Boss Ladies, Watch Out!

Essays on Women, Sex and Writing

Terry Castle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135225278
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

A new collection of essays on literature and sexuality by one of the wittiest and most iconoclastic critics writing today.

part I

1 WOMEN AND LITERARY CRITICISM

Do women have the right to criticize? Throughout the eighteenth century it was commonly held that literary judgment was—or should be—a privilege reserved for men. A woman who set forth literary opinions in public exposed either her folly or her presumption. Women, according to Jonathan Swift, were the “ill-judging Sex,” inclined, like Echo, to take more delight in repeating “offensive Noise” than in celebrating Philomela's song.¹ Henry Fielding, playing the role of “Censor” to the “great Empire of Letters” in the Covent-Gar-den Journal, debarred all “fine Ladies” from admission to the lofty “Realms of Criticism.” Women, he averred, spoke only a debased critical language, a repetitious modern lingo composed of the phrases, “sad Stuff, low Stuff, mean Stuff, vile Stuff, dirty Stuff, and so-forth.” They were “Gothic” marauders in the republic of letters, usurping authority “without knowing one Word of the ancient Laws, and original Constitution of that Body of which they have professed themselves to be Members.”² In the 1750s, Oliver Goldsmith and Tobias Smollett took turns reviling Isabella Griffiths, the wife of Ralph Griffiths, who had dared to emend Goldsmith's works and publish reviews of her own in her husband's Monthly Review. Smollett boasted that his own journal, the Critical Review, was free of the depredations of “old women” like Griffiths, whom he dismissed, with palpable sexual disgust, as the “Antiquated Female Critic.”³ In 1769, when Elizabeth Montagu published her only critical work, The Writings and Genius of Shakespear [sic], James Boswell worried aloud about resentment which might be aroused by a woman “intruding herself into the chair of criticism” and was eager to defend his mentor Samuel Johnson against charges of prejudice against his bluestocking rival. But Johnson's distaste for modern-day “Amazons of the pen” was nonetheless apparent: “I am very fond of the company of ladies,” he observed in one conversation. “I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.” Women were most pleasing, in Johnson's public view, “when they hold their tongues.”⁴

In the face of such relentless contempt, it is not surprising that many eighteenth-century women writers—including some who published works of criticism—should have internalized painful doubts about their own powers of taste and discernment. Early in her married life Mary Wortley Montagu produced— at the request of her husband (who merely wished to distract her from the travails of pregnancy)—a detailed critique of the plot and diction of Addison's then-unproduced tragedy Cato. Addison was impressed enough by her criticisms, which were both piquant and precise, to revise the play extensively along the lines she had suggested. Despite such implicit approbation, however, Montagu felt obliged to apologize for taking on a task “so much above my skill” and, in a letter to her husband, begged him to remember that she had done so only by his “Command.” The essay itself (which at Addison's request was never circulated) bears Montagu's self-deprecating heading, “Wrote at the desire of Mr. Wortley; suppressed at the desire of Mr. Addison.”⁵

In an even more paradoxical case of self-disparagement later in the century, the educational writer Hannah More (who also wrote a treatise on the theater) judged women intrinsically incapable of critical thought. Because women were “naturally more affectionate than fastidious,” she wrote in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), they were likely “both to read and to hear with a less critical spirit than men, they will not be on the watch to detect errors, so much as to gather improvement; they have seldom that hardness which is acquired by dealing deeply in the books of controversy; but are more inclined to the perusal of works which quicken the devotional feelings, than to such as awaken a spirit of doubt or scepticism.” It was true, she allowed, that a female reader might display “delicacy and quickness of perception,” as well as an “intuitive penetration” into character, but these were mere reactive powers, “like the sensitive and tender organs of some timid animals,” bestowed by Providence “as a kind of natural guard, to warn of the approach of danger.” Women lacked “the wholeness of mind” that critical judgment required and were defective in the crucial faculty of “comparing, combining, analysing, and separating” ideas.⁶

It would require a separate study to explain adequately why the prospect of women critics provoked so much anxiety in eighteenth-century commentators. Traditional misogynistic fears of female insubordination were at least partly responsible: a woman who assumed authority in the great “Republic of Letters” (to adopt Fielding's political terminology) might be encouraged to train her critical faculties on the world at large. The persistent taboo against women criticizing male authors in particular—a prejudice which continues to influence reviewing practice in our own day—may have been motivated by deeper masculine anxieties about the “Amazonian” sentiments a liberated women's criticism might be expected to unleash.

At the same time, women writers (of any sort) represented a new and destabilizing force in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace. Traditionally, of course, women had been granted a symbolic role in literary production: in the time-honored formulations of classical rhetoric, masculine poetic genius owed its flights to the enabling inspiration of the Muses. But real women, in the prevailing archaic conception, were not supposed to take up the pen themselves. A few seventeenth-century feminists had complained of the exclusion. Bathsua Makin (? 1612–?74) argued that the very cult of the Muses itself proved that women had once been—and could become again—creators in their own right. The arts were represented “in Womens Shapes,” she wrote in 1673, because women had in fact been their “Inventors” and chief “Promoters” in antiquity. “Minerva and the nine Muses were women famous for learning whilst they lived, and therefore thus adored when dead.”⁷ Other women, equally celebrated in their day, had invented the poetic genres: “The Sybils could never have invented the heroic, nor Sappho the sapphic verses, had they been illiterate.”⁸ It was time, wrote Makin, for women to make themselves preeminent once again in the “Arts and Tongues” of civilization.

By the end of the seventeenth century, with a slow but perceptible rise in female literacy, the weakening of court patronage, and the growing commercialization of literary activity throughout Western Europe, Makin's wish had begun to come partly true: more women than ever before were indeed becoming writers and getting paid for it. In early-eighteenth-century London (somewhat later in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin), the presence of a female literary subculture—a new class of “scribbling females,” composed of novelists, editors, hack journalists, booksellers, and the like—was increasingly visible. Forced to compete with their new distaff rivals, the male literary establishment responded with alarm and resentment. The complaint against women critics drew much of its particular animus, one suspects, from larger impinging professional jealousies; in the eyes of traditionalists, the female critic was simply the most blatant example of woman's new and overweening literary ambition. She could easily be made to stand for any sort of illegitimate hankering after authority. It is symptomatic of the deeper sexual tensions in eighteenth-century intellectual culture that Swift, in his diatribe against the corruption of learning in The Battle of the Books (1704), should blame the collapse of traditional aesthetic values on the feminization of contemporary taste. In the nightmare emblem-world of the satirist, the “malignant deity” Criticism takes shape as a rampant, monstrous female, chaotically ruling over her offspring the Moderns, who suckle on her nastiness and squalor:

She dwelt on the Top of a snowy Mountain in Nova Zembla; there Momus found her extended in her Den, upon the Spoils of numberless Volumes half devoured. At her right Hand sat Ignorance, her Father and Husband, blind with Age; at her left, Pride her Mother, dressing her up in the Scraps of Paper herself had torn. There was Opinion her Sister, light of Foot, hoodwinkt, and headstrong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her play'd her Children, Noise and Impudence, Dullness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-Manners. The Goddess herself had Claws like a Cat; Her Head, and Ears, and Voice resembled those of an Ass; Her Teeth fallen out before; Her Eyes turned inward; as if she lookt only upon herself; Her Diet was the overflowing of her own Gall; Her Spleen was so large, as to stand prominent like a Dug of the first Rate, nor wanted Ex-crescencies in form of Teats, at which a Crew of ugly Monsters were greedily sucking; and, what is wonderful to conceive, the bulk of Spleen encreased faster than the Sucking could diminish it.⁹

One could hardly ask for a more flagrant image of a threatening gyno-criticism.

Such vivid antipathy undoubtedly discouraged many women authors from ever attempting the business of criticism at all. But even in the case of women who did produce critical writing, particularly in the years between 1720 and 1780, one cannot avoid noticing in their works the often distorting effects of cultural prejudice. Exaggerated self-consciousness—a stylized display of authorial timidity or self-effacement—frequently mars eighteenth-century feminine critical rhetoric. Frances Brooke, introducing her theater reviews and critical essays in The Old Maid in 1755, observed apologetically that such writing could only seem “an odd attempt in a woman.” In the preface to her study of Shakespeare from 1769, Elizabeth Montagu deferred to the “superiority of talents and learning” of Shakespeare's male editors and abjured “the vain presumption of attempting to correct any passages of this celebrated Author” herself. Even the usually forthright Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, embarking in 1782 on what would become a celebrated epistolary debate with Choderlos de Laclos over his novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, disclaimed any right to criticize Laclos as a fellow author: her own novels, she said, were mere “bagatelles.” She could only judge his work—and that diffidently—as a woman (“en qualité de femme”). Likewise, the recurrence of certain themes and issues in women's criticism—the obsession, for example, with the moralizing aspects of literary works—also signaled underlying self-doubt: female critics compensated for their profound sense of professional insecurity by paying exaggerated attention to the piety (or lack thereof) in the works they scrutinized. From Eliza Haywood on, eighteenth-century women critics made a cult of their moral respectability. Only near the end of the century, with the debut of charismatic literary figures like Germaine de Staël and Stephanie de Genlis in France, or Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Inchbald in England, did a less hidebound image of the female critic begin to emerge— the image of the woman confident enough in her intellectual abilities to pass judgment, without excessive scruple, on the great works of past and present.

Given such inhibitions, what sort of criticism did women write? Women critics employed a variety of rhetorical formats, reflecting the assortment of contexts in which the practice of criticism itself—which had yet to be defined in strictly professional or academic terms—was pursued in the period. Eighteenth-century critics worked in general in a hodgepodge of styles and genres; the formal critical essay, typified by Samuel Johnson's Rambler 4 “On Fiction” or Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition, was only one form among many. Prefaces, dedications, epilogues, linguistic treatises, translations, reviews, anthologies, biographical memoirs, private correspondence, and literary works themselves (one thinks of Austen's remarks on the novel in Northanger Abbey) all provided contexts in which a distinctly “critical” discourse might flourish.

Certain styles and genres, of course, were more accessible than others. Generally speaking, the more formal critical subgenres—the philological treatise, the learned dialogue, the refined verse epistle—were less popular with women than ad hoc forms, for obvious reasons. Owing to the defects of female education in the period, women seldom had the background in classical languages and literature necessary to engage in the erudite skirmishing of philological debate, though even here, it is important to note, a handful of exceptional women succeeded in making a mark. The seventeenth-century Dutch learned lady Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), known to her contemporaries as the “Star of Utrecht,” was famous throughout Europe for her extraordinary linguistic accomplishments—besides learning all the modern languages, she had taught herself Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Chaldee, Syriac, and Ethiopian and written grammars for several languages—and her feats proved an inspiration to a number of eighteenth-century female scholars. The celebrated classicist Anne Lefèvre Dacier (1654–1720), for example, translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into French in 1711 and took a vigorous part in the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, publishing Homère défendu contre lApologie du R. P. Hardouin; ou Suite des causes de la corruption du goust in 1716. (So renowned were her Greek translations that even Fielding, some thirty years after her death, paid homage to the great “Madam Daciere” in Tom Jones.¹⁰) Dacier's English contemporary Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756), sometimes called the “Saxon Muse,” was another brilliant female scholar: after translating Aelfric's English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-day of St Gregory in 1709, she produced the first English Anglo-Saxon grammar, Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue … with an Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities, in 1715. Besides revealing Elstob's wide knowledge of English poetry, the Rudiments was noteworthy for its defense of Anglo-Saxon studies against the criticisms of Swift, who had complained that such knowledge was uselessly pedantic. Other gif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• part I
• part II
• Selected Bibliography
• Index