Between Exclusion and Seclusion: The Precarious and Elusive Place of Women in Early-Modern Thought

Pina Totaro, ed. Donne, filosofia e cultura nel Seicento . Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1999. 460 pp. 46.48 Euro.

Among intellectual historians, the seventeenth century is often thought of as the age of the scientific revolution and mechanical philosophy. In recent years, in the wake of social historical and feminist research, both the scientific revolution and the mechanical philosophy have been implicated in crucial gender redefinitions. By adding gender to race and class, this line of inquiry has informed a process of renewal and enrichment in the humanities and historical disciplines. Nevertheless, not everything in this revolution has been for the best. At the risk of seeming retrograde, I suggest that two historiographic myths, based on fanciful extrapolations from and narrow engagement with classic texts, need to be debunked: first, the myth of a holistic, "organismic," and peaceful premodernity; and second, the myth of a scientific objectivity that is supposed to be derived from an alleged masculinization of thought. These two myths presuppose a shift of epistemic proportion from an organic premodernity to an objectified modernity, driven by the impulse to control and dominate. The main culprits, of course, are Francis Bacon, charged with the rape of nature, and René Descartes, diagnosed with an "anxiety over separation from the organic female universe." ¹

With regard to the first myth, Carolyn Merchant's Death of Nature, published in 1980, successfully popularized the view that both the new science and the underlying mechanical philosophy demonstrated an aggressive, exploitative, and male chauvinistic attitude in their attempts to subjugate nature and, by extension, woman. Purportedly, a parallel subjugation took place between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Francis Bacon was its outspoken advocate: "The new image of nature as a female to be controlled and dissected through experiment legitimated," said Merchant, "the exploitation of natural resources." ² Merchant's interpretation relied on the catchy but incorrect narrative of a benign and tolerant "order of nature in the cosmos, society, and the self" ³ that was destroyed by an evil mechanical philosophy, harbinger of dualistic conflict, atomistic dissection, and oppressive organization. This interpretation is more than a little nostalgic. It also picks and chooses the past it wishes to romanticize, for we could, if we wished, read the subjugation of nature and woman into the "organic" view of classical and premodern authors whereby form and the whole (the masculine) took precedence over matter and the parts (the feminine). An organic view need not be pleasing either: the utopianism that Merchant associates with the "organismic" project—Campanella's Città del sole, for example—might well worry those attached to a society of a less organized, more open order.

The second myth is represented by a cluster of ideas nicely packaged but, again, constructed on a narrow foundation that truncates our understanding of the early-modern historical process. The rise of scientific method has been linked to the notion of objectivity. Objectivity, in this reading, is made to consist in the denial of the feminine—a masculine response of detachment and alienation from the female universe and everything it represents. Drawing heavily on psychoanalysis, scholars such as Erica Harth and Susan Bordo have taken "objectivity" to stand for impersonality, detachment, and anonymity. Science, in this way, has been viewed as a masculine mode of discourse, of which Descartes's cogito is the apogee. It seems to be quite immaterial that Descartes, for the first time in Western thought, clearly announced that men and women share the faculty of reason equally. For Harth, the Cartesian legacy, far from broadening participation in intellectual culture, "contributed heavily to a totalizing rational discourse of abstract universality and objectivity from which women by the historical contingencies of their gender became excluded." ⁴ The point is that belief in the masculinity of scientific thought is precisely a prejudice. Of...