Gender, Material Chronotopes, and the Emergence of the Eighteenth-Century Microscope

Abstract

This essay expands on previous feminist rhetorical scholarship to account for the ways that material, spatial, and temporal rhetorics operate together to enable gender performances and relations. Extending M.M. Bakhtin's concept of the literary chronotope, we offer the concept of the “material chronotope” to examine how routinized engagements with material objects, such as emerging technologies, and their surrounding material–rhetorical contexts facilitate particular embodied performances of gender. Drawing from the example of the eighteenth-century microscope, we demonstrate how three coexisting designs—the pocket microscope, the solar microscope, and the standard microscope—each positioned women users differently in time and space, facilitating different relationships to science, nature, and femininity. Whereas previous scholarship has emphasized the extent to which new technologies are incorporated into existing social institutions, becoming complicit in the maintenance of gender dichotomies, we draw from this example to argue that these boundaries are not simply maintained but constantly under renegotiation.

Notes

¹By using the term “material–rhetorical” we refer to the inextricability of material and rhetorical elements—the degree to which material objects, texts, spaces, and times carry particular meanings derived from their associations with one another and with broader contexts that are likewise material. Other scholars both within rhetorical studies and beyond—J. Blake Scott, Nathan Stormer, and Karen Barad, for instance—have similarly questioned the effectiveness and desirability of splitting the “rhetorical” or “discursive” from the “material.”

²Although the microscope was originally developed in the seventeenth century, we understand the eighteenth century as a moment of “technological emergence” because, at that time, both the range of users and the diversity of designs were rapidly expanding.

³By the “standard” microscope, we refer to any one of several variations of the microscope characterized by its indoor location and its solitary viewing situation. Like the pocket and solar microscope, the standard microscope contained multiple variations in its design. In The Microscope Made Easy (1742), Henry Baker describes some of the variations found in the eighteenth-century standard microscope: “Microscopes are either Single or Double: the Single have but one Lens; the Double are a Combination of two or more. Each of these two Kinds has its particular Advantage; for a single Glass shews the Object nearer at hand, and rather more distinct; and a Combination of Glasses presents a larger Field, or, in other Words, exhibits more of an Object, equally magnified, at one View” (7).

⁴From 1717 to 1816, the value of a guinea was fixed at 21 shillings, or one pound and one shilling. In addition to less expensive pocket microscopes like those sold by Martin, there were luxury models available such as Mr. Wilson's pocket microscope, which boasted costly accessories like ivory and brass sliders and a hair-brush to dust the lens (Baker 10–11).

⁵This name translates to “lover of nature.” Although the contributor gendered himself as male, there is no knowing whether this was in fact the case, as many female authors of the time took on male pseudonyms. Honoring the contributor's wishes, we refer to “Philonaturæ” here as “he.”

⁶The new rhetorical and embodied performances afforded to female users of the pocket microscope were inflected by contemporaneous debates about gendered identity. Arguments that encouraged female microscopy, such as Philonaturæ's, often complicated the liberatory meanings suggested through the pocket microscope's use. Philonaturæ, for instance, notes that female users are “too volatile to have Patience to go through those tedious Volumes, which are requisite for the understanding of all other Sciences” (139). Nonetheless he pairs this observation with the claim that because using the pocket microscope “may be acquir'd without the least Trouble or Study … [w]e need but look to be informed of all that Books can teach us of this Part of Natural Philosophy” (139). In this manner, Philonaturæ privileges the immediate, visually compelling activities of the naturalist discoverer over traditional book-learning, affirming women's place in this particular type of scientific activity even as he cites men's and women's uneven educations and temperaments to reinforce the divisions between the sexes. Although such textual constructions contributed to the persistence of existing gender difference, they simultaneously enabled greater numbers of women to interact with a technology deemed acceptable for their use. Within this rubric, women could view their own actions as potential contributions to a larger intellectual project and to perceive their everyday interactions with nature as acts of exploration and discovery.

⁷Significantly, the solar microscope could also be fashioned, in part, from a pocket microscope. In The Microscope Made Easy (1742) Baker explains how the solar microscope is composed of a “Tube, a Looking-glass, a convex Lens and WILSON'S single Pocket Microscope” (22). Thus, the owner of a pocket microscope could realistically engage in two very distinct microscopic activities, engaging two material chronotopes as well as two versions of scientific inquiry.

⁸The transition to more objective, professional, and masculine forms of scientific practice in the nineteenth century is documented in the work of Barbara Gates and Ann Shteir, Londa Schiebinger, and Patricia Phillips.

⁹In their book Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak note an 1816 letter that refers to “the solar microscope as if it were an outmoded device” (219), though they mention that showmen were still using the device at that time.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chelsea Redeker Milbourne

Chelsea Redeker Milbourne is a Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Sarah Hallenbeck

Sarah Hallenbeck is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 601 South College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403, USA. E-mail: [email protected]