Women and Manners

Although excluded from the universities and the professions, women played important roles not only in the home but also in more formal spheres of social interaction, such as the courts of rulers. Under the tutelage of their mothers and wives, nobles learned manners, or the fine points of social etiquette. In some ways, aristocratic men were expected to act more like women; just as women had long been expected to please men, now aristocratic men had to please their monarch or patron by displaying proper manners and conversing with elegance and wit.

The upper classes began to reject popular festivals and fairs in favor of private theaters, where seats were relatively expensive and behavior was formal. Clowns and buffoons now seemed vulgar; the last king of England to keep a court fool was Charles I. Some tastes spread downward from the upper classes, however. Chivalric romances that had long entranced the nobility, such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, now appeared in simplified form in cheap booklets printed for lower-class readers.

Molière, the greatest French playwright of the seventeenth century, wrote sparkling comedies of manners that revealed much about the new aristocratic behavior. His play The Middle-Class Gentleman, first performed for Louis XIV in 1670, revolves around the yearning of a rich middle-class Frenchman, Monsieur Jourdain, to learn to act like a gentilhomme (both “gentleman” and “nobleman”). Monsieur Jourdain buys fancy clothes; hires private instructors in dancing, music, fencing, and philosophy; and lends money to a debt-ridden noble in hopes that the noble will marry his daughter. Only his sensible wife and his daughter’s love for a worthier commoner stand in his way. The message for the king’s courtiers seemed to be a reassuring one: only born nobles can hope to act like nobles. But the play also showed how the middle classes were learning to emulate the nobility: If one could learn to act nobly through self-discipline, could not anyone with some education and money pass himself off as noble?

As Molière’s play demonstrated, new attention to manners trickled down from the court to the middle class. A French treatise on manners written in 1672 explained proper behavior:

The key words rusticity and disgusting reveal the association of unacceptable social behavior with the peasantry, dirt, and repulsion. Similar rules governed spitting and blowing one’s nose in public.

Courtly manners often permeated the upper reaches of society by means of the salon, an informal gathering held regularly in a private home and presided over by a socially eminent woman. The French government occasionally worried that these gatherings might challenge its authority, but the three main topics of salon conversation were love, literature, and philosophy. Before publishing a manuscript, many authors, including court favorites like Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, would read their compositions to a salon gathering.

Some women went beyond encouraging male authors and began to write their own works, but they faced many obstacles. Madame de Lafayette wrote several short novels that were published anonymously because it was considered inappropriate for aristocratic women to appear in print. Following the publication of The Princess of Clèves in 1678, she denied having written it. Despite these limitations, French women began to turn out best sellers of that new type of literary form, the novel. Their success prompted the philosopher Pierre Bayle to remark in 1697 that “our best French novels for a long time have been written by women.”

The new importance of women in the world of manners and letters did not sit well with everyone. Although the French writer François Poulain de la Barre, in a series of works published in the 1670s, used the new science to assert the equality of women’s minds, most men resisted the idea. Clergymen, lawyers, scholars, and playwrights attacked women’s growing public influence. Women, they complained, were corrupting forces and needed restraint. Molière wrote plays denouncing women’s pretension to judge literary merit. English playwrights derided learned women by creating characters with names such as Lady Knowall, Lady Meanwell, and Mrs. Lovewit.

A real-life target of the English playwrights was Aphra Behn (1640–1689), one of the first professional woman authors. Her short novel Oroonoko (1688) told the story of an African prince mistakenly sold into slavery. The story was so successful that it was adapted by playwrights and performed repeatedly in England and France for the next hundred years.