Abstract
The ironies of labour’s conceptualisation in the long eighteenth century, particularly as it related to social status and to gender, have long been susceptible to misunderstanding. One thinks of Madame de Pompadour as she was clumsily eulogised in a 2006 episode of the BBC’s Doctor Who: ‘she always did work too hard’. Of course, as is demonstrated throughout Anthony J. La Vopa’s excellent book, The Labor of the Mind, it was generally all but impossible to acknowledge the intellectual and social engagements of aristocratic women as constituting work at all. This categorical exclusion was rooted not solely in sexist ideology but also in longstanding arguments – conversations formative of Enlightenment culture itself – concerning the supposed dangers of pedantry, the gendering of elite sociable spaces and the appropriate judgement and performance of social qualities such as aisance and honnêteté, naturalness and politeness. As La Vopa explains, the cultural authority of aristocratic circles – and especially of the influential women within them – was founded on ‘a perceived incompatibility between the socially validating freedom of play and the socially invalidating constraints of labor’ (p. 20). In light of this, the early modernity that La Vopa depicts is declaredly and defiantly unmodern; attempts to identify a feminist movement in these Enlightenment spaces must substantially qualify their definition of feminism or risk egregious anachronism. And yet La Vopa makes a convincing case for his eighteenth-century case studies, both women and men, being pertinent to modern feminist thought precisely because of their anxious relationship with concepts of work, identity and self-expression. He is admirably conscientious in rejecting a sense of our own cultural superiority, insisting instead that the ‘logics of illogic’ (p. 300) underlying much eighteenth-century discourse on gender may have their equivalents in our own time. By recognising the kinds of accomplishment, intelligence and artistry more readily allowed to eighteenth-century women, and the challenges these admittedly confined virtues posed for chauvinistic social agendas, we also acquire a deeper appreciation of just how hard this playful, paradoxical work must indeed have been.
La Vopa’s book takes us from the 1670s to the 1770s, hopping from France to Britain and back again in the process. Although broadly chronological, this is definitely not a linear narrative. La Vopa describes his intention to chart ‘a kind of virtual conversation across generations, eras, and national cultures’ (p. 3), a metaphor which pays deference to the polite self-representation of the era while allowing for the possibility of disagreement or delusion in the loose dialogues that are presented. Not all of these historical figures would have known of each other, let alone have thought of themselves as being in conversation. But the reluctance to engage, the determination of the likes of the third Earl of Shaftesbury to exclude the French and the feminine from his model of polite sociability, is also part of the story. It was not only the female intellectuals of the era who needed to labour in order to appear not to labour. One of the great pleasures of La Vopa’s work lies in observing the ironic similarities between the predicaments of early feminists and their defensive, bluntly masculinist counterparts. This is all the more important because, for all that The Labor of the Mind showcases of the impressively radical thinking of figures such as Poullain de la Barre (Chapter Two) and Louise d’Epinay (Chapter Eight), it was Nicolas Malebranche’s ‘rigorist censure of effeminacy’ (p. 96) that in fact set the tone for most gender discourse through the long eighteenth century, establishing much of the framework within which female philosophical expression would need to operate.
La Vopa’s methodology in each of his chapters involves an appealing combination of close textual analysis and biographical contextualisation. Although literary scholars may be wary of the latter, it is generally deployed less as a means of revealing the authentic figure behind a written work, and more to probe the relationship between the philosophies and practices of sociability, a way of ‘restoring the social to intellectual history’ (p. 17). Thus, de la Barre’s dedication of a 1691 work to the wife of a Genevan councillor illustrates his entry into ‘a world of bourgeois wealth and domesticity quite different from the Parisian salons’ (p. 90). Later, an investigation of Diderot’s own bourgeois identity helps to elucidate both the disorderly argument of his essay ‘On Women’ (1772) and the ‘irreconcilable disagreement’ (p. 286) that subsisted between him and his friend d’Epinay. Perhaps, the most successful, because most suggestive, application of this biographical method is found in a short chapter on the subject of gallantry and friendship between the sexes (Chapter Four). In Charles de Saint-Évremond’s search for ‘a wholeness with a woman that combined the sweetness of friendship of the mind and the desire of passionate love’ (p. 105), La Vopa finds a powerful distillation of platonic love’s rhetorical attractions and dangers as they manifested in eighteenth-century discourse.
It will be conspicuous from the foregoing paragraphs that in spite of the book’s close attention to the subject of women’s intellectual labour, a great many of the writers under discussion here are men. This is in part due to the nature of the eighteenth-century public sphere in both France and Britain. There were simply greater opportunities for men to opine in printed texts about the influence of women within society and within philosophical endeavours. La Vopa does a fine job of fitting female voices and experience alongside his male case studies, particularly through the reading of correspondence and other ostensibly private texts. Nonetheless, especially in his two chapters focused on Britain (Chapter Five on Shaftesbury and Chapter Six on David Hume), we are left with a slight sense of missed opportunity. It is a shame that space could not be found for the distinct contributions to early feminism made by British women. If the chronological scope of the study precluded any more than a fleeting reference to Mary Wollstonecraft, then somewhat earlier figures such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu or Catherine Macaulay (whose historical works of the 1760s onwards were themselves in fruitful dispute with those of Hume) could have been valuable.
This is on the whole, though, an important and engaging work despite its inevitable omissions. La Vopa’s movements from literary observation to historical excursus are never less than elegant; they frequently exhibit in its full complexity that paradoxical culture of mondanité which has been brought to the forefront of Enlightenment research by Antoine Lilti and others in recent years.