Improving Man (original)

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Improving Man: A Response to Anthony Fletcher, and to the “Base Man” Model of Early-Modern History” (Patrick McEvoy-Halston; Spring 2001) John Brewer, in his article “The most polite age and the most vicious”, is careful to note that although he is discussing culture, he is not using the term in the “inclusive, all-embracing way deployed by anthropologists” (341). Instead he “limits” his discussion of culture to the commercialized culture filling in the void of court culture in eighteenth-century England. However, he concludes that this commercialized culture can be characterized in an all-embracing way: “the seductive woman is analogous to the culture of which she is a part. She [. . .] is a prostitute” (358). Kathleen Wilson, in her article “Imperialism and the politics of identity”, describes imperialism (foreign policy), initially, as something which was imagined in eighteenth-century England in various ways (238). But, she concludes that “[a]s the antidote to national effeminacy, the imperial project was described and valorized in the images of an aggressive masculinity” (256). It seems that eighteenth-century English historiography has a problem on its hands. Historians seem to prefer to keep their subject multi-faceted, slippery, and thus not amenable as a subject for social science. Yet they are coming to conclusions which cannot be characterized as anything other than singular and totalistic. The dangerous female characterizes perceptions of the domestic “public sphere” and determines reactionary hyper masculine conceptions of foreign policy. What space is left? Community life? Nope, Laura Gowing tells us that this is all about the dangerous female too. How about the “private” mind? Nope, Anthony Fletcher tells us that

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gender “shows itself above all in the mind, in the intimacies of personal behavior and the unspoken and often unrecorded convention of private and public life” (xix). Fletcher cuts to the chase. Eighteenth-century England was a patriarchy. Men, being men, prefer to dominate women. But if all aesthetic complexities of culture have at their core this hard, brutal reality, perhaps its time for historians to incorporate the hard, brutal, uncompromising research of social science. And wouldn’t it be funny if it turns out to be science which legitimates studying a subject which, lets face it, if it turns out to be all about men’s inhumanity to women, after excavating its “archaeology of power” so that it doesn’t happen again, deserves to be left dead and buried. Gender history is beginning to seem akin to deism: once you’re on this track you’re on your way to total disbelief, and disenchantment with history. John Tosh, for example, concludes a book on masculinities in eighteenth-century England, wondering if chronicling the linguistic, discursive changes in gender definition i.e., gender history, is a trivial sport glossing over the fact that the male, biological, sex remains depressingly the same over the years (Tosh would object to this characterization; he tries (twice) to explain that this is not what he is suggesting which is instead that male gender remains perennially the same - leaving me to suspect that this distinction is more about a conversation Tosh is having with himself about what possibilities are, and which ones are not, permissible for a historian to consider than it is about real substance). Culture is often defined in various ways, but certainly history is axiomatically about change over time, isn’t it? Doesn’t anthropology, sociology, social science, get all the cards if change over time comes to seem trivial? Fletcher, too, in apparent despair over realizing that “[c]ivility and politeness on the one hand and sexual power on the other

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begin to look like two sides of a coin” (346), begins to wonder if there isn’t some fundamental male wound. Liam Hudson, a psychologist (not a Lacanian psychologist, or language doctor, but a real one!), is called in to tell us about the “universals”, the “always”, of male drives (339). All the nuances, possibilities, the existential glories of History are becoming hegemonic nonsense, at worst, or an aesthetically pretty way to imagine the past, at best. For the non-sentimentally inclined though, without his emperors’ clothes, our King History, apparently, really chronicles the journeys across time of the naked ape. It really is a Darwinian journey which Anthony Fletcher chronicles in his Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800. Norbert Elias, the social scientist students of manners, and morals gender historians normally refer, and react to, is far too optimistic for the base truths that these historians are uncovering. Elias, after all, in his account of how a libidinally driven society changed into a super-ego managed one, believed that all that was gained and lost in this transition was at least shared by everyone. Fletcher offers an account of eighteenth-century England where men finally manage to discursively manipulate their environment - gender definitions - so that women become bordered up into a servile narrow niche, leaving all the best fruits for themselves. This is the “other side of the coin” of an account of the eighteenth-century England as the rise of a “polite and commercial people.” According to Fletcher, it is the real story. Still, dominion has its price - its own shadow side. “By definition [Fletcher tells us] a system of ideological subordination produces continuing anxiety in those who are doing the subordinating, together with a constant need for reiteration and for

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responses to those who are contesting the system” (407; emphasis mine). (Who can argue with this? My mother, for example, has ideologically defined some plants as “weeds” that constantly threaten to invade her garden, which is why it is, of course, by definition, impossible for her to relax while in her garden.) But, then again, Fletcher doesn’t quite mean this, because the whole point of his book is that the construction of separate spheres, using an ideology of separate genders, is effective in easing male anxieties about the dangerous female. He tells us that “[a]s men’s confidence grew about the ideology of gender construction, they could afford to take a more liberal attitude than previously to women’s learning and intellectual fulfillments” (397). He notes the sheer confidence, in tone, of John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774). He credits this confidence “undoubtedly” (392) to a growing assurance of women’s ability to control themselves, to control their own passions. But it is true that Fletcher’s account of men’s situation before the miraculous (for men) development of Lockeian empirical psychology, fits an equation of male dominance with anxiety. For awhile, at least, women were fortunate that though they had brutish husbands, sons, and brothers, that these same husbands, sons, and brothers were apparently rather stupid (Fletcher’s suggests that men might have been affectionate to their wives, but note below what he says the fundamental goal for men in early modern England was). Give them an ideology to work with they could craft great evils - or as good as the particular ideology permitted. But if this ideology was inadequate, men could wait, apparently for millennium, until, like a gift from God, they were given a better ideological framework to work with. Fletcher explains the starting point for men in early modern England involved a

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“need to find a more secure basis and future for patriarchy” (401). Men were stuck with a conception of womankind that “left them in possession of sources of power which men found mysterious and threatening” (402) and of men defined “in terms of hierarchy rather than incommensurable difference [which] gave them an insufficiently competent means of imposing a patriarchal order rooted in nature” (402). Men were stuck with a one-sex model of the body invented by Galen fifteen hundred years before them. They could use it so that men possessed more of the good humoral stuff than did women, but because gender was not firmly separated, there could be no fully private and public realms, and men would always be susceptible to women’s “poisons” i.e., they could never get the woman “out of their systems.” Moreover, women might be imagined as men, perhaps as easily as by donning male clothing. And as women, they were voraciously sexual, so for men to demonstrate their household superiority, the basis of patriarchy, they had to sexually satisfy their women. No easy chore - leaving possibilities of feeling sexually inadequate a very real possibility for most men. This conception, though, of the voracious woman, according to Fletcher, is an example of what men could make of this one sex model. He says that “the problematising of women as themselves powerfully sexual as well as irrational was a solvent to the male sense of responsibility for making relationships endure” (28). So while this made demonstrating household superiority a problem, it did still serve men’s purposes. But it still amounted to gender disorder. A new model was needed. Until then, much of popular culture involved an obsession with scolds, witches, being cuckolded and other clear signs of loss of manhood. Before the two sex model was invented, men were left soothing over their felt

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inadequacies, and we should be left wondering why it took so long to come up with a better model. Once culture is defined as a patriarchy, we have male actors who are consciously attempting to oppress women. It shouldn’t then be so easy to imagine a model lasting for fifteen hundred years that served men’s purposes, but barely, and so torturously. Why didn’t men at some point get together at a “tribal council” and figure out something better? Why on earth did they constitute any kind of patriarchy which might be discursively flexible. Let women know that they’re in charge, simply because . . . and if there’s any problem let them know they’ll get a beating - just like how school yard bullies successfully operate. Are these foolish questions? Or are they the kind of questions which might make us question whether Fletcher and gender historians have missed the real reasons for male anxieties (while usefully chronicling their omnipresence), the real reason that eighteenth-century men were so afraid of being unmanned - creating plays, ballads, on up to foreign policy to nurse their anxieties? In offering us the explanation that anxieties were generated by male oppression, gender historians steadfastly refuse to imagine it might have worked the other way around. Which way, I wonder, might have the more explanatory power? Which one could come closest to actually be proven? To this I now turn, and in the process, hopefully offer us an alternative image to the static, base, man: the improving man. It is a story which will eventually turn to a developmental psychologist for insight - a psychologist (scientist?), and a form of psychology, which (immensely!) ironically takes the importance of change over time more seriously than some historians now do. Did anxiety-provoking experiences generate the eighteenth-century obsession with the dangerous female, effeminacy fears, and a need to create a social structure -

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patriarchy - by which to keep women hemmed in? This is not quite the question that Lawrence Stone asks in his The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800, but it follows naturally if one accepts his account of the consequences of the development of warmer family environments through this period. Stone, like Tosh, sorts through ideological change and is left uncertain whether documenting movements of ideas is the best way to account for human behavior. Tosh’s concern is that the fluidity and movement of ideas are a mismatch for the apparent continuous orientation of the male sex. Stone, leading to opposite conclusion, wonders if “[t]he rise of affect . . . is only partly a product of individualism . . . [which seems] to have its roots also in a basic personality change” (268). Stone, believing there to have been a rise of a personality with a ‘steep gradient affect’ (warmth) among the upper bourgeoisie and squiarchy (268), associates this with the “end for such things as the abolition of the slave trade, the suppression of most cruel sports, prison reform, and reform in the treatment of the mentally sick” (237). He characterizes these developments as “genuinely moral” (238). He is ambiguous about which one caused the other i.e., did warmer family environments generate moral social changes, or did a more relaxed social atmosphere generate warmer family environments, but we are left with an equation where either side might have played the generative role. In contrast, with Fletcher, families play a meekly generative role if at all; the best they can do is bravely and spiritedly resist a powerful and sinister environment (this again is quite Darwinian; Darwin has the environment do all the big things; see Barzun 1981). Note, for example, how Fletcher describes the relationship between husbands and wives. He says:

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What emerges quite clearly is that these husbands and wives were aware of the public teachings about authority and female subordination which we find in a whole range of discourses such as homilies and conduct books and which are reflected in the drama of the period, in ballads and satirical literature. But this does not mean that either husbands or wives were able or willing simply to match their behavior to the rules of prescription. The marriages that have been discussed here were only in certain limited ways patriarchal in practice. In each case there was an internal dynamic to the relationship that intimate historical sources allow us at least to glimpse. The ingredients of this internal dynamic were always particular, consisting of the hopes and desires, the strength of will and the emotional inclinations of the partners concerned. (172) Fletcher seems willing to conclude that the resistance to patriarchal norms could be considerable. For instance, he points out that “[c]onduct book writer gave as careful attention to the relationship of master and servant as to that of parent and child” (212) but also that “there is plenty of evidence in diaries and letters that most mothers and many fathers were deeply involved with and strongly attached to their children” (188). Remarkable, considering that the “biological and social role of a fertile married woman made her life arduous” (184). But he does not allow all this goodness in the family a real connection with social changes. The same sort of social change that Stone might connect with the growth of affective individualism in the family, Fletcher maintains has more to do with patriarchal oppression. The 1624 Infanticide Act, for instance, according to Fletcher, originates from “an obsessive concern about the problem of uncontrolled female sexuality among the poor” (278). According to Fletcher, it was

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clearly not a genuinely moral development. Fletcher would likely not have considered whether patriarchy was the consequence, not the product, of household anxieties because the generative ability of his loving and warm households is apparently quite limited. Once young boys were taken away from their loving mothers, and subjected to punitive apprenticeships or schools, they apparently became the same men who kept patriarchy afloat. However, if we consider household environment as a powerful generative agent of the social environment, could it be that Stone’s characterization of the sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries as a period where a “personality type with ‘low gradient’ affect, whose capacity for warm relationships was generally limited, and who diffused what there was of it widely among family, kin, and neighbours” (268) predominated, might be part of an explanation for the omnipresence of male anxieties for the period? Fletcher, whose thesis seems a parallel work to Stone’s, covering the same period, and the same subject matter, must be aware of this possibility (and might have something to do with some of the odd examples he insists should be characterized as examples of parental love), but leaves us with a sense that this option is in essence very difficult to explore. Alas, intimate source material is limited. The nature of relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children can only be a matter of conjecture, and perhaps should be left to common sense anyway. Common sense would tell us that “[t]he age, like all ages, had its child abusers” (208). As a way of getting at private master and servant relations we could use public records. But public records, according to Fletcher, “predictably reveal sadists who went far beyond the bounds of what was considered acceptable at the time” (214). However, common sense would

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also tell us that something is amiss when public records are used to defuse any sense that barbarous treatment of servants was the norm, and also to prove and emphasize the importance of the omnipresence of “moderate” violence against women in the household. Fletcher says that “[t]he absence of systematic records of wife-beating would seem to suggest that it was common and that a moderate level of violence within marriage was seen as acceptable and not as a matter of public order” (194). But here he is not defusing marital violence. Instead he uses this statement to introduce a lengthy documentation of the horrors of being a wife in this period, towards a conclusion that [“s]uch incidental evidence reminds us of a huge untold story of the contestedness of English Patriarchy within the early modern home” (198; emphasis mine). If we turn to anthropology to help us gain insight into aspects of history where we might especially wish, as Stone comments, “actually [to] be present, with notebooks, tape-recorders and cameras, at the events we describe” (1987, 86), we’ll realize why this oft-repeated wish might be somewhat disingenuous. What I am suggesting is that if we like the stories we tell about a period of history we are interested in, the absence of evidence might help us keep these stories the way we want them to be. Fletcher doesn’t turn to anthropology, but he does refer to a number of gender historians who as a group tend to dip into the anthropological well to help make their cases. With anthropology, you didn’t need a new generation of gender or social anthropologists to unearth an obsession with dangerous women - it’s omnipresent. But when history takes on subjects like manners and morals, consumption, and foreign policy, and finds the “dangerous woman”, we are left with one more reason to turn to anthropology - and to anthropologists with their notebooks, tape-recorders, and cameras to investigate pretty

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much anything they want to (slight to substantial exaggeration; see Tuzin 1991). As noted, even the traditional historian’s trepidation about anthropology tending “to be one of the most a historical of disciplines in its lack of interest in change over time” (Stone 1987, 85-86) should now newly serve as an advertisement for anthropology considering, as we have explored, that some historians are developing the same habit. And if we look to anthropology I think a case can begin to be made that the effort to explain the omnipresence of male anxieties has thus far failed to explore a more likely explanation for them than we have thus far been offered. The anthropologist Donald Tuzin begins a paper written for the reading public of Social Science and Medicine by stating that if you [n]ame any behavior . . . [you would] probably get agreement from most anthropologists that we need to know more about it” (867). But he argues that what is curious about sex is that anthropologists “seem unable to decide whether they know too little or too much about it” (867). He asks: “Facts? We have plenty of facts about sexuality, in the sense of descriptive reports, but few data, in the sense of facts as they are valorized in a context of analysis” (867). Tuzin’s complaint is the opposite one of gender historians who offer plenty of analysis but complain about the relative absence of accounts of intimate behavior. Tuzin, himself, though, does work with his ethnographic facts to build up a theory to explain a particular sexual act: the self-administered penile blood letting of Ilahita males (a practice, he explains, that is not unusual in the ethnographic world). The usual explanation offered for this behavior is that adult males have been socialized to understand this activity as necessary “ in order to rid their bodies of maternal and other feminine essences” (871). He notes that what could only be understood by witnessing

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the behavior was the unmistakably autoerotic element in the observed behavior. He asked the man, and he asked himself, how the participant managed to sustain an erection during the procedure. Were custom or social norms sufficient to explain why the man would hack at his own glands with a crab claw? He concludes that “unlike when the ordeal was first administered when a terrified youth feared castration, peniscutting has a tonic effect, largely because it is a reassurance of his masculine power to control, dominate and expel agents which owing to their feminine source, are weakening and debilitating. Importantly [he writes], this effect occurs not only because cultural understandings dictate that it should; by virtue of its independent erotic component the experience verifies and by so doing naturalizes the culturally constituted idea that penis cutting is, indeed, an effective means for ridding the body of noxious, specifically feminine, substances” (871). Thus far, if Fletcher wanted to use an anthropologist to support his thesis, Tuzin might serve. If early modern English men, stuck with a model of a one-sex body and a corresponding patriarchal model based on gender hierarchy, rather than inseparability, could figure out a way to substantiate these norms with the real felt experience of household dominance, they too would feel pleasure. Tuzin’s Ilahita may have been somewhat more inventive, or perhaps were prepared to go to further lengths, than Fletcher’s eighteenth-century male men, because the Ilahita, too, lived with a mythological charter myth that left patriarchy perennially vulnerable (1999, 160). Remember, Fletcher told us that early-modern English men were stuck with a conception of womankind that “left them in possession of sources of power which men found mysterious and threatening” (402). In essence, the Ilahita men believed in a

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charter myth that credited the original discovery or invention of paramount cult objects, like bullroarers, to women. Thus, it was feared that should women ever find out these secrets, which were “kept secret” within the confines of the male initiation rite - the Tambaran, that the end of secrecy would “mean the end of women’s credulity and men’s legitimacy” (159). The Ilahita were stuck within an ideological framework which was potentially far more disastrous for them than was true for eighteenth-century English men. The Ilahita, did not have an Adam and Even myth which clearly made men hierachically superior to women. Instead, the Ilahita charter myths gave the greatest powers to women. So men feared that should women find out these secrets - secrets which were told by each generation of men to the next - that there would be an “apocalyptic collapse of male authority” (159). Apparently, the Ilahita, too, could have used an ideological reconstruction of their charter myths, because they were otherwise left fearing (although immediately before hand, joyfully anticipating - explanation to follow) a deluge. And, in fact, that’s what they got: the Tambaran did break down and Tuzin revisited his Ilahita friends to uncover the results. Fletcher several times to the work of Lyndal Roper and to her work Oedipus and the Devil. Roper discusses how discovering that “[t]he axiom that gender identity was not a biological given but a historical creation was immensely liberating: the historian’s task was to lay bare the precise historical meaning of masculinity and femininity in the past, thus relativizing the content of these constructs in the present”(13). Clever gender historians could excavate the archaeology of gender construction, and dig up the nasty secrets that help keep men in power in the present. Tuzin tells us though that the secrets of the Tambaran were exposed not by the women but by Ilahita men themselves. He

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recounts: [In] September 1984, the people of Ilahita experienced an event of historic significance to themselves. During a Sunday church service, several men in their forties came forward to the platform, and by prearrangement each in turn confessed to the women in the congregation that the secret men’s cult - known locally and throughout this region as the Tambaran - was a lie. To be exact, the secret was that there was no secret. Contrary to what the women and their foremothers had been told for generations, the spirits of the Tambaran did not materialize and sit with the men in their secret conclaves, did not eat the sacrificial feasts, did not sing in voices of another world. These were merely illusions, created by initiated men with the help of imaginative tricks, prodigious appetites, and clever man . . . (1; emphasis in original) He asks himself: “Why did the men do it? What would have incited them to obliterate, in the space of a few moments, the soul of an ancestral tradition that encompassed a vast range of cognitions, values, and social relationships?”(20). He speculates that it was possible that Christianity undermined their sacred truths, but he is unconvinced. He asks: [W]hy did it take thirty-two years of exposure to Christian teachings before they made the final leap to faith? The most general answer is that it took a generation’s worth of challenging circumstances, grudging adjustments, and spiritual decay before the Tambaran, hugely successful in its time but also fraught with moral contradictions, finally became unwelcome in its own home. In other words, it was not only that Christianity - its tenents and promises, as

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construed by the villagers - pulled Ilahita in that direction; something else, something old and internal to the culture pushed it there. (2; emphasis mine) He is referring to the Ilahita Creation myth about the Cassowary-Mother - the story of “Nambweapa’w”. This story “foretells the death of male hegemony as an act of revenge, one to which, also prophetically, the men fatally, avoidably, expose themselves” (65). The men were as happy about this as Roper is about the prospects of undermining the myths of patriarchy in the present day. “The men rid themselves of the contradiction that had bedeviled them since the inception of the ritual system in the last century: the reliance on secrecy and deceit, which undermined the legitimacy of male authority and produced a sense of moral unease and vulnerability among the men themselves” (65). The men expressed to Tuzin that “to reveal the Tambaran to the women meant conquering their fear that its secrets would be discovered . . . [which is] why, as was later described to [him], the occasion was triumphant, festive. The act was a catharsis, a brave, spiritual cleansing. By returning the cassowary’s skin to the women . . . the men resolved a moral dissonance that had haunted male society from is mythic beginnings” ( 176). Tuzin tells us the later results: With no deceptions and secrets to hide, there is no need for masculine, conscience - soothing considerateness. Domestic relationships are increasingly raw and unbuffered. From both observed cases and the general impression gotten from living in Ilahita, it is clear that acts of violence by men against women - mostly against wives, but also against mothers - have greatly increased in frequency with the decline and death of the Tambaran. The reason is nearly

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always the same: with the Tambaran gone, wives no longer bend to their husband’s will; indeed some wives, believing men are now powerless, attempt to dominate their husbands. What they find is that, with the Tambaran gone, husbands resort to their fists, which in the short term hurt far more than rhetoric does . . . Men no longer dominate women and therefore they no longer fear them. The loss of the Tambaran has removed the sublimation channel, exposing women to a level of domestic brutality much higher than was previously observed. Ritual menace and rhetorical violence have gone, replaced with the real thing. Ironically, it would appear that the Cassowary - Mother’s final revenge, the ultimate force of the Deluge, is not the liberated savagery of women, but the unsublimated savagery of men. (177) It was a Burkeian horror story made real. But for Tuzin, experiencing this horrid turnabout to a people he clearly had come to love brought about a clear realization something he couldn’t understand fully until the Tambaran was dissolved. Tuzin admits that “[d]uring [his] first fieldwork, problems in the mother -son relationship were detectable but overshadowed by the effects of ritual controls on this and all other relationships . . . [but] by the time of [his] return the death of the Tambaran and the altered state of gender relations had yanked these problems into stark visibility” (165). He says that what the men could not know when the Tambaran was being dismantled was that “while the Tambaran may have engendered fears at one level, it dissipated fears on another. Those fears, older and more primitive than the Tambaran, were not really fears about women at all, but about Mother - though, of course, it was and is women who suffer because of them” (177). He says “what is clear in retrospect

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is that the Tambaran - that most woman hating of institutions - actually helped to protect the maternal relationship by displacing and diffusing much of its negative affect” (168). He says that “because women endured a free-floating resentment, which perhaps closest to capturing the generalized sense of subordination she experienced as woman” (172) that it is “not surprising that the woman’s frustrated anger settled upon her sons - those other males in her life who were not fully under the protection of the Tambaran” (172). “Ironically [he says] this maternal behavior propagated its own tragedy by giving boys an experience of women that was consistent with the grim lessons of the Tambaran. Never mind that the boys may have grown up to be caring husbands, men who were not always happy with what the Tambaran required of them; the morbid thoughts . . . found outlet in the violent imagery of the Tambaran. It was to those tyrannies that wives responded. Like mothers before them, wives would vent their frustrations upon their sons, and so the cycle was repeated: men punishing mothers, in the guises of wives” (172). Tuzin, now really seeing the abuse of sons within the household comes to conclusions he hadn’t previously about the nature of pleasure in penile self-mutilation. Earlier he had been arguing that men took pleasure from this act because it made substantial the myths concerning the dangers of female poisons. Now, he begins to argue that the men took pleasure in the myths because they made substantial real felt feelings of female domination and emasculation. Perhaps driven by the horrors he was now witnessing, he unapologetically asks questions which had been with him for some time. “Why [he asks] did men of the Tambaran preserve the incriminating charter? If the secrets were lethal to the men’s interests, why did they not simply stop telling them,

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burying the secrets, once and for all, under six feet of amnesia? Or, better yet, why didn’t the mythmaker concoct a set of tales justifying the men’s seizure of ritual prerogatives from the women?” (160; emphasis mine). He answers, definitively, that “[t] he answer is that the Ilahita men cleaved to these stories in order to cope with felt vulnerabilities . . . Naming or narrativizing an existential fear is no cure for it . . . [but] [n]evertheless, named fears are less terrifying than unnamed ones, and the ability to project these fears as pictures, stories and ideologies is a large part of what separates us from the beasts” (160-161; emphasis mine). Tuzin is concluding that the myths which gave to women fundamental powers was a reflection of felt experience by men within the household. Boys might resist abuse, but they experience the mother as allpowerful. Tuzin refers to the larger adult turbulences as “a continuation of problems in the mother-child relationship at an . . . earlier stage . . . before gender differentiation is clearly established; when personal identity is being formed and the presence of absence of essential trust in primary relationships is setting the trajectory of future stages of development” (173). Men take pleasure in getting “the woman” out of them because their personal identity is being formed at a time when their mothers have clear dominion over them. It works, but its not enough: “the men keep telling these stories to themselves [stories of female power, and male emasculination]” (169; emphasis in original), demonstrating their chronic anxieties. Tuzin has come to a theory to organize his facts which - whether he knows it or not - may explain why anthropologists have left “facts . . . theoretically unassimilated and conceptually undeveloped” (867). Frances Dolan (a gender historian who is apparently quite trendy - she has been recommended to me a few times lately) cites

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Linda Gordon to make a point about “current fears” in gender scholarship: “Defending women against male violence is so urgent that we fear women’s loss of status as deserving, political ‘victims’ if we acknowledge women’s own aggressions.” Dolan remarks that “[i]n the last decade or so, this reluctance, and a practical concern about diverting scarce funds away from battered women, has created deep divisions between researchers and activists focusing on ‘domestic violence,’ which is usually construed as synonymous with wife abuse, and those who define their topic as ‘family violence,’ to include attention to women’s aggression as well as their victimization” (221). While Dolan agrees “with those who focus on battered women that men’s violence causes more harm and is therefore a more pressing social problem, [she] also think[s] that the reluctance to scrutinize women’s violence obstructs the project of understanding everyday life in the past and of improving it now” (221-222; bless her). It is not the intention of my essay to revisit the material evidence that historians like Stone believe prove growing affective relations, or, like Linda Pollock (note that Pollock turned to evidence from sociobiology, studies of primates, and (selectively!) from anthropology to make her case (Cunnigham 14)) or Keith Wrightson, believe disprove Stone’s theory. I am simply not yet familiar enough with the material evidence to even consider doing so. However, I am hoping I am presenting my own kind of evidence that might make those who are more familiar with the material evidence than I am consider if answers as to the nature of parent-child relations in the past lie in further exploration beyond what we now know, or in considering whether previous interpretations have a lot to do with what historians are prepared to admit to themselves concerning its nature. Returning to Dolan. She cites some of the same evidence Fletcher does -

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Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew - but to help prove that both men and women used violence in the household. Fletcher says that the play is about how “[p]atriarchy has its price for women, a price paid in terms of certain requirements for public behavior” (107). But Dolan points out “that Katharine’s violence toward characters other than Petruchio is not necessarily, or not only, ‘shrewish’. This is, it is not invariably depicted as something she must learn not to do. For if the blow she strikes at Petruchio allies her to the shrew tradition, some of her other outbursts place her in the tradition of spirited English lasses or, as Petruchio says admiringly, ‘lusty wenche[s]’” (209). She argues that “[t]he focus on Petruchio’s methods of taming Katherine, as well as the assumption that domestic violence is always and only enacted by husbands against wives, can obscure who hits whom and why in the play” (208). “As Katharine learns to entreat and beseech, then, it is not surprising that she employs physical force to command her audience’s attention, dragging in Bianca and the Widow ‘as prisoners of her womanly persuasion’. The focus has shifted from overt physical violence. . . to less injurious coercion . . . and to discursive domination ... In relation to more acceptable targets and by means of more acceptable tactics, Katharine still dominates others” (220; emphasis mine). Continuing to problematise the sharp dichotomy between dominate and subordinate, Dolan notes “that the sharp representation of women as casualties in court records and as killers in a range of legal and literary representations - collapses when the focus shifts from murder to non-lethal forms of violence. So does the sharp opposition between court records and other kinds of evidence” (205). She is correct: if true, this does problematise current favoured representations of patriarchy. For if all the

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ballads, plays, etc., about powerful, dominating women, scolds, witches, and whores, can be related to real experiences of dominating women, we should be left wondering if maintaining patriarchy necessitated the creation of these stereotypes or whether real experiences of dominating women maintained patriarchy - the same question Tuzin ended up pondering. As mentioned, Fletcher refers to Roper’s work Oedipus and the Devil several times in his text (more than any other scholar in fact). Yet strangely, he does not do so when he discusses witchcraft (the subtitle of Roper‘s book is: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe). Fletcher says that “[w]ell established patriarchal attitudes . . . made a connection in contemporary demonological theory between women and witchcraft predictable. The issue, as in all sexual politics, was one of power. Faced by women who behaved in away that was suspicious and irrational , men in authority . . . jumped easily to the conclusion that witchcraft was involved” (26). What Roper says about witchcraft is this: [W]itchcraft accusations centrally involved deep antagonisms between women, enmities so intense that neighbours could testify against a woman they had known for years in full knowledge that they were sending her to a ‘blood bath’ as one accused woman cried to her neighbours as they left the house for the chancellery. Their main motifs concern suckling, giving birth, food and feeding; the capacities of parturient women’s bodies and the vulnerability of infants. This was surprising, at least to me: I had expected to find in witchcraft a culmination of the sexual antagonism which I have discerned in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury German culture. (202; emphasis mine)

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Roper ends up concluding that the reason mothers accused other women of beings witches is so “[s]he and those around her are able to crystallize her own ambivalence towards her infant by projecting intolerable feelings on to the lying-in-maid” (215). She talks about the experience of new mothers: “[G]iving birth and caring for an infant might raise memories of her own infancy, recalling the terrifying dependence on the maternal figure for whom she may have experienced unadmitted, intolerable feelings of hatred as well as love, there was another person playing the maternal role to hand” (211). “She projected the evil feelings about herself on to the ‘other’ woman” (211). Roper’s account of witchcraft leads in an entirely different direction than does Fletcher’s. Indeed, Roper points out that it was not a matter of misogyny: “after all [she explains], it was because the state took the fears and accusations of suffering mothers seriously that cases could be prosecuted” (217). So I am left wondering: If it is possible for historians to look at the same material evidence (or essentially the same, Ropers’ examples are mostly about Germany though Fletcher is quite aware of this) and come to nearly opposite conclusions concerning the nature of the dangerous female, how much of this history is self-serving? Shouldn’t we consider whether what gender historians like Roper and Dolan are doing is moving us slowly, but surely, to the same conclusions about early modern England (Europe) that anthropologists like Tuzin (there are many others, and his account of Ilahita is widely applicable throughout New Guinea - at the very least) came to concerning the cultures they were studying. Will we eventually conclude that the reason a one-sex model existed for over a millennium is not because men weren’t capable of inventing something better until Locke came around, but because it accurately characterized what it felt to be a man during this

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period? We might need our ideological frameworks to reflect the way we feel (as Tuzin proposes). If we can allow ourselves to imagine ideological systems in this way, then Stone’s account of the development of affective individualism might in fact be linked to the development of a two sex gender model (and, unlike Stone’s account, this might have been an improvement for both men and women). Perhaps you couldn’t have a two-sex gender model until men felt less like they were full of maternal poisons. And what about the development of manners? the ‘man of feeling’? the private vs. public distinction? Will we eventually realize that collapsing characterizations of these developments into forms of gender control, might miss the real story that they had more to do with an improvement of relations between man and woman, between generations, that allowed for a kind of social growth previously impossible to imagine? Tuzin offered us an anthropologist’s (by and large - he refers to the work of psychologists) perspective of the consequences of the maternal abuse of their sons. If we imagine that the consequence of being reviled as “the dangerous other” in early modern England was not Fletchers’ Uebermenschen mothers, but was instead the same as for Ilahita women, perhaps its now time to turn to a developmental psychologist to investigate the nature of the growing child. Tuzin refers to the importance of identity formation in the early years of a child’s life. Stanley Greenspan offers an expansive look at this in his book Growth of the Mind. Before I get into this, a few words about Greenspan. Like Tuzin, Greenspan tends to be the kind of scholar that elicits comments like: “Greenspan generously shares his insights . . .which are brilliant and exciting. . . a clear guide to the early stages of emotional development”. (This quotation is from Berry Brazleton, a psychologist

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that historians like Linda Pollock and David Stannard have actually used to support counter arguments to the one I am making). Something in their overall calmness (Tuzin’s outburst waited until 1999) in manner, their respect for other scholars, and perhaps because they “don’t take their arguments too far” (this book by Greenspan would be deemed an exception here), allows them to get away with presenting arguments which are not politically correct and yet remain on “acceptable” reading lists. Greenspan begins his book by introducing us the importance of emotions for the development of the mind: In recent years, through our research and that of others, we have found unexpected common origins for the mind’s highest capacities: intelligence, morality, and sense of self. We have charted critical stages in the mind’s early growth, most of which occur even before our first thoughts are registered. At each stage certain critical experiences are necessary. Contrary to traditional notions, however, these experiences are not cognitive but are types of subtle emotional exchanges. In fact, emotions, not cognitive stimulation, serve as the mind’s primary architect. (1) He continues: Historically, emotions have been viewed in a number of ways: as outlets for extreme passion, as physiologic reactions, as subjective states of feeling, as interpersonal social cues. Our developmental observations suggest, however, that perhaps the most critical role for emotions is to create, organize, and orchestrate many of the mind’s most important functions. In fact, intellect, academic abilities, sense of self, consciousness, and morality have common

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origins in our earliest and ongoing emotional experiences. Unlikely as the scenario may seem, the emotions are in fact the architects of a vast array of cognitive operations throughout the lifespan. Indeed, they make possible all creative thought. (7) However: Because the formative emotional experiences through which our minds develop vary so much from person to person, individuals differ considerably in the levels of the mind they master and maintain. Some have difficulty with forming relationships and modulating feelings and behavior. Some master only the mind’s early levels. They interact and communicate predominantly though behavior (hitting when angry, grabbing when lusty, stealing when greedy). Others progress to using symbols, including ideas and words, to communicate their wishes, feelings, or intentions but still tend to function in polarized, rigid ways. Others who progress further are capable of reflecting on feelings, dealing with gray-area ambiguities, collaborating and negotiating with their own and other’s wishes, and formulating values and ideals.

Also . . .the depth and

breadth of each individual’s mental development varies. The inner world of some people encompasses may of the emotional themes of life -

closeness,

dependency, sexual pleasure, assertiveness, anger, passion, empathy, jealousy, competition. Others experience only a shallow, repetitive drama. (164) Greenspan tells us that “the child can develop a rich inner life only if she has experiences from which she can derive and refine inner images” (84) This is intuitively

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understood by historians when it comes to, say, the experiences of people encountering the “enriched” environment of London in early modern England (when they are not talking about the anxieties of the London environment that is). But according to Greenspan, although later experiences are important, the most fundamental and determining experiences (or lack thereof) occur in early childhood with interactions (or lack thereof) between children and their mothers (within the household). Painful experience can polarize patterns. “Projecting one’s own inner desires on others can result in a fixed attitude about how the world operates, one that can become selffulfilling. Regarding other people with suspicion, for example, may lead them to act angrily, which only confirms the individual in believing they are not to be trusted. Fixed beliefs derive from rigid personal needs that do not allow an empathic grasp of the complexities of other people’s lives” (122). Further, if the interactions between the mother and child are overly hostile “emotions fail to cohere into comprehensible patterns. Intense storms of feeling rage across the mind, whipping up huge waves of affect that capsize and wreck thought, logic, and the sense of reality” (190). Assuming you had a generation raised without the affective, interactional involvement Greenspan says characterizes the adult who reacts to situations impulsively, who attributes hostile intentions in ambiguous situations, and who tend to think in a stereotyped polarized ways, would they be at all similar to the generations constituting early modern England? John Beattie has argued that “violence was part of everyday life” (37). Stone concludes that “[i]t already seems clear. . .that medieval English society was twice as violence-prone as early modern English society, and early modern English society at least five times as violence-prone as nineteenth-century

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English society” (1987, 310). The normal explanation for this change in the level of violence (Beattie notes the decrease in violence too) is that a commercial society could not function without self-restraint. Robert Shoemaker tells us that in London, “[i]n a rapidly, growing metropolis, filled with immigrants and permeated by new forms of wealth, men of all social classes needed new ways of establishing and defending their honour” (1999, 138). So new prescriptive codes emphasizing manners (self-restraint) decreased physical violence (though Shoemaker tell us it increased the use of public insults by men). In Shoemaker’s article on “The Decline of Public Insult in London” he argues against a top down imposition of this civilizing process. He says that “[w]hereas Elias identified the key agents of the ‘civilizing process’ as the developing state and interactions between the ruling and upper-middle classes, the changes [he documents] were for the most part unrelated to the state. . .” (130; unlike, say, Paul Langford 1999). My complaint with historians who are concerned to tell us not to look at “pressures from above” is that they do not themselves get to the “bottom” of the matter. If Greenspan is right, and if developmental psychology is a valid discipline, then we must stop imagining the mind as tabula rasa, so that it isn’t common sense that if prescriptive codes start (and if these norms weren’t resisted by “the oppressed”) prescribing selfrestraint that that itself would inculcate it. Greenspan is arguing that self-restraint has more to do with emotional development and that conflict resolution has to do with self-restraint and empathy: Conflict resolution, however, is not a purely cognitive enterprise or a rational weighing of options. It involves other capacities as well: the ability to empathize and a moral sensibility, both of which stem from mastery of the

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different levels of emotional development. In many ways, a person’s ability to deal with conflict is a natural extension of her ethical or moral awareness. Successful conflict resolution requires the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes, to acknowledge and empathically experience the other’s objectives. It’s difficult to give up any of your own goals if you can’t intuitively understand the reason the other person feels so strongly about his own” (234). In other words, manners really are related to morals, and that both are not part of a hegemonic ideological system but signs of real personal, and thus also societal, growth. The conventional explanation for the development of sympathy (Adam Smith) is related to the new needs of a commercial society, or even more to new conceptions of the body focusing on “nerves”. We are often offered little discussion whether or not this was related to a real growth in human sympathy and sympathies. For example, Paul Langford tells us that in the eighteenth-century, character was coming to be associated with “a stronger sense of the complexity of human psychology, of the range of choices available, unconsciously as much as consciously. With this went a still clearer notion of the richness of human experience. Personality became less, not more, explicable and harder to judge definitively, more prone to delicate and uncertain distinctions” (294) This resembles almost exactly how Greenspan characterized an emotionally well-developed person. But Langford is documenting a new character type of the English gentleman - who had read The Man of Feeling - and so he says: “[w]hat real effect it had on ordinary behavior it is impossible to estimate. Perhaps it was a selfdelusion” (295). But Langford does recognize the growth an entirely new social category (credits it to needs of the state), and for Greenspan, and I hope for us, this itself

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a clue as the nature of its origins. Greenspan remarks that “[i]n both theory and practice we have tended to underemphasize the generative aspect of intelligence, the creation of intentions and ideas, instead focusing more on how intentions and ideas are put into a frame of reference” (127) He speculates that “perhaps we have paid less attention to the generative aspects of intelligence because we haven’t understood the processes involved in their production. Because ideas emerge from affects and intentions, it is quite possible that the dichotomy between reason and emotion is partly responsible for our oversight” (127). I think that this is an example of Greenspan’s generosity. My experience has been that there has always been a preference for the Hobbesian man in history and the social sciences - or the Darwinian (Darwin does discuss man’s development of morality but characterizes man’s ability to replicate or rival the creative processes of nature as “pathetic” (1859). The overall model of ideological growth we normally encounter, as I have already mentioned, is Darwinian. The biologist Brian Goodwin complains about the greatest error of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, “which is to describe biological process at the organismic level in terms of pure contingencies, organisms being seen as the manifestations not of rational order together with contingencies, but solely in terms of contingent evolutionary histories” (57). NeoDarwinism, he says, “does not have a theory of organisms as self-organizing entities” (54) He expands into an argument of the potential ability of the mind to internalize the environment as part of a process of creating alternatives to their current environment. This potential, as Greenspan has explained, depends on the nature of early child -parent relations. Without an affective relationship with the mother, the child experiences life

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as a “shallow, repetitive drama” (164). Together, Greenspan and Goodwin, offer challenges to easy assumptions of the power of ideological frameworks to straightjacket the creation of new paradigms. Instead, the unusual staying power of an ideology requires explanation. But if we follow my line of argument, the new two-sex gender model, and the creation of private (female) and public spheres (male) should be an improvement over the one-sex model - and not for the reasons Fletcher offers. Even Stone believes this to have been a disaster. I’m going to let Anne Mellor make this case for me. Mellor argues: Rather than seeing the public sphere ‘invading’ and ‘colonizing’ the private sphere, as John Brewer does, I see the values of the private sphere associated primarily with

women-moral virtue and an ethic of care - infiltrating and

finally dominating the discursive public sphere during the Romantic era. As a result of women’s published writing in this period, generations of children were taught to see the role of the nation differently. Women writers were primarily responsible for insisting that the conduct of the British government must be moral - that political leaders should demonstrate the same Christian virtues that mothers and daughters - and fathers and sons - were expected to practice at home. It was this transformation in public opinion, in the political culture of Britain, that made the financial excesses and sexual promiscuity of George IV increasingly less acceptable to his subjects and ensured that no future monarch of England during the nineteenth or twentieth century would be permitted to indulge in such fiscal and moral irregularities. (11-12)

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Mellor, agreeing with Linda Colley, argues that “women writers of the Romantic era in Britain participated fully in the public sphere as Habermas defined it. Their interventions - through the agency of the discursive public sphere - thus had political and economic consequences so far reaching that they call into question the prevailing scholarly assumption that women did not participate in the public sphere or that a locatable dividing line between the private and public sphere, existed in England between 1780 and 1830” (142). Importantly, for our purposes, she points out that: A striking visual confirmation of their success in redefining the image of the ideal British woman occurs in a design by Lord George Murray that was widely circulated in 1792 by the loyalist Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. Etched by Thomas Rowlandson, The Contrast/1792/Which Is Best visually represents two opposing modes of feminized national identity or governance: England’s Britannia versus France’s Marianne . . . [figure 1] “French Liberty” is portrayed as an Amazonian harridan with Medusa-like, snaky hair, carrying a sword and triumphantly brandishing on her pitchfork the head of the decapitated male corpse beneath her foot. Another hanged gentleman swings from the lamppost behind her ,emphasizing that her savage revolutionary fury is directed especially against males . . . In contrast, “British Liberty,” or Britannia, appears holding the scales of Justice in one hand, and the Magna Carta in the other. Modestly dressed, wearing the helmet of Athena, the Union Jack engraved on the shield that forms the side of her chair, with the British lion sleeping beside her, Britannia is an icon of prosperous peace and happiness, guarded by the British man-of-war

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before her. Most notable, however, is the fact that Britannia holds the traditional staff and Phrygian cap of Liberty. This new Britannia, even as she forswears French license and violence and instead promotes the domestic virtues listed below her - “Religion, Morality, Loyalty, Obedience to the Laws, Independance, Personal Security, Justice, Inheritance, Protection, Property, Industry, National Prosperity, Happiness” - nonetheless embraces that “Independance” or “female revolution in manners” explicitly advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792. (143-144) If Britannia is, as Mellor argues, the mother of the nation, Britannia’s portrayal as clearly female does not seem to limit her importance and power. This is what Fletcher has argued should have happened. If we compare this Britannia with the Armada portrait of Elizabeth, who, Fletcher tells us, is aligned “with the armed warrior maidens of the psychomachia” (80) and thus, he says, is partly male, we might wonder if we are seeing the results of growing warmth between children and their mothers over this time. The war-like powerful “mother” Elizabeth transforming into a softer - though still strong - mother Britannia. Consider: Why exactly was Marianne depicted as an Amazon? was she partly male? wasn’t this sort of depiction related to a one sex gender model which had by then been replaced? Or do these images, like all public images and portrayals of women across time, reflect at a cultural level the nature of the experience of mothers within the household? Women could still be imagined as Amazon-like, even if the French Marianne and not the English Britannia, in spite of a two-sex model, perhaps because many men had grown up with experiences of a terrifying mother within the household. Yet, to at least imagine a softer, though still authoritative image of

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Britannia, may have represented a kind of growth in the imaginative acceptance of the portrayal of women. She could be strong and yet not be warrior-like, or demonic. I am not suggesting that there was a complete turnaround, but perhaps, if we do not limit too closely the kind of public portrayals of women we might think would characterize female empowerment, hidden in late-eighteenth century images of women might be signs of a growing toleration of the strong woman as something other than a terrorizing creature that men needed to tame. We might also remind ourselves that although gender borders may not be a sign of a mature society they well have been an improvement over what existed previously. (And consider Tuzin’s account of the collapse of borders in Ilahita society . . . ). Consider, too, according to Shoemaker, from “an examination of conduct books . . . and popular literature shows, for example, that a key aspect of contemporary beliefs about defamation, the cultural stereotype that women were prone to scolding, lost much of its power in the eighteenth-century. In these books complaints that women were naturally loquacious and loose with their tongues virtually disappear after the middle of the eighteenth-century”(119) Shoemaker believes that this was a result of the waning of humoral psychology. Could it instead be because children were growing up with less scolding from their mothers? - a conclusion we might come to assuming the rise of developmental psychology in history. Fletcher concludes that the end of the eighteenth-century did see a reduction in male anxieties. I agree - it seems clear from all the material evidence that he and others provide that (some? many?)boys were experiencing less anxiety provoking, warmer relationships with their mothers, so there was less reason to feel anxious. (I am, in part, being playful here - I am not maintaining

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that the nature of city life, rhythms of commerce or social changes, had nothing to do with the experience of anxiety). Warmer relations might have made women’s greater involvement in the public sphere possible, and it would certainly be a pre-requisite for Mellor’s thesis of women setting the tone of public life (even foreign policy - she explains that the “concept of the mother of the nation [was] also used to justify Britain’s colonial imperialism (144)”) to be correct. This influence would otherwise, invariably, be construed (and felt) as poisonous (Wilson demonstrates the prevalence of “poison” imagery or feminized images of corruption (1998, 223) and hyper-masculine “patriot” imagery but up until 1785 - a careful look at the nature of changes in this sort of imagery throughout this period and thereafter would seem warranted (my next step?)). I have been trying to show that the eighteenth-century may have been the story of the improving man, rather than part of a continuing story of the base man. Stone once wondered if social psychology might one-day capture the interests of modish historians in the way anthropology currently had then done (1987). I would like to make the case for developmental psychology instead. Stone’s concern over social science was that it tended to be reductive and static. I would argue that though much of the history gender historians offer is a pleasure to read (surprised?), it is because many of them are extremely nuanced writers. But they are collapsing the nuances of history into a singular paradigm of patriarchal hegemony, despite its many variations. This paradigm offers changes in discursive definitions of gender, say, but along with an (essentially) unchanging account of men’s predatory tendencies. Developmental psychology and developmental psychologists are axiomatically attached to the importance of change over time, and to the importance (and possibility) of the

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particulars of experience in affecting the direction of this change. Moreover, developmental psychology is all about a celebration of the potential ability of all people to direct and shape their future, their world, to become creative, complex, multi-faceted and “good” - exactly the qualities that we should hope define future historians as well as future citizens. I would suggest that psychologists like Greenspan, with his attentive, extensive, and patient observations of his subject from which he intuits remarkable insights into why people are as they are, and do what they do, should serve as a model of what a historian should ask of her/himself in regards to the study of her/his topic of interest. Let’s open up the questions . . .

[Dr. Money’s comments: “I take my hat off!! A real sense of engagement with the problems and thus something to engage with. Well done! 92%]