:: The Young Enthusiast ::

Main Arguments:

“educational theory during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries formed and indispensable source for the English novel’s narrative form and its often contradictory representation of individuals’ social identity” (2)

“in understanding the early novel’s pedagogical agenda, we can trace the outlines of a crucial fictional antecedent to the later development of the subgenre called the novel of education, or Bildungsroman.” (2)

“early modern educational writing can be considered a kind of discursive way station both thematically and formally between Enlightenment epistemology and the emerging novel.” (8)

“Locke, Astell, Defoe, and Haywood approach individual development from a decidedly external point of view, keeping a constant eye on the social and institutional implications of the exfoliation of selfhood. The point is to establish access to the convolutions of individual motive and identity, although that channel of communication between interiority and exteriority is never entirely stable.” (32)

The protagonists of Betsy Thoughtless and The Female Quixote, “as autodidacts who initially attempt to master everyone around them, provide an implicit critique of Crusoe’s imperial ambitions on his island as they learn the value of self-limitation, especially as women.” (35)

“The issue of whether virtue was primarily to be preserved or acquired remained a divisive one.” (82)

Quotations useful to MA Thesis:

“A second way to approach Locke’s philosophy and the novel is to treat them as analogous discursive formations produced by much larger, even glacial, historical changes, such as the emergence of “realist” criteria for judging writing of all kinds, or the development of an individualistic, bourgeois description of human identity and social relations.” (5)

“novels by authors such as Lennox and Haywood… form a crucial part of feminism’s history because these women began to imagine the category of gender as a separate, semiautonomous cultural category by applying the contemporaneous arguments attacking a traditional social hierarchy based on rank to an analysis of the condition of middle- and upper-class women. And the fundamental premise of this project was that those women should be able to enlarge their share of the social franchise by way of better education and intellectual self-improvement.” (23)

“the Bildungsroman captures both psychological individuality and existential generality, the peculiarity of specific personality and the universality of human nature in the broadest sense.” (28)

“In his A Light to Grammar, and All other Arts and Sciences (1641), for instance, Hazekiah Woodward draws on Comenius’s work to advocate an educational approach based on the *page break* stimulation and elevation of the senses, explaining that with this method, a pupil ‘shall doe his work in playing, and play working.’” (47-48)

Me: This last quote is important… education’s main shift didn’t come from revolutions in epistemology, but revolutions in aesthetics. Of course we all realize that the cultivation of aesthetic taste became much more important with Hume et al, but it seems that rather than epistemology taking over ontology as the most prominent philosophical discipline, aesthetics took over for ontology in the popular mind. It seems that aesthetics is actually more fundamental to our view of the world; whereas what Locke describes is simply the collection of sensory data, aesthetics implies a consideration and evaluation of this data that helps to form the world around us, both in the sense of objectivity and in the sense of education. And whereas epistemology didn’t actually change but merely our understanding of it, aesthetics underwent a revolution from the romantic aesthetics of Plato to the modern aesthetics of realism, particularly psychological realism. As education moved away from rote memorization and rule-based didacticism, what replaced it was a delicacy of taste that not only sought to make the most of the student’s mind, but theoretically this delicacy of taste would confirm reaffirm “natural” class distinctions.

Locke’s epistemology required that aesthetics take a more prominent role in culture. Because we are constantly collecting all of this sense data, it is the aesthetic faculty that is constantly judging the usefulness of what we see, hear, taste, touch, etc. By saying, in effect, that we see and experience everything (not just what God wants us to see), Locke makes like an aesthetic experience, as every process of arranging and reformulating primary ideas is an essentially aesthetic function.

Was education, then, increasingly viewed as feminine because education became so necessarily tied to the aesthetic? It seems as though women were educated primarily in the aesthetic (i.e. art, music, French) whereas men were educated in the practical (rhetoric, Latin, politics, classical poetry). Women had this delicacy of taste already because they had been cultivating it for centuries, whereas men were just starting the process of forming themselves into aesthetes.

So as aesthetic philosophy came about, fiction had to serve a different function, which is the reason that the novel overtook romance as the most popular genre. With romance, there is a Platonic sense of an ideal reality which includes an ideal morality, and by portraying this abstracted, ideal reality you give students and readers an example to which they can live up. However, in the Enlightenment the existence of this ideal was being questioned, and instead of trying to hit upon the ideal system, scholars engaged in a constant cycle of formulation, testing, reformulation, testing, and thus the novel became a sort of flight simulator in which authors either condoned or exploded the pre-formulated abstract precepts at hand. This seems to give authors a lot more power in the formation of morality, because whereas before they were simply the mouthpiece for the man behind the green curtain, now they are actually engaged in a process of critical evaluation (though they still seemed to be locked out of the process of invention). Thus, the novel became a space for social critique, but not necessarily social reformation.

“Astell’s claim that women need to make a temporary retreat from society, for instance, in the interest of educating themselves, is based on the distinction that Locke makes between sensation and reflection.” (53)

This is the distinction that it seems like people like Wittgenstein would later try to refute in the 20th century. It’s funny, it seems that Astell assumes that you can’t reflect on something while you are experiencing it, which is why Astell says you cannot understand society until you live outside of it. This idea is pretty instinctually attractive, as disciplines like sociology say that you can’t study your own culture. Very interesting. Perhaps novels, in some way, provide this critical distance from which women can then make evaluations of their own morality?

“If by reducing the importance of physical punishment, Locke’s impulse has been partly to replace the body with the mind as the chief instrument to induce obedience, then that move has also endowed the mind with the bodily aura of substance, material function, and vulnerability to disease.” (62)

Everything in the Enlightenment is so grounded in perception, but since the teacher (or the novelist) cannot control what is perceived, they can only control the pupil’s (or the reader’s) reaction to these external stimuli, and that is what the novel should do. Thus, critiques of the novel that found it immoral because it depicted immorality were anti-Enlightenment, because what is important is not simply what is depicted, but how the characters react to those situations. If the novel’s heroines and heroes are immoral that would be a valid critique, but Haywood, for instance, is required to put Betsy Thoughtless into morally dangerous situations because she is supposed to depict and critique a range of aesthetic responses to these stimuli.

“The act of seeing, or surveying in narrative, is more than a question of data collecting or information dispersal—it is more, in other words, than a matter of pure epistemology. It is further—and more pressingly, in Enlightenment terms—an issue of the moral, social, and finally political implications of perceiving clearly and acting appropriately.” (107)

“there seems good reason to agree with George Starr that the sentimental novel is in fact antieducational in its assumptions about human nature and the development of plot.” (114) – In other words, sentimental heroines always resist change (usually the compromising of their virtue), assuming that change is always bad instead of embracing change as something that can make things better as well as worse.

“This construction of femininity could be called the ‘virginity syndrome’: by modeling morality strictly in terms of sexual innocence or experience, it makes the prospect of women’s gradual reformation problematic, if not infeasible.” (118)

There is a weird kind of theatricality involved in this illustration of moral precepts. Just as the actors on stage act out a pre-established script (some with more or less ad-libbing than others), the follower of the moral precept must make the precept real, or give it a living, breathing reality. Within this process the private reading of conduct literature and imparting of precepts by authority figures is rendered public by its presence as an ingredient in what is ultimately expressed in public display, which almost all female authors insist is the only real part of virtue that matters. Think about the last part of Betsy; there’s no real use for the public display of virtue that she engages in when she holds strictly to the rule about the year of mourning for her husband’s loss (especially since her husband was well-known to be abusive and evil), but she holds to that in order to actually reclaim some of her public virtue (such a reclamation was often thought implausible/impossible by other feminist writers and theorists, see the “virginity syndrome” remark above). However, she does seem to be committing a transgression against private virtue by engaging in a correspondence with Trueworth, even though she does make some effort to keep the correspondence within the bounds of seemliness. So we see that by adhering strictly to public rules, one is able to find space to operate in private.

“causuistical analysts wrote to enlighten their readers without dogmatic prescriptions, proceeding instead on the basis of instructive examples that could suggest, rather than dictate, solutions, and they consistently maintained that individual readers always had the prerogative—and burden—of making their own ethical decisions, which should nonetheless be translatable into the terms of recognized morality.” (213)

“Another key to Betsy’s successful development is learning to master a kind of social theatricality, in which women must constantly attend to how they are perceived and what standing they have in terms of ‘reputation.’” (288)

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