SOURCE: “Instructing the ‘Empire of Beauty’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Politics of Female Rationality,” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60, No. 4, November 1995, pp. 1-26.

[In the following essay, Sherman investigates the apparent anti-feminism of such works by Montagu as “A Satyr.” According to the critic, Montagu's harsh rebukes of female behavior are meant to reform women and are consonant with her view “that women can be rational, and belong in a public sphere defined by rational debate.”]

In her annotation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's “A Satyr,” Isobel Grundy remarks that “As an attack on women, it stands out oddly among her works” (Grundy and Halsband 210). Even in the gossipy brilliance of Montagu's celebrated letters, Cynthia Lowenthal finds a certain reticence, noting that Montagu “is often surprisingly slow to censure” her sex (117). Yet while such observations favor Montagu's decided feminism, there are occasions in her work, as in “A Satyr” and comparable outburts, that resonate with the sharpest Restoration satires against women, made all the more glaring for being relatively few. In this article, I consider this anomaly, arguing that Montagu's apparent anti-feminism does not reflect bouts of gender disaffection. Rather it is a gambit, instrumental to a unisex view of politics that requires each sex to act responsibly—and men to nurture that potential—both in the public sphere and in conjugal relations. Female conduct that is politically irresponsible, and destructive to the commonweal, is identified for redirection. Conversely, Machiavelles who pursue ends that are “politically correct” (from Montagu's perspective) do not engender reproof of their sex. Montagu's anti-female satire does not, therefore (as does male-authored satire of the period), attack women as an always already constituted (and hence monolithic, incorrigible) alternative base of power.¹ Rather it cites women not yet conversant with Montagu's prescription for better politics, crediting them with a capacity to reform. Such “anti-feminism” is explicable (and finally consistent with Montagu's “feminism”) in that it is contingent, a trope to justify women's engagement in edifying, rational discourse that is not (as men would have it, as women might like it) over women's heads.

1

The periodical The Nonsense of Common-Sense (1737-38), which Montagu wrote using an anonymous male persona, defends the Whig ministry from Opposition attacks.² Issue No.1 promotes Britain's wool manufacture, the pillar of mercantilism, and elaborates the class, gender, and ontological implications of woolenness.³ It argues that Britons unnaturally disdain “the natural growth of our own Lands,” and that social—hence correctable—pressures impel them towards imported silks.⁴ In the female upper classes, a perverse, paradoxical dress code, denying British weather, subverts humane employment policies: wool is “the support of the poor, reduc'd now to a very low ebb by the Luxury and ill taste of the Rich, and the Fantastic mimicry of our Ladys, who are so accustomed to shiver in silks, that they exclaim on the Hardships of Warmth and Decency” (Grundy and Halsband 105-8, 106-7).⁵ By miming each other, and ultimately the decadent Rich, ‘Ladys’ spread poverty. Yet such irony, unremarked by the well-attired, returns to travesty Lady-likeness: ‘Ladys’ find Hardships in comfort and modesty, so innured to vampishly freezing that they forget bourgeois norms.

Thus if at a “macro” level ‘Ladys’ unwittingly hurt the poor, in “micro” terms they unwittingly hurt themselves: their clothes, uncomfortable and indecent, traduce their commitment to the prerogatives and decorum of elevated status.⁶ Lady-likeness goes downmarket. By futile ‘mimicry,’ women suffer the sumptuary degradation imposed on their impoverished victims, blurring the distance between classes.⁷ In another sense, their adopted standard (‘ill taste’) bespeaks an absence of inbred “class.” This multi-valent comeuppance suggests that (aristocrat) Montagu points to class striving—arbitrated by money, indifferent to the commonweal—as disruptive of class and classiness. She identifies Ladys as declassé, as well as agents of a class implosion in which lapsed social concern and taste (coordinates of female bad-acting) ramify into sumptuary disorder. She renders insouciance towards the poor as a sartorial Mobius strip: the poor, excluded from purlieus of Warmth and Decency, re-entangle Ladys in their Hardships (cold and indecency), making Ladys a grotesque amalgam of silk and slumming. The satire exposes Lady-readers—aware that potential admirers are readers—to the theoretical basis for rejecting silk (and silk-wearers), for casting silk-wearing as nasty, unbecoming, irrational. Montagu renders the regime of silk in terms that resonate in the cultural critique of Stallybrass and White, who observe that the “grotesque” develops from “hybridization … particularly of high and low,” causing “a heterodox merging of elements usually perceived as incompatible,” a “version of the grotesque [that] unsettles any fixed binarism” (Stallybrass and White 44).⁸ The regime of silk turns back upon Ladys, whose rejection of a rational politics—the adoption of Britain's ‘natural growth,’ the succor of the poor—produces a politics of self-indefinition.

Yet notwithstanding Montagu's pointed rebuke, the event is reversible. For Montagu, the politics of dress does not presume women's incorrigible vanity (a favorite satirical charge among males), but rather a weakness for emulation based on vanity but subject to modulation by appeals to female reason. Her barbs against women are contingent, lapsing if women adopt sound politics. Montagu's male “author” has regard for women, prescribing measures that rationalize—woolenize—their dress while accommodating women's desire to shine:

Notwithstanding the great Respect I bear to their Sex, I confess I do not only aplaud [sic] the present order that confines them to appear in stuff, but wish that the Winter court Dress was for ever oblig'd to be Cloath, which is capable of imbibeing the most beautifull Colours, and might be ornamented by Lace and Embroidery to the utmost Magnificence.

(The Nonsense of Common-Sense I, 107)⁹

Display is permissible, so long as it is based on an underlying foundation of ‘stuff,’ i.e. wool. It is the politics of wool—of mercantilism and employment—not anti-feminism, that drives the argument. Women are necessarily implicated in economic policy, but if their negative impact can be neutralized they need not be demonized as unalterably vain. The “author” demonstrates that he has women's best interests at heart, as well as that of the poor:

Many cold Faces that I have seen at the Opera, disfigur'd with red tips of Noses, dress'd in slight Tabbys and padusois [silk from Padua], would have had an agreeable glow of natural Heat if their Bodys had been cover'd with the warm product of our sheep.

(107)

The grotesquerie of red-nosed faces, again contrasted to a “natural” condition associated with wearing wool, introduces a Bakhtinian, sexually unbecoming element into silk-swathed female deportment.¹⁰ Bereft of ‘Decency,’ females bear a protuberant signifier (the traditional joking analogue to the phallus) of active sexuality. The “author” offers to attenuate that embarrassing condition, literally covering it in sheep's clothing. He is “politically correct” within Montagu's regime, appealing to women's latent rationality, offering an alternative to irrational attire that is good for the nation and for women. The satire is sharp but reversible, contingent on women's response to instruction.¹¹

The charge against silk gains rhetorical intensity, however, when Montagu mounts a wrenching contrast to the ‘cold Faces’ at the Opera. After citing the “oppressions … us'd against the helpless Labourer … beaten down with the greatest Hardness in the price of his Labour,” the essay denounces “the Master tradesmen [who] without mercy grind the Faces of the Poor, who are vainly Industrious, and whose Familys suffer more real misery in a free Country than the slaves in Jamaica or Algiers” (108). ‘Faces of the Poor,’ and ‘cold Faces’ blind to the effect of wearing silk, jibe in a chilling, ironic nexus.¹² The ‘cold’ bourgeois Faces seem vain, assuming a disdainful moral aspect figuratively disfiguring their comic grotesquerie.¹³ The Faces of females, disconnected from the potentially warming ‘natural Heat’ of their ‘Bodys,’ float above the misery of the poor, who display all too well a connection with their own bodies. It is the rich women, therefore, who must become reconnected, fusing Face and body—and social conscience—into a physical/social coherence. For Montagu, the joke on women's faces ends in a taut political conceit. Her object is to shame women into reformation. She does not attack them as inherently given to vice, but attempts to show them a way towards regaining virtue. Such virtue is constituted in a politics favoring wool.

In The Nonsense of Common-Sense No. 2, Montagu's male persona continues exposing the ironies in women's position, citing their resistance to reducing interest rates on government debt.¹⁴ Though pleased that women “find in the imaginary Empire of Beauty, a consolation for being excluded every part of Government” (109), he deplores this Empire when it confronts Government, disrupting rational administration in the interest of vain self-indulgence. In the essay's logic, women's position precipitates a return of the repressed: exiled from the state to an imagined imperium of Beauty, beauties assault the actual imperium of pragmatic economics. However, the issue is not women's inherent irrationality, but their social construction: the essay cites “the Foibles to which Education has enclin'd them” (109), which cause women to breed irrational public policy. In this mode women need, and are presumed amenable to correction. Pointing to women, the essayist observes:

It is their Tongues that have so loudly exclaim'd against the real patriot scheme of reduceing the Interest; and this united Tattle has had force enough to put a stop to the most reasonable Design that has appear'd in public for a long time.

(109)

‘Tattle’—a term connoting frivolity—is exacerbated by tripping off disembodied Tongues dissociated from women's thinking apparatus. Massed into ‘united Tattle,’ it is paradoxically empty but sufficiently weighty to stop a ‘reasonable Design.’¹⁵ Reason, design, i.e. deliberation in male purlieus of high policy, succumbs to a literally brainless intervention. The argument acknowledges the power of frivolity (is Montagu's gender-chauvinism poking through?), but offers to reclaim British women for reason and Design on grounds of the greater good:

I am persuaded that the British Mothers, sisters, and mistrisses (for Wives are out of the Question) have exerted their Authority on this occasion and have met with astonishing Success. I would therefore offer some plain Refflections to their consideration, which possibly they have not yet heard.

(109-10)

Appealing to women's sense, the argument acknowledges that they are not incorrigible. It gives them benefit of the doubt, suggesting that once women encounter sense in place of Tattle they may change course. Thus Montagu provisionally rescues women from the stereotype: they act irrationally, but may react positively to rational discourse. Once again her ‘attack’ is voidable, subject to women's changing their politics.

The essay notes that since Britian is a trading nation, high rates of interest are detrimental, draining cash from shop-keeping into the Funds. Immediately, however, the case is brought down to the “interest” of “Ladys,” so that the feminine interest and that of the nation may be juxtaposed, analyzed—measured against a standard of costs and benefits:

[T]here are many Ladys of high Birth with the small Fortunes of 5 or £6000 and how can they live upon 2 or 3 per cent? Very easily, very agreably [sic], if they can abandon Quadrille and Fine cloaths. It is to be hop'd that they would substitute some more improveing amusement in the room of the first; and I can assure them that the second is of no manner of advantage to their persons, of which I do not doubt they will have a sensible demonstration this very Winter. All Ladys are now oblig'd to appear in Stuff and plain Linnen; and I do not question but they will make as glorious a Campaign as ever they did in their Lives, and have as many Conquests to boast of, as when they shin'd in silks and Laces.

(110)

The ‘imaginary Empire of Beauty’ pursues real Campaign and Conquests, capturing men's interest at dances and with clothes financed by interest from Funds. Montagu's male “author” acknowledges that women's interest in interest is sexual, that Ministerial efforts to reduce interest challenge women's need to manifest their egos. But he does not dismiss such need, a move that would render him insufferably moralistic and akin to male satirists (disdainful of female egos, hypocritically obtuse to women's dependence on male “interest”).¹⁶ Rather, Montagu's persona allies himself with women even as he chides them, citing alternatives consistent with a reduced income. Such equipoise between disparaging women as a group (presumed to be ignorant of economic logic), and willingness to let-women-be-women (provided a modus vivendi can be found), characterizes Montagu's contingent anti-feminism. Coming from an ostensibly male pen, it sets an example for males.

The essay's final ironic turn deploys the female ego against itself, mounting an argument of reverse snobbery that it is hard to refuse:

If I must suppose there are great Numbers of Ladys in these narrow circumstances, I will suppose at least one in Twenty of them to be handsome enough to make the rest of their Sex desirous of looking like them. What a great Advantage then will they bring to their Country by the suppression of Luxury, when the plainest Dress will be thought the Genteelest!

(111)

Hoist on their own petard, women driven by Campaign and Conquests must emulate plainness. They will, so long as one in twenty conceives herself most handsome; doffs her frills; challenges others to a new standard of taste. The reduction of interest is therefore not only compatible with female ego, but can actually be exploited by ego-driven females to make others follow suit. Machiavelles have a place. The emulative impulse disparaged (but finally condoned) in Issue No. 1 is now rhetorically harnessed, shown to be of advantage to whomever deems herself handsome (and who could afford not to avow that status!), and of Advantage to the nation in suppressing Luxury. Montagu has women cornered, even as she seemingly appeals to their needs, even as she ultimately vindicates “the common Welfare of the Nation” (109), Whiggishly construed. From the point of view of feminist logic, Montagu mounts a brilliant gambit, conceding to the opposition women's frivolous, egoistic tropes, but demonstrating to women how they can be turned to account. Women need not be written off as hopelessly out of step with a rational polity. Rather, a rational calculus of personal “interest,” lying just below the surface of their interest in assemblies and clothes, can be deployed in a win-win strategy. Women can remain in their ‘imaginary Empire’ while serving a real imperium.

2

Montagu's incursion into the public sphere, albeit shrouded in the persona of a male, reflects her unwillingness to accept such ‘consolation’ as the Empire of Beauty offered. One senses that in her own estimation, her logic is too keen, too suited to the pragmatics of swaying minds, to confine itself to the domestic or diffuse itself in fancy. In this regard Montagu departs from the self-estimation, hence from the ideology of one such as Margaret Cavendish, who typically accepts isolation from statecraft but finds in it a license to create the mind's own state:

That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavor to be Margaret the First; and, though I have neither Power, Time, nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror … yet rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made one of my own. And thus believing, or, at least, hoping, that no Creature can, or will, Envy me for this World of mine.¹⁷

In Cavendish's pronouncement, Empire is ‘imaginary’ in a wholly different sense than that identified by Montagu: it is not the sexual aggrandizement consequent upon Beauty, but the intense application of mind to the self's own resources.¹⁸ It urges a withdrawal beyond rustication and even beyond the domestic, to a “sphere” literally comprehended by the head. The contrast with Montagu is instructive in that it throws into relief the dilemma of the politico-literary woman, isolated from purlieus of power but still aspiring towards politics and creative political discourse. If one did not invent a world, where did women's rhetoric fit in the scheme of power relations?

Between 1668, when Cavendish crowned herself, and the publication of The Nonsense of Common-Sense in 1737, women's political prerogatives had not materially changed. Women were still excluded from politics, and pursued such “interest” as they had primarily through Tattle and influence.¹⁹ Insofar as women's literary impulse intersected with politics, it did so via the protective vehicle of fiction;²⁰ in occasional poems obliquely touching on the monarchy and affairs of state; and in essays concerned with political principle.²¹ Montagu, however, goes another route. She navigates around Cavendish (withdrawn into an idiosyncratic imperium, which she rules), the chroniclers of court intrigue, and occasional poets and essayists disengaged from quotidian public debate. Instead, Montagu develops a political discourse neither dependent on fiction (invention or innuendo) nor aloof from the everyday, which addresses the practical administration of government.²² Her male persona deploys a logic that appeals to women, that sympathizes with their concerns even as it chides such concerns as parochial. A female political “interest,” articulated in mundane terms, begins to emerge; the only fiction remaining is Montagu's identity.

The importance of Montagu's strategy—a “feminist anti-feminism” that (as a male-directed gambit) would induct women into mundane political discourse—mirrors Montagu's admission of herself into the privileged sphere of mundane political authorship. While the history of women's political fiction is well-documented,²³ and the history of women's occasional polemics is increasingly the subject of gender/genre studies,²⁴ the history of women's writing on complex, technical issues of governance has not been studied as a genre with the same interest. Arguably, Montagu charts a course towards this genre, focusing on issues more gendered than “sexy” (in scandal chronicle terms, and in terms of inherent fascination), that invoke the emerging discourse of political economy.²⁵ In this formulation, Montagu's ostensible, contingent anti-feminism is intrinsic to a view that women can be rational, and belong in a public sphere defined by rational debate.²⁶

The anti-feminism identified by Isobel Grundy in Montagu's poem, “A Satyr” (1717/18), imports into the domestic sphere a comparable antipathy towards the erring, but not congenitally irrational woman. It features a series of “types”—gambler, embezzler, coquette, virtuoso—none of whom make satisfactory wives. Yet as in Montagu's pronouncements on the public sphere, the poem is not anti-feminist in the reigning sense of imputing to women malign incorrigibility. Delivered through the persona of a jaded, splenetic male, it attacks the socially constructed woman, the exemplar of ‘Foibles to which Education has enclin'd’ her. As such, it is not an anatomy of wanton female nature, so much as a study in complex micro-politics, i.e. in conjugal relations as seen by (yet another “type”) the aging ex-rake:

To say the truth, tir'd with my rambling Life
I wish the solid Comfort of a Wife,
To pass in peace My now declineing years
And disapoint the hopes of Greedy heirs.

(“A Satyr” 7-10)²⁷

Who is being satirized among this plethora—men, women? Rather, I think, a society which induces a type of mutual warping, issuing in selfishness all around. Thus if the speaker rues, and is even hardened by the menu of noncomplaisant females, his perception is itself suspect, refracted through an unalloyed patriarchy that would “view my Image in an Infant face / And see renew'd the honnours of my Race” (13-14).²⁸ Even Milton, the patriarch of patriarchal marriage, argued that conjugality was “conversation,” not self-regard; Montagu's speaker misses this point.²⁹ Thus the poem's ostensible anti-feminism elicits the reader's skeptical response; one reads the speaker's dictums through his egoism, interpreting so as to discount for it.

The speaker's first plaint is that a new bride is apt to stay out nights gambling. He pities the husband forced to endure tales of wee-hour bad luck:

You must your tender Consort's sorrows share
And kindly listen while the sighing Dame
Tells by what strange Surprize she lost the Game
By what unthought of Chance, unheard before
When 7 the main some Devil brought up 4.

(36-40)

But what does the speaker counsel? He does not, as would the Miltonic husband, undertake compassionately to correct his wife. In response to what appears to be the wife's naive (albeit temporizing) suggestion—

Such cursed Fortune cannot allways last,
One Lucky Night may recompence the past

(41-42)

the husband counsels:

Wise Arguments like these must needs prevail,
Mortgage your land or set your House to Sale,
Debts must be paid or Madam's Credit Fail.

(43-45)

Such a precipitous disposal of assets is a radical step. More particularly, it is unresponsive, failing to pursue the wife's imprudent, probably desperate deferral of serious financial recuperation. The discursive disjunction suggests a state of fundamental disconnect in the relationship: the husband makes no effort to discuss the wife's irrational conduct. Apparently complacent in his convictions about women, he does not believe in—and so does not engage—any capacity in the wife to reason.

Though Madam's debts may finally require disposition of real estate, there is no male offer of a median way, e.g. retrenching on servants, stabling the coach. In a fascinating, mirror-image scene in Defoe's The Compleat English Tradesman (1725), a husband's credit is about to collapse. Though he avoids addressing—much less consulting—his wife about the grounds for his gloomy deportment, she demands forthright conversation:

[Y]our way of speaking is ambiguous and doubtful; I entreat you be plain and free with me, what is at the bottom of it? why won't you tell me? what have I done, that I am not to be trusted with a thing that so nearly concerns me?

(I, 138)

Upon ascertaining the facts, the wife does not allow the husband to drift (or to hide behind the patriarchal pose of protecting her from grim reality), but offers rational measures to shore up the couple's credit:

WHY, first, I have kept five maids you see, and a footman, I shall immediately give three of my maids warning, and the fellow also, and save you that part of the expence. … [T]wo maids may do all my house-business, and I'll look after my children myself.

(I, 141)

In the context of real conversation, women—at least in Defoe's estimation—are capable of financial management, even more so than overwrought men.³⁰ The wife in Montagu's poem does not initiate (and would as soon perhaps defer) productive conversation. In that sense she occupies the same position as Defoe's tradesman, needing encouragement (if not compassionate pressure), as well as instruction concerning the state of the household's credit. The failure of such events, the silence and disconnect that yawns at the poem's reader, constitute the poem's purport. This discursive absence modulates the apparent anti-feminism. It suggests that in a system which assumes male “rationality” and undervalues even that possibility in females, the frivolous woman is offerred no opportunity to be rational.³¹ She continues in the ‘Foibles’ to which ‘Education’ inclines her. The irony of summarily discounting her abilities is that the husband proves irrational, prejudicing his financial status more than he may need to. He ‘disapoint[s] the hopes of Greedy heirs,’ but not as he intended.

The poem continues with an attack on the miserly woman who “devours” the husband's fortune, then happily sees him jailed. Yet what sort of man cannot manage his funds? The man's satire backfires, implicating a milquetoast irresponsible towards his fortune. Such butts were common in the eighteenth century, where guidebooks warned the gentry against abdicating to their stewards.³² Thus while the female is undeniably opportunistic, her persona is constructed within a relationship that leaves her untamed. She is a type of primitive, available for moral education. As in the poem's previous section, a discursive disconnect severs husband and wife and impedes the wife's reformation.

The speaker next considers the virtues of another type of primitive, a sort of Margery Pinchwife:

… The Maid I make my Choice,
Incapable of such detested vice,
In sweet retirement wastes her virgin Days,
Unknown at Court, and rarely seen at plays.(33)

(66-69)

All bets are off, however, amidst inevitable temptation:

… yet have you ever known
An artless Innocence brought up to Town,
Led by her Spouse, for hither she must come,
To plays, assemblys, Church and Drawing Room,
Soon grows Polite, all sense of Shame laid by,
(Or but asham'd of Rustic Modesty).

(75-80)

There follows a catalogue of the wife's shameless, costly acts; she rebukes the husband should he “murmur at the vain Expence” (99). Though “some new Jewel future Quiet buys” (118), there is no hint amidst this dialectic of gallavanting, acrimony, and appeasement, of husbandly concern for his wife's happiness. There is complaint but not instruction. It is the same pattern, already well established in the poem, of discursive disconnect. The dynamics of marriage are stared at, rather than mutually orchestrated. The husband would have marriage be a kind of stasis, with the wife fully formed for his comfort. Such passivity creates an economy of waste on both sides, while some effort beyond mere expression of spleen might yield a more rational outcome.

Insofar as “A Satyr” and The Nonsense of Common-Sense contemplate the politics of women's corrigibility—in private and public spheres respectively—they constitue a single, consistent discourse, a refraction of anti-feminism through an ultimately pro-feminist bias. In that regard, both works are not aberrational vis à vis Montagu's general sympathy for women.³⁴ They suggest a frustration with gender stereotypes. They do not, however, deny that women can and do behave selfishly, ignorant of (if not inherently indifferent to) the well-being of the polity—national or domestic. While Montagu acknowledges female imperfection, she sees apparent female ‘Foibles’ within a context of amenability to reasoned appeal and education. In this sense she offers an alternative to prevailing ideology that is still less than a frontal assault on it. Her approach is measured, couched as a concern for the management of political/economic units affecting males and females.

“A Satyr” closes with two portraits satirizing female incursions into male discourses: science—

A Gilded Telescope oft fills her hand,
An Orrery does on her Toilet stand—

(152-3)

and party politics—

Even at her Tea instead of female Chat
With matchiavilian Art reforms the State,
Profess'd a Champion of her Party's Cause
Raillys our Rulers, and arraigns the Laws.

(166-69)

The passages dwell on incommensurate pairings: a Toilet for an Orrery, a Party's Cause at Tea. If women attempt male-identified discourse, they achieve only bathos, spoiling domesticity but not transcending it. Their environment is ridiculously “hybridized.” Even assuming the speaker's animus, therefore, can such passages jibe with a reading of “A Satyr” that supports women's rational potential? Or does the poem finally concede women a chance to demonstrate ability, then allow them to hang themselves? Grundy's gloss encourages such a view, but one hesitates to adopt it, since it derogates from Montagu's own persona: she avowed a life-long “inclination (I should say passion) for Learning” (Halsband, Letters III, 23), and identified with Whig causes.

In my view, the cited passages do not withdraw, but rather amplify the poem's gambit: skewering foiblish women, exposing the discursive void that elicits such ‘Foibles’ and shrouds (represses!) women's latent abilities. “A Satyr” posits women's rational potential as emergent in an encouraging environment. The presumptuous autodidact is but another product of the absence of such environment, i.e. of ‘Foibles to which Education has enclin'd’ her. The poem is a type of verbal “negative,” evoking the lack of male/female communication, elaborating on it as grounds for allowing women edifying exchanges with men. Women's untutored frolics are symptomatic of the problem which the poem—crediting women with potential—would address.

Even in Montagu's later years, when her satires against women subsided, she did not recommend reading for “empowerment,” but to assuage isolation.³⁵ In the absence of edifying discourse, women might inhabit their minds—not arrogate to themselves a purchase on the world beyond. Citing unnamed self-taught ladies, Montagu skewers intellectual vanity, the foiblish indiscipline of having no discourse with the proprietors of learning:

Those Women are ridiculous, not because they have Learning but because they have it not. One thinks herselfe a compleat Historian after reading Eachard's Roman History, another a profound Philosopher having got by heart some of Pope's unintelligible essays, and a third an able Divine on the strength of Whitfield's Sermons. Thus you hear them screaming Politics and Controversie.

(Halsband, Letters III, 23)

“A Satyr”'s jibes at learned ladies and Ms. Politic Would-Be's are consistent with a feminism premised on engagement, aware that women seeking to define positions in purlieus of power and prestige will likely need instruction. Montagu's views are less flamboyant than those of Cavendish, who not only produced a polity-of-one, but argued that since she was excluded from institutional science her own natural philosophy might be equally valid.³⁶

If Montagu's “feminism” is nuanced, articulated through a male-directed gambit, then it is logical that “A Satyr”'s autodidact be cast as out on a limb, refusing the limits of received knowledge, inserting her ego into the mysterium tremendum:

New Systems seeks, will all Dark points explore,
Charm'd with Opinions never heard before,
Boldly derideing Superstitious fear,
Raillys the mysterys she should revere,
Mistakeing what she cannot comprehend
In downright atheism her Studys end.

(154-9)

The speaker's animus notwithstanding, the passage suggests that failure to ask questions, to acknowledge that questions exist, is godless and unbecoming. Thus the poem comes full circle. If women should be invited into discourse, they should be disposed towards it. They cannot presume on their own understanding. The poem's “anti-feminism” operates within a horizon of correction, postulating correction as a possibility but requiring that both parties be forthcoming.

3

I end this article by testing Montagu's most notorious “anti-feminist” remark against the foregoing discussion. In 1723, she wrote to her friend, Barbara Calthorpe:

To say Truth, I have never had any great Esteem for the gennerality of the fair Sex, and my only Consolation for being of that Gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being marry'd to any one amongst them.

After discussing a perhaps over-charitable interpretation of “the Actions of Lady Holderness,” she continues:

But the Men, you may well imagine, are not so charitable, and they agree in the Kind Refflexion that nothing hinders Women from playing the Fool but not having it in their power. The many Instances that are to be found to support this opinion ought to make the Few reasonable more valu'd—but where are the Reasonable Ladys?

(Halsband, Letters III, 33-34)

Does such a sentiment belie the intent which, I suggest, infuses The Nonsense of Common-Sense and “A Satyr”? Does Lady Mary privately admit that rationality is beyond women, that even if she were married to a woman her wife would be incorrigible? Even her contingent support of female potential shrinks before this passage. Yet it is possible to suggest that had she married a woman, she would have been as remote as any husband (including her own), i.e. there are no Reasonable Ladys because no discursive environment exists favorable to reason.

Moreover, on the subject of female capacities Montagu's private views require the same attention to polemical nuance as do her public statements. On the one hand, she seems to contradict herself. If she argues to a bishop that women are inferior—“I do not doubt that God and Nature has thrown us into an Inferior Rank” (I, 45)—she asserts (to her daughter, about her granddaughter's education) that “[t]he same characters are form'd by the same Lessons, which inclines me to think (if I dare say it) that Nature has not plac'd us in an inferior Rank to Men” (III, 27).³⁷ However, Montagu's skepticism in the first case operates—as an endearing concession, a pious protection of her flank—to shield a jab at patriarchy, “the Careless Education given to Women of Quality” (I, 46). She insists on women's latent capacities:

We are permitted no Books but such as tend to the weakening and Effeminating the Mind, our Natural Deffects are every way indulg'd, and tis look'd upon as in a degree Criminal to improve our Reason, or fancy we have any.

(I, 44)

If Montagu is grateful not to have married a bimbo, and seems doubtful of her own capacity to reform one, she is nonetheless adamant that bimbos are made and not born, that women can be elevated but are routinely suppressed.

Even if Montagu's plaint, “where are the Reasonable Ladys?,” does not reflect her low opinion of female education,³⁸ even if it evinces real animus, I would argue that private utterances may expose a spleen, an exasperation induced by specific events—Lady Holderness' frolic—that evaporate before they can infect public, politic, strategic statements. In the published texts discussed here, as well as in such letters that extend beyond gossip into exhortation (i.e. micro-politics), Montagu displays an attitude towards women premised on their rational capacities. If she acknowledges women's seeming weakness, and their tendency towards vanity and ‘Foibles,’ it is to promote their induction into discourse with those of greater knowledge (in almost all cases, men).

Montagu's insight is that such induction will not only benefit women, but also the patriarchal domains of household and state. Her “anti-feminism”—sisterly at heart—is still not motivated by notions of justice or gender equity (albeit she can pronounce on women as ‘not … inferior’). Rather, it contemplates practical economics, the negotiations required to run a political unit. To leave women out of the process, to leave them out as fully-instructed players, stifles the polity's economic well-being. In A Social History of Truth, Steven Shapin states: “Who gets to speak? Whose speech may be accounted truth? These are political matters. Arguably, they are the most fundamental matters to be settled in any polity, and as they are resolved so political order is constituted, both in the house of knowledge and in the state” (403-4). For Montagu, whether a woman ‘gets to speak’ is only part of a sufficient political accommodation, since female speech (to be useful, to be ‘accounted truth’) first requires access to the premises of discourse, its substrate of ideas and information. Her satire against women recuperates women into useful discourse by soliciting instruction anterior to their speech, an exposure that appeals to women's rationality and enables them to act rationally. In this regard, ‘the house of knowledge’ is any domestic scene, which the state replicates with a comparable, solicitous self-interest. The polity's interest, not the woman's, is Montagu's primary object.

Without a whiff of irony, Shapin notes that women were excluded from discourse since “there was no legitimacy in giving political voice to those … who were … spoken for by others [“masters/husbands/fathers”]” (405). Montagu, however, inculcates the irony of ‘speaking for’ women: it upsets the speakers' projects, i.e. male efforts to maintain viable households and states. In Montagu's regime, cancelling women's speech on grounds that they have a proxy, defeats the proxy. Truly ‘true’ discourse, beneficial to all parties in a political/economic unit, develops in an exchange between genders where both are commensurately informed.

In light of Montagu's insertion of her public satire into the politics of knowledge, rather than into an arena where broader claims for gender equity might be fought (and lost), her gambit seems calculated to maximize persuasiveness, but also limited in terms of what we see as “feminist.” While she addresses issues that implicate women, they are not “women's issues.” Women benefit secondarily. Montagu is not One Of Us. Though her polemics dazzle, they are aloof, dis-engaged with women's issues and concerned, rather, with unisex pragmatics. She prescribes a rationale for rational polities; women should be integrated politically on grounds of good sense. Thus if Montagu's “anti-feminism” is contingent, her “feminism” (in the politics of knowledge) is collateral.

It is instructive to envision these two terms—these two phenomena—in a different relation. Montagu's “anti-feminism” is distinct from that of Mary Wollstonecraft, who satirized women with the direct, “feminist” objective of rescuing women from misogynist paradigms. Felicity Nussbaum observes that in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft “clear[s] away a vast forest of antifeminist dogma in order to achieve, for herself and thus implicitly for all women, a rational superior view that recognizes and exposes male domination of women. A feminist deployment of hatred of women's culturally ascribed characteristics becomes her innovative satiric strategy. … The unorthodox, if temporary, alliance of feminist with misogynist cultural codes may be used to organize them, elaborate upon them, and co-optthem in order to articulate the previously unpresentable” (318-334, 331, 332). Montagu's “anti-feminism” is similarly co-optative, demonstrating to men the ironic relation between patriarchal ‘cultural codes’ and economic rationality. But while her object is to enhance such rationality, her “vindication” of women's rational potential is secondary and provisional. She does not argue that women merit deference in the abstract, notwithstanding their economic impact. The distance between Montagu and Wollstonecraft marks the emergence of our own feminism.

Notes

1. On the period's anti-feminist satire, especially as it evinces undifferentiated animus towards women based on their assumed political threat, see Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women 1660-1750. Nussbaum observes that in the myth of Augustan satire, women “represent a world of disorder, and the satirists rage at the female power to seduce and overpower them” (19). In such satire, women are incorrigible, “no norm is offered as a relief to the picure of women's depraved condition” (20). In The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Terry Castle cites “the eighteenth-century male satirist's familiar assault on women's purported incorrigibility, licentiousness, and emotional instability” (30).

2. Common Sense was a rabid Opposition publication. For bibliographical and political background of Montagu's periodical, see Robert Halsband's edition of The Nonsense of Common-Sense. Christine Gerrard discusses the Opposition in The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth 1725-1742.

3. On “mercantilism,” a system of economic nationalism concerned with the balance of trade, see Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England. Though Montagu promotes wool consumption, wool was a major export commodity.

4. Silk-weaving was a major domestic industry. Finished silks frequently came from other European countries.

5. In Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century, J. A. W. Gunn observes that by the late seventeenth century “the task of promoting employment gained priority over the accumulation of a national stock of money” (245). On the female body as the site of luxurious, imported attire, and hence of ideological contestation over economic policy, see Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Montagu's view of luxury challenges Mandeville's Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714, 1723), which caused a furor by asserting that desire for luxury fuelled economic growth. For Mandeville's view on wool vs. silk, see the Fable, Remark (L). He praises emulation in Remark (M), noting that “while Women of Quality are frighten'd to see Merchant's Wives and Daughters dress'd like themselves,” such “striving to outdo one another … sets the Poor to Work.” Benjamin Martyn, however, thought that the wool/silk dilemma could be cured by cultivating silk worms in Georgia and importing English poor to weave it. See Reasons for Establishing the Colony of Georgia, With Regard to the Trade of Great Britain (1733).

6. “Decency” is a social obligation. In the Fable, Mandeville observes that “to appear decently is a Civility, and often a Duty, which, without any Regard to our selves, we owe to those we converse with” (Remark [M]). In Morality and Dress, Aileen Ribeiro demonstrates the class/gender/ethical signification of clothes.

7. Montagu's disparagement of silk-wearing intervenes in a thriving male discourse. As Mary Poovey remarks, “[F]ashion was a topic of much discussion in the popular press throughout the long eighteenth century. Like the debates about credit, discussions of fashion often carried anxieties about the economic and epistemological instability of modern society. … Necessary but of dubious morality, fashion—again like credit—was often asociated with women, either because ‘the Changeable Foible of the Ladies’ was considered the source of revolutions in style or because women like Alexander Pope's Belinda were thought to exacerbate England's consumption of what Defoe called ‘Foreign Trifles.’” See “Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: The Place of Gender in the Social Constitution of Knowledge,” in George Levine, ed., Aestheties and Ideology, 79-105, 93-94. Though critics lamented lower class women's attempts to dress “up” (it caused epistemological confusion), Montagu suggests that bourgeois emulation has the same effect, since dressing to emulate rivals and ‘the Rich’ blurs the markers of class fidelity. For a list of recent work on eighteenth-century attitudes towards women's fashion, see Poovey, “Aesthetics and Political Economy,” notes 42 and 45. See also Ann Bermingham, “The Picturesque and ready-to-wear femininity,” in Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, eds., The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape, and Aesthetics Since 1770, 81-119. Bermingham provides an interesting perspective on Montagu's economic nationalism, noting that later in the century the fashionable woman's “freedom to consume the dress of other countries confirmed Britain's growing international economic and political power, and its proprietary interests in the Middle and Far East” (103).

8. Underlying the disruption of class boundaries by dress is the ethos of Masquerade, implying that silk-wearing involves female society in an ambient Masquerade. In Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Fiction, Terry Castle observes that institutionalized Masquerade erased the legibility of clothes, so that one appeared as one's opposite. In class terms, “disguise represented not just a skewing or modification of the truth, but its reversal” (75-76).

9. The ‘present order’ refers to mourning attire required after the death of Queen Caroline.

10. On the grotesque body and its implication in topsy-turvy, overrunning excess and degradation, see Mikhail Bakhtin's seminal (!) Rabelais and His World. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White discuss bourgeois efforts, early in the eighteenth century, to “delibidinize” discursive sites such as coffee houses so as to promote rational discourse. See chapter 2.

11. Catherine Sharrock asks how a female-authored text ostensibly authored by a male can “question the male monopoly over words and knowledge when it wraps both its words and its knowledge in ‘masculine’ clothing?” Such a text, she suggests, “undermines its own attempt to alter the status quo, by conceding to the male author-ity by which that status quo is supported.” See “De-ciphering women and de-scribing authority,” in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman, eds., Women, Writing, History 1640-1740, 109-24, 111. I argue that in The Nonsense of Common-Sense, Montagu's male persona challenges the status quo by setting an example: men impatient with women's frivolity may still credit them with a capacity to reform. For another view of Montagu's male persona, see Jill Campbell, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity,” in Beth Fowkes Tobin, ed., History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century Literature, 64-85.

12. Montagu's emphasis on Faces is psychologically astute, focusing her argument on the body's most “ideological” element. Michael Eigen observes: “[O]f all body areas the human face is most centrally expressive of human personality and exerts its prominence as an organizing principle in the field of meaning. It acts as a reference point by which all other body areas may acquire deeper personal significance” (“Significance of the Face” 436).

13. Some commentators saw wool as engendering the grotesque body. An anonymous poem, The Man of Taste (1733), dismissed the public weal:

    Shall I wear clothes in awkward England made?
    And sweat in cloth, to help the woolen trade?
    In French embroid'ry and in Flanders lace
    I'll spend the income of a treasurer's place.

14. For background on the National Debt, and on the politics of Walpole's sinking fund intended to clear it, see P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688-1765, and John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783.

15. In The Nonsense of Common-Sense women's irrational politics is figured as physical incoherence. Tongues and brains work separately, as do Faces, bodies and brains. Kate Lilley has commented on women's writing as it figures the “unstable relations and shifting boundaries [between] … the private body and the body politic.” See “True state within: Women's elegy 1640-1700,” in Grundy and Wiseman, Women, Writing, History, 72-92, 82.

16. Montagu wrote extensively about such dependence. See for example Eclogues “Friday” and “Satturday.” She also manipulated her portrait appearance, wearing exotic dress and concealing smallpox scars. See Marcia Pointon, “Killing Pictures,” in John Barrell, ed., Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700-1850.

17. The Description of the New World Called the Blazing World (1668), “To All Noble and Worthy Ladies,” n.p.

18. On the relation of Cavendish's politics to an inner state where a woman (Cavendish herself) rules unopposed, see Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England.” See also Sandra Sherman, “Trembling Texts: Margaret Cavendish and the Dialectic of Authorship,” suggesting that Cavendish's solipsistic polity required male sanction.

19. Abigail Masham, for example, made a career by retailing gossip to a credulous Queen Anne. She is demonized in Daniel Defoe's The Secret History of the White Staff (London, 1714-15). The Duchess of Marlborough (1660-1744) was the most (in)famous female politico of the day. See Frances Harris, A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. Harris observes that “As a woman, the only official role in public life which was open to her was that of professional courtier, and this she performed, with only one brief interval, for the better part of forty years” (1). In Spectator No. 81, Addison deplored the “Party-Rage in Women” that “deprives the Fair Sex of those peculiar Charms with which Nature endowed them.” Montagu caricatures women's political energy, evincing its impotence, in the grotesque scene of “Amazonian” Duchesses (and assorted aristocratic followers) attempting to storm Parliament. See Robert Halsband, ed. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, II, 135-7. On women's occasional efforts to petition Parliament on personal and economic matters, see Charlotte Otten, ed., English Women's Voices 1540-1700, Part 3.

20. On the English scandal chronicle of Behn, Manley, and Haywood, see Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740, and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, Chapter 6.

21. On the political element in women's essays and occasional poems, see Carol Barash, “‘The Native Liberty … of the Subject,’” in Grundy and Wiseman, Women, Writing, History, 55-69. Douglas Butler suggests that Susanna Centlivre endorses a Whiggish individualism. See “Plot and Politics in Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife,” in Mary Ann Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, eds., Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660-1820. Centlivre's The Gotham Election (1715) suggested that Tories were Jacobites, but was subtitled “A Farce.”

22. As Halsband observes in his edition of The Nonsense of Common Sense, Lady Mary's technique is singular, even compared to other periodical essays of the time. Her papers “use no literary devices except the fictitious letter that comprises No. III. All the other papers are straightforward essays, without allegory, fable, tale, journal, or dream” (xxix).

23. See, for example, Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, and Ballaster, Seductive Forms.

24. Grundy and Wiseman, Women, Writing, History is among the most useful texts.

25. “Political economy” addresses the processes connecting public policy with economic results, e.g. production and distribution of income, resource allocation, and rates of inflation. The first systematic study of political economy was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), though earlier economists such as William Petty (The Political Anatomy of Ireland [1691]) addressed aspects of the field. Montagu's emphasis on directing private “interest” towards the public weal was not unlike that of mid-eighteenth century political economists, e.g. James Steuart. On this aspect of political economy, see Nancy Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire, Chapter 3.

26. On the rise of an eighteenth-century public sphere defined by rational (and decidedly male) discourse, see Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to Post-Structuralism. Eagleton observes that “in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the European bourgeoisie begins to carve out for itself a distinctive discursive space, one of rational judgment and enlightened critique rather than of the brutal ukases of an authoritarian politics. Poised between the state and civil society, this bourgeois ‘public sphere’ as Habermas has termed it, comprises a realm of social institutions—clubs, journals, coffeehouses, periodicals—in which private individuals assemble for the free, equal exchange of reasonable discourse, thus welding themselves into a relatively cohesive body whose deliberations may assume the form of a powerful political force” (9). Montagu broached the irony of assuming that women were not ‘a powerful political force,’ albeit excluded from discourse.

27. “A Satyr,” in Grundy and Halsband, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 210-214. Presumably the speaker has played the field, acknowledging that “Man can only boast of true Delight / When Law confines the wand'ring Appetite” (17-18).

28. Women deplored such attitudes. In The Female Advocate, Or an Answer to a Late Satyr Against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy of Women (1686), Sarah Fyge cites as a principle of patriarchy that men marry only to produce heirs to their estates.

29. For Milton's idea that marriage required mutually edifying talk, see The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643). The tract had important popular influence in the eighteenth century, as in Farquhar's The Beaux Strategem (1707). The growing acceptance of “companionate marriage” is discussed in Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. Though Montagu later became embittered, her early views (which prevailed at the time of “A Satyr” and continued as an ideal) conceive of marriage as conversation: “If I had a Compannion, it should be one (now that I am going to make you a picture after my own heart) that I very much lovd, and that very much lovd me, one that thought that the truest wisdom which most conduced to our happynesse, and that it was not below a man of sense to take satisfaction in the conversation of a reasonable woman, one who did not think tendernesse a disgrace to his understanding. …” She abhors precisely the dismissive male portrayed in “A Satyr,” noting that she wishes “quite the reverse of a race of people who are obstinate in being wretched, nor is it in the power of Fortune to make them otherwise. They never have a friend that they do not suspect has a design to cheat 'em, or a mistresse that they do not believe Jilts 'em” (Halsband, The Complete Letters, I, 61).

30. Defoe was notably progressive in gauging women's capacities. He proposed “An Academy for Women,” arguing that “what they might be capable of being bred to is plain from some instances of female wit, which this age is not without; which upbraids us with injustice, and looks as if we denied women the advantages of education for fear they should vie with the men in their improvements.” See An Essay Upon Projects (1698), in Henry Morley, ed., The Earlier Life and Chief Earlier Works of Daniel Defoe, 24-164, 145. In The Compleat English Tradesman, Defoe also urged husbands to educate wives in the family business so as to avoid catastrophe should a husband prematurely die. See Letter XXI.

31. The Nonsense of Common-Sense IV, states: “Men that have not sense enough to shew any superiority in their Arguments hope to be yielded to by a Faith that as they are men all the Reason that has been allotted to Humankind has falln [sic] to their share. I am seriously of another Opinion: as much greatness of Mind may be shewn in submission as in command” (133).

32. See, for example, Roger North, The Gentleman Accomptant: Or, An Essay to Unfold the Mystery of Accompts (London, 1715).

33. In Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), Horner suggests that Pinchwife bring Margery to town “to be taught breeding.” Pinchwife responds: “To be taught! No, sir, I thank you. Good wives and private soldiers should be ignorant.” See James Ogden, ed., The Country Wife, I, i. 398-401.

34. My reading of “A Satyr” answers Felicity Nussbaum's question, “Why did Lady Mary write such a satire, the very breed of satire she condemned in later years?” It does so by confuting Nussbaum's answer, that “Lady Mary expressed only a limited feminist consciousness as a young woman in Turkey,” which might “account for her willingness” to write the poem. See The Brink of All We Hate, 125, 127. Nussbaum does not read the poem as a double satire, aimed at the speaker in relation to his female object.

35. Montagu remarks, for example, that “I know by Experience it is in the power of Study not only to make solitude tolerable but agreeable” (Halsband, The Complete Letters III, 25).

36. On Cavendish's curious self-directed science, which she expounded in voluminous writings, see Lisa Sarasohn, “A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Sylvia Bowerbank, “The Spider's Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the Female Imagination,” and Sylvia Brown, “Margaret Cavendish: Strategies Rhetorical and Philosophical Against the Charge of Wantonness.”

37. In The Brink of All We Hate, Nussbaum explains the disparity in Montagu's views by arguing that only “after years of being satirized herself as a learned lady, did she insist on sexual equality” (127). My view posits a concern for women's potential even in Montagu's early work, and explains apparent contradiction so as not to overshadow such concern. In this regard, see “Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio,” in which Joseph Lew distinguishes between letters Montagu wrote to men and to women. As between each group, he discerns “a number of discourses competing for hegemony” (435). This approach could illuminate the cited letters, as well as the different genres constituting Montagu's oeuvre—her (private) letters and (public) essays, the latter inserted into political debate and presumably inflected by the terms of that debate.

38. There is ample support that Montagu's acerbic remark is attributable to the “feminist anti-feminism” I am suggesting. Several illustrious predecessors cite women's apparent inferiority owing to poor education. See, e.g., Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters (1664); Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1696); Mary Chudleigh, “Of Knowledge,” in Essays Upon Several Subjects (1710).

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