1. The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault (Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (1976)
2nd year text
“Briefly, my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function… The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?”
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. by Robert Hurley (Penguin Classics, 1978), pp. 8-9.
Writing for The Spectator, Jasper Griffin described The History of Sexuality as ‘A brilliant display of fireworks, attacking the widespread and banal notion that “in the beginning” sexual activity was guilt-free and delicious, being repressed and blighted only by the gloom of Victorianism’. This is a great description of the introductory portion of the book but as a summary of the book I think it misses the mark slightly. More than just exposing the falsity of the notion of Victorian sexuality and attitudes towards sex as prudish and repressive, in The History of Sexuality Foucault examines the possible motives for the reconstruction of history in such a way and how this myth of Victorian sexual repression was perpetuated and supported through other discursive fields like medicine, law, and education.
Writing in the 70s, Foucault argued that the effort of various discursive fields to rewrite Victorian sexuality as repressed and limited to a solely procreative function, which had previously been thought to serve the needs of a burgeoning capitalist class, served the partial function of positioning modern society as enlightened people uniquely unafraid of their own sexuality. Foucault termed this entire process– the reconstruction of history regarding the sexuality of the Victorians, the reasons behind it, and its function — the “repressive hypothesis”. In the book, which is the opening volume in a series of four, he explores not just the discourses of the repressive hypothesis, but also “the will behind them and the strategic intention that supports them”.1
This book was so influential for me because it brought into focus how the natural life that certain concepts have in the collective psyche can be the result of centuries of conscious and subconscious work to serve a particular purpose or purposes. In the lecture for this book, my lecturer pointed out the parallel between the posturing of Foucault’s society and our own with regard to sexuality. This brought to mind the especial pressure on young women since the Sexual Revolution to prove themselves as “sexually liberated” through the openness with which they talk about their sexuality and sexual activities in order to be counted among the modern women of the 21st century, lest they be seen as one of those women victimised by the patriarchal ideals of old (as though a person cannot be a sexual being without everybody else knowing about it…).2 When I was at university, which wasn’t that long ago, this spirit was still very much alive. On this topic, Foucault wrote:
“But there may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law. He somehow anticipates the coming freedom.”
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 6.
The History of Sexuality is fascinating and it’s a book I think anyone curious about how certain aspects of individual and social identity can be socially constructed, and to what end this may be done, would enjoy. While it’s fairly short (my edition is only 155 pages), Foucault’s writing style is on the dense side and I had to pause every so often to make sure I was following what he was saying so it may take a bit longer to read than some other books of the same length. The insight gained from persevering deciphering his sentences is well worth it though and I’m sure that people interested in history and sociology would find it as interesting as I did.
2. Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (1790)
1st year text
“The age of chivalry is gone. — That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.”
Edmund Burke, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ in Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, ed. by Marilyn Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 44.
Reflections of the Revolution in France was Edmund Burke’s response to the ethos and activities of the revolutionaries in France at the time of the French Revolution. In it he decries the democratic ideals of the French bourgeoisie, presenting them as foolish, misguided, and bound to result in chaos. (History shows that things obviously did not go swimmingly for the majority of French people following Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s executions and the establishment of a French Republic but I don’t think this was because democracy is an inherently problematic thing, as Burke suggested.) Burke’s pamphlet is thought to have been motivated by a desire to uphold conservatism in England, which he seemed to perceive as being threatened by the activities of the French middle class.3 As such, Reflections on the Revolution in France is generally understood to be a defence of the conservative ideals of monarchical rule, the inheritance of titles, private property ownership, reverence for the institution of the church, and the joyful deference towards and submission of subjects towards their rulers, basically everything that the ancien régime of France stood for and the revolutionaries against.
What I found most striking about Burke’s writing in the pamphlet was his contempt for the notion of a middle class with their own wealth and access to resources. This class was emerging in England at the time of his writing and was the class leading the Revolution in France. This was an aspirational class made up of lawyers, merchants, and business owners who, partly influenced by the Enlightenment, found that their interests stood in conflict with those of the upper classes and the traditional working class/peasantry to some extent. Compared to the qualifications of the nobility for state matters, of which he never specified, Burke saw these people as wholly unfit for government (disqualified by their commonness), describing them, along with the rest of the general population as a “swinish multitude”.4 On the composition of the National Assembly, the the assembly of the Third Estate formed after the Estates General of 1789, he wrote:
Judge, Sir, of my surprize, when I found that a very great proportion of the Assembly (a majority, I believe, of the members who attended) was composed of practitioners in the law. It was composed not of distinguished magistrates, who had given pledges to their country of their science, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in universities; — but for the far greater part, as it must in such a number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession… From the moment I read the list I saw distinctly, and very nearly as it happened all that was to follow…
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 42.
While he lambasts the inferiority of these common men for matters of state, he never explains what exactly it is, apart from the notions of inheritance and access to the right kinds of “habits” that “enlarge and liberalize the understanding”, that makes aristocrats more fit to govern the country instead.5 It’s notable that these things which make an assembly “respectably composed” in his eyes are themselves not innate to the nobility, but accessible to them only because of the privileges afforded them by the “superiority” of being born with the right names.
I was also amazed by what felt to me like intellectual dishonesty in his representation of the reasons for the revolutionaries’ desires to overthrow the ancien régime. By framing the Revolution as “This unforced choice, this fond election of evil” and in his obfuscation of the very real ways in which the established order was unjust to ordinary French people, he presents the French bourgeoisie and peasantry as unreasonable and motivated by frivolity rather than by their indignation at centuries-old injustices.6 I also found it funny to read the statement that “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views” after he had been praising the fact that his England operated on a system of government where virtually all wealth and power was concentrated into the hands of titled men who had special privileges and liberties that the general populace did not.7
As a historical text, I found Reflections on the Revolution in France interesting to read, and as a literary text, I found it a great insight on the way sensationalist language, selective omission, and even just the privilege of having an education of some kind, which some can use to suggest their infallibility to those they believe will fall for it, can be used to manipulate. I also have Reflections on the Revolution in France to thank for inspiring one of my favourite lines from a female writer. In her response to Burke’s insistence on the paternalism of the ruling class as a desirable thing, Mary Wollestonecraft said: “These are gothic notions of beauty – the ivy is beautiful, but, when it insidiously destroys the trunk from which it receives support, who would not grub it up?”
*Wollstonecraft also said of Burke: “I perceive, from the whole tenor of your Reflections, that you have a mortal antipathy to reason”, which made my jaw drop the first time I read it because the sass??? I think Wollestonecraft was what they would have called a “saucy” woman back in the day.
3. Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
1st year text
“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. … It is high time that Communists should openly… meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party in Marx/Engels Selected Works, trans. by Samuel Moore (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 14.
This was so eye-opening to me because it was my first time giving close, sustained attention to non-fiction writing of an explicitly political nature and analysing the ways in which the literary features we typically think of as only being prominent in fiction were being used to achieve political aims. I was surprised to see how literary the manifesto was, relying heavily on devices such as metaphor (“The bourgeoisie… has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation”), personification, listing, and other rhetorical devices to convince, persuade, and create the impression of validity.
Courtesy of the token glances at some non-fiction writing at GCSE level, I had previously thought that political writing simply made some use of these techniques that we had become accustomed to analysing in novels and poetry. Studying this manifesto and the ones that followed in later years showed me that those literary techniques, far from being mere features of political writing, were actually the forces giving those texts (especially ones as emotive as the Communist Manifesto or the Redstockings Manifesto of 1969) any power and propulsion at all. Consider the restless effect created by the assonance and the adjectives “constant”, “uninterrupted” and “everlasting” in the list below (as well as the fact that what is being described has been presented as a list in the first place):
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.8
Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 16.
The sentence that follows has its own poetry:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 16.
I think the Manifesto of the Communist Party was my first time really appreciating how most writing is extremely calculated and how the best kind achieves it aims on a subconscious level, without you able to really register why it has stayed with you so much.
4. ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions’ in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler (1990)
3rd year text
In this chapter of their book on gender performativity, Judith Butler argues that gender is simply a “stylised repetition of acts” that approximate a fantasy or an ideal of gender and that gender is constantly being produced and reproduced by repeated acts, gestures and movements. They write that the term strategy best explains gender expression, labelling it a ‘strategy of survival’ because society punishes people who fail to enact their gender in the prescribed way, which reinforces the idea that gender serves a political purpose. Butler argues that the idea of ‘true’ femininity or masculinity works to conceal the performative nature of gender identity and also limits the possibilities offered by alternative gender configurations that would undermine compulsory heterosexual hegemony. Thus the idea of a ‘gender core’ is necessary for the regulation of sexuality and in this way the category of gender is a function of social discourse as well as a historical concept.
This idea of gender being constructed by our actions and presentation of ourselves was really interesting to me because from my observation, it’s absolutely the case that society does punish men and women who stray from the expressions of their sex it deems acceptable, and that this is used to subdue the population into a singular expression of maleness and femaleness. Among other ways I ‘perform’ femininity, it made me think twice about the choices I make everyday in my dress and the fact that I routinely remove my body hair (and apologise for it if I haven’t) things I very likely wouldn’t think to do had I not been raised in a culture that teaches that this is the “right” thing for girls and women to do. It also made me think conversely of the ways in which men who stray from stereotypical masculinity (by having the “wrong” interests or being too quiet and soft-spoken for example) are still figured as deviant in some spaces.
Butler’s words would come to mind when, a few years later, I would read this from Margaret Attwood on the internalised male gaze in women: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Honourable Mentions:
A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson (1682) – 3rd year text
A memoir/slave narrative of the capture of Englishwoman Mary Rowlandson by a group of Native Americans in colonial America. The racism in her language, particularly towards the native women, and the power she had over the native men was a poignant reminder of the privileges and power white women also exercised in colonialism, which has sometimes been erased in favour of presenting them solely as victims of white male patriarchy.
What Is An Author? by Michel Foucault (1969) – 1st year text
An essay about the ideological function of the author figure. He said that the author is “the ideological figure by which we one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning”. It’s another interesting read, also rather dense.
Vindication of the Rights of Men by Mary Wollstonecraft (1790) – 1st year text
A pamphlet responding to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Wollstonecraft opposed Burke’s valorisation of tradition and his attack on Republicanism. This pamphlet was her basically telling him off for being a bit silly.
- Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 8. ↩︎
- How liberating the Sexual Revolution has actually been for women is another conversation altogether.
↩︎ - Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, p. 33.
↩︎ - Burke, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ p. 46.
↩︎ - Burke, p. 42.
↩︎ - Burke, p. 41.
↩︎ - Burke, p. 39.
↩︎ - The Manifesto was not written in English so these are the choices of the translator Samuel Moore. The nature of translation makes it so that the translation of a text is a work in its own right so everything I’ve written about this manifesto refers to this specific translation of it. I can’t read German so I can’t make any comparison of his translation with the original but I’m going to assume (possibly wrongly) that Moore did not deviate so much from the original that there is no semblance of the original in his work. ↩︎
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