one is likely to find. It is geologically layered. The bottom stratum of conventional wisdom, including humanist scholasticism, was formed by Aristotle’s view of women as imperfect or incomplete men and Galenic humoral theory, which still dominated medical thinking and had long been integrated into neo-Aristotelian philosophy. In the tight body-mind nexus that this discourse posits, intellectual strength, or “force,” is in some way a function of physical strength, which in turn is generated by the power of heat. By virtue of her role in reproduction, and in sexual intercourse as it was commonly perceived, the female is a passive instrument of nature; the male acts on nature, willing and reasoning to dominate it. Humoral composition makes the female brain, one might say, a soft cold sponge; the male brain is fire-hardened metal. No less than lifting a weight or pushing a plough, though of a qualitatively different order, intellection is an exercise of strength. In her social being woman’s weakness of body and mind takes the form of a lack of self-command, and that is exhibited above all in her indiscrete and babbling speech.66 Here we rise to the top geological layer, Bouhours’s critique of his own era. He extends the ancient stereotype of the babbling or chattering woman—the woman unable to control her tongue—to what was being haled in other quarters as women’s mastery of the art of conversation. Often extolled for its liveliness and subtlety, female esprit figures here as “flashes” that are ephemeral, irrational, and trivial. The epistemological assumption that runs through all the layers is that women lack the capacity for judgment. Bouhours draws on a standard philosophical concept of judgment as the grasp of universal principles and the prudent and consistent application of them to particular cases. It is above all in this power to abstract—to detach universal ideas from sensate particularity—that men demonstrate their superior intellectual strength. Paradoxically “solidity” lies in abstracting from the density of material being. Women are confined to the particular, in their thought as in their social being, which is to say that they cannot rise above trivia. Again Bouhours undercuts the feminizing lexicon of honnêteté. There is a clean difference between the “delicacy” conventionally attributed to women and the true delicacy of mind required of the bel esprit.67
The conventional wisdom had not gone unchallenged. In the traditional “argument about women” (querelle des femmes), stretching from the Renaissance to the mid-seventeenth century, women’s defenders piled on historical examples to prove that exceptional women could be just as virtuous, and just as courageous, as men famed for those qualities, and, less often, that they could be just as intelligent as men with great minds. But this amounted to challenging male supremacy on its own terms; attributes considered “natural” to men remained normative for women.68 As the discourse of honnêteté put a premium on the distinct kind of relational intelligence required in polite sociability and particularly in conversation, female-coded kinds of cognition were revalued in a new hierarchical order of capacities of intellection. Now the qualities considered “natural” to women became normative for men. Men had to acquire from women a “natural” way of speaking; a lively sensitivity; quick intuition; gentleness or softness (douceur); delicacy; grace; amiability. To fail to do so was to risk a loss of honor, a social derogation from the elite of worldliness. Bowing to the imperatives of honor, one might say, men had to give women the lead as cultural facilitators, mediators, and even arbiters.
At issue here was the relationship between intelligence and language facility, the mind and speech. For men educated in the collèges and the universities, learning language was a laborious process of acquisition. One of the justifications for the centrality of Latin in the curriculum was, in fact, that learning the language instilled in boys the endurance, the inurement to laborious effort, essential to a manly character.69 While men were disciplined to use language as an instrument of thought, women’s facility in their native tongue seemed to make words the “natural” and unmediated expression of thought. What had been dismissed as women’s babble about social particularity, a world of mere appearance, was now admired as the performance of women’s superior relational intelligence. To be socially efficacious thoughts must be communicable, and it was women who excelled in that kind of intelligence. Sometimes this was considered a natural gift, something women had by nature and men had to acquire. But if women had the gift, it was no less important that it had not been corrupted by the Latinate education of the schools.70 Society women looked down on the training they neither could have nor, in their enjoyment of an exclusive liberty, wanted to have. It was not simply that they rejected academic jargon. They were free of the rules of traditional rhetorical performance, and of a manly labor of abstraction they considered laborious and therefore boring. While the French Academy sought a standard French for print, women continued to spell phonetically. It was precisely this “natural” naïveté that made women’s speech and writing the model for the elegant simplicity of a polite style.71 Natural simplicity grounded their new cultural authority as judges of literature. At once cultivated and uncorrupted by pedantry in any form, they were the arbiters of taste.
At work here was not “rhetorical re-description,” if we mean by that phrase the technique (paradiastole) of effecting social change by replacing one term with another—from negative to positive, or vice versa—to describe an attribute or an action.72 Instead there was a more subtle and, one might say, smoother process: the received terms were given new valuative and normative meaning. The revaluation is especially clear in the use of the word “delicacy,” a female trait by tradition, to describe an essential quality of polite conversation and good taste.73 Writing in the 1630s, Du Bosc sought to persuade society women that they could make polite conversation more intellectually substantive by doing serious reading, including the ancient texts. He knew that he was challenging conventional wisdom by claiming that female “delicacy” of mind included the capacity to understand the “sciences.”74 In the ensuing decades the discourse of honnêteté, in putting a premium on delicacy, often gave it a kind of acuteness of piercing strength. This linguistic shift made it questionable whether the intelligence that really mattered was about strength in the conventional sense, or indeed in any sense. Perhaps there were more valuable kinds of mental capacity in what had been considered female weakness.
The discourse was cutting the connection (literal and analogical) between male physical strength and mental energy. It implicitly contradicted the conventional notion that by virtue of women’s role in reproduction, their minds were more subject to their physicality. In a sense, it reversed that assumption: the nature of women’s physicality—the delicacy of their bodily makeup—gave them more freedom of mind in what mattered, in relational intelligence and the socially constructed “taste” of le monde, than men enjoyed. That was why schooling could not give men the delicacy of taste that distinguished le monde from the world at large. Only by attending “the school of women” could they become honnête. Delicacy in speech implied a cognitive advantage. Traditionally stereotyped as ephemeral prattle, women’s speech was now admired for its greater “netteté” than men’s; one of the attributes of their more natural speech was greater precision of expression. The implication was that, to a degree, women had the advantage in reasoning itself; the natural flow of their speech reflected the natural acuity of their thought. While in ordinary usage “delicacy” might continue to connote female mental weakness, a daintiness and fragility of the mind, delicacy now also attributed a superior cognitive perceptiveness and clarity to women. Other female traits gave reason a “beautiful” appearance, above all in its externalization in speech. They clothed it—not in the sense of providing mere ornamentation, but in the sense of softening it without diminishing its strength, enhancing its inherent persuasive power without making it overbearing or intimidating. It was in this positive sense that women were seen to be able to “insinuate” thoughts to others in a way that men could not.75
In this discursive context we can better understand what makes Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, published in 1686, such a tour de force. The son of a provincial noble family related to the Corneille brothers, Fontenelle had begun visiting Paris as a young man. He entered the literary world as a fledgling playwright and a contributor to the Mercure galant. Thanks to his connections, his literary gifts, and the grace and wit with which he exhibited
