Coffeehouses and the shaping of Male Identity in Brian Cowan's The Social Life of Coffee

In The Social Life of Coffee, Brian Cowan highlighted an interesting cross between masculine identity and the English coffeehouse. He claims that in The Spectator and The Tatler, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison set forth ideals of a masculine coffeehouse. Men in 18^th century London used coffeehouses to prove their masculinity; coffeehouses were also venues for which effeminate men were ridiculed for their primary interest in “self-display.” These “fops,” “beaus,” and “mollies” were not only criticized for their “self-display” and interest in feminine matters, but also because they did not contribute to the political, business, and cultural discourse of the coffeehouse. Joining in on this discourse was an expectation of coffeehouse “manners.” There was a fear that coffeehouses were becoming places that catered to “cheap gossip and egotistical self promotion” (Cowan 233).  It seems to me that coffeehouses dictated “proper” masculine discourse, and those who strayed from this discourse were not masculine enough, or were simply too female.

Effeminacy, newsmongering, obsessions with fashion, novelty, and self-display, were frowned upon. Coffeehouse patrons feared that there was a “misuse of the public sphere” (235).  Addison and Steele envisioned the public sphere as a “forum for urbane but not risqué conversation” (237).  They wanted to differentiate the “male” public sphere from the “female” private sphere. Thus, “male coffeehouse manners” became a popular concern of the day. In their periodicals, Addison and Steele were popular commentators on proper male behavior. How men behaved in coffeehouses was indicative of how masculine their identities were.

The idea that coffeehouses were so prominent in shaping male identity fascinates me. My research tends to focus on female identity as set forth by the pressures of society, and how conduct books, magazines, or novels of the time aimed to teach women how to behave. We can think of Steele and Addison’s periodicals as doing the same thing. Cowan says that even within “the Spectator’s accounts of female coffeehouse workers…the object of reform was not the women, but the men” (244). Addison and Steele used the coffeehouse as a venue for exploration of 18^th century male ideals, and then commented on the behaviors of men within those coffeehouses. Their periodicals take the shape of male conduct manuals that differentiated proper from improper behavior, and set forth proper topics to be discussed in public spaces. Cowan comments that Addison and Steele’s periodicals created awareness to “masculine failings” (245).

But why was it so important to dictate proper behavior within a coffeehouse? If we think about coffee shops today, it would be difficult to answer this question. But in Addison and Steele’s contemporary society, the London coffeehouse represented the larger, British public sphere. Male identity was representative of a larger, British identity. 

Collaboration and Openness in Professor Martha Nell Smith’s Talk on Editing

In the master’s class at Wayne State University, Professor Martha Nell Smith gave us personal insight on her experiences as an editor. I was mostly intrigued by two concepts Professor Smith discussed, that I see as key  terms in regards to where the humanities is headed: collaboration and openness.  

Professor Smith highlights the importance of collaboration in the editing process, including digital work. In producing digital archives, Professor Smith found herself working with other scholars; she noted how much she enjoyed doing so and even made sure to point out that most of her books are co-authored. Her likeness for collaboration possibly stems from her belief that the tools that scholars produce are not more important than the people who produce them. Respecting the hard labor and good work of editors is a good thing, and worshipping the tools they create is not. She takes a very humane approach to the editing process, making it known that as people get their hands “dirty” in messy archives, even the most principled editors will make mistakes. Professor Smith recalls a time when her own graduate student caught a mistake in one of her works. A second “pair of eyes” is fundamental then in the editing process. Collaboration is important because the more “eyes” you have, the more accurate the editing process will be. She calls editors “stewards” who owe it to readers, and those becoming acquainted with editing, to make the editorial process “transparent,” and not pretend to know things they don’t actually know. In her article, “The Human Touch Software of the Highest Order,” Professor Smith discusses the different attitudes towards editing. She insists that even with collaborative efforts, editors need not agree on every aspect of the process. She says, “Each can report what she sees and audiences benefit from multiple viewpoints”(Smith 14). This seems to make collaborative efforts appear more friendly rather than competitive. I think better works can be produced this way.

Alongside her discussion of the editing process, Professor Smith discussed her current work-in-progress, the Emily Dickinson archive.  Her goal is to create an archive that allows for an open “space of knowledge exchange for a networked world of scholars, students, and readers.” One of her aims is to make this archive open for public access. I especially appreciated her outlook on this project, one that does not see knowledge as restricted. Hardvard University has asked her to sell her archive and others urge her to make it a “closed” space. Professor Smith, however, argues that Emily Dickinson’s manuscript is already open because these matters are of public record. She simply doesn’t understand why access to Dickinson’s manuscripts should be restricted. I completely agree. Openness is a key value to uphold as the humanities becomes more and more “digital.” Scholars and non-scholars alike can contribute to the growth of knowledge.

The Beggar and the Player In John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera

What I found to be particularly interesting about John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, is the inclusion of the Beggar, the fictional author of the play, and the Player as characters. These two characters appear in the beginning of the drama and reappear towards the very end, but within different contexts.

The Beggar and the Player are having a discussion in the introduction of The Beggar’s Opera. While they share this dialogue, they are at a distance from the play itself. Why would Gay create a fictional author? Is this his way of avoiding authorship should his contemporaries label him seditious? Would the Beggar and the Player’s exchange be performed on stage, or was it only meant to be read? I asked myself these questions but had trouble answering them. When I first read the exchange between the Beggar and the Player, I was under the impression that the play will adhere to conventions found in the operas. The Beggar makes this clear to the Player when he says, “I have introduced the similes that are in all your celebrated operas” and then goes on to explain some of these inclusions (41). At this point in the reading, I didn’t have the slightest idea as to what the initial dialogue’s purpose is. By the end of the piece, however, I felt I could answer some of my own questions.

By the end of the piece, the Beggar and the Player appear once more. However, they are no longer at a distance, but rather “enter” the scene itself (120).  By entering the scene, have they become characters in the play? It is in this scene that we learn about the Beggar’s authorial intention: to apply “poetical justice” to the end of his play in order to punish vice and reward virtue (120). He thus intended on executing Macheath. The Player, however, interjects and says, “Why then, friend, this is a downright deep tragedy. The catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an opera must end happily” to which the Beggar complies (191).  Nonetheless, the Beggar makes it clear that had the play gone as he intended, “it would have carried a most excellent moral” (121).

The Beggar and the Player represent a tension existing in Gay’s contemporary society: wanting to abide by the traditional neoclassical features of a drama, and yet having to accommodate the literature to fulfill the public’s new interest. I don’t think Gay was going to simply end his drama within the conventions of an Italian opera without making it clear that he detests doing so. So, how can he do this without facing backlash from his contemporary society? He creates a fictional author, the Beggar.

By the end of the play, I was able to answer some of my initial questions. I was nonetheless left with many more unanswered. Does Gay’s ending imply that the audience’s expectations triumph over the author’s desire? By making the fictional author a beggar, is Gay hinting that the Beggar had no choice but to denounce poetic merit for the sake of making an income? Is the author a commodity then?

Satirizing the Gothic in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen is satirizing the Gothic genre. It is in response to Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest. The title of Austen's novel itself is very gothic, giving readers an image of a distant and vast abbey (as in Radcliffe's novel), but the story itself is not.

The beginning of Northanger Abbey sets us up for what is to be a satire of the Gothic genre. The novel begins with “No,” almost as a sort of negation. Catherine, as Austen indicates, was never thought to be a “heroine.” Austen is fighting a gender stereotype that is typical of Gothic novels, and is suggesting that maybe Catherine is simply not heroic.

Parents are often absent in gothic novels. For example, Adeline's mother in The Romance of the Forest is absent. In Northanger Abbey, however, both of Catherine’s parents are alive and well. Austen introduces Catherine’s mother, “a woman of useful plain sense….and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution” (15). Thus, she is healthy and strong, so there is no inclination that she will die.

            The Morland family is described to be very plain “who seldom aimed at wit of any kind,” (64) and if this does not anger Gothic readers, the following description of Catherine might: “She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features” (15). Gothic heroines are typically very beautiful, often as a result of their inner goodness. Catherine, however, is “awkward,” has sickly skin, and lifeless hair. She does not fit the image of the Gothic heroine, and Austen may be suggesting that this image is rather unrealistic. And if Catherine’s lack of physical superiority is not enough, Austen relates to us that Catherine is “occasionally stupid” (16). Catherine does not like to play music, and when it came to writing and accounts, “her proficiency in either was not remarkable” (16). Austen introduces a normal, everyday woman, defying the traditional convention of creating the superior Gothic heroine.

            Austen builds up suspense in Northanger Abbey, as is typical of Romantic and Gothic novels. However, she replaces the supernatural with realism. For example, where a manuscript should be, Austen gives us a laundry list instead! Austen is suggesting that the supernatural is not in nature and that novels should return to the domestic. Austen wrote the same novel six times, believing that domestic fiction will offer women new choices if they lack money or lineage.

Austen is critical of Catherine’s reading of Gothic novels. Isabella enters the room while Catherine is reading Mysteries of Udolpho, and Catherine remarks: “I should like to spend my whole life in reading it” (39). Catherine wants to be in the novel and Austen’s nightmare is that women become the fiction and are steered away from reality. Moreover, Catherine’s perspective is so colored by Gothic novels that she can’t even see English landscape: “ ‘I never look at it,’ said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, ‘without thinking of the south of France’ ” (102). Therefore, Austen satirizes the Gothic genre, implying that the domestic novel is more benefiting for women.

It has been very interesting to see how authors experimented with the novel in the 18th century. It seems that Jane Austen is insisting that novels stray away from the Romantic or Gothic genre and instead, focus on a more realistic and advantageous genre, the domestic. 

Article Responses: The Rise of the Novel

In “Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe,” Maximillian E. Novak is voicing his concern with literary scholars who want to remove Defoe from his place in “the rise of the novel.” He indicates that these scholars see no real literary value in Defoe’s Robinson Cruosoe. He continues to defend Robinson Crusoe as a novel that had a large impact throughout Western Europe, and urges critics to reconsider “revising Defoe’s place in the canon” (243). What was most interesting to me was Novak’s discussion of Ian Watt’s exclusion of female authors in his book, The Rise of the Novel. He agrees that Watt took a “male-oriented vision of the novel” (252), but understands this exclusion of female authors indicating, “Watt’s work is rooted in its time” (246). Novak urge critics to reshape the canon by including significant female authors, but not at the expense of prominent male authors, like Defoe. He claims that it is not “sensible” to insist “entirely on the feminine nature of the form” and dismiss “male writers solely on the basis of gender” (252). After our discussions of the canon this semester, and having read Janet Todd’s The Sign of Angellica, I realized how far removed women are from current literary study focusing on the rise of the novel. I thought it necessary to reshape our canon by including prominent female authors; prior to reading Novak’s article, however, I hadn’t thought about how we will approach this. I think he poses a fair concern and is right in urging critics not to exclude male authors in the process of including female authors. Instead of devaluing certain works, it would be best that critics begin to value marginalized female authors and their works.

In “A Question of Beginnings,” Robert B. Alter also discusses Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel in terms of its biases. Nonetheless, he indicates the importance of Watt’s work and stresses its influence on eighteenth-century literary scholarship.  Alter makes an interesting observation: “The choice, then, of a particular beginning for the novel will always be in some degree arbitrary, inevitable dictated by the critic’s perception of what the eventual characteristic traits of the genre turn out to be” (215). I agree with this notion; it seems impossible to me for critics to distance themselves from their own biases that tend to make claims on which characteristics best represent the genre itself. According to Alter, Watt’s shortfall is in failing to cover “all the teeming variety and unpredictability of the genre” by deeming “realism” as the main criterion for the novel (216). Nonetheless, Alter ends his article by claiming that The Rise of the Novel is unparalleled “in its identification of the importance for the novel of individual experience” (225).  Alter warns critics against rejecting Watt’s work because of its shortfalls, and instead urges critics to consider what it does offer in terms of scholarship.

On a different note, Deidre Lynch’s “Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions” was a challenging article that discusses the emotional attachments people have to things in sentimental novels and how keepsakes become “props” intended to invoke feelings and tears in readers. From what I have learned about eighteenth- century morality, luxury and the collection of “things” was associated with the upper class and hence, with vice.  In Lynch’s article, she recognizes “people’s new willingness to….value the luxury of good as a vehicle for the finer feelings” (346). Lynch discusses how keepsakes actually help move the narrative forward, which was a new outlook for me.

I have to say I gained novel insights this week. I am curious about how we can reform the canon to make it more democratic (keeping in mind that we don’t want to reverse the marginalization process by excluding prominent male authors). I am trying to be more open about Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, although his exclusion of female authors troubles me. I am also interested in the association of luxury with finer feelings rather than luxury with vice. I hope we can touch upon some of these topics in class!