Altaf Ahmed Sheikh 1 M.A (Hons.

) English Literature

Tom Jones, A Foundling : a Novel by Henry Fielding.

Gender : questions of agency and ideology.

d. Gender: questions of agency and autonomy

Barker, Hannah and Elaine Chalus. ‘Introduction’ in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England. (1-28)
Pollak, Ellen. The Poetics of Sexual Myth. ch. 2 ‘The Eighteenth-Century Myth of Passive
Womanhood’ (22-76)
Fletcher, Anthony. Gender Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800. ch. 15 ‘The Construction of
Femininity’ (376-400)
Jones, Robert W. Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: the Analysis of
Beauty. ch. 2 ‘The Art of Being Pretty’ (79-116)

Contemporary sources:
Essex, John. The Young Ladies Conduct. (1722). Introduction (49-82), Chapter 2 ‘Of Complaisance to
Equals, Respect to Inferiors, and Humility to all’ (108-111), Ch. 3 ‘Of Temperance, Chastity, Industry,
&c’ (117-129)
Wilkes, Wetenhall. A Letter of Moral and Genteel Advice. (1741) pp. 430-434, 456-466

I. ‘ Introduction’ in Gender in Eighteenth century England.

This article gives us the different points of view concerning the construction of gender in
the 18th century. In general, texts argued that men and women were naturally different.
Authors said that women were of a lower status and tried to mould them into an idealized
shape (modest, pious, and domestic). This perception has been accentuated during the 18th
century and women were confined to a private sphere.
We can see that the gender history is closely linked with the women’s history. Until then,
the history was based on a male point of view; men dominated both the public and private
life. But with the emergence of gender, women’s history is important for her emancipation.
The majority of the studies centred primarily on women and femininity. We can see that
the sexes were not rigidly defined and that gender affected men’s and women’s lives more
than we had thought until then.
Many authors talk of separate spheres; men were naturally suited to the public sphere of
work and politics, as women were naturally suited to the private sphere of the home and the
family. In Tom Jones, we cannot find many relevant occurrences of the separate spheres; the
only character who could enter this idea is Mrs Western. She seems to partake in the public
sphere but that makes her not feminine anymore. Fielding often shows that the place of the
women is at home. This construction of separate spheres was a motor for the class formation.
The middle class even made this central to their class identity.
But some historians had doubts about this rigid separation. They thought that the different
spheres were permeable and fluid in the 18th century. But even if people could create their
own individuality, they were all subject to gendered social rules and obligations, like class,
age, occupation and religion.

II The myth of Passive Womanhood

With the rise of the novel in the 18th century, there is an emergence of a middle-class and
increasingly female reading. Women become more and more readers and at the same time
subjects of literary representation.
Economic status of women: During the 17th century, women played an active role in the
family workshop. But under the more commercial system of economic organization which
was developing in the 17th century, men became journeymen and day labourers and women

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lost their role as members of the trades through marriage and also their prime source of both
training and employment.
Conception of women as an intellectual empty ornament: husband considered as the head of
the woman. Duty of the wife to obey her husband. Passive and contemplative ideal.
The idea of the sublime: An Essay upon Projects (Daniel Defoe, 1697). Woman isn’t seen as
a rational subject but as an affective object and considered as spiritually perfect object of
desire. Woman’s ornamental status wasn’t established only because of her economic
uselessness: was also determined by her cultural construction as an accessory to masculine
desire.
Stock deviants: The prude, the coquette, the censorious woman and the scold. Stock deviants
are women who endeavour to become subjects of desire within a context that objectifies
female sexuality as property. Prude and coquette are the same kind of women. They are
primarily motivated by the desire to use their sexuality as a source of personal pleasure and
profit. They exploit their role as sexual object, in order to satisfy themselves.
The censorious woman and the scold both also exercise a distorted notion of chastity itself.
The censorious woman substitutes literal virginity for irreproachable virtue. For her, there is
only one vice, it is the only vice she is not guilty of (Mrs Wilkins).
The scold knows chastity to be the first merit in a woman; she is one who directs her severity
toward her husband and other men instead of other women (Mrs Partridge).

III. (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble) The desexualisation of Mrs Western suggests that the
power of a woman is the power of seduction and not a political power. If a woman had not the
power to seduce, it means that she is masculine by a lack of femininity. Since men had the
power to gevern, it just confirms the assumption that masculinity goes together with the
power to govern. One side we have sex and gender and in the other desire. Woman is
subordinated to men in a binary oppositional system, associated in a complementary
distribution. ‘The conception of gender presupposes not only a causal relation among sex,
gender and desire, but suggests as well that desire reflects or expresses gender and that gender
reflects or expresses desire. The metaphysical unity of the three is assumed to be truly known
and expressed in a differentiating desire for an oppositional gender - taht is in a form of
oppositional heterosexuality.’ (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble 30). To break with binarism,
Butler proposes us to see gender as performance. She defines gender as a „strategy of cultural
survival“, with the punitive consequences that comes with it. Gender is a fictive creation of
‘discrete categories’. To guarantee the reproduction of this culture it was established the
heterosexually-base system of marriage grounded on reproduction. According to Foucault,
‘the association of a natural sex with a discrete gender and with an ostensibly natural
‘attraction’ to the opposing sex/gender is an unnatural conjunction of cultural constructs in the
service of reproductive interests’.

IV. In „The Art of Being Pretty“, the discourse on beauty in the 18th century is built on the
distinction between external and internal, physical and moral. We can see that the beautiful
and the feminine were considered as identical.
The discourse on beauty is unseparable from the social codes and „the conduct of polite
society“. In this discourse a new group of ideas, feelings, taste and femininity emerged. There
was an opinion that women were capable of a greater « sensibility of taste » because they had
more lively passions than men. That is why women were more sensitive connoisseurs than
men ; and male connoisseurs were feminine because they were sensitive. There is a polemic
whether it is physicla of moral quality which gives worth to a woman. Spence is his « Crito »
introduces the term of « real personal beauty » and gives four heads of beauty : colour, form,

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expression, grace. From the point of view of form and colour, « the qualities Crito desires in
the bodies of women fulfil a well-established agenda, one that aims to provide simple and
irrecoverable sexual differentations. He seeks delicacy, softness, smallness and whiteness of
skin ; in short the signs of a body which has obstained from labour » (p.90). Expression is the
representation of emotions in the face and body which are represented by looks or gestures.
Even a face which does not have beautiful features can be beautiful if it has pleasngness.
Grace is the most important of the four elements, and Crito says that a beautiful woman is
always capable of grace (p.92).
The idea of the dual position of women as the judging and the judged is discussed. „While
women as the foundation of the social are the final arbiters of taste, it is an arbitration which
needs careful scrutiny.
Women are represented by Hume as both the agent of tasteful appreciation and
as objects of scrutiny” (p. 84).

V. In The Construction of Femininity, Anthony FLETCHER investigates the rise of a modern

femininity defined from a masculine point of view ‘in terms of a set of positive values’. His
argumentation is built on prescriptive material from the 1550s to the 1800s. Throughout the
decades, we notice a shift from didacticism to persuasion: women gradually come to be shed
in a positive light, as complementary partners to their husbands, contrasting the prohibitive
view of womanhood which prevails over the mid XVIth and XVIIth centuries. Indeed, before
the Restoration, this type of writings exhibits a moralising and didactic tone in an attempt to
keep women from satisfying what was thought to be natural evil tendencies. The notion of
virtue is deeply intertwined with that of chastity, hence the importance of a ‘modest
countenance’ since external behaviour is supposed to reflect internal beauty. Advice books
promote a set of behavioural defences against vice through body-language, self-control,
discretion and so on. Virtue comes to be defined as prudence and courage rather than chastity,
bringing about the belief in gendered training rather than prescriptive defences. Conduct
books from the 1670s to the 1800s usually parallel the medical literature focusing on sexual
difference. Women are viewed from an essentialist perspective as nearly exclusively
emotional beings in need of masculine protection. Nevertheless, their emotional specificity is
valorised into an exemplary nurturing role in a couple. Thus, gender is constructed within the
perspective of marriage as the basis of social order. Women are persuaded into internalising
their complementing role. Accordingly, education and reading are viewed as a means of
gender construction, in contrast to the prohibitive conception of learning of the XVIIth century.
In Tom Jones, such characters as Sophia, Molly, Mrs Western both represent and contradict
aspects of the modern definition of femininity in complex different ways.

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