Enlightenment Liberties

Libertés des Lumières

Actes du séminaire de la Société internationale
d’étude du XVIIIe siècle

Sous la direction de Guillaume Ansart,

Raphaël Ehrsam, Catriona Seth et Yasmin Solomonescu

HONORÉ CHAMPION
PARIS
 ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY :
THREE WRITERS AND A CARICATURIST

The end of the eighteenth century saw a surge in thinking and writing
about sex, from libertine novels recommending incest in pious tones to
antiquarian treatises linking religion, art, and language to prehistoric fertility
cults. I want to discuss a small fragment of this literature, perhaps the driest,
which links sex to human nature. But before we can begin this speculation
as readers of the twenty-first century, we have to examine for a moment the
curious word « sex ». First of all, what does the word mean to us ?
Genotype, phenotype, unconscious and conscious performance of social roles,
acts of procreation or recreation : the list goes on. On one hand, the word in
its ambiguity nicely suggests both activities and identities. On the other, it
raises doubts : most terms of the attempted disambiguation above were
unfamiliar in 1800. The authors I shall discuss use the word to divide
humans and other species into two camps, whose relations are the subject of
debate. Thus D. A. F. de Sade : « One abhors this sex, and wants to imitate
it ! »1. Mary Wollstonecraft, who likewise uses the noun, knows the
adjective, but again, exclusively to pick out a character of one sex : « The
attention to dress, therefore, which has been thought a sexual propensity, I
think natural to mankind »2. And yet other authors seem to use the word as
we do. Jeremy Bentham, besides the two sexes, discusses the legal status of
« sexual desire »3.

1
« On abhorre ce sexe, et l’on veut l’imiter ! » (D. A. F. de Sade, La nouvelle Justine, ou
les Malheurs de la Vertu, [Paris], n. pub., 1797, vol. 1, p. 162).
2
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political
and Moral Subjects, 3rd ed., London, Joseph Johnson, 1796. The third edition is the last
supervised by the author.
3
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation [printed
1780 ; published 1789], London, Pickering, 1823, vol. 1, p. 176-77. It may seem that
Wollstonecraft uses the term similarly at one place in the Vindication : « I only exclaim
against the sexual desire of conquest when the heart is out of the question ». But the very next
sentence, like the definite article, makes clear that the desire is « sexual » in being thought
to afflict particularly women : « This desire is not confined to women » (Wollstonecraft,
op. cit., p. 120). See the use of « sexual attachment » p. 446, where the term seems to mean
attachment between members of the two sexes.
344 ANDREI POP

What interests me in the period is the attempt to define sex in relation to

human nature as a set of capacities and constraints – a function of positive
liberty, in Isaiah Berlin’s terminology, of what people actually can do, and
not of negative liberty, of what they are not forbidden to do4. Such study is
novel only insofar as the most productive tradition in the history of sex, from
Michel Foucault to Faramerz Dabhoiwala, prefers negative liberty, even as
the story told has shifted in emphasis from the policing of subjects to their
liberation. Sex as a science of human nature seems unpromising today not
just for the reason that made Berlin suspicious of positive liberties, the need
for authoritarian government to enforce them, but because of what might be
called an analogous authority in the realm of culture – invasive clinical and
discursive practices, as Foucault saw psychoanalysis and other forms of
therapy5. This view remains more or less dominant, even as an increasing
focus on liberties has to some extent softened its austere view of sex6.
Unfortunately, the « sciences of man » refuse to die. Evolutionary biology
and neuroscience, if not exactly poised to conquer the humanities, may be
reasonably held, once developed, to disclose what can be known about
human sexual behaviour in general, as opposed to historically specific, terms.
That cherished preserve of the humanities, be it called historical convention,
social construction, or free will, may be forced one day to take account of
parameters of human adaptability in line with a natural-scientific study of
human beings. My object is not to take sides in the latest installment of the
« science wars » : for what it’s worth, I find much evolutionary criticism of
the moment silly, but it will not always be so7. My object is rather to show
that similar debates took place around 1800, and that sex, both as an aspect
of individual identity and as a set of activities between individuals, was
conceived as a set of powers and limitations arising from human nature
understood not theologically but biologically. Of course, in 1800 the word
« biology » meant nothing, and what one understood by « nature » ranged
from the eclectic analogies with natural history (of plants as well as animals)
to the mythic « state of nature » of social contract theory. That the result,

4
Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1958.
5
Indeed, the most provocative claim of The History of Sexuality is that the theoretical
concept « sex » is itself a creature of this repressive pseudoscientific culture.
6
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex : A History of the First Sexual Revolution, New
York, Oxford University Press, 2012. The empirical and theoretical validity of this tradition
is my starting point.
7
Luisa Calè and Adriana Craciun (introduction, « The Disorder of Things », Special Issue
of Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 45, no 1, Autumn 2011, p. 1-13) try to fend off scientific
rhetoric in the humanities by focussing on « disorder », but how do we know that a Darwinian
critic will not see order where they see disorder ?
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 345

however imperfect, mattered politically, even when it was expressed in verse

or a caricature, bears witness to the cognitive legibility of art, and to
continuity in thinking, even in such a field as sex which seems to get
reinvented at many points in human history.

1. Gillray and Darwin

On 1 August 1798, the date of Napoleon’s victory in the Battle of the

Nile, British caricaturist James Gillray published New Morality, a satirical
panorama of a print illustrating some doggerel published on July 9th in the
Anti-Jacobin Magazine (Fig. 3). A panoply of English liberals, half-animal
in form, are shown crawling out of « the Yeasty main » to pay obeisance to
the Idols of the Republic and their human delegate, « Directorial Lama » La
Révellière-Lépeaux, who had usurped presidency of the republic, though
Napoleon was to sideline him within a year’s time8. Gillray provides
something of a group portrait of the opposition, from poets like Coleridge
and Southey to theorists like Priestley and Godwin (the latter reduced to the
stature of a dwarfish donkey), with Charles Lamb a frog and Thomas Paine
a corseted crocodile shedding the requisite tears. Even left-leaning newspa-
pers, the Morning Post and Morning Chronicle, are identifiable by recognisa-
ble mastheads9. Above the fray fly human-headed birds who may have given
Goya the unforgettable motif for his Caprichos of 1799 ; below, the Duke of
Bedford in the guise of Leviathan hogs the stage, with Burke’s fishhook in
his nose (a reference to the latter’s polemical Letter to a Noble Lord) and
Charles James Fox, George Tierney, and John Nicholls astride his back,
while John Thelwall dangles from the beast’s neck, proffering a copy of his
lectures, from which he seems to be orating10.
The print is a veritable who’s who of republicanism, but is there sense in
it ? Robert Southey admitted to enjoying the print : « I have seen myself

8
Alexander Meyrick Broadley (Napoleon in Caricature, 1795-1821, London and New York,
Lane, 1911, vol. 1, p. 118) observes that Directorial religious views are ridiculed as much as
English Jacobins.
9
Many figures are named in the poem. The full version, which is long and far less funny,
was reprinted in Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, London, Wright, 1801, p. 233-56. The print is
reproduced with a key as the additional plate to the large-paper edition of Poetry of the Anti-
Jacobin : Comprising the Celebrated Political and Satirical Poems, ed. Charles Edmonds,
London, Low et al., 1890. For identification of the remaining figures, see Joseph Grego, The
Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist, with the History of his Life and Times, London,
Chatto & Windus, 1873, p. 246-47.
10
On Thelwall’s persecution and reputation in the 1790s, see Yasmin Solomonescu’s article
in this collection.
346 ANDREI POP

Bedfordized, and it has been a subject of much amusement. Holcroft’s

likeness is admirably preserved ». Yet Southey was less satisfied by the
content, in particular the coherence of the choice of victims : « I know not
what poor Lamb has done to be croaking there. What I think the worst part
of the anti-Jacobin abuse is the lumping together men of such opposite
principles : this was stupid »11. This criticism is fair enough, especially
aimed at George Canning’s poem, which had first brought many of the
targets together12. Gillray’s print has its own tensions and obscurities, but
they are not stupid. Above all, the animal representation of his targets is
problematic to the extent that it walks the line between simple abuse and
reasoned criticism. Bedford as a corpulent Biblical sea creature is probably
simple abuse : but what are we to make of the primate physiognomy and tail
peeking out from the torn pants of the Morning Chronicle crier ? And why
are Godwin, Coleridge, and Southey donkeys, the latter fashionably dressed
donkeys to boot ? Southey himself had an opinion on this :

Do you know that I have been caricatured in the Anti-Jacobin Magazine,

together with Lloyd, Lamb, the Duke of Bedford, Fox, &c., &c. The fellow has
not, however, libeled my likeness, because he did not know it ; so he clapped
an ass’s head on my shoulders13.

As a matter of fact, Southey may have been right. But worries about man’s
relation to nature extend from Gillray’s figures to his epithets. High priest
Lépeaux reads from a volume labeled Religion de la N[ature], but the plump
middle deity on the altar of Reason, who chews on a globe as soft as that
shared by Napoleon and Pitt in a later caricature by Gillray, tramples with
her foot a page labeled Ties of Nature. Do Jacobins make a show of honoring
nature while trampling her commandments ? Who gets to decide what these
might be, anyway ?
I believe the core of the satire, in particular its imputation of inhumanity,
has something to do with the basket of flowers sprouting Phrygian bonnets,

11
Southey, letter to C. W. W. Wynn, 15 Aug. 1798, in The Life and Correspondence of
Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols., London, Longman et al., 1849-50, vol.
1, p. 344-45.
12
The print was distributed both by itself and as a folding plate to the 1 Aug. 1798 issue
of the Anti-Jacobin (The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, London, Whittle and Chapple,
1799, vol. 1, p. 115), across from a 36-line excerpt from George Canning’s poem, published
in the 9 July issue.
13
Southey, letter to Thomas Southey, 29 Aug. 1798, in Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.),
op. cit., vol. 1, p. 347.
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 347

labeled Zoonomia, or, Jacobin Plants14 (see Fig. 4). The reference is to
Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, by Erasmus Darwin, the two
volumes of which would go through three editions by 1801. Zoonomia
endeavoured no less than to reform medicine, down to the practical treatment
of diseases, on a unitary philosophical basis, the core tenet of which is that
humans are animals and thus should be understood zoologically15. Central
to Darwin’s philosophy as laid out in Zoonomia is the claim that « the
ultimate cause only of all motion is immaterial, that is God », a doctrine due
to the Catholic theologian and Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche, but which
struck English readers in 1795 as atheism. So did the account of an ape in
Exeter Exchange using a rock to crack nuts and « thus using tools to effect
his purpose, like mankind », but more shocking still was the proto-evolution-
ist thesis concluding the theoretical first volume of the book :

all animals have a similar origin, viz. from a single living filament ; and [...]
the difference of their forms and qualities has arisen only from the different
irritabilities and sensibilities, or voluntarities, or associabilities, of this original
living filament16.

Did claims like these earn Darwin a place in New Morality ? A noted
historian of science finds only anti-French sentiment in play : « Here [in
Gillray] was further proof that Darwin was of enduring and central political
significance for those who, in this hyper-emotional atmosphere, feared all
things French »17.

14
Alan Bewell sees the « antiscientific biases of conservatives » at work in « ‘On the Banks
of the South Sea’ : Botany and Sexual Controversy in the Late Eighteenth Century », in
Visions of Empire : Voyages, Botany, and Representation of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller
and Peter Hanns Reill, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 190 ; British
Museum staff see « an appropriate offering to the botanist Lépeaux ». See the object
description at <http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_det
ails.aspx?objectId=1480866&partId=1&searchText=new+morality&page=1> (accessed 5 June
2013).
15
Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols., London, Johnson,
1794-96. The first volume contains the physiology and corresponding materialist philosophy ;
the second, diseases and treatments. In the third, enlarged edition, the order of the second and
third parts is reversed.
16
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 109, 143, 498, respectively. Incidentally, Darwin in the second passage
is the originator of the thesis that an opposable thumb is central to human superiority over
other primates.
17
Patricia Fara, Erasmus Darwin : Sex, Science, and Serendipity, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2012, p. 37. Neither « hyper-emotional » nor « fear of all things French » sounds like
348 ANDREI POP

Such « irritabilities » aside, it is worth asking how many readers Darwin

could have reached with what was marketed as a metaphysics for doctors ;
one anonymous reviewer, after taking Darwin to task for his heresies,
concedes, « that great ingenuity will be displayed in many parts, and that
every thing related will be delivered in a pleasing manner, must also be
expected from the author of the Botanic Garden »18. The Botanic Garden
(1789-91) was a verse rendering of Linnæan botany, concerning itself in the
first half, « The Economy of Vegetation », with climatic and environmental
variation, and in the second, « The Loves of the Plants », with an elaborate,
humorous enumeration of the anatomy and reproductive behaviours of a great
variety of plants. That Darwin, a hard-working society doctor who had
published his poem anonymously, was in fact its author is revealed in
Zoonomia, which bears the mention « By Erasmus Darwin, [...] Author of the
Botanic Garden » on its title page. Indeed, it is in view of this bestseller that
Darwin’s claim to be revolutionary must be judged19.
Just what is so threatening about the erotic popular science of « The
Loves of the Plants » ? In this his verse rendering of the Linnæan system,
Darwin represents plants, or more precisely plant sex organs, as Ovidian
lovers. Polyandry, or multiple male lovers, flexibly described as husbands,
wooers, or for that matter siblings, is the rule : « Sweet blooms GENISTA in
the myrtle shade, / And ten fond brothers woo the haughty maid »20.
Multiple female lovers also appear : « Thy love CALLITRICHE, two Virgins

Gillray. George Canning, the author of « New Morality », co-wrote « Loves of the
Triangles », a parody of Darwin’s putative Jacobinism published in the Anti-Jacobin before
the print (New Morality graced the last issue).
18
Article VI, Review of Darwin’s Zoonomia, British Critic, no 5, Jan.-June 1795, p. 122.
See p. 115 : « as we proceeded, we found rather the author of the Botanic Garden than the
physician : the poet accustomed to delight by the excursions of his imagination, and unable
to restrain its wanderings, than the strict and sober physiologist ».
19
There is of course other « Jacobin » content in Darwin, usually well insulated by
moralistic banality. For instance, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding
Schools (London, Johnson, 1797) cites situations like the « inactivity, folly, or death of a
husband » that require women of « internal strength and activity of mind, capable to transact
the business or combat the evils of life » (p. 13). There is here a fine balance between seeing
such cases as disasters or as opportunities for female advancement. On other politically radical
aspects of Darwin, especially his endorsement of the French Revolution, see Alan Bewell,
« ‘Jacobin Plants’ : Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s », Wordsworth Circle, vol. 20, no 3,
Summer 1989, p. 132-39, and Luisa Calè, « ‘A Female Band Despising Nature’s Law’ :
Botany, Gender and Revolution in the 1790s », Romanticism on the Net, no 17, Feb. 2000
<http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2000/v/n17/005889ar.html>.
20
Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, 4th ed., London, Johnson, 1799, vol. 2, « The
Loves of the Plants », p. 5 (Canto I, lines 57-58).
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 349

share »21. What this means, a footnote on the same page explains, is that
« One male and two females inhabit each flower ». Indeed, Darwin glosses
every erotic metaphor with a botanical footnote reprising the liaisons in dry
scientific terms22. This in itself seems ripe enough for parody, and indeed
critics have found veiled parodies and criticisms in works by contemporaries
ranging from William Wordsworth to Jane Austen23. But Gillray’s unsubtle
attack requires more for a target than aesthetic differences or discomfort with
Darwin’s eroticism (as we shall see, Gillray was not puritanical). It may be
that what struck enemies of the doctor was a deeper challenge to contempora-
neous views of human individuality, as it depends on sexual practice. Even
his friends underestimated this aspect of Darwin. The challenge appears most
clearly in the poem’s conclusion, wherein a single plant is compared to the
entire population of Tahiti :

A hundred virgins join a hundred swains,

And fond ADONIS leads the sprightly trains ;
[...]
– As round his shrine the gaudy circles bow,
And seal with muttering lips the faithless vow,
Licentious Hymen joins their mingled hands
And loosely twines the meretricious bands. –
Thus where pleased VENUS in the southern main,
Sheds all her smiles on Otaheite’s plain,
Wide o’er the isle her silken net she draws
And the Loves laugh at all but Nature’s laws24.

Darwin has fun thumbing his nose at society with this ode to Bacchic excess
among plants, whose « faithless vows » do not transgress « Nature’s laws ».
But what is startling in the passage is the collective subject, in the form of

21
Ibid., p. 4 (I, 45).
22
Darwin had just translated Linnæus’s Genera Plantarum as The Families of Plants, 2
vols., Lichfield, Jackson ; London, Johnson, 1787. Consonant with Darwin’s early practice,
this translation is anonymous, authorship being ascribed to « A Botanical Society at
Lichfield », Darwin’s home parish.
23
Desmond King-Hele (Darwin and the Romantic Poets, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1986,
p. 70) finds Darwin the butt of Wordsworth’s attack on « gaudy and inane phraseology » in
the preface to the Lyrical Ballads ; Theresa M. Kelley (Clandestine Marriage : Botany and
Romantic Culture, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) writes : « I wonder
whether the fickle, unctuously pious Collins in Pride and Prejudice might [not] be Jane
Austen’s pointed reply to Darwin’s complaint about adulterous females in the plant
Collinsonia » (p. 275, note 77).
24
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 236-37 (IV, 489-90, 501-08).
350 ANDREI POP

a plant that is compared with a human society. The long footnote accompa-
nying it elaborates on this link between botany and ethnography :

Adonis. l. 490. Many males and many females live together in the same flower.
It may seem a solecism in language, to call a flower, which contains many of
both sexes, an individual ; and the more so to call a tree or shrub an
individual, which consists of so many flowers. Every tree, indeed, ought to be
considered as a family or swarm of its respective buds ; but the buds
themselves seem to be individual plants ; because each has leaves or lungs
appropriated to it ; and the bark of the tree is only a congeries of the roots of
all these individual buds. Thus hollow oak-trees and willows are often seen
with the whole wood decayed and gone, and yet the few remaining branches
flourish with vigour ; but in respect to the male and female parts of a flower,
they do not destroy its individuality any more than the number of paps of a
sow, or the number of her cotyledons, each of which includes one of her
young.
The society called the Areoi, in the island of Otaheite, consists of about 100
males and 100 females, who form one promiscuous marriage25.

The discussion of the oak as a colony of buds might strike twenty-first-

century readers familiar with the rhetoric around the US National Institutes
of Health’s Human Microbiome Project, whose stated goal is to reinvent
medicine along the motto that « we are not individuals, we are colonies of
creatures », as Broad Institute co-director Bruce Birren puts it26. I am not
going to criticise this somewhat brazen pronouncement beyond pointing out
that its critique of individualism applies only to our bodies, and not to our
conscious minds, to which bacteria are not thought to contribute significantly.
What I would rather bring out is Birren’s challenge to traditional Western
medicine and bioethics, namely the assumption that we are above and apart
from the rest of nature, which we may ruthlessly exploit without reservation :
if we see ourselves, at least physically, as colonies of microorganisms, we
may come to favour more collaborative models of health and even survival.
Darwin’s comparisons of a human society with the buds of an oak, or the
paps of a sow, point in the same direction. They are not pleas for medical
pluralism, since medicine in his time had hardly been codified as a natural
science ; they are pleas for social and sexual pluralism, which Darwin

25
Ibid., p. 236 (IV, 490, note).
26
See the website of the Human Microbiome Project <https://olive.broadinstitute.org/pro
jects/hmp> (accessed 6 May 2013). The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute, a collaboration of
Harvard and MIT, is central to the Human Microbiome Project. See their official site,
<http://www.hmpdacc.org/> (accessed 6 May 2013).
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 351

celebrates by recounting the variety of erotic arrangements found in nature,

and above all in the uncontroversial world of plants27.
If this anachronistic reading of Darwin’s « Loves » could have struck a
chord with critical readers of the 1790s, it may well account for the vitriol
aimed at his light-hearted fantasy. For a rewriting of individual identity is
more frightening, because less familiar, than mere praise of the French
Revolution. What would such a revision of identities look like ? Scholars of
British science and literature often note Darwin’s inclusion in New Morality
in the form of the basket of Jacobin Plants, but a visual quotation from
« The Loves of the Plants » has so far escaped notice : the donkey-headed
poets just to the right of the basket (Fig. 4). If we discount the long muzzles,
which in both figures appear curiously pasted on beyond the outstretched
right arms, the figures closely resemble Darwin’s Anubis, the protagonist of
a print called The Fertilization of Egypt, engraved by William Blake after
Henry Fuseli28 (Fig. 5). Darwin’s verses render the yearly flooding of the
Nile : « High o’er his head the beams of SIRIUS glow, / And, Dog of Nile,
ANUBIS, barks below »29. In the Blake print, the muscular backside of the
god stands out from the landscape, which squeezes the Nile falls, Jupiter as
Rain God, and diminutive pyramids all in the space around and between
Anubis’s legs. Towering above all this is a syncretic animal god whose
physique and spread-legged stance recall Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian
Man30. The emblem of humanism has been turned so that his rear faces us,

27
One might compare Darwin less with his grandson than with evolutionary biologist Joan
Roughgarden, whose Evolution’s Rainbow (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California
Press, 2004) argues that the variety of sexual behaviour is better explained by social than by
sexual selection. This thesis, needless to say, is controversial.
28
A striking intermediate drawing by Blake, responsible for much of the scenery and the
entirety of the dark-light contrast, can be found with the Fuseli original in the British Museum.
Fuseli recommended Blake’s performance to his later engraver, Moses Haughton, for
emulation in a 17 Aug. 1798 letter to his friend, the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe :
« Let him look at the Anubis in the first part of the Botanic Garden, and He will have a
Clue » (Roscoe Paper 1654, Liverpool City Library Record Office, transcribed in The English
Letters of Henry Fuseli, ed. David H. Weinglass, London, Kraus, 1984, p. 187).
29
Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, 3rd ed., London, Johnson, 1795, vol. 1, « The
Economy of Vegetation », p. 127 (III, 133-34). Darwin explains : « The Abbé Le Pluche
observes, that as Sirius, or the dog-star, rose at the time of the commencement of the flood,
its rising was watched by the astronomers, and notice given of the approach of inundation, by
hanging the figure of Anubis, which was that of a man with a dog’s head, upon all their
temples. Histoire du Ciel » (p. 127, note).
30
Blake produced his own variant on the Vitruvian Man, variously called Glad Day or
Dance of Albion. The first state dates from 1793, two years after the Darwin book, though
bienentendu
352 ANDREI POP

and he has been given an animal head while retaining the athletic physiogno-
my. The result is no mere alienation of the classical ideal, but its exposure
to culture and nature : to Egyptian religion and, more concretely, since
Darwin knows more about zoology than about Egypt, to a biological view of
life. The biological view in no way excludes the metaphysical and cultural.
Sex and god are points on a continuum of animal experience.
It is this continuum, and its liability to disturb morality and the politics
meant to rest on it, that Gillray seizes on. The caricaturist in a letter to
Canning writes of Fuseli « & ye use to be made of him »31. Comparison
with the Darwin print explains much that is odd in the donkeys – above all
the upturned ears, looking like Hermes’s helmet or the sort of headgear that
Wagnerian singers wear in cartoons. Gillray is willing to sacrifice his own
usual aptness of description in order to retain aptness of citation from Fuseli
and Blake. This is particularly effective in light of the conspicuous changes
– the long snout and visible hooves of the donkey-men. All is from Darwin,
but with a critical twist : the worshipping gesture of Southey and Coleridge,
appropriate perhaps to the poem’s conception of their « mystic harps » tuned
to a French key, goes beyond it to suggest political abasement, even slavery
(a favourite motif for Gillray, one of whose sardonic prints is called French
Liberty, British Slavery). To put the unspoken implications of this particular
group of figures into words, Gillray is saying something like this : sexual
naturalism, as embodied in both Darwin’s Botanic Garden and the poetry
sympathetic to it (Southey’s « Saphics », a reference to his 1797 poem
« Sappho »), is akin to servility, because despite all its notions of subjective
freedom, its central concept is necessity32.

Blake inscribed « 1780 » on the plate, presumably the date of a first (lost) drawing. David
Bindman and Deirdre Toomey, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, London,
Thames & Hudson, 1978, p. 400.
31
Draper Hill, Mr. Gillray : The Caricaturist, London, Phaidon, 1965, p. 90. Gillray is
agreeing with Canning about the utility of Fuseli’s « mad taste » for his work. As E. H.
Gombrich noted in his review of Hill (Burlington Magazine, no 108, 1966, p. 206-07), the next
sentence of Gillray’s reply, which reads « I am convinced how very necessary his Mock
Sublime ‘Mad Taste’ [sic] », indicates Gillray’s familiarity with academic categories. Gillray
had studied at the Royal Academy. The letters, formerly in the British Museum, are now in
the British Library, Add MS 27337.
32
In an 18 Feb. 1826 letter to Grosvenor Charles Bedford (chief clerk of the Audit Office,
no relation to the Dukes of Bedford), Southey mentions that he would like to bring Warton’s
History of English Poetry up to date, indicating incidentally his high regard for Darwin : « I
mean to conclude with Hayley, Cowper, and Darwin » (C. C. Southey (ed.), op. cit., vol. 5,
p. 245). Among Southey’s manuscripts, there is nothing on Darwin in the « Collections for
History of English Literature and Poetry », but there are excerpts from Darwin’s Phythologia :
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 353

2. D. A. F. de Sade

The position I am arguing Gillray attributed to Darwin, perhaps unfairly,

is strikingly close to the actual views of their contemporary, D. A. F. de
Sade. To keep the comparison concrete, I quote Sade on the Tahitians, whom
like Darwin he admires for their sexual freedom.

The Tahitians satisfy their desires publicly ; they would blush to do so in

hiding. The Europeans showed them their religious rites, consisting in the
celebration of that ridiculous juggling act they call Mass. The natives then
begged permission to show their own. It was the rape of a little girl of ten by
a big boy of twenty-five. What a difference33 !

One benefit of reading Sade in tandem with Darwin is an appreciation of the

shared character of Enlightenment thinking about sexual liberty. For instance,
in describing ritual deflowering as a Tahitian « Mass », Sade is doing more
than just poking anticlerical fun at the Roman Catholic Church – for
elsewhere he depicts priests as wild as the « Tahitians », penetrating women
with the Host, for instance. This passage from a footnote in Juliette, on the
other hand, paints a contrast : unlike the tame « jonglerie » of the Europeans,
the Tahitian rite, in being violently sexual, is naturally good. What we have
here, as in Blake’s Anubis or New Morality, though more explosive, is the
attention to sex as a basic feature of human nature.
The match between doctrine and images, intuitively plausible in the realm
of ideas, is bound to sound far-fetched in the face of historical detail. James

or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800) under the heading « Collections for
the Doctor, etc. ». See Southey’s Commonplace-Book, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols., London,
Longman et al., 1849-51, vol. 4, p. 493. Incidentally, in a late (2 Feb. 1836) letter to Edward
Moxon, Southey indicates that he knew the print’s author to be Gillray (C. C. Southey (ed.),
op. cit., vol. 6, p. 288).
33
« Les Otaïtiens satisfont publiquement leurs désirs ; ils rougiraient de se cacher pour cela.
Les Européens leur firent voir leurs cérémonies religieuses, consistant dans la célébration de
cette ridicule jonglerie qu’ils nomment messe. À leur tour ils demandèrent la permission de
faire voir les leurs. C’était le viol d’une petite fille de dix ans, par un grand garçon de vingt-
cinq. Quelle différence » (Sade, Juliette, in Œuvres complètes du marquis de Sade, 15 vols.,
Paris, Cercle du livre précieux, 1962-64, vol. 3, p. 340-41, in the list immediately after the
cannibals). Made famous by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde (Paris,
1771), Tahiti served as a subject of utopian speculation from Denis Diderot’s Supplément au
voyage de Bougainville (1772) to Paul Gauguin around 1900. Sade may not have read
Diderot’s Supplément, itself inspired by Joseph Banks’s 1772 Supplement and published
posthumously in a multi-author collection called Opuscules philosophiques et littéraires, Paris,
Chevet, 1796. Chapters 3 and 4 defend free love as natural law.
354 ANDREI POP

Gillray, the poor sexton’s son, educated by the Moravian Brothers in London
in an antiquated language full of « ye’s » : a reader of Sade34 ? In any case,
we know he read Darwin, and I have argued that he did so more deeply than
most, if not with an open mind.
One image by Gillray relevant to Darwin and one relevant to Sade will
help me to make my point. Evidence that Gillray took Darwin seriously is in
An Excrescence ; a Fungus ; alias a Toadstool upon a Dung-hill (1791) (Fig.
6). Here Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, the nemesis of both Blake
and Gillray, is skewered as a scatological mushroom, growing out of the
odorous manure of the royal crown (George III being Gillray’s other
favourite target). This print is fitting as corroborating evidence for the New
Morality in that the form alone reminds one of Darwin : the metamorphosis
borrowed from « The Loves of the Plants » (in its third edition in 1791)
illustrates here not an elevation of organic processes to gallant eroticism, but
the opposite descent of the human, indeed of a State personage, to base
transactions in putrefied matter. If the laws of nature (Zoonomia) explain our
lives and those of plants, then Pitt’s baseness (as Gillray subjectively sees it)
can be described in terms of a dunghill fungus.
So much for Gillray as a reader of Darwin. What about Gillray the non-
reader of Sade ? There is no image of the French Revolution more phantas-
magoric than Gillray’s Un petit Soupèr, a la Parisiènne (1792), wherein a
sans-culotte family, from white-haired grandparents to bare-bottomed infants,
feasts on the bodies, entrails, organs – even an eye – of the guillotined (Fig.
7). Art historian Linda Nochlin has observed that « the far-out, radical
cartoonists of the 1960s look positively timid and repressed in compari-
son »35. A closer look at the text reveals that what is being shown is indeed
not fact but theory. « On Maigre Days each had his Dish / Of Soup, or
Sallad, Eggs, or Fish ; / But now ’tis human Flesh they gnaw. / And ev’ry
Day is Mardi Gras ». Besides the expected jabs at Catholicism, the poem sets
up an interesting counterfactual claim : Frenchmen are human just like us ;
they eat eggs and salad, soup and fish. But the Revolution, it is implied, has
ushered in permanent carnival, in which humans are fair game. We can
compare this with Sade on eating human flesh, taken from the same
encyclopedic catalogue of libertines through the history of humanity that

34
On Gillray’s childhood and schooling, see Hill, op. cit., p. 8-12. Camilla Smith
(« Between Fantasy and Angst : Assessing the Subject and Meaning of Henry Fuseli’s Late
Pornographic Drawings 1800-1825 », Art History, vol. 33, no 3, 2010, p. 420-48) makes a
spirited case for the availability of Sade to English artists around 1800.
35
Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces : The Fragment as Metaphor of Modernity, London,
Thames & Hudson, 1994, p. 15.
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 355

provided us with his text on the Tahitians : « once one has tasted this meat,
it becomes impossible to enjoy others [...] »36. The point of juxtaposing
Sade and Gillray is not the fatuous claim that A could have read B. It is
rather to confront conflicting views of the same practice.
What kind of theoretical content could be skewered by the petit Soupèr ?
Again, given the programmatic linking of humanity, violence, and religion,
it is safe to say that it is no individual deviation (« Frenchmen have become
mad ») but a theoretical stance (« Jacobinism ») that is alleged to cause
atrocity. Though Edmund Burke is the usual source on this, I think we will
get a fairer picture of Gillray’s target from Sade’s « Français, encore un
effort si vous voulez être républicains », the theoretical pamphlet inserted in
his 1795 dialogue La philosophie dans le boudoir. This text justifies its
concrete suggestions for the Thermidorian government (a more moderate
stage of the French Revolution following the fall of Robespierre), and indeed
the sexual education outlined in the surrounding dialogue, by statement of
metaphysical principles. Some of these echo Sade’s first, explicitly philoso-
phical texts of the 1770s. They are exceptional for how they draw from
standard materialist and empiricist assumptions a libertarian view of human
sexuality and violence.
In an early fragment called only « Pensée », Sade already presents himself
as an empiricist beginning from the certainty that we think only what the
senses bring in. The Cartesian je pense, donc je suis is for Sade « the result
of the operation of all our senses »37. Sade thus accepts the cogito, but only
as a synthesis of empirical acts of perception : neither God nor other
subjectivities have a privileged place in this system. « All ideas are
representations of objects which strike us ; what could the idea of God
represent to us, since it is evidently an idea without an object ? »38
Only the perceiving animal is treated with metaphysical respect. Within
these bounds, Sade is a thoroughgoing moralist : « We shall no doubt

36
« La meilleure de toutes les nourritures, sans doute, pour obtenir de l’abondance et de
l’épaisseur dans la matière séminale. Rien n’est absurde comme notre répugnance sur cet
article ; un peu d’expérience l’aurait bientôt vaincue – une fois qu’on a tâté de cette chair, il
devient impossible d’en aimer d’autres [...] » (Sade, Juliette, op. cit., p. 340).
37
« Donc, cette pensée [je pense, donc je suis] est le résultat de l’opération de tous nos
sens, quoiqu’elle ne le soit d’aucun en particulier [...] » (Sade, « Pensée », in Œuvres
complètes, op. cit., vol. 14, p. 69).
38
« Toutes nos idées sont des représentations des objets qui nous frappent ; qu’est-ce qui
peut nous représenter l’idée de Dieu qui est évidemment une idée sans objet [...] » (Sade,
« Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains », in La philosophie dans le
boudoir [1795], ed. Jean Deprun, in Œuvres, ed. Michel Delon, 3 vols., Paris, Gallimard,
1998, vol. 3, p. 119).
356 ANDREI POP

humiliate the pride of man, in reducing him to the rank of all other natural
productions, but the philosopher caresses no petty human vanities »39. The
image of the human mushroom on the dunghill seems a fitting accompani-
ment to this low status. How does one go from such a reduction in the
importance of human subjects to their liberation ? For Sade, this proceeds in
two steps. First, the insignificance of human life is used to argue that
violence should not be punished : as humans are no better than plants (it is
fascinating that the equivalence is made with plants, and not merely animals),
the death of a human is meaningless. The most that should be done is to
permit revenge40.
Where does sexual liberty fit into a scheme of naturalised human
insignificance ? Since sex is often a form of violence, all kinds of sexual
practices are permissible as functions of organisms and individual wills ; the
fiercer, the better the act can be defended on the model of violence just
discussed, but there is no objection in principle to gentler forms of intima-
cy41. On the other hand, there seems to be some inconsistency about
women. As feminist readers have rightly insisted, Sade’s heroines, from the
victim Justine to the perpetrator Juliette, are uniquely autonomous and self-
sufficient, nothing like the emotionally overextended heroines of the
sentimental novel42. However, the official Sade of « Encore un effort [...] »

39
« Nous allons sans doute humilier ici l’orgueil de l’homme, en le rabaissant au rang de
toutes les autres productions de la nature, mais le philosophe ne caresse point les petites
vanités humaines [...] » (ibid.).
40
« Nous ne devons certainement pas douter un moment que tout ce qui s’appelle crimes
moraux, c’est-à-dire toutes les actions de l’espèce de celles que nous venons de citer, ne soit
parfaitement indifférent dans un gouvernement, dont le seul devoir consiste à conserver, par
tel moyen que ce puisse être, la forme essentielle à son maintien ; voilà l’unique morale d’un
gouvernement républicain » (ibid., p. 129).
41
In the text of La nouvelle Justine (1797) there is a footnote that is very explicit about the
link between eroticism and aggression : « Il n’est pas un seul homme cruel qui n’ait été un
très-grand libertin ; et réversiblement un libertin qui ne devienne féroce ». The note goes on
to say that ferocity, like pain, is a state of the mind (« mode de l’âme ») independent of us,
and thus neither praise- nor blameworthy. See Sade, La nouvelle Justine, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 56.
42
Simone de Beauvoir, « Faut-il brûler Sade ? », Les Temps modernes, no 74-75,
1951/1952, p. 1002-33, 1197-1230, translated as Must We Burn Sade ?, London, Nevill, 1953.
Beauvoir sees Sade as an apt critic of traditional society, who went astray in thinking
domination inevitable. Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography
(New York, Pantheon, 1978) is a less ambiguous celebration of the independence from male
control of Sade’s women. Though not feminist, Camille Paglia’s reading of Sade in Sexual
Personæ (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990, p. 230-47), which promotes
female sexuality and attacks motherhood, owes something to both strands of feminist thinking
about Sade.
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 357

writes that in a politically reformed society, women should be reduced to a

state of chattel slavery43.
How is this explained ? For Sade, as for many male writers on this
subject, women are in general less strong physically than men, so sexual
slavery is a natural outcome of egoistic competition. Some of Sade’s
metaphysical assumptions adjust this antagonistic view with what he thinks
to be the human lot in general. The liberty of humans, not just women,
consists in enslavement to nature. The libertine noblewoman Saint-Ange, a
mouthpiece of liberated, aggressive female sexuality in La philosophie dans
le boudoir, is described by Sade in terms of « the divine laws of pleasure
which enchained her all her life »44. Natural law, like a strict monotheistic
God, decrees, leaving man to obey : determinism in fact makes this simpler,
since there is no free will to account for. Freedom in a material sense is
enslavement to passions, and all that the state should do is get out of the way
of this pursuit, and prevent others from interfering.
This deterministic view of natural law is not too different from Darwin’s
in the Zoonomia (published the same year as La philosophie), who differed
substantially only in putting a clockmaker God at the beginning of the
deterministic chain of causes. But Sade’s version, though godless, still won’t
explain female slavery. Even if we grant Sade the thesis that on average men
are physically stronger than women, what is to stop strong « Sadeian
women », as Angela Carter calls them, from banding together and enslaving
men ?
The question is difficult to answer, and in a psychobiographical mode, I
concede that it is not worth posing. What Sade might have thought on a topic
he does not write about is less interesting than what he should have thought,
given what he did write. But is that not taking Sade too seriously ? Are
Sade’s texts not artful ploys designed to implicate us in a game of aggression
and desire ? Certainly they are, but I would insist that this is not all they are.
They are in addition tissues of thoughts, some terribly consistent, some
puzzling. The subordination of women in a state of nature is one such
puzzling theme, which gains in clarity if his novelistic discussions of it are
granted the same capacity to convey thought as his programmatic statements.

43
« Des mœurs » discusses woman as common property in the state of nature. See also the
following note : « Le premier mouvement de concupiscence qu’éprouve une jeune fille, est
l’époque que la nature lui indique pour se prostituer, et sans aucune autre espèce de
considération, elle doit céder dès que sa nature parle ; elle en outrage les lois si elle résiste »
(Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir, op. cit., p. 136).
44
The exact phrase is « les lois divines du plaisir qui l’enchaînèrent toute sa vie » (Sade,
« Aux Libertins », in La Philosophie dans le boudoir, op. cit., p. 3). Note the gender of the
readers. See Svein-Eirik Fauskevåg, Sade ou La tentation totalitaire : étude sur l’anthropolo-
gie littéraire dans La Nouvelle Justine et l’Histoire de Juliette, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2001.
358 ANDREI POP

In this vein I will conclude my discussion of Sade with a brief examination

of the « Dissertation sur les Femmes » brought forth by the libertine
Gernande in Chapter XIV of La nouvelle Justine (1797). The speech makes
a show of divesting itself of the motives of the character uttering it, Gernande
(who loathes his wife), to ascend to a discussion of the sexes « de sang
froid ». He begins, interestingly, by denying the existence of conditions
needed for a mutually respectful coexistence of man and woman. Such an
association could only hold between naturally equal beings, but is ludicrous
« between one strong being and one weak one »45. There follow pedantic
and unfortunately all-too-believable examples of the killing, enslavement, and
general abuse of women by men in many societies. One also finds the
expected praise of men and egoism. Finally, the discourse ends, rather
plaintively, on a domestic note : « So there, I shall treat my wife as I see fit
[...]. As I find the right in all the codes of the universe, in my heart, and in
nature »46.
There are several reactions to the speech, of which perhaps the most
interesting is that of Madame d’Esterval, a « Sadeian woman » who with her
husband is one of the principal aggressors in the preceding chapters. To
Gernande she concedes that her sex on the whole is not worth defending, but
insists that she herself does not fit his account, for she is « an amphibious
being, in any case, who, as you yourselves have decided, tends infinitely
more closely to your sex than to that of women »47.
An amphibious being : is this not how Gillray described practitioners of
the « new morality » ? It is important to me that Sade has this being identify
itself – herself ? himself ? – as amphibian. The noun is in Sade less
indicative of frogs or slime (which Gillray arbitrarily pins on his « frog and
toad », Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd48), and more a metaphor for an
intermediate place between two genera. Indeed, Madame d’Esterval’s
precarious place among the exploiters is not one that belongs to her naturally,
but, as her speech makes clear, is only secured by their consensus. That a
caricaturist would render his opponents as quasi-human may not mean much

45
« Une telle association ne saurait avoir lieu, qu’il ne se forme aussitôt un pacte entre ces
deux êtres, de ne faire, chacun vis-à-vis l’un de l’autre, que la sorte d’usage de leur force qui
ne peut nuire à aucun des deux ; mais cette ridicule convention ne saurait assurément exister
entre l’être fort et l’être faible » (Sade, La nouvelle Justine, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 259).
46
« [...] et là, je traiterai ma femme comme il me conviendra [...]. Comme j’en trouve le
droit dans tous les codes de l’Univers, dans mon cœur, et dans la nature » (ibid., vol. 3,
p. 269).
47
« Je suis un être amphibie, d’ailleurs, qui, comme vous l’avez vous-mêmes décidé, tient
infiniment plus à votre sexe qu’à celui des femmes [...] » (ibid., vol. 3, p. 270).
48
Southey recounts a dinner at which « Lamb became disputatious, and said things to
Godwin which made him quietly say ‘Pray, Mr. Lamb, are you toad or frog ?’ » (Southey,
letter to Moxon, in C. C. Southey (ed.), op. cit., vol. 6, p. 288).
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 359

beyond the conventions of defamation ; that an advocate of natural ethics can

describe a character in this way lends credence to the thesis that both
advocate and critic have the same thing in mind, though they value it very
differently. Whatever dimension of parochial fear-mongering the New
Morality traffics in, Gillray has grasped at least one aspect of the philosophi-
cal attempt to found political and social morality on a naturalised view of sex
and human nature : it results in a slave mentality, if not literally, relative to
other human beings, then abstractly, relative to nature.

3. Mary Wollstonecraft

This section concludes my discussion of efforts around 1800 to found a

moral and political theory of human nature on arguments about sex. The
theory was one promoting tolerance under a comic façade in Darwin, and of
paternalism masquerading as sexual revolution in Sade49. That it could
assume such different forms on the basis of very similar evidence and lines
of argument had to do, I think, with disagreements about how the theory was
to be interpreted practically. And so this final segment of my discussion
addresses in particular the consequences of a theory of human nature for
everyday action, as well as political activism. As it stands, the picture is not
complete – and it could not be without being longer and addressing a greater
number of authors and events – but it remains unbalanced in one important
sense. Neither Darwin’s plants nor Sade’s slaves seem directly products of
the world we live in, or that Sade and Darwin lived in. Like Gillray’s
mushrooms and cannibals they are extreme extrapolations of aspects of the
social and natural world. What we need to bring this discussion to a
conclusion is a voice more strongly attuned to existing society : that of
a social scientist. And for this purpose I can think of no better inter-
locutor than the writer who may have been the first social scientist, Mary
Wollstonecraft50.

49
Sade himself was unsure of his political position, as he dramatically put it in a 1791 letter
to Gaufridy : « Que suis-je à présent ? Aristocrate ou démocrate ? Vous me le direz s’il vous
plaît, car pour moi je n’en sais rien » (Œuvres, op. cit., vol. 1, p. lxxvii). The consensus the
Surrealists shared with Napoleon is that Sade subverted the bourgeois family. But those
persons his fiction and theory argue should be exposed to abuse are women and children, in
other words, dependents of the bourgeois household. I leave it to the reader to judge the
subversiveness of such proposals.
50
I do not mean to celebrate Wollstonecraft as utterly original : her work is certainly
informed by the Philosophical Radicals and by strains of theoretical feminism reaching back
to Plato. But there is an important sense in which, besides being a philosopher like these
precursors, Wollstonecraft was also a student of everyday life.
360 ANDREI POP

Wollstonecraft shared a publisher (Joseph Johnson) with Darwin, Blake

and Fuseli and lived in France from December 1792 to April 1795, that is to
say, during the time Sade composed La Philosophie dans le boudoir. She
makes a cameo appearance in New Morality, albeit a disembodied one, as the
author of Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, the subtitle of which graces a
pamphlet fallen from the « Cornucopia of Ignorance ». Only that is not quite
right. The pamphlet in Gillray is called Wrongs of Women (see Fig. 4).
Wollstonecraft’s novel, Maria, was first published posthumously in 1798, and
attacked in the Anti-Jacobin Review, along with William Godwin’s Memoirs
of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, also seen in the
print. Both books, and their prototype, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
have in their title « Woman » in the singular : it is a concept word or mass
term, and indicates that the class as a whole is the subject of discussion or
fictional portrayal. But Gillray’s pamphlet with its plural « Women »,
inadvertently or not, harks back to Wollstonecraft’s first famous book, her
reply to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1791’s Vindication
of the Rights of Men. The turn from Men to Women, and from Rights to
Wrongs, suggests that Gillray, like Godwin in his memoirs, thought of
Wollstonecraft above all as the author of the Vindication of the Rights of
Woman51. This book is a more eloquent defense of the « new morality »
than any other of Gillray’s targets, real (Darwin) or potential (Sade).
The second Vindication was thus already a classic by 1800. William
Godwin, radical political philosopher, husband, and uncompromising
memoirist of Wollstonecraft, considered the book « eminently deficient in
method and arrangement », though he admitted, « it will be read as long as
the English language endures »52. To be fair, it was the first volume of what
Wollstonecraft at one point conceived as a trilogy53. The content itself,
however, may disconcert the modern reader expecting a founding document
of feminism. Religious morality, if not of an entirely orthodox bent, is central

51
The first, four-volume edition of Wollstonecraft’s posthumous writings, of which Maria
occupied the first two, bore the title Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman.
52
William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
London, Johnson, 1798, p. 83. A good starting point for the reception of Wollstonecraft’s book
is Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman : A Sourcebook, ed. Adriana
Craciun, London, Routledge, 2002.
53
Concerning organisation, Wollstonecraft herself states in the « Advertisement » : « When
I began to write this work, I divided it into three parts, supposing that one volume would
contain a full discussion of the arguments which seemed to me to rise naturally from a few
simple principles ; but fresh illustrations occurring as I advanced, I now present only the first
part to the public » (Wollstonecraft, op. cit., n. pag.).
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 361

to the work54. Setting out to refute those who insisted on the subordination
of women, Wollstonecraft explicitly concedes portions of the reigning
morality, in particular the moral and intellectual imperfection of woman in
her present state, that would not even have been accepted by her radical
circle55. Part of her argument for enfranchisement, for instance, turns on its
making women better mothers and wives : conversely, women are not good
citizens if they are not good caretakers56. There is much to be said for her
arguments for these claims, which may be seen as proposals for reform of the
domestic as well as the political order, but there is no denying their distance
from the intellectual style of twentieth-century feminism57.
Part of the challenge in approaching the Vindication as a text in the
history of sexuality is that it is a very ambitious text with many agendas. It
is a timely rebuttal of French republicans who failed to enfranchise women
with the 1791 Constitution ; it is a critique of sentimentalism and its aesthetic
phenomena. I propose to read it very partially, as a treatise in nascent social
science, concerned with relations between men and women, both groups
being understood by the overlapping concepts of rational creatures and
fellow creatures. The second term seems a revolutionary emphasis of
Wollstonecraft’s, for it allows her to voice ethical and political demands that
apply to women and men equally. But for Wollstonecraft this equality is
implicit in the first, Aristotelian term, at least as she had used it since her
first work of theory, the 1787 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,
which begins : « [...] I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature
to attend to its offspring [...] »58.

54
On Wollstonecraft’s religiosity, see the classic article by Moira Ferguson, « The
Discovery of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Female Reader », Signs, vol. 3, no 4, Summer 1978,
p. 945-57.
55
« It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of
men ; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection, which would make them good
wives and mothers » (Wollstonecraft, op. cit., p. 321). See Susan Ferguson, « The Radical
Ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft », Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 32, no 3, Sept.
1999, p. 427-50.
56
See Laura Brace, « ‘Not empire, but equality’ : Mary Wollstonecraft, the Marriage State,
and the Sexual Contract », Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 8, no 4, 2000, p. 433-55.
57
In a reply to Brace (« Mothers and Independent Citizens : Making Sense of Wollstone-
craft’s Supposed Essentialism », Philosophical Papers, vol. 42, no 3, 2013, p. 259-84),
Sandrine Bergès argues that Wollstonecraft’s thesis contains « the seeds of feminist arguments
for co-parenting ».
58
Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, London, Johnson, 1787,
p. 1. The whole sentence reads : « As I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature
to attend to its offspring, I am sorry to observe, that reason and duty together have not so
powerful an influence over human conduct, as instinct has in the brute creation » (p. 1-2).
Unfortunately, the next sentence takes mothers alone to task, though fathers are also at fault.
362 ANDREI POP

As is fitting for a social scientist, the author presents a functional view of

society : « I mean [...] to infer that the society is not properly organized
which does not compel men and women to discharge their respective duties,
by making it the only way to acquire that countenance from their fellow-
creatures, which every human being wishes some way to attain »59.
Independence for women (as Wollstonecraft understood the term, including
the just-mentioned familial duties) ought to please men, but they fail to see
this, fearing instead a bloody struggle in the state of nature. « Their fellow
creatures would not then be viewed as frail beings [...] but guarded against
as beasts of prey ». Fortunately, nature intervenes for peaceful coexistence
of the sexes, « and in morals, as well as in works of taste, we should be
observant of her sacred indications »60.
The pronoun suggests that nature is female. Wollstonecraft indeed seems
to go farther :

I disclaim that specious humility which, after investigating nature, stops at the
author, – The High and Lofty One, who inhabiteth eternity, doubtless possesses
many attributes of which we can form no conception ; but reason tells me that
they cannot clash with those I adore – and I am compelled to listen to her
voice61.

This is of course not social science, but it is not rhetoric either – it is

practicing what one preaches, since part of the book’s concern is to argue for
equal education for women on the basis of human reason. In one pious-
sounding sentence, Wollstonecraft manages through adroit pronoun use to
imply that both reason and deity are female : but all this is just softening of
the reader’s prejudices, since the drift of the passage is that we ought to see
that what unites us with God transcends our differences, and not anthropo-
morphise him in a way that would serve our purposes (by making him male).
Neither God nor reason is male ; they are not sexed62.

59
Wollstonecraft, Vindication, op. cit., p. 322-3.
60
Ibid., p. 239 (both quotes).
61
Ibid., p. 94.
62
See Sandrine Bergès, Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, New York, Routledge, 2013, p. 7, and ch. 3. This view of reason leads
Wollstonecraft to reject Rousseau’s separation of men and women in education : « women,
considered not only as moral, but rational creatures, ought to endeavour to acquire human
virtues (or perfections) by the same means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful
kind of half being – one of Rousseau’s wild chimeras » (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, op. cit.,
p. 77 ; italics Wollstonecraft’s).
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 363

A political credo accompanies this metaphysics : « It is time to effect a

revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity –
and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming
themselves to reform the world »63. Marx may have picked up here the
striking motif of the oppressed liberating humanity by liberating themselves.
This is made to sound possible because they are intrinsically « part of the
human species », and a profound change in their status will by necessity
affect the whole. But the forces driving this revolution pose dangers as well.
A sarcastic passage follows :

– If men be demi-gods – why let us serve them ! And if the dignity of the
female soul be as disputable as that of animals – if their reason does not afford
sufficient light to direct their conduct whilst unerring instinct is denied – they
are surely of all creatures the most miserable64 !

This is the dark side to treating men and women as rational animals. As in
Sade, there is something to be said for strength : « I will allow that bodily
strength seems to give man a natural superiority over woman : and this is the
only solid basis on which the superiority of the sex can be built [...] »65. In
the state of nature, and in most states since, men ruled by force. Not that in
itself violence is a justification : « As to the argument respecting the
subjection in which the sex has ever been held, it retorts on man »66.
Modern society must reflect on its brutality, as the author herself does, but
in the end it may be powerless to eradicate it. « When morality shall be
settled on a more solid basis, then, without being gifted with a prophetic
spirit, I will venture to predict that woman will be either the friend or slave
of man ». The dilemma is restated on the same page in terms of knowledge.
In the future, « we shall not, as at present, doubt whether she is a moral
agent, or the link which unites man with brutes »67. A perfect society may
fail to bring about perfect equality between the sexes : « Let there be then no
coercion established in society, and the common law of gravity prevailing,
the sexes will fall into their proper places »68.

63
Ibid., p. 92-93.
64
Ibid., p. 93.
65
Ibid., p. 77.
66
Ibid., p. 73. See also p. 69 : « I shall only insist that men have increased that inferiority
till women are almost sunk below the standard of rational creatures ». See the bitter irony near
the beginning, p. 6 : « My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational
creatures [...] ».
67
Ibid., p. 69. See Bergès, Wollstonecraft, op. cit., p. 41-60.
68
From the dedication to Talleyrand-Périgord, Wollstonecraft, Vindication, op. cit., p. xii.
364 ANDREI POP

Did Wollstonecraft truly believe in this apocalyptic choice ? The

« common law of gravity » may sound implausibly close to Sade, but it is
close to Darwin, who inhabited the same world of scientifically informed
radical politics. Again, as in Sade, we face the conundrum of an aesthetically
ambitious and theoretically substantial text : does it mean what it says, or is
it goading us to read our own reflection in it ? I would like to ask this in
light of a Gillray caricature aimed at the Duke and Duchess of York, whose
petite feet were celebrated in the press – that is, before they were presented
as supine in Fashionable contrasts ; or the Duchess’s little Shoe yeilding
[sic] to the Magnitude of the Duke’s Foot (1792) (Fig. 8). The feet in dainty
women’s shoes on the outside, the men’s feet stiffly stuck together on the
inside, pressing down the bed sheet, seem to enact a dance : the « common
law of gravity » according to which one sex comes out on top, or at any rate
remains clearly delimited from the other.
It is tempting, in light of New Morality and Wollstonecraft’s inclusion
therein, to read Gillray’s Fashionable contrasts as an affirmation of the
difference of the sexes, even of their hierarchy. But I believe this pits our
two authors starkly against each other, and goes against the spirit of the
caricature : after all, what we see is two pairs of feet, whose differences,
accentuated as they may be by fashionable footwear, are only physical. The
elliptical yet comically direct rendering of coitus really makes no claims
about the implications of sexuality for human nature besides the implicit
assertion that it is an everyday part of life. I do not wish to claim that
Gillray, who lived in a common law arrangement with his publisher Hannah
Humphrey, entertained any conscious sympathy for the equality of the sexes.
Rather, I would like to give Wollstonecraft the last word, not so much
against Gillray, whose acid pen struck in many directions, but against the
society they both inhabited.

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it
though it may excite a horse-laugh. – I do earnestly wish to see the distinction
of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour69.

Wollstonecraft’s wild wish is tempered by a reservation. Like Gillray she is

not afraid of a laugh. But her vision of a society in which the sexes are not
marked draws the line in the same place as the cartoonist : « where love
animates the behaviour », the distinction is permitted.
I began this article by asking whether an account of positive liberty in
terms of sex is possible around 1800 : the best accounts of the period, and

69
Ibid., p. 121.
ENLIGHTENMENT SEXUAL ANTHROPOLOGY 365

of the history of sexuality, tend to read in the symbols of liberty, from

philosophical reformism to the legalisation of homosexuality by the French
revolutionaries, only the seeds of a more complex, modern system of social
control of the body. Nothing I discussed suggests a revision of the darker
prognoses in the history of sexuality : the Victorian era, with its extremes of
fantasy and social constraint, was around the corner. But concepts of liberty
weren’t just in the air : they were in books and paintings, poems and prints.
They were thought about, that is to say shared, by foes of many parties and
both sexes. The liberation sought was sometimes political, sometimes sexual :
in both cases it involved human beings in valuable if flawed reflection about
who or what we are.

Andrei POP
University of Chicago

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 Cet ouvrage rassemble quatorze articles présentés lors du
Séminaire international des jeunes dix-huitiémistes de la Société
internationale d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (SIEDS – ISECS) qui
s’est tenu à l’Université d’Indiana à Bloomington (États-Unis), du
2 au 7 juillet 2012. Le thème du séminaire, « Libertés des
Lumières », a inspiré une diversité d’approches reflétant celle des
conceptions de la liberté au XVIIIe siècle. Les études réunies dans
ce volume relèvent d’une pluralité de disciplines, depuis l’histoire,
la philosophie et la littérature jusqu’aux sciences politiques et aux
études religieuses, en passant par l’histoire de l’art et du théâtre. À
ce caractère interdisciplinaire de l’ouvrage s’ajoute une dimension
pleinement européenne et atlantique, puisque s’y trouvent prises
en compte l’Europe occidentale, la Scandinavie et l’Amérique
coloniale.

ÉTUDES INTERNATIONALES SUR LE DIX-HUITIÈME SIÈCLE No 17

INTERNATIONAL EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES No 17