Abstract
In 1687, Aphra Behn published the third installment of Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, in which a narrator fully knowledgeable about the characters’ most intimate inner thoughts and most private doings tells their story infused with her own physical, political, and social desires. For Behn, it was inconceivable that anyone could distinguish what today we might call one’s subject position from one’s knowledge. Forty years later in The Accomplish’d Rake (1727), Mary Davys created an embodied narrator also fully knowledgeable about the characters’ most intimate inner thoughts and most private doings, but this narrator’s material existence was essentially irrelevant beyond its fact. Davys’s narrator’s knowledge was validated by a detachment that Behn would have treated as a delusion.
It was a great while before she could recover from the Indisposition to which this fatal and unexpected Accident had reduced her: But, as I have said, she was not of a Nature to dv for Love …
—Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
But her sanguine Temper soon dispell’d the Mist that would have clouded her warm Imagination, and she was resolved to hope Sir John would like a College-life so well, that some Years would drop before he came again.
—Mary Davys, The Accomplish’d Rake
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Notes
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989);
Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancientand Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003);
Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
See also Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self; Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe; Taylor, Sources of the Self; Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” ELH 64, no. 2 (1997): 457, doi:10.1353/elh.1997.0017;
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, paperback ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
See, for example, Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Including and Translation of Thomas Hobbes, “Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris,” by Simon Shaffer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1995);
Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
Judith P. Zinsser, ed., Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005);
Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton, Introduction to Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 1–6.
See, for example, Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump; Shapin, Social History; Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy; Dear, Discipline and Experience; Peter Harrison, “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 4 (October 1995): 531–53, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709991;
Peter Dear, “Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 76, no. 2 (June 1985): 149–61;
Geoffrey Gorham, “Mind-Body Dualism and the Harvey-Descartes Controversy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 2 (April 1994): 211–34, doi:10.2307/2709897;
Barbara M. Benedict, “The Mad Scientist: The Creation of a Literary Stereotype,” in Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the “Long” Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert C. Leitz, III and Kevin L. Cope (New York: AMS Press, 2004), 68–70;
Elizabeth Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001);
Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 107; Keller, “Producing Petty Gods”;
Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007);
Francis Young, English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1929 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013).
This narrative of self and epistemology follows the opposite course traced by Loraine Daston and Peter Galison in Objectivity. They argue that scientific methodology created a sense of self, particularly a scientific self. I do not dispute that epistemology may have generated a scientific self—one investigated not only by Daston and Galison but also, for example, by Jan Golinski in his work on Humphy Davy—but I do suggest that the epistemology whose influence they are tracking itself had its origins in something beyond itself. Daston and Galison, Objectivity; Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 6.
George S. Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders: Pre- And Post-Modern Discourses: Medical, Scientific (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991), 284, 294;
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).
See also Rachel Carnell, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 18;
Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York: The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 2004);
Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Carnell, Partisan Politics; Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010);
Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989);
Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
See also Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton, ed., Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997); Zinsser, Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science;
Judy A. Hayden, ed., The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Zinsser, Introduction to Zinsser, Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, 3–9; Hunter and Hutton, Introduction, 5; Schiebinger, The Mind, 10–47; Feingold, Newtonian Moment, 122–25; Harth, Cartesian Women, 5; Patricia Sheridan, Introduction to Catharine Trotter Cockburn: Philosophical Writings, ed. Patricia Sheridan (Toronto: Broadview, 2006), 9–11.
Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders, 276–81; Kristine Larsen, “‘A Woman’s Place Is in the Dome’: Gender and the Astronomical Observatory, 1670–1970,” MP: An Online Feminist Journal 2, no. 5 (October 2009): 104–24, http://academinist.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Woman_PlaceLarsen.pdf; Feingold, Newtonian Moment, 119–25.
Donna Haraway, “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium,” in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 232.
Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, “Introduction: When Feminisms Intersect Epistemology,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 11. See also Vrinda Dalmiya and Linda Alcoff, “Are ‘Old Wives’ Tales’ Justified?” in Alcoff and Potter, Feminist Epistemologies, 217–44; Stephen Clucas, “Joanna Stephens’s Medicine and the Experimental Philosophy,” in Zinsser, Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, 142. Michael Hunter observes that starting in the 1640s, followers of the “new science” evinced a general “proneness to downgrade other forms of knowledge and other methods of ratiocination by comparison” (“Christopher Wren,” 48).
See, for example, Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 3; Dear, “Totius in Verba”; Jan V. Golinski, “Robert Boyle: Skepticism and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Chemical Discourse,” in The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987), 58–82;
John T. Harwood, “Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia,” in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1989), 119–47;
Dwight Atkinson, Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context: “The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London,” 1675–1975 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999).
As Lanser puts it in The Narrative Act, “If we can acknowledge the crucial impact of point of view in the presentation and reception of a tale, then surely we can also entertain the possibility of more complex links between ideology and technique through the structuring of point of view. It is possible that the very choice of a narrative technique can reveal and embody ideology.” Susan Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 18. See also Lanser, Fictions of Authority.
A smattering of studies on this subject includes Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986);
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1600–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989);
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999);
Paula Backscheider, ed., Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Fiction and Social Engagement (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000);
Sarah Prescott, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690–1740 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003);
Susan Carlile, ed., Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011).
J. Paul Hunter, “Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2, no. 4 (1990): 275–91;
Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987);
Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680–1740 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
See also Martha A. Turner, Mechanism and the Novel: Science in the Narrative Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Helen Thompson and Natania Meeker, “Empiricism, Substance, Narrative: An Introduction,” special issue of Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 48, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 183–86.
J. A. Downie, “Mary Davys’s ‘Probable Feign’d Stories’ and Critical Shibboleths about ‘The Rise of the Novel,’” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12, no. 2–3 (January–April 2000): 309–26, doi:10.1353/ecf.2000.0033. There are any number of studies that similarly argue that the novel emerged from a melting pot of genres and discourses—McKeon, Origins of the English Novel;
Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983);
J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990);
William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–1789 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and so forth. Downie argues convincingly not only for novelists’ awareness of this process at the time but also for the termination of a first stage or arc of development at 1730, when novelists fell temporarily silent and playwrights—some of them the same people—took voice.
John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
Paula R. Backscheider, “The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work, ed. Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 25–26; Downie, “‘Probable Feign’d Stories.’”
See, for example, Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982);
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980);
Jonathan Culler, “Omniscience,” Narrative 12, no. 1 (January 2004): 22–34;
Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003), 256–63.
Paul Dawson, “The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction.” Narrative 17, no. 2 (May 2009): 144, doi:10.1353/nar.0.0023
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972);
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990);
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Ellen Spolsky, “Narrative as Nourishment,” in Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 37–60; Lanser, Fictions of Authority; Lanser, The Narrative Act.
Blakey Vermeule writes, for example, “Rather than seeing the science of moral psychology as an effect of Enlightenment ideology, I would argue that it picks out deep facts about the sources of morality, facts that the evolutionary synthesis is now able to explain and contextualize. On this view, empiricism turns out to have the right account of the sources of moral life. This view informs the readings in this book in ways that I will explain.” Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
See also, for example, Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006);
Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010);
David Herman, “Narrative Theory after the Second Cognitive Revolution,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 155–75;
Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010);
Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Mark Blackwell, ed. The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007); “Empiricism, Substance, Narrative,” ed. Helen Thompson and Natania Meeker, special issue, Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 48, no. 3 (Fall 2007).
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© 2014 Karen Bloom Gevirtz
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Gevirtz, K.B. (2014). Introduction. In: Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386762_1
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