Literary Characters - The Learned Lady and The Female Wit

To understand 18th century Britain's reaction towards the Learned Lady or the Female Wit, it is necessary to see how female sexuality and female knowledge was understood as linked.

The female wit of the Restoration stage had always incorporated an element of sexuality, as was natural for a character mirroring the rake. As the long 18th century rolled on, however, and attitudes to female sexuality changed so did those towards female wit. As female writers like Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood rose to prominence, satires suggested that having and flaunting knowledge would be the same as having and flaunting sexual knowledge. A woman writer, using the most public medium to "flaunt" her knowledge, was considered not only to "prostitute her mind" but also to appropriate male prerogatives. This made them unnatural women and unfit for the ideal role of a modest, virtuous and silent wife/mother.

Here it is important to distinguish the learned lady and the female wit from the other female characters. While these were characters of performance and sexual impropriety (qualities writers like Pope, Swift and Addison often ascribed to womanhood as a whole), the learned lady and the female wit neither put on a performance nor show off their sexualty.

Alexander Pope did not think highly of women of knowledge
and was subsequently targeted by women writers like Montagu and Burney

Although satires often linked them with sexuality, the real outrage of the display of feminine knowledge was the implication that women were capable of higher thought like men were. This was a perversion that went beyond mere authorship. Thus, this would be ridiculed e.g. with Charlotte Lennox' Lucy or Henry Fielding's Mrs. Slipslop struggling with difficult words and consepts they presume to master.

What became central to the discussion of female knowledge was education. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters argue that whatever could be found to be lacking in women's knowledge was due to faults in their education. (This is also the chief obstacle in Lennox' The Female Quixote.). Elizabeth Carter and Frances Burney tried to show how learning and femininity could be combined without subjecting the learned lady or the female wit to the scorn of contemporary society. These writers represented a trend in women's right to aquisition and presentation of knowledge which were to change literature and society.

Source: Elaine M. McGirr, Eighteenth-Century Characters: A Guide to the Literature of the Age (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Literary Characters - The Coquette and The Prude

Somewhat like the rake and the fop, and the country gentleman and the cit the Coquette and the Prude seem to be opposed but turn out to share a number of qualities. The coquette is a flirt, playing on the expectations of men and her own femininity while the prude is the seeming opposite, excessively occupied with her virtue and excluding her heart and potential admirers.

The characters share one crucial common trait; both resist marriage and are thus increasingly frowned upon as marriage and motherhood become the percieved natural state of women. Although the coquette faces a downward slide into vulgarity and the prude a similar one into spinsterhood or a transformation into an old maid, their similarities become increasingly apparent throughout the 18th century. Samuel Richardson's prudish Pamela was easily satirised in Henry Fielding's coquette Shamela as resistance to male advances just as easily can be interpreted as schemes to attract these men. Pamela might be both a prude and a coquette. Although it seems Richarson finds prudery impossible (as it is based in modesty which is so attractive), her flaunting of her virtue in most social settings signifies mixed characteristics.

Pamela - prude or coquette?

Addison and Steele were very preoccupied with these characters and saw them in a mercantilistic light. Both, they argued, tried to increase their stock by manipulating the market. This meant being unnatural, which in the expanding capitalism was seen as just as dangerous as in social life.

Later, this was seen as uncomfortable evidence of the superficiality of gender roles and the effect of this. Assumed characters not only opposed the "natural state of woman" but they also presumed to threaten the balance of power relations. Colley Cibber suggests in The Provok'd Husband that the coquette and the prude assumes these characters to preserve their techincal chastity, allowing them to take social liberties elsewhere. In this sense, far from increasing their attractions, they become repulsive because they are not "proper" women.

In spite of this, the coquette was an oft represented character. Likened to the fop, she was lively and social. Her agenda was also understood as a mere postponement of married life, to which end she would avoid too close a relationship to one single suitor. On the other hand, there were also a number of tragic coquettes. Richardson's Clarissa could for instance be seen as a coquette paying for her failure with her life. Whether successful or not, the coquette always ranked above the prude. Both characters were seen as threats to the feminine ideal, but the prude was thought to enbody all the coquette's vices but none of  her virtues and she, unlike the coquette, rejected married life altogether.

Source: Elaine M. McGirr, Eighteenth-Century Characters: A Guide to the Literature of the Age (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Literary Characters - The Cit

The Cit, the opposite of the country gentleman, is a citizen and a member of the growing middle class. With the advent of mercantile capitalism, theatre-goers were increasingly from this social state. As the aristocratic element in the audience dwindled, so did the status of the rake and the his typical victim the cit rose to prominence.

In the early 17th century, the cit had been an ambiguous character. Greedy and vulgar but still enterprising, he increasingly came to stand for the expansion of British influence in trade, shedding his negative qualities onto the character of the Dutch Merchant. Whereas the fop with whom he shares some urban characteristics was a figure of ridicule, the cit never suffered this treatment although he was early on suffering as the victim of the rake.

In the Restoration, the aspiring and socially climbing cit was criticised for his presumption but as he became more intrinsically involved in the health of the nation his abandoning his trade became synonymous with treason. In Richardson's Clarissa and Hogarth's Marriage á la mode, however, the social aspirations and the increasing influence of the middle class is seen to save the aristocracy; the "new money" achieve social status and the "old blood" recieve influence, funds and continued lineage.


Robinson Crusoe was a cit working his industrious, colonial influence on an untamed world



Three processes affect and reflect the cit throughout the century. Firstly, its rise to prominence is seen in its favourable treatment in satires like Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild and John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Here, the upper and working classes were linked and criticised in opposition to the middle class, i.e. the cit. Secondly, artists increasingly looked to the increasingly affluent middle class for patronage. This led to an improvement in the portrayal of the cit. Finally, as middle class expertise and wealth led them into higher social milieu and often out to landed estates the distinction between the cit and the country gentleman became increasingly blurred. Although the cit's trade was still percieved as both vital and vulgar, prominent writers like Richardson symptomatically often cast their hero as a country gentleman but often an industrious one. (This merger would perhaps reflect Richardson's own middle class background). As McGirr states, "the ideal character at the century's close was a combination of the cit and the country gentleman: honest, industrious, solvent, well-fed and unapologetically British" (74)

Source: Elaine M. McGirr, Eighteenth-Century Characters: A Guide to the Literature of the Age (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Literary Characters - The Country Gentleman

Just as the rake and the fop were seen as dichotomies of masculinity, the Country Gentleman formed a dichotomy with the Cit. In addition the country gentleman became the object of an "internal dichotomy" where two representations highlighted the conflicts in an increasingly partisan political milieu.

The country gentleman first appeared in Horace and Virgil and was equated with the "good man" in Renaissance and 17th century literature. He embodied qualities like independence, freedom, moderation and earnestness. He is a character fundamentally in opposition to the city; he resents the fashions, customs, characters of and foreign influence on the city and, most significantly, is opposed to centralised politics. Whereas the character stays much the same throughout the 17th and 18th century, its use and the nature of its traits changes depending on which party is in power.

The Whig party in the making embraced the qualities of the country gentleman. They were opposed to the Stuart court and its Catholic, foreign affiliates. They conservatively and nationalistically celebrated country gentleman's Englishness (later representing him as Addison and Steele's Sir Roger de Coverley and John Bull) and saw him as a representative of the landed gentry whose ancestors made King John sign the Magna Charta. In Whig literature, like Buckingham and Howard's The Country Gentleman, the country gentleman visits the city, finds faults with city politics and particularly with the fops and their French excesses and returns to the country to avoid the corruption of the city.

The court, soon-to-be-Tory, party on the other hand supported the Stuarts, a hierarchical understanding of society and embraced foreign impulses (which neatly tied in with the Stuarts' inclination towards Catholicism). The Tories saw the country gentleman as a failed man; a rustic, cowardly, uncouth "booby" who failed to participate in society. He was clearly linked to the then vanquished roundhead Puritans in Aphra Behn's The Rover and The Roundheads. Here, the country gentleman is subjected to the wit and masculinity of the cavalier rake and fails to avoid being bested in all respects.

The Whig country gentleman's oppositional aspect did complicate matters following the Glorious Revolution and the protestant succession, however. To oppose the new government became synonymous with supporting the ousted Stuarts and so the Whigs washed their hands of the country gentleman. Fielding's Tom Jones features Squire Western, a brutish country gentleman in contrast to the polite de Coverley. As the Whigs switched sides, the country gentleman became more of a threatening Tory figure.

There is a further twist to this confusing story. The decline of the Tories was followed by a fragmentation of the Whig party. Robert Walpole's absolutist tendencies met with opposition from members of his own party who saw these as Tory characteristics. Thus, the negatively depicted country gentleman would simultaneously be used to criticise Walpole's government (as Fielding did) and to criticise those political elements in the city which were in opposition to this government. (Colley Cibber's country gentleman's central characteristic, as portrayed in The Provok'd Husband; or a Journey to London, is wrongheaded opposition to politics and politicians).

Towards the end of the 18th century, with the rise of the cult of sensibility, saw a softening in the treatment of the country gentleman. In Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, the he is presented in a more favourable light. In a number of tableaux, the country gentleman Ben Stilton and later Harvey, the eponymous protagonist, are more in tune with morality and virtue than city characters they encounter. Although this corresponds to the properties of sensibility it also destroys the country gentleman or leaves him at a consistent disadvantage.

John Bull - the francophobic country gentleman

In addition, a more masculine, active, rough and ready country gentleman rises to prominence towards the end of the century. The John Bull character became an oppositional response to threatening developments in France and this form of the country gentleman would become the precedent for many of the country gentlemen of the 19th century. From Austen to Wilde, the happy completion of a plot would often involve settling in the country and becoming a country gentleman.

Source: Elaine M. McGirr, Eighteenth-Century Characters: A Guide to the Literature of the Age (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

18th Century Literary Wrestling

Henry Fielding, one of the least snotty of the 18th century novelists, includes an anecdote of a brawl in an inn in his novel Joseph Adams. It is reminiscent of modern wrestling matches with their highly choreographed moves and introduction of ever more colourful characters. The excerpt features the protagonist's friend, parson Abraham Adams, the host, his wife and the camber maid of Lady Booby, Joseph Andrews' former employer, who is satirically named Mrs. Slipslop. Joseph himself does not partake in the squabble, but is the occasion for it. He has fallen off parson Adams' horse and has his bruised leg tended to. The host enters the room and deprecates him for a weakling, whence the excerpt continues. Enjoy!
  

"Upon these words, Adams fetched two
strides across the room; and snapping his fingers over his head,
muttered aloud, He would excommunicate such a wretch for a farthing, for
he believed the devil had more humanity. These words occasioned a
dialogue between Adams and the host, in which there were two or three
sharp replies, till Joseph bad the latter know how to behave himself to
his betters. At which the host (having first strictly surveyed Adams)
scornfully repeating the word "betters," flew into a rage, and, telling
Joseph he was as able to walk out of his house as he had been to walk
into it, offered to lay violent hands on him; which perceiving, Adams
dealt him so sound a compliment over his face with his fist, that the
blood immediately gushed out of his nose in a stream. The host, being
unwilling to be outdone in courtesy, especially by a person of Adams's
figure, returned the favour with so much gratitude, that the parson's
nostrils began to look a little redder than usual. Upon which he again
assailed his antagonist, and with another stroke laid him sprawling on
the floor.


(Source: Wikimedia Commons)


The hostess, who was a better wife than so surly a husband deserved,
seeing her husband all bloody and stretched along, hastened presently to
his assistance, or rather to revenge the blow, which, to all appearance,
was the last he would ever receive; when, lo! a pan full of hog's blood,
which unluckily stood on the dresser, presented itself first to her
hands. She seized it in her fury, and without any reflection, discharged
it into the parson's face; and with so good an aim, that much the
greater part first saluted his countenance, and trickled thence in so
large a current down to his beard, and over his garments, that a more
horrible spectacle was hardly to be seen, or even imagined. All which
was perceived by Mrs Slipslop, who entered the kitchen at that instant.
This good gentlewoman, not being of a temper so extremely cool and
patient as perhaps was required to ask many questions on this occasion,
flew with great impetuosity at the hostess's cap, which, together with
some of her hair, she plucked from her head in a moment, giving her, at
the same time, several hearty cuffs in the face; which by frequent
practice on the inferior servants, she had learned an excellent knack of
delivering with a good grace. Poor Joseph could hardly rise from his
chair; the parson was employed in wiping the blood from his eyes, which
had entirely blinded him; and the landlord was but just beginning to
stir; whilst Mrs Slipslop, holding down the landlady's face with her
left hand, made so dexterous an use of her right, that the poor woman
began to roar, in a key which alarmed all the company in the inn.

There happened to be in the inn, at this time, besides the ladies who
arrived in the stage-coach, the two gentlemen who were present at Mr
Tow-wouse's when Joseph was detained for his horse's meat, and whom we
have before mentioned to have stopt at the alehouse with Adams. There
was likewise a gentleman just returned from his travels to Italy; all
whom the horrid outcry of murder presently brought into the kitchen,
where the several combatants were found in the postures already
described.

It was now no difficulty to put an end to the fray, the conquerors being
satisfied with the vengeance they had taken, and the conquered having no
appetite to renew the fight. The principal figure, and which engaged the
eyes of all, was Adams, who was all over covered with blood, which the
whole company concluded to be his own, and consequently imagined him no
longer for this world. But the host, who had now recovered from his
blow, and was risen from the ground, soon delivered them from this
apprehension, by damning his wife for wasting the hog's puddings, and
telling her all would have been very well if she had not intermeddled,
like a b--as she was; adding, he was very glad the gentlewoman had paid
her, though not half what she deserved. The poor woman had indeed fared
much the worst; having, besides the unmerciful cuffs received, lost a
quantity of hair, which Mrs Slipslop in triumph held in her left hand."

Source:
Fielding, Henry: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, London 1912, 118-120
(Transcription from http://www.fullbooks.com/Joseph-Andrews-Vol-13.html, last visited 27.08.2010
Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Garrick_in_the_Provoked_Wife-print.jpg, last visited 27.08.2010