Malebranche, Taste, and Sensibility: The Origins of Sensitive Taste and a Reconsideration of Cartesianism's Feminist Potential

The difference which one remarks in the man and the woman, comes not only from education, but also from their nature. The fibers of the woman are ordinarily more slender, which makes the senses more fine, and the interior sentiment more delicate.This natural disposition makes them prefer perceptible objects to metaphysical realities, amiable qualities to essential qualities, the brilliant to the solid, luxury and ostentation to cleanliness and commodity.It's also what makes them sensitive to piety, inconstant and light, and often capricious. The trace which objects leave there not being profound enough, it is easily effaced by a new impression: in such a way that in their minds the present object often sweeps away that which is absent.2Thus observed the literary compiler Didier Pierre Chicaneau de Neuville in 1751, in a then typically physiological explanation for women's mental processes and superficial taste. Slender nervous fibers meant extreme susceptibility to sensory stimulation and a delicate lightness of impression, "easily effaced," and scientized women's well known love of novelty and fashion and inability to concentrate and pursue "those sciences which derive from the rivalry between reasonings and sustained judgments," as the Vitalist physician Antoine Le Camus put it two years later. Le Camus's explanation for women's "particular finesse d'esprit and delicacy" was identical to Neuville's: "This singular and distinctive genius of women obliges us to have recourse to a more special cause than climates, education, the regime of life and the temperaments; it is the primordial conformation. The fibers of feminine bodies are much more weak and of a much more slack tissue than those of men. Thus the fibers of the brain being delicate, they will cause by their vibrations a certain delicacy in the impressions, delicacy that will be remarked in everything."3Neuville and Le Camus typify a mid-century French presumption that women's mental judgments, characteristics, and predilections were due to an extraordinarily sensitive and reactive female nervous system, and express a contemporaneous interpretive trend that explicitly repudiated any notion that women's intellectual abilities or aesthetic preferences could be adequately explained by history, culture or education. Instead, such interpreters fixated on the scientized explanation that the sexed body was determinative of a timeless, unchangeable sexed mind, transparently revealed in its (contemporary) cultural trivialities and tastes. The physiological claims they favored had, by the 1760s, so deeply "naturalized [the] female intellect" that it was simply common sense for Rousseau to state, "the only thing we know with certainty is that everything man and woman have in common belongs to the species, and that everything which distinguishes them" (which was almost everything, for Rousseau), "belongs to the sex." In Emile, the assumption that a woman's tastes refiected her natural constitution and destination - pleasing men - was foundational.4 While contemporary French or Parisian manifestations of this femininity were frequently criticized as excessive and false, by Rousseau among others, they were, by this point, seen as no more than cultural variations on what had become polarized and biologically determined sexed behaviors. That these essentialized activities and tastes were causing the degeneration of French taste and cultural productions which Rousseau and other critics were witnessing, was, they thought, due to women's present ill-advised social predominance and inUuence, which in earlier centuries or other societies were kept in better check and certainly had less in the way of urban and market opportunity. Female nature, however, had, for most observers, become a biological constant by mid-century, whatever historical manifestations it might express in particular cultures, urban or rural settings, and eras, depending on whether correctly channeled, overly repressed, or - always a bad idea allowed to run wild. …