Polite Mentors and Franklin's "Exquisite Pleasure": Sociability, Prophylaxis, and Dependence in the Autobiography

In critical readings of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, very little has engendered such stark disagreement as his account, over the course of part 1, of a series of encounters with older men, generally of superior social status, who recognize the young Franklin's potential. Many critics have emphasized the central role of these relationships in the context of Franklin's movement away from the traditional authority of his family and toward mature self-determination. Hugh J. Dawson and Jay Fliegelman have described Franklin's elders, persuasively and influentially, as "surrogate fathers." Especially during Franklin's "dangerous Time of Youth" in Philadelphia, "remote from the Eye & Advice of my Father" (Franklin 1360), they provide paternal guidance and approbation on the model of the educative, affective family, modifying it by making it less hierarchical and intrusive. Drawing a suggestive analogy between Franklin's transition to independent maturity and his challenge of customary social-political hierarchies, Fliegelman identifies the Autobiography's anti-patriarchal critique with its function as an "attack on the fixed orders of society and the government of names" (Fliegelman 107–12; Dawson 266–92).¹ Because the relationships with elder mentors entail elements of dependence and artifice, Fliegelman and Dawson insist, Franklin's eventual assertion of integrity and self-determination necessitates his abandoning these surrogates toward the end of part 1. Franklin's life is bifurcated into successive periods of dependence and autonomy, separated by the brief, ambiguous phase of his relations with polite gentlemen.

For the same reasons, however, the encounters with elders are often seen as providing a kind of training ground for Franklin's calculating manipulation of appearances. Readers of the Autobiography that view Franklin's personality as insincere, malleable, and instrumental—such as Mitchell Breitwieser and Grantland S. Rice—reveal the persistence of aspects of these relationships that Fliegelman's model has no place for, and in such a way as to qualify the terms through which we could see the mature Franklin as unequivocally sincere or independent (Breitwieser 180–189; Rice 45–69). In accounting for Franklin's sustained impersonality and artifice, this vein of criticism tends to veer off in the direction of the other extreme from Fliegelman's self-made man, toward the persistent stereotype set out by Weber and Lawrence—a Franklin who, as Breitwieser suggests, "demotes uncalculating modes of thought and feeling—whether aesthetic, curious, political, affectionate, or erotic—to the category of waste" (208).²

It is not strange that these opposing takes on Franklin should differ most sharply in their interpretation of his relationships with elder gentlemen in the Autobiography. These mentor figures introduce him to a language that was supposed to coordinate the very antithetical terms that have been so difficult to reconcile in assessing Franklin himself: autonomy and other-directedness, self-revelation and dissimulation or withdrawal, self-concern and convivial generosity. "Politeness" emerged from early modern courts in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and came to regulate forms of sociability that set themselves apart from the traditional authority of church and state. Oriented to the goal of pleasing in company, polite conversations cultivated an easy reciprocity, and sought to evade the moral dogmatism associated with churchmen and the pedantry of the scholar. The unspecified, gratuitous nature of polite friendship helped to define the capacious, unspecialized learning proper to the gentleman. In turn, polite letters (or belles lettres) embodied the form of sociable exchange: "In 'le monde,'" as David Shields observes, "writing was understood to be a precipitate of conversation" (16). Spreading beyond royal courts, politeness became the language of aristocratic salons and gentlemanly clubs, and, increasingly, socially mixed institutions such as the coffeehouse, the public park, and, notably, petty-commercial contexts such as the shop and the printing house. At the same time, consumer goods, the circulation of colonial agents, and print all contributed to disseminate politeness from metropoles to provinces and colonies.

In entering into polite conversation with the young Franklin, his elder mentors bestow on him an acquaintance with polite discourse that was not part of his domestic training. Along with...