Abstract
In the vast majority of scholarly works which trace the emergence of racial thought, the eighteenth century is viewed as a crucial period. Even if, as in more recent accounts, the century did not see the birth of ‘modern’ racial thought, it remains one in which these attitudes developed from their earl-ier, less ‘scientific’ forms.1 It is not difficult to see why. A period of booming scientific endeavour coupled with commercial and imperial expansion to provide new sources and outlets for European industry, culture, ethnocentrism and, ultimately, racialism. As a result, the pluralism and ‘multiplicity’ characteristic of earlier discourses of race gave way, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to a more crystallized taxonomy (and hence hierarchy) of races.2 Nor was race the only category of thought to undergo such change at this time. Gender and sex — by which is meant sexual difference — likewise arguably underwent a transition to a more stable and binaristic mode.3 The reasons behind this change are more obscure, although those who have argued in its favour point to crises of confidence in masculine identity starting around 1775 and the consequent need to subjugate women.4 According to Thomas Laqueur, whose seminal Making Sex (1990) almost single-handedly spawned this branch of scholarship, the political need to confine women to the ‘domestic sphere’ produced a current of scientific thought sympathetic to this aim.
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Notes
For the existence of racial thought prior to the eighteenth century, see esp. Kim F. Hall (1995) Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)
and Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton (eds) (2007) Race in Early Modem England: A Documentary Companion (New York: Palgrave).
Examples of the more sizeable literature which features the eighteenth century as a turning point include Dror Wahrman (2004) The Making of the Modem Sel f Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press);
Roxann Wheeler (2000) The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press);
Nancy Leys Stepan (1982) The Idea of Race in Science: Britain1800–1960 (London: Macmillan);
Hannah Augstein (ed.) (1996) Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol: Thoemmes);
Harold E. Pagliario (ed.) (1973) Racism in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 3 (Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western Reserve University Press).
Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, chapters 1 and 2; Thomas Laqueur (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press);
Londa Schiebinger (1994) Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modem Science (London: Pandora);
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall (1997) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge), esp. part 3;
Robert B. Shoemaker (1998) Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman);
Tim Hitchcock (1997) English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (London: Macmillan), ch. 4.
Nancy Stepan (1998) ‘Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship’, Gender and History, 10:1, 26–52, p. 29.
See Michel Foucault (1998 [1976]) The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin), esp. pp. 26, 54, 119, 149–50;
Ann Laura Stoler (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press);
Ann Laura Stoler (2002) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley and London: University of California Press), ch. 6.
See Laqueur, Making Sex; Judith Butler (2006) Gender Trouble (London and New York: Routledge);
Judith Butler (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits o f’Sex’ (London and New York: Routledge).
For two detailed surveys of the litera-ture on sexuality which point to the need to rethink categories such as identity, see Karen Harvey (2002) ‘A Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 45:4, 899–916
and H.G. Cocks (2006) ‘Modernity and the Self in the History of Sexuality’, Historical Journal, 49:4, 1211–27.
See Stepan, Idea of Race in Science; Stepan (1985) ‘Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places’ in J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (eds) Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 97–120;
Stepan (1986) ‘Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science’, Isis, 77:2, 261–77; Stepan, ‘Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship’;
Londa Schiebinger (1990) ‘The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23:4, 387–405; Schiebinger, Nature’s Body;
Schiebinger (1994) ‘Mammals, Primatology and Sexology’ in Roy Porter and MikulአTeich (eds) Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 184–209.
Earlier examples from the historiography of race that refer to sex include Winthrop D. Jordan (1968) White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press); Pagliaro, (ed.), Racism in the Eighteenth Century.
From one of the earliest modern histories of race, Eric Voegelin’s (1933) Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte von Ray bis Carus (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt), natural history and especially Buffon have featured heavily.
See Voegelin (1998) The History of the Race Idea from Ray to Carus, trans Ruth Hein, ed. Klaus Vondung, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 3 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press).
The distinction between erotica and pornography is hotly contested. For a stimulating discussion see Bradford K. Mudge (2000) The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 3–30.
Margaret C. Jacob (1996) ‘The Materialist World of Pornography’ in Lynn Hunt (ed.) The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone), 157–202;
Feona Attwood (2002) ‘Reading Porn: The Paradigm Shift in Pornography Research’, Sexualities, 5:1, 91–105;
Karen Harvey (2004) Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
and Karen Harvey (2002) ‘The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England’, Gender and History, 14:2, 202–23.
For example, when the notorious publisher Edmund Curll was indicted in 1725 for publishing the obscene Venus in the Cloister, he argued that it was intended as an anti-Catholic piece. One of the judges felt that this argument was strong enough to mitigate the offence. See Peter Wagner (1990) Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Paladin), pp. 72–3;
Paul Baines and Pat Rogers (2007) Edmund Curll: Bookseller (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 158–60.
The most obvious example of the potential for extreme philosophical engagement in pornography is that of the Marquis de Sade. See esp. Caroline Warman (2001) Sade: From Materialism to Pornography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation). Buffon himself fell foul of the charge of materialism amongst some Scottish readers in the later eighteenth century.
See P.B. Wood (1987) ‘Buffon’s Reception in Scotland: The Aberdeen Connection’, Annals of Science, 44:2, 169–90.
Roy Porter (1982) ‘Mixed Feelings: The Enlightenment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ in Paul-Gabriel Boucé (ed.) Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp.1–27;
Annamarie Jagose (2007) ‘“Critical Extasy”: Orgasm and Sensibility in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, Signs, 32:2, 459–82.
Gentleman’s Magazine, 59:1 (February 1789), 180; William H. Epstein (1974) John Cleland: Images of a Life (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 30–64.
See Wagner, Eros Revived, esp. pp. 234, 237–46; Peter Sabor (1999) ‘Introduction’ in John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. vii–viii, and Sabor’s excellent review of scholarship on the Memoirs,
Sabor (2000) ‘From Sexual Liberation to Gender Trouble: Reading Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure from the 1960s to the 1990s’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33:4, 561–78.
See John Hollander (1963) ‘The Old Last Act: Some Observations on Fanny Hill’, Encounter, 21:4, 69–77;
Malcolm Bradbury (1971) ‘Fanny Hill and the Comic Novel’, Critical Quarterly, 13:3, 263–75;
Julia Epstein (1989) ‘Fanny’s Fanny: Epistolarity, Eroticism, and the Transsexual Text’ in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (ed.) Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern University Press), 135–53;
Edward W. Copeland (1972) ‘Clarissa and Fanny Hill: Sisters in Distress’, Studies in the Novel, 4:3, 343–52.
On the origins of the novel and realism see Ian Watt (1957) The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus), esp. ch. 1;
Lennard J. Davis (1983) Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press), ch. 6;
J. Paul Hunter (1990) Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton), ch. 8;
John Richetti (1999) The English Novel in History 1700–1780 (London: Routledge), ch. 1;
Terry Eagleton (2005) The English Novel (Oxford: Blackwell), ch. 1.
For the role of empiricism in this development see esp. Michael McKeon (2002) The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (London: Johns Hopkins University Press; first publ. 1987);
Rosamaria Loretelli (2000) ‘The Aesthetics of Empiricism and the Origin of the Novel’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 41:2, 83–109.
See Leo Braudy (1970) ‘Fanny Hill and Materialism’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4:1, 21–40; Jacob, ‘Materialist World of Pornography’;
Barry Ivker (1975) ‘John Cleland and the Marquis d’Argens: Eroticism and Natural Morality in Mid-Eighteenth-Century English and French Fiction’, Mosaic, 8:2, 141–8.
See Wagner, Eros Revived, pp. 237–46; Gary Gautier (1994) ‘Fanny’s Fantasies: Class, Gender, and the Unstable Narrator in Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, Style, 28:2, 133–45;
Gary Gautier (1995) ‘Fanny Hill’s Mapping of Sexuality, Female Identity, and Maternity’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 35:3, 473–91;
Kate Levin (1998) ‘The Meanness of Writing for a Bookseller: John Cleland’s Fanny on the Market’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 28:3, 329–49.
Jacques Roger (1997) Buffon: A Life in Natural History, ed. L. Pearce Williams, trans Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), pp. 3–52.
E. Genet-Varcin and Jacques Roger (1954) ‘Bibliographie de Buffon’ in Jean Piveteau (ed.) Œuvres philosophiques de Buffon (Paris: Presses universitaires de France), 513–70, p. 527.
See Roger, Buffon; Jacques Roger (1997) The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson, trans Robert Ellrich (Stanford: Stanford University Press), esp. pp. 426–474;
Phillip R. Sloan (1976) ‘The Buffon-Linnaeus Controversy’, Isis, 67:3, 356–75;
Thierry Hoquet (2005) Buffon: histoire naturelle et philosophie, Les Dix-Huitièmes Siècles, 92 (Paris: Champion).
Thierry Hoquet (2005) Buffon: histoire naturelle et philosophie, Les Dix-Huitièmes Siècles, 92 (Paris: Champion).
On their respective linguistic abilities, see Epstein, John Cleland, pp. 48–53; Roger Lonsdale (1979) ‘New Attributions to John Cleland’, Review of English Studies, 30 (n.s.), 119, 268–90, pp. 276–84; Roger, Buffon, p. 25.
John Lyon (1976) ‘The “Initial Discourse” to Buffon’s Histoire naturelle: The First Complete English Translation’, Journal of the History of Biology, 9:1, 133–81, p. 173;
Buffon (1749) Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy, 44 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, later Plassan, 1749–1804), I, p. 53. Hereafter cited as Buffon, HN.
See Colin Kidd (2006) The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), ch. 4.
Buffon (1792) Barr’s Buffon. Buffon’s Natural History, 10 vols (London: J.S. Barr), IV, p. 182 (hereafter cited as Buffon, BB); Buffon, HN, III, p. 363.
Claude Blanckaert (1993) ‘Buffon and the Natural History of Man: Writing History and the “Foundational Myth” of Anthropology’, History of the Human Sciences, 6:13, 13–50, p. 25.
Sloan, ‘Buffon–Linnaeus Controversy’; Sloan (1978) ‘The Impact of Buffon’s Taxonomic Philosophy in German Biology: The Establishment of the Biological Species Concept’ in E.R. Forbes (ed.) Human Implications of Scientific Advance: Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of the History of Science, Edinburgh, 10–15 August 1977 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 531–8; Blanckaert, ‘Buffon and the Natural History of Man’; Roger, Life Sciences, pp. 426–74.
Sloan, ‘Buffon-Linnaeus Controversy’; Roger, Life Sciences, p. 431; Denise Brahimi (1980) ‘La sexualité dans l’anthropologie humaniste de Buffon’, Dix-huitième Siècle, 12, 113–26.
Tassie Gwilliam (1996) ‘Female Fraud: Counterfeit Maidenheads in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6:4, 518–48, p. 534.
Hal Gladfelder (2006) ‘Plague Spots’ in David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg (eds) Social Histories of Deformity and Disability (London: Routledge), pp. 56–78.
On the foreignness of sodomy, see Rictor Norton (2006) Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (Stroud: Chalford Press), pp. 191–2;
George S. Rousseau (1987) ‘The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: “Utterly Confused Category” and/or Rich Repository?’ in Robert Purks Maccubbin (ed.) ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 132–68, p. 137;
Anon. (?1730) Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, in England (London: A. Dodd and E. Nutt). This last text was plagiarized in Anon. (1749) Satan’s Harvest Home (London: n.p.), a circumstance which has led several scholars to posit 1749 as a crucial year in the formation of modern homosexual identities.
See Rictor Norton (2004) ‘Introduction’ in Norton (ed.) Sodomites, Mollies, Sapphists and Tommies, Vol. V of Alexander Pettit and Patrick Spedding (eds) Eighteenth Century British Erotica II (London: Pickering and Chatto), pp. vii–xxiii, pp. xvi–xvii.
Richard [Smalbroke], Lord Bishop of St David’s (1728) Reformation necessary to prevent Our Ruine: A Sermon Preached to the Societies for Reformation of Manners (London: Joseph Downing), p. 21. Emphasis mine.
On the creation of the sodomite as part of the emergence of modern Western culture, see Randolph Trumbach, ‘Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography’ in Maccubbin (ed.) ’Tis Nature’s Fault, 109–21; Trumbach (1998) Sex and the Gender Revolution. Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), ch. 1;
G.S. Rousseau (1991) Perilous Enlightenment: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses — Sexual, Historical (Manchester: Manchester University Press), ch. 5; Rousseau, ‘Pursuit of Homosexuality’; Hitchcock, English Sexualities, ch. 5.
Buffon himself supported a version of epigenesis (a foetus is formed from the gradual accretion of particles from both parents), but this remained unpopular until the limitations of the prevailing theory — preformationism (the ovum or spermatozoon contained a fully-formed miniature foetus) — were laid bare towards the end of the eighteenth century. See Buffon, BB, II, pp. 255–348, III, pp. 1–316 (HN, II, pp. 1–426). See also Elizabeth B. Gasking (1967) Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828 (London: Hutchinson);
Shirley A. Roe (1981) Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller–Wolff Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
Eve Keller (2007) Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England (London and Washington: University of Washington Press).
John Locke (2004 [1690]) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin), II.xi.12, pp. 156–7.
It was not, however, until the nineteenth century that such theorists spoke of ‘intelligence’. See Stephen Jay Gould (1981) The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton).
Cleland’s later linguistic works — The Way to Things by Words (1766), Specimen of an Etimological Vocabulary (1768), and Additional Articles to the Specimen of an Etimological Vocabulary (1769) — evidence his desire to move away from modern European languages (and hence from current signifiers) towards earlier forms more aligned with ‘nature’. See Frederick Burwick (1991) ‘John Cleland: Language and Eroticism’ in Peter Wagner (ed.) Erotica and the Enlightenment (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag), pp. 41–69;
Carolyn Williams (1998) ‘The Way to Things by Words: John Cleland, the Name of the Father, and Speculative Etymology’, Yearbook of English Studies, 28, 250–75.
Andrew Wells (2009) ‘Masculinity and its Other in Eighteenth-Century Racial Thought’ in Heather Ellis and Jessica Meyer (eds) Masculinity and the Other: Historical Perspectives (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press), pp. 85–113, pp. 88–9.
D.L. Davis and R.G. Whitten (1987) ‘The Cross-Cultural Study of Human Sexuality’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 16, 69–98, p. 70.
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Wells, A. (2011). Confusion Embodied: Epistemologies of Sex and Race in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49) and the Histoire naturelle (1749–1804). In: Fisher, K., Toulalan, S. (eds) Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_3
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