SOURCE: “The ‘Spectatress’: Satire and the Aristocrats,” in Lady Mary Wortley Montague and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter, The University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 114-52.

[In this essay, Lowenthal argues that in her letters concerning the English social elite Montagu “attempts to work through [the] competing demands of class and gender … and to emphasize the impossibility of separating private from public behavior.”]

Upon her return to England, and without the “enlivening sun” of Constantinople, Lady Mary supplies her own brilliance in a series of satiric letters composed primarily during the 1720s and 1730s and sent to her sister and other aristocratic women friends. As in the Turkish Embassy Letters, she purports to be the detached observer of scenes before her: “As for my selfe, having nothing to say I say nothing. I insensibly dwindle into a Spectatress” (20 March 1725; 2:48).¹ Yet her strategy in these letters is not to make the unknown familiar, as she did with the sensuous and exotic sights of a foreign culture, but to estrange the known. In this alternate form of journalistic reportage, Lady Mary turns her gaze to the customs of the English beau monde, and there she sees manners and customs, follies and foibles, equally remarkable: “I writ to you very lately (my dear Sister) but ridiculous things happening, I cannot help (as far as in me lies) sharing all my Pleasures with you. I own I enjoy vast delight in the Folly of Mankind, and God be prais'd that is an inexhaustible Source of Entertainment” (September 1725; 2:56).

Lady Mary assumes the right to comment on English society because she has a keen eye for the ridiculous and a certainty that her world is a stage full of absurdity. Yet her claim to “dwindle into a Spectatress” is as revealing as Millamant's “dwindling into a wife,” for both women speak their desire for and their resistance to the assigned roles. In Turkey Lady Mary's womanhood and aristocracy functioned together relatively well: her discussions with Turkish men of rank led her to believe that aristocrats everywhere shared universal sentiments, while the romance allowed her to see women as free. In England, however, Lady Mary's womanhood and aristocracy form no such comfortable equation, and, through the course of the letters, these two important elements of her own self-definition are revealed to be a source of active conflict.

The “inexhaustible Source” of folly and “Entertainment” she cites above is the aristocracy. The frenetic energy of upper-class social life and its shifting personal alliances are a continual source of amusement for her and her sister: “All our Acquaintance are run mad; they do such things, such monstrous and stupendous things! Lady Harvey and Lady Bristol have quarrell'd in such a polite manner that they have given one another all the Titles so liberally bestow'd amongst the Ladys at Billingsgate. … Ned Thompson is as happy as the Money and charms of Belle Dunch can make him, and a miserable Dog for all that” (February 1725; 2:45-46). Yet for all her attention to the specific excesses of her acquaintances, she ends, contrary to the evidence in the letter itself, by insisting on the insignificance of her subject: “For my part, as it is my establish'd Opinion That this Globe of ours is no better than a Holland Cheese and the Walkers about in it Mites, I possess my Mind in patience, let what will happen, and should feel tolerably easy thô a great Rat came and eat halfe of it up.”

It is this tension between the “stupendous” and the inconsequential that provides her with ample material for satire, primarily because she understands that the rules for polite behavior are subject to constant revision. The chief function of the courtly nobility, according to Norbert Elias, was “to distinguish themselves, to maintain themselves as a distinct formation, a social counterweight to the bourgeoisie.” Yet once the middle class had the money and the power to mimic the behavior of the privileged, the aristocratic models of conduct became useless as a visible means of rank and distinction. Because “the embarrassment-threshold,” as Elias calls it, constantly advanced, aristocrats asserted their control through “the intense vigilance with which [they] observe[d] and polish[ed] everything that distinguishe[d] them from people of lower rank: not only the external signs of status, but also their speech, their gestures, their social amusements and manners.”² As aristocrats, Lady Mary and her friends perceive themselves as standard-bearers of the best in manners and conduct, and thus Lady Mary, sensitively attuned to this theatrical but shifting threshold, feels the pressure to maintain aristocratic class distinctions.

Yet her comments about life in English society are shaped not only by her rank but also by her gender; as a woman, she is controlled by a dominant culture that imposes very real restrictions on her behavior. Thus when she is invited, as an aristocrat, to set and maintain certain class standards, she must also face, as a member of a “privileged underclass,” the constraints imposed upon her by a culture constructed according to male models. In a changing early-eighteenth-century culture, when wealth could be earned by men outside of court circles, aristocratic men still set the standards for the marks of individual male status. For women of privilege, however, the problem was made doubly difficult because the aristocratic imperatives often failed to match the changing demands of gender: on the one hand, aristocratic women had to display their difference in order to maintain it; on the other hand, they found that public display for all women had begun to be equated with sexual license. The tension in her remark about the notorious Lady Vane (whose “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” are found in Smollett's Peregrine Pickle) comes from Lady Vane's public flaunting of her supposedly private sexual liaison, while the humor comes from Lady Mary'sdescription of this “private” female behavior in terms of the “public” male prerogative of patriotism: “Lady Vane is returned hither in company with [her lover] Lord Berkeley, and went with him in publick to Cranford, where they remain as happy as love and youth can make them. I am told that though she does not pique herself upon fidelity to any one man (which is but a narrow way of thinking), she boasts that she has always been true to her nation, and, notwithstanding foreign attacks, has always reserved her charms for the use of her own countrymen” (January 1739; 2:133-34). In equating a woman's scandalous love affair with English nationalism, an equation that makes sexual fidelity “but a narrow way of thinking,” Lady Mary turns illicit female sexuality into a necessary sacrifice in the “higher” cause of political solidarity. And the joke is funny precisely because such gender differences are there to be exploited.

Thus, for a noblewoman, class and gender form an unstable compound. Lady Mary had to devise a means by which a gentlewoman could “achieve effective public personification when the entire realm of public dignity had been defined in a specifically male way through the use of the male body-image.”³ While the subjects of these satiric letters concern almost exclusively the men and women of her own class, her treatment of questions of gender within the aristocratic imperatives highlights “difference” in a particularly visible way: it becomes a locus of anxiety as gentlewomen attempt to find a way to display their difference not just from nonaristocratic women but from all men as well. With neither political nor economic power at her disposal, Lady Mary exploits the considerable “cultural capital,” to use Bourdieu's phrase, that she does have: to authorize and reject standards of conduct in the social world.

It is therefore not surprising, considering these competing, often contradictory pressures, that Lady Mary's letters are almost obsessively concerned with transgressions, for it is here, in their violation, that “correct” standards of conduct are particularly apparent. When an acquaintance, especially a woman, transgresses the code, Lady Mary is quick to cite and even to dwell on the infraction. But she is often surprisingly slow to censure. In fact, she is just as likely to celebrate the unauthorized behavior as condemn it. Such a contradictory construction of the limits of polite behavior indicates Lady Mary's resistance to the definitions of proper behavior in a culture whose standards were subject to revision, and the degree of this resistance is reflected in her language: the more extreme the transgression, the more extreme her discourse becomes as she crosses linguistic boundaries and mixes incompatible styles. This mixing, coming as it does from an aristocrat and a woman, complicates the categories of “high” and “low,” “classical” and “grotesque,” “institutionalized” and “unsanctioned.” The Bakhtinian perspective on history—which produces a description of culture predicated on a “carnivalesque” of subversive “low” discourse that acts to putpressure on the monolithic social structure above—has been revised by Peter Stallybras and Allon White, who assert that the culture actually lurches between these two extremes. The high, they argue, is dependent on the low for the energy that conflict generates: “The primary site of contradiction, the site of conflicting desires and mutually incompatible representation, is undoubtedly the ‘low.’ … The ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other … but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life.”⁴ Lady Mary's always satiric, relentlessly evaluative, and very funny letters prove that, when viewed from within, the early-eighteenth-century aristocratic “upper” structure has no such singular monolithic status or internal coherence; conflict from within destabilizes and defines the “top.”

Especially for aristocratic women, this conflict is largely generated by a strengthening demarcation of the boundary between public and private life. Throughout the eighteenth century, women increasingly lost their opportunities to display the “virtuous visibility” Mary Astell had once hoped they would signify and instead came to find that their virtue was defined primarily through their willingness to disappear into a bourgeois domestic invisibility. Thus the pressure on women generally and increasingly was to withdraw. Lady Mary's letters prove, however, that in reality this “boundary” between public and private is altogether permeable, for her narratives constantly disrupt the convenient binary in a form that itself mimics the problem. She re-creates instances of aristocratic public display through the reputedly “private” epistolary form, asharing of her exaggerated descriptions of aristocratic performance. But she also circulates anecdotes concerning the private—often the sexual and thus supposedly “invisible”—lives of her female acquaintances in an epistolary form that makes such private behavior public. Thus the division between those two supposedly separate realms exists only as a creative fiction, one that is communally agreed upon but one that can be consciously manipulated when the circumstances demand it. For an aristocratic woman, such manipulation is essential, because a merely reputed division between public and private allows aristocratic women to display themselves in public, as one imperative of their status, in all their finery and with all the attendant dignity and respect due to their rank; simultaneously, however, the division allows them to act in private as though their behavior were not subject to the same scrutiny and the same potential public censure.

In the letters concerning the English beau monde, Lady Mary attempts to work through these competing demands of class and gender, to exploit the space for revision offered by the shifting “embarrassment-threshold,” and to emphasize the impossibility of separating private from public behavior: from her privileged but female vantage point, she tries to negotiate a compromise that allows a woman to maintain both a visible and a respectable status in a world quick to seize upon instances of female misconduct. In the end, she fails to negotiate this compromise between display and decorum, but in the process she produces letters that sparkle with all the wit and verbal richness that the tension of competing imperatives can create.

I

Her revision of the social codes takes place within a relatively enclosed community of similarly privileged people. According to historian John Cannon, the “social elite” in 1720 was indeed a small group, and thus the opportunities for Lady Mary to learn the intimate details of all her acquaintances, both male and female, would have been many.⁵ Even though she calls herself a “Spectatress,” she is a “private” journalist in ways Addison and Steele cannot be. Unlike a newspaper reporter, she names names—citing specific individuals, telling their private stories, authorizing and criticizing as she pleases. She recounts, in one instance, the “freshest news in Town” concerning the near “Fatal Accident” that “happen'd 3 nights ago to a very pritty young Fellow, Brother to Lord Finch, who was drinking with a dearly beloved Drab whom you may have heard of, by the name of Sally Salisbury.” The participants are named and the “accident” detailed: “In a jealous pique, she stabb'd him to the heart with a Knife. He fell down dead immediately, but a Surgeon being call'd for, and the Knife drawn out of his body, he open'd his Eyes, and his first words were to beg her to be freinds [sic] with him, and Kiss'd her” (25 December [1722]; 2:20). Lady Mary ridicules this young man of aristocratic lineage both for his stupidity in associating with a dangerous lower-class woman and more specifically for the sentimentalizing of his romantic attachment to this notorious prostitute.⁶

Moreover, unlike Addison and Steele, whose purpose was transparently didactic, Lady Mary and her aristocratic female epistolary friends participate in a subtler form of value definition. They desire, on the one hand, to share their sensibilities as a means of confirming their community, and, on the other hand, they participate in reworking the subtleties of that system. Lady Mary's assumption that her sister would appreciate the absurdity of the fracas recounted above confirms Patricia Meyer Spacks's claims, in her fascinating examination of gossip, that the sharing of such information grows out of a system of exchange, a partnership that pits “us” against “them”: within what Spacks calls “the economics of gossip,” there is a consistent sharing—of point of view, information, and reassurance.⁷ This mutuality is essential because the information Lady Mary presents sometimes contains no overt judgment; the letters themselves create, as Bruce Redford asserts, both the text and context.⁸ Take, for instance, the following comment Lady Mary sent to her sister concerning the Duchess of Montagu:

Her Daughter Belle is at this instant in the Paradisal state of receiving visits every day from a passionate Lover who is her first Love, who she thinks the finest Gentleman in Europe, and is besides that Duke of Manchester. Her Mama and I often laugh and sigh refflecting on her Felicity, the Consummation of which will be in a fortnight.

(2 April 1723; 2:22)

The seemingly innocent comment, that she laughs and sighs watching these young lovers, can also be read as the more barbed claim that the lovers' “Felicity”—not their marriage—will be shortly consummated. This kind of information, without an overt emotional context, elicits similar responses from epistolary partners once intimacy is generated and sustained. Lady Mary can send this letter to the Countess of Mar knowing that their shared identity—as sisters, as epistolary partners, and as aristocratic women—will evoke a mutual response: her sister, familiar with the participants, will laugh at Lady Mary's characterizations; also familiar with the less than satisfying marriage Lady Mary had made for herself, the Countess of Mar will appreciate the underlying lament. In fact, this mutual interpretation of events is as important as the events themselves; it is the shared epistolary system that creates significance, the set of normative behaviors, and the code of standards.

This sharing goes beyond similar emotional responses, for the fact of community creates the space for a redefinition of values. If, as Spacks has argued, gossip provides “a resource for the subordinated” and “a crucial means of self-expression, a crucial form of solidarity,”⁹ such solidarity would seem to be predicated on knowledge, because “knowing the code”—and managing not to violate it—should determine whether one is included or excluded from community. However, the problems of ignorance and knowledge are more complicated than they initially appear. Two anecdotes, which reassess the value and function of marriage for both men and women, serve as paradigms for the ways Lady Mary treats ignorance and knowledge as she cites and then judges violations of the codes, judgments that function as opportunities for such redefinition and creation of community.

Tradition says that a honeymoon failure can be attributed to the bride's fear or ineptitude as well as to the groom's past debauchery. But here the situation is reversed and extraordinary enough for Lady Mary to retell:

I am in hopes your King of France behaves better than our Duke of Bedford, who by the care of a pious Mother certainly preserv'd his Virginity to his marriage bed, where he was so much disapointed in his fair Bride (who thô his own Inclination could not bestow on him those expressless Raptures he had figur'd to himselfe) that he allready Pukes at the very name of her, and determines to let his Estate go to his Brother, rather than go through the filthy Drudgery of getting an Heir to it. N.B. This is true History and I think the most extrodinary has happen'd in this last age. This comes of living till sixteen without a competent knowledge either of practical or speculative Anatomy, and litterally thinking fine Ladys compos'd of Lillys and Roses.

(August 1725; 2:55-56)

Lady Mary's complaint, directed at both the young man's distaste for his conjugal duties and those mothers who fail to teach their sons about “practical or speculative Anatomy,” is couched in imagery almost Swiftian in its physicality: the groom, reminiscent of Stephron, “allready Pukes” at his beloved's name and considers sexual intercourse finally as “filthy Drudgery.” In the last two sentences, however, this satirical tone shifts to a genuine lament about his “pious Mother” and her cultivation of a belief that women are indeed the “Lillys and Roses” found in a romance. Thus the young man's unrealized hopes about the bliss of the marriage bed are caused by both ignorance and exaggerated expectations.

The second anecdote presents a deviation resulting not from too much ignorance but from too much knowledge:

As for news, the last Wedding is that of Peg Pelham, and I have, I think, never seen so comfortable a prospect of Happyness. According to all appearance she can not fail of being a Widow in 6 weeks at farthest, and accordingly she has been so good a Huswife to line her wedding cloaths with black.

(March 1727; 2:72)

The humor of the passage rests with Lady Mary's juxtaposing the generally satiric comment on the cause of marital bliss—widowhood—with the more specific comment on Peg Pelham's huswifery, an “oeconomy” always desirable in a new bride. Yet Lady Mary's ironic admiration also displays her fear that the condition of marriage generally is so unstable that she can subtly authorize this young bride not simply to line her trousseau with black but to marry only with widowhood in sight. This, of course, undermines a whole set of traditional values articulated in the larger culture. Thus, even though Lady Mary applauds Peg Pelham and ridicules the duke, both of her narratives serve as larger comments concerning the “correct” expectations one should bring to marriage, and through this process Lady Mary and her friends undercut and redefine the power of the standards they are told to honor.

The pressure generated when competing violations occur within a single incident—and Lady Mary's subsequent celebration of one and condemnation of the other—sheds light not only on the specific standards she brings to bear but also on her sense of the theatricality underlying fashionable behavior. An extended narrative, concerning the transgression of the sexual codes by a witty set of lovers who dupe an insensitive intruder, focuses on a young woman who fails to read the social signals (and whose ignorance is therefore punishable) and a couple who knowingly transgress the boundaries of sexual decorum with a style Lady Mary admires. The incident involves the daughter of a colonel whose self-absorption causes her to step over the “embarrassment-threshold” and whose insensitivity is ridiculed and ultimately exploded by the ploy of the clever lovers. Lady Mary calls the tale “the most diverting story about Town” and opens with an introduction to the major characters: “I can't tell whither you know a Tall, musical, silly, ugly thing, niece to Lady Essex Roberts, who is call'd Miss Leigh. She went a few day ago to visit Mrs. Betty Titchburne, Lady Sunderland's sister, who lives in the House with her, and was deny'd at the door; but with the true manners of a great Fool told the porter that if his Lady was at home she was very positive she would be very glad to see her” (23 June 1727; 2:78). Lady Mary's characterization of Miss Leigh, in the unpleasant adjectives “Tall, musical, silly, ugly,” is expanded upon by Walpole, who in his correspondence describes her as “a virtuosa, a musician, a madwoman” apparently so in love with Handel that she wore his picture, along with the Pretender's, on her breast.¹⁰ With the manners of “a great Fool,” Miss Leigh ignores an important social convention: when one is politely refused entrance at the door, one turns with equal politeness and leaves.

Her unwelcome intrusion is a blunder so insensitive that it startles Mrs. Titchburne, who “was ready to drop down at the sight of her,” but she tells the young woman, “in a grave way,” that entry has been “deny'd to every mortal” because she intends “to pass the Evening in devout preparations.” These preparations, however, turn out to have quite a secular purpose: Miss Leigh had not been there a quarter of an hour when there is a “violent rap” at the door, and somebody “vehemently” runs upstairs. Miss Titchburne, surprised again, says she “beleiv'd it was Mr. Edgcombe” and is “quite amaz'd how he took it into his Head to visit her.” During these excuses, Lady Mary writes, “enter Edgcombe, who appear'd frighted at the sight of a third person.” Miss Titchburne's seeming surprise and her disingenuous claim to be amazed by his presence is played off Edgcombe's very real shock upon seeing the musical Miss Leigh.

Although a scenario for instant embarrassment is set up, the lovers are quick to flatter Miss Leigh's vanity by asking her to play. When she sits down at the harpsichord, however, “her Audience decamp'd to the Bed Chamber, and left her to play over 3 or 4 lessons to her selfe.” This scene, whose centerpiece is Miss Leigh's playing blithely to an empty house, could have been lifted from a comedy of manners: by enlivening her narrative with shifting entrances and exits, energy and confusion, Lady Mary creates a kind of dramatic irony complete with stage directions (“enter Edgcombe”). She invites her readers to share in the ridicule by aligning themselves with the witty lovers in the same way they would with a hero or heroine in comedy—for self-assurance and knowledge are the valued commodity in controlling this plot.

As Lady Mary continues to juxtapose the young woman's barging into a situation where she is obviously unwanted against her equally blind response to being abandoned and even shunned, the absurdity of the situation grows: “They return'd, and made what excuses they could, but said very frankly they had not heard her performance and begg'd her to begin again, which she comply'd with, and gave them the opertunity of a second retirement. Miss Leigh was by this time all Fire and Flame to see her heavenly Harmony thus slighted, and when they return'd told them she did not understand playing to an empty room. Mr. Edgecombe begg'd ten thousand pardons, and said if she would play Godi, it was a Tune he dy'd to hear, and it would be an Obligation he should never forget” (2:79). The couple's “frankly” claiming not to have heard a note and their retiring to the bedroom once again culminate in the wordplay of Mr. Edgcombe's request for the aria from Handel's Ottone, “a Tune he dy'd to hear” (2:79n). The pun on “dy'd” and its older meaning of sexual climax is doubly funny, for it is both a “frank” statement of his present intention and a description of the reason he had “not heard her performance” in the moments just past. Had Miss Leigh any self-awareness, she would have fled at that point, but not surprisingly she once again behaves inappropriately, this time in an act of retribution: “She made answer, she would do him a much greater Obligation by her Absence, which she suppos'd was all that was wanting at that Time, and run down stairs in a great Fury, to publish as fast as she could, and was so indefatigable in this pious design that in 4 and twenty hours all the people in Town had heard the story, and poor Edgcombe met with nothing where ever he went but complements about his third Tune, which is reckon'd very handsome in a Lover past forty” (2:79). Lady Mary's sympathies obviously lie with the clever lovers and their humiliation of an unwanted intruder who fails to see that rather than damaging Mr. Edgcombe's reputation she has made him and his “third Tune” objects of admiration. The lovers, fully aware of the absurdity of the situation, act with confident aggression, and thus Lady Mary empowers them to treat Miss Leigh with such contempt. Equally important, Lady Mary concentrates on exposing a doltish breach of decorum rather than the illicit love affair between two equally perceptive, intelligent, and clever people who are willing to carry a joke as far as it will go.¹¹

II

Exposure, however, is a given for aristocrats, male and female. They maintained their status through the manipulation of the difference they could create between themselves and the “lower orders,” a difference apparent in the rich and expensive fashions that artificially constructed the aristocratic body as well as in the class accents and mannered gestures of aristocratic “body management,” as Dorinda Outram calls it.¹² Accordingly, public violations of the social codes provide a particularly rich opportunity for Lady Mary to push the boundaries of social and linguisitic decorum: when aristocratic exposure takes place within a legitimate and sanctioned form of public display—when aristocratic women necessarily invite the gaze of onlookers as one imperative of their status—Lady Mary delights in producing grotesque descriptions of an excessive, too insistent female presence.

In a letter addressed to Lady Pomfret and concerned with the events surrounding the October 1738 coronation of George III, Lady Mary refers to the “common” mob that rioted that day: “Our mobs grow very horrible; here are a vast number of legs and arms that only want a head to make a very formidable body” (2:125). This indistinguishable mass of fragmented body parts is typical of aristocratic representations of the “lower orders”: the “grotesque body”—a multiple image that is “teeming, always already part of a throng”¹³—is opposed to the fully constituted and coherent classical body. The “want [of] a head” further emphasizes the disjunction between the contained and “managed” aristocratic body and the ungovernable, headless, “grotesque” mob, a group represented in the aristocratic imagination as lacking the unique individuality and singularity of the “upper” culture.

Lady Mary goes on, however, to make a double contrast by separating herself and Lady Pomfret from the equally frenetic aristocratic preparations for the day: “But while we readers of history are, perhaps, refining too much, the happier part of our sex are more usefully employed in preparation for the birth-day, where I hear Lady Pembroke is to shine in a particular manner, and Lady Cowper to exhibit some new devices worthy of her genius” (1:125). In this same role of “reader of history,” Lady Mary had earlier created a brilliant series of grotesque portraits—emphasizing the vanity of the women present for the 1727 coronation ceremonies of George II—that highlights the comedy of female display. She does not employ images of a headless, fragmented mob teeming with scattered body parts but instead anatomizes individual aristocratic female bodies so that each takes on gigantic proportions.

Claiming that it was “very entertaining to Observe the variety of airs that all meant the same thing, the Business of every walker there being to conceal Vanity and gain Admiration” (October 1727; 2:85), Lady Mary emphasizes the visual power of the spectacle:

But she that drew the greatest Number of Eyes was indisputably the Countess of Orkney. She exposed behind a mixture of Fat and Wrinkles, and before a considerable pair of Bubbys a good deal withered, a great Belly that preceeded her; add to this the inimitable roll of her Eyes, and her Grey Hair which by good Fortune stood directly upright, and 'tis impossible to immagine a more Delightfull Spectacle. She had embellish'd all this with a great deal of Magnificence which made her as big again as usual, and I shou'd have thought her one of the largest things of God's making if my Lady St. John had not display'd all her Charms that day.

(2:85-86)

The countess's body, displayed in a sanctioned public space and not simply visible but consciously adorned, invites and even demands onlookers, and thus Lady Mary relentlessly returns to the magnitude of her size, actually increasing her already too spectacular presence. Lady Mary then doubles the impact of her humor by claiming that the countess would have been “one of the largest things of God's making” were it not for the too substantial charms of Lady St. John—whom, delightfully, Lady Mary does not even bother to describe. This grotesquerie increases as Lady Mary's account itself multiplies: “The poor Dutchess of Montross Crep'd along with a Dozen of black Snakes playing round her Face; and my Lady Portland (who is fall'n away since her dismission from Court) represented very finely an Egyptian Mummy embroider'd over with Hieroglyphics” (2:86). The female body is a source of both humor and revulsion, as Lady Mary calls attention to its inherent “flaws”—the countess's fat and wrinkles—and as it is inappropriately constructed in a Medusan and mummified style complete with scripted hieroglyphics. In the end, however, Lady Mary ends up actively appreciating the aristocratic female display, taking delight in the shared vanity: “In General I could not perceive but the Old were as well pleas'd as the Young, and I (who dread growing Wise more than any thing in the World) was overjoy'd to observe one can never outlive one's Vanity” (2:86). She represents this group of aristocratic celebrants as very different from the “arms and legs” of the common mob. For all their aristocratic multiplicity and grotesqueness, they do not fall into the category of the indistinguishable mass; instead, Lady Mary endows them with a too visible aristocratic individuality.

This giddy, exclusively descriptive celebration of the public display of female “charms” differs from Lady Mary's account of a group of aristocratic women storming the House of Lords. She creates an image that indeed emphasizes and criticizes gender transgression by highlighting female display, but she makes her “teeming throng” of duchesses and ladies too apparent in an arena inappropriate to their status and their gender: the special aristocratic world of politics, a public space long held by the aristocracy to be an exclusively male province. She ridicules this violation in the “high” language of an epic discourse that itself had always been gendered; yet her exploitation of these conventions—as an attempt to deflate, diminish, and “feminize” the event in the mock epic form—actually results in her endowing her acquaintances with the genuine power that the heroic conventions confer.

Opening the letter by claiming that the whole town has been obsessed with politics, specifically a long and bitter debate on 1 March 1739, Lady Mary argues that “one ought to have some of the gifts of Lilly or Partridge” to discuss the matter and that only those mortals with “the talent of divination” should participate in politics. Having situated political intrigue in the realm of the supernatural, she laments that she is alone in this opinion:

The ladies [have] shewn their zeal and appetite for knowledge in a most glorious manner. At the last warm debate in the House of Lords, it was unanimously resolved there should be no crowd of unnecessary auditors; consequently the fair sex were excluded, and the gallery destined to the sole use of the House of Commons. Notwithstanding which determination, a tribe of dames resolved to shew on this occasion, that neither men nor laws could resist them. These heroines were Lady Huntingdon, the Duchess of Queensbury, the Duchess of Ancaster, Lady Westmoreland, Lady Cobham, Lady Charlotte Edwin, Lady Archibald Hamilton and her daughter, Mrs. Scott, and Mrs. Pendarvis [sic], and Lady Frances Saunderson. I am thus particular in their names, since I look upon them to be the boldest assertors, and most resigned sufferers for liberty, I ever read of.

(2:135-36)

Here Lady Mary exploits the language of revolution: this “tribe of dames,” including “the boldest assertors” and the “most resigned sufferers for liberty,” refuses to acknowledge the bounds of acceptable female behavior in allowing “neither men nor laws”—political power—to exclude them. Equally important is the fact that Lady Mary was a longtime friend and journalistic supporter of Walpole and his government, and these women favored the Opposition. Thus empowered by the spectacle they make of themselves and by her own political convictions, Lady Mary ridicules these women for their transgressions.

The conflict grows into confrontation as the women demand the right to enter:

They presented themselves at the door at nine o'clock in the morning, where Sir William Saunderson respectfully informed them the [Lord] Chancellor had made an order against their admittance. The Duchess of Queensbury, as head of the squadron, pished at the ill-breeding of a mere lawyer, and desired him to let them up stairs privately. After some modest refusals he swore by G—— he would not let them in. Her grace, with a noble warmth, answered, by G—— they would come in, in spite of the Chancellor and the whole House. This being reported, the Peers resolved to starve them out; an order was made that the doors should not be opened till they had raised their siege.

(2:136)

Lady Mary contrasts Sir William's initially respectful refusal to admit “the squadron” with the duchess's lack of respect in treating the Usher of the Black Rod as a “mere lawyer” and “pish[ing] at” his ill breeding. The duchess's own transgressions are highlighted when she provokes a shouting match, including the trading of the oath “by G———,” on the steps of the House of Lords. This seeming impasse is finally resolved, however, through clever female “strategems in war”:

These Amazons now shewed themselves qualified for the duty even of foot-soldiers; they stood there till five in the afternoon, without either sustenance or evacuation, every now and then playing vollies of thumps, kicks, and raps, against the door, with so much violence that the speakers in the House were scarce heard. When the Lords were not to be conquered by this, the two Duchesses (very well apprized of the use of stratagems in war) commanded a dead silence of half an hour; and the Chancellor, who thought this a certain proof of their absence, (the Commons also being very impatient to enter) gave order for the opening of the door; upon which they all rushed in, pushed aside their competitors, and placed themselves in the front rows of the gallery.

(2:136-37)

Lady Mary exploits military language to emphasize further the discrepancy between a relatively trivial event and the epic language of battle. A “squadron” of “foot-soldiers” led by a duchess performs its “duty” by participating in a “siege,” and, even though they cannot “conquer,” when “commanded” by the “strategems in war” they manage to “rush in.” The sacrifice the women make is not, of course, the risking of their lives; it is a sacrifice of the body, and Lady Mary does not hesitate to point to the biological functions of duchesses and ladies who stand “without either sustenance or evacuation.” Ultimately, the women “win” not through continued violence or rebellion but through a “stratagem” of passive resistance—silence. Once the men are fooled into believing that the rebellion has been squashed, the women take their “rightful” places in the front of the gallery.

A revealing contrast to Lady Mary's narrative is the firsthand account by Mrs. Pendarves, a member of the “squadron,” who opens her letter with a mildly ironic insistence on the value of public rather than private service: “Like a most noble patriot, I have given up all private advantages for the good of my country.” Unfortunately, this promising beginning does not hold as Mrs. Pendarves settles into a more pedestrian recounting of the events:

To tell you all the particulars of our provocations, the insults of the door-keepers, and our unshaken intrepidity, would flourish out more paper than a single frank would contain, but we bore the buffets of a stinking crowd from half an hour after ten till five in the afternoon, without moving an inch from our places, only see-sawing about as the motion of the multitude forced us. … [Finally] we generously gave [the members of the House of Commons] the liberty of taking their places. As soon as the door was opened they all rushed in, and we followed; some of them had the gallantry to give us their places, and with violent squeezing, and such a resolution as hardly was ever met with, we riggled ourselves into seats. I think that was the first time I wished to be a man—though nothing less than a peer. … Am I not a furious politician? But enough of these affairs, those of friendship suit my nature better, where the struggles that arise are from very different principles than what animate courtiers and politicians, whose selfish views, under the glare of the good of their country, so often fill their hearts with a train of evil thoughts.¹⁴

The differences between Lady Mary's epic retelling of the incident and this straightforward account reside in both the style and the narrative structure. Whereas Lady Mary packs her account with literary language, Mrs. Pendarves's narrative is sparse: her descriptive strategy is limited to calling the crowd “stinking” and citing their “see-sawing” motions. She describes the women themselves simply as resolute, with their only real activity a “violent squeezing” that resulted in their “riggl[ing]” into their seats. This “riggl[ing]” stands in direct contrast to Lady Mary's “vollies of trumps, kicks, and raps” performed by a squadron of foot soldiers. Lady Mary also understands narrative form: her retelling invests the participants with energy—the women “rushed,” “pushed,” and “placed” themselves in the gallery—as opposed to Mrs. Pendarves's unembellished and anticlimactic “and we followed.”¹⁵

While Lady Mary's mock-epic account highlights the disjunction between the classical body, always associated with the aristocracy and with high language, and the grotesque body that makes each woman indistinguishable from the other, she does name the “tribe of dames” individually. More than Lady Mary's, Mrs. Pendarves's nonironic account actually makes these aristocrats indistinguishable from a common mob. Moreover, while both women write about the trangression of the dictates of gender, Lady Mary's account complicates the problem of class. Mrs. Pendarves's wish to be a man, but “nothing less than a peer,” overrides gender in preference of aristocratic status. Lady Mary's account, while it paints the duchesses as grotesque in their individualized multiplicity, simultaneously elevates them into the realm of the epic heroes. The result is the tension of incompatible iconography in both realms.

The conclusion of the letter points to Lady Mary's recognition of this tension as she, in an act of self-diminishment, sets up an uneasy dichotomy between the duchesses' “heroic” behavior and her own: “I beg your pardon, dear madam, for this long relation; but 'tis impossible to be short on so copious a subject; and you must own this action very well worthy of record, and I think not to be paralleled in any history, ancient or modern. I look so little in my own eyes (who was at that time ingloriously sitting over a tea-table), I hardly dare subscribe myself even, Yours” (2:137). Lady Mary presents an ironic image of herself that would initially insist that she, above such unladylike behavior, sat genteelly drinking tea. Without acknowledging her personal foray into political activism—her anonymous periodical The Nonsense of Common-Sense (1737-38)—she purports to live out of the public spotlight, choosing to violate literary, not social, conventions. However, her description of herself as “inglorious” is not altogether inaccurate. Her inactivity on this occasion stands in contrast to the tenacity that these women displayed in the face of powerful obstacles and that is indeed “not paralleled” and, as her letter itself proves, “worthy of record.” Her epic treatment elevates the duchesses into larger-than-life Amazon warriors willing to endure hardships in order to achieve their ends. Like eighteenth-century poets, who longed to write real epic poetry but found themselves engaged in a mock epic (blaming the age for the reduction of heroic pretensions and for stifling epic urges), Lady Mary takes up the opposite strategy. Yet in writing a mock account of duchesses, ladies, and their seemingly trivial breaking of social decorums, Lady Mary also appreciates, if ironically, the courage these women displayed.

Acts of “heroism” such as these were particularly difficult for women to achieve, according to Dorinda Outram's study of the role of women during the French Revolution, because such acts required a “personification” based on the successful public display of physicality according to a male model. This physicality, while a “reservoir of authority” for men, was always a potential humiliation for women. Lady Mary's account of the duchesses proves that such a space for humiliation was there to be exploited. But Outram goes on to argue that, before the Revolution, Frenchwomen had a place in politics, even if their influence was always linked to sexuality: behind the scenes, they personalized politics, factionalized governments with a competition for favors, and destabilized potential alliances. Wielding such influence, women were powerful and despised. After the Revolution, women became respected only in consequence of being excluded from the public and banished to middle-class invisibility; a chaste woman could have no public authority, and if she aspired to such power she was automatically presumed to be sexually uncontrolled and politically threatening.¹⁶

In England, where the revolution occurred a century before, without bloodshed, and in a culture much less clearly divided between the aristocracy and the various levels of gentry, merchant, and middle class, this movement from female inclusion to exclusion was less readily discernible; yet it is clear that by the middle of the eighteenth century in England, women's public participation had lost its late-seventeenth-century connotation of “virtuous visibility.” Citing John Brown's claim that “Obscenity itself is grown effeminate,” Harriet Guest goes even further to argue that the middle class came increasingly to see female participation, female visibility, as equivalent to the obscene, a form of corruption. Brown's lament for the loss of the old days—when, in Guest's words, “men were manly, and women in public were prostitutes”—emphasizes the fact that female public participation had begun to confuse gender differences.¹⁷ While aristocrats continued to stress class differences as their means of maintaining their status, the middle class worked to highlight gender distinctions. It did so, however, through the paradoxical process of placing and even coercing women into the silent invisibility of the domestic world. There, they became more obviously different from middle-class and aristocratic men who had a place and a voice in the world. This movement into the difference of the invisible domestic world presented problems for aristocratic women who had to be seen but who were beginning to be told that they had no sanctioned public place.

As aristocrats, Lady Mary and her acquaintances were comfortable being the objects of others' gazes. Such visibility was essential for the maintenance of class status. And even if these rites of observation allow her to ridicule her fellow aristocrats—as she does when she takes the role of “reader of history” to celebrate, exaggerate, and distort the visual spectacle of female bodies on public parade during the coronation ceremonies—such female display is both a traditional element of her class responsibilities and an occasion ripe for humor. As a woman, however, Lady Mary recognized the new cultural pressure urging women into the invisibility of the domestic world. Thus display, as a sign of aristocratic worth, competes with withdrawal, as a sign of proper womanliness.

III

Reputation presents one such sign. As a public phenomenon modified in private, it is a commodity whose value rises and falls according to the vicissitudes of fortune or the breaches in decorum that one is stupid enough, or unlucky enough, to have committed, and thus it occupies the liminal position of mediating between the two. The enactment or violation of polite standards—and its influence on one's reputation—would seem to be most apparent in public, as evidenced above in Lady Mary's exaggerations of the too visible displays staged by her aristocratic female acquaintances. However, reputations are more powerfully shaped by private, domestic relationships; as a result, anxiety about the interpenetration between the two supposedly separate spheres of public and private is particularly apparent in epistolary discourse: as Homer Obed Brown puts it, “The letter gives answers (information); its emphasis is on revelation.”¹⁸

Because reputation is linked, especially for women, with sex, Lady Mary's letters are almost obsessively concerned with others' sexual foibles. Yet absent from these same letters is any sermonizing. In fact, Lady Mary is more likely to judge an incident according to aesthetic rather than moral criteria. For instance, she calls the occasion of a married woman's being wooed by a lovesick gallant—a man whom the young woman ultimately humiliates by refusing the affair—not a sin but a “farce”:

I have so good an Opinion of your taste to beleive Arlequin in person will never make you laugh so much as the Earl of Stairs's furious passion for Lady Walpole, aged 14 and some months. Mrs. Murry undertook to bring the busyness to bear, and provided the oppertunity (a great Ingredient you'l say), but the young Lady prov'd skittish. She did not only turn this Heroic Flame into present ridicule, but expos'd all his generous Sentiments to divert her Husband and Father-in-law. His Lordship is gone to Scotland; and if there was any body wicked enough to write upon it, Here is a subject worthy the pen of the best Ballad maker in Grubstreet.

([June 1726]; 2:67)

It is not the immorality of Lord Stair's pursuit of Lady Walpole that piques Lady Mary's interest (nor does she complain about Mrs. Murray's “pimping” for the event). Instead it is Lady Walpole's volubility and the breach of social decorum that such a violation implies that fascinate Lady Mary: the young woman's act of retelling, of turning passion into narrative and thus “Heroic Flame” into ridicule, is the real source of amusement. Moreover, Lady Mary's remarks further reinforce the essentially public nature of such reputedly private sexual liaisons. Her suggestion that somebody “wicked enough” should commemorate the event acknowledges that the act of retelling transgresses the reputed boundary of privacy, but she does not call attention to the fact that such narratives constitute almost the singular subject of her own discourse, that her own act of “wickedness” is enacted there on the page. Instead, she locates the source of genuine public exposure in an institutionalized form of revelation, the Grub Street balladeers.

Lady Mary can produce her own collection of revelations because she possesses the necessary knowledge. Her witty treatment of marriage echoes the “sex intrigues” of Restoration comedy precisely because she can provide for public inspection information about private experience. Knowledge, and the Foucauldian power it confers, takes on a special resonance when applied to matters of sex, for it purports to bring to light the closest-kept secrets and thus creates the most unstable—potentially the most destructive and potentially the most comic—kind of power, a fact she fully recognizes. She recounts, for instance, one particularly theatrical incident where knowledge about the private use a woman has made of her body occasions a very public drawing-room scandal. The event occurred during the “Tunbridge battles” between Lady Townshend and Kitty Edwin: “The secret cause [of their feud] is variously guessed at; but it is certain Lady Townshend came into the great room gently behind her friend, and tapping her on the shoulder with her fan, said aloud, I know where, how, and who. These mysterious words drew the attention of all the company, and had such an effect upon poor Kitty, she was carried to her lodging in strong hystericks. However, by the intercession of prudent mediators peace was concluded” ([November 1738]; 2:131). Lady Townshend “wins” the battle precisely because she purports to have knowledge (whether or not she actually does) of the specifics of Kitty Edwin's private behavior: the “where, how, and who.” Lady Mary acts in the same journalistic capacity—offering to her readers narratives concerning the secrets of her acquaintances and, in the process, accruing the same measure of power.

Marriage and the social rituals attendant upon it—courtship, contracts, scandals, and affairs—are sites of particular interest, and powerful tension, because Lady Mary does indeed have access to the “where, how, and who.” She also knows that an aristocratic woman is expected to marry and to behave appropriately when “placed” in marriage, even as she fully acknowledges that unhappiness too often results from “misplacement”: “Lady J. Wharton is to be marry'd to Mr. Holt, which I am sorry for, to see a young Woman that I realy think one of the agreablest Girls upon Earth so vilely misplac'd; but where are people match'd! I suppose we shall all come right in Heaven, as in a Country Dance, thô hands are strangly given and taken while they are in motion, at last all meet their partners when the Jig is done” ([ca. 11 August 1721]; 2:11). The disturbing suggestion that only through death and in the afterlife can one possibly find the appropriate partner is lightened by Lady Mary's metaphor equating marriage with the simple pleasures of a rustic dance, but the seeming impossibility of securing a happy marriage in this world underlies her lament.

Lady Mary has too much “real-world” evidence to support anything other than the conclusion that unhappiness in marriage is the lot of most women. In expressing her fears about the proliferation of messy, damaging, and very public parliamentary divorces, she offers a solution that will protect those most in need of it—women: “[Divorces] grow more fashionable every day, and in a little while won't be at all Scandalous. The best Expedient for the public and to prevent the Expence of private familys would be a genneral Act of Divorceing all the people in England. You know, those that pleas'd might marry over again, and it would save the Reputations of several Ladys that are now in peril of being expos'd every day” ([May 1725]; 2:51-52). Her general act of divorce would prevent women from the wrong kind of public exposure—from having to endure the genuinely public scandal that the recounting of their misconduct occasions in the parliamentary forum, scandal that permanently damages a woman's reputation without injuring her husband's.

Yet Lady Mary also rejects another possible “solution” to the problem of marital unhappiness: choosing a partner outside of one's class. The case of a privileged woman who, in desiring to marry a man “beneath her station,” fails to value her aristocratic status presents a direct threat to Lady Mary's class identity. Although the subject had “furnished the tea-tables [at Bath] with fresh tattle for this last fortnight,” Lady Gage informs Lady Mary of the completely inappropriate attempt of Lady Harriet Herbert to marry John Beard, a young actor “who sings in the farces at Drury-lane.” As the daughter of the first Earl of Waldegrave, ambassador to France, and the widow of the son of the second Marquess of Powis, Lady Harriet was a woman of high social standing. When Lady Gage turns to Lady Mary for advice about how to prevent the unsuitable marriage, Lady Mary replies: “I told her honestly, that since the lady was capable of such amours, I did not doubt if this was broke off she would bestow her person and fortune on some hackney-coachman or chairman; and that I really saw no method of saving her from ruin, and her family from dishonour, but by poisoning her; and offered to be at the expence of the arsenic, and even to administer it with my own hands, if she would invite her to drink tea with her that evening” (November 1738; 2:127-28). The degree of the threat posed by this marriage is clear in the extremity of Lady Mary's solution: her comical remedy of “arsenic at tea” indicates that Lady Harriet's actions are potentially dangerous both to women (Lady Harriet's “ruin”) and to the aristocracy (her family's “dishonour”). As J. V. Beckett puts it, “Most aristocrats regarded marital equality as part of the natural order of events, … [and] while marriage might be seen as an important financial transaction … it was even more crucial as a means of cementing the social fabric of the group.”¹⁹ The possibility of Lady Harriet's marrying so far beneath her station is a potential threat to this cohesive social fabric, for it would be weakened by the irrevocable loss of one of its female members, Lady Harriet herself.

The comedy in the letter takes on greater significance as Lady Mary leads up to a pronouncement about the damage such a misalliance can create. First, she claims the Lady Harriet's relations have “no reason to be amazed at her constitution” but instead are “violently surprized” by her desire for a legitimate marriage.²⁰ This snide comment comes from Lady Mary's knowledge of the history of scandal in Lady Harriet's family. The young woman follows in the footsteps of her grandmother, who was an illegitimate daughter of James II, and the subject of scandal in her widowhood when she became pregnant, refused to name her lover, and was forced into a convent (2:128n). Lady Mary concludes the letter with references to both women's “bad” behavior: “Such examples are very detrimental to our whole sex; and are apt to influence the other into a belief that we are unfit to manage either liberty or money.” When women err, they become vulnerable and exposed to punishment “from above”: men are provided with justifications for curtailing women's “liberty” (the “management” of their bodies) and for limiting women's freedom in the social world (withholding “money”).

Thus questions of the body—especially questions about what women will or will not do with their bodies and what degree of exposure they are willing to risk—form the subject of many of Lady Mary's most intriguing letters. The body and its functions are such powerful sites of fascination precisely because they are considered the most exclusive and the most private property of the individual. In the early eighteenth century, a new and essentially bourgeois notion of a “body politic” was being redefined in such a way that women were excluded. In the political language of the Revolution, this new “body politic”—formed according to Locke's claims in the Second Treatise that the individual owns his body and the products of that body's labor and thus according to a male model of property and ownership—was also qualified by Locke's distinguishing a subject's voluntary submission to the artificial, constructed power of the magistrate from the “natural” forms of power: “that of a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave.”²¹ Thus the powerful public body was constituted by the property-owning male, who held a “natural” sway over the domestic as well as the political worlds.

When a female body, re-created in epistolary discourse, is exposed and circulated, it becomes particularly vulnerable and emblematic; the boundaries between public and private are revealed to be permeable, and the writer turns information into power. The female body, as Lady Mary learned in Turkey, is visible and substantial, capable of being viewed in an aesthetic context as an objet d'art. In England, because of its different rules of decorum and its different imperatives for female display, Lady Mary responds to the uncovered body with both fascination and ridicule. Her treatment of Mme de Broglio is a case in point. The revelation here exists on a variety of levels as Lady Mary exposes the woman's body as a means of “uncovering” it and conflating her behavior with bad judgment:

Madam de Broglio makes a great Noise, but tis only from the frequency and Quantity of her pissing, which she does not fail to do at least ten times a day amongst a cloud of Wittnesses.

One would think her daughter of a River,
As I heard Mr. Mirmont tell,
And the best Commendation that he could give her
Was that she made Water excellent well.
With a fa la la etc.

(December 1724; 2:43)

Because Mme de Broglio, as the wife of the French ambassador, could quite reasonably be expected to make a great “Noise” in society, Lady Mary can turn these expectations into the pun that describes the ambassadress in terms of the “noise” of her biological functions rather than her social power. Lady Mary feels empowered to ridicule her precisely because she has called attention to her body and revealed herself in this inappropriate way.

One final example of a woman who fails to manage her body appropriately and who thus makes a public spectacle of herself “for love” is the Duchess of Cleveland; she violates not only the dictates of gender but also the imperatives of age—and the dignity and wisdom that should accompany it—and thus provides a particularly personal threat to Lady Mary. The inseparability of the public from the private is also forcefully reinscribed in the narrative concerning the passion of the sixty-three-year-old duchess for the twenty-five-year-old illegitimate grandson of Charles II and Nell Gwynn, a love that makes the old woman an object of general scorn: “The Man in England that gives the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain is a Youth of Royal blood, with all his Grandmother's beauty, Wit, and good Qualitys; in short, he is Nell Guin in person with the Sex alter'd, and occasions such fracas amongst the Ladys of Galantry that it passes [belief]. You'l state to hear of her Grace of Cleveland at the Head of them” (April 1727; 2:74). The duchess's transgression is so severe that it provokes Lady Mary to poetry:

The God of Love, enrag'd to see
The Nymph despise his Flame,
At Dice and cards mispend her Nights
And slight a nobler Game;
For the Neglect of offers past
And Pride in days of yore,
He kindles up a Fire at last
That burns her at threescore.
A polish'd white is smoothly spread
Where whilom wrinkles lay,
And glowing with an artfull red
She ogles at the Play.
Along the Mall she softly sails
In White and Silver drest,
Her neck expos'd to eastern Gales,
And Jewells on her breast.
Her children banish'd, Age forgot,
Lord Sidney is her care,
And, what is much a happier lot,
Has hopes to be her Heir.

Lady Mary offers up a damning poetic portrait of a woman whose private passion spills over into a public display of its effects. Painted red and draped in virginal silver and white, the body of the duchess, reminiscent of Lady Wishfort's, becomes even more grotesque as Lady Mary focuses on the older woman's neck and breasts (two parts of female anatomy that age in quite visible ways) and describes them not only as exposed but bejewelled, calling attention to their “defects.”

She concludes the letter in a very different tone, however, one that draws a particularly striking image from the duchess's private life and ends with an expression of Lady Mary's own fears: “This is all true History thô it is dogrell Rhime. In good earnest, [the duchess] has turn'd Lady Grace and Family out o' doors to make room for him, and there he lies like leafe Gold upon a pill. There never was so violent and so indiscreet a passion. Lady Stafford says, nothing was ever like it since Phedra and Hipolitus.—Lord ha' mercy upon us; see what we may all come to!” (April 1727; 2:74-75). The evocative image of the young Lord Sidney, lying “like leafe Gold upon a pill,” satirically debases both lovers: the duchess's body becomes a pill that resonates not simply with medicinal implications and the sicknesses of old age but also with the threatening possibilities of poison. The youthful Lord Sidney, so comfortably languishing in all his gilt beauty, becomes the useless decoration of this potentially restorative but also potentially lethal cure.²² Underlying Lady Mary's censure is her own fear that the duchess's “violent” and “indiscreet” passion may paint a picture of a future not unlike the one she and her friends may someday face, and thus she echoes Mrs. Fainall's lament about Lady Wishfort, one that emphasizes the “we” in the shared potential for humiliation that women face: “Lord ha' mercy upon us; see what we may all come to!” Her fears were not unjustified, of course, for her own midlife infatuation with Algarotti revealed that she, too, was capable of playing the fool for love.

IV

The competing pressures of the public and private realms and Lady Mary's response to the supposed division between them often take the form of her mixing two supposedly “separate” languages: the political (an aristocratic discourse concerned with governmental forms of power) and the religious (a moral discourse often concerned with forms of private behavior). In two final letters, both extended descriptions of sexual excesses, Lady Mary forcefully reveals, through her use of these incompatible discourses, that the too easy dichotomy between public and private life is insupportable. The first letter recounts a public occasion, the birth-night celebration of 31 October 1723; here, she expresses real concern about women's staging a public display of their sexuality. The second brings to light a secret society of debauchery, a society she actively celebrates.

In a complex and relentlessly ironic letter, Lady Mary describes the birth-night party, another public and sanctioned aristocratic display. The letter provides an example not only of Lady Mary's mixing of incompatible, even competing styles but also of her anxieties about the loss of protection that a culturally sanctioned “hypocrisy”—an agreed-upon cultural division between the public and the private, a division that is also openly permeable—allows to women. She is both participant and spectator in the event, writing “piping hot” from the party and “warm'd with all the Agreable Ideas that fine Cloths, fine Gentlemen, brisk Tunes and lively dances can raise there,” and she entertains Lady Mar with the “freshest Account” of the event by calling herself one of the best figures there: “To say truth, people are grown so extravagantly ugly that we old Beautys are force'd to come out on show days to keep the Court in Countenance” (2:31). Because she herself participates, a straightforward account of her own good showing would sound immodest and even false; thus she handles the occasion with amused self-deprecation by claiming a place even for the old beauties (she was thirty-four at the time). Such “modesty,” however, barely masks her giddy delight in having cast such a fine figure amidst the general splendor.

The public display of aristocratic finery and gaiety leads her to remark about private sexual choices: “Mrs. West was [there], who is a great Prude, having but 2 lovers at a Time; I think those are Lord Haddingtoun and Mr. Lindsay, the one for use, the one for show” (2:31). The issues of “use” and “show” point directly to the seemingly double nature of existence: life in a community demands that one fulfill the social forms, hence one has, for “show,” a publicly acceptable lover; but private life allows one an additional choice, a lover for “use.”

There is, however, no real division between the realms of public and private: Lady Mary knows the identities of both lovers and names each for his specific role. Her epigrammatic remark reveals the fundamental tension of a social existence: she and her acquaintances act as though the public and private realms are separate, when obviously the slippage between them is undeniable, a fluidity that can result only in hypocrisy:

The World improves in one virtue to a violent degree—I mean plain dealing. Hipocricy being (as the Scripture declares) a damnable Sin, I hope our publicans and Sinners will be sav'd by the open profession of a contrary virtue. I was told by a very good Author, who is deep in the secret, that at this very minute there is a bill cooking up at a Hunting Seat in Nortfolk to have Not taken out of the Commandments and clap'd into the Creed the Ensuing session of Parliament. This bold attempt for the Liberty of the subject is wholly projected by Mr. Walpole, who propos'd it to the Secret Committee in his Parlor. Will: Yonge seconded it, and answer'd for all his Acquaintance voteing right to a man.

(2:31-32)

Lady Mary delights in a scheme whereby politicians take over the province of religion and legislate a “new morality,” a world where “thou shalt commit adultery” and “I do not believe in God, the Father, Almighty” become the new commandments sanctioned for the “liberation” of citizens. No longer “oppressed” by the fictions of public and private separation, citizens loosen the restraints of traditionally moral sexual behavior; more important, they are apparently freed from hypocrisy.

But even this new morality is complicated by human contrariness: “Doddington very gravely objected that the obstinancy of Human Nature was such that he fear'd when they had possitive Commandments so to do, perhaps people would not commit adultery and bear False Wittness against their Neighbours with the readyness and Cheerfullness they do at present” (2:32). Such positive commandments point to the two “sins” that are most evident not only in Lady Mary's fashionable world but also in her letters: the sexual intrigues of her neighbors. And even though she predicts that the bill will be dropped, “tis certain it might be carry'd with great Ease, the world being intirely revenue du bagatelle, and Honnour, Virtue, Reputation etc., which we used to hear of in our Nursery, is as much laid aside and forgotten as crumple'd Riband” (2:32).

The metaphor of virtue discarded as one would a soiled fashion leads her to abandon the political in order to focus on marriage and the consequences of the “new morality” for women. It also occasions an important new tone as well:

To speak plainly, I am very sorry for the forlorn state of Matrimony, which is as much ridicul'd by our Young Ladys as it us'd to be by young fellows; in short, both Sexes have found the Inconveniencys of it, and the Apellation of Rake is as genteel in a Woman as a Man of Quality. 'Tis no Scandal to say, Misse———— the maid of Honnour looks very well now she's up again, and poor Biddy Noel has never been quite well since her last Flux. You may Imagine we marry'd Women look very silly; we have nothing to excuse our selves but that twas done a great while ago and we were very young when we did it.

(2:32)

The threat present here is not a socially sanctioned hypocrisy but the frank public acknowledgment of female sexuality. During the birth-night celebration the exposure of women's bodies and their private sexual behavior—the staple of the letters Lady Mary trades with her epistolary partners—is not an item revealed through the “private” reading of epistolary discourse but a commodity too visible amid a glittering and polite gathering. Here it is clear that Lady Mary does not lament the “hypocrisy” of her society at all; rather, she laments the loss of the safety and security produced by a culturally sanctioned and creative fiction that defines a division between public and private life.

The danger presents itself in the seeming erasure of gender differences: young women, like young men of old, ridicule marriage as inconvenient, consider “the Apellation of Rake as … genteel in a Woman as a Man of Quality,” and are not the least scandalized by a single woman's pregnancy. Her use of the quotation (“Poor Biddy Noel has never been quite well since her last Flux”) reinforces the threat in such a widespread acceptance of traditionally “immoral” behavior and the clear lack of Astell's “virtuous visibility.” In fact, in this new society it is Lady Mary and her married friends who must apologize for their “indiscretion,” that is, for having married, with the same excuse one used to hear for an unplanned pregnancy: “Twas done a great while ago and we were very young when we did it.” Her lament predates John Brown's concerns about almost the same phenomenon: “The Sexes have now little other apparent Distinction, beyond that of Person and Dress: Their peculiar and characteristic Manners are confounded and lost: The one Sex having advanced into Boldness, as the other have sunk into Effeminacy.”²³ As Lady Mary understands, such a phenomenon is particularly threatening because it only appears to erase the double standard: in enacting the male model of sexual conduct, women forfeit the protection of a “hypocrisy” that allows them their visibility but keeps them from being vulnerable to charges of sexual license and irresponsibility, charges that men could overcome but women only rarely. Once female visibility becomes equated with the immoral, men have a justification for forcing women out of the spotlight; and, while Lady Mary cannot predict that men will impose upon women a bourgeois form of “domestic invisibility,” she does perceive the threat in unprotected displays of female sexuality.

Thus in the birth-night letter, Lady Mary may claim to be amused and even delighted by the cleverness of the politican's scheme, but she is genuinely concerned about gentlewomen's loss of distinction and the protection that a culturally sanctioned hypocrisy provides. She expresses this concern in the only language that accurately reflects the “new” society: a consistent irony produced through the mixing of incompatible styles. Only such discourse can describe a world where aristocratic gender differences are lost and immorality is politically legislated, but not to women's benefit.

One final letter presents an example of Lady Mary's most extreme use of incompatible styles to communicate the tension, confusion, and resistance that female transgressions can generate. In examining the potential for chaos in her social circle, Lady Mary, as a “spectatress,” differs significantly from Mr. Spectator and his program to facilitate stability. According to Michael Ketcham's groundbreaking study, The Spectator lacks incisive thinking and an ironic undermining of expectations because Addison and Steele hope to create a social structure out of a literary structure: “They do not test conventions or test language in order to examine their inadequacies or hidden potentials”; instead, they actually create conventions “in order to establish rather than question an idea of social order.”²⁴ As evidenced above, Lady Mary's satire often pushes the limits of conventions—in mock epics or subverted political and religious discourse—because she witnesses the possibility for chaos in her aristocratic world. Her discourse, focused on incidents of social disorder, represents the inappropriateness of particular “polite” behaviors in a language and a literary structure incongruous to the occasion, an incompatibility that emphasizes the disjunctions in a world of shifting standards.

The letter begins with Lady Mary's acknowledgment that change and instability define social life; she cites a “metamorphosis” in her acquaintances “as wondrous to me as any in Ovid.” First, she recounts the shocking second marriage of Lady Holderness, a woman communal gossip says is willing to renounce her children for the sake of the marriage.²⁵ Lady Mary finds the match altogether inexplicable for other reasons: the couple is “sunk in all the Joys of happy Love nothwithstanding she wants the use of her 2 hands by a Rheumatism, and he has an arm that he can't move. I wish I could send you the particulars of this Amour, which seems to me as curious as that between 2 Oysters, and as well worthy the serious Enquiry of the Naturalists” (2:37). Such private love among the gentry reminds her of a narrative whose “Heroine,” as Lady Mary calls her, is Anastasia Robinson, the reigning prima donna for the decade following her 1714 performance in the opera Creso.²⁶ The social disturbance caused by Lady Holderness's bewildering engagement is mild compared to the political chaos produced when Mrs. Robinson's “honour” is publicly threatened. In this instance, Lady Mary illustrates an incident of aristocratic insult and challenge, not in a metaphor drawn from the sciences and demanding the “Enquiry of the Naturalists,” but in the satirically reductive narrative form of the fairy tale, complete with giants, dwarfs, and threatened violence.²⁷ The form itself points not only to the absurdity of the fracas but also to the threat posed when the private becomes truly public, when the sexual becomes entangled in the political—not simply in literary style, but in reality.

On this occasion, Lord Peterborough, who just before his death claimed to have married Mrs. Robinson, becomes the champion of her “virtue.” Lady Mary compares this activity to Don Quixote's mad quest, a knight errantry of the silliest order:

[Anastasia Robinson] has engag'd halfe the Town in Arms from the Nicety of her virtue, which was not able to bear the too near approach of Senesino in the Opera, and her Condescention in accepting of Lord Peterborrough for a Champion, who has signaliz'd both his Love and Courage upon this occasion in as many instances as ever D[on] Quixote did for Dulcinea. Poor Senesino like a vanquish'd Giant was forc'd to confess upon his knees that Anastasia was a non pareil of virtue and of Beauty. Lord Stanhope, as dwarf to the said Giant, jok'd of his side, and was challeng'd for his pains. Lord Delawar was Lord Peterborrough's second; my Lady miscarry'd.

(March 1724; 2:37-38)

At the center of the threatened violence is Senesino, a castrato of “majestic figure” brought to his knees “like a vanquish'd Giant.” The image of a giant Italian kneeling in submission at the feet of an English Quixote is certainly amusing in its own right, but the problem of size, coupled with the madness of violence in defense of a virtue already suspect, is complicated by Lord Stanhope's interference. Stanhope, later Earl of Chesterfield, was notably short in stature and, according to Lord Hervey, had “a propensity to ridicule, in which he indulged himself with infinite humour and no distinction, and with inexhaustible spirits and no discretion” (2:38n). Such a lack of discretion is apparent when this puny David baits a majestic Goliath and earns himself a challenge as a result.

But this small, isolated incident takes on much larger dimensions when the threatened violence ultimately spills over from the participants and into the highest echelons of power: “The Whole Town divided into partys on this important point. Innumerable have been the disorders between the 2 sexes on so great an Account, besides halfe the House of Peers being put under Arrest. By the Providence of Heaven and the wise Cares of his Majesty no bloodshed ensu'd. However, things are now tolerably accomodated, and the Fair Lady rides through the Town in Triumph in the shineing Berlin of her Hero, not to reckon the Essential advantage of £100 per month which (tis said) he allows her” (2:38). Once the insignificant amours of the upper crust begin to affect the larger world of politics, everyone, including even the House of Lords, must choose sides. Peace reigns and the fairy tale concludes only after the king proclaims, the giant is vanquished, and the fair maiden lives happily ever after—in “Triumph” on one hundred pounds a month.

The “gallantry” in the above anecdote, whose import is diminished and whose absurdity is magnified through a whimsical literary form, takes on greater power and greater threat in Lady Mary's final examination of the sexual high jinks of a group of young aristocrats. In what might be the most daring piece of writing in all of her correspondence, she again exploits political discourse and the language of religion to paint a picture not of public female transgression but of general, if supposedly private, sexual excess. She endows the group of young people, who call themselves the Schemers, with the weight of religious discourse, and they ascend into ethereal realms to become modern-day apostles. However, their means of ascension is suspect; masterminded and choreographed by the Schemers, sex becomes a secular rite of passage:

In General, never was Galantry in so elevated a Figure as it is at present. 20 very pritty fellows (the Duke of Wharton being President and chief [sic] director) have form'd themselves into a committee of Galantry. They call themselves Schemers, and meet regularly 3 times a week to consult on Galant Schemes for the advancement of that branch of Happyness which the vulgar call Whoring.

(March 1724; 2:38)

This “branch of Happyness” was institutionalized by Viscount Hillsborrough, who opened his Hanover Square house “on Ash Wednesday” for the “best contriv'd Entertainment in the World, and the only remedy against spleen and vapours occasion'd by the Formality of that day, which still subsists amongst other rags of Popery not yet rooted out” (2:38). The plan, of course, contains a rank blasphemy: Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten fasts, was a High Church holiday for the Anglicans as well as the Catholics, and Lady Mary's calling this secular ceremony a “remedy” against the “spleen and vapours” of the day honored in a sacred ritual violates both the doctrines of the church and the demands of linguistic decorum.

Her examination of the house rules agreed upon by the Schemers is couched in the language of political probity: the rules are “several Articles absolutely necessary for the promotion of public good and the conservation of peace in private Familys.” This ironic claim to “gallantry's” creation of better citizens and happier homes is dependent on one special element—secrecy. Each member must arrive “at the hour of 6 mask'd in a Domine,” and all must swear not to attempt to discover the identity of “his brother's incognita”: “If by Accident or the Lady's indiscretion her name should chance to be discover'd by one or more of the Schemers, that name should remain sacred and as unspeakable as the name of the Deity amongst the Jews” (2:39). The women's dressing in masks and dominoes, clothing Terry Castle calls a classic form of disguise and a traditional mark of intrigue, lends to the proceedings an ironic, sacramental air in keeping with the Schemers' subversion of the Lenten spirit.

Castle also argues that such robes are “cypherlike,” a sign of negativity and an emblem of potential,²⁸ and such potential resonates in the “Solemnity” of the Schemers' ritual feasting:

You may imagine such wholsome Laws brought all the best Company to this polite Assembly; add to these the Inducement of good Music, Fine Liquors, a splendid Supper, and the best punch you ever tasted. But you'l ask, how could they sup without shewing their faces? You must know the very Garrets were clean'd and lighted out at this Solemnity. The whole Company (view'd the supper, which was large enough to) suffer every fair one to point to what she thought most delightfull to be convey'd to her respective apartment.

The opening sentence of this section is a fine example of Lady Mary's ability to create comic impact: she moves from the high (“such wholsome Laws”) to the low (“the best punch you ever tasted”) so rapidly and smoothly that all the appetites of these men and women are brought into high relief. The focal point of the scene—the young women dressed in the secular equivalents of monk's habits and standing before a table, pointing wordlessly at the supper dishes—becomes a blasphemous imitation of the Mass translated into wholly secular terms.

Anonymity and secrecy are maintained by screens set up around individual tables: “Those who were yet in the state of probation, and scrupul'd too much happyness in this world for fear of its being deducted in the Next, had screens set round little neat Tables in the public rooms, which were as inviolate (but to the partners) as Walls of Adamant. You may imagine there were few of this latter Class, and tis to be hop'd that good Examples and the Indefatigable endeavors of the Schemers (who spare no pains in carrying on the good cause) will lessen them daily” (2:39). Lady Mary reverses the traditional language of religion in suggesting that those women who “scupl'd too much happyness in this world”—women who desire only flirtation, not lovemaking—exist in a “state of probation.” Her remark has its real-life analogue in the three-part initiation process monks had to complete: a movement from the noviatiate, to probation, and then to final vows. Thus, like their religious counterparts, these young women await their final initiation—only theirs leads not to chastity but to sex.

In the final section, while donning the cloak of a “true patriot,” Lady Mary raises her voice to proclaim the “new gospel”:

These Galantrys are continu'd every Wednesday during Lent, and I won't ask your pardon for this long Account of 'em since I consider the duty of a true English Woman is to do what Honnour she can to her native Country, and that it would be a Sin against the pious Love I bear the Land of my Nativity to confine the renown due to the Schemers within the small extent of this little Isleland, which ought to be spread where ever Men can sigh or Women wish.

(2:39-40)

Employing this wonderfully overblown rhetoric of the patriotic nationalist and ironically aligning herself with Enlightenment philosophes such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, who were deeply impressed by the freedom and equality they saw coexisting in England,²⁹ Lady Mary makes use of her country's reputation for progress by praising the England celebrated as the most “progressive” nation on earth: a land of liberty, prosperity, science, and free inquiry. But she ends the letter with a complaint made even more powerful by its striking religious metaphor:

Tis true they have the Envy and Curses of the old and ugly of both Sexes, and a general persecution from all old Women, but this is no more than all Reformations must expect in their beginning, and what the Christian Church suffer'd in a remarkable manner at its first blaze. You may easily beleive, The whole Generation of Fathers, Mothers, and Husbands raise as great a Clamour against this new institution as the pagan preists did of old against the light of the Gospel, and for the same reasons, since it strikes at the very foundation of their Authority, which Authority is built on grosse impositions upon Mankind.

(2:40)

Calling the new sexual license the next Reformation, she is able to situate those unable to recognize both the light of this new gospel and the “first blaze” of this new church in the dark, unenlightened realm of the pagan.

The tension found in all the satiric letters is here at its most intense. The processes of “before and after” are completely reversed in the Schemers' ritual: rather than participating in a Mardi Gras of sanctioned and legitimized revelry before the Lenten season, the Schemers wantonly celebrate during the time of fasts and self-restraint. Their “carnival” is indeed outside the law, beyond sanction, and without legitimacy. Lady Mary obviously feels the pressure of the violation, but as a writer she knows that the Schemers' devilry is too tempting to pass up: stylistically complicitous with the Schemers, she exploits the opportunity to violate literary forms with the same aggression and style. The freedom the Schemers enact in loosening the sexual bonds, Lady Mary re-creates in the blasphemous and dangerous use of this sacred, “mock-religious” language. But while her irony emphasizes the transgression, she never points the moralist's finger of blame and indeed celebrates the flamboyance of their transgressions: just as the Schemers have “out-performed,” “out-theatered” the church, Lady Mary creates a discourse that allows her to circumvent the decorums and the “authorities” that constrain her.

A very different public narrative concerning the Schemers' activities appeared in the 6 June 1724 edition (no. 26) of the Universal Journal. The editor of this weekly newspaper had earlier described the paper's purpose this way: “As to the Irregularities of the Beau Monde of both Sexes, we shall visit them with our deceas'd Friend Bickerstaff's Ghost, whom we have full Power to raise with all his former Authority and Dignity: By him we shall chastise every growing Enormity, and reduce Dress and Decorum to the just Standard of his Day” (no. 1). Such a “growing Enormity” is to be found in the activities of the Schemers, who for all their insistence on secrecy have not escaped public notice, as the Journal acknowledges: “The Inhabitants of the polite Part of the Town are no strangers to the Designs of these Bravadoes.” The newspaper account, unlike Lady Mary's, condemns the “bestial” nature of the Schemers' pursuits: not only have they reportedly written to a member “of a Foreign Academy,” desiring him “to get what knowledge he can of the Statues made by the several Legislators of the Canibals … to serve them as model for their own,” they have supposedly planned to set the lions in the Tower of London loose to roam free and terrorize the city. In direct contrast to Lady Mary's discourse of patriots and apostles, the Journal first likens the Schemers to the Roman triumvirate and then goes on to point to the depth of their depravity: “Thus have our Schemers agreed, that no Consideration whatsoever shall be a Check to their Pleasures, when they are in Pursuit of 'em; nor shall any one refuse gratifying his bestial Appetite, because the Person he has pitched upon is his Mother or his Sister” (2). With these predictions of terror and incest, the only “Reformation” the Journal can hope for is a genuinely religious one. The editor, originally intending to publish the names of the Schemers “to see whether a Knowledge of their being detected would not work the Reformation,” reconsidered out of fear that their public identification might only “harden their Hearts.” The report therefore ends with the editor's apology for having “terrify'd a great number of my Female Readers” but with this offer of comfort: because the Schemers have “made free with their Constitutions,” they have often had to visit surgeons and apothecaries, and the Journal predicts that of the eighteen members “not Eight will live to see the End of Autumn.”

The differences in the accounts are significant: for Lady Mary, the reputed secrecy of the society functions as a form of protection; for the Journal, it is the source of the threat. Lady Mary's play with political and religious language meets a straightforward condemnation of the bestial nature of the Schemers' characters. Whereas the charges of cannibalism, incest, and social regression form a topos of barbarism for the Journal, Lady Mary's language draws on the imagery of theater and spectacle to suggest an ironic theory of historical Englightenment and progress. Yet just as the Schemer's activities are here shown to be publicly available, Lady Mary's own account turns out to be less than secret. Her letter could never be “published” officially, for it is too scandalous in its blasphemy; yet the Schemers do become privy to and applaud her epistolary performance. She insists that when they got their hands on the letter she “had much ado to get it from 'em” (2:40), but her cavalier attitude about the letter's having fallen into the wrong hands could indicate that, even if she did not play an active part in actually transmitting the letter to these young people, she is not altogether displeased by the event. She rewards the Schemers with this scandalous narrative because of their transgressive flamboyance, theatricality, and aggressive style, and her delight in having her wit appreciated by the participants gives her a chance to tout one final instance of the Schemers' violations of convention.

As a “spectatress” and “reader of history,” Lady Mary's satirical letters treat, on the one hand, these private activities of her friends and acquaintances. Through her “insider's” knowledge and through the epistolary form itself, she makes concrete the “invisible” elements of individual life—the bodies, the sexual liaisons, the absurd infatuations of her friends. On the other hand, she exaggerates and distorts the publicly available images of her aristocratic circle when she makes their often too visible presence loom large and even grotesque. Yet her letters also reveal the tension in a world split between the permeable boundaries of these reputedly public and private realms. She lives in a world where accounts of public events are shared in private epistolary discourse and where the private secrets of individual life become the public property of letter writers—a world where no absolute standards for “acceptable behavior” seem finally to apply. The women birth-night celebrants, following the roles provided by men, publicly flaunt their sexuality, much to Lady Mary's dismay; the Schemers, male and female, privately flaunt their debauchery and provoke Lady Mary's ironic celebration. Such transgressions, while the sources of her humor, also generate her desire to find some solution to the problem of an aristocratic woman's need to maintain a public visibility while simultaneously sustaining the “fiction” of privacy—as protection from charges of immorality but without a coercion into invisibility.

Horace Walpole recognized the source of the tension in these letters when in 1751 Lady Mary's niece lent him a collection of over fifty of these letters. Usually one of Lady Mary's strongest detractors, he was effusive in his praise: “They are charming! have more spirit and vivacity than you can conceive, and as much of the spirit of debauchery in them as you will conceive in her writing. … In most of them, the wit and style are superior to any letters I ever read but Madame Sévigné's. It is very remarkable how much better women write than men.”³⁰ This very “wit and style,” this “spirit of debauchery,” are the results of the tension Lady Mary never successfully resolves. Her search for a less complicated and more secure place for a gentlewoman in a changing eighteenth-century world that appears to be dividing along gender, not class, lines—a division that insists that women choose invisible marks of domestic distinction and the exclusively private forms of authority that can only translate to Lady Mary as the erasure of difference and the complete loss of her status—must await her self-imposed exile from England.

She tells her sister in 1727, “I am so far from avoiding Company, I resolve never to live without; and when I am no longer an Actor upon this stage (by the way, I talk of twenty years hence at soonest), as a Spectator I may laugh at the farcical Actions that will doubtless be then represented, Nature being exceeding provident in providing Fools and Coxcombs in all Ages, who are the greatest preservatives against the Spleen that I ever could find out” ([July 1727]; 2:82). She leaves the stage sooner than she planned, however, when she abandons England in 1739. Only from the Italian countryside and only when she sends letters focused on three generations of aristocratic women—herself, her daughter, and her granddaughters—does she come to believe that female retirement is the only place that allows a gentlewoman to maintain her visible status as an aristocrat while avoiding the conflict, the violations and transgressions, inescapable in the social world.

Notes

1. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-67). All subsequent references to this edition are placed parenthetically in the text. I have followed Halsband's editorial practice of using square brackets for editorial interpolations and angle brackets for doubtful readings.

2. Norbert Elias, Power and Civility: The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1939): 2:304-5.

3. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 85.

4. Peter Stallybras and Allon White, Trangressions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 4-5.

5. John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 31-33. Cannon estimates that, in the 1720s, there was a total of 1,384 members in the category he calls “the social elite”; for his list he includes the English peers, Irish peers, Scottish peers, baronets, and knights. He also argues that, during the whole of the eighteenth century, only 1,003 persons held peerages. His omission of “country gentlemen, landed aristocracy, merchants or the middling ranks of society” (10-11) as well as the second sons and the daughters of nobility (such as Lady Mary herself) make his figures seem particularly small, a fact he acknowledges by granting that the sample taken “both underestimates and exaggerates the size of the political elite,” and that “no more than a fragment of the governing class”—and one might add the “social” class—is represented in his underestimate (10).

6. Halsband reports that Finch did not actually die after the violence that arose over Finch's having given an opera ticket to Salisbury's sister in an attempt to seduce the girl. Salisbury, the alias of Sarah Pridden, became the subject of at least three published “biographies” in 1723. “Effigies, Parentage, Education, Life, Merry-Pranks, and Conversations of the Celebrated Mrs. Sally Salisbury” is a relatively mild defense of Pridden as an intelligent, accomplished young woman betrayed by “those rash, giddy, hair-brain'd hot spur fiery Gallants.” Anthony Boles's “Genuine History of Mrs. Sarah Prydden, Usually Called Sally Salisbury, and Her Gallants” also takes a moral tone by insisting that the blame be placed on those who seduced and betrayed her. The most unpleasant of the trio, Captain Charles Walker's “Authentick Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues, and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury,” recounts in near obscene form her “polite Deviations from Virtue” and her “graceful Wantonness.” Walker's particularly graphic story, illustrating a link between sex and money intended to titillate his readers, opens with an image of Salisbury standing on her head while two peers hold her legs; “thus every Admirer pleas'd with the sight, pull'd out his Gold,” and took his part in the “sport”: “With eye intent, each Sportsman took his Aim; / The merry Chuck-Hole border'd on the Rump, / And from this Play Sally deriv'd a Name. / Within her tifted Chink, the Guineas Shone, / And each she receiv'd, was all her own.” Walker also includes in his narrative an account of her trial, which resulted in a guilty verdict for the assault charge but acquittal for attempted murder. Pridden was fined one hundred pounds and sentenced to a year's imprisonment.

7. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 22. Jan B. Gordon, examining Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall, suspects the nature of gossip: “Gossip devalues because it has nothing standing behind it. Lacking the authenticity of a definable source, it is simultaneously financially, theologically, and narratively unredeemable.” As a speech act, gossip in its rumormongering, unanchored form may indeed be “unredeemable”; however, Lady Mary's “gossip” does have the “authenticity of a definable source,” and it “devalues” as a means of “revaluing” (“Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Anne Brontë's Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel,” English Literary History 51 [Winter 1984]: 725, 719-45).

8. Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 8-9.

9. Spacks, Gossip, 5.

10. Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937); 34:258; quoted by Halsband, Complete Letters 2:78n.

11. The story concludes, however, on a less joyous note. When Miss Titchburne's sister, Lady Sunderland, “could not avoid hearing this Galant History,” she invited all the participants, including Miss Leigh, to dinner. After apologizing to the unwanted intruder in front of all the guests and servants, Lady Sunderland claimed it was “high time” Mr. Edgcombe explained himself, and she issued an ultimatum: he had four months to decide whether “to marry or lose her [sister] for ever.” Even though Lady Mary expected a wedding, Edgcombe (a widower) remained unmarried (2:80n).

12. Outram, The Body, 148.

13. Stallybras and White, Transgressions, 21.

14. Mrs. Delany [Mrs. Pendarves], The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville [also Mrs. Pendarves], 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), 2:44-45.

15. A. S. Turberville recounts almost the whole of Lady Mary's narrative of this episode, retaining her “Amazonian” metaphors: “The doors were kept locked despite the angry protests of the ladies, who thereupon adopted Amazonian methods anticipatory of the suffragette tactics of the twentieth century”; and “By the adoption of Amazonian tactics [the women] succeeded in forcing an entry into the Chamber” (The House of Lords in the Eighteenth Century [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970], 15, 238).

16. Outram, The Body, 150, 126-33.

17. Harriet Guest, “A Double Lustre: Femininity and Sociable Commerce, 1730-1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 482. Guest cites John Brown's Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), 44-45, 51.

18. Homer Obed Brown, “The Errant Letter and the Whispering Gallery,” Genre (Winter 1977): 581.

19. J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660-1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 103-4.

20. Halsband reports that the marriage did actually take place on 8 Jan. 1739 and that Lady Harriet brought with her a jointure of eight hundred pounds a year.

21. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 7. See also Ruth Perry's “Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 444-57, for an extended discussion of the way Locke's revolutionary discourse stripped women of power by defining the individual as a “property-owning being independent of all other property-owning beings,” a definition that in seventeenth-century England excluded women (452).

22. The relationship is even more striking when one remembers that the Duchess of Cleveland had married a bastard son of Charles II (by Barbara Villiers) and so was a relation by marriage of Charles II's exquisite grandson.

23. Guest, “Double Lustre,” 483.

24. Michael G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the “Spectator” Papers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 5.

25. Halsband reports that indeed she did not renounce her children; the court decided to leave them in her care until “riper of years” (Complete Letters 2:34n).

26. Dictionary of National Biography 13:1.

27. Lady Mary's interest both in Ovid and in the fairy-tale form has been discussed by her editors, Isobel Grundy and Robert Halsband: see Grundy's “‘Entire’” and “Ovid” and Halsband's “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Philological Quarterly 45 (Jan. 1966): 145-56.

28. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 58-60, 77.

29. Halsband reports that Lady Mary may have met both Voltaire and Montesquieu when each visited England. She claims that during Voltaire's 1726-27 visit he showed her his analysis of Paradise Lost, and she probably met Montesquieu sometime during 1729-30, for he sent her a letter asking her to attend a benefit performance by the dancer Marie Sallé. See Halsband's “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as a Friend of Continental Writers,” John Rylands Library Bulletin 39 (1956): 63. For a more complete discussion of the philosophes' responses to England, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1969).

30. Horace Walpole to Thomas Mann, 14 Oct. 1751, as quoted in Robert Halsband, “Walpole versus Lady Mary,” 226.