Translating Rabelais: Sterne, Motteux, and the Culture of Politeness

Abstract

In a study of 1933 which has long provided the most comprehensive account of Rabelais's presence in English literary history, Huntington Brown presented eighteenth-century gentility as instigating an unfortunate enervation of the Rabelaisian spirit. Noting the movement in the age of Queen Anne to a 'more ladylike standard of speech', Brown argued that 'English letters since the revolutionary period of the eighteenth century have been for the most part unhappily genteel, and hence proportionately barren of anything like true Pantagruelism. Sterne himself was tainted with the new plague, as he betrays in his devious and itching treatment of sex.' For Brown, the contagion of politeness became so widespread during the eighteenth century that even Sterne himself a writer who would be lauded by William Warburton as the 'English Rabelais' was unable entirely to inoculate himself.2 The civilized sapping of Rabelaisian energy pinpointed by Brown involved processes of cultural adaptation which, in recent years, have been less pejoratively analysed in terms of the 'genteelization' or 'feminization' of discourse which began to take place from the later seventeenth century onwards. As Lawrence Klein has argued, part of the cultural project of politeness was the encouragement of a 'conversational' style which would refine written discourse and render it gentlemanly. Branching out from the arena of social behaviour to encompass discourse generally, social politeness the 'art of pleasing in company' also became during this period the refined discourse of literary politeness (or, in Klein's suggestive formulation, the 'art of pleasing in texts').3 As cultural historians have increasingly emphasized, moreover, for many eighteenth-century commentators the genteelization of discourse was an important part of a national movement towards refinement a movement in which the civilizing role of women was frequently viewed as instrumental. Against Brown's distaste for the refined and the ladylike, therefore, we are now more willing to accept on its own terms the eighteenth-century encouragement of a decorous