Philosophy and Sexual Politics in Mary Astell and Samuel Richardson

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Notes

¹ R. Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 17, 166–7. I am grateful to Peter Anstey, Janet Aikins Yount and the reviewers for their helpful comments.

² Margaret Collier to Richardson, 3 October 1755, cited T.C.D. Eaves and B.D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 565. For the debate about Richardson's feminism see E. Moers, review of Eaves and Kimpel, New York Review of Books (10 February 1972), 27; J. Harris, Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, reprinted 2009); S. Kilfeather, ‘The Rise of Richardson Criticism’, in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, edited by M.A. Doody and P. Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 251–66; and L. Richardson, ‘Leaving her Father's House: Astell, Locke, and Clarissa's Body Politic’, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 34, edited by C. Ingrassia and J.S. Ravel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 151–71, 170–1, n26, 29.

³ M. Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, 2 parts (London, 1694, 1697), edited by P. Springborg (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997), is henceforth cited as SP; M. Astell's Some Reflections Upon Marriage. With Additions, fourth edition (London: 1730, reprinted New York: Source Book Press, 1970) as M; S. Richardson's Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady [1748–49], edited by A. Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) as C; and his Pamela or, Virtue Rewarded [1740], edited by P. Sabor with an introduction by M.A. Doody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) as P. For information about Astell, I rely throughout on Perry's definitive biography, henceforth called Astell. See also Richardson, ‘Leaving’, for significant connections between Astell and Clarissa.

⁴ Perry, Astell, 210, 212, 99.

⁵ J. Harris, ‘Richardson: Original or Learned Genius?’, in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, edited by M.A. Doody and P. Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 188–202, 195.

⁶ See Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 11.

⁷ G. Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences [Oxford: 1752], edited by R. Perry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985), 383.

⁸ In 1730, the preface of 1706 appears as the Appendix. I am extremely grateful for John Dussinger's news about the 1730 printing of Reflections, received after I assembled the circumstantial evidence. The nine ornaments from Richardson's press in the Reflections of 1730 convince both him and the Richardson bibliographer Keith Maslen that he did indeed print it. Dussinger speculates that Richardson might even have initiated the reprint.

⁹ Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, edited by J. Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 69.

¹⁰ See Suarez, ‘Asserting the Negative: “Child” Clarissa and the Problem of the “Determined Girl”’, in New Essays on Samuel Richardson, edited by A.J. Rivero (New York: St Martin's Press, 1996), 69–84 (76).

¹¹ B. Makin, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen [1673], edited by P.L. Barbour (Augustan Reprint Society no. 202, 1980), 3.

¹² S. Apetrei, ‘“Call No Man Master Upon Earth”: Mary Astell's Tory Feminism and an Unknown Correspondence,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41:4 (2008), 507–23 (508).

¹³ R. Filmer, Patriarcha, or, The Natural Power of Kings (London, 1680).

¹⁴ J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1690], edited by P. Laslett (New York: New American Library, 1963), 178.

¹⁵ See R. Perry, ‘Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23:4 (1990), 444–55; and Richardson, ‘Leaving’.

¹⁶ Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 200.

¹⁷ S. Salih observes that those eighteenth-century women who applied the discourse of slavery to themselves did not necessarily embrace abolitionism. See Salih, ‘Her Blacks, Her Whites, and Her Double Face!: Altering Alterity in The Wanderer’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 11:3 (1999), 1–16.

¹⁸ P.A. Weiss, ‘Mary Astell: Including Women's Voices in Political Theory’, Hypatia, 19:3 (2004), 63–84 (66).

¹⁹ See Apetrei, ‘Call No Man Master’, 508, 517.

²⁰ M. Astell, ‘Appendix’, The Christian Religion, As Profess'd by a Daughter of The Church of England (second edition, 1717), cited in Astell and J. Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, edited by D. Taylor and M. New (Chippenham: Ashgate, 2005), and Perry, Astell, 150. For a history of passive obedience, see Perry, Astell, 171–2.

²¹ As Perry writes, ‘after the Glorious Revolution no English king would forget that he sat on the throne at the sufferance of his people. Royal authority had been dealt a blow from which it never recovered’ (Astell, 163).

²² J. Waldron asks, ‘what is the status of unmarried women, according to Locke? Subjection to their fathers, brothers, or nearest male relation?’ See God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 37. To that question, Astell and Richardson would have returned an unequivocal ‘yes’.

²³ See Suarez, ‘Asserting the Negative’, 82, citing Mark 12:25 and Luke 20:35.

²⁵ M, 60. See also M, 87.

²⁴ V. Woolf, A Room of One's Own [1929] and Three Guineas [1938], edited by M. Shiach, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 26–33. As Perry argues, ‘Astell began the modern dialogue in print about the power relations between the sexes’, for ‘her influence can be traced in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf, in their efforts to present heroines with sufficient spiritual and psychological strength to hold their own in patriarchal society’ (Astell, 139). Woolf undoubtedly knew about Astell, for in Three Guineas, she cites F.M. Smith, Mary Astell ([Columbia University Press, 1916], reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1966), recounts the story of Bishop Burnet's intervention and reminds readers that women benefactors made possible the foundation of colleges for men: Clare, Queens', St John's and Christ's (146–8, 282, n21).

²⁶ Q. Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1972), vol. 1, 185.

²⁷ Perry writes similarly that Astell's ‘proud spirit shuddered at submitting to an inferior mind or a less delicate sense of virtue’ (Astell, 329).

²⁸ Astell, Christian Religion, cited in Astell and Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, 249.

²⁹ See Harris, Richardson, 64–5, 76–7, 79.

³⁰ For Lovelace's affinities with Hobbes, see J. Harris, ‘Protean Lovelace’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2:4 (1990), 327–46, repr. in Passion & Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson, edited by D. Blewitt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 92–113.

³¹ See P. Springborg, ‘Mary Astell (1666–1731), Critic of Locke’, American Political Science Review, 89:3 (1995), 621–33 (628); Harris, Richardson, 92–3.

³² S. Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison [1753–54], 3 parts, edited by J. Harris (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, reprinted 1979), part 3, 250.

³³ See J. Harris, ‘Grotesque, Classical and Pornographic Bodies in Clarissa’, in Rivero, New Essays, 101–16.

³⁴ Isaiah xi:6.

³⁵ Cited by Apetrei, ‘Call No Man Master’, 519.

³⁶ Cited by Perry, Astell, 219.

³⁷ A.H. Upham was the first to see the connection, in ‘A Parallel for Richardson's Clarissa’, Modern Language Notes, 28:4 (1913), 103–05.

³⁸ For a history of the idea, see B. Hill, ‘A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery’, Past and Present, 117 (1987), 107–30. See also Hill, The First English Feminist: ‘Reflections upon Marriage’ and Other Writings by Mary Astell (Aldershot, Hants: Gower, 1986).

³⁹ Perry, Astell, 286.

⁴⁰ Astell, Letters, 65. Ballard picks up the same expression to describe Astell: ‘She was as ambitious to slide gently through the world without so much as being seen or taken notice of, as others are to bustle and make a figure in it’ (Memoirs, 383).

⁴¹ Astell, Letters, 112.

⁴² J. Dussinger examines the influence of W. Law and G. Cheyne's ascetic theology in ‘Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection in Clarissa’, PMLA 81 (1966), 236–45; he analyses Richardson's religion in ‘Richardson's “Christian Vocation”’, Papers on Language and Literature, 3 (1967), 3–19; and he provides a Freudian account of Clarissa's drive to Christian perfection in death, in The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (The Hague: Mouton, 1974). M.A. Doody writes of ‘The Gnostic Clarissa’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 11:1 (1998), 49–78, and R. Bechler perceives Jacob Boehme as significant, in ‘“Triall by what is Contrary”: Samuel Richardson and Christian Dialectic’, in Samuel Richardson: Passion and Prudence, edited by V.G. Myer (London: Vision Books), 93–113.

⁴³ See Perry, Astell, 119.

⁴⁴ K. Maslen, Samuel Richardson of London Printer: A Study of his Printing Based on Ornament Use and Business Accounts (Otago Studies in English 7, University of Otago, 2001), 190–214, 13, 272.

⁴⁵ D. Taylor, ‘Clarissa Harlowe, Mary Astell, and Elizabeth Carter: John Norris of Bemerton's Female “Descendants”’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 12:1 (1999), 19–38 (26). See also his Reason and Religion in ‘Clarissa’: Samuel Richardson and ‘the famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

⁴⁶ For further information about many of these women, see E. Eger and L. Pelz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008).

⁴⁷ See Astell: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), edited by P. Springborg, xiv–xv.

⁴⁸ Perry, Astell, 119; D. Taylor, ‘Mary Astell's Work towards a New Edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II’, Studies in Bibliography, 57 (2005–06), 197–232 (205).

⁴⁹ Pamela relies on Astell for her critique of Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education: see Taylor, ‘Clarissa Harlowe’, 32, n35.

⁵⁰ S. Richardson, ‘Hints of Prefaces for Clarissa’, with introduction by J. Harris, headnotes by T. Keymer, in Samuel Richardson's Published Commentary on ‘Clarissa’, 3 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), vol. 1, 321.

⁵¹ Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, 343.

⁵² I am grateful to the late J.F. Thaddeus for drawing Chapone's text to my attention.

⁵³ Locke, Two Treatises, I, 47.

⁵⁴ Chapone, The Hardships of the English Laws. In relation to Wives. With an Explanation of the Original Curse of Subjection passed upon the Woman. In an Humble Address to the Legislature (London, 1735; reprinted Dublin, 1735), 6.

⁵⁵ Waldron rightly detects an ‘air of embarrassment’ in Locke's admission that political power was ‘a relation between free and equal individuals’, and conjugal power ‘a relation between a free individual and a creature that is something less than a free individual’ (God, 21–43). The fact that Locke was a man of his time is no excuse, however. Astell, Chapone and Richardson answer Locke by pointing out that women did not own their own bodies. The personal was indeed political, then as now. For Woolf, too, who in 1938 drew a devastating parallel between tyrannical Victorian patriarchs and modern dictators, ‘the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected’, since ‘the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other’ (Three Guineas, 270). Even now, argues S. Schulhofer, the law protects property, labour, privacy and other fundamental interests, but the right to choose whether and when to be sexually intimate with another person is too often ignored. Especially when coercion is involved, he says, a woman's right to bodily integrity and sexual autonomy remains her ‘missing, unprotected entitlement’ (‘Unwanted Sex’, Atlantic Monthly, October 1998, 55–66).

⁵⁹ Ballard Papers, Bodleian Library, 43:132, 155, which Perry kindly copied to me.

⁵⁶ See Perry, Astell, 330.

⁵⁷ G. Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences [Oxford, 1752], edited by R. Perry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985).

⁵⁸ Perry, Astell, 35–7. See also R. Perry, ‘Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23:4 (1990), 444–55.

⁶⁰ Perry, in Ballard, Memoirs 41–2.

⁶¹ P. Sabor argues persuasively in his introduction to Letters and Passages Restored from the Original Manuscripts of the History of Clarissa [1751], vol. 2 of Samuel Richardson's Published Commentary on ‘Clarissa’ 1747–1765, 3 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998) for many of Richardson's revisions being genuine ‘restorations’ from a longer manuscript. But the inserted passages from Astell must have been additions. For further debate about the revisions, see also Harris, Richardson, 130; F. Stuber, ‘On Original and Final Intentions, or Can There Be an Authoritative ‘Clarissa’? Text 2 (1985), 229–44; and Stuber, ‘Text, Writer, Reader, World’, introduction to Clarissa, facsimile of third edition, edited by Stuber, M.A. Doody, J.S. Borck et al. (New York: AMS Press, 1990–96).

⁶² Third edition of Clarissa, vol. 7, 215. For Richardson's evolving views on the education of women and men, see J. Harris, ‘Learning and Genius in Sir Charles Grandison’, Studies in the Eighteenth Century IV, edited by R.F. Brissenden and J.C. Eade (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 167–92.

⁶³ Perry, Astell, 13, 41, 25–8.

⁶⁴ C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract: Aspects of Patriarchal Liberalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 2, 225, 60.

⁶⁵ Perry, Astell, 100.