Recuperating women

Several common themes are pursued through the course of these five very different books on five different subsets of eighteenth-century women writers, themes that present interesting approaches to women’s writing which may, however, by now have become familiar. The locus of the dominant theme, as noted by Erica Harth in Cartesian Women, is Luce Irigaray’s relentless pursuit through her Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) of the question “What is the relation of women to a discourse that excludes them?” A corollary theme concerns the hidden class bias of Enlightenment discourse. Complex deliberations on these subjects provide the narrative for both Harth’s book and Elizabeth A. Bohls’ Women Travel Writers .

Harth provides excellent background on the pre-Cartesian position of women and on Cartesian theory. Woman had been viewed as an inferior, incomplete man and alternatively as a monster. The Cartesian theory of duality of mind and body, however, with its “universalism that denies differences among knowers,” produced a particularly unlucky duality for women, who could now claim a mind unmarked by sex, but a body very much marked by it. The unfortunate result was that women Cartesians, much attracted to the thesis that their minds were identical to those of men, were nevertheless barred from the Parisian public academies and conferences and confined to the less prestigious salons, which effectively deprived them of equal access to, and expression of, knowledge. And the assigned domain of Cartesian women was not writing but speech. Women had experienced a “simultaneous absorption into and exclusion from a universalizing, sex-neutral rational discourse.” Harth’s subject, then, is “the uneasiness of the relation between educated women and rational discourse,” and she identifies the uneasiness as a mismatch between the particular (women’s bodies) and the universal (their minds). Her project is to “expose the exclusion of the feminine from Western philosophical discourse.” Her women subjects include Madeleine de Scudéry, who may have trespassed by publishing conversations from the salon, conversations in which her precieuse female characters speak “the language of subversion,” eschewing heterosexual love and marriage. Women often, while adhering to the idea of the sexless mind, objected to Descartes’ theory of animal mechanism, but seventeenth-century Cartesiennes uncoupled the mind and sex by denying their own sexuality. Cartesian women, Harth concludes, helped construct a masculinist universal discourse that ultimately excluded them.

Harth’s is a fine book. Perhaps its most important contribution is its re-presentation or reintroduction of women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical discourse, which has borne at least as uneasy a relation to them as, Harth shows, they have to it.

A minor theme of Cartesian Women is the hidden hegemonic face of the Enlightenment, the discourse of which “claims that the universe of knowledge is open to ‘all men,’ while reserving its pursuit and dissemination to a few.” This is a theme obviously relevant to the exclusion of women from philosophical discourse and is more fully developed by Bohls.

But before turning to Bohls, one problem with books that describe the complex relationship of woman writer to discourse should probably be addressed. Harth invokes the demand of Nancy K. Miller that the literary...