Abstract
Mary Davys is the author in this study who is the exception that proves the rule. While Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, and Eliza Haywood all had connections to natural philosophy one way or another, Mary Davys did not. She knew Cambridge students, but there is no evidence that her acquaintances were or went on to be natural philosophers. Nor is there evidence that Davys read works of natural philosophy, although her novels suggest that she was familiar with natural philosophy from its presence in popular culture. It is precisely because of the nature of this connection to natural philosophy that Mary Davys’s novels concern the final chapter of this book. Davys’s work reveals an ongoing interest in the relationship between knowledge and morality, detachment and integration that occupied so much of natural philosophy during this period. Like Eliza Haywood’s The Tea-Table (1725) discussed in the previous chapter, Davys’s novels investigate how a self can be not only reliably truthful because disengaged but also reliably judgmental because morally correct. Unlike Haywood’s narrative, which explores the issue in terms of the social position of the narrator, Davys’s narratives consistently consider the issue in terms of the nature of the self. In attempting to create a self who is internally morally invested but narratively detached, Davys draws on contemporary, if debated, ideas of the self and develops techniques that underpin literary omniscience.
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Notes
Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 186;
William H. McBurney, “Mrs. Mary Davys: Forerunner of Fielding,” PMLA 74, no. 4 (September 1959): 348–55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/460444;
Jean B. Kern, “Mary Davys as Novelist of Manners.” Essays in Literature 10, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 29–38;
Victoria Joule, “Mary Davys’s Novel Contribution to Women and Realism,” Women’s Writing 17, no. 1 (May 2010): 30–48, doi:10.1080/09699080903533262;
Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 143–47;
Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 50–51;
Frans De Bruyn, “Mary Davys (1674–1732),” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists, 1660–1800, ed. Philip Breed Dematteis and Leemon B. McHenry, vol. 39 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1985), 135–37;
Martha Bowden, Introduction to “The Reform’d Coquet,” “Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady,” and “The Accomplish’d Rake”, ed. Martha F. Bowden (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999), xxv;
Donald Hal Stefanson, “The Works of Mary Davys: A Critical Edition (Vol. I and II)” (PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 1971), xiv–xv.
Like Victoria Joule, for example, Jesse Molesworth does not see women writers as part of the realist novel. Joule, “Mary Davys,” 31; Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also Staves, Literary History, 184.
Rachel Carnell, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
See also J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 56.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 6th ed. (Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, 2001), IV.iv.7, eBook.
Sarah Prescott, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690–1740 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 44.
McBurney, “Mrs. Mary Davys,” 355. See also Prescott, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 44; De Bruyn, “Mary Davys,” 134–35; 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.
Martha Bowden, “Silences, Contradictions, and the Urge to Fiction: Reflections on Writing about Mary Davys,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 36, no. 2 (2003): 127–47;
Martha Bowden, “Mary Davys: Self-Presentation and Woman Writer’s Reputation in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Women’s Writing 3, no. 1 (1996): 22–25; Bowden, Introduction, xvi–xvii;
Peggy Keeran and Jennifer Bowers, Literary Research and the British Eighteenth Century: Strategies and Sources (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 256–62.
Recently, Gerd Bayer has proposed another possible narrative by Mary Davys: “z,” published in The Gentleman’s Journal in 1693. Although Bayer’s proposal is persuasive, he acknowledges that the evidence is not definitive; consequently, “A Gift and No Gift” remains outside the scope of this study. Gerd Bayer, “A Possible Early Publication by Mary Davys and Its Swiftian Afterglow,” Notes & Queries 59, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 194–97, doi:10.1093/notesj/gjs006.
Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011);
Alice Wakely, “Mary Davys and the Politics of Epistolary Form,” in “Cultures of Whiggism”: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. David Womersley, assisted by Paddy Bullard and Abigail Williams (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 257–67; Spencer, “Amatory and Scandal Fiction,” np;
Susan Glover, Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 82–85; Stefanson, “Mary Davys,” xi–xii.
According to Richard Westfall, Flamsteed got the copies on March 28, 1714 and burned them after separating the materials he wanted from the dreck, but Westfall does not give an exact date for what Davys calls the “Conflagration.” Presumably it took Flamsteed several days to dissect 300 copies, so Davys’s dating the fire to April makes sense. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 694–96. See also Bowden, “The Reform’d Coquet,” 241n47.
Gary W. Kronk, Cometology: A Catalog of Comets, vol. 1: Ancient-1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1:389–91.
Westfall, Never at Rest, 835–36; Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker and Company, 1995), 53.
Michael Hunter, “Science and Astrology in Seventeenth-Century England: An Unpublished Polemic by John Flamsteed,” in Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995), 245–85;
A. J. Meadows, “John Flamsteed, Our Astronomical Observator,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 50, no. 2 (July 1996): 252, http://www.jstor.org/stable/531915;
Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 50–51.
George S. Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders: Pre-And Post-Modern Discourses: Medical, Scientific (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991), 331.
Victoria Joule, for example, suggests that Sir John Galliard is an “homage to the Johnians,’” the men of St. John’s College at Cambridge, for their “helpful exchange of ideas” and suggestions for the manuscript of The Accomplish’d Rake. Joule, “Mary Davys,” 37. See also Lindy Riley, “Mary Davys’s Satiric Novel Familiar Letters: Refusing Patriarchal Inscription of Women,” in Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. James E. Gill (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 207; Glover, Engendering Property, 85–86. Davys herself admitted that Cambridge students encouraged her to write but rejected the idea that they had a hand in the composition. Mary Davys, Preface to The Works of Mrs. Davys, vol. 2 (London: H. Woodfall, 1725), 2:7–8.
Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders, 275–77. Marjorie Hope Nicolson notes that women in mid-century Dublin could attend lectures on Newtonian optics as well, although it is not clear whether those lectures would have been held in coffeehouses. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 16.
Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
Daniel P. Gunn, “Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma,” Narrative 12, no. 1 (January 2004): 35.
Laura Buchholtz, “The Morphing Metaphor and the Question of Narrative Voice,” Narrative 17, no. 2 (May 2009): 200–219.
For more discussion of widows in the eighteenth-century novel, see Karen Bloom Gevirtz, Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005).
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, paperback ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
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© 2014 Karen Bloom Gevirtz
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Gevirtz, K.B. (2014). The Moral Observer. In: Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386762_6
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