Abstract
If there is anyone who epitomizes the ability to remain detached from an experiment and its results, one could make a strong case for Isaac Newton, who once pushed a needle into the socket behind his own eyeball in order to further his inquiries into the nature of optics. Reporting the procedure in his notebook, he writes,
I took a bodkin (g h) & put it betwixt my eye and ye bone as near to the Backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye with ye end of it (soe as to make the curvature a, b c d e f in my eye) there appeared severall white dark & coloured circles r, s, t, etc. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye with ye point of ye bodkin, but if I held my eye & ye bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye with it yet ye circles would grow faint & often disappear until I renewed em by moving my eye or ye bodkin.1
Consider what it takes to devise such an experiment, then to sharpen the needle, insert it into one’s head, press it repeatedly against the back of one’s eyeball, and take lucid, thorough notes on the experience. Contrast this detachment with Newton’s infamous pugnacity or compare his fierce professional and personal isolation at Cambridge with his behavior starting in 1689, when he became socially and politically active, eventually moving to London to become Warden of the Mint in 1696.2
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Notes
Isaac Newton, Laboratory Notebook, c. 1669–1693, Newton Papers, MS Add.3975, Cambridge University Library. For a very readable description of Newton’s experiment, see George Johnson, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (New York: Knopf, 2008), 38–39.
Briefer accounts can be found in Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, paperback reprint edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 94
and James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 61.
A more sensational and fictionalized “account” appears in the play Isaac’s Eye by Lucas Hnath (dir. Linsay Firman, perf. Jeff Biehl, Kristen Bush, Haskell King, and Michael Louis Serafin-Wells, Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York, 2013).
A detailed account of Newton’s increasing sociability and use of social networks appears in Westfall’s magisterial biography of Newton. As Westfall succinctly puts it, after 1689, “Newton also began to perceive himself in a new light which was incompatible with the isolation he had striven to maintain for twenty years” (481). See also Robert Iliffe, “Author-Mongering: The ‘Editor’ between Producer and Consumer,” in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1995), 173–78;
Robert Iliffe, Newton: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Rupert Hall, “Isaac Newton: Creator of the Cambridge Scientific Tradition,” in Cambridge Scientific Minds, ed. Peter Harman and Simon Mitton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46–47;
or Gale E. Christianson, Isaac Newton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Barbara M. Benedict, “The Curious Genre: Female Inquiry in Amatory Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 194–210.
Joseph Drury, “Haywood’s Thinking Machines,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 21, no. 2 (Winter 2008–9): 201–4.
See, for example, Paula R. Backscheider, “The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work, ed. Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 31–36;
Eve Tavor Bannet, “Haywood’s Spectator and the Female World,” in Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and “The Female Spectator”, ed. Lynn Marie Wright and Donald J. Newman (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 97–101;
Kathleen Lubey, “Eliza Haywood’s Amatory Aesthetic,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): 309–22;
Juliette Merritt, Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 9;
Earla Wilputte, Introduction to Three Novellas by Eliza Haywood, ed. Earla Wilputte (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1995), 8, 12;
Aleksondra Hultquist, “Marriage in Haywood; or, Amatory Reading Rewarded,” in Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s, ed. Susan Carlile (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 31–46; Karen Cajka, “The Unprotected Woman in Eliza Haywood’s The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy,” in Carlile, Masters, 47–58. For more discussion of Aphra Behn’s treatment of the body in constructing the self, please see chapter 2. 7.
See, for example, Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 127, 133–35;
Paula R. Backscheider, “The Shadow of an Author: Eliza Haywood,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 11, no. 1 (October 1998): 79, http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol11/iss1/1; Bannet, “Haywood’s Spectator,” 98;
Kristen M. Girten, “Unsexed Souls: Natural Philosophy as Transformation in Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 55–74. 8.
Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9–10, 29–54. 9. Backscheider, “Shadow,” 79–102.
Drury, “Haywood’s Thinking Machines”; Tiffany Potter, “‘A God-like Sublimity of Passion’: Eliza Haywood’s Libertine Consistency,” The Eighteenth-Century Novel 1 (2001): 95–126.
Louis-Adrien Du Perron de Castera, The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone; Or, The Caprices of Love and Destiny: An Historical Novel. Written in French by M. L’Abbé de Castera; and now translated into English (London: D. Browne, 1725). Leah Orr contends that this text cannot be attributed to Haywood on anything except a speculative basis, but most scholars accept the attribution for now.
Leah Orr, “The Basis for Attribution in the Canon of Eliza Haywood,” The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 12, no. 4 (December 2011): 346–47, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lbt/summary/v012/12.4.orr.html.
Eliza Haywood, Love In Excess, ed. David Oakleaf, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Broadview, 2000), 100.
Eliza Haywood, The Tea-Table: Or, A Conversation between some Polite Persons of both Sexes … Part the Second, in Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, ed. Alexander Pettit, vol. 1, Miscellaneous Writings, 1725–43 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 40, 41. All further references to Part 2 are to this text. For more discussion of Behn’s “To Daphnis,” please see chapter 2.
See, for example, Drury, “Haywood’s Thinking Machines”; Rebecca P. Bocchicchio, “‘Blushing, Trembling, and Incapable of Defense’: The Hysterics of The British Recluse,” in Saxton and Bocchicchio, The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood, 95–114; Rachel K. Carnell, “The Very Scandal of Her Tea Table: Eliza Haywood’s Response to the Whig Sphere,” in Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture, ed. Chris Mounsey (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 255–73. Potter’s analysis of Haywood’s handling of libertines in her narratives implies a similar concern with the specifically male self, as well. Potter, “Eliza Haywood’s Libertine Consistency.”
Gerrard, Aaron Hill, 76–77; Kathryn R. King, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 31–32;
Patrick Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 226.
Eliza Haywood, The Tea-Table: Or, A Conversation Between Some Polite Persons of Both Sexes in “Fantomina” and Other Works, ed. Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004), 73. All further references to The Tea-Table are to this text.
Like Dryden, John Donne was concerned with the larger significance of Galileo’s revelations about nature. In “An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary,” Donne writes, “And new philosophy calls all in doubt, / The element of fire is quite put out; / The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit / Can well direct him where to look for it. / And freely men confess that this world’s spent, / When in the planets, and the firmament / They seek so many new; / They see that this / Is crumbled out again to his atomies.” John Donne, “An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary,” in John Donne: The Complete Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin, 1971), l. 205–12.
Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.
Until recently, scholars have regarded Haywood as an opponent of Walpole and the Whigs, but Kathryn R. King’s Political Biography of Eliza Haywood proposes a more complex view of Haywood’s political sympathies. The word “cabal,” whatever the political affiliation, however, was certainly a politically loaded one in the 1720s. Rachel Carnell notes that it was associated both with Jacobitism and “women’s tea tables,” and that later Haywood would use “cabal” disparagingly and compare it unfavorably to a “league.” Carnell, “Scandal of Her Tea Table,” 256; Rachel Carnell, “It’s Not Easy Being Green: Gender and Friendship in Eliza Haywood’s Political Periodicals,” in “Politics of Friendship,” special issue, Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 2 (Winter 1998/1999): 199–214, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30054219. For examples of the more traditional view of Haywood’s opposition to Walpole, see Kirsten T. Saxton, introduction to Saxton and Bocchicchio, The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood, 3; Lynn Marie Wright and Donald J. Newman, introduction to Wright and Newman, Fair Philosopher, 28–29; Bannet, “Haywood’s Spectator,” 82–103; Kathryn R. King, “Patriot or Opportunist? Eliza Haywood and the Politics of The Female Spectator,” in Wright and Newman, Fair Philosopher, 104–21; Earla A. Wilputte, “‘Too ticklish to meddle with’: The Silencing of The Female Spectator’s Political Correspondents,” in Wright and Newman, Fair Philosopher, 122–40.
Ruth Gilbert, “Seeing and Knowing: Science, Pornography and Early Modern Hermaphrodites,” in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 150–70.
Alexander Pettit, “Adventures in Pornographic Places: Eliza Haywood’s Tea-Table and the Decentering of Moral Argument,” Papers on Language & Literature 38, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 245, 247.
Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Including and Translation of Thomas Hobbes, “Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris,” by Simon Shaffer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 20, 107.
A number of critics have pointed to ways in which Haywood was interested in Hobbes’ ideas, among them Joseph Drury, “Haywood’s Thinking Machines,” and Helen Thompson, “Plotting Materialism: W. Charleton’s The Ephesian Matron, E. Haywood’s Fantomina, and Feminine Consistency,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 195–214, doi:10.1353/ecs.2002.0017.
Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator, in Selections from “The Female Spectator”, ed. Patricia Meyers Spacks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), I, IV, 60.
Joseph Addison, The Spectator no. 1 (1 March 1711), in Selections from “The Tatler” and “The Spectator”, ed. Angus Ross (New York: Penguin, 1982), 200.
Kathryn R. King, “Spying Upon the Conjurer: Haywood, Curiosity, and ‘the Novel’ in the 1720s,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 184.
Steven Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 238.
Drury, “Haywood’s Thinking Machines,” 215–17. In this point my argument directly opposes Sharon Harrow’s claim that Haywood’s poetry and novels draw on “Enlightenment individualism” to justify the independent acting of amatory heroines. Sharon Harrow, “Having Text: Desire and Language in Haywood’s Love in Excess and The Distressed Orphan,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22, no. 2 (Winter 2009–10): 279–308.
See, for example, Susan Paterson Clover, Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006).
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© 2014 Karen Bloom Gevirtz
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Gevirtz, K.B. (2014). The Detached Observer. In: Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386762_5
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