ABSTRACT
In 1770 Samuel Johnson observed that the “violence and ill effects” of the “passion of love” had been exaggerated, “for who knows any real sufferings on that head more than from the exorbitancy of any other passion?”1 But when a lady derided the amatory novels of the day, Johnson protested that “we must not ridicule” a “passion which has caused the change of empires and the loss of worlds-a passion which has inspired heroism and subdued avarice.”2 Even for so rigorous a moralist and literary critic, amatory fiction still had the power to evoke aristocratic themes and heroic achievements. In spite of its extravagance, such fiction could summon up an ethos of honor and duty that continued to resonate powerfully. Challenging that nostalgic aristocratic ethos, increasingly, was the value put upon those bourgeois norms that cut across social orders and ranks, a development that the philosopher Charles Taylor has called the exaltation of “ordinary life,” whereby the “life of production and reproduction, of work and the family” took over from the warrior ethic or the life of Platonic contemplation as the highest form of existence.3 In antiquity, what Taylor identifies as “ordinary life” was “infrastructural,” the necessary and sustaining background to a life of heroism or citizenship or contemplation. About me time of the Reformation, says Taylor, for Christianity the significant life occurred in marriage and in one’s calling. “The previous ‘higher’ forms of life were dethroned, as it were. And along with this went frequently an attack, covert or overt, on the elites which had made these forms their province.”4
