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Chapter 5 The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America Caroline Winterer Death by classics? For twenty-year-old Eliza Lucas (c. 1722–93), who presided over a prosperous indigo plantation in colonial South Carolina, the idea seemed ludicrous. An avid reader of Plutarch’s Lives, she scoffed at the warnings of an older woman from the neighborhood, who advised her that rising at 5 a.m. to read Plutarch would send her to an early grave—or worse, wrinkle her skin and ‘‘spoil’’ her marriage. After narrowly preventing the older woman from hurling the toxic text into the fireplace, Lucas cheerfully polished it off and then begged a male friend to send her some Virgil. An extreme instance of devotion to classical reading, perhaps, but Eliza Lucas (later Pinckney) was not atypical among elite, white American women in the eighteenth century, who began in increasing numbers to read classical literature. This chapter will investigate how and why they embarked on this project, focusing most especially on women’s own stated reasons for reading the classics as articulated in diaries, letters, magazines, and books.1 Few intellectual projects have been so wrapped in paranoid rhetoric for so long as classical study, a branch of learning that seemed to possess infinite capacities to illuminate, refine, and ennoble men and an equally dependable ability to corrupt women. Since the Renaissance, classical learning had been as much an academic subject for boys as a male puberty rite. Boys learned Latin and Greek in school not just so that they could master the judicious statecraft and heroic deeds of the ancients but also as a combative initiation rite into the mysteries and privileges of languages, exemplars, and sayings that gentlemen knew and ladies did not. In this world the gold standard of erudition was Greek, the silver Latin: to know and use these languages with grace and agility was to sit among the gods of Olympus, dispensing wisdom both philosophical and political. Both languages were so difficult to acquire that they remained 106 Winterer the realm of privileged boys and men who had the time and tutoring to learn them. The occasional, highly privileged girl might be taught Greek and Latin and encouraged to emulate classical female worthies, but this was often done in the spirit of virtue-building busywork—a kind of lexical embroidery. Advanced study of the classical languages was discouraged for women lest they ‘‘appear threateningly insane and requiring restraint,’’ as the fifteenth-century Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni put it. A woman, he observed, should leave ‘‘all public severity to men.’’ The classically learned woman also became dangerously unfeminine, a virilis femina or an homasse (man-woman). The Renaissance humanist conversation about classical civic virtue was both the language of politics and the idiom of exclusion. Colonial Americans inherited this classical project , and few women in the seventeenth century (barring spectacular exceptions such as Anne Bradstreet) were taught Greek, Latin, or classical history and literature.2 By the mid-eighteenth century a change was afoot that brought growing numbers of elite women into the sphere of classical learning long cherished by men. The cause of this new opportunity for female classical learning was the establishment in colonial America of salons and tea tables, where groups of men and women could gather for conversation, reading, society games, and the like. Modeled on British precedents— which were modeled on French versions—this new colonial ‘‘polite’’ society created a whole new arena for sociability between the sexes. But what to say there? And how to say it? Being polite required a whole new social register. ‘‘Politeness,’’ explains Lawrence Klein of the situation in England, ‘‘tended to bring all modes of apprehension—spiritual, cognitive , aesthetic—within the horizon of gentility and cast all such spiritual, intellectual, or creative endeavours as a species of gentlemanly accomplishment .’’ In feats of steely self-control, polite people strove to appear languid and easy, restrained and learned. 3 For this dazzling project of cultivating gentility, classical learning became imperative. Long associated with the pinnacles of masculine learning, judgment, and statecraft, classical learning now became a conversation , like the weather, to which all could contribute, each in his or her own measure. The shift in the function of classical erudition was not easy, trying both men and women in different ways. From men, it required restraint: a polite man had to resist the urge to trumpet his classical learning pedantically. Pedantry was a minor offense in...

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