Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-jbkpb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-08T14:46:10.923Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Enthusiastic Improvement: Mary Astell and Damaris Masham on Sociability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Abstract

Many commentators have contrasted the way that sociability is theorized in the writings of Mary Astell and Damaris Masham, emphasizing the extent to which Masham is more interested in embodied, worldly existence. I argue, by contrast, that Astell's own interest in imagining a constitutively relational individual emerges once we pay attention to her use of religious texts and tropes. To explore the relevance of Astell's Christianity, I emphasize both how Astell's Christianity shapes her view of the individual's relation to society and how Masham's contrasting views can be analyzed through the lens of her charge that Astell is an “enthusiast.” In late seventeenth‐century England, “enthusiasm” was a term of abuse that, commentators have recently argued, could function polemically to dismiss those deemed either excessively social or antisocial. By accusing Astell of enthusiasm, I claim, Masham seeks to marginalize the relational self that Astell imagines and to promote a more instrumental view of social ties. I suggest some aspects of Astell's thought that may have struck contemporaries as “enthusiastic” and contrast her vision of the self with Masham's more hedonistic subject. I conclude that, although each woman differently configures the relation between self and society, they share a desire to imagine autonomy within a relational framework.

Type
Open Issue Content
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

My thanks are due to those who reviewed this article for Hypatia, as their constructive suggestions helped improve the argument.

References

Achinstein, Sharon. 2007. Mary Astell, religion, and feminism: Texts in motion. In Mary Astell: Reason, gender, and faith, ed. Kolbrener, William and Michelson, Michal. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Adams, John. 1702. London. A sermon preach'd at St. Paul's Cathedral. London.Google Scholar
Apetrei, Sarah. 2008. “Call no man master upon earth”: Mary Astell's Tory feminism and an unknown correspondence. Eighteenth‐Century Studies 41 (4): 507–23.Google Scholar
Apetrei, Sarah. 2010. Women, feminism and religion in early enlightenment England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Aurelia. 2009. Autonomy and the relational individual: Spinoza and feminism. In Feminist interpretations of Baruch Spinoza, ed. Gatens, Moira. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Astell, Mary. 1694–97/2002. A Serious proposal to the ladies, ed. Springborg, Patricia. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview.Google Scholar
Astell, Mary. 1695. Letters concerning the love of God. London.Google Scholar
Astell, Mary. 1704. Moderation truly stated. London.Google Scholar
Astell, Mary. 1705. The Christian religion, as profess'd by a daughter of the church of England. London.Google Scholar
Astell, Mary. 1709. Bart'lemy Fair: or, An enquiry after wit. London.Google Scholar
Ayers, Michael. 1991. Locke, vol. 2, Ontology. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Black, Matthew, ed. 2001. Peake's commentary on the Bible. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980/1997. Selections from The logic of practice. Trans. Richard Nice. In The logic of the gift: Toward an ethic of generosity, ed. Schrift, Alan D.New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Broad, Jacqueline. 2002. Woman philosophers of the seventeenth century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Broad, Jacqueline. 2006. A woman's influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on moral accountability. Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (3): 489510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broad, Jacqueline. 2007. Astell, Cartesian ethics, and the critique of custom. In Mary Astell: Reason, gender, and faith, ed. Kolbrener, William and Michelson, Michal. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Buickerood, James. 2005. What is it with Damaris, Lady Masham? Locke Studies 5: 179214.Google Scholar
Cixous, Hélène. 1975/1997. Sorties: Out and out: Attacks/ways out/forays. Trans. Betsy Wing. In The logic of the gift: Toward an ethic of generosity, ed. Schrift, Alan D.New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1991/1997. The time of the king. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. In The logic of the gift: Toward an ethic of generosity, ed. Schrift, Alan D.New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Frankel, Lois. 1996. Damaris Cudworth Masham. In Hypatia's daughters: Fifteen hundred years of women philosophers, ed. McAlister, Linda Lopez. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. 1988. Embracing the absolute: The politics of the female subject in seventeenth‐century England. Genders 1: 2439.Google Scholar
Gregory, C. A. 1982. Gifts and commodities. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Heyd, Michael. 1995. “Be sober and reasonable”: The critique of enthusiasm in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Bridget. 1986. The first English feminist: Reflections upon marriage and other writings by Mary Astell. New York: St. Martin's.Google Scholar
Hutton, Sarah. 1993. Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham: Between Cambridge Platonism and enlightenment. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1 (1): 2954.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinnaird, Joan. 1979. Mary Astell and the conservative contribution to English feminism. Journal of the History of British Studies 19 (1): 5379.Google Scholar
Klein, Lawrence E. 1997. Sociability, solitude, and enthusiasm. Huntington Library Quarterly 60 (1/2): 153–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, Jan. 1983. Once more astonished: The parables of Jesus. New York: Crossroad.Google Scholar
Locke, John. 1690/1975. An essay concerning human understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H.Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mackenzie, Catriona, and Stoljar, Natalie. 2000. Relational autonomy: Feminist perspectives on autonomy, agency, and the social self. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Macpherson, C. B. 1962. The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Masham, Damaris. 1696. A discourse concerning the love of God. London.Google Scholar
Masham, Damaris. 1705. Occasional thoughts in reference to a vertuous or Christian life. London.Google Scholar
Mauss, Marcel. 1923–4/1967. The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. Trans. Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
McDowell, Paula. 1998. The women of Grub Street: Press, politics, and gender in the London literary marketplace 1678–1730. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDowell, Paula. 2002. Enlightenment enthusiasms and the spectacular failure of the Philadelphian society. Eighteenth‐Century Studies 35 (4): 515–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mee, Jon. 2003. Romanticism, enthusiasm, and regulation: Poetics and the policing of culture in the romantic period. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Morillo, John. 2000. John Dennis: Enthusiastic passions, cultural memory, and literary theory. Eighteenth‐Century Studies 34 (1): 2141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perry, Ruth. 1986. The celebrated Mary Astell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Perry, Ruth. 1990. Mary Astell: The feminist critique of possessive individualism. Eighteenth‐Century Studies 23 (4): 444–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A. 1998. Enthusiasms: The antiself of enlightenment. In Enthusiasm and enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850, ed. Klein, Lawrence E. and La Vopa, Anthony L.San Marino, CA: Huntington Library.Google Scholar
Schneewind, J. B. 1994. Locke's moral philosophy. In The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Chappell, Vere. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sleigh, Robert C. 2005. Reflections on the Masham–Leibniz correspondence. In Early modern philosophy: Mind, matter, and metaphysics, ed. Mercer, Christia and O'Neill, Eileen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Hilda. 1998. Women writers and the early modern British philosophical tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Springborg, Patricia. 1995. Mary Astell (1666–1731), critic of Locke. American Political Science Review 89 (3): 621–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, E. Derek, and New, Melvyn. 2005. Introduction. Letters concerning the love of God. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Tillotson, John. 1757. Sermons on several occasions, vols. 6–7. London.Google Scholar
Turner, Frederick. 1999. Shakespeare's twenty‐first century economics: The morality of love and money. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Penny. 2004. Mary Astell: Including women's voices in political theory. Hypatia 19 (3): 6384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar