Eighteenth-Century Echoes: Strong Female Protagonists Then & Now

“Be sure don’t let people’s telling you, you are pretty, puff you up; for you did not make yourself, and so can have no praise due to you for it. It is virtue and goodness only, that make the true beauty.”

--Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded

Mr. B & Pamela

Many of the most famous novels of the eighteenth century recount the tumultuous story of a young woman’s first entry into society. Pamela, by Richardson, often considered a turning point in the rise of the modern novel, is in many ways the prototype for this type of narrative. Pamela, and others like it, all deal with a young woman’s entry into society, her search for a suitable mate, her development into a virtuous woman, and the many obstacles that stand in her way.Works like Eliza Haywood’s  The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biduloph (as well as its Continuation), Frances Burney’s Evelina or Camilla, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, are all variations on a theme. A young woman without a suitable mentor or guide must navigate the treacherous social scene (often in a “debauched” place like London or Bath) in which she is constantly pressured to spend money, flirt freely, and associate with villains and rakes. She is put into situations out of her control, asked to make important life decisions, and influenced by those who want to gain by her naivete. A single wrong decision can dog the heroine throughout life (as in Sidney Bidulph) or it can be resolved through the help of friends and newly-discovered family connections (as in Evelina).

What these novels have in common with more recent young adult fiction is the focus on a young teen-aged girl as the protagonist. Having read the Hunger Games series, Ally Condie’s Matched series, watched the Twilight films (I couldn’t make myself get through the books), and more recently finished Veronica Roth’s Divergent, I was struck by the recent prominence of strong female protagonists both now and in the eighteenth century. (How strong they are is, of course, up for debate.)

Contemporary YA fiction has broken spectacularly into mainstream culture, starting most obviously (and pathetically) with Twilight. Twilight’s Bella is not much to write home about in terms of agency, but the series’s love triangle, which leads Bella to follow her heart and make some difficult decisions, has subsequently morphed into a popular trope in recent teen dystopian fiction. The Hunger Games’s Katniss is smarter, more interesting, and much stronger (at least physically) than Bella; she kicks ass, takes names, and has serious doubts about pursuing a romantic attachment during times of war—but the novel insists on throwing her into a love triangle situation. (Jennifer Lawrence’s rendering of Katniss has only increased her appeal, something Lionsgate undoubtedly hopes to repeat by casting Shailene Woodley in their adaptation of Roth’s Divergent, out in the spring.)

"J-Law" as Katniss in The Hunger Games film adaptation.

The idea of a female heroine put to various tests, thrown into a dangerous setting, unsure of whom she can trust, asked to choose between factions (quite literally in the Divergent and Matched series), given a makeover, and put in a situation where she must choose an appropriate (male) mate is strikingly similar to the Pamela trajectory. The stakes have not been raised, necessarily; they have merely been updated. Running away with Wickham was social death for Pride and Prejudice’s Lydia; for many of Austen’s contemporaries, social death was as bad if not worse than actual death. (…and in Clarissa, actually does end in death.)

It’s easy to guess why a teen-aged girl is such a titillating choice of protagonist both then and now. She is old enough to be sexy, but young enough to be virginal; her story is that of development but also of romance. Richardson’s Pamela and its various literary off-spring were meant as texts that taught young women how to behave, think, and feel. (Though it is worth mentioning that read today, Pamela seems rather voyeuristic, as we are asked to imagine Richardson penning various scenes in which Pamela is abused, undressed, and groped in the dark.)

Many of the novels by female novelists like Haywood, Edgeworth and Burney functioned not only to warn and teach young women (Edgeworth’s father was the author of various works on female and young person’s education and she collaborated with him on some of the projects), but also to expose and criticize the society that gave rise to the problems these young women would have to face. The novels function as social criticism as they illustrate the many ways in which society works against young women, forcing them to make difficult decisions that will affect their whole lives.

A Twilight publicity image
illustrating the love triangle that
split female viewers into "Team
Edward" and "Team Jacob"

Today’s dystopian YA novels have an element of social commentary, as is usual with dystopian fiction in general, but few of them challenge social expectations of women or gender norms in any real way. The love triangle set up by Twilight as the “standard” for YA girls’ fiction is so lucrative, that any author with visions of movie options would be stupid not to write one in. The romantic plot in these works often overshadows the more transgressive dystopian elements of the novels. The dystopian setting becomes merely a catalyst for love; the love story becomes the focal point of the narrative, as important if not more important than bringing down an evil government. In fact, in a series like Matched, the main character might never have joined the rebellion against the government if it weren’t because she fell in love with a social misfit.

On the other hand, today’s YA novels seem to encourage qualities like self-reliance, a high threshold for pain, sacrifice for the benefit of others, and self-confidence. Little girls around the U.S. are begging their parents for archery lessons so they can be like Katniss. Similarly, like many classic novels of growing up, YA dystopian fiction emphasizes the process of “self-discovery” and understanding what it means to be “true to oneself” and one’s core values—it’s just a shame that the biggest part of this self-discovery is figuring out which boy you prefer.

Most of the YA fiction for young women today is written by women; conversely, in the eighteenth century, both men and women put female characters at the center of their stories for the explicit purposes of educating young women (and, maybe a little, fantasizing about them, too). Consider Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana; Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa; Henry Fielding’s Amelia; Diderot’s The Nun; or Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, all of which contain female protagonists who are fascinating and complex. Now consider some of today’s splashiest, most popular and celebrated literary male writers: Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, John Irving, Stephen King…How many of them have written novels centered around the development of a young woman? It’s a bit funny to think that of all of them, King’s Carrie comes closest to that description. In terms of contemporary “serious” fiction, the teen girl is negligible at best, a joke at worst.

In the end, all of these issues come back to what we, as a society, understand teen-aged girls to be like. Both eighteenth-century and contemporary YA novelists seem to believe that teen girls are searching for a place to fit in, and that this fitting in is intimately tied to finding someone to love and to be loved by in return. While not a terrible conclusion in and of itself, it seems to indicate that our expectations of teen girls and the social construction of teen girlhood has not changed very much in 200 years. If anything, it seems that authors' approaches to these expectations has gotten worse: instead of trying to correct teen girl’s stereotypical behaviors, today’s YA novelists seem to cater to them, providing them with the kind of fantasies that Charlotte Lennox spoofs so tenderly in The Female Quixote.

A Century of Shaving

"God gave men beards for ornaments and to distinguish them from women."
--Carl Linnaeus, Diaeta Naturalis (1733)

Eighteenth-century wig and barber shop.

One of the things that has made studying the eighteenth century (rather than contemporary literature, as was my original specialization when I first entered grad school) absolutely fascinating is all the amazing nuggets of historical information that I've dug up while doing research.

Many people don't know just how many things that we take for granted as modern inventions (like dildos or condoms) actually have long historical roots. The reverse is also true: there are many bizarre historical facts and beliefs that we have forgotten or, perhaps, chosen to forget, because they became outdated (like the practices of using mouse fur to make fake eyebrows or mercury to "cure" syphilis).

America's famously clean-shaven
founding father, George Washington.

While researching concepts of the gendered body in the eighteenth century, I ended up reading up quite a bit on beards, facial and otherwise. It took me some time to realize that although characters mention facial beards in eighteenth-century works (like Moll, in Defoe's  Moll Flanders), the beard itself was unfashionable in the eighteenth century. The more I looked, the more I came to realize that clean-shaved-ness was expected of men for nearly the whole century. Portraits of all the King Georges, the American "Founding Fathers" and many other noted luminaries of the time portray men always clean shaven, though they do, occasionally, include a five o'clock shadow.

Some forms of facial hair, like the mustache, were almost always popular among military men, but overall, even in the military, men were expected to have a razor and keep up with shaving--or to make time to go to a barber. While the beard, as described by historian Will Fisher, was hugely popular in the Renaissance, to the point that it was a defining characteristic of mature masculinity, and mustaches and mutton chops are the calling cards of the Victorian period, the eighteenth century was almost completely facial-hair free.

The ability to grow a facial beard, however, was significant in the eighteenth-century European cultural imaginary, as it came to be thought of as an essential aspect of the white man's supremacy over other races. Eighteenth-century naturalists like Francois Bernier and Richard Bradely used the relative beardedness of different peoples to identify and classify different races. The beard-growing Europeans were "naturally" superior to the beardless Asians and native peoples of the Americas, and their practice of shaving made them superior to the "unkempt" bearded men of the African continent.

In Peter the Great's Russia, Peter himself imposed a "beard tax" on upper-class men who did not shave in hopes of moving Russia further toward the "civilized" West, further associating shaving with being evolved and Enlightened. (Though it is worth noting that both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I also levied beard taxes in England in earlier periods.)

Medieval illustration
of the 4 humors.

Of course, the inability to grow facial hair was also thought of as yet another sign of why women were inferior to men. According to Linnaeus, who came up with this theory based on the theory of the humors, men were "dry and hot," and the excess heat in the body manifested in either sperm or hair. Facial hair was therefore caused by the heat of reabsorbed semen in the male body. Interestingly, bearded women were therefore quite threatening in this hierarchy, as they sported hair that was supposed to belong to the male sex exclusively.

Similarly, women who were independent, powerful, intelligent or self-sufficient were also often thought of as "bearded." Immanuel Kant, for example, invoked the beard in his attach on learned women like the classicist Madame Dacier or the physicist Emilie du Chatelet, citing that women like them "might just as well havea  beard, for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives." Actual bearded women, however, were dismissed as unfeminine, while the whiskers of postmenopausal women were explained through the Galenic model of reabsorbed bodily fluid--the fluids no longer expelled through menstruation reformed into facial hair.

Also of note, in eighteenth-century narratives of cross-dressing women, many women who tried to pass as men, like the female soldier Hannah Snell, had to figure out how to distract others from their lack of facial hair. Several of them compensated for this lack by soliciting the desires of other women, thus appropriating yet another kind of "beard."

Eighteenth-Century Women Writing About Women Writing

Our friend Aphra.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege to teach an upper-level English course at Stony Brook on a topic of my choice. Since the department was looking to run an upper-level course on poetry, I proposed (successfully) to teach a course on eighteenth-century women poets. It was an exhilarating experience in many ways, as the students were mostly unfamiliar with eighteenth-century literature or culture. Together we explored the fabulous voices of female poets starting with Aphra Behn and Anne Finch and ending with Joanna Baillie and Mary Robinson.

One thing that particularly struck me was how often women wrote about writing, specifically, about being female poets and the challenges therein.

Elizabeth Thomas’s poetry is filled with the anger and frustration of being told (apparently) many times over that poetry was not “fit for women,” as in her poem, “On Sir J---- S---- saying in a Sarcastic Manner, My Books would make me Mad. An Ode”:

Unhappy sex! how hard’s our fate,

by Custom’s tyranny confined

To foolish needlework and chat,

Or such like exercise as that,

Lady Mary Chudleigh

But still denied th’ improvement of our mind!

(1722)

In these lines, she reiterates, almost to the letter, the earlier complaints of Mary, Lady Chudleigh in “The Lady’s Defense”:

‘Tis hard we should be by the men despised,

Yet kept from knowing what would make us prized;

Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools,

And with the utmost industry bred fools;

Laughed out of reason, jested out of sense,

And nothing left but native innocence;

Then told we are incapable of wit,

And only for the meanest drudgeries fit

(1701)

Sarah Egerton’s “The Emulation” (1703), Elizabeth Tollet’s “Hypatia” (1724), Mary Leapor’s “An Essay on Woman” [not an essay…a poem] (1746), and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “The Rights of Woman” (c. 1795) elaborate similar themes of being withheld from knowledge and education all the while being told that, as women, they were silly, useless or incapable of bettering themselves.

Poems like Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” (1713?) and Esther Lewis’s “A Mirror for Detractors. Addressed to a Friend” (1748) more specifically discuss the problem of being a woman poet:

Anne Finch

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed

--From “The Introduction”

…when a woman dares indite,

And seek in print the public sight,

All tongues are presently in motion

About her person, mind, and portion;

And every blemish, every fault,

Unseen before, to light is brought

--From “A Mirror for Detractors”

For those of us who study the literary output of the ladies of the eighteenth century, such sentiments are probably expected from our literary foremothers. For my students, however, they were a wonderful illustration of the limited rights and position of women in the eighteenth century. Even for myself, the anguish, chagrin, frustration and outright anger of these women was palpable in these poems in a way that was immediate and unmediated, and I started using them in introductory women’s studies courses as a way of foregrounding later nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s right movements.

As usual, the past reasserts itself in the present, however, and I find these poems still illustrate the frustrations of women writers writing now. Countless articles have appeared lately about how women writers are constantly belittled and their output discounted by publishers and reviewers, as well as how women’s novels are often marketed with “softer” “more feminine” book covers. All this, despite the fact that women now edge out men in pursuit of bachelor’s degrees in the United Stated. We no longer lack the education, but we are still marginalized when it comes to reviews and marketing.

Similarly, the poetry of women is, in my experience, under-taught at the undergraduate level. When I mentioned to a colleague (a male Romanticist) that I was teaching a course on “eighteenth-century women poets,” he (half-) jokingly replied, “Oh, were there any?” If he looked at almost any general literary anthology, however, he might surmise that there certainly weren’t enough to make an entire course syllabus just on them alone. 

Ladies in Breeches: Hannah Snell

My primary research interest in the eighteenth century right now is the representation of cross-dressed women in the literature . One of my favorite characters is that of Hannah Snell, a real life female cross-dresser, whose story was written and published under the title, The Female Soldier, in 1747 in England.

One of the most popular images of Snell.

Hannah sailed the seas with the British marines, disguised as a man, and, according to her story (she was illiterate, so her story is told by a, seemingly male, narrator), her female sex was never discovered. Initially, she joins the army in order to find her husband, who abandoned her when she was pregnant. After she gives birth and her child dies, she decides to find him. She hears of his being pressed into service (this was common in the 18^th century as Britain waged many wars and conquests without the resource of a standing army; more about that when I discuss Peg Woffington and her turn as “The Female Volunteer” next week!) and decides to join up herself in search of him.

While on her travels, she sees the world, and eventually she fights at the Battle of Pondicherry, India, where she is wounded with a groin wound. She manages to escape being “discovered” by convincing a local woman (referred to in the text as a “Black,” though this designation applies to the Indians of India in the eighteenth-century) to give her some ointment for her wound.

As with many of the “passing women” of the eighteenth century, Hannah must prove herself with feats of strength—and flirtations with other women. She defends the honor of several women in port who may have otherwise fallen in with some of her fellow crewmen with evil intentions, and these women apparently find her version of masculinity quite appealing. 

A rather different image of Snell.

 

Upon her return, Hannah goes with her ship’s mates to the marine offices to prove that she indeed served aboard ship and to collect her pay—which she does, successfully. Afterwards, she appears in her uniform on stage at Sadler’s Wells, performing her military exercises for money.

While the text ends on a happy note, historians have found evidence that Snell eventually re-married (rather unhappily) and died alone and in poverty (not unusual for an interesting, independent woman of this period, unfortunately; the writer Aphra Behn also died in pain and in poverty despite penning many fantastic works of fiction, poetry and plays).

What I find fascinating about the actual text of Snell’s tale are the narrative contortions necessary to make Snell a virtuous woman but also a strong and valiant character. She’s good at disguising herself (lying to others), but it’s ok, because she’s doing it for a noble end. She’s deathly afraid of getting raped aboard ship, but she’s also one of the toughest and strongest crew members. Most interestingly for my research is the narrator’s insistence that we understand exactly how she passed despite being female-bodied. We never learn how she relieved herself aboard ship in front of fellow crew-members, or how she hid her monthly menses, but we get a blow by blow of how she dug out the bullet from her own groin at Pondicherry to avoid dealing with a surgeon. 

 

A less masculine version of Snell.

Similarly, when Snell is to be whipped shirtless in front of the company for disobeying orders, the narrator goes into detail about how she had small breasts, and how she wore a bandanna, and how she stood with her arms held up and facing the wall, so no one could tell she had breasts. Snell’s female-bodied-ness is central to the story, as it establishes the need to stay hidden, it illustrates how much she wishes to preserve her virtue, and it creates the central tension of the text. On the other hand, this need to keep her true sex hidden leads her to flirt with other women, women who, according to the text, seem to really, really like her. As a man. Or something. The ambiguity, the possibility of reading women like Snell from many different angles, is part of what makes the study of 18th-century female cross-dressers so fascinating.

Welcome to Notes & Petticoats!

Welcome to my blog and my very first post! This blog, like many wonderful blogs before it, is dedicated to discussing, pondering and examining aspects of eighteenth-century life and literature, especially in the British Isles. Posts will focus on literature, material histories, and issues of representation, especially with regard to gender and sexuality, which is my scholarly focus in eighteenth-century literary studies.

Why “notes and petticoats,” you might ask? Good question.

A petticoat is a skirt; in the eighteenth-century, it can be either a skirt worn under a dress or jacket, completely invisible from the outside, or it can be the main item of clothing covering the lower body of women. Petticoats could be completely functional, or they could be ornately decorated and embroidered lavishly. As an item of clothing, the petticoat is both functional and excessive, but it always refers to women’s clothing. In this sense, the petticoat exemplifies the focus in my research specifically on representations of women in the eighteenth century.

Similarly, in the eighteenth century, “the petticoats” could be a way of referring to women in general, as opposed to “the breeches,” the pants that men wore at the time and signifying the menfolk. The term “petticoat government” refers to the rule by women of the home, and can often be used both a positive sense (the pleasures of domesticity), or a negative one (the tyranny of the female sex over the male sex, i.e. being “whipped” or, as an eighteenth-century denizen would term it, “hen-pecked”). Henry Fielding uses the term in at least two plays he penned in the century to refer to such female tyranny. Petticoat, therefore, can be something of a loaded term.

The sartorial divisions between men and women were stringent in the eighteenth century. Yet, the practice of cross-dressing flourished during this time—a topic I explored in my dissertation and which I continue to work on in articles and a future book project. Women donned breeches for a variety of reasons in the eighteenth century—some of those women I’ll explore in future posts. In any case, the large dresses of the late eighteenth century, fitted with various hoops and layers, were difficult to maneuver, and breeches, at the very least, provided comfort and ease of movement. At the same time, most eighteenth-century moralists (i.e. men) believed that women in breeches were, at the very least, committing a sexually salacious act by wearing breeches, as the breeches clearly defined where a lady’s legs began and ended.

Thus, petticoats symbolize the expectations placed on women of the time, in addition to illustrating the divisions between public and private selves, the construction of the body through clothing, and the changing understanding of sex and gender in the eighteenth century. Lastly, petticoats could function as secret hiding places located right on a woman’s body. In Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740), the eponymous heroine tries to hide the letters she writes and receives by sewing them into her “undercoat, next to her linen,” i.e. into her petticoat. Just like the petticoats go from underclothes to outerwear, so Pamela’s secret thoughts become public when Mr. B forces Pamela to give him her letters, literally undressing her. Petticoats are titillating secret-holders, reminding us of the eighteenth-century obsession with young girls making their entrance into the world, resisting worldly temptations, and learning how to make a good match.

Who can resist a petticoat? Its many layers draw us in, tempt us, hiding and revealing at the same time. Here on this blog, I’ll be examining the many different layers of the eighteenth century, just as Mr. B. examined Pamela’s petticoat. (Oh myy, as George Takei would say.)

I hope you’ll join me along the way, especially with reading suggestions, interesting Enlightenment-related links, comments, and guest posts.