1790: The Physick of Pleasure: Being a Most Instructive Account of Several Ladies Whose Educations Were Conducted Entirely Without Their Consent
From the collected papers of Jon Switt, Gentleman, Author, and Person of Considerable Leisure, composed in England, where such things are always happening to someone.
It has long been observed by the more honest variety of philosopher—a species rarer than the honest politician and only slightly more common than the honest bishop—that a woman arrives in London much as a letter arrives at the Post: handled by a great many strangers before reaching her destination, frequently misdirected, and opened by someone who was never intended to receive her.
Felicity arrived in the autumn.
This is relevant only insofar as autumn is the season when gentlemen find their consciences most pliable, the summer’s cricket having dulled their vigilance and the winter’s guilt not yet having arrived. She came from the north, which is to say from a place that London considers interchangeable with the moon, carrying a small bag, a smaller purse, and the sort of optimism that, in women, the city had made its primary agricultural product—cultivating it carefully before harvest.
She was taken in by a Mrs. Blandy, whose establishment in Covent Garden was described in its informal prospectus (distributed discreetly among the better clubs) as a house of refined company, which was accurate in the same spirit that an abattoir might be called a house of refined livestock management.
Mrs. Blandy was a woman of extraordinary administrative gifts. Had she been born male, she would doubtless have run a ministry. She ran instead a household of eleven women, two valets, a cook of terrifying competence, and a system of account books so precise that future historians would weep, not at the contents, but at the quality of the penmanship.
“You will find,” she told Felicity, on her first morning, over a breakfast of considerable sumptuousness, “that the gentlemen who visit us are, on the whole, not bad men.”
She paused here, in the manner of someone who has promised not to say the rest of the sentence.
“They are, rather, men.”
This distinction, Felicity would come to understand, was Mrs. Blandy’s entire philosophy, rendered in seven words, and it was a more useful education than anything offered at the institutions currently declining to educate women.
There was, sharing the upper rooms, a woman known to the house as Lady Serene, though she had been christened Margaret, and her actual title—rarely deployed, like a good pistol—was somewhat grander than either. She had been, before certain reversals of fortune too tedious to detail (viz: a husband, a gambling debt, a husband’s gambling debt, and a husband), a woman of the middling gentry. She was now a woman of rather better income, considerably more autonomy, and a philosophical disposition that the eighteenth century had not quite invented vocabulary for.
Lady Serene had composed, in the intervals between appointments, a memoir. She showed it to Felicity one afternoon.
“I have titled it,” she said, “Observations Upon the Commerce of Sensation, Together with Several Remarks Upon Those Who Conduct It Whilst Pretending Otherwise.”
“Is it very long?” asked Felicity.
“It is precisely as long as the hypocrisy it describes,” said Lady Serene. “Which is to say: considerable.”
She had written, at one point, a chapter that began: It has been suggested by Mr. Locke that all men arrive in the world as blank slates. I can confirm, from extensive professional experience, that they do not remain so. The writing, however, tends strongly toward repetition. And elsewhere: Dr. Johnson has observed that a man’s worth is measured in his deeds. I have measured several gentlemen’s deeds quite precisely and found the unit of measurement he had in mind was not, in any case, available to him.
The question of physicians must now be addressed, because it was a Thursday, and on Thursdays things tended toward the medical.
When a woman in Mrs. Blandy’s establishment required a doctor—which, given the nature of the establishment and the nature of the century, was regularly—a doctor was sent for. This doctor was, invariably and by the settled consensus of the entire medical profession, a man. This was not remarkable to anyone in the house. It was simply weather. One did not remark upon weather; one arranged oneself appropriately.
Dr. Habberly arrived on this particular Thursday to attend to one of the younger residents, a girl called Clara who had developed a persistent fever. Dr. Habberly was a man of sixty, of considerable reputation, of a wig slightly too large for his head, and of a professional manner that managed simultaneously to convey deep concern for his patient and profound discomfort that his patient was a woman with opinions.
He examined Clara with the brisk efficiency of a man handling cargo.
Lady Serene, who had appointed herself observer, sat in the corner with her memoir and said nothing. She was very good at saying nothing in ways that filled the room entirely.
“She requires rest,” Dr. Habberly announced, to Mrs. Blandy, as though Clara were not present. “And quiet. And separation from—“ he made a gesture that encompassed the house, the profession, and the general direction of human desire, “—stimulation.”
“Naturally,” said Mrs. Blandy.
“Women,” he continued, warming to his subject in the manner of a man who has prepared this lecture regardless of whether the occasion demanded it, “are constitutionally susceptible to nervous disturbance when exposed to excessive feeling.”
Felicity, who had accompanied Mrs. Blandy because she was still learning how establishments functioned, found herself regarding the doctor with an expression her face had composed without consulting her. It was the expression of someone watching a very confident man walk toward a door that is, in fact, a wall.
“Might I ask,” said Felicity, “whether there exist women physicians?”
Dr. Habberly looked at her as though she had proposed that there existed fish philosophers.
“There do not,” he said.
“Ah,” said Felicity.
She did not say anything further. There was no need. The room had already said it.
What the room said, should anyone require translation, was this: The body of a woman is a territory administered entirely by men—its health, its illness, its pleasures and their consequences, its capacity for sensation and its capacity for inconvenience—all of it mapped, charted, theorised, and occasionally misread by those who do not inhabit it. And yet. It is also, somehow, simultaneously, the source of moral corruption. The woman is both the passive subject of medical attention and the active cause of social disorder. She is an object that causes things. A territory that rebels. An illness that enjoys itself.
This paradox was not, in 1790, considered a paradox. It was considered the natural order.
The natural order, as Lady Serene had noted in chapter seven of her memoir, was a phrase most frequently used by those whom it most naturally ordered.
Clara recovered.
This was a mildly disappointing outcome for Dr. Habberly’s theory of nervous susceptibility, but he revised his notes accordingly and submitted a paper to the Royal Society, which praised its methodology.
Lady Serene, meanwhile, continued her memoir. She had reached the chapter on courtly love, which she had titled: A History of Men Worshipping Women at a Convenient Distance, Being Also a Study in Real Estate. It quoted, among others, a pamphlet she attributed to an unnamed clergyman: “Feminine virtue is best preserved at the theoretical level, where it may be admired without the awkwardness of proximity.”
She had also collected, over her years in London, a small anthology of remarks made to her by gentlemen who considered themselves her moral superiors and were, in at least the economic sense, demonstrably wrong. These she planned to publish, posthumously, under a male pseudonym, with an introduction claiming the author was a Bishop.
“It will sell enormously,” she told Felicity.
“Will anyone know it is you?”
“Everyone will know it is me,” said Lady Serene, “and no one will say so, which is the arrangement by which most things of value in England are currently produced.”
Felicity had been writing, too.
Not a memoir, exactly. More an account. Of the texture of things. The weight of silk when it is not yours to own. The temperature of a room full of men who believe that what they are purchasing is discretion. The strange, tilted sensation of being simultaneously regarded as entirely without significance and as the central engine of an enormous amount of significant behaviour.
She wrote about the small ceremonies of the house: the way the women dressed for the evening with the particular care of people doing skilled work; the way Mrs. Blandy conducted the books with the expression of a cathedral treasurer; the way Lady Serene read philosophy between appointments and left marginalia that the philosophers had not anticipated.
Mr. Hume suggests that causation is an inference of the mind. He is correct. I infer it constantly, and its causes are always the same, and they are always wearing better coats than I am.
She wrote, also, about desire, because it would have been dishonest not to. The whole house ran on desire—the desire of visitors, certainly, but also the desire of its inhabitants: for safety, for income, for something that occasionally, improbably, was pleasure itself, the genuine article, arrived at sideways and unexpected, the way one sometimes finds excellent wine in a terrible inn.
Desire had texture. It arrived like weather. It was not—she had decided, and this was a position she had reached slowly and without assistance—it was not simple. It was not simple in the way that nothing involving human bodies and human minds was simple, which was to say: it was not simple at all, and the century’s determination to make it simple was one of the century’s less successful projects.
The house continued.
This was, when considered, the remarkable thing. It continued. It continued while Parliament met and produced proclamations about morality. It continued while the church offered sermons on the subject of women, which women were not invited to contribute to. It continued while physicians theorised about feminine constitutions they had not consulted. It continued while literature produced cautionary tales in which women like Felicity ended badly, because the alternative—women like Felicity ending well—implied a kind of narrative justice the form had not budgeted for.
Outside, London was very busy being London. The streets smelled of horse and coal and possibility. Somewhere, a pamphlet was being printed. Somewhere, a law was being made about property that women would not own. Somewhere, a man was delivering a lecture on the nature of feminine virtue to an audience of men.
Inside, Lady Serene was reading.
Clara had begun to paint.
Mrs. Blandy was doing the accounts.
And Felicity was writing, in a hand that got surer with each page, about what it was to inhabit a body that the century considered simultaneously scandalous and invisible—a paradox so fundamental that the century had never noticed it was one.
The autumn light came through the window.
It was, she noted, describing neither the light nor the season but something that sat between them, very beautiful.
She wrote that down.
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