THE FEMINIZATION DEBATE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND. Literature, commerce and luxury. E. J. Clery. 234pp. Palgrave Macmillan. Paperback, £18.99. (US $27.95). - 0 333 77732 8.
What connects Clarissa, Samuel Richardson's doorstop of a novel, and coffee (apart from needing plenty of the latter to get through the former)?
E. J. Clery answers that question with a single, unattractive lump of a word:
"feminization", as in the title of her new book, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England. Clery begins with coffee, and the warning that feminization, or "the promise of reform through the example of female virtue", was not necessarily a good thing for women. It was a discourse that "failed to address the real problems facing women in every rank of society -inadequate legal rights and the sexual double standard, lack of access to education, paid work and fair wages". In fact, it "exacerbated" these problems "by imposing new restrictive definitions of idealized femininity". Misogynists denounced the baleful influence of women on society as "effeminacy", whereas Richardson, among others, argued that men should both accept and adopt superior feminine virtues. Only exceptional women counted, though, and, most exceptionally, women who wrote. So the progressive idea of benign feminization and the misogynist fear of malign effeminacy equally well betray an obsession with the permeability of the male psyche.
Clarissa (1747-8) is central to Clery's slim and subtle Feminization Debate.
Its heroine, the eponymous Miss Harlowe, is nothing if not exceptional: a model of morality and a prolific writer (of letters), "excelling all (her) sex".
"Every eye . . . is upon you", her friend Anna Howe says at the novel's outset, "with the expectation of an example." Clarissa's nemesis, the libertine Lovelace, also wants to make an example of her, which is why he abducts her, tries repeatedly to seduce her, and finally rapes her. "All I have done to her", he remarks of one close nocturnal encounter, "would have been looked upon as a frolic only, a romping-bout, and laughed off by nine parts in ten of the sex accordingly." If he can reduce this "angel" to the status of a mere woman, he reckons, "What a triumph (this will be) over the whole sex!".
For Lovelace, the female of the species is a biologically inferior version of the male: a "softer Man", as Pope contemptuously terms her, or a body grotesquely buttressed between corsets, cosmetics and frippery, as imagined by Swift. As such, women incline towards "corruption, weakness, cowardice, luxury, immorality and the unbridled play of passions". But there was an antithetical heresy that taught that sexuality was, in fact, bipolar; women, a separate sex, embodied separate virtues: "sociability, civility, compassion, domesticity and love of family, the dynamic exercise of the passions and, above all, refinement, the mark of modernity". To a nation determined to be modern, these qualities would prove as vital as business acumen and a stomach for the high seas.
Richardson himself does not distance Clarissa from the bustle of the real world.
