Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen by Jenny Davidson

151 was unacceptable to eighteenth-century Whigs. Centlivre’s successes, The Busy Body (1709), The Wonder (1714), and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) chronicle the triumph of Whig market economy in the early eighteenth century. She ‘‘embraced the free market and the rhetoric of independence it offered women with tales of self-determining women who make their own marriage contracts.’’ What she was unable to resolve was the contradiction in contract law that excluded marriage from operating fully under its influence . Instead, her heroines are limited at best to ‘‘the chance to negotiate their own commodification, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.’’ It is more than a half century before women playwrights matched the success of Behn and Centlivre. Both Cowley and Inchbald wrote after Lord Harwicke’s 1753 marriage act had undermined contract law in favor of parental control as the most powerful determinant of marriage . Comic playwrights had to look at courtship and marriage from this regressive perspective. Cowley’s approach in The Runaway (1776), Who’s the Dupe? (1779), The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), Which Is the Man? (1783) and A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783) was to link women’s contractual rights to a nationalistic discourse, but as external events late in her career undermined British patriotic rhetoric, they also undermined Cowley’s optimism about heroines’ rights in her comedies. By the time Inchbald wrote her successful comedies, I’ll Tell You What (1785), Every One Has His Fault (1793), and Wives as They Wereand Maids as They Are (1797), she was responding to a world where women faced abuses of power that were not to be remedied by law. She turned to such concepts as love and community as counters to the corruption she saw aroundher.Inchbald’s concern with the legal status of women led her to conclusions Ms. Anderson labels dark and cynical. My summary fails to do justice to Ms. Anderson’s insights on the plays. Those insights and her overall argument about changing representations of marriage in comedies by women are the most valuable contributions this study makes to our understanding of eighteenth-century drama. Brian Corman University of Toronto JENNY DAVIDSON. Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 242. $70. What is the relationship between the vice of hypocrisy and the social virtue of politeness? Are tact and self-restraintdistinguishable from or simply forms of hypocrisy ? In what sense or to what degree is hypocrisy redeemed by its social benefits ? Ms. Davidson guides us back to the eighteenth-century provenance of these thorny and still relevant questions. She sketches the career of manners and particularly of ‘‘the thing called ‘tact’’’ as it goes ‘‘from being stigmatized at the beginningoftheeighteenthcenturyasavice associated with effete male French aristocrats to being embraced at the start of the nineteenth century as the domestic virtue that would enable British women to manage feelings in both the home and the nation.’’ Each of Ms. Davidson’s five chapters concerns a separate episode in the history of hypocrisy and/or a related constellation of terms: manners, politeness , gallantry, chivalry, modesty, selfcontrol , and tact. Some of these chapters are more successful than others. Chapter One, ‘‘Hypocrisy and the ser- 152 vant problem,’’ will be of particular interest to Scriblerian readers. It unfolds from Swift’s ostensible defense of hypocrisy in the Project for the Advancement of Religion: ‘‘Hypocrisy is much more eligible than open Infidelity and Vice: It wears the Livery of Religion, it acknowledgeth her Authority, and is cautious of giving Scandal.’’ By latching on to Swift’s use of ‘‘Livery’’ here (indeed by deploying this quotation three times), and juxtaposing his satire of liveried servants in Directions to Servants, Ms. Davidson argues that the manifestation of hypocrisy Swift finds most troubling is the ‘‘not-so-secret insolence’’ofservants. I find this limited claim somewhat persuasive , but am less persuaded by the chapter’s broader claim that ‘‘not just Swift, but Locke and Mandeville as well, are able to promotethekindsofhypocrisy that benefit society by rejecting what they depict as the destructive and selfinterested dissimulation of the servant class.’’Locke does not represent...

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