Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head

Sovereign Feminine - Matthew Head


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which were so much approved, that a subscription was opened for printing a collection of them: since that time she has supported herself with dignity, by the productions of her pen.”7 In this story of upward mobility Karsch’s career is founded on genius, promoted by subscription, and sustained by commerce. Burney’s reference to “dignity” invites the reader to embrace this vertiginous combination of woman, authorship, and commerce.

      Not all Burney’s European women survived the voyage from travel diary to A General History, but in the final chapter 12 of the final volume of the General History (1789) Burney included numerous native female musicians.8 This created the patriotic and decidedly modern impression that the history of music culminated in the full participation of both sexes in the public concert life and theaters of contemporary London. On a mission not just to inform but to reform, Burney described the historical prejudice against theatrical singers, particularly women (4:631). In the following paragraphs, in tracing the rise of concerts and musical theater, women appear equally alongside men in the historical record, as if, in modern England, personal liberty and industry replaced earlier superstitious prohibitions. Women featured not just as jewels in male-authored crowns but as motors of historical change: In 1703 “Mrs. Champion, the singer, performed a piece upon the harpsichord at her benefit in Lincoln’s-Inn play-house; the first feat of the kind that was announced in the newspapers” (4:633). Presumably Burney meant the fact of a benefit concert, though he may have intended to highlight the novelty of a solo harpsichord recital. At times Burney almost taunted the English readers of his General History with the image of cash flowing into a household from well-trained female singers: In 1730 “Miss Caecilia Young, a scholar of Signor Geminiani, who now sang in public for the first time, had a benefit concert at Drury-Lane play-house, pit and boxes laid together at half a guinea. This lady, afterwards the wife of Dr. Arne, with a good natural voice and fine shake, had been so well taught, that her style of singing was infinitely superior to that of any other English woman of her time” (4:653–54).

      If Burney was particularly explicit about commerce in this last chapter, he nonetheless concluded his history with an image of sheer female excellence. As if arranging a piece of statuary, Burney granted an “honourable niche” to Mrs. Elizabeth Billington (née Weichsel) in his final paragraphs: “No song seems too high or too rapid for her execution. But besides these powers, . . . the natural tone of her voice is so exquisitely sweet, her knowledge of Music so considerable, her shake so true, her closes and embellishments so various, and her expression so grateful, that nothing but envy or apathy can hear her without delight” (4:681). This is to my knowledge the only occasion on which Elizabeth Billington served as the culmination to a history of Western music.

      Billington’s talents notwithstanding, her significance in Burney’s A General History warrants reflection: what is going on here, discursively? Tempting as it might be to figure Burney as a champion of female achievement in its own right, such a reading fails to account for the ways praise is bound up with—even a way of making—broader points about the arts and society, music, and Burney as a writer. Commonsense explanations have some value. Burney’s praise probably helped to endear him to his female readership. But there is more to consider. Even from this rapid survey it is apparent that Burney employed women didactically to exemplify particular aspects of contemporary and recent musical culture. Praised not just for their musical excellence but for meanings that excellence held for critical and historical writing, Burney’s women are sometimes constrained and essentialized both as female ideals and as ciphers of modernity. His lavish, if on occasions generic, praise of female musicians is of interest to feminist criticism but unlikely to satisfy feminist desire.

      THE INDEXICAL THEORY OF WOMAN

      Burney’s historiography was informed by the then fashionable but contentious view that the history of a civilization is, in essence, a history of its women, or rather, a history of how its women were treated by men. In an article from 1985 on Enlightenment historiography Sylvana Tomaselli styled this the “indexical theory of woman.”9 Tomaselli found in the indexical theory an equation of women with culture and order. This was at odds with what she reported as a dominant assumption of twentieth-century feminism, that women are associated with irrationality and cultural chaos. The “indexical theory” of the Enlightenment, she argued, enshrined the opposite view, not woman as Other but as the civilized and civilizing center. The idea was that the position of women in society provides an absolute measure of its degree of progress: simply put, the further a society travels from the primitive, the more freedom it accords women to develop their intellectual and artistic potential. In his History of Women (1779) William Alexander observed: “Women among savages [are] condemned to every species of servile, or rather, of slavish drudgery; [we] shall as constantly find them emerging from this state, in the same proportion as we find the men emerging from ignorance and brutality, and approaching to knowledge and refinement; the rank, therefore, and condition, in which we find women in any country, mark out to us with the greatest precision, the exact point in the scale of civil society.”10

      The conceit circulated well beyond Britain. In an article from 1789 one W. de la Bossiere Chambor expounded patriotically on “the respect and esteem of ancient Germans for the women of their nation.” To treat women as slaves is a sign of barbarism, he affirmed, marshaling the evidence of classical writers to demonstrate that German women had long enjoyed admiration at home. And rightly so, for they refine and cultivate men, even converting wildness and barbarism into military bravery, as well as presiding over peacetime and home life. Invoking what would later become a racial ideal but functions here as a marker of exalted womanhood, Bossiere Chambor appealed to the physical beauty of German women, their blond hair, blue eyes, fair complexions, and long limbs. Employing a neoclassical motif, he likened them to the goddesses and heroines of antiquity, as if modern Germany were peopled with the women of classical mythology and art.11 His source was presumably the Germania of Tacitus (ca. 98 A.D.).12

      Though a historiographical principle, the indexical theory traveled well beyond history books. It was dramatized, for example, in “abduction” or seraglio operas. In Mozart and Stephanie’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (K. 384) Osmin, who believes that women require incarceration to keep them faithful, attempts to force himself on the cheeky maid Blonde, who, despite her occupation, counters proudly that she is “an Englishwoman, born to freedom.” If not personifying she at least lays claim to the exalted state of free womanhood and quickly turns didactic, instructing Osmin in the fine art of coaxing and flirtation—a saucy twist on the notion that women reform male manners (see her aria “Durch Zärtlichkeit und Schmeicheln,” act 2).13

      For the Burney of the Tours and General History the “indexical theory” was cutting edge. Although the idea of female exemplification of civility stretched back to the beginning of the century, a more systematic “theory of feminization” linking incipient capitalism, female ascendance, and a notion of progress first appeared with Adam Smith at midcentury.14 As Emma Clery has encapsulated the arguments, the indexical theory opposed (even if, initially, from within) elements of a civic humanist tradition in England that took the classical republic as its model. Anticommerce, often misogynist, and equating virtue with (a version of) manliness and public service, civic humanism summoned the imagery of the male warrior citizen as the defender against decadence and decline. An alternative model of history was characterized, in Clery’s words, by a “linear, historical narrative, involving a gendered account of progress, a positive feminization, [and] a triumphant movement towards increased civility and refinement.”15 Burney’s General History, with its overlapping celebrations of modernity, women, and commerce, offered such an alternative. Burney’s women are integral to his historiography. Had his story concerned the triumph of pure music over its historical fetters of church, court, and text, he might have needed to develop different rhetorical strategies. But that story about music’s discovery of its autonomy was not yet central to the emerging business of music-historical writing.

      LUXURY

      The definition of music in the preface to A General History as an “innocent luxury,” a phrase Burney silently borrowed from the Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume, provocatively situated music within celebrations of modernity (something Hume had not attempted). More was at stake than borrowing an elegant turn of phrase.


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