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Dangerous Intimacies
Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel
By Lisa L. Moore Duke University Press
Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9654-3
CHAPTER 1
Resisting Reform: Millenium Hall
Millenium Hall' and the Lesbian Canon
Sarah Scott's 1762 novel begins this study because it seems to have summarized assumptions about female friendship that were circulating throughout early-eighteenth-century culture, codifying them into a form that became influential for both novelists and readers throughout the latter half of the century. The novel depicts a community of women who eschew marriage and live together, performing charitable works, educating and employing the surrounding villagers, and engaging in pursuits of "rational piety" themselves, including reading, drawing, and music. Such a scene would seem to nominate the novel for a prominent place in the canon of lesbian-feminist representation. In the first full-length article to appear on the novel since its 1986 republication, George Haggerty summarizes nearly a decade of published and unpublished opinion when he claims that Millenium Hall constructs "narrative authority for women-loving-women and offers women in general an escape from the prison-house of patriarchal narrative." Haggerty finds the novel a powerful affirmation of "lesbian narrative" (117) that transgresses "the boundaries set for women in the eighteenth century" (118). The novel's popularity, however, seems to conflict with such an account of its destabilizing effect on its eighteenth-century reading audience. Millenium Hall went through four editions in the sixteen years following its publication in 1762, which indicates a fairly wide readership. What are the grounds of the novel's appeal for the middle-class readers (probably both men and women) whose interest in "romantic friendship" kept it in circulation? How can we reconcile claims about the novel's radical effects with its widespread popularity and undeniable conservatism? Why is its separatist vision neither a threatening nor a subversive one in terms of eighteenth-century culture?
To address these questions, we must examine the novel's careful construction of a particular form of power—bourgeois, domestic female virtue— as the legitimate property of the middle-class women characters of Millenium Hall. Defined in opposition to public, political, and particularly sexual power, this class-specific form of female agency sketches out the possibility of female homosocial institutions and practices that work with rather than against class and gender hierarchies. In constructing a space within which upper-class ladies might live together rather than with men, die novel works to further, rather than problematize or hinder, the spread of a bourgeois modernity crucially predicated on the centrality and naturalness of the heterosexual family. (This structure is itself a historically specific form of the much older social hierarchy of men over women.) The novel thus presents a paradox for feminist criticism: an all-female Utopia that nevertheless strenuously resists the possibility of a critique of the emerging gender and sexual norms of the mid—eighteenth century.
What was seductive for women readers in particular about the women characters of Millenium Hall, women praised for their sexual unattractiveness and resistance to pleasure? The women of Millenium Hall, I would argue, represent a specific form of power that was available to bourgeois women within the patriarchal family structures that during the eighteenth century came to be central in the construction of bourgeois hegemony across society. To define this new category, we can turn to Nancy Armstrong's account of "the power of domestic surveillance," which provides the means for a necessary gender-marking of Foucault's notion of the "panoptic gaze." For Foucault, modern disciplinary society functions by means of this gaze: "Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere." Power operates through the constant play and possibility of the gaze, creating for itself "a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance." But Foucault's Panopticon, like Scott's Millenium Hall, did have physical effects. In its power to deform and reform bodies, "it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals." Although the women of Millenium Hall disclaim the title "reformer," their community sets the stage for various social experiments, sometimes carried out on their own bodies but more often on those of the poor around them. In enabling these bodily marks and changes, the Millenium Hall women consolidate their own power as agents of the panoptic gaze.
Armstrong argues that the emergence of modern bourgeois subjectivity was crucially predicated on the development of a particular gendered identity, that of the virtuous domestic woman. Her characteristic activity was "domestic surveillance," the ceaseless observation of the intersections of power and subjectivity in the household. The domestic woman, according to Armstrong, "was inscribed with values that addressed a whole range of competing interest groups and, through her, these groups gained authority over domestic relations and personal life. In this way, furthermore, they established the need for the kind of surveillance upon which modern institutions are based." Given these high stakes, then, the appeal of the constrained role of the domestic woman for Scott and her woman characters and readers becomes clearer. The confinement of women to the domestic space actually placed them at the intersection of the competing sets of hierarchies struggling to achieve hegemony over the formation of modern subject relations; in Armstrong's words, "the notion of the household as a specifically feminine space established the preconditions for a modern institutional culture." To occupy the position of operating those intersections through surveillance was indeed, as Armstrong claims, "a form of power," one that beckoned beguilingly to middle-class women from the pages of many eighteenth-century domestic novels. But how could women who refused to participate in heterosexual norms, who "failed" to marry, come to occupy such a central position? How is female sexuality constructed in Scott's novel such that the power of domestic surveillance becomes an attribute of romantic friendship?
In the following reading of Millenium Hall, I aim to exemplify the extent of domestic female power in mid-eighteenth-century culture but also to move away from Armstrong's emphasis on its success by identifying the limitations and constraints it posed for the very women who hoped to be enabled by it. Armstrong's account fails to distinguish between the agency of the middle-class women whom eighteenth-century novels placed at the heart of culture and that of the culture such a placement served. She claims that "the power of all the domestic cliches we have grown half ashamed to live by... was given to women and exercised through them," without appearing to notice that to have power "given" to them, women must not have been in complete control of the forms, effects, and distribution of that power. The effectiveness of power was guaranteed, according to Armstrong, by its ability to pass for a "natural" psychological state, desire. Thus, "the domestic woman exercised a form of power that appeared to have no political force at all because it seemed forceful only when it was desired." In such a formulation, desire, pleasure, and sexuality adhere seamlessly to the interests of bourgeois politics as its primary naturalizing agents. To point to the powerlessness of bourgeois women, according to Armstrong, is to participate in a "rhetoric of victimization" that garners them even more power. In contrast, I want to offer an account of the contested construction of female sexuality in Scott's novel that renders desire a much more recalcitrant and complicated category than these statements allow. In my view, the argument that domestic female power was able successfully to mask and naturalize itself as mere "desire" takes the claims of novels such as Millenium Hall too much in their own terms; this promise of a seamlessly successful form of female power was exactly the lure that bourgeois ideology was beginning to hold out to women in the eighteenth century. In the second part of the chapter, then, I will document the novel's inadvertent portrait of the mutilating, abusive "experiments" performed by bourgeois women themselves in the service of domestic ideology, to discipline them into agents of a bourgeois hegemony in which the bodies and desires of women become objects, rather than agents, of this new form of patriarchal culture.
Thus the novel tells a conflicted story about domestic female power. On one hand, bourgeois women can operate such power in ways that produce hierarchies in which they are privileged; on the other hand, these very hierarchies are the locations in which the novel's female characters are abused and dominated. This contradiction helps account for the emptiness of the novel's most persistent metaphor—that is, slavery. Enslavement is the image the novel uses most frequently to express the conditions the Millenium Hall ladies are trying to escape or ameliorate, and the rhetoric of abolition informs the novel's language at crucial points. Sarah Scott was familiar with contemporary antislavery arguments; twelve years after the publication of Millenium Hall, in The History of Sir George Ellison she wrote a detailed critique of the cruelty of Caribbean slave masters, which culminated in an economic and moral argument for the humane treatment of slaves (though not for abolition itself). Strangely, however, the English trade in slaves is never mentioned in Millenium Hall. The metaphor of slavery keeps the historical fact of the trade in human beings always hovering at the edge of the novel, but within the language of the novel itself, slavery is an empty category, drained of historical and social reference in the service of British domestic ideology. In the final section of this chapter, then, I will investigate how the rhetoric of slavery illuminates both the privilege of the Millenium Hall ladies and the limits of that privilege. The precarious balance between protofeminist critique and bourgeois accommodation turns out to depend on die simultaneous invocation of physical force and its insistent attenuation to the status of empty metaphor. Scott's novel offers an early instance of the way in which the emergence of British feminist argument depended not only on abolition but also on slavery itself.
By examining the rhetoric of slavery that structures certain key conflicts in the representation of female friendship in Millenium Hall, I point to die novel's involvement in an important Enlightenment discourse of liberation: abolition. As Moira Ferguson has demonstrated in her landmark study Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834, abolitionist discourse was an important precursor to English feminism, a relationship that created an uneasy, often one-sided, alliance between Englishwomen and the Africans they almost never knew. Women arguing for their own education or enfranchisement, Ferguson notes, "were prone to refer loosely to themselves as slaves" throughout this period. Thus, over the course of the century, the term "slavery" in Englishwomen's writing acquired layers of meaning that drifted away from direct reference to the trade in human beings. Slavery became a popular metaphor for all kinds of oppression, in the process often losing its directiy political charge and contestatory status and serving instead to refer to any of the purely personal limitations that Enlightenment theories were discovering as hindrances to human progress. This detachment of discussions of slavery from any acknowledgment of its most obvious and literal example in the experience of eighteenth-century English people, however, grounds the metaphoric use of "slavery" on a contradiction that constantly threatens to undo the discursive work whereby the moral charge of antislavery sentiment could be marshaled against the evils plaguing the bourgeois self and home. In Millenium Hall, the recurrent metaphor of slavery signals both the text's conscious invocation of a depoliticized discourse that seeks to contain social critique and its unconscious awareness of two other sets of relations on which the text depends. The first is social: the privilege that permits the Englishman who "discovers" Millenium Hall and makes its story public depends on the leisure afforded him by his Jamaican plantations— depends, that is, on slavery. The second is discursive: for the women of Millenium Hall to call themselves or the people around them "slaves" depends on the absence of actual slaves—Africans enslaved in English colonies in the Americas—from a narrative that nonetheless depends on their labor to produce the conditions of its own existence. The rhetoric of slavery in the text, then, demonstrates how and at whose expense the privilege of the Millenium Hall ladies is constructed. Thus, I trace an expanding and contracting dynamic in my account of the emergent form of power accorded to Englishwomen by bourgeois culture.
Power and the Panoptic Gaze
Millenium Hall begins as the epistolary account of an unnamed male traveler. In company with a young male friend, Lamont, this man is making his leisurely way from London to his family's country estate. One day they pass by the extremely well kept grounds of the house they dub Millenium Hall and decide to pay a call. There the narrator meets a "near relation," Mrs. Maynard, and prevails upon her to tell the story of the several happily employed women he sees around him in the house and garden. The novel is then divided into sections narrated by Mrs. Maynard and entitled "The History of Miss Mancel and Mrs. Morgan," "The History of Lady Mary Jones," "The History of Miss Selvyn," and "The History of Miss Trentham." The novel ends with the conversion of the narrator's companion, Lamont, fired by the ladies' pious example, from a worldly and secular point of view to that of devout Christianity.
Toward the middle of the novel, Lamont registers his anxiety about the high moral standards the ladies set for themselves and, implicitly, for him as their listener/reader. He admits that "if any people have a right to turn reformers, you ladies are best qualified"; Miss Mancel, horrified at the title that links her and her companions with the feminists and political radicals of their day, insists: "We do not set up for reformers ... we wish to regulate ourselves by the laws laid down to us, and as far as our influence can extend, endeavour to enforce them; beyond that small circle all is foreign to us; we have sufficient employment in improving ourselves; to mend the world requires much abler hands" (118). The "foreignness" of the world beyond Millenium Hall—the masculine, public world of law and government to which "reformers" direct their critiques—emphasizes the clear boundaries set on the authority of these bourgeois women. Instead of changing "the world," they confine their feminine "influence" to the private sphere of the household. Here, in the tentative language coded as appropriate to the domestic woman, they "endeavour to enforce" the hierarchized standards of morality and social life that buttress patriarchal law. Their positions as the conduits through which the law speaks and operates attest to the absolute functionality of domestic female virtue in the formation of modern narratives of power and pleasure. Because they take up the constrained position of the domestic woman, then, the characters in Millenium Hall achieve a very material authority over the privatized social space to which that ideology limits them.
The novel opens with an account of the visual pleasure furnished for the male narrator/spectators by the sight of women working in a field outside Millenium Hall. The narrator notes that "in them we beheld rural simplicity, without any of those marks of poverty and boorish rusticity which would have spoilt the pastoral air of the scene around us" (5). The marks of class ("boorish rusticity") and even of labor itself have been erased from this static tableau. This language of male fantasy in the novel, according to Melinda Alliker Rabb, represents "a mode of discourse never shared by the women in describing their own habitation"; for the women, she claims, "the garden is not idealized ... it is not a timeless paradise." Nonetheless, this passage attests to the effectiveness with which the Millenium Hall women have performed the ideological work of producing working-class women as a spectacle for male pleasure. Two crucial definitions for the rest of the novel are put into play in this early scene: the association of pleasure with masculinity, and the production of working-class women as the object of the bourgeois gaze.
Rabb is right, however, to insist on the distinction between masculine and feminine modes of representation in the novel. For while bourgeois women are important agents of the gaze later in the novel, theirs is the gaze of discipline, never that of pleasure. They observe the poor women of the surrounding village in order to enforce bourgeois standards of piety, cleanliness, morality, and rank on them: to discipline their bodies into the shapes required by bourgeois hegemony.
The women are particularly concerned with marriage, as it is a central institution in perpetuating this hegemony. They give small dowries to the kitchen workers and laborers who serve them; but to "merit" such a "gift," the young women must place themselves under the surveillance of the Millenium Hall ladies. The following account attests to the material power of the domestic female gaze over poor households:
[The ladies] watch with so careful an eye over the conduct of these young people as proves of much greater service to them than the money they bestow. They kindly, but strongly, reprehend the first error, and guard them by the most prudent admonitions against a repetition of their fault. By little presents they shew their approbation of those who behave well, always proportioning their gifts to the merits of the person; which are therefore looked upon as the most honourable testimony of their conduct, and are treasured up as valuable marks of distinction. This encouragement has great influence, and makes them vie with each other in endeavours to excel in sobriety, cleanliness, meekness and industry. (119–120)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dangerous Intimacies by Lisa L. Moore. Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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