Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
sublime and the beautiful, it is not hard to read the passages in Lessing and
Burke protesting incursions by the visual arts into the domain of poetry as arttheoretical
analogues to the anxiety about female transgression into the sphere
of the male exemplified by Rousseau’s strictures on women’s morals and education.
It is not by accident that Lessing’s text illustrates the danger to social order
posed by visual art’s overrunning the limits proper to it by women’s adulterous
fantasies and their production of monsters.
Sexual disorder
The gender metaphors we have been tracking in aesthetics, that is, seem related
to ideas about social disorder that preoccupied many eighteenth-century thinkers,
who drew on earlier images of female sexuality to express general social concerns.
In Natalie Zemon Davis’s words, “the female sex was thought the disorderly one
par excellence in early modern Europe.” Woman’s
disorderliness was founded in physiology . . . Her womb was like a
hungry animal; when not amply fed by sexual intercourse or reproduction,
it was likely to wander about her body, overpowering her
speech and senses . . . The lower rules the higher within the woman,
then, and if she were given her way, she would want to rule over those
above her outside. 47
Though such ideas are certainly to be found in premodern societies, the accelerated
development of a secular, urban culture and national state formation from
the fourteenth century on seems to have brought with it a “sharp turn toward
misogyny.” This accompanied a redefinition of male and female gender roles
integral to modernization, notably involving an important loss of power by
upper-status women and the redefinition of woman’s sphere as a domestic one in
a restructured patriarchal household, while “the military, financial, and juridical
powers of feudal families became ‘public,’ that is, state functions” and “men
moved into the new positions of state control.” 48
These developments intensified in the course of the seventeenth century. By the
eighteenth century married women had lost many of their earlier legal, economic,
47 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on top,” in idem, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 121–5. In the eighteenth century this tradition takes
the form of “an archetypal conception of woman as a sexually insatiable creature when her
desire is aroused . . . one of the major sexual myths traceable in many medical handbooks, and
certainly underlying much eighteenth-century fiction.” See Paul-Gabriel Boucé, “Some sexual
beliefs and myths in eighteenth-century Britain,” in P.-G. Boucé (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 41–2.
48 Joan Kelly, “Early feminist theory and the Querelle des femmes, 1401–1789,” in idem, Women, History,
and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 70, 85.
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