Virtue and Evidence: Catharine Macaulay’s Historical Realism

JEMCS 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2004) Virtue and Evidence: Catharine Macaulay's Historical Realism Laura Mandell "Morals must be taught on immutable principles." From which position Mrs Mfacaulay] infers?"That true wis dom, which is never found at variance with rectitude, is as useful to women as tomen. . . . [For Macaulay, there is] No characteristic difference in sex. The observations on this subject might have been carried much farther. . . . ?Mary Wollstonecraft, "[Review ofMacaulay's] Letters on Education" (November 1790, 7.314) Wollstonecraft herself carried these observations further in her Vindication of the Rights ofMen, penned imme diately after or concurrently with this review in November 1790, and in her later continuation ofthat work, Vindication of the Rights ofWomen (1792). The subject of this essay is Catharine Macaulay's notion of virtue, a concept that has radical political potential?as seen, if nowhere else, in the historical fact of Wollstonecraft's productions and their indebtedness toMacaulay's work. Macaulay is a "sagacious writer" with whom Wollstonecraft finds herself "perfectly coinciding" ("Article 1" 7.309) in this respect. Feminist read ers from Mary Hays in the 1790s, to Sally Alexander in the 1980s (128-129) and Susan Eilenberg at the outset of the twenty-first century have, I believe, consistently misunder stood what both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft mean by virtue. Macaulay's notion is not identical to bourgeois virtue, an ideological notion that arose in conjunction with political 128 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies liberalism,1 nor even congruent with the Jacobin or radical beliefs of her political circle,2 nor completely congruent with the civic humanist view of James Harrington that itmost closely resembles. Like the civil-war Republicans who form the heroes of her History of England, Macaulay affirms the value of devotion to the public good, but for her, such devotion is personally rewarding rather than privative. As Iwill show, forMacaulay, virtue is an absolute principle of radical equality in which society's good and one's own good and pleasure are consub stantial. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist accounts of both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, Iwould like to suggest, misunderstand 'Virtue'' by locating it in the wrong register. For Macaulay (and later Wollstonecraft), "virtue" is not a claim about the self, not an identity. To reduce it to such a thing is to render it bourgeois, puritanical, and, of course, deluded. Rather, her definition coincides with Harrington's view that virtues are political "powers" (Pocock, Political Works 16). Macaulay's "virtue" is an ethical impera tive to behave not just as a feminist, but with consistently applied egalitarian principles. The virtuous historian asks over and over again, while performing any activity, the ques tion posed by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell: "what kind of a restructuring of [society] is possible and desirable . . .such as would further women's emancipation as well as create a more humane society for all?" (9). Such radical egalitarian ism includes participation in the movement against cruelty to animals (the portion of Macaulay's Letters with which Wollstonecraft is so taken in her review).3 But Macaulay's "virtue" ismore. As an intersubjective principle, it is a heuris tic device as well for arriving at an objective understanding of the past. That is, Macaulay's virtue is not only a principle of action: as a position from which one can represent the past, it generates historical realism. There is some still untapped, radical potential in Enlightenment feminisms. We have reached a crisis at our historical moment in politicizing historical and literary histor ical accounts. According to Hayden White, contemporary his torians' "notion of objectivity" is "quite different from anything that might be meant by that term in the physical sciences" (67). Allowing "the bare facts" to speak requires that the his MandeU 129 torian identity with the historical object and yet not impose upon it.Yet, we now accept as theoretical dogma that all of us are guilty of projecting, to some degree, our own values and concerns into the past.4 This crisis in describing the historical object is most visible inwhat David Simpson calls "the sheer ubiquity, awkward visibility, and visible incompetence of arguments from situatedness" (194). InWhite's view, the...