The domestication of politeness, 1711--1784.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A genteel discourse for the refinement of conduct and conversation in the salon and the sociable club, politeness met with widespread resistance in its transformation from an essentially gentlemanly category to a widely available mode of self-cultivation. Studies of the pastoral and the sentimental narrative have suggested that politeness, in its artifice and formality, provided an extraordinarily productive counter-model for new formulations of authenticity and intimacy in the second half of the century. However, my examination of polite letters in the first half of the century frustrated this dichotomy, because it led me to the surprising discovery of these same oppositions within polite discourse.
My first three chapters trace the different manners in which Shaftesbury, Addison, Steele, and Benjamin Franklin conceive of polite discourse as the movement between social convention and naturalness or spontaneity. It is in drawing on Shaftesbury's innovative account of this movement, I demonstrate, that Addison and Steele attempt to transform politeness from a tacitly unitary aristocratic ideal to a language for establishing harmonious consensus in civil society. The dynamic opposition I describe within polite discourse is especially useful in addressing the writings of Franklin, who is seen alternately as either purely conventional (artificial, instrumental, and duplicitous) or as utterly natural (simple, sincere, and integral). Artifice and sincerity serve Franklin as mutually productive anti-norms, I argue, through which he evades both the constraint of customary, authoritarian relations and the arbitrariness of post-traditional sociability.
The insights of the first half of the dissertation led me to question conceptions of literary sentimentalism as discontinuous with polite discourse—above all, in formulations of domestic intimacy as the domain in which the artifice and convention of politeness have no place. In Smollett's <italic>Humphry Clinker</italic>, Rousseau's <italic>La Nouvelle Héloïse</italic>, and Crévecoeur's <italic>Letters from an American Farmer</italic>, I discover continuities with the demotion of convention that I describe in the polite letters of the first half of the century. By incorporating polite norms for spontaneity into the domestic sphere, however, these texts construe politeness, by opposition, as mere convention.