meanings. We might call this the vertical route to horizontal extension; we are led out to the longue durée embedded in the text, or at least to the middle durée. The language of seventeenth-century politeness echoes through texts of the High Enlightenment, over a century later, which play with and sometimes bend beyond recognition their received connotations. We cannot understand Malebranche without Augustinianism; Shaftesbury and others without Stoicism; Diderot without a succession of medical mind/body paradigms. To do justice to the labor/aisance binary we have to be aware of the lineages of the family of words in which it operated, which have articulated gender differentiation since antiquity.
All this may not meet the aims of a refashioned history of ideas. I prefer to call it a history of language at work, a history whose tight focus on the form as well as the content of texts requires a long view.
Chapter 1
The Social Aesthetic of Play in Seventeenth-Century France
In the second half of the seventeenth century French authors commonly gave their nation pride of place in the creation of a distinctly modern literature. The natural grace of literary French seemed to make it superior not only to other European vernacular languages, but also to classical Greek and, perhaps more striking, to the classical Latin on which boys and young men labored in the collèges, heard university lectures, and conducted academic theses and disputations. There was much arrogance and more than a little pretension to the assumption that French belles lettres were, or ought to be, the envy of Europe. And yet many of the innovations that came to characterize “modern” literature did have their origins in seventeenth-century France, and the reason is not hard to find. It was in le monde—the elite society of Paris—that the writing of prose and poetry entered into symbiosis with a new culture of orality, the polite conversation of the salons and other venues of sociability among the titled and the wealthy.1 Out of this chemistry came a wide array of new stylistic forms and genres in the vernacular, among them the mock epic, the “gallant” love letter, the vernacular poem, the epistolary essay, the polite dialogue, and the novel. Strict traditionalists among “the learned” (savants) might disapprove, but they were scorned as mere “pedants”; there was no need to imitate classical literature unswervingly on the assumption that it could not be superseded. The eloquence of public rhetoric in the royal law courts and the pulpits was owed respect, of course, but polite conversation and writing prided itself on being unsullied by it.
This was the goût moderne, the “modern taste” developed by, among others, Vincent Voiture, Madeleine de Scudéry, Mme de Lafayette, and Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle. The eighteenth century witnessed a growing distaste for the goût moderne as the fluffy mannerism of a self-absorbed aristocratic society. Diderot and other philosophes equated its modernity with decadence; national rebirth required something quite different, an uplifting literature of high moral seriousness. Over the last several decades literary scholarship has taken exception to the self-righteousness of this verdict.2 Two interlinked themes have emerged: that the goût moderne was modern in a far more positive sense than its eighteenth-century critics allowed, and that women—or more precisely, the women of le monde—played the central role in forming it and endowing it with cultural authority. In the French monarchy, Mlle de Scudéry has one of her characters observe in a conversational essay on “politeness” (politesse), the conversation of women is more “free” (libre) than in republics.3 Scudéry’s Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–1653) and Lafayette’s Zaïde (1669–1671) and La princesse de Clèves (1678) were founding texts in the history of the modern novel. Women’s presence as listeners and readers was essential to the formation of a worldly literary culture and the fledgling literary public that emerged around it. Stylistic experiments in constituting a new relation between author and reader—a shift from the rhetorical imposition of authority to a more reciprocal intersubjectivity—simulated the reciprocity expected in the “sociable equality” of polite conversation, of which women were the acknowledged masters. If aesthetic judgment was not individualized in the modern sense, it nonetheless gave more play to the “free” subjectivity with which women, unencumbered by learned rules, seemed especially endowed.
The goût moderne confronts us, however, with a deep paradox that we have not taken sufficiently into account. It is all too obvious that leisure was the way of life of the French old-regime aristocracy. It is so obvious, in fact, that we rarely plumb the alterity with which that way of life confronts us. We observe seventeenth-century polite culture from our side of a great social and cultural divide. One of the defining assumptions of modernity is that labor, and especially intellectual labor in various kinds of professional work, is a vital route to personal and social self-validation. When we speak of labor that is dehumanizing, it is with the certainty that labor ought to confer moral dignity, and indeed that it is essential to the realization of human potentialities. The certainty owes its centrality in modern culture to a concatenation of social and intellectual changes, some of them already underway in the late seventeenth century. One thinks of the Protestant and particularly Calvinist ideal of the calling, the Jansenist recognition of the need for the motive power of self-interest in human societies, and John Locke’s ethical thought.4 The norm of utility in assigning personal worth—of social “usefulness” through labor—is one of the enduring legacies of the Enlightenment, and it has been powerfully reiterated, if also impoverished, in our current saturation in an ideology of immediate market utility. Modern advertising insinuates that disciplined labor is not only materially rewarding, but also emotionally satisfying and even liberating. Enthusiasts of contemporary crime novels and television series will agree, I think, that the detectives, so obsessed by their work that they have little or no personal life, are emblematic of this ethos. Only in work do they find the meaning they cannot do without.
Most pertinent for our purposes, the work ethos permeates the pursuit of equality in modern feminism; among the essential human rights owed to women is the right to equal access to labor and its rewards. The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, approved at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, claimed for women equal rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and women’s exclusion from most intellectual labor surely figured in its denunciation of men for endeavoring “in every way that (they) could to destroy woman’s selfconfidence in her powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” Feminists regularly appeal to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, because it makes no distinction between men and women in stating that “everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”
In the light of these lineages of modernity, the norms of le monde and its literary culture were profoundly un-modern. The preeminence of this world rested on a perceived incompatibility between the socially validating freedom of play and the socially invalidating constraints of labor. In the spaces of polite sociability, labor was taboo. Women were the emblems and guardians of a social aesthetic of play that scorned utility, and that required that the performance of intelligence appear to be effortless, untainted by the concentrated and sustained effort that the term “labor” evoked. Hence the paradox of a profoundly unmodern modernity in which gender and status norms were so tightly interwoven as to be barely distinguishable. The paradox reminds us pointedly that, just as perceptions of social institutions and practices are refracted through the lens of gender distinctions, so too gender distinctions are refracted through the lens of status imperatives.5
To avoid presentism in studying seventeenth-century mondanité, I have made the social and cultural logic of un-modern modernity central to my reading of its texts. That is essential to understanding another paradox: that gender and status norms fused to set strict boundaries for women’s performance of intelligence even as they made female thought and speech exemplary for men aspiring to polite cultivation. Awareness of this duality
