Tedra Osell, "Where Are the Women?: Pseudonymity and the Public Sphere, Then and Now<" (Page 2 of 4)
At the same time, popular publishing became a political arena. In the
seventeenth century, the lead up to the English Civil War had been
accompanied by an explosion in populist printing: there were two
pamphlets published in England in 1640, but 1,996 in 1642.[10]
Despite periodic censorship during the rest of the century, political
shifts to Commonwealth and then back to monarchy brought about, for the
first time, the sense of a politically aware reading public. When
Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, his authority was limited by
a Parliament newly aware of its own power. This power depended on public
opinion in ways that monarchy had not; members of Parliament were
elected, and suddenly formal political parties and public debate were an
integral part of government. Although the press were (and remain)
commonly subjected to criticism, the fact was that "the party system
required an active press."[11]
Newspapers, pamphlets, and
broadsides—the periodical ephemera of political news and
debate&mdashtherefore created an enduring association between publishing,
politics, and the public interest.
Thus, for the first time in history, early eighteenth-century England
had an established, permanent reading public. Urbanization and colonial
trade were giving rise to a growing middle class. People could purchase
inexpensive reading material, there were new coffeehouses where they
could pick up a paper or discuss what they read, they had enough
leisure to enjoy light reading and enough political and economic power
to feel compelled to keep up with foreign and domestic news. The modern
public sphere was founded on print publication.
To these new readers of the eighteenth century, the emergence of
modern print culture felt as revolutionary and innovative as the shift
to online publication and digital technology seems to us. Probably more
so: in the twenty-first century, the shift from paper to online
publication is primarily a shift in medium and access. But for
eighteenth-century readers, the entire concept of publication, reading,
and the public sphere were new inventions. Many of the arguments and
objections we now hear about the revolutionary nature of blogging—that
it shifts political power away from party elites to common people, that
it allows almost anyone a public voice, that the proliferation of
periodicals/blogs puts good writing on the same level with bad—were
made then. In 1711, John Gay complained of "whole Swarms of little . .
. Scriblers."[12]
In 2006, David Brooks—employing a metaphor
from Gay's era, no less—takes issue with "the land of the
Lilliputians."[13]
Each man represents the less established
writers to whom new publishing forms give voice as trivial, small,
irritating.
Brooks's criticism of bloggers is incidental to his criticism of Kos
(Markos Moulitsas Zúniga) as a new "Kingpin" of "self-importance." In
contrast, Gay dismisses the "swarms of scribblers" specifically in
order to praise Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's new essay
periodical, The Spectator. But both rely on an implicit contrast
between named writers (Zúniga, Steele and Addison) and the anonymous
horde; the implication is that anonymity or obscurity signifies
deficiency.
There's an important difference between Brooks's focus and Gay's,
though. Brooks is speaking of political blogs specifically, while Gay
refers to essay periodicals, a genre that explicitly disassociated
itself from party politics. The first of the type, Steele's
Tatler, began by satirizing "politic persons, who are so public
spirited as to neglect their own affairs to look into transactions of
State" and ended with an apology for "the least excusable Part of all
this Work . . . That I have, in some Places in it, touched upon Matters
which concern both the Church and State," i.e., "Politicks."[14]
In fact, Steele's Tatler was pseudonymously published by "Isaac
Bickerstaff," rather than Steele himself, in order to allow him to
publish opinions at a remove from his official position as the editor
of the government-approved Guardian. Throughout the eighteenth
century, essay periodicals lifted themselves above newspapers by
claiming a literary status that transcended the merely political and
ephemeral; in the twenty-first century, blogs are widely perceived as
less reliable or important than newspapers and magazines. (The latter,
as it happens, are considered by historians of journalism as the direct
descendants of essay periodicals.)
But these two genres—essay periodicals and blogs—do share some
important and characteristic formal features. Blogs encourage and
publish readers' comments, while essay periodicals, unlike their newspaper
contemporaries, solicited and published readers' letters. Both forms also
offer, not an official authoritative voice, but an informal and personal
one. These attributes are crucially important to arguments that blogs or
essay periodicals are inherently democratizing. They lie behind
Jürgen Habermas' declaration that it was essay periodicals specifically
that "transposed 'public spirit'" into the spirit of the
age.[15]
Pseudonymity, or the potential for pseudonymity, underpins both the
author/reader dialogue and personal voices that characterize these two
genres. Authors and readers of blogs and essay periodicals use
pseudonyms as a matter of course. Pseudonymous authorship allowed
periodical essayists to blend personal voices with public commentary.
To those familiar with eighteenth-century precedents, this is one of the
most striking resemblances between periodical essays and today's blogs.
A pseudonymous persona draws attention to the problem of authorship; the
absence of a "real" name
draws attention to the fact that the text is written by a real, absent
person. Hence a pseudonym prevents a text from being impersonal, from
pretending to objectivity. At the same time though, by hiding an
author's real name, a pseudonym makes a text more fully public. To the
eighteenth century, hiding an author's status and political connections
placed more weight on readers' judgment of the text itself, without
regard to their opinions of the author. For twenty-first century
readers, the claim is that "on the internet, no one knows you're a
dog," as the cartoon puts it.[16]
Which brings us to the particular problem of gender. It's widely
perceived that women bloggers are far more likely to be
anonymous.[17]
Similarly, the essay periodical canon is
traditionally male; it's been argued that the genre created national
consensus by creating a typical figure—male, white, and propertied—who
represented an imagined national average.[18]
Indeed, critics of
Habermas's idea of the public sphere have pointed out that his idea of
its inclusiveness is deeply flawed in that the public sphere has long
excluded women along with ethnic minorities, the uneducated, and other
disenfranchised people.[19]
But this argument, like the belief that women don't blog and didn't
write essay periodicals, relies in part on a form of erasure. My
research in eighteenth-century essay periodicals has convinced me that
the genre was, in fact, more democratic, more truly public, than either
Habermas' critics or the traditional canon have recognized. In fact, by
rejecting overly political content, essay periodicals feminized
themselves: Bickerstaff claims to have named his paper The Tatler
"in honour of the fair sex,"[20]
and Gay praises Steele for
rescuing wit "out of the hands of Pedants" and making it "a most welcome
guest at Tea-tables."[21]
The Tatler's most successful
rival was The Female Tatler. There were also The Young
Lady, Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator, Frances Brooke's
Old Maid—all successful, long-lived titles— as well as many other
papers which had the shorter runs that were typical of most essay
periodicals.
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