confirms the necessity of an authority to control its energy within the confines of the Dictionary.
Perhaps most striking in this conflicted account of Englishness is that Johnson assigns a feminine role to language. The fitfulness, waywardness, capriciousness, and willfulness that, according to him, constitute the various problems that vex a lexicographer’s task, are now bound up with ideologies of gender, and language acts even more like a flighty woman. Gender intersects with and informs Johnson’s project of cultural representation. He writes:
I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote. (280, italics Johnson’s)
This passage establishes the hierarchical priority of things over words and at the same time of sons over daughters. It is a telling instance of how gender categories overlap with the tenet that things precede words. The feminine is directly associated with a mutable language prone to decay; masculine “things” and “ideas,” in contrast, of which language is “only the instrument,” conform to the stability and uniformity that Johnson would recommend. Equally crucial is that the representation of the masculine as permanent and material is only established by way of the faulty, corrupted “instrument.” The availability of masculine “things,” that is, is guaranteed only by employing, or trafficking in, the feminine body of language. The mobility, the femininity of language makes possible a solid, unmoving, permanent masculinity within English culture.
The relationship of feminine to masculine in this passage is produced by the same wishful anxiety that characterizes Johnson’s more forceful moment of sociological scapegoating, here involving Mediterranean and Indian “trafficking”:
Commerce, however necessary, however lucrative, as it depraves the manners, corrupts the language; they that have frequent intercourse with strangers, to whom they endeavor to accommodate themselves, must in time learn a mingled dialect, like the jargon that serves the traffickers on the Mediterranean and Indian coasts. This will not always be confined to the exchange, the warehouse, or the port, but will be communicated by degrees to other ranks of the people, and at last incorporated with the current speech. (294)
Here the necessary evil of commercial traffic functions as the screen onto which Johnson can project his anxieties about recontaining language within a lexicographical frame. The slippery, suspect position he has previously allotted the feminine now becomes pointedly othered; Johnson aligns “strangers” with corruption, and particularly strangers from exoticized ports of exchange like the “Mediterranean” and “Indian” coasts. The “mingled” mongrel dialect such traffickers speak, produced out of such questionable spaces as “the exchange, the warehouse, or the port,” may penetrate British bourgeois propriety and be “incorporated with the current speech,” thus infecting the proper language and hindering the lexicographer’s search for linguistic “purity.”
Johnson’s conflicting representations of primary features of capitalism—his promotion of a bourgeois work ethic on the one hand and his fear of commerce on the other—suggests internal inconsistency in capitalist logic. Capitalist enterprise is at odds with the bourgeois impulse to protect national borders. That such a territorial impulse is opposed by an equally powerful desire to invite commerce in the foreign reveals the xenodochy on which xenophobia rests. For Johnson, lexicographical drudgery—a product of the bourgeois work ethic—is useful because it polices the borders of nation, here marked by language; commerce, “however necessary, however lucrative” to the power and efficacy of a national whole, is highly suspect because it “corrupts the language.”
Although Johnson warns against the dangers of commerce, he is not particularly concerned with the actual disappearance of English words, or even with the emergence of a “dialect of France.” It is the “mingled dialect” or mixed “jargon” emerging from those Mediterranean and Indian traffickers that worries him. This worry reveals Johnson’s political imperative to construct not only an inviolable English language but also an inviolable English (bourgeois) society.24 Johnson’s anxiety about the possibility of linguistic infection seems to be class based as well as xenophobic; he fears that dialects from the Indian and Mediterranean coasts (and not France) will be “communicated by degrees to other ranks of people, and be at last incorporated within current speech.” His anxiety—connected to the categories of class (“ranks”), race, gender, sexuality (“communicated”)—readily shifts its focus from one to the next. These anxious shifts indicate that Johnson sees identity in terms of difference.
Foreignness is analogous to femininity in the way in which Johnson constructs an ideal of Englishness by debasement and rejection. Both the foreign and the feminine are cast out of Johnson’s representation of permanence, as masculine “things” and “ideas” eventually evolve into “pure,” timeless English diction. In the Preface, Johnson sustains his belief in a pure origin by turning and orienting English toward the past. He rids English (and England) of the “improprieties” of innovation and ignorance that are, by implication, feminine. Such improprieties and infelicities of usage are intrinsic to language, however, and are not just contingent errors or accidents that can be excluded from the definition of language.
Purity of origin, as represented in the Preface, lays the groundwork for Johnson’s representation of English cultural and national identity. Before Johnson can cast out foreign and feminine “improprieties,” however, he must identify and construct them. Johnson employs a strategy of othering—a process that creates the other in order to cast it out—by engaging in precisely the sort of traffic that he identifies as among the “lower employments of life” and associates with both the foreign and the feminine. That is, Johnson must use language itself with all its improprieties as the means by which a representation of his own position as well as Englishness is produced.
One way of accounting for the others Johnson employs on behalf of constructing an inviolable and “pure” sense of Englishness is to use Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “self-consolidating” and “absolute” others. The feminine, previously aligned with those “spots of barbarism” that resist critical cleansing, function as the “self-consolidating” other: the presence of something identifiably not-English but yet able to combine with an English “self” (represented as the “genuine sources of pure diction” to which Johnson refers) and to present a unified front against the highly visible, “absolute other”: the foreign.25 Johnson’s invective against the dangers of translation cohere with his cultural representation. Johnson complains that the
great pest of speech is frequency of translation. No book was ever turned from one language into another without imparting something of its native idiom; this is the most mischievous and comprehensive innovation; single words may enter by thousands and the fabric of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once; it alters not the single stones of the building but the order of the columns. If an academy should be established for the cultivation of our style, which I, who can never wish to see dependence multiplied, hope the spirit of English liberty will hinder or destroy, let them, instead of compiling grammars and dictionaries, endeavor, with all their influence, to stop the license of translators, whose idleness and ignorance, if it be suffered to proceed, will reduce us to babble a dialect of France. (296)
Part of this invective is informed by Johnson’s own investment as a rival lexicographer to those academies in France and Italy that were engaged in producing their own dictionaries. And certainly part of his rancor can be accounted for by the bitterness he felt toward English academic institutions, which had, in the powerfully empathetic words of Walter Jackson Bate, “for fifteen years … barred” him entrance for lack of a degree.26 It is curious, however, that Johnson focuses on translation itself as a single cause for the problems he has with language (especially since he himself has profited from French translation in time of dire need). Like trafficking with Mediterranean and Indian cultures, translation functions as a kind of porous border, a membrane that, while marking out discrete languages and cultures, does not enforce these boundaries. These borders present the most difficult