The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
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a rather vague determination to limit what I take on board to what will advance historical understanding. In this book, however, I want to demonstrate that border crossings among the pieces are possible and worth the effort. Like Samuel Moyn, I am interested in the integration of representations with social structures and practices, though there will be less attention here to the role of concepts in constituting societal structures than to the terms of exchange in structured social practices.15 Within that theoretical agenda, I want to demonstrate that literary hermeneutics—what I am calling a rhetorical approach—are essential to the recovery of social meaning.
The labor/aisance dichotomy requires us to bring the social and the cultural into a working partnership. The dichotomy had an internal logic, by which I mean that, however arbitrary its point of departure in the underlying assumptions of gender difference, its apparently indisputable appeals to the work of “nature”—to the ways in which nature connected things causally and made sense of social difference—provided authoritative justification for the assignment of unequal intelligence to men and women. I want to give explanatory and interpretive bite to a truism often acknowledged in theory but more rarely found in practice: that the logic in question fused gender norms with status norms, the hierarchical norms of “honor” in early modern societies. If feminism seeks the emancipation of women, then advocacy of the emancipation of women’s minds, however tentative from our standpoint, certainly merits, by itself, the name feminist. But feminist scholarship that has largely ignored the logic of the imperatives of honor is seriously flawed; it has given us presentist oversimplifications of early modern articulations of feminism, which are as striking for their self-imposed constrictions as for their emancipatory impulses. In the social and cultural processes in which perceived differences in male and female minds partook of the authority of “nature,” gender norms and status norms reinforced each other. Our modern controversies about intelligence began not in the heads of enlightened philosophers, but in the networks of le monde, the Parisian milieus where the precious qualities of politeness (honnêteté), gallantry (galanterie) and worldliness (mondanité) were the currency of social distinction. In their putatively natural being, manifested in the aisance of their thought and speech, women were the exemplars of the unique honor claimed by le monde. Men had to perform their manliness in leisured conversation with aristocratic women. There was an inherent tension between this performance and the ethos of what I will call the manly mind, a certain sort of ideal intelligence formed by intense, disciplined labor in the Stoic tradition of askesis, in philosophical reasoning, and in the acquisition of learning.
We speak of a process of feminization that extended into the eighteenth century. Polite status required men to emulate their female counterparts in manners and above all in conversational sociability. But not to emulate them too much; the specter of “effeminacy,” already a presence in the seventeenth century, stalked Shaftesbury’s thought and became something of an obsession, the trope for a drumbeat of anxiety, in the eighteenth century, especially in Britain but also in France. In a persistent stereotype, the “fop” betrayed his effeminacy in his excessive delicacy, his overly demonstrative expression of feeling, and his preoccupation with the latest fashions (especially French). A widespread adaptation of civic humanism made effeminacy emblematic of the softening effect of excessive luxury in a rapidly commercializing civilization of speculation and consumerism.16 Within a discursive tradition that descried the vitiation of “character,” understood as the social representation of the inner autonomy of “virtue,” our focus will be on strength of mind as the critical ground of character. Manly integrity was acceding to womanish dissembling, the corrupting art of presenting a false self; manly courage to cowardice; manly rigor and energy to vanity and indolence. Men of excessive sensibility had an “effeminacy of mind,” the ever vigilant moralist Vicesimus Knox wrote in 1782, as seen in their flight from “vigorous pursuits and manly exertion.”17
One of my aims is to contribute to changing an originally troubled relationship between intellectual history and feminist history into one of mutual support. Until quite recently intellectual history was not a pathbreaker in denaturalizing gender categories. Its practitioners either entirely ignored male-centeredness or accepted it on its own terms. But we have begun to recognize that, in the effort to make sense of processes and meanings of gender differentiation, the two fields need each other. My aim, I should stress, is not to add a “gender” dimension to what we already understand about the thought of a particular historical figure, but to follow, as far as it will take me, an angle of approach that gives us a new understanding of the central concerns of her thought.18 This kind of re-reading can fairly be called “cultural,” but without a thoroughgoing practice of intellectual history it cannot be accomplished. We need to understand how gender differentiation at once infused and was infused by a wide range of currents of thought in early modern European intellectual life. The most important of them will be familiar to students of the era: Malebranche’s Augustinianism and Cartesianism; Mme de Lambert’s classical ideal of virtue and friendship; Shaftesbury’s Stoicism and English republicanism; David Hume’s mitigated philosophical skepticism, as well as his reliance on the notions of sympathy and sensibility; Mme Necker’s blending of sentiment and enlightened Calvinism; Diderot’s shift, via a kind of Stoicism, from sensibility to vitalist materialism; Mme d’Épinay’s Stoic logic for female emancipation. There was something protean about the Stoic tradition. If Stoicism typically guided men, and only men, though a rigorous askesis, a solitary exercise in rational reflectivity, it could also be a grounding for women’s as well as men’s moral autonomy. It will be a thread running through the book.
I also want to add to our growing awareness that, however clearly drawn gender differences were in the early modern era, they did not imprint one unvarying template on individual subjectivities. It is important to distinguish between how in “underlying normative structures” gender differences were conceived as binary opposites, and what they could be taken to imply, or how they could be normatively reconfigured, in discursive practice. If the question educated men faced was how to be polite without being stigmatized as effeminate, the corresponding question for women was how to display their intellectual abilities without seeming to be man-like and hence unnatural creatures, the freaks evoked by the term “learned woman” (femme savante). There were binaries: strength/weakness; hardness/softness; willed action on a resistant Nature/passivity as Nature’s instrument; self-sufficiency/dependence; abstraction/sensate particularity; rational judgment/the fantasies of the imagination; labor/indolence. They operated in tightly clustered metaphors and had deep and tenacious root systems, as evidenced by their remarkable consistency over the period we cover, despite shifts in the medical paradigms that underlay them. Today the notion of “fluidity” in gender differences is becoming a commonplace. But the binaries still fix differences; compliance with the natural requires inward muting and silencing for both sexes. Precisely because the binaries are fixed, they at once overlie anxiety about identity and fuel it. “Manliness,” Pierre Bourdieu has observed, “is an eminently relational notion, constructed in front of and for other men and against femininity, in a kind of fear of the female, firstly in oneself.”19
And yet we know that in the early modern era, as in any other era, there was a measure of confusion in gender roles, and that is not at all surprising. The cognitive capacities and other attributes assigned exclusively either to men or to women are better conceived as currents and cross currents on a spectrum than as neatly divided into two different kinds. If taken in their apparent rigidity, the binaries leave no spaces for a middle zone of variations in construction as a social and cultural process; in the social configurations in which these variations operate; in the suppleness of their meaning in social exchange; and in the rhetorical performances that represent them. These are the spaces I have tried to explore.
The men and women of this book thought and wrote within large-frame structural changes in social relations and cultural practices. To encompass both “the constructed quality of the entire social world” and the importance of “material instantiation” and especially the “material social fabric,” William H. Sewell, Jr., has proposed the term “built environment.”20 Our story progresses through episodes in the building of what our historical agents viewed as the modern, in the sense of the new or recent. Placing our texts within these experiences of change is essential to understanding