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The Bluestockings and Virtue Friendship
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Journal Article
The Bluestockings and Virtue Friendship
2018
Overview
Drawing on the example of two friendships of Elizabeth Montagu, this essay argues that \"virtue friendship\" was the standard against which eighteenth-century men and women, especially the Bluestockings, measured their personal relationships. Deborah Heller argues that this virtue-based, rational ideal of friendship ultimately derived from Aristotle and his treatises on ethics. Feeling and affect are indeed essential components of this virtuebased model of friendship, but they need to be directed toward what is truly lovable, the friend's moral goodness. Although we see tokens of \"love\" language in Montagu's correspondence, they represent claims of sincerity and truthfulness toward the other person that must be redeemed over time. The only way of redeeming these claims is through continuous communication and mutuality. Heller argues, finally, that the intersubjective structure of virtue friendship had important social consequences as well—through its very pragmatics of subjective truthfulness and sincerity.
