A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice
Page 16
Hamlet’s main focus is on the relationship between a mother and her son. King Lear, the other play in which misogyny is a main theme, is centred on the relationship between a father and his daughters. It marked a noticeable change in emotional emphasis. According to a recent biographer of Shakespeare ‘after about 1606 the father-daughter bond becomes an almost obsessive theme in his work.’199
If psychology has a theory of misogyny, it is one that traces its origins to the primal relationship between mother and son. Usually, by the time a man has daughters, his character is set, and even if they are as wicked as Lear’s Goneril and Regan, their behaviour will not form their father’s feelings about women in general, it will merely confirm it. For this reason, misogyny, however powerfully expressed in King Lear, is less central to the play’s dynamic than it is in Hamlet. The plot merely affords Lear the opportunity to vent. Made homeless by Goneril and Regan, to whom the old king has foolishly given over his kingdom, abandoned to the elements, Lear erupts in one of the most powerful scenes in literature (Act 4, Scene 6):
Behold yon simpering dame,
Whose face between her forks presageth snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure’s name;
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they’re centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle to the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends’;
There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphury pit,
Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie,
Fie, pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good
Apothecary, to sweeten my imagination . . .
Again, as in Hamlet, what begins as an attack on a particular woman (or a particular kind of woman – in this case, one who parades false modesty) turns into a fierce denunciation of female sexuality. And once again, as with Gertrude and Desdemona in Othello, it is woman’s ‘appetite’ for sex that disgusts the hero and sours his imagination. But unlike Hamlet, King Lear is redeemed by a woman – his third daughter Cordelia, who stood up to him at the beginning of the play with a display of honesty that undercuts the play’s misogyny. Refusing to flatter him with false praise, she demonstrates the link between truth and love that her father does not fully grasp until the end – and only at the cost of Cordelia’s life, which she loses attempting to rescue him. Misogyny does not survive Shakespeare’s tragic vision any more than do other follies that bring about human unhappiness. Pity, which springs from a profound sympathy for the human condition, as endured by men and women alike, replaces them as the dominant emotion of his greatest plays. The triumph of Shakespearean tragedy is that through pity it reveals that we share a common humanity, in which all distinctions, including those between men and women, are rendered insignificant.
In the plays that followed, the works of his last years as a dramatist, such as The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale the diatribes against women – whether rhetorical or deeply felt – disappear. The prevailing mood is reconciliation, usually between father and daughter. The conflict between men and women is resolved satisfactorily in the relationship that a father has with his daughter.
Elsewhere, misogyny showed its resilience throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the face of social, moral, economic and political developments that would profoundly transform women’s status. In England, a dual process can be discerned. As a new model of family developed among the rising middle classes, with increased emphasis on mutual affection between man and wife, a breakdown in traditional sexual morality took place among the wits of the court circles of the post-1660 period, that at times approached nihilism. Along with it appeared some of the most scurrilous poetic attacks on women since Juvenal (see Chapter 2).
John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (1647–80), the poet who penned some of the most exquisite love lyrics in the English language, including that beginning, ‘An age in her embraces passed/Would seem a winter’s day,’ could also describe a woman as ‘a passive pot for fools to spend in’ (that is, a chamber pot) and liken female genitalia to a sewer.200 The Earl of Rochester belonged to a new phenomenon – the first generation of rakes, young upper-class males who followed a libertine life style, bawdy, open-minded, rebellious, irreligious, often politically progressive, and at the same time, unrelenting satirists, as given to outbursts of misanthropic despair as they were to misogynistic verses. Theirs was a fierce rejection of the official Puritanism that had prevailed in the previous generation; they would set off a series of moral cycles in the West, with periods of sexual conservatism being followed by outbreaks of hedonism followed by conservative reaction, which would last to this day.
The rakes effectively created a subculture around the court of the Restoration period (1660–88) where sex was pursued only for pleasure. On the continent, the same kind of hedonism prevailed at the court of Louis XIV (1643–1713). It constituted a rebellion against Judaeo-Christian sexual morality, inspired by the humanism of Renaissance Italy. In the past, as in the Rome of the late Republic and early Empire, there had been comparable ‘breakdowns’ of conventional morality among sections of the ruling class. But in general, they were severely punished. In the late seventeenth century, however, with the weakening of the authority of the churches, and an emerging middle-class world-view from which a coherent morality had yet to be derived, no institution had the power to curb the new hedonism.
The women who were part of the rakes’ circle ranged in social status from lower-class prostitutes and actresses (then a novel feature on the social scene) to aristocratic ladies, some of whom, in reputation at least, were as promiscuous as the men. For the first time in English history, a few of them left behind their views of the erotic and verbal game in which they were so intensely engaged, crossing poetic swords with some of the sharpest wits of the period. The most famous, Aphra Behn (1640–89), was renowned, and vilified, as a successful playwright and poet, the first Englishwoman to achieve such literary fame. She was denounced as a ‘lewd harlot’, who dared to describe how a young wife can sexually exhaust her husband, and reduce him to a trembling wreck. She made literary history by giving the woman’s version of premature ejaculation, for which male poets too often blamed their ‘fair nymphs’. In her poem ‘The Disappointment’ the ‘hapless swain’ is accused of trying to prolong his pleasure ‘which too much love destroys’ and so finds ‘his vast pleasure turned to pain’. 201
For their part, the rakes’ attitude to women was at once decorous and coarse, oscillating between adoration and contempt, which was usually born of disappointment or rejection. There was also a strong strain of anxiety about their sexual performance, which is seen in the number of poems about impotence and the court ladies’ increasing use of dildos. The fact that the dildo was from the 1660s onwards usually of Italian manufacture, increased the upper-class English male’s sexual angst, since Italy was associated with an effeminizing eroticism. For an Englishman, what could be more humiliating than to be superannuated by an Italian dildo? 202 The rakes broke no new ground in the chronicles of misogyny, except that in the explicitness and coarseness of their language they foreshadowed the first of those that we would recognize as pornographers. Indeed, Wilmot was treated as such until relatively recently. In 1926, an edition of his poems was seized in New York by the police and destroyed.203 However, the rakes were unlike pornographers in several important ways – one was that they dealt with the frustrations of sex as well as its delights, being as frank about their episodes of impotence as about their conquests. There also prevailed a feeling, particularly powerful in Rochester’s case, that the pursuit of sexual pleasure is just another one of life’s transient absurdities.
By the late seventeenth century, a significant number of people saw sex as an activity independent of procreation and love. Biology, of course, still imposed constraints on the a
bility of men, and more so women, to act out that view, the condom and the dildo not withstanding. Though it is a view that has been met with more than one conservative moral backlash, it has continued to thrive in Western society, regardless of all attempts to suppress or contain it.
However, it was far from being the dominant morality, nor was it the one that would determine the shape misogyny would take in the coming centuries. By the early eighteenth century, in England and Holland, thanks to the huge expansion in overseas trade, the mercantile middle class had established itself as a political power to be reckoned with. It had forged a moral code to reflect its priorities. It was a moral code that was in some ways conservative, stressing the virtues of frugality, thrift, hard work and sexual restraint. But thanks to its revolutionary emphasis on the needs and importance of the individual, it made it increasingly difficult to deny women their full share of humanity even as misogyny refashioned itself to fit aspects of the new dominant morality.
During the early eighteenth century, a new literary form arose to embody that individualism: the novel. It would play a unique role in women’s history. For the first time characters were portrayed as individuals, living their lives in an actual time and an actual place. The novel was true to women’s experience in ways no previous literature had attempted. Before, the great poets and dramatists had presented characters and plots that stayed faithful to certain universal types, derived from mythology or history and intended not so much to represent an individual but to embody some general truth about life. These truths were held to be timeless, unchanging Platonic absolutes contrasting with the ephemera of individual experience. In contrast, the novel from its very beginnings, in the work of Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), relies on realistic detail to tell the stories of characters. We get to know Defoe’s characters Moll Flanders and Roxana in an intimate way, quite unlike the way we know Medea or King Lear. The novel was an instrument for exploring the personal lives of recognizable people, and as such allowed the presentation of women characters and their relationships in a completely new way. It is no coincidence that the novel was also the first literary form that women’s tastes and concerns helped to shape; nor is it a surprise that, though its earliest practitioners were men, it would soon become the genre in which women excelled more than in any other. By the end of the eighteenth century in England there were more women novelists than men.204
The prosperity of the middle classes in England had been accompanied by an expansion of the reading public and an information explosion, with printing presses appearing all over London, producing pamphlets, and the first newspapers and magazines. Furthermore, an increasing number of women had more free time on their hands. Because of an enduring Protestant distrust of the theatre as being somewhat disreputable, a large number of those women turned to the novel for entertainment. Its appeal to the middle class, and to women, was evident. You did not need a Classical education, or knowledge of Greek and Roman history, to enjoy Moll Flanders. Its author, after all, had been educated in a trade school and had practised a trade (first as a hosiery merchant then as a pamphleteer and journalist). The fact that novels often featured women characters in lead roles was also a powerful attraction to women readers. Two of Defoe’s four greatest novels are about women – Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724).205 He was a strong advocate for women’s education. Apart from everything else, he was a successful author who realized the importance of women as readers. Defoe also helped influence the growing opinion that opposed parents forcing daughters to marry against their will, which he likened to rape. As a spokesman for the middle classes, he stressed the importance of love in marriage and argued, ‘to say love is not essential to a form of marriage is true; but to say that it is not essential to the felicity of the married state . . . is not true.’206 However, as a God-fearing Protestant, he warned against ‘lewdness’, or sexual passion, as a reason to marry, claiming in a pamphlet, that it ‘brings madness, desperation, ruin of families, self-murders, killing of bastards, etc.’207
However, the moral message that his novels convey is not quite so unambiguous. All Defoe’s characters are basically like his first and most famous, Robinson Crusoe; they are shipwrecks. Crusoe is shipwrecked by storm at sea; Roxana, on the other hand, is shipwrecked by a foolish, selfish husband who abandons her and her five children to starve. The stories are all tales of survival under difficult circumstances. Roxana survives and prospers by becoming a whore and courtesan to a series of rich men. A predictable enough if not respectable route for a beautiful woman to take, it might be thought, and Defoe tries to reassure the reader with frequent moral asides stressing that he is not recommending that women should follow his heroine’s example. But Roxana does not conform to the prevailing stereotypes of women and though Defoe does his best to disapprove of her, it is evident throughout the novel that his admiration for her as an economic success story overcomes his conventional moralizing against how she makes her money. Most importantly, she is not governed by love but by the desire to preserve the autonomy that she has achieved thanks to her economic success. A considerable part of the novel is about how she manages her money. In doing so, she redefines her relationship with men. She rejects marriage when proposed to by a man who loves her because, she says, ‘tho’ I could give up my Virtue, and expose myself, I could not give up my Money . . .’ She explains: ‘my heart was bent upon an Independency of Fortune; and I told him, I knew no State of Matrimony, but what was, at best, a State of Inferiority, if not Bondage; that I had no Notion of it; that I lived a Life of absolute Liberty now; was as free as I was born, and having a plentiful Fortune, I did not understand what Coherence the words Honour and Obey had with the Liberty of a Free Woman.’208
Even when pregnant, she resists the offer of marriage. Defoe reverses the usual situation. It is the father that is pleading for marriage to the mother on behalf of their unborn child. Roxana rejects him and he is stunned. ‘For it was never known,’ he responds, ‘that any Woman refused to marry a Man that had first lain with her, much less a Man that had gotten her with-child; but you go upon different Notions from all the World, and tho’ you reason it so strongly, that a Man knows hardly what to answer, yet I must own, there is something in it shocking to Nature . . .’209 Roxana’s concern about the security of her fortune accurately reflects the legal situation of married women in the eighteenth century, which was still governed by patriarchal notions that went back to Roman times. On marriage a woman’s property became her husband’s. (This would remain the case until well into the nineteenth century.)
In the end, Roxana does marry – for a title, and only after the strictest measures are in force for preserving the independence of her fortune. The strongest characters in her story are all women, and the most intense relationships are between them. The male characters are passive, insubstantial creatures, who do not even have names, mere rungs on the ladder of Roxana’s climb to the top.210 Just as Robinson Crusoe was the portrait of the autonomous man, forging an independent life for himself against all the odds, Roxana is his female equivalent – the first vision of an autonomous woman that we have. Throughout the novel she is called an ‘Amazon’ – a member of the legendary tribe of warrior women who lived without men – an indication of the deep-seated and continuing anxiety that the notion of an autonomous woman inspires.
For women the middle-class values that opened up visions of individuality would prove to be fraught with ambiguities. The new morality of the middle class resembled the old in its identification of a woman’s worth with her chastity. The middle-class wife and mother of the new model family, while she was expected to be able to ‘comfort’ her husband sexually, was also being increasingly represented as a person for whom sexual pleasure was not important. Her virtue became propaganda in the moral war the middle class fought against the wastrels and degenerates of the aristocracy. The image of the good middle-class wife of the eighteenth century would prepare the way for the fainting, sexless Victorian maidens of the nine
teenth.
The resilience of misogyny can be explained partly by the fact that misogynists have always had it both ways. Perhaps comparable to the way Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews as both Bolshevists and bankers, misogynists have either condemned women for being sexually insatiable or denied they had any sexual desires at all. In this contradictory dualism, women were viewed as either insatiable sexual predators or chaste and virtuous sexual victims.
This dualism clearly manifested itself in the 1740s. The greatest poet of the age, Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in such poems as ‘To A Lady’ summed up one aspect of traditional misogynistic thinking:
Some men to business, some to pleasure take,
But every woman is at heart a rake.211
A completely opposite view of women appeared around the same time with the publication of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, the first novel by Samuel Richardson. Richardson, a printer and the son of a carpenter, was commissioned by a publisher to write a volume of letters that would teach the innocent – or presumed innocent – daughters of the middle class how to conduct themselves when working as servants in the homes of the aristocracy. Pamela was the tale of how a virtuous young woman resists the multifarious and determined attempts of her employer, Mr B, a rake, to seduce her. Pamela declares that her maxim is ‘May I never survive, one moment, that fatal one in which I shall forfeit my innocence!’212 Faced with her impregnable purity, Mr B finally gives up and proposes marriage. Pamela reconsiders all her previous moral objections to him and deciding he is not such a bad chap after all, accepts. By the novel’s end, thanks to his wife’s sterling example, the rake has become a Puritan. It was not, of course, the first tale of a virtuous woman resisting a lustful male, but it was the first time a servant girl was accorded that heroic role, proving that while the aristocracy may still be socially superior to the rising middle class, the middle class were their moral superiors.