She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sensitive Witnesses: Feminist Materialism in the British Enlightenment, and reported the following:
On page 99 of my book Sensitive Witnesses, I present a fundamental distinction between two highly popular and influential periodicals of the eighteenth century: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator (1711-12) and Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744-46). The former is perhaps best known as a highly popular and influential accompaniment to eighteenth-century British coffee-house culture, which was instrumental in helping to establish the modern public sphere. The latter is often characterized as the first periodical written by a woman for women—and thus viewed as having set the stage for today’s glamour magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue. As its title attests, The Female Spectator broadcasts its association to Addison and Steele’s earlier publication. Throughout its copious pages, Haywood’s eponymous narrator regularly refers to “Mr. Spectator” as her “brother.” Moreover, Haywood adopts and adapts many of The Spectator’s key features. For instance, though they both center around an eponymous narrator, they are portrayed as having been conceived and composed by a committee. Furthermore, they both similarly appeal to a broad readership (including both men and women), inviting their readers to become correspondents and regularly including and responding to their readers’ letters in their papers. (It is uncertain whether the letters they incorporate are real or fictional.) However, on page 99, I present one key way in which Haywood’s Female Spectator deviates from its predecessor: namely, in its portrayal of sympathy. I argue that, whereas The Spectator models and promotes a version of sympathy that corresponds to what would be theorized by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) a few decades after the periodical’s publication, Haywood’s Female Spectator embodies a version of sympathy that instead accords with that portrayed by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739). Moreover, I demonstrate on page 99 that Smith’s theory of sympathy is founded on a notion of impartiality whereby the ability of one to feel sympathy for another is contingent on one’s success at cultivating a sense of indifference. Somewhat ironically, according to Smith, it is only when we can “moderate” our feelings through indifference that we are able to feel for another person (which Smith portrays as “form[ing] some idea of his sensations.” It is such a conception of sympathy that Addison and Steele’s Spectator exemplifies and from which Haywood’s Female Spectator departs.Learn more about Sensitive Witnesses at the Stanford University Press website.
Page 99 focuses on the antithesis of the sensitive witness—the “impartial observer,” which I characterize throughout the book as a “modest witness.” However, as the sensitive witnesses my book studies regularly perceive and style themselves in critical opposition to the modest witness, to recognize who the sensitive witness is not is to gain valuable insight into who she is. In fact, the feminist materialists my book explores perceived the practice of sensitive witnessing as both a challenge and alternative to the practice of modest witnessing. Moreover, it was precisely the modest witness’s claim to indifference they repudiated. Informed by materialism, they disputed the feasibility of such indifference, insisting instead that to be a creature in this atomically infused cosmos is to be radically open to one’s environment and, thus, to be constantly and irresistibly vulnerable (sensitive) to stimulation.
Page 99 sets up my discussion of how Eliza Haywood criticizes the indifference and related masculine modesty cultivated, asserted, and encouraged by The Spectator. Though Haywood’s parodic technique is unique, the criticism she poses is illustrative of the critical thread that distinguishes and runs throughout the various feminist works my book addresses. Not all of the authors I study are as overtly concerned with sympathy as Haywood is. However, all of the sensitive witnesses my book explores were similarly critical of the presumption of “impartiality” that Adam Smith as well as Addison and Steele encouraged and performed. Moreover, informed by a sense of material continuity, sensitive witnessing is distinguished by a belief in the kinship between self and other, which resonates with Haywood’s Humean understanding of sympathy. Whereas the modest witness evokes Smith’s “impartial spectator,” the sensitive witness challenges notions of impartiality and perceives relationships as based on connectedness (or, to quote Hume, “resemblance”) rather than separation.
Sensitive Witnesses shows how a group of female British authors of the Enlightenment transformed their perceived propensity, as women, to be distinctly sensitive or sympathetic to others from a philosophical impediment into a philosophical advantage. They employ principles of Epicurean materialism to show the infeasibility of the impartiality and masculine modesty that their male philosophical counterpart frequently claimed for themselves. With support from these principles, they encourage their readers—both male and female—to trade modesty for sensitivity, suggesting that doing so is not only appropriate given the nature of the cosmos but also beneficial to scientific discovery.
--Marshal Zeringue
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