The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Struggles surrounding sex and gender were central to eighteenth-century British life. In this richly detailed book, G. J. Barker-Benfield takes the familiar story of the rise of separate spheres to a new level, focusing on the interplay between cultural constructions of masculinity and of femininity. In the reform of manners associated with the emergence of British commercial capitalism, he argues, the middle classes invented modern meanings of sex and gender, fully aware that much was at stake.

Barker-Benfield elaborates Norbert Elias’s civilizing process for Britain between the Protestant and French Revolutions, turning first to the emergence of the public male sphere. Men turned away from the rough-and-ready behavior sanctioned by the older order, where, at one extreme, the squire, parson, farmer, or tradesman had adhered to the stringent codes of honor specific to each rank, while, at the other extreme, they had also beaten their wives, molested women in public places, and engaged in general vandalism and debauchery. Men’s manners, Barker-Benfield argues, were reformed in the interests of commerce. Men cultivated politeness and sensibility in refurbished taverns and recently established coffeehouses, new kinds of economic centers that encouraged trade, the exchange of information and capital. Taverns, inns, and the like had long provided public spaces for male sociability, but primarily as retreats from cold, poorly lit, and uncomfortable homes. The new public spaces (from which women continued to be excluded) served to expand commercial interests; a man’s good reputation, a new version of honor, could be translated into credit. While men cultivated a new sensibility, they also agonized over the danger of being made “effeminate” by luxury and refined taste—qualities increasingly identified with women.

Barker-Benfield writes his history of manners against an economic backdrop, claiming that the role of women as consumers was foundational to the culture of sensibility. As women were transformed from producers to consumers of household goods, interiors became more comfortable, newly furnished with everything from forks and tea services to wainscot walls and porcelain chamber pots. Women became financial managers of households, the primary consumers of personal furnishings, and ultimately, arbiters of middle-class taste. In England, taste became synonymous with virtue—almost in the German sense of Bildung. Women (and consumer culture) softened men, making them newly benevolent, compassionate, and humane. Thus, Barker-Benfield concludes, masculinity and femininity formed one another. Men and women both staked out new territories, men taking the high public ground and women the private, but in many instances their desires and needs converged.

While Barker-Benfield tells an elaborate story about the gendered nature of eighteenth-century cultures of sensibility, he hesitates to engage with some mainstream interpretations of the materials he has chosen for analysis. He relates sensibility to self-expression, consumerism, the rise of the novel, and the like, but not to men’s and women’s divergent roles in the broader intellectual and political culture. To take but one example, Carole Pateman, who like Barker-Benfield takes John Locke as an important starting point, tells a very different story in The Sexual Contract (1988). Pateman is concerned with the rise of the rights-bearing individual whose place in the commonwealth depends on his or her being seen as having reason. Although Barker-Benfield discusses the conflict between reason and sensitivity, he does not discuss reason as essentially male-identified in this period, or the role of reason in the culture of sensibility. Nor does he make clear how masculine sensibility functioned in the public sphere of heroic manhood—the state. Novels and novel-writing may have been feminized in this period; English men, however, jealously guarded most other intellectual pursuits from English women and also from “effeminate” French men (Barker-Benfield does not treat national differences in definitions of gender). English men also defined for themselves (in natural philosophy, for example) a distinctive intellectual style modeled on combat; Rousseau, whom Barker-Benfield cites...