[In the excerpt below, Poovey describes how female identity was constructed in eighteenth-century England. She also shows how conduct books reinforced this identity and the definition of women's role in society. The editors have included only those footnotes that pertain to the excerpted portion of the text.]

The definition of female nature that emerged by the end of the eighteenth century both reinforced and formalized the complex social role that actual women played during this period. But because bourgeois society simultaneously depended on and perpetuated a paradoxical formulation of female sexuality, the late eighteenth-century equation of “female” and “feminine” is characterized at every level by paradoxes and contradictions. The first of many such complexities is evident in the fact that, even though late eighteenth-century moralists described femininity as innate, they also insisted that feminine virtues needed constant cultivation. During the eighteenth century, in fact, an entire body of literature emerged that was devoted exclusively to this cultivation. Instructions about proper conduct appeared in the numerous periodicals addressed specifically to women,¹ in more general essay-periodicals like the Spectator, and in ladies' conduct books. This last genre, which consisted of works composed by both men and women, was directed primarily to the middle classes and was intended to educate young girls (and their mothers) in the behavior considered “proper,” then “natural,” for a “lady.” Conduct material of all kinds increased in volume and popularity after the 1740s, in keeping with the increased emphasis on domestic education and the growing number of middle-class women readers.

Letters from readers, published in these periodicals, suggest (since their authenticity cannot be guaranteed) that women did look to this material as a guide to their own conduct. These readers frequently provided examples from their own lives to prove the justice of a moral precept (often, interestingly enough, by their having violated it), and sometimes they even asked that a principle be made more strict so as to be more definitive. This conduct material is instructive, not only because it probably served a prescriptive function for mothers and daughters, but also because, as products of the everyday discourse of eighteenth-century propriety, the essays are themselves expressions of the implicit values of their culture. Indeed, in many respects this conduct material provides the best access both to the way in which this culture defined female nature and to the ways in which a woman of this period would have experienced the social and psychological dimensions of ideology. For in reproducing the ideological configuration that protected bourgeois society, both the hierarchy of values and the rhetorical strategies contained in these works provided real women with the terms by which they conceptualized and interpreted their own behavior and desires.

If we compare, for example, equivalent issues from two companion periodicals, some of the culture's unspoken attitudes toward women immediately emerge.² In January, 1793, both the Lady's Magazine, which dominated its market from 1770 to 1830, and the Gentleman's Magazine, the most popular monthly periodical of the last half of the century, opened the new year with a statement of purpose and a response to the trial and death of France's Louis XVI. The editor of the Gentleman's Magazine greeted his readers with a direct allusion to the dangerous events in France:

Europe since the period when it was overrum by the Goths and the Vandals, has never experienced more alarm and danger than at the present moment—Religion, Manners, Literature, and the Arts, are all equally menaced by a foe, whose characteristic is a compound of impetuosity, ignorance and crime. To resist and counteract these machinations, has been the honest and unremitting endeavour of the Gentleman's Magazine and ever will be so, as long as our Political and Religious Constitution shall require our indefatigable support.³

The editor of the Lady's Magazine begins on a different note:

The utility of Miscellanies of this kind [ladies' periodicals], for the promoting of knowledge and the liberal arts, need not be insisted on. … In the Lady's Magazine, which has now been favoured with the public approbation for three and twenty years, the interest of morality and religion have constantly been especially attended to.⁴

Each periodical is affirming its commitment to established English values, but where the Gentleman's Magazine explicitly warns its readers of a political and cultural menace, the Lady's Magazine presents a reassuring picture of stability and continuity. The form in which the statements are cast also reflects this difference: the Gentleman's Magazine boldly claims to offer a specific response to a specific historical situation (“to resist and counteract these machinations … as long as …”), but the Lady's Magazine formulates its purpose in a subordinate phrase and as an ongoing activity (“for the promoting … constantly been … attended to”). Finally, the Gentleman's Magazine appeals to its readers' reason and convictions and invites each individual to judge the merit of its enterprise, but the Lady's Magazine couches its appeal in terms not of personal conviction but of established standards—“morality and religion”—and collective, “public,” opinion.

The terms in which news of the terrifying events in France are reported also bear out this difference. In the January issue of the Gentleman's Magazine the cumulative effect of the “Foreign Intelligence” section supports the author's claim that all Europe is “at the present moment” in a state of “alarm and danger.” We learn of the death vote taken for the king in Paris, antiagitator actions in Poland, Jacobin arms-smuggling into Bilbao, and, in Ireland, a riot and the successful plundering of munitions by “banditti” (p. 81). In the February issue of the Lady's Magazine, on the other hand, the death of the king is reported but no such general alarm is raised. The editors do describe anti-Gallic military preparations in Spain, Austria, Sardinia, Germany, and Russia, but no French victories are reported, the French Republic is depicted as being improverished by “the rapacity of the French contractors,” and the French troops are described as inadequately clothed because of “the negligence of the commissaries” (p. 107). The Lady's Magazine also tends to draw reassuring conclusions for its readers. The article on naval preparations, for example, comments that “it is not difficult to prognosticate that, in case of war, the French will be unable to contend with Great Britain for the dominion of the ocean” (p. 107).

The Gentleman's Magazine reports the execution of Louis XVI in a normal entry in the part of the news section entitled “Historical Chronicle.” The Lady's Magazine, on the other hand, which rarely reports any political events, places its account first among its entries and accompanies it with a full-page engraving of the king. That the Lady's Magazine is especially interested in the appearance of the king is borne out by this detailed description, which has no equivalent in the Gentleman's Magazine: “His hair was dressed in curls, his beard shaved; he wore a clean shirt and stock, a white waistcoat, black florentine silk breeches, black silk stockings, and his shoes were tied with black silk strings” (p. 8). This information is not given to help the magazine's readers form individual opinions about the political events. Rather, because the editors recognize that “public attention will probably be turned for some time to this tragical event” (p. 5), such details are designed to provide the substance for polite conversations.

We can infer from these differences that men were typically given an assortment of facts (all thirty-eight points of the proposed Alien Act, for example, as well as transcriptions of parliamentary proceedings) and were expected to formulate from them personal judgments, and that women, on the contrary, were encouraged to accept conclusions offered by an authoritative voice and to be more interested in the appearances of events than in their causes or political significance. Men, expected to take an active political—if not military—role in England's defense, were aroused by the specter of an alarming foe; women, expected to keep the domestic circle free of such anxieties, were given a picture of national strength and an incompetent enemy. The appeal to men is explicit and direct because the assumption is that men's passions as well as their reason are subject to individual consciousness and control. The appeal to women, on the other hand, is indirect; it is couched in sensual rather than intellectual terms and is supported by numerous references to “public opinion,” by moral stories, and by other “entertaining instruction.” The implicit assumption is that women's quick passions will be more effectively engaged by such formulations than by either less overt moralizing or more direct reporting of facts.

Such thematic and rhetorical “cultivation” was considered necessary in part because what most moralists described as the most fundamental female characteristic—a woman's emotional responsiveness—was regarded as a profoundly ambivalent trait. This “amiableness of disposition,” which was thought to form the basis of a woman's benevolence, her “sprightliness of imagination,” and her “sensibility of heart,” is, if properly governed, productive of the greatest personal and social good: the domestic harmony and social charm celebrated by numerous moralists. But if, by chance or oversight, this female receptivity is exposed to internal or external temptations, it can rapidly degenerate into sexual appetite, which seventeenth-century writers explicitly feared. Eighteenth-century moralists formulated this complexity in various ways. Some, for example, described female passions as external forces that occasionally overwhelm a woman's essentially “feminine” nature: “the agents of nature are often at work in apparently open disobedience to her laws … if the agitations of passion … have hurried their unhappy victim from the paths of rectitude and principle … it would be weakness, not wisdom, to infer that such were the characteristics of the species.”⁵ Others, like Adam Smith, viewed susceptibility as the inevitable inverse of feminine virtue. “Humanity,” according to Smith, “is the virtue of a woman, generosity [is the virtue] of a man.”

Humanity consists merely in the exquisite fellow-feeling which the spectator entertains with the sentiments of the persons principally concerned, so as to grieve for their sufferings, to resent their injuries, and to rejoice at their good fortune. The most humane actions require no self-denial, no self-command, no great exertion of the sense of propriety. They consist only in doing what this exquisite sympathy would of its own accord prompt us to do.⁶

The implication of Smith's definition is that because women do not habitually practice self-denial their “natural receptivity” is dangerously alive to all kinds of stimuli. But whether moralists describe women's passions as inexplicable eruptions of disobedient nature or as the logical extension of female sympathy, all definitions of female virtue allude to—and try to control—sexuality. Far from dismissing the specter of female sexuality, in fact, the late eighteenth-century ideal of feminine propriety simply transmutes it into its opposite. The result of this inversion is the fundamental paradox that pervades all discussions of women: at the heart of the explicit description of “feminine,” Angelic women, superior to all physical appetite, resides the “female” sexuality that was automatically assumed to be the defining characteristic of female nature.

The persistence of the assumption that women are fundamentally sexual can be seen in nearly all examples and at nearly every level of the conduct material. Early in the century the phrases used to describe female nature are transparent euphemisms for sexual appetite. Such writers as Daniel Defoe, Bernard Mandeville, and Jonathan Swift, for example, did not let their readers forget that fear of women's “frailty” lay behind the “custom, which we miscall modesty.” “Inclination, which we prettily call love,” Defoe acknowledged, exchanging one euphemism for another, “does sometimes move a little too visibly in the sex, and frailty often follows.”⁷ Several decades later Dr. Johnson was still alluding to sexuality when he remarked that, “Nature has given women so much power, that the law has wisely given them little.”⁸ The anonymous female author of The Polite Lady was even more explicit than her male peers: women's passions, she acknowledged, “are much more keen and violent than those of the other sex, or, which is the same thing, we are less capable to check and restrain them.”⁹

More subtle reminders appear throughout the century as explicit allusions to female sexuality gave way to more idealizing descriptions of femininity. Most of the activities that moral essayists consistently described as “unladylike” or “unnatural” were the ones that might jeopardize conjugal fidelity: frequenting the theater or masquerades, coquetting, or dressing provocatively or immodestly. All attacks on female “appetite” were also, implicitly, defenses of female chastity. These appetites were legion; and, as numerous commentators revealed, the underlying assumption was that, once indulged, any appetite would become voracious and lead eventually to the most dangerous desire of all. Thus moralists warn against gambling, overeating, or drinking too much (“She who is first a prostitute to Wine, will soon be to Lust also”),¹⁰ and even against reading novels (“The appetite becomes too keen to be denied … the contents of the circulating library, are devoured with indiscriminate and insatiable avidity. Hence the mind is secretly corrupted”).¹¹ For Hannah More, one particularly prevalent incarnation of female appetite is vanity. As the following passage reveals, what looks like simply an uncontrollable appetite for praise has more ominous repercussions. More is warning men against choosing a wife at a public assembly:

If a man select a picture for himself from among all its exhibited competitors, and bring it to his own house, the picture being passive, he is able to fix it there: while the wife, picked up at a public place, and accustomed to incessant display, will not, it is probable, when brought home stick so quietly to the spot where he fixes her; but will escape to the exhibition-room again, and continue to be displayed at every subsequent exhibition, just as if she were not become private property, and had never been definitively disposed of.¹²

A woman who is not “private property” is implicitly available for public use, a fact on which More does not have to elaborate.

Throughout the conduct material the litany against female appetite goes on. A woman whose beauty has once been praised will crave more public applause, and a female wit “lives on flattery as its daily bread.”¹³ Even the obsessive cultivation of virtue—as Clarissa Harlowe learned—can be a form of “intemperance,” an indulgence of the appetite for notice. Thomas Gisborne ratified this assumption when he lamented the ends to which indulging female appetite could lead: to “unsteadiness of mind; to fondness of novelty; to habits of frivolousness, and trifling employment; … to an unreasonable regard for wit and shining accomplishments; … to sudden excesses; [to] unmerited attachments.”¹⁴ And the author of The Polite Lady makes the connection between self-indulgence and sexual profligacy even clearer when she explains that indulging any desire is finally

an enemy to this virtue of chastity. For, it not only inflames the blood, and raises the passions; but, at the same time, darkens and clouds the mind, and renders it less capable to resist and regulate the inferior appetites. It debases and corrupts the heart: it gives us too strong a relish for the pleasures of sense, and too great a disgust for those of a rational nature.¹⁵

Immediately behind such warnings is, as I have suggested, the desire to secure both men's property and their peace of mind. When these moralists offer explanations, however, they are more likely to allude to the order of the universe than to the well-being of an estate or an individual. According to the author of The Ladies Library, for example, unrestrained appetite

is the Spring and Original of infinite Confusions; the grand Incendiary, which puts Kingdoms, Churches and Families in Combustion; a Contradiction, not only to the Word, but to the Works of God; a kind of anticreative Power, which reduces things to the Chaos from whence God drew them. … So especially the Female Sex, whose Passions being naturally the more impetuous, ought to be the most strictly guarded, and kept under the severe Discipline of Reason; for where 'tis otherwise, where a Woman has no Guide but her Will, and her Will is nothing but her Humour, the Event is sure to be fatal to herself; and often to others also.¹⁶

Given the voraciousness that female desire was assumed to have, the surest safeguard against overindulgence was not to allow or admit to appetites of any kind. Thus women were encouraged to display no vanity, no passion, no assertive “self” at all. In keeping with this design, even genuinely talented women were urged to avoid all behavior that would call attention to themselves: “'Tis the duty of a young lady to talk with an air of diffidence, as if she proposed what she said, rather with a view to receive information herself, than to inform and instruct the company”; a woman “should be carefully instructed that her talents are only a means to a still higher attainment, and that she is not to rest in them as an end; that merely to exercise them as instruments for the acquisition of fame and the promoting of pleasure, is subversive of her delicacy as a woman”; a woman, in fact, should “think it [her] greatest commendation not to be talked of one way or other.”¹⁷

All of this self-effacing behavior was included in the general category of “modesty.” But even modesty perpetuates the paradoxical formulation of female sexuality. For a modest demeanor served not only to assure the world that a woman's appetites were under control; it also indicated that female sexuality was still assertive enough to require control. That is, even as modesty was proclaimed to be the most reliable guardian of a woman's chastity—and hence the external sign of her internal integrity—it was also declared to be an advertisement for—and hence an attraction to—her sexuality.¹⁸ This paradox appears in nearly every eighteenth-century discussion of modesty. The anonymous author of The Ladies Library, for example, assures her readers that, properly displayed, modesty constitutes an infallible protection against men's “most impudent Attack”:

For 'tis certain a modest Countenance gives a Check to Lust; there is something awful, as if there was something divine in it; and with all the Simplicity of Innocence, it has a commanding Power that restrains the Fury of Desire. Such an Authority there is in Virtue, that where 'tis eminent, 'tis apt to controul all loose Appetites, and he must not only be lustful but sacrilegious who attempts to violate such a Sanctuary.¹⁹

Yet the same author declares modesty to be a woman's most effective lure: “An innocent Modesty, a native Simplicity of Look, eclipse all the glaring Splendors of Art and Dress” (1: 117). Modesty is provocation; it whets the lover's appetite; it suspends both partners momentarily in the delicious foreplay of anticipation:

Mankind esteems those things most which are at a distance; whereas an easy and cheap Compliance begets Contempt. While Women govern themselves by the exact Rule of Prudence, their Lustre is like the Meridian Sun in its Brightness, which, tho' less approachable, is counted more glorious. … If Women affect Finery and Comeliness to render themselves agreeable only, let them know, they are never so comely and fine, as when they are cloathed in Virgin Modesty; never so amiable as when they are adorn'd with the Beauties of Innocence and Virtue.

[1:129]

Because the glory of its eventual conqueror is directly proportionate to the resistance modesty poses, its efficacy is directly proportionate to its conspicuousness. Richard Allestree, from whom the author of The Ladies Library derives much of her imagery, organization, and language, more fully describes the paradoxical nature of modesty. Like the “Meridian Sun,” modesty “eclipse [s the] glaring Splendour” of ostentatious art. But

if boldness be to be read in her Face, it blots all the lines of beauty, is like a cloud over the Sun, intercepts the view of all that was otherwise Amiable, and renders it's [sic] blackness the more observable, by being plac'd near somewhat that was apt to attract the eyes.²⁰

In this metaphor, woman is the object of man's attention. Yet, like the sun, her modesty cannot be directly seen; it is know by the light it reflects, light that hints at its radiant center but that brings into sharp relief only the man who pursues, then obtains this hidden prize. Modesty announces purity in a virgin, promises fidelity in a wife, and thus will continue to be a reflection of her husband's power. “Boldness,” on the other hand, calls attention to the woman herself (“intercepts the view”), instead of reflecting a man's gaze through the woman back to himself. (“All that was otherwise Amiable” here suggests not only the modest woman but also the man aggrandized by her consent.) The woman as desiring subject is “blackness,” a cultural void, a negative that comes into view only when it interferes with the ideal woman, who cannot be seen at all.

The paradox of modesty—and the paradox of female sexuality it simultaneously concealed and revealed—necessarily established the terms in which real women both consciously conceptualized and evaluated their own behavior and even unconsciously experienced their own gender. For the fact that this definition was reinforced by nearly every bourgeois institution and social experience meant that to define oneself by some other category than the paradox of sexuality/chastity was to move wholly outside of social definition, to risk being designated a “monster.” Indeed, even to define oneself explicitly in terms of sexuality was to exclude oneself from the gender to which female anatomy theoretically relegated a woman. The least departure from modesty, as Richard Allestree unequivocally explained, is “a proportaionable [sic] receding from Woman-hood,” and “the total abandoning it ranks them among Brutes.”²¹ More practically, a woman's social position depended completely on her obedience to men's will, and it was partly for this reason that women tended to embrace chastity as “the greatest glory and ornament of our sex,” even though chastity might mean self-denial and even though its loss might affect her husband and his property more than the woman herself (barring, of course, an unwanted pregnancy).

The importance women assigned to chastity is aptly conveyed by the lament from one woman to another that, “this lost, every thing that is dear and valuable to a woman, is lost along with it; the peace of her own mind, the love of her friends, the esteem of the world, the enjoyment of present pleasure, and all hopes of future happiness.”²² But it is also important to recognize that there were positive incentives for a woman to accept the equation between “female” and “feminine.” Indeed, if any principle that advances the interests of one group at the expense of another is to operate effectively as ideology, it must at the very least provide psychological rewards for those who are ruled as well as practical benefits for those whose rulership it supports. A woman might well consider chastity her “greatest glory and ornament” because to do so enhanced her social value and promised her the eventual gratification of the very desires that modesty was supposed to deny. In other words, because the code of modesty was paradoxical in its very configuration it allowed for both indirect expressions of desire and the promise of rewards both immediate and deferred.

But despite incentives and rewards, this ideology, from the perspective of a woman's lived experience, presented at least two critical problems. Equating chastity with value not only required a woman to suppress or sublimate her sexual and emotional appetites; it also required her to signal her virtue by a physical intactness that is by definition invisible. In reality she could display her chastity only indirectly or—even more precisely—negatively: by not speaking, by not betraying the least consciousness of her essential sexuality. Modesty was one form of indirect display; an expressive “countenance” was another. “Modesty,” according to Dr. Gregory, “will naturally dispose you to be rather silent in company. … [But] one may take a share in conversation without uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shews it, and never escapes an observing eye.”²³ Hannah More also describes such communicative but decorous silence: “an inviolable and marked attention may shew, that a woman is pleased with a subject, and an illuminated countenance may prove that she understands it, almost as unequivocally as language itself.”²⁴ Such “unequivocal” silence is theoretically communicative, of course, only as long as the external sign of the countenance is assumed to bear a perfect, indeed automatic, relationship to the interior self: Nature has “marked the genuine feelings of modesty with a look and manner … correspondent and expressive.”²⁵ As long as one postulates such a correspondence, the silence of the Proper Lady can presumably be read like an open book; she is (or should be) quite simply what she seems to be.²⁶

The assumption that one can interpret a woman's subjective feelings by visible, objective signs—her “look and manner”—has an even more embracing, but equally delimiting, counterpart: the notion that one can interpret a woman's essence by her context—by her reputation or her “situation.” The cultural importance granted to reputation is reflected in the consistency with which eighteenth-century novelists dwell on this subject. Anna Howe's advice to Clarissa to marry Lovelace even after the rape is one of the most memorable of these references, if only because here reputation seems so thoroughly beside the point.²⁷ For eighteenth-century heroines, “situation” is still another piece of the equivocal cultural code. “Situation,” as we learn from Burney's Evelina, can refer not simply to a woman's position in society (to her father's position more precisely, or, as in Evelina's case, to her lack of an acknowledged father and hence to her lack of a determinate, protective social position); it can even refer to her immediate physical surroundings. When Evelina wanders lost through the dark footpaths of Vauxhall, every man who sees her assumes she is a prostitute; and when she is forced to take tea in the Branghtons' parlor, visitors immediately conclude that she is one of their kind. In order for such an ambiguous system of values to remain intelligible, everyone must assume that all external signs are organic expressions of the hidden essence. Just as how you look must designate what you are, so where you are must invariably tell who you are.²⁸

But the paradoxical formulation of female sexuality, upon which all these values are based, means that this correspondence does not necessarily exist. Just as a woman's modest demeanor actually disguises her essential sexuality, so a woman's situation, her reputation, or her countenance could dramatically misrepresent her character. This possibility obviously poses a threat to men, but, as the examples of Clarissa and Evelina suggest, it also threatens women. So numerous—and so frightening—were the possibilities that the code of propriety would distort or repress genuine feelings that catastrophes of this sort constitute a staple of many of the best novels of the period. The works of Fanny Burney provide one such vision of what these values must have looked like from within. In Camilla the heroine is repeatedly thwarted because she cannot openly declare her love for Edgar Mandlebert. Struggling desperately to master the conventions of female indirection, Camilla tries to maneuver Mandlebert into taking the initiative by flirting with his rival, Sir Sedley Clarendel. But, unfortunately, Camilla's boldness alienates Edgar, and, when she tries to retreat from Sir Sedley, her modesty arouses the unwanted suitor all the more. Unwittingly, Camilla has twice misjudged the message her behavior conveys and thus has twice exposed herself to misinterpretation. Her efforts to clarify her true feelings to Sir Sedley only inaugurate further misunderstanding, for in her desire to speak to Clarendel alone Edgar sees only the stereotype of a woman making an open declaration—presumably, of her love.

Burney's first novel, Evelina, explores another discomforting facet of propriety. Unlike Camilla, who knows but cannot speak her heart, Evelina has been so thoroughly protected by her guardian that she has never felt—much less learned to understand—genuine desire. Evelina's predicament is a perfect example of a phenomenon that Mary Wollstonecraft explores: the fact that a woman's situation, far from being either an accurate index of her heart or even simply a misrepresentation of her actual position, can actually help constitute the responses it seems to represent. Situation—and the behavior it requires—can actually make a woman into a Proper Lady, or, as in Evelina's case, it can unnaturally prolong her childhood. Situations do eventually educate Evelina: in London, she gradually discovers how to interpret the language of social intercourse and even the clamors of her passion. But this cannot occur until her ignorance, fostered by her initial protected situation, is finally dispelled. So apt is unconsciousness as a trope for Evelina's persistent innocence that her one decisive, spontaneous action—saving Mr. Macartney from suicide—immediately causes her to faint.

Evelina's innocence is, of course, her primary attraction in the eyes of the worldly Lord Orville. But because her innocence is predicated on ignorance, Evelina experiences both embarrassment and helplessness in London's high society. Pursued by the leering Sir Clement Willoughby through London's treacherous amusements, Evelina suffers the consequences of living in—without understanding—the paradoxes of propriety. As a proper young lady she is theoretically ignorant of sexuality, but as a fully developed young woman she clearly is a sexual being. When she blushes, she unwittingly signals not only her modesty but also her consciousness of her innocence. This consciousness is exactly what Willoughby wants to see, for it introduces the possibility that the girl will recognize—if not respond to—his advances. The dilemma for Evelina is that, in a knowing world, a woman cannot be truly innocent, for she will always unintentionally betray the sexuality that virtue exists to protect. The only guaranteed protection is to avoid the adult world altogether, as Evelina's guardian said she should. The moralist, Dr. Gregory, explains this impasse of virtue explicitly:

A virtuous girl often hears very indelicate things with a countenance no wise embarrassed, because in truth she does not understand them. Yet this is, most ungenerously, ascribed to that command of features, and that ready presence of mind, which you are thought to possess in a degree far beyond us; or, by still more malignant observers, it is ascribed to hardened effrontery.

Sometimes a girl laughs with all the simplicity of unsuspecting innocence, for no other reason but being infected with other people's laughing: she is then believed to know more than she should do.—If she does happen to understand an improper thing, she suffers a very complicated distress: she feels her modesty hurt in the most sensible manner, and at the same time is ashamed of appearing conscious of the injury.²⁹

A woman is not to betray knowledge of sexuality (or even, in compromising circumstances, the absence of knowledge, which may be read as knowledge disguised) because knowledge denotes experience and hence potential, if not actual, corruption. “She that listens to any wanton discourse,” Allestree declares, “has violated her ears; she that speaks any, her tongue; every immodest glance vitiates her eye, and every the lightest act of dalliance, leaves something of stain and sullage behind it.”³⁰ Yet a woman cannot convince anyone that she is completely without sexual desire, either. As Clarissa Harlowe discovers, even a mother will not believe that a girl is altogether free of desire; if she will not allow her affection to be directed by her parents, the Harlowes assume, a young girl must already be “prepossessed” by love for another man.³¹

Another paradox evident in eighteenth-century discussions of women constituted a further, less consciously identifiable, dilemma for real women trying to formulate and interpret their own behavior. By now it is a commonplace that eighteenth-century England witnessed the rise of individualism; it was part and parcel of the consolidation of bourgeois values that we have already examined. During the eighteenth century, philosophers, following John Locke, generally stressed the importance of applying reason to empirical observations in order to reach truths that everyone could acquire. Individualism also governed political theory, economic principles and practice, and even, under the influence of Protestantism, religious beliefs. And, especially during the second half of the century, individualism acquired a concrete form in the scientific achievements that rapidly began to transform society. Individual effort became the mark of past accomplishments and the guarantor of future success; this was the era of the “self-made man,” when aristocratic privilege could finally be challenged on a wide scale by individuals possessed of talent, opportunity, and the capacity for hard work.

Middle-class women were no doubt familiar with the values and even the rhetoric of individualism; even if they had never heard of Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, or John Locke, they mouthed the truisms of this doctrine every time they read their children Goody Two-Shoes or taught them the benefits of self-discipline.³² In fact, the very translation of sexual control into “duty” is perfectly in keeping with the tenets of individualism: a woman's social contribution was, in essence, self-control, just as her primary antagonist was herself. “If women guard against themselves,” the aphorism assured, “they may bid defiance to all the arts of men.”³³ Yet despite their obvious incorporation into the ideology of individualism, middle-class women were not encouraged to think of themselves as part of this nation of individuals. Because of the need to protect their virtue, they were advised to acquire knowledge only indirectly—by reading history, perhaps, or by talking to an older female friend. As the author of The Polite Lady advised her readers, “the knowledge, learning, wisdom, and experience of your friend will, in effect, become your own; because you may always use them with the same freedom as if they were your own property.”³⁴ Women were also urged to think of themselves collectively—not as a political unit, or as beings possessed of individual talents, capacities, or rights, but simply in terms of the universals of what Richardson's Lovelace called “the sex, the sex.”

As we will see more clearly in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen, this paradox could prove significant for women in a variety of ways. Women of the aspiring trading classes, like Mary Wollstonecraft, unconsciously adopted the values of individualism; they therefore tended to imagine that social change comes from individual effort—their own as well as men's. Yet because they were women they actually had neither the political nor economic power necessary to contribute to social change. Moreover, because ambitious women of this class tended automatically to identify themselves with other aggressive, upwardly mobile individuals and not with women as a group, they often ignored the common problems women shared; thus they worked against establishing the solidarity that would eventually prove necessary to political reform. On the other hand, women of the landed gentry and professional classes, like Jane Austen, tended to occupy an even more complex position within the ideology of individualism. In keeping with the basically feudal habits of their class, women of this social group could easily interpret the individualistic ambition of the tradesmen and Dissenters as a challenge posed to the traditional values of their fathers and brothers. But in keeping with the rhetoric of progress everywhere evident in their culture, they, too, could most easily envision the defense of their class in terms of individual moral efforts. Thus Jane Austen unintentionally echoes the values of individualism when she assigns to individual women the task of correcting the moral wrongs of an entire class if not of society as a whole. However, her heroines' limited accomplishments and the fairytale quality of her novels' conclusions suggest that Austen senses, at some level, the futility of this “solution.”

Given these paradoxes at the heart of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century values, nearly every moralist felt compelled to forestall frustration by celebrating the virtue of endurance and the rewards of self-denial. “Bear and forbear,” is Clarissa's private litany. For the unfortunate Sarah Pennington the example of Griselda implicitly governs the advice she gives her cherished daughters. Having inherited a private fortune from a doting relative, as Clarissa did, the real-life Sarah Pennington unintentionally aroused her husband's anger. Despite the fact that she had previously obeyed his every command, Pennington accused his wife of adultery and drove her out of his house and away from her children. From her solitary retreat, Sarah Pennington was forced to communicate with her daughters by public letter; with remarkable forbearance, she advises them to protect above all else their future husbands' “Repose.” Even his infidelity should be ignored, she argues, or, better yet, left undiscovered: “the fewer Faults you discover in your Partner, the better; never search after what it will give you no Pleasure to find; never desire to hear what you will not like to be told.”³⁵

Despite all these explicit and implicit strictures on their self-conceptions and self-expression, eighteenth-century women did find ways to communicate and even satisfy their desires. The important thing to notice, however, is that the forms that female self-expression typically assumed are characterized by indirection. For, as we have already begun to see, the code of propriety did accommodate women's desires, but only as long as the expression of those desires conformed to the paradoxical configuration inherent in the code itself: self-assertion had to look like something other than what it was. Women's “accomplishments,” for instance, were one legitimate vehicle for the indirect indulgence of vanity. Piano-playing, singing, dancing, fine needlework, and painting were only thinly disguised opportunities for the display of personal charms; and the fierce competition this display often promoted was, like Mary Astell's “Vertue and Ingenuity,” an acceptable version of men's professional competitiveness. As long as it was strictly confined to certain arenas and ultimately obedient to men's will, women were also allowed to exercise considerable personal—if indirect—power. Before she married, a young girl possessed the power of what moralists called “her Negative”: the right to resist or even reject the proposal of a suitor. In exchange for relinquishing this right, a woman acquired what moralists considered her greatest power: the power of influence. Especially in the first decades of the nineteenth century, moralists waxed eloquent on the beneficent effects of woman's simple presence. Here is Miss Hatfield in 1803:

As the benign properties of the solar rays dissipate and dispel gross vapours in the material world, so does the presence of women operate in the intellectual. Over the mind of a good and sensible man her power is gentle and prevailing; his councils are assisted by her prudence; the rude vicissitudes of fortune are softened by her sensibility and friendship.³⁶

In 1810, Reynald Morryson explained to readers of the Gentleman's Magazine that, because “modesty is [the] native grace” of women,

they must immediately inspire humility and gentleness in others; as they are accustomed to diffidence, they teach the blessing of liberality and a charitable judgment: their sympathy must add a charm to benevolence; and their cheerfulness, which never exceeds decorum, is the assurance of innocent pleasures, and the shame of all that is intemperate.³⁷

The most effective operation of a woman's influence, however, centers in the home. It is as a mother, the moralists agreed, that a woman exercises her highest capacity for “power.” As Hannah More declaimed:

The great object to which you who are, or may be mothers, are more especially called, is the education of your children. If we are responsible for the use of influence in the case of those over whom we have no definite right; in the case of our children we are responsible for the exercise of acknowledged power: a power wide in its extent, indefinite in its effects, and inestimable in its importance. On you, depend in no small degree the principles of the whole rising generation. … And, remember, the dignity of the work to which you are called, is no less than that of preserving the ark of the Lord.³⁸

Abigail Mott, writing in 1825, is equally adamant: “Let every mother consider herself as an instrument in the hand of a kind Providence to provide its realization,” she proclaimed.

Let her reflect how much the proper education of one single family may eventually contribute towards it. And that while the fruits of her labour are a rich compensation of peace, virtue and contentment, which may descend through generations yet unborn, she will herself enjoy a suitable and permanent reward.³⁹

Like the effects, the rewards of this activity are deferred; indeed, they are as oblique as the effort—which is really no effort at all—with which women act in society. Simply by being what late eighteenth-century moralists believed they were, women could enjoy praises never bestowed on their wanton alter egos. And, as vehicles for exercising their influence were gradually institutionalized in the form of charitable and religious organizations, women could even actively participate in socially constructive work without seeming to assert themselves at all. By the end of the century, participation in such indirect activity was probably automatic for most women. Almost everything in their education and culture conspired to make such behavior seem not only proper but natural.

Notes

1. The first English periodical for women was probably the Ladies' Mercury, published briefly by John Dunton in 1693; it was followed by the Ladies' Diary; or, Women's Almanack in 1704, and then by such diverse periodicals as the Visiter in 1723, the Ladies' Journal in 1727, the Parrot in 1728, the Lady's Magazine; or, Universal Repository in 1733, the Female Spectator in 1744, the Lady's Weekly Magazine in 1747, the Ladies' Magazine; or, Universal Entertainer in 1749, the Old Maid in 1755, and the Lady's Museum in 1760. For further discussion of such magazines, see Cynthia L. White, Women's Magazines, 1693-1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1972), esp. pp. 30-32, and Bertha Monica Stearns, “Early English Periodicals for Ladies (1700-1760),” PMLA 48 (1933): 38-60. General periodicals that occasionally appealed specifically to women include The Tatler, The Spectator, Johnson's Rambler and Idler, and The Gentleman's Magazine.

2. I owe the research for this comparison to Tad Anderson. His unpublished essay, “Sexual Roles in Late Eighteenth-Century England: A Comparison of the January 1793 issues of Lady's Magazine and Gentleman's Magazine” (Yale College, 1978), has been instrumental in helping me formulate these observations.

3. Gentleman's Magazine 43 (January 1793).

4. Lady's Magazine 24 (January 1793).

5. “Female Character,” The Ladies Magazine 1, no. 5 (May 1828): 196.

6. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 10th ed., 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1804), 1:400.

7. Daniel Defoe, “Essay upon Several Projects: Or, Effectual Ways for Advancing the Interests of the Nation” (1702), in The Complete Works of Daniel Defoe, 3 vols. (London: John Clements, 1843), 3:42. See also Bernard Mandeville, The Virgin Unmask'd: Or, Female Dialogues betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady and Her Niece, on Several Diverting Discourses on Love, Marriage, Memoirs, and Morals, &c. of the Times, 2d ed. (London: G. Strathan, 1724), p. 117. and Jonathan Swift, “The Lady's Dressing Room” (1730), rpt. in The Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William Bowman Piper (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 535-38.

8. See James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, ed. George B. Hill, 6 vols. (1887 ed.), 5:226 n.

9. The Polite Lady: Or a Course of Female Education. In a Series of Letters, from a Mother to Her Daughter, 2d ed. (London: Newberry & Carnan, 1769), p. 267.

10. Allestree, Ladies Calling, p. 14.

11. Gisborne, Enquiry, pp. 228-29.

12. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, Jr. & W. Davies, 1799), 2:166.

13. More, ibid., p. 71.

14. Gisborne, Enquiry, pp. 33-34.

15. The Polite Lady, pp. 191-92.

16. The Ladies Library, 1:162.

17. The Polite Lady, p. 205; Hannah More, Strictures, 2:12; Spectator 81, in The Spectator with Notes and a General Index, 2 vols. (New York: Samuel Marks, 1826), 1:109.

18. See Ellen Pollak, “Re-Reading The Rape of the Lock: Pope and the Paradox of Female Power,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 10, ed. Harry C. Payne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), pp. 429-44), and Peggy Kamuf, “Rousseau's Politics of Visibility,” Diacritics 5, no. 4 (Winter 1975): 51-56.

19. The Ladies Library, 1:128.

20. Allestree, Ladies Calling, p. 6.

21. Ibid., p. 15.

22. The Polite Lady, pp. 184, 186-87.

23. Dr. Gregory, A Father's Legacy to His Daughters, 4th ed. (1762; London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell, and Edinburgh: J. Balfour & W. Creech, 1774), p. 28.

24. More, Strictures, 2: 66-67.

25. James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: A. Millar & T. Cadell, 1767), 1:99.

26. In Fanny Burney's novel, Reverend Villars assumes that Evelina can be “read.” When Evelina, lost in thought about Lord Orville, asks her guardian if he has been reading, Villars replies, “Yes, my child;—a book that both afflicts and perplexes me” (Evelina [1778; New York: Norton, 1965], p. 248).

27. Unlike Anna Howe, Clarissa knows that reputation is not essential to her “self.” Despite the fact that her reputation has long been ruined, it is only after the rape that she laments to Anna: “I, my best self, have not escaped!” (Clarissa, 3:321).

28. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 163-64.

29. Gregory, Legacy, pp. 58-60.

30. Allestree, Ladies Calling, p. 156.

31. When Clarissa declares that, although she will not marry Mr. Solmes, her “heart is free,” her parents are frankly incredulous. Either her heart must be “prepossessed,” they assert, or it must be theirs to dispose of. They cannot conceive of the possibility that a young girl might know and “own” her own heart.

32. See Isaac Kramnick, “Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Later Eighteenth Century,” in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 203-40.

33. Gorges Edmond Howard, Aphorisms and Maxims on Various Subjects for the Good Conduct of Life, &c. (n.p., n.d.), p. 332.

34. The Polite Lady, p. 58.

35. Sarah Pennington, An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to Her Absent Daughters. In a Letter to Miss Pennington (London: S. Chandler, 1761), pp. 71-72.

36. Miss Hatfield, Letters on the Importance of the Female Sex: With Observations on Their Manners, and on Education (London: J. Adland, 1803), p. 4.

37. Reynald Morryson, “On Female Association,” Gentleman's Magazine 80 (June 1810): 531.

38. More, Strictures, 1:59-61.

39. Abigail Mott, Observations on the Importance of Female Education, and Maternal Instruction, with Their Beneficial Influence on Society. By a Mother. (New York: Mahlon Day, 1825), p. 16.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

[Allestree, Richard.] The Ladies Calling. 12th impression. Oxford: n.p., 1727.

Boswell, James.Life of Johnson. Edited by R. W. Chapman. New edition, corrected by J. D. Fleeman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Defoe, Daniel. “Essays upon Several Projects: Or, Effectual Ways for Advancing the interests of the Nation.” Pp. 42-44 in The Complete Works of Daniel Defoe, vol. 3. London: John Clements, 1843.

Fordyce, James. Sermons to Young Women. 2 vols. 4th ed. London: A. Millar & T. Cadell, 1767.

The Gentleman's Magazine. Selected issues. London, 1731-1907.

Gisborne, Thomas. An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. 4th ed. London: T. Cadell, Jr. & W. Davies, 1799.

Gregory, Dr. John. A Father's Legacy to His Daughters. 4th ed. London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell, 1774.

Hatfield, Miss. Letters on the Importance of the Female Sex: With Observations on Their Manners, and on Education. London: J. Adlard, 1803.

Howard, Gorges Edmond. Aphorisms and Maxims on Various Subjects for the Good Conduct of Life, &c. N.p., n.d.

The Ladies Library, Written by a Lady. 3 vols. 3d ed. and 5th ed. London: J. & R. Tonson, 1722, 1739.

Ladies' Magazine. Selected issues. Boston: 1828-36.

Lady's Magazine. Selected issues. London: 1770-1830.

Mandeville, Bernard. The Virgin Unmask'd: Or, Female Dialogues betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady and Her Niece, on Several Diverting Discourses on Love, Marriage, Memoirs, and Morals, &c. of the Times. 2d ed. London: G. Strathan, 1724.

More, Hannah.Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. 2 vols. 2d ed. London: T. Cadell, Jr. & W. Davies, 1799.

Mott, Abigail. Observations on the Importance of Female Education, and Maternal Instruction, with Their Beneficial Influence on Society. By a Mother. New York: Mahlon Day, 1825.

Pennington, Sarah. An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to Her Absent Daughters. In a Letter to Miss Pennington. London: S. Chandler, 1761.

The Polite Lady: Or a Course of Female Education. In a Series of Letters, from a Mother to Her Daughter. 2d ed. London: Newberry & Carnan, 1769.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 2 vols. 10th ed. London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1804.

Secondary Sources

Kamuf, Peggy. “Rousseau's Politics of Visibility.” Diacritics 5 (1975): 51-56.

Kramnick, Isaac. “Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Later Eighteenth Century.” Pp. 203-40 in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, edited by Perez Zagorin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Pollak, Ellen..“Re-reading The Rape of the Lock: Pope and the Paradox of Female Power.” Pp. 429-44 in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 10, edited by Harry C. Payne. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981.

Stearns, Bertha Monica. “Early English Periodicals for Ladies (1700-1760).” PMLA 48 (1933): 38-60.

Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

White, Cynthia L. Women's Magazines, 1693-1968. London: Michael Joseph, 1972.