Abstract
An astounding number of watershed events occurred in the period between 1660 and 1700 in England, the establishment of a national institution for pursuing science not least among them. The intellectual tumult in Europe during the seventeenth century produced, in 1662, the chartering of The Royal Society, which was dedicated to the search for knowledge to be used for the benefit of humanity through a particular movement in natural philosophy called the “New Science,” also known as experimental philosophy. As part of the Royal Society’s efforts to secure greater respect and a larger following for its methods and conclusions, its fellows engaged in a public campaign to make those methods and conclusions mainstream. Such efforts, including Robert Hooke’s spectacular Micrographia (1665) and Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), had mixed results in terms of public approval, but they were successful in terms of bringing the ideas and methods of experimental philosophy into the cultural mainstream. Other innovators, including dramatists and prose writers, picked up these ideas and used them for the literary developments of the time. One such author was Aphra Behn (c.1640–89). Her narratives reveal a profound interest in the concerns and methods of natural philosophy and demonstrate how the ideas, methods, and rhetorical challenges of the philosophical debates directly influenced the emerging novel’s interests and form.
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Notes
There is a long-standing discussion of the image of nature and the characterization of the experimenter’s activities during this time, beginning with scholars’ examination of Francis Bacon’s language in the New Organon and New Atlantis. See, for example, Sarah Hutton, “The Riddle of the Sphinx: Francis Bacon and the Emblems of Science,” in Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1997), 7–28;
Margaret J. Osler, “The Gender of Nature and the Nature of Gender in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, ed. Judith P Zinsser (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 71–85.
Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 144.
Jan V. Golinski, “Robert Boyle: Skepticism and Authority in Seventeenth-Century Chemical Discourse,” in The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987), 64–5, 69, 68. Emphases in original.
For a more extensive discussion of Boyle’s work compared to traditional chemistry books of that time, see Golinski, 58–82; John T. Harwood, “Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia,” in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge [England]; Wolfeboro, NH: The Boydell Press, 1989), 121.
J. Paul Hunter contends that Robert Boyle’s efforts to popularize experimental philosophy created a cultural incubator for the novel, observing that his “pedestrian commitments make him important in the history of taste, desire, and ideas, for his fuzzy categories and refusals to make distinctions are in fact responsible for popularizing ways of thinking crucial to the reception of novels” (276). He adds that, “It was Boyle who played the leading role in creating this episte- mology of ordinary life. The key texts are The Christian Virtuoso (1690–91) and the odd collection of meditations prefaced with a kind of theoretical justification—the collection that Swift scoffed at but paid parodic homage, the Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects of 1665” (278). While the rich confusion of late seventeenth-century natural philosophy may have contributed to the emergence of the novel, this confusion cannot be attributed to a particular author, but rather to dilemmas facing natural philosophers about their ideas and their representation of those ideas in print. See J. Paul Hunter, “Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2.4 (July 1990): 275–91.
Many aspects of the New Science and its rhetorical conflicts, not just the self posited by its practitioners, appear in the culture, particularly literature from the 1660s forward. Playwrights satirized the New Science, poets wrote about magnetism, and Defoe’s narratives drew on Baconian principles. As late as 1726, Jonathan Swift could lavish significant scorn on the experiments and experimenters of the Royal Society in Gulliver’s Travels. See Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) and Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Al Coppola demonstrates that in Emperor of the Moon, Behn goes beyond the original play, Arlequin, empereur dans la lune, to infuse her text with ideas from the New Science and to link drama and natural philosophy.
Al Coppola, “Retraining the Virtuoso’s Gaze: Behn’s Emperor of the Moon, the Royal Society, and the Spectacles of Science and Politics,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41.4 (Summer 2008): 481–506.
Cavendish’s work in natural philosophy has garnered significant attention of late. Biographies examine this aspect of her work to varying degrees; see Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004);
Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by her Pen (New York: Perseus Publishing, 2003);
And Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). Other scholars have explored specific aspects of her philosophical work.
See, for example, Sujata Iyengar, “Royalist, Romanticist, Racialist: Rank, Gender, and Race in the Science and Fiction of Margaret Cavendish,” ELH: English Literary History 69 (2002): 649–72;
Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” ELH: English Literary History 64.2 (1997): 447–71;
Judith Moore, “Twentieth-Century Feminism and Seventeenth-Century Science: Margaret Cavendish in Opposing Contexts,” Restoration 26.1 (Spring 2002): 1–14;
B. R. Siegfried, “The City of Chance, or, Margaret Cavendish’s Theory of Radical Symmetry,” Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue (May 2004): 1–29;
Hilda L. Smith, “Margaret Cavendish and the Microscope at Play,” in Zinsser, Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, 34–47; Elizabeth A. Spiller, “Reading Through Galileo’s Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading,” Renaissance Quarterly 53.1 (Spring 2000): 192–221.
Sarah Goodfellow, “‘Such Masculine Strokes’: Aphra Behn as Translator of A Discovery of New Worlds,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 28.2 (Summer 1996): 229–50;
Line Cottegnies, “The Translator as Critic: Aphra Behn’s Translation of Fontenelle’s Discovery of New Worlds (1688),” Restoration 27.1 (Spring 2003): 23–38;
Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: The Dial Press, 1980), 141, 168, 187, 182;
Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: Pandora, 2000), 290–4.
William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, trans. Robert Willis (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993), a translation of Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Frankfurt, 1628), 18.
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Jo Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665).
Aphra Behn, “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), vol. 5, 57.
Aphra Behn, “The Adventure of the Black Lady,” in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), vol. 5, 8, 9–10.
Aphra Behn, The History of the Nun; or. The Fair Vow Breaker, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (1915. New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), vol. 5, 265.
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols. (1915. New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), vol. 5, 129. For a more extensive discussion of the autobiographical elements in Oroonoko, see Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, and Todd, Secret History.
Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte, 1729; ed. Florian Cajoli, 1934. 2 vols. Vol. 1: The Motion of Bodies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 5.
See David Locke, “Voices of Science,” The American Scholar 67.3 (Summer 1998): 104, 108–09.
Hooke is quite explicit in the Preface, in fact: “If therefore the Reader expects any infallible Deductions, or certainty of Axioms, I am to say of my self, that those stronger Works of Wit and Imagination are above my weak Abilities; or if they had not been so, I would not have made use of them in this present Subject before me …” Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Jo Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), n.p.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Including a Translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris, by Simon Shaffer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 60–9.
Robert Chibka suggests that the cultural differences between Oroonoko and the English, including the narrator, is largely the willingness to manipulate truth. “Europeans continually maintain power over Oroonoko by a twofold mechanism,” Chibka writes, “they lie and assume that he does the same. He, by the same token, remains powerless because he tells truth and assumes that they will do the same.” Robert L. Chibka, “‘Oh! Do Not Fear a Woman’s Invention’: Truth, Falsehood, and Fiction in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30.4 (Winter 1998): 520.
Jacqueline Pearson, “Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn,” Part 1, The Review of English Studies 42.165 (February 1991): 43. Emphases in original.
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© 2011 Judy A. Hayden
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Gevirtz, K.B. (2011). Behn and the Scientific Self. In: Hayden, J.A. (eds) The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118430_6
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