Proposing Men: Dialects of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical

Shawn Lisa Maurer's book, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical, has a proposal of its own: that the popular periodical literature of the eighteenth century, which has long been understood as setting itself up as a shaping force in the construction of femininity, takes an even more urgent interest in forming the masculine. In fact, "the need to reconfigure masculine gender identity along with new forms of patriarchy is what drove much of the discourse about women" (2). For this reconfiguration of patriarchy, Maurer relies on Carole Pateman, who has observed that the eighteenth-century's rhetoric of rights and contract marks not the end of patriarchy, but rather its transition from a paternal to a fraternal form. Thus the masculine subjects formed by the periodicals do not autocratically command their wives and daughters; those men, in fact, become the cruel fathers against whom the new man must define himself. The periodicals instead advocate a kinder, gentler masculinity--the bourgeois family man, who graciously lends his wisdom to the females under his auspices. Maurer thus sets her argument against feminist theories of the separation of spheres in the eighteenth century, insisting that "men's public identity depended upon, and was indeed shaped by, their domestic or familial roles" (12). (It might be interesting to see how a consideration of women's relationship to the public sphere either supports or complicates her deconstruction, but this is not the topic of the book.) She further departs from traditional feminist arguments by insisting that these new roles oppress men as well as women. While Maurer devotes less of her study than might have been useful to this observation, she argues that the new order burdened men with the responsibility of providing for dependents. Even more compellingly, she shows how male sexuality was both stripped of its earlier "more polymorphous possibilities" (32) and "riven by the competing pulls of libertine compulsion," which become an expression of masculine domination, and "moral self-control" (31).

She begins with Peter Motteux and John Dunton, showing that even in their publications apparently addressed to women, masculinity remained at the center. These early periodicals clearly differed from the later ones, but at the same time set the stage by giving "men full responsibility both for their own and for women's deviations from the emerging norms of heterosexual monogamy" (52). This is particularly apparent in her reading of John Dunton's Nightwalker, a periodical that narrates the author's attempts to reform London prostitutes by posing as a client. Nightwalker, she demonstrates, had both ideological and practical ties to the Society for the Reformation of Manners. While prostitutes are the topic of this periodical and the obsession of the reforming societies, Maurer points out that the narrative itself finds male corruption and deviation far more interesting than female transgression. Many of the prostitutes' stories, in fact, turn out to be tales of paternal cruelty and brotherly irresponsibility.

In the later periodicals, the construction of masculinity becomes subtler but no less insistent. While the importance of female chastity in these publications has long been observed, Maurer calls attention to the significance of male restraint. In both his drama and his periodical writing, Steele in particular formed the chaste merchant into a new kind of hero. Responding to recent arguments about the figuration of commercial relations themselves as feminine, Maurer observes that "the fear of feminization associated with the trader and exacerbated in large part by his dependence upon others is [in Steele] displaced onto the aristocrat who is feminized by his inability to control the sexual passion that might either lead to a challenge or prevent him from negotiating his way out of one" (86). She further shows how in The Conscious Lovers, "the merchant embodies the kind of fraternal alliance in which fathers, sons, and brothers support rather than compete with each other" (95). The Spectator Club emerges as another version of the fraternal patriarchy, for it depends both on male friendship and female exclusion. Proposing Men also contributes to the discussion of how these periodicals shaped the relationship between gender and consumption, although Maurer teases out the inscriptions of men rather than of women. She sees a tension rather than a simple advocacy in the periodicals of male consumerism: "those in the middle ranks, who even in the seventeenth century had provided the largest market for new and imported goods, were increasingly caught between the economic need to consume as a way to display social status as well as credit-worthiness, and the moral need to resist lavish expenditure, as such resistance was what distinguished them from a supposedly profligate aristocracy and gentry" (135). While she agrees with Laura Brown that displacing onto women all the dubiousness of global commerce resolved some of this, she adds that periodical literature also positioned men as morally and socially responsible for women's behavior. Thus proper masculine subjects were being constructed at least as forcefully as proper feminine ones. Further, the figure of the woman dressed in the world's wealth erases male participation and thus men, "constrained by the breadwinner role that was forcing them into the life-threatening pursuits associated with imperialist accumulation, were also being stripped of aspects of their own humanness, in particular the emotive capacity increasingly displaced onto women" (154).

Finally, Maurer challenges Katheryn Shevelow's argument that these eighteenth-century periodicals constituted a precursor to the modern "women's magazine." While she agrees that these periodicals certainly contribute significantly to the shaping of the feminine, at the same time they are more frequently speaking to men, who are in turn responsible for educating women. Thinking of these periodicals as "women's magazines" "unthinkingly erase[s] men's consequential and even predominant place in the domestic realm" (205). Further, the eighteenth century did not yet divide the world into separate spheres, and the idea of a publication written exclusively for women is anachronistic: "there could be nothing 'for women' that was not necessarily defined, monitored, or in some way circumscribed by men" (207). Even in Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator, "[w]omen's fundamental submission to male authority within the domestic sphere means that women can provide warning before the fact, or sympathy after it, but are virtually powerless in terms of effecting any kind of decisive change" (215).

Proposing Men, then, adds a meaningful new perspective to our understanding of periodical literature and forces us to rethink the commonly assumed separation of spheres. While these periodicals describe both ideal and flawed versions of the feminine, one must certainly read these descriptions differently when thinking of the magazines as primarily directed to men. Pateman's arguments function productively here as a starting point for thinking about the many particular ways in which patriarchy changes rather than disappears in the eighteenth century, and Maurer's book is an important corrective to those who would celebrate its demise. The significance of men to the domestic is also a valuable lesson of this study that the author demonstrates extremely well. Clearly Maurer is right when she argues that the idealized figure of the public sphere male depends on the assumption of a particular kind of private life.

The one significant line of argument in this book that lacks full development is the cost of this system to men. Maurer frequently comments that the eighteenth-century's new patriarchy oppressed men as well as women, but most of the readings explore the ways in which periodicals position men as the benevolent protectors and directors of female behavior. By emphasizing male dominance in both the "public" and "private" spheres, Proposing Men gestures toward but does not fully develop empathy for the burdens of manhood. While the advantages of being the one who directs other family members need little explanation, the disadvantages demand fleshing out. And what about those men the author alludes to as missing from Brown's argument who were "forced...into life-threatening pursuits associated with imperialism accumulation? Do these men bear responsibility for their part in developing imperialism, or are there other ways to look at their lives and texts that develop these complexities? Do the periodicals themselves ever chafe against the constraints of masculinity, however subtly or unintentionally? By leaving such questions relatively unexplored and insisting on the ubiquity of male monitoring, this book ends up painting a picture of eighteenth-century gender possibilities that might be bleaker than some readers will find convincing. Thus, Proposing Men maintains an ambivalent and sometimes confusing relationship to feminism: on the one hand, Maurer positions her argument in contrast to feminist ones, most of which, she argues, neglect masculinity, read the periodicals as directed toward women, and celebrate the domestic as the sphere of women, although these generalizations about "feminist" arguments frequently and frustratingly appear without specific citation. Yet at the same time, this book certainly does not ignore the limits this reformed patriarchy placed on women; in fact, the cost to women in this new paradigm comes across much more forcefully than any cost to men. Nevertheless, Maurer certainly does not deny the impact of these periodicals on the construction of the feminine. Instead, she suggestively refutes the common assumption that they were directed to women; in the process, she describes the tensions of modern masculinity and changes the way we must read periodical literature.