Brief Notices

Note: Appearance among these brief descriptions of recent publications that have arrived too late to find an appropriate reviewer in this issue does not preclude more detailed review in a later issue of M L N.

Michael McKeon. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. xxvii + 873 pages.

Michael McKeon has recently published three large volumes with the Johns Hopkins University Press: a brilliantly edited critical anthology, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (2000), which has gone a long way in righting the balance between our contemporary fascination with structural-narratological issues and the traditional concerns of genre theory; the 15th anniversary edition of his benchmark study, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (2002); and now The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. The present volume is by far the largest of the trio: 873 pages, 120 pages of erudite notes, and 94 shrewdly chosen plates and other illustrations. It weighs in at 3 1/4 pounds. The book is as capacious in its scope as in its physical dimensions. McKeon observes that the title of the book states its central concerns "in ascending order of generality." Thus his broadest interest "lies in the comprehensive division of knowledge that takes place in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and that separates modernity from tradition." In his Introduction, which addresses questions of method, he confesses that his study could be framed as an abstract and therefore deceptively simple hypothesis: "In 'traditional' cultures, the differential relationship between public and private modes of experience is conceived as a distinction that does not admit of separation. In 'modernity' the public and the private are separated out from each other, a condition that both sustains the sense of traditional distinction and, axiomatically, reconstitutes the public and private as categories that are susceptible to separation." Pursuing this point, he argues that "traditional" knowledge is implicit and deeply embedded, while "modern" knowledge is an explicit and self-conscious awareness.

Facing the enormous scope of this historical division, he chooses to focus his study specifically on the range of English culture as his historical example, admittedly still a large, complex, and daunting project. Further refining the object of his study, he elects to center the fundamental question of the modern separation of the public and the private in the division of knowledge on the category of domesticity, which is "perhaps its most visible and resonant expression." The narrative that he proposes thus draws upon the entire spectrum of a people's experience (including the "secret" prehistory of the category before it fully emerges). At the most "public" extreme are political developments like the formation of civil society over against the state, the rise of contractual thinking, and the devolution of absolutism from monarch to individual subject. The middle range of experience includes the influence of Protestant and scientific thought, the printed publication of the private, the conceptualization of virtual publics—society, public opinion, the market—and the capitalization of production, the decline of the domestic economy, and the increase in the sexual division of labor. The most "private" pole of experience involves the privatization of marriage, the family and the household, as well as the complex entanglement of femininity, interiority, subjectivity, and sexuality. (These last issues McKeon has already explored deeply in his writings on the novel.)

Considering the book's length, scope of concerns, and agenda (at least as baldly stated here), a reader might expect some hard going. In fact, McKeon's narrative, rich in examples and carefully drawn interrelationships, offers a remarkably engaging experience, well written and coherently argued.

To enlist an early reader's testimony, we might turn to Thomas Laqueur who has provided a concise but admirably focused appreciation of this ambitious and important work:

This is a deliciously rich and generous exploration of the material and conceptual separation of the public from the private, one that illuminates just about every aspect of what it means to be modern: political...