The Male Self Redefined: Education and the Feminized Man in the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story

Ben P. Robertson

Best Submission: Scholarly Essay

 

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft lamented the state of the woman in British society, charging men with keeping the female half of the population in a perpetual “state of childhood” (101).  She believed that women had been degraded and deprived for centuries and that they needed to be educated on rational principles so that they could become productive members of society rather than useless decorations for men. Wollstonecraft’s ideas, although radical, were not unusual for the time during which she lived.  Among other important events, recent revolutions in America and France had destabilized the ideologies of the time, so many texts from this period exhibit marked preoccupation with—among other complex and varied issues—the woman’s role in society and emerging ideas about sexuality and gender relations.

 

The question of the woman’s place in this changing society surfaces quite frequently, becoming a near-obsession for many writers.  In some cases, as in Belinda Portman of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, the female protagonist achieves at least some measure of autonomy in her own life.  Belinda is able to resist the emotional terrorism of her relatives and friends, exerting her own will in decisions about marriage and other more quotidian issues.  However, female protagonists are not always this successful in asserting their rights, and they often become victims in the struggle between male and female power. The Marquis de Sade’s Justine and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story, both published the year before Wollstonecraft’s treatise, exemplify this victimization of women in the fates of the main female characters.  In Inchbald’s text, Miss Milner and her daughter Matilda become victims, while Justine becomes the victim—in more gruesome terms—in de Sade’s narrative. The reasons for the victimization of these women lie in the way the male self was constructed at the end of the eighteenth century.  If one can interpret the title character of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe as a representative of the way the male self was defined, then this victimization appears more logical in psychological terms. In the revolutionary period of the 1790s, emerging female power threatened the male self, which was defined in opposition to that of the female.  The male, sensing a destabilization of his own identity, reasserted his power over the female to maintain control and to resist his own feminization—a feminization brought about by his own actions or by his subjection to some form of female desire.  Since his education did not offer alternate solutions to that instability, the male validated his own power—and his own self—by victimizing the female.  Hence, rather than simply being badly educated, Justine, Miss Milner, and Matilda are victims of male redefinition of self which manifests itself in destructive forms because of the limitations of male education.

 

This defining of the self may not be an overt element of de Sade’s and Inchbald’s novels, but it does help to elucidate the motivations behind the characters’ actions. Essentially, each male character defines his own self in opposition to the female selves around him.  His own limited education has not provided him with the ability to construct his sense of self without some form of female subjection, and when he feels feminized, his response is to victimize women.  The title character of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe demonstrates this tendency quite clearly, and although the novel was not published until 1816, it does, nevertheless, capture a sense of the emerging ideas of self during the earlier time period. De Sade and Inchbald may not explicitly have articulated such exploratory notions of the self in their novels, but their texts do represent earlier versions of this exploration.

 

Adolphe is a confession, much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, and in this text, Constant presents his title character as engaging in a great act of self-justification for his love of Ellenore.  Adolphe’s sense of self is not stable, and as he relates the history of his love, it becomes clear that his involvement with her is an attempt to give himself an identity.  As the critic Ian Alexander notes about the text, “Adolphe is a novel of self-discovery and self-evaluation” (9).  He goes on to point out that Adolphe “is an example of the young man in search of an identity” and that in Adolphe’s case, “continuity of the self is the ability to take root in the being of another” (22; 33).  At the beginning of the text, Adolphe claims, “I nursed in the depths of my being a longing for emotional experience” (39).  He feels bored and listless, and he says, “I felt that no objective was worth striving for” (40).  However, when he meets Ellenore, his attitude changes considerably.  He comments at one point, “Coming into my consciousness just when my heart was longing for affection and my vanity needed success, Ellenore seemed a conquest worthy of me” (48).  Thus, even in the first part of the novel, Adolphe defines his own self in opposition to the self of Ellenore because his education has not given him an adequate sense of identity.  His listlessness and lethargy are energized into action by Ellenore’s presence, and he engages in “conquest.”  As Alexander notes, Adolphe can “only exist in and through his relations with others” and specifically through Ellenore (35).  Initially, his efforts are futile, and he finds himself “amazed by the intensity” of his own suffering (51).  He is happy to suffer, however, because doing so gives him that intensity of emotion that he desired at the beginning of the text.  At one point, he tells Ellenore,

Unless you promise to see me here tomorrow at eleven, . . . I shall leave at once, abandon country, family, and father, break off all my connexions, abjure all my obligations and go away, anywhere, and seek the speediest end to a life you are plaguing for your amusement. (53)

Unwilling to take responsibility for his own actions, he transfers that responsibility to Ellenore, claiming that she is using him for her own amusement.  However, the opposite is the case as Adolphe defines himself against Ellenore’s self. He threatens physical suicide because a break with her would be a suicide of his own self.

Interestingly, Adolphe maintains that he does not love Ellenore, but he says he remains with her because she needs and loves him.  As one critic notes, even Ellenore sees through his “lack of love” but cannot help relying on his protests of devotion (Coleman 577).  Adolphe uses Ellenore’s love as a means of validating his own sense of self because as long as she loves him, he has a reason for existence.  For example, he recognizes the “strange sway” she holds over him, and he tells her, “My one support has been your friendship, and without it I cannot live” (64; 55).  He describes her as having become a “tie” rather than “an objective,” and when she dies at the end of the text, he finds his new liberty “irksome” (64; 120). Near the middle of the novel, Adolphe reconfirms the instability of his own self when he comments, “We are such unstable creatures that feelings we pretend to have we really do have in the end” (83). His father seems to recognize this instability when he writes to the young man to say, “I can only feel pity that with your spirit of independence you invariably do what you do not want to do . . . .  it is no longer you who are keeping her, but she you” (90).  Because Adolphe defines his sense of self through Ellenore, he can no longer be as independent as he once was.  Whether he really loves Ellenore is irrelevant.  To him, what matters, instead, is that she loves him, thus validating his selfhood.  This validation, however, is based upon a flawed male education that leaves Adolphe with little sense of identity, just as the male characters in de Sade’s Justine and Inchbald’s A Simple Story seem to crave the subjugation of a woman in their attempts to define themselves.

 

From Mary Wollstonecraft’s point of view, this definition of the male’s self through the female’s dependence on him—or, rather, subjugation to him—has been the object of female education for centuries.  Although A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is not about the construction of the male self, the text does, nevertheless, obliquely recognize the male’s desire to define himself in terms of female dependence.  Wollstonecraft declaims against “the prevailing opinion that woman was created for man” and cites the “cardinal virtues of the sex”—from the traditional point of view—as being “[g]entleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection” (109; 118).  The education of the female was designed to instill this docile passivity.  Wollstonecraft goes on to cite “patience, docility, good humour, and flexibility” as male-desired characteristics to be inculcated in a woman’s education, alleging that most men want a woman to be either a slave or a plaything (150; 107).  She claims that the male writers of conduct books have attempted to “render women more artificial, weak characters, than they would otherwise have been; and consequently, more useless members of society” (103).  The point of Wollstonecraft’s complaints is that women traditionally have been educated to be weak, passive creatures whose purpose is to serve men.  She quotes Rousseau as saying that “woman is expressly formed to please the man” and cites the prevailing belief that “obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting rigour” in a woman’s education (137; 108). Of course, Wollstonecraft disagreed with these notions, urging the reliance upon reason in educating women so that they would be able to make more productive contributions to society. However, the traditional system against which Wollstonecraft fought attempted to keep the female in a subjugated role, and this role validated male power and identity because it forced the woman to depend upon the man, just as Adolphe perceives Ellenore.  As long as the male believes he is needed, his sense of identity remains intact, and his own sense of self is validated by the perceived dependence of the female.  The inadequacies of the male’s education leave him with a lack of identity that he tries to fill in his subjection of women and in his perpetuating that subjection through a limiting female education.

 

This subjugating education of women appears in the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, a text that ostensibly is a discussion of virtue. As the narrator asks at the beginning, “Will it not be felt that Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found too feeble to contend with Vice, and that, in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along after the others?” (457).  In fact, de Sade does much more than a simple examination of virtue, and female education and subjection become two of the many important issues in the text.  After all, women were educated to have virtue, and in terms of the pornographic nature of Justine, virtue can be equated with chastity. The text essentially recreates the trials of Justine, who attempts to remain virtuous throughout the narrative. As the narrator notes at the beginning, Juliette, who is Justine’s sister, has received “the best education” (458).  Justine has received the same education, for the narrator notes that “the one and the other of the two sisters had been denied no counsels, no masters, no books, and no polite talents” (459).  However, even the “best education” for a woman was inadequate from Mary Wollstonecraft’s point of view, and the remainder of the text confirms this inadequacy.  When the two sisters find themselves orphaned, they are forced to rely on their own wits for financial support.  Unfortunately, they have not received the education based on reason that Wollstonecraft would have given them.  Instead, they have been educated to be virtuous and, in Rousseau’s terms, to be serviceable to men.  Consequently, they are unable to work at legitimate jobs to support themselves, and their only options are marriage, prostitution (in some form or another), or reliance upon someone’s charity.  Marriage will not work since they need money immediately, so Juliette decides to “surrender herself to libertinage” (460).  She is later able to marry, thus solidifying her financial position.  Justine, on the other hand, shudders at the thought of selling her body and attempts to find charity instead. This attempt initiates the series of nightmarish sexual encounters which Justine endures as she tries to maintain her sense of virtue.  Obviously, the traditional, male-controlled education these women have received fails them when they find themselves independent of their father.

 

The female education itself, however, is not the sole cause of Justine’s trials.  Part of the reason Justine must endure the tortures of so many males in this novel is that, much like Adolphe, the men are using Justine in their own efforts to define themselves.  Their own education has stunted their senses of identity, resulting in their compensating for this deficiency through female subjection. At the beginning of the novel, Justine is forced to join a company of thieves who capture a young man named Saint-Florent.  The thieves decide to kill the young man, but Justine saves him and accompanies him as he flees. Immediately thereafter, the two find themselves alone in the forest, where Saint-Florent says, “We have arrived, whore,” before knocking Justine unconscious and raping her (502). Saint-Florent’s actions suggest that, on some level, he feels threatened by Justine, perhaps because she usurped a male role by saving him—thus feminizing him as a traditionally helpless female figure—or perhaps because her protestations of virtue contradict her role as a provider of pleasure to men (in Rousseau’s terms).  In any case, the young man feels compelled to redefine himself and to revalidate his own masculine self by assaulting Justine.

 

Immediately thereafter, Justine witnesses a homosexual encounter between the Comte de Bressac and Jasmin, one of his domestics.  When the two men discover that Justine has observed them, they first contemplate killing her but decide instead to torture her by suspending her by the arms and legs from four trees.  Again, the source of the male animosity toward Justine comes from a feminized male who attempts to redefine himself in opposition to her.  As Justine says at one point in this episode, “The young lord was constantly the woman and although there was about him what suggested the possibility he could have acted the man in his turn, he had not for one instant even the appearance of wishing to” (505).  Regardless of the Comte’s sexual orientation, he is still male, and he lives in a male-dominated society, so when he finds himself caught in a feminized position, he wishes to reassert his masculine self through Justine’s torture.

 

Similar episodes occur throughout the novel, as male characters find themselves feminized and then attempt to redefine the self to validate their masculinity.  The Benedictine monastery of Saint Mary-in-the-Wood, for example, houses four monks who torture Justine and other women in exercises in self-definition.  Further examples include the Comte de Gernande, who bleeds his bound wife as he engages in homosexual—and feminizing—activity, and Saint-Florent, who appears once more in the novel to torture Justine.  Like Constant’s Adolphe, the men in Justine define the male self in opposition to the female self, and these acts of subjection are symptoms of male redefinition of identity.

 

A similar type of redefinition through subjection appears in a significantly different form in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story.  This text is more overtly concerned with female education, and Inchbald laments in the introduction that she herself had “an education confined to the narrow boundaries prescribed her sex” (1).  As Gary Kelly notes in The English Jacobin Novel, “Both Miss Milner and Matilda are, for all their spontaneity and charm, shown to be the products of their ‘education’ in the widest sense, the whole range of circumstances and experiences which surround their youth” (83).  Further, Terry Castle calls the novel a “story of failed ‘education’” (293).  In fact, the last line of the text suggests that Mr. Milner would have been better off giving his daughter “A PROPER EDUCATION” (338).  The narrator suggests at the beginning that Miss Milner has a mind “without one ornament,” and that she had been “indulged in all her wishes to the extreme of folly” since her infancy (5; 15).  She does, however, have in her personality a certain independent strain that becomes an impediment in her relationship with Dorriforth, her guardian.  She has acquired the “dangerous character of a wit” and is not afraid to laugh at Dorriforth’s religious ceremonies (15).  Furthermore, when Dorriforth tries to obtain a husband for her, she resists, claiming she will “not consent to marry a man whom [she] could never love” (25). Interestingly, Dorriforth himself becomes the focus of her love, as she feminizes him into an object to be admired. She says she loves him “with all the passion of a mistress, and with all the tenderness of a wife” (72).  As a woman, she is expected to be virtuous, and that virtue precludes passion such as a mistress might feel.  She thus takes a more masculine role, feminizing Dorriforth as an object of desire.

 

The dynamic between the two characters changes significantly when Dorriforth finally learns that Miss Milner loves him.  He inherits a title, becoming Lord Elmwood, and the Pope grants him a dispensation from his vows of celibacy.  Miss Milner, of course, then expects to become his wife.  However, she often acts haughty and insolent, and she begins to spend money extravagantly.  On several occasions, she deliberately tests his love as if trying to see how far she can push his tolerance.  In one final act of defiance, she attends a masquerade about which Elmwood had told her “[n]ot to think of being there” (151).  Even worse, she attends the ball “in men’s cloaths” (159).  In doing so, she further empowers herself through the masculinity of the clothing while simultaneously feminizing Elmwood since he is unable to censor her actions and since her clothing choice places her in an empowering position.  Lord Elmwood’s response to her is to say, “[Y]ou may expect in a few days we shall part” (163).  He plans an extended voyage on the Continent and does not even speak to her when he takes his leave. Of course, Elmwood’s longtime friend Sandford effects a reconciliation between the two, but Elmwood’s initial instincts are flight and silence. 

 

These instinctive responses—flight and silence—are Elmwood’s way of redefining his sense of self, just as the male characters in Justine use violence for this purpose.  J. M. S. Tompkins says in her introduction to the book that A Simple Story concentrates on personal relationships, and this redefinition of self certainly qualifies as a personal relationship issue.  Elmwood’s identity has been destabilized by Miss Milner’s actions, particularly in the culminating attendance at the masquerade in male clothing. He becomes feminized as the object of his ward’s affections while Miss Milner becomes more masculinized in her appropriation of power.  However, Elmwood is ill-equipped to handle this situation because his male education has been inadequate in providing him with a solid sense of self.  As Gary Kelly notes, it is “worth remembering that Dorriforth’s education forms an important aspect of the novel’s treatment of the theme” of education (91).  Kelly is correct, for when Elmwood senses instability in his relationship with Miss Milner, his instinct is to remove himself from the situation, refusing even to speak to her.  Rather than oppressing her with violence, he avoids her entirely which, in itself, is damaging to Miss Milner in terms of emotional isolation and a refusal even to acknowledge her existence.

 

This redefinition of self continues in the second half of A Simple Story in Elmwood’s relationship with his daughter where, according to Susan Allen Ford, “Inchbald’s account of the second generation replicates and intensifies this tyranny of the patriarchy” (52).  Again, this tyranny is a direct result of deficient male education.  During an extended absence of Elmwood’s in the West Indies, Miss Milner becomes restless and acquires a lover.  As the narrator notes, now she “is no longer beautiful—no longer beloved—no longer—tremble while you read it!—no longer—virtuous” (194).  The consequence is that Elmwood refuses ever again to see her or their daughter Matilda.  Rather than fleeing as he does in the first half of the book, he banishes both Miss Milner and Matilda from his presence, and the two end up living in a small house on the Scottish border.  In fact, Elmwood prohibits his servants and friends from even mentioning either of the women’s names in his presence.  The narrator comments that “to mention either the mother or child to Lord Elmwood was an equal offence,” and when the elderly head gardener forgets this rule one day, he loses his job (202).  The narrator notices “in [Elmwood’s] nature shades of evil” near the beginning of the text, and that evil certainly surfaces in his attitude toward Matilda (33). The narrator notes that “prudence he called it, not to form another attachment near to his heart” and that “he formed the unshaken resolution, never to acknowledge Lady Matilda as his child” even though the innocent girl was born well before her mother’s affair (202). Even when Miss Milner dies, leaving Matilda essentially orphaned, Elmwood refuses to see the child.  He allows her to live at Elmwood House, but she must avoid him at any cost.  If he sees her even once, he will force her to leave.

 

Matilda’s attitude toward Elmwood and these restrictions is much different from Miss Milner’s, in part because of her education.  Mr. Sandford supervises that education, turning the girl into a well-rounded young woman.  She likes to draw and play music, and “as a scholar she excelled most of her sex, from the great pains Sandford had taken with that part of her education” (221).  Sandford, however, does not educate Matilda as Mary Wollstonecraft would have preferred.  Her studies are controlled quite strictly by Sandford and Mrs. Woodley so that she becomes the passive, childlike creature that Wollstonecraft disliked so much. Her situation constitutes “an entire loss of self” (Ford 55).  In fact, Matilda is willing even to conform to her father’s unreasonable dictum that she not allow him to see her when they stay in the same house.  While Elmwood is gone, Matilda enjoys the entire house, but when he is home, she retreats to a separate wing of the building, never daring to exit for fear of banishment.  Thus, Elmwood redefines himself in opposition to Matilda by suppressing her very existence.

 

This suppression, however, is not enough to keep Matilda from feminizing Elmwood, much as her mother did.  Although Matilda uses different methods, the result is the same—the feminization of the male. Matilda watches Elmwood’s carriage from her window, for example, as he enters and exits Elmwood House.  Her surveillance of him is similar to the masculine surveillance to which she herself was subjected by Mr. Sandford in her educational endeavors.  She asks Sandford about her father frequently and essentially makes him an object of desire, just as her mother did, albeit a nonsexual object in Matilda’s case.  The narrator comments, “She listened sometimes with tears, sometimes with hope, but always with awe, and terror, to every sentence wherein her father was concerned” (218).  The efforts Elmwood has made to suppress Matilda’s existence from his own life have had the effect of making him the desired object of Matilda’s thoughts, resulting in his feminization.  When Matilda accidentally stumbles upon Elmwood on the stairs one day, she mutters, “Save me,” before swooning (274).  The narrator’s comment, “Her voice unmanned him,” underscores that feminization, and all Elmwood can say is, “Miss Milner—Dear Miss Milner.”  His inability to remember Matilda’s name during this emotional moment and his calling her by her mother’s name emphasizes the similarity between his relationships with the two women.  Although Miss Milner is aggressive and Matilda is passive, the two women have the same effect on him, feminizing and thus destabilizing his sense of self because his own education has not provided him with a strong sense of identity.

 

The consequence of this meeting on the stairs is that Matilda is banned from Elmwood House. However, Elmwood changes his mind about the banishment when he hears that Matilda has been kidnapped by Lord Margrave.  He hastens to rescue her, bringing her home and finally recognizing her status as his child.  In effect, the kidnapping acts as a further feminization of Elmwood as Margrave forcibly takes Matilda, whom Elmwood sees—on one level—as his possession.  From this point of view, Elmwood’s reunion with Matilda is not so idealistically chivalrous as it might appear.  Instead, Elmwood simply is reacquiring the woman whom he needs in his definition of self in opposition to the feminine.  Without her, he has no identity.

 

This definition of the male self is an important source of the difficulties the female characters experience in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story and in the Marquis de Sade’s Justine.  In both texts, education seems to be an issue in how the women succeed in empowering themselves.  Justine is usually powerless, but she occasionally takes a role that feminizes the males whom she meets.  Miss Milner is much more aggressive, but her actions have the same effect—as do Matilda’s, although Matilda is the most passive of the three women in question. In both books, the men find their own identities destabilized by this feminization since, as can be seen in Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, the male defines the self in opposition to the female.  Sensing an instability, the men attempt a redefinition of self which will recapture the former perceived stability of the male-oriented power structure.  The women thus become victims of this redefinition as each male validates his own power and his own identity through victimization.  Hence, in an ideal world, the education of men needs to provide a better sense of male identity just as much as women’s education needs to be based on the rationalism that Mary Wollstonecraft advocated.  With a better education, men perhaps would not feel threatened by the feminization they perceived in women’s obtaining power.  If such had been the case in Justine and A Simple Story, then Justine, Miss Milner, and Matilda might not have fallen victim to the male redefinition of self.

 

Works Cited

 

Alexander, Ian W.  Benjamin Constant: Adolphe. London: Edward Arnold, 1973.

     Castle, Terry.  Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction.  Stanford: Stanford University

     Press, 1986.

Coleman, Patrick.  “The Authority of Pain in Adolphe.”  Studies in Romanticism

     28.4 (1989): 577-99.

Constant, Benjamin.  Adolphe.  Trans. and introd. Leonard Tancock.  London:

     Penguin, 1964.

Ford, Susan Allen.  “‘A name more dear’: Daughters, Fathers, and Desire in A Simple

     Story, The False Friend, and Mathilda.”  Re-Visioning Romanticism: British

     Women Writers, 1776-1837.  Ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner.

     Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.  51-71.

Inchbald, Elizabeth.  A Simple Story.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Kelly, Gary.  The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805.  Oxford: Oxford University

     Press, 1976.

de Sade, Marquis.  Justine.  Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other

     Writings.  Comp. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. New York:

     Grove, 1965.

Tompkins, J. M. S.  “Introduction.”  A Simple Story.  By Elizabeth Inchbald.

     London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Wollstonecraft, Mary.  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.  London: Penguin,

     1992.

 

Additional Works Consulted

 

Barthes, Roland.  Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Trans. Richard Miller.  Berkeley:

     University of California Press, 1989.

Haggerty, George E.  “Female Abjection in Inchbald’s A Simple Story.”  Studies in

     English Literature 36.3 (1996): 655-71.

Keller, Barbara.  Woman’s Journey toward Self and Its Literary Exploration.

     Bern: Peter Lang, 1986.

Parker, Jo Alyson.  “Complicating A Simple Story: Inchbald’s Two Versions of

     Female Power.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30.3 (1997): 255-70.

Spender, Dale.  Mothers of the Novel. London: Pandora, 1986.

Ward, Candace.  “Inordinate Desire: Schooling the Senses in Elizabeth Inchbald's

      A Simple Story.” Studies in the Novel 31.1 (1999): 1-18.