Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1999)

by Laura Mandell

Some kinds of misogyny are used in eighteenth-century literature for what we might call "good" purposes, to resist the commodification of literature and even to resist the sexism inherent in idealizing representations of women, i.e., even for feminist purposes. The efficacy of such resistance, however, depends upon being able to read that misogyny as a rhetorical figure rather than as having a real referent, the female body. Misogyny becomes virulent when we de-rhetoricize it: some texts do that, but also some readers do it no matter what is going on in the text being read. To see misogyny as rhetorical is not to deny that it has had insidious effects: misogynous representations have indeed promoted the oppression of women. It is just to notice that misogyny as a rhetoric serves many functions. This book deals with two, specifically: the promotion of capitalist desires, and the construction of the canon.

1. Chapter 1. "Misogyny and Literariness: Dryden, Pope, and Swift": Swift, Pope, and Dryden turn to misogyny as a refuge from reductive reading practices; only by reading their works as figurative rather than literal attacks on women can we see those pressures which come from the commodification of literature into objects. Misogyny is one means they have for fighting against reductive readings, preserving the opportunity for understanding texts by occupying the many different perspectives offered by each sentence, regardless of whether a perspective is ostensibly maligned or approved by the text as a whole. (I wouldn't choose to have them be misogynous writers. But it seems to me that they were trying to do something besides just express their own distaste for women.)
2. Chapter 2. "Capitalism and Rape: Thomas Otway's The Orphan": Otway's she-tragedy eroticizes rape for the sake of making it attractive, rape representing capitalist entrepreneurial practices in displaced form. Misogyny is not intrinsically erotic but has been eroticized and then used to figure capitalist relations. Sadomasochism provides sexual pleasure (not necessarily because of human nature; that is, it could be historically conditioned). Entrepreneurs need to be sadistic but not masochistic (giving everything away, or giving up all one's power, won't make one a successful capitalist). Transferring the pleasures of sadomasochism from representations of male-to-male relations (as in the courtier's relation to his lord) onto representations of male-to-female relations (as in the capitalist's relation to his workers and/or competitors) encourages the entrepreneur to get pleasure from sadism (attacking someone who is envisaged as completely other) while secretly garnering masochistic pleasure (secretly identifying with that other). The quintessential Restoration play, according to our canon, is not the she-tragedy, I argue, because plays such as Otway's Orphan and Rowe's Jane Shore rendered their women figures too sympathetic: their misogyny is not virulent enough to secure capitalist desire nor to render the texts canonical objects.
3. Chapter 3. "Engendering Capitalist Desires: Filthy Bawds and Thoroughly Good Merchants in Mandeville and Lillo": Mandeville and Lillo successfully idealize the businessman by representing female prostitutes as the abject other. Mandeville's "Modest Defence" and Lillo's "London Merchant" do effectively promote capitalism, but they are more like propaganda than literature. They do not have the status of canonical texts, even though reading works by Swift and Pope as unambiguous, as if they simply expressed virulent misogyny, has indeed worked to canonize Augustan satire.
4. Chapter 4. "Misogyny and Feminism: Mary Leapor": Mary Leapor's poetry makes use of misogynous representations for feminist purposes. Sexism takes many forms, including the idealization of women. If women's bodies are being exploited by representations that idealize them, de-idealizing them is one way of protesting that exploitation -- Mary Leapor's strategy. There is a fine line between de-idealizing and degrading representations of women; or, it is more correct to say that there may not be any line at all between them, that such a line can only be drawn by readers who elicit the de-idealizing and hence feminist potential of derogatory representations of women.
5. Chapter 5. "Misogyny and the Canon: The Character of Women in Anthologies of Poetry": This chapter shows how misogyny has been deployed in the process of canon formation. It is not the case that canonical texts necessarily degrade women. Rather, the material conditions for reproducing poetry, specifically the division of poems into canonizing anthologies on the one hand, and miscellanies, giftbooks, and ephemeral teaching texts on the other, has abjected women: excluded them from the ideal, eternal realm of "the Author" by including them as historically embodied "curiosities."
6. Chapter 6. "Transcending Misogyny: Anna Letitia Barbauld Writes Her Way Out": Chapter 6 shows how Barbauld was able to imagine herself a great writer through the development of a "dissenting aesthetic." In the context of an emerging discipline that abjects women writers in order to render male writers transcendent, Barbauld's religion allows her to see the body as such -- which women were seen as incarnating -- as transcendent even though (or better, because) material. An underlying fantasy of the material soul sustains her faith in her own writing.