[In the following excerpt, Lockridge analyzes the reasons for Byrd's tempered yet intense disdain for women as set out in the satirical essay “The Female Creed” that appears in one of his secret diaries.]

At the very moment when he was recording his private fears about himself and about women in his commonplace book, William Byrd was aiming a public dart of misogyny at women in the form of an essay called “The Female Creed,” dated to the year 1725. Here, many of the same constructions of women would be offered and if anything deepened into an implied portrait of what Susan Gubar has called “The Female Monster” of the Augustan age. Yet “The Female Creed” is also a curiously gentle satire, and it may foretell an age in which overt, scarifying misogyny was to pass out of fashion. Not out of men's minds, perhaps, or out of their private musings, but out of public discourse.¹ If this is true, then private misogyny of the sort found in Byrd's commonplace was to become one of the last refuges of expression for the intense hatred of women which had hitherto been equally welcome in the public prints.²

“The Female Creed” is a parody of the Christian credo. In it, the articles of Christian faith are replaced by a list of popular superstitions supposedly held by all women as a virtual religion. These superstitions read like a table of contents to Keith Thomas's well-known study Religion and the Decline of Magic, which chronicles the gradual disappearance of such beliefs in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.³ “I believe,” says Byrd, speaking for women in what he describes as twenty successive articles of the female faith, “in Spirits, Demons, and Hobgoblins, … in Fairy, Pucks, and Robin-good-fellows, … in Witches, magicians and sorcerers, … in astrologers, coffee-casters and Fortune-tellers, … that every man carries his Fate on his Forehead [or in his physiognomy in general], … in Dogs, Ravens, and Screech Owls … as the most knowing in Futurity, … in Dreams, Visions and Impulses by which Guardian Angels and friendly Demons impart timely notices to us of things to come, … in Death-watches in a wall & Winding-sheets … that are as certain Fore-runners of fate, … in … the gift of Second-Sight, … in the Itching of Sundry Parts about us [which] will make notable discoveries of adventures to come, … in Times and Seasons [that] … are strangely lucky and others unaccountably unfortunate, … that our good or bad Fortune may be clearly collected from the Situation of a Pin upon the Floor, … that all odd numbers are lucky except the fatal number of 13 [several headings give examples], … and that whoever … throws down the Salt at Table will pay for it by some dire misfortune.” “In short,” concludes this fantastical credo, “I believe in the Philosopher-sstone, the perpetual motion, the squareing of the circle, the tameing of a Shrew, and what is more incredible than all the rest, I believe in the constancy and Fidelity of Man.”

The gentleness of this satire is obvious, as it chides women for what are by this time largely harmless superstitions presumably once held by many and still held by some men, and it ends by suggesting that the most fantastic of women's many unbased beliefs is their trust in men. In due time I will explore the meaning of the public restraint which Byrd is exercising here even as in his private commonplace he is raging against women in general and Charmante in particular. For now, however, we need to note that beneath this polite surface satire “The Female Creed” is easily as full of implicit fury against women as the commonplace book. For each of the twenty presumed articles of female faith listed becomes itself a miniature essay, in which that superstition is loosely linked to a series of gossipy tales about prominent women and men, identified by pseudonyms. Within each essay not only credulous women but also the female body, female desire and power become the introduction to, metaphor for, and implicitly the source of the social and political corruptions of early eighteenth-century England.

As each of these mini-essays proceeds, it is as if a misogynistic and disillusioned William Byrd has seized the speaker's mace from credulous woman, the purported speaker. Under guise of her purported credulity and under the guise of witty court gossip, he is delivering his own increasingly bitter indictment of women and of his times. In the end the link with the particular female superstition with which the mini-essay had begun is nearly lost, dissolving into far-reaching ridicule of women and of English society and politics.

I believe in astrologers, coffee-casters, and Fortune-tellers of every denomination, whether they profess to read the Ladys destiny in their faces, in their palms, or like those of China in their fair posteriors. I believe according as the Planets and Fixt stars happen to be placed in the sky at the Instant of our birth, they forebode what complexion we shall be of, and what is to betide us every year of our lives. I believe my Lady Pilfer cou'd by no means help being light-finger'd, and lifting Fans and china-cups, every time she went to Mother Tomb's, because that Knave Mercury was lord of her ascendant, nor can Furistante well avoid being a vixen and a Termagant, yea and exceeding loud in her Curtain lectures, because she happen'd to be born under Mars, which all the sons of art know to be a boistrous Planet, and since that wanton Huzzy Venus presided at the nativity of poor Miss Frail, how cruel are the Prudes, for allowing no Quarter to that unfortunate Damsel, because she happen'd to prove more fruitfull than themselves. I believe tho' the Stars hold their heads so high they some times condescend to act the low part of Jonathan Wild, and help People to their gold snuff boxes and Silver Spoons again, that like the Maiden Sisters in St. James' street they kindly bring the Sexes together, and get many a hearty curse for their pains. I firmly believe that casting of Coffee Grounds is a very thriving branch of the Black Art and by the grotesque Figures drawn by Some invisible Painter in the cup, shews the Fortune of the caster pretty plain, but not quite so evidently as the believing it shews his Folly. I believe from my heart that the Pretender to the crowne of Great Britain has no other hopes of ever putting it on his head, but what the Mistresses of this art inspire him with. I believe if a Bull or a Goat appear in a mans cup, he must needs be a Whoremaster, tho' he be a Lord Chancellor or an Arch-Bishop, and if a Bear or a Munky be seen in a Ladys she'll need a vast deal of Grace to keep her honest. If an ass or an owl chance to be there, the happy caster will have a fair Hit to be an alderman, but if the Beast's ears appear longer, or the Bird's countenance graver than ordinary, there are hopes he may come to be a Judge or at lowest a Sergeant at Law. If a ravening wolfe be in the cup, the man may rise in the navy and grow to be a Captain of a man of War, or if he be a Land officer, and good for nothing else, he may live to be a Governour in His Majesty's Plantations. A Dutch mastiff or a Parrot are ill omens in a woman's cup and foretell she'll continue long a pure Virgin and grow as censorious and discreet as Mademoiselle Sky who is so vigorous a Prude she wont suffer a male creature in her house that has not been serv'd like Seresini.

The satire placed under this heading is not as hard on women as that found under others, but “Lady Pilfer,” “Furistante,” and “Miss Frail” leave no doubt that superstition is far from the only female sin. From degraded women, the narrative proceeds to Lord Chancellors, Archbishops, aldermen and Judges, any of whom may be revealed by the coffee grounds to be a whoremaster or an ass. Having potentially indicted the entire English political and religious establishment, Byrd moves on to a personal grievance, letting the shape of a “ravening wolf” in the bottom of the coffee cup stand for military men, one of whom “if he be a Land officer, and good for nothing else, he may live to be a Governour in His Majesty's Plantations.” This is a clear reference to Alexander Spotswood, an officer who had served in the English army in France and been rewarded with the lieutenant governorship of Virginia in 1709 at a time Byrd had coveted that post. Byrd's subsequent efforts to unseat Spotswood had by 1719 led to an ignominious rejection of his claims by English authorities, a failure he is still trying to overcome in his commonplace book in the 1720's. The sources of this colonial's alienation from the establishment are here laid bare. The miniature narrative then concludes with “Mademoiselle Sky,” who, in the opposite sin from “Miss Frail,” tolerates only men who, like the Italian male soprano Seresini, have been castrated. Superstition, then, is merely the gate through which female failings become the setting, and, in the case of “Lady Pilfer” and “Miss Frail” the model and metaphor, for Byrd's indictment of the ravening wolves and whoremasters in power in England.

But the satire of women becomes far harsher in later references, and it soon becomes the fallible, repulsive, and implicitly corruptible female body itself that is the central metaphor for all these tales of social and political corruption. Section after section of “The Female Creed” goes out of its way to dwell on the weaknesses of women's bodies, as each section moves on toward its larger function of satirizing English power in general. Women's inability to control their bodily functions fascinates the writer. In the context of the ongoing social and political satire Byrd is pushing here, these references seem to stand for an England that has lost its morals and continence.

Hence it comes to pass that so many Females in all countrys can scarce hold their precious water, haveing been terrify'd in the Nursery with Bulbeggars and Apparitions. This is the case of the unfortunate Dripabunda, who when She fancy'd She saw the Ghost of her deceast Husband, dy'd away for fear the good man was come to life again. From that fatal moment she lost her Retentive faculty, beyond the Relief of Turpentine Pills and Bristolwater, nor can even Dr. Friend, or Apollo himself intirely stop the Leak, but stil whenever she laughs beyond a Simper or a Broad Smile, the liveing Salalmoniac flows from her.

But then alas if the fatal Point of the Pin lye towards a poor Girle, every thing that day will fall out wrong, she cannot stoop but she'l squeeze out a f—t, or laugh but she'll be-piss her self.

But Enthusiasts tell us we are most dispos'd to see visions when we [women] are fasting and full of Wind, our souls being then most alert and aptest to ramble out of our Bodys.

Recommend me to discreet Fartamira, who never pretends to wipe her Backside on Such a day as this, for fear of bedaubing her taper Fingers. I was acquainted with a wise Woman once, who always kept her bed on Childermass day, believing her Self safe in that Snugg Situation, but that precaution fail'd her once very cruelly. For poor Mrs. Straddle, (the Gentlewoman's name) pearching with all her weight upon the Pot, the brittle Utensil flew to pieces, filling the Bed with water of high-perfume. …

Typically, these references lead on to larger satirical purposes; in the latter case, for example, fashionable London in general, and in specific the speculators who profited from the South Sea Bubble, are the ultimate images of loss of control.⁴

At moments “The Female Creed” could be called “The Female Posterior,” so great is Byrd's fascination with this aspect of repulsive female corporeality.

I believe these Elfs to shew their love of Cleanliness, wou'd pinch a dirty Slut every night, til her Haunches were as black as a Gammon of Bacon, so that if Drabella or Fustimina had liv'd in those cleanly days, their nether Parts had been nippt to a Jelly.

But alas if a Female chance to be markt on either Breast like Miss Tinder or upon either Buttock, like the widdow Touchwood, tis odds but she'll be troubled with a Devil, which nothing but Fasting and Prayer will be able to cast out.

Tis a certain piece of History that Mademoiselle Frizzle was 26 years ago put into so mortal a Fright with one of these Deathwatches, that her very heart-breakers, that lay upon her Toilet, turn'd as grey as a Gander, yet blessed be God she is stil alive, and strong enough to open her Self a passage to the King with her Elbows, every Drawing-room night let the Throng be never so great, and she may stil receive her pension, and carry that hideous Smile upon her face full 30 years longer, because the fatal Insect tickt 56 times.

… at such a Sullen time as this, tis impossible even for Miss Tidy, who dos every thing with a grace, to dress her head to her mind, either the plaits will lye eneaven or the Poke Stand quite ascue, and let her Maid be never so carefull, when she pins up her Gown, she'll unavoidably run a calker into her thrummy Breech.

Yet uncontrolled bodily functions and repulsive gluteal corporeality only stand for the fact that it is the female body in general which is portrayed as repulsive, dirty, and ugly in a theme which is prior to, permeates, and prefigures the larger, nongendered social critique Byrd is offering.

In the first place I believe that Dreams like the excessive modesty of Prudes or the overacted Grief of Widdows are to be taken by the contrarys. …

So Seignior Tetato dreamt last summer at Tunbridge, that the great Dutch Woman patted him on the Cheak with her Shoulder of Mutton hand, and the next morning the Queen of the Fairys frown'd upon him.

Her Ladyship ran nimbly up stairs, to gain the more time for Conversation, and surpriz'd the unfortunate Madam Pitapat dirty and undrest, with no more light in the Room than what the Fire and her Eyes afforded.

Fine Mrs Lurewell Understands the power of this lucky number, and knows she shall give most pain when she wears but one Patch. For this reason she never Sticks on more on a Sunday morning when she gos to church, tho' she have never so many Pimples to conceal.

Immediately upon this Disaster, a grave Aldermans Lady, who was indeed old and ugly enough to be a Witch, bad him beware, or Some mischief wou'd betide him. Voracio instead of being thankfull for this sage admonition, only answer'd her Lad^p with a very ingenious Horselaugh not having time to wast upon idle Repartees. But the omen Soon overtook him.

It goes without saying that the lust of these repulsive creatures for food, sex, and power is also a distinguishing characteristic of the women portrayed in these gossipy passages.

My good Lady Junket … once refus'd to tast a Pye, because it had 13 ortolans in it, and this too when Lent was just ended, and there was not a morsel of any think else for Supper. How unfortunate was the Curiosity which made her Lad^p inquire how many of those rare Birds were immur'd in the Crust? But certain it is, that the moment her question was answer'd, She lay'd down her Knife & Fork, retir'd from the Table, and pretended she cou'd not eat, tho' her poor Guts croakt all the while at their disappointment.

It was in one of these morning-slumbers that the agreable Decora fancey'd she saw count Gimcrack rideing Bare-backt upon a colt which galloping up directly to her, cast his feeble Rider plumb into her lap.

I believe when a young Gentlewoman's Elbow itches, she will shortly steal out of bed from her Sister, like Miss Fondlefellow, & notwithstanding her pretended fear of Spirits, go in quest of a more Significant Bedfellow.

So very frail is the strongest female Resolution, at a time when all the humours of the Body flow to the weakest part, and all the passions of the Soul are ripen'd into Love. I believe that the prime Season for Critical minutes, is the merry month of May, because then the Sap rises in the animal as briskly as in the vegetable World.

So Scarrouel while she was a penniless Poets Wife, and consequently kept pretty sharp, had a strong Impulse she shou'd live to carry the Grand Monarch about in Leading-strings and Since the decease of that prodigious Woman, tis said her neice Violetta has had another, that she shall do the same thing by a monarch grander than he.

Clearly the misogynistic agenda of “The Female Creed” runs well beyond the superstition that its title and organizing rubrics assign to women. Women are the very essence of human corruption. Only once this portrait is firmly established within each heading's essay does Byrd go on to attack corruption in the male establishment.

Squire Sparerib has reason to think 7 a happy number, because he repents duly once in Seaven years, of haveing made so many Cuckolds in the city, and so many Cullys at the other end of the Towne. The reason of his Septennial Repentance is plain, he suspects every 7th year to be something of a Climacterick, and consequently to threaten his life. When this sad Revolution comes on, the poor ‘Squire is in great agonys, he fasts his Scragged Carcass to a Skeleton, and out-prays a repenting Harlot. If then he stink for fear at the approach of the Smaller Climactericks, he'll surely dye for fear, when the great one stares him in the face.

A mole under the ingenious Jack Shepherd's left Ear portended he'd come at last, where most Ministers of state deserve to come, to the Gallows.

Thus the day had hardly dawned, when Majr. Bluster dreamt that the Devil, dwellt perpetually on his lips, took him up by the chin, with a Promise to shew him London, but disappointed him sore, and shew'd him Tiburn.

So that great Oracle of Equity, Count Bribantio had a vast partiality for Five, provided it had three significant cyphers after it. Insomuch that whenever his Eys happen'd to be dazzled with this charming number, especially when it cou'd be made Guineas, his Whigg-Integrity all forsook him in an instant. Under so powerfull a temptation he cou'd not forbear prostituting the Kings conscience of which he was the unworthy Keeper, and quite forgot that he was the Guardian of the Widdow and the Fatherless.

What William Byrd is really constructing in “The Female Creed” is a precocious version of the metaphor of “The Female Monster” that Swift, Pope, and others of their circle were to use to great effect in the years immediately succeeding Byrd's essay. In their hands as well, female corporeality, corruptibility, and desire became a metaphor for social corruption in general, and so a vehicle for a social criticism that ranged far beyond women. As Susan Gubar puts it, some of the scriblerians' women are “corroding matter personified.” Further, “the debased arts of the female serve … as an emblem of the corruption of literary and ethical standards in Walpole's England.”⁵ In effect, Swift and Pope are to combine the entropic, annihilating qualities of women as seen in Byrd's commonplace with the bodily corruption and continuing, possessive desire he pictures in “The Female Creed” into a single female monster whose vices—formlessness, mundanity, corruption, insatiability—stand for those of Augustan England. It appears from these cases that in early eighteenth-century England misogyny, self-fear, and social and political alienation were being combined in the minds of marginal men, first of William Byrd, a rejected colonial, and then of Swift and Pope, the Tory artists isolated amidst the corruptions of Walpole's England, into a portrait of pervasive horror whose name, or at least whose central metaphor, was woman.

The William Byrd of the commonplace is thus readily recognizable in the William Byrd of “The Female Creed.” Yet above its scabrous interior “The Female Creed” remains the somewhat gentler satire of women implied in its title and list of outdated superstitions. On this level it makes the superficial but I think meaningful assertion that women are simply repositories of superstition. This accusation in some ways goes back as far as the Malleus Maleficarum, but is not in and of itself a devastating criticism.⁶ What is going on here? Why is the intense misogyny of “The Female Creed” cloaked in such a polite guise?

What is going on, I would suggest, is that William Byrd is in the process of entering the enlightenment. We know this from several immediately succeeding sources. The final pages of his commonplace book, written around 1726, are dominated by a compendium of factual knowledge, a proposal for a universal language, and an entranced commentary on William Wollaston's The Religion of Nature Delineated, itself an effort to construct a rational science of ethics. As a result, on balance the commonplace is no longer an Erasmian commonplace, almost exclusively filled with rhetorical/moral poses and witty court gossip from across the centuries. Instead, it becomes the mnemonic and reflective instrument of a man occupied with useful facts, with schemes for improvement and with the power of reason. These are the very characteristics of practical enlightenment thought. Shortly thereafter, on returning to Virginia in 1726, Byrd confirmed his entry into at least the language and possibly the very cosmology of the enlightenment by describing himself in effect as first mover of his plantation world:

Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flocks and my herds, my bondmen, and bondwomen, and every soart of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independance on every one, but Providence. However tho' this soart of life is without expence yet it is attended with a great deal of trouble. I must take care to keep all my people to their duty, to set all the springs in motion, and to make every one draw his equal share to carry the machine forward. But then tis an amusement in this silent country, and a continual exercise of our patience and oeconomy.

A few years later he was to abandon his earlier defense of slavery and denounce the practice in terms congenial to a new mentality of secular enlightened benevolence, as a violation of the humanity of slaves and masters alike. He even spelled out the solution for this evil practice, an end to the trade in human beings.⁷ The old Tory William Byrd begins to sound more like Thomas Jefferson, the genius of the American enlightenment.

But we note that to be “enlightened,” to speak in terms of abstract first-mover deities and of a secular, rational ethics, was in Byrd's mind in no way inconsistent with the continuation of his own patriarchal power. In fact, the passage in which he depicts himself as first mover invokes that metaphor and the new, mechanistic cosmology which it implies in the service of a stronger image of patriarchy. As first mover the plantation patriarch is no mere biblical figure—though this archaic metaphor is also employed. Rather, he is lifted above the level of mere master, even of biblical father, to the status of a distant deity, whose mere motion is enough to set all the microcosms of the plantation in constant and effective motion for an implied eternity. An effective metaphor indeed! Byrd as first mover is a lofty, distant, immensely powerful creator of a patriarch. In this patriarch's mind the enlightenment could be appropriated not only to ornament his intellect but also to amplify his authority. In the end, it was authority which mattered most to him, as Byrd the enlightened patriarch never freed his slaves but kept them on his plantation as tiny cogwheels in the miniature cosmos which his authority had set in motion.

“The Female Creed” stands at the beginning of William Byrd's impending entry into and appropriation of the enlightenment. In it, he is conducting the initial act of appropriation, the seizure of the newly desacralized cosmology, of the new faith in science, reason, and improvement, by men, or by this man at least, as an asset eventually to be used for his own patriarchal purposes. What we see is of course not the seizure itself, but a reciprocal act by which an about-to-become-enlightened man lifts up in his hands all the “superstitions” of the past age, and consigns them to women. Essentially he is feminizing superstition in order to take masculine possession of the rationality of the enlightenment.⁸

Where did he get the idea? Byrd's own library, though he probably did not have it all with him in London at the time, contained works that treated popular beliefs, witchcraft, fairies, etc., in considerable detail.⁹ Such incompletely identified works as Unheard of Curiosities, Miscellanea Curiosa, History of the Magicians, and Apparitions, all found in the later catalog of his library, very likely treated many beliefs that were even then becoming “superstitions.” Also in his library were Frauds of the Monks and Loyd's Popery, which linked magical and superstitious beliefs to Catholicism, a common association which Byrd also makes. Ben Jonson's works were known to Byrd as well and Jonson's poems include details of fairy behavior found also in “The Female Creed.” Sir William Temple's oeuvre was in Byrd's library as well, and Temple wrote on popular beliefs, including fairies, Puck, and Robin-good-fellow. Joseph Glanville's study of Witchcraft covered nicely, and skeptically, details of demonology also found in Byrd's essay.¹⁰ Other popular beliefs, especially of the upper classes, such as coffee-casting, the Philosopher's stone, and perpetual motion, were surely known to Byrd from experience.

There is a strong suspicion that the catalyst that led Byrd to write “The Female Creed” was Henry Bourne's Antiquitates Vulgares. This book appears not to have been in Byrd's library—unless it is mistitled as Antiquitates Christianae; his books frequently had partially incorrect spine titles and in this case the misnomer would be appropriate to Bourne's intention (see below)—but it first appeared in 1725, just when “The Female Creed” was written. Its encyclopedic form matches that taken by Byrd's essay, and nearly all the arcane details of the very first article of the “Creed,” beginning “I believe, as all good Catholicks ought to do, in Spirits, Demons, and Hobgoblins,” are found in chapters 6, 8, 10, and 11 of Bourne and are seldom found so closely woven together in other sources.¹¹ If Bourne was Byrd's inspiration, the transmutation the Virginian worked on his source is interesting. Bourne was an Anglican curate who attributed the vulgar beliefs he chronicled to ordinary men and women alike. His object was characteristic of the early enlightenment, namely to cleanse popular life of ceremonies based on beliefs “almost all superstitious, being generally either the produce of Heathenism; or the Inventions of Indolent Monks, who having nothing else to do, were the Forgers of many silly and wicked Opinions, to keep the World in Awe and Ignorance.”¹² Some popular beliefs, however, he considered either socially functional or consistent with a latitudinarian Anglicanism. Here, he felt that his aim “to wipe off … the Dust they have contracted, to clear them of Superstition, and make known their End and Design, may turn [them] to some Account, and be of Advantage.”¹³ Byrd in turn culled out from Bourne and from other readings only beliefs worthy of scorn, and attributed them to women. He was that eager to consign the magical past to women, because only by so doing could he stand secure in a masculinized, enlightened rationality.

There was a terrible irony in this action, for what William Byrd thereby assigned to women was not only the world of magic and wonder in which European men and women had lived since before history began, but also his own personal past. He was fleeing as fast as he could from the frightened, credulous William Byrd who, on June 21, 1710, had recorded: “About five nights since I dreamed I saw a flaming star in the air at which I was much frightened and called some others to see it but when they came it disappeared. I fear this portends some judgement to this country or at least to myself.” There had been several such apocalyptic dreams and portents in Byrd's early life, as he adjusted to the high mortality of Virginia after his first return there in 1705 as a young man of thirty. At one point he was to dig up his dead father and try to read a message of death and redemption in the corpse's face.¹⁴ As late as 1716 in London he would go to a “conjurer,” a fortune-teller, at a time when he was having still more prophetic dreams.¹⁵ Now, less than ten years later, a maritally and politically defeated and probably no more confident William Byrd was seizing new truths, the truths of reason and improvement, to save himself from oblivion. To consolidate his progress in this endeavor he dumped on women as mere “superstition” the articles of his own former faith, namely prophetic dreams, visions, signs, conjurers, fortune-tellers, the lot: “I [Woman] believe in astrologers, coffee-casters and Fortune-tellers of every denomination. … I believe in Dreams, Visions, and Impulses by which Guardian Angels and Friendly Demons impart timely notices to us of things to come.” Through this opened door, a door into his own past, really, he poured scorn on “superstitious” women for their bodies as well. In exorcising women he was exorcising his own past beliefs and revealing his fears about himself, the fear that he was not modern enough, the fear, perhaps, that his own body and self were corruptible. Such was the psychology of “rational” empowerment for this man.

Just for the record, what was the exact nature of the new world that William Byrd was masculinizing and scrambling to enter, the reciprocal of his indictment of “female” superstition as embodied in “The Female Creed”? A world without mystery; a world without supernatural beings save a distant, first-moving deity, with no fairies, no witches, no Puck, no Robin-good-fellow; a world with no fate in its stars, unable to foretell its future, in which coffee grounds were but scrap and animals not portents but only organisms; a world in which the body held no signs but only scientifically understandable mechanisms; a world without prophetic dreams and visions; in which death watch beetles were just a species that ate wood, candle smoke mere pollution without images of the future in it, and an itch just a tremor of the nerves, a sign of nothing more; a world in which time was uniform and without auspicious or fateful moments, a pin just a pin, a number just a quantity, and spilled salt something to be swept up; a world with no Philosopher's stone, and in which the circle was forever unsquareable in the light of modern mathematics. But perhaps he did not see it in this cold light: to William Byrd the enlightenment was mostly fashion and power.

I have called the misogyny implied in this discarding of former selves and former intellectual fashions, and in the dumping of these on women, “gentle.” You may wonder why, since it reveals the gendered savagery of a man scrambling to be intellectually fashionable, and hides in its subtexts a hatred of the female body even deeper than that being entered concurrently in his commonplace book. Yet in the end it is gentle, for in the end Byrd's ultimate accusation against women is that they are intellectually unfashionable. While this charge hoists lustful and possessive woman on her own petard by consigning her to be that which she most fears, unfashionable, it is, in and of itself, not a vicious attack on women. Compared to what lay beneath the surface, buried in Byrd's commonplace or deep in the body of the “Creed” itself, an outdated superstition is a gentle rubric for identifying women. And my question is, why? Why, in an age soon to be noted for the savagery of its public as well as private misogyny, did William Byrd in public discourse feel it best to subsume his deeper purposes under the relatively gentle misogynistic accusation that women were at best unfashionable and at worst irrational?

There were surely several reasons but, for what it is worth, I think one of them is that he had no choice. The reason for this is connected with the nature of the enlightenment itself. I would suggest, very tentatively, that a worldview known for its benevolence, optimism, and faith in human reason, could not, at least on the surface, long continue to indulge openly and primarily in the vicious sexual, corporeal misogyny that made women a race of inhuman, lustful, annihilating demons. Demons were, as “The Female Creed” demonstrates, passing out of fashion, so female demons likewise were no longer acceptable. Moreover, a creed, the enlightenment, known for its optimism could hardly continue to indulge in public in explicit nightmare visions of female entropy. Finally, the new faith in human rationality would eventually imply for some enlightenment thinkers at least the potential rationality of both genders and all races. Women could not automatically be considered an utterly irrational, totally separate race. So I would suggest that Swift and Pope, these Tory misogynists, were the last of a dying breed, the public and coruscating misogynist, the crafter of feral female demons, of gendered nightmares and entropic disorders. And I would suggest that the gentler satire that provides the largest frame for “The Female Creed,” and beneath whose mild headings Byrd hides his severer misogynies, reflects William Byrd's subliminal awareness that just as superstition was going out of style in a new age, so was raw, public misogyny. If he wanted to appropriate the enlightenment, he had to be at least superficially polite to women. Hatred was delegated to his subtext.

The enlightenment cut both ways, of course. Byrd's subtexted hatred of female corporeality was partly related to the personal frustrations over access to power and resources taken up in his commonplace book, but it was also itself enhanced by his very movement into the early enlightenment. What he was exorcising, in “woman's” voice, which was really his own voice, was “woman” in himself in all its dimensions, the superstitious and the corporeal, the credulous and the corruptible, the frivolous and the fleshly self. All this was preparation for his entry into the disembodied, benevolent rationality of a new cosmology, a cosmology which he had masculinized by rejecting with contempt all that was superstitious or corporeal, even within himself, as “female.” But all these operations were nonetheless subsumed under the general tone of civility with which an enlightened man had to treat women in public discourse.

Private misogyny was, however, another matter. In 1725, in his commonplace book, William Byrd still felt free to cast the war of the sexes not only as anatomical and sexual but as a virtual race war of annihilation whose stakes were order and disorder. Forty years later, so did one of his successors in Virginia.

Notes

1. “The Female Creed” is in Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, ed. Maude H. Woodfin and Marion Tinling (Richmond, 1942), 449-75. Susan Gubar's “The Female Monster,” Signs 3, 2 (Winter 1977 and Deborah Laycock's “Dreams and Bubbles: The Sexual Politics of South Sea Investment,” delivered at the Western Meeting of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, San Diego, February 1991 (Professor Laycock is in the Department of English, University of Iowa), leave little doubt that, until the mid-eighteenth century, there were virtually no limits on publicly printed misogyny in England, and suggest that if anything the intensity of public misogynistic discourse peaked between 1690 and 1740.

2. Misogyny remained active in the printed medical literature, however, and under this “scientific” disguise probably became more marked with time: see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

3. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (N.Y., 1971).

4. For more male misogyny prompted by the South Sea Bubble, see Deborah Laycock, “Dreams and Bubbles.”

5. Gubar, “The Female Monster,” 388-89.

6. Malleus Maleficarum, Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, trans., ed. and with an introduction by Montague Summers (London, 1928).

7. The quotation “one of the patriarchs” is in Byrd, The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1689-1776, ed. Marion Tinling (Charlottesville, 1977), v. I, 355, letter to Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrey, July 5, 1726; the critique of slavery is in Correspondence, II, 487, in a letter to Lord Egmont.

8. This feminization of superstition has been noticed in passing in Peter Wagner's paper on another aspect of “The Female Creed,” “The Female Creed: William Byrd as Ribald Satirist,” unpublished paper, Peter Wagner, Department of Modern Languages, University of Aston in Birmingham, and Jan Lewis's current research includes an inquiry into a similar phenomenon in Hamilton's Federalist essays.

9. This is the so-called Stretch catalog, made in 1777 before the library was sold, and printed in John Spenser Bassett, The Writings of Colonel William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esquire (N.Y., 1901), 413-43.

10. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, footnotes all of these authors under his discussions covering the same beliefs Byrd chronicles in “The Female Creed.”

11. Henry Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares, or, The Antiquities of the Commonplace People (Newcastle, 1725). I am grateful to my colleague Thomas Tentler for this reference.

12. Bourne, Antiquitates, Preface.

13. Bourne, op. cit., loc. cit.

14. See Kenneth Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II (Chapel Hill, 1987), 43-5.

15. See Another Secret Diary, January-February 1718.