Abstract
Introducing the second edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1713, Roger Cotes announced that “Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations, although they afterwards proceed with the greatest accuracy from those principles, may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be.”1 Although it would have outraged him to hear such a claim, the argument could be made that the new natural philosophy in England, including the work in Newton’s Principia that he was so unequivocally defending, was founded upon a hypothesis: the idea that humans possess a unified, stable self. Newton may have been correct about gravity, as Robert Hooke was correct about the appearance of a flea and Robert Boyle correct about a vacuum; they proceeded, in other words, with the greatest accuracy. But the first principle of their speculations, that human beings possess a stable self capable of rational and detached observation and cogitation leading to knowledge of the natural world, appeared to some thinkers and writers to be more hypothesis than fact. Furthermore, those thinkers and writers were often uncomfortable with the impact that this idea of self had on the definition of knowledge and the attendant distribution of power in their world.
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Notes
Roger Cotes, “Cotes’ Preface to the Second Edition,” in Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte (1729), ed. Florian Cajoli (1934), vol. 1: The Motion of Bodies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), xx.
Recently, Leah Orr has challenged the attribution of Love-Letters. In the absence of more consistent logic and other scholarship, I have chosen to follow the established practice of scholars in the field and treat Love-Letters as Behn’s. Even if Love-Letters is not Behn’s, this chapter shows that its handling of the self is consistent with Behn’s interest in natural philosophy expressed in her narrative fiction, poetry, drama, and translations, and supports my larger argument that authors of the period found the idea of the stable, unified self profoundly and increasingly problematic as political events unfolded. Leah Orr, “Attribution Problems in the Fiction of Aphra Behn,” The Modern Language Review 108, no. 1 (January 2013): 30–51, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.108.1.0030.
A sampling of scholarship examining Behn’s familiarity with natural philosophy includes Anne Bratach, “Following the Intrigue: Aphra Behn, Genre, and Restoration Science,” Journal of Narrative Technique 26, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 209–227;
Sarah Goodfellow, “‘Such Masculine Strokes’: Aphra Behn as Translator of A Discovery of New Worlds,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 28, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 229–250;
Line Cottegnies, “The Translator as Critic: Aphra Behn’s Translation of Fontenelle’s Discovery of New Worlds (1688),” Restoration 27, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 23–38;
Helen Thompson, “‘Thou Monarch of my Panting Soul’: Hobbesian Obligation and the Durability of Romance in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters,” in British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 107–120;
Barbara M. Benedict, “The Curious Genre: Female Inquiry in Amatory Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 194–210;
Al Coppola, “Retraining the Virtuoso’s Gaze: Behn’s Emperor of the Moon, The Royal Society, and the Spectacles of Science and Politics,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 481–506;
Alvin Snider, “Atoms and Seeds: Aphra Behn’s Lucretius,” Clio 33, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 1–24;
Alvin Snider, “Cartesian Bodies,” Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 92, no. 2 (November 2000): 299–319;
Ros Ballaster, “Taking Liberties: Revisiting Behn’s Libertinism,” Women’s Writing 19, no. 2 (May 2012): 165–76, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2011.646861;
Karen Gevirtz, “Aphra Behn and the Scientific Self,” in The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein, ed. Judy Hayden (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 85–98;
Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640–89 (Jonathan Cape: London, 1977);
Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: Pandora, 2000);
Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial, 1980).
Mary Ann O’Donnell traces the development of Behn’s abilities as a translator in several languages in the introduction to Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, 2nd ed. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 4. O’Donnell suggests that while Behn’s French was strong enough by the late 1680s to produce her supple translation of Fontenelle and her reflections on translating in the “Translator’s Preface” to that work, Behn’s Latin probably required “help” from someone more fluent. (In the textual introduction to Volume 1 of The Works of Aphra Behn, Todd speculates in a brief narrative about what that process might have looked like). Whatever Behn’s linguistic proficiencies, it remains striking that three of her translations or associations with significant translations are works of natural philosophy when she could have chosen or been chosen to translate other kinds of texts. As Todd notes, “In her prose translations Behn appears to have followed Roscommon and Dryden in choosing a source consistent with her own views and temperament.” Janet Todd, textual introduction to The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 1, Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), xxxvi;
Todd, textual introduction to The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 4, Translations (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), ix. See also Snider, “Atoms and Seeds,” 15.
Aphra Behn, The Roundheads, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 6, The Plays, 1678–1682 (Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 1996), 385. I am indebted to Mary Ann O’Donnell for pointing out this reference.
Aphra Behn, “To the Unknown Daphnis on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius,” in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 1, Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), 7–10. For a more extensive treatment of Behn’s poem, see Snider, “Atoms and Seeds,” 1–24.
Coppola, “Retraining the Virtuoso’s Gaze”; Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess, 263, 270–274; Goodfellow, “‘Such Masculine Strokes’”; Cottegnies, “The Translator as Critic”; Thompson, “‘Thou Monarch of my Panting Soul’”; Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, 141, 168, 187, 182; Todd, Secret Life, 290–94; Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80–81.
Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 2, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 1993), 32, 158, 185–186. All further references to this text are abbreviated Love-Letters.
Bratach, “Following the Intrigue,” 211–213, 219; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Joanna Lipking (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 8. See also Benedict, “The Curious Genre,” 197.
George Warren, An impartial description of Surinam upon the continent of Guiana in America (London: William Godbid, 1667), 10–11. An entertaining specimen of this type of writing is Henry Stubbe’s very serious anthropology of chocolate, The Indian nectar, or, A discourse concerning chocolate…. (London: J. C., 1662).
Maximilian E. Novak, “Friday: or, the Power of Naming,” in Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Battestin, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 110–22.
Emily Hodgson Anderson, “Novelty in Novels: A Look at What’s New in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Studies in the Novel 39, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 4.
For more discussion of spectacle and the scientific revolution, see for example Coppola, “Virtuoso’s Gaze”; Tita Chico, “Gimcrack’s Legacy: Sex, Wealth, and the Theater of Experimental Philosophy,” Comparative Drama 42, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 29–49;
M. A. Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500–1750 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007); Bratach, “Following the Intrigue,” 220–21;
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, eds., Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008).
Behn’s description of the “numb eel” resembles Warren’s in his Impartial History of Surinam, but as Stanley Finger recently pointed out, Behn’s sources must have gone well beyond Warren and probably included personal experience. Finger also points out that the properties of such sea creatures were often described as “cold.” Oroonoko’s complaint about the effects being inconsistent with “cold philosophy” suggests another reading, as well. Cold was a topic that fascinated seventeenth-century natural philosophers, particularly empiricists. Boyle conducted an extensive series of experiments to investigate cold as a natural phenomenon, for example, and published the results in New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, Or an Experimental History of Cold. Warren, Impartial History, 2; Stanley Finger, “The Lady and the Eel: How Aphra Behn Introduced Europeans to the ‘Numb Eel.’” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 55, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 378–401;
Robert Boyle, New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, Or an Experimental History of Cold…., in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, vol. 4, Colours and Cold, 1664–5 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999). I am indebted to Mary Ann O’Donnell for calling my attention to Finger’s essay.
Stephen Clucas describes a series of experiments performed on a mixture developed by Joanna Stephens for curing gallstones, pointing out that one after the other, the experimenters tested the medicine on themselves and others without considering the impact of the body on the results of the experiment. Similarly, Newton is famous for performing a number of his experiments in optics on his own eyes, and Boyle tested the powers of cold fluids by drinking them. Stephen Clucas, “Joanna Stephens’s Medicine and the Experimental Philosophy,” in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith P. Zinsser (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 149–50; Isaac Newton, Laboratory Notebook, c. 1669–1693, MS Add. 3975, Newton Papers, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, UK;
George Johnson, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (New York: Knopf, 2008), 38–39; Boyle, Experimental History of Cold, 4:343–44.
Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe: 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 173; John Richetti, “Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister: Aphra Behn and Amatory Fiction,” in Rivero, Augustan Subjects, 21; Janet Todd, General Introduction to The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 1, Poetry, xxi; Todd, Secret Life, 337.
Diana Barnes, “Familiar Epistolary Philosophy: Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters (1664),” Parergon 26, no. 2 (2009): 39–64; Elspeth Graham, “Intersubjectivity, Intertextuality, and Form in the Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish,” in Dowd and Eckerle, Genre and Women’s Life Writing, 131–50;
Jan 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.
Janet Todd, “Love-Letters and Critical History,” in Aphra Behn (1640–1689): Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Bernard Dhuicq and Guyonne Leduc (Montreal: L’Harmattan, 2000), 198;
Diana Barnes, “The Restoration of Royalist Form in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters,” in Women Writing 1550–1750, ed. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman, special issue of Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review 18, no. 1 (2001): 205–6.
See, for example, Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980), 4, 14, 75; Beebee, Epistolary Fiction;
Barbara Maria Zaczek, Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1997);
Susan Wright, “Private Language Made Public: The Language of Letters as Literature,” Poetics 18 (1989): 549–78;
Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005).
Donald R. Wehrs, “Eros, Ethics, and Identity: Royalist Feminism and the Politics of Desire in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister,” SEL 32 (1992): 461.
Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1958), 113.
Wehrs, “Eros, Ethics, and Identity,” 461, 466; Maureen Duffy, Introduction to Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister by Aphra Behn (New York: Virago: 1987), x–xi.
See also Jorge Figueroa-Dorrego, “Reconciling ‘the most Contrary and Distant Thoughts’: Paradox and Irony in the Novels of Aphra Behn,” in Re-Shaping the Genres: Restoration Women Writers, ed. Zenón Luis-Martinez and Jorge Figueroa-Dorrego (New York: Peter Lange, 2003), 239.
Margarete Rubik, “Estranging the Familiar, Familiarizing the Strange: Self and Other in Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter,” in O’Donnell, Dhuicq, and Leduc, Aphra Behn (1640–1689), 40. See also Annamaria Lamarra, “The Difficulty in Saying ‘I’: Aphra Behn and the Female Autobiography,” in Aphra Behn (1640–1689): Le Modèle Européen, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell and Bernard Dhuicq (Entrevaux, France: Bilingua GA Editions, 2005), 1–7.
For more on the problems of the physically absent beloved in epistolary fiction, see Stephen Ahern, “‘Glorious ruine’: Romantic Excess and the Politics of Sensibility in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters,” Restoration 29, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 30.
See, for example, Peter Walmsley, Locke’s “Essay” and the Rhetoric of Science (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003).
See also Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 11. Ballaster argues that the late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century political conflicts were still open to women, who could participate in them through the prose fictions, especially the amatory narratives, that became the novel.
See, for example, John E. Leary, Jr., Francis Bacon and the Politics of Science (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994);
James Dougal Fleming, “Introduction: The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700,” in The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700, ed. James Dougal Fleming (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 8.
Peter Laslett, Introduction to Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, ed. Peter Laslett, student edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 51;
Rachel Carnell, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 20, 4–8.
See also Gary S. De Krey, “Radicals, Reformers and Republicans: Academic Language and Political Discourse in Restoration London,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 71–99;
Francis F. Steen, “The Politics of Love: Propaganda and Structural Learning in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister,” Poetics Today 23, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 91–122;
Jacqueline Broad, “Mary Astell’s Machiavellian Moment? Politics and Feminism in Moderation truly Stated,” in Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, ed. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 9–23.
“Like Fielding, Behn knows that historical events can be distorted in historical narratives,” he points out. Albert J. Rivero, “‘Heiroglyphick’d’ History: in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 134.
Aphra Behn, “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, Vol. 3: “The Fair Jilt” and Other Stories (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 382.
Rupert Hall, “Isaac Newton: Creator of the Cambridge Scientific Tradition,” in Cambridge Scientific Minds, ed. Peter Harman and Simon Mitton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 40–41.
Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte (1729), ed. Florian Cajoli (1934), vol. 1: The Motion of Bodies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1962), 5, 4.
It was established practice during the late seventeenth century to use the particular as the general. The maneuver, according to Peter Dear, came from Aristotelian methodology and had not yet been objected to. “Above all,” Dear notes, “throughout the century the universal experience reigned virtually unchallenged as the irreducible touchstone of empirical adequacy.” Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.
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), 60–69.
Robert L. Chibka suggests that the cultural differences between Oroonoko and the English, including the narrator, are to no small degree based in the willingness to manipulate truth. “Europeans continually maintain power over Oroonoko by a twofold mechanism,” Chibka writes; “they lie and assume that he does the same. He, by the same token, remains powerless because he tells truth and assumes that they will do the same.” Robert L. Chibka, “‘Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman’s Invention’: Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 520.
Jacqueline Pearson, “Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn,” part 1, The Review of English Studies 42, no. 165 (February 1991): 43, original italics.
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© 2014 Karen Bloom Gevirtz
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Gevirtz, K.B. (2014). An Ingenious Romance: The Stable Self. In: Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386762_3
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