From Johnson's Quarrel with Swift, Jordan Richman

On The Characters of Women

Nature—passion, the body—lives through reason, that is wit, good sense, and decency. Friendship is a prime value because it keeps the other pleasures alive. The word friendship was not a platitude for Swift:

Dear Jim, pardon me, I know not what I am saying; but believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting, and as much engaging, as violent love. Adieu (Correspondence, III, 322).

Herbert Davis sees Swift’s attempt to fashion a “new view of woman” as going beyond his seventeenth-century models. He describes this woman as unromantic but not unpleasing: “She is able to take her place in the world on equal terms, a free, intelligent gentlewoman, worthy of man’s highest regard and friendship whether within or without the bounds of holy matrimony” (Davis, p. 45). I believe Johnson follows the example of Swift in his expectation of women, an expectation based on the urge to balance and reconcile nature to reason and effected by bringing men and women together for the purposes of polite conversation. Though he expressed doubt about the Letter to a Young Lady, he is actually close to Swift’s thinking in fashioning several female portraits in The Rambler.

Johnson also teaches that the distance between men and women should be narrowed for the sake of reason that assumes friendship and understanding. Female behavior when it is either too conventional, i.e., artificially reasonable, or too unconventional, i.e. artificially natural, is disagreeable. In Rambler 115, Camilla sees herself as a disciple of Swift’s advice:

She …proclaimed her approbation of Swift’s opinion that women are only a higher species of monkeys, and confessed that when she considered the behavior or heard the conversation of her sex she could not but forgive the Turks for suspecting them to want souls (Works, II, 46).

In the portrait of Camilla, Johnson does not disagree with Swift, because Swift in his Letter to a Young Lady also cautions against the kind of role Camilla assumes:

I know very well, that those who are commonly called learned Women, have lost all Manner of Credit by their impertinent Talkativeness, and Conceit of themselves (Works, IX, 92).

It is possible to view Johnson’s coward Anthea also as another representation of a Swiftian attitude toward the female. Swift also expresses distaste for cowardice as a female virtue:

There is, indeed, one Infirmity which is generally allowed you, I mean that of Cowardice . . . At least, if Cowardice be a Sign of Cruelty, (as it is generally granted) I can hardly think it an Accomplishment so desireable [sic], as to be thought worth improving by Affectation (IX, 93).

Anthea, who appears in Rambler 34, completely confirms Swift’s denunciation down to the last detail of seeing cowardice as a sign of cruelty. The objects of Anthea’s frights, such as frogs and coaches, are on the same scale as those listed by Swift. I interpret Johnson’s ironic ending as a sign of Anthea’s cruelty:

At last we came home, and she told her company next day what a pleasant ride had been taken (Works, II, 170).

That she can make such a statement after all the confusion, disorder, and annoyance she has caused by her obsessions reveals the kind of cruelty that accompanies female cowardice. As Johnson humorously displays her, Anthea really wants to manipulate people.

The difficulty in narrowing the distance between the sexes is the attractions of power the woman sees in either extreme. As an Amazon or a coward she is looking for power to master her social unease.

Johnson suggests the possibility of a compromise through the character of Cornelia, while at the same time attacking the conventional role of the wife as a kitchen manager. Lady Bustle is a super-housewife. She is someone who:

makes an orange pudding which is the envy of all the neighbourhood and which she has hitherto found means of mixing and baking with such secrecy, that the ingredient to which it owes its flavour has never been discovered (II, 249).

Cornelia’s humility makes her wonder whether she:

shall throw away the books which I have hitherto thought it my duty to read for The Lady’s Closet Opened, The Complete Servant Maid, and The Court Cook, and resign all curiosity after right and wrong for the art of scalding damascenes without bursting them, and preserving the whiteness of pickled mushrooms (II, 248).

While Lady Bustle’s presumed virtues are humorously dispatched, Cornelia stands as the personification of a modern woman because of her inquisitive concern for the values of right and wrong and her awareness of the roles which are offered to her. She sees Lady Bustle and her entire family, including the husband, engaged in a mindless pursuit of abundance. By this pursuit they have dulled their minds to humanity, thereby losing some of their own. Ultimately her moral neutrality must be seen as a kind of immorality when Cornelia observes that:

She has no curiosity after the events of a war or the fate of heroes in distress; she can hear without the least emotion the ravage of a fire or devastations of a storm. Her neighbours grow rich or poor, come into the world or go out of it, without regard while she is pressing the jelly-bag or airing the state-room (II, 248–249).

By protesting against “these ladies as the great patterns of our sex,” Cornelia is protesting against domestic complacency. It is a protest Swift makes when he observes: “your Sex employs more thought, memory, and application to be Fools, than would serve to make them wise and useful.” Swift would agree that a wife should be able to give her husband more than orange-pudding. However, neither Johnson nor Swift felt that it could be love in the romantic sense of the word:

Swift: Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage: and they were always mortal enemies (Works, IV, 247).

Johnson: But love and marriage are different states (Boswell’s Life, I, 381).
It is commonly a weak man who marries for love (III, 3).

The Foundation for Marriage: To be continued…