| The word progress acquires new meaning in eighteenth-century British literature. Whereas in earlier times, the word refers to physical movement, in the eighteenth century progress becomes a generic term for improvement. The problem of progress depends on what counts as improvement; progress requires a standard of value. I argue that the notion of separate spheres—public and private, commercial and domestic, rational and emotional—is this century's resolution to various crises in value. But this schema is actually a false resolution based on impossible separations. This narrative of improvement, which presents the separate spheres as timeless and natural, stumbles when it cannot reconcile its internal contradictions. Using the insights of deconstruction alongside Walter Benjamin's historical materialism, I trace a rhetorical pattern in Enlightenment narratives which perpetually reproduces such contradictions. Enlightenment “progress” may thus be understood as a rhetorical fiction rather than a universal law.; Chapter one demonstrates how Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “Political Economy,” in Diderot's Encyclopedia, mobilizes the process by which unstable categories, like general and particular, generate similarly flawed categories which nevertheless continue to mutate and proliferate. In subsequent chapters, I explore various permutations of the general/particular dichotomy in several novels and political tracts from later in the long eighteenth century. Chapter two explores the role of public opinion in William Godwin's Caleb Williams, specifically how the capriciousness of public opinion undermines Godwin's commitment to private judgment. In chapter three, I read Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman as troubling the distinction between reason and sentiment. Focusing on her references to Adam Smith, I argue that her attacks on sentimental excess are in fact ironic; Wollstonecraft's emotional transports are a rhetorical tool rather than a lapse of the reason she so relentlessly lionizes. Finally, in chapter four, I turn to the cultish Charlotte Dacre, whose novel Zofloya has received little attention in eighteenth-century scholarship; and yet she, too, offers a radical interpretation of “progress.” Exposing female rivalry as a form of competition in the private sphere, Dacre gives further evidence that the various binaries of the separate spheres—male/female, domestic/commercial—do not add up. |
