The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England 9780804773348

Citation preview

the self and it

The Self and It Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England

Julie Park

stanford university press stanford, california 2010

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. An earlier version of Chapter 4 was published as “Pains and Pleasures of the Automaton: Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Abjection,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 23–49. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published as “ ‘I Shall Enter Her Heart’: Fetishizing Feeling in Clarissa,” Studies in the Novel 37, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 371–93. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published as “Unheimlich Maneuvers: Eighteenth-Century Dolls and Repetitions in Freud,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 44, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 45–68. Frontispiece: “Moll Handy,” 1740. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Park, Julie   The self and it : novel objects in eighteenth-century England / Julie Park.    p.  cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8047-5696-9 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism.  2.  Self in literature. 3.  Mimesis in literature.  4.  Commercial products in literature.  5.  Capitalism and literature—England—History—18th century.  I.  Title. PR858.S427P37  2010 823’.509353—dc22 2009005429

For my parents

With respect to the characters of mankind, my curiosity is quite satisfied: I have done with the science of men, and must now endeavour to amuse myself with the novelty of things. —tobias smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

x

Introduction: Its, Parts, Wholes, and the   Eighteenth-Century Self

xiii

novel 1 For the Pleasure of It: Consuming Novelty

3

fetish 2 “No Sex in Ethereals”: Making the Heart and Hymen Real in Clarissa

51

doll 3 Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange: The Self as Mimetic Object

79

automaton 4 Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out

123

puppet 5 Puppet Life: Voice, Animation, and Charlotte Charke’s Narrative

161

viii  Contents last things 6 Unheimlich Maneuvers: Enlightenment Objects in the Age of Psychoanalysis

189

Notes

227

Index

259

Illustrations

Frontispiece. “Moll Handy,” 1740. 1.1 William Hogarth, “Royalty, Episcopacy and Law,” or, “Inhabitants of ye Moon,” ca. 1724–1725. 3.1 “Mrs. Wright.” London Magazine, November 1775. 3.2 John Carter, Funeral Effigies in Henry V’s Chantry, Westminster Abbey, 1786. 3.3 Fashion Doll’s Dress, ca. 1700. 3.4 Fashion Doll, 1770s. 4.1 James Cox, “Miniature Secretary Incorporating a Clock,” ca. 1766–1772. 5.1 “Pantin à la Mode.” 5.2 Samuel Foote with Characters from “Piety in Pattens,” 1773. 5.3 “Piety in Pattens, or Timbertoe on Tiptoe,” 1773? 5.4 “Enthusiasm Delineated,” ca. 1760. 5.5 William Hogarth, detail from lower-right border of Analysis of Beauty, Plate 1, 1753. 5.6 F. Garden, “Charlotte Charke at Four,” 1775. 6.1 “Ridiculous Taste or the Ladies Absurdity,” 1771. 6.2 M. Darly, “The Extravaganza or the Mountain Head Dress of 1776.” 6.3 Louise-Madeleine and Charles-Nicholas Cochin, “La charmante catin,” 1731. 6.4 Charles-Nicholas Cochin, “Mademoiselle Catherina,” 1743. 6.5 Teapot Half-Dolls from the Goebel Company Catalog, 1918.

xvi 93 101 104 107 144 167 168 169 172 177 184 198 199 222 223 224

Acknowledgments

My first acknowledgment of indebtedness goes to my advisors and teachers at Princeton. Earliest on, Diana Fuss led me to think through objects and things. She gave me many other things as an advisor, including the courage for patience, clarity, and difficult questions. As my main supervisor, Claudia L. Johnson went beyond her call of duty in reading just about every single incarnation of the book. Her advice has always been direct and illuminating, and her deep support continues to carry me through many tricky passages. Jonathan Lamb was dedicated and expansive in his advisory role; he readily loaded me with books, sources, and all the time I needed for his counsel. April Alliston was the first teacher to galvanize eighteenth-century studies for me. I am grateful for her probing and judicious comments on my writing, the excitement she passed on to me over questions about mimesis, character and verisimilitude, and above all her most loyal support and friendship. Joanna Picciotto taught me everything I know about seventeenth-century England. Being her preceptor for her undergraduate seminar gave me an opportunity to learn from her dazzling gifts in teaching, scholarship, and friendship. I am grateful to Oliver Arnold for taking an early interest in my work. He was the first to encourage me to find promise in dolls. I am lucky to have had such formidably talented scholars as my mentors. My teachers at Bryn Mawr, Jane Hedley and Carol Bernstein, first taught me how to trace the beauty of ideas—always closely—and love rigor as its own reward. I could not have predicted how long it would take for me to get to thank them in this way. My colleagues at McMaster University, David Clark, Henry Giroux, Melinda Gough, Jacques Khalip, and Susan Searls Giroux have been generous in sharing with me their wisdom, time, support, and candor. Alicia Kerfoot, an inspiring doctoral supervisee, single-handedly helped me with the intimidating chore of

Acknowledgments   xi obtaining permissions and reproductions for illustrations in this book. Antoinette Somo took me under her able wing and made many gestures of loyalty and support that I will always remember. The members of my graduate seminar “The Eighteenth-Century Novel,” Melissa Carroll, Ailsa Kay, Amanda Spina, Pouria Taghipour Tabrizi, and Emily West were passionate readers and interlocutors, bringing me good cheer during an important stage of writing this book. The many colleagues at Vassar who have taken the time to give me much-appreciated support, guidance and good will include Mark Amodio, Peter Antelyes, Beth Darlington, Bob DeMaria, Don Foster, Wendy Graham, Michael Joyce, Jean Kane, Paul Kane, Dorothy Kim, Zoltan Markus, Dan Peck, Paul Russell and Susan Zlotnick. William Germano helped me at a crucial point in getting my book proposal off the ground. I can only wish to write with his zest and style, as well as fulfill the standards of his editorial vision. Norris Pope, the original acquiring editor for this book at Stanford University Press, has been patient, gentlemanly, and attentive. Working with him, Emily-Jane Cohen, and Sarah Crane Newman has been a pleasure. My two readers at Stanford, David Porter and Peter Schwenger, helped bring closure to this project with their detailed and encouraging reports. David Porter has been especially gracious to me as a senior eighteenth-century scholar. I am blessed to be working in a field with many other gifted and generous scholars. I owe Farid Azfar, George Boulukos, Jenny Davidson, Lynn Festa, Deidre Lynch and Lisa O’Connell not only for their inspiring models of scholarship and writing, but also for their steadfastness and advice, and readiness for a good meal. Erin Mackie and Jonathan Sheehan displayed true nobility of character in reading and commenting on a very early version of my manuscript. Joseph Drury read the manuscript at a later stage and provided helpful and insightful commentary, too. John Brewer walked with me through many dilemmas, as well as hills in Hollywood. Friends situated in other areas of expertise have been no less crucial for their unfailing loyalty and sustenance. Tamara Ketabgian has been an intellectual companion and friend since graduate school. I have benefited from her reading of my work, and from the pleasure of reading hers. She and Daniel Youd have been there for me—showing up whenever it mattered—in ways I will always remember. Ellen WaylandSmith has been deep and true as a friend in counting my successes as dear

xii  Acknowledgments to herself, too. I look forward to seeing her book in print too. Ed Park gave me the title for my last chapter, and earliest on, excitement for objects and machines of the mind. Sakhr Tariki’s care, devotion and integrity have helped me stay true to my best interests. An Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship at the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and Clark Library, as well as a Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library provided me with the time and funding to write this book. I am grateful to Helen Deutsch, Mary Terrall, Peter Reill, and Roy Ritchie for hosting a wonderful year in Southern California. Other sources of support for this book include grants and fellowships from the Faculty Committee on Research at Vassar College, the Mellon Centre for British Art, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am also indebted to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for awarding me the Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, the National Maritime Museum for the Caird Short-Term Research Fellowship, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for the Aubrey Williams Research Travel Grant. Caroline Goodfellow, doll curator of the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood; Jill Shefrin, independent scholar; and the marvelous Joan Sussler, former curator of the Lewis Walpole Library, introduced me to many of the material artifacts that appear in this book. I am indebted to Caroline Goodfellow for telling me about twentieth-century half-dolls and to Joan Sussler for introducing me to the work of the Darlys and prints of women with “big hair” from the 1770s. Brian Parker of the Lewis Walpole Library showed me “Moll Handy,” the print that appears on the book cover. Without these specialists, I would never have been able to enter the world of wonderful things and images housed in their collections. My family has shown me their support and constancy in ways I could not have predicted would mean so much to me. Mom, Dad, Michael, and Jane form my original tribe, and I am thrilled to welcome Young-Jae and Min-Jae Park, and Vera and Stella Kim as its new members. Animal love also cries out for acknowledgment. Orpheus and Whiskey have filled my days with warmth and character. Their late companions, brave Oscar and lovely Cleo have left regret over their leaving, but sweet memories, too. This book is dedicated to my mother and father, Won Joo and Nae Hong Park, who have marveled at my patience, as much as I have at theirs.

Introduction: Its, Parts, Wholes, and the Eighteenth-Century Self

This book centers on the strange transformation of things into a powerful vocabulary of selfhood during eighteenth-century England’s rise to a global market economy. As exotic and manufactured commodities filled its social landscape, eighteenth-century England’s human inhabitants encountered new tools for devising novel versions of the self. Within this world of goods, the centrality of the object—as manifested in the material goods themselves, the idealized and ideologically shaped models of the self, and most generally, the perception of a thing—created a rich and exotic idiom for selfhood. Indeed, the eighteenth-century self reached its most lively articulation through the material objects we traditionally consider as trivial imitations or supplements of the human: dolls, machines, puppets, wigs, muffs, hats, pens, letters, bound books, and fictional narratives. Within England’s rapidly expanding market culture, these newly prevalent artifacts not only mirrored and symbolized the self, but also became identifiable as the self itself. Imitated by humans, as well as ingeniously imitating them, the anthropomorphized objects of my study created new understandings of subjectivity that have endured as decisive attributes of modern life. Not least are its powerful fictions of the self as a malleable commodity on one hand, and an object of empirical investigation on the other. Bernard Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees introduces the moral complexities introduced in eighteenth-century England’s commodity culture when he attributes “the Wealth, the Glory and the worldly Greatness of Nations” to human vanity and its attendant lust for commodities. “It is the sensual Courtier that sets no Limits to his Luxury; the Fickle Strumpet that invents new Fashions every Week; the haughty Duchess that in Equipage, Entertainments, and all her Behaviour would imitate a Princess; the profuse Rake and lavish heir, that scatter about their Money

xiv  Introduction without Wit or Judgment, buy every thing they see, and either destroy or give it away the next Day,” and not peaceful and charitable Men, free of desires, who “are the Prey and proper Food” of the “full grown Leviathan” that constitutes a “Great and Wealthy” nation.1 Mandeville emphasizes that it is not just desire, but mimetic desire that propels industry and trade, when he describes vanity as a condition in which men and women elicit a “fondness for imitation” as well as a need to “appear what every body sees they are not” (“A Search into the Nature of Society,” Fable I, 358). So central did the acquisition and display of objects become to forming the self—and invariably a feminine self—that objects threatened to displace the subject as a locus for selfhood in eighteenth-century England. The growing institutions of prostitution and slavery in the eighteenth century, for example, illustrate most radically how human beings partook of the grammar of trade by becoming commodities themselves. And yet such confusions between people and things took place on a more universal level as the very condition of consumer desire. The relationship I distinguish between “subject” and “object” is mainly a grammatical one as demonstrated in Mandeville’s division between the “wishing self” and the “wish’d for self.” Relegating them to positions that can be described by the rules of grammar—subject and object, active and passive—Mandeville stakes out two versions of the self that commercial society creates: “It is the Self we wish well to; and therefore we cannot wish for Change in ourselves, but with a Proviso, that . . . that Part of us, that wishes, should still remain: for take away that Consciousness you had of yourself, whilst you was wishing, and tell me pray, what part of you it is, that could be the better for the Alteration you wish’d for?” (Fable II, 137). In other words, Mandeville’s subject, the “wishing self,” in entertaining fantasies about an idealized and improved self, runs the risk of being replaced by the object of its desire, the “wish’d for self.” An early example for how eighteenth-century subjects registered the category of “object” as a constituent of selfhood appears in Locke’s exploration of identity and diversity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. While describing the self as “that conscious thinking thing . . . conscious of Pleasure and Pain,” Locke concedes that even “the little finger is as much a part of it self ” insofar as it also plays a role in

Introduction   xv forming consciousness. However, “Upon separation of this little Finger, should this consciousness go along with the little Finger, and leave the rest of the Body, ‘tis evident the little Finger would be the Person, the same Person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the Body.”2 Locke’s ironic hypothesis raises the possibility, or the threat, of radically objectifying the self in any effort to formulate self-consciousness. Perhaps the most vivid examples for human identity’s susceptibility to becoming embodied in inanimate objects lie in the period’s satirical representations of inanimate objects either “coming to life” or carrying traits of human subjecthood. Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem The Rape of the Lock derives its formally subversive effects not only from placing satirical emphasis on a lock of hair, but also in depicting “The Cave of Spleen” as a fantasy space where “living teapots stand,” jars “sigh,” and a goose-pie “talks.”3 Hogarth’s print “Royalty, Episcopacy, and Law,” or, “Inhabitants of ye Moon” satirizes contemporary politics by drawing a portrait of the royal family as figures composed almost entirely of inanimate objects: the king’s head is a guinea, the bishop’s a Jew’s harp, the judge’s a gavel, and the lady-in-waiting, in addition to a teapot for her head, has a fan for her torso (see Figure 1.1).4 Other spectacles of humans transformed into commodified and consumable objects arose in the popularity of dolls, waxworks, and automata as forms of entertainment, thus demonstrating the period’s fascination with “man-made” versions of the human, as well as objects made to look like the human. While the act of constructing a self-moving doll indicated a wondrous advancement in science and technology, and while dolls in general played important roles in developing a new market for fashion and leisure, automata and dolls also represented the growing complexity of modern subjectivity. Complicating notions of agency and mastery in fashioning the self, the prevalence of dolls in eighteenth-century culture shows how the modern subject, through continually striving to objectify and construct its qualities of presence and experience, leaves the self both pleasingly and distressingly “a thing.” At this same moment, the novel as a literary form appeared to embody and turn into an object the experience of life itself. In representing an individual psychology and recording “the contingencies and changing valences of modern life,” it could not help but turn life into an object.5 The

figure 1.1. William Hogarth, “Royalty, Episcopacy and Law,” or “Inhabitants of the Moon,” ca. 1724–1725. Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Special Collections, Mills Library, McMaster University.

Introduction   xvii novel as a literary form—both in its material status as a book, a thing that binds printed paper, and as a purported “container” of an individual subjectivity and the objects that chart and surround it—operates in a fashion similar to the sacks and pockets that hold the Laputians’ tools for language in Gulliver’s Travels. As it foregrounds the status of objects by using them to express qualities of individual experience—Richardson’s catalogues of Pamela’s bundles of clothing and Defoe’s inventories of Moll’s stolen goods are two examples—and by being an object itself, the eighteenth-century English novel self-consciously incorporates the tools and language of “objecthood” as well as objectivity. Even as the language of early novels stayed rooted in the factual and historical modes that seventeenth-century natural philosophy advised for all written prose by incorporating meticulous rendition of circumstantial details, neutrality of narration, and adherence to verisimilitude, it flew in the face of accepted epistemologies and literary standards by being essentially about events that never happened and people who never existed. Such textual masquerades can be traced in the way that the early novel often labeled itself as a “history” of an individual subject.6 By virtue of ordering subjective experience into the language of truth throughout its narratives, the early English novel masqueraded subjectivity as an objective construct. This effect was a surprising, and above all, novel one. Eighteenthcentury English readers, who themselves were turning into something new, were not used to seeing the mimetic principles of poetry and drama applied toward constructing the psychological interiority and reflexivity that became the novel’s distinguishing features.7 Narrative tools contributed to this technology, transforming the way texts about the human subject were written, much in the same way the period’s consumer culture and fashions heightened human subjects’ potential to become malleable as social texts. In this way, while partaking of the new science’s experimental program and factual language, the novel collaborated with consumer society’s fictional lure of promising a new and ideal self that based itself in the material of everyday life, from domestic objects to daily fashions. An anonymous critic of the “new species of literature” exemplified by the works of Henry Fielding, figures the formative novel’s mixture of romance and history as a process of exchange: “For chrystal Palaces and winged Horses, we find homely Cots and ambling Nags; and instead of Impossibility, what we experience every Day.”8

xviii  Introduction While romance with its extravagant plots and characters constitutes a “strange monster” and “prose run mad” for this critic, its offshoot, a yet unnamed genre, proved itself more novel as “a lively Representative of real Life.”9 In such a capacity, the novel provides its author with the opportunity to play the role of a collector in choosing what aspects of “real life” to exhibit. According to Samuel Johnson in Rambler 4, authors of the formative novel are not so much “at liberty” to “invent” but “to select objects” of “real life.” Those objects, “cull[ed] from the mass of mankind,” warrant close “attention” and have much in common with “a diamond” that is “polished by art, and placed in such a situation as to display that luster which before was buried among common stones.”10 The novel itself, like the natural oddities that packed the curiosity cabinets of the scientific community, appeared as an alluring object to eighteenth-century readers precisely because it engaged in two simultaneously modern projects: objectifying the self and deepening its interior reaches in doing so. Perhaps the most immediate and material example of the crossings between literature and technology that pervaded the eighteenth-century novel is the notion of “character.” As Deidre Lynch reminds us in The Economy of Character, the pliancy of the eighteenth-century notion of character, the fictional representation of a person, that is, hinged on a pun: the “imaginary people” that novelists produced were entwined with Defoe’s definition in An Essay on Literature (1726) for character: “types impressing their Forms on Paper by Punction or the Work of an Engine.”11 This pun heightens our understanding that the tactile properties of fiction, derived from fingere, a fabricating of the mind and the hands, resonated both in the making of eighteenth-century novels and with human subjects. Joseph Moxon, author of Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing (1683), advances this notion by claiming that the typographer was the “Soul [who] by his own Judgement, from solid reasoning with himself, can either perform, or direct others to perform from the beginning to the end, all the Handy-works and Physical Operations relating to Typographie.” Moxon, in short, believed that the cutting of letters, so crucial to the mechanical production of books, was a “philosophical” project. Throughout my own project I explore how the eighteenth-century novel, situating itself in these conflicts between self

Introduction   xix and object and mind and machine, produced the self not only as a textual construct, but as a deeply material and even mechanical one. As I demonstrate how the eighteenth-century English novel innovated representations of subjectivity in conjunction with contemporary languages of objectivity, I draw on eighteenth-century philosophy, imperialism, religion, libertinism, political economy, consumerism, conduct literature, and the cult of sensibility. Common to all of these discourses is an overriding approach to objects as a means not only for acquiring knowledge of self and others, but also for acquiring the self. My study stresses that in the eighteenth-century, the language of objects constituted a way of defining the self through things. In doing so, it positions the literary genre that began to be called “the novel” in eighteenth-century England as a fetishized commodity bespeaking human passions, commensurate in value and influence with an array of other new commodity objects. In its own status as a “new” literary form that turned the experience of life into a curiously lifelike object of psychological and circumstantial plausibility, the novel shared a vital relationship with other objects of market culture positing subjectivity. Throughout individual chapters on each object— novel, instrument, fetish, doll, automaton, and puppet—I uncover how both things and textual representations share an intense desire to penetrate and embody an authentic human and predominantly female interiority through complex mimetic strategies. That so many popular and definitive novels of the age were written by male authors impersonating female subjects (Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana, Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure are some examples), suggests one of the guiding terms for the evolving genre was a textual desideratum for female interiority, in itself a novel territory for readers. Coinciding with the novel’s emphasis on materiality and material objects to render its reality effects, then, was an implicit desire to realize the human subject as a female one, thus suggesting the pervasive and diverse connections between women and things themselves throughout the eighteenth century. By no means is it a new argument to assert the relationship between the developing novel of realism and the rise of consumer culture and empiricist epistemologies, as Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel had done

xx  Introduction with considerable influence, nor is it now uncommon to seek connections between the material culture and literature of the period.12 My study, however, rewrites both past and more recent approaches to eighteenthcentury literature by integrating the novel and its techniques within the lives of objects and their human subjects. It shows not only how the early novel has come to structure our experience of the world and the making of ourselves in that world, but also the idea that we can make ourselves at all. Important studies that follow and revise Watt’s, such as Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, argue that its most decisive generic innovation lies in the way it blurs lines between reality and fiction.13 These studies, however, do not show how such categorical blurrings became a part of lived experience that worked in concert with ones taking place in contexts apparently remote from aesthetic and textual ones. This study does so by revealing how the nexus of terms derived from Latin words for making, forming, or producing artificially—fashion, fiction, fact, fetish—was far more densely entangled in eighteenth-century England’s approaches to subjectivity, and its inherent thinghood, than has been realized. In demonstrating these central yet overlooked correspondences between novels and consumer objects, I argue that the early novel’s advancing models of verisimilitude worked as pivotal agents in a prehistory for Marx’s inescapable narrative of commodity fetishism, whereby things possess human qualities and agency. As it historicizes the psychology of objects within the framework of eighteenth-century England’s thriving consumer culture, The Self and It revises a story that others have viewed as originating in later centuries: in an age of Enlightenment, things indeed have the power to move, affect people’s lives, and most of all, enable a genre of selfhood. This is a study of material objects in eighteenth-century England that shows how much the modern psyche—and its thrilling projections of “artificial life”—derive from the formation of the early novel, and the reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities that underlies it. That our use of the word novel, according to Watt, was not fully established until after the latter half of the eighteenth century to denote a literary object and yet flourished as an adjective to describe cultural impressions, shows how the novel was well in place as a genre of experience

Introduction   xxi before it became a prominent genre of literature.14 If the eighteenth-century novel as a literary form appeared new or original, it was because it served as a form of mediating human subjectivity through an object—an object that “speaks for itself,” as Daniel Defoe put it in Roxana. Indeed, Spectator 478 takes this vision of an anthropomorphized book even further and foregrounds the relationship between books and dolls in the “Imaginary Repository for Fashions” it conceives and describes. In this institution for disciplined knowledge, books with “gilded Leaves and Covers” turn out to be boxes containing dolls that model every fashion ever invented. This project, in showing how the culture of novelty in eighteenth-century England collaborated with the novel as a literary form, permits two of its most distinct objects, mutually propelled by mimetic urges, to converse with each other. What results in the dialogue between book and doll is an understanding that “the novel” existed as a model for subjectivity, well before the novel as a literary genre came into full development. Indeed, when Joseph Addison in Spectator 412 claims that “everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed,” he could easily be referring to the experience of reading novels, or encountering novel objects as operative vehicles of novelty. One might argue that in an age where conceptions of “the self” were being radically objectified in philosophy, science, and literature, and increasingly conceived as prone to the material enhancements energetically promised by a consumer society, dolls naturally exerted a strong influence on the eighteenth-century popular imagination. Almost like children themselves—indeed, the child was a frequently invoked subject for the philosophical narrative of enlightened becoming—eighteenth-century consumers were discovering how to develop identities in a strange and newly object-laden world through striking fanciful and intense relationships with those objects. The objects that were made to look like human subjects, such as dolls and waxworks, were bound to exert influence when secular possibilities for creating and controlling versions of the self were becoming more common—whether through the objectifying procedures of scientific experiments, literary narrative, fashionable adornment, or musing on sensorial existence in time and space.

xxii  Introduction In its own displacements of abstract forms with concrete signs of subjectivity, the eighteenth-century novel as a material object was governed by a set of conventions that shaped its appearance and usage. As the market for decorative and fashionable objects swelled, so did the market for printed books. As manufactured articles put up for sale, novels as printed books, in fact, comprised the same market as that of fashion and luxury goods. By the time they appear in Jane Austen’s works, circulating libraries function as signs to denote the fashionableness of a social setting. The unfinished novel Sanditon in particular indicates the glamour of the novel as a consumer object when describing a circulating library as affording “every thing; all the useless things in the world that could not be done without,” and such “pretty temptations” as Frances Burney’s Camilla alongside “drawers of rings and brooches.”15 Such commensuration between book and bauble perhaps fell out of the smaller formats in which novels were published. Often appearing in duodecimo-sized volumes of about four by seven inches, novels were marketed and used as eminently portable books. As books in the eighteenth century were made available to a much wider range of readers than before, they also had greater capacity for intimacy with the individual reader’s body. Typography also participated in a similar effort to accommodate the human figure and even its ineffable and absent parts. The row of asterisks to denote female genitalia in Sterne’s novel and the symbol of the pointing finger representing Lovelace’s epistolary invasions in Richardson’s novel—as well as Tristram’s own intrusions in Sterne’s book—exemplify how print graphically renders the human body in eighteenth-century novels. Throughout the eighteenth century, books and body parts, much like Locke’s own little finger, operate not so much as appendages, but as the very constituents of selfhood. In the eighteenth century, things held fascination not only in themselves, but also in their ability to undergo transmutations. On this count the fetish is a persistent form of object in this project as it represents imaginative constructions of the self that are projected into social reality. At a basic level, fetishism is a powerful model for thinking about the acts of substitution and symbol formation that take place in our everyday lives. Furthermore, it compels us to take into account the historical and cultural

Introduction   xxiii context in which we form our identities, while understanding that objects in themselves indicate specific human investments and values. The model of the fetish I formulate and generate in this book, basing itself as much on eighteenth-century developments of the topic as on Marxian and Freudian formulations, approaches it as a particular kind of object that retains an opaque subjectivity. The repetition of its logic in eighteenth-century cultural discourses—arising in this book in commentaries on English fashion by Mandeville, Addison, Richard Steele, and Henry Fielding; in David Hume’s study of religion; and in Charles de Brosses’s pseudoanthropological treatise on the cult of fetishism— shows how permeable the realms between public and private spaces were throughout the period insofar as the fetish, in its psychoanalytic and even Marxian sense is “a story masquerading as an object.”16 Thus, the fetish is a story about the relationship between humans and things. As such, it is a story that narrates the border condition between humans, things and their apparently disparate worlds. From exotic products that cross bodies of land to manual, optical, and sexual instruments that bridge the organic and the mechanical parts of bodily being, borderlines and the process of becoming haunt eighteenth-century negotiations with the object world.17 The movements of the fetish represent, above all, a problem in Enlightenment standards of knowing. Eighteenth-century instruments of knowledge manifest perhaps the most compelling aspect of the fetish in their ability to bridge the fantastic and concrete, and to make the object world coextensive with human desire. Fetishism, liminal because it reifies abstract thought at the same time it endows objects with the fleeting qualities of the fantastic, pervaded eighteenth-century attempts to create and fulfill standards of objectivity in Enlightenment discourses of vision in science. In basing selfhood on the status of material objects, the figures in my study—from Richardson, Burney, and Charke to libertines, female shoppers, people of fashion, and fetishists—regard things as transmutable, buoyant, and agentive. Addison describes this very ability to “converse with a picture, and find an agreeable companion in a statue” as the attributes of a “man of a polite imagination.”18 Elsewhere in the same essay, he renders novelty, an aspect of the imagination, not only as a condition in

xxiv  Introduction which objects move, but also as the human response of pain and pleasure when the object falls out of reach: “We are quickly tired with looking upon hills and valleys, where every thing continues fixt and settled in the same place and posture, but find our thoughts a little agitated and relieved at the sight of such objects as ever in motion, and sliding away from beneath the eyes of the beholder.”19 This statement presents an idea common to the eighteenth-century subjects in this book: objects move of their own accord as well as move the feelings of their would-be possessors and imitators. Not only this, the objects that exert the most influence on the individual psyche are those that, in resisting possession, possess the individual. True fetishes, they are as much objects of the material world as they are of the imagination. That such objects “slide away” from the view of reality comprises perhaps the most persistent fear for many of the subjects in this study, not least of all the writers who gave shape to the literary object we now call “the novel.” Two types of objects govern the structure of this book: “part objects” that supplement aspects of the human, such as a dress or a hat, and anthropomorphized objects that replicate the human subject in its “totality,” such as a doll or a puppet. In following the dynamics of partto-whole relationships, the object types reflect the classical relationship between metonymy and metaphor, as well as the Gulliverian dialectic between the miniature and the gigantic.20 Indeed, the story about things as people and people as things in eighteenth-century England is a cultural enactment of terms that have always been central to literary and rhetorical studies. And what Roman Jakobson has claimed is the mode of the realist novel—metonymy with its contingent, accidental, and alienable connections, as opposed to metaphor’s essential ones—is also the procedure of commodity culture and its fetishism.21 Yet the processes by which things become subjects—whether in apostrophe, synecdoche, personification, or prosopopoeia—and by which printed words obtain and project “voice” have always been accepted in poetic practice. This book shows how the eighteenth-century novel’s most novel elements arise most powerfully in its translations of poetic norms into narrative practice. Furthermore, it shows how the advancements made in the eighteenth-century novel— from free indirect discourse and its own translation of subjective experience into objective language, to the manufacturing of voice for inanimate

Introduction   xxv things and invented identities—were made in collaboration with other material artifacts that posited lifelikeness, novelty, and subjectivity. Chapter 1 explores how the idea of the novel as a cultural experience of novelty emerged concurrently with its solidification as a literary medium. That the global origins of England’s early market culture share the same exotic background as Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet’s history of prose fiction in his influential Treatise on Romance indicates that novelty in eighteenth-century lives comprised as much an act of consuming strange things as reading them. Both cultural phenomenon and textual artifact, the novel introduced experiences of metamorphoses through staging encounters with alterity. Perhaps no other narrative exemplifies the entwined conditions of experiencing novelty and novel writing than Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). The remainder of this chapter investigates how, as novelty’s recurring partner, fashion operated as a powerful agent for fictions of eighteenth-century British subjectivity, and was regarded as the age of Enlightenment’s own fetish. Alluring in its own novelty, fashion promised the attainment of an imagined self in everyday life. Daniel Defoe’s Roxana brilliantly consolidates the various tensions that produced fashionable objects and the human subjects they made. A language replete with properties for manipulating the signs of gender and class that were constantly undergoing revision, the emergence of the fashion system in eighteenth-century England enabled objects to speak for people, including the object of the novel. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between eighteenth-century affect and object relations by considering the story of sexual fetishism in Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748) as a symptom of both libertine and novelistic ambitions. By obsessively acquiring objects and evidence of “true” feminine presence, both Richardson and the libertine character he invents register the fear of absence that threatens cultural and individual investments in surfaces and other material artifacts of being. This secret thread of fetishism running throughout Richardson’s moralistic novel intersects with the eighteenth-century model of sensibility as a social presentation of emotions. Privileging the presence of “real” feeling through the body, sensibility often runs the risk of becoming fetishism as it turns the body and its parts into artifacts of interiority. Drawing closely the link between circumstance and circumscription, Richardson’s acute anxiety

xxvi  Introduction over circumscribing individual and gendered consciousness finds its outlet in the extravagant piling on of circumstantial details that contribute to the book’s status as a prototype for the novel of domestic realism. In Richardson’s novel, minute descriptions of Clarissa’s status as a body—the very premise for defining her as exemplary and virtuous—become part of the fabric of seduction as conceived by Lovelace. Tracing the fetishistic strains of Richardson’s novel illuminates the sexually constructivist properties of the novel of sensibility, and in turn, the affective and moral significance of fetishism. The extraordinary increase of letters, sentiments, and tears in Clarissa serves as the memorial to masculine creativity in its efforts to fill in the fissures and holes of everyday—and modern—life. Chapter 3 maintains that the complex fascination with dolls in eighteenth-century culture—both life-size and smaller—held implications in constructing the female subject as a mimetic self suspended in a state of perpetual desire. At the same time the English novel was further developing its tradition of “formal realism,” the growing preoccupation with dolls in popular entertainment reflects a more general trend toward a culture of realism, and toward fulfilling the desire for re-creating “true” consciousness and “true” being through artifacts. Imitations of the human subject haunted the metropolitan scenes of pleasure and leisure throughout the century in the forms of puppet shows in public parks, automata museums, waxwork exhibitions, toyshops, and performing animals. While dolls as spectacles promoted entertainment and pleasure, they were often created initially to mourn and commemorate the dead, as the popular funerary dolls of royalty at Westminster Abbey attests. Furthermore, dolls functioned as figurative and literal models for eighteenth-century women, whose close readings of novels, conduct books, and fashion plates alike conditioned them to desire being another. In emulating fashion dolls, eighteenth-century women imitated objects already made to look human—and feminine. Functioning for women as an international traveling dummy, the fashion doll disseminated information in an age when the fashion press had not yet come into being. Noting how objects impose a “wish’d for self” in place of the “wishing self” in Fable of the Bees (1714– 1732), Mandeville strikes upon the fashion doll’s status as a consuming double for femininity. This mode of wishing discloses the psychic qualities of novelty: wishing in an age of consumerism, after all, demands new

Introduction   xxvii objects to complete its meaning and function. And yet, to fulfill the wish is to cancel the subject who wishes, as well as the state of wishing itself. Chapter 4 shows how the perpetual motion of female wishing and its nonreproductive effects contrast with the wonder that automata produced in eighteenth-century pleasure seekers. The growing absorption in what it means to be a machine produced a mechanics of affect. Burney indicates the cultural evolution of the automaton in the eighteenth century when, in her first novel Evelina (1778), venues such as Cox’s Mechanical Museum featured as stopping points in the heroine’s fashionable London excursions. Later, in Camilla (1796), the automaton figures not as a spectacle of pleasure but as a model of eighteenth-century femininity compromised and burdened by conduct book directives. Burney depicts women whose attempts to solidify their social positions are thwarted by their drives to spend their resources to the point of abjection. In Burney’s world, the uncertainty of existing on social and psychic borderlines threatens to produce the self as an abject spectacle of automated being, divided from her individual and rational self. As Burney’s journals and letters show, working with the novel form was fraught with technical and psychological difficulties. The intellectual and ideological background surrounding constructions of exemplary femininity poses an even greater challenge to the idea that women can innovate reality, proceeding by progression as opposed to repetition. Much like the automaton—whose smooth regularity it seems to disrupt—the underlying anguish of abjection in Burney’s novels derive not only from the impossibility of establishing female identity as either subject or object, but also from its own status as textual representation. Chapter 5 reveals that the mood of self-objectification is very different in the case of the self-proclaimed “oddity of fame” and “curiosity,” Charlotte Charke, and her projects of self-fashioning. Her work as a puppeteer implicates her propensities for theatrical and everyday cross-dressing while at the same time demonstrating her facility for manipulating voice, an integral feature of modern fiction. In A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755), itself a strange object of selfcommodification, Charke uses narrative to mediate a life that eluded final definition through her serial appropriations of different social personae. While enjoying popularity especially with women, Charke, puppets, and opera singers (the infamous castrati whose “property is their throats,”

xxviii  Introduction according to Fielding) were also derided as “mere representatives” of men, as Spectator 14 puts it. The male organ, missing in all members of this family of cross-dressing puppeteers, castrated male singers, and inert wooden figures, placed them in a species closer to monsters, curiosities, and things. In these examples of “naked unaccommodated man”—both living and wooden—eighteenth-century subjects encountered their sexually indifferent but powerfully vocal doubles. Thus, Chapter 5 works to suggest that these figures collaborated with the work of the contemporary novel in their attempts to fabricate individual “voice” through media that fall outside the natural boundaries of the human. Chapter 6, the concluding chapter, reveals how the equation of the desiring self to thing (id = it) as a function of novelty is the chief Enlightenment legacy to our commercial, and even psychoanalytic, culture. Indeed, the transmutation of the term novelty into the uncanny in Freud testifies to the transcultural and transhistorical continuity of thinking about the self as an object and its unceasing mechanism of making self and things strange. Just as Locke turned the space of the mind into a space to operate and to form, Freud transformed the self into a geography of different regions that remains inseparable from the material objects outside of it. In attempting to define a phenomenon that is above all a “subdued emotional impulse” and “a special core of feeling” in his essay “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919), Freud attributes great power to inanimate objects. As the concept of the uncanny indicates, with its incorporation of repetition in its very meaning, the process of making strange the objects of everyday life that was so definitive of novelty in eighteenth-century England has become registered as infinitely repeated and repeatable in Freud’s twentiethcentury Austrian context. Indeed, as I show in my concluding chapter, objects of the Enlightenment and the trope of Enlightenment itself, once novel in their own context, have become uncanny. Rife with references to dolls, automata, “painted ladies,” prostitutes, and fetishes, Freud’s essay perpetuates an attachment to themes that preoccupied eighteenth-century writers. Observing that the uncanny arises (almost automatically) when “the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is,” or when “a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes,” Freud revisits the dilemma that originally troubled the eighteenth century. “The

Introduction   xxix Enlightenment,” dedicated to naturalizing superstition, supposedly ended the age of wonder, according to the intellectual movement’s most notorious critics, Horkheimer and Adorno. But it may be that belief in miracles and sorcery died out only to become reborn in the wake of eighteenthcentury consumerism. In an age of Enlightenment, and then in an age of psychoanalysis, objects indeed have the power to move, affect people’s lives, and most of all, enable a fictional genre of living. The Self and It presents the literary genre of the novel as a vital aspect of Western cultural and material history. It asks that we reevaluate our assumptions about the position of literature in both our intellectual and daily encounters with the medium. In drawing on artifacts of material culture alongside literary texts and various nonfictional treatises, it questions established theories of knowledge and develops new ones. What is the relationship between material objects, literary texts and historically modulated forms of affect? How might the relationship transform what we assume about the materials and categories of lived experience? Such questions expand the importance of literature because it identifies the novel as a constitutive element within a movement long identified as central to eighteenth-century culture, if not modern culture in general: their materialist structures of thinking, feeling, and indeed, writing.

novel

chapter one

For the Pleasure of It: Consuming Novelty We have run Through every change that fancy, at the loom Exhausted, has had genius to supply; And studious of mutation still, discard A real elegance, a little used, For monstrous novelty, and strange disguise —william cowper, The Task, book ii

Through building its global market economy, attended and facilitated by the exploration and colonization of exotic lands, eighteenth-century England directed a marvelous narrative about material objects and their relationships with human subjects. As proponents of Enlightenment ideas questioned and discounted the idolatrous religions of other cultures, members of metropolitan English society practiced their own form of idolatry in their unthinking devotion to the increasingly powerful sway of fashion.1 These idols of metropolitan life—manifested in strangely flavored comestibles, household curios and knickknacks, luxurious textiles, and the extravagant accessories for fashionable dress—served not only as decorations for the self, but also as the very instruments for making it. Such an overloading of new and strange articles both in human experience and on humans themselves could not help but produce a shift

   novel in self-consciousness. Imperialism and trade, by providing the means for discovering and transporting foreign goods, transformed the objects of everyday life in Britain, and the sensorial impressions of taste, vision, and touch that registered their presence. The English East India Company, founded in 1600, sought to dominate the countries of “the Orient” for trade and exploration throughout the eighteenth century, and played a crucial role in filling England’s landscape with the arresting sights and features that marked its identity as a consumer society in interior and exterior spaces of living.2 So unusual were these sights that signs of England’s commerce with the Eastern parts of the world served as spectacles of wonder and entertainment to heighten the restored monarchy’s glory. On the day before his coronation, April 22, 1661, Charles II’s procession through the triumphal arches—created for this occasion—took him past the East-India House in Leadenhall. The Company, participating in this celebration, hung on the balconies of its offices a painting of an East Indiaman “under full canvas.”3 While one boy in Indian dress and two black Moor attendants kneeled before the king to deliver a speech, another boy in Indian dress rode a camel and scattered spices, silks, and jewels to the jubilant crowds.4 A few decades later, Charles Davenant, son of dramatist and poet Sir William Davenant, and inspector of customs for the East India Company, outlines in his Essay on the East-India Trade the irreversible effect of foreign trade in the daily lives of those Europeans who consumed such products: But since Europe has tasted of this luxury, since the custom of a hundred years has made their spices necessary to the constitutions of all degrees of people, since their silks are pleasing every where to the better sort, and since their callicoes are a useful wear at home, and in our plantations, and for the Spaniards in America, it can never be advisable for England to quit this trade and leave it to any other nation.5

Davenant, an advocate for free trade between England and the East Indies, concentrates on its sensual advantages as a way to persuade opponents of its economic ones and in so doing, intimates their psychic effects. Thus changing the experiences of daily life, such novelties as spices, coffee, tea, chocolate, and luxurious and attractive fabrics provided an exotic idiom for displaying and constructing the self, and for giving it plea-

For the Pleasure of It    sures difficult to forsake. If consumer objects were used as a way to define the self, then exoticism and its associations with the foreign, strange, and novel became terms integral to eighteenth-century self-constructions. The eighteenth-century “self” would be tied forever with “the other,” even as the process of domestication gradually softened the marks of novelty and exoticism in foreign goods and eventually made them a “natural” feature of daily life.6 A few more decades later, the anonymous author of Some Considerations on the Nature and Importance of the East-India Trade presents an argument similar to Davenant’s.7 In doing so, he reveals another factor in the growing complexity of English taste as it samples and then comes to require exotic goods for household staples such as “pepper, QuickSilver, Cotton, Drugs, Raw-Silk, Salt-Peter,” and even goods identified as fashionable luxuries, such as “China, Japan and lacquer’d Ware, Arrack, Muslins, Tea, Coffee &c.”8 While the goods themselves change—out of necessity to re-create the desirable sense of newness—desire for the new itself is natural and constant: “Mens tastes,” the author says, are “like all other Parts of Nature” in that they “require Variety and Change; the very Air we all live by would be fatal, without a fresh Succession, and a new Circulation.” Thus, “No Part of the World can vie with the East-Indies, in the Variety and Goodness of its Product, and consequently no Trade can so well humour and satisfy the Pleasures of every Man’s arbitrary State.”9 What might be viewed as an immaterial and incalculable aspect of life—fashion—turns into the basic, essential, and very “nature of things”: “Fashion and Custom, and indeed the Nature of Things, having fix’d and set a Value on the East-India Goods, they are become necessary to all the Nations of Europe; and Men can be no more restrain’d from them, than they can from their Food and Raiment.”10 With such statements, proponents for mercantilism reveal not so much arguments for English foreign trade, but rather, the centrality of manufactured objects and their requisite charge of novelty in eighteenth-century psychic economies. Here, in the age of what Neil McKendrick has characterized as “the Consumer Revolution,” need, want, and pleasure begin to form a common vocabulary for relationships not just between persons and things, but also between persons and the novel things they fantasized about, acquired, and strived to become.

   novel The following chapter seeks to explore this very quality of novelty: its ability to re-create human relationships with things as potentially transformative and generative ones. Throughout, eighteenth-century accounts and examples of these relationships bring the world of goods in close association or even friendship—as Miguel Tamen would have it—with the world of letters, turning all material things into media, instruments and figures for the imagination and its desires.11 In short, the integral relationship between real and imagined objects in eighteenth-century England is a profoundly fetishistic one. As such, it extends to the related nexus of terms for “self-making” and “world making,” which acquired complex resonance during the era that saw the novel’s rise: fashion, fiction, and fact—all deriving from fingere, the Latin word for “making things.” The very standards of realism that controlled these terms in their diverse manifestations produced the startling effect of novelty and its promise of selftransformation and self-innovation. Among other cultural developments that moved objects and their transformative potential to daily consciousness was the novel. Examples of such novels include Oroonoko, with its catalogues of “mercantile exotica” from Surinam; Tom Jones, with its self-proclaimed “adventures of the muff” that work to move the plot forward; Pamela and Clarissa, with their tear-stained, hidden, and purloined letters; and Roxana, with its drama of the heroine’s Turkish dress.12 While the English East India Company and early forms of the novel had existed well before the eighteenth century, they both gained cultural ascendancy during this time and acquired reputations for circulating the new, strange, and unusual in a culture keenly receptive to them. Much as the East India Company set in motion a process of domestication whereby England would appropriate, transport, and assimilate the products of foreign countries, the novel itself developed out of an imported tradition of narrative—romance—that was distinctly foreign and exotic, too. That one of the earliest authorities of the history of the novel, Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, also wrote histories of trade signals the abiding connections between the two cultural formations, not least of all in their global routes of dissemination and, as I will argue, their collaborative effects of giving psychic currency to material realities. Huet’s work to persuade his reader of the benefits in both romance and trade indicates that each had yet to be embraced in the author’s

For the Pleasure of It    mid- to late-seventeenth-century French context. The English translator of The History of the Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients reveals in his dedication that by 1717 England had established its dominance in trade. In his address to his patrons, the chairmen and directors of the East India Company, he refers to the Company as “the most glorious and important society for trade that ever flourish’d in any nation.”13 Furthermore, he states, the occasion of reading his translation of Huet’s history will offer the East India Company officials an opportunity to “look back with pleasure on the various efforts of all monarchs and states to raise commerce to that pitch, which was reserved for the honour of Great-Britain, for you only to effect, and maintain.”14 Indeed, a similarly nationalistic spirit drives Stephen Lewis’s 1715 translation of Huet’s History of Romances. While addressing the recent popularity of the romance genre in England—“[it has] become the principal diversion of the retirement of people of all conditions”—Lewis acknowledges that England had mostly been “supply’d with translations from the French.” To remedy this situation, he hopes that “some English genius will dare to naturalize romance into our soil.” He argues that the romance would most likely “agree” as well with English soil as with “that of a neighbouring country,” and that the English “are acknowledg’d, after all . . . to be very ingenious, in improving foreign inventions.”15 In tracing the genealogy of the Western novel in The History of Romances, Huet covers the same geographies—he “ransacks the East” and “makes the Oriental libraries contributory,” as his first English translator puts it—that he traced in his History of the Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients.16 In so doing, he remains emphatic about how only the “Oriental” temperament could have given birth to such an imaginative and innovative genre, though he concludes his essay by attributing the retrieval of romance from “barbarity” to the French. For many historians of the literary form, from Clara Reeve and Samuel Johnson to Laetitia Barbauld and Sir Walter Scott, romance, with its rudimentary prose expression and unabashed privileging of the fantastic and improbable over the real, was the novel’s primary progenitor.17 Huet, in expanding the frame of reference for examples closer to his own time and space such as the works of Madame de Scudéry, Cervantes, and Honoré d’Urfé, reroots the genre in the Orient and in so doing, resorts

   novel to pseudoanthropological generalizations. The Syrians, for instance, “have a Genius singularly disposed and addicted to Poetry, Invention, and Fiction; all their discourse is Figures; they never express themselves but in Allegories; their Theologie and Philosophie, but principally their Politicks and Morals are all couched under Fables and Parables.”18 Similarly, the Egyptians, Arabians, and Indians all evince a love for metaphor, invention, and the “wrapping” of fiction. For Huet, Horace’s description of the River Hydaspes as “fabulous” has less to do with its geographic properties—it “has its Source in Persia, and finishes its course in the Indies”—than its connection with cultures “very much addicted to Fiction and Disguisements.”19 Throughout, Huet’s frequent recourse to the imagery of dress and clothing discloses a tactile dimension in fiction that projects the possibilities for its material manifestations and associations. Thus, fiction and its cognates—fable, parable, and invention—“wrapt” in “tissue,” “vayl,” “masque,” and “disguisement,” share close relationships with fashion and the materiality of luxury as well as counterfeit. With his pronouncement about the characteristics of cultures that surround the River Hydaspes, Huet indicates the controlling figure for his definition of romance: falsehoods masquerading in truth’s clothing. Of the different nations described, the Ionians are the most influential and yet the most forgotten in their contributions to romance. Reflecting a similar preoccupation with the accoutrements of good living that took over eighteenth-century Britain, and representing an ancient model for the thriving trading nation Huet expressed desire for France to become in his Memoirs of the Dutch Trade, the Ionians comprise, “a people of Asia Minor . . . raised to a great Power [after] having acquired vast Riches.” They “were plunged in Luxurie and Voluptuousness, [which are] inseparable companions of plenty,” according to Huet. They also “refined upon the pleasures of the Table, they made the addition of Flowers and Perfumes, [and] they found out new Ornaments for their Houses; the finest Wools, and the fairest Tapistries of the World came from them . . . but amongst these Milesians surpassed all in the science of pleasures, and were most ingenious in their delicacies: these were the first who taught the Persians the Art of making Romance.” Huet includes these details of sensual pleasure in the Ionians’ customs as if they account for why this group became responsible for “Romances, full of love-stories and dissolute

For the Pleasure of It    Relations” of the highest reputation that eventually passed into the hands of the Persians and Greeks. Indeed, their capacity for enjoying and refining material pleasures seems an unspoken requisite in their equally strong capacity for “the art of composing romance.”20 The novel as an offspring of romance, according to Huet’s genealogy, carries a legacy of exoticism, luxury, invention, and richly sensual enjoyment. In its eighteenth-century manifestations, it would continue to carry these traits of consumption, as Hortensius, the conservative interlocutor of Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance (1785), suggests with his likening of novels to spicy and intensely flavored food: “a person used to this kind of reading will be disgusted with every thing serious or solid, as a weakened and depraved stomach rejects plain and wholesome food.”21 As Huet’s early-eighteenth-century translator had wished to see happen, the English public of the era, not immune to the enticing novelty of the novel, would digest its exotic and foreign qualities and incorporate them with the “plain and wholesome food” of the epic poetry that had imparted prestige to England’s literary heritage. In its addictive qualities and appeal to the “science of pleasures,” the novel would become as normative and English as tea, chintz, and decorated china would also become.22 Writings on trade evince a widespread fascination with novelty and the addictive qualities of different sensorial experiences. In likening the necessity for change and variety in human lives to the need for “a fresh succession and a new circulation” of air, the author of Some Considerations on the Nature and Importance of the East-India Trade demonstrates that novelty, not luxury, makes objects alluring.23 While scholars have certainly been correct in arguing the “central” place of luxury in “the global history of consumption,” luxury itself as “an economic concept covering production, trade, and the civilizing impact of superfluous commodities” remains adjacent rather than central to the imaginative role that those “superfluous commodities” played in the lives of their consumers.24 Embedded in qualities of substance and sensorial contact that—as Hume puts it—bring “great refinement in the gratification of the senses,” the standard of “luxury” changes through time, especially as middle-class buyers turn luxuries into everyday necessities.25 However, luxury’s status remains steady as a commodity or condition of life that achieves a higher attainment of pleasure than what is necessary or standard. Novelty on

   novel the other hand, is less predictable in its qualities and effects for those who seek to experience and consume it. Like fashion and the fetish, novelty’s designation is contingent and accidental. More important, while luxury’s defining quality lies in its capacity to fulfill, enhance, and maintain comfort, novelty’s resists comfort as it stimulates the imagination and, like fashion, transforms the self.26 We are left with the cultural artifact of the novel as a reminder of eighteenth-century England’s endless elaborations on novelty and its vital relation to made things. As Raymond Williams reminds us, the fact that “fiction” has become synonymous with the “novel” is not a given, but results from the accumulation of diverse historical associations. It is the novel’s ineluctable ties with the socially and psychologically circumscribed experience of novelty—and its world of circulating things—that has yet to be brought forward as a decisive factor in its emergence both as a model of literary expression and as subject formation. If, by the end of the eighteenth century, the literary genre that had risen in conjunction with England’s market culture was later named the “novel,” it was through its own visions of self-fashioning and convincing realism that consumers valued in other objects of novelty and mimetic fascination that were populating the market. As this chapter situates the early English novel in specific manifestations of eighteenth-century novelty, fashion and fetishism, it will reveal that the development of a literary genre was founded on a pervasive enchantment with the glamour and movements of strange things, and the image of the self made and fashioned into a strange thing.

Passion for Novelty Recent decades have witnessed a wave of writing by Anglo-American scholars accounting for the historical forces that caused material goods to proliferate throughout eighteenth-century England, changing social structures irreversibly.27 In addition to luxury, such terms as empire, exoticism, wonder, the global, and consumption guide the direction of their narratives. Just as prevalent as the terms highlighted already by these historians, novelty demands particular emphasis, as its use in the cultural vocabulary encompassed the psychological, aesthetic, material, and textual domains of experience affected by England’s imperial and capitalist ambitions. Espe-

For the Pleasure of It    cially pertinent to the textual medium, novelty not only accommodates the temporal domain, but also proceeds through it. The term itself, novelty, had been situated in a predominantly religious context throughout the seventeenth century, as the titles of numerous religious tracts attest, where it designated any form of heresy or doctrinal innovation.28 Occupying a more aesthetic—and less stigmatized—register toward the end of the seventeenth century, novelty’s newer guise signaled not only eighteenthcentury England’s fascination with all things new, but also its vaunted advancements toward modernity.29 Novelty existed—whether or not it was called that—as an aesthetic concept well before Addison celebrated its imagination-spurring qualities in his Spectator essays.30 From Aristotle and Aquinas to Walter Charleton, Thomas Hobbes, and John Dennis, others before Addison have recognized “the power of the new and surprising to give aesthetic pleasure.”31 Likewise, the word “new” predominates in scientific titles of the seventeenth century, exemplified by such works as Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon (1620), Robert Boyle’s New Experiments Touching the Spring of the Air (1660), and countless medical works.32 And as Linda Levy Peck has demonstrated, luxury markets peddling “the new, the rare, the curious and the modern” had also thrived in the early seventeenth century, not just toward the end.33 While these findings suggest that novelty was not in itself a novel formation in the eighteenth century—either as aesthetic idea, scientific ideal, or commodity—they also indicate that its sway was contained in more specialized vocabularies and elite social classes. The pointed manner in which such eighteenth-century figures as Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Joseph Priestley, and Edmund Burke engaged the topic of novelty—finally giving it a proper name—from the second half of the century onward, indicates its entry into the mainstream as a general aesthetic category, psychological stimulant, and most distinctly, a feature of consumer experience. A later eighteenth-century publication by “Man in the Moon” titled London Unmask’ d: Or, the New Town Spy, following a “Peripatetic” and, as the title page states, his “ramble through the regions of novelty, whim, fashion and taste,” shows that such regions had in fact absorbed the whole “metropolis,” from “the cities of London and Westminster [to] their purlieus and vicinities.” Expanding well beyond the reaches of the Royal Exchange and privately owned wunderkammern (Peck’s privileged

   novel sites of seventeenth-century consumption), novelty “prevails” throughout so much of the Peripatetic’s London that he is moved to proclaim, “Though it is a maxim founded on the experience and declaration of the greatest philosophers, ‘that there is nothing new under the sun,’ it must be confessed, that the love of what passes at least for novelty, has ever predominated with us vain mortals . . . Of this, as a peripatetic, I was fully convinced from numerous observations in the course of my tour.”34 Indeed, so endemic is novelty to metropolitan experience, and so various are its producers, manifestations, and effects, that it leads the Peripatetic and his friend to believe its influence may cause the “ruin and disgrace [of] the world,” of which London serves as an instructive “miniature.” While the Peripatetic cites the Roman Empire’s fall by luxury as an example that may warn his own country, luxury itself is not so much a type of material condition as a moral attitude brought on by the persistent indulgence of the “passion for novelty.” For this, “the importation of exotic fashions, exotic wonders, and exotic manners,” as well as “the greatest performance that ever was or ever will, or ever can be [that are] announced almost weekly” bring fulfillment and further stimulation (Unmask’ d, 135, 46–47). In the midst of a metropolitan tour that involves encountering a quack “empiric,” a seductive castrato, modishly dressed sparks and demireps disguising their “true stations,” air balloons, a clumsy but well-received “modern conjuror,” and theatrical productions starring costumed and dancing dogs, the Peripatetic’s friend observes, “Novelty never ceases . . . in this world of wonders; there are spirits at work every moment, in devising schemes and projects to weedle the money out of the pockets of the public . . . The faculty of seeing has no where more ample scope for indulgence than here” (Unmask’ d, 46). Thus, London Unmask’ d: Or, the New Town Spy, represents an advanced stage of novelty’s reign in eighteenth-century daily life, showing the reach of its social expansion. By 1783, it has become a material reality that is inextricable from commerce and, for the Peripatetic, a cultural malady.35 While scholars are correct to point out that neither novelty as an aesthetic category nor England’s formation as a consumer society was in fact “new” in the eighteenth century, London Unmask’ d indicates that the intense coidentification between the two was. The Peripatetic’s friend certainly concurs with such earlier commentators as Dennis, Charleton, and

For the Pleasure of It    Hobbes when he comments, “The mind stands in need of constant amusement, and the source of that amusement must be derived from reflection on subjects, or the view or possession of objects, that are most consentaneous to our several propensities and inclinations.” However, such objects also lose their ability to amuse “when attained,” as the “mind becomes appalled by repeated enjoyment” (Unmask’ d, 142) The Peripatetic’s friend aptly describes the mind’s next course of action: it of course wanders in search of novelty and the charms of variety; so that as infants cry for every new toy they see, the children of a larger growth . . . are constantly tormenting themselves with anxious wishes for the obtaining of a something on which, on which, according to the common phrase, “they have set their minds;” but being once obtained, away starts fancy in quest of another something; and then another, and another after that, and the last bauble is as pleasing as the former, till the curtain drops, and thus ends the farce. (Unmask’d, 142–43)

The preceding sequence of events recalls the object-obsessed and fancyguided actions of such figures in this book as Lovelace, the libertine fetishizer; Teraminta, the fashion-doll worshiper in The Spectator; and Charlotte Charke, the serial impersonator of roles both onstage and off. Even as the Peripatetic’s friend transmits his moral disapproval of the scenario, his description of novelty’s effects on the mind relays the compelling yet delicate state of reality it approximates in the guise of a specific object or “bauble.” It also evokes the scene of “remembrance” sketched by Hobbes as an adjunct of the imagination’s faculty for “seeking” or “invention”: “Sometimes a man knows a place determinate, within the compasse whereof he is to seek; and then his thoughts run over all the parts thereof, in the same manner, as one would sweep a room, to find a jewell; or as a Spaniel ranges the field, till he finds a sent; or as a man should run over the Alphabet, to start a rime.”36 At the same time that Hobbes’s images pertain to the retrograde contents of memory, the mind’s motions move forward nevertheless to find its lost objects, following the direction of novelty, and of prose itself. Prose, after all, containing the prefix pro—or “forward, onward, in a course or in time”—and perhaps related to process, proceeds across the blank page in a way that can only be described as “sweeping” in comparison with the metrical alignments of poetry or the measured dialogues of drama.37

   novel The Peripatetic’s friend describes the drama of novelty as a “farce,” and such a label only highlights the novelty seeker’s utter absorption in the quest to make real the image provoked by the novel object. That the search is repeated after the object has been “obtained,” suggests that novelty’s allure lies in its ability to hold in suspension an object’s state of being both real and unreal, and both distant and close. Or, novelty makes real objects seem illusory, and illusory objects seem real. It is novelty’s ability to activate the drama of “seeming” that draws the subject to the novel object. Once seeming becomes being, and distance becomes closeness, “the curtain,” so to speak, “drops.” In the next section I will explore how the dynamics of oscillation between seeming and being, and distance and closeness, direct the movements of objects and things in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), giving the narrative the shimmer of novelty that it both embraces and resists, and the status it has enjoyed, as the most prototypically novelistic of narratives—if not “the first” novel—written in England’s long eighteenth century.

Oroonoko Recently, other scholars have regarded Oroonoko as a signal location for novelty’s diverse—and extraliterary—manifestations, using them as clues to answer broader questions about the narrative’s relationship to pedagogical, anthropological, and aesthetic concerns.38 In its treatment of novelty, Behn’s narrative incorporates the multiple usages in her time, from its sense as a foreign and exotic quality—“the gust of Novelty”— to the novel’s meaning as “news” or information about recent events, as in “Trefry was infinitely pleas’d with this Novel.”39 At the same time, the text comprises a novelty in itself as a hybrid genre; it equivocates between its avowed status as a “history”—to please its conservative patron, Lord Maitland—and its equally avowed “Romantick” appearance, deriving, Behn claims, from its exotic context. Behn makes these poles of equivocation explicit when she explains in her epistle dedicatory, “If there be any thing that seems Romantick, I beseech your Lordship to consider, these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders; at least they appear so to us, because New and Strange” (Oroonoko, 7). Here, Behn reasons that any attempt to represent

For the Pleasure of It    the features of a distant country will appear to betray known standards of truth—and resemble romance—so new they will be to the European reader. In her attempt to emulate historical standards of verisimilitude when describing her experience of a novel setting—while adapting features of heroic drama and romance—Behn builds the early paradigm for the novel form.40 Throughout, the worlds of Oroonoko are steeped in the new. The first pages make clear the overlapping significances of “the new world” as it arises for Behn’s reader in his own world—“where he finds Diversions for every Minute, new and strange”—and as it arises for the slaves in the story, who are taken to “these new Colonies,” Surinam. As critics have explored, the conservative political and aesthetic sentiments expressed in Behn’s epistle dedicatory contradict the progressive tendencies of her text—its proto-novelistic self-consciousness about verisimilitude as it incorporates conventions of fictional (romance) narrative, for instance.41 While she apologizes to Lord Maitland for appearing to be writing fanciful romance when describing novel cultures, Behn professes to “omit, for Brevity’s sake, a thousand little Accidents . . . which might prove tedious and heavy” to her nonaristocratic reader. This common reader, she explains—distinct from Maitland, the exiled Jacobite—lives in a world of abundant novelties, arriving quickly and often (Oroonoko, 9).42 Behn confronts two types of readers with divergent sets of expectations: the aristocratic patron who shuns “Novelty,” reading for “Knowledge” and heroic examples instead, and the consumer who reads precisely for the diversion and invention afforded by the “gust of Novelty.”43 Whether targeting the reader who professes to read for knowledge, or for entertainment only, Behn’s resulting narrative produces the “mutual enfolding of new or ‘foreign’ worlds and the ‘real’ one” that fostered the eighteenth-century novel’s main structuring elements, as well as those of Huet’s romances—the rhetoric of fact clothing a fictional interior.44 Not only this, it also demonstrates the extent to which novelty was a cultural fixture—albeit stigmatized—toward the end of the seventeenth century.45 In its function as a travel narrative and, as Mary Baine Campbell argues, an early foray into anthropologic ethnography, Oroonoko indicates that novelty involves a spatial and locomotive act of overcoming distance: it makes the strange and foreign approachable as well as appropriable.46

   novel Hence Behn’s “very Glittering and Rich” dress; her “Taffaty Cap, with Black Feathers”; and her brother’s “Stuff Suit, with Silver loops and Buttons, and abundance of Green Ribbons” appear “infinitely surprising” to the Indians of Surinam, who respond by “taking up one Petticoat, then wondering to see another,” and tying “about their Legs” the garters “Lac’d with Silver Lace at the ends” worn by Behn and her brother (Oroonoko, 48). Later, the European custom of kissing proves to be just as attractive to the Indians, and invites imitation as they watch Behn’s brother kiss the wife of a Peeie, or a young prophet. Behn describes how they came “running and kiss’d” Behn and “kiss’d one another,” and “made a very great Jest, it being so Novel” (Oroonoko, 50). For an English audience, Behn herself traffics in the trade of novelties by translating Surinam’s natural resources and fashions into a dense and lively tableau of word pictures. I am referring of course to the famous catalogue of animals, rarities, feathers, insects, baskets, weapons, beads, aprons and “a thousand little Knacks” that introduces her narrative and conceivably helps authenticate her claim of “Eye-Witness” status. Appearing next to her claims of friendship with the natives, the catalogue of animals and things seems positioned to prove the “brotherly and friendly Affection” with which the English “caress[ed]” the “Natives of the place.” Instead of “daring to command ‘em,” as they do the West African slaves brought to work in Surinam, the English “trade with’em.” Like so many novel kisses—as tried on with delight by the Indians—and Native caresses, the list works to communicate not only the “perfect Amity” of colonial relations, but also the procedure of novelty itself. By this I mean the translation of exotica into terms accessible and familiar to the reader: Fish, Venison, Buffilo’s, Skins, and little Rarities’ as Marmosets, a sort of Monkey as big as a Rat or Weasel, but of a marvelous and delicate shape, and has Face and Hands like an Humane Creature: and Cousheries, a little Beast in the form and fashion of a Lion, as big as a Kitten; but so exactly made in all parts like that noble Beast, that it is it in Miniature. Then for little Parakeetoes, great Parrots, Muckaws, and a thousand other Birds and Beasts of wonderful and surprizing. Forms, Shapes, and colours. For Skins of prodigious Snakes, of which there are some threescore Yards in length; as is the Skin of one that may be seen at His Majesty’s Antiquaries: Where are also some rare Flies, of amazing Forms and Colours, presented to ‘em by my self; some as big as my Fist, some less; and all of various Excellencies, such as Art cannot imitate. (Oroonoko, 8–9)

For the Pleasure of It    While obeying the protocol for description devised by the Royal Society—the “close, naked, natural way of speaking” and “mathematical plainness” that Thomas Sprat espoused in his History of the Royal Society (1667)—Behn’s substitutions of verba for res in the passage works as a form of novelty in the making.47 Indeed, the passage reveals that the experience of novelty is one that is made, not innate to things themselves. Where, in the string of nouns that comprise the passage, would the charm and desirability of the strange animals reside without descriptive modifiers such as “marvelous,” “delicate,” “humane,” “noble,” “miniature,” “little,” “great,” “wonderful,” “surprizing,” “prodigious,” “rare,” and “amazing”? Moreover, how might the English reader “see” the animals “as they are” without the indicators of scale that work not only to describe but also domesticate them by comparing them with known creatures and measurements? Thus, a cousheries is a miniature lion—“it is it”—the size of a kitten, and later, an armadilly is a rhinoceros the size of a six-week-old pig (Oroonoko, 8, 43). Much like the Indians’ equivocally described state of dress—both bare and adorned, as Margaret Ferguson points out—and the Africans’ body carvings, Behn’s fact-centered prose here seems on one level to be free of artifice, and also, significant action.48 Upon closer observation, the passage bears the pattern for a common narrative of the time: the story of nature’s products reconstituted as strange and familiar at the same time to draw the eyes, hands, and curiosity of English consumers, the very work of novelty and one might even say, fashion. As the passage continues to list further “rarities” and commodities, it tells this story through the feathers—“whose Tinctures are unconceivable”—that are traded with the natives of Surinam. The natives themselves “order” the feathers “into all shapes, [making] themselves little short Habits of ‘em, and glorious Wreaths for their Heads, Necks, Arms and Legs” (Oroonoko, 9). Much like the petticoats the Indians “take up” and the silver-laced garters they tie around their own legs, the feathers attest to their own novelty and are “taken up” by Behn herself. She describes having “a Set of” feathers “presented to” her, and giving them “to the King’s Theatre.” There, they become a commodified form of play as they are used to fashion a stage costume for the Indian Queen, the title character of Sir Robert Howard and John Dryden’s play. As a costume, the feathers are “infinitely admir’d by” the “Persons of Quality” and deemed “unimitable” (Oroonoko, 9).

   novel When Mary Campbell glosses Gilles Lipovetsky’s description of fashion in Empire of Fashion as “ ‘a form of social change, independent of any particular object; it is first and foremost a social mechanism characterized by a particularly brief time span and by more or less fanciful shifts that enable it to affect quite diverse spheres of collective life,’ ” she perceives in it a striking similarity with the system and function of the novel. Rerendering Lipovetsky, Campbell writes, “Fashion is not only a kind of prearticulate anthropology, but the temporal institution prerequisite to the genre of the novel: the genre that narrates ‘social change’ taking place over a ‘brief time span’ by means of ‘fanciful shifts,’ from the subject position of the inhabitant (however resistant) of fashion’s accelerated temporality.”49 Sharing a temporal foundation with fashion, the novel, in other words, accommodates through its faculty of narration—assembling words and sentences on paper instead of fabric and material on a human body— fashion’s inherent form of not only change, but also social change. In the case of Oroonoko, fashion tells the story of novelty in its cross-cultural transits and contacts. In doing so, it tells the novel’s own story as a form that emerged from the struggle to give an unprecedented coherence to the experience of alterity—whether surfacing as race, landscape, custom, or clothing—within the frames of both reality and fiction. Through its methods of bringing the distant into closeness, and the close into distance—showing one appropriating the garments of another culture, showing a member of another culture appropriating one’s garments—Oroonoko not only comprises novelty, but also enacts novelty. In the process, as Campbell herself claims about the resulting effects of fashion, “An other world is eaten up, incorporated, to become visible as a self of self-defining signs in ‘the “World.” ’ ”50 In changing society through its “shifts” and movements, fashion also changes the bodies and identities of the subjects who acquire legibility through entering its system. Certainly, the most disturbing story of change in the narrative is the one concerning the title hero as he shifts from West African nobility to commodified human, a slave, to a series of disarticulated body parts to be passed from colonial plantation to plantation as a warning against similar rebellion from slaves. As Elaine Freedgood might put it, this story comprises one of the “fugitive meanings” of the imported commodities that furnish

For the Pleasure of It    fashionable life in England.51 Prime examples of these are the previously discussed feathers that dressed the Indian Queen, or the other “thousand little Knacks, and Rarities in Nature” that were exported to England and acquired through “peaceable” trade with the Surinam natives. Rendered contingent to this relationship of “perfect Amity” between colonizers and colonized—and the traded goods that issue from it—is the exportation of West Africans such as Oroonoko to be “ma[d]e use of” in Surinam as the labor that makes colonization possible (Oroonoko, 8–9). In part narrating the origins of such novel objects appearing throughout London social life, Oroonoko not only gives solidity to their otherwise fugitive meanings, but also shows the process by which the worlds and subjects from which they came become “eaten up, incorporated” and reemerge as “the ‘World’ ” of Restoration worldliness. Critics have traditionally accounted for the inventories of Surinam’s natural resources as motifs imported from contemporary travel narratives and as set pieces of verisimilitude. Combined with the novella’s other narrative conventions, such as heroic romance and history, they contribute to the paradigmatic status of hybridity—or, “categorical instability” for Michael McKeon—that would become a trademark feature of the eighteenth-century novel.52 For Laura Brown, the goods from Surinam “are at best a small factor in the real economic connection [i.e., slavery] between England and the West Indies; they serve primarily as a synecdoche for imperialist exploration.” Moreover, the “enumeration of these goods belong to a widespread discourse of imperialist accumulation, typical of . . . the Restoration and early eighteenth century, in which the mere act of proliferative listing, the evocation of brilliant colors, and the sense of an incalculable quantity express the period’s fascination with imperialist acquisition.”53 Rather than viewing the objects as less relevant than the central subject of Oroonoko—the history of the Royal Slave himself— because they are slighter in scale and ornamental, I am interested in allowing for their greater importance. By introducing her novella with the catalog of goods as they transform from natural products to imported novelties, and by continuing to describe and itemize them throughout the text, Behn allows for a pivotal correspondence between subject and object. At the same time the values and positions of objects change, the human subjects attached to them undergo changes as well. Furthermore,

   novel in the same way “little Parakeetoes, great parrots, Muckaws, and a thousand other Birds and beasts of wonderful and surprising Forms, Shapes, and Colours” transform from inhabitants of a natural landscape to the novelties that Europeans own as pets, so too does Oroonoko (Oroonoko, 8). In his case, the transformation takes place not only from prince to slave to circulating body parts, but also from prince to slave to circulating body parts to the printed object that readers hold in their hands for the transforming mental experience of novelty. What Oroonoko narrates above all is the loss of newness in its state of innocence, not in novelty. Indeed, the narrative suggests that in order to beget novelty—the novelty that charms the worldly with toys, spectacles, and fashions—one must lose the other newness of innocence. Early in the text, the narrator proclaims that the natives of Surinam, or “these People,” represent “an absolute Idea of the first State of Innocence, before Man knew how to sin” (Oroonoko, 10). The following passage, however, reveals a conflicting attitude toward the exchange of such cherished innocence for the novelty of worldliness that imperialism profits from and effects. Diverting attention momentarily from Oroonoko, now “Caesar” at this point in the story, the narrator provides more views on Surinam that suggest sympathy with the imperialist ambitions: “in a Word, I must say thus much of it, That certainly had his late Majesty, of sacred Memory, but seen and known what a vast and charming World he had been Master of in that Continent, he would never have parted so Easily with it to the Dutch” (Oroonoko, 43). At the same time Behn expresses regret over England’s loss of Surinam as one of its colonies, she testifies to the beauty and wonders of the place, for it “affords all things both for Beauty and Use.” In the same way that the words used to describe the goods that emerge from Surinam—its “marvelous and delicate” Marmosets, “little Rarities,” and kittenlike Cousheries—reveal a playful affection toward the objects, the words used to describe its landscape resemble loving strokes on its beautiful features: tis there Eternal Spring, always the very Months of April, May and June; the Shades are perpetual, the Trees, bearing at once all degrees of Leaves and Fruit, from blooming Buds to ripe Autumns; Groves of Oranges, Limons, Citrons, Figs, Nutmegs, and noble Aromaticks, continually bearing their Fragrancies. The Trees appearing all like Nosegays adorn’d with Flowers of different kinds; some are all White, some

For the Pleasure of It    Purple, some Scarlet, some Blue, some Yellow, bearing, at the same time, Ripe Fruit and Blooming Young, or producing every Day new. (Oroonoko, 43)

The sense of eternal freshness and abundance, however, becomes disrupted by the following sentence, which takes one of the features of the landscape—its trees—to detail its usefulness as a natural resource: The very Wood of all these Trees have an intrinsick Value above common Timber; for they are, when cut, of different Colours, glorious to behold; and bear a Price considerable, to inlay withal. Besides this, they yield rich Balm, and Gums; so that we make our Candles of such an Aromatick Substance, as does not only give a sufficient Light, but as they Burn, they cast their Perfumes all about. (Oroonoko, 43)

No paragraph break distinguishes the content of these sentences from the earlier ones. There is no need for one, as the described motion of cutting the trees—a motion routinely performed, no doubt, by African slaves— provides the break between the landscape’s peaceful state of natural growth and its use by colonial settlers for the necessities of civilized life. A far cry from the pure delights offered by the untouched landscape with its endless blooms and lovely fragrances, the second passage provides an image of beauty—“Colours, glorious to behold”—contorted by the adjoining pain of violent and human-derived force, exploitation, and the process of becoming both a commodity and an object of evaluation. Different meanings and values scatter from the cut timber as it turns into inlay, balm, gums, candles, light and then perfume. Such a narrative describes Oroonoko’s progress, as he too is assigned a price, cut into repeatedly, made use of, quartered, dispersed, and when about to expire, bears a smell, but an “earthly smell about him” that is “so strong,” it makes the narrator leave the room (Oroonoko, 64).54 If the flowers of Surinam as described by Behn are “eternally Blowing, and every Day and Hour new”—effectively comprising an artificial paradise in its textually preserved state of freshness and growth with no decay—then her history of Oroonoko works to leave a lasting picture of him in words, one that will “out-last those of the Pencil”—that is, the “Painter”—and “even Worlds themselves,” because the faculty of the Poet’s pen inscribes “The Nobler part, the Soul and Mind” (Oroonoko, 43, 5). In this sense, Oroonoko appears to be an antinovel—and an odd candidate as

   novel prototype for the English novel—in its refutation of novelty’s transience for an aesthetic of timelessness and truth. Behn hopes, after all, that “the Reputation [of her] Pen is considerable enough to make [Oroonoko’s] Glorious Name to survive to all Ages” (Oroonoko, 65). Yet author and narrative are implicated in novelty by virtue of their ineluctable ties to the marketplace of print, as ineluctable as Oroonoko’s extreme condition of becoming the human chattel that is slavery.55 While the medium of print braces her narrative in a state of durability and relative permanence—in contrast with the actual state of composing it, which she reveals as having been “writ . . . in a few Hours,” without resting the “Pen a Moment for Thought”—it enters a field of transience and inexplicable transformation in value through its eventual commodity status (Oroonoko, 7). The narrator indicates awareness that such is the case when she refers to her reader’s world as one “where he finds Diversions for every Minute, new and strange,” and must therefore fashion her writing in a way to hold his attention (Oroonoko, 8). And certainly the fact that by 1753, such newspapers as The Public Advertiser advertise the sale of “clasp knives,” “garters and leaders,” “shoe and kneebuckles,” and “gross sleeve buttons” next to ads for A Genuine Account of Some Late Transactions in the East Indies, for The Country Gentleman’s Pocket-Companion and Builder’s Assistant for Rural Decorative Architecture, and for Colley Cibber’s Lives of the British Poets, indicate that books—no matter how handsomely and classically realized its heroes—will share the same fate as baubles and “mercantile exotica” in their dependence on the whims and appetites of a faceless consumer as England progresses further into the trade of novelties.56

The Rise of Fashion and Novel Selves Whereas Oroonoko reminds us that England’s robust expansions in global commerce brought the relationship between enslaved humans into morally devastating interchangeability with inanimate objects, numerous sources throughout the period indicate that, for English citizens, the same activities brought a heightened sense of personal identity as a malleable entity, and in fact, a medium for daily acts of metamorphoses.57 Because it transforms the consumer’s sense of reality through bringing her into contact with a different world, the very function of novelty is to effect change

For the Pleasure of It    and metamorphosis, the process by which “something can become something else.”58 In Michael Taussig’s glossing of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” the desire for metamorphosis—the “compulsions of persons to ‘become and behave like something else’ ”—furnishes the “rudiment [of] the mimetic faculty.” In doing so, mimesis entails “the ability to mime, and mime well” and, likewise, “the capacity to Other,” as well as the “compulsion to become the other.” Mimesis, in other words, collaborates with novelty by suspending the subject between states of sameness and difference, or closeness and distance in its relationship to “the Other.”59 For more cynical observers, such “metamorphoses” constituted acts of masquerade and disguise. Mandeville’s remarks and examples throughout The Fable of the Bees give an ample foretaste of such stock rhetorical features in arguments about foreign commerce and luxury throughout the eighteenth century. In Remark “M” he comments that the new accessibility of fashion “encourages every Body, who is conscious of his little Merit, if he is any ways able, to wear Cloathes above his Rank, especially in large and populous Cities . . . and consequently have the Pleasure of being esteem’d by a vast Majority, not as what they are, but what they appear to be” (Fable I, 128; emphasis mine). Studying the habit of wearing “Cloathes above [one’s] Rank” in more detail, Mandeville observes “the poorest Labourer’s Wife in the Parish . . . will half starve her self and her Husband to purchase a second-hand Gown and Petticoat, that cannot do her half the Service; because, forsooth, it is more genteel” (Fable I, 129). In this eighteenth-century world where a wife would forego feeding herself and her husband to buy someone else’s cast-down finery, fashion no longer endows the bold coherence of social rank experienced by the liveried subjects in Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s Renaissance world. Dramatic advancements in trade and marketing—from lowered costs of fashionable commodities to the introduction of ready-made garments—allowed boundaries of social hierarchy to shift and loosen.60 When describing eighteenth-century society as a “continuously ascending hierarchy of people or families, each one a little better off or a little more genteel than the one below it, not a set of discrete, self-contained groups,” Peter Earle reveals the shadings and nuances that class identities would acquire in response to England’s development into a mercantile

   novel society.61 More dramatic was the fact that mercantilism, while supplying the materials for noble clients to live in elegance and luxury, produced its own class. Members of this new merchant class—as commented upon by Defoe in The Review—enjoyed the advantages of the elite, too, and slipped into the same clothes they sold as new purchases of their own, not as the secondhand goods or hand-me-downs that were formerly designated as wear for nonelites.62 Constituting “the middling sort,” “the middling rank,” and “the middling orders” of society, this newfound trading profession was lauded by Addison in Spectator 21 for providing several with “an honest Industry,” placing them in “stations of Life which may give them an Opportunity of making their Fortunes,” and “flourish[ing] by Multitudes,” as it “gives Employment to all its Professors,” in contrast with the professions of “Law, Physick or Divinity.”63 More pointedly revealing its status as a progenitor for the omnipresent middle classes of modernity, Defoe in Letter 22 of The Complete English Tradesman praises members of mercantile professions for creating their own wealth, creating profits for their own families and nation. In doing so he highlights their abilities to reshape social identity: “Trade is so far here from being inconsistent with a Gentleman, that in short trade in England makes Gentlemen.” Extending to the broader reaches of family fortune and future profession, trade has also “peopled this nation with Gentlemen; for after a generation or two the tradesmen’s children, or at least their grand-children, come to be as good Gentlemen, Statesmen, Parliament-men, Privy-Counsellors, Judges, Bishops, and Noblemen, as those of the highest birth and the most ancient families; and nothing too high for them.”64 Later in the century, London Unmask’ d: Or, the New Town Spy (1784?) blames “the importation of exotic fashions, exotic wonders, and exotic manners” for encouraging English subjects’ “fondness for imitation.” Furthermore, the import market leaves England “stigmatized” as “the land of fools and apes . . . exposed . . . to the ridicule of those who have profitably availed themselves of [its citizens’] foibles” (Unmask’ d, 135). Throughout the exposé of “the Metropolis and its Inhabitants” that comprises London Unmask’ d, the “Peripatetic” and his friend routinely bristle at their encounters with such figures as a “beau in masquerade,” a “gentleman constituted so merely by dress,” who is “in reality a journey man

For the Pleasure of It    barber,” a tin-man’s son in “gay habiliments” whose “awkwardly stiff” appearance betrays his effort “to pass for a gentleman,” and a “groupe of fine ladies, attractive in their charms, and tempting to behold” who are in fact prostitutes (Unmask’ d, 13, 43, 53). Accompanying such encounters are such pronouncements as “ ‘Surely . . . the world is one scene of masquerade, and every character appears under convert. Formerly the externals marked rank and degree, but now, if we would form a true estimate, the most probable means seems to be that of reversing appearances’ ” (Unmask’ d, 13). These sources demonstrate that the means for consumption in eighteenth-century England contributed to a newly realized practice of mimesis in lived experience. The narrative medium of the novel accommodated the fluidity of identity changes—whether imagined or materialized—that occurred within the framework of the everyday. Solidifying in a culture that expressed a wideheld understanding that fabric, style, and the arrangement of objects might create appearances of “true” personhood, the idea of the novel was not merely verisimilar, it was verisimilar of an approach to life that was in itself verisimilar. Moreover, the novel converged with the marketplace’s other fashions and novelties in producing shared notions of the self as capable of being made and remade. Certainly, Margaret Cavendish, in her Epistle Dedicatory to her brother-in-law for Poems and Fancies (1653), perceives a direct relationship with textile production and imaginative activity in hoping with her work to “Spin a Garment of Memory, to lapp up [her] Name, that it might grow to after Ages.”65 Drawing out the feminine associations with the textile arts, she addresses “Noble, and Worthy Ladies” directly to urge them to regard the products of “fancy,” such as her “poetry” as being akin to the arts of dressing and needlework: Besides, Poetry, which is built upon Fancy, Women may claim, as a worke belonging most properly to themselves: for I have observ’d, that their Braines work usually in a Fantasticall motion; as in their severall, and various dresses, in their many and singular choices of Cloaths, and Ribbons, and the like; in their curious shadowing, and mixing of Colours, in their Wrought workes, and divers sorts of Stitches they imploy their Needle, and many Curious things they make, as Flowers, Boxes, Baskets with Beads, Shells, Silke, Straw, or any thing else . . . and thus their Thoughts are imployed perpetually with Fancies. (Poems, A3)

   novel Even more revealing is the connection Cavendish makes between poetry and fashion and other forms of imaginative representation: Fancy goeth not so much by Rule, & Method, as by Choice: and if I have chosen my Silke with fresh contours, and matcht them in good shadows, although the stitches be not very true, yet it will please the Eye; so if my Writing please the Readers, though not the Learned, it will satisfie me. (Poems, A3)

Just as the visual and tactile pleasures of choosing one’s dress involves the license of the imagination, so too does the act of writing to please oneself. Writing as a privileged but persecuted Royalist, Cavendish’s choices in fashion—and, to a certain extent, her choices to write for herself—pertain to few others. What she describes has less to do with “fashion” than with “fancy,” a yet private form of deriving pleasure from things and the imagination. When such sartorial “choices” become more available to members of society who are not nobly born, and the materials for such choices become more abundant—as they do throughout the course of the eighteenth century—fancy becomes fashion, which occupies an altogether different relationship to time, and to space. In its relationship to time, fashion belongs to modernity and novelty. In fact, according to Mark Taylor, “fashion did not exist prior to the advent of modernity . . . . The relays joining fashion and modernity intersect in the word modern.” After all, he continues, “modern derives from the Latin modo, which means ‘just now’ and, by extension, ‘of today.’ ”66 Furthermore, just as novelty distinguishes itself through its temporary duration in time—thus marking time—so too does fashion. For one commentator, novelty is the “Mother of Fashion,” thus suggesting that without novelty, fashion would not exist. In addition, it is novelty that “prescribes/ New Laws to all the sportive Tribes,” making objects take different shapes, turning humans into objects, and the natural into the artificial:   Hence Novelty maintains her Pow’r To please or wound us every Hour. Mother of Fashion—she prescribes New Laws to all the sportive Tribes. Now bids the Hair in Ringlets twine, Like Tendrils of the wanton Vine;

For the Pleasure of It    Now piles it up with Wool and Feather, To combat with the Wind and Weather— Moreover, ‘Tis Novelty prescribes to Taste Unbending Stays—so closely lac’d, That Virgin fair in hoop’d Apparel, Looks like a Funnel in a Barrel.67

In its relationship to space, fashion belongs to the public, and the public’s need to mediate social relations through objects. In its ability to shape and transform the human form in concert with changes in public taste, as well as its unabashed domination of nature through artifice—revealing and exploiting reality’s status as a material construct and sign system—fashion is inseparable from the project of fiction. As any observer of fashion will note, from Henry Fielding to Georg Simmel and Roland Barthes, the temporality of fashion, if it could speak, follows this structure: “ ‘Yesterday I was what you are, tomorrow you will be what I am.’ ”68 Thus, fashion occupies a paradoxical space in time; the very style that first arrested and surprised the eye can only prove its status as fashion through inciting future imitation that, in turn, hastens its own death, its relegation to the past tense. Fashion, like fiction, involves the impossible project of mimesis, spurring its practitioners to projects of mimicry and verisimilitude. Fiction itself, through exhausting its own novelty and derivation from romance during the course of the eighteenth century, and becoming the standard form of modern literary expression, reflects the course of fashion in its flight toward exoticism and improbability and onward to domesticity and realism. Samuel Pepys’s description of Cavendish and her fanciful rather than fashionable form of dress falls in accordance with this historical pattern of fanciful romance preceding the domesticated and verisimilar novel. On April 11, 1667, he wrote: “The whole story of this Lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic. Her footmen in velvet coats, and herself in an antique dress, as they say; and was the other day at her own play, The Humorous Lovers; the most ridiculous thing that ever was wrote.”69 In Restoration England, to be sartorially fanciful is to be identified with the antic and the romance genre. Within the eighteenth century, to wear clothes boldly but in a style recognizable to others, and to be identified with fiction, are to be in fashion.

   novel If the Duchess of Newcastle Margaret Cavendish inspired Samuel Pepys to call her life a romance, then the title character of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana inspires her admirers and later readers to call hers a novel. While Defoe’s novel takes place during the same time Pepys records his impressions of Cavendish, it was written a little more than half a century later, in 1724. Much as Cavendish’s choices of dress worked metonymically to define her character in her own world, a novel dress works literally to define and name Defoe’s own character. Arising in a work that professes to provide the “history” of a “beautiful lady,” the passage describes an object that has far-reaching significance for both the genesis of the book and the heroine’s identity, itself an object of perpetual invention. The Dress was extraordinary fine indeed, I had bought it as a Curiosity, having never seen the like; the Robe was a fine Persian, or India Damask; the Ground white, and the Flowers blue and gold, and the Train held five Yards; the Dress under it, was a Vest of the same, embroider’d with Gold, and set with some Pearl in the Work, and some Turqois Stones; to the Vest, was a Girdle five or six Inches wide, after the Turkish Mode; and on both Ends where it join’d, or hook’d was set with Diamonds for eight Inches either way, only they were not true Diamonds; but no-body knew that but myself. The Turban, or Head-Dress, had a Pinacle on the top, but not about five Inches, with a Piece of loose Sarcenet hanging from it; and on the Front, just over the Forehead, was a good Jewel, which I had added to it.70

“Roxana” is the name the heroine acquires only after she hastily decides to appear in the gown—described as “exceedingly surprizing, perfectly new”—and dance “an Antick” in front of an admiring audience at a ball she holds in her home. Just as the choice to wear the gown is incidental to learning that the king and his men were arriving unexpectedly in masquerade, so too is the name conferred on her for wearing the dress: “At the finishing of the Dance, the Company clapp’d, and almost shouted; and one of the Gentlemen cry’d out, Roxana! Roxana! . . . upon which foolish Accident I had the Name of Roxana presently fix’d upon me all over the Court End of Town, as effectually as if I had been Christen’d Roxana.” The dress, in its theatrical associations with the new and the exotic, designates the heroine’s new name and identity. Like Behn’s set of feathers used in London productions of The Indian Queen, Roxana’s gown originated from a foreign country and was “bought as a Curiosity,” as she had “never

For the Pleasure of It    seen the like” (Roxana, 215). Given to her with a Turkish Slave as a present from her former lover, the unnamed prince, during their travels, the dress carries private meaning for her own pleasure. We know this because she mentions that getting into the foreign dress for her ball on impulse was not difficult as she had “dress’d [herself ] in it many times, by the help of [her] little Turk, and afterwards, between Amy” and herself. She admits doing so “only to see how I look’d in it” (Roxana, 215). While it provides a powerful source of self-realization in her private moments, she comes to recognize its powers for shaping a more expansively realized form of selfinvention—that of public reputation—after wearing it at her ball. She reflects, “I had, it seems, the Felicity of pleasing every-body that Night, to an Extreme; and my Ball, but especially my Dress, was the Chat of the Town for that Week, and so the Name Roxana was the Toast at, and about the Court” (Roxana, 217). Through the accidental contiguity of the exotic dress on her body, her real name, Susan, becomes extinguished, much in the same way she extinguishes the life of her daughter, also named Susan, at the end of the book. The dress becomes the fetish of her English audience’s desires for exoticism, and of her own desire as a “free agent” and courtesan to commodify herself, and then to remember her former self during a time in her life when she also wants to suppress that former self in order to live with respectability. At this point, the dress reemerges as a novelty to “charm” her newest husband, the Dutch Merchant, while they live in seclusion with her Quaker friend. Earlier, Roxana had lived and dressed as a Quaker herself before becoming reunited with the Merchant. As a newlywed, she has exhausted the novelty of being made a “Lady” through the title her husband has bought for her. In this instance, the novelty is not so different from the novelty of kissing that the Indians in Oroonoko try on with delight: I was now my LADY—, and I must own, I was exceedingly pleas’d with it; ‘twas so Big, and so Great, to hear myself call’d Her Ladyship, and the like; that I was like the Indian King at Virginia, who having a House built for him by the English, and a Lock put upon the Door, wou’d sit whole Days together, with the Key in his Hand, locking and unlocking, and double-locking the Door, with an unaccountable Pleasure at the Novelty; so I cou’d have sat a whole Day together, to hear Amy

   novel talk to me, and call me Your Ladyship at every word; but after a-while the Novelty wore off. (Roxana, 291)

Spending days on end without dancing, music, or company demands continual inventiveness in finding entertainment. Asked by her husband to dress up for him alone, she decides to wear the Turkish dress again: “I told him, I believ’d I was able to dress me so, in one kind of Dress that I had by me, that he wou’d not know his Wife when he saw her especially if anybody else was by” (Roxana, 292). Upon wearing the dress for him, she like Pamela with Mr. B in her country girl garb, gives him pleasure in allowing him to pretend she is somebody else, a stranger: “In this figure, Amy holding the Train of my Robe, I came down to him: He was surpriz’d, and perfectly astonish’d; he knew me, to be sure, because I had prepar’d him, and because there was nobody else there, but the QUAKER and Amy” (Roxana, 292). So irresistible the vision of Roxana is in the Turkish dress, she thereafter “frequently put it on, and upon two or three Occasions danc’d in it, but always at his Request” (Roxana, 293). And so vivid is the memory of the dress for those who saw her in it as Roxana, it is the means by which her daughter—a former servant in her Pall Mall apartments—comes to recognize her as her mother and threatens to reveal her past life as a celebrated courtesan. Thus, all these intricate turns of the plot reveal that it is the dominating charisma of the Turkish dress that operates as the sign for the woman. Whether she wants it to or not, material reality has composed the fabric of her social being. At the same time, the book appears to desire the same powerful certainty that the dress affords in determining the composition of the woman’s “interior” self. In this way, it is not so much the dress itself, but the dress as a sign for the woman that operates as the book’s fetish. The book, after all, is called Roxana, as if it were coextensive with the novel dress that gave her the exotic name, and as if print and paper could somehow serve as the embodiment of a real woman. The very first paragraph of the book, as it appears in the preface, presents itself as a sort of self-propelled automaton, as if the author, finished with his task of assembling his object can release it to the public and, as he puts it, permit it to “speak for itself” (Roxana, 35). As he struggles to legitimate his entry into print with claims of his work’s truthfulness— “and so the Work is not a Story, but a History”—he also contends with the

For the Pleasure of It    challenge of using words to accomplish the work of an essentially different medium: If it is not as Beautiful as the Lady herself is reported to be; if it is not as diverting as the Reader can desire, and much more than he can reasonably expect; and if all the most diverting Parts of it are not adapted to the Instruction and Improvement of the Reader, the Relator says, it must be from the Defect of his Performance; dressing up the Story in worse Cloaths than the Lady, whose Words he speaks, prepared it for the World. (Roxana, 35)

In its attempts to “dress up the story,” using words to embody the sensual glamour of Roxana’s person, the outer frame of the book collaborates with the inner passage on Roxana’s Turkish costume. Glamour, etymologically a corrupt form of “grammar,” pervades the novel. On one hand, Roxana produces her glamour as a famed courtesan through exploiting the charms that commodities and imperial appropriations offer; along with wearing her Turkish dress, she furnishes her home with Damask linens and China dishes and plates. On the other, Defoe casts the spell of glamour through mixing forms of visual perception with verbal tools. He also casts the spell of plausibility through mixing the forms of gender in exchanging his voice for that of a woman, claiming in the preface, “as she has told it herself, we have the less Reason to question the Truth.” In attempting to achieve the truthfulness of Roxana’s existence as a real person—for that, after all, is what concerns Defoe when he claims the book is a “history” and not just a “story”—he needs to embody not only her voice and mind, but also her presence as a physical entity who creates visual effects. The penetration of an alternate consciousness can only take place through these accompanying acts of outward description. While the description of the dress is somewhat too linear and paratactical to achieve successfully the full-bodied effect of a picture or painting, the act is crucial, for it symbolizes the novel’s general project of supplementing and colonizing an invented subjectivity that already recognizes the interpenetrations between fashion and the composition of the interior self.71 The home truth that Roxana generates is that rather than operating as signs of the self to simply “wear” and “put on,” the novel garments of fashion were deeply constitutive of selfhood in mercantile England. In sum, Roxana affords us the understanding that whether emerging as novel or novelty, text or textile, manufactured objects in eighteenth-

   novel century England told resonant stories about the self and its deepest desires. However, while England’s people of fashion refined their habits of valuing the power of things in their purchases of new identities, Enlightenment intellectuals were deriding similar habits of fetishism and idolatry in foreign lands. This is to say that eighteenth-century consuming subjects, in their “active seeking of personal gratification through material goods,” enacted their own practices of endowing “haphazardly chosen material objects” with “purpose, intention, and a direct power over the material life of both human beings and the natural world.”72 The next section looks at the conflicting attitudes to the ontological status of things—whether as inert or alive—that produces an apparent divide between eighteenthcentury cultures of reason and fashion. In doing so, it regards the novel as an operative medium for negotiating such tensions.

“And these things are very various”: Fetish and Fashion in the Age of Enlightenment Perhaps the most influential depiction of the Enlightenment’s longranging influence on the ills of modernity, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment dwells particularly on its resistance to and “extirpation” of animism, or the belief that inanimate objects have souls of their own.73 This eradication, they argue, brought on the “disenchantment of the world.” Science and technology—the products of Enlightenment—turned reason into an instrument of power by subordinating nature to the forces of reason. Along the way, human beings themselves fell prey to the powers of objectification and its “instrumental rationality” that had promised to liberate them from a prior state of savagery. The Enlightenment’s much-vaunted instruments of reason indeed changed the world, but in doing so, gave humans the license and capacity to dominate others, especially those who submitted to the power of objects, rather than exerted their own power over them. Fashion—fiction—fact—fetish: this sequence of terms, in their dense entanglement throughout the eighteenth century, marks the period’s experimental and empirical cast of mind. One might, following Bruno Latour, implicate the terms further by creating a new one, “the factish.” Though they share etymology—“everyone says it constantly, explicitly,

For the Pleasure of It    obsessively”—one realizes the terms’ kinship only “after the hammer has broken them in two.” That hammer is “the fact” of reason, which aims to “break away all the delusions of belief,” and the fetish is that “empty [of meaning] stone onto which meaning is mistakenly projected.” The fact, the hammer, has been made to destroy what has been believed to signify belief. The fetish—the material “nothing” that, for iconoclasts, is wrongly an immaterial “something”—only makes more apparent the equally fabricated nature of “fact” and its origination from dreams—those of reason.74 From the standpoint of “after,” then—an “after” that has been commonly attributed to the development and labor of Enlightenment instruments—this section works to show how the divide between instrumental rationality and fetishism appears sturdier in theories about the Enlightenment than in the cultural practices of the eighteenth century, such as fashion, and its relationship with the “invention” of the novel. Jonathan Swift presents this idea in Section II of Tale of a Tub when he offers an “occasional satire upon dress and fashion” that cuts through the purportedly central tale of three brothers and how they interpret their father’s will.75 The tale-teller recounts how, during the brothers’ wanton participation in town life in which they “went to new plays on the first night, haunted the chocolate-houses, beat the watch . . . bilked hackney coachmen, ran in debt with shopkeepers and lay with their wives,” a religious sect emerged. This sect, binding together members of the fashionable grand monde, bases its world system on the fanciful idiom of dress and clothing, and takes as its principle deity a tailor-god who “daily create[s] men by a kind of manufactory operation” (Tub, 35). For these “sartorists,” the world is essentially a “large suit of clothes”: which invests everything . . . the earth is invested by air; the air is invested by the stars; and the stars are invested by the primum mobile. Look on this globe of earth, you will find it to be a very complete and fashionable dress. What is that which some call land, but a fine coat faced with green? or the sea, but a waistcoat of water-tabby? Proceed to the particular works of the creation, you will find how curious Journeyman Nature hath been, to trim up the vegetable beaux; observe how sparkish a periwig adorns the head of a beech, and what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by the birch. (Tub, 36)

   novel Exploiting the polysemy of “investment,” Swift gives the world of fashion literally universal dimensions and mocks the materialist principles of scientific reason, Christian and alchemical beliefs in transubstantiation, and allegory itself. He pushes forms of materialism to their extreme so that they achieve parity with the fanciful and trivial world of fashion. Furthermore, the trope of fashion reveals the continuities between allegedly modern and premodern systems of belief. The “Tale-Teller” himself, the narrative mouthpiece through which Swift archly sustains his satire, enacts the most exaggerated form of materialism in his zeal to give objective shape to abstractions. As Martin Battestin claims, “It is not just that he delights in allegories and metaphors, which for others exist as rhetorical means to an end, implying conceptual truths beyond the power of discursive reason to define, but that he sees them as ends in themselves, as literal explanations of the world.”76 Perhaps the greatest irony in Swift’s multivalent satire of modern intellectual life becomes transmitted in this feature of the Tale-Teller’s overriding attitude: the culture of materialism that collaborated with the new science did not succeed in disengaging from less evolved notions of existence and belief. In privileging material forms of reality and existence, it conversed with an avowedly primitive viewpoint, that of the fetishist who, seduced by the shimmer of surfaces, worships the symbol itself. The idea of fetishism as a religion practiced by unenlightened societies was in fact erected and refined toward the third quarter of the eighteenth century.77 Charles de Brosses (1709–1777)—a French statesman who, in addition to publishing treatises on anthropology and religion, served as the first president of the parliament of Dijon—is responsible for coining the operative term fétichisme in Du culte des dieux fétiches (1760). The term, he explains, derives from the magically invested object itself: “The cult . . . of certain earthly and material objects called fetishes amongst Africans, and for which reason I will refer to it as fetishism.”78 For de Brosses, these African practices of fétichisme provided the key to understanding his main area of inquiry, the puzzle of Egyptian zoolatry. As a form of religion, Egyptian zoolatry repulsed and mystified proponents of Enlightenment ideals who could not conceive of worshiping animals, life forms lower than human beings. Arguing against scholars determined to penetrate the mystery of Egyptian zoolatry by reading the animals allegorically, de

For the Pleasure of It    Brosses insists on the nonsymbolic value of Egyptian idols; the instance of African fetishism offered the most persuasive example by which he could make his claims. De Brosses’s chief English interlocutor was David Hume. In fact, sections of de Brosses’s text concerning the origins of fetishism in primitive mental life appear to be lifted directly from Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757). Exploring the same issues that underlie fetishism, of the “universal tendency among mankind to . . . transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted,” Hume’s discussion is directed by a search for understanding how the distinction between the “theism” of modernity, and the polytheism of less evolved societies came into being.79 Questioning why the Greeks worshiped so many gods and goddesses, and why they were conceived as humans, Hume finds answers in practices of fetishism (without calling it that), “the gross polytheism of the vulgar.” He concedes that the tendency to “find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity . . . ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us” gives rise to more esteemed cultural practices, such as “the frequency and beauty of prosopopoeia in poetry; where trees, mountains and streams are personified, and in the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passions.”80 To argue, as Hume does, that members of less evolved societies tend to concretize and make the unknown perceptible to the senses, and the enlightened to form abstractions, is to cast the fetish- and idol-making savage as the infants of humanity. From Mandeville to de Brosses, too, the one figure within a “civilized” society who approximates the vulgar idolater is the child in constant and undiscriminating dialogue with the object world. Mandeville’s Cleomenes, in a dialogue that opens out of an attempt to answer the question, “how came Savages into the world?” observes that children, like “savages”: seem to imagine, that every thing thinks and feels in the same Manner as they do themselves . . . they generally have this wrong Opinion of Things inanimate . . . whenever they labour under any Misfortune, which their own Wildness, and want of Care have drawn upon them . . . you see them angry at and strike, a Table, a Chair, the Floor, or any thing else, that can seem to have been accessory to their hurting themselves. (Fable II, 5th Dialogue, 209)

   novel Mandeville’s attempt to draw out the similarity between children and “savages” emphasizes their mutual tendency to project causal force to objects contingent or accessory to their experience of pain, as well as their tendency to assume inanimate objects carry the same faculties of thought, feeling, and intention that they do. De Brosses, while constructing a similar image of the child as a contemporary and local corollary for the “credulous disposition” afflicting the “wild man” in Mandeville’s dialogue, claims the analogy is more far ranging than one would like to believe, as the adults of civilized societies behave much like children and the weakly reasoning savages: Since no one is astonished to see children fail to elevate their minds higher than their dolls, believe them alive, and then behave towards them accordingly, why should one be amazed to see peoples who constantly pass their life in an eternal infancy and who are never more than four years old reason incorrectly and act as they reason? Attitudes of this ilk are most common, even in enlightened times, and among civilised nations.81

Despite de Brosses’s universalizing assessment, fetishism and its alleged practitioners became the requisite other for the Enlightenment’s vision of itself as reasonable masters of objects. Such others emerged in representations of fashion as an irrational and phantasmatic phenomenon. In works ranging from Pope’s hallucinatory vision of the “moving toyshop of [the] heart” in The Rape of the Lock to Mandeville’s description of clothes as “objects of mutability” and fickleness in The Grumbling Hive, fashion inspires anxiety and fascination, even as critics soberly appreciate its certainty in promoting economic growth and trade. One speaker in Abbé de Bellegarde’s dialogue The Modes, translated from the French into English in 1735, argues “there is more policy than fancy in the alteration of our fashions; it encourages trade, and procures us the money of foreigners.” And yet, this speaker acknowledges the inherently fanciful patterns of fashion when he proposes, “it would be necessary to fix the imagination of all mankind, who delight in the invention of novelties, and who soon take a disgust to what they were most charmed with at first.”82 Much like Fielding, the speaker in this dialogue objects to the erratic and unaccountable motions of human desire that propel certain styles to fashionable status:

For the Pleasure of It    One thing inexcusable in them is, their flying of a sudden from one extreme to another; when they left off high-crowned hats, as lofty as pyramids, they wore them so that there was hardly depth sufficient to contain their heads. Then they changed from their wide stockings for strait ones; and then little doublets, which did not cover half the breast, were metamorphosed into long stifn’d waistcoats.83

Referring to a definition that underscores fashion’s supernatural and atavistic traits, Fielding, in The Covent-Garden Journal, no. 37, writes that “people whose Essence consisteth in Appearances, and who, while they seem to be something, are really nothing,” constitute the emergent class of “People of Fashion” demoralizing London society.84 By dwelling on fashion’s etymological origins as a corrupt form of “fascination,” Fielding makes explicit the connection between fashion and the supernatural. Accordingly, its followers “were formerly believed by the Vulgar to be a Kind of Conjurers, and to possess a Species of the Black Art” (CGJ, 218). Indeed, the most pronounced conceit in his social commentary consists of a play on the notion of the circle as an exclusive group—of conjurers and likewise, in a modern society, people of fashion—replete with talismans to ward off outsiders who attempt to penetrate it: Numberless are the Devices made use of by the People of Fashion of both Sexes, to avoid the Pursuit of the Vulgar, and to preserve the Purity of the Circle. Sometimes the Perriwig covers the whole Beau, and he peeps forth from the midst like an Owl in an Ivy Bush; at other Times his Ears stand up behind half a dozen Hairs, and give you the Idea of a different Animal. Sometimes a large black Bag, with Wings spread as broad as a Raven’s adorns his Back, at other Times, a little lank Silk appears like a dead Black-bird to his Neck. To Day he borrows the Tail of a Rat, and To-morrow that of a Monkey; for he will transform himself into the Likeness of the vilest Animal, to avoid the Resemblance of his own Species. (CGJ, 220)

While Fielding never invokes the term directly, the illogical logic of fetishism pervades his depiction of the follies of fashion. Comprising an inventory of novel and special effects that change and multiply endlessly, the fashionable accessories appear to move and progress on their own. Once designated as the next fashionable standard, they protect the circle from the encroachment of outsiders. Indeed, they do not so much adorn as disguise, decoy, and transmogrify their wearers, changing their species as the wearers change garments:

   novel Nor are the Ladies less watchful of the Enemy’s Motions, or less anxious to avoid them. What Hoods and Hats and Caps and Coifs have fallen a Sacrifice in this Pursuit! Within my Memory the Ladies of the Circle covered their lovely Necks with a Cloak; this being routed by the Enemy, was exchanged for the Manteel; this again was succeeded by the Pelorine, the Pelorine by the Neckatee, the Neckatee by the Capuchine; which hath now stood its Ground a long Time, but not without various Changes of Colour, Shape, Ornaments, &c. And here I must not pass by the many admirable Arts made use of by these Ladies, to deceive and dodge their Imitators; when they are hunted out in any favourite Mode, the Method is to lay it by for a Time, and then to resume it again all at once, when the Enemy least expect it. Thus Patches appear and disappear several Times in a Season. (CGJ, 220)

Perhaps most consistent in Fielding’s passage is fashion’s ability to dehumanize, placing people on a par with animals and allowing contingent things to subsume human features and functions. The periwig overwhelms “the beau” so that one can barely see his face, beauty patches move, “appear[ing] and disappear[ing]” throughout time, and the cloak, mantle, pelerine, neckerchief, and capuchin are variously invented as charms to guard women and repulse imitators and usurpers. In the rush to fortify themselves from the intrusion of outsiders, people of fashion unwittingly allow themselves to be supplanted by other foreign elements—the very materials used to mark their inclusion in the caste of fashion. “The force of fashion” in the eighteenth century was not so much distinguished by the blurring of distinctions between gender and class, as some would argue, but rather, the effacement of boundaries between person and thing, subject and object. Following the influential paradigms recently offered by some feminist theorists, one might claim that eighteenth-century fashion accomplished the daily performance of gender and in many cases, social status. My main point is not so much that these signs of identity could be manipulated, but rather, that human identity itself can be reduced to a sign. True to fetishistic form, the sign in Fielding’s passage functions metonymically: I have myself seen the Enemy in the Pit, with Faces all over spotted like the Leopard, when the Circle in the Boxes have with a conscious Triumph displayed their native Alabaster, without a simple Blemish, tho’ they had a few Evenings before

For the Pleasure of It    worn a thousand: within a Month afterwards the Leopards have appeared in the Boxes to the great Mortification of the Fair Faces in the Pit. In the same Manner the Ruff after a long Discontinuance some Time since began to revive in the Circle, and advanced downwards, till it almost met the Tucker. But no sooner did the Enemy pursue, than it vanished all at once, and the Boxes became a Collection of little Hills of Snow, extremely delightful to the Eyes of every Beholder. (CGJ, 221)

Instead of seeing the people, or even their general shapes and forms, Fielding’s description concentrates on fashion accessories, such as the beauty patch and the ruff, and their autonomous movements along the human body which in turn becomes decorporealized. After the ruff has completed its course in fashion, he points out, its disappearance leads to the disappearance of the human body as the newly exposed necks and chests turn into “a collection of little hills of snow.” At the same time, the human body, envisioned as a collective landscape of natural and material objects, becomes coextensive with the social body. The space of London social hierarchies, as manifested in the distinction between the grandeur of the theater box and the humbleness of the pit neatly correspond with the mapping of fashionable objects on corporeal spaces. And yet, as the restless rhythm of Fielding’s passage indicates, whimsy guides the placement and significance of these objects on an otherwise coherent social map. One can discern such close observation of trivial things and their usefulness in mapping the greater design of human relationships to each other and the world in Fielding’s most famous work, Tom Jones, written three years earlier than his essay on “people of fashion.” Take, for instance, Fielding’s attitude toward inanimate objects in Tom Jones. Contained within the larger narrative of Tom Jones is an it-narrative that follows the protagonist’s own unpredictable peregrinations—“the adventures of the muff,” in the author’s own words. The muff, belonging to Jones’s beloved, Sophia Western, operates as a metonym for her, much like letters do for Clarissa, or for Pamela Andrews in Pamela. Moreover, the muff operates much like a letter does insofar as it mediates the estranged lovers’ affection for each other. Tom, after finding it on a chair, “ ‘put his hands into it’ ” and “ ‘kissed it again and again, and said it was the prettiest muff in the world.’ ”85 The muff, however, unlike Clarissa’s or Pamela’s letters, or Roxana’s dress, does not function as an object of meaning in its own

   novel status as a thing that has absorbed its owner’s aura. Instead, the muff appears and reappears throughout Tom Jones to move the plot toward its preconceived conclusion. It operates, in other words, as a mechanism for the larger machine of the narrative, thus retaining its “true” scale as a small but important detail. The narrator himself posits this notion after describing the “little incident” in which the muff falls off Sophia’s fingers and into the fire: Though this incident will probably appear of little consequence to many of our readers, yet, trifling as it was, it had so violent an effect on poor Jones that we thought it our duty to relate it. In reality, there are many little circumstances too often omitted by injudicious historians, from which events of the utmost importance arises. The world may indeed be considered as a vast machine, in which the great wheels are originally set in motion by those which are very minute, and almost imperceptible to any but the strongest eyes.86

Just as Fielding as narrator conceives the world as a “vast machine,” so too does Fielding as author conceive the novel as an embodiment of that world as machine. In so doing, characters end up functioning as greater versions of the material objects that help propel the narrative toward its destined conclusion. Rather than turning objects and details into representatives of the individual subject, as Defoe’s narrative does, Fielding’s omniscient narrative turns personhood itself into an object set against the greater context of society at large, and under the more powerful agency of narrative. If developments in the English novel domesticated the irrational forces of fashion, other animate objects remained ungovernable as the fetishes of foreign cultures. Similar to fashion, fetishism distinguishes itself from more general forms of idolatry by virtue of its dependence on “haphazardly chosen” objects that could be worn close to the body, and that defy representation. In other words, the thing is the deity and the body absorbs its magic. And once the forms and objects of both fashion and fetishism become legible as representative of something, and thus imitable, they lose their charm. For William Smith, who published his account of traveling to Guinea in 1744, the creation of a fetish supports itself purely on fancy: The most numerous sect [in Africa] are the Pagan, who trouble themselves about no Religion at all; yet every one of them have some Trifle or other, to which they

For the Pleasure of It    pay a particular Respect, or Kind of Adoration, believing it can defend them from all Danger’s: Some have a Lion’s Tail, some a Bird’s Feather, some a Pebble, a Bit of Rag, a Dog’s Leg; or, in short, any Thing they fancy: And this they call their FITTISH, which Word not only signifies the Thing worshipped, but sometimes a Spell, Charm, or Inchantment.87

Smith’s catalogue of African fetishes, resembling Fielding’s assortment of animal parts and natural objects in the menagerie of fashion, clarifies the exact points of correspondence in eighteenth-century interpretations of fashion as fetishism. Through resisting reason and resembling the improbable metamorphoses of fables and fictions, fashion stood for the weakness of the human mind at the same time it fed the ambitions of a market economy. Though fetishism’s collaboration with the world of eighteenth-century trade was not explicitly acknowledged during the time, its origins as an idea that traveled to Western Europe through imperialist contact demonstrates how it concerned, above all, acts of exchange, both material and rhetorical. The term fetishism itself, with its etymology embedded in imperialist contact, magic, and enchantment, opens an investigation of how the eighteenth century conceived “unenlightened” approaches to objects. The belief that objects could serve as projections of human beings ran counter to the features not only of an enlightened cast of mind but also of modernity itself.88 Precisely by embodying a contrary approach to objects— endowing them instead with the agency usually reserved for humans— fetishism and its alleged practitioners became the requisite foil for the increasingly predominant standard of a modern and instrumentalized approach to knowledge. The divide between instrumental rationality and fetishism, emblematizing foremost the temporal divide between modern and premodern societies, and enlightened and unenlightened subjects, appears sturdier in Enlightenment theories than in such contemporary phenomena as fashion, and even the very scientific assumptions that sought to make the distinctions in the first place. In perhaps more prosaic terms, magic was woven into the fabric of the eighteenth-century market economy through the work of commodity formation. Davenant’s essay, commissioned toward the end of the seventeenth century to defend the Company against attacks that its commerce was causing England’s own merchants to lose business, incorporates the

   novel hallmark trait of commodity fetishism as a solution: the dramatically reductive effects of fetishism on the human body. If wrought silks, bengals, and dyed, printed, or stained calicos from Persia and East India were surpassing the popularity of domestic muslin and linen, a viable solution would lie not in prohibiting their importation and wear, but in increasing the production and exportation of England’s own commodities. This, Davenant proposes, would require an “increase” and “multitude of hands.” Even within its earlier manifestations—the mercantile system that spawned eighteenth-century consumer society—capitalism generated the phantasmagoric effects of fetishism by amputating body parts from their workers and turning them into signs in themselves and obscuring their contact with human selves. Here, in this classic example of Marxist fetishism, the belief in magic and fantastic transubstantiations that had all but disappeared from intellectual culture and social life would become displaced into the realm of industrial capitalism. Marx, a reader of de Brosses, appears to have recognized that the subject of his study could permute into the fabric of modern life, replete with its formations of capital, technology, and industry. The magic of transmutation was not the only thread that ran throughout these modern formations: “The power that was science and the power that was money were, in final analysis, the same kind of power: the power of abstraction, measurement, quantification.”89 Not merely related to things made and manufactured, as Pietz’s delineation of the word’s history emphasizes, fetishism’s progenitor, the Portuguese word feitiço means literally “that which is made in order to make.” It is through forgetting this doubled gesture of fabrication implicit in fetishism that fetish worshippers and people of fashion could be figured as the benighted foils for the prestigious handlers of instrumental reason. Such so-called “machines” of eighteenth-century fashion, as the cork rump for women and artificial calves for men, indicate that the realm of the frivolous was not so far removed from the scientific in its prosthetic approach to objects. Like scientific instruments, cosmetic prosthetics supplement and amplify the natural endowments and capacities of the human subject, thus enabling a closer approximation of an objective norm. At the same time developments in scientific precision and instrumentalization expressed an attitude toward objects and nature surprisingly similar—if not sympathetic—to the apparently purposeless qualities of fashion and

For the Pleasure of It    fetishism. Cavendish certainly felt this attitude in her critique of microscopy as a pursuit that reduced men to boys playing with toys. Eighteenthcentury fashion and science approached instruments as marvelous extensions of human body parts and senses, revealing a partiality to objects that was as dependent on the fantastically object-invested structure of metonymy as the fetish itself. As Barbara Stafford and Simon Schaffer have demonstrated, frivolity mingled with science especially in the scientific demonstrations that were used as popular forms of spectacle and entertainment for eighteenthcentury audiences.90 Science as much as fashion promoted a culture of display. And ultimately, fashion as much as science helped the Enlightenment move beyond the troubling equivocation of essential categories by producing a distinct hierarchy that privileged the part over the whole, the object over the subject, and the artificial over the natural. After all, as Swift demonstrates, eighteenth-century conceptions of both science and fashion held dear novelty, skilled manipulation of nature, and the metamorphoses of material properties. Fetishism, whether it was defied in Enlightenment science and reason or practiced in contemporary fashion, produced the series of paradoxical effects and the spaces of equivocation that animate the period: the factual and the fictional resembled and imitated each other, converging in the fetish and mediating their exchange in the novel. Constructed as materialism’s repressed other, fetishism underlay the most enduring dilemmas of eighteenth-century questions on beliefs, knowledge, and the differences therein. Concurrently, new tools for scientific and psychological examinations, new cultural types such as the man of science (the “virtuoso”) and the libertine, and finally, new forms of literary expression emerged to help form the period’s materialist empire of mind and space. Within literary history, the novel aesthetically produced and contained the fetishistic exchanges between the natural and the artificial, the probable and the wonderful that had turned fashion into an object of fascination, and tool for “realistic” self-presentation. Where else to retrieve an account of the human subject negotiating the overwhelmingly plastic and mobile possibilities of its objectivity and objecthood than in the eighteenth-century novel of so-called realism?

   novel

Fashioned to Fashion: The New Species of Writing The Enlightenment’s program of instrumental rationality transformed the way texts about the human subject were written, much in the same way the period’s consumer culture heightened the potential for human subjects to become malleable as social texts. Emerging as a hybrid of the predominant narrative forms of romance and history, the eighteenthcentury novel expressed a preoccupation with the meticulous rendition of circumstantial details, neutrality of narration, and adherence to standards of verisimilitude that came to characterize scientific discourse.91 Indicating this tension between the fantastic and the realistic inherent in the eighteenth-century novel, Johnson’s dictionary entry for “invention” offers “fiction” as its first definition, followed by “discovery,” “excogitation; act of producing something new,” “forgery,” and “the thing invented.” Thus, the novel in its “experimental” and “inventive” qualities, was rooted in principles of scientific method, even as its inherent fictitiousness appeared to contradict scientific standards of probability, realism, and truth. John Bender in exploring the eighteenth-century novel’s collaboration with scientific principles, chooses Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding as the main players, for their novels “pretend to offer densely particular, visually evidentiary accounts of the physical and mental circumstances that actuate their characters and motivate the causal consequences of their plots.”92 That these novelists pretend to supply the material of scientific procedure implicates the complicating feature of art that prevents the eighteenth-century novel from “actually” being science itself. Yet the apparent drive in such novels to approximate the work of science through the tools of language and the imagination suggests that the most dominant and influential examples of the genre—those appearing from early to mid-century that laboriously and self-consciously accounted for their own fictiveness against the factual standards of history and science, such as Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, and Tom Jones—arose from the very gap that separates “fact” from “fiction” and the desire to fill it. Even as Margaret Doody, in acute opposition to prevailing viewpoints promulgated by Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, seeks to deflate traditional conceptions about England’s primacy in producing the novel—“the English performed a wonderful trick in persuading themselves that ‘The

For the Pleasure of It    Rise of the Novel’ took place in England in the eighteenth century”—she affirms its role in producing the idea of novelty surrounding the novel as a literary form. With the same gesture that she corrects literary historical shortsightedness in geographical and national attributions, Doody succeeds in highlighting the profound impact eighteenth-century English incarnations of the literary form has had on our conception of modern literature, and their effectiveness in representing the innovative qualities of the modern self. If, for Doody, eighteenth-century England cannot rightfully claim the novel as its own “invention,” then it can at least claim responsibility for creating its fringe variants, “forms that are not to be dignified as Novel, or rather by the favored term, fictional ‘History.’ ” Accordingly, “That century produced the Oriental tale, the fantastic apologue (Candide, Rasselas), the pornographic memoir (Fanny Hill). It also invents the ‘Gothic’ novel, a momentous invention.”93 Doody, despite her strenuous efforts to deflate the predominant viewpoint that the eighteenth century occupies a privileged position in the “birth” of the novel form, concedes that the period’s productions of the novel bore the stamp of novelty and invention. Much in the same way Johnson’s “invention” readily identifies itself with “fiction,” the origins of fiction—and the fetish—implicate the act of making something to achieve desired ends, hence reflecting the term’s technological as well as imaginative aspects. For Christian Wolff in his Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General (1728), technology is tied up with the arts—it is called “a philosophy of the arts”—and comprises an essential component of his own schema of human knowledge. Technology is “the science of the arts and of the works of art. Or if you prefer, it is the science of the things which man produces by using the organs of the body, especially the hands.”94 Thus, when Lewis Mumford in Art and Technics bemoans the gulf between art and technology, he refers more to twentieth-century constructions and productions of the terms than to the “arts” constructed in the eighteenth century as technology’s partner. In the eighteenth century, the exertions of human hands form the kinship between the arts and technology, including the exertions of the novelist’s hand holding a pen and the scientist’s hand holding an instrument to “describe” nature’s paths.95 While Alexander Pope in 1714 ironically incorporated the “supernatural machinery” of Sylphs to create fantastic

   novel effects in The Rape of the Lock, and “machinery” had been commonly used as dramatic props in late-seventeenth-century plays, machinery was not explicitly associated with the literary genre of novels. Contemporary reactions to the newly articulated genre and individual authors’ expressed motives and standards suggest that the eighteenth-century novel in its inception was based on a technology of writing that aimed to integrate the forces of imagination and creativity with the details of daily life. Johnson’s Rambler 4 voices reservations toward the mimetic technology of the new form, both in the terms he uses to describe it—it is the artificial product of “invention” and can be produced by “machines”— and in its ability to shape the human subject whom it represents and, more critically, who experiences it. Novels “are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy: not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account.” In other words, novel readers suffer from the same vacuity and susceptibility as primitive fetishizers, who are called “the young, the ignorant and the idle” in the essay. Not only akin to fetishizers, novel readers also resemble the products of presumably more advanced societies, automata, for they stupidly copy whatever model or program of moral behavior is set before them in prose: “But when an adventurer is leveled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama as may be the lot of any other man, young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope by observing his behavior and success to regulate their own practices when they shall be engaged in the like part.”96 And so Clarissa Harlowe, in her utter exemplarity, is not so much a heroine as a role model fashioned to fashion others like her. Elaine Scarry comments on the short distance between computers and novels in their mimetic powers: Sometimes in a technological and automated society, the mimesis of sentient awareness may become so elaborate that the object may become frightening . . . Computers differ only in the elaborateness rather than in the fact of mimesis, and they are not singular even in their elaborateness. Novels, for example, produce this same inanimate fiction of speaking, feeling, thinking, and are perhaps less startling and suspect only because we have lived with them a much longer time.97

For the Pleasure of It    The startling capacity for novels to “counterfeit” human subjectivity—to give voice to Gulliver, Crusoe, Pamela, Clarissa, and others—relied on certain mimetic strategies. Distinct variants of English literature that came into being during the eighteenth century, such as novels of pornography and sensibility, approached writing as a means by which pain and pleasure and other registers of affective life could be articulated through “objective” descriptions of the body. Cleland’s Fanny Hill and Richardson’s Clarissa especially, with their self-conscious negotiations between objective and subjective poles of being via the artifactual mediums of personal letters, the memoir form, and in the case of Richardson, prefaces, postscripts, lists of characters, tables of contents, and other textual apparatuses, constituted a space that promoted and imagined materialist aims with the inventiveness of contemporary technology. Perhaps the figure most conducive to these approaches, either directly represented or implied as the reader in these works, is the topic of the following chapter, the libertine. For the libertine, objects operate as a sexualized medium for knowledge of both the self and the other. The term “object of desire” thus achieves resonance in libertinism; never a static property for the libertine, the object exists as a vital indicator of his knowledge, coextensive with both his being and sexuality. While the more common viewpoint might assume that the subject endows meaning and the object depends on the subject to obtain meaning, libertinism as a permutation of novelistic strategies suggests it is the other way around. The object of the libertine’s desire is a fetish, a perversely privileged object that, in being both there and not there, determines the restless and never-ending nature of the libertine’s pursuits, as well as the fundamental instability of his objects of desire. As I will show in the next chapter—moving us from the world of trade, fashion, and exoticism to an avowedly domestic and internal one—in the libertine’s object world, the desire to become the other becomes recast as the desire to possess the other.

c h a p t e r t wo

“No Sex in Ethereals”: Making the Heart and Hymen Real in Clarissa

In its barest narrative terms, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747–1748) is a novel in letters about how a notorious libertine kidnaps and rapes a young woman to seek revenge on her family and test her virtue.1 The young woman, exceptional in almost every regard from the transcendental to the mundane—beauty, writing, wit, needlework, French, housekeeping, chastity, and worship of God—unknowingly walks into the charming libertine’s schemes by writing to him in an attempt to reform him, and by rebelling against her parents, who want her to marry someone else. Despite her subsequent “fall,” the loss of her virginity, she recovers her virtuous identity through starving herself and thus wasting the body that has been defiled against her will. In death, able to “return to her native skies,” she is more glorious than ever. Throughout this tale, raised to epic proportions in its development of intrigue over that eighteenth-century obsession—female virtue—the status of Clarissa’s body remains central, and to the very end, elusive. Within this elusive rendition, the details of such body parts as her heart and hymen become all-important not only to the libertine character, but also to the novel’s construction of femininity. As we well know, according to recent histories of sexuality and medicine, we owe our understanding of the sexed body—the idea that a female body constitutes a separate category from a male body—to the

   fetish eighteenth century.2 In frequently citing Richardson’s earlier work Pamela (1740) as the first English novel, standard literary history implicates the novel’s beginnings in a male construction of sexual difference and female subjectivity.3 Presenting the point of view of a servant as she resists her rakish employer’s advances, Pamela enforces an emerging sexual ideology that makes ideal femininity contingent on a woman’s chastity. In Clarissa, Richardson once again writes a narrative that defines female subjectivity in relation to the body. In this case, however, by depicting and collaborating with Lovelace’s male subjectivity in order to help represent Clarissa’s subjectivity, Richardson renders a more modern construction of sexuality, closer to our current conception of gender systems. I propose that he stages the sexual dynamics of fetishim, which lay bare the sexually constructivist properties of the novel of sensibility, and in turn, the fictional properties of the fetishized body part. Several feminist theorists have discussed fetishism as a paradigm for understanding how female subjectivity evolves as the object of an obsessive male “I”/eye. Indeed, as one theorist notes, fetishism “may be the most apt figure for sexual difference.”4 While such nineteenth-century French literature critics as Naomi Schor and Emily Apter have demonstrated fetishism’s roots in the nineteenth-century novel, no one as yet has ventured into our debt to the eighteenth century, though Apter herself has indicated that many of the nineteenth-century’s “gender clichés” that shaped early psychoanalysis come from a nostalgia for “the extremity-enhanced body of the eighteenth-century woman” and a fascination with her as “fiction, fixture, and even fetish of the feminine.”5 In what follows I will reread Clarissa—perhaps the preeminent eighteenth-century text with an “exemplary” female character—in terms of more current theories of fetishism. By doing so, I will show that the eighteenth century’s sensibility fosters some of fetishism’s most important features, especially through the “perverting” influences of Lovelace’s libertinism. I will also show that Richardson apprehends and stresses aspects of fetishism that often disappear from its contemporary accounts. More than simply foregrounding the fictitiousness of the body part, Richardson’s novel of sensibility underscores the affective and moral significances of fetishism by revealing the body part as a substitute for love and virtue. Hence in their affective and profoundly imaginative approaches to body parts, Richardson’s domestic

“No Sex in Ethereals”    novel of sensibility and Freud’s theory of fetishism share the tendency to regard the female body as the operative and original medium for bracing the tension between the ideal and the real, the apparent and the actual.6 Despite Naomi Schor’s response to Foucault that the nineteenth century constitutes “the Golden Age of the Detail,” I urge in this chapter a recuperation of Foucault’s notion that “one might profitably undertake to write a ‘History of the Detail,’ with special emphasis on the eighteenth century, since it was during that critical transitional period that the detail went from being a theological category to a secular and political instrument of both power and knowledge.”7 Indeed, the history of the detail must be restored to an eighteenth-century emphasis because it was also during this period that the search for detail and realist narrative worked closely with a contemporary establishment of such new categories as public and private spheres, and male and female bodies. Instead of tracing how these separate categories become constituted within specific eighteenthcentury discourses such as medical texts and conduct books (as many have done already), I will return to a literary text—Clarissa—as a more detailed instance of how textual practices fictionalize and elaborate these categories in terms of sexed subjectivity and its objects, anxiously conceived or pursued as material.

The Libertine and the Angel: The Body/Soul Context and “Realist” Narrative My comparison of fetishism and sensibility hinges on this shared premise that the body can exhibit features of a person’s subjectivity such as emotions, desire, or sexual identity. While sensibility is a moral system for how one sympathizes with another’s feelings, and fetishism is a psychoanalytic paradigm for how one transmutes anxiety over another’s anatomical lack into a sexual perversion, each places the utmost importance on the way their responses become configured in terms of body parts, or objects closely related to those parts. In short, both fetishism and sensibility make a psychological response exquisitely physical. For example—each traditionally inscribed as male subjects in their respective literatures—the man of sensibility may become transported by the sight of a teardrop that reinforces his own inner sensitivity, while the fetishist becomes titillated

   fetish by a foot, hand, or braid of hair that, for some reason, recalls an imaginary penis that corroborates his sense of empowerment. Before exploring the mechanisms of fetishism and sensibility in more detail, and how they work throughout Clarissa, I would like to point out that in both of these examples, fetishism and sensibility are grounded in the philosophical opposition between body and mind. Extremely suggestive, the opposition produces numerous binary pairs that inform the novel’s narrative development: inside and outside, absence and presence, self and other, abstract and material, public and private. Throughout, Clarissa stages these tensions deriving from the body/mind opposition by defining Clarissa in terms of her “real” and “ideal” features. The sexual stereotypes that Lovelace and Clarissa exemplify— libertine and angel—most assertively enact the opposition between body and mind (or “soul,” in view of Clarissa’s Christian beliefs). Lovelace, as sensual libertine, in claiming “the haughty beauty will not refuse me, when her pride of being corporeally inviolate is brought down,” aims to disrupt Clarissa’s integrity and prove his power by transforming her body from chaste to sexualized, while Clarissa, as ethereal angel, resists and ultimately proves that the soul can transcend the body even when violated (Clarissa, 879). In representing opposing sides of the classic mind/body dualism, Clarissa and Lovelace offer different interpretations of what makes a woman a woman. In Clarissa, we see a woman who becomes an icon for virtuous femininity, despite—and indeed, through—her disturbing need to validate her virtue by dying. Writing the story in such a way that she fulfills her own aims precisely, Richardson secures Clarissa’s status as an angelic female through establishing her spiritual transcendence. In other words, her idealizations seem to become reality for her almost too resolutely—and paradoxically, this occurs through her project of becoming incorporeal. Lovelace, on the other hand, working from the viewpoint that the body and all things apprehended through the senses can determine sexual identity, incites more modern questions about the epistemology and representation of sexed subjectivity. By framing his abduction of Clarissa as a quest “to know if she be really angel or woman” (Clarissa, 492), he must not only test her virtue, but also prove that she even has a body through testing the most telling indicators of desire—her heart and hymen. In

“No Sex in Ethereals”    this quest, we may uncover the paradoxes in eighteenth-century sexual constructions, as well as the inherent collaboration between Lovelace as a libertine character who strives to create according to his own model and Richardson as a moralizing author who struggles to engender the finest example of femininity. These attempts at fabrication encounter resistance in the contradictions produced by the body/soul divide, suggesting that the real question in Clarissa is not so much about virtuousness, but about virtuality. How can a woman, configured as an “angel,” have a sexed and “real” body and still represent ideal virtue? Indeed, if we view an exemplar as an ideal—implicitly unattainable, implicitly a fantasy—then how can Clarissa be represented at all? Many of the answers, for both Richardson and Lovelace, lie in parts. Though Richardson treats the mind/body divide as the main ground for Clarissa’s and Lovelace’s struggle, he registers a need to go beyond this basic dichotomy into a further fragmentation of subjectivity in order to make a more complex and thus truer impression of reality. As he writes in his preface, he hopes to produce a persuasive and vivid object lesson for young girls and their parents by narrating Clarissa’s experiences. He relies on a technique—“writing to the moment”—that involves recording the minute details of daily consciousness, capturing private thoughts and sentiments as well as outward actions, or “instantaneous descriptions and reflections” (Clarissa, 35). Already well known for his “keyhole view of life” in his earlier novel where he “analyses patiently the feelings of thoughts of Pamela” and “takes a feminine interest in her round-eared caps and her mittens,” Richardson’s agenda of “writing to the moment” was meant to produce a “reading to the moment” in which readers would identify with and feel for Clarissa’s harrowing experiences.8 Correspondingly, Lovelace spies repeatedly on Clarissa and writes to his friend Belford, “I know thou likest this lively present-tense manner, as it is one of my particular” (Clarissa, 882). Thus working to engender a close identification between character and reader (and himself identifying inadvertently with his voyeuristic male villain) so that a successful education in female virtue and suffering may take place, Richardson turns to a mode of fiction making that depends on the “realness” of its reality. In doing so, he forms the foundation for what I had discussed in Chapter 1 as the novel’s operative feature of novelty—its ingeniously realistic mode of narrative in which the

   fetish closely traced details of personal experience and psychology lend credence to its fabrications of consciousness.

“I Know My Own Heart”: The Sensible Body In eighteenth-century social life, sensibility produced the following moral equation: the more acute one’s sensory responses—tears, blushes, quiverings, or fainting—to external stimuli such as the spectacle of someone else’s suffering, the more emotionally and physiologically refined one is. Generated primarily through this moment of spectatorial subjectivity, or sympathy, sensibility bases its moral values on how a subject relates affectively to another through the body. In this emphasis on a mutual influence between subject and object, sensibility took over a formerly more solitary consciousness and instantiated a modern “reinvention of the emotions.”9 In addition, perhaps indicating why sensibility became almost inextricable from many literary enterprises in the eighteenth century, sensibility made ambiguous the nature of feelings and desires—are they “real,” or are they merely the products of one’s own perception of what is real? In line with this ambiguity over reality and perceived reality, sensibility’s sympathetic model of responding to the spectacle of someone else’s suffering is far from straightforward. However direct the line of visual contact seems at first between spectator and sufferer, sensibility constructs a triangulated relationship in which one responds to the image of oneself being looked at by the other in the act of sympathizing with the other. In this way, through the intervention of a spectator’s perception of the other, and the physical responses that conform to that perception, sensibility produces imaginary bodies, along with imagined selves and feelings. Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) demonstrates this notion of imagining the body through sympathy: “When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.”10 In sensibility, the status of love and the status of objects come to determine the status of the human subject—all for the purpose of creating an ethically responsible and virtuous society. A language of affectivity, sensibility explored the multifarious nuances

“No Sex in Ethereals”    of love emanating from the heart, as Madame de Scudéry’s famous map, la carte de Tendre from her novel Clélie (1654) illustrates.11 Turning on the image of the anatomical organ itself, “the heart” denoted several registers of a person’s being that traverse the mind/body divide—physical, moral, emotional, and sexual. Clarissa herself displays this notion when she says, “Something is working, I know not what. I am really a good deal disordered in body as well as mind. Indeed I am quite heart-sick!” (Clarissa, 328). By the time the word appears in Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in the middle of the eighteenth century, “the heart” secures prominence, both in medical terminology as a central body part—“the muscle which by its contraction and dilation propels the blood through the course of circulation, and is therefore considered as the source of vital motion”—and “in popular language” as “the seat sometimes of courage, sometimes of affection.” Indeed, in Clarissa, the heroine’s heart becomes a much-contested object of power and desire—for Lovelace, and also for her family members when struggling to make her marry the ugly but rich Solmes—“Your heart, not your knees, must bend,” and “The heart, Clary, is what I want,” her mother says to her (Clarissa, 89, 103). For herself as well, Clarissa’s heart designates not only her capacity for compassion and feeling, but also her will and integrity: “I know my own heart, madam, I wish you did,” she says to her aunt (Clarissa, 323). Though not inscribed by name in the rhetoric of sensibility, the hymen was also a precious body part insofar as it indicated a woman’s chastity. Increasingly important to the culture of sensibility, the chaste woman preserved moral values and promoted the deepening of separate spheres between men and women during the century: “While men pursued the practical business of commerce, women became preservers of the religious values of charity and compassion . . . they grew into Protestant virgins, the consciences of society.” In addition, through remaining chaste, the female body gave a private family a form of commodity, to be sought, stolen, or defended.12 The hymen, in short, by signifying men’s honor and social strength, demonstrated sensibility’s gender, economic, and class inflections. As its unconscious preoccupation with the hymen and overt fixation on female chastity suggests, sensibility gets the parts for its motor from the female body. Central to the inception of modern subjectivity

   fetish and psychology, sensibility in this way helps form the history of gender assumptions marking psychoanalysis. By the time the female body was established as a separate and different sex in the eighteenth century, it had acquired its status as an organism of extreme sensibility, fraught with a “more moveable” nervous system “than men,” and susceptible to derangements.13 Indeed, the specter of the hysterical woman, a celebrity figure in eighteenth-century English medicine long before Freud’s Dora, lurked underneath the rhetoric of sensibility.14 Clarissa Harlowe, a female paragon of sensible morality and behavior, gives herself over to hysterical fits, most vividly rendered in the visually arresting portions of the novel where scraps of her writing—as opposed to complete passages and letters—are represented to denote her troubled state of mind and broken speech after the rape. Precisely because it was viewed as prone to extravagant shows of emotion such as crying, fainting, and blushing, the female body became the exemplar of sensibility. This figure of an emotionally passionate yet virtuous woman predominated in sensibility’s definition, and superseded an alternative definition that allowed physical and moral susceptibility to feed into sexual responsiveness in men (exemplified by Fielding’s Tom Jones and Sterne’s Yorick in A Sentimental Journey). Clichés about female anatomy thus dictated eighteenth-century moral systems: men, as well as women themselves were eventually expected to emulate the allegedly more finely strung nervous system of the female body. Promoting sympathy, sentiment, and compassion, those “female” and thus sensible qualities of the nerves would create a more harmonious society. Soon a prestigious and fashionable type for eighteenth-century masculinity, the “Man of Feeling” answered a popular need for a male counterpart to Clarissa’s impressive sensibility, as the masquerade of femininity increasingly preoccupied both sexes. Though the cultural and literary phenomenon gained momentum after Clarissa’s publication, most energetically developed in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), I will later show in more detail that the Man of Feeling’s projects to emulate and objectify female sensibility had always been present in morally deviant libertine stratagems, like those of Lovelace. In order to become a Man of Feeling, a man could mimic “feminine” capacities of weeping, blushing, and crying at the sight of hardships

“No Sex in Ethereals”    suffered by such weaker members of society as children, the poor, and women, and thus enhance his innate valor and social superiority. In this ironic fashion, despite its gendering as a feminine quality, sensibility’s socially and morally effective practitioners were male subjects. Corroborating this idea, women in novels of sensibility are rarely seen to deploy sympathy for social betterment, or to look compassionately at others: “women of feeling weep over their own troubles, while men weep only as they look on. Women, for their part, rarely look.”15 The Man of Feeling is thus constructed through a series of displaced looks at femininity: he is the product of his own gaze looking on the gaze of others looking at him as he performs feminine gestures. In this way, sensibility presented a behavioral norm that pressured both women and men to envision and emulate the precious image of a chaste and sympathetically excitable female body that is forever displaced, and never, for some reason, within direct view, even for women themselves. Eighteenth-century English society became shaped by the contours and features of this imagined female body, and Richardson’s Clarissa presented one of the most influential models of it. One might say, also, that it exemplified a movement that fetishized the female body itself, as well as its specific parts, in the name of society’s “moral improvement.”

“A Particular and Quite Special Penis”: The Fetishized Body Several features in Enlightenment structures of sensibility prefigure Freud’s theory of fetishism. On the most fundamental level, they include an emphasis on the relationship between body and mind, the necessary perception of daily life’s material objects—whether fashionable or not— to define subjectivity and consciousness, and perhaps most of all, the idea that the female body carries an exemplary status. As a special term that complicates Richardson’s representation of Clarissa, feminine exemplarity also complicates Freud’s theory of fetishism. Within Freud’s theory, the original object in question, driving the fetishist to seek erotic enjoyment in such disparate and decorative objects as shoes, ribbons, skirt hems, and locks of hair is in itself an exemplary one, as a frequently quoted line from his essay signals: “When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for

   fetish the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in childhood but had later been lost” (“Fetishism,” 152). Not only is the object itself an exemplar, a particular and quite special penis, but also the person who possessed this object: “To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up” (“Fetishism,” 152–53). As an exemplary persona who possessed the special penis, the mother will stand as the model on which the fetishist will base his subsequent relationships with women. Undeniably, a story of loss and mourning inheres in Freud’s theory of fetishism, and the focus of loss is the female body, originally manifested in this first “other,” the mother. From the outset, in focusing on lost objects and the attempts to substitute them, Freud’s rendering of the fetishist’s background sets the dichotomies of absence and presence that will arrange his life. Facing such absence and loss, the fetishist’s project to resurrect his mother’s penis encounters particular problems. First of all, the special penis never existed in the first place, thus foregrounding the fetish’s insistently imaginative quality. Its etymology bears this out; attributed to the French word, factice, which means “imitation,” or “artificial,” and to the Portuguese feitiço, meaning “magical practice” or “worship of false values,” which in turn derive from the Latin adjective for “manufactured,” facticius, the fetish emerges from a rich genealogy of words dealing with the imagined and the fictional. The fetishist thus practices fiction by fabricating narratives for particular body parts. For him, the master plot involves endowing the female with male genitals. So fetishism, much like sensibility, involves an invention of the body part in order to sustain not just identity, but sexual identity. Furthermore, like sensibility, this invention is motivated by a desire for the female body, and rooted in a specific image for that body which has yet to be real, but is vividly perceived and imagined. The fetish, therefore, encompasses two contradictory traits—it strives toward concretization, even as it draws energy from its origin as an abstract quality. In its drive to concretization, fetishism follows the phallic design. Endeavoring to remain as close as possible to the original

“No Sex in Ethereals”    lost object, whatever the fetishist produces as the fetish object tends to be clearly defined, palpable, and visually bold—much like the erect penis itself. And much like sensibility, the life of fetishism is contingent on the location of objects vivid and “real” enough to be perceived, appropriated, or controlled through the senses. For both the fetishist and the person of sensibility, the durability of objects assures them that their own subjectivities are intact. In addition to its beginning in illusion, the fetish also reveals its attachment to abstraction through its fragmented nature. Never a complete depiction of what it derives from, such as the woman or the imagined penis itself, the fetish embodies only a supplementary feature of the woman’s being such as her odor, underwear, pieces of clothing, or parts of her body. In short, these features achieve importance as relics of the moment when the boy sees his mother’s “castration” for the first time. Sensorially contiguous to the scene of horror, they conveniently stand in for the missing penis thereafter, and are linked to the traumatic spectacle. For Louise Kaplan, the fetishist makes a perverse enterprise out of his attention to sartorial or corporeal detail: “Fetishism exemplifies the perverse strategy. In every perversion a part, a detail, always stands for the whole . . . The fetish is designed to divert attention from a whole story by focusing attention on a detail.”16 Here we return to the biggest abstraction in fetishism—the exemplar which the fetish supposedly represents is intrinsically false, and never existed in the first place. It is a fabrication. If sensibility is defined as a “quickness of perception” in Johnson’s Dictionary, and concentrated in the visual transaction where one witnesses, identifies with, and ultimately imagines the sight of an other’s suffering, then Freud’s story of fetishism as a swift moment of visual perception and identity-formation looks remarkably similar: a little boy looks at his mother’s sex organs for the first time to find nothing there, least of all what he was expecting, a penis. Calling it the “longed-for sight of the female member,” Freud casts fetishism primarily as a visual longing, or a desire to see something that is absent, something that vindicates a man’s love for his own penis, in spite of his mother’s horrifying lack. Though other senses may come into play in the creation of a fetish, such as touching or smelling, vision is by far the most salient because it is the originary means by which the fetishist perceives his mother’s castration. Moreover,

   fetish for the man of feeling as well as the fetishist, the act of looking is so critical because it is less the means by which they recognize someone else’s condition, than the means by which they recognize themselves. In order to gain the sensorial impression that will create the comfortable self images they desire, fetishists and men of feeling need to position women as objects or spectacles, easily manipulable and consumable. Precisely because the fetishist had previously identified so closely and positively with his mother, the visual encounter with his mother’s “castration” is traumatic for him. Her castration poses the biggest threat in making him aware for the first time of his own potential for castration, or, the absence of a body part he believed would always be present and intact. In addition, the boy’s reaction signifies his discovery of difference—sexual difference, that is—which also causes him great pain by separating him from his mother. There is a solution, however, to this seemingly hopeless situation. It is the fetish itself, which “remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it,” and even more dramatically, “also saves the fetishist from being a homosexual by endowing women with the attribute which makes them acceptable as sexual objects” (“Fetishism,” 154). The specific mechanism for this fiction, this miraculous act that enables the little boy to simultaneously affirm and deny his mother’s and therefore his own castration in a grammatically impossible statement where “yes” and “no” inhabit the very same space, is “disavowal.” In effect, through disavowal, the little boy simultaneously affirms and denies sexual difference. Hence disavowal also overcomes the mind/body divide by turning the illusion of the mother’s penis into an ersatz reality, allowing the fetishist to articulate, “Yes . . . the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything.” Simultaneously, the negative realization that “this penis is no longer the same as it was before” accompanies the affirmation. Perhaps the most ingenious feature of the fetish and its structure of disavowal is that in constructing the fetish as a substitute for the mother’s penis that is not quite the same as the “original” one, it enables the fetishist to believe that it really did exist in the first place, protecting him from the idea of ever being without one himself. The basic features of both sensibility and fetishism, thus established, make evident that Lovelace himself cannot easily reach definition as a Man of Feeling, or a proper practitioner of sensibility. Though he falls into

“No Sex in Ethereals”    a variant of sensibility where men bear erotically sensible nerves, this is not the benevolent sensibility or love that Richardson’s fiction strives to produce as the norm. This is not to say that Lovelace detaches himself from the organizing principles of sensibility in his pursuit of Clarissa, or that his fetishizing approach differs from Richardson’s narrative technique. Sharing its emphasis on body parts, use of visual perception as a means of identification, and even its vocabulary of emotions, Lovelace transmutes the moral purpose of sensibility into a plainly self-interested psychological investment. According to Jean Hagstrum: Richardson is certainly one of the masters of sensibility . . . it is clear that the idea for him is . . . a complex of emotion about emotion . . . But perhaps the most important feature of Richardsonian sensibility is that it is regarded as defining our humanity and measuring our dignity. It therefore is the sine qua non of love; since Lovelace does not evidently possess it—is capable throughout his lifetime only of a kind of parody of it—Clarissa cannot possibly give him her heart.17 (Emphasis mine.)

Hagstrum, in discerning Lovelace’s sensibility as a parody, picks up on the rich possibilities for performing and masquerading sensibility. Rather than simply stating that Lovelace falls outside the category of “sensibility,” I would argue that he foreshadows psychoanalysis’s preoccupation with sexual perversion by foregrounding the performative and fetishistic possibilities within sensibility’s structure and Richardson’s own narrative technique. More properly, within his own historical context, Lovelace’s immoral approach to sensibility—sensual, rather than sensible—manifests itself as libertinism, another eighteenth-century way of living through the body in which “free livers” dispel the “painful emptiness of boredom” by pursuing pleasure and passions.18 Leaning on the last sentence in Hagstrum’s formulation of Richardson’s sensibility, and Lovelace’s exclusion from it, I will examine the ways in which Lovelace looks for love, and for Clarissa’s own heart.

The Outside In: Looking for Her Heart and Hymen While it is a document of sensibility, domestic realism, and an instruction in good female conduct, Clarissa is also a narrative of seduction.

   fetish As a seduction narrative, its plot hinges on the point of view of a male libertine character, and in doing so, develops a detailed understanding of libertine strategies.19 From the outset, the libertine and the Man of Feeling are most similar in that they both represent stereotypes for upper-class English eighteenth-century male subjectivity that depend on objectifying female subjectivity. Yet, unlike the sentimental male or the Man of Feeling, the libertine—frequently defined as a free spirit, an individualist, or as “one who lives without restraint or law”—is more interested in transgressing cultural norms for his own pleasure than in promoting good feeling in the world.20 Like the fetishist’s ambivalent and contradictory traits, the libertine’s seemingly reckless and whimsical actions mask a deeply systematic mind-set often coherent only to himself. Carol Houlihan Flynn supplies a definition for the “libertine” that underscores his separateness from conventional social life: “The libertines of the eighteenth century were determined to deliver themselves from the slavery of everyday life, from the rules restricting everyone else’s behavior.”21 The libertine, then, is an exceptional or nonnormative member of society who resists and disavows “respectable” measures of self-definition. Paradoxically, in keeping with the psychoanalytic definition of disavowal, so crucial to fetishism, “where something is affirmed in the same gesture that it is denied,” he relies on those measures and prescriptions just as much, if not more than everyone else; his radical difference can only come into definition through the existence of normative standards.22 Following a tradition beginning in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and firmly established in Restoration comedy, the libertine character in eighteenth-century literature is a fully blown representation of male desire.23 He also goes by the alternate label of “rake” and is most notorious for using women, especially young virgins, poorly. In order to make them succumb to his erotic designs, he deploys intricate strategies and his own considerable charm. The art of conquering virgins endows him with a source of pride and self-made gratification, and as demonstrated by popular metaphors for libertinism that link it to its upper-class origins, gives the libertine the pleasure of a hunt or a chase with three principle components: “the practical reason or cunning of the hunter, the instinct of the wild animal, and the trap.”24 Punning on the word “hart,” the liber-

“No Sex in Ethereals”    tine thus hunts for a woman’s “heart”—in this case, a euphemism for her willingness to be seduced. As an excerpt from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie illustrates, the hunter must know the animal well “ ‘for the successful maintenance of traps . . . The important point is to be well acquainted with the animal’s ruses, and to lack neither care nor vigilance’ ” (Body, 122). Lovelace himself voices a love for this requisite knowledge in a statement that suggests the anatomical and ontological contours of “woman,” or as he puts it, “the sex”: “I love, thou knowest, to trace human nature, and more particularly female nature, through its most secret recesses” (Clarissa, 843). The fast movement from a seemingly external research through the motion of “tracing,” to a more internal quest conflates the heart with the hymen in a libertine economy of body parts, as another of Lovelace’s statements, “I shall enter her heart,” suggests (Clarissa, 541). This statement also evinces the growing fixation on anatomy in the eighteenth century—which, in the following approximation, blends similarly into hunting imagery: “Anatomy and its inseparable practice of dissection were the eighteenthcentury paradigms for any forced, artful, contrived, and violent study of depths . . . The messiness of the body, as well as the unruliness of everyday life, were thus managed by the use of either a reducing tool or an analytical system. The immobilized specimen under scrutiny could neither hide nor escape” (Body, 47). All these associations with Lovelace’s libertine pursuits are found in Lovelace’s own name, and even in one of his aliases, Robert Huntingford (Clarissa, 417). As a “lover of lace,” Lovelace’s name signifies either a love of snares and nets for entrapment, or a love for an intricate and delicate ornamental fabric made of tightly interlocking threads (the more elegant transmutation of a trap made into aesthetic object). Either association brings Lovelace’s character close to the fetishist’s: as a lover and hunter of material details and precious objects of his own particular desire, he aims to pin them down so he may then fondle, probe, dismantle, and take possession of them. Moreover—replicating the ironic affect of the fetish itself—the hard aggression of the fetishist’s phallic design is veiled by a tantalizingly refined piece of fabric. And yet, the most tellingly fetishistic feature of Lovelace’s name is in the actual pronunication of it—“Love-

   fetish less”—his passion for hunting objects, hunting for the love they embody, derives from and compensates for his own lack. Lovelace, like all fetishists and gender stereotypes, does not come into his libertine identity instantaneously, but through distinct causes and events, and affecting exemplars. For most critics and readers of Clarissa, exemplarity is most prominent in Richardson’s stated intent: Clarissa is an “exemplar to her sex” meant to teach contemporary female readers how to behave in equally virtuous ways. However, another exemplary female is often overlooked as an object of Lovelace’s longing. She is the unnamed woman who first taught Lovelace the ways of love, and who broke his young and still impressionable heart. Anna Howe, Clarissa’s best friend, narrates to her the prehistory of Lovelace’s libertine career, as transmitted through gossip, or, “common bruit”: She then touched upon the moral character of Mr. Lovelace: and how reasonable the aversion of your relations is, to a man who gives himself the liberties he is said to take; and who, indeed, himself, denies not the accusation; having been heard to declare, that he will do all the mischief he can to the sex, in revenge for the ill usage and broken vows of his first love, at a time when he was too young (his own expression, it seems) to be insincere. I replied that I had heard everyone say, that that lady really used him ill; that it affected him so much at the time, that he was forced to travel upon it; and, to drive her out of his heart, ran into courses which he had ingenuity enough himself to condemn: that, however, he had denied the menaces against the sex which were attributed to him, when charged with them by me in your presence; and declared himself incapable of so unjust and ungenerous a resentment against all, for the perfidy of one. (Clarissa, 247)

In Anna’s account of Lovelace’s past, the scenario of “first love” is the most convincing explanation for his later abuse of women, and demonstrates how a libertine is made, not born. Indeed, Lovelace’s encounter with this unnamed woman’s heartlessness leaves him with such an impression of his own impotence that he counteracts it through all later encounters with women. He forever attempts to undo this first betrayal, “to drive her out of his heart.” In addition to operating through the same structure of part-towhole relationships—abusing “the sex” for the “ill usage” of one woman, and in reverse, testing one woman to prove something about “the sex”— Lovelace’s libertinism resembles classic Freudian fetishism in that it arises

“No Sex in Ethereals”    from an originary point in time, a specific moment of trauma in which the young man, “too young to be insincere” discovers through “broken vows” the possibilities of artifice, double meanings, and betrayal. Though the phallic reference is nowhere explicit, we may still trace the metaphor of castration—or the shattering of an illusion of having something—within Lovelace’s affective lack: as for the male child in Freud, the most distressing source of sorrow is the discovery of emptiness behind an impression of fullness, or, more specifically for Lovelace, a horrible absence where mutual love was once expected. This reminds him of his powerlessness, or the potential for his own lack in a relationship previously based on love and trust (within the fetishist’s history, the bond between child and mother), making the woman even more powerful. Here, in substituting the affective register of sensibility for Freud’s more anatomically regulated circumscription of phallic autonomy, the triangulating paradigm of sympathy governs the mutual influence between subject and object in a way that gives the subject an especially objectifying and self-distancing posture: had the woman’s heart been “really” there, not only would it reflect his own possession of one, but also allow her to return the love he endows through his vision of hers, thus making it possible for himself to be seen as loveable, as well as loving. Commenting elsewhere on fetishism in the recently recovered “Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society,” Freud elaborates on the emotional circumstances of its etiology while confirming Krafft Ebing’s assertion that “the fetish originates in an emotional experience.”25 In yet another source, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud mentions more explicitly the paradigm of “first love” that shapes fetishism’s beginnings: “the choice of a fetish is an after-effect of some sexual impression, received as a rule in early childhood. (This may be brought into line with the proverbial durability of first loves: on revient toujours à ses premiers amours.)”26 Through these comments, Freud steadily suggests that fetishism, as a means of sexual identification, forms and follows an inescapable history of emotions attached to pivotal events. Richardson’s Lovelace, in his prelibertine discovery of loss and lack, presents a history and background of emotions that bring out the affective significance of fetishism only hinted at by Freud’s theories. Moreover, in highlighting the affective implications in fetishism’s registration of female “lack,” sensibility’s paradigm for how

   fetish one relates to another suggests the importance of the object’s position in actively returning a feeling—or being seen to—as opposed to passively embodying and signifying an impression, as in fetishism. Sensibility, in dictating to eighteenth-century society that so much of one’s being and affective potential are bound up in the heart, attributes the sort of idealizing and identificatory significance to it that Freud will later attribute to the penis. As an organ connected with agency, will, and desire—defined as “the seat of courage”—the heart in Richardson’s text suggests strong phallic possibilities. It complicates the benevolent register of sensibility and sympathy. Moreover, just as the penis possesses a dual significance as body organ proper, and as metaphor (known as a “phallus” in this case), the heart in the eighteenth century also gestures to its own phantasmatic and indeterminate status by straddling the two spheres of anatomy and immaterial metaphor, a product of both body and mind. To further explore the affective relationship between “sentiment” and “sexuality,” I will look at a rare scene where, in an attempt to get Clarissa’s heart, Lovelace evinces traits of sensibility, and in doing so, demonstrates how identification may govern the sympathetic spectator to a dangerous degree—Lovelace, in responding to the image of Clarissa’s sensible body, loses himself in her. Perhaps most remarkable is that, in withholding her heart from him, Clarissa retains and asserts her autonomy; unlike the phallus, the heart is not so gender-specific, and can “naturally” belong to a woman. While holding her hostage in his house, Lovelace upsets Clarissa by demanding her to spend more time with him and to favor his company above all others: She turned from me, standing up; and lifting up her folded hands and charming eyes, swimming in tears—Oh my dear papa, said the inimitable creature, you might have spared your heavy curse, had you known how I have been punished, ever since my swerving feet led me out of your garden doors to meet this man! Then, sinking into her chair a burst of passionate tears forced their way down her glowing cheeks. My dearest life, taking her still folded hands in mine, who can bear an invocation so affecting, though so passionate? And as I hope to live, my nose tingled as I once when a boy remember it did (and indeed once more very lately), just as before some tears came into my eyes; and I durst hardly trust my face in view of hers. (Clarissa, 650)

“No Sex in Ethereals”    Here, the scene of sensibility explicitly depicts two people in a mirroring relationship—each of their physical productions of emotion works to define the other’s. Moreover, the whole time, Lovelace remains conscious of how he seems as he reacts to Clarissa, cataloguing his own reactions in his writing: as Clarissa first produces a powerful outburst of tears, Lovelace responds with tears of his own, ineluctably reflecting the expression on Clarissa’s face: “I durst hardly trust my face in view of hers,” Lovelace implies that her own face causes his to lose its control and ineluctably reflect the expression on hers. Giving way to boyhood memories conjured when he cries, Lovelace drops his ruthless libertine role to return to the mode of yearning and desire from his first experience with unrequited love, suggesting that one of the underlying motives in seducing and fetishizing Clarissa is to get her to love him, and thus fulfill his lack. By getting her to secrete copious tears in front of him, Lovelace almost assures himself of her feelings for him. Searching for her heart, he pathetically beseeches Clarissa: “Would to Heaven I loved that Heaven as I love you! And yet, if I doubted a return in love, let me perish if I should know how to wish you mine!—Give me hope, dearest creature, give me but hope, that I am your preferable choice!” (Clarissa, 650). Implied in his urgency for her to show he is her “choice” is a desire to have himself reflected in her. In other words, to have such an esteemed woman as Clarissa love him is to identify with her as exemplar and become himself an exemplar. To conquer her (heart) is to be her. She does not let him. In a tone strangely dry in comparison to her passionate weeping a short moment ago, she replies: “I think, I think, that I cannot make an answerable return to the value you profess for me. My temper is utterly ruined.” Lovelace continues to recount the dialogue as it quickly loses its sentimental ardor: “She paused. I was silent.” Without affective displays of her love as the other for his self, he is without identity, without value, without power. Moreover, he is silent. Not just a leisurely pursuit, Lovelace’s libertine hunt for Clarissa’s heart bases itself on identificatory needs that closely imitate sensibility’s own idealizing gestures. However, as Jean Hagstrum believes, Lovelace’s hunger for emotion and love constitutes only a “parody” of love and sensibility, and not the real thing, insofar as it is bluntly pitched to enhance his self-love. Yet how does one ascertain “true” sensibility when, from the start, it issued and was valued as one’s superfine perception of other feelings and bodies?

   fetish

The Inside Out: Representing Sex in Ethereals And what is a “true woman”? From the outset, Lovelace’s project to seduce Clarissa arises from an enigma of femininity particular to the eighteenth century: while a woman proving that she is impervious to losing her chastity is known as an “angel,” a woman still viewed as susceptible to it is—a woman. Manifest in the opposing structure of mind versus body, these paradoxical terms of female existence dictate Lovelace’s pursuit and mold his desire “to know if she be really angel or woman.” In other words, just as the penis and heart constantly vacillate between registers of absence and lack, Clarissa herself seems to rise and fall constantly either as exalted “angel” or eroticized “woman” in Lovelace’s obsession. Moreover, these dual possibilities explain his empiricist outlook on seduction: much as he feels virtue must be proven—“What must that virtue be which will not stand a trial?”—he needs to prove she has a body in order to validate his erotic fantasies of her (Clarissa, 430). Tied in with the problem of exemplarity, “an abstraction or image and not a presentation of any lived possibility,” angels pose a distinct problem for the fetishist: If, as Lovelace himself asserts, “there is no sex in ethereals,” how can an angel be penetrated sexually, let alone fragmented and possessed?27 Without an originally human body, and without sexual organs defining its gender, an angel is impervious to the human necessity to know through the bodily senses.28 In addition, given its “natural” origin as an immaterial and invisible being, representing an angel seems an impossible endeavor. Anna, Clarissa’s loyally adulating friend comments on the dilemma of painting her portrait: “But one observation I will add, that were your character and my character to be truly drawn, mine would be allowed to be the most natural. Shades and lights are equally necessary in a fine picture. Yours would be surrounded with such a flood of brightness, with such a glory, that it would indeed dazzle; but leave one heartless to imitate it” (Clarissa, 485). In an iconoclastic fashion, Clarissa’s overpoweringly divine characteristics defy and thwart natural representation, and especially the fetishistic drive to concretization. As Anna’s passage indicates, Clarissa is more aura than person, and as such, cannot be contained. One is “left heartless” in the face of an exemplar, because exemplarity resists representation and imitation.

“No Sex in Ethereals”    Within the context of Anna’s comment, “leave one heartless to imitate it,” we are left with an impression of impotence—an inability to “imitate,” emulate or represent what one desires most. Anna’s comment on Clarissa’s resistance to portraiture reminds us not only how her exemplarity confounds Lovelace’s project to fetishize her, but also how it throws into question Richardson’s own project to represent her as his heroine of sensibility. Indeed, Freud, in richly evoking fetishism as “the longed-for sight of the female member,” demonstrates how much it depends on visuality, and how the fetish object, if not literally seen with the eyes, must be figured as representable (“Fetishism,” 155). In this way, fetishism is most of all a desire for representation, and for making something when there is in fact nothing. As such, fetishism is inextricable from Richardson’s efforts to fashion a woman’s voice, being, and essence for the moral purpose of sensibility. The status of the letter in this epistolary novel plays a central role in thematizing Richardson’s and Lovelace’s compulsions to represent and thus fetishize “the sex.” In attempting to embody the presence of a body that is desired, but missing, the letter attempts to accomplish the same act as sensibility and fetishism. Richardson’s “writing to the moment,” and Lovelace’s “lively present-tense manner” of writing make even more sense in this light—both modes consciously attempt to shorten the temporal and spatial distance between bodies communicating to each other. As the phallic imagery of the pen suggests, the crucial body part for Lovelace to gain access to is not so much Clarissa’s heart, but her hymen. Laying bare the cruder significance behind his libertine fascination with her heart, Lovelace turns his strategies to a more direct assault of female integrity, especially once he realizes that she will never succumb to his attempt to seduce her through courtly means. He must imagine the heart through different channels, and his sympathy is overtaken by rage, frustration, and violent urges. The accumulation of such scenes as the one narrated earlier, in which Clarissa demonstrates a mastery over his and her sentiment, makes Lovelace aware of her ability to overpower him. Hoping to find the type of woman’s heart made of “wax”—like the dolls in the following chapter—in Clarissa he more often comes across the “adamant” variety. Moreover, the hymen becomes a likely candidate for attack be-

   fetish cause unlike the heart’s more metaphorical function of revealing desire, the hymen provides an anatomical index to a female subject’s desire. Instead of referring explicitly to the hymen itself, or a woman’s sexual anatomy, the epistle becomes the novel’s outward object of obsession and desire. From the start, Lovelace’s curiosity about the numerous letters Clarissa writes to Anna is expressed in metaphors of dressing and undressing sexual parts when the letters disappear into the secret recesses of Clarissa’s letter cabinet and the folds of her clothing: “See the lady pop a paper into the drawer” (Clarissa, 656); “I shall never let my goddess rest till I have discovered where she puts her letters”; and “But as to her pockets, I think my mind hankers after them, as the less mischievous attempt—But they cannot hold all the letters that I should wish to see” (Clarissa, 569). These playful musings deepen into a desperate and violent need to gain insight into women’s thoughts and behavior as Lovelace begins to obsess about the nature of Anna’s and Clarissa’s friendship. He writes when looking for a letter from Anna that will reveal Clarissa’s next course of action in escaping his house: “I would bind, gag, strip, rob, and do anything but murder, to intercept it” (Clarissa, 851). Much like Richardson who writes letters to recover presence in absence, Lovelace needs to puncture the hymen to show it is present in order to show he is present. The hymen, intact, is the part that endows women social esteem and the privilege of being called “angel.” It is also the part that will make women eligible for the marriage market and finally get them out of their parents’ homes, much as the epistle itself (an angel is also a messenger) is the only way for them to get their thoughts and feelings out of their homes. The hymen itself, however, is barely a body part. The dictionary renders it as a transparent sheath whose significance makes itself known only upon physical contact: “The virginal membrane, a fold of mucous membrane stretched across and partially closing the external orifice of the vagina” (OED). Thus the hymen is just as materially evasive as the feminine letter is for Lovelace, and helps represent “the horror of nothing to see” of women’s sexual parts.29 Resisting the fetishist’s obsessive eye, the hymen itself presents lack, and thus, the letter itself becomes the fetish for a fetish—it provides something to see. Finding Clarissa’s hymen becomes so important for Lovelace because he has begun to suspect that she has the penis: “the haughty beauty will

“No Sex in Ethereals”    not refuse me, when her pride of being corporeally inviolate is brought down: when she can tell no tales” (Clarissa, 879). After she has finally escaped to Hampstead, he fumes and rages against her: “I’ll teach the dear charming creature to emulate me in contrivance!—I’ll teach her to weave webs and plots against her conqueror!—I’ll show that in her smuggling schemes she is but a spider compared to me, and that she has all this time been spinning only a cobweb!” (Clarissa, 879). Collapsing the two meanings of “lace”—trap and ornament—Lovelace finds that the lacework he was so proud of constructing himself can be formed by feminine hands as well. In a hallucinatory letter “Wafered on” to a letter written to Belford about his search for Clarissa after she has escaped, Lovelace spins a fantasy of murdering his conscience, personified as an obstinate woman, in cold blood: A bloody murder!—So I believe it will prove—At her last gasp!—Poor impertinent opposer! Eternally resisting!—Eternally contradicting! There she lies, weltering in her blood! Her death’s wound have I given her!—But she was a thief, an imposter, as well as a tormentor. She had stolen my pen. While I was sullenly meditating, doubting as to my future measures, she stole it; and thus she wrote with it, in a hand exactly like my own; and would have faced me down, that it was really my own handwriting. (Clarissa, 848)

The most powerful woman, then, is characterized as one who can take a man’s pen and write her own words as if they were his own. Clarissa may be seen as such a woman—not only does she wield her own pen in being just as compulsive a writer of letters as Lovelace, but also she, a morally upright young woman, takes Lovelace’s pen by saturating his conscience with thoughts of her. The above statement allows us to believe she takes Richardson’s pen, too. An alternative view of the text that registers its enthrallment with phallic femininity is, instead of viewing Richardson as using his pen to construct and define her, she has taken his away from him, writing her thoughts down in a man’s hand and producing the text that is Clarissa. This faculty, however, is hardly a female privilege. The phallic woman embodies power only insofar as a masculine subject wills her to do so in order to disavow the threat that he, like her, may be castrated. For Louise Kaplan, the phallic woman is:

   fetish a woman who embodies a stereotype of denigrated femininity . . . the slave who has the power to generate erections in her master because she is imagined as having a phallus hiding under her silky veils. The phallic woman, even when she plays the role of a dominating sadist . . . is a demeaned and “castrated” woman, a woman who has been temporarily repaired for the purpose of creating erections in the man who is paying the bill.30

While several critics have commented on Clarissa’s fragmentation after her rape—as borne out by the famous page containing literal fragments of her incoherent writing—another letter points to Lovelace’s own fragmentation and defeat, as well as Richardson’s.31 Attempting to document the rape, Lovelace’s text shows especially how male subjectivity fails in representing its desire. This page, like Clarissa’s fragments, is visually striking in its typographic inconsistency: instead of a full page of text following the last details of events leading up to the rape itself:—“And thus, between terror, and the late hour, and what followed, she was diverted from the thoughts of getting out of the house to Mrs. Leeson’s, or anywhere else,”— there appears, under Letter 257, both a gap and a statement by Lovelace illustrating his lack of phallic composure, or, his inability to write: And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives. And I am Your humble servant, R. LOVELACE

An anomalous intervention from the narrator follows: “The whole of this black transaction is given by the injured lady to Miss Howe, in her subsequent letters, dated Thursday July 6. To which the reader is referred” (Clarissa, 883). Thus, the narrative defers the telling of the act to Clarissa, and Lovelace, presumably out of shame and horror, cannot do so himself. In this sense, despite her fragmentation, she has taken his pen away from him. Yet the rape can never be fully represented by anyone because Clarissa is unconscious during the act itself. The hymen, then, loses its significance as an index of female desire precisely because Clarissa has been drugged (with laudanum slipped into beer) during the act of penetration. The impotence and in turn the unrepresentability of the rape itself—an act that might actually represent Lovelace’s phallic empowerment—stand for the inadequacy of “realist” narrative and the failure of such strategies

“No Sex in Ethereals”    as sensibility ever to render the most private acts and emotions external for consumption. The elided scene of penetration is perhaps the most telling proof of Clarissa’s corporeal inviolability. It also proves the fundamental limitations in the fetishist’s and the subject of sensibility’s abilities to construct and affirm their own idealized identities through imagining other bodies. Indeed, Clarissa shows that though the female body seems a likely and desirable medium for both their self-imaginings, it presents them with the most difficulty. Lovelace’s libertine progress to “the most secret recesses” of “female nature” takes him to the point where “he could go no farther,” even as he has dared to venture into the depths of heart, and Clarissa’s sex. Thereafter, for the remainder of the book, he must watch Clarissa gain ascendancy over her fallen status, spurn his pleas for forgiveness, and earn the status of sainthood within society. Instead of proving that the hymen is a material and susceptible body part, Clarissa shows its metaphorical powers as a transparent and hence materially elusive signifier of sexual integrity, especially when she chooses to leave her own body by starving it to death. In this case, the act of fetishism aids her mission for autonomy through slipping into a narcissistic mode. Severing it from her “happy” and spiritual self, as she declares in her will, Clarissa fetishizes her own body—turning it into a doll—by inviting others to worship and gaze upon it when she finally dies, and using it to monumentalize her suffering and “unhappy self.” Moreover, demonstrating that Clarissa’s has always been what Lovelace wanted all along, her mourning cousin, Colonel Morden, declares, “She seems indeed to have been, as much as mortal could be, LOVE itself” (Clarissa, 1422). Lovelace, a fetishist to the very end, requests Clarissa’s body to be dissected and embalmed, and her heart brought to him to keep in a gold receptacle (Clarissa, 1384). For him, Clarissa’s triumphant outcome only gives him opportunity to fetishize virtue itself, and leaves him declaring that “she was a vixen in her virtue” (Clarissa, 1382). The monumental text of Clarissa may be the ultimate fetish object that strives, in its seemingly infinite number of parts, to disavow its own lack. As a litany for Richardson’s text, Freud’s theory finally finds a resting place: Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place and has

   fetish been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute. (“Fetishism,” 154; emphasis mine)

The extraordinary increase of letters, sentiments, and tears that Clarissa represents, then, serves as the memorial to masculine creativity in its efforts to fill in the fissures and holes of everyday life. The novel, written during an age of emerging gender structures and stereotypes—as well as an emerging culture of consumerism and empiricism where things anxiously fill up lacks—attempts to overcome the threat of castrated/castrating woman, and registers her as an originating figure for modern sexual difference and modern sexual relationships. In discussing how Richardson constructs “reality” and affective experiences in a manner that anticipates Freud’s theory of fetishism, I have uncovered not only the relationship between Richardson and Freud, but also the significant identification between novelist and libertine. As divergent as they appear in their backgrounds, these male constructivists of female subjectivity all demonstrate that male subjectivity insists on objectifying feminine subjectivity in terms of its body parts in order to overcome the anxiety of affective as well as anatomical lack. This insistence arises not only within personal psychology and sexual practices, but also in social and aesthetic agendas, thus allowing us to see the all too permeable boundary between “the normal” and the “perverse,” the “moral” and the “immoral,” especially as it anatomizes the domestic dailiness of female subjectivity. In Clarissa “reality” and affective experiences are constructed fetishistically, and not just for the presumably benevolent purposes of sensibility. Potentially material objects threatening to expire as purely imaginative constructs, affective experiences must be captured in the most vital and “real” of all tenses, the present. The gargantuan proportions of Richardson’s text, a body over whose own size he expressed concern, lay bare the breadth and consequence of his ardor for details in expressing a modern subjectivity. They also expose the anxiety underlying idealization, “that psychic activity” that, according to Kaja Silverman, lies “at the heart of love,” and also, at the heart of sensibility and fetishism.

c h a p t e r t h ree

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange: The Self as Mimetic Object

This chapter, considering an inanimate object, the doll, as a possible site of subjectivity, introduces a shift in focus from the fetish to the idol, the part to the whole. The distinction between idol and fetish, useful for understanding the nature of early modern encounters with the exotic and the emergence of commodity culture—in which all objects have market value—also, for William Pietz, crystallizes Enlightenment mentality. The idol, a freestanding “false god,” elicits worship and is recognized by consensus, and the fetish, a “novel idea” (inherently resisting consensual recognition) is worn and used around the body as “an instrument to achieve a concrete, material effect.”1 While fetishism may appear a mere variant of what Hume regards as the “vulgar” tendency to “clothe” the abstract and the unknown “in shapes more suitable to . . . natural comprehension,” its status as a tool whose referent is utterly nothing rankles Enlightenment attitudes toward material objects as instruments for advancing knowledge.2 Some eighteenth-century renderings of women as idols, explicitly synonymous with dolls in one case, mistake the woman for the idol entirely, certain that the social manifestation of vanity corresponds with the woman’s personal imaginings of the ideal self. Addison’s satires of female vanity in The Spectator, especially number 73 (May 24, 1711), explicitly liken women in social spaces to idols and derive humor from transposing

   doll the sacred terms of religious practice onto the trivial spectacle of female vanity: The playhouse is very frequently filled with Idols; several of them are carried in procession every evening about the ring, and several of them set up their worship even in churches. They are to be accosted in the language proper to the Deity. Life and death are in their power: joys of heaven and pains of hell are at their disposal: paradise is in their arms, and eternity in every moment that you are present with them. Raptures, transports, ecstasies, are the rewards which they confer: sighs and tears, prayers and broken hearts, are the offerings which are paid to them.

As for her private life, the Idol’s most distinguishing characteristics include an absorption in “the Adorning of her Person” that makes itself apparent in “every Posture of her Body, Air of her Face, and Motion of her Head.” The Idol’s “Business and Employment,” to “gain Adorers” and “seduce Men” to her “worship,” are also obvious, compelling her to appear “in all publick Places and Assemblies.” The essay pauses its ridiculing critique of contemporary femininity to explain that because “the woman generally outlives the Idol,” the author desires his fair readers “to give a proper direction to their passion for being admired,” a direction that gains a “reasonable and lasting admiration,” obtainable not from “beauty, or dress, or fashion,” but from “inward ornaments” immune to the defacing effects of “time or sickness.” Idolatry here defines itself as the vice of women overly invested in themselves as surface beings, a flaw of femininity that was repeatedly cited and admonished throughout the century, in conduct book discourses in particular. Women, Addison claims, are unable to recognize that the physical and material features of being an idol are subject to mutability and eventually perish. His moral recapitulates the grave Clarissa’s speech in canto V of The Rape of the Lock, where she proclaims to an unmoved audience “ ‘Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul’ ” (line 34). Implicit in the practical thrust of his moral is the idea that once one becomes overly attached to a physical object, especially the self as a physical object, the object loses its physicality and vaporizes into nothing, revealing itself an idea and a fantasy. Here, Addison overlooks the possibility that the feminine drive to become a social idol might not just dissolve into but come out of the transient space of phantasm and imagination that Pope, in canto I of The Rape of the Lock, depicts as an integral aspect of women’s

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    cosmetic rituals. Addison’s critique blames the weakness of women’s inner life, or scarcity of “inward ornaments” on their tendencies toward selfidolatry. Earlier, in Spectator 15 (March 17, 1711), Addison identifies this “weakness of being taken with outside and appearances” as a “natural” one among “ordinary” women. His critique, in other words, views women in their brightly ornamented shells of selfhood with matching interiors (“Women are . . . perpetually dazzling one anothers Imaginations, and filling their Heads with nothing but Colours”), not just as idols, but as dolls that unceremoniously populate everyday life and settings, despite their efforts to appear sacred and inspire worship. In contrast with Addison’s female-directed moralizing, the anonymous author of the poem Adollizing, or, A Lively Picture of Adoll-Worship (1748) presents the idea of “woman as idol” or “adollizing” as an invention born out of libertine sexual desire and the author’s own “effect of flight” in libertine reform.3 The discourse borders here on the fetishistic as it privileges more than Addison does the work of an individual imagination in situating women as idols. Moreover, male idolatry is as much at stake as female. In his preface to the poem the author explains that while the invention, the “adoll,” is novel, the “ground-work” from which it derives is “a real fact, known to many others.” This groundwork is a “simple fable” of libertine ambition: “A person of high distinction failing in his attempt on the virtue of a young lady of great beauty and merit, resolves to enjoy her at any rate, and thereupon has recourse to the extraordinary method here attempted to be described” (Adollizing, iv). In its fantastic replications of women as dolls to be used and adored, the poem creates an object lesson for libertines who try to exceed the limits of nature by substituting inert matter for flesh, and lust for love. Though the female doll seems the poem’s main object, the preface reveals that the libertine Clodius himself is “a copy” and, in canto II, enjoys life as “the general idol of the fair.” Much like Addison’s female idol, Clodius is able to seduce several women at once with diverse tricks of language and the body. The transformation of woman to doll and back to woman again only serves to effect Clodius’s own conversion from libertine idolater to worthy lover. To be a real man himself, rather than an idol, he needs to reject both his worship of female dolls and his tendencies to regard real women as dolls to manipulate and collect. The female doll, in short, operates as much a tool for moral reform as for pleasure.

   doll The woman as “adoll” comes into being when Clodius, rebuffed by one impenetrable woman, Clarabella, “calls invention to his wanton aid.” Reflecting on the weapons of sexual battle evoked in other libertine texts such as Spy on Mother Midnight, Clodius bemoans how “Woman . . . when man’s neglect denies,/ With mimic art the real thing supplies:/ When of dear copulation she despairs,/ At once a dildo softens all her cares.” Through this reflection on how women satisfy their sexual urges with mechanical aids, calling upon “creative pow’r” whose “fertile thought/ Can raise a solid entity from nought,” Clodius hits upon “the lucky thought” that avails himself of “th’inventive wit”: With this, a Doll, by new mechanic aid, As big as life, he artfully has made; Resembling CLARABELL’S every grace, In stature, shape, in dress as well as face: For this, a groupe of different trades employ Their various skill to frame the curious toy

The enlisted tradesmen further complete their tasks by achieving the mimesis of Clarabella’s sex and accordingly, the size of the inventor’s own: On the arch’d mount, just o’er the cloven part, A tufft of hair he fixes with nice art, Of CLARABELLA’s colour, golden hue, In sweet abundance tempting to the view. A seven-inch bore, proportion’d to his mind, With oval entrance, all with spunge he lin’d, Which warmly mollify’d, is fit for use, And will the sought-for consequence produce.

The text itself, staying true to the poem’s “lively picture of adoll-worship,” achieves a mimesis of the sex act as it recounts Clodius’s use of his “curious toy.” Filling the room with the sounds of his “ardent” kisses, he lays “CLARADOLLA” on a couch, lifts her “cloaths,” flings “the supple joints” and concludes the “filthy scene” with his final “injection.” Conjuring the image of a man having sex with an image of a woman, this scene, in all its filth, interpenetrates mimetic acts by showing that the sex doll accomplishes in material dimensions what pornography does rhetorically. Each imitates reality to draw physical responses from their users and readers. In effect, Clodius, the doll-worshiping libertine, and Anonymous, the author

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    of the text, work in conjunction, much as Lovelace and Richardson do in Clarissa. Here again, libertine desire becomes inextricable from the desire for authorship, and here also we begin to see the mutual collaboration between dolls and literature in simulating versions of selfhood. The pleasures of the doll merge with the pleasures of the text.4 Indeed the libertine’s sense of triumph seems less to do with finding an outlet for sexual urges than with achieving a “mimicry of bliss” (emphasis mine). Starting “a fresh theme” for improving “the CLARADOLLA scheme,” Clodius dares to increase the variety of “that darling passion” by building a “whole Seraglio” of the most celebrated “BRITISH fair.” This plan stimulates a sense of his omnipotence as Clodius realizes, “By thund’ring Jove! there’s not a charming face/ But shall my gall’ries, and my closets grace.” Accordingly he resolves, “A prime collection will I order strait.” Yet hints of Clodius’s vulnerability emerge in his reflections on the benefits of CLARADOLLA: the doll not only allows him to negotiate his game of ensnaring the cold and unmovable CLARABELLA, but it also fulfills the lack the original game and the original woman already suggested: Henceforth, he cries, no longer shall I prove The poignant tortures of despairing Love! There is the remedy, the certain cure For all that wretched Lovers can endure! My CLARADOLLA yields me kind relief, And puts a period to my future grief: What CLARABELLA glories to deny, She, thrice more bounteous, shall my wants supply: With pleasing surety not to ask in vain, From her, no coyness, fickleness, disdain: Whatever liberties with her I take, No silly scruples will she idly make, But unresisting and complacent still, Be all obsequious to my wanton will; Nor know you scarce the real from what feigns, When the hot blood runs boiling thro’ the veins.

Here, where misogynist and childhood desires for omnipotence intersect, the transfer of Clarabella to Claradolla solves the problem of unrequited love. In other words, turning the woman into a doll, an object that is “the

   doll assimilation of the model and its copy, of the living and the lifeless,” allows Clodius to stabilize the uncertainty generated by the real woman, Clarabella.5 Furthermore, true to the libertine impulse to collect novel and psychically potent trophies of sexual conquests, Clodius keeps his Claradollas in a closet while contriving to ruin Clarabella by showing his creation off to a group of rakehell friends, who, from afar, mistake the form in the bedchamber for the real woman and spread rumors about her fall from virtue. The poem, despite its pleasure in having coined a new word, “adollizing,” and setting in motion the mechanistic properties of love (“From Love all animated beings spring” and “Love’s the first passion of the human breast,/ The master-spring and mover of the rest”), exhausts its libertine’s pleasures in metamorphoses and inventions of femininity. Venus, irritated and insulted by Clodius’s actions, punishes him by making him all too aware of “the cheat” and enabling him to “See, see” the dolls “all to dusty ruin beat!” Clodius begins once again to dream of Clarabella who at last, through Venus’s merciful intervention, begins to return and match his affection. The dolls, at one time fulfilling the libertine’s lack, turn back into lack itself. With its strange mixing of lewd scenes and morals, Adollizing depicts an important turn in the eighteenth-century continuum of fetish, idol, libertinism, and femininity. Instead of fetishizing the parts of a woman in order to mediate his desire, Clodius objectifies and simulates the whole woman, and thus she becomes part idol, part doll, as the term “adollizing” suggests.6 Adhering to its objective to reform the libertine’s idolatry (of himself and of Clarabella), the poem assumes that a woman can be taken either as an idol/doll or as “herself”; she can take up space in the libertine’s cabinet or in his heart, once and for all, at least in his own mind. Even as Clodius’s fantasy embodies more the private fantasy of the fetish in his construction of woman as a sexual idol, it, like Steele’s critique of women in eighteenth-century social life, partakes of the language of absolutes that supports iconoclastic denunciations of idolatry. Each, in viewing the woman as an idol, assumes that the transformation from human to image is complete and decisive, and universally legible. Missing throughout Adollizing and Addison’s Spectator essay is the understanding of a more subtle and continuous metamorphosis of raising “a solid entity from nought” that obscures the boundary between woman and doll and reveals the woman to be more a fetish than an idol, even in

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    her reification as a corporeally integrated figure for a human subject. The soft transitions of fetishism—its subtle laws of fancy and unceasing traffic through social reality and private fantasy, public action, and inward thoughts—are, as I will show here, truer to the cultural production of femininity in the eighteenth century than the deterministic and totalizing discourses of idolatry that Spectator 73 and Adollizing incorporate. Eighteenth-century “woman,” implicated in the ceaseless desires and fantasies of consumer society, the rigors of materialist formulations of the self, and conduct book ideologies, was perpetually, not incidentally, caught in the transitions of becoming that most idealized version of womanhood, the doll.

Bartholomew Fair At the end of the seventeenth century, Ned Ward, in his stumblings through Bartholomew Fair—the most profitable of public fairs for “trade and pleasure”—visited a waxwork booth called “the Temple of Diana.”7 Ward, the self-styled “spy” of London life, describes the automaton that stood at the entrance, “a comical figure gaping and drumming . . . his beard wagging up and down . . . his eyes rolled about.” It was flanked by two wax dolls that appear’d very natural, insomuch that it induced us to walk in and take sight of their whole works; being much astonish’d upon our first entrance of the room, at the liveliness of the figures, who sat in such easie postures, and their hands dispos’d with such a becoming freedom, that life it self could not have appear’d less stiff, or the whole frame more regular; the eyes being fix’d with that tenderness, which I apprehend as a great difficulty; so that the most experience’d of our charming ladies could not, after an hours practice in her glass, have look’d more soft and languishing.8

The episode of surprised viewings and mirrorings of “lively figures” culminates with the description of a country carter who peeps into the “Temple” and mistakes the dolls for “ ‘zo many vine voulk.’ ” Believing the booth contains so many people sitting in a room together, and he had been cheated of the true spectacle he had paid to see, the carter demands the return of his fare. The show’s mistress, trying to persuade him that “he was deceived,

   doll and that those fine people, as he thought ‘em were only waxworks, which was the sight he was to see,” urges him to walk into the showroom. Instead of recognizing his mistake, the “bumpkin,” upon closer view of the waxworks, “could not forbear making his country honours to the ladies” and attempts to converse with them, thus provoking the “whole company to burst in a laughter.” Much like Partridge’s experience in Tom Jones of viewing the ghost of Hamlet’s father—arising in a novel as fascinated by the novelty mediated by lifelike art as Ward’s encounter with dolls at Bartholomew Fair—the bumpkin misreads lifelike effects for life itself. Here, the reality effect of waxworks brings another reality into focus as it yields distinctions between those classes that can recognize the dolls’ artifice as imitation, and those that cannot. Even more striking, however, is the way the country carter responds to being made the object of laughter by insulting in turn a gentlewoman who asks how he would like one of the dolls “for a bedfellow.” By answering, “for all she looks so woundy gainly, now she’s dressed, when she comes to pluck off her paint and her patches, and doff her vine clouthes to come to bed, she, perhaps, may look as ugly as you do,” the bumpkin does not so much miss the subtlety of the waxworks’ display of lifelikeness as he exposes and exploits the cultural reality of his original misprision. Operating as fitting vehicles for creating effects of likeness are the living dolls that gentlewomen themselves already are. In her plainness, the gentlewoman, like the rest of her sex, is no more than a doll with its makeup and fashionable dress removed. And in femininity, the bumpkin reveals, the original model to be imitated is the doll—a lifeless object that is already a simulacrum of “life itself”—not the woman. Departing the scene of competing spectacles, of superrealistic waxworks and the elements of society who struggle to distinguish between art and life, Ward refers to the waxwork booth as a place for satisfying “curiosities with art’s nicest imitation of human nature.” The booth, however, is only one of many features in Ward’s jaunt to Bartholomew Fair that entice consumers with ingenious forms of imitation. If women alone are regarded as natural collaborators with dolls in acts of artifice and imitation, all members of society, in contrast, desire to behold those acts, and Bartholomew Fair profits on and feeds that desire. There, Ward watches puppet shows, rope dancers, tumblers, and monkeys imitating humans. He snacks on filberts, bergamot pears, and small beer, and has

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    his handkerchief picked. All the while criers accompany him with their entreaties, “Will you buy a mouse-trap, or a rat-trap? Will you buy a clothbrush, a hat-brush, or a comb-brush?” and “Buy my cucumbers to pickle.” This early-eighteenth-century scene of Bartholomew Fair with its diverse hurly-burlies and marketplace of “the strangest hodge-podge that ever was jumbled together” is but a local and early instance of the broader outpouring of commerce and material goods that eighteenth-century subjects, eager for novelty and entertainment, consumed. Moreover, Bartholomew Fair, with its earliest history rooted in the cloth trade, aptly introduces the self as a mannequin, as well as an object of aesthetic fabrication. Pope reveals this vision in The Rape of the Lock as the outgrowth of a world that has become dominated by the objects and aesthetic experiences of consumer life. Perhaps the most celebrated image of a woman as fashion doll in eighteenth-century literature is of Belinda in canto I, bending to her “heavenly” reflection and tremblingly applying the cosmetic products of imperialist gain to render a “purer blush” and call “forth all the wonders of her face” (lines 125 and 143–44) in the private setting of her dressing room.9 Even with its exquisite refinement, this canonical image shares the rude truth of the bumpkin’s riposte at Ward’s Bartholomew Fair. It presents an equivalent relationship between women and dolls that resides in their shared surfaces of paint, patches, and fine clothes. Less rude is the shared notion that such tools of artifice can produce pleasure through the very act of imitation and transforming reality. In texts of earlier periods, such as Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair (1614), the Fair as a cultural and aesthetic trope—for the acts of imposture that saturate everyday life—allows the author to cast “the world” in a representative space that already embodies the world: the stage. At Jonson’s early-seventeenth-century Bartholomew Fair, much like Ward’s in the next century, instructively revealing and subversive exchanges— in a setting that privileges commercial and economic ones—take place not so much between humans themselves, but between humans and their inhuman doubles. Further exploiting the magical sorcery of mimesis prevalent on the fairgrounds, the play’s most powerful representations of human follies and limitations occur in the puppet booth, with characters conversing and arguing with wooden puppets as if they were people, and being defeated by them. These doubles, or puppets, operate as mediums

   doll for revealing truths about human hypocrisy and daily acts of pretending. The most affecting distillation of the Fair’s ability to suspend, transmute, and market notions of reality—while at the same time parodying antitheatrical argument—arises in the next-to-final scene.10 Here, the character Busy, arguing with the puppet Dionysus about the artifice of the stage and its customs of cross-dressing, finds himself defeated when the puppet lifts his garments to reveal a lower body that equivocates any notion of “true” sex. Furthermore, Dionysius reminds Busy that practitioners of so-called legitimate professions, much like stage performers, also work to spin fantasy into reality. Such figures include the “bugle-maker,” “confect-maker,” “tire-woman,” “French fashioner,” and lastly, the Friars “with their perukes and their puffs, their fans and their huffs.” William Wordsworth in Book VII of The Prelude, similarly regards the Fair as a symbolically portentous space that enlarges the artificial dimensions of everyday existence in the “endless stream of men and moving things” of a commercially driven metropolis (line 151).11 Wordsworth, however, situates the Fair and its artificial forms of life, “the Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes/ The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvelous craft,” not so much in a theatrical vocabulary as Jonson does, but rather, in a metaphysical one (lines 711–12). Based on Wordsworth’s first long visit to London as a young man in 1791, this Romantic poem depicts the richly psychological experience of quintessentially eighteenthcentury forms of popular entertainment. As it narrates the life of a mind, and registers and refracts the impressions and “scenes” of the external world, London and Bartholomew Fair appear as embodiments of a deficient form of world making. Because they offer conceptions of the world that are manufactured and available only through commercial exchange, the scenes of London, including its most celebrated fairground, place the mind into a passive as opposed to active position. In contrast with images that evoke subjective insight about human, natural, and intellectual experiences—“mighty Shakespeare’s page,” the man with the sickly babe on his knee, the blind beggar, the glow-worm underneath the dusky plume, for instance—the shows of London agree with a mind “reared upon the base of outward things.” For these shows, “full-formed,” only “take, with small internal help/ Possession of the faculties” (lines 650–54). Shocking in its density of sights and sounds, the city itself churns

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    out “dazzling wares” that become interchangeable with “face after face” of “comers and goers” passing through “shop after shop.” Other forms of exchange—whereby people turn into things—take place in the form of “mimic shapes,” or statues of monarchs and sovereigns on horses “in gilded pomp” (lines 157, 156, 138, 134), “carved maniacs at the gates” of Bedlam (line 132), and “Boyle, Shakespeare, Newton, or the attractive head/ Of some quack-doctor, famous in his day” guarding doorways “like guardian saints” (lines 165–66). Not just people, but life itself turns into a thing. “Spectacles within doors”—or, presumably, panoramas, with their “circumambient scenery” accomplishes the transformation of life into things with its “sights that ape/ The absolute presence of reality.” Wordsworth’s vision of London is in itself a panorama of scenes that imitate life, and life that imitates scenes. In this late-eighteenth-century world structured by commercial exchange and its attendant shock of sights, sounds, and “dazzling wares,” life is less immediate than lifelikeness. The theatricality of life has become so exaggerated, its “perpetual whirl of trivial objects” so concentrated, that Bartholomew Fair—overflowing with “moveables of wonder,” “Wax-work, Clock-work,” and “marvelous craft”—becomes a marketplace not just for the follies of man, but for “freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats” (lines 725, 712, and 715–16). Throughout a poem in which “things that are, are not,” Bartholomew Fair constitutes a benighted parade of actuality. In contrast, Ward from his early-eighteenth-century perspective, remains untroubled by the usurpation of the philosophical mind in the face of consumer display. Indeed, he is eagerly receptive to the display. So permeable is he to the “wooden Sodom,” all of his senses become engaged in his visit as he reports glimpsing the hair of the butcher “shined with the pomatum of beef and mutton,” hearing “brain-breaking noise,” touching the shoulders of a woman who requires his help crossing the street, smelling the “sour breath of corrupt carcases,” and tasting pots of English liquor. Concluding his visit, he reports satiation: “Thus heartily tired with our day’s ramble, we paid our reckoning, and posted home to bed, with as good an appetite to rest as a new-married lover ever had to the embraces of his bride the first night.” Quite distinct from Wordsworth who condemns the “perpetual whirl/ Of trivial objects” that erases the boundaries

   doll between people and things, and people and other people, Ward finds ready refreshment—indeed, re-creation—in it. Nowhere is this attitude more explicit than in his confessed inability to distinguish the dolls from living women, and his preference for the dolls’ postures of naturalism to those of “the most experience’d of our charming ladies.” Ward’s aesthetic and even erotic predilection toward dolls of women as opposed to women themselves within this moment of Bartholomew Fair’s history closely anticipates an important moment in the linked history of the doll. According to Victorian author Henry Morley, it was toward the middle of the eighteenth century at Bartholomew Fair that the word doll as we now know it came into being. A doll was originally referred to as a “baby,” and contrary to views that maintain the word derives from idol, doll arbitrarily evolved as a diminutive for the female name Dorothy.12 While not as spectacularly aberrant as its exotic beasts, scaly boys, hermaphrodites, and living fairies, the doll in all its sizes and forms—from puppets, waxworks, and automata to “babies” for fairgoers to buy and take home—occupied a privileged position in Bartholomew Fair’s illustrious family of oddities. Dolls played an integral role in the Fair’s entertainment because they made literal what the monsters underwent: the transformation of their beings into playthings for mass consumption. Close relatives to these commodities were the prostitutes who filled the Fair, and in recognition of their kinship with their inanimate doubles—brightly painted and displaying themselves for sale—were also called Bartholomew Babies. This cultural gesture suggests the doll’s powerful influence in providing frames of reference for various forms of subjectivity during the period. It was the female doll in particular, the most common form, and as Morley suggests, the “natural” sex for the doll, that exerted such influence.13 And yet Bartholomew Fair was only the most concentrated site for the display and selling of dolls in general throughout the eighteenth century.14 These imitations of the human subject also haunted public parks, automata museums, waxwork exhibitions, and toyshops and, for a time, dangled in private homes on the bodies of individual persons, which the momentary craze for puppets as fashion accessories to carry and dangle in one’s hands—“pantins”—demonstrates.15 Numerous advertisements indicate that the practice of “seeing” dolls was popular especially between the 1750s and 1790s. The Daily Advertiser

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    announced in August 1752 the opening of a “large commodious room” in the George Inn Yard, West-Smithfield, where Yeates senior’s “large operatical Wax-Work” would perform. The advertisement boasted “These Figures are the richest, largest, and most beautiful ever seen in England,” and “have all the just Motions and Gestures of Life.” Not just the dolls themselves but also the scenery promised entertainment, as the “Machines, Transparencies, and other Decorations” were “entirely new, and finish’d in the Italian manner.”16 Another advertisement from the Daily Advertiser announced earlier that year, January 1, 1752, that “Punch’s Theatre in James-Street, near the Hay-Market during the Christmas Holidays” would present a “new, grand, operatical, moving Wax-Work,” called “Damon and Phillida.” Much like Yeates’s, these dolls, “upwards of five Feet high,” were touted for their large size and “accurate Resemblance of Life in its various Actions.” Again, the scenery, transparencies, and costumes for this waxwork show were emphasized as “new.” In addition to physical qualities of size, newness, and fidelity to the movements and actions of life, more ineffable ones such as the subjective experience of being “agreeably deceived” featured as selling points in advertisements for waxwork shows. More often than not, the “agreeable” deception involved not being able to discern that the dolls were in fact dolls. Unlike Rackstrow’s Museum at No. 197 Fleet Street, which revealed life in its anatomical dimensions and processes—the “Human Frame in its unfolded” state—the “life” imitated in such museums as Mrs. Salmon’s, Mrs. Wright’s, Mrs. Goldsmith’s, or Mrs. Mills’s emphasized instead the “striking” similitude between an inanimate object and a living person. About Mrs. Wright, an American expatriate, the London Magazine published an essay, “A Sketch of the Character of Mrs. WRIGHT (With an exact Likeness of her)” that praised her “surprising” and “striking genius, . . . in itself so novel.”17 Adam Smith, in his essay “Of the Imitative Arts,” also lauds Patience Wright for her works, “perhaps more perfect than any thing [he] had ever seen.”18 The illustration or “exact likeness” of Mrs. Wright that appeared with the London Magazine article shows her holding the head and torso of a male model; held against the folds of her dress across her stomach, the male doll appears organically attached to his female creator and indeed, seems to “live by the fingers of Mrs. Wright.”19 The illustration, the illustration depicts the wax modeler and her model

   doll so closely that it is difficult to tell which figure is the doll, and which the human (see Figure 3.1). In real life, as well, the effect of such difficulty in distinguishing human from copy in Wright’s dolls was remarked upon repeatedly. The London Magazine mentions the group of life-size characters captured in conversation and “so natural, that people frequently speak to the dumb figures.”20 For the author of this “character sketch” of the wax doll artist, the wax medium represents “a new style of picturing, superior to statuary, and peculiar to” Wright and “the honour of America.” The poet, playwright, and novelist Henry Pye, in his lengthy meditations on the mimetic arts, A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle, writes less approvingly of such reality effects in an effort to distinguish between different media. In doing so, however, he only reinforces the power of wax on the mind of its viewer as well as the effects of pain that such deep impressions leave, unlike other media such as painting and sculpture. Perhaps referring to the same group of dolls “speaking” in conversation to each other that the London Magazine mentioned, Pye reflects: As painting imitates entirely by natural means, (I mean as opposed to symbols) it is able to imitate the most exactly of any art except coloured statuary; but as its means of imitation are always apparent, the imitation can never be too exact to please . . . The same may be said of statues in stone or metal, where the material, the mean of imitation is, I think, yet more apparent; but in coloured statuary, or wax-work, where the imitation may for a short time be concealed, that pleasure is not produced, which is the proper result of imitative art, and objects of pity and terror may be so accurately represented as to be really painful. The collection of figures in wax-work coloured, dressed, and sitting down at card tables, exhibited some years ago by Mrs. Wright, on first entrance gave exactly the idea of a well dressed assembly, and the impression remained after the illusion ceased. Nothing of this sort is produced by painting or statuary, and yet how different and superior to this surprise is the pleasure we receive from a portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, or a statue of Banks.21

The word striking, used repeatedly in ads, notices, and general commentary, not only describes the impressions made on the viewer’s mind, but also renders the mind as a soft and malleable substance, much like the wax used to make the dolls. Above, as Pye glosses the affective registers produced by different mimetic media, he transmits the violence implic-

figure 3.1. “Mrs. Wright,” London Magazine, November 1775. Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Special Collections, Mills Library, McMaster University.

   doll it in the act of “striking,” as well as the susceptibility of the mind to such blows. “Striking” also evokes the quality of experience involved in imagining events and characters during the reading process, as well as the method of manufacturing literary characters in printmaking. Pye himself presents the connection between the overly forceful impressions of reality produced by waxwork dolls and by novels when he describes the young woman, who is for ever weeping over the distresses of a Clarissa, or a Sydney Biddulph, and tracing the affecting scenes, and wonderful revolutions, to be found in the adventures of a Cecilia, or an Emmeline, have her feelings something deadened to the less interesting distresses of ordinary life . . . may not the passion of pity be purged of some of its more violent effects in reality, from being frequently excited for amusement by fictitious tales of woe.22

Indeed, it is the “desire of resembling the fictitious heroine of a novel” that has “often induced a young mind to enquire for those sensations.”23 Toward the last third of the century, it was not just marginalized country bumpkins (as in Ned Ward’s social tableau), but the general pleasure seeker who delighted in the striking moment of regarding the doll and character as if they were like themselves, living persons. In contrast with the pain that Pye highlights, an ad from August 2, 1786, indicates the forms of desire and pleasure that viewing waxwork figures entailed.24 These included the subjective mind-set that accompanied the viewing of waxwork figures, the qualities of experience elicited by them, as well as the price for their procurement: The Naturalist, Artist, and Connoisseur, may highly delight themselves, by inspecting the most Wonderful, Curious, and Ingenious Exhibition, Ever offered to the PUBLIC.—Comprising, among a Large, Beautiful Variety of ANIMATED FIGURES, &c.—Striking Likenesses of the Celebrated Mrs. ROBINSON,—D. GARRICK, Esq.—And MARGARET NICHOLSON, who made an Attempt on the Life of his Most Sacred Majesty, King George III.

The show was to be seen from “Nine in the Morning till Ten in the Evening,” in a series of apartments along Somerset House, in the Strand. Admission was 1 shilling per person, but 6 shillings for seeing the “Speaking Figure.” Children and Servants could pay half price. An advertisement of the same time, 1786, for “Mrs. Salmon’s Royal Wax-work at No. 189 in Fleet Street,” cries a collection of more than two hundred “Figures as large

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    as Life” filling four rooms.25 These rooms contained numerous scenes of rulers, heroes, and heroines of British history and folklore, as well as prosaic social types. In its comprehensiveness of characters, figures, and even different life forms, Mrs. Salmon’s waxworks constituted an embodiment of “the World” and offered a visual model for similarly encyclopedic enterprises undertaken by the print market’s volumes of universal knowledge. Figures in her collection include: Queen Elizabeth, with Lady Margaret Russel, who pricked her Finger and bled to Death in one room King Henry VIII introducing to Court Anna Bullen, to the great dislike of Queen Katherine and Cardinal Wolsey the chaste Nuns of Collingham, who slit their Noses and upper Lips to preserve their Virgin Vow a Cherokee King, with his chief Peter the wild boy the British Giant an Old Maid and her Sweetheart a Dutch Christening a fine Representation of the Death of Werter, attended by Charlotte and her Family Mrs. Salmon herself, with “three of her Children.”26 Perhaps the most fantastic spectacle in Salmon’s collection of waxworks was “a beautiful Rock, ornamented with Pearls, Corals, and rich Stones” that contained “six Caves, in which” one could see “Hermits moving, Mermaids waving.” The repetition of the word life, surrounded by other words denoting “likeness,” “resemblance,” and “similitude” reveals that life itself and its effective imitation were at stake in waxwork shows of eighteenth-century England. Indeed, “likeness,” in its constant proximity to “life,” could almost substitute for it completely. Whether erected as “lively” representations of history, homage to recently departed members of the royal family and military heroes, or visual mediations of beloved literary characters, the waxwork dolls of eighteenth-century Britain were valued for the way

   doll they reconstituted life as a purely material phenomenon. And yet, in order to become plausible as life, such material reconstitutions needed to stimulate the ostensibly immaterial and irrational faculty of the imagination. It was within this cultural moment—when the eighteenth-century imagination willingly collaborated with naturalistic form to turn inert matter into human life—that dolls not only “came to” life, but also possessed it. At the same time that dolls seized the cultural imagination, they inspired comparisons with the novel. A book reviewer in 1794 registered the relationship between books and dolls—and their shared abilities to displace reality—when criticizing novelists who create scenes and characters that transcend their own social status: “Hence their lords and ladies are often no more like the people of fashion at the west end of the town, than the waxen figures in Fleet-street are like the illustrious personages whom they are said to represent.”27 Certainly, Monboddo’s reasons for admiring Tom Jones as a representative for the “lately sprung up” “species of narrative poem” echo the more esteemed qualities of waxwork shows, especially when he chooses to describe the experience of the novel as an activity of “seeing” rather than “reading”: “it has more personages brought into the story than any thing of the poetic kind I have ever seen . . . I have never seen any thing that was so much animated, and as I may say, all alive with characters and manners, as the History of Tom Jones.”28 Just as seemingly “alive” models of human life crowded the rooms of waxwork shows, they also filled the pages of Fielding’s novel. One might say that Mrs. Salmon, who used her mixed personages to relate the more distant history of England, operated as much as a doll maker and show woman as a historian and “writer of characters.” The Mirror allows for this notion when stating in 1779, “beside those who have professedly confined themselves to the delineation of character, every historian who relates events, and who describes the disposition and qualities of the persons engaged in them, is to be considered as a writer of characters.”29 On one hand, the essayist, Lord William Craig, gives us the terminology by which we can recognize the mimetic correspondences between historical text and doll—each privileges the modeling of “character.” On the other, he provides a genealogy for the emerging genre of the “new” novel that centralizes character, rather than “truth,” history, romance, or moral values. Used to seeing “character drawing” in the typological and isolated

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    renditions of Theophrastus and La Bruyere, readers in eighteenth-century England began to encounter the same emphasis on representing the traits of individual personhood in prose that, much like history, narrated the flow of circumstances and events (Mirror, 252–53).30 In doing so, a considerably more pliable and variegated image of personhood came into being. Just as prose fiction, with its innovations in constructing character, conceived the self as a malleable subject, susceptible to factors in its immediate environment, so too did the waxwork shows of eighteenth-century London. Indeed, by writing that novelists can “by the assistance of story . . . exhibit” the predominating features of an individual character “in every possible point of view,” Craig brings to mind the three-dimensional property of dolls (Mirror, 252–53). While sculptures may appear to fulfill the same voluminal standards, they, unlike the dolls of popular entertainment in eighteenth-century England, are not painted, nor do they wear fashions of the day or appear in staged settings.31 In short, sculptures, unlike dolls, evade the qualities of novelty that eighteenth-century consumers desired and sought in various media, from the printed pages of books to the dressed simulacra of themselves that performed on stages and stood on display in exhibition rooms. Throughout Craig incorporates terminology that reinforces the notion that dolls—in their contemporary usage as figures placed in narrative scenes and contexts—embody materially the new aesthetic ideals of characters: “it is, perhaps, impossible, to mark the nice and delicate shades of characters, without bringing the image more fully before the eye, and placing the person in that situation which calls him forth into action” (Mirror, 250). This is to say characters ought to be drawn so skillfully, they not only appear to have the full depths and dimensions of an actual person, but also seem to be in the same room as the reader. The most worthy novelists, “in place of relying upon the mere force of incident, bring the characters of their personages fully before us, paint all their shades and attitudes . . . making us, as it were, intimately acquainted with them” (Mirror, 254). Of the novelists who possess this “happy talent of delineating with truth and delicacy all the features and nice tints of human character,” are Fielding, “ever delightful, notwithstanding” his “indelicate coarseness,” and Richardson, “in spite of his immeasurable tediousness” (Mirror, 254).

   doll Toward mid-century, at least two waxwork shows circumvented the dull bits in Richardson’s prose by showcasing only the most stirring aspects of Pamela’s life. While one of them based itself on scenes from the original novel, the other followed John Kelly’s unauthorized sequel, Pamela’s Conduct in High Life. For a fictional woman who becomes confused with manufactured objects within the novel that creates her, and who undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis from servant girl to genteel wife, replicating her as a plastic, three-dimensional doll not only seems an apt procedure, but also continues the authorial project of characterizing her. Throughout the novel, she is alternately Mr. B’s “painted gewgaw,” “pretty image,” “speaking picture,” and “fool’s plaything,” as well as Richardson’s own creation. Indeed, as James Grantham Turner has argued, the exploding extra-textual and textual responses to Pamela—from paintings, plays, operas, and fashion accessories to sequels and satirical rewritings—converged in amplifying the novel’s own project of imagining the heroine’s body, including the “body of Pamela-as-text.”32 Even as “the public demands a Pamela more objectified and artifactual, embalmed in waxwork or fluttering on the fan,” the internal experience of reading the novel itself radically urges the heroine’s embodiment. While “Pamelists” might register this quality as the novel’s ability to “touch” readers emotionally, “anti-Pamelists,” such as the anonymous author of Pamela Censured, register it as the text’s dangerous proximity to pornography: “I think it is very artfully work’d up, and the Passions so strongly touch’d that it is impossible for Youth to read it without Sympathy, and even wishing themselves in such a Situation.”33 So wishful a young reader may become of being Pamela, she “can never read the Description of Naked Breasts being run over with the Hand . . . but her own soft Breasts must heave at the Idea and secretly sigh for the same pressure.”34 In the passage, the pornographic dimensions are undeniable, and certainly, the censurer unwittingly reproduces the very pornography he condemns. Yet more intriguing is the way in which the censurer envisions a shifting of identity taking place when the reader’s own body molds to the sensations described as being experienced by the character. The censurer not only suggests Pamela causes the reader to turn her own body into a doll to shape, but also implicates the potential for all novels—in their stirring of passions and character-identification—to turn readers into dolls.

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    Critics of novels that appeared well after Pamela, such as Mary Brunton’s Self Control (1811), continued to issue laments about “the identifying propensity” overcoming novel readers whereby, according to one anonymous reviewer, “it is easier to identify our modern selves with drawing-room and dressing-room personages, than with knight or lady of heroic times . . . an imposing transfer is made of situations and feelings to ourselves.” The most susceptible reader is “the young lady who has not quite determined whether to be herself, or her favourite heroine.”35 As for “today,” she “inevitably appears not quite herself.” Viewing characters in this light as potential objects of imitation, one might say the doll occupies the interstices between character and reader by making material the abstract fantasies of exemplary personhood that novel characters promulgate. Despite their strictly external form of embodiment, the dolls of eighteenth-century England, much like the characters from novels they sometimes modeled themselves after, penetrated the internal realm of experience through the reveries they stimulate in their viewers.

Objects of Loss, Mourning, and Realism At the same time that dolls played a conspicuous role in popular entertainment, they were used also as concrete inscriptions of both private and public loss. Max von Boehn describes how “When a certain Count Harcourt died, in 1769, his grief-stricken widow ordered a large wax image of her husband to be made, got it clad in his dressing-gown, and set it in an easy chair by her bedside.”36 Even more astonishing is the story of William Congreve, whose friend Henrietta the Duchess of Marlborough ordered a life-sized doll to be made of him upon his death in 1729. So exact was the effigy that it showed the open sore on his leg that plagued him during his lifetime. So attached was the Duchess of Marlborough to the doll as a replacement for Congreve himself that she “paid a doctor to dress this wound, and went about with the figure as if it were a living being.”37 Royalty, at least since 1377 with the death of Edward III, used dolls to memorialize dead rulers and national heroes. These life-sized effigies of the dead were based on death masks, carved from wood, decked out in royal finery, and carried on a platform during the ruler’s funeral procession. Ultimately, the funeral images, of which the ones made before 1660

   doll were dubbed “the Ragged Regiment,” were laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. Later figures after 1660 had wax heads and hands, glass eyes, and hair and bristle eyelashes. They were intended for funeral displays and were no longer carried during processions. These include likenesses of Charles II (1685); Frances, the Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (1702); and the Duke of Buckingham (1723) and his mother Catherine, Duchess of Buckingham (1743). In this context, wax dolls represented the full extent to which kings and sovereignty could operate as the “mere” forms, figures, or instruments of power that Wollstonecraft later decried in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to counter Rousseau’s claim that female children are naturally drawn to dolls and “see things through a false medium.”38 In 1786 the artist John Carter drew the Regiment in various states of disrepair39 (see Figure 3.2). The same year, Sophie von la Roche, encountering the Westminster Abbey dolls during her trip to London commented on their “queer” verisimilitude: The custom of exhibiting wax figures of important personages, clad in the costume of their day, struck me as extremely queer. A beautiful Duchess of Richmond seems to come towards one, when the doors of her cupboard have been opened, fan in hand, in her court-dress of green velvet embroidered in gold, as seen a hundred years ago; her stuffed dog and parrot are by her side.40

La Roche’s description, like Ward’s reception of the Bartholomew Fair waxworks, expresses wonder that the Duchess of Richmond appears still alive, with all the details of her existence captured. The similarity of these responses indicates that the enduring appeal of dolls for eighteenth-century subjects was their ability to create effects not only of reality, but also of life, and its qualities of animatedness. Indeed, neglected since the fourteenth century, the Westminster Abbey figures were restored in the late eighteenth century, the very time in which their appeal to visitors such as la Roche increased and brought more funds to church workers through the admission fee of twopence.41 The age of Enlightenment marks the point where the figures shifted in function from funerary relics to commodity objects—from idols to mere dolls more significant in their appeals to individual enjoyment than to common and spiritual values.42 As the popularity of these Westminster Abbey and other dolls indicate, the metaphorics of the intellectual and cultural period of Enlightenment in-

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange   

figure 3.2. John Carter, Funeral Effigies in Henry V’s Chantry, Westminster Abbey, 1786. Courtesy of the Muniment Room and Library, Westminster Abbey.

volved not just light and illumination, but the malleability and tactility of the material used to produce light—wax—and whose shape-shifting qualities became as representative of both the novel and its consuming subjects as reason itself. As these examples show, dolls, well before their widespread devel-

   doll opment into children’s toys in the nineteenth century, were codified to bear the adult inscriptions of loss. Waxworks, in comparison with other media, stimulated the eerie sense of mortality and of “still life” because their moldable properties are so conducive to naturalistic representation. Not just representation, waxworks endeavor to substitute completely for reality: “the waxworks simply carry this almost painful tendency toward naturalism, to use [Julius von] Schlosser’s happy phrase, ‘to the verge of indiscretion,’ ” writes von Boehn.43 In the most climactic scene of Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, it is a waxwork figure, so painful in its naturalistic rendition of pain, that makes Emily faint upon viewing it in a chamber behind a curtain.44 Emily’s fainting, famously undercutting her ability to discover anything further, also allows the narrative to remain Gothic in its extension of suspense, mystery, and horror. And yet, the novel’s ending slips into a mode of realism and rationality, explaining that had Emily “dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived, that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax.”45 The spectacle of a painful death, it turns out, was used as an object of penance for a former member of the house of Udolpho, who was made to regard it regularly to “profit by the humiliating moral it conveyed” of mortality. The logical neatness of Radcliffe’s plot resolution does not work simply to moralize her novel’s unsettling Gothic effects. It also produces the crossing of the irrational and rational that characterizes the aesthetic qualities of so many eighteenth-century forms of entertainment, including dolls and novels. Waxworks, like their mechanical counterparts, automata, most successfully generate fascination through a heightened effect of verisimilitude that could only be modeled by anatomical and scientific findings. Describing this effect, Marina Warner aptly writes, “in the waxwork of the Age of Enlightenment, reason meets the marvelous to produce a convincing representation of the human body and individual personality.”46 For both waxwork dolls and the eighteenth-century novel, the unnerving and wonderful semblance of being “alive” derived from the lessons of scientific method. If waxworks captured those lessons in space, novels did so in the temporal dimensions of narrative, as John Bender indicates when stating that the novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding “pretend to offer densely particular, visually evidentiary accounts of the physical

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    and mental circumstances that actuate their characters and motivate the causal consequences of their plots.”47 If the widely accepted uses for dolls were to operate not just as novel mirrors of nature and objects of pleasure, but also as unabashed—and “almost painful”—surrogates for humans, what, then, to make of their function as a model for femininity in that curious artifact of eighteenthcentury life, the fashion doll? (see Figure 3.3). If a doll is already the sign of loss—of being human, of being alive—then the project of emulating a doll might seem to result in the reinscription of loss. Such acts of reinscription suggest that femininity in the eighteenth century was a project of artificial reproduction that progressively distanced itself from nature and authenticity. In other words, being a woman in the eighteenth century was an intensely mimetic and modern project, capturing not what women are, but what women are like. This “likeness,” however, found its sources as much in manufactured objects as in novels, which in turn assumed the task of approximating the properties of “real” subjects in space—as well as time. If the eighteenthcentury novel as a literary form appeared new and original, it was because it served as a form of mediating the transience of human subjectivity through an object—an inanimate object—a book—that “speaks for itself” as Defoe had put it in Roxana.48 The loss of authentic humanness may very well be a cultural trope: in signaling the loss of any notion of an original and natural selfhood, eighteenth-century women’s emulation of dolls embraces the losses that are inherent to the modern—and novel— subject. Increasingly secular, the modern subject, as formed in eighteenthcentury England by dolls, became more given to the phantasmatic logic of commodity formation and the shifting fantasies of individual longings than ever before.

The Fashion Doll and the Mimetic Self Not just an interesting cultural detail in doll and fashion histories, the phenomenon of the fashion doll stimulates questions about how the period commodified the feminine, and how those methods of commodification helped construct modern notions of femininity. Furthermore, it clarifies how commodity culture helped conceive modern notions of femi-

   doll

figure 3.3. Fashion Doll’s Dress: c. 1770. Courtesy of the Bath Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset Council, UK.

ninity as a separate sex with specific desires and a specific relationship with the world of objects. Because fashion dolls were made by individual craftsmen such as wood turners or wax workers, as opposed to factory machines, their appearances to the eighteenth-century public were made on a selective basis, often within secluded areas of stores. The intimacy between woman and doll in those settings suggests that the fashion doll as a merchandising tool produced charged encounters between the natural and the artificial, the original and the copy, and the human and the inhuman, that inevitably disrupted any sense of a natural or integrated selfhood.49 For Daniel Roche, the fashion doll represented more than a trend in eighteenth-century consumer practices: “In sum,

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    the Europe of good form and court society was dependent on these Parisian merchants’ dolls; they were displayed in shop windows and admired beyond the beau monde; they were an aspect of the Enlightenment” (emphasis mine).50 The fashion dolls served as “an aspect” of the Enlightenment by being an instrument for the rise of consumerism and the period’s abandonment to high artifice. In addition, the fashion doll emblematizes the more ontological issues of how consumer societies confuse the distinction between “real” and “imagined” selfhood, thus throwing into question the viability of a “real” self. Eighteenth-century women were especially disposed to bracing this tension; in referring to dolls as models for norms of self-presentation, they somehow fashioned themselves as dolls. That the fascination with such artificial and ambiguous constructions of humanness as dolls, puppets, and automata in the latter half of the century coincided with women’s increasing participation in social life, shows an inclination to construct femininity as another type of novel and marvelous spectacle. Even as the spectacle of commodity-laden femininity bolstered Britain’s triumphant market economy and compelled the public eye, it enraged middle-class moralizers from Addison and Steele to conduct book authors Fordyce and Gisborne. This era produced visions of “woman” that arranged collaborations between the swift and fanciful movements of fashion and the urge to systematize and master “the world.” The doll, in its mute embodiment of the human subject, is the central figure for such collaborations, whose underlying motivations rest in assimilating desire with knowledge—the knowledge of others in order to obtain the desired self. In the eighteenth century, the state of longing for an ideal femininity was integral to the experience of femininity itself, and was most powerfully stimulated by a mute, artifactual and inanimate exemplar. Given several different names during its eighteenth-century life— jointed baby, courrier de la mode, Grande Pandore and Petite Pandore, poupée and grande poupée, doll à la mode, and mannequin—the fashion doll originated in France and functioned as a travelling dummy delivered to various countries and homes since at least the fourteenth century.

   doll However, it was not until the eighteenth century that the fashion doll became a widespread phenomenon of consumer culture. Neil McKendrick asserts that toward the end of the century, the fashion doll was no longer exclusively controlled by the French, nor intended for the eyes of the aristocracy only.51 England became a dispatcher of the fashion doll, and the middle-class female the prime object of its lures, implicating further its status as an “aspect of the Enlightenment” and an emblem of a modern age. In a period where common as well as noble people began desiring and endeavoring to be “in fashion,” the doll was an important vehicle for transmitting information about clothing trends, and facilitating the leveling of social hierarchies. Despite its ubiquity in cultural texts, the doll’s material history remains patchy. Little is documented about who made them, how they were made, how often they were seen, how they were displayed, what they actually looked like, and what happened to them when they expired as messengers of fashion. Very few examples of eighteenth-century fashion dolls have survived. Only the outermost remnants of a fashion doll—her allimportant dress—survives in the Bath Fashion Museum (see Figure 3.3). Alice Early believes a wooden doll, now owned by the Bostonian Society, came aboard as an English fashion doll on the ship that instigated the Boston Tea Party.52 Exemplifying the doll’s ever-ready interchangeability both as an object for adult consumption and as a child’s toy, the doll has since gone into the hands of children, and its eighteenth-century gown replaced by fashions contemporary to the times of subsequent owners.53 Globally, the fashion doll’s most frequent trips took place back and forth between Paris, the period’s fashion capital, and London. These dolls made possible in the sartorial realm the uniformity of appearance and increased quantity of reproduction that print technologies made possible in the textual medium.54 Furthermore, just as print made more convenient and possible the objectification and thus dissemination of ideas and information for a rapidly growing reading public, the fashion doll made it possible for women to quickly gain knowledge of fashion ideals and attempt to emulate them. That magazines eventually replaced the fashion doll to convey similar information suggests the technological advance that print signified for eighteenth-century subjects. In this sense, the strikingly concrete medium through which novels also relayed their own exemplary

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange   

figure 3.4. Fashion Doll: Eighteenth Century. Museum of London.

models of femininity, from Pamela and Clarissa to the scores of domestic novels that followed them, implicate the literary genre as the fashion doll’s rival—and collaborator—as a source of selfhood.55 A letter in The Spectator—in itself a powerfully influential vehicle of conveying information to the newly ascending middle-class public—indicates the extent to which women depended on fashion dolls as an “embodied” model of selfhood. Because of the fashion doll’s larger dimensions— closer in scale to the viewer’s body than the reader’s to the novel—an encounter with it invited a more radically mimetic cross-identification between woman and doll than woman and bauble might. Spectator 277 suggests this as it “embodies” the voice of a fashion doll devotee: I have long bewailed in secret the calamities of my sex during the war, in all which time we have laboured under the insupportable inventions of English tire-women, who though they sometimes copy indifferently well, can never compose with that “gout” they do in France.

   doll I was almost in despair of ever more seeing a model from that dear country, when last Sunday I overheard a lady in the next pew to me whisper another, that at the Seven Stars in King-street, Covent-garden, there was a mademoiselle completely dressed just come from Paris. I was in the utmost impatience during the remaining part of the service, and as soon as ever it was over, having learnt the millener’s “addresse,” I went directly to her house in King-street, but was told that the French lady was at a person of quality’s in Pall-mall, and would not be back again until very late that night. I was therefore obliged to renew my visit very early this morning, and had then a full view of the dear moppet from head to foot . . .  I thought fit, however, to give you this notice, that you may not be surprised at my appearing à la mode de Paris on the next birthnight.56

Breathlessly detailing the whereabouts of the fashion doll, the author of this letter—a male author impersonating “Teraminta”—personifies the doll by giving it such distinctly human names as “mademoiselle,” “the French lady,” and “the dear moppet.”57 Moreover, “she” refers to the doll— another “she”—as if it were an autonomous being, travelling to and from various fashionable houses on her own. The letter concludes with Teraminta’s intention to give “notice” to her correspondent, “Mr. Spectator.” What exactly is she alerting him to? Not to be surprised by her suddenly stylish dress “à la mode de Paris” the next time he sees her. Yet, given her descriptions of the doll as a living woman on whom to pay a visit, her slavish need to view the doll, and her warning to Mr. Spectator, she implies a more complex relationship between woman and doll than her bright absorption in frivolity might suggest. Accompanying female attendance to dolls is an ineluctable and “natural” desire to transform the self into a doll, and to turn the doll into a self. While the Spectator letter demonstrates how the wish to view the doll evolves into the wish to become the doll, other cultural sources indicate the transformation can be a spurious or quite redundant one as the identification between women and dolls is already an effect of female nature itself. Eighteenth-century personages consistently referred to fashion dolls, invariably making ironic remarks about the inability to distinguish between the dolls and real women. Horace Walpole wrote a letter to Mary Berry on October 10, 1793, denouncing the “egregious vanity” of the French: “They sent dolls dressed in their own fashions to other countries, and imagined they were communicating universal knowledge—and

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    indeed there was little difference between the jointed baby and the prototype.”58 Louis Sebastien Mercier, in his Tableau de Paris, refers to Paris as the geographical origin from which designers send the laws of fashion to the universe and acknowledges his country’s particular “genius” in fashion, “the art of making the most common things seem new again.” He also recounts bringing a friend to a house of fashion on Rue Saint-Honoré to convince him that the “prototype inspirateur” indeed exists. In doing so, Mercier calls the boutique’s interior a “seraglio” (un serrail) of dolls, and describes how his friend repeatedly touched the dolls in order to verify their “realness.”59 And yet if these sources seem to compress the temporality of transformation into an immediate identification between women and the fashion doll, it is because the work of transformation that Teraminta embraces has taken place elsewhere, in the privacy of the woman’s own encounter with the doll. An advertisement from 1799 for Ross’s Fashionable Female Emporium in London relays a sense of the physical act of viewing a fashion doll by boasting an exhibition of wigs and headdresses in a special room that, much like the secret interiors of the Parisian boutiques that Mercier visited, is secluded and thus protected from the stares of “impertinent curiosity”: TRICHOMATO-PARASTASIS, or ATHENIAN WIGGERY, No. 119, Bishopsgate-Street Within, Three Doors from the London Tavern. In this Exhibition, the Elegance of Nature, and Convenience of Art, are so combined, as at once to rival and ameliorate each other. The Room is secluded from the View of impertinent Curiosity, where his Fair Patrons may, uninterruptedly, examine the Effect of artificial Tresses on POUPEE of all Complexions; and, by a trial on themselves, blend the different Tints with their own.60

Ross’s advertisement reveals that successful cosmetic enhancement requires a balance between art and nature that both threatens and supports each other. Such a collaborative objective for two apparently contradictory elements, art and nature, anticipates Simone de Beauvoir’s notion that it is “through adornment” that “woman allies herself to nature while bringing to nature the need of artifice.”61 Elsewhere she states, “The function of ornament is to make her share more intimately in nature and at the same time to remove her from the natural, it is to lend to palpitating life the gelid urgency of artifice” (emphasis mine).62 In keeping with such principles, the

   doll emporium’s selling points, in addition to the secluded room where women are free to lose themselves in consumer reverie, lie in the merchandiser’s attempt at realism, despite and because of the dolls’ innate artificiality. At Ross’s Fashionable Female Emporium, dolls “of all complexions” supply shoppers with objective points of comparisons between themselves and the desired effect that their artificial versions, dolls, exemplify for them. Ross’s Emporium, in short, offers a space where women and dolls can commune, rivaling and ameliorating each other. Imparting a more direct sense of the affect that viewing fashion dolls in their enclosed space elicited, Cleone Knox, an Irish “young lady of fashion” on a tour of Europe, wrote in her diary from 1764: Madame de Brinoy escorted me in her coach to the Rue St. Honoré to see the Marvellous Temple of Fashion there. This street is the home of the Marchand des Modes, and we occupied ourselves for near an hour admiring the little Dolls and mannequins decked out in the newest modes. These are sent all over the World, even to Constantinople and other Barbaric spots.63

Hinting that the dolls themselves are more intriguing than the fashions they peddled, Knox’s description offers us some evidence that an encounter with dolls in a fashion emporium was, in contrast with Mercier’s prurient impression of encountering a seraglio, a museum-like experience. Housed in one place, the “Marvellous Temple of Fashion” forms a collection of dolls in diverse dresses that connote both the fantasy and containment of the exotic places they are said to visit, and suggest its capacity to impart information as well as wonder. Cleone Knox’s nearly hour-long admiration of the dolls bespeaks their arresting effect on her. The very name of the fashion emporium that Knox visits—the Marvellous Temple of Fashion—with its appropriation of the wonderful and the sacred to market itself and conceal its true function of commercial exchange, indicate that like waxworks, fashion dolls stage a meeting between reason and wonder. Here, reason evinces itself in the rationary spirit of mercantilism that motivates the production of fashion dolls. At the same time, the discourse of wonder surfaces in the mindaltering effects of women’s encounters with fashion dolls.64 Defined as a dreamlike experience that is productive of an expanded selfhood through relaxing the boundaries of a fixed self and allowing objects to impress themselves on the brain, wonder can also threaten to overtake the self

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    when the subject overidentifies with those objects of wonder. The fashion doll, wonderful in its ability to insinuate dreams of self-transformation, threatens to extinguish the self and its own human capacity to desire being the doll, and what the doll represents.

Enlightened Expansion and Containment: The Doll Collection in the Imaginary Repository for Fashions Whereas museums focus on producing knowledge through its simulacra of alternate realities, the Marvellous Temple of Fashion of Rue St. Honoré stimulates pleasure and desire. Appearing to articulate more fully the institutional vision that fashion dolls and their showrooms promised, Steele’s Spectator 478 presents a plan for a Repository for Fashions, with shelves filled not with “Books as in a Library” but boxes containing miniature dolls modeling fashion specimens.65 The Folding-Doors that cover the boxes open to reveal a Baby dress’d out in some Fashion which has flourish’d, and standing upon a Pedestal, where the Time of its Reign is mark’d down. For its further Regulation let it be order’d, that every one who invents a Fashion shall bring in his Box whose Front he may at Pleasure have either work’d or painted with some amorous or gay Device, that, like Books with gilded Leaves and Covers, it may the sooner draw the Eyes of the Beholders.

While this architectural dream seems a precursor to the modern costume museum, and a satire of the Royal Society’s own repositories of curious natural objects, it remains an artifact of Enlightenment attitudes toward fashion as a potentially disruptive and volatile product of fancy and the imagination. A.B., the author of the letter to Mr. Spectator containing the proposal, recounts how the idea came out of a shopping trip with a friend. Less enthused about shopping than his friend, A.B. becomes bored. He recounts, “the things which I had been staring at along with him began to fill my Head, and led me into a Set of amusing Thoughts concerning them.” Here, consumer desire travels in an interesting direction. Instead of adorning visions of his outward self, “the things” he stares at in stores directly enter his head to transmute into abstract thoughts and imaginings

   doll that in turn emerge as the museum itself, which, like the head that imagines it, functions as another type of container for knowledge and inventions. It is the museum and the dolls within that wear the merchandise stealing his friend’s attention, showing how A.B.’s shopping-induced reverie belies a more intimate involvement with the dream-images of fashionable commodities. Rejecting such an involvement, he muses on fashion’s power to generate employment and “Circulation of Money,” wondering “if any one who enters into a Detail of Fashions” stops to consider these broader implications. After his friend has completed his shopping, they chat in a tavern, where they extol fashion’s effects as objects striking and pleasing to the senses, and objects that in turn make men “agreeable Objects.” Fashion, they agree, improves society in that the bashful man can learn to feel at ease in company if he knows he is dressed correctly. Fashion also gives society a universal language for reading the different ranks of men. No doubt a point where the letter’s satire begins to creep in, the building they both imagine to commemorate the wonderful social effects of fashion is shaped “as that which stands among the Pyramids, in the Form of a Woman’s Head.” This quasi-Egyptian head, austerely raised on pillars, bears such fashionable ornaments as “an Imitation of Fringe carv’d in the Base, a Sort of Appearance of Lace in the Frize; and a Representation of curling Locks, with Bows of Riban sloping over them, may fill up the Work of the Cornish.” The door to this building bears further embellishment through a picture hanging above elaborately depicting: a Looking-Glass and a Dressing-Chair in the Middle of it: Then on one Side . . . Patch-boxes, Pin-Cushions, and little Bottles; on the other, Powder-Bags, Puff, Combs, and Brushes; beyond these, Swords with fine Knots, whose Points are hidden, and Fans almost closed, with the Handles downward, are to stand out interchangeably from the Sides, till they meet at the Top and form a Semi-circle over the rest of the Figures: Beneath it all, the Writing is to run in this pretty sounding manner: All ye Venuses, Graces, and Cupids, attend: See, prepared to your hands, Darts, torches, and bands: Your weapons here choose, and your empire extend.66

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    As the building’s exterior attempts to endow a monumental and ancient effect to the figuration of a woman’s form, its ornamentation haphazardly derived from current fads only creates a spectacle of fashion’s pure artifice and regenerates it as that tasteless form of “metafashion,” kitsch.67 This architectural imbalance between the classical and the trivial artifacts of fashionable life recalls Pope’s own mock-epic animations of striving wigs and sword knots in The Rape of the Lock, as well as the battle scene of canto V in which Belinda draws her bodkin as a weapon. Even as A.B.’s letter demonstrates how the effort to endow permanence to fashion results in absurdity, it reveals that fashion, whose very essence defies permanence by fostering the transience of novelty and public taste, is produced through a vocabulary of objects, concrete and discernible in their absolute materiality and relationship to an all too specific point in time. The powder bags, fans, and sword knots, abstracted from their wearers and placed on the permanent structure of a building, endure as embarrassing tokens of human caprice and desire, and as instruments for trivia’s battles and empires. Of a piece with this mocking enlargement of the trivial and the small, the Repository for Fashion’s building is constructed as a fashionable woman’s head, almost as if to disown A.B.’s masculine involvement with fashion, for it was his head, after all, that the merchandise entered earlier, only to become transformed into the museum’s plan. The woman’s immense head serves as an exteriorized and enlarged copy for the fashion dolls it houses in “two Apartments, appropriated to each Sex.” The fashion babies fit into the repository as books and natural objects do in libraries and cabinets of curiosity. Indeed, their booklike casings indicate their hybrid function. They are “regulated,” dated, and maintained by an archivist, a “Keeper appointed, who shall be a Gentleman qualify’d with a competent Knowledge in Cloaths” (in other words, it is wryly revealed, a viable employment for “some Beau” who has “spent his Estate” on clothes). In its endeavors to regulate and systematize the heterogeneity of dolls as representatives of diverse and exotic fashions, the Repository treats dolls as miniature receptacles for knowledge, “marking down” their qualities and presenting them as books for reference rather than the dreamy absorption offered by novels and, for some, the shopping experience. If the handling of the books and dolls themselves appear to deny the fanciful effects of novelty and fashion—or “the art of making the most common things seem new again” as Mercier defined it—A.B.’s process

   doll of imagining the Repository does not. The eighteenth-century novel—in keeping with the Lockean model of human understanding as a technological medium, the camera obscura specifically, where things move and happen—offered readers a new medium for reflexivity and psychological interiority.68 By containing the subjective forces of reflection and imagination blended with the external or objectively defined features of daily life, the early novel was able to represent what traditional mimetic forms such as poetry and drama could not. Culturally, fashion was conjoined with novels by virtue of not only their shared identities as fashionable goods that signaled modernity, but also their mutual absorption of the traces of daily life as transmitted through matter itself, not just through the head. An anonymous reviewer of Labyrinths of Life (1791) forms this connection between the material and abstract contents of one’s head in reflecting on an earlier “species of goods,” the novel: Two of the earlier fabricators of this species of goods, the modern novel, in our country, were Daniel Defoe, and Mrs Haywood; the success of Pamela may be said to have brought it into fashion; and the progress has not been less rapid than the extension of the use of tea, to which a novel is almost as general an attendant, as the bread and butter, especially in a morning. While we are on this subject, it is also to be noted, that nothing is more common than to find hair powder lodged between the leaves of a novel; which evinces the corresponding attention paid to the inside as well as to the outside of a modern head. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, were the Wedgwoods, of their days.69

While the excerpt relays how novels became equivalent with such consumer products as Wedgwood china (and their authors likened to manufacturers), its image of the novel’s hair powder–streaked pages supports a viewpoint similar to the one sustaining A.B.’s imaginary plan for the Repository of Fashion: any engagement with fashion or novelty forms an inextricable link between the “exterior” head and the “interior.” Yet, while the fashionable products of the novel reader’s exterior head correspond with what goes inside the interior, A.B., the reluctant consumer and would-be capitalist (as builder of an architectural and economic capital), displaces the material objects that enter his own head into a fantastically conceived albeit functional one. In other words, he dissociates himself from novelistic and fashionable involvement even as he entertains their habits of mind. Keeping its doll collection for the general public’s use, the

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    Repository’s dolls function much like the medical “Venuses” or dolls that filled anatomy museums and cabinets to show the workings of the human body and the mechanics of birthing throughout the eighteenth century.70 Yet, unlike the contemporary sources that relay impressions of viewing fashion dolls, there is no subjective sense of wonder in their viewing, no personal pleasure in the dolls’ mimetic allure—its very replication, in material form, of a person—or in their novelty. In seeking to organize and utilize fashion through these dolls, the founders of the Fashion Repository develop a relationship with them that is more detached—objective and instrumentalizing—than Teraminta’s or Cleone Knox’s, who are swayed by pleasure in the dolls themselves. It is true that men such as Mercier, would-be Grand Signior of a seraglio, and Clodius, in Adollizing, derive pleasure from dolls. However, it is not so much the pleasure of identification as the pleasure of control and possession that collectors also share. Unlike Mercier and Clodius, A.B. fails to register any impulse to anthropomorphize the dolls of his museum. Instead, he regards the dolls solely as objects for the collection and organization of knowledge, and the growth of British capital, the larger structures that the consumer, distracted by the pleasures of material things, cannot see. In short, there is no pleasure here because the Repository of Fashion is described from the point of view of the institution, the civic collection itself. The Repository of Fashion betokens the eighteenth-century’s transformation of cabinets of curiosity, or kunstkammern, into inventories of use and categories, diminishing their former emphases in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the play, wonder, and difference, and increasing the divide between art and technics. Bredekamp calls this eighteenth-century direction in the history of the kunstkammer a “compulsion for utility.”71 In turn, this compulsion entailed a radical “rejection of the marvelous.” Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park claim this rejection, in fact, was “central to the new, secular meaning of enlightenment as a state of mind and a way of life.”72 One aspect of the Repository’s usefulness is its function as a helpmate to Britain’s profile as a center for fashion. The founders hope that the Repository will help oust Britain’s rival in fashion (and original purveyor of the fashion doll), France, and expand Britain’s mercantile and imperialist activities. The emphasis is on use and expansion. Yet the Repository, in its

   doll status as a collection, operates as a source of containment. It is, in fact, a model in miniature for Britain itself.73 As instruments and models for knowledge about fashion history, as well as Britain’s global empire and market economy, the fashion dolls of Spectator 278 mediate a more “Enlightened” approach to fashion, an approach that none of its female worshippers appear to see. For they, it is implied, become trapped in the interior and timeless confines of the fashion repositories and emporiums, and too closely identify with the contained versions of themselves that are spread around the globe to increase Britain’s empire.

Mandeville’s Wish’d for Self Bernard Mandeville, the most controversial commentator on England’s rise to capitalism and a self-proclaimed “champion” of vice and luxury, outlines the precarious relationship between subjects and objects mobilized by consumer desires. In its stresses on the material object as both an enabler for human desire and a threat to the “authentic” self, Mandeville’s unfolding of the dynamics between the wishing self and the wish’d for self in The Fable of the Bees (1714–1732) helps theorize the fashion doll’s role as an agent of subject-formation. Most compellingly, Mandeville contextualizes in socioeconomic terms the psychological lure of novelty in a freshly thriving market culture, thus making more coherent the inner workings of women emulating an ideal self that is, after all, a lifeless object. Through his interlocutors Cleomenes and Horatio in the third dialogue of The Fable of the Bees, Part II (a defense of the incendiary Part I), Mandeville delineates the psychology—“anatomizing the invisible Parts of Man,” as he puts it—that motivates people to desire being what they are not (Fable I, 145). Claiming that in “self-liking,” “every individual person likes himself better than he does any other,” Cleomenes meets with Horatio’s rebuttal that, in fact, he encountered in Rome a Count Theodati whom he “often wish’d [himself] to be.” Cleomenes responds evenly, “He was a very fine person indeed, and extremely well accomplish’d; and therefore you wish’d to be such another, which is all you could mean” (Fable II, 137). Interestingly, though Horatio’s example was a male one, Cleomenes recites female instances of emulation to support his point: “Celia has a very handsome face, fine eyes, fine teeth; but she has red hair, and is ill

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    made; therefore she wishes for Chloe’s hair and Bellinda’s shape; but she would still remain Celia.” Horatio insists, however, that his desire to emulate another person does not extend merely to pieces or parts of the person: “But I wish’d, that I might have been that Person, that very Theodati” (Fable II, 137). Horatio’s bold pronouncement that he wanted to be that very other person upsets the model of “self-liking” that Cleomenes has attempted to explain to him. Indeed, for within “self-liking,” Horatio’s desire is “impossible, [even] to wish it; unless [he] wish’d for annihilation at the same time” (Fable II, 137). Cleomenes elaborates: “It is that self we wish well to; and therefore we cannot wish for any change in ourselves, but with a proviso, that . . . that part of us, that wishes, should still remain: for take away that consciousness you had of yourself, whilst you was wishing, and tell me pray, what part of you it is, that could be the better for the alteration you wish’d for?” (Fable II, 137). Elsewhere, Cleomenes restates the problem in more extreme terms, “That he itself, the person wishing, must be destroy’d before the change could be entire” (Fable II, 137). This rich formulation addresses the violence that desire can inflict on the self. Not only can desire split the self into two separate zones—the “wishing self” and the “wish’d for” self—it also causes the eventual erasure of that prior self, the “wishing self.” Much like the fantastically naturalistic waxwork figures so significant to eighteenth-century aristocrats and pleasure seekers, the specters of pain and emptiness lurked on the underside of consumer culture’s material plenitude. The distinction between original and copy undergirds the anxiety that accompanies the wish’d for self’s replacement of the wishing self. While self-liking in the dialogue seems to use “like” as a verb form, meaning to “find pleasing or favorable,” the negative conclusion Cleomenes makes about Horatio’s all-consuming desire to become someone other than himself latches onto its mimetic alternative as an adjective for “having the same characteristics or qualities as some other person or thing” (OED). In other words, when Cleomenes cautions Horatio against the self-destructive possibilities of wishing for a more ideal self, he not only worries about the loss of self-esteem that inheres in “self-liking,” but also expresses anxiety about the loss of integrity or likeness to the “wishing self,” which becomes defined as “natural,” “true,” and “authentic” in relation to the “wish’d for” self. Self-liking, in other words, realized as the desire to

   doll make oneself in the image of not someone else, but oneself, reveals an antimimetic strain; to make oneself in the image of someone else is to make the self disruptively strange and novel. This very same discourse against emulation—and its impulse of “copying”—appeared in responses to the novel as a potent tool for education via its mimetic powers, most dangerously borne out in the reader herself as an ineluctable urge toward mimicking the characters about whom she reads, and with whom she identifies.74 In novel discourses about susceptible readers, as in Mandeville’s descriptions of the consumer subject throughout The Fable of the Bees, the implied self is gendered as female. The Whole Duty of Woman, Or, an Infallible Guide to the Fair Sex (1737), for example, discredits “the reading [of] romance, which seems now to be thought the peculiar and only becoming Study of young Ladies . . . [because] it is to be feared they often leave ill Impressions behind them. Those amorous Passions, which it is their design to paint to the utmost Life, are apt to insinuate themselves into their unwary Readers, and by an unhappy Inversion a Copy shall produce an Original.”75 In this condemnation, the “copy” performs the surprising trick of becoming the “original,” echoing the process by which Teraminta in Spectator 277 obtains a full view of the fashion doll “from head to foot,” only to become not just a copy of, but “the dear moppet” herself when “appearing à la mode de Paris on the next birthnight.” Inanimate objects from novels to dolls, rendered as copies of elements in “reality,” take over the functions of their own originals, the living, feeling, thinking, and speaking subjects who consume them. Consider that most avidly copied character in the material and moral lives of mid-eighteenth-century women, Pamela, and her own admiring regard of herself. For the construction of virtue, this heroine’s desire for self-fashioning through the garments of another—a higher class other, with abundant access to finery—is rejected and the image of Pamela’s “own” self becomes the desired doll, just as consumers who read the novel, visited the waxwork shows, and bought Pamela hats and fans desired her: I trick’d myself up as well as I could in my Garb, and put on my round-ear’d Cap; but with a green Knot however, and my homespun Gown and Petticoat, and plainleather Shoes; but yet they are what they call Spanish Leather, and my ordinary Hose, ordinary I mean to what I have been lately used to; tho’ I shall think good

Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange    Yarn may do very well for every day, when I come home. A plain Muslin Tucker I put on, and my black Silk Necklace, instead of the French Necklace my Lady gave me; and put the Ear-rings out of my Ears; and when I was quite ‘quipp’d, I took my Straw Hat in my Hand, with its two blue Strings, and look’d about me in the Glass, as proud as any thing—-To say Truth, I never lik’d myself so well in my Life.76

Thus Pamela exemplifies a scenario in which objectifying the self results in a literal moment of self-liking; she likes her “own” self so much, she will make her self just “like” that self. Mandeville’s grammar of selfhood cautions precisely against a form of wishing that Pamela rejects, one that takes another self as its object. Rather than wishing for another self, it is better for the wishing self to remain incomplete, stranded without a requisite object, and thus defying metaphysical if not grammatical demands. Using vanity—the supremely feminized form of self-liking—as an appropriate embodiment, Mandeville’s economy respects wishing’s transitive essence when it preserves the wisher’s consciousness and the identity it forms through the very state of wishing. Moreover, because vanity entails wishing for another person’s discrete parts—another woman’s hair, or yet another woman’s shape—it reaches out to a less threatening sense of objects as inorganic and concrete material that may more easily be appropriated and serve as adornments for the self one already has, and likes. Hence, the model represented in Spectator 478, in imagining dolls as diminutive objects in relation to the knowledge- and profit-driven subject, only reinforces the Enlightened model of self-liking and the dreams of self-integrity, order, and regularity it upholds. In the wish-propelled and consumer framework of a woman regarding a full-scale (hence more easily anthropomorphized) fashion doll, however, the presence of two selves in a statement linked by “wishing to be” rather than “wishing to have” presents the metaphysical pitfall of ceasing to be at all when wishing to be another. Certainly, as Mandeville demonstrates, the representation of the self was always at stake in these various activities that demanded objects— getting, buying, acquiring, accumulating, consuming, wanting, desiring, wishing. The language of consumption found itself on intimate terms with the language of self-objectification.77 Thus manifested in Mandeville’s diverse portrayals throughout his Fable of the contemporary fervor for acquiring and consuming objects more often than not, converged with the

   doll register of subjectification. This convergence between subjectification and objectification, realized in fashion dolls, could be marked by pleasure or by the threat of self-annihilation. In Mandeville’s portrayal of “the nature of society,” novelty and its ability to confuse subjects with objects became the very condition for subjective being, as well as a healthy economy. As Mandeville’s example of a Celia who wishes for Chloe’s hair and Bellinda’s shape yet remains Celia suggests, the subject who is more susceptible to this process of self-objectification is a feminine one. Numerous contemporary accounts of eighteenth-century trade also dwelled on how accountable women were for most of the traffic in goods because of their weakness for frivolity. In other words, it is womanly vice in particular that supports Mandeville’s paradoxical apposition of “private vice, publick benefits” and its role in the greater machine of society, fancifully constructed as a literal beehive in the satire from which the Fable emerged, The Grumbling Hive.78 And yet, true to Mandeville’s own paradoxical cast of mind, a virtue within the alleged vices of “pride” and “luxury” reveals itself. Eighteenth-century women were not merely “objectified” as instruments for the maintenance of England’s global prosperity and its passage into modernity; rather, women themselves sought to objectify themselves precisely in order to purchase their subjectivity, a procedure that has been coherently articulated and preserved for us today in that most eloquent object of subjectivity, the novel. The dual value of wonder, a by-product of novelty, according to Henry Home of Kames, in producing a subject whose constitution remains inextricable from its objects, also produced a distinct version of the modern self that articulates the vicissitudes of materiality and selfhood.79 In spite of shunning the “self-liking” that both Mandeville and Kames cite as means for preserving oneself from the upsetting effects of novelty, eighteenth-century women’s interior practices of self-liking (or self-emulation)—most stunningly engaged with dolls—elicited affective responses that never fail to appear in the Enlightenment’s narratives of knowledge and improvement, its lessons of pain and pleasure both.

c h a p t e r f o ur

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out

The novels of Frances Burney—Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796), in particular—focus on the period in eighteenth-century women’s lives as they move from childhood into adult life and present themselves formally to “the world.”1 While depicting her heroines’ experiences in pleasure gardens, masked balls, holiday resorts, and theaters, Burney lays bare the interface between their private sense of self-consciousness in these settings and the uncompromisingly public nature of social life. For Burney’s characters and herself as a published writer—coming out, whether in ballrooms, in pleasure gardens, or on the printed page—entails a compulsive identification with the automaton, a model of mimesis and regularity that appeared persistently in eighteenth-century conduct literature and social life. As I will discuss in this chapter, depicting such processes of mechanical identification paradoxically grant Burney’s protagonists affective range, as well as promote the aesthetic force and technical innovation of her novels.2 When presenting women as automata, Burney does not simply reiterate or decry a cultural stereotype. Rather, she deploys the novel medium for detailing the possibilities of generating individual affect within the very confines of the mechanized subjectivity that appears to limit the depth of female expression. It is through subscribing to the laws of propriety, yet bringing themselves to the limits at which those laws become impossible to obey, that Burney’s heroines paradoxical-

   automaton ly loosen the regulatory constraints of ideal femininity. The surplus of affect produced by imminent states of abjection, in other words, creates the force by which the protagonists simultaneously obey and resist the conversions into automatized subjectivity that social life demands. Writing within a discursive background surrounding the possibilities of mechanical subjectivity, Burney consistently engaged the novel as an ideologically loaded “vehicle” for projecting these volatile processes of self-objectification involved when presenting oneself in public contexts of exposure and display. As her journals and letters show, working with the novel form was fraught with technical and psychological difficulties that resisted pressures—from her father, Charles Burney, and her father figure, Samuel Crisp—to meet punishing deadlines in order to garner yet more fame and money after the surprise success of her secretly written first novel, Evelina. Rather than attributing artistic agency to her, fashionable and influential friends viewed her writings as the effortless products of a charming but limited machine. Indeed, it was through likening Burney to a machine that her friends expressed their affection, as well as admiration for her talent. Chiding Burney on December 5, 1779, for falling ill, her “Daddy,” Samuel Crisp writes, “Why, what a slight piece of machinery is the terrestrial part of thee, our Fannikin! A mere nothing, a Blast, a Vapour, disorders the Spring of thy Watch’ and the Mechanism is so fine, that it requires no common hand to set it a going again.”3 About her writing, Crisp claimed “she can coin gold at such a Rate, as to sit by a warm Fire, and in 3 or 4 months . . . gain £250 by scribbling the Invention of her own Brain—only putting down in black and white whatever comes into her own head, without labour.” In Burney’s case, the vehicle struggles against its tenor: the novel’s form, with its forward-moving engine of narrative, implicitly works in tension with Burney’s own efforts to depict the liminal subjectivity of heroines trapped between social codes on one hand and their own repetitive reflexes of loss and abjection on the other. As if recognizing the inherent impossibility of matching her form to her content, Burney’s novels, after Evelina, became increasingly swollen, dense, and burdened by proliferating characters and circumstantial details, seeming,

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    it appears, not to trust the operability of their own novelistic force and conclusions.4 At the same time, she expressed throughout her letters and journals and her father’s biography, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, a “conflicted sense of herself as a compulsive writer,” both wanting and not wanting to write, but always writing nevertheless.5 She registered this conflict through recurring to the conventional idiom of identifying her body as a machine, divorced from the unceasing one of her brain.6 After the anxiety-provoking success of Evelina, and during the writing of Cecilia, she wrote to her sister: I go on but indifferently,-I didn’t write as I did, the certainty of being known, the high success of Evelina, which, as Mr. [Samuel] Crisp says, to fail in a 2d would tarnish,-these thoughts worry and depress me, -& a desire to do more than I have been able, by writing at unseasonable Hours, & never letting my Brains rest even when my corporeal machine was succumbent.7

If working with the novel form appears fraught with technical and psychological difficulties for Burney, the social and ideological background for her novels surrounding ideas about mechanical subjectivity—embedded as much in the sights and artifacts of material culture as in conduct book dictates and contemporary philosophy—challenges further the notion that women can mediate subjectivity through acts of invention as opposed to copying. Few other models of subjectivity appear to compel and thwart the heroines more, and Burney herself, than the ever-capacious figure of eighteenth-century machine life and its well-modulated displays of openness and inwardness, whether captured in marvelous toys, the strict patterns of conduct book femininity, or the carefully crafted characters of a novel.

The Machine Life of Women in Eighteenth-Century England While consumer society propelled female subjects into a perpetual and nongenerative state of wishing for trinkets and apparel—with the fashion doll working as its agent—it also presented an artifactual corol-

   automaton lary in the unreflecting yet intriguingly repetitive figure of the automaton. Well before Hoffmann’s haunting creation of Olympia in “The Sandman” (1818), Ned Ward in Adam and Eve Stript of their Furbelows (1714) made a ready equation between the “Machine” and cultural models of femininity when describing the “Devout Lady” who, in her piety, “is so precise in her Deportment, and so mathematically regular in all her Actions, that you would think every Motion in her Limbs, were the Effects of Art, and not of Nature, and that her whole Composition was but a Machine of Clockwork.”8 Elsewhere throughout the century, the machine proliferated in conduct literature as a mixed figure for women’s consistency and restraint, or her vanity and vacuity. Working as a moral standard, for example, clockwork imagery fuels Hester Chapone’s lecture on procrastination in Letters on the Improvement of the Mind: “There is in many people, and particularly in youth, a strange aversion to regularity—a desire to delay what ought to be done immediately, in order to do something else . . . It is of more consequence to you than you can conceive . . . to acquire habits of constancy and steadiness.”9 Viewing the mechanics of conduct more broadly, Abbé D’Ancourt’s Lady’s Preceptor, or, a Letter to a Young Lady of Distinction upon Politeness, conceives the whole of life as a machine: “Life is a continual Series of operations, both of Body and Mind, which ought to be regulated and performed with the utmost care.”10 For Richard Allestree, in A Lady’s Calling, modesty itself, “the Science of decent motion,” operates as a canny system for regulating thought and behavior, as it “checks and controles all rude exorbitancies, and is the great civilizer of conversations.” Furthermore, it equalizes the internal self to the external self, as it “does not only ballast the mind with sober and humble thoughts of ones self, but also steers every part of the outward frame.”11 John Essex in The Young Ladies Conduct: or, Rules for Education depicts a less idealized and unified version of female machine life when, in a chapter on “Industry, and the Abhorrence of Idleness,” he works to “remind” his “Fair Readers” that without “Moral Duties . . . they are no more than a bare animated Piece of beautiful Clay.”12 Conduct literature, in fact, presents the most forceful images of young women as machines when specifically enjoining against such identification. For instance, George Lord Saville [sic], Earl of Halifax, in The Lady’s New-year’s Gift: Or, Advice to a Daughter (1724),

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    describes the woman whose “Looking-Glass in the Morning dictateth to her all the Motions of the Day”: “she cometh into a Room as if her Limbs were set on with ill made Screws, which maketh the Company fear the pretty Thing should leave some of its Artificial Person upon the Floor. She doth not like herself as God Almighty made her, but will have some of her own Workmanship.”13 Not falling short of oral expression, mechanization affects even the woman’s speech: “her Discourse is a senseless Chime of empty Words.” Though taken in at first by the piece of work that is his love object, the young man who has fallen in love with her soon comes to his senses and sees instead of the “Goddess” he worshiped, “only an Artificial Shrine moved by Wheels and Springs.”14 Of interest in the eighteenth-century catalogue of entries on the relationship between automatism and female conduct is the manner in which the machine works as the standard against which female character is not only compared and measured, but self-created. Unlike the consuming woman’s relationship with the fashion doll and, by extension, the experience of novel reading, identifying with the automaton derives from and creates a thwarted, rather than expanded image of self. These moments of moral identification, unlike consumption’s gentler reveries, worked in close tension with social circumstances and standards. In Halifax’s depiction, the woman afflicted by vanity and affectation only becomes a machine through the force of her own vices. So intent is she on becoming the idealized vision of her self, she forsakes her natural, “God-given” features for artificial ones. In short, she becomes her own walking and talking doll. In contrast with Hoffmann’s 1818 female automaton, Halifax’s 1688 version is created not by men of science—Spalanzani and Coppelius—but by the woman’s own hands. This aspect of the eighteenth-century relationship between women and automata—one in which women initiate the effort to create their identities in the image of machines—gave new meaning to standard definitions of the automaton as “a machine or engine which has the principle of motion in itself.”15 More remarkable in Halifax’s example is that such efforts at selfmanufacturing derive from the woman’s feelings of self-dislike—“She doth not like herself as God Almighty made her.” Moreover, just as soon as her dislike of her natural self leads her to re-create herself in the image of a machine, it also threatens to undo her own workmanship, which the companion image of the woman as a disarticulated, incoherent, and

   automaton broken toy seems to want to suggest. Halifax’s punishing vision of the woman as a machine whose overreaching vanity leaves pieces of her shattered on the floor stages the relationship between women and machines produced throughout Burney’s novels. Within her narratives of women who strive and fail to meet compulsory standards of social and moral conduct, mechanical models of selfhood turn into the very image of abjection that Halifax imagines, thus creating an unlikely but classical conjunction between the mechanical and the organic.16 Such metaphors for women as machines arose alongside a more gender-neutral if not less complex discourse of mechanics that emerged in diverse areas, from Hobbes’s foundational image of the commonwealth as an “Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall,” debates between philosophes and materialists on determinism versus free will, La Mettrie’s radical identification between the human and the machine in L’Homme Machine, and Kant’s use of the automaton to debate the viability of free will in deterministic thought, to Adam Smith’s notion of self-regulation in economic liberalism.17 In these ways, “a rich motif of Enlightenment philosophy and its legacies,” as Simon Schaffer puts its, the automaton also pervaded literature about and for members of society who have yet to become civil subjects, the apex of Enlightened subjectivity. In addition to the roles that Schaffer mentions—commodities for popular culture, tools for “the management of industry and the workforce” for Vaucanson and Lavoisier, and “apt emblems of subjection and government” for Kant and Bentham—automata also featured as points of reference for narratives of human growth and development.18 This is to say that while the automaton signified the advancement of society by supplying proof of human ingenuity, it also worked to model subjects who “innately” lack the signs of advancement, but can be taught to acquire them through mechanical acts of repetition and imitation, such as children, women, and animals.19

The Mechanics of Coming Out: A Theory of Abjection By consistently narrating the moment of coming out in young women’s lives, and following closely their experiences in spaces that were in

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    fact designed to make their identities visible to a wider, marriage-minded public, Burney’s novels give the lie to still prevalent assumptions that eighteenth-century female life was relegated to “private” settings. The Georgian social ritual of coming out serves as prime evidence for arguments seeking to revise the “separate spheres” model for understanding the history of gender in eighteenth-century England.20 In order to fuel the gentry’s new social machine, the marriage market, young women were in fact obligated to appear in its “stalls,” the “assemblies, plays and pleasure gardens of Georgian England.”21 For the young girls in Camilla, the passage of coming out is cast early on as morally and socially crucial—the governess Miss Margland insists tirelessly on “the necessity of bringing the young ladies out, and the duty of thinking of their establishment”—and thus launches the ensuing narrative (Camilla, 54). Following Burney, and coterminous with her, conduct book authors and other commentators on female customs deployed “coming out” and its attendant motions of travel, exposure, and display as figures for a reviled worldliness that women, upon leaving childhood, were all too capable of occupying.22 Accordingly, Thomas Gisborne, in his popular An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), describes the young girl’s “introduction into the world” as a dramatic departure from the sober education at home or school (which he instructively calls a “public seminary”) that previously structured her life. “Emancipated from the shackles of instructions, [she is] brought forward to act her part on the public stage of life.” In such passages, conduct book moralizing cuts two ways. On one hand, Gisborne treats the young woman’s act of coming out as a social obligation. On the other, the choice of theatrical metaphor signals Gisborne’s contempt toward the woman’s vanity and self-absorption, which grow with each worldly entrance she makes. The more she occupies the surfaces of life, the more surfaces—the beloved image of herself above all—fill and comprise her internal thoughts, thus reconstituting thought itself as a series of material objects and the self-flattery they produce. Having “burn[ed]” with “impatience for the hour of displaying her perfection,” and becoming “intoxicated beforehand with anticipated flatteries,” she “is launched, in the pride of ornament,” and, like Pope’s Belinda, “from that day forward thinks by day and dreams by night of amusements, and of dress, and of compliments, and of admirers.”23

   automaton Wollstonecraft, more concise, but just as metaphorically pungent, queries, “Besides, what can be more indelicate than a girl’s coming out in the fashionable world? Which, in other words, is to bring to market a marriageable miss, whose person is taken from one public place to another, richly caparisoned.”24 Displeased, too, by how “the love of pleasure and the love of sway” corrupt—or, displace—the intellect, Wollstonecraft warns that the girl who devotes herself to preparing for her social debut and neglects her education will come to possess a mind as artificial as her face. In doing so, she creates the startling image of the fashionable lady not so much as a doll, but as an android: “The consequence is obvious; in gay scenes of dissipation we meet the artificial mind and face.” In the above passages the young woman coming out is, in addition to an automaton, an actress on stage, a burning object, an intoxicated slave, a “dazzled stranger,” an empty vessel, a gaudily dressed horse, and a piece of moveable goods. It is through indulging in elaborate metaphors to decry the very conditions of excess and artifice in female public life that Gisborne, Wollstonecraft, and countless conduct book writers reveal the constitution of emergent womanhood in eighteenth-century social life is ineluctably metaphorical. These metaphors, in describing women through the properties of different entities and objects, accomplish linguistically what coming out does socially, for “when we use one word for another,” writes Christopher Tilley, “we move an entity from one place to another.”25 In representing the genteel girl’s turn to womanhood through its very procedure of “moving” her from one place in society to another, coming out literally enacts the meanings attributed to metaphor in eighteenth-century language. These include its classical etymology—derived from metapherein, to carry across in Greek—to one of its contemporary definitions of transferring a word “from its First and Proper Signification, to express some other Thing in a more remote and Secondary Meaning.”26 Not only did eighteenth-century definitions consistently assign literal movement to figurative language—“A TROPE is defined to be an elegant turning of a word from its natural and proper, to a relative signification”27—they also perceived metaphor as providing tactile ornament to language, thus embodying the very quality that perturbed contemporary moralizers about femininity. One rhetorician compares metaphors “to the Clothes and Perukes which were first contriv’d to defend from the Cold, but since we

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    use them as an Ornament and a Grace” and furthermore, refers to them as “ingenious Images, that represent the Things with more pleasure and more handsomely than the bare Objects can.”28 By contrast, Austen’s Mary Crawford, in Mansfield Park (1814), communicates plainly and indeed, with charm, that coming out entails not so much the transformation of femininity into a metaphor, but rather a thoroughgoing metamorphosis of the self. Having asked Edmund Bertram about Fanny Price, “ ‘Pray, is she out, or is she not?—I am puzzled.— She dined at the parsonage, with the rest of you, which seemed like being out; and yet she says so little, that I can hardly suppose she is,’ ” she determines, Till now, I could not have supposed it possible to be mistaken as to a girl’s being out or not. A girl not out, has always the same sort of dress; a close bonnet for instance, looks very demure, and never says a word . . . The most objectionable part is, that the alteration of manners on being introduced into company is frequently too sudden. They sometimes pass in such very little time from reserve to quite the opposite—to confidence! That is the faulty part of the present system. One does not like to see a girl of eighteen or nineteen so immediately up to everything—and perhaps when one has seen her hardly able to speak the year before.29

Here, Mary Crawford distinguishes the woman who has come out by creating a metonym rather than a metaphor for what she is not—“a close bonnet for instance.” Furthermore, she indicates one of the concerns about eighteenth-century public life that—more than any other literary genre—only the medium of the novel can negotiate and elaborate. If the eternally close-bonneted Fanny Price gives Mary Crawford pause for the first time in knowing whether a woman is out, it is because Fanny’s own subjectivity, like all of Burney’s heroines, remains at odds with the ontological transformations of femininity that societal standards tend to regard as complete, transparent, and unequivocal. Mary Crawford’s question about Fanny Price—“is she out, or is she not?”—prompts us to reconsider that understanding “the Introduction [of ] a well-educated, but inexperienced young woman into public company, and a round of the most fashionable Spring Diversions of London”—as Burney herself described Evelina to her prospective publisher—demands a subtler hermeneutics that simultaneously perceives its object’s ability to withhold information, thus turning the allegedly public or transparent subject into a private one.30 Indeed,

   automaton such an approach is necessary for understanding the internal spaces that Burney’s novels create within the avowedly public reaches of their heroines’ narrative trajectories on the marriage market, and of their own destinations as published commodities on a book market. As any transitional state would, coming out promises a metamorphosis that encompasses both social and psychological levels of experience. Though for most observers the change takes place decisively and abruptly, in Burney’s hands, it finds an elastic medium for expression in the emergent genre of the novel, which allows the passage to span several volumes that expand in size and scope with each new publication, and each new heroine. This is to say that the novel medium, in its ability to represent temporal experience on its longitude axis, accommodates not only the perils of the process, but also its daily repetitiveness. As the seemingly endless outings in each novel attest, no single appearance at a given ball, resort town, opera house, or pump room can complete the act of coming out, save the closure of the narratives that bear the names of the heroines and are then contained as book objects for further consumption. Arguably, the marriages that end Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla can only provide weak and ambiguous closure, as each of them demands subservience or self-sacrifice, or both, from the heroine. In this way, Marina Warner’s etymological review of “pupa” draws out the paradoxes in Burney’s narrative ambivalences. In Greek, the word for pupa is nekydallos, or “little corpse; in Latin, the word pupa itself means “doll.”31 Making their “first appearance in public,” and purportedly changing from dependent children to autonomous adults, Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla experience their transitions as a risk-ridden yet repeatedly “mortifying” state of encasement within and against unchanging codes of conduct. These frequent moments of “mortification”—ranging from social embarrassment to extreme shock, grief, and in Camilla, actively wishing to be a corpse, or in Cecilia, begging not to be buried alive—render them as much little corpses as little dolls shaped by both propriety and fashion (Camilla, 860; Cecilia, 908). In Cecilia, the heroine’s secret marriage with a man named “Mortimer” renders her nominally mortified. The name (“dead water,” in French) also signifies his function in the plot as the suitor whose family pride forbids him to forsake his noble name, thus forcing Cecilia to forfeit her uncle’s inheritance, whose one condition is to require

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    her husband to take her name. For all the heroines, complete and triumphant metamorphosis is questionable as their marriages either leave them, in circular fashion, with husbands who resume the roles of paternal mentor figures, as with Evelina and Camilla, or with a husband who demands financial loss and psychic unease, as with Cecilia. What remains for Burney to offer in debates on women’s “place” in eighteenth-century England is not so much a definitive understanding of how the conceptual categories of “public” and “private” were or were not gendered, as many critics have investigated already. Rather, her fiction makes room for displaying psychic life within spaces deemed “public”— including the public spaces of the pages in a novel—by showing how the incorporation of women in public life remains inextricable from a powerful yet awkward category of emotion: abjection. The project of illustrating this emotion as one that rises out of the individual failure to embody mechanical standards of consistency and “regular” behavior—and in Burney’s own case, authorial productivity—demanded free indirect discourse. Such a technology of writing allowed Burney not only to be one of the first to combine the psychologically driven technique of Richardson with the physically contingent and socially descriptive one of Fielding, but also to hold in perpetual suspension the feminized roles of being subject and object at once, the very condition of both the abject and the automaton. It is through this newly invented novel technique, with its ability to represent both external and internal qualities of experience, that Burney most convincingly conveys the notion that the social ritual of coming out invariably entails the psychological ordeal of a casting out. In its foundations as a word derived from the Latin verb for “throwing down,” “throwing away” or “casting off,” and “casting out” (abicio), abjection shares the spatial orientation and quality of mobility that distinguish the process of coming out, as well as metaphor. Not least, mobility distinguishes the material object/subject most remarkable for its ability to move “on its own”: the automaton. Toward the late seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, abjection carried a moral charge in religious texts and novels as an adjective to describe slaves and cowards, parasites and debtors, or one’s origins of birth. Though the word itself does not figure conspicuously in Burney’s novels—it appears at least once in Cecilia and in Evelina—the quality of circumstance and feeling does, as any one

   automaton who has read Burney’s increasingly dense body of work about fallen heiresses, rejected daughters, hysterical lovers, and social outcasts can attest.32 While other emotions can be ascribed to what Burney’s heroines undergo, such as shame, depression, or guilt, it is abjection that captures the filially and socially contingent, as well as spectacularly corporeal aspects of the women’s depleted states. As excerpts from her diary and letters indicate, Burney is a writer who struggles most conspicuously with such visions of conduct literature’s ideal femininity, and its ugly reflections of blemished femininity, which the literature paradoxically determines as femininity itself.33 Though her novels work especially hard to smooth away untoward contortions by sustaining a hyperexpository and objective narrative voice, violent and unseemly images of feminine misconduct pollute the novels’ placid surfaces nevertheless, thus producing not the material excess of ornament, but its corporeal face of abjection. This vision is most salient in Burney’s pictures of female characters as bleeding, drooling, and gibbering statues and machines throughout Cecilia and Camilla. Even in the comparatively more “sprightly” Evelina, spectacles of female degradation surface not just in the infamous old-lady footrace, but in the image of the aged coquette Madame Duval tied to a tree, roaring with anger and sitting in a ditch. Here, the artificial and the organic serve as a permutation of the mechanical and the organic: “She was covered with dirt, weeds, and filth, and her face was really horrible, for the pomatum and powder from her head, and the dust from the road, were quite pasted on her skin by her tears, which, with her rouge made so frightful a mixture, that she hardly looked human” (Evelina, 148). At the end of Cecilia we see its beautiful heiress bankrupt, abandoned by her husband, and raving on the floor of a straw-filled room in a pawn-broker’s shop, and elsewhere, her suitor’s proud mother tearing away with “her face, hands and neck all covered with blood” from a bursting blood vessel (Cecilia, 899, 680). In Camilla, itself a purported conduct book with a passage that became anthologized in later editions of John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughter, we see Camilla and her sister Eugenia spy on an exquisitely beautiful woman spinning manically on her lawn and drooling, “rendering utterly disgusting a chin that a statuary might have wished to model” (Camilla, 355–62, 309).34 Toward the end we see Camilla herself, much like Cecilia, alternately crawling up the stairs,

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    falling prostrate on the floor, with “agonies nearly convulsive” distorting “her features” and writhing “her form” over petty shopping debts she believes have caused her father’s imprisonment (Camilla, 824). For Julia Kristeva, it is the very crisis of the internal rendering itself external that defines abjection.35 In a formulation that derives largely from Mary Douglas’s delineation of pollution and its powerful effects on tribal structures, she writes, “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Abjection, 3). As such, boundary dissolution, the shattering of self-integrity, and the disturbance of such fundamental categories as inside and outside are implicit in any abject condition: “The body’s inside, in that case, shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside. It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents. Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up” (Abjection, 53). Here, Kristeva underscores the compensatory quality of abjection. Not a gratuitous production of excess, and not the cause of abjection in itself, the gross matter famously signifying Kristeva’s abjection works to “reassure” the subject after the loss of its integrity. And to have this integrity means having a clear separation between the internal and external aspects of the self. Once that separation is lost—through rendering a self that is all surface, for instance, or, by contrast, all transparency—the self dissolves. Abject waste, in its revoltingly concrete embodiment, works to prove that an interior self still remains, or, as Mary Douglas puts it, “affirm[s] the physical fullness of reality.”36 As the characters who bear or extrude waste matter—dirt, saliva and blood—the coquettish grandmother (Evelina), the beautiful idiot girl (Camilla), and the proud and class-obsessed mother-in-law (Cecilia) produce corporeally what the heroines undergo when they cross the boundaries of their “own and clean” selves. While it works as a powerful figure for the overlapping structures of the body and society, abjection also accounts in grammatical terms for what happens to a psyche striving to become a subject while cultural forces (itself included) insist on its objecthood. In this very struggle, the abject is neither subject nor object. The abject does have in common with

   automaton the object, however, the status of “being opposed to ‘I’ ” (Abjection, 1). In Burney’s case, the immanent pain in the third-person narratives following the epistolary Evelina may be traced to this resistance of the “I,” even as the narratives struggle to produce it. Cecilia, for instance, continually suppresses self-revelation and reflection for the sake of action and reason. During the tumult of making plans for her clandestine marriage, the heroine is described as forcing herself to forego introspection for practical action: “Cecilia now had no time for after-thoughts or anxious repentance, since notwithstanding the hurry of her spirits, and the confusion of mind, she had too much real business to yield to pensive indulgence” (Cecilia, 825) and “It was necessary, however, not to moralize, but to act” (Cecilia, 858). When the heroine does give in to responding to her emotions, the narrator herself takes over in assuming the stance of reason by using a hyperexpository and balanced tone, even as she makes clear the heroine’s own “wandering of reason”: Grief and horror for what was past, apprehension and suspense for what was to come, so disordered her whole frame, so confused even her intellects, that when not all the assistance of fancy could persuade her she still heard the footsteps of Delvile, she went to the chair upon which he had been seated, and taking possession of it, sat with her arms crossed, silent, quiet, and erect, almost vacant of all thought, yet with a secret idea she was doing something right. (Cecilia, 850)

The reader is alerted to just how far Cecilia has gone off the rails when her friend appears in the next paragraph and expresses “surprise and concern at the strangeness of her look and attitude.” Cecilia’s own mental reflections on the implications of her secret marriage discloses the constant sense of judgment and supervision that assails her thoughts: Disinterested as she was, she considered her situation as peculiarly perverse, that from the time of her coming to a fortune which most others regarded as enviable, she had been a stranger to peace, a fruitless seeker of happiness, a dupe to the fraudulent, and a prey to the needy! . . . These reflections only gave way to others still more disagreeable; she was now a second time engaged in a transaction she could not approve, and suffering the whole, peace of her future life to hang upon an action dark, private, and imprudent: an action by which the liberal kindness of her late husband would be annulled, by which the father of her intended husband would be disobeyed, and which already, in a similar instance, had brought her to affliction and disgrace. (Cecilia, 826)

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    Thus deploying the technique later recognized as free indirect discourse, Burney creates a view of the character from many perspectives at once— the character as she experiences herself and others, the character as others experience her (as evinced through dialogue), and the character as the narrator sees her and sees others experiencing her. Perhaps most remarkable about the technique is the impossibility of distinguishing where one perspective ends and the other begins, as one of many more passages describing Cecilia’s senility illustrates: Mean while the frantic Cecilia escaped both pursuit and insult by the velocity of her own motion. She called aloud upon Delvile as she flew to the end of the street. No Delvile was there!—she turned the corner; yet saw nothing of him; she still went on, though unknowing whither, the distraction of her mind every instant growing greater, from the inflammation of fatigue, heat, and disappointment. She was spoken to repeatedly, she was even caught once or twice by her riding habit; but she forced herself along by her own vehement rapidity, not hearing what was said nor heeding what was thought. Delvile, bleeding by the arm of Belfield, was the image before her eyes, and took such full possession of her senses, that still, as she ran on, she fancied it in view. She scarce touched the ground; she scarce felt her own motion; she seemed as if endued with supernatural speed, gliding from place to place, from street to street; with no consciousness of any plan . . . till quite spent and exhausted, she abruptly ran into a yet open shop, where, breathless and panting, she sunk upon the floor, and, with a look disconsolate and helpless, sat for some time without speaking. (Cecilia, 897)

The length of such passages displays the level of detail and number of perspectives Burney uses to make manifest all at once the character’s outward circumstance, actions, encounters, and appearance, as well as her train of thought. Perhaps no other narrative technique can convey so effectively a state of being that quite literally, with the heroine falling to the ground at the end of the passage (and throughout her episode of lunacy), dramatizes not only the abject, but also the self as a feeling object.37 Dead to the world, spinning around without internal purpose like an automaton, and a compelling spectacle to others, she is nevertheless alive to her internal suffering.

   automaton

Hiding in Plain Sight: Free Indirect Discourse as Social Technique Though she seems to have found an effective technique— “omniscient” third-person narration—for describing internal conditions from a neutral perspective, Burney is so anxious about meeting readers’ expectations that, in a cancelled introduction to Cecilia, she asks for lenience from her critics. In it, she begs to be excused from explaining the motives behind her second novel by stating, “the intricacies of the human Heart are various as innumerable, & its feelings, upon all interesting occasions, are so minute & complex, as to baffle all the power of Language.”38 Nevertheless, in the introductory paragraph to her following novel, Camilla, published fourteen years after Cecilia, Burney lays claim to attempting to master the very “intricacies of the human heart,” thus admitting to her own ambitions as a writer (Cecilia, 945). Here, she asserts, “the historian of human life finds less of difficulty and of intricacy to develop, in its accidents and adventures, than the investigator of the human heart in its feelings and its changes.” For, “the Heart of man . . . lives its own surprise—it ceases to beat—and the void is inscrutable! In one grand and general view, who can display such a portrait?” Answering her own question, Burney takes it upon herself to “fairly, however faintly, to delineate some of its features” (Camilla, 7). In a brilliant exposition of this puzzling passage, Julie Choi interprets that Burney is describing her own role as narrator when mentioning “the sole and discriminate province of the pen which would trace nature, yet blot out personality.” Pointing out that “the task of novelist is to transcribe that which is invisible”—the “inscrutable” void the human heart leaves when “it ceases to beat” certainly bears out the notion—Choi claims that Burney solves the inherent difficulty of depicting “invisible” interiority by invoking an analogy with a “prospect painter observing an epic landscape.” In doing so, Burney is not only subsuming her own identity with the pen’s function, but also making herself absent as “observer” or “ ‘delineator’ ” from the landscape. By “blotting out personality,” the pen makes completely immaterial the narrator’s own identity. Indeed, this pen—Burney’s pen, or, Burney as pen—eradicates completely “the author/narrator function” to make possible free indirect discourse, a new

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    authorial position whose primary feature is “transparency.” This transparency encompasses other qualities, too, of being simultaneously present and absent while describing the interior and exterior qualities of characters, in a tense that describes the present while using the grammatical past.39 In an earlier article, Margaret Doody, much like Choi, locates the foundations of realist third-person narrative voice—with its sophisticated and abundant qualities of simultaneity—in eighteenth-century women’s writing. For Doody, too, Burney plays an important role in the development of free indirect discourse, but unlike Choi, she regards Burney’s influence as an “individual triumph” attributable singularly to the author of Evelina, and “uniquely related to the ‘realist modes.’ ”40 Underscoring the social obstacles involved for women in writing novels, not least the belief that “a woman is not to be judgmental,” Margaret Doody constructs a narrative in which Burney’s switch from a first-person epistolary model in Evelina to a third-person narrative voice constitutes a courageous advance in allowing women writers to assume textual authority.41 For Doody, “Fanny Burney’s novels provide a record of the women’s struggle toward the creation of a tone which is neither whispering or arch. She is the first woman writer in this period to show with marked success what could be done by creating an authoritative and persuasive omniscient author” (Doody, 284). In prior novels, Burney and other women writers found the “journal-novel” a “safe feminine form.” They “tended to hide themselves modestly behind their characters” for in doing so, “responsibility for judgments . . . belongs to the characters, and the novelist can always admit that they might be wrong” (Doody, 280–81). To appear at all in print entails becoming identified with one’s product, Doody points out, but Burney’s choice to write Cecilia in the third person is an act of “daring.” So much so that Doody goes as far as to say: “The seven veils are cast off and the author seems to be dancing naked before us. That which dances on the page is not the human being who is born and dies, but the critical distinction is of no practical comfort to the author” (Doody, 284). To a certain extent, Burney was indeed safe from “exposing” herself in writing Evelina—but not necessarily because the epistolary form in which it was written was more acceptably “feminine.” She was safer—as long as her identity was kept secret, which was not for long—because the novel had been published anonymously. Many readers in fact assumed

   automaton the novel had been written by a man—Joshua Reynolds said he “would give 50 pounds to know the Author”; a “Mr. Taylor” also “declared he will find him out”; and Lowndes, the publisher himself, guessed the novel had been written by Horace Walpole because he, too, had “published a Book in this snug manner.” Most damning was a Mr. Mordaunt, who refused to “believe Evelina could be Written by a Young Woman, or, indeed, by any Woman.”42 Having come out as the author of Evelina, Burney felt the risk of having her identity shaped not only by her creative products, but also by books as physical objects. This form of identification, in fact, entailed the greater source of exposure for her. When Johnson accused her of not loving to read—for she never carried “a Book in her Hand,” he had noticed—she answered by pulling out from under her gloves the book she had in fact been carrying all along, a copy of his Life of Waller. Her explanation reveals the extent to which the mere sight of a book attached to her person could define her, much like Mary Crawford’s notion of the girl not yet out as a “close bonnet”: “Sir . . . I am always afraid of being caught Reading, lest I should pass for being studious, or affected, & therefore, instead of making a Display of Books, I always try to hide them” (EJL III, 172, September 26, 1778). Wishing her success on the second edition of Evelina, her mentor Samuel Crisp pursued further the notion of the book as an extension of Burney’s personhood—to the extent that it turns into her child: I wish you joy of your second delivery . . . the Babe was born a fine, fair fat, healthy Child . . . & its swaddling Cloaths became it very well; & if you have put a Ribband in its Cap & a fine new Sash, its original Features will still be the Object to attract Notice, & the little particulars of dress hardly observ’d: however in its new Form I am determin’d & impatient to have it; & as I see by Londes’ advertisement it is still to be had in Sheets. (EJL III, 176, November 6, 1778)

Nearly three years later, when working on Cecilia, Burney continued the joke by writing to inform Crisp of progress on his “favourite Ugly Girl,” who was being prepared “to appear, tolerably Cloathed, if not adorned, to the World” (EJL IV, 432–33, August 15, 1781). Whether or not Burney wrote her novels in the first or third person, the authorship of novels was a source of acute vulnerability, and its material products—like so many dolls, pupae, and automata—objects of self-fashioning. Instances of the gross conflations of Burney and her

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    book product occurred when Dr. Johnson called her “Evelina” (“Come,— Evelina,—come & sit by me”) and when two girls in a shop stared so intently at her, it was “as if they expected to read in [her] Face all the Characters in [her] Book” (EJL III, 93, August 23–30, 1778; and 394, post– October 12–25, 1779). The move into the third person—and thus the fortuitous development of free indirect discourse—was not so much an act of “daring” to have opinions or judgments, as it was a strategy for both hiding the writing self and displaying it. In this way the “writing self,” apart from the characters themselves who emerged as “written selves,” became the more shielded and less accessible figure of the “narrator,” who in turn was able to give a psychosocial condition such as abjection its shocking coherence. About eight years after the publication of Evelina, it was Queen Charlotte who realized that Burney had perfected the role of “omniscient” narrator in daily life, as well as her true calling as a novelist. The Queen, conversing with Mary Delany in January 1786, upon reading in the newspaper that Burney had written a play, exclaimed, “Miss Burney’s name is every where but her Character is as delicate as if it were no where;—& I should be sorry to have her write for so public a thing as the Stage.”43 While on one hand, to come out at all as a woman in eighteenth-century England necessitated the curiously covert yet omnipresent form of presentation that became formalized in novelistic prose as free indirect discourse, on the other hand, it was only a grammatical form of objectifying the self that collaborated with other forms. And these forms, too, were shaped under the pressures of social rites and regulations. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the very book that gave “voice” to Burney’s will to write, and at the same time brought an end to her “dear, long loved, long cherished snugship,” Evelina (EJL III, 135, September 3, 1778). While the epistolary novel appears to decry the automaton as an object, it reveals a deep affinity for the automaton as subject, the very form of womanhood that the heroine is shaped to become. If Burney had not yet learned the trick of distancing her own identity from her creations by filtering novelistic subjectivity through a third person—thus turning all subjects into objects—she expresses in Evelina a similar realization through the heroine’s lessons from a jeweled and mechanical pineapple.

   automaton

Evelina and Cox’s Mechanical Pineapple Evelina, a character presented in Burney’s first published novel as possessing “a virtuous mind, a cultivated understanding, and a feeling heart” in her “first appearance upon the great and busy stage of life,” and having “ignorance of the forms, and inexperience in the manners, of the world,” undergoes her social and moral education at sites of consumption. At Cox’s Museum, where she and her company encounter, among other mechanical toys, a pineapple that suddenly opens to reveal a nest of singing birds and a concluding “concert of mechanical music,” Evelina gains an opportunity to display her correct understanding of aesthetic values by dismissing the artificial effects and pleasures that the museum showcases. “This Museum is very astonishing, and very superb; yet, it afforded me but little pleasure, for it is a mere show, though a wonderful one,” she writes to her guardian, Mr. Villars. Madame Duval, on the other hand, Evelina’s “at once uneducated and unprincipled” grandmother, reacts “in extacies” to the concluding “concert of mechanical music” while Captain Mirvan “flung himself into so many ridiculous distortions by way of mimicking her.” The mechanical concert’s “effect” merely pleases Evelina, even as she “cannot explain how it was produced” (Evelina, 13, 77). Perhaps the most suggestive detail in Evelina’s depiction of her excursion to Cox’s Museum is her answer to Sir Willoughby’s question of what she thinks of “this brilliant spectacle:” “ ‘It is very fine, and very ingenious . . . and yet-I don’t know how it is,-but I seem to miss something’ ” (Evelina, 76). Evelina’s experience of Cox’s Museum corresponds with the features of its show catalogued in 1773. Situated “Within the Rails at the East-End of the Room,” the mechanical pineapple actually served as the ornament for the figure of a “Gardener’s boy upon beautiful green enamelled ground, whereon various fruits, roots, leaves, insects and implements of gardening are placed, differently composed of gold and jewellery.”44 The boy, dressed in a coat “embroidered and ornamented with jewellery,” wore a brilliantly jeweled hat from which the pineapple itself grew, “copied from nature, whose leaves are finely enamelled of a beautiful transparent green.” The catalogue lists the two items as the sixteenth and seventeenth pieces of the museum, and continues in its description:

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    the pine-apple is of silver, richly gilt, that bursts open upon playing of the chimes, and discovers a nest of six birds: in the center of the nest is the mother bird, formed of Jeweller’s work, whose plumage is set with stones of various colours, which, during the playing of the music, is, by a curious mechanism, animated like life; feeding her several young ones with pearls, and moving from one to the other, holding each pearl in her bill over the bird that is fed, and drawing up another pearl which is also carried to the next bird, and then delivered; and so on successively feeding her young, from one to the other, fluttering her wings at the same time; after which the pineapple closes again of itself.

While Burney’s own writing scarcely accommodates the ornateness of the actual pineapple, Cox’s catalogue reveals the depth of its ornamental and mechanical intricacy, and of several other mechanical pieces throughout the museum that are equally if not more stunning in their minuteness of detail, lavishness of materials, and ingenuity (see Figure 4.1). Such pieces include the deeply layered arrangements of bejeweled and animated pyramids, elephants, a dragon, bulls, dolphins, a spiral worm, and “Asiatic beasts.”45 Human figures are mostly “Asiatic,” such as the “Automaton in the habit of a Chinese” and “two Automaton figures of a man and a woman, in Turkish habits” that appear to be singing while ringing bells with hammers in each of their hands. In another piece, an “Eastern Lady” moves “from right to left” in a “rich Pavilion” and holding “a rich Guittar, set with stones of various colours.” A “Time-piece” hangs above, ending with a “mechanical moving Star” that seems to grow “when in motion.”46 Burney’s prose style, resolutely indifferent to the visual exoticism and showiness of her characters’ settings, allows the moral and instructive essence of her novels and their characters to predominate. And yet when Lillian and Edward Bloom describe Burney’s writing as consisting of a “peculiar conflation of a fairy-tale narrative and a quasi-philosophical motif, stage-like dialogue, an alternation between comic scenes and those of moral purpose, realistic if blurred boundaries,” they could very well be describing one of the magical yet mechanical narratives of Cox’s pieces.47 Elsewhere, Edward Bloom explains, “If we do not really see place, we are always aware of it as a social force. As a novelist Fanny appreciated setting, but she thought it less important than her shifting clusters of people and their interactions” (Evelina, xxv). Indeed, if Burney slights the visual and mechanical splendor of Cox’s ingenious machines, it is to devote her

[Stanford University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image.]

figure 4.1. James Cox, “Miniature Secretary Incorporating a Clock,” ca. 1766-1772. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    rhetorical energies to perfecting the crafting of her own “little people.” These were the characters that populate her novels, and provoked the English Review (January 1783), upon the publication of Cecilia, to praise all of its figures for seeming “fairly purchased at the great work-shop of life.”48 Their “numerous[ness]” and “excessive opulence” prompted Edmund Burke to write Burney in a letter: “You have crowded into a few small volumes an incredible variety of characters; most of them well planned, well supported, and well contrasted with each other.” Gently, he suggests, “Justly as your characters are drawn, perhaps they are too numerous.”49 More teasing in person, Burke had called out to her at an assembly, “Don’t go yet, little character-monger!”50 Similarly, Johnson declared that both Richardson and Fielding “would have been really afraid of her.” While on one hand “there is merit in Evelina which [Richardson] could not have borne,” on the other hand, in “all of Harry Fielding’s Works . . . there’s nothing so delicately finished.” For these distinctions, Johnson in turn characterized Burney by “shaking his Head” at her and exclaiming, “O, you little Character-Monger, you!” (EJL III, 109–10, August 23–30, 1778). Cox’s Museum with its automata, producing in Evelina a sense of missing “something,” is the very distillation for what the fashionable world fosters, from playhouses and opera houses, Marybone [sic] Gardens with its fireworks telling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, to Ranelagh with its Rotunda and Chinese House, so brilliantly lit as to make evening seem like daylight hours.51 The pleasure venues of eighteenth-century London in their artificial reconstructions of “other” worlds, operate as showcases for fashionable people who participate in life not as themselves, but, much like dolls and automata, as signs and referents of something else. Indeed, it is Cox’s Museum’s adherence to the dazzling semblance of life as opposed to the unmediated presence of life that provokes Evelina’s sense of lack in her encounters with its mechanical toys. Cox’s Museum figures again later in the novel in a conversation at the Pantheon between Mrs. Mirvan, Mr. Lovel, and Lord Orville, Evelina’s other mentor figure and later, her husband. Orville, prompted by Mrs. Mirvan to offer his opinion on the establishment answers, “The mechanism . . . is wonderfully ingenious: I am sorry it is turned to no better account; but its purpose is so frivolous, so very remote from all aim at instruction or utility, that the sight of so fine a shew, only leaves a regret on

   automaton the mind, that so much work, and so much ingenuity, should not be better bestowed” (Evelina, 110). Providing an impression that is as ambivalent as Evelina’s own, yet more forcible and analytical in its moralistic tenor, Orville also expresses a familiar Enlightenment attitude; he disapproves of wonder for its own sake—indeed, rejects it—and regrets the automata’s “uselessness.” By the time Burney wrote her last novel, The Wanderer (1814), she had gained enough experience with the genre to make claims for its value and reveal its relationship to her own self-image. In her introduction to the work, addressing her father, she recalls how at the age of fifteen, she burnt all her secret attempts at fiction writing out of an innate shame. In doing so, Burney strikes upon the “degradation” attached to fiction as “a class of composition.” The character of Evelina, Burney explains in the same introduction, “struggled herself into life” in defiance of “every self-effort” to suppress her urges for creating simulacra of people out of language. More confident of her form in old age, she issues the command: “Divest, for a moment, the title of Novel from its stationary standard for insignificance and say! What is the species of writing that offers fairer opportunities for conveying useful precepts?” (Wanderer, 7). Repeatedly invoking the mechanical imagery of the novel as a “vehicle” or conveyer for abstract thought, she also states indirectly its essentially feminized form by begging the general reader not to dismiss its moral usefulness because it is “enwrap[ped]” in “an exterior the most frivolous,” or because it appears “a mere vehicle for frivolous, or seductive amusement” (Wanderer, 9, 7). The prejudices that Burney feels to be hampering perceptions of the novel as a valid medium for “illustrations of conduct” and “natural and probable human existence” echo Orville’s and Evelina’s attitudes toward Cox’s automata (Wanderer, 7, 9). And yet, the pineapple opening to display singing birds, like novels, does offer moral examples, despite its equally gay and fanciful exteriors.52 As Evelina undertakes the challenge of developing her moral sense through participating in worldly adventures, she encounters the need to develop a vocabulary of irony: in all its settings, she discovers, worldliness entails presenting the self to mean something else. The automata that she rejects as wonderful but false are the very models for the worldly self she learns to both assimilate and reject in her education of manners, especially as she

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    begins to recognize the disjunction between the misleadingly transparent form of letters and the inner content of thought and feeling. Repeatedly throughout her letters to Maria Mirvan, Evelina recognizes the inherently “inanimate” and “cold” nature of letters, and pleads, when rebuked for her “silence,” “Narrative does not offer, nor does a lively imagination supply the deficiency” (Evelina, 253, 262). No longer the dutiful transcriber of every event to Mr. Villars, she maintains the interest of reserve and omission when writing in her next-to-last letter, “I say nothing of our conversation, because you may so well suppose both the subjects we chose, and our manner of discussing them” (Evelina, 392). The mechanical pineapple that opens and “closes again of itself” serves as a model of the ideal femininity—open, yet controlled—that conduct books of the period so rigorously formulated, and that Burney, in her obsession with providing “examples,” “models,” and “illustrations” of conduct, wants Evelina and her other heroines to embody.53 Later novels, however, with their disturbing sequences of heroines transformed into spectacles of madness, imply that as a model of femininity, the toy pineapple in its pleasing charm is perhaps most lacking in its inability to evoke the pain of femininity, despite the secrets suggested by its closures. To be sure, the balance between pleasure and pain is an enduring moral and philosophical ideal for diverse authors of the Enlightenment, from Jane Austen, whose smooth narratives stage the harsh unfoldings of the self, to George Campbell, who observes, “a mixture of pain [gives] strength and stability to pleasure.”54 The balance is perhaps most of all important for the statue in Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations. The statue—itself an organic fantasy of human automatism—comes into life and his own voice from acquiring not only sense faculties, but also the capacity to feel pleasure and pain.55

Artificial Illumination and the Bright Lights of Abjection: Camilla Burney’s later novels, Cecilia and Camilla, upset the ideal balance of Condillac’s philosophical model and Cox’s pineapple by emphasizing pain over pleasure as the affective instrument for self-knowledge. Cecilia’s and Camilla’s intensely conflicted experiences at masquerades and

   automaton in shops and resort towns, for example, transmute the pleasure endorsed at these sites of social and commercial exchange into inner scenes of torment, mortification, guilt, and shame. This excess of pain that Burney so dutifully draws outward as a pain produced in turn by an uneasy sense of public exposure, supplies the very definition for abjection. In doing so, Burney situates abjection as an affect produced within eighteenth-century frameworks of propriety, and heightened by the specular framework of eighteenth-century social life and its own forms of “enlightenment,” from brilliantly lit pleasure gardens and innovations in street lighting, to the internalized gaze of conduct ideology. For every beautiful, rich, and accomplished heroine Burney creates, she dutifully thwarts her power by producing her abject other—a perversely degraded woman who has lost her mind, her fortune, and most of all, her specular self-governance. What might these losses and abject spectacles mean, especially when Burney’s heroines labor to emulate conduct book femininity? In the end, Camilla’s and Cecilia’s reversals of fortune and their surrender to madness serve as extremely apologetic compensation for their mistakes and failures. They express above all their “right to be punished” for not being “good enough.” Burney’s fiction chillingly demonstrates that the notion of “good enough” for female subjects is, in the end, impossible to fulfill, and yet it is the beginning for an obsessively self-admonishing mode of behavior and consciousness. As an automatic response to this implicitly impossible ideal, imagining the abject female is the ultimate duty; doing so registers and compensates for her failure to embody the ideal, yet appears to maintain the necessary distance self-idealization demands. Burney’s novels, in consistently developing the relationship between abjection, automatism, and female conduct, represent late-eighteenth-century femininity as a condition enmeshed in the compulsory aspects of female dollship, the phantasmatic properties of objectivity, and most of all, the failed vision of Enlightenment standards for individual autonomy and classical images of beauty. Camilla, for example, juxtaposes interior values of selfhood with exterior ones, as well as the visual impressions of the grotesque and the beautiful by presenting three female characters who comprise a spectrum of these qualities. Eugenia, once the most beautiful in her family but turned into a “wizen little stump” by childhood smallpox and a freak accident at a

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    public fair, compensates for her physical deformity with a gift for scholarship and an amiable spirit. For most of her early life, she is so “protected” by her family members from becoming aware of her ugliness that she never understands the extent of her deformity until she travels outside her home and encounters public jeers and rejection, whereupon she painfully discovers she was a “total stranger” to the “sensations” she “excites” in others (Camilla, 301). In direct opposition to Eugenia, Indiana, her “beautiful vacant-looking cousin” and “that most exquisite workmanship of nature,” indolently foregoes any spiritual or intellectual work with the tutor she shares with Eugenia and seems “scarce to live but while arraying, or displaying herself” (Camilla, 800, 812). Through her self-absorbed and doll-like qualities, Indiana in fact embodies the scourge of conduct books. Camilla, heroine of the novel, does not fall as easily into a “purely” interior or exterior subjectivity as do her sister Eugenia and cousin Indiana. Endowed with an “elastic” form and mind, an “animated voice” and personality, “engaging manners,” and “captivating looks,” her consciousness is often in conflict with the moral codes of female conduct to which she devotes herself. Caught between the extremes of duty and pleasure, an awareness of how she appears to herself, and an even stronger awareness of how she appears to others, Camilla’s consciousness becomes increasingly tortured by its liminal position and conflicting drives. As discussed earlier, Burney’s use of free indirect discourse, an enterprise first undertaken in Cecilia after the epistolary Evelina, heightens this “betwixt and between” sense of Camilla’s subjectivity. Much like Cecilia, Burney’s third novel presents liminal identity as a mediation between private and public areas of self-representation, which in turn denotes the turn from childhood to adulthood. Never fully child or woman, Camilla, like Cecilia, is suspended in the act of becoming. Subtitled A Picture of Youth, the novel begins in the characters’ childhood. Though the majority of the book narrates Camilla’s experiences as a seventeen-year-old woman attempting to make her way around fashionable society after she leaves her parents’ home, the moment of childhood lingers; images of dolls and mechanical toys prevail throughout the novel as a submerged vocabulary for the struggles Camilla endures as she confronts tensions between social vulnerability and domestic discipline. By prefacing a young woman’s entrance in the marriage market with scenes

   automaton of her girlhood, Burney’s novel suggests the objects of childhood are ever present in the objectives of womanhood. Furthermore, Camilla’s representations of femininity emphasize a struggle between “interior” and “exterior” aspects of being as well as the endeavor to emulate models of femininity. It does so most effectively in its constant allusions to dolls, statues, and automata: from the toys of the girls’ childhood, the references to both Indiana and Camilla as beautiful automatons or statues, and even Camilla’s “sprightliness” and “elasticity,” qualities more suggestive of an ingeniously constructed plaything than a human woman. Darkening these doll references and images further are Camilla’s moments of “mortification” that paradoxically, in their oversaturation of pain or even unexpected pleasure, make her more of a statue than a sentient being, thus reversing the narrative of Condillac’s statue’s coming-into-being: “Camilla, overwhelmed with internal shame, yet more powerful than grief itself, stood motionless,” and “Camilla, overpowered with the struggles of joy and contrition, sunk nearly lifeless” (Camilla, 761–62, 882). More explicitly compared to an automaton, Camilla, demoralized at a ball, turns into “a fair lifeless machine . . . put in motion [by] the music” (Camilla, 714). Eugenia, at the same event, finds herself “nearly turned . . . to marble” when overhearing Melmond, the young scholar she adores, discussing his disdain for her with Indiana (Camilla, 720). Edgar Mandelbert, as Camilla’s own personal monitor, functions to regulate her social behavior and choices through his judgments: “he was observant of the errors of others, and watched till he nearly eradicated his own” (Camilla, 57). Moreover, he unexpectedly appears whenever Camilla has been coerced or cajoled into an injudicious situation—usually in scenes of shopping or commercial exchange—with inappropriate companions, or appears to have conducted herself not as a woman of virtue (sincere), but as a coquette (unsteady and capricious). Camilla’s own self-esteem falls and rises in jagged rhythm with Edgar’s sternly disapproving or adoring regard for her, as suggested by such chapter titles as “Computations of Self-Love” or “A Self-Dissection.” Reflecting alone after experiencing Edgar’s severe disapprobation of her flirtation, an ill-conceived “experiment,” with the fop Sir Sedley Clarendel, Camilla responds with a view to adjusting her machinery for Edgar:

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    She had seen Edgar, though he knew her to be protected, follow her to the coach, and she had seen, by the light afforded from the lamps of the carriage, that her safety from the crowd and tumult was not the sole object of his watchfulness, since though that, at the instant she turned round, was obviously secure, his countenance exhibited the strongest marks of disturbance. The secret spring, therefore, she now thought that was to re-unite them, was in her own possession. (Camilla, 669)

Indeed, her adjustment, provoked by watching his watching, precisely entails machinating a semblance of “general gaiety” in order to “renew solicitude [on Edgar’s] part by a displayed ease of mind on her own” (Camilla, 669). Thus keeping her heroine’s self-construction susceptible to her lover’s scopic obsession—he is called “a watcher” by Camilla’s friend, Mrs. Arlbery—Burney’s novel illustrates the problematics of identity formation in which an animate or inanimate doll is consistently invoked as the epitome of femininity. From this, these issues arise: a woman’s being is compared against an object, and a woman’s being is figured as an object. Thus, her “essential” characteristics are registered strictly in terms of what surface impressions she creates and projects. Edgar’s role as Camilla’s monitor and watcher is made problematic most of all by the fact that his assessments of “the solidity or lightness of [her] heart” are based on pure speculations of her outward actions (Camilla, 594). And yet Edgar himself serves as a localized and humanly embodied instance of a more general social phenomenon. In life, caught between their parents’ and then their husbands’ homes, never completely subject or object, Burney’s heroines situate themselves on the threshold of cultural legibility and visibility.56 The stakes in such visual positionings are high; through the period’s technological advancements in lighting, optical devices, and mirrors, “the very ability to look and to be seen in a social setting was markedly improved.”57 If England’s participation in the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment has been contested, its development of material enlightenment remains unquestionable. As the above examples demonstrate, Burney’s heroines tend to degenerate into grotesque spectacles that transgress boundaries of propriety, despite their good intentions. Much like Schelling’s definition of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) from which Freud works, “the name for everything that

   automaton ought to have remained hidden but has come to light,” Burney’s heroines embody the unwelcome obverse of conduct book precepts by ineluctably losing hold of the prescribed “veil of modesty.”58 In doing so, they make themselves abject through naked displays of surplus emotion, and as Camilla demonstrates, through a surplus of fashionable consumption. Such moments of mental evacuation, arising from harrowing circumstances for Burney’s heroines, compete with other automatized images of women who seem not only to have lost their minds, but to have never held secure possession of them in the first place. The pretty and fashionable Miss Dennel, for example, one of Camilla’s companions in Tunbridge Wells, aroused by the “gay company and gay shops” on the Pantiles (the “fashionable pleasure-walk” of the Wells), becomes a mechanical animal: she “kept her mouth open, and her head jerking from object to object, so incessantly, that she saw nothing distinctly, from the eagerness of her fear lest anything should escape her” (Camilla, 394). Lady Honoria, the character through which the term “coming out” became coined, is herself a figure of automatized femininity as she chatters—“rattles”—nonsensically and without reflection.

The Automaton’s Tears: Authorship and Abjection Burney’s fascination with such mechanical doll-like women can be traced throughout her personal writings in detailed descriptions of women she encounters at social gatherings. In a journal letter of June 16, 1779, to her sister Susanna, she writes about the great beauty Sophia Streatfield, who had the peculiar gift of being able to make herself cry when she willed it (EJL III, 316, post–June 15–26?, 1779).59 As much a commentary on social behavior as on Streatfield herself, Burney describes the strange scene in which the sophisticated crowd of Hester Thrale’s Streatham Park induce the young woman to cry for them: Sir Phillip. Well, I have heard so much of these Tears, that I would give the Universe to have a sight of them. Mrs. Thrale. Lord, she shall Cry again if you like it. S.S. [Sophia Streatfield]. No, -pray, Mrs. Thrale;Sir Philip. O pray do! - pray let me see a little of it!-

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    Mrs. Thrale. Yes, do cry, a little, Sophy; -(in a wheedling Voice) pray do!-Consider, now, you are going to Day, -and it’s very hard if you won’t cry a little; -indeed, S.S., you ought to cryNow for the wonder of wonders, -when Mrs. Thrale, in a coaxing voice, suited to a Nurse soothing a Baby, had run on for some Time, - while all the rest of us, in Laughter, joined in the request, -two Crystal Tears came into the soft Eyes of the S.S., -and rolled gently down her Cheeks! -such a sight I never saw before, nor could I have believed;-she offered not to conceal, or dissipate them, -on the contrary, she really contrived to have them seen by every body. She looked, indeed, uncommonly handsome, for her pretty Face was not, like Chloe, blubbered, it was smooth and elegant, and neither her Features or complexion were at all ruffled, -nay, indeed, she was smiling all the Time.

In this scene drawn from real life, as incredible and dense with the moral implications of social life as any in Burney’s novels, wonder ensues not only from Streatfield’s ability to issue tears when prompted, thus fabricating affect, but also from her ability to turn a purportedly raw display of feeling into a pleasing and pretty image. The company breaks through the suspense of Streatfield’s so-called “pain” by erupting “at once” into “loud and rude bursts of laughter” at its end. Unlike Streatfield, Burney’s heroines indeed “blubber” in their tears, and oppose the smooth and contained qualities of beauty with the excessive and deforming features of the abject and the grotesque. According to Mary Russo, the grotesque body is the antithesis of the beautiful body, and shares important characteristics with the abject and the liminal insofar as it is “the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process and change” against “the Classical body which is monumental, static, closed, and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism.”60 While psychologically spectacular scenes of Burney’s heroines’ experiencing extreme emotions represent the grotesque waste of abjection, they also represent mappings of a waste more pervasive in their social milieus, the waste of bourgeois consumption.61 Camilla narrates the late eighteenth century’s growth as a consumer culture in its Southampton chapters in which Camilla shops with Mrs. Mittin and becomes mistaken for either a prostitute or a madwoman.62 In this world, the male aristocratic drive for acquiring objects as sexual trophies dramatized in Richardson’s Clarissa and Pope’s Rape of the Lock

   automaton spreads to a newer and wider order of society as the middle-class female partakes of the fantasy of compensating for or adjusting “reality” through acquiring consumer goods. In this way, Camilla represents a turn from sexual fetishism to commodity fetishism in the system of objects developed throughout the eighteenth century. Yet Camilla also illustrates that the overconsumption of objects, rather than enhancing or augmenting the self, entails its expenditure and depletion, through forcing the self to purge—in the form of guilt, shame, tears, and mortification—what it consumes. In one of the many effective instances of free indirect discourse in the novel, we are allowed to hear with Camilla the amount of her brother’s debts from her father, and at the same time, experience her private recognition that hers far exceed her brother’s: [Camilla] overwhelmed with shame, yet more powerful than grief itself, stood motionless. These expences appeared but like a second part of her own, with her milliner, her jeweller, and her haberdasher . . . Surprised by her entire silence, Mr. Tyrold looked up. Her cheeks, rather livid than pale, and the deep dismay of her countenance, extremely affected him. The kindness of his embraces relieved her by melting her into tears . . . Am I punished? Am I punished? She internally exclaimed; but could not bear to meet the eyes of her father. (Camilla, 762)

As the tears—coupled with the internally quoted voice of guilt, “Am I punished?”—indicate, the abject’s main vehicle of expression, unlike the cultural and materially fabricated vocabulary of fashion, lies in the body. As such it comprises, above all, “something horrible to see” deriving from the body’s interior (Abjection, 155). Burney may be identified with her own heroines in her own susceptibility to the pains and psychic disturbances of coming out. Numerous scholars of Burney have read her novels closely alongside her diaries and letters in order to understand the social and biographical circumstances of her art. However, Patricia Meyer Spacks in “Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney” differs from those tactics in that she believes the novels themselves provide rich sources of explication for Burney’s psychological experiences. In the following passage Spacks outlines the social and psychological consequences of Burney’s fiction writing: To be marked, discovered, known as a writer, and, therefore, perhaps not a proper female, perhaps a woman unforgivably addicted to self-display: this idea focused Fanny Burney’s terror of doing wrong. To make oneself known as a writer invites

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    people to look; to offer one’s fantasies for the perusal of others invites violation. For a woman to be looked at or talked of means, at best, loss of dignity, at worst, loss of reputation.63

The socially and psychologically charged process of coming out then takes place in the female writer’s very project. To modify Spacks’s point, it is not so much the embarrassment of being looked at, but the anxiety of being looked at as a subject of speech that makes Burney’s production of fiction so painful. Yet, for Burney, the desire to be in command of language competes with the shame of self-presentation, and her “obsessive, almost uncontrollable authorial energy” worked in conflict with the “mousy fearfulness” of her public persona.64 Much was at stake in Burney’s introduction to Evelina as she acknowledges in its preface that it is to “the public,” a synonym for “novel-readers” to which it is being presented. Here, too, she lays knowing claim to her psychological composition as an author, describing it as “a very singular mixture of timidity and confidence.” She both “trembles” for her novels’ success, knowing of their “imperfections,” and remains assured “while happily wrapped up in a mantle of impenetrable obscurity.” This “public” testimony of her own character is consistent with the events she accounts for in her journal: alongside sobbing scenes of gratitude with her father over his “precious approbation” of Evelina and ecstatic recognitions of herself as a “person of Consequence” are descriptions of suffering insomnia over “the certainty of being known as a scribbler” throughout her early journals and letters.65 Hester Thrale most incisively captured the strangeness of Burney’s conflicts when attempting to cure her of “an over-delicacy that may make” Burney unhappy” all her “Life” and asking her, “for why should you write a Book, Print a Book, and have every Body Read and like your Book,-and then sneak in a Corner and disown it!”66 Later in her life, Burney continues to try to sneak into corners: in a diary fragment written during her years working in Queen Charlotte’s court as her second Keeper of the Robes, she still endures the rigors of publicity brought on by authorship. In her mid-thirties and well past the age of “coming out,” Burney finds herself assailed by a devout reader of Cecilia who calls out, “I must speak with you! I am bursting, I am crammed, --I am Delviled & Ceciliad, all over, & through & through!” Her admirer, literally figuring his obsession with her novel as an act of consumption— incorporating her book, characters, and by extension her as author within

   automaton his body—compels her to ponder, “I knew, here, ‘twas the Book, not the writer, he was thus worshipping.”67 As one-time amanuensis for her father’s multivolume General History of Music, Burney, it may seem, understood the distinctions between copying and creating and self and product that her admirer confuses. To her admirer, she is still an amanuensis, inseparable and indistinguishable from the novel she penned—there is no room for difference between the material book that comprises Cecilia and the living author; it is as if she merely transcribed the book as a literal extension of herself. So acute in its social observations, Burney’s writing, according to Margaret Doody, had constantly run the risk of appearing to her contemporaries the product of mere transcription as opposed to conscious reflection and willful ordering: Some critics have made her a mere impersonal machine; she has been compared to a camera obscura and a tape recorder. Her novels are not automatic transmissions from eighteenth-century drawing rooms. They are the creative products of an actively intelligent, witty, and passionate human being, drawing on an experience of considerable tension and complexity, who thought she had something to say which could only be said imaginatively.68

Doody’s adjectives to denote Burney’s “human-ness” underscore a general anxiety about identifying humans with machines. Even as they, too, appear automatic in the regularity of their occurrences, the raw moments of abjection that afflict Cecilia and Camilla—and most powerfully Burney herself in her later witnessing of her own mastectomy—ensure that Burney manages to disrupt the smooth and classical beauty of the machine that appears to constrict female creativity.69 Much like Richardson’s own unusually lengthy works, Burney’s works suggest the impossibility of novelistic containment, especially via the mimetic technologies of transcription and textual reproductions. In her preface to Evelina, Burney indicates the tensions between the original and the copy that writing novels mediates: The heroine of these memoirs, young, artless, and inexperienced, is No faultless Monster, that the World ne’er saw, but the offspring of Nature, and of Nature in her simplest attire. In all the Arts, the value of copies can only be proportioned to the scarceness of originals: among sculptors and painters, a fine statue, or a beautiful picture, of some great master, may deservedly employ the imitative talents of

Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out    younger and inferior artists, that their appropriation to one spot, may not wholly prevent the more general expansion of their excellence; but, among authors, the reverse is the case, since the noblest productions of literature, are almost equally attainable with the meanest. In books, therefore, imitation cannot be shunned too sedulously; for the very perfection of a model which is frequently seen, serves but more forcibly to mark the inferiority of a copy. (Evelina, “Preface,” 8)

Distinguishing the work of copying in literature as less productive and ideal than the generative work of art, Burney suggests the changes brought out by the technological use of the printing press, a machine that can too easily create copies of superior models, and of which eighteenth-century novels were offsprings. Despite the tellingly confused syntax of this passage, its main point appears to affirm the value of the original by associating it with what springs from “Nature” and appears only infrequently. For Burney, the copy is the “Monster,” and the original is the product of a natural birth. Her heroine is coextensive with the book itself—another potential “Monster”—as her description blends into a general assessment of books and literature without any differentiation. Much like the automaton, the eighteenth-century novel attempts to replicate the dimensions of human beingness, even as Burney appears to deny the taint of copying in her introduction to Evelina. She wants to see her novel not as a mutant human—an automaton, as her references to copying suggest—but as a legitimate child of nature. Yet her subsequent novels, becoming more ambitious and attuned to the psychological duress of female socialization, manifest an increasing susceptibility to the contours of monstrosity and, at the same time, the anthropomorphic repetitions of the automaton. The more obediently truthful and ambitiously expansive her novels attempt to be in drawing “characters from nature” and the “manners of the times” (to use Burney’s phrasings in Evelina), the more time, space, and reiterations they require to accommodate those impressions. More excessive than monumental, and messy rather than sleek, Burney’s works resist the smooth and closed containment associated with the Classical body. For Burney there are rarely smooth and beautiful shapes for the public representation—whether through copying or original “birth”—of a subjectivity associated with both the novel and the feminine; rather, there are mainly abject ones.

c h a p t e r f i ve

Puppet Life: Voice, Animation, and Charlotte Charke’s Narrative

Just as prevalent as the dolls and automata of Chapters 3 and 4, puppets occupied a prominent position in eighteenth-century London’s culture of pleasure. So much so that George Speaight, historian of the English puppet theater, is moved to declare about this era, “Never before or since have the puppets played quite so effective and so well publicized a part in fashionable society; never before or since have puppet theatres so successfully made themselves the talk of the town.”1 Indeed, it is Burney’s newly cosmopolitan Evelina who testifies to Speaight’s claim when she reports to Mr. Villars how an outing to the Fantocini (Italian puppet theater) provided her company with “infinite entertainment.” The puppets were “so admirably managed,” she gushes, they “astonished and diverted us all.”2 The puppets’ “admirable” management described by Evelina recalls the automaton’s self-regulation and restraint. In many instances, the puppet in eighteenth-century usage was not just a variant of a doll, but also, in its mechanical construction, a variant of an automaton. James Ralph, in The Touch-Stone (1728) maintains, “the Mechanical Genius of the English is obvious to every body in many Cases, but in none more properly, than in the Contrivance and Conduct of our PUPPET-SHEWS.”3 Joseph Cradock, playwright of Zobeide and a contemporary of Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Foote, similarly underscores

   puppet the puppet’s mechanical craftsmanship when describing in his Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs how Reverend William Ludlam, a celebrated mechanic from Leicester, responded to a London puppet show. Ludlam, “quite surprised and entertained,” found that by the end of the show “the puppets acted so naturally that, though he placed himself close to the stage, he could scarce detect either string or wire.” In the puppets’ mimetic illusion, Ludlam discovered a new standard of mechanical ingenuity to study and emulate. Accordingly he resolves that instead of attending “mechanical societies, and rummaging for improvements afterwards,” or catching colds by “examining the dock-yards,” he would “come to London [and] visit fantoccinis and frequent the harlequin farces” where the managers “collect all these able mechanists.” So humbled was Ludlam by the fantoccini’s mechanical sophistication, he resolved to “burn” his own puppets, a set of “Chinese Tumblers” with “quicksilver in the veins” once he returned to Leicester.4 The puppet is, as some critics of the medium call it, a “performing object.”5 In this regard, when recalling the mechanical toys of James Cox, which told stories with their movements and revealed their jeweled interiors to enchanted audiences of the eighteenth century, the puppet still does not seem so different from an automaton. However, as Roman Paska writes, “the essential fascination of puppet theater . . . is a function of its nature as a theatrical activity consisting in the animation of lifeless objects (dead things) through the active intervention of a living human operator.” Moreover, the necessarily “theatrical destination of the puppet” distinguishes it from “the automaton, the mannequin and the doll, with their passive claims to formal autonomy.”6 Traditionally appearing within the framework of a narrative that is enacted before an expectant audience, the puppet occupies an assigned role as an object that speaks and interacts with other objects that speak back to it. Reacting to this spectacle, James Ralph enthuses: “I confess, I cannot view a well-executed PUPPETSHEW, without extravagant Emotions of Pleasure: To see our Artists, like so many Prometheus’s: [sic ] animate a Bit of Wood, and give Life, Speech and Motion, perhaps, to what was the Leg of a Joint-stool, strikes me with a pleasing Surprize, and prepossesses me wonderfully in favour of these little wooden Actors, and their Primum-mobile.”7 In praising the puppeteer’s capacity to give life to a piece of wood,

Puppet Life    Ralph rehearses Marx’s magical story of commodity fetishism, as it, too, concerns the animation of a piece of wood. Yet, unlike the puppet, which evinces physical symptoms of life—life, speech, and motion—the wooden table cum commodity “not only stands with its feet on the ground, [but also] evolves out of all its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”8 While Marx’s narrative confirms its own ends of establishing that the commodity “is a very strange thing,” by “[a]bounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,” it also works to elaborate Ralph’s mystical notion of the puppet, and its self-determining nature once it leaves the hands of its maker. What once served as a local and portable form of entertainment more than a century earlier in Ralph’s account of the puppet theater becomes an all-encompassing model for the uncontainable mechanisms of capitalist society. A steady line prevails between Ralph’s wooden puppet with “life, speech and motion,’ and Marx’s table that “stands on it head” and produces ideas out of its “wooden brain.” Both figures convey the power of material objects to animate the human urge toward self-creation, and both command the attention of those who would otherwise regard them as dumb, insentient, and worthless. It is Joseph Addison, in “The Puppet Show” (1689), one of his mockepic Latin poems, who depicts with precise detail the puppet’s transformation from a “useless log” to a “human form” with “an adopted face” that dances, squeaks, and “roams/ O’er painted mansions and illustrious domes”: Now sing we whence the puppet-actors came, What hidden power supplies the hollow frame; What cunning agent o’er the scenes presides, And all the secret operation guides. The turner shapes the useless log with care, And forces it a human form to wear: With the sharp steel he works the wooden race, And lends the timber an adopted face. Tenacious wires the legs and feet unite, And arms connected keep the shoulders right. Adapted organs to fit organs join, And joints with joints, and limbs with limbs combine. Then adds the active wheels and springs unseen,

   puppet By which he artful turns the small machine, That moves at pleasure by the secret wires; And last his voice the senseless trunk inspires.9

In this process where wood couples with steel and wires, and “adapted organs to fit organs join,” the puppet comes into being. Describing this process of transformation, the poem itself articulates the puppet’s parts in its own act of uttering the stages of creation in the puppet-making process. Most pivotal is the chain of “turning” that girds the passage, from the “turns” of phrasing in the lines of poetry themselves, to the turning performed by the craftsman to transform the wooden log into a puppet. To put it another way, like the young girl coming out to society to become a woman, the wood that turns into a puppet enacts the movement of metaphor and its variant, the trope. Indeed, a definition quoted earlier, in Chapter 4, centers on this movement: “A TROPE is defined to be an elegant turning of a word from its natural and proper, to a relative signification.”10 Like a word elegantly turning into the shape of another meaning, the piece of wood in the puppet maker’s hand “turns” into the “human form.” Both working toward mimetic ends, skillful rhetoric and craftsmanship make acts of appropriation as well as supplementation—signaled by words like “adopted face” and “adapted organs”—operative in media that normally lack human qualities. “Last” in the puppet-making process, and last in the poem itself, but first as the most resonant quality in the puppet’s performance is its attribution of voice, “its squeaking voice, and accents not its own.” In this chapter I propose that a poetics of puppetry in eighteenthcentury England informed not just textual productions of narrative, but also the ability for narrative to reconstruct the human subject as a character to create and manipulate across the page. Nowhere does the model of the puppet theater play such a pivotal role in subject formation and narration as A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, “Written by Herself.”11 Charke’s 1755 account of her strange and, as she puts it, madcap life, with its serial mutations and fabrications of identity, foregrounds and incorporates these traits of the puppet and puppet theater, not least in its own mediation through a narrative that curiously foreshortens the subject’s own interiority and equivocates her sexuality. Though she worked as a puppeteer only momentarily in her life, I will maintain that the

Puppet Life    procedure of Charke’s narrative remains indebted to a technique practiced specifically in the puppet theater: emitting a “personal” voice through material distinct from its original body. Reading Charke’s Narrative both as a prosthetic mouthpiece for her plea of pardon to a father who refused to see her, and as a “performing object” or puppet in its own right, this chapter figures the work as an early example of what the novel is capable of doing. In its most fully realized form, the novel is able to reconstruct the human being through manufactured media—print and text, writing implements and blank surfaces—significantly distinct from flesh and blood. Like Charke’s narrative, the novel can attempt to embody nevertheless the voice and heart of the human being in its own absence. Not just relegated to Evelina’s fashionable and moneyed set, puppet shows attracted various managers throughout the long eighteenth century, from itinerant showmen running booths at Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs to proprietors of elegant theaters. Both types of venues featured stunningly elaborate machines and painted scenes to showcase their puppets. As far back as 1664, John Locke mentioned seeing a puppet show at Bartholomew Fair called Judith and Holofernes. During the early part of the century, Powell’s Little Piazza Theatre in Covent Garden, specializing in miniature imitations of Italian operas, was popular enough with fashionable society for Addison in 1711 to comment wryly on its success in Spectator 14: “the opera at the Haymarket, and that under the little Piazza in Covent Garden . . . [are] at present the two leading diversions of the town.” Drawing a comparison between the two, he writes, “that by the squeak of their voices the heroes of each are eunuchs; and as the wit in both pieces are equal, I must prefer the performance of Mr. Powell, because it is in our own language.” Thus, Addison locates a similarity between the notorious Italian castrato singers of the opera and Powell’s puppets because each transgresses the “natural” boundaries of masculinity with their effeminate voices. Accordingly, each seems to have also tantalized audiences with their almost human, almost inhuman qualities, while the English language form of entertainment won Addison’s favor for its more legible and rational effects. In 1748, a Madame de la Nash—revealed by Martin Battestin in 1966 to be Henry Fielding—opened a “Breakfast Room for the nobility and Gentry” on Panton Street where she “gave the very best of Tea, Coffee,

   puppet Chocolate and Jellies” to consume along with her refined puppet shows.12 At Madame de la Nash’s the teakettle was scheduled to boil at eleven, and Master Punch to mount at twelve. The “House” was “fitted up in the most elegant Manner” and “Ladies” enabled to sit in “Boxes” while their footmen were “admitted to keep them.”13 The fad for puppets went so far toward the mid-century that puppets were bought and owned by the upper classes of France and England as stylish accessories, called “pantin” figures, to dangle from their hands. The public affection for these pasteboard marionettes was given scathing commentary by D’Alembert in 1747 in an entry for the object in L’Encyclopédie: “Posterity will find difficulty in believing that there were in France people of mature judgment capable of spending time, in a fit of weakmindedness, with this ridiculous toy, and that with an ardour which in other countries would hardly be pardoned in tenderest youth.” Supposedly, the French eventually outlawed them in 1756 because “the women, under the lively influence of this continual jumping, were in danger of bringing children into the world with twisted limbs like the pantins.”14 These dolls, too, affected trends in fashion, compelling the modistes of Paris to design dresses and headdresses à la pantin—presumably in the style of figures from the commedia della arte and Arcadia. Reiterating a cultural theme explored in Chapter 3—not only did women strive to emulate dolls that modeled fashion for real women, but also, in the case of the pantins, they were compelled to copy the fashions and appearances specific to dolls and dollhood (see Figure 5.1). Around the 1760s and 1770s, the actor and playwright Samuel Foote ran the popular Little Theatre in the Haymarket where he performed alongside his life-sized puppets, interacting with them as an equal (see Figure 5.2). Foote, who had acquired a wooden leg through a horseback riding accident, represented himself both as a man and as a puppet when on stage. One contemporary illustration in particular, “Piety in Pattens, or Timbertoe on Tiptoe,” foregrounds his wooden leg to create a jaunty visual joke. With the servant girl puppet elevated on her pattens, the much shorter Foote must stand on the toes of one foot to reach her, as the toes on the “timber” leg offer no use (see Figure 5.3). With his wooden leg, Foote was able to claim anatomical kinship with the very puppets he manipulated and presented on stage. And as a director of plays with human actors as well as wooden ones, he possessed

Puppet Life   

[Stanford University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image.]

figure 5.1. “Pantin à la Mode.” © Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum.

insight into not only the differences between the two types of performers, but also the particular qualities of the puppet. In an exordium to his Primitive Puppet Show, featuring Handsome Housemaid, or Piety in Pattens, a “Sentimental Comedy,” Foote explains the “nature” and “intention” of the puppet show, which he calls “a new kind of entertainment,” and “that purer part of the Drama.” Of its advantages to traditional drama, Foote cites the ability to alter the “figures” of the performers to make them more attractive at will: “One advantage we cannot help thinking we have over the rest of our race is, that if our persons should not please you at present, we can alter them till they do.” Even the semblance of emotion—“the real flesh and blood of the face”—is present on the wooden performer—“as upon any other Lady’s in the same situation.” Unlike other performers (such as the Italian singers on the opera stage), the puppets appeal to the love of nation, for they all have “sprung” from “the soil” of England, and

   puppet

[Stanford University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image.]

figure 5.2. Samuel Foote with characters from “Piety in Pattens,” The Macaroni and Theatrical Magazine, February, 1773. Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Special Collections, Mills Library, McMaster University.

have not been expensively “ransacked” from Europe. A lengthy list follows, of the various trees and types of wood used for different characters: for constant lovers, we have the circling ivy, crab-stocks for old maids, and weeping willows for Methodist preachers; for modish wives, we have the brittle poplar; their husbands, we shall give you in hornbeam . . . for incorrigible poets, we have plenty of birch; and thorns for fraudulent bankrupts, directors, and nabobs; for conjugal virtue, we have the fruitful, the unfading olive; and for public spirit, that lord of the forest, the majestic oak.15

In addition to highlighting his performers’ English provenance, with this list Foote also draws out their inherent materiality. The puppets’ statuses as material objects, removed from the human body of the voice that speaks through them, enables the puppeteer to exploit the logic of the supplement for political strategy. At this point speaking more as a member of the puppet “race” than a puppeteer, Foote explains how the puppet as a performer, unlike a human actor playing the same role, can escape the risk of being identified with the character it is playing. He states, “Our imita-

figure 5.3. “Piety in Pattens or Timbertoe on Tiptoe,” 1773? Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

   puppet tive powers and docility no man must pretend to dispute; whatever is given us we faithfully execute: if we err, it is the fault of our teachers; and so rooted and firmly fixed is our virtue, that the looser parts of Congreve or Vanbrugh may proceed from our mouths without ever tainting our morals.”16 While appearing to “speak” and emit words through their mouths, puppets also appeared to “eat” as well. Moreover, some of them stained the puppet race’s “pure” lineage—as conceived by Foote—by arriving through a non-English source. In 1770, Carlo Perico’s theater of fantoccini (Italian for “marionettes”) starred Harlequin puppets that dined from plates of macaroni onstage, to the audiences’ amazement and delight. Such distinguished figures as Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke visited Perico’s Panton Street theater to witness such scenes. Boswell’s Life of Johnson documents how when Goldsmith, at “the exhibition of the Fantoccini in London,” heard “those who sat next him” praising the “dexterity” with which “a puppet was made to toss a pike,” he “exclaimed with some warmth, ‘Pshaw! I can do it better myself.’ ” In a footnote to the incident, Boswell documents further how when Goldsmith “went home with Mr. Burke to supper,” he “broke his shin by attempting to exhibit to the company how much better he could jump over a stick than the puppets.”17 Notwithstanding the competitiveness they inspired in Goldsmith, Perico’s puppets had become such a fixture in fashionable society they set a metaphorical standard for both social artifice and the invisible mechanisms of human behavior. The name “Perico” itself became a byword for puppetry and its associations with artificiality and scripted gestures. An excerpt from the epistolary sentimental novel Emma; or, the Unfortunate Attachment (1773) reveals the cultural influence of Perico and his puppets. The urbane Miss Bishop, writing to Lady Noel, observes a mystifying exchange in the drawing room: “I staid until the action expressed what was to be understood: but even here I was continually at a stand; for, as it was moved by different springs from any thing I had ever seen, I could not always tell what it would have meant.” Unable to reach a conclusion, she declares “Had the Sieur Perico not better constructed his puppets, the Fantoccini would not have been so much in vogue. He might make a proper preceptor, I should think, to these creatures, who, having neither heart nor brains, would be moved by mechanism: he would at least make tolerable actors of them.”18

Puppet Life    In addition to serving as metaphors for sociability and providing fashionable entertainment, puppets also provided a standard by which human and political corruption could be critiqued and measured. Poems such as Swift’s Mad Mullinix and Timothy (1728) exemplify the rich political significance of the puppet figure in its satire of Richard Tighe, a Whig politician, as a “petulant, conceited,” and aggressive Punch-like character. Hogarth’s unpublished print, “Enthusiasm Delineated” (ca. 1760), executes its satire of religious fanaticism by representing an incredible convergence between human figures and religious idols, as well as different faiths (see Figure 5.4). One might argue that the puppet figure—shown festooned around the Anglican minister’s pulpit as various Biblical characters—forms an intermediary between the idols, completely immobile, and the people, able to move of their own volition, and thus breaks down their polarized differences. The artist’s “intention” inscribed underneath the print, “to give a lineal representation of the strange Effects of litteral and low conceptions of Sacred Beings as also of the Idolatrous Tendency of Pictures in Churches and prints in Religious books &c,” asserts its demystifying mode of satire. Targeting several religious groups at once— Roman Catholics, illustrated by the congregation members who not only hug idols of Christ in their arms, but also eat them; Anglicans, represented by the minister on the higher pulpit gesticulating wildly with puppets of the Devil in one hand, and Raphael’s ancient God flanked by two angels in the other; Methodists, represented by a plump preacher at the lower pulpit screwing his face with emotion, and flanked by two cherubs, one with chicken feet for legs; and Jews, denoted by the bearded man swooning over an illustration from the Old Testament—Hogarth attempts to depict how they hold a mode of faith in common not only through placing them into one congregation together, but also by showing how each in their own way practices a form of primitive idolatry. Thus, through their investments in inanimate objects as literal representations of the sacred— borne out in the Roman Catholics who munch on Christ’s miniature body in the print—they are not much more enlightened than their pagan ancestors, “savage” neighbors on the globe, or gullible children.19 In this visual critique of religious enthusiasm, the various figures— human and inhuman—connect and thus complete a spectrum of life forms in various states of awareness. The only figure exempt from Hogarth’s

   puppet

figure 5.4. “Enthusiasm Delineated,” ca. 1760. Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Special Collections, Mills Library, McMaster University.

tableau of unthinking enthusiasm is the Oriental figure wearing an oversized turban and smoking a hookah—representing the Moslem faith— who peers in a window from the outside and observes the congregation’s frenzy with detached curiosity. He sees what they are unable to see— themselves. Swayed by the power of the religious and superstitious imagination, the “real” people in the congregation are like so many dummies

Puppet Life    in their submission to unreason. Indeed, the Anglican minister, with his wig flying off his bald head, wears the motley diamond-patterned vest of a harlequin underneath his dark robe; he operates not only as the grand master puppeteer of the congregation, but also as the chief puppet and fool himself, Punch. While these eighteenth-century satires may not have been so subtle in their choice of the puppet as a metaphor for vitiated and irrational political and belief systems, the culture’s persistent attachment to the theme indicates a more complex and submerged evaluation of what it means to be an enlightened human subject, and the issues of agency, self-awareness, and mastery over one’s world the condition implicates. Eighteenth-century English culture, in other words, was poised to respond to the puppet’s salience as a metaphor for subjectivity, a metaphor that was especially amenable to the new terms and structures of selfhood that consumer culture shed in its fast evolution during the period. It was only at the end of the century that puppets lost their appeal for adult audiences, even at Bartholomew Fair. Hence afterwards, puppet shows would be brought out for the demands of children exclusively, thus denoting a point where modernizing culture outgrew its eighteenth-century investments in dolls and relegated them to the sphere of children.

Charlotte Charke and the Voice of Narrative Charlotte Charke, the notorious actress, transvestite, and estranged daughter of celebrated dramatist Colley Cibber, at one moment in her tumultuous life, crowded with “many strange and unaccountable vicissitudes of fortune,” partook of the century-long fascination with performing objects when opening in 1737 a puppet theater with exquisite stage sets and marionettes. As Fidelis Morgan explains, a primary motivator for opening the puppet theater was to find a way to bypass Walpole’s infamous Licensing Act of 1737. The law prohibited dramatists and actors from performing anywhere else but in two patent theaters, Theatre Royal Drury Lane and Theatre Royal Covent Garden. In doing so, it kept such outspoken playwrights and managers as Henry Fielding from presenting their openly satirical critiques of both Walpole’s government and his supporter, Charke’s father, Colley Cibber.20 Charke herself had already begun

   puppet to be targeted as a controversial member of the theater scene through her play, The Art of Management, which decried the unfair treatment of players by managers in general, and her own firing by Charles Fleetwood from his Drury Lane Theatre in particular. Of her rendering of her former boss in The Art of Management, she writes, “I took no small Pains to set him in a most ridiculous Light, and spared not to utter some Truths which, I am sensible, ought rather to have been concealed” (Narrative, 62). She made matters worse both for her stage career and for her relationship with her father by next working for Fielding’s theater company, and playing such parts as Lord Place, a character modeled on Colley Cibber, in Fielding’s Pasquin. As Morgan explains, by speaking out against the Licensing Act, Charke had spoiled her chances of working for one of the patent houses. Furthermore, when the Licensing Act forced Fielding to leave the theater world altogether, Charke lost an employer. Much as Foote later would discern how, in puppetry, the notion of agency in performance gets lost between the puppet and its operator, Charke discovered a way out of the License Act through using the same medium. Her puppets at “the Tennis-Court” on James Street, were, as she puts it, “allowed to be the most elegant that was ever exhibited,” and sported exquisitely detailed faces that faithfully reproduced their human models. As she had done in her girlhood activities of shooting, medicine, gardening, scholarship, and acting, Charke threw herself enthusiastically into puppeteering. She displayed her educated background by taking a literary approach to her choice of plays and production style, choosing works that were being produced concurrently in the human theater, from The Unhappy Favourite to Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Richard III and a number of Fielding’s plays. Most striking in her approach was her aim to achieve verisimilitude with her puppets, as if she were representing the “real theatre in miniature.”21 Echoing an eighteenth-century acting strategy of imitating statues and paintings, she modeled her puppets’ faces on pictures of famed individuals, and dressed them lavishly: “I was so very curious, that I bought Mezzotinto’s of several eminent Persons, and had the Faces carved from them. Then, in regard to my Cloaths, I spared for no Cost to make them splendidly magnificent, and the Scenes were agreeable to the rest.”22 She in fact paid nearly five hundred pounds for these puppets, and later sold them for twenty guineas.

Puppet Life    Following the pattern of all her life’s projects, her puppet show, though a commercial success, eventually shut down because of unforeseen misfortunes and physical obstacles. Charke’s efforts to follow a creative existence while making a living with her puppet shows were cut short when she caught a fever and became overly fatigued. This was an especially unfortunate inconvenience, for Charke herself worked as “one of the principal Exhibiters for those Gentry.” Commenting on the properties of what she calls “my wooden troop” and suggesting why her good health was crucial to the successful running of the shows, Charke reflects on a common comparison of the time between living actors and puppets. The mouths of puppets, or “inanimate heroes and heroines,” she claims, are not so different from the bad actors whose own mouths “MOVE without any Reality of Utterance, or at least” are “so unintelligible in the Attempt, they might as well have closed their Lips, without raising an Expectation they were unlucky enough to disappoint.” Having worked as both a puppeteer and an actress, she finds the difference, “whether ORATORS or PLAYERS . . . not material” and furthermore, advises anyone who wishes to be a “tragick player” to be “an orator,” too (Narrative, iv, 82). These details of Charke’s career as a puppeteer, with its emphasis on mimesis, the mediation of character and voice through an inanimate object, and the human world in miniature, reflect the crucial terms of her own life, in both writing and living it. Recent critics, intrigued by the rich implications of her transvestism in daily life and on stage, have analyzed Charke in terms of stage history, the paradoxes and idiosyncrasies of her narrative as a medium for self-formation, the applicability of such terms as bisexual or feminist to her identity, as well as her mysteriously vexed relationship with her famous father. So famous was her long-standing dispute with her father, Charke claims, rumors circulated about her having posed as a highwayman and attacking him, and also working as a fishmonger and slapping him in the face with a flounder. Within these rumors lies some semblance to real life in that Charke did indeed appropriate endlessly different roles not just in dramatic productions, but also in her means of supporting herself. Supplying another topic of great fascination for critics, Charke was a lifelong masquerader in performing a “thousand unaccountable things” for her livelihood, including her stints as waiter, grocer, soup shop owner, pastry chef, tap room owner, higgler, farmer, oil woman, sausage maker and seller, hog merchant, and novelist.

   puppet Consistent in these critiques are questions about psychological intention and personal and political agency as they emerge in Charke’s theatrical manner of presenting herself, even in prose. Her performative approach to writing prose, in other words, “embodies her identity as crossdressing woman and actress,” as Robert Folkenflik puts it.23 From the very first pages of her Narrative, Charke indicates her novel as well as selfdramatizing approach to writing and selfhood when dedicating the text to herself and giving herself the title, “NONPAREIL OF THE AGE.” Later, in the dedication, she writes, “If, by your Approbation, the World may be perswaded into a tolerable Opinion of my Labours, I shall, for the Noveltysake, venture for once to call you, FRIEND; a Name, I own, I never as yet have known you by” (Narrative, 6). In contrast with critics who view Charke’s writing of her Narrative as an attempt to unify her divided selfhood, I view this peculiar instance of Charke in dialogue with herself as a willful attempt to continue to make her self, even to herself strange, turning it into an object of pleasure and mirth in doing so. Self-objectification, for Charke, is an act of self-pleasuring, even as she attempts to regain her father’s favor by demonstrating her penitence in the Narrative. In this way Charke’s Narrative appears to focus less on human interests and influences and more on its intersections with the world of the inhuman and almost human that emerges in her fleeting descriptions of her wooden troupe as well as all other activities in her life. Much as her wooden puppets enacted human worlds in miniature, each of her professions, and each of her attempts to account for what she repeatedly calls her “unaccountable” life, gleefully rises to the challenge of mimesis, yet always stops short of achieving the depth or roundedness yielded by selfreflection. In her blunt and almost stream-of-consciousness prose, she appears to replicate the uncanny effect of Hogarth’s engraving, The Analysis of Beauty I, especially its lower-right border where the human face evolves through different modes of representation—from masterly realism showing every nuance of emotion, to the vacuous simplicity of a wooden block head, or a wig maker’s dummy (see Figure 5.5). Between Charke herself and her puppets, another cultural figure completes the aesthetic spectrum of human life forms and trivial oddities that the Narrative evokes. When emphasizing, in the passages quoted earlier, that puppets operate as vehicles for projecting voices, Charke indicates

Puppet Life   

figure 5.5. William Hogarth, detail from lower right border of Analysis of Beauty, Plate 1, 1753. Courtesy of the William Ready Division of Archives and Special Collections, Mills Library, McMaster University.

their parity with the castrati ridiculed by Addison. Charke herself, in her indeterminate gender—dressing and presenting herself throughout most of her life as a man, though biologically a woman—embodies the liminal species that Steele calls the “eunuch,” and thus in her own life, makes immaterial the distinction between male and female, as well as puppet and actor. Lacking the anatomical organ that would properly signify and constitute their malehood, and missing the surface features of femininity, Charke and castrati, like puppets, are destined to equivocate the borders of human identity. Victor Turner, in his anthropological investigation of rites of passage in an African tribe, defines liminality as a distinctly objectless condition: “A further structurally negative characteristic of transitional beings is that they have nothing. They have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally from their fellows . . . In the words of King Lear they represent ‘naked unaccommodated man.’ ” Thus divested of both belongings and belonging, liminal beings, in the cases of Charke and castrati, exploit what they do have—their mutable identities—in order to gain cultural legibility. In a word, abject—neither subject nor object—they aggrandize their mutations from the norm in the service of transmitting their voices, the only instruments they own. Henry Fielding, disregarding the infamous riches and fortune that castrati acquired through their lucrative careers, reflected on their castration precisely in terms of property, referring to them as “these poor Italians, whose Property is their Throats.”24 The voices themselves, however, maintain their owners’ liminal identities by resisting the frame of probability. While popular spokespersons of English aesthetic sense derided opera, the “exotic monster,” for implausibly interweaving dramatic action with singing as well as executing both in an incomprehensible foreign language, the castrato and his extraordinary voice caused the most anxiety—onstage and offstage—for

   puppet violating “the semblance of reality.” Performing in a setting that already overwhelmed reason and the senses, the experience of hearing a castrato sing constituted an uncanny experience in a uniquely aural register. In addition to providing an unsettling visual experience, a physiological result of missing testicles—“They have the look of a crocodile, the grin of an ape, the legs of a peacock, the paunch of a cow, the shape of an elephant, the brains of a goose, the throat of a pig, and the tail of a mouse”—the opera singers, “exotick animals . . . lately imported from the Continent,” emitted a voice that defied convention.25 While popular eighteenth-century accounts invariably remarked on the “unnatural” and improbable highness of their voices, dismissing and ridiculing them as “childish” squeaks or piping, this more recent description of a rereleased gramophone recording of “the last castrato,” Moreschi (1858–1922), renders the disarming effect of the castrato voice in more technical detail and thus offers a clue to its impact on eighteenth-century ears: It is not so much the style of performance that disturbs (a near yodel—strange enough in its own right) as the timbre, the way the sound is produced. In Moreschi’s performance of the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria,’ for instance, notes just above middle C sound, as with a boy soprano, like the very bottom of his vocal range, but they are belted with the force of a fully grown man. As the melodic line lifts, remarkably, to take a soprano’s high B the voice seems to come more from his head, but again—recording quality aside—the sound is different: clearer and purer than the colour of either a female soprano or a male falsettist, it seems to possess an odd, penetrating sweetness, the sharp taste of an unknown fruit.26

Regardless of such historical constraints as differences in choice of music, individual singing styles, and site and conditions of performance, the expectation that such a high voice should come from a body other than the singer’s—or a body other than human—consistently lies at the root of the castrato’s discomfiting effect. The reviewer of Moreschi continues to describe her aural experience by emphasizing her inability to picture a body to match the voice: The uncanny (yes, hair-raising) effect of listening to his voice lies in something still more extreme—an utter lack of identification: I simply cannot fathom the

Puppet Life    body that produces those sounds. The voice, in its utter strangeness, cuts off the possibility of my forming any real or imagined connection with the singing body. And in that breach, I cannot help but be reminded of the uncomfortable lack that defines the castrato himself.27

In the eighteenth century, the castrato produced a similar disquietude in his listeners, but with a more specific yet equally thwarted expectation—listeners often expected a female body to accompany the castrato’s voice. One of the dialogue speakers in Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees proclaims, “I always had such an aversion to eunuchs, as no fine singing or acting of any of them has yet been able to conquer; when I hear a feminine voice, I look for a petticoat; and I perfectly loath the sight of those sexless animals.”28 Eluding reason in pairing the visual appearance of a man with the auditory impression of a woman, the castrato consequently evades a stable human identity because he carries the traits of both sexes. For this reason, among others, the castrato shares the fundamental kinship with puppets noted by Addison. Either missing or mismatching the essential components for a coherent identity, both the castrato and puppet function as instruments for entertainment. Entertaining, most of all, for their artificial voices that work against the grain of their appearances—respectively masculine or inhuman—and against the grain of nature and reality. The very structure of puppetry promises an unreal experience—a voice from “nowhere” emanating through apparently inanimate objects magically made animate by wires, strings, and invisible hands, constitutes its mode of expression. Following eighteenth-century puppet theater conventions, puppeteers spoke through a tin “squeaker” that raised the pitch of their voices to a shrill register. Charke’s own star, Punch, spoke through such a contraption, as the following source indicates: “Tis said she intends, by their artificial voices to cut out the Italians; for it has been found that Punch can hold his breath and quiver much better and longer than Farinelli; I wish this may be true, for then we may expect to have Italian songs at a moderate rate, without the use of a knife.”29 Revealing that Addison’s construction of a rivalry between the two forms of entertainment had become a cultural cliché, this contemporary observation also alludes to the violent procedure by which the castrato loses

   puppet his physiological source of masculinity and gains his exceptional, albeit “artificial” voice. Charke’s puppet shows, such as “The Beggar’s Wedding,” a variation of The Beggar’s Opera, literalized this rivalry between her puppets and castrati by staging a character modeled on Farinelli, the period’s reigning castrato. Furthermore, Charke mirrored in burlesque fashion the traditional casting of castrati in female roles by showing a version of Henry Fielding’s play, The Covent Garden Tragedy, in which Punch, “being the first time in petticoats,” played the part of a notorious brothel madam.30 In love affairs, puppets were not so much rivals with castrati as the puppeteer, Charke herself; for she, like the opera stars, was often the object of young women’s romantic interest, at least according to her own autobiographical narrative. With Charke, as in the cases of the heiress and the landlady who employed her as a waiter, women believed they were falling in love with a charming young man and hoped to marry him. The heiress, so attached to the idea of Charke as a young man, refused to believe her confession of her true sex. Popular jokes about the equivocal sex of castrati, on the other hand, tended to depict women as being naively ignorant about the full meaning of the “true nature” of eunuchs, and what consequences they might have in the bedroom. The play The Remarkable Trial of the Queen of Quavers (1778) crudely indicates such an attitude: When he appears in public, he is so artfully painted and patched up, that I don’t wonder he should seduce the curiosity of raw unexperienced young women; but I assure you, Miss, that the Castrati are not what they seem, they are downright swindlers in love . . . If you take Signor Rascallini to a serious task, you will be sure of finding him a blunted sword, an old woman in masquerade, a pistol without balls, a pen without ink, a dog that cannot wag his tail, a pin which cannot prick, a chimney without fire, where no dinner can be cooked, a warming pan with a broken handle, and a house that cannot stand long, because it is built without stones.31

In 1718, an English translation of Traité des Eunnuques (1707) by Charles Ancillon appeared, titled Eunuchism Display’d, exhaustively arguing against the legitimacy of marriages between women and eunuchs. Much like The Remarkable Trial, this document concentrates on the anatomical deficiency of eunuchs in its denunciation of their possible coupling with women. Its publication prompted by the contemporary case of a young girl’s desire to marry the opera singer Nicolini, this treatise faults the eunuch’s inabil-

Puppet Life    ity to engage in sexual intercourse and thus procreate as the crucial cause for finding marriages between eunuchs and women both unviable and immoral. At the same time, it provides a “natural history” of the eunuch’s origins in civilization and investigates possible cultural motives for “making” them. Perhaps most remarkable in this text is the author’s foregrounding of a connection between the eunuch and “a senseless idol,” first perceived in Ecclesiasticus: The author of Ecclesiasticus compares a man that is persecuted of the lord, or that bears the pain, or weight of his own iniquity, to a mouth shut up, to a grave, to a senseless idol, to a eunuch; for it seems they are all one in the language of that wise author, whose words are these, ‘Delicates poured upon a mouth shut up, are as messes of meat upon a grave. What good doth the offering unto an idol? For neither can it eat, nor smell, so is he that is persecuted of the lord. He seeth with his eyes, and groaneth as an eunuch that embraceth a virgin and sigheth.32

Thus likened to a nonsentient representational object, the eunuch, though he can see, recognize, and even feel desire, is incapable of fulfilling it through accomplishing the most basic of human and animal acts—sexual intercourse. He resembles Perico’s macaroni-slurping marionette who appears able to perform a vital function, but, behind the folds of its costume, lacks the necessary equipment to fully taste and digest the offered food. On a par with each other, the women who fell in love with the glamorous castrati of the eighteenth century were viewed as being as naïve as the simpleton figure “Roger” in James Robertson’s poem, “The PuppetShow” (1773), who mistakes the figures in a puppet performance for real players. Rushing to meet the performers backstage after the show, he becomes disconcerted, yet “twirls his hat” and bows nevertheless, at the sight of them in disarticulated and indiscrete disarray: Here dangling on a pin were seen A purpled king, or tinsel’d queen Here Punch with sceptred princes tumbled, Here priests with Beelzebub lay jumbled; Here sidelong hanging by a wire, A chop-fallen hero, prince, or ‘squire

Onlookers “laugh ‘till their sides and midriffs ake” at his misunderstanding, then explain to him:

   puppet Were you not blind, you might behold ‘Tis tinsel this you take for gold; And what you fancy flesh and blood, Is naught save frippery rags and wood, That cannot speak, look, move, or stand, But owe all to the artist’s hand, Who fix’d on high, lordly presides, And with a wire each action guides.33

The puppets, described by “the enlightened” onlookers, resemble the idols of Ecclesiasticus in their lack of sensorial functions, and Roger, “blind,” corresponds with them. Roger, however, reveals that his simpleton actions of bowing to puppets derive from a more sophisticated understanding that his “mistake” bears little difference from the empty actions of decorum required in a civil society that, within quotidian exchanges, placed increasing importance on gestures and appearances: In London—-nay some say, at Court— There’s nought more common than to see The beaver doff ’d and bended knee, To strutting wooden-headed beaus, With empty sobs and tinsel cloaths; Who, puppet-like, ne’er speak or move, But as they’re wire-led from above; And like these folks aside are thrown, As useless Logs—the work once done.34

Perhaps most devastating in Roger’s rejoinder—which takes a page out of the bumpkin’s book in Ward’s earlier anecdote about the waxwork dolls at Bartholomew Fair—is the suggestion that on stage, puppets do not so much impersonate living people as people, in the theater of everyday life, impersonate puppets. The lack of the crucial masculine organ alluded to in Charke’s story about her disappointed heiress had consequences in narrative situations as well. As much as Charke’s puppets emblematize the prosthetic selves she endeavored to create for herself throughout her life, her own narrative, what she calls “the little brat of my brain,” works as the material compensation for personal as well as financial lack. The impetus for the writing and publication of her autobiography is to regain her father’s support

Puppet Life    and acknowledgement. Indeed, his disavowal of her as his child forms the foundation for her status as an unstable and unaccommodated self. She describes the central goal of her narrative in surprisingly plangent terms: “since my Maturity, I lost that Blessing: Which, if strongest Compunction, and uninterrupted Hours of Anguish, blended with Self-conviction and filial Love, can move his Heart to Pity and Forgiveness, I shall, with Pride and unutterable Transport, throw myself at his Feet, to implore the only Benefit I desire or expect, his BLESSING, and his PARDON” (Narrative, 8). This pronouncement is one of the few places in the Narrative where Charke attempts to fully describe qualities of emotion in blended terms. Because her father, Colley Cibber, has refused to speak to her himself, she hopes to maintain a conversation with him through the mouthpiece of her Narrative. Despite her heartfelt intentions to please her father, Charke cannot resist the play of puppetry as she rushes through and toys with different modes of being in her life and in her Narrative. Repeatedly, she makes promises to make the reader as well as herself laugh in the telling of her story. Like the puppet medium, Charke achieves her stylistic effects through movement, not through the shading and nuance of reflexive activity. In this way, she has not changed significantly from her childhood persona when she endeavored to become a miniature version of her father at the age of four, which the F. Garden image illustrates (see Figure 5.6): As I have promis’d to conceal nothing that might raise a Laugh, I shall begin with a small Specimen of my former Madness, when I was but four Years of Age. Having, even then, a passionate Fondness for a Perriwig, I crawl’d out of Bed one Summer’s Morning at Twickenham, where my Father had Part of a House and Gardens for the Season, and, taking it into my small Pate, that by Dint of a Wig and a Waistcoat, I should be the perfect Representative of my Sire, I crept softly into the Servants Hall, where I had the Night before espied all Things in Order, to perpetrate the happy Design I had framed for the next Morning’s Expedition. Accordingly I paddled down Stairs, taking with me my Shoes, Stockings, and little Dimity Coat; which I artfully contrived to pin up, as well as I could, to supply the Want of a Pair of Breeches. By the Help of a long Broom, I took down a Waistcoat of my Brother’s, and an enormous bushy Tie-wig of my Father’s, which entirely enclos’d my Head and Body, with the Knots of the Ties thumping my little Heels as I march’d along, with a slow and solemn Pace. The Covert of Hair in which I was conceal’d, with the Weight of a monstrous Belt and large Silver-hilted

   puppet

[Stanford University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image.]

figure 5.6. F. Garden, “Charlotte Charke at Four,” 1775. © Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum. Sword, that I could scarce drag along, was a vast Impediment in my Procession: And, what still added to the other Inconveniencies I labour’d under, was whelming myself under one of my Father’s large Beaver-hats, laden with Lace, as thick and as broad as a Brickbat. Being thus accoutred, I began to consider that ‘twould be impossible for me to pass for Mr. Cibber in Girl’s Shoes, therefore took an Opportunity to slip out of Doors after the Gardener, who went to his Work, and roll’d myself into a dry Ditch, which was as deep as I was high; and, in this Grotesque Pigmy-State, walk’d up and down the Ditch bowing to all who came by me. But, behold, the Oddity of my Appearance soon assembled a Croud about me; which yielded me no

Puppet Life    small Joy, as I conceiv’d their Risibility on this Occasion to be Marks of Approbation, and walk’d myself into a Fever, in the happy Thought of being taken for the ‘Squire. (Narrative, 11)

This appears to be a favorite moment for Charke, as she refers to it again in a portion of her adult life and became famous for ostentatiously wearing about town a lace-trimmed hat as part of her masculine attire. It is, in fact, a miniature version of her own life, as well as an effort to become a miniature version of her father. Such a childhood scene and its affinities with the puppet theater as a diminutive version of human adult worlds, helps answer generic as well as ontological questions about Charke’s narrative and life. Straddling the two genres of drama and the novel, the puppet theater and Charke’s Narrative accomplish the work of both while creating an aesthetic space to accommodate a novel subject who escapes from the pain of uncertainty by transmuting it into the aimless pleasures of trivia.

chapter six

Unheimlich Maneuvers: Enlightenment Objects in the Age of Psychoanalysis

What does our own commercial and psychoanalytic culture owe to the eighteenth century and its strenuous efforts toward enlightenment? The fetishes, puppets, and miniaturized and automatized humans that animate so many eighteenth-century literary and cultural texts suggest that we owe a great deal. Writers from Rochester to Rousseau, from Johnson to Burney, and from Swift to Addison show a pervasive concern with untangling the knotted relationship between commodities and human subjectivity. These writers share a vision of the human subject as both a collection of commodities and a commodity in itself, resulting in the subject’s identification with those objects that are so stunningly made in their image, and that supplement their image. Both thwarting and defining Enlightenment subjectivity, these objects—the dolls, puppets, and automata that often appear to have more agency than the human subjects they resemble or “serve”—are typically but not altogether accurately perceived as the leading figures of Freud’s influential essay on the uncanny and the modernist milieu in which it was written. Indeed, we often recognize Freud and not his eighteenth-century predecessors as the first or most distinct imaginer of the uncanniness that accompanies modern subjectivity. Within the critical tradition of Gothic literature, for instance, it has become commonplace to “apply” Freud for

   last things conceptual enlightenment of such key Gothic mechanisms as the projection of internal drives and emotions onto external structures and objects. Instead of submitting to this proleptic tendency, this concluding chapter considers Freud as an epiphenomenon of the eighteenth century. Through invoking Freud as a secondary symptom of the eighteenth century that in turn accompanies our reading of the period, the age of Enlightenment and its most enduring attitudes become more sharply defined. By tracing the trope of enlightenment in Freud and its ineluctable associations with eighteenth-century methods and instruments of Enlightenment, I show that the ideas and visions of the eighteenth century remain very much with us as post-Freudian subjects. My use of “enlightenment” contrasts with “Enlightenment.” The former denotes the metaphorical process of clarification and mental understanding that falls out of the historical framework of the “age of Enlightenment” yet is greatly indebted to its ideas. The latter refers to the intellectual movement—selfconsciously aware of itself as such—that reached its height of vigor and concentration in the eighteenth century. If literary criticism cannot escape returning to Freud for illumination of eighteenth-century texts, it is because Freud himself cannot escape the age of Enlightenment.

Unheimlich Maneuvers More than a century after the age of Enlightenment, Freud, in “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919), attempted to define a phenomenon that is, above all, a “subdued emotional impulse” and “a special core of feeling.” Freud’s essay—rife with references to dolls, automata, “painted ladies,” prostitutes, and fetishes—manifests an attachment to representations of objectified subjectivity that captivated eighteenth-century writers. “The ‘Uncanny’ ” denotes psychoanalysis’s relationship with the Enlightenment not so much through perpetuating these individual themes themselves as through the shared attitude that objects can all too easily become confused with the self and take on lives of their own. Observing that the uncanny arises when “the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is,” and when “a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes,” Freud revisits the dilemma of a radical-

Unheimlich Maneuvers    ly objectified subjectivity that originally troubled—and fascinated—the eighteenth century.1 Recent critics have regarded Freud’s uncanny as a “historical allegory” for the consequences of Enlightenment productions of rational and objectifiable knowledge. For Mladen Dolar, the uncanny emerged as a direct result of the “historical rupture brought about by the Enlightenment.” As a consequence, Dolar claims, “It seems that Freud speaks about a ‘universal’ of human experience when he speaks of the uncanny, yet his own examples tacitly point to its location in a specific historical conjuncture, to the . . . Enlightenment. There is a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity.”2 Similarly using Freud’s interpretation of the uncanny to account for western European history, Terry Castle asks, “Might one argue, extrapolating from Freud, that the uncanny itself first ‘comes to light’—becomes a part of human experience—in that period known as the Enlightenment?”3 This interpretation of the uncanny as a historical by-product of the Enlightenment implicitly follows the deeply Freudian structure of repression: the “Age of Reason,” in attempting to suppress formerly acceptable beliefs in superstition and the supernatural, created a charged space for those beliefs to emerge as “the uncanny.” Thus produced by the Enlightenment, the uncanny itself represents the return of Western civilization’s repressed roots in such “primitive” beliefs as superstition, the supernatural, and magic. In short, the uncanny signifies the dread return of excess and indeterminacy, remnants from the age of pre-Enlightenment. I seek to adjust this fundamentally linear account of the eighteenth century’s vexed passage into Enlightenment by viewing the boundary between the enlightened and the uncanny—and by extension, the unenlightened—as altogether more permeable than we have been led to believe. Not only does the uncanny directly result from the Enlightenment, but it also constituted the Enlightenment in much the same way that the canny itself implicitly carries the seed of the uncanny in its own meaning. Though this seems a subtle distinction, its consequences lead us to a more nuanced account of the eighteenth century’s contributions to formations of modern subjectivity, and how these contributions derive from the period’s material constructions of subjects who occupied this boundary. Certain social attitudes and traditions of the period concerning the use of

   last things optical instruments and their ineluctable object, the spectacle of femininity—“at once so foreign and domestic”—seeping into and destabilizing the eighteenth century’s frameworks of social propriety, most conspicuously supplied the terms for later formulations of uncanniness.4 The most pervasive, a “special core of feeling,” that above all confuses enlightened structures of belief with unenlightened ones, underscores the eighteenth century’s examples of women vividly exchanging their roles and features with those of commodity objects. These eighteenth-century spectacles of women exceeding the spaces of domesticity and rationality, vividly and complexly rendered in The Rape of the Lock, are precisely what enabled Freud’s labile formulation of the uncanny to take place.

“communicated with the air of a secret”: Pope and the Trivial Thing Perhaps no other literary text showcases the fetishistic tendencies of eighteenth-century material culture more memorably—and elegantly—than Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714).5 By the time Pope’s poem emerged, partakers of eighteenth-century material culture had unmoored idolatry from its theological context to enact it in unabashedly worldly terms. Hobbes, describing idolaters as those who “worship for Gods, those Apparences that remain in the Brain from the impression of externall Bodies upon the organs of their Senses” focuses on the utter absence and nothingness that the sensuous enticements of idolatry cover. “And this is the reason why St. Paul says, Wee know that an Idol is Nothing,” he elaborates.6 Indeed, the significance of God had become so diminished in the brains of eighteenth-century consumers that their idols stood for nothing but the glamorous appearances of commodities in themselves. This groundless faith—“this invisible je ne sais quoi” as Defoe calls it— in the fiction of appearances also directed the growth of credit and trade.7 Pope’s own representations of the intrinsically ephemeral nature of commodities in The Rape of the Lock—transmitted most overtly in the “supernatural machinery” of the Sylphs who are invisible and yet effect material changes throughout the poem—bear out the period’s cultural and economic movements and their paradoxical rooting in the nothingness that deepened even (and especially) as material plenitude expanded.

Unheimlich Maneuvers    Tracing the poem’s patterns of commodity fetishism, however, has become a well-worn strategy in literary criticism.8 One might argue that in some instances Pope reverses commodity fetishism when he recognizes that the human worker is mistakenly credited for the work that already invisible hands—those of the “busy” Sylphs (who were once women themselves)—produce. “And Betty’s praised for labours not her own,” observes the poet at the end of the elaborate toilet table rituals that conclude canto I. Critics from Louis Landa to Laura Brown cite this same scene as a moment in which Pope solidifies and contains the products and labors of overseas expansion and trade in the synecdochic figure of female vanity.9 Brown writes, “female adornment becomes the main cultural emblem of commodity fetishism.”10 The domestic event of a woman “making herself up” at her toilet table highlights—through the consolidating effects of rhyming couplets, mild alliteration and assonance, and the verbs “unite” and “transform”—the indiscriminate mixing of various geographies and even species that occur when objects are transmuted into commodities: Unnumbered treasures ope at once, and here The various offerings of the world appear; From each she nicely culls with curious toil, And decks the goddess with the glittering spoil. This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder box The tortoise her and elephant unite, Transformed to combs, the speckled, and the white. (I, 129–36)

One might say that such a passage entices critics to dwell on the story of British trade and imperialism inherent not only in The Rape of the Lock, but also in the gorgeous spectacle of Belinda herself. For Landa and Brown both, the passage from Addison’s Spectator 69 (1711) that depicts “the single Dress of a Woman of Quality” as the “product of an hundred Climates” from “the Torrid Zone” to “beneath the Pole,” provides the model for their discussion of this passage and of Belinda in general as a synecdoche for England’s imperialist expansion. The “secret” in Pope’s poem— covered over by the skirts of domestic femininity—exists in the exertions of mercantile capitalism. For these critics, Marx, with his authoritative delineation of “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret,” unlocks the poem’s “significance.”11

   last things I will suggest, however, that the secret lies elsewhere as the contradictory movement of the passage itself indicates. Though it appears to “ope at once,” “unlock,” and spread the secret of Belinda’s beauty as the product of “curious toil,” the passage still guards the secret of femininity through keeping unbroken the tight circle of her narcissistic gaze and, indeed, the closed couplets that gird the verse. That Pope allies the ephemeral world of commodities with the equally ephemeral vanity of womankind is indisputable. Yet other features of Pope’s poem that appear to cry out for Marxist interpretation—and have garnered it—go beyond illustrating the mystifying process of commodification. Take, for instance, the Cave of Spleen in canto IV. While the inventory of the walking pipkin, the “living” teapots, sighing jar, and maids turned bottles (IV, 47–54) exposes the reifying and dehumanizing effects of mercantile capitalism, I would argue that here especially, negative and thus repressed affect becomes the important issue. On the level of plot, the Cave serves as the logical destination after the Baron rapes Belinda’s lock. Logical, for just as it contains mainly containers—those “bodies changed to various forms by spleen,” the animate bottles, jars, pipkin, and teapots—the gloomy and strange grotto embodies the fallen status of the container that looms throughout the poem, the fragile China vessel of female chastity.12 The spectacles of humbler containers made uncannily animate in the Cave of Spleen reinforce the shattered condition of Belinda’s own container and the visitation of mourning such shattering necessitates. The Cave of Spleen, above all, carries the pieces of affect—personified as the two handmaids “Ill-nature” and “Affectation” attending Queen Spleen herself—that result when “rich china vessels, fallen from high,/ In glittering dust, and painted fragments lie!” (III, 159–60). Partaking fully of “the tradition of Ovidian strangeness,” that characterizes Augustan poetry, the Cave of Spleen also operates as the obverse of the refined social world that Belinda and her Sylphs inhabit.13 If Pope, as Margaret Doody claims, “is fascinated by the human capacity to undergo metamorphosis in ordinary life,” then The Rape of the Lock serves as a mirror image for this fashionable eighteenth-century society. In this social realm, phantasmatic effects take place in acts of materialization, not in vanishings or, in Marxist parlance, “abstractions.” As the “controlled

Unheimlich Maneuvers    juxtaposition” between Hampton Court and the Cave of Spleen indicates, the attractively fanciful and mobile surfaces of fashionable commodities conceal the emptiness of the fetishized and fetishizing subjectivity that don those surfaces.14 To represent the plenitude and absence of this world, and then to constellate that world as a series of things signifying and containing loss, not gain, suggests a desire to engage the emotional consequences of frivolity and excess. In the poem’s final movement of making material an invisible and abstract entity—Belinda’s feminine pride and virtue—the purloined lock reemerges in the heavens above as a shooting star: “The sylphs behold it kindling as it flies,/ And pleased pursue its progress through the skies” (V, 131–32). In the neighboring “lunar sphere,” “all things lost on earth” are mounted and treasured, such as the “smiles of harlots,” “courtier’s promises,” “heroes’ ” wits in “ponderous vases,” and those of “beaux” in “snuff-boxes and tweezer cases” (V, 113–22). The effect—and affect—are uncanny. Samuel Johnson in Lives of the Poets celebrates the poem precisely for its uncanny features: “new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.” That this defamiliarizing effect of uncanniness reflects eighteenth-century notions of femininity becomes apparent when Johnson observes that the poem’s representation of “the whole detail of a female day [is] invested with so much art of decoration” it incites an “appetite of curiosity” for what Pope himself calls in his dedicatory letter to Arabella Fermor, “ ‘the little unguarded follies of the female sex.’ ” Not casually averted, Johnson claims “we . . . have a thousand times turned fastidiously away” from such spectacles (emphasis mine).15 The uncanny tendency toward repetition can also be found on the level of language, as this oft-quoted passage demonstrates: With varying vanities, from every part, They shift the moving toyshop of their heart; Where wigs with wigs, with sword-knots sword-knots strive, Beaux banish beaux, and coaches coaches drive. (I, 99–105)

Here, words become uncanny doubles of each other. Much like the Sylphs’ nearly imperceptible labor the passage describes, inanimate objects on the surface appear to repeat each other (seemingly un-”varying”), only to be transformed (“by a soft transition”) into new grammatical functions as ac-

   last things tive subjects. Coaches, wigs, and sword-knots operate on the same level as the human beaux. Moreover, the passage implies a causal relationship. Because the beaux invest so much in the accessories of fashionable life, those very same accessories end up subsuming their identities as human agents. Pope, then, in communicating the secrets of fashionable subjectivity rendered as a feminized one, shows how fetishism, rooted in idolatrous patterns, instantiates the uncanny affect generated when seeing the object world as if for the very first time. Here, in this revision, the objects have traded their dumb, blind, deaf, and immobile features for human ones.

Unhomely Women and Enlightenment While eighteenth-century intellectual society endeavored to reform superstitious beliefs through manipulating and experimenting on objects, and thus explaining away unnatural phenomena, contemporary consumer society’s relationship with objects moved stealthily in a different direction. Popular forms of entertainment, such as the automata exhibitions featured in fashionable life, exemplified this simultaneous turn toward and away from wonder. Even as Vaucanson’s mechanical flautist, Jacquet-Droz’s boy writer and lady pianist, and Kempelen’s Turkish chess player implicitly celebrated the technological achievements that made the machines in the first place, they generated their popular appeal from this unenlightened affect of wonder produced in witnessing machines that could magically simulate human functions. Just as automata belied the Enlightenment in their very assertion of its principles, the surprising and novel participation of women in social life also challenged the frameworks of Enlightenment propriety even as it instrumentalized market economic growth in the eighteenth century.16 The rejected residue of the Enlightenment project, the uncanny, not only was a powerful effect operating in narrative situations, as many critics of the Gothic novel have demonstrated, it was also a compelling structure for daily fictions of eighteenth-century femininity. Conduct literature, political discourses, and caricatures of the time indicate that ideological efforts to construct domestically contained and spiritually reflective women met with their subversive doubles not only within the confines of poetry and novels, but also in the equally marvelous dimensions of consumer society.

Unheimlich Maneuvers    Caricaturists of the 1770s examine similar details of feminine frivolity that Pope had made famous earlier in his depiction of the stakes involved in abducting a lock from Belinda’s “labyrinth” hair. Some caricaturists demonstrate the “seriousness” of such examinations by facetiously transposing the tools of science onto a quest to measure and plumb the extravagances of female hair fashion (see Figure 6.1). In “bringing to light” the monstrous proportions of “The Mountain Head Dress of 1776,” the print-maker Mary Darly strains the frame of artistic convention by covering three-quarters of the page with the head-dress, woven through and dripping with flowers, fruit, and feathers, and reserving only one-quarter of the image to depict the woman herself as she serenely holds up the fantastic still life perched on her own head (see Figure 6.2). Much as the disproportionate frames of these prints suggest, these women, loaded down by fashionable accessories, filled up and strained the boundaries of eighteenth-century public spaces. Belinda herself registers that the rape of her lock results from her transgression of appearing in public and engaging with social life and customs in the first place: By love of courts to numerous ills betrayed. Oh had I rather un-admired remained In some lone isle, or distant northern land; Where the gilt chariot never marks the way, Where none learn ombre, none e’er taste bohea! There kept my charms concealed from mortal eye, Like roses that in deserts bloom and die. What moved my mind with youthful lords to roam? O had I stayed, and said my prayers at home! (IV, 153–60)

Caught between social pressures and ethical ones, femininity in the eighteenth century became the medium for an ideological production of the uncanny itself. The very definition of caricature—derived from “the Italian caricare, to overload or drag a weight just a little heavier than our vehicle can carry”—was perfectly embodied in the extremity-enhanced and spiritually hollow eighteenth-century women of the beau monde.17 In contrast with “Ridiculous Taste, or the Ladies’ Absurdity” in Figure 6.1, which regards the woman’s headdress as a spectacular body to navigate with a sextant, some caricatures went so far as to construct women’s fashion itself as a possible tool for knowledge. The caption for “A

figure 6.1. “Ridiculous Taste or the Ladies Absurdity,” 1771. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

figure 6.2. M. Darly, “The Extravaganza or the Mountain Head Dress of 1776.” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

   last things New Opera Glass for the Year 1777,” depicting a man squinting through the rolled curls of a woman’s coiffure, jests: “Behold how Jemmy treats the fair, and makes a telescope of hair, how will this suit high headed lasses, if curls are turn’d to optic glasses.” William Barker, a hairdresser who devised a plan of hairdressing that modeled itself on Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty, deplored these cylindrical curls: “I am at a loss to represent these curls by any natural allusion . . . The things, or curls . . . (as they are falsely called) are only imprisoned hair, clogged by the grease of pomatum and smothered with a profusion of powder.”18 Moreover, Barker faults the curls for obscuring basic features of the human form, such as the neck and the ears. Another 1777 caricature focuses on the thinglike and thing-making properties of this popular hairstyle, similarly transmuting its function into a practical one. “The Optic Curls” depicts two men in a theater box sitting behind a woman placidly looking at the performance through an eyepiece. Her headdress, so spectacular that it reaches the top of the picture’s frame, would otherwise obstruct the men’s view if they had not resorted to using her curls as ersatz viewing glasses. Called “prospect glasses” by the English and “lorgnettes” by the French, these miniature telescopes that resemble women’s cylindrical curls indicate how the new developments in science and technology spread into the commercial world of fashion. Carried as status symbols, the eyepieces were elaborately decorated with gold, ivory, Wedgwood, and gemstones, and sometimes ingeniously embedded in walking sticks, fans, snuffboxes, and toothpick holders. Their prominence as accessories of fashion exemplifies the eighteenth century’s visually mediated form of social interaction. Not just for enhancing vision, these spectacles and pocket telescopes shaped social contact: used correctly, objects far away appeared closer, when reversed, objects appeared more distant. People, moreover, could push the boundaries of politeness with these devices by staring at others, especially while appearing to rummage in boxes and other accessories that strategically hid the glasses. In social spaces, as in spaces for scientific inquiry, optical instruments served as mediums for depersonalized confrontations between subjects. Indeed, as much as these instruments inevitably transformed any person under its view into an object, they also transformed their users into objects. As this 1745 account of a woman of fashion, Anne-Marie Lepage, indicates, instead of seeing human faces in

Unheimlich Maneuvers    these social settings, one would often encounter the faces of visual machines: “I entered my box. Hardly was I seated when I noticed twenty glasses pointed towards me; I had sometimes seen, at the Opéra or at the Comédie, this use of the lorgnette, but never with such effrontery. They used a fan or a hat in order not to be noticed; but on this occasion they used not the slightest discretion.”19 These caricatures, in reinventing the curls of women’s headdresses as visual instruments, displace the woman as spectacle to the means of seeing itself in the very same frame. Even as “The Optic Curls” depicts the instrumentalized women looking through her own eyepiece, men’s roles as seers are deepened by turning the potentially distracting spectacle of femininity into another form of spectacle—the sort that supplements vision. One historian, in claiming that the eighteenth-century satirical print made a “spectacle of difference” through visually representing the grotesque and abject subjects of the modern city, invites us to consider what lies at stake in these caricatures of fashionable women in public spaces.20 These caricatures not only make a spectacle of sexual difference through demarcating the positions of sight, they also use the spectacle to advance the project of enlightenment. Numerous other popular prints from the period, lampooning the inordinate height and bizarre decorations of headdresses, width of skirts, and depth of makeup, registered the strangeness of female fashion while accomplishing the visually instrumentalized task of “enlightenment.” M. Darly writes in the Book of Caricaturas that “Caricatura is the burlesque of character, an exaggeration of nature, especially of those forms and features which have a striking peculiarity in them. It is a species of drawing, destitute of those delicacies which embellish the imitations of fine nature. It adds no beauties to the objects it represents, but exhibits a comical similitude, and in a kind of mimicry holds out its defects and blemishes in full view” (emphasis mine).21 Freud, later, would echo Darly’s understanding of caricature, recognizing that jokes operated on a “succession of bewilderment and enlightenment, the bringing forward of what is hidden.” Quoting a contemporary on the genre, he would also discern that caricature itself constituted making obvious the ugly, “ ‘so that it lies clear and open to the light of day.’ ”22 As I will demonstrate later, the qualities that Freud discerns as comprising the system of jokes are also the qualities that

   last things distinguish the uncanny. Though one achieves the affect of pleasure, and the other of horror, they both partake in the process of “enlightenment,” the process of bringing to view what is obscure and hidden. During the period known as the Enlightenment, women were often brought forward to view, and to light, creating both effects of jokes and the uncanny. While the sublime, roughly apposite with definitions for the uncanny, was the term more commonly used for uncanny effects during the eighteenth century, I argue that the terminology of the uncanny—itself a “theory of the sublime”—accounts more for the confounding effects of women emerging in public spaces.23 Directly invoking the tension between the public and the private, as well as irrationality and rationality, the uncanny emerges distinctly from eighteenth century cultural productions of femininity and thus opens a means for historicizing the period forward, as well as backward. Present in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary at least since 1596, “the uncanny” was originally used to describe someone “mischievous, malicious.” By 1773 it came to mean not only someone unreliable and not to be trusted, but also someone associated with the supernatural, a property that explicitly challenged Enlightenment standards of knowledge. This Enlightenmenttinctured stain of the uncanny, then, would become the operative feature in Freud’s extended development of the term.

Uncanny Crockery: Vessels, Jars, and Pandora’s “Box” The source for Freud’s hallmark definition of the uncanny—“the uncanny proceeds from something familiar that has been repressed”— derives from the post-Enlightenment thinker Friedrich Schelling (1775– 1854).24 Schelling, like E.T.A. Hoffmann, began his body of work at the end of the Enlightenment. His reflection on the uncanny first appeared in his Philosophy of Mythology and describes its cultural evolution in classical Greece. Though this text was delivered in a lecture series between 1842 and 1846, its issues were never far away from the Enlightenment’s concerns. Indeed, Schelling’s entire career derived its energy from questioning and arguing core ideas of the Enlightenment, especially ones surrounding faith and reason presented by Kant.25 Moving in a different direction

Unheimlich Maneuvers    from the Enlightenment, but still indebted to its attitudes, Schelling, instead of suppressing religion and mythology because they “lacked reason,” focused on uncovering their systems, believing that they possessed more reason than any of his philosophical predecessors or contemporaries had believed.26 The statement that Freud would find so productive for his discussion of the uncanny first appeared in the following passage: Greece has a Homer precisely because it has Mysteries, i.e., because it has succeeded in completely conquering that principle of the past, which in the Oriental systems was still dominant and on the surface. It has succeeded in putting that principle back into the interior, i.e., into secrecy, into the Mystery (out of which, after all, it has emerged in the first place). The pure sky that hovers above the Homeric poetry was first able to extend over Greece after the dark and darkening of the power of that uncanny (unheimliches) principle (for one calls “uncanny” all that which should have remained in secret [im Geheimnis], in concealment and latency, but which has nonetheless stepped forward)—that aether which forms a dome over the Homeric world was first able to spread itself out after the power of that uncanny principle, which dominated in earlier religions, was precipitated down in the Mystery.27

Describing the classical world’s efforts to achieve cultural progress through repressing earlier notions of religion and replacing them with “culture” (with Homeric poetry as one of its manifestations), Schelling represents the uncanny as the “acute shock in the mythological mind” of bringing “unconscious motivations into the light of full consciousness.”28 Schelling, then, renders “enlightenment” as a process that can take place outside of the eighteenth-century temporal frame in which normative histories have confined it. Moreover, his example shows that “the uncanny” was a means for understanding and defining the operation and effects of the enlightenment’s revolutionary process before Freud. Not vanquished or eradicated in enlightenment, the uncanny, in its act of being repressed “back” to its originary “mystery,” operates as a “secret” to be hoarded and kept intimate, exiled from public consumption. Schelling’s definition illuminates another enlightenment narrative. Along with a social and philosophical program, his definition and language provide a rich source for the way enlightenment functions as a process of discerning sexual difference. Perhaps no other figure exemplified this contradictory position more starkly than the eighteenth-century woman. The eighteenth century, in

   last things its widespread preoccupation with maintaining standards of female propriety in the face of changing social structures, produced a femininity that became an exemplar of the uncanny. The domestic images of femininity as tame and closeted competed with the images, rendered as strange and alien, of publicly visible women. Pressured to remain private, modest, and chastely “natural” in their attire, unmarried women also felt drawn toward the excesses and frivolity of fashion, and the increasingly available outlets for their social enjoyment such as the theater, opera, masked balls, pleasure gardens, and resorts.29 In an effort to regulate femininity to domestic space and descry the morally offensive image of women in public spaces, Rousseau, in his letter to D’Alembert on the social function of the theater (le spectacle) also recalls memories of the ancients by venerating the hidden and closeted position of women in their society: “they did not have the best places at the theatre; they did not put themselves on display; they were not even always permitted to go; and it is well known that there was a death penalty for those who dared to show themselves at the Olympic games.”30 Implying that contemporary women should reproduce the privatizing customs of the ancients, he upholds a rigorous standard of secrecy in his cherished image of a woman in her home. Indeed, for Rousseau, it is the only spectacle that a woman can rightly project: Is there a sight in the world so touching, so respectable, as that of a mother . . . prudently governing the home? It is here that she shows herself in all the dignity of a decent woman . . . A home whose mistress is absent is a body without a soul which soon falls into corruption; a woman outside of her home loses her greatest luster, and, despoiled of her real ornaments, she displays herself indecently . . . Whatever she may do, one feels that in public she is not in her place.31

In his loving depiction of the eighteenth-century housewife, snug and cozy in the confines of a home, Rousseau creates categories for pure and corrupt femininity, as well as pure and corrupt domesticity. The two categories become inextricable; a home can be pure only if its mistress stays inside to manage it, just as a woman can retain her “true” ornaments and beauty only if she stays home and guards herself from public display. In this way, the house and the woman become mutually dependent on each other for marking the boundaries of decency; constituting each other, they each in turn constituted the very notion of “decency.”

Unheimlich Maneuvers    Meanwhile, the affronting obverse of this image situates itself at the theater: Only two years of theatre and everything will be overturned . . . The two sexes meeting daily in the same place; the groups which will be formed for going there; the ways of life that they will see depicted in the theatre, which they will be eager to imitate; the exposition of the ladies and the maidens all tricked out in their very best and put on display in the boxes as though they were in the window of a shop waiting for buyers.32

Perverting social structures and thus government by allowing the two sexes to mingle and providing all too suggestive examples of corrupt morals and artifice, the theater also provides a dwelling in which women can be seen. Though enclosed as she is in her home, the theater is still the “wrong” place for an eighteenth-century woman to go, simply because she can be seen in public, and thus likened to a whore, a living commodity. In line with what certain critics have discerned in Freud’s essay on the uncanny, and other critics in Gothic narrative, the trope that guides Rousseau’s critique of female decency is an architectural structure: the house.33 Heavily influenced by Greek models, eighteenth-century practices of constructing norms for how women should maintain propriety in spite of social changes, depended on fantasies of “the home” and all its connotations of interiority, the womb, and female anatomy that would later inform Freud’s development of the uncanny. The more presence women held in space—both in their own appearances as surface, and in their appearances on the surfaces of society—the more idealized and nostalgically charged the home became. An interior and concealed dwelling seemed the only safe place to contain women; it was thus produced as coterminous with the “nature” of femininity itself. Not merely an ahistorical theory for the discussion of the Gothic novel, as most critics have approached it, Freud’s notion of the uncanny heavily depended on the cultural shifts, repetitions, and contradictions that drove eighteenth-century creations of the female subject as a disruptive object in social and cultural milieus. More than a coincidence, the contiguous emergences of women and automata as new and spectacular aspects of eighteenth-century public life collaborated to produce mechanical subjectivity, the very fruits of Enlightenment labor, as the predominantly feminized

   last things other—unenlightenment itself. This image would continue to grow throughout the Victorian period, and, as we shall see, eventually reemerge to destabilize Freud’s account of the uncanny. In short, the convergence of women and automata as new aspects of social life during the eighteenth century indicates where femininity began to represent the mechanical subjectivity and its technological production of knowledge that is inherent to modernity.34 The connections between Enlightenment culture and its eventual transmutations into the age of psychoanalysis hinge on the quintessentially Enlightenment metaphorics of light and its attendant sensorial function, vision. They also shape the Enlightenment’s uncanny narratives of human subjects encountering themselves as objects. Though light has always seemed to represent knowledge, at least as far back as antiquity, the Enlightenment’s investments in its metaphorical value were rooted in specific scientific inventions and developments that heightened its uses.35 Newton’s Opticks, the preeminent text of the English Enlightenment, exemplifies this radically instrumentalized approach to light. In other characteristically Enlightenment texts such as Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Addison’s Spectator essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” the exhilaration elicited by the newly found technological resources for vision and light merged with the period’s fascination with objects of both the material world and the imagination. In order to complete their functions effectively, Enlightenment instruments of light and vision, much like wishing, demanded objects as a matter of course. These instruments, more often than not, were used to measure, examine, commodify, and objectify human subjects who represented both the unknown and the unenlightened, such as women and exotic and unenlightened peoples. Other unenlightened subjects included children, the elderly, and the poor.36 In the next section, I claim that this fascination with visually realized and objectified others that could easily be both of the mind and of the material world, is the most pronounced example of how the Enlightenment legacy worked itself into Freudian psychoanalysis.

Unheimlich Maneuvers   

The Post-Enlightened: Shattering the Spectacles of Reason in “The Sandman” Nearly inseparable from any critique of Freud’s essay on the uncanny is a commentary on his reading of Hoffmann’s story of 1818, “The Sandman.”37 Indeed, the story has become a necessary element in discussions of Freud’s uncanny. Interpreting Freud’s reading of “The Sandman” alongside a separate reading of Hoffmann’s story itself gives us an irresistible opportunity to analyze the analyst and to apply his own lessons of psychoanalytic reading by noting especially what he chooses to leaves out, and how he renders or misrenders “the truth.” Though there is no shortage of deconstructive glosses on Freud’s infamously “failed” explanation of the uncanny through Hoffmann’s story, I choose not to take his discussion of this story for granted, for it is through retracing his rhetorical procedures in juxtaposition with “The Sandman” that we can understand how the age of Enlightenment repeats itself throughout his essay.38 Freud’s reconstruction of Hoffmann’s story is a valuable clue to how eighteenthcentury ideas have trickled down into some of our most influential notions about gendered subjectivity, as well as into the story of psychoanalysis itself. Thus, this chapter, in forging an intimate relationship between the uncanny as a constitutive effect of the Enlightenment, and the alienating projections of femininity in eighteenth-century social life, centralizes the uncanny where Freud, and later his Enlightenment-focused readers Dolar and Castle, overlook it: on the bewildering contours of enlightened female subjectivity as represented by a thing, an animated doll. Ernst Theodore Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822), in writing his fiction directly after the closing of the Enlightenment period, displayed a preoccupation with the eighteenth-century customs and ideas that preceded his era. Certainly, the fact that he changed one of his middle names from Wilhelm to Amadeus as a tribute to Mozart indicates a loyalty to his eighteenth-century antecedents. Throughout his body of fiction, such Enlightenment-era novelties as the Gothic narrative, optical technologies, waxwork figures, masquerade balls, and mesmerized characters proliferate. The automaton, in particular, demonstrates his interest in the questions and promises of self-mastery eighteenth-century Europe so intensely prompted and pursued. In addition to “The Sandman,” an earlier story on

   last things this theme, titled “Automata” (1814), centers on a “Talking Turk” automaton who gives unsettling predictions about the future. In this instance, Hoffmann highlights the exotic oriental subject as another figure for the unenlightened other who emerges as a residue of eighteenth-century imperialist objectives.39 Hoffmann’s use of these eighteenth-century icons teasingly inverts Enlightenment beliefs. Instead of seeking to demystify them and rationally explain their inner workings, he freely exploits their abilities to incite fear and wonder. In fact, throughout “The Sandman,” he satirizes the preceding era by projecting its customs and personae onto comically grotesque and untrustworthy characters. For instance, the narrator reveals that Coppelius, the story’s Sandman figure, in his initial manifestation as the loathsome friend of Nathaniel’s father, dresses himself in what appears to be outdated eighteenth-century attire. When he comes to visit the family, he “always” appears “in an ash-grey coat of old-fashioned cut and a similarly styled waistcoat, . . . black stockings and shoes with jewelled buckles,” and a “little wig [that] covered hardly more than the crown of his head,” with “rolls of hair [that] stood high over his big red ears” (“Sandman,” 89).40 Moreover, Spalanzani, Nathaniel’s physics professor, is described as a “little round man, with high cheekbones, a thin nose, turned-out lips, little piercing eyes.” Attempting to distill his aura, Nathaniel recurs to a visual image of the eighteenth century: “But Chodowiecki’s picture of Cagliostro in a Berlin pocket calendar would give you a better idea of him than any description, for that is what Spalanzani looks like” (“Sandman,” 98). That the actual Cagliostro was a notorious charlatan who held séances and sold love potions throughout eighteenth-century Europe hints at the story’s later revelation that Spalanzani, the man of science, was Coppola’s partner in creating Olympia, the automaton with whom Nathaniel becomes disastrously infatuated. Coppola himself, the diabolical dealer of barometers, lorgnettes, spectacles, and telescopes, turns out to be the selfsame Coppelius in a different guise. Spalanzani created Olympia’s “clockwork, speech, walk,” and Coppelius/Coppola supplied her eyes. In addition to its external procedure of transposing eighteenthcentury traits onto unattractive characters, the internal structure of “The Sandman” appears to make the enlightened unenlightened, and

Unheimlich Maneuvers    the unenlightened enlightened. At the center of Hoffmann’s tale is an eerily doubled love story. In love with two women—Clara, his fiancée, and Olympia, Spalanzani’s automaton daughter—Nathaniel during his hallucinations confuses which woman is real, and which one a mere doll. Clara, with her “cold disposition” and rational explanations for his uncanny experiences becomes an automaton to him, and Olympia, with her blankness that conveniently operates as a screen for his innermost desires, takes on a “profound and glorious nature” (“Sandman,” 106, 116). Clara, who “sees only the motley surface” of things, and “rejoices at the deceitfully gleaming fruit and does not think of the deadly poison within it,” attempts to convince Nathaniel that the supernatural constitutes merely “phantoms of our own ego” (“Sandman,” 96–97). Unambiguously and often humorously, Hoffmann uses the characters of Nathaniel and Clara to allegorize the polarities of Romanticism and Enlightenment. As Nathaniel becomes increasingly absorbed by his “obscure, gloomy and boring mysticism,” the lovers “without noticing it . . . became more and more estranged from one another” (“Sandman,” 104). At the same time that Hoffmann ironically depicts Nathaniel’s loosening hold on reason from the viewpoint of such clear-headed characters as Clara, he nevertheless ushers his readers into a deep involvement with Nathaniel’s own fadings into and out of his senses, and his tendency—perceived as “childish”—to understand the objects of his mind as reality. The contrast between Clara and Olympia as rivals for Nathaniel’s love recalls Frances Burney’s representation of eighteenth-century femininity in Camilla as a condition beleaguered by its ineluctable associations with automata. In one of the story’s pivotal scenes, Olympia makes her first social entrance at a party held in her honor by her “father,” Spalanzani. Playing the piano “with great accomplishment,” she reminds us of Kempelen’s mechanical female pianist entertaining eighteenth-century crowds. “Though her pace and posture had about them something deliberate and stiff which many found unpleasing,” people in the story for the most part accept her as one of them, and attribute her stiffness to shyness.” Only afterwards do they learn that she was actually “a wooden puppet instead of a living person” (“Sandman,” 113, 121). Thus, Hoffmann’s story comments satirically on a social condition that Burney represented earlier as painful and abjecting for women in her eighteenth-century milieu.

   last things Olympia’s unveiling as an automaton accounts for the relaxation of social standards that once compelled women to emulate the artificial behavior of automata. Moreover, the figure of Olympia in early-nineteenth-century society reveals how real women, in becoming closely associated with automata, came themselves to carry the uncanny threat of the inhuman: But the minds of many esteemed gentlemen were still not set at rest: the episode of the automaton had struck deep roots into their souls, and there stealthily arose in fact a detectable mistrust of the human form. To be quite convinced they were not in love with a wooden doll, many enamoured young men demanded that their young ladies should sing and dance in a less than perfect manner, that while being read to they should knit, sew, play with their puppy and so on, but above all that they should not merely listen but sometimes speak, too, and in such a way that what they said gave evidence of some real thinking and feeling behind it. Many love-bonds grew more firmly tied under this regime; others on the contrary gently dissolved. ‘You really cannot tell which way it will go,’ they said. To counter any kind of suspicions, there was an unbelievable amount of yawning and no sneezing at all at the tea-circles. (“Sandman,” 121–22)

As a final commentary on eighteenth-century mores and beliefs, “The Sandman” locates the main culprit for misprisions of vision in the objective rationality that its venerated optical instruments helped promote. It is through the lens of Nathaniel’s “small, very cleanly fashioned pocket-telescope,” bought from Coppola, for perhaps “much too high a price” that he begins to fall in love with Olympia (“Sandman,” 110). Previously a beautiful statue or a possibly “weak-minded” oddity to him as she is to most people, Olympia, seen through this telescope, becomes incredibly seductive and real. As he takes his new telescope to his eyes and looks out the window to test it, his gaze involuntarily falls on Olympia, now his neighbor in the house next door: He had never in his life before handled a glass which brought objects to the eyes so sharply and clearly defined . . . Olympia was, as usual, sitting before the little table, her arms lying upon it and her hands folded. Only now did Nathaniel behold Olympia’s beautiful face. The eyes alone seemed to him strangely fixed and dead, yet as the image in the glass grew sharper and sharper it seemed as though beams of moonlight began to rise within them; it was as if they were at that moment acquiring the power of sight . . . Nathaniel stood before the window as if rooted to the spot, lost in contemplation of Olympia’s heavenly beauty. (“Sandman,” 110)

Unheimlich Maneuvers    Thus, in Hoffmann’s story, the Enlightenment instruments of reason only end up obscuring and distorting reality though they seem to clarify it. Indeed, they are the very instruments by which Nathaniel becomes deranged and loses sight of what is real, and what is imagined. From this point onward, Olympia’s lifelessness ceases to make Nathaniel feel as it once did, in his own words, “uncanny.” Instead, Nathaniel himself embodies the uncanny as he repeatedly runs to his window, “impelled by an irresistible power,” to stare through his telescope at the still, silent, and unseeing Olympia. The spell becomes broken—and uncanniness assails, indeed, traumatizes him—only when he stumbles upon Olympia for the first time without his telescope. At this point she is a “female figure,” torn to pieces by her two makers as they struggle for final possession of her. “Nathaniel recoiled in terror as he recognized the figure of Olympia; flaring into a furious rage, he went to rescue his beloved” at the very moment that all the glassware in Spalanzani’s laboratory shatters into “a thousand pieces.” The scene most of all emphasizes Nathaniel’s horrified recognition that Olympia is merely a collection of objects: “Then Coppola threw the figure over his shoulder and, laughing shrilly, ran quickly down the staircase, so that the feet of the figure hanging down repulsively behind him thumped and clattered woodenly against the stairs.” Without the telescope, and with all the accessories of scientific inquiry destroyed around him, he can see “all too clearly that Olympia’s deathly white face possessed no eyes; where the eyes should have been, there were only pits of blackness—she was a lifeless doll!” (“Sandman,” 119–20; emphasis mine). The shattering of the optical instruments so cherished throughout the age of Enlightenment engenders the ultimate recognition that Olympia, with her eyeless white face, is in fact a female doll. Thus, the impotence of the instrument becomes linked with a femininity whose femininity is doubled by its status as a doll. These themes of impotence and doubling provoke great conflict in Freud’s discourse of the uncanny.

The Reenlightened: Freud and the Uses of Disenchantment It is this symbol of the lifeless and mechanical doll, laden with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conflicts, that troubles Freud’s ex-

   last things position of the uncanny. Throughout, Freud persists in denying Olympia’s significance as an uncanny agent.41 Deriving his speculations from Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 essay on the same topic, Freud follows Jentsch’s lead in singling out Hoffmann as an author who successfully employs the “psychological artifice [the uncanny] in his fantastic fiction.”42 At the same time he is careful to differentiate his own position from Jentsch’s emphasis on dolls and their offshoots, waxwork figures and automata, as purveyors of the uncanny experience. For Jentsch, these objects are uncanny because they are “a very good instance” of “ ‘doubts over whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’ ” (Freud, 226). To clear up this certainty, Jentsch explains, “ ‘would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the thing’ ” (Freud, 227). Yet Jentsch’s criteria fail to illuminate the uncanny effects in “The Sandman” because doing so would entail locating the main agent of uncanniness in Olympia. For Freud, Olympia’s uncanniness is slight and negligible in comparison to the uncanny theme brought on by the figure of the eye-snatching figure of the Sandman, who reminds us of repressed childhood beliefs and the fear of castration. This focus on the Sandman figure, Freud claims, represents the “rationalistic interpretation” of the story. The most inconsistent aspect of Freud’s “The Uncanny” is its habit of refuting Jentsch’s main ideas, only to recapitulate them at later points in the essay. As Freud’s discussion progresses, we begin to lose track of exactly where his ideas diverge from Jentsch’s. In a sense, Freud’s conflict with Jentsch embodies the struggle between enlightened and unenlightened beliefs. The privileged position in which Jentsch places intellectual uncertainty rankles Freud—its explanatory powers are “incomplete.” Furthermore, according to Freud, “we, with the superiority of rational minds are able to detect the sober truth” (Freud, 230; emphasis mine). Uncanniness, rather, occurs when the seeing eye—the most privileged body part in Enlightenment discourse, which Freud associates with the penis—becomes momentarily disabled or purloined by the blinding return of “childhood” and “primitive” beliefs in magic, animism, and superstition. Sounding much like an Enlightenment critic of the marvelous, Freud questions the role superstition plays in religious beliefs, and by extension,

Unheimlich Maneuvers    its dubious influence in political structures that promise the reward of an afterlife to citizens who adhere to moral order. Sealing his attachment to Enlightenment divisions between the enlightened and the unenlightened, Freud concludes, “almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic” (Freud, 242; emphasis mine). And yet, at the end of his extended rebuttal of Jentsch’s article, he more or less mimics the very point he had begun his article by disputing: There is one more point of general application which I should like to add, though, strictly speaking, it has been included in what has already been said about animism and modes of working of the mental apparatus that have been surmounted; for I think it deserves special emphasis. This is that an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. (Freud, 244)

What, then, to make of Freud’s elaborate detours around animism and indeterminacy? We may recall that what impelled him to move away from them at the onset of his dialogue with Jentsch was the figure of Olympia. It appears that direct reflections on a doll, and not animism and indeterminacy themselves, must be avoided at all costs. The doll, in most cases a consuming double for femininity, carries the most direct threat of castration and thus functions apotropaically within Freud’s system of the uncanny. Freud, then, enlists himself among Samuel Johnson’s “we” who turn “fastidiously away [from] ‘the little unguarded follies of the female sex,’ ” at least “a thousand times.”

Translating the Objects of Feeling Freud’s best defense for his own ineluctably uncanny maneuvers in perpetuating Jentsch’s main points may in fact be his own theory of the uncanny, introduced early in his essay as being most of all a subjective experience that depends on individual temperament, and not on any objective criteria. Defining the uncanny as a “quality of feeling” for which an objective system can never exist because its production depends on an individual’s psychic history, as well as the individual’s capacity for “extreme delicacy of perception”—thus recalling the eighteenth century’s sensibili-

   last things ty—Freud admits that he himself, “the writer of the present contribution,” fails the requirements of sensitivity in order to feel the uncanny. The solution he proposes, “translation,” invokes the process of “transferring meaning,” of producing another language (“something different”) that will help him feel the experience of uncanniness more readily (Freud, 220, 227). Indirectly, Freud enlists a partial description for the psychoanalytic process of “transference” to explain how the “translation” might occur. Referring to himself in the passage in the third person, Freud likens himself to a patient by needing direction and prodding to help him remember the uncanny: “it is long since he has experienced or heard of anything,” he says. As described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the analyst’s task is to “discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient” and “inducing him by human influence . . . to abandon his resistances.” Moreover, the analyst aims to make “what was unconscious . . . become conscious,” encouraging the patient to remember as opposed to repeat.43 Thus, the work of analysis and its mechanism of transference seek to enlighten. Here, Freud expresses the Enlightenment drive to produce human subjects who can learn to think for themselves and rely on their own powers of reason and reflection.44 The analyst, then, as suggested by Freud’s rhetorical self-placement into the third person, becomes the instrument and object for perhaps the most clearly articulated goal of the Enlightenment project.45 Its strong ties with figurative language, and its catachrestic compulsion to concretize the self through inanimate objects, clarify and deepen psychoanalysis’s connection with the Enlightenment. In order to undergo treatment, the patient of psychoanalysis must pry the unconscious—the seedbed for primitive and childish beliefs—out of subjective and unknowable darkness and make it emerge in the clear light of objectification and consciousness, all to eventually recognize the ensuing object, seemingly foreign and different, as the self itself. Freud’s definition of the uncanny, as produced in its conflicted dialogue with Jentsch, lays bare its essence as an “unconscious” structure, unknowable and concealed to the self—a predicament that began to haunt modernity, and thus define it, through Enlightenment endeavors to clarify the unknown by visualizing and creating systems of meaning for it. Implicit in such endeavors was the troublesome awareness that knowledge of one’s self and the world remains, at a certain level, inaccessible.46

Unheimlich Maneuvers    Thus, the causal relationship between the Enlightenment on one hand, presumably a quest to see and know at all costs—and the uncanny on the other, the property that resists knowing—collapses. The two, rather, are inextricable parts of one another. To enlighten is simultaneously to make uncanny, in much the same way that by seeking to defamiliarize the self only to make it better known, psychoanalysis as a matter of course summons the uncanny. In other words, as many twentieth-century revisions of “the Enlightenment” demonstrate, where there is light, there are inevitably shadows.47 Acknowledging the paradoxical approach to knowledge inherent to psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips uses the notion of “Enlightenment” to figure Freud’s two approaches: “The Enlightenment Freud, like Socrates, can help us remind ourselves of who we are, of what we once and always knew (and wanted). But the post-Freudian Freud— the man who was always ahead of himself . . . was the ironist of exactly this Enlightenment project. He was an expert on the impossibility of selfknowledge, on the limits of expertise.”48 Indeed, the entire essay illustrates this paradoxical movement. Just as Freud’s parsing of the term heimliche culminates in a display of its likeness with its apparent opposite, unheimliche, his essay, laying claims on a “true” definition of the uncanny (a definition “truer” than Jentsch’s, at any rate), ends in a disordered and contradictory attempt at definition—bloated with too much meaning, and yet unable to articulate it—much like the scattered and disjointed remains of an automaton taken apart for an inspection of its machinery. The best example of an Enlightenment practice that actively produced the unconscious out of an attempt to regulate and normativize behavior was mesmerism, or, as it was known in eighteenth-century Britain, “animal magnetism.” Within such a practice, a close relationship or rapport between magnetizer and patient is cultivated through inducing the patient into a trance to tune into the patient’s symptoms and draw them out as much as possible in order to attack and tame them in situ.49 Though Mesmer’s notion of an invisible fluid that passed from one body to another during this transaction—called a “crisis”—was found later to lack credibility, his belief in “curing” a patient through controlling the patient’s consciousness by momentarily suspending it and creating an exchange between himself and patient had an important influence on the originary methods of psychoanalysis. Contrasting with its eventual transmutation into psychoanalysis, mesmerism in the eighteenth century also

   last things drew comparisons from its detractors with the operation of puppets: “that destiny itself is determined by particular genies who guide us without our knowing and without our seeing the strings which hold us: at last that in this lower world we are all like real puppets, ignorant and utterly blind slaves.”50 Implicit in this detractor’s critique is the notion that under the effects of mesmerism, the patient loses her agency and humanness, turning into nothing but a pile of wood and string to be made animate by a skilled “genie.” The detractor thus figures the process as vaguely oriental in its diversion from the path to autonomy and enlightenment. And yet there was something progressive about mesmerism for it was, after all, an incipient form of hypnotism, which became a prevailing mode of curing medical disorders of a psychosomatic ilk all throughout the nineteenth century. One only needs to recall the later hypnotic experiments of Charcot on his hysterics, and Freud’s schooling with Charcot and own use of hypnotism early in his career to understand the connection between Enlightenment experiments on the mind and body and the later formulations of transference and the unconscious that mark the “founding” of psychoanalysis a century later. Moreover, Mesmer, like Freud, found the most productive subject for practicing his “cure” in the female patient.51 In fact, the practice of mesmerism during the eighteenth century created another opportunity for women to be cast as unenlightened, merely because they were considered to be more susceptible to mesmerism. We shall see, however, in Freud’s own writing on the uncanny, that the feminized and uncanny process of being hypnotized, mesmerized, and automatized can be experienced by the analyst himself. This sequence of events perhaps best exemplifies the paradoxically obscuring effects of Enlightenment.

Genitalia—An Italian Tale Dolls come back to haunt Freud’s narrative of the uncanny despite his exertions to avoid them in his frequently cited story, likened to the helplessness often experienced in the “dreamstate,” about becoming lost in an Italian town. Intended to illustrate the factor of repetition compulsion in creating uncanny feelings, this story ineluctably draws from Jentsch’s belief in the uncanniness of automata insofar as repetition compulsion itself involves the automatization of one’s own subjectivity. Moreover, the

Unheimlich Maneuvers    dominant figures in this story that incite Freud to behave in such an automatic fashion are presented—covertly—as dolls. As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery. (Freud, 237)

This anecdote narrates the relationship between Freud, the narrator who loses control over his spatial orientation, repeatedly returning to the same spot without apparent reason, and to the prostitutes who remain stationary. Stating, “Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses,” Freud disavows a formation that would more directly implicate his agency as one who voluntarily looks at the prostitutes such as “I saw nothing but painted women.”52 The entire anecdote tensely negotiates certainty and doubt, self-possession and helplessness, and subject and object positions. Thus, Freud’s clearest demonstration of the uncanny occurs not when he interprets “The Sandman,” but when he himself repeats Rousseau’s and Nathaniel’s (Hoffmann’s hero) perplexed and obsessive viewings of impassive women on display in a window. In doing so he encounters an image of himself, “beginning to excite attention”—as image. Instead of walking away from the quarter once and for all, he returns repeatedly to the scene of this unveiling, the site of his own castration whereby he loses his autonomy, gazing with his eyes intact at a disorienting view of feminine interiority turned exterior. One might say that this image of feminine interiority arises not only through the surprising window view of women inside their homes, but also through the unarticulated yet implicit image of the pudenda. In his preceding dream-text, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud had already formed the inherent association between Italy and genitalia by commenting on the latent sexual content in “the dreams of a woman patient

   last things who had never visited that lovely country.” In the German language, he explains, “to Italy” (gen Italien) bears striking resemblance to the word for “genitals” (Genitalien).53 And yet, this is not the first time he summons the image of female genitals in his essay. Shot throughout his exposition of the uncanny are references to female sexual parts: his conclusion that the uncanny fantasy of being buried alive harks back to “intra-uterine existence,” Biblical citations that refer to “ ‘heimlich parts of the body, pudenda,’ ” and of course, his dramatic yet relatively brief analysis: “There is a joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’; whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,’ we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body” (Freud, 225, 223, 245). For Freud, home, as represented in his inexplicable returns to the Italian prostitute quarters, lies in Genitalien. Escaping a direct route to this matter—precisely because at its center is nothing, the threatening “hole” of femininity itself—he keeps his eye on the surface of things, the surface that the prostitutes, “painted women,” so vividly supply. Partaking of the Enlightenment belief that female nature is distinguished by its existence in and as surface, the only piece of material evidence for “what” the prostitutes are is that Freud can see, in the broad daylight of a hot summer afternoon, that they are “painted” and overwhelmingly visible, crowding his vision as they fill the windows of the small houses. Thus miniaturized and designated as “for sale,” the women are represented not only as prostitutes, but as their close cousins in commodified femininity, mannequins in a shop window. Both designated to generate their beings through surfaces, dolls and prostitutes are the most prominent images of women as ware, commodity, and merchandise to be displayed and purchased for a monetary price. Could there be something about dolls themselves that invites an anxiety exceeding the fear of castration evoked by losing one’s eyes? I argue that, instead of inadequately embodying the “true” source of uncanny feelings, Freud refuses to look at dolls because, in Medusa-like fashion, they directly reflect back the threat of castration in their unseeing eyes; indeed, they are too uncanny. The visions of Olympia, the Italian prostitutes, and objectified women in general inspire the fear of vacuity that resides in the hypervisual and material standards of Enlightenment

Unheimlich Maneuvers    epistemology and aesthetics.54 That is, dolls and women-as-objects, with their lifeless simulations of humanness, mercilessly evoke lack, loss, and fears of self-disintegration. Freud’s equation between the penis and the eye depends on Enlightenment constructions of light and vision, and the instruments used to supplement them, as crucial tokens of an autonomous subjectivity. To create dolls, and to fashion women into dolls, was one strategy for maintaining one’s own enlightened subjectivity, and relegating emptiness to other subjects.55 Jean Starobinski, commenting on the evolution of femininity in the eighteenth century, reveals the threateningly doll-like figure that “woman” became toward the end of the century: “Woman—persecutor or persecuted, murderess or tortured victim, desecrating or desecrated—woman is no longer the queen who ruled in the Rococo boudoirs. The beautiful ‘object’ is the instrument (active or passive) of a grotesque black pleasure. Whether they inflict it or suffer it, a work of destruction is performed, in which the reverse of pleasure is no longer simply boredom, but death.”56 Through pushing to its extreme the image of femininity as subject and object of a gay and refined pleasure in such aesthetic modes as rococo, the eighteenth century created an opportunity for its obverse—a grotesque and life-denying force—to come into being. The doll, with its properties of excess and frivolity on one hand, and hollow interiority on the other, became the figure for this disturbing duality in eighteenth-century constructions of femininity, as Rousseau’s image in Emile of a little girl/woman adorning her doll, and in turn herself, transmits.57 In psychoanalysis, this image of Rousseau’s little girl compulsively dressing and undressing her doll becomes explicitly recast as a masculine disorder, as if the most upsetting aspect of femininity were the suggestion that women’s “natural” and irrational propensity to repetitious activity were contagious. To view women themselves as subjects who would be otherwise inert and motionless without their repetitious activity masks the reality that these enlightened men themselves—Freud, Rousseau, and earliest Johnson—are the ones who compulsively return to the scene of women existing as surfaces. The repetition is theirs. In the Enlightenment, the concatenation between prostitutes, automata, and knowledge was very much in place. Beginning with Bacon’s analogy, “Knowledge that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan,

   last things which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation,” knowledge that yields strictly the pleasure of discovering “the truth,” found its counterpart in the whore.58 Completing a nongenerative yet pleasurable construction of knowledge, the automaton emerged as the ultimate whore of knowledge. The engravings of Charles-Nicolas Cochin, “La charmante catin” (1731) and “Mademoiselle Catherina” (1743), illustrate crowds and groups of people observing a female automaton walking across the center of the floor (see Figures 6.3 and 6.4). Referred to as a catin, or courtesan, the following verse uses the figure to reflect on the deceptive autonomy of human beings and their unsuspected kinship with automata: Without jest—but that which we are Is often our fate. The great ones, if they so desire, Almost make of the people That which a hidden spring makes here of the courtesan.59

As Horst Bredekamp points out, the human figures in “La charmante catin,” sitting in the glow of a light that contrasts with the room’s surrounding darkness, appear to be participants at a supernatural gathering to view the apparition of a moving doll. Demonstrating clearly the class lines that separate the enlightened from the unenlightened, the print also depicts a servant girl on her knees with her arms stretched out, mouth and eyes wide open, and provoked into spasms of religious enthusiasm by the marvelous doll. The rest of the onlookers, fashionably covered by ruffles and beauty patches, evince their civilized and enlightened status through observing the doll with expressions that show more amused interest than passion. Mandeville, the most voluble commentator on the instrumentality of women in consumer society, prompts our conclusion that contrary to Bacon’s construction, women as whores, dolls, and automata were critical figures in the generation of an Enlightenment economy. This feminized state of finding oneself in automatic mode—of involuntarily and predictably repeating something in order to reach a hidden goal—was a precondition for the uncanniness that still torments and defines modernity. Yet repetition is merely a structure; it is an acting out of something that remains unknown. Though one knows what the action and outcome are going to be, one never knows when it will happen, nor will one ever find

Unheimlich Maneuvers    what is unknowingly sought—that is why the action is repeated. There is a frailty in this certainty. Repetition compulsion is the curse of modern subjectivity inherited from the Enlightenment. Within its logic, human subjects wage psychic battles with themselves as mechanical beings. Not stopping there, something in particular becomes produced through modern and enlightened repetition compulsions: sexual difference. Repetition, also implicit in the process of stereotyping, ensures the appearance of a division between the two sexes, when in fact, they are both vulnerable to the potentially blinding effects of rational objectification.

Eighteenth-Century Women at Home in Modernism This chapter ends the book with a consideration of how eighteenthcentury femininity uncannily haunted Freud’s own material culture. Certainly, we may locate Freud’s habits as a reader of Enlightenment-affiliated texts through his careful interpretation of Hoffmann’s 1818 story, and his dispersal of Enlightenment-derived attitudes toward superstition and animism throughout the essay. Household objects popular during Freud’s time may also have served as referents during his writing of the uncanny. These were the German porcelain half-dolls “made by the thousands” at the beginning of the twentieth century until no later than the 1930s. Known as tea warmers, or teepuppenkopfe, they were also used for myriad household purposes such as pincushions, perfume bottle stoppers, cake covers, lamps and lampshades, parasol handles, candy dishes, and powder puff receptacles (see Figure 6.5). The most predominant model for the “look” of these dolls was the eighteenth-century court woman. A popular model was the MarieAntoinette half-doll. Other models included representations of Vigée LeBrun, and ladies in Marie-Antoinette’s court such as her friend, the Princesse de Lamballe, who had also been decapitated. If not meant to directly copy the features of famous eighteenth-century European women, the dolls copy the general fashions and styles of their period. Resembling women in rococo paintings by Watteau and Boucher, these dolls wear towering headdresses with rows of curls, sweetly submissive and vacuous

figure 6.3. Louise-Madeleine and Charles-Nicholas Cochin. “La charmante catin,” 1731. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Unheimlich Maneuvers   

figure 6.4. Charles-Nicholas Cochin, “Mademoiselle Catherina,” 1743. Courtesy of Guildhall Library, City of London.

facial expressions, languid arm gestures, and full gowns with fichus, stomachers, three-quarter sleeves, ladders of bows, and a general explosion of ruffles and ribbons. Curiously, the makers of these dolls took liberties with eighteenth-century styles, sometimes giving the dolls frankly seductive, as well as anachronistic details. More slatternly than coquettish, some of the dolls wear gowns nearly falling off their torsos, while pushing their bare shoulders forward and pointing suggestively to their still-covered breasts, or, foregoing a falling gown altogether, flutter a fan against a naked torso. That these dolls were made and became popular as novelty objects against the backdrop of World War I suggests nostalgia for the gay frivolity that eighteenth-century femininity came to symbolize. Similar to the eighteenth century’s own investments in objectifying subjects, and subjectifying objects in order to stimulate economic activity, an advertisement for one of the manufacturers, Goebel, uses the following strategy to entice buyers: “ ‘Aren’t they beautiful? Look at them, they speak for themselves.’ ”60 Marion Frieda, encyclopedist of half-dolls, hypothesizes why the dolls became desirable fantasies for early-twentieth-century subjects: “the little half-figures could satisfy the longing for beauty which could not

   last things

figure 6.5. Teapot Half-Dolls from the Goebel Company Catalog, 1918. From Marion Frieda, Collector’s Encyclopedia of Half-Dolls, with permission.

be stifled by the ‘iron-hard’ period following a long, cruel war.”61 This of course was the very moment that Freud wrote “The ‘Uncanny.’ ” In a scant reference to his context, Freud attributes his lack of specialized knowledge on the fantastic literature of the uncanny to the war-torn period in which he wrote the essay: “But I must confess that I have not made a very thorough examination of the literature, especially the foreign literature, relating to this present modest contribution of mine, for reasons which, as may easily be guessed, lie in the times in which we live” (Freud, 220). The frank and nostalgic eroticization of eighteenth-century femininity produced through these dolls is accompanied by the uncanny condition of their bodies. Cut off at the waist, they completely lack their legs—and thus, their genital regions. The lower regions of their bodies, covered over by their billowing skirts, function in the service of the household goods they ornament. Instead of legs and genitalia, one would find

Unheimlich Maneuvers    instead the base of a lamp, the bottom half of a jewelry box, or, simply, a pincushion. Thus, these dolls of eighteenth-century women, ironically literalizing the uncanny condition of femininity, furnish Freud’s context, and very well may have colored—consciously or unconsciously—Freud’s ideas on femininity and the uncanny about which he was writing at the time. Uncannily enough, it is the doll that most tellingly indicates how the perpetual motion of constructing femininity in the eighteenth century— as animate objects that speak for uneasy enlightenment—found a home in the age of psychoanalysis as its own greatest fetish and fiction.

Notes

introduction 1.  Bernard Mandeville, “A Search into the Nature of Society,” in The Fable of the Bees, vol. 1, ed. F. B. Kaye (1714; Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1988), 355. See also vol. 2, ed. F. B. Kaye (1729; Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1988). Further references to these works are by title, volume number, and page number in the main text. 2.  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), book 2, chap. 27, sec. 17. 3. Alexander Pope, A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 4.  Ronald Paulson indicates that Hogarth based this illustration on Jonathan Swift’s satire of the “clothes worshippers” in Tale of a Tub. I discuss Swift’s “sartorists” in Chapter 1. See Ronald Paulson, “Putting Out the Fire in Her Imperial Majesty’s Apartment: Opposition Politics, Anticlericalism, and Aesthetics,” ELH 63, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 11n. 5.  Michael Seidel, “Gulliver’s Travels and the Contracts of Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72. 6.  See April Alliston, “Gender and the Rhetoric of Evidence in Early-Modern Historical Narratives,” Yale Journal of Criticism 33, no. 3 (1996): 232–57. 7. For a discussion of this literary turn and its relationship with social and textual constructions of women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). She writes, “A figure of female subjectivity, a grammar really, awaited the substance that the novel and its readers, as well as the countless individuals educated according to the model of the new woman, would eventually provide” (60). 8. Anonymous, An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding: with a Word or Two upon the Modern State of Criticism (London, 1751), 151. 9.  Ibid.

   Notes 10.  Samuel Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 157. 11. Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 31. 12.  See, for instance, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); David Porter, Ideographia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 13.  See also J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels (New York: Norton, 1990) and Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 14.  Ian Watt, Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 10. 15.  Jane Austen, “Sanditon,” in Sanditon and Other Stories, ed. Peter Washington (1817; New York: Knopf, 1996), 33–34. 16.  Robert Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 155, cited in Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 118. 17.  On the microscope’s ontological and epistemological effects in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture, see Joanna Picciotto, “Reforming the Garden: The Experimentalist Eden and Paradise Lost,” ELH 72, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 23–78 and “Optical Instruments and the Eighteenth-Century Observer,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 29 (2000): 123–13. 18.  Joseph Addison, Spectator 411 (Saturday, June 21, 1712), in Erin Mackie, ed., The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 388. 19. Addison, Spectator 412 (Monday, June 23, 1712), in ibid., 391. 20.  Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 21.  See Barbara Johnson, “Metaphor, Metonymy and Voice,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987), 157 and Jonathan Culler, “The Turns of Metaphor,” in Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 190. chapter 1 1.  See David Hume, Natural History of Religion, in Writings on Religion, ed. Anthony Flew (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1992) and Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (London and New York: Norton, 1966). 2.  Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London and New York: Longman, 1993); Bal Krishna, Commercial Relations Between India and England: 1601–1757 (London: Routledge and Sons, 1924); and Margaret Wilbur, The East India Company and the British Empire in the Far East (New York: Russell and Russell, 1945).

Notes    3.  Wilbur, East India Company, 129. 4.  John Ogilby, The Relation of His Majestie’s Entertainment Passing Through the City of London, to His Coronation: With a Description of the Triumphal Arches, and Solemnity (London, 1661), 9–10. These two boys, John Ogilby reveals in his account of the king’s procession, were John and Samuel Ford, sons of Sir Richard Ford, a member of the East India Company committee. 5.  Charles Davenant, Essay on the East-India Trade (London, 1697). 6.  The increasing prevalence of such once costly and exotic goods as tea, sugar, and blue and white china in middle-class English households from the teens to the middle of the eighteenth century exemplifies the effects of this naturalization. See Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988) and Charlotte Sussman, “Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792,” Representations 48 (Fall 1994): 48–69. 7. Anonymous, Some Considerations on the Nature and Importance of the EastIndia Trade (London: John Clarke, 1728), 70. 8.  Ibid., 75. 9.  Ibid., 73. 10.  Ibid. 11.  Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 12.  I borrow the term “mercantile exotica” from James Bunn, “The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism,” New Literary History 11, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 303–21. 13.  Pierre-Daniel Huet, The History of the Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients . . . (London, 1717), iv. 14.  Ibid. 15.  Stephen Lewis, preface to Pierre-Daniel Huet, The History of Romances, trans. Stephen Lewis (London, 1715), viii–ix. 16. Anonymous, “The Translator to the Reader,” in Pierre-Daniel Huet, A Treatise of Romance and Their Original; Translated Out of French (London: R. Battersby, 1672), A4[3]. 17.  Michael McKeon in the first chapter of The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) rigorously considers the role of romance’s tense yet productive relationship with history in forming the eighteenth-century novel. According to Srinivas Aravamudan, those who “outsourced” romance’s origins in Eastern regions include Huet, Reeve, and Thomas Warton. See Aravamudan, “In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory,” Novel 33, no. 1 (November 1999): 5–31. Aravamudan cites Thomas Warton, “On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe,” preface to History of English Poetry, vol. 1 of 3 (London, 1774). 18. Huet, Treatise of Romance, 12. 19. Huet, History of Romances, 30–31. 20. Huet, Treatise of Romance, 27–29.

   Notes 21.  Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, vol. 2 (1785; facsimile edition, New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 78. 22.  Margaret Anne Doody is especially polemical about exposing the history of the novel as a form plundered by the English and mediated through the narratives of critics such as Ian Watt as an avowedly eighteenth-century English construction. See Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). 23. Anonymous, Some Considerations on the Nature and Importance of the East-India Trade (London, 1728), 73. 24.  Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 182 (February 2004): 85–142; quotations are from pages 93 and 94. 25. David Hume, “Of Luxury,” in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, 1758), 157. 26.  Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 18. 27.  In addition to Kowaleski-Wallace, and Mackie, see, for example, Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Laura Brown, Ends of Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990); and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 28. For example, Early English Books Online contains such entries under a keyword search for “novelty” as Francis White, A Treatise of the Sabbath-day Containing, a Defence of the Orthodoxall Doctrine of the Church of England, Against Sabbatarian-Novelty (London, 1635); Pierre Du Moulin, The Novelty of Popery, Opposed to the Antiquity of True Christianity Against the Book of Cardinal De Perron (London, 1662); Samuel Felgate, The Novelty of the Modern Romish Religion (London, 1682); Gregory Hascard, A Discourse About the Charge of Novelty Upon the Reformed Church of England Made by the Papists Asking of Us the Question, Where Was Our Religion Before Luther? (London, 1685); John Gother, Pope Pius His Profession of Faith Vindicated from Novelty in Additional Articles (London, 1687); etc. 29. For studies that self-consciously view the culture of eighteenth-century England as a figure of “modernity” in varying registers, see Frank Boyle, Swift

Notes    as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: Guilford Press, 1998). 30.  See Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, “Addison and Some of His Predecessors on ‘Novelty,’ ” PMLA 52, no. 5 (December 1937): 1114–29. 31.  Ibid., 1114. 32. Lynn Thorndike, “Newness and Craving for Novelty in SeventeenthCentury Science and Medicine,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (October 1951): 584–98. 33.  In Peck’s view, other historians have overly heralded the “rise” of consumerism and luxury trade as an eighteenth-century development. As much as she objects to historians such as John Brewer, Peter Earle, and Maxine Berg for “suggest[ing] that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century luxury consumption was narrowly focused on the court, giving way in the early eighteenth century to urban consumption and demand for goods by a middle-class public,” most of the shoppers, owners, and gift recipients of luxury goods mentioned in her study do indeed bear titles or are labeled by her as “noble” and “elite.” Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 352; see also page 14. The works she cites include John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) and Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). 34.  Man in the Moon, London Unmask’ d: Or, the New Town Spy (London: William Adlard, 1784?), 135. Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 35. Eighteenth Century Collection Online provides a tentative publication date as 1784, while a reference in the text—“Quere, is honesty above par in 1783?” (14)—suggests it may be 1783. 36.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 1996), 22. 37. Franco Moretti, keynote address for Theories of the Novel Conference, Brown University, November 9, 2007. 38.  I am referring, respectively, to 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): 1–16; Mary Baine Campbell, Chapter 8 of Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 257–83; and G. Gabrielle Starr, “Objects, Imaginings, and Facts:

   Notes Going Beyond Genre in Behn and Defoe,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16, no. 4 (July 2004): 499–518. 39. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Joanna Lipking (New York: Norton, 1997), 6, 40. Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. For accounts that relate the origins of the novel to the early development of news writings, see Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983) and J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). 40. For an illuminating account of how dramatic conventions of verisimilitude become translated into prose narrative, see Kristiaan P. Aercke, “Congreve’s Incognita: Romance, Novel, Drama?” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2, no. 4 (July 1990): 293–308. 41.  See Catherine Labio, “ ‘What’s in Fashion Vent’: Behn, La Fayette, and the Market for Novels and Novelty,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 119–40 and Oddvar Holmesland, “Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Cultural Dialectics and the Novel,” ELH 68 (2001): 57–79 for discussions of this discrepancy between Behn’s political and aesthetic agendas in Oroonoko. 42.  In her suggestive essay, G. Gabrielle Starr approaches novelty in Behn’s Oroonoko as a means by which writing can render imagination within “empirical” limits of “perception,” bringing “empirical observation and its quest for certainty into contact with the uncertain.” Starr, “Objects, Imaginings, and Facts,” 504. 43.  Catherine Labio accounts for this contradiction as “the simultaneous awareness of and ambivalence toward the contemporary linkage between reading and novelty.” Labio, “What’s in Fashion Vent,” 126. 44.  The evocative description of the narrative technique in Oroonoko comes from Campbell, Chapter 8, Wonder and Science. 45.  See Labio, “What’s in Fashion Vent,” 124–26. 46.  See Campbell, Wonder and Science. 47.  See Anne Bratach, “Following the Intrigue: Aphra Behn, Genre and Restoration Science,” Journal of Narrative Technique 26, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 209–27. 48.  See Margaret W. Ferguson, “Feathers and Flies: Aphra Behn and the Seventeenth-Century Trade in Exotica,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Campbell points out that “the scientizing observational style . . . is antinarrative . . . [and that] description retards (even replaces) action” (278). This comprises an especially problematic feature of what she calls the “natural history” passages of Oroonoko, insofar as they “divert” the reader from the narrator’s own culpability in the series of events that lead to the brutal torturing and execution of Oroonoko. See Campbell, Wonder and Science, 279.

Notes    49.  Campbell, Wonder and Science, 226. See also Gilles Lipovestky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 16. 50.  Campbell, Wonder and Science, 226. 51. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 52.  Michel McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, 20. 53.  Brown, Ends of Empire, 43. 54.  The narrative is rife with other cuttings, in fact, including the description of Oroonoko’s and Imoinda’s ornamental body carvings, which the narrator says are traditional for nobility of Coromantien, and Oroonoko’s own act of cutting Imoinda’s throat, then her “Smiling Face” from her body. To a certain extent, Imoinda’s own death follows a similar sequence as Oroonoko’s. After being sliced and cut by Oroonoko, her corpse leaves a “smell” that is “unusual . . . for Stinks must be very noisom that can be distinguish’d among such a quantity of Natural Sweets, as every Inch of that Land produces” (Behn, 40, 61–62). 55. For an excellent and evocative study of the representational links between slaves and things, see chapters 3 and 4 in Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). As Catherine Gallagher explains, the Licensing Act of 1662 left Behn with no ownership right to her own product—the narrative that devotes itself to preserving “[her] Slave” as she calls him in her dedication—upon having it printed. See Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670–1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 63–64. For Behn’s reference to Oroonoko as “my slave,” see Oroonoko, 7. 56. For this finding, I am indebted to Pouria Taghipour Tabrizi, who shared it with me in his research paper, “Title-Pages and the Rise of the Novel,” written for my graduate seminar on the eighteenth-century novel. 57. Dror Wahrman covers many of these sources and comments on this feature of eighteenth-century life as an aspect of what he calls “the ancien régime of identity” and figures it as “a regime of identity not characterized by an axiomatic presupposition of a deep inner core of selfhood.” See Dror Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 198. 58.  Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 18. 59.  Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 19. 60.  See Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) and Earle, Making of the English Middle Class. 61. Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 331.

   Notes 62. For an informative account of the selling and buying of clothes in seventeenth-century England, see Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 5. 63. Erin Mackie, ed., The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 198–99. 64. Daniel Defoe, quoted in ibid., 291. 65.  Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London: T.R. for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653), A2. Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 66.  Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 169. 67. Anonymous, On Novelty: And on Trifles, and Triflers (R. Cruttwell, in St. James’s-Street: Bath, 1778), 5. 68.  Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 273. Barthes himself quotes a gravestone inscription. 69.  Samuel Pepys, Diary, vol. 8, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (1667; London, and Berkeley and Los Angeles: HarperCollins UK and University of California Press, 1995 and 2000), 163. 70. Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin, 1982), 215. Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 71.  See Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode. 72.  Joyce Appleby, “Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter, 164 and William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res 9 (Spring 1985). 73.  Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1999, 1972). For a precis of significant twentieth-century accounts of “the Enlightenment project,” see introduction to The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). In the same volume, see Dorinda Outram, “The Enlightenment Our Contemporary.” 74.  Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 272–73. 75.  Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1726), in A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 76.  Martin Battestin, The Providence of Wit (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 232.

Notes    77.  William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” Res 16 (Autumn 1988): 105–23. 78.  Charles de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches, ou Parallèle de l’ancienne Religion de l’Egypte avec la Religion actuelle de Nigritie (Paris, 1760), 10: “le culte . . . de certains objets terrestres & matériels appellés Fétiches chez les Négres Africains, parmi lesquels ce culte subsiste, & que par cette raison j’appellerai Fétichisme.” 79. Hume, Natural History of Religion, 117. 80.  Ibid. 81. De Brosses, Du Culte des dieux fétiches, 185–86. English translation from Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). Puisque l’on ne s’étonne pas de voir les enfans ne pas élever leur esprit plus haut que leurs leurs poupées, les croires animées, & agir avec elles en conséquence, pourquoi s’étonneroit-on de voir des peuples, qui passent constamment leur vie dans une continuelle enfance & qui n’ont jamais plus de quatre ans, raisonner sans aucune justesse, & agir comme ils raisonnent? Les esprits de cette trempe sont les plus communs, même dans les siécles éclairés, & parmi les nations civilisées. 82.  M. l’abbé de Bellegarde (Jean Baptiste Morvan), The modes, or, A conversation upon the fashions of all nations, translated from French (London, 1735), 28. 83.  Ibid., 29. 84. Henry Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal, no. 37 (Saturday, May 9, 1752), ed. Bertrand Goldgar (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 217– 21. Further references to this work are by CGJ and page number in the main text. 85. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. John Bender and Simon Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 179. 86.  Ibid., 194. 87.  William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London, 1744), 26–27. Quoted in Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa,” 109. 88.  See the introduction in Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, for an excellent appraisal of the ever-shifting concept of modernity and its special relevance to the construction of eighteenth-century “geographies.” 89. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1966; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 25. 90.  Barbara Stafford, Artful Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994) and “Voyeur or Observer? Enlightenment Thoughts on the Dilemmas of Dis-

   Notes play,” Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 95–128 and Simon Schaffer, “The Consuming Flame: Electrical Showmen and Tory Mystics in the World of Goods,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter, 489–526. For discussions of the public aspects of scientific experiments, see also Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Charles Taylor, The Art and Science of Lecture Demonstration (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1988). 91. For a discussion of the relationship between scientific method and eighteenth-century fiction, see John Bender, “Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis,” Representations 61 (Winter 1998): 6–28. 92.  Ibid., 8. 93. Doody, True Story of the Novel, 293, 294. 94.  Christian Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General (1728), trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Indianapolis, IN, and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 38. 95.  Mumford, Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). 96.  Samuel Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 155–59. 97. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 304–5. chapter 2 1.  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985). Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 2.  See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in The Making of the Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Barbara Duden, The Woman Under the Skin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). For a recent and booklength response to Laqueur’s argument, see Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3.  Ian Watt, in perhaps the most canonical account of the eighteenth-century novel, finds “the conception of sex we find in Richardson embodies a more complete and comprehensive separation between the male and female roles than had

Notes    previously existed.” Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 162. 4. E. L. McCallum, “How to Do Things with Fetishism,” Differences 7, no. 3 (1993): 24–49. 5. Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 84, 66–67. 6.  Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al., vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 145–57. Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 7. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), 65–66. Schor quotes from Michel Foucault: “A Meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans and data. And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 141. 8. Edith Birkhead, “Sentiment and Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” in Essays and Studies of the English Association, vol. 11 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 102. 9.  This is especially true in sensibility’s earliest guise as mid-seventeenth-century French sensibilité, according to Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 10. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (1759; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 10. 11.  Translations of such French heroic romances during the first half of the eighteenth century contributed to the growth of sensibility, as well as the novel, in England. 12.  Janet Todd, Sensibility (London: Methuen, 1986), 19. 13.  Robert Whytt, Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of those Disorders which have been commonly call’ d Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric (Edinburgh, 1765), 10. 14.  See John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 15.  Claudia Johnson, “A ‘Sweet Face as White as Death’: Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility,” in Novel (Winter 1989): 173. 16. Louise Kaplan, Female Perversions (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 4. Kaplan repeats this statement on at least two different pages: 34 and 123. 17.  Jean Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 199.

   Notes 18.  Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty 1700–1789, trans. Bernard Swift (Geneva: Skira, 1964), 10. 19. Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, 18n. Here, Apter reinforces a perverse understanding of libertine practices by revealing that nineteenth-century sexologists advanced their theories through analyzing libertine and other examples from eighteenth-century literature and history. 20.  Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755). 21.  Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 200. 22. Elizabeth Wright, ed., Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 70. 23.  Brigitte Glaser, The Body in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 1994), 81. Glaser provides further information about the history of libertinism and masculinity in literature. 24.  Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 122. Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 25.  Sigmund Freud, “Freud and Fetishism: Previously Unpublished Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society,” ed. and trans. Louis Rose, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 57 (1988): 151. 26.  Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 20. 27.  Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 133. 28.  Stuart Schneiderman, An Angel Passes: How the Sexes Became Undivided (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 186. 29. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 26. 30.  Kaplan, Female Perversions, 35. 31.  See Elizabeth Harries, The Unfinished Manner (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994) and Terry Castle, Clarissa’s Ciphers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). chapter 3 1.  William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” Res 13 (Spring 1987), 36–37. 2. David Hume, Natural History of Religion in Writings on Religion, ed. Anthony Flew (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1992), 117. 3. Anonymous, Adollizing, or, A Lively Picture of Adoll-Worship (London, 1748). I am indebted to James Grantham Turner for informing me of this source before the age of ECCO. Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text.

Notes    4.  The collaboration of Adollizing’s author with Clodius can be further located in the preface, where he emphasizes the “too singular a nature” of the poem’s title and his need to justify “the freedom taken to introduce a new Word into our Language.” Like Clodius’s dolls, his new word comes out of “th’inventive Wit,” in that he hopes he “will not be envy’d” for “having set up” his “forge for the striking only of one single word.” Furthermore, taking his cue from Horace, he claims that “new names must of necessity be given to new discoveries.” 5. Dominique Autié, “Artificial Bodies or the Naturalist’s Chamber,” Mannequins, ed. Nicole Perrot (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 11. 6.  There is no etymological relationship between the words adollizing and idolizing. 7.  Bartholomew Fair, in Smithfield, the northwestern part of the City of London, which began as a site for religious worship and pilgrimages, and then a market for cloth and meat, held its operations from 1133 until 1855. 8. Ned Ward, The London Spy, ed. Paul Hyland (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1993), 192–93. 9. Alexander Pope, A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 82. See Tita Chico, “The Arts of Beauty: Women’s Cosmetics and Pope’s Ekphrasis,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 1–23. 10.  Ben Johnson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Eugene M. Waith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). See Melinda Gough, “Jonson’s Siren Stage,” Studies in Philology 96, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 68–95 for a reading of the play as an apology for the theatre, and Jonathan Haynes, “Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,” ELH 51, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 645–68 for an account of the play’s relationship to the Fair as a social-historically constructed site of festivity. 11.  The Prelude was written during the last years of the eighteenth century but published much later in 1850, five years before the closing of Bartholomew Fair. All lines quoted are from William Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). 12. Henry Morley, Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair (London: Chapman and Hall, 1880), 259. 13.  Ibid., 259–260. 14. For accounts of more dispersed doll venues in the eighteenth century, see Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978) and George Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre, 2nd ed. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990). 15.  The fad for puppets went so far toward the mid-century that they were even used by the upper classes of France and England to complete the effect of

   Notes fashionable garments or domestic interiors. These artifacts are discussed further in Chapter 5. 16.  Daily Advertiser (August 1752). From scrapbook of advertisements at the Lewis Walpole Library (LWL), Farmington, Connecticut. Uncatalogued at time of finding, April 2003. 17.  “A Sketch of the Character of Mrs. WRIGHT (With an exact Likeness of her)” London Magazine 44 (February 1775): 555–57. 18. Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Dublin, 1795; New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 191. 19.  “Sketch,” 556. 20.  Ibid., 555. 21. Henry James Pye, A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle, by Examples Taken Chiefly from the Modern Poets (London, 1792), 110–11. 22.  Ibid., 148. 23.  Ibid., 146. 24. Advertisement (August 2, 1786), LWL Scrapbook. 25. Advertisement (ca. 1786): “Mrs. Salmon’s Royal Wax-work at No. 189 in Fleet Street, Volume of broadsides, Folger Library c.1850 c.10. 26.  Ibid., 1850 c.15.151 (ca. 1785). 27.  The Analytical Review 18 (January 1794), reprinted in Ioan Williams, Novel and Romance, 1700–1800 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 385. 28.  James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, vol. 4 of 6 (Edinburgh, 1773–92), 135. 29.  William Craig, The Mirror, no. 31 (Tuesday, May 11, 1779), vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1781), 248. Further references to this work are by journal title and page number in the main text. 30. For further elaboration on the properties of historical narrative, see Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, vol. 3 of 3 (Dublin, 1783). 31.  Joshua Reynolds, in Discourse X claims that the use of color and “modern dress” violate the “ideal beauty” of sculpture. Reynolds, Discourses, ed. Pat Rogers (London: Penguin, 1992), 233, 234, 246. 32.  James Grantham Turner, “Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela,” Representations 48 (Fall 1994): 92. 33. Anonymous, Pamela Censured: In a Letter to the Editor (London, 1741), 23. 34.  Ibid. 35. Anonymous, Review of Self Control in Eclectic Review 8 (June 1812): 603– 20. Lines quoted are from pages 605–6. 36.  Max von Boehn, Dolls and Puppets (London: Harrap, 1932), 55. 37.  John C. Hodges provides the primary sources for this story, in William Congreve, the Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 109–10. See Daily

Notes    Post, no. 3997 (Saturday, July 15 1732), which announces, “We hear that the Effigies of the late ingenious William Congreve, Esq; done in Waxwork, at the Expence of 200 l. and which was kept at a Person of Quality’s House in St. James’s, was broke to Pieces by the Carelessness of a Servant in bringing it down Stairs last Monday Night.” See also Anonymous, “The Amorous D—-h—ss: or, Her G—-Grateful” (London, 1733): To raise in Wax the GOD-LIKE man . . .  The Figure form’d, with lovely Grace, Having for Niche, a curious Case, She visits oft the dear-lov’ d Place. Breaths out her soft desires, some say, Full half a Dozen Times a Day. See also Theophilus Cibber, Lives of the Poets, vol. 4 (London, 1753), 92: It is said of Mr. Congreve, that he was a particular favorite of the ladies . . . sprightly as well as eloquent in his manner, and so much a favorite of Henrietta duchess of Marlborough, that even after his death, she caused an image of him to be every day placed at her toilet-table, to which she would talk as to the living Mr. Congreve, with all the freedom of the most polite and unreserved conversation. 38.  Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, 1988), 42. She writes: “For men of the greatest abilities have seldom had sufficient strength to rise above the surrounding atmosphere; and, if the page of genius have [sic] always been blurred by the prejudices of the age, some allowance should be made for a sex, who, like kings, always see things through a false medium.” 39.  The ragged regiment of royal figures include Edward III, 1377; Anne of Bohemia, 1394; Katherine de Valois, 1437; Elizabeth of York, 1503; Henry VII, 1509; Mary Tudor, 1558; Anne of Denmark, 1619; James I, 1625; Charles II, 1685; William III and Mary II, ca. 1725; and Queen Anne, heads and hands, 1715, effigy 1740. See Richard Mortimer, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1994). 40.  Sophie von la Roche, Sophie in London, 1786: Being the Diary of Sophie v. la Roche, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), 132. 41. E. T. Bradley, Annals of Westminster Abbey (London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell & Company, 1898), 311. 42.  Joseph Roach has taken this notion further by speculating that the changing historical function of the Westminster Abbey dolls has led to the contemporary “practice of erotic celebrity.” See Roach, “Celebrity Erotics: Pepys, Perfor-

   Notes mance, and Painted Ladies,” Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 211–30. 43.  Von Boehn, Dolls and Puppets, 93. 44. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 348. 45.  Ibid., 662. 46.  Marina Warner, “Waxworks and Wonderlands” in Visual Display, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (Seattle: Bay Press, and Dia Center for the Arts, 1995), 188. 47.  John Bender, “Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis,” Representations 61 (Winter 1998): 8. 48. Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin, 1982), 35. 49. Although I have found no primary source that directly explains from what material the fashion dolls were made, and who made them, tradesman manuals of the time and the fact that most eighteenth-century dolls were wooden, indicate they were most probably made by wood turners. R. Campbell in The London Tradesman explains that the wig maker buys his “blocks,” or the wood on which the wig is fashioned, from the turner. The turner himself made with his lathe, in addition to these blocks for wig makers, toys, snuffboxes, washing tubs, and casks. On the other hand, the only extant fashion dolls—those made and kept in France and Germany and still in elaborate eighteenth-century costumes—were made of wax. 50. Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 474–75. 51. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 43. 52. Alice K. Early, English Dolls: Effigies and Puppets (London: Batsford, 1955), 163. 53.  The current staff at the Bostonian Society is now uncertain whether or not the doll—subsequently named “Polly Sumner”—was originally a milliner’s model. However, an opulent description of its former eighteenth-century dress suggests that it began as one, though the doll now wears a drab, gray dress from the post–Civil War era: “At first Polly was dressed elaborately, after the manner of ladies of the court of St. James’s of her time. Her gown was of rich brocade, with a huge hoop, her little round cap was trimmed with long ostrich plumes and around her slender neck was a necklace of pearl beads.” Boston Globe (January– February, 1930). The Museum of Costume in Bath, England, keeps only the outward remnants of an “authenticated” fashion doll, the court dress worn by a 1770 milliner’s model. Its size proves the dress was made for a fashion doll: at thirty inches high, it is scaled according to the purportedly standard measurement of a milliner’s model. The actual doll no longer exists. The former National Museum

Notes    at Independence Hall in Philadelphia held perhaps the only extant model of a “genuine” fashion doll, dressed in a taffeta sacque dress over a hooped petticoat and red high-heeled slippers. 54. Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 55. For an incisive discussion of how print culture and aspects of its technological medium inflected the embodiment and reembodiment of character in novels, see Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 56. Attributed to Eustace Budgell, The Spectator, ed. with an introduction and notes, Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). 57.  The cross-sexing implications of this letter deserve greater elaboration that exceeds the scope of this chapter. 58. Horace Walpole, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Mary and Agnes Berry, ed. W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace, vol. 12 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 28–29. 59. Louis Sebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, 1732), 212–16. 60. Daniel Lysons, Collectanea, scrapbook collected 1660–1840 in British Library. 61.  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 529. 62.  Ibid., 158. 63.  Cleone Knox, The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion, ed. Alexander Blacker Kerr (New York: Appleton, 1926). 64.  Zakiya Hanafi writes: Wonder acts as a sort of trance state, an intermediate state of being in which the ego boundary is more permeable; consciousness of self fades to allow more intense and memorable imprinting of the object onto one’s cognitive and memory organs. This is the positively connotated aspect of wonder. But, as in all altered states, there is a danger of remaining captivated by and in the ‘other,’ so that self runs the risk of being annihilated. See The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 192. 65.  See Erin Mackie’s inspired discussion of this proposed edifice in Market à la Mode (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 91–93. 66.  Adeste, a quotquot sun, Veneres, Gratiae, Cupidines,/ En vobis adsunt in promptu/ Faces, Vincula, Spicula,/ Hine eligite, sumite, regite. Translated in Budgell, Spectator, vol. 4 (no. 478, Monday, September 8, 1712), 196.

   Notes 67.  Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Stewart reminds us that kitsch derives “from the German kitschen, ‘to put together sloppily.’ ” Furthermore, it richly involves a paradoxical relationship to time, space, culture, and the subject positions of the individual and the community: the kitsch object offers a saturation of materiality, a saturation which takes place to such a degree that materiality is ironic, split into contrasting voices: past and present, mass production and individual subject, oblivion and reification. Such objects serve to subjectify all consumer culture, to institute a nostalgia of the populace which in fact makes the populace itself a kind of subject . . . they are apprehended on the level of collective identity. (166–67) 68. Here, I appeal to Ian Watt’s account of the eighteenth-century novel as a project of “formal realism” that corresponded with contemporary projects of “philosophical realism.” 69. From review of The Labyrinths of Life (1791) in The Monthly Review 5 (July 1791), 337–38. 70. For further discussions of these anatomical wax dolls, see Jann Matlock, “Censoring the Realist Gaze,” in Spectacles of Realism, ed. Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); John Bender, “Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 71. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995), 82. 72. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 331. 73. For an acute analysis of the metaphorical properties of the collection, see Stewart, On Longing, 151–69 and Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1998). 74.  See William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). For a discussion of the “copy theory of knowledge” and its relationship to eighteenth-century–novel reading practices, see Lynch, The Economy of Character, 41, 47–48. 75.  Quoted in Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 183. 76.  Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Peter Sabor (London: Penguin, 1980), 87. 77.  See Elaine Scarry’s discussion of objectification as a necessary feature of subject-formation in The Body in Pain (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. 5.

Notes    78. According to Mandeville, “It is incredible what vast quantity of Trinkets as well as Apparel are purchas’d and used by Women, which they could never have come at by any other means, than pinching their Families, Marketing, and other ways of cheating and pilfering from their Husbands.” And yet such profligacy gives way to national well-being: “a considerable Portion of what the Prosperity of London and Trade in general, and consequently the Honour, Strength, Safety, and all the worldly interest of the Nation consist in, depends entirely on the Deceit and vile Stratagems of Women.” Furthermore, “the Variety of Work that is perform’d, and the number of Hands employ’d to gratify the Fickleness and Luxury of Women is prodigious” (Fable I, 226–28). 79. Henry Home of Kames, Elements of Criticism (1761; A.S. Barnes: New York, 1856). Kames’s discussion of novelty appears in Chapter 6, “Novelty and the Unexpected Appearance of Objects.” For Lord Kames, too, women play an important role in defining the wonderful effects of novelty, always the operative attribute of desirable consumer goods in eighteenth-century Britain: “even women will acknowledge that it is novelty which pleases the most in a new fashion” 152–53. chapter 4 1. Frances Burney: Camilla, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 1983); Cecilia, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 148. Further references to these works are by title and page number in the main text. 2. Although Rey Chow refers to the far-removed context and medium of early-twentieth-century cinematography and its ability to capture the psychological effects of “mechanically repeated motions” in such films as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, the connection she makes between the automaton and the spectacle captures the arresting effects of compulsion and perpetual unease at the heart of Burney’s narratives about women’s experiences of turning into social subjects in mid- to late-eighteenth-century British society: “Being ‘automatized’ means being subjected to social exploitation whose origins are beyond one’s individual grasp, but it also means becoming a spectacle whose ‘aesthetic’ power increases with one’s increasing awkwardness and helplessness.” From “Postmodern Automatons,” Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 106. I am indebted to Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character for this source. 3. Frances Burney, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 4, The Streatham Years, Part II 1780–1781, ed. Betty Rizzo (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-

   Notes Queen’s University Press, 2003), 2n6. Further references to volume 4 are by EJL IV, page number, and date in the main text. 4.  Only Camilla was published in installments by subscription. 5.  See Julia Epstein’s reading of the compulsive element in Burney’s writing career in Chapter 1, “Compulsive Writing,” in The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 6.  See Daniel Cottom, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Digestion,” Representations 66 (Spring 1999): 60. 7. Frances Burney to Esther Burney (January 8, 1781), in Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor and Lars Troide (London: Penguin, 2001), 169. 8. Ned Ward, Adam and Eve Stript of Their Furbelows (London, 1714), 7. 9. Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, vol. 2 (London, 1773), 67. 10. Abbé D’Ancourt, The Lady’s Preceptor, or, a Letter to a Young Lady of Distinction upon Politeness, translated by a Gentleman of Cambridge, vol. 1, 6th ed. (Birmingham, 1778). 11.  Richard Allestree, The Lady’s Calling, vol. 1 (London, 1720), 5–6. 12.  John Essex, The Young Ladies Conduct: Or, Rules for Education, vol. 2 (London, 1722), 47. 13.  George Lord Saville [sic], Late Marquis and Earl of Halifax, The Lady’s Newyear’s Gift: Or, Advice to a Daughter, vol. 2 (London, 1724), 100; and vol. 3, 101. 14.  Ibid., 104. 15. Definition for “automaton” in Frederick Barlow, The Complete English Dictionary; or, General Repository of the English Language, vol. 1: AUX–AWK (London, 1772–73). 16.  See Joseph Rykwert, “Organic and Mechanical,” Res 22 (Fall 1992): 11–18. 17.  See Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge: Hackett, 1988), 127–28. 18.  Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 128. 19.  See Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Machine Man, trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13: “Man was trained like an animal . . . A mathematician learnt the most difficult proofs and calculations, as a monkey learnt to put on and take off his little hat or to ride his trained dog . . . As we can see, there is nothing simpler than the mechanism of our education!” 20.  The most vigorous revisionist of the “separate spheres” model in historiographies of gender is Amanda Vickery in “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A

Notes    Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383–414 and The Gentleman’s Daughter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Other examples include Harriet Guest, Small Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Eve Tavor Bannett, Domestic Revolutions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Lawrence Klein, “Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 97–109. 21.  Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 265. 22. Frances Brooke’s The Excursion (1777), published the same year as Evelina, manifests the association with travel that the practice of “coming out” relays. The trope of carriages and carriage rides runs throughout its own narrative of a young girl making her first “entrance” into society. 23.  Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London, 1806), 96–97. 24.  Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1975; New York: Norton, 1988), 170. 25.  Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 265. 26. Anonymous, Things Divine and Supernatural Conceived by Analogy with Things Natural and Human (London, 1733), 3. 27. Alexander Adam, The Rudiments of Latin and English Grammar (Edinburgh, 1793), 243. Housed in the British Library. 28. Anonymous, Lady’s Rhetoric (originally published in French; London, 1707), 89. 29.  Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London: Penguin, 1996), 42. 30. Frances Burney, Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 2, 1774– 1777, ed. Lars E. Troide (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 215. 31.  Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 92–93. 32.  In Cecilia the heroine says to her future mother-in-law: “Do not talk to me of affection, madam . . . whatever you had for me is past,-even your esteem is gone,-you may pity me, indeed, but your pity is mixed with contempt, and I am not so abject as to find comfort from exciting it” (641). 33.  See Joyce Hemlow, “Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books,” PMLA 65 (1950): 732–61. 34. Edward and Lillian Bloom inform us that Gregory’s text with “Mr. Tyrold’s Advice to his Daughter . . . from ‘Camilla’, by Mrs. D’Arblay” was included in 1809–1816 printings (Camilla, 941). 35.  Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 53. Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text.

   Notes 36.  Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London and New York: Routledge), 121. 37.  Kristeva evokes the relationship between cadavers and the abject by pointing out the derivation of the word cadaver from cadere, which means “to fall”: These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver.” (Abjection, 3) 38.  Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody include this draft introduction in their edition of Cecilia (1988). 39.  Julie Choi, “Feminine Authority? Common Sense and the Question of Voice in the Novel,” New Literary History 37, no. 4 (1996), 641–62. Choi discusses Burney’s introduction to Camilla specifically in contrast with William Godwin’s postscript of 1832 to Caleb Williams, in which he explains his choice to write the text in the first person. See pages 650–51. 40.  Ibid., 655. 41.  Margaret Anne Doody, “George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel,” in “George Eliot, 1880–1980,” special issue, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 3 (December 1990): 260–91, 280. Further references to this work are by author and page number in the main text. 42. Frances Burney, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 3, The Streatham Years, Part I 1778–1779, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994), 78–79, 149, 157, 398, 80, 326. Further references to volume 3 are by EJL III, page number, and date in the main text. Reynolds’s vow is repeated at least four times throughout the letters and journals written from 1778 to 1779. 43. Letter from Frances Burney to Susan Burney Phillips, post–January 14, 1786, in A Known Scribbler: Frances Burney on Literary Life, ed. Justine Crimp (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 234. 44. Anonymous (James Cox?), A Descriptive Catalogue of the Several Superb and Magnificent Pieces of Mechanism and Jewellery, Exhibited in the Museum, at Spring-Gardens, Charing Cross (London, 1773), 28–29. 45. Further information on James Cox and his thriving export trade with the Chinese market can be found, most recently, in Catherine Pagani, Eastern Magnificence and European Ingenuity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). See also Pagani, “The Clocks of James Cox: Chinoiserie and the Clock Trade of China in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Apollo 141 (January 1995): 15–22 and Charles M. Aked, “The Emperor’s Clock,” Clocks 9, no. 4 (1986): 29–34. The Guildhall Library, London, has one of three copies of William Meyrick, A Short

Notes    Account of the Remarkable Clock Made by James Cox, in the Year 1766 by Order of the East India Company for the Emperor of China (London, 1868). 46. Anonymous (James Cox?), A Descriptive Catalogue, 13. 47. Lillian D. Bloom and Edward A. Bloom, “Fanny Burney’s Novels: The Retreat from Wonder,” Novel 12, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 215–36. 48.  English Review 1 (January 1783): 14. 49.  The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (1778–1840), vol. 2, ed. Charlotte Barrett, with Preface and Notes by Austin Dobson (London: Macmillan, 1904), 93. 50.  Burney shares this anecdote in a footnote of her introduction to The Wanderer (1814; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5. Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 51.  See Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens (London: Macmillan, 1896), 199–218 for a history of Ranelagh. Wroth quotes Lydia Melford in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: “Ranelagh looks like the enchanted palace of a genio, adorned with the most exquisite performances of painting, carving, and gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps that emulate the noonday sun” (203). 52.  This reading of the Cox’s Museum scene in Evelina diverges from that of Simon During, who views it as a more or less transparent vehicle for expressing the characters’ moral positions. See During, Modern Enchantments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 53.  See Bannett, Domestic Revolutions, on the mutual focus on exemplarity in novels and conduct books of the second half of the eighteenth century. 54.  George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776; Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 131. 55. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (1754; London: Favril, 1930), 236. 56.  Julia Epstein, “Marginality in Frances Burney’s Novels,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Here, Epstein makes use of Victor Turner’s anthropological descriptions of liminality to focus on the theme of social “margins.” For this chapter, I find it more pertinent to underscore the themes of transformation and conversion inherent in such historically mediated structures of liminality as the eighteenth-century custom of coming out. 57.  Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 88. See John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

   Notes 58. Friedrich Schelling, Philosophy of Mythology, quoted in Edward Allen Beach, The Potencies of God(s) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 228. 59.  Burney’s first encounter with the S.S.’s ability to cry on demand left her shocked and frightened. Exclaiming “No, I won’t look at her, [she] ran away, lest she [the S.S.] should think [Burney] laughed at her” (EJL III, 254, post–February 26, 1779). 60.  Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 62–63. 61. For readings of Camilla and consumer culture, see James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 62.  Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney,” in Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Leopold Damrosch, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 462. 63. Epstein, Iron Pen, 26. 64.  Burney, Journals and Letters, vol. 42 (March 1778): 86; vol. 43 (June 23, 1778): 87; and vol. 47 (Frances Burney to Susanna Burney, August 30, 1778): 100. 65.  Ibid., vol. 47 (Frances Burney to Susanna Burney, August 30, 1778), 98, 101. 66.  Scrap from Diary, Fragments of Court Journal (1786–1790), Autogr. Eg. 3696, ff. 8–26. Archived in the British Library. 67.  Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 34. 68.  Ibid., 34. 69. For an acute analysis of this experience through Burney’s journals and letters, see John Wiltshire, “Fanny Burney’s Face, Madame D’Arblay’s Veil,” in Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). chapter 5 1.  George Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre (New York: John de Graff, 1955), 92. 2. Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 49. 3.  James Ralph, The Touch-Stone: Or, Historical, Critical, Political, Moral, Philosophical and Theological Essays Upon the Reigning Diversions of the Town

Notes    (London, 1728), 228. I am grateful to Brian Cowan for telling me about this source. 4.  Joseph Cradock, Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs, vol. 4 (London: J.B. Nichols, 1828), 279–91. 5.  John Bell, “Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects at the End of the Century,” in Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects, ed. John Bell (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001), 5. See also Steve Tillis, Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art (Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992). 6.  Roman Paska, “The Inanimate Incarnate,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part I, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 411–12. 7.  Ralph, Touch-Stone, 228. 8.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 163–64. 9.  Joseph Addison, “The Puppet-Show,” in Jonathan Swift, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 4th ed. (Dublin, 1721), 270, 273. 10. Alexander Adam, The Rudiments of Latin and English Grammar (Edinburgh, 1793), 243. 11.  Charlotte Charke, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, ed. Leonard R. N. Ashley (1755; Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1969). Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 12.  Martin Battestin, “Fielding and ‘Master Punch’ in Panton Street,” Philological Quarterly 45, no. 1 (January 1966), 193. 13. Advertisement (ca. 1748), reprinted in ibid., 193. 14.  Max von Boehn, Dolls and Puppets (London: Harrap, 1932), 131. 15.  Samuel Foote, “Exordium to the Primitive Puppet Show,” Town and Country Magazine (June 1773), 319–21. 16.  Ibid., 320. 17.  James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 293. 18. Anonymous, Emma; or, the Unfortunate Attachment, 3 vols., vol. 2 (London, 1773), 207–8. 19. For help in identifying these figures, I consulted Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 354–59, 298–301. 20. Fidelis Morgan with Charlotte Charke, The Well-Known Troublemaker: A Life of Charlotte Charke (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 62–63. 21.  Speaight, History of the English Puppet Theatre, 104.

   Notes 22. For an overview of eighteenth-century approaches to acting, see Alan S. Downer, “Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth-Century Acting,” PMLA 58, no. 4 (1943): 1002–37. 23.  Robert Folkenflik, “Gender, Genre, and Theatricality in the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke,” in Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97. 24. Henry Fielding, The True Patriot and Related Writings 9 (December 31, 1745), ed. W. B. Coley (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 165. Furthering the eighteenth-century interpenetration between castrati and puppets, Fielding in his career as a playwright incorporated puppet shows in The Pleasures of the Town, as well as ridiculed castrati in Eurydice (performed 1736–1737). 25. For information about the physiological consequences of castration, see Enid Rhodes Peschel and Richard E. Peschel, “Medicine and Music: The Castrati in Opera,” Opera Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Winter 1986/1987): 21–38 and Anonymous, The Remarkable Trial of the Queen of Quavers (London, 1778). 26.  Katherine Bergeron, “The Castrato as History,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 2 (July 1996): 175–76. 27.  Ibid., 175. 28.  Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, vol. 2 (1729; Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1988), 103. 29.  The Usefulness of the Stage (1738), quoted in Speaight, History of the English Puppet Theatre, 105. 30.  Cited in Speaight, History of the English Puppet Theatre, 104. 31.  Quoted in Frederick Petty, Italian Opera in London: 1760–1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1972, 1980), 84. 32.  Eunuchism Display’ d, trans. Robert Samber (London, 1718), 165–66. 33.  James Robertson, “The Puppet-Show,” in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1773), 216–17. 34.  Ibid., 217. chapter 6 1.  Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 17 (1919, 1961; London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 219, 234, 244. All quotations in the text are from this edition. 2.  Mladen Dolar, “I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night,” October 58 (Fall 1991): 5. 3.  Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 7.

Notes    4.  William Congreve, The Way of the World, ed. Kathleen M. Lynch (1700; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). 5. Alexander Pope, A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Further references to The Rape of the Lock are by canto and page number in the main text. 6.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (1991; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 445. 7. Daniel Defoe, A Review of the State of the English Nation 6, no. 31 (June 14, 1709). 8.  See Laura Brown, “Capitalizing on Women: Dress, Aesthetics, and Alexander Pope,” in Brown, Ends of Empire, 103–34. Other accounts of the poem’s enactment of commodity fetishism include Stuart Crehan, “The Rape of the Lock and the Economy of ‘Trivial Things,’ ” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 45–68 and Colin Nicholson, “A Culture of Commodities: “ ‘Trivial Things’ in The Rape of the Lock,” in Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27–50. 9. Louis Landa, “Pope’s Belinda, the General Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm,” in Essays in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 178–98. 10.  Brown, “Capitalizing on Women,” 120. 11.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 163–77. 12.  See also “frail china jar” (II, 106), “China’s earth” (III, 110), and “tottering china” (IV, 163). The two most canonical critics of the poem, Cleanth Brooks and Aubrey Williams, make much of its “crockery” images. Interestingly, they both recall Freud. Brooks writes: “In the same way, one finds it hard to believe, after some of the material in the ‘Cave of Spleen’ section (‘And maids turn’d bottles call aloud for corks’), that Pope would have been too much startled to come upon the theories of Sigmund Freud.” Williams writes: “Freud, indeed, sees all imagery of containers to be feminine, and thus attributes archetypal status to it.” Cleanth Brooks, “The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor” and Aubrey Williams, “ ‘Fall’ of China and Rape of the Lock.” Both essays are collected in Maynard Mack, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1968), 247, 280. 13.  Margaret Doody, The Daring Muse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 135. 14. Austin Warren, Rage for Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), quoted in G. S. Rousseau, ed., The Rape of the Lock: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 103. 15.  Samuel Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 550.

   Notes 16.  Mandeville, Fable, Volumes I and II; Joan Landes, Women and The Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society (London and New York: Longman, 1998); and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 17.  C. R. Ashbee, Caricature (New York: Scribner’s, 1928), 30–31. 18.  William Barker, Treatise on the Principles of Hair-Dressing; in which the Deformities of Modern Hairdressing are pointed out, and an elegant and natural Plan recommended, upon Hogarth’s immortal System of Beauty (London, ca. 1786), quoted in Richard Corson, Fashion in Hair (London: Peter Owen, 1971), 356. 19.  Quoted in Richard Corson, Fashions in Eyeglasses (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1967), 85. 20.  Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference (New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 1999). 21.  Matthew Darly and Mary Darly, A Book of Caricaturas (London: 1776?). Archived at Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. 22.  Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: Norton, 1989), 6, 11–12. 23. David B. Morris, “Gothic Sublimity,” New Literary History 16, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 299–319. 24.  Quoted in Edward Allen Beach, Potencies of God(s): Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 228. 25.  See Dale Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) and Emil Fackenheim, The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 26.  One of Schelling’s examples was de Brosses’s Enlightenment text on primitive fetishism, Du Culte des dieux fétiches (1760). 27. Friedrich Schelling, Philosophy of Mythology, quoted in Edward Allen Beach, The Potencies of God(s), 228. 28.  Ibid., 229. 29.  See Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, esp. chap. 4, “Women and Eighteenth-Century Consumerism.” 30.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 88. 31.  Ibid. 32.  Ibid., 111. 33.  See Anthony Vidler, “The Architecture of the Uncanny,” Assemblage 3 (July 1987): 7–29. For a discussion on the significance of houses and the Gothic, see Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman, “Gothic Possibilities,” New Literary History 8, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 278–94.

Notes    34. For an account of Victorian figurations of women as automata, see Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 86. Although I do not tackle this phenomenon here, another representation of the automaton as simultaneously a symbol for the age of Enlightenment and the unenlightened other was the Oriental, as evinced in the inventory for Cox’s Mechanical Museum in eighteenth-century London, and Kempelen’s chess player. 35.  Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova, eds., The Enlightenment and Its Shadows (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 36. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 343. 37. All quotations from “The Sandman” come from E.T.A. Hoffmann, Tales of Hoffmann, trans. and ed. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Further references to this work are by title and page number in the main text. 38. For examples of this type of reading, see Neil Hertz, “Freud and the Sandman,” in The End of the Line (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Sarah Kofman, Freud and Fiction, trans. Sarah Wykes (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1991); Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1984); and Lis Moller, The Freudian Reading: Analytical and Fictional Constructions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). 39.  Most likely, Hoffmann’s source for this figure was Kempelen’s infamous Turkish chess player that toured Europe, captivated audiences during the late eighteenth century, and later ended up in the Chinese Museum of Philadelphia, only to be destroyed there in 1854 during a fire. See Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, 127–65. For historical background on the eighteenthcentury afterlife of Kempelen’s chess player, see Mary Hillier, Automata and Mechanical Toys (London: Bloomsbury, 1976). 40.  Jean Starobinski discusses the nineteenth-century perceptions of the eighteenth century as simultaneously nostalgic, fetishistic, and moralizing: “The official thinkers of respectable society in the nineteenth century deplored the moral corruption of the preceding century; but this same society preferred ‘Louis XV’ furniture, collected libertine prints, and for its amusements dressed up in swords, silk breeches, powdered wigs and black velvet masks.” See Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty 1700–1789, trans. Bernard Swift (Geneva: Skira, 1964), 9. 41. Equally odd is the manner in which Freud’s strenuous resistance to Olympia has only further implicated the mechanical female doll as an emblem for the uncanny. Examples of this misunderstanding can be seen in the way certain summaries of Freud’s argument ignore his rhetorical torsions in denying the uncanny possibilities in dolls to, instead, attribute Jentsch’s idea unequivocally to

   Notes Freud. See, for example, Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) and Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 42. Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenscrift 22 and 23 (August and September 1906): 195–98 and 203–5, respectively. 43. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 18. In “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” Freud later makes a more explicit connection with the work of psychoanalysis: @next:The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same origin. The layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow-men, but at the same time he is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his own being . . . Indeed, I should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason. (243) 44.  Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (1784; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 45.  The subtitle for Freud’s earlier book, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), makes this correspondence between the work of psychoanalysis (curing neurotics) and the Enlightenment (enlightening savages) especially clear. 46. David Hume’s work in particular exemplifies this quest to understand not only what we can know about the mind, but also what the mind cannot know about itself. See L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 47.  See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “So . . . What Is Enlightenment? An Inquisition into Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 20 (Spring 1994): 524–56; Clark, Golinski, and Schaffer, eds., Sciences in Enlightened Europe; and Hulme and Jordanova, eds., Enlightenment and Its Shadows. 48. Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 6. 49.  See Robert Darnton, Mesmerism (New York: Shocken Books, 1968); Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970); and Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) and Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 50.  Jean-Jacques Paulet, L’Antimagnétisme, quoted in Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 157.

Notes    51.  See Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992). 52.  Es waren nur geschminkte Frauen an den Fenstern der kleinen Häuser zu sehen (Freud, 237). 53.  Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. James Strachey (1900; New York: Avon Books, 1965), 265. Robin Lydenberg points out this similarity in “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (October 1997): 1076. 54.  See Fredric Bogel, Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 55. Landa, “Pope’s Belinda,” 178–98. 56.  Starobinski, Invention of Liberty, 72. 57.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (1762; New York: Basic Books, 1979), 367. 58. Francis Bacon, quoted in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972, 1999), 5. 59.  Inscription on “La charmante catin,” quoted and translated in Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener, 1995), 3. 60. Anonymous, quoted in Marion Frieda, Collector’s Encyclopedia of HalfDolls (Paducah, KY: Collector’s Books, 1979), 56. 61. Frieda, Collector’s Encyclopedia, 56.

Index

abjection: in Burney’s novels, xxvii, 128, 133–35, 148, 153, 156; cadavers and, 248n37; in Camilla, 147– 52; compensatory quality of, 135; etymology of, 133; incorporation of women in public life involves, 133; internal rendering itself external in defining, 135; as neither subject nor object, xxvii, 135–36; psychological consequences of fiction-writing for Burney, 154–57; surplus affect produced by imminent states of, 124; a theory of, 128–37 Adam and Eve Stript of their Furbelows (Ward), 126 Addison, Joseph: on commodity-laden femininity, 105; logic of the fetish in work of, xxiii; on merchant class, 24; on novelty, xxi, xxiii–xxiv, 11; on pleasures of the imagination, 206; on products of foreign trade, 193; on puppets and castrati, 165, 177, 179; on things as agentive, xxiii–xxiv; on women as idols, 79–81, 84 Adollizing, or, A Lively Picture of AdollWorship (anonymous), 81–85, 115, 239n4 Adorno, Theodor, 32 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, 65, 165, 204 Allestree, Richard, 126 Analysis of Beauty I, The (Hogarth), 176, 177, 200 anatomy, 65, 115 Ancillon, Charles, 180–81

Ancourt, Abbé D’, 126 angels, 54, 70, 72 animism, 32, 212, 213, 221 Apter, Emily, 52, 238n19 Aquinas, Thomas, 11 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 229n17 Aristotle, 11 Armstrong, Nancy, 227n7 Art of Management, The (Charke), 174 Austen, Jane: balance between pleasure and pain in works of, 147; Mansfield Park, 131; Sanditon, xxii; works in circulating libraries, xxii automata: in Camilla, 149, 150; in Cox’s Mechanical Museum, xxvii, 142–47; in culture of realism, xxvi; in Enlightenment literature, 128; in Evelina, 141; in Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’ “, xxviii, 190; in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” 207–10; Jentsch on uncanniness of, 212, 216; knowledge associated with, 219–20; novel compared with, 156; novel readers compared with, 46; objectification of humans in, xv; the Oriental as, 255n34; puppets compared with, 161–62; in Roxana, 30; and spectacle, 245n2; unenlightened affect of, 196; women as, xxvii, 123, 125–28, 130, 152, 205–6, 210; women’s increasing participation in social life and interest in, 105 “Automata” (Hoffmann), 208

   Index Bacon, Francis, 11, 219–20 Barbauld, Laetitia, 7 Barker, William, 200 Barthes, Roland, 27 Bartholomew Fair, 85–90; forms of imitation at, 86–87; in history of dolls, 90; Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, 87–88; place and dates of, 239n7; prostitutes at, 90; puppet theater at, 86, 165, 173; waxworks at, 85–86, 182; in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, 88–89 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 87–88 Bath Museum of Costume, 104, 106, 242n53 Battestin, Martin, 34, 165 beauty patches, 38–39 Beauvoir, Simone de, 109–10 Beggar’s Wedding, The (puppet show), 180 Behn, Aphra, see Oroonoko Bellegarde, Abbé de, 36–37 Bender, John, 44, 102 Benjamin, Walter, 23 Bentham, Jeremy, 128 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 214 Bloom, Edward, 143, 145 Bloom, Lillian, 143 body, the: anatomy, 65, 115; the fetishized body, 59–63; grotesque body, 153; the heart, 57, 65, 68–69, 72; imagining through sympathy, 56; libertine as living through, 63; the sensible body, 56–59. See also genitalia; sexual difference body-mind dualism, 54, 55, 59, 62 Boehn, Max von, 99, 102 Book of Caricaturas, A (Darly and Darly), 201 books: as boxes containing dolls, xxi, 111, 113; as constituents of selfhood, xxii; as dependent on whims of consumer, 22; expanding market for, xxii. See also novel, the Bostonian Society, 106, 242n53 Boswell, James, 170

Boyle, Robert, 11 Bredekamp, Horst, 115, 220 Brooke, Frances, 247n22 Brooks, Cleanth, 253n12 Brosses, Charles de, xxiii, 34–35, 36, 42 Brown, Laura, 19, 193 Brunton, Mary, 99 Burke, Edmund, 11, 145, 170 Burney, Charles, 124, 125 Burney, Frances, 123–57; abjection in novels of, xxvii, 128, 133–35, 148, 156; as amanuensis, 156–57; characters of, 143, 145; compared with camera obscura, 124, 156; free indirect discourse in works of, 133, 137, 138–41, 149; mastectomy of, 156; the novel’s form and, 124–25, 146; psychological consequences of fiction-writing for, 154–57; in Queen Charlotte’s court, 155; on Streatfield crying at will, 152–53; techniques of Richardson and Fielding combined in, 133; The Wanderer, 146; women who strive and fail in works of, 128. See also Camilla; Cecilia; Evelina cabinets of curiosity, xviii, 115 Cagliostro, Alessandro, 208 camera obscura, 114, 124, 156 Camilla (Burney), 147–52; abjection in, 134–35, 156; automata in, xxvii; balance of pleasure and pain upset in, 147–48; on coming out, 129; consumer culture in, 153–54; as consumer object, xxii; focus of, 123; free indirect discourse in, 154; Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” compared with, 209; interior versus exterior selves in, 148–49, 150; liminal identity in, 149–50; marriage that ends, 132–33; on mastering intricacies of human heart, 138; monitor in, 150–51; mortification in, 132, 150, 154; subtitled A Picture of Youth, 149 Campbell, George, 147

Index    Campbell, Mary Baine, 15, 18, 232n48 caricature, 196–201; etymology of, 197; and Freud’s understanding of jokes, 201 Carter, John, 100, 101 Castle, Terry, 191, 207 castrati: disquietude produced by, 179; liminality of, 177; in London Unmask’d: Or, the New Town Spy, 12; as “mere representatives of men,” xxvii–xxviii; physical appearance of, 178; puppets compared with, 165, 177, 179–80; voices of, 177–79; women marrying, 180–82 castration: Clarissa as overcoming threat of castrating woman, 76; dolls invite anxiety of, 218–19; in Freud’s theory of fetishism, 61, 62, 67; and Lovelace’s affective lack in Clarissa, 66; phallic femininity and, 73. See also castrati Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 25–26, 27, 28, 43 Cecilia (Burney): abjection in, 134–35, 148, 156; “abjection” in, 133, 247n32; balance of pleasure and pain upset in, 147–48; Burney on writing of, 125, 140; cancelled introduction to, 138; characters of, 145; focus of, 123; free indirect discourse in, 137, 138, 139, 149; marriage that ends, 132–33; mortification in, 132–33; reflection suppressed for sake of action in, 136–37; third-person narrative of, 139; Thrale on, 124 Chapone, Hester, 126 character, xviii, 96–97, 99 Charcot, Jean, 216 Charke, Charlotte, 173–85; The Art of Management, 174; as cross-dresser, xxvii, 175, 175–77; facility for manipulating voice, xxvii; liminality of, 177; as miniature version of her father, 183–85, 184; occupations of, 175; as puppeteer, 164–65, 173–77,

180; search for novelty of, 13; seen as “mere representative of men,” xxvii– xxviii; theatrical self-presentation of, 176; women fall in love with, 180. See also Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke Charles II, 4 Charleton, Walter, 11, 13 Charlotte, Queen, 141 “Charmante catin, La” (Cochin), 220, 222 chastity: of “angels,” 70; of Clarissa, 51; in domestic images of femininity, 204; eighteenth-century fixation on, 57; ideal femininity as dependent on, 52; in The Rape of the Lock, 194 Choi, Julie, 138–39, 248n39 Chow, Rey, 245n2 Cibber, Colley, 22, 173, 174, 175, 183 Clarissa (Richardson), 51–76; acquiring objects as sexual trophies in, 153–54; “angel”/”woman” opposition in, 70; body-mind dualism in, 54; Cecilia compared with, 124; Clarissa as angelic female, 54–55, 70; Clarissa as role model, 46, 59; Clarissa fetishizes her own body, 75; Clarissa gains ascendancy over her fallen status, 75; exemplarity in, xxvi, 46, 52, 55, 59, 66, 69, 70, 71, 107; gargantuan size of, 76; heroine’s heart in, 57; hysterical fits in, 58; libertine in, 51, 54, 55, 63, 64–69, 75; Lovelace’s immoral approach to sensibility in, 62–63; male author impersonates female subject in, xix; minute descriptions of Clarissa’s body in, xxvi; as novel of sensibility, xxvi, 52, 63; as object lesson, 55; as overcoming threat of castrating woman, 76; phallic femininity in, 72–74; pointing finger in, xxii; purloined letters in, 6, 39, 47, 51, 71, 72; quest for Clarissa’s heart, 54–55, 57–58, 68–69; quest for Clarissa’s hymen, 54–55, 57, 71–73;

   Index rape in, 74–75; realism of, 55–56, 63, 74, 76; “realness” of reality in, 55–56; search for novelty in, 13; as seduction narrative, 63–64; sexual difference in, 54–55; sexual fetishism in, xxv–xxvi, 52–53, 65–67, 72, 75; summary of, 51; text as fetish, 75; textual apparatuses of, 47 class: in distinction between enlightened and unenlightened, 220; fashion in performance of, 38; libertine’s upper-class origins, 64; in mercantile society, 23–24 Cleland, John, xix, 45, 47 Clélie (Scudéry), 57 clockwork imagery, 126 Clodius, 81–84, 115, 239n4 Cochin, Charles-Nicolas, 220, 222, 223 coming out, 123; in Camilla, 152; mechanics of, 128–37; metamorphosis in, 131, 132, 133; pain and psychic disturbance of, 154, 155; puppet creation compared with, 164 Commentary Illustrating the Poetics of Aristotle (Pye), 92, 94 commodities: all objects have value in commodity culture, 79; Charke’s Narrative as self-commodification, xxvii–xxviii; commodification of the feminine, 103–4, 105; commodity fetishism, xx, 42, 154, 163, 192– 96; formation of, 41–42; humans becoming, xiv; Mandeville on lust for, xiii–xiv; the novel as fetishized, xix; in transformation of selfhood, xiii–xv, 189; women as, 218 Complete English Tradesman, The (Defoe), 24 Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations, 147, 150 conduct literature: abjection produced by, 148; Burney’s characters struggle with visions of, 134–35, 148, 152; on coming out, 123, 129; on commodityladen femininity, 105; femininity in,

xxvii, 85, 125, 134, 148; on machine life, 125, 126, 147; metaphors in, 130; versus the uncanny, 196; on women as surface, 80 Congreve, William, 99, 240n37 consumer culture: in Burney’s novels, 152; in Camilla, 153–54; consumer revolution, 5; fashion dolls in rise of, 105, 106; and humans as social texts, xvii; in London, 89; material enhancements offered by, xxi; mimesis in, 25; the novel as consumer object, xxii; novel of realism and rise of, xix–xx; the novel’s mode compared with procedure of, xxiv; novelty in formation of, 12–13; self-objectification in, 119–20; unenlightened affect in, 196; women propelled into mechanical behavior in, 125–26. See also commodities Covent Garden, Little Piazza Theatre in, 165 Covent-Garden Journal, The, 37 Covent Garden Tragedy, The (Fielding), 180 Cowper, William, 3 Cox, James: “Miniature Secretary Incorporating a Clock,” 144; puppets compared with mechanical toys of, 162 Cox’s Mechanical Museum, xxvii, 142– 47, 255n34 Cradock, Joseph, 161–62 Craig, Lord William, 96–97 Crisp, Samuel, 124, 125, 140 cross-dressing: by Charke, xxvii, 175, 176, 177; in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, 88; seen as “mere representative of men,” xxviii Daily Advertiser (newspaper), 90–91 “Damon and Phillida” waxworks show, 91 Darly, Mary, 197, 199, 201 Daston, Lorraine, 115

Index    Davenant, Charles, 4, 41–42 decency, 204–5 Defoe, Daniel: on character, xviii; The Complete English Tradesman, 24; An Essay on Literature, xviii; on faith in fiction of appearances, 192; on merchant class, 24; Moll Flanders, xvii, xix; reviewer of Labyrinths of Life on, 114; Robinson Crusoe, 44; scientific procedure and novels of, 44, 102. See also Roxana de la Nash, Madame, 165–66 Delany, Mary, 141 Dennis, John, 11, 13 details, 53, 76, 237n7 Dialectic of the Enlightenment, The (Horkheimer and Adorno), 32 display, culture of, 43 Dolar, Mladen, 191, 207 dolls, 79–120; in anatomy museums, 115; as anthropomorphized objects, xxiv; in Bartholomew Fair’s entertainment, 90; in Camilla, 149, 150; castration anxiety invited by, 218–19; Clarissa turns her body into, 75; as commodities, 218; in constructing female subject as mimetic self suspended in state of perpetual desire, xxvi; in Freud’s narrative of the uncanny, xxviii, 190, 216–19; as funeral images, xxvi, 99–101; German half-dolls, 221–25; idealized femininity of, 105; as inscriptions of loss, 99–103; Jentsch on uncanniness of, 212; as models for women, xxvi– xxvii, 86, 103, 105, 151, 166; mutual collaboration with literature, 83; the novel compared with, 96–99; objectification of humans in, xv, xxi; in popular imagination, xxi; puppets distinguished from, 162; women as, 81–85, 108–10, 218–19; women as indistinguishable from, 90; word doll receives it modern usage, 90. See also fashion dolls; waxworks

Doody, Margaret Anne, 44–45, 139, 156, 194, 230n22 Douglas, Mary, 135 Dryden, John, 17 Du cult des dieux fétiches (de Brosses), 34 During, Simon, 249n52 Earle, Peter, 23–24 Early, Alice, 106 East India Company, 4, 6, 7 Emma; or, the Unfortunate Attachment (anonymous), 170 emotion, 56, 58, 67 Encyclopédie, 65, 165 English Review, 145 Enlightenment: automaton in literature of, 128; becomes uncanny, xxviii– xxix, 191–92, 215; enlightenment distinguished from, 190; on fashion, 36–41, 43; fashion dolls as aspect of, 105–6, 116; on fetishism, 32–36, 41; Freud’s attachment to, 213, 214– 15, 221; Hoffmann inverts beliefs of, 208; hypervisual standards of, 218–19; on idolatry, 3, 32, 84; instrumental rationality of, 32, 33, 41, 44; mechanical subjectivity of, 205–6; metaphorics of light and vision of, 206; nineteenth-century attitude toward, 255n40; prostitutes and automata associated with knowledge in, 219–20; psychoanalysis’ connection to, 189–90, 206, 207, 214–15, 256n45; Schelling’s questioning of, 202–3; on self-liking, 119; shattering of spectacles of reason in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” 207– 11; unhomely women and, 196–202; on women as surface, 80, 218 Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, An (Gisborne), 129 “Enthusiasm Delineated” (Hogarth), 171–73, 172 Epstein, Julia, 249n56 Essay Concerning Human Understanding,

   Index An (Locke), xiv–xv, xxii, xxviii, 206 Essay on Literature, An (Defoe), xviii Essay on the East-India Trade (Davenant), 4, 41–42 Essex, John, 126 Eunuchism Display’d (Ancillon), 180–81 Evelina (Burney): abjection in, 134– 35; “abjection” in, 133; anonymous publication of, 139–40; on automata, 141; on copying in literature, 156–57; and Cox’s Mechanical Museum, xxvii, 142–47; as epistolary, 136, 139, 147, 149; as extension of Burney’s personhood, 140–41; focus of, 123, 131; marriage that ends, 132– 33; mortification in, 132; public presentation of, 155; on puppet theater, 161; success of, 124, 125; title character “struggled herself into life,” 146 Excursion, The (Brooke), 247n22 exoticism: books share fate of exotica, 22; in eighteenth-century selfconstructions, 5; in the novel, 9, 27, 47; Oroonoko’s catalogue of mercantile exotica, 6, 16–19; in Roxana, 29 Expedition of Humphry Clinker, The (Melford), 249n51 “Extravaganza or the Mountain Head Dress of 1776, The” (Darly), 197, 199 Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville): on castrati, 179; on children and fetishes, 35–36; on fashion, 23; on fashion dolls, xxvi, 116; implied self gendered as female, 118; on lust for commodities, xiii–xiv; on luxury, 23, 120; on novelty, 120; on “private vice, publick benefit,” 120; on “wishing” and “wish’d for” selves, xiv, xxvii, 116–20 fact: and fiction resemble and imitate each other, 43; in nexus of Latin words for making, xx, 6, 32–33; the

novel and gap between fiction and, 44 Fanny Hill (Cleland), xix, 45, 47 Farinelli, 180 fashion: advances in trade and marketing of, 23; as agent for fictions of subjectivity, xxv; à la pantin, 166; Bellegarde on, 36–37; Britain wishes to become center for, 115; caricatures of women’s, 196–201; in creating and controlling the self, xxi, 3, 31–32; dehumanizing ability of, 38; dolls modeling, xxi; East-Indian goods as, 5; Enlightenment attitude toward, 36–41, 43; etymology of term, 37; as fetish, xxv, 37, 41; fiction compared with, 8; Fielding on people of, 37–39; and humans as social texts, xvii; as idolatrous, 3; imagination compared with, 25–26; in impossible project of mimesis, 27; libraries as sign of, xxii; “machines” of, 42; in market economy, 41; modernity associated with, 26; in nexus of Latin words for making, xx, 6; in the novel, 43, 114; novel selves and rise of, 22–43; novelty as dear in, 43; novelty as mother of, 26–27; in Oroonoko, 17– 18; as prerequisite for the novel, 18; as public, 27; purposeless quality of, 42–43; The Rape of the Lock on, 193– 96; supernatural traits of, 37; Tale of a Tub on, 33–34; temporality of, 27, 36–37, 113. See also fashion dolls fashion dolls, 103–11; as aspect of Enlightenment, 105–6, 116; books as boxes containing, xxi, 111, 113; Bostonian Society doll, 106, 242n53; communication by means of, xxvi, 106–7; convergence of subjectification and objectification in, 120; dress from Bath Fashion Museum, 104, 106; The Fable of the Bees and, xxvi, 116; manufacture of, 242n49; material history of, 106;

Index    as merchandising tool, 104–5; the novel as rival of, 106–7; origins of, 105–6; in The Rape of the Lock, 87; in rise of consumer culture, 105, 106; The Spectator’s Repository of Fashions, xxi, 111–16; The Spectator’s “Teraminta” on, 13, 107–8, 115, 118; viewing, 109–11; women imitate, xxvi–xxvii, 105 Father’s Legacy to His Daughter, A (Gregory), 134, 247n34 femininity: in Burney’s novels, 124, 134, 148, 150; commodification of, 103–4, 105; conduct book, xvii, 85, 125, 134, 148; domestic images of, 204–5; enigma of eighteenth-century, 70; exemplary, xxvi, xxvii, 52, 59, 106–7, 204; gay frivolity associated with eighteenth-century, 223; ideal, 52, 105, 124, 134, 147; phallic, 72– 74; in production of the uncanny, 197; spectacle of, 105, 192, 201; the uncanny exemplified by, 204 Ferguson, Margaret, 17 Fermor, Arabella, 195 fetishism: in Adollizing, or, A Lively Picture of Adoll-Worship, 81, 84; angels as problem for, 70; as border condition of humans and things, xxii–xxiii; de Brosses on, xxiii, 34–35, 36; Clarissa fetishizes her own body, 75; of Clarissa’s Lovelace, xxvi, 65– 67, 72, 75; Clarissa text as fetish, 75; commodity fetishism, xx, 42, 154, 163, 192–96; contradictory traits of, 60– 61; as defying representation, 40–41; disavowal in, 62, 64; double gesture of fabrication in, 42; in eighteenthcentury cultural discourses, xxiii; Enlightenment attitude toward, 32– 36, 41; fashion as fetish, xxv, 37, 41; female body as fetish, 59, 84–85; the fetishized body, 59–63; “first love” paradigm in, 67; Freud’s theory of, xxviii, 53, 59–63, 64, 67–68, 71, 75–

76, 190; Hume on, xxiii, 35, 79; idols compared with fetishes, 79; libertine compared with, 64; in market economy, 41; in nexus of Latin words for making, xx, 32–33; the novel as fetishized commodity, xix; novel readers compared with fetishizers, 46; object of libertine’s desire as fetish, 47; paradox and equivocation produced by, 43; as perverse, 61; Portuguese for, 42, 60; as possessing the individual, xxiv; purposeless quality of, 42–43; relationship between real and imagined objects as, 6; in Richardson’s efforts to fashion woman’s voice, 71; in Roxana, 29, 30; and sensibility, xxv–xxvi, 53–54, 76; and sexual difference, 52; sexual fetishism in Clarissa, xxv–xxvi, 52–53; soft transitions of, 85; vision associated with, 61–62, 71 fiction: and fact resemble and imitate each other, 43; fashion compared with, 8; Johnson on invention as, 44, 45; in nexus of Latin words for making, xx, 6, 32–33; the novel and gap between fact and, 44; the novel as blurring line between reality and, xx; as synonymous with the novel, 10; tactile properties of, xviii, 8. See also novel, the Fielding, Henry: Burney combines Richardson’s technique with that of, 133; on castrati, 177; character delineated by, 97; Charke works for, 174; The Covent Garden Tragedy, 180; Johnson on Burney and, 145; Licensing Act of 1737 forces him to leave theater, 173, 174; logic of the fetish in work of, xxiii; as Madame de la Nash, 165–66; Pasquin, 174; on people of fashion, 37–39; process of exchange attributed to works of, xvii; puppets and castrati in plays of, 252n24; reviewer of Labyrinths of

   Index Life on, 114; scientific procedure and novels of, 44, 102; on temporality of fashion, 27, 36. See also Tom Jones “first love” paradigm, 66, 67 Fleetwood, Charles, 174 Flynn, Carol Houlihan, 64 Folkenflik, Robert, 176 Foote, Samuel, 166–70 Fordyce, James, 105 foreign trade: Davenant on sensual advantages of, 4–5; domestication of foreign goods, 5, 229n6; East India Company, 4, 6, 7; Fable of the Bees on, 23; foreign goods in the novel, 6; Huet on, 6–7; The Rape of the Lock on products of, 193 Foucault, Michel, 53, 237n7 Freedgood, Elaine, 18 free indirect discourse: as advancement of eighteenth-century novel, xxiv; in Burney’s novels, 133, 137, 138–41, 149, 154; in illustrating abjection, 133 Freud, Sigmund: attachment to Enlightenment, 213, 214–15, 221; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 214; on container imagery, 253n12; on fetishism, 53, 59–63, 64, 67–68, 71, 75–76; on geography of the self, xxviii; on Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” 207, 211–12, 255n41; The Interpretation of Dreams, 217–18; on jokes, 201; prostitutes encountered in Italy by, 217; studies with Charcot, 216; on superstition, 212–13, 221; on the uncanny, 151–52, 190–91, 202, 203, 207, 211–19. See also “ ‘Uncanny,’ The” Frieda, Marion, 223–24 Gallagher, Catherine, 233n55 Garden, F., 183, 184 gender: fashion in performance of, 38. See also femininity General History of Music (Burney), 156 genitalia: hymen, 57, 65; Italy associated

with female, 217–18. See also castration; penis Gisborne, Thomas, 105, 129, 130 glamour, 31 Godwin, William, 248n39 Goebel Company, 223–24 Goldsmith, Oliver, 170 Gothic literature: architectural structure in, 205; as eighteenth-century creation, 45; in Hoffmann’s works, 207; psychoanalysis in interpretation of, 189–90; the uncanny in, 196 Gregory, John, 134, 247n34 grotesque body, 153 Grumbling Hive, The (Mandeville), 36 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), xvii, xxiv Hagstrum, Jean, 63, 69 hairstyles, caricatures of, 197–201 half-dolls, 221–25, 224 Halifax, George Savile, Earl of, 126–28 Hanafi, Zakiya, 243n64 Haywood, Eliza, 114 heart, the, 57, 65, 68–69, 72 History of the Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients (Huet), 7 Hobbes, Thomas, 11, 13, 128, 192 Hoffmann, E. T. A.: “Automata,” 208; eighteenth-century novelties in works of, 207; “The Sandman,” 126, 127, 207–12, 217, 221; Schelling compared with, 202 Hogarth, William: The Analysis of Beauty I, 176–77, 200; “Enthusiasm Delineated,” 171–73, 172; “Royalty, Episcopacy, and the Law,” xv–xvi Homer, 203 Homme Machine, L’ (La Mettrie), 128 Horace, 8 Horkheimer, Max, 32 Howard, Sir Robert, 17 Huet, Pierre-Daniel: History of the Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients, 7; Memoirs of the Dutch Trade, 8; on the romance, 6–9;

Index    Treatise of Romance, xxv, 7 Hume, David: on fetishism, xxiii, 35, 79; Natural History of Religion, 35; on standard of luxury, 9; Treatise of Human Nature, 206; on understanding what mind can’t know about itself, 256n46; on vision and light, 206 Humorous Lovers, The (Cavendish), 27 hybridity, 19 hymen, 57, 65 hypnotism, 216 hysteria, 58 idolatry: in English society, 3; Enlightenment opposition to, 3, 32, 84; fetishism distinguished from, 40; secular, 192 idols: fetishes compared with, 79; puppets compared with, 171; women as, 79–81, 84–85; word doll derived from, 90. See also idolatry Indian Queen (Howard and Dryden), 17 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 217–18 invention, xviii, 44–46, 125 Ionians, 8 Italy, female genitalia associated with, 217–18 Jacquet-Droz, Pierre, 196 Jakobson, Roman, xxiv Jentsch, Ernst, 212–16 Johnson, Samuel: on Burney as character-monger, 145; on Burney not reading, 140; “heart” as defined by, 57; on invention as “fiction”, 44–45; Life of Waller, 140; Lives of the Poets, 195; on mimetic power of the novel, 46; at Perico’s Panton Street theater, 170; on The Rape of the Lock, 195; on “real life” objects in the novel, xviii; on romance as progenitor of the novel, 7; “sensibility” as defined by, 61; turns away from follies of female

sex, 213; on women as surface beings, 219 jokes, 201–2 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 23 Jonson, Ben, 87–88 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 11, 120, 245n79 Kant, Immanuel, 128, 202 Kaplan, Louise, 61, 73–74 Kelly, John, 98 Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 196, 255n39 kitsch, 113, 244n67 knowledge: eighteenth-century instruments of, xxiii; prostitutes and automata associated with, 219–20; psychoanalysis’ paradoxical approach to, 215; technological production of, 206. See also science Knox, Cleone, 110, 115 Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 67 Kristeva, Julia, 135, 248n37 kunstkammern, 115 Labio, Catherine, 232n43 Labyrinths of Life (Thomson), 114 Lady’s Calling, A (Allestree), 126 Lady’s New-year’s Gift: Or, Advice to a Daughter (Halifax), 126–28 Lady’s Preceptor, or, a Letter to a Young Lady of Distinction upon Politeness (D’Ancourt), 126 Lamballe, Princesse de, 221 La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de, 128, 246n19 Landa, Louis, 193 La Roche, Sophie von, 100 Latour, Bruno, 32 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 128 LeBrun, Vigée, 221 Lepage, Anne-Marie, 200–201 Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (Chapone), 126 Lewis, Stephen, 7 libertine, the: in Clarissa, 51, 54, 55, 63, 64–69, 75; Clodius as, 81;

   Index fetishist compared with, 64; as living through the body, 63; Man of Feeling compared with, 64; as nonnormative, 64; novelist compared with, 76; object of desire for, 47; as representation of male desire, 64; virgins seduced by, 64–65; women as dolls for, 81–85 libraries, xxii Licensing Act of 1737, 173, 174 Life of Waller (Johnson), 140 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 18 Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs (Cradock), 162 Little Theatre (Haymarket), 166–70 Lives of the Poets (Johnson), 195 Locke, John: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, xiv–xv, xxii, xxviii, 206; on puppet show at Bartholomew Fair, 165; on understanding as technological medium, 114 London Magazine, 91–93 London Unmask’d: Or, the New Town Spy (Man in the Moon), 11–14, 24–25 lorgnettes, 200–201 love: anxiety underlying idealization and, 76; dolls and unrequited, 83; “first love” paradigm, 66–67; mechanistic properties of, 84; sensibility and, 63 Ludlam, William, 162 luxury: in accounting for proliferation of material goods, 10; become necessities, 5; Fable of the Bees on, 23, 120; as moral attitude, 12; novelty compared with, 9–10; novelty for selling luxury goods, 11, 231n33; Roman Empire’s fall seen as due to, 12 Lynch, Deirdre, xviii machinery: Burney’s body compared with, 124–25; discourses of mechanics, 128; of fashion, 42;

machine life of eighteenth-century women, 125–28; mechanistic properties of love, 84; and the novel, 45–46; in The Rape of the Lock, 45– 46, 192; women satisfy their sexual urges with mechanical aids, 82. See also automata “Mademoiselle Catherina” (Cochin), 220, 223 Mad Mullinix and Timothy (Swift), 171 magazines, 106 Maitland, Lord, 14–15 Mandeville, Bernard: on clothes as objects of mutability, 36; The Grumbling Hive, 36; logic of the fetish in work of, xxiii. See also Fable of the Bees, The “Man in the Moon,” 11–14, 24–25 Man of Feeling, 58–59, 62–63, 64 Mansfield Park (Austen), 131 Marie-Antoinette half-doll, 221 Marx, Karl, xx, xxiii, 42, 163, 193–94 Marylebone Gardens, 145 materialism, xxix, 34, 43, 47, 128 McKendrick, Neil, 5, 106 McKeon, Michael, xx, 19, 229n17 Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing (Moxon), xviii Melford, Lydia, 249n51 Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 125 Memoirs of the Dutch Trade (Huet), 8 merchant class, 24 Mercier, Louis Sebastien, 109, 110, 113, 115 mesmerism, 215–16 metamorphoses: in Adollizing, 84; in coming out, 131–33; of fashion, 37, 41, 43; the novel introduces experiences of, xxv; novelty as medium for daily acts of, 22–23; Pope on human capacity for, 194; science on, 43 metaphor, xxiv, 130–31, 164 metonymy, xxiv, 43, 131

Index    mimesis: automata as models of, 123; in consumer society, 25; desire for metamorphosis and, 23; fashion dolls and the mimetic self, xxvi, 103–11; fashion in impossible project of, 27; forms of imitation at Bartholomew Fair, 86–87; Mandeville on industry and, xiv; in the novel, xvii, 46–47; the novel and fascination with, 10; novel characters as objects of imitation, 99; in puppets, 162, 164, 175–76; Pye on mimetic arts, 92, 94; the self as mimetic object, 79–120; of sex, 82; in statues, 89; woman as mimetic, 103 mind-body dualism, 54–55, 59, 62 Mirror, The (periodical), 96–97 Modes, The (Bellegarde), 36–37 Moll Flanders (Defoe), xvii, xix Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 96 Moreschi, Alessandro, 178–79 Morgan, Fidelis, 173–74 Morley, Henry, 90 Moxon, Joseph, xviii muffs, 6, 39–40 Mumford, Lewis, 42, 45, 235n89 Museum of Costume (Bath), 104, 106, 242n53 Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), 102 Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (Charke): impetus for writing and publication of, 182–83; as object of self-commodification, xxvii– xxviii; puppets as model for subject formation and narration in, 164, 183; self-dramatizing approach of, 176 Natural History of Religion (Hume), 35 new, the, see novelty New Experiments Touching the Spring of Air (Boyle), 11 “New Opera Glass for the Year 1777, A” (caricature), 200 Newton, Sir Isaac, 206 novel, the: as act of consumption, xxv;

advancements in eighteenth-century, xxiv–xxv; automata compared with, 156; as blurring line between reality and fiction, xx; Burney’s engagement with, 124–25, 146; character in, 96–97; characters as objects of imitation, 99; Charke’s Narrative compared with, 165; coming out as subject of, 132; consumer culture’s procedure and mode of, xxiv; consumer culture’s rise and, xix– xx; as consumer object, xxii; as counterfeiting human subjectivity, 47; as cultural phenomenon and textual artifact, xxv; dolls compared with, 96–99; emergence of, 44–47; England in development of, 44–45; exoticism in, 9, 27, 47; fashion as prerequisite for, 18; as fashion doll’s rival, 106–7; fashion in, 43, 114; as fetishized commodity, xix; fiction becomes synonymous with, 10; foreign goods in, 6; formal realism of, xxvi, 244n68; as “history,” xvii, 45; hybridity as characteristic of, 19; identity changes accommodated by, 25; journal-novel, 139; libertine compared with novelist, 76; life objectified in, xv, xvii–xx; male authors impersonates female subjects, xix; as material object, xvii, xxii; metonymy of, xxiv; mimesis in, xvii, 46–47; and novelty, xx–xxi, xv, 9, 10, 45; psychological interiority and reflexivity in, xvii, xviii; of realism, xix–xx, 43; romance as progenitor of, 6–7, 9, 44; scientific language in, xvii, 44, 102–3; of sensibility, 47, 52, 59; smaller format of, xxii; solidification as literary medium, xxv; tension between fantastic and realistic in, 44; translation of poetic norms into narrative practice, xxiv; verisimilitude in, xvii, xx, 25, 44 novelty, 3–47; Addison on, xxi, xxiii–

   Index xxiv, 11; as aesthetic concept, 11; constant desire for, 5, 13; in consumer culture’s formation, 12–13; as contingent and accidental, 10; as dear in fashion, 43; distance overcome by, 15; drama of seeming activated by, 14; The Fable of the Bees on, 120; fashion’s rise and novel selves, 22–43; luxury compared with, 9–10; Mandeville on psychological lure of, 116; metamorphosis as result of, 22– 23; in metropolitan experience, 11–12; as mother of fashion, 26–27; as never ceasing, 12; the novel and culture of, xx–xxi, xv, 9–10, 45; in Oroonoko, 14–22; passion for, 10–14; as religious concept, 11; in science, 43; selftransformation and self-innovation promised by, 6; transmutation into the uncanny, xxviii; wonder as byproduct of, 120 Novum Organon (Bacon), 11 “Of the Imitative Arts” (Smith), 91 Ogilby, John, 229n4 “On the Mimetic Faculty” (Benjamin), 23 optical instruments: camera obscura, 114, 124, 156; and Freud’s equation of penis and eye, 219; in Hoffmann’s works, 207, 210–11; lorgnettes, 200– 201; social propriety destabilized by, 192; technologies of visibility, 151, 206 “Optic Curls, The” (caricature), 200–201 Opticks (Newton), 206 Oroonoko (Behn), 14–22; as antinovel, 21–22; catalogues of mercantile exotica in, 6, 16–19; on correspondence between subject and object, 19–20; cuttings in, 21, 233n54; as early paradigm of novel form, 15; entwined conditions of experiencing novelty and novel writing in, xxv; extraliterary aspects of, 14; on flowers of Surinam, 20–21; as history, 14;

as romance, 14–15; sympathy with imperialism in, 20; two types of reader addressed in, 15 Pamela (Richardson): brings the novel into fashion, 114; catalogues of bundles of clothing in, xvii; in country girl garb, 30; exemplary femininity in, 107; in gap between fact and fiction, 44; keyhole view of life in, 55; male author impersonates female subject in, xix; purloined letters in, 6, 39; self-objectification in, 118–19; sexual difference in, 52; waxworks shows of, 98, 118 Pamela Censured (anonymous), 98 Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (Kelly), 98 pantin figures, 166, 167 Park, Katherine, 115 Paska, Roman, 162 Pasquin (Fielding), 174 Paulson, Ronald, 227n4 Peck, Linda Levy, 11, 231n33 penis: as body organ and metaphor, 68; fetish as substitute for, 59–62, 75–76; heart compared with, 68; phallic femininity in Clarissa, 72–74; phallic pen imagery, 71 Pepys, Samuel, 27, 28 Perico, Carlo, 170, 181 phallus, see penis Phillips, Adam, 215 Philosophy of Mythology (Schelling), 202 Pietz, William, 42, 79 pleasure gardens, 123, 129, 145, 148, 204 Poems and Fancies (Cavendish), 25 polytheism, 35 Pope, Alexander, see Rape of the Lock, The pornography, 45, 47, 82, 98 Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General (Wolff ), 45 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 88–89, 239n11 Priestly, Joseph, 11

Index    private/public distinction, see public/ private distinction Progress of Romance (Reeve), 9 prospect glasses, 200–201 prosthetics, cosmetic, 42 prostitution: at Bartholomew Fair, 90; Freud encounters prostitutes in Italy, 217; in Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’ “, xxviii, 190; humans as commodities in, xiv, 218; knowledge associated with, 219–20; women at theaters likened to whores, 205 psychoanalysis: Enlightenment’s connection to, 189–90, 206, 207, 214–15, 256n45; Freud’s theory of fetishism, 53, 59–63, 64, 67–68, 71, 75–76; gender assumptions of, 58; in interpretation of Gothic literature, 189–90; mesmerism and, 215–16; perversion as preoccupation of, 63; transference, 214; as uncanny, 256n43 Public Advertiser, The (newspaper), 22 public/private distinction: and Burney’s novels, 129, 133, 149; in Clarissa, 54; permeability of, xxiii; realist narrative in establishment of, 53; sensibility renders private acts public, 75; uncanny evokes tension between, 202; women increasing participation in social life, 105, 196, 202 pupae, 132, 140 puppets, 161–85; Addison’s “The Puppet Show,” 163–64; as anthropomorphized objects, xxiv; automata compared with, 161–62; at Bartholomew Fair, 86, 165, 173; become children’s entertainment, 173; castrati compared with, 165, 177, 179–80; Charke as puppeteer, 164–65, 173–77, 180; craze for, 90, 239n15; in culture of realism, xxvi; at Foote’s Little Theatre in the Haymarket, 166–70; at Little Piazza Theatre, Covent Garden, 165; living actors compared with, 175; at Madame de

la Nash’s, 165–66; as material objects, 168; as model for mechanisms of capitalist society, 163; pantin figures, 166–67; at Perico’s Panton Street theater, 170; in political and social satire, 171–73; as standard for human behavior, 170–71; theatrical destination of, 162; unreal experience produced by, 179; voices projected by, 176–77, 179; women’s increasing participation in social life and interest in, 105 “Puppet Show, The” (Addison), 163–64 “Puppet Show, The” (Robertson), 181–82 Pye, Henry, 92, 94 Rackstrow’s Museum, 91 Radcliffe, Ann, 102 “Ragged Regiment,” 100, 241n39 Ralph, James, 161, 162–63 Rambler (periodical), xviii, 46 Ranelagh Gardens, 145, 249n51 Rape of the Lock, The (Pope), 192–96; acquiring objects as sexual trophies in, 153–54; on attachment to physical objects, 80; fashion doll in, 87; machinery in, 45–46, 192; mixture of classical and trivial in, 111; on moving toyshop of the heart, 36; things come to life in, xv; uncanny features of, 195 rationality: instrumental, 32–33, 41–42, 44; Schelling on religion and, 203; shattering of spectacles of reason in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” 207–11; the uncanny and, 202 ready-made garments, 23 realism: in Clarissa, 55–56, 63, 74, 76; in complex of Latin terms for “making,” 6; consumer culture’s rise and novel of, xix–xx; culture of, xxvi; of fashion dolls, 110; formal, xxvi, 244n68; new categories established by, 53; novel of, xix–xx, 43; in novel’s popularity, 10; tension between fantastic and realistic in the novel, 44; third-person narrative voice and, 139

   Index reason, see rationality Reeve, Clara, 7, 9 Remarkable Trial of the Queen of the Quavers, The (anonymous), 180 repetition, 220–21 Repository of Fashions, xxi, 111–16 Review, The (periodical), 24 Reynolds, Joshua, 140, 170, 248n42 Richardson, Samuel: Burney combines Fielding’s technique with that of, 133; character delineated by, 97; Johnson on Burney and, 145; keyhole view of life of, 55; reviewer of Labyrinths of Life on, 114; scientific procedure and novels of, 44, 102; as writing to the moment, 55, 71. See also Clarissa; Pamela Richmond, Frances, Duchess of, 100 “Ridiculous Taste, or the Ladies’ Absurdity” (caricature), 197–98 Roach, Joseph, 241n42 Robertson, James, 181–82 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 44 Roche, Daniel, 104–5 Rococo style, 219, 221 romance: Cavendish’s life as, 27–28; Huet on history of, 6–9; the novel emerges from, 6–7, 9, 44; sartorial fancy associated with, 27; The Whole Duty of Woman on, 118 Ross’s Fashionable Female Emporium, 109–10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 100, 204–5, 217, 219 Roxana (Defoe), 28–32; becomes a lady, 29–30; consolidates tensions that produced fashionable objects and human subjects, xxv; daughter Susan, 29–30; first paragraph of, 30–31; glamour in, 31; as history, 28, 30–31; male author impersonates female subject in, xix; name acquired by heroine, 28–29; on object that speaks for itself, xxi, 103; real name, Susan, becomes extinguished, 29; Turkish dress in, 6, 28–29, 30–31, 39

Royal Society, 111 “Royalty, Episcopacy, and the Law” (Hogarth), xv–xvi ruffs, 39 Russo, Mary, 153 Salmon, Mrs., 91, 94–95, 96 Sanditon (Austen), xxii “Sandman, The” (Hoffmann), 126–27, 207–12, 217, 221 Scarry, Elaine, 46 Schaffer, Simon, 43, 128 Schelling, Friedrich, 202–3 Schor, Naomi, 52–53 science: caricaturists transpose tools of, 197; culture of display in, 43; fetishism pervades eighteenthcentury, xxiii; instrumentalization of, xxiii, 42–43; “man of,” 43; novels partake of language of, xvii, 44, 102–3; novelty in, 11, 43; scientizing narrative style, 232n48; waxworks derived from, 102 Scott, Sir Walter, 7 Scudéry, Madame de, 7, 57 self, the: books as constituents of, xxii; commodities in transforming eighteenth-century, xiii–xv, 189; consumer society confuses real and imagined, 105; exoticism in construction of, 5; fashion as agent for fictions of subjectivity, xxv; fashion dolls and the mimetic, 103–11; fashion in creating and controlling, xxi, 3, 31–32; fashion’s rise and novel selves, 22–43; Freud on geography of, xxviii; imitation of human subject, xxvi; inanimate objects carrying traits of, xv; as increasingly secular, 103; Locke on objectification of, xiv–xv, xxii; Mandeville on “wishing” and “wish’d for” selves, xiv, xxvii, 116–20; as mimetic object, 79–120; pliable and variegated personhood, 97; processes by which things become subjects, xxiv; puppets as model

Index    for subject formation, 164; radical objectification in eighteenth-century discourses, xxi; self-liking, 116–20; self-objectification, xxvii, 119–20, 124, 176 Self Control (Brunton), 99 sensibility, 56–57; Clarissa as heroine of, 71, 76; female body in elements of, 57–58, 59; and fetishism, xxv–xxvi, 53–54, 76; and Freudian uncanny, 213–14; on the heart, 68; Johnson’s definition of, 61; Man of Feeling, 58–59, 62–64; novels of, 47, 52, 59; on object actively returning feeling, 67– 68; for rendering private acts public, 75; sexually constructivist properties of novel of, xxvi, 52 Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne), 58 “separate spheres” model, 129 sexual difference: in Clarissa, 54–55; eighteenth-century origins of, 51–53; novel of sensibility in construction of, xxvi, 52; repetition compulsion in production of, 221; Schelling on enlightenment as process of discerning, 203 Silverman, Kaja, 76 Simmel, Georg, 27 slavery: humans as commodities in, xiv; in Oroonoko, 19–21, 233n55 Smith, Adam, 11, 56, 91, 128 Smith, William, 40–41 Some Considerations on the Nature and Importance of the East-India Trade (anonymous), 5 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 154–55 Speaight, George, 161 spectacle: and automata, 245n2; of femininity, 105, 192, 201; Rousseau on women at the theater, 204–5 Spectator, The: Addison on novelty, xxi, xxiii–xxiv, 11; Addison on pleasures of the imagination, 206; Addison on trading profession, 24; Addison on women as idols, 79–81, 84; on dolls as

embodiment of selfhood, 107–8; on “mere representatives” of men, xxviii; on products of foreign trade, 193; on puppets at Little Piazza Theatre, Covent Garden, 165; on Repository of Fashions, xxi, 111–16; “Teraminta” on fashion dolls, 13, 107–8, 115, 118 Sprat, Thomas, 17 Stafford, Barbara, 43, 64–65, 238n24 Stallybrass, Peter, 23 Starobinski, Jean, 219, 255n40 Starr, G. Gabrielle, 232n42 Steele, Richard: on commodity-laden femininity, 105; critique of women in social life, 84; on eunuchs, 177; logic of the fetish in work of, xxiii Sterne, Laurence, xxii, 58, 114 Streatfield, Sophia, 152–53 subjectivity, see self, the sublime, the, 202 superstition, xxix, 172, 191, 196, 212–13, 221 Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels, xvii, xxiv; Mad Mullinix and Timothy, 171; Tale of a Tub, 33–34, 227n4 sympathy, 53, 56, 58, 59, 67, 68 Syrians, 8 Tableau de Paris (Mercier), 109 Tale of a Tub (Swift), 33–34, 227n4 Tamen, Miguel, 6 Task, The (Cowper), 3 Taussig, Michael, 23 Taylor, Mark C., 26 tea warmers (teepuppenkopfe), 221–25, 224 technology: art and, 45; in Hoffmann’s works, 207; and literature, xviii; printing, 156; of visibility, 151, 206; of writing, 46 “Teraminta,” 13, 108, 115 theater, Rousseau on women at, 204–5 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 56 Thrale, Hester, 124, 152–53, 155

   Index Tighe, Richard, 171 Tilley, Christopher, 130 Tom Jones (Fielding): adventures of the muff in, 6, 39–40; in gap between fact and fiction, 44; Monboddo on waxwork shows and, 96; Partridge’s viewing ghost of Hamlet’s father, 86; sentiment and male sexuality in, 58 Touch-Stone, The (Ralph), 161–63 Traité des Eunnuques (Ancillon), 180–81 transference, 214 transvestism, see cross-dressing Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 206 Treatise of Romance (Huet), xxv, 7 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), xxii tropes, 130, 164 Turner, James Grantham, 98 Turner, Victor, 177 typography, xxii uncanny, the: Burney’s heroines and, 151–52; the Enlightenment becomes, xxviii–xxix, 191–92, 215; female sexual parts associated with, 218; femininity and, 197, 204; Freud’s theory of, 151–52, 190–91, 202–3, 207, 211–19; in half-dolls, 224–25; in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” 207, 210, 212, 255n41; jokes compared with, 201–2; novelty’s transmutation into, xxviii; original meaning of, 202; psychoanalysis as, 256n43; as quality of feeling, 213–14; in The Rape of the Lock, 195; as rejected residue of the Enlightenment, 191, 196; Schelling and origins of concept of, 202–3; secret operation of, 203; the sublime and, 202; supernatural associated with, 191, 202; unhomely women and the Enlightenment, 196–202 “ ‘Uncanny,’ The” (Freud): eighteenthcentury themes in, xxviii, 189, 190; inconsistencies in, 212; wartime context of, 224

vanity: Addison on women’s, 79–80; clockwork imagery and women’s, 126; as fondness for imitation, xiv; Gisborne on women’s, 129; Halifax on women’s, 127–28; Mandeville on, xiii, xiv, 119; The Rape of the Lock on female, 193–95; Walpole on French, 108 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 128, 196 verisimilitude: of Charke’s puppets, 174; fashion spurs its practitioners to, 27; in the novel, xvii, xx, 25, 44; in Oroonoko, 15, 19; of waxworks, 102 virgins, libertine’s seduction of, 64–65 vision: in Enlightenment discourse, xxiii, 206; fetishism associated with, 61–62, 71. See also optical instruments voice: of castrati, 177–79; Charke’s facility for manipulating, xxvii; fabricated through media that fall outside the human, xxviii; fetishism in Richardson’s efforts to fashion woman’s, 71; novel’s capacity for giving, xxiv–xxv, 47; puppets project, 176–77, 179 Wahrman, Dror, 233n57 Walpole, Horace, 108, 140, 173 Wanderer, The (Burney), 146 Ward, Ned, 85–87, 89–90, 126, 182 Warner, Marina, 102, 132 Watt, Ian, xix–xx, 44, 76, 236n3, 244n68 waxworks, 91–96; at Bartholomew Fair, 85–86, 182; character in, 97; in culture of realism, xxvi; funerary dolls of royalty, xxvi, 99–101; in Hoffmann’s works, 207; Jentsch on uncanniness of, 212; objectification of humans in, xv, xxi; of Pamela, 98, 118; scientific method in, 102; sense of mortality in, 102; subjective mindset accompanying viewing, 94–96; verisimilitude of, 102 Wedgwood china, 114 Westminster Abbey, funerary dolls of royalty at, xxvi, 100–101

Index    Whole Duty of Woman, Or, an Infallible Guide to the Fair Sex (Kenrick), 118 Williams, Aubrey, 253n12 Williams, Raymond, 10 Wolff, Christian, 45 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 100, 130, 241n38 women: as automata, xxvii, 123, 125–28, 130, 152, 205–6, 210; caricatures of fashion of, 196–201; carry uncanny threat of the inhuman, 210; as commodities, 218; contradictory position of, 203–5; display of objects in selfhood of, xiv; as dolls, 81–85, 108–10, 218–19; dolls as models for, xxvi–xxvii, 86, 103, 105, 151, 166; eunuchs married by, 180–82; The Fable of the Bees’s implied self gendered as female, 118; female body as fetish, 59, 84–85; in Freud’s theory of fetishism, 59–63; hymen, 57, 65; hysterical, 58; as idols, 79–81, 84–85; increasing participation in social life, 105, 196, 202; as indistinguishable from dolls, 90; Italy associated with female genitalia, 217–18; libertine uses, 64; machine life of eighteenthcentury, xxvii, 125–28; male authors impersonate female subjects, xix;

mimetic characteristic of, 103; as natural sex for dolls, 90; obsession with female virtue in eighteenth century, 51; perpetual motion of female wishing, xxvii; The Rape of the Lock on commodities and, 193–96; Rousseau on theatrical attendance of, 204–5; self-objectification as feminine, 120, 245n78; sensibility takes elements from female body, 57– 59; as surface beings, 80–81, 218–19; susceptibility to mesmerism of, 216; things associated with, xix; unhomely women and the Enlightenment, 196–202; viewing fashion dolls, 109– 11. See also coming out; femininity; prostitution wonder, xxvii, 110, 120, 196, 243n64 Wordsworth, William, 88–89, 239n11 Wright, Patience, 91–93 Wroth, Warwick, 249n51 Yeates’s waxworks, 91 Young Ladies Conduct: or, Rules for Education (Essex), 126 zoolatry, Egyptian, 34–35