72 The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century Englandanomalous, unstable categories, irresistibly attracted by their unintelligibility, their lack of a ed juridical status.70 They represent the polarities in the spectrum of femininity: with no man, or with too many men. In Moll Flanders and Roxana fornication plays havoc with legal deitions. Wives live as mistresses, mistresses masquerade as legitimate wives, there are multiple partners, marital and extramarital. In the Modest Defence Mandeville explains how every woman, of any type or condition, is at risk of succumbing to sexual temptation. Both Mandeville and Defoe, in his pamphlet Some Considerations upon Street-Walkers (1726), call for legislative intervention to forestall the universalization of prostitution. Women susceptibility to the passions, their nature as chaotic versions of men, ultimately threatens the heterosexual matrix, the family unit and social order itself. But all of this can be understood, and a cure prescribed, within Mandeville utilitarian schema. The disruptive supplement is the eunuch, who introduces the difference between sexed and sexless bodies. The only time that Mandeville spokesman Cleomenes demurs at the justiation of luxury is on the subject of opera castrati: no amount of pleasure can balance the estroying of Manhood�(FB, II, 104).71 In the 1720s the case for commerce and luxury as a beneial force relates to the world of men alone. Mandeville had anticipated this development with his narrative of the happy capitalist aborio�in the Female Tatler, a merchant who can d no pleasure greater than continuing to drudge in a counting-house well into his old age, while seeing the greater share of his pros converted into luxuries by his extravagant nephew: the symbiotic relation between gain and expenditure is the basis of a prosperous national economy.72 In Fable of the Bees Part I, the civilizing process takes place through ttery and the threat of violence rather than through love and admiration of women. This part presents what has been called a onspiratorial�view of the connection between private vice and public benes. It is through the agency of a great man, an expertly manipulative politician, that the people are led by their selh desires to contribute to the public weal. Mandeville here leaves in place one of the key features of the Machiavellian paradigm: the omniscient legislator.73 In Fable of the Bees Part II (1729), there is a paradigm shift towards an evolutionary theory of the conversion of the passions into prosperity.74 This volume takes the form of a series of dialogues between two gentlemen of leisure, the Mandevillian Cleomenes and Horatio, a disciple of Shaftesbury. The very name leomenes�is a taunt: Cleomenes was the legendary king who attempted to restore Sparta to its ancient purity by restricting private wealth. His eighteenth-century namesake is intent on explaining the naturalness and inevitability of the development towards afence and material security. He dispenses with moral justiation, and there is no hint of a comparable spiritual evolution. Although a avage
