For, the clearer our conceptions in art and science become, the more they will assimilate themselves to the conceptions of duty in conduct, will become practically stringent like rules of conduct, and will invite the same sort of language in dealing with them.

(Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma)

This collection of essays grew out of our recognition of a very simple truth: the literature of conduct and the conduct of the writing known as literature share the same history. Both literature and conduct books, especially those written for women, are integral and instrumental to the history of desire. The essays in this volume demonstrate that conduct books for women, in particular, strive to reproduce, if not always to revise, the culturally approved forms of desire. Anthropologists generally agree that cultures systematically designate a certain kind of woman as the object of desire. The exchange of such women not only determines kinship relations among families or tribes but also determines the economic and political organization characterizing the group within which such an exchange of women takes place. If it is true that in other cultures the rules that govern kinship relations also regulate the political economy, and that kinship relations are in this respect one and the same as political relations, then we must also assume that whatever it is that makes certain objects of sexual exchange more valuable than others also provides the basis of political authority. Granting this, one must ask if our own culture does not yield to the same logic we identify in others: do we not have kinship rules as precise and elaborate as those we attribute to other cultures? Do these rules not reproduce a specific political order, one in which we play the roles of both subject and instrument? Do we not have a characteristic technology of desire which ensures the reproduction of prevailing kinship relations? When we speak of the woman we desire or the woman we desire to be, do we not appear to be speaking about what is most basic and natural in ourselves? And is it not this very knowledge of ourselves as the subjects and objects of desire that we have been taught to discover in literature?

It is the intention of this collection of essays to show that such expressions of desire in fact constitute ideology in its most basic and powerful form, namely, one that culture designates as nature itself. Of the means which European culture has developed to create and regulate desire, conduct books for women and certain other forms of writing now known as literature offer us the clearest examples. To us, it seems all too obvious that if sexual relations can uphold specific forms of political authority in other cultures, they must have the power to do so in ours; the terms and dynamics of sexual desire must be a political language in modern cultures too.¹ From this hypothesis follow certain implications for the study of literature. First, literature concerned with women and the vicissitudes of sexual love is no less political than literature that deals with men and the official institutions of state. Because redefinitions of desire often revise the basis of political power, or human nature itself, one might say that changes in the understanding of desire, the practice of courtship, and the organization of the family are culturally antecedent to changes in the official institutions of state. Second, where this relationship between personal and public experience can be shown to hold true, we must see representations of desire, neither as reflections nor as consequences of political power, but as a form of political power in their own right.

Because the relationship between sex and politics is an ancient and ongoing one, we have asked scholars working in various periods of literary history to read literature in relation to the literature of female conduct. As we will argue, these essays together demonstrate that the production of specific forms of desire has created and maintained specific forms of political authority, and that sexual desire therefore cannot be left out of political history. It seems clear to us that most critical approaches to literature cannot describe the role literature has played in the history of desire. For if critics do care to consider literature historically, they generally do so in reference to a world determined by economic and political relationships among men. In pursuing the relation between literature and conduct books, we have tried to resist this tendency. We have chosen to consider history as all those symbolic practices, among which writing is one, that make up the social reality at a given moment in time. Within such a framework, we can observe the terms of desire change from one age to the next. We can see the notion of gender undergo transformation. And we may conclude that literature played different—but nonetheless important—roles in effecting such changes.

Yet, despite remarkable parallels between the literature of conduct and the conduct of literature, literary histories rarely if ever contain references to the literature of female conduct, and even more rarely are conduct books for women allowed to contribute to our notion of cultural history. A glance at the subject holdings of any well-stocked library reveals numerous titles devoted to social and economic history as well as to the traditional history of ideas, and there are always a handful of titles concerned with the history of the family. Moreover, a closer look at the same catalogue uncovers other kinds of histories, what we usually mean by cultural histories, not only histories of literature and the sister arts, but also histories of folk practices and those forms of expression known as popular culture. Yet a search of any reputable research library will reveal that much the same conditions now prevail as reigned in Virginia Woolf's day when she made her historic trip to the British Museum and found no useful information under “women,” nothing, at least, to help her explain the relationship between women and fiction. And even the most careful examination of the library will reveal few subject headings of the sort to which conduct books for women might belong. Still fewer headings link women and the cultural materials over which they hold sway with the events of traditional histories. Indeed, it is often difficult to locate conduct books for women in a library's catalogue unless they happen to be written by someone—Lord Halifax or Mary Wollstonecraft, for example—known for writing in a more prestigious mode. By way of contrast to the fate of conduct books for women, Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Guazzo's Civil Conversations, as well as advice in the form of “letters to a son” from Sir Henry Sidney to Lord Chesterfield have been regularly mined for historical insights. The conclusion to be drawn from this discrepancy is a rather obvious one. History has felt obliged to account for the qualities that represent the male of the dominant class as a desirable person to be, for such information seems to contribute directly to our understanding of political life—real and imagined—from the Middle Ages to the present day.

To generalize, then, about the way information is used if it concerns women and sexuality rather than men and political life, we have to say that information about women, as Woolf discovered decades ago, is still used primarily to essentialize women, to fix their natures, and in this way to remove them from the theater of political events that nature has apparently designated for men. But even though this writing has not been considered as history, an unbroken tradition of such instruction books for women extends from the Middle Ages to the present day. At one time, this writing took the form of devotional manuals for the wives and daughters of the aristocracy as well as courtesy books for would-be court ladies. To these, a later period added domestic economies for women who maintained the household through their own labor, as well as pamphlets on marriage and domestic life that represented a dissenting view. These coexisted with books that set the standards for polite demeanor to which the prosperous merchant's wife or the daughter of a gentry family was supposed to aspire. And still later authors took up the matter of the manners and morals of the woman who ensured her husband an orderly home and an emotionally gratifying family life. That literary scholars and historians have seldom turned to this kind of writing for historical insight seems all the more astonishing when one considers that during the eighteenth century the publication of conduct books for women actually surpassed in quantity and variety those directed at men. And to this day female conduct books in their many guises flood a highly competitive marketplace where they provide a major source of revenue for the publishing industry. We ourselves have seen this writing appear in a variety of formats from beauty guides and exercise booklets to etiquette manuals and glamor books.

If information that sought to refine a woman's judgment, taste, demeanor, speech, and dress once existed in such abundance that it eventually changed the way literate people understood themselves in relation to others, representations of women have no less power today. With the development of the mass media such representations saturate the culture as never before. Not only does the billboard blond and television mini-series heroine reach out to virtually every social group including even the very rich and the very poor, but also the forms of desire authorized by these objects of desire allow little room for variation according to the ethnicity, region, class, or even nationality of individual consumers. Rather than formulating and disseminating an emergent ideology, the gendered world of information we inhabit today reproduces and maintains the dominant view.

Through all their historical permutations, books telling women how to become desirable have held to the single objective of specifying what a woman should desire to be if she wishes to attract a socially approved male and keep him happy. Conduct books for women may seem to strive simply for a more desirable woman. But in determining what kind of woman a woman should desire to be, these books also determine what kind of woman men should find desirable. Thus the genre implies two distinct aspects of desire, a desired object, and a subject who desires that object. While this form, like the two sexes themselves, appears constant through time, the content fillings—or what qualities make the female desirable, and what kind of male is supposed to desire her in this way—change along with those other cultural practices which are most important to maintaining political order. In tracing the history of desire, we will therefore be tracing a political process marked by moments where the object and subject of desire undergo transformation. We will be telling the story of the language of kinship relations and its appropriation by aspiring classes, the story, in other words, of the hegemony that brought the middle classes into power and made the world we inhabit today.

Early modern culture determined kinship relations largely by birth and title. The rules of kinship established who was and who was not included in the empowered group. Rules governing other sexual relations existed among professional people, merchants, and trades-people, as well as the laboring classes. But even those who opposed political authority that was based on genealogy and distributed according to blood understood they had to acquire power through access to the nobility or imitation of it. A considerable body of medieval texts including Arthurian romances, dream visions, and other kinds of extended fictional narratives represented the aristocratic ideal of sexual conduct. These stories identified noble birth as the natural basis for kinship relations. The source of desirability resided in the woman's noble heritage, just as the compulsion to desire and the capacity to woo such a woman sprang from the aristocratic blood of the male. These stories mystified the element of blood by representing it as the ultimate source of sexual desire. But, as Kathleen Ashley argues, the emergence of an alternative way of figuring sexual desire can be discerned in the conduct books of the same period. During the high Middle Ages, the books that aimed at producing desirable women reiterated the common view that “good wymmen” are those who seek spiritual salvation by living the contemplative life. This principle was supposed to render a woman piteous, meek, and sweet tempered and, on this basis, desirable as a wife. During the late Middle Ages, however, one can see the bourgeoisie using the female to understand their interests as distinct from and even in opposition to those of the aristocracy. Thus, as Ashley demonstrates, female conduct books that were aimed at the non-aristocratic reader revised the values that patristic commentary formerly attributed to Mary Magdalene and Martha. Mary's contemplative posture in relation to Christ was no longer preferred to Martha's more active show of hospitality. Ashley shows how the inclusion of material from these conduct books eventually transformed episodes in the religious drama from a “mirror of Salvation” for the community into a secular form that established middle-class social models for the women in the audience. From this, she concludes that conduct books for women “seem to characterize the ideology of the newly powerful bourgeoisie in the late medieval and early Renaissance period.”

It is reasonable to assume that an aristocratic model of kinship relations dominated the early modern period stretching between medieval romance and the appearance of fiction in which the contours of modern love can be discerned. But we must quickly note some basic changes in the Renaissance model from the one that Ashley describes. First of all, during the reign of Elizabeth I, the majority of English writers of poetry, prose fiction, and drama came from the middle ranks. The authors of Renaissance love lyrics might be as close to the aristocracy as Philip Sidney or as far from that élite social group as Christopher Marlowe, but despite the social barriers removing them from the community of illustrious blood, the authors of Petrarchan verse, sonnet sequences, narrative poems on topics of love, and prose romances celebrated the same object of desire. To a man, they found the aristocratic woman more valuable precisely because she was unavailable to men of their lower rank. This literature of love created a double bind where the poet situated himself, as desiring subject, in an alienated relationship to the object that his poetry defined as supremely desirable. While literary criticism has long been preoccupied with this form of male desire, only recently have critics and scholars begun to consider how female desire was understood in the Renaissance.

In her study of Renaissance conduct books for women, Ann R. Jones shows how the prevailing model of sexual desire placed the court lady in a double bind of a somewhat different nature. Jones draws her examples from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian manuals, but the situation she describes holds true for other parts of Europe as well, including England. On the one hand, Jones explains, court ladies were expected to be visible, affable, endearing to men of their rank or higher, and, on the other hand, the desirable woman had to be modest in demeanor and emotionally reticent. It is not difficult to see how this double bind arose from and maintained political relations where power was concentrated in a secular oligarchy whose membership was largely determined by birth. As bearer of the blood, a female member of such an élite group was regarded as a living icon; her lavish dress and skillful speech was supposed to display her father's wealth and title. Her function, in Jones's words, was “to be a member of the chorus prompting men to bravery in tournaments and eloquence in conversation.” But while as an object she was supposed to make aristocratic power seem consumately desirable, it was also necessary that an aristocratic woman appear chaste. Because she quite literally embodied the power of blood, this woman had to behave in a way that kept the community of blood closed, pure, and superior. The ritual punishment of desirous aristocratic women upon the Jacobean stage implies a situation where the ideal woman exerted extraordinary power as the object of desire, especially over men of aspiring social groups. But because the mere presence of female desire—as in Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, or Cleopatra—inevitably disrupted the power that flowed through her to ensure the continuity from one generation of the nobility to the next, the ideal woman had to be totally devoid of sexual desire herself.

Contemporaneous with such female courtesy literature in England were instruction books that clearly spoke from a minority position by addressing a readership we might now loosely term as Puritan.² Their definition of the female role as object and subject of desire advanced the belief that political power should be based on moral superiority. At issue in the way that sexual relations were represented, according to Jacques Donzelot, “was the transition from a government of families to a government through the family.”³ Sexual relations so often provided the terms of argument during the early modern period that no representation of the household could be considered politically neutral. To contest the notion of a state that depended upon inherited power, Puritan treatises on marriage and household governance represented the family as a self-enclosed social unit in whose affairs the state could not intervene. Against genealogy the treatises posited domesticity. But in claiming sovereignty for the father over his home, it can be argued, they were not really proposing a new form of political organization. According to Kathleen M. Davis, the Puritan doctrine of equality insisted only upon the difference of sexual roles in which the female was certainly subordinate to the male, and not upon the equality of the woman in kind. “The result of this partnership,” Davis explains, “was a definition of mutual and complementary duties and characteristics.” Gender was clearly understood in oppositional terms that resemble a more modern world organized around gender distinctions. This can be seen in a chart compiled by John Dod and Robert Cleaver for their widely read Puritan manual on household government:⁴

Husband
Get goods
Travel, seek a living
Get money and provisions
Deal with many men
Be “entertaining”
Be skillful in talk
Be a giver
Apparel yourself as you may
Dispatch all things out of outdoors
Wife
Gather them together and save them
Keep the house
Do not vainly spend it
Talk with few
Be solitary and withdrawn
Boast of silence
Be a saver
Apparel yourself as it becomes you
Oversee and give order within

According to handbooks such as these, the household consisted of a male and a female who were structurally identical in that they were represented as active and passive versions of the same attributes. In such a configuration, the female did not represent a different way of organizing social reality. By representing the family in terms of an opposition of complementary genders, Puritan tracts enclosed the domestic unit. It was clear that these authors wanted to cut it off from the genealogical tree of state and, as such, use it to represent an independent and self-generated source of power, but their moment in history had not arrived. The hegemonic potential of the model had yet to be realized at that point in time.

Unlike Puritan authors, middle-class reformers of nineteenth-century England could look back on a substantial body of writing that authorized such a political alternative. This writing produced a new kind of woman, a domestic woman, and established her as the most desirable woman to marry. It was she, and not her aristocratic counterpart, who ensured a man the sanctity and gratification of private life. Before the middle-class household could provide a common ideal for individuals from competing interest groups, Nancy Armstrong argues, the household must have been understood as a place that was governed by an essentially female form of power, power different from that of the male and yet a positive force in its own right. Although certainly subject to political force, the domestic woman exercised a form of power that appeared to have no political force at all, because that power seemed passive. It appeared to originate in the desiring subject, or male, rather than in the female object of desire. This power was the power of domestic surveillance. The husband who met the standard listed above passed into oblivion well before the aristocratic male ceased to dominate British political consciousness, but the domestic woman enjoyed an entirely different fate. In the centuries intervening between the Puritan revolution and the early nineteenth century, she was inscribed with values that addressed a whole range of competing interest groups, and through her these groups gained authority over domestic relations and personal life. In this way, furthermore, various interest groups aligned themselves against the old aristocracy and established the need for the kind of surveillance upon which modern institutions are based.

Indeed, the last two decades of the seventeenth century saw an explosion of writing that proposed to educate the daughters of numerous aspiring social groups.⁵ These modern conduct books proffer an educational program on grounds that it will make these women desirable to men of a superior quality, in fact more desirable than women who have only their own rank and fortune to recommend them. With remarkable predictability, these books propose a curriculum they claim is capable of producing a woman whose value resides chiefly in her femaleness rather than in traditional signs of status, a woman possessing psychological depth rather than a physically attractive surface, one who, in other words, excels in the qualities that differentiate her from the male rather than in terms of her father's wealth and title. As femaleness was successfully redefined in these terms, the woman exalted by an aristocratic tradition of letters ceased to appear so desirable. In becoming the other side of a new sexual coin, the aristocratic woman in turn represented surface instead of depth, embodied material rather than moral values, and displayed idle sensuality where there should be constant vigilance and tireless concern for the well-being of others. The conduct-book doctrine of gender implied that such a woman was not truly female.

We are claiming, in effect, that a major historical change occurred in the early eighteenth century: the production of a new object of desire that—for the first time in history—represented the interests of those in the middle ranks of society. Defoe's conduct books come out of a tradition that harks back to Puritan marriage manuals but goes one better than them. Carol Houlihan Flynn explains how this literature translates the terms of a dissenting tradition into those of a domestic orthodoxy as it endorses, for example, “voluntary surrender to God! and the godly husband!” Her discussion of Defoe's Family Instructor argues that “what is at issue” in these books “is who has the power to be the instructor.” While it clearly gives all authority to the male, Defoe's non-fiction account of sexual relations hovers between an earlier model that authorized the female's subjugation by physical force and a more recognizably modern one in which the female desires her own subordination, or “voluntary compliance.” This, Flynn argues, is not the position Defoe takes in his own fiction which looks at life through the eyes of a female persona. In Moll Flanders and Roxana marriage is represented in terms that openly contest the idealized model of kinship identified with the ruling class. These heroines define themselves within a predacious economy where marriage offers their only means of survival. They prove that women cannot afford to distinguish money from love and are therefore forced to marry on terms that—according to the sentimental tradition—resemble prostitution. From this, we may draw a conclusion of no small importance in the history of desire. Defoe acknowledges that the virtuous domestic woman may indeed be the object of male desire, but when it comes to representing the woman as a desiring subject, Defoe offers a view from the bottom that is highly critical, not only of the reigning marriage practices, but also of the sentimental challenge to them. His women can desire a man for any number of reasons, but when she has to choose between money and love, money is better than sentiment alone.

That Defoe could express his political viewpoint through marriage manuals and fictional autobiographies of women testifies, among other things, to the unprecedented popularity that such literature was acquiring at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Defoe's use of these genres also suggests that its popularity had something to do with its capacity to express a dissenting viewpoint that was on the rise. Armstrong observes that around the turn of the century the proportion of conduct books written for women shifted abruptly in relation to the number of those devoted to men.⁶ And as books for, about, and often by women came to dominate the field, it was also true that those books upholding the aristocratic ideal of behavior suddenly fell off in popularity. It is Armstrong's claim that the British Enlightenment gave rise to a new woman, a creature of feelings that naturally inclined to household management and caring for the sick, needy, and young. As the guardian and guarantor of private life, she was also the first example of modern psychology. She rose with remarkable speed to cultural prominence over her more-or-less noble counterparts and in the process transformed the whole idea of what it meant to be noble. Together with conduct books and other literature that claimed to be directed at women readers, novels helped to redefine what men were supposed to desire in women and what women, in turn, were supposed to desire to be. Most of the eighteenth-century novels that interest us today took part in this ideological struggle which, in less than a century, allowed an emergent social group to seize hold of the language of courtship and kinship and to make it articulate an alternative form of power. The new domestic ideal not only provided a basis on which numerous competing social groups could each identify their interests but also provided a form of power exercised through constant supervision and the regulation of desire, thus preparing the cultural ground in which capitalism could rapidly flourish. Indeed, the conduct books for women, though written by people of differing regions, sects, factions, and genders, rather singlemindedly represented the social world as one divided into public and private, economic and domestic, labor and leisure according to a principle of gender that placed the household and sexual relations under female authority. “By sexing the social world,” according to Armstrong, “this body of writing produced a single idea of the household. And this ideal in turn helped to generate the belief that there was such a thing as the middle class well before one existed in any other form.” By the end of the eighteenth century, people thought of society in terms of a class sexuality, for in contrast with both the landed aristocracy with its libertine appetites and the promiscuous mob was the sanctuary of middle-class love.

In “Wild nights: pleasure/sexuality/feminism,” Cora Kaplan investigates the complicated configuration of gender and class that characterized English thinking in the wake of the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women identifies the condition of women with the corruption of the ancien régime. Daughters were traded like objects in the marketplace among fathers and husbands without any concern for the desires of the individual woman involved or any need to educate her to make choices she was prepared to live with. To represent the aristocratic woman as degraded because she was the currency of an exchange among men, Wollstonecraft borrowed the rhetoric of earlier conduct books and fiction that challenged aristocratic sexuality. Unlike most authors who adopted such a rhetoric, however, Wollstonecraft did not criticize aristocratic sexuality in order to exalt the domestic woman. To the contrary, she attacked the dominant kinship practices in order to argue that the woman's condition had worsened with the division of labor into gendered spheres that characterized the emergent middle-class view. She saw women not as a revolutionary group but as one that must be completely re-educated. Wollstonecraft argues, in Kaplan's words, that “before the middle-class woman can join the middle-class man in advocating and advancing human progress she must be persuaded to become more masculine and respectable,” by giving up her role both as “insignificant objects of desire” and as desiring subject. To position this viewpoint within the political debate of the time, Kaplan sees Wollstonecraft's feminist argument in opposition with the fundamental tenet of Rousseau's Émile that men and women should receive different educations because of innate differences of mind. Even as she accepted Rousseau's political agenda, Wollstonecraft opposed his notion of gender, arguing that female desire becomes more offensive when women are educated to become objects of male desire. To resist this form of self-definition, however, a woman must also forsake her role as desiring subject. Thus Wollstonecraft adopts the rhetoric of puritanical sexuality—a strategy the middle-classes used effectively to undermine the authority of the old aristocracy—to call upon women to reform themselves. They were to make themselves as knowledgeable and independent as men by renouncing their sexual pleasure, a price men did not have to pay.

Thomas M. Kavanagh is particularly concerned with how the “polarization of gender” affects both literature and our reading of it. The opposition structuring the new sexuality was the same in Laclos's France as it was in Wollstonecraft's England: if women wanted to have power as such, unlike men they had to renounce desire. Such is the distinction between the sexes in Les Liaisons dangereuses. But, cautions Kavanagh, Laclos's women cannot be understood as representations of our own notion of male and female. In order to locate the novel in history, Kavanagh looks to the conduct book in which Laclos discusses sexuality in relation to the politics of his times. Laclos uses this non-fictional mode to explain how both sexes are empowered even though each has very different powers; the male dominates the female in terms of physical strength, but the female excels in powers of imagination that enable her to manipulate male desire. On this basis, Kavanagh argues that the character of Merteuil is not meant to be unwomanly, but that of a woman who “consciously and consequently acts as the most womanly woman throughout this novel.” Her defeat cannot represent the triumph of gender distinctions, then, but a far more complex and interesting historical process where a grander notion of gender was displaced by another, more limited kind. In admiring the female's imaginative powers and refusing to endorse her renunciation of desire, then, Laclos disputes a view such as Wollstonecraft's that identifies power with rational intelligence that men can acquire simply because they have been born men. Nevertheless, Laclos authorizes the very notion of sexuality he represents as constraining. For in contrast with Wollstonecraft, he assumes that female irrationality, for all its admirable powers, is rooted in her essential nature as the object of male desire rather than in a culture that teaches her to desire a subservient role.

Written with full awareness of the rhetoric of reform and how it worked through representations of gender, such endorsements of female sensuality invariably turned against themselves, as indeed Laclos's fiction did, to criticize the practices of a libertine culture. Sometime around the end of the eighteenth century, however, one may observe the novel losing interest in its critique of the dominant classes and taking up a rather different project. In the hands of Burney and Austen, fiction could still be said to oppose the domestic woman to women of title and wealth, but a woman's behavior was even more likely to be impugned if that behavior seemed motivated by desires which could also be attributed to the daughters of merchants and, later, to working-class girls. It is finally for their mercenary lust that the Bingley sisters strike us as less than desirable in Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and the same point is still more forcefully made in Jane Eyre by the acquisitive urge that attracts Blanche Ingram to Rochester and repels him from her. With the novels of Burney and Austen, furthermore, the conduct-book ideal of womanhood defined an ideal against which novelistic representations of women were held up as being more true to life. On the premise that no one really measured up to this ideal, Victorian fiction took up the task of retailoring the representation of women to indicate that each individual had slightly different desires; no two women could be right for the same man, nor any two men for the same woman. In Dickens, then, as in the Victorian love lyric, one finds the ideal marriage is not represented as being anything other than a fiction. With remarkable regularity, the best possible relationships to be achieved in this fiction turn out to be inferior substitutes for an original mother or father. As if to say that an idealized fiction of love had an unhealthy grip on human desire, furthermore, Thackeray treats Amelia Sedley harshly for conforming to the feminine ideal and punishes her husband Dobbin as well for confusing love with conformity. Not only novels by Dickens and Thackeray but all Victorian fiction testified in one way or another to the reality of a power that eighteenth-century conduct books could only imagine.

From the work of Rachel Bowlby, it appears that during the nineteenth century other forms of writing took over where the conduct book left off. If the eighteenth-century conduct book consistently promised to produce a woman who, in contrast with her aristocratic counterpart, possessed the virtues of frugality and self-restraint, the nineteenth century was all the more obsessed with regulating household consumption by regulating the female subject. A woman's taste was more important than ever before. According to Bowlby's study of the diaries for the Bon Marché, the authors of such guides to consumerism represented the store “not as a factory, but as a large, well-ordered domestic establishment. In this way, the diary brings the store closer to home.” By the mid-nineteenth century, this suggests, middle-class power had become so well entrenched in England and France, and that power so clearly identified with the domestic woman and the private domain she was supposed to oversee, that books describing the character formation and household duties of this woman were no longer necessary. We might say that fiction had passed into social and economic fact. To be sure, some books directed the doctrine of domesticity toward the lower classes, promising social success as the reward for a feminine mode of behavior, and some books tried to revise the doctrine by urging women to acquire forms of knowledge that would make them economically independent. But these did not characterize the mainstream of books for women during the second half of the nineteenth century.

We should pause at this point and take note of the contrast between two important historical transformations in the conduct-book form. We can identify the beginning of the British Enlightenment with the moment when books that aimed at producing the domestic woman outstripped courtesy literature that presented forms of aristocratic behavior as the ideal to which both men and women should aspire. The triumph of the modern middle classes took place at least in part through the triumph of the female conduct book over courtesy literature. For this change in the representation of desire produced a culture divided into gendered spheres, the primary difference between “masculine” and “feminine” then creating the difference between public and private, work and leisure, economic and domestic, political and aesthetic. All the important themes subtending capitalism and enabling such economic practices to make sense in turn rested upon the assumption that such differences are as natural as gender itself. Indeed, we still understand ourselves and others within the same gendered universe of words and things. But this is not to deny there have been significant changes within the moment initiated and sustained by the production of a gendered universe. With the entrenchment of the new middle classes, the representation of gender and the regulation of desire became more important than ever before. In fact, it can be argued that the regulation of desire through representations of gender became the most efficacious form of social control, more so than the police, the military, the law courts, or even the schoolroom.⁷ Beginning at birth and taking hold of the individual mind in the earliest years of childhood, psychoanalytic theory insists, each individual learns to think of himself or herself as first and foremost a boy or a girl and destined by natural desire to reproduce in some form the idealized social unit of mother, father, brother, and sister. At some point during the nineteenth century, literate people began to regard this kinship system as normal, natural, and good. Though a specifically modern form of family peculiar to capitalist nations, the family structured on gender differences appears to serve no particular interest groups and to have no particular political objectives. Thus it seemed only right to measure any and all other sexual practices against this model of kinship relations as if against a universal standard.

By the mid-nineteenth century authors of advice for women accordingly found it unnecessary to articulate the whole body of the woman, of the knowledge she must possess as a woman, or of the household that she was supposed to supervise. A fragment of these—her eyes, table manners, or china—could represent the whole. In Bowlby's analysis, furthermore, such fragmentation characterized female desire as well as her identity as the object of male desire. A woman's magazine La Dernière Mode illustrates how parts of the body, like objects that make up the household, were detached from the whole and then fetishized as they came to represent an idealized version of the whole. This mode of representation—or fashion system, as Barthes called it—not only objectifies the woman as a part object, but also “gives the woman her image in the mirror.” The woman desires to be the exalted object, which she is not by birth or even by education, but which she knows the male desires her to be. Thus we might say that the disjunction between surface and depth operated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a relation of signifier and signified. The woman's desirability, or value as an object of desire, had to be sought beneath the surface of her body that was the emblem of her family's wealth and station. Her value as a female was supposed to derive from certain qualities of mind, or nature as a desiring subject.

According to the MacCannells, what they call “the beauty system” continued the Enlightenment project by representing the female as an object that required improvement. Only we find that it is in terms of the body that this improvement is measured. We might mark this change in the history of desire with the appearance of hysteria in all its manifestations. A glance through the early case studies of Freud and Breuer or through Frued's Dora will reveal how hysteria inscribed a purely psychological conflict within the woman upon the surface of her body. In the early case histories, hysteria becomes nothing else but the woman's desire for self-regulation, paradoxically, gone out of control. When up against resistance on the part of desire, the desire for self-control could take the form of a speech impediment which prevented her from expressing desire, of a limp which confined her to the home, of genital disorders that limited sexual activity, or of eating problems which transferred the whole principle of household regulation onto the regulation of the woman's body in a way that might even prove life threatening. But the beauty system, unlike hysteria, inscribes a socially approved form of desire upon the female body: the desire to be what the male desires her to be. A girl, according to the MacCannells,

is drawn into the beauty system by the force of her entire culture, by the design of the overall relationship between the sexes. When she looks into the mirror and sees ugliness reflected back upon herself, what she is actually experiencing is the value that her society has placed upon her category, that she has no value.

Glamour books, etiquette guides, and manuals for physical fitness divide the female body into zones and “through display or artifice bring it back to nature.” No less so than hysteria, then, the beauty system displaces the depths onto the surface. Self-enhancing makeup, fashionable dress, social adeptness, and congeniality indicate not only a woman's capacity for self-regulation and her knowledge of how to go about achieving self-regulation, but also her desire to oberve the procedures that ensure desirability. To the degree that she achieves one of the reigning stereotypes of beauty, the gap between self and stereotype—or, in other words, the difference between the female as subject and object—disappears, and the stereotype appears to be nature itself. The “natural woman” is of course the most difficult stereotype of all to achieve; it is as remote from the female as it is from the male and, like the aristocratic woman of an earlier time, the more desirable to both sexes for appearing so.

To demonstrate that the relationship between class and gender remains a problematic one to this day, Kaplan contrasts the class-bound feminism of Wollstonecraft with that of Adrienne Rich, who assumes the position of a radical feminist in contemporary letters. Kaplan writes,

While Wollstonecraft acknowledged that a depraved sexual pleasure for both men and women was the effect of unequal power relations between them, radical feminism underlines the unpleasure of these relations for women. Where women have no choice over the aim and object of their sexuality, heterosexuality, in the words of Adrienne Rich, is “compulsory”—an institution more comprehensive and sinister than the different relations and practices it constructs. Worse, compulsory heterosexuality is part of a chain of gender specific tortures, both medical and conjugal: hysterectomy, cliterodectomy, battering, rape, and imprisonment are all elaborations of the sadistic act of penetration itself, penetration the socially valorised symbol of violence against women.

In constructing female sexuality as naturally different from that of the male, however, Rich “has,” in Kaplan's opinion, “shifted the terms of the nature/culture debate without really shifting the paradigm around women and sexuality.” The fantasy that one can create another, non-competitive social reality on the basis of gender was a contradiction in Wollstonecraft's day and remains so today. As Kaplan's comparative study clearly demonstrates, “the dream of an autonomous sexuality, not constructed through the desire of the other, male or female, is a transcendental fantasy of bourgeois individualism.”

However various with respect to literary period, language area, and critical procedures, the essays in this collection together raise certain issues for literary criticism. All of the authors believe there is a history of sexuality, and all use female conduct books to document that history. But where does that history lie? How is it to be discovered? What bearing does that history have upon literature and vice versa? The approaches to these questions are no less various, it appears, than the authors' understanding of culture itself. Several essays in this collection discover a relationship between representations of women in the literature of conduct and the use of such representations in literature. The essays by Flynn and Jones understand this relationship as one of difference, in which conduct books present the more conservative and literature, the more liberal attitude towards women. The literary viewpoint, whether authored by male or female, represents a minority viewpoint. Thus female poets of Renaissance France express dissatisfaction with a discourse that defines women as objects of desire, but which finds them undesirable when they display desires of their own. And Defoe's radical deidealization of legitimate monogamy suggests that, with the possible exception of the wealthiest among them, women had to exchange their own bodies if they wanted to survive within the present economic situation. Despite the gap of a century or more between the courtly love poetry Jones discusses and the marriage manuals upon which Flynn bases her analysis of women in Defoe's fiction, the viewpoint of women in each case offers a means of expressing an alternative source of economic power from that underwriting the dominant view. But that the two essays agree in all these important respects raises a question, one that is brought to the forefront by the form of intertextuality that binds this collection of essays together. What difference does the gender of an author make? Must we identify the author with the desiring subject? If so, then why does Defoe find it advantageous to speak as a woman when launching his critique of economic conditions? Can we regard the female as a form of resistance when she is writing in the mode of the dominant class? These are some of the questions that arise from the essays by Jones and Flynn. To answer them requires one to historicize the very terms male and female.

This is the objective of Ashley and Kavanagh, both of whom use female conduct books to establish a set of norms for representing sexual behavior different from our own. Kavanagh finds Laclos's construction of such norms to be consistent with representations found in eighteenth-century French literature. Observing how Laclos represented women in an unfinished conduct book, Kavanagh takes issue with those who read Merteuil as if she were living in the twentieth century. Ashley demonstrates that late medieval conduct books revise an earlier model of female behavior for a merchant class ready to insist upon their own sexual norms. For these authors, as for Jones and Flynn, changes in the representation of women accompany more extensive historical changes and must be understood in relation to those changes. It is clear, for example, that with the period discussed by Flynn and Kavanagh, namely the Enlightenment in France and England, women have ceased to be defined primarily as iconic embodiments of wealth and title. Rather, the woman as object of desire has been linked in a meaningful way to the woman as desiring subject. And as Cora Kaplan demonstrates in her comparative study of Mary Wollstonecraft and Adrienne Rich, once this link has been forced, there can be no getting around it: any representation of sexual behavior invariably inscribes itself within the discourse of bourgeois individualism.

The relationship between class and gender raises a second order of problem for literary criticism. Once we become conscious of the historical dimension of sexuality, we may find ourselves able to document change in the distribution of features of gender and values attached to each. Yet there remains the question of causality. It becomes imperative to ask not only why do these particular changes occur, but also where and how. Ashley, Jones, Kaplan, Armstrong, and Bowlby all assume a materialist position in relation to their data, contending that the history of sexuality must be seen in relationship to economic struggles, that the struggle to represent ideal female behavior indeed accompanied the struggle of an emergent middle class to gain economic power.

In our opinion, however, the question of precisely how to configure sex and class remains a tricky one. It is possible, like Ashley, Jones, and Flynn—whose examples date from the Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century—to read sex allegorically in relation to political conflict, the female of course representing the subordinate social group. But when we encounter the materials serving as data for Kaplan, Armstrong, Bowlby, and the MacCannells, it is clear we are entering new historical territory where our designated materials will not submit to the same procedures that seem to provide a reasonable means of historicizing earlier literature. The knot can be untangled from two directions. First, we can abandon reflection theory, or the idea that literary history pursues a different but parallel course in relation to the other symbolic practices that compose history per se. Secondly, if we do consider literature—along with other kinds of writing—as one among many practices that appear to undergo change along with changes in political relationships, we may discover that writing does not necessarily reflect a change that has already occurred elsewhere in the culture. Indeed, following Foucault, we would argue that there have been times when writing created the semiotic conditions that allowed radical changes in economic and political relations to occur. The essays dealing with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment culture indicate this is really what happened. They suggest that the redefinition of the female was a crucial feature of the hegemomy that brought the middle classes into power. These essays suggest further that with the emergence of the new middle classes, power itself changed; the dissemination of certain forms of literacy—or, in other words, hegemony itself—took precedence over the more commonly recognized institutions of state—the police, the courts, and the military, for example—in maintaining middle-class power. This recognition is probably the single most important consequence of reading literature in relation to the literature of conduct for women.

In 1928 Virginia Woolf suggested that an event of major historical proportions occurred when middle-class women began to write. Supporting this claim, as Woolf herself evidently knew, required nothing short of rewriting history. “Thus towards the end of the eighteenth century,” in her words, “a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.”⁸ Despite recent interest in the history of representation qua representation, relatively few literary scholars and critics have explored the role of representation in history. While most of us pay lip-service to the power of literacy, we have not considered in a detailed and systematic way whether literature has played any part in political history. Indeed, it is the tendency of the disciplines in the United States and Britain to detach the writing we teach as literature from the other symbolic practices that compose history per se. Woolf's statement explains how this tendency has direct bearing on women. If writing is not figured into political history, then political power will continue to appear as if it (deceptively) resides exclusively in institutions that are largely governed by men, and the role played by women at various stages in the middle-class hegemony will remain unexamined for the political force that it was and still is.

Our decision, in editing this collection, to view women's writing as such a political force must in turn have obvious and direct bearing on our notions of what literature is and how we should approach it. It is unquestionably the tendency of the literary institution in this country to collaborate with history in relegating the writing known as literature to the status of a secondary modeling system, which is subordinate to one degree or another to the data properly composing history. It is worth nothing that the moment when middle-class women began to write marked the moment when the writing of political economy took on unprecedented explanatory power. Writing itself appeared to lose political significance along with courtship procedures, marriage practices, and the organization of the household. And this occurred at the very time when these areas of culture assumed unprecedented power—or so the collective effort of this volume suggests.

While compiling this collection, we were reminded of the tendency of traditional histories to identify the important historical data as the products of men. We were attending a conference devoted to the Spanish Golden Age when a problem emerged very much like the problem that confronts many of us who deal with women's writing. A historian had been invited to respond to a paper concerned with the political viewpoint of artisan poets in sixteenth-century Mexico. He appeared perplexed, unsure of what he was supposed to do with this information, and skeptical of how the effects of this kind of literacy might be considered since it yielded little in terms of what this historian considered to be “evidence.” He could only allow those truths to be declared truth which were based, in his words, “on counting cattle and bags of grain.” It is difficult to believe this narrow notion of history could claim much respect. Yet on grounds that only a certain kind of information could be considered historical data, he sought to trivialize whatever such poetry had to say about the circumstances out of which it was produced. Not only did the historian understand human culture in terms of an unexamined emphasis on productive labor, but also he understood work only in terms of very specific products. Moreover, his representation did not acknowledge its basis in representation. The historian in question never counted a single head of cattle or bag of grain. He simply privileged account books over all other of modes of representation.

Indeed, so fixed is the idea that political meaning derives from a source outside of writing that all manner of printed material occupies no place within the academic disciplines. The argument for this collection relies in particular on women's conduct books, but there are more, many more, kinds of writing to be read and analyzed, all of which provide the material record of everyday life as it was supposed to be lived. And much of the excluded material was produced by, for, and about women. Like the conduct books for women, this material will flesh out the process which brought modern woman into being. It will explain how she rose with such incredible speed to cultural prominence. It will show that she was uniquely equipped to set in motion a process that would compel future generations to reproduce an idealized body and household compulsively, as if by natural desire. In this way, we may discover how the domestic woman—who may, for all we know, have existed in representation for as long as a century before she stepped forth from the pages of books to oversee middle-class parlors—became a function of each “normal” individual's psychic life. By occupying this place in the mind, this form of desire made it possible for masses of diverse individuals to coexist within modern culture.

To prove such an hypothesis to the satisfaction of those who believe history resides in an account of cattle and grain will take many years and many more researchers. Much of the material which will make up a more adequate account of the rise of the middle classes has as yet found no place within the disciplines. It has long been kept out of sight within the unclassified space of popular culture. Conduct books for women must be viewed as just one among many forgotten kinds of information which are similarly woven into the fabric of literature. In being the sort of data that conventional histories cannot account for, most of this material has the status of junk. But for the very reason it does resemble the stuff of an attic, such material can suddenly acquire enormous value as it finds a place for itself among the objects of knowledge. It is this kind of residual cultural information that can supplement the structures determining reality at a given moment in time, and do so in a way that requires some major revision of the conceptual framework within which those structures dominate.

Notes

1. This point has been discussed more fully by N. Armstrong in her (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, New York, Oxford University Press. See also M. Godelier (1982) “The ideal in the real,” in R. Samuel and G. Steadman Jones (eds) Culture, Ideology, and Politics, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 12-38.

2. For a more complete discussion of the relationship between Jacobean literature and the debate between royalists and Puritans over the nature of the family, see L. Tennenhouse (1986) Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres, New York and London, Methuen.

3. J. Donzelot (1972) The Policing of Families, trans. R. Hurley, New York, Pantheon, 92.

4. K. M. Davis (1977) “The sacred condition of equality—how original were puritan doctrines of marriage?,” Social History, 5, 570. Davis quotes the list of duties from J. Dod and R. Cleaver (1614) A Godly Forme of Householde Gouernment, London.

5. P. Crawford has documented the trend in such publications from the beginning to the end of the seventeenth century in her (1985) “Women's published writings 1600-1700,” in M. Prior (ed.) Women in Society, London, Methuen, 211-81; see especially Appendix 2, 265-71.

6. See M. Curtin (1985) “A question of manners: status and gender in etiquette and courtesy,” Journal of Modern History, 57, 407 and n. 26.

7. M. Foucault is responsible for this and many of our other insights. See especially his (1978) The History of Sexuality, vol. I, trans. R. Hurley, New York, Random House.

8. V. Woolf (1928) A Room of One's Own, New York, Harcourt, Brace, & World, 69.