Effeminacy and Femininity: Domestic Prose Satire and David Simple
Felicity Nussbaum, University of California
Volume 11, no. 4, July 1999
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
During the past decade or two common wisdom has assumed that with the formation of the public sphere, mid-eighteenth-century England ushers in the cult of domesticity, companionate marriage, and the retreat of women into the private sphere. According to this familiar narrative now happily beginning to be complicated by the recognition of women’s sometimes subtle strategies for managing professional authorship and their surprisingly public authority — sentimental bourgeois values predominate, and modern rather rigid notions of gender difference and sexual identity emerge. Yet curiously, Samuel Johnson indicates in the Adventurer (11 December 1753) that it was in former times, an era in the long-forgotten past, when “ladies contented themselves with private virtues and domestic excellence, and a female writer, like a female warrior, was considered as a kind of excentric being, that deviated, however illustriously, from her due sphere of motion.” He continues, “The revolution of years has now produced a generation of Amazons of the pen, who with the spirit of their predecessors have set masculine tyranny at defiance, asserted their claim to the regions of science, and seem resolved to contest the usurpations of virility.” The class of professional writers, “the generation of Amazons” that Johnson describes, clearly defies easy confinement to domesticity or to an image of ideal femininity. Instead, such women typify for him an entire generation capable of colonizing the masculine domain. … If Johnson thought women writers of the mid-eighteenth century were feisty women who had given up domestic pursuits, why do we persist in emphasizing their traditional femininity?
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Domesticity” include:
Opening the Phosphoric “Envelope”: Scientific Appraisal, Domestic Spectacle, and (Un)”Reasonable Creatures” in Edgeworth’s Belinda
by NICOLE M. WRIGHT (ECF 24.3, Spring 2012)
Histories of Female Progress in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers
by JULIE MURRAY (ECF 22.4, Summer 2010)
Out of Egypt and into England: Secrecy and State in Samuel Pratt’s Family Secrets,”
by JAMES CRUISE (ECF 22.2, Winter 2010)
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