Women and Print Culture (Routledge Revivals)

The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical

Kathryn Shevelow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317620259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für weibliche Autoren

With the growth of popular literary forms, particularly the periodical, during the eighteenth century, women began to assume an unprecedented place in print culture as readers and writers. Yet at the same time the very textual practices of that culture inscribed women within an increasingly restrictive and oppressive set of representations. First published in 1989, this title examines the emergence and dramatic growth of periodical literature, showing how the journals solicited women as subscribers and contributors, whilst also attempting to regulate their conduct through the promotion of exemplary feminine types. By enclosing its female readership within a discourse that defined women in terms of love, matrimony, the family, and the home, the English periodical became one of the main linguistic sites for the construction of the eighteenth-century ideology of domestic womanhood.

Based on the close scrutiny of the popular periodical press between 1690 and 1760, including journals such as the Athenian Mercury, the Tatler, and the Spectator, this study will be of particular value to any student of the relationship between women and print culture, the development of women's magazines, and the study of literary audiences.

1
'Fair-sexing it': an introduction to periodical literature and the eighteenth-century construction of femininity

I'll not meddle with the Spectator - let him fair-sex it to the world's end.

(Jonathan Journal to Stella)

During the eighteenth century, as upper- and middle-class Englishwomen increasingly began to participate in the public realm of print culture, the representational practices of that culture were steadily enclosing them within the private sphere of the home. That is, at the same historical moment that women were, to a degree unprecedented in western Europe, becoming visible as readers and writers, the literary representation of women - whether as members of an intended audience, as writing subjects, or as textual objects — was producing an increasingly narrow and restrictive model of femininity. These simultaneous and interrelated processes may seem to constitute a paradox, but they are only contradictory if we insist upon equating access to the mechanisms of print exclusively with metaphors of enfranchisement and inclusion rather than those of restriction and containment. In fact, the access that literate women gained to the print culture developing in eighteenth-century England had mixed consequences for their representation in and by writing. For many of the very agents that were enabling, even actively promoting, women's participation in print culture were also those engaged in containing it.

The growth of popular literary forms such as the periodical played a key role in this simultaneous process of inclusion and restriction. The periodicals' characteristic attention to women and 'women's concerns' (the editorial policy that Swift sneeringly labeled 'fair-sexing it') served an emerging ideology that, in the act of making claims for women's capabilities and social importance, constructed women as essentially — that is, both biologically and socially - 'other' than men. Although many of the features of this construction, such as the particular associations of women with love and romance, matrimony, children, and the household, were by no means new in the eighteenth century, their representation in popular literature contributed powerfully to a developing discourse surrounding women that was reformulating sexual relations and the family based upon new criteria.

My purpose in this book is to delineate the process of simultaneous enfranchisement and restriction that marked women's visible entrance into print culture by tracing the early stages of the development of the popular periodical, as it emerged in the late seventeenth century. By 'popular' I mean to indicate the relative breadth or inclusiveness of the early periodical's intended audience rather than its position on a hierarchical scale: I use the term to signify a general publication intended to interest an audience relatively heterogeneous in regard to social class and educational status, and to this end I want to differentiate my use throughout this book of the term 'popular' to describe certain types of periodicals from other connotations connected with 'popular' (as opposed to 'elite') culture. Though such an opposition between popular and elite does play a part in the early periodicals' projection of an audience, the terms themselves are indeterminate, not only because they were undergoing transformations in eighteenth-century Europe, but also because they are open to a variety of competing constructions. Some analyses would categorize the audience of the popular periodical as belonging by orientation if not class to a new literate, enlightened 'elite' evolving in the eighteenth century.¹ Indeed, the periodicals often acted as agents for the transmission of 'genteel' codes of conduct, thus aligning themselves with values explicitly associated with the upper classes. Yet they addressed readers represented as being in need of such instruction in manners. In fact, though literate and often upwardly mobile, a good segment of the intended audience for the popular periodicals, and indeed some of their editors, were and perceived themselves to be marginal to many of the practices of upper-class culture (which they tended to construct as more monolithic than it was); they did not view themselves as participating in its forms of social and political power, its educational institutions, and its classically-based literary traditions. In this book, the notion of the elite will signify this dominant upper-class culture. Though elite readers were indeed part of the popular periodical's audience, for the most part the periodical either sought to appeal to, or directly solicited, readers perceived as marginal to this dominant group.

The popular periodical was initially directed at a readership which included a mixture of classes and both sexes. It became instrumental in forming a female reading audience organized around the literary representation of women as readers, writing subjects, and textual figures situated within a reformist discourse designed to instruct and entertain. Through its topicality and appearance of direct engagement with its readers' lives, the popular periodical attempted to exert influence as a purveyor of values. As one recent study of the periodical argues, it 'provided implicitly normative accounts of social structure and behavior' (Botein, Censer, and Ritvo 468). In regard to the representation of women, the periodical, as it developed throughout the eighteenth century, played a decidedly normative role. For it was in the periodical that one particular formulation of femininity most persistently manifested itself on the popular level: the notion of women as different in kind rather than degree from men, possessing in the household a 'separate but equal' area of activity and authority. Thus as the popular periodical developed as a genre, it was instrumental in articulating and refining a conception of gender relations gaining currency in the eighteenth century. The early periodical was one of the principal linguistic sites for the production of a new ideology of femininity and the family.

The ideological orientation of the popular periodical can be traced most immediately to the self-consciously 'progressive' attitude to 'the fair sex' shared by the earliest producers of that literature — such men as John Dunton, Peter Motteux, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, and Joseph Addison. In the periodicals they edited between 1691 and 1713, they issued numerous invitations to women to read, to write for, and to correspond with, the periodical; they declared the 'equality' of women to men; they crusaded with varying degrees of intensity for improvements in women's education, coupling them with sometimes more vigorous crusades for improvements in women's behavior; they proclaimed their intention to use their periodicals to defend and serve women; and they variously represented women, as readers, as writers, as correspondents, and as illustrative figures, in their periodical texts. Granted, these author—editors differed somewhat in their attitudes toward women, as Rae Blanchard's classic article on Richard Steele points out.² Still, their periodicals shared the considerable common ground of popularity in which, as I shall argue in chapter 2, the address to women was a decisive factor.

Under the mantle of a progressive orientation towards women lay a range of motivations and goals. For our purposes, they are most revealingly arranged along a continuum of reformist intentions. The early popular periodicals' reformist agendas tended to collect around the interrelated purposes of 'learning' (the periodical as an informational tool in itself, as well as a force exhorting women to gain knowledge) and the modification of behavior (the periodical as social critic and conduct book, exposing vice and modeling virtue). These reformist agendas coexisted within the same periodical — indeed, they were inseparable — but in the space of twenty years between the major periodicals of Dunton and Steele, the emphasis shifted from reform-as-knowledge to reform-as-behavior-modification, (Later periodicals, particularly the magazines specifically designed for women which appeared in mid-century, returned to and greatly expanded the instructional agenda, as chapter 5 will show, but in a way that revealed that the conflation of knowledge with behavior modification, always implicit in the popular periodical, had become explicit.) The shift from Dunton to Steele involved a change in both the frequency and the type of representation of women; the amount of printed space occupied by women increased, offering a more extensive elaboration of a category of representation labeled 'feminine,' a category formulated in the periodicals of Dunton but greatly refined in those of Steele.

The periodical was a public disseminator of prescriptions for private behavior: it constructed, for public consumption, normative images of 'private life' closely identified with women. In this way, the popular periodical, as it established itself throughout the eighteenth century, became a primary locus of the 'feminization of discourse,' Terry Eagleton's term for that contradictory process by which 'feminine values,' increasingly assigned to the private realm, were emerging as influences upon public culture.³ The popular periodicals validated certain types of feminine experience, insisted upon the significance of certain feminine concerns as literary material and social agenda, and asserted women's intellectual capabilities and potential equality. Their program of bringing women into literary culture tended from the beginning towards an overdetermination of one feminine figure: the domestic woman, constructed in a relation of difference to man, a difference of kind rather than degree. This figure was a highly idealized construction of femininity, one situated within a long tradition of the literary representation of women, but here newly formulated in such a way as to involve the woman both as reader and as writer, as subject as well as object, in the service of an as yet unestablished but coalescing ideology.

In investigating the formation of this overdetermined phenomenon, the construction of the domestic woman in and by print, this book will focus predominantly on the early developmental stages of the popular periodical, tracing a trajectory of representation from early formulations of this figure to its remarkably rapid formalization. Most of the book will concentrate on the first two decades of periodical publication, 1691-1712, with particular emphasis upon John Dunton's Athenian Mercury, the first major popular periodical, and Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's Taller, which in many senses defined the genre, particularly in relation to its representations of women. In the rest of this introductory first chapter, I shall discuss the class context of the early periodical, sketch out some of the main themes of eighteenth-century thinking about women, and situate the book in relation to other accounts of women, representation, readers, and the study of the eighteenth century. In chapter 2 I shall give an account of the birth of the popular periodical press, its sphere of influence, its audience-building strategies, its means of production and distribution, and its ideological orientation. Chapter 3 will look closely at the Athenian Mercury, whose social agenda and epistolary format made writers out of readers in a regulatory context, with important consequences for the production of the feminine writing subject throughout the eighteenth century. Chapter 4 will focus on the influential essay-periodicals, the Tatler and (to a lesser degree) the Spectator, both of which manipulated the developing conventions of the popular periodical, most particularly its mission as a regulator of readers' lives, in order to promulgate an increasingly prescriptive figure of the sentimental family⁴ whose center was the woman. Chapter 5 will trace out the legacy of the earliest periodicals by looking at several publications that emerged between the 1720s and the 1760s. As the periodical developed it specialized according to gender, a process that began in the 1720s and accelerated in mid-century with the creation of the women's magazine and the introduction of women as periodical editors. Throughout all of these chapters, I shall be tracing the representation of women in the periodical as indicative of the complementary processes of inclusion and containment that governed their entrance into print culture. The periodical played a key role in expanding women's participation as readers, as writers, and as textual figures; and in so doing, the periodical was simultaneously a principal site of the normative construction of femininity in writing.

The Problems of Ideology and the Middle Class

The term 'ideology' suggests a body of coherent or cohering interests that the ideology serves, but these interests are particularly difficult to define at a time of historical shifts in ideologies. The representation of women in the popular periodical can be directly implicated in the normalizing of one construction of femininity, but it is a simpler matter to identify the process as ideological than it is to pin down the interests represented by the ideology, or even to fix upon an accurate, historically specific, descriptive category in which to contain them. If we assume that 'ideology works to appear as a natural, unprejudiced truth . . . while it actually constitutes a motivated, class-oriented rationalization' (L. Davis 220-1 ),⁵ and that it 'both epitomizes and itself influences broader social relations of power' (Sedgwick 13), we face the problem of characterizing ideological orientation in an historically precise, way. And if we assume that 'Ideology is inscribed in discourse in the sense that it is literally written or spoken in it ... [it is] a way of thinking, speaking, experiencing' (Belsey 5),⁶ we need to situate a given discourse complex historically as well. We shall find the process of representing women in the early eighteenth-century periodical to be an increasingly normative one, constructing a feminine area of influence, authority, and experience — the home and creating a corresponding picture of feminine nature, and we must ask what identifiable cultural group or class these representations serve.

A class-based account of these representational phenomena (though, I think, indispensable) raises certain problems. The most pressing of these is the difficulty of delimiting precisely the relation between the historical experience and social identities of people and the construction of ideology. Authoritative accounts of the expansion of printing and the development of such popular forms as the periodical and the novel in this period have approached them through a notion of 'the rise of the middle class.' Raymond Williams summarizes the widely-held assumptions about this interrelationship as it influenced the growth of a new middle-class audience:

It is from the 1690s that the growth of a new kind of middle-class reading public becomes evident, in direct relation to the growth in size and importance of a middle class defined as merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, and administrative and clerical workers. New forms of reading, in the newspaper, the periodical and the magazine, account for the major expansion, and behind them comes the novel, in close relation from its beginnings to this particular public. (182)

And Ian Watt, whose history of 'the rise of the [English] novel' established the groundwork for all subsequent discussions of middle-class influence on literary development, charts the widening of the 'intermediate class' (40) of readers to include 'the increasingly prosperous and numerous social groups concerned with commerce and manufacture.' This development, he argues, represented a moment of transformation in literary history:

it is probable that this particular change alone, even if it was of comparatively minor proportions, may have altered the centre of gravity of the reading public sufficiently to place the middle class as a whole in a dominating position for the first time. (48)

Since Watt, many accounts of the social and historical context of early eighteenth-century literature have stressed the significance of women readers (usually the 'new' middle-class women readers) upon the growth and the shape of literary practices. They have emphasized the profound influences of female literacy and leisure (discussed further in chapter 2); they have seen the feminine 'Cult of letter-writing' (Watt 189) as an influence upon and product of the period's fascination with epistolary genres (including the epistolary periodical); they have noted a relationship between the formal 'domesticity' of the novel and the culturally-enforced domesticity of the women who read (and wrote) them and seen women as an important target audience for popular literature like the periodical.

Yet the adequacy of the term 'middle-class' as a demographically accurate model for describing these developments is very problematic, as is the notion that the normative representation of women is a middle-class construct. For one thing, as has often been said, 'the middle class is always rising': the history and conditions of the middle-class's upward trajectory have been the subjects of much wide-ranging debate. Arguments have been offered for a coherent middle class since the early Renaissance, if not before; on the other hand, scholars have challenged the notion of the economic dominance and cultural authority of the middle class in the early eighteenth century, placing the point of middle-class emergence, and certainly of its hegemony, closer to, if not well into, the nineteenth century. And, particularly for the early eighteenth century, there are difficulties in distinguishing characteristics and ideology of the middle class from those of the aristocracy and particularly the gentry, since these were also undergoing significantly rapid changes in this period, were also served by the new popular literature, and to a certain degree participated in the 'progressive' literary and social agenda announced by the periodical.⁷ The demographic distinction between 'the gentry' and 'the middle class' has long been a focus of controversy, and attempting to assign separate ideologies to each continues to be a vexed problem. And finally, such literacy statistics as do exist, statistics that I will examine in more detail in chapter 2, are subject to debates both methodological and interpretative.

Although my examination of the periodical literature draws upon some of the same information as the historical studies just mentioned, and even makes use of some of the studies themselves, I am less concerned with the historical dimension of class structures than I am with delineating certain cultural codes in the making — those which governed the dominant representations of women. These codes carried certain markers which many of us have come to associate with 'middle-class consciousness.' The periodicals I examine, for instance, demonstrate a sometimes aggressively articulated complex of beliefs and a marked social agenda formulated in opposition to what is presented as an alterable, upper-class-dominated status quo; and they do so in relation to an audience that, in so far as it is described or figured textually, includes readers who are not among t...