Effeminacy and Femininity: Domestic Prose Satire and David Simple

Effeminacy and Femininity: Domestic Prose Satire and David SimpleFelicity Nussbaum During the past decade or two common wisdom has assumed that with the formation of the public sphere, mid-eighteenth-century England ushers in the cult of domesticity, companionate marriage, and the retreat of women into the private sphere. According to this familiar narrative— now happily beginning to be complicated by the recognition of women's sometimes subtle strategies for managing professional authorship and their surprisingly public authority—sentimental bourgeois values predominate, and modern rather rigid notions of gender difference and sexual identity emerge.1 Yet curiously, Samuel Johnson indicates in the Adventurer (11 December 1753) that it was informertimes, an erain the long-forgotten past, when "ladies contented themselves with private virtues and domestic excellence, and a female writer, like a female warrior, was considered as a kind of excentric being, that deviated, however illustriously, from her due sphere of motion." He continues, "The revolution of years has now produced a generation of Amazons of the pen, who with the spirit of their 1 Forcritical arguments that womenwriters after the 1740s turned from amatory fiction to sentimental domestic novels, see Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women'sAmatory Fictionfrom 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Jane Spencer, The Rise ofthe Woman Novelistfrom Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986); and Janet Todd, The Sign ofAngelika: Women, Writing andFiction, 1660-1800 (London: Virago, 1989). Forrevisions to these ideas, see Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), who argues that the satiric inversions in Behn, Manley, Lennox, Burney, and Edgeworth paradoxically negate and redefine women's authorial property and public presence, though she also believes that mid-century brings a new moral seriousness and respectability to women's self-presentation (p. 147). Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story ofthe Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), focuses especially on gendering the novel's reader (pp. 274-81). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 4, July 1999 422 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION predecessors have set masculine tyranny at defiance, asserted their claim to the regions of science, and seem resolved to contest the usurpations of virility."2 The class of professional writers, "the generation of Amazons" that Johnson describes, clearly defies easy confinementto domesticity or to an image of ideal femininity. Instead, such women typify for him an entire generation capable of colonizing the masculine domain. Johnson's sentiments would seem to echo the contemporaneous polemical feminist tract Beauty's Triumph (1751), derived from the 1739 Sophia pamphlets, which compliments women's proficiency in the sciences: "And therefore perhaps one reason why Women, when they apply to the sciences, make so much greater proficiency, in less time and with less labour, than the Men, is their having a greater brilliancy ofparts, and solidity ofjudgment, to enable them to steer the shorter way to truth."3 But Johnson equivocates in his praise: women who excel in their endeavours and justifiably exercise their sway against masculine tyranny exceed their appropriate sphere. Alluding to a national disease that has brought a proliferation of publication , a "universal eagerness of writing," and an "epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper," Johnson blames women especially for the predicament . IfJohnson thought women writers ofthe mid-eighteenth century were feisty women who had given up domestic pursuits, why do we persist in emphasizing their traditional femininity? Johnson may have been referring to chroniques scandaleuses such as Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs (3 volumes, 1748-54), Hannah Snell's The Female Soldier (17'5O), orAn Apologyfor the ConductofMrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips (3 volumes, 1748^9), as contemporary Amazons of the pen. Or maybe he was simply voicing his concern about the explosive increase in women's fiction-writing by authors such as Eliza Haywood, Sarah 2 Samuel Johnson, The Idler and the Adventurer, ed. W.J. Bate et al, The Yale Edition ofthe Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), no. 115 (11 Dec. 1753) 2:457-58. Jane Spencer argues that "at the same time as encouraging women to write," this eighteenth-century "feminization of literature defined literature as...