A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (22 page)

The women who were part of the rakes’ circle ranged in social status from lower-class prostitutes and actresses (then a novel feature on the social scene) to aristocratic ladies, some of whom, in reputation at least, were as promiscuous as the men. For the first time in English history, a few of them left behind their views of the erotic and verbal game in which they were so intensely engaged, crossing poetic swords with some of the sharpest wits of the period. The most famous, Aphra Behn (1640–89), was renowned, and vilified, as a successful playwright and poet, the first Englishwoman to achieve such literary fame. She was denounced as a ‘lewd harlot’, who dared to describe how a young wife can sexually exhaust her husband, and reduce him to a trembling wreck. She made literary history by giving the woman’s version of premature ejaculation, for which male poets too often blamed their ‘fair
nymphs’. In her poem ‘The Disappointment’ the ‘hapless swain’ is accused of trying to prolong his pleasure ‘which too much love destroys’ and so finds ‘his vast pleasure turned to pain’.
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For their part, the rakes’ attitude to women was at once decorous and coarse, oscillating between adoration and contempt, which was usually born of disappointment or rejection. There was also a strong strain of anxiety about their sexual performance, which is seen in the number of poems about impotence and the court ladies’ increasing use of dildos. The fact that the dildo was from the 1660s onwards usually of Italian manufacture, increased the upper-class English male’s sexual angst, since Italy was associated with an effeminizing eroticism. For an Englishman, what could be more humiliating than to be superannuated by an Italian dildo?
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The rakes broke no new ground in the chronicles of misogyny, except that in the explicitness and coarseness of their language they foreshadowed the first of those that we would recognize as pornographers. Indeed, Wilmot was treated as such until relatively recently. In 1926, an edition of his poems was seized in New York by the police and destroyed.
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However, the rakes were unlike pornographers in several important ways – one was that they dealt with the frustrations of sex as well as its delights, being as frank about their episodes of impotence as about their conquests. There also prevailed a feeling, particularly powerful in Rochester’s case, that the pursuit of sexual pleasure is just another one of life’s transient absurdities.

By the late seventeenth century, a significant number of people saw sex as an activity independent of procreation and love. Biology, of course, still imposed constraints on the ability of men, and more so women, to act out that view, the condom and the dildo not withstanding. Though it is a view that has been met with more than one conservative moral backlash, it
has continued to thrive in Western society, regardless of all attempts to suppress or contain it.

However, it was far from being the dominant morality, nor was it the one that would determine the shape misogyny would take in the coming centuries. By the early eighteenth century, in England and Holland, thanks to the huge expansion in overseas trade, the mercantile middle class had established itself as a political power to be reckoned with. It had forged a moral code to reflect its priorities. It was a moral code that was in some ways conservative, stressing the virtues of frugality, thrift, hard work and sexual restraint. But thanks to its revolutionary emphasis on the needs and importance of the individual, it made it increasingly difficult to deny women their full share of humanity even as misogyny refashioned itself to fit aspects of the new dominant morality.

During the early eighteenth century, a new literary form arose to embody that individualism: the novel. It would play a unique role in women’s history. For the first time characters were portrayed as individuals, living their lives in an actual time and an actual place. The novel was true to women’s experience in ways no previous literature had attempted. Before, the great poets and dramatists had presented characters and plots that stayed faithful to certain universal types, derived from mythology or history and intended not so much to represent an individual but to embody some general truth about life. These truths were held to be timeless, unchanging Platonic absolutes contrasting with the ephemera of individual experience. In contrast, the novel from its very beginnings, in the work of Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), relies on realistic detail to tell the stories of characters. We get to know Defoe’s characters Moll Flanders and Roxana in an intimate way, quite unlike the way we know Medea or King Lear. The novel was an instrument for exploring the personal lives of recognizable
people, and as such allowed the presentation of women characters and their relationships in a completely new way. It is no coincidence that the novel was also the first literary form that women’s tastes and concerns helped to shape; nor is it a surprise that, though its earliest practitioners were men, it would soon become the genre in which women excelled more than in any other. By the end of the eighteenth century in England there were more women novelists than men.
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The prosperity of the middle classes in England had been accompanied by an expansion of the reading public and an information explosion, with printing presses appearing all over London, producing pamphlets, and the first newspapers and magazines. Furthermore, an increasing number of women had more free time on their hands. Because of an enduring Protestant distrust of the theatre as being somewhat disreputable, a large number of those women turned to the novel for entertainment. Its appeal to the middle class, and to women, was evident. You did not need a Classical education, or knowledge of Greek and Roman history, to enjoy
Moll Flanders.
Its author, after all, had been educated in a trade school and had practised a trade (first as a hosiery merchant then as a pamphleteer and journalist). The fact that novels often featured women characters in lead roles was also a powerful attraction to women readers. Two of Defoe’s four greatest novels are about women –
Moll Flanders
(1722) and
Roxana
(1724).
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He was a strong advocate for women’s education. Apart from everything else, he was a successful author who realized the importance of women as readers. Defoe also helped influence the growing opinion that opposed parents forcing daughters to marry against their will, which he likened to rape. As a spokesman for the middle classes, he stressed the importance of love in marriage and argued, ‘to say love is not essential to a form of marriage is true; but to say that it is not
essential to the felicity of the married state . . . is not true.’
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However, as a God-fearing Protestant, he warned against ‘lewdness’, or sexual passion, as a reason to marry, claiming in a pamphlet, that it ‘brings madness, desperation, ruin of families, self-murders, killing of bastards, etc.’
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However, the moral message that his novels convey is not quite so unambiguous. All Defoe’s characters are basically like his first and most famous, Robinson Crusoe; they are shipwrecks. Crusoe is shipwrecked by storm at sea; Roxana, on the other hand, is shipwrecked by a foolish, selfish husband who abandons her and her five children to starve. The stories are all tales of survival under difficult circumstances. Roxana survives and prospers by becoming a whore and courtesan to a series of rich men. A predictable enough if not respectable route for a beautiful woman to take, it might be thought, and Defoe tries to reassure the reader with frequent moral asides stressing that he is not recommending that women should follow his heroine’s example. But Roxana does not conform to the prevailing stereotypes of women and though Defoe does his best to disapprove of her, it is evident throughout the novel that his admiration for her as an economic success story overcomes his conventional moralizing against how she makes her money. Most importantly, she is not governed by love but by the desire to preserve the autonomy that she has achieved thanks to her economic success. A considerable part of the novel is about how she manages her money. In doing so, she redefines her relationship with men. She rejects marriage when proposed to by a man who loves her because, she says, ‘tho’ I could give up my Virtue, and expose myself, I could not give up my Money . . .’ She explains: ‘my heart was bent upon an Independency of Fortune; and I told him, I knew no State of Matrimony, but what was, at best, a State of Inferiority, if not Bondage; that I had no Notion of it; that I lived a Life of absolute Liberty now; was as free as I was born, and
having a plentiful Fortune, I did not understand what Coherence the words Honour and Obey had with the Liberty of a Free Woman.’
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Even when pregnant, she resists the offer of marriage. Defoe reverses the usual situation. It is the father that is pleading for marriage to the mother on behalf of their unborn child. Roxana rejects him and he is stunned. ‘For it was never known,’ he responds, ‘that any Woman refused to marry a Man that had first lain with her, much less a Man that had gotten her with-child; but you go upon different Notions from all the World, and tho’ you reason it so strongly, that a Man knows hardly what to answer, yet I must own, there is something in it shocking to Nature . . .’
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Roxana’s concern about the security of her fortune accurately reflects the legal situation of married women in the eighteenth century, which was still governed by patriarchal notions that went back to Roman times. On marriage a woman’s property became her husband’s. (This would remain the case until well into the nineteenth century.)

In the end, Roxana does marry – for a title, and only after the strictest measures are in force for preserving the independence of her fortune. The strongest characters in her story are all women, and the most intense relationships are between them. The male characters are passive, insubstantial creatures, who do not even have names, mere rungs on the ladder of Roxana’s climb to the top.
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Just as Robinson Crusoe was the portrait of the autonomous man, forging an independent life for himself against all the odds, Roxana is his female equivalent – the first vision of an autonomous woman that we have. Throughout the novel she is called an ‘Amazon’ – a member of the legendary tribe of warrior women who lived without men – an indication of the deep-seated and continuing anxiety that the notion of an autonomous woman inspires.

For women the middle-class values that opened up visions of individuality would prove to be fraught with ambiguities. The new morality of the middle class resembled the old in its identification of a woman’s worth with her chastity. The middle-class wife and mother of the new model family, while she was expected to be able to ‘comfort’ her husband sexually, was also being increasingly represented as a person for whom sexual pleasure was not important. Her virtue became propaganda in the moral war the middle class fought against the wastrels and degenerates of the aristocracy. The image of the good middle-class wife of the eighteenth century would prepare the way for the fainting, sexless Victorian maidens of the nineteenth.

The resilience of misogyny can be explained partly by the fact that misogynists have always had it both ways. Perhaps comparable to the way Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews as both Bolshevists and bankers, misogynists have either condemned women for being sexually insatiable or denied they had any sexual desires at all. In this contradictory dualism, women were viewed as either insatiable sexual predators or chaste and virtuous sexual victims.

This dualism clearly manifested itself in the 1740s. The greatest poet of the age, Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in such poems as ‘To A Lady’ summed up one aspect of traditional misogynistic thinking:

Some men to business, some to pleasure take,
But every woman is at heart a rake.
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A completely opposite view of women appeared around the same time with the publication of
Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded,
the first novel by Samuel Richardson. Richardson, a printer and the son of a carpenter, was commissioned by a
publisher to write a volume of letters that would teach the innocent – or presumed innocent – daughters of the middle class how to conduct themselves when working as servants in the homes of the aristocracy.
Pamela
was the tale of how a virtuous young woman resists the multifarious and determined attempts of her employer, Mr B, a rake, to seduce her. Pamela declares that her maxim is ‘May I never survive, one moment, that fatal one in which I shall forfeit my innocence!’
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Faced with her impregnable purity, Mr B finally gives up and proposes marriage. Pamela reconsiders all her previous moral objections to him and deciding he is not such a bad chap after all, accepts. By the novel’s end, thanks to his wife’s sterling example, the rake has become a Puritan. It was not, of course, the first tale of a virtuous woman resisting a lustful male, but it was the first time a servant girl was accorded that heroic role, proving that while the aristocracy may still be socially superior to the rising middle class, the middle class were their moral superiors.

Pamela
enjoyed extraordinary success, first in England, where it went through four editions in a short time, and then in France. Among its most devoted readers were middle-class women. For this reason, the novel is a landmark in the history of women as well as of literature. By making
Pamela
a bestseller, for the first time women (at least middle-class women) had exercised their say over what they wanted from writers. And what they chose was
Pamela,
a parable of middle-class feminine purity pitted against the desires of the rapacious upper-class male. Its lead character provided a model for the daughters of merchants, printers and haberdashers to emulate. But the parable contained a deep moral ambiguity. Was Pamela being ‘pure’ for purity’s sake, or merely as a lure to entrap Mr B?
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