This is not, it should be stressed, a simple story of the imperatives of status constricting the emancipatory thrust of new thinking about gender. Arguably one of the instructive twists in the story is that a logic of elite status, pervasive in the discourse of honnêteté, played a vital role in making possible a new logic of gender—one that quite explicitly reversed the construed normative relationship between male and female intelligence. It is hard to see how Poullain could have formulated his concept of gender equality without the salons’ efforts to justify themselves as a status community. The denigration of the kinds of intellectual authority represented by male corporate cultures; the revaluation of the relationship between female physical “delicacy” and intellectual strength; the new significance given to “natural” speech as an instrument and emblem of intelligence; the insistence that the value of intelligence and knowledge hinged on their efficacy in forms of social communication emphasizing reciprocity: these new cultural construals of gender were as indispensable to Poullain’s breakthrough as was Cartesian method. Poullain did not simply reorient the discourse; he upended it, using gender norms designed to make women the guardians of a culture of leisure to advocate equal access for women to positions in the social division of labor. In his hands the reconstrual of gender norms leapt across the boundary that distinguished an imagined community of leisure, mixing men and women on new terms of communication, from the rest of society. It justified a vision of a society bringing together men and women on new terms of labor conceived as social communication. It is above all this reimagining that makes Poullain a remarkable figure for his time and place.
In this sense Poullain distilled a socially determined discourse into a “socially underdetermined” concept of equality. In Education, however, he can be said to have reacknowledged the constraints of the historically determinate. Its “conversations” reflect the fact that, in the social world he was addressing, women’s ascent to intellectual equality with men was inseparable from, and indeed contingent on, their fulfilling their assigned role as the exemplars and guardians of an exclusive culture of leisure or, more precisely, of aesthetic play. Because that role was not compatible with the avowed practice of intellectual labor, it also forbade women from using their newfound intellectual equality to engage in critical thinking as a social practice. That is the irony that Poullain’s blending of Cartesian rationalism and the discourse of honnêteté in a polite dialogue could not efface.
We risk limiting ourselves to two equally unacceptable alternatives. One is to discount the ideal of “the feminine” produced by the discourse of honnêteté, and by the women who had a central role in its formulation. Since the discourse banned even the appearance of intellectual labor, we might conclude, it has nothing to say to modern feminism. That would be unfortunate; we would deprive ourselves of an instructive historical precedent for reconstruing intelligence in terms of social communication. The precedent anticipates efforts in contemporary feminism to rethink the nature and value of intelligence. But for feminists seeking ways to avoid the no-win choice between equality and difference, its lesson may be as cautionary as it is inspiring. The other extreme would be to hail the female practitioners of honnêteté as modern feminists, ignoring their need to avoid even the appearance of engaging in the labor of the mind. That too has its cost, or at least its danger. Can a feminism arguing that women have the same capacity as men to engage in the labor of the mind, and that they ought to have the same right to do so, afford to trace one of its roots back to the ideal of the honnête femme? Perhaps; but only if the recovered ideal is handled with extreme care, keeping in mind its double-edged implications. The discourse of honnêteté confirms that, even in emphatically patriarchal societies, gender norms can be reoriented in an emancipatory direction. But the discourse is also an object lesson that, particularly when fused with gender distinctions, status imperatives have been insidiously powerful in segregating women from the freedom that labor has come to promise.
Chapter 3
Malebranche and the Bel Esprit
“Error is the cause of men’s misery.” With that somber appraisal of the human condition Nicolas Malebranche opened the first chapter of The Search After Truth, a prodigious treatise written in French and published in two parts in 1674–1675.1 The title was a bold gesture, obviously meant to evoke the search for truth Descartes had recounted in his Discourse on Method nearly forty years earlier. The treatise immediately established its author as a presence to be reckoned with in the theology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy of the final quarter of the seventeenth century. There would be ten editions in his lifetime. He would publish seven more books, all in French, and most addressed to educated audiences extending well beyond academic learning.
To judge by the multiple editions of his texts, Malebranche was a widely read author. Well before his death in 1715, he was regarded as one of the great stylists of French classicism. And yet he might be called an author who rejected authorship, and even as he developed an elegantly lucid and forceful style, he sought to resist the temptation of style. Central to this posture was his equation of French social modernity—the world of polite civility and its paragon, the bel esprit—with “effeminacy.” Malebranche did not use the term “effeminacy” simply to characterize inclinations to be observed in certain men. He made it emblematic of the form that human corruption was taking in what he saw as the social condition of seventeenth-century modernity. As one of the great system-builders of his era, he gave the concept of effeminacy a new status, as a key term of moral diagnosis set within an all-encompassing philosophical and theological framework.
Montaigne’s Sin of Style
The similarities between Malebranche’s life and Poullain de la Barre’s extend well beyond the fact that the two men were roughly of the same generation (Poullain was ten years younger) and that their first publications appeared within a year of each other. Both were born and came of age in Paris, in families that made their livings in the judicial apparatus of the French state. Both were disillusioned by their theological studies at the Sorbonne, though Malebranche, unlike Poullain, received a degree. Perhaps most striking, the two men had passed through the same crucible; for both, Descartes’s new paradigm of the human body had been the point of entry to an intellectual vocation.
And yet it is precisely in their appropriations of Cartesianism that we see their intellectual paths beginning to diverge sharply. We are reminded that in the middle decades of the century Cartesianism was a protean force in French intellectual life.2 What it generated depended on what it bonded with. Poullain found in Cartesianism a new justification for his commitment to developments in French Protestantism that point directly to the relatively undogmatic and humanistic Christianity of the Enlightenment. Malebranche incorporated his Cartesianism into the most powerful change in the French religious culture of his age: the reassertion of the theological and moral rigorism of the Augustinian tradition.
The Augustinian revival found its most radical expression in Jansenism, a movement defined by its refusal to accept the