Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 9781442674394

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Mary Robinson (1758-1800)
1. Engendering a Female Subject: Mary Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self
2. Questioning Nature's Mould: Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham
3. Fathers as Monsters of Deceit: Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend
4. Recasting Exquisite Sensibility: Robinson's The Natural Daughter
Part II: Jane West (1758-1852)
5. Abjection and the Necessity of the Other: West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story
6. Politicizing the Domestic: The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times
7. Displaying Hysterical Bodies: Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father
Part III: Amelia Opie (1769-1853)
8. Re-scripting the Tale of the Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter
9. The Curtain between the Heart and Maternal Affection: Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray
10. Not a Simple Moral Tale: Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper
Afterword
Notes
Index

Citation preview

EMPOWERING THE FEMININE: THE NARRATIVES OF MARY ROBINSON, JANE WEST, AND AMELIA OPIE, 1796-1812

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ELEANOR TY

Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 19 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4362-3

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ty, Eleanor Rose, 1958Empowering the feminine : the narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4362-3

1. Robinson, Mary, 1758—1800 — Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. West, Jane, 1758-1852 - Criticism, interpretation, etc. 3. Opie, Amelia Alderson, 1769-1853- Criticism, interpretation, etc. 4. English fiction - Women authors - History and criticism. 5. Feminist fiction, English - History and criticism. 6. English fiction - 18th century - History and criticism. 7. English fiction - 19th century - History and criticism. 8. Women in literature. 9. Feminism in literature. I. Title. PR868.W6T92 1998 823'.7099287 098-931826-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

PREFACE

Vll

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

xi

3

Part I: Mary Robinson (1758-1800)

21

1 Engendering a Female Subject: Mary Robinson's (Re) Presentations of the Self 23 2 Questioning Nature's Mould: Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 42 3 Fathers as Monsters of Deceit: Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 57 4 Recasting Exquisite Sensibility: Robinson's The Natural Daughter 72 Part II: Jane West (1758-1852)

85

5 Abjection and the Necessity of the Other: West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story 87 6 Politicizing the Domestic: The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 101 7 Displaying Hysterical Bodies: Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father

116

Part III: Amelia Opie (1769-1853) 131 8 Re-scripting the Tale of the Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter 133

vi Contents 9 The Curtain between the Heart and Maternal Affection: Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 145 10 Not a Simple Moral Tale: Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie' s Temper 161 Afterword NOTES

185

INDEX

219

178

Preface

This book examines selected narratives by three female writers who lived in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In linking together Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, I hope to show the ways in which three women, though of different ideological and social backgrounds, attempted to negotiate with the period's prevailing notions of gender, identity, and female selfhood. Robinson, West, and Opie each explored the various ways women could empower themselves and be empowered without necessarily breaking with cultural definitions of the feminine. Writing in the particularly turbulent years after the French Revolution and after the radical feminist ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, these authors were conscious of the political and cultural implications of their works. They understood that novels, for instance, could not only influence and shape a young female reader's thinking about marriage, motherhood, and family relations, but that books could also help define an individual's position in society and outline the way one's subjectivity was constituted. They were aware of the connections between the home and the political arena, and often sought to redefine the terms in the domestic realm in order to show a range of possibilities for both women and men in the private and public sphere. My readings are based on close analysis of the texts themselves, though I have attempted as much as possible to situate the works in their historical, literary, and social milieu. In some cases, I have linked the narratives to biographical information about the author where this is available; in others, I have made references to specific books to which the novelist was reacting. For example, William Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political fustice was an influential text for these women, whether regarded positively or

viii Preface negatively. My discussion has also been informed by poststructuralist and feminist theories about the construction and the formation of the subject. Following the theories principally of Lacan and Foucault, feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler have proposed theories of language and subjectivity that are useful for understanding the way women are represented and constituted. Assumptions about the female sex and sexuality in the late eighteenth century, as in the twentieth century, interpret what is 'natural' and proper behaviour for women. Female identity then, and to a lesser extent, today is bound in many ways to social institutions and customs such as those of courtship, marriage, and domesticity. In the novels by Robinson, West, and Opie, these issues, as well as those involving female chastity, maternity, and motherhood, figure prominently as they were contentious and in the process of being reconfigured. In discussions about motherhood, I have used Adrienne Rich's influential Of Woman Born, which is based on a woman's experience, observations, and reflections as a mother. Though the conditions of our lives in the twentieth century are different from those of women in the late Enlightenment and Romantic period, a number of the same premises and problems occur. We are still shaped by many of the Western cultural myths and patriarchal paradigms that were pervasive some two hundred years ago despite our great sense of technical progress. Since feminist critics are not in agreement about the value of psychoanalytic theories of development as a critical practice and as a means of promoting social change, it is necessary to say a few words about this approach at the outset. One of the problems often raised by those who are sceptical of psychoanalytical theories is that of transhistoricity. Is it possible to speak, for instance, of female desire, when social and cultural conditions are so different for the twentieth-century and for the late eighteenth-century woman? This problem is linked to the larger question of how and where to locate femininity, as Teresa Brennan points out. On this issue, psychoanalytic theorists and sociologists agree that femininity is not innate or essential to women - 'masculine' and 'feminine' identity are not fixed by biology. But they differ as to how most women become feminine subjects. In her useful and intelligent essay 'An Impasse in Psychoanalysis and Feminism,' Brennan elucidates the difference between 'psychoanalytic theory of psychical sexuality and the socio-historical concerns of feminism.'1 She argues that psychoanalysis cannot make a sociological distinction between 'an innate sex and a socially defined masculinity or femininity' because 'psychical sexuality has certain structural transhistorical determinants, buat... it is also, necessarily, a socio-historical prod-

Preface ix uct.'2 In other words, as long as women and men assume their subjectivity through language that is gendered, then issues of identity, sexuality, and power remain problematic regardless of historical conditions. What does change are the particulars of the fantasy or desire, which vary depending on the society and age in which one lives. Let me briefly explain this argument. We remember that in Lacan's theory, the small being becomes human when it is placed in language, when it accepts the symbolic dimension that divides the mind into the conscious and the unconscious, the male and female. In becoming a sexed subject, and in order to think thoughts from the standpoint of 'I,' one necessarily has to repress some ideas while selecting others through an acceptance of the phallus as the marker of difference. With this acceptance, the being becomes the distinct, separate individual who is able to speak and express meaning. What is expressed through speech, however, is very limited. It is only what one is able to demand through language. The subject cannot express all that underlies the demand, and that which is left unarticulated is desire.3 Psychoanalysts argue that this desire is often for oneness, for the state of being not separated, and for the qualities of the other, which the subject had to repress in order to be separate. The force of desire, the force of fantasy varies because of individual or social historical contigencies, and this is why sexual identity or the social division of labour changes. The theory accounts for why many women experience conflict between 'feminist reason and sexist desire.' As Brennan notes, 'fantasies which are psychically derived are projected into social relations; and thus have their own ideational impact ... psychoanalysis is a theory of ... how fantasies go out over there.'4 When I speak of empowering the 'feminine' in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the feminine to which I refer is a subject who, like women in the twentieth century, has been psychically defined as the subject lacking the phallus, but who, unlike women today, is deprived of legal existence after marriage, who could not hold public office, and whose primary role in life was to be a wife and mother.5 While the specificities of woman's desire or fantasy might be different because of differing ideological expectations of woman over the past two hundred years, I contend that what most women want is still what they do not have. To a great extent, this consists of the power and accompanying privileges that are conferred to the other, the male subject. Robinson, West, and Opie articulate some of these desires in their works. But more importantly, they invest the feminine subject with dignity by redefining the roles women play in society, by highlighting her capabilities both within and outside of

x Preface the home, and by questioning the inevitability of oppressive patriarchal institutions. This book is not a historical survey of women writers of the period. In some ways, it is a continuation of my first monograph, which dealt with five revolutionary women novelists of the 1790s. The present work does not deal directly with writers who were openly echoing the philosophies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, but with some who were, nevertheless, responding to the issues raised by the radicals of that time. My aim, as in the recent work of Claudia Johnson, Anne Mellor, Nicola Watson, Gary Kelly, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, and others, is to broaden the discussion of the women writers of that period in general, and to situate the postrevolutionary debates about women in the works of writers of diverse ideological perspectives.

Acknowledgments

For their invigorating and lively conversation, help, encouragement, and sagesse, I am indebted to Peter Sabor, Claire Grogan, Lisa Vargo, April London, Paul Bleton, Syndy Conger, Roxanne Eberle, Anne Mellor, and Patricia Elliot. The writing of this book would not have been possible without a Major Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University gave me financial support and awarded me the Grace Anderson Fellowship in 1996, which gave me a term off to complete the manuscript. I have used printed materials and manuscript resources at the British Library, and the Bodleian, University of Toronto, and McMaster University libraries. I am grateful to these institutions and their efficient librarians and staff. Parts of this book have appeared in print before. A slightly different version of chapter 1 was published in English Studies in Canada 21.4 (December 1995); portions of chapter 3 appeared in Lumen 14 (1995). Chapter 5 was included in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 1 (ed. Kevin Cope). I owe much to my colleagues and students at Wilfrid Laurier University for making daily life such a pleasure. Finally, my thanks are due to my family, especially my mother, and the loving and dependable team at home - David Hunter, Jason, and Jeremy, who made his appearance in 1997.

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EMPOWERING THE FEMININE: THE NARRATIVES OF MARY ROBINSON, JANE WEST, AND AMELIA OPIE, 1796-1812

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Introduction

The Turbulent Legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1796-1812 It will be readily conceded by every person who has perused Mrs. Godwin's writings with attention and candour, that she was not only possessed of great genius, which directed her to original habits of thinking, but has also an undaunted and masculine spirit, which encouraged her to declare her thoughts without reserve. Her sentiments, however, in some important respects, are too much at variance with those which have been generally adopted; and, although we may probably be ranked with the votaries of the old system, whose dark minds the rays of new philosophy have never been able to penetrate, we are not afraid to express our opinion that the doctrines upon which she has principally insisted are unfriendly to human happiness, and, if practically followed, would injure the sex they were intended to vindicate and protect. The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature (Jan.-April 1798)

It is well known, that both Mrs. Wollstonecraft and her biographer spent much of their time in labouring to eradicate from the minds of their readers all respect for establishments deemed venerable for their antiquity, and to inspire them with enthusiastic admiration of daring and untried theories in morals, in politics, and in religion. The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review (Sept. 1798)

Such was the catastrophe of a female philosopher of the new order; such the events of her life; and such the apology for her conduct. It will be read with disgust

4

Empowering the Feminine

by every female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by every one attached to the interests of religion and morality; and with indignation by any one who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion. Licentious as the times are, we trust it will obtain no imitators of the heroine in this country. It may act, however, as a warning to those who fancy themselves at liberty to dispense with the laws of propriety and decency, and who suppose the possession of perverted talents will atone for deviations from rules long established for the well-government of society, and the happiness of mankind. The European Magazine and London Review (April 1798)

Blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands, if they were forced to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr. Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world. The extreme excentricity of Mr. G.'s sentiments will account for this conduct. Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance of his own. He neither looks to marriage with respect, nor to suicide with horror. The Monthly Review (Sept.-Dec. 1798) These reviews ofMemoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'

by William Godwin, all published shortly after the book came out in 1798, express in terms that range from mild shock to disgust, the sense of outrage at Godwin's frank disclosure of the unorthodox life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Reviews from the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine to the Analytical Review, which was sympathetic to Jacobin philosophy, varied in tone, but were in agreement as to which aspects of Wollstonecraft's life aroused the most controversy. It was Godwin's even-handed attitude as much as Wollstonecraft's eccentric actions that provoked their offence and reaction. As one reviewer summed it up: 'He relates with complacency of Mary Wollstonecraft, afterward his wife, that she cultivated a platonic affection for Mr. Fuseli the painter: - that she cohabited with Mr. Imlay as his wife, took his name, and had a child by him, without being married; and that she even lived with Mr. G. himself, and was pregnant by him; and that it was only her pregnancy which induced them to think of marriage; fearing that, otherwise, she might be excluded from society. He gravely records, also ... her attempt to drown herself in the Thames, in consequence of the ill-treatment which she experienced from Mr. Imlay.'1

Introduction

5

Despite Wollstonecraft's extraordinary talents and her attempts to improve the lives of women, by the end of the eighteenth century, what readers and critics had to contend with was not only her intellectual achievements, but also her scandalous life. Indeed, until the relatively recent interest in feminism, in women's history, and in women's writing, there were more books published about Wollstonecraft's life than there were studies of her works.2 For Clarissa Campbell Orr, Wollstonecraft's contribution to the perception of women in history was significant and extended through the nineteenth century: 'Whether or not women in the nineteenth century actively acknowledged or repudiated a link with Wollstonecraft, her views on women could not be completely obliterated. Wollstonecraft's assertion that women could be citizens - the most radical element in her ideal of rational womanhood - permanently changed the conceptual landscape.'3 Yet the link of feminism with 'moral and political radicalism' made it 'harder for women wanting moderate improvement to identify themselves explicitly with women's rights.'4 With the publication of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), Wollstonecraft had established herself as leading promulgator of women's rights. Claudia Johnson notes that 'Wollstonecraft's primary concern ... is not to discuss women's condition per se, much less female sexuality ... Wollstonecraft's principal argument is that the establishment of a democratic republic depends on the extirpation of hereditary, patriarchal structures, which have systematically vitiated men's character and deformed women's along with it.'5 By the early 1790s then, the connection between gender and politics became evident. Following the example of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), writers who wished to

discuss women's role in the family were inevitably drawn to make comparisons between the domestic and the public sphere, between the legitimacy of fathers to rule the household and monarchs to rule the state.6 Women novelists from both sides of what Marilyn Butler termed 'the war of ideas,'7 made explicit or implicit references to fathers as either benevolent rulers or tyrants, either in support of the existing patriarchal structure or in order to critique its abuses. Novelists such as Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, among others, contributed to what Nancy Armstrong calls 'the ubiquity of middle-class power' by writing about their desire, and by seizing 'the authority to say what was female,'8 but more often than not, they also had a political agenda, an overt or covert response to the feminist controversy, or what Gary Kelly calls the 'revolutionary feminism' of the 1790s.9

6 Empowering the Feminine In this study, which is a continuation of my earlier work on women writers of the 1790s,10 I examine three women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on their works published between 1796 and 1812. These three women were prolific but very different sorts of writers who were influenced by Wollstonecraft: Mary Robinson (1758-1800), better known as the actress 'Perdita' who was mistress to the Prince of Wales (later George IV); Jane West (1758-1852), who wrote under the matronly pseudonym 'Prudentia Homespun'; and Amelia Opie (1769-1853), who associated with Godwin and his Jacobin circle in the early 1790s, but became a Quaker towards the end of her life. Robinson, West, and Opie all published in various genres: novels, books of poetry, tales, plays, tracts, and other short pieces. They were, in their own time, recognized literary figures who participated in contemporary debates raised by Wollstonecraft: about an individual's place in a changing society, the function of sensibility and sentiment, what virtue meant for a young woman, and a mother's importance in the home. Today, however, the novels of Robinson, West, and Opie have attracted relatively little attention from eighteenth-century and Romantic scholars. For the most part, the handful of essays to date tend to discuss the poetry and life of Robinson rather than her novels. Although West is often cited as a conservative novelist, there are only one or two published essays on her novels, while much of the criticism on Opie focuses on only one of her novels, Adeline Mowbray, which was based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Robinson, West, and Opie were women who did not espouse what we have now termed 'feminist' sentiments as readily or as consistently as writers like Wollstonecraft or Hays did in the decade following the French Revolution. What Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace has noted about their contemporary, More, applies to present-day attitudes to Robinson, West, and Opie: 'When we encounter what seems to be a strain of political conservatism in the works of writers such as Hannah More, it is only natural that we would gravitate instead toward the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft; it is far easier to identify with Wollstonecraft's revolutionary sympathies.'11 Jane West and, to a lesser extent, Amelia Opie and Mary Robinson were often involved in what Kowaleski-Wallace calls 'patriarchal complicity.'12 They accepted, though not without some questioning on Robinson's and Opie's part, the seductive position of woman as man's cherished companion and the preserver of domestic virtue. These writers were concerned with feminine ideals, with conduct-book definitions of female virtue, with what Ruth Yeazell calls 'fictions of modesty,' with being what Mary Poovey terms a

Introduction 7 'proper lady,' and with what Ellen Pollak describes as the 'myth of passive womanhood.'13 Yet they were, in their own ways, attempting to critique and reform the society they lived in. As Anne Mellor notes, 'Romantic women writers challenged the masculine "feminization of discourse" ... by unmasking- the oppression of women encoded within the eighteenthcentury bourgeois construction of femininity ... the "feminized" novel was in fact the site of a powerful struggle over the very construction of gender. '14 In the case of the three authors of this study, one way of challenging the accepted view of female inferiority was through a valorization of what they believed were the positive 'feminine' characteristics that women possessed. Rather than confronting the existing gender-biased structures in the way that Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays did, for the most part Robinson, West, and Opie sought to elevate women by what I have termed 'empowering the feminine.' In some instances, they rewrote the codes of masculinity and femininity; in others, they attempted to invest more dignity to those tasks that were customarily viewed as female ones; or else they questioned the way women were traditionally represented in literature, in religious and popular texts. Many of their concerns were the very same ones raised by Mary Wollstonecraft, but as one can see from the virulent reviews of the Memoirs, by the end of the decade it was important to frame arguments in such a way as not to offend the fastidious morals of the general public. Some of the criticisms in the reviews signalled the kinds of issues with which these writers were struggling. A number of the phrases used by them were key terms or catch phrases of the Jacobin and anti-Jacobin debates of the period and would be repeatedly evoked in the novels by Robinson, West, and Opie. For example, two of the reviews mention 'system,' 'new philosophy,' or 'female philosopher,' and imply that 'human happiness' or 'happiness' was the goal sought by Wollstonecraft's philosophies. These terms echo the language of Godwinian philosophy. In his influential Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), William Godwin stated that 'the true object' of his 'moral and political' disquisition was 'pleasure or happiness.' He was concerned with the way 'the individuals of the human species' may be 'made to contribute most substantially to the general improvement and happiness.'15 Both the Critical Review and the British Critic raised the question of the practicality of doctrines or theories, and criticized Wollstonecraft for admiring 'daring and untried theories.' In novels such as The Natural Daughter, The Infidel Father, and Adeline Mowbray,

Robinson, West, and Opie also illustrated the problem of theory and its practice. In particular, they demonstrated the difficulties of applying

8 Empowering the Feminine Godwin's system of philosophy to women's lives without qualification. In the passage above, the Critical Review notes Wollstonecraft's 'masculine spirit,' as she did not follow those rules of delicacy, propriety, and decency valued by society, according to the London Review. The very stable notion of what constituted male and female gender, then, was at stake in these debates about proper and improper conduct, about liberty versus the adherence to long-established rules. Though I have been discussing the three writers thus far as a group, there are distinct and crucial differences in the ways these authors, who happened to have lived around the same time, dealt with the difficulties of what twentieth-century poststructuralist theorists would call 'female subjectivity.'16 West tended to be much more conservative in her views of women than Robinson or Opie. In their works, however, all three demonstrated that the 'feminine,' though of utmost importance, was not a universal and permanent notion, but often a site of ideological contradictions. At one point Robinson remarks in her Condition of Women: 'If WOMAN be the weaker creature, her frailty should be the more readily forgiven. She is exposed by her personal attractions, to more perils, and yet she is not permitted to bear that shield, which man assumes; she is not allowed the exercise of courage to repulse the enemies of her fame and happiness.'17 Woman is both glorified for her delicacy, yet penalized for her weakness by not having means of protection from physical, social, and financial dangers. Because her writing is derived to a large extent from the literary tradition of the poetry of sensibility, weakness and strength, passion and reason, chastity and pleasure, feeling and thought are qualities that have 'ambiguous significance' in her works.18 In her later works Robinson examines many cultural assumptions about woman, including her supposed 'frailty,' and her limited intellectual abilities. Her novels often grapple with the vexed question of the essential feminine subject, or what constituted the female self. In her novel Walsingham she tantalizingly creates a cross-dresser, a heroine who successfully poses as a man in order to circumvent patrilinear laws and customs. By highlighting how fluid the boundaries are between masculinity and femininity, and how dependent these notions are upon costume, dress, and other forms of representation in her works, Robinson critiques cultural beliefs about the inherent or 'natural' qualities of women that other writers of the period took for granted.19 Jane West, whose A Gossip's Story was used by Jane Austen as a model for Sense and Sensibility, is much more adamant about the moral and religious duties of wives and husbands, the roles of mothers and fathers. Her novels,

Introduction

9

especially those published before 1810, are thinly disguised conduct books with obvious lessons.20 She speaks from the interesting position of what Lisa Wood calls a 'particular combination of anti-jacobinism, didacticism, and Anglican Evangelicalism.'21 Yet, she too can be said to be rewriting the script of the 'domestic woman' during what Gary Kelly calls the 'professional middle-class cultural revolution.'22 By using conventional notions of femininity such as chastity, sensitivity, piety, and restraint to create positive and strong female models, she was establishing for women their identity as active agents in the bourgeois social structure. Janet Todd notes that West used the spinster figure of Prudentia Homespun 'in opposition to the image of the sexually available Wollstonecraft - detached from the hurlyburly in which the heroines were enmeshed, advocating a marriage that should be endured but hinting that one might do worse than join the "fraternity" of old maids.'23 West believed that women provided the moral fabric of the home. She wrote a five-part poem that paid tribute to 'The Mother' (1810), in which she describes the 'arduous task' of British mothers who are 'exhorted to infuse a patriotic spirit into their sons, and to train their daughters in humility and benevolence.'24 Paradoxically, however, as Kowaleski-Wallace has noted of More, if women 'were allowed to assume an important social and political position as "maternal agents," their empowerment was ultimately limited by a discourse insisting upon persistent cultural stereotypes for female behaviour.' West's writings, like More's, participated in the double dimensions of 'empowerment and containment, agency and dispossession.'25 For Amelia Opie, empowering the feminine entailed a re-examination of the close ties between parent and child, and often involved a recasting of scripts for mothers, daughters, and 'fallen' or seduced women. At one level, Opie's novels are didactic, very much like her prose tales, which encapsulate in a relatively short space a powerful lesson about vanity, duty, honesty, or obedience. Yet at another level, her novels tend to be much more ambiguous and open to dialogical readings. One reason for this ambiguity is that though Opie was an 'ardent admirer of revolutionary principles' throughout the 1790s, as Roxanne Eberle notes, by the time Opie wrote her novels in the early 1800s, the conservative backlash against Wollstonecraft and her beliefs was so intense that Opie employed more oblique ways of exploring issues of femininity, identity, and freedom.26 One of the recurring motifs in Opie's works is the opposition between what she calls, in her Simple Tales, 'love and duty.'27 For many of her young heroines, romantic love and female desire frequently place the relationship between a daughter and her parent in jeopardy. More often than not,

10 Empowering the Feminine impulsive desires create a schism between the heroine and her parent that causes much suffering. The healing of this separation then takes up the bulk of the narrative. What is engrossing about these resolutions is the way prolonged and excessive penitence serves to highlight the inconsistencies in the discourses on sexuality and desire, and in the way virtuous and unvirtuous women were categorized by society. As one character in a tale remarks of a wrongdoer, 'Your crime was real and great, but so have been your virtues; and why should one crime be deemed heavy enough to outweigh many good actions?'28 Thus, while not challenging the necessity for suffering and punishment, Opie's narratives do question how moral judgments are made, how women are assessed by their community. In summary, without seeming to confront directly the subservient position of woman in late eighteenth-century society, Robinson, West, and Opie nevertheless resist facile prescriptions of female passivity and helplessness. My work explores the strategies used by these writers that empower the feminine, the maternal, and at the same time inevitably reinforce the limitations society prescribed for women. I argue that their narratives illustrate creative ways in which qualities such as delicacy, softness, and sensibility could become powerful tools for social change. In their own ways, these three writers were responding, whether positively or negatively, to the life and works of Mary Wollstonecraft. They, too, wished to reform society and they each advocated a better system of education for young ladies. As Mitzi Myers notes, 'in the nineties ... female educators of every stripe - from radicals like Catherine Macaulay Graham, Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Anne Frances Randall (who was probably Mary Robinson), to moderates like Clara Reeve, Maria Edgeworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Priscilla Wakefield, and Mary Ann Radcliffe, to religionists like Sarah Trimmer, More, and Jane West — vigorously attacked the deficiencies of fashionable training and values. In their different ways, they seek to endow woman's role with more competence, dignity, and consequence.'29 This book focuses on three writers of seemingly different ideological backgrounds who grapple with the questions raised by Wollstonecraft in the decade of the 1790s. As their experiences and intentions differed greatly, so too did their modes of writing. Though they were all writing novels, they used the conventions of the sentimental and Gothic novel, the moral tale, and didactic literature, and employed satire, the epistolary form, and the memoir to varying degrees. Some of their novels tend to be excessive in length and in tone, some rather digressive. They were, however, typical of the age in which they were writing. Many of the novels were widely read and went into several editions. More importantly, they succeeded in engaging their readers in the debates about the private and the

Introduction 11 political, about the relationship between women and men in the domestic and public spheres, about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour for women. The Fascination with Female Bodies, Female Suffering, and Fallen Women

At the beginning of the decade in which the women were writing, Edmund Burke's influential work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790),

employed the suffering female body in order to arouse his readers' sympathy for the monarchy. In his well-known, dramatic description of the events of 6 October 1789, Edmund Burke used the body of the 'almost naked' queen of France fleeing from 'a band of cruel ruffians and assassins' who entered the royal chamber and pierced her bed with 'an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards.'30 To make his point that the 'age of chivalry' was gone, he recreated with nostalgia and reverence the memory of the queen, who sixteen or seventeen years ago was the dauphiness at Versailles. For Burke, she was then 'glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy.'31 Claudia Johnson notes that 'throughout the 1790s, Edmund Burke's description of the lovely, once ecstatically venerated queen beset in her own bedroom by a gleefully violent band of ruffians bent on her rape and murder, followed by his elegy on the death of chivalry ... was the preeminent, publicly canvassed "tale of sorrow." '32 For her part, Mary Wollstonecraft recognized the excessively sentimental and elitist depiction of Burke. In response to Burke's passage about the king and queen being moved from their palace, she wrote:

A sentiment of this kind glanced across my mind when I read the following exclamation. 'Whilst the royal captives, who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women.' Probably you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables orfish,who never had had any advantages of education; or their vices might have lost part of their abominable deformity, by losing part of their grossness. The queen of France - the great and small vulgar, claim our pity; they have almost insuperable obstacles to surmount in their progress towards true dignity of character.33

Wollstonecraft's sarcastic response to Burke highlights the anomaly of his kind of chivalry. Women who are beautiful and splendid are to be wor-

12 Empowering the Feminine shipped, while the working poor and lower classes are to be feared because of their monstrosity. She understood that 'true dignity' was not to be garnered from such an unrealistic adoration or repulsion of women. Linda Zerilli says, 'Burke's recreation of the assault on the royal family at Versailles, which draws on a dark and repressed image of brute passions unconstrained by the civilizing conventions of chivalry and feminine beauty, figures woman as the site of chaos that is at once social and symbolic.'34 Here, women's bodies are the sites of the nation's struggle for power, and the representation of all that is glorious and abhorrent. Whether they agreed with Burke's interpretation of events or not, these women writers of the 1790s and early 1800s had his example to draw on or with which to argue. As in Burke's Reflections, their works also focused on the woman's body as a site of potential chaos. Like Burke, they used their narratives to manipulate their readers' sympathy for political and ideological purposes. Claudia Johnson has noted that the Reflections 'presents a vast and multifaceted series of events in France as a unitary family drama.'35 Similarly, in the novels by women of the time, the actions of the woman who does not fulfil her domestic or maternal duties, or those of the one who deviates from the paths of 'virtue' are shown to have dire, political, and public consequences. These characters are severely punished for their transgressions, and what becomes fascinating in the novels is the disparity between the act of disobedience and the length and harshness of the woman's period of atonement. Depending upon the attitude of the narrator, this penitence and suffering can be seen as either just punishment for the wrongdoer, or excessive retribution, thereby raising questions about the validity of the reproof. The period of what has now become known as Romanticism features a number of works that deal with the prison house of the body and of the material world. The best known is Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality.' In his book Gothic Bodies, Steven Bruhm argues that 'the major Romantic authors share with their Gothic cousins a fascination with physical pain, and much Romantic production concerns itself with the implications of physical pain on the transcendent consciousness.'36 This pain comes from awareness of local violence in England, of the revolutions in France and America, as well as physical pains that remind writers of the limitations of the body. Bruhm notes, for example, that for Ann Radcliffe and William Wordsworth 'the imagination itself is a site of spectacle, where the pained body is evoked to register the hero/poet's engagement in the sad music of humanity, the social violences of which the sensitive writer had become so aware.'37 He links this Romantic tendency to depict pain to

Introduction

13

the earlier literature of sensibility, which 'fostered the myth that pain could be shared through the medium of the sympathetic body.'38 Bruhm's study does not mention the writers I focus on here, but his points about the relation between the body in pain and the imagination are useful in my examination of the narratives of Robinson, West, and Opie, for many of the novels feature the suffering body, particularly the pained female body as an object or a site of spectacle. The female writers were following, in part, the discourse on the sentimental and on sensibility, which according to Ann Jessie Van Sant, was 'related to immediate moral and aesthetic responsiveness ... In an early use of the term, for example, sensibility accounts for an intensely felt humanity or philanthropy; it is an "inward pain" in response to the suffering of others.'39 As I see it, these writers often used scenes of female suffering in their novels in order to further their own political purposes. West creates anti-heroines who suffer and are exiled from society in order to depict the horrors of following the misguided teachings of Jacobin philosophy, while Robinson and Opie depict women who are in emotional and sometimes physical agony in order to explore the implications of patriarchal ideology on women. They counted on arousing the imaginative, sympathetic response of their readers. Closely tied to the depiction of female suffering is the portrayal of the confined female body. For many of the women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, confinement was not only metaphorical, but physical as well. Scenes of confinement surface more than once in novels such as Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791), Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1797), Charlotte Smith's The Young Philosopher (1798), Mary Hays' s The Victim of Prejudice (1799), as well as in those by Robinson and, to a lesser extent, in those by Opie.40 The frequency and the repetition of physical confinement in these women's novels suggest that it is more than just a motif. Female confinement can be seen simply as a convention of the sentimental and the Gothic novel,41 but it works to politicize women's socio-economic and psychic plight in late eighteenthcentury England. It is a variation of the female suffering motif that focuses on physical restraints to the female body. In works such as Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial transitional periods between the Classical and the Modern order.42 According to Foucault, this period marks the beginning of 'the great confinement,'43 surveillance through Panopticism,44 and the 'deployment of sexuality' by Western

14 Empowering the Feminine societies.45 It is not coincidental that this Foucauldian moment of rupture is marked by such a strong interest in the depiction of women in prisons, restricted circles, and asylums in the literature of the times. For these scenes bring to the foreground the ways in which sexual and economic freedom, knowledge, and power are affected and delimited by one's gender. Women are chosen by those in authority as the subjects of surveillance or the inmates of madhouses because of their supposedly dangerous tendencies or their excesses. More often than not, these tendencies have to do with their sexual natures, their reproductive capacities, and their freedom to exercise control over their bodies. In short, what is at stake is no less than the containment of specific female bodily powers. It would be foolish to suggest that scenes of confinement only began to surface at the end of the eighteenth century. Certainly the first half of the century, with such works as John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), and Fielding's The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great

(1743) and Amelia (1752), demonstrates a marked interest in criminals and prison scenes. In Imagining the Penitentiary John Bender notes the importance of prison scenes in novels of this period: 'attitudes toward prison which were formulated between 1719 and 1779 in narrative literature and art - especially in prose fiction - sustained and ... enabled the conception and construction of actual penitentiary prisons later in the eighteenth century.'46 However, what is different about the scenes of confinement as delineated by women novelists of the 1790s is the absence of traditional criminal elements in their heroines. Inchbald's Miss Milner and Matilda, Radcliffe's Emily St Aubert, Wollstonecraft's Maria, Smith's Laura Glenmorris, Hays's Mary Raymond, Robinson's Gertrude St Leger and Martha Morley are not thieves, murderers, or prostitutes. But the fact that they are locked up at some point in the novel, treated like criminals, and deprived of their liberty and property indicates the precarious existence of a middle-class woman in late eighteenth-century society. In Robinson's, West's, and Opie's works, the female body, to use Lois McNay's words, becomes the 'centre of the struggle for domination, the body is both shaped and reshaped by the different warring forces acting upon it.'47 In other words, this sexualization of the female body is fundamental to the way women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are constructed as subjects; it shows the 'processes through which the female body is transformed into a feminine one.'48 Incarceration can

be either physical, as in an enclosed space, or psychological and social, through being effectively barred from participation in certain cultural and familial activities. It is paradigmatic of the way women are disciplined by

Introduction

15

patriarchal society to become what Foucault calls 'docile bodies.'49 Though the specific circumstances of incarcerated females appear to be different in the novels, the reasons for confinement are similar: an effort to curtail women's intellectual development and knowledge, to shape and transform female sexual desires, to control women's properties or inheritance, and to break matrilinial and maternal bonds. The parameters for these categories are often blurred, and the effects of imprisonment show that the issues are interrelated. The female body is invested with highly charged qualities that serve to legitimate its confinement for reasons other than thieving or other common criminal activities. Thus, woman's sexualized identity is shown to be inseparable from her economic, social, and intellectual identity. Radicalism at the Turn of the Century

Most historians see 1793, the year when Britain entered the first war of the Coalition, as the turning point of revolutionary sympathy in the decade of the 1790s. In the early stages of the French Revolution, many English people greeted the events of 1789 with enthusiasm and even rapture. Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, for example, saw the revolution as a prophetic coming of the new kingdom, while non-religious supporters saw it as a 'secularized kind of pseudo-rnillenarianism.' J.R. Dinwiddy notes that the support came from 'members of the educated classes, many of them associated with the heterodox (anti-Trinitarian) branches of Dissent' whose political outlook 'was formed by a combination of influences including "classical-republican" ideas, Enlightenment optimism, and religious millenarianism.'50 Both Robinson, with her London stage and literary connections, and Opie, with her Norwich Dissenting background, fall into this group of supporters. Along with writers like Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Thomas Holcroft, Inchbald, Hays, Williams, and others, they saw the revolution in France as a propitious moment of reform in England. Malcolm Thomis and Peter Holt point out that reform ideology of the 1790s was not 'consciously revolutionary,' but it 'had a number of revolutionary implications.' Two of the most important challenges of the radical reformers were 'the divine right of property to serve as the only legitimate basis of government and the right of property-owners to grant or withhold the right to vote.'51 In 1792, the London Corresponding Society proclaimed the 'people's natural and inalienable rights of resistance to oppression, and of sharing in the government of their country.'52 The reformers believed that what they sought could be achieved by peaceful pressure and not by force of arms.

16 Empowering the Feminine In the eyes of the government, however, these claims, along with the events in France in 1789, the threats of French invasion after 1793, violent food riots in Britain in the mid 1780s and again in the mid 1790s, were dangerous and not to be tolerated. Pitt's government feared that there was revolt intended and responded by suspending the habeas corpus in the 1794 Act. Members of the Corresponding and Constitutional Societies in London and Sheffield were arrested. There were other targets from fears of insurrection. For example, Thomas Muir was punished because he was an educated man who had openly distributed Paine's works for the 'lower orders.'53 The editor of the Annual Register for 1794 observed that violent

divisions had returned to British politics and made comparisons of the factions with the 'royal and republican parties that had divided' the nation in the last century.54 A number of repressive measures followed. In 1795, the government passed legislation to forbid all large, public meetings without special permit. Secret organizations were outlawed by the 1797 Unlawful Oaths Act, and the1799Corresponding Societies Act suppressed and prohibited the United Englishmen, United Scotsmen, United Irishmen, and the London Corresponding Society as 'unlawful Combinations and Confederations against the Government.'55 Around this time, the terrible famine of 1795-6 led to high prices and food shortages, and in 1797 naval mutinies occurred at Portsmouth, Plymouth, Nore, and Yarmouth, which may have had some connections to reformers and radicals.56 Overall, however, the situation was not alarming. In Ireland, the Irish Catholic rebels provided some grounds for the many repressive acts of the government, but in England and Scotland there were no large-scale organized struggles for independence. War against France led conservatives to identify reformers with French ideas, and they were often smeared as traitors. Henry Cockburn recalled that 'Jacobinism was a term denoting everything alarming and hateful.'57 This highly charged and politicized climate at the turn of the century, along with the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, and the subsequent publication of the Memoirs, greatly affected the novelists who were writing at the time. Anti-Jacobins, including Jane West, capitalized on fears of French influence and invasion, on the contamination of the aristocracy by association with upstarts, and on the moral degeneration of the nation through the debasement of women. A number of works appeared that targeted English Jacobins, especially women. The Reverend Richard Polwhele's poem The Unsex'dFemales (1798) cited Mary Hays, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and others, among Wollstonecraft's female band of rebels who despised 'Na-

Introduction

17

ture's law.'58 Charles Lloyd'sEdmund Oliver (1798) satirized Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Hays, and the English Jacobins, while Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) recreated with humour, ridicule, and wit the radical philosophy and lives of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Hays. The end of the century saw a strengthening of conservatism, anti-republicanism, and anti-feminism. For their part, revolutionary sympathizers became more cautious and divided in their opinions about how to bring about reform. Some members of the London Corresponding Society continued to agitate for reform in the House of Commons, but others became more fatalistic, and believed that the existing system would collapse on its own accord. Thomas Paine s Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance (1796) proph-

esied national bankruptcy, and popularized the belief that the funding system in England was on its deathbed. Political education remained, however, the principal concern of most reformers. Influenced by Godwin, many thought that general education and a change of attitude would result in political change. Friends and followers of Wollstonecraft, like Hays and Robinson, published essays about the condition of women that appealed to readers' reason. The unfavourable climate at the end of the decade, however, made them reluctant to sign these tracts, and they were published either anonymously or under a pseudonym. In the novels of radical writers, aristocrats, property owners, and people of the upper classes are depicted as corrupt and decadent, and often contrasted with the struggling and deserving folk from the middle classes or the lower orders. An indication of what the public could and could not tolerate by the early 1800s can be seen in a work such as Hays's Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries (1803).

Though Hays wrote two obituaries for Mary Wollstonecraft, one for the Annual Necrology for iygy—S and the other for the Monthly Magazine of

September 1797, she did not include Wollstonecraft's life in her collection of biographies of about 290 women. Wollstonecraft's absence in a text that was supposed to include 'every woman who, either by her virtues, her talents, or the peculiarities of her fortune, has rendered herself illustrious or distinguished' is a telling statement about the conservative politics of the age.59 In a similar way, Opie's works of the early 1800s refrained from making overt and unambiguous statements of support for the female vindicator of women's rights. By September 1801, preliminaries of peace were signed, and Britain and France were no longer at war. The interest in Jacobinism and revolution subsided somewhat. The years 1800-2 saw a revival of agitation, but there

18 Empowering the Feminine was less talk of French help or invasion. J.R. Dinwiddy surmises that in order for Britain to have a revolution at this time, a conjunction of events, such as a French invasion, an Irish rebellion, and acute distress was needed. These events never occurred together, as 'the harvests of 1801 and 1802 were good, and when the threat of invasion returned in 1803 food prices were again at moderate levels and the underground societies had virtually ceased to operate.'60 During the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth century, attitudes to the French Revolution were 'generally reserved and often defensive, and it was common for reformers to steer clear of the episode in their speeches and publications.'61 West and Opie continued to use some of the issues from the radical debates of the decade before in their works published in the early years of the 1800s, but after 1805 their interest in Godwinian philosophy dwindled. West focused more on conduct books and later wrote historical novels, The Loyalists (1812) and Alicia deLacy (1814). Opie continued to write moral tales, poetry, and novels until her formal admission into the Society of Friends in 1825, but her fiction became less political, and leaned towards moral conflicts. Temper (1812) is a good example of this shift in interest. E.P. Thompson contends that it was not until the 1830s that talk of reform again became serious, when 'most English working people came to feel an identity between themselves and as against their rulers and employers.'62 A Note on Methodology The purpose of my study is not to discuss and categorize Robinson, West, and Opie within the confines of twentieth-century schools of feminist thought, but to uncover the ways in which they negotiated the position of the female subject within the specific historical, cultural, and social milieu that I sketch, albeit briefly in some cases. While their narratives seem couched in the language of sentiment, of romance, and of the Gothic, they redefine what has traditionally been seen as 'feminine' by giving what Paul Smith calls 'agency' and power to the domestic woman, to maternal figures, and to the virtuous heroine.63 Their novels, often with overtly didactic tendencies, highlight the complexities inherent in the construction and maintenance of what John Gregory, in A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Emile (1762), have described as the 'natural' soft and sweet character of woman. In my subtitle I have deliberately used the word 'narratives' rather than 'novels' because though most of the texts I analyse are fictional, I do include memoirs and essays. I have not attempted to discuss in detail the

Introduction

19

numerous books of poetry by Robinson and Opie, not because they are not relevant to issues on the feminine subject, but because the poetic genre entails its own rhetorical and literary conventions. By limiting my study to prose, I hope to give the book focus and coherence. For me, the novel form allows for the best amplification and the working out of the authors' ideas on the feminine, some of which are found in their essays and tracts. Robinson's explicitly feminist essay, Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and West's conduct manuals, Letters Addressed to a Young Man and Letters to a Young Lady, are thus examined in relation to the authors' novels to see how ideologies of femininity are simultaneously prescribed, described, and practised in fiction. By 'feminine' I mean those qualities of compliance, gentleness, sympathy, submission, modesty, reserve, innocence, that many writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as George Savile, Marquis of Halifax in The Lady's New Year's Gift: or, Advice to a Daughter (1688); Alexander Pope in his 'Epistle to a Lady'; Samuel Richardson in Pamela and Clarissa; Thomas Gisborne in his Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, and Hannah More in her essays and novels have traditionally ascribed to women. Robinson, West, and Opie engaged in the debate about the 'naturalness' and usefulness of these qualities in women. Their ambiguous feelings towards what was considered 'feminine' in their culture resulted in narratives that are much more 'dialogic' and 'heteroglot'64 in their multiple plots and fascinating configuration of characters than has been recognized.

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PART I: MARYROBINSON (1758-1800)

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1 Engendering a Female Subject: Mary Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self

What a creature is woman! How wildly inconsistent! How daring, yet how timid! We are at once the most ambitious tyrants, and the most abject slaves ... We boast a resisting power formed on the basis of stern and frigid virtue; we are philosophers in precept, - but how often are we women in example! Robinson, The False Friend (II: 92-4)

Despite the fact that Mary Robinson was an actress, poet, novelist, playwright, and autobiographer, that she published at least six volumes of poetry, eight novels, and produced two plays between 1775 and 1800,1 until very recently she was best known as 'Perdita,' the beautiful actress who attracted the attention of George, Prince of Wales (later George IV) in a performance of Shakespeare's The Winter's Talent Drury Lane in 1779. The alreadv married Perdita's short-lived but flamboyant affair the following year with the prince, or 'Florizel,' as he called himself, made her the subject of a number of biographies and pseudo-biographical narratives,2 and the target of numerous pamphlets and caricatures that criticized her profligacy and her extravagance, especially after the end of the liaison in 1781-2. After less than a year, the Prince of Wales, who at one point had sent her a miniature of himself with the words 'Je ne change qu'en mourant' and 'Unalterable to my Perdita through life,' left her for another woman, Mrs Armistead, Robinson's former maid at Drury Lane. As she writes in her Memoirs, he never honoured the bond of £20,000 that he gave her, and left her without a career, and badly in debt.3 Her Memoirs published posthumously in 1801 went into many editions and was frequentlv reprinted throughout the nineteenth century.4 Among art histori-

24 Empowering the Feminine ans, Robinson's name is mentioned because she was known as one of the beautiful women painted at this time by the leading portrait artists of the day, such as George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.5 During her lifetime, she was a public personage whose comings and goings were reported in the daily presses.6 Malcolm Cormack comments that Robinson's life is a 'story' that 'hardly requires any romantic exaggeration.'7 Towards the end of her life, Robinson managed to turn around the rather infamous and scandalous reputation of her early years. In the last decade of her career, she succeeded in establishing herself as a respected poet, editor, and novelist. In the 1790s Robinson published some of her major works, such as her Poems (1791-3); novels, including Vancenza (1792), The Widow (1794), Angelina (1796), Hubert de Sevrac (1796), Walsingham

(1797), and The Natural Daughter (1799). She became one of the Morning Post's celebrity poets from 1797 until her death in 1800.8 Marguerite Steen notes that in 1799 she 'got a little commission from the Morning Post, to edit the poetical columns of that journal, and her compositions, under the signture of "Tabitha Bramble," continued to decorate its pages up to within a short time of her death.'9 After reading her poem 'Jasper,' which appeared in the Annual Anthology, 1800, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of Robinson: 'She is a woman of undoubted Genius ... She overloads everything; but I never knew a human Being with so fulls, mind - bad, good, & indifferent ... but full, & overflowing.'10 By all accounts, he appeared to have admired her greatly. He corresponded with her, and wrote 'A Stranger Minstrel' to her a few weeks before she died.11 In the early 1790s, she was an active member of the circle of English radicals that included William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza and John Fenwick, and Robert Southey, causing the Reverend Richard Polwhele to include her as one of the 'Gallic freaks' and 'Unsex'dFemales' in his satiric poem of 1798. In this chapter, which will serve as an introduction to Mary Robinson's life and works, I explore the ways in which Robinson constructs herself as a subject, focusing on her Memoirs, begun in January 1798 but completed by her daughter Maria, and her treatise, Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799). I argue that these two

works of different genres written around the same time present and represent various aspects of the bios of Robinson's life. They work to counter the pictorial and 'gossipy' representations of her that were created by others in public venues, especially during her younger days. Robinson engenders herself in these texts and in her novels mediated through cultural expectations of what a woman ought to be, and through

Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self 25 literary conventions of the essay, the novel, and the memoir. She manipulates facts, fiction, illustrations, and rhetorical conventions, but is, in turn, manipulated by her implied readers and the public, so that the narratives, though compelling, become fictions of her female selfhood. Her works reveal her 'multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory identity,' and demonstrate how she becomes, in Teresa de Lauretis' terms, 'a subject that is not divided in, but rather at odds with, language; an identity made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender.'12 In her Memoirs, for example, Robinson claims that the 'pages are the pages of truth, unadorned by romance, and unembellished by the graces of phraseology.'13 However, as Sidonie Smith notes, 'the autobiographer is the self-historian, autobiography representation.'14 Hayden White reminds us that history is 'primarily a certain kind of relationship to "the past" mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse.'15 Though Robinson purports to be telling the truth, she is constrained not only by her feelings about what is acceptable to polite society, but also by language itself. Smith explains: 'the language we use to "capture" memory and experience can never "fix" the "real" experience but only approximate it, yielding up its own surplus of meaning or revealing its own artificial closures.'16 'Involved in a kind of masquerade, the autobiographer creates an iconic representation of continuous identity that stands for, or rather before, her subjectivity as she tells of this "I" rather than of that "I." She may even create several, sometimes competing stories about or versions of herself as her subjectivity is displaced by one or multiple textual representations.'17 As autobiography, Robinson's Memoirs is at times more intriguing for what it attempts to hide than what it discloses. It reveals only one story, one "I" of Robinson, as it is circumscribed to a great extent by the London public's perception of the author as a fallen woman or adulteress. The autobiographer both resists and inscribes herself as the figure of the repentant whore, because her status as the one-time mistress of the Prince of Wales is the primary reason for both her fame and her disgrace in her early years. Memoirs'wa.s written at the same time as Robinson was composing poems for her Lyrical Tales, published in 1800, writing her treatise and last novels, and editing the literary section of the Morning Post. She is reported to have been seriously ill from 1797 on, but managed to be incredibly productive in the last two years of her life. In 1800, she translated Hager's Picture of Palermo from German, and was also working on a 'blank-verse translation of Klopstock's Messiah.'18 Yet she hardly speaks of herself as a writer; instead she focuses on her early life as an actress.19 The reason may be that she adopted a chronological approach, and Robinson never finished her

26 Empowering the Feminine memoirs because of her rheumatism and illness. On 18 January 1798 the Morning Post had reported: 'Mrs. Robinson's disorder is a nervous fever, attended by a depression of spirits, which all the attention of her friends cannot alleviate.'20 Yet she had opportunity for retrospection and could have made use of the perspective of a mature thinker. For instance, she remarks at one point: 'Ah! how little has the misjudging world known of what has passed in my mind, even in the apparently gayest moments of my existence! How much have I regretted that ever I was born, even when I have been surrounded with all that could gratify the vanity of woman!' (I: 82). In the Memoirs, though she mentions her writing (I: 35, 159, 170), she never speaks from the position of a published author. Instead, as Felicity Nussbaum points out, 'eighteenth-century women who represented their subjectivity in text, even private texts, were inevitably caught in mimicking male definitions of themselves. Their self-fashionings were bound up in cultural definitions of gender - those assumed, prescribed, and embedded in their consciousness, as well as their subversive thoughts and acts in contradiction to those definitions.'21 Frequently in the Memoirs she constructs herself as an object of desire for an implied male viewer. She presents herself as an erotic spectacle and provides what Laura Mulvey terms 'scopophilia,' or pleasure in looking, for her readers.22 For instance, when Robinson begins to publish poetry, the contrast between her presentation of herself as an author and that of herself as a femmefatale is striking. Her representations at this point reveal the degree to which she has internalized conventional constructions of womanhood. Because women were not expected to have great mental capacities, Robinson writes with an attitude of extreme modesty in assessing her intellectual achievements, while she adopts a kind of flaunting pride in her appearance. She is noticeably diffident about her skills as poet: 'My little collection of poems, which I had arranged for publication, and which had been ready ever since my marriage, I now determined to print immediately. They were indeed trifles, very trifles; I have since perused them with a blush of self-reproof, and wondered how I could venture on presenting them to the public' (I: 159). Contrarily, the account of her entrance to a party at Ranelagh in the next paragraph is narrated with relish and with triumph: T had now been married near two years; my person was considerably improved; I was grown taller than when I became Mr. Robinson's wife, and I had now more the manners of a woman of the world than those of girlish simplicity, which had hitherto characterised me ... The dress which I wore was plain and simple: it was composed of pale lilac lustring. My head had a wreath of white flowers; I was complimented

Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self 27 on my looks by the whole party' (1:160). By focusing repeatedly in her Memoirs on what she was wearing, as she does here, Robinson constructs herself sometimes as innocente, and other times as belle. This latter representation of herself is reminiscent of the discourse of society pages and the fashion section of the press. For example, the style is similar to reports of Robinson in the Morning Herald of 19 April 1782: 'Mrs. Robinson ... wore a dress of white crepe, decorated with festoons of white flowers, and a cap trimmed in a similar manner. She was much admired for the elegant simplicity of her dress.'23 In her Memoirs she describes herself as others would have seen her, adopting the identity or the version of herself created by the dailies. The fact that Robinson describes with so much nostalgia and a certain amount of vanity the details of her clothing some twenty years after the incident demonstrates the importance of appearance and dress to women's identity. As Virginia Woolf notes, 'there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.'24 Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk point out that 'the archetypal female prop of the mirror has been used variously in relation to woman, and almost always against her ... it has historically served to imprison femininity: for a woman to be reassured of her "looks" is to know she will be looked at. But beyond a woman's (always mediated) subjective relationship to her hand mirror is a range of ways in which she herself serves as mirror.'25 Robinson's depiction of herself reveals how she is framed by the male gaze, constrained discursively by social definitions of her identity even as she wishes to free herself of the public's misconceptions about her. At this time, she also posed for numerous portraits that aid in the representation of her as a woman of the demi-monde. These portraits, included in the Memoirs in later nineteenth-century editions, can be seen as visual representations of 'herself as heroine.'26 Cecilia Macheski argues that 'especially for women, the written record of a life is often inadequate and disappointing,' and that portraits are an alternative form of 'autobiographical report ... Public self-examination became more easily possible through the genre of the portrait than the confessional text.'27 While Macheski assumes that women had full control over the way they were to be depicted, other critics are not in agreement as to the degree of agency the sitter, especially a female one, had in the eighteenth century. Most discuss portraits as the creation of the artist.28 However, some suggest that 'there must have been discussion not only concerning the colour of the

28 Empowering the Feminine walls, the character of the neighbouring paintings, and the height at which portraits were to be hung. What the sitter wore was not always selected by the artist, nor surely what the sitter did.'29 James Northcote notes that Joshua Reynolds kept a 'port-folio in his painting-room, containing every print that had then been taken from his portraits; so that those who came to sit, had this collection to look over,'30 and could choose from them. By the time Robinson sat for her portraits, Romney, Gainsborough, and Reynolds were all established artists and their respective styles well-known among fashionable circles. For instance, Gainsborough was known to be concerned with 'likeness,' and his paintings were noted for their 'evocation of mood,'31 while Reynolds was known for endowing his female sitters with 'intelligence and sensibility,' whether they were 'ladies' or not.32 The point is that in agreeing to sit to Romney, Reynolds, and Gainsborough in 1781-2, Robinson participated in the production of her representation, perhaps recognizing, albeit unconsciously, 'the self as art and the self in art.'33 Even if she is most frequently depicted gazing straight at the viewer (see portraits by Romney, Reynolds, 39-41), a pose that would associate her with sexual transgressors such as Kitty Fisher, these portraits are still far more refined and romantic than the cartoons published in the presses at this time. These portraits emphasize her youth, femininity, and self-confidence; her sexual appeal and sophistication; and her beauty and coy assurance. One of the most famous paintings of Robinson is Gainsborough's fulllength portrait, commissioned by the Prince of Wales. It is much more elaborate than the others. Ingamells notes: 'it is a pastoral in which Perdita, easily and gracefully posed and simply clad, approaches the role of the Shakespearean shepherdess.'34 Surrounded by trees, flowers, and sitting beside a dog, Perdita holds a miniature that has been identified as one the prince had presented to her of himself as a token of his love. Though the painting is regarded as 'an extraordinary homage to beauty, and a masterpiece of painting,'35 it was not well received by Gainsborough's contemporaries. The Public Advertiser criticized it for 'not being a likeness' of Robinson, which suggests that there was some awareness that the portrait was yet another person's version or 'representation' of Robinson. In the Gainsborough pastoral Robinson appears to be the lethargic and sad discarded mistress who was once brilliant in the beau monde. By December 1780, Robinson was left with a debt of £7,000, a ruined stage career, and the mockery of a ruthless public. M.J. Levy argues that 'rather than being a depiction of her during her love affair, [it] is in fact a portrait of her after it had ended; and that its purpose is to rebuke the Prince for

Robinson's (Re) Presentations of the Self 29 his failure to honour his obligations.'36 The miniature she holds in her hand functions as a forceful reminder of his pledge of eternal love. Though the mood is more languid, the pastoral air and the pose is similar to Gainsborough's Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1785-6). Gainsborough depicts both as wistful, beautiful, somewhat ethereal women, romanticizing them as illusory, woodland maidens. The Arcadian setting, in keeping with her shepherdess role on stage, suggests a somewhat forced association with rustic simplicity that is ironically at odds with Robinson's courtly life at the time. Between 1834 and 1894, the Perdita portrait was hung and displayed simply under the title A Lady with a Dog by Gainsborough.37 This near-

disappearance of Mary Robinson's name is indicative of the ease with which women's identities are often effaced or denied. That the name of the subject of the portrait becomes lost is perhaps understandable after Robinson's death, but I suggest that it is a concrete example of what has been happening all along in Robinson's life. Robinson has problems establishing and maintaining herself as a subject partly because of public versions of her, as manifested in the cartoons, gossip, newspaper accounts, and artistic renditions of her. The public constructs different identities of her, reading her life as a text - of the tragic actress, the beautiful whore, the transcendent muse, and later, the novelist of sensibility. Negative depictions of Robinson proliferated elsewhere. In the same year that she was sitting for the portraits a number of satiric pieces ap-

peared in print. In Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite, and His Answers to

Them, an anonymous writer portrays Robinson as a swindler, who 'wrote the letters of Florizel and Perdita' to acquire 'notice and popularity.' In 1781 Robinson was apparently attempting to negotiate with the Prince of Wales for the return of his letters. She was asking for £25,000.38 Through a series of epistolary exchanges, Robinson is depicted as a shameless married woman who professes to love a certain Mr. — only to have him pay her drafts. She was still the subject of malevolent and playful attacks a year later, when she met and fell in love with Colonel Banastre Tarleton. A Gillray cartoon entitled 'The Thunderer' (see 37) shows a valiant and boastful Tarleton, the Prince of Wales with a feathered head, and Mary Robinson perched in the background. Robinson sits with her legs spread-eagle, straddling the Whirligig sign, which advertises 'a la mode beef, hot, every night.' The lurid advertisement links her with meat to be consumed, to be enjoyed. The sexual violence suggested by the impaling phallus shows the kind of virulence with which Robinson had to contend. In a similar sardonic tone, under 'Ship News' for 21 September 1782, the Morning Post

30 Empowering the Feminine announced that 'the Tarleton, armed ship, [had] captured the Perdita frigate ... a prodigious fine clean bottomed vessel [which] had taken many prizes during her cruize, particularly the Florizel... she was captured some time ago by the Fox, but was, soon afterwards, retaken by the Maiden, and had a sumptuous suit of new rigging when she fell in with the Tarleton.'39 It is difficult to ascertain the truth from the gossip here, but the references are to men who probably had sexual relationships with Robinson in the 1780s: the statesman Charles James Fox, and Lord Maiden, who had been the intermediary for the prince and Robinson. In 1782 Lord Maiden, then Robinson's escort, had bet one thousand guineas that Colonel Tarleton could not win the affections of Robinson.40 In this announcement Robinson is made into a prize to be had by the bravest naval officer. The analogy renders her an object lacking agency. Poems such as The Vis-d-Vis ofBerkleySquare mocked Robinson's ostentation and display of her 'Coaches, Chariots, Cars, / Blazon'd with Coronets and Stars.' She is condemned as an example of 'Such very gorgeous Harlotry / Shaming a foolish Nation.'41 A letter included in the Memoirs mentions these malicious attacks: 'My estrangement from the prince was now the theme of public animadversion, while the newly invigorated shafts of my old enemies, the daily prints, were again hurled upon my defenceless head with tenfold fury' (II: 80). While Robinson speaks of herself as a 'defenceless' victim of the daily prints here, she did attempt to provide alternate representations of herself. A portrait that Robinson used as a frontispiece for her Poems of 1791 and her Lyrical Tales in 1800 reflects a very different subject from the ones created by the press. The portrait engraved by Burke after Joshua Reynolds has a sombre tone and was subsequently titled Contemplation (see 41). Robinson is depicted in more angular, almost masculine lines, her face turned away, as if weary of the world. The melancholy and meditative aura created by the dark sky and turbulent sea overshadows suggestions of beauty and sexual allure. Here, Robinson is presented as a disillusioned figure, no longer youthful or carefree and innocent. She is caught in repose, suggesting an introspective self. She sat for the portrait between 1783 and 1784, probably during a period of illness after her miscarriage, which made her semi-paralysed for the rest of her life. Exactly what 'illness' crippled Robinson is difficult to determine. According to her daughter, Maria, 'an imprudent exposure to the night air in travelling, when, exhausted by fatigue and mental anxiety, she slept in a chaise with the windows open, brought on a fever, which confined her to her bed during six months. The disorder terminated, at the conclusion of that period, in a violent rheumatism, which progressively deprived her of the use of her

Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self 31 limbs (Memoirs, II: 95-6). According to Bass, however, Robinson was on her way to Dover in an attempt to bring Tarleton £300 when she went into labour in her coach: 'Somehow the midwifery was bungled, and in the ordeal she was paralyzed. Mary had paid her forfeit to love.'42 The pose in this portrait relates to a passage in Robinson's Memoirs where she watched over her suffering child at Brightelmstone:43 'Mrs. Robinson beguiled her anxiety by contemplating the ocean ... To a mind naturally susceptible, and tinctured by circumstances with sadness, this occupation afforded a melancholy pleasure, which could scarcely be relinquished without regret. Whole nights were passed by Mrs. Robinson at her window in deep meditation, contrasting with her present situation the scenes of her former life' (II: 115). The passage is narrated by her daughter, Maria Elizabeth, but is another instance of Robinson's attempt at representing herself. This time she takes on the role of the anxious and serious mother. This self, which was increasingly becoming more reflective and sober, dominates the last ten years of Robinson's life. The Contemplation portrait becomes an appropriate visual representation of Robinson as a mature woman, mother, thinker, and writer. Its presence in the later published works of Robinson aids in challenging the denigrating representations of the author as prize and prostitute. Linda Peterson suggests that 'in Robinson's Memoirs, two main plots juxtapose the autobiographer's progress in one set of roles (daughter, mother) against her regress in another (wife, mistress). One plot traces the fall of a beautiful young woman from chastity to infidelity' while the other is the 'acceptable feminine plot' of 'Robinson as a loving mother and faithful daughter.' Peterson notes that the plot of the fall 'repeats the pattern of the chroniques scandaleuses, an eighteenth-century literary form associated with female writing. In the Memoirs Robinson actually refuses to complete this plot, breaking off her narrative just before she consummates her affair with the prince. It is her daughter who posthumously finishes the text, rationalizing her mother's sexual fall and detailing the pain she suffered.'44 Peterson calls this feature of doubleness in female autobiography 'narrative duplicity.'45 Rather than calling it 'duplicity,' conscious or unconscious, however, I view Robinson's tendency to tell partial truths, sentimentalize events, and suppress facts as manifestations of her struggle with her subjectivity. One way to explain her seemingly various representations of herself is through Julia Kristeva's theory of the 'subject in process' or the split subject. Kristeva argues that subjectivity is not stable, coherent, and constant, but is continually shifting. She stresses the importance of language in the signifying process' and in the construction of the sub-

32 Empowering the Feminine ject.46 Eighteenth-century ideologies of passive womanhood, the lascivious actress, the elegant courtesan, the chaste maiden all interpellate Robinson and provide different conventional constructions of womanhood for her. But these constructions also render it difficult for her to take or adopt a position outside of these preconceived notions of what a woman should be. Her subsequent attempts at establishing a position for herself as a credible female writer became extremely difficult. For example, her first novel, Vancenza; or, The Dangers of Credulity (1792) was supposedly sold out

in a day and went into five more editions, but critics conjecture that it did so because of the public's curiosity rather than literary interest.47 In the 1790s Robinson was praised for her skill as a writer, particularly for her poetry, by various friends and admirers. Some of these tributary poems are included in the last volume of her Memoirs of 1801. While these lines counter the earlier attacks and satires on her character, they too, do not succeed in presenting Robinson fully as a subject. They tend to go the opposite way, and are simply conventional eulogies of a poetess. If she was stereotyped by the cartoons and satires as a beautiful but destructive nymph, here she is depicted as an enchanting and sublime literary goddess. She is hailed as the 'peerless Muse' by Richard Tickell, as the 'pensive songstress' by John Taylor, as 'Transcendent Laura ... whose sainted glow / Bade my weak soul renounce its woe' by Robert Merry, as the 'lovely songstress' and the 'Sweet Sappho of our Isle' by the Reverend William Tasker. Robinson had written poems and other pieces under the names of Laura Maria, Julia, Laura, and Tabitha Bramble in John Bell's World; or, Fashionable Gazette (1787-94) and in the Morning Post in 1799. These pseudonyms are further examples of stereotypes or roles for women that Robinson exploited or, at least, played with. The Tabitha Bramble persona, borrowed from Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker, had become standard for an embittered old maid. It is the opposite version of 'Laura,' and reveals the contradictory identities and subject positions she inhabited.48 In her study of Robinson's poetry, Judith Pascoe notes that 'the figure of this brusque, sexually undesirable female - the polar opposite of the glamorous construction of Robinson favored by newspapers of the period - enabled her to write sharply critical poetry utterly unlike the softer effusions of Laura Maria or Oberon.'49 A further confusion occurs when some of the writers conflate their admiration for her intellectual powers with her sexual allure, thereby combining flattery of a woman's poetry with keeping her in her place. For example, while praising her 'highly polish'd mind,' General Burgoyne

Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self 33 writes: 'For who can gaze upon thy lip, / That coral lip of brightest hue, / Nor wish its honied balm to sip / More fresh, more sweet than morning dew?'50 Gratifying as these epithets may have been, they are almost as destructive as the satires because they ultimately efface the woman writer and present only a cliche in her stead. Used this way, the form of the panegyric does not allow for subtleties and does not actually tell us much about Robinson's strengths and weaknesses as a poet. The epithets reveal more about what the various male admirers wished to see in their poetess and muse, than what Robinson was like. The numerous satires, cartoons, tributary lines are discursive constructions of Perdita that need to be read with a degree of caution, for they present different or shifting versions of her which, in turn, influence how she comes to understand and then later depict herself. The portraits are another form of representation over which she may have had some control. Perhaps it is only in her last works that the philosopher and thinker in her emerges. Her most direct engagement with the feminist controversy of the 1790s - which some critics see as a debate between conservatives and radicals about, among other things, the proper place of woman in societyappears to be Thoughts on the Condition of Women, first published under the name of Anne Frances Randall. In this work, the anger which she was not able to express in the Memoirs comes through. The genre of Condition of Women, a treatise or essay, had been used by other polemical women such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays earlier in the 1790s to express what we would now term 'feminist' sentiments.51 Katharine Rogers notes of Wollstonecraft and Hays: 'both, at their best, used a forceful downright style, animated by personal experience and passionate commitment to their cause.'52 This is the style that Robinson adopts in her treatise. Without the generic and ideological constraints of the T in the autobiographical form, she is able to construct a female self that is free from male libidinal desire. The voice in Condition of Women is forceful, persuasive, and feminist: 'I shall remind my enlightened country-women that they are not the mere appendages of domestic life, but the partners, the equal associates of man: and where they excel in intellectual powers, they are no less capable of all that prejudice and custom have united in attributing, exclusively, to the thinking faculties of man.'53 She claims an affinity with the author of the vindication of the 'Rights of Woman whose recent death, she feels, 'has not been sufficiently lamented' (2). Both Robinson and Mary Wollstonecraft believe that women are not to be blamed for their deficiencies, but rather hold the custom and manners of society responsible for placing 'the female mind in the subordinate ranks of intellectual sociabil-

34 Empowering the Feminine ity' (Condition of Women, 1). The self who emerges from this treatise is unlike that of the Memoirs or even that of the portraits. It is a self not empowered by her sense of physical beauty and attractiveness, but made bold by her mental faculties and ability to engage in philosophical debate. Robinson reveals her awareness of the complications involved in the challenging of eighteenth-century notions of the female subject: 'There are but three classes of women [who are] desirable associates in the eyes of men: handsome women; licentious women; and good sort of women - The first for his vanity; the second for his amusement; and the last for the arrangement of his domestic drudgery. A thinking woman does not entertain him; a learned woman does not flatter his self-love, by confessing inferiority; and a woman of real genius, eclipses him by her brilliancy' (Condition, 56-7). While in the Memoirs she participates in the construction and representation of herself as a so-called 'handsome' and 'licentious' woman, here she is struggling to free herself from these conventional categories. Instead she writes from the position of the 'thinking' woman. To support her argument that 'in activity of mind, [woman] is [man's] equal' (Condition, 17), Robinson cites examples of women from ancient history to modern times who are celebrated for their learning and wisdom. The catalogue, consisting of such names as Atossa, Queen of Persia; Agallis of Corcyra; Catherine of Alexandria; Queen Elizabeth; and Elizabeth Singer Rowe, is her testament of woman's intellectual and physical fortitude.54 Collectively, the women represent the defiance of sociocultural and religious limits placed on female subjects. Though as an essay Condition of Women adopts an analytical stance, there are moments wherein Robinson's own personal concerns appear. More than once in the work she laments that women, unlike men, have no power of retribution: 'even the laws of honour have been perverted to oppress her' (4). A man who is wronged may 'challenge, and even destroy his adversary,' but 'were a WOMAN to attempt such an expedient, however strong her sense of injury, however invincible her fortitude, or important the preservation of character, she would be deemed a murdress' (4). Duelling was customarily a male prerogative, while women who challenged each other were virtually unheard of.55 What is interesting here is that this particular subject reveals Robinson's own concern with injustice. With both the Prince of Wales who abandoned her, and her companion Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who also left her to marry a younger woman when she was crippled and ill, she was not able to seek reparation. Condition of Women indicates Robinson's outrage at the inequities of the situation. For her, this problem, 'that woman is denied the first privilege of

Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self 35 nature, the power of SELF-DEFENSE' is the 'prominent subject' of the letter (73). Whereas in the Memoirs her attitude towards male/female relationships is tolerant and accepting, here she is indignant: 'The laws are made by man; and self-preservation is, by them, deemed the primary law of nature. Hence, woman is destined to be the passive creature: she is to yield obedience, and to depend for support upon a being who is perpetually authorised to deceive her' (78). The narrative that she constructs here, of female powerlessness and of male deceit, is one that reflects her personal experience of being forsaken. It supplements the restrained account of her life in the Memoirs, a work that was censored not only by Robinson herself, but also by her daughter who edited it. Robinson's fictional and autobiographical narratives of the late 1790s reveal female subjects who are at once compliant with and defiant of the discursive and social structures in the late eighteenth century. While Robinson realizes that much of the fault lies in how women are taught to behave or are engendered as subjects, she is aware of the undeniable pleasures and rewards of 'patriarchal complicity.' Her works present accounts of her hopes and disappointments, her social critiques and selfcensure. As one character says in The False Friend: 'we are taught to cherish deceit, indifference, vanity, contempt, and scorn; we cannot bear neglect, because it awakens our self-love; we think not of the natural fickleness of man; but we tremble, lest the world should suppose, that a husband's infidelity proceeds from our own want of attractions to hold him faithful' (II: 130). Robinson's memoirs, essay, and novels show how women were not simplv duped by patriarchal ideals or masculine representations, but also seduced into different culturally sanctioned gender positions. When these positions turn out to be inadequate or impossible to subscribe to, more often than not, they seek blame within themselves. Robinson's various self-representations illustrate the clamorous energies, frustrations, and desires of one late eighteenth-century woman and reveal the ways in which she dealt with competing, sometimes contradictory constructions of woman.

36 Empowering the Feminine

Perdito and Perdita - or - the Man & Woman of the People, © The British Museum.

FLORIZELANDPERDITAFlorizelandPerdita,©TheBritishMuseum.

Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self

The Thunderer, by James Gillray, © The British Museum.

37

38 Empowering the Feminine

Perdita, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1781. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self 39

Mrs. Robinson, after Reynolds's portrait, 1782. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

40 Empowering the Feminine

Mrs. Robinson, by George Romnet, 1781, Reproduce by permission the Trustees of the wllace collection.

Robinson's (Re) Presentations of the Self 41

Mrs. Robinson [Contemplation], by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1784. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

2

Questioning Nature's Mould: Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham

Penelope's mind was formed in nature's most perfect mould; it was composed of the purest passions, the most exquisite sensibility; she harmonized the ills of life by the affections of the heart... she lamented in silence, and devoted her thoughts to the most profound melancholy. Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature (I: 43-4)1

Mary Darby Robinson's novel Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature, though

little-known today, attracted much attention from reviewers and critics when it first appeared in 1797. Contemporary readers were familiar with Mary Robinson's literary skills from her previous publications, which by this point were already quite substantial. Robinson had produced a considerable body of poetry, was hailed as 'the English Sappho,'2 and had published almost a novel a year in the five years before Walsingham.3 For reviewers, this productivity was viewed both positively and negatively. The Analytical Review, for example, remarked that 'the productions of Mrs. R., we have before had occasion to observe, though in various parts evincing proof of ability and feeling, are yet, from the rapidity with which they are poured forth, ill calculated to abide the ordeal of criticism. '4 Like a number of other reviews of the novel published in 1798, the review criticized Walsingham for its digressive and loose plot, improbable ending, and the rather morbid sensibility of the hero. However, many agreed that the work was well-written, and praised the poetical pieces interspersed in the novel, as 'they certainly add considerably to the merit of the work.'5 One review, however, was entirely enthusiastic about the work, saying, 'Never have we read any novel of these days, so uniformly interesting... All the sweets of fancy, the poignancy of passion,

Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 43 the delicacies of sentiment, and the energies of genius, have contributed to feast us with ambrosia and nectar: we have partaken of them greedily, and as gratefully.'6 In recent years, while there has been a revival of interest in Mary Robinson as an author, the critical attention has focused mainly on her poetry, for which she was much admired.7 One notable exception is a brilliant essay by Chris Cullens, which discusses the way Walsingham 'discourses masquerade, maternity, and ... the "melancholia of gender" by which both female and male subjectivities are bodily "inscripted" and achieve, or fail to achieve, textual representation via language.'8 Cullens observes that Robinson's novel 'is not only one of the wildest plots in eighteenth-century fiction but also one which plays out that script of the exposure and multiple losses by which the female body fixed in the public gaze is threatened.'9 In this chapter, I examine the ways in which Robinson links what Judith Butler calls 'the performativity of gender'10 to late eighteenth-century notions of nature and the natural, as well as to female desire. One of the reasons why contemporary reviewers found the novel so disconcerting and structurally weak is that Robinson attempted to engage with many contemporary issues in it. Walsingham reflects the philosophical debates about female education; about nature vs art; reason and passion; male vs female power in the 1790s, yet it is, at the same time, a satire of aristocratic manners, an autobiographical statement, and a novel of sensibility. In the course of the four volumes, the author gives us a picture of the times, a brief discussion of what constitutes a good novel, as well as presents an invective against literary reviewers and critics. I attempt to deal with some of the most important issues raised in Walsingham. Like several other works of the 1790s, Walsingham is concerned with the appropriate roles women and men ought to play in society, about what is proper and improper behaviour, especially for women.11 In particular, as the subtitle suggests, Robinson emphasizes the importance of nature in the construction of male and female subjectivities. As Sylvia Bowerbank notes, 'in the 1790s, as in the 1990s, the authority of "nature" was appealed to as a normative value as if it had a fixed and universal meaning.'12 In the passage quoted in the epigraph, for example, the sweet mother of the hero, Penelope, is contrasted with her sister, Frances Aubrey, who looks 'only for the enjoyments of the presentmoment' (1:42). The qualities in Penelope praised by the narrator are associated with nature - 'exquisite sensibility' and 'affections of the heart' that derive implicitly from her solitary upbringing in south Wales (I: 43). The exact meaning of'nature,' however, was constantly shifting in the eighteenth century, and continued to evolve well into the Romantic period. In his Essay on Man (1733-4), Pope evokes nature to sug-

44 Empowering the Feminine gest the harmonious existence possible between people in society and the creatures of the world. In Epistle II, he states that 'Nature's Road must ever be prefer'd' (II: 161). But his notion of'nature' was slightly different from that of someone like Mary Robinson, whose protagonist says, 'I was the pupil of nature' (I: 252) and shows a tendency to indulge in emotions and sensibility. Robinson believed that 'Nature will speak in frequent whispers to the feeling mind, and there is no sound that can over power the voice of conscience' (II: 12). Her notion of nature is closer to that delineated by Elizabeth Inchbald in Nature and Art (1796) and Charlotte Smith in The Young Philosopher (1798) than to that of writers who came before or shortly after. Inchbald's and Smith's novels are similar to Walsingham in. that they feature a male protagonist who is a marginalized figure associated with 'nature' rather than the world of fashionable society. These figures are often social outcasts who follow their own notions of right and wrong based not so much on Rousseauvean instinct, as on reason, reading, and observation. They tend to be wary of highly elaborate social customs, especially if upper class and aristocratic, and of religious or cultural expectations. This definition of nature linked to sensibility was developed more fully in the works of a Romantic poet like William Wordsworth, who professes to be a 'worshipper of Nature' and who confidently states that 'Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her.'13 Compared to Wordsworth, Robinson's belief in nature was more difficult to pin down. For her, nature was not necessarily tied to the beauties of the landscape. In fact, in Walsingham there is a rather disconcerting schism between the poetic pieces interspersed in the novel, which are often, though not exclusively, tributes to the physical world or to creatures of nature, and the narrative, which is set for the most part in interiors and in cityscapes. In the narrative proper, there are few elaborate descriptions of hills, mountains, or rivers. In addition, in contrast to Wordsworth, following nature's dictates did not mean unconditional protection from harm. Despite the fact that Penelope was amiable, her mind formed in 'nature's most perfect mould,' for instance, she seems relatively helpless, and dies early in the novel, leaving her son without much protection. Another ambiguous association occurs with Walsingham, who describes himself as 'the Pupil of Nature - the victim of prejudice - the heir to misfortune!' (IV: 314). Hence, though nature is frequently invoked, it is not always with hope or faith in its power. Walsingham turns to nature as a source of consolation 'when the cold unfeeling world' frowns upon his sorrows (I: 72). Nature arouses in him 'the love of human kind' (I: 74), but this love does not always manifest itself through pure and virtuous action on his part. The shift in the discourse of nature from that used by Pope to that used by

Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 45 Robinson and by Wordsworth coincides with what Michel Foucault calls the shift from the 'classical' to the 'modern' period.14 Foucault says, 'The question is no longer: How can experience of nature give rise to necessaryjudgements? But rather: How can man think what he does not think ... How can man be that life whose web, pulsations, and buried energy constantly exceed the experience that he is immediately given of them? ... How can he be the subject of a language that for thousands of years has been formed without him.'15 For Foucault, the late eighteenth century marks a period of discontinuity or rupture, where 'the great circular forms in which similitude was enclosed were disclocated and opened so that the table of identities could be unfolded; and ... destroyed.'16 Foucault's theories are useful as away of framing Robinson's Walsingham, which is concerned with issues of representation and the formation of identity. In the novel, Robinson questions social constructions of reality, which she terms 'the artificial scenes of life' (I: 201). She opposes this man-made reality with a system based on individual merit and on nature.' Her use of the term reveals her desire to re-examine its meanings and to politicize it. At one point, Walsingham attributes to nature the desire to fight oppression: 'To aid the wretch who was sinking beneath the stroke of inhumanity was natural; to resist unmerited persecution, was one of those impulses which nature had from my infancy implanted in my breast' (II: 169). At another instance, a character argues that 'there can be no rational objection' to giving women the education of a scholar, 'as long as woman is gifted with those mental powers which place her on an equality with man' (I: 232). The novel goes so far as to imply that differences between gender are superficial or physical only, not necessarily grounded on nature." I want to further explore these issues of gender and identity in Walsingham through an examination of the feminized hero, Walsingham Ainsforth, and the cross-dressed heroine known as Sir Sidney Aubrey. I argue that though issues of gender are muted or often subsumed by the plot of sensibility, their presence in the novel signals what Marjorie Garber calls a 'category crisis,' or a 'failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another.'17 This category crisis, what Foucault calls'the limits of representation,' becomes apparent by the early nineteenth century, when, according to him, 'words, classes, and wealth will acquire a mode of being no longer compatible with that of representation.'18 In other words, the very notion of what was 'natural' was no longer self-evident. Nature, with its problematic and varied definitions, plays a significant role in Walsingham, The hero invokes nature paradoxically as a guide, a symbol of truth, and a bearer of misfortune. Early on, Walsingham blames

46 Empowering the Feminine nature for making him the 'child of sorrow, the victim of deception' (1:7). He writes:' the shaft which pierced my bosom was winged by a resistless hand - the hand of nature' (I: 7-8). However, he also calls upon nature as a defence of his character and of his narrative: 'I am delineating a portrait from nature; my hand is guided by the sacred impulse of truth ... We do not create ourselves; Nature is a liberal parent' (1:84). What Robinson seems to be putting in opposition to nature is artifice or deception. After watching a perfomance of King Lear, Walsingham comments: 'Hypocrisy, in whatever shape it presented itself, never failed to awaken my abhorrence; to feign was, in my opinion, to be both mean and criminal' (1:100). The difficulty for Walsingham comes with the realization that there is no 'natural' state for human beings in society. He says: 'I consider the world as a vast and varying theatre, where every individual was destined to play his part, and to receive the applause or disapprobation of his surrounding contemporaries' (I: 99). Given the acting metaphor, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between those who are playing a part and those who act according to the designs of nature. Walsingham's observation suggests that we are all performers vying for applause, that there is no unmediated state where the 'natural' can take place. This comparison of identity with the stage is interesting in the lightof twentieth-century feminist theories of gender identity as a kind of performance. In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler suggests that it is useful 'to shift the terms of the debate' about sexual identities 'from constructivism versus essentialism to the more complex question' of the 'performative' aspect of gender.19 Butler argues that 'sexuality cannot be summarily made or unmade, and it would be a mistake to associate "constructivism" with "the freedom of subject to form her/his sexuality as s/he pleases." A construction is, after all, not the same as an artifice ... The "performative" dimension of construction is precisely the forced reiteration of norms.'20 Performativity for Butler is 'neither free play nor theatrical selfrepresentation; nor can it be simply equated with performance.' It is rather a 'process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms.'21 While Robinson does not articulate the theories of sexual identities in the sophisticated way that Butler does, she does touch on many of these problems in Walsingham through the character of Sir Sidney Aubrey. Sidney is forced by his/her ambitious mother and her scheming maid to take on a male identity from birth in order that s/he may have the bulk of his father's inheritance.22 Though this aspect of the plot was deemed improbable by contemporary reviewers of the novel, according to Randolph Trumbach, historically, there were cases of women who dressed and passed as men in eighteenth-century London: 'Most cross-dressing women did not dress as

Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 47 they did as a means of attracting other women.'23 However, there were a number of women who posed as men in order to marry and to defraud women of their money.24 Others, like Christian Davies, Hannah Snell, Mary Knowles, and Mary Talbot, dressed as men in order to be soldiers and sailors. Their cases appeared in newspapers and they became popular heroines.25 Mary Robinson's own experience as an actress gave her various opportunities of donning male attire on stage. In her Memoirs Robinson speaks of playing the parts of Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It during her brief career as an actress in Drury Lane.26 According to contemporary reports, Robinson's figure in men's clothing was attractive and so much admired that Richard Brinsley Sheridan often cast her in roles with male disguises.27 In her biography, Robert Bass writes, 'Having seen Man wear the breeches of Viola and Rosalind, and of Fidelia andjacintha, the Prince [of Wales] proposed that she come disguised as a boy to his apartment in Buckingham House.'28 By the time she wrote her novel then, Robinson was well aware of the potentials of the cross-dressed female body. This aspect of the novel - the woman secretly disguised and passing as a man - put off some contemporary readers of Walsingham. For example, the Monthly Revietunoted that 'the improbabilities and inconsistencies which had shocked us... resolved themselves into one great and gigantic WONDER: - a touch of romance on which a novelist seldom ventures.'29 However, to Robinson, whom I see as a woman accustomed to inhabiting various identities and revealing multifarious types of personalities through the course of her life and writing, the question of the fluidity of Sidney's identity and Walsingham's subsequent desire for her/him, was less problematic. Stuart Curran notes that 'in writing tor the Morning Post [Robinson] employed a variety of pseudonyms, some ten alone occurring in the output of her last year. She clearly had elaborated at least some of these in to the character of personae.'30 On this phenomenon, Judith Pascoe suggests that 'given her checkered past, Robinson may simply have been enjoying a respite from the burden of her own name.' But she notes that, for Robinson, 'the self that claims authorship of these poems is a curious array of free-floating and nontotalized personae... Robinson's resolute refusal to fix her poems under a single name might be conceived as disrupting reader expectations and, in turn, liberating the figure of the poet from any single poetic stance.'31 In my view, the same impulse to free oneself from the constraints of an over-determined feminine identity is at work in Walsingham. In creating a man who is really awoman, Robinson demonstrates the possibilities and potentials of the female body and mind. Sidney's freefloating identity is as liberating as Robinson's many signatures and identities in the Morning Post.

48 Empowering the Feminine In Walsingham she does not dwell on the practical details of Sidney's disguise. None of the characters ever comments on his/her beardlessness, breasts, or presumably high voice. Robinson seems to take it for granted that physically, women can pass for men if they so desire. Instead, she focuses on the performative requisites of masculinity, what Butler calls the 'forced reiteration of norms.' One of the characters notes: 'to be perfectly commeilfaut in the lists of modern gallantry, a man should eat a tiger, or burn a citadel with all the sangfroidofa complete Vandal. Guy Earl of Warwick would have been wonderfully sought after by the love-inspiring phalanx of the present day. He slew a black calf (II: 157). Though this comment is made halfjokingly, what it reveals is an awareness of the many social conventions associated with the chivalrous male. It is these acts of bravado, not so much anatomical difference or hairs on one's chest, that make the man. Thus, no one suspects Sir Sidney of being a woman because s/he has learned to make the right moves. When s/he hears his/her cousin talk about a woman, s/he quickly stakes his/her claims on her. For example, with Lady Emily Delvin, s/he vows: 'If she is worthy of notice, I shall take her myself.' S/He boasts like a good libertine that 'since the day of Lady Emily's first entreein the world of gallantry, she has never had such a lover as Sidney Aubrey' (II: 135). Sir Sidney is so adept at acting like a man that s/he is almost more attractive to women than the men around him/her: 'Sir Sidney Aubrey was ... handsome, polite, accomplished, engaging, and unaffected. He sung, he danced, he played on the mandolin, and spoke the Italian and French languages with the fluency of a native. Yet these were not his only acquirements; he fenced like a professor of the science; painted with the correctness of an artist; was expert at all manly exercises; a delightful poet; and a fascinating companion' (I: 269). Indeed, Walsingham becomes jealous of him/her because women find Sir Sidney such a delightful being. Isabella writes: 'Sir Sidney is an angel! never did nature form so wonderful a creature ... Born to embellish society, Sir Sidney comes among us like a constellation' (1:266-7). In retrospect, these passages are highly ironic. Isabella is right. Nature could never form 'so wonderful a creature,' as Sidney is an unnatural fabrication. But her comment does call into question the relationship between the 'natural' man and the constructed or artificial one. Here Robinson shows how easily gender identity can be staged or enacted. As Cullens notes, 'it is not bodies in the flesh, described in their corporeal specificity, that are the object of inspection in this novel; rather, it is the significatory categories that they embody, by which they are invested, predicated, and assigned a social place in "the eyes of the world. '"32 Sidney's description also raises the issue of the desirable qualities in a man of high society. The skills for which s/he is admired are a combination

Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 49 of what was traditionally taught to males and what was taught to females. A conservative thinker such as Hannah More argued that women and men should have distinct spheres: 'Women ... never understand their own interests so little, as when they affect those qualities and accomplishments, from the want of which they derive their highest merit ... Greater delicacy evidently implies greater fragility; and this weakness, natural and moral, clearly points out the necessity of a superior degree of caution, reitrement and reserve.'33 Sidney's upbringing has clearly violated what More would consider women's 'natural' delicacy and fragility since s/he 'was expert at all manly exercises.' S/He seems to excel artistically, linguistically, and physically, which suggests that traditional cultural divisions of what was considered suitable for the feminine and the masculine mind or body may need to be revised. As Marjorie Garber writes, 'one of the most important aspects of cross-dressing is the way in which it offers a challenge to easy notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of "female" and "male," whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural.'34 Thus, Sidney's straddling of both masculine and feminine arts breaks down customary boundaries between the two. Similarly, Sidney's observations about women, articulated as they are when s/he is believed to be a man, bring up questions about male and female desire. Sidney contends: 'woman is a charming creature, provided she has her way; a gentle associate where she has the power to command; a kind friend where there is no prospect of rivalry: and yet there is no living out of their society. Wherever I go, I make woman my companion; whatever I meditate, I consult a woman: in short, when I abandon the sex I must cease to live; for existence will not be worth preserving when woman is forgotten' (I: 2756). Does Sidney find woman a 'charming creature' from the perspective of a man or from that of a woman, or both? In what context does s/he favour women as companions? Sidney's position here as that of what Garber calls a ' third sex'35 unsettles conventional binary thinking about sexual differences and, perhaps, even sexual preferences. As Garber notes, 'transvestism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element

that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself.'36 While I am not suggesting that Robinson was consciously writing about lesbian desire, this particular scene does challenge our easy assumptions about the attraction of 'opposite' sexes and underscore the strength of female bonds. Adrienne Rich points out that 'literature which depicts woman bonding and woman identification' is 'essential for female survival.'37 She writes: 'Woman identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead

50 Empowering the Feminine of female power, curtailed and contained under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women's passion for women, women's choice of women as allies, life companions, and community, the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other,. '38 In

Walsingham Sidney is able to establish a community of women around her in whom she confides. She persuades Isabella to give up her romantic interest in Walsingham, and later does the same with Lady Arabella. It is interesting to note that Sir Sidney prefers female companions as long as s/he is in male disguise, but when his/her gender is finally revealed, s/he surrenders Isabella's companionship to become Walsingham'swife. For her part, Isabella is hastily married off to the foolish, but harmless, Lord Kencarth. The pattern seems to suggest the difficulties of women bonding under a heterosexual and patriarchal matrix. In order to fit in with patriarchal society's notion of useful members of the community, women are forced into giving up their female companions, and encouraged to focus exclusively on becoming good wives. Following this pattern of loss, Sidney is forced to relinquish some of the skills that had made him/her such a stellar man. One character notes: 'The amiable Sidney has been educated in masculine habits; but every affection of her heart is beautifully feminine; heroic though tender; and constant, though almost hopeless. She will, nevertheless, demand some time to fashion her manners to the graces of her sex' (IV: 388). In the final pages of the novel, Walsingham reports with some satisfaction that 'so completely is she changed, so purely gentle, so feminine in manners; while her mind still retains the energy of that richly-treasured dignity of feeling which are the effects of a masculine education, that I do not lament past sorrows' (IV: 398). The forced and hasty conclusion of the union between Sidney and Walsingham, who has previously not thought of his cousin as anything but a rival for Isabella, seems somewhat of a compromise in terms of the possibilities of gender transgressions suggested in the novel. Having already given her heroine a 'masculine education' and having proved that a woman was capable of such an education, Robinson does not carry through with the political implications of her cross-dressed character. That she was aware of the inequalities in the system of education is evident in an essay she published two years after Walsingham. In Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, Robinson writes: 'Custom, from the

earliest periods of antiquity, has endeavoured to place the female mind in the subordinate ranks of intellectual sociability. WOMAN has ever been considered as a lovely and fascinating part of the creation, but her claims to

Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 51 mental equality have not only been questioned, by envious and interested sceptics; but, by a barbarous policy in the other sex, considerably depressed, for want of liberal and classical cultivation.'39 In Walsingham this kind of feminist thinking is implicitly present but not explicitly stated.40 In the same manner, Robinson's depiction of the male character, Walsingham, can be seen as an attempt to rewrite, albeit briefly, the norms of masculinity. For Walsingham is not the typical gallant but a sensitive and marginal figure. He is like the man of sentiment in Laurence Sterne's A Sentirnentaljourney (1768) and Henry Mackenzie's The Man ofFeeling (1771).

In contrast to other men in the novel, such as the Duke of Heartwing, Wralsingham is forever aiding the weak and abandoned. In his youth, he rescues an old horse, Match'em (I: 92); later he saves a spaniel from being drowned (I: 112). In both these cases, Walsingham sympathizes with the unfortunate creature, much like himself, who has been supplanted by another. In his travels, he aids a stranger who is forced to flee his home (II: 77); he pardons a highwayman who attempted to rob him, and subsequently, even pays for a surgeon to to take care of him (III: 173). Walsingham reads novels of sensibility and compares his plight to characters from Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise (III: 329). On the one hand, Robinson can be seen as merely recreating a highly conventional literary figure, that of the man of feeling. Walsingham's emotional state is typically sentimental. He shows an 'ideal sensitivity to - and spontaneous display of - virtuous feelings, especially those of pity, sympathy, benevolence, of the open heart as opposed to the prudent mind.'41 In the tradition of novels like David Simple and The Vicar ofWakefield, Walsingham is, in Janet Todd's words, 'a single hero ... opposed to the expanse of a hostile society, and, while the sentimental Humean virtues of benevolence and tenderness are indeed the basis of human worth and fellowship, these virtues on the whole occur defensively and impotently and their possession always creates the victim.'42 On the other hand, Robinson can be said to be reconfiguring masculine character at the same time as she was questioning the limits placed on the female sex. For according to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, sensibility could be a beneficial and moral quality because it creates feelings of empathy with the sufferer.43 Sensibility in the novel is most strongly associated with Walsingham, while many female characters seem completely devoid of it. Gerard Barker explains that 'since sympathy thus depends upon our own impressions, those who possess the keenest sensitivity tend to be most responsive and likely most compassionate, even to extremes.'44 At the time she was writing the novel, Robinson herself was suffering from a severe case of rheumatism and depression. Her illness would also account for the

52 Empowering the Feminine sense of unmitigated sorrow that permeates Walsingham's narrative.45 Robert Bass says that 'Walsingham was Mary's confessional,' and that 'the details as well as the attitudes' of a number of scenes in the novel 'came from the author's own experience.'46 What is interesting in terms of the gender issues I have been discussing is the gender reversal in the novel, where the male protagonist enacts the scenes of sympathy and suffering. It is Walsingham, and not a female character who speaks for Robinson. In addition, he identifies his character with nature, as he stresses repeatedly that he is 'the child of nature' as opposed to one brought up in the 'artificial scenes of life' (1:201). Nature, traditionally feminized, is thus associated now with a male character who is then able to empathize with the oppressed, and to perform virtuous action. However, nature is also deemed responsible for some of Walsingham's other actions. At one point in the novel Walsingham explains what he means by the 'pupil of nature': 'my mind was permitted to form its bent, before I had judgment to discriminate the paths which led to reputation or dishonour. I rushed forward, blind and impetuous: the present impulse guided me; the future pang of compunction was neither feared nor anticipated' (I: 252). In this case, nature is equated with spontaneity of feeling and action, much like the way Wordsworth describes his youthful appreciation of nature in 'Tintern Abbey.'47 He opposes 'natural passions' to the 'dictates of reason and reflection' (III: 271). Nature in Walsingham seems to be linked in this case to passion and to impulse versus studied action or culture. Sometimes this force of nature leads Walsingham to foolish actions, to 'error' (III: 272). What is interesting about this dichotomy is that in Walsingham it is not the female characters, but the male Walsingham who embodies this impulsive behaviour. Traditionally, it is women who are associated with passion, while men are linked to reason and order.48 In the context of the various gender displacements in the novel, this association of the male with emotions and sensibility signals a further destabilization of assumptions about gender differences, about what is 'natural,' and how subjects are represented. Politically, the question of what role emotions or passion should play in women's lives was of crucial importance. William Godwin, in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, believed that societies should be based on reason rational thought. At first, radical women writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, were enticed by his tenets and they both even tried to practise living their lives based on reason.49 However, by the later part of the 1790s, it was becoming evident that reason could not be the sole criterion of action. Walsingham reflects Robinson's particular engagement with the

Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 53 philosophical debates of the time. Although Robinson was cited by the Reverend Richard Polwhele as an 'unsex'd' female along with Wollstonecraft, Hays, Helen Maria Williams, and others, her support of French republicanism and Godwinian philosophy was more implicit than direct.50 For example, while Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, condemned the education of women because it contributed to women's weakness, Robinson never outrightly rejected emotion or sensibility in the same way. Wollstonecraft argued that women's 'senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected... they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility.'51 Asjerome McGann notes, 'Robinson wants to argue with Wollstonecraft about the social, philosophical, and intellectual power of "sensibility" ... what she contests is Wollstonecraft's recurrent tendency to denigrate the importance of "passion," "love," and the philosophy of sensibility that underpins those ideas and experiences.'52 In Walsingham there are a number of statements that suggest the limitations of philosophy. For instance, Sidney, quoting Rochefoucauld, tells Walsingham, 'Philosophy, with all its boasted powers, cannot subdue the miseries of affection; it may triumph over past ills, or those that are approaching; but present sorrows seldom fail to triumph over philosophy' (II: 55). Robinson's attitude is a practical one. She believes that life and experiences, including the disappointments from affection, are the best teachers of philosophy. Walsingham meditates at one point: 'The falsehood and folly of the world does more towards forming a perfect philosopher than all the pedantry of scholastic knowledge obtained in the cell of an anchoret, or the gloom of a cloister. Man may ruminate in the still sequestered scenes of life; but extensive knoweldge and proportionate disgust for the mazy miseries of this sublunary sphere, can only be acquired and justly founded on an extensive intercourse with society. The citizen of the world is the only true philosopher: he examines without prejudice; he judges from experience' (II: 199). For this reason, the reviewer, Mr Gnat, is made an object of ridicule when he tries to explain to others what is meant by the 'new philosophy.' Asked to define it, he can only say, 'The new philosophy is - In short, it is not the old philosophy' (II: 269). Mr Gnat has written 'A Treatise on Things Incomprehensible,' but he is universally disliked, and confesses that he seldom reads 'more than ten pages of any book that is not written by one of [his] literary association' (II: 259,272). Mr Gnat is a poor philosopher because he has not experienced firsthand the vicissitudes of life the way Walsingham has. Indeed, if one examines the novel, much of the impetus of the narrative comes from strong emotions, sensibility, or what can be termed as female desire. It is, first of all, the affection of Rosanna that causes Walsingham to

54 Empowering the Feminine commence his memoirs, which comprise the body of the text. She pleads with Walsingham to write by quoting a passionate letter written by Heloise to Abelard in which the heroine expresses her longing to unite her sorrows with that of her lover (1:17). Nicola Watson has pointed out the importance of La Nouvelle Heloise for the novels of this period. In particular, Watson notes that Rousseau's Julie exemplified 'the complex of desire and transgression upon which the narrative of revolution, in the1790sand thereafter, is founded.'53 This complex of female desire and transgression permeates much of Walsingham with varying results. One contemporary reviewer of the novel found the women 'altogether contemptible.'54 The reason for this comment is that women such as the scheming servant, Judith Blagden, Lady Aubrey, and the immoral Lady Emily Delvin are the arch-villains of the novel. No male character is shown to wield as much power as these women. Lord Linbourne and Walsingham, who are villainous in that they both seduce women, are either severely punished, by death in Linbourne's case, or become extremely remorseful of their action. It is the women whose desires cause them to become manipulative to the point of transgressing the normative values of society that are most disturbing in the novel. While my intention is not to condone the actions of Judith Blagden and Lady Aubrey, it is possible to view them in a more sympathetic light than the reviewer has. Blagden, in particular, who is depicted as a heartless monster whose diabolical plan deprives Walsingham and his uncle, Colonel Aubrey, of their rightful inheritance, is herself a woman who has been seduced and abandoned in her early years. While she has been called a 'fury' who is 'the origin of every misery, of every impending calamity that threatens' the Aubrey family (IV: 317-18), she is nevertheless linked, through her story and by the similarity in her initials and name, to the unfortunate and lovely Julie de Beaumont. Judith andjulie are both RousseauveanJulies who have given in to their desires. Judith's youthful liaison with Walsingham's father, Arthur Ainsforth, resulted in her illegitimate son, Edward (IV: 362), while Julie's affections were won by Lord Linbourne at a time when she was the protegee of Lady Emily Delvin (II: 192). Both women were victims of sensibility, but chose to deal with their plight differently -Judith by vengeance, andjulie through quiet suffering. Julie's emotional speech, which evokes pity in Walsingham, could apply to Judith as well. She asks, 'Whither can I go? Society will not receive a fugitive, who has violated every law of propriety' (II: 184). She explains, 'Few women err from innate depravity. We are generally the victims of credulity, affection, or that childish vanity which is a part of our existence' (II: 185-6). The point of the association between two such dissimilar women is that they are both rendered desperate not only by the

Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 55 men who abandon them, but also by a system that does not permit them either to seek justice or to fulfil their dreams of marriage. Read in this context, Judith Blagden becomes less contemptible, and becomes an object of pity. If, as Chris Cullens has argued, the novel highlights the way women are caught in 'the masquerade of womanliness,' Blagden engineers her own masquerade to counter it. Since power and economic security were not available to Blagden through the customary channel of marriage to a respectable man, she secures them, and a future for her son, by perverse means. Ifnotall the female characters are likeable, what is striking about the male characters in Walsingham is that, for the most part, they are rather ineffectual. The two most respected male figures in the book, Mr Randolph and Mr Hanbury, are excellent models and give Walsingham good advice, but they are curiously absent when Walsingham is in trouble. The benevolent Mr Optic, as Walsingham notes, was 'already divided into a thousand parts, and each devoted to the throbbings of sympathy' (II: 289). Others are obvious satires of degenerate aristocrats, such as Linbourne, the Duke of Heartwing, and Lord Kencarth. Dr Pimpernel is a quack and an unscrupulous womanizer. His opinions about women epitomize the chauvinistic attitudes of the period. He says, for instance, 'Men should assert their rights —women grow saucy - must be taken down - only invented to amuse the lords of the creation - no business to write. Arrogant husseys!' (II: 279). He believes that women are only of value 'from fourteen to five-and-thirty: - all beyond that age should die. But man! the grand creature man! should live for ever! - A man at the age of sixty is the glowing zenith of mental and corporeal beauty!' (III: 109). These kinds of attitudes are what the women have to combat, and it is not altogether surprising that they resort to such extreme measures to get their way. Finally, the most obvious point Robinson makes about gender roles is the way patriarchy systematically discriminates between men and women. The whole plot of the novel - the secrets, Walsingham's real and imagined sorrows - revolves around the fact that as a woman, Sidney stands to lose her father's estate and most of the money, while as a man, s/he inherits all. The novel questions the practice of patrilineage by showing how being born male is simply an accident of birth, and not a right in its own. It demonstrates the arbitrarv nature of the way the culture distributes class and social privileges. Authority, money, and status are given by society to those who wear the right clothes, not those who deserve them. Walsingham reveals how this clothed body becomes the site of contested ideologies about gender identity. It reveals the way economic and social power is distributed to male bodies, or bodies that masquerade as males. Robinson's use of an effeminized

56 Empowering the Feminine male body and a masculinized female body demonstrates the unnatural aspects and instability of sociocultural constructions of gender that in turn are the basis for the deployment of wealth and power in late eighteenthcentury British society.

3

Fathers as Monsters of Deceit: Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend

'Your father, Gertrude, was a monster of deceit, a false friend, and an enemy to virtue.' The False Friend (II: 49)'

Mary Robinson's The False Friend, published in February 1799, was written at a time when the author was at an emotional and physical low point in her life. She had been through a period of illness and convalescence atEnglefield Green, near Windsor, in the summer of 1798. Her companion and friend for more than sixteen years, Banastre Tarleton, had just announced his marriage to twenty-two-year-old Susan Priscilla Bertie in December 1798. Susan Bertie was the natural daughter of Robert Bertie, Duke of Ancaster, and speculations about the fortune that she possessed varied from £12,000 to £30,000. Disappointed, Robinson wrote The False Friend, which featured Tarleton as the villainous plotter and libertine Mr Treville. Readers of the daily prints recognized the original at once. The Oracle of 28 February 1798 noted: 'Mrs. Robinson's charming new book has a very ancient title, and is on a very old subject... and as the days of chivalry are no more, Bravery in theField is not always accompanied by Fidelity in the Closet.'2 Given this biographical context, it is not surprising that one of the novel's main themes is that of treachery or 'false friends,' who are depicted primarily, though not exclusively, as male figures. The whole of The False Friend has a a nightmarish and Gothic-like quality, with repetitions of scenes of dishonesty, cruelty, mistaken identities, and corrupt morals. Undoubtedly, these scenes caused the reviewer in the Analytical Review to comment that 'the story appears to us wild, romantic, abounding in inconsistency and improbability; the characters, in general, overcharged.'3

58 Empowering the Feminine In this chapter, I want to look at The False Friend not for its verisimilitude, as many contemporary reviewers did, but for what it reveals about the end of the decade according to Robinson's view. The novel ought not to be read as an attempt at realism but as a particular vision of the time, in the same way as, say, William Blake's poetic visions. Its disillusionment and darkness have much in common with novels like Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman; and Mary Hays's The Victim of Prejudice, both published

towards the end of the 1790s. I wish, in particular, to explore, through an ideological reading of The False Friend, Robinson's involvement with the radical side of the 'war of ideas'4 that was still raging in England in the 1790s and early 1800s. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, whom her heroine calls a 'champion' of our sex {FalseFriend II: 78), Robinson distrusted Edmund Burke's belief in patriarchy, his unquestioned elevation of the male as the 'monarch' of every British household. While in Thoughts on the Condition of Women she boldly asserts that women 'are not the mere appendages of domestic life, but the partners, the equal associates of man' (3), in her novel TheFalse Friend, the strong feminist stance is muted. The novel seems to be couched in the language of sensibility, and its Gothic elements seem to be unnecessarily exaggerated. However, it is the very discrepancy between the powerful authority of father figures and the helplessness of the languishing virgin daughter that highlights the vulnerability of women. The fact that almost every patriarchal figure encountered by the heroine, Gertrude St Leger, turns out to be a monster, a 'false friend,' and a potential rapist suggests the precariousness of woman's situation. Gertrude's domestic story, with its overtones of incest, its plot of abduction, imprisonment, and forced marriage, becomes a political statement about the ways in which the role of the father and, by analogy, all male figures of authority could be misused. In The False Friend, though he is tyrannical, the patriarch remains the allencompassing and dominating figure for the daughter. The predominance of the father-daughter relationship or of a powerful male and helpless female relationship is in many ways indicative of a revealing pattern in Robinson's own life, as well as in her other works. Robinson had a series of relationships with promising men who turned out to be disappointing. Her husband, Thomas Robinson, who pretended to be a gentleman of substance when he courted her, turned out to be a penniless bastard. He spent money recklessly, kept a mistress, and the couple ended up in debtors' prison. Tarleton, who gambled heavily, left her in 1797 when she was crippled and had difficulty moving her limbs and joints. By the late 1790s, Robinson, paralysed from the waist down, turned increasingly to writing as a means of consolation and financial support for herself, her daughter, and her wid-

Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 59 owed mother.5 In his examination of her Lyrical Tales (1800), Stuart Curran notes that 'the common theme of Robinson's pathetic poetry is a sudden and total displacement of the stabilities on which existences depend.'6 Her last works in prose reflect this same sense of displacement and disenchantment. Yet she still maintained a strange, tenacious desire for the ideals of domesticity, a belief in males as figures of authority despite her anger and disappointment. In The False Friend, for example, she creates a compelling patriarchal figure, Lord Denmore, who reassuringly tells the heroine, 'I will be your friend, your protector' (II: 53). Yet for most of the novel he abandons Gertrude to her excessive sensibility, her naivete, and the machinations of fortune hunters and Gothic seducers. Like Mary Wollstonecraft in Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman,7 Robinson seems to be working out her ambivalent feelings towards what Mary Poovey, in another context, calls 'romantic idealism,'8 and towards the expectations of the patriarchal family. The French Revolution of 1789 had inspired many radicals such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays to envision possibilities of change in the domestic as well as the public sphere.9 As Edmund Burke pointed out in his Reflections on the Revolution in France a 'revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions'10 had begun with the removal of the king and queen of France from their palace in Versailles. Though Robinson did not openly show her support for the Republicans in the same way as Wollstonecraft did, in The False Friend she engages in the debate about the unavoidable changes in the nature of the domestic family after the feminist controversy of the early 1790s. As Anne Mellor notes, 'many women writers of the Romantic era ... explicitly or implicitly advocated "family politics" as a political program that would radically transform the public sphere.'11 Though The False Friend is subtitled'a domestic story,' then, it is very much concerned with large social issues, such as the importance of affection in marriages, the imbalance of power in the family, the limited sphere of women, and the responsibility of fathers and other figures of authority. One pervasive theme of The False Friend is excessive female sensibility, which was a subject also treated by other writers of the 1790s such as Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Jane West, Amelia Opie, and Mary Hays.12 As we have seen in Walsingham, for Robinson, a man or woman's capacity to feel strong emotions, to be sympathetic, was not altogether a negative quality, as it enabled him or her to perceive and to write about what others could not. However, sensibility became problematic, particularly for a woman, when she was not able to get beyond feeling, or when the man upon whom her emotions were lavished was a worthless individual. At one point Robinson writes

60 Empowering the Feminine of the positive side of sensibility: 'If the proud could be taught to feel, how often would they blush at the miseries they inflict; how severely would compunction chastise them for the pangs which they teach the unfortunate to experience' (I: 28). Gary Kelly notes that the 'liberal reforming element of the culture of Sensibility was clearly recognized as subversive by Anti-Jacobin British writers in the 1790s.'13 The heroine, Gertrude, like Robinson herself, is praised for the 'delicacy of her sentiments, and the ingenuousness of her temper' (II:170).Yet this sensibility is what eventually leads to Gertrude's destruction. She notes: 'If we permit one object to influence every thought, to control every sentiment, to usurp an undivided dominion over our subjugated faculties ... whether that object be the lover or the friend ... he holds the reins of government over our senses' (II: 181). Gertrude feels that she has become the dupe of her affections: 'I have nourished the poison till it has pervaded the innermost recesses of my heart, till it has infected the source of thought' (II: 183). The problem that Robinson illustrates in The False Friend and in her Thoughts on the Condition of Women is the discrepancy between a woman's capacity for powerful feeling and her inability to act according to her emotions or insights. This was a difficulty Mary Hays also explored in Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). Hays intended her heroine Emma, the 'offspring of sensibility,' to be a singular 'warning,' rather than an 'example' for her readers.14 Robinson makes no such claim, and quite often Gertrude's voice seems to echo that of her own, taking a stance on sensibility that was not atypical of other female writers of her time. GJ. Barker-Benfield notes that many of the novels of the period of the French Revolution until 1814 'upheld the notion that sensibility was a positive female characteristic when it was combined with mind and will, albeit will for self-governance ... so many works personifying sense and sensibility in characters' suggest 'the widespread existence of conflict within women, parallel to the attacks made on them by men, between a sensibility governed by reason and a sensibility dangerously given over to fantasy and the pursuit of pleasure.'15 In her works, Robinson demonstrates how sensibility can make women painfully aware of their own conditions without necessarily being able to alleviate their domestic problems. She complains, 'Woman is to endure neglect, infidelity, and scorn: she is to endure them patiently... she is to have no passions, no affections' {Condition, 77). In many instances in The False Friend, women become victimized because they are not able to deal with the lack of sensibility, with the deceit and indifference that Robinson sees as inherent in the fashionable world in which they live. The reality of these women's lives does not meet some of the romantic expectations nourished by their sensibility and fantasy.

Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 61 Linked to this concern about sensibility is the effect it had on women's relationship with men, particularly those men who take advantage of their capacity for emotions and feeling. 'False friends' is a motif repeated in the novel to suggest its importance. Aside from the heroine, a number of other women are ruined by their misplaced affections for treacherous male figures. For example Gertrude says of Lady Denmore: 'She was the victim of an unconquerable passion; the susceptibility of her mind was the ruin of her prospects, the bane of her reputation, and the undermining of her repose for ever ... she sacrificed all that was dear to woman, for a wretch who was practised in all that was despicable in man' (II: 314-16). Similarly, another woman, Mary Ashgrove, dies the 'victim' of her lover's 'falsehood' (IV: 73). When Mary Ashgrove realizes 'that all the affections of her heart were devoted to such a monster,' Gertrude remarks: 'there is no sensation more painful to the feeling mind, than the consciousness of idolizing a being, whose depravity should render him an object of detestation' (IV: 76). Implicitly these narratives within narratives, which seem to mirror each other, criticize a system wherein females are taught to place all their hopes upon unfaithful or false men. Treville, depicted as a monstrous and unscrupulous seducer of innocent women, is compared to Richardson's Lovelace (II: 172). The heroine laments that women are susceptible to the machinations and charms of such a man: 'Sentiment forms no part of his attachment; all the claims of esteem, generosity, and friendship, sink subdued before the ruling power of self-gratification ... These are the despots who hold us in a state of bondage! who call themselves our idolators, till the caprice of their natures prove their apostasy. Created to protect us, they expose us to every danger; endowed with strength to sustain our erring judgment, they are ever eager to mislead us. Formed to fascinate our senses, thev govern them at pleasure ... O man! thou pleasing, subtle, fawning, conquering foe! thou yielding tyrant! thou imperious slave! What language can describe thee?' (II: 93—4). As Robinson says, 'woman, persecuted WOMAN, was taught to find her most relentless enemy, in that being, whom nature designed to cherish and protect her' (IV: 231). Interestingly, Robinson criticizes the way women are 'taught' to find help from unreliable men, but she goes along with the belief that men ought to 'protect' women by nature.' That is, she does not wish to overturn the premises of the patriarchal system; she only chastises those who do not follow its chivalric codes. The world that Robinson depicts in The False Friend is a world of 'destabilization and excess,' qualities that Elizabeth Napier associates with the Gothic, a form ' centrally concerned with problems of power, authority, and

62 Empowering the Feminine institutional oppression.'16 The emotions aroused by Robinson's narrative are similar to those found in Gothic novels: a mixture of terror, artifice, and luxury,' heightened in 'moments of moral and spiritual decay, or of vulnerability and threat.'17 Robinson shows the upper classes and aristocrats in a decadent state of irresponsibility. Old values and traditions have eroded, and have been replaced by dubious new ones. Lord Denmore speaks of a time 'when women were sincere, and men deserving! when wives made domestic happiness their study, and the honour of a husband's name was their certificate for virtue and discretion' (II: 129). His wife reminds him, however, that in those days husbands 'did not pass their nights in clubs, their days with wantons; they were not ashamed of domestic virtue; neglectful of domestic happiness' (II: 130). She complains that the new system teaches women to 'cherish deceit, indifference, vanity, contempt, and scorn' (II: 130). Robinson's argument is that men are accountable for the 'destructive follies' and excesses of women: 'While they grow bold in the defence of vice, and timid in the cause of virtue, how can they hope that a weak, frail, feeling, and neglected woman has power to oppose deception, or to resist the pleasures of a world on which she is thrown defenceless?' (II: 131-2). This passage reveals the extent and limitations of Robinson's critique in the novel. While she lashes out against men who are unreliable and who misuse their authority, she does not extend her condemnation to include the way in which women are artificially made subordinates of men in her society. Here she still subscribes to the cultural construction of woman as the weak and frail being who must look to men for protection. This sentiment is echoed in Thoughts on the Condition of Women: 'though it be readily allowed that the primary requisites for the ruling powers of man, are strong mental faculties; woman is to be denied the exercise of that intuitive privilege, and to remain inactive, as though she were the least enlightened of rational and thinking beings. What first established, and then ratified this oppressive, this inhuman law? The tyranny of man; who saw the necessity of subjugating a being, whose natural gifts were equal, if not superior to his own' (55). The language used in the essay - words such as 'oppressive,' 'tyranny,' 'subjugating' - are reminiscent of Mary Wollstonecraft's revolutionary rhetoric.18 As the reviewer for the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine sarcastically remarks, the writer of the tract 'belongs to the "legion of Wollstonecrafts," whose office it is to "undermine poison.'''19 The language shows Robinson's awareness of the sense of injustice in the way gender roles are constructed, and establishes her, at least in the minds of the conservatives, as a disciple of the better-known vindicator of woman's rights. This alliance with Mary Wollstonecraft was by this time not an altogether flattering one. In his review of The False Friend, Dr Bisset observed:

Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 63 [ Robinson presents] a morbid sensibility; a constitution, or state of mind; rarely to be found among the virtuous and wise. If we once open a door to feeling as the excuse of every action which it may produce, we may bid farewell to morality, to order, and to every thing valuable in society. Mary Wollstonecraft could plead her feelings in justification of her concubinage and her attempted suicide. Most females who began their career in the same way, and who may have afterwards arrived at a more advanced stage of profligacy, might plead their feelings as a justification of their conduct... Perfectly coinciding with Mrs Robinson, that sentiment, to a certain degree, is necessary to virtue and to happiness, we cannot help thinking that she, very probably without intending it, inculcates sensibility much farther than is beneficial, and so far as would be hurtful to its votaries.20 Though this reviewer does not mention it, one of the most disturbing, and also most fascinating elements in the novel is the attraction Gertrude feels for her guardian, Lord Denmore. According to Gertrude, her sensibility is the reason for her strong feelings for the man who later confesses to be her biological father. It is the transgressive act par excellence in the novel, which is not condemned by the narrator. At seventeen, when Gertrude meets her guardian for the first time, he awakens in her desires she has never known. To her friend, she writes, 'My heart palpitated with a fervour of affection, almost agonizing. I never before experienced any thing like it... It is impossible to describe the effect which Lord Denmore's humour produces on my mind: the waverings of his temper seem like the thermometer which raises or depresses my spirits almost with a magical, and ... with a sympathetic dominion' (I: 36-7). In her essay on Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, Robinson's The False Friend, and Mary Shelley's Mathilda, Susan Allen Ford observes that 'these fictions of fatherdaughter incest all share a plot powered by forbidden desire, a characteristic definition - and then redefinition - of both daughter and father, a significantly absent mother, and a rhetoric of incest that develops through spatialization as well as through the suppression of speech ... the involuted matrix of family relationships charts the disruptive connections between sexuality and power, figuring this forbidden desire as threat to the family, to the society, and to the very self.'21 This half-articulated, forbidden love is the one immoral act that Gertrude unknowingly perpetrates as a result of her youth and acute sensibility. There are several reasons for Gertrude's incestous desire for her guardian and father. In psvchoanalytic terms, Gertrude's case fits in with Freud's theories about female libidinal development. In his 1931 essay on 'Female Sexuality. Freud argued that after a young girl becomes aware of her castrated

64 Empowering the Feminine state, she desires a penis, and turns to her father as her object. For Freud, this pattern was the 'normal female attitude,' or the 'feminine form of the Oedipus complex. '22 If, like Lacan, we interpret the phallus as a symbol of social and economic power rather than as a literal organ, this explanation becomes very plausible. For Gertrude is a supposed orphan who has been schooled in relative isolation in Ireland at Lord Denmore's expense. For her, he represents the family that she has not known, hence love, as well as wealth, position, and power. In addition, he is a man of mystery, and his equivocal words lead Gertrude to misunderstand his feelings for her. Early on in the novel, he tells her, 'I begin to fear that you are too amiable, too interesting. I shall love you more than I ought' (I: 33). Because she does not know about his actual relationship to her, she does not understand why he pays so much attention to her. She muses, 'Why am I left in this magnificent abode? Why treated as its mistress; respected, served, obeyed? What claim have I upon Lord Denmore's bounty? Apromise pledged to my dear lost parents. Why was that promise made?' (I: 156). Without the answers to these questions, she begins to interpret his love as romantic in nature and reciprocates it. In 'Three Essays on the Theory of Female Sexuality,' Freud notes that sexual love and non-sexual love for parents are 'fed from the same souces,' and that 'girls with an exaggerated need for affection and an equally exaggerated horror of the real demands made by sexual life have an irresistible temptation on the one hand to realize the ideal of asexual love in their lives and on the other hand to conceal their libido behind an affection which they can express without self-reproaches, by holding fast throughout their lives to their infantile fondness, revived at puberty, for their parents or brothers and sisters.'23 Gertrude is thus at that age when she is still confused about her own sexuality and desire. Her exaggerated sensibility is not the whole cause of her incestous feelings; it only makes her slightly more susceptible to Lord Denmore. A more important question that arises is for what purpose Robinson created this plot of incest and forbidden love. To a certain extent, Robinson was interested in exploring the nature of female desire here. She plays with a number of romance plots in The False Friend only to negate them, to reveal how illusory they are. For instance, at the beginning of the novel, Lord Denmore appears splendid like a prince or a knight in shining armour. Gertrude accidentally falls into a river, and he rescues her. In a trance-like state, she awakens, 'I heard such accents as made me doubt this sublunary scene, and fancy myself even in Elysium' (I: 26). Lord Denmore also functions as an Abelard figure, as Gertrude's tutor, when he educates her in his library. Gertrude gratefully acknowledges, 'Has he not taught me to analyze the human heart; to separate the dross of folly from the pure and solid ore of truth? Have I not explored the

Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 65 paths of virtue and philosophy, guided by his classic taste, and enlightened by the power of his intellectual pre-eminence?' (1:148).Ata later point the narrator observes of the heroine, 'How exquisitely would such a character be delineated by the pen of Rousseau; how worthy would she have been of such a lover as Petrarch; how nearly similar are her sorrows to those of the unfortunate Eloise!' (IV: 233). These intertextual references add pathos to the novel by revealing a world of imaginative potentials, fantasies, and desires that are no longer possible in Robinson's fallen world. In Robinson's view, those exquisite ages of chivalry, romance, and heroism are gone. Instead, one is left with domestic tragedy. The narrator concludes Gertrude's story by lamenting: 'in her eventfull history, you will read the dangerous consequences of DOMESTIC TREACHERY. You will also perceive the miseries attendant on that want of CANDOUR, which, while itenvelopes the fate of an illegitimate offspring in perpetual mystery, exposes the unconscious sufferer to the vicissitudes of a world, where the INNOCENT are too often punished for the vices of the GUILTY' (IV: 365). Only too aware of what could have been, Robinson contrasts those illusory worlds with Gertrude's state of thwarted desires. To reinforce her notion of the world as a disappointment, Robinson uses the instabilities of the Gothic landscape in her novel. Throughout The False Friend, Gertrude seems unable to take control of her life. She is carried, sometimes literally, from one scene of terror or humiliation to another. Rather than seeing this as Robinson's exploitation of the conventions of the Gothic, a mere attempt to get on the 'bestseller list,' I suggest that the damsel in perpetual distress becomes suggestive of woman's sense of helplessness and vulnerability in a society that accorded her little real economic and social power. Gertrude suffers from a series of mishaps: she is taken to Blonzely's and mistaken for a prostitute; people assume that she is Lord Denmore s mistress and mock her; the villain Treville, under whose care she is placed, attempts to seduce her a number of times. Because she is young and credulous, she becomes a target for the schemers: Blonzely tries to imprison her for debt; she is later kidnapped, and then narrowly escapes being raped by shooting at her assailant. Even the landlady, Mrs Ferret, with whom she takes refuge, robs her of her possessions. It is as if the whole world has become a scene of persecution for Gertrude. Teresa de Lauretis notes that violence against women is 'en-gendered,' and contrary to the 'dominant representation of violence as a "breakdown in social order,''' she proposes instead that 'violence is a sign of a power struggle for the maintenance of a certain kind of social order.'24 With this statement in mind, we can read the various acts of violence that Gertrude encounters as society's means of maintaining the status quo, that of ensuring that ayoung, unmarried woman

66 Empowering the Feminine remains a fearful, vulnerable, and delicate body. The values of marriage, the heterosexual family, and patriarchy are all implicitly reinforced as long as women believe that their best chances of being cared for and protected are within the traditional domestic family. For Robinson, the world in general is a cheat, where people wear masks to hide their inherent duplicity. Gertrude compares men to ravenous wolves that seek prey:'I have seen villains sanctioned by high patronage, even in the avowal of crimes, for which the lower orders of society would be eternally dishonoured. I beheld men, without sentiment, feeling, rectitude, or character, upheld in infamy; countenanced by the exalted, and even by the virtuous; their enormities concealed beneath the brazen mask of arrogance, and their violations of honour excused as the ebullitions of a glowing fancy' (II: 239). The aristocrats depicted in The False Friend are particularly callous and insensitive. For instance, Sir Hector believes that the world and all its inhabitants are created for his pleasure and gratification. 'We send a dozen black vagabonds up to Persia for our essences, and it is bad luck indeed, if out of twelve four does not return with his commission... But they were created for our use, therefore we never care what becomes of them: there's plenty to be found; they overrun the country as thick as blackberries' (I: 122). His attitude is decidedly imperialistic, as he confidently states,'The world was made for my gratification, you islanders know nothing of the luxuries of life ... No set of men are more generous than we props of the eastern world: look at the treasures we have transported from the mines of Asia; the stars that dazzle in the highest spheres! the blazing constellations, which, but for our industry would still lie buried in the mines of our terrestrial Elysium! we teach them to shine forth, to illumine ...' (I: 124-5). Sir Hector uses what David Spurr calls the 'rhetoric of affirmation in colonial discourse,' which is 'deployed on behalf of a collective subjectivity which idealizes itself variously in the name of civilization, humanity, science, progress, etc., so that the repeated affirmation of such values becomes itself a means of gaining power and mastery.'25 For Sir Hector, nature is there to be appropriated, and he makes use of the appeal that takes the form of 'absence that calls for affirming presence, of natural abundance that awaits the creative hand of technology.'26 This attitude of exploitation becomes even more frightening, as Sir Hector, who takes advantage of many women through the course of the novel, later acts as the Lord Justice before whom Gertrude has to plead her case. Gertrude meets him again as Lord Arcotwho says halfjokingly that 'women were born to be slaves' (IV: 99). Through him, Robinson links colonial attitudes and discourses to the enslavement ofwomen in England. That such a man is deemed

Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 67 a worthy character, and put in an office of legal authority, becomes a telling comment on the way race and gender were defined and valued in the society in which Robinson lived. Like Elizabeth Inchbald andjane West, particularly in novels such as Nature and Art (1796)27 and The History ofNedEvans (1796) ,28 Robinson believed that the nobility and upper classes were not fulfilling their social obligations and therefore not deserving of their high positions. One servant in The False Friend remarks: 'One expects more from great people, you know, Ma'am, than one does from common folks; and, truth can tell, we are often sadly disappointed' (IV: 196). Frequently in these novels that share a desire to reform society, common people are depicted as generous and intelligent beings while the rich and titled are idle and depraved. For example, in TheFalseFriend, while Gertrude takes refuge at Pew's parsonage, she notes the difference between the two worlds she has encountered: 'Here, simplicity and virtue grace the humble paths of life, attended by benevolence, and sustained by unaffected piety. There, all was dissimulation, vice, and folly; enw the predominating passion of the mind, and slander the promoter of even inquietude' (II: 241-2). As depicted in a number of works by revolutionary and Romantic writers, the upper classes are rapacious and lacking in integrity, while the simpler folks possess admirable qualities. Another way Robinson highlights the problems she perceived in a society ruled by fathers is by revealing the instability and volatility of many male characters, especially those who wield power. Throughout the novel, the strong incestuous love between Lord Denmore and his adolescent ward Gertrude casts a malignant shadow upon the character of this otherwise respected father-figure. Other examples of unscrupulous and capricious characters abound. People in the upper classes, for instance, frequently marry for selfish and ambitious reasons. Lord Melcomb 'wanted a rich wife; the Lady sighed for a titled husband' (I: 62). The shakiness of these family units is shown, as most of the relationships described at the beginning of volume 1 have dissolved by volume 4 of the novel. Men elope with their friends' wives; many have extramarital affairs. Late eighteenth-century fashionable society, as Robinson saw it, was a scene of perpetual chaos, reflecting its confused moral values. This view of the corrupt world of fashion similarly emerges in her essays entitled 'The Sylphid,' first published in the morning newspapers.29 The most distressing aspect of this moral chaos for women was that they were, more often than not, the susceptible victims of male desire and whims. Often this vulnerability lead to death. Following the convention of Gothic and sentimental novels, Robinson depicts a number of deathbed scenes in TheFalseFriend to create terror. But what is interesting is that most of the characters who die are women who languish as victims of

68 Empowering the Feminine misplaced passion. These women, unlike those in the novels of Ann Radcliffe, actually die in the course of the novel. That is, their deaths are notjust part of the imagined fears of the heroine. For example, Gertrude, upon entering a chamber in Denmore Castle'hung with ancient tapestry,'immediately associates it with death. She thinks, 'gigantic features on every side seemed to frown upon me: my bed looked like a funeral bier; my heart throbbed quick, and my tottering steps feebly bore me towards the door' (1:85). Here sexuality, as suggested by the bed, leads to death, to the funeral bier. This notion is affirmed, not contradicted, by Lord Denmore, who tells Gertrude shortly after, 'in this castle your mother perished! Within these walls, your father... saw her expire' (1:89). Unlike the novels of Radcliffe, there is no good male, no virtuous lover or kind father to counterbalance the tyrannical Lord Denmore. Indeed, women do notjust pass away in The False Friend, they are dismembered; they are in danger of being buried alive; or their bodies are desecrated. What remains of Gertrude's mother, who is for the most part unnamed and deliberately forgotten, is a bust of Sappho. This bust, along with the bust of Lord Denmore, exerts a macabre influence on Gertrude. She thinks, 'Sappho ... loved - she was deserted - she was the victim of an hopeless passion ... I recollected that she buried her burning bosom in the deep wave. I beheld the scene before me, and shivered with involuntary horror' (I: 169). Later, she accidentally touches the head of Sappho, causing it to shatter 'into a thousand pieces' (IV: 206). When a stranger tells her that her mother was the model for the Sappho bust, Gertrude returns to it: 'I endeavoured, with trembling hands, to select any feature, which might still be perfect; nor can myjoy be described, when I found that nearly the whole of the countenance had escaped destruction' (IV: 262). She then attempts to pay homage to it by kissing it, 'with a mixture of tenderness and awe; talked to it in the language of filial affection; pressed it to my bosom, and on my knees invoked the gentle spirit of my parent to sustain my soul, and soothe it into resignation' (IV: 262). This scene is suggestive of the natural bonds in society that have been broken. Gertrude has no access to her mother, to her maternal body, or to memories of her. Because of a sexual transgression committed in the past, all she has of her mother is a fragment of a severed head. The mother is reduced to a spectre who does not even have the power to appear before Gertrude. 'The castle clock struck twelve: each distinct vibration seemed to smite my heart, while I expected every instant to see the pale vision of my departed mother' (IV: 263). However, the mother does not appear, for it seems that she already lives through Gertrude, who shares her name and her looks. Another woman who is reduced to a cipher is Lady Denmore. Though only

Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 69 twenty-four years old at the beginning of the novel, she is plagued by insecurities and jealousy, takes poison, and is left for dead in her chamber. Again, what is fascinating in the way Robinson uses Gothic conventions is her association of sexuality, horror, and death. Just as Gertrude identifies with the bust of her mother, she sees herself in the fate of Lady Denmore. Upon entering Lady Denmore' s dressing room, she notes:' I felt a thrilling horror, which seemed to forbid my proceeding any farther ... The long glass, at which she always finished dressing, was before me; I beheld my own features, to which the light that I carried gave an additional paleness; I stood as though my feet were rooted to the ground; the house was as silent as the grave, and my blood seemed to freeze with the terrors which failed me' (I: 279). After inadvertently making a noise with Lady Denmore's harp, Gertrude hears a sigh from the deathbed, and discovers that Lady Denmore 'was still living' (1:282). This bizarre scene seems to be the opposite of the broken bust scene. In the former, Gertrude kills the image of an already dead mother. Here she revives a surrogate, or stepmother figure who is presumed dead. In both cases, there is a strong identification of the heroine with the mother-figure whose potentials are cut short. Gertrude's mother is associated with Sappho, who possessed 'gifts of mental preeminence' (I: 165), while Lady Denmore presumably plays the harp. Both women die because of their excessive passion for Lord Denmore. They suffer without actually having a chance to tell or sing their stories. It is as if Gertrude is the inheritor of these broken lives. She is the one destined to write out her life story and theirs, in the form of letters to her friend, Frances. But in doing so, she also must replicate the passions and the tragedies of her mothers. There is yet another, more macabre scene involving Lady Denmore's dying body and Gertrude that parallels this one. About halfway through the novel, when Gertrude escapes after being kidnapped, she finds Lady Denmore, who at this time is actually dying, in the presence of Treville, with whom she has eloped. Lady Denmore expires after making a will to Gertrude, and presenting her with a packet that will exonerate Gertrude. In the very room where Lady Denmore's body lay, Treville attempts to seduce Gertrude, asking her to marry him in order to get her bequest of twenty thousand pounds. Gertrude is repulsed: 'The bed on which she died, the chamber in which she closed the scene of mortal anguish, and the presence of the being whose unkindness had destroyed her, filled my mind with sensations so torturing, that reason began to sicken, and I was yielding myself to the dominion of despair' (II: 322). This scene explicitly links sexuality, horror, maternal effacement, and death. It is the fulfilment of what Gertrude sees in the mirror in Lady Denmore's chamber earlier. The body of the mother is used to render the body of the young daughter monstrous to herself. In a gruesome way, Gertrude's body is used

70 Empowering the Feminine literally as a substitute for the still warm, but now dead, body of her stepmother. Instead of being a site of maternal love and comfort, the mother's body in Robinson's world of perverted and false fathers becomes a site of abjection for Gertrude. In Julia Kristeva's words, 'Mother and death, both abominated, abjected, slyly build a victimizing and persecuting machine at the cost of which I become subject of the Symbolic as well as Other of the Abject.'30 Only by escaping the scene of maternal death and perverse sexuality, and only when Gertrude retrieves the packet given to her by Lady Denmore is she able to clear her name and take her place as Lord Denmore's daughter. What is striking about these scenes involving Gertrude's real mother and Lady Denmore is the way in which women are repeatedly silenced and obliterated. In the world of false fathers, female identities, female lives are shown to be vulnerable and ephemeral. If Gertrude speaks for Robinson, she seems pessimistic about the current state of her society. Gertrude says to Lord Arcotatone point: 'There is little chance of any species of reformation while the Church and State are in such hands as Mr Somerton's [Treville] and your Lordship's ... the poison of vice and folly must be eradicated by the thinking orders of mankind' (IV: 99). Furthermore, in a burst of feminist energy, Gertrude asserts: 'for woman, since she had been allowed the advantages of education, has proved that her intellects are in no degree inferior to those of man; and what she may want in strength of mind, she more than supplies by sentiment, taste, and imagination ... When women were confined to the dull occupations of domestic duty, men were mere despots; not loved, but feared; blessed, but not blessing. We have broke the destructive spell which manacled the mind; we are no longer the vassals of our imperious help-mates; we dare think; and we at length assert those rights which nature formed us to enjoy' (IV: 100-1). Despite this claim, which links her to the mature Robinson, Gertrude, however, remains imprisoned by her sentiments, by her incestuous affection for her adopted father.31 Though she realizes that what she feels for him is a 'fatal partiality' (:292), she is unable to control her feelings, as 'they are complicated even to the verge of insanity' (I: 296). Her fighting spirit is not sustained. She dies, like her mother and Lady Denmore, a 'victim of sensibility' (IV: 367). In contrast to these languishing female characters, the males seem to thrive and live for conquest. In addition to the ubiquitous Sir Hector, who later becomes Lord Arcot, there is the Reverend Treville, the Banastre Tarleton figure, who also takes on another identity by the end of the novel. After attempting to seduce Gertrude, intriguing with Miss Cecil, and eloping with Lady Denmore, Treville, whom the heroine compares to Richardson's Lovelace (II: 172), reappears under another name. As

Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 71 Somerton, he becomes the lover of Mary Ashgroves, whom he abandons, and who eventually dies of a broken heart. The changing identities of these men suggests their changeable and unstable natures. These erratic and irresolute males, Robinson shows, are not the solid and reliable upholders of domestic and national virtue as described by Edmund Burke. It is difficult to envision them as father-figures of the ideal English family. In Thoughts on the Condition of Women Robinson noted with irony the ambivalent nature of this role: 'Man who professes himself her champion, her protector, is the most subtle and unrelenting enemy she has to encounter' (26). The False Friend, published in the same year, illustrates through its numerous scenes of female victimization, many of the feminist ideas found in her essay. Ultimately, despite her virtuous intentions and character, the heroine in The False Friend is tormented and eventually overwhelmed by the machinations of those around her. Though she had earlier spoken of woman as man's equal' (II: 78), she is unable to live up to her beliefs. She is not strong enough to dissociate her sensibility from her reason, or to resist the forbidden passion she feels. She asks: 'Is there any magic sufficiently strong to rescue us from their power over our senses? ... For I am the slave of such a fascination. Like the bird that is enthralled, I struggle for freedom, and the more I struggle the stronger I am entangled' (II: 85). Thus, the novel seems to end with defeat and resignation. However, for feminist readers it is an important and liberating work, as it articulates in a powerful way a number of the injustices and wrongs suffered by women of the time. Its epistolary form gives voice to the intricate layers of a female subject who is perhaps not as long-suffering, consistent, and heroic as Rousseau's Helo'ise, to whom she is compared, but who is nevertheless an engrossing product of the revolutionary' and sentimental discourses of her time. Reading Robinson's novel in the context of her late works and personal experiences, one sees the complex social, historical, and literary limitations that an eighteenthcentury woman encountered in her attempts to grapple with many of the pervasive cultural ideologies of her time.

4 Recasting Exquisite Sensibility: Robinson's The Natural Daughter

'O child! that ["Virtue Rewarded"] is a work of such gothic antiquity, that we have nothad onecopyin our shop these twentyyears. Nobody would think of dosing over such dull lessons. If your mistress wants something to make her melancholy, I recommend, "Delicate Distresses," "Victims of Sensibility," "The Sorrows of Love," "The Deserted Wife.''1 The Natural Daughter (II: 42)

This comment about the current trends in novel reading is given by the bookseller Mr Index, a character in The Natural Daughter (1799). Published a year before the author's death, The Natural Daughter is one of Mary Robinson's most self-reflexive novels. There are numerous satiric and humorous observations about the kinds of fiction that attracted late eighteenth-century readers. As was common practice in the period, the novel is interspersed with bits of poetry, but it also has a character who becomes a novelist. Robinson's last novel does not force readers to acknowledge what Linda Hutcheon calls 'the artifice, the "art," of what he is reading' in the way postmodern fiction does, but it does make many playful references to other literary works and is very much aware of literary conventions.2 Though it is in part, as Robert Bass says, 'a thin, novelized autobiography,'3 more interestingly, it is a work that attempts to rewrite the traditional scripts for women found in sentimental fiction of the day. One of the most pervasive models for female behaviour was what Mary Wollstonecraft described in her Vindication oftheRights ofWomanas 'thatweak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners.'4 In this chapter, I show the ways in which The Natural Daughterrejects this construction of woman and attempts to create new narratives that empower the feminine subject.

Robinson's The Natural Daughter 73

Robinson attempts to recuperate the positive effects of female sensibility at a time when the anti-Jacobins were levelling virulent attacks against what they perceived as negative effects of excessive sensibility, as shown in the lives and works of a number of radical women of the 1790s. She explores alternative subject positions for women in a work that collapses boundaries between life and text, between autobiography, memoirs, and sentimental fiction. The Natural Daughter demonstrates both her continuing efforts to redefine women's role in society and the way she attempted to distinguish herself particularly from the example of Wollstonecraft's life, which was by then the subject of public condemnation. It also outlines her timorous engagement with the politics of the French Revolution and Englishjacobinism. The novel is set in April 1792, some seven years before its composition date. 1792 saw the publication of Robinson's first novel, Vancenza; or, The Dangers of Credulity and was the year when Tarleton and Robinson separated after what Robinson describes as 'ten long years of anxious sorrow' in her song 'Bounding Billow.'5 Mr Morely, the heroine's husband, is much like Tarleton; he later proves unfaithful and unworthy of his companion, and separates from her early in the novel. The heroine, like Robinson, had to find ways of supporting herself. Like one of the minor characters in the novel, Robinson travelled to France in the summer of1792and was detained there because of the revolution. She may also have chosen that year because the injustices of Marat and the September Massacres showed how even a worthwhile cause such as liberty could become problematic in practice. Her critique of court culture and aristocracy in her earlier works, such as The Widow; or, a Picture of Modern Times (1794), associated her with the radicals in the minds of the anti-Jacobins. Similarly, she was ridiculed by William Beloe in his Memoirs of a Sexagenarian (1817) as a follower of William Godwin. But she was not insensitive to the negative effects of the revolution. In the novel, the actress figure, Mrs Sedgley, notes:' though an idolater of Rational Liberty, I most decidedly execrated the cruelty and licentiousness which blacken the page of Time ... Every individual who shrinks from oppression, every friend to the superior claims of worth and genius, is, in these suspecting times, condemned without even an examination; though were truth and impartiality to influence their judges, they would be found the first to venerate the sacred rights of social order, and the last to uphold the atrocities of anarchy' (1:214-15). This sentiment is similar to that expressed in Robinson's poem The Progress of Liberty,' where she hails liberty as a 'rational delight,' and condemns Marat and Robespierre as 'two arch demons.'6 Scenes of'the excess of horror' in Paris where 'women were drest like Bacchanalians; and men like the frantic fiends of Pandemonium' (I: 205, 207) figure only

74 Empowering the Feminine momentarily in The Natural Daughter, but they underline the theme of the abuse of power. They also serve to create a backdrop of chaos and confusion, which Robinson felt was characteristic of the upper class and aristocracy of the time. The most important critique in the novel, however, is that of the heroine of sentiment. Mr Index's dismissal of Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded as 'a work of gothic antiquity' (II: 42) suggests that a girl who maintains her innocence was no longer a feasible model for women of the 1790s. The plot of 'virtue in distress' had to be recast in more pragmatic terms. What Robinson demonstrates in The Natural Daughter is that 'virtue' had a more complex and ambiguous meaning than merely that of a young lady keeping her virginity. In the dichotomy set up betweeen the heroine, Martha, and her sister, Julia, chastity does not figure as the main criterion of female virtue, but is only one aspect of what concerns the female subject. It is tempting to read Martha andjulia as representatives of what Austen might call sense and sensibility, or what Inchbald might call nature and art. These opposites hold true to a certain extent. However, Robinson makes the action of the novel sufficiently complicated that such distinctions are less than clear. Both Martha andjulia are influenced by eighteenth-century notions of sensibility, which, as Barker-Benfield has shown, were influential enough to affect medical discourses, consumerism, as well as literature and art.7 But the sensibility of the two heroines differs in kind and in practice. In the 1790s, sensibility, its excesses and its uses, were contentious subjects of debate among the radicals and the anti-Jacobins, as Chris Jones, Janet Todd, and Claudia L. Johnson have pointed out.8 Both sides were suspicious of sensibility, even though they recognized, following David Hume and Adam Smith, that sensibility was closely allied with sympathy, which moved one to compassion and benevolent social action.9 Claudia Johnson notes that at this time there was a 'masculinization of formerly feminine gender traits,' where writers such as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau validate 'male authority figures by representing them as men of feeling,' but the effect is that 'it also bars the women whose distress occasions their affective displays from enjoying any comparable moral authority by representing their affectivity as inferior, unconscious, unruly, or even criminal.'10 With Walsingham and in The Natural Daughter, Robinson demonstrates her awareness of the complexity of sensitivity and sentimentality as traits in women and men. In The Natural Daughter, the two sisters' names indicate their symbolic functions and their relation to sensibility. We remember that in Luke's gospel, Martha is the sister who fusses and serves (Luke 10: 40). In Robinson's novel, Martha, besides embodying aspects of the author's life, is the one

Robinson's The Natural Daughter 75 who acts upon her sympathies. Her sensibility moves her to benevolent action. In contrast, her sister, Julia, follows the tradition of the literaryjulies of the eighteenth century. She is a descendant of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie in La Nouvelle Heloise, of Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigne,11 Wollstonecraft's Maria in Wrongs of Woman, Hays' s Emma in Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and possibly even of the heroines from Robinson's earlier novels. Wollstonecraft's and Hays's heroines, though not christened Julie, both read about and modelled themselves after Rousseau's Heloise.12 Robinson knew Wollstonecraft and had made some critical remarks to her about the excessively contrived ending of Hays's first novel.13 In particular, what Robinson is reacting to is not so much the Julie who, as Janet Todd says, is the chaste, susceptible and unwilling wife,'14 but a heroine whose whole existence pivots on feeling or sentiment. Robinson herself had created a number of these protagonists in her novels. For example, in Walsingham the protagonist acknowledges, 'mine have been the errors of a too vivid imagination; the miseries of sensibility, acute, but not indiscriminate.'15 I argue that what Robinson is critiquing here is the woman whose whole conduct is based solely upon feeling. Julia becomes emblematic of the morally dubious heroine of sensibility as well as one who is rendered useless, frozen into inactivity by her too exquisite sensibility. Like Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Robinson disagrees with Rousseau's ideal woman, Sophie, who is engaging, charming, and is also described by the author as possessing an 'exquisite sensibility.'16 In The Natural Daughter, Robinson shows not just the inadequacies but also the dangers of the Rousseauvean model and attempts at the same time to vindicate her own and, to a lesser extent, Wollstonecraft's life and actions. The telling contrast between the Bradford sisters begins with their physical description. Martha is 'giddy, wild, buxom, good-natured, ... sincere ... she was gay, robust, and noisy' while Julia, tutored by a French governess, is 'small in stature; fair, delicately formed' (I: 5, 6). Though the novel was initially meant to reveal Susan Priscilla Bertie, the woman for whom Tarleton left Robinson, as the 'natural' or illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Ancaster, it became much more than an expose. As in Walsingham, the novel seems to be concerned equally about 'natural,' in the sense of uncorrupted and unaffected, versus artificial behaviour in women. In her Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft had warned of the 'false refinement, immorality, and vanity' that resulted from the education of young ladies: 'Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society.'17 In The Natural Daughter, Julia, who is a model of feminine excellence,' is contrasted with the 'unso-

76 Empowering the Feminine phisticated Martha,' who was sent to a 'country boarding-school for education' (I: 6-7). The prettyJulia has 'eyes soft and languishing,' and possesses a 'romantic tendency' and delicacy: 'she seemed, like the snow-drop, to droop at every breeze that the soft breath ofApril wafted through' (1:5-6). However, Robinson quickly demonstrates which of the two sisters is more worthy of our admiration. Early in the novel, when they meet a lame soldier during their travels, they are both affected by the incident, but react differently. Julia acts like the woman of feeling: 'At supper, Julia could not eat for thinking of the soldier's wounded arm' (I: 35). In contrast, Martha takes it upon herself to do something for him. Her deed is reminiscent of the biblical Good Samaritan's. The soldier, 'by the private order of Martha, had been lodged near the inn, and provided with a comfortable meal' (1:35). Evidently, what is needed in the situation is not elegance or delicacy, which is the response that young ladies are taught, but direct action, in this case an act of Christian charity. In the same way, Julia, schooled by sensibility, 'wept incessantly at the tragedy of Jane Shore,' while Martha does not (1:43). However, it is Martha who is generous enough to give a needy unknown lady five guineas for a benefit ticket. Again and again, it is Martha who takes practical action while Julia, who is soft and romantic, can only indulge in her own emotions. The novel goes so far as to show that misguided sensibility can actually kill. When the doctor orders their father to live moderately because his health is in danger, he ignores the physician's advice. Bradford continues to eat sumptuously: 'he indulged in every luxury, ate immoderately, played deeply, fretted incessantly, drank inordinately' (I: 69). In contrast to the submissive Julia, Martha dares to contradict him. The narrator notes thatJulia, 'by her own gentle acquiescence,' was 'hurrying her father towards the margin of the grave' (1:69). When the father dies, the narrator ironically comments on Julia's selfishness: 'Julia's consternation was only to be equalled by her grief: she had lost her dear, her indulgent father' (I: 95-6). Though somewhat obliquely, Robinson's criticism here is aimed at educators like Rousseau, who insisted that 'woman is framed to please, and to live in subjection, she must render herself agreeable to man, instead of provoking his wrath.'18 In the case of Julia and her father, being agreeable, charming, and submissive was actually harmful. Implicitly, the example supports Wollstonecraft's contention that 'writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory, have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters than they would otherwise have been; and, consequently, more useless members of society.'19 Wollstonecraft's question about female dependence is also applicable here: If women are edu-

Robinson's The Natural Daughter 77

cated 'to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power... are they... liable to error?'20 Another point brought out by the contrast between the sisters is the social and cultural constructedness of the feminine subject. In order to become the 'woman of fashion,'Julia engages in whatjudith Butler, in another context, calls 'performativity.'21' [Julia] now rouged highly, talked boldly, gazed steadfastly, laughed sarcastically, and sighed significantly. Her dress was less after the vestal costume: she knew how to fold her drapery after the manner of a Grecian Venus or a Roman Mesalina: she could smile like Lais, and make love like Sappho: she was the perpetual retailer of anecdote for the amusement of Lady Pen; and she professed an abhorrence of everything serious or literary, in compliment to the taste of the dissipated baronet' (1:93). In the tradition of Pope's Rape of the Lock, Robinson satirizes the elaborate rituals and manners of the upper class and aristocracy. In a series of essays called 'The Sylphid,' first published in the Morning Post, Robinson explicitly describes contemporary fashion as art deprived of nature: 'I found myself in the dressing-room of a celebrated beauty. Heavens! what a scene! Where, where was deserted Nature? What miserable efforts of art were substituted for the sublimities of genius.'22 Julia takes on this artificial self that enables her to move in the fashionable circles while Martha acts according to the dictates of nature. This opposition is consistent with sentimental fiction's taste for 'simplicity and naturalness.'23 But what is interesting is the way Robinson deploys this opposition. She links nature not to the pure and innocent girl, Julia, but to Martha Morley, who leads a decidedly complicated and somewhat singular life. Martha's narrative does not follow a sentimental heroine's trajectory, which is usually that of a girl's entrance into the world, courtship, and eventual marriage. In The Natural Daughter, the courtship period, which usually takes up most of the novel of sentiment, is brief and understated. Martha, governed more by 'sentiment' than by 'passion,' marries Mr Morley unceremoniously very early in the novel. Her narrative then follows that of the episodic or picaresque novel. Martha Morley is expelled from a kind of Edenic home and has to make her way in a world full of accidents, deceit, good and evil characters. She experiences a series of adventures and misadventures much like Voltaire's Candide or Fielding's Tom Jones. Like The False Friend, which was published earlier in the same year, The Natural Daughter is a novel full of twisted subplots and erratic fortunes. Seemingly good characters, such as father-figures and husbands, turn out to be false or villainous. The innocent is often made to suffer through other people's machinations. Deceitful behaviour, mistaken identities, disguises, and duplicity permeate the pages of The Natural Daughter. There are a number of

78 Empowering the Feminine 'natural' daughters in the work, but equally significant are the number of 'unnatural' daughters, in King Lear's sense of the term. It is a world wherein natural relations have been perverted, but nevertheless sanctioned by society. The epigraph to the novel asks: 'Can such things be, / Without our special wonder?' Robinson presents a large cast of characters who are constantly shifting, suggesting the instability and the turmoil of the period. It is a world governed primarily by appearances rather than natural goodness or feeling. For this reason, sensibility becomes problematic. As Chris Jones points out, 'radical writers of sensibility stressed qualities in direct contrast to the popular degenerate model of the "man of feeling" in emphasizing action and intervention ... In championing individual sensibility they affirmed the authority of personal experience over precept and custom.'24 Often however, this individual sensibility or sense of right and wrong is misread or misconstrued by the public. One of the crucial lessons of the novel is that one needs to look past external appearances in order to make the correct moral judgments about characters. Again and again the stories within the narrative suggest the difficulties of assessing and rewarding virtue and virtuous conduct, particularly with women. In the summer of 1799 when Robinson was writing The Natural Daughter, how to interpret women's public and private actions was of particular concern. Godwin's publication of Memoirs of the Author of'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' had given the antijacobins plenty of ammunition to attack those who advocated more freedom for women. As we have seen, reviews of the Memoirs in the Anti-Jacobin Review, the British Critic, and the European Magazine all used Wollstonecraft as a warning to those who would deviate from the laws of propriety and decency. Much as Mary Hays had presented herself in her fictional autobiography, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Godwin presented Wollstonecraft as a woman distinguished by 'exquisite sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character.'25 Friends and followers of Wollstonecraft, such as Hays and Robinson, all subsequently suffered from the ensuing charges of lack of morality in those who claimed to be led by individual sensibility. For example, in his review of The False Friend, published in February, 1799, Dr Bisset links Robinson's work to Wollstonecraft derisively. Robinson had concluded that novel with the death of the innocent heroine, describing her as 'the VICTIM OF SENSIBILITY.'26 Dr Bisset's review picks up this phrase and notes that 'we doubt not, that even Newgate has considerable supplies from the victims of sensibility, or, in other words, from those who are propelled by present impulse instead of being guided by duty.'27 In The Natural Daughter, Robinson reacts to these attacks and responds to some of their criticism. 'Victims of Sensibility' is one

Robinson's The Natural Daughter 79 of the works recommended by Mr Index as a novel 'to make [one] melancholy' (II: 42). A number of incidents in the novel, however, suggest that Robinson was attempting to refute and render more complex the stories of these 'victims of sensibility.' There are many parallels between the heroine's narrative and that of Robinson's life, as well as the life of MaryWollstonecraft. Robert Bass notes that Martha Morley 'cried withavoice that was Mary's.'28 Like Robinson, she believes that she has suffered many injustices: 'she believed herself to be the most ill-fated of the human race ... But her pride was still more powerful than her misfortunes; again the inborn spirit of her soul armed her with courage to resist oppression. She had been deeply wounded, but the blow was given by a vulgar hand; she had been treated with scorn, but it was the low scorn of recreant ignorance; she had been neglected, but there was distinction in the neglect of unenlightened beings. She had been hurled from affluence to indigence, from the sunny smiles of flattering folly, to the stern and darkening frown of unequivocal adversity' (II: 6-7). Many readers would recognize this description to be the narrative of Robinson's early years - her unhappy marriage to Thomas Robinson, her stardom in Drury Lane, her brief affair with the Prince of Wales in 1780, and her subsequent struggle to support herself and her daughter through writing. The heroine's efforts to find economic independence are reminiscent of Robinson's financial trials. At one point, Martha Morley becomes successful as an actress because of her natural talents: 'She was the pupil of Nature; her feelings were spontaneous, her ideas expanded, and her judgment correct... She was lively and unaffected: her smiles were exhilarating, her sighs were pathetic; her voice was either delicately animating or persuasively soothing: ... she was the thing she seemed, while even the perfection of her art was Nature' (I: 245). Subsequently, she attempts to write, and her fame as a poet mirrors that of Robinson as Laura and Laura Maria in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Playing with readers' familiarity with her life, she has one character ask, Are you Ann Matilda, or Delia Crusca, or Laura Maria?' (quoted by Bass, 393). In her study of Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Tilottama Rajan argues that the inscription of the author in the text is a characteristically romantic move: expressive not of the egotistical sublime, but of the text as the unfinished transcription of a subject still in process.'29 Rajan further notes that 'the transposition of personal experience into fiction recognizes that experience as discursively constructed... But it is also away of putting the finality of the text under erasure, by suggesting that what it "does" or where it ends is limited by its genesis in the life of a conflicted historical subject.'30 Although

80 Empowering the Feminine not all of the events in The Natural Daughter are transcriptions of the author's life, Rajan's observations about the effects of autobiographical materials are useful here. By including what would have been well-known elements of her own life in her novel, Robinson calls attention to the constructedness of both the fictional nd the biographical narratives. Both her novels and the narratives of her life found in the cartoons, gossip columns, and reviews of British daily and monthly papers are what Hayden White calls 'historiographical texts' rather than simply factual accounts.31 By offeringyet another interpretation of her life in her fiction, Robinson challenges the validity of existing narratives. In particular, her version stresses the pathos of lives such as her own: 'A wife, a young and lovely woman, exposed to the insidious machinations of man; deserted, driven forth to seek for support, alone, and stigmatized! - How many, like Martha, have been hurried on to ruin, by the sharp sting of kindred persecution! How many generous, feeling, noble natures have withered in obscurity and sorrow, while dulness, ignorance, and overweening pride revel in luxury, and set all the claims of modest merit at defiance' (II: 50). This interpretation of her life, suggesting that it is society that is unable to appreciate her talents and sensibility, becomes a strong competing version of the Mary Robinson known to the public. In a similar way, in her depiction of Mrs Sedgely, Robinson hints at the injustices suffered by Mary Wollstonecraft. Mrs Sedgely, a woman Martha befriends, has a natural daughter called Fanny or Frances, which happens to be Wollstonecraft's eldest daughter's name. Sedgely's account of her relationship with her lover sounds somewhat like Godwin's account of Wollstonecraft's connection with Gilbert Imlay. Mrs Sedgely explains: 'I loved the betrayer of my confidence ... though he had exposed me to every insult, to misery and death ... how strangely are we prone to love, where we feel conscious that the affections of our hearts are hopeless' (I: 215, 231-2). Godwin had similarly discussed Wollstonecraft's passion for and devotion to Imlay despite Imlay's coolness towards her: 'She nourished an individual affection ... and a heart like hers was not formed to nourish affection by halves ... Her confidence was entire; her love unbounded.'32 But what is most significant about the Sedgely narrative is that it gives an alternative narrative and resolution to the story of the 'fallen' woman. Though Sedgely has been seduced and has had an illegitimate daughter, she is not silenced, not exiled, and does not become a prostitute or die repenting. In fact, what one remembers about her is her movement and energy. She has travelled to Paris and had witnessed the effects of the revolution; she succeeds in an acting career and is 'pronounced ajuvenile Siddons' (1:249). Finally, she is

Robinson's The Natural Daughter 81

able to retire with her daughter to a simple but 'beautifully romantic' abode in Switzerland (II: 272). Narratives such as these may be what caused Thomas Mathias in The Pursuits of Literature (1805) to complain of the works of some of his contemporaries: 'Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Mrs Inchbald, Mrs Mary Robinson, Mrs &c. &c. though all of them are very ingenious ladies, yet they are too frequently whining or friskingin novels, till our girls' heads turn wild with impossible adventures, and are now and then tainted with democracy.'33 As Sonia Hofkosh points out, what Mathias was objecting to was the fact that these books 'enact and inspire female desire, both corporeal and political.'34 Depicting women travelling by themselves, working, establishing communities outside of marriage may not sound too radical by today's standards, but they were seen to be dangerous by Mathias, as they caused female readers to yearn for 'impossible adventures.' In contrast to a number of female characters of this period who are confined to one locale, both Martha Morley and Mrs Sedgely are female 'wanderers.' Unlike most of the heroines in fiction byjane Austen or Frances Burney, they are not ensconced in their homes, gardens, or shops. Instead, they are constantly shifting and moving because of their marginal existence - Sedgely because of her natural daughter, and Martha Morley because her husband has banished her from his home, suspecting an intrigue. Of wandering, Margaret Anne Doody says: 'it represents erratic and personal energy expended outside a structure, and without progressing to asetobjective. Impelled either by the harshness of a rejecting society or by some inner spiritual quest, the Wanderer leaves the herd and moves to or through some form of symbolic wilderness or wildness, seeing a world very different from that perceived by those who think they are at the centre. Alien and alienated, yet potentially bearing a new compassion or a new wisdom, the Wanderer draws a different map.'35 Both Martha and Mrs Sedgely are wandering heroines who are outside of the social structure and manage to survive on their own. They are both intelligent and articulate women of sensibility, yet not of the languishing kind like Julia. When they encounter adversity, the reactions of Julia and the two women are different. Julia is not able to cope well with the 'persecutions of fortune.' Her 'mind was enfeebled by indulgence, and her temper peevish, because it had no stimulating griefs to rouse its energies, or to teach it, by the realities of woe, to shake off the visions of a capricious imagination' (II: 2-3). In contrast, Martha and Mrs Sedgely are able to adapt to their circumstances. At one point, Martha decides to economize because of her difficult financial situation: 'Conscious that her present plan of economy originated in a proud spirit, which panted for independence, as well as in a desire to act honourably, she little cared

82 Empowering the Feminine what an interested world thought respecting the apparent decrease of her usual expenses' (II: 60). The passage has the dual function of vindicating Robinson's way of living in the late 1790s as well as showing Martha Morley's strength of character and her ability to see the world as an outsider. What is perhaps most extraordinary about Martha Morley, and by implication, Mary Robinson, are her many transformations. In the course of the novel, she braves the censures of the world by adopting the infant Frances, changes her name to Mrs Denison in order to be a lady's companion, becomes an actress, writes and publishes poems and novels, works as a teacher in a school for young ladies, pretends to be her friend Sophia and is imprisoned in a madhouse because of her impersonation, and ends up marrying the worthy Lord Francis. As Mathias noted, there is certainly much 'frisking' in the novel. Martha Morley's shifting identities demonstrate a woman's versatility and talents, but also underline the limitations of her position in that society. The transformations wrought on her self revealjust how easily the self can be lost and can fail to be recognized by those around her. For Robinson and Wollstonecraft, who were both seeking legitimation and subjectivity as authors but who were viewed by their critics as prostitutes, this theme of misrecognition is crucial. The disjunction between the self that the public assumes from the woman's body, its external appearances and activities, and the self that emerges from her body ofwriting is precisely the issue with which this novel grapples. In addition, the constant need to disguise, to work under assumed names, and to change jobs reveals the precarious state of women in the work force. Like the sixth edition of her novel, which is circulated without her knowledge, Martha Morley's circulation as a working girl in the late eighteenth century is not fully in her control. Her predicament is similar to that outlined by Mary Hays. In Emma Courtney, Hays had argued that women have not been properly 'educated for commerce, for a profession, for labour,'36 so that they have difficulty in being socially and economically independent. Hence, when Martha wanders, it is not with the freedom of the adventurous epic hero, but as what Luce Irigaray, in psychosexual terms, describes as one in a state of dereliction or psychic homelessness.37 The fluidity and ease with which Martha changes roles may show her capability to adjust, but it may also suggest women's lack of definition and their need to role-play in order to function in society. The very possibility of self-possession and selfdefinition is fraught with frenzy and uncertainty. While the novel illustrates clearly what it does not want woman to be, that is, a woman of such exquisite sensibility that she becomes unable to function, it doesnotyetmap out clearly what it wants woman to be. Despite the fact that the novel presents many tantalizing alternatives-to courtship and love as the main interests for women of

Robinson's The Natural Daughter 83 intelligence and sensibility, The Natural Daughter nevertheless ends with the heroine's marriage or, in her case, remarriage, to a man who has admired her all along. This impasse in the ideology of what is fitting for the proper lady is mirrored in the novel's form. Through the booksellers Martha encounters, Robinson makes many playful references to what her novel ought not to be. Mr Index notes: 'We have our warehouses full of unsold sentimental novels already ... they only sell for waste paper; and you may frequently see 'The Tears of Genius,' 'Moral Tales,' 'WeddedLove,' 'Disinterested Attachment,' 'The Felicities of Friendship' and 'The Sublime System of Social Sympathy' lining trunks, or enveloping the merchandize of pastry cooks and cheesemongers' (II: 36). Mr Index also advises her to 'make a story out of some recent popular event, such as an highly fashioned elopement, a deserted, distracted husband, an abandoned wife, an ungrateful runaway daughter, or a son ruined by sharpers' (II: 37). He stresses that in order to sell a book one should 'write a Dedication, full of fine words and laboured panegyric' (II: 40). The Natural Daughter, though without a flowery panegyric, is based partly on Robinson's and Tarleton's much publicized lives, and can be seen to fit Index's description. While it seems keenly aware of the inadequacies of its own form, the need to pamper a flighty reading public, it is also still very much a sentimental novel as it follows the vicissitudes of a heroine of sensibility, and contains all the requisite conventions of the genre. The difference, I argue, is that a work such as The Natural Daughter can also be read as a woman's social inscription of the self, functioning as a testament of Robinson's multifarious subjectivity. Because it is her last novel, it stands as a text about self-framing, complementing her Memoirs, which Robinson began in 1798, but which remained unfinished when she died. In conclusion, though The Natural Daughter concerns itself with a subjectmatter very different from Richardson's Pamela, one could say that it still exhibits the theme of 'virtue rewarded.' However, the novel shows how extensively virtue had been redefined over the past fifty years. Robinson's novel can be seen as her last effort to combat the anti-radical sentiment of the last years of the decade. As Chris Jones has noted, 'the caricature of sensibility supported by the wave of anti-Jacobin novels and tales divested it of any legitimate claims to active intervention. They emptied the term of any social idealism emphasizing its individualism and emotional self-indulgence which was seen as its inevitable concomitant.'38 Robinson counters the argument by acknowledging the real consequences of their fears in her characterization of Julia, but at the same time, also re-invests in the term through her autobiographical character Martha Morley, who is able to perform charita-

84 Empowering the Feminine ble acts based upon her sensibilities. By making her character echo the events of her actual life, Robinson is able to inscribe herself into the historical and literary debate. It may be that The Natural Daughter joins those sentimental novels that end up 'lining trunks, or enveloping the merchandize of pastry cooks and cheese-mongers' but it provides a thoughtful additive for the literary palate.

PART II: JANE WEST (1758-1852)

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5 Abjection and the Necessity of the Other: West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story

Jane West, better known by her pseudonym, Prudentia Homespun,1 was one of the most active participants in the so-called 'war of ideas,' the 'feminist controversy in England,' or the battle between the Jacobins and anti-Jacobins.2 Her three novels of the 1790s, The Advantages of Education; or, the History of Maria Williams (1793); A Gossip's Story (1796); and A Tale of the Times (1799),3 have been read as examples of conservative tracts, or didactic fiction for young ladies. Claudia Johnson points out that 'Jane West was the most distinguished to dramatize Burkean fictions with little adulteration ... idealizing the patriarchal family with unremitting earnestness and insistence. 4 According to Johnson, West's novels support Edmund Burke's arguments in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and its sequel, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), that 'private worth and domestic confidence alone can secure the nation's survival against the forces of anarchy.'3 West's works idealize the father-figure of the family, demonstrating that the benevolent patriarch is the best ruler of the home, just as a prudent and judicious monarch is the best governor of the country. Another reason West's name is known to scholars is that A Gossip's Story, with its tale of two sisters, is believed to have inspired Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.6 Relatively little, however, has been written about Jane West. Because West's novels are thinly disguised conduct books with obvious lessons, they have not attracted the attention of twentieth-century scholars who tend to be more attracted to the revolutionary women of the period. West's novels are generally regarded as fairly straightforward didactic fiction focusing on female education.7 Didacticism notwithstanding, West's novels are much more problematic than has been acknowledged, particularly in their attempts to prescribe the ideal female subject in late eighteenth-

88 Empowering the Feminine century society. For in each of the three novels in this decade, West does more than just outline the model woman; she also represents and constructs the negative, or what Julia Kristeva calls the 'abjected' other8 of this exemplary. The three novels of the period all feature not one protagonist, but a pair of heroines who are played off against each other. Patricia Spacks suggests that these pairs, sometimes sisters, as in A Gossip's Story, are reminiscent of sibling rivalry in fairy tales, which 'implicitly reassure the reader about envious or rivalrous feelings toward sibling competitors by equating struggles between brothers or sisters with the ancient conflict of good and evil and by offering outcomes in which right always triumphs, outcomes both psychologically and morally comforting.'9 While this is a possible explanation for the two-heroine structural feature of West's novels of the 1790s, I want to argue instead that what West does is actually to construct and support by means of a story what Ellen Pollak has termed 'the myth of passive womanhood.' Pollak writes: 'The peculiar advantage of this mimetic feature of myths is that it enables certain logical contradictions to be presented plausibly. The contradictions are obscured by being brought within a discursive order that constitutes the world according to culturally sanctioned axioms and laws. In this way, ideological consistency can be passed off as logical consistency, and systems of knowledge (which are inevitably systems of value too) can operate as narratives of fact.'10 My chapter focuses on the way West constructs this myth of the feminine, particularly in its reliance on binary opposites or on what Jacques Derrida calls 'differance as a means of signification. What is fascinating about West's ideal woman is that she can only be created through opposites to or differences from the negative 'other.' This reliance on the other to authenticate subjectivity suggests the precarious basis of the exemplary, as she is dependent upon the abjected other for her existence. In other words, she is, to a great extent, the opposite of what the object of revulsion is, rather than a subject who is able to exist independently. The ideal is unstable and indeterminate without the other. The fact that West's narratives go to so much trouble to depict in painful details the plight of the 'other' suggests an awareness of, if not fascination with, what Kristeva calls the 'powers of horror' or abjection. Telling the story of the abjected other becomes a means of controlling the disruptive forces that threaten the ideology of what Poovey has termed the 'proper lady.'11 Because of its obvious use of sisters who are opposites of each other, A Gossip's Story is perhaps the best illustration of this problematic construction. As in her first novel, West uses the persona of the spinster, Prudentia

West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story 89 Homespun, to relate the story. The voice of this ironic and self-deprecating narrator frames the story of the two sisters self-consciously, rather as a Fielding narrator did earlier in the century. More than just accompanying her readers through the journey, however, Prudentia Homespun herself becomes a fictional character. She tells her readers, for example, about her retired life: 'I have been for several years the inhabitant of a small market-town called Danbury, in the north of England ... my family consists of only myself, a female servant, and an old tabby cat, I have but little domestick care to engage my attention and anxiety' (I: 1). What is interesting about this fictional autobiography is its antithesis to the author's real life. West herself was hardly a spinster; she was married to a yeoman farmer, Thomas West, and had three sons.12 While this may seem like a piece of biographical trivia, I think that it does relate very much to the ideological construction and creation of the model feminine figure that I am exploring. Prudentia claims that she associates with 'many single ladies' who have 'established a very agreeable society, which meets three times a week, to communicate the observations which the levity of youth, the vanity of ostentation, or the meanness of avarice have suggested' (I: 2). The members of this 'scandalous club ... exhibit models of prudence' in their conduct and 'shew no mercy to others' (I: 2, 3). This figure can be seen as a female version of the detached 'man about town' or 'spectator' figure who can comment upon the activities of the inhabitants with a certain ironic detachment. While one could argue that this figure of the old gossipy woman provides an ideal vantage point from which to observe the goings-on of the town, the use of this spinster figure has deeper ramifications in the novel than mere convenience. In the eighteenth century, old maids occupied an unenviable position in society, and were generally 'scorned and pitied.'13 They were often caricatured in novels and seen to have 'no respectable role' except as governess or companion.14 Kern notes that they often 'appeared in men's novels as sex-starved, frustrated, and disagreeable stereotypes,' though women novelists tended to be more sympathetic to this figure and individualized their old maid characters beyond stereotypes.'15 The point is that West adopted this disagreeable role, not out of necessity, but by choice.16 Her fictional spinster seems fairly self-sufficient, and is economically independent, as she possesses a small, regular annuity. However, as an old maid' she would not be expected to lead any kind of a sexual life, which would contrast with the lewd image of radicals such as Wollstonecraft and Hays. In Letters to a Young Lady, in Which the Duties and Character of Women Are Considered (1806), West argues that 'single

go Empowering the Feminine women' do not necessarily have to 'pass their lives in a dull mediocrity ... Destitute of nearer ties, and unfettered by primary obligations, the whole world of benevolence affords a sphere for their actions, and the whole circle of science offers to adorn their minds.' That West chose to write from the stance of this sexually detached or restrained figure, who is free to do charitable action, is significant. Her narrator cannot be accused of any sexual impropriety, or of neglecting domestic duties. Because of her non-participation in sexual, maternal, and childbearing roles, she is distanced from many of the earthly, physical, and biological functions usually associated with woman. Deprived of what are traditionally considered 'female' funtions, she is almost neuter or gender-free. It is revealing that West has to go to such lengths of defeminization to establish credibility as a critic of social mores. I am not suggesting that West advocated the single state as the ideal one for all women. But the adoption of the old maid-narrator figure does have some bearing on her construction of the feminine ideal. In West, the exemplary woman is similarly free from libidinous desire and sexual improprieties. Female sexuality and pleasure become a non-issue in her scheme of domestic perfection. This is an area where West differs from a more radical thinker like Wollstonecraft. Critic Mitzi Myers has convincingly argued that both the Evangelical Hannah More, who is usually regarded as a conservative moralist, and the vindicator of the 'rights of woman,' Mary Wollstonecraft, shared the desire to reform female manners, and 'to replace the regnant ideal of pliant, unproductive urbanity with socially functional middle-class models.'17 Particularly in her early work, Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft stressed the need for female educ tion in order to counter women's sensibility, and that 'romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling.'18 She believed that reason could 'teach passion to submit to necessity; or, let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions which rather imbitter than sweeten the cup of life, when they are not restrained within due bounds.'19 However, what Myers does not point out is that by the time Wollstonecraft wrote Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, the lesson of restraint was not so clear-cut. Between 1792 and 1797, or between the publication of Rights of Woman and Wrongs of Woman Wollstonecraft had had two passionate l affairs, one with Gilbert Imlay and the other with William Godwin. Poovey says that from the relationship with Imlay Wollstonecraft 'developed ... not only a new acceptance of her own emotionalism but also a new openness to emotional dependence and a resolution not to rest content with theories that denied felt desires of body and heart.'20In her last novel, Wrongs

West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story 91 Woman, the heroine succumbs to the possibility of romance despite a bad marriage. While the judge rebukes Maria with the comment 'what virtuous woman thought of her feelings,'21 we are not left with the impression that Wollstonecraft agrees with his pronouncement. A woman's feeling, sexuality, and passion were important, and not to be discounted. Though West, like More and Wollstonecraft, shared the wish to reform women, her views of sexuality were very different from Wollstonecraft's. Not surprisingly, in her novels written in the same period, the good heroines, while not spinsters, are those who are sexually restrained. They tend to derive their strength from Christian suffering, from having to sacrifice their own feelings and desires in order to submit to parental or spousal duty. In A Gossip's Story, the elder sister, Louisa Dudley, who grows up under her father's tutelage, becomes an ideal example of filial obedience: Louisa, who from her earliest years discovered a disposition to improve both in moral and mental excellence, listened with attention to her father's precepts, illustrated at times by the painful yet pleasing description of what her mother was. Instructions thus enforced by example, sunk with double weight into her retentive mind, and she early nursed the laudable ambition of copying those amiable virtues, of which her departed mother and living father exhibited such fine models' (I: 15). Louisa learns right and wrong from the father, and though the name of the mother is mentioned, because the mother dies early in the novel, she is unreal, idealized, and silent. In other words, she occupies the place of the stereotypical inspirational muse or angel. Whatever virtues she did or did not possess are created or re-presented by the father who has the power to tell her story to the daughters. Paradoxically, in her other works, West stresses that mothers and maternal figures are important to a young lady's development. For instance, in the poem The Mother, West writes: Mothers, 'tis yours to form a reptile swarm Of sceptics, or a host of Christians fraught With faith and hope divine. 'Tis also yours To sow the seeds of moral purity, Or fan the infant-passions till they blaze, Fed with infernal fuel.22

However, only one of West's four novels of this period features a model mother. Lucy Evans's mother in The Advantages of Education is the only mother who provides her daughter with guidance and love. In West's

92 Empowering the Feminine other works, including A Tale of the Times, Letters to a Young Lady, and The

Infidel Father, mothers die young, or are absent, and therefore are powerless or unable to give their daughters counsel and care. West wishes to empower women by teaching them to pay attention to domestic and maternal duties, but more often than not, her methods involve showing examples of bad mothering rather than illustrating ideal mothers. Comparable to an extended prose fable or an exemplum, West's novels teach primarily by illustrating the consequences of thoughtless and irresponsible action in women. Marianne Dudley, the other sister, has had an upbringing that has been feminine-based, and hence negative, in the narrator's view. It has encouraged too much sensibility in her: Marianne experienced under her Grandmother, all the fond indulgence of doating love. If ever the excesses of tenderness are pardonable, they might be in Mrs. Alderson's circumstances ... It was natural to view the child which her daughter had bequeathed her, with an affection rising to agonizing sensibility. (I: 16) Marianne had a variety of instances of high heroick virtue to produce, not drawn indeed from actual observation of life, but from her favourite studies. She had long been an attentive reader of memoirs and adventures, and had transplanted into her gentle bosom all the soft feelings and highly refined sensibilities of the respective heroines. (I: 38)

As a reader of romances, Marianne has developed excessive emotions, the 'soft feelings' of heroines. This difference in background and character becomes the crux of the novel as it determines the sisters' fate. Louisa represses her own feelings and desires, and thinks of her father's welfare before her own. She allows her father to direct her in the choice of a husband, consenting at one point to marry the disagreeable Sir William Milton. The father tells her: 'personal considerations are beneath your attention. Defect in character is the unavoidable lot of humanity' (I: 67). Conversely, Marianne, who is courted by a much more worthy suitor of whom her father approves, rejects him because he does not live up to her expectations formed by her reading of 'memoirs and adventures' (I: 38): 'he seemed much more gay and lively than was consistent with the painful suspense in which courtship ought to keep the lover's heart. His manner was unembarrassed, which was wrong; he was comfortable in her absence; her preference indeed seemed to give him satisfaction, but not of the transporting kind she expected' (I: 45).

West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story 93 As can be expected, the consequences of these two attitudes are predictable. The obedient Louisa is saved from the union with Sir William, cares for her father through a period of poverty and illness, and is eventually rewarded with the wealthy and loving Pelham. The over-imaginative Marianne marries the romantic Mr Clermont, only to find that the passion and ardour of romance quickly fade. Her alliance is fraught with jealousy, grief, and misunderstandings. While the bifurcation of the histories of the two sisters may sound like an innocuous tale designed for the edification of young ladies, its positioning of women reveals much about what one critic calls the 'dominant myths of our culture.'23 In particular, reading the narrative through feminist psychoanlytic theories reveals compelling patterns and implications about the structure of West's novel. Marianne Hirsch's adaptation of Freud's notion of 'family romance' is useful for reading this and other women's texts: 'The family romance describes the experience of familial structures as discursive: the family romance is the story we tell ourselves about the social and psychological reality of the family in which we find ourselves and about the patterns of desire that motivate the interaction among its members.'24 As Julia Kristeva says: 'Narrative is, in sum, the most elaborate kind of attempt, on the part of the speaking subject, after syntactic competence, to situate his or her self among his or her desires and their taboos, that is at the interior of the oedipal triangle.'25 In A Gossip's Story West situates her good heroine clearly under what Lacan would call the Name of the Father.26 The daughter who obeys the father becomes successfully integrated into the social structure or the Lacanian symbolic order towards the end of the novel. Marianne, however, is linked to the mother, who is killed off, and subsequently brought up by a substitute maternal figure, her grandmother. Because the grandmother, Mrs Alderson, 'had lost an amiable and only daughter,' she views Marianne as 'a pledge from an inhabitant of another world, a relique snatched from the grave, a bond of union between herself and the glorified spirit of its immortal mother' (I: 16, 17). This maternal bond, associated in the novel with death, the weak, the sentimental, and the excessive, ultimately leads to the destruction of Marianne's emotional and psychological well-being. West explains her didactic intentions in creating Marianne: 'In her character I wish to exhibit the portrait of an amiable and ingenuous mind, solicitous to excel, and desirous to be happy, but destitute of natural vigour or acquired stability; forming to itself a romantick standard, to which nothing human ever attained; perplexed by imaginary difficulties;

94 Empowering the Feminine sinking under fancied evils; destroying its own peace by the very means which it takes to secure it' (I: 47). A sociohistorical and literary analysis of the configuration of the sisters would interpret the essential theme of the novel to be that of the eighteenth-century debate between reason and passion. Marianne's penchant for heroics would align her with her namesake in Austen's Sense and Sensibility, with the young Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, or with Sheridan's foolish Lydia Languish. Of this tradition, Janet Todd says, 'From the 1780s onwards, sentimental literature and the principles behind it were bombarded with criticism and ridicule ... As the eighteenth century closed, sensibility was viewed more and more as anti-community, a progressing away from, not into, Humean social sympathy.'27 A historical approach would read West's novel as an anti-Jacobin tract in support of Burke and the conservatives.28 The novel warns young women against forming their judgments based solely on their feelings, and reinforces the notion that patriarchal authority is in fact the best guarantor of individual happiness. What these readings do not uncover, however, are the implications and assumptions for women behind the narrative's teaching. The sisters' alliances to male and female authority figures and the differing consequences form remarkable patterns in the light of postLacanian psycholinguistics. In psychoanalytic terms, the ideal that West is able to achieve at the end is one that, for the daughter, entails the complete rejection of the mother, and the embracing of the father and his Law. Women are empowered, but only if they follow the Law of the Father. What is most striking, however, about West's novels of the decade following the upheaval of the French Revolution is their fascination with the misguided sister or friend who is intended as the negative other of the ideal female heroine. The fact that it takes two girls to construct this feminine ideal in her three novels of this period suggests West's preoccupation with and, perhaps, even fear of the excesses of the female philosopher figure. West does not consciously create characters who represent Mary Wollstonecraft or Mary Hays, as Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, or Amelia Opie were later to do,29 but her 'bad sister' or negative figures, Marianne Dudley in A Gossip's Story, Charlotte Raby in The Advantages of Education, and Geraldine Powerscourt in A Tale of the Times, all act rashly and are self-willed. What West says about Geraldine Powerscourt, for example, could be applied to the real-life Mary Wollstonecraft: her story is 'an awful momento to all those who, trusting in the supposed security of their own virtue, neglect the suggestions of prudence' (III: 295). To emphasize the Jacobin or revolutionary link, Geraldine's seducer, Fitzosborne, guided by the 'false philosophy ... founded upon the vision-

West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story 95 ary perfectibility of the human species,' kills himself to avoid being guillotined under Robespierre's reign (III: 374). This notion of perfectibility is meant to ridicule William Godwin and his radical followers. In Enquiry concerning Political Justice Godwin had written: 'man is perfectible ... By perfectible, it is not meant that he is capable of being brought to perfection. But the word seems sufficiently adapted to express the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement; and in this sense it is here to be understood.'30 West feels horror but, at the same time, a fascination with these females who represent defiance of authority and transgression. Her mixed feelings can be explained in part by Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Kristeva describes abjection as 'what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.'31 The problem with Kristeva's theory is its tendency towards essentialism. Abjection is linked to the maternal: 'abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.'32 The abject 'is the violence of mourning for an "object" that has always already been lost. The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments.'33 For both West and Kristeva, the subject needs to keep these disruptive, feminine impulses in check in order to define itself as a subject. Furthermore, in certain religions, abjection is hemmed in through 'prohibition and law,' or it can persist as 'exclusion or taboo.'34 As one critic puts it, 'Kristeva is fascinated by the ways in which "proper" sociality and subjectivity are based on the expulsion or exclusion of the improper, the unclean, and the disorderly elements of its corporeal existence that must be separated from its "clean and proper" self.'35 It is this aspect of abjection that I think is most applicable to Jane West's creation of the irresponsible or self-willed sister. Kristeva believes that 'what must be expelled from the subject's corporeal functioning can never be fully obliterated but hovers at the border of the subject's identity, threatening apparent unities and stabilities with disruption and possible dissolution.'36 Hence, in West, this negative 'other' of the feminine ideal is invoked yet prohibited, precariously created, yet denied existence in the patriarchal world of late eighteenth-century England. This threatening 'other,' as I have suggested, is associated with the French anarchists, the excessive, and, in the case of A Gossip's Story, with the maternal. West intends these characters to be negative examples, demonstrating what the ideal woman should not do. Yet the extent to which she describes their stories in detail implies an obsessive preoccupa-

96 Empowering the Feminine tion, if not fascination with them. Marianne in A Gossip's Story, for example, is in many ways a more interesting character than Louisa. Unlike her sister, she is both different and also distanced from her father. She is afraid of him, and yet refuses his counsel. At one point, before an interview with him regarding a suitor, fear renders Marianne incapable of receiving paternal advice: 'She so deeply pondered on the probable consequences of the interview with her father, that her mind was rendered too weak to derive any benefit from it' (I: 91). Yet later, when her father tells Marianne to resign her 'extreme sensibility' (II: 41) in her dealings with her husband, Marianne responds: 'To this lively sentiment I ascribe the ineffable delight his presence excites, and the refined transport which I feel at all his observant assiduous attentions' (ibid.). In other words, indulging in emotions, in the excitement of sexual passions, in sensuality, are pleasures forbidden under the Law of the Father. In West's configuration, this defiance of patriarchal authority regarding 'extreme sensibility' or propensity for self-fulfillment, albeit indulgent, leads to matrimonial discord. These inclinations are perceived to be foolish and melodramatic, and must be restrained or repressed in order for the marriage to work. The father makes clear the set of regulations and prohibitions necessary for the functioning of the patriarchal family. Marianne must be selfeffacing, and place her husband's needs before hers at all times. He tells her: 'There is no part of the female character dearer to us men, than the idea that you are the soothers of our inquietudes, the solacers of our sorrow, the sympathizing friends to whom we may at all times retire for comfort, in every distress' (II: 43). In Kristeva's terms, the abject must be purified from narcissism, must learn to repress its drives.37 Marianne's desires have no legitimate place in her marital relationship. The father continues: 'Exert the powers of your understanding, my dear child ... You are commanded to prepare yourself for a spiritual world, not to languish out life in luxurious softness' (II: 44). In religious terms, the father's exhortation orders the woman to deny earthly pleasures in hopes of 'spiritual' ones. Yet West's teachings are different from the evangelical More's, as men and women are not expected to endure the same sacrifices. In West's world, a husband is allowed human desires, imperfections, and weaknesses; a wife needs to 'divert [her] attention from his failings' (II: 135): 'you will study your husband's temper and character, with the deepest attention; in order that you may discover the peculiar tendency of those errors and prejudices, from which the best of us are not free, that by familiarizing them to your mind, they may steal upon you in the diminished form of little imperfections' (II: 46). West's feminine ideal must not

West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story 97 only conquer her own desires and pleasures; she must also be angelic enough to excuse similar weaknesses in her husband. Much of the function of the negative sister in the novel is to provide occasions for didacticism. West uses Marianne's transgressions to highlight the dangers of impropriety and to emphasize difference with the angelic ideal. When Marianne complains to her father about her husband, he tells her to accept marital difficulties as one of the 'ills common to humanity' (II: 116). He advises that women should be 'easily entreated' whenever there are quarrels between spouses, believing that 'troubles arising from contrariety of temper and opinion, may be remedied by prudence and concession' [on the woman's part] (II: 106, 116). The qualities Marianne possesses - enthusiasm, imprudence, theatrical passions (II: 119) - are those traditionally most frequently associated with the 'feminine,' as opposed to restraint, wisdom, and reason, which are culturally ascribed to the masculine realm. Louisa, West's ideal, feminizes masculine traits, while Marianne's feminine affectivity is problematically debased. One may go so far as to say that West's ideal wife should exhibit no passion at all. She concludes that Marianne's 'married life may teach ladies not to depend upon the durability of that evanescent affection which lovers feel' (II: 160). In addition, in A Gossip's Story the oedipal rejection of the mother and maternal figures must be complete. It seems as if every female figure must be ab-jected.' In Marianne's case, her girlfriend and confidante incurs the jealousy and anger of her husband. In order for the couple to be successfully reconciled, the father advises his daughter against resuming the friendship: I must, however, repeat that a wife should retain no connections which her husband decidedly disapproves. A prudent woman indeed will never form any which can give pain to a reasonable man ... Female friendship, my child, is often disgraced by a ridiculous imitation. Two romantick girls select each other ... They relinquish the practice of acknowledged virtues, to indulge in a frivolous intimacy, and ... they gratify a propensity for mere gossip, capricious expectations, and fantastick desires. (II: 131-2)

West expresses a similar concern in her conduct book designed for women. In Letters to a Young Lady, she says: 'I forbear to mention the dangers which young women are exposed to from faithless confidants, indiscreet friends, artful parasites, needy dependants, and all that routine of interested servility so commonly appendant to beauty, birth, or fortune.'38

98 Empowering the Feminine In psychoanalytic terms, what Marianne's father prescribes is Freud's oedipal rejection of the mother, and a turning to the father or a substitute father-figure. West would be enacting what Adrienne Rich calls matrophobia: 'Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers' bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mothers'; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.'39 Both Rich and Kristeva suggest that the 'killing' of what seems like the 'other' is actually a desire to be rid of what phallogocentric culture traditionally designates as the 'feminine' in woman. Helene Cixous has demontrated that the system of dualities prevalent in Western culture is 'hierarchized,' where the qualities associated with the woman and mother figure are seen as weak or undesirable in society as in examples of 'activity/passivity,' 'sun/moon,' 'father/mother,' 'master/slave.'40 In the context of late eighteenth-century Britain, where woman could only be defined in relation to a male figure, that is, could only achieve subjectivity as wife, mother, or daughter, West would feel that matrophobia or the killing of the subversive, weak, or 'feminine' part of oneself was a necessary part of becoming successfully integrated into and accepted by a society with its predominantly male-centred values. Indeed, in West's depiction of the ideal Louisa, there is no room for a female or maternal figure: ' [Louisa] wholly confined to the duties of a daughter, her heart glowed with the purest flame of benevolence, nor could disappointment obscure, nor distress absorb the sacred radiance' (II: 59). Unlike Marianne, Louisa's pleasures are not self-indulgent: 'her favourite amusements; her books, her needle, her musick, her garden, the society of her beloved father, and those active exertions of charity from which her limited purse could not wholly restrain her' (II: 61-2). Since Louisa's (and Marianne's) mother has been killed off literally and metaphorically when the daughters were in their early years, and she, Louisa, has been with her father, there is no undesirable feminine influence in the older sister's background. Louisa dedicates herself wholly to her father, and lives by his Law. She has the full approval of Prudentia Homespun, the narrator, who, though a woman, is one who has successfully suppressed the sentimentality and romantic preoccupations associated with Marianne and with the traditional feminine. Though Louisa finds herself falling in love with Pelham, she represses her feelings until these are sanctioned by Mr Dudley. In the novel, she virtually has no existence outside of the

West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story 99 Lacanian father. As a dutiful daughter, she devotes her life to Mr Dudley until he dies. At his deathbed, he hands her over with his blessings to Pelham who has come to appreciate Louisa's worth while she tended and prayed for her father. That the father has moulded her character is evident from his praise of her: 'She was my adviser, my comforter, my companion, my friend, our tastes, our habits, our desires corresponded ... I know that she has sufficient greatness of soul to dignify narrow circumstances by cheerful patience' (II: 198). Though in the eyes of conservative moralists intent on preserving the family, Louisa would be commended for her filial obedience, in the feminist psychoanlytic terms I have been employing, she would be seen as a subject who has repressed or rejected her desires. Her 'tastes,' 'habits,' and 'desires' are her father's, as he himself points out. Luce Irigaray has pointed out that 'our culture is based upon the exchange of women.'41 She argues that women are 'commodities' and that 'the economy of exchange - of desire - is man's business.'42 This observation seems particularly appropriate to the resolution of West's novel as Louisa is literally 'given' by her father to Pelham, who has been assisting the Dudley family with financial advice and aid. The fact that Louisa has loved Pelham all along makes the transaction seem less mercenary and somewhat romantic, but it is still difficult to read the scene without thinking of it as an exchange of a useful commodity between men who wield power. The father, who no longer needs his nurse and companion, presents his daughter to his young friend, suggesting a patrilinear handing over of property. Even after his death, the figure of the father remains a strong influence on the couple, as Pelham arranges to have a statue of him erected on their property. Pelham explains: 'We will recollect your father's precepts, and consider it as a chequered scene, from which the virtuous, well-regulated mind may derive many advantages ... our remembrance shall tend to meliorate our own hearts, and our love prompts us to exercise those virtues which have glorified him, and will exalt us to equal happiness' (II: 214). This phallic image of the father's statue watching over his descendants and his patrimony is an apt and literal rendition of the type of society and familial structure Jane West was promoting. Patriarchal teachings and the father's law abides even without a real father. For West as for Burke, the community functions best under this kind of patriarchal rule. Finally, it is important to stress that this ideal is not 'natural' but very much culturally and discursively constructed. Despite West's repeated disclaimer, I would suggest that her novels do make use of exaggerations

ioo Empowering the Feminine and extremes. In her preface to The Advantages of Education, West entreats her readers not 'to expect extravagance of character, or variety of incident.' Instead, what she says she does is to 'describe life as [the inexperienced part of her own sex] are likely to find it.' Similarly in the introduction to A Gossip's Story West says of her first novel: 'It had no splendour of language, no local description, nothing of the marvellous, or the enigmatical, no sudden elevation, and no astonishing depression. It merely spoke of human life as it is, and so simple was the story, that at the outset an attentive reader must have foreboded the catastrophe' (I: vi). However, as I have tried to show through A Gossip's Story, this claim to 'realism,' or 'human life as it is' is a false one. West does polarize her characters, because this is the only way her ideal feminine figure can be delineated. The story of the transgressive other takes up more than half the novel, and is a necessary aspect of the representation of the exemplary. Without the abject or the object of revulsion, this ideal cannot be determined or even signified. She remains a vague, unrealized figure without her counterpart. In West's novels, the threatening 'other' must be created, and then exorcised and punished to enable the smooth existence of the ideal subject. West's method of empowering the feminine elevates the domestic woman, but has its price and consequences for others. Ultimately, the indeterminacy of the one without the other may point to the difficulties and virtual impossibility, for women then and now, of achieving West's feminine ideal.

6

Politicizing the Domestic: The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times

One of the misfortunes under which literature now labours is, that the title of a work no longer announces its intention: books of travels are converted into vehicles of politics and systems of legislation. Female letter-writers teach us the arcana of government, and obliquely vindicate, or even recommend, manners and actions at which female delicacy should blush, and female tenderness mourn. Traits on education subvert every principle of filial reverence: Writers on morality lay the axe to the root of domestic harmony ... And last, though not least in its effect, the novel, calculated, by its insinuating narrative and interesting description to fascinate the imagination without rousing the stronger energies of the mind, is converted into an offensive weapon, directed against our religion, our morals, or our government, as the humour of the writers may determine his particular warfare A Tale of the Times (III: 387-8)'

Writing in 1799, Jane West, as Mrs Prudentia Homespun, warns her English readers of the threats to the moral fabric of society posed by subversive literary texts of various kinds. West, by then a poet, dramatist, and novelist, had established herself on the anti-Jacobin side of the revolutionary debate of the 1790s. She paid tribute to Burke by publishing an 'Elegy on the Death of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke' in 1797. Like Burke and other conservative moralists, West asserts her belief in the necessity of submission to figures of authority both in the private and the public sphere, and defends Christian teachings in almost all her writings. Her novels of the late 1790s demonstrate not only her concern with what she perceived as the moral degeneration of the times, but also the way this

102 Empowering the Feminine decline became obsessively linked to women. In her last novel of the decade these fears translate themselves into the apprehension that the sacred realm of domesticity, symbolically represented by the maternal body, was about to be penetrated by the anarchic forces of the sympathizers of the French Revolution. By the latter part of the decade, the 'war of ideas' between the radicals and the conservatives had escalated to a point where, in Marilyn Butler's words, 'the pursuit of the "Jacobinical" became a national pastime, a witch-hunt.'2 The excesses of the leaders of the French Revolution and England's war against France discredited those English radicals who supported the revolution. Reactions became more hysterical and '"jacobins" were detected not merely among the self-acknowledged progressives of the Godwin circle but in writers whose intentions were sometimes or always politically innocent.'3 West's third novel, A Tale of the Times, is significant because it is a self-consciously pedagogical, anti-Jacobin work that engages with the issues of the day. It seeks to counter the beliefs of the radicals who stressed individual merit, judgment, and reason. It inculcates the teachings of the conservatives by employing what West perceived as the novel's most potent force, 'its insinuating narrative and interesting description.' Despite her opposition to the methods employed by polemical writers, West, too, attempted to instil lessons of restraint, Christian fortitude, and obedience by 'fascinat[ing] the imagination' of her readers. whose 'energies' she wished to rouse. In other words, West herself participated in what she condemned, converting books 'into vehicles of politics' by stressing what Lynn Hunt calls 'the family romance of the French Revolution.'4 In Linda Zerilli's words, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) tells 'a tale of the writer's efforts to contain a confused social world and an inverted symbolic order in which femininity no longer signifies what Burke would have it signify - beauty, order, and submission.'5 Similarly, West's A Tale of the Times uses her heroine, a mother, as an allegorical figure of what England could and would become if the Jacobins prevail. Geraldine's slow and arduous seduction can be read as the seduction of Britain.6 In its structure, A Tale of the Times is more complex than West's earlier novels, The Advantages ofEducation; or, The History of Maria Williams (1793)

and A Gossip's Story (1797), both of which are said to have influenced Jane Austen.7 While its ideological assumptions are opposite to those expounded by radicals such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays, its convoluted plot of seduction, with its reliance on sensibility and melodrama, links it with progressive novels such as Wrongs of Woman (1797),

The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 103 Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), and Inchbald' s Nature and Art (1796). My

chapter explores the ways in which West manipulated the attractions and the form of the sentimental novel for her own didactic purposes, and discusses the ways in which domestic plots become intimately linked with historical and political ones. In particular, it focuses on the way the figure of the mother becomes the locus of social and cultural anxiety in the works of a reactionary writer like West. For West recognized the dangers, but also the power of books on young, impressionable minds. In Letters to a Young Lady, she writes: 'what impressions romantic adventures, high-wrought scenes of passion, and all the turmoil of intrigue, incident, extravagant attachment, and improbable vicissitudes of fortune, must make upon a vacant mind, whose judgment has not been exercised either by real information, or the conclusions of experience and observation.'8 Yet, as Prudentia Homespun, she was willing to harness this power to 'disseminate her own peculiar sentiments' (I: 3). Mrs Prudentia claims that she intends 'to lead her readers through no other labyrinth than the wiles of systematic depravity, nor to present any object more soul-harrowing than a deceived and entangled, but ultimately penitent heart' (I: 6). But in fact, what her narrative does is to politicize the domestic through melodramatic conventions. Peter Brooks locates the origins of melodrama 'within the context of the French Revolution,' arguing that melodrama 'comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their installation as away of life, is of immediate, daily, political concern.'9 I suggest that West's novel has links with melodrama because it 'creates the excitement of its drama by putting us in touch with the conflict of good and evil played out under the surface of things.'10 For what is most striking about West's novel is its use of absolute and irrefutable examples of virtue and depravity. I want to show that this insistence on the supreme or the representative model contributes to the potency of the lesson, but becomes problematic in the narrative and in practice. West's heroine is not just any ordinary young and innocent girl, she is 'a mother' and West asserts that 'maternal feelings have frequently inspired such long-suffering quiet fortitude as would add lustre to the annals of a martyr' (III: 11-12). As Julia Kristeva points out, however, motherhood 'is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory; what is more, it involves less an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of the relationship that binds us to her, one that cannot be localized.'11 Hence, West's teachings, with their focus on the Christian, the feminine, and the maternal, raise

104 Empowering the Feminine questions not only about the way English society of the late eighteenth century constituted virtue, but also about the way it perceived it had to constitute itself. According to West, English society is best served and preserved when women and men carry out their religious and moral responsibilities in life. Thus, in her handbooks for youths, Letters Addressed to a Young Man (1801) and Letters to a Young Lady (1806), large sections are devoted to a discussion of 'those duties ... which the God of Nature requires us to fulfil' (Young Lady I: 28). Aware of the controversy about the essence of femininity raised by the debates of the 1790s, West appeals to her 'christian readers' and 'their acquiescence in the facts that are recorded in holy writ' in her discussion about the 'original destination of women' (I: 34-5). She refutes Godwinian notions of materialism and necessity12 when she encourages readers not to waste 'time in a philosophical analysis of the peculiar construction of our intellects, or the physical organization of our bodies' (I: 35). Instead, she urges women to follow the 'design of our creation,' which, according to her, taught a woman 'to be the helpmate of man, to partake of his labours, to alleviate his distresses, to regulate his domestic concerns, to rear and instruct the subsequent generation' (I: 35). She employs the discourse of nationalism and patriotism in order to reinforce what she believes are the teachings of Christianity. In this way, civil, religious, and moral obligations all intersect and are translated into the domestic and maternal duties of women. Being a good wife and mother, according to West, was not only a way of showing Christian piety, it was also a way of demonstrating one's love of one's country. This link is clearly made in Letters to a Young Lady when she reminds her reader that the 'rank which Britain now holds among the nations of the earth' can only be supported as long as 'female virtue' is not 'degraded and abashed' or 'shrinks from investigation' (I: 42). At another point in Letters to a Young Lady she stresses, 'No nation has preserved its political independence for any long period after its women became dissipated and licentious. When the hallowed graces of the chaste matron have given place to the bold allurements of the courtezan, the rising generation always proclaims its base origin' (I: 56-7). Preserving female virtue, then, became a highly political act: for women, it was a way of upholding British pride and valour. The extremely charged, imagined relation between the sexual proclivities of a woman and the politics of the nation served many purposes. It heightened nationalistic fervour by reconstituting differences and boundaries. Britons could differentiate themselves from less civilized peoples Mahometans, Africans, and even Europeans, people who, according to

The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 105 West, do not always treat women 'with benevolent regard to their happiness' (Young Lady I: 38). At the same time, concerns or threats of invasion become domesticated and contained. The enemy is localized, defined, and categorized. While women are given the important function of protecting the state, this analogy also serves paradoxically to reinscribe patriarchal power. Women are represented as vulnerable creatures always in danger of being attacked, and therefore in need of male protection. West instils fears in her female readers by citing examples from ancient history, from the Bible, and from recent events in France: As far as the records of past ages permit us to judge, female depravity preceded the downfal of those mighty states of Greece and Italy which once gave law to the world. We have inspired testimony, that the licentiousness, pride, and extravagance of 'the daughters of Sion,' during the latter part of her first monarchy, accelerated the divine judgments, and unsheathed the sword of the Babylonish destroyer. The events that we have witnessed in our times confirm this position: in most of the realms that have been overcome by the arms of France, a notorious dereliction of female principle prevailed; and the state of manners in France itself, as far as related to our sex, had obtained such dreadful publicity, as allows us to ascribe the fall of that country in a great measure to the dissipated indelicate behaviour and loose morals of its women. (Young Lady I: 57-8) The obsessive focus on sexual chastity, on the woman's body, that is a kind of sexual sensationalism that is designed to create apprehension in women, but that also neutralizes the enemy. It was much easier to blame and to target sexual deviants than it was to struggle with the implications of Jacobinism and the philosophy of radicals such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Holcroft.13 Repeatedly, the lesson in West's writing is that decadence and corruption in the home are linked to bad government and bad people, while resistance to sexual depravity becomes an act of national importance. West addresses women: Thus, though we are not entitled to a place in the senate, we become legislators in the most important sense of the word, by impressing on the minds of all around us the obligation which gives force to the statute. Were we but steadily united in resisting the corruption of the times, the boastful libertine, the professed man of gallantry, the vapid coxcomb, the prophane scoffer, the indecent jester, and all the reptile swarm which perverted pride and false wit produce, would disappear. It is us that they seek to please, or rather to astonish; and if we were but steadily

106 Empowering the Feminine resolved to repay their vanity with contempt, and to bestow our smiles only on what was meritorious, or really brilliant, the habits of the gay world would undergo a most happy transformation. (Young Lady I: 59). Her message to women, of 'resisting the corruption of the times,' is the dominant interest of the plot and the primary concern of A Tale of the Times. In this novel, published when anti-Jacobin sentiments were at their strongest, West depicts the villain, Edward Fitzosborne, with an intensity and specificity that suggest his symbolic importance. Fitzosborne is the incarnation of all the evils described by West in Letters to a Young Lady. He is 'the boastful libertine, the professed man of gallantry ... the prophane scoffer.' He is what Edmund Burke most feared about the French Revolution, where 'every thing is new ... every thing is dangerous,' where 'literary men' are 'converted into a gang of robbers and assassins,' and where 'philosophers are fanatics.'14 Ironically, in her desire to further the 'cause of morality and religion' (A Tale of the Times I: 8), West creates in Fitzosborne one of the most complex and interesting villains in the literature of the times. Through many intertextual references, West delineates him as a satanic destroyer of domestic bliss. Fitzosborne is at once Milton's devil, Shakespeare's Iago, Richardson's Lovelace, a French philosophe, and a Godwinian. He is clearly a figure whom readers are meant to abhor. However, his superior intelligence, his shrewdness, his adroit manipulation of others also make him an anti-hero of the first rank. It is his machinations that drive the narrative. With the introduction of his character in the middle of the second volume, the novel picks up and shifts from its leisurely and somewhat slow pace to move rapidly towards its climax. However, as he is depicted as an irresistible arch-villain, he seems almost too great an enemy for the average wife and mother of England, whom the heroine is meant to represent. It is not surprising that she has difficulties overcoming his machinations. Since Fitzosborne's systematic seduction of the maternal figure becomes the focus of interest of the second half of the novel, it is important to examine how he is represented by West in her politically charged novel. The most frequent intertext West uses is Milton's Paradise Lost. When Fitzosborne returns to England after having 'narrowly escaped the guillotine' (II: 99) in Paris, he views the 'apparent happiness' of Geraldine and her Lord with envy. The narrator says that the heroine's beauty and domestic content 'excited in the philosophic mind of Fitzosborne nearly the same emotions as those which the arch Apostate felt on viewing Adam and Eve in Paradise' (II: 119). In the 1790s, as Claudia Johnson notes, the

The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 107 term 'philosophy ... acquires particularly volatile implications that sometimes ring like challenges in the very title of novels.'15 Thus, both Sophia King's Waldorf; or, The Dangers of Philosophy (1798) and Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) depict heroines who are misguided by the revolutionary claims of reason and individualism. Similarly, Burke had warned in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that 'the scheme of this barbarous philosophy ... is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern, which each individual may find in them, from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests.'16 Aware of the political resonances of the term, West goes a step further and equates French or 'modern philosophy' with the devil's logic. Fitzosborne is the intelligent, but misguided 'fallen angel' (II: 120) who seeks to destroy Eden. But what is notable in West's paradigm is that paradise is figured ideologically in the first half of the novel as the life of an aristocratic gentleman and his wife in their country estate. Albeit with some irony, the narrator recounts Lord Monteith's satisfied discourse about his life: 'it related to his own castle; how much he and Geraldine had improved it; how popular they were among their neighbours; and how they spent their time' (II: 121). This retired, orderly existence of the gentleman is precisely what is at stake in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke decries those with 'upstart insolence,' the 'levellers' who 'pervert the natural order of things.' In contrast, he speaks favourably of the British House of Commons, which is 'filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and politic distinction, that the country can afford.'17 Fitzosborne persuades the innocent wife and mother to err with the rhetorical power of Milton's Belial. Prudentia Homespun tells us that the heroine, Geraldine, had not discovered that in Fitzosborne 'all was false, and hollow; though his tongue / Dropp'd manna, and could make the worse appear / The better reason' (II: 192). The narrator draws a parallel between Fitzosborne's ability to make wrong seem right and the reasoning of the radicals of the 1790s. More specifically, she attacks the thinkers like Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, blaming them for destroying the sanctity of the home. Making links between the domestic and the political sphere, she contends: 'the annihilation of thrones and altars' are not due to 'the successful arms of France, but to those principles which, by dissolving domestic confidence and undermining private worth, paved the wav for universal confusion' (II: 275). Thus, when Fitzosborne

108 Empowering the Feminine reasons to himself, he uses arguments from Godwin, who was known for his repudiation of the institution of marriage. In a section on 'Cooperation, Cohabitation and Marriage' in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, Godwin notes that 'marriage, as now understood, is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, 18 prejudice will be alive and vigorous. So long as I seek, by despotic and artificial means, to maintain my possession of a woman, I am guilty of the most odious selfishness.' Echoing Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice. Fitzosborne rationalizes his actions: 'Private vices are public benefits. Is it not a general advantage, that property should be transferred from an indolent sensualist to an active intelligent enterprising citizen, who would turn it to beneficial purposes?' (II: 294). Godwin had argued that 'various abuses of the most incontrovertible nature have insinuated themselves into the administration of property.' He believed that one way of solving the problems of inequity created by property and inheritance was to have 'every member of the community voluntarily... resign that which would be productive of a higher degree of benefit and pleasure when possessed by his neighbour than when occupied by himself.'19 West depicts Godwinian reason as false, associating it with sophists who 'promulgate systems to justify iniquity, and proscribe repentance by a morality which overturns every restraint, and a religion that prohibits nothing but devotion' (II: 273). She points out that by the kind of thinking that promotes erroneous beliefs, such as 'whatever is profitable is right,' 'the end sanctifies the means,' and 'human actions ought to be free,' these philosophers dissolve the bonds of society (II: 273). West even juxtaposes solid English virtues and licentious French values by the use of literary texts in the novel. In one scene, Fitzosborne advises Geraldine not to read Samuel Johnson's Rasselas because Johnson is 'too profound to be the idol of the million' (II: 183), while in another scene, he makes Geraldine20discover her husband's infidelity by sending her to 'fetch a volume of Rousseau' in her lord's dressing room (III: 36). The implications here are clear: contact with the writer of La Nouvelle Helo'ise leads to 'French principles,' to the dissolution of Geraldine's English home and marriage. In a similar manner, by frequent allusions and citations from Milton and Shakespeare, West associates Geraldine with quintessendaily innocent female figures who lead their men and, by implication, the whole nation into tragedy. If Fitzosborne is compared to the devil, Geraldine is by analogy Milton's Eve, who is responsible for the fall of mankind. In the crucial chapter where Geraldine is duped by Fitzosborne into leaving her

The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 109 home and her children to go off to Edinburgh with him, West uses this passage from Book 9 of Paradise Lost as an epigraph: O much deceiv'd, much failing, hapless Eve! Of thy presum'd return! event perverse! Thou never from that hour in Paradise Foundst either sweet repast or sound repose; Such ambush, laid among sweet flowers and shades, Waited with hellish rancour imminent To intercept thy way, or send thee back Despoil'd of innocence, of faith, of bliss!

(III: 203)

This quotation from Milton emphasizes the epic importance of the woman's decision and adds to the pathos of Geraldine's situation. When Fitzosborne intimidates her into flight, she is depicted as the distraught mother who worries not for herself, but for her children: 'O my helpless, houseless babes! - where shall I shelter them (III: 228). Her departure from Lord Monteith's household becomes the 'event perverse' that forever exiles her from paradise. West transforms what is essentially an abduction21 or Scottish elopement scenario from a sentimental novel into an act of momentous, even cosmic, significance - a lesson for all the wives and mothers in England. What is even more notable here is the way West deftly recasts Geraldine's home into a state of Eden that it never was. By using the lost paradise analogy, West transforms Geraldine's conjugal state into a seat of 'innocence, of faith, of bliss.' The many misgivings that Geraldine had about her lord, indeed, ones that the narrator shared, are forgotten at this juncture in the novel. The narrator had described Lord Monteith initially as one of those common characters which the world every day produces' and one whose 'abilities were not conspicuous' (I: 193). After their marriage, Geraldine's 'delicacy was hurt at the gross character of his amusements' (II: 22). His devotion to hunting left him little time for Geraldine's more refined pleasures. It is due largely to Geraldine's efforts, her 'natural sweetness of temper, and correct notions of the human character' that their home becomes 'Spenser's Bower of Bliss' (II: 28). But all the limitations of Monteith's character, his neglect, and even his infidelity, albeit engineered by Fitzosborne, become forgotten. Instead, the events after the fall focus on Geraldine's irrevocable error and the impossibility of returning to the prelapsarian state. West combines epic lament along with melodrama to create a highly emotional denouement.

no

Empowering the Feminine

Not only does Geraldine lose her place as mother and wife of the family after she is tricked away from her home by Fitzosborne, she loses her place in society altogether. In West's mind, there is no room for the kind of sexual freedom espoused by the new philosophers. Godwin had envisioned a world where 'each man would select for himself a partner to whom he will adhere as long as that adherence shall continue to be the choice of both parties,' believing that 'the abolition of the present system of marriage appears to involve no evils.'22 Fitzosborne echoes Godwin's arguments when he tells Geraldine: 'Marriage, being merely a civil engagement, cannot invalidate the great laws of Nature; and the man must be a prey to the most narrow prejudices, who would deny a woman the right of flying to the protection of a kindred mind, when her revolting soul spurns the tyrannical power of a husband whom she can neither respect nor love' (III: 287). However, this kind of thinking is shown to be faulty and destructive, as after her one 'false step' (III: 277), Geraldine symbolically ceases to be a subject. She loses both her marital status and the 'name of the father.'23 This point is repeated as she laments, 'Ah! what am I now? -I have no home, no one to recognize or to protect me' (III: 266). Later she says: 'I have forfeited the name with which Lord Monteith once honoured me, and I will not disgrace the unsullied purity of my father's' (III: 298). As she has no name, no subjectivity, she can no longer claim the privileges of wife and mother. Of her husband she says, 'He would not allow me to speak to him. He will never let me see my children more. - Not once more ... I only asked for once, before I die' (III: 272). In the end, she acquiesces to her lord's prohibitions and accepts her dereliction: 'Wherever my children appeared, the sad tale of their mother would still be whispered, and the blush of shame must dye their cheeks' (III: 304). She gives up her 'maternal character,' which, at an earlier point in her life, was the only way to find 'those colloquial pleasures ... which had been withheld from her connubial portion' (II: 78). Her role as mother was one of the few sure means of finding contentment in her life. With the loss of this maternal role and her pure reputation comes her 'rapid decline' (III: 341). According to West's melodramatic configuration of maternal virtue, only Geraldine's death can atone for her lapse, and pave the way for her husband's reconciliation with her daughters. Remembering Geraldine as the 'sweet sufferer,' Lord Monteith folded his daughters 'in his arms. Their likeness to their mother was recognized with heart-rending anguish' (III: 356). Although it is evident that West wanted her female readers to learn about the gravity of the maternal character, she has, nevertheless, placed an extremely onerous responsibility on women. In her book Of Woman Born,

The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 111 Adrienne Rich points out that motherhood 'has a history, it has an ideology, it is more fundamental than tribalism or nationalism ... [and is] essential to the patriarchal system.'24 Rich believes that 'throughout patriarchal mythology, dream-symbolism, theology, language, two ideas flow side by side: one, that the female body is impure, corrupt, the site of discharges, bleedings, dangerous to masculinity, a source of moral and physical contamination, "the devil's gateway." On the other hand, as mother the woman is beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing; and the physical potential for motherhood - that same body with its bleedings and mysteries - is her single destiny and justification in life.'25 Rich's observations of the way women are viewed by Western patriarchal society are useful in our reading of West's A Tale of the Times, for West idealizes woman, especially mother-figures, in her novel. Both Geraldine and Mrs Evans are portrayed initially, in Rich's terms, as 'beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing' beings. As soon as Geraldine, whom the narrator depicts as '"chaste as the isicle [sic] on Dian's temple;" attached to her husband; the fondest of mothers; domestic, prudent, and religious' (II: 149), begins to feel'a mixture of pity and esteem' (II: 148) for Fitzosborne, she is no longer the pure and asexual mother. By the third volume of the novel, she is transformed into 'the female body' that is, in Rich's words, 'impure, corrupt... dangerous to masculinity, a source of moral and physical contamination.' After being violated by Fitzosborne, she calls herself 'a wretch whom every one that is tenacious of reputation must abjure ... [whose] children must be estranged ... or be suspected of being infected by [her] contaminating criminality' (III: 327). Geraldine's language and her description of herself as a person capable of infecting others suggest that she as well as West, as Prudentia Homespun, has internalized the belief that women are either angels or whores, pure mothers or sexualized diseased bodies. Another problem with West's idealization of women is that it becomes virtually impossible to have access to the actual experience of motherhood. Although Geraldine derives her primary identity from her role as mother, scenes where she interacts with her children are scant or nonexistent in the novel. At one point, Prudentia mentions that Lady Geraldine Monteith is expecting (II: 42), but does not describe the event that makes Geraldine a mother: 'I pass-by Sir William's rapturous reception of his daughter, the unaffected transport of the countess' (II: 50). At another point, Prudentia notes that the 'illness of lady Monteith's eldest daughter' alarmed her, and that by this time, Geraldine was 'the mother of three daughters, all promising and lovely' (II: 73, 74). However, there are no explicit scenes of nurture between mother and daughter(s). Adrienne

112 Empowering the Feminine Rich has lamented that the 'cathexis between mother and daughter essential, distorted, misused - is the great unwritten story.'26 Similarly, in 'Stabat Mater,'Julia Kristeva points out the need for a post-virginal discourse on maternity, one that would take into account the pleasures, ambivalence, and power of the experience of maternity. Kristeva argues that 'we live in a civilization where the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood.'27 Yet the epitome of this motherhood is the Virgin Mary who is 'an inaccessible goal,' as she is, among other things, a 'Queen in heaven and a Mother of the earthly institutions (of the Church) .'28 With Mary as the ideal mother, 'the female sexual organ changed into an innocent shell... sexuality is brought down to the level of innuendo.'29 Like Rich, Kristeva demonstrates that the possibilities for females are limited: ' a woman will only have the choice to live her life either hyper-abstractly ... in order thus to earn divine grace and homologation with symbolic order; or merely different, other, fallen.'30 In A Tale of the Times, the reason why the denouement is so swift and traumatic is that having failed as a divine example, Geraldine can only be the fallen woman. Even the lines from Nicholas Rowe that are used as an epigraph to the chapter subsequent to Geraldine's disgrace show the impossibly high standards West sets for woman: 'In vain look back to what she was before; / She sets, like stars that fall, to rise again no more' (III: 277). In other words, women, 'like stars,' can partake of heavenly glory, but this elevation has its price. In the novel, Geraldine has to be sacrificed to preserve her family and the English nation. She is ostracized and made a scapegoat in order that West may warn her female readers about the dangers of indulging in 'unsuspected feelings' (III: 319). Trusting in one's own sense of right and wrong, in one's feelings, was what radicals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays advocated in their novels of the 1790s. Aside from Geraldine Monteith, the other important mother-figure in the novel is Lucy Evans's mother. Lucy Evans is clearly meant as a foil to Geraldine, just as in West's A Gossip's Story (1796), the sisters Louisa and Marianne are contrasted with each other. Lucy Evans's mother is an exemplary maternal figure, unlike Geraldine's mother, who dies because she fails to fulfil her maternal duty. In the case of the latter woman, after Geraldine's birth, instead of taking care of her infant, Mrs Powerscourt 'was ruminating on the possibility of being at Chester races; and, contrary to the opinion of her matronly friends, she resolved on the hazardous expedient of a too early appearance in public' (I: 73). What is interesting here is the way the narrator links these events as a warning to those who would neglect their maternal responsibilities. 'A severe cold ... and the

The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 113 neglect of the first maternal duty, joined to inattention to her own safety' (I: 73) are the causes of Mrs Powerscourt's ill-health and premature death, according to Prudentia Homespun. Conversely, Mrs Evans is the woman whom Geraldine considers 'as more truly fulfilling the maternal character,' as she had judicious, firm, but affectionate reproofs' and was 'an experienced governess' (I: 100-1). It was to 'the instructions of Mrs Evans ... that [Geraldine's] mind was indebted for its richest treasures' (I: 101). The benefits of Mrs Evans's mothering can best be seen in her daughter, Lucy. Lucy's character 'was cast in nature's most artless mould, and finished by the unremitting attention of an intelligent mother and an exemplary father' (I: 104). Compared to the wealthy Geraldine, Lucy 'had read much, she had thought more; her leisure for study and reflection was greater than her friend's, and her mind imperceptibly acquired superior energy' (I: 105). West suggests that maternal care and intelligent mothering can more than compensate for the lack of privileges of rank and power. Lucy, unlike Geraldine, does not let passion or sentiment rule her actions. Early in the novel, when Geraldine pleads with Lucy to 'save her from the dreadful alternative of a detested marriage' proposed by her father, Lucy 'could recollect nothing but her mother's solemn adjuration' (I: 159), which was for Geraldine to submit to the wisdom of her father. Mrs Evans's power and influence over her daughter extend even beyond her lifetime. Although Lucy's mother dies before the middle of the novel, Lucy adheres to her teachings and her wishes in order to 'prove' her 'filial reverence to the best of mothers' (II: 44). After her death, Lucy says: 'While she lived, I thought my conduct as a daughter not blamable; but now that she is beyond the reach of my attention, I find infinite occasion for self-reproach' (II: 45). Mrs Evans exercises what Michel Foucault would call the power of surveillance on her daughter. Her influence is similar to the effect of Bentham's Panopticon: 'to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assumes the automatic functioning of power.31While I am certainly not suggesting that Lucy is in any kind of a Foucauldian prison throughout her life, West does show the omnipresence of the maternal on Lucy. Ultimately, Mrs Evans's example and lesson of patience and negation of selfish female desires have their rewards as Lucy finds contentment in marriage and the rearing of Geraldine's children, whom she adopts. Mothering in A Tale of the Times, as I have attempted to show, does not necessarily consist of a mother interacting physically with her biological offspring. Instead it becomes what Elizabeth Rowaleski-Wallace defines as the 'maternal.' Kowaleski-Wallace notes that 'in contrast to maternity, we

114 Empowering the Feminine could define the "maternal" as the representation of the feminine principle as it manifests itself outside of any specific practices of child rearing ... it corresponds not to any social woman, but to an internalized sense of female power.'32 Using slightly different terminology, Anne K. Mellor suggests that the 'ideology of maternity is represented in very different ways in male- and female-authored texts in the Romantic period.'33 Mellor argues: 'Male writers focus on biological maternity, on the body of the mother (and especially on her milk-filled breasts), as the source of life itself, while female writers concern themselves with the various ways in which the socially constructed role of motherhood can be performed. They celebrate the mother as educator and moral guide, as the provider of spiritual and emotional comfort.'34 Both critics note that at this period in the eighteenth century, female writers actively participated in the social and historical construction of maternity.35 I suggest that Jane West was similarly involved in the redefinition of the domestic by focusing specifically on the power of the maternal even though, ostensibly, she represents herself as the harmless, gossipy Prudentia Homespun from Danbury. Her position is somewhat paradoxical in this respect. As Marlon B. Ross points out, 'the woman who speaks out purposefully not to dissentbut rather to reaffirm her total subordination to the political establishment inevitably finds herself in a problematic position of dissent. The only pure form of feminine action she can take in offering her (non) political support to the status quo is to be silent.'36 Thus, West can be seen to be as fully political and polemical as those writers she criticizes. Her awareness of her adversarial position is revealed when she apologizes to her readers towards the end of the work for allowing herself to 'repel the enemy's insidious attacks with similar weapons,' by 'vending pernicious sentiments ... through the medium of books of entertainment' (III: 387). If, like Mary Wollstonecraft and her followers, West was determined to elevate women in her texts by teaching them to be 'affectionate wives and rational mothers' rather than 'alluring mistresses,'37 there is still one crucial difference between their thinking. West attempted to instruct through fear. In Deidre Lynch's words, West, like Burke, 'is incited to matrophobia by a runaway female sexuality, a disorder that simultaneously over-produces babies and fails to replicate the politico-economic order.'38 Following Burke, West imagined 'the nation as a ravished wife in need of virile protection,' while, as Mellor demonstrates, 'Wollstonecraft substituted the image of the nation as a benevolent family educating its children for mature independence and motivated by "natural affections" to ensure the welfare of all its members.'39 This distinction, however, does not diminish West's importance. West was following the conservative program of the 1790s, which, as

The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 115 April London notes, 'held two imperfectly meshed paradigms of femaleness generated by the "culture of sensibility": woman is both a physical being susceptible to masculine appropriation and an agent of the civilizing values of domesticity that are a product of her moral acuteness.'40 In A Tale of the Times, West shows how woman, or more particularly, a mother, represents all of the most sacred and most cherished virtues of the nation, but could also become the means by which that nation falls.

7 Displaying Hysterical Bodies: Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father

In the 'Retrospect of Domestic Literature - Novels and Romances' found in the July 1803 issue of The Monthly Magazine, Mrs Prudentia Homespun's fourth novelistic production received this terse review:1 'The Infidel Father is a novel from the sermonizing pen of Mrs West, and is too strongly marked, like her other writings, with the spirit of the Methodist school.'2 However, in the same year, a long review of the novel was published in the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, praising Jane West for going against the 'pernicious books' found in circulating libraries: 'Mrs. West... openly braves [her] enemies; boldly throws down the gauntlet to the philosophistical sages, the Paines, the Godwins, the Woolstonecrofts [sic], the Williamses, of the age; hurls defiance in the face of fashionable vice, and holds up her unblushing votaries to obloquy and shame.'3 While the title of the novel seems to suggest a religious focus, The Infidel Father is much more than a 'Methodist' work. Like A Tale of the Times4 (1799), it is a sentimental satire of the radical thinkers of the 1790s. While it is not as much fun or as full of parodic allusions as Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800-1), it is similar in intent and spirit. What the Anti-Jacobin reviewer recognized was the novel's overtly political as well as religious aims. Through her self-created fictional spinster in Danbury, West criticizes the middle class for its loss of 'sound sense, decent propriety, and manly virtues.'5 In particular, she blames the degeneration of the family on the rejection of Christianity and on the adoption of the 'new system of education' based on Godwin's belief in rational thinking (I: 272). My chapter focuses on this critique of enlightened philosophy and system of education, especially on the ways this criticism is sexualized and gendered. If West associates propriety with 'manly virtues' (I: iii), by

Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father 117 implication, impropriety and dissolution are feminine vices. While she depicts a number of horrific scenes where women and men have been misled by reason, the most powerful ones are those in which readers are presented with the spectacle of the female body. At several points in the novel, women become uncontrollable and hysterical. These scenes, which are intended as warnings for young women, are Gothicized, highly charged, and exaggerated. The female body functions as the site of chaos, as the embodiment of all that has gone wrong with the world. More often than not, religious and intellectual transgression is associated with sexual indulgence, deviance, and being French. Condemning her acquaintances who have a tendency to exhibit loose morals and a willingness to tolerate sexual laxity, the young heroine of the novel exclaims: 'The world shall rise up in judgement against them, hunt these fiends in human shape back to the infernal regions, and purify a civilized age and a Christian country from this worse than barbarian, worse than pagan contamination' (III: 139). This intersection of 'Methodist' fervour with British patriotism, sexual conservatism, and paternalistic thinking is what makes The Infidel Father such an interesting novel. Like West's previous novel, A Tale of the Times, it is a fine example of the strong anti-Jacobin sentiment that pervaded around the turn of the century, the years immediately following the death of Mary Wollstonecraft. I suggest that, in part, the many spectacles of hysterical females in The Infidel Father are a manifestation of society's need to govern and punish what it perceived was an unmanageable inclination on the part of the radicals to break free from the rigid rules of propriety, property, and the hierarchies necessary for the hereditary system of patrilineage. In his study of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that it was in the eighteenth century that 'specific mechanisms of knowledge and power' centred on sex.6 For Foucault it was at this time that women's bodies became the subject of scientific and institutional scrutiny and control. In A Tale of the Times, West as Prudentia had focused on the threats to the mother and to the domestic family posed by the radical thinkers of the 1790s. In The Infidel Father domestic sanctity is still perceived to be at risk, but she now puts the blame of lack ofjudgment on the father-figure who is supposed to guide his family. While A Tale of the Times presented a number of portraits of mothers good and bad, The Infidel Father depicts a series of fathers - a foolish, misguided one; an irresponsible, weak one; and of course, an exemplar)' model. In both novels, however, sex and sexuality remain the principal way in which the nation is corrupted; they are the manifestations of the evils of modern philosophy and sophistic logic.

n8

Empowering the Feminine

Another concern of the novel, which is a running theme in all of Jane West's works, is the importance of education, especially female education. In The Infidel Father, this concern takes up much of the first volume. Early in the work, Prudentia informs her readers: 'My plan has ever been to seize on some important moral truth, and then to fabricate a story to illustrateiV (I: 7). At the time of composition of the novel, she considered 'a dereliction of parental authority, extravagant expectations, romantic attachments, and the dangers arising from confidential intimacies' as most 'prominent among the many morbid diseases that haunt the lazar-house of relaxed manners' (I: 7-8). Her desire to improve the condition of women through education is in keeping with the goals of both the radicals and the antiJacobins of the time. Writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Hays, and Amelia Opie were all concerned with the issues West cites here. For this reason, many of the novels they produced, such as Mary, A Fiction; A Simple Story; Memoirs of Emma Courtney; and Adeline Mowbray, feature

girls raised by negligent, foolish, or misguided parents or parental figures. The difficulty of living up to the expectations of the 'proper lady'7 is revealed as many of these works feature multi-generational heroines whose problems pertaining to proper conduct take more than one woman's life and example to resolve. Ten years before West's novel, Wollstonecraft had written about the dangers of parental authority, romantic attachments, and intimacies in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Both Wollstonecraft and West were concerned that young girls make foolish decisions based on fancy, sentiment, and excessive sensibility. What they disagreed on was upon what to base correct or proper behaviour. For Wollstonecraft, women must be encouraged to become 'rational creatures, and free citizens.'8 West, however, ridicules the notion that girls can make choices based on reason. For her, reason or philosophy is a poor substitute for Christian doctrine. Despite the list of the 'philosophistical sages' given by the reviewers of the Anti-Jacobin Review, West's two main targets in The InfidelFatherarejeanJacques Rousseau and William Godwin. The fear and dislike of the French philosopher follows in the tradition of Edmund Burke, whose Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) denounced Rousseau as 'the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity.'9 In this Letter, which is a continuation and revision of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke makes the link between the disintegration of the French nation, familial bonds, and Rousseau. Burke rebukes the National Assembly for following those 'practical philosophers' headed by Rousseau, as it has dire consequences: 'As the relation between parents and children is the first among the elements of vulgar, natural morality, they erect statues to a wild,

Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father 119 ferocious, low-minded, hard-hearted father of fine general feelings; a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred ... The next relation which they regenerate by their statues to Rousseau, is that which is next in sanctity to that of a father. They differ from those old-fashioned thinkers, who considered pedagogues as sober and venerable characters, and allied to the parental ... In this age of light, they teach the people, that preceptors ought to be in the place of gallants.'10 For Burke as for West, one of the faults of Rousseau's philosophy is that it teaches people to disregard the natural authority of fathers and the respect children ought to have for their fathers, and replace them with a kind of weak philanthrophy. In his Emile (1762) Rousseau, who believed that 'natural man, man as he is born, is good,' argued that education ought to consist less in imposing rules and regulations than in letting a child learn through experience.11 He also thought that, ideally, 'the very words obey and command will be excluded from [the child's] vocabulary, still more those of duty and obligation; but the words strength, necessity, weakness, and constraint must have a large place in it.'12 The position is echoed in England by Godwin, who in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, also argued that authority ought not to be imposed on individuals; instead, as Mark Philp says, 'it is only through the full and free exercise of each individual's private judgment that... truths can be discovered, communicated and translated into action, so that the improvement of society will be brought about.'13 The views of both these philosophers are replicated and satirized by West in The Infidel Father. The second concern expressed by Burke regarding pedagogues becoming gallants comes mainly from Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761).14 Rousseau's eighteenth-century rewriting of the passionate and illicit love of Eloisa for her tutor was highly influential, especially among revolutionary writers who saw it as a text expressing an articulate and educated woman's desire and sexuality. For example, Hays's heroine, Emma Courtney, reads what she calls 'this dangerous, enchanting work' as a girl with transport, with ... enthusiasm.'15 When she believes that she is in love, she calls the man 'the St. Preux, the Emilius, of [her] sleeping and waking reveries.'16 Similarly, after reading Rousseau's Heloise, Wollstonecraft's heroine, Maria, in The Wrongs of Woman, sees her inmate, Darnford. as the personification of Saint Preux, or of an ideal lover far superior.'17 Nicola Watson suggests that 'women novelists known for their revolutionaiy sympathies - Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, Eliza Fenwick, Mary' Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft amongst them - made repeated attempts to adapt the controversial plot of La Nouvelle Heloise.'18 In their fictions, its plot and epistolary form came to be associated with

120 Empowering the Feminine 'authentic female feeling,' and it became a work embodying 'the daughter's sexual rebellion against the father and the ancien regime for which he stands.'19 In other novels that do not explicitly cite Rousseau, such as Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791) and Opie's Adeline Mowbray (1801), the heroine falls in love with a preceptor-figure, usually with unfortunate consequences. However, the complex ways in which these love stories are worked out - not always with happy endings - suggest that while the women writers were attracted to the plot of Heloise, to the tutor/ sage who was also an irresistible figure of desire, they also realized the transgressive, disruptive, and potentially explosive implications of Rousseau's narrative. In retrospect, Burke's warning, written before many of these novels were published, was a timely and judicious one. For Burke, the rulers of the National Assembly, influenced by 'the false sympathies of this Nouvelle Eloise ... endeavour to subvert those principles of domestic trust and fidelity, which form the discipline of social life. They propagate principles by which every servant may think it, if not his duty, at least his privilege, to betray his master ... They destroy all the tranquility and security of domestic life; turning the asylum of the house into a gloomy prison, where the father of the family must drag out a miserable existence ...'20 I have cited Burke's condemnation of Rousseau and his influence at length because, in my view, The Infidel Father, like A Tale of the Times, is an extended illustration of Burke's fears. West demonstrates how 'domestic trust and fidelity' is subverted by radical philosophies based on reason, freedom, individual feeling, and experience - qualities both Rousseau and Godwin felt ought to be emphasized. For West, cultivating these qualities only leads to a destruction of traditional principles and values. Her narrative, then, dramatizes in an exaggerated way the perils of these philosophies, highlighting the tragic consequences for one particular father and his family. In order to show that 'modern' teachings have negative effects on the middle class as well as aristocrats, West begins her narrative with an extended subplot involving the wholesale ironmonger Peter Jones and his pretentious wife. This subplot serves as a comic introduction to the main story of Lord Glanville, the 'infidel' father. The progress of the Joneses up the social and economic ladder is presented in detail in order to mock those who are not content with their place in society as well as to satirize those in high fashion. Their antics provide a humorous view of upper-class society. For instance, early in her married life, not liking their vulgar name, Mrs Kitty Jones changes their names to Sir Peter and Lady Fitzjohn by ingeniously searching in the churchyard of her husband's family: 'She visited the dwelling of her husband's ancestors, and found indisputable

Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father 121 marks that it had a baronial residence 400 years ago. She magnified a ditch into a moat, transformed a pigeon-house into a watch-tower ...' (I: 43). In her wish to aggrandize the family, she employs Mr Babble as the tutor for her daughter, Melisandriania, and her son, Artemidorous. Mr Babble is an exaggerated and foolish version of Rousseau's tutor in Emile. For instance, he looks to the savages of New Zealand, California, Terra del Fuego, South Sea Islands' as models of behaviour (I: 60). As both Rousseau and Godwin advocate, Mr Babble lets children learn by experience, even though they may harm themselves. Godwin wrote: 'Till we are acquainted with the nature of the objects around us, we cannot compare them with the principles we have formed, and understand the modes of employing them. There are other ways of attaining wisdom and ability beside the school of adversity, but there is no way of attaining them, but through the medium of experience.'21 Similarly, in a Godwinian fashion, he says: 'Fasting will excite bodily pain; and the more intense that pain, the more vehement will be the operation of the mind' (I: 57). He also tells the nurse to let the children play with knives, otherwise 'you would impede their natural liberty, and weaken the power of experience' (I: 65). He favours the abtruse system of modern philosophical education' that allows young Artemidorous to play with gunpowder, resulting in the boy's breaking the windows of the house, and causing a fire to start (I: 69-70). Babble is dismissed finally when, in a scene 'adopted from Rousseau's Emilius,' he lets the two children set out together by themselves to exercise their freedom (I: 82). After much searching, the boy is brought back unconscious, while the girl, Melisandriania, goes missing. Burke's point about the deterioration of the family through bad preceptors is further illustrated by the woman engaged to 'finish' Melisandriania 'in the best style' (I: 89). The accomplished governess, Miss La Rouge, had once been a French milliner, then a kept mistress, and had but lately turned her attention to the science of education' (I: 89). Miss La Rouge may be a mocking reference to either Mary Wollstonecraft or Mary Hays, as she believes that it was 'unchristian to say that a woman "byonefalse step for ever damns her fame''' (I: 92). In their novels of the late 1790s, both Wollstonecraft and Hays argued that women ought not to be judged solely by their sexual virtue or chastity. The heroines of Wrongs of Woman and The Victim of Prejudice assert their right to liberty, and speak of their virtue and honour after losing the traditional marker of female virtue, their chastity. In The Infidel Father the effect of such a woman on Melisandriania is to make her become 'a beautiful accomplished automaton, without a mind; versed in the manners of the day, and ready to adopt any character to which

122 Empowering the Feminine the world affixed a transitory importance' (I: 96). What is interesting about this treatment, however, is that West does not follow through with the negative results of Melisandriania's education. After dwelling in detail on the misguided education of the Fitz-John children, West does not go on to develop them fully as adults. They remain shadowy, secondary characters who form a comic backdrop. Instead, the author shifts the story line and focus to the aristocratic family of the Glanvilles, whose daughter, Caroline, suffers acutely and melodramatically from the consequences of experimental philosophy and teaching. Structurally, this shift from the comic Fitz-Johns to the more serious Glanvilles is a weak point in the novel. What seems to link these two and other stories is the father-figure who fails to take adequate charge of his family. Peter Fitz-John leaves the important task of educating his children to his foolish wife, who chooses bad tutors, while Lord Glanville commits the graver error of subscribing to the teachings of modern philosophers. Prudentia concludes the first section of the novel by a moral about being satisfied with one's lot: 'let us not be craving for a new religion, a new government, a new system of morals, or a new code of law ... Instead of indulging factitious desires, and fastidious dislikes, let us steadily examine the real value of what we possess; remembering, that nothing human can be perfect, that the failings which we are long accustomed to are become so familiar to our habits, that they may be borne; and the virtues which we have long proved are rendered so necessary to our comforts, that we cannot be deprived of them without experiencing a painful void' (I: 11419). This lesson effectively connects Christian acceptance and submission with an antijacobin agenda. Without citing Godwin, West refutes his notion of the perfectibility of human nature and the need to change the system of government. Godwin was of the opinion that 'man is perfectible.' By this he meant 'the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement.' Because man is thus perfectible and in a 'state of perpetual mutation,' Godwin felt that governments ought also to change, or else that 'we should have as little of it, as the general peace of human society will permit.'22 These ideas cause familial havoc in the narratives - comically with the Fitz-Johns, and tragically with the Glanvilles. As the novel moves from the one family to the other, West moves from those who would ape the 'new religion ... a new system of morals' to those who practise the new philosophy. The tone changes from light mockery to a more didactic and sentimental one as West criticizes what she calls 'modern manners' (I: 127). Lord Glanville, who is influenced by the opinions of Shaftesbury and

Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father 123 Bolingbroke, by the 'sarcasms of Voltaire,' and by the 'varying sophisms of Rousseau' (I: 145), is introduced by this meditation: 'man is born to trouble; sorrow and care are in some degree his inevitable portion; but a tenfold portion of sorrow shall be the lot of him who willingly and determinately deviates from the plain path of rectitude. The thorns of care are scatttered all over the world, nor is the pillow of the Christian free from these painful inmates; but if you ask me where their points are sharpest, and their wounds most envenomed, I will direct you to the bosom of the Infidel' (I: 144). From the plot, it is difficult to ascertain which is Lord Glanville's most serious fault. He embodies all the qualities West feared courtly values, Jacobin thinking, and atheism. He is a libertine, an infidel, and a Godwinite. It is this particular conjunction of traits that makes him the tragic and despicable hero in a novel by Jane West. For both Jacobin and anti-Jacobin writers condemned libertinism, and the plot of the 'seduced maiden' was fairly common in sentimental novels by the late eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.23 The incidents from Lord Glanville's early life could just as easily be taken from a novel by Mary Robinson or Amelia Opie, as it is a typical narrative of seduction. Lord Glanville, then called Lord Malvern, falls in love with Sophia Aubrey, the orphaned daughter of a clergyman, and after much courting and liberal gifts to her and her brother, succeeds in convincing her to marry him privately. They live together for four years, during which time she bears him a son. However, after the death of his father, Lord Glanville comes into his title and estate, decides to marry the heiress Caroline Lewson, and abandons his first wife and child. Sophia's brother challenges him to a duel, and is killed in the process, thereby making Glanville not only a seducer but also a murderer. Though his deeds are unknown to others, 'he carried the scorpion remorse in his own bosom, and the soul-harrowing resemblance of the dying Aubrey and the distracted Sophia followed him to every clime through which he passed, like Cain, a fugitive and a wanderer' (I: 203). The crucial difference between West's novel and the narratives of seduced maidens produced by more radical novelists of the period is that the others tend to dwell on the tragic consequences of the loss of the woman's virtue. For example, in Hays's Victim of Prejudice, the seduction becomes the means by which the author exposes the injustices of society, while in Opie's The Father and Daughter, the narrative becomes one of female repentance and redemption. In comparison, West's seduced maiden or abandoned wife becomes nothing more than a spectre who haunts the hero. She is not given the power of speech, and her story is told by others

124 Empowering the Feminine years after her death. Even though she has not really erred - as she was legally married - she is banished to the margins of the narrative, and appears only in dream state to Lord Glanville. It is only when Glanville meets his granddaughter, Sophia, some forty-seven years after, that he recollects the sordid events of his youth: 'Sometimes poor Aubrey stood before him with that soul-harrowing look which he gave him on receiving the murderous bullet in his bosom. Sometimes he saw the well-remembered cherubic countenance of his son, who now appeared struggling with all the calamities that attend a deserted orphan. But a still more dreadful vision often appeared. It was his injured wife in the moment of frenzy; her arms bound, lest they should injure her own person, her hair wildly dishevelled, and her eyes bereft of all their soft intelligence; yet, even in madness, retaining her habits of piety and fidelity, and imploring every beholder to pray for poor Harry's cruel father' (II: 97-8). In West's world, the seduced woman becomes the madwoman in the attic of Glanville's memory. She is a ghostly presence or an apparition that haunts him but occasionally. As she dies soon after Glanville abandons her, West no longer has to take into account her real presence or plight. Instead she is frozen in her 'moment of frenzy,' bound up and confined safely in the past and in a dream. Her main function in the novel seems to have been that of producing the 'good' daughter, or in this case, granddaughter, to contrast with Glanville's 'bad' daughter, Caroline. The anti-heroine, Caroline, has problems that stem from her faulty upbringing - a direct replication of the doctrines of'modern' philosophy: 'Lord Glanville had educated his daughter in the principles of investigation and independence, as explained by the newest commentary on ratiocination ... all her actions were to be guided by prudence, and virtue was to be the constant inhabitant of her bosom ... Her attachment to him was to be quite distinct from the ties of nature, because she was to be instructed that those ties are merely the bond of prejudice. It was not to be the result of duty; because duty implies obligation, and must therefore be unsuitable to the nature of an independent, reflecting being' (I: 236, 238-9). Readers of Enquiry concerning Political Justice will recognize some of

Godwin's key concepts being repeated here. Godwin believed that 'independent, reflective and virtuous agents' alone can inaugurate a new society. For him, this 'good society' consists of'good, rational, and self-perfecting beings.'24 Since Godwin felt that 'to a rational being there can be but one rule of conduct, justice, and one mode of ascertaining that rule, the exercise of his understanding,' to compel individuals to obey authority whether a government or a father - was to 'depart from the independence

Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father 125 of our understanding.'25 In the case of a child and his parent, Godwin thought that the child should obey the parent only if it was evident that the parent knows better than the child what ought to be done. As Godwin argued: 'Nothing can be more necessary for the general benefit, than that we should divest ourselves, as soon as the proper period arrives, of the shackles of infancy; that human life should not be one eternal childhood; but that men should judge for themselves, unfettered by the prejudices of education, of the institutions of their country.'26 In The Infidel Father, Lord Glanville is unable to direct his daughter's actions because she would only answer him with such Godwinian teachings: 'You have convinced me, that I possess inherent independence; and now you would inforce my submission to parental authority, an abuse which you have often told me was derived from misconception, fostered by priestcraft, and submitted to by childish imbecility' (I: 270). To prevent this kind of retort, Prudentia says, 'I must advise [the generality of fathers] to reflect before they adopt the new system of education. Its tenets are so well adapted to suit the perverse views of fallen humanity, that the humblest talent may hope to confront paternal pertinacity, with the weapons furnished by paternal folly (I: 272). In contrast to the foolish 'new system of education' propagated by Godwin, West presents the traditional ways of another father-figure, the Reverend Brudenell, who elevates the orphaned Sophia on Christian doctrines. The granddaughter of Lord Glanville and his first unfortunate, discarded wife, Sophia has been taught the importance of 'piety, benevolence, and integrity' (II: 80). As in a number ofJane West's earlier novels, she is the heroine who is contrasted with the abjected 'other' in order to facilitate the author's didactic purposes. Because Caroline has been corrupted by Godwinian tenets, she hardly shows any 'natural affection' or 'filial duty' to her father (I: 239). She pursues 'transitory and temporal objects' (II: 86), while Sophia, at the age of twenty, 'was passionately fond of Mr Brudenell, and devoted to reflection and tranquil amusements' (II: 64). Brudenell has full confidence that Sophia's soul will 'rise to the performance of the extensive duties which [her] situation requires' because she has been 'regularly educated as a Christian' (II: 70). He tells her: T taught vou to subdue your evil propensities ... I founded your moral rectitude on the principle, that no good deed would go without its reward, nor any premeditated, unrepented sin without its future punishment... I did not invigorate your passions, nor did I attempt to eradicate them; but I strove to render them the allies of religion. By inculcating the doctrine of divine omnipresence, I gave you a rule of action infinitely more valuable than all that philosophy ever framed; a rule that will regulate your reflec-

126 Empowering the Feminine tions when you are in your closet, that will inspire you with virtuous singularity when a multitude would draw you into evil, that will teach you justice to the meanest individual, and will give you fortitude and consistency before the proudest earthly tyrant' (II: 73-5). West uses Brudenell as a spokesman for traditional, Christian values, which she believes provide a solid bulwark againstJacobin philosophy. She has faith that virtue will be rewarded, and in response to Godwin's notion of private judgment based on reason, West counters with the 'doctrine of divine omnipresence.' The effect of the different systems of education on the two girls is observed by Lord Glanville, who becomes aware of the shortcomings of his daughter: 'Lord Glanville contrasted [Sophia's] active services, her uniform sweetness, her unaffected wish to please, manifested not on extraordinary occasions, but daily and hourly, with his self-engrossed, self-willed, though at times enchanting daughter. He would not allow that Sophia's superior conduct proceeded from a better system of education than his own ... He had taught [Caroline] obstinacy, which he called fortitude; selfishness, which he dignified by the name of self-esteem; and a lofty disregard for the opinions, interests, and convenience of others, which in his vocabulary was the proper distinction of a free independent being' (II: 92-5). By substituting one term for another - obstinacy for fortitude, selfishness for self-esteem - West undermines and challenges many of the central arguments and philosophies in Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice. Her narrative illustrates the defects of Godwin's theories when they are put into action. High-sounding ideals, such as freedom and independence, become impractical, self-serving, and dangerous when they are put in pratice by inexperienced and foolish young women. West further demonstrates the limitations of Godwin's trust in private judgment by showing how fallible it can be. The greater part of the second and the third volumes is devoted to mishaps and domestic disasters caused by Caroline's erroneous thinking and upbringing. Similar to her deployment of the character of Fitzosborne in A Tale of the Times, West introduces Mr Raymond, who is the embodiment of what Edmund Burke feared as the upstart who would infiltrate and corrupt noble families. In his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, Burke

warned: 'When the fence from the gallantry of preceptors is broken down, and your families are no longer protected by decent pride, and salutary domestic prejudice, there is but one step to a frightful corruption. The rulers in the National Assembly are in good hopes that the females of the first families in France may become an easy prey to dancing-masters, fidlers, pattern-drawers, friseurs, and valets de chambre, and other active

Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father 127 citizens of that description, who having the entry into your houses, and being half-domesticated by their situation, may be blended with you by regular and irregular relations.'27 Mr Raymond,28 who is in debt and has a dubious background, believes in 'candour,' which according to the 'new school,' determined that 'a father was very fair game, and that it was lawful to hunt him down' (II: 104-5). He attracts Caroline's attention and arouses her sympathies by speaking of himself as a'persecuted' man (II: 168). West discredits Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and other radicals' attempts to value individual merit above rank and fortune by making Raymond a hypocrite and a cheat. He pretends to distinguish Caroline based on 'personal merit1 and claims to be indifferent to her fortune (II: 197). In order to secure her hand in marriage, he conspires with the groom to save Caroline from what she believed was an attempt to kidnap her by Italian and French banditti. Believing that she owes Raymond her 'life and honour,' Caroline acts according to her own 'conviction,' goes against the 'prejudice of society,' and marries him against her father's wishes (II: 274). The melodramatic and highly wrought scenes that follow Caroline's elopement are excessive, almost Gothic in quality and mood. West's critique of enlightenment philosophy concentrates for the most part on its negative effects on the female body. Soon after the marriage, which she confesses has made her wretched, Caroline deteriorates not only morally but physically. She claims that Raymond has deceived her and neglects her, and is seen at various times in private and public places with the Marquis of Montolieu. This lord, who represents French decadence and depravity, precipitates Caroline's destruction and fall. She is seen at a tetea-tete with him at a masquerade, at breakfast, and with his encouragement, gets heavily into debt through gambling. When Sophia visits her, she has become a spectre of what she once was: 'The delicate smoothness and brilliancy of her complexion had disappeared; and, though rouge was resorted to as a substitute for natural roses, it wanted the kindling animation, the ever-varying expression, which used alternately to flush and fade in her most intelligent face. Every feature too seemed worn with anxiety; her eyes had lost their lustre, and appeared sunk and dim, compared with the lightning glances which darted from them at Glanville Castle' (III: 84). Not only does Caroline lose her beauty and sprightliness, she loses all sense of right and wrong. West equates Godwinian notions of independence and judgment with perverted and loose morals, as Caroline calmly considers divorce and adultery, associated in the novel with Europe, as alternatives to her unhappy marriage. She tells Sophia: 'Many women, who were wretched in their first choice, have had that tie legally dissolved, and lived admired

128 Empowering the Feminine patterns of conjugal fidelity with the man for whom they braved censure by avowing the preference arising from calm consideration. Many circumstances may paliate the infidelity of a wife; as the superior merit of the lover, an assurance that his affection will not be diminished ...' (III: 130-1). In her defence of her actions, Caroline sounds rather like Maria, the heroine of Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman, who also claimed the privilege of a divorce.29 However, West counters any influence Caroline might have with the readers through her heroine, Sophia, who reacts with disgust and indignation. In one instance when Caroline states that in Europe, infidelities in marriages were quite common, Sophia responds patriotically: 'If manners on the continent be as corrupt as you describe, it behoves British decorum to make the firmer stand. We may be at peace with the persons of the wicked, but never with their morals' (III: 99). In addition, in contrast to Wollstonecraft's heroine, whose first-person narration legitimizes her claims of abuse, neglect, and necessity for divorce, narrative control is given to Prudentia, whose solid, moralizing voice precludes any possibility of the reader's feeling sympathy for the headstrong Caroline. On the subject of matrimonial wretchedness, for example, Prudentia has this homely advice: 'it must be remembered that the nuptial tie is indissoluble; and, since the most courageous spirit can hardly venture to encounter a life ofrealmisery, I would humbly recommend to all those of my own sex who have been so unfortunate as to choose precipitately, to regulate their conduct by another of those homely rules which have (after all) some good sense in them, and try to "make the best of a bad bargain." We may not, perhaps, be able to convert the pebble into a diamond; but what if, by indefatigable labour, it should be polished into a Bristol stone, will not our ingenuity be rewarded by the change?' (III: 88). The crucial difference between West and more progressive writers like Wollstonecraft and Robinson is that West advocates resignation and prayers as a good response to the 'vices of our wedded partner.' In Prudentia's words, 'there is no other defence against them, than the superior purity of our conduct, the regular influence of our good example, our intercessive prayers, and the comforts of religion. These, I trust, are sufficient not merely to preserve us from despair, but to gild our lives with the cheerful ray of conscious duty' (III: 89). In order to reinforce her lesson about the consequences of improper behaviour on the part of daughters and wives, West punishes her transgressive anti-heroine by making her an object of horror and excess. The effect is to create strong dichotomies between the 'good' and the 'bad' girl, outlining two clearly marked identities for her female readers. Since

Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father 129 Caroline has failed to fulfil her socially expected roles as the virginal daughter and good wife, she is shifted into the uninhabitable and unspeakable categories of other: the prostitute, the madwoman, and the murderer. To produce this subject, West stages a number of spectacular scenes involving Caroline. Against the advice of her friends and relations, Caroline goes on stage to act the part of Mrs Sullen in George Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem.30 At the same time, as the novel progresses, she is increasingly deprived of speech. Instead of giving her a voice to explain her philosophy, Prudentia has characters describe her actions for her. One character gives this report of Caroline after seeing her in the play: hysterical laughs, and the turbulent rolling of her eyes, too plainly indicated the perturbed state of her mind ... the scene of parting with Sullen vanquished her mock magnamity, and, after a violent effort to laugh which I shall never forget, her features became convulsed, and she sunk upon the stage' (III: 248). Through these descriptions, West associates the rebellious female with the hysterical, abnormal, and diseased body. The unchaste woman becomes the madwoman, a spectacle loose in the public sphere. The blame is placed squarely on French and atheistic influences, as an old servant laments: '[Caroline] was sadly neglected, poor young creature, and left to those heathenish foreigners. I once tried to teach her the catechism, but my lord forbade me, and he burnt my lady's bible, because my young lady was fond of it' (III: 255). In West's view, this lack of Christian education, as well as the teachings of radical philosophers, encourage imprudence,' which leads to Caroline's loss of respect in her community and eventual demise (III: 267). In a highly dramatic scene that serves to contrast the two girls, Caroline drops on her knees before Sophia, her blushing face concealed by her hands, and silently regrets her erroneous ways. This tableau of the errant woman kneeling before innocence functions like an emblem of West's anti-Jacobin sentiment. For the antiJacobins, the 'unsex'd females,' the followers of Godwinian philosophy, were women led astray who ought to be brought back to the fold. Not content merely with socially ostracizing the deviant woman and her misguided father, West ends the novel by killing them both off, thereby fulfilling her Christian belief that unrepented sin would be punished. Rejected by her French lord, and cast out by her father, who calls her a bastard' and a strumpet,' Caroline rushes to her father's sickroom and stabs herself at his feet (III: 304). The details are given by the old servant, who witnessed the scene: 'she had struck with such force, that the knife was plunged up to the heft in her bosom ... her blood flowed upon the floor like a fountain' (III: 305). At this point, Prudentia then reminds her

130 Empowering the Feminine readers that 'the Infidel Father was a spectator of this scene. He saw the convulsive struggles of his dying child, perverted by his false principles, and rendered furious by his cruelty... too late relenting, he had screamed out forgiveness' (III: 306). This macabre and Gothic scenario is followed shortly after by the death of the infidel father himself. Again, Prudentia puts a moralistic edge to the event: 'The death-bed of an Atheist cannot be described. It is a sight from which the human heart recoils with horror' (II: 307). Lord Glanville dies with 'a horrible retrospection of his past life' (III: 307). He sees his past sins flit before him: 'an abandoned distracted wife, a murdered kinsman, and a deserted son' (III: 307). When he dies, few people mourn his passing as 'he loved himself too well, and his fellow creatures too little, to be regretted' (III: 314). Both deaths are visual renditions of a hellish existence on earth. Both scenes are spectacles that invite didactic readings and interpretations. By not simply describing the scenes, but emphasizing at the same time other people's reactions to them, West directs her readers' attention to the moral behind the tale. She avoids the much more ambivalent readings that might result from a parodic version of Jacobinism such as in Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. These deaths would be a perfectly tidy and schematic conclusion were it not for the disturbing fact that, in the novel, it is not only the infidel father and his Godwinian daughter who die violent and spectacular deaths. The lessons about justice, charity, and obedience to authority work only if one suppresses and ignores the story of Sophia's grandmother, the innocent Sophia Aubrey. Her story of seduction and eventual madness links her not with her granddaughter, Sophia who leads an exemplary life and is rewarded at the end, but with the errant Caroline, who also becomes mentally and emotionally disturbed after being abandoned by Lord Glanville. Her presence in the novel suggests that even without the influence of the much-feared Jacobin philosophy, young women were still easy targets, susceptible to deceit and seduction. It is perhaps some small comfort to know that young Sophia eventually inherits the Glanville estate and receives the recognition due to the first Sophia. In any case, for West, one should not expect to be rewarded in this life. In her novel, virtue is at least rewarded and crime is punished , even though it is two generations later.

PART III: AMELIA OPIE (1769-1853)

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8 Re-scripting the Tale of the Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter

Prose writer and poet Amelia Alderson Opie (1769-1853) published at least twelve works of fiction and three books of poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Writing became her primary means of support after the death of her husband, the painter John Opie, in 1807. Jan Fergus and Janice Thaddeus point out that 'during more than thirty years as a writer of poetry and didactic domestic fiction, Opie was reasonably successful ... between 1804 and 1834, she earned at least £4280,' a figure that amounts 'to about a third of Maria Edgeworth's earnings during approximately the same period, and almost exactly as much as Burney received from her four novels.'1 Today she is best known in literary studies for her novel Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter (1805),

which is loosely based on the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. She had, however, already published a number of works before this controversial novel.2 One of her most popular and successful works was The Father and Daughter, A Tale in Prose (1801), which 'ran through nine

editions for a total printing of 6750 copies plus the first three editions (probably another 2750 copies).'3 This number is impressive when one considers that in the 1790s, print orders for unknown authors were usually for 750 copies, while a well-known author would have a print order of about 1250.4 Though literary merit does not necessarily come from sheer sales figures, a close look at a book that was well liked and widely read can give an indication of the prevailing ideological beliefs; notions of what was considered right, wrong, or important, as well as what was proper and improper in a culture at a particular moment. As Opie's The Father and Daughter deals with a morally contentious subject about women and attempts to redefine, albeit in a limited way, their position in the domestic and public sphere, it can be read as a gauge of the values that were prized,

134 Empowering the Feminine tolerated, or deemed unacceptable to English society at the turn of the century. In this chapter, I examine the way Amelia Opie grapples with the notion of female virtue and the proper conduct for a woman. I argue that she rewrites the script of the fallen woman within a socially acceptable framework and discourse of penitence. While much of the biographical material on Opie written in the nineteenth century concentrates on her life as a Quaker,5 I want to show that in her early life, Opie participated in the production of the kind of 'domestic fiction' that Nancy Armstrong suggests 'helped to produce a subject who understood herself in the psychological terms that had shaped fiction.'6 Armstrong argues that at this time, 'the novel developed sophisticated strategies for transforming political information into any one of several recognizable psychological conditions, and it did so in a way that concealed the power exercised by discourse itself in carrying out this transformation on a mass scale.'7 Opie's The Father and Daughter, like Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796) from which she quotes,8 offers a subtle but penetrating critique of established society from the perspective of the seduced young maiden. Charlotte Smith, in Emmeline (1788), had similarly explored the plight of the seduced woman, though in a more limited way, through her subplot of Lady Adelina.9 In her tale, Opie invites a more thorough reassessment of the ways in which power, female sexuality, and human desire intersect by giving voice and individuality to the sexually transgressive figure. Rejecting the conventional endings of the fallen woman found in sentimental fiction such as Richardson's Clarissa, Opie elevates the stature of her heroine by drawing on biblical and Shakespearean paradigms. She shifts the focus of the tale from a struggle between two lovers to larger, more classic conflicts between a father and daughter, between social norms and individual convictions. In the tale, Opie expands the subjectivity of her heroine, and, implicitly, that of woman not just to include the customary roles of maiden, mistress or wife, but to highlight and encompass roles of daughter, caregiver and provider, mother, worker, and nurse. In this way, woman is no longer defined solely by her sexual availability, or what Irigaray calls their 'use value and exchange value,'10 but become desiring and resisting subjects. In an essay called 'British Seduced Maidens,' Susan Staves accounts for the 'fascination of the pathetic seduced maiden for the eighteenth century' by suggesting that these women 'were so appealing because they embodied precisely those virtues the culture especially prized in young women: beauty, simplicity (or ignorance, to call it a harsher name), trustfulness, and affectionateness.'11 Staves cites Opie's The Father and

She Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter 135 Daughter as a convenient example of the seduced-maiden novel' and argues that the heroine, Agnes, is 'only one of many such pathetic seduced maidenstobefoundineighteenth-centuryfiction.1' 2WhileIamnotdisputingStaves'sargumentthatOpies' talecontainsmanyoftheconventionsofth Staves's argument that Opie's tale contains many of the conventions of thee seduced maiden story found in works such as Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), and Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796), there are crucial differences worth noting. One important difference is that in Opie's tale, the seduced maiden is the central rather than a secondary character of the work. Her story is not used simply as a foil to that of the more virtuous hero or heroine. In The Father and Daughter Agnes is the locus of interest, not an abject other. Her story was so moving and powerful that Sir Walter Scott 'was in tears as he read,' and Mr Prince Hoare, painter, dramatist, and editor of The Artist, could not sleep all night, as the book 'made him so wretched.'13 Another difference is its immense popularity. Opie's tale inspired Ferdinando Paer's opera, Agnese, sung by Ambrogetti (1809), a play called Smiles and Tears (1815) by Mrs Kemble, and Thomas Moncrieff s The Lear of Private Life.14 The European Magazine and London Review for September 1801 described it as 'a very affecting moral story' in which 'the incidents, which are of a domestic nature ... occur naturally, and "come home to the business and bosoms" of every class of readers.'15 The astonishing success and immediate acceptance of Opie's tale cannot simplv be explained by the culture's fascination with the pathos of the seduced maiden. I suggest that it penetrated the 'bosom of every class of readers' because I he Father and Daughter, as its title suggests, stages a classic story of parental love and filial devotion or what might be called a Freudian 'family romance.'"' As opposed to a courtship novel, in which the main protagonists are the two young lovers, this tale plays out the more primal struggle between father and daughter, between an age of innocence and that of experience, between disruption and order. It uses a number of theatrical scenes, tableaus, and dramatic devices to reconcile opposing forces and to dispel anxieties about the potential dangers of the female body. I argue that the tale challenges the stereotype of the pathetic, seduced fallen woman by conflating the transgressive body of the prostitute with the penitential figure of the Magdalen. In addition, in its use of Shakespearean paradigms, it offered readers the chance to mourn the loss of a world of simplicity and order, the pre-revolutionary world that, according to Edmund Burke, depended upon 'the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.'17 Opie was well aware of the dramatic power of many of the characters

136 Empowering the Feminine and scenes she depicted in The Father and Daughter. Many of them were stimulated by events she had witnessed and experienced. For example, in her own 18 youth, she was particularly attached to her father. As an only child, after the death of her mother when she was fifteen, she 'took the head of her father's table, and the management of his domestic arrangements.'The Father and Daughter is dedicated to him, in gratitude 'for years of tenderness and indulgence' (iv). She writes: 'To you I owe whatever of cultivation my mind has received; and the first fruits of that mind to you I dedicate' (Dedication, iii). Much later in 1807, after the death of her husband, John Opie, she returned to live in her father's house in Norwich and remained close to him throughout his life. The moving scenes of the father gone mad were apparently inspired by her fascination with the plight of lunatics and criminals. In her memoirs, which she started but never completed, Opie recounts how, as a child, she used to stop at the city asylum for lunatics and see the inmates at their windows through the iron gates. After a number of visits, she befriended a man called Goodings, and became known by the others as 'the little girl from St. George's.'19 Of this experience she writes: 'the sight of a lunatic gave me a fearful pleasure, which nothing else excited; and when, as youth advanced, I knew that loss of reason accompanied distressed circumstances, I know that I was doubly eager to administer to the pecuniary wants of those who were awaiting their appointed time in madness as well as poverty. Yet, notwithstanding, I could not divest myself entirely of fear of these objects of my pity ...'20 One of these men of bedlam, who had 'a look full of mournful expression,'21 was in her mind when she wrote The Father and Daughter. Another event that shaped her thinking in her twenty-something years was her friendship with the radical intellectuals of the 1790s. Her father, James Alderson, was among those who 'hailed the dawn of the French revolution with pleasure' and he was involved in a local society that canvassed reforms.22 When she was in London, Opie was frequently in the company of William Godwin, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Thomas Holcroft.23 By then, she had also met and admired Mary Wollstonecraft, who went by the name of Mrs Imlay. In 1794, she attended the treason trials of Thomas Hardy, the founder of the London Corresponding Society, and John Home Tooke. Her interest in courts continued through her later years, and she analysed her absorption by them in a paper called 'Reminiscences ofJudges' Courts' in 1844: I have often asked myself why it is that I, and many others, can sit from early morning till evening in a court of justice, with still increasing interest? and the

The Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter 137 answer has been, that it proceeds from that general and enduring passion, the love of excitement. Those courts are epitomes of human life, and their walls, within their bounded space, contain beings full of the passions, infirmities, resentments, self-deceits, self-interests, fears, hopes, triumphs, and defeats, incident to our common nature, and the proofs and results of which are there painfully brought before us. A court of justice may be likened to a stage, the principal performers on which are the barristers; and happiest are they who have the most frequent opportunities of moving the feelings, and influencing the convictions, of that respectable audience - a British jury.24 I cite these biographical facts and anecdotes because they are important in my reading of The Father and Daughter. In my view, Opie's close relationship with her father, her fascination with the inmates of Bedlam, her friendship with the radicals of the 1790s, and her awareness of the dramatic power of moments of crisis even in common incidents or people, all contribute to the way she developed her early tale. One of the passages from The Father and Daughter quoted most often by reviewers and critics of the nineteenth as well as of this century is the memorable opening scene:25 The night was dark - the wind blew keenly over the frozen and rugged heath, when Agnes, pressing her moaning child to her bosom, was travelling on foot to her father's habitation. Would to God I had never left it!' she exclaimed ... (l) 26 This opening leads to the moving encounter between Agnes and the maniac, who tells her, 'I had a child once - but she is dead, poor soul!' (67). The shocking revelation of the madman's identity then follows: he turned hastily round, when, dreadful confirmation of her fears, Agnes beheld her father!!! It was indeed Fitzhenry, driven to madness by his daughter's desertion and disgrace ... Agnes ... let fall her sleeping child, and, sinking on the ground, extended her arms towards Fitzhenry, articulating in a faint voice, 'O God! my father!' then prostrating herself at his feet, she clasped his knees in an agony too great for utterance. At the name of father,' the poor maniac started, and gazed on her earnestly, with savage wildness, while his whole frame became convulsed ... He raved, he tore

138 Empowering the Feminine his hair; he screamed and uttered the most dreadful exercrations... he repeated the word father, and said the name was mockery to him. (68, 71) I quote this scene at length because it is indicative of the tale's intensity and dramatic potency. The recognition scene is a favourite device of dramatists from Shakespeare to the eighteenth century.27 In particular, however, the recognition or reconciliation of father and daughter became a frequent motif in many seduction tales. Staves notes that 'scenes of fathers weeping over the loss of their daughters, of fathers pining away with grief, and tearful scenes of final reconciliations when the errant daughter comes home repentant are more common and much more fully rendered than seductions themselves.'28 What is different about Opie's scene from these others is that it takes place outdoors, in a 'frozen and rugged heath' rather than in a domestic space. Its unusual setting renders it closer to a scene from King Lear than from a domestic or sentimental novel. As in the well-known third act of Shakespeare's play, the father-figure here, believing that he has been abandoned by his daughter, rages against the elements. The narrator's emphasis on the foul weather, the wind, the night, as well as 'the tempest in [the father's] mind'29 that leads him to madness, directs us to the storm scene in King Lear. Lear's problem, that of 'filial ingratitude,'30 is also what led Fitzhenry to 'the death-stroke of his reason' (70). Similar to Shakespeare's play, the daughter returns to heal and care for the father without his realization. While the causes of estrangement are different, Opie's implicit comparison of her heroine to Cordelia, the good daughter, ennobles and elevates Agnes. Agnes, the seduced woman, becomes the one who has been mistakenly condemned by the ruler and by society, but who returns to show her fidelity and devotion. By implication, the Cordelia analogy transforms Agnes from a pathetic seduced maiden to a heroine of heroic or tragic stature. The consequences of this elevation are manifold. One effect of taking the story of a simple village girl and her father and comparing it to a tragedy is to participate in the reshaping of cultural history. As Nancy Armstrong has argued persuasively about the way domestic fiction empowers the female and the middle classes, I suggest that in this moral tale, Opie, too, succeeds in rewriting female subjectivity based on emotions, psychological behaviour rather than 'one's specific sociopolitical identity.'31 As the stage effect of the scene dominates our senses and controls our emotional response the specific class or mercantile background of the characters become irrelevant. This scene of the father and daughter moves readers because it

The Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter 139 uses archetypal postures: the daughter falls down and clasps her father's knees in grief, in her stance suggestive of devotion, penitence, and suffering. Fitzhenrv's repetition of the word 'father' with 'savage wildness' (71) adds to the pathos of the situation. As in King Lear, such sacred words are reminders of an older world of order, where fathers and kings were accorded respect and deference. I am not suggesting that Opie was necessarily lamenting the loss of the pre-revolutionarv world, which Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France had so eloquently and nostalgically called 'the age of chivalry.'32 Opie's sympathies were more ambivalent, as shown by her interest in the treason trials of 1794, her friendship with the radicals of Godwin's circle in the 1790s, and at the same time, her close association with her Quaker friends, the Gurneys. As a writer, however, she was not unaware of the dramatic power of the scenes of domestic love and filial affection that were often used by novelists of sensibility. GJ. Barker-Benfield points out that there are strong links between the iconic gestures of these novels and the heroic world: The depiction in the fictive world of sensibility of deferential gestures was derived from the romantic or feudal past. Most apparent are the kneelings and other postures of super- and subordination, expressing a range of meanings: supplication, gratitude, and distress, for example. Such postures permitted the extravagant expression of emotions because of their subordination to form ... the culture's language of gesture and word became a system defining female propriety and attempting to define "the sex" as "ladies." Sensibility marked a "bourgeoisified" courtly status ...'33Opie plays with these postures and conventions from the culture of sensibility, conferrring on her father and daughter of humble origins the passions and the grandeur of an earlier aristocratic age. What is important to note is that despite its Shakesperean paradigm, Opie's tale is still rooted in the domestic. The climactic scene between Agnes and her father is interrupted by the needs of Agnes's child, whom she momentarily forgets in her own agony. It is precisely because Opie combines the sweeping svmbolism and scope of Lear with the domestic and affectionate scenes of a sentimental novel like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie ou La Nouvelle Heloise that her Father and Daughter was so appealing.

Another important element of the tale is its strong parabolic overtones. While the plot of the tale is simple and typical of seduction novels, it has biblical resonances that gives it a mythic or pastoral quality. It is probably this aspect of the tale that caused the reviewer of The Critical Review to remark that 'the moral inculcated by this tale is seriously impressive. It exhibits in the most affecting point of view the misery consequent upon

140 Empowering the Feminine the illicit indulgence of the passions; and the effect of the awful lesson which it teaches is not impaired by any intermixture of levity of dialogue or pruriency of description.'34 Opie herself wished this work to be considered a didactic tale rather than a novel. In her preface she modestly says, 'its highest pretensions are to be a SIMPLE, MORAL TALE' (vi). While it can undoubtedly be read as a strong warning for women not to become 'the victim of artifice, self-confidence, and temptation' (233), like Adeline Mowbray, it also critiques the morally pretentious and inconsistent behaviour of people of quality. Several passages in the tale mark differences between the instinctively sympathetic and charitable actions of simple folk and the questionable or dubious reactions of the people of high social standing. For instance, when Agnes returns to the village, she is aided by a series of characters from the lower echelon of society who treat her with kindness and with neighbourly goodness. After her exhausting trip she is given food and shelter by a cottager and his wife. When Agnes offers them payment, they refuse her money because, according to them, 'What we did, we did because we could not help it' (85). The wife tells Agnes, 'And as to saving the child ... am I not a mother myself, and can I help feeling for a mother?' (85-6). Her comments suggest that there exists a characteristic of charity, goodness, or sympathy for fellow beings in people that is 'natural' rather than socially constructed. However, that only the poorer segment of society act upon this sympathy is interesting. This valorization of the abilities of low and rustic life is in keeping with democratic tendencies of the post-revolutionary decade. Like the poet William Wordsworth35 and her friend Thomas Holcroft, Opie elevated the lower orders, showing their moral worth through their actions. In a similar manner, Fanny, the daughter of Agnes's former nurse, welcomes her with a hospitality far above her means. Observing the lavish breakfast Fanny has laid out, Agnes comments, 'Ay, the prodigal is returned, and you have killed the fatted calf (102-3). The reference to the prodigal son acknowledges Agnes's error, but the allusion to Luke's parable also alerts us to the way Opie wishes us to reacts to Agnes's misspent youth and foolish behaviour. Though Agnes's transgression, unlike that of the son in the biblical narrative, is of a sexual nature, the response Opie suggests through the comparison is that of unconditional forgiveness. Thus Opie appropriates the parabolic and Christian discourse to recover the doubly displaced body of the disobedient daughter and the seduced woman. Susan Staves argues that 'the pathos of the seduced maiden depends upon her being a modest girl who strenuously resists invitations to illicit intercourse, yielding only after a protracted siege and under

The Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter 141 otherwise extraordinary circumstances.'36 However, in The Father and Daughter, Opie states that she does not wish to dwell on scenes that depict the 'embarrassments, temptations, and struggles, which preceded Agnes's undoing' (24). Instead, she shifts the focus away from what Ruth Yeazell calls 'fictions of modesty,'37 away from eighteenth-century cultural definitions of the innocent and delicate maiden, to more humanitarian and moral conceptions of laudable human behaviour, which is in keeping with her aim of writing a moral tale rather than a sentimental novel. The naturally benevolent and generous acts of Fanny and the cottagers are contrasted with the more strained and ambivalent response of gentlefolk. Mr Seymour, the father of Agnes's best friend, is described as a kindhearted but vain man who 'never acted in any way without saying to himself, "what will the world say?" Hence, though his first impulses were frequently good, the determinations of his judgment were often contemptible' (112). Mr Seymour's first reaction when Agnes goes to ask for his help is to order her to leave his house directly, 'as it should be no harbour for abandoned women and unnatural children' (106). Opie makes a direct comment on the misdirected and artificial customs of those in positions of privilege and power by showing the difference between Seymour's severe conduct and his servant's impulsive and generous one. The servant, 'kinder than the master,' sympathetically addresses Agnes: 'you were the sweetest-tempered young lady - that ever I should see you thus!' (107), and cannot shut the door against her despite his master's orders. Eventually, however, Seymour does relent and becomes Agnes's advocate. He aids her in her desire to be servant in Bedlam in order to care for her mad father. Other gentlefolk in the village are not so forgiving. At a party one lady calls Agnes a 'good-for-nothing minx,' while another, aptly named Mrs Macfiendy, wonders how Mr Seymour 'could condescend to look at such trash' (145, 146). When Seymour defends Agnes, Mrs Macfiendy insults them both by suggesting that Seymour was a 'gay man' and that Agnes would be glad to take up with anything now' (150). The divergent attitudes to the seduced woman from the different social groups can be seen as Opie's critique of her contemporary society. Agnes's tale is reminiscent of a subplot in Elizabeth Inchbald's more political and overtly Jacobin novel, Nature and Art (1796), which also features a young girl from the village who is seduced by a man of higher social standing than she, left with a child, and then turned away by people of the upper class. Interestingly enough, in some editions of this novel, Inchbald's seduced maiden, Hannah Primrose, was named Agnes. In The Father and Daughter, Opie quotes a passage about the mistaken, idealized notion of

142 Empowering the Feminine love from Inchbald: 'Love, however rated by many as the chief passion of the heart, is but a poor dependent, a retainer on the other passions admiration, gratitude, respect, esteem, pride in the object' (7). In the passage before this one, Inchabld notes that 'there are many person, who, if they had never heard of the passion of love, would never have felt it.'38 Readers who are familiar with Inchbald's novel would recognize the intertextual reference and remember the story of poor Hannah. This decidedly unromantic framing of Agnes's passion for her seducer, Clifford, occurs early in The Father and Daughter. It suggests that, in Opie's view, there are other channels for women's passion and energy than romantic love. Inchbald's seduced maiden is much more of a victim of love and of society at large than Opie's. She is ignorant, illiterate, and eventually succumbs to a life of prostitution after her seduction. In contrast, Opie's heroine successfully redeems herself in her society: 'her penitence became town talk' (151). She earns a living doing shawl work, takes care of her father, and even finds time to minister to the poor, so that in her poverty, she 'had the satisfaction of knowing that she was as consoling to the distressed, if not as useful, as she was in her prosperity' (167). Unlike Inchbald's seduced maiden, who is primarily used as a negative contrast to the good female protagonist, Opie's heroine is able to take on subject positions other than that of the discarded mistress and harlot. Her ability to make herself useful gives her a kind of dignity and power that puts the concept of the seduced maiden under 'erasure,' to use a Derridian term. For Derrida, a signifier under erasure is 'effaced while still remaining legible, is destroyed while making visible the very idea of the sign.'39 Through this way, Opie deconstructs or puts into question eighteenthcentury cultural notions of what it means to be a fallen woman. The other important function of the reference to Inchbald's novel is that it highlights the theme of 'nature and art.' Inchbald's novel was originally called 'a satire upon the times,' and I have argued elsewhere that it provides a criticism of society through contrasting perspectives of the literal and the symbolic, or nature and culture.40 By alluding to her friend's political novel, Opie implicitly calls attention to the similarities between the two works. Gary Kelly has noted that Opie's fictions exhibit 'somewhat contradictory qualities, preaching conformity to the conventional sexual and family roles, but fascinated by deviations from those roles, incorporating criticism ... but reaffirming ... social institutions.'41 Kelly points out that, in The Father and Daughter, 'Opie does show signs of her friendship with Mary Wollstonecraft; for in Agnes Fitzhenry's time of need it is other women, not the absent lover or incapacitated father, who

The Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter 143 come to her rescue.' Furthermore, he suggests that Caroline Seymour could be an idealized version of Opie herself, while Fanny could be a composite of Wollstonecraft's youthful friend, Fanny Blood, and faithful servant, Marguerite.42 Thus, though she does not write of the 'wrongs of woman' in the same way that Wollstonecraft or Inchbald do, she does invite her readers to reassess their views of the sexually transgressive figure. Here the woman who embodies the site of desire, someone who has given in to the corrupt 'pleasures' of the flesh, is shown to be capable of filial devotion, maternal solicitude, and social charity. During the time when Agnes performs her seven years of penitence, it is the people of high societv, those who have learned the lessons of 'art' or artifice, who exhibit unnatural or uncharitable behaviour towards her. They condemn Agnes without taking into consideration the circumstances of her seduction, or else they condemn her outwardly only because society expects it of them. Opie renders her heroine more dignified and less pathetic than other seduced maidens through another allusion, this time to a better-known eighteenth-century novel. At one point in the tale, Agnes receives money from her friend Caroline, and decides to replace her worn-out servant gown, saying, '''My father loved to see me fine," as poor Clarissa says and had 1 never left him, I should not have been forced to wear such a gown as this' (194-5). Like Richardson's Clarissa, Agnes's fervent wish after her seduction is for the forgiveness and blessing of her father. Like Clarissa, she has been tricked away from home, and made to adopt a role, or to wear a gown, not fitting to her initial situation in life. Yet there are also crucial differences to the two stories. While Clarissa regains her dignity and becomes saintly through a negation of her earthly body, as some critics have noted.43 Agnes gains the respect of the town slowly through 'a life of self-denial, patience, fortitude, and industry' (192). Suffering becomes the means to her redemption. The contrast between them is demonstrated by the context of the quote from Richardson. In Clarissa, it occurs when Clarissa has been taken to debtors' prison at the suit filed by Mrs Sinclair. Clarissa is attempting to give away her clothes, suggesting that they are no longer useful in her condition. The quotation is followed by her resigned comment, 'All shall go.'44 In The Father and Daughter, Agnes uses the quotation to justify her buying a new gown that is more suitable to her circumstance. The distinction, albeit minor, is indicative of the way in which Opie rewrites the story of the fallen woman. For her, the one false step that leads to seduction does not necessarily prevent one from continuing to lead a useful life on earth. Ultimately, Agnes's efforts at creating a home for herself and her father

144 Empowering the Feminine are terminated abruptly by his death. The ending of the tale is sudden, melodramatic, and tragic, for Agnes dies shortly after her father recognizes her and forgives her. It seems as if Agnes's love for her father is so intense that she cannot exist without him. However, as I have attempted to show, what seems to be of more significance is the way Opie recasts the script of a familiar story. If Gary Kelly is right that Agnes's friend Caroline is an idealized version of Opie herself, it seems appropriate to conclude with Caroline's sentiments on the subject of fallen women rather than the actual ending of the tale, which is highly conventional. In a letter to Agnes, Caroline writes: It is the slang of the present day ... to inveigh bitterly against society for excluding from its circle, with unrelenting rigour, the woman who has once transgressed the salutary laws of chastity; and some brilliant and persuasive, but, in my opinion, mistaken writers, of both sexes, have endeavoured to prove that many an amiable woman has been for ever lost to virtue and the world, and become the victim of prostitution, merely because her first fault was treated with ill-judging and criminal severity. This assertion appears to me to be fraught with mischief; as it is calculated to deter the victim of seduction from penitence and amendment, by telling her that she would employ them in her favour in vain. And it is surely as false as it is dangerous. I know many instances, and it is fair to conclude that the experience of others is similar to mine, of women restored by perseverance in a life of expiatory amendment, to that rank in society which they had forfeited by one false step, while their fault has been forgotten in their exemplary conduct as wives and mothers. (190-1)

This statement, which encourages a forgiving and charitable attitude to the fallen woman, rather than the oft-quoted strongly didactic warning against 'listening to the voice of the seducer' at the end of the tale (234), is more in keeping with what we know of Opie and of the conditions in which the tale was written. For this reader, it expresses more accurately the actual moral of Opie's short but fascinating tale.

9 The Curtain between the Heart and Maternal Affection: Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray At the end of Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter (1804), the

Quaker woman, Rachel Pemberton, discovers that the way in which Mrs Mowbray believed she could pay the 'greatest attention' to her daughter's education was through the writing of a 'voluminous manuscript' on the subject of education.1 But she notes, while the mother was busy 'composing her system of education, Adeline was almost banished [from] her presence' (257). The Quaker woman then admonishes Mrs Mowbray: 'forgive me if I venture to observe, that till of late years a thick curtain of self-love seems to have been dropped between thy heart and maternal affection. It is now, and now only, that thou hast learned to feel like a true and affectionate mother!' (257). This incident, which occurs just before the much-desired reconciliation between the mother and daughter, is a telling vignette of Mrs Mowbray and a microcosm of many of the concerns found in Opie's best-known novel. The fact that Adeline Mowbray is a roman a clef about Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin has tended to be the focus of discussions of the novel. Critics seem to be divided between seeing the novel as an indictment of the radical thinkers of the 1790s, or as a feminist defence of Wollstonecraft's life. Whereas contemporary reviews of the novel tended to see it as condemning Jacobin philosophy, twentieth-century scholars have pointed out the contradictory and, possibly, revolutionary messages inherent in the novel.2 For instance, Opie's nineteenth-century biographer, Cecilia Brightwell, echoes the words of the Monthly Review of 1806 in her summary of the object of the work. According to Brightwell, it is 'to pourtray the lamentable consequences which would result from the adoption of lax principles on the subject of matrimony.'3 More recently, however, Claudia Johnson cautions against a too-strict classification ofJacobins

146 Empowering the Feminine and anti-Jacobins, noting that Elizabeth 'Hamilton and Opie, for example, do not endorse the status quo without serious qualifications. They dutifully denounce reformist zeal, only to tuck away parallel plots which vindicate liberty, private conscience, and the defiance of authority, and thus discretely define broad areas where conservatives and progressives could agree, surely no part of the reactionary program.'4 Similarly, Gary Kelly has noted that in the works of Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth, there are both 'official and unofficial ideologies, both a dominant and hegemonic patriarchal attitude to the relation between self and society, and a submerged and therefore covert feminist '5

one. What these readings emphasize are the political aspects of the novel; what they do not discuss as much is the interesting subtitle of Adeline Mowbray, which is 'the mother and daughter,' especially the way in which this vexed and emotionally charged relationship relates to the Jacobinism or theandJacobinism of the novel. For what the Quaker woman says to the mother, Mrs Mowbray, raises significant questions about good and bad mothering, about women's function in the home and in society. The Quaker woman believes that there is an incompatibility between modern philosophy and maternal love. The 'curtain' that falls between Mrs Mowbray's heart and mind, between her love of self and her affection for her daughter, is emblematic of the curtain that many antijacobins perceived existed between theory and practice, between Godwin's books and women's experience. Elizabeth Hamilton in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800-1), for example, humorously satirizes this incompatibility in her heroine, Bridgetina Botherim. Opie's novel poses similar questions, but it does not sustain a satiric mode, and is thus ideologically different. In this chapter, I examine Opie's depiction of the near-obsessive, quasi-tragic relationship between mother and daughter. While the subtitle presents this relationship in the singular, there are, in fact, a number of mothers and substitute mother-figures in the novel, as well as several daughters and women desiring to be daughters. My argument is that it is impossible to read the political philosophy of the novel without linking it to the way Opie delineates this female bond. In other words, what Freud calls the 'family romance' is as central to the novel as the issue of how Opie viewed the radical theories of the 1790s.6 The novel invites readings from a number of perspectives. In Adeline Mowbray, as in Temper published some eight years later, Opie explores the lifelong, crucial bond between mother and daughter. Here, the themes of intense mother/daughter love and hatred, loss and recov-

I'heorv and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 147 ery, banishment and forgiveness are rendered almost in mythic terms. The plot resounds with elements of Greek myth and Christian iconography. In her book called The Mother/Daughter Plot, Marianne Hirsch suggests that both motherhood and daughterhood' can be seen as 'story - as narrative representation of social and subjective reality and of literary convention.' She argues that 'it is essential for feminists to be aware of the pervasiveness of familial metaphors and of the family as vantage point in our culture and in its analytic methodologies.'7 It is revealing to look at a girl's struggles with femininity, with becoming a woman, with the expectations of society in relation to cultural myths and fantasies, particularly those that use female models. In reading Adeline Mowbray, for example, one can see many links with strong female figures from classical literature. In her anger and jealousy of her daughter, Mrs Editha Mowbray is like Sophocles' Clytemnestra, who has turned against her daughter, Electra, in favour of her new husband, Aegisthus. However, later in the novel, when Editha Mowbray repents and pines for her daughter, she can be compared to Demeter in her search for Kore, who has been stolen by Hades. Adeline, like Iphigenia, has embraced the logic of the patriarchal rulers, and has decided to sacrifice herself. She sees her death as a necessary step in order to improve her daughter's life. These parallels are not consistent, but they are useful in giving readers a perspective into a novel that seems otherwise excessive and melodramatic. What Opies does is to translate age-old paradigms into the domestic, in order to give her protagonists heroic stature. As Gary Kelly notes, Opie 'uses fiction to depict the social and psychological drama of the home, a topic of increasing interest to the professional and middle-class people — and especially women — who formed the majority of the novel-reading classes.'8 Aside from mythic representations, Opie also uses conventions from popular literary genres of her time. In her thorough and engaging reading of Adeline Mowbray, Roxanne Eberle points out that the novel draws on 'two familiar narratives - the sentimental bildungsroman and the seduction plot/ as well as elements of the philosophical novel and the domestic tale in order to highlight 'essential questions about property, freedom of the individual, and female sexuality.'9 Eberle argues that Opie situates the debate between radicals and conservatives 'directly over the heroine's desirable - and commodifiable - female form' in order to expose the selfinterest explicit in both camps.10 Her essay focuses, to a large extent, on the heroine as 'fallen' woman, with references to Wollstonecraft's actual life and works, and Godwin's account of her in his Memoirs. However, what is not discussed is the other and equally important aspect of the heroine's

148 Empowering the Feminine life. She is not only a sexualized female, she is also a daughter, who subsequently becomes a desirable body in the eyes of the men around her. Opie devotes quite a bit of time in her novel to the transition of Adeline from daughter to wife or mistress. If we are to see the novel as a Bildungsroman, issues of family, in particular, those of the mother, play a large part in the formation and development of the protagnist's mind and character. In addition, as a 'domestic' tale, the emphasis is not only on the middle-class context, but also on the psychological forces that shape the subject of the fiction.11 What is more problematic is the notion of 'tale,' which Opie had used to describe The Father and Daughter, but which at the time, and perhaps even now, denotes simplicity.12 Adeline Mowbray, with its conflicting messages about the mother/daughter bond, freedom, marriage, and sexuality, is, however, not all that simple. It is also possible to read the novel as a love story, not between Adeline and her lover, Frederic Glenmurray, but between Adeline and her mother. For the mother/daughter relationship not only begins and ends the work, but is an integral element of the plot. For Adeline, it is the memory and the desire of the mother that influences many of her actions. It is also this memory and desire of the mother that impels the narrative. Despite her relatively happy relationship with Glenmurray, and her subsequent marriage to his cousin, Charles Berrendale, Adeline locates her happiest moments, perhaps themselves fantasies, in the time spent with her mother. Her feelings for her mother are a complex mixture of gratitude, guilt, pity, and love. At times, these memories overshadow all her other thoughts and activities. For example, shortly after her elopement with Glenmurray, she is overcome by contrition: 'The idea that her mother had utterly renounced her now took possession of her imagination, and love had no charm to offer her capable of affording her consolation: the care which she had taken of her infancy, the affectionate attentions that had preserved her life, and the uninterrupted kindness which she had shown towards her till her attachment to Sir Patrick took place - all these pressed powerfully and painfully on her memory, till her elopement seemed wholly unjustifiable in her eyes, and she reprobated her conduct in terms of the most bitter self-reproach' (79). At another instance, when her old friend, Dr Norberry tells her that her mother's husband had become a bigamist, and that he, the doctor, now blushes to call himself her friend, Adeline again thinks of her mother with regret and anguish: 'The image of her mother, happy as the wife of a man she loved, could not long rival Glenmurray; but the image of her mother, disgraced and wretched, awoke all the habitual but dormant tenderness of years; every feeling of filial

fheory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 149 gratitude revived in all its force; and, even while leaning on the shoulder of her lover, she sighed to be once more clasped to the bosom of her mother' (90). In both these incidents, the love and companionship of her partner, Glenmurray, are not enough to compensate for the loss of her mother. Jane Spencer notes that 'it is the separation from her mother, rather than society's condemnation or a sense of guilt, which makes Adeline miserable.'13 Adeline sighs to be in the arms of her mother even while she is with the man she respects and loves. The mother represents for her all that was perfect in Adeline's earlier years now that she is beyond the daughter's reach. One way of explaining this obsession with the mother is through twentiethcentury psychoanalytic theories of development. In psychoanalytic terms, one could say that for Adeline, the mother functions as the lost object of desire, what Jacques Lacan calls the 'objet a,' an other to which one relates. According to Elizabeth Grosz, this object is not the goal, but an imaginary object that is the 'cause of desire.'14 Lacan stresses that 'desire is produced in the beyond of the demand,' so that what one desires is not simply the object, but always something in excess of it.15 The object of desire for Adeline, whether it is her mother, knowledge, or later, Glenmurray, is only a partial representation of something beyond it. Desire, which is bound up in a system of deferrals and transferences, is structured through language. Thus, what Adeline articulates as her desire is not necessarily all that she desires, as demand is the consequence of the subjection of the need to the regulation of language.'16 Adeline's desire may be for a number of things: maternal love and solicitude, recognition of her subjectivity and independence, power, sexual pleasure, material and emotional comforts. But in early nineteenth-century British society, a woman could only express a wish for things that were culturally sanctioned as proper for women. Romantic love that leads to marriage, for example, is what Major Douglas and Dr Norberry encourage Adeline to seek in order to become a respectable woman. But marriage, to Glenmurray or to any other man, is clearly not the sum of all that Adeline desires, and that state is later revealed to be problematic. Partly through the unsatisfactory and vexed relationship of Adeline with her partner, with her husband, and with her mother, Opie explores the complexities of the desiring female subject in her society. As an object of desire, however, the mother is not altogether satisfactory, because she, too, has her own desires. Dr Norberry accuses Mrs Mowbray of disregarding her daughter's welfare, playing the fool at forty and falling for a 'pennyless profligate, merely because he had a fine person and a handsome leg' (101). Mrs Mowbray admits that it is because Sir Patrick was

150 Empowering the Feminine partial to Adeline that she became so angry at her daughter; 'it is being the object of that cruel preference, which I never, never will forgive her!' (102). At this point, the doctor describes Mrs Mowbray as 'a woman dead to every graceful impulse of maternal affection, and alive only to a selfish sense of rivalship and hatred' (104). While Opie's portrait of the mother here is not at all flattering, it does raise an important issue about ideals of femininity and womanhood that are problematic for women. Poet and feminist Adrienne Rich notes that 'the woman's body, with its potential for gestating, bringing forth and nourishing new life, has been through the ages a field of contradiction: a space invested with power, and an acute vulnerability; a numinous figure and the incarnation of evil; a hoard of ambivalences, most of which have worked to disqualify women from the collective act of defining culture.'17 Rich discusses the troubles women experience in living up to the contradictory ideals that have become deeply internalized in many female psyches. In Adeline Mowbray, what Opie shows is precisely the difficulty of separating the sexual body from the maternal body. Unreasonable and jealous though Mrs Mowbray might be, she is an example of someone who does not wish to give up her libidinal pleasure upon taking on the maternal role. On this issue, Luce Irigaray points out that in our society, women are expected to let the 'maternal function take precedence over the more specifically erotic function.' She says that 'this prescription has to be understood within an economy and an ideology of (re)production, but it is also, or still, the mark of a subjection to man's desire.'18 Mrs Mowbray's cruelty and hardheartedness can be understood as a mark of this economy that persists in idealizing women into sexual beings or sacred mothers, and forcing them to act according to these separate roles and functions. Another way of reading the obsession with the mother in Adeline Mowbray is to see Mrs Mowbray as a figure who represents pure theory or pure knowledge, and hence, power. She is an attractive figure to Adeline because Adeline, too, has been exposed only to theory and intellectual ideas. At a young age, while Adeline still did not know very much of the world, she had 'read Rousseau's Contrat Social, but not his Julie; Montesquieu's Esprit des Loix, but not his Lettres Persanes; and had glowed with republican ardour over the scenes of Voltaire's Brutus, but had never had her mind polluted by the pages of his romances' (57). In an interesting reversal of the typical case of heroines whose imaginations are overly active because they have read too many romances, Opie creates a heroine who is captivated by theories and systems, fascinated by abstract ideals and philosophy. This fondness for metaphysics may have been partly due to the fact that she associates her mother with theories. We remember that early in her life, Editha Mowbray

Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 151 was often so 'wrapt in philosophical abstraction' that she 'suffered day after day to pass in the culpable neglect of positive duties' (2). Mocking William Godwin and his habits, Opie depicts Editha Mowbray as someone who would imagine 'systems for the good of society, and the furtherance of general philanthropy,' but would allow 'individual suffering in her neighbourhood to pass unobserved and unrelieved' (2-3). Adeline associates her mother with study, with learning, and with knowledge, and she grows up with 'the most perfect respect and affection' for her, which was 'excited by the high idea which she had formed of her abilities' (6). It is the gap between the high idealism of what anti-Jacobins would call 'modern' theory and complications in following it through that Opie highlights in Adeline Mowbray. Unlike critics who read Opie's works as manifestations of anti-Jacobin sentiments, I see Opie as an author who sympathized with and understood what the radicals were espousing, but who remained distant enough to perceive the difficulties of practising their theories without there being changes in society at large. It is well known that in the 1790s, Opie had close ties not only with William Godwin, but also with other intellectuals such as Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Her enthusiasm for the new philosophy, however, did not blind her to its limitations. In Adeline Mowbray, she attempts to show how Godwin's theories were problematic when applied to women. As Eberle points out, Opie felt that Godwin displayed a 'want of all feeling' in his uncompromising and complete account of Wollstonecraft's life in his Memoirs of her.'9 In her novel based on Godwin and Wollstonecraft, Opie exposes the shortcomings of Godwin's tenets when women attempt to live them. Adeline, who has imbibed the philosophy naively, asks: 'Alas! When can we hope to see society enlightened and improved, when even those who see and strive to amend its faults in theory, in practice tamely submit to the trammels which it imposes?' (130). Both Glenmurray and her mother are ardent philosophers, but they are willing to compromise somewhat in practice. In fact, it is the mother's inability to practise what she has read that causes the breach between her and her daughter. When Mrs Mowbray discovers that Adeline has been living with Glenmurray and is pregnant, she spurns her attempts to plead for forgiveness, saying, 'and canst thou, while conscious of carrying in thy bosom the proof of thy infamy, dare to solicit and expect my pardon?' (109). Mrs Mowbray yields to conservative notions of right and wrong, to conventions of her society in practice, whereas her daughter practises what Godwinian philosophy has taught her. Despite Mrs Mowbray's coldness and her maledictions, for Adeline her mother continues to be the object of her affections, the source of comfort

152 Empowering the Feminine and consolation throughout her life. Romantic love never quitefillsthe void that the mother's absence created. It is interesting that Adeline's character is reflected in her taste for books. While browsing in Sir Patrick's library, she 'turns with disgust' from 'dangerous French novels of all descriptions,' as she was 'unprepared by any reading of the kind to receive and relish the poison contained in them' (58). Stories of seduction have no place in Adeline's heart. Instead, time and time again, it is in maternal love that she envisions solace. For example, after the death of Glenmurray, for whom she felt the 'fondest enthusiasm of passion,' she recollects her mother: 'all her love for her returned; and she pined for that consoling fondness, those soothing attentions, which, in a time of such affliction, a mother on a widowed daughter can alone bestow' (165). Much later, when she discovers that her husband, Berrendale, has married another woman in Jamaica and has refused to acknowledge his marriage to her, she once again entertains thoughts of her mother: 'in the midst of her distress, a sudden thought struck Adeline, which converted her anger into joy, and her sorrow into exultation. 'Yes, my mother may now forgive me without violating any part of her oath," she exclaimed. - "I am now forsaken, despised and disgraced!''' (203). This aspect of Adeline is the most moving and pathetic. She acts like a suffering martyr, willing to forgive her mother, to think the best of her, and later sacrifices her own life in order that her daughter might have a chance at reconciliation with Mrs Mowbray. Gary Kelly explains this tendency in Opie's heroines to incur moral debts and to pay through 'protracted penitence' by linking it to 'Christian and feminine ideology in the eighteenth century.'20 Kelly suggests that it is through quiet fortitude and suffering in silence that 'the virtuous inner self of women is revealed, since 'society requires women to lead most of their lives in private and in secret.'21 Indeed, Adeline is linked iconographically to a Christ-like figure more than once. Eberle has noted that 'the Christ-like imagery of Adeline's wounded feet in early childhood foreshadows the images of the Magdalen which dominate her adulthood.'22 Adeline is called 'Angel woman' by Savanna because she saves William from going to prison (147). At another instance, Adeline prays for Glenmurray's recovery using Christ's words at the Mount of Olives, 'Father, if it be possible, permit this cup to pass by me untasted' (161). She does not complain of her troubles after her marriage to Berrendale. Instead, 'she fancied that all the sufferings she underwent were trials which she was doomed to undergo, as punishments for the crime she had committed in leaving her mother and living with Glenmurray. She therefore welcomed her afflictions, and lifted up her meek eyes to her God and Saviour, in every hour of her trials, with the look of tearful but

Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 153 grateful resignation' (187). These images of suffering, atonement, and sacrifice make it difficult to read the novel as a straightforward condemnation of Marv Wollstonecraft and her life. Adeline may be naive and too literal in her eagerness to practise what Glenmurray has preached, but she is not depicted as a 'prostitute,' a word that the anti-Jacobins associated with Wollstonecraft. Along with these scenes of martyrdom and suffering enacted by Adeline, Opie creates emotional sympathy for Adeline through the many scenes of violence directed at her. In Adeline Mowbray, much of the potency of the tale of the misguided female philosopher comes from the dramatic and painful encounters between Adeline Mowbray - the character supposedly noddled on Wollstonecraft - and upright people of society who believe she s a kept mistress. Opie repeatedly dwells on these embarrassing and excruciating scenes, whereas the actual Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, written by William Godwin, contains only brief comments about these incidents. It is interesting that at least one scholar believes that before meetingjohn Opie, Amelia Alderson carried on 'a lengthy but discreet affair with an older man,' who was referred to in her letters as 'B,' possibly Mr Boddington of Southgate.23 The fashionable painter John Opie was divorced when he married Amelia Alderson in 1798.24 Given this somewhat unconventional biographical background of the writer, we have to read Opie's descriptions of the disturbing encounters between town moralists and the 'mistress' figure as what Bakhtin would call a 'double-voiced discourse,' where speech 'serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author.'25 On the surface, these scenes express moral indignation at what society deems improper conduct. Yet because of their frequency and intensity, they may also be regarded as expressions of sympathy and reveal implicit support for the target of the outrage. Godwin's narrative is very different from the novel. One critic points out that he writes in a 'clear, terse style' in the Memoirs.26 For example, in the Memoirs, while discussing the reason why he and Wollstonecraft did not immediately marry, Godwin writes: 'the laws of etiquette ordinarily laid down in these cases, are essentially absurd, and ... the sentiments of the heart cannot submit to be directed by the rule and square. But Mary had an extreme aversion to be made the topic of vulgar discussion; and, if there be any weakness in this, the dreadful trials through which she had recently passed, may well plead in its excuse. She felt that she had been too much, and too rudely spoken of, in the former instance; and she could not

154 Empowering the Feminine resolve to do anything that should immediately revive that painful topic.'27 In this passage, there is much implied about the difficulties Wollstonecraft faced as a single mother and as the unmarried 'Mrs Imlay,' but Godwin's narrative is tightly controlled and gives very limited details. Godwin does not give us instances of how Wollstonecraft was 'too much and too rudely spoken of by people. As her biographer, though he appears open and honest, and though he attempts to stay close to the facts, he does heavily edit through omission. Through the lack of particulars and through temporal compression, the 'dreadful trials' and the 'painful topic' are minimized in the Memoirs. Godwin's Memoirs can be contrasted with Opie's fictional version of this experience. Because she is writing a novel rather than a factual narrative, Opie compresses and expands time freely. She also takes many liberties in the creation and (re) presentation of situations and personages. In fact one scholar goes so far as to say that Adeline Mowbray 'is said to be based on Mary Wollstonecraft's situation, but the characters bear no resemblance to her or to anyone else in her life.'28 This is not altogether the case, as there are a number of similarities in characterization between Wollstonecraft and Adeline, and Godwin and Glenmurray. Like Godwin, Glenmurray is publicly known for his disapproval of the institution of marriage. On this subject, Godwin's views are well-known: 'nothing can be so ridiculous upon the face of it, or so contrary to the genuine march of sentiment, as to require the overflowing of the soul to wait upon a ceremony, and that at which, wherever delicacy and imagination exist, is of all things most sacredly private, to blow a trumpet before it, and to record the moment when it has arrived at its climax.'29 In Adeline Mowbray Glenmurray, too, believes that marriage as an institution is 'at once absurd, unjust, and immoral' and convinces the heroine through his writing that 'the sacred ties of love' are profaned by 'so odious and unnecessary a ceremony' (28). But the representation of the consequences of this belief on the woman is quite different in the Memoirs and in the novel. In Godwin's Memoirs, Wollstonecraft has two relationships with men outside marriage. Her liaison with Gilbert Imlay is seen as an unfortunate, but understandable, youthful infatuation. She is depicted as a self-sacrificing victim in that case: 'Mary had objected to a marriage with Mr Imlay, who at the time their connection was formed, had no property whatever; because she would not involve him in certain family embarrassments to which she conceived herself exposed, or make him answerable for the pecuniary demands that existed against her.'30 The mature Godwin is able to present Wollstonecraft's involvement with Imlay as a mistake: 'She did not give full

Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 155 play to her judgment in this most important choice of life ... the connection ... was a very unequal one.'31 The violence of Wollstonecraft's grief at the termination of the relationship and her attempted suicide is mitigated to a large exent by Godwin's controlled and distanced voice, as well as by his own discourse of romance that immediately follows: T am now led, by the progress of the story, to the last branch of her history, the connection between Mary and myself... I had never loved till now; or, at least, had never nourished a passion to the same growth, or met with an object so consummately worthy.'32 Godwin's strong and passionate love for Wollstonecraft, and his insistence on her worth, seem to smooth over or even negate whatever calamities had befallen her before their meeting. His Memoirs closes with an elegiac tone where the subject is elevated to the status of the ideal: 'I think I may venture to say, that no two persons ever found in each other's society, a satisfaction more pure and refined.'33 He speaks mournfully of the loss of the 'treasures of her mind, and the virtues of her heart.'34 This ending, which is an essentially nostalgic tribute to an angelic figure, is not present in Opie's novel. By reversing the worthy and unworthy lovers, or the Imlay and Godwin figures, as well as by obsessively depicting society's harsh views of Wollstonecraft's choices in life, Opie highlights the struggle and the violence, rather than the sense of achievement and the short-lived romantic bliss experienced by Wollstonecraft towards the end of her life. While ostensibly mocking her heroine's foolish insistence upon not entering the state of marriage, Opie also directs her readers' attention to the malevolence and hypocrisy of late eighteenth-century fashionable society. In other words, while not deviating from the the didactic intent of the novel, Opie inadvertently presents a gendered perspective on the double standards of contemporary ideology. What Julia Epstein has remarked about violence in Burney's novels applies to Opie's:'... episodes of escalating violence and violation ... reveal a complicated relationship between decorous propriety and its potential for unexpected explosion ... In stunning episodes of unprepared, gratuitous brutality, violence repeatedly shatters the apparently conventional social economy the novels' settings appear to subscribe to and protect. The characters' obsessions with social appearances derive from the possibility that violence may break through surface behaviors at any moment.'35 In Opie's novel, scenes of violence increase in intensity and proximity to the heroine. They reveal an unsettling aspect of the apparently civilized society, and emphasize the frequency with which women become the targets of brutal, male behaviour. Adeline's refusal to marry, and hence to submit to the rules of propriety, result in multiple scenes of unexpected, gratuitous violations

156 Empowering the Feminine that affect her both externally and internally. Unlike Godwin's narrative, Opie's fictional representation of Wollstonecraft's life does not conclude with the rewards, albeit brief, of romance and domestic retreat, or with the discovery of a true patriarchal protector. Instead, it becomes a study of the slow and painful defeat and debilitation of a strong, rebellious, and generous spirit. It outlines the entrapment of females in a rigid and stifling system that brooks no individuality. Through this depiction, Opie reveals her awareness of the cultural constraints that affected independently minded women of her time. Violence in Opie's novel progresses from those episodes in which abuses are merely recounted, that is, without the heroine's presence, to those that directly affect and engulf her. At the beginning of her relationship with Glenmurray, she is twice forced to pack up and depart hurriedly from her place of residence because the introduction of Adeline as a 'companion' rather than 'wife' to Glenmurray would mean an offensive gesture to the fashionable women of society (76). Through the narrator, Opie records insults for her readers that the character Adeline does not hear: 'So, then, this angel of purity turns out to be a kept lady,' says one character mockingly (76). Another calls her 'wicked,' while the man who was initially impressed with 'the charm of modest dignity both in [her] dress and manners' lewdly expresses a desire that he 'might have enjoyed her company' himself (75, 78) after he finds out she is not married. This scene is presented 'off-stage,' revealed in third person through the omniscient narrator, and hence distanced somewhat from the heroine. One never sees its effect on Adeline. As the novel progresses, however, the scenes of violence become more dramatic and acute. They are no longer presented in separate vignettes away from the heroine, but become troubling indications of her own fears and feelings of helplessness. Verbal abuse and hostile action move from the social sphere to the domestic sphere, symbolically suggesting patriarchal penetration of woman's innermost private realm. In Adeline's case, abuse comes in various forms: firstly, in the form of sexual harassment by a series of men ranging from the gallant, Colonel Mordaunt, who cannot even wait till 'Mr. Glenmurray is removed to a happier world' before he makes propositions to her (118), to the lawyer, Mr Langley. Significantly, these two men, representing the army and the judicial system, become violators of women's rights in late eighteenth-century society rather than their protectors, as their professional titles indicate. In a particularly painful scene, Adeline, bereft of fortune and friends, goes to her lawyer to inquire about the deceased Glenmurray's bequest. The lawyer humiliates

Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 157 Adeline as she was 'neither the widow nor relation of Mr. Glenmurray' (179), and then proceeds to molest her as she leaves, 'forcibly squeezing her fingers,' and 'forcibly kiss [ing her] ungloved hand' (179). Right after departing from him, Adeline encounters two gentlemen in the street who pursue her to her coach, sneering at her, and making lewd suggestions to her because they recognize her as Glenmurray's former mistress: 'Fair creature, may I ask where you live now? ... we might cease to be strangers,' one says, while 'his companion gave way to a loud fit of laughter' (180). These fictional representations of scenes that Godwin only alludes to in the Memoirs indicate Opie's sensitivity to and understanding of Wollstonecraft's plight as an unmarried woman who had defied what Pollak calls the 'myth of passive womanhood.'36 In her novel, Opie seeks to develop a female subject position outside the stereotypical mistress or fallen woman. A second manifestation of verbal abuse in Opie's novel reveals the violence that lurks beneath the seemingly safe and formal division of class and social hierarchy in late eighteenth-century England. Opie demonstrates the fragility of this conventional structure, and in particular, woman's fluid place or lack of place in it. As long as women are willing to adhere to the cultural myth of the 'proper lady' and willing to stay within the boundaries defined for them by society, they are 'safe' from violence. But as Wollstonecraft's and the fictional Adeline's cases illustrate, patriarchal society allows no protection for a woman who is defined as neither 'wife' nor 'widow.' Adeline Mowbray attempts to gain independence through establishing a village school. This element of the novel is reminiscent of Wollstonecraft's school at Newington Green, which she ran with two of her sisters and Fanny Blood in 1784—6. In actuality, Wollstonecraft's school failed for a number of reasons - the departure and subsequent death of Fanny Blood, financial trouble, etc. In the novel, Opie simplifies matters considerably and places the blame for the disintegration of the school on the discovery of Adeline's marital status, or rather lack of it. Opie's simplication places the fault on the heroine's sexual history. On the surface, the lesson she purports seems to be that licentiousness destroys one's standing in society. Adeline Mowbray's former servant, Mary Warner, accidentally meets her, and mocks her publicly: 'I am glad to see you here in such a respectable situation ... What sort of a getting-up had you, Miss Mowbray?' (169). The result of the servant's insolent attitude and impertinent questions is Adeline's disgrace and the dissolution of her little school as Adeline acknowledges the truth of Mary's insinuations. This and a subsequent incident with Mary, however, can be interpreted not onlv as a lesson against female sexual promiscuity, but as an indication of

158 Empowering the Feminine the tremendous burden society placed on female decorous propriety and reputation. That an economically impoverished person is able to destroy a woman's social position and can even cast doubts on her subjectivity through a revelation of her sexual history becomes indicative of the precarious basis of the construction of her identity. This scene also reveals the exaggerated importance of the 'representation' of a woman to the public. That is, as long as Adeline's past was not known, she commanded the villagers' 'respect and attention' (167). She was an ideal teacher, as 'no sooner were scholars entrusted to her care, than she became the idol of her pupils; and their improvement was rapid in proportion to the love which they bore her' (167). However, when her sexual history is revealed, people consider that to patronize her 'would be patronizing vice' (172). In a slightly different way, what Opie shows again is the disjunction between theory and practice, between people's notions of virtue in public and in private. 'One character sums up Adeline's life as a lesson for children: it inculcates most powerfully how vain are personal graces, talents, sweetness of temper, and even active benevolence, to ensure respectability and confer happiness, without a strict regard to the long-established rules for conduct, and a continuance in those paths of virtue and decorum which the wisdom of ages has pointed out to the steps of every one' (172). This lesson would be a fairly straightforward one, if one took 'every one' in this last passage to mean every woman. For a close reading of the novel reveals that male characters are exempt from the rule, that they do not necessarily have to continue 'in those paths of virtue and decorum' in order to succeed in late eighteenth-century society. In fact, the male characters are often the ones who cause chaos and who create disruption in the social order without the tragic moral and psychological consequences that beset Adeline. Claudia Johnson points out that Opie's Adeline Mowbray is 'positively dizzying in the degree to which it invalidates all answers, conservative and radical.'37 On the surface, it seems to support the conservative Edmund Burke's argument for the necessity of the benevolent patriarch as the head of English households. Burke cites the revolution in France as an example of the anarchy that can result when domestic monarchs as well as royal ones are not accorded their due respect. However, the scenes of violence, mostly perpetrated by male characters, serve to negate this facile 'official' ideology. Despite Adeline's assertion towards the end of the novel that 'marriage must be more beneficial to society in its consequences, than connexions capable of being dissolved at pleasure' (243), most of the marriages in Adeline Mowbray are disastrous. Both Adeline's and her mother's husbands

Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 159 are not only selfish brutes who seek intrigues with other women, but they turn out to be bigamists. Sir Patrick considers women 'a race of subordinate beings,' like horses (27), while Berrendale, who was 'no advocate for the equality of the sexes... thought it only a matter of course that he should fare better than his wife' (184). The only two heterosexual relationships that seem to work, albeit briefly, are those of Adeline and Glenmurray, and Mr and Mrs Pemberton. In exile, Adeline and Glenmurray are able to enjoy each other's company, 'their attachment was cemented by one of the strongest of all ties the consciousness of mutual benefit and assistance' (68). In the case of the Pembertons, their happiness comes from living in a quiet 'domestic circle' and being members of the Society of Friends (254). Both of these relationships exist, to some extent, outside of the norm, either without the sancitity of marriage, or else as an alternative lifestyle, that of the Quakers. As a result of what I perceive to be Opie's sense of ambivalence about Godwinian theory, and about conventional relationships between women and men, one is forced to look elsewhere in the novel for what the author was advocating. The two people who aid Adeline the most in her times of trouble are the two substitute mother-figures, the mulatto, Savanna, and the Quaker, Rachel Pemberton. In contrast to Adeline's mother, or to her husband, both of whom in theory are supposed to help Adeline, these two women have no obligation or formal ties to her. Yet they are the ones who remain faithful friends and companions to Adeline when her mother and husband abandon her. As Felicity Nussbaum points out, Savanna is depicted at times as a 'kind of alien being,' 'animal-like,' or even savage and wild in her excessive emotional reactions, but she is constant and effective.38 She swears 'never to forsake [Adeline] in sickness or in sorrow' (148), speaks on Adeline's behalf to Berrendale, and is even enslaved in Jamaica for her mistress' cause. Rachel Pemberton is similarly devoted. She comforts Adeline at the time of Glenmurray's death, and later helps in the reconciliation between Adeline and Mrs Mowbray. Both these women practise active acts of charity and contribute to the 'general improvement and happiness' of the human species without writing books or developing abstract theories on the subject.39 Ultimately, if lessons are to be learned from the tale of the mother and daughter, it is not so much that the daughter learns from the mother's mistakes, but the reverse. Editha Mowbray, the mother, learns from her daughter that it is far better to practise acts of love in order to benefit society, than to develop a theoretical system about improving society. It is only late in her life that Editha Mowbray discovers the pleasures of active benevolence, something that Adeline had practised since her early days.

160 Empowering the Feminine Before her elopement with Glenmurray, Adeline had taken upon herself 'the office of almoner,' had carried broth and wine to the infirm cottager; administered medicine and other comforts; and had visited the sick (8), while her mother was busy with her books. By the end of the novel, the mother has taken her daughter's place: 'She who, while the child of prosperity, was a romantic, indolent theorist, an inactive speculator, a proud contemner of the dictates of sober experience, and a neglecter of that practical benevolence which can in days produce more benefit to others than theories and theorists can accomplish in years - this erring woman, awakened from her dreams and reveries, to habits of useful exertion, by the stimulating touch of affliction, was become the visitor of the sick, the consoler of the sorrowful, the parent of the fatherless, while virtuous industry looked up to her with hope; and her name, like that of Adeline in happier days, was pronounced with prayers and blessings' (255-6). From this passage and other examples I have cited it seems that Opie believed that abstract systems had to be tempered with lived experience, that theory was less useful than practical action, and that Godwinian philosophy was still too far ahead of its time to be serviceable to women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century societies. However, one also sees the limitations of the lesson of female benevolence, as it necessitates that women be caregivers, nurturers, and mothers to the community, and depends upon the sympathy and goodwill of upper-class people. In other words, it reinscribes and perpetuates gender and class divisions. Because of the demands of the sentimental genre, and the general disinclination of the public towards feminist thinking by the early 1800s, Opie's novel eschews radical solutions. The lesson is taught at the sacrifice of the heroine's life. Adeline has bequeathed a rich lesson not only to her daughter, Editha, but also to the surrogate father, Dr Norberry, and to the three mother-figures who surround her and tend to her at her death. The thick curtain of self-love has been lifted, but not without concomitant problems.

10 Not a Simple Moral Tale: Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper

Between the publication of Adeline Mowbray (1805) and her next full-length novel, Opie published a four-volume collection of tales in 1806, The Warrior's Return and Other Poems in 1808, and edited John Opie's Lectures on Painting, Delivered at the Royal Academy in 1809. By the time she wrote Temper; or, Domestic Scenes (1812), she was becoming well-known as a bluestocking and writer. As Susan Howard notes, 'her home was open to artists and writers, and she included among her friends William Wordsworth, Walter Scottt, Sarah Siddons, and Elizabeth Inchbald.'1 In 1810, she was the 'modern' novelist chosen by Anna Laetitia Barbauld for special mention in her essay 'On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing.'2 Though she was establishing herself as a novelist, she was not altogether comfortable with being associated with the genre. As Maria Edgeworth did with Belinda (1801), Opie had called The Father and Daughter a simple moral tale rather than a novel. Similarly, Temper is subtitled 'a tale.' Her Simple Tales (1806), like Edgeworth's Moral Tales for Young People (1801), are moral fables featuring upper- and middle-class characters, often in domestic situations. Though much longer than any of the 'short' stories in Simple Tales, Temper retains something of the didactic quality and the rather forced contrivances of her tales. It is a novel that pivots around and builds situations upon a moral theme much like the tales published some six years earlier. The overt didacticism may be the reason for the relative obscurity and unpopularity of Temper today. Critics virtually ignore it, and of those who have read it, Ann H.Jones says that it is 'the worst' novel Opie ever wrote because it is 'utterly didactic and told with an absolute lack of artistry.'3 While it is true that Temper contains many passages that are intended to edify its readers, it also contains interesting tensions between female desire and social constraint; between authority and transgression; and reveals the

162 Empowering the Feminine difficulties women have with their mothers. There are a number of scenes that evoke much pathos, and scenes depicting a woman caught between her sense of who she is and the societal perception of her. These themes and issues are very much part of Opie's earlier works, and indeed, account for their contemporary popularity and interest today. Among present-day critics, Gary Kelly's assessment of the novel seems the most just. He notes that 'Opie's interest ... is in domestic heroism, the moral drama of the home, of conjugal and family life, and she often sets these scenes and motifs against the artificialities and intrigues, the hypocrisy, self-interest, and vice of the public and social world, the world of manners.'4 Viewed in this way, Opie's aims are not so different from the aim ofJane West, who was also intent on elevating the domestic woman and her sphere. However, what makes Opie's novel different from West's is the curious focus on scenes of suffering, on emotional and psychological drama, as well as an obsession with returning to the mother. In her novels, she studies with sensitivity Western culture's tendency to both glorify and blame the mother. Before the composition of Temper, Amelia Opie received this advice in a letter from one of her friends. Lady Charleville wrote: 'begin a good, long, Clarissa-like novel; you have principles and fancy to compose an elevating and interesting work, and a knowledge of the manners of the world, which Richardson wanted. Write now all the summer, and let there be no episodes, no under plot, but give me a character, acting and developing itself under a variety of circumstances, to interest my feelings and exert my understanding; and set her feet on English ground, and let us not have mystic notions, or Asiatic refinements, to perplex our intellects, too well braced by this northern temperature to sympathize with mysteries, embroideries, and odours, or start at every creaking hinge in an old castle.'5 It is difficult to ascertain whether or not Opie had Lady Charleville's wish in mind when she wrote Temper, but to a certain extent, the novel is as Lady Charleville describes - elevating, interesting, and solidly on 'English ground.' It also bears some resemblance to Richardson's serious novel. Like Clarissa Harlowe, Agatha Torrington's confidence in her own judgment leads her to ignore the advice of her parent, and she is whisked away in a chaise by her lover, who subsequently claims sexual favours from here. Though the circumstances are not exactly the same, both Clarissa and Agatha become estranged from their families, and must spend the rest of their lives atoning for their mistake. While Richardson tends to direct the readers towards a Christian resolution, Opie's is focused on moral improvement, as announced on the title-page of the work. The novel is closer to conduct-book literature than it is to a sermon or a book of meditations.

Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper 163 The epigraph reads: 'A horse not broken becometh headstrong, and a child left to himself will be wilful.' The novel is inspired by William Hayley's poem, The Triumphs of Temper (1781), which was an extremely popular satire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6 It is, however, different from Hayley's poem, which pits the allegorical character of Spleen against the good temper of the heroine and her father. Like Pope's The Rape of the Lock to which it is indebted, Hayley's poem concludes happily after the heroine undergoes temptations and trials. Hayley's Serena, like many eighteenth-century heroines, is severely tested at a masquerade, but emerges triumphant and unscathed. She has the protection and guidance of a father and a strict aunt, while Opie's Agatha loses her father, and the counsel of her mother, after her elopement. Egerton is the character who comes closest to the protective Sprite who watches over Serena, but he appears too late for Agatha. Opie's rendition is much more sentimental and melodramatic than the light-hearted tone of Hayley's poem. While the difference may be attributed to the different genres which Hayley and Opie used, it is also possible that Opie wanted to emphasize the material and physical consequences for women who do not adhere to social customs and to established notions of right conduct and propriety. In this chapter, the focus of my discussion will be not so much on the didactic impetus of the novel as on Opie's fascination with female suffering, with the ambivalent relationship between the mother, her daughter, and her granddaughter. For what seems to me more compelling in Temper is not what Opie intended, but the resulting complexity as she attempts to work out her lesson about the need for control and temperance through the character of the headstrong female. In some ways, as the title of my chapter suggests, Opie's Temperis somewhat similar to Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791). Ever since the early 1790s, Opie knew Inchbald, and7 at one point had jokingly reported: 'Mrs. Inchbald says, the report of the world is, that Mr. Holcroft is in love with her, she with Mr. Godwin, Mr. Godwin with me, and I am in love with Mr. Holcroft! A pretty story indeed! ' Though I have found direct no mention of the connection between the two novels, Opie certainly would have read her friend Inchbald's first novel, which like hers, features a passionate and wilful heroine whose desire seems uncontainable. In A Simple Story, as in Temper, the problem of what to do with the woman who refuses to conform to social expectations is displaced to to the next generation. Daughters atone for their mothers' errors. In addition, in both novels, the transgressive elements of the plot belie the ostensible didactic intent of the authors.8 Whether consciously or

164 Empowering the Feminine not, Opie seems to be exploring what feminist critic Marianne Hirsch calls the 'mother/daughter plot,' which has much to do with female identity and experience. Hirsch argues that the plots of the 'other woman,' the mother, in relation to the 'other child,' the daughter, are often 'unspeakable plots' in mythology or in Freudian-inspired psychoanalysis.9 My discussion of Temper will focus on this mother/daughter plot, in what Adrienne Rich calls 'the great unwritten story.'10 Viewed in this way, Temper has much to offer its readers, and becomes a powerful story of maternal love, female desire, romantic expectations, and cultural prohibitions. In Temper, Opie revisits a number of scenarios she wrote about in her earlier novels and tales. One of the most engrossing aspects of the novel is the powerful link between parent and child, particularly between the mother and daughter. Agatha's relationship to her mother, Emma Torrington, is reminiscent of the situation in Adeline Mowbray, where, despite her mother's faults and her unrelenting anger, the daughter constantly yearns for her love and forgiveness. In Temper, I would go so far as to say that the parent/child bond surpasses in intensity any heterosexual attachment in the novel. Jane Spencer surmises that 'it seemes likely that there is an autobiographical significance to Amelia Opie's portrait of the troubled mother-daughter relationship.'11 Opie's mother died in 1784 when she was fifteen, an age that her nineteenth-century biographer, Cecilia Brightwell, observed was 'the most critical period of a woman's life.'12 Brightwell notes that Opie's mother 'was possessed of firm purpose and high principle; a true-hearted woman, and somewhat of a disciplinarian.'13 These qualities are revealed in a poem called 'In Memory of My Mother,' where Opie writes: I heard thee speak in accents kind, And promptly praise, or firmly chide; Again admir'd that vigorous mind Of power to charm, reprove, and guide. Hark! clearer still thy voice I hear! Again reproof, in accents mild, Seems whispering in my conscious ear, And pains, yet soothes, thy kneeling child!14 Her mother is associated with intense love, comfort, and yet also authority and discipline. Because she lost her mother at a fairly young age, she describes a kind of childhood paradise cut short, combined with a strong sense of guilt for not having listened to all her mother's commands.

Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper 165 Again I'm exiled from thy sight, Alone my rebel will to mourn; ... Oh! how I mourn'd my heedless youth Thy watchful care repaid so ill, Yetjoy'd to think some words of truth Sunk in my soul, and teach me still ...15

In Adeline Mowbray and in Temper, there is a strong sense of loss and mourning for the maternal figure. As in Opie's poem of her mother, Adeline and Agatha feel regret, guilt, and a keen sense of pain when they remember the mother whom they can no longer access. Opie's Temper illustrates the difference in the subjectivity of a woman both when she is in a mother/daughter relationship and when she is involved in a male/female one. Luce Irigaray points out that in exchanges that take place between men, women 'give up their bodies to men as the supporting material of specularization, of speculation. They yield to him their natural and social value as a locus of imprints, marks, and mirage of his activity.'16 In relationships with men, women cannot be subjects; 'they are amorphous and confused: natural body, maternal body, doubtless useful to the consumer, but without any possible identity or communicable value.'7 In Agatha's relationship with Danvers, she becomes this amorphous and confused subject. However, in her relationship with her mother, she becomes a much stronger subject. In 'A Chance for Life,' Irigaray contends that a woman 'becomes a subject immediately through her relation to a subject like herself: her mother. She cannot reduce her mother to the status of an object without reducing herself at the same time, because she and her mother share the same sex.'18 In her more recent work, Irigaray stresses the importance of the mother to the formation of female identity. She contradicts Freud, who believes that in the course of human development, children need to detach themselves from their parents and from parental authority.19 For Irigaray, a daughter does not have to put a distance between herself and her mother. 'The possible discovery of women's identity,' raises 'an important problem of subjective relationship.' She says: 'It would seem that woman enters directly into intersubjective rapport with her mother. Her economy is based on subjectsubject relations, not subject-object, and is thus a highly social and cultural economy that leads to women being interpreted as the guardians of love ... Woman needs to develop words, images, and symbols to express her intersubjective relationship with her mother, and then with other women, if she is to enter into a nondestructive relation with men. We need to

166 Empowering the Feminine release, examine, and define this economy of identity that is specific to woman.'20 It is useful to keep Irigaray's theories about female subjectivity and identity in mind when we study Temper because her ideas help us understand the emotional and psychological interactions between Agatha and her mother. Though it was not her stated intent, Opie does explore the 'intersubjective relationship' of a woman with her mother, thereby redefining women's identity in the way Irigaray exhorts women to do. She shows how crucial it is to find a subjective identity through the relationship with the mother and the consequences of the failure of this search. The novel starts when Agatha is a young child, which suggests that Opie was aware of the importance of childhood experiences, family, and external circumstances to the development of character. The author's former good friend, William Godwin, had argued in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice that 'the actions and dispositions of mankind are the offspring of circumstances and events, and not of any original determination that they bring into the world.'21 By examining the forces that influence Agatha as a child, Opie hoped to show how bad temper could be averted in children. However, what she reveals at the same time is what Irigaray calls the 'subject-subject' relationship between Agatha and her mother. At four, Agatha is a temperamental child who needs the strict disciplining of her father. After the incident where she is punished for refusing to give up a pair of pointed scissors, she becomes better behaved under her father's watchful care. But at his death, she is again spoiled by her mother, who 'gave way to the childish whims of her daughter, from want, she said, of energy in her afflicted state to contradict her; and afterwards, from want of power to distress, even momentarily, the beloved being who reminded her of the husband she had lost' (I: 14).22 While Agatha's frequently petulant behaviour is clearly not desirable, she does develop a strong-minded and determined character: 'Agatha became the tyrant of her mother and her mother's household, and the pity, the torment, and detestation of all the relations and friends who visited at the house' (I: 15). This kind of behaviour, though not ideal, is contradictory to what was expected of typical young ladies who were taught to be docile and submissive. Hence, though Agatha is clearly meant to be a negative example for women, she becomes an interesting figure of someone who challenges early nineteenth-century conventions. When Agatha approaches 'the age of womanhood ... she became an object of fear even to her mother; for, having been long accustomed to tyrannize, in trifling matters, she showed herself resolved to govern in matters of importance' (I: 15). For instance,

Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper 167 at seventeen she is determined to visit a relation, trusting that her own judgment will be enough to direct her actions. At social functions, she believes that, like the song she sings, her 'heart' is her 'own,' and her 'will' is free.' In defiance of social customs, she tells her mother, 'no mortal man shall dance with me, unless he is my choice' (I: 20). This independence and defiance of the rules of propriety lead her to misery, as it is her favouring Danvers at the dance that causes him to trick her into eloping with him even though he already had a wife and family in India. Like Inchbald's Miss Milner, Agatha suffers for the rest of her life for her transgression and act of disobedience against her mother. For shortly after her secret marriage to Danvers, she discovers that he was 'a man of no tenderness, no affections, and who, now the novelty of her beauty was passed, and her fortune nearly expended in paying his debts, regarded her in no other light than as an incumbrance' (I: 31). Whereas in her mother's house, she was very much in control of herself and even tyrannized others, with Danvers she becomes what Irigaray calls a commodity and 'material of specularization.' Without the support of her mother, who would not forgive her, she becomes helpless. In response to her reproaches and her indignant spirit,' the 'vicious and cold-hearted' Danvers merely runs from her 'to the societv of other women, to the tavern and the gaming-table' (I: 34,31). The problem facing Agatha is not simply that of a neglected wife; it becomes a problem of identity. Danvers informs her that they are not legally married, and tries to pay her off with thirty guineas. Unable to find the clergyman who performed the wedding ceremony, Agatha cannot prove her legal status: 'Agatha saw that she was a mother, without being a wife; and that she had given birth to a child who had no legal inheritance, and though not the offspring of a mother's guilt was undoubtedly the victim of a father's depravity' (I: 39). She becomes what Irigaray describes as a 'natural body, maternal body,' but without the status of subject. Opie links the uncertainty of Agatha's condition to the larger issue of female identity and subjectivity: 'For Agatha was married, yet had no husband; had a mother, yet was motherless; she was herself a parent, without the means of prolonging the existence of her child; she was spotless in virtue, yet was believed criminal even by the mother who bore her in her bosom; she had uttered her just complaints, and had been treated as a maniac; and discarded by the only being who could enable her to redress her wrongs' (I: 72). This passage highlights many of the difficulties faced by women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even though by 1812 Opie

168 Empowering the Feminine had dissociated herself from her radical friends of the 1790s, it reveals her awareness of and sensitivity to the economic and social problems they had articulated. In her treatises and in her last novel, Mary Wollstonecraft had explored issues such as women's economic dependence, parental tyranny, the over-emphasis on chastity as a sign of virtue in woman, and the prejudice of the legal system against women. Without the urgency and the anger of Wollstonecraft, Opie nevertheless suceeds in raising many of the same questions here. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft had argued that in order for a woman to be 'really virtuous and useful ... she must not be dependent on her husband's bounty for her subsistence during his life, or support after his death.' She also believed that a woman 'who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty' is more respectable than 'the most accomplished beauty.'23 As Wollstonecraft did in her Maria; or, Wrongs of Woman, in Temper Opie illustrates how this dependence on an unreliable husband can create a miserable situation for a woman. At one point, in her desperation at her inability to support herself and her child, Agatha attempts to jump off Westminster Bridge. In addition, the question of female virtue, which Opie had explored in The Father and Daughter and in Adeline Mowbray, becomes relevant here again. In her mind, Agatha sees herself as innocent, as 'a deserted wife, and a discarded daughter,' but in her mother's estimation as well as in the eyes of the world, she is a fallen woman (I: 91). In Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft had complained that the 'regard for reputation' of chastity was 'the grand source of female depravity' because it forced respectable women to adopt artificial modes of behaviour, whereas if 'an innocent girl become a prey to love, she is degraded for ever.'24 Agatha is one such innocent who is beset by conflicting notions of her own virtue and character. Gary Kelly notes that in novels such as Temper and Valentine's Eve, there is a 'disparity between the heroine's "true" inner character and the outward appearance, her social character or reputation.' This disparity 'generates a variety of feelings, mostly shame, guilt, and remorse, which overpay the moral debt,' so that readers see that her 'suffering and her punishment are overpayment.'25 It is this suffering that makes Opie's novels so fascinating to study. According to Kelly, 'whether or not the heroine has transgressed a moral or social code, her suffering and humiliation seem incommensurate with her real or supposed crime, and she remains to be bathed in the reader's sympathy alone. The centre of Opie's tales is this "passion," in the Christian sense: the sufferings of a martyr.'26 While this is a valid and insightful reading, I should like to offer an

Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper 169 alternate, more secular interpretation of the heroine's excessive suffering or passion. As I have noted in my study of The Father and Daughter, Opie's fallen women have some affinity to Inchbald's heroine in Nature and Art, where Hannah Primrose, a cottager's daughter, is seduced, abandoned, and has to turn to prostitution in order to survive. The difference between Hannah and Opie's heroines, however, is that while both Agnes and Agatha make bad choices in their marriages, and are subsequently abandoned by their husbands, they do not resort to prostitution as Hannah does even in their desperate situation. Vivien Jones points out that there was a 'renewed politicisation of prostitution - both as polemical metaphor and as social fact' in the second half of the 1790s.27 She contends that 'prostitution becomes for the first time explicitly a feminist issue' through radicals like Wollstonecraft and Hays, as well as advocates of reform such as Priscilla Wakefield and Hannah More.28 Opie's heroines do not become prostitutes, as she is not directing her readers to the same problem of sexual and economic injustice as her contemporaries. However, she does not romanticize the seduced maiden either. Without using the story of the harlot's progress, she calls attention to the economic dependence of women through the use of pathos and emotionalism in their stories. What Opie seems to be equally intent on exploring is what one twentieth-century feminist calls 'female genealogies,' the genealogical relation between women, specifically links from a mother to her mother, to her daughter, and so on.29 In her novels as well as in many of the stories in Simple Tales, the mother is a pivotal figure. For example, in a tale called The Robber,' a thief who is apprehended by a merchant implores for mercy by invoking his mother. He says: 'All my prospects in life this wicked action has blasted, and I can never know comfort more, for I can never respect myself: but I have a mother; and I am her only child - her all; and were she to know my crime, she would die — she would indeed. Oh, for God's sake! - show mercy to me, and save me from the additional guilt of parricide! My mother! - my poor dear mother!'30 In another tale called 'The Fashionable Wife and the Unfashionable Husband,' Opie begins with this epigraph: where is the eye that can equal a mother's invigilance?'31 In this tale, because the heroine's mother dies when she is seven years old, the heroine never learns to correct little domestic faults, from 'tendencies to wastefulness; to unnecessary expense; to want of order: - to want of punctuality in the payment of old debts, and to imprudent haste in contracting new ones.'32 Opie notes that these faults are likely to escape a father's notice, and the heroine's marriage is almost ruined because she had no mother to correct her. While these tales do not all focus on mothers and daughters,

170 Empowering the Feminine they tend to highlight the importance of mothers to children's development. In a similar way, the first part of Temperplays out Agatha's agonizing yet ambivalent feelings towards her mother, which affect both her own and her daughter's identity. Hence, though Opie was not insensitive to the kinds of female difficulties outlined by Wollstonecraft and other revolutionary writers, her vision of society seems to be more hopeful. While she saw many social ills that needed correction, she believed that individuals, such as good mothers, could make a difference. Instead of agitating to change the system, Opie trusted that morally responsible individuals could make a better society. Agatha, unlike Wollstonecraft's Maria, does not end up locked in a madhouse, deprived of her child, but is rescued by the Orwells, a kind couple, 'generous Christian beings,' who take her in and cherish her as they would their own daughter, though she was a stranger (I: 91). With their care, Agatha recovers and is able to earn a small livelihood through her sketches, which they sell at the print shop. It is this belief in the inherent goodness of human beings and in the triumph of virtuous action that makes Opie's works different from those of radicals such as Wollstonecraft, Inchbald, and Hays. In stories such as 'The Black Velvet Pelisse,' 'The Death Bed,' and 'The Uncle and Nephew,' found in Simple Tales, she shows how kindness and virtue bring rewards in unexpected ways. Secret acts of charity and self-sacrifice are recompensed usually by a suitable marriage or by gifts at the end of the tales. In comparison to the tales, Temper, which is longer and more intricate, has a correspondingly more complex plot and better developed characters. Agatha is not simply the stereotypical innocent girl who becomes a seduced maiden in distress. She is shown to experience feelings of dejection, revenge, vanity, and anger, particularly against her mother. While she is grateful to the Orwells for giving her a second chance, she continues to nurse a 'vindictive resentment' towards her mother (I: 93): 'She looked forward with angry pleasure to the time when she would become an object of unavailing regret to her mother, and her daughter an object of pride and of tenderness' (I: 106). The narrator attributes her attitude to her temper, which is described as 'the bane of Agatha's existence' (I: 93). This 'temper' has other repercussions. It is also responsible for making Agatha feel superior to the Orwells, who are tradespeople. Opie describes it as 'not so much a sense of superior birth, as a feeling of difference, a consciousness of different habits, ways of thinking, and manners - the result of opposite situations' (I: 103). These flaws in Agatha prevent her from being fully reconciled with her mother and the society in which she

Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper 171 lives. Her problems with identity and proper behaviour are not resolved and are transferred to her daughter. Consequently, the happy ending is also deferred until the next generation. This structure of the two-generational story was used by a number of writers 33 in the revolutionary decade either to show through repetition the common plight of women or to reveal the difficulties women experience in refusing to subscribe to the power relations that govern their social lives. Opie's Temper similarly uses this structure and echoes some of the issues raised by the novelists of the 1790s. She also explores what has been described by Adrienne Rich as 'the essential female tragedy,' or 'the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter'34 For in novels such as A Simple Story, Wrongs of Woman, The Victim of Prejudice, as well as in

Temper, a mother's rebellion often entails exile or death, and consequently, the severance of her ties with her daughter. Ruth Perry notes that in the mid to late eighteenth century, there is 'an array of unrelenting plots punishing fictional women for what was rapidly becoming improper - and tragic - sexual behaviour. Such characters as Sarah Fielding's adulterous Lady Dellwyn, Mrs Inchbald's rebellious Miss Milner, Amelia Opie's convention-flouting Adeline Mowbray, or Mary Wollstonecraft's courageous and free-thinking Maria are all severely punished in their respective texts for taking liberties with society's rules about female chastity. ;w In Emma's and Agatha's case, the problem of improper behaviour is not resolved until the third generation through Agatha's daughter, who, though christened Emma, is called Agatha. This confusion of the child's name suggests the confusion of her maternal heritage, a result of society's attempts to control and punish rebellious women, and symbolically, the obfuscation of female genealogy for women in general. Agatha raises her child without allowing the young girl to know about or to name her grandmother who has banished her. But this prohibition clearly causes her emotional and psychological anguish. At one point during her exile from her maternal home, Agatha reads an advertisement placed in the newspaper by her mother announcing her forgiveness. She becomes overwhelmed: 'several times she caught herself calling her daughter by the long-prohibited name of Emma, the name of her mother: and as she did so the last time, she burst into tears, and folded the astonished child to her bosom with emotions of a various and contending nature. But the name so recalled to her memory and her tongue was not again banished thence' (I: 115). When the child corrects the mother by saying, T am Agatha, not Emma, mamma,' Agatha replies, 'You are both, my dear' (I:116).This scene is highly suggestive of the powerful but

172 Empowering the Feminine emotionally fraught bond between mother and daughter, which is then passed on to the granddaughter. Agatha's turmoil is not surprising, since her mother is both the source of unequivocal love when she was a child, and then consequently, responsible for her complete rejection as an adult. The mother is forced into becoming the embodiment of authority in place of the father. Luce Irigaray contends that 'in our patriarchal culture the daughter is absolutely unable to control her relation to her mother.' She believes that 'within our current value system,' it is impossible 'for a girl to achieve a satisfactory relation to the woman who has given her birth.' For Irigaray, this is 'one place where the need for another "syntax," another "grammar" of culture is crucial.'36 In Opie's novel, Agatha is unable to articulate fully what she feels for her mother, as suggested by her tears and what Opie describes as the 'emotions of a various and contending nature.' For the mother is both victim and victimizer, both the nourisher/caregiver and the figure representing law and patriarchal order. Agatha's conflicting reactions to her mother are then transferred to her daughter. At one point, she regrets having inspired in her daughter a hatred of her grandmother. She acknowledges: 'I violated my duty both as a child and mother, when I tried to pollute that innocent heart with the angry and disturbed passions of mine' (I: 119). One way of understanding Agatha's ambivalent reaction is through Adrienne Rich's theories of motherhood. Rich argues that as we continue to live in the 'kingdom of the fathers,' daughters feel 'matrophobia,' or the fear of'becoming one's mother.' Rich explains: 'Thousands of daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred they are struggling to win free of, the one through whom the restrictions and degradations of a female existence were perforce transmitted. Easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her.'37 This strong love of the mother and yet hatred of her inherited values is the reason why Agatha despairs at her mother's rejection and yet refuses to give in to her. She is a woman torn between her own desire for independence and society's notions of propriety and right conduct, which are handed down to her by the mother. As in Adeline Mowbray, the difficulties with the mother are rendered more complicated by the use of an 'other' wife/mother figure in the form of a woman of colour. Lola appears briefly twice only, early in volume 1 and towards the end of volume 3. But like Savanna in Adeline Mowbray, she plays an important role in the novel, functioning both as an agent in Danvers's deceit, thereby contributing to the plot, and also acting as a suggestive parallel and other to Agatha. Lola, an ex-mistress of Danvers in Calcutta,

Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper 173 arrives in England with Danvers's son, for whom she has been acting as nursemaid, and with the news of the death of his first wife. Hopeful of regaining Danvers's affections, she helps him by lying to Agatha and making her believe that their marriage was not legitimate. Though Agatha discovers the truth eventually, Danvers sends this 'woman of colour' to Emma Torrington to inform her that her daughter lived only as Danvers's mistress rather than his wife. She is described as an 'artful Indian' who successfully convinces Agatha's mother that her daughter has disgraced herself, thereby causing the rupture between them (I: 55). In this her first appearance, Lola functions as an exotic, lurid creature. She is a reminder of Danvers's past life in India, representing the 'savage' sexualized other, in contrast with Agatha, who is figured as the domestic mother. She comes from what Felicity Nussbaum calls the 'torrid zones,' at a time in history when 'the invention of the "other" woman of empire enabled the consolidation of the cult of domesticity in England.'38 Lola is thje demonic lover who conspires with 'pernicious alacrity' to alienate Agatha, the pure mother. On seeing the Indian woman with the little boy, Agatha looks at her 'innocent babe,' snatching 'to her heart the child sleeping on a sofa beside her' (I: 48). Agatha with her baby is contrasted at this point with Lola, the dark woman, surrogate mother-figure, who is the vehicle through which Danvers is able to carry out his machinations. Though Opie may have been influenced by the ideology of her time concerning racial difference and white superiority, her view of people of colour was a fairly enlightened one for her time. In her memoirs of her childhood years, she writes of her parents forcing her, despite her fear, to shake hands with an African, the footman of a rich merchant in her neighbourhood. They became 'very good friends' afterwards, and she recalls learning about 'negro history' from her parents, of being told 'the sad tale of negro wrongs and negro slavery.'39 Cecilia Brightwell notes that later 'she took a deep interest' in anti-slavery societies, and engaged 'actively in promoting their interests.'40 In her novels, most of the people of colour are, rather sadly, depicted as servants, but she does not render them villainous. As noted in Adeline Mowbray, they are often finally responsible for the happy ending, usually a reconciliation between the mother and daughter. In Temper, Lola's second appearance reverses the terms of Agatha's first encounter with her. Instead of acting as the accessory to the villain, she becomes the woman who is in dire need of help and whom others have abandoned. Working as a governess for one of young Emma's friends, she is the 'poor mulatto' with scarlet fever whom Emma nurses at the risk of endangering her own life. Young Emma, who is in almost every

174 Empowering the Feminine way the opposite of her wilful and selfish mother, explains to the surprised doctor in attendance that 'she should consider herself as accessary to the death of a fellow-creature if she did not do all in her power to save her' (III: 256). At these words, Dr M— is 'rendered silent by respect for feelings so virtuous and benevolent' (III: 257). Clearly, scenes like these are meant to contrast with Agatha's ungenerous behaviour in the past. Emma deigns to help a stranger, a foreigner, while her mother caused others suffering. As in the case of many of the multi-generational stories of this period, the daughter's generous and charitable acts serve to atone for her mother's errors. Through this structure, the author is able to raise some of the problematic issues relating to female identity and women's desire for independence, yet end the novel in a manner that satisfies the conventions of a traditional romance plot. In a similar way, the mulatto, Lola, atones for her past malice by confessing to Emma, whom she calls 'the blessed angel who saved my life' (III: 275). Opie here replicates cultural stereotypes in her depiction of the Indian woman as the primitive savage who believes in the supernatural, and in her idealization of the white woman as the domestic angel. In a somewhat comic scene, Lola, in a delirious state, mistakes the auburnhaired Emma for her mother. Giving a 'loud and fearful shriek, she hides under the bedclothes, and implores, "Go, go! Pray don't kill me!''' (III: 259). She confesses to Emma later that she was the woman of colour who was employed by Emma's father to deceive both her mother and her grandmother: 'O blessed angel! you saved my life, while I did all I could to injure you and your poor mother!' (III: 276). Even in this scene of reconciliation, Opie highlights the fact that it was not from any compunction that Lola confessed, but rather because she was, at the time of her deceit, again thwarted by Danvers, who promptly left her to marry another woman. In this way, there is a strange but telling association between the mulatto and the heroine. Lola, the sexualized other woman, becomes aligned with Agatha, as both are mistreated, used, and abandoned by the same man. Eventually, Lola becomes the means by which Danvers, now Lord Clonawley, becomes reconciled with his daughter, Emma. Lola testifies on her behalf, detailing to Lord Clonawley 'his daughter's beauty, and her active virtue; her generous nature, and her compassionate forgiveness' leading the father to acknowledge her. 'And this is MYchild' (III: 313), he saysfinally,and asks for her forgiveness. Opie's use of the 'other' woman of British empire combines colonialist, anti-colonialist, and feminist impulses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Initially, Lola functions as a necessary other to

Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper 175 Agatha in order to highlight the pathos of Agatha's situation, but later, she becomes aligned with her. Nussbaum has argued that 'the "other" woman of empire enabled ... the association of the sexualized woman at home with the exotic, or "savage," non-European woman.'41 These sexualized women have to be colonized, or at least, in Opie's moral world, they have to endure great punishment for their transgression. But Lola also becomes a crusader for justice, the means by which Agatha's injuries are righted. In her confrontation with Lord Clonawley, she represents the dual roles of wronged wife and mother. She is accorded power in the novel, as it is through her speech and urgent pleading that Emma's father is overcome with contrition. What remains problematic, however, is that after this act, which paves the way for the long-awaited reconciliation of the heroine with her family, Lola is obliterated from the narrative. Emma is acknowledged as a legitimate daughter and inherits £10,000, but Lola, who was also Danvers's lover at one point, and who did serve him, does not even merit a place in the conclusion. She has no legitimate claim, no daughter or son who could partake of Danvers's inheritance. In other words, she remains the looseficelleby means of which one could deconstruct this forced happy end. Lola exists as a reminder that the heroine's good fortune depends to a certain extent upon the marginalization of others. If Temper can be said to be about a 'series of small and large dislocations and relocations'42 of identities and heritage, what it reveals is that the other woman of British empire, unlike her white counterpart, still had few options, few possibilities of relocation. Such a paradigm is suggestive of the role of British imperialism at this stage in history. Lola's metaphorical and spiritual alignment with the heroine, yet with a dissimilar resolution, reveals what Edward Said describes as 'the connection between Europe's well-being and cultural identity ... and ... the subjugation of imperial realms overseas.'43 Lola, the colonial other, is needed in order to ensure the prosperity and subjective identity of the heroine, representative of white middle-class women in Britain. Considerations such as these seem to overshadow, at least for this reader, the overt theme and lesson of 'temper.' Cecilia Brightwell notes that in writing this novel, Opie 'adopted more the character of a moralist, aiming at practical usefulness; and she had the satisfaction of receiving assurances that it had exerted a beneficial influence on some of her readers.'44 Opie brings in the lesson of temper on numerous occasions in the novel. At times the lectures, especially those given by Mr Egerton, Emma's tutor and surrogate father, seem tendentious and almost forced into place. Not surprisingly, they comprise the overtly didactic parts of the

176 Empowering the Feminine last two-thirds of the novel. One of the most explicit lessons given by Egerton is the following: 'I consider Temper as one of the most busy and universal agents in all human actions ... Perhaps nothing is rarer than a single motive; almost all our motives are compound; and if we examine our own hearts and actions with that accuracy and diffidence which become us as finite and responsible beings, we shall find that of our motives to bad actions Temper is very often a principal ingredient, and that it is not unfrequently one incitement to a good one. I am also convinced ... that the crimes both of private individuals and of sovereigns are to be traced up to an uncorrected and uneducated temper as their source' (I: 208-9). Egerton defines temper as 'the moral part of goodhumour, that which shows itself in bearing with the ill-humour and provoking irritability of others' (I: 212). However well the term is defined, in the novel, temper encompasses a wide range of meaning, and seems to be somewhat different when applied to men and women. For a man such as the cantankerous, rich Hargrave, bad temper is simply ill-humour - complaints about the food at his table, anger at people when they do not comply with his wishes. However, temper in a woman, as Egerton explains it, seems to entail much more. It tends to be prescriptive, and covers the qualities that are deemed desirable in a young lady, as espoused by the conduct books of the time. In at least two passages in the novel, Egerton describes what temper means for a girl. For instance, the qualities he admires are not simply good-humour, but self-sacrifice and generosity, 'the general temper and disposition are often shown in one action, however trifling: and it is evident that she who is thus selfish in her amusements is selfish in little things; - a terrible trait in a wife! The happiness of the married life depends in a power of making small sacrifices with readiness and cheerfulness. Few persons are ever called upon to make great sacrifices, or to confer great favours; but affection is kept alive, and happiness secured, by keeping up a constant warfare against little selfishness: and the woman who is benevolent, and habitually fond of obliging, will, regardless of herself, be benevolent and obliging even in a ballroom' (II: 299). This advice sounds much like the kind given by Hannah More and Jane West in their tracts and novels. Of the three works by Opie studied here, Temper is the one that ostensibly is the most similar to the ideologies of the conservative writers of the time. It concludes with Emma being wed to Henry St Aubyn, whose 'most striking characteristic was filial piety' (I:173).Egerton continues his role as father, tutor, and sage, and becomes mentor not only to Emma, but also to her new family. The novel ends, appropriately

Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper 177 enough, with Emma, her husband, and Egerton discussing the importance of temper. According to Egerton: 'there is no situation in life in which fine temper is not of use. In affliction it disposes the sufferer to dwell more on the blessing it still retains, than on those which it has lost, and thereby prepares the mind for the influence of pious resignation. In sickness it induces patience and quiet endurance, lest complaint should wound the feeling of affectionate attendants; while it disposes those affectionate attendants themselves to bear with the often provoking and ungrateful petulance of disease; for though religion and principle may in time clear away every obstacle to their desirable ends, the way to them is made easy and quick at once if Temper be the guide' (III: 361). Temper is the catch-all phrase to mean patience, resignation, endurance, even piety, especially for a woman. In the world of this generation, there is no place for impetuous and wilful behaviour; for the transgressive and rebellious acts of the mother. However, along with the eradication of these bad habits go desire, self-assertion, and challenges to orthodox thinking. What seems to be missing from this otherwise perfect ending is the drama, and emotional and psychological interest of the earlier parts of the novel. Similar to other multi-generational narratives such as A Simple Story, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, or even Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, there is a

static and lifeless quality about the second generation that was not the case with the women of the first generation. These novels all reveal the ways in which women have sacrificed and have compromised - their desires, their aspirations, sometimes their lives - in order to live within patriarchal culture. Many feminist critics have found alternate ways of reading these and other texts to show that, despite their conventional endings, they have contributed to the empowerment of women. One way of reading that highlights what Mary Jacobus calls 'the difference of view' in these narratives is to not be too caught up in the endings of the novels, but to look at the very suggestive middles. Jacobus notes that 'all attempts to inscribe female difference within writing are a matter of inscribing women within fictions of one kind or another ... and hence ... what is at stake for both women writing and writing about women is the rewriting of these fictionsthe work of revision which makes "the difference of view" a question rather than an answer.'45 This chapter has been such an attempt at revision, an effort to read between the exigencies of literary and sociocultural traditions.

Afterword

While I have not given a full biographical account of the authors in this study, I have attempted to integrate the prose texts written by Robinson, West, and Opie with the larger cultural and historical contexts of these works. My aim has not been to arrive at definitive conclusions about the authors or their narratives, as I consider this examination to be exploratory and rehabilitative in nature. A number of the narratives I studied have not yet received any critical attention in our time. Part of the aim of this work is to place the three writers in the tradition of women's literary history from which they have been hitherto excluded. I hope that my discussion will encourage alternative readings and other ways of engaging with these texts. The focus of my book has been on issues raised by the authors that I, as a twentieth-century feminist, have personally found compelling — on gender and identity; desire and restraint; female subjectivity and domesticity; and the power of the maternal. I believe that such an endeavour not only speaks of the relevance of three much-neglected, yet significant late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers, but also about the importance of constructions and representations of the female and the feminine in Western culture. Recent studies on gender and the subject, such as those by Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Diana Fuss, suggest that subjectivity is a process very much dependent upon discursive practices, ideology, the psychic, and the social.1 A study of how three women who lived in what Foucault calls the beginning of the 'modern' period negotiated power within their domestic and cultural spheres reveals much about the bases of the notions of femininity and gender difference in our society today. While the definitions of the feminine are certainly different today from

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what they were in the 1790s and 1800s, women are still having to challenge basic notions of the gender and sexual difference in our daily lives. Sharon Marcus argues that 'both feminist and poststructuralist theories have persuasively contended that we only come to exist through our emergence into a preexistent language, into a social set of meanings which scripts us but does not exhaustively determine our selves.'2 She points out: 'The script should be understood as a framework, a grid of comprehensibility which we might feel impelled to use as a way of organizing and interpreting events and actions. We may be swayed by it even against our own interests - few women can resist utterly all the current modes of feminization - but its legitimacy is never complete, never assured.'3 It is by defining and being aware of the ways we are made feminine or feminized that we can challenge and explode some of the negative aspects of the social script handed down to us. Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie have, in their own ways, questioned, revised, and reconfigured the scripts for women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their attempts to empower women as subjects are not the same as the efforts of liberal feminists today. They were not agitating for political votes, equity in the labour force, or control of fertility and reproduction. What each of them achieved, however, is not to be dismissed. They challenged traditional notions of femininity - the belief that women were delicate and ornamental, hence weak and useless except as alluring mistresses. They redefined the role and value of the maternal. They sought to detach what people believed was 'natural' to women from what were socially and historically constructed positions for them. If their narratives do not all end happilv, it is because they were seeking to balance and reconcile what they felt and sensed was not right with the world as it was, with the values they were taught to cherish. At times, their views seem inconsistent or contradictory because they were still working out the details of how women could lead rich and rewarding lives and still subscribe to the culture's prescriptions of the proper lady. This study is limited by its focus on the genre of prose narrative - novels, memoirs, and a tale - and by its examination of works published at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The conjunction of the disenchantment with the French Revolution due to the excesses of Danton, Robespierre, and Marat; Britain's war with France; and the death of Wollstonecraft, the woman who embodied feminism in the 1790s, made the sixteen-year period of this study politically charged and a particularly interesting one for women writers, whether they were from the London literary circle influenced by Godwin, the Norwich Dis-

180 Afterword senting community, or the anti-Jacobin and Church of England Evangelical traditions. Though their reasons for writing were different, each of them sought to engage publicly with the debates about the place of women in society. Like many eighteenth-century writers, they endeavoured to entertain and instruct their readers, as well as earn money from the published volumes. These various intentions, political agendas, and biases of the writers create much of the interest and tension in the works. By concentrating on the narratives of Robinson, West, and Opie of this time, we see the ways in which three women attempted to reshape the discourses of the existing historically situated gendered hierarchy in order to give women more authority and control over their own lives. While their multivolumed works appear indistinguishable from one another from their titles, their reliance on the conventions of the novel of sentiment, and their appeal to a largely feminized reading public, they were noticeably different in their politics and their use of narrative techniques and literary devices. The distinguishing characteristic of Robinson's narratives of this period, whether fictional or autobiographical, is the use of the discourse of sensibility and, to a lesser extent, the conventions of the Gothic. More often than not, Robinson's narrators use the first-person voice to articulate a sense of estrangement from the dominant norm or culture, which is depicted ambiguously as luxurious, brilliant, but corrupt. This narrator, usually positioned outside of this culture, speaks from a disenfranchised position because of his or her economic and social condition. Writing in the form of memoirs or epistles, he or she exhibits extreme sensitivity to vicissitudes, articulates acute distress and strong feeling. With the exception of The Natural Daughter, which employs an ironic third-person voice, Robinson's narrators take the stance of victim and innocent pawn. This pose is similar to the position of the woman in distress found frequently in Robinson's poems, as Jacqueline Labbe notes. Labbe argues that Charlotte Smith and Robinson 'take advantage of their position as women in a society that expects certain behaviors out of women and men; they exploit ... the idea that women need men's protection for survival.'4 Similarly, Judith Pascoe points out that these poets 'use the public's awareness of their personal circumstances to temper or heighten their poetry's passionate claims.' Pascoe believes that romanticism itself 'is founded on theatrical modes of self-representation.'5 This technique of making public one's personal sorrow and having the protagonists articulate injustices and wrongs enabled Robinson to critique the world of false fathers, false friends, and what she perceived to be the unappreciative London public in

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her narratives. It is for this reason that my study of Robinson begins with an examination of her Memoirs, and continues with a biographical and critical approach to her works. In Robinson's narratives the boundaries between the private and the public are not clear. Like her, her protagonists attempt to elicit readers' sympathy through their inherent virtue and honour. During the course of the narrative, they reveal the difficulties of preserving this virtue in a debased world through their heightened emotional perspectives. In their dealings with the world, their culpable actions proceed from ignorance, and through their ingenuousness, their mistakes, and their failures of judgment, readers become aware of the limitations of the manners and morals of society. From the perspective of the ingenue or the innocent narrator, the world appears Gothicized and cruel, particularly to women. It is a world full of unnatural acts and deceits. A number of Robinson's narratives, particularlv in a novel such as The Natural Daughter, also function satirically. As in her essays published as 'The Sylphid,' the targets of her satire are aristocrats and the beau- and demi-monde. In 'Sylphid #4,' originally published in the Morning Post, she writes of the fashionable world: 'What a strange melange of luxury and insipidity! What sophisticated minds must such beings possess! How useless are they in the vast scale of human organization, and how little does their existence benefit or adorn society!'6 The attitude and satiric mode of this late work are similar to the style and tone of Jane West, whose spinster narrator often mocks the busy and artificially splendid world around her. While Robinson uses sensibility, West denounces it as an affectation and links it to the Jacobins. As we have seen, one characteristic feature of Jane West's fiction of this period is her use of the two-pronged heroine structure to embody dialectically opposed moral values. West is the Edmund Spenser of the 1790s in her effort to teach through allegorical narratives. Her heroines, like Una and Duessa from The Faerie Queene, must learn to distinguish right from wrong, must choose the correct ways of behaviour and suitable companions in life, or forever be damned in a Jacobin tragedy or melodrama, like those scripted by Burke. Her novels are designed to fashion a young lady in the same way as Spenser's allegory is intended to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline. As in Spenser, morality, virtue, and patriotism contribute to the glory of the English nation. West envisions English women as chaste guardians of the sanctity of home, family, and following that, the country as a whole. Their deviation from the straight and narrow paths of domestic duties and Christianity lead to the labyrinthian mazes of Godwinian philosophy and Rousseauvean wandering woods.

182 Afterword If Robinson's works tend to be biographical, West's narratives are deliberately anti-biographical. West constructs a fictional narrator who in her social and marital status is very unlike herself. West is married with children; Prudentia Homespun is an eccentric old maid who leads a quiet life in Danbury with her cat and her maid, Betty. This persona enables West as narrator to take certain liberties that she herself would not think proper for young ladies. While instructing women to be content with their wifely duties and maternal roles, West herself goes beyond the domestic sphere to intervene in the public world of print, to criticize the faults of the world as she sees it. As Prudentia, she says she can 'claim an unbounded privilege of digressing,' is allowed to 'say odd things,' can 'talk' of herself whenever she pleases, and can support her own opinion.7 Eccentricity becomes an excuse and a clever device for transgressing codes of femininity and propriety in the same way as Robinson's figure of the victim provided her with a way of speaking of her personal injuries and social ills. This paradoxical disjunction between what West claims women should be like and what she practices is only one of the many engrossing aspects of West. Another feature of her writing that I have highlighted through theories of the subject and abjection is her need to demonize the other. In her desire to warn young ladies of the dangers of Jacobin philosophy, West creates monstrous figures of those who sympathize with the revolution, those who espouse radical philosophy, and those who are not devout Christians. Ironically, her errant characters are delineated with much more skill and detail than her paragons. Politics - philosophical and sexual - also concerned Opie, particularly in a work such as Adeline Mowbray. But for Opie, whose writing career flourished in the early 1800s, the feminist and polemical debates of the 1790s were already more distanced than for West. Opie's tales and novels operate on a mythic or iconographic level as well as by appealing to the sentimental. She makes use of stock figures and scenes from morality plays, fables, and myth for dramatic purposes. In her narratives we find the penitential, long-suffering woman, the mad father, the wayward mother or daughter, and the faithful black servant. It is not surprising that The Father andDaughter-wasmade into an opera, because Opie's texts tend to function on the excessive and the melodramatic. While the plots of seduction are similar to those found in West's novels, the tone and pacing are different. Opie is less judgmental, less ironic, and more ambivalent towards sinners. By the time she was writing, there was less hysteria about France, the revolution, and its corrupting influences on the English woman. Aside from Adeline Mowbray, which replicates and examines the Godwin-

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Wollstonecraft relationship, her works during this time are psychological studies of human character with moral twists. What is fascinating about the way Opie's narratives work is the way they compel the reader to rethink age-old paradigms and familiar plot lines. They contest and unsettle stereotypical notions of women, of their desires, and their capabilities. One is surprised by the incongruity of the simple moral and the complex structure of the plot. The narrative often demands a reading that is not in keeping with the ostensible lesson or deflects the strong didactic message. Hence, my discussion emphasizes the discontinuities, the contradictions, and the troubled middles of her works rather than the somewhat forced preachy endings. Opie was well aware of the fact that it was not the particular incidents that happen in a novel or tale that become its most meaningful elements, but rather how these scenes relate to and affect the character or reader. In Temper the narrator notes, 'Events in life are often not important in themselves, but rendered so by the effect which they produced in the person to whom they occur.'8 Her skill as a writer of fiction consists in selecting and representing these crucial poignant moments, particularly in a woman's life. Through them she reveals the inadequacies of the social, economic, or legal system, which directly or indirectly lead to the traumatic or tragic events. For instance, the plight of a destitute girl whose mother has refused to acknowledge her evokes much pathos and compassion, but Opie also makes her readers aware of the ideological significance of poverty, dereliction, and maternal rejection. As she is influenced by the Enlightenment Dissenting tradition, which values individual and private action, she often highlights the way one good heart, one simple act of kindness can combat systemic prejudices or corruption. It is perhaps appropriate to conclude my study with a quotation from one of the writers' contemporaries, Mary Hays, who expresses what all three observed, and here articulates the aspirations for which they yearned: The powers and capacity of woman for rational and moral advancement, are, at this day, no longer a question: still, her general training - though superior minds, aided by the diffusion of literature, struggle and assert themselves, - is for adornment rather than for use; for exhibition rather than for moral and mental improvement; for the delights of the harem, rather than to render her friend, the companion, the assistant, the counsellor of man, the former of his infant habits, the instructor of his early years, the source from which his character takes its bias, his principles their rise. The education of woman is yet directed only towards the embellishment of the transient season of youth.

184

Afterword

We live in an age of great events, vicissitudes, and innovations: the invention of printing, the consequent diffusion of literature and extension of education, necessarily lead to a new order of things: it is in the nature, and of the essence, of man and mind to be active and progressive: much is to be feared; more perhaps to be hoped ...9

Notes

Preface 1 Teresa Brennan, 'An Impasse in Psychoanalysis and Feminism,' in A Reader in Feminist Knowledge, ed. Sneja Gunew (New York: Routledge, 1991), 115-16. 2 Ibid., 123, 116. 3 Helpful explanations of Lacan's notion of desire are found in Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), chap. 1, and in Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990), chap. 3. 4 Brennan, An Impasse,' 118, 130, 131. 5 Janelle Greenberg, 'The Legal Status of the English Woman in Early Eighteenth-Century Common Law and Equity,' Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 4 (1975): 171-81, notes that when a woman married, she was placed, along with underage children, 'in the same legal category as wards, lunatics, idiots and outlaws.' Introduction 1 Review of Memoirs oftheAuthor of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,' The Monthly Review, 2nd series, vol. 27 (Sept.-Dec. 1798): 322. 2 There are numerous studies of Wollstonecraft's life and works. Some of these include Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan, 1992); Emily Sunstein, A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974); Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972); and Ralph Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951).

186 Notes to pages 5-8 3 Clarissa Campbell Orr, ed., Wollstonecraft's Daughters: Womanhood in England and France 1780-1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 9. 4 Ibid., 1. 5 Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 24. 6 I have discussed this comparison in my book Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), introduction. See also the first chapter of Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 7 For an early and important study of this period, see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). 8 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5. 9 Gary Kelly, in Revolutionary Feminism, uses the term 'revolutionary feminism' to refer to two related aspects - 'the French Revolution and the cultural revolution that founded the modern state in Britain,' 1. 10 I examined selected novels by Wollstonecraft, Hays, Williams, Inchbald, and Smith in Unsex'd Revolutionaries. 11 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers'Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5. 12 Kowaleski-Wallace argues that More and Edgeworth 'warrant our attention as "daddies' girls" ... Their stories can tell us something important about what it means to participate successfully in a masculine literary discourse that, at best, creates a female subject according to its own bias and interests,' Their Fathers' Daughters, 12. 13 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Woman and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3. 14 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10. 15 William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), 75, 79. 16 Chris Weedon provides a definition of the term in Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987): 'Subjectivity is used to refer to the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world,' 32.

Notes to pages 8-10

187

1 7 Man Robinson, Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, 2nd ed. (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799). 7. 18 Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 109. McGann studies Mary Robinson and the English Delia Cruscans, in chap. 9. 19 Many conduct-book writers assumed that women were naturally more delicate and more reticent that men. For example, Dr Gregory writes to his daughters of the contrast between men and women: 'The natural hardness of our hearts, and strength of our passions, inflamed by the uncontrouled licence we are too often indulged with in our youth, are apt to render our manners more dissolute, and make us less susceptible of the finer feelings of the heart. Your superior delicacy, your modesty, and the usual severity of your education, preserve you, in a great measure, from any temptation to those vices to which we are most subjected.' 'A Father's Legacy to His Daughters,' in The Young Lady's Pocket Library, or Parental Monitor (1790; facsimile reprint, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), 4. 20 Lisa Wood, in "This Maze of History and Fiction": Conservatism, Genre, and the Problem of Domestic Freedom in Jane West's Alicia de Lacy,' English Studies in Canada 23.2 (June 1997): 125-39, argues that West's later works, such as Alicia de Lacy, are 'more complex' in their treatment of 'domestic freedom, 130. But she also notes that the early novels 'take the form of didactic domestic narratives,' 127. 21 Lisa Wood, "This Maze of History and Fiction,''' 125. 22 Garv Kellv. Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). 8. 23 Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 233. 24 Mrs [Jane] West, The Mother: A Poem, in Five Books (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Ornic, 1810), 46, 44. 25 Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers' Daughters, 57. 26 Roxanne Eberle, 'Amelia Opie's Adeline Moiubray: Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or, The Vindication of a Fallen Woman,' Studies in the Novel 26.2 (Summer 1994). 121. 27 Amelia Opie's Love and Duty' is a tale based on a collection of French trials 111 volume 2 of Simple Tales, 4 vols., 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806). 28 Amelia Opie, 'The Robber,' in Simple Tales, vol. 1: 347. 29 Mitzi Mvers, 'Reform or Ruin: "A Revolution in Female Manners,''' Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 11 (1982): 201.

188

Notes to pages 11-14

30 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: World's Classics, 1993), 71. 31 Ibid., 75. 32 Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 2. 33 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997), 62. 34 Linda M.G. Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, an Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 63. 35 Claudia L. Johnson, fane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 5. 36 Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), xvi. 37 Ibid., xvii. 38 Ibid., 18. 39 Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5. 40 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries ofUdolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobree (Oxford: World's Classics, 1970); Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: World's Classics, 1976); Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story,ed. J.M.S. Tompkins (Oxford: World's Classics, 1988); Charlotte Smith, The Young Philosopher, 4 vols (New York: Garland, 1974); and Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice (Peterborough, ON.: Broadview Press, 1994). 41 For example, Nina da Vinci Nichols, in 'Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis, and Bronte,' The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann Fleenor (Montreal: Eden Press, 1983), has pointed out that 'Gothic novels rely upon place not only to situate plot but to evoke the terror of Gothic themes,' 187. 42 Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), says that 'the last years of the eighteenth century are broken by a discontinuity similar to that which destroyed Renaissance thought at the beginning of the seventeenth; ... knowledge takes up residence in a new space,' 217. 43 Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988), chap. 2. 44 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), chap. 3. 45 Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), part 4. 46 John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1. 47 Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 15.

Notes to pages 14-23 189 48 Ibid., 23. 49 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138. 50 J.R. Dinwiddy, 'Conceptions of Revolution in the English Radicalism of the 1790s,' in Radicalism and Reform in Britain 1780-1850 (London: Hambledon, 1992), 171, 170. 51 Malcolm I. Thomis and Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789-1848 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 6. 52 Ibid., 7. 53 Ibid., 15. 54 The Annual Register for 1794, 267, as quoted by Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 36. 55 Thomis and Holt, Threats of Revolution, 16. 56 See Roger Well, Insurrection: The British Experience 1795-1803 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983), chap. 5. 57 As quoted by Thomis and Holt, Threats of Revolution, 23. 58 Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'dFemales: A Poem (1798; New York: Garland Reprints, 1974). 59 Mary Hays, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries, 6 vols. (London: R. Phillips, 1803), iii. Hays took on this work to earn money, and may have felt that to include Wollstonecraft would be risky 60 Dinwiddy, 'Conceptions of Revolution,' in Radicalism and Reform, 194. 61 J.R. Dinwiddy, English Radicals and the French Revolution, 1800-1850,' in ibid., 208. 62 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1968), 12. 63 Paul Smith, in Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), notes that the term agent is 'used to mark the idea of a form of subjectivity where, by virtue of the contradictions and disturbances in and among subject-positions, the possibility (indeed, the actuality) of resistance to ideological pressure is allowed for,' xxxv. 64 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 324-5. 1: Engendering a Female Subject: Mary Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self 1 For a list of Robinson's works and an account of her life and achievements, see Eleanor Ty, Mary Robinson,' in British Reform Writers, 1789-1832, ed. Gary Kellv and Edd Applegate. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 158 (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1996), 297-305; Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the

igo

Notes to pages 23-4

Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 314; Marguerite Steen, The Lost One: A Biography of Mary (Perdita) Robinson (London: Methuen, 1937), 233; Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 916; and Janet Todd, ed., A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman, 1985), 270-2. 2 Three examples of romantic biographies are E. Barrington, The Exquisite Perdita (New York: Dodd, 1926); [Sarah Green], The Private History of the Court of England, 2 vols. (London, 1808); and Stanley Victor Makower, Perdita: A Romance in Biography (New York: Appleton, 1908). 3 For her own account of this incident, see Mary Robinson, Memoirs of Mary 'Perdita'Robinson (1801), introduction byj. Fitzgerald Molloy (London: Gibbings, 1895). According to Robert D. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (London: Redman, 1957), 'the scandalous romance of Florizel and Perdita lasted exactly a year. The Prince first saw Mary on December 3, 1779, and their final break occurred about December 15, 1780,' 185. Brief accounts are given in the introductory section of J.R. De J.Jackson, Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography 1770-1835 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 4 Robinson's Memoirs-was published and reprinted at least ten times in the nineteenth century. 5 According to John Ingamells, Mrs. Robinson and Her Portraits (London: Wallace Collection, 1978), 14-15, Robinson sat to George Romney early in 1781, and to Thomas Gainsborough in August of that year for her wholelength portrait. Nicholas Penny states that 'Mrs. Robinson had fourteen appointments with Reynolds in 1782' and notes that 'the appointments she had with Reynolds in the first two months of1782correspond closely with those for her lover, Colonel Tarleton,' Reynolds (New York: Abrams, 1986), 299. 6 In the early part of the 1780s, the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Herald, and the Morning Post frequently featured titillating news items about Mary Robinson and her amours. See Bass, Green Dragoon, chaps. 18-19. 7 Malcolm Cormack, The Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 134. 8 See Judith Pascoe, 'Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace,' in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 252-68. 9 Steen, The Lost One, 224; see also Makower, Perdita, 336.

Notes to pages 24-7 191 10 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71), I: 562. 11 For a study of Coleridge's 'romantic and mannerly regard' for Robinson and the literary relationship that existed between them, see Lisa Vargo, 'The Claims of. "Real Life and Manners": Coleridge and Mary Robinson,' Wordsworth Circle 26.3 (Summer 1995): 134-7. 12 Teresa de Lauretis, 'Feminist Studies / Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts,' in Feminist Studies / Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 9. 13 Mary Robinson, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself, 2 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), I: 122. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the memoirs are from this edition. 14 Sidonie Smith, 'Construing Truths in Lying Mouths: Truth telling in Women's Autobiography,' Studies in the Literary Imagination 23.2 (1990): 145. 15 Hayden White, '"Figuring the Nature of Times Deceased": Literary Theory and Historical Writing,' in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1989), 19. 16 Smith, 'Truths,' 145. 17 Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 47. 18 Bass, (Ween Dragoon, 399. 19 Mary Robinson was a published poet before becoming an actress. Her early works include Flegiac Verses to a Young Lady on the Death of Her Brother (1775); Poems by Mrs. Robinson (1775); Captivity, a Poem, and Celadon and Lydia, a Tale (1777); The Songs, Choruses, etc. in The Lucky Escape (1778). 20 As quoted in Bass, Green Dragoon, 379. 21 Felicity Nussbaum, 'Eighteenth-Century Women's Autobiographical Commonplaces,' in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 154. 22 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 16. 23 As quoted by Bass, Green Dragoon, 195. 24 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London: Granada, 1977), 117. 25 Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk, eds and intro. Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 7. 26 Cecilia Macheski, 'Herself as Heroine: Portraits as Autobiography for Elizabeth Inchbald,' in Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theatre. [660-1820, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 34. Portraits are included in later editions of

192 Notes to pages 27-30 the Memoirs. See Mary Robinson, Memoirs of Mary 'Perdita'Robinson, with Portraits (1801), intro. byj. Fitzgerald Molloy (London, 1895); and Mrs. Mary Robinson, Written by Herself. With the Lives of the Duchesses of Gordon and Devonshire by Grace and Philip Warton (London: Grolier, n.d.). 27 Macheski, 'Herself,' 34, 38. 28 For example, according to Cormack, Gainsborough's Queen Charlotte, exhibited in 1781, was acknowledged 'as a consummate and "picturesque" piece of flattery of a plain woman,' Gainsborough, 26. 29 Nicholas Penny, Reynolds, 28. Similarly, Marcia Pointon, in Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), says that 'women of the ruling class in the eighteenth century do seem to have been actively involved in the commissioning of portraits. Moreover, inscribed in the literature of the age was an assumption that the subject to some degree determined the composition of a portrait,' 145. 30 James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols. (1819; facsimile reprint, London, Cornmarket, 1971), I: 83 . 31 John Hayes, Gainsborough: Paintings and Drawings (London: Phaidon, 1975), 46. Hayes says that 'likeness, not composition or grandeur or self-advertisement, was always [Thomas Gainsborough's] first consideration,' 13. Apparently, he never worked much, if at all, on the head of one of his portraits without the sitter before him. 32 Penny, Reynolds, 23. Penny says that 'Reynolds's female sitters, including indeed, especially - notorious courtesans such as Kitty Fisher or Nelly O'Brien, appear to be women of superior "breeding,"' 23. 33 Pointon, Hanging the Head, 1. 34 Ingamells, Mrs. Robinson, 31. 35 Ibid. 36 MJ. Levy, 'Gainsborough's Mrs. Robinson: A Portrait and Its Context,' Apollo 136 (1992), 154. 37 See Ingamells, Mrs. Robinson, 31, 5. According to Ellis Waterhouse, Gainsborough (London: Spring, 1958), the painting had the following history: 'sold with Mrs. Robinson's effects, 1784: George, Prince of Wales by 1790: presented 1818 to Marquess of Hertford,' 87. 38 M.H. R - , Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite, and His Answers to Them (London: 1781), ii. See Bass, Green Dragoon, 189. 39 As quoted by Ingamells, 19. 40 See Bass, Green Dragoon, 197. 41 The Vis-d-Vis of Berkley-Square; or, A Wheel off Mrs. W* T**N's Carriage. Inscribed toFlorizel (London, 1783), 9, 19.

Notes to pages 31-42 193 42 Bass, Green Dragoon, 224. 43 Better known today as Brighton. 44 Linda Peterson, 'Female Autobiographer, Narrative Duplicity,' Studies in the Literary Imagination 23.2 (1990): 166-7. 45 Ibid., 165. 46 Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 91, 90. 47 See Steen, The Lost One, 212. 48 Mary Robinson, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. With Some Posthumous Pieces, 4 vols., ed. Mary Elizabeth Robinson (London: R. Phillips, 1801), IV: 102, 108, 112-13, 140. 49 Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 174. 50 In Memoirs 1801, 99-100. 51 See Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). Hays wrote two tracts: Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793) and Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798). Other less radical women also published pro-woman manifestos in the same genre as Robinson's. See Mary Ann Radcliffe's The Female, Advocate; or, An Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (1799), and Priscilla Wakefield's Reflections on the Condition of the Female Sex: With Suggestions for Its Improvement (1798). 52 Katharine Rogers, 'The Contribution of Mary Hays,' Prose Studies 10.2 (1987): 131. 53 Maiy Robinson, Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, 2nd ed. (London, 1799), 3. 54 The technique of citing women from the past as proof of the sex's worth is an old one, associated primarily with the Renaissance. Mary Hays was later to feminize history the same way with her Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries. 55 One duelling scene does occur in fiction around this time. In Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), Lady Delacour and Harriot Freke attract the 'English mob' with their 'duel fought by women in men's clothes,' 47. 2: Questioning Nature's Mould: Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 1 Mary Robinson, Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature, 4 vols. (New York: Carland Reprints, 1974). 2 In a review of Robinson's The Widow; or, A Picture of Modern Times by the Morning Post 14 October 1794, the writer notes that Robinson, 'whose

194

Notes to pages 4 2 - 5

writings, two years since, [the multitude] worshipped even to idolatry, whom they named, "the ENGLISH SAPPHO!" ... whose Literary Fame would "outlive the Pencil of a Reynolds!" is now the subject of abuse, because her Novel breathes the Spirit of Democracy!!' (3). 3 For a list of her works, see MJ. Levy, Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson (London: Peter Owen, 1994), xi-xiii, and Eleanor Ty, 'Mary Robinson,' in British Reform Writers, 1789-1832, ed. Gary Kelly and Edd Applegate. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 158 (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1996), 297305. 4 Review of Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature, in The Analytical Review, vol. 27 (Jan .-June 1798): 80. 5 Review of Walsingham in The Monthly Review, 2nd series, vol. 26 (May-Aug. 1798): 444. 6 Review of Walsingham in The Monthly Visitor, vol. 3 (Jan. 1798): 86. 7 Some of these studies include Stuart Curran, 'Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context,' in Re-VisioningRomanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 17-35; Jacqueline Labbe, 'Selling One's Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry,' Wordsworth Circle 25.2 (Spring 1994): 68-71; and Judith Pascoe, 'The Spectacular Fldneuse: Mary Robinson and the City of London,' Wordsworth Circle 23.3 (Summer 1992): 165-71. 8 Chris Cullens, 'Mrs. Robinson and the Masquerade of Womanliness,' in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea Von Miicke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 268. 9 Ibid., 267. 10 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993) 95. 11 I have studied some of these works in Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 12 Sylvia Bowerbank, 'Does Woman Speak for Nature? Toward a Genealogy of Ecological Feminism,' in Between Monsters, Goddesses, and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine, and Cyberspace, ed. Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (London: Zed Books, 1996). 13 William Wordsworth, 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,' 11. 152, 122-3, Romantic Poetry and Prose, ed. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 146-50. 14 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973). 15 Ibid., 323.

Notes to pages 45-9 195 16 Ibid., 217. 17 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992) 16. 18 Foucault, Order ofThings, 221. 19 Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter, 93-4. 20 Ibid., 94. 21 Ibid., 95. 22 In Walsingham Sir Edward Aubrey dies before the birth of his child. In his will, he bequeaths his estate and sixty thousand pounds to the infant if it is a son, but if it is a female, the estates are to go to Aubrey's brother, and the daughter is to inherit only thirty thousand pounds. 23 Randolph Trumbach, 'London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture,' in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 122. 24 Trumbach cites the case of Sarah Ketson and Constantine Boone, who married for women's money. See 'London's Sapphists,' 122. 25 See ibid., 123. 26 Mary Robinson, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, 2 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), 11:14. 27 Mary Robinson was one of the stars of Drury Lane during the 1779—80 season. The Morning Chronicle of 29 January 1780 reported: 'Mrs. Robinson last night acquitted herself very respectably in the character of Rosalind in Shakespeare's beautiful comedy As You Like It. Her figure was perfectly proper, and her deportment sufficiently graceful.' Quoted by Robert D. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (London: Alvin Redman, 1957) 129. Robinson also played the roles of Fidelia in Wycherley's The Plain Dealer and Jacintha in Hoadley's The Suspicious Husband. Both roles showed off Robinson attractively in breeches (Bass, 131). 28 Bass, Greenm Dragoon, 131. 29 Review of Walsingham in The Monthly Revieiv, 2nd series, vol. 26 (May-Aug. 1798): 442. 30 Stuart Curran, 'Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context,' 27. 31 Judith Pascoe, Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace,' in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 262. 32 Cullens, Mrs. Robinson and the Masquerade of Womanliness,' 274. 33 Hannah More, Essays, The Lady's Pocket Library (Philadelphia: R. Folwell, 1794), (5. 34 Garber, Vested Interests, 10.

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Notes to pages 49-52

35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 17. 37 Adrienne Rich, foreword to 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,' Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: Norton, 1993), 204. 38 Ibid., 221. 39 Mary Robinson, Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, 2nd ed. (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), 1. 40 Most of the reviews of the novel when it first appeared focused on its satire of fashionable life. For instance, the Analytical Review ofJanuary 1798 said: 'We must suppose Mrs. R. to be acquainted with the manners of fashionable life. Yet if her portraits be not caricatures, the extremes of society appear to meet.' The Oracle of 30 December 1797 predicted: 'Mrs. Robinson's Walsingham's animadversions on Box-Lobbies, Bull-dogs, Polygraphs, and Old Women will probably cause a revolution in the taste for those eccentric sources of amusement.' Both reviews are quoted from Bass, The Green Dragoon, 378-9. 41 Brian Vickers, introduction to The Man ofFeelingby Henry Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), ix. 42 Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 94. 43 Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 4th ed. (London, 1774), pt. I, chap. 1, p 2, writes: 'As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.' 44 Gerard A. Barker, Henry Mackenzie (Boston: Twayne, 1975), 29. 45 The Morning Post of. 18 January 1798 reported: 'Mrs. Robinson's disorder is a nervous fever, attended by a depression of spirits, which all the attention of her friends cannot alleviate,' quoted by Bass, 379. 46 Bass, The Green Dragoon, 378. 47 Wordsworth writes: 'when first / I came among these hills; when like a roe / I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides / Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, / Wherever nature led ...' 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,' 11. 66-70. 48 In the eighteenth century, there were some who believed that there were physiological reasons for this difference. For example, a 'physician' disagrees with the belief that 'Women were hotter than Men, because they are sooner ripe for Business, for ... they have more Blood, they have also more Heat.' He ascribes women's problems to their 'weakness of that Heat.' But he does assert that 'man ... feeds more happily, defends himself with more Courage and Presence of Mind, reasons with more Strength.' Excerpt from Women in

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the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 81-2. 49 With Wollstonecraft and Hays, the debate between reason and sensibility was an ongoing one. Both writers were influenced by Godwin, however, and around the mid-1790s their works reveal their wish for women to lead lives based on the intellect and reason, rather than on feeling. See Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), and for Wollstonecraft, see Syndy McMillen Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994), especially the introduction, for the way Wollstonecraft's attitude towards sensibility changed over the years. 50 Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females: A Poem (1798; New York: Garland Reprints, 1974). 51 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol Poston (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988), 60 52 Jerome McGann, 'Mary Robinson and the Myth of Sappho,' Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 56.1 (March 1995): 67. 53 Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 15. 54 Review of Walsingham, The Analytical Review, vol. 27 (Jan.June 1798): 81. 3: Fathers as Monsters of Deceit: Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 1 Mary Robinson, The False Friend: A Domestic Story, 4 vols. (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799). All further references to this novel are from this edition. 2 As quoted by Robert Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (London: Alvin Redman, 1957), 389. 3 Review of The False Friend in The Analytical Review, n.s., vol. I (Jan.-June 1799): 209. 4 See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). 5 See Judith Pascoe, 'The Spectacular Fldneuse: Mary Robinson and the City of London,' Wordsworth Circle23.3 (Summer 1992): 165-71; and Cheryl Turner, Living fry the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992). 6 Stuart Curran, 'Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context,' in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 31. 7 Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and the Wrongs of Woman (Oxford: World's Classics, 1976).

198

Notes to pages 59-64

8 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 105. 9 I have discussed this at length in the introduction of my book Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 10 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: World's Classics, 1993), 80. 11 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 84. 12 For example, Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Radcliffe's The Mysteries ofUdolpho, West's A Gossip's Story, and Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney. For further discussion of female sensibility in these authors, see Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Eleanor Ty, Unsex'd Revolutionaries. 13 Gary Kelly, 'Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s,' in fetter 'd or free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 286. 14 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796; Oxford: World's Classics, 1996), 4. 15 GJ. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: Unversity of Chicago Press, 1992), 361. 16 Elizabeth R. Napier, The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century Literary Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 45. 17 Ibid., 46. 18 Though earlier writers like Anne Finch, Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fyge Egerton, and others had complained of male rule and tyranny, the recent example of the French Revolution gave added weight to the metaphors of women's imprisonment and slavery. 19 Review of A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, vol. 3 (April-Aug. 1799): 146. Originally, Thoughts on the Condition of Women was published under Anne Frances Randall's name with this title. 20 [Dr Bisset] Review of The False Friend, in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, vol. 3 (April-Aug. 1799): 40. 21 Susan Allen Ford, '"A name more dear": Daughters, Fathers, and Desire in A Simple Story, The False Friend, and Mathilda,' in Re-Visioning Romanticism, 51-2. 22 Sigmund Freud, 'Female Sexuality,' in Freud on Women: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (New York: Norton, 1990), 327.

Notes to pages 64-73 199 23 Freud, 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,' Freud on Women, 142. 24 Teresa de Lauretis, 'The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender,' in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Routledge, 1989), 241-2. 25 David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 110. 26 Ibid., 28. 27 Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art, 2 vols. (London: G.G. andj. Robinson, 1796). 28 [Jane West,] The History of Ned Evans (1796), 4 vols. 2nd ed. (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1797). This novel is attributed to West, but may have been written by someone else. 29 Volume 3 of Robinson's Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. With Some Posthumous Pieces, 4 vols., ed. Mary Elizabeth Robinson (London: R Phillips, 1801) contains thirteen essays from 'The Sylphid.' 30 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 112. 31 The heroine's erotic involvement with the man who turns out to be her real father is fictional, as there is no actual event in Robinson's life that parallels it. This novel is the only one by Robinson that involves an incestuous relationship between a father and his daughter. 4: Recasting Exquisite Sensibility: Robinson's The Natural Daughter 1 Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter. With Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel. 2 vols. (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), II: 42. All further quotations are from this edition. 2 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980), 5. Hutcheon uses the term 'selfreflexive' interchangeably with others such as 'metafictive,' 'narcissistic,' 'auto-referential' to refer to 'fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity,' 1. 3 Robert D. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives ofBanastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (London: Alvin Redman, 1957), 392. 4 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988), 9. 5 Bass, The Green Dragoon, 321. 6 Mary Robinson, 'The Progress of Liberty: A Poem in Two Books,' in vol. 4 of

200

Notes to pages 73-5

Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. With Some Posthumous Pieces, ed. Mary Elizabeth Robinson (London: R. Phillips, 1801), IV: 36, 37. 7 For a thorough historical study of sensibility, see GJ. Barker-Benfield's The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 8 See Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), chap. 1; Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), chap. 8; and Claudia L. Johnson, fane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), introduction. 9 Developing the ideas of the Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature (1740), and Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), argued that the ability to sympathize with others made us act benevolently and was the basis of social harmony. Hume felt that 'women and children are most subject to pity, as being most guided by that faculty,' A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 370. Smith believed that the communication of sorrow to a sympathetic person could be pleasurable, 'because the sweetness of his sympathy more than compensates the bitterness of that sorrow,' The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 15. See also Todd, Sensibility, 26-7, and Jones, Radical Sensibility, 26-33. 10 Claudia L.Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14. 11 For a study of the differences between Rousseau's Julie and Mackenzie's Julia, see Kim Ian Michasiw, 'Imitation and Ideology: Henry Mackenzie's Rousseau,' Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5.2 (Jan. 1993):153-76. 12 Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria 'flew to Rousseau' when she was disappointed, and thinks her fellow prisoner to be 'the personification of Saint Preux,' Mary and the Wrongs of Woman (Oxford: World's Classics, 1976), 89. Mary Hays's Emma Courtney reads Rousseau's Heloise with 'transport' and with 'enthusiasm,' and similarly imagines her good friend's son to be her 'St. Preux.' See Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford: World's Classics, 1996), I: chaps. 8 and 18. 13 In a letter to Hays dated January 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft informed Hays that Robinson had read Emma Courtney and thought 'the death of Augustus the end of the story and that the husband should have been suffered to die a natural death,' Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 376. 14 Janet Todd, Sensibility, 1ll. 15 Mary Robinson, Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature, 4 vols. (London: T.N. Longman, 1797; facsimile reprint, New York: Garland, 1974), I: 7.

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16 [ean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius; or, A Treatise of Education, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: J. Dickson and C. Elliot, 1773), III: 87. 17 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 9. 18 Rousseau, Emilius, III: 7-8. 19 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 22. 20 Ibid., 48. 21 Judith Butler, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993), argues that sex and sexuality are assumed through 'performativity,' through 'a regularized and constrained repetition of norms,' 95.1 borrow her term here as I see the way the feminine subject is constructed, particularly in the eighteenth century, also as an act of performativity. 22 Mary Robinson, 'The Sylphid,' in vol. 3 of Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. With Some Posthumous Pieces, III: 25. 23 Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 206. 24 Jones, Radical Sensibility, 9. 25 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (London: J.Johnson, 1798; reprint, New York: Garland, 1974), 6. 26 Mary Robinson, The False Friend, A Domestic Story, 4 vols. (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799) IV: 367. 27 [Dr Bisset], review of The False Friend in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, vol. 3 (May 1799): 40. 28 Bass, The Green Dragoon, 393. 29 Tilottama Rajan, 'Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney,' Studies in Romanticism 32.2 (Sept. 1993): 149. 30 Ibid., 150. 31 Hayden White, in '"Figuring the nature of the times deceased": Literary Theory and Historical Writing,' The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1989), stresses that 'historical discourses typically produce narrative interpretations of their subject matter,' 21. 32 Godwin, Memoirs, 113-14. 33 Thomas Mathias, Pursuits of Literature (London: T. Becket, 1805), 56-8. 34 Sonia Hofkosh, A Woman's Profession: Sexual Difference and the Romance of Authorship,' Studies in Romanticism 32.2 (Summer 1993): 252. 35 Margaret Anne Doody, introduction to The Wanderer by Fanny Burney (Oxford: World's Classics, 1991), vii. 36 Mary Havs, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, I: chap. 11. 37 Margaret Whitford, in Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), explains that for Irigaray, 'women are abandoned outside the symbolic order.' Dereliction connotes 'the state of being

202

Notes to pages 83-8

abandoned by God or, in mythology, the state of an Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos, left without hope, without help, without refuge,' 77-8. 38 Jones, Radical Sensibility, ix. 5: Abjection and the Necessity of the Other: West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story 1 Isobel Grundy notes that Jane West took the name Prudentia Homespun from Charlotte McCarthy, Irish poet and religious writer, whose Letter to the bishop of London (1767?) bears this name. See Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 683, 1151. 2 On the debate of the 1790s, see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); and Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). In 1974 Garland Publications issued a series of forty-three works under the title 'Feminist Controversy in England, 1788-1810.' Four of these works are by Jane West. 3 References are to the following editions: Jane West, The Advantages of Education; or, The History of Maria Williams (1793), introduction by Gina Luria (New York: Garland, 1974); A Gossip's Story and a Legendary Tale, 2 vols., 4th ed. (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799); A Tale of the Times (1799), introduction by Gina Luria (New York: Garland, 1974). 4 Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 6. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 See Butler, War of Ideas, 101; Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship Novel, 1740-1820: A Feminized Genre (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 116; and Colin Pedley, '''The Inward Dispositions of the Heart": Jane Austen and Jane West,' Notes and Queries 36.2 (June 1989): 169. 7 For brief discussions of this, see Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 233; Johnson, Jane Austen, 7; and Green, Courtship Novel, 116. 8 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), especially chap. 1. 9 Patricia Meyer Spacks, 'Sisters,' in fetter'd or free? British Women Novelists, 16701815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 136. 10 Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5. 11 Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New

Notes to pages 88-94

203

York: Columbia University Press, 1991), chap. 3. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chap. 1. 12 Pamela Lloyd, 'Some New Information on Jane West,' Notes and Queries 31.4 (Dec. 1984): 46913 Elizabeth Bergen Brophy, Women's Lives and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991), 230. 14 Jean Kern, 'The Old Mind, or "to grow old, and be poor, and laughed at''' in fetter'd or free?, ed. Schofield and Macheski, 201. 15 Ibid. 16 West, Letters to a Young Lady, in Which the Duties and Character of Women Are Considered (1806), introduction by Gina Luria, 3 vols. (New York: Garland, 1974), II: 89-90. 17 Mitzi Myers, 'Reform or Ruin: A Revolution in Female Manners,' Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 11 (1982): 204. 18 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston 2nd ed. (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1975), 33. 19 Ibid., 31. 20 Poovey, Proper Lady, 83. 21 Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and the Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (New York, Oxford: World's Classics, 1976), 199. 22 Jane West, The Mother: A Poem in Five Books, 2nd ed. (London: PaternosterRow, 1810), 94. 23 Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 4. 24 Marianne Hirsch in The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 9. 25 As quoted by Hirsch in Mother/Daughter Plot, 9-10. 26 See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), chap. 6. 27 Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 141, 136. 28 For example, Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1989), 319. 29 Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), introduction by Eva Figes (London: Pandora, 1986), 208, features a Wollstonecraftian Harriot Freke, who cries 'Vive la liberte' in a chapter called 'Rights of Woman.' Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 3 vols. 3rd ed. (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1800-1) has a character called Bridgetina Botherim, who is modelled after Hays's heroine, Emma Courtney.

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30 William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 144-5. 31 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 32 Ibid., 10. 33 Ibid., 15. 34 Ibid., 16, 17. 35 Elizabeth Grosz, 'The Body of Signification,' in Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 86. 36 Ibid., 87. Grosz thinks that one problem with Kristeva is that 'there can be no specifically female writing, no female text, but only texts about women or evoking a lost, renounced femininity and maternity,' 101. Though I have used Kristeva's notion of the abject in this paper, like Grosz I am concerned about Kristeva's association of the unclean, marginal, and disruptive with the feminine, and about Kristeva's lack of positive solutions for female subjects. Kristeva's abject is useful for describing what happens in West's novel, but ultimately she does not offer a resolution to the difficulty of female identity. 37 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 12-17. 38 Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, I: 24. 39 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 10th ed. (New York: Norton, 1976), 236. 40 Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, 'Sorties,' in The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 63-4. 41 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 170. 42 Ibid., 177. 6: Politicizing the Domestic: The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 1 Jane West, A Tale of the Times, 3 vols. (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799; facsimile reprint, New York: Garland, 1974). All subsequent citations are from the Garland edition. 2 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 88. 3 Butler, in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 89, writes that 'the leading spirits behind The Anti-Jacobin of 1797-8 were George Canning, William Gifford, and Hookham Frere,' who targeted writers such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Holcroft, Robert Southey, Samuel Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd. 4 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of

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California Press, 1992). Though Hunt concentrates mainly on newspaper accounts, paintings, novels, and other historical documents in France, she does note that 'no one understood better than the English critic of the Revolution, Edmund Burke, the connection between filial devotion and the willingness of a subject to obey,' 3. 5 Linda M. Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 62. 6 April London has made a similar point in her paper 'Jane West and the Politics of Reading,' in Tradition in Transition, ed. James Basker and Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 56-74. She notes that 'Geraldine's integrity and, more especially, her identification with the distinctive national virtues exemplified by georgic encourage our reading her ... as a figure for Britain itself (72). While London establishes the link between the public and the private, and the distinction between the pastoral and the georgic in A Tale of the Times, she does not discuss the significance of the maternal figure in the novel. 7 See Gina Luria's introduction to West's The Advantages of Education; or, The History of Maria Williams, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1974), I: 6 and Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 6. 8 Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, in Which the Duties and Character of Women Are Considered, 3 vols. (1806; New York: Garland, 1974). 9 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 14-15. 10 Ibid., 4-5. 11 Julia Kristeva, 'Stabat Mater,' in The Rristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 161. 12 William Godwin believed that it was important to analyse one's past and the events leading up to one's actions because 'the characters of men originate in their external circumstances' rather than in any original bias that they bring into the world. Enquiry concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 96. 13 The Anti-Jacobin Review of 1798 went so far as to list Wollstonecraft under the word 'prostitution' in the index. My point is that West and the anti-Jacobins tended to conflate sexual chastity with nationalism. Because Wollstonecraft had sexual liaisons with both Gilbert Imlay and William Godwin, she was viewed as a threat to the moral constitution of society. 14 Edmund Burke, 'A Letter to a Noble Lord' (1796), in Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, ed. Marilyn Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge LIniversitv Press, 1984), 57.

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15 Johnson, Jane Austen, 11. 16 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: World's Classics, 1993), 77. Further citations from this text are from this edition. 17 Ibid., 34, 49, 44./ 18 Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, 762. 19 Ibid., 701, 740. 20 A term used by the judge in Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria; or, The Wrongs oj Woman (Oxford: World's Classics, 1976). In Wollstonecraft's novel, the judge attributes the heroine's infidelity to 'French principles' and tells her that 'it was her duty to love and obey the man chosen by her parents and relations' (199). In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke claimed that Englishmen 'still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not... lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century ... We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us,' 86. 21 Usually these abductions or elopements occur to young unmarried women, as in Mary Hays's Victim of Prejudice (1799), where the orphan heroine is abducted to London and suffers a rape, or in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, where Lydia elopes with Wickham. 22 William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, 763. 23 According to Lacan, it is through the 'name of the father' that we construct identities in the symbolic order. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 67. 24 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), 33-4. 25 Ibid., 34. 26 Ibid., 225. 27 Julia Kristeva, 'Stabat Mater,' in The Kristeva Reader, 161. 28 Ibid., 181, 180. 29 Ibid., 173. 30 Ibid. 31 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 201. Foucault sees panopticism as a 'discipline-mechanism' that 'must improve the exercise of power,' 209. 32 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers' Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15. 33 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993) > 83. 34 Ibid. 35 Kowaleski-Wallace studies the texts of two writers of the period, Hannah

Notes to pages 114-17

36

37

38

39 40

207

More and Maria Edgeworth, while Mellor draws her examples from a wider range of authors, including Susan Ferrier, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Helen Maria Williams, Ann Radcliffe, and others. Marlon B. Ross, 'Configurations of Feminine Reform: The Woman Writer and the Tradition of Dissent,' in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 93. These are Mary Wollstonecraft's words and one of her main aims as stated in the introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988), 7. Deidre Lynch, 'Domesticating Fictions and Nationalizing Women: Edmund Burke, Property, and the Reproduction of Englishness,' in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 49. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 32. April London, Jane West and the Politics of Reading,' 72.

7: Displaying Hysterical Bodies: Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father 1 Jane West's works were usually published unsigned so there is some controversy as to how many novels she produced in the 1790s. In addition to the three novels that feature Prudentia Homespun as narrator - The Advantages of Education, or The History of Maria Williams (1793); A Gossip's Story (1796); and A Tale of the Times (1799) - the catalogues in the British Library list two other works, The History of Ned Evans (1796) and The Church of Saint Siffrid (1797), under West's naine. Both The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, ed. Blain, Grundy, Clements (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) and Janet Todd's A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660-1800 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987), however, do not attribute the latter two works to Jane West. 2 The Monthly Magazine, vol. 15, supp. no. 103 (28 July 1803): 639. 3 Review of The Infidel Father, in the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, vol. 15 (May-Aug. 1803): 41. 4 For a study of the use of parody by Hamilton, see Eleanor Ty, 'Female Philosophy Refunctioned: Elizabeth Hamilton's Parodic Novel,' Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 22.4 (Oct. 1991): 111-29. 5 jane West, The Infidel Father, 3 vols. (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1802), I: iii. 6 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage: 1990), 103.

208

Notes to pages 118-27

7 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chap. 1. 8 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol Poston (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988), 178. 9 Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly 1791, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: World's Classics, 1993), 270. 10 Ibid., 272. 11 P.D. Jimack, introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (New York: Everyman's Library, 1974), xiv. 12 Rousseau, Emile, 53. 13 Mark Philp, Godwin's Political Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 15. 14 Rousseau's La NouvelleHeloisewdiS available in English as Eloisa; or, A Series of Original Letters Collected and Published byJ.J. Rousseau, trans, from the French [by William Kendrick], 4 vols. (London, 1761). 15 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796; Oxford: World's Classics, 1996), 25. 16 Ibid., 59. 17 Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman (Oxford: World's Classics, 1976), 89. 18 Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 23. 19 Ibid., 26. 20 Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 275-6. 21 Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, (1798; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 414. Similarly, Rousseau says, 'I shall not take pains to prevent Emile hurting himself; far from it, I should be vexed if he never hurt himself, if he grew up unacquainted with pain. To bear pain is his first and most useful lesson,' Emile, 41. 22 Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, 144-5, 253.. 23 Some examples are Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art; Mary Hays's The Victim ofPrejudice; and Mary Robinson's Angelina. See also Susan Staves, 'British Seduced Maidens,' Eighteenth-Century Studies 14.2 (Winter 1980/1): 109-34. 24 Philp, Godwin's Political Justice, 207. 25 Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, 200, 241. 26 Ibid., 246. 27 Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 274. 28 I am not certain that there is a connection, but West might have been thinking of Mary Hays's The Victim of Prejudice here. In Hays's novel, Mr.

Notes to pages 128-34

209

Raymond is the progressive guardian and preceptor of Mary, the rebellious heroine. See Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice (Peterborough: Broadview, 1994). 29 See Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (Oxford: World's Classics, 1976), 198. 30 In The Beaux' Stratagem (1707), Mrs Sullen is unhappily married to a drunken country blockhead, from whom she longs to be freed. Her plight arouses pity as well as laughter. 8: Re-scripting the Tale of the Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter 1 Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, 'Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820,' Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987), 198. 2 Critics have noted that the novel elicits controversy because of its ambivalent message. For example, Claudia Johnson says that 'rather than compare a radical social position unfavourably to a Burkean one, Opie plays both ends off against the middle,' Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23. 3 Fergus and Thaddeus, 'Women, Publishers, and Money,' 206. 4 These numbers varied from publisher to publisher. At Hookham, one might print as few as 500 copies, while at Longman print orders for 750 copies were more typical. See Fergus and Thaddeus, 193, 197, and 207. 5 Susan Howard says that Opie's 'career as a fiction writer essentially ended with her formal admission into the Society of Friends in 1825,' Susan K. Howard, 'Amelia Opie,' in British Romantic Novelists, 1789-1832, ed. Bradford K. Mudge, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 116 (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1992), 231. Some of these biographies include two by Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie (Norwich: Fletcher and Alexander, 1854), and Memoir of Amelia Opie (London: Religious Tract Society, 1855). Those published in the twentieth century tend to emphasize her radical links. See, for example, Jacobine Menzies-Wilson and Helen Lloyd, Amelia: The Tale of a Plain Friend (London: Oxford University Press, 1937); and Margaret Eliot MacGregor, Amelia Alderson Opie: Worldling and Friend (Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1933). 6 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23. 7 Ibid., 36. Armstrong links the transformative power of domestic fictions to emergent capitalism, while I am primarily emphasizing the importance of the genre on gender relations.

210

Notes to pages 134-6

8 Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter, A Tale in Prose, 7 th ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1813), 8. Further quotations are from this edition. 9 Charlotte Smith, Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). I studied this novel in my Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), chap. 7. 10 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 173. Irigaray argues that 'the society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women,' where women play social roles such as 'mother, virgin, prostitute,' 170, 186.I argue that Opie's novel attempts to resist such easy configurations by confounding them. 11 Susan Staves, 'British Seduced Maidens,' Eighteenth-Century Studies 14.2 (Winter 1980/1): 109, 118. 12 Ibid., 110, 112. 13 Menzies-Wilson and Lloyd, Amelia, 101. 14 Ibid., 102. See also Ann H.Jones, Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of fane Austen's Age (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 52. 15 The European Magazine and London Review 40 (Sept. 1801): 194. 16 In a paper called 'Family Romances,' Sigmund Freud, using the case of a neurotic, discusses the way an individual develops by imaginative romances. One of these is 'the replacement of both parents or of the father alone by grander people' with 'real recollections of the actual and humble ones.' Freud concludes that the result is that the 'child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him,' The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 300. My point is that the relation between parent and child is a close and often vexed one that is often played out in various ways through literature. 17 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 79. 18 Cecilia Lucy Brightwell. Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie (Norwich: Fletcher and Alexander, 1854; facsimile reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1975), 3. 19 Ibid., 14. 20 Ibid., 15-16. 21 Ibid., 17. 22 Ibid., 40. According to Brightwell, among the 'leading measures contended for were the Abolition of Negro Slavery, the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, and the reform of the House of Commons,' 40. 23 Of this intimate circle, Elizabeth Inchbald had said to Opie: 'The report of the world is that Mr. Holcroft is in love with me, I with Mr. Godwin, Mr.

Notes to pages 137-42

211

Godwin with you, and you with Mr. Holcroft,' Menzies-Wilson and Lloyd, Amelia, 35. 24 Brightwell, Memorials, 361. 25 For instance, this is the scene quoted by Menzies-Wilson and Lloyd, 94, as well as in the review of the tale in The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, vol. 35 (May-Aug. 1802): 114-17. Ann H.Jones notes the similarity of this scene to the opening lines of a poem called 'The Hermit's Tale,' published in contemporary magazines. See Ideas and Innovations, 290. 26 The Father and Daughter is also found in volume 1 of The Works of Mrs Amelia Opie, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: James Crissy, 1843). 27 A novel that Opie would have read is Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791). It features a dramatic reconciliation scene between a father and his daughter whom he has exiled from his presence. 28 Staves, 'British Seduced Maidens,' 120. 29 William Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv, 12. 30 Ibid., III, iv, 13. 31 Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 15. 32 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 76. 33 G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 295-6. 34 Art. 38 - The Father and Daughter, review in The Critical Review, or Annals, of Literature, vol. 35 (May-Aug. 1802): 114-15. 35 Opie's verse appeared in a collection, The Entertaining Magazine, or Polite Repository of Elegant Amusement, Containing Pleasing Extracts from Modern Authors (1803), alongside the poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Robinson, Charles Lloyd, Robert Bloomfield, Southey, and others. See John E.Jordan, Why the Lyrical Ballads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 77. 36 Staves, 'British Seduced Maidens,' 115. 37 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 38 Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art, 2 vols. (London: G.G. a n d j . Robinson, 1796), I: chap. 21, 141. This novel has been edited by Shawn L. Maurer and published in a modern edition (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997). 39 Jacques Derrida, 'Of Grammatology,' in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 40. 40 See chap. 6 of my Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 41 Gary Kellv, 'Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology,' Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 12.4 (Oct. 1981): 5.

212

Notes to pages 143-8

42 Ibid., 7. 43 For example, Brigitte Glaser, in The Body in Samuel Richardson's 'Clarissa': Contexts of and Contradictions in the Development of Character (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1994), 180, says, 'Clarissa's decision to resign her life of the body in favour of her life of the spirit places her above ordinary human beings.' 44 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, 4 vols. (New York: Dutton, 1976), III: 441. 9: The Curtain between the Heart and Maternal Affection: Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 1 Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter (1804) (London: Pandora, 1986), 257. Subsequent quotations from the novel are from this modern edition. 2 See reviews of Adeline Mowbray in The Critical Review, 3rd series, 4 (1805): 219-20 and in The Monthly Review, 2nd series, 51 (1806): 320-1. The Critical Review did note that Opie had thrown 'fascinating colours' over the erroneous virtues of the protagonists, 219. 3 Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie (London: Norwich, 1854; facsimile reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1975), 118. 4 Claudia L.Johnson, fane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xxi. 5 Gary Kelly, 'Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology,' Ariel 12.4 (Oct. 1981): 4. 6 The original title to Sigmund Freud's paper was 'Der Familienroman der Neurotiker.' Roman designates novel, and is perhaps a more suitable term than romance. The idealization of one's parents is, in my view, a pervasive occurrence, and does become an issue in many novels about families. 7 Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 10, 11. 8 Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 178-1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 84-5. 9 Roxanne Eberle, 'Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray: Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or, The Vindication of a Fallen Woman,' Studies in the Novel 26.2 (Summer 1994): 123. 10 Ibid., 123. 11 See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23.

Notes to pages 148-55 213 12 Gary Kelly, in English Fiction of the Romantic Period, notes that to readers of t time, a tale' would suggest 'a short narrative, probably dealing with rustic or provincial life and with daily and domestic reality, celebrating values of simplicity, naturalness, and candour,' 64-5. 13 Jane Spencer, '"Of Use to Her Daughter": Maternal Authority and Early Women Novelists,' in Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 208. 14 Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 199°). 75. Grosz notes that 'the "object" providing satisfaction is not the object oj the drive. It is always a divergence, a metonym, a lack of the real, displaced onto a substitute,' 75. 15 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 265. 16 Grosz, Jacques Lacan, 62. 17 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), 102. 18 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 64. 19 Eberle, Diverting the Libertine Gaze,' 126. 20 Garv Kelly, Discharging Debts: The Moral Economy of Amelia Opie's Fiction, Wordsworth Circle \\ (Autumn 1980): 199, 200. 21 Ibid., 200. 22 Eberle, Diverting the Libertine Gaze,' 129. 23 Donald Reiman, introduction to The Warrior's Return / The Black Man's Lament by Amelia Opie (New York: Garland, 1978), v-vi. 24 Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 815. 25 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 324. 26 Marilvn Butler, fane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 74. 27 William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. W. Clark Durant (New York: Haskel House, 1927), 102-3. 28 Jennifer Lorch, Mary Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Radical Feminist (New York: Berg's Women's Series, 1990), 65. 29 Godwin, Memoirs, 101. 30 Ibid., 70-1. 31 Ibid., 75—6. 32 Ibid., 101

214

Notes to pages 155-64

33 Ibid., 107-8. 34 Ibid., 124. 35 Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 87. 36 Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 4. 37 Johnson, Jane Austen, 22. 38 Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in EighteenthCentury English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 45. Nussbaum notes that 'Savanna is clearly the domestic who acts as surrogate mother for privileged women who delegate maternal responsibilities to their social inferiors, and as such she replicates racial stereotypes,' 45. 39 One of the stated aims of William Godwin's Enquiry concerning PoliticalJustice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), 79. 10: Not a Simple Moral Tale: Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper 1 Susan K. Howard, 'Amelia Opie,' British Romantic Novelists, 1789-1832, ed. Bradford K. Mudge, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 116 (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1992), 231. 2 This essay was the preface to volume 1 of Anna Laetitia Barbauld's The British Novelists (London, 1810). See Ann H.Jones, Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen's Age (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 59. 3 Ibid. 4 Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 84. 5 Lady C.L. Charleville to Amelia Opie, dated 23 August 1809. Published in Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie (Norwich: Fletcher and Alexander, 1854; facsimile reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1975), 137-8. 6 William Hayley, The Triumphs of Temper: A Poem in 6 Cantos (London: Dodsley, 1781). There were many editions of the poem, which was reissued in 1782, 1788, 1793, 1803, and 1817. 7 Amelia Opie, undated letter. As quoted by Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, 57. 8 For a fuller discussion of this problem, see Eleanor Ty, chap. 5, 'Disruption and Containment,' in Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 85-100. 9 Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 2.

Notes to pages 164-9

215

10 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1986), 225. 11 Jane Spencer, '"Of Use to Her Daughter": Maternal Authority and Early Women Novelists,' in Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 209. 12 Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, 6. 13 Ibid. 14 Reprinted in Ibid., 10. 15 Reprinted in Ibid., 10. 16 Luce Irigaray, 'Women on the Market,' in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 177. 17 Ibid., 188. 18 Luce Irigaray, 'A Chance for Life,' in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 196. 19 See Sigmund Freud, 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,' and 'Family Ro mances,' in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 291,298. 20 Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 196. 21 William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). 97. 22 Amelia Opie, Temper; or Domestic Scenes: A Tale, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812). All quotations from the novel are from this edition. 23 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol Poston (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988), 146, 149. 24 Ibid., 133, 132. 25 Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 85. 26 Ibid. 27 Vivien Jones, 'Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narrative.' Women's Writing 4.2 (1997): 203. Jones argues that the interest in harlots' narratives stems from a long tradition since the 1720s where 'popular narratives are inseparable from the politics of reform and regulation,' 204. Pity for redeemable prostitutes becomes evident through the establishment and maintenance of institutions such as the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes. 28 Ibid., 201-20. 29 Luisa Muraro uses this term in her discussion of Luce Irigaray's philosophy in 'Female Genealogies,' in Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): 317-33.

216

Notes to pages 169-80

30 Amelia Opie, 'The Robber,' Simple Tales, 4 vols., 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806), I: 267-8. 31 Opie, 'The Fashionable Wife and the Unfashionable Husband,' Simple Tales, I: 81. 32 Ibid., 82. 33 See chapters 3 and 5 of my Unsex'd Revolutionaries for a fuller study of replication in mother-daughter narratives. 34 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, 237. 35 Ruth Perry, 'Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in EighteenthCentury England,' Eighteenth-Century Life 16, n.s. 1 (Feb. 1992): 188. 36 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 143. 37 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, 235. 38 Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1. 39 As quoted in Brightwell, Memorials, 13. 40 Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memoir of Amelia Opie (London: Religious Tract Society, 1855), 25. 41 Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 1. 42 A phrase used by Edward Said in his discussion of Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 84. 43 Ibid., 81. 44 Brightwell, Memoir, 19. 45 Mary Jacobus, 'The Difference of View,' in Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 21. Afterword 1 I am thinking, in particular, of works like Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993): and also of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989). 2 Sharon Marcus, 'Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,' in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 391. 3 Ibid., 391-2. 4 Jacqueline M. Labbe, 'Selling One's Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary

Notes to pages 180-4

217

Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry,' Wordsworth Circle 25.2 (Spring 1994): 68. 5 Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 7. 6 Mary Robinson, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. With Some Posthumous Pieces, 4 vols., ed. Mary Elizabeth Robinson (London: R. Phillips, 1801), III: 26. The fourteen 'Sylphid' essays are found in volume 3 of this edition. 7 Jane West, The Infidel Father (London: Longman and Rees, 1802), I: 12. 8 Amelia Opie, Temper (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812), I: 159. 9 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated (London: T. and J. Allman, 1821), vii.

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Index

abjection, 88, 95-7, 100, 125 Alderson, James, 136 Analytical Review, 4, 42, 57, 196n40 Annual Anthology, 24 Annual Necrology, 17 Annual Register, 16 Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 4, 62, 78, 116, 118, 205n13 anti-Jacobins, 16, 60, 83, 94, 101, 118, 122-3, 129, 151, 153, 180; debates, 7, 73-4, 146 Armistead, Mrs, 23 Armstrong, Nancy, 5, 134, 138, 209nm7 Austen, Jane, 59, 74, 81; as novelist, 5; Northanger Abbey, 94; Pride and Prejudice, 206n2l; Sense and Sensibility, 8, 87, 94 Bakhtin, M.M., 19, 153 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 10, 16, 151, 161 Barker, Gerard, 51 Barker-Benfield, G.J., 60, 74, 139 Bass, Robert D., 31, 47, 52, 72, 79, 190n3 Bell, John: World; or, Fashionable Gazette, 32

Beloe, William: Memoirs of a Sexagenarian, 73 Bender, John: Imagining the Penitentiary, 14 Bertie, Robert, duke of Ancaster, 57 Bertie, Susan Priscilla, 57, 75 Bisset, Dr 62, 78 Blake, William, 58 Blood, Fanny, 157 Boddington, Mr, 153 Bolingbroke, Viscount, 123 Bowerbank, Sylvia, 43 Brennan, Teresa, viii, ix Brightwell, Cecilia, 145, 164, 173, 175, 21on22 British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, 3, 78 Brodzki, Bella, 27 Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights, 177 Brooks, Peter, 103 Bruhm, Steven, 12-13 Burgoyne, General John, 32 Burke, Edmund, 58, 71, 74, 94, 99, 101, 106, 119, 135, 158, 181; Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 87, 118, 126; Reflections on the Revolution

220 Index in France, 5, 11-12, 59, 87, 102, 107, 139, 2o6n2O Burney, Frances, 5, 81, 133 Butler, Judith: theory of gender, 43, 46, 48, 77, 178; subjectivity, viii, 201n21

Butler, Marilyn: war of ideas, 5, 102 Charleville, Lady, 162 Cixous, Helene, 98 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 17, 24 Cormack, Malcolm, 24 Critical Review, 3, 8

Cullens, Chris, 43, 48, 55 Curran, Stuart, 47, 59 da Vinci Nichols, Nina, l88n4l Danton, Georges Jacques, 179 de Lauretis, Teresa, 24, 65 Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders, 14 Derrida, Jacques, 88, 142 Dinwiddy,J.R., 15, 18 Doody, Margaret Anne, 81 Eberle, Roxanne, 9, 147, 151-2 Edgeworth, Maria, 10, 94; Belinda, 161, 193n55, 203n29; Moral Tales, 161; as novelist, 5, 133, 146 empowering, vii, 10, 179; examples of, 7, 72-3 Epstein, Julia, 155 European Magazine and London Review,

4, 8, 78, 135 Farquhar, George: The Beaux' Stratagem, 129

fathers and father-figures, 87, 94, 96, 99, 117, 125 female: body, 13-15, 102, 117, 127, 135; chastity, viii, 9, 74; desire,

viii-ix, 53, 97, 149, 161, 177, 183; selfhood and identity, vii, 34, 157-8, 165, 167, 171, 179 feminine: cultural definitions of, vii, ix, 19, 32, 77, 178-9; location of, viii; myth of, 88-90, 100 femininity, 9-10, 147, 150 feminist theory, viii, 18, 174-5 Fenwick, Eliza, 24, 119 Fenwick, John, 24 Fergus, Jan, 133 Fielding, Henry, 77, 89; Amelia, 14; Jonathan Wild, 14 Fielding, Sarah, 171; David Simple, 51 Fisher, Kitty, 28 Ford, Susan Allen, 63 Foucault, Michel, viii, 13-15, 45, 113, 178; The History of Sexuality, 117; The Order of Things, 13, 188n42

Fox, Charles James, 30 French Revolution, 15-16, 59, 73, 102-3, 106. 136, 179, 182; period after, vii, 18, 94 Freud, Sigmund, 63-4, 93, 135, 146, 165, 21on16, 212n6 Fuseli, Henry, 4 Fuss, Diana, 178 Gainsborough, Thomas, 24, 28-9, 38 Garber, Marjorie, 45, 49 Gay, John: The Beggar's Opera, 14

gender, vii; constitution of male and female, 8, 45-52, 55-6 George, Prince of Wales [George IV], 6, 23, 28-9, 34, 47, 79 Gillray, James, 29, 37 Gisborne, Thomas: Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, 19

Glaser, Brigitte, 212n43 Godwin, William, 15, 17, 24, 59, 73,

Index

221

90, 102, 105-7, 136, 139, 145, 155, 163, 179, 182; attitude to Wollstonecraft, 4; Enquiry concerning Political Justice, vii, 7, 52, 95, 108, 119, 124, 126, 166, 205n12; Memoirs of the Author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,'4, 78, 80, 147, 153-7; philosophy of, x, 8, 104, 110, 116, 118, 120-7, 146, 151, 159-60, 181 Goldsmith, Oliver, 74; The Vicar of Wakefield, 51, 135 Gothic, 10, 12-13, 18, 57-8, 6l-2, 65, 67, 69, 117, 127, 130, 180-1 Graham, Catherine Macaulay, 10 Gregory, John, 76; A Father's Legacy to His Daughters, 18, 187n19 Grosz, Elizabeth, 149, 204n36 213n14 Grundy, Isobel, 202m

Holt, Peter, 15 Howard, Susan, 161 Hume, David, 74, 94, 2OOn9 Hunt, Lynn, 102, 204n4 Hutcheon, Linda, 72, 199n2

Hager, Joseph: Picture of Palermo, 25 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 94; Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 17, 107, 116, 130, 146 Hardy, Thomas: 1794 treason trial, 136 Hayes, John, 192n31 Hayley, William: The Triumphs of Temper, 163 Hays, Mary, 94, 119, 183-4, 197n49; Female Biography, 17, 189n59, 193n54; feminism, 6-7, 33, 59, 169; Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 60, 75, 78-9, 82, 102-3, 118, 20on12; as novelist, 5; radicalism, 10, 15-17, 52-3, 89, 112, 170; The Victim of Prejudice, 13, 14, 58, 121, 123, 171, 2o6n20, 2o8n28 Hirsch, Marianne, 93, 147, 164 Hoare, Mr Prince 135 Holcroft, Thomas, 15, 105, 127, 136, 140, 151, 163

Jacobins, 102, 181; debates, 7, 73-4, 87; philosophy, 13, 16-17, 94, 105, 123, 130, 145-6, 182 Jacobus, Mary, 177 Johnson, Claudia L., x, 5, 11, 12, 74, 87, 106-7, 145, 158, 209 Johnson, Samuel, 108 Jones, Chris, 74, 78, 83 Jones, Vivien, 169, 215n27

identity, vii; female and feminine, viii-ix, 9 Imlay, Gilbert, 4, 80, 90, 154-5 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 15, 74, 81, 136, 151, 161, 170; as novelist, 5, 143; Nature and Art, 44, 67, 103, 134-5, 141-2, 169; A Simple Story, 13, 14, 63, 118, 120, 163, 167, 171, 177, 211n27 Ingamells, John, 28, 190n5 Irigaray, Luce: theories of subjectivity, viii, 165-6; on woman, 99, 134, 150, 172, 21on1o

Kelly, Gary, x, 5, 9, 60, 142, 144, 146, 147, 152, 162, 168, 186n9, 2l3n12 Kemble, Mrs: Smiles and Tears, 135 Kern, Jean, 89 King, Sophia: Waldorf, 107 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, x, 6, 9, 113-14, l86n12 Kristeva, Julia, 31, 70, 88, 93, 95, 98, 103, 112, 178 La Rochefoucauld, Francois, due de, 53

222

Index

Labbe, Jacqueline, 180 Lacan, Jacques, 64, 93-4, 99, 149, 185; formation of the subject, viii-ix, 206n23 Lamb, Lady Caroline, 146 Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite, 29 Levy, MJ., 28 Lloyd, Charles: Edmund Oliver, 17 London Corresponding Society, 15-17, 136 Lynch, Deidre, 114

Morning Herald, 27 Morning Post, 24, 25-6, 29, 32, 47, 77, 193n2, 196n45 mothers and motherhood, vii, viii, 91, 97, 103, 115, 117, 148-51, 164-73. See also maternal/maternity. Mulvey, Laura, 26 Myers, Mitzi, 10, 90 Napier, Elizabeth, 61 Northcote, James, 28 Nussbaum, Felicity, 26, 159, 173, 175, 214n138

Macheski, Cecilia, 27 Mackenzie, Henry: Julia de Roubigne, 75; The Man of Feeling, 51, 135 Maiden, Lord, 30 Marat, Jean Paul, 73, 179 Marcus, Sharon, 179 marriage, vii; custom of, viii maternal/maternity, 10, 93, 95, 110, 113-14, 178; being reconfigured, viii, 112; body, 69-70; duties, 12, 92; love, 146, 164 Mathias, Thomas: The Pursuits of Literature, 81, 82 McGann, Jerome, 53 McNay, Lois, 14 Mellor, Anne, x, 7, 59, 114 Merry, Robert, 32 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 106-9 Moncrieff, Thomas: The Lear of Private Life, 135 Montesquieu, Charles Louis, baron de, 150 Monthly Magazine, 17, 116 Monthly Review, 4, 145 More, Hannah, 6, 9, 10, 19, 49, 90, 96, 169, 176 Morning Chronicle, 195n27

Opie, Amelia, vii, ix, 6-10, 13-15, 17, 59, 94, 123, 178-9, 182-3; Adeline Mowbray, 6, 7, 118, 120, 133, 145-60, 164, 171-3, 182; The Father and Daughter, 123, 133-44, 161, 168, 169, 182; Simple Tales, 9, 161, 169-70; Temper, 18, 146, 161-77, 183; Valentine's Eve, 168; The Warrior's Return and Other Poems, 161 Opie, John, 133, 136, 153; Lectures on Painting, 161 Oracle, 57, 196n40 Orr, Clarissa Campbell, 5 Paer, Ferdinando: Agnese, 135 Paine, Tom, 16, 116; The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, 17 Pascoe, Judith, 32, 47, 180 Penny, Nicholas, 190n5, 192n32 Perry, Ruth, 171 Peterson, Linda, 31 Petrarch, Francesco, 65 Philp, Mark, 119 Pointon, Marcia, 192n29 Pollak, Ellen, 7, 88, 157

Index Polwhele, Reverend Richard: The Unsex'dFemales, 16, 24, 53 Poovey, Mary, 6-7, 59, 88, 90 Pope, Alexander: 'Epistle to a Lady,' 19; Essay on Man, 43-4; Rape of the Lock, 77, 163 poststructuralist theory, viii Price, Richard, 15 Priestley, Joseph, 15 psychoanalytic theories: of development, viii-ix, 93-8 Public Advertiser, 28 Radcliffe, Ann, 5, 12, 59, 68; The Mysteries of Udolpho, 13, 14 Radcliffe, Mary Ann, 10 Rajan, Tilottama, 79 Reeve, Clara, 10 Reynolds, Joshua, 24, 28, 30, 39, 41 Rich, Adrienne, 49-50, 98, 150, 164, 171-2; Of Woman Born, viii, 110-12 Richardson, Samuel: Pamela, 19, 74, 83; Clarissa, 19, 61, 70, 106, 134, 143, 162 Robespierre, Maximilien, 73, 179 Robinson, Maria Elizabeth, 30—1 Robinson, Mary, vii, ix, 6-7, 13, 15-17, 38-41, 123, 128, 178-82; Angelina, 24; as Anne Frances Randall, 10, 33; The False Friend, 14, 23, 35, 57-71, 77—8; Hubert de Sevrac, 24; as Laura, 32, 79; Lyrical Tales, 25, 30, 59; Memoirs, 23-35, 83, 181; The Natural Daughter, 7, 14, 24, 72-84, 180-1; as Perdita, 6, 23, 29, 33, 36, 38; Poems, 24, 30; 'The Sylphid,' 67, 77, 181; as Tabitha Bramble, 24, 32; Thoughts on the Condition of Women, 8, 19, 24, 33-4. 50-1, 58, 60, 62, 71; Vancenza,

223

32, 73; Walsingham, 8, 24, 42-56, 74-5, 196n40; The Widow, 24, 73 Robinson, Thomas, 58, 79 Rogers, Katharine, 33 Romney, George, 24, 28, 40 Ross, Marlon, 114 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 74, 107, 118-21, 150, 181; Emile, 18, 75-6, 119, 2o8n21; La Nouvelle Heloise, 51, 54,65,71.75, 108, 119, 139 Rowe, Nicholas, 112 Said, Edward, 175 Savile, George, 19 Schenk, Celeste, 27 Scott, Sir Walter, 135, 161 sensibility, 51, 53, 58-61, 70, 73-4, 78, 81-4, 94, 139, 180, 197n49 sentimental novel, 10, 67, 103, 116, 123, 141, 182 Shaftesbury, third earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 122 Shakespeare, William, 108, 134-5; As You Like It, 47; King Lear, 46, 78, 138-9; Othello, 106; Twelfth Night, 47; The Winter's Tale, 23, 28 Shelley, Mary: Mathilda, 63 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 47, 94 Siddons, Sarah, 161 Smith, Adam, 74; Theory of Moral Sentiments, 51, 2OOn9 Smith, Charlotte, 5, 16, 81, 119, 180; The Young Philosopher, 13, 14, 44 Smith, Paul, 18 Smith, Sidonie, 25 Smollett, Tobias: Humphry Clinker, 32 Sophocles, 147 Southey, Robert, 24 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 88 Spencer, Jane, 164

T 224 Index Spenser, Edmund, log; The Faerie Queene, 181

Spurr, David, 66 Staves, Susan, 134-5, 138, 140 Steen, Marguerite, 24 Sterne, Laurence, 74; A Sentimental Journey, 51

subjectivity, 31, 43, 83, 110, 134, 138, 142, 149, 178; definition of, 8, 186n16; formation of, vii, viii, 165-7; and language, ix, 25 Tan, Amy: The Joy Luck Club, 177

Tarleton, Colonel Banastre, 29-30, 34, 57-8, 73, 83 Tasker, Rev. William, 32 Taylor, John, 32 Thaddeus, Janice, 133 Thomis, Malcolm, 15 Thompson, E.P., 18 Tickell, Richard, 32 Todd, Janet, 9, 51, 74, 75, 94 Tooke, John Home, 136 Trimmer, Sarah, 10 Trumbach, Randolph, 46-7 Ty, Eleanor: Unsex'd Revolutionaries, x,6 Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 13 Vis-d-Vis of Berkley-Square, The, 30

Voltaire, Francois M.A. de, 123, 150; Candide, 77

Wakefield, Priscilla, 10, 169 Watson, Nicola, x, 54, 119 Weedon, Chris, 186n16 West, Jane, vii, ix, 7, 10, 13, 14, 16, 59, 67, 176, 178-9, 181-2; The Advantages of Education, 87, 91, 94, 100,

102; Alicia de Lacy, 18;AGossip's Story, 8, 87-100, 102, 112; The Infidel Father, 7, 92, 116-30; Letters Addressed to a Young Man, 19, 104; Letters to a Young Lady, 19, 89, 97,

103-6; The Loyalists, 18; 'The Mother,' 9; as Prudentia Homespun, 6, 9, 87-91, 98, 101, 182; A Tale of the Times, 87, 92, 94, 101-15, 116, 117, 120, 126 White, Hayden, 25, 80, 201n31 Whitford, Margaret, 201n37 Williams, Helen Maria, 15-16, 53, 116, 119 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 82, 94, 107, 197n49, 205n13; feminism, 33, 114, 169; and French Revolution, 15; legacy of, 3-11, 62-3, 73, 117, 179; life of, 79-80, 136, 142-3, 145, 147, 151, 153-8, 183; Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman, 13, 14, 58, 59, 75,

90-1, 102, 119, 121, 128, 168, 170-1, 200n12, 2o6n20; Mary, A Fiction, 118; philosophy of, x, 116; radicalism, 16-17, 24, 52-3, 89, 105, 112; reaction to Burke, 11-12; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,

vii, 5, 53, 72, 75-6, 90, 118, 168 women: 'natural,' viii, 179; roles for, 73 Wood, Lisa, 9, 187n20 Woolf, Virginia, 27 Wordsworth, William, 12, 44-5, 140, 161; Tintern Abbey,' 52, 196n47 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 6, 141 Zerilli, Linda, 12, 102