Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing

E. Burleigh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137404084
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

Through the prism of intimacy, Burleigh sheds light on eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century American texts. This insightful study shows how the trope of the family recurred to produce contradictory images - both intimately familiar and frighteningly alienating - through which Americans responded to upheavals in their cultural landscape.

Chapter 1

Discursive Intimacy

Franklin Reads the Spectator with Bifocals

Beginning a book about the trope of family in early American literature with a discussion of gossip in early eighteenth-century British periodicals may seem (to put it charitably) counterintuitive. Without this background, however, the discussion that follows would be missing a crucial antecedent: how people thought about relationships between people that were not familial—nor national, nor economic, nor political, nor even necessarily emotionally deep, let alone steeped in the sentiment and sensibility that would come to dominate discussions of human connection in the second half of the century. Understanding how noninstrumental (or not primarily instrumental) relationships were figured makes clear the ways in which later eighteenth-century American writers both repudiated and repurposed different languages of union.

I argue that early eighteenth-century essay writers learned to value the structure of gossip for three reasons: first, because of its capacity to create a provisional intimacy not structured by affective or institutional relationships; second, because that intimacy produces limited but mobile communities through apparently oppositional but in fact reciprocal modes—both enforcing social norms and suggesting the pleasure of violating those norms through gossip; and third, because of its capacity to depict spaces in terms of conversation rather than actual, geographical locations. From closet to tea table to theater to coffeehouse, at the moment of exchange, environment recedes (although it is never entirely forgotten) and the sensation of shared secrets takes precedence, marking a discursive space of intimacy. By “discursive space,” I mean not simply to refer to physical space—the auditory range, for example, required to hear gossip—but to temporal space as well, which is a function of the longevity of a given conversation. That is to say, the space carved out by gossip is temporary and provisional, its boundaries not necessarily coterminous with the conclusion of a conversation but always potentially available and always potentially collapsible. Thus gossip-structured essays served to sponsor a form of social cohesion explicitly not rooted in rational discourse. By this I do not mean to suggest that gossip constitutes a version of irrationality but to argue that it is one mode of sociable relation not governed by the rational communicative imperatives so frequently associated with the eighteenth century in general and its print culture in particular. Gossip accomplishes this cohesion precisely because it is a nonrational, nonfunctionalist form of communication.

It is also persistently gendered. Consider the way in which the very title and first issue (1709) of the Tatler make explicit a connection between tattling and gender: having instructed his male audience that he will tell them “what to think,” Richard Steele, in the persona of Isaac Bickerstaff (the gentleman astrologer whose “Lucubrations” the Tatler purports to be), “resolve[s] also to have something which may be of Entertainment to the Fair Sex, in Honor of whom I have invented the Title of this Paper.”1 This gendering has been taken to align gossip with femininity and femininity with the private, so that gossip becomes a private form of language because it is associated with women.2 These associations do not line up perfectly, however. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions of gossip undeniably describe it as a feminine vice, in direct contrast to the useful public discourse of men. But it is not clear that, given the structure of gossip, we need to understand this initially feminized mode as exclusively private. The gendered divisions between gossip and conversation, between coffeehouse and tea table, are not clear cut—as evidenced in part by the Tatler and Spectator’s adoption of gossip’s structure for the very goal of propounding useful public discourse. Nor does the gendered division map onto a public/private division quite so neatly. Gossip acts as a point of permeability between public and private, one that not only Steele but also many writers of periodical essays exploited in considerations of how civic (but not always civil) discourse might shape and direct a nation. This uneven lining up of gender with social and discursive space underscores a secondary argument running throughout this chapter: that what is most interesting about eighteenth-century imaginings of public and private realms is how people imagined negotiating the spaces between, across, through, and around those realms.

Or consider the development of the word “gossip” itself: while it was used as a verb occasionally prior to the nineteenth century, the far more common understanding of “gossip” was as a noun signaling a relationship of affinity between persons. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) first defines “gossip” as “one who answers for the child in baptism,” a definition the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) follows in its first, etymologically derived definition, from godsib, of a baptismal sponsor or godparent. The OED next defines gossip as “a familiar acquaintance,” a term applying primarily to women. Johnson, by contrast, lists its second meaning as “a tippling companion” and third as “one who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in.” The “tippling companion”—presumptively male, rather than the other presumptively female persons who run about tattling—marks precisely the kinds of informal, noninstrumental relationships whose structure essay writers were interested in adapting—largely but not exclusively feminized, then, but also not aligned with either rational discourse or sentimental attachment.

I use the term “gossip” here in part to capture the complex and contradictory sets of relationships its evolving meanings contain—relationships both sacred and profane, lasting and ephemeral, and explicitly and pejoratively feminized but also applied to both men and women. I also use it in the interest of simplicity: eighteenth-century periodicals proliferated terms for conversations about other people, ranging from the rather harmless (if childish) “tattling” and “prating” to the perhaps repugnant but not necessarily pernicious “gossip” or “idle talk,” from the shocking but ultimately inconsequential “scandalizing” to regulatory “censure,” from libelous “calumny” to downright vicious “backbiting.” Lumping these modes together under the somewhat anachronistic rubric of “gossip,” if reductive, helps isolate the common structure shared by each of these terms and highlights that structure’s significance in eighteenth-century periodical literature.

At its most basic, gossip’s structure is one of inclusion (of the gossipers in a relationship of shared knowledge) through exclusion (of the object of gossip, who is the object of that shared knowledge). This definition will become more nuanced as the chapter investigates particular print instances of this intimate conversational structure, but for the moment, I want to stress that gossip is not interested in its own effects. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have consequences nor that those consequences can’t be specifically mobilized: it is precisely the argument of this chapter that certain periodical writers do seize on both the structure and topic of gossip as a means to produce discursive intimacy in a printed text. Rather, I want to underscore the fact that gossip is not normally understood to be functional or socially useful; it is in fact generally understood to undermine social bonds: it hurts people, it renders conversation vapid, and it registers and encourages selfishness.3 In this respect, then, gossip simply perpetuates itself for the pleasure of perpetuating itself: it does not require (though it may have) a purpose or function.

The chapter begins by considering gossip as a mode of discourse and its theoretical implications for performances of femininity and the stability of any sort of public/private dividing line, even in the period often understood to originate that division. It then substantiates this critique of public and private by examining the use of a gossiping structure in two of the most prominent early eighteenth-century London periodicals, the Tatler and the Spectator. The chapter next turns to two other periodicals—one contemporaneous, the other appearing more than a generation later—which imitated the personas of the first two and played up the gendered ascription of gossiping: the Female Tatler and the Female Spectator. It concludes with two sections on Ben Franklin’s essays published in periodicals: The first addresses his gender-bending use of gossip as an explicit theme and topic, while the second assesses his ventriloquism of a figure who would usually be an object of gossip.

The Public, the Private, and Gossip

Gossip’s disruption of the boundaries between what are most often termed “public” and “private” poses a problem for the usual narrative of the development of the public sphere, and my understanding of public and private thus obviously qualifies the model articulated by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. On the Habermasian account, the public sphere emerges out of the creation of an intimate sphere (aligned with the domestic) that constitutes persons with a sense of their own subjectivity, which individual subjectivities then become available for abstraction into liberal citizenship.4 But gossip in the early eighteenth century appears to draw from, or depend on, a division between public and private that antedates the historical “origin” of the public sphere at the beginning of the long eighteenth century. Moreover, it establishes the existence of two such realms only to suggest their mutual interpenetration. How can something depend on a division it erases?

There are a few ways to answer this question. One response would hold that there is a public and a private in the Habermasian sense in the early eighteenth century, but that abstraction is not a prerequisite to entry into the public sphere. Another would argue that the mutual constitution of the public and the private means that they are always on the verge of collapsing into each other. Another answer would suggest that there is no such distinction in the eighteenth century, that this division is more properly understood to occur in the nineteenth century when gendered habitation of the public and the private seems to solidify. Still another version would claim that the public and the private become distinct for men in the eighteenth century but that women had to use other modes of mobility—like gossip—in order to have access to the public and that men adapted this mode as a way of producing a sense of intimate readerly inclusivity. In some sense these all seem at least potentially plausible, though there are significant rebuttals to each—if abstraction is not required, why do writers omit or disguise their identities? Doesn’t reciprocal definition suggest overlap without dissolution? What could mass print production mean if not the creation of a public? If the gendering of roles and spheres really solidified in the nineteenth century, why would there be such a sharp sex division in the eighteenth century? I suggest that the incipient division of realms Habermas traces is incomplete in the eighteenth century: the public sphere was not so public because of the exclusionary practices of its actual geographical spaces; the domestic arena was not so private, given the expansive definition and size of families (nonnuclear relatives, visitors on extended stays, servants) and, in urban spaces, given the proximity of other domestic spaces; the first moves in the direction of a division between public and private brought with them an emphasis on a social realm that partakes of both and belongs to neither, which I am calling the intimate; and the primary discursive form of this realm—coextensive with but not identical to the eighteenth century’s focus on polite conversation and sociability—is gossip.5

Habermas’s account of the rise of coffeehouse culture in London as the origination of a public sphere moderated by rational communicative discourse between socially mixed but situationally equal people matches in part my own understanding of the development of public spaces. Where my thinking differs most substantially from his model is first in its account of the development of privacy, which he links to the rise of the bourgeois conjugal family and the attendant shifts in architecture and belletristic conceptions of subjectivity and sentiment, all tending toward the understanding of selfhood as definitionally interior. I understand the private to be discursively structured as well but productive of what he terms the “role of human beings pure and simple” only insofar as human is understood to mean male.6 Second and more important, I contest the notion of an exclusively “rational” account of discourse in the development of the public. At stake for me in Habermas’s emphasis on rationality (and in his respondents’ emphasis on sentiment) is the functionalist approach to social space it implies, by which I mean the predictable production of persons by virtue of the spaces they inhabit.

One way to explain this rather compacted formulation is to look carefully at Habermas’s explanation of the role the intimate sphere plays in the development of the public. He argues that the new bourgeois public embraced the idea of law as “the quintessence of general, abstract, and permanent norms” in direct contrast with autocratic monarchical rule because of “the practice of the secrets of state.”7 The public’s amenability to the rule of law derives in part, as he explains it, from the normative effects of literary practices and social conventions emanating from the intimacy of the conjugal home and its emphasis on subjective individuation: “As a public they were already under the implicit law of the parity of all cultivated persons.”8 Habermas goes on to explain the consequences of this interpenetration of public and intimate realms in the following terms: “The bourgeois public’s critical public debate took place in principle without regard to all preexisting social and political rank and in accord with universal rules. These rules, because they remained strictly external to the individuals as such, secured space for the development of these individuals’ interiority by literary means. These rules, because universally valid, secured a space for the individuated person; because they were objective, they secured a space for what was most subjective; because they were abstract, for what was most concrete.”9

It’s crucial to note Habermas’s reliance upon the imaginative space “secured” for the “individuated person,” in contradistinction to the literal spaces that barred particular persons. He relies here, as in his assessment of the social function of London’s coffeehouses, upon the principle of access and equality imagined by the newly developing bourgeois public. But this principle was simply that: an abstract norm like the rule of law, certainly, but one whose practice differed substantially from its theoretical purity. Habermas is clearly aware of this: he notes, for example, that discussions within coffeehouses lacked any guarantee of political inconsequentiality and the fact that women, excluded from the actual space of the coffeehouses, launched an unsuccessful pamphlet campaign against the vitiating effects of coffee.10 What gets lost in this analysis, however, is the way in which such principled accessibility, if not extended in practice, results in precisely the sort of secrecy he imagines such normativity opposing. That is to say, in the terms of this chapter, where Habermas sees court secrets and monarchical rule replaced by rational-critical debate and the rule of law, I see the transformation of court secrets used for political leverage into discursive secrecy and revelation—the structure of gossip—used to negotiate and ultimately collapse those spaces in and to which access is not permitted.

The question of access is a question of movement across spaces, and the movement between public and private enacted by gossip is one prominent method of rendering seemingly exclusive spaces permeable. Understanding access as movement—rather than a Habermasian potentiality of principle—de-spatializes both the public and the private. As should be clear by now, intimacy constituted by gossip in this chapter emphatically does not invoke a Habermasian intimate sphere, reducible to the domestic, nor does it simply replace “privacy” with a plausible synonym. Gossip’s intimacy rests in the (usually) dyadic structure of conversation but stretches across all sorts of arenas: familial, political, economic, and social. “Intimacy” in the way I use it describes a relationship between persons that is not in the service of anything (except, perhaps, the production of still more intimacy—an economics of self-proliferation that will be discussed later): it is not a functional, determinate sphere.

Patricia Spacks, in her 1985 book Gossip, notes an “atmosphere of erotic titillation” present even in gossip of a nonsexual nature.11 This “implicit voyeurism” stems from our shared “prurient interest in others’ privacies, what goes on behind closed doors.”12 Rooting gossip in prurience, however, as Spacks does, is only one part of the equation in eighteenth-century conceptions of gossip. Spacks notes thr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Intimacy, Integrity, Interdependence
• 1. Discursive Intimacy: Franklin Reads the Spectator with Bifocals
• 2. “Regular Love,” Incest, and Intimacy in The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette
• 3. Incommensurate Equivalences: Genre, Representation, and Equity in Clara Howard and Jane Talbot
• 4. Sisters in Arms: Incest, Miscegenation, and Sacrifice in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie
• 5. “Mangled and Bleeding” Facts: Proslavery Novels and the Temporality of Sentiment
• Notes
• Bibliography