The Brink of All We Hate

English Satires on Women, 1660–1750

Felicity A. Nussbaum

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813154091
• eBook ISBN: 9780813183473
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Is it not monstrous, that our Seducers should be our Accusers? Will they not employ Fraud, nay often Force to gain us? What various Arts, what Stratagems, what Wiles will they use for our Destruction? But that once accomplished, every opprobrious Term with which our Language so plentifully abounds, shall be bestowed on us, even by the very Villains who have wronged us"—Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs (1748).

In her scandalous Memoirs, Laetitia Pilkington spoke out against the English satires of the Restoration and eighteenth century, which employed "every opprobrious term" to chastise women. In The Brink of All We Hate, Felicity Nussbaum documents and groups those opprobrious terms in order to identify the conventions of the satires, to demonstrate how those conventions create a myth, to provide critical readings of poetic texts in the antifeminist tradition, and to draw some conclusions about the basic nature of satire. Nussbaum finds that the English tradition of antifeminist satire draws on a background that includes Hesiod, Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal, as well as the more modern French tradition of La Bruyere and Boileau and the late seventeenth-century English pamphlets by Gould, Fige, and Ames. The tradition was employed by the major figures of the golden age of satire—Samuel Butler, Dryden, Swift, Addison, and Pope.

Examining the elements of the tradition of antifeminist satire and exploring its uses, from the most routine to the most artful, by the various poets, Nussbaum reveals a clearer context in which many poems of the Restoration and eighteenth century will be read anew.

Notes

CHAPTER I

1. “A Satyr on Charles II,” in The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David Vieth (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), p. 70, 11. 14-15.

2. Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, 1712-50, Written by Herself, ed. Iris Barry (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928), pp. 53, 103. The verbal assault on Pilkington is said in good humor and introduces a jest which compliments Pilkington to her husband. Swift, Pilkington notes, “always prefaced a compliment with an affront.”

3. Katharine M. Rogers, in The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1966), has traced the history of misogyny from Eve to the twentieth century. In general I agree with the conclusion she draws in her chapter on the Restoration and eighteenth century—that in the period “there is a gradual softening of the prevalent attitude to women, combined with an increasing tendency toward polite disparagement” (p. 187).

4. For example, Robert C. Elliott, The Literary Persona (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981); Alvin B. Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965); and Maynard Mack, “The Muse of Satire,” Yale Review 41 (1951): 80-92.

5. The question of whether neoclassical antifeminist satires, especially those of Pope and Swift, are “projections of male anxiety and ambivalence about sexuality and control” or a literary activity influenced by the linguistic .and cultural codes available at a certain historical moment is debated by Susan Gubar in “The Female Monster in Augustan Satire,” Signs 3 (Winter 1977): 380-94, and in a subsequent exchange with Ellen Pollak, Signs 3 (Spring 1978): 728-33. I suggest that antifeminist satires can be alternately and simultaneously reflections of the historical situation and of male projections, though the emphasis in this book is on the satirist’s rhetorical stance and the creation of a fiction of satire, rather than on the individual neurosis of the satirist.

6. Michael Seidel, The Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), p. 12.

7. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I: 68. All subsequent citations are to this edition.

8. Ballard Ms. 43, f. 17, Bodleian Library, Oxford. On 7 March 1735/36 Elstob apologizes to George Ballard: “Yet I do not think my self proficient enough in these Arts, to become a teacher of them.” I am grateful for permission to cite this manuscript.

9. John Bennett, Strictures on Female Education Chiefly As It Relates to the Culture of the Heart (London, 1795;rpt., Manchester: Source Book Press, 1971), p. 88.

10. George Lillo, The London Merchant, ed. William H. McBurney, Regents Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 64.

CHAPTER II

1. De l’égalité des deux sexes was republished in 1676, 1679, 1690, and 1691. For a useful note on François Poulain de la Barre (1647-1723), with liberal citations from the essays, consult Michael A. Seidel, “Poulain De La Barre’s The Woman As Good As the Man,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974): 499–508.

2. Earl Miner, The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 389. See also Miner’s “In Satire’s Falling City,” in The Satirist’s Art, ed. H. James Jensen and Malvin R. Zirker, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 3-27.

3. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 637-45.

4. Gregory King, Natural and Politicall Observation and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England (London, 1696). For general studies, see Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 31-59; and Barbara Schnorrenberg and Jean E. Hunter, “The Eighteenth-Century Englishwoman,” in The Women of England from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present: Interpretive Bibliographical Essays, ed. Barbara Kanner (Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1979).

5. Dorothy Gardiner, English Girlhood at School: A Study of Education through Twelve Centuries (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1929), p. 235; Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), pp. 27-45.

6. Ed. Paula L. Barbour, Augustan Reprint Society, no. 202 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1980), pp. 3-4.

7. In “Richard Steele and the Status of Women,” Studies in Philology 26 (1929): 326, Rae Blanchard accurately labels Fénelon, along with Richard Brathwaite, Gervase Markham, Richard Allestree, and Lord Halifax, as conservatives who believe woman is inferior by nature, custom, and biblical law.

8. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex in which are inserted the characters of A Pedant, A Squire, A Beau, A Vertuoso, A Poetaster, A City-critick. &c. In a Letter to a Lady By a Lady was published in 1696 (2nd ed. 1696; 3rd, 1697; 4th, 1791). Though it has generally been attributed to Mary Astell, Myra Reynolds cites the author as Mrs. Drake, wife of James Drake, while Rae Blanchard notes that A Farther Essay in Defence of the Female Sex is a literal translation of Madame de Pringy’s essay. The author defends women’s learning and argues against the usual charges of lust. For a recent study that underscores Astell’s belief in women’s separate but equal domain, see Joan K. Kinnaird, “Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism,” Journal of British Studies 19 (1979): 53-75.

9. Daniel Defoe, An Essay on Projects (London, 1697).

10. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), chapter 6.

11. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: George Routledge, 1919).

12. See, for example, J.J. Habakkuk, “Marriage Settlements in the Eighteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 32 (1950): 15-30.

13. [Margaret Fell], Women Speaking Justified (1667), ed. David Latt, Augustan Reprint Society, no. 196 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1979).

14. 3rd ed. (London, 1634), p. 275.

15. Christopher Hill, in The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972), pp. 247-60, discusses the position of women, especially in radical sects like the Ranters.

16. Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Past and Present 13 (1958): 55-56.

17. Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979).

18. Entry for 12-13 January 1668, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1668-1669, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 9: 21-22.

19. David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745 (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1965), pp. 12-15.

20. Ibid., p. 47.

21. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• I. Introduction
• II. Rhyming Women Dead: Restoration Satires on Women
• III. The Better Women: The Amazon Myth and Hudibras
• IV. “That Lost Thing, Love”: Women and Impotence in Rochester’s Poetry
• V. Rara Avis in Terris: Translations of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire
• VI. “The Sex’s Flight”: Women and Time in Swift’s Poetry
• VII. Enemies and Enviers: Minor Eighteenth-Century Satires
• VIII. “The Glory, Jest, and Riddle of the Town”: Women in Pope’s Poetry
• IX. Conclusion
• Notes
• Index