Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty by Robert W. Jones (review)

64 author’s success was dependent on how well he both ‘‘owned’’ his writing and avoided hack work. Pope functions as a transition between the Restoration and the Industrial Revolution perceptions of the poet because anxiety over his infirmities and Catholicism prevented him from being represented like otherEnglish male poets. Pope derogated the feminine and rejected the aristocratic modelforpoetic norms; instead of the infantilizing and subordinate relations with a patron, he saw the marketplace as potentially liberating . In contrast to Rochester, Thomas Gray a century later is effeminized and ridiculed because of his unwillingness to publish and circulate his work for money. Literary authority moved from the elite and aristocratic to the intellectual working class and Gray lacked the masculine rigor ofboth ‘‘appropriate’’formandsubject . By Johnson’s time, however, the poet controls the marketplace and the reader, not the other way around. ‘‘Portrayed as seductive objects, texts,’’ according to Ms. Zionkowski, ‘‘entice the reader’s attention with a promise of infinitely new pleasures of consumption; the author, by contrast, manages this seduction and eventual domination of the reader without making himself an object of desire and pleasure.’’ It would have been helpful to contextualize constructions of masculinity to a greater extent before applying the term to poets and to discuss how masculinityduring the eighteenth century was affected by economics and class politics. While masculinity can broadly be characterized as competition among men and derogation of the feminine, representations of masculinity evolved in response to and in concert with specific factors such as improved economic opportunities, social mobility, and rising literacy rates. That said, this book is relevant and extremely useful. Rebecca Shapiro Westminster College ROBERT W. JONES. Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty. Cambridge : Cambridge, 1998. Pp. xii ⫹ 268. $65. This study analyzes what the concept of beauty meant in eighteenth-century Britain: who defined and theorized it, what interpretations were offered,andthe social and cultural ramifications of shifting definitions during the period. Tracing the wide-ranging debates about taste and beauty across a variety of discourses, Mr. Jones shows how the gendering of such controversies illumines social and cultural practices while shaping crucial changes in both the public and private spheres. Although Genderand theFormationof Taste concentrates primarily on the last half of the eighteenth century, Shaftesbury and Addison appear in the first two chapters, which analyze contemporary philosophical and theatrical approaches to beauty across the century. The treatment of Shaftesbury anchors the introductory chapter, as Mr. Jones begins to trace the multiple intersections of discourses that made ‘‘the beautiful’’ an increasingly contested term during the period . Although a footnote concedes the variety of possible readings of Shaftesbury ’s work, the discussion focuses only on civic humanism. Shaftesbury’sformulations of the beautiful in aristocratic and masculine terms as essential to virtue and the public good were obviously vulnerable to pressures from an emerging commercial and privatized middle-class culture, one in which women’s social roles were increasingly valued. In con- 65 trast to Shaftesbury’s connection of the beautiful with an ideal state order, later writers would refashion the beautiful to represent the private realm of polite sociability , valorizing sensibility and good taste. Although Addison and Steele, and particularly Addison, are given full creditfor their major roles in the complex discursive shifts in the meaning of beauty and also its relationships to virtue, few analyses of their words are included, aside from a short discussion of the Spectator passage on Addison’s ‘‘Man of Polite Imagination’’in the first chapter. The ‘‘Introduction ’’attributes this omission to the familiarity of most eighteenth-century scholars with Addison and Steele’s moral programs, and instead uses Joseph Highmore as an example. In general, Mr. Jones’stechniqueofusing less-knownfigurestoilluminatetreatments of the major theoreticians works well to create rich contexts. His attention to nuance is exemplary, as he deploys comparative readings to clarifyandrefine individual positions. Shaftesbury, for example , is effectively juxtaposed with Akenside and contrasted with Spence. Less appealing is the somewhat erratic punctuation, unless British and American practices of comma placement are diverging in increasingly bizarre ways. More basic problems with this study stem from the same sources that Johnson noted in Rambler 92: ‘‘It...