The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
change, or, to put it more simply, as history; and to learning how the binaries worked, or were subverted, in the lives and thought of my subjects. The main lines of the narrative are familiar, as they summarize extensive research in recent decades on polite sociability and literary culture. We begin with what I see as the paradox of unmodern modernity, a variation on Ernst Bloch’s idea of “the synchronicity of the nonsynchronous” (Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen).21 In the seventeenth century the elite Parisian social circles known as le monde, despite their rigidly hierarchical values, brought men and women together in a “polite” and “gallant” sociability that required men, within the boundaries of this social space, to show a new respect for women and indeed to take them as models in the art of conversation, the central site for the performance of the refined mind, and the exemplar for tasteful style in writing.
In the course of the eighteenth century le monde remained predominantly aristocratic but included larger numbers of men of letters without aristocratic credentials, including the philosophes. Even Diderot, who prided himself on being an anti-Establishment figure, made occasional appearances at Mme Necker’s salon and others. In Great Britain purveyors of polite manners had looked to France, but tapered French aristocratic norms to the lives of the expanding urban middle class in the liberal professions, commerce, and trade that was so artfully constituted as an audience, a modern public, by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in their wildly popular The Tatler and The Spectator. Particularly in England and Scotland, as print became a commodity in an expanding consumer culture, women became a larger presence as authors and, as important for our purposes, as readers. Some of the new print materials—popular romances, devotional literature, pedagogical tracts, etc.—were aimed primarily at women; but other genres, including some novels, gave men and women an unprecedented common ground for intellectual exchange. Shaftesbury had detested this development. Several decades later Hume realized that, to win fame as a polite man of letters, an author had to bring educated and cultivated women into his audience.
As a master essayist Hume practiced what has aptly been called Enlightenment gallantry.22 Among Anglophone authors he was the most acutely attuned to the galant style in French belles letters that extended back to the early seventeenth century. The career of this tradition figures large in this book, as it was one of the sites for argument about the meaning and value of modern changes for relations between the sexes. The argument was in part historical. Was modern gallantry—the kind practiced in le monde in the eighteenth century, and in the drawing rooms of the Scottish literati—a social expansion of the medieval chivalric code that gave women a new value and esteem; or another patronizing way of not taking the female mind seriously; or a corruption of chivalry, a thin veil for rampant licentiousness? At issue was what the proper relationship between men and women in the upper reaches of French, English, and Scottish societies should be. More precisely for our purposes, in the praise of more or less gallant politeness, and in the rebukes of it from various angles, we find guiding assumptions about how the intelligences of men and women ought to connect despite (or by virtue of) their supposed differences.
In one way or another, modern changes required delicate maneuverings within the gender binaries, and occasionally they opened, however tentatively, lacunae free of them and spaces to slip by them. This is where historical explanation and literary interpretation converge in the book. I will argue that the convergence makes texts revelatory in new ways. In the use of genres, in the choice of authorial style, and in the practice of literary criticism, we see dilemmas in the self-representation of both male and female character. The dilemmas give most of the chapters an ironic arch. Poullain de la Barre’s first treatise called for women to assume work roles that would allow them to perform the same intellectual labor as men; in his second, he retreated from that position, bowing to status imperatives that the women he was addressing could not be expected to defy. Malebranche saw the presentation of self in prose style as so sinfully effeminate that he sought to eschew it altogether in his own writing; and as a result he became one of the master prose stylists of the French classical era. Shaftesbury sought to remold literary politeness. Faced with what he saw as effeminacy run rampant in modern commercialized print culture, he undertook creative but tortuously convoluted essays to reconcile the polite and the manly. David Hume performed a delicate balancing act, embracing women as readers, and often identifying with them temperamentally, but finding it necessary to reserve cultural authority in matters of taste—the authoritative judgment of the critic—to rare men. In her exercises in virtual authorship Mme Necker acknowledged “genius” as an exclusively male power but nonetheless claimed a kind of equality for a distinctly feminine literary criticism. Diderot, who saw effeminacy as a creeping social reality, not a specter, faced the task of making the imagination, traditionally considered more errantly volatile in women, a labor integral to a manly mind.
My concern with relational intelligence has led me to devote considerable attention to friendship as an intimate exchange of intelligence between men and between men and women. Again I find Scott’s agenda challenging. Gender differentiation is “an attempt to resolve the dilemma of sexual difference, to assign fixed meaning to that which ultimately cannot be fixed,” she argues, and hence we should regard identity not as in any way “fixed,” but rather as ceaselessly fluid.23 That opens the way to recovering transgressive fantasies of “wholeness” and “completeness” that keep impelling change precisely because they are indeed fantasies, never to be fully realized. Scott’s notion of fantasy draws primarily on Freud and Lacan. Her own work confirms that her proposed way of employing psychoanalytical concepts, unlike earlier moves in that direction, would be thoroughly historical. Though I am neither inclined nor able to take this psychoanalytical route, I find Scott’s notion of fantasies of wholeness of great interpretive value. For some men, of course, wholeness might seem to require standing firmly on one side of the gender divide. A striking case in point is Shaftesbury’s fantasy of an exclusively masculine ethos in the practice of intellectual raillery among a circle of male friends. Removed from the softening influence of women, the fraternity would be at once genuinely polite and manly. But there is something of fantasy in Scott’s sense, and of the felt need for fluidity, in the intellectual intimacies of friendships between men and women, as they were imagined and practiced. As different as are the texts of Saint-Évremond, Lambert, Hume, Thomas, Necker, and d’Épinay, they share a quest for a wholeness that would absorb gender differentiation into a holistic ideal of the human, even as they proceed from the reigning assumption of the reality of difference.
Contextual intellectual history is at once experiencing a renewal and undergoing skeptical questioning. To some critics we run the risk of trapping ourselves in a hyperparticularism, and to escape it we need what Darrin McMahon calls a “refashioned history of ideas.” The critics are not calling for a return to what has been dismissed as the hopelessly idealist history of ideas with which, fairly or not, Arthur Lovejoy is said to have burdened American scholarship. What they have in mind would not be premised on any sort of idealist metaphysics, and would certainly not be limited to a sacred canon. It would explore continuities and ruptures in ideas over much wider temporal stretches than we find in most current scholarship, and it would assess them in a way that allows us to engage them for present purposes, perhaps even to evaluate their truth claims. At the same time contextualism itself is being reconceived as we ask how the social can be returned to intellectual history without falling back into a crude reductionism, making ideas a function of the interests of structural blocs like classes and professional groups.24 Can we practice an intellectual history that explores the integration of representations and social practices? Can we recover the social meaning of ideas by seeing how they worked, sometimes with surprising suppleness, in processes of social exchange?
How these two ways of refashioning the field might be combined is an open question. In an effort to intertwine seemingly divergent positions, I read texts as the performances of rhetorical personae.25 Performance in this sense is a subset of my notion of the “performance” of intelligence, but focused now on writing and print. I do not have in mind rhetoric as a formal academic discipline, based on classical texts and central to the academic education of boys and young men for centuries (though it is highly relevant that rhetoric in that sense was an exclusively male realm