.4 (Fall 1998): 42. 27. Alice Sowaal emphasizes this point. See Alice Sowaal, “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom,” Philosophy Compass 2.2 (2007): 230. 28. Mary Astell and John Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, ed. E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 87. 29. Aristotle, Politics, 1260a, 13–14. 30. Damaris Masham, Occasional Thoughts In Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (London: Printed for A. and J. Churchil, 1705), 190. 31. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (Oxford: Printed at the Theatre, 1673). http://anglicanhistory.org/women/calling/wives.html. See section 47. Accessed June 25, 2008. 32. She points out that rank and duty oblige some people to “hurry” in order to provide for their families. See Astell, Christian Religion, 300.


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CH A P T E R

7

Centlivre: Joint-worms and Jointures Judy A . H ayde n

Susanna Centlivre’s The Basset-Table (1705)1 has been explored as a satire against Mary Astell and/or the Royal Society, as a treatise on gambling, and as a commentary on gender and marriage.2 I would argue, however, that while these are certainly valid means by which to investigate this play, and while certainly female gambling plays a key role, the main thrust here is the playful virtuosa, Valeria, in spite of the playwright’s claim in her dedication that her purpose is to correct the vice of the period. If one juxtaposes Valeria in The Basset-Table with the virtuoso, Periwinkle, in her later play, A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), it becomes evident that Centlivre treats the two “scientific” characters in a much different manner.3 The virtuosa in The Basset-Table obtains the man she loves and apparently continues her “scientific” study, while the silly virtuoso in A Bold Stroke for a Wife becomes the dupe of the lovelorn bachelor. What I will demonstrate in this essay, then, is that Centlivre’s The Basset-Table is a tongue-in-cheek romp that pretends at mockery of the philosophic lady while simultaneously presenting a plot in praise of female curiosity and inquiry.4 In an issue of The Female Tatler, “Lucinda,” who is probably Centlivre herself, remarks with more than a little discontent that only in her study and among her books can she not be “blamed for my curiosity.”5 Long considered an “intellectual vice,” curiosity was associated with vanity, pride and disobedience.6 While with the dawn of the New Science in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon insisted that the end of curiosity and knowledge was the glorification of God,7 there were those, such as John Milton, who remained somewhat disquiet about man’s quest for knowledge and the notion of prying into God’s works. When, for example, Adam in Paradise Lost expresses curiosity about the motions of the heavenly bodies, Raphael replies: . . . the great architect Did wisely to conceal and not divulge


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His secrets to be scanned by them who ought Rather admire; or, if they list to try Conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide .... Think only what concerns thee and thy being; Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there Live, in what state, condition, or degree, Contented that thus far hath been revealed Not of earth only but of highest Heaven. (8.72–178)8 Nevertheless, as the eighteenth century unfolded, masculine “curiosity” in Britain began to undergo a careful rehabilitation from the pejorative context of earlier historical periods. Curiosity started to give way to wonder, and with the development and popularity of the curiosity cabinet, men such as William Derham could argue that scripture commended men who were “curious and ingenious Enquirers that Seek them out [God’s works], or pry into them.”9 One of the reasons this shift could take place, Harrison argues, is that the pursuit of knowledge was “gradually dissociated from the personal morality of the investigator.”10 In debates about sin and science, however, female curiosity was not so easily rehabilitated. The phrase Harrison uses to identify one of several factors that assisted in the rehabilitation of masculine curiosity categorically explains the impossibility of rescuing female curiosity: the “personal morality of the investigator.”11 Women’s virtue was always under question, and women were continually at odds to defend it since “[i]t was commonly asserted that women’s carnal appetite was voracious.”12 Mary Astell argued against such notion, asserting that “Altho’ it has been said by Men of more Wit than Wisdom, and perhaps of more malice than either, that Women are naturally incapable of acting Prudently, or that they are necessarily determined to folly, I must by no means grant it.”13 Curiosity, then, as “Lucinda” points out in The Female Tatler, was never considered a positive attribute for women and particularly not if it pertained to learning. William Kenrick chastised female curiosity, writing “It is not for thee, O woman, to undergo the perils of the deep, to dig in the hollow mines of the earth, to trace the dark springs of science, or to number the thick stars of the heavens [ . . . ]. Thy kingdom is thine own house and thy government the care of thy family.”14 Female curiosity was illegitimate because it “operated outside the world of law and order.”15 Susan Scott Parrish notes that from the early 1600s to the early 1800s, “women were taught to associate their own curiosity with a litany of ills: vanity, idleness, transgression, self-interest, fading pleasure, and false knowledge.”16 Although curiosity may have been configured female, as was Nature, the Royal Society—and earlier Bacon himself—had argued for a science


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that was distinctively masculine. Bacon advocated for a heroic birth of science, which would in the long run produce “a blessed race of Heroes or Supermen.”17 As noted in the Introduction to this collection, Cowley writes in his ode to Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society that “Philosophy, I say, and call it, He, / For whatso’ere the Painter’s Fancy be / It a male Virtu seems to me.”18 Cowley complains that male philosophy had been amused by “Sports of wanton Wit” and fed with “Desserts of Poetry . . . / Instead of solid meats t’increase his force; / Instead of vigorous exercise” (ll. 20–23). In The New Organon, the gentlemanly natural philosopher was directed to peer into the recesses of female Nature, for she “is conquered only by obedience” (1.3). In the process of this conquest, Bacon observes that it is necessary “to penetrate to the more inward and remote parts of nature” (1.8), and that philosophers should not be hesitant in their incursions or be “anxious that a closer investigation of nature may penetrate beyond the permitted bounds of sound opinion” (1.89). In his poem “To the Royal Society,” Cowley, too, delights in the ability of masculine science to peer into Nature’s private recesses, her “Littleness”: Natures great Works no distance can obscure, No smalness her near Objects can secure. Y’ have taught the curious Sight to press Into the privatest recess Of her imperceptible Littleness. (ll. 141–45) In his epistle dedicatory, Nathaniel Highmore wrote to Boyle, “You stick not to trace Nature in her most intricate parts, [and] to torture her to a confession,”19 while John Ray’s epitaph notes that he had “pierced ev’n her darkest entrails through.”20 Against this paradigm, then, women longing to know, to learn, and to understand were pitted in a contest in which the rules were founded on the concept of female virtue (which must be surrendered) and masculine sexual desire (aggressive and even violent). Since truth could only result from man’s assault on Nature, Joseph Glanvill was concerned that man might not be masculine enough. The Woman in us, still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the Garden: and our Understandings are wedded to an Eve, as fatal as the Mother of our miseries. And while all things are judg’d according to their suitableness, or disagreement to the Gusto of the fond Feminine; we shall be as far from the Tree of Knowledge, as from that, which is guarded by the Cherubin.21 Nevertheless, in spite of the gendered construction of the pursuit of the New Science (and the masculine and aggressive metaphors used to parlay this), Centlivre forays into the contest with high praise, as we shall see, for her she-philosopher.


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Little is known about Susanna Centlivre (c. 1667–1723) before her arrival in London, which occurred about 1700.22 F. P. Lock suggests that she was probably an orphan. If so, she managed in some manner to achieve a good education, and before her life ended she could count among her acquaintances contemporary figures such as George Farquhar, Nicholas Rowe, Richard Steele, and perhaps John Dennis, but certainly Mary Pix and Sarah Fyge Egerton. Centlivre published at least two collections of letters, she wrote and published poetry, periodical essays, and a number of plays, for which she is perhaps best known. Her own curiosity about the New Science appears sporadically in her works, but is perhaps best ref lected in the virtuosa of The Basset-Table. Valeria’s curiosity stands diametrically opposed to her father’s explicit command that she fulfill the stereotypical female role—marriage and the production of heirs. Her philosophy Sir Richard patently dismisses, observing simply, “You and your Will may Philosophize as long as you please, –Mistress, —but your Body shall be taught another Doctrine . . . . ‘Tis the Flesh Huswife, that must raise Heirs, —and Supporters of my Name” (4.39). Even so, while Nature may be forced into submission by an aggressive masculine desire for “truth,” Centlivre’s virtuosa will not suffer such aggression. Valeria’s philosophical interests are viewed by the men in her society as a form of madness. When a servant arrives to announce her father in company of another, Valeria hopes for something rather scientific: “What, is it an Accident, a Substance, a Material Being, or, a Being of Reason?” (2.22). When she learns it is a man, she remarks, “P’sha, a Man, that’s nothing,” to which her cousin, Lady Reveller, remarks, “She’ll prove by and by out of Discartes [sic], that we are all Machines” (2.22–23). Introduced to the mariner, Captain Hearty, the man her father has ordained she marry, Valeria remarks: I would have ask’d you, Sir, if ever you had the curiosity to inspect a Mermaid—Or if you are convinc’d there is a World in every Star—We, by our Telliscopes, find Seas, Groves and Plains, and all that; but what they are Peopled with, there’s the Query. (2.24) Appalled by her interest in philosophy, the grizzled sea captain concludes that she is “fitter for Moorfields than Matrimony” (2.24). In a gentleman’s agreement, the captain engages in the ruse to dupe Sir Richard by marrying off his betrothed to her beau, Ensign Lovely. When Valeria’s father, Sir Richard, discovers the subterfuge, the Captain justifies his action, explaining that Valeria is “too whimsical for our Element; her hard Words might have Conjur’d up a Storm for ought I know –so I have set her ashore” (5.51). “Hard Words” is an expression Sir Patient Fancy uses in reference to Lady Knowell, another learned lady, in Aphra Behn’s play, Sir Patient Fancy.23 Sir Patient describes Lady Knowell as “the intolerable Lady, Madam Romance, that walking


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Library of Profane Books,” a woman of “eternal noise and hard words” (2.1.180–3).24 Centlivre dedicates The Basset-Table to “Arthur, Lord Altham, Baron of Altham in the Kingdom of Ireland,” observing that classical playwrights used comedy to ridicule “Folly, Intemperance, and Debauchery,” diverting audiences “out of their Vices” through laugher. Further, Centlivre adds, “I have had a tender regard to good Manners, and by the main Drift of it, endeavour’d to Redicule [sic] and Correct one of the most reigning Vices of the Age” (5). Yet, while Centlivre observes a continuing problem with vice, she at no time mentions gambling directly in this dedication, nor does the term appear in the prologue or the epilogue. So what is the vice to which she refers? The obvious assumption is, of course, gambling, which would have been of topical interest to her audience given that gambling had become a serious problem in the eighteenth century. Gambling certainly is a concern in one of the main plots of this play; however, just as important and equally significant to the outcome of The Basset-Table is Centlivre’s work with natural philosophy in the second plot of this play. Valeria’s curiosity is transgressive and sexual, for as Thomas Wright observes in The Female Vertuoso’s (1693), “A Woman’s Wit was always a Pimp to her pleasures.”25 That Centlivre pairs her virtuosa plot with one of gambling is not coincidental, for, like female curiosity, female gambling in eighteenth-century drama connoted sexual transgression. “What can be lost at the gaming table in these plays is not aristocratic honor, but female sexual virtue.”26 In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I, Mary Astell made a concerted effort to conf late education and vice, arguing that in “Ignorance and a narrow Education, lay the Foundation of Vice, and Imagination and Custom rear it up.”27 Thus, while in The Basset-Table Centlivre may make overt reference to gambling, she indicates covertly men’s criticism of women’s desire for learning and their interest in the New Science. In The World’s Olio (1655), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, pointed out that it was only lack of opportunity that kept women from engaging in the New Science. “Whereas in nature we have as clear an understanding as men, if we were bred in schools to mature our brains and to manure our understandings, that we might bring forth the fruits of knowledge” (A4R).28 In her Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), Bathsua Makin argues that “Had God intended women only as a finer sort of cattle, he would not have made them reasonable.”29 She observes their need for skills in math and sciences for good housewifery, to dye wool and f lax, to plant fields and vineyards, and to buy and sell merchandise, for example (35). In 1696, Judith Drake argued that women should be taught “Arithmetik, and other arts” since the “Vivacity of our Wits, and the Readiness of our Invention . . . demonstrate that we were chief ly intended for Thought and the Exercise of the Mind.”30 In 1703, Lady Mary Chudleigh complained that it “is not reasonable to expect that a Woman should be nicely skill’d


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in Physics: We are kept Strangers to all ingenious and useful Studies, and can have but a slight and superficial Knowledge of things.”31 Early in The Basset-Table, Centlivre, too, decisively points out her society’s failure to acknowledge and to accept women’s desire for an education. When Valeria’s cousin, Lady Reveller, teases her for her interest in natural Philosophy, Valeria insists that nothing should enslave the mind. Lady Reveller: . . . Well, Cousin, might I Advise, you should bestow Your Fortune in Founding a College for the Study of Philosophy, where none but Women should be admitted; and to Immortalize your Name, they should be call’d Valerians, ha, ha, ha. Valeria: What you make a Jest of, I’de Execute, were Fortune in my Power. (2.22) How much of Valeria’s remark should we assess as fodder provided for the laughter of the audience, and how much might we charge to Centlivre’s own interest in women’s education? Although D. N. Deluna has argued that Centlivre “lampoons” Mary Astell in the above-noted scene through the “eccentric Valeria whose egotism has motivated her desire to found a women’s college of like-minded airy intellectuals,”32 there were a number of women before Mary Astell (and after) who suggested the establishment of female academies or nunneries, such as Lady Lettice, Viscountess Falkland (1610–46), Mary North (1638–62), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), and Bathsua Makin (c.1600–c.1675). Frederick P. Lock notes that “It is clear from the sympathetic portrait of Valeria in The Basset-Table that Centlivre saw nothing absurd in experimental science.”33 Again, while little is known of Centlivre’s upbringing, there is clear reason to believe that she actively pursued an understanding of contemporary “scientific” discussions, and this would not have been particularly difficult for her given that public lectures and experiments in the New Science were available. These were often theatrical, Larry Stewart claims, and points out the potential similarity between these lectures and “raree shows.”34 The public lectures and experiments, too, required Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief ” in order that the audience might engage with this new knowledge in “puzzling electrical attractions, capillary movements of liquids, or even the involuntary motions of animals.”35 Robert Iliffe and Frances Willmoth note that “in the early eighteenth century it became increasingly fashionable for ladies to attend these public lectures and to use philosophical instruments.”36 Given the theatricality of such events and their appeal to women, Centlivre may well have attended such shows. We do know that Centlivre was familiar with Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds. In his book on the actress Anne Oldfield, William Egerton


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includes a letter from John Lucas, who notes that Centlivre borrowed from Oldfield a copy of Fontenelle’s text. Centlivre returned the text, having inscribed on a blank leaf of the book a short poem, in which she notes: Yet tho’ Philosophers such Schemes pursue, And fancy’d Worlds in every Planet View; They can but guess at Orbs above the Skies, And darkly paint the Lakes and Hills that Rise.37 These lines, which continue with praise of Oldfield’s beauty, reverberate with the question similarly asked by Centlivre’s vituosa, Valeria, in The Basset-Table: we know that lakes and hills exist on these celestial orbs, but are they inhabited? Centlivre appears as well to have some knowledge of contemporary publications and/or lectures supported by the Royal Society, as might be seen in the conversation between Ensign Lovely and Sir James Courtly. Lovely: ’Tis true, that little she-Philosopher has made me do Penance more heartily than ever my sins did; I deserve her by meer Dint of Patience. I have stood whole hours to hear her Assert that Fire cannot burn, nor Water Drown, nor Pain Aff lict, and forty ridiculous Systems— Sir James: And all her Experiments on Frogs, Fish—and Flies, ha, ha, ha, without the least Contradiction. Lovely: Contradiction, no, no I allow’d all she said with undoubtedly, Madam, —I am of your mind, Madam, it must be so—natural Causes, &c. (1.16) In fact, several of the subjects and/or experiments to which Centlivre refers in this play involved the renowned Edward Tyson. His experiments on the Lumbricus latus (or the jointed worm) and the Lumbricus teres (or the round worm) were published in 1683 in the Philosophical Transactions38 (Fig. 7.1). In 1681 he translated from Low Dutch Jan Swammerdam’s book on the anatomy of the may-f ly, and he collaborated with Francis Willughby on De Historia Piscium (Fig. 7.2). In his own work, Tyson noted the need for a good microscope.39 Through Sir James’ and Ensign Lovely’s humorous jibes at the “little she-Philosopher,” Centlivre demonstrates not only an awareness of contemporary lectures, experiments, and transactions currently available to a public audience, but she also demonstrates familiarity with the topics of Edward Tyson’s work. Tyson had been roundly satirized by Samuel Garth in The Dispensary (1699), in which Garth claimed Tyson’s audience was comprised of lunatics and the vulgar public seeking his


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Figure 7.1 California.

From Edward Tyson’s essay on the Lumbricus Latus, Philosophical Transactions (1683). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino,

Figure 7.2 From the frontispiece to Francis Willughby’s De historia piscum. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


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advice, and that the famed doctor offered a place where “Abandon’d Authors here a Refuse meet, / And from the World, to Dust and worms retreat” (43).40 Given Tyson’s well-established reputation for the study of worms, it seems plausible that Centlivre refers to him in this play, particularly during Valeria’s discussion with Lovely of her latest acquisition: Lovely: Prodigious! ‘Tis the Joint-Worm, which the Learned talk of so much. Valeria: Ay; the Lumbricus Latus, or Faescia, as Hippocrates calls it, or Vulgarly in English the Tape-Worm—Thudoeus us [sic] tells us of One of these Worms found in a Human Body 200 Foot Long, without Head or Tail. Lovely: I wish they be not got into thy Brain. (Aside). Oh you Charm me with these Discoveries. Valeria: Here’s another Sort of Worm call’d Lumbricus teres Intestinalis. (3.28–29) Valeria’s “scientific” curiosity is both confusing and threatening to her father, whose desire is simply that she marry and provide grandchildren. When Sir Richard discovers Valeria engaged with her experiments in her study, he begins to toss her microscope and other scientific paraphernalia out the window. Valeria: Oh Dear Father, save my Lambricus Latus. Sir Richard: I’ll Lamprey and Latum you; what’s that I wonder? Ha! Where the Devil got you Names that your Father don’t understand? Ha? (3.29) During the Restoration and early eighteenth century, curiosity was interpreted as “ocular” and became associated with visual lust, so that women who engaged in questioning science or collecting specimens were frequently viewed as “agents of pride, the central vice of mankind’s fallen state.”41 When Sir Richard in this scene finds Ensign Lovely hidden in Valeria’s room, the incident only emphasizes Valeria’s “lust,” which in turn serves to confirm her father’s resolution that he marry his daughter off quickly, before she compromised the family honor. “I doubt you have been studying Natural Philosophy with a Vengeance,” he says accusingly, and pulling her along, he assures her, “I have a Husband still for you; —come along, come along, I’ll send the Servants to clear this Room of your Bawbles” (3.30). Where Valeria may have obtained those names that her father did not understand was perhaps from the many “scientific” publications available to the curious or from the numerous public lectures given by members of the Royal Society in London, such as those near the


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Royal Exchange, as well as those in ale houses and private homes. Larry Stewart argues that because natural philosophers were “determined to make themselves heard,” natural philosophy became, at least to some extent, “the subject of public contemplation.”42 John Harris, a noted theologian, mathematician, and topographer, for example, instituted free public lectures “for the public good,” and the mathematician James Hodgson offered classes in natural philosophy and astronomy that these might “lay the best and surest Foundation for all useful knowledge.”43 A variety of periodicals, such the well-documented Athenian Mercury, but also the Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious, The Works of the Learned, and The Ladies’ Diary; or, Women’s Almanack, catered to general public curiosity about mathematics and the New Science.44 Michael Hunter has argued that while the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society may have been intended for “practitioners” of the New Science, the publications also appealed to a wider, public audience for, as Oldenburg observes, “the benefit of such Englishmen as are drawn to curious things, yet perhaps do not know Latin.”45 Although the key word here in Oldenburg’s remark is “Englishmen” [italics mine], women were unschooled in Latin, and so for them as well the transactions opened the door to a new world of experimental and philosophical knowledge. That Centlivre demonstrates an awareness of the New Science in her dramatic text should not be surprising since she would have had access to at least some of these new developments and ideas, if not directly then perhaps as a consequence of a purposeful dissemination of new ideas to a public curious and desiring to know. That she had a clear interest in the New Science might be seen in her poetry as well. For example, Centlivre wrote a commendatory poem on Sarah Fyge’s Poems on Several Occasions, together with a Pastoral (1706), in which Fyge remarks on contemporary ideas about science.46 In her first poem in this collection, “On Friendship,” for example, Fyge uses a cognitive approach to the concept of friendship, constructing it as a scientific experiment, asking “where, this Extract may be found” that would make all men friends. “And what Ingredients make the Rich Compound; / Or in what Soul, is true kindly heat, / That can this great Experiment compleat” (1). Experimental science informs Fyge’s second poem, “The Extacy,” as her soul surveys first the “Empyrean Throne” only to descend to traverse the “Ætherial Plain” where she commands that it should “Write in Journals as ye go, / And to the inquiring Earth relate; / By dropping it below” (4). As her soul gazes over the Earth, recording her assessment, she decides that “In this Amphibious Ball, is vast variety, / To entertain my Curiosity” (4). However, in Fyge’s third poem, “On the Honourable Robert Boyl’s Notion of Nature,” we see her vivid celebration of the New Science and the man she feels offered it to a public long oppressed by Nature’s tyranny. “Tis bravely done, great Boyle has disenthro’d. / The Goddess


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nature, so unjustly Crown’d, / And by the Learn’d so many Ages own’d” (11). Nature, long the “Refuge of Atheists” and theists, she claims, had become the “Rival to Omnipotence,” and needed to be put in her place. Who better to do this than Robert Boyle? “Boyle the great Champion of Providence. / Whose conquering Truths in an Inquiry drest, / Have celebrated Nature dispossest” (12). Centlivre’s response to Fyge’s collection is a celebratory offering in the introduction that addresses her own frustration with being sidelined as a woman: Thou Champion for our Sex go on and show Ambitious Man what Womankind can do In vain they boast of large Scholastick Rules, Their skill in Arts and Labour in the Schools. What various Tongues and Languages acquir’d, How fam’d for Policy, for Wit admir’d; Their solid Judgment in Philosophy, The Metaphysicks, Truths, and Poetry, Since here they’ll find themselves outdon by thee. Centlivre’s praise of Fyge’s collection may seem overwrought, yet her frustration with women’s lack of education was surely felt by many intelligent young women left out of the world of knowledge opening around them, knowledge in the process of a wonder-filled metamorphosis. In The Basset-Table, Centlivre follows an argument asserted more than thirty years earlier by Aphra Behn. In her note to the reader that prefaced The Dutch Lover, Behn asks why “women having equal education with men, were not as capable of knowledge, of whatever sort as well as they.”47 Mary Astell, too, insists that women’s intellectual “inferiority” is purely custom rather than nature. “Women [are] as capable of Learning as Men are,” Astell argues (83); any incapacity, she observes, “is acquired not natural” (59). When Centlivre’s Alpiew in The Basset-Table insists that learning is ridiculous for women, Valeria adamantly objects to the notion that woman’s nature does not lend itself readily to education. “Philosophy Sutes our Sex, as Jack Boots would do,” Alpiew contends. Valeria counters this argument with, “Custom would bring them [ jack boots] as much in Fashion as Furbeloes, and Practice would make us as Valiant as e’re a Hero of them all; the Resolution is in the Mind, —Nothing can enslave that” (2.22).48 Alpiew’s view of women’s education had more in common with that of Thomas Wright, who wrote, “The Women of Old did not read so much, but lived better. Housewifry was all the Knowledge they aspired to; now adays Wives must Write forsooth, and pretend to Wit with a Pox.”49 Although Valeria certainly provides a vehicle for satire on the scientific or learned lady, she suffers no undue harm. She differs much from


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Lady Meanwell in Thomas Wright’s The Female Vertuoso’s, who is held up for ridicule. Lady Meanwell invents a “mathematical engine” meant to keep the streets of London dry. The “engine” requires the “setting up of Timber Posts round about the City, and the fixing a pair of Bellows upon every one of ‘em, to blow the Clouds away” (1.23). Examples of outrageous folly such as this are not a part of Valeria’s study. Her investigation and dissection of worms, insects and f lies resonates with contemporary “scientific” research. In general, the “learned females who ventured outside their traditional domestic roles were variously classified as wonderful, monstrous, freakish or unnatural,”50 and in literary texts, they often received their “come-uppance”; Valeria, however, obtains all that she desires. She ends the play married to the man she loves, a man who not only tolerates her philosophical inquiry but seems, on occasion, to have joined her in her experiments. This is made clear when Lovely gently chastises Valeria, as he reveals his disguise, that she “us’d to be more Kind when we have fish’d for Eals in Vinegar” (5.51). The traditionalist and stoic Sir Richard is revealed as the “freakish” father, who can think of nothing but the grandchildren he expects Valeria to provide: “Boys, all Boys, —and all Soldiers” (4.39). In his attempt to pry his daughter away from her science and force her into matrimony and motherhood, he becomes the dupe, having married his daughter to the [very] Ensign he had “so carefully avoided!” (5.51). This is not a play that praises the sort of traditional womanhood that men like Sir Richard would have expected; rather, through its playfulness and topical mockery, The Basset-Table celebrates female learning and women’s engagement with the New Science. That Centlivre celebrates female curiosity in The Basset-Table does not mean that she praises all those who engage in the New Science. Exploring Centlivre’s Whig politics, Douglas R. Butler notes that in A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) she lampoons “those who prize the f lotsam and jetsam of ages past,” where the corrupt Greek language Periwinkle uses “suggests the corrupt values of the world’s Periwinkles.”51 It is essential, however, to clarify here that while Centlivre engages in satire in A Bold Stroke, the ridicule is not directed at “scientists” in general, but rather at the absurd virtuoso. The “adulation of the exotic and the rare” characterized the virtuoso, while the practitioner of the New Science aspired to “a comprehensive collection of objects, ordinary as well as extraordinary.”52 A Bold Stroke for a Wife largely lacks subplots or additional threads. The argument of the play is confined to a deftly contrived main plot. Ann Lovely would like to marry; however, her recently deceased father had left her by his will in the guardianship of four men (a Quaker, a stock broker, an old “beau,” and a “silly virtuoso”), all adamantly opposed to each other’s philosophy. Mr. Lovely, her father, was “the most whimsical, out-of-the-way temper’d Man” who hated posterity (1.186), and so


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contrived in his will that in order to marry she must obtain the consent of all four guardians; should she not marry, the guardians would become the recipients of his fortune, thirty thousand pounds. During her stay with Sir Philip Modelove, her “beau” guardian, the soldier Colonel Fainwell falls in love with her, but she informs him that she is “condemned to the Caprice of four Persons, who never yet agreed in any one thing” (1.187). With the help of his friend Freeman, a merchant, and Sackbut, the tavernkeeper, Fainwell sets out to obtain the permission of these four disparate men. Fainwell obtains first the permission of Modelove, and with relative ease since, as the old bachelor observes, “I am for marrying her, for I hate the Trouble of a Guardian” (2.194). However, gaining the permission of the silly virtuoso is a different matter. Sir Philip points to the heart of the problem when he asks Periwinkle what he intends to do with Mrs. Lovely: “Must she be sent to the Indies for a Venture, —or live to be an old Maid, and then enter’d amongst your Curiosities, and shewn for a Monster, Mr. Periwinkle?” (2.198). Such a suggestion is not far perhaps from the truth, as Periwinkle’s interest is solely in traveling and obtaining the rarest of curiosities. When he learns that Fainwell’s travels are limited to those in books, he dismisses contemptuously the would-be lover (2.199). Centlivre’s satire of the virtuoso, then, begins in earnest when Fainwell develops a plot to deceive Periwinkle. Their discourse becomes virtually a “raree show” within the “show” of the play as the two men compete with each other over the extraordinariness of their collections. Attired in “Egyptian dress” and establishing himself as a traveller, who has “many valuable Curiosities” (3.202), Fainwell meets with Periwinkle in Sackbut’s tavern. Fainwell claims to be wearing the habit of “Claudius Ptolomeus,” while Periwinkle points to his own coat as having been worn by John Tradescant. Fainwell wins Periwinkle’s attention, however, when he claims that Tradescant was his uncle. A discussion of Fainwell’s curiosities follow: an ape he removed from the breast of a female mummy, two tusks of a hippopotamus, two pair of Chinese nutcrackers, a muff made of the feathers of the geese that “sav’d the Roman Capitol” (3.202), as well as an Indian leaf, which when opened will cover an acre, and a vial of water from the waves that bore Cleopatra’s vessel when she sailed to meet Mark Anthony. The prerequisite “truth” and “fact” established decades earlier by the Royal Society is noticeably absent here as the gullible virtuoso believes the qualities of each item Fainwell describes. In fact, the only demonstration of proof or truth that Periwinkle requires is for Fainwell’s magic girdle that makes the wearer invisible and allows him to travel instantly from place to place by the simple turn of a screw. Fainwell’s bid to have the virtuoso sign the document agreeing to the marriage with Ann Lovely is suddenly shattered, however, when the drawer enters


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and calls to Fainwell as “Colonel,” alerting Periwinkle to his true identity. Richard Steele drew on the implicit link between the stage and the scientific “show” when he rented premises in which to establish his “Censorium” where he hoped to promote “science as entertainment . . . . [by presenting] scientific lecturers interspersed with musical and dramatical entertainments.”53 This link is ostensibly what Centlivre draws on here in Fainwell’s interaction with Periwinkle in the tavern. Coffee houses, ale houses, and the public markets were but a few of the places where science met spectacle in assorted “raree shows,” such as “the display of the skeleton of a whale marooned near Greenwich in 1713 . . . the museum of monsters in Don Saltero’s Coffee House, or . . . demonstrations of astounding strength in the taverns or the public markets.”54 Centlivre offers Periwinkle as one of the amateur collectors “whose acquisitiveness is a feeble compensation for their sexual and social inadequacies.”55 To Fainwell’s disguise as a traveler, who has come to find a “Rarity in the Keeping of four Men . . . a Chaste, Beautiful, unaffected Woman,” Periwinkle responds: Pish! Women are no Rarities. —I never had any great Tast that Way. I married, indeed, to please a Father, and I got a Girl to please my Wife; but she and the Child (thank Heaven) died together—Women are the very Gewgaws of the Creation; Play-things for Boys, which, when they write Man, they ought to throw aside. (3.204) Periwinkle does eventually consign his ward to Fainwell. Dressed as the steward Pillage to Sir Toby Periwinkle, Fainwell informs the virtuoso that his uncle has died and Periwinkle is to inherit an estate of seven hundred pounds a year. Substituting the marriage contract for a lease, Fainwell obtains the necessary signature. Periwinkle is so pleased at his good fortune that he can only remark, “Seven Hundred a Year! I wish he had died seventeen Years ago; —What a valuable Collection of Rarities might I have had by this time?” (4.216). Periwinkle’s interest in collecting is neither to further knowledge nor for continued study, but rather to gather such a collection, “as will make my Name famous to Posterity; —I wou’d not die like other Mortals, forgotten in a Year or two, as my Uncle will be” (4.216). As David A. Alton has argued, to be called a virtuoso at the end of the seventeenth century was to be “associated with futile and indiscriminate study.”56 Periwinkle’s collection is futile in that it brings him no knowledge; his goal is simply to collect such rarities as to be remembered by posterity. Valeria in The Basset-Table is not an agent of pride; she does not represent the central vice of man’s fallen nature, nor does her curiosity attempt “to poach on the status of [her] social superior,”


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as Barbara Benedict observes, is the case in literary representation of female curiosity.57 In fact, when her father crushes the worm she has found, Valeria cries, “Oh my poor Worm! Now you have destroy’d a Thing, that, for ought I know, England cann’t [sic] produce again” (3.29). The loss is not hers alone, but that of all of England. When Valeria is criticized for having killed and dissected her dove, she asks whether it could have been put to a more noble use than to further knowledge (2.22). The same cannot be said for Periwinkle, however. The difference then between the humorous virtuosa or scientific lady in The Basset-Table and the ridiculous virtuoso in A Bold Stroke for a Wife is the requirement for a love of learning, which Periwinkle clearly lacks. The audience may have laughed at Valeria, the “little she-philosopher,” but they also recognized that she held fast the stage. They watched, wide-eyed perhaps, as she transgressed established social and gender paradigms, but they saw, even so, that order did not collapse. The stage/play world simply plodded forward. Against the loud guffaws, Centlivre offered no overt challenge, yet she nevertheless made her mark, for we are left to ponder how many silent-lipped virtuosas, who witnessed the play with guarded titillation, may have thought as Valeria did, “Dear, dear Philosophy, what immense pleasures dwell in thee!” (2.24). Notes 1. Susanna Centlivre, The Basset-Table (1705), ed. Jacqueline Pearson, Eighteenth- Century Women Playwrights, gen. ed. Derek Hughes, vol. 3 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), 1–52. This play has neither scene nor line numbers; therefore, all references are to act and page. 2. See, for example, D. N. Deluna, “Mary Astell: England’s First Feminist Literary Critic,” Women’s Studies 22 (1993): 233; Beth Kowalski Wallace, “A Modest Defense of Gaming Women,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 31 (2002): 21–41; Victoria Warren, “Gender and Genre in Susanna Centlivre’s The Gamester and The Basset-Table,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 43.3 (Summer 2003): 605–24; Annette Kreis-Schinck, Women, Writing, and the Theatre in the Early Modern Period: The Plays of Aphra Behn and Suzanne Centlivre (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001); and Misty Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 3. Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, ed. Jacqueline Pearson, Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights, gen. ed. Derek Hughes, vol. 3 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), 175–231. This play has neither scene nor line numbers; therefore, all references are to act and page. 4. Although in the “Introduction” to her edition of Centlivre’s Basset-Table, Jane Milling notes that gambling is the main focus of this play, she also acknowledges that the playwright’s depiction of Valeria is sympathetic. She concurs that given that Valeria is not required to surrender her interest in natural science in order to marry and that her interests in science is not presented as “a bar to domestic order,” Centlivre’s “parody” of the philosophic lady is not a negative one. See “Introduction,” in The Basset-Table, ed. Jane Milling (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2009), 22–30. Centlivre’s biographer F. P. Lock agrees that Centlivre presents in Lucy and


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5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

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Valeria women “whose native good sense has been improved” by education. See his Susanna Centlivre (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 53–4. The Female Tatler, ed. and intro. Fidelis Morgan (London: J. M. Dent, 1992), 200–203. The letter purportedly by Centlivre is in issue No. 111, dated March 29–31, 1710, and entitled “Lucinda’s Day.” Peter Harrison, “Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge, and the Reformation of Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England,” ISIS 92.2 ( June 2001): 265–71. See Francis Bacon, The New Organon, trans. Michael Silverthorne, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Book I, aphorism 129. “Just let man recover the right over nature which belongs to him by God’s gift, and give it scope; right reason and sound religion will govern its use.” Further references to this text will be by in-text citation by Book and aphorism number. As Benedict points out, although Bacon advocated an extensive and intensive program of gaining knowledge, he also acknowledged that this learning was done to honor God’s supremacy. See Barbara Benedict, Curiosity. A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 19. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2005). As qtd. in Harrison, “Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge,” 287. I am not claiming here that this shift in acceptance and theological views of the pursuit of natural philosophy was in any way as straightforward or as effortless as this, but rather I simply wish to point out here that a shift did indeed occur, on a number of levels, which allowed for the justification of the acquisition of knowledge. Harrison, “Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge,” 288. Ibid. Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity. English Women’s Writing 1649–1688 (London: Virago, 1988), 2. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 58. William Kenrick, The Whole Duty of a Woman by “A Lady” (1737) as qtd in Susan Scott Parrish, “Women’s Nature. Curiosity, Pastoral, and the New Science in British America,” Early American Literature 37.2 ( June 2002): 201. Benedict, Curiosity, 25. Parrish, “Women’s Nature,” 199. As qtd in Ruth Gilbert’s, “The Masculine Matrix: Male Births and the Scientific Imagination in Early-Modern England,” in The Arts of 17th-Century Science. Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture, ed. Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2002), 166–7. Abraham Cowley, “To the Royal Society,” in Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667), ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1958). See also Gilbert, “Masculine Matrix,” 166. Nathaniel Highmore, “Epistle Dedicatory,” in History of Generation (1651), as quoted in Parrish, “Women’s Nature,” 199–200. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), 8, as quoted in Parrish, “Women’s Nature,” 199. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: Or, Confidence in Opinion (London, 1661; Facs. rprt. in The Vanity of Dogmatizing: The Three Versions. Critical Introduction, Stephen Medcalf [Hove: Harvester, 1970]), 118. Lock, Susanna Centlivre, 17. Centlivre was certainly familiar with Behn. Jaqueline Pearson observes that early in her career, Centlivre even adopted Behn’s nom de plume, Astrea, “as a conscious act of homage to Aphra Behn.” See Pearson’s “Introduction,” to Susanna Centlivre, vol. 3, EighteenthCentury Women Playwrights, gen. ed. Derek Hughes (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), xiv. Aphra Behn, Sir Patient Fancy, in Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996) vol. 6, 1–81. See also my essay, “Of Privileges and Masculine Parts: The


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25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

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Learned Lady in Aphra Behn’s Sir Patient Fancy,” Papers in Language and Literature 42.3 (Summer 2006): 317–331. Thomas Wright, The Female Vertuoso’s (London: Printed by J. Wild for R. Vincent, 1693), 26. Wallace, “A Modest Defense of Gaming Women,” 26. Astell, A Serious Proposal, 67. Margaret Cavendish, “The Preface to the Reader,” in The Worlds Olio. Written By the Right Honorble, the Lady Margaret Newcastle (London: Printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), A4–A5v. Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen . . . this Way of Education (London: Printed by J.D., 1673), 22–3. Judith Drake, Essay in Defense of the Female Sex (1696), in Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 245–6. As qtd in Myra Renolds, The Learned Lady in England, 1650–1760 (1920; rprt. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 147. Deluna, “Mary Astell,” 233. Lock, Susanna Centlivre, 112. Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science. Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 107–08. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science, 118–19. For Coleridge’s comment, see Samuel Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, in The Collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 6. Rob Iliffe and Frances Willmoth, “Astronomy and the Domestic Sphere: Margaret Flamsteed and Caroline Herschel as Assistant Astronomers,” in Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700, ed Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 241. William Egerton, Faithful Memoirs of the Life, Amours and Performances of That justly Celebrated, and most Eminent Actress of her Time, Mrs. Anne Oldfield. Interspersed with several other Dramatical Memoirs (London: s.n.,] 1731). “Lumbricus latus, or a Discourse Read before the Royal Society of the Joynted Worm . . . against the Doctrine of Univocal Generation,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 13 (1683): 113–144; “Lumbricus teres, or Some Anatomical Observations on the Round Worm Bred in Human Bodies,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1683): 154–61. See F. J. Cole, A History of Comparative Anatomy. From Aristotle to the Eighteenth Century (MacMillan, 1949; rprt. New York: Dover 1975), 198–99. Samuel Garth, The Dispensary, A Poem (London: John Nutt, 1699; rprt. By Jacob Tonson as The Dispensary: A Poem. In Six Canto’s, 1714), 43–4. Benedict, Curiosity, 18, 25. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science, xxviii, xxxi. Ibid., 114. For information on early periodicals for women, see Bertha Monica Stearns, “Early English Periodicals for Ladies, 1700–1760,” PMLA 481 (March 1933): 38–60. Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 53. F., S. [Fyge, Sarah]. Poems on Several Occasions, Together with a Pastoral. By Mrs. S. F. London: J. Nutt, 1706. Aphra Behn, The Dutch Lover, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996), vol. 5, 157–238 Jackboots were men’s military boots worn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; they typically came up over the knee and added defensive protection for combat. A furbelow was a f lounce or pleated border of a petticoat or gown. Thus, Valeria suggests that a general acceptance that education is not gender specific would end the anomaly of the learned lady. Wright, The Female Vertuoso’s, 26. Iliffe and Willmoth, “Astronomy and the Domestic Sphere,” 239. Douglas R. Butler, “Plot and Politics in Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife,” in Curtain Calls. British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820, ed Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1991), 360.


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52. Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science. The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989), 150. 53. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science, 94. 54. Ibid., 118. 55. Benedict, Curiosity, 18. 56. David A. Alton, “Copernicus or Cheesecake? Faultlines and Unjust Des(s)erts: Noes toward the Cultural Significance of the Virtuosa,” Cuadernos de Filologia Ínglesa 9.2 (2001): 48. 57. Ibid.


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CH A P T E R

8

Du Châtelet and the Rhetoric of Science Judith P. Z in s se r

In an early draft of her translator’s preface for Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706–49) changed a passage that read “the unfairness of men excluding us from literature” to “excluding us from the sciences.”1 To her the choice seemed significant. Then and now, however, the differences are not so obvious. To reason, to narrate, and to persuade are skills shared by the practitioners of both disciplines, whether in the eighteenth or the twentyfirst century. Unlike many of the learned, privileged English women of this collection, Du Châtelet rarely acknowledged her female sex in her writings. On only two occasions did she complain of the disadvantages of her gendered circumstances. She was no advocate for all women and certainly not a feminist in our modern sense. Rather, she was angry that she, an “exceptional” woman, had been denied a man’s education and the many paths to “la gloire,” open to the men of her family, as diplomats, government ministers, and officers in the King’s army.2 As Voltaire, her lover and companion of fifteen years, often wrote, it was as if she were a man suffering the misfortune of having been born in a woman’s body. In fact, Du Châtelet very much enjoyed being a noblewoman and all the privileges this entailed: the clothes made of lush brocades from Tuscany; the entertainments of Paris, such as the Opéra; the late night supper parties, the cards, and gossip of Louis XV’s court; and the decorating of each new residence, such as her husband’s family chateau in Champagne and the hôtel she purchased in Argenteuil on the outskirts of the capital. In addition, she took her responsibilities for her family—her husband, Florent-Claude, marquis Du Châtelet-Lomont, their daughter, and son—as seriously as she did her unconventional studies of philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. The marquis rose to be one of eleven of the King’s Lieutenant-Generals, a rank similar to a four-star general in the U.S. Army. Her daughter married into the Neapolitan elite


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and became the principal lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Naples. Her son had a succession of careers, as a military officer like his father, as a diplomat, including serving as ambassador to Great Britain, and finally as an advisor to Louis XVI in the last years of the King’s reign. Voltaire also benefitted from her skills as a courtier, gaining royal favor, a position at court, and election to the Académie française despite his many provocative challenges to the government’s censors.3 Sometimes, the historian finds it difficult to understand how this remarkable woman could have accomplished so much in her short lifetime. At her death, just before her forty-third birthday, Du Châtelet had published three works of natural philosophy: her Dissertation on fire that is the subject of this essay; the Institutions de physique, her original synthesis of Cartesian and Leibnizian metaphysics with Newtonian mechanics; and her answer to Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan in a dispute about the correct formula for momentum. A fourth, her translation of and commentary on Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia, was sent to the printer in the last weeks of her life and published posthumously. Three other manuscripts, dealing with morality and philosophy more generally, circulated clandestinely: her free translation of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, her seven-hundredpage critique of the Old and New Testaments, and her Discours sur le bonheur with its rejection of repentance and obvious delight in passions of the mind and the senses. However, like many of the women in this collection, Du Châtelet read widely, availed herself of mentors, of whom Voltaire was only the most famous, and bravely pursued her unorthodox interests, creating her own reputation in fields traditionally reserved to male intellectuals. It is possible that Du Châtelet took lessons with her younger brother when she was just nine or ten, learning Latin and Euclidian geometry. Otherwise, as she herself explains in her translator’s preface to Mandeville’s Bees, she embraced the young noblewoman’s silly pursuits, les choses frivoles as she called them. She was only drawn back to an appreciation of her intellect, of the fact that she was a “thinking creature,” in her midtwenties, after her marriage and the birth of her children. A family friend encouraged her to read Pierre Coste’s translation of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) when she was awaiting the birth of her third child. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, a leading mathematician of the Académie royale des sciences, gave her lessons in analytical geometry. And Voltaire, France’s leading playwright and the rival to Racine and Corneille, fell in love with her and gave her the final encouragement she needed to leave Paris and join him at the Du Châtelet family chateau, a place both described as their “hermitage,” for the idyllic life of the philosophe. As she wrote to an Italian member of the Republic of Letters, “My kingdom of Cirey is not of this world.”4 She was correct, for in no other circumstances could she have f lourished as an intellectual and developed her excitement and skills as a writer and thinker.


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Initially, Du Châtelet saw herself as Voltaire’s willing assistant. Her translation of Mandeville probably began at his suggestion as part of a more general project in formulating their views on “la morale,” the rules governing human behavior. He adapted her research on the Aztec Empire for his tragedy Alzire, first performed at the Comédie française in January 1736. She collaborated with him in his foray into natural philosophy, the Eléments de la philosophie de Newton (1736), Voltaire’s popular exposition of Newton’s Opticks (1704) and the Englishman’s System of the World (1728). In the first edition, Voltaire humbly acknowledged her role in its composition (Fig. 8.1), for she had already demonstrated that she understood the mathematics of Descartes’ Dioptriques (1637) and of Newton’s writings much better than he.5 When in the summer of 1737 Voltaire decided that he wished to compose an entry for the 1738 Académie des sciences biennial prize competition, she once again became an active participant in reading, experimenting, and thinking. The Académie had announced the topic in the spring of 1736, and essays had to be submitted by September 1, 1737. Voltaire had become an enthusiastic proponent of experimentation while in exile in Leiden in the winter of 1736/37. There he met Petrus van Musschenbroek and attended the demonstration lectures by another Dutch Newtonian, Willem Jacob ‘sGravesande. On his return to Cirey, Voltaire created a gallery for the instruments he ordered from Paris, a cabinet de physique, as it was called in the eighteenth century. He had his man of business purchase the substances needed to replicate the experiments described by Europe’s leading chemists, such as Hermann Bøerhaave and Musschenbroek. With a pyrometer, used in the eighteenth century to measure the expansion of matter when heated, and their burning glass, Du Châtelet and Voltaire spent the spring and early summer setting different materials on fire in the forests of Cirey and heating and cooling others at a nearby forge. In the chateau, with their Réaumur and Fahrenheit thermometers, an air pump, bowls and beakers, and a burning lamp, they studied the changes in ethyl alcohol, ammonium chloride, sulfuric acid, mercury, and gold, to name only a few, in the air, in a void, separately, and when mixed with each other. In this way they worked to answer the two questions posed by the Académie: What is the nature of fire? How is it propagated? Voltaire, blindly loyal to Newton, hoped to replicate proofs that supported the Englishman’s view that fire was “matter,” having weight, and thus subject to the laws of gravity and attraction like other material substances. Though their experiments proved inconclusive, since some materials weighed more after heating and others less, Voltaire insisted that Newton’s hypothesis was correct, that fire added its weight to the substance burned. Du Châtelet could not agree to such an irrational leap of judgment, and, as a result, decided to write and submit her own dissertation.6 She told only her husband of her unorthodox decision. He probably took her essay to Paris for her, as she would have had no time to wait for the weekly mail service. Working through many nights, she completed


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Figure 8.1 Du Châtelet figured as Inspiration, from Voltaire’s Elémens de la Philosophie de Neuton (1738). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


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her entry sometime just before the September first deadline. It joined Voltaire’s as one of thirteen submissions, the first ever by a woman. Competitors submitted their essays anonymously; only an epigraph identified the author. As arguments could make enemies, anonymity was a common practice in much scientific and philosophical writing in these decades, and a philosophe might not want his work dismissed because of his association with a particular school or point of view, such as adherents of Descartes as opposed to those of Newton. So, if Du Châtelet could master the authorities on the subject, the methods of argumentation, and the rhetoric of eighteenth-century natural philosophy, nothing would reveal the fact of her sex. Most importantly, anonymity gave her the opportunity to have her ideas considered by France’s scientific elite without being ridiculed because they had been formulated by a female, whose mind and body by definition excluded her from such intellectual endeavors.7 Du Châtelet accomplished the first task easily. She demonstrated her knowledge of those who had written on fire and its observed properties of heat and light: Bøerhaave and Musschenbroek, Boyle, Homberg, Lémery, as well as Descartes and Newton.8 She referred to specific books and treatises and cited authors and page numbers. When the Académie decided to publish both her and Voltaire’s submissions even though the prize had been awarded to three other authors, its justification explained that their essays were “among the best” of those that took a view contrary to that of the judges, for they demonstrated “much reading and great knowledge of good works of physics,” and “they are filled with many very well explained facts of many points of view.”9 She showed no reluctance about questioning the value of these cited authorities’ experiments and disagreeing with their conclusions. However, although Du Châtelet might reject their conclusions, she presented these implicit and explicit questions and obvious disagreements in a manner and in language that mirrored that of the Académie.10 She readily copied the techniques of scientific argumentation set by the leading writers and identified herself as a master of the rhetoric of science, of “natural philosophy,” as it was called in her day. Our modern understanding of “science” is not that of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, not even of Newton. Their definition of their studies covered everything from the first causes of the universe to the behavior of its smallest particles. Du Châtelet, like Descartes and Newton, insisted that all must be considered and explained in order to have a coherent explanation for the workings of the cosmos. In addition, “science” still carried the Aristotelian meaning of “certain” knowledge. For Du Châtelet and her contemporaries in France and on the Continent, such certainty came only with mathematics. What she wrote about in her Dissertation was reasoned opinion and probable hypotheses derived from experiment and observation. Even Voltaire, who was less scrupulous about such distinctions in his thinking, began his entry for the competition by explaining how much was not known about fire and


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its behavior, in the sense of certain knowledge, scarcely more than the first men who discovered fire. Experiments offered some knowledge, but were crude in relation to knowledge of first causes. Voltaire concluded his introduction: “Let us see then, about the nature of fire and its propagation, the little that we know for certain without daring to give as truth that which is only doubtful, or at the very most, probable.”11 The burden of the definition of the nature of fire and of its behavior had to come then from observations and experiments and the products of inductive reason. To convince others of these “opinions” would call into play all the arts of persuasion—what Aristotle defined as rhetoric. Voltaire and others submitting dissertations and mémoires to the Académie had the benefit of a classical education, and thus were thoroughly schooled in its valued skills. In France, the Jesuit collège taught all the great authors, including Aristotle and his Art of Rhetoric. Even mathematics was studied in Latin and thus reinforced adherence to classical forms and models of exposition. Du Châtelet had no such tutelage. She must have acquired her understanding of persuasive argumentation from the authorities she studied and from her own sense of what constituted clear and effective prose. In fact, the few extant successive revisions of her writings indicate just that, her continuing efforts to find the simplest, clearest, and most logical expression of her ideas. For example, the 1742 edition of her Institutions de physique shows extensive stylistic changes. She cut digressions, clarified passages, and generally created a sparer, more exact narrative than the original published in 1740. Certainly, as she would have known from her reading of the Mémoires of members of the Académie, and of the Philosophical Transactions of London’s Royal Society, a general form had evolved for the presentation of an essay of natural philosophy. She read a number of these in her study of fire, including, for example, a 1723 treatise by René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur on the dail, a luminous shell fish, and the English chemist Robert Boyle’s accounts of his experiments with fire in the 1670s. She also had many models from the more extended texts that she consulted, whether in the original or in a French translation.12 She refers in her Dissertation to Bøerhaave’s Elementa chemiae (1733) and Musschenbroek’s Elementa physicae (1739), to Wilhelm Homberg’s Essais de chimie (1702–09) and Nicholas Lémery’s Cours de chimie (1730). She had mastered Descartes’ Dioptriques and had certainly read part, if not all, of his Principes de la philosophie (1644). Du Châtelet wrote to Maupertuis that she had read Newton’s Opticks so many times that she knew it virtually by heart.13 This familiarity, in conjunction with her agreement with Bøerhaave’s views on fire, suggests that these two authors gave her the models of persuasion upon which she most readily drew. The three books of the Opticks offer three different rhetorical approaches. Book I consists of statements defining the “properties of light,” each statement followed by descriptions of the experiments Newton conducted, which stand as proof of the particular property


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identified. Book II reverses the sequence, beginning with “observations” about the behavior of light followed by “remarks upon the foregoing observations,” which then become the definitive statements on light, its constituent colors and their behavior passing through different media. Book III, perhaps the most interesting in terms of argumentation, is a set of eleven “Observations,” followed by thirty-one “Queries.” Sometimes the question is merely rhetorical, suggesting that it is in fact a statement, as in Query 10 where Newton surmises that the f lame of a fire is a “vapour,” “red hot smoke.”14 In these queries, he uses analogy to support many of his hypotheses. For example, in Queries 17 and 19, the ripples from a stone thrown into the water offer the image of how light behaves on impact with a body (347–9). In Query 30, Newton offers his definition of this process, his “Method of Analysis,” which he identifies as “induction.” At his most persuasive, he likens this investigative method in natural philosophy to mathematics, thus claiming additional certainty for it. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction . . . . By this way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from Motions to the Forces producing them: and in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till [sic] the Argument end in them most general. (404–5) Although Du Châtelet never claimed to know Bøerhaave’s Elementa so well, her Dissertation indicates how carefully she must have studied it. Following Newton’s methods, Bøerhaave first described experiments illustrating fire’s behavior, moving from these observations to deduce a definition of its nature. In her Dissertation, Du Châtelet would agree with Bøerhaave’s conclusion that since fire causes all manner of materials to expand, one of its essential qualities, “the true, certain, individual, and proper mark of fire,” must be this ability: rarefaction. Similarly, she was persuaded by his experiments that fire is “in every part of the known world,” “equally distributed through every space,” and a source of motion.15 Like Newton, Bøerhaave endorsed the use of analogy: “These things then being premised, we may again venture from Experiments to account for a great many Phenomena that we observe . . . ” (122). His belief in the probability of his experiments and resulting observations and conclusions bordered on certainty. He assumed that they would be convincing to others should there be disagreements. Du Châtelet must have appreciated his confident phrasing as there would be echoes in her own writing: “And if a person carefully considers the things I have already offer’d . . . I can’t but believe, he will find they plainly confirm my opinion, and shew [sic] the fallacy of the other: For who does not see . . . And who will deny . . . who don’t easily perceive . . . . And who doubts” (138). The Académie in setting the questions for the competition made it difficult for contestants to follow the method of analysis set out by Newton


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and used by Bøerhaave in his study of fire. To ask consideration of the “nature of fire” before establishing its behavior or propagation forced Du Châtelet to use a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning. This is evident in Part I of her Dissertation, where she offers a phenomenon, such as heat or light, assumed to describe the “nature of fire,” and then indicates through the recounting of experiments whether or not this quality should be considered “essential” or merely “contingent,” a “mode” of fire, not one of its defining characteristics. For her, these initial statements on the nature of fire constitute “hypotheses” about particulars of the phenomenon to be proved or disproved before they are accepted as general, probable statements. As she explains: One must never conclude from the particular to the general, so though heat & light are often united, it does not follow that they always are. These are two effects of the being that we call Fire, but do these two properties, to light & heat, constitute its essence? Can they be removed from it? In other words, is fire always hot & luminous? (2–3) In this way, Du Châtelet is a model of Aristotelian rhetoric. She seeks to know what makes this thing what it is, and not like anything else. If it is part of a class of “beings,” then what differentiates it from the others in that class? To answer these and subsequent questions in the course of her Dissertation, and despite her lack of formal training, she uses the full range of classical rhetorical devices to prove her views.16 Du Châtelet relies primarily on experiments done by others, and those that she and Voltaire had replicated at Cirey to determine the nature of fire. However, she gives numerous caveats along the way. Though a follower of John Locke and a strong believer in the value of “experience,” of observations by the senses tempered by reasoned ref lection, she was also quick to point out that the senses can mislead and are an imperfect guide to discovery of “truth,” of what she considered certain knowledge. For example, she notes that marble seems colder than wool, though neither can generate heat. In the case of defining the nature of fire, she explains: “light & heat are the objects of our senses touch & sight . . . sensations . . . which seem to depend on our existence & the manner in which we exist; for a blind man will define Fire as that which heats, & a man deprived of universal touch, that which lights.” She continues, noting that “one deprived of these two senses, would not have any idea of [Fire]” (7). Given this potential uncertainty, Du Châtelet turned to rhetorical devices to persuade her readers. For example, she accepted Bøerhaave’s idea that rarefaction is an essential quality of fire, and she proves it by refuting all the objections made by other authorities, a standard part of a Classical disputation. When presented with what might be considered the unanswerable, that the moon’s rays do not seem to have this affect on the bodies they touch, she responds that the problem lies with our instruments,


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not with her hypothesis (13–14). With other premises, such as that motion produces fire, she reverses the logic, accepting the consequence but rejecting the cause. Fire is not the result of motion, she argues, for then “all violent motion would produce Fire, but very strong winds . . . far from producing inf lammation of the air, the atmosphere that they act on, produce on the contrary, a cold which all of Nature feels which is often fatal to animals & to the produce of the earth.” In a neat turn of phrase, she asserts the opposite, that fire is the cause of all motion, and eloquently makes rarefaction “one of the primary laws of Nature, one of the mainsprings of the Creator, & the end for which Fire was created . . . ; without this universal agent, without this breath of life which God has spread over his work, Nature would languish at rest, & the Universe could not subsist a moment as it is” (15, 14). Du Châtelet’s dispute with Voltaire hinged on whether fire could be considered “matter.” She begins by skillfully undermining any certain answer: “This is what the sagacity of Boyle, Musschenbroek, Bøerhaave, Homberg, Lémery, ‘sGravesande, etc. has not yet been able to determine.” She conjectures that perhaps it is “a truth” that “is not to be known to humanity.” The irony of her statement becomes obvious as she skillfully concedes that fire has some qualities of matter, but casts doubt on two others: impenetrability and weight (susceptibility to gravity). In considering the quality of impenetrability, she uses the strategy of presenting the arguments for and against. She also persuades by analogy, comparing fire to the human soul and to the behavior of a ray of sunlight hitting a body. On this question of weight, she shows new respect for experiment when it supports the view she favors: “It is again to experiment, this great master of Philosophy, to teach us if Fire has this property.” She explains that all gave different results, sometimes showing an increase of weight in the heated materials, sometimes a decrease. Given the contradictory experimental results, fire had not been proved to have weight. Further, she insists that, on ref lection, any objection to this conclusion “collapses,” even if made by a philosophe as renowned as Musschenbroek. She reasons that other properties may have been introduced, for example, from the iron rod used to stoke the fire. Similarly, a commonsense observation leads to a definitive analogy: a comparison of sunlight and fire. She hypothesizes that a ray of sunlight has weight and, using well-known calculations about the effects of the force of moving bodies, convincingly suggests that “a single instant of light would destroy all the Universe.” Her final sentence for this part of the Dissertation confidently silences all argument: “From all these experiments it must, then, be concluded that Fire has no weight, or that if it does, it is impossible for its weight ever to be perceptible to us” (13, 18–34). Du Châtelet adds a last section for this consideration of the Académie’s first question, in which she defines what she believes to be the essential properties of fire, other than rarefaction. Here, as Newton did in Part II of his Opticks, she presents generalizations without always giving descriptions


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of experiments, assuming, as Newton had, that in these instances the previous pages of description and analysis implied the necessary proofs. As a means of reinforcing her disagreement with Voltaire over the material nature of fire, she begins by stating: “. . . we cannot but acknowledge that far from tending towards the center of the earth, as other bodies do, rather [Fire] f lees from this center, & that its action naturally carries it upwards.” She continues a few pages later: “So, far from being subject to it, Fire is perpetually antagonistic to gravity, thus, all in Nature is in perpetual oscillations of dilation & contraction caused by the action of Fire on bodies & the reaction of bodies that oppose the action of fire by their weight & the cohesion of their particles” (35, 39). The purpose of Part II of Du Châtelet’s Dissertation, as dictated by the Académie, was to ascertain the laws followed by fire “when it acts on bodies, & when its effects are perceptible” (31). In considering this, the propagation of fire, she needed little persuasive subtlety. Following Bøerhaave, and relying in some instances on the descriptions of fire’s actions in Part I, Du Châtelet could make this section descriptive: how fire acts throughout nature, how it heats bodies, how it acts on solids and liquids and on plants and animals, its relation to friction, to the elasticity of bodies, to electricity, to the sun, and to the Earth’s core. If rhetorical strategies were required, she often turned to the familiar appeal to negative consequences: fire, rather than causing the elasticity of the air, destroys the elasticity of all bodies (87–9). The clearest use of this device appears in her discussion “Of the nature of the Sun,” in which she logically demonstrates that the “Sun cannot be a globe of Fire.” Here, Du Châtelet neatly turns Voltaire’s adherence to Newton into an argument against his favored position on the nature of fire, a rhetorical victory. She lays out her reasoning methodically. First, she lists the arguments in favor of conf lating the Sun and fire. She then proves that the Sun cannot be “a globe of Fire,” it must be some kind of solid matter. For, “either Fire [synonymous with sunlight] is heavy & tends towards a center, or it has no weight, & does not tend towards any point more than towards another.” In either case, there would be no light emanating from the Sun. Further, given the acknowledged scientific “truth” of the Sun’s central position, “the Sun must be a solid in M. Newton’s system,” an entity with the capacity to attract other bodies (124–9). Perhaps because the project had proved more taxing than she imagined or because it had ceased to challenge her, there are more occasions in Part II when Du Châtelet concedes the tenuousness of her statements. Sections have phrases such as: “it seems to me,” or that a particular conclusion is “probable.” She appeals to analogy, describing it as “this thread that we have been given to guide us in the labyrinth of Nature.” For example, in her discussion of electricity, she explains that “Fire seems to be the cause of electricity” because of the similarities between the circumstances causing electricity and those occasioning fire (89–92). This part, however, also includes her only foray into an original scientific supposition on a


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question not considered in any detail by the other authors whose submissions were published by the Académie: the absence of fire. In terms of establishing her authority as a natural philosopher, her decision to consider the cooling and freezing of bodies was a daring choice and a brilliant opportunity to demonstrate her rhetorical abilities. For all of her rhetorical leaps in the Dissertation, imagining other colors produced by other suns in other universes, for example, this section, “Of the causes of the Freezing of Water,” provides a remarkable insight into how she reasoned and how eighteenth-century natural philosophy became our modern science. Today her hypothesis, that nitrates and salts fall from the sky and mixing with water cause it to freeze, sounds incredible. How could she even begin to arrive at such a conclusion? Her reasoning presents a classic example of Aristotle’s enthymeme, the syllogism constituted of implied premises; the result, a tentative conclusion based on probable premises. As described in his Art of Rhetoric, a similarity is proposed that is then logically related to a general quality, which can then be used to apply to a different particular example.17 Du Châtelet uses this strategy so convincingly that it is hard to believe that she had no formal rhetorical training. She begins by defining “freezing,” as a type of “cold,” explaining that it cannot be caused solely by the absence of fire. To move to her hypothesis, she presumes the reader’s acceptance of an explanation only mentioned brief ly in an earlier section of her Dissertation, unspoken premises that come from her understanding of f lammability, a phenomenon that she believed was occasioned by particles present in all matter that carry that quality. This is premise number one. She assumes the analogy between f lammability and “refrigerating,” as she called it, but unlike the inherent particles that cause matter to burst into f lame, those that freeze must be added to the body in order to overcome those that heat and occasion fire. By a combination of well-posed rhetorical questions and answers, based on a variety of observations and experiments, she leads the reader away from “the absence of fire” and to her hypothesis about an essential “other cause” (108–23). Like Newton in his Opticks, she proposes to examine carefully “the accompanying circumstances” of freezing, which “afford the most help in discovering this cause.” Experiments demonstrate that something must have been added to water to cause it to freeze, which leads logically to the next question: “But what are these frigerating particles? This remains for us to examine.” She turns to her own experiences and observations. “Everyone knows that the water contained in a vase surrounded with salt & snow, will freeze” and that “if, in place of Salt, Anhydrous Nitric Acid is mixed with the Snow, the cold that is produced then makes the Thermometer lower to 72º below freezing” (115). To this she adds the authority of experiments by Fahrenheit, who made this remarkable discovery, and Bøerhaave, who noted in a passage that perhaps she remembered: “Now what person living could ever have had the least suspicion of


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such a Phenomenon as this?”18 By analogy, she continues, “It is very likely that natural freezing operates in the same manner as our artificial freezing.” This is premise number two. Without any suggestion of the tentative nature of this hypothesis, she continues: “& that particles of Salt & Nitrates that the Sun raises in the air, & which then fall back on the earth, insinuate themselves into the water, stop up its pores, & plug, like so many nails, its interstices, expel the particles of Fire, & finally make the water pass from the state of a f luid to that of a solid” (116). She then presents accounts of French travelers that she believes support her premise. It only remains for her to eliminate possible objections stemming from the fact that there are areas in which it “rarely freezes in summer.” She describes these as climates without “an abundance of these frigerating particles.” Thus, the Sun’s action on them keeps them “suspended in the atmosphere.” The few that fall to earth are not enough to freeze the water particles. In the end, it is her own conviction that is the most persuasive strategy. She has shown that there is no other possible explanation: I do not believe, after all these reasons, that one could refrain from acknowledging that these particles (of which all the Phenomena of Nature, & all of our operations on ice, demonstrate the existence) are absolutely necessary for the freezing of water & that without them no cause could be assigned for it. (123) Fanciful as this reasoning seems today, far from what “science” is presumed to promise us, it is only time that separates us, not Du Châtelet’s methods and manner of explanation. Like today’s scientists, she assumed that her “love for the truth” and her “sincere desire to contribute to its knowledge” had guided her and would gain the hearing of her peers (136–7). In the twenty-first century, hypotheses about the natural world, about the universe, remain true, false, or probable. We understand that it is only the new hypotheses, the probable, that require a persuasive narrative. Rhetorical strategies continue to be significant. As Geoffrey Cantor, the historian of science, explains, the report of a set of experiments from which, in theory, a new hypothesis has been derived is, in fact, a “highly artificial product,” not the “impersonal, passive reconstruction” that its author(s) purport to be offering to the scientific community. Instead, the report must, through its description of the procedures and results, lead all to the apparently necessary conclusion that follows.19 Even the apparatus of the experiments can carry the hypothesis and demonstrate what was already thought, rather than making possible different results. In this way, Du Châtelet’s vase filled with water and surrounded by snow, salt, and nitrates confirmed rather than tested her explanation for the phenomenon of freezing. We remain as susceptible and dependent as Du Châtelet and other eighteenth-century natural philosophers on the need “for rational belief in experimental results” and for strategies of persuasion.20


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Notes 1. Judith P. Zinsser, “Entrepreneur of the ‘Republic of Letters’: Emilie de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet, and Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees,” French Historical Studies 25.4 (2002): 622–3. 2. These passages appear in her translator’s preface to her free translation of Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, and in her Discours sur le bonheur. See for this analysis of her “feminism,” Zinsser, “Entrepreneur of the ‘Republic of Letters,’ ” 595–624; and Judith P. Zinsser, Emilie Du Châtelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (New York: Penguin, 2007), 152–3. 3. For more details on these and other aspects of Du Châtelet’s life and activities, see Zinsser, Emilie Du Châtelet. 4. Letter No. 66, Du Châtelet to Algarotti ( June 15, 1736), Lettres de la marquise Du Châtelet, ed. Theodore Besterman, 2 vols. (Geneva: Institut et musée de Voltaire, 1958), vol. 1, 117. 5. In his preface to the first edition of the Eléments, Voltaire described her as a coauthor rather than a simple collaborator. He compared himself to a minister of state formulating an idea but only as a result of the efforts of another. See Zinsser, Emilie Du Châtelet, 150. 6. Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu (Paris: Prault, Fils, 1744). 7. Du Châtelet was to have this experience in 1741, after her explicit attack on Dortous de Mairan in her Institutions de physique. His answering pamphlet ridiculed her efforts as those of a f lighty young noblewoman. By then, however, she was confident of her views and her abilities and answered him in turn with even more effective use of irony and ridicule. See Zinsser, Du Châtelet, 191–6. 8. It took particular courage to support Descartes’ view of fire as a substance somewhere between matter and spirit, her final conclusion on the nature of fire. Voltaire adamantly opposed the sixteenth-century natural philosopher, for example, in his Lettres philosophiques of 1734, a work that Du Châtelet knew well. There, in Letter 14, he described Descartes’ philosophy as “nothing more than an ingenious novel, at the best only plausible to ignoramuses.” In many instances, Descartes “was wrong,” including about “the laws of dynamics, the nature of light.” Voltaire grudgingly gave Descartes credit for his methodical and logical mind and that “he taught the men of his time to reason and to use his own weapons against himself.” Voltaire, Letters on England (New York: Penguin, 1980), 71–2. 9. The Académie published their essays twice: in 1739 and then with the collected papers for the year 1738 in 1752. Du Châtelet published a revised edition in 1744. The justification appeared as a separate page, a preface to the essays, which remained without the authors’ names. 10. As historians of science have come to abandon the old teleological view of science, for example, of physics as a neat progression from Galileo to Einstein, they have begun to consider questions of epistemology and rhetoric. On the historiography of science, see for example: Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy,” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of EighteenthCentury Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter Dear, “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: Toward a Heuristic Narrative for the Scientific Revolution,” Configurations 6.2 (1998): 173–93; Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity that Illusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003). On epistemology and language, see for example: Mary Hesse, “The Explanatory Function of Metaphor,” Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800, ed. Andrew Benjamin, Geoffrey Canto, and John Christie (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989); Allan Franklin, “The Epistemology of Experiment”; and Geoffrey Cantor, “The Rhetoric of Experiment,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and the now classic Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 11. Voltaire, Essai sur la nature du feu et sur sa propagation, in Les Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire (Oxford, UK: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991), vol. 17, 31. Even Du Châtelet’s first mathematics tutor,


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12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Judith P. Zinsser

Maupertuis, in his inf luential popular tract on the Cartesian and Newtonian explanations for the movement of the planets, Discours sur les differentes figures des astres (1732), though he made it obvious which system he believed best fit observed phenomena, explained that “It is not for me to pass judgment on a question which divides the greatest Philosophers.” He left it to his readers to examine the facts as he had presented them. Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Discours sur les differentes figures des astres (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1732), 10, 45. Du Châtelet rarely indicates the edition of the text. Historians can only surmise the exact source from the books in Voltaire’s library purchased by Catherine the Great after his death and housed at the St. Petersburg National Library of Russia. A number have her pencil comments in the margins or on bits of paper set to mark a page. For a list of the collection, see Bibliothèque de Voltaire: Catalogue des Livres (Leningrad: Editions de l’Académie des Sciences l’URSS, 1961). Letter No. 152, Du Châtelet to Maupertuis (December 1, 1738), Lettres, vol.1, 273. Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York: Dover Publications, 1979 [1730 ed.]), 41–42. Herman Bøerhaave, Elements of Chemistry, trans. Timothy Dallowe, 2 vols. (London: J & J. Pemberton; J. Clarke, A. Millar, J. Gray, 1735), vol. 1, 85, 112–14, 122. The most pertinent section of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric is Part III, section 8, entitled “Common Topics.” See Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. H. C. Lawson-Tancred (New York: Penguin, 1991). There are studies of the use of classical rhetoric; see for example, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2001); and Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For this essay, I have used the categorization in Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 212; Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 60–1. Bøerhaave, Elements, vol. I, 100. Note that there is no obvious explanation today for the thermometer reading given here. Cantor calls this the “rhetoric of experiment,” 160–1. See Franklin, “The Epistemology of Experiment,” 438–41, 458.


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CH A P T E R

9

The Life of Burney’s Clockwork Characters Jul ie Par k

“The spirit killeth, the letter giveth life.” —T. S. Eliot Here is Fanny Burney quite in the contrary Extream: Her new Novel called Cecilia is the Picture of Life such as the Author sees it: while therefore this Mode of Life lasts, her Book will be of value, as the Representation is astonishingly perfect: but as nothing in the Book is derived from Study, so it can have no Principle of duration—Burney’s Cecilia is to Richardson’s Clarissa what a Camera Obscura in the Window of a London parlour, —is to a view of Venice by the clear Pencil of Canaletti. —Hester Thrale, Thraliana May 19, 1782 When Hester Thrale compares Burney’s heroine to a homely camera obscura in the above quotation, while comparing Richardson’s to the rendering of a landscape painter’s hand, one might assume she is belittling the female novelist’s abilities.1 Thrale, after all, amply demonstrates throughout her letters the intensely ambivalent quality of her feelings toward her close friend. However, the context in which the passage appears suggests a more complex estimation of Burney’s writing. Preceded by a remark on the Duchess of Devonshire’s recent translations of Horace, Thrale’s assessment of Burney may have less to do with denigrating her imaginative capacities than with describing mimetic standards of her day. Whereas the Duchess, in the act of translating, makes “no reference to life,” and displays no “[n]otion of writing from her own sensations,” Burney represents the “contrary Extream” in her very effort to reconstruct “Life” itself. Although admittedly prosaic in contrast with the Canaletti pencil ascribed to Richardson, the camera obscura in Thrale’s description of Burney’s writing reveals the eighteenth-century valuation of (visual) technology as an experimental—and creative—form of subjective mediation. On a basic level, what the camera obscura metaphor does is show


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that if the imagination of a novelist was being compared with a machine then it could hardly be surprising if the products of that imagination— her characters—would resemble machines as well. Such a view toward technology also concurs with the qualities of “invention” and “ingenuity” that reviewers and readers throughout Burney’s career consistently attributed to her work, especially in what The Monthly Review called her “command of the language of character.”2 For example, after assessing the characters populating her third novel Camilla, the same review concludes, “it may be difficult to find any novels, except those of Fielding, in which characters are more accurately drawn than in those of this very ingenious lady.”3 Even earlier, The English Review, when praising the characters of Burney’s second novel Cecilia as being “purchased at the great work-shop of life” and “solely indebted” to “her own observation,” recurs to the language of mechanistic creativity that marks Thrale’s later remarks.4 Burney herself contributes to the perception that the novelist’s task of producing characters coincides with that of an engineer, literally, a “contriver or maker of ‘engines,’ ” when describing in a letter to her father the plans for Camilla to be “sketches of Characters & morals, put in action, not a Romance.”5 These sketches “in action” comprise the main difference between the emerging novel of realism and what in her terms was the “novel,” the “mere love story” that constituted the “romance.” This is clear when she writes in the same letter about her work in progress, “I own I do not like calling it a Novel: it gives so simply the notion of a mere love story, that I recoil a little from it” (117). In short, the development of characters, marked by their intricacies of “action” as well as “morals,” supply the features for the modern novel we know today; at the same time they challenged the standards of what was known as the novel in Burney’s time, a still disreputable species.6 In addition to the camera obscura, commentators on her novels, including Burney herself, have placed them in conversation with the watch, the microscope, and ultimately the automaton. As this essay will explore, the qualities of movement, external detail and interior transparency that enable characters in novels to more closely resemble “real” people, engendered a new standard of lifelikeness that also motivated the making of such machines as the celebrated automata of Jacques Vaucanson.7 Much as Burney’s novels produced replications of persons that delighted readers with their uncanny faithfulness to putatively real-life persons, Vaucanson’s mechanical creations thrilled pleasure seekers with a level of verisimilitude that enabled manufactured beings to simulate or “counterfeit,” as Hugh Kenner puts it, and at times rival their living models.8 The automaton maker’s attempt to recreate a living entity’s faculties brings Burney’s innovative work into relief as a novelist who broke new ground in developing lifelike imitations of humans (“characters”). It also allows us to apprehend the history of the novel as a medium for rendering artificial life. Whereas a “mechanician” (the Victorian term for Vaucanson,


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Wolfgang von Kempelen, and members of the family Le Droz) might work to replicate the features and faculties of a generic being, such as a musician, an animal, or chess player, a novelist works to replicate the features and faculties of a distinct persona with individual traits and qualities, as well as a name.9 In Burney’s novels, and in her process of writing those novels, characters occupy a point where the mimetic energies of aesthetic, moral, and scientific projects of the period intersect: the common aim of replicating “life” in order to understand and enjoy it. In Burney’s letters we see that characters are not merely aesthetically mediated imitations of life, but are also a way of life. Recognizing this continuity between characters emerging in novels and characters emerging in real life, she writes in one of her letters to her mentor Samuel Crisp, “I have other purposes for Imaginary Characters than filling Letters with them.”10 This essay, evaluating mechanical inf luences in Burney’s fiction, emphasizes their significance in the new technology of lifelikeness her novel-writing practice presents through the widely-praised collection of characters she invents with each of her novels. In this way, Burney anticipates the work of Mary Shelley, whose most celebrated fictional product concerns literally the experiment—and the consequences—of replicating human life through inhuman means. In Burney’s case, her evolving techniques for lifelike narration, such as free indirect discourse and third-person narration, especially, are rarely inextricable from her persistent attempts to handle both the pressures of female authorship and the indignity of the novel genre. Analogies between Burney’s work as a novelist and Vaucanson’s as an inventor, and likewise between their respective products, like mechanical figures, on one hand, and fictional characters, on the other, allow us to apprehend how narrative in the eighteenth century participated in a far-reaching cultural turn toward constructing the self as an object of imitation, even its invisible regions such as the mind. The basic assumption binding the eighteenth-century automaton maker and the novelist included the notion that subjects in the natural world can be reproduced and “authored” through media different from their original sources.11 Once created and “wound,” these manufactured subjects can be made to run on their own, performing “all its different operations without being touched any more.”12 By considering the pervasiveness of analogies between author, characters, and machines in Burney’s fiction, and the coextensiveness of characters in life and fiction, I will bring into focus how science and fiction alike approached “life” as a state of being that could be manufactured through inventive means. Eighteenth-century automata considered alongside eighteenth-century novels, in other words, demonstrate to us that eighteenth-century mimetic practices, whether through narrative or mechanical technique, were more a contrivance of life than an “imitation of life.” Though others have probed the interrelationships between science’s and literature’s emerging programs of “truth,” fact, and realism in the eighteenth


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century, attention has yet to be paid to the prevailing ideas about life, in particular the idea that its “internal” processes can be laid as bare as its external motions.13 Clockwork Characters and Narrative Lifelikeness Mechanical figures describe the work of other eighteenth-century novelists, not just Burney. Indeed, recognizing the main distinctions between the characters of Richardson and Fielding through the model of a clock has long been a procedure for telling the history of the eighteenth-century novel. Samuel Johnson laid the foundation by making a comparison based, no less, on a mechanical simile: “there was as great a difference between them [Richardson and Fielding] as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate.”14 Johnson also sets forth the terms by which literary characters are assessed: “Characters of manners are very entertaining; but they are to be understood by a more superficial observer than characters of nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart” (389). In using a pocket-sized clockwork machine to illustrate the difference between Richardson’s and Fielding’s styles, he indirectly communicates the kinship between human subjects, machines, and the textual creations that mediate that relationship. To understand how each author conceives the state of being human, consider a watch or the human heart, he says, and the level of intimacy with which each can be known and with which each can know the other. Johnson’s analysis of the operative distinctions between Fielding and Richardson, for Ian Watt, “raised fundamental issues so forcibly that later criticism cannot but use his formulations as points of departure.” Moreover, “any comparison between the two first masters of the novel certainly must begin from the basis which he provided.”15 For J. Paul Hunter, the comparison is not only essential for critiquing the two “masters” themselves but also for revealing “the extremes of possibility in the novel’s accommodation of experience, perspective, and examination” and the “basic different directions the novel has taken through history.”16 The directions a novel can take, according to Robert Alter, have at their starting point the formation of character or a plausible representation of a human being. Whereas Richardson causes such “close identification with characters” that “all ethical reference” becomes lost, Fielding “uses the amplitude of the novel form . . . to step back from [characters] and set them firmly in an embracing system of moral possibilities.”17 Indeed, he “takes a consistently external view of his characters” and rejects the novelist’s ability to “reconstruct inner states minutely with words.”18 Stated in these terms, the distinction between Richardson and Fielding is mainly one of spatial orientation; whereas one situates the novel’s perspective inside the self, the other places it outside. But what of a narrative approach that


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allows the novel to occupy both vantage points, of “giving both inner life and objective vision?”19 And what of a novel that can both outwardly tell the time and reveal its own interior workings in the telling? David Masson’s history of the novel from 1859 adapts Johnson’s original formulation to articulate this very possibility of such a transparent machine: It is when a writer fastens his situation on the central mechanism of human nature, selects the primary springs and forces of action, and works outwards to the medley of external effects through the imagined operation of these springs and forces in certain collocations, contrasts, and oppositions . . . precisely as, by a real mechanician, the motions on the dial-plate of a watch are seen as the working of the complex interior.20 It was Burney who may well have been the first to develop this narrative technology of making the workings of the “complex interior” that Masson observes as being as plain to see as “the motions on the dial-plate.” Samuel Johnson himself anticipated Burney’s feat of reconciling the two opposing models of writing represented by Johnson and Fielding, by not only declaring that Richardson and Fielding would have both been “afraid of her” but also stating that Evelina contained “things and Characters in it more than worthy of Fielding” for “Harry Fielding . . . knew nothing but the shell of Life.”21 Most likely playing on Johnson’s alleged statement that “Richardson had picked the kernel of life, while Fielding was contented with the husk,” Mrs. Thrale added to the moment of “puffery” by saying to Burney, “So You, Ma’am . . . have found the kernel.”22 Decades before the publication of Evelina (1778), Clarissa (1747–48), and Tom Jones (1749), another model for such a machine had already surfaced in Paris in 1738 in Vaucanson’s mechanical duck. By showing both the outward semblance of a duck and its interior functions, Vaucanson arrived sooner than the English novelists did at realizing this fuller-bodied vision for imitating life forms. What the English novel would be able to accomplish later with the innovation of third-person voice and free indirect discourse, the French automaton-maker achieved slightly earlier with his innovation of physical transparency. When Vaucanson chose to make the view of the duck’s innards “transparent” and “complete,” he not only created a novel effect but also a paradoxical impression of objective intimacy that would become a mimetic standard for English novelists as well. Some Versions of Realism: Vaucanson’s Defecating Duck and Mechanical Lifelikeness Vaucanson’s career as a creator of automata began, according to his Victorian admirers, with an early fascination with clockwork. Several of


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these nineteenth-century accounts regard Vaucanson as a hero of mechanical contrivances and narrate the pivotal event when, as a boy, “little Jack was left to his own resources for amusement” while accompanying his mother during a social visit.23 Much like Nathaniel in Hoffmann’s The Sandman, who first learns about his clockwork object of desire upon spying it through the window of a neighboring home, young Vaucanson, sitting and waiting for his mother, “watched through the chink of a door the movement of a clock—watched and pondered, until suddenly one day in school he seized the secret of the mechanism.” Soon “he contrived, with some pieces of wood and some rough tools, to make a clock, which kept time pretty correctly.”24 As Jessica Riskin has recently demonstrated, it was the very nature of automata from the second half of the eighteenth century, in contrast with their industrial age successors and seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury predecessors, to convey as well as test the arresting effects of imitation, also known as “mimesis.”25 Underscoring aesthetic experience and internal imitation rather than function or external imitation alone, eighteenth-century approaches to mechanical creations, invariably of animals and people, comprised a “particular style” of building machines. As such, they served as “philosophical experiments” for understanding “which aspects of living creatures could be reproduced in machinery,” as well as “what such reproductions might reveal about their natural subjects.”26 Eighteenth-century automata, above all, allowed their makers to understand the relationship between “the outward appearance and inner function” of the living creatures they were made to replicate.27 Rather than aiming for mere resemblance, Riskin explains, eighteenthcentury makers of machines strove to “simulate” both the lifelike textures and internal processes of natural models.28 Of these machines aspiring toward a “deeper” mimesis, the mechanical creations of Vaucanson were the most exemplary and inf luential. Vaucanson’s radically comprehensive effort to reproduce life and its processes first manifested itself in the mechanical f lautist. In addition to little pulleys, bellows, strings, screws, levers, weights, and wires of chain and steel, Vaucanson’s six and a half foot tall automaton possessed more “organic” parts, such as a tongue, lips, and fingers tipped with “skin” or leather to “imitate the softness of the natural Finger.”29 Joints connected with tendons were in turn attached to chains and levers to form moveable arms and fingers, replete with a part “imitating the Bone which the Anatomists call Metacarpos” (13). Other levers moved the tongue and the lips as they stopped and unstopped the hole of the f lute, creating different passages of wind and thus the articulation of different notes that a “true Player on the f lute” would make if he were “to perform in such a Case” (21). Throughout his account of creating the mechanical f lute player, Vaucanson voices not only the desire to “imitate the Action of a living Man” but also to “compare” the “different Motion” of the automaton with “those of a living Person,” and “imitating by Art all that is necessary for a Man to perform in such a Case”


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(18, 16, and 21). In viewing his creation as the product of what might happen if a man were to play a f lute, and not just viewing the creation as an automaton that resembles a man, the inventor appeared to find within the artful assembly of originally-inert objects a possible model for life itself. Indeed, the success of his invention rested on the extent to which he could make claims of reversing the conventional order of mimesis, whereby the human could be described as performing the same actions as the automaton “in such a case.” More sensational, though less technically accomplished, was Vaucanson’s mechanical duck, which was put on display in London in 1742 in the Haymarket Opera House’s Long Room, alongside the f lute player and the tambour and pipe player (Fig 9.1). So deeply imitative was the duck of life that in addition to drinking, playing “in the Water with his Bill,” and making “a gurgling Noise like a real living Duck,” it showed “the Mechanism of the Intestines which are employed in the Operations of Eating, Drinking, and Digestion” (23). The duck, wrote Vaucanson to the Abbé de Fontaine, “stretches out its Neck to take Corn out of your Hand; it swallows it, digests it, and discharges it digested by the usual Passage” (21). Vaucanson acknowledged an intrinsic limitation in the ability to execute “a perfect Digestion, capable of producing Blood and nutritive Particles for the Support of the Animal.” Unlike the f lute player automaton, which proved so thorough and nimble a “simulation” that it practically made unnecessary a “living Man” to play the same instrument and produce similar effects, the duck behaved closer to an artifact of realism than a replacement for a living duck. More a simulacrum than a simulation, the duck was unable truly to digest the corn and “make it come out sensibly changed from what it was” (22). Despite this discrepancy in his creation’s mechanism, Vaucanson did not shy from transparency in constructing the duck’s body. In another move that self-consciously distanced his automaton from earlier ones, Vaucanson exposed the duck’s interior, as he discloses below: To shew that the Contrivances for moving these Wings are nothing like what is made use of in those wonderful Pieces of art of the Cock mov’d by the Clock at Lyons, and that at Strasburgh, the whole Mechanism of our artificial Duck is exposed to View; my Design being rather to demonstrate the Manner of the Actions, than to shew a Machine. Perhaps some Ladies, or some People, who only like the Outside of Animals, had rather have seen the whole cover’d; that is, the Duck with Feathers. But besides, that I have been desir’d to make every Thing visible; I wou’d not be thought to impose upon the Spectators by any conceal’d or juggling Contrivance. (23) Through “exposing” and “making visible” the duck’s “mechanism,” Vaucanson was able to show that the wings of his bird copied precisely the anatomy of a real bird, thus testifying to an internal and more “authentic”


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Figure 9.1 Vaucanson’s Tabor-player, Duck and Flute-player, from An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton (1742). Reproduced by permission of the History & Special Collections for the Sciences, Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, UCLA.


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verisimilitude. Every conceivable moving function belonging to a bird was imitated and brought into motion in “this small Automaton,” including its ability to “rise upon its Legs, and throw its Neck to the Right and Left” (23). The most thrilling aspect of the duck’s claim to simulation was the site of its failure—the feces that emerged originally from an external source. While it confirmed the machine’s inability to do everything a real duck can, such as complete the full course of the digestion process, it also operated as a powerful signifier of the mechanical duck’s attempt to be real, or, in other words, its qualities of realism.30 The excretion of similar “lifelike materials” in the functioning of other machines defined this era in technology from others before and directly after it.31 At the same time that wax represented the height of realistic ambitions in dollmakers of the period, the use of leather measured the extent to which makers of automata and prostheses sought a new level of lifelikeness in their creations. In addition to the leather used for the tips of Vaucanson’s f lute player’s fingers, elastic gum or “caoutchouc” from Guiana was to be used for the creation of blood vessels in an automaton, commissioned by Louis XVI but never made, whose internal mechanism imitated the circulation of blood.32 Leather and other organic substances also appeared in the family Droz’s leather prosthetic “hands,” Madame du Coudray’s f lesh-colored and sponge-filled “birthing machine,” and even its cruder English sister by William Smellie, with its leather pouch “organs” and “babies.”33 Successful imitations of life, in other words, not only had to look like life, they had to feel, move, and even smell like it too, thus exceeding the limits of what was considered mechanical and, by extension, what was organic. For this reason, no doubt, Vaucanson’s automatons and those of other creators captured the attention of Enlightenment philosophers and the same public that enjoyed the sensational excesses of Italian opera, masquerade balls, and, of course, novels, where similar mixings of the natural and artificial took place. Surpassing leather in its tactile, visual, and olfactory qualities, then, were the duck’s turds, which in their qualities of filth elicited feelings not simply of disgust but of pleasure over the recognition of their organic realism. With this came the realization that mechanical objects too, like their organic counterparts, underwent internal processes that were eminently productive of signs of life, not least of all through the purported exposure of those processes to their viewers. As Vaucanson’s mechanical creations and other eighteenth-century machines and prostheses purchased their qualities of realism and induced the pleasure of novelty through ejaculating or bleeding, they redefined the boundaries of existence whereby the inner and private become externalized. Moreover, in attempting to “test” the “limits of resemblance between synthetic and natural life,” and at times confusing them in doing so, automaton makers such as Vaucanson provide material corollaries for the


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perverse commingling of the mechanical and organic that Burney depicts as integral qualities of female abjection in the eighteenth century.34 Such attempts convey the extent to which eighteenth-century “contrivers” regarded life as an entity to reproduce through mechanical means, with its internal features most often rendered as organic matter that found its substitution in other matter. This view, that all internal processes irreducibly carry material weight and visibility, created moments of invention not only in science but also in literature, where a “new” genre of literature, the novel of realism, was also seeking to reproduce the interior as well as exterior features of human life. Sharing a vocabulary of experiment and invention (“this kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language,” writes Fielding in his preface to Joseph Andrews) balanced against standards of mimesis that required both mobility and depth; the novelist and the mechanical contriver collaborated in a project of reproducing life itself.35 It is, above all, the artificial and yet unusually lifelike quality of interior transparency that brings the defecating duck in close relationship with new procedures of the novel, which writers such as Burney instituted. Ugly Girls and Ideas in Motion: Burney’s Word Beings When Burney’s doting mentor, Samuel Crisp, a playwright himself, counsels her against writing drama [“Comedy”] because it would damage her respectability as a woman,” he gives a description of prose fiction [“Histories”] that underscores its main distinctions from playwriting.36 Minuteness of observation and construction, the exposure of what was previously invisible, and acquisition of knowledge prevail as much in Crisp’s description of novelistic mechanisms as in Vaucanson’s account of mechanisms themselves. Revealingly, in his letter, he draws on the nascent life sciences, highlighting the display of a physiological process— blood circulation: In these little entertaining, elegant Histories, the writer has his full scope . . . He may be as minute as he pleases, and the more minute the better; provided that Taste, a deep and penetrating knowledge of human Nature, and the World, accompany that minuteness. When this is the Case, the very Soul, and all it’s [sic] most secret recesses and workings, are develop’d, & laid as open to View, as the blood Globules circulating in a frog’s foot, when seen thro’ a Microscope. The exquisite touches such a Work is capable of (of which, Evelina is, without f lattery, a glaring instance) are truly charming. (189) Fusing the workings of the soul with blood circulation, Crisp champions fiction as a superior device for accessing the secret and the minute.


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In drama, Crisp continues, narration and description are drastically reduced to accommodate dialogue and momentum so that “all must be compress’d into Quintessence.” Most debilitating to drama is “the detail, which, in Fielding, Marivaux, Crebillon, is so delightful,” but “on the Stage would bear down all patience” (190). Crisp’s comparison between novels and plays shows that they favor different qualities of experience: rather than the novel’s depth, penetration, and comprehensive scope, successful drama privileges plot. Playfully replicating what he espouses, Crisp explains if “the Story” of comedy “does not open and unfold itself in the easy, natural unconstrain’d f low of the Dialogue; if that Dialogue does not go on with Spirit, Wit, Variety, Fun, Humour, repartee &—& all in short into the Bargain—Serviteur!—Good bye—t’ye!—” (190). Crisp ascribes to Evelina the ability to render inner experience transparent. For him the idea of the human as a machine was not so unimaginable; he describes “the soul” as a concrete and material body, ready for visual and tactile examination, much as La Mettrie deemed “the soul is a principle of motion or a tangible material part of the brain” (189). Crisp’s choice of scientific object, the microscope, much like his narrative object, Burney’s epistolary Evelina, ref lects an earlier stage of development in technologies of knowledge and self hood. In the same way that the microscope’s view remains circumscribed by the viewer’s vision, the epistolary novel yields only the given letter writer’s point of view. While creating an unusually plausible account of subjective reality through capturing the mental and emotional qualities of experience from a first-person and present-tense perspective, epistolary narrative remains limited in its ability to control plot on a larger scale, as well as create an image of its central characters that unifies their internal lives with their external circumstances. Both epistolary plot and character proceed, by necessity, in fragments. Events, actions, and their consequences can only unfold to the reader when the letter writer chooses to communicate them in the discrete unit of a letter to an invisible recipient. Moreover, language in epistolary narrative adapts a “communicative” function whereby a designated “I,” with distinct qualities and character traits, speaks directly to an absent and silent “you.” Within this tightly circumscribed relationship between letter writer and reader, epistolary narrative embodies personhood grammatically as an “I,” who in turn supplements its self piecemeal through the material artifact of the letters that comprise and advance the narrative. That Evelina begins not with the heroine’s own voice but an epistolary exchange between family friend Lady Howard and guardian Mr. Villars, in order to set up the conditions of her background, demonstrates the limitations of epistolary narrative. In the absence of a narrator, the third-person and objective view of the heroine, in other words, can only take place through other characters, who must present themselves and their perceptions in the same medium as hers—the epistle. Though her friends had already been recognizing her ability to balance the semblance of both objectivity and subjectivity—the husk and


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the kernel, the dial plate and the interior mechanism—on the written page in her epistolary first novel, the novels written after Evelina (1778), such as Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796), and The Wanderer (1814), progressed the technique much further. Turning to the third-person narrative voice, which worked effectively to intercept and translate the thoughts of characters at the same time it detailed their external surroundings, Burney cultivated and exploited what has come to be known as free indirect discourse, a trademark technique of the modern novel. Though it has been more commonly attributed to Jane Austen as its originator, it was in use before the publication of her works, not only in Burney’s novels but also in Ann Radcliffe’s and Charlotte Lennox’s—and even as early as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Not enough, if anything at all, has been said about the first paragraph of Burney’s second novel, Cecilia, which is remarkable for instantiating one of the tenets of free indirect discourse—representing thought as utterance. The very first paragraph of the novel, taking place in the moment the heroine leaves her childhood home, reconstitutes her “secret prayer” as a spoken statement, not yet “indirect” discourse insofar as it is set off in quotation marks: “Peace to the spirits of my honoured parents, respected be their remains, and immortalized their virtues! may time, while it moulders their frail relicks to dust, commit to tradition the record of their goodness; and Oh may their orphan-descendant be inf luenced through life by the remembrance of their purity, and be solaced in death, that by her it was unsullied!” Such was the secret prayer with which the only survivor of the Beverley family quitted the abode of her youth and residence of her forefathers; while tears of recollecting sorrow filled her eyes and obstructed the last view of her native town which had excited them. Cecilia, this fair traveler, had lately entered into the one-andtwentieth year of her age . . . .37 Introducing the narrative and the heroine at the same time, moving from internal monologue to exterior context and the combination of the two, and then explicit narration, as opposed to dispersing information in a series of letters between different characters, this set of passages provides an initial view to the perpetually oscillating registers in point of view that free indirect discourse enables.38 The registers include the voice and perspective of the character, and the voice and perspective of the narrator, shown to be vastly different in tone and scope—intimate and narrow versus distant and broad. In doing so, it produces an almost imperceptibly unifying dynamic that makes self as subject and self as object one and the same. This dynamic, in creating a fuller impression of the main character as both a psychologically realized and physically situated entity,


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provides the animating mechanism for making characters appear to move and breath. The f luctuations between each register are where the imagined being and the reader’s relationship with that being can come to life in an altogether more nuanced and supple manner than before. Whereas epistolary narrative might have effectively transmitted the f luctuations of a character’s thought and feeling in response to an event after it has taken place, third-person narrative transmits them in the context of the event itself. Such simultaneity of time and space produces an even more immediate sense of realism, as if the reader were experiencing the constructed reality at the same time as the character. A writer in the English Review certainly registers this effect of well-crafted verisimilitude when assessing Cecilia: By telling a plain and simple story . . . she has contrived to interest the Reader through five volumes. No event takes place but what might have happened to any one; no character appears . . . that every day’s experience does not discover a similar. And yet, with so much skill are these common materials compounded, that . . . . [t]he perplexities and embarrassments which, for a time, retard, and at last bring on the catastrophes, spring in a manner so enforced, from the temper and dispositions of the persons, or from the situations in which they are placed, as to produce that full effect, that plenitude of satisfaction which invariably attends a faithful representation of nature.39 This language coheres with Vaucanson’s own description of his f lute player automaton, not only in its attentiveness to the author’s craftsmanship, her ability to “contrive,” but also the narrative’s ability to move both the reader and itself through the mechanism of plot. At the same time the passage makes clear, though, that the principle of movement is less important than its relationship to the character’s ability to seem like a person one might meet in “every day’s experience.” Echoing Vaucanson’s wish to “imitate the Action of a living Man” with his f lute player, as well as his feat of “imitating by Art all that is necessary for a Man to perform in such a Case,” Burney’s reviewer in the English Review extols fictional narrative’s capacity to create the impression that readers may substitute themselves for the “exhibited” character, and vice versa: In history, it is the great chain of events, rather than the actors which occupies and interests the mind . . . . The imaginary scenes produced by the novel writer operate in a different manner: situations every where occur in which we ourselves may be placed, and persons are exhibited, whose prototypes we may often meet in life. Every thing comes more home to the heart, because at every step we feel a possibility, often a probability, of being concerned in similar transactions. Nothing is henceforth indifferent to us, and we feel unsatisfied


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if the persons as well as the characters in the story be not minutely pourtrayed.40 The passage helps us clarify that even though the importance in similitude, or the “suchness” between person and person represented, works to distinguish novels from history, it is a quality that links novels and characters with machines.41 Other uses of both third-person narration and free indirect discourse in Cecilia demonstrate that, despite using a voice traditionally deemed “impartial” and distant, Burney’s third-person accounts of her characters’ inner life become psychologically and at times physiologically rich, especially in scenes of abjection and mental disorder that become more grotesque in Camilla. One might view these scenes as narrative equivalents to the mechanical duck’s excrement insofar as the effect may revolt the reader with their pungency, and only work further to heighten the level of verisimilitude by, literally, adding another dimension to the experience of witnessing an interior process, whether digestion or affective response. Take for instance a scene in Evelina, where the heroine experiences pain and shame in disappointing her guardian: I burst into tears: with difficulty had I so long restrained them; for my heart, while it glowed with tenderness and gratitude, was oppressed with a sense of its own unworthiness. ‘You are all, all goodness!’ cried I, in a voice scarce audible, ‘little as I deserve, —unable as I am to repay, such kindness, —yet my whole soul feels, —thanks you for it!’42 A comparable scene in Cecilia removes the elliptical dashes to provide a carefully balanced and detailed account of what issues inside and outside the heroine’s awareness: And she then went into her carriage. Cecilia, unfitted to attend her old friend, and unequal to the task of explaining to her the cruel scene in which she had just been engaged, then hastened to her own apartment. Her hitherto stif led emotions broke forth in tears and repinings: her fate was finally determined, and its determination was not more unhappy than humiliating; she was openly rejected by the family whose alliance she was known to wish . . . . A misery so peculiar she found hard to support, and almost bursting with conf licting passions, her heart alternately swelled from offended pride, and sunk from disappointed tenderness.43 Thus, a different form of objectification takes place in the third person narrative from the epistolary narrative. Whereas the epistolary narrative turns subjective feeling and thought into artifacts, as embodied in the


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letter, the third-person narrative turns personhood itself into an object. Tears operate in both Evelina and Cecilia as tokens of painfully real feeling, much as the mechanical duck’s turd operated as tokens of “real” digestion, which signify the product of emotional process. But in Cecilia, the process by which they surface is rendered as transparently as was the duck’s digestion process. While technical accounts of free indirect discourse such as Dorrit Cohn’s underscore its qualities of “rendering a character’s thought in his own idiom while maintaining the third-person reference and the basic tense of narration,” Margaret Doody’s literary historical study emphasizes how it originated as a solution for the exigencies facing female characters and authors.44 Jane Spencer makes a similar case in viewing Burney’s turn to third-person narrative as a means of empowering the female writer as well as the narration of women’s experiences, but she does so by identifying it as an act of emulating her friend, admirer, and mentor, Samuel Johnson, and his own “omniscient authorial voice,” with its “balanced” sentences and “elevated diction.” Adapting such a voice for her second novel Cecilia gave “an air of authority to the narrative, making it seem perfectly natural that the experiences of a young girl in London society should carry the weight of general moral ref lection.”45 As much as the turn to writing narrative in the third person may have afforded Burney’s narratives an “air of authority,” it also resulted in the transformation of characters, including the transformation of the author into a character of sorts, albeit an invisible one. Burney voiced such desire for an invisible authorship repeatedly. In one of many remarkable moments in her diary, she describes how she had “almost thrown” herself “out the window in” her “eagerness to get out of the way of ” the “gross and noisy applause” issued when strangers excitedly recognized—“outed”—her as the author of “that excellent Novel,” Evelina.46 Burney found relief from the pressures of self-exposing authorship by regarding the book itself as a possibly animate yet separate entity indistinguishable from the characters within the book. When writing to Samuel Crisp about progress on her second novel Cecilia, she likened her work to a self-propelling automaton that she was bringing into being: “You enquire about your favourite Ugly Girl . . . you will be scandalized to hear that not one word did she get forward from February . . . I have her now in Hand, & hope, by assisting at her Toilette, to enable her in due Time to appear, tolerably Cloathed if not adorned, to the World . . . .”47 From a passive doll in need of assistance to self-moving automata that progresses with each word written, Burney’s thoughts on her own creations demonstrate the ways in which authorial attitudes toward novel writing in eighteenth-century England moved in step with those of automata makers who also sought higher levels of autonomy in their creations. Burney eventually viewed Camilla’s characters as surpassing the level of ideas “put in motion” in her prior two novels. Rather than operating as


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vehicles for her ideas, the characters of Camilla became so lifelike that they seemed like “actual” persons of their own: . . . the force of the name attached by the idea of the Character, in the author’s mind, is such, that I should not know how to sustain it by any other for a long while. In Cecilia & Evelina ‘twas the same: the Names of all the personages annexed with me all the ideas I put in motion with them. The Work is so far advanced, that the personages are all, to Me, as so many actual acquaintances, whose memoirs & opinions I am committing to paper.48 Such remarks bring to mind Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” her “offspring of happy days,” her Frankenstein. When Shelley describes how she “saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision . . . the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together . . . the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy half vital motion,” she brings herself into unwitting dialogue with Burney’s own discoveries of life in the world of inanimate objects, including, above all, the world of words.49 No stranger to the prospect of birthing monsters (her preface to Evelina famously refutes the possible charge that her heroine might be a “monster” and claims she is instead “the offspring of Nature”), Burney’s efforts to create lifelike characters bring credence as well as another facet to Kenner’s claim that, for the eighteenth century, “not the automaton, but the concept of counterfeitable man, was the age’s characterizing achievement.”50 The goal of lifelikeness in both technologies of novels and science demonstrates how humans are not so distinct from the machine in their desires for life.

Notes I am grateful to the generous suggestions Tamara Ketabgian gave me in the course of writing this essay. 1. Hester Thrale, May 19, 1782, Thraliana, Vol. 1, 1776–1784, ed. Katharine C. Balderston (Oxford: Clarendon Press in Co-Operation with the Huntington Library, 1942), 536. 2. Unsigned review, “Mrs. D’Arblay’s Camilla,” Monthly Review (October 1796): 161. 3. Unsigned review, “Mrs. D’Arblay’s Camilla,” 161. 4. Unsigned review, “Cecilia, a Novel,” English Review ( January 1783): 14. 5. Frances Burney, letter to Charles Burney, June 18, 1795, The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Vol. III, ed. Joyce Hemlow with Patricia Boutilier and Althea Douglas (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 117. Further references to this volume will be cited in-text by volume and page number. 6. She recounts in the same letter to her father that while she was working as Queen Charlotte’s Keeper of the Robe, “the Word Novel was long in the way of Cecilia, as I was told, at the Queen’s House. And it was not permitted to be read by the Princesses, till it was sanctioned by a Bishop’s recommendation” (117). 7. See Tamara Ketabgian, “ ‘Melancholy Mad Elephants’: Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times,” Victorian Studies 45.4 (Summer 2003): 649–76. This article, which has


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11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

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23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

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inf luenced my own thinking about the cultural history of literature and machines, goes against the grain of such postindustrial accounts in arguing “for a more porous and productive relation between human nature, industrial technology, and that most contested of topics—emotions” (650). Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). For more on the ontological shift that takes place when characters’ names seem as if they belong to “particular individuals in the contemporary social environment,” see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Pimlico: London, 2000), 18–21. Catherine Gallagher reconsiders this issue and reframes it as a feature of “fictionality,” a new conceptual category that emerged with the developing genre of the eighteenth-century novel in “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, Vol. I, History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 341–4. Burney, letter to Samuel Crisp, August 9, 1780, in Letters and Journals of Fanny Burney, Vol. IV, The Streatham Years Part II 1780–1781, ed. Betty Rizzo (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003), 217. Where it is clear, further references to this volume will be cited in-text. The Royal Censor of Paris, for instance, referred to Vaucanson as the “author” of the f lute player machine on June 12, 1738. Jacques Vaucanson, An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton (London: Printed by T. Parker, 1742), 22. Further references will be cited in-text. See, for instance, Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1904; new ed., London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1953), 389. Watt, Rise of the Novel, 262. J. Paul Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 224–5. Robert Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 63. Ibid., 65. Margaret Anne Doody, “George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” NineteenthCentury Fiction, 35:3, Special issue: George Eliot, 1880–1980 (December 1990): 260–91, particularly 289. David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles; Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Macmillan and Co., 1859), 112. Letter to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 23-[30] August [1778], The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Vol. III, The Streatham Years Part I 1778–1779, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 110, 115. Where it is clear, further references to this volume will be cited in-text. Letter to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 23-[30] August [1778], Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Vol. III, Part I 1778–1779, 115. The editors of the volume indicate that Johnson’s kernel and husk analogy for Richardson and Fielding appear in Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, 127. “Vaucanson, the Celebrated Mechanician and Constructor of Automata,” Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 35.996 (March 1840): 182. “Vaucanson,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 261.1873 ( January 1887): 41; and “Vaucanson’s Automata,” Leisure Hour 396 ( July 1859): 478. Jessica Riskin, “Eighteenth-Century Wetware,” Representations 83 (Summer 2003): 97–125; and “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 599–633. Riskin, “The Defecating Duck,” 601. Ibid., 627. Riskin privileges the term “simulate” throughout “The Defecating Duck.”


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29. Jacques Vaucanson, An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton, Translated out of the French original by J. T. Desaguliers (London: Printed by T. Parker, and sold by Mr. Stephen Varillon,1742), 13. Further citations from this work will be by in-text citation. 30. See Daniel Cottom, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Digestion,” Representations 66 (Spring 1999). Rather than evaluating its different qualities of realism, Cottom views Vaucanson’s duck as a provocation for reconsidering the nature of art and its equivalence to excrement. 31. Riskin, “Eighteenth-Century Wetware,” 112–3. 32. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (London: Chatto and Windus, 1842), 206–07. 33. For more on Smellie’s birthing machine, see Bonnie Blackwell, “Tristram Shandy and the Theater of the Mechanical Mother,” English Literary History 68 (2001): 81–133. 34. See my “Pains and Pleasures of the Automaton: Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Abjection,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40.1 (Fall 2006): 23–49. 35. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Homer Goldberg (New York: Norton, 1987), 3. For a suggestive examination of mobility and portability as pivotal features in the novel’s eighteenthcentury “rise,” see Deidre Shauna Lynch, “Novels in the World of Moving Goods,” in A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 121–43. 36. Letter from Samuel Crisp to Frances Burney, December 8, 1778, Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Vol. III, The Streatham Years Part I, 189. 37. Burney, Cecilia, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody; with an introduction by Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5. 38. I borrow this notion from Michael McKeon. See his Theory of the Novel, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 485. 39. Anonymous review, “Cecilia, a Novel,” English Review ( January 1783): 14. 40. Ibid., 16. 41. April Alliston enlarges precisely on the critical difference presented by character in distinguishing between history and the novel; she argues that “both history and the novel aim to unfold a hidden truth over time . . . and that in both cases . . . that hidden truth is ultimately a truth about character,” from a soon to be published paper presented on a roundtable I chaired, “The Rise of the Novel Revisited” at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual meeting, Montreal, 2006. 42. Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 265. 43. Burney, Cecilia, 643. 44. Doody, “George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” 278. 45. Jane Spencer, “Evelina and Cecilia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36. 46. Letter from Susanna Elizabeth Burney, c. May 6, 1780, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Vol. IV, The Streatham Years, Part II, 1780–1781, 103. 47. Letter from Frances Burney to Samuel Crisp, August 15, 1781, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Vol. IV, The Streatham Years, Part II, 1780–1781, 432. 48. Letter to Doctor Burney from Frances Burney, July 21, 1795, The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Great Bookham 1793–1797, 143. 49. Mary Shelley, “Introduction,” Frankenstein, 1818 Text, Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York and London: Norton, 1996), 173, 172. 50. Kenner, The Counterfeiters, 41.


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CH A P T E R

10

Inchbald: Animal Magnetism and Medical Quackery F re de rick L . Burwick

Responding to the contemporary controversy concerning the reputed charlatanry and sexual exploitation of female patients, Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) (Fig. 10.1) satirized the medical practice of animal magnetism, forerunner of modern hypnotism, introduced by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) and his followers. Inchbald’s Animal Magnetism successfully premiered at Covent Garden on April 29, 1788, and was revived six months later, on October 25, 1788.1 An adaptation from LeMédicin malgré tout le monde (1786) by Antoine Jean Bourlin (1752–1828), Inchbald’s script reveals her awareness of two other contemporary comedies: Le magnetisme animal (1786) by Louis-Nicolas Mareschal and Les docteurs modernes (1784) by Pierre-Yon Berré and Jean Baptiste Radet.2 For many years her friend and physician, Dr. Brodie provided her with his own skeptical opinion of the merits of mesmerism in medical practice, but the wider field of her research under the guidance of Anthony Le Texier compelled her to recognize that the mesmeric trance was not just a hoax. In Animal Magnetism, Inchbald demonstrated her theatrically-informed control of plot, dialogue, and situational effects.3 A model of construction with vivid and witty dialogue, the play was also bold and brash in its comic critique of the attempted manipulation and control of women. Especially pertinent to Animal Magnetism were the boundaries between artifice and nature, imagination and reality. This is a play of pretending and playacting. Her themes, shared with other women playwrights of the period, often incorporated a woman’s right to make her own choice in marriage and control her own property and finances.4 By the end of the eighteenth century, the practice of mesmerism had spread to London and other major cities throughout Europe. Comic and satirical references to animal magnetism began to appear in the works of other playwrights, but Inchbald was the first to bring to the London stage


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Figure 10.1 Portrait of Inchbald from European Magazine and London Review (1788). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


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an entire play addressing the pretences of animal magnetism.5 If animal magnetism were no more than a hoax, and hoaxes were often practiced in the name of mesmerism, it nevertheless served as a revealing metaphor for the subjugation of women. If not a hoax but an effective method of mental inf luence, it would promulgate a far more insidious male control of the female mind and will. With the strong implications of animal magnetism as a means of sexual coercion, authors critiqued the presumed science as well as the nature of its effects on the female body.6 Mesmer began his practice of “magnetizing” in Vienna, and his treatment of Maria Theresa von Paradies, a young pianist blind since the age of three, seemed to relieve her nervous condition and partially restore her sight. Scandal arose because the young woman, whom Mesmer had taken into his apartments during her treatment, formed an inordinate attachment to her physician that ended with her father storming into Mesmer’s home and demanding that the child be returned. When Viennese physicians barred Mesmer’s further medical practice, he moved to Paris. Scandal soon followed, not because of any formal charges of misbehavior with his female clientele, but simply because that clientele grew so large that other physicians found their own medical practice dwindling. Even after Mesmer’s salon was banned in Paris, others continued to adopt his techniques. In his salon at the Place Vendôme, Mesmer could accommodate thirty patients gathered around a wooden tub filled with iron filings and bottles of magnetized waters. Patients were required to grasp iron rods extending from the tubs. The apparatus resembled a large version of the recently discovered Leyden jar and lent credence to the operative fiction that Mesmer utilized currents of energy. Drawing from contemporary scientific interest in electricity and magnetism, Mesmer explained that he was able to inf luence a f luid that permeated the entire universe, infusing both mind and matter. He used magnets, or simply the magnetic currents of his own touch, to redistribute this f luid within the patient so as to restore equilibrium. For those illnesses that were psychosomatic, rising from the patient’s own fears and phobias, Mesmer could indeed produce remarkable cures through the power of suggestion. Apparently, he had himself no notion of the true nature of how the mind is inf luenced or the interaction of mind and body. He could nevertheless induce spellbinding trances in his patients. Mesmer prepared a theatrical salon to encourage a responsive participation of imagination. His practice, combining pseudoscientific electrical and magnetic devices, mirrors, dim lighting, music, charlatanry, and showmanship, soon had many followers and imitators.7 The physicians of Paris soon rallied against the practitioners of animal magnetism, as did their colleagues in Vienna. In 1784, a royal commission, including Benjamin Franklin, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, Jean-Sylvan Bailly, and several more prominent members of the Faculty of Medicine and the Academy of Sciences, was assigned to investigate the claims of Mesmer and his followers. Their conclusion: “The imagination works


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wonders; magnetism yields no result.”8 This report was translated into English by Inchbald’s lifelong friend, William Godwin.9 From present-day understanding of the workings of hypnotism, one might read “imagination” as “suggestibility,” and concur with the opinion of the commission. Certainly the notion of magnetism was nothing more than a persuasive metaphor for the procedures. The commission, however, also observed that the inf luence upon the “imagination” might easily be abused: since the physician can, if he will, take advantage of his patient . . . . Even if we ascribe to him superhuman virtue, since he is exposed to emotions which awaken such desires, the imperious law of nature will affect his patient, and he is responsible, not merely for his own wrong-doing, but for that he may have excited in another.10 The scandal over Mesmer and Maria Theresa von Paradies or other subsequent rumors may have prompted the commission to express concern. It seemed possible that a subject might be made to obey sexually improper commands under a trance and might even remain obedient to such commands after being awakened, a phenomenon later referred to as posthypnotic suggestion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allen Poe were among the many authors who wrote on the compelling power of mesmerism to alter the mind.11 By the end of the nineteenth century, George du Maurier’s story of the diva, Trilby O’Ferrall, and her mentor, Svengali, was readily deemed a plausible account of how an unscrupulous practitioner might inf luence a subject to adopt behavior and make decisions during a trance, which she would subsequently fail to recollect, and would believe were her own freely willed choice.12 An abiding problem in the scientific investigation of the mesmeric or hypnotic trance,13 then and now, is whether subjects are consciously aware of their actions, whether subjects might be induced to engage in behavior against their will. Current evidence demonstrates that subjects of hypnotism are not asleep or even in a semi-sleep. They are alert and attentive to the words of the hypnotist, but that attention is indeed trancelike in its fixation. As the Royal Commission observed in 1784, the subjects are in a state of heightened imagination and are very responsive to suggestion. It is a state closely akin to being so deeply involved in seeing a film or reading a novel that one temporarily ignores external reality. Such self-induced trances are indeed forms of self-hypnosis. In deep hypnosis, the hypnotist manipulates suggestion much in the manner of a storyteller or filmmaker, guiding the subject into accepting suggestions, as if these were reality. In the same manner that emotions may be aroused by a film or novel, the subject may be aroused by hypnotic suggestion to respond in a mode of playacting. Although aware that all is imaginary, the subject exercises “a willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,” such as Coleridge advocated.14


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Because the real world is thus held in abeyance, the imaginary circumstances become the active and determinate circumstances. Having induced this mental state, hypnosis seems to allow access to the subconscious mind, the part of the mind that stores thoughts, feelings, memories, and motives that the conscious mind filters out. That access allows for behavior modification, such as establishing triggers for alleviating depression or for not smoking cigarettes. The conscious mind always works in tandem with the subconscious mind, but hypnosis may open thresholds. Thus Svengali did not force Trilby, he simply opened up her latent desire to sing. According to this explanation, the response to suggestion is simply a liberating of a suppressed desire.15 That altered states of consciousness could be induced in a subject was a remarkable discovery, but contemporary medical science was unprepared to explain how this change was wrought. The notion of “animal magnetism” was easily discredited, but the phenomenon itself was no hoax. From Godwin, Inchbald knew of the experiments with electricity as a “nerve agent,” and from Dr. Brodie, she was familiar with the commonplace electrical applications in medical practice. Scientists were correct in their assumption of the bioelectric nature of the nervous system, but they failed to realize the extreme subtlety of that electrical activity.16 Not until Hans Berger’s development of electroencephalography (EEG) in 1924 were scientists able to measure and discriminate the electrical activity of brain waves. Berger himself was able to distinguish the alpha wave rhythm (8–12 Hz),17 also known as Berger’s wave, activated when the eyes are closed, and the immediate shift to the faster beta waves (14–30 Hz) when the eyes are opened. In addition to these two basic frequencies of waking consciousness (beta) and the daydreaming, imaginative mode (alpha), two further frequencies were identified: theta waves (4–7 Hz) occurred during dreaming, hypnosis, meditation, or deep concentration as in reading; delta waves (0.5–6 Hz) occurred during sound sleep.18 As Inchbald’s parody of the discourse reveals, the propagation of electrical and magnetic energy was understood as the transmission of a “universal f luid.” Her play was staged at the very time that great crowds in Bristol and then in London were gathering to attend the lectures on animal magnetism by Dr. John Boniot De Mainauduc.19 His editor and biographer, Dr. George Winter, attests that the audience was made up of doctors, scientists, clergy, and nobility.20 Hannah More, active guardian of public morality, suspected that more scurrilous types were participating in “the demonaical mummery” of De Mainauduc’s London lectures. In addition, she resented the fact that his quackery was extraordinarily profitable.21 He also treated patients with considerable success, which he then documented by publishing testimonies of their cure and recuperation.22 Winter reports that the “lectures excited very considerable sensation in scientific and literary circles,” but they also enabled doctors and charlatans alike to set themselves up as magnetic practitioners.23 Although she sets her play in Paris, Inchbald had witnessed in London this same proliferation


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of practitioners that rendered it impossible to distinguish doctors who had attended medical school from those who simply bought their degrees or faked their credentials. Once the report of the Royal Commission announced that animal magnetism was simply a matter of imagination, the satirists had an easy target. Cassandre, the practitioner in Les docteurs modernes (1784), sings of his great skill.24 Inchbald indulges much the same sort of humor when she has La Fluer, disguised as Doctor Mystery, give a demonstration to the Doctor eager to learn the art of magnetizing: La Fluer: You know Doctor, there is an universal f luid which spreads throughout all nature. Doctor: A f luid? La Fluer: Yes, a f luid—which is—a—f luid—and you know, Doctor that this f luid—generally called a f luid, is the most subtile of all that is the most subtle—Do you understand me. Doctor: Yes, yes— La Fluer: It ascends on high, (looking down) and descends on low, (looking up) penetrates all substances, from the hardest metal, to the softest bosom—you understand me I perceive? Doctor: Not very well. La Fluer: I will give you a simile then— Doctor: I shall be much oblig’d to you. La Fluer: This f luid is like a river—You know what a river is? Doctor: Yes, certainly. La Fluer: This f luid is like a river, that—that—runs—that—goes— that—gently glides—so—so—so—while there is nothing to stop it.—But if it encounters a mound or any other impediment—boo— boo—boo—it bursts forth—it overf lows the country round—throws down villages, hamlets, houses, trees, cows and lambs; but remove obstacles which obstruct its course, and it begins again, softly and sweetly to f low—thus—thus—thus—the fields are again adorned, and every thing goes on, as well as it can go on.—Thus it is with the Animal Fluid, which f luid obeys the command of my art. (AM 11–12) Mesmer’s salon was itself a theatrical setting, and Mesmer’s language, with its references to magnets and a universal f luid, is rife for parody.25 Inchbald exercises that parody without deviating significantly from the language. Doctor: Surprising art! but what are the means you employ? La Fluer: Merely gestures—or a simple touch— Doctor: Astonishing! give me some proof of your art directly, do satisfy my curiosity.


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La Fluer: I will, —and by holding this wand, in which is a Magnet, in a particular position, I will so direct the f luid, that it shall immediately give you the most excruciating rheumatism which will last you a couple of hours—I will then change it to the gout—then to strong convulsions—and after into a raging fever, & in this manner shall your curiosity become satisfied (holds up his wand as if to Magnetise.) Doctor: Hold, Doctor, I had rather see the experiment on some one else. (AM 12–13) Even in his declaration that gesture and touch work just as well as actual magnets, La Fluer closely follows Mesmer’s Discours. When he tells of an onset of “strong convulsions” and “a raging fever,” he echoes Mesmer’s account of the necessary “crises” in a magnetic treatment. Ref lecting Albrecht von Haller’s concept of the sensibility and irritability of muscle tissue,26 Mesmer declared that the magnetic response entailed corresponding phases of relaxation and agitation.27 A lover attempting to pass a letter under the watchful eye of a young lady’s guardian is not a rare scene in the comedy of the period; nevertheless it seems no coincidence that Inchbald replays a similar scene in Animal Magnetism. In his disguise as Dr. Mystery, La Fluer has just acquainted the Doctor with the universal f luid and the power of the magnet, when he seizes an opportunity to convey through Lisette, her maid, a letter that his master has written to Constance. The scene is not only strikingly similar to the scene in The Choleric Fathers, but Inchbald presents it as if it were a reenactment of a scene from a play: La Fluer: An honest Gentleman of about 70 years age was before the audience in love with a young lady of 18 whom he had brought up from her infancy, and whom he meant make his wife. Doctor: Very natural. La Fluer: A young Gentleman of the neighbourhood because he was young, rich, and handsome, imagined he would suit the lady better. Doctor: Just like them all. La Fluer: He therefore disguised his Valet, who under the mask of friendship introduced himself to this good man the guardian. Doctor: A villain, he deserv’d to be hang’d. La Fluer: And seiz’d the moment when he embraced him as I now embrace you—to stretch out his hand, while it was behind him, and convey a letter to the Lady’s waiting maid. (La Fluer embraces the Doctor, and exchanges Letters with Lisette, Lisette gives the letter she receives to Constance, La Fluer puts the other into his pocket). (AM 14–15) Inchbald adds comic irony to the reenactment by making it the occasion for a mock denunciation of the immorality of plays. The plot that La Fluer pretends to reenact applies exactly to the present situation, in which


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the Doctor, as Constance’s guardian, has reared his young ward with the intention of taking her as his wife as soon as she comes of age, and he is therefore zealous in sequestering her from any would-be suitors. Dr. Brodie, who had been her physician, and sometime suitor,28 may have shared with Inchbald the prevailing gossip as well as his own conviction of the quackery of the mesmerist claim. Inchbald has her own quack doctor boast that “by the power of Magnetism they can cure any ill, or inspire any passion” (AM 10). The crux is whether that mesmerically-induced passion overrides an individual’s own will and feelings. In January 1788, Inchbald began meeting frequently with Anthony Le Texier,29 a drama critic, and, with the eight-volume collection that he had completed during the previous year, a major mediator of French plays in London.30 Among Inchbald’s twenty-one plays, nine were adapted from popular French dramatists, an endeavor in which Le Texier was her initial guide. Apparent from her diary entries during the first three months of 1788, Le Texier had Inchbald read much more than the text she was translating. 31 To understand the satire of French comedy, she would also have to be familiar with the circumstances, scientific and cultural, that provoked the satire. In the scientific community of England, too, a pitched debate was being waged over the nature of mesmeric trances. 32 As Inchbald could surmise from the account of Nicolas Bergasse, 33 the scientific objection to Mesmer’s claims was not in the effects that were wrought by inf luencing the mind, but in the explanation of the presumed cause. Electricity and magnetism were at the center of current investigations in physics, and Mesmer, unwisely as it turned out, appropriated the phenomena that could not be confirmed by scientific tests and that failed even as a metaphor. Through Le Texier’s guidance, Inchbald also drew from the mesmerist comedies of Louis-Nicolas Mareschal, Pierre Yon Berré, and Jean Baptiste Radet, but her principal source was Antoine Jean Bourlin’s Le Médicin malgré tout le monde (1786), whose title is a playful variation on Molière’s Le médecine malgré lui (1666). Gossip in Paris in 1787 had been dominated by the adultery scandal involving the wife of Guillaume Kornman, cofounder and sponsor of the French Mesmeric Society, and the well-known playwright, PierreAugustin Caron de Beaumarchais, who defended Kornman’s unfaithful wife. Hoping for personal gain, Kornman himself had promoted the infidelity of his wife in 1781, but when her lover lost his office, Kornman denounced the adultery and had his wife imprisoned. The question arose whether Camille Kornman had acted under her own free will or had been compelled to adultery by a mesmeric trance induced by her husband. The quarrel became public in 1787 when Kornmann published a pamphlet against Beaumarchais,34 and Beaumarchais quickly responded with a pamphlet against Kornman.35 Other than the concern with sexual desire under mesmeric inf luence, Inchbald made no direct use of the


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Kornman scandal, but just two years later the Kornman affair was again brought to public attention as the subject of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Burgtheater in Vienna on January 26, 1790.36 Aside from Holcroft and Inchbald, other playwrights made incidental references to mesmerism. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm (1767) deals with the aftermath of the Seven Years War in which Prussia joined Great Britain in the war against France. James Johnstone’s English adaptation, The Disbanded Officer, performed at the Haymarket on July 23, 1786, closes with an epilogue ridiculing France, “where in wit, dress, folly, taste, and sin, / Refinements (save in morals) all begin.” In France, the magnetists put their patients to sleep and aroused them again with a clap of their hands; the epilogist calls for applause to demonstrate a more active British magnetism.37 In Better Late than Never (Drury Lane, November 17, 1790), Miles Peter Andrews wrote the major scenes in which Augusta attempts to cure Saville of his gambling and rescue his fortune, and Frederick Reynolds wrote the subplot, in which Sir Charles, in his endeavor to seduce Mrs. Flurry, dupes her husband into seeking a cure from the bogus mesmerist, Dr. Hubblebubble. Pallet: But are you sure, Flurry will venture hither? Sir Charles: Quite certain; I knew he had heard of Dr. Hubblebubble’s late fame in magnetism, and other modern wonders; therefore sent him a line in the Doctor’s name, assuring him that he wou’d make a complete cure of him, gratis, for the sake of his own reputation. You may easily imagine our valetudinarian bit at the proposal.38 The Doctor in Inchbald’s play is also eager to learn the secrets of magnetism, not as a cure for himself but as a means of rescuing reputation. After all, practitioners were commonly charlatans with no medical credentials.39 Setting her play in France, she nevertheless implicated trespasses already stirring scandal in London. A mesmeric mode of charlatanry was imitated in the notorious “Temple of Health and Hymen” (1780–83) of the quack James Graham,40 “in the ministrations of which Emma Lyon, the future Lady Hamilton, played a prominent choreographic part.”41 Inchbald’s Doctor is no doctor at all, but a quack who has been barred by the medical academy. Even before he first appears, the audience is given an example of his medical malpractice in the person of Jeffrey, loyal servant and experimental guinea pig. Jeffrey limps on stage with a bandaged leg, declaring that he is still in pain from being bitten and is “not yet satisfied the dog was not mad.” The only reason that the Doctor ordered him to kill the dog, Lisette tells him, was “to make you believe he was mad, and to shew his skill by pretending to preserve you from the Infection.” Worse, the Doctor also attempted to cure his eyes. Jeffrey proudly declares


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that he no longer suffers from that aff liction, for the simple reason that the Doctor has removed the offending eye. Jeffrey: He was so kind to put my left eye out, in order to save the right. Constance: Well still you are more fortunate than the God of Love, for he has no eyes at all— Jeffrey: And I shall have two very soon, for my master has promis’d me to buy me one at the great manufactory, which will be much handsomer than either of my other—a very handsomer glass one. Lisette: And if the Doctor will remake you thus piece by piece, in time my dear Jeffrey, you may become a very pretty man. (AM 6–7) The Doctor has had even less success in his treatment of other patients. The academy has refused to grant him a diploma and has threatened to bar him from practice. The Doctor nevertheless insists upon his professional integrity: “I . . . exercise my profession according to the rules of reason and nature; Is it not natural to die, then if a dozen or two of my patients have died under my hands, is not that natural?” (AM 9–10). Constance: Very true, Sir, a young ward has sent for you to attend his guardian—three nephews have sent for you to attend their uncles, very rich men—and five husbands have sent for you in great haste to attend their wives. Doctor: And is not that a sign they think what I can do—is it not a sign they have the highest opinion of my skill. (AM 9–10) The Doctor intends to redeem his practice by learning the methods of animal magnetism. “By the power of Magnetism they can cure any ill,” the Doctor declares, “or inspire any passion.” The ability to inf luence the passions, which exposes the Doctor’s ulterior motives, prompts Constance to express a worried concern, “Is it possible?” The Doctor assures her that with this power “every effect is produced upon the frame” as well as “wonders in physic equally surprising” (AM 10). The Marquise de Lancy, whose efforts to meet with Constance have been thwarted by the Doctor, plots to gain access to the otherwise securely locked and guarded household by using the Doctor’s ambition to acquire the power of magnetism. He thus sends his valet La Fluer, disguised as Doctor Mystery. In teaching the Doctor the secrets of animal magnetism, La Fluer secretly delivers the letter from the Marquis, then departs to bring in a patient on whom the Doctor might practice his techniques of magnetizing. Assured that the magnetic wand that La Fluer has provided him has the power to compel his young ward to love him, the Doctor eagerly begins to experiment on Constance. Lisette, however, has overheard the plot and tells Constance that her guardian


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intends “to Magnetise you and force you to love him, in spite of yourself ” (AM 16). Inchbald has the young ladies hatch a counterplot born of the old caveat, “Be careful what you wish for.” If the magnet has the power to arouse the passions, how is that power focused? And how limited? Certain that the magnet can wield no such power over them, the young ladies plot to use their own powers of playacting. They shall both pretend to be under the magnet’s spell and totally in love with the Doctor. “If the Magnetism affects you,” Lisette says to Constance, “why not have the same power over me? and if it makes you love him, it shall make me adore him” (AM 17). Lisette: No, mine is not merely a love, but a rage—a violence—I doat to distraction—love you to the loss of my health, of spirits, of rest and life. Constance: If you do not take pity on the passion which burns in my heart. (with tenderness.) Lisette: If you can be regardless of the f lames which consume me with Violence— Constance: Can you be insensible of my tender pleadings? Lisette: Take care how you turn my affection to hatred. Doctor: (goes from between them.) (aside) What a terrible situation I have got myself into, —the effect of the Magnetism is very natural, it acts upon one as well as another, but Lisette’s love is very troublesome. (AM 18) Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the Doctor finds that he has unleashed a power that he cannot control. He may have coveted his ward, but he discovers he cannot cope with the extreme forces of passion she now expresses. Because he fails to requite her love, Constance threatens suicide: “Why do you thus run from me, is this the return my love demands, —but be not uneasy, death shall deliver you from an object whose passion you despise.” Even more impassioned, Lisette threatens violence: “if I am treated with kindness, I am naturally soft, gentle, and tender, but if I am neglected (rising)—by all that’s great and precious I will do some strange thing either to you, or my rival” (AM 18–19). La Fluer returns with the Marquis, who is disguised as a patient and pretending to suffer from delusions. In a wild rage, he brandishes his handkerchief as if it were a dagger. La Fluer calms with his magnetizing power: La Fluer: I cannot wholly relieve him at present but you shall see me change the manner of his ravings, behold my power (pretends to magnetise). See his countenance changes, his looks express tenderness now it is no longer fury that transports him, but the soft languor of love now pervades his senses. (AM 23–24)


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While the patient is put to bed to recuperate from his fit, Lisette devises a scheme to get Jeffrey out of the way by pretending that, as a result of his dog bite, he has gone mad with hydrophobia. Fearing for his life, Jeffrey runs out of the house, with La Fluer after him to make sure that he does not return. In La Fluer’s absence, the Doctor attempts to treat the Marquis with the magnetic wand, with disastrous consequences. With each move of the magnetic wand, the patient’s symptoms are made to shift from one part of his body to another: Marquis: The malady changes its place, oh, my head, remove it from my head, make it descend (the Doctor more frighted) now it f lies to my heart, it sets it on fire, it tares it in pieces. Doctor: I wish the Doctor wou’d return. Marquis: My tortures redouble—vultures gnaw me, can’t you remove them (Doctor attempts again to Magnetise). No, no, my strength fails me—my eyes lose their sight—I die— (groans, sinks on the couch and remains motionless). Lisette: Oh! he’s dead—he’s dead—he’s dead (crying). Constance: (in tears too) What will become of us all—he’s dead—he’s dead. Doctor: I am quite shocked at it—but my dear children, don’t make such a noise (trembling) the neighbours will hear you, and they will say I have kill’d him, with some of my experiments. Lisette: It was that fatal wand you put upon his heart. Doctor: Yes, I suppose I directed the f luid the wrong way, but perhaps he only Fainted, —who knows but we may recover him. (AM 30) Presuming that his patient is dead, the Doctor decides to attempt further experiments on his corpse. In the meantime La Fluer returns and trades places with the corpse so that the Marquis can fetch two of his servants, also disguised as doctors of the medical academy, to investigate the rumored malpractice “by a notorious professor of Quackery” (AM 34). Fearing legal action against him for malpractice, perhaps even for murder, the Doctor agrees to sign a document granting his ward permission to marry the Marquis. The only impediment is the ward herself. If a decision to marry is to be made, then she must make it of her own free will. Constance, however, is still pretending to be under the sway of the magnetic wand. Constance: No, for how could I wed another when the Doctor is the object of my love. Doctor: But consider, my dear Constance, that I am old, and ugly; jealous, and infirm, indeed I am indeed I am, I protest Constance.


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Constance: But my love for you is so implanted in my heart. (AM 35–36) Once the contract is signed, La Fluer need no longer play the corpse. When the dead man rises, the Doctor realizes that he has been tricked: Doctor: I am cheated, defrauded, —what, ho, neighbours, —here are thieves, murderers (calling). Marquis: Nay, Doctor, ref lect upon the arts you made use of, to keep my Constance yours, even in spite of her inclination, then do not condemn the artifice I employed to obtain her, with her own consent. A reward like this urged me to encounter every hazard and every danger. For believe me doctor there is no Magnetism, like the powerful Magnetism of Love. (AM 36) In the course of the play, what is “natural” is defined to include the mortality rate of the Doctor’s patients, the universal f luid, the desire of “an honest Gentleman of about 70 years age” for “a young lady of 18,” the action of magnetism on two ladies as readily as on one, and magnetism as the power of love. If suggestibility, imagination, and playacting are all natural modes of mental response, then it cannot be argued that no “natural” magnetic trances are staged in Animal Magnetism. Rather, the “natural” is achieved through the theatrical. Mesmer himself exercised theatrical showmanship. Being mesmerized or hypnotized is responding to hypnotic suggestion in a mode of playacting. Inchbald’s play offers a complex series of playacting: La Fluer as Doctor Mystery, Lisette and Constance pretending aroused passions, the Marquis as a delusionary patient, Lisette, Constance, and La Fluer pretending Jeffrey is a hydrophobic madman, La Fluer and the Marquis taking turns as a corpse, and the Marquis and his servants pretending to investigate charges of medical malpractice. Sixty years after its opening season, Animal Magnetism was still praised as a box office attraction. James Robinson Planché, himself a prolific and successful playwright, offers the following exchange between “The Drama” (played by Julia Glover) presumed to have fallen in bad times, and “Puff ” (played by Charles Mathews) the theater critic and promoter: Puff: You remember “Animal Magnetism”? Drama: Perfectly; a capital farce that brought many a good half price in better days. Puff: You’d make ten times the money by the same farce under its new title of mesmerism, and by the personal application of it escape a great deal of anxiety. For instance, once thrown into a state of magnetic slumber, you become insensible to pain, —I might cut off the whole free list of a theatre, the public press excepted, and you wouldn’t be in the slightest degree aware of it! All complimentary


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admissions might be suspended without interfering with the healthful action of your own faculties, and by the communication of the magnetic f luid to the audience, roars of laughter, or f loods of tears could be produced at the pleasure of the operators.42 Granting that Dame Drama was in the doldrums, Puff suggests that not Inchbald’s comedy but the very science that she had satirized might be the best cure. Let both performance and audience be subjected to a trance and all the desired effects would be easy to manipulate. A later revival of Animal Magnetism was directed by Charles Dickens at Tavistock House in January 1857. Dickens himself played the Doctor, who is tricked into thinking that he can “magnetize,” his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth as Constance, his mistress Ellen Ternanas as Lisette, the novelist Wilkie Collins as La Fluer, and the artist Augustus Egg as the Marquis. Dicken’s revival of Animal Magnetism was, of course, related to the same keen interest in mesmerism that prompted him to attend the mesmeric demonstrations of John Elliotson,43 to practice mesmerism on his wife and on the wife of a Swiss banker, Madame de la Rue, and to introduce themes of mind control into Barnaby Rudge, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and other novels.44 In London the hostility between the mesmerists and anti-mesmerists was far less heated than it had been in Paris. Les docteurs modernes was condemned by advocates of animal magnetism, who defended Mesmer for opening new venues of psychological medicine. Jean-Jacques Duval d’Eprémesnil accused the Théâtre Italien of indecency in their attack upon Mesmer.45 At Covent Garden, Inchbald’s piece was greeted with laughter and applause and was often revived. She does not attack Mesmer as charlatan; rather, she shows the grand potential for charlatanry in the practice. Her parody is all the more persuasive because she accurately echoes Mesmer’s own language. The entire action of her plot displays remarkable ingenuity in creating scenarios for meta-theatrical playacting, and her female characters, Lisette and Constance, show themselves fully able to rise above subjugation and exploitation. Notes 1. John Genest, Some account of the English Stage: From the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols. (Bath: H.E. Carrington, 1832), documents further London performances: Haymarket, July 22, 1806; Covent Garden, March 16, 1819; Haymarket, October 2, 1824; and Covent Garden, November 24, 1824. I directed numerous performances of Animal Magnetism in 2004; see: Burwick, “Teaching Romantic Drama: Production and Performance,” http://www.units. muohio.edu/visualrhetoric/rc/burwick.html. Accessed May 24, 2010. 2. Antoine Jean Bourlin, called Dumaniant (1752–1828), Le Médicin malgré tout le monde (1786); Louis-Nicolas Mareschal, Le magnetisme animal (1786); Pierre-Yon Berré and Jean Baptiste Radet, Les docteurs modernes (Comédie Italienne, November 16, 1784). 3. Inchbald, Elizabeth, Animal Magnetism (Dublin: Printed for P. Byron, 1788). The play has neither scene nor line numbers and therefore will be cited parenthetically by page number. Lines from the play will be noted in-text as, Animal Magnetism (= AM).


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4. Compare, for example, Hannah Cowley, Bold Stroke for a Husband, a Comedy, as Acted at the Theatre Royal, in Covent Garden (February 25, 1783). 5. Johanna Mari Cummings, Ch. 4: “Animal Magnetism: Mesmerism and the Question of Revolutionary Sympathies,” in Staging Science: The Invisible Forces in the Plays of Elizabeth Inchbald (Diss. University of New Mexico, 2006), 97–137. 6. Patricia Fara, Fatal Attraction: Magnetic Mysteries of the Enlightenment (Thriplow: Icon, 2005), 202: “The great majority of [magnetic] treatments entailed male practitioners’ exerting powers over female patients. As men and women explored this asymmetrical relationship, they molded gender relationships. Following the lead of French critics, English authors reinforced images of female inferiority by attributing their perceived susceptibility to physical causes—weak nerves and that conveniently inf luential organ, the uterus. Endorsing denigrations of pernicious French femininity, chauvinists combined assertions of both male and national supremacy by stressing that it was Parisian women who had initiated this therapeutic fashion.” 7. Lilian R. Furst, “Partners and Strangers: The Mind-Body Relationship in History,” Karger Gazette 69 (2007): 36. The most complete contemporary account was Nicolas Bergasse. Considerations Sur Le Magnetisme Animal, Ou Sur La Theorie Du Monde Et Des Etres Organises. D’apres les Principes de M. Mesmer. Avec des penseessur le Mouvement, par le Marquis de Chatellux, de l’Academie Francoise (The Hague: N.P., 1784). 8. Rapport de commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal (Paris, 1784). See Histoire académique du magnétisme animal accompagnée de notes et de remarques critiques sur toutes les observations et expériences faites jusqu’à ce jour, ed. Claude Burdin and Frédéric Dubois (Paris: Chez J.-B. Baillière, libraire de l’Académie royale de médecine); A Londres: H. Baillière (Imprimerie de Belin-Mandar, 1841), 73. 9. Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practised at Paris. Translated from the French. With an Historical Introduction (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1785). 10. Rapport secret sur le magnétisme animal (Paris, 1784) in Histoire académique du magnétisme animal, 92–101. 11. Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). See also Frederick Burwick, “Coleridge, Schlegel, and Animal Magnetism,” in English and German Romanticism: Cross-currents and Controversies, ed. James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1985), 275–300. For De Quincey, see Burwick, “De Quincey and Animal Magnetism,” The Wordsworth Circle 36.1 (Winter 2005): 32–40. For Hoffmann, see Jürgen Barkhoff, “Geschlechteranthropologie und Mesmerismus: Literarische Magnetiseurinnen bei und um E.T.A. Hoffmann,” in Hoffmanneske Geschichte: zu einer Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft, ed. Gerhard Neumann and Alexander von Bormann (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 3–19. Regarding Hawthorne’s work on mesmerism, see Samuel Chase Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998); and for Poe, see Doris V. Falk, “Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism,” PMLA 84.3 (May 1969): 536–46. 12. George du Maurier, Trilby (New York: Harper & Bros., 1894); R. C. McCail, “The Genesis of Du Maurier’s Trilby,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 13 (1977): 12–15; and Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 339–41. 13. The term “hypnotism” was introduced in 1843 by James Braid, Neurypnology (1843); see G. E. Berrios and Roy Porter, eds., A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origin and History of Psychiatric Disorders (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 437–9. 14. Samuel Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, in The Collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 6. 15. Tobias Egner and Amir Raz, “Cognitive Control Processes and Hypnosis,” Hypnosis and Conscious States: The Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective, ed. Graham A. Jamieson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29–50. 16. Graham Richards, Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas. Part 1, 1600–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 272–5. 17. Hz = Hertz, cycles per second. 18. Colin Blakemore, Mechanics of the Mind (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 49–51.


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19. John Boniot De Mainauduc, The Lectures of J. B. de Mainauduc, M.D. (London: printed for the executrix by Fry, at the Cicero Press, 1798). 20. De Mainauduc and George Winter, Animal Magnetism. History of its Origin, Progress, and Present State; Its Principles and Secrets Displayed, as Delivered by the Late Dr. De Mainauduc. To Which is Added, Dissertations on the Dropsy; Spasms; Epileptic Fits; St. Vitus’s Dance: Gout; Rheumatism and Consumption, etc. (Bristol: George Routh; London: E. Newberry, J. Otridge, 1801), 14, 15. “On looking over the list of students,” notes Dr. George Winter, “that had been, or then were, [at Bristol] under the Doctor’s tuition, it appeared that there was 1duke, 1 duchess, 1 marchioness, 2 countesses, 1 earl, 1 lord, 3 ladies, 1 bishop, 5 right honourable gentlemen and ladies, 2 baronets, 7 members of parliament, 1 clergyman, 2 physicians, 7 surgeons, exclusive of 92 gentlemen and ladies of respectability; in the whole, 127.” 21. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 4 vols. (London, 1834), vol 2, 120. Hannah More to Horace Walpole, September 1788: “I give you leave to be as severe as you please on the demonaical mummery which had been acting in this country . . . . Mesmer has got a hundred thousand pounds by animal magnetism in Paris. Maineduc is getting as much in London.” 22. De Mainauduc, Veritas; or, A Treatise Containing Observations on, and a Supplement to the Two Reports of the Commissioners, Appointed by the King of France to Examine into Animal Magnetism (London: Printed by T. Bensley for the Author, 1785). 23. De Mainauduc and Winter, Animal Magnetism, 15. 24. Berré and Radet, Les docteurs modernes, 18–19. 25. F. A. Mesmer, “Discours de M. Mesmer sur le Magnétisme,” Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F.A. Mesmer, trans. and compiled by George Bloch, intro. E. R. Hilgard (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufman), 33–8. 26. Hubert Steinke, Irritating Experiments: Haller’s Concept and the European Controversy on Irritability and Sensibility, 1750–90, The Welcome Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005), 86–8. 27. Mesmer, “Le Magnétisme Animal” (1779); see also the later account of the “crises” in: “Mémoire de F. A. Mesmer, docteur en médecine, sur ses découvertes” (1799); Mesmer, Mesmerism, 48, 69, 103–105, 124–28. 28. Inchbald, The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, ed. Ben P. Robertson, 3 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), vol. 2, 378. 29. Ibid., 387. 30. Anthony A. Le Texier. Recueil des pièces de théâtre (London: T. Hookham, 1785–87). 31. Inchbald, Diaries, vol. 2, 222–32. Entries from January 29 to March 25, 1788 record her work on the translation and her meetings with Le Texier, also her meeting with Dr. Moore, and the reading of the manuscript by Thomas Harris, manager of Covent Garden. The comedy opened at Covent Garden on April 29, 1788. 32. Roy Porter, “ ‘Under The Inf luence’: Mesmerism in England,” History Today 35.9 (September 1985): 22–9. 33. See Bergasse, Considerations Sur Le Magnetisme Animal (The Hague: N.P., 1784). 34. Guillaume Kornman [actually Nicolas Bergasse], “Mémoire sur une question d’adultère, de sèduction et de diffamation: Pour le Sieur Kornman contre la Dame Kornman, son épouse le Sieur Daudet de Jossan le Sieur Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais et M. Le Noir, Conseiller d’Etat, et ancient Lieutenant-général de police. A la suite duquel son les pièces justificatives et autres qui ont été imprimées jusqu’à ce jour signé G. Kornman (Reliure inconnue),” as cited in Pierpaolo Polzonetti, “Mesmerizing Adultery: Cosi Fan Tutte and the Kornman Scandal,” Cambridge Opera Journal 14.3 (November 2002): 265. 35. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, “Mémoire de P.-A. Caron de Beaumarchais, en réponse au libelle diffamatoire signé Guillaume Kornman, dont plainte en diffamation est rendue, avec requête, à M. le lieutenant criminel, et permission d’informer,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Beaumarchais (Paris: Firmin-Didot Frères, Fils, 1865), 444–6. 36. Andrew Steptoe, “Mozart, Mesmer and Così fan tutte,” Music & Letters 67 (1986): 248–55; Polzonetti, “Mesmerizing Adultery,” 263–96. 37. James Johnstone, The Disbanded Officer, or, The Baroness of Bruschall: A Comedy. As Performed at the Theatre Royal in the Hay-Market The Disbanded Officer; Or, The Baroness of Bruchsal: A Comedy. As Performed at the Theatre Royal in the Hay-Market (London: Printed for T. Cadell [etc.], 1786). The epilogue reads: “Why magnetism shall tickle them to sleep— / Nay, laugh


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38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

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not, skeptics—there, a patient stands, / That can expect no cure, but from your hands; / Then by your treatment of the poor pale creature, / Prove British magnetism to be—goodnature.” Miles Peter Andrews and Frederick Reynolds, Better Late than Never. A Comedy in Five Acts. As Performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane (London: Printed for J. Ridgway [etc.], 1790), 37. Genest, Some account of the English Stage,vol. 7, 17, notes that Andrews has based the major plot on Thomas Lewis O’Bierne, The Generous Impostor (Drury Lane, November 22, 1780), adapted from the French comedy, Néricault Destouches, Le Dissipateur, ou L’honnête friponne; for the subplot, Reynolds borrowed characters and situation from Richard Estcourt, The Fair Example (Drury Lane, April 10, 1703), also adapted from the French play by Florent Carton Dancourt, Bourgeoises à la mode (November 15, 1692). Porter, “Under the Inf luence,” 22–9. Marjean D. Purinton, “George Colman’s The Iron Chest and Blue-Beard and the Pseudoscience of Curiosity Cabinets,” Victorian Studies 49.2 (2007): 250–7. James Graham, The Guardian Goddess of Health: Or, the Whole Art of Preserving and Curing Diseases . . . By James Graham, M.D. (London: Printed for the People: and by the Rosy Heralds of Health distributed, 1780); James Graham, A Sketch: Or, Short Description of Dr. Graham’s Medical Apparatus, &c. Erected about the Beginning of the Year 1780, In his House, on the Royal Terrace, Adelphi, London (London: Almon, 1780); Roy Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). Fielding Hudson Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine, 4th ed. (1913; Philadelphia: B. Saunders Co., 1929), 382. A. D. Harvey, Sex in Georgian England: Attitudes and Prejudices from the 1720s to the 1820s, rev. ed. (London: Phoenix, 1994). Harvey maintains that Graham’s use of Emma Lyon as the Temple’s Goddess of Health demonstrates the doctor’s shrewd sense of what clients want to see and to hear. He suggests that people who f locked to consult Dr. Graham were negotiating culturally shared sexual fears and longings, 167–8. James Robinson Planché, The Drama at Home, or An Evening with Puff. An Original, Occasional, and Local Extravaganza, In One Act (Haymarket, April 8, 1844), in The Extravaganzas of J.R. Planché, Esq. (Somerset Herald) 1825–1871, ed. T. F. Dillon Croker and Stephen Tucker (London: S. French, 1879). John Elliotson, “Notes of lectures on the theory and practice of medicine”; UCLA Biomed History and Special Collections Cage, Ms. coll. no.104. Cf. W.R., Merrington, University College Hospital (1976), 22–5. Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 14–16, 20–68, 74–105; Tatar, Spellbound, 190–1. Jean-Jacques Duval d’Eprémesnil, “Réflexions prélimiaires, a l’occasion de la Piece intitlulée, les Docteurs Modernes, jouée sur le Théâtre Italien. Le sieize Novembre 1784” (Paris: N.P., 1785). “Forcés de ménager sa personneils l’attaquent dans son honneur. On l’a joué sur le Théâtre Italien de la manière la plus indécente & la plus calomnieuse; lui diréctement, & indirectement ses Elèves & ses Malades,” 2. On d’Eprémesnil, see Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 48–52.


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CH A P T E R

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Lee: The New Science and Female Madness M arj ean D. P urinton

Sophia Lee’s five-act, blank-verse tragedy Almeyda; Queen of Granada was performed at Drury Lane in 1796, and although it received positive reviews and its title star was Sarah Siddons, the play lasted only four nights.1 Its recent hypertextual revitalization and critical attention might be explained, in part, due to the fact that its tragic heroine succumbs to mental disease in the course of the play’s central conf lict and that insanity dominated periodical, political, religious, medical, legal, and popular discourses at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, this is also a period during which medical interests were theatricalized and theatre was medicalized, and no wonder, given the dramatic actual events in which insanity figured prominently.2 Lee was living in geographical locations and in a cultural milieu, including London, Bristol, Clifton, and Bath, in which topical controversies about medicine and science were commonplace.3 Lee shifts the medical and legal issues associated with madness onto her historical tragedy. Almeyda constitutes a case study in insanity, an analysis of contemporary changes in pre-psychological diagnoses and treatments, safely concealed in a fictitious, historically and geographically distant dramatic account.4 In this way, Lee’s tragedy contributes to the scientific and medical discourses foreshadowing Mary Shelley’s fictional treatment in Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818). What I seek to demonstrate here is that literary and learned women were keenly engaged in ministerings of “mad doctors” of the day. Like Mary Somerville, Joanna Baillie, and Mary Wollstonecraft, Lee understood how the “passions” were powerfully gendered by medical accounts. Many late eighteenthcentury intellectuals would no doubt have followed with curiosity and criticism the sensationalized episodes of attempted and successful homicides at the hands of those deemed mentally deranged, and they would have considered and discussed what such actions meant in legal and medical terms.


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Lee’s critique of science, like that of Mary Shelley’s, was rendered in fictional form—but from the stage, a venue that enabled her to demonstrate a number of issues: the subjective and interpretative nature of science; the manner in which science’s efforts to understand and to control mind and body were conditional, uncertain, and changing; and the way in which diagnoses and cures of the mysterious workings of the mind were inchoate and ineffective. Because so much scientific attention and medical discourse, as well as many current events, featured insanity, the late Georgian perception was that insanity was becoming epidemic. William Pargeter records in his 1792 Observations on Maniacal Disorders that “The frequency of this disease renders it truly alarming.”5 With so much discursive attention to madness in medical and media accounts, it is not surprising to find its underpinnings in the literary and dramatic works of women writers, whose access to those other public spaces of discussion would have been limited. With the Licensing Act in force, Lee was cautious about her portrayal of contemporary politics—including madnessinduced regicide attempts—on the stage. Late eighteenth-century London had, in fact, been the scene of a number of high profile cases involving insane behaviors in public venues. Public debate about the King’s mental illness and its treatment made insanity all the more visible and controversial. According to Thomas Dixon, the status of the King’s mental state in 1789 was treated in the daily press, with extended extracts from The Examination of the King’s Physicians report. The King’s madness and the Regency Crisis of 1788–9 occur on the eve of epochal changes in the treatment of the insane, during which the restraining and controlling techniques with which George III was treated were being replaced by moral and emotional forms of management.6 Insanity and nervous disorders were no longer associated solely with poverty and working class environments, as they were appearing with frequency among members of the upper classes. According to Andrew Scull, by the end of the eighteenth century, George III’s mania reinforced the medical view of insanity as an upper-class illness.7 Roy Porter points out that there was an emergent sympathy toward the mad, as well as a growing preoccupation among the literati with relations between self and society, the private and public, the normal and the mad.8 This interest in royalty and madness was featured in Sophia Lee’s tragedy at the same time that the underpinnings of the play resonated with pedestrian instances of nervous disorders. In 1796, the same year that Lee’s tragedy about the Queen of Granada appeared on the boards, the York Retreat opened (for the treatment of those with mental health needs), the first edition of Alexander Crichton’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement was published, and Mary Lamb committed matricide in what was believed to be a fit of madness. The Lamb incident occurred a decade after another sensationalized murder attempt on the King by a distressed, presumably mad, woman, Margaret Nicholson, which had by 1796 drawn attention to the


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plight of the insane as well as the harm that they were capable of doing. Both the Lamb and the Nicholson cases pointed to the potential danger of national and domestic security at the hands of excitable and overly passionate women. To ref lect upon the political and personal implications of female homicidal mania in the theatre, Lee had to displace the dramatic action historically, geographically, and culturally. Almeyda; Queen of Granada joins the multiple sources of debate and discussion occasioned by actual events in which conceptualizations of madness were in transition in terms of diagnosis and medical management, in gender associations, and in legal responses to cases in which criminal actions were committed by those deemed insane. In all of these actual cases of insanity, as well as the dramatic situation in Lee’s tragedy, we find that the security of the monarch is at risk at a time of domestic unrest. Almeyda takes place in medieval Spain at a Moorish castle built on a rock overhanging the River Guadalquivir, a seemingly distant place and time from contemporary British fever over madness. In the context of political surveillance following the French Revolution, Lee wisely displaces radical and controversial handlings of female madness in her tragedy. Almeyda is a passionate, untamed Moorish “other,” who, in order to spare Alonzo (the son of Ramirez, King of Castile), must marry Orasmyn, the son of Abdallah, the Regent of Granada and Almeyda’s uncle. Almeyda’s desires violate masculine and cultural directives, for she has fallen in love with the Spanish Alonzo. Abdallah’s exercise of patriarchal matchmaking is based on his own desires to disrupt Almeyda’s claim to the throne, a position of power that he had already ruthlessly pried from Almeyda’s deceased father. The potential miscegenation is a disruptive, insane plan loaded with historically derived racial connotations. As John Beusterien has argued in the context of seventeenth-century Spanish theatre, the African Moor is an icon unsuitable for marriage; sexually impotent and incapable of marrying into white Spanish society, the Moor is excluded from social reproduction.9 According to Diego Saglia, intermarriage or miscegenation are crucial concerns in the very sources of the SpanishMoorish discourse, at the heart of the unjust persecution of the Queen of Granada.10 Did Sarah Siddons perform Almeyda in blackface, the raza made visible on the performer’s face? Probably not, as Beusterien asserts that the Moor is not necessarily associated with color.11 Lee’s Almeyda is, however, enough of a representational “other” to open onto dramatic spaces in which alterity could be enacted in ways closer to the late eighteenthcentury British experiences. Almeyda embodies the gendered and racial inf lections associated with extreme passions such as madness. Since Lee’s tragedy is concerned with matters of race, royalty, and insanity, she wisely displaces these topical issues to medieval Spain, lest she, like the insane regicides plaguing late eighteenth-century England, be identified and named a traitor.


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What is a black female, portrayed by her detractors as a hysterical woman incapable of rational leadership, to do in this situation? Almeyda’s dilemma is similar to that experienced by British women in the late eighteenth century whose abilities to exercise rational thought and logical leadership in any domain, whether it be home or the political arena, were seen as restricted by biological determinism. Furthermore, a corrupt Regent in Granada, seeking to displace rightful leadership by naming it incompetent and insane, was a situation analogous enough to the Regency Crisis of 1788 to be recognized easily by British audiences. Lee’s Almeyda therefore manipulates British late Georgian perceptions of the pathologically ill and psychologically unbalanced woman to deceive the very ones who would label her “hysterical.” Almeyda’s deviance is thus two-fold, for she is black in complexion and deranged in her mind. Almeyda cleverly fulfills cultural expectations of her medicalized identity so that she can outwit scientific and religious prescriptions of mental stability. She carves out the social space of insanity in order to stage her own theatre of resistance, and she “puts on an act” of madness. For personal and political reasons, she plays the part that medical science would assign to her as woman and as Moor. Here, insanity not only resonates with Islamic associations, but the psychological examination of lunatics is also inf lected with the valences of the Spanish Inquisition. Almeyda’s political situation, coupled with racial conf licts, is sufficient to drive a person mad. But she puts on madness, like whiteness, as a mask, a self-conscious identification in the face of male-defined identifications that, like the lunatic’s straitjacket, paradoxically constrains and frees her. Almeyda’s playacting exposes insanity, like gender and race, as an artificial category, a role that can be performed. Furthermore, Lee’s tragedy figures insanity as unruly theatricalized space in which Almeyda can challenge normative categories of racial, gender, and mental behavior. In what ways did the medical discourses of late eighteenth-century Britain sustain gender and racial ideologies? The play complicates medicalized notions of female hysteria with Almeyda’s depiction as AfricanHispanic. According to Sander Gilman, the connection of blackness and madness had its roots in classical medicine, especially Greek physiognomy, and by the late eighteenth century the association occurs at mythic levels as cultural fascination with all body types as mental states turned from the “normal” to the pathological.12 Throughout the play, as with the actual events of matricide and regicide in late eighteenth-century London, the association of a balanced body/mind ref lects the balance of a well-regulated, civilized nation. This parallel draws upon the Enlightenment tradition of the family as a microcosm of society. So the healthy state of an individual’s body/mind functions as a synecdoche for the collective culture. In this configuration, the security of a nation would be threatened by lunatic leadership, or the stability of a household could be disrupted by the presence of an insane person.


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In his 1784 Anatomical Lectures, William Hunter tells his students: “The human body under a disease, is the country which labours under a civil war or invasion; the physician is, or should be, the dictator and general, who is to take command, and to direct all the necessary operations.”13 Mary Wollstonecraft likens the English republic to a sick body, and observes in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794) that France had grown sick on “the corruption of a state diseased.”14 Her metaphor draws on conventional medical cures of purging and bleeding that leave the contaminated body healthy and likens them to the distasteful but necessary actions of revolution that cure the nation of its corrupt leadership. The setting adds another layer to the body/culture analogy, for, as Diego Saglia asserts, Orientalism equated with dangers affecting both the human body and the body politic was likened to a foreign disease endangering the compromised health of the nation.15 In the beginning of Lee’s tragedy, we encounter the sick national body of Spain. The Moors ruled Spain from 711 until the end of the Reconquista in 1492. Although the Reconquista was neither continuous nor coordinated warfare, it was marked by infighting among Christian states as well as between Arabs and Spaniards.16 Granada was the last Arab center to be retaken by the Spanish under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. Between 1476 and 1492, tension between Granada and Castile existed because Moorish King Abul-Hassan refused tribute to the Spanish king.17 Lee’s play is set sometime between 1248 and 1492, probably closer to the 1470s, when Granada was plagued by rivalry among Arab noble families and during which time the Moors were vulnerable to Spanish attacks. The Moors underestimated the preparedness of their Castilian enemies and continued their peacetime revelries. Their pleasure-loving lifestyle and their weak-minded leadership rendered them vulnerable to attack, and some historians claim that by the end of the thirteenth century Granada under Moorish rule had become “effeminate.”18 In the language deployed by a nascent psychology at the end of the eighteenth century, the Moorish nation of Granada had fallen to feminized ways, losing its strength of character and resistance to rival powers. At a metadramatic level, Moorish Granada exhibits symptoms of the “phantom disease,” neurasthenia, as it later came to be called in the nineteenth century. As body politic, Granada experiences collective nervousness and unstable leadership resulting from its lack of nerve, its absence of force. In fact, it was believed that excessive emotionality accompanying neurasthenia was instrumental in causing the decay of entire nations— and thus the fears that British rule during the Regency Crisis of 1788 might result in emasculated and effete leadership. Whatever triggers the inherent weakness in the individual (especially in women) can ultimately lead to the destruction of an entire culture. As Sander Gilman argues, neurasthenia was perceived as an illness that paradigmatically revealed the degenerative effects of society.19


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Granada might be diagnosed with a cultural form of what George Cheyne in 1733 called the “English Malady” and what Thomas Trotter in 1807 would call the “Nervous Temperament.”20 In his treatise about this ailment, Trotter cautions how the inf luence of nervous temperament significantly affects national character and domestic happiness, and for his own Great Britain he fears that “amidst the general effeminacy of manner this is rapidly consuming the manly spirit and physical strength of this age, and what may ultimately annihilate all that is great in the character of Britons” can be attributable to nervous disorders (153). Ironically, in Almeyda, Abdallah’s son embodies the effeminate ruler aff licted with nervous temperament, for he seeks compromise to the dynasty’s struggles with the Spanish. Although he loves Almeyda, he is willing to respect her love for Alonzo and to thwart his father’s drive to usurp her power through an arranged marriage. The diseased politics that frame the tragedy are presented through a conversation between Ramirez, the King of Castile, and Victoria, the Princess of Castile. Abdallah had usurped the throne of Almeyda’s father, Almanzor, taking advantage of his brother’s effeminacy of leadership. Abdallah hopes to find in Almeyda an equally weak, vain woman. Almeyda must control her Moorish noble wildness and “conceal those passions to be great, / Subdue them to be happy” (1.1). In other words, Almeyda must repress her emotions and exercise a rationality gendered masculine, for as Ramirez asserts, “In the mind / All sov’reignty begins and ends” (1.1). As Ramirez and Victoria return Almeyda, their former captive, to Granada, they attempt to school her in the role that she will need to perform to exercise her rightful position as Queen. Victoria encourages Almeyda to govern her “wild transports” that warp judgment (1.1), but her passion for Alonzo produces an internal struggle as she attempts to adapt to her new role. The conventional malady of love-madness was of interest to the New Sciences of the late eighteenth century. Alexander Crichton observes, “Of all the passions which subjugate human reason, [love] is doubtless, the most irresistible in its attack, the most insidious in its progress, and the most powerful in its effects.”21 According to Crichton, love engenders an exalted state of the imagination and increased sensibility of the body, and the refusal or disappointment of love can therefore produce “a proxysm [sic] of mania” (1.230), symptoms we can anticipate in Almeyda’s response to her political and familial duties. Unhappy in Granada, Almeyda longs to return to Castile: “Here in Granada—mid my royal kindred, / By councils f latter’d, and an army hail’d! / Almeyda, is a solitary wretch” (3.2). Home is not a safe space for women, for in coming “home” Almeyda has learned the lessons of suffering, sorrow, and bondage foreign to her existence in Castile. Although Victoria has promised her that she will obtain repose from reason, Almeyda comes to reject her friend’s recommendation as “the science of hypocrisy” (1.1). Almeyda remains uncertain that she can yield to the duty of her royal station, an Islamic Queen in a Christian Spain, and acquiesce to the


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duty of womanhood. Of course, her resistance to these strictures might be termed “madness.” These narrow boundaries of womanhood vex Abdallah’s effeminate son, Orasmyn, who tells his father how he disdains Arabic laws that make women “domestic, artificial beings merely” (2.1), but Abdullah is intent on binding Almeyda to compliance with such laws through the arranged marriage before she discovers the artificiality of the construction of womanhood. Orasmyn has genuine feelings for the Queen, and he tries to play her suitor rather than his father’s political dupe. But Almeyda has, in fact, discovered her madness, for she frankly tells Orasmyn that he courts her diadem not her. Abdallah advises Orasmyn not to bow down immediately to woman’s frown, for Almeyda may change her mind tomorrow, “such is their weak, their f luctuating nature” (2.1). The tragedy puts the nature of woman into question, resonating as it does with Alexander Crichton’s assertion: “Women are much more liable to this disease [nervous disorders] than men” (1.335). Lee’s dramatic situation registers a context of insanity familiar to late eighteenth-century theatergoers, insanity stimulated by domestic vexations, misery, and thwarted love that might have been discussed in William Falconer’s 1788 A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions Upon Disorders of the Body.22 Medical men of late Georgian New Sciences used newlyconstructed, nerve-based insanity to reassign the humoral hysteria stereotype to the nervous woman. Roy Porter points out that hysteria had been considered a female malaise and attributed to the “wondering womb,” but it was now seen as arising from a defect of the nerves.23 Crichton’s New Science claimed that painful affection from grief “is almost peculiar to females, for on their delicate frame, mental causes of every kind operate, in general, more powerfully than on men” (2.190). Same illness, new name. New Sciences, old stereotype. Traditional male opinion in both fifteenth and eighteenth centuries nevertheless viewed women as constitutionally weak, prone to irrationality, and given to nervous irritability and excessive passions. Orasmyn warns Almeyda about the danger she risks in staying at the fortress and in displaying her feelings so transparently. Abdallah is not about to let “a haughty, foolish, woman” cross him or to “work her highwrought passions into frenzy” (3.1). Alonzo, too, knows that Abdallah “poorly plays upon [women’s] sexes weakness” (3.2). When Abdallah threatens Almeyda with confinement in the fortress, she accommodates him with what appears to be maniac speech. Abdallah describes her linguistic performance: “With more than moral eloquence, she speaks; / Then sudden breaks forth into incoherence, / While we in vain would catch the f leeting sense” (3.1). While Paula Backschieder claims that much of the conf lict and its language in Almeyda are highly gendered,24 I would add that the gendering and gender-bending are enhanced by the play’s handling of madness. Like the actual public instances involving insane persons, Lee’s play puts madness


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spectacularly on view. For eighteenth-century doctors treating the mad, lunacy was a state of alternating bouts of derangement and lucidity. Joel Peter Eigen explains how distracted speech, incoherent conversation, fanciful visions, and delirious ranting often surfaced during the questioning of persons deemed lunatics. Frequently, those being interrogated were unable to recognize that a question was asked, or they refused to answer it appropriately. Speech patterns might also demonstrate a lack of social etiquette. Incoherent sentences, random speech, garbled syntax, and scrambled word order could be sufficient evidence of manifest derangement.25 These are the audio patterns that Abdallah describes as emanating from Almeyda’s speech, but he is reluctant to bring her for examination by legal or medical authorities. William Pargeter recommended in 1792 that lunatics’ testimony should not be admitted in a court, and their signatures should not be used in legal transactions (134); yet periodical insanity was a legal quagmire. Lunatics could, explains John Barrell, be tried for any offenses committed during their periods of deranged mentality, and they received no immunity from prosecution during lucid intervals.26 Melancholia was recognized as a particular kind of lunacy, described by William Falconer in 1788 as arising from “an attachment of the mind to one object, concerning which the reason is defective, whilst in general it is perfect in what respects other subject.” For Falconer, melancholia occurs when one idea overpowers the rest until “at last the person becomes quite irrational in respect of this one idea, however rational [she] may be in other respects” (115). Almeyda’s speeches point to her suffering from this melancholic, partial insanity. Abdallah’s reluctance to bring her before an official inquest might also be explained by his skepticism about the validity of Almeyda’s lunacy. After all, there could be method in her madness, and her mental instability might be counterfeit or performative. Roy Porter concedes how being vaporish or hysterical were roles that women themselves adopted, sometimes to vent their feelings and to cope with life’s demands. Some women cultivated melancholy and hysteria more energetically, and they were often charged with political radicalism, religious enthusiasm, or an unsexed constitution, akin to witches in the fifteenth century or Mary Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century, for example.27 Abdallah ponders whether Almeyda’s derangement might be theatrical or whether it might well be the result of the biological destiny of her sex. While Almeyda may be showing contempt for her political situation, bound as it is to her sexual desire and to patriarchal standards for women, he senses some latent resistance in her lunacy. Female Madness: Margaret Nicholson and Mary Lamb Two high profile public cases of insanity, Margaret Nicholson’s attempted regicide and Mary Lamb’s successful matricide, rendered center stage


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questions about the physical and mental attributes of the female sex. The public was puzzled by the audacious, criminal behavior of mentally disturbed women and turned to the New Sciences for answers. Margaret Nicholson was a thirty-six-year-old London needlewoman who, much like Almeyda of Lee’s tragedy, was distressed over the loss of her livelihood and her lover. She petitioned George III more than twenty times for assistance, but she received no reply. On August 2, 1786, she went to St. James’s Palace to approach the King as his coach entered the grounds.28 The incident was recorded in John Haslam’s 1823 Sketches in Bedlam: As the King was alighting from his chariot at the garden entrance of St. James’s, a woman, very decently dressed, in the act of presenting a petition, which His Majesty was receiving with great condescension, struck a concealed knife at his breast; which happily he avoided by drawing back. As she was making a second thrust, one of the King’s footmen wrenched the knife from her hand. The King, with great temper and fortitude, exclaimed, “I am not hurt; take care of the poor woman; do not hurt her.” (19–27)29 Nicholson appeared before the Privy Council, and while the Government sought to avoid a treason trial by proving that she acted alone and in a state of mental distraction, witnesses were uncertain about her madness. Witnesses overheard her talking to herself, a conventionally recognized symptom of madness by Alexander Crichton, who characterizes female maniacs by their incessant loose-lipped chatter: “The most modest young female who it might be supposed had never heard an improper or indecent expression in their life, when unfortunately seized with this complaint seem suddenly to be inspired with the sentiments and dialect of a loose libertine” (1.181–2). Dr. Thomas Monro and a nurse examined her for six days, and during that interval her behavior became increasingly wild, her speech unintelligible. She occasionally broke out into fits of laughter. Convinced that Nicholson’s insanity was not counterfeited, Dr. Monro pronounced her disordered, and a jury declared her unfit to stand trial. The Privy Council sent Nicholson to Bethlem for the rest of her life.30 For medical men as well as the general public, the Nicholson case raised the question about whether a delusional mind, such as that of Margaret Nicholson or Queen Almeyda, could be diagnosed as insane when it was confined to one topic. In other words, could insanity be partial, and if so, how could delusions be demonstrated and proved? Nicholson’s landlord, Jonathan Fiske, who was not altogether convinced of Nicholson’s insanity, wrote, printed, and distributed a pamphlet entitled The Life and Transactions of Margaret Nicholson (1786).31 Fiske depicts Nicholson as the tragic heroine of history, portraying her as a woman who was jilted in love and who for some time considered a plot of revenge against her fiance by filing legal action against him for half of his property. Fiske reports that Nicholson saw herself as regal, and he suggests


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that she was capable of cunning, dexterity, and deception. Nicholson’s brother testified before the Privy Council that his sister had been insane for several years, and that “her sanity was occasioned by her pride” (40). In 1810, the purported Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; Being Poems Found Amongst the Paper of the Noted Female Who Attempted the Life of the King in 1786 revitalized the political and medical fervor created by Nicholson’s actions. The poems were actually written by a young Percy Bysshe Shelley and issued under Nicholson’s name while she was in Bethlem. Shelley would have known not only about Nicholson’s attempted regicide, a case that remained topical, but also would have been well acquainted with the literary outpouring of gothic and tragic accounts of insane characters, much like Queen Almeyda. The literary hoax, like Lee’s tragedy, ref lects and contributes to the period’s fascination with insanity. The opening untitled fragment of Shelley’s poem laments the inattention of the King to His people’s distress in indicting the tyrant as the source for their troubles: “Oppressors of mankind to you we owe / The baleful streams from whence these miseries f low.”32 The rage the poem expresses against the King might well be leveled at Abdallah of Lee’s tragedy: “Monarchs of earth! This is the baleful deed, / Thine are the crimes for which thy subjects bleed.” The King (George III and by extension Prince Abdallah) is driven by maddening power and political control at the expense of all others. The persona paints herself as the victim of an insane king, who wreaks fear, war, terror, and woe upon his people in order to advance “his mad career,” leadership gone mad, in other words, as indeed it had in 1788. The fragment concludes with a warning that religious enthusiasts will bring a reckoning of this insanity, for “to enthusiast ears . . . the hated cause remove,” a potentially treasonous statement like the prophecies of Richard Brothers or convictions of Queen Almeyda that could get its writer declared insane and sent to Bethlem. The other female-specific insanity case that helps us read Queen Almeyda’s madness occurred on September 21, 1796, when Mary Lamb committed matricide with a carving knife in her own home. The coroner’s court convened to establish Elizabeth Lamb’s cause of death (she had been stabbed several times in the heart) and then declared Mary insane. She was freed on the security that she would be properly treated as a lunatic. The court ruled that Mary was entirely unconscious of her actions at the time of her frenzied attack on her mother, and so, unlike Margaret Nicholson, she was not criminalized. Press reports following the incident sympathetically portrayed mother and daughter as victims of poverty.33 Charles Lamb, Mary’s brother, took her to a private madhouse and accepted full responsibility for her care. As we have seen in the case of Queen Almeyda, madness was considered by medical men as a disease to which women were especially susceptible owing to their emotions and their sexual and undisciplined natures. Bonnie Woodbery has argued that at the end of the late eighteenth


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century, management tactics of intimidation, isolation, and restraint practiced at the asylums caused a general gender-silencing of madness.34 For Woodbery, silence has surrounded Mary Lamb’s treatment, as well as her mental disorders, and she has been portrayed as an insane old maid, a useless creature.35 Like Almeyda’s incoherent speech, the language uttered by lunatics, especially women, is often dismissed, and whatever contributions it might make to a greater understanding of nervous conditions is also lost. This “day of horrors,” as it was termed by Charles Lamb in his letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge on October 3, 1796, was, according to feminist scholars, a result of Mary’s confinement and servitude to the domestic sphere.36 This subjugation was acute for women of lower classes and for women of color, as is the case with Almeyda. This subjugation was rendered acceptable by medical assessments of difference, whether that difference was registered as gender, class, or race, as Thomas Trotter’s explanations of the “savage” vividly demonstrated. Alexander Crichton’s anthropological statement about the female “savage” might aptly be applied to Mary and Almeyda: “The woman are always slaves, and are obliged to do the most laborious and meanest offices; no sense of gratitude is ever felt for the pleasures they bestow; no attempt is made to render them service, or augment their happiness . . . ” (2.306). As her life would later demonstrate, and as we will discover with Queen Almeyda, Mary Lamb was a woman of considerable intellectual capability, writing talent, and social acumen—a woman not easily contained by the strictures of her sex. While heredity may have played a role in Mary’s madness, the social, familial, and medical expectations for her as a woman certainly exasperated any predispositions toward mental illness. As a woman who also shouldered the burden of family caretaking, Sophia Lee would have found passionate understanding of the strain that might have driven Mary Lamb to impulsive murder. Female Madness: Queen Almeyda In Sophia Lee’s tragedy, Orasmyn offers little hope for Almeyda’s recovery. He is convinced that Almeyda’s bewildered mental state will culminate in permanent mania, a condition described by William Pargeter as one in which “a violently increased excitement is manifest from the increase of strength and vigour that takes place; of which have been seen many wonderful instances, even in female, before weak and delicate” (8). In Pargeter’s taxonomy of madness, the causes of mania can be short and transitory and can induce in the sufferer sudden changes (10). A puzzled Orasmyn tries to ascertain the sudden change in Almeyda and asks: “Whence sprung this unintelligible transport?” (3.2). Almeyda cryptically responds: “I have not fashion’d / The mass of horrors f loating in this brain” (3.2). The play’s male characters consequently function as physicians or Inquisition wizards,


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performing their own examinations of Almeyda’s mental health. Alonzo diagnoses Almeyda as impetuous and rash, capable of harming herself. Orasmyn diagnoses Almeyda’s wild and wandering eyes as symptoms of her having reached the depths of madness: “Of the vast host of mental ills ordain’d, / To punish hapless man, the worst has seiz’d her” (4.1). He is willing to marry a crazy woman, but he seeks to discover the cause of her madness, for he acknowledges that “a calamity so sudden, speaks / Some known, yet latent cause” (5.1). Abdallah also diagnoses Almeyda’s “astonishing delusion,” when she dreams that Alonzo has killed himself and reacts with delirious and deranged transports. “—Nature’s exhausted in her! Some dire truth / Lurks under all this mystery and frenzy” (4.1). Abdallah diagnoses Almeyda with love-sickness of the kind that can drive a woman mad or melancholic: “Yet, oft, / In woman, (mutable in all besides) / Love fixes ev’n to frenzy!” (5.1). The pseudo-medical opinions rendered here resonate with Alexander Crichton’s assessment of the state of mind called “phrenzy.” For Crichton, “phrenzy” is marked by wild, incoherent talking, sudden fits of rage or laughter, loud and discordant screams, and obstinate behavior (1.160–1). Barbara Judson finds an association of the mad woman during the 1790s with the figure of the Medusa, for the Medusa is a symbolic reminder of the refinement of physiognomy, the bristling of anatomy, the irrationalism of political tyranny, and the passions of psychosis—an association that might be applied to Almeyda, Margaret Nicholson, and Mary Lamb.37 By Act 3, Almeyda is willing to forfeit her inheritance to Abdallah to spare Alonzo, and Orasmyn predicts that Abdallah’s pressure on Almeyda will “end in madness” (3.2). Orasmyn befriends Alonzo and helps him to escape. Following Alonzo’s disappearance, Almeyda’s “reason wanders” (4.1); her grief turns from anguish to delirium, and she confesses to being affrighted with nightmares that she shudders to share. Upon Abdallah’s insistence that she describe her dream, Almeyda speaks cryptically: I spoke it unawares—but strange, strange, visions, Still swim before these eyes! —yet not Alonzo— —Tho’ him alone I sought. I came to save, —Too late, alas! I came. (4.1) Abdallah is convinced “some dire truth / Lurks under all this mystery and frenzy” (4.1). Abdallah may recognize that dreams can signal uncontrolled passions, a precursor to hysteria, a popularly held late eighteenth-century medical opinion. For Thomas Trotter, women and “savages” were more susceptible to nervous disorders, for they lacked fully developed sexual and mental capabilities. “The temper of mind with nervous people, renders them very prone to what is called reverie” (219). Trotter’s medical explanation of the causal relationship between nervous disorders and dreams aptly describes what Almeyda says in the tragedy: “Sleep disturbed and harassed


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by dreams of the most frightful sort, such as falling down precipices, suffering shipwreck, being devoured by wild beasts, are common enough on these unhappy occasions” (186). Almeyda seems to be delusional, a state of mind that, along with delirium, was of particular interest to medical professionals of late eighteenthcentury Britain. Those who suffered delusions often suffered nightmares, and those in delirium frequently heard voices perceived by no one else. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, Crichton points to the propensity of hysterics to hear voices, among other extra-sensory perceptions: All delirious people, no matter whether they be maniacs or hypochondriacs, or people in delirium of fever, or of hysteria, differ from those of a sound mind in this respect, that they have certain diseased perceptions and notions in the reality of which they firmly believe, and which consequently become motives of many actions and expressions which appear unreasonable to the rest of mankind. (1.137–38) Almeyda claims to have heard Alonzo call her in her dream, and to those who hear her words and observe her actions, she seems to be tormented by mental commotions. Almeyda’s delusions move from auditory senses to visual representations when first she mistakes Abdallah for Ramirez and then Orasmyn for Alonzo. She passionately professes her love, and Orasmyn recognizes that she cannot be in her right mind: “Of the vast host of mental ill, ordain’d / To punish hapless, man the worst has seiz’d her!” (4.1). Cunningly, Abdallah tries to force Orasmyn to marry her on the spot, while she seemingly has mistaken him for Alonzo. Abdallah tries to exploit the hysteric’s condition described by Crichton as self-absorption: “the savage, unendowed [sic] with any ideas but those which are connected with [her] own existence, and those which arise from the impressions of pleasure or pain to which [her] body is subject, [and] governed by this instinct” (2.305). Almeyda’s playacting here serves two audiences—those onstage and those reading the reactions of the onstage characters. To insure that Abdallah and Orasmyn believe that Almeyda is a maniac, she performs restless ravings and unrelieved frenzy throughout the night. Almeyda’s madness at this juncture in the play points to the shift in gendered madness that Jane Kromm has observed in visual representations of mad women from the 1780s through the first half of the nineteenth century. Kromm notes that by the end of the eighteenth century madness is equated with punishment for questionable judgment and for women who ventured outside the domestic sphere. Kromm also argues that during this period male-dominant constructions of madness were displaced by female-dominant constructions of madness, so that masculinity was disassociated from raving and frenzy and made available as visible markers


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of madness for women. Mad women were physically and verbally intrusive and disruptive. Seen as antisocial and menacing, mad women moved into the aggressive representational position previously held by men. This newly constructed gender politics of madness resulted in independent and sexually assertive mad women being associated with revolutionary ideas and politics, represented in such visual symbols as Medusa.38 To complement theories of insanity rendered by the New Sciences, the unruly woman was a “visually styled, theatrical, spectacular gender stereotype of madness.”39 Almeyda’s mental malady plays into Abdallah’s scheme to discredit her as Granada’s ruler and to justify her abdication as queen, thereby bestowing on him the crown as Regent. He is determined to have Almeyda brought before the Council and to have them declare her insane in a gesture that reiterates the process in which Margaret Nicholson was brought before the Privy Council in 1786, shortly after her attempted regicide. Abdallah relies on hyperbole in his depiction of Almeyda’s condition to a Lord of the Council, as he claims she is senseless, “Lost in frenzy— / With vacant eye, ev’n now, she gazed upon me, / But know nor voice, nor feature!” (5.1). Almeyda looks mad as well as acts mad. If the Council accepts Abdallah’s prognosis, Almeyda will be dethroned and locked away so as to pose no harm to herself or others. The Council agrees that Almeyda’s malady is habitual, but that she suffers from some distraction or buried passion that must be interrogated. In a highly theatricalized spectacle, Almeyda is brought before the Council, a woman driven mad by love and grief, a woman whose constitution is not strong enough to handle the challenges of domesticity, let alone political leadership (5.2). Like the all-male medical profession that had historically associated hysteria and female sexuality, the all-male Council will diagnose Almeyda’s mental condition in terms of the prevailing medical wisdom about female constitution. Lee’s portrayal of Almeyda’s trial or examination before the Council represents analogously how easily women who refused to perform the roles assigned to them by the patriarchy (or Uncle Abdallah), such as Mary Lamb, were diagnosed as mad, women outside the boundaries of “normative” society, a standard increasingly determined and codified by male physicians, politicians, and barristers. Abdallah behaves in accord with what Jane Kromm claims occurs during the late eighteenth-century transition in representations of insanity, where the newly constructed stereotype of the sexually aggressive mad woman, physically threatening and agitated, puts masculine authority in jeopardy.40 In a dramatic shift, Almeyda turns the tables on Abdallah, who recognizes her mental stability. Almeyda has played her spectacular part of the hysteric before the Council so well that Abdallah confesses: “There is too much of method to this frenzy. / Would I had never trusted the event!” (5.2). Even as a hysteric, Almeyda cannot be controlled by her evil uncle. In its enactment by Sarah Siddons, Almeyda’s performance surely called


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to mind other mad women performed by the Tragic Muse, especially Lady Macbeth. Lee’s script for Almeyda portrays the female hysteric as the daily newspapers were wont in sensationalized accounts, emphasizing her broken, inadequate speech and delusional images—and with just enough hint of truth to be disarming: Hold—hide me! Save me from this inward horror! —Hark! Hear ye not the murd’rers feet approaching? —That death-devoting voice! Ev’n now they come— They rush upon my love!—Oh! spare him, spare him! —Dar’st thou, inhuman?—He’s a monarch’s heir! Off, ruffians! Nor profane that gallant form— Oh! for a giant’s arm, to wrest him from you! —Now, now, the steep rocks echo with his fall, And the rude surge entombs him!—Oh, Alonzo! (5.2) Almeyda’s mad speech contrasts with the reasoned, logical sequences articulated by the characters around her. Consequently, speech determines alterity as a marker of mental derangement, not as a marker of the racial “other.” The Council is transposed by her performance, but it quickly orders her to recall her erring sense, to cease dwelling on these gloomy fictions. She provides an encore of additional ravings for her lost love. Abdallah begins to fear that the Council will detect her playacting, and he tries to guide the Council’s assessment of her mentality: “Mark, how this wildness shakes her—In such transport / She cannot yield the crown” (5.2). An insane queen has no legal standing, and, like Mary Lamb, Almeyda deploys the very mental weaknesses assigned to women in order to thwart the patriarch’s machinations that would seek to destroy her. Almeyda does resign the crown, but she refuses it to Abdallah and has him impeached for treason. Almeyda throws off her disguise and reasons with the Council, giving her justification for having played the lunatic. She explains how female behaviors seen as madness are often the result of the miserable role prescribed to them by social structures based on gender. Women are not mad; they are repressed, misunderstood, devalued. “—Alas I am not mad, but miserable!” (5.2). Because women’s voices are silenced in late Georgian England, one way for a woman to be heard is to be mad, to engage in behavior unsuitable to the patriarchal strictures that seek to contain her. Second-wave feminist Phyllis Chesler observed at the end of the twentieth century that mad women act alone, and they make no sense in terms of the rules of their cultures.41 According to Chesler, women are taught to value their own sacrifice so highly that unless they “naturally” perform it, they are deemed mad. Women are, she explains, bound by limited social tolerance for “unacceptable behavior, and there is great social and psychiatric pressure to adjust or to be judged as psychotic.”42 If a woman is doubly


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bound in a straitjacket by class, as in the cases of Margaret Nicholson and Mary Lamb, or by race, as in the case of Almeyda, then her right to reason is even more difficult to obtain. And although Almeyda tragically dies at the end of Lee’s play, she successfully manipulates her sexualized and racialized identity in order to prevent power from being transferred to her wicked uncle. Like the actual mad women of late eighteenth-century London, she subverts first the proper social role of woman and second the medicalized assumptions about madness in order to achieve agency in her situation. Almeyda, as well as Almeyda, seeks to interrogate and revise the medical accounts that would cast women as mentally, physically, and emotionally inferior to men. Juxtaposing Thomas Trotter’s remarks about nervous temperament with the play’s concluding lines is a way of seeing how the boundaries between theatre and medicine are blurred, casting doubt on the validity, the truth, and the reality of what medical science claims about mental derangement. Trotter cites the nervous system as central to all human thinking, acting, and feeling: On the whole, then, it is fair to conclude, that the pathology of these diseases is to be sought in the deranged sensations, and inverted sympathies of the GREAT SYMPATHETIC NERVES; and in the irregular action of all those organs to which it is distributed. The causes therefore, whether moral or physical, exert their inf luence on this portion of the nervous system; whose office directs the most important operations in the animal economy. (228–29) The New Science had opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box, and mental derangement would never be seen quite the same way. The New Science’s handling of madness had enormous legal repercussions shortly after Lee’s tragedy was staged in 1796. Perhaps part of the fascination with madness, its predominance in the New Sciences, its occurrences in public and political events, its inf luences on law, and its representations in drama point to the recognition of its potential in everyone, the “other” whose shades lurk beneath the skin of the most ordinary and normal. Thomas Dixon sums up the prevailing attitude about insanity as a cultural phenomena in the late Georgian period: “Madness elicited a complex response in the medical and political establishment: benevolence toward those who had lost their minds, medical tyranny over those who should get their minds back, abuse of the abnormal, and fear of the pathologies that could befall us all.”43 Notes 1. Sophia Lee, Almeyda; Queen of Granada. 1796. British Women Playwrights around 1800. http:// www.etang.umontreal.ca/bwp1800/plays/lee_queen/queen_V.html. Accessed May 18, 2008. All references are to act and scene.


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2. See, for example, my essays “Staging the Physical: Romantic Science Theatricalized in T. L. Beddoes’s The Brides’ Tragedy,” European Romantic Review 14.1 (2003): 81–95; “Bryon’s Disability and the Techno-Gothic Grotesque in The Deformed Transformed,” European Romantic Review 12.3 (Summer 2001): 301–20; and “Theatricalized Bodies and Spirits: Gothic as Performance in Romantic Drama,” Gothic Studies: An International Journal of Criticism, Theory, History, and Cultural Studies 3.2 (August 2001): 134–55. 3. Judith Barbour, “Lee, Sophia (1750–1824) and Harriet (1757–1851),” in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 581–82; Eileen Finan, with update by Steven J. Gores, “Sophia Lee,” in An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, rev. ed., ed. Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 386–87; Rebecca Garwood, “Sophia Lee (1750–1824) and Harriet Lee (1757–1851),” in Library and Early Women’s Writing (Chawton House Library, n.d.). http://www.chawton.org/library/biographies/lee.htm. Accessed July 7, 2009. 4. Ellen Donkin, Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London 1776–1829 (London: Routledge, 1995), 77–108. 5. William Pargeter, Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Reading: Printed for the Author and Sold by Smart and Cowslade; London: J. Murray; Oxford: J. Fletcher, 1792), 4. 6. Thomas Dixon, “Patients and Passions: Languages of Medicine and Emotion, 1789–1850,” in Medicine, Emothion, Disease 1700–1950, ed. Fay Bound Alberti (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 22–4. 7. Andrew T. Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 185. 8. Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 100. 9. John Beusterien, An Eye on Race: Perspectives from Theater in Imperial Spain (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 133. 10. Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 255–65. 11. Beusterien, An Eye on Race, 43–50, 109. 12. Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 146–91. 13. William Hunter, Two Introductory Lectures Delivered by William Hunter, to His Last Course of Anatomical Lectures at His Theatre in Windmill-Street (London: Printed by order of the Trustees, for J. Johnson, 1784), 70. 14. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effects It Has Produced in Europe, 1795 (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975), 520. 15. Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain, 260. 16. John Hooper, The New Spaniard, 2nd ed. (1986. New York: Penguin, 2006), 222. 17. John A. Crow, Spain: The Rood & the Flower: An Interpretation of Spain and the Spanish People, 3rd ed. (1963; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 72, 95. 18. Ibid., 72. 19. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 199–213. 20. George Cheyne, The English Malady: Or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases . . . in Three Parts . . . . (London : printed for G. Strahan, and J. Leake at Bath, 1733); Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament; Being a Practical Enquiry into the Increasing Prevalence, Prevention, and Treatment of those Diseases Commonly Called Nervous, Bilious, Stomach and Liver complaints: Indigestions, Low Spririts, Gout, &c. (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, and Orm, 1807), 153. 21. Alexander Crichton, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement: Comprehending a Concise System of Physiology and Pathology of the Human Mind, and History of the Passions and Their Effects, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1798), vol. 2, 299. 22. William Falconer, A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body (London: C. Dilly, 1788). 23. Porter, Madmen, 58. 24. Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 203.


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25. Joel Peter Eigen, Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad Doctors in the English Court (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 86–8. 26. John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 531–2. 27. Porter, Madmen, 133–50. 28. Steve Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 69–73; Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 310–11. 29. John Haslam, Sketches in Bedlam (London: Sherwood, Jones & Co., 1823). 30. Poole, The Politics of Regicide, 75–78; Sarah Burton, A Double Life: A Biography of Charles & Mary Lamb (London: Viking, 2003), 91; Macalpine and Hunter, George III and the MadBusiness, 311. 31. Jonathan Fiske, The Life and Transactions of Margaret Nicholson (London: Printed for J. Fiske, 1786), 30. 32. [Percy Bysshe Shelley], Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; being poems found amongst the paper of that noted female who attempted the life of the King in 1786 (Oxford: J. Munday, 1810), 11. 33. Burton, A Double Life, 88–103. 34. Bonnie Woodbery, “The Mad Body as the Text of Culture in the Writings of Mary Lamb,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 39.4 (Autumn 1999): 660–1. 35. Woodbery, “The Mad Body,” 662–3; “The Silence of the Lambs: Anti-Maniacal Regimes in the Writings of Mary Lamb,” Women’s Writing 5.3 (1998): 289. 36. Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975–78), vol. 1, 48. 37. Barbara Judson, “The Politics of the Medusa: Shelley’s Physiognomy of Revolution,” ELH 68 (2001): 135–45. 38. Jane E. Kromm, “The Feminization of Madness in Visual Representation,” Feminist Studies 20.3 (Autumn 1994): 507–25. 39. Ibid., 523. 40. Ibid., 540. 41. Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 56. 42. Ibid., 106–18. 43. Dixon, “Patients and Passions,” 246.


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Barbauld: “Embryo Systems and Unkindled Suns” D om eta Wie gand

In 1714, Edmund Halley (1656–1742), renowned scientist and competent navigator, urged the Royal Society to undertake an unprecedented action, not simply of scientific inquiry but of international scientific cooperation, to map the Transits of Venus. The Transits of Venus are a rare astronomical event occurring eight years apart every 109 years. During this transit, the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. If properly observed, the measurements taken would allow scientists to calculate the distance of the planets and to assess accurately the size of the solar system. Halley’s request to the Royal Society underscores the importance of this event. He claimed “the most noble [or lofty] problem of the universe [in nature] for humanity is to seek to gain knowledge of and apply observation toward the working out of the period of the transit.”1 His insistence that mapping the Transits of Venus did not constitute merely an important scientific problem but the single most important problem in all the universe was not taken as hyperbolic by his colleagues. Halley was already an aging man when he made the prediction of the coming Transits of Venus and realized their potential for scientific advancement. He knew that he would not live to see the transits of 1761 and 1768, so he worked out the difficult calculations necessary to predict the best sites for observation and set them forth in a treatise published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1714. Over the next fifty-four years, England and the international scientific community at large undertook this challenge. The event captured the imagination of the international scientific community as well as the lay population.2 James Cook’s first voyage (1768–71) to the South Seas was undertaken as a part of this task. While scientific interest may have propelled these travelers forward, popular interest of the readers back home cemented the ties of astronomy, navigation, discovery, and demystification securely to national identity.


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International cooperation between governments was needed to collect, collate, and analyze the astronomical data from points as distant as Russia, Canada, Australia, America, and Tahiti.3 The importance of the event ensured that Cook set out with the endorsement and anticipation of popular support and a sort of diplomatic and political immunity for safe passage in his travel. Perhaps most importantly, he set out under the cloak of science, a “noble cause,” which seemed to make his actions above reproach. The English admiralty was more than willing to go under this mantle of pure research—and more than willing to turn this immunity to their own advantage for commercial and military exploration. The huge expenditure of resources and national pride associated with the voyage had a deep and enduring effect on the public. The popularization of the event assured that it occupied the British imagination. Cook became the subject of popular writings, and the wonder of astronomy and navigation found its way into other popular poetry.4 Anna Barbauld’s poetry produced during this period is probably the best example of the interrelationship of astronomy, the practice of navigation and its relationship to empire, and the development of the Romantic poetic imagination. The key to this relationship lies in astronomy’s practical use as a navigational tool for the maritime nation of England and in astronomy’s grip on the poetic imagination as it appeals to the religious, infinite and complex. Recognition and comprehension of Barbauld’s use of astronomy drives to the heart of uncovering astronomy’s crucial but insufficiently explored inf luence on Romantic poetry. The seductive notion of understanding the solar system and demystifying the very heavens (as well as our own small world through exploration) take shape in the Romantic poetic imagination as the imaginative journey of the soul outward in nature and its return to the corporeal. M. H. Abrams, in his classic study “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” defines this genre of Romantic poem so: It begins with the description of a landscape visited in maturity, evokes the entire life of the poet as a protracted meditation on things past, and presents the growth of the poet’s mind as an interaction with the natural milieu by which it fostered, from which it is tragically alienated, and to which in the resolution it is restored, with a difference attributable to the intervening experiences; the poem ends at the time of its beginning.5 This thematic and narrative structure resonates throughout the Romantic period. Abrams sees the form, which comes to fruition in poets such as Coleridge and Keats, arising from the combination of local nature poems of the eighteenth century and the tradition of seventeenth-century meditative poetry. I do not dispute this line of thinking. However, scholars should note that both the imaginative theme and its historical inspiration


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are inf luenced also by the historical developments in the astronomical science of the eighteenth century. The form first takes shape in the poetry of the period, notably in Anna Barbauld’s treatment of astronomical themes engaging infinity, genesis, and narrative structure of poetical journeys of fancy. The physical journey and the intellectual calculations of the Transit of Venus confronted the mind with distances that were actual yet so large as to defy human ability to conceive of them. This challenge of discovery and its resulting association with a “noble” cause, despite the extreme complexity of execution and the exorbitant use of resources to achieve these results, became in many ways the operating metaphor and eventually the cultural paradigm of the British Colonial Empire throughout the next century. It is the human fascination with complexity transformed into the metaphor of discovery and demystification that is really at the core of these trips— both Cook’s material voyage of discovery and Barbauld’s f lights of poetic fancy. British society relied on scientific and technological advances in astronomy and navigation to colonize a large portion of the world. The metaphors of scientific exploration, their support of that colonization, and the resultant wealth of the British Empire also produced counter texts in Romantic literature. The works of Barbauld pull at something in the pathos of human existence. They center on the perplexing place of humankind when it realizes its small space among the infinite. Narrators in these poems are simultaneously enraptured with the scientific world and reason, and yet terrified by its meaning in the experience of religion and humanity. Just as Cook discovers and maps the terrestrial world to demystify the limits of the celestial in the solar system, so Barbauld’s narrators often map the celestial and the imaginative to demystify the limits of the terrestrial and the imperial. Discovering and mapping of the heavens first required a commensurate discovery and mapping of the Earth’s surface, particularly the oceans. It is clear from looking over Cook’s journals that even though the voyage was proposed by the scientific community for pure scientific research, when executed by the captain under control of the admiralty the focus was plainly not the transit. The transit is observed, of course. On June 3, 1769, Cook’s journal gives the following cursory information: “so that we had every advantage we could desire in Observing the whole of the passage of the Planet Venus over the Sun’s disk.”6 The entry for June 4, in which a sailor is punished for stealing bread, is nearly as large, and the entry for June 6, discussing venereal disease amongst the crew, is four times the size.7 Overall, Cook seems infinitely more interested in the resources of the South Sea Islands and the people than in the scientific event. Research by Mary Louise Pratt has shown that Cook was under secret orders to explore for the possibility of commercial exploitation.8 The issue of mapping, exploration, and demystifying the natural world was to serve the admiralty as well as science through the provision of star charts,


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commercial development and resources, such as grew out of the collecting and experiments of Joseph Banks. This imperial gain is evident also in the secret instructions given to Cook to continue the work of Wallis in discovering new land for colonization and military ports.9 The military and commercial efforts to map the world were inextricably linked to the scientific effort to map the solar system. The same metaphors are at the core of the greater Romantic lyric as well, with its journey of discovery and alienation. In many ways the metaphors of travel, discovery, and an engagement with complexity and infinity echoed the fascination of astronomy in Halley’s treatise; at one and the same time the problems both demystified and boggled the human mind in regard to the universe and humanity’s place in it. For a contemporary view of this fascination with astronomy and longitude in navigation, consider the engraving by William Hogarth entitled A Rake’s Progress.10 The plate shows the “rake” at the end of his life in Bedlam (Fig. 12.1). In this scene of the madhouse there are two interesting figures. An explication of the engraving explains: The next in view is one man drawing lines upon a wall, in order, if possible, to find out the longitude; and another before him, looking through a paper, by way of a telescope. By these expressive figures we are given to understand that such is the misfortune of man, that while, perhaps, the aspiring soul is pursuing some lofty and elevated conception, soaring to an uncommon pitch, and teeming with some grand discovery, the ferment often proves too strong for the feeble brain to support, and lay the whole magazine of notions and images in wild confusion.11 This engraving clearly shows the eighteenth-century obsession with the pursuits of astronomy and navigation. Unlike other figures in the engraving, the figures engaged in astronomical investigation and calculation of longitude are coupled next to each other, like the two men driven to insanity by religious contemplation, intensifying the association of navigation and astronomy. Although the dissipated rake is purportedly the subject of the engraving, the “astronomer” and “navigator” are located just behind him. This means that as the eye moves outward from the rake, it travels to these two figures. Hogarth’s work points out the danger to the human psyche of becoming obsessed with “notions and images” of infinity and discovery. Those lofty pursuits of “grand discovery” inherently hold the possibility for individual human destruction within themselves. The Romantic psyche and the notion of individual self are called into question in this schema. The pursuit of scientific concerns was certainly not a universal part of education during the period in question. Anna Barbauld had a dissenter’s education, emphasizing scientific reason and simultaneously cautioning against its misuse. Barbauld studied a wide variety of scientific material


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Figure 12.1 Plate 8 From Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1735). Reproduced by permission of Washington State University Libraries.

including astronomy and was a good friend to the important scientific figure Joseph Priestly, chemist and member of the Lunar Society. Her circle included Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, and other members of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society as well.12 Her poetry and prose show a more than passing knowledge and awareness of the state of astronomical science at the end of the eighteenth century. Not surprisingly then, her pieces contain references to the Transit of Mercury, speculation on the age and nature of the cosmos, the origin of stars, and direct references to the astronomer William Herschel. Some of these references, such as the poem “To the Baron de Stonne, Who Had Wished at the Next Transit of Mercury to find himself between Mrs. La Borde and Mrs. B [arbauld]”are mere occasions for speculation on some other matter, in this case the transience of beauty. However, several poems strive toward something more meaningful. Barbauld’s exposure to science, mathematics, and exploration, for example, is clear in the critically neglected poems “Eternity” and “To Miss Kinder on Receiving a Note Dated February 30.” In “To Miss Kinder,” the outlook is a “prophetic” view of resolving impossibilities, and the means by which this prophecy is cast requires


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the metaphors of exploration, mathematics, and astronomy.13 The poem addresses impossible utopian triumphs in its lines: The Lamb and the lion together shall play, And green Erin weave garlands to crown Castlereigh. All creeds shall be like, and all mysteries clear, Nor the Bigot shall frown, nor the Skeptic shall sneer. From the Pole to the Line, and from Spain to Cathay, The good and the wise on the throne shall bear sway. To the depths of the Ocean the plummet shall sound And the circle be squared and the longitude found; (ll. 9–16) At a utopian future date, when “all mysteries clear” (l. 11), humanity “From the Pole to the Line, and from Spain to Cathay” (l. 13) will overcome its propensity for tyranny. Of course the area outlined geographically lists largely the limits of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century exploration— from the arctic to the tropics and the west to the east. The theme of exploration in the context of mathematical and navigational difficulties continues with “To the depths of the Ocean the plummet shall sound / and the circle be squared and the longitude found” (ll. 15–16), where the “longitude found” refers to the long-standing problem of determining longitude at sea. The lines are concerned with exploration in the context of mathematical and navigational difficulties. Although James Cook’s voyages in part tested the chronometer that would prove to be the answer to calculation of longitude that so confounded the eighteenth century sailor, technological refinement along with the difficulties of astronomical calculations caused longitude to be a problem (if a far less severe one) into the nineteenth century. Navigation, and its reliance and connection to astronomy, cannot be overestimated here.14 Barbauld demonstrates unambiguously consideration of the fact that it was through accurate navigation, superior technological advances, and popular pride in the strength of the admiralty that the massive colonization, commercial exploitation, and military superiority of the British Empire were established. The development of science was directly linked to the search for a solution to the longitude problem.15 Timekeeping was necessary to establish the longitude coordinate, and no clock existed that could withstand the rough sea travel. The only other method of establishing longitude was with a series of astronomical computations involving the relationship of the moon to other celestial objects or the “fixed” stars. Even with the development and use of the chronometer, other astronomical measurements needed to be taken to ensure accurate navigational coordinates. Putting longitude in the line with enduring mathematical impossibility of “squaring the circle” reminds us of Hogarth’s depiction of the obsessed men in the sanitarium. Such effort in the face of impossible feats results in de facto alienation, both in Hogarth’s artwork and in the Romantic narratives investigating mathematics, astronomy, and exploration.


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These Romantic narratives take the abstract ideas of the contemplation of seemingly insoluble scientific problems and transform them into concrete images of the alienated Romantic narrator. The discussion of a “noble problem” such as Halley’s is a commonly recurring theme in much Romantic poetry. The poem “Eternity,” which William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft suggest was composed c.1809–10, makes several references that situate it in the midst of astronomical context.16 Importantly, “Eternity” displays the absorption with the ideas of infinity, eternity, and God that marks the incorporation of astronomical ideas with the literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: “Thou art /And he who does inhabit thee” (ll. 24–5). The vast reaches of space that engulf time in the poem are called both “womb and grave” and serve as the genesis and extinction of time itself. However, the concept of infinity is not limited to the discussion of an almighty, but includes the lines: —No line can reach To thy unfathomed depths. The reasoning sage Who can dissect a sunbeam, count the stars, And measure distant worlds, is here a child, And, humbled, drops his calculating pen. (ll. 17–21) Mankind’s representative in these lines, the “reasoning sage,” has conquered many astonishing natural problems such as the spectrum; yet, the emphasis is not on accomplishment, but rather on the recoil of the human mind from the infinitely complex natural world. The narrative structure of the poem may imaginatively situate the sage among “distant worlds” in space, but is ultimately alienated by the scope of the problem to be grasped. Here the operating metaphors of the poem include sea exploration: “No line can reach / To thy unfathomed depths” (ll. 17–18); spectrum optics in “The Reasoning sage / Who can dissect a sunbeam” (ll. 18–19); and the current astronomical projects of William Herschel, which include his work to “count the stars, / And measure distant worlds” (ll. 19–20). McCarthy and Kraft credit Pope’s Essay on Man 2:19–30 (not incorrectly); however, the projects are also more timely. Herschel worked tirelessly to count and map star systems.17 His work was instrumental in expanding the size of the known solar system, and he virtually invented the field of stellar astronomy. Additionally, “dissect the sunbeam” may refer to the work begun by Newton, but that work was extended by Herschel when he discovered infrared radiation.18 Significantly, in 1800, infrared extended the fascination with sunlight and optics beyond the visible to the invisible. Here was a case when the sage believed a problem “solved,” only to be confronted later by evidence of a deeper complexity of nature. Barbauld is clearly aware of Herschel’s prominence and importance in the world of astronomical studies.19 She ties the literary tradition of Pope to the scientific exploration of Herschel,


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and, in so doing, the long journey of human learning is pushed to the very edge of contemporary scientific knowledge. The edge of scientific knowledge is the alienation of the Romantic psyche. Barbauld, who through her friend Joseph Priestly has ties of her own to the Lunar Society, is well-informed of the state of the science. She sees the problem of Herschel’s project to map the structure of the universe, and she clearly reacts with distinctly Romantic sensibilities to the idea of the eternal and infinite: “Thou strange being, / which art and must be, yet which contradict’st / All sense, all reasoning” (ll. 12–14). Lockean empiricism does not hold all the answers, even in this new age of demystification and learning. Furthermore, as Barbauld points out, advances such as sea travel and exploration, optics, and astronomy are ultimately doomed: “On and still onward f lows the ceaseless tide, / And wrecks of empires and of worlds are born / Like atoms on its bosom” (ll. 22–4). In this expanded vision of the world, not only is the growing empire a local and insignificant achievement, but also the world that achieves this level of learning is equated to the smallest conceivable (till the early nineteenth century) bits of matter in the universe. This fascination with the infinite, as it is beheld by the late eighteenthcentury reader, comes to startling fruition in Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation.”20 It is also in this poem that we see the fully developed idea of the greater Romantic lyric, as the poet begins in the native local landscape and, through meditation, sends her soul out amongst the solar system toward the infinite, ultimately returning exhausted and inspired where she began. John M. Anderson points out elsewhere that Barbauld’s poetry both fits and reinvents the greater Romantic lyric as proposed by M. H. Abrams.21 My purpose is to show that “Summer Evening’s Meditation” itself is not only an example of the form, but that the poem and the form itself might owe a debt to the historical developments in astronomy and exploration. As such, Barbauld should certainly figure as a seminal poet in the form. “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” begins in the “damp grotto” and “unpierc’d woods” and moves outward toward the “blue concave” of evening (ll. 19, 20, 24). It is the seeming infinity of the sky and stars that point to evidence of the deity. The night sky is like a “mythic tablet” that is “inscribed” by God (l. 33). Abrams asserts that this Renaissance idea of liber creaturum and its analogic correspondence of the book in nature is to “evoke in the reader the shock of delightful discovery.”22 This idea underscores much of the correspondence of nature and deity, discovery, and alienation in the greater Romantic lyric as it develops in the nineteenth century. Christopher Miller recapitulates the idea as such: the speaker stations himself in space, wanders spatially and temporally through recollection or anticipation, and finally returns to the outer scene with a new clarity of understanding; and the cultural


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construct of Natural Supernaturalism, through which this lyric form incorporates elements of a deeply ingrained Christian mythos.23 The poem closely fits the conventions of the greater Romantic lyric, or, more precisely, the greater Romantic lyric is built on the ideas of discovery, travel, demystification, and alienation between the corporeal and scientific and the imaginative and religious. The meditation or journey begins: Where, one by one, the living eyes of heaven Awake, quick kindling o’er the face of ether One boundless blaze; ten thousand trembling fires, And dancing lustres, where th’ unsteady eye Restless and dazzled, wanders unconfin’d O’er all this field of glories: (ll. 25–30) Here the stars are lighted, “kindling” the ether. The narrator associates these objects of infinity with being “restless” and inspiring the urge to journey outward. What follows is reminiscent of Halley’s imaginative call to solve that “most noble problem in nature.” As the narrator begins her journey: / I sail, From the green borders of the peopled earth, And the pale moon, her duteous fair attendant; From solitary Mars; from the vast orb Of Jupiter, whose huge gigantic bulk Dances in ether like the lightest leaf; To the dim verge, the suburbs of the system, Where cheerless Saturn ‘midst his wat’ry moons Girt with Lucid zone, in gloomy pomp, Sits like an exil’d monarch: fearless thence I launch into trackless deeps of space. (ll. 73–82) The metaphor that begins this trek is a ship sailing, which is a common enough travel image. Fantastically, however, the voyage is one to the far reaches of the solar system. Barbauld is clearly familiar with her contemporary astronomical knowledge, including size, arrangement, and beliefs, about the moons of Saturn. The 1773 edition figures Saturn as female, which William McCarthy points out is “Her resistance to the idea of a male deity . . . consciously or unwittingly.”24 Although this “error” was corrected in later editions, the poem does figure space itself as female and fertile. Fertility is connected to the development of star systems, figuring as the climax of the demystifying journey out. McCarthy and Kraft point out that the poem was


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published in 1773, but that the “date of composition is unknown; we can say nothing about the occasion of this, one of ALB’s finest poems.”25 While we may not be able to pinpoint composition exactly, we can narrow the window. Barbauld establishes her limit to the solar system when she mentions Saturn, the farthest planet that she knew. Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in the year 1781.26 Given Barbauld’s astronomical training, her friendships with Priestly and Watson of the Lunar Society and the popular stir that Herschel’s discovery later caused, the idea that some relevant contemporary astronomical event inspires this f light of fancy, is logical. But more importantly, the entire poem is an exercise in a sailing discovery to establish the limits of the solar system, a project not unlike Cook’s voyages and the international effort to map the Transits of Venus. Given the metaphors of sailing and discovery that map and set the limits of the known solar system, the poem may likely have been composed between or shortly after the years 1768–69, when Cook was undertaking his first voyage. Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” does not stop at the edge of the solar system. The poem continues: Or is there aught beyond? What hand unseen Impels me onward thro’ the glowing orbs Of habitable nature; far remote, To the dread confines of eternal night, To solitudes of vast unpeopled space, The desarts of creation, wide and wild; Where embryo systems and unkindled suns Sleep in the womb of chaos; (ll. 90–7) This passage is exceptional in several respects. The narrator moves out beyond the confines of the planetary system in her discovery of the universe, an extraordinary imaginative act when one considers that in the eighteenth century astronomy for most practical purposes meant planetary astronomy. It is not until the final two decades of the eighteenth century that William Herschel invented the field of stellar astronomy and imagined the stars beyond the solar system as dynamic rather than “fixed.”27 As early as 1781, Herschel tried to detect stellar parallax (which is how he initially discovered Uranus), establishing movement, making the “fixed” stars part of a dynamic system. Barbauld commensurately conceives of the stars as part of a dynamic system, metaphorically being birthed by chaos in deep space. The “unkindled suns” recall those early lines of “quick kindling o’er the face of ether / One boundless blaze; ten thousand trembling fires” (ll. 26–7). These lines show new stars being “born” in the regions of space, existing in “embryo” and potential forms, so the metaphor is suggestive of growing dynamic star systems.28 This female figure of the womb of the universe places the genesis of star systems in a natural


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dynamic. The startling possibility asserts itself that if a star system is generated and birthed, it will also grow, change, move, and eventually die. I have elsewhere traced similar astronomical imagery from Coleridge to Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden.29 In part one, canto one of The Botanic Garden, lines 97–114, Darwin discusses the generation of the stars and planets from nebulous matter. The poem begins by calling on “primeval nymphs of fire,” followed by Divine Love passing the torch to chaos where: . . . the kindling ether runs, and the mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first; (ll. 105–108)30 These lines not only demonstrate a Herschelian view of a specific instance of the beginning of the universe but also are footnoted by Darwin, explicitly attributing the idea to Herschel. In his note, Darwin explains this cosmogonical begetting of the temporal celestial universe as “filling in a moment the immensity of space with light and motion” and observes of the Herschelian view that “a grander idea cannot be conceived by the mind of man.”31 The passages in Darwin date to the 1791 edition. The similarities to Barbauld’s lines—composed far earlier—are startling. The same “kindling ether” is lighted in the depths of chaos. The imagery is again a birthing one, although not from a particularly feminine point of view, with the production of planets being said to “issue” from the productive act. While the science may be Herschel’s from the 1780s, the metaphor began as Barbauld’s prior to 1773, at least ten to fifteen or so years before Herschel’s and Darwin’s work. Barbauld’s imaginative exploration of the universe may be a response to the exploratory astronomical enquiry of the journey to map the Transits of Venus. However, it also looks forward to the scientific developments and views to come. Barbauld’s speaker in “A Summer’s Evening’s Meditation” contends that she ultimately cannot continue such a f light of imagination, and, as is the common pattern in the greater Romantic lyric, the alienated soul returns where the poem begins, to the “shade, and lawns, and streams” of the earth (l. 115). The poem ends with: . . . the hour will come When all these splendors bursting on my sight Shall stand unveil’d, and to my ravished sense Unlock the glories of the world unknown. (ll. 119–22) Note that future knowledge is to “unlock the glories of the world unknown” rather than take part in the f light of fancy to the stars. The inspiration of the stars may begin the discursive journey toward demystification, but the voyage ends with the transfer of that thirst to a desire


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to unlock the earthly world. The celestial inspiration to journey outward ends then with the notion of terrestrial mastery. Terrestrial mastery in the nineteenth century plays out in the colonizing of large portions of other continents and other populations. The hope and inspiration of science and discovery that marked Cook’s voyages is ultimately reconstructed in the visions of empire. Probably no better example of this fear for Britain’s purposes exists than Barbauld’s own later poetry. For example, in her “Riddle IV,” she explores the power of science and mathematics in which she references sea exploration (l. 12) and the project to map the stars of both Northern and Southern Hemispheres, “wouldst thou know . . . the stars that Herschel views” (ll. 6–9). Again the inspiration of the celestial begins the questioning process of imagination, but continues by associating the exploration of Africa with the central characteristic of ambition and the accession of wealth: With fairy feet we compass round The pyramids’ capacious mound, And step by step ambitious climb The cloud-capt mountains’ height sublime; Riches, tho we do not use, Tis our’s to gain, and our’s to lose. (ll. 15–20) The abstract answer to the riddle of “mathematic equations” is transformed in the poem to the inspiration to undertake impossible feats, such as the project to map the heavens, the ambition of exploration, and the ultimate economic gain or loss to those who can control mathematics and science. These concerns lie beneath much of Barbauld’s poetry. Unlike the far more hopeful “To Miss Kinder,” Barbauld scrutinizes the current and future British Empire in her poem “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” castigating Britain as “an island Queen amidst thy subject seas” (l. 40).32 The poem focuses on the persecution of countries and individuals by Britain and foresees a future in which other empires, notably America, will rise and leave the British “debt to Science and the Muse unpaid” (l. 74). Time is what constitutes this shift. As Christoph Bode points out, “This indictment and this prophecy are carried across by a spatial metaphorics according to which the course of dominant civilizations runs parallel to that of the sun, from east to west.”33 The structural metaphor of the birth, growth, and death of a day recapitulates the birth, growth, and death of the empire using celestial astronomical markers. The astronomical metaphor of inspiration, exploration, discovery, commerce, decay, and finally the fall of the British Empire controls the entire poem. While Barbauld pays homage in the poem to scientists such as Newton, Humphrey Davy, Joseph Priestley, and many others, she laments that “genius now forsakes the favoured shore, / And hates, capricious, what he loved before; / Then empires fall to dust, then arts decay” (ll. 241–3).


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The poem, then, valorizes the loss of men of science and the inspiration of their production. However, the science and its inspiration to discover fuel the colonial commercial machine. Just as Edmund Halley’s vision of the use of the Transits of Venus to map the solar system inspired Cook’s voyages, the voyages themselves were used to open up exploration and subsequent colonization of nations and populations. Barbauld’s narrator addresses this in the lines: But fairest f lowers expand but to decay; The worm is in thy core, thy glories pass away; Arts, arms and wealth destroy the fruits they bring; Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring. (ll. 313–16) At the heart of the “f lower” that is the British Empire, something is destructive and ugly. The inspiration that caused the genius of arts and sciences in Britain, and hence made possible the wealth and commerce that developed, is at some level also a corrupting inf luence. This is an idea Barbauld explores elsewhere as well. In the popular children’s education series written by Barbauld and her brother John Aiken, “Evenings at Home,” the price and commensurate costs of empire are central. In one of the episodes entitled “The Ship,” a father tries to make his son understand something beyond the romance and adventure in seafaring. As Michelle Levy points out, this is done by sharing the boy’s enthusiasm for its grandeur. At the same time, however, he reminds his son of the vast knowledge—mathematical, astronomical, and geographical—needed to construct and operate such a vessel . . . . The piece ends with a respite for the father, as Charles, upon returning to their house, reminds his father of his promise to teach him longitude and latitude. Still, “The Ship” points to the need for constant parental vigilance in an age that celebrates military prowess and offers quick riches for those willing to go to sea.34 The vigilance of the parents in this episode can be generalized to the society in “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.” Science inspires; knowledge allows exploration; exploration and the martial and commercial gains it leads to are something that must inspire restraint and vigilance—or such gains lead to ruin. The valorization of British scientific developments and their practical applications to the advancement of the British Empire in the eighteenth century were to have far-reaching effects on the British psyche throughout the nineteenth century. The further development and expansion of the Empire through the tracking of the Transits of Venus, the discovery of Uranus, and the preparation of star charts, which greatly enhanced navigational accuracy, led to a new sense of time and space.


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The demystification of the cosmos peculiarly lent itself to a nineteenthcentury psyche, which at one and the same time reverenced infinity but allowed people to make the navigational advances that brought the world within reach. As their universe expanded, the world became imaginatively and practically much smaller. The outcomes from such advances fostered the mind-set that the world was not vast (in comparison with the heavens) and that the technological advances in navigation and steam power, which allowed the conquest of the world to become attainable, were actually shrinking the world space. The realizable goals of the Empire may have been attached at first to the cause of science, but soon they drove that science—all in the quest to understand the infinite through exploration. In 1859, nearly one hundred years after Cook and Barbauld took their respective voyages to map the solar system, the astronomer Mary Somerville described it thus: The very conception of Infinity by the human mind is the mark of a nature to which no limit can be prescribed. We ascribe this attribute to God, because we possess capacities and wants which only an unlimited being can fill . . . . The infinity of the human mind appears in the delight we take find in the vast scenes of nature in the immensity of the heavens and Ocean, and especially in the rush and roar of mighty winds and torrents, where amidst our deep awe a power within us yearns to respond to this omnipotence around us.—Thus God’s infinity has its image in the soul . . . . The greatness of God is the infinity of attributes which we ourselves possess. 35 This passage follows Somerville’s notes on Herschel’s discussion of stellar motion, the relationship of solar spots with terrestrial magnetism and the aurora, and the description of “tails of a comet.” First, Somerville writes “take,” replacing this verb with “find.” This attraction and demystification of infinity had, at least as a first impulse, a proprietary and imperial feel. Second, Somerville uses in her examples of the vast and immense, the “heavens” and the “Ocean.” The conf lation in the nineteenth-century mind of the heavens and the oceans must certainly be related to the metaphorical conf lation of the “noble cause” of demystifying the universe through science and demystifying the world through imperial exploration and conquest. Finally, it cannot be ignored that the passage directly observes that “we” possess the “infinity of attributes,” which suggests a deification of the British scientist. This study began with one man, Edmund Halley, and his assessment of what constituted the most “noble problem in nature.” From that one man, a scientific center and cause developed that, if not necessarily created the “noble cause” of imperialism, then certainly offered both a cloak and a metaphor that developed an expansive system of science, government, and


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colonial/commercial development. The study ends with a woman, whose ruminations on the nature of infinity show how Halley’s “problem” consumed the British scientific world. That consumption of the mind by ideas of infinite time and space were enacted in the world in a proprietary model of conquest. Barbauld, celebrated poet and thinker, sits between the Enlightenment science of Halley and the Victorian empire of Somerville. She both ref lects the enthusiasm of scientific demystification and cautions against its potential misuse in commercial gain. Notes 1. Edmund Halley (Edm. Halleio), “Methodus Singularis qua Solis Parallaxis Sive Distantia a Terra, ope Veneris intra Solem Conspiciendoe, Tuto Determinari Poterit,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 29 (1714): 454–5, JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/103085. Accessed January 1, 2005. 2. Informational broadsides were widely distributed to the public, newspaper accounts and special pamphlets prepared in an obviously sensationalized manner for the lay public, who would have had little understanding of the complex celestial mathematics or their implications. 3. The “Most Noble Problem in Nature”: The Transit of Venus in the Eighteenth Century, Exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, April 13 to September 12, 2004. 4. An example of this is Anna Seward’s “Elegy for Captain Cook,” which focuses on Cook as a fetish for human progress. The poem appeared in successive editions of her works with various publishers over the next forty years. The number of editions alone is a testament to Cook and the popularity of his voyage. 5. M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 530. 6. James Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, 4 vols., ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), vol. 1, 97. 7. Ibid., 98–9. 8. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 34. 9. J. C. Beaglehole, “Introduction” to Journals of Captain James Cook, vol. 1, cix–cx. 10. William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, in The Works of William Hogarth, ed. Rev. J. Tussler, 2 vols. (London: E. T. Brain & Co. 18[? ]) vol. 1., Plate 8. 11. Tussler, Works of William Hogarth, vol. 1, 25. 12. Aileen Fyfe, “Reading Children’s Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families,” The Historical Journal 43.2 ( June 2000): 455. 13. Anna Letitia Barbauld, “To Miss Kinder on Receiving a Note Dated February 30,” poem, February 30, 1827, Edward Everett Papers, 1675–1910, microfilm edition, 54 reels (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1972), reel 2, Massachusetts Historical Society. McCarthy and Kraft give this poem a possible date of around 1800 due to the reference to Castlereigh. See Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), editorial notes 322–3. 14. This conf lation of astronomy and navigation is easily seen when one examines important figures in either field. Edmund Halley was an astronomer by trade who also trained as a navigator in order to conduct experiments. Thomas Wright and F. W. Bessel were navigators who also advanced important astronomical theories and made specific astronomical discoveries. 15. The longitude at sea was unknown since the time the coordinate system was invented by Hipparchus, nearly two thousand years before. See, J. E. D. Williams, From Sails to Satellites: The Origin and Development of Navigational Science (Oxford and New York: Oxford University


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16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

Dometa Wiegand

Press, 1992), 94. A large reward was offered by the English government for any solution to help establish longitude at sea. Barbauld, “Eternity,” in Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. McCarthy and Kraft (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 148–9. See McCarthy and Kraft, editorial notes, 306. He also discovered the planet Uranus in 1781. Herschel posited a disc-shaped universe, as well as prepared accurate star charts of the Northern Hemisphere. William Herschel, “Experiments on the Refrangibility of the Invisible Rays of the Sun,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 90 (1800): 284–92, JSTOR http://www. jstor.org/stable/107057. Accessed June 1, 2009. Herschel related an anecdote of his introduction to the scientific men of the day in a manuscript. He had no suitable place to set up his telescope for observation, so he set it up on a piece of public land. One night Dr. Watson, who was a member of the Lunar Society, was going by and asked to look through it. Dr. Watson was so impressed by the quality of the instrument that he invited Herschel to a meeting of the literary society. Within two months the King had informed him that he was to give up music and become an astronomer (MSS M1103). Actually, his dual background as musician and amateur astronomer allowed Herschel a certain mobility of thought. As Rousseau observes, the “incomparable observer, drew a faithful picture of the firmament, but without forbidding himself such fanciful hypotheses as that of the island universes.” See Pierre Rousseau, Man’s Conquest of the Stars, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961), 206. The “island universes” refer to Herschel’s notion that stars coalesce and are “born” from nebulous matter. This idea was a novel and paradigmshifting view in the field of astronomy. Barbauld, “A Summer Evening’s Meditation,” in Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. McCarthy and Kraft (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 81–4. See John M. Anderson, “ ‘The First Fire’: Barbauld Rewrites the Greater Romantic Lyric,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 34.4 (Autumn 1994): 719–38. M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” 536. Christopher R. Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 163. William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 95. McCarthy and Kraft, eds., The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, 269. It is important to remember that Herschel is the first person outside of the classical period to discover a planet. The event captured the popular imagination and fueled pride in the British scientific ventures of the day. Michael J. Crowe, “William Herschel,” in Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Norris S. Hetherington (New York: Garland, 1993), 284. Crowe points out that Herschel is the first astronomer to take a cosmogonical approach in studies as far back as 1789. A cosmogony is important in that it looks at the universe in a dynamic and evolving way. Christopher Hitt notes that these lines recall Milton’s Paradise Lost 2.910–17. See his “Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century,” College Literature 31.3 (Summer 2004): 123–47. However, I wish to focus on the Barbauldian idea of “systems.” This is quite different from Milton’s “worlds.” These lines imply not the making of individual bodies by a “hands on” creator, but the growth by natural means, a “kindling ether” of dynamic solar systems. See my essay, “Coleridge’s ‘Web of Time’: The Herschels, the Darwins, and ‘Psalm 19,’ ” The Coleridge Bulletin 28 (Winter 2006): 91–100. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden; A Poem in Two Parts. Part I Containing, The Economy of Vegetation. Part II The Loves of the Plants with Philosophical Notes (London: J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1791). Ibid., 10. Barbauld, “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” in Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. McCarthy and Kraft (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 152–61. Christoph Bode, “Ad fonts! Remarks on the Temporalization of Space in Hemans (1829), Bruce (1790), and Barbauld (1812),” Romanticism 10.1 (2004): 76. Michelle Levy, “A Radical Education of Evenings at Home,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 19.1–2 (Fall 2006): 139–40.


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35. Manuscript source for letters, diaries, day journals, autobiographical manuscripts, and scientific works and notes for Mary Somerville. Papers used are contained in three categories in the finding aid: MSAU 1 or 2 for “Mary Somerville Autobiography,” MSBY for “Mary Somerville, Byron,” and “Mary Somerville, Cobb Power.” Miscellaneous notebooks, notes, etc. often boxed with MSAU or letters. MSS: MSAU 4, Box 6.


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CH A P T E R

13

Grant: Gender, Genre, and Cultural Analysis Pam Pe r kin s

In August 1811, as she was on the verge of publishing her Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, the Scottish writer Anne Grant (1755–1838) received an uncompromisingly critical letter about the collection from her friend and sometime editor, George Thomson, whom she had asked to read the proofs.1 It was her fourth book—or her fifth if one counts a slightly revised edition of her 1803 Poems on Various Subjects—so she was an experienced author, something that must have made Thomson’s hostility to the project a particularly disappointing surprise. Although he had admired Letters from the Mountains, her 1806 quasi-autobiographical account of the Highland culture in which she had spent much of her adult life, Thomson thought the new work entirely unsuited to her abilities. “I cannot help regretting extremely,” Thomson wrote, that you ever forsook that form of writing, so well suited to display your powers, and to hide your defects. In epistolary writing you may be as excursive, and miscellaneous, as digressive as you please: —but in Essays of great length, the Public expect a more methodical arrangement, and clearer connection than is suited to your poetical genius and irregular habits of writing. (Thomson f.201v)2 While one may not agree with Thomson’s criticism, certainly his observations invite attention, particularly the manner in which he distinguishes between “poetical” writing and intellectual analysis; he assumes unquestioningly that Grant’s account of Highland culture belongs in the world of poetry and the belles lettres rather than offering a “rational theory of human nature” or a serious contribution to the “history of man” (Thomson f.203). Yet Grant, who had already given a personal, subjective account of the Highlands in Letters from the Mountains, was attempting a much more ambitious form of cultural analysis in the new book; regardless as to whether


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she succeeded, Thomson’s earnest attempts to persuade her that she had mistaken both her task and her abilities point to a significant difference between the two works. In Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, Grant’s aim was, at least in part, to provide what we might now call an ethnographic study of a culture that she and many of her contemporaries believed to be both unique and on the verge of eradication. As such, it was indeed intended as a serious contribution to “the history of man,” rather than a mere record of private experience. Yet, as Thomson’s reaction suggests, in attempting serious cultural analysis, Grant was confronted with the problem of establishing her credibility and authority as an observer of culture rather than a transcriber, however charming and able, of private, individual life. In their contrasting aims, styles, and receptions, Letters from the Mountains and Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders suggest the difficulties faced by women writers of the early nineteenth century in trying to move beyond stereotypically female genres into the world of the social sciences. Anne Grant is little known today, but during her relatively brief publishing career—she published her first book in 1803 and her last (except for a posthumous collection of her letters) in 1814—she was both popular and fairly critically successful. Her literary debut was a collection of poems published by subscription in order to scrape together a little extra money following the death of her clergyman husband, who had been unable to leave her and their surviving eight children much else than a small church pension. Although mainly a collection of occasional verse, the volume was anchored by an ambitious long poem about what Grant presented as the dying culture of the Scottish Highlands where she had lived for her entire married life. The daughter of two Highlanders, Grant herself had been born in Glasgow and spent her childhood in colonial America, where her father, a soldier, had been stationed. She saw the Highlands for the first time in 1773, at the age of seventeen, when her father was posted to Fort Augustus on his return from the American colonies. As the wife of the minister of the remote Highland parish of Laggan, Grant both learned Gaelic and settled happily into a way of life that she later insisted was unlike anything else in Britain and entirely incomprehensible to any outsider who lacked such deep, long-term experience of it. Her second book, which was by far her most successful, was a collection of letters that she had sent to her friends in Britain over the three decades during the period she lived in Fort Augustus and Laggan, which described the strange new world in which she found herself. Letters from the Mountains is simultaneously an epistolary self-portrait and an eyewitness account of a society very different from that of mainstream Britain, yet is in many ways a conventionally “feminine” book, in which Grant frames her social commentary and cultural analysis as passing observations gleaned in the course of going about daily life in her private, domestic world. Even so, her wider interest in social practice comes through clearly enough as she contrasts,


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for example, the simple faith of her Highland dairymaid with fashionable skepticism or as she ref lects on her own “primitive” or “savage” tastes.3 Letters from the Mountains thus offers a picture of a supposedly exotic way of life, miraculously, if tenuously, preserved in a remote corner of Britain, from the perspective of a modern British woman who has had a highly unusual opportunity to make an extended and detailed first-hand study of it. Yet Grant’s contemporaries seemed to see Letters from the Mountains less as a work of cultural analysis than as an evocative, poetic glimpse of a vanishing Eden, in which the voice of the writer harmonizes with her subject to create an idealized vision of a virtuous, simple mode of life presumed to be long since lost to more modern Britons. This point about reception is emphasized by the number of early readers for whom admiration of the book was tied in with their ability to believe in the worth and virtue of the writer. Maria, Lady Stanley, was representative of a number of her contemporaries who, when she recommended the book to a friend, added “I shall not be happy till I know something of the authoress, and I shall be quite wretched if I can discern she has any unpleasant qualities.”4 Her reaction was shared by a group of London women who approached George Chalmers, a Scottish antiquarian and civil servant, to see if he could track down the author so that they could learn more about her. Although the book had been published anonymously, finding a Mrs. G—, widow of the former minister of Laggan, was not a taxing chore. The women, Chalmers reported to Grant, “have been captivated by your Mountain Letters, which certainly possess the power of touching the heart” and were particularly keen to hear more about her children; later, he “congratulate[d]” her again on the “conquest which your mountain letters have made over the hearts of all ages, and professions.”5 As his emphasis on the book’s power over the heart makes clear, the letters were not being read as a source of objective information on Scottish culture, but for their sentimental impact. Any instruction provided by the book, in this view, was moral, not scientific, an argument that is reinforced by the charitable activity to which the women who approached Chalmers were moved, as they contributed both time and money to advancing Grant’s career, so that she could better support her family. More directly, John Hatsell, a Member of Parliament to whom Grant had sent copies of the book, proclaimed that he was so impressed “by the deserv’d contempt of the little and trivial vanities of the Great World, and those pure principles of virtue and religion, which are everywhere conspicuous” in her writing that “I have never risen from the perusal of these Volumes, without feeling myself a happier, and better Man.”6 Moved to charitable action by the book, he subscribed fifty pounds over the cover price for it. The sense that the character of the writer was of more interest than the “exotic” culture she was describing was also echoed and reinforced by a number of the original reviewers. A writer in The Eclectic Review argued that the main pleasure presented by the letters is the picture they offer of an individual mind, in which the lively, youthful fancies of the early


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letters gradually give way to “a still deeper tone of that fascinating tenderness which pervades every part of the volumes.” 7 Rather more inf luentially, Francis Jeffrey argued in The Edinburgh Review that Letters from the Mountains succeeded because it managed what would seem to be the paradoxical task of conveying an artless voice in artful language, exhibiting “that bright bloom of the mind, which so seldom endures till the age of authorship.”8 The point here, of course, is not just that Grant was able to evoke strong emotions in her readers, but rather that those emotions were focused on the author herself. The society she describes becomes, in effect, a ref lection and an intensifier of her own character; ethnography fades, intentionally or not, into autobiography. Given Grant’s insistence that what she was publishing were her own private letters, this focus on the character of the writer might not be entirely surprising. Yet letters, as eighteenth-century readers and critics knew very well, were not solely private documents; indeed, the f lexibility of the epistolary mode made it particularly valuable to those who were attempting to provide instruction in an accessible medium, as scholars such as Mary Favret and, more recently, Clare Brant have inf luentially demonstrated. Women, in particular, were able to use letters to enable their literary and intellectual contributions to reach beyond their domestic circle; by the time that Grant was publishing, epistolarity had been used by a number of women to straddle the divide between public and private.9 In a number of cases, such correspondence enabled women to participate in scientific or philosophical exchanges with distinguished male contemporaries, using an ostensibly private medium as the basis of a public exchange of ideas. While women’s scientific correspondence of this sort might be most immediately associated with the salon culture of the European Enlightenment, there were numerous British counterparts to such famous continental women of letters as Emilie Du Châtelet, from Damaris Masham and Mary Astell at one end of the century to Mary Somerville at the other. As a result, Grant’s readers would have been as familiar with the concept of the published letter as a vehicle for the exploration of ideas or for the presentation of information as they were with the idea of the letter as a dramatization of the self. Even more immediately relevant to Grant’s project is the very large number of travelers’ letters that were published in the eighteenth century. While it is difficult to generalize about the form, given the very wide range of approaches and voices used by individual travelers, most of these collections are built on the assumption that there is at least some interest on the part of both reader and writer in the unfamiliar landscape or culture in which the writer is placed. Even if the interest of many travel letters of this era lies in “the ways self inscribed itself into that world of changeable differences encountered through travel,” it was still generally the case that “[o]bservation, information, and opinion in travel letters operate like arguments.”10 Reader expectations of this genre would involve at least as much cultural commentary as self-revelation.


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This focus on “observation [and] information” in eighteenth-century epistolary travels makes it all the more striking that interest in Letters from the Mountains was directed so strongly toward Grant herself, especially as there is no question that Grant is both explicitly and implicitly arguing a thesis about cultural progress throughout the book. Perhaps the clearest statement of this thesis comes early in the third volume, as she declares her conviction that “the paths that lead from nature and simplicity . . . do not indeed tend to happiness” (3:8), but that once one has started down those paths, there is no turning back: We endeavour to return to those habits which long distant recollection has endeared, which poetical description has decked with beauties innumerable, but which are incapable of being combined and enjoyed together. Estranged from nature, enervated by luxury, and softened by false delicacy, we set about the experiment; we find the cottage quiet indeed, but smoky, confined, and deficient in a thousand things on which we are become too dependant. The narrow bounds imprison us, the low roof crushes, and scanty light which struggles in through the little casement, bewilders us. The inhabitants we find innocent, hospitable, and willing to please; but we are shocked with their vulgar language, disgusted with their uncouth manners, and tired with the sameness to which their narrow circle of ideas confines their conversation; and we are unable either to descend to their topics, or bring them up to ours; we find dull uniformity and listless languor in the valley, whose culture does not employ, and whose produce does not enrich us. (3:9–10) As this passage makes evident, Grant is keenly interested in the ways in which culture shapes individual experience of the world. Even more important is the emphasis she places on the intellectual complexity of the cultural position she claims for herself, as she lives in and, in the eyes of her readers at least, embodies a world of nature and simplicity. At the same time, however, she is able to transcend the “narrow circle of ideas” that she insists usually characterizes such a life. Far from presenting herself as the artless voice from the wilderness admired by Jeffrey, Grant attempts to create for herself a f lexible and sophisticated relationship with the culture she describes. Her contemporaries were unable or unwilling to see that sophistication might be attributed, at least in part, to the way that Grant treats her literary aims in the prefatory material of Letters from the Mountains. Even as she makes clear that she is not attempting a straightforward self-portrait, she states unequivocally that the letters can offer only “broken and interrupted sketches” of her life, and that in the interests (presumably) of privacy she has cut out “those parts which contained most of narrative and anecdote” (1:vii). She also rhetorically aligns herself with the Highland culture she describes, so that the gap between self and society nearly vanishes. In


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particular, when she summarizes her project as an attempt to represent “the tastes, the feelings, and habits of those, who, in the secret shades of privacy, cultivate the simple duties and kindly affections of domestic life” (1:viii), it is not immediately clear whether she is thinking of her own life or those of the Highland villagers she observes. This blurring of the distinction between author and subject, as Grant uses the rhetoric of domestic femininity to describe Highland society, may be a deliberate literary tactic on her part. If it interfered with the reception of her book as a work of serious cultural analysis, all the evidence suggests that it also contributed to the immediate financial and critical success of the Letters. Yet as Thomson’s criticism of the Essays suggests, there might also have been a longer-term critical cost. When, in the later book, Grant attempted to shift her focus from unselfconscious self-revelation to more detached cultural analysis, Thomson seemed unwilling or unable to recognize that she was attempting something very different in style and approach from her early work, despite the similarities in subject matter. This failure on Thomson’s part to recognize what Grant was doing is all the more striking given that in the Essays Grant “was working within a well-established matrix of proto-ethnographic eighteenth-century genres (travel-writing, translation, and Scottish historiography),”11 and doing so in a manner that demonstrates that her goal is to share cultural knowledge as well as to offer her readers a vision of moral virtue. In the Essays, Grant offers not merely a personal mediation on her experience of life in a simpler world, but rather a foray into the territory of conjectural history—a phrase coined by the moral philosopher Dugald Stewart to describe the school of historical, and what might now be called anthropological, studies that assumed that all “primitive” societies were more or less the same. Arguing that human society progresses in a more or less predictable line from nomadic hunter-gatherers through pastoralism and then on to agricultural and modern commercial society,12 Stewart and his older contemporaries, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, suggested that the prehistoric past can be reconstructed, in some measure, by a study of surviving “primitive” peoples, an idea that fuelled the late eighteenthcentury fascination with the Aboriginal cultures of North America and the newly encountered Pacific Islanders, among others.13 This was an interest that Grant shared. The Essays were not in fact her first attempt at writing conjectural history, as she had touched on the subject of Native American culture and its implications, for an understanding of the European societies that were displacing it, in her 1808 Memoirs of an American Lady, an odd and ambitious mixture of biography, memoir, and history.14 Yet her more serious and sustained exploration of the subject was unquestionably in the Essays, which she opens by staking out her own claims to original, important scholarship. She argues that the British scholars investigating the history of humankind were pointlessly “bewilder[ing] themselves” by writing learned disquisitions about “the ancient Scythians and modern Tartars, the Belgae, the Gauls, the Goths,


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the more modern Danes . . . names of which I know very little, and they cannot know much,” even though “the remains of the most ancient, unmingled and original people in Europe” were living more or less on their doorstep (1:7). Her insistence that the study of Highland culture is a vital contribution to the human sciences and that the neglect of that study by her contemporaries is a particularly egregious failure of the Enlightenment project is clear and unambiguous: Whoever has observed the very great pains taken by men of capacious mind and enlightened curiosity, to trace the progress of mind in remote and uncivilized countries . . . must wonder at our countrymen in particular. Their diligent search of what is remote, and in a great measure unattainable in the history of mind and manners, and total neglect of what is obvious and within reach, nay, concealed in the recesses of their native country,—is not merely strange, but altogether unaccountable . . . . Why has not this wide field for speculation been explored. Why have the lovers of useful knowledge neglected to dig into a mine so rich in science; even that most valuable science, the knowledge of human nature. (1.6–8) If Grant is too modest to state directly that she intends to remedy that neglect, the implication is clear enough. Yet there are two important caveats to any attempt to claim that the Essays is making an overlooked contribution to Enlightenment explorations of the human sciences in a way that Letters was not. First, and more simplistically, it is easy to demonstrate that Grant is slightly overstating her own originality, as the Highlanders were by no means entirely overlooked in the proto-ethnographic literature of the Scottish Enlightenment. To take just one of many possible examples to the contrary, Henry Home, Lord Kames, turns repeatedly to the Highlanders in his Sketches of the History of Man, bolstering his arguments about matters such as Spartan attitudes toward sexuality, by reference to contemporary Highland practices.15 That said, no less an authority than Francis Jeffrey agreed with Grant that “the well informed part of the English public know much more of the people of Otaheite or Ceylon, than they do of the people of Badenoch or Lochaber.”16 More importantly, even in Essays, Grant at times seems ambivalent about the intellectual range of her work, and, as in Letters, she opens with a self-deprecating address to the reader, in which she explains that the Essays are “merely the overf lowings of a mind filled with retrospective views of the past” (1:vii), an image that is evocative of the sort of casually feminized disorder that Thomson claims delighted him in her letters while dismaying him in the more intellectually ambitious essays. Grant insists that the essays are not “the result of labour or study” but rather are merely a continuation of the project that she began in Letters from the Mountains (1:iii–iv), a point emphasized by her decision to fill out


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the second volume with more of her letters. In doing so, Grant modestly undercuts what might have been perceived as unfeminine ambition. At the same time, however, Grant makes it clear that this book is not just a reworking of her previous one, and in the process she implies that the self-deprecation of the preface is a gesture of authorial decorum that should not be taken too seriously. In the second essay, for example, Grant modifies her polite feminine hesitancy to admit to any sort of sustained or serious study by insisting that the Highlanders can be understood only by somebody thoroughly well-versed in their “very peculiar and difficult language,” an accomplishment that requires making the study of it “a principal object” of attention and considerable “time and pains” (1:34). Even if she does not claim at this point that she has taken such “pains,” she emphasizes elsewhere in the book both her f luency in the language and the fact that she learned it only as an adult (2:338). Moreover, even as Grant glances back to Letters from the Mountains by switching genre halfway through the second volume of the Essays, she complicates the “artless” persona of the earlier work by featuring letters to Thomson in which she explicitly discusses her literary craft and ambitions. She might be deprecating about women’s achievements; for example, she writes in one letter, “Certainly a female writer is an incongruous thing!” (2:291), but her moments of modesty are balanced by her simultaneous insistence that her work is designed for serious readers, “the lovers of truth and nature” (2:297). Given Grant’s overt desire to reach an audience looking for more than casual entertainment, the techniques by which she attempts to establish an authoritative voice, even while clinging to the then-familiar rhetoric of feminine self-deprecation, become particularly interesting. In a significant choice of metaphor, she describes both the Letters and the Essays as a form of artwork, something that might seem to downplay the intellectual aims of the latter, as she presents herself as a dabbler in the fine arts, a more conventionally ladylike occupation than scientific observation. Yet at the same time, Grant emphasizes that she sees her second book as a more complex and fully developed picture of the world than the first, as she expands upon her metaphoric link between written and visual art. In contrast to the earlier poems and letters, which were merely “casual sketches,” she explains that the Essays offer a “fully delineated” picture of Highland culture (1:iii), an image that undercuts her claims that they are more or less literally unstudied. In addition, by choosing to represent the difference between the two books as being like that between a sketch and a formal, finished artwork, Grant reinforces the sense that she sees the Essays not just as much more ambitious but also as much less conventionally feminine than the Letters. Although Richard C. Sha has argued that the genre of the prose sketch in itself offered women writers a way of pushing beyond conventionally feminine modes of writing,17 Grant suggests in one of the letters that she includes toward the end of the Essays an unambiguously gendered division


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between the facile pleasures offered by quick, casually pretty pictures and the sterner demands of detailed, accurate drawings. Writing to Thomson in 1802, Grant explains that her then unpublished long poem about the Highlands will not be popular with most women readers because her writing is shaped by “that severe and masculine truth of taste which rejects superf luous ornament.” And she concludes: Arcadian images would please more; but verisimilitude will please longer. Misses will not put my book in their work-bag; but, as longevity is the portion of truth, it may work its way into light, and lie on the tables of their grandsons; and this not as a fine poem, but a correct drawing. (2:270–2) By establishing a direct link between “correct drawing” and “masculine” taste, this passage implicitly underscores Grant’s interest in the “fully delineated” Essays, moving beyond the more stereotypically feminine style of writing that her original readers saw her as undertaking in Letters from the Mountains. It is not only by adopting a voice that is metaphorically aligned with masculine tastes and interests that Grant implicitly distances her authorial persona in the Essays from the feminized Highland world portrayed in the Letters. She also does so by representing herself and her audience as adult observers of a childlike culture. Of course, as she imagines cultural difference in temporal terms, she exemplifies what twentieth- and twentyfirst-century critics have identified as one of the more troubling aspects of Enlightenment work in the human sciences. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian, for one, has explored in detail the sociopolitical implications of the “denial of coevalness,” or the imposition of a form of “temporal asymmetry” between an observer and the culture being observed.18 More recently, Roxann Wheeler has argued that the work of the conjectural historians led to a concept of racialized difference, as those living in more “primitive” cultures are regarded as “other,” not because of skin color but rather because of latent assumptions that the level of cultural development limits individual options for full maturation.19 In effect, such people are presented as being in a state of culturally engrained and more or less permanent childhood. This is an idea that is latent in Letters from the Mountains. Grant’s insistence that anyone who has experienced modern, metropolitan life is permanently barred from the enjoyment of pastoral simplicity can obviously be read as a miniature allegory of the loss of childhood innocence. Yet in that book she also presents herself as being part of that “primitive” world, a child of nature or a wild Highland girl, a reading borne out by Jeffrey’s praise of the collection for “breath[ing] . . . a spirit of youth” that “seldom endures” into maturity.20 Grant, in a 1791 letter to a longtime friend of her own age, differentiates herself from her correspondent by insisting that her “tastes were more primitive than ever” and thereby asserts that


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her own move into individual adulthood had not carried her away from the cultural innocence of the people among whom she lived (2:182). This blurring of herself and her subject is, again, much less evident in the Essays, as she is definite there in drawing a line between herself as observer and the Highlanders as the passive, childlike subjects of her intellectual scrutiny. “We contemplate nations in this state, with a feeling like that which every unspoilt mind derives from the innocent prattle of such children as are not confined in artificial trammels,” she writes in her first essay (1:5). Later she argues that Highlanders’ beliefs in spirits and second sight—their “blind eagerness to know more of the future and invisible”—is “no more the subject of contemptuous ridicule, than these imitative sports of our children, from which we draw a pleasing presage of their future capacity” (2:64). Whatever reservations twenty-first-century readers might have about this metaphorical representation of an entire culture as childlike, Grant, far from sharing them, aligns herself with an imagined “modern,” adult reader in a way that she had not done in the earlier volume. Even if Grant’s work shares some of what we now see as the blind spots of her era, the main point here is not to call attention to the gaps between her assumptions and our own, but rather to emphasize the way in which her adoption of the then conventional child/adult metaphor shapes the construction of her authorial persona. Through this metaphor, Grant is implicitly focusing attention not on her own distance from mainstream society, as she does in the Letters, but rather on her qualifications as an observer, something that is essential to her claim that she offers in her work a unique insight into a culture that is of vital interest to any student of the human sciences. Where complications arise in this attempt to establish her authority is not in her unquestioning absorption of the structures of the protoethnographic thought of her day, but rather in her simultaneous insistence that she is not in any stable or permanent way a member of the intellectual, “adult” audience that she is addressing. Her reason for doing so is straightforward enough. A complete outsider, she insists vigorously and repeatedly, would be unqualified to offer a detailed, scientific analysis of Highland culture, as he or she would lack both the language and proper access to the private life of the community. Yet she also argues that a person raised in the Highland culture would be equally unable to give a fair and objective account of it, even—or perhaps especially—if he had mastered the scholarly discourse of eighteenth-century intellectual society. The problem, according to Grant, is that a Highlander who has been educated in the manner of a modern British gentleman would be prevented by a mixture of pride and shame from revealing the “lurking enthusiasm and cherished credulity of the . . . mountaineer” (1:36). In what might initially seem a decidedly jarring image, she compares Highlanders established in mainstream British society to “the Jewish converts in Portugal, to whom the manners of their ancestors were a subject of secret and endeared veneration” but who, to ensure their place in


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the dominant culture, had to “speak of [those customs] with contempt” (1:34–5).21 Yet, even if this metaphor of forced conversion overstates British hostility to traditional Highland culture, especially given that at the time Grant was writing there was something of a fad for literary representations of the Highlands,22 it still complicates in interesting ways the earlier metaphor of Highlanders as the embodiment of cultural childhood. While allowing that at least some individual Highlanders can be adult participants in the larger culture, Grant insists that they can only do so by convincing others that they have left their birth culture entirely behind and no longer see it as part of their “adult” cultural identity. According to Grant, assimilation comes at the cost of literal self-denial, thus making it impossible for the assimilated individual to speak about his birth culture fairly without losing his place in the culture of his adoption (1:34–5). The masculine pronoun is appropriate in summarizing Grant’s arguments about the impossibility of a Highlander’s producing a disinterested and accurate account of his own society, as she assumes that the only type of Highlander who could adapt successfully enough to contemporary society to “pass” in it would be an educated gentleman. Passing from the Highland world into that of modern Britain thus involves not only a move from metaphorical childhood to adulthood, but also a move from a feminine into a masculine world. The idea that Celtic cultures (and other minority cultures) are feminized in the writing of this era is, of course, so familiar as to be trite; what makes Grant’s version of this trope a little unusual is that she implies that a writer who has stepped out of that “feminine” world into the “masculine” one of the Enlightenment public sphere is no longer fully capable of writing about it. The result is an audacious paradox: while an understanding of the Highlands is essential to Enlightenment study of the human sciences, a complete and unquestioning embrace of those sciences makes such a study impossible. In effect, at the dawning of ethnography as a discipline, Grant denies not just the validity but even the possibility of engaging in straightforward ethnographic research and moving toward what later critics (following Mary Louise Pratt) have called auto-ethnography, a term “refer[ring] to instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms.”23 In auto-ethnography, the writer mediates between two worlds, claiming affinities with both. As James Buzard has demonstrated in a recent survey of the debates about the ethnographic gaze, this is a technique that underlies some of the foundational works of anthropology. He points out that writers as varied in their approaches and levels of professional training as Mary Kingsley and Bronislaw Malinowski have argued that having minds that are, for one reason or another, “akin to that of the savage” gives them a special insight into the non-Western peoples they are observing, which other Europeans would lack.24 That is the tactic that Anne Grant uses. In a quotation cited by almost all the critics who have worked on her accounts of the Highlands, Grant


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refers to herself in the Essays as “not absolutely a native nor entirely a stranger” and therefore able to “add . . . the observant curiosity of the latter to the facilities of enquiry enjoyed by the former” (1:10).25 Yet the subject position that Grant constructs for herself here goes beyond that of having merely lived for some years in the Highlands. She merges the sort of private, domestic role that she claimed in the prefatory material of Letters from the Mountains with the public role of the scientific observer. She is at once domiciled in the culture that she is writing about and yet detached from it, and the metaphors that she uses to write about Highland versus British culture underpin her claims to mediate between the two worlds. She is neither a child attempting to speak to a mysterious adult world that she cannot fully understand, nor a public man, forced to “convert” in order to be granted credibility. By a careful rhetorical move, she asserts her ability to speak fully about and from a world that, as she has insisted, otherwise defies accurate representation. Even while recognizing the cleverness of her rhetoric, one encounters a problem with accepting unquestioningly Grant’s assertion that she can be an authoritative voice on the subject of Highland culture because she is neither truly part of nor entirely separate from the world that she is observing. She failed to convince a sizeable proportion of her contemporary readers that she was in fact able to step outside the feminized, childlike world of the Highlander portrayed in her books. That is not to say that they necessarily disliked the Essays; even Thomson, after all, found the content interesting and merely attacked Grant’s attempt to step back from and analyze her own experience. Yet in order to write as an auto-ethnographer, Grant needed to maintain at least some distance between herself and the Highland culture about which she was writing, and so it is both significant and unsurprising that her attempt to do so was exactly the point that Thomson found most objectionable. His main advice to Grant was that she should recognize her limitations and forego the intellectual ambitions of essay for the casual f luidity of the letter; he urged her to reconstruct the book by “mould[ing] the Essays into Letters, making half a dozen out of an Essay, and addressing them to some one of your distinguished English friends, who may be supposed desirous of an acquaintance with with [sic] the character and manner of the Highlanders” (f.27v). On one level, of course, Thomson here advises that Grant use the genre of the letter in much the same way as so many of her female contemporaries—that is, as a form of generic sleight of hand, in which formal instruction or argument is politely disguised as a form of social exchange. In this case, however, the revision would be considerably more than cosmetic since it would return her to the more conventionally feminine literary persona that she had constructed in Letters from the Mountains and that she was trying to reinvent in the Essays. In rewriting her essays as letters, Grant would again be merging herself with her subject, recasting herself as an embodiment of a fading culture rather than as the collector and interpreter of data. On another level, however,


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and in anachronistic terminology, Thomson advises Grant to represent herself as more of a native informant rather than the anthropological participant/observer figure she presents herself as in her first two essays. Thomson was also not alone in this reluctance to concede Grant the right of speaking in a detached, public voice about the culture in which she lived. In a posthumous survey of Grant’s work, the American scholar Andrews Norton expressed similar doubts about Grant’s ability to write in the public voice of the ethnographer. “Her talents,” he writes decisively, did not lie in writing for the public. For this . . . she wanted the requisite habits of mind, and especially the power of regarding herself as an individual personally unknown, addressing readers unknown to herself. Her strong good sense, her correct taste, her warm and disinterested feelings, her imagination, and her power of describing clearly and truly scenes and characters, appear to advantage only when she is pouring out her mind to her private friends.26 No matter how much Grant attempted to establish her own claims to speak as an observer of her society, her readers insisted upon seeing her as an unselfconscious embodiment of it, a vessel for “pouring” out ideas and impressions for others to enjoy and ref lect upon rather than as an active interpreter of the world around her. Perhaps even more devastating for Grant’s claim to speak as an observer of, as well as a participant in, her society was that when the book was praised it tended to be admired as a compendium or an embodiment of Highland cultural practices rather than as a study of them. Thomson rather dryly conceded that even if the book failed in its main intellectual aims, it would at least “delight all true Highlanders” (f.204), praise that dismisses it as an example of the sort of cultural myth-making that Grant was attempting to analyze. He was not alone in reading the book this way. An 1814 novel attributed to Christian Johnstone, The Saxon and the Gael, used the Essays as the basis of its picture of Highland society, but downplayed the claims of that “recent beautiful work” to be taken seriously as cultural analysis by noting rather condescendingly that Grant’s “imagination has painted her native prejudices in colours so delightfully warm, that it is difficult to say whether her philosophy or her first faith be strongest, and whether her work would not have been better entitled, ‘An Apology for the Second Sight,’ &c. &c. &c.”27 Gallingly enough, perhaps, what Johnstone (or whoever wrote the novel) does here is to dismiss Grant in precisely the same terms that Grant uses to deny that somebody who was fully a native could write about the culture. Surprisingly, it was Francis Jeffrey, despite the decidedly mixed tone of his Edinburgh Review article on the Essays, who seemed most ready to recognize Grant’s intellectual ambitions. Noting that “to illustrate the character and manners of men in remote situations, and in the earlier stages of civilization, may be said to be the object of all her writings,”28


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he places her book in the intellectual milieu of the Enlightenment human sciences, a place to which she had vigorously laid claim, and he quotes approvingly a number of her comments on matters such as social progress and the economics of emigration. Yet, Jeffrey notwithstanding, the book never made it into the canon of Enlightenment works of conjectural history or cultural studies, and while Grant herself remained known for her work on the Highlands, it was the Letters, not the Essays, that enabled her in the later decades of the nineteenth century to maintain her place in the literary world. In many ways, the greater success of the earlier book is natural enough in that Grant’s letters are lively and compelling, and the combination of autobiography, travel narrative, and moral ref lection gives them a narrative sophistication that effectively underpins the apparently artless voice of the writer. Yet it is important that in recognizing the literary virtues of the Letters we do not underestimate the ambition or the achievement of the Essays and see them, as did so many of Grant’s contemporaries, as a failed attempt to repeat an earlier success. The proto-ethnographic content of the Essays makes them very different, and in many ways a much more ambitious work, a point emphasized by the difficulty that Grant had in establishing a narrative voice that was sufficiently detached from her earlier persona to be taken seriously as the source of vital cultural information. Whatever we might think of the content of Grant’s study of the Highlanders—and the critiques of the assumptions underlying conjectural history by Fabian, Wheeler, and others—the Essays remain of interest as an example of the methods by which a woman of Grant’s generation might attempt to frame a contribution to the social sciences. No less importantly, the failure of many of Grant’s readers to recognize what she was attempting suggests the difficulties encountered by such women when they attempt to move beyond a conventionally feminine mode of conveying information, such as the ostensibly private letter, to a more ambitious and direct exploration of the social sciences. Notes 1. Anne Grant, Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland. 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811). The Essays will hereafter be cited in text by volume and page number. 2. Unpublished letters and extracts in the Edinburgh University Library, by special permission of the Edinburgh University Press, Special Collections Department. 3. Anne Grant, Letters from the Mountains, 2nd ed., 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1807), vol. 2, 265–6. This reference is to a letter dated July 1793, in which Grant tells a friend the story of her dairy-maid, who believes unquestioningly in a tale of a talking cow. While sharing her friend’s presumed amusement at the maid’s naïveté, Grant insists that such “credulity” is preferable to world-weary skepticism. The Letters will hereafter be cited in text by volume and page number. 4. Jane Adeane, ed., The Early Married Life of Maria Josepha Lady Stanley (London: Longman & Co., 1899), 290. The letter quoted is dated April 1807. 5. George Chalmers, Unpublished Letters to Anne Grant, Edinburgh University Library, La.II.357. See f. 116–116v, f.127.


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6. John Hatsell, Unpublished Letters to Anne Grant, Edinburgh University Library, La.II.357. See 109v. 7. “Review of Letters from the Mountains, Being the Real Correspondence of a Lady . . . ,” The Eclectic Review 3.2 (December 1807): 1066. 8. Francis Jeffrey, “Review of Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders,” The Edinburgh Review 18. xxxvi (August 1811): 481. 9. John Brewer discusses the manipulation of “the public and private valences of letter writing” in eighteenth-century Britain (12). See “This, That, and the Other: Public, Social, and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformations of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 1–21. See also Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) on women and late-eighteenth century epistolarity. See Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) for an informative general survey of the mode. 10. Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture, 245. 11. Ina Ferris, “Translation from the Borders: Encounter and Recalcitrance in Waverley and ClanAlbin,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1997): 203. 12. See Grant, Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, vol. 2, 24–6 for her summary of the hunter-gatherer and pastoral stages of society. Essay IX also focuses on the “Progress of the Faculties in the infancy of Knowledge,” vol. 2, 72. 13. For an overview of this theory of history, see Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Murray Pittock, “Historiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 258–79; and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), especially 181–8. 14. In her later work on the Highlands, Grant explicitly compares the Mohawks whom she encountered in childhood to the Highlanders she lived among as an adult. The idea that Highlanders were more or less culturally equivalent to Native Americans was not unique to Grant; perhaps the most famous example of it appears in Walter Scott’s 1827 short story “The Two Drovers,” which ends with a comparison of the two cultures. See my “Paradises Lost: Anne Grant and Late Eighteenth-Century Idealizations of America,” Early American Literature 40 (2005): 315–40 for a discussion of Grant’s use of the four-stage model of history in the Memoirs. 15. See, for example, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 4 vols. (1774. London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell; and Edinburgh: William Creech, 1788), vol. 1, 378. 16. Jeffrey, “Review of Essays,” 483. 17. Richard C. Sha, “Expanding the Limits of Feminine Writing: The Prose Sketches of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Helen Maria Williams,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 194–206. 18. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25–35. These are concepts that are used throughout the book but are first presented in detail in the pages cited here. 19. Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 181– 90, 192. 20. Ibid., 480. 21. Grant gives no indication here of whom—if anybody—she has in mind, but the most prominent Highlander among the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers was Adam Ferguson, author of An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Grant seems indebted to Ferguson’s arguments on “The History of Rude Nations,” although he focuses here on the ancient Celts and the modern North Americans for his examples. 22. In addition to the very obvious case of Scott’s Waverley (1814), a major cultural phenomenon, see Christian Johnstone’s Clan-Albin (1815), which features a satiric account of a preening, self-absorbed landowner who adopts Highland fashion in England purely for effect, and Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1815). 23. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.


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24. James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 33. The phrase quoted is one that Buzard cites from Mary Kingsley in a note (also on 33), and his focus in the passage is on Malinowski and the complexities built into the Participant/Observer figure in anthropology in one of the foundational texts of the discipline. 25. For a discussion of Grant’s construction of her insider/outsider position, see Kenneth McNeil, especially pages 150–62. Betty Haglund also touches on this issue in her article on Grant’s travels. See “‘Not Absolutely a Native nor Entirely a Stranger,’ The Journeys of Anne Grant,” Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. Glen Hooper and Tim Young (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 41–54. Ferris, “Translation from the Borders,” 204, uses Grant’s construction of an “unstable and equivocal space” for “intercultural” observation as the basis for her reading of cultural translation in two major novels of the period, Waverley and Clan-Albin. 26. Andrews Norton, “Review of Memoir and Letters,” North American Review 60 (1845): 148. 27. See Johnstone, The Saxon and the Gael, 4 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg; and Edinburgh: T. Dick, 1814), vol. 4, 62. Grant revealed in a letter she wrote late in life to Walter Scott that she was a believer in second sight. Her deep concern that Scott not reveal the fact until after her death indicates her desire to maintain intellectual credibility as an observer rather than an exemplar of Highland culture. The undated letter was probably written around 1828, and is owned by the National Library of Scotland (Ms.3907, ff.350–52). 28. Jeffrey, “Review of Essays,” 482.


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Manuscript Sources Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Austin, Texas: Manuscript sources for letters, diaries, day journals, and scientific works for William Frederick Herschel. Papers are given under three categories in the finding aid: M for “Miscellaneous,” L for “Letters,” W for “Works.” MSS: M1103 Bodleian Library Oxford, UK: Manuscript source for letters, diaries, day journals, autobiographical manuscripts, and scientific works and notes for Mary Somerville. Papers used are contained in three categories in the finding aid: MSAU 1 or 2 for “Mary Somerville Autobiography,” MSBY for “Mary Somerville, Byron,” and “Mary Somerville, Cobb Power.” Miscellaneous notebooks, notes, etc. often boxed with MSAU or letters. MSS: MSAU 4, Box 6. Primary Sources Allestree, Richard. The Ladies Calling: In Two Parts. By the Author of The Whole Duty of Man, The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety, and The Gentlemans Calling. Oxford: Printed at the Theatre, 1673. http://anglicanhistory.org/women/calling/wives.html. Accessed June 25, 2008. Andrews, Miles Peter, and Frederick Reynolds. Better Late than Never. A Comedy in Five Acts. As Performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury–Lane. London: Printed for J. Ridgway, 1790. Anonymous. “Cecilia, a Novel.” English Review ( January 1783): 14–16. ———. “Mrs. D’Arblay’s Camilla.” Monthly Review (October 1796): 156–63. ———. “Review of Letters from the Mountains, Being the Real Correspondence of a Lady.” The Eclectic Review3.2 (December 1807): 1064–71. ———. “Vaucanson.” The Gentleman’s Magazine 261.1873 ( January 1887): 39–47. ———. “Vaucanson, the Celebrated Mechanician and Constructor of Automata.” Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction 39.996 (March 1840): 182. ———. “Vaucanson’s Automata.” Leisure Hour 396 ( July 1859): 478–9. Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. Trans. with Intro. and Notes by H. C. Lawson-Tancred. London and New York: Penguin, 1991.


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I N DE X

Note: Page numbers in italics denote illustrations and page numbers in bold denote entire chapters. Abrams, M. H., 202, 208, 215, 216 Académie française, 134 Académie royale des sciences, 6, 21, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 145 alchemy/alchemical, 61, 71, 73 Alker, Sharon, 11–12, 65–83 Allestree, Richard Gentleman’s Calling, 110 Ladies Calling, 110, 112 Alter, Robert, 150, 163 Alton, David A., 127, 131 anatomy, 71 Anderson, John M., 208, 216 animal magnetism, 13, 165–81 anthropology/anthropological, 193, 224, 227, 229, 231, 234 archeus, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 60, 74 Aristotle, 47, 49, 52, 137, 138 Art of Rhetoric, 138, 140, 143, 146 and dream theory, 40 Politics, 109–10, 112 Astell, Mary, 4–5, 12, 22, 99–112, 113, 118, 222 Christian Religion, 99–112 passim Letters Concerning the Love of God, 108, 112 Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 2–3, 4, 14, 99–112, 114, 117, 124, 129, 130 astronomy, 201–17 atheism, 29, 32, 37, 45, 66 Athenian Mercury, 6, 123 Atherton, Margaret, 111, 112 atomism, 29–48 passim Austen, Jane, 158 automata, 13, 148–64 passim

Backscheider, Paula, 199 Bacon, Francis, 1, 19, 20, 23, 24, 86, 88, 97, 113, 114–15 Masculine Birth of Time, 19, 26 New Atlantis, 24–5, 96 New Organon, 96, 113, 115, 129 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 13, 201–17 “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” 212–13, 216 “Eternity,” 205, 207–8, 216 “Evenings at Home,” 213 “Riddle IV,” 212 “Summer Evening’s Meditation,” 208–10, 211–12, 216 “To Miss Kinder,” 205–6, 215 “To the Baron de Stonne,” 205 Barbour, Reid, 32, 45 Barnard, Teresa, 14 Barrell, John, 190, 200 Bassi, Laura, 22, 27 Behn, Aphra, 12, 68, 85–98, 129 “Adventure of the Black Lady,” 88, 89, 97 A Discovery of New Worlds, 25, 28 “Dumb Virgin,” 68 Dutch Lover, 124, 130 Emperor of the Moon, 87 History of the Nun, 89–91, 95, 97 Oroonoko, 89, 91, 92, 93–4, 95, 97, 98, 158 Sir Patient Fancy, 116–17, 129–30 “Unfortunate Bride,” 68 “Unfortunate Happy Lady,” 88, 89, 97 Benedict, Barbara, 128, 129, 130, 131 Berré, Pierre-Yon, 172 Le docteurs moderns, 165, 178, 180


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Index

Beusterien John, 185, 199 Bode, Christoph, 212, 216 body, 38, 40, 42, 44, 103, 108 and culture, 187 and mind, 31, 34, 35, 36, 41, 42, 75, 78, 99, 100, 103, 107, 109, 111, 167, 184, 186 and soul, 30, 35, 38, 39, 71, 77, 110 and spirit, 30, 40, 67, 78 Bøerhaave, Hermann, 135, 137, 140, 141, 142 Elementa chemiae, 138, 139, 143–4, 146 Bohun, Ralph, 47, 61 Bourlin, Antoine Jean Le Médicin malgré tout le monde, 165, 172, 178 Boyle, Deborah, 61, 63, 99–112 Boyle, Robert, 23, 49, 51, 60, 61, 71, 73, 76, 86, 87, 91, 92, 96, 115, 123–4, 137, 138, 141 A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things, 45 Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours, 27, 86–7 New Experiments, 86 Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects, 97 Skeptical Chemist, 86 Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, 19–20, 27 Brant, Clare, 222, 233 Breteuil, Gabriel Émilie Le Tonnelier de, Marquise Du Châtelet, 9, 12–13, 18, 25, 133–46, 136, 222 Discours sur le bonheur, 145 Dissertation sur la nature et propagation du feu, 13, 133–46 Institutions de physique, 138, 145 Broad, Jacqueline, 47–63 Burney, Frances, Madame D’Arblay, 13, 147–64 Camilla, 148, 158, 160, 161, 162 Cecilia, 148, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162 Evelina, 151, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162 The Wanderer, 158 Burwick, Frederick L., 13, 165–81 Butler, Douglas R., 125, 130 Cabbala, 12, 78 cabbalism/cabbalist, 71, 77

Calvinism, 29 camera obscura, 147, 148 Cantor, Geoffrey, 144, 145, 146 Carter, Elizabeth Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explained, 9, 21 Cartesian/Cartesianism, 12, 26, 30, 36, 78, 83, 99–112, 134, 146 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 2, 9, 11, 17, 18, 19, 22, 30, 42, 47–63, 48, 65, 83, 87, 97, 118 Description of a New World called a Blazing World, 25–6, 28, 62 Grounds of Natural Philosophy, 25, 59, 63 Observations on Experimental Philosophy, 25, 62 Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 2, 14 Philosophical Letters, 47–63 World’s Olio, 48, 51, 59, 62, 63, 117, 130 Centlivre, Susanna, 12, 113–31 The Basset Table, 12, 113–31 A Bold Stroke for a Wife, 12, 113–31 Charleton, Walter, 32, 47, 49, 51, 62 chemistry, 4, 71, 133 Chesler, Phyllis, 197, 200 Cheyne, George English Malady, 188, 199 Chudleigh, Lady Mary, 118 clock/clockwork/watch, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 206 Clodius, Frederick, 73, 82 Clowes, William, 71, 81 Clucas, Stephen, 62, 83, 86, 96, 98 Coker, Matthew, 75, 82 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 118, 130, 168, 179, 193, 202, 211 Conway, Lady Anne, Viscountess of Conway, 9, 11, 12, 29–30, 65–83 Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 12, 65–83 Cook, Harold J., 71, 81 Cook, James [Captain], 13, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 212, 213, 214, 215 Copernican System/theory, 9, 10, 24, 15, 51 corpuscles/corpuscularian theory, 41, 42 Couser, G. Thomas, 82 Cowley, Abraham “To the Royal Society,” 4, 15, 19, 115, 129


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Index Creech, Thomas, 87 Crichton, Alexander An Inquiry into the Nature, 184, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194, 195, 199 Crisp, Samuel, 149, 156, 157, 161, 163, 164 Cudworth, Ralph, 83 curiosity, 113, 114, 116 cabinet, 114 female, 9, 12, 113, 114, 117 masculine, 114 Darwin, Erasmus, 205 Botanic Garden, 211, 216 Davis, Leonard J., 67, 80, 81, 83 Dear, Peter, 6, 14, 15, 145 Debus, Allen, 50, 62, 81 Defoe, Daniel, 97 An Essay Upon Projects, 3, 14 Deluna, D. N., 118, 128, 130 Dennis, John, 116 True Character of Mr. Pope, 80 De Quehen, Hugh, 33, 45 Dering, Sir Edward, 82 Descartes, René, 1, 9, 11, 12, 30, 49, 66, 79, 86, 99–112, 116, 137, 145 Dioptriques, 135, 138 Discourse on Method, 101, 103, 110 Meditations, 99, 102, 103 Passions of the Soul, 104 Principles of Philosophy, 101, 102, 103, 138 desire(s), 34, 35, 37, 38, 91, 96, 107, 108, 152, 168, 169 and birth defects, 56, 57, 58 for knowledge/education, 3, 37, 117, 118, 144, 211–12 sexual, 39, 40, 68, 115, 172, 185, 190 for truth, 116 women’s, 57, 58 Deutsch, Helen, 69, 81 Dickie, Simon, 67, 80 Dixon, Thomas, 184, 198, 199, 200 Donne, John, 66 Doody, Margaret, 161, 163, 164 Drake, Judith Essay in Defense of the Female Sex, 117, 130 dream(s), 31, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 44, 50, 52, 114, 169, 194, 195 -consciousness, 31, 36 day dreams, 169 -inspired philosophy, 55

257

Drury Lane, 13 Dryden, John, 32 dualism, 31, 40, 78, 83, 99, 109, 110 Eclectic Review, 221, 233 Edgeworth, Maria Letters for Literary Ladies, 1, 3, 4, 14, 15 Edinburgh Review, 222, 231, 233, 234 education and marriage, 2 masculine, 2, 133 women’s, 2, 3–4, 5, 117, 118, 124, 125 effeminate/effeminacy, 188, 189 Egerton, Sarah Fyge, 116 Poems on Several Occasions, 123–4, 130 Egerton, William, 118–19, 130 Egyptians, 66 Eigen, Joel Peter, 190, 200 electricity, 142, 167, 169, 172 Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, 30, 103–4, 112 English Review, 148, 159, 162, 164 Epicurian/Epicurianism, 26, 29–48 passim Epicurus, 32, 34, 43 eternity, 207 ethnography, 14, 220, 222, 229, 231 auto-ethnography, 229, 230 proto-ethnography/ethnographic, 224, 225, 228, 232 Euler, Leonard Letters . . . to a German Princess, 20, 27 Evelyn, John, 37, 45, 61 Evelyn, Mary, 47, 61 Fabian, Johannes, 127, 232, 233 faith, 77, 101, 221 and reason, 38, 53, 100, 101, 106, 108, 129 and “science,” 12, 101, 106, 111, 112 faith healing, see spiritual healing Falconer, William Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions, 189, 190, 199 Fara, Patricia, 97, 179 Farquhar, George, 116 Favret, Mary, 222, 233 Female Spectator, 6 Female Tatler, 113, 114, 129 Ferguson, Adam, 224, 233 Ferris, Ina, 233, 234


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Index

Fielding, Henry, 150, 151, 157, 163 Joseph Andrews, 156, 164 Tom Jones, 151 Fifth Monarchy, 44 Filmerianism, 42 Finch, Anne Kingsmill, Countess of Winchelsea Selected Poems, 3, 15 Findlen, Paula, 15, 27 Flamsteed, John, 22, 23 Flamsteed, Margaret, 23, 130 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 1, 9, 10, 25, 87, 118–19 Oeuvres diverses, 7, 8 Frankenstein, see Shelley, Mary Franklin, Allan, 145, 146 Franklin, Rosalind, 18 Galen, 53, 70, 74 see also medicine Galilei, Galileo, 9, 17, 24, 27, 49, 145 Garth, Samuel The Dispensary, 119, 122, 130 Gassendi, Pierre, 32 Gell, Robert, 75 Genesis, 11, 29–48 passim Gentleman’s Magazine, 163 Gevirtz, Karen Bloom, 85–98 Gillespie, Stuart, 32, 45, 46 Gilman, Sander, 186, 187, 199 Glanvill, Joseph, 49 Vanity of Dogmatizing, 115, 129 Glisson, Francis, 51 Godwin, William, 168, 169 Goldberg, Jonathan, 30, 39, 45 Golinski, Jan V., 86, 96, 145 Goreau, Angeline, 97 Grant, Anne, 14, 219–34 Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders, 219–34 Letters from the Mountains, 219–34 Memoirs of an American Lady, 224 Poems on Various Subjects, 219 Great Plague (1665–6), 51 Greatrakes, Valentine, 75, 76, 82 Greeks, 66 Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 15 Halley, Edmund, 13, 201, 204, 207, 209, 213, 214, 215

Hammond, Paul, 41–2, 45, 46 Harkness, Deborah E., 15 Harris, Francis, 62 Harris, John, 123 Harrison, Peter, 114, 129 Hartlib, Samuel, 73 Harvey, A. D., 181 Harvey, William, 9, 49, 72, 89, 91, 92, 98 On the Motion of the Heart and Blood, 87, 88, 97 Harwood, John T., 87, 88, 96, 97 Hayden, Judy, 1–15, 113–31 Haywood, Eliza, 68 The Female Spectator, 6 Helmont, Francis Mercury van, 11, 50, 65–8 Spirit of Diseases, 81, 83 Helmont, Jan Baptiste van, 49, 72, 73, 82 Oriatrike, or Physick Refined, 11, 47–63 hermetic/hermeticism, 71, 76 Herschel, Caroline, 9, 23 Herschel, William, 9, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216 Hippocrates, 40, 71 Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 21, 47, 49, 66, 79, 87, 89 Hobbesian, 26, 78 Hobby, Elaine, 129 Hodgson, James, 123 Hogarth, William, 204 A Rake’s Progress, 204, 205, 206, 215 Homberg, William, 137, 141 Essais de chimie, 138 homicide, 183 matricide, 184, 190, 192, 193 regicide, 184, 186, 190, 192, 196 Hooke, Robert, 23, 87, 89, 91, 92 Micrographia, 85, 87, 88, 92, 97, 98 Hopkins, David, 44, 46 Horrocks, Jeremiah, 23 Hues, Charles, 73–4 Hunter, Henry, 20 Hunter, J. Paul, 96, 97, 150, 163, 164 Hunter, Lynette, 23, 27, 62, 86, 96, 130 Hunter, Michael, 123, 130, 131 Hunter, William Two Introductory Lectures, 187, 199 Hutchinson, Lucy, 29–46 Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, 29


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Index On the Principles of the Christian Religion, 33 Order and Disorder, 11, 29–46 Translation of De rerum natura, 29–46 Hutton, Sarah, 11, 17–28, 62, 67, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 96, 130 hylozoism, 78 hypnotism, see animal magnetism hysteria/hysteric(s), 186, 189, 190, 195, 196, 197 iatrophysics, 71 Iliff, Rob, 27, 118, 130 imagination, 74, 80, 148, 167, 168 and birthmarks and birth defects, 57, 58, 60 poetic, 202 and reality, 165 and Romantic poetry, 13–14, 202 scientific, 25–6 as suggestion, 168 and the womb, 56 women’s, 57, 58, 117 and writing, 25 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 13, 165–81, 166 Animal Magnetism, 165–81 infinite/infinity, 39, 202, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 214, 215 creatures, 79 and God, 77, 105 nature, 52 James, Susan, 28, 62 Jeffrey, Francis, 222, 223, 225, 227, 231, 232, 233, 234 Johnson, Samuel, 150, 151, 161, 163 Judson, Barbara, 194, 200 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 18, 19, 20, 26, 63, 97 Kenner, Hugh, 148, 162, 163, 164 Kenney, E. J., 40, 45 Kenrick, William Whole Duty of a Woman, 114, 129 Kepler, Johannes, 24 Somnium, 24 Kinnaird, Joan, 101, 111 Kirch, Gottfried, 23 knowledge, 5, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 30, 33, 50, 85, 86, 89, 99, 102, 103, 105, 109, 114, 118, 123, 127, 129,

259

137–8, 144, 156, 157, 201, 205, 208, 211, 224, 225 acquired by reason, 100, 106 and the body, 30, 34, 37, 40, 44, 65, 68, 70, 108 communication of, 3, 6, 87 and dreams, 36, 52 and education, 2, 3–4, 9, 30, 117, 118, 123, 124, 213 and faith, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106–7, 113, 129 household, 2, 3–4, 5, 23, 70, 86 infallible, 53 intuitive, 100 and the senses, 99, 101, 108, 140 Tree of, 2, 155 Kraft, Elizabeth, 207, 209, 215, 216 Kroll, Richard, 1, 14 Kromm, Jane, 195, 196, 200 Ladies’ Diary, 6, 123 Ladies Magazine, 6 Ladies’ Mercury, 6 Ladies Monthly Museum, 6 Lamb, Charles, 192, 193 Lamb, Mary, 184, 185, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198 language, 41, 43, 65, 66, 67, 78, 79, 100, 106, 110, 124, 125, 145, 148, 156, 159, 170, 178, 187, 189, 222, 223, 226, 228 epistolary, 157 of madness, 193 of medicine, 69, 71, 76 of poetry, 40 science, 1, 19, 24, 87, 96, 137 spiritual, 42 Lee, Sophie, 13, 183–200 Almeyda: Queen of Granda, 13, 183–200 Leibniz, Gottfried Willhelm, 79 Leisure Hour, 163 Lémery, Nicholas, 137, 141 Cours de chimie, 138 Lennox, Charlotte, 158 Lettice, Lady, Viscountess Falkland, 118 libertinism, 29, 33, 44 Lindemann, Mary, 70, 81 Lloyd, David, 75, 82 Lloyd, Genevieve, 19, 26, 111, 112 Lock, Frederick P., 116, 118, 128, 129, 130 Locke, David, 92, 98


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260

Index

Locke, John, 21, 27, 89, 92, 98, 99, 112, 140, 208 Correspondence, 21, 27 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 100, 101, 111, 134 longitude, 206, 215–16 Lovelace, Ada, 18 Lucretius, 33, 87 De rerum natura, 29–48 Lunar Society, 205, 208, 210, 216 machine(s), 100, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155 human as, 71, 100, 110, 116, 150, 152, 157, 160, 162 imagination as, 148 Maclean, Ian, 63 madness, 116, 183–200 men and, 49, 53, 58, 183–200 passim and race, 183–200 passim and the womb, 47–63 passim women and, 49, 53, 55, 58–9, 60, 183–200 passim magnet/magnetism, 165–81 passim Mainauduc, John Boniot de, 169, 180 Makin, Bathsua, 118 An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, 3–4, 15, 117, 130 Mandeville, Bernard Fable of the Bees, 133, 134, 135, 145 Mareschal, Louis-Nicolas, 165, 172, 178 marriage, 39, 40 Masham, Damaris, 21, 27, 110, 112, 222 Masson, David, 151, 163 materialism/materialist, 30, 31, 34, 37, 43, 44, 47, 52 classical, 44 Lucretian, 33 scientific, 32 mathematics, 12, 100, 102, 104, 108, 118, 123, 133, 137, 138, 205, 206, 212 matter and spirit, 71, 77 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, 138, 146 Discours sur les differentes figures des astres, 146 Mayerne, Sir Theodore Turquet de, 73 McCarthy, William, 207, 209, 215, 216 McKeon, Michael, 5, 14, 163, 164

mechanism, 42, 71, 72, 88 medicine, 11–12, 23, 32, 34, 40, 44, 47–63 passim, 65–83 passim alternative, 61, 74, 75, 76 Aristotlean-Galenic tradition, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 60, 72, 73 and attitudes toward women, 50 and charlatanry, 13, 74, 167, 173, 178 and chemistry, 49, 50, 51, 61, 72, 73 female culture of, 69–70 Galenic humoral theory, 51, 52, 59, 60, 61, 70, 71, 81 and gender, 185, 186, 193 and the mind, 74 and race, 185, 186, 193, 198 and religion, 73 and resistance, 186 Medusa, 194, 196 melancholia, 190 Merchant, Carolyn, 15, 18, 20, 26 Mesmer, F. A., 165–81 passim mesmerism, see animal magnetism microscope, 92, 119, 122, 148, 156, 157 Miller, Christopher, 208, 216 Miller, Shannon, 42, 45 Milling, Jane, 128 Milton, John Paradise Lost, 42, 113–14, 129, 216 mind, 40, 107, 108, 124, 167, 169, 184, 190, 194 delusion/delusional, 191, 195 and senses, 134 and soul, 43 and spirit, 37 women’s, 55, 61 Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, 163 Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) Les Femmes Savantes, 4 Le médicine malgré lui, 172 Mommertz, Monika, 23, 27 monstrous births, 49, 54, 57, 58 Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 23 Monthly Review, 148, 162 Moor (s), 183–200 passim More, Hannah, 169, 180 More, Henry, 11, 49, 65–83 passim Munro, Hugh, 33, 45 Mussenbroek, Petrus van, 135, 137, 141 Elementa physicae, 138


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Index Nature, 114, 115, 123, 124, 141, 142 and artifice, 165 human, 156 women’s, 189, 192, 194, 197 Natuurkundig Genootshap für Dames, 22 navigation, 201–17 passim Nedham, Marchamont, 51 Nelson, Holly Faith, 65–83 nerves/nervous, 189, 194 disorders, 188, 189, 194 temperament, 188, 198 Newton, Sir Isaac, 1, 60, 135, 137, 139, 142, 207 Opticks, 23, 25, 98, 138, 141, 143, 146 Principia, 24, 27, 87, 92, 97, 98, 134 Nicholson, Margaret, 184, 185, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 80, 81 Nolle, Heinrich Systema Medicinae, 76 Norbrook, David, 29, 44, 45 Norris, John, 108, 112 North, Mary, 118 Nussbaum, Felicity, 65, 81 observer, see witness Oldenburg, Henry, 19, 123 Oldfield, Anne, 118–19 O’Neill, Eileen, 15, 62 Osler, Margaret, 27, 63, 96 Ovid Metamorphoses, 41 Pagel, Walter, 51, 62, 63 Paracelsus, 50, 52, 53, 54, 71, 74, 82 Pargeter, William Observations on Maniacal Disorders, 184, 190, 193, 199 Park, Julie, 147–64 Park, Katherine, 26, 45 Parrish, Susan Scott, 15, 114, 129 passion(s), 31, 37, 55, 99, 104, 108, 134, 188, 196 and dreams, 194 and medicine, 183 women’s, 185, 189 Patin, Henri, 37 patriarchalism, 42 patriarchy, 196, 197 Pearson, Jacqueline, 95, 98, 128, 129

261

Pender, Stephen, 66, 80, 81 Perkins, Pam, 14, 219–34 Phillips, Patricia, 15 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 6, 119, 123, 130, 138, 215, 216, 201 physics, 20, 24, 118, 133, 137, 145, 172 physiology, 71 piety, 29, 31, 68, 73 Pix, Mary, 116 Platonists/Platonism, 35, 36 neo-Platonism, 43 Plutarch, 55 Polzonetti, Pierpaolo, 180 Poole, Steve, 200 Pope, Alexander, 67, 207 Porter, Roy, 72, 81, 145, 179, 180, 181, 184, 189, 190, 199, 200 Pratt, Mary Louise, 203, 215, 229, 233 Priestly, Joseph, 205, 208, 210, 212 Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, see Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia prophecy, 41 Ptolomaic System, 24 public and private, 5, 100, 109–10, 111, 184, 186, 193, 220, 222 Pulter, Hester, 17 Purinton, Marjean D., 13–14, 181 Quaker(s)/Quakerism, 76, 79, 82, 125 race, 2, 39, 115, 185, 186, 193, 197–8 Radcliffe, Ann, 158 Radet, Jean Baptiste, 165, 172, 178, 180 Ranters, 79 Ray, John, 115 reason, 19, 25, 38, 47, 49, 52, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106, 111, 133, 137, 142, 143, 144, 174, 203, 204, 207, 208 and the body, 108 and education, 30 and experience, 49, 53 faith and, 38, 53, 99, 100, 106, 108, 129 inductive, 138, 140 knowledge and, 13 and the passions, 39, 101, 188 scientific, 204 and the senses, 47, 140 Rees, Emma L. E., 42, 46, 97 Regency Crisis (1788–9), 184, 186, 187


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262

Index

Reiss, Timothy, 86, 96 republicanism, 29 rhetoric, 4, 13, 230 of correspondence, 54 of domestic femininity, 224, 225 and science, 1, 19, 22–3, 85, 87, 91, 92, 96, 97, 98, 134–46 passim Richardson, Samuel, 147, 150, 151, 163 Ridgley, Thomas, 70, 72, 73 Riskin, Jessica, 152, 163 Roccati, Cristina, 22, 27 Rogers, John, 63 Rousseau, Pierre, 216 Rowe, Nicholas, 116 Royal College of Physicians, 87 Royal Society, 1, 2, 6, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 85, 87, 113, 114, 119, 122–3, 126, 138, 201 Saglia, Diego, 185, 187, 199 Sarasohn, Lisa T., 26, 63 Sawday, Jonathan, 46, 73, 81 Schaffer, Simon, 92, 96, 98, 145 Schiebinger, Londa, 5, 14, 15, 26, 27, 45 Schrijvers, P. H., 40, 45 science fiction, 24–5 Scull, Andrew, 184, 199 self, 12, 33–4, 35, 37, 39, 43, 85–98, 149, 150, 157, 158, 204, 222, 229 and society, 184, 223 Semler, Liam, 62, 63 senses, 25, 35–6, 38, 40, 41, 42, 66, 95, 99, 103, 104, 107, 108, 112, 140, 175, 208, 211 auditory, 195 and the body, 35, 108 and images, 41 and intellect, 12 and the mind, 107, 108, 134 and reason, 47, 63 and sleep, 40, 41 and thought, 36 sexuality, 30, 34, 36, 39, 225 female, 196 ‘sGravesande, Willem Jacob, 135, 141 Shadwell, Thomas The Virtuoso, 87 Shakespeare, William Richard III, 67, 80 Shapin, Steven, 69, 80, 81, 92, 98, 145

Shapiro, Barbara J., 145, 163 Shapiro, Lisa, 112 Shelley, Mary, 17, 149, 184 Frankenstein, 11, 17, 18, 162, 164, 183, 241 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 192, 200 Sherrer, Grace B., 80, 82 Siddons, Sarah, 13, 183, 185, 196 Smith, Adam, 224 Smith, Charlotte, 13 Snider, Alvin, 29–46 Snyder, Sharon L., 80, 82, 83 social sciences, 220, 232 Somerville, Mary, 183, 214, 215, 216, 222 The Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 24, 27 soul, 30, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41, 52, 74, 77, 105, 108, 123, 156, 157, 204 and birthmarks, 56, 57 The Spectator, 4, 15 Spencer, Jane, 161, 164 Spinoza, Benedict de, 66 spiritual healing, 75, 76, 77 Sprat, Thomas, 87 History of the Royal Society, 1, 14, 19, 85, 87, 115, 129 Springborg, Patricia, 101, 111, 112 Steele, Richard, 4, 5, 116, 127 Stephens, Joanna, 96, 98 Stewart, Larry, 118, 123, 130, 131 suicide, 55, 175 Swift, Jonathan, 96–7 Sydney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 17 Tackenius, Otto, 73 Tatar, Maria, 178, 181 The Tatler, 15 Taylor, Jane, 13 Texier, Anthony Le, 165, 172, 180 Thomas, Keith, 76, 82 Thomson, George, 219, 224, 230, 231 Thrale, Hester, 13, 147, 148, 151, 162 Todd, Janet, 28, 97, 129, 130 Tradescant, John, 126 Transit(s) of Venus, 13, 201, 202, 203, 210, 211, 213 Trotter, Thomas View of the Nervous Temperament, 188, 193, 194, 198, 199 Tyson, Edward, 119, 120, 121, 122


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Index Vaucason, Jacques, 13, 148, 149, 152, 155, 156, 164 f lute player, 154, 159, 163 mechanical duck, 151, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 163 Tabor-player, 154 Vaughan, Henry Hermetical Physick, 76, 82 Vaughn, William, 27, 74 Vitalism/vitalist, 78, 83 Voltaire, 133–46 passim Elémens de la Philosophie de Neuton, 136 Essai sur la nature du feu et sur sa propagation, 133–46 Letters on England, 145 Lettres philosophiques, 145 Wallace, Beth Kowalski, 128, 130 Waller, Edmund, 37, 45 Ward, Richard, 81 Watt, Ian, 150, 163 Wear, Andrew, 69, 71, 73, 81, 82 Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious, 6, 123 Wheeler, Roxann, 227, 232, 233 Wiegand, Dometa, 201–17 Wilkins, John Discovery of a New World, 25, 28 Willis, Thomas, 68, 72, 73 Two Discourses, 81, 82 Willmoth, Francis, 27, 118, 130 Willughby, Francis De Historia Piscium, 119, 121 Wilson, Catherine, 32, 45 Winkelmann, Maria Margaretha, 9, 23 Winter, George, 169, 180 witch/witchcraft, 20, 47, 55, 56, 190 men and, 49, 53, 56, 58 women and, 11, 49, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59

263

witness, 87–8, 220, 228, 231 authority of, 89 objective, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95 reliable/unreliable, 87, 89, 93 virtual, 92 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 183, 190 A Historical and Moral View, 187, 199 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 2, 4, 14, 15 womb, 11, 55, 60, 207, 210 mad, raging, 11, 47–63 and the female mind, 55 wondering, 189 women cause birthmarks, 49, 54, 56, 57, 60 and education, 2–5, 20–1, 30 and History of Science, 14, 17–28 literary, 183 and madness, 13, 49, 53, 55, 58–9, 60, 192 mental attributes, 191 natures of, 189, 192, 194, 197 physical attributes, 191 and reputation, 9 sexual exploitation of, 13, 165–81 passim and sexuality, 196 social expectations/roles, 189, 193, 195, 197, 198 and witchcraft, 11, 49, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59 Woodbery, Bonnie, 192–3, 200 Works of the Learned, 123 Wright, Thomas, 117, 124 Female Vertuoso’s, 125, 130 Zinsser, Judith, 12, 13, 27, 63, 96, 97, 133–46


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