Plotting materialism: W. Charleton's The Ephesian Matron, E. Haywood's Fantomina, and Feminine consistency

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 195-214

  Thompson, Helen ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950249815     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2002.0017     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. Richard Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), 16.
2. In opposition to those who take Restoration culture as the "product of a single Foucauldian rupture" (17)
3. Kroll evokes the "distinctively neoclassical ideology of contingency" (62).
4. Kroll, The Material Word, 39.
5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), 79.
6. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991). Radway offers the following exposition of the text of an exemplary contemporary romance: "[The romantic hero] here embodies an ideal hero's love for his heroine in the image of a mother who stays with her child through a storm to soothe away its fears . . . This romantic heroine is not excited by brutality but sensuously aroused by the promise of being nurtured as a child is by its mother. [This text's] descriptions make it unusually clear that the fantasy that generates the romance originates in the oedipal desire to love and be loved by an individual of the opposite sex and in the continuing pre-oedipal wish that is part of a woman's inner-object configuration, the wish to regain the love of the mother and all that it implies -erotic pleasure, symbiotic completion, and identity confirmation" (146).
7. The "relational poverty" (151) enjoined upon women by the oedipal family -in which a girl's heterosexual object-choice follows from her disidentification with the father and the rupture of her previously nurturing/desiring relation to her mother -is resolved in the hero who embodies mother and lover at once: "He is the ideal male partner who is capable of fulfilling both object roles in this woman's triangular inner-object configuration. His spectacular masculinity . . . confirms the completeness of her rejection of her childlike self. At the same time, his extraordinary tenderness . . . means she does not have to give up the physical part of her mother's attentions . . . The symbolic recovery of primary love and the total security and identity confirmation it implies finally enable her to embrace her new identity as a mature woman" (147).
8. In other words, the contemporary romance fantasy allows women to have their (post-oedipal) cake and eat (pre-oedipal) it too, resolving Freud's famous insight into the contradictory process of feminine development under patriarchy in the figure of the tender but spectacularly masculine hero. Radway's reading of the cultural function of the romance relies upon the Barthesian insight that realistic novelistic form converts patriarchal necessity into personal contingency: "[T]he romantic myth is itself disguised in the form of the realistic novel" (198);
9. "Romance writers, in effect, supply a myth in the guise of the truly possible" (207).
10. Although the materialist elaboration of romantic character is not realistic (or even, I will argue, distinctly interiorized), one might productively consider the increasingly pressing relevance of Radway's insight into the formal union of necessity and contingency to such texts as Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740).
11. Radway makes the following cautionary observation (to those, perhaps, who would stress the purely utopic potential of popular culture): "Its vociferous defense of human individuality and freedom notwithstanding, American society is still remarkably successful at exacting the necessary compliance from its female members" (208).
12. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1996), 5.
13. William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998), 166.
14. Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 171.
15. The word "carefree" derives from Warner's global synopsis of "the whole system of print entertainment, the whole mis-en-scène of the ego securing its ends within a masquerade of the social, the whole possibility of a carefree absorption of the reader in novel reading" (175).
16. Along these lines, Warner invokes "the hopeful, carefree movement toward the new that is built into the very nature of seriality" (168);
17. thus Aphra Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister enables "potentially Utopian spaces of relative equals, like the masquerade . . . [and] allows its characters to pursue the thing they desire with remarkable freedom" (75).
18. Judith Butler, "Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex," in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 97.
19. For a discussion of masquerade as Utopia that strongly anticipates Warner's discussion of romance fantasy, disguise, and the "overriding impulse . . . towards freedom" articulated by these texts, see Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986); citation from 51.
20. Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1730 ed.; repr. New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 29.
21. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 124.
22. Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, 88.
23. See Doody's The True Story of the Novel for an account of the critical force of a "simple progressivism" (3) that has valorized the "bourgeois individualism" (5) apparently expressed by the novel. Doody's contention that "romance and the novel are one" (15) constitutes, to my mind, a profoundly feminist revision of literary history, one that deeply affects our historiography of Western literary / bourgeois / political subjectivity (these categories are conflated, most notably, by Jürgen Habermas).
24. For a generic treatment of romance that defines its difference from the novel as the function of a change in the epistemological status of narrative, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987).
25. The Satyricon of Petronius, trans. William Arrowsmith (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1959), 121.
26. This phrasing is consistent with Satyrica, trans. R. Bracht Branham and Daniel Kinney (London: J. M. Dent, 1996), 107.
27. Sir Walter Charleton, The Ephesian Matron, in The Sensational Restoration, ed. H. James Jensen (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996), 65.
28. Charleton, The Ephesian and Cimmerian Matrons, Two Notable Examples of the Power of Love and Wit (London: Henry Herringman, 1668), prefatory letter to The Ephesian Matron.
29. In "Walter Charleton's Early Life 1620-1659, and Relationship to Natural Philosophy in Mid-Seventeenth Century England" (Annals of Science 30, 3 [1973|: 311-40), Lindsay Sharp refutes the claims of Robert Kargon (see n. 22, below) and others that Charleton met Hobbes before Hobbes's return to England from Paris in 1652.
30. On the issue of Charleton's turn to Epicureanism from the hermetic tradition marked by his early adherence to Helmont and Paracelsus, among others, see Sharp and Nina Rattner Gelbart, "The Intellectual Development of Walter Charleton," Ambix 18, 3 (1971): 149-68.
31. For an account of Epicureanism's British reception which supplements that of Richard Kroll, see Charles Trawick Harrison, "The Ancient Atomists and English Literature of the Seventeenth Century," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 45 (1934): 1-79.
32. Charleton, The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature. A Physico-Theological Treatise (London: Printed by J. F. for William Lee, 1652), 44.
33. This argument is articulated most clearly by Robert Kargon in Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
34. See also Kargon's introduction to Charleton's Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1966).
35. Although they do not discuss Charleton at length, see Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993)
36. and John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996); Rogers briefly references the early, "vitalist" Charleton.
37. Charleton's other amorous narrative is The Cimmerian Matron (1668), first published as a companion piece to The Ephesian Matron. It too modernizes a classical plot (of Boccaccio and of the Indian collection of tales the Pantchatantra) and is concerned with feminine inconstancy and the substitution, mutilation, and radical indifference of amorous bodies. The Cimmerian Matron is repr. in Charles C. Mish, Restoration Prose Fiction 1660-1700: An Anthology of Representative Pieces (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970).
38. The Philosophy of Epicurus: Letters, Doctrines, and Parallel Passages from Lucretius, trans. and introd. George K. Strodach (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1963), 127.
39. For another translation, see The Epicurus Reader, trans. Brad In wood and L. P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994).
40. Strodach, The Philosophy of Epicurus, 128.
41. Charleton, The Ephesian Matron, ed. Jensen, 69.
42. Charleton states that men and women are "impelled to the act of generation" through "a certain knowledge of the goodness or fitness in the object . . . this goodness or fitness, being not otherwise to be known but by the outward marks, or signs of its appearing in male and female, is no sooner discovered to the senses and imagination, but the appetite attending that knowledge, is excited and set on work to love and pursue that object, in which the fitness doth appear . . . The marks, by which that fitness makes itself known, being the shape and form of the body, and all its parts peculiar to each sex: hence it unavoidably follows, that the male-beauty is only the mark of the good constitution for the active power in generation; as the female-beauty is only the mark of the passive;
43. and that the desire or appetite, which ariseth upon the discovery of those signs, and solicits either male or female to the act of conjunction . . . is that passion we call love of a different sex ..." (The Ephesian Matron, ed. Jensen, 68-9).
44. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 623.
45. For a discussion that places Locke at the onset of a major shift in the philosophical integration of thought ("soul," in Epicurean terms) and matter, see John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983).
46. Eliza Haywood, Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze, in Popular Fiction by Women 1660-1730, eds. Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 227. Subsequent citations from this edition are noted parenthetically.
47. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 4
48. This is very frequently the case for Haywood. For another extremely strong articulation of the impossibility of feminine constancy, see Haywood, The British Recluse (1722).
49. Warner comments upon the resemblance of this micro-plot to Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740).
50. Charleton, The Immortality of the Human Soul, Demonstrated by the Light of Nature (London: Henry Herringman, 1657), 103-4.
51. In making this point I diverge from Warner's claim that disguise plots like that of Fantomina envision "a species of feminine magic" continuous with the following contemporary developments: "Today's women's magazines continue to underwrite the magic of the 'makeover.' By adding exercise, diet, and plastic surgery to the age-old resources of clothes and cosmetics, these magazines offer medico-scientific support to the notion that the most ordinary girls could be a Cinderella" (196). Haywood's vision of performative transformation distinguishes between objective change to the features of a single body and gestural transformation of one whole body into another. In the present, the distinction between performance (gesture) and remedial surgery may be lost, but this is neither conceptually nor formally the case for Haywood.
52. Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1993), 61.
53. The phrase "assume the feminine role" proceeds from Luce Irigaray's "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine," in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 76.
54. Although Doane explicitly valorizes "a certain distance between oneself and one's image" as central to masquerade's potential as "resistance" (cited in Craft-Fair-child, Masquerade and Gender, 60)
55. Irigaray's more cryptic invocation of mimicry cannot be aligned with this split. In fact, to return to the passage on mimicry that Craft-Fairchild cites, Irigaray envisions a paradoxical scenario whereby a woman might "try to recover the place of her exploitation," to "resubmit herself -inasmuch as she is on the side of the 'perceptible,' of 'matter' -to 'ideas,' in particular ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic." Women "are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere: another case of the persistence of 'matter'. . ." (Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender, 76, italics Irigaray's).
56. The impossibility of a feminine subject under patriarchy is reflected in an elsewhere that can be qualified neither as matter nor idea (insofar as neither are "hers"), but rather as what Irigaray calls "playful repetition" and what I call "consistency": Haywood's heroine resubmits herself to a masculine logic but also remains unqualifiably "elsewhere."
57. According to Locke, "Man (by being Master of himself, and Proprietor of his own Person, and the Actions or Labour of it) has still in himself the great Foundation of Property." Second Treatise
58. "Property," in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 298-9.
59. See also C. B. Macpherson's reformulation: "The individual, it was thought, was free insomuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities." The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), 2.
60. The moments when Haywood's heroine exults over the success of her performance, far from being ironic, are quite earnest explications of the benefits of her impossible embodiment of object-hood. These asides are, indeed, funny; but, to my mind, their critical force derives from their quite canny confusion of the "real" and the "impossible," of Beauplaisir's vanishing desire and the extension of materialism that it demands. While Haywood's reader cannot fail to appreciate the irony of this scenario, the consolidation of a unified subject dissociated from her performances occurs only once at the margins of Haywood's narrative, when she is addressed by Beauplaisir's multiply-directed letters. And I would suggest, again, that this subject does not respond ironically to her interpellation by those letters.
61. Warner's definition of what constitutes "women's popular culture" is indicative in this regard. He states:" I have noted several fundamental problems with interpreting Behn, Manley, and Haywood as instances of women's popular culture: first, their novels are not cast in the form of an address to a woman reader; second, although the author is sometimes figured as a woman, she is not consistently feminist . . ." (121).
62. It is striking that Warner, who cites Radway at the very outset of his project (xv), nonetheless adopts a criterion for "women's popular culture" that opposes Radway's reading of the cultural function of romance -that it be "consistently feminist. " One might ask whether women's popular culture has ever been, or could ever be, consistently feminist (and, reciprocally, is men's popular culture consistently masculinist?). Radway suggests that the fantasies appropriated by romance readers do not easily sanction the binary of feminist as opposed to nonfeminist or, to paraphrase Craft-Fairchild, of "resistance" as opposed to "compliance." While this position may seem wishy-washy (both Radway and Butler comment upon its stakes), it refuses to reduce an historical, formal and political agency constituted from potentially subversive repetition to the very terms that such a repetition resists.
63. See Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988) for a critique of possessive individualism as it dissimulates the contractual dispossession of women's bodies in the cases of conjugal rights and prostitution.
64. Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) gives a now-classic account of the bourgeois mystification of masculine citizens' privilege into a generalized idea of "humanity."
65. For an elaboration of Astell's critique of possessive individualism, especially as this elucidates the stakes of her royalism, see Ruth Perry, "Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism," in Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, 4 (1990): 444-57.
66. See Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women's Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), for an assessment of the feminist history of Renaissance texts that is also relevant to the eighteenth-century feminist literary history. Of the critical tendency to "[confirm] the continuity of female experiences," Ezell states: "This belief in a uniform female response to life, then, enables us to identify with early women writers and to achieve a sense of a female literary family. Such a belief also results, at its crudest level, in a lamentable tendency to judge the 'feminism' of earlier generations as it meets our standards. This is most noticeable in the treatment of women living and writing before 1800. We worry about whether our literary forebears were 'good' feminists" (26-7).
67. Ezell's discussion of the impact of Virginia Woolf's vision of the self-divided women writer (in A Room of One's Own) upon feminist literary history is especially incisive.
68. See especially "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine," in This Sex Which Is Not One, for Irigaray's discussion of the feminine "subject."
69. For Rosalind Ballaster, pregnancy indeed essentializes Haywood's heroine's sex in a manner that contravenes her previous "mimicry": "Pregnancy is the irrefutable sign of female difference that calls a halt to the woman's 'mimicry' of femininity." Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 191.
70. Charleton, The Ephesian and Cimmerian Matrons, followed by The Mysteries and Miracles of Love (London: Henry Herringman, 1668), 48-9.
71. This phrase comes from Charleton's "An Apology for Epicurus," which precedes Epicurus's Morals (London: Henry Herringman, 1670).
72. Charleton, The Mysteries and Miracles of Love, 49.
73. For a groundbreaking exposition of relation of the term "novelty," especially as this references print news, to the origins of the early modern novel, see Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983).
74. To establish the continuity of print news with early modern narrative, Davis emphatically disavows any connection between the novel and the early romance: "I will argue that the romance is not usefully seen as a forebear of, a relative of, or an influence on the novel . . . there was a profound rupture, a discursive chasm between these two forms" (25). Davis seems to assert as grounds for the continuity of news and novel the strict discontinuity of news and romance, a distinction that is not, at least to my mind, borne out by the subsequent texts he analyzes (especially in his fascinating discussion of early ballads, which position readers as both pedagogical objects and voyeuristic subjects of, specifically, sexual peccadillo).