Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England

Bodies, Identities, and Power (Open Access)

Soile Ylivuori

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367584252
• eBook ISBN: 9780429845697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This first in-depth study of women's politeness examines the complex relationship individuals had with the discursive ideals of polite femininity. Contextualising women's autobiographical writings (journals and letters) with a wide range of eighteenth-century printed didactic material, it analyses the tensions between politeness discourse which aimed to regulate acceptable feminine identities and women's possibilities to resist this disciplinary regime. Ylivuori focuses on the central role the female body played as both the means through which individuals actively fashioned themselves as polite and feminine, and the supposedly truthful expression of their inner status of polite femininity.

1 Framing the Stage

Politeness and the Body

In 1741, the young Elizabeth Robinson—later Montagu—wrote to her close friend, the Duchess of Portland, to describe a gentry family of great peculiarity in her neighbourhood in Kent. Montagu draw their picture with biting sarcasm so characteristic of her. The father of the family, a former Member of the Parliament, she described as ‘a man of few words, but less meaning’, and his wife ‘an awkward woman’, always kept ‘in the country to nurse seven or eight daughters, after his own manner’. This dismal upbringing had ‘answered the design’, Montagu derided; ‘he has taught them that all finery lies in a pair of red-heeled shoes; and as for diversion (or, as I suppose they call it, fun), there is nothing like blind-man’s buff; thus dressed, and thus accomplished, he brought them to our races’. Montagu then compared ‘these jumping Joans’ to their overly refined polar opposites whom she and the Duchess had encountered earlier in Buckinghamshire: ‘they had not one article of behaviour so untaught as to appear natural; these have not one manner that seems acquired by art’—and, all in all, ‘the two families would make a fine contrast’. Montagu concluded with a little panegyric; ‘but you will say what are these people to you? because you keep the very medium of politeness, must you be troubled with those that are in the bad extremes of behaviour!’¹

As Montagu’s blunt evaluation of ‘bad extremes of behaviour’ shows, politeness played a crucial role in elite women’s social interaction and self-fashioning. From Montagu’s letter, it becomes clear that politeness required more than taking part in polite amusements or receiving a polite education. It was about keeping the perfect medium of behaviour—controlling oneself and performing according to carefully prescribed rules. This first chapter lays the conceptual premises surrounding those rules, as well as my methodological means of analysing them. Questions of what was politeness, who were the polite, and what did Montagu, Delany, Talbot, and Burney think about politeness, exactly, will be answered—as well as some more theoretical speculations of polite subjects’ possibilities for agency.

Female Bodies and Performances of Politeness

To get beneath the skin of politeness, so to speak, this book focuses on the importance of the management of the body to politeness. The body was the focus of disciplinary discourses and the site of individual practice of politeness—a fact given little sustained attention in previous research. Women were socially expected to exercise and discipline their bodies in order to weed out ‘impolite’, ‘vulgar’, or ‘inappropriate’ manners and appearances and thus to appear ‘polite’. The idealised forms of conduct were strictly tied together with femininity; ‘appropriate’ conduct for women was always weighed against their supposedly ‘natural’ gendered character and inclinations, physical frame and humour balance, as well as position in society. My Foucauldian-inspired analysis thus approaches politeness as a regime of power/knowledge that uses discourses to convey feminine and polite ideals to the women of polite society, with the goal of producing normative gendered bodies that will, in their turn, participate in maintaining and further constructing the discourse that defines them. In this process, the body can be seen as not only the target on which power is inscribed, but also as the medium through which it operates. Recent feminist and poststructuralist scholarship has emphasised the role the body plays in the process of reiteration and reworking of cultural norms. The body has been seen as an inscriptive surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus reinforced; more than a physical entity, it is viewed as a set of actions, routines, and exercises that reflects discursive ideals imposed on it as performative deeds, postures, gestures, and appearances.² Thus, the body is seen as fictional in poststructuralist thought; in Elizabeth Grosz’s words, it is actively produced ‘by various cultural narratives and discourses […] not always or even usually transparent to themselves’. Bodies become ‘emblems, heralds, badges, theaters, tableaux’ that are ‘marked [and] branded, by a social seal’.³ As I demonstrate, this is very much what was happening within the culture of politeness, which aimed to regulate women’s bodies by engaging them in techniques of polite education, training, and supervision.⁴

Poststructuralist feminist theory maintains that this marking of the body should not be considered as a simple superficial event; instead, the goal of this process is to generate psychical interiority, identity, individuality, and subjectivity. Grosz compares this paradox to the Möbius strip, where the outside changes into the inside without ever actually changing, since the strip is both its external and internal surface at the same time.⁵ Thus, to construct a body is to construct a soul. This way, politeness becomes a performative identity, where its laws are acted, and through that acting also internalised. Women were urged to internalise a gendered polite identity by exercising and disciplining their bodies to meet the norms of polite femininity deemed ‘natural’—despite the fact that within the heterogeneous politeness discourse, there was no consensus on what these natural norms exactly were. Nevertheless, certain forms of conduct were represented as ‘natural’ for women by the virtue of their gender. This positioned the body in a problematic dual role as both already intrinsically feminine and continuously under the need to be fashioned feminine through disciplined exercise.

What about the individual, then? The question of the possibility of agency has, of course, been a focus of debate and theoretical controversy between historians for decades.⁶ The Foucauldian-inspired poststructuralist approach has problematised the entire distinction between discourse and reality; since the ‘I’ cannot exist outside the discourse, what kind of agency is left for an individual? The attempt to answer this question, in relation to eighteenth-century elite women, is at the heart of this book. On this score, my study has been greatly influenced by Foucault’s later work, which is dedicated to examining the very question of the relationship between the individual and overlaying structure. Even though Foucault seems, in his earlier oeuvre, to take the stance that an individual’s subjectivity is inevitably produced through a society’s power/knowledge regime, the last two published volumes of The History of Sexuality signal a major departure from this idea. Foucault himself acknowledges in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure that he has in his previous works neglected the proper analysis of subjectivity. He states that in order to analyse ‘the subject’, one has to look for ‘the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject’.⁷ Another influential concept has been Judith Butler’s notion of iterative performativity, which has become a standard analytical tool for scholars working on questions of subjectivity and resistance. Butler has fruitfully approached power/knowledge as not a deterministic apparatus but a dynamic and complex strategic situation, where resistance appears as ‘the effect of power, as part of power, its self-subversion’.⁸

The body plays, again, a central role in the process of negotiating agency, autonomy, and subjectivity. According to Johanna Oksala, the body is not only the means through which normativity is enforced but also the locus of resistance to normalising power.⁹ Therefore, the body performs a double role in the process of subjectivity construction, as it is both inscribed by power/knowledge and fashioned into autonomy by individuals. Foucault writes in The Use of Pleasure that submitting to a code of conduct requires forming oneself as an ethical subject acting in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code.¹⁰ This requires a specific kind of working on oneself, something that Foucault calls ethical work that ‘one performs on oneself, not only in order to bring one’s conduct into compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one’s behaviour’.¹¹ In other words, working on one’s body through different techniques of the self is a means of managing discursive normativity on an individual level and negotiating it into one’s subjectivity. The goal is to establish the required identity as an ethical choice and aesthetic self-fashioning. From this perspective, women were not merely being forced to act according to the rules of politeness, but they actively worked on themselves in order to internalise the polite feminine identities and to become true polite subjects.

More significantly, working on the body in different ways can also be utilised as a strategy of resistance, with the goal of acquiring freedom from discursive normativity.¹² Johanna Oksala argues that subjects can cultivate and practice freedom and materialise and stylise the possibilities that are opened around them through critically reflecting on themselves and their conduct, actions, beliefs, and their social environment. Oksala states that care for the self as a practice of freedom means ‘challenging, contesting, and changing the constitutive conditions of subjectivity’, as well as ‘exploring possibilities for new forms of subjectivity, new fields of experiences, pleasures, and relationships, and modes of living and thinking’. Thus, the quest for freedom becomes a question of ‘developing forms of subjectivity that are capable of functioning as resistance to normalising power’.¹³ In other words, politeness could also provide women with enabling subject positions through different practices of the body.

Throughout the book, I trace women’s possibilities to resist the normalising power of feminine politeness. As Judith Butler and Joan Scott have argued, identity construction itself creates its own subversion, since the process of repetitiously performing normative acts is, by necessity, imperfect.¹⁴ The goal of this book is to move beyond this somewhat abstract formulation by identifying specific tangible strategies of freedom women engaged with within the context of polite society. Indeed, I suggest that the practices of hypocrisy, play between exterior and interior, multiplicity of identity, and self-discipline can be located from my case studies autobiographical writings as actual means they used to resist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Framing the Stage Politeness and the Body
• 2. Gendered Politeness and Power
• 3. Hypocrisy and Strategic Dissimulation
• 4. Playing with Public and Private
• 5. Multiple Identities
• 6. Discipline and Subversion
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index