relationship between intelligence and language facility, the mind and speech. For men educated in the collèges and the universities, learning language was a laborious process of acquisition. One of the justifications for the centrality of Latin in the curriculum was, in fact, that learning the language instilled in boys the endurance, the inurement to laborious effort, essential to a manly character.69 While men were disciplined to use language as an instrument of thought, women’s facility in their native tongue seemed to make words the “natural” and unmediated expression of thought. What had been dismissed as women’s babble about social particularity, a world of mere appearance, was now admired as the performance of women’s superior relational intelligence. To be socially efficacious thoughts must be communicable, and it was women who excelled in that kind of intelligence. Sometimes this was considered a natural gift, something women had by nature and men had to acquire. But if women had the gift, it was no less important that it had not been corrupted by the Latinate education of the schools.70 Society women looked down on the training they neither could have nor, in their enjoyment of an exclusive liberty, wanted to have. It was not simply that they rejected academic jargon. They were free of the rules of traditional rhetorical performance, and of a manly labor of abstraction they considered laborious and therefore boring. While the French Academy sought a standard French for print, women continued to spell phonetically. It was precisely this “natural” naïveté that made women’s speech and writing the model for the elegant simplicity of a polite style.71 Natural simplicity grounded their new cultural authority as judges of literature. At once cultivated and uncorrupted by pedantry in any form, they were the arbiters of taste.
At work here was not “rhetorical re-description,” if we mean by that phrase the technique (paradiastole) of effecting social change by replacing one term with another—from negative to positive, or vice versa—to describe an attribute or an action.72 Instead there was a more subtle and, one might say, smoother process: the received terms were given new valuative and normative meaning. The revaluation is especially clear in the use of the word “delicacy,” a female trait by tradition, to describe an essential quality of polite conversation and good taste.73 Writing in the 1630s, Du Bosc sought to persuade society women that they could make polite conversation more intellectually substantive by doing serious reading, including the ancient texts. He knew that he was challenging conventional wisdom by claiming that female “delicacy” of mind included the capacity to understand the “sciences.”74 In the ensuing decades the discourse of honnêteté, in putting a premium on delicacy, often gave it a kind of acuteness of piercing strength. This linguistic shift made it questionable whether the intelligence that really mattered was about strength in the conventional sense, or indeed in any sense. Perhaps there were more valuable kinds of mental capacity in what had been considered female weakness.
The discourse was cutting the connection (literal and analogical) between male physical strength and mental energy. It implicitly contradicted the conventional notion that by virtue of women’s role in reproduction, their minds were more subject to their physicality. In a sense, it reversed that assumption: the nature of women’s physicality—the delicacy of their bodily makeup—gave them more freedom of mind in what mattered, in relational intelligence and the socially constructed “taste” of le monde, than men enjoyed. That was why schooling could not give men the delicacy of taste that distinguished le monde from the world at large. Only by attending “the school of women” could they become honnête. Delicacy in speech implied a cognitive advantage. Traditionally stereotyped as ephemeral prattle, women’s speech was now admired for its greater “netteté” than men’s; one of the attributes of their more natural speech was greater precision of expression. The implication was that, to a degree, women had the advantage in reasoning itself; the natural flow of their speech reflected the natural acuity of their thought. While in ordinary usage “delicacy” might continue to connote female mental weakness, a daintiness and fragility of the mind, delicacy now also attributed a superior cognitive perceptiveness and clarity to women. Other female traits gave reason a “beautiful” appearance, above all in its externalization in speech. They clothed it—not in the sense of providing mere ornamentation, but in the sense of softening it without diminishing its strength, enhancing its inherent persuasive power without making it overbearing or intimidating. It was in this positive sense that women were seen to be able to “insinuate” thoughts to others in a way that men could not.75
In this discursive context we can better understand what makes Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, published in 1686, such a tour de force. The son of a provincial noble family related to the Corneille brothers, Fontenelle had begun visiting Paris as a young man. He entered the literary world as a fledgling playwright and a contributor to the Mercure galant. Thanks to his connections, his literary gifts, and the grace and wit with which he exhibited his considerable learning, he rose into the highest fashionable circles and was much in demand in the salons. In the Conversations he undertook the formidable task of having a gallant gentleman explain the new science, from Copernicus’s heliocentric cosmos to Descartes’s vortices, to a young and beautiful marquise who is quite at home in le monde but is spending some time at her country chateau. They have five evening conversations in the garden, where they can converse unobserved as they gaze at the heavens. The gentleman obviously accomplishes his purpose. Having been introduced at the end to Descartes’s vortices and the possibility of a vast plurality of solar systems, the marquise exclaims “I have the whole system of the universe in my head! I’m a scholar!”76 “Scholar” is, of course, a surprising term for an honnête femme to apply to herself. The marquise uses it with more than a little irony, but not at all flippantly.
J. B. Shank has done us the service of rescuing this text from conventional misreadings and placing it squarely in the new discursive freedom of mixed-gender conversational sociability. Extricating the text from a now defunct teleology in the history of science, a linear narrative in which Cartesian science figures as a wrong turn, is only the first step. What Shank sees Fontenelle enacting so deftly is one of “the lost alternatives to Newtonian physics,” another way of conceiving scientific inquiry that is by no means irrelevant today, and that can “open up perspectives on the lost social and political possibilities of the period as well.”77 Nor is the text, Shank argues, another conventional exercise in gallantry, paternalistically using the idiom of light flirtation to “popularize” scientific reasoning to a typical woman who cannot rise above sentiment.78 The gentleman does, to be sure, try to engage in gallantry out of incurable habit. “It will never be said of me,” he comments on the first evening, “that in an arbor, at ten o’clock in the evening, I talked of philosophy to the most beautiful woman I know.”79 But talk he does, at sophisticated conceptual levels, and that is because the marquise insists that she is capable of “enjoying intellectual pleasures.” She repeatedly demonstrates her intelligence by grasping truths, by countering her interlocutor’s speculations with skepticism, and by raising questions that move the conversation in fascinating directions. In this alternative view science requires rational clarity, but the essential measure of its “truth” is whether it gives “pleasure” to the imagination. Its beauty lies in the elegant simplicity of its laws, and in the apparently infinite diversity of forms and colors that clothe them. Science becomes a process of “imaginative picture making.”80 What we are witnessing, Shank emphasizes, is the aestheticizing not just of the presentation of science to neophytes, but of the basic process of scientific understanding.
Much of this is convincing, but when Shank follows DeJean’s lead he pushes his argument too far. In the fusion of the aesthetic and scientific that we have lost, he argues, we find a mixed-sex partnership in “knowledge production”; and that in turn connects the text to “the feminist pedagogical project” of the era, whose key text was Poullain de la Barre’s On the Equality of the Two Sexes.81 “Production” carries the wrong connotations; it cannot be detached from labor, the disciplined making of a product. At issue, I should stress again, is not intelligence itself; it is a measure of Fontenelle’s mastery of dialogue in its polite form that he gives us no reason to conclude that the marquise is any less intelligent than the gentleman (and she often seems quite a bit more sensible). The issue is the socially and culturally acceptable