Laura Shannon Prize Lecture November 3, 2022
“The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Pamela L. Cheek on Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue”
The Laura Shannon Prize 2022
BY GRÁINNE MCEVOYOn November 3, 2022, Pamela Cheek, professor of French and comparative literature at the University of New Mexico, delivered a lecture and accepted the 2022 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, administered by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. Cheek was awarded the humanities cycle prize for her book Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. In an original public lecture titled “The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue,” Cheek gave a fascinating, erudite account of how women writers navigated a literary marketplace that was in formation, developing distinctive codes and narrative devices that allowed them to articulate, among other things, women’s experience of sexual violence and rape. While the promise of this 18th-century literary means of articulating what we now call “gaslighting” was ultimately lost, Cheek explained that these codes left a powerful legacy for understanding power and narratives — how we tell stories and who gets to tell stories — in the past and today.
Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute and professor of social ethics, welcomed Cheek to Notre Dame and acknowledged the benefaction of Laura Shannon (1939-2021) and her husband Michael, represented at the lecture by their daughter Claire Kelly, a member of the Nanovic Institute’s Advisory Board. Sedmak also recognized the winners of the Laura Shannon silver medal,
“The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Pamela L. Cheek on Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue”
Susan Stewart for The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (University of Chicago Press), and honorable mention, Barbara Mennel for Women at Work in Twenty-First Century European Cinema (University of Illinois Press).
Cheek was introduced by Stephen Fallon, John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities in the University of Notre Dame’s program of liberal studies, who served on the 2022 prize final jury. Fallon described Heroine and Local Girls as “elegantly written and wonderfully readable,” and quoted another juror who praised Cheek for producing “a much-needed transnational history of the emergence of women’s writing as a distinct body of literature that facilitated intra-sexual and textual community building.” Fallon praised the book as a groundbreaking work that provides a compelling account of the origins of European women’s writing. Cheek, he closed, “has written a book that will help future scholars look at this broad sweep of women’s writing, not only in the 18th century but also in the period before and since, with new eyes.”
Identifying Women’s Writing: Imprints from the Past
Cheek opened her lecture by articulating two intellectual aspirations that she believes truly matter today: the humanistic endeavor (supported by initiatives such as the Laura Shannon Prize) and continuing to think about the legacy of Europe. This latter goal, Cheek explained, is one of the driving forces of her work in Heroines and Local Girls, an inquiry that recognizes “how codes and ideas that were experimental, odd, or controversial two or three centuries ago structure our thoughts and lives, sometimes in ways that are barely perceptible because they now seem so ordinary to us.” This realization set her on the path to providing, in Heroines and Local Girls, an account of “an influential textual procedure and code at an early stage of its evolution, a stage at which, as we look back, the promise and also the rough patches are visible.”
“The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Pamela L. Cheek on Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue”
Cheek explained the encounters that set her on the path to examining 18th-century writing by women. She recalled conversations with her students, individuals from all over the world — Cameroon, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, France, Iran, and rural parts of the U.S. like New Mexico or South Carolina — who revealed to her that they wanted to study “women’s writing.” These repeated queries gave Cheek pause to wonder what the students meant by “women’s writing” and what “women’s writing” meant to them. “How was it,” she continued “that people … from regions and nations with their own traditions and writing thought of ‘women’s writing’ as a single thing … a unified object to study?” Aided by the “grand recovery work” of generations of scholars on writing by women, Cheek committed herself to honor her students’ sense “that there were certain, perhaps set ways [or codes] that writing by women announced itself to them and produced a sense of attachment and affinity.”
Cheek had one great advantage in her pursuit of these questions: as a scholar of 18th-century European literature, her research was situated in a moment of messiness and formation. Literary genres, narratives, the operation of print culture, and literary marketplaces were still very much in formation, and this nascent context proved fruitful to Cheek’s research in a number of ways. One such development was the explosion of the print marketplace through cheaper printing and new groups of readers (especially women). This growth of the market provoked publishers and authors to create a distinction between books with market capital and books with aesthetic capital, works that staked a claim to elevated literary value. In the broader political context of the rise of nations, literary greatness in 18th-century Europe was typically measured according to competitive claims to national greatness within an almost exclusively masculine literary heritage. 18th-century women writers found themselves navigating this messy redefinition of literary value.
The 18th-century formation of new codes, or narrative devices, was critical in Cheek’s endeavor to understand and identify “women’s writing.” As she explained, “the rough edges, the patches and gaps are visible in 18th-century literature in a way that they aren’t today.” This visibility
“The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Pamela L. Cheek on Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue”
of codes, according to Cheek, is very much the case for women’s writing, particularly as it moved into the print marketplace. She began to notice particular codes showing up in work by women, some of which were distinct from devices used by male authors. In texts such as Jane Barker’s A Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1723), Cheek noticed the repetition of an older code, that of “a conversational community of women.” This code had been used repeatedly in the past, including in the influential The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) by Christine de Pizan. In Barker’s novel, this code presents itself in scenes between the central character Galesia and “Her Ladyship.” The two women engage in “the useful task of needlework,” crafting a screen that stitches together, among othe materials, fragments of Galesia’s own writing, and sharing confidences while they are at work. This narrative device contrasted with processes of one-to-one mentorship, across generations and within national literary traditions, that were evident in writing by men. Cheek explained that this code — a circle of women sharing confidences — was part of the habitus of early modern women, their practices and lived experiences as a group. She argued that the narrative device gave the literature “patterned elements, requisite patches stitched into the screen, without which women’s writing could not be recognizable as such.”
Communicating “Gaslighting” in the 18th Century
As her research progressed, Cheek explained, she began to notice newer narrative devices being used repeatedly in 18th century writing by women. These newer codes, she argued, held promise. In a literary marketplace where a “capital of virtue” dictated polite literary forms and prevented women writers from explicitly describing sexual behavior, stories of rape and sexual violence against women were interpreted and overwritten by men. Cheek described how new narrative devices offered a way for women to challenge that hegemony and communicate stories of violence against their group.
“The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Pamela L. Cheek on Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue”
The publication of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1758) was a watershed moment in how sexual violence could be articulated in the “polite” British novel. Through context and elision, which Cheek describes as a “dot dot dot” technique, Richardson managed the rape of his central character for a polite audience. He successfully evaded any narrative codes that might have aligned his text with contemporary romances and novels, forms that were considered indecent and “inflaming” for a reading public that included growing numbers of young women. Instead, Richardson weaved otherwise shocking sexual violence into a new “polite” form of novel that retained both aesthetic and market value, explicitly decent and implicitly salacious. Cheek displayed one important element of Richardson’s depiction of the attack: Clarissa Harlowe’s post-rape letter to her attacker and captor, Robert Lovelace. In scattered typography, Clarissa’s disconnected thoughts are strewn across the page, an innovative printing technique and narrative device that vividly contrasts the “madness” of her post-rape papers with the mental clarity of the lucid, stylized letters she writes earlier in the novel. For the benefit of a “polite” audience, Cheek explained, Clarissa’s lack of reason and self-awareness exonerates her from any complicity, even after the fact, in the sexual encounter.
This Richardsonian articulation of rape, Cheek explained, presented a dilemma for women who wished to write about sexual violence, women who inhabited a world in which the lived experiences of their group included unwanted sexual attention and violence. Women writers were caught between two stools: if they depicted sexual violence in explicit ways, their work would be identified as whorish, pornographic, and aesthetically-inferior, but if they emulated Richardson’s polite sentimental novel in which the victim’s account of sexual abuse is devoid of reason and clarity, their protagonist would, like Clarissa, have no control over the narrative surrounding her rape.
In response, Cheek argues, women writers developed a new, more complex strategy: articulating “gaslighting,” demonstrating that power rests with whoever controls the way a story is heard and understood. To illustrate, Cheek used the example of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) in which the author presented a female protagonist, Arabella, whose fear of sexual
“The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Pamela L. Cheek on Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue”
exploitation and abuse is repeatedly mocked and dismissed by the men who surround her as silly, irrational, and a result of reading too many romances. As the story develops, however, Lennox shows that Arabella is under constant threat of exploitation and sexual manipulation by her uncle and a host of suitors who wish to seize control of her fortune, her only leverage in a world where unmarried women are generally powerless. Cheek argued that by showing how these men dismiss Arabella’s credible fears as delusion, Lennox, with other women writers, “discovered narrative means of communicating ‘gaslighting’ — accounts of women who would tell their stories of abuse only for these stories to be dismissed as impossible because of their silliness, their madness, their lack of competence.”
The Lost Promise of the 18th-century Literary “Me Too”
At this point in the lecture, Cheek brought her audience to the powerful literary and political legacy that connects eighteenth-century narratives by women and “Me Too” accounts of sexual abuse, exploitation, and gaslighting today. Eighteenth-century women writers, she explained, combined various codes and narrative devices and invented women’s writing. In so doing, they created a new capital, an alternative to market and literary value: identity capital, the value of which lay in “representing an experience common to women, shared by women, for women, in a story and language that preserved their virtue and belonged only to them, and that also represented the pattern of repression of their story.”
What followed, Cheek continued, was a process by which market capitalism squandered the promise presented by this means of communicating abuse and exploitation, this device for resisting power and hegemony. The invention of identity capital through women’s writing paved the way for the literary marketplace to segment into identity- or affinity-based audiences. While Cheek celebrates the advantages that such identity-based cultural segmentation brings in terms of fostering group formation and solidarity, such siloing undermined the ability to communicate personal experiences,
“The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Pamela L. Cheek on Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue”
foster sympathies, and retain power over narratives across affinity groups. She argued that this process has allowed certain narratives and forces to remain powerful and hegemonic, with implications for identity groups based on race, nationality, ethnicity, gender, and religion, to name a few.
In spite of the failed promise of this 18th-century innovation — “the power to narrate gaslighting and demonstrate the difference between how authority tells the story and how an individual might tell the story” — Cheek concluded her lecture on a note of optimism. “I continue to be amazed,” she said, “by the students from around the world who come to me grasping works that mobilize them, who find something transformative, and liberatory, and empowering in the claim to a story written in a voice that they themselves share.”
The Laura Shannon Prize, one of the preeminent prizes for European studies, is awarded each year to the best book that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole. The Laura Shannon Prize is made possible through a generous endowment from Laura Shannon (1939-2021) and her husband, Michael, class of ’58. Laura Shannon became a member of the Nanovic Institute’s advisory board in 2003 and served for many years; Claire Shannon Kelly serves as a member of the institute’s advisory board, continuing her parents’ legacy. For more information, and to view the archive of past winners and lectures, visit nanovic.nd.edu/lsprize.
“The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Pamela L. Cheek on Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue”