Fashioning Masculinity

National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century

Dr Michele Cohen, Michele Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134842209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The fashioning of English gentlemen in the eighteenth century was modelled on French practices of sociability and conversation. Michele Cohen shows how at the same time, the English constructed their cultural relations with the French as relations of seduction and desire. She argues that this produced anxiety on the part of the English over the effect of French practices on English masculinity and the virtue of English women.
By the end of the century, representing the French as an effeminate other was integral to the forging of English, masculine national identity. Michele Cohen examines the derogation of women and the French which accompanied the emergent 'masculine' English identity. While taciturnity became emblematic of the English gentleman's depth of mind and masculinity, sprightly conversation was seen as representing the shallow and inferior intellect of English women and the French of both sexes.
Michele Cohen also demonstrates how visible evidence of girls' verbal and language learning skills served only to construe the female mind as inferior. She argues that this perception still has currency today.

1
CONVERSATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE HONNÊTE HOMME IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

Just as there is a specific social context for the sermon or the funeral oration, so too with conversation: it requires a context that is both historically and socially specific, thereby ordering a social space which can become its own.¹ In seventeenth-century France, the salon² was that space. Around the ruelle in an aristocratic lady’s ‘bedroom’³ gathered not only aristocratic men but also men of letters from a variety of other backgrounds, such as Voiture, or Corneille.⁴

More importantly, though, in the ruelles, there were ladies of rank. The social, linguistic and aesthetic ideals which were developed in the seventeenth century centred around notions of politesse,⁵ and the presence of aristocratic women was crucial to its elaboration. The most consummate expression of politesse was in conversation. Women were seen as the natural means to the achievement of this ideal because of their refined and delicate manners, their ‘natural aversion to coarseness’ and, according to Vaugelas, the purity of their French.⁶

Women were central to cultural and social developments of the seventeenth century, not merely because they reigned over the space of the salon, nor just because they were also the arbiters of taste,⁷ but because polite conversation and, most crucially, honnêteté, could not be achieved without them. To achieve honnêteté, wrote Méré, it is necessary to seek the company of honnêtes gens,⁸ and particularly women, for

les entretiens des Dames, dont les grâces font penser aux bienséances sont encore plus nécessaires pour s’achever dans l’honnêteté.⁹ [the conversation of women, whose graces make us think about bienséances,¹⁰ are even more necessary to perfect ourselves in honnêteté.]

In interpreting the positioning of the women of the salon, however, we need to exercise some caution if we are not to fall prey to anachronistic conclusions about their status or their ‘feminism’. While they clearly had a crucial role bearing in important ways on the cultural life and manners of the nobles and the ways these were produced, we should not allow the importance of the role to obscure its nature: it was oriented not to the woman’s production of her self, but to the production of the self-perfecting man, the honnête homme.

Similarly, while their ‘freedom’ may have been greater than that of noble women in Italy or Spain in the same period, whatever value we might put upon such cross-cultural comparison should not obscure the character of the practices which made up that ‘greater freedom’, what they were ‘free’ to do: these women’s conversation, though securing for themselves the privilege of their class, was ultimately productive of gender difference, not power.¹¹ The status of salon women was elevated commensurably with their vital role in refining the conversation of the nobleman, but ultimately it was the noble man who benefited and achieved honnêteté. My primary concern, then, is with the way conversation related to gender on the one hand and to language on the other. This concern leads me directly to consider the honnête homme, and to examine in more detail the discourse on honnêteté.

HONNÊTETÉ

What was honnêteté? While there are many different definitions of that ‘elusive concept’,¹² they nevertheless share certain features. First of all, honnêteté entailed a notion of sociability. On honnêteté depended ‘le plus parfait et le plus aimable commerce du monde’ [the most perfect and amiable commerce of the world].¹³ This sociability also maintained a complex relation to notions of urbanity¹⁴ and politesse. Second, honnêteté was about seductiveness, about developing an art de plaire as part of an aesthetic of the self. The art de plaire itself had a number of aspects: to please, a man had to be agreeable to all, accommodate everyone’s whims and moods,¹⁵ and suffer in silence if wronged:

La colère nous porte à nous venger, et l’honnêteté s’y oppose: renonçons à la douceur de la vengeance; et pardonnons d’un visage riant et d’un coeur sincere.¹⁶

[Anger prompts us to revenge ourselves, but honnêteté opposes it; let us renounce the sweetness of vengeance and forgive with a smile and a sincere heart.]

Because honnêteté was an ideal of self perfection, the honnête homme had to excel in all the virtues of the heart, the mind and those relating to social conduct.¹⁷ Thus, saying neither too much nor too little and cultivating an esprit de finesse, a penetration which allowed one to guess and preempt the secret, innermost thoughts of one’s interlocutors were skills indispensable to honnêteté, and no conversation could take place without them.¹⁸ However, despite all these precisions and stipulations, honnêteté escaped all rules and was, ultimately, a je ne sais quoi.¹⁹

The sources of honnêteté have been discussed in detail by Maurice Magendie, who identified Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano as one of its most important sources.²⁰ One of the first major theorisations of honnêteté, Nicolas Faret’s L’honnête homme oul’art de plaire à la cour,²¹ was, according to Magendie, the bestknown of the French works influenced by Castiglione. Though many treatises on honnêteté were published in the seventeenth century, its ‘foremost exponent and most profound theoretician’²² was the Chevalier de Méré, whose work was published between 1668 and 1677. One of the most important differences between Faret and Méré is usually held to be that Faret’s conception of honnêteté was bourgeois, and Méré’s was aristocratic and mondain ²³ But there is a further, more crucial difference between them. Whereas Faret’s honnêteté was aimed at constructing a code of manners and behaviour for the courtesan at Court, Méré’s honnêteté was a means for men to perfect themselves, what Foucault called ‘a technology of the self’. As Foucault explains, this concept refers to

an art of existence or, rather, a technique of life…a question of knowing how to govern one’s own life in order to give it the most beautiful possible form (in the eyes of others, of oneself)…a practice of self whose aim was to constitute oneself as the worker of the beauty of one’s own life.²⁴

Honnêteté was not learned in books and could not be taught.²⁵

Rather, it was acquired by conversing with other honnêtes gens, especially women, because it was in their company and in the desire to please them that men refined themselves and became honnêtes. Thus, one of the main ways of achieving it was love, in the tradition of courtly love established in the first decade of the seventeenth century by L’Astrée.²⁶ Women were central to this art of seduction, but not as the objects of love so much as the instruments whereby the man might produce himself as honnête. When the honnête homme Mérigène is asked who made him so accomplished, he answers that he owes everything to love:

sans lui il ne serait point ce qu’il est, et que s’il a les qualités d’un honnête homme il les doit à une belle femme qui mit dans son coeur le désir de plaire et le dessein de mériter son affection.²⁷

[without love he would not be what he is; that if he now has the virtues of an honnête homme, he owes them to a beautiful woman who put in his heart the desire to please and be worthy of her affection.]

This passage is significant because of the way it positions the woman in relation to the love she elicits. Mérigène makes it clear: it is to love, not to that particular woman, that he owes his honnêteté. As Méré explained, love filled men’s hearts and minds with noble thoughts:

il est certain que quand on aime une personne d’un mérite exquis, cet amour remplit d’honnêteté le coeur et 1’esprit et donne toujours de plus nobles pensées que 1’affection qu’on a pour une personne ordinaire.²⁸

[it is certain that when we like a person of exquisite merit, this love fills the heart and the mind with honnêteté, and always gives nobler thoughts than the affection we feel towards an ordinary person.]

In their ‘natural’ state, he noted, men are usually ‘all of a piece’, blunt, rigid even, without manners or graces, the antithesis of honnête. When they are not used to women, they become tonguetied²⁹ in their presence. ‘Ceux qui ne sont pas faits à leur manière delicate et mystérieuse, ne savent bien souvent que leur dire’.³⁰ [Those who are not used to their delicate and mysterious ways often do not know what to say to them.] It is the desire to be attractive to women that changes a man, makes him ‘other’ and he (his tongue) becomes ‘insinuant’.

Honnêteté thus appears to have an erotic character.³¹ But this insinuation, which Horowitz calls a discourse of erotic domination,³² is not concerned with possessing the object of love. Through language, love is ‘de-sensualized’,³³ and it represents an indispensable stage in the construction of the self-as-art, a technique for the ethical and aesthetic perfection of the (male) self. As Foucault put it,

technologies of the self…permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.³⁴

The question is, where does this leave women? When Michael Moriarty, in Taste and Ideology, asked to what extent the discourse of honnêteté contributed to ‘the improvement in the image, and maybe the actual condition of women’,³⁵ he intimated that the answer would be affirmative. But, one must first ask, which women?

CONVERSATION

Most major seventeenth-century writers wrote about conversation.³⁶ Everyone had something to say about what conversation ought to be and how it ought to be conducted, and many of the treatises on the art were themselves written in the form of conversations. Such was its importance that in all the written portraits of the time, conduct in conversation was always included, and was of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Conversation and the Construction of the Honnête Homme in Seventeenth-Century France
• 2 The English Gentleman and His Tongue
• 3 Politeness
• 4 The Grand Tour of The English Gentleman
• 5 The Accomplishment of The Eighteenth-Century Lady
• 6 The Sexed Mind
• 7 Tongues, Masculinity and National Character
• Notes
• Bibliography