Heart in the Margins

(I'd like to begin with the complaint that it is weirdly easier for me to focus on writing things when I'm not writing in Word? This may be a problem. This is in fact not my first post-Word option; Scrivener is; but as I sketched out what I wanted to accomplish, page-by-page, in the ten pages of paper I have to write tomorrow and Saturday, I realized that there are exactly three pages whose content remains somewhat mysterious to me, and those are the pages discussing Mary Astell, and Scrivener wasn't helping me figure them out. So here I am.)

Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is actually the text that got me started thinking about this paper. I found it a fascinating read -- about halfway through my notes, somewhere, there is the scrawled phrase "heavenly feminist university scheme!" probably surrounded with hearts or something, because basically Astell's proposal is that women should come together into a communal retreat that would do everything from providing a space for religious devotion to educating women in useful knowledge to supporting real friendship instead of backbiting and gossip to (ultimately) preventing rich single women from being sexually assaulted by men with designs on their fortunes.

Custom, Fashion, and the World

“Thus Ignorance and a narrow Education lay the Foundation of Vice, and Imitation and Custom rear it up. Custom, that merciless torrent that carries all before it, and which indeed can be stem’d by none but such as have a great deal of Prudence and a rooted Vertue” (147)

“ ‘Tis Custom therefore, that Tyrant Custom, which is the grand motive to all those irrational choices which we daily see made in the World, so very contrary to our present interest and pleasure, as well as to our Future. We think it an unpardonable mistake not to do as our neighbours do, and part with our Peace and Pleasure as well as our Innocence and Vertue, merely in complyance with an unreasonable Fashion” (147)
 

“Therefore, one great end of this Institution shall be, to expel that cloud of Ignorance which Custom has involv’d us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful Knowledge, that the Souls of Women may no longer be the only unadorn’d and neglected things.” (152)

A Happier Eden: Undoing the First Fall, Creating Female Friendship and Conversation

While Astell doesn't precisely gender "custom," I do think that there is a sense that her use of "custom" and my use of "patriarchy." Early on, she writes,

“Let us learn to pride ourselves in something more excellent than the invention of a Fashion; And not entertain such a degrading thought of our own worth, as to imagine that our Souls were given us only for the service of our Bodies, and that the best improvement we can make of these, is to attract the Eyes of Men. We value them too much, and our selves too little, if we place any part of our desert in their Opinion; and don’t think our selves capable of Nobler Things than the pitiful Conquest of some worthless heart.” (141)

Rejecting the male gaze as the impetus for female "improvement" [a charged word in the context of pastoral at this point!] opens up a space in which women can encourage and help improve each other -- a space of female friendship that the pressures of the outside world seem to render impossible. When Astell describes her proposed retirement as a “Happy Retreat! which will be the introducing you into such a Paradise as your Mother Eve forfeited” and where “there are no Serpents to deceive you,” the invocation of women's lineage from Eve serves both as a reminder of the biblical justification for some of women's weaknesses and as a promise that that perceived weakness is just another form of "custom" that rears its serpent head and prevents women from achieving their fullest potential as rational creatures (151).

And it is as rational creatures, not just spiritual or emotional ones, that the women of Astell's proposal are called to form a community. Writing against the imagined complaints of men who would reject her proposal as hurtful, Astell counters, “I cannot imagine wherein the hurt lies, if instead of doing mischief to one another, by an uncharitable and vain Conversation, Women be enabled to inform and instruct those of their own Sex at least” (155). Wouldn't it be nice, Astell says, if “In stead of that Froth and Impertinence, that Censure and Pragmaticalness, with which Feminine Conversations so much abound. we should hear their tongues employ’d in making Proselytes to heaven” (164)? What actual conditions would be possible to make this the case?

After seclusion, the first real answer is education:

“What is it but the want of an ingenious Education, that renders the generality of Feminine Conversations so insipid and foolish and their solitude so insupportable? Learning is therefore necessary to render them more agreeable and useful in company, and to furnish them with becoming entertainments when alone” (154)

The "company" imagined here is a specifically feminine company that has little in common with the company of the world. Instead, “this happy Society will be but one Body, whose Soul is love, animating and informing it, and perpetually breathing forth it self in flames of holy desires after GOD and acts of Benevolence to each other” (157). While Astell does emphasize the spiritual nature of her proposed venture, she isn't shy about the educational value she wants women to derive from it: in a sequel pamphlet, responding to critiques, she describes the venture as “rather Academical than Monastic” (179), suggesting that this imagined retreat might serve not only as a place of spiritual but also intellectual growth and power. In the end, the retreat from heterosexual society into a homosocial one is empowering for Astell: “you may more peaceably enjoy your selves, and all the innocent Pleasures it is able to afford you, and particularly that which is worth all the rest, a Noble Vertuous and Disinteress’d Friendship” (151).

While Astell's Proposal is often classed as something of a utopian scheme, certain sections of the text suggest that she has every intention of making this institution a reality. Her proposal, she suggests, needs to be enacted in the real world because it would serve to alleviate the real-world concerns of a particular set of women:

One thing I will say for this particular class, I'm doing a lot more reading in the later seventeenth century than I thought I would ever get the chance to do. I'm an eighteenth-centuryist at heart, and mostly a mid-to-late eighteenth-centuryist (my dissertation will probably start with Richardson and Fielding and end with Austen and Scott, at this point), because mostly I care about the novel. But I do care, more broadly, about what it means to constitute communities in print, and as a result I am starting to care about the rise of the periodical press, and apparently, about the ways in which royalist women writers dealt with their figurative and literal isolation during the civil wars and Interregnum and after the Glorious Revolution.

For this particular paper, I'm interested in representations of virtual vs. actual communities of women, particularly in print (because print circulation itself can create a virtual community out of its readership, the way that manuscript letters don't really accomplish). As a result, I turned to Margaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664) and read them through to see how this collection constructs female sociability and to what ends it does so. Some of these letters may have been written before the Restoration; all of them are written in light of the trauma of the civil wars, which forced Cavendish into exile on the Continent and cost her husband a great deal of his property and wealth. And this is important, because my current thesis about the function of virtual vs. actual (female) communities in Sociable Letters is that Cavendish associates the world of actual sociability with damaging gossip and insecure alliances reminiscent of the civil wars, and as a result casts the royalist retreat from the country (or into the countryside, away from the city and the actual sociability it represents) as a retreat from the warfare amongst women and a retreat to virtual sociability via letters which will always offer more security, and therefore more pleasure.

Now, to back up and actually talk about the evidence that seems to support this.

The Frame

SL is framed as representing

the Correspondence of two Ladies, living at some Short Distance from each other, which make it not only their Chief Delight and Pastime, but their Tye in Friendship, to Discourse by Letters, as they would do if they were Personally together, so that these Letters are an Imitation of a Personal Visitation and Conversation, which I think is Better (I am sure more Profitable) than those Conversations that are an Imitation of Romantical Letters, which are but Empty Words, and Vain Complements. (42)

This introduction suggests a few things, not just about the letters that will be present in this collection, but about the ways in which Cavendish believes these letters will differ from letters written in the "Mode-style" of "our Modern Letter-writers" (42). Her emphasis on the idea that these letters will represent virtually the same kind of discourse these ladies would have "if they were Personally together" suggests that letters typically did not function in the same terms as "Personal Visitation and Conversation." Furthermore, her argument that letters imitating conversation are better than conversations imitating letters suggests that the sincerity of the language employed is of greater importance to her than the distance that separates the conversant parties: be it face to face or via the post, conversation should and can be "personal" (which I suspect she's using in much we way we'd use the phrase "in person" today).

[It's also possible that the fact of there only being two ladies is significant -- when I move on to talking about gossip, I want to suggest that Cavendish finds it most problematic when it happens in larger groups, as opposed to when it happens as a way of passing news between two good friends.]

The first letter of the collection lays out much the same framework: "You were pleas’d to desire, that, since we cannot converse Personally, we should converse by Letters, so as if we were speaking to each other […] so that our Letters may present our personal meetings and associatings" (47). The very notion that letters can "present our personal meetings" suggests that the letter is a powerful vehicle for the creation of virtual sociability that is no less intense (and no less valuable) than the kind of sociability that inheres in face-to-face "personal" encounters.

[I just want to note here that the frame closes weirdly. There are some letters in the end of the collection that are obviously written to Cavendish's real-life acquaintances, rather than to this fictitious "lady," but the final letter acknowledges this and treats the fictitious lady as real, in so doing pointing up the virtual and print-mediated nature of this collection. "As I began this Book with those Letters to you," she writes, "so I will end it, hoping you will Pardon me for Mixing some Letters with those to your self" (286) -- and yet none of the letters have thus far acknowledged that they are being written for a book, rather than being actually written. By suggesting that the recipient of these letters a) is real, and b) knows all along that the letters are part of a "Book" and not part of a correspondence, Cavendish both affirms and breaks down the notion that these letters might be representative of a real correspondence. I don't know quite what to do with this yet, but it really interests me.]

Gossip and women's resentment of other women

The letters that represent women's sociable interactions seem to suggest that these will always end in anger and strife, due to women's need to compete with each other for pride of place and tear each other down in order to promote their own interests. These relationships may be couched under the language of "friendship," but Cavendish seems to be of the opinion that with friends like these, who needs enemies? In an early letter, she writes that “Friendship that is made out of fond Humours, seldom lasts long, especially when they live and bord together...especially Women” (69), and continues,

Thus they may be Friends and Enemies all their Life time, and perchance take a pleasure in being so, for Women for the most part take delight to make Friendships, and then to fall out, and be Friends again, and so to and fro, which is as much Pastime and Recreations to them, as going abroad and staying at home. But I wish all Friends were as constant Friends as your Ladiship and I (70)

The inconstancy Cavendish accuses so-called "friendships" of exhibiting is mirrored in the paired oppositional terms of these sentences: "Friends and Enemies," "to and fro," "going abroad and staying at home." The last sentence, in contrast, concludes by pairing the presumably like terms of "your Ladiship and I." What I find interesting is that this letter begins with the assertion that the reason this particular other pair of women have for being on-again-off-again friends is that they actually "live and bord together" and have to see each other in person on a daily basis. Thus, the slightest suggestion that a virtual correspondence is more salutary to female friendship than an actual series of personal visits.

This idea of women being at odds with each other is developed throughout the collection, leading to statements like the following:

it is so Unusual for one Woman to Praise another, as it seems Unnatural; wherefore she doth not Delight to be Prais’d by her own Sex (116)

it is not only Men that Slander Women, but one Woman Slanders another, indeed, Women are the Chief Dishonourers of their own Sex, not so much by their Crimes, as by the Reproaches of each other (229)

The need for retirement


The civil wars

So as it turns out, one of the early meanings of "gossip" was "One who has contracted spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism" (OED 1). One of the most interesting letters in SL discusses what happens when its writer is "Invited to be a Gossip, to Name the Lady B.Rs. Child, of which she Lyes in" (157). What starts out as an older concept of gossip soon turns into a newer one (something more like "A person, mostly a woman, of light and trifling character, esp. one who delights in idle talk; a newsmonger, a tattler" (OED 3)). Suddenly all of the other women present at such an occasion begin complaining about their terrible husbands. The letter-writer sits and listens in silence for a bit before entering the conversation to tell these women that their complaints won't do any good if they aren't directed at their husbands, and that in fact it reflects poorly upon them if their husbands are poorly behaved.

The resultant scene is metaphorically one of warfare: “the Ladies […] with Anger fell into such a Fury with me, as they fell upon me, not with Blows, but with Words, and their Tongues as their Swords, did endeavour to Wound me [...] it hath so Frighted me; as I shall not hastily go to a Gossiping meeting again, like as those that become Cowards at the Roaring Noise of Cannons, so I, at the Scolding Voices of Women” (158). Being in the midst of a group of women whom you've angered is like being in the midst of a war.

And this isn't the only letter to take up these metaphors. Another describes the way in which high society in towns and cities represents a situation in which “every One is against Another; indeed, every One is against All, and All against every One, and yet through the itch of Talk, Luxury, Wantonness and Vanity, they will Associate into Companies, or rather may I say, Gather into Companies” (79). Cavendish plays on "company," which can mean both a group of people gathered for social purposes and a group of soldiers, gathered to fight in a war, and shortly makes the metaphor explicit by referring to her desire for “Retirement from the publick Concourse and Army of the World” (79). Again, this is connected specifically to gossip as an action primarily undertaken by women against other women: in society, “if any Woman be more Beautiful than commonly the rest are, if she appears to the World, she shall be sure to have more Female Detractors and Slanderers, to ruin her Reputation, than any Monarch hath Souldiers to fight an Enemy” (78-9). The reference to soldiers that might help a monarch fight off an enemy has particular resonance in the writings of a woman whose husband gave a great deal of money to raise armies for the English monarchy during the civil wars, and who lost almost all that he invested [indeed, SL contains a great number of letters about the loss of property the Cavendishes have sustained as a result of the civil wars -- need to reference those in paper]. There are more women gossips, Cavendish suggests, than there are loyal soldiers to support their king. And though it might be something of a stretch, I think it's possible to make an equation between gossip and rebellion/treason [might not make it in this paper as it doesn't seem the kind of thing that M would really buy into, though I totally do]. As a result, Cavendish is left “wish[ing] for the honour of our Sex, that Women could as easily make peace as war” (53) -- both in the nation at large, and amongst themselves.