SOURCE: "Sex and Love, Marriage and Friendship: A Feminist Reading of the Quest for Happii;iess in Rasselas," in English Studies, Vol. 6, 1985, pp. 513-25.

In this article I intend to argue that happiness is not shown to be unobtainable in Rasselas, although it is not connected with any particular way of life. Happiness arises from friendship, that is, from equal and affectionate relationships, which may break down the barriers of social, generational and gender differences. I call it a feminist reading because I place special emphasis on the role played by the female characters, whom I examine in relation to the preconceptions of eighteenth century literature and the contemporary attitudes. It will be seen that my methods are eclectic: I start with a thematic analysis of the text and proceed to a consideration of current ideas about the nature of women, ending up with some remarks on Johnson's own attitudes to women.

Rasselas is not a sexy book. There is not even much romantic interest; and perhaps only the force of Johnson's prose style keeps us from finding it incongruous that the search for happiness circumvents any serious consideration of sexual relationships. It is true that there is a protracted debate on marriage, but it is largely concerned with the family as an institution, with its intergenerational problems. Despite these obvious discouragements, I intend to consider the presentation of sexuality in Rasselas.

One notable point is that none of the characters falls in love, or even seriously anticipates the possibility of doing so. The nearest we get to a love-affair is the warm regard which grows up between Pekuah and the unnamed astronomer, which restores his sanity. This, however, is soon assimilated into the general good fellowship of the sociable group, and it is clearly not envisaged that their relationship should become official and permanent: in fact, we are informed the Pekuah's whim at the end of the tale is to embrace religion, as 'she was weary of expectation and disgust, and would gladly be fixed in some unvariable state'¹—in a female community; while the astronomer, like Imlac, was content to drift aimlessly through life 'without directing their course to any particular port'.² After twenty years of travel, apparently without any notice of the opposite sex worth mentioning, Imlac decides to marry and 'sit down in the quiet of domestick life',³ but being rejected on his first offer gives up the attempt. The nearest Rasselas himself comes to contemplating a sexual relationship is summed up in his pronouncement, 'Whenever I shall seek a wife, it shall be my first question, whether she be willing to be led by reason?¹⁴ His 'whenever' is as inconclusive as his premises are naive. Nekayah shows equal detachment when, in reply to her brother's moralising observation that 'the world must be peopled by marriage, or peopled without it.' 'How the world is to be peopled, returned Nekayah, is not my care, and needs not be yours. I see no danger that the present generation should omit to leave successors behind them."⁵

The only significant figure in the tale who actually has sex is the desert chieftain, that gloomy, noble alienated figure, who kidnaps Pekuah and holds her for ransom. Her terrors on being captured are soon alleviated when she learns that 'the Arab ranged the country merely to get riches',⁶ and his sexual needs are satisfied within the confines of his seraglio. Pekuah is left to the society of these women, but finds them no company for her:

The diversions of the women … were only childish play, by which the mind accustomed to stronger operations could not be kept busy. I could do all which they delighted in doing by powers merely sensitive, while my intellectual faculties were flown to Cairo. They ran from room to room as a bird hops from wire to wire in his cage. They danced for the sake of motion, as lambs frisk in the meadow. One sometimes pretended to be hurt that the others might be alarmed, or hid herself that the others might seek her. Part of their time passed in watching the progress of light bodies that floated on the river, and part in marking the various forms into which the clouds broke in the sky.

Their business was only needlework, in which I and my maids sometimes helped them; but you know that the mind will easily straggle from the fingers, nor will you suspect that captivity and absence from Nekayah could receive solace from silken flowers.

Nor was much satisfaction to be hoped from their conversation: for of what could they be expected to talk? They had seen nothing; for they had lived from their earliest youth in that narrow spot: of what they had not seen they could have no knowledge, for they could not read. They had no ideas but of the few things that were within their view, and had hardly names for any thing but their cloaths and their food. As I bore a superiour character, I was often called to terminate their quarrels, which I decided as equitably as I could. If it could have amused me to hear the complaints of each against the rest, I might have been often detained by long stories, but the motives of their animosity were so small that I could not listen without intercepting the tale.⁷

I have quoted at such length because this will be a key passage in my argument. Pekuah is here giving inform mation not only about the Arab women but also about herself by way of contrast. At this point she embodies the Johnsonian concept of the mature human personality, whose mind is never fully at rest, who seeks satisfaction beyond the inadequacies of the present moment, and for whom physical existence is insubstantial beside the moral and intellectual. The Arab women, on the other hand, are compared to children and to animals, and are by implication neither truly adult nor indeed truly human. They are unconscious spiritual prisoners, occupied with the same inevitable songs and motions, their minds and bodies integrated in an eternal present, like Shelley's skylark or Keats's nightingale. They lack the alienation that makes us human; and while Pekuah's intellectual faculties were flown to Cairo, a neo-Platonic bird of the divine intellectual soul, they ran from room to room as a cage-bird hops from wire to wire. Their condition is that to which human nature can sink without the stimulation of responsibility and education.⁸

These are the Arab's bedfellows, but scarcely his loves or companions; for him, the delights of eroticism are not entangled with the solemn burden of self-awareness. He separates his true self from his sexual nature, and the beauty of the women who gratify his lust is only a flower to pluck and throw away, whereas his true delight is the conversation of Pekuah. Before he knew her, his attitude to women had been the one generated by patriarchal societies, which confine the minds and bodies of women, turning them into auxiliary persons whose function is to minister to the needs of their fully human menfolk. Pekuah, by being interesting as a person, cannot become a sex-object and as such implicitly degraded. Knowing her, the Arab becomes aware of a quality of companionship which could mitigate his loneliness, and he understands enough not to seduce her: the divisiveness of patriarchy makes sexuality a barrier rather than a bridge between the sexes which must be excluded from honourable relationships. It is also apparent that the Arab is spiritually as unmarried as Rasselas and his companions, and shares with them an awareness of the complexities of existence that is so oppressive that one can scarcely imagine them abandoning themselves to passion. Some of these complexities arise from the conflict between the doctrine of human equality and the various kinds of subordination found in society.

But certainly, both love and happiness exist within the framework of the story; indeed, it is shown that in the end there can be no possibility of lasting happiness without love. There is, however, a delusive happiness, an ecstatic, explosive experience which cannot settle into a prolonged state, a kind of epiphany akin to Keats's 'Joy, whose hand is ever at his lip / Bidding adieu'. In Rasselas it functions as a release from tension, whether confinement or deprivation, a kind of emotional orgasm whose euphoria soon collapses into some such negative affect as ennui or panic. One may cite Imlac's reactions to finding himself free of his father's repressive authority and embarked upon the sublime ocean:

When I first entered upon the world of waters, and lost sight of land, I looked round with pleasing terrour, and thinking my soul enlarged by the boundless prospect, imagined that I could gaze round forever without satiety; but, in a short time, I grew weary of looking on barren uniformity, where I could only see again what I had already seen.⁹

When he first beholds the world beyond the Happy Valley Rasselas experiences a similar elation, though in this case the deflation is communicated indirectly and ironically, via the reactions of other characters:

The prince looked round with rapture, anticipated all the pleasures of travel, and in thought was already transported beyond his father's dominions. Imlac, though very joyful at his escape, had less expectation of pleasure in the world, which he had before tried, and of which he had been weary.… The princess and her maid turned their eyes towards every part, and, seeing nothing to bound their prospect, considered themselves as in danger of being lost in boundless vacuity.¹⁰

In both cases, the joy of hope is fallacious as it lacks an adequate object. Furthermore, Johnson characteristically brings his pragmatism to bear on the sublimity of natural scenery, which he tended to regard as boring once its initial impact has faded, and morally irrelevant.¹¹

The third instance of ecstatic happiness is of a different nature and proceeds in a more auspicious direction. Again, it is a release from tension, in this case the tension resulting from deprivation: the reunion of Nekayah with her friend Pekuah, whom she thought she had lost forever:

The princess and her favourite embraced each other with a transport too violent to be expressed, and went out together to pour the tears of tenderness in secret, and exchange professions of kindness and gratitude.¹²

In this case there is no deflation or defection of the emotion, but it simply spreads out genially into a settled state. And this must be because friendship is one of the few positive values of the book, and perhaps the only one not to operate on the purely spiritual level: as such, it is the only unambiguous good. Affectionate mutual regard does not disappoint; in fact, it is the precondition of other kinds of happiness. When Pekuah is abducted, and seems irrevocably lost, Nekayah resolves 'to retire from the world with all its flatteries and deceits'; however, Imlac advises her:

'That you have been deprived of one pleasure is no very good reason for rejection of the rest.' 'Since Pekuah was taken from me, said the princess, I have no pleasure to reject or to retain. She that has no one to love or trust has little to hope. She wants the radical principle of happiness … Wealth is nothing but as it is bestowed, and knowledge nothing but as it is communicated: they must be imparted to others, and to whom could I now delight to impart them?"³

Sad words of wisdom; and not merely the transient sentiments of a shocked and bereaved woman, for they are reiterated in the discourse of the sage whom the company fall in with one evening on the banks of the Nile. They are impressed with his immense learning and his comprehensive grasp of the causes of things, and congratulate him on possessing this unfailing source of pleasure; but he too is bored and disillusioned, and strives to correct their misconceptions:

Let the gay and the vigorous expect pleasure in their excursions, it is enough that age can obtain ease. To me the world has lost its novelty: I look round, and see what I remember to have seen in happier days. I rest against a tree, and consider, that in the same shade I once disputed upon the annual overflow of the Nile with a friend who is now silent in the grave … I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband. I have outlived my friends and my rivals. Nothing is now of much importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself.¹⁴

It is certain that love is necessary to happiness, love that has to do with communication and sharing, with the dignified concept of mutual regard. Everywhere in the book there is the quiet insistence that people need objects of affection to give their endeavours meaning—their secular endeavours, at least; and I find that the solitary religious quest which seems to receive the final accolade is thrown into ironic perspective by much of the realistic psychological investigation. Remember also that the grandiloquent systems of the stoic philosopher are immediately discredited when his daughter dies and he is left alone.

Sexuality does not figure at all as a means to happiness. Perhaps this is one aspect of Johnson's concern to define the human in contrast to the animal, for it is unlikely that he consciously held views about the nature of sexuality under patriarchy, whatever his observation of life may have taught him. It is certainly a concomitant of Johnson's rationalistic separation of matter and spirit. His rationalism and basically empirical attitudes would never permit him to regard conjugal sexuality as divine, as Milton does. However, Milton's doctrine of marriage was patriarchal, as was that of the majority of Johnson's contemporaries, while Rasselas is certainly not a male chauvinistic document. If we look at it in its contemporary context, we will realize that it is constructed around an ideal of freedom and equality which is surprisingly advanced, and this includes the element of sexual equality. The prince and his sister, his tutor, her maid, and the learned astronomer form a group of individuals who have freely chosen each other's company, who come to respect and care for each other, practise mutual tolerance and co-operation, and receive pleasure and happiness from this voluntary association.

Friendship, indeed, seems to be presented as a humanistic quality, the potential for which distinguishes humankind from the other creatures; but like language and reason, the primary human characteristics, it is a quality which can be abused, or deteriorate, or fail to develop properly without proper nurture and education. Rasselas provides examples of people who have not developed their full human potential. There are, for instance, the celibate, who are further characterized as misanthropic recluses who

dream away their time without friendship, without fondness, and are driven to rid themselves of the day, for which they have nouse, by childish amusements, or vicious delights. They act as beings under the constant sense of some known inferiority, that fills their minds with rancour, and their tongues with censure. They are peevish at home, and malevolent abroad; and, as the outlaws of human nature, make it their business and their pleasure to disturb that society which debars them from its privileges. To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude: it is not retreat but exclusion from mankind.¹⁵

This, we may protest, is not entirely fair to the single state: after all, the speaker and her friends are themselves unmarried.¹⁶ Nekayah seems to regard celibacy as indicative of a general refusal, or inability, to form connections and accept responsibility. Marriage here means the highest form of friendship, and the deprivations of celibacy are primarily social, not sexual. Indeed, the refusal to involve one's fate with anyone else amounts to 'exclusion from mankind'.

The two other important instances of groups who fail to develop their human faculties are specifically female: the women of the seraglio, mentioned above, and the daughters of the middle-class families visited by Nekayah in her investigations of 'private life'. Though nominally Egyptian, these girls are certainly modelled on English young ladies of the time and function as a familiar counterpart to the more exotic Arab women, as if to drive the point home:

The daughters of many houses were airy and cheerful, but Nekayah had been too long accustomed to the conversation of Imlac and her brother to be much pleased with childish levity and prattle which had no meaning. She found their thoughts narrow, their wishes low, and their merriment often artificial. Their pleasures, poor as they were, could not be preserved pure, but were embittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation. They were always jealous of the beauty of each other; of a quality to which solicitude can add nothing, and from which detraction can take nothing away. Many were in love with triflers like themselves, and many fancied they were in love when in truth they were only idle. Their affection was seldom fixed on sense or virtue, and therefore seldom ended but in vexation. Their grief, however, like their joy, was transient; every thing floated in their mind unconnected with the past or future, so that one desire easily gave way to another, as a second stone cast into the water effaces and confounds the circles of the first.

With these girls she played as with inoffensive animals, and found them proud of her countenance, and weary of her company.¹⁷

There are several points here that are relevant to Johnson's humanistic preoccupations: the girls are compared to 'inoffensive animals', their levity is 'childish' and their conversation 'prattle which had no meaning'. Their concerns are not rational: the present moment for them is 'unconnected with the past or future', and their emotions are transient and superficial, mere reflex responses without a moral basis. Nor are they capable of appreciating Nekayah's superior character, except from the point of view of social prestige. In this they are not superior to Pekuah's companions in the harem, who can only make use of the captive lady's education and experience to help them settle their silly differences. Such girls are not capable of friendship: their relationships are 'embittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation', as will commonly be the case with women brought up to regard their own worth as dependent on the favour they find in men's eyes.

I do not think that the foolishness, giddiness and immaturity of these girls is stressed in order to argue the natural inferiority of women, as the princess and her maid are by way of contrast two young women who undergo the same process as the prince, an educational adventure towards full humanity begun equally in restlessness and discontent.'" Rasselas, who at first imagines that only he is dissatisfied with life in the Happy Valley, learns that in fact he is not alone: most of the attendants and entertainers curse the day they first entered the place, especially those who are unlike Imlac in that their memories are not stocked with images. These, 'whose minds have no impressions but of the present moment, are either corroded by malignant passions, or sit stupid in the gloom of perpetual vacancy'.¹⁹ The only one to attempt escape is the projector who designs the wings, but his hatred of the place has become so fervent that it distorts his intellectual ability, causing him to reason illogically and disregard essential objections. Unvaried security and pleasure do not apparently make for satisfying human lives.

When the prince and Imlac have half finished work on the secret tunnel they receive a secret visit from Nekayah, who informs them:

I am equally weary of confinement with yourself, and not less desirous of knowing what is done or suffered in the world. Permit me to fly with you from this tasteless tranquillity, which will yet grow more loathsome when you have left me.²⁰

Nekayah's plea is a departure from the convention, most familiar and probably most representative in Genesis in the Bible and in Paradise Lost, in Hamlet and in various Faust stories, that the male is the quintessentially human figure, while women are simply one of the problems he encounters, the most serious temptation of the flesh, the motive for deserting reason and virtue. It is significant that Nekayah is not the mistress of Rasselas but his sister; as such, her motives cannot be sensual and presented as an obstacle to the male. She is his female counterpart. The princess demands the right to accompany her brother as her quest is the same as his.

She and her lady-in-waiting come to represent one of the important human qualities, friendship,²¹ and thus function as a contrast to the class of celibates (the wilfully alone) and to the flighty middle-class girls (the uneducated and undeveloped personalities), at the same time refuting the misogynistic dictum, still sometimes heard, that women are incapable of friendship. This may well have had some substance in an age when women's minds were generally uncultivated and when, as marriage was usually their only approved aim in life, being decisive for their security and social position, rivalry with other women was encouraged. In 1727, a generation before Rasselas was written, Swift comments in 'A letter to a young lady on her marriage': 'I advise that your Company at home should consist of Men rather than Women. To say the Truth, I never yet knew a tolerable Woman to be fond of her own Sex.'²² He clearly cannot envisage that a woman might receive any benefit, either of instruction, intellectual stimulation or affection from the company of her own sex. Johnson, who was acquainted with the letters of Katherine Philips,23 the High Priestess of friendship, knew better; furthermore, by the mid-century, thanks in part to the enormous expansion of the publishing industry, there were more, and more noticeable, 'tolerable' women in England. Swift's views, indeed, were not unreasonable, given the state of society in the early eighteenth century. Furthermore, his misogyny is merely a subsection of his cynical misanthropy, his refusal to expect too much of the human race; he never gives evidence of the rabid hatred of women evinced by true misogynists²⁴ like the unspeakable author of Man Superior to Woman (1739), a specious and condescending reaction to feminine 'wit'. Swift is a conservative who, though he may seem to agree with 'Sophia' that the apparent inferiority of women is the result of practices dictated by custom and interest,25 can give his young lady no more radical advice than that she must submissively learn from her husband and his friends. Thirty years later, Rasselas presents serious, educated female characters who do not define themselves in relation to men.

But this was exceptional. Popular fiction aimed at a female readership has from the earliest times concerned itself chiefly with romance and marriage and portrayed female excellence almost exclusively as it functioned as a bait for Prince Charming, and this was certainly true in Johnson's day, even of the better quality writers. Richardson, who was probably the most popular of all with women, shows both the comic and tragic aspect of this world-view, but does not challenge it.

The only considerable eighteenth century novelist to depart substantially from these stereotypes is Defoe, who is much more interested in the money side of sexual relationships and whose major female protagonist, Moll Flanders, while endowed with wit and beauty, is far from a paragon of virtue and perfectly aware of the economic aspects of her sexuality. Defoe, incidentally, also held moderate feminist views more than half a century before the publication of Rasselas: as his essay on the education of women demonstrates, he realized that lack of educational opportunities was one significant cause of the inferior status of women. In this essay, however, despite his evident wish to think justly of the other sex, Defoe betrays by his linguistic usage that he cannot avoid regarding the masculine half of our species as 'man', and hence by association as 'the human race':

And, without partiality, a woman of sense and manners is the finest and most delicate part of GOD's Creation, the glory of Her Maker, and the great instance of His singular regard to man, His darling creature: to whom He gave the best gift either GOD could bestow or man receive.²⁶

Such slight, casual usage is indicative of deeper attitudes which the writer must have shared with the greater part of his contemporaries, probably female as well as male. We can cite by contrast this sentence from the opening chapter of Rasselas:

According to the custom which has descended from age to age among the monarchs of the torrid zone, Rasselas was confined in a private palace, with the other sons and daughters of Abissinian royalty, till the order of succession should call him to the throne.²⁷

It is significant that both 'sons and daughters' are specified, not simply 'sons' or 'heirs': from the very first page of Rasselas, women are visible members of the human race. Whether this indicates a general change of sensibility in the half century since An Essay on Projects is not to be decided here, but his Eastern tale does show Johnson's individual consciousness of women's equal humanity. This can further be seen in the context of the rather voluptuous and sensational genre which provides the literary background to the work.

We are all familiar with the fantastic adventures and romantic sexuality of the Oriental stories, and also with their gender stereotypes, later to become part of our popular culture through the success of 'Gothic' orientalism and Byron's metrical romances. The genre became known in England in the first half of the eighteenth century largely from Ambrose Philips's translated Persian Tales (1714). It has been supposed that the second and third volumes of this collection, which relate the search for ahappy man, could be a primary source for Rasselas. However, as Geoffrey Tillotson observes,28 each of the Tales provides an example of true love. The one dramatic incident in Rasselas, the episode which effects the travellers' transition from observation of life to involvement, concerns loss and reunion in friendship, not in romantic love. My contention is that in avoiding romance and eroticism and instead emphasizing friendship in this way, Johnson manages to avoid the polarization of the sexes. It is also significant that in the debate on marriage the main consideration is relative maturity and compatibility of temperament, and the question of sovereignty is circumvented: that is, the relations between the sexes are depicted as based on equality, not subordination.

Johnson had several advantages over his more genteel male contemporaries, whose literary education was limited to the prescribed syllabus at school and university and whose knowledge of society was equally superficial and restricted. He had read voraciously in his father's bookshop during his formative years, so that at Oxford he astounded his tutors with his extensive knowledge. During much of his early manhood he struggled in poverty and among the poor, an experience which taught him to respect human worth wherever he found it: his 'Elegy on the Death of Levet' reminds us of this. I believe that both his reading and his wide acquaintance with life led him to regard the achievements of women seriously and sympathetically. In preparing his edition of Shakespeare his knowledge of the sources of the plays was probably obtained chiefly from Charlotte Lennox's Shakespeare Illustrated, and he had read the critical writings of Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blues;²⁹ the Blue-Stockings, indeed, were his conversational companions, with Elizabeth Carter, for whom he had a special respect, having her own chair in his house. Of the long Rambler series only four numbers are not by Johnson, and three of these he deputised to women (no. 30 to Catherine Talbot, nos. 44 and 100 to Elizabeth Carter; no. 97 is by Samuel Richardson). A glance through Boswell's Life of Johnson will suffice to show how important female acquaintances were in his social and intellectual life. One thinks also of his encouragement of Fanny Burney and his delight in her success. At the end of his life he writes approvingly, in the Life of Addison, of the general intellectual improvement of women in the course of the century.³⁰

I cannot find any proof that Johnson may have read Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), the most important feminist essay on education before Mary Wollstonecraft; but, as A. D. Atkinson remarks:

the reading record of a man who lived two centuries ago is bound to be deficient. We will never know every detail of his book-borrowing, his browsing in book-shops, or his reading in the King's library or on his visits to Oxford. What books he dipped into while helping to compile the Harleian Catalogue can never be more than a matter of speculation.³¹

One may permit oneself to feel that the account of Nekayah's last ambition sounds like a reminiscence of Mary Astell's proposal for a female seminary:

The princess thought, that of all sublunary things, knowledge was the best: she desired first to learn all sciences, and then purposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside, that, by conversing with the old, and educating the young, she might divide her time between the acquisition and communication of wisdom, and raise up for the next age models of prudence, and patterns of piety.³² [my italics]

Mary Astell called her proposed seminary a 'Monastery or Religious Retirement' and envisaged it as

a Type or Antepast of Heav'n, where your Employments will be, as there, to magnify God, to love one another, and to communicate that useful Knowledge which by the due improvement of your time in Study and Contemplation you will obtain. [It will be] a Seminary to stock the Kingdom with pious and prudent Ladies, and is to expel that cloud of Ignorance which Custom has involv'd us in … and to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful Knowledge, that the Souls of Women may no longer be the only unadom'd and neglected things.³³ [my italics]

This passage partakes so much of the serious and dignified spirit of Rasselas that I cannot help conjecturing that, even if he had not read the work that it is taken from, Johnson would have been in agreement with the philosophy behind it. Nekayah's college is not so thoroughly a religious foundation as Astell's seminary, but it is immediately preceded in the text by Pekuah's ambition to fill the convent of St. Anthony with pious maidens and be made prioress of the order, so the work ends with the two ladies resolving to dedicate themselves to learning and piety. What Rasselas adds to A Serious Proposal is irony. It is characteristic that Nekayah must first learn all sciences, and that she and Pekuah automatically envisage themselves as the leaders of their respective institutions. But the two ladies have high and worthy ambitions, and should not be judged too harshly for sharing in the weaknesses of humanity.

In 1755, writing to her daughter, Lady Bute, about the education of girls, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had known Mary Astell personally, remarks: 'I have already told you that I look on my Grand Daughters as Lay Nuns'.³⁴ It is interesting that two years previously her earnest recommendation that Lady Bute should provide a thorough scholarly education for her eldest daughter was followed by the caution that the girl should

conceal whatever Learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness and lameness. The parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate Hatred, of all he and she Fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four of all her Aquaintance.³⁵

This is a useful indication of the attitude to the educated woman prevalent in the highest circles in the decade in which Rasselas was written. It is also significant that Lady Bute rejected her mother's advice and brought up her daughters in the conventional manner. We might therefore conjecture that Johnson's serious-minded female characters could only win acceptance because they were dressed in Eastern costume. He uses the exoticism of his chosen genre not, as later writers were to do, to create divisive Romantic stereotypes, but to portray a world of the imagination where the destructive divisions are far less extreme than they were in the England of his day.

Imlac's discourse on the nature of the soul, as well as making explicit the body/soul dualism which seems intrinsic to Johnson's conception of sexuality, is also potential evidence for a doctrine of human equality and as such a suitable transition to the conclusion of a book whose main theme has been human nature. It is interesting that a similar rationalistic definition of the soul, as an immaterial entity which necessarily lacks physical attributes and distinctions, had been adduced in Woman not inferior to Man (1739):

It is a known truth, that the difference of sexes regards only the body, and That merely as it relates to the propagation of human nature. But the soul, concurring to it only by consent, actuates all after the same manner; so that in this there is no sex at all. There is no more difference to be discem'd between the souls of a dunce, and a man of wit, or of an illiterate person and an experienced one, than between a boy of four and a man of forty years of age. And since there is not at most any greater difference between the souls of Women and Men, there can be no real diversity contracted from the body: All the diversity then must come from education, exercise and the impressions of those external objects which surround us in different circumstances.³⁶

'Sophia' lacks Imlac's elegance of exposition and rigorous logic, but one gets the point.

It would not be true to say that Johnson's protestant belief in the equality of souls was entirely free of the patriarchal emphasis of the Civil War radicals. His views on male inheritance are wellknown, as indeed is his doctrine of subordination in society. His life and practice are not always easy to reconcile with his stated views; indeed, he is also a notorious master of inconsistency and of talking for effect. His outrageous remarks about female preachers, women who know Greek, and Mrs. Carter's skill in making puddings are also celebrated, though the last story is not necessarily sexist: Johnson did not despise female occupations like cooking and needlework, and may only have meant to imply that Mrs. Carter was no narrow pedant. But even today, only the most humourless feminists fail to find drag-shows amusing, and we all make jokes based on outmoded stereotypes: humour has its own enclosed universe, which is largely linguistic. Furthermore, there is no figure whose everyday conversation is so fully recorded as Johnson, and few people would think it fair to have their every observation handed down to posterity, often by a far from impartial recorder, and subjected to the scrutiny of scholars two hundred years later. The published works must have their own autonomy.

I believe that Johnson avoids romance and sexuality in Rasselas while providing admirable female characters because he wished to depict women as potentially equal to men, with similar problems and aims, and not as the supporting cast in a drama of humanity in which men play all the important roles. In many ways it is the work of a traditional humanist, but one whose humanism includes the whole human race. Although the book sometimes seems to communicate a vision of human futility its tone is lofty and sympathetic. The irony is not harsh and damaging, and the possibility of human dignity is never lost sight of. It depicts a group of people who need and respect each other, for whom incidental differences of age, sex and fortune are not important. Perhaps the noblest achievement of Prince Rasselas is his acceptance on equal terms of women and social inferiors, including his admiration and sympathy for the deluded astronomer. The dignity of the human ideal is not consistent with social or sexual prejudice.

Notes

¹ Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. D. J. Enright, Penguin, 1976, p. 149. The text is based on the revised second edition of 1759 (see Note on the Text, p. 35).

² Ibid p. 150.

³ Ibid p. 67.

⁴ Ibid p. 102.

⁵ Ibid pp. 99-100.

⁶ Ibid p. 122.

⁷ Ibid pp. 124-5.

⁸ I have developed this theme in my earlier article, 'Rasselas, Milton, and Humanism', English Studies, vol. 60, no. 1 (Feb. 1979), pp. 14-22. Rasselas himself, at the beginning of the tale, is aware that his discontent sets him apart from the animals of the valley, but his humanity is undeveloped and at this stage expresses itself in play and make-believe rather than conscious moral action. Johnson, of course, contends here and in his essays that truly adult status is strenuous to achieve and maintain, and that most of us do in fact play and dream our way through life most of the time.

⁹Rasselas, p. 57.

¹⁰ Ibid p. 73.

¹¹ For my previous remarks on Johnson's ambiguous response to sublimity, see 'Rasselas, Milton, and Humanism', p. 17.

¹²Rasselas p. 118.

¹³ Ibid. p. 114.

¹⁴ Ibid. p. 136.

¹⁵ Ibid. p. 95.

¹⁶ In this context, it is well to remember that there are strong indications that unmarried women were generally despised and mistrusted in the eighteenth century, cf: 'there can be no doubt that the spinster in the early eighteenth century, when the problem first became of serious proportions, enjoyed a reputation for malice and ill-temper, "If an old maid should bite anybody, it would certainly be as mortal as the bite of a mad dog", remarked Defoe in 1723, and from then onward the ill-natured old maid became a feature of the English novel, and a subject of hostile comment by all writers of domestic handbooks'. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Penguin Books, 1979, pp. 244-5. See also: 'Among the unmarried Women, what numberless Tribes of useless Things are there not, whose Pride, Avarice, Fickleness or icy Constitutions, rob human Nature of the Individuals they were intended to bear; and by not answering the Use they were given to him for, become a dead Weight upon Man? Indeed, if there are some among them less squeamish than the rest, who atone out of Wedlock for their Slowness to engage in it; how few of them is human Nature the better for? How many of them stifle the Fruit of their Pleasures before it is ripe! Not to speak of those Disgraces to the soft Shape they wear, who only delay Destruction to make it morecruel'. Man Superior to WOMAN; or a VINDICATION of MAN'S Natural Right of Sovereign Authority over the Woman, London, 1739, p. 21. Need we suppose that this author was alone in his contempt of women? This excerpt also demonstrates that the generalised term 'man' could commonly be used to denote the male sex rather than the entire human race. In Rasselas, women are portrayed as having the same potential and responsibilities as men: they are not mere breeding machines.

¹⁷Rasselas, pp. 91-2.

¹⁸ I am not trying to persuade the reader that the behaviour of the two women shows no weak, 'feminine' traits. They are, for example, initially more fearful than the men, and Pekuah is superstitious, but the course of the action educates them away from these failings. They also display mirth when they first hear of the astronomer's madness; however, their triviality is soon corrected by Imlac's reprimand (p. 132). Characteristic female weaknesses are not presented as intrinsic but as the result of convention and upbringing and thus susceptible of cure.

¹⁹Rasselas, p. 68.

²⁰ Ibid. p. 72.

²¹ I am using this term in a very generalized sense. Johnson's first definition of 'friendship' in his Dictionary is: 'The state of minds united in mutual benevolence', and as such the word can be applied to groups and social units as well as to pairs of friends, who thus represent a heightened form of the general social tie.

²² Swift, Works, vol. IX, ed. Herbert Davis, p. 88, Oxford, 1968.

²³ A. D. Atkinson, 'Dr. Johnson's English Prose Reading', N & Q, 1953, p. 108.

²⁴ I do not see poems like 'The lady's Dressing-Room' as misogynistic, though they are certainly misanthropic. In them, men are wilfully deluded and then driven to madness because they are as unprepared as women to face the truth about physical existence.

²⁵ See, passim, Woman not Inferior to Man: or, A short and modest Vindication of the natural Right of the FAIR-SEX to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men, by SOPHIA, A Person of Quality, London, 1739 (2nd ed., which I have consulted, 1740).

²⁶ Daniel Defoe, 'The Education of Women', from An Essay upon Projects, written about 1692 but first published 1697. Quoted from An English Garner, ed. Edward Arber, Westminster, 1897, vol. II, p.267.

²⁷Rasselas, p. 39.

²⁸ Geoffrey Tillotson, 'Rasselas and the "Persian Tales", T. L. S., Aug. 29, 1935, p. 534.

²⁹ Atkinson, p. 110.

³⁰ 'That general knowledge which now circulates in common talk, was in his time rarely to be found. Men not professing learning were not ashamed of ignorance; and, in the female world, any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured.' Lives of the English Poets, vol. I, p. 366, Everyman's Library, 1925 (1964).

³¹ Atkinson, p. 60.

³²Rasselas, pp. 149-50.

³³ [Mary Astell], A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, in two parts, by a Lover of her Sex, 1697. Quoted in Dorothy Gardiner, English Girlhood at School, p. 222, Oxford, 1929.

³⁴The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, ed. Robert Halsband, Oxford, 1967, vol. III, p. 83.

³⁵ Ibid. p. 22.

³⁶ 'Sophia', p. 23.