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...beliefs that replaced an older one. As James Bono claims, "scientific language, rather than simply monolithic and stable, is itself complex, self-contesting, and a source alternately of temporary discursive stability and of a tensely unstable, complexly negotiated exchange." (1) Seventeenth-century natural philosophers themselves were well aware of the importance of language to the epistemological challenges they faced, and they often played out political, theological, and philosophical disputes in the arena of language. The centrality of linguistic concerns to seventeenth-century natural philosophers is evident from many of the texts authored by Royal Society writers, including Sprat, Glanvill, and Wilkins. (2) One manifestation of such concerns is the efforts early Royal Society members expended to create universal language schemes. These artificial language schemes were intended to offer a solution to the "linguistic crisis" of the seventeenth century by facilitating commerce and knowledge transmission with universal, standardized linguistic symbols.
The most extensive of these language schemes, benefiting from contributions by many Royal Society members, was John Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668). (3) Wilkins's language scheme, nearly 500 pages long in its entirety, took up much of his later life and involved considerable help from other Royal Society members. (4) Though the premise and the execution of the project--to create an empirically based language using symbols that show a rational relationship between the sign and what it signifies--seem absurd to us today, Wilkins's seriousness of intent cannot be doubted. (5) The language project allows us to gain insight into ideological and linguistic assumptions that underlie early modern natural philosophy.
Wilkins's Essay proposes both a universal character (or set of iconic symbols), i.e., a language that can be universally understood, and a philosophical language, or a language whose symbols reflect the essence of what they represent. The Essay consists of a Prolegomenon, explaining his purpose and views on language, then the universal philosophy, comprising lists of tables showing relations between categories of words describing both natural and man-made objects. (6) After classifying all the things and ideas he considered worthy of representation in his new language, he then presents the philosophical grammar, and finally the real character, or symbols, he proposes instead of a phonetic alphabet. (7) The universal philosophy, the most substantial part of the Essay, is a series of tables that catalogue words and concepts according to their relations to each other. The tables were meant to be empirical; that is, they were intended to show actual relationships that could be observed in the natural world, and in some ways, these tables are the precursors to modern biological taxonomies. (8) The tables were crucial to his purpose because the relationship among all objects and abstract notions had to be established before Wilkins could create a language capable of representing those relationships.
Wilkins's philosophical language, through the introductory material and the tables, constructs an idealized speaking subject who is wholly rational and able to engage the natural world to create knowledge without the distractions posed by language. That speaking subject, though seemingly neutral and ungendered, even disembodied, is in fact constructed as masculine. I suggest that Wilkins uses four separate, though closely related, mechanisms through which he constructs this masculine speaking subject. First, the prefatory material and the philosophical language construct language itself as fallen, feminized, and a source of temptation. Second, and closely related to the first, Wilkins constructs a specific type of masculinity by denigrating undesirable characteristics, such as fashion, ornament, or excessive sensuality, through associating them with femininity or suggesting that they feminize men who indulge in them. Third, the focus of the philosophical language is on public discourse, the open marketplace of ideas, rather than the personal subjective space of emotions; emotions and subjective interpretation are disallowed in the masculine public sphere. (9) And finally, Wilkins's language, in the tables of the universal philosophy, constructs women as irrational, incapable of transcending their bodies and emotions. Although Wilkins most likely did not intend to silence women or to suggest that they would be incapable of speaking his language, the subject position that he constructs privileges rationality and public discourse, and in conjunction with the denial of rationality to women, the end result is that women are silenced and excluded from his language by being denied access to the subject position the language creates. By virtue of the subject's seeming neutrality, it claims universality and thus disguises its gendered nature. (10)
Studies of the ideologies structuring natural philosophical discourse in the seventeenth century have contextualized Wilkins's project within the complex cultural dynamics of the Restoration and early modern natural philosophy. Since Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump laid the groundwork for rhetorical and cultural studies of seventeenth-century science, the ideological, theological, and cultural bases for the linguistic assumptions of natural philosophers have been subject to analysis by scholars of literature, rhetoric, and natural philosophy. (11) Desiree Hellegers, for instance, traces views of language and gender throughout the Restoration in poetry and science, although her treatment of Wilkins's language project is brief. In the post-revolutionary contingent culture of the Restoration, she argues, Wilkins sought to ensure social order by silencing the discursive possibilities of language, unlike Milton and Donne, who embraced those possibilities. (12) Robert Stillman, Robert Markley, and Richard Kroll, through more detailed analyses of the Essay, reveal Wilkins's ideological concerns with representation, natural philosophy, and social order. (13) Markley claims that language projects such as Wilkins's were motivated "by the desire to create an authoritative semiotics that will suppress dialogical contention and promote sociopolitical stability." (14) Stillman agrees, saying Wilkins intended his language to be "a philosophical linguistics founded upon 'common assent' about universal principles of reason, leveled against the nefarious consequences of general custom." (15) Those analyses, paired with feminist critiques of science, lay the groundwork for this study of the gendered dynamics of Wilkins's project.
CORRUPTION AND THE MOTHER TONGUE: MECHANISMS OF RESISTANCE TO THE TEMPTATIONS OF FEMINIZED LANGUAGE
Wilkins's view of language as feminized and in need of discipline is not overt; rather, it occurs through his depictions of the proliferation and corruption of words as a source of pleasure and temptation. His denigration and disciplining of natural language parallels the treatment of nature by early modern natural philosophers. The natural world, as Carolyn Merchant and Evelyn Fox Keller show, was often figured as a disorderly and potentially seductive female in need of discipline. (16) Seventeenth-century natural philosophers were concerned with the theological implications of studying a nature that was fallen and corrupt, and justified their studies of "the Book of Nature" in ways that would not threaten a theology that privileged God's wisdom in the Book of Scripture over experiential wisdom gained in the corrupt and fallen world. (17) Hellegers, like Markley, analyzes the ways that Royal Society natural philosophers were troubled by conflicting views of nature as being on the one hand the expression of divine order and on the other as feminized, disorderly, and in need of the discipline of the masculine experimentalist. (18) Hellegers connects seventeenth-century views of the disorderly, fallen nature with notions that language was similarly fallen, disordered, and in need of discipline, arguing that to Bacon, both language and nature were often feminized. (19) It was Wilkins, however, who saw language's disorderly state as so threatening that he undertook the task of disciplining it. If Wilkins's language is a masculinist attempt to impose order on a feminized nature, as Markley suggests, it is also an attempt to impose order on the temptations posed by language. (20) Wilkins in his prefatory remarks depicts language as furthering its own sinful state through the pleasures it offers. Language threatens to degrade its corrupt state by tempting men to pursue elegance and beauty in speech or writing, rather than pursuing true knowledge. His artificial language offers a remedy by creating a speaking subject who is masculinized through his ability to resist the temptations offered by natural language.
Wilkins's concern with the sources of linguistic corruption is evident from the chapter he devotes to this topic in the introductory section of the Essay. Throughout his prefatory remarks and in the discussion of the imperfection of words, he devotes considerable energy to outlining the various influences that individual desires exert on language, and these influences are figured as temptations to be resisted. These desires include self-interest, such as the use of fashionable court terms to further one's court ambitions, and also pleasure, such as the sensual appeals of elegant-sounding phrases. Language itself presents a temptation; in its unruly, promiscuous, natural state, it...
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