Over the last two decades, a burgeoning interest in women intellectuals from the early modern period has resulted in outstanding surveys, anthologies and a robust secondary literature.Footnote1 The consequence is that we now have a clearer, richer understanding of the range and quality of many women authors, together with an enhanced appreciation of their philosophical depth.
This special issue is the fruit of a conference exploring the intersection of women, philosophy and literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, held in September 2009 at the University of Otago. Speakers both built on and extended recent scholarship in papers about women writers from Margaret Cavendish to Jane Austen, the representation of women by Nicolas Malebranche and mid-eighteenth-century playwrights, and the impact of a woman philosopher on Samuel Richardson. Their inter-connections highlight the thematic continuity of the whole.
This collection includes at least four common threads. First, the question of influence, or rather the extent to which contemporary philosophers influenced women thinkers and the extent to which they influenced one another. Second, the question of the gendered nature of mind, especially the epistemic status of women's reason. That debate cannot be uncoupled from a third early modern preoccupation variously touched on in these essays, that is, the relation between humans and animals. And fourth, the decidedly Christian character of many of the writings under discussion.
We begin with influence, a notoriously difficult topic, for it runs the twin dangers of reductionism and over-reading of the evidence. And yet, for most scholars the question of influence is irresistible. Who influenced whom, when, and how? Such queries bear not only on an author's originality, but also on her intellectual development within a broader milieu, as Liam Semler demonstrates in his study of intertextual connections between Cavendish and Descartes, Hobbes, Kenelm Digby and Walter Charleton. New evidence about Cavendish's early intellectual development shows her engaging with Descartes' metaphysics and mechanistic physiology, as well as appropriating motifs from Hobbes' political theory for her own broader ends in natural philosophy. Thus Semler sheds fresh light on a philosopher normally approached through her more mature works, especially her response to the new experimental philosophy of the early Royal Society.
Jocelyn Harris also frames her paper around a question of influence and appropriation: the effect of Mary Astell on the popular novelist Samuel Richardson. Through a close study of historical connections and intertextual analysis, Harris presents strong evidence that his masterpiece Clarissa channels Astell's powerful critique of the structures and attitudes that constrained early modern women. Charles Pigden continues the theme of influence, though with one specific philosophical issue in mind: that Jane Austen endorsed David Hume's conclusion concerning the rationality of the ‘sensible knave’, extending his point through deft portrayal of characters such as Mr Elliot in Persuasion. Although Pigden says that no ‘smoking gun’ exists to prove that Austen read Hume, he claims in his more generalised argument about influence that any philosophically-attuned writer of the period could not have missed the debate about whether one could legitimate unscrupulous behaviour.
Questions of influence are also significant for Karen Green and Jacqui Broad. Green rehabilitates the reputation of Catherine Macaulay by tracing the trajectory of ideas about virtue, rights and the social contract from Astell to Macaulay to Mary Wollstonecraft (see also the paper by Jane Spencer). Although Jacqui Broad argues similarly that Astell adopted Malebranche's opinion about free will, she herself is mainly concerned to correct assumptions about his ideas on the gendered nature of women's minds. In her analysis of four Englishwomen's responses to Malebranche, she argues that in spite of claiming that women's delicate cerebral fibres corrupted their child-rearing practices, he was no advocate of gendered biological determinism.
Sophie Tomlinson also tackles the theme of the gendered mind in her careful and thorough study of Aphra Behn's reaction to Lucretius' philosophy, as Thomas Creech's translation of De rerum natura revealed it to her in 1682. Tomlinson charts Behn's struggle with the epistemic status of her own ‘woman's reason’ as she engaged both with the libertinism associated with Epicureanism and her self-definition as a woman writer in a field dominated by men. Summing up Behn's ambiguous view of her own reason with the happy phrase ‘fluidly gendered’, Tomlinson maps the complex array of forces at play within her literary persona.
As Jennifer Clement shows, the representation of Elizabeth I in plays written from 1731 to 1761 proves that the question of women's reason still had traction in the mid-eighteenth century marketplace of ideas. It is deliciously ironic that Richardson's voicing of Astell's protestations about the treatment of women in England was contemporaneous with playwrights calling a woman ruler archetypal for balancing deference to parliament with a hard head and heartfelt love for her people. As Clement argues in her exposé of probable political motivations for the plots and characters of Elizabeth, Cecil and Essex, Elizabeth remained the most potent monarchical figurehead in the English psyche throughout the decades of Hanoverian rule.
A third theme touched on in several articles is the relation between humans and animals. The Cartesian doctrine of the bête machine provided a natural division between the animal kingdom and humankind, a division that could be and indeed was exploited in arguments about the equality of men's and womens' reason. Even if the mature Cavendish did not hold this position, as Semler and others have pointed out, Wollstonecraft certainly did. Jane Spencer focuses primarily on this relation between humans and animals, showing how Wollstonecraft's critique of claims about gender inequality – arguments derived both from philosophy and contemporary natural history – was ultimately predicated on the equality of men's and women's minds in Cartesian dualism. As a result, says Spencer, Wollstonecraft was less closely aligned with animal advocacy than many other feminist writers of the Enlightenment.
The role of Cartesianism should not be over-emphasised, however, for a belief in an immaterial, rational soul was standard Christian doctrine. As these papers suggest, a highly-developed Christian worldview mattered more to many of the women than premises that were merely theological. Thus the prospect of an afterlife motivated Astell, the fictional Clarissa, Anne Docwra and Catherine Macaulay. For Behn, however, reason trumped faith, while Austen, if Pigden is right, was happy to follow Hume's case for the rationality of the sensible knave, on the sceptical proviso that no final accounting will ever occur.
Notes
1For a selection of recent publications see: J. Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); J. Broad and K. Green, A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); C. Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); S. Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing, edited by L. Lunger Knoppers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); P. Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women's Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Early Modern Women's Writing: An Anthology 1560–1700, edited by P. Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); L.T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Women's Political Writings, 1610–1725, 4 vols, edited by H.L. Smith, M. Suzuki and S. Wiseman (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007); Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, edited by J. Wallwork and P. Salzman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); S. Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).