This web page offers a suggestive place to make connections between theorizations of the public sphere and the function of the novel in the rise of the public sphere of letters in the eighteenth-century. To ground the inquiry I have provided a summary of the most relevant chapters from Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. To broaden the conversation I then offer a select bibliography of recent revisions, critiques, and extensions of Habermas's original formulations as they relate specifically to the rise of the novel. Finally, I suggest ways to read the function of representations of public life in fiction in a brief note on Frances Burney's Evelina, and concludes by providing a select bibliography which includes theorizations of the novel in terms of publicity, female authorship, and the rise of the novel.
I.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 1993. 1-56.
Habermas follows in the tradition of such philosophers and social theorists as Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant, and Marx in attempting to understand the emergence of a public authority and "opinion" separate from -- and eventually superseding -- monarchy and the aristocracy. He does this by understanding how the concept of the public was attached to specific loci of power at particular historical moments in western culture. In this regard, he contrasts the Hellenic and the modern (bourgeois) models -- models which were based on "horizontal" relationships of economic dependence (15) -- with what he calls the "representative publicity" of the feudal, Renaissance/court, and baroque/aristocratic modes of publicness, which were models based on "vertical" economic dependencies. The notion of representative publicness refers to a social organization whereby "an opposition between the public and private spheres . . . did not exist" (5):
[T]his publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute . . . In itself the status of manorial lord, on whatever level, was neutral in relation to the criteria of "public" and "private;" but its incumbent represented it publicly. He displayed himself, presented himself as an embodiment of some sort of "higher" power. (7)
The purpose of representation, then, was to make "something invisible visible" (7) -- that something being state authority; such symbolic manifestations of power were wholly "dependant on the people [commoners] before whom it was displayed" (10). Habermas mentions that, for a modern example of such representative publicness, we need look no further than to sites of religion and church ritual.
Marking a shift from a decentralized, embodied, symbolic code of publicity, Habermas argues that, in Renaissance and Baroque societies, "the independent provincial nobility based in the feudal rights attached to the land lost its power to represent [for reasons related to early capitalism's commercial economy]; publicity of representation was concentrated at the prince's court" (9). At this next moment in the transformation of the public, the court became the private space in which public functions were staged. With the inclusion of bourgeois notables as guests of the court, a sociability developed which marks a form of representative publicity "in which the monarch's court [became] an enclave within a society separating itself from the state. Now for the first time private and public spheres became separate in a specifically modern sense" (11):
'Private' designated the exclusion from the sphere of the state apparatus; for 'public' referred to the state that in the meantime had developed, under absolutism, into an entity having an objective existence over against the person of the ruler. (11)
This social configuration then developed into a sphere of "civil society" that was to be the "corollary of the depersonalized state authority" (19). In this sphere the nobleman was replaced by the new man, the bourgeois, a product of the emergent capitalism in that "[t]he nobleman was what he represented; the bourgeois, what he produced" (13). This marks a crucial shift away from an embodied, ennobled public representative and a public agent, the product of an ideology of the self-actualizing personality -- the self-made man who has no representative bearing. To illustrate this shift, Habermas makes reference to Goethe's Wilhelm in his metaphor of the public sphere as a stage in which men perform an authority that is separate from the state primarily through commercial relationships that have been revised from being individual and family-based to a situation of social interdependence:
Hannah Arendt refers to the private sphere of society that has become publicly relevant when she characterizes the modern (in contrast to the ancient) relationship of the public sphere to the private terms of the rise of the "social": 'society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependance for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance, and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.' (19)
"[T]he traffic in commodities and news" developed out of these common interests which further transformed with political and social order under capitalist mercantilism (15). While mercantilist companies were organizing and expanding their capitalist bases, the advent of the printing press and the political journals it printed trafficked the "private" news of taxation, trade, and commodities which became a public exchange (21). The state also utilized such journals to disseminate information to what they called the public, meaning not the common man, but the "educated masses," who were the bourgeois, the capitalists -- "merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers" who were the "carriers" of the public, especially the reading public (22-23). As regional and national interdependence grew among the bourgeois, a "critical sphere" emerged in the seventeenth-century, "that zone of continuous administrative contact became "critical" also in the sense that it provoked the critical judgement of a public making use of its reason" (24).
Hence we arrive at the modern use of the term bourgeois public sphere: "the sphere of private people coming together as a public" (27) in which public opinion is created and ideas are submitted for the critical public (publicity).
It is important to note that, with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere power does not exactly change hands from the aristocracy to the bourgeois, as they don't "rule," per se. The purpose of the bourgeois public sphere was rather to "undercut the principle upon which existing rule was based. The principle of control that the bourgeois public opposed to the latter -- namely publicity -- was intended to change domination as such" (28). In this way the claim to power emerged in rational-critical public debate. Habermas argues that it is important to note the centrality of the patriarchal conjugal family in the formation of the rational-critical subjectivity. Indeed, he claims that "the doubling of the private sphere on the higher plane of the intimate sphere [the family] furnished the foundation for an identification of those two roles ["property owner" and "human being"] under the common title 'private'" (29). It is the intimate sphere which first provided an audience-based subjectivity in which members could explore their relations with a sense of "free interiority" (28).
In connection with this intimate sphere, a more public, but still apolitical sphere emerged before the political one, that being "the literary precursor of the public sphere operative in the political domain" (29). As Habermas argues, "it provided a training ground for a critical public reflection still preoccupied with itself -- a process of self-clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness" (29). It is important to note that this public sphere of letters was not entirely free from courtly influence. As the town and salon (in sites such as the coffeehouse) take over the function of the center of critical debate, a cultural-poetical contrast occurred in which the bourgeois intellectuals had sociable discussions with representatives of the "elegant world" (30); through these rational-critical debates the bourgeois shed its dependance upon the authority of the aristocratic nobel hosts through "a certain parity of the educated" (31-2). These new sites had three things in common: they preserved a social intercourse that attempted to disregard status altogether, at least as an ideal; in the process of problematizing issues that had heretofore not been questioned, this new domain of "common concern" caused philosophical and literary works to lose their aura of extra-ordinariness and simply become cultural products/commodities that were generally accessible and reflective of their experiences (36); and finally, "the same process that converted culture into a commodity . . . established the public as inclusive . . . whomever could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion" (37).
We can begin to see the ways in which the emergent public sphere was enabled by the formation of institutions, like coffeehouses and salons, which were centers of literary -- and eventually political -- criticism, particularly in the period from 1680-1730. The central result of such shifts in social centers was that "opinion became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence" (33-4). As literature, theater, music, and art went public -- or, became detached from courtly presentation and patronage -- the result was vehicles which institutionalized lay judgement/opinion as well. It is in this way that Habermas understands the emergence of the curious figure of the critic, who performs "a curiously dialectical task: he viewed himself at the same time as the public's mandatory and as its educator" (41). This "spokesman for the public" functions to highlight the goal of the inhabitants of these new public institutions for rational-critical debate: that the public believed that "it was only through critical absorption of philosophy, literature, and art that the public attained enlightenment and realized itself in the latter's living process" (42).
With the emergence of the critical journals, such as The Tattler and The Spectator in Briton, which connected the ever-growing public sphere with a common discourse, "the public held up a mirror to itself," as "the public that read and debated this sort of thing read and debated about itself" (43).
With such institutions for rational-critical debate firmly in place, the courtly taste which was still present within the bourgeois public sphere withered, and the space became bourgeois in that "a privateness oriented to an audience" became institutionalized (43). Habermas claims that such public debate hinged on the possession of a particular subjectivity, one that had its home in the patriarchal conjugal family. Although it was set up as the alternative, emancipatory space unrelated to the public sphere of commerce and exchange, its construction as "dependent compliment" to the family's public role was the organ which maintained bourgeois private autonomy in the marketplace (47): "as an agent of society it served especially the task of that difficult mediation through which, in spite of the illusion of freedom, strict conformity with socially necessary requirements was brought about" (47). We see the family's self-image as generating closeness, ideas of freedom, love, and cultivation of the person "as an objective meaning contained as an element in the structure of the actual institution, and without whose subjective validity society would not have been able to reproduce itself" (48). In this regard literary discourse, such as the novel, became manifestations of this individual's working through their own subjectivity:
The relations between author, work, and public . . . became intimate mutual relationships between privatized individuals who were psychologically interested in what was 'human,' in self-knowledge, and in empathy . . . [The novel's purpose became that of placing] a final veil over the difference between reality and illusion . . . [With its new label, "fiction,"] the psychological novel fashioned for the first time the kind of realism that allowed anyone to enter into literary action as a substitute for his own, to use the relationships . . . as substitutes for reality. (50)
Habermas summarizes his characterization of the emergence bourgeois public sphere as both an expansion and completion of the intimate sphere of the patriarchal conjugal family (50). The intimate sphere held within it both salon and living-room, suggesting that the privacy of the one was oriented to the public nature of the other, just as the subjectivity of the privatized individual was always already related to publicity. In this way, both conjoin in literature, which became a reading experience in which "the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself" (51).
Habermas closes chapter two by discussing the relationship between the public sphere in the world of letters and the public sphere in the political realm. Essentially, he suggests that a political discourse developed within the bourgeois public sphere against the state's discourse of "secrecy" in matters of the public good. Members of rational-critical debates became interested in bringing rule into convergence with reason. In this way, the notion of law was redefined as inhering "a rationality in which what is right converges with what is just" (53); a negotiated truth, not authority, is said to make law reasonable, and publicity is now held in contradistinction to notions of secrecy. Habermas concludes by commenting on the complementarily of the collective spheres of letters and politics:
As soon as privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings ceased to communicate merely about their subjectivity but rather in their capacity as property owners desired to influence public power in their common interest, the humanity of the literary public sphere served to increase the effectiveness of the public sphere in the political realm. the fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the fictitious identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of the property owners and the roles of the human beings pure and simple. (56)
II.
Selected Bibliography on Relations Between the Public Sphere, the Eighteenth-Century, and the Novel
Alejandro, Roberto. Hermeneutics, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993.
Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
Burt, Richard, Ed. The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1994.
Calhoun, Craig, Ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 1992. A collection of essay that explores the stregnths and weaknesses of the public sphere (as theorized by Habermas) as a viable social category of explanation. Most of the critiques tend towards disagreement with Habermas's notion of rationality of discourse; while some try to place the public sphere
earlier than Habermas does, others say it is impossible to talk about the public sphere as a vital category of human analysis.
Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." Postmodernism and the Re-Reading of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992. 197-231. Fraser's essay is a critical re-reading of Habermas's work on the public sphere, as she draws attention to the plurality
of spheres which are always in existence, and that econominc tensions between spheres and counter-spheres is at the core of public representation.
Hansen, Miriam. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1993.
. "Unstable Mixtures, Dilated Spheres: Negt and Kluge's The Public Sphere and Experience, Twenty Years Later." Public Culture 5 (1993): 179-212.
Holub, Robert C. Jurgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Jacob, Margaret. "The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective." Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.1 (1994): 95-114. Jacob's aim in this essay is to argue for Habermas's work on the public sphere to be used as a heuristic which
reconceives the enlightenment and asks us to historicize enlightenment cultural practices. Jacobs offers comparative and "international" methodological perspectives to encourage scholars to write new narratives of European Enlightenment.
Klein, Lawrence E. "Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth- Century England." Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993. 100-15.
. "Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth-Century: Some Questions About Evidence and Analytic Procedure." Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (1994): 97-109. This volume of Eighteenth-Century Studies, "The Public and the Nation," is devoted to thinking through issues of the public sphere, and has
contributions from Dena Goodman, Anthony La Vopa, Douglas Smith, Greg Laugero, and Kathleen Wilson. Lawrence Klein's contribution problematizes the "domestic thesis" which emphasizes the separate and gendered spheres of public and private, which he argues doesn't explain the complexity of discourses and human experience in practice.
Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988. Landes's work is in direct dialogue with Habermas, as she refines his theses in relation to the specific cultural moment of the French Revolution to highlight the influence of women within counter-public spheres, as well as their significance in court and salon culture.
McIntosh, Carey. Common and Courtly Language: The Stylistics of Social Class in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1986.
Narain, Mona. "Women Writers in the Public Sphere." Diss. State U of New York, Stonybrook, 1995.
Negt, Oskar. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1993.
Newey, Vincent, Ed. Centering the Self: Subjectivity, Society, and Reading From Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy. Aldershot, England: Scolar P, 1995.
Richetti, John. "The Public Sphere and the Eighteenth-century Novel: Social Criticism and Narrative Enactment." Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (1992): 114-29. Richetti wants to refine and extend Habermas's work on the eighteenth century British
public sphere to ask whether the public sphere's political rationality is represented that way in the English novel; he is further interested in asking whether Habermas's work helps us understand the political and cultural place of the developing novel, and how it participates and dissents from the public sphere.
Rivers, Isabel, Ed. Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Leicestershire: Leicester UP, 1982.
Robbins, Bruce. "The Phantom Public Sphere." Social Text 8-9 (1990): 24-145.
, Ed. The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1993. Starting with the premise that the public is a "phantom," or that we lack public cohesiveness,
the writers in this collection go about retheorizing precisely what kind of public we have, or can have, in the twentieth century with such social forces as the pervasive media, with global corporations, and advancing technology.
Saccamano, Neil. "The Consolations of Ambivalence: Habermas and the Public Sphere." MLN 106 (1991): 685-98.
Tobin, Beth Fowkes, Ed. History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Athens: U Georgia P, 1994.
Wang, Orrin N.C. "Romancing the Counter-Public Sphere: A Response to Romanticism and Its Publics." Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 579-88.
Willard, Charles Arthur. "The Problem of the Public Sphere: Three Diagnoses." Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1990. 135-53.
Yoh, Keonjong. "The Rhetoric of the Public Sphere: The Construction of the Cultural Authority of the Enlightenment Intellectual." 1995. Diss. State U of New York, Buffalo, 1995.
Zomchick, John P. Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
III.
Burney, Frances. Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. Ed. Edward A. Bloom. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.
Volume One of Frances Burney's Evelina is an excellent representation of the life of the town as taxonomized in terms of the public sphere by Habermas. But besides Habermas's work, I was also reminded of the French film La nuit de Varennes in which a vigorous critical debate between differently classed citizens occurs in a carriage that is in flight from the city during the French Revolution. This film, Habermas's history, and Burney's novel are each concerned with the rational-critical debate that takes place in the newly emergent public sphere of the town.
In terms of the novel we see this debate most often catalyzed by Mme. Duval and Captain Mirvan, who are ironically characterized by Evelina (and the other members of her cache) as "wrangling" instead of engaging in the kind of debate that has purchase within their circle (58). They function as crude parodies, as the two characters are extremes of the crass bourgeois -- the ungenteel lower gentry -- represented by Mirvan; and the usurping, class-climbing, would-be aristocrat Mme. Duval. Their antagonism is cast in terms of national differences between the British and the French that each one feels cannot be transcended (65). In this way Captain Mirvan finds Mme. Duval to be a senseless slave to "fashion," and finds the town and its social centers to be, not only feminized ("there i'n't so much as one public place besides the play house, where a man, that's to say a man who is a man, ought not to be ashamed to show his face (110)), but also focused too much on the spectacle instead of the content of social events. Here I am reminded of Mirvan's disgust at Sir Lovel for attending the play and getting so caught up in the spectacle of the crowd that he didn't know what transpired on stage.
But Mme. Duval is not comfortable in these public spaces, either, as seen in the horrid time she had at the opera (93). What becomes clear is that the pair's wrangling over nationalistic features is actually code for the social conflict which pervades the novel, the crisis of the burgeoning bourgeois entering into a public sphere which is still very much influenced by the courtly, noble manners of the aristocracy; and so the Captain and the Madame function to show readers a debate which is off center, to show us opinions that have no currency within this new social system. Indeed, both our moral rudders -- and our rudders for good opinion (they seem to be one and the same here) -- are Lord Orville, a nobleman, and Evelina, the country girl without social connections. Orville is described by Evelina as having "a politeness which knows no intermission, and makes no distinction, is as unassuming and modest, as if he had never mixed with the great, and was totally ignorant of every qualification he possess" (113). Considering the multiple references to public performance and mask-wearing -- terms which the characters apply in reference to performing social roles for proper recognition -- I find it interesting that Evelina constructs Orville as one whose performance is "without intermission." Orville understands that his social rank fails to represent and so he now must perform as ignorant of such previous authority, and has converted that authority into an authority of manners.
Evelina seems to fit less securely within the rational-critical sphere. In fact, she is completely silent amongst the debates: "I was quite frightened; - I made no answer; - I even attempted to rise, and could not, but sat still, mute and motionless" (85). Evelina is praised for her fine manners, her purity and restraint and comportment, but it is her inability to engage in the debates in the public sphere -- not just debates over the opera or the theater, but in debates which will determine the very conditions of her existence -- which appears to be her downfall, at least at the end of Volume One. Evelina's criticism is confined to epistolary form, the space of private communication and the textual manifestation of the private sphere. In these letters she is just as trenchant a critic and just as opinionated as the bombastic Captain (as seen in her comments about her visit to the Pantheon), but does so in a sophisticated, sarcastic manner that is quite engaging. Still, it is this false separation between public and private that Rev. Villars enforces (116) that leads in Evelina's inability to function within the public and assert some persuasive influence over the people who so righteously rule over her destiny.
Selected Bibliography on Evelina Criticism
Campbell, Gina. "How to Read Like a Gentleman: Burney's Instructions to Her Critics in Evelina." ELH 57 (1990): 557-84.
. "Bringing Belmont to Justice: Burney's Quest for Paternal Recognition in Evelina." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3 (1991): 323-40.
Cutting-Gray, Joanne. "Writing Innocence: Fanny Burney's Evelina." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 9 (1990): 43-57.
Doody, Margaret Anne. "Beyond Evelina: the Individual Novel and the Community of Literature." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3 (1991): 358-71. This special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction arose not from planning but from essays submitted.
Contributors include Julia Epstein, Amy Paul, Susan Greenfield, Gina Campbell, and David Oakleaf. Doody's essay is a good starting point into this collection of essays as she historicizes Burney scholarship through her own contributions to the field, and notes the cannonical changes which have occurred to make it academically appropriate to work on Evelina. Still she argues that future scholars will need to attend more to the "interworking influences and references both public and private" that make up the novel (364).
Dowling, William C. "Evelina and the Genealogy of Literary Shame." Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (1992): 208-20. Dowling contextualizes the work of Thomas Edwards on Jane Austin and the function of shame by finding a precursor to Austen's use of
shame in Frances Burney's Evelina. Dowling argues that Burney understood how the Augustan satirists appealed to shame in theorizing morality and used it as a mechanism of textual control between reader and the narrative in order to understand her particular historical moment.
Dykstal, Timothy. "Evelina and the Culture Industry." Criticism 37 (1995): 559-81.
Epstein, Julia L. "Evelina's Deceptions: The Letter and the Spirit." Fanny Burney's Evelina. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1988. 111-129.
Fizer, Irene. "The Name of the Daughter: Identity and Incest in Evelina." Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy. Ed. Patricia Yeager, Beth Kowlaski Wallace, Nancy Miller. Carbondale: U of Illinois P, 1989. 78-107.
Graham, Kenneth W. "Cinderella or Bluebeard: The Double Plot of Evelina." Man and Nature. Ed. E.T. Annandale, Richard A. Lebrun. Edmonton: Academic Printing & Pub., 1986.
Greenfield, Susan C. "'Oh Dear Resemblance of thy Murdered Mother': Female Authorship in Evelina." Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1991): 301-20. Greenfield examines Evelina's representation of authorship and argues that identity and literary
power are depicted as matrilineal gifts, and extends this idea both to Burney's personal experiences and with cultural narratives about the origins of the novel as genre.
Hart, John. "Frances Burney's Evelina: Mirvan and Mezzotint." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7 (1994): 51-70.
Koehler, Martha Jean. "Paragons and Parasites: Narrative Disruptions and Gender Constraints in Epistolary Fiction." Diss. U of Washington, 1993.
Loffler, Arno. "'The World . . . What It Appears to a Girl of Seventeen': Fanny Burney's Evelina als satirischer Roman." Anglia 112 (1994): 50-74.
Northcut, Rose-Marie. "Female Protagonists in the Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Novel: A Study of Richardson, La Roche, and Burney." Diss. 1990.
Oakleaf, David. "The Name of the Father: Social Identity and the Ambition of Evelina." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3 (1991): 341-58.
Olson, Judy Ann. "Diversionary Tactics: Feminine Authority in the Novels of Burney and Austen." Diss. U of California, Irvine, 1993.
Pawl, Amy Joyce. "Dutiful Daughters: The search for the Sentimental Family in the Novels of Burney, Inchbald, and Austen." Diss. U California, Berkeley, 1994.
Richetti, John J. "Voice and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Haywood to Burney." Studies in the Novel 19 (1987): 263-272.
Sol, Antoinette Marie. Textual Promiscuities: Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Frances Burney and Choderlos de Laclos. Diss. U California, Los Angeles, 1995.
Staub, Kristina. Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1987.
Tucker, Irene. "Writing Home: Evelina, the Epistolary Novel, and the Paradox of Property." ELH 60 (1993): 419-39.