 | The Unsex'd Females |  |
INTRODUCTION
A prolific writer whose work is now largely forgotten, Richard
Polwhele 
was the author of numerous religious tracts, political satires
and essays, topographical and historical studies, poems, translations,
and biographical and autobiographical sketches. He was born in
Truro, Cornwall, on 6 January 1760 to common but well-to-do
parents: his father, Thomas, maintained a small but ancient estate
two miles outside of town, and his mother, Mary, kept the house a
center of social activity. The poet and satirist John Wolcot (better
known by his nom de plume, "Peter Pindar") was an
instructor of 
Polwhele's at school, and a frequent guest at the
Polwhele home. Wolcot took an active interest in young Richard's
literary aspirations, reading his poems and praising them for their wit,
but at the same time adjuring him to refrain from writing in "damned
epithets." The two must have had a falling-out at some point; years
later, Polwhele would spitefully attack his former mentor in A
Sketch of Peter Pindar (1800) (See Appendix I). In addition to
Wolcot, Mary Polwhele had other literary friends, two of whom
Richard met on a visit to Bath and Bristol in 1777: the historian and
radical political pamphleteer Catherine Macaulay, and the poet and
playwright Hannah More. Macaulay, "the English Thucydides," was on
this occasion being honored with a birthday celebration, featuring
elaborate parties, poetry readings, and culminating with the
presentation of a sculpture featuring Macaulay as the muse Clio.
Richard Polwhele participated in the festivities by composing an ode
for Macaulay, which was published along with five other poems in
April, and which marked Polwhele's debut as a writer. Following the
suggestions of several of his friends, Polwhele soon after published a
volume of poetry entitled The Fate of Lewellyn, a work
which did nothing to further his career, and which indeed gave him
an early reputation as a callow and unpromising poet.
In the spring of 1778 Polwhele entered Christ Church, Oxford,
where he remained long enough to be admitted to the study of law,
but not long enough to take his degree; instead he entered the
church, and proceeded to take minor offices in various small parishes
in Cornwall and Devonshire. His first long-term position was as
curate of Kenton in Devonshire, a post he held from 1782 to 1793.
Here Polwhele cultivated many friends, including several self-styled
literary men who had formed a society for belle lettres in Exeter.
Polwhele became an active member of this group, and served as both
editor and major contributor to its first anthology, Poems,
Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall (1792).
During his years at Kenton Polwhele also completed what was to
become his most acclaimed and enduring work, his translation of the
Greek pastoral poets Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus (1786) (these
were reprinted countless times, and the translation of Theocritus
remained the standard throughout most of the nineteenth century). In
1793 Polwhele published the first of his topographical "histories,"
Historical Views of Devonshire, and began publishing his
second, more extensive study, The History of Devonshire
(1793-1806). In the same year, Polwhele suffered the loss of his first
wife, Loveday, and consequently took a brief sabbatical from his
curacy; after a few months at home with his mother, Polwhele
returned to Kenton with his three children, and was soon married
again.
Together with his new wife, Mary, Polwhele left Kenton in early
1794 and took an appointment at the parish of Manaccan, near
Helston, Cornwall, where he resided until 1806. In contrast to
Kenton, Manaccan was a poor parish, and Polwhele found that he
had little income with which to support his ever-growing family, and
few intellectual friends with whom to converse; most of the money
Polwhele earned from his office he had to pour into repairs for the
dilapidated cottage in which he lived, and most of his conversation
took the form of epistles (among his chief correspondents were
Samuel Badcock, Macaulay, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, and
Anna Seward). Polwhele's relationship with the literary society at
Exeter also took a bad turn; the anthology of Essays by a
Society of Gentlemen at Exeter (1796), edited by Polwhele ,
became a source of heated controversy between members of the
group, and resulted in Polwhele dissociating himself from
the others. Despite these hardships, Polwhele continued to find both
time and energy to write, and indeed composed and published a
prodigious number of poems, essays, and histories during his tenure
at Manaccan. His chief labor during this period was the massive
three-volume History of Cornwall (1803), which included
civil and military history, a description of the population, sketches of
literary figures and literary productions, and a glossary of Cornish
language. In addition to this work, Polwhele produced a number of
essays and satires on religious matters, such as Anecdotes of
Methodism and Sir Aaron, or The Flights of
Fanaticism (both published in 1800), in which he sought to
expose the "follies" of low-church sects; published several poems,
including The Old English Gentleman (1797) and
The Unsex'd Females (1798); and frequently contributed
essays and poems to the Anti-Jacobin Review.
Polwhele's literary production slowed significantly during the
next thirty years, largely because he found himself greatly overworked
in his clerical offices. To better support his family, Polwhele found it
necessary to take and hold several positions simultaneously: although
he left Manaccan in 1806, he continued to hold the curacy there as a
nonresident until 1821; he undertook the vicarage of the parish of St.
Anthony in Meneage in 1809, and held that position until 1828; from
Manaccan he had gone back to Truro to become curate of Kenwyn,
which he supplemented in 1821 with the vicarage of Newlyn East.
During this time he published a few sermons, a few satiric essays and
poems, compiled his Biographical Sketches in Cornwall
(1831), and labored on an autobiography. His last years were spent
on the family estate of Polwhele , where he died on 12 March 1838.
Although the majority of reviewers found The Unsex'd
Females a tedious, lifeless piece of writing (little was said of its
politics), Polwhele's associates at the Anti-Jacobin
Review were quick to call it to the attention of reactionary
readers. "The...poem has much of a political cast, and, therefore,
comes peculiarly within our region of reviewing," remarks
the anonymous critic (27),
"And we are happy to see one of the first poets of the day, one who ranks amongst the foremost for richness of language, vividness of fancy, and brilliance of imagery, employing his poetical talents, at this awful crisis of church and state, in vindication of all that is dear to us as Britons and as Christians (33)."
The reviewer here acknowledges what he considers the "larger" purpose of The Unsex'd Females, beyond its concern with a particular group of women: the poem seeks to reaffirm
Polwhele's chief concerns, and one which he had found that Thomas
Mathias, author of his acknowledged lodestar, The Pursuits of
Literature, shared with him. Polwhele and Mathias, like many
of the religious reactionaries in England in the 1790s, believed that
the Reign of Terror in France was proof patent that Reason is not a
deity, but rather is a false idol worshipped by those human
beings who have forgotten that they are sinful, wicked creatures direly
in need of providential (both deific and monarchical) direction.
Mathias articulates the position eloquently in the introductory epistle
to The Pursuits of Literature:
"When I have read and thought deeply on the accumulated horrors, and all the gradations of wickedness and misery, through which the modern systematic philosophy of Europe has conducted her illuminated votaries, to the confines of political death and mental darkness, my mind for a space feels a convulsion, and suffers the nature of an insurrection. I look around me. I look to human actions, and to human principles. I consider again and again, what is the nature and effect of learning and of instruction: what is the doctrine of evidence, and the foundation of truth....I am told, that human reason is nearly advanced to full perfection; I am assured, that she is arrived at the haven, where she would be. I again look around me. I ask, where is that haven? Where is that steady gale which has conducted her? I listen, but it is to the tempest: I cast my view abroad, but the ocean is every where perturbed (xiv-xv)."
According to Polwhele , Mathias's poem had served as a clarion
call to those "whose politics and even religion have been long
wavering" to examine their values and become "fixed in their
principles" (3); The Pursuits was a sermon against the
Revolution and those with revolutionary sympathies, and may indeed
have been the text which most persuaded Polwhele to adopt the
reactionary position. Polwhele's devotion to the project of The
Pursuits of Literature continued even after Mathias disparaged
him in a subsequent edition; although Polwhele could no longer
muster up the same praise for the poem itself as he did before the
attack (See Appendix I). In any case, The Unsex'd
Females stands among the first in a line of reactionary works
composed by Polwhele , most of the later ones appearing in the pages
of the Anti-Jacobin Review.
Of course The Unsex'd Females is much more than
a poem against the French Revolution and against Reason: it is, first
and foremost, a satiric critique of the feminist principles expounded
by Mary Wollstonecraft and her followers. In A Vindication of
the Rights of Men (1790), the first polemic (of many, from
various sources) aimed at Edmund Burke's Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790), Wollstonecraft had set forth a
radical critique of British society, which she regarded as particularly
oppressive with regard to women. The views were more fully set forth
in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): English
women, she argued, had been assigned straitened roles within society,
had been trivialized as sentimental creatures, and had been denied
access to higher education. Sentimentalist literature Wollstonecraft
found particularly noxious, for it tended to portray women as
essentially emotional beings, and consequently as inferior to men in
their capacity for rational understanding. This rejection of the
sentimental ideal of femininity is Polwhele's immediate concern in
The Unsex'd Females, but throughout the poem he links
Wollstonecraftian feminism with revolutionary politics and
anti-Christian values.
Polwhele's attacks on Wollstonecraft's immorality and irreligion
take the form of sallies against her personal affairs. After
Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, her husband, William Godwin, had
put into publication his biographical account of her private life;
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman was published twice in 1798, and was apparently not
only read by Polwhele , but also reviewed by him for the April 1798
issue of the European Magazine (the substantial and
unmistakable similarities between the unsigned review and Polwhele's
footnotes on the Memoirs in his poem are discussed in
the notes to the present edition). From Godwin's biography Polwhele
garnered the fodder he needed to take shots at Wollstonecraft's
history of "licentious" love affairs, and particularly her relationships
with the painter Henry Fuseli and the American revolutionary Gilbert
Imlay. According to Polwhele , these liaisons were indicative of the
poor moral character one could only expect to find in a "woman who
has broken through all religious restraints" (28-29), who has rejected
the laws of Nature and of Nature's God: "Nature is the grand basis of
all laws human and divine: and the woman, who has no regard to
nature, either in the decoration of her person, or the culture of
her mind, will soon 'walk after the flesh, in the lust of uncleanness,
and despise government"' (6). The despising of government both by
man and by monarch, the rejection of God and Nature (i.e., the
"natural" intellectual and qualitative differences between the genders)
in favor of Reason and social refiguration, and the abandonment of
domestic duty for the pleasures of sexual self-fulfillment are for
Polwhele all symptoms of the same disease, the "Gallic frenzy" that
has infected and unsexed the English woman.
Curiously, however, of the eight women Polwhele names as
"unsexed" (15-20), only two actually fit the Wollstonecraftian model:
Mary Hays and Helen Maria Williams. Hays had been a close friend
of Wollstonecraft (indeed, she had orchestrated her marriage to
Godwin), and had established herself as an equally radical, equally
controversial feminist theorist through the publication of such works
as Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793)
(though this treatise, unlike Wollstonecraft's, emphasized Christian
principles as the basis of its critique of gender/power relations). More
infamous even than Wollstonecraft, Williams had gained notoriety in
England for her Letters from France, 1792-96 (1796), a
sympathetic account of the Jacobins' rise to power, and for her widely
publicized liaison with fellow radical John Hurford Stone. But these
two stand quite apart from the other women Polwhele calls into
question. Charlotte Smith, who had indeed once been a French
sympathizer, had by 1798 already become a leading voice among the
reactionaries; in The Emigrants (1793), Smith had
expressed her outrage at the massacre of the French aristocrats and
her disillusionment with revolution. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, although
the author of several liberal political works (such as the abolitionist
satire Epistle to William Wilberforce [1791]), was hardly
a revolutionary; furthermore, she had no sympathy whatsoever for
Wollstonecraft's feminism, being herself a staunch believer in the
propriety and priority of the male-dominated household, and an
outspoken opponent of the "overeducation" of women. One wonders
why Polwhele mentions her as first among Wollstonecraft's disciples.
Mary Robinson's notoriety stemmed not from her political views (she
was, compared to Wollstone-craft, only fashionally liberal) but from
her affairs, particularly her early liaison with the Prince of Wales. As
for the artists Emma Crewe and Angelica Kauffman, Polwhele can
only accuse them of breaching decorum in their sensual
Polwhele must have found
impeccable).
Considering this catalog of the unsexed, one can only conclude
that Polwhele attacks these women not for what they are, but for
what they are not: they are unsexed, unfeminine, either because they
are immodest, or unsentimental, or insubordinate. Women must do
more than simply avoid setting a bad example: they must provide a
positive model of chaste, sentimental, subordinate femininity.
Polwhele therefore provides his reader with a list of women he deems
exemplary among literary ladies. Prominent among them are the
women of the Blue Stocking Circle, the literary society that met for
much of the 1780s in the salons of Elizabeth Montagu. In addition to
Montagu herself, the group consisted of Elizabeth Carter, Hester
Chapone, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke,
Horace Walpole, Joshua Reynolds, and many other conservative
notables, and held its meetings without the debaucheries of dancing,
gambling, and alcohol. Polwhele also mentions favorably the
sentimental novelist Fanny Burney, who in works such as
Evelina (1778) and Camilla (1796) mixed
"with sparkling humour chaste/ Delicious feelings and the purest
taste" (34); the gothic author Ann Radcliffe, presumably for her
stirring accounts of virtue in distress; the illustrator Diana Beauclerk;
and the poet Anna Seward. This litany of saintly women is sung by "a
voice seraphic" (28), calling the sex away from the perils of
Wollstonecraft, and at its conclusion the reader learns that this has
been the voice of Polwhele's "friend," Hannah More. Vehemently
opposed to Wollstonecraftian feminism, More believed in a natural
intellectual and psychological difference between genders, and
Polwhele cites approvingly her opinion that "the mind, in each sex,
has some natural kind of bias, which constitutes a distinction
of character; and...the happiness of both depends, in a great measure,
on the preservation and observance of this distinction" (36-37).
Maintaining the distinction of gender roles is Polwhele's primary
agenda in The Unsex'd Females, but this agenda is
caught up with many others. In order to ensure that men and women
behave differently, they must inhabit and operate in different spheres.
If women were allowed to follow their own sexual desires and sleep
with any man they wished, whither the domestic duties of hearth and
home? If women were educated in the same way as men, and busied
themselves with the hard affairs of government, what would become
of the softer sex? And if women lost their femininity and abandoned
their domestic obligations, what would the future hold for English
society? The questions alone must have frightened Polwhele , but
they were not questions he would have to answer; by the turn of the
century Wollstonecraft and her followers had fallen so far into public
disfavor that any fears of revolutionary feminism had been effectively
quelled. But in the nineteenth century, women worked within the
roles provided them — as beings sentimental and religious,
compassionate and "seraphic" — to create another, more subversive,
and ultimately more effective feminist program for the refiguration of
society. Religious groups devoted to causes such as temperance and
the abolition of slavery sprung up on both sides of the Atlantic, and
provided women with opportunities to exert, through the exercise of
their putative moral and spiritual superiority, a substantial amount of
control over the destinies of men, and eventually over
Polwhele's
poem in the history of feminist thought thus becomes a two-handed
affair: on the one hand, The Unsex'd Females stands as
a critique of late eighteenth-century feminism and as a testament to
the seemingly unfailing ability of patriarchal cultures to to use fear
and loathing as tactics in the reiteration and retrenching of their
ideological justification; on the other hand, the very terms in which
Polwhele defines femininity, and the barriers which he sets up to
women's abilities, are those which would ultimately be taken by many
women in the nineteenth century and used as springboards into a new
feminist ideology more subversively radical than Polwhele , or even
Wollstonecraft, could ever have imagined. | The Unsex'd Females | |