Preface

Abstract

Preface Discovering an a posteriori order in a varied collection of essays is an artificial enterprise. Yet, such artificiality fascinated the thinkers and writers of the eighteenth century in Europe. The readers of this volume will take, I trust, subtle esthetic pleasure in the realization that, through no fault of the editor, these essays as a group treat, with varying emphasis, one of the universal prob­ lems that confronted the writers of the Enlightenment. In fact, had a title been required for this collection, I would have provided something like “Seeing is Believing: Essays on Cultural Perception in the Eighteenth Century.” For the majority of the essays in volume six of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture treat percep­ tual activities as specific as reading or as general as recognizing the presence of an Other: the self, another, or other societies. The analysis of the act of perception and how it leads to cognition and how the resultant knowledge is turned into action does provide the artificial order referred to above. This is a strongly literary volume, with a good number of essays on the verbal arts (though one, that of Professor Carroll, deals effectively with how one French composer “perceived” Horace and brought him into the musical context of the eight­ eenth century). Among the dominant figures in this collection are Johnson, Lessing, Rousseau, Franklin, Prevost, Swift, and Wollstonecraft . However, such a bias is to be expected, since literature was, more than any other artifact, at the interface of the self and ix X / Preface society. It dealt then, even more than now, in a consistently efficacious and insinuating way, with perception and the processes of cognition. In one of the most influential essays written in the eighteenth century, we read, The fact of our existence is the first thing taught us by our sensations and, indeed, is inseparable from them. From this it follows that our first reflective ideas must be concerned with ourselves, that is to say, must concern that thinking principle which constitutes our nature and which is in no way distinct from ourselves. The second thing taught us by our sensations is the existence of external objects, among which we must include our own bodies, since they are, so to speak, external to us even before we have defined the nature of the thinking principle within us. This passage, written and published at mid-century, comes from D’Alembert’s “Preliminary Discourse” to the Encyclopedie. It is the formalization of two of the most significant ethical and esthetic preoccupations of the eighteenth century, namely, how civilized man perceives others, himself, and his cultures, and how he defines the relationships among these activities. There are several essays in this volume which examine in depth such concerns as cultural definition and perception. Pierre Aubery’s essay subtly delineates the complex way in which the French saw the English in America, as well as how the European French perceived the American French. He shows how stereo­ typical images became concretized and discusses the political significance of their maintenance. There are also several papers (forming one of the ISECS workshops) which deal effectively with the perception of women and of woman’s “place” in the context of eighteenth-century society. Besides Professor Myers’ somewhat revisionist view ofMary Wollstonecraft, Professors Cynthia Matlack, Irene Dash, and Roseann Runte all discuss the relationship between cultural values and esthetic considerations in terms of the de­ piction of women in literature and on the stage. Dash’s paper especially shows to what lengths writers went to define and Preface I xi propagate a feminine image consonant with the dominant per­ ception of the social function of woman. Specifically, she dis­ cusses how Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale was bowdlerized so that “the weaker sex” syndrome could be emphasized. Christine Sjogren’s essay analyzes the role that Lessing played in the defense of feminism. English Showalter’s study of the novelist Madame de Graffigny reveals the precarious social and financial status of female artists in eighteenth-century France. And Kay Wilkins details how the French image of womanhood changed over several decades (from the 1720s to the 1780s) as seen in the pages of two...