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First paragraph:

John Brewer, in his article “The most polite age and the most vicious”, is careful to note that although he is discussing culture, he is not using the term in the “inclusive, all-embracing way deployed by anthropologists” (341). Instead he “limits” his discussion of culture to the commercialized culture filling in the void of court culture in eighteenth-century England. However, he concludes that this commercialized culture can be characterized in an all-embracing way: “the seductive woman is analogous to the culture of which she is a part. She [. . .] is a prostitute” (358). Kathleen Wilson, in her article “Imperialism and the politics of identity”, describes imperialism (foreign policy), initially, as something which was imagined in eighteenth-century England in various ways (238). But, she concludes that “[a]s the antidote to national effeminacy, the imperial project was described and valorized in the images of an aggressive masculinity” (256). It seems that eighteenth-century English historiography has a problem on its hands. Historians seem to prefer to keep their subject multi-faceted, slippery, and thus not amenable as a subject for social science. Yet they are coming to conclusions which cannot be characterized as anything other than singular and totalistic. The dangerous female characterizes perceptions of the domestic “public sphere” and determines reactionary hyper masculine conceptions of foreign policy. What space is left? Community life? Nope, Laura Gowing tells us that this is all about the dangerous female too. How about the “private” mind? Nope, Anthony Fletcher tells us that gender “shows itself above all in the mind, in the intimacies of personal behavior and the unspoken and often unrecorded convention of private and public life” (xix). Fletcher cuts to the chase. Eighteenth-century England was a patriarchy. Men, being men, prefer to dominate women. But if all aesthetic complexities of culture have at their core this hard, brutal reality, perhaps its time for historians to incorporate the hard, brutal, uncompromising research of social science. And wouldn’t it be funny if it turns out to be science which legitimates studying a subject which, lets face it, if it turns out to be all about men’s inhumanity to women, after excavating its “archaeology of power” so that it doesn’t happen again, deserves to be left dead and buried.