Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 by Anthony Pollock

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 by Anthony Pollock Shawn Lisa Maurer Anthony Pollock. Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755. New York: Routledge, 2009/2012. Pp. 232. $142.50. Recently reissued in paperback, Mr. Pollock’s compelling study has become newly available to readers interested in the conversation about the shaping, dissemination, and continuing influence of the discursive public sphere in eighteenth-century England. Yet rather than address the necessary exclusions and limitations of such a model, Mr. Pollock turns his energies to “de-center[ing] the familiar Whig paradigm” by bringing into the discussion as “influential theorists of public discourse” Astell, Manley, and Haywood—whom he reads alongside Addison and Steele. A synthetic reframing, Mr. Pollock’s close readings bring those occluded texts “from margin to center.” He provides insight into how Addison and Steele’s vision of an ostensibly inclusive and politically neutral publicness dominated eighteenth-century discourse. Although his analysis is well-grounded in public sphere debates, Mr. Pollock’s use of primary sources enables him to “recover a sense of the period’s ideological complexity by attending to perspectives that have often been left out of historical work.” Relegating critical discussion largely to footnotes, his nuanced readings of lesser-known female-authored texts contextualize “materials against which figures like Addison and Richardson constructed their influential essayistic and novelistic paradigms.” Part I on “representations of general readership in post-Restoration print culture” analyzes “Models and Countermodels of English Public Discourse, 1690–1714,” attending to “neglected” texts, such as the Female Tatler, which connect with the dominant “spectatorial” vision of Addison and Steele. The more innovative analyses of the book’s second half consist of two chapters that address “the cultural politics of female engagement in conventional public-sphere activities.” Expanding the argument to both genre and period, Part II addresses the novelistic reworking of spectatorial ideology in Pamela and Haywood’s mid-century periodical publications. Chapter I, looking backward, attends to three lesser-known writers whose “appeal Addison and Steele wanted both to borrow and to redirect”: Dunton, Astell, and “Ned” Ward. If The Athenian Mercury provided Steele with models for readerly engagement and editorial hierarchy, Astell’s essays, with their trenchant critique of patriarchy, represent the threat that must be contained by Addison’s Whig vision: a method for female self- and social reform through public engagement. Yet the bulk of the chapter ingeniously reads Ward’s steamy London Spy to uncover critical links to Addison’s Spectator, which include “Ward’s deployment of the anonymous observer as a new kind of public intellectual, his idea of the essay periodical as a vehicle for wide-ranging cultural critique, [End Page 132] and his association of the critical observer with specific urban spaces and forms of sociability.” The short chapter “Neutering Addison and Steele” comes as an anticlimax. Mr. Pollock claims that “Addison’s and Steele’s efforts to imagine a neutral spectator turn into allegories of neutrality’s impossibility.” In an excellent chapter on the controversial Female Tatler, he restores the gravitas and complexity of an overlooked text; the chapter’s cogent analysis asks us to rethink our understanding of “gender, power, and the public sphere.” Chapter 4 returns to Astell’s essays, arguing for her crucial emphasis on “the need for women to move from a specular to a discursive conception of themselves and their social agency.” Mr. Pollock provocatively connects the largely ignored Pamela Part 2 to early essay periodicals. He persuasively interprets Pamela as a “female working-class version of Addison’s own Mr. Spectator,” and thus a “potentially subversive feminist critic” in the Astellian mode. A strong final chapter analyzes Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746) and the little-known but fascinating Invisible Spy (1755). Through sustained comparison to the earlier Spectator, the chapter analyzes the complex narrative strategies at play in Haywood’s ostensibly didactic work: “By staging the Female Spectator’s narrative vacillation between Addisonian paternalism and Astellian resistance, Haywood allegorizes the situation of these female readers in early liberal print culture.” The chapter’s final section shows how Haywood works to “subvert the Addisonian spectatorial paradigm...