Flirting and modernity

 

In the 18^th century, English essayists expressed a lotta anxiety about female reading.  The “new” genre of the romance fiction already created its problems for the classically trained, who rightly suspected that the prevalence of literacy was having a massive, unpredictable effect.  

As Samuel Johnson wrote:

“In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself; the virtues and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity; and he amused himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and persecutors, as with beings of another species, whose actions were regulated upon motives of their own, and who had neither faults nor excellencies in common with himself.

But when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope, by observing his behaviour and success, to regulate their own practices, when they shall be engaged in the like part.”

When the adventurer is a bit of a scoundrel or a woman, the hypnotic effect upon the female displaced another bit of the hierarchy – which is why it was necessary to supervise female reading especially. There was a copious literature about just that necessity, which has been culled by many feminist literary historians.

But that scene of literacy and reading in Britain looked a bit differently to intellectuals from less developed lands. Georg Lichtenberg, an anglophile whose visit to England was, perhaps, the most dramatic adventure of his life, was one of them. For him, a woman reading a newspaper was the very image of civilization. And, he suspected, it was a scene lodged in the superstructure, underneath which there was a material infrastructure that was dissolving the old separation between private and public, a structure that held women prisoners of the household. Although you would never know it from today’s “war of civilization” Western press, in which the Moslem world’s veiling of women is a throwback to the stone age, in Europe up through the 19^th century there were very strict rules that applied to women in public. They were not supposed to be there. The flaneur might be an outlier – the flaneuse was an outlaw. We imagine city streets in the nineteenth century in the image of 21^st century costume dramas, but in reality, the streets were for men. The women who appeared on the street was subject to an initiation that had much to do with the assumption of her sexual availability. To be appropriately covered was a norm for women that was extremely hazardous to broach.

A French novelist, Pierre Senges, has recently written a novel that proposes to view Lichtenberg’s Suedelbucher – Waste books – as fragments of a novel. Lichtenberg himself was a reader of novels and a thinker about the genre. He wrote in a sort of proto-Kittler style about the connection between the novel, modernization, and women, using the English cityscape and mode of transportation as motives to novel-writing – taking up the challenge of the “levelling of adventure” that made the (female) reader a potential heroine and seeing in it a freedom from the old ways.  

Lichtenberg tutored English students in Gottingen, and first visited England in 1770. Those features that worried the Tory moralist as well as Whig feminists, like Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft wanted education and emancipation, but was not happy about thrusting women (the bourgeois female subject) into the public sphere:

“Females are not educated to become public speakers or players; though many young ladies are now led by fashion to exhibit their persons on a stage, sacrificing to mere vanity that diffidence and reserve which characterizes youth, and is the most graceful ornament of the sex. 

But if it be allowed to be a breach of modesty for a woman to obtrude her person or talents on the public when necessity does not justify and spur her on, yet to be able to read with propriety is certainly a very desirable attainment: to facilitate this task, and exercise the voice, many dialogues have been selected; but not always the most beautiful with respect to composition, as the taste should very gradually be formed.”

Lichtenberg, however, saw female publicness as the inevitable accompaniment of modernization. He observed in England that the house scheme was such as to individualize the residents, the family members. While in Germany children and adolescents doubled up in their rooms, and the communal air of the household extended to watchfulness about the comings and goings of all the members, especially the girls, in England the house plan allowed for individuals to “own” their rooms, and the houses were situated so as to give multiple access to the outside. In 1965, a demographer named John Hajnal proposed that the early modern period saw a splitting up of European marriage patterns, with the “West” – notably England and some of France – adhering to a new pattern of family residence.  He  called the Western pattern the simple household formation, in which one and only one married couple were at the center of the household; in the East, you had what he called a joint household formation, in which two or more related married couples formed the household. Hajnal claimed that in the sixteenth century, the Western type of household was new, and characterized by a demographic shift in which marriage occurred significantly later in life. For women, for instance, the average age moves from 20 to 25. Meanwhile, in the East, the marriage age remained very young, and so a married couple of, basically, teenagers remained in a household with an older couple, usually the husband’s family.

East and West, here, name Cold War entities that don’t fit Hajnal’s data. Spain and Italy south of Tuscany is “Eastern”, and Bohemia is Western. Nevertheless, if Hajnal’s theory is right, it says very important things about Early modernity – namely, that the discovery of youth – the extended time before marriage – and of “individualism” are entangled.

Lichtenberg definitely had something like that entaglement in line with his notion that novel reading was connected to such things as the greater chance for eye to eye contact between men and women that came about in a modernized carriage system – to which he attributed enormous adventurous, and thus novelistic, importance. The comparison with the “virtuous” German system of uncomfortable coaches, potholed roads, and subpar defence against the elements against the English system brushes back the moralist’s scolding tone: “Furthermore, the seed of episodes are laid in the all too good society of comfortable Post carriages in England, that are always full of well clothed women and where, a situation that Parliament shouldn’t tolerate, the passengers sit so that they look at each other face to face, from which can arise a dangerous confusion of eyes, and even more a highly scandalous confusion of legs, which leads to laughter and after that sometimes an indissoluble confusion of souls and thoughts, so that many an honorable young man traveling from London to Oxford will often be traveling to the devil. Something like this is, thank heaven, not possible with our Post Carriages…”

The mark of modernization: flirting. What Lichtenberg describes humorously and with sympathy is found to be slightly wrong even by such authorities, 120 years later, as Freud, who in some text decries American “flirtation”, which takes the seriousness out of the erotic.