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Breeches of Decorum: The Figure of a Barbarian in Montaigne and Addison

This essay proceeds from the suggestion that Joseph Addison alludes to Michel de Montaigne's "Des Cannibales" in Spectator 50, when Mr. Spectator relates the visit to London of "four Indian kings." Addison adapts Montaigne's playful allegory of barbarism and civilization in service of his own project of constructing a discursive model of civic society, ultimately consigning Montaigne himself to the category of the barbaric in order to re-establish the distinction, which the "lively old Gascon" has mischievously undermined with the jest about breeches that concludes his essay. Montaigne implies that if civilization is reducible to its signs, then the civilized, decorous body that breeches signify is civilized precisely because the breeches displace— replace as well as conceal—it, and what breeches conceal may equally be the body of a barbarian. Indeed, the naked body must, according to the categorical limits established here, be barbaric. Breeches therefore are not just the sign of civilized decorum, they are its very substance. Addison's solution is to restabilize, by rhetorical means, the constitutive oppositions that Montaigne's breeches jest undoes. The figural logic that underpins the clothing tropes is metonymic in the first instance; breeches are associated with civilization and with masculinity. In Lockean linguistics the relationship between words and ideas/things is always metonymic contiguity. The relation between civilized man and barbarian, on the other hand, is comparative and hence metaphoric. In spite of his strenuously avowed mistrust of language that takes on the autonomous qualities of ideas or things, Addison is willing to locate what Locke calls "natural correspondence and connection" in relationships that are primarily and essentially metaphoric; constitutive oppositions that establish necessary difference rather than resemblance, but are nonetheless metaphoric in the first instance.