Feminism and Eighteenth-Century Studies: Working in the Bordello of History

Abstract

Feminism's early interventions in the study of Anglophone culture over the long eighteenth century were bold and radically altered our understanding of the period. But this sea-change has also been shadowed by a sense of anxiety and an underlying fear that in achieving its most prominent goal feminism rendered itself obsolete. Once the question of the canon had been ceded, what was there left for feminism to contribute to eighteenth-century studies? The most sustained response to the question has come from scholars following the lead of "new formalism" who have argued either explicitly or implicitly that feminism's most valuable contribution to eighteenth-century studies now lies in the realm of epistemology generally and aesthetics in particular. However, as Marjorie Levinson has argued recently, "new formalism" never really rose to the level of a "theory" because it never fully articulated what was at stake in its arguments and was, thus, ill-equipped to devise a methodology. Likewise, the new "feminist epistemologies" have inspired nuanced, highly insightful, local readings of specific authors that seem ill-equipped to disclose how it is that they advance, participate in, or even foreground feminism beyond the fact that that they tend to focus on women writers struggling with the gendered contradictions of their own and/or their readers' aesthetic pleasure. While the effort to open a new frontier in feminism and eighteenth-century studies is valuable, and, indeed, much work remains to be done by feminists on both the aesthetic and on epistemology, it is disturbing that the trumpeting of a "new feminism" is attended by a sense that we have finished our business with the past. I want to suggest here that, as feminists, our business with history is not done by half, and beyond that our business with History as both a political and a social fiction is exactly what we need to be focusing on.