Introduction

IN a memorable and ringing affirmation, D. H. Lawrence called the novel "the one bright book of life." For Lawrence the novel was much more than a literary genre; it was a means to intensely vital knowledge, far superior to science or philosophy or religion. In place of their abstract and partial views of life, the novel offered the "changing rainbow of our living relationships." But at about the same time that Lawrence was celebrating the power of the novel to give its readers the full and authentic feel of human experience, the Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács more somberly traced its degenerative descent from classical epic. Describing the novel in gloomy and decidedly melodramatic terms as the epic of a world "abandoned by God" and as a record of modern humanity's homelessness in The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (1920), Lukács looked back to the immediacy and communal integrity of ancient epic and saw the novel as the expression of what he called a dissonance in modern life whereby individuals are estranged from the external world. The novel records, he said, a profound irony at the heart of modern experience "within which things appear as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete autonomous life, as flowering and as decaying, as the infliction of suffering and as suffering itself." During the 1920s Lawrence saw the novel as the unique record of concrete and living experience, whereas for Lukács, writing in Central Europe during the bitter aftermath of World War — ix- World War, it was symptomatic of the ironic and contradictory confusion peculiar to modern life in the West.

Whether taken as a rapturous affirmation of the possibility of individual fulfillment or as a depressing rendition of modern emptiness and alienation, the novel has invariably been understood by critics and novelists alike as the distinctively modern literary form, a response to uniquely modern conditions. Lawrence and Lukács agreed that modern life was deeply unsatisfactory, but they had opposite notions of what the novel could do to ameliorate it. For Lawrence the novel could transfigure and vivify life; for Lukács the novel eloquently but helplessly recorded its despair and emptiness. A third and to my mind more relevant attitude regarding the purpose of the novel, and one that takes a broader historical and literary perspective, has since emerged for modern criticism. For M. M. Bakhtin, a Russian critic whose neglected writings from the Stalinist period were rediscovered by Western readers in the 1970s, the novel was not only the unique marker of European modernity but a literary mode that expressed, in its essential and defining formal qualities, revolutionary and, potentially, utterly liberating linguistic energies.

According to Bakhtin, the novel represented an absolute and thus exhilarating breakthrough from older literary forms and from the hierarchical and repressive view of life he felt they embodied. In one of his essays Bakhtin distinguished the novel as being radically distinct from other literary genres in its rendering of a new "multi-languaged consciousness," which made contact as literature never had before with "the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness." The epic offers the world as a finished and frozen entity, an event from the distant past evoked in a special, specifically literary language appropriate to its inspiring grandeur and remoteness. But the novel, in Bakhtin's most influential formulation of his thesis, is defined by its rendering of the dynamic present, not in a separate and unitary literary language, but in the competing and often comic discord of actual and multiple voices-what he termed polyglossia or heteroglossia-whereby language is used in ways that communicate a "relativizing of linguistic consciousness." Speech in the novel, whether that of characters or narrators or authors, is thus always for Bakhtin "dialogical," representing the process of shifting and contested signification peculiar to language itself, or at least to modern notions of the way language works. The novel is dialogical in Bakhtin's special sense because it renders the incessant shap- x- ing of reality as perceived by human beings through rival forms of language, which itself is not a static or ahistorical entity but rather finds dynamic and diverse embodiment in the competing dialects of particular social groups that struggle for dominance. In its evocation of the novel's subversion of static and hierarchical notions of language and reality, Bakhtin's version of the novel's positive and liberating function in the modern world seems to me more convincing, or at least more useful, than Lawrence's utopian intensity or Lukács's post-Great War gloom. Bakhtin's theory shifts the critical emphasis from the novel's subject matter, the nature of modern life and consciousness, to its form, the expressive relativizing of language. For readers of The Columbia History of the British Novel, it is interesting that Bakhtin singles out the British comic novelists, notably Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Dickens, for their instinctive grasp of the dialogical principle. When they described the purpose of the novel, Lukács and Lawrence were thinking primarily of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel of personal development, the bildungsroman, but Bakhtin took an inclusive historical view that looked back as far as François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1552) and traced the novel's evolution through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and into the modern period. In thus broadening the novel's scope and historical reference in order to explain its peculiar power, Bakhtin saved readers from modern self-pity and enabled critics and literary historians to look beyond the modern predicament as the novel's only subject.

Nonetheless, the issue of the value and meaning of the novel from our present situation remains unresolved for many readers and critics. Clearly, the novel has become in the last three hundred years many different things for many readers as well as for novelists themselves. But for all that, the term itself remains both simple and elusive. So various and so multiple, the novel can be described but never, it seems, adequately defined. A minimalist description of the novel might say that it is an extended (too long to read at one sitting) narrative in prose about imaginary but vividly particularized or historically specific individuals. But however one describes it, the novel has been from its beginnings (themselves a subject of much dispute) for its writers and readers an aggressively and self-consciously new literary category. For many twentieth-century critics and historians of the novel, it is the narrative form that uniquely expresses the condition of Western culture and consciousness since the emergence of what everyone recognizes as the — xi- modern age-an age in which we still live and that lacks clear definition or any sense of single or simple self-consciousness but that nonetheless situates itself, like the novel, as somehow separate and distinct from all that has preceded it.

Crucial to the culture of the modern age is individualism, an understanding of the world that the Western European tradition takes for granted as part of the natural order of things but that in fact represents the fairly recent historical development of a consciousness or sense of self that remains strange and even incomprehensible to people outside that tradition. Novels both promote and mimic the values intrinsic to this individualism. In most novels that come to mind, particular persons in their individualized immediacy are presented as being more important or more immediate than communities or cultures with their long traditions and accumulated ways, and the novel is most often about the clash between such individuals and the larger social units that necessarily produce them. The novel presupposes that clash, even if it often records an eventual reconciliation or reintegration of the individual with the surrounding society. The novel thus implies, as the literary and cultural critic Edward Said has remarked, a universe that is necessarily unresolved or incomplete, a universe in a process of development, evolving or progressing toward a more nearly complete or more complex form of consciousness as it records the multiplicity and infinite diversity of individuals. Such a view is distinctively Western or JudeoChristian, since, as Said points out, there are no novels in Islamic culture until it comes into contact with the literary culture of the modern West. For Islam, the world is complete, created by God as a plenum, full of every conceivable entity such a world could have. But for the Judeo-Christian tradition, the fallen and sinful world (along with the individuals who compose it) is radically incomplete and yearning, in a religious sense, for individual salvation and for the transfiguring judgment day when human history shall end. In the thoroughly secular and psychologized context of the novel, this world is viewed rather more optimistically and is conceived as a process of progressive human development, reaching for higher or more complex forms of development for individuals and for their communities, for personal fulfillment and social utopia. In other words, the novel articulates the central, selfdefining characteristics of Western religious and secular culture. If approached analytically and critically, say its defenders, it provides an unparalleled opportunity for self-knowledge for those within that tra — xii- dition. For those outside that tradition or on the margins of Western culture and its privileged classes, members of colonized non-Western societies or members of minority groups or culturally deprived social classes within them, the novel in its three-hundred-year sweep just might provide access to a liberating understanding of the cultural forms that oppress them. Whatever else it may be, the novel is a vividly informative record of Western consciousness during the last three hundred years.

That Western individualism is the recurring subject matter of the novel is not in dispute, but just about everything else about the novel is. Where did it come from? How and why did it take form? How does the novel differ from the long prose fictions that preceded it from classical antiquity onward? How exactly is it distinct from long narratives in verse, from classical epic and medieval romance? At its best in the works of acknowledged masters like the great nineteenth-century realists such as Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Stendhal, George Eliot, James, Manzoni, Galdó s, and Dostoevsky, does the novel communicate a truth about modern European humanity that is otherwise unavailable? Is the novel, in the hands of such masters of the form, an unsurpassed instrument of moral and historical knowledge? Or is it, as some academic critics have increasingly come to claim, actually a subtle means for the repression and regulation of individuals that only masquerades as an impartial rendering of the way things are? Is the novel really, as much modern criticism would have it, the imposition of an ideological view of the world, forcing upon its readers notions of linear development and of a stable external reality that are at best fairly recent cultural constructions? Does novelistic realism represent the naturalizing of a view of the world and of personal identity peculiar to postEnlightenment European thought and especially to white males with cultural power and economic privilege?

These are cogent and disturbing accusations that many of the chapters in this volume will present and even endorse in one way or another. But a traditional and alternative «humanist» view at least in part survives, even among the most politically sensitive critics. Should we hold fast, many wonder, to an older and much more hopeful view that the novel somehow records a struggle against imposed ideological and cultural limitations and points the way to personal liberation and self-fulfillment? Is the novel both a record of authentic individual consciousness separating itself from history and communal ideologies (insofar as-xiii-that is possible) and an impetus for its readers to achieve a similar liberation? Is the novelist an artistic visionary whose imagination, intelligence, and craft can render social and historical relations with a fullness that allows readers to understand the worm they live in?

For a history of the British novel, this last is the most important critical question these days, especially since the emergence of feminist criticism during the past quarter-century. A number of the chapters in this volume will argue that the British novel begins as a profoundly female form in several senses of the term. Even though the most familiar examples (the «canonical» works, as critics say nowadays) of British eighteenth-century fiction were written by men, the bulk of fiction produced throughout the eighteen century was written by women. Although we cannot be certain that the audience for this fiction was predominantly female, women seem to have been perceived as the core audience for much British fiction. Moreover, the early British novel, whether written by a man or by a woman, presents domestic life as its recurring central subject and, with its focus on the interior and private lives of characters, moves dramatically away from the traditional concerns of literature with public life and masculine heroism in love, war, and politics. Indeed, some feminist critics have extended this argument, finding in the emerging British novel the establishment of a new modern self that is, they argue, gendered female. For such critics, the novel articulates a consciousness whose sensitivity and interior self-awareness were, and to some extent still are, recognized as feminine rather than masculine personality traits. The individual that the eighteenth- century novel imagines and bequeaths to subsequent British fiction as the ideal moral and social personality is characteristically feminized, since (so goes the argument) its male heroes define themselves as such by acquiring certain feminine qualifies that include a self-effacing sensitivity and an empathic understanding of others in place of the dominance, self-possession, and control that typify conventional masculine heroism.

Certainly, the British novel in its eighteenth-century phase tends to deal mostly with domestic and private experience rather than public or political life, and marriage and courtship provide its crucial focus. Another strain of fiction, however, initiated in 1719 by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, offers masculine adventure in exotic places; its subject is the exploration and conquest of the non-European world by male European adventurers. Although it is sometimes the vehicle for serious and-xiv-complex imagining, such adventure fiction has tended, since Defoe's novel appeared, to be restricted to children's stories. As some critics have suggested, this relegation to the nursery of life in the external world of action and military conquest may point to European culture's deep uneasiness with its own recent history. By these lights, the novel's emphasis on domestic intensities and private or personal quests may be the culture's instinctive masking of the patriarchal domination of women's lives and of the economic domination and even imperialistic exploitation of the rest of the world-forces that lie at the heart of the modern Western history in which we still live.

The early British novel is not only for the most part domestic in its settings; it is also intensely parochial, attentive to the complex local networks of social and linguistic stratifications that to this day characterize British life. In trying to do justice to the diversity of local manners and dialects among the people of their island nation, British novelists, it can be argued, have helped to create something like a national personality by promoting an image of eccentric distinctiveness as the peculiar sign of the inhabitants of Great Britain. From Defoe's vividly individual rogues and whores to Fielding's and Smollett's portrait galleries of memorable country squires, innkeepers, servants, aristocrats, and petty criminals to Sterne's zany and self-obsessed narrators, there is a clear progression to the memorable quirkiness of many of the inhabitants of the British nineteenth-century novel-to Dickens's and Trollope's characters, for example, many of whom have come to represent for the rest of the world (for better or worse) the essence of Britishness in their comically mannered self-enclosure. But there is a more significant aspect to the eighteenth-century British novel's focus on quirky individuality. Perhaps more so than its French and German and Spanish counterparts, British fiction is in this representation of eccentricity notably alert to a modernity of personal expressiveness that emerges within new and more efficient systems of social organization.

That is to say, in its attention to radical particularity the early British novel records the characteristic stresses and strains of the momentous transition from traditional hierarchical modes of life to those rationalized and regularized forms of social organization that characterize the modern nation-state. As it develops in the early eighteenth century in Britain, realistic narrative comes to involve the ventriloquizing of particular individuals who by definition do not fit neatly into didactic or general categories. The difference between John Bunyan's Pilgrim's — xv- Progress (1678) and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) lies precisely in Crusoe's historically and psychologically particularized identity that is never wholly contained by moral allegory as that of Bunyan's hero is. Committed, usually, to didactic intentions for their fictions, novelists like Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding modify or even subvert those intentions by imagining characters who, as their stories progress, tend to move beyond the general and the typical into identities quite their own. Such eccentric individuality is obviously a kind of resistance to old moral and psychological categories, but it also entails precisely the isolation of identity into discrete units that allows for a new, more abstract and efficient ordering of individuals apart from their complex positioning in communal history and moral tradition.

As the most advanced country in eighteenth-century Europe, Great Britain was widely admired at the time as the nation with the most flexible and stable political and economic institutions (for example, the most efficient tax-gathering apparatus of any European state) and the largest, most prosperous middle class. From its beginnings in the work of Defoe and Richardson, as many of the chapters that follow will show, the British novel focuses intensely upon the blurring of lines between those traditional status divisions whereby society had been organized for centuries. More than other European fiction, eighteenth-century British novels depict and dramatize the emergence of recognizably modern kinds of individuality wherein persons acquire worth, status, or power either by luck, by redefined and expanded economic opportunity, or by the exercise of extraordinary moral virtue. To some extent, the nineteenth-century British novel retains this singular, perhaps insular, focus on particularized characters, with their local surroundings and peculiar institutional circumstances, but it also acquires a more complex sense of history and society. After Sir Walter Scott more or less invented the historical novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, novelists were necessarily more acutely aware of a broader, encompassing world of time and space. In the novels of George Eliot or Dickens or Thackeray, for example, individual destiny plays itself out in provincial British places that are thrown into relief against the backdrop of the larger world. More and more, the Victorian novelist embodies an overseeing or supervising intelligence that places individuals within those immense, controlling forces that we attempt to understand by labeling them history and society. The British novel opens up to include more of the historically changing and expanding world and is itself subject to — xvi- foreign influences, becoming part of a world literature written in English in America and other new English-speaking countries as well as in Great Britain. And the influence also works in the other direction. With the exercise of cultural and political hegemony first by the British Empire in the nineteenth century and then by the United States in the mid-twentieth century, English has become a world language whose literature occupies a dominant position in an emerging global culture that parallels the global economy we hear so much of these days.

But whatever the British novel's origins or its ideological role since the eighteenth century in forming or reflecting an important corner of Western consciousness, the pivotal place of the novel in modern contemporary literary culture in Great Britain and in America is indisputable. Since the early twentieth century, the novel along with other literary kinds has tended to split more dramatically than ever into selfconsciously artistic and popular forms, as mass commercial culture has become a vast industry and as literary modernism and so-called postmodernism have fostered a separate realm of writing read by a tiny minority and kept alive by academic attention. But in spite of the gulf between the tradition established by writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the books that make up the vigorous trade in popular best-sellers, the novel in numerous guises continues to flourish. Librarians and best-seller lists testify to the novel's centrality by dividing the world of writing into fiction and nonfiction. With glossy and colorful covers, in categories ranging from reprints of the classics to lurid bestsellers and sensational thrillers, from science fiction to romances, westerns, and gothics, novels in the broad sense of the word crowd the bookshelves of supermarkets, drugstores, airport souvenir shops, chain bookstores in shopping malls, and gas stations and truck stops on interstate highways. And yet for all its popular vigor, the novel still carries a stigma of frivolity and artistic inferiority, partly because it is, after all, merely a false story, a set of imaginary happenings that is by its very nature inferior in the eyes of many readers to, say, history or biography.

Perhaps the British novel has always been sustained by its perennial battle with its detractors, who have tended to view it with suspicion as a popular form and as something of a waste of time for readers who could be more profitably employed with true and useful things. In Northanger Abbey (1818), Jane Austen imagines a young lady apologizing for her reading by saying it is "only a novel," and then Austen herself supplies a defense of fiction quite as impassioned as Lawrence's, — xvii- calling it "only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language." For the coyly ironic Austen, this is an extraordinary statement, one that the English critic Frank Kermode recently quoted as he reviewed some contemporary novels in the London Review of Books. Kermode is moved in his review to defend what he sees as an embattled literary institution: "And yet it can be argued that even in the present state of things the novel may be the best available instrument of ethical inquiry; that its own extraordinary variety of means equips it as our best recorder of human variety, even at a time when biography is challenging that position; and that its capacity for wit and humour and poetry continues to exist and even to expand."

Kermode's eloquent defense of the novel seems to be a perennial necessity, and "Is the novel dead?" is a predictable theme when panels of novelists are convened to discuss the state of modern culture. Always in crisis and seemingly aware of its own fragility and moral and cultural ambiguity, the novel has been since its beginnings more of an occasion for modern narration to question its own purposes than a stable narrative institution. Paradoxically, that instability seems to be the essence of the novel's strength and endurance, and the collaborative history of the British novel that this volume attempts to provide will highlight for readers just that fruitful instability. Modern literary history is a stern and unforgiving taskmaster, in many cases nowadays interrogating the past (as critics like to say) to reveal its hidden complicity with power and privilege. Some of the chapters in this history of the British novel, collectively written by many contributors, will trace the roots of the novel's insecurity by pointing to the hidden-or at least obscured-cultural or ideological agendas of novels and novelists; other chapters will seek to contextualize novelistic production as inseparable from the demands of the literary marketplace or in some cases from the psychosexual pathologies of particular authors. But whatever the scandalous charge, ideological or personal, most novels can take it, since at their best they themselves are about their own shortcomings. The novel dramatizes the very failures critics attribute to it. Novelists deliver deep meditations on human complicity in social injustice; they point by their own lack of final answers and their tendency toward multifarious explorations of the moral world around us, — xviii- to the biggest social and moral questions. By shaping imaginary lives, the novel may thus illuminate what a culture most desires or fears. In reading a novel we can hear, as Bakhtin would say, the dialogue among competing versions of truth that is the novel's uniquely dynamic version of the truth itself.

John Richetti

— xix-

THE COLUMBIA HISTORY OF THE BRITISH NOVEL[1]

Licensing Pleasure: Literary History and the Novel in Early Modern Britain

The Scandal of Novel Reading

NOVELS have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. Long before it became an issue for debate in literary studies, a quantum leap in the number, variety, and popularity of novels provoked cultural alarm in England during the decades following 1700. The flood of novels on the market, and the pleasures they incited, led many to see novels as a catastrophe for book-centered culture. While the novel was not clearly defined or conceptualized, the targets of the antinovel campaign were quite precise: seventeenth-century romances, novellas of Continental origin, and those «novels» and "secret histories" written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood in the decades following 1680. The central themes of this debate may be culled from several texts: Samuel Johnson's 1750 Rambler No. 4 essay on the new fiction of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; Francis Coventry's enthusiastic pamphlet in support of Fielding, "An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding: With a Word or Two upon the Modern State of Criticism" (1751); and in The Progress of Romance, a literary history in dialogue form by Clara Reeve published in 1785.

These texts mobilize criticism and alarm, praise and prescription in an attempt to modulate the comparatively new vogue for novel reading. Francis Coventry mocks the unreflected «emulation» produced in readers by the French romances of an earlier day: "This [vogue] obtain'd a -1- long Time. Every Beau was an Orondates, and all the Belles were Stariras." Though Samuel Johnson could not account for the fashion for romance, his Rambler No. 4 essay describes the more powerful identification that recent "familiar histories" like Clarissa and Tom Jones induce in their readers: "If the power of example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that… the best examples only should be exhibited." If novels produce effects "almost without the intervention of the [reader's] will," then readers are at risk of becoming automatons, and the author must assume responsibility for the novel's moral effects.

The power and danger of novels, especially to young women not exposed to classical education, arose from the pleasures they induced. In The Progress of Romance, Clara Reeve's leading character, Euphrasia, remembers "my mother and aunts being shut up in the parlour reading Pamela, and I took it very hard that I was excluded." Closeted with a novel, some are included, and others excluded, from the circle of pleasure. Coventry remarks upon the tenacity with which readers clung to their pleasures: "For tho' it was a folly, it was a pleasing one: and if sense could not yield the pretty creatures greater pleasure, dear nonsense must be ador'd." Opposing this pleasure "lecture would lose it's force; and ridicule would strive in vain to remove it."

But what is so pernicious about reading novels? The Progress of Romance ends with a staged debate between the woman scholar Euphrasia and a high-culture snob named Hortensius. Hortensius develops a wide-ranging indictment of novel reading. First, novels turn the reader's taste against serious reading: "A person used to this kind of reading will be disgusted with every thing serious or solid, as a weakened and depraved stomach rejects plain and wholesome food." Second, novels incite the heart with false emotions: "The seeds of vice and folly are sown in the heart, — the passions are awakened, — false expectations are raised.-A young woman is taught to expect adventures and intrigues… If a plain man addresses her in rational terms and pays her the greatest of compliments, — that of desiring to spend his life with her, — that is not sufficient, her vanity is disappointed, she expects to meet a Hero in Romance." Finally, novels induce a dangerous autonomy from parents and guardians: "From this kind of reading, young people fancy themselves capable of judging of men and manners, and… believe themselves wiser than their parents and guardians, whom they -2- treat with contempt and ridicule." Hortensius indicts novels for transforming the cultural function of reading from providing solid moral nourishment to catering to exotic tastes; from preparing a woman for the ordinary rational address of a plain good man to leading her to expect a proposal from a hero out of romance; and from reinforcing reliance upon parents and guardians to promoting a belief in the subject's autonomy. Taken together, novels have disfigured the reader's body: the taste, passions, and judgment of stomach, heart, and mind. Here, as so often in the polemics that surround novels, the reader is characterized as a susceptible female whose moral life is at risk. By strong implication, she is most responsible for transmitting the virus of novel reading.

From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, and after nearly nine decades of film and five of television, the alarm provoked by novel reading may seem hyperbolic or even quaint. But a condescendingly modernist «pro-pleasure» position renders the alarm with novel reading, and its effects on early modern culture, unintelligible. Though it is difficult to credit the specific object of the alarm of the eighteenthcentury critics of novels-after all, we recommend to students some of the very novels these early modern critics inveighed against-given our current anxieties about the cultural effects of slasher films, rap music, MTV, and soap operas, it seems contradictory to dismiss those who worried about the effects of novels when they were new. But there are fundamental obstacles to deciphering the eighteenth century's anxious discourse on the pleasures of novels. After psychoanalysis, most concede the difficulty of knowing why one experiences pleasure; it is even more difficult to define the content or cause of the pleasure of eighteenth-century novel readers. However, we can trace certain clear effects of the campaign against these unlicensed pleasures. First, cultural critics sketched the profile of the culture-destroying pleasure seeker who haunts the modern era: the obsessive, unrestrained, closeted consumer of fantasy. Then, novelists like Richardson and Fielding, accepting the cogency of this critique, developed replacement fictions as a cure for the novel-addicted reader. In doing so, they aimed to deflect and reform, improve and justify the pleasures of a new species of elevated novel.

Since Plato's attack on the poets, philosophers and cultural critics had worried the effects of an audience's absorption in fictional entertainment. During the early eighteenth century the market gave this old cul -3- tural issue new urgency. Although there had been a trade in books for centuries, several developments gave the circulation of novels unprecedented cultural force. At a time when state censorship in England was subsiding and technological advances were making all printed matter more affordable, the market in printed books offered a site for the production and consumption of a very broad spectrum of entertainment. Published anonymously, or by parvenu authors supported by no patron of rank, novels appeared as anonymous and irresponsible creations, conceived with only one guiding intention: to pander to any desire that would produce a sale. Novels not only violated the spirit of seriousness expected of readers of books like The Pilgrim's Progress or Paradise Lost; they made no pretense to making any lasting contribution to culture. Novels were the first «disposable» books, written in anticipation of their own obsolescence and in acceptance of their own transient function as part of a culture of serial entertainments. Although only a small part of print culture in the early decades of the eighteenth century, novels appear to have been the most high-profile, fashionable, and fast-moving segment of the market. The vogue for novels helped to constitute a market culture-in the modern sense of commodities for purchase by the individual. In short, novels desanctified the book. Little wonder that novels were figured as an uncontrollable menace to culture.

Many of the vices attributed to the novel are also characteristics of the market: both breed imitation, gratify desire, and are oblivious to their moral effects. The market appears as a machine evidencing an uncanny automatism. Once they had become "the thing," nothing could stop novels on the market. In critiquing novels, cultural critics deplored the market's powerful, autonomous effect upon culture. Coventry's description of the imitations provoked by the success of Fielding's novels develops a general rule about success and emulation in a market-driven culture: "It is very certain, that whenever any thing new, of what kind soever, is started by one man, and appears with great success in the world, it quickly produces several in the same taste." Producers for the market have become mere factors of the market. Using the by now clichéd terms for describing the Grub Street hacks, Clara Reeve emphasizes how the accelerating multiplicity of novels complicates her own efforts at the classification and criticism of romances and novels. Rampant production also allows bad imitations to proliferate and engenders new institutions to deliver novels indiscriminately into the hands of every reader: "The press groaned under the weight of Novels, which sprung up like mush -4- rooms every year… [Novels] did but now begin to increase upon us, but ten years more multiplied them tenfold. Every work of merit produced a swarm of imitators, till they became a public evil, and the institution of Circulating libraries, conveyed them in the cheapest manner to every bodies hand." An uncontrolled multiplicity threatens to metastasize culture. For the scholar surveying the production of many ages, the market has the effect of blurring the distinctness and expressive readability of culture. Thus in his History of Fiction (1814) John Dunlop complains that while earlier epochs developed "only one species of fiction," which could then be read as «characteristic» of the age, more recently "different kinds have sprung up at once; and thus they were no longer expressive of the taste and feelings of the period of their composition." The critical histories of the novel by Reeve and Dunlop aim to restore the character to culture.

If, according to a formula developed in the writings of the French cultural critic Michel Foucault, power operates less by repressing or censoring than by producing new "reality," new "domains of objects and rituals of truth," then the success of novels on the market changed culture by producing a need to read. Clara Reeve describes this newly incited desire: "People must read something, they cannot always be engaged by dry disquisitions, the mind requires some amusement." Between uncritical surrender to novel reading and a wholesale rejection of novels in favor of «serious» reading, Richardson and Fielding traced a third pathway for the novel. In Reeve's words, the strategy was to "write an antidote to the bad effects" of novels "under the disguise" of being novels. This requires a cunning pharmacology. When Lady Echlin, Richardson's most morally exacting correspondent, warns that "the best instruction you can give, blended with love intrigue, will never answer your good intention," Richardson replies with a celebrated reformulation of the old demand that art should both amuse and instruct: "Instruction, Madam, is the Pill; Amusement is the Gilding. Writings that do not touch the Passions of the Light and Airy, will hardly ever reach the heart." Coventry describes the manner in which Fielding, "who sees all the little movements by which human nature is actuated," intervenes in the market for novels. "The disease became epidemical, but there were no hopes of a cure, 'till Mr. Fielding endeavour'd to show the World, that pure Nature could furnish out as agreeable entertainment, as those airy non-entical forms they had long ador'd, and persuaded the ladies to leave this extravagance to their Abi -5- gails with their cast cloaths." Thus the «disease» of romance, associated with the craze for new fashions, can be «cured» only by cutting new paths toward pleasure. Then the old novels, with their corrupting pleasures, can be passed on, along with old dresses, to the lady's servant.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a detailed account of how the popularity of the «histories» published by Richardson and Fielding in the 1740s effected an upward revaluation of the novel in Britain. However, the key elements of their successful strategy are implicit in the metaphors of the antidote, the vaccine, and the gilded pill. First, a broad spectrum of earlier writings-romances, novellas, and secret histories written on the Continent and in Britain-are characterized as essentially equivalent. Deemed licentious, fantasy-ridden, and debased, they are decried as a cultural disease. Next, Richardson and Fielding produce substitute fictions to absorb the reader. Although Richardson and Fielding wrote antinovels, they didn't write nonnovels. Just as a vaccine can achieve its antidotal function only by introducing a mild form of a disease into the body of the patient, their novels incorporated many elements of the dangerous old novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood into this "new species" of fiction. By including improving discourse familiar from conduct books, spiritual autobiography, and the periodical essay, the «histories» of Richardson and Fielding could appear radically "new."

Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605 / 1615) and Lafayette's Princess de Cleves (1678) had demonstrated the power of a modern fiction composed on the textual «grounds» of the earlier romance. Those who elevated the novel in England pursued a similar strategy by appropriating elements from the earlier novel-such as the female libertine, or the intricate seduction scheme-and articulating (by connecting together, and thus "speaking") them in a new way, with a new meaning, as part of a new form of novel. Thus, within Richardson's Clarissa, the rake Lovelace, by using disguise and manipulation to pursue seduction, upholds the old novel's ethos of amorous intrigue within the plot lines of the new. The bad old obsession with sex and passion is still there, but through Clarissa's resistance and its attendant critical discourse, sex is sublimated to the virtuous sentiments of the new and improving novel. Incorporated into a new species of novel, the old novel gilds the pill from within, helping to insure the popularity of the new novel. To secure the enlightening cultural address of their novels, Richardson and Fielding disavowed rather than assumed their debt to those popular -6- novels whose narrative resources they incorporated and whose cultural space they sought to occupy. They simultaneously absorbed and erased the novels they would supplant.

The new novel reorients rather than banishes spontaneous reader identification; now a morally improving emulation is promoted. When, in The Progress of Romance, Hortensius complains that Richardson's epistolary novels "have taught many young girls to wiredraw their language, and to spin always long letters out of nothing," Euphrasia defends the cultural value of studying and imitating Richardson over the «studies» of an earlier generation: "Let the young girls… copy Richardson, as often as they please, and it will be owing to the defects of their understandings, or judgments, if they do not improve by him. We could not say as much of the reading Ladies of the last age… No truly, for their studies were the French and Spanish Romances, and the writings of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manly, and Mrs. Heywood [sic]." In order to serve as an antidotal substitute for the poison of novels, the elevated novels of Richardson and Fielding had to be founded in an antagonistic critique and overwriting of the earlier novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood. This elevating novel brought a new disposition of pleasure and value to its readers. But the novel's rise is not a spontaneous or organic development. On the contested cultural site of novel reading at mid-century, it is, as the Marxist critic John Frow suggests in a different context, not so much the old that has died, but the new that has killed.

Sublimating the Novel by Telling Its History

The successes of Pamela (1740), Joseph Andrews (1742), Clarissa (1747–1748), and Tom Jones (1749), as well as the many imitations they provoked on the market, helped to countersign the elevated novel as a significant new cultural formation. But such validation also depended upon those critics who grasped the possibilities of this new kind of fiction and sought to describe its signal features, cultural virtues, and history. This project often required inventive critical strategies. By rescuing the elevated novel from the general cultural indictment of novels, the early literary critics and historians I have cited-Samuel Johnson, Francis Coventry, Clara Reeve, and John Dunlop-made their texts supplements to the project of elevating the novel.

For Johnson, a critical intervention on behalf of the new novel meant -7- arguing, by way of response to the recent popularity of Tom Jones and Roderick Random, in favor of the «exemplary» characters of Richardson over the more true-to-life «mixed» characters of Fielding and Smollett. In a pamphlet published anonymously, "An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding" (1751), Coventry follows the basic procedure Fielding had devised in the many interpolated prefaces to Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones: he transports critical terms and ideas developed earlier for poetry, epic, and drama to the novel. But Coventry goes farther. Just as Aristotle modeled the «rules» of tragedy upon Sophocles, and early modern French and English critics defined the rules for epic through criticism of Homer, Coventry made Fielding's work the template for the «species» of writing he had "founded." As the "great Example" and "great original" for "future historians of this kind," Fielding's work provides the terms for a new inventory of neoclassical «laws»: "As Mr. Fielding first introduc'd this new kind of Biography, he restrain'd it with Laws which should ever after be deem'd sacred by all that attempted his Manner; which I here propose to give a brief account of." In his "word or two on the modern state of criticism," Coventry bewails the decline of criticism from earlier epochs (from Horace to Pope), quotes and corrects the modern scorn for critics, and inveighs against the partisanship discernible in the reception of new plays. Coventry's way of posturing as a critic-he is unctuous, defensive, and yet arrogant-is the very antithesis of the imperious law-givings and definitive pronouncements characteristic of Fielding's narrators. But both styles of address suggest there is as yet no preestablished cultural vantage point or institutionalized discourse for the criticism of novels.

But such an anchor for the articulation of the novel was developing. Written thirty-five years later than Johnson's or Coventry's criticism, Reeve's Progress of Romance (1785) composes what seems to be the first scholarly literary history of novels in English. Within the term romance Reeve comprehends not only the Greek romance, the medieval romances (in both verse and prose), and the seventeenthcentury heroic romance; she also goes backward to the epics of Homer and forward to the "modern novels" of France and England. The inclusion of Homeric epic in the category of romance is a classification dubious enough to have been rejected by virtually every subsequent literary historian of the novel; but it gives Reeve's protagonist, Euphrasia, a way to refute the high-culture bias of her polemical antagonist, Hortensius. In addition, by developing the term romance into a global -8- category inclusive of fictional entertainments produced over a vast expanse of "times, countries, and manners," she uses the historicist horizon of her study to develop an indulgence that protects the now unfashionable romances as well as the modern novels under contemporary attack. The literary history and criticism of the English novel that has developed over the two hundred years since Reeve's text-from John Dunlop and Hippolyte Taine to Ian Watt and Michael McKeon-inevitably comes to be implicated in the task Richardson and Fielding seemed to set going in England: that of securing an elevated cultural address for the novel.

We can begin to grasp the broader cultural uses of literary history by attending to the way John Dunlop introduces his ambitious three-volume History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age (1815). In order to articulate the general cultural value of fiction over history Dunlop quotes Lord Bacon:

Fiction gives to mankind what history denies, and, in some measure, satisfies the mind with shadows when it cannot enjoy the substance:… Fiction strongly shows that a greater variety of things, a more perfect order, a more beautiful variety, than can any where be found in nature, is pleasing to the mind. And as real history gives us not the success of things according to the deserts of vice and virtue, Fiction corrects it, and presents us with the fates and fortunes of persons rewarded or punished according to merit. And as real history disgusts us with a familiar and constant similitude of things, Fiction relieves us by unexpected turns and changes, and thus not only delights, but inculcates morality and nobleness of soul. It raises the mind by accommodating the images of things to our desires, and not like history and reason, subjecting the mind to things."

By appealing to Bacon on the value of fiction, Dunlop not only invokes the authority of a major British thinker but also neatly hurdles almost two hundred years of wrangling over the morally dubious effects of taking pleasure from fiction. By using the general term fiction for his history of romances and novels, Dunlop encompasses the polemical terms of the debate he would nonetheless inflect and recast. Eighteenth-century defenses of the novel (from Congreve and Richardson to Fielding and Reeve) usually engage a set of polar oppositions still familiar to us: the novel is to the romance as the «real» is to the "ideal," as fact is to fantasy, as the probable is to the amazing, as the commonplace is to the exotic, and so on. Fiction is developed by Dunlop as a third term that -9- can at once finesse and reconcile these polar oppositions. Fiction does this by becoming art, delivering "a more perfect order, a more beautiful variety" than "nature."

Through Dunlop's use of Bacon, Renaissance and Romantic aesthetics meet in a justification of fiction that is, finally, psychological. Through fiction, the reader is no longer «subject» to things, nor disgusted with "a familiar and constant similitude of things." Instead, fiction «relieves» and "delights," and "raises the mind by accommodating the images of things to our desires." The cultural efficacy of fiction comes from its successful gratification of the reader's pleasure. Dunlop's translation of Bacon assumes yet reverses the anxiety about the reader's pleasure that had motivated earlier condemnations of the novel. When Dunlop glosses Bacon's emphasis upon "delight," it becomes apparent that the pleasure Dunlop promotes is quite different from the pleasure that novel readers had been accused of indulging. Instead of obsessive, personal, deluded, erotic pleasures, we are called to soft and social ones: "How much are we indebted to [fiction] for pleasure and enjoyment! it sweetens solitude and charms sorrow… " These pleasures improve and uplift the reader, by taking him or her into an elevated social and emotive space: "The rude are refined by an introduction, as it were, to the higher orders of mankind, and even the dissipated and selfish are, in some degree, corrected by those paintings of virtue and simple nature, which must ever be employed by the novelist if he wish to awaken emotion or delight." Having confirmed its beneficial effect, Dunlop can confirm the novel's rise from its earlier disreputable cultural position:

This powerful instrument of virtue and happiness, after having been long despised, on account of the purposes to which it had been made subservient, has gradually become more justly appreciated, and more highly valued. Works of Fiction have been produced, abounding at once with the most interesting details, and the most sagacious reflections, and which differ from treatises of abstract philosophy only by the greater justness of their views, and the higher interest which they excite.

Dunlop's description of his project helps us to apprehend the broader purpose of his literary history: to sublimate the novel so as to produce a new disposition, or arrangement, of the pleasure of novel reading. With his title, which neither exiles all novels from culture in favor of drama, epic, sermons, or conduct books, nor favors the simple, uncritical acceptance of all novels into his narrative of the history of fiction, — 10- Dunlop announces that his history is to be "critical"-that is, it will judge works according to their quality so as to focus upon only "the most celebrated" prose fiction. What results, in both Reeve and Dunlop as well as in every subsequent literary history, is a chronological panorama, a certain spectacular sequential cinematography of culture in which selected cultural practices and productions are narrated as significant and valuable. By this means literary history (selectively) licenses (sublimated) pleasures. Through this literary history, novels produced in the market can be inserted into a (more or less) continuous narrative and turned toward higher cultural purposes: for example, serving as an expression of "the voice of the people" (Taine) or being part of "the Great Tradition" (Leavis).

Dunlop writes as though the culturally elevating role for fiction were already achieved. In fact, his own literary history is designed to promote that end. To argue the centrality of fiction to culture, Dunlop begins his introduction with an elaborate analogy between gardening and fiction making, which quickly implicates his own literary history. The analogy also indexes what we might call the necessary violence of literary history. Just as the «savage» has gathered, and placed around his dwelling, plants that please him, so too have men lived events "which are peculiarly grateful, and of which the narrative at once pleases himself, and excites in the minds of his hearers a kindred emotion." What are gathered are "unlooked-for occurrences, successful enterprise, or great and unexpected deliverance from signal danger and distress." A gardener learns that one must not just collect but also weed out the

useless or noxious, and [those] which weaken or impair the pure delight which he derives from others… the rose should no longer be placed beside the thistle, as in the wild, but that it should flourish in a clear, and sheltered, and romantic situation, where its sweets may be undiminished, and where its form can be contemplated without any attending circumstances of uneasiness or disgust. The collector of agreeable facts finds, in like manner, that the sympathy which they excite can be heightened by removing from their detail every thing that is not interesting, or which tends to weaken the principal emotion, which it is his intention to raise. He renders, in this way, the occurrences more unexpected, the enterprises more successful, the deliverance from danger and distress more wonderful.

The same process that describes the "fine arts" of gardening and fiction making-selecting, weeding, and intensifying with an eye toward -11- pleasure-applies also to the literary history Dunlop composes. Dunlop's «critical» history of fiction becomes an improving and enlightening cultivation of fiction for culture. By using the fiction of widely different epochs to survey the variety of cultural achievements, literary history makes novels more than instruments of private (kinky, obsessive) gratification. They are drawn into the larger tableau of cultural accomplishment-which Dunlop calls "the advance of the human mind"-until a certain disinterested moral and aesthetic pleasure appears to be the telos of all fiction making.

But the gardening metaphor insinuates certain assumptions into the project of this literary history. Literary history as cultivation spatializes time, so that the successive conflicts between the often antagonistic types of fiction written in England over the course of a century by, for example, Behn, Richardson, Fielding, and Radcliffe, are arranged to appear as one harmoniously balanced array of species that can be surveyed in one leisurely stroll, as one wanders through a garden. However, it proves as implausible to have a literary history without a literary historian as it is to have a garden without a gardener. It is the valuative role of the literary historian-the critic holding the scales over each text read-that produces the synchronic moment of judgment through which a narrative of the progress or history of romance, novel, and fiction can be grasped and told. Then, the way in which that story is told has a feedback effect: which writers are included and excluded, which are brought into the foreground, cast into the shade, or weeded away, determines what kinds of writing and authorship will come to count as «tradition» that grounds subsequent value judgments. This is the ironic terminus of a hegemonic literary history. Literary history can easily become tautological and self-confirming, a garden wall to protect specimens collected against the very factors it might have interpreted: history, change, difference.

A Vortex Mis-seen as an Origin

Once Dunlop's literary history gets under way, it becomes apparent that civilizing the novel requires a certain calculated violence. In a chapter entitled "Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the English Novel," Dunlop offers a typology of the elevated novel: novels are divided into the «serious» (Richardson, Sheridan, Godwin), the «comic» (Fielding, Smollett), and the «romantic» (Walpole, Reeve, Radcliffe). But before -12- offering this schematic overview of what we would now call the eighteenth-century novel, Dunlop does some weeding by giving cursory negative treatment to the novels of Behn, Manley, and the early Haywood. Behn's novels, we are informed, "have not escaped the moral contagion which infected the literature of that age." Though Dunlop merely alludes to "the objections which may be charged against many" of Behn's novels, he ends the passage describing the "faults in points of morals" of Behn's "imitator," Eliza Haywood, in this fashion: "Her male characters are in the highest degree licentious, and her females are as impassioned as the Saracen princesses in the Spanish romances of chivalry."

By orientalizing these early novels and by characterizing them as inappropriately erotic-too feminine, too European, and too immoral-Dunlop relegates to the margins of The The History of Fiction some of the most popular novels published in England between 1683 and 1730. How is the eclipse of an influential strain of popular fiction to be understood? Dunlop's dismissal of Behn, Manley, and Haywood from his history confirms a judgment that critics of the early amorous novel had been making since the 1730s. This negative judgment might be attributed to changes in sensibility, taste, or style, or to the idea that a certain formula has exhausted its appeal. But these words merely relabel rather than explain the cultural change we are trying to interpret. It is, no doubt, correct to argue that the novels of amorous intrigue are an integral expression of the culture of the Restoration, with the zeal of Charles II's court for sexual license, its eschewal of the dour asceticism of the Commonwealth, and its enthusiastic translation of French cultural forms. Such a historical placement of the early novel allows one to align its passing with the reaction, after 1688, against the excesses of the Restoration. Pleasures disowned become discomforting, and through embarrassment, a kind of unpleasure.

Some feminist literary historians have attributed the devaluation of Behn, Manley, and Haywood to their gender. However, even before Richardson and Fielding won ascent from the market for their novels of the 1740s, the moral improvement of the novel of amorous intrigue was undertaken by Elizabeth Rowe, Jane Barker, and Penelope Aubin. Explanations based upon taste, political history, and gender fail to come to terms with the particular way in which the novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood were devalued and overwritten in the 1740s.

The erasure or forgetting of earlier cultural formations is an obscure -13- process. Unlike material objects, cultural ideas and forms do not become used up or out of date. Cultural forms-from letters and love stories to national constitutions-can be rejuvenated by new technology, foreign transplants, and political strife. In other words, recycling seems to be the rule rather than the exception in culture. Thus, for example, the novel of amorous intrigue, developed in the late Restoration by Behn under strong influence from the Continental novella and the aristocratic literature of love, was exploited for politically motivated scandal and satire by Delariviere Manley in the New Atalantis (1709). Then, following the spectacular success of Love in Excess (1719–1720), this species of novel was turned into repeatable "formula fiction" on the market by Eliza Haywood in the 1720s. To remove elements from culture one must understand «forgetting» as, in Nietzsche's words, "an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression." The incorporation of the novel of amorous intrigue within the elevated novel of the 1740s is one of the means by which old pleasures are disowned and effaced. As I have noted above, novelists like Richardson and Fielding promote this forgetting, first by defacing the novel of amorous intrigue and then by providing their own novels as replacements for the novels they characterize as degraded and immoral. These new novels overwrite-disavow but appropriate, waste but recycle-the novels they spurn.

Reeve and Dunlop do not commit their literary histories to exercising a "good memory." Unlike certain late-twentieth-century counterhegemonic literary histories-whether feminist, African-American, or gay and lesbian-the works of Reeve and Dunlop do not set out to counteract a biased cultural memory. Instead they are constrained by the protocols of a culturally elevating literary history to be critical and selective, and thus forgetful. In the introduction to The Progress of Romance, Reeve tells her readers that she seeks "to assist according to my best judgment, the reader's choice, amidst the almost infinite variety it affords, in a selection of such as are most worthy of a place in the libraries of readers of every class, who seek either for information or entertainment." The effacement of Behn's novels from those literary histories written in the wake of the novel's elevation does not depend upon the good will of the literary historian. Thus, while Reeve is generous with Behn-"let us cast a veil of compassion over her faults"-and Dunlop is severe, both ignore all her novels except Oroonoko. By contrast, the novels of Richardson and Fielding are given positions of -14- special priority in both accounts of the novel's rise. The success of the elevated novel in the 1740s-its appearance in culture as the only novel worthy of reading, cultural attention, and detailed literary history-means the early novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood will be pushed into the margins of literary histories, where they nonetheless never quite disappear but serve-as they do in Richardson and Fielding's texts-as an abject trace or degraded «other» needed to secure the identity of the «real» (i.e., legitimate) novel.

From Reeve forward, scholarly literary history develops a paradoxical relationship to the forgotten texts of the past. It retrieves from the archival memory of culture and reads again what its contemporary culture has almost completely forgotten. This activity pushes Reeve toward a certain regret about the shifts in cultural value that can look quite arbitrary to one who has looked long enough down the "stream of time."

Romances have for many ages past been read and admired, lately it has been the fashion to decry and ridicule them; but to an unprejudiced person, this will prove nothing but the variations of times, manners, and opinions.-Writers of all denominations, — Princes and Priests, — Bishops and Heroes, — have their day, and then are out of date.-Sometimes indeed a work of intrinsic merit will revive, and renew its claim to immortality: but this happiness falls to the lot of few, in comparison of those who roll down the stream of time, and fall into the gulph of oblivion.

This passage naturalizes the process of disappearance and forgetting-by its reference to the wheel of fortune that gives "princes and priests, bishops and heroes… their day" and then takes it away, as well as by its metaphorical characterization of the movement of a "work of… merit" down "the stream of time" into "the gulph of oblivion." These analogies obscure the particular cultural strife at work within shifts in cultural memory. Thus the differences of gender, politics, and class that separate Behn and Richardson, casting the first down into «oblivion» while the second is raised up into prominence, are conducted through the literary histories that translate them for a later age. Though literary historians attempt to be «unprejudiced» (Reeve) and embrace an ethos of "judgment, candour, and impartiality" (Coventry), and though their histories aspire to secure general moral or universal aesthetic grounds for critical judgment, the actual practice of literary history does not occlude but instead reflects cultural division. -15-

Since one of the meanings of gulf is a "whirlpool, or absorbing eddy," I can accommodate my thesis about the novel's rise to Reeve's metaphor. The elevation of the new novel over the old novel of amorous intrigue produces a vortex or whirlpool within the land/seascape of eighteenth-century British culture. Where one kind of reading is thrown up, another is thrown down; where one kind of pleasure is licensed, another is discredited. This turbulent vortex of reciprocal appearance and disappearance is mis-seen as the origin of the novel. But in order for the elevated novel to appear, the novel of amorous intrigue must be made to disappear into a gulf of oblivion. Thus birth requires a burial, but only after the murder of the other novel. While this vortex first appears in the cultural strife of the 1740s, it is also readable in every subsequent literary history devised to tell of the novel's rise.

To apprehend "the rise of the novel" as a vortex of cultural conflict helps to refocus the way gender difference and strife crosscut the expansion of novel reading in early modern culture. In aligning romances with French fashions and insisting that both are distinctly female addictions, Coventry was repeating one of the clichés of his age. The romance was associated with women because of its popularity with women readers. Reeve, by casting The Progress of Romance in the form of a series of salonlike lectures and debates between Hortensius and Euphrasia (with Sophronia acting the role of a nonpartisan judge), inscribes the debate about romance and its value within a battle of the sexes. Euphrasia rejects Hortensius's sweeping critique of romances, first by asking how Hortensius can banish all «fiction» of questionable moral standards-for this would mean indicting the classical authors boys study in their youth-and then by rejecting any double standard by which novels might receive sweeping censure because they are the favorite reading of women. By exfoliating her account of the novel's progress in a series of lessons that finally wins the willing conversion of a skeptical male, Reeve's text acquires the shape and feel of a seduction. Hortensius seems to relent in his opposition to romance because of his high regard for Euphrasia. But the resolution of this staged debate does not overcome the deeper resonances of the gendered contest around romances and novels. The pejorative terms applied to romance (fanciful, wishful, out of touch with reality, etc.) are also applied to women. The favorable terms applied to novels (realistic, rational, improving) are congruent with those that describe the male as a politically responsible member of the public sphere. -16-

Within the context of the debate about novels, it is not surprising that male and female critics offer different pathways toward the novel's elevation. In elevating the novel, Coventry follows Fielding's attempt to splice classical knowledge and criticism into the reading of the novel. Although John Dunlop, like Reeve, applies a modern, historicist, more or less tolerant horizon of scholarship to the novel, his appeal to philosophical grounds for evaluating fiction helps push the novel toward a monumental cultural role. In elevating the novel, Clara Reeve (like Mary Wollstonecraft and Laetitia Barbauld later) turns the novel into a form for transmitting social knowledge. Reeve ends her literary history by offering two lists to parents, guardians, and tutors, "intended chiefly for the female sex": "Books for Children" and "Books for Young Ladies." This two-stage course of reading includes fables, spellers, conduct books, periodical essays, and only one item on the second list we would describe as a novel-"Richardson's Works." Following this curriculum prepares young female minds for an informed and critical reading of the romances and novels Reeve has described in The Progress of Romance. Literary history acquires the pedagogical function it still serves in literary studies: it becomes a reading list with its entries contextualized by narrative.

The gendered divide that expresses itself throughout the course of the institutionalization of the novel in England and in the various accounts of its «rise» is only one instance, though perhaps the most pervasive and important one, of the partisanship David Perkins has detected in much literary history. Given the way literary history is used to shape pleasure and define value, how could it be different? Thus the various positions upon what constitutes the first novel, and implicitly, what is the most valuable paradigm of novelistic authorship, work within the earliest literary histories of the elevated novel, and are reflected in the divergent critical valuations of Richardson and Fielding. In this way, the rivalry of Richardson and Fielding on the market during the 1740s was reproduced in the earliest literary criticism and history of the novel. Coventry ignores Richardson in proclaiming Fielding's unheralded achievements, while Johnson's prescription for the novel's cultural role is rigged to favor Richardson's fictional practice. The antagonism of Richardson and Fielding expresses itself through the writings of Hazlitt, Coleridge, Scott, and every subsequent literary historian of their differences. This antagonism shows little sign of dissipating in our own day. It is not just that different values reflect themselves in diver -17- gent accounts of our cultural repertoire. There are also always different agendas for the future dispositions of pleasure and value. Thus recent feminist critics have found Richardson most useful in their critical work, but Fieldingnot.

The elevation of the novel and its countersigning by literary history is neither simply right nor wrong, good nor bad. New discursive formations-like the elevated novel-incite new and valuable cultural production. Thus, however unfair or tendentious its judgments about the early novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood, literary history's sublimation of "the novel" enables the ambitious novelistic projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One example is the quixotic ambition to write "the Great American Novel." Literary history does not have to be fair, or oriented toward the categories we would now credit, in order for it to bear its effects into culture. Yet its judgments are also always-and interminably-open to revision. The appeals court of culture is always in session. The recent feminist revaluation of the women novelists of the early eighteenth century seems to depend upon a contemporary reinterpretation of what is happening in the novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood: explicit treatments of gender, sexuality, and power that have critical currency in our own time.

The Rise of Debate about the Rise of the English Novel

This chapter's account of the cultural scandal of novel reading, and of the inventive responses of novelists and literary historians to that scandal, suggests a signal tendency of most literary histories of the novel. Like a museum, literary history turns the strife of history into a repertoire of forms. It does so by taking differences that may have motivated the writing or reading of novels within specific historical contexts-differences of religion, politics, class, social propriety, or ethical design, to name a few-and converts them into differences of kind. Thus, for example, the polemic between Richardson and Fielding about the sorts of narrative and character fiction should possess comes to represent, within literary history, two species of novel: the Richardson novel of psychology and sentiment, and the Fielding novel of social panorama and critique. The novels of amorous intrigue written by Behn and the early Haywood have a bad difference that puts them entirely outside the frame of literary history of the elevated novel.

Notice the reversal of vision that literary history effects. If we inter -18- pret the writings of Behn, Richardson, and Fielding as part of the cultural history of Britain, we can find complex patterns of antagonism and detect the conscious and unconscious efforts of each author to distinguish his or her writing from its antecedents. By differentiating his novels from Behn's, Richardson engenders many of the differences evident between their novels. By contrast, literary history "finds," upon the archival table of its investigations, different novels, which it then attempts to distinguish and classify. Differences among novels are no longer effects of history, but the initial data for literary classification. Thus the category «novel» acquires a paradoxical role: pregiven and yet belated in its arrival, "the novel" is made to appear ready at hand, but it is actually that which the literary history of the novel defines. Often presented as the humble, minimal, and preliminary axiom of a literary history, the idea of the novel operates within the literary history of canonical texts as a kind of law. Changes in the idea of the novel during the nineteenth century were a necessary precondition for the belated emergence of the novel's origins as a compelling enigma.

Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the novel keeps rising, and The Columbia History of the British Novel is one more symptom of that movement. Space does not permit a full genealogy of the evolution of the question of the novel's origins. But I can offer a brief sketch of those changes whereby the question becomes one of the Gordian knots of literary studies. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, novels are collected, edited, reviewed, and taught in schools and universities. Three basic shifts in the category of "the novel" are concomitants of this modern institutionalization of the novel as an object of knowledge in literary studies. First the novel is nationalized. Novels were once considered the type of writing most likely to move easily across linguistic and national boundaries. The critics and literary historians I have quoted in this chapter found the romances and novels of different nations on the same shelves. Reeve and Dunlop discuss the novels of Cervantes, Marivaux, and Rousseau within the same conceptual coordinates as the novels of Richardson and Fielding. But in the nineteenth century, novels come to be understood as a type of writing particularly suited to representing the character, mores, landscape, and spirit of the nation. At its most significant, a novel is, in the phrase of the French literary historian Hippolyte Taine, an expression of "the voice of the people."

In the wake of this idea, a thesis develops that would never have -19- occurred to Reeve or Dunlop: that the modern English novel has little or nothing to do with earlier novellas and romances, and thus it does not develop out of Italian, Spanish, or French precursors. Instead the novel is said to derive from distinctly English discourses: the journalism of Addison and Steele, the party writers of the reign of Queen Anne, the new Science, religious autobiography like Bunyan's, writers of travel and adventure, and so on. This position was first clearly enunciated by the nineteenth-century professor of English at Glasgow, Walter Raleigh, in his book The English Novel (1894). It has been developed much more fully in recent books by Michael McKeon and J. Paul Hunter. While Reeve's "progress of romance" and Dunlop's "history of fiction" are inclusively multinational, extending backward to ancient and medieval times and across the channel to include Continental romance and novella, national literary histories cut these temporal and spatial links. Traits of the British culture-empiricism, protestant individualism, moral seriousness, and a fondness for eccentric character-are promoted from secondary characteristics of novels which happened to have been written in England to primary radicals of the novel's generic identity.

By narrowing the vortex of the novel's formation, a nationalist British literary history produces a new object of cultural value now dubbed "the English novel." The English novel becomes the subject and eponymous protagonist in a series of literary histories written by Walter Raleigh (1894), George Saintsbury (1913), and Walter Allen (1954). The phrase appears again in the titles of William Lyon Phelps's Advance of the English Novel (1916), Ernest Baker History of the English Novel (1924–1936), and Arnold Kettle Introduction to the English Novel (1951). Within these literary histories, Richardson and Fielding and Smollett and Sterne become the "dream team" of eighteenth-century fiction, and, in Saintsbury's famous metaphor, they are the four wheels of that carriage of English fiction that, with its full modern development into a repeatable «formula» by Austen and Scott, is "set a-going to travel through the centuries." After Saintsbury, Defoe is added as a fifth early master of the English novel. With Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957), the modifier «English» is implied but erased. Now the rise of "the English novel" marks the rise of «the» novel, that is, all novels. A synecdoche wags the dog. In this way a national literary history overcomes what has always worried the earliest promoters and elevators of the novel in Britain: the belatedness and indebtedness of English fiction. -20-

The claim for the priority of the English novel made by this group of literary historians involves a shift in the novel's distinct identity: instead of consisting in its moral coherence, the novel's identity comes to derive from its adherence to some sort of realism. Although the kernel of this thesis is at least as old as the distinction between romance and novella defined by Congreve, Reeve, and others, the nineteenth century contributes an arduous and subtle development to the idea of what constitutes realism. With the development of the idea of society as an organic totality, the novel becomes-for Balzac, Dickens, and Eliot-uniquely appropriate for its study and analysis. Novelistic realism is complicated and enriched by those novelists-especially Flaubert and James-who undertake to aestheticize the novel. As art, the novel realizes its equality with poetry, and prepares itself for entrance into the "Great Tradition" (Leavis's 1948 title) of Western literature. The idea of the novel as art means that novel studies, and literary histories of the novel, come to privilege the novel's "form." Claims for the novel's formal coherence are not fatal to the idea of the novel's realistic imitation of social or psychic life. Instead the two ideas work together in literary histories from Ernest Baker's ten-volume History of the English Novel to Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957). For Ian Watt "formal realism" becomes the distinctive characteristic of the novel and the crucial invention necessary for its «rise» to being the most influential linguistic vehicle of subjective experience.

With the idea of the novel's nationalism, its realism, and its power to express a personal interiority emerge three questions that have preoccupied scholarly study of the early British novel for at least one hundred years. Out of the concept of the novel's Englishness emerges a new question: how, where, and why does the English novel begin, originate, arise? This question is framed so as to assure that its answer will come from within the study of British culture. Once the novel is given a modern, relatively scientific epistemological mission-to be realistic in its representation of social and psychological life-one must ask, what constitutes realism? What form of writing should serve as the paradigm for novelistic mimesis? These are not so much questions that can be answered as a terrain for interminable negotiation and invention. Finally, how is the Englishness and realism of the novel implicated in the invention of the modern subject? With Watt, and those many critics and literary historians who have followed in his wake, the notion that the novel is a fully actualized form of a nation's literature, characterized -21- by realism, is brought into alignment with two relatively new ideas about the novel's beginnings: its sudden birth and its distinctive modernity. Recently, new work on the novel's rise, influenced by Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism, has sought to contest and complicate this classic interpretation of the rise of the novel. Instead of trying to summarize this rich vein of work, I will close with an observation. The themes of the novel's modernity and sudden birth, its realism and aesthetic greatness, its expression of nationhood or moral guidance to the reader-whether formulated early or late in the novel's "progress"-all these themes serve to update the cultural project that unfolded in the eight decades after 1740, and that this essay has explored: the impulse to elevate the novel and to sublimate the pleasures it incites.

William Warner

Selected Bibliography

Baker Ernest. The History of the English Novel. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1924.

Coventry Francis. "An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding". London, 1751. Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint No. 95, 1962.

Dunlop John Colin. The History of Fiction. 3 vols. London, 1814.

Frow John. Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Perkins David. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Raleigh Sir Walter. The English Novel: A Short Sketch of Its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of "Waverley." London: John Murray, 1894.

Reeve Clara. The Progress of Romance. Colchester, 1785.

Saintsbury George. The English Novel. London: Dent, 1913.

Taine Hippolyte A. History of English Literature. 1863. Trans. H. Van Laun. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965.

Watt Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

-22-

Defoe and Early Narrative

But my poor old island's still Unrediscovered, unrenameable. None of the books has ever got it right.

Elizabeth Bishop, "Crusoe in England"

"The school of example, my lord, is the world: and the masters of this school are history and experience."

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History

Defoe and "the Novel"

NO account of the rise or origin of the English novel can neglect the prose narratives of Daniel Defoe. Most critics recognize that Defoe's plots are not often formally coherent or satisfying. But few major accounts of Defoe's narratives have explained their workings by emphasizing the extent to which they defy ordinary novelistic categories. Of Defoe's seven major narratives- Robinson Crusoe (1719), Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), and Roxana (1724) — only Memoirs of a Cavalier can be described as formally controlled throughout. Otherwise, Defoe's narratives are marked by an episodic and apparently arbitrary narrative arrangement.

Ian Watt's analysis of Defoe in The Rise of the Novel, for example, reflects a preference for what he calls "formal realism" and an appreciation of psychological characterization (Watt recognizes, however, that these critical conventions have been invented since Defoe). Thus by categorizing Robinson Crusoe as a romance and Moll Flanders as, in effect, a novel, Watt articulates a standard distinction between two texts that are in many ways remarkably alike. By calling Robinson Crusoe an example of possessive individualism at work, Watt also adheres to a forreal criterion for what constitutes a novel: the appeal to a certain economic motive explains the coherence of the story and gives it a formal meaning. Other critics have emphasized the extent to which Defoe -23- used certain Puritan conventions, like the spiritual autobiography. Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, all in their various ways, learn to spiritualize their otherwise mundane and secular existence. According to this model, Robinson learns, in the course of his exile on his island, increasingly to ascribe providential meanings to his experiences; Moll, having repented of her life of crime when faced with the gallows in Newgate, rediscovers wealth, her son, and her happiness in Virginia before she returns to England. And although Roxana's tale records the success of a life as mistress and courtesan that earns her substantial material wealth, the threatening reappearance of her longabandoned daughter toward the end, and the final paragraph of the book, in which Roxana is seen paying for her sins in a life of poverty, can be taken as peculiar inversions of the same master plot.

The conventional critical account of the differences between Bunyan and Defoe calls upon similar assumptions about what constitutes a novel-as opposed to other forms of prose narrative-and shows that Defoe's narratives approach the novel more nearly than Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Defoe occupies a place in a story that is already about the novel, so that the critic is already committed to certain criteria of judgment that will cause him or her to perceive either certain elements in Defoe, or certain of Defoe's narratives-usually Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and Roxana-as clearer harbingers than others of what was to come in the classic novels of, say, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

Critics have argued recently that structures laid down by Richardson and Fielding have become the standard for judging whether a work of prose is truly novelistic. By using their work as the yardstick, the argument goes, critics agree to suppress the extent to which Richardson and Fielding-as well as other writers-both used and discarded the earlier prose narratives of Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, and Eliza Haywood. Behn, Manley, and Haywood, that is, wrote narratives whose techniques Richardson and Fielding gentrified and masculinized, thereby obliterating their predecessors from most subsequent accounts of the early novel in England. In other words, we have been so well trained to have certain expectations of what a novel consists of that we find Behn, Manley, and Haywood somewhat incoherent or formless as writers. At this juncture, these critics suggest, we should discard our prejudices, recognize that Behn, Manley, and Haywood had other sorts of things in mind, and judge them according to their own apparent -24- aims, according to the genres with which they were most directly engaged, and according to the cultural and literary expectations of the early rather than the middle years of the eighteenth century. I find this thesis persuasive on most counts, and I think the same approach should be taken with regard to another important and early writer of prose fiction-Daniel Defoe.

I believe that we cannot understand what Defoe succeeds in doing unless we base our interpretation upon the following premises: (1) we should not seek in any given text evidence of what we expect or want a «novel» to do (especially since Defoe explicitly attacks novels); (2) we should search Defoe's main prose narratives for a common nexus of attitudes about narrative, even though some of his stories are less satisfactory to our taste than others; (3) by attending as far as possible to what those narratives tell us about their own procedures, we should look for the literary «unity» that is presented to us (if any), or alternatively for the coherence Defoe sought in writing his narratives; and (4) we should recognize that Defoe operated out of a literate culture that, in practice if not in theory, recognized only the loosest of boundaries between genres, and tended to experiment with forms and techniques from a wide range of sources in both high and low culture.

Although the Restoration and the eighteenth century are often thought of as a period in which literature was governed by strict rules of decorum, it was in fact an age in which literary forms were continually exploding under constant scrutiny and revision: the looseness of the category novel fits an age that celebrates the fluidity of many other literary forms (such as Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, Pope's Dunciad, or Swift's Tale of a Tub). Moreover, the looseness of generic categories, especially in the early eighteenth century, reflects a series of cultural uncertainties and conflicts which themselves provide topics for Defoe's narratives: the outcome of certain political and cultural controversies was by no means clear to Defoe or his contemporaries. When we examine the characteristic habits of Defoe's presentation, we repeatedly find a number of distinguishing rhetorical features; and yet we find important signs that Defoe was engaged in a debate about the moral and cognitive relationship of prose narrative to the world (both the world it apparently describes and the world encountered by the reader). This debate is part of a wider set of concerns shared by other early eighteenth-century critics and writers, and Defoe's participation in it demonstrates the degree to which he belonged to that milieu, not his -25- uniqueness (except perhaps imaginatively). In particular, it is Defoe's obsession with history as a mode of knowledge, as a mode of writing, and as a setting for character and action that best reveals his ambitions for the nature and function of his narratives.

Defoe and "History"

We should take seriously what Roxana says about the quality of the tale she tells. "My Business," she insists, "is History." Defoe incorporates similar statements about the kind of narratives he is to present in several of his prefaces. The preface to Moll Flanders begins, "The World is so taken up of late with Novels and Romances that it will be hard for a private History to be taken for Genuine"; the «Editor» of Colonel Jack opines, "If he has made it a History or a Parable, it will be equally useful, and capable of doing Good"; we are told of Roxana, that "the Work is not a Story, but a History"; Captain Singleton describes himself as following an historical method. In his Serious Reflections [on] Robinson Crusoe (1720), although Defoe begins by asserting that "the fable is always made for the moral, not the moral for the fable," his energies are directed to claiming that Robinson Crusoe, "though allegorical, is also historical," and that all its details, including Robinson's attempts at providential interpretation, "are all histories and real stories" and "are all historical and true in fact." For Defoe as for any neoclassical author, narratives always have moral purpose, but a moral purpose visible only by observing second causes and common actions (or "the ordinary course of life"). The actions of providence are not immediately evident, so that while Defoe speaks of "emblematic history," he also opposes it to "romance," and writes that "Nothing is more frequent than for us to mistake Providence, even in its most visible appearances." Though we can infer the actions of providence, it is not a simple business:

The only objection, and which I can see no method to give a reason for and no answer to, is, why, if it be the work of Providence, those things should be so imperfect, so broken, so irregular, that men may either never be able to pass any right judgement of them, as is sometimes the case, or make a perfect judgement of them, which is often the case, and so the end of the intimation be entirely defeated, without any fault, neglect, or omission of the man.

Some critics see Defoe's claims about history as linking his narratives to the genre of spiritual autobiography, which is indeed a kind of history -26- but one that does not sufficiently describe the mechanisms that distinguish Defoe's works from, say, Grace Abounding or The Pilgrim's Progress. Indeed, when the editor of Colonel Jack places history and parable before his reader as alternative ways of thinking about the narrative, he reminds his early-eighteenth-century reader of the extent to which history is like parable in that both are supposed, in order to please and instruct, to convey morals or precepts by means of the narrative examples they present. But history is also, and crucially, distinguished from parable, in that the narrative vehicle from which we are expected to draw precepts to govern our moral and political conduct is itself the record of randomly occurring events. If we draw from what we read in history books an order or design, or some clear moral, we do so at the cost of simplifying or editing those narrative particulars that escape or inundate the moral they supposedly serve. In parable, of course, the narrative is predetermined by the moral purpose it expresses. What exists before history is written is raw experience, and the patterns or teleology we find in history come as superimpositions upon that experience. Moreover, I think Defoe was aware that some of those patterns are imposed for ideological purposes: to see it any other way amounts to holding that providence directly controls each and every one of our actions-an idea Defoe carefully refutes in his Serious Reflections.

Defoe apparently recognized at least two steps in the process of legitimizing a historical record: the first is simply to record the facts; the second is to render those facts morally significant. Both processes involve a crucial editorializing of the raw materials of experience, which of itself is formless. To give any literary shape to his account, the historian must impose some kind of significance or teleology upon the chaos of facts confronting him, but the moralist repeats this process of truncation and reduction even more vigorously in order to convey a moral to an audience temporally and spatially removed from the historical moment in question. This process of reduction is epitomized in the fundamental distinction Locke draws between the two aspects of our entire mental life: we have experience, then we reflect upon it. Locke's radical politics emerges at the point where he makes clear that the activity of reflection-which is primarily marked by the use of language-incorporates a series of reductions that commit a sort of violence upon the raw elements of the world as well as upon our cognitive life: it inevitably simplifies and thereby controls them to facilitate social and political "commerce." -27-

What seems, then, to be almost obsessively at issue in Defoe is the tension between the local details of a particular person's experience, especially as the narrator recalls them, and the meanings that that individual attempts to impose upon the experience, which the reader is asked to confirm. In this sense, Robinson's experiences and his attempts to rationalize them are equally matters of historical record. This may be the effect of a movement toward secularization in English culture since Bunyan, as some critics assert; according to one argument, The Pilgrim's Progress forges an extraordinary coherence between the allegorical dimension and the narrative vehicle, approaching in many places the condition of Watt's formal realism (for example, in the Vanity Fair episode, which uncannily presents the atmosphere of a Restoration law court like the one that sentenced Bunyan).

But in Defoe we detect a strain, either within the narrator, within the author, or both, as they struggle to assign meanings to what are evidently violent, chaotic, or random events, often exacerbated by the narrator's criminal or eccentric behavior. Thus there is considerable critical commentary, for example, about the extent to which Moll Flanders is an ironic novel. The question is, how can Moll's repentance become the precipitating cause for her reward, when she is actually rewarded for her life of crime rather than for her act of repentance? The explicit providential explanation for the outcome does not fit all the facts of the case. The critics' concern with irony in this context raises crucial questions about the extent to which Defoe was aware of what he was doing as he wrote and whether he consciously strove to endow a completed narrative with a unified moral and formal structure. It is possible to argue that Moll's repentance in Newgate supplies precisely the right ironic commentary upon her earlier experiences, thus bestowing on the novel a coherence its earlier episodic nature lacks.

Such concerns with symmetry do not account sufficiently for Defoe's other narratives, nor do they account for the degree to which Defoe's obsession with history as the chief correlative to his own strategies signals the possibility of another kind of irony altogether. That Defoe is capable of unified plots is evidenced by Memoirs of a Cavalier. But unlike modern critics searching for organic form, Defoe is not primarily interested in formal unity or formal irony: the ironies that occur in Defoe's narratives occur more locally and insistently in response to certain crises that the narrator attempts to render significant. Defoe is correspondingly unconcerned about the tidiness of his narrative endings, — 28- since formal perfection is not central to his purpose: his endings often feel contrived and hurried, or, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe, close the narrative in a rather indeterminate way. Thus, at the beginning of his tale, Colonel Jack writes that "my Life has been such a Checquer Work of Nature"; and the challenge in Colonel Jack's tale, as in all of Defoe's, is for the narrator to coordinate the details of his or her experience with the language, if not the fact, of providence. (Thus Robinson cries out, "How strange a Chequer Work of Providence is the Life of Man!") The tension between the particulars of the narrators' experiences and the language of moral accounting-whether that of religion, conscience, reflection, or providence-is rendered all the more palpable, in virtually every case, by the sheer force and abundance with which the local details of an individual's history are rendered (Defoe's novels are full of lists, letters, journal accounts, and moments of dialogue, many of which are highly reminiscent of Bunyan). And this tension emerges even more explicitly in Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and Roxana, where the means of calibrating from moment to moment the fortunes of the narrator are fiscal or, in a slightly broader sense, economic. The acquisitive energy that many critics celebrate as a feature of Robinson's, Moll's, or Roxana's personalities is also, I think, inseparable from the sheer energy generated by the act of tale-telling itself, an energy that is underscored by the multiple kinds of narratives in any given Defoe story.

Except for Roxana, who becomes progressively richer until the final twist of fortune recorded only in the last paragraph, all the narrators find themselves wealthy at the end; and the reader is left with an uncomfortable sense that the language of reflection, conscience, or providence does not adequately explain the causes or conditions of that wealth. Thus Captain Singleton spends the first half of his career wandering in Africa (here the author finds ample opportunity to incorporate exotic detail beyond the thematic requirements of the story) and the second half as a pirate, accompanied by the canny and pacific Quaker, William. Having become very rich, the narrator is moved by his sojourn in Arabia and by Williams presence to reflect on himself, apparently for the first sustained period in his life. He writes to William:

It is not material to record here what a Mass of ill-gotten Wealth we had got together: It will be more to the Purpose to tell you, that I began to be sensible -29- of the Crime of getting of it in such a Manner as I had done, that I had very little Satisfaction in the Possession of it.

William talks to Captain Singleton further, and our narrator declares that

William had struck so deep into my unthinking Temper, with hinting to me, that there was something beyond all this, that the present Time was the Time of Enjoyment, but that the Time of Account approached; that the Work that remain'd was gentler than the Labour past, viz. Repentance.

But even so, William proceeds to argue that there is no point in disposing of their wealth, and so, in the final few pages of the book, William and Captain Singleton become even richer by selling their goods, and Captain Singleton, upon returning to England, bestows on William's sister a sum of five thousand pounds and proceeds to marry her. The book's ending thus bestows on Captain Singleton rewards in excess of his act of repentance, which immediately precedes his homecoming. The mere fact of repentance does not determine the kind or quantity of reward that follows it.

The apparent effects of conscience upon Roxana's behavior are virtually nil. Such effects would be difficult to detect in any case, since Defoe's characteristic narrative form makes it hard to tell, as the narrator recounts her story, whether she felt pangs of conscience during the actual experiences or whether the intrusion of conscience is merely a reflection of the repentant and virtuous perspective from which she writes. Thus Roxana writes about the interventions of conscience at an important moment as though they are a series of gaps in her experience-as if she were thinking in formal terms about the condition of her own tale:

There was, and would be, Hours of Intervals, and of dark Reflections which came involuntarily in, and thrust in Sighs in the middle of all my Songs; and there would be, sometimes, a heaviness of Heart, which intermingl'd itself with all my Joy… Conscience will, and does, often break in upon [people] at particular times, let them do what they can do to prevent it.

Both the «repentant» Roxana and the Roxana in the midst of whoring and managing her wealth reflect on the character's experience in similar terms; and her reflection does little to alter the course of her career, which only suddenly and finally experiences a reversal-for completely mysterious reasons. -30-

The arbitrariness of assigning meanings to a sum of separate experiences-and the fact that such assignation reflects distinct cultural assumptions-is highlighted, especially in Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year, by the narrator's use of the Bible as a means to pin down and summarize his experience. With Robinson, this habit is persistent; he frequently flicks open the pages of the scriptures to reassure himself of the meaning of events that-for him as well as for his reader-might as well be a series of random occurrences. The narrative conditions under which this habit is recorded only heighten the reader's perception that the action is slightly desperate. About a third of the way through his account, Robinson has apparently switched from his direct narrative into a journal mode, but the entry for June 27 records Robinson sick with an ague. He first calls on God, "Lord look upon me, Lord pity me, Lord have Mercy upon me"; then he falls asleep and has an apocalyptic dream in which a kind of revenging angel threatens him for having failed to repent; finally he is struck by his impiety and believes God (who is symbolically associated throughout with his father) is punishing him. In the course of his speculations (or "Reflections") Robinson slips out of his journal, as if the fever and fear have marred the internal consistency of his subsequent record. Returning to the journal for June 28, Robinson begins to reconsider his relation to God on a grand scale, and finds himself "struck dumb with these Reflections." He immediately experiments with tobacco, which disturbs his head, and, intoxicated by its fumes, he "open'd the Book casually," to read these words: "Call on me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me." Rather than interpreting the application of this injunction as adequate to the "Case," as Robinson calls it, we should remain conscious of the arbitrary relation between the biblical motto and what Robinson assumes it glosses, especially considering the cognitive dissonance that Robinson experiences at this juncture. Later, we find Robinson creating even more arbitrary connections between events when he says that it was on the same calendar date that he left his father and later went to sea, or that he was both born and saved from drowning on the thirtieth of September.

The entire plot of A Journal of the Plague Year is precipitated by the narrator's ("H. F.") gesture of turning the pages of the Bible, much as Robinson continually does. H. F. is unsure whether he should, like his brother, flee London as the plague mounts. He is most explicitly concerned about protecting his goods, but he then writes: -31-

This lay close to me, and my Mind seemed more and more encouraged to stay than ever, and supported with a secret Satisfaction, that I should be kept: Add to this that turning over the Bible, which lay before me, and while my Thoughts were more than ordinarily serious upon the Question, I cry'd out, WELL, I know not what to do, Lord direct me! and the like; and [at] that Juncture, I happen'd to stop turning over the Book at the 91 st Psalm, and casting my Eye on the second Verse, I read on to the 7th Verse exclusive.

Not only does the Bible supply these somewhat unsatisfactory means of justifying and glossing actions, but-Defoe seems to suggest-it is in the action of some biblical narratives themselves that we find a similar cryptic relationship between human experience, rendered via second causes, and the actions of the divine, which remain inscrutable. The chief figure of this narrative and historical conundrum is of course Job, whose afflictions strike him as disproportionate to divine action in the world as he understands it; and the problem of reconciling divine omniscience with human knowledge is never truly resolved in that book. It is for this reason, I suggest, that Job crops up as a kind of master plot for Robinson Crusoe: at the end of his story, Robinson writes, "I might well say, now indeed, That the latter End of Job was better than the Beginning." Colonel Jack is left at the end of his career in retirement or "Exile," where "I had… leisure to reflect, and to repent, to call to mind things pass'd, and with a just Detestation, learn as Job says, to abhor my self in Dust and Ashes." And Roxana's wanderings in the world begin as her husband leaves her with five children. She is comforted by Amy, an "old Aunt," and another woman, who "sat down like Job's three Comforters, and said not one Word to me for a great while." To align the events of ordinary life unequivocally with the motions of providence is, Defoe seems to say in A Journal of the Plague Year, "Turkish predestinarianism." We cannot, H. F. writes, see the plague as arising from anything but "natural causes": though God can choose to work within "the ordinary course of things," our business is to attend to second rather than first causes, which are as obscure to us as the origins and essence of the plague itself.

Whereas the language of providence and of reflection attempts recursively to endow the details of the narrative with a total and harmonizing significance, Defoe's narratives also incorporate a language of anticipation, as if either the narrator-or Defoe-wants to assert control over the storytelling that is to come, which will in the course of time prove to have providential or at least formal significance. Given the -32- general roughness of Defoe's technique-some critics think he might have written Captain Singleton in great haste to capitalize on the success of Robinson Crusoe-such assurances of control seem more hopeful than otherwise. Further, in highlighting the contradiction between the narrator's predictions and the actual course of events, they are at odds with the sense that the outcome is consistently providential; that is, they seem to intensify rather than settle the problem of narrative control. This foreshadowing of future events is pervasive. "I am hastening to my own story," writes Colonel Jack; Roxana refers to the impending close of her story ("this End of my Story"); Moll says that she is "too near the End of my Story"; characters commonly refer to some "new scene" of their lives that is about to follow (immediately before coming across the footprint for the first time, Robinson writes, "But now I come to a new Scene of my Life").

This internal and repetitive irony has two thematic implications that deserve mention. First, Defoe indulges the typical neoclassical fascination with forensics, which follows naturally from his interest in criminal life. When Moll is finally imprisoned for theft, her "governess," who acts as advisor and fence, tries to tamper with the evidence, but to no avail, since, it transpires, "I was to have three Witnesses of Fact against me, the Master and his two Maids; that is to say, I was as certain to be cast for my Life, as it was certain that I was alive." The point is that, finally, empirical knowledge prevails against the attempt to subvert it-though such attempts are repeatedly made by Defoe's characters who tell several versions of their stories to the reader and to other listeners in the tale. In contrast to Fielding's interpolated narratives, Defoe's tend to obscure or edit rather than confirm the certainty of some preexisting truth: critics have often pointed out that Robinson's journal changes the particulars of what we have hitherto been told. Roxana is hounded by a French Jew who tries to prove that she was not truly married to the man whose jewels she possesses. He is, of course, correct, but a struggle ensues over who is to have legal possession, and Roxana, who deserves the jewels, treats the Jew to considerable abuse. A Journal of the Plague Year is centrally about the forensic problem of inferring the causes of the plague, of detecting its signs and its course, and of creating an adequate report of the entire event: H. F. uses the empirical vocabulary of experiment, evidence, and hypothesis throughout. At best, he states, we can develop a method of judging the relative validity of signs and evidence: "Seeing then that we could come at the -33- certainty of things by no method but that of inquiry of the neighbours or of the family, and on that we could not justly depend, it was not possible but that the uncertainty of this matter would remain as above."

The second thematic implication of Defoe's peculiar irony is more directly political. His novels invite an analogy between the narrators' attempts to force patterns on the flux of experience, and the structure of imperialism, where one nation imposes its will, its language, and its institutions upon another. This is most clearly evidenced in Robinson Crusoe. The distinct vocabulary that emerges in the course of time to fit Robinson's circumstances and behavior is the dual language of family and sovereignty. Like Gray's Elegy, Robinson Crusoe is not about solitary experience, but about how solitary experience establishes the conditions for social and political life. (Typically for the period, Defoe was to write in Serious Reflections that "Man is a creature so formed for society, that it may not only be said that it is not good for him to be alone, but 't is really impossible that he should be alone.") This view receives support from Novak's argument that Defoe was not a possessive individualist (as Watt assumes), but that he supported an older, mercantilist ideal of trade that was "basically communal rather than individualistic." It takes about a third of the book for Robinson to establish himself on the island after his shipwreck, but from that point forward he begins increasingly to imagine himself as the head of a family (if only a family of animals), and as king or lord of the island. Robinson's tenure almost exactly coincides with the Restoration period (1660–1688), which saw the collapse of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II and James II; and Defoe's skepticism about the Stuarts, who attempted to rule without the consent of Parliament, is echoed by Robinson's increasingly absolutist vocabulary. Robinson first speaks of himself as "King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly," and then begins to speak of his "Family." He also becomes a lord of manorial property, but he increasingly assumes the garb of an absolutist monarch: "I had the Lives of all my Subjects at my absolute Command. I could hang, draw, give Liberty, and take it away, and no Rebels among all my Subjects." Later, Robinson celebrates his absolute mastery over Friday and the Spaniard he has rescued from the cannibals, speaking proudly of his tolerance even toward pagans and papists: we have witnessed a process through which the language of sovereignty has increasingly defined experience.

The tension between Robinson's impulses toward political patronage and toward control within a context where the desire for sovereignty -34- wins out, is best dramatized in those moments when Robinson, having discovered that the Indians of the region are indeed cannibals, thinks about exterminating them. There is a virtually seamless movement from Robinson's dream about saving a «Savage» and making him his servant, to his conscious decision to enslave one at the earliest opportunity, and then to his saving and subjugating Friday. But Robinson's attitude toward the cannibals veers drastically between a desire to exterminate them and the recognition that they are only accountable to God, not to himself. Whether Defoe intended it or not, this dramatizes the conflict within the European imperialistic sensibility between a genocidal and primitivistic impulse. After witnessing the remnants of the first cannibal feast, Robinson declares, "I could think of nothing but how I might destroy some of these Monsters," but he repents, realizing that they are «innocent» as far as he knows. Robinson twice repeats this thought process, each time checking himself; but, significantly, he finally expresses his murderous impulses when he sees that an intended victim is a European. The imperial motives of the narrator are also manifest in Captain Singleton, where Captain Singleton provokes some Africans to attack him so that he can justify enslaving them according to a "Law of Arms" defined unilaterally by himself. The point comes across clearly in the discrepancy between what we observe and Captain Singleton's language of self-justification.

My major thesis, then, is that history describes the mechanisms of Defoe's novels not because it represents some given literary form but because it constitutes a mode, a way of reading or interpreting experience that does not dictate formally perfect endings. Unlike spiritual autobiography, history is open-ended; and even if Defoe owes some debt to spiritual autobiography, Hans Frei suggests that he wrote in an age in which biblical narrative was subject to the same scrutiny as secular history. This is not to repeat the conventional criticism that Defoe is flawed because his plots are too episodic: rather, the episodes serve a cumulative function by revealing how characters become readers within the plots, thus directing Defoe's readers how to read the world. Like the ending of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas in which there is no conclusion, the open forms of Defoe's narratives encourage the reader to apply what they learn. As Moll Flanders puts it, "The Moral indeed of all my History is left to be gather'd by the Senses and Judgment of the Reader; I am not Qualified to preach to them, let the Experience of one Creature completely Wicked, and compleatly Miserable be a Store -35- house of useful warning to those that read." In brief, history is, for Defoe's narrators and readers equally, an instrument of knowledge.

The two chief metaphors for this activity are the reading of history-situating the self in time-and the narrator's development of topographical or geographical knowledge-situating the self in space. Both metaphors presuppose that useful knowledge is primarily visual, just as reading must be thought of as a visual negotiation with graphic signs: a tract often credited to Defoe, An Essay upon Literature (1724), analyzes the development of systems of writing in different cultures, and argues that politically and economically viable cultures are literate, not oral. Thus, the claim in Colonel Jack, Memoirs of a Cavalier, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and Roxana is that the narrator's account has been transcribed and edited from an orally delivered version. This calls to our attention the fact that the book is an artificial and ultimately arbitrary compilation of manuscripts or accounts. And as the editor or publisher of Moll Flanders points out, we cannot expect these accounts to be complete, since "no Body can write their own Life to the full End of it."

Moreover, we see Robinson engaged in the activity of editing his own journal, and Roxana editing her story. Roxana also appears partly conscious that her account, like the accounts of others within her tale, is fragmentary. The end of the novel is taken up with Roxana's longabandoned daughter, Susan, pursuing her mother. Amy acts as a kind of detective shielding Roxana from exposure, and she reports that Susan's discourse "consisted of broken Fragments of Stories, such as the Girl herself had heard so long ago." Other spies and observers populate Defoe's narratives: Robinson constantly uses his spyglass from a lookout; the cavalier records how often he patiently observed Gustavus Adolphus's military councils so that he is able to reveal the fatal discrepancy between that king and Charles I ("And here I experienced the Truth of an old English Proverb," he writes, "That Standers-by see more than the Gamesters."); Colonel Jack acts like Addison's Mr. Spectator when he returns to London, because since he is believed to be French, he can observe events from an ironic perspective; H. F. becomes a special observer of events in the plague-stricken city because he is made an inspector; Moll spies on the gentleman whom she has met in Bath; Amy spies on Roxana's first husband; Roxana's Quaker friend acts as her spy, and so on.

The two texts in which the topos of historical reading serves most obviously as a catalytic force are Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack. -36-

Both narrators are educated in the course of time by tutors who teach them literacy and cartography. We can detect a comparable development in Robinson's perspective on his experience when he calculates that his island is located in the mouth of the Orinoco River, and the turn of events during the plague is marked in part by H. F.'s leaving London, traveling to Greenwich, and surveying the Thames from a prospect, as if to provide himself literally and symbolically with a broader perspective on events in the city. Moll writes that, even on her second visit to Virginia, she only had a vague knowledge of the American colonies, and "I, that till I wrote this, did not know what the word Geographical signify'd": the very act of writing here expands the writer's consciousness of space.

Emerging from no background at all, both Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack aspire to become gentlemen, and their growth in literacy is closely related to a redefinition of the gentleman in which they, along with their creator, are engaged. Their tales thus inscribe both cognitive and social ambitions. Colonel Jack raises the issue of how we are to take his story, since he hopes that "my History will find a place in the World." Imbibing the rumor that he is the son of a gentlewoman, he acts as "a kind of Historian"-though an oral historian who gleans his knowledge from "old Soldiers and Tars." His early career as a criminal coincides with his illiteracy: in time, he discovers how valuable it would be to read, not least in order to calculate the interest he makes on a sum he has left in safekeeping with a gentleman. Finally realizing that not knowing how is a handicap even within his doubtful profession, he learns to read in six months, and the narrative immediately propels him from his criminal life into army service and thence to Virginia, which, as it does for Moll, proves to be an environment that makes a new person of him. He learns to rule the slaves on his master's estates by benevolence instead of force, creating a bond of gratitude rather than fear; and he soon succeeds on his own estates by the same principle. (Colonel Jack later becomes a grateful supporter of the Hanoverian succession after he benefits from a general pardon to those involved in the 1715 rebellion: he is thus repaid in kind.)

The middle of the book involves several changes at once: having described his success, the narrator pauses to "Impose a short Digression on the Reader," which provides the first important moment of selfreflection. He suffers a kind of hell, but not one generated by genuine religious feeling "but from meer Reasonings with myself, and from -37- being arriv'd to a Capacity of making a right Judgement of things more than before." This is a Lockean rather than a providential development, one confirmed by a new love of books, especially "Livy's Roman History, the History of the Turks, the English History of Speed, and others; the History of the Low Country Wars, the History of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and the History of the Spaniard's Conquest of Mexico." He instantly mentions a new servant whom «Fate» places in his way. This man is "an excellent Schollar" with a "liberal Education," and Colonel Jack learns Latin; the plantation does better than ever during the next twelve years. Colonel Jack is increasingly burdened with a conscience about his state, and causes his «Tutor» to turn from teaching him Latin to instructing him in the scriptures, but biblical instruction is interspersed with "History," stimulating Colonel Jack's desire to see more of the world: this introduces the second half of his tale, which is more episodic than the first, although it finally returns him to Virginia, to a wife, and from there to trade and riches in the West Indies. The reader learns of his wealth through the appropriate journals, books, and lists. As in Roxana, the plot ends rather abruptly with Colonel Jack living in retirement, as if to create some physical space between himself and his past and between the reader and the «History» that he has presented. If we are led to repentance, as he hopes, the means of persuasion follows a historical method. The reader must contemplate the distinction between example and precept, between raw experience and some account of its total significance: as it surfaces in the course of the narrative, the language of providence is too wayward to achieve that result on its own.

Like Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton falls into two parts. At first, Captain Bob, as he is also known, travels extensively in Africa, crossing deserts and lakes, meeting exotic animals, and confronting native peoples; for a change of career, he becomes a pirate, gets very rich, and has a last-minute spasm of conscience about his wealth. Even more patently than Colonel Jack, the narrative is more concerned with revealing its historical method than with securing a satisfactorily providential ending: in the first paragraph, Captain Singleton explicitly makes such method his subject. He becomes literate fairly early on in his career, learning a smattering of Latin, writing "a tolerable Hand," and reading "Charts and Books." The meandering style of the accounts of his African journey is explained to some extent by the fact that, since he didn't understand navigation at the time, he kept no journal of his exploits. The journey -38- becomes slightly more purposeful when the gunner acts as a tutor: he is "an excellent Mathematician, a good Scholar, and a compleat Sailor," and teaches Captain Bob "all the Sciences useful for Navigation, and particularly… the Geographical Part of Knowledge." This training "laid the Foundation of a general Knowledge of things in my Mind." Eventually, the party meets a European in an African village, a «Gentleman» and scholar, who knows the region and the way to the sea. The European recounts his own "History," and though the party stays to accumulate more gold and ivory, this is the end of the African venture, as if to suggest that cartographic knowledge is really the most valuable plunder Captain Singleton has gained.

William the Quaker becomes Captain Singleton's mentor and guide in the second part. William is always pacific, but at the same time bent on profit. The demise of their joint career as pirates is precipitated by an expedition to Ceylon, where they encounter hostile natives who almost get the better of them. At this juncture, Defoe, having stated that William already knows the tale of Captain Knox's experience there, concludes the episode by reproducing a long passage from Knox's story. Critics often see this as a clumsy device by an author too keen to capitalize on the success of Robinson Crusoe. But if this passage is the product of haste, it merely reveals more baldly Defoe's concern with parallel history-we are given comparative stories to judge-and this method of reading is adumbrated within Knox's own tale, since he has as his companions two early-seventeenth-century tracts, Charles Bayly's Practice of Pietie (1620), and Richard Rogers's Seven Treatises Leading and Guiding to True Happiness (1603). He then miraculously happens on a Bible, and, deciding to escape from Ceylon, finally reaches a Dutch harbor, which causes Knox and his native helper to thank God for his providence. The providential significance of Knox's tale is heavily marked by Knox's engagement with devotional texts; but what is relatively easy for Knox to interpret in his life as divine guidance is less easy for Defoe's reader to see in Captain Singleton's tale. This difference in narrative meaning is highlighted by the juxtaposition of Knox's and Singleton's accounts, whereby the latter cannot so easily ascribe events to providential action.

A less indirect exercise in the parallel reading of history is Memoirs of a Cavalier. The book is cleanly divided into two parts to enforce the comparisons Defoe asks his reader to make. Accordingly, we discover that the story is not just about the dangers of civil war. In fact, the cav -39- alier first observes and serves Gustavus Adolphus in his brilliant military exploits on behalf of Protestant Christendom against the French, but we also see Gustavus Adolphus disappear from the scene, and his generals fatally divide their energies after his death. The Memoirs are in large part about the value of good counsel; thus in the second part, which describes the course of the English Civil War, Charles I condemns himself by his inability to choose or to take advice. Charles's failure is underscored by Prince Rupert's notorious impetuosity on the battlefield: in both cases action is singular, rash, and unpremeditated. The central issue is one of political and military method: the cavalier measures all strategies against the "Method of the King of Sweden." This establishes a pattern that is matched not among the royalists but, finally, in that model of virtue, the parliamentarian Sir Thomas Fairfax. Defoe's purpose is thus somewhat subversive, since the analogies his history sets up show the values of good republican as well as good Protestant government. He does provide a list of "providences," as he calls them, but the list is drawn up by a Roman Catholic, which means that readers still have to judge the application of these incidents to the cavalier's experience, just as the cavalier reminds us that his private history must be compared with or supplemented by public history. He writes: "The History of the Times will supply the Particulars which I omit, being willing to confine my self to my own Accounts and Observations; I was now no more an Actor, but a melancholly Observator of the Misfortunes of the Times."

Defoe and "Character"

Just as it is a mistake to ask Defoe to present us with conventional novelistic criteria for judging his narratives, so it would be a mistake to think of Defoean character as primarily psychologistic in its nature and growth. This is not to say that a character's individual circumstances cannot create intense emotion: Defoe powerfully conveys Moll's agonies in Newgate and Roxana's terror at being discovered by her daughter. Critics are also prone to celebrate Moll's and Roxana's energetic commitment to a criminal or sinful life and their feverish dedication to the acquisition of wealth. And it is also possible to think of Robinson Crusoe as profoundly egocentric. But nevertheless I think that in Defoe, character as such remains remarkably static, as changing circumstances induce different emotions that-while they often change -40- dramatically-are not truly cumulative. These emotions cannot constitute continuous psychological development of the kind we expect, for example, from Henry James, in part owing to the episodic nature of the narrative itself. In this sense, Swift's Gulliver is not so far removed from his supposedly «novelistic» cousins in Defoe.

But the representation of a continuous internal state is disrupted also because Defoe seems vexed by the question of what constitutes identity in the first place. He certainly wrote in an age when questions of individual identity were hotly debated and further complicated by a political and ethical issue: how is an individual constituted or defined in relation to his or her social and political roles? Defoe, we must remember, was a profoundly political writer in a profoundly political age. To bolster his reading of the rise of the novel, Watt cites Locke's notion that identity is composed of individual consciousness through time; but he fails to mention that Locke's central criterion for identity is to some extent antiessentialist, since persons are confirmed as such by receiving rewards and punishments at judgment day for their actions during this life. The criterion for individual identity in this light is more external, more socially constituted than Watt seems to imply. What links a person at one time with the same person at another is his or her history, and in Defoe that history is largely rendered in terms of events and actions rather than states of mind.

Thus, although characters in all the tales speak autobiographically, they do so as if able to observe themselves from without, and with the awareness that their identity derives in part from being seen or described by others within a public space. Part of this phenomenon may follow from the fiction that the narratives are written, edited, or published some years after the events described. Part of it stems from the fact that the narrators tell their tales at some physical distance from the scenes they describe. As one critic puts it, exile is often the condition of narrative-a point that Colonel Jack himself makes about his own "Exile"-and the same insight arises more oddly in Robinson's famous moment of encountering the footprint in the sand, because he wonders whether "this Foot might be the Print of my own Foot": the self is briefly constituted by a displaced imprint of part of the body. And part of the phenomenon also emerges from the narrators' tendency to paint themselves as emblems or moral devices for their readers to contemplate: Robinson speaks of himself as an «emblem»; Moll calls herself a «Memento»; Roxana uses the phrase "a standing Monument"; and -41- Colonel Jack depicts himself and a partner in crime as "something like the Cock in the Fable," displacing identity into a predetermined dramatic scene. Similarly, characters remember that their names are the product of the reputation they have earned: this is obviously true of Captain Singleton, and Moll remembers that the way her circumstances are described is as important as some other actuality. Thus Moll says at one point that she is "a single Person again, as I may call my self"; and later, she describes a traveling companion as "my Friend, as I call'd her."

One critic sees the habit of converting the self into an emblem as proof of Defoe's «Puritan» habits of representation. But the «self» that emerges operates at some distance from the speaking «I» for other, perhaps less logical reasons as well. The self seems oddly disjointed in other ways: Captain Singleton says in a telling moment, "I had nobody to vouch for me what I was, or from whence I came." Likewise, no character, apart from Robinson Crusoe and H. F., is known by his or her true, or essential name, and H. F.'s name is nothing if not cryptic (though Defoe had an uncle Henry Foe). All the other characters are defined by arbitrary, usually generic or titular names: Colonel Jack is only given that title to distinguish him from two other «Johns» who are designated «Captain» and «Major» according to their respective ages. «Singleton» is reputedly Captain Singleton's surname, but the «Captain» comments in advance on what he becomes by action and reputation in the course of his tale; «Bob» is an arbitrary first name-"it seems they never knew by what Name I was Christen'd"-so in signing himself «CAPTAINBOB» at the end of the entire narrative, the narrator has finally shed any trace of his natural origins. Moll Flanders is not Moll's true name; it is the name by which Moll becomes notorious in criminal gossip (the name thus becomes at once a kind of linguistic currency and a purely public feature of identity), and refers synecdochically to Moll's trade as a prostitute (moll), and to her propensity for stealing cloth (Flanders being a source of cloth as well as reputedly of the best prostitutes). Very early in her story, Moll falls in love and sleeps with the elder brother in the family that has sheltered her. She feels that her position renders her truly his wife no matter how her position is socially constituted. This mistake about essence carries with it a real pathos, and if there is one growth in Moll's consciousness, it comes in her recognition of her essentially social identity. She says to her seducer, "if I have been perswaded to believe that I am really, and in Essence of the -42- Thing your Wife, shall I now give the Lye to all those Arguments, and call myself your Whore, or Mistress, which is the same thing?" But later, she has learned to assume a range of roles to manipulate her circumstances: in her role as a criminal, "generally I took up new Figures, and contriv'd to appear in new Shapes every time I went abroad."

As one critic has phrased it, Defoe characteristically renders the self as "displaced." He tends to depict characters' propensity to discover aspects of themselves in others, or others' tendencies to assume, as if by osmosis, the narrator's qualities. In Roxana, Amy shares and manages Roxana's plot to the extent that even their sexual histories are intertwined: in a reversal of the usual anthropological model, female bonding is secured by trading in men. Amy's management of Roxana's reputation by manipulating gossip is also a participation in Roxana's identity since that identity is inseparable (until the end) from her public value. Moll develops a symbiotic relationship with her «governess» or fence; Robinson has Xury at the beginning (whom he sells) and Friday at the end (whom he has effectively enslaved), almost as if they play the fool and Edgar to Robinson's Lear. The episodes in Robinson Crusoe conclude with Friday committing daring exploits in the Pyrenees, defeating wolves and a bear. These incidents are curiously at odds with the story as a whole, although we could read Friday's action as Crusoe's projected desire for dramatic activity after years of enforced domesticity on the island. Moll, Roxana, and Captain Singleton also develop relationships with Quakers, who represent a community that itself was tangentially related to English society as a whole. Like the Jews in European intellectual life, these characters have a peculiar perspective on a society in which they participate and yet in some sense resist; and Quaker pacifism (in Captain Singleton) and honesty (in Moll Flanders and Roxana) differentiate these figures from a world in which the narrators would otherwise find only projections of their worse motives.

Roxana is also a name that clothes an identity with a certain reputation, one that both she and Amy are keen to manipulate and censor: the issue is often a question of how Roxana is known or said to be known, so that gossip as a form of social advertising assumes a high value. Significantly, the truth about Roxana's private identity and her past surfaces in the figure of her long-abandoned daughter who tenaciously pursues her; and it is equally significant that only at this point in the plot do we learn that Roxana's true name is the same as her daughter's, Susan. (Roxana reports this as if there were an identity linking her with -43- her daughter: "She was my own Name," she writes [my emphasis].) Here, true identity comes as a threat both to the narrator and to the continuity of narrative itself: Roxana breaks off soon after the protagonist flees to Holland to escape the potential consequences of discovery. True identity presents an equally significant threat to Moll, since it is by such knowledge that she learns that she has married her own brother: few themes could better threaten social and narrative development than incest. Roxana's real name also threatens her politically, since she has earlier enjoyed the changeability of public and conventional definition, such that even her gender becomes fluid: she tells the merchant who proposes to her, "I wou'd be a Man-Woman; for as I was born free, I wou'd die so." (She elaborates elsewhere by writing, "while a Woman was single, she was a Masculine in her politick Capacity.")

I have suggested that the abiding question seems to be how the individual enters both a political and fiscal economy. Defoe's narratives appear to pose it by more than one device: like the individual in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan or John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government, the character begins life as a social minimum, a kind of atom that only becomes defined as a character and a social or political agent by virtue of accumulating experience in the public world. The obligations individuals develop are not the most obvious or natural ones, so that, as in Hobbes's contract by which such individuals yield up their powers to the sovereign, we are made conscious of the artifice by which those individuals deal with the world and with others. The emphasis on the artifice necessary for the construction of a viable social economy explains in part why narrators dissimulate even to those they love, and why characters are often obsessed by clothing, since they are conscious of how they are seen and marked from without: in the last part of her story, Roxana becomes increasingly defined by the fact that she has on occasion donned a Turkish costume; and her daughter intuits the truth about her precisely because that costume has become a public and forensic sign of who Roxana is. One symptom of Moll's economic and social confidence at the end of her story is the fact that she dresses her husband James in finery "to make him appear, as he really was, a very fine Gentleman." The preface to Roxana appropriately speaks of tale-telling as a form of dressing up: the editor will not dress up "the Story in worse Cloathes than the Lady."

In contrast to the Victorian hero or heroine, Defoe's characters become less rather than more essentially themselves. They always have -44- tangential relations to their own family histories-or have none-and often they abandon the family obligations they do develop, as if to render the construction of social bonds as strenuous as possible. Robinson deliberately defies his father; H. F. remains in plague-stricken London while his brother escapes (much as the fickle Restoration court escapes to Oxford). Although the cavalier retains an important tie to his father, it is clear that the paternal role is assumed by Gustavus Adolphus, the ideal king and military commander, virtues the cavalier subsequently imputes to Fairfax. Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack only have pasts and families by hearsay: thus Captain Singleton has a gypsy woman "whom I was taught to call Mother," only after he has been stolen and sold; his life of wandering seems predetermined by this upbringing. Similarly, Colonel Jack wanders in search of gentility partly because "my Nurse told me my Mother was a Gentlewoman." Roxana and Moll both abandon families and children, although Moll rediscovers her son by her brother in Virginia, and Roxana is eventually hounded by one of the children she has abandoned.

In shedding or escaping familial ties, characters seem constantly to be inventing and reinventing themselves. The strain of invention is marked in part by the completeness of Captain Singleton's and Colonel Jack's ignorance of Christian truths (in religious terms, both characters are blank slates who must make themselves); in part by a common obsession to render the self genteel, as if to defy a social category that was conventionally inherited, not made, in the century before Defoe's; and in part by the fact that Defoe invents characters whose relationship to male Protestant English society after 1688- the Whig settlement Defoe recommends-is or becomes quite tangential. Two narrators are women; it transpires that Robinson, Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack become Catholics; Colonel Jack participates briefly in the 1715 rebellion; though a royalist, the cavalier comes to admire Fairfax as a model commander (and by implication magistrate); and H. F. operates under dire circumstances that render all social relations eccentric and strange: here the plague functions as one of those scenes of erasure that permit us to reimagine how a society could construct itself out of whole cloth. And though Roxana and Crusoe know their family background, they are foreigners: Roxanais the daughter of French Huguenots, and Crusoe the son of a German, Kreutznauer, born in Bremen.

Given Defoe's obsessions with money and commerce, it is also -45- unsurprising that characters come to operate as public counters within a system of exchange, and if they accumulate value in the process of time it is not in psychological but in fiscal terms. Not only do the characters usually make money in the course of things, but they themselves also operate as monetary units that gain value merely by having circulated around the world the way goods were supposed to do in Defoe's mercantilism. Thus Captain Singleton begins badly, but well, by being sold as a baby. Roxana constantly makes money, but also becomes, crucially, a prince's "Idol," by which epithet she realizes how as a sexual creature she is using herself as a commodity. Of the prince, she says, "I had… perfectly engrossed him"; and she writes, "Thus far am I a standing Mark of the Weakness of Great Men, in their Vice… [for] they raise the Value of the Object which they pretend to pitch upon, by their Fancy." Here the term «Mark» conflates public and narrative signs with the public nature of currency, so that dressing up is an attempt to raise one's value in both economies. Similarly, Moll circulates both at home and in the colonies, which constantly increases her value. As for Colonel Jack and Robinson Crusoe, early investment in the colonies continues to increase their wealth even as their local fortunes fluctuate, and the narrative «end» is signaled by the return on those investments. In a less dramatic way this is also true of Captain Singleton, who places some of his spoils at the disposal of a gentleman who ensures that they earn interest. And because for Defoe London is the hub of commerce, London exercises a pull for all-except the cavalier, whose concerns are exclusively political.

Finally, how do the narratives prove political? We have seen that Memoirs of a Cavalier recommends a figure like Sir Thomas Fairfax, and it seems from other texts that Defoe favors a kind of benevolent patriarchy, which he carefully opposes to the tyranny he associates with late Caroline culture. To promote the values of such patriarchy, which would ensure a cooperative society, he also develops not only a language of contract but of gratitude and sentiment that will provide the means for understanding. The importance of contracts is reinforced by Defoe's emphasis on the graphic or writing: for example, Moll negotiates her marriage to her brother (as it transpires) by conducting a dialogue on a windowpane with his diamond ring, then on a sheet of paper. Her jeweler-landlord shows Roxana "a Contract in Writing" to engage her in marriage; and the genuineness of her bond to her last husband, the Dutch merchant, is proven by a mutual exchange of accounts. He -46- brings to her boxes "full of Books, and Papers, and Parchments, I mean, Books of Accompts, and Writings"; she in turn produces proofs of her investments in real estate; and he seals his love for her by returning "all my Writings into my own Hands again."

We have already seen, in other narratives, how instrumental literacy is to the self's dealings with the world. If contracts are seen as graphic documents, one problem that emerges is anthropological: what constitutes a contract with nonliterate or preliterate societies? This is obviously of concern to Robinson, but it is of special interest in Captain Singleton, where the wanderings in Africa are not only the occasion for depiction of the exotic, but for testing the conditions under which the explorers can feel safe in their dealings with African tribes. Early on, the text reminds us of the Hobbesian postulate about the state of nature: after realizing that not all «Savages» are cannibals, Captain Singleton remarks however that they are "only civil for Fear." Captain Singleton himself becomes the contractual magistrate of his group, just as he remarks that another tribe is "brutish," using a term with an unmistakably Hobbesian ring. There is a fascination henceforth with the signs that either the party or the Africans make to indicate peaceful intentions: thus at one point, "one of our Company remember'd the Signal of Friendship which the Natives made us from the South Part of the Island, viz. of setting up a long Pole, and put us in Mind, that perhaps it was the same thing to them as a Flag of Truce was to us." Later, the party wounds and then heals a «royal» African prisoner, who swears an oath of loyalty to Captain Singleton by breaking an arrow in two and setting the point against his breast; and he subsequently becomes known as "the Black Prince." He in turn ensures that the natives voluntarily submit to enslavement by the Europeans, and it also becomes their task to convey the appropriate "Signal of Peace" to those other tribes whose dialects they do not know. In his career as a pirate, the question becomes for Captain Singleton whether he can trust the hoisting of the white flag, and in Ceylon he is betrayed, since "I thought all Nations in the World, even the most savage People, when they held out a Flag of Peace, kept the Offer of Peace made by that Signal, very sacredly." Thus Defoe reminds us of the necessity for some bonding fiction between peoples, but characteristically leaves the answer up in the air.

Defoe's social prescriptions are rendered perhaps more clearly than elsewhere in A Journal of the Plague Year, which in some ways is Defoe's -47- most satisfying book. The general strategy is to ask us to imagine a circumstance in which ordinary human life comes to a standstill (a plague, which I think Defoe presents as a metaphor for the South Sea Bubble that had ruined thousands the year before Defoe's book appeared) and thus to reimagine the terms by which we bond to survive. Two features stand out. First, Defoe incorporates a long digression involving three men-John, Thomas, and Richard — who succeed in saving a group of refugees from the plague-stricken city by illegally leading them outside the city confines to Epping. The group does not survive, however, by communal effort alone, for it is forced ultimately to rely on the benevolence of a local magistrate. Defoe's polity is not as republican as it seems at first, but rather prescribes a benign magistrate of the kind Colonel Jack exemplifies by his benevolent treatment of his slaves in Virginia: the carrot substitutes for the stick, Whig for Tory hegemony.

Second, more clearly in this book than elsewhere, Defoe begins to sketch the possibilities for a kind of affective and sentimental means of knowing others. As the plague progresses, the space of the book is filled with gestures and cries, there being some experiences for which mere words are inadequate. And in circumstances that emphasize the special distress of suffering families, Defoe presents the possibility that a gestural and lachrymose rhetoric of the body may transcend language. In a key episode, H. F. visits Robert the Waterman, whose family is locked with the plague inside their house. Robert weeps as H. F. asks why he has abandoned them, to which Robert replies:

"I do not abandon them; I work for them as much as I am able; and blessed be the Lord, I keep them from want"; and with that I observed that he lifted up his eyes to heaven, with a countenance that presently told me I had happened on a man that was no hypocrite, but a serious, religious, good man.

One man struck with grief dies of a broken heart; another man's head literally sinks between his shoulders. This is hardly realism, any more than are similar moments in Smollett and Dickens; but it all amounts to a gestural and sentimental rhetoric that begins to cordon the family off from the larger concerns of the polity and anticipates the private and sentimental worlds of Sterne and The Man of Feeling.

Richard Kroll -48-

Selected Bibliography

Backscheider Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Boardman Michael M. Defoe and the Uses of Narrative. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

Brown Homer O. "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe." English Literary History 38 (1971): 562 -90.

Hunter J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in "Robinson Crusoe." Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966.

Kay Carol. Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.

McKillop Alan Dugald. Early Masters of English Fiction. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956.

Novak Maximillian E. Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.

Richetti John J. Daniel Defoe. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Sill Geoffrey M. Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, 1713–1719. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.

Starr George A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965.

Sutherland James. Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1971.

-49-

Sex, Lies, and Invisibility: Amatory Fiction from the Restoration to Mid-Century

THE sensational tales of sexual intrigue published by and for English women in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were among the most widely read texts of their day, rivaling best-sellers like Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe in popularity. Today, however, these amatory fictions tend to be virtually invisible in traditional accounts of literary history, briefly noticed as primitive and inconsequential progenitors of «the» novel. While traditional historians may admit that the early realism of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding shares some features with amatory narratives, they nevertheless consistently define the work of the canonical Augustan novelists according to how essentially different it is from that produced by their female contemporaries, how much of an improvement, how completely path-breaking. The very category "amatory fiction" functions in such schemes as a kind of negative space, insignificant except as it helps to define the privileged category "novel," from which it is always excluded.

Any new consideration of amatory fiction, then, must remain suspicious of that very category, which represents less a discrete species with definitive formal characteristics than a constellation of texts that may have little in common except their exclusion from received gender and genre hierarchies. Still, undertakings like this volume necessarily presuppose some sort of taxonomy, and the inclusion of these texts here is important enough to justify a certain amount of categorizing, so long as it is recognized as such. Moreover, despite formal diversity so considerable as to make their unity as a genre arguable, many amatory fictions -50- do share certain thematic concerns, social functions, and historical positions. It is in terms of these common characteristics that they are discussed here.

The amatory fictions of the early eighteenth century were a mixed breed. Their ancestry goes back to the Italian novelles, to Cervantes (particularly his Exemplary Novels, translated by Mappe in 1640), and to French romances of the seventeenth century, especially the work of Gauthier de Costes de la Calprenède (1614–1663) and Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701). Perhaps the most important single influence was that of the Portuguese Letters, first translated into English by Sir Roger L'Estrange as Five Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier in 1677. After the prodigious success of this supposedly authentic set of letters from a lovesick nun to the man who has abandoned her, many authors, male and female, tried their hand at scandalous writing of various sorts.

But three women- Aphra Behn (c. 1640–1689), Delariviere Manley (c. 1670–1724) and Eliza Haywood (c. 1693–1756) — held undisputed preeminence during the eighteenth century as authors of scandalous fiction. Indeed, the work of this "fair Triumvirate" (as they were first called in 1732; Janet Todd calls them the "naughty triumvirate") was so well known that it was routinely equated by their contemporaries with subversive and transgressive female creativity itself, and for the rest of the century women writers struggled to live down the infamous trio's licentious personal and literary styles and to make female authorship more respectable. In an effort to understand "amatory fiction," then, we might do worse than to look closely at the works of these three authors, asking why they were so powerful in their time and why their power has been so problematic ever since.

"Love," Eliza Haywood explains in her Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), "is… dangerous to the softer Sex; they cannot arm themselves too much against it, and for whatever Delights it affords to the Successful few, it pays a double Portion of Wretchedness to the numerous Unfortunate." The comment might be seen as epitomizing the assumptions of amatory fiction, where love almost always brings fleeting pleasure to self-centered, fickle men and lasting misery to the women who trust them. In amatory writing's most typical plot, an innocent young girl is seduced by an experienced, older man who promises her everlasting love but abandons her ruthlessly once his physical desires have been sated. Often the perfidious male is married -51- already; usually he is of aristocratic birth; frequently he is the young woman's relative or guardian, a circumstance that makes his behavior even more shocking, puts her in a most defenseless and victimized position, and allows for titillating suggestions of incest.

That women trust men is, in these stories, both their greatest error and their unavoidable fate, since desirable young women must by definition be entirely naive about sexual matters. Like the culture that produced them, amatory works placed young women in a double bind: without sexual experience, they are the natural prey of more experienced male predators; with sexual experience, they are whores. A young woman in Augustan society, after all, could not actually experiment with the other sex and keep her good reputation, not even so far as to hold a private conversation, receive a letter, or be seen in a public place in the company of a man; she had very little means of discovering mysterious and dangerous male ways. But she could read amatory fiction and learn to avoid the fate of the women it depicted.

Warning the innocent is the stated purpose of many, though not all, writers of amatory fiction. The great exception is Aphra Behn, the first member of the "fair Triumvirate," whose stories are often virtually amoral, distributing rewards and punishments with very little reference to Christian, poetic, or even secular justice. In her Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–1687), for instance, Behn narrates a series of illicit love affairs involving a small group of young people related by marriage or blood. She includes in a subplot the almost obligatory amatory narrative of seduced and abandoned female innocence, but concentrates most of her attention on the sexual exploits of persons of both sexes who are equally devoid of innocence and without moral scruple, characters with whom she clearly expects the reader to identify. Behn's heroine, Sylvia, still appalls undergraduates with her heartless, roaming sexual desire and her incapacity for guilt, faithfulness, or remorse. Predatory and mercenary, Sylvia always manages to get what she wants, and ends the novel as insouciant and sexually adventurous as she began it. Likewise in The Fair Jilt (1688), the unrestrained sexuality of the corrupt Miranda brings her love, wealth, title, and safety from the law; she is rewarded for years of criminal behavior and sexual aggression with a quiet life in the country and a doting husband. Behn's editor, Montagu Summers, notes with dismay how "sparingly and little" Miranda's culpable behaviors are punished, and how positively she is portrayed. Behn does include some criticism of Miranda (though, as -52- Summers notes, not much), but she is more interested in depicting Miranda's power than in warning (or convincing) female readers of their powerlessness.

Behn's eighteenth-century followers, however, found it necessary to appeal directly to an ethic of female instruction, and to ensure that evil characters were punished and correct moral lessons drawn. They worked within an increasingly moralistic culture, and their fictions were closely tied to bourgeois values. In Behn and Manley the ideal and most passionate sexual relationship is the extramarital affair, free from the blighting considerations of property; but in Haywood, chronologically the last of the three great Augustan writers of amatory fiction, monogamous marriages based on love and faithfulness become increasingly important denouements (though the action usually takes place in the period before marriage). It becomes typical for eighteenth-century amatory writing to go to great lengths to insist upon its moral and didactic purposes. Indeed, as in Defoe and Richardson, the action often stops dead while the author pauses to comment sententiously upon it. After narrating a particularly vivid tale of seduction and abandonment, one of Manley's narrators pauses to point out that the life of the unfortunate heroine after her abandonment was "one continu'd Scene of Horror, Sorrow, and Repentance"; she finally died "a true Landmark: to warn all believing Virgins from shipwracking their Honour upon (that dangerous Coast of Rocks) the Vows and pretended Passion of Mankind." Haywood's The Perplex'd Dutchess; Or, Treachery Rewarded (1727) portrays a female protagonist much like Miranda in Behn's Fair Jilt. But unlike Miranda, Haywood's Duchess is "tormented by guilt and fears" even in the midst of her illgotten successes, and ends her life "in the most forlorn, unfriended, and unpitied state; not all her Riches being able to procure her one Moment's ease from the Racks of a guilty Thought," while the virtuous married couple she attempts to defraud goes on to achieve political power and domestic bliss.

But while moralizing increasingly permeates these texts, the sexual exploits that provoke it are always represented with lingering delight. Indeed, the emphasis on sexuality is perhaps the most noticeable feature of amatory fiction. When in Behn's The Dumb Virgin; Or, The Force of Imagination (1698) the hero Dangerfield walks beneath the window of the beautiful Maria just as she is leaning out, the description of her dishabille is characteristic: -53-

He saw her in all the heightning Circumstances of her Charms… her Nightgown hanging loose, discover'd her charming Bosom… her Breasts with an easy Heaving, show'd the Smoothness of her Soul and of her Skin; their Motions were so languishingly soft, that they cou'd not be said to rise and fall, but rather to swell up towards Love, the Heat of which seem'd to melt them down again; some scatter'd jetty Hairs, which hung confus'dly over her Breasts, made her Bosom show like Venus caught in Vulcan's Net, but 'twas the Spectator, not she, was captivated.

In Haywood's Love in Excess, the innocent Melliora begs her guardian Count D'Elmont to leave her bedroom, where he has come uninvited. "What!" he replies, "when I have thee thus! Thus naked in my Arms, Trembling, Defenceless, Yeilding, Panting with equal Wishes?" And Manley's unnamed Duke, guardian to the lovely and innocent Charlot, sneaks into her room while she is "uncovered in a melancholy careless Posture," and proceeds to rape her:

She was going to rise; but he prevented her, by flying to her Arms, where, as we may call it, he nail'd her down to the Bed with Kisses;… whilst yet her Surprise made her doubtful of his Designs he took Advantage of her Confusion to accomplish 'em; neither her Prayers, Tears, nor Strugglings, could prevent him.

As these examples suggest, amatory novels are not squeamish about sexual matters, and they routinely connect sexuality to voyeurism, exploitation, and violence. Indeed, most critics of amatory fiction accurately mark its connection to today's so-called soft pornography. As in pornography, the language of lust in amatory fiction follows codes of male arousal: sexual excitement is created visually, and bodies, especially female bodies, are routinely fetishized, as in the description of Behn's Maria (who, significantly, is unable to speak) leaning out of her window. There are many scenes like the one in Atalantis between the Duke and Charlot, where predatory men sneak around to gaze on the nearnaked bodies of unsuspecting, supine young women. When Haywood's Count D'Elmont gazes on his ward's vulnerable female body, that body is described in the slow detail typical of amatory fiction, detail obviously meant to arouse the reader as it does the desiring Count.

He beheld the Lovely Melliora in her Bed, and fast asleep, her Head was reclin'd on one of her Arms; a Pillow softer and whiter far than that it lean'd on, the other was stretch'd out, and with it's Extention had thrust down the Bed-Cloths so far, that all the Beauties of her Neck and Breast appear'd to view. He took an inexpressible Pleasure, in gazing on her as she lay. -54-

Sometimes this familiar scene is reversed, and female intruders gaze hungrily at scantily clad men whose bodies seem arranged for consumption. Indeed, such representation of female sexual desire is a hallmark of amatory writing and distinguishes it from canonical realist novels.

The Dutchess softly enter'd that little Chamber of Repose, the Weather violently hot the Umbrelloes were let down from behind the Windows, the Sashes open, and the Jessimine that cover'd 'em blew in with a gentle Fragrancy;… and to compleat the Scene, the young Germanicus in a dress and posture not very decent to describe… newly risen from the Bath, and in a loose Gown… he had thrown himself upon the Bed, pretending to Sleep, with nothing on but his Shirt and Night-Gown, which he had so indecently dispos'd, that slumbring as he appear'd, his whole Person stood confess'd to the Eyes of the Amorous Dutchess. (Manley, New Atalantis.)

But if amatory fiction can be credited with representing female desire, often that desire takes the form of an inversion of masculine appetite as it was constructed by Augustan imaginations. Here the Duchess eyes Germanicus with precisely the sort of appropriating, lascivious gaze that men normally use on women in amatory fiction. But her looking becomes an unconscious parody of the controlling, sexual gaze of male characters rather than a challenge to it. The reader is invited to snicker along with Germanicus, who is not really the unwitting object of the Duchess's gaze at all (as Melliora really is for Count D'Elmont in Love in Excess). On the contrary, he is secretly awake throughout the scene, and has staged his own «seduction» in league with his male friend Fortunatus, the Duchess's sated lover, who waits to burst in and accuse the Duchess of infidelity. Furthermore, the Duchess thinks that the man she is gazing on is Fortunatus, with whom she had arranged a rendezvous. At a crucial moment in their lovemaking when she might have clearly seen Germanicus's face, she closes her eyes in ecstasy, and so "her own Desires help'd the Deceit." While on the surface it recognizes the Duchess's desire, the Germanicus episode in fact denies it most emphatically by suggesting that female desire is at best only a somewhat comic, easily manipulated and collusive version of male desire. Male desire remains the primary agent in the scene: men still define and dictate sexuality, and women are still denied authentic, alternative sexual desire. The Duchess de l'Inconstant is a pawn in the familiar game of male sexual control as surely as if she were herself reclining on the bed. -55-

Behn's Miranda, far more in control when she turns her boldly sexual gaze on a handsome young priest, is perhaps a more promising representation of female desire.

She gaz'd upon him, while he bow'd before her, and waited for her Charity, till she perceiv'd the lovely Friar to blush, and cast his Eyes to the Ground… At last she… gave him a Pistole; but with so much Deliberation and Leisure, as easily betray'd the Satisfaction she took in looking on him. (The Fair Jilt)

But here too, female desire is undercut in the act of being imagined. To show a woman wanting a man, Behn reverses traditional positions and roles, making Miranda the aggressor and the priest the shrinking object of lust, but keeping intact the assumption that desire manifests itself as mastery. After staring the priest down, Miranda goes on to replicate the typical actions of a man bent on sexual conquest: she dreams of the young friar naked in bed, then tricks him into a private interview (in the confessional, no less) where she addresses him in the codified language of the male seducer: she calls him her "cruel Charmer," begs for his "Pity," and holds him by his clothes when he attempts to flee. Angered at the priest's resistance, Miranda even issues the ultimate threat a man could make to a woman in Augustan times: "I will either force you to abandon that dull Dissimulation, or you shall die, to prove your Sanctity real… I will ruin thee, [and] take away your Life and Honour." As the scene lurches toward its parodic climax, Behn reverses every cliché of female and male sexual roles:

The trembling young Man… demanded what she would have him do? When she reply'd-… Come to my Arms, my trembling, longing Arms… At these Words she rose from his Feet, and snatching him in her Arms, he could not defend himself from receiving a thousand Kisses from the lovely Mouth of the charming Wanton.

"I own your Power," the still-resisting priest gasps. His ordeal ends when Miranda, unable actually to rape him, accuses him of rape instead. The other priests, hurrying to rescue her, "found Miranda and the good Father very indecently struggling; which they mis-interpreted, as Miranda desir'd." The hapless young priest is arrested and spends many years in prison, while Miranda, as we have seen, comes to a comfortable end.

Behn's reversal of genders, though it lends comedy and exposes stereotypes, does little to revise the system of sexual force that amatory -56- fictions continue to uphold, a system that most often worked, in fiction as in practice, to enhance male prerogatives and reinforce women's comparative powerlessness. Undoubtedly, in Miranda's upside-down rape of the priest, Behn is laughing at the expense of the patriarchal love-as-rape scenarios that permeated her culture's art and social relations, scenarios that invariably represented men as lustful brutes and women as sexual prey. But Behn also makes ridiculous her sexually powerful woman-a rapist without a penis who must finally attribute to her intended victim the violent act she threatens, achieving victory only by reassuming the typical posture of cringing female. Of course, Miranda's deliberate assumption of the role of sexual victim is itself a paradoxically powerful move, a strategy that beats patriarchy, as it were, at its own game; and certainly the mere representation of a powerful woman exercising sexual desire is extraordinarily subversive (enough so, perhaps, to contribute to the continued exclusion of The Fair Jilt from the canons of eighteenth-century literature). But along with the potentially empowering aspects of amatory fiction's scenes of female lust, there are also disturbing assumptions at work. Amatory fiction's women actively desire, often initiate, and thoroughly enjoy heterosexual sex; but they consistently define and act out their desire according to the force-oriented ethic of the Augustan rake. Within such a framework, representations of female sexuality fail to exemplify a positively or uniquely female form of sexual desire, though they do succeed in creating a space for such representation. Even the most transgressive scenes, then, function in contradictory ways, at once revolutionary and conventional: they show women exercising sexual desire, and at the same time bolster phallocentric patterns of sexual dominance.

The co-optation of female sexuality by established sex-as-force systems points to the pervasive masculinist orientation at work in these texts written by and for women, an orientation also signaled by the repeated use of misogynist truisms. "'Tis the Humour of our Sex," Behn announces in a female voice, "to deny most eagerly those Grants to Lovers, for which most tenderly we sigh."

So contradictory are we to our selves, as if the Deity had made us with a seeming Reluctancy to his own Designs; placing as much Discords in our Minds, as there is Harmony in our Faces. We are a sort of aiery Clouds, whose Lightning flash out one way, and the Thunder another. Our Words and Thoughts can ne'er agree. -57-

Likewise, Manley's female narrator pauses to counsel the Duke when he is wondering whether to «possess» Charlot right away or "permit her time to know and set a value upon what she granted." "One ought never," the narrator remarks, "allow 'em [women] time to Think, their vivacity being prodigious, and their forsight exceeding short, and limited; the first hurry of their Passions, if they are but vigorously follow'd, is what is generally most favourable to Lovers." Not that giving Charlot a chance to think would much jeopardize the Duke's chances. After all, as we learn later in Atalantis, "when once a young Maid pretends to put her self upon the same Foot with a Lover at Argument, she is sure to be cast." And when in Love in Excess a man sees his girlfriend flirting with another man, Haywood genders his jealous feelings to the detriment of women: "Envy, and a sort of Womanish Spleen transported him," she informs us. Behn even goes so far as to unite her disparagement of her own sex with denigration of the genre she works in. "Women enjoy'd," she remarks in The Unfortunate Bride; Or, The Blind Lady a Beauty (1698), "are like Romances read… meet Tricks of the slight of Hand, which, when found out, you only wonder at your selves for wondering so before at them." Like its presentation of female desire as a faint replica of male desire, amatory fiction's repeated-indeed, excessive-reference to misogynist stereotypes signals its fundamental implication in androcentric codes that work to mitigate the threat of female subjectivity and sexuality.

This is not to say that the many representations of women's desire offered in these texts have no subversive power. On the contrary, no appraisal of the sexual force of amatory fiction can afford to leave out its tremendous potential for subversion. Merely by assuming a position as subject (both the central subject of the narrative and the possessor of active sexual subjectivity), even if that position is ironized, amatory fiction's desiring women threaten traditional male prerogatives based on female subjugation and objectification, and provide space for readers to imagine something new. It is important to remember that the facet of eighteenth-century prose fiction that is considered most revolutionary by critics as different as McKeon and Armstrong-its habit of making ordinary women of central importance-originated not in Richardson (as is often taught), but in amatory fiction. Furthermore, the bald statement of misogynist truisms, disturbing as it is, sometimes has a comic ring. Occasionally such stuff is presented in italics (as in the quotation from Manley above); despite the notoriously unsystematic way some -58- Augustan writers and printers used italic type, it is possible that in some cases this may suggest more self-consciousness and control than critics generally grant these writers-perhaps even a sense of humor. But caution is also required. Insofar as these texts do not themselves succeed in representing a uniquely female sexual desire, their representations of women as desiring subjects may be less an expression of new, boldly female sensibilities than a repackaging for women of the usual maleoriented social and intimate arrangements.

In this sense, Augustan amatory fictions are the direct ancestors of modern supermarket romances with their lurid, fetishistic covers, their sexually demanding men and innocent, desirable, passive women, and their insistence that sexual violence, correctly interpreted, reveals or engenders love. Indeed, without mitigating the immense cultural and historical distance between Augustan England and the contemporary United States, we can trace a distinct line of inheritance from Augustan amatory fiction to today's semipornographic mass-market romances. Recent work on the ideological functions of modern pulp reading, especially the work of Janice Radway, illuminates by implication the cultural work of Augustan England's amatory fictions and demonstrates the continuing power of the past in the present.

A latter-day variant of amatory fiction, Harlequin romances are written especially for female consumption, offering sex and love in arousing, but usually not graphic, packages. They inspire obsessive reading, and are considered by readers and critics alike to be low, throwaway forms of writing, requiring of their audience little sophistication or application. Readers of Harlequin-type romances read in order to replicate predictable sensations and reaffirm cherished assumptions. So these romances seldom challenge dominant ideologies; they work instead to shore up traditional social positions (woman as the object of sexual desire, man as its subject) and expectations (heterosexual monogamy; female devotion to children). Although readers often use these texts as a means of escape and sometimes even of resistance, their participation draws them ever more tightly into the ideological web of male privilege and female subordination. Readers read obsessively because the books manage to promise a space for female protest and desire while never quite providing it; they whet, but never satisfy, both the reader's sexual appetite and her appetite for socially transgressive autonomy. Amatory fictions work the same way; as Richetti observes, — 59- they tend more often to "flatter and exploit" than to "challenge or redefine" readers' assumptions.

Like the Harlequins and other forms of romance, amatory fictions tend to repeat a limited number of characteristic topoi (obsessively recurrent formulas, assumptions, or ideas). Among the most frequently encountered of these is the idea that love is an irresistible force: lovers are its victims, and escape is impossible. "Almighty Love," intones a fallen woman in Haywood's British Recluse (1722), "despises all Controul." "You know, Sir," young Felisinda explains to her father in Haywood's Force of Nature, "that our Passions are not the effect of Will, but Fate." In Behn's The Nun; Or, The Perjur'd Beauty (1697), a young man who finds himself desiring the woman his best friend loves cries out "I could wish I did not love you, Ardelia! But that were impossible!" As early as 1709, this topos was so familiar that Manley could attack it head-on:

Are there such violent Desires that Reason cannot suppress? Is Love such an irresistable Tyrant? Will he trample upon all Obstacles? Are the most sacred ties of no obligation in his Sense? O no! for if it were but true Love, 'twould seek the good of the Person belov'd.

Also frequently invoked in amatory tales is the notion that men are inherently changeable (either insincere to begin with or honestly incapable of keeping their many vows of faithfulness), while women are naturally more trusting and trustworthy. "Without dispute," Behn declares, "Women are by Nature more Constant and Just, than Men, and did not their first Lovers teach them the trick of Change, they would be Doves, that would never quit their Mate." Men adore women until women succumb sexually; then men begin to cool off, just as women really fall in love. "The same unaccountable thing that cools the Swain," Manley remarks toward the end of the first volume of Atalantis, "more warms the Nymph: Enjoyment (the death of Love in all Mankind) gives Birth to new Fondness, and doating Extasies in the Women; they begin later, withheld by Modesty, and by a very ill tim'd Oeconomy, take up their Fondness exactly where their Lover leaves it." Women continue pathetically to love forever, despite male faithfulness and even abuse. Alovisa, for example, in Haywood's Love in Excess, resists the importunities of a hopeful lover even though her husband is openly unfaithful and unkind. "I Love my Husband still," she cries, — 60- "with an unbated Fondness, doat upon him! faithless and cruel as he is, he still is lovely!"

Always, amatory narrators pause over protracted physical and verbal struggles between desiring men and resisting women. Women resist, but faintly; they are implicated in the force men universally use over them. Moreover, women's struggles to escape male advances actually make them more vulnerable in the intimate combat that will inevitably end in male victory, for female resistance always heightens male desire. In this representative passage from Haywood's British Recluse, several of these topoi figure at once:

My Hands were the first Victims of his fiery Pressures, then my Lips, my Neck, my Breast; and perceiving that, quite lost in Ecstasy, I but faintly resisted what he did, far greater Boldnesses ensued-My Soul dissolv'd, its Faculties o'er-power'd-and Reason, Pride, and Shame, and Fear, and every Foe to soft Desire, charm'd to Forgetfulness, my trembling Limbs refus'd to oppose the lovely Tyrant's Will! And, if my faultering Tongue entreated him to desist, or my weak Hands attempted to repulse the encroaching Liberty of his; it serv'd but, as he said, the more to inflame his Wishes.

That this description is placed into the mouth of a woman who will shortly become yet another sexual victim and whose life is blighted by the event, suggests the degree to which the repeated topoi of amatory fiction anesthetized readers to its misogynist assumptions, and implicated them in the patterns of an androcentric universe.

It is a truism of amatory fiction that intelligence ("wit") is antithetical to that all-important female attribute, beauty; the two cannot coexist in one woman. Behn points directly to this convention in The Dumb Virgin, where she creates two sisters, one merely beautiful and the other merely witty, who seem to the man who wants them both to be the separate halves of one supremely desirable woman. Love is typically reduced to sexual desire, and sex itself to acts of force often indistinguishable from rape. Indeed, sex that is not violent is worth remarking: the Duke's passion for Charlot in New Atalantis is extraordinary because "to heighten it, resistance was not at all necessary." Sexual compulsion always serves to awaken desire in female characters. The central, abiding, and most sacred relationships, except in anomalous works like Haywood's British Recluse, are neither heterosexual liaisons nor relationships between women, but friendships between men.

Even such a brief catalog of the recurrent topoi of amatory fiction -61- reveals that this writing is built around assumptions that undermine, to varying extents, the ostensible effort to represent female subjectivity. What function could such negative formulae serve for amatory fiction's readers, most of whom were women, that would keep them endlessly coming back for more? Recent work in history and literary theory, as well as recent critical studies of the works themselves, suggest several explanations for the fascination of Augustan society, and particularly of its women, with amatory fiction. These are proffered here, in highly abbreviated form, to indicate the status of current efforts to understand the function of amatory fiction in Augustan England.

We might begin by considering the double function we have already seen these works performing-both informational and sensual. Behn, Manley, Haywood, and their peers were writing for women increasingly cut off from the world outside the domestic circle. That world was, they knew, full of traps laid especially for them; even the smallest error could result in permanent social alienation. Under these circumstances, amatory fiction provided Augustan women with a sense of involvement in the outside world-which, for all its dangers and disappointments, had great advantages over restrictive domesticity-while allowing them to maintain a safe distance from it. Countless innocent heroines go pathetically to their ruin like so many lambs to the slaughter, without the benefit of amatory fiction to guide them; but readers were invited to take a stance Richetti describes as "sadly wiser but deeply sympathetic," to assume a pleasantly unfamiliar posture of worldly wisdom and experience vis-U+00EO-vis characters they could identify with but still feel superior toward. This sense of controlled danger must have combined with the exotic eventfulness of the plots and the representation of sexual thrills that many readers would have been unlikely to experience in marriage to make these works supremely attractive, especially to the ladies and would-be ladies who voraciously consumed them.

Amatory works encouraged the notion that to read them was to engage in a rebellious, scandalous activity parallel to the sexual explorations their heroines (but not their readers) were constantly engaged in. They routinely depict romance reading and novel reading as dangerous for women, inevitably connected to (and sometimes even conflated with) sexual experience. When Manley's Duke prepares to seduce Charlot, he gives her salacious reading material first. "By this dangerous reading, he pretended to shew her, that there were Pleasures her Sex were born for, and which she might consequently long to taste!" — 62-

Like Charlot, Augustan women picking up Love in Excess or The New Atalantis must have felt that they were tasting forbidden fruit.

Another reason for the great popularity of amatory fictions may have been their ability to represent peculiarly female negotiations of shifts occurring in the early eighteenth-century English economy, a man's world becoming newly oriented toward trade, commerce, capital, and profit. Under these conditions, it is perhaps not surprising, as Williamson observes, that amatory fiction's men are predatory and selfish, its women always on the defensive and fearful of abandonment. Furthermore, amatory writing catered to popular interest in the decadent lives of the rich and famous, and presented female heroines as what Beasley calls "the formal representation of an ideal of order, set against… power-mongering, lasciviousness, and corruption." In this analysis, amatory fiction served important political functions, building self-consciousness and solidarity among its female readers.

There is yet another argument for the enormous popularity of Augustan amatory fiction, one that also demonstrates the seldomnoted participation of these works in their culture's most pressing public debates. It is neither accidental nor simply predictable that amatory fiction's most common plots are plots of seduction and betrayal, that it so obsessively represents false oaths, failed promises, and broken vows. The compulsiveness with which vows are made and broken in these works demonstrates more than the ostensible lesson that women should not trust men's promises; it goes to the heart of Augustan questions about the status of personal honor and the authority of words in a world where sacred vows to God and king recently had been rendered negotiable and contingent.

The problem of broken vows constituted a significant and prolonged crisis in English culture at the end of the seventeenth century. Before this period, the fact that someone made a statement on oath was understood to guarantee the truth of the statement; the act of taking a vow itself unquestionably guaranteed the fulfillment of a promise. But this understanding of the nature of oaths gave way during the seventeenth century to a new idea satirized in Butler's Hudibras (1663): "Oaths are but words, and words but wind, / Too feeble implements to bind." Words were no longer entities with real-life authority and causal functions; oaths and vows, which once had assured performance, were no longer trustworthy. Furthermore, the dissonance between old and new notions concerning the efficacy of oaths could be exploited by those -63- most ready to deploy the new nominalism against the old idealism. "Oaths," as Susan Staves notes, "were regarded as political weapons" at the end of the century.

Shifts in the understanding of the meaning of oaths extended to private relations of trust, including sexual relations and marriage. In the seventeenth century, a promise of marriage was binding, and failure on the part of one of the pair subsequently to marry was grounds for legal action. But amatory fiction depicts a new universe, where a woman who trusts the promises of her suitor does so at her own risk, and earns as much scorn as pity when she finds herself abandoned. Even marriage vows were subject to the new provisionality. It is no coincidence that the first parliamentary divorce was granted in 1698.

The events of the Glorious Revolution constituted what Staves calls "the most dramatic Restoration crisis of conscience over oath-taking," and provided the immediate context of the obsessive concerns of amatory fiction. A short review of those events may be in order. In 1688, England's unpopular Roman Catholic king, James II, the legitimate but controversial heir, fled to France in fear of his life, wrongly believing that his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange were advancing with a large army to force him from his throne. By fleeing, James was ousted (or ousted himself) as effectively as if civil war had taken place, and many Englishmen congratulated themselves on the achievement of what came to be known as the "Glorious (because bloodless) Revolution."

Bloodless though the revolution may have been, the very significant changes it wrought did not come about without struggle. William and Mary took immediate measures to ensure that subjects would cooperate with the new regime, whatever their private thoughts about its legitimacy. New oaths of allegiance were drawn up, and penalties for those who balked were severe. Still there was considerable resistance, especially at first, and many English subjects continued well into the eighteenth century to feel the force of their former oaths of allegiance to King James. James's presence on the Continent was a source of anxiety to English governments for decades, and his supporters ("Jacobites") attempted more than once forcibly to restore his heirs to the throne. Eventually, though, the fact of possession, the reluctance of the nation to go to war for a tyrannical Catholic king who had deserted his throne, the increasing military and commercial success of Augustan England (interpreted by some as God's blessing on the revolution), and the sim -64- ple passage of time all worked together to smooth over the explosive possibilities of 1689. The succession continued to be granted to Protestants, even though James's son and grandsons survived until 1788. Doubt about the legitimacy of the changes effected by the Glorious Revolution or about the positions of subjects who had broken vows for purposes of expediency became something one did not openly express. Yet such doubts persisted, often in somewhat disguised forms.

One place where they surfaced with regularity was in amatory fiction's obsessive representation of broken vows. The usual vow-breaker in amatory fiction is the male seducer; but amatory fiction is also concerned with bigamy (a favorite theme of Manley, who was herself the victim of a bigamous husband), adultery, and lovers who are unfaithful to personal codes of honor (Philander in Behn's Love Letters; Mosco in Manley's New Atalantis). The representation of broken oaths links amatory fiction to wider crises of cultural conscience and political process in Augustan England.

For instance, Behn's History of the Nun; Or, The Fair Vow-Breaker (1689) turns on the problem of broken vows, conflating a familiar amatory fable with a political warning in the immediate context of the Glorious Revolution. In Behn's version of the tale, the intelligent and beautiful young Isabella turns down an offer of marriage from a young man named Villenoys in favor of taking holy orders. She becomes a nun; he goes off to war. While in the monastery, however, Isabella-to her own horror-falls helplessly in love with Henault, her closest friend's brother. She struggles greatly with her passion, mortifying herself in various ways. Henault, meanwhile, is troubled by his irresistible desire for a nun, a desire that he knows amounts to "Sacrilege."

Eventually the two run off together, despite Isabella's vows. But once they leave the monastery, things begin to go badly. They are poor; Isabella becomes pregnant. At last, Henault reluctantly accedes to his father's demands, leaving Isabella behind to campaign with the army. He joins Villenoys's regiment, and they become close friends. The war itself is given characteristically short shrift. "It is not my business to relate the History of the War," the narrator says; we learn only that "they acted very Noble" and that in one battle Henault falls. Isabella grieves extravagantly when she receives official news of his death. Though much courted, she turns down all suitors. But when Villenoys arrives, she has again fallen into poverty. She decides out of «interest» to favor Villenoys's suit after an extended period of mourning. -65-

Five years after what turns out to be a loving and comfortable marriage, Villenoys decides to go away overnight. That night a visitor calls on Isabella. It is, of course, Henault, who did not die after all but has been doing slave labor all these years. Terrified of the charge of adultery (and noticing that Henault is poor) Isabella sneaks into the guest room and smothers him. Only then does she feel love for him again. When Villenoys returns, Isabella is tormented by a sense of guilty innocence: "She fell on her knees, and cry'd, 'Oh! you can never Pardon me, if I should tell you, and yet, alas! I am innocent of Ill! " She tells Villenoys that Henault died naturally in his sleep. They decide to put the body in a sack and throw it in the river. But while Villenoys is waiting for her to sew the sack closed, Isabella deliberately stitches it to his coat. When he throws the sack into the river, he goes along with it and is drowned. No one suspects Isabella until a traveler who had been a slave with Henault exposes her as "the Murderess of two Husbands (both belov'd) in one Night." While awaiting execution, she spends her time exhorting others "never to break a Vow." Even on the scaffold she makes a speech "of half an Hour long," the burden of which is "a warning to the Vow-Breakers."

In Behn's representation, Isabella's decision to break her nun's vows and run off with Henault is to blame for all the macabre events that ensue. Yet Isabella is powerless not to break her vows. "She had try'd all that was possible in Human Strength to perform," the narrator informs us when as a young nun Isabella is struggling with her desire for Henault.

She had try'd Fasting long, Praying fervently, rigid Penances and Pains, severe Disciplines, all the Mortification, almost to the destruction of Life it self, to conquer the unruly Flame; but still it burnt and rag'd but the more; so, at last, she was forc'd to permit that to conquer her, she could not conquer, and submitted to her Fate, as a thing destin'd her by Heaven… and this being her real Belief, she the more patiently gave way to all the Thoughts that pleas'd her.

Like other resisting-yet-desiring maidens in amatory fiction, Isabella is "forc'd to permit" just what she most wants. Behn is careful not to present Isabella's submission as mere self-delusion, a simple capitulation to her own desires; the point is that she is really being compelled, she honestly resists. Helpless against "Fate," she is nevertheless guilty, too.

Never break a vow, Behn's story warns a vow-breaking society. In 1689, such a moral could not have been more appropriately placed than -66- in a tale where vows are impossible to keep. Henault, like King James, is apparently gone forever; but really the first husband remains alive, and comes back to expose his wife's unintentional perfidy (as well as her continued love). The story represents sympathetically the moral and religious uncertainty many were experiencing in the context of the Glorious Revolution, the sense of being without choice but nevertheless at fault. One critic has called Behn's attention to vow-breaking "a mere excuse for a romantic and improbable tale," thus reinforcing the traditional view of amatory fiction as irrelevant rubbish. But on the contrary, The History of the Nun is as political as it is "romantic." As Ann Messenger observes, "although the sexual passion of a French nun may seem far removed from the turmoil of England's government in 1688, the issue of broken loyalty unites them." Behn's conflation of politics and sexual relations gives the lie to traditional distinctions between public and private concerns, male and female experience, amatory and realistic fiction. Without being any less sensational, melodramatic and bizarre, her story is at the same time a political parable of the Glorious Revolution in an anxious contemporary voice.

The obsession with broken vows epitomized in Behn's History of the Nun is related to another source of amatory fiction's extraordinary power: its persistent representation of agency (and therefore, responsibility) as complex and shifting, never finally assignable. Like the matter of broken vows, the problem of political agency was enormously troubling at and after the Glorious Revolution. Who, many wondered, was responsible for what had happened? Was it God's will that James lost the throne, or was it the tragic result of the king's own error, or of his subjects' disobedience? Was James's flight an act of abdication, or was his replacement a treasonous usurpation? Amatory fiction places questions of agency in a sexual. context, participating in feminized guise in the central political issues of its day, issues that continued to haunt British consciences until at least the 1740s when the last organized Jacobite uprising took place.

As we have seen, sexual relations are most often figured in these texts as relations of force and deceit; rape is the central paradigm for sexual experience. Yet these writers almost always include complicating factors that mitigate the helplessness of victims (i.e., women), making them complicit in their own undoings. When Manley relates a story involving a young woman named Louisa and her bigamous seducer, she is careful to insist that Louisa herself must be held partially responsible -67- for her own downfall: " Louisa had no very strong Head; his superficial Reasons might quickly take place, especially when they were seconded by Inclination: Unknown to her self she lov'd him, else all his Attempts would have been insignificant." At the same time, Louisa's responsibility is oddly denied, too. After all, she can't help it that she has "no very strong Head," and her love for her seducer is "unknown to her self." Manley's formulation is typically dissonant, but need not be dismissed as merely contradictory or slapdash. Instead, it may indicate how complex a subject seduction was for Augustan writers. Unable to decide whether they had been conquered or liberated in 1689, disturbingly aware that abdication and usurpation had become indistinguishable, Augustan writers expose as interested and false the traditional habit of distinguishing seduction from rape according to definitive assignments of agency.

This complex attitude toward agency is epitomized in Haywood's Love in Excess, the eighteenth century's best-selling work of amatory fiction. When Haywood's Melliora finds herself solicited by her guardian, Count D'Elmont, she is disturbed to find that although she feels powerless and afraid, and does all she can to resist his advances (going so far as to plug up the keyholes to her room and eventually entering a monastery to escape), she nevertheless enjoys D'Elmont's attentions and inwardly returns his desire. In this difficult situation, Melliora "carry'd with her a World of troubled Meditations… but when she Reflected how dear that Person she had so much cause to fear, was to her, she thought her self, at once the most unfortunate and most Guilty of her Sex." Melliora is the paradigm of the besieged maiden in amatory fiction, a maiden who, for all her innocence, victimization and passivity, is yet a «guilty» party. Even when she is held down on her bed and physically overpowered by D'Elmont, her own desire is cast as partially responsible for the event. For on the fateful night when the count has crept into her room to gaze on her asleep, she is already, unfortunately, dreaming about him. Just as D'Elmont begins to have second thoughts about taking advantage of her, Melliora undoes herself by talking in her sleep.

The resistless posture he beheld her in, rouz'd all that was Honourable in him, he thought it pity even to wake her, but more to wrong such Innocence, and he was sometimes Prompted to return and leave her as he found her… He, stooping to the Bed, and gently laying his Face close to her's, (Possibly Designing no more than to steal a Kiss from her, unperceiv'd) that Action, — 68- Concurring at that Instant, with her Dream, made her throw her Arm (still Slumbering) about his Neck, and in a Soft and Languishing Voice, Cry out, O! D'Elmont Cease, cease to Charm, to such a height-Life cannot bear these Raptures! — And then again, Embracing him yet closer-O! too, too Lovely Count-Extatick Ruiner!

"If he had now left her," the narrator remarks dryly, "some might have applauded an Honour so uncommon; but more wou'd have Condemn'd his Stupidity." The near-rape that follows takes place in this complicated setting. Melliora is desiring, but still innocent (since she is asleep); D'Elmont is aggressive, but responsive as well. Haywood carefully shifts the burden of intention and responsibility for sexual violence, making rape itself less a separate category than an extreme case of (mutual) seduction, and destabilizing the positions of seducer and seduced.

As this example indicates, representations of rape and seduction are often hard to tell apart in amatory fiction; the crucial question of agency is difficult to resolve. By making rape and seduction versions of each other, amatory fiction challenges the agency-based distinction usually drawn between the two, demonstrating that choice and intention are always themselves constrained, overdetermined, and diffuse. But characteristically, the challenge operates to double purpose. By suggesting that all seductions are forms of rape, amatory fiction exposes the patriarchal strategy of making the victim guilty by proving that she was «really» seduced rather than raped; but by suggesting that all rapes are varieties of seduction, amatory fiction abets the familiar process of male exoneration, whereby victims are cast as complicit actors. Like its persistent interest in the guilt of vow-breakers helpless to keep their vows, amatory fiction's complex representations of seduction-as-rape and its refusal definitively to assign positions of aggressor and victim in seduction-rape scenarios constitute significant instances of Augustan society's efforts to interpret its own history.

Despite great popularity and relevance in their day, amatory fictions are now held in contempt. However interesting these texts may be as part of the Augustan cultural landscape, most critics still feel that they are simply not very good literature; their present value seems to be mainly that of rather embarrassing curiosities, "justly neglected" (as John Richetti puts it) except by "the most thorough of specialists or dedicated of graduate students." But there are exceptions to this rule. Most -69- prominent among those who have recently championed amatory fiction as serious literature is Ros Ballaster, who has written the only fulllength study of the genre. Ballaster's important book joins a growing body of revisionist studies that suggest new ways to approach the question of value. Rather than denigrate (or praise) amatory fictions wholesale, critics might better ask why we define «good» literature as we do, how our assumptions about literary value still work to valorize some voices and exclude others, and how our capacities for pleasure might be augmented by respectful engagement with works we have been trained to resist or dismiss.

And as I have tried to suggest here, amatory fiction remains largely invisible for reasons other than its supposed poor quality. These texts are difficult to focus on because they seem to mar the picture: they fail to affirm traditionally valued purposes and strategies for reading, and they defy critical paradigms for realism. The brainchildren of sexually infamous and socially marginal women, they insistently represent a world where women's experiences of sexual power are central, and where such experiences conflate unexpectedly with political issues in the public world. They are obsessed with a limited number of recurrent ideas, especially with broken vows and with disturbing sexual relations in which seduction often looks a lot like rape, choice like constraint, and coercion like complicity.

But it may be precisely because of their traditionally defined liabilities that Augustan amatory fictions are in fact crucial to literary history now. Amatory fictions powerfully formulate acute Augustan social dilemmas, and expose assumptions and equivocations that later centuries have continued to hold dear. Behn, Manley, Haywood, and their peers re-present public issues of authority and accountability as issues of gendered power relations, making problematic the assumption that political relations and intimate relations are essentially different. They represent sexual contracts, subject as they are to interpretation and change, not as a special case but as the epitome of contract itself. They make explicit the difficulty of distinguishing complicity and force, whether in political or sexual relations, and so expose myths of definitive agency and accountability.

Positioned as they are at the fringes of respectable discourse and at the beginning of the century that laid the foundations of long-standing political and domestic structures, amatory fictions demonstrate the historical fabrication of authority systems that have come to seem eternal -70- and inevitable. Their challenges are not radical, programmatic, or sustained; they tend to capitulate to existing power arrangements. Yet intimations of resistance remain latent in acts of collusion. Defying codes for literary and moral respectability, amatory fictions invite us to turn a critical eye on our tendency to organize experience according to exclusionary categories. They offer us a chance to imagine alternatives to the rigid roles of victim and oppressor, and to understand history-social or literary-not as a process of competitively «rising» and «falling» groups or genres, but as a narrative of reciprocal pleasures, shared anxieties, and promiscuously mingling bodies and voices.

Toni O'Shaughnessy Bowers

Selected Bibliography

Armstrong Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Ballaster Ros. Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

Beasley Jerry C. "Politics and Moral Idealism: The Achievement of Some Early Women Novelists." In Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, eds., Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986.

Langbauer Laurie. Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

McKeon Michael. The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Messenger Ann. His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986.

Perry Ruth. Women, Letters, and the Novel. New York: AMS Press, 1980.

Radway Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Richetti John J. Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969, 1992.

Schofield Mary Anne. Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in Feminine Fiction, 1713–1799. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990.

Schofield Mary Anne. Quiet Rebellion: The Fictional Heroines of Eliza Fowler Haywood. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982.

Spencer Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. New York: Blackwell, 1986. -71-

Spender Dale. Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen. New York: Pandora, 1986.

Staves Susan. Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

Todd Janet. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660–1800. London: Virago, 1989.

Williamson Marilyn L. Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650–1750. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990.

-72-

Richardson and His Circle

SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689–1761), the first literary superstar, sent all Europe into convulsions of enthusiasm, suspense, boredom, grief, revulsion, and adoration. By 1800 his massive novels had been translated into at least eight languages. But critical opinion, then as now, was divided. "I heartily despise him and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner," Lady Mary Wortley Montagu confessed. Coleridge found Richardson's mind "vile," his novels «day-dreamy» and claustrophobic-an overheated sickroom compared to the breezy, open landscape of Henry Fielding's. Fielding himself jeered at the social-climbing pretensions of Richardson's first novel in a devastating parody, but dissolved into admiring tears over Clarissa. For Samuel Johnson, Fielding merely describes the face of a clock, whereas Richardson explores and explains its inner workings: "There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's, than in all Tom Jones." This vision of Richardson as a great moralist and psychologist was shared, surprisingly, by some of the most radical figures of European literature. Though Voltaire hoped he would never be "condemned to reread Clarissa," Diderot vowed that, if poverty forced him to sell his books, he would keep only the Bible, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Richardson. Laclos, author of Les liaisons dangereuses, declared Clarissa "le chef-d'oeuvre des romans," a novel of "utmost genius." The Marquis de Sade agreed.

Diderot's enthusiasm for "the divine Richardson" helps us to grasp just how revolutionary he seemed to his contemporaries. Diderot sens-73- es that the novel has been changed so irrevocably that the frivolous term roman no longer applies, though no new name has been found. What earlier moralists did with maxims, Richardson does with far more powerful materials-"actions" and "images." We regard his characters as real acquaintances, cry out to them, debate with them. Readers do not remain passive, but interact with the text, and the text in turn transforms its readers, mysteriously strengthening their impulse to do good and shun evil. Oddly enough, the novels of a starchy Puritanical Englishman become a «touchstone» for the Enlightenment philosophe, confirming his love of «Virtue» and his vision of a material universe troubled and energized by the clash of contradictions. What Diderot especially values is Richardson's ability to articulate the secrets of the unconscious, to "bring the torch into the depths of the cavern," to capture the "dissonant tone" of a speaker concealing the truth, to express the struggles and divisions within families and even within a single individual. Especially compelling are his portraits of a wise and intelligent heroine whose every action is wrong (Clarissa) and a male protagonist (Lovelace) who combines every possible extreme of good and evil.

These qualities did not develop early in Richardson, whose conventional petit-bourgeois life has encouraged the view that he must have created his masterpieces by accident. Coleridge speaks for many readers when he admires the novels but recoils from "so very vile a mind, so oozy, so hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent!" It is true that Richardson's work is heavily didactic, and includes such jewels as The Young Man's Pocket Companion (1734), which dictates strict rules to the apprentice and forbids him to attend any public entertainment except Lillo's London Merchant. It is true that Richardson's own life (until he began writing fiction at the age of fifty) seems unpromisingly "middle class"-the son of a joiner, apprenticed to the (semi)respectable trade of printing, married his master's daughter, rose to be a prosperous publisher and printer to the Crown. Worse still, he grew uncommonly fat and conducted himself like Uriah Heep, "a sly sinner, creeping along the very edges of the walks… afraid of being seen" (the portrait is Richardson's own, so we should suspect irony). Nevertheless, two episodes in the early life of the Good Apprentice suggest a strong narrative drive and an imagination inspired by secrets. First, he was excited and filled with "strong desire" by the myth of the ring that makes its wearer invisible: "I was a very sheepish boy, and thought I should make a very happy use of it on a multitude of occasions." The invisibility con-74- ferred by fiction-all his novels pretend to be real letters, written in the grip of events and only later discovered by their "editor"-would allow him to indulge this "strong desire to be master" and to enjoy the «happy» results of shedding inhibitions and scruples. And second, he recalls that as a bashful thirteen-year-old (with a reputation for storytelling) he was employed to write love letters by "the young Women of Taste and Reading," who "revealed to me their Love Secrets": "I have been directed to chide, and even repulse… at the very time that the Heart of the Chider or Repulser was open before me, overflowing with Esteem and Affection, and the fair Repulser dreading to be taken at her Word." In thus acting as a «Secretary» (in several senses), Richardson learned important lessons in the erotics of intimacy, the contradiction between words and feelings, and the power of writing for others.

The Novels

Richardson's first full-length fiction clearly grows out of his «Secretarial» experience as a boy; Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) takes its cue from a volume of form letters he composed to help the semiliterate write and behave. In one of these Familiar Letters (eventually published in 1741), the father of a servant-girl "on hearing of her Master's attempting her Virtue" orders his daughter home immediately, because to stay is to encourage him ("God grant that you have not already yielded to his base desires!"); in the next letter the daughter announces she has already left, intact. The story ends in a mere ten lines. But Richardson's mind obviously dwelt on what might happen if the girl did remain virtuous but did not in fact leave. The result is a lively and spontaneous novel told mostly in her own letters, supplemented by third-person narrative and by the journal she keeps after her abduction. Richardson starts with stock comedy characters (the pert but genteel fille de chambre, the lecherous squire) but invests them with an unprecedented moral seriousness, claiming for the lower-class heroine an ethical status hitherto granted in fiction only to the nobility; indeed, her strange name «Pamela» comes directly from the princess in Sir Philip Sidney's aristocratic romance Arcadia (1584). Pamela brings to life in minute-byminute descriptions her hesitations and terrors, her rationalizations for not leaving when she could, her struggles with her own heart as well as with Mr. B.'s arrogant if clumsy sexual harassment, her claustrophobia and suicidal impulses under house arrest, her attempts to conceive these -75- "trials" as a God-given spiritual crisis, the dawning of a new respect in Mr. B.'s eyes, his conversion from Don Juan to Prince Charming, his struggles with the social ignominy of marrying a servant-girl, her adjustments to the role of social leader, their wedding, her difficult negotiations with snobbish relatives, and finally her triumphant handling of the discovery that her husband has an illegitimate daughter. The response was a tidal wave of lachrymose praise ("If all the Books in England were to be burnt, this Book, next the Bible, ought to be preserved"), followed by an undertow of mockery from those who found its subject trivial and its emotions overblown. Pamela became a modern industrial product, generating new editions with testimonials, murals in Vauxhall Gardens, critiques, parodies, translations, plays (one by Voltaire and two by Goldoni), engravings, six operas, a Heroic Poem, a pictorial fan, two waxworks, and several sequels tracing "Pamela in High Life," including one by Richardson himself (1741).

In Pamela Richardson had developed a new kind of domestic fiction from the structure of courtship-comedy, and in the follow-up (sometimes known as Pamela II) he attempts another kind of comedy, in which already familiar characters encounter the problems of married life in the fashionable world: the vices of the Town, the principles of education, the pros and cons of breast-feeding, the jealousy of the husband when the first baby arrives, the jealousy (and class insecurity) of the wife when Mr. B. takes up with an Italianate Countess. Many readers find the new improved Pamela-the genteel oracle of social propriety and slavish gratitude to a complacent husband-a poor substitute for the vivid unpolished «sauce-box» of the opening letters. Richardson's ear remains sharp in scenes involving conflict or absurdity, but the long passages of discussion in what he imagines to be the upper-class world manage to sound both mincing and turgid. Nevertheless, the postmarital parts of Pamela (the second half of the original volume 2, and the sequel added as volumes 3 and 4) deal seriously with a broad range of social issues, centered on the corruption and reform of the aristocracy and the tension between sexuality and social stability. Toward the end of part 2, for example, Pamela's circle discusses whether "a Reform'd Rake makes the best Husband," that is, whether the double standard should be tolerated, whether male sexual predation should be regarded as mere "sowing wild oats" or seasoning while women were held to strict standards of chastity and ferociously punished if they strayed. Pamela denounces this hypocrisy with great fervor, and yet (as -76- her friends immediately cry out) she herself is married to a reformed rake whom she extols as a godlike benefactor and "Master." Her reply, that Mr. B. was a dignified "Gentleman of Sense" and not a common town rake, suggests both the inadequacies of Pamela and the genesis of Richardson's tragic masterpiece, Clarissa. For although Mr. B. is supposed to be a dashing aristocratic sensualist before his conversion, Richardson actually shows him as a confused adolescent, a Squire Booby (the cruel name given him in Fielding's parody Shamela). And when Richardson next attempted to create an upper-class libertine, this time successfully, he turned out to be an infinitely more dangerous character, indeed one of the most fascinatingly Satanic in literature: Robert Lovelace, the nemesis of Clarissa Harlowe.

Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, published in three cliffhanging installments between December 1747 and December 1748, vastly magnifies the resources of the epistolary novel. In this millionword collection, both the female victim and the male pursuer write their experiences "to the moment"; each corresponds with strongly drawn confidant(e)s who become major characters in their own right, and with a throng of minor relatives, servants, and accomplices, all distinguished by their own manners of writing. Moreover, the letter itself-the physical object and the unique perspective it embodies-plays an even greater part in the action. Pamela's journal acts as a sexual symbol when she sews it into her underskirts, and as an agent of conversion when Mr. B. finally reads it, awestruck by its pathos and authenticity. But in Clarissa the story hinges at each stage on the various meanings of "correspondence." Clarissa dates her own downfall from her secret exchange of letters with Lovelace, when he is banished the house by her apoplectic father after a duel provoked by her equally irascible brother, a former college mate. Lovelace's spy network constantly intercepts and manipulates the letters of others. When Clarissa refuses a clandestine interview by the gate of her father's estate, Lovelace replaces the letter untouched so that she is forced to meet him in person-and she is duly abducted. When her confidante Anna Howe warns Clarissa that the respectable London house where Lovelace lodged her is in fact a brothel, and his friends actually highwaymen and confidence tricksters, the letter never reaches her; Lovelace captures it, edits it (marking each point with marginal index fingers to prod his revenge), and replaces the women's authentic letters with forgeries that serve his own plot. By such manipulations of word and appearance he baffles and torments -77- Clarissa, putting off the issue of marriage in the hope that she, like "every woman" according to libertine doctrine, will sooner or later give way to her desire and become his whore. This tangle of deceit and «trial» continues up to "the final Outrage," when he tricks her back into the brothel, drugs her, and rapes her unconscious body. Rather than subsiding into rueful acceptance as he hoped, Clarissa disintegrates with a violence equal and opposite to his own; the room is filled with torn fragments of letters, scattered across the page in a typographical equivalent to her frenzy. Hereafter, in the novel's most surprising turn and the most controversial for readers in 1748, Lovelace loses all vestige of control over Clarissa's text, her body, her interpretation of the world. The ground shifts to religious tragedy as she, fully convinced of her «ruin» despite her inviolate will, prepares to waste away and die. In the process she gains a verbal and personal authority that had eluded her before. Lovelace continues his hysterical plotting, longing once again to capture female letters, dreaming that "the Seal would have yielded to the touch of my warm finger… and the folds, as other plications have done, opened of themselves to oblige my curiosity." But he cannot (or will not) grasp the true situation. When the anorexic heroine feels on the point of death, she sends him one last letter, finally tricking him as he has constantly deceived her: reading of her departure for "her father's house," the secular Lovelace assumes that she has finally lifted the ferocious curse her father laid on her after the abduction/elopement; he cannot recognize the biblical allusion and the massive pompe funèbre it ushers in. While the nineteen-year-old Clarissa expires in a halo of saintly rapture, and Mrs. Sinclair the brothelkeeper dies in hideous squalor, the alienated Lovelace slinks off to Europe, only to «expiate» his crime and embrace death in a suicidal duel with Clarissa's mysterious cousin Morden.

Both during and after this outpouring of fictional letters, Richardson himself engaged in an immense correspondence with literati, friends, and anonymous admirers, debating the ethics and the outcome of Clarissa. In a sense, this circle of (mostly female) writers and readers helped to generate the text itself, since Richardson made numerous changes in response to their criticisms. Over time the master printer built an extraordinary apparatus around his novel, to counteract what he took to be careless or perverse misinterpretations and to highlight those aspects that his friends found most improving. Clarissa was revised, expanded with original letters ("restored" from manuscript and -78- marked with special symbols), set in large print for the weak-eyed, fortified with footnotes explaining the wickedness of Lovelace, and supplemented with hundreds of pages describing the characters, summarizing all 537 letters (with the moral of each in italics), indexing those morals alphabetically, extracting the Maxims and Sentiments, and gathering the biblical passages that inspired the heroine's final days. Modern critics rejoice in Richardson's overanxious attempts to control the interpretation of his own book, since they suggest a split between the official morality preached by Clarissa and the «real» meaning of the text-a psychoanalytic truth about repressed sexuality, perhaps, or a political truth about patriarchy and class hierarchy, or a deconstructive truth about the inherent instability of all textual meaning. Certainly some of Richardson's later efforts suggest a panic or cover-up, particularly those highly visible footnotes and plot summaries that drive home character features that should have been conveyed wholly in the letters themselves. Having showed, he feels he must also tell. Many of his additions, however, did belong in the original manuscript and were suppressed from the first edition too timidly, following readers' criticism that he later overrode; one particularly demented fantasy (in which Lovelace plans to rape Anna Howe and her mother on a boating trip) was struck out on the advice of a young correspondent, but returned triumphantly in the third edition (volume 4, letter 42). And Richardson held fast to the grim essentials of the plot-the rape and Clarissa's death-in the face of almost universal protest.

The consultatory mode of authorship contributed most to Richardson's third novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754) — his most popular with contemporary readers including Jane Austen, though few critics now recognize its substance. Richardson appealed widely for materials to incorporate into this pendant to Clarissa, the story of a good and beautiful man. Many scenes are set in Italy, where he had never been, and among the aristocracy, where he had never belonged (though, as he was proud to point out, he had never been to a masquerade or a brothel either, and still painted them convincingly from report). The knighterrant hero, who rescues the brilliant and beautiful Harriet Byron from a vile seducer on Hounslow Heath, turns out to have lived abroad and become involved with Lady Clementina della Porretta, a baroque saint driven insane by the conflict between her love for the Anglican Sir Charles and her fervent Catholicism. He is thus inhibited from acting upon his growing love for Harriet, and this impasse, seen largely -79- through Harriet's own vivid eyes, forms the central core of the narrative. Why is he mysteriously unhappy? Will he marry the magnificent Clementina once he has helped bring her back to health? If not, can Harriet accept a man who frankly loves two women? Around this core grows a mass of subsidiary narratives, ranging in tone from slapstick comedy (as Sir Charles's boisterous sister torments her new husband), through feminist satire (as Harriet rejects alternative lovers), to operatic melodrama, when Clementina runs mad or when Olivia, another Italian noblewoman, pulls a knife on the hero. (Richardson amused himself by dividing the Dramatis Personae into "Men," "Women," and "Italians.") Now that he has left behind the claustrophobic unity of Clarissa, he feels free to explore all the "natural passions" that spring up within the Grandison circle-that loose group of orphaned siblings and protégés that replaces the conventional family: Charlotte Grandison's love for her brother, so strong that it makes all other men seem worthless; the fervent embraces of Harriet and Sir Charles's fifteen-year-old ward Emily; the more-than-brotherly love between Sir Charles and Clementina's crippled brother Jeronymo. The narrative mode is equally varied. Richardson experiments with scenes written as drama within letters written to the moment, flashbacks from older letters, direct narrative by an elderly clergyman, even the «minutes» taken by a concealed stenographer. But the letter always remains open and transparent, designed to be read by the whole group,in marked contrast to the deadly secrecy that shrouds almost all communication in Clarissa.

If Pamela is comedy and Clarissa tragedy, then Grandison is clearly romance, with its paragon lovers and its meandering episodic plot (Richardson did not know from one volume to the next what he would do with the story, whereas in writing Clarissa the terrible conclusion had always been in his view). But it is a thoroughly up-to-date romance, set not in some supernatural realm but in a polite and constitutional society. Wherever possible, tears are shed instead of blood-and in prodigious quantities; even the ex-villain Sir Hargrave manages a small flood, and the good characters seem to have tear ducts as infinite as their nobility. The breadth of Grandison allowed Richardson to tackle what he had attempted in Pamela II, an encyclopedic range of problems germane to the life of a new community based on sensibility. Sir Charles, in the vanguard of what Richardson hopes is a reforming spirit among the leaders of society, deals intelligently and gracefully with the remnants of feudal barbarism among his own people (dueling, — 80- lechery, violence, snobbery), and guides his family and friends through the intricate tangles of choosing their mates-the most painful tangle being his own. Aware that the wickedness of Lovelace generated most of the reader's interest, Grandison tries to transfer some of this interest to the Good Man, involving him in "perverse accidents" and making him a «designer» of plots and stratagems, "a Rake in his address, and a Saint in his heart"; those who love him also fear that "had he been a wicked man, he would have been a very wicked one." Twentieth-century readers have generally ridiculed this attempt to make goodness intriguing. By modern standards of quotidian realism, the bad characters are too marginal and the good too successful, too idealistic, and too articulate in moments of crisis. But we should still recognize Grandison's affinities with genres we currently value-its high flights resembling opera, and its minute analysis of elite behavior anticipating the roman-fleuves of Henry James and Proust. In terms of its literary progeny, Grandison has actually been quite influential; not only Jane Austen but George Eliot praised this panoramic and morally earnest novel centered on an outstanding heroine. Without Grandison there may have been no Middlemarch.

Virtue Rewarded?

Critics have never quite accepted Richardson's attempt, in Pamela, to graft a sharply realistic narrative manner onto a fairy-tale narrative structure. But we should not underestimate that realism. In the first half of the novel, for example, Richardson's impressive social and psychological detail manages to suggest a growing attachment between Pamela and Mr. B. long before love is explicitly declared. She invents reasons not to leave his service, not to encourage other suitors, not to escape from the country house to which he abducts her (as she describes it, the bull in the next field vividly embodies her vision of male sexuality). She feels a stab of concern when an accident threatens B.'s life, and admits she "does not hate him." She lingers over the details of his appearance and behavior even when they intimidate her; he, meanwhile, flips hysterically between rage and tenderness, boisterous lechery and nervous hesitation, apparently in the grip of a strong if unacknowledged internal conflict. When the subject of marriage comes up, even mockingly, Pamela's reactions-sudden blushes, overprompt denials, overly detailed accounts of how she would spend her time as a wife-81- suggest that she has dreamed of the possibility and suppressed her yearning. When she does leave captivity, introspection lays bare a divided and «treacherous» heart that calls her back into bondage: "and yet all the time this Heart is Pamela." Struggling to understand how she could love a man who treated her so imperiously, she realizes that he has given her consequence: "Cruel as I have thought you, and dangerous your Views to my Honesty, You, Sir, are the only Person living that ever was more than indifferent to me."

Pamela is a social hybrid, of humble, rustic background yet brought up in privileged circumstances as the personal waiting-woman to Mr. B.'s mother. She has acquired sumptuous clothes, soft hands, and such refined accomplishments as embroidery, estate management, and letter writing; she later attributes her novelistic skills to the training she received in administering charity, when she learned to make fine discriminations between the deserving poor and their imitators. In a sense, then, she and Mr. B. are siblings, and their intimacy develops within this domestic web; the first hint of his seductive intentions comes when he offers to share his dead mother's underwear, and the first hint that she likes him comes when she refuses to leave before finishing his embroidered waistcoat. This kind of detail renders plausible, if anything could, the huge shift in character between the squire-and-wench routine at the start and the Exemplary Couple at the close of the novel. Pamela's intriguing mixture of naïveté and sophistication, which troubled the more dismissive readers, thus matches the upper servant's unique position in the household, perceptively rendered by Richardson. Less plausible, however, is her ability to recognize, and be shocked by, sexual innuendo: the adolescent may well be sensitive to the leers of the servants who "seem as if they would look one through" and the master who kisses her "as if he would have eaten me," but how would she know that the corrupt housekeeper Mrs. Jewkes speaks "like a vile London Prostitute"?

Before their eyes mist over with sentimental gratitude, Pamela (and her author) convincingly reveal the sociopolitical tensions played out in the amorous maneuvers of squire and servant. Her ability to swallow her fear and answer back when bullied, dismissed by Mr. B. as sexy «sauce» or criminal insubordination, suggests (to the alert reader) not cheek but courage in the face of tyranny, and as her «trials» become grimmer, so does the tone of her defiance: "Oh! what can the abject Poor do against the mighty Rich, when they are determin'd to oppress?" — 82- Pamela's «Virtue» becomes essential because she has no other property in a world where status, identity, and personal value all depend on property; she resists not merely the man's sexual predation, but the landowner's assertion of absolute power over his chattels. "How came I to be his Property?" she asks; "What Right has he in me, but such as a Thief may plead to stolen Goods?" This political acuity (Mr. B.'s bawd and collaborator calls Pamela's observation "downright Rebellion") may support Terry Eagleton's view of Richardson as a revolutionary class warrior-not, of course, for the proletariat, but for the virtuous and hardworking bourgeoisie. Certainly his villains are either flaming aristocrats or hapless servants corrupted by them, though after Pamela his sympathetic characters (Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, Harriet Byron) likewise stem from the gentry. Militant class hatred certainly sharpens the realism of Pamela and wells up at moments throughout Richardson's work. Pamela's failure to escape across the open fields is credible, not just because she feels ambivalent fear and attraction for the rampant male, but because the country was indeed a war zone, patrolled and mined by "the mighty Rich" in league with one another. Mr. B. asserts class power to shut off every avenue for the imprisoned woman, corrupting the postal service and intimidating any local clergy (like the sweet but powerless Williams) who might offer refuge; his peers meanwhile dismiss the affair as an inconsequential frolic: "What is all this, but that the 'Squire our Neighbour has a mind to his Mother's Waiting-maid?… He hurts no Family by this." Nevertheless, in Pamela (as later in Grandison) these towering abuses are cured by a voluntary surrender to middle-class values, not by total war; repeatedly the vicious snob, once touched by the fairy wand of goodness wielded by Pamela (or Sir Charles), converts on the spot to piety, sobriety, and early dining. Except in the case of Lovelace, Richardson's imagination seems reformist rather than revolutionary.

This transition from social drama to wish fulfillment drains much of the novel's artistic vitality. Pamela's sharply phrased class awareness dissolves, except for the occasional flicker of sarcasm, into sugary glorification of her lord and master. Richardson's aristocrats, particularly Mr. B.'s tumultuous sister, Lady Davers, come to life when they unleash their violent prejudice (and stoke the middle-class reader's indignation), but the magic of Pamela transforms them into cardboard figures who mouth statements like "I believe there is something in Virtue, that we had not well considered" or "We People of Fortune… are general-83- ly educated wrong." Reformist zeal may also blind Richardson to the vulgarity of the values that triumph in this story of "Virtue Rewarded." What kind of reward does Pamela receive for her refusal to submit to a man who thinks her entire being, sex and soul, can be purchased for cash? Why, that same man (to whom she yields her entire being in a vow of marital obedience), and copious quantities of the very cash that would have supported her as a kept mistress (handed over, a hundred guineas at a time, the morning after the wedding night). As her parents, former ditch-diggers, enumerate the splendors of the farm they have been given in Kent, they exult "that all is the Reward of our Child's Virtue!" and Pamela herself reminds us that "the Kentish Estate was to be Part of the Purchace of my Infamy." Of course, there is all the difference between skulking in private as an insecure concubine and basking in public recognition as a wife, commanding a large budget for charitable works-though throughout part 2 Pamela still agonizes over her unworthiness, shuns public gatherings, and fears that Mr. B. will turn her away. But Richardson's economic realism, which gives palpable solidity to the «happy» scenes as well as the «trial» scenes, does tend to undermine that difference.

Satirical «anti-Pamelists» were quick to exploit the vein of materialism that runs through Richardson's arriviste fantasy. The best known among them is Henry Fielding, whose Shamela (1741) parodies both the epistolary novel itself (Shamela is a Covent Garden whore angling for the innocent Squire Booby after bearing a child by the well-hung Parson Williams) and the rapturous readers' testimonials appended to Richardson's second edition: Parson Tickletext gives new meaning to the cult of sensibility and the technique of "writing to the moment"-"Oh! I feel an Emotion even while I am relating this: Methinks I see Pamela at this Instant, with all the Pride of Ornament cast off!" — but Parson Oliver brings him down to earth with a pungent critique of Richardson's subversive, pornographic novel. Oliver then supplies the true letters of Pamela, in which lewd reality alternates with faux-genteel protestations ("so we talked a full Hour and a half about my Vartue"). Fielding continued this taunting in his first full-length novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), where Pamela's brother, a truly virtuous and beautiful serving-man, resists the seductions of his employee. Richardson-baiting is left behind as Joseph (kicked out from the household rather than locked in) wanders the roads with the quixotic Parson Adams, but the satire returns in the last volume, where marriage and -84- social climbing have turned Pamela into a cold-hearted snob, worse than those she encountered while a servant herself. Other negative tributes include (all from 1741) the anonymous Pamela Censured, James Parry's True Anti-Pamela, and Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela, or Feign'd Innocence Detected, the scandalous life of Syrena Tricksy. Soon there appeared a French translation of Haywood's novel (1743) and a separate French Antipamela, ou Mémoires de M. D. (1742).

Most notorious of these anti-Pamelas must be John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (London, 1748–1749), whose lowborn heroine Fanny Hilldoes give in without a struggle to the first attractive young gentleman, does live the life of a "London prostitute," and yet achieves by rising in her profession exactly what Pamela achieves by abstaining: wealth, family, and respectable married bliss in a higher class. Early in the novel Fanny's friend Esther decides to take the Shamela route ("by preserving their VARTUE, some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand"), but Fanny arrives at a similar conclusion without losing her sentimental ideals; she can sacrifice the pleasures of Vice to "the delicate charms of VIRTUE" because she finds married sex with her true love even more intense than illicit copulation with her customers. Other critiques of Pamela also focus on sexuality. Pamela Censured picks out all the scenes where Mr. B. manhandles or leaps upon his servant, retells them as suggestively as possible, then protests that no young person could read them without being corrupted (girls will masturbate uncontrollably, boys will become intriguers and rapists, boasting that they would have succeeded where Mr. B. faltered). The letters of Shamela convert the same scenes into irresistibly lewd travesties, but the Fielding figure, Parson Oliver, adopts a more solemn approach: "There are many lascivious Images" in Richardson's novel, "very improper to be laid before the Youth of either Sex"; "I cannot agree that my Daughter should… see the Girl lie on her Back, with one Arm round Mrs. Jewkes and the other round the Squire, naked in Bed, with his Hand on her Breasts, &c." Richardsondoes create scenes like this, intensely sexual from the young man's perspective but horrifying from Pamela's; the buckish readers who see only the former, whether they leer or pretend to disapprove, see just half the story.

These frivolous and/or moralistic parodies help us grasp the significance of Richardson's original novel. They are often right about the -85- details, if wrong about what those mean for the integrity of the work. All the anti-Pamelists perceive, quite rightly, that Richardson has presented a divided heroine, torn apart by impulses that run counter to her strict and «Puritanical» morality-but they cannot give him credit for this perception. Seeing only the stock figure of the wily serving-wench, they cannot believe in those involuntary actions (trembling, hesitating, convulsing, fainting) that convince us of Pamela's psychological crisis; they assume that she must be fully conscious and calculating, trained in the "arts of the Town"-the whorish stratagems of Shamela or Syrena Tricksy. The parodists are wrong to dismiss Richardson as a sly pornographer, and yet there is something voyeuristic about the desire to share the most intimate moments in an adolescent girl's first crisis, and to experience her feelings, not mediated by time and third-person narrative, but "to the moment," through the peephole. Pornographic mirror images of Pamela's career do remind us of an important truth-that official definitions of female «Virtue» focused obsessively and exclusively on the vagina, on what Shamela calls "a poor Girl's little &c."; Richardson merely insists that a poor girl's etc. could be as valuable (for society and for the novel) as a Countess's.

Conservative critics like Fielding were right to find something subversive in Richardson's Cinderella fantasy of social climbing, presented as an authentic social document; the «Instruction» conveyed by Pamela to servant-maids, Parson Oliver complains, is "To look out for their Masters as sharp as they can," so that "if the Master is not a Fool, they will be debauched by him, and if he is a Fool, they will marry him." (Fielding should be considered an expert on this catastrophe, since he himself married his servant-woman a few years later.) It is not simply the miscegenation of classes that Fielding finds unthinkable, but the destruction of a whole hierarchy of values: moral seriousness belongs exclusively to the gentry, so the sexuality of a servant-girl cannot be anything but a joke. Joseph Andrews puts these wenches in their proper place with the bawdy, lighthearted treatment of Betty at the inn (no romance names for her), who avoids pregnancy by receiving two lovers at once. Joseph's beloved Fanny seems to form an exception to Fielding's farcical treatment of the lower orders; she is at least taken seriously as a love object, though her subjectivity never occupies the reader (she cannot read or write). But Fanny turns out to be Pamela's long-lost sister, just as Joseph (like Tom Jones later) turns out to be a son of the upper classes, mysteriously mislaid when young, — 86- that the shortcomings of Mr. B. prompted Richardson to create a more formidable and expressive libertine, too dangerous to "reform," too violent to be salvaged by the sentimental compromises and conversions that wrap up Pamela. This suggests a revolutionary break between the two works. Richardson would later try to present his novels as a smooth, homogenous progression, a steady accumulation of moral truths, by publishing A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. (It is just as well that Diderot did not read this attempt by the author to highlight the least impressive aspect of his work.) But when he was actually writing Clarissa, and defending his decision to push it to an uncompromisingly tragic conclusion, he understood how deeply he had broken from the earlier novel-a break inspired not by a moralizing program but by powerful artistic ambition. To soften Clarissa by reformation and happy ending would be to collude in the atrocities committed by Lovelace, to trivialize the heroine's suffering-and to repeat himself: "What had I done more than I had done in Pamela?… What of extraordinary would there be in it?" He now dismisses the Pamela solution as «trite» and calls Mr. B. "a lordly and imperious Husband, who hardly deserved her"-a sweeping condemnation that implicates Pamela in the delusion, for praising him so highly in public and in her prayers. When we draw up our list of anti-Pamelas, we must place Clarissa at its head.

Clarissa: Fiction, Drama, and Originality

Richardson clearly wanted to be seen as a literary original, an untutored genius closer to Nature than Art-indeed he exaggerated his own ignorance of literature to strengthen the claim that everything came from his own «extraordinary» creativity. (It seems appropriate that the poetcritic Edward Young chose Richardson as the addressee of his groundbreaking Conjectures on Original Composition, though Diderot may overstate the case when he equates the English novelist with Homer.) Like all major authors, however, he achieves this originality by transforming the themes, genres, and myths of earlier writing. We have already seen how Richardson borrows the name «Pamela» from Arcadian romance, how he combines the materials of comedy with the seri-87- ousness of spiritual autobiography, how he rewrites the Cinderella story as a detailed chronicle of social transformation-and we can still trace this fable in the cruel brother and ugly sister of Clarissa, though the Prince has now become the Big Bad Wolf. We should now examine his use of previous drama and "Novel," even though, paradoxically, these two main influences on his fiction filled him with disgust. In The Young Man's Pocket Companion he attacks the theater as a vile corruption, fit only for the idle gentry and hostile to "People of Business and Trade," who appear only as cuckolds and buffoons. The "mere Novel" was even worse, a shallow and trivial form for "Story-Lovers and AmusementSeekers"; Richardson presents his grand moral System "in the humble guise of a Novel only by way of Accommodation to the Manners and Taste of an Age overwhelmed with a Torrent of Luxury, and abandoned to Sound and senselessness." Yet he wrote his best work in what he called "the Novel Kind"-at a length that only the leisured classes could read-and (as we shall see) drew extensively on the theater to create his compulsive and intense protagonists.

Richardson was not the first to narrate a scandalous seduction in letters written in the heat of the moment; Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister introduced this kind of novel to England in 1686. He certainly knew other epistolary sources like the (nonfictional) letters of Mme de Sévigné and the (fictional) letters of Ninon de L'Enclos, which he believed genuine. He was not the first to modernize romance by analyzing the emotional crises of the aristocracy at vast length, for the seventeenth-century novels of Mlle de Scudéry had done precisely this. Jane Barker and Elizabeth Rowe, in the early eighteenth century, had already tried to combine popular fiction with a religious and didactic purpose, and Defoe had already filled the novel with minute details taken from ordinary life. Nor was Richardson the first to make a single thwarted and obsessive love affair the center of the narrative; the author of Clarissa may not have known Prévost's Manon Lescaut (though Prévost himself translated Richardson's novels), but he had read a translation of Mme de Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves. These French and English predecessors-almost exclusively female, we should note-helped to generate both Lovelace and Clarissa.

Though Lovelace clearly derives from the boisterous rakes of English Restoration comedy, Richardson has given him a layer of French refinement that makes his cruelty all the more appalling. He spent his formative years "at the French Court," and his troubles with women -88- may derive from an early misunderstanding of the French initiation game, in which the young man is "put into the world" by a fashionable seductress like Ninon de L'Enclos, and then left to fend for himself. Lovelace can never overcome his fury at being conquered and abandoned in his teens by a woman of his own class, a "Quality-jilt," and he harps on this episode whenever he tries to explain why he must persecute and ruin Clarissa. Lovelace's situation and behavior resemble those of the Duc de Nemours, the libertine who falls in love with the Princesse de Clèves: like Nemours (and unlike the Rovers and Horners of the English theater) he abandons all other sexual adventures and flings himself obsessively into the chase, disguising himself and haunting the edges of Clarissa's estate in hopes of glimpsing her; like Nemours, he proposes marriage once the obstacles are removed, only to be rejected because of the damage he has already done. But Richardson plays a significant variation on Lafayette's novel, since here the heroine is single and the obstacles that turn potential love into tragedy are created by Lovelace himself. Clarissa, in turn, resembles the Princesse in her awareness that she "does not hate" her dangerous lover (a typical French euphemism for desire), in her refusal to compromise once she fully understands that danger, and in her sensitivity to the implications of small favors and gestures-a delicacy born of danger that some English readers interpreted as prudery. And as a letter writer she resembles another of Richardson's French prototypes, Mme de Sévigné. Pamela's epistolary «voice» went from servant-girl's pertness to homiletic gravity without ever achieving the tone of a real aristocrat, but Clarissa sounds like a grande dame; like Sévigné's, her letters breathe intimacy, wit, and stylishness, casual upper-class colloquialism and vivid sketches of character. She writes «freely» about her oppressive family, with a subtle sarcasm created from the restricted vocabulary of politeness. It is all the more frustrating, then, that her verbal freedom cannot be translated into action, cannot halt the encroachment of the arrogant brother or the unwelcome suitor.

Clarissa also resembles the spirited heroines of Restoration comedy, sexually virtuous but free enough in wit and style to match the rakish hero. Discussing Lovelace with her confidante, she slips into the sparklingly offhand tone of Congreve's Millamant, suggesting not just worldly intelligence but amusement and even conspiratorial pleasure in his addresses: "Bashfulness in Mr. Lovelace, my dear!"; "The man, you know, has very ready knees"; "What will not these men say to obtain -89- belief, and a power over one?"; "What shall I do with this Lovelace?" He is a "contradictory creature," an "impatient creature," an "artful wretch"-all terms that with a tap of the fan could turn from insult to endearment. Her flustered response to a supposed offer of marriage-"Would he have had me catch at his first, at his very first word?" (letter 107) — sounds like Millamant during the proviso scene in The Way of the World, a parallel all the more poignant since Lovelace is deliberately preventing their confrontation from evolving into a courtship ritual with a happy ending. Even her tragic perplexity is tinged with drawingroom slang: "I am strangely at a loss what to think of this man. He is a perfect Proteus!" The horror of Clarissa's predicament increases, then, when we see her as a worldly heroine in a Restoration comedy situation that has been grotesquely hardened, translated into a realm where the comedic resolution is impossible and where her gracious liberty of style must fight to the death with the predatory violence of libertinism.

The Congrevean comedy-heroine is expected not only to outwit her brutal father and trounce the deadly alternative suitor (as Clarissa does with the repulsive Solmes, her father's choice), but to grill her future mate with merciless wit and penetration,only to soften by the final act and accept his proposal of marriage. (This is precisely what Charlotte Grandison does in Richardson's kinder, gentler fiction.) Lovelace constantly complains about Clarissa's "penetration," which «obliges» him (so he claims) to proceed "by the Sap," by secret military tunnels (letter 99); his rape of her unconscious body may be read as a crude physical counterpart to this quality that he fears in her. Clarissa sees through Lovelace, perceiving, where others find aristocratic confidence, only the nervous arrogance of the upstart, an insecurity that could erupt or implode into violence. In the psychological realm it is she who is the aristocrat and he the parvenu-a precise reversal of the social position of their families. Clarissa's critical yet fascinated vision of Lovelace dominates the start of the novel, since Richardson cleverly withholds the man's own letters for nearly two hundred pages. As he closes in, and his real intentions become agonizingly apparent to the reader (though not to Clarissa), she continues to exercise her suspicious intelligence on the character he presents to her, exposing the "half-menacing strain" of his compliments, the contradiction between his sugared words and the "lines of his own face," his habit of "visibly triumphing… in the success of his arts" (letter 98). After her capture they still play the game of scrutiny, like the alert and predatory couples of comedy, "great watch-90- ers of each other's eyes; and indeed… more than half-afraid of each other" (letter 125). Clarissa continues to play the tragic Millamant, verbally reducing her partner/opponent to "a simpleton, hesitating, and having nothing to say for himself" (letter 107), and Lovelace recognizes her power to "beat me out of my play," to silence his speeches and disrupt the trained seducer's well-oiled sequence of moves. Her tone becomes inevitably darker after her violation, but the dynamics are the same: "Abandoned man! — Man did I say?… well may'st thou quake; well may'st thou tremble and falter, and hesitate, as thou dost!" (letter 263). Only her resolution to die gives her a more effective role.

Lovelace is himself a dramatist, theatrical in his actions and in his letters (which are thick with quotes from Restoration drama and sometimes written out in play form, with speaking parts and stage directions). But Clarissa is similarly creative, even though her desire to shape the world is thwarted; the letter fragments she scatters after the rape, for example, cite the same heroic plays that Lovelace loves to quote, giving us an eerie sense of the compatibility that underlies their destructive deadlock. They struggle, however, over what kind of drama will emerge. Lovelace-who is always contriving plots to rival Horner, dressing up cronies to impersonate respectable characters, and giving episodes theatrical tides like "The Quarrelsome Lovers"-obviously wants to define the whole business as a Restoration sex comedy, with Clarissa as the fallen woman. This genre assumes that issues of sex and power are fundamentally lightweight, that women really like to be outwitted or violated by "Men of Spirit," and that the rake, however wicked he has been, can save everything by an offer of marriage in "the last Act" (Lovelace's very words). Clarissa hopes that she might be involved in an eighteenth-century sentimental comedy, where the rake reforms sincerely and intends marriage from the start. Once the rape destroys all vestige of this illusion, however, she improvises a tragedy out of what few resources are left her-quite literally, snatching up scissors or a penknife to impersonate Lucretia, or spending her last few pounds on a coffin decorated with emblems of her own design. Richardson draws attention to this generic shift in his letters to outraged readers; his goals are Pity and Terror, the high emotions of classical tragedy.

Like his predecessors in drama and real life, Lovelace prefers the artifact of seduction to the pleasures of union. Perverted creativity inspires both his original attraction to Clarissa and the cat-and-mouse games he plays thereafter. "I love dearly to exercise my invention," he -91- explains; "I have ever had more pleasure in my Contrivances than in the End of them. I am no sensual man; but a man of spirit"-adding, with gratuitous misogyny, that "One woman is like another." (This passage was restored to the third edition in an attempt to darken Lovelace's character.) He must force Clarissa into sexuality (to prove that "every Woman is the same"), and yet sex is empty and disgusting for him-"a vapour, a bubble!" He craves intimacy with her, and yet cannot imagine sexual love within marriage, since he equates consummation with linguistic and emotional vacuum; like Dom Juan in Molière, he fears that once he has conquered "there is nothing more to be said." Lovelace repeatedly gloats over the "illustrious subject" that Clarissa provides "to exercise [his] pen upon," as if the chief motivation of his pursuit were to stimulate the act of writing. As Clarissa stubbornly refuses to conform to his scenario, writing becomes a compensatory fantasy realm, where "Robert the Great" controls everything according to his "imperial will and pleasure" (letter 99). He tries to think of Clarissa as a fiction, an author's character who must simply be what he dictates: "I might have had her before now, if I would. If I would treat her as flesh and blood, I should find her such" (letter 157.1).

But Lovelace also presents himself as the passive agent or mouthpiece of a «subject» outside himself. At times he blames his "plotting villain of a heart," as if that organ did not belong to him ("I so little its master!" [letter 153]). Sometimes he blames the place, hoping that the move to London will solve all his problems automatically. Then he blames the women in the London brothel, who urge him to carry on with the rape. Most of all, he blames Clarissa, ascribing to her all the «Power» that in reality he has stripped away from her; while she is treated like a Middle Eastern hostage, constantly spied upon and physically barred from approaching the windows and the door, Lovelace wails that "every time I attend her, I find that she is less in my power, I more in hers" (letter 99). In an extreme version of this conceit, he imagines that Conscience has stolen his pen and written moral reflections into his text; he then proceeds to beat and choke this female Conscience figure to death. In a text stuck on with wax to the main letter, Lovelace admits that he is "afraid of the gang of my cursed contrivances" and "compelled to be the wretch my choice has made me!" The paradox of libertine freedom could hardly be taken further. Richardson has created a tormentor who perceives his own futility and yet seems powerless to change it: "I am a machine at last, and no free agent" (letter 246). -92- Richardson's «extraordinary» libertine does not repent, of course, but flings himself even more deeply into the character that conventional society expects of him: "Am I not a Rake, as it is called? And who ever knew a Rake stick at any-thing?"; "Were I now to lose her, how unworthy should I be to be the Prince and Leader of such a Confraternity as ours! — How unable to look up among men!" (letters 127, 104). Lovelace frets about the «figure» he will make in "Rakish Annals," afraid of not matching up to a pre-scripted libertine identity. And for all this, Clarissa must pay: "If I forgive thee, Charmer, for… these contempts, I am not the Lovelace I have been reputed to be; and that thy treatment of me shews that thou thinkest I am" (letter 103). When Laclos's Valmont shifts the blame to his victims or to the way of the world, we always read it as a cynical maneuver, but Lovelace seems genuinely indignant and genuinely unaware of the contradiction that sustains his pursuit of Clarissa and reduces it to stalemate: one the one hand, he tries to force her into his own script, to impose a prefabricated character on her (much as her father wants to do with his monstrous arranged marriage); on the other hand, he continually describes himself as passive and "female," casting her in the active role of initiator, of definer, of "subject." Even when «Conscience» holds his pen, he presents himself as the victim of a larger circumstance: "What a happy man… had I been, had it been given me to be only what I wished to appear to be!" (letter 246). The fate he wishes on Clarissa-to be a fiction wholly controlled by someone else's will, with no gap between projected appearance and inner essence-he really desires for himself.

A total revolution of manners

Though critics treated the magisterial Clarissa with far more respect than the upstart Pamela, they still worried that the intensity and directness of Richardson's realism-the very quality that made his work so compelling-might undermine his moral intention. No one doubted his power to arouse the most intense emotions, but many readers (even among his friends) thought it was used irresponsibly. The rape arouses «Horror» rather than the nobler Pity and Terror. Endless scenes of attempted seduction have the effect of pornography (the same argument that was used in Pamela Censured, which Richardson obviously took to heart). The long-drawn-out treatment of cruelty and death impose a kind of torture on the reader-or else we may be corrupted by -93- a perverse delight in another's suffering. Samuel Johnson famously praised the «Sentiment» of Clarissa rather than the story (if you read it for the story you will hang yourself), but «Sentiment» may bring on an unwholesome kind of sympathy that undermines our judgment. Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, found Richardson emotionally irresistible and socially deplorable: she wept like "an old Fool" over Clarissa and yet despised his «miserable» style and «low» characters (far from being role models, Anna Howe is "a more vicious character" than the prostitute Sally Martin, Clarissa should be locked up in Bedlam, and Charlotte Grandison should have "her Bum well whipp'd"). Richardson's confusing mélange of «tenderness» and impropriety "will do more general mischief than the Works of Lord Rochester."

Richardson insists relentlessly that Clarissa must be worshiped as a Christian paragon and that Lovelace, if not absolutely evil, is much too vicious to be attractive. Some of Richardson's friends did recognize the powerful critique of patriarchal aggression in Lovelace: Astraea Hill calls for a Protestant nunnery to protect women from "mask'd male Savages" (Lovelaces, Solmeses, and Harlowes); Sarah Fielding sees that Lovelace destroys "every thing that is valuable, only because everything that is valuable is in his Power." But most readers found Lovelace more entertaining, Clarissa more culpable, her rape more arbitrarily cruel, and her death more devastating, than Richardson had intended. The heroine was widely criticized for overdelicacy, rashness, excessive delay in accepting Lovelace's offers of marriage, inadequate knowledge of her own heart, and failure to escape once she knows the extent of his villainy-all developments of the portrait of unconscious desire first sketched in Pamela. Even the sympathetic Johnson notes that "there is always something which she prefers to truth," though he (like Diderot) praised those complexities and contradictions that other contemporaries paraded as faults.

Richardson asked for such criticisms-quite literally, since he insisted on sharing his manuscripts and provoking a detailed analysis in reply. Readers in his inner circle responded, not with detached technical observations, but with intense emotional outbursts and detailed proposals for alternative scenes and endings. As Diderot put it, the reader plays an interactive "rôle" in the drama of Clarissa. Richardson's correspondents display a sensibility bordering on erotic excitement: Sarah Fielding becomes "all sensation" as she reads; Colley Cibber cruises London in search of girls who look like Clarissa; Lady Brad-94- Brad- (who wrote under a romantic pseudonym) alternately blushes, cajoles, and throbs with pain. Clarissa stimulated not only the feeling heart but the fiction writer in the reader. Lady Bradshaigh sketched out, and her sister Lady Echlin actually wrote, an alternative ending for Clarissa running to 136 pages, with a critical preface. Sarah Fielding produced Remarks on Clarissa as a short story, in which the characters reveal themselves by their obtuse or sympathetic responses to the great book; those who dismiss women's issues as trivial ("Letters wrote between Misses!"), those who cannot endure any narrative longer than an almanac, those who blame Clarissa and exonerate Lovelace, are matched to their obnoxious counterparts in Clarissa itself. Fielding's brother Henry, whose fiction-writing career had been launched by the desire to puncture Pamela, praised Clarissa by sending Richardson a «Narrative» of the emotions that overwhelmed him during the rape and its aftermath: "God forbid that the Man who reads this with dry Eyes should be alone with my Daughter when she hath no Assistance within Call!" Henry Fielding's «Heart» breaks down the barriers between fiction and life, mingling Clarissa and his own daughter for the thrill of imagining virtue in danger.

Lady Echlin's preface and alternative ending encapsulate the problems forced upon the reader of Clarissa. The heroine's "conduct is quite inconsistent with her character," since she could not possibly be so credulous as to let herself be recaptured after once escaping from the brothel. Lovelace's belief that every woman can be «subdued» is in fact ratified, not disproved, by the terrible actions that follow. The reader becomes "too much oppresst, or distracted, to admitt a rational sensibility." Nor is justice properly done; the wicked siblings are not punished enough, and Lovelace is removed by the arbitrary and anti-Christian means of a duel. Echlin avoids all this by giving the villains sudden attacks of conscience as they try to recapture Clarissa: her wasted form shocks them so deeply that they convert and repent. This narrativestopping device brings Clarissa into line with Pamela and Grandison, and throws into greater relief Richardson's «extraordinary» decision to make Lovelace an exception to his general weakness for sentimental conversions. Echlin's desire for a happy ending (or at least a wistfully sad one, since the reconciled Clarissa and Lovelace still die of "consuming Illness") shows how threatening Richardson's tragic vision could seem. Threatening and perhaps misogynistic: significantly, Echlin's version hinges on female agency and "sensibility," since it is Sally -95- Sally-devilishly unrepentant in the original Clarissa-who first breaks down in remors and destroys the plot.

Richardson's response to these improvements, as to all the calls for a happy ending, seethes with the indignation of the artist defending his integrity and of the moralist exposing upper-class indulgence. Since Lady Echlin's Lovelace stops short of the "capital Crime," he actually did no evil; why then kill him off at all? Why not shower him with rewards, make him "a Governor of one of the American Colonies," where he could shine "as a Man you had reformed"? This echoes his withering criticism of the happy-ending school in the postscript to the 1751 edition: after trampling on Clarissa, murdering other women by forcing them to die in clandestine childbirth, and "glorying in his wickedness" for years, Lovelace has only "as an act of grace and favour to hold out his hand to receive that of the best of women, whenever he pleased, and to have it thought that Marriage would be a sufficient amends for all his enormities to others, as well as to her." Those who would let Lovelace off the hook trivialize women's oppression and turn Clarissa's suffering into entertainment (they would keep the earlier scenes "for the sake of the sport her distresses would give to the tenderhearted reader"). Richardson's spirited defense raises as many problems as it solves, however. His sarcastic praise of Echlin's «good» characters and "excellent Heart" hints at a scandalous truth, that the needs of a good heart and a good novel might be diametrically opposed. (Richardson tried to heal this rift in Grandison, with doubtful success.) His argument for the necessity of rape-as if all Lovelace's coercion and mental cruelty amounted to nothing, and only vaginal penetration were real-resembles the libertine creed more than the Christian. And Richardson shares Lovelace's main assumption, that Clarissa's «trials» are necessary to prove her virtue and so must be escalated ad infinitum. The more scenes of sexual torment the novelist dreams up, the more moral the novel must be, and so on to the logical conclusion: " Clarissa has the greatest of Triumphs… in, and after the Outrage, and because of the Outrage." Richardson repeatedly insists that "the Tendency of all I have written is to exalt the Sex," but we must be suspicious of an exaltation that necessarily involves exposing an imaginary heroine to the most protracted sexual abuse.

However dubious his motives, Richardson does at least take rape seriously, as many recent feminist and deconstructionist critics appreciate. As a physical event, a single penetration during a drugged coma -96- might not seem a matter of life and death-so Lovelace insinuates when he compares Clarissa to the suicidal Lucretia: "Is death the natural consequence of a Rape?" But Clarissa understands what Lovelace pretends to deny, that rape is primarily a symbolic act, an attempt to shatter the whole edifice of female identity. As Terry Castle puts it, "A kind of demented fatality leads Lovelace from hermeneutic violence against her to actual sexual violence: his very literal infiltration of Clarissa's body is intimately related to that infiltration of sign systems he has already effected in order to control her… Clarissa's celebrated 'long time a-dying' becomes, thus, a methodical self-expulsion from the realm of signification." The entering of her body means total violation, not only because it destroys her technical virginity (barring her forever from conventional marriage), but also because she has been robbed of every other space to call her own, bullied out of her inheritance, imprisoned first in her father's house and then in the brothel contrived by Lovelace. What he calls her «pride» in bodily integrity was the last self-possession left to her, and now only by starving that alienated body to nothing can she regain her "father's house." The psychological association of penetration and death-a natural link, perhaps, for an author whose six sons all died in infancy-recurs throughout the novel: in dreams, Clarissa is stabbed by Lovelace and tumbled into a mass grave; in real life she turns knives on herself or begs Lovelace to "let thy pointed mercy enter!" In her will (read out to the whole family) she forbids any surgical opening of her body and imagines Lovelace "viewing her dead, whom he ONCE before saw in a manner dead" (letter 507). Lovelace meanwhile (in yet another instance of the weird compatibility that underlies their conflict) fantasizes about having her corpse opened-sending the bowels to her father and keeping the heart himself "in spirits"-since only he can truly «interpret» and «possess» her.

Richardson's greatest gift, as Diderot rightly perceived, was the uncanny psychological accuracy that allowed him to enter the most private recesses and the most extreme experiences like an invisible magician. But his novelistic imagination sometimes undermines the consistency of the moral system he claims to be presenting. For example, Richardson preaches domesticity, "family values," and absolute submission to patriarchal authority, but he shows the actual family as a Gothic nightmare, worse than anything in Frankenstein because it is realistic enough to be typical; well might Diderot hail Clarissa as a terrifying new Gospel that hews apart man and wife, daughter and mother, — 97- brother and sister. Again, the stomach-churning Swiftian description of Mrs. Sinclair's physical decay is meant to drive home the central moral of the book: that the rake cannot possibly «reform» to make a good husband, that nothing can cleanse this abomination but "a total revolution of manners" (letter 499). We admire this militant refusal to compromise, until we remember that these lines are delivered by Belford, Lovelace's fellow rake and confidant. Not only does Belford reform, he receives the highest honors, marries well, inherits Lovelace's fortune, and earns such respect from the dying Clarissa that she appoints him executor of her will (therefore guardian of those papers that survive to constitute the novel); he becomes in effect the authorized narrator for the last three volumes. Richardson thus accommodates precisely the reformist doctrine he attacks most fervently, just as he «accommodates» his moral intention to the corrupt form of the novel. And Lovelace raises another good question about this new hero: since he was privy to all the evil inflicted on Clarissa, why did he not intervene earlier, like a knight rescuing a damsel from the giant's castle?

For better or worse, Richardson aspired not merely to entertain or mirror contemporary life but to transform it; even in Familiar Letters he claims to present "rules to think and act by, as well as forms to write after." Yet this didactic, exemplary function does not fit well with the imperatives of narrative art. The means by which a novelist commands «extraordinary» attention frequently subvert the end-instruction in Christian piety and social duty. Capturing the reader requires excitement, arousal, the imposition of will, the intermingling of emotive and creative power. And if all successful novels work a kind of seduction, then Clarissa, which compels the reader to witness voluptuous cruelty at astonishing length, seems to draw us into a sadomasochistic bond. In his correspondence Richardson equates himself with Pygmalion, but (as Lady Bradshaigh points out) Pygmalion gave life to his creation, not death. Richardson, like Lovelace, assumes that "my Girl" must be put through a mounting series of trials as an experiment; how does this differ from the urge to «sport» with Clarissa's sufferings, condemned in those who call for a happy ending? It is a kind of torture to read page after page of Lovelace's plots and deceptions, knowing that Clarissa, in the next room, cannot see them. But is the reader a fellow victim or the torturer's accomplice? The power of this author's cruelty is recognized by no less an expert than the Marquis de Sade: "If after twelve or fifteen volumes the immortal Richardson had virtuously ended by converting -98- Lovelace and having him peacefully marry Clarissa, would you… have shed the delicious tears which [he] won from every feeling reader?" The novelist's supreme goal is to create "interest," de Sade continues, and this is best achieved when "our souls are torn," when "virtue crushes vice."

A psychoanalyst might assume that Richardson really resembled Lovelace and repressed this side of his psyche, but it would be more accurate to say that the agency of the novelist-what the author does to the reader-resembles what Lovelace tries to do to Clarissa. Richardson himself seems to exploit the parallel at times. His correspondence and prefatoria glisten with playful hints that he too is an «Encroacher» or a "Designer." He often defends Lovelace, quotes him as an authority, or confirms his libertine theories of "Women," triumphantly flaunting his female readers' indulgent response to Lovelace as evidence for their corruption-just as Lovelace flaunted his sexual conquests to make the same point. Circulating his manuscript in a female coterie (reminiscent of that group he served at thirteen?) allowed Richardson to run his emotional experiments, provoke an intense reaction, and then ride over the protests, violating the will of lady after lady. Responsive fans like Lady Bradshaigh replied in kind; as each new volume is pressed upon her she cries "Would you have me weep incessantly?… I cannot, indeed I cannot!" Richardson «teaches» the male reader to "gain his horrid ends," Bradshaigh complains, and reduces the female reader to a trembling victim: "I am as mad as the poor injured Clarissa, and am afraid I cannot help hating you." "A tender heart" could not possibly draw such "shocking scenes"; he must be one of those "detestable wretches" who "delight in horror," like the artist who had a man tortured so that he could paint a more authentic Crucifixion. After a night of weeping over Clarissa, "what must I say to the Man who has so disappointed and given me so much Pain? Why that I admire him for the Pain he gives, it being an undoubted Proof of his Abilities." After the rape she declares "you now can go no farther"-echoing the very words that Lovelace uses to announce the outrage itself.

Artistic power lies in extremity; so Bradshaigh implies and de Sade later confirms. The imagination must press into the cavern until it can "go no farther." This, according to de Sade, is precisely what Richardson bequeathed to the novel. In Sir Charles Grandison, however, Richardson refused to follow this «extraordinary» path. Here damsels are inevitably rescued and libertine giants reduced to dwarves. Erotic tension yields to the faintly prurient display of magnanimity ("Her -99- bosom heaved with the grandeur of her sentiments"). The robust feminism of Harriet and Charlotte lapses into self-deprecation, feminine "delicacy," and compliance. The hero, splendid as a rational manager, does not throb and suffer enough: as Taine put it, "his conscience and his peruque are intact"; we can only canonize him and then "have him stuffed." Grandison unfolds in a dreamworld of elective affinities, where real parents have been conveniently killed off. Significantly, when we do learn about Sir Charles's and Clementina's family we encounter episodes of monstrous cruelty, abused authority, and heart-rending suffering-and it was precisely these scenes that pumped the tears from readers like Wortley Montagu, Diderot, and Stendhal. This study of sensibility without obsession, sublimity without abjection, only proves de Sade's disturbing thesis: ever since Clarissa, the novelist is bound to explore, not virtue alone, but the uttermost capacities of vice, the deepest «folds» of the human heart.

James Grantham Turner

Selected Bibliography

Barbauld Laetitia, ed. The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, Selected from the Original Manuscripts. London, 1804.

Books Douglas, ed. Joseph Andrews and Shamela. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Castle Terry. Clarissa's Cyphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's Clarissa. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Diderot Denis. "Éloge de Richardson" (1761), available in all standard editions and in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière. Paris: Garnier, 1959, 29–48.

Doody Margaret Anne. A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

Doody Margaret Anne, and Peter Sabor, eds. Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Eagleton Terry. The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Blackwell; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

Eaves T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.

Echlin Lady Elizabeth. An Alternative Ending to Richardson's Clarissa. Dimiter Daphinoff, ed. Swiss Studies in English 107. Berne: Francke, 1982. -100-

Fielding Sarah. Remarks on Clarissa. London, 1749. Facsimile ed. Peter Sabor. Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1985.

Flynn Carol Houlihan. Samuel Richardson, a Man of Letters. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Halsband Robert, ed. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Complete Letters. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon, 1957.

Haywood Eliza. Anti-Pamela, or Feign'd Innocence Detected. London, 1741.

Pamela Censured, in a Letter to the Editor. London, 1741. Facsimile ed. Charles Batten. Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1976.

Paulson Ronald, and Thomas Lockwood, eds. Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1969.

Traugott John. "Clarissa's Richardson: An Essay to Find the Reader." In Maximillian E. Novak, ed., English Literature in the Age of Disguise. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. -101-

Fielding and the Novel at Mid-Century

THIS volume, this "history of the British novel," represents a collective inquiry into the emergence and evolution of one profoundly influential literary form. Here, I will pursue one aspect of that inquiry by focusing on the achievements of an early practitioner of the form, Henry Fielding. In his own varied literary career as poet, journalist, essayist, playwright, and, of course, novelist, Fielding himself frequently took up the subject of the history of literary forms, lamenting the decline of venerable forms, greeting the arrival of new forms with distrust or distaste, commenting on the cause and consequences of literary empires' rise and fall, and engaging in the practice of both old and new forms with a certain shameless abandon.

Sometimes Fielding presents his views of literary history directly, in expository prose; at other times he communicates those views more subtly or more imaginatively, through networks of allusion, through narrative incidents, or through emblematic scenarios. Were Fielding, for example, to address the subject of this essay-"Fielding and the Novel"-he might compose a prose essay under that title, or he might just as easily create a farcical scene in a play in which a character named Fielding encounters a character named The Novel, and the two of them banter, argue, fall in love, duel, or perhaps dance. Much of the humor of such a scene would derive from the incommensurability of the two characters who thus meet up on stage, one a historical personage with human character and agency, the other a mere generic abstraction; and Fielding's treatments of literary history often raise questions, in partic -102- ular, about how the agency of individual authors interacts with the seemingly inert influence of existing conventions and forms.

In fact, Fieldingdid compose a scene much like the one I have just described. The final act of his 1730 play, The Author's Farce, consists of a "puppet show" in which live actors play the parts of puppets named for a variety of current entertainments and literary genres: tragedy, comedy, oratory, pantomime, opera-and, notably, the novel. "Mrs. Novel," as Fielding calls his human/puppet embodiment of the novel form, not only competes within the puppet show for the love of "Signior Opera," but steps outside the puppet show's frame to flirt with a parson who has burst in upon the show to try to close it down. Mrs. Novel thus exchanges words with the representatives of other forms of entertainment in the puppet show, with the author of her play, and with the parson and constable who interrupt it. The confrontations that ensue between different ways of talking-novelistic, tragic, comedic, oratorical, operatic, even (in Monsieur Pantomime's case) nonverbal-as well as between different levels of action (within the play and inside the play-within-the-play) are amusingly absurd.

These confrontations also are suggestive of what I will describe as a characteristic quality of the novels that Fielding began to produce a decade after this play was performed. Although those novels do not present us with personified embodiments of a handful of genres, the way The Author's Farce does, their language characteristically incorporates the voices of any number of genres, juxtaposing the verbal mannerisms and formal features of a variety of discourses, playing upon the gaps and dissonances that appear between them, and often locating a phrase, an event, or a character in several contexts or frames of reference simultaneously. Further, the multiple frames of reference that Fielding's novels stubbornly superimpose are often historically as well as formally disjunctive ones. That is, if his novels may be called, in some significant sense, novels of the "mid-century," they define the space they inhabit in the «middle» or midst of history not as a comfortably balanced, central, or intermediate one, but as one that is, jarringly, both early and late.

As a critic has recently observed, the puppet show scene in The Author's Farce provides a graphic emblem not only for the distinctive nature of the prose in Fielding's novels, but for novelistic discourse in general, as it is described by one side in current theoretical debates. The writings of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin emphasize the multi-103- plicity of social dialects within any single language-the separate vocabularies and manners of speech that belong to the members of different professions, age groups, economic classes, sexes, and so on. He characterizes the novel as a genre uniquely capable of encompassing the diversity of speech types and voices (the "heteroglossia") that other literary genres exclude. In encompassing this linguistic diversity, the novel admits into its pages the fact of social difference-and, therefore, the possibility of social struggle. Furthermore, according to Bakhtin, the novel characteristically emphasizes the variability within a language over time, as well as the diversity of voices within it at any one time. Dramatizing the way that past, present, and imminently future uses of the language coexist, the novel calls attention to the historical nature of social realities and forms, to the gaps and contradictions between past and present beliefs and institutions, and to the incompleteness of historical change itself, which leaves traces of old social realities amid the new. Bakhtin repeatedly refers to Fielding's novels as paradigmatic examples of novelistic discourse, thus described; the chaotic scene of dialogue between wildly diverse-even ontologically dissimilar-characters on the stage of The Author's Farce might seem to him, as to critics influenced by his work, a fitting anticipation of Fielding's later achievements as a novelist.

To other theorists and critics of the novel, however, that scene would not seem to provide an apt representation of novelistic discourse at all-unless, perhaps, the scene were revised to present Mrs. Novel holding forth on the theater's stage alone. In sharp contrast with Bakhtin's description of the novel, some recent accounts have characterized the novel as offering a specialized, insular, and illusorily harmonious discourse-one that carefully excludes some parts of social life from its pages, maintaining the divisions between different «spheres» within society so successfully as to conceal them. In particular, in this view, the genre of the novel functions to maintain the division between private and public spheres of action and experience, taking only the former for its subject matter and disavowing any connection between the realm of the «personal» and that of political or economic life. In doing so, the novel effaces the way that the institutions of personal life, and even ways of talking about personal experience, change over time, emerging from a process of historical struggle between different interest groups.

If Fielding's novels can be invoked as paradigmatic within Bakhtin's theory, they become anomalous in this second account of the nature of -104- the novel. Tom Jones in particular not only acknowledges but insists on the connections between matters of personal and of political importance; and all of Fielding's novels call attention to the ongoing power of history to shape the conventions of personal identity as well as of public life. Thus, Fielding's interest in literary history is part of his more general interest in historical process: in the world of his novels, the individual formulates his identity through social conventions that are as transient, perhaps, as some of the literary conventions Fielding ridicules in his plays. Such possible uses of the novel form, emphasized by Bakhtin's account and particularly vividly realized in Fielding's work, appear in the novels of his contemporaries and successors as well.

Though Fielding does not consistently strive to conceal the conventional nature of social life or the influence of historical change, he often expresses a kind of horrified surprise at the extent to which individual personality may be shaped by these contingencies-what he calls in an early essay the "Force of Fashion on the Mind." When Fielding employs the device of the puppet show in The Author's Farce to parody popular entertainments, he refers to the crude puppet shows offered in country towns and at fairs, thus implying that the tastes of the town have sunk to a low level; but the device also resonates more broadly with a suggestion that there is something puppetlike about following the dictates of current fashion (whether a rage for the opera, the pantomime, or, for that matter, the novel). A thematics of puppetry, literally staged in the final act of The Author's Farce, appears as well in Fielding's other plays, in his essays, and in his novels, often serving to express both the comic and the dark possibilities of the control of individual identity from the outside. Fielding repeatedly comes back to the idea that some people might as well be puppets, their movements manipulated by strings and their bodies and minds made of something less animate than flesh and blood. He returns often as well to the scene of the masquerade, a popular entertainment in his time, and more generally to the idea of people wearing masks, whether literal or figurative ones.

A mask may be donned voluntarily, to please or to deceive a viewer, and Fielding frequently employs images of masking to portray the human proclivity to affectation, which he names as the proper target of ridicule in his preface to Joseph Andrews. He also often suggests, however, that masks may come to dominate their wearers, the artificial self they represent overpowering any organic identity that might be pre-105- sumed to lie beneath. Thus Fielding's thematic interests in puppet life and in masks are closely linked, and they are both linked, perhaps less obviously, to his complicated and evolving exploration of the many meanings of "adoption." An affected identity might be called an adopted rather than an innate or genuine one; new institutions and beliefs, unlike timeless or natural ones, must be adopted by a culture in the course of history; in a more straightforward sense of the word, Tom Jones is an adoptive rather than a biological son of Allworthy, as Joseph Andrews turns out to be the adopted child of those he had thought were his blood relations. Especially in his earlier writings, Fielding tends to attach a pejorative sense to adoption as it appears in my first two examples: at times he links these senses of adoption to the stricter, familial one to suggest that a person who adopts a character or who lives by adopted beliefs is-like a puppet-not really flesh and blood, and so, in some sense, is not related to other people by blood ties.

Even in his early works, however, this opposition between adoptive and natural identities and relations is not strictly maintained. The Authors' Farce closes with a sequence of increasingly absurd revelations of lost identities and family bonds, including the discovery that one of the puppets on stage is the son of one of the human characters in the play's frame narrative. At times teasingly, at times seriously, Fielding repeatedly suggests that there may be more of a continuum between identity that seems merely artificial, affected, or allegorical (a human being who tries to «name» himself with the affected virtue of piety or wit or generosity; a puppet character named "Mrs. Novel") and what we ordinarily recognize as an individual human self. Though some of the characters in his novels have at least apparently naturalistic names such as Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, or Abraham Adams, and others, like the puppets in The Author's Farce, are named for a quality, an occupation, or an obsession (such as Booby, Allworthy, Thwackum, or Square), these characters interact in the same plane of novelistic reality and may turn out to have closer ties to each other, including blood ones, than might initially appear.

The characters on stage in the final scene of The Author's Farce are presented as puppets, I have suggested, because they are so shaped, controlled, and defined by their particular historical moment; yet, significantly, that same historical moment generates a number of different puppets with their own distinctive ways of talking and moving, rather than manipulating them in unison. For Fielding, historical determin-106- ism is never singular and monolithic: he is interested in the contradictions, gaps, and disjunctions within a society's system of practices and beliefs at any one time. In The Author's Farce, these disjunctions between different ways of talking and acting are trivial ones, and they appear in the spaces between the characters we see on stage. In the course of Fielding's career as a novelist, he becomes increasingly interested in locating these disjunctions within the individual, so that character itself becomes the meeting place of disparate genres, multiple discourses, incompatible frames of reference. In the works he wrote before becoming a novelist, and to greater or lesser extents in all of his novels as well, Fielding takes a satirist's view of inconsistencies within human identity, treating them as comical or scandalous secrets to be exposed by the keen observer's pen. However, even in his early novel, Joseph Andrews, Fielding begins to express uncertainty or distrust about the satirist's view of identity. In Tom Jones and Amelia, he bodies forth the possibility that it is in fact the tense and often unstable coexistence of disparate discourses or frames of reference within a single self that preserves the possibility of individual character, keeping it alive and dynamic within the grid of history's dictates.

Fielding himself at mid-century presents us with a vivid example of a culture's past, present, and future in collision within the individual soul. Mid-eighteenth-centuryEngland lay uneasily between a long cultural past and that future we now inhabit as our present world. Many recognizably modern institutions developed rapidly in the course of Fielding's lifetime, changing the cultural landscape around him in radical-though frequently preliminary or partial-ways. Often, Fielding joined the chorus of doomsayers who denounced such changes as signaling, if not the end of the world, the end of the social and cultural world as they knew it. Sometimes Fielding showed more pragmatic adaptability, accepting the changes he witnessed or even capitalizing upon them (perhaps with a gesture of knowing irony). Occasionally he even ran forward to carry the banner for new views or institutions, insisting on their promise with real imaginative zeal.

Fielding's relation to Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister of England from 1720 to 1742, illustrates the complexity-perhaps the irresolvable ambiguity-of his attitudes toward the political and economic changes of his time. In Walpole's day, the post of Prime Minister was not an officially designated one; it was Walpole's enemies, complaining -107- of the disproportionate power he wielded at court and in the government, who dubbed him the country's «prime» minister. They saw his influence as dangerously eroding the traditional authority of the king, already significantly curtailed by the 1688 Glorious Revolution and the subsequent Act of Settlement that formalized certain limits on royal power. And Walpole's critics rightly saw his methods of influence as forever altering the nature of English national government: Walpole developed a variety of bureaucratic and administrative means to exert control of a distinctively modern nature, including an effective system of bartering government posts at home and an extensive network of spies or "secret service men" abroad.

At points in his career, Fielding joined such conservative literary figures as the members of the Scriblerus Club (Swift, Pope, Gay, and others) in attacking Walpole, sometimes making him the target of merry ridicule, sometimes suggesting, more seriously, that Walpole presided over a far-reaching degradation of England's culture. Fielding even donned the pseudonym "Scriblerus Secundus" for some of his early satiric works to indicate his identification with this group. Scholars have debated, however, whether Fielding adopted a more positive view of Walpole at other times, and whether he may even have accepted secret patronage from him. More important for our purposes is the question of whether Fielding at some moments, or in some respects, entertained enthusiasm for the wide historical changes with which Walpole's regime was associated.

Those changes were as much economic as political. The features of a modern capitalist economy, so familiar to us now, were just being consolidated in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, and they existed alongside surviving values and institutional arrangements from an older economic system. The Bank of England and the maintaining of a substantial national debt, initiated at the end of the seventeenth century, developed so rapidly and so consequentially in the early eighteenth century as to represent what some have called a financial revolution. Others have described the eighteenth century as the period in which a true "consumer society" was born in England; an unprecedented emphasis on changing fashions and on the exchange and acquisition of consumer goods gave commodities a new role in English culture. Yet these changes were not instantaneous or thoroughgoing. Within specifically literary culture, a strong strain of nostalgic or reactionary sentiment persisted alongside newer views: English literary culture at -108- mid-century had one foot in the Augustan era of the first part of the century, with its neoclassical values and its suspicion of change, and one foot in the «Whig» ethos of the years to come, with its enthusiasm for trade and for the new financial and economic institutions, its acceptance of limitations on royal power, and its support for ministerial means of managing national government. Though some have called Fielding a consistently "good Whig," he, too, seems to have his two feet planted in different historical moments, and his work is characteristically divided in mood about the historical changes that surrounded him.

Suggestively, as a London magistrate in the last years of his life, Fielding himself sponsored two innovations that resonated broadly with Walpole's new order. The more fanciful of these was a commercial agency founded by Fielding and his half brother John, which they called "The Office of Intelligence: or, Universal Register of Persons and Things." The services offered by the Fieldings' registry are familiar to us from the modern institutions of employment agencies, real estate agencies, travel agencies, and consignment shops, although the «universal» aspirations of their registry might strike us as unusual: the agency was to serve as a clearinghouse for services of every kind, matching (for a small fee) vacant jobs with would-be workers, vacant houses with buyers or renters, unwanted goods with new owners, and so on. Fielding put a great deal of effort into promoting or «puffing» this venture in his periodical writing and even in his last novel. Though the "Universal Register" does not seem to have made his fortune, his hope that it might do so, and the faith he expressed that it could perform great services to society, make Fielding, in this venture at least, a voice for the commercial conception of society that was becoming more and more dominant during his lifetime.

More specifically, the basic premise of the "Universal Register"-Fielding's discovery that information gathering is itself a valuable product-parallels in the commercial sphere one of Walpole's great discoveries in the realm of governance: the utility of centralized information as a form of power. Fielding's second scheme or innovation also applied the power of centralized information, and to much more consequential effect for the future of English society. From his position as magistrate at Bow Street in London, Fielding argued passionately the need for a troop of regular, skilled constables to pursue and apprehend criminals; and his lobbying resulted in the establishment of the "Bow Street Run-" -109- "nets," the first efficient, professional police force in England. This innovation, now seemingly an inevitable part of civil life, improved law enforcement by providing professionals to "run after" those who had committed a crime; but this improvement, as Fielding emphasized in his proposals, depended on the scheme's first and crucial provision-that of a centralized location for the reporting of crimes.

Critics and theorists of the novel have suggested that there is something about the novel form, with its capacities for centralized or totalizing narration (its inclusion of sweeping perspectives and minute detail, its apparent access into individual consciousnesses, its compelling effects on readers) that makes it appropriate that it emerged as a genre during the same period in which police forces, penitentiaries, and other systems of surveillance, reporting, and control developed as crucial forms of state power. How apt, then, that Fielding the novelist was also Fielding, the founder of the Bow Street Runners. And yet (to return more directly to our subject of Fielding and the Novel), Fielding did not simply or immediately embrace the new genre of the novel, at least not as it was practiced by one of its great popularizers, Samuel Richardson.

Readers from Fielding's day to our own have noted that this great writer was initially catapulted into his career as a novelist, having first gained fame as a playwright and having achieved some minor competence in other forms, by his cranky resistance to Richardson's vastly popular first novel, Pamela. Within six months of Pamela's publication in 1740, Fielding had dismissed it handily in a brilliant parody, Shamela, poking fun at the moral pretensions of Pamela's heroine and at Pamela itself, lowering the mode of the novel's events to broad burlesque, and shrinking the protracted span of its action to a whirlwind thirty or forty pages. Energetic and hilarious as this dismissal had been, Fielding somehow was moved to respond to Pamela again the following year; but what begins as another burlesquing of Richardson's novel, Joseph Andrews, becomes, as it goes on, Fielding's own first full-length contribution to the emerging genre. The particular story of Fielding's entry into the new novel form bespeaks, then, that same ambivalence we have remarked in his responses to other new institutions and practices. Though both he and Richardson were to engage in the practice of writing novels, they clearly interpreted that practice quite differently, and contended openly for the authority to define the new genre in their own -110- ways, reminding us that any historical innovation may be shaped in alternative directions or put to different, perhaps even opposing, purposes. Even within Fielding's novels, however, the interpretation of the new genre is a complex, self-reflective, and often divided one-one that may be made to look more unitary and self-consistent than it is when defined within a system of contrasts with Richardson's works.

The contrasts that have regularly been drawn between Richardson's and Fielding's novels are at once helpful and potentially misleading. Readers have always noticed that Fielding did not follow Richardson's example in employing the epistolary form of narration used in Pamela. Indeed, he vigorously parodied that form in Shamela, and then ridiculed it again in Joseph Andrews, where he also first offered his own alternative to the form: a narrator who describes events and characters in the third-person past tense, from outside the plane and time frame of the novel's action, speaking in his own distinctive voice. Fielding would develop his use of that narrative voice in Tom Jones, where the narrator again holds forth on matters literary and philosophical in the first chapters of each of the novel's books. The use of this omniscient and magisterial narrative voice has been linked by readers to Fielding's treatment of character, which they see as strikingly different from Richardson's. The nature of that difference has often been described as the difference between «internal» and «external» characterization: Richardson's fiction of a text composed by Pamela herself, written as events occurred, allows him to render those events from «inside» her present consciousness, whereas Fielding, it has been observed, generally describes characters as they would be seen and understood from the outside.

Some readers have seen this difference as a sign of the decided inferiority of Fielding's human understanding, as well as of his works. In Richardson and Fielding's own time, Samuel Johnson commented that there was as great a difference between the two novelists "as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate." Readers more sympathetic to Fielding have argued that his choice of external characterization reflects not the superficiality of his vision, but the profundity of his philosophical recognition that in life itself, other people's characters are always only experienced through external and often misleading evidence. Thus, the insistent theme of misrecognitions, particularly in Joseph Andrews, serves to illustrate the verisimilitude of Fielding's narrative technique, and shows the effects-often comic, sometimes tragic-of the opacity -111- of one person's true character to another. Fielding is not simply philosophical, however, about this opacity: an element of longing for mutual transparency and full access to others' inner selves appears in his novels. This longing contributes to an elegiac strain within them, which has been too frequently overlooked as critics concentrate on drawing broad distinctions between Fielding's work and Richardson's.

In drawing such distinctions, critics rightly observe that Richardson's and Fielding's novels have different generic affiliations as well as different forms of narration and characterization. Fielding called some of his plays "dramatic satires," and his novels, too, are indebted to satiric traditions in a way Richardson's do not seem to be. This is one way in which they seem more closely tied to Augustan literary culture than do Richardson's novels, as satire was a highly developed and valued form among the Scriblerus Club members and other writers of the early eighteenth century. However, as I have already briefly noted, Fielding's own stance toward satire is a complex one, and his view of satire's powers becomes increasingly dark in the course of his novel-and essay-writing career.

Further, while Richardson's first novel draws on the native English traditions of spiritual autobiography, model-letter books, and conduct manuals, Fielding, in his preface to Joseph Andrews and elsewhere, explicitly declares the generic roots of his own novels in the tradition of classical epic. When Richardson and Fielding adopt these distinct generic lineages for their novels, they strike quite different stances toward recent developments in literary history-and in social history as well. The classical heritage Fielding invokes was made available to him through the traditional education he received as an upper-class boy; Richardson was well schooled instead in the growing body of literature, largely didactic or religious in nature, written in English for the aspiring middle class. More broadly, the classical epics so valued by the Augustans contain an image of male heroism, located in a world of militaristic values, that many of the newer works of mid-eighteenth-centuryEngland, often focused on female virtue and located in a world of domestic relations, did not honor. The nature of these newer works bespoke important, if somewhat inchoate, changes within English social life: a new valuation of «companionate» rather than arranged marriages, and an increasing idealization of female nature, as of the roles of wife and mother. With Pamela, or [Female] Virtue Rewarded, Richardson places himself at the very center of these social changes; -112- while Fielding's affirmation of epic models seems to leave him outside them, belatedly harking back to a fading world.

Some critics have been so impressed with the contrasting concentrations of Fielding and Richardson on male and on female ideals that they have summed up the differences between these two early novelists by declaring Fielding a paradigmatically virile and masculine writer, "a man's man," and Richardson "in all seriousness, one of our great women." (We might thus revise the imagined dramatic scene with which we began as a testy encounter between "Mr. Novel" and "Mrs. Novel," with Fielding and Richardson filling these respective puppet roles.) Critics have also remarked, however, that in his final novel, Amelia, Fielding explores the subjects of female heroism and domestic relations which Richardson had so momentously made his own, thus changing places with Richardson, who turned to questions of male virtue in the last novel he wrote. This crisscrossing of characteristic interests, satisfying in the neatness of its apparent reversals, had in fact been prepared for by elements in Fielding's earlier novels. For, despite his avowed and important debts to epic and the concentration on male character in his first three fictional works (reflected in their titles), Fielding from the first presents conventional notions of male heroism as extremely vexed, and he expresses a complex and ambivalent attitude toward emerging ideals of female character as well.

The availability of other selves for «internal» characterization, the legitimacy of satiric attacks on personal character, the viability of epic models of heroism, the authenticity of female claims to special virtue-all of these questions are posed in complicated and dynamic ways in Fielding's novels. His treatment of them evolves within the course of each of his novels, as well as between them. Fielding knew that the reader's experience of a novel itself has a "history," unfolding over time, and he capitalizes upon the dynamic nature of that experience, raising expectations only to explode them, moving the reader through different views of an event, a character, or a phrase-sometimes in the developing span of an elaborate plot, sometimes in the course of a single sentence. The highly mobile point of view conjured by Fielding's prose allows for the extraordinary effects of tone that critics have described as his characteristic "double irony" or "double reversals."

Fielding's most masterful achievements of style derive from this capacity of his prose to sustain multiple implications simultaneously, or in quick succession. So however, do the clumsiest, seemingly most -113- incompetent or ill-considered aspects of some of his works. To an unsympathetic reader, Jonathan Wild, Fielding's first novelistic work, may seem merely inconsistent in its use of an ironic persona; the tone of Amelia, his last, has struck some readers as oscillating wildly, bathetically, between earnest feeling and an unintentional atmosphere of burlesque. In these works, however, as in Shamela, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones, incoherences-problems of tone, awkward junctures between incommensurate discourses, inconsistencies in narrative strategy-are themselves made to signify: within each work, Fielding thematizes the experience of Babel, calling attention to those gaps within social discourse we have learned to overlook.

Toward the close of Jonathan Wild, Mrs. Heartfree has been relating her adventures at some length to a small audience gathered in Heartfree's prison cell, when a "horrid uproar" alarmed the company and "put a stop to her narration at present." The narrator comments, "It is impossible for me to give the reader a better idea of the noise which now arose than by desiring him to imagine I had the hundred tongues the poet once wished for, and was vociferating from them all at once, by hollowing, scolding, crying, swearing, bellowing, and, in short, by every different articulation which is within the scope of the human organ." Fielding does not give voice in Jonathan Wild to every different articulation within the scope of the human organ, but he does there unleash a dizzying diversity of forms of expression. The uproar that breaks into Mrs. Heartfree's story dramatizes, within the narrative, a much more constant process of disruption and interruption occurring throughout Jonathan Wild, where it is generally another among the narrator's own "hundred tongues" that breaks off the prevailing discourse of the moment. The mode of this early work is primarily ironic and satirical, but the targets of its satire are many, and sometimes apparently incompatible with each other; and the ironic persona who delivers the tale suffers strange transformations, sometimes admitting other points of view into his narration in the form of references to the opinions of "weak men," sometimes temporarily (as if inadvertently) assuming those alternative views himself.

Fielding builds the satirical fable of Jonathan Wild around the life story of an infamous criminal of that name, convicted and hanged in London in 1725. Wild was not simply a thief: he presided over a substantial and organized gang of thieves, and, with an audacity that seems -114- to have impressed as well as offended his contemporaries, he also garnered reward money by helping victims regain what his own gang members had taken. He exploited the system for capturing thieves as well, informing on members of his gang who challenged his authority in some way. Thus, without carrying out a robbery himself, Wild might profit at several levels from the event. At intervals throughout Jonathan Wild, Fielding links Wild's criminal enterprise to legitimate capitalist entrepreneurship, implicating capitalism in Wild's amoral greed, by emphasizing that it is his employing of other hands to labor for his profit that defines his «greatness» as a man. The insistence with which Fielding uses the term «greatness» and the phrase "the great man" to refer to Wild calls attention to a political target for his satire as well as an economic one: during his long tenure as prime minister, the many opponents of Sir Robert Walpole sneeringly referred to him as "the great man." In 1728, in The Beggar's Opera, John Gay had already made this satiric connection, identifying Jonathan Wild and Robert Walpole as moral if not social equivalents; Fielding deepens the connection, underlining the way that Wild and Walpole have both made their fortunes by presiding over systems, exploiting institutions, and simply, impudently, assuming an authority over others that has no particular source.

These elements of Fielding's satire easily intertwine, as Walpole's forms of governance and the institutions of a developing capitalism constitute important and interrelated features of Fielding's newly modern world. (We might note, for that matter, the peculiar similarity of the service offered by Wild in obtaining information about stolen goods and matching dispossessed owners with missing property and the kind of service conceived of by Fielding in his own innovation, the office of the "Universal Register." In Jonathan Wild, a version of that service is treated as the tellingly criminal epitome of modern enterprise.) Fielding extends his satire of things modern in Jonathan Wild into the specifically literary sphere, parodying the popular genres of criminal biography, travel narrative, and epistolary romance at different points in the tale. However, the main literary tradition with which his satire engages is not a modern but an ancient one: the world of epic, with its ideas of honor and glory and its delineation of the character of a hero. Epic references are always near at hand for the narrator of Jonathan Wild, who compares Jonathan Wild to Aeneas and his sidekick to Achates, dwells at a number of points on the nature of heroic greatness, and offers his -115- reader rhetorical flourishes adopted from epic, as when he provides a long epic simile about bulls and cows to describe the cacophonous interruption of Mrs. Heartfree's story. Thus, one of the hundred tongues in which Fielding erupts into speech in that episode, as throughout Jonathan Wild, is a tongue derived from epic. Fielding's epic similes in Jonathan Wild (as in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones) are entertaining because they place such homely references in the high diction and elaborate syntax of epic style, providing a measure of the distance between epic grandeur and the pedestrian modern world. However, Fielding's voicing of epic language in Jonathan Wild does not only serve, in the mode of mock-epic, to express the degeneracy of modern times. Instead, when Fielding violently, anachronistically, yokes together references to distinctively modern phenomena and to famous classical figures or events, he works to unsettle accepted «heroic» values in both, prying each loose from its familiar context by means of the other. Over and over again in Jonathan Wild, Fielding emphasizes the destructiveness of heroes' actions in history, although, speaking within his ironic persona, he pretends to celebrate that destructiveness, praising military heroes' willingness to massacre whole nations for the sake of their honor. The true worth of heroic character is thus drawn into question in Jonathan Wild in two ways: by this appalling praise for the heroic leader's spectacular sacrifice of human lives, and by the equation created between such heroic acts and the ignoble scheming of Jonathan Wild, who, we are told, has modeled himself on the epic and historical heroes he read about in school.

Fielding does not content himself with expressing the bankruptcy of both ancient and modern heroism in Jonathan Wild; he also attempts, at points, to advance an alternative set of values that he can affirm, albeit indirectly and perhaps only partially. He refers to the virtues of good nature, friendliness, generosity, and domestic devotion, although he claims to see them as merely «silly» weaknesses; and he embodies these «weaknesses» in the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Heartfree, whose story begins as a subplot of Wild's adventure but eventually becomes an equally weighty center of interest. Although Wild and the Heartfrees interact within the same space of narrative, they inhabit largely separate frames of reference, belonging to different literary genres and moral universes, so that Fielding's treatments of these characters can interrupt each other but cannot be simultaneously engaged. It is an episode involving Wild that literally interrupts Mrs. Heartfree's narration of her -116- adventures; the chorus of dissimilar voices unleashed at this interruption creates a boundary between Wild's and Mrs. Heartfree's incompatible ways of speaking, enacting and expanding upon the irreconcilable discord we might hear between them.

Throughout Jonathan Wild, Fielding typically marks such borders rather than erasing them or moving smoothly across them: he calls attention to the breaks or ruptures within our ways of constructing social meaning, including the separation we respect implicitly between public and private life. The Heartfrees' virtues are largely those of private life, whereas the various men satirized in the character of Wild aspire to success in the public spheres of politics or finance. Wild's tale too, however, includes events of a personal nature: Fielding interweaves the story of his courtship and unhappy marriage to Laetitia Snap with that of his commercial and quasi-political exploits. Significantly, the moments of greatest instability in the narrator's tone-the moments of wavering between ironic and earnest expression-tend to occur as he moves between his domestic and his public (political, economic, criminal) plots. (In particular, the narrator equivocates throughout Jonathan Wild about whether "greatness"-that is, amoral, insatiable ambition and greed-tends to thrive or tends to provide its own punishment in this world; and he gives different answers to this question for public and for private life.) A few utopian moments in Jonathan Wild suggest the possibility of healing this public-private division: the "very grave man" who opposes Wild's authority in Newgate exhorts the debtors to form a true community there, in which public good and private benefit will be identified; and the book's final pages leave us with a vision of an extended Heartfree family living "all together in one house" as one "family of love."

The utopian prospect of unification (of persons and of parts of life) is only glimpsed, however, among the increasing images of fragmentation in the closing chapters of Jonathan Wild, from the dialogue between Jonathan and the ordinary at Newgate, with its ellipses indicating lacunae in the text, to the narrator's closing acknowledgment that he must bring together "those several features" of Jonathan's character "which lie scattered up and down in this history." «History» is more than a merely conventional term in this formulation: in its final pages, The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great reminds us that the various languages it has employed (of epic greatness, of modern political parties, of ancient empires, of capitalist ambi-117- tion, of domestic virtue) all unfold in history and meet confusedly there: Wild shall "stand unrivalled on the pinnacle of GREATNESS" only "while greatness consists in power, pride, insolence, and doing mischief to mankind…," the narrator concludes-letting slip his ironic mask, even as he reveals that it has been constructed out of his historical moment.

In Shamela, the multiple voices in which Fielding speaks-or, I should say, the multiple pens with which Fielding writes-are formalized as belonging to the several correspondents whose letters make up this brief work. Pamela itself includes a few letters from writers other than Pamela, and Richardson would expand the epistolary form in Clarissa to encompass letters from a number of correspondents; but the variety of letter writers in Shamela works directly and explicitly to challenge the authenticity of any one writer's presentation of events. Before we arrive at the text of Shamela's first letter, we are given a mock dedication and two supposed encomiums to the editor of the volume (parodies of Richardson's elaborate self-flattering apparatus in later editions of Pamela), and also a pair of letters between two readers of Pamela-Parson Tickletext, who has been taken in by the seductive power of Pamela's appearance in letters, and Parson Oliver, who disabuses Tickletext of his illusions and offers the letters to follow as the eye-opening authentic original of Pamela's tale. These "framing materials" in Shamela serve not only to introduce Shamela's letters and the challenge they pose to Pamela's authenticity, but also to establish a multileveled structure of perspectives, like the one set up by the puppet show in The Author's Farce, with similarly peculiar interactions between frame and framed, reader (or editor) and character or text.

The specific content of the framing materials also provides a more implicit critique of the false apparent unity of Pamela's world: in these introductory letters, Fielding rather gracelessly cobbles together ridicule of Richardson's literary success with ridicule of two of his favorite political targets, Sir Robert Walpole and Lord Hervey. The incongruity of the effect is itself significant. Encountering the unexpected figures of the Prime Minister and one of his allies on the threshold of Fielding's parody of a novel, we have to wonder how the world of political conflict is or is not relevant to the apparently self-contained domestic world conjured by Richardson's tale. Fielding makes us feel the division that may be quietly maintained between public and private -118- spheres of life by crossing that division-bringing together the separate languages of each without overcoming the dissonance we are likely to hear between them.

Lord Hervey, satirized under the name of "Miss Fanny" in the dedication to Shamela, makes a brief appearance in Joseph Andrews as well. There, he provides the satiric original for Beau Didapper, the effeminate man who ineffectively threatens Fanny's virtue in Book 4. Fielding and others had frequently satirized Lord Hervey not only for his political allegiances but for his supposed effeminacy and sexual ambiguity, but such a satirical reference seems out of place in the final book of Joseph Andrews. Fielding in fact addresses the subject of satire at several points in Joseph Andrews, most explicitly in Book 3, chapter 1, where he defends general satire but rejects particular satire-or satire of recognizable individuals-as the equivalent of public executions. Five chapters later, in narrative rather than expository form, he again links verbal satire to physical violence and questions its legitimacy when he describes his main characters' encounter with the Roasting Squire. Intent, we are told, on finding the «ridiculous» in all he meets, the Roasting Squire exploits his social power to abuse and humiliate by any means, indulging in practical jokes that force their victims into ridiculous postures, or that even hurt them physically, rather than serving to expose real hidden weaknesses. The ridiculous is precisely what Fielding named in the preface to Joseph Andrews as the source of his own work's comic elements, though he there confidently asserts that the effect of ridiculousness attaches itself to individuals only because they have assumed affectations of some kind. Laughter, in this view, functions morally, to reveal concealed faults and inconsistencies; but in the course of Joseph Andrews, Fielding questions whether laughter can be an amoral, merely aggressive force as well.

He conveys this questioning largely through a complicated interplay between disparate genres and literary modes-drama, satire, the novel as defined by Richardson, the epic as defined by Milton-in the rhetoric, images, and narrative events of Joseph Andrews. Allusions to Paradise Lost especially enrich the texture of the scenes involving the Roasting Squire (in the "natural amphitheatre" where Joseph, Fanny, and Adams picnic, and in the tormenting of Adams with a «devil» or firecracker at the Squire's estate). The verbal and narrative recollections of Milton's poem in these scenes quietly advance epic forms of expression as an alternative to satiric ones. Both epic precedents and satiric -119- ones, however, are invoked by Fielding in Joseph Andrews to dislocate Richardson's epistolary novel form-to denaturalize its modes of representation by bringing them up against those of very different literary forms.

The opening gambit in Fielding's response to Richardson in Joseph Andrews has always struck readers as self-evidently comical and debunking: Fielding replaces the serving-maid who so fervently defends her chastity in Pamela with a male servant, who rejects his mistress's advances with equal fervor. The comedy of the scenes between Lady Booby and Joseph, critics have commented, is like the comedy of cross-dressing; Joseph appears in a garment adopted from his sister's wardrobe of virtues, rather than one natural to himself. Fielding does exploit our different expectations about female and male chastity to play these scenes for broad comic effect. Even in the opening scenes of the novel, however, the implications of this comic reversal of roles are ambiguous. Why does what constitutes a virtue in one sex become ridiculous when asserted by the other? Should virtues be like clothing, to be donned only when they are in fashion, becoming to one wearer but absurd on another? As the novel leaves its burlesque relation to Pamela behind, Joseph no longer functions primarily as a figure of absurdity, and even, some have claimed, becomes the hero of the novel. If so, he does so neither by abandoning his initial association with feminine roles nor by proving that all the features of his identity are natural rather than adopted. The description of Joseph's physical appearance, Fielding's comments on his tears at the abduction of Fanny, the story of his replacement of a girl in the cradle as a baby-all continue to link Joseph with feminine postures and roles, but not in ways that Fielding consistently ridicules. One function of this evolving treatment of Joseph's gender identity is to question the value and humanity of the traditional male "hero"-a term Fielding uses to describe the would-be rapist of Fanny, who embodies such unthinking aggression that his head, Fielding tells us, might as well be made of solid bone.

Joseph's identity is, in a number of ways, characterized by borrowing or adoption: he adopts his sister's model of righteous virtue; his own name turns out, unexpectedly, to be an adoptive one; he even has to borrow the clothing he wears from other people at several points in the novel. Through Joseph, however, Fielding dignifies the idea of adopted identity, rather than making it an emblem (as a purely satirical writer might) of the gap between essential and assumed character. Gammar -120- Gammar tells us that after finding Joseph in the cradle in place of her little girl, she came to love him "all to nothing as if [he] had been my own girl." The plot revelations that come at the close of Tom Jones even more emphatically trace a continuum between adoptive and biological relations: the discovery that Tom is in fact Bridget Allworthy's illegitimate son makes good on his long-standing adoptive relation to Allworthy by revealing that Allworthy is his uncle by blood, if not actually his father. Tom's character, like Joseph's, emerges in the course of his novel through a complex interplay between different discourses, but the dynamic tensions within his character might be fruitfully located in competing «texts» from political and social rather than literary history.

The events of political history intrude directly into the plot of Tom Jones when Tom encounters soldiers on their way to fight against the Jacobite rebellion. The references to this rebellion set the novel's action in 1745, the year the followers of "Bonnie Prince Charlie," advancing south from Scotland, sought to reclaim the British monarchy for the Stuart line, dethroned in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Tom expresses Fielding's own sympathies with the existing government of England when he decides to volunteer and join the soldiers in their defense of England's Protestant religion and constitutional liberty. While Fielding made a name for himself writing against the ministry of Robert Walpole early in his career, in the mid -1740s he was one of the staunchest supporters of the new ministry (Henry Pelham's) in print, and published two periodicals and several pamphlets specifically in response to the Jacobite threat. In these polemical writings, he urges his countrymen to join the King's army and take arms against the invading Jacobites; but in Tom Jones, his hero never makes it into battle. Instead, the King's soldiers turn out to be an unruly bunch; Tom soon quarrels with one of them, is injured, and gets left behind; and his pursuit of the troops and of their glorious cause is gradually replaced by a pursuit of Sophia and of love. Although the trajectory toward battle with Jacobite forces is thus never carried out, the invocation of this political context, and then the movement of the plot between Tom's patriotic and his romantic aims, traces a connection between the apparently separate matters of national government and of personal identity and desire.

The political writings of Fielding and other propagandists on both sides of the Jacobite debate often made this connection explicitly, with each side in the conflict warning that the victory of the other would -121- spell catastrophe not only for the rule of the nation but for relationships between the sexes and within the family. Critics of Tom Jones have noted that the «patriarchalist» arguments made in favor of Jacobitism involved analogies between the government of nations and of families, advocating the absolute authority of kings and husbands and fathers to rule over their respective realms. Thus, Squire Western's support for the Jacobite cause accords neatly with the views he expresses about his own right to control his wife's and daughter's lives. This analogizing between national and domestic rule, important to formulations of patriarchalist political philosophy, does not, however, sum up all the claims made by both Jacobite and anti-Jacobite propaganda about the consequences of their conflict for the realm of personal experience. Whig writing against the rebellion (including Fielding's) insisted that a Jacobite victory would usher in not only a different government but different definitions of male and female identity-definitions associated with the earlier era of Stuart rule, and ones that afforded men much less dignity and control.

Among the central motifs of much Whig propaganda, visual as well as verbal, were certain stereotyped images of the typical Jacobite man and woman. The Whig image of the Jacobite man drew on the existing type of the Restoration Cavalier gentleman, and mixed appealing with negative qualities: he might be witty, dashing, gallant, and successful with the ladies, but also too easily swayed by those ladies, weak-willed, and superstitious. Whig polemics invoke a more thoroughly negative image of the Jacobite woman: she must necessarily be headstrong and dominating, and possibly fierce, cruel, and perverse as well. At best, her courage and spirit make her seem a more lively alternative to the timid, gentle, chaste, and compassionate women conjured in Whig propaganda of this period to prove the humanity of their own cause.

Fielding engages this contemporary discourse about masculine and feminine character when he constructs his male and female protagonists, Tom and Sophia, in Tom Jones. He employs the language of this discourse to characterize them, placing them within its insistent oppositions-but, significantly, he invokes terms from the conventional accounts of both Whig and Jacobite men and women to describe them, forcing together the opposed categories of character within their single identities. Tom is both a good, modern, moral hero (even volunteering to fight in the Whig cause) and something of a Cavalier figure (occupied in various love affairs, brave to a fault, and irresistibly dashing); -122- Sophia, we are told at a number of points, is courageous and spirited as well as gentle, compassionate, and, of course, chaste. This has troubled critics of Tom Jones, who have variously identified Tom and Sophia with one or the other side of the Whig-Jacobite conflict: some have argued that, within the political allegory of Tom Jones, Tom should be identified with Bonnie Prince Charlie himself, others that he represents the Whig opposition to that prince's cause. At several points in the novel, Fielding in fact foregrounds an effect of diverse, even opposed frames of reference meeting within the individual characters of his hero and heroine.

In one such scene, Tom decides (like a good Cavalier hero) to challenge Northerton to a duel, but only because (like a good Christian hero) he thinks it would be wrong to sustain malice or unforgivingness toward him over time. In another, Sophia simultaneously shows courage and gentle love when she runs away from her father's home. Though these do not seem necessarily to be mutually exclusive qualities, Fielding highlights a sense of conflict or dissonance between them; he connects both scenes, in fact, to descriptions of cacophonous outbreaks of multiple, dissonant voices something like the one that interrupts Mrs. Heartfree in Jonathan Wild. He also sets both scenes at midnight, as if to suggest that the conflicting discourses or frames of reference that meet within his characters belong to one day-or era-and to the next, and come confusedly into contact at the midpoint between days (as they might, say, at mid-century). "Twelve Times did the iron Register of Time beat on the sonorous Bell-metal," Fielding tells us, when Sophia" softly stole down Stairs, and having barred and unlocked one of the House Doors, sallied forth…"; "The Clock had now struck Twelve… when Jones softly opening his Door, issued forth… "

Fielding portrays the male protagonist of his last novel, Amelia, as perpetually poised between two days, or two cultural eras. For Captain Booth, this suspension of his own identity between two eras is so severe that he is nearly paralyzed, rarely able, literally or figuratively, to «sally» or "issue forth." For much of Amelia, Booth is confined to his home to avoid arrest for debt; when he is not there, it is because he has failed to avoid arrest and is even more closely confined in prison. Booth's actions, however, are restricted not only by physical confinement but by a nearly constant sense of internal conflict. The conflicts that stymie Booth's will again and again are generated by his double allegiance to older and to emerging ideas of male character. As a gentleman and -123- especially as a soldier, Booth feels it is his duty to accept challenges to duel, but his Christian conscience recoils at the thought of shedding blood; his Cavalier sense of male honor makes him respond to Miss Mathews's advances in prison (as Tom does to Molly's, to Mrs. Waters's, and to Lady Bellaston's), but his devotion to his wife and to the ideal of a loving marriage renders him nearly senseless with guilt about this affair; his assumptions about a gentleman's proper occupation make it inconceivable to him to look for work beneath a military post, but he is unable to find such a post and cannot support the little family he so loves.

The conflicting frames of reference within which Booth attempts to define himself and to act also shape (and misshape) his efforts to interpret the events around him: Booth is always interpreting others' actions in the wrong contexts, wavering in the general assumptions he brings to social relations, and failing to reconcile his disparate views of the same events. The narrator of Amelia himself partakes of this kind of interpretive confusion and instability. Rather than projecting a single, sustained, omniscient view of the events and characters he describes, this narrator seems to waver, like Booth, between old and new assumptions (particularly about relations between the sexes and between social classes), offering one explanation and then another, in succession, without ever reconciling his inconsistencies. Only Amelia is able to achieve constancy of identity and point of view in this novel; while Booth hangs suspended between present and past models of male character, she seems to have moved forward vigorously into a crucial new model for female identity, that of the idealized wife and mother. However, ambivalences about this role (in particular, uncertainties about whether it complements and supports or competes with and challenges traditional male authority) shadow Fielding's treatment of Amelia, creating problems of tone and linking Amelia to various «doubles» within the novels-women who echo her dignified and appealing qualities in a satiric or burlesque key.

Some of Fielding's most successful early works capitalized upon the comic possibilities of female claims to heroism. In Shamela, he ridiculed Richardson's invention of a new, specifically female kind of heroic behavior; in one of his most popular plays, Tom Thumb, he added an extra dimension to the script's hilarity by casting a woman in the part of the play's tiny but histrionic hero. In Amelia, he seems to offer a female hero in all earnestness-but many of his original read-124- ers were not impressed. Some of them found Fielding's apparent change of heart in this novel unconvincing and ridiculous; many focused specifically on the novel's account of the injury to Amelia's nose, scoffing at Booth's description of her heroic behavior on the occasion and pretending to believe that the accident left Amelia with no nose at all. In revisions of the novel, Fielding emphasized that Amelia's nose was successfully reconstructed by a surgeon, and his treatment of this reconstruction is itself significant: whereas earlier he might have drawn out the satiric possibilities of a facial feature that had been artificially reshaped or assumed, he here treats the reconstructed nose, altered by accident and reclaimed by careful artifice, as at least as humanly dignified and appealing as Amelia's original nose. Thus, in his final novel, Fielding embraces a sense of human character as altered by time and history, its features layered by the perhaps indistinguishable, though sometimes contradictory, contributions of nature, artifice, and circumstance.The character we encounter in tracing Fielding through his life's works is itself thus layered, often clearly shaped by the accidents of his historical situation, and strikingly contradictory in the multiple impulses he expresses over time. The man who so memorably ridiculed Richardson's tale of a master marrying his maid went on, eventually, to marry his own; the same writer who produced devastating satires of Walpole's ministry was to become a most vocal supporter of the ministerial establishment. The ways that Fielding strikes us as enmeshed in history, and the ways that historical change involves him, frequently, in contradictions, do not seem, however, to silence him, as they often do Booth. Sometimes cacophonously, always energetically, Fielding's voice, at mid-century, issues forth.

Jill Campbell

Selected Bibliography

Bakhtin Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Battestin Martin C., with Ruthe R. Battestin. Henry Fielding: A Life. New York: Routledge, 1989. -125-

Bender John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Brown Homer Obed. "Tom Jones: The 'Bastard' of History." Boundary 27 (1979): 201 -33.

Carlton Peter J. "Tom Jones and the 45 Once Again." Studies in the Novel 20 (1988): 361 -73.

Castle Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.

Hammond Brean S. "Politics and Cultural Politics: The Case of Henry Fielding." Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (1992): 76–93.

Hunter J. Paul. Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstunce. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

McKeon Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Paulson Ronald. Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967.

Rawson C. J. Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress: 'Nature's Dance of Death' and Other Studies. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.

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From Swift to Smollett: The Satirical Tradition in Prose Narrative

SMOLLETT'S most enduring contribution to the English novel lay in combining diverse strains of satire and picaresque tales into a thoroughly original cast of fiction. Upon these preexisting narrative modes he imposed dozens of characters, 840 in all (excluding the characters in his Travels), and fabricated comic scenes that have delighted readers for over two centuries; and while it is wrong to think of him primarily as a "satiric novelist" or as the Georgian realist par excellence who embodied "picaresque satire in prose," it is fitting to acknowledge the prominent place of these features in his fiction. His "brisk, masculine, and nervous style," as he himself called it, possesses a stylistic force rarely found in the sweep of the English novel-indeed he seems to have converted his own rambunctious energy in real life into a kind of fictional jouissance. His complex systems of morality and didacticism resulted in his becoming one of the most profound social commentators of his era, and his hawk's eye for vivid detail rendered him the Hogarth of eighteenth-century prose, especially in the "progress pieces" and the depiction of "grotesques." These insignia are as crucial to his accomplishment as any incorporations of satire and the picaresque.

His vision of the world derived from a wide array of literary traditions that embraced the blend of idealism and irony of Cervantes's Don Quixote, revenge tragedy, comedy of "humors," the great satires of Swift and Pope, rogue tales, Hogarthian grotesque, and a more local British heritage of sea stories and Scottish lore that he knew firsthand. Scott, — 127- Dickens, Henry James, and many other novelists have commented on his extraordinary originality, as have those of Smollett's twentieth-century literary heirs who knew to what degree he was one of their so-called founding fathers. He was an uneven novelist, capable of miscalculation and unpredictability and often writing too quickly and erratically, and his penchant for experimentation in the novel cost him as much aggravation as it reaped reward and financial benefit; but he remains the only competitor of Sterne in the satirical phase of the English novel at midcentury.

Satire did not, of course, lead to the early eighteenth-century novel in any prescriptive or formal sense, but shaped it in so many ways that the overlaps of the two forms-satire and novel-have always been worthy of study, despite the frustrations involved in trying to arrive at neat conclusions about reciprocity or coherent theories about influence. A more secure approach reasons that satiric narrative enriched the early British novel. Even in the domain of readerly expectations, no coherent patterns can be traced through the early novelists from Defoe and Fielding to Sterne and Jane Austen. Satire was an ancient form of literature, already highly developed in its Horatian and Juvenalian poetic incarnations, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had undergone such transformation that it had become impossible to set it off from such competing forms as pastoral and autobiography, let alone to delineate its boundaries from the newly developing novel of the 1720s. The single aspect of satire clearest to its readers of the 1720s was that it assumed moral norms with which readers could agree or disagree. It was these norms, or values, that rendered it such a controversial form.

Satire had been especially suited to broad concerns of chaos and incoherence-the clutter and medley of diurnal life-rather than nobler strains of order, integration, and perfection. By the time the great English poets Dryden, Pope, and Swift laid their imprints upon the form of satire, it had become the accepted vehicle for criticism of confused systems of patronage and social order, as well as human frailties and irrationalities-so much so that some readers perceived its goals as inflexible and unbending, and consequently dubious. Satirists shaped their readers to believe that its norms were the correct ones, its values solid, whether in the sphere of the public realm versus the private or the city versus the country. Set the chronological dials to approximately 1725, in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble when England's economic climate was turbulent and fraught with anxiety, and it is clear -128- that for good reason madness and bestiality have become two of satire's most fundamental images.

Even so, satire, both in poetic and prose forms, was unable to cope with the demands for realism of the new reading public. The matter is not that satire failed (it hardly failed), or even that it had become worn out and tired, but rather that in some primal way the imagination of its greatest authors (the Popes and Swifts) existed in a realm removed from the pressing needs of the moment. The urgency of the moment was at stake, not form or artistic failure. It was not that satiric narrative was incapable of coping with the concerns of the day-the rampant sense that the world had gone mad or the new cannibalism of life in the cities-but rather that its psychological mechanisms for coping were unsuited to the needs of contemporary readers, especially young readers. In Swift's case, the coping mechanisms were further complicated by his sense that all moral norms had been toppled and replaced with values impossible to consider reasonable; and because of the insidious ways he saw these new values absorbed into the infrastructure of his society, he became incensed with virtually all forms of creation-even literary and novelistic creation. Stated in another key, satire (exposure) and realism (concern for the moment) did not get along. An example of the disparity is found in Swift's Tale of a Tub, the story of a hack driven mad in the process of turning out prose paid for by the word. He is a quixotic figure in reverse who has no means of coping with the bestiality of his modern society, and he has neither the desire nor the inclination to belong to, or connect with, his milieu. He lives in a cluttered and filthy urban garret far removed from nature and the land, and harbors no sense of private spaces, either within the house or outside in the garden; a public creature exclusively, he defines himself in the present place and time only, without reference to the past or to his own family's roots. The more the hack churns out words, the worse he writes and the more confused his opinions become. Swift ridicules him as an utterly alienated figure-a dupe among knaves-in a work brilliant for its glittering depiction of the impoverished writer in the brave new world of print technology and new publishing arrangements. Viewed, however, from the perspective of realism-the moment, the present crisis, characters and life as they are today-Swift's prose narrative fails to cope with the social realities of the hack's world and its values. Two generations later, Smollett's Roderick Random, also crude and alienated, will be presented in altogether different ways.

-129- The extent to which satire had been appropriated by the novel is grasped by consulting Gulliver's Travels (1726). Here the master-servant and fool-knave relation is as central to Swift's purpose as the author's sense of time (the relative present) and place (exotic places that reflect on England and Ireland). Despite Lemuel's travels to remote islands-Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Houyhnhnmland, places inhabited by pygmies and giants, horses and monkeys-he domesticizes these creatures and dresses them up to resemble local, familiar Britons who appear contemporary, at least on the surface. Lemuel's first-person narrative no doubt lent Swift's story contemporaneity, as did the author's description of Lemuel's response to the odd creatures and places he encounters; and Swift's critique of modern learning (projects) and technology (print, publishing, architecture, mathematics) is so specific in Book 3- the Voyage to Laputa-that the reader of 1726 must immediately have understood why the narrator decried the lack of utility in modern science.

Furthermore, the critique of rationality in Book 4- Swift's "excremental vision"-is so directly focused on modern targets that readers could construe it as a commentary on the squalid conditions of their own lives (with respect to sewage, plumbing, hygiene, plague, refrigeration, diet) as well as a philosophical pronouncement about the essence of human nature and natural nature. But Swift's ending is far from optimistic, as his readers from the 1720s onward have known, and by the end of the story Gulliver appears so very foolish that contemporary readers must have wondered whether Swift had not been satirizing his protagonist all along. Although we today are sympathetic with Lemuel's responses to the strange sounds and smells he experienced, we also want to laugh at him. But no sooner do we do so than we-especially Swift's most attentive readers-grow aware that we are laughing at ourselves, either unaware of the evil Lemuel has witnessed, or so jaded by its modern versions that we have become immune to the phenomenon of evil itself. Swift maneuvers a secure position between these extremes-like a steersman between the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis-by making Lemuel appear merely silly rather than philosophically pained, tragically afflicted, or even chthonically enraged. Swift's book ends as it began: a tightly constructed prose satire permeated with the attributes of the newly developing prose novel.

But social life in England drastically altered in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble, and coupled to its transformations were diverse new -130- needs for information from a hungry reading public. The old forms of Augustan satire broke down, were no longer adequate; and under the various agendas of the Walpole administration, and-more critically-in the ever-growing English cities, not even Swift's version of satiric realism in Gulliver's Travels was sufficient for readers of the 1730s and 1740s who wanted their literature to be entirely up to the moment. The extraordinary element of the up-to-the-moment syndrome is that all sorts of literature we may consider less than au courant from our perspective today passed as remarkably immediate for those readers-for example, the French and Spanish translations that were consumed in great quantities between the publication of Gulliver's Travels and Roderick Random, especially Cervantes's Don Quixote (the most popular foreign work of fiction up to the publication of Tristram Shandy) and Le Sage's Gil Blas. Even Fielding found Don Quixote irresistible as he fictionalized the "don's" adventures in England in 1734. Narratives depicting Christian piety and heroism, such as many epistolary novels by women, and political satire, such as The Court Secret (1740), were found on the same shelves as anti-Walpole journalism and oriental travelogues. Even more popular, as many Fielding critics have shown, were works of romance: the form celebrating sentimental love within a wide series of fictive conventions. (Smollett was dubious, as he wrote in the preface of Roderick Random, that «romance» could accommodate his novelistic intentions, even if he did make forays into this form during the 1750s and 1760s.) Added to these were dozens of fictions we would call spy novels (often called by this name, as in Giovanni Paolo Marana's The Turkish Spy, Thomas Lediard's The German Spy, and others), as well as secret histories permeated with racy love and high intrigue. Satire was present in varying degrees in many of these works of the 1720s, 1730s, and 1740s, but not in the form in which it would appear in Smollett's first and perhaps most satiric novel, Roderick Random. Strains of satire are evident throughout Mrs. Haywood's novels of the 1720s and 1730s, but they appear in incongruent forms that adhere to another satiric tradition than the one found in Swift's prose works. Satire was even present in works of high didacticism and pious polemics. In short, it was ubiquitous.

During the 1730s the problem was how to satisfy a craving for contemporary realism, especially in its low-life versions, outside the confines of journalism and periodical essays. As John J. Richetti has written, the novel was, especially then, permeated with a "native journalis-

-131- tic instinct for the notorious and the sensational." All sorts of prose writing-secret histories, chroniques scandaleuses, romances of many varieties, voyages both real and imaginary, utopian and dystopian prose, rogue and other criminal stories, accounts of spiritual life and salvation, shilling pamphlets-attempted to cope with this demand for contemporary realism, though few fulfilled it with literary mastery. The old masters were no longer writing, the new not yet on the scene. By the 1730s Defoe was dead; Fielding, still a devoted playwright, had not yet written novels; Richardson, the successful printer, was still churning out didactic manuals instructing young women on how to behave; and Smollett, a Scot, was ten years old in 1731, growing up on the banks of rustic Loch Lomond, hundreds of miles north of London and Birmingham, a place remote enough not to be contaminated by the squalor of Glasgow and Edinburgh. No one knows exactly which literature, especially which prose works, Smollett read in these formative years before he entered the University of Edinburgh as a medical student. He must have read widely if his two poetic satires, Advice and Reproof, are an indication, but he grew up luxuriating on the banks of the lake, close to the land and its rustic values, within an environment as different as can be imagined from the one in London he would never genuinely consider to be home.

Seeking fame and fortune, he migrated to London in 1739 at eighteen, a penny in his pocket and persuaded that he could do other things if medical practice did not pan out, soon to experience the greatest jolt of his life-the chaos and confusion of one of the world's largest cities. Here he found a density of population he had never before imagined, as well as every form of violence and carnality, perversion and panhandling, rendering the people there alienated from each other, veritable accomplices in their daily transgressions. Fielding and Richardson had both been living in London for a long time and were better prepared for its vices, but Smollett was shocked by its aberrations. Like Fielding, he tried to gain entry to the city's literary life through the drama; but his first play, The Regicide, fell flat on its nose and he soon turned to the writing of prose narratives such as Roderick Random. Fielding had also turned to the writing of prose fiction in the 1740s, though for reasons very different from Smollett's, and if Fielding was temperamentally as attracted to epic, Quixotism, and roguery (as in Jonathan Wild), as Richardson was to tragedy and sentiment, Smollett found himself lured by a modified form of picaresque fiction-an old Iberian form dating -132- from the time of Cervantes and Lazarillo de Tormes in the sixteenth century whose essence chronicles the adventures of master and servant on the rogue road of life. But in Smollett, modification occurs as the result of his extraordinary endings, while reconciliations occur between characters and their society in ways no earlier picaresque writer could have imagined.

The advantage of this modified picaresque model for Smollett lay in its realism and the opportunities it presented for eschewing romance at all costs. Its essential mold combining adventure and wanderlust in a world overrun by knaves and fools was, to be sure, one of its main attractions for Smollett, as was the fact, so glaring to him, that it mirrored his own experiences, including his sexual encounters, in dangerous London as well as at sea as a ship surgeon. A loose, rambling form, picaresque sprawled to wherever the hero went; it was anecdotal and episodic, and thrived on a low level of probability, likelihood, and specific setting. The picaresque storyteller imagined his authority as deriving from the simple fact that his male cronies (there was little room for women in this patriarchal picaresque world, except to fulfill the most stereotypic of roles) wanted to listen to his stories recounting exotic adventures. The more the picaro rambled in picaresque, even when in the mode of a Swiftian "progress piece," the more he endeared himself to his listeners.

But picaresque also had disadvantages nowhere evident in satire. Satire existed in a more certain mental landscape, defined its values more clearly, was less self-conscious about its versions of didacticism and morality, and, most importantly, thrived on the vices of the city (as in Samuel Johnson's London, a modern imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal, the Roman poet). Satire, not romance in any version, was the literary form, perhaps even subgenre, best equipped to capture the realism of the modern city and cope with its versions of brutality, even if it could not accommodate Smollett's other imaginative space: his unrelenting search for exotic adventure. Nothing can detract from the hard fact that the London to which Smollett arrived in 1739 was steeped in squalor and assaulted all his senses, forming one of the most lasting and recurring experiences of his life.

London may have been the setting for many romantic liaisons as the young Smollett entered it, but one would never know it from his early satiric novels. When romantic love appears in Roderick Random or Peregrine Pickle, it is subdued and merely idealized in the most convention-133- al of fictional ways. It is the picaresque hero himself who is romanticized, as several critics have noted, not the innocent women in these novels. Romance in these early novels of Smollett is absorbed, incorporated, diminished, and even inverted, but never made a principle of organization or the shaping block of one of the narratives. The first readers of these novels who had read in the romance tradition could hear the voices of romance as a backdrop-as a curtain behind which the young Scot novelist sometimes stood, as in his depictions of Narcissa-but never as any essential feature, let alone original pillar, of his early novels.

Perhaps it was this ambivalence and anxiety- Smollett's allegiance to satire and picaresque and his fierce recoil from romance-that dominated the substratum of his imagination when he conceived Roderick Random (1748). Here his themes are human violence and brutality, more specifically the transgressions and alienation that result from such acts even in unique circumstances; and this may be why he cast the most autobiographical and confessional of his novels in this mold. The vision is so dark and dreary that it borders on the cannibalistic, as each raw experience follows on one still rawer. But every tug toward the picaresque (as in the picaro's thirst for adventure through the encountering of new character types) drew Smollett back to fictive satire, specifically of the type that exposes vice and corruption within urban settings.

Smollett composes here as a sort of Hogarth "drawing pictures in prose" rather than as a Swift who relies on parody of an already established form to lash out at his targets; his book is conceptualized as a series of intricate «pictures» intended to capture the entirety of society in its wide diversity. In Roderick Random Smollett uses his quill rather than the pallet (as Hogarth did) to portray the sequence of his hero's dissipations through drink ("Gin Lane" and "Beer Street") and sex ("A Rake's Progress"), all in a first novel of the tough "I was born" variety. His fictional canvas is broad (there are 126 characters in a book less than half the size of Tom Jones) and far-flung (Random travels from Scotland to England, Carthagena, Paraguay, Buenos Aires, and back). Fools, knaves, and dupes lurk everywhere: amid the crowds and mobs in the cities he visits, as well as in empty spaces on the rogue road of life and at sea. But there is nothing Swiftian about the strategies of presentation-no parody of an established form (travel literature), no exotic remote landscapes populated by pygmies, giants, and imaginary ratio-134- nal horses against whom the protagonist is constantly being evaluated, all for the purpose of beguiling the innocent reader into believing that the final product-Gulliver's Travels-had been something other than what its surfaces revealed.

Instead, the preface of Roderick Random hits the satiric nail in the center when it claims that of "all kinds of satire, there is none so entertaining, and universally improving, as that which is introduced, as it were, occasionally, in the course of an interesting story." Here the story derives essentially from the picaresque: an essentially good and morally honest Rory is turned into a criminal manqué as he makes his way through the kingdoms of villainy. Yet Smollett's achievement here entails his blending of "picaresque realism" with diverse strains (not merely poetic varieties) of "satire." To achieve this end he uses the techniques of rogue biography (first person direct narrative suffused with dialogue) and couplet satire, and he also relies on Gil Blas, his supposed model.

No one could have read Roderick Random in tandem with Gulliver's Travels and thought they were similar. Sailors and the high seas dominate both books, as do a diversity of characters; both books are «pictures» in this sense but their tone and feel differ. Lemuel awakens at the end of his travels as a type of Swiftian Frankenstein's monster, alienated from his surroundings and awestruck that he has returned to yahooland, while Rory emerges from his picaresque road of life-a Dickensian nightmare to the finish-as a reclaimed saint who has arrived in heaven through the gates of a rustic paradise. In the end there is no means to reconcile these two satiric traditions in English fiction, although Fielding and Austen perform heroic attempts by invoking the values of the country estate over the moral chaos and mannerly disorder of the city. But a full account of the satiric differences of Gulliver's Travels and Roderick Random would necessitate further study of this tradition of satiric novel writing in the two decades between 1726 and 1748, a diverse and rich mountain of fiction, even if not distinguished by literary genius.

In Roderick Random, realism is achieved primarily through situation and irony rather than character analysis, as we see money won and lost, tricks deployed, stratagems contrived, the ravages of war ironically played out, vices like gambling rampant, heiresses duped, and every kind of innocence and goodness inverted. The grotesques who populate the book-the Bowlings, Straps, Weasels, Banters, Wagtails, Thickets, — 135- Chatters, Quiverwits, Straddles-cut against the grain of realism by virtue of their degree of cunning and knavery. But Smollett recoups what he has lost in grotesquerie from his brilliant blend of situation, satire, irony, and the picaresque threads of his narrative. Geographically, only the sea is made subordinate to modern urban sprawl. Roderick finds himself lonely in both places, suggesting a new type of character realism in the form of what modern sociologists have called "the lonely crowd." A second tier of realistic and contemporary themes also emerges: a world of children and their games, their pranks, and their play; school life and education (anticipating the bildungsroman); the ravages and ironies of war; the relatively new vice of sodomy (especially at sea where its tentacles cannot be escaped); and the perennial lure of foreign places basking under strange moons and exotic suns. The more Roderick and his fellows try to escape the clutches of these stratagems, the more alienated they become in a global world Smollett represents as «urban» as well as consistently violent and brutal. George Steiner has remarked, perhaps with Roderick Random in mind, that Smollett's world dwells on the making and losing of money. It is, more minutely, about the versions of despair and brokenness that arise when transactions involving money go awry.

Smollett does everything he can in Roderick Random to assert his sense of temporality. His characters are varied and racy, his pace so quick, that readers imagine they are hearing today's news. Time and space are viewed from the perspective of the present, even when the action is occurring outside England. In familiar and local places, London and Bath, the crowds are so large, the mobs so violent, that characters constantly fear for their lives; in South America and Europe the reader gladly forgoes the next twist in the plot to learn about local custom and practice. Love and intrigue (Miss Williams's sad story is but one example) thrive everywhere, as they did in the sprawl of historical London of the late 1740s. There are narrative insets and incorporations of other stories, such as the "history of Melopoyn" (a pathetic poet imprisoned with Roderick in the Marshalsea prison) and «Marmozet» (David Garrick, the actor and playwright, who continues to appear in Smollett's novels), and flashbacks of the novelist's own life, as in the account of Smollett's attempt to produce The Regicide. In Smollett's vision the forms of urban dissipation are excessive, as is its crime (we expect to find Random in prison), all of which circumstances must have met the reader's expectations just as they satisfied Hogarth's viewers in "The Rake's Progress." -136-

Even the end of the novel courts realism through its combination of fantasy and escape. Here Random's picaresque wanderings through the land of nightmares come to an end and he is happily married-but only by returning to rustic Scotland, the country whose literature always plays an important role in the landscape of Smollett's novels. In brief, Smollett does everything possible to lend to his brand of the novel an aura of realism and the present. Yet in almost every episode or anecdote, every grotesque character or despondent situation, the satirist and ironist in him is evoked. And even the use of first-person narrative, allegedly to permit readers to glimpse the hero intimately, counteracts the energies of novelistic realism by converting it to a prose amalgam of new-style satire and a modified version of the old picaresque. It is a blend that English fiction had never seen before and from which many nineteenth-and twentieth-century novelists would learn. But the continuity of satire is a crucial element in this version: for all his novelistic inventiveness, Smollett, like his satiric predecessors, returns to the themes of the perpetual madness and bestiality of the modern world.

Peregrine Pickle, published four years later in 1751, is Roderick Random composed in another key and amplified to almost three times the size. Instead of 126 characters there are 226, twice as many as are found in Tom Jones, and at its heart lies an aberrant hero who, like Random, is a particular kind of rogue. The same amalgam of new-style satire and modified picaresque is evident, although the novel is written in the third person and is less autobiographical. The story is of a hot-blooded scalawag, «Perry» Pickle, who sympathizes with the distressed and downtrodden, yet whose own life appears to be strung together only by random episodes and a series of romantic escapades. Here, as in Roderick Random, there is an unquenchable thirst for adventure-adventure that ends happily as Perry marries Emilia, inherits a vast fortune, and retires to his country estate. The narrative meanders and races in ways never found in its much tighter predecessor. Smollett tried to organize this huge hulk of material into a tripartite division: the hero's youth, dominated by stories of the sea and his own life in school; the hero on the Grand Tour; and the hero as a fortune hunter in London. But his structure is less evident than Fielding's tripartite division in Tom Jones, and Smollett's «plan» (if that is what it is) has neither the mythic nor the Christian elements of Fielding's book, nor its brilliant contrasts between city and country dramatized in the language of Providence and the carnivalesque. In this version of the amalgam of satire and the -137- picaresque, the latter seems to triumph, but the habit of lashing out at specific social institutions and individuals remains Smollett's most salient feature, seen in his attacks on writers who had hindered his writing career and, again, in the spleen directed at Fielding. Smollett's awareness of social confusion and the need for temporality is again evident, as in his brilliant contrasts between the city and country, land and sea, stereotypes of male and female in a milieu where gender is subservient to money; but human transgression and its consequential alienation are treated less analytically than his readers might have liked. Finally, these matters bear heavily on the novel's tone, suggesting that Smollett has cultivated adventure purely for its own sake in this book, without considering its implications for form and substance.

The new feature in Peregrine Pickle entails three interpolated narratives, longer and odder inset pieces than those found in any previous English novel and probably deriving from the new taste for lengthy narrative. The longest of these, occupying almost a fifth of the novel and occupying the space of more than fifty thousand words, is the "Memoirs of Lady Vane," the story of Frances Vane, a prominent socialite in love with pleasure. The others recount the distresses of Daniel Mackercher, an ally of James Annesley in the infamous suit brought against the Earl of Anglesey, and Count d'Alvarez, who was sold into slavery and later found in Bohemia. By the late 1740s, readers of novels expected to find such interpolations or self-contained digressions. Fielding had made use of them as early as the inset about "Mr. Wilson" in Joseph Andrews, and there are several in Tom Jones: the Man of the Hill, the King of the Gypsies, the puppet show, and smaller ones, but Smollett's incorporation was original in a number of other ways that his readers immediately recognized.

Lady Vane's «Memoirs» are penned by a woman, whereas the other voices are male, and more significantly by a woman who, no matter how much she loves pleasure, continues to be viewed sympathetically by the novelist. At the end of her rueful story of escape and wandering, Smollett shows her to have learned through her far-flung experiences, as when she demands a settlement of a thousand pounds from her last lover. Again, transactions involving money in a fundamental way form the core of the Smollettian fantasy in these early novels. But Frances's story is also organically related to the moral realm of Peregrine Pickle and is not merely an extraneous island of erotic intrigue. Peregrine, perhaps in the role of Smollett's mouthpiece, accepts her account of her -138- amours at her own valuation and passes no judgment on her, just as the historical Smollett allegedly took her story in dictation and accepted it entirely. Finally, this unusual account of an articulate "courtesan of pleasure," published on the heels of another set of "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" (Cleland's), permitted Smollett to glance at the anti-Pamela tradition and at contemporary female novelists ranging from Eliza Haywood and Penelope Aubin to Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox. He accomplished this by catering to both male and female readers-vicarious experience satisfied both-and by extending his views about money to include female needs, feminist consumption, and female materialism. He further catered to the expectations of female readers by giving the "woman of pleasure" a voice of her own through which she could plead that she was virtuous in ways that merited explanation. These "Memoirs," the size of a novella, amounted to much more than another conventional or interruptive feature, predictable by mid-century in long English novels.

The effect of the three interpolations (the two inset stories pertaining to male vicissitude are less original) was to give Smollett's amalgam of satire and the picaresque a peculiarly original flavor, but it did not work as well in this second novel as it had in Roderick Random. If the first part of Peregrine Pickle-populated with the grotesque figures of Mrs. Grizzle, Tom Pipes, Keypstick, Hatchway, Hawser Trunnion and his memorable comrades at the "garrison"-was entirely original for its novelistic incorporations, parts 2 and 3 were less so. The large themes in part 1- real and surrogate families, the sense of «home» as a spiritual rather than a physical place, life at sea and in school, the new social relations of uncles and nephews, mothers and sons, boys and girls-caused some readers to wonder if Smollett had new philosophical interests he was bringing to bear on the novel, and several modern critics have speculated on the differences between Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle despite their abundant formal similarities. But these philosophical concerns have never been identified and studied because of the dearth of biographical material about Smollett's intellectual life before he took over the editorship of the Critical Review in 1756. Still, there is no doubt that Smollett was beginning to think in a new fashion about the ways in which societies are held hostage to terrorists like Perry the prankster, joker, drinker, exploiter, dissimulator. The only step Perry does not take is the final, anarchic one dissolving rule and order. Viewed from our perspective two hundred years later, it is clear that -139- Peregrine Pickle has much to offer the cultural historian of child rearing, puberty, and adolescence, as well as of school and student life.

The second part of the novel, " Perry on the Grand Tour," practically sank the novel with its lack of up-to-the-minute temporality. The problem lay not in Smollett's caricature-like simpletons (the tutor Jolter, the valet Tom Pipes, the painter Pallet who hitches up with Perry in Europe) but in their actions and in the reasons for their erratic and immature behavior. Here Smollett reverted to satire, as his hero and his traveling buddies deride foreign customs, alien figures (Pallet and the physician, who cross-dress, attend masquerades, and are jailed), and public institutions (colleges and societies) — all for the purpose of detecting vice and stamping out brutality. Some early readers were amused by these escapades; others thought there was something serious, almost philosophic, about Smollett's new interest in play and prank; but not even the last section of the novel-Peregrine's tour through polite society as a fortune hunter-or the three inset pieces could rescue the book. In the last part, Perry undergoes "a rake's progress" and descends into the hell of poverty and despair, only to be rescued by philanthropists, Emilia's love, and his good luck in being restored to his father's estate and inheritance.

Peregrine Pickle was widely read in England and Europe and brought fame to its author, but was not the best-seller that Roderick Random was; nor has it enhanced Smollett's reputation in our time. However, there are signs of a change of tide. The novel's stylistic energy and ebullience in the presentation and development of character is apparent, as is its concession to female and middle-class readers, and there is a fresh sense in our time that Smollett possessed more profound insight into the social order and its confusion when held under stress than he has been given credit for. His novels have been studied for their views of economic wealth and luxury, and as a prose stylist he had much to offer readers seeking to understand how social creatures are transformed for the worse at the moment they become the victims of economic circumstance; but these are ultimately depressing topics for readers in any generation, verging on despair and the pathological.

At the time of its publication in 1751, the critical consensus was that not even Peregrine Pickle's exposure of the secrets of "polite society," or its recurrent amorousness, could redeem its male hero, who is so remarkably «crude» and «brutal» (though not as heinous in his acts as his successor, the archvillain Fathom). Nor was the novel redeemed by its constant ironic attack on targets chosen from every niche of human -140- society. No matter how unusual are the twists of his story in Peregrine Pickle, Smollett has revealed himself as a Rabelaisian Panurge or Pantagruel-the quintessence of the satirist-rather than as a sentimental novelist capable of inventing a sympathetic protagonist about whom we care. In the end we care more about Perry's world than his own fate, no matter how loud is Emilia's love song or how much money awaits him on his country estate.

The secret of Peregrine Pickle is found in the preface of Smollett's next novel, Ferdinand Count Fathom, an extraordinary pronouncement because it so strongly contradicts the story that follows while being so genuinely applicable to Peregrine Pickle:

A novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of his own importance.

Smollett's first two novels, Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, are much finer examples of this aesthetic than his third, as a consequence of the satiric potential of this view of the novel. Yet in Fathom something much uglier and potentially more horrifying than satire surfaces: the utter blackness of human existence-a world so bleak in its versions of villainy that the reader wonders how any of us has escaped from slitting his wrists long ago. As one critic has written, "as a picture of unregenerate evil, Fathom is Smollett's masterpiece in satirical black comedy." True, but Smollett's contemporaries did not see the book in this light, and even for those who penetrated its "satirical black comedy" this content hardly redeemed it. Whether the culprit was the incoherent form of Fathom-a blend of elements-its satirical versions, the inherent villainy of its aberrant hero who remains depressing at best, or something else altogether, this third novel fell flat. Only in our century has Fathom regained some of the critical, and in my view experimental, respect it deserves.

But if satire thrives on incongruence and a rhetoric of irony, Fathom is satiric in ways few of Smollett's dedicated readers of the 1740s and 1750s could have overlooked. Obsessed with roguery and criminality, the rakish Rory, villainous Perry, and despicable Fathom always think -141- they can beat society at its own game, and in the first two novels they do, perhaps as the result of inherent moral goodness rewarded by Providence. But Fathom exists in another sphere where neither chance nor luck can help him, nor the restoration of lost fathers and forgotten inheritances. Random and Pickle both endure hardship despite a picaresque optimism that always seems to play out in their favor, but Fathom's relation to hardship is that of happiness to the fool: at least the knaves plot their steps carefully (even Random and Pickle in their worst moments). But treacherous fools like Fathom compel their authors to send their readers a message too Swiftian to be missed. "Happiness… is a perpetual Possession of being well Deceived… The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves." Swift iterated it in one satirical key, now Smollett in another.

Smollett's form in this third novel also baffled his readers, and did not enhance his reputation, no matter what symmetries they detected in the forces of good (Renaldo, Monimia, Farrel) triumphing over evil (Fathom) within a providential order ultimately just. The fairness of Providence sets the tone and shape of the book. A fraction of the length of Peregrine Pickle, it possesses a fraction of the number of characters-only seventy-one-and cultivates romantic sensibility rather than the innovative satiric picaresque. Instead of glancing at Apuleius or Petronius, Smollett disengages himself from formal satire and extols fancy and the imagination, fear and the passions. Nor does he incorporate the epistolary tradition or the type of moral allegory Sarah Fielding was then writing. Here the plot centers around the exploits of "the treacherous Fathom," born a renegade in 1708 in the low countries, "a principal character [chosen] from the purlieus of treachery and fraud." This morality play, soaked in black humor as it were, is played out in a sentimental romance, and early readers wondered whether the loosely connected story amounted to anything more than a string of flat characters monolithically good and evil. No middle, or gray, was sensed. Early readers were asking whether the novel possessed an appropriate mimesis or representation and wondered whether sentimental romance was being cultivated for ends they could not Fathom. Fathom did not seem at all to fit the paradigm of a "satiric Smollettian novel."

Yet, however odd the book may have seemed to general readers then, Fathom abounds with new features of great interest to historians of the English novel. The dedication is written by Smollett to himself ("To Dr. S--"), suggesting that an author assumes an autobiographical -142- role whether or not he wishes to. Then, in the dictum about the novel as "a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life"-a broad canvas rather than a narrow section-a new completeness axiom is introduced to the English novel that reaches a zenith in Trollope, Thackeray, and Dickens. The range in Fathom is more limited than this aesthetic suggests, perhaps as a result of Smollett's fascination with roguery and crime, and in view of his intention to demonstrate, through plot and character analysis, that "fear is the most interesting of the passions." In chapter 21, Smollett introduces a scene of still-warm corpses and murderers in an abandoned farmhouse that is so chilling, the reader wonders what his intention is.

Experiment and inventiveness also abound in his formal plot: the novel begins in middle Europe, shifts to England, returns to the Continent, and ends (as it did in Roderick Random) with redemption in rustic retreat in a northern English county. There is nothing comic or lighthearted in this bleak picture of human depravity found in broad daylight as well as in prisons and asylums; villainy and madness dominate Fathom's pages as do fun and pranks in Peregrine Pickle, and the book has an altogether different flavor. Furthermore, the reader's expectations of realism are thwarted by twists in the story that are by turns fanciful, romantic, sentimental, Gothic, treacherous, and unpredictable-all registering a threshold of the "merely probable" that troubled Smollett's readers. Even the flat, stereotypic character types drawn from many nationalities and religions function in this «probable» way: Jews and Mohammedans, Europeans and Turks, creatures from social classes high-born and low-born; and no episode in the "love scenes," no instance of the novelist's benevolence displayed toward Fathom, staves off the Gothic sense of impending evil that lurks throughout the novel. Nothing in the imagined world of the great Augustan verse satirists-the Popes and Swifts and their imitators during the 1730s-approximated this extremity of bleakness. The vision is so black that one wonders what Smollett's imagination was if it produced a book like this on the heels of two rollicking novels filled with light and sunshine.

For all of Pickle's formal oddities and digressive incorporations, that novel still resembled "the Smollettian mold" and the Fieldingesque novel through its penchant for incorporations and digressions and its reliance on picaresque satire. But Fathom was unrecognizable and fulfilled few, if any, of the reader's novelistic expectations. Smollett, discouraged and having lost favor with some printers after its publication -143- in 1753, then turned to other forms of writing-histories, compilations, journalism, reviews-which informed the content of his last four works of fiction: the themes of prisons and punishment in Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762); the newly leisured sightseer in Travels Through France and Italy (1766); Japanese culture in The Adventures of an Atom (1769); and a new version, and inversion, of the res in urbis theme-the country within the city — in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). In certain ways Sir Launcelot Greaves is an even odder experiment in fiction than Fathom. A «romance» about "English Quixotism" and knight errantry, it is the story of the young, melancholic Sir Launcelot Greaves, heir to a titled Yorkshire estate, who decides to become an "errant knight," and his hunchback peasant squire, Timothy Crabshaw. The book makes clear that Smollett's forays into romance (as in Count Fathom) were always made at a price.

Greaves is in love with the lovely Aurelia Darnel, whose father disapproves of their marriage, and Smollett spends much energy separating and uniting them, many times, until their marriage paves the way for the recovery of Greaves's estate. Marriage always saves the day in Smollett's fictions; here it takes a back seat to romantic love and Quixotism, to such a degree that even Gilbert, Greaves's horse, is thoroughly Cervantic. The pace is quick, the characters unfamiliar in the satiric prose tradition from Swift to Smollett, deriving as they do from the quixotic romance tradition. The story cultivates action rather than character (virtually all the characters are monochromatic grotesques named for their chief attributes: Cowslip, Crabshaw, Dawdle, Fang, Ferret, Gobble, etc.), and situation rather than theme. The remaining material satirizes local politics, elections, and various forms of patronage, rather than grand universal themes of life and death, reason and the passions; and the relatively small amount of satire is conveyed through familiar quixotic figures rather than animated norms (Houyhnhnms and Yahoos), as it had been in Swift. Yet the satire is also concrete and specific, as in the old forms of Smollettian villainy and grotesquerie from the 1740s.

It is hard to imagine why Smollett thought this model of the novel could succeed in 1762, even with its illustrations and serialization (Greaves is the first novel by a major English writer to employ both techniques). The versions of realism are problematic throughout, as incident after incident requires some deus ex machina to salvage the good guys. And its notion of fictive temporality is constantly placed in -144- jeopardy despite the development of the themes of madness (Smollett quotes profusely from contemporary psychiatric theory), imprisonment (hero and heroine are incarcerated next to each other and the penitentiary lurks as a motif throughout the book), and politics (corruption is rampant among local politicians). Indeed the theme of incarceration extends so far into the novel's fabric that one wonders whether Smollett's Greavian penitentiaries reveal an arrière-pensée.

Smollett must have considered his brand of "English Quixotism" thoroughly original (it anticipated Richard Graves's in The Spiritual Quixote by a decade), especially the suggestion that chivalry could revive manners and morals in Georgian England. The «romantic» landscape found in the book was Smollett's antidote to the cannibalistic city-London-he saw developing in the 1750s, and in Greaves's exposure of fools, knaves, and dupes, Smollett indulged the lingering satiric element in his psyche that needed to assert its affinities with Swift in A Tale of a Tub. But however integrated a "modern knight" Greaves may be, however dedicated to the cause of uprooting corruption where he finds it (a type of picaro in reverse), his story seemed antiquated to readers of the first volume of Tristram Shandy. Also, Smollett's women in Launcelot Greaves appear stuffier than they had ten years earlier, his men less subjected to psychological scrutiny (for all Greaves's clinical madness, Smollett does little to establish its nature). Ultimately, the versions of realism and representation in the novel are shellacked with an antique veneer, such that the reader is pulled in the opposite direction of "the contemporary moment" -1762- and of a novelist "writing to the moment."

Launcelot Greaves, like its equally problematic predecessor, Fathom, gained little critical acclaim. Appearing when novels of sentiment and sensibility were becoming increasingly popular, it introduced a cast that was derivative and quixotic (though the book was called a "a modern romance"), lending it an atmosphere of the precious and cutting against the grain of the realistic sentimental fiction then coming into vogue. Nor did it treat of manners and morals in the contemporary scene, as women novelists from Lennox to Frances Burney would. It confronted the present by recreating an old, Cervantic world alien to the social needs of the new decade presided over by a new king, and its satirical vignettes were not strong enough in themselves to redeem the book. So, for the second time, Smollett turned away from novel writing to pursue compilations and histories. -145-

Fortune also bandied him about during the 1760s. While Sterne blazed into the spotlight with Tristram Shandy, Smollett was recovering from a term in prison, grieving the death of his only child, and witnessing the disintegration of his personal health, both mental and physical. Bitter and broken, he went to the Mediterranean in search of recovery and regeneration, returning to England only one more time. While abroad he wrote the vivid Travels Through France and Italy (1766), cast as letters by a splenetic traveler, and the very Swiftian Adventures of an Atom, the more intriguing of the two works from the perspective of the historian of the "satiric tradition" of the novel.

The Adventures of an Atom is a throwback to Pope in The Dunciad and Swift in Gulliver's Travels, necessitating a «key» to unlock its seventynine characters (Got-hama-baba is George II, Fika-kaka the Duke of Newcastle, Sti-phi-rum-poo Earl Hardwicke, and so forth) and dense political references (every Japanese figure stands for someone English). This violent and scatological roman U+00EO clef is thoroughly «excremental» in its vision, if idiosyncratic in its presentation of Orientalism; and close perusal shows it also to be one of the shrewdest commentaries on contemporary British politics. The challenge of Atom lies less in its unities (a fragment, it appears to have no unity) or style (typically energetic and masculine) than in its versions of allegory and scatology; as a result, some of its first readers wondered what kind of fiction it was-this was the source of the debates about its authorship-and fewer could understand the author's purpose. Novel readers accustomed to Sophia, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville, The Fool of Quality, The Castle of Otranto, The Man of Real Sensibility, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Man of Feeling, The Tears of Sensibility, and, of course, A Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy, were baffled by a prose fragment with isomorphic targets.

The story is of a "talking atom" contained within the body of haberdasher Nathaniel Peacock, but the «atom» inexplicably breaks away after it has undergone several transformations and political reincarnations. The «atom» (whatever it actually is) was part of the Japanese prime minister's anus, afterward having passed through the guts of a duck and the generative organs of a sailor into Peacock's pineal gland. While inside Peacock, the atom narrates events it experienced in Japan (England) from 1754 to 1767, but the reader unfamiliar with these political events is at sea. Few satirical works of the classical period are more interesting for the historian of the prose fragment than The Atom. Impossible to -146- construe as a novel, even in the experimental mold of Random or Fathom, it raises more puzzles than it solves and does not even attempt to be contemporary or temporal in the way Smollett had been in Launcelot Greaves. It is Smollett writing in his most satirical and Swiftian mood.

No such puzzlement greeted Smollett's last novel, the magnificently crafted Humphry Clinker, completed while the writer was abroad in search of health. Composed in the epistolary mode, but with letters that never resemble Richardson's, this comic «expedition» is built around five correspondences that show a relativity of viewpoints about human experience as it relates to social organization. The book is in every way a "large broad picture" written in accordance with Smollett's earlier aesthetic. The correspondences are by the protagonist Matthew Bramble, a prickly and misanthropic Welsh squire with a heart of gold; Bramble's ward, Jery Melford, an Oxford University spark in search of his own identity; Jery's younger sister Liddy, a romantic boarding-school girl who is actually an inexperienced young noodle; Bramble's sister Tabitha (Tabby), a grasping and prudish spinster who has become man-crazy; and their commonsensical maid Win Jenkins, who writes hilarious misspelled letters yet whose religion permits her to see what the entourage actually is: "a family of love where every sole is so kind and courteous."

The five sets of letters are weighted in the correspondences of Bramble (prickly as his first name is biblically benevolent) and Melford (a realist who comments intelligently on Matt's excesses). Most of the eightythree letters, spanning over nine months from April Fools Day to Christmas, are written from Matthew to his personal physician, Dr. Lewis, and from Jery to his Oxford tutor, Sir Watkin Phillips. Henry James adjudged this complex point of view to be Smollett's greatest contribution to the development of the English novel, but it is only one of the book's interesting aspects. Smollett's achievement is more complex than any single element and includes the managing of satire, comedy, and romance under the aegis of a new epistolary model, as well as his new vision of the social order linking sex and sensibility, the city and the country, chaos and decay, life and death. He also fulfills certain readerly expectations while thwarting others, as when he operates against all expectations generated by the book's title (Clinker does not appear until the second third of the novel). His form here is a tightly constructed prose vehicle: an epistolary satire "right up to the moment," especially in its exposure of urban decay and confusion, but always with a new twist in the story line; the novel glitters in ways no previous book of Smollett's had. -147-

Humphry Clinker's 233 characters exceed the number in Peregrine Pickle, a book more than twice its size, and many of the figures are historical ones (real politicians, statesmen, preachers, scholars, physicians) at whom potshots are taken. Despite this, manners and morals never lie far from the novelist's imagination. The plot is episodic, loosely strung together, perpetually interrupted by accidents, detours, fires, flashbacks, characters who reappear from earlier Smollett novels (such as a repentant Fathom), and interpolations (like Jery's account of Paunceford and Serle, who suffer economic reversal). The five-way correspondences require that everyone's point of view be subjected to interpretation by everyone else. And the autobiographical elements are so strong (Smollett as Bramble) that even while exercising caution, it is impossible for the reader not to recognize that Smollett has refined his earlier satiric thrust into a symbolic myth about the good life, based on health of mind and body, the family, the country, and the pastoral north. But Smollett's epistolary vehicle also mitigates excessive contradictions by reasserting trifling comic values, as when Bramble informs Tabby that she must decide between him and "her lap dog." Smollett's epistolary mode sparkles in the way Pope's couplets had, and as Jane Austen's tight fictions would a generation later. The book's comic and terrifically grotesque flavor is further strengthened by Matt's "goutiness," the most resistant to therapy, if also most "male," of chronic Georgian diseases because few women contracted it while everyone seems to have endured its agonies without incurring serious jeopardy. Smollett's story (Humphry Clinker) and Bramble's medical condition (gout) are both inherently comic insofar as no great harm ever comes to either: the story ends happily and the victims of gout always recover. But in Smollett's time women were thought not to contract gout, virtually assuring readers that gout was a male condition. Moreover, there is something genuinely comic in the bloated male bodies populating the pages of Humphry Clinker.

Satire is diffused throughout Humphry Clinker and developed in relation to the clutter and filth of the British cities the group visits: a constant reminder of the assault on their physical senses, especially the olfactory (jokingly, Sterne nicknamed "Smelfungus Smollett" for his sensitivity to smell). But clutter and chaos extend thematically beyond the city to all social forms, including politics, patronage, preferment, language, and social mobility. Smollett also rewarded the reader's expectation for modernity and temporality by raising "the contempo-148- rary city" (London, Edinburgh, Bath) to the level of major theme awaiting the satirist's lash for "London's vile milk." His sharp eye misses nothing in London's economies, traffic between import and export, conspicuous consumption, corruption, inflation, luxury, high living, late nights, and gluttony. All converge to a Swiftian type of decay that no amount of «romance» or «Quixotism» can abrogate.

The characters promote their own hobbyhorses: Matt a patriarchal view of society, which he extends from "the body politic," an old trope, to his own "natural body" in his words "an hospital these fourteen years"; Jery the leveling out of the social classes and systems of patriarchy to such extremity that social "chaos is to me a source of infinite amusement"; Clinker, the ragged postilion and child of Methodist love whose real father is none other than Bramble, a desire to find out who he really is; Win the wish to see the "inner light" of every spirit; and Tabby, the human embodiment of sex over sensibility, the demonic quest to market herself as marriage material. Even lesser characters have their hobbyhorses, for example, the grotesque Lismahago, a Scottish soldier scalped by North American Indians, "a tall meager figure, answering with his horse, the description of Don Quixote mounted on Rozinante," whose imagination dwells on his exotic adventures. Of the five main figures, Jery and Matt play off each other: young and old, sensible and irritable, rational and sentimental. Careful scrutiny of Bramble is needed before his type of sentimentalism is understood, but there are also similarities between the two men when it becomes evident that Bramble's earlier libertinism accompanied an ingrained benevolence. Indeed, this coupling of robust sexuality and human goodness seems to be one of Smollett's main themes, and literally produced the hero for whom the book is named, Humphry Clinker-Matt's real son.

The remarkable twist in character development is that Bramble's satiric proclivity wanes as he recovers the "good life" (as described above). Smollett suggests through his satiric persona that the healthier we grow, the less we carp about the physical and moral decay surrounding us; and he defines «health» as equally partaking of "mind and body." Still, Smollett's materials did not end here. He catered to the reader's need for being "right up to the moment" by inserting diverse subjects then hotly debated in Britain. Humphry Clinker is, after all, a novel published in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War and conceptualized during a period (the late 1760s) when the most basic ideas of liberty and freedom, democracy and government, isolation and nation-149- alism, were coming under fire. It is a postwar novel (as is Roderick Random, for a different war) as well as something else: a sociological treatise on the quality of life and the dangers encroaching on human happiness. Economics and luxury, pro and con, loom on every page, as does social commentary, and Smollett writes at his best in this last novel when anatomizing present conditions. Here, in a work that is the inverse of Greaves, an acquired historical narrative technique (Smollett had written prolific histories of England and Scotland) helped him less than a vivid prose style and energetic sentence structure, dominated by active verbs, adverbs, and pleonasms directed at the five senses.

Three of Smollett's topical subjects in Humphry Clinker make the point: the satire on Methodism, the incorporation of materials about the New World, and the philosophical treatment of the concept of regeneration. By 1771, readers of fiction had come to expect hostility to Methodism, with its mad enthusiasm, its professions of "new light," and its sudden "epiphanic moments" (think of Fielding's attacks on such hypocritical Methodists as Blifil). Smollett's tack is different. He suggests that Methodism is an urban religion, the result of new forms of alienation in which city dwellers pay a quid pro quo for their separation from the land. Even Tabby's conversion to "the New Light" implies dislocation from her native heath. In this critique of urban Methodism, Smollett reveals himself as a kind of English physiocrat, claiming that when people become ecologically uprooted and join a culture without "a history," they pay a price. The inclusion of exotic accounts of the New World (Lismahago's life among the Iroquois and Miami and his romantic adventures with Squinkinakoosta) is Smollett's way of addressing readers who are informed about foreign news.

Finally, his theory of regeneration is so intrinsic to the novel's main themes-the city and the country, primitive and civilized societies, the social classes and the professions, human health, leisure, travel, sex, marriage, luxury, simplicity-that it is impossible to imagine Humphry Clinker without it. What a different story this would be without the triple sets of weddings at the end, "romantic closure" for all the travelers except Bramble, and-despite his continued celibacy-Bramble's own physical recovery on a rustic, if feudal, country estate in Scotland. The symbolic journey reflects Smollett's profound belief in the country over the city and in provincial integrity over urban decay; and what is regeneration if not the ability to begin anew and survive? But his version of bodily and spiritual rejuvenation is not Fielding's: it is not the -150- country estate, with its moral hierarchies and inscriptions of the providential order, which resuscitates the fallen and depraved, but a plain ethic of rusticity and simplicity; almost the belief that the return to nature and the land has the greatest healing effect on mankind.

With regard to literary history, Smollett was the first of the major eighteenth-century British novelists to descant freely on the dialectic between metropolitan and provincial values, a topic that mushroomed into national debate by the end of the century. For Smollett, regeneration occurred specifically by communion with rusticity, the only solace for one who had been dislocated by the jumble of city life, its violent assault on the physical senses, and the leveling and confusing of the social classes. Smollett had always been attuned to the theme of city versus country, and to the ways the new leisured classes were changing the face of Britain by leaving certain regions uninhabited and occupying others. But his idiosyncratic method in Humphry Clinker elevates place and setting and prompts him to include the inset stories of Baynard, Dennison and Lismahago. This, then, is a new version of romantic pastoral featuring the theme of res in urbis (the country brought into the city).

One other concern pertaining to Bramble is essential: the loop of "mind and body" that runs throughout the story-a type of exuberant discourse derived from medical lore. Indeed, it may be that Bramble's prickliness and benevolence notwithstanding (the biblical Matthew) the reason his names begins with M and B is further to enrich the story along the lines of mind and body, just as Swift enriched Lemuel The Wanderer by calling him «Gulliver» (gull). Bramble's health is poor at the start, both in "mind and body," but Smollett the physician knew that his semiautobiographical protagonist would not mend until both mind and body improved. During the years (1761 to 1768) when Sterne was winning acclaim for Tristram Shandy, Smollett proposed a competing theory of the human organism based on a monism of the vital organic self: one in which mind and body were linked through nerve and sense in a perpetual neural feedback system. Bramble's benevolence as well as his irritability stem from precisely this neural physiognomy, as novelist and protagonist make plain that both are anatomical monists rather than latter-day Cartesian dualists.

This view suggests that a valid sense of selfhood occurs only when individuals consult their anatomies in relation to their souls, hence mind and body rather than either in exclusion. In his masterpiece, Sterne had proposed an equally vitalistic model, which centered on an -151- integrated system of animal spirits and nerves, for understanding the workings of the human imagination in relation to "he springs of life." But Smollett's version implies that we can understand Bramble for the princely heart he is-as a modern "man of feeling"-only by consulting the psychoanatomical loop that pours out its impressions in "letters to my doctor." The incorporation of this neural material into epistolary fiction was another of Smollett's inventions, a concession to temporality that provided his readers with a sense that their novelist was working for them all the time in being "right up to the minute."

Smollett's achievement, then, in Humphry Clinker is various, brilliant if uneven, and in some fundamental way experimental once again. It is as if he had been searching all along for a new paradigm for the novel while working within competing models to Fielding, Richardson, and, self-consciously in the last years of his life, Sterne. As an acute observer of the social scene, particularly the contemporary «cannibalistic» city, he had no peer: his vision of the balance of power between the city and country is altogether different from that of Richardson, for example, whose plots thrive on socially aggressive and upwardly mobile middleclass families, like the Harlowes, who exploit the poor within the city, and pour money into their country estates (Harlowe Place) to ape the manners of the aristocracy. And even if Sterne, Austen, and others abjured Smollett's version of "the raw and coarse" or failed to acknowledge their indebtedness to his work, it is hard to imagine their own novels without Smollettian predecessors. So much brick and mortar did he give to the temple of the English novel.

All his novels are in some rudimentary sense "satirical"-but satirical in ways that embrace and incorporate realism, comedy, romance, and the picaresque. Moreover, the novels differ from each other, and it would be erroneous to think that all his books are constructed as "simple satirical novels"-no better than to believe that Tristram Shandy is such. Smollett's loyalties in fiction-to satire, the picaresque, the comic and grotesque-altered from book to book, even changed within one book, and if we cannot appreciate why these divergent allegiances were so consequential for him, this has much more to do with our own sense of plot, character, time, space, and the rest of the Aristotelian unities in the aftermath of Jamesian fiction than with Smollett's sense of the developing novel.

G. S. Rousseau

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Selected Bibliography

Beasley J. C. Novels of the 1740s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Beasley J. C., et al. The Georgia Edition of the Works of Tobias Smollett. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

Becker G. Documents of Modern Realism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964.

Byrd M. London in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982.

Carretta Vincent. George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Hunter J. P. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: Norton, 1990.

Kernan A. B. The Plot of Satire. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965.

McKeon Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Moore R. E. Hogarth's Literary Relationships. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948.

Paulson Ronald. Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967.

Paulson Ronald. The Fictions of Satire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.

Richetti John J. Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.

Rousseau G. S. Tobias Smollett. Essays of Two Decades. Edinburgh and New York: Seabury Press, 1982.

Rousseau G. S., and P. G. Boucè, eds. Tobias Smollett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Spacks Patricia Meyer. Imagining a Self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976.

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Sterne: Comedian and Experimental Novelist

WHY read Sterne? Such a question arises not only because of our historical distance from him (he died in 1768) but somehow seems inherent in the very nature of his enterprise as a novelist. From the time he burst onto the public consciousness with the appearance of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy in the winter of 1759-60, there have been voices that have said that, because of its oddity and difficulty, Sterne's work couldn't be read, or that, because of its impropriety, it shouldn't be read. Yet he has never lacked powerful defenders, although the defenses have been even more various than the attacks. Sterne's advocates have loved his jeux d'esprit and his pathos; they have praised his originality and his brilliant use of sources; he has been termed the last of the Augustan satirists and the first prophetic voice of modernism; readers have admired him for creating characters of unsurpassed immediacy and for steadfastly refusing to adhere to any convention of novel writing. Perhaps it is his capacity to inspire such varied-indeed, contradictory-responses even among those who defend him that led Goethe to comment several times that Sterne was a "free soul." Certainly, whatever limitations Laurence Sterne the man faced (and he faced many), Sterne the novelist seems remarkably resistant to categorization or description, much less final judgment. It is very hard to pin him down.

Such a variety of response is difficult to map. In the discussion that follows, I have tried to create such a map around three landmarks in the collected commentary on Sterne. These brief remarks, one by Sterne -154- himself and two by his critics, turn up in almost any discussion of him-so regularly, in fact, that they might be called the enduring clichés of Sterne criticism. My intention is not the further circulation of coins rubbed almost smooth by time. Instead, I would like to see if we can, by highlighting these comments, restore their roughness of surface and make them useful again. Between them, they raise virtually all of the central issues we confront in trying to understand Sterne and his career as a novelist.

"I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous."

So wrote Sterne to a friend in January 1760, with the first installment of Tristram Shandy just published and already creating a stir. The statement can be passed over as a relatively innocuous answer to the question Pope asked himself, "Why did I write?" or it can serve, as it generally does, as a prelude to brief remarks about Sterne's contemporary popularity. But much of Sterne's life, and (just as interestingly) a great deal of information about what it meant to be a novelist at the nascence of the genre are compressed into or implied by the remark. What does it mean, in the context of mid-eighteenth-centuryEngland, that someone wrote to be famous?

The facts of Sterne's life hardly suggest a candidate for fame, literary or otherwise. When he was born, in Ireland, in November 1713, he entered the world as a gentleman's son, but his hold on the privilege that honorific implied was an uncertain one. Young Laurence might have claimed an Archbishop of York as great-grandfather, and prominent Yorkshire landowners as living relations, but his father was a younger son, mired in an unpromising military career (hence, the Irish birth), and there was little in the future novelist's early childhood to separate him from the kind of life endured by those whose class status was technically much lower. The family was poor, they moved frequently from garrison to garrison, and Sterne's younger siblings died with numbing regularity. But in the matter of class, as in so much else, Sterne is hard to categorize, for if his early years show little gentility, he did ultimately enjoy, with family help, a gentleman's education, and his school years culminated in a Sterne family fellowship to Jesus College, Cambridge. While his parents gave him almost nothing, his more distant family saw to it that this poor relation could enter that almost obligatory path of the shabby but well-educated genteel: the priest-155- hood. In 1735, Sterne was ordained and took up the first of several vicarages he would hold, all in the neighborhood of York. Tristram Shandy was still a quarter-century away.

Sterne's life between his ordination and his sudden elevation to literary fame cannot, at least in its externals, have been very different from that of many provincial clergy. In these years, he married (not happily) and had one daughter; he intrigued (with no great distinction) in politics, mostly ecclesiastical; he farmed a bit, hunted, and played the violin; he read a lot; he fought to keep an incipient consumption (which eventually killed him) at bay; over time, he gained more lucrative livings and more prominent church positions. Family connections, both his own and his wife's, helped at times, but it is also clear that Sterne felt considerable resentment about the obligations those connections created; eventually, he quarreled with his uncle, Jaques Sterne, an important figure in the clerical world of York. His career as a clergyman was at best moderately successful, and outside of the small world of Yorkshire church affairs, Sterne was totally obscure. The 1750s were an especially difficult decade: he had become alienated from his powerful uncle, his wife, never a source of much happiness, descended into madness, and a persistent public rumor had it that Sterne had mistreated his widowed mother. Yet some reservoir of confidence and ambition survived, for at the very end of that dark decade, in as he says, "a bye corner of the kingdom, and in a retir'd thatched house," he wrote the opening volumes of Tristram Shandy, bravely published them at his own expense, and sent half the copies to London, to all appearances serenely assured that, whatever his past, his future would be glorious.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, volumes 1 and 2, appeared on the London market on January 1, 1760. Sterne himself arrived in the capital about three months later. By then, the great city was more than ready to receive its new sensation. One historian of fame has called Sterne "the first English author who can be called a celebrity," a judgment that remains safely this side of hyperbole. Sterne was lionized, petted, and feted by the great and the already famous. A new country dance was named the "Tristram Shandy (as was a racehorse), and London prostitutes, it is said, approached potential customers for a time by asking them if they wanted their clocks wound up. And while Sterne may have written for fame, not money, he got both, selling his copyrights for a lucrative sum. If it is strictly true that the mild prosperity Sterne enjoyed from -156- his clerical livings meant he didn't need this money to survive, he would undeniably enjoy spending it.

What is striking about this success story is what it reveals about Sterne's ambition to be "famous." Fama is a goddess that writers have always worshiped, but, in Sterne's case, the emphasis is different. For the fame he achieved in the early months of 1760 seems to have had little to do with the traditional idea of artistic immortality, the desire that his powerful rhyme should outlive the gilded monuments of princes. The voice that touched Sterne's trembling ear was not that of Phoebus, but of a living, laughing body of admirers, pressing him with invitations to dinner, huddling to warm themselves by his aura. Sterne may well have had traditional notions of writerly fame in mind when he made his remark, but by the time he found himself at the center of London's admiring gaze, he had fervently embraced a more immediate role as that characteristically modern phenomenon, the celebrity: someone whom people want to know (or know about) now.

Sterne's celebrity, while it originated in the popularity of his novel and is therefore in part a creation of the marketplace, cannot be explained in terms of sales alone. From a modern point of view, an eighteenth-century writer did not have to sell very many copies in order to enjoy status as a best-seller. Fielding once defined «Nobody» as "All the people in Great Britain, except about 1200," and by that yardstick, Sterne-as well as fellow best-selling authors like Fielding and Richardson-could be said to be read by almost no one. (England's population in 1761 was a little over six million.) The various installments of Tristram Shandy-after the initial two volumes in 1760, he brought out further two-volume continuations in 1761, 1762, and 1765, and he brought out the last volume, the ninth, in 1767- had press runs of four thousand, and that figure appears to be close to the final sales for each. Richardson's sales were comparable, and even Tom Jones, a blockbuster by the standards of Georgian England, did not exceed ten thousand copies sold. The new kind of writing, the novel, was «popular» only in a special sense; even taking into account the existence of lending libraries, it was entertainment only for a small portion of the populace. The small size of the audience is brought into sharp focus by an extraordinary statement by Arthur Cash, Sterne's most recent biographer: "[Sterne] had probably been introduced personally to about half the people who bought his books, and many had become his personal friends." -157-

If the most popular novelists had comparable-and by our standards, relatively small-sales, what separates Sterne from his contemporaries? Why is he the first literary celebrity in England? Neither Fielding nor Richardson, to take the two most prominent examples, became celebrities in the way Sterne did. Fielding was well known, but as a novelist was never the focus of public attention and curiosity as Sterne was. Richardson was notoriously vain about his work; he is, after all, the one Samuel Johnson summed up so memorably: "That fellow Richardson could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar." But Richardson was a shy man, who generally preferred letters to face-toface encounters. What he wanted-and plenty of it-was praise. Sterne's contemporary fame, what I am calling his celebrity, seems to be a function neither of his sales nor of the public evaluation of his work (the good reviews of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy gave way to generally unkind notices thereafter). What the historical record shows, rather, is a remarkably personal bond between Sterne and his devotees, as Cash's comment above suggests. They wanted not just the book but the man behind the book (one reader said, "I'd ride fifty miles just to smoak a pipe with him"); he desired not just an audience with the money to buy what he wrote and like what they read, but faces, individuals, who wanted to know him.

Bishop Warburton, a lion of letters who liked Tristram Shandy on its first appearance and a man who tried hard to make himself Sterne's patron (an overture Sterne rebuffed with little grace), dismissed the novelist at the time of his death in a revealing way. Sterne was, he said, "the idol of the higher mob." Warburton was clearly bitter that Sterne had refused the velvet collar of patronage, but the comment is revealing in other ways, too. It shows one influential but conservative literary figure's incredulity in the face of the new image of the writer that Sterne embodied-impatient with patrons and intoxicated by the spotlight of wider attention. But the intended insult falls flat. Sterne would have embraced Warburton's remark, the essence of it anyway, if not the tone. To be such an «idol» was exactly what he wanted, and it is that desire that separates him from his popular contemporaries. But one important question at the heart of this issue is still hanging: how did Tristram Shandy-a novel, words on a page-make all this happen? (A Sentimental Journey was not published until very shortly before Sterne's death.) Sterne's vanity and ambition did not make him a celebrity; a book did. How? — 158- The simple answer is that, in Tristram Shandy, Sterne was being perfectly honest when he described the work as "a portrait of myself." Sterne wrote about himself, and many of those first readers, such as the man who would ride fifty miles to share a pipe, liked what they read. But the whereabouts of Sterne's self are harder to determine. There is plenty of evidence, on the one hand, to suggest that those first readers freely associated Sterne with Tristram, and even the briefest look at contemporary accounts of the author reveals that he was most often referred to, not as "Laurence Sterne," but as his character. As Johnson reports his one meeting with Sterne: "Tristram Shandy introduced himself; and Tristram Shandy had scarcely sat down," and so forth. Sterne apparently liked being called Tristram, but-to complicate matters-he also encouraged the identification of himself with Yorick, who is, after all, the clergyman in the novel. When Sterne published his sermons in the wake of his initial burst of fame, he titled them Sermons of Mr. Yorick, and he went on, at the end of his career, to make Yorick the narrator of A Sentimental Journey. Clearly, he promoted the identification of his narrator/characters with himself, but he did so in a complex way.

The situation is further muddied if we try to specify more precisely the nature of the connection between the novelistic lives of Tristram and Yorick and the real one of Sterne. To put it simply, there is almost no connection. Yorick is a clergyman to be sure, and both Yorick and Tristram travel, as Sterne did, on the continent; Sterne seems to have pilloried real people of his acquaintance; the sermon Trim reads in volume 2 of Tristram Shandy is one Sterne actually preached. But such autobiographical gleanings are few. Nothing important that happens to Tristram-not the tribulations of his birth and naming, not the constellation of family and servants, not the incidents of either his or Yorick's travels-ever happened to Sterne. Moreover, surprisingly little of Tristram Shandy is even about Tristram; it's about Walter or Toby, and much of the action (even the last incident in the book) takes place long before Tristram is born.

Thus, the harder we look, the odder things get. Sterne is not, in the usual manner of autobiographical novels as we have come to know them, writing about himself, fictionalizing however superficially his own experiences. Instead, he has imagined a world, populated it with people, and invented incidents and conversation out of airy nothingness. And yet, stubbornly and undeniably, both of his fictions are pro-159- jections of Sterne, and not just in the narrow sense that all novels are expressions of a peculiar individual reality. Even Flaubert, after all, the theorist of the artist-god who remains wholly removed from the fiction he creates, admitted in a very Sterne-like way that Madame Bovary was just himself. But that was a deathbed confession; Sterne's readers all knew that Tristram «was» his author, but in what sense?

We will look more closely at the texture of Sterne's fiction in the next section, but for now it will perhaps suffice to say that what Sterne conveys of himself is his voice, especially if we take «voice» to be one of our culture's principal metonyms of "personality." Tristram Shandy is largely made up of talk, characters telling stories, arguing with each other, passing the time; but, far more than this, it consists of a voice, Tristram's, talking to us. Listen to two passages, chosen more or less at random:

As for the clergy-No-if I say a word against them, I'll be shot.-I have no desire, — and besides, if I had, — I durst not for my soul touch upon the subject, — with such weak nerves and spirits, and in the condition I am in at present, 'twould be as much as my life was worth, to deject and contrist myself with so sad and melancholy an account, — and therefore, 'tis safer to draw a curtain across, and hasten from it, as fast as I can, to the main and principal point I have undertaken to clear up. (Volume 3, chapter 20)

"It is with Love as with Cuckoldom"-the suffering party is at least the third, but generally the last in the house who knows any thing about the matter: this comes, as all the world knows, from having half a dozen words for one thing; and so long, as what in this vessel of the human frame, is Love-may be Hatred, in that-Sentiment half a yard higher-and Nonsense-no, Madam, — not there-I mean at the part I am now pointing to with my forefinger-how can we help ourselves? (Volume 3, chapter 4)

The voice is urbane, yet vulnerable, apparently spontaneous, amusingly disjointed, running always close to the edge of one scandal or another, ready at all times to embrace innuendo. Above all, it is a performing voice, and what it performs-or, better, creates the illusion of performing-is a personality.

There is no particular reason to assume that such a voice was, definitively, Laurence Sterne. We are all now suspicious in a healthy way about identifying anything as essential, especially in matters of the self. This voice, too, is a construction, more artful and self-conscious than most. But it was at least part of Sterne's genius that he recognized in the -160- new form of the novel the opportunity to perform or project a distinctive voice of personality. Fielding had done it already, in Tom Jones particularly, but he had kept the voice separate from Tom's story: Fielding's narrator controls the action openly but is not part of it. To a remarkable degree, however, Sterne's voice is the story, is the action of all of his fiction. But that does not really state the difference strongly enough, for Sterne takes another step beyond Fielding. Not only did he make his voice the center of his novels, he realized-at least after the publication of the first installment of Tristram Shandy-that such a voice (however invented) could be the source of this new brand of writerly fame, personal celebrity. The novel-either because of its formal freedom, or because of the kind of audience it attracted, or because the era was increasingly shaped by a mercantile cast of mind, or (most likely) because of the fortuitous combination of all these forces-allowed for what we might call the commodification of personality. The book, with its square shape and hard covers, could become almost literally a package, a package for a voice to be bought and sold. We may regard with some distaste the resulting loss of distinction between a person and a product, but whatever our response, we should not lose sight of the historical importance of what Sterne represents, for it is not a trivial moment in the making of the world that we live in. And perhaps our judgment may be tempered somewhat if we keep in mind that celebrity (however commodified) was something Sterne longed for, something he found, and by every account, something he loved.

But Sterne's celebrity, however determined by history and personality, and however significant as an image of the future world, is not the end of the story. Celebrity ends with death, and then the only form of fame left for the writer is the old-fashioned one, the immortality of reputation. As Tristram says, "Death opens the gates of fame." The fiction of Laurence Sterne has endured, at least until now. And having looked at the author and what his career represents in the history of the novel, it is time to examine more closely his work, for in the end it gained Sterne not only contemporary celebrity but also lasting reputation.

"Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last."

Boswell records this among other miscellaneous observations made by Samuel Johnson on a day in March 1776- about eight years after Sterne's death. Johnson must have taken some satisfaction in pro-161- nouncing this terse obituary. As noted above, the two men met only once, late in 1761, and the conversation went badly (Sterne may have shown Johnson a pornographic picture). Johnson was wrong, of course, but it is worth analyzing for a moment how he was wrong. Was he mistaken to assume that literary oddity and endurance are incompatible? Or was he in error when he said Tristram Shandy was odd? He was undeniably mistaken to imply that Sterne's novel would not last (to give Johnson credit, Sterne was somewhat neglected, as many writers are, in the years immediately following his death), but-as is so often the case with Johnson's critical blunders-the question he raises is central. What is the relationship between endurance and oddity in works of art? Can something genuinely bizarre last? One popular answer, at least in the case of Sterne, has been to deny that he is odd. With marvelous dexterity, this school of thought works to normalize Sterne's fiction. Such an approach, however, finally does confirm Johnson's point about the kind of art that will survive: nothing odd, it turns out, will do for long. In this section, I want to look at some of the most prominent attempts to grapple with Sterne's work, including especially the many discussions that have insisted in one way or another that Johnson was wrong about Sterne, that his work is not odd. If my own discussion is weighted more heavily toward Tristram Shandy, and leaves less room for A Sentimental Journey, that reflects both the balance of the criticism that now exists and the fact that most readers are likely to approach Sterne through his first novel.

Most any modern reader who casually picks up Tristram Shandy will think Johnson's opinion frankly obvious. It begins with the hero's intimate account of his own conception, and then proceeds, digressing at every single opportunity, to recount a very few events from his earliest childhood. While there are plenty of Tristram's opinions, delivered in that distinctive voice we glanced at above, there is in fact very little of his life; most of the events we do see occur not to him but to his father, Walter, and to his Uncle Toby; and many of these take place long before his birth. Along the way, there are interpolated stories, extracts in French and Latin, a missing chapter, chapters out of numerical order, and a host of typographical peculiarities: a blank page, a black page, marbled pages, straight lines, crooked lines, doodles, dashes, and asterisks. Whatever the other oddities of Tristram Shandy, it looks strange. Lest we fall into the error of thinking this sense of oddity is born of our own ignorance, we must remember that it was a contemporary, John-162- John, who called it odd, and he was hardly the first. Everyone thought it was peculiar when it appeared ("a succession of Surprise, surprise, surprise," Hume said) and the argument was not about whether it was strange but whether you liked the strangeness. Horace Walpole, for one, hated it, calling it a "very insipid and tedious performance… the great humour of which consists in the whole narrative going backwards." But his friend and correspondent, Horace Mann, confessed, "You will laugh at me, I suppose, when I say that I don't understand Tristram Shandy, because it was probably the intention of the author that nobody should… It diverted me, however, extremely."

The oddity of Sterne bears much further scrutiny, but I think it can best be approached by looking in some detail at arguments on the other side. A great deal of modern criticism has aligned itself against Johnson, though in a bewildering variety of ways. Let us make a first distinction, however, between approaches that are historical and those that are nonhistorical. I will look at the latter first.

The nonhistorical approach is typified by one critic who, in the 1960s, called Sterne "an inexplicable anachronism," and who in support of his point approvingly quoted this remark from several decades before: "To see what Sterne's achievement really was, is, I believe, only in these last few years possible, in a mind made aware by The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, and Remembrance of Things Past." For this school of thought, Sterne was of course strange to a reader like Johnson, in the same way as any prophet who is ahead of his time is perceived as strange. Sterne understood, virtually at the beginning of its history, that the novel's destiny lay not with the kind of work being done around him, but with at least three hallmarks of the modern novel: difficulty, self-consciousness, and the attempt to render in all its subtlety the manifold subjectivity of the inner life.

Setting aside the question of whether Sterne's contemporaries or his predecessors were really uninterested in these possibilities for the novel, it is undeniably true that his own work manifests all these qualities: he is difficult, he does promote self-consciousness, and he is sensitive to the peculiarities of interior experience. The difficulty of Tristram Shandy is undeniable. It is hard to read a book whose story line, such as it is, is hopelessly fragmented and delayed. These frustrations, moreover, have as one of their consequences a kind of alienation effect: as readers, we become self-conscious of our complicity in what Richardson rather peevishly called readers' desire for "Story, story, story"; such -163- a desire for an apparently seamless and progressive unfolding of linked events can falsify our experience of ourselves and the world. Once we have achieved that awareness, we can become more cognizant of the way our experience does unfold-disjointedly, digressively, above all, subjectively. Such is an abstract rendering, at least in part, of the world of Sterne from this modernist point of view, and such a description points up obvious congruences with the world of Joyce or Woolf.

This approach to Sterne, while it has not disappeared, has gradually diminished in importance over the last twenty years, especially in light of the broad return to history that has marked so much recent criticism. Critical trends aside, however, an understanding of Sterne as an "inexplicable anachronism" seems to me to ignore the fact that reading Tristram Shandy is not very much like reading Ulysses or To the Lighthouse. And the difference is not simply a matter of costume, or setting, or language. These writers differ in fundamentals, for the difficulty or selfawareness or stream of consciousness narration of the high modernists is, finally, in the service of realistic presentation and authorial objectivity. Sterne's digressions and moments of self-consciousness may sometimes work to create a realistic effect (more on this below), but Sterne seems at least equally interested in exposing how all attempts at realistic representation are doomed. Before the first volume is half over, Tristram interrupts the action in a by-now familiar way to comment on his problems as a storyteller:

When a man sits down to write a history, — tho' it be but the history of Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb, he knows no more than his heels what lets and confounded hinderances he is to meet with in his way, — or what a dance he may be led by one excursion or another, before all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, — straight forward;-… he might venture to foretell you to the hour when he should get to his journey's end;-but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually solliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various Accounts to reconcile:

Anecdotes to pick up:

Inscriptions to make out:

Stories to weave in:

Traditions to sift:

Personages to call upon: -164-

Panegyricks to paste up at this door:

Pasquinades at that: — All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from. (Volume 1, chapter 14)

The striking thing about this passage is the way that it can be read both as a statement of an aesthetic of realism and as a devastating critique of all fictional attempts to be real. The historian-novelist who wants to be accurate cannot be a muleteer, but our experience of reading the first thirteen chapters of Tristram Shandy has already insinuated into our minds the sinking feeling that unless a writer is a muleteer, he or she will never finish. We can look at Sterne in two ways: as (at times) a marvelous realist (Ian Watt refers to Sterne's "mastery of realistic presentation") and as perhaps the eighteenth century's most acute critic of fictional realism. He can be both because he seems to be attracted to both roles, and he will inevitably resist all attempts to slow or stabilize his oscillation between them. The reasons for this oscillation will be explored more fully below; for now, it suffices to say that such an attitude toward realism makes any attempt to understand Sterne as a prophet of modernism inherently problematic.

If the effort to make Sterne not «odd» by aligning him with the familiar voices of modernism runs into trouble, what about the many attempts to deny Johnson's comment precisely by putting these novels into an eighteenth-century context? I will first look at those arguments based on the phenomenon of sensibility, and then move on to look at Sterne's relation to Augustan satire and to John Locke.

"Sensibility" in mid- eighteenth-centuryEngland was not so much a political or intellectual movement as it was a fashion. It certainly had its roots in both religion and philosophy, as a certain strain of English thought from the late seventeenth century onward turned away from the gloomy images of human nature conjured up by Hobbes and by the sterner spokesmen for Calvinistic Protestantism. Sensibility emphasized the infinite capacity of the human heart for sympathetic feeling. We respond to the plight of others instinctively and powerfully, and our tears become the legible sign of our basic goodness. A taste developed for works of art that provoked or at least represented these tender feelings, and in many ways the novel led all the rest. Among Sterne's immediate predecessors, writers as different as Fielding and Richardson show the effects of this taste: with the long-suffering Clarissa, Richardson proved himself a master of the ability to elicit a sympathetic response; -165- Fielding, with heroes like Parson Adams or Tom Jones, consistently created characters with a good heart.

Sterne's name has become almost synonymous with sensibility, and little wonder. In the welter of voices that makes up the texture of Tristram Shandy, one note sounds with apparent clarity again and again-the feeling heart. We see it especially clearly in Toby and his servant Trim: the former famously and literally refuses to hurt a fly, and rushes generously to the bedside of the dying Le Fever, a perfect stranger; the latter poignantly epitomizes the fragility of human life at the death of Bobby Shandy, and is given to melancholy spells when he thinks of the fate of his brother. But sensibility is not merely something Tristram discusses in others-it is a large part of his portrait of himself. Think of his encounter with the ass of Lyons, or with poor, mad Maria, and so on. In the 1780s, the most commonly reprinted version of Sterne's work was a kind of golden treasury called The Beauties of Sterne; Including All His Pathetic Tales, and Most Distinguished Observations on Life, Selected for the Heart of Sensibility, a fact that suggests that for a number of contemporary readers this was the aspect of Sterne that appealed the most. His last work, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, takes the note of sensibility that appeared intermittently in Tristram Shandy and turns it into the dominant strain, as the traveling Yorick moves from one feeling moment to the next. This latter work includes a panegyric on sensibility that effectively sums up both its meaning and its appeal: "Dear sensibility! sources inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!.. — eternal fountain of our feelings!.. This is the divinity which stirs within me-… that I feel some generous cares beyond myself-all comes from thee, great great SENSORIUM of the world!"

Sensibility, however, was a taste fraught with contradictions. The emphasis was more on the good feelings of the responsive heart than on the heart's responsibility to do anything to relieve the suffering that inspired it. Toby does rush to Le Fever's deathbed and offer help, and he assists Le Fever's son after the child is left orphaned, but our primary focus throughout the episode is on what Toby's feelings tell us about him and his good heart. It is tempting to say that such an emphasis on responses tends to blur the reality of suffering; suffering, in fact, can be seen as a good thing, since we require it-and require it in others! — to know our own generous feelings. In particular, the fact that so much of this pathos was inspired by women and the poor makes many modern -166- readers very uncomfortable, and it is quite possible to perceive at least a tacit complicity between sensibility and oppression of all stripes. The privileged revel in their good hearts, and they relieve suffering only in localized (and perhaps selfish) ways.

Lest we revel too much in the indignation that is our age's sensibility, it is important to examine whether Sterne himself-notwithstanding his status as a high priest in the cult-embraced sensibility in an uncritical way. The panegyric above hints at some ironic distance: Yorick feels divinity within him, and most of Sterne's first readers would have recognized the allusion to the moment in Paradise Lost where Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit; they, too, feel "Divinity within them breeding wings / Wherewith to scorn the earth." The possibility that sensibility is, if not an absolutely false divinity, then an ambiguous one, is in fact a far more insistent idea in Sterne than for many of his contemporaries.

Look, for instance, at the scene between the wayfaring Tristram and the pathetic mad girl, Maria: she is "beautiful," but "unsettled in her senses" (thwarted love, of course); she sits upon a bank, her goat beside her, and plays her pipes to the Virgin. Tristram is smitten with the full force of "an honest heart-ache," and then:

MARIA made a cadence so melancholy, so tender and querulous, that I sprung out of the chaise to help her, and found myself sitting betwixt her and the goat before I relapsed from my enthusiasm.

MARIA look'd wistfully for some time at me, and then at her goat-and then at me-and then at her goat again, and so on, alternately-

— Well, Maria, said I softly-What resemblance do you find?

I do entreat the candid reader to believe me, that it was from the humblest conviction of what a Beast man is, — that I ask'd the question; and that I would not have let fall an unseasonable pleasantry in the venerable presence of Misery, to be entitled to all the wit that ever Rabelais scatter'd-and yet I own my heart smote me, and that I so smarted at the very idea of it, that I swore I would set up for Wisdom and utter grave sentences the rest of my days-and never-never attempt again to commit mirth with man, woman, or child, the longest day I had to live. (Volume 9, chapter 24)

The idea of the "beauties of Sterne" takes on an entirely appropriate double entendre here, and we must ask, what is Sterne trying to evoke: a tear for Maria? a laugh at his own expense? Both, surely, but also more, for he seems intent as well on exposing for our amused and ironic scrutiny the potentially erotic charge lurking in every «heart-ache» of -167- sensibility. Sterne admits that his pathos is inevitably tinged with something more than a little goat-footed; Richardson, to take just one point of contrast, insists that the slow decline of pious Clarissa only works to throw into higher relief the most important doctrines of Christianity. His own less noble feelings he projects onto Lovelace, whom he conveniently kills off.

Sterne is never only one thing. The anthologists may have wished him safely and solely sentimental, but he is better seen as a unique hybrid, a sentimentalist who is at times perfectly sincere, but one who also often remembers the potential in sentiment for the pompous or the narcissistic or the exploitative or the merely futile (one strong undercurrent in the Le Fever tale is the uselessness of Toby's good feelings). Sterne's sensibility ties him to his era, but the way he weaves it into his work also sets him apart slightly; he remains capable at all times of a canny laugh at the spectacle of his own bleeding heart.

The ironies of the Maria episode inevitably raise questions about Sterne as a satirist, and a number of critics have tried to understand him in relation to the norms of eighteenth-century satire; some have even gone so far as to call him the last of the Augustan satirists and these critics insist that a true historical reading of Sterne must begin with that context. He is not odd, that is, in the light of Swift and Pope. An anecdote that Sterne himself recounts encourages this point of view. Speaking of an encounter he had in 1760 with a certain elderly gentleman, Sterne tells us:

He came up to me, one day, as I was at the Princess of Wales's court. "I want to know you, Mr. Sterne; but it is fit you should know, also, who it is that wishes this pleasure. You have heard, continued he, of an old Lord Bathurst, of whom your Popes, and Swifts, have sung and spoken so much; I have lived my life with geniuses of that cast; but have survived them; and, despairing ever to find their equals, it is some years since I have closed my accounts, and shut up my books, with thoughts of never opening them again; but you have kindled a desire in me of opening them once more before I die; which I now do; so go home and dine with me.

We could pause a long time over these remarks, for they are rich with all kinds of implications (for instance, is the relentlessly mercantile tone of Bathurst's comments a reflection of what traditional patronage feels like from the patron's point of view, or is it Sterne's later coloring, an intriguing revelation about his feelings for a system he regarded with -168- ambivalence?). We should also note that Bathurst never actually says that Sterne is like Swift and Pope, but the story has given license to a number of critics who want to see family resemblances between Sterne and the Augustans. Sterne does share with the Augustans (and with earlier figures, such as Rabelais) a love of elaborate intellectual foolery, the so-called tradition of learned wit we see in works like A Tale of a Tub or the Peri Bathous. But while it is important to understand Sterne as a satirist, it is not necessarily most accurate to see him as an Augustan satirist, and such an attempt may be as anachronistic as the effort to make him modern. In fact, the problems with assigning Sterne a place as the last Augustan are manifold: his temperament is strikingly different, his politics are all wrong, and his aims as a writer, on balance, seem to be quite different. The world of the Augustans was once memorably summed up by one critic with the phrase, "the gloom of the Tory satirists"; Sterne was not gloomy, he was a staunch Whig, and he lacks the militancy that is at the heart of the kind of Juvenalian satire Pope and Swift most often practiced.

For the contrast in temperament, we can look to Tristram's insistence (which seems very much to be Sterne's) that his book is "if… wrote against any thing, — 'tis wrote, and please your worships, against the spleen." Swift and Pope often make us laugh, but they seem intent on embracing spleen, and exploiting it as the organ from which their truest work will emerge. Some of that may have been constitutional, but it was certainly reinforced by their politics and their increasingly splenetic horror at what the Whigs wrought. Sterne, however, was neither a Tory nor a politically angry man. We can see both his politics and their tone in the scene where Toby and Trim must regretfully demolish their toy fortifications in order that they may honor the terms of the Tory Peace of Utrecht. The sentiment is Whig orthodoxy, but the spirit could hardly be gentler (and it is amusing to speculate what Bathurst thought of the scene; his own peerage was one of those created by the Tories so that the Peace of Utrecht could be saved).

The largest difficulty with this approach, however, emerges when we ask the question, what, if Sterne was a satirist, was his satire about? While the capaciousness of the satiric imagination in Swift and Pope is such that we may often wonder if there is a limit to their range, we can also point to a core of issues that form the heart of their enterprise: the Whigs, especially Walpole; abuses in learning; bad writing; religious differences; the sin of Pride. Sterne may have aligned himself with the -169- Whigs, but as the destruction of the toy fortifications suggests, there is little political militancy. He does poke fun at Walter Shandy's mad theorizing on child development, but Walter is a character, not merely an attitude, and the response he generates is complex and in part sympathetic. Sterne undoubtedly wrote A Sentimental Journey to balance genial travels against Smollett's angry ones, but that was only the most minor of his intentions or effects. Sentiment itself, as we have seen, receives ironic treatment, but that irony is only part of the story; Sterne is also genuinely sentimental, and the anthologists erred more by simplifying than by falsifying the role of sensibility in his writing. The fact is, Sterne frequently wants us to adopt an ironic viewpoint toward something in his work, but that irony is only rarely the sum of his intention. This is a crucial point, and we can see it repeated if we look at the way he uses the thought of John Locke. With Locke, the question of what is to be taken ironically and what is to be taken straight is central, but it is also a question without a final answer.

Locke has been a name to conjure with in much Sterne criticism, and he has a central place in the critical tradition that wants to place Sterne firmly in an eighteenth-century setting. Locke clearly belongs in any comprehensive discussion of Sterne (Tristram Shandy is seeded with references, direct and allusive) and several connections between the novelist and the philosopher have been discovered. It has been argued that Locke provided Sterne both with a model of the human mind that we can see at work in his fiction, particularly in the way character unfolds, and that such a model also provided the novelist with a structure for his apparently shapeless work, especially Tristram Shandy. Such a conviction led one critic, writing a few decades ago, to insist that "in Tristram Shandy, the name and influence of Locke are pervasive." Are they?

Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding (dated 1690, published 1689) proved in many ways as influential on the philosophy of its time as Newton's physics; indeed, many thought Locke had formulated the laws of thought as reliably as his contemporary had articulated the governing principles of gravity and motion. Locke's aim was to describe how the mind worked, and the mechanics he developed were empirical. At birth, our minds are empty slates, devoid of innate knowledge but nonetheless receptive to new ideas, which come to us and accumulate in our minds through one of two channels: through our experience of outward objects as perceived by our senses, or through the -170- mind's reflection on its own operations. As Locke himself puts it, "In all that great extent wherein the mind wanders… it stirs not one jot beyond those Ideas, which Sense or Reflection have offered for its Contemplation."

To be sure, Sterne is interested in both sensation and reflection. Tristram Shandy is a work filled with sensation, most of it-though not all-painful; we can balance the hot chestnut in Phutatorius's breeches with the Beguine's tender treatment of Trim's wound. And Tristram is much given to reflection on his mind's operations. The passage quoted above in which he refuses the role of the muleteer-historian is only one of a number of places where the narrator pauses to consider how his mind works. But lurking behind these twin pillars of the Lockean mind is a necessary principle of combination, a process of association; without that, our ideas would remain discrete quanta of intellectual possibility. It is this quality of association that interests Sterne most of all. As early as the fourth chapter of the first volume, he announces, in explanation and extenuation of his mother's ill-timed query about the clock:

From an unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up, — but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popp'd into her head, — & vice versa:-which strange combination of ideas, the sagacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sorts of prejudice whatsoever. (Volume 1, chapter 4)

Annotators will typically refer readers of this passage to these words of Locke's:

Some of our Ideas have a natural Correspondence and Connexion one with another… Besides this there is another Connexion of Ideas wholly owing to chance or Custom; Ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some Mens Minds, that 'tis very hard to separate them, they always keep in company, and this one no sooner at any time comes into the Understanding, but its Associate appears with it.

Locke here is describing, as Sterne is narrating in the passage about his mother, peculiar associations, and Locke is scrupulous throughout the Essay to acknowledge the individuality of all minds. But the examination of such peculiarity is not Locke's central aim, and he describes such oddity primarily as a concession to the limitations of his larger effort, which is to describe how all minds work and thus what all "human -171- understanding" has in common. Not so Sterne. His interest in the sagacious philosopher centers on those moments where Locke speaks of human understanding as flawed or ridiculous or, especially, as subjective. And such knowledge intrigues Sterne largely because he finds it so funny. Mrs. Shandy's association of clock winding with conjugal union is «unhappy» only for the Shandy family; for readers, it's meant to be the first good joke in the book. And association will be the source of other jokes, particularly involving Toby, whose mental track of association is worn so smooth that anything-even Walter awkwardly reaching across his body-reminds him of fortifications.

But Sterne (and here we reach the nub of a problem we have seen before), while always a jester, is rarely only a jester. The individuality of association and the resultant peculiarity of mind are undoubtedly sources of humor, but they seem to be more, and to be bound up with both the way he constructs character and the way he builds structure. But how far? If we think of character, what Sterne learned from Locke allowed him to formulate an intellectual basis for the creation of fictional people who look very much like characters in the old «humours» tradition. The one-track mind of Walter or Toby can be explained in a Lockean way, but their provenance in the comic world is ancient. Ben Jonson could create an enthusiast without reference to Locke and so, one suspects, could Sterne. His use of the Essay to «explain» such a traditional character type may be less an attempt to be realistic than it is another joke at the expense of learning: Locke's version of the Principia only leads Sterne back to the funnymen of the Roman or the Elizabethan stage.

The more important issue is structure, for the form-or lack of it-of Sterne's work has bedeviled many readers and is doubtless one source of Johnson's complaint that Tristram Shandy was odd. What we might call the strong Lockean position on this matter is aptly summarized by James Work, one of Sterne's best editors: "The most important structural device [in Tristram Shandy] is the principle of the association of ideas upon which the whole progression of the book is based." It is true that mental associations are one principle at work in the book: we have seen Mrs. Shandy's wry connection and Toby's unwavering focus on the science of siegecraft. As far as «progression» goes, Tristram's narration of his life and opinions often seems based on some personal internal logic: recounting his birth makes him think ahead to his baptism, which leads him to remember a French debate on prenatal baptism he -172- has read about, which becomes a bawdy joke. However, to say that these associations are "the most important structural device" or that the "whole progression" of the book is based on them may be a bit grandiose. Certainly, Work's comment (and this viewpoint has been quite influential, at least until recently) seems to reflect the taste of a few decades ago, when critics were loath to appreciate any literary work whose unity they could not demonstrate. Thus, to insist on a Lockean structure in Sterne, for all its apparent historicity, may be another modern imposition.

Again, as with the muleteer-historian, the central question is the extent of Sterne's commitment to realistic representation. To say that he has adopted Locke as the source of structure and the engine of progression is to imply a desire on his part to consistently imitate not an action but a consciousness (Tristram's, mostly), and to imitate it on the basis of assumptions borrowed from Locke. The beauty of teleology is that it can almost always be imposed on any sequence we can look at retrospectively (like a plot), and the divagations of Tristram's mind are no exception. But are we actually to assume that, say, Slawkenbergius's Tale is interpolated in precisely the place that it is because Sterne is putting it in the service of an attempt «realistically» to re-create (along Lockean lines) the way a mind like Tristram's would work? Nonsense. Sterne placed it there because it was funny. And yet, that is not quite the end of the matter either. For if the kind of systematic mimetic structure the strong Lockeans have discovered in Tristram Shandy is a critical imposition, we should also acknowledge that in some Sternean and very unsystematic way, mimesis does take place. A picture of a consciousness does emerge-forcefully enough, as we have seen, that many of those first readers wanted to meet the man whose consciousness they presumed they had already encountered in the pages of his book. However artificially Sterne has manipulated the idea of Lockean association, his manipulation is not so artificial that all we are left with are the jokes. There is a doubleness at the heart of Sterne, a doubleness that is difficult to accept. As readers, we tend to be like the Widow Wadman: we long to put our fingers on "the place," the place where ambiguity disappears and we can say with certainty, Sterne's aims were mimetic and Locke was his model; or, Sterne's goals were satiric and Locke was his target. It is a harder task to comprehend how he could do both.

We can return now to a question raised above: if Sterne is a satirist, what is his satire about? We have seen the ways in which both sensibil-173- ity and Lockean psychology are and are not targets in the way that satire traditionally establishes its objects of attack. Lurking behind and between those issues, however, is a more central one, one I have touched on already: representation. For it is with representation that Sterne's doubleness is most apparent. If Sterne has one great satiric target, it is the novel itself, and yet he has embodied that satire in a work that stubbornly-against all odds, I am tempted to say-remains a novel.

Jean-Jacques Mayoux has beautifully articulated this fundamental truth about Sterne; speaking of Tristram Shandy, he says, "If every representation is in some degree a parody, is not every parody in danger of becoming in some way representative?" Mayoux's point, of course, is a general one: both parody and mimesis, as selections from and stylizations of reality, exist on a continuum, and the difference between them is a difference of degree and not of kind. Yet the way they shift in Sterne, one into the other and then back again, is central to our experience of reading him. A great deal of Tristram Shandy does seem directed at exposing by parody the difficulties of fictional representation: Tristram's ludicrously delayed birth, to take one large example, the narrator's hilarious inability to get Walter and Toby down the stairs, to cite a smaller instance. Defoe's density of detail, Richardson's moment-bymoment rendering of the sensitive consciousness, Fielding's godlike narrator-all this and more falls apart in Tristram's bumbling hands. But even as Tristram's problems expose the fallacies of mimesis and the contradictions of fictional convention, the picture shifts, and the muddle of writing suddenly looks like the muddle of life. A parody of realistic writing becomes, ironically, an effective representation. How very odd.

"Irresponsible (and nasty) trifling"

Thus, in 1948, did F. R. Leavis exclude Sterne from The Great Tradition, his influential study of the English novel. The fact that the dismissal was relegated to a footnote-perhaps the most quoted footnote in modern literary criticism-only emphasizes the magisterial contempt it conveys. Leavis hardly commands the deference today that he once did, and in fact, people went on busily reading and writing about Sterne even in the years of his greatest influence. Yet we cannot dismiss Leavis's few, biting words as easily as Leavis dismissed Sterne. Charges -174- that Sterne was somehow improper, and so not fit to be read, dogged him when he first published, and-appropriately transmogrified-they dog him today. To many, his oddity has been less troubling than his wickedness. What, then, have been the attacks, and what defenses have been made?

Bishop Warburton, rumor had it, bestowed a purse upon Sterne at the time of Tristram Shandy's first appearance, but he also had words of advice for the clergyman-novelist. He wrote Sterne during the composition of volumes 3 and 4: "You say you will continue to laugh aloud. In good time. But one… would wish to laugh in good company, where priests and virgins may be present." This was not, needless to say, the audience Sterne aimed to please, and the novel that began with a fateful instance of coitus interruptus proceeded in the next installments to recount the tale of Slawkenbergius's extraordinary nose, the sexualization of the word «whiskers» in sixteenth-century Navarre, and the Beguine's masturbatory therapy for Trim. And that is only a small selection.

There were two problems for contemporary readers. The sexual content itself troubled some; beyond that, there was the fact that such content issued from the pen of a clergyman. This double provocation to public morality is summed up by a comment about Tristram Shandy made by Lady Bradshaigh in a letter to Richardson, her great friend: "Upon the whole, I think the performance, mean dirty Wit. I may add scandelous considering the Man." (By contrast, after the publication of Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson's last novel, she gushed to the author, "Oh, Sir, you ought to have been a Bishop!") The scandal of Sterne's profession, "the shiten shepherd" as Chaucer puts it, was a strictly contemporary issue, but the discomfort inspired by the sexuality of Sterne's fiction has never disappeared. In particular, as Warburton's comment partially foretold, Sterne has consistently presented problems for female readers.

While Sterne's initial readership was not exclusively male, there is evidence that a number of women were uncomfortable with Sterne's bawdy. As the wife of one clergyman said of Tristram Shandy: "I have [not] read, or shall read it;… as I cannot presume to depend on my own strength of mind, I think it safest and best to avoid whatever may prejudice it." Such self-censoring tendencies were overcome by Clara Reeve, the author of the early Gothic novel The Old English Baron, but she clearly regretted her courageousness: "It is not a woman's book… I have never read this book half through, and yet I have read enough to be ashamed of." A few decades later, Coleridge, while dismissing the -175- possibility that Tristram Shandy could do moral harm, insisted that it was, as Reeve implied, a man's book: "Sterne's morals are bad, but I do not think can do much harm to any one whom they would not find bad enough before. Besides, the oddity and erudite grimaces under which much of the dirt is hidden take away the effect for the most part; although, to be sure, the book is scarcely readable by women." It is not clear whether Coleridge thought a woman's reading Sterne would corrupt her-probably not; what he implies, however, is a masculine preserve of humor from which women should be kept.

Troubled reactions to the sexual content of Sterne's fiction have never disappeared, as Leavis's comment indicates; however, the connection between that content and a female readership has again become a serious critical issue. For some readers in the last ten years or so, Sterne has reemerged as a writer who is almost exclusively for men. Worse, he is a spokesman for corrupt attitudes toward women. One very recent critic, echoing Reeve, has called Tristram Shandy "a man's book, if ever there was one," and a number of other readers hear, in Tristram's lubricious meanderings, the voice of patriarchal oppression. The new, genderbased, attacks on Sterne are not, obviously, the same as those made two centuries ago, and the differences need to be looked at; at the same time, such continuities as do exist also merit examination.

The most significant difference involves a change in attitudes toward the portrayal of sexuality in all forms. The eighteenth century was franker in many ways than the century or century and a half that followed. Yet if Sterne's contemporaries were not Victorians, a comment like Reeve's suggests that, at least for some, there was a distinction made between materials suitable for men and for women. The recent attacks on Sterne, of course, have nothing to do with an attempt to revive paternalistic restriction of women's reading; no serious reader today invokes the standard of that which brings a blush to the cheek of a young girl as the line of censorship or condemnation. The feminist critique of Sterne (and it is not universal) is based not on the fact that much of the material in his fiction is sexual, but on the way that sexuality is represented. From this point of view, the book's sexual interests and humor are exclusively male, and women appear only as objects of erotic desire or (more commonly) sexual frustration. Moreover, there is the unflattering portrait of "Madam," the imaginary prude in his audience whom Sterne addresses whenever the fog of innuendo becomes especially thick. By reducing women almost exclusively to a sexual -176- function, the argument says, Sterne perpetuates stereotypes; and by relying on the existence of a male preserve of sexual humor, he has reinforced one potent image of oppression.

For anyone interested in the unfolding shape of Sterne criticism over time, it is remarkable to see the way the debate has returned to one of its original roots. In part, this reflects the new didacticism of much criticism generally, a didacticism which, after all, though it claims to be political, has the effect of reintroducing to the evaluation of literature the kind of moral concern that dominated literary criticism for much of its history. But Sterne seems to have a special ability to provoke moral reactions-a clergyman shouldn't write this, innocent women shouldn't read it, these books have no place in a world of transformed gender relations, and so on. We have moved away from the ad hominem tone of much of the early moral reaction, and we have left completely behind the paternalistic censorship that would make Sterne available only to those with a key to the club library. But if we step farther back, we cannot help but be struck by the way moral issues continue to inform the critical discussion. My opening query-why read Sterne? — remains for many a pressing moral question.

It is not easy to defend Sterne from some of the recent feminist opposition to his work. Tristram Shandy is relentlessly phallocentric, and reading it we can feel ourselves in a kind of literalized Lacanian universe, where quite nonsymbolic phalluses are indeed a universal ground of signification: everything refers to, because all meaning is generated by, the male genital. Sigurd Burckhardt has shown quite well how the law of gravity in the novel always pulls us down to that very spot. That is the place where fortifications and windows and hot chestnuts fall, where the Widow Wadman longs to put her finger, where even an innocent word like «nose» ends up. What's more, women are largely absent from the stage, and their cameo appearances are usually in the service of some joke at their expense. Tristram Shandy creates a world of male talk, and the novel often seems like an extended example-or series of examples-of that peculiar English custom, the segregation of the sexes for after-dinner conversation. Figuratively, we are always sitting with the men over their port.

Despite all this, Sterne has his defenders. The main line of defense is based on the idea that Sterne is not representing male oppression in order to endorse it, but to satirize it. Walter's mechanical lovemaking and his wild theories of child rearing; Toby's infantile retreat to a world -177- of toy soldiers; the man-midwife Slop's "vile instruments"; Tristram's inability to escape the whole catalog of male sexual anxieties (impotence, size, deformity, castration) — all this and more shows that Sterne's intention is to make fun of men. The long section of the narrative that is, at least intermittently, concerned with Tristram's birth gives us plenty of evidence for both sides of this argument. Here, while the important business of Mrs. Shandy's labor proceeds upstairs and out of sight, we have an extended conversation involving Walter, Toby, Trim, and Dr. Slop. Trim reads Yorick's sermon, issues of politics and religion are discussed, pipes are smoked, and so forth. The worlds of men and women do not meet, except for Slop's incompetent and nosedisfiguring intervention at the very end. From one point of view, this scene reinforces the idea that women's labor (not only childbirth, but generally: Mrs. Shandy is surrounded by women working to help her) is not worth our attention. Moreover, women and their work are reduced to purely reproductive roles-their business is birth. On the other hand, however, Sterne makes it clear that the whole crew of men are useless-they idly sit and smoke, their talk is mostly trivial and selfinterested, they have nothing to do. Men are narcissists and bores, and they insist on hogging the stage. As is so often the case, however, the overall effect of this part of the narrative is difficult to characterize definitively. It's easy to laugh at this fraternity; but, because they are all we have on which to focus our attention, they consume our interest and we become in some way engaged with them. This is satire, surely, but it is satire in which Sterne seems to concede not only that women are worthy of respect (they, after all, are accomplishing something), but that they are outside his ken, or at least outside the bounds of what he is interested in talking about. It's easy to see how female readers can recognize Sterne's satire on men and still feel themselves without a foothold in the book. The men may very well be making fools of themselves; Sterne may understand quite accurately how the walls that contain them also limit and cripple them; but nonetheless the separation remains. It is perhaps worth remembering that both of the primary female characters in the novel, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow Wadman, are shown in the posture of eavesdropping.

To conclude, there is no single answer to the question, why read Sterne? — just as there is no one reason we should not. Rather than catalog either set of reasons again, however, I will take a small risk and say -178- that, at least today, those who like Sterne enjoy him because they still find him to be funny. Comedy does not travel well, and it rarely keeps. A change of place or the passing of time will spoil many of the best jokes, and Sterne has not survived these perils unscathed. Much of the humor of Sterne's fiction is thus lost to us; and footnotes and annotation and commentary only twist the knife, for what is most fatal to a joke, even worse than time and place, is an explanation. "Oh, now I see," the reader says, and glumly turns the page. And yet, for some, enough jokes do survive that Sterne's stated ambition-to make us laugh-still finds fulfillment.And many of those who still laugh at Tristram Shandy laugh loudest at its fractured form. Sterne may be, as the title of this chapter suggests, both a comedian and an experimental novelist, but his experiments are some of his best comedy. To return to a point made earlier, he does not experiment to revolutionize the novel (though, from our vantage point, it often looks that way), but to have fun with the conventions he saw hardening all around him in the genre's first half-century or so-conventions of progression, of unity of action, of a fourth wall standing between book and author on one side and the audience on the other. The way he exposes those conventions, primarily by refusing to obey them, is the best continuing joke that he has, and because the novel has proven to be such an enduring and popular literary form, the fun Sterne has at the expense of its standard conventions can evoke laughter today. His oddity has never lessened, and his irresponsibility can rankle even after two centuries-but the gift of laughter is the soul of Sterne, and for those who see it, that gift is still enough.

John Allen Stevenson

Selected Bibliography

Brissenden R. F. "'Trusting to Almighty God': Another Look at the Composition of Tristram Shandy." In Arthur H. Cash and John M. Stedmond, The Winged Skull, Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference. London: Methuen, 1971.

Brown Marshall. "Sterne's Stories." In Marshall Brown, Preromanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Burckhardt Sigurd. "Tristram Shandy's Law of Gravity." English Literary History 28 (Spring 1961): 70–88. -179-

Cash Arthur H. Laurence Sterne. 2 vols. London: Methuen, 1975 and 1986.

Howes Alan B., ed. Laurence Sterne: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1974.

Hunter J. Paul. "Clocks, Calendars, and Names: The Troubles of Tristram and the Aesthetics of Uncertainty." In J. Douglas Canfield and J. Paul Hunter, eds., Rhetorics of Order/Ordering Rhetorics in English Neoclassical Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989.

Lanham Richard. "Tristram Shandy": The Games of Pleasure. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973.

Mayoux Jean-Jacques. "Laurence Sterne." In John Traugott, ed., Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Perry Ruth. "Words for Sex: The Verbal-Sexual Continuum in Tristram Shandy." Studies in the Novel 20 (Spring, 1988): 27–42.

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Sentimental Novels of the Later Eighteenth Century

THE form of the sentimental novel is typically that of an antibildungsroman: instead of a progress toward maturity, it deals sympathetically with the character who cannot grow up and find an active place in society. Its ideal is stasis or regression, which makes for episodic, cyclical narratives that often go nowhere or back where they began. Owing to different social assumptions about masculinity and femininity, the sentimental heroine can figure in conventional romance plots that end with wedding bells, since her role conforms to the popular sense of what a young woman should be; the sentimental hero poses an implicit challenge to accepted notions of masculinity, and he cannot be assimilated into the world represented in the novels. As a consequence, sentimental novels tend to become satires on "the world," but satires in which the hero himself cannot usually take part because of his naïveté, good nature, and general childlikeness. From one point of view, the cult of sentiment represents a clear challenge to traditional social, economic, and gender hierarchies, which it seeks to replace with bonds of fraternal benevolence embracing all mankind. From another point of view this movement is not egalitarian at all, but rather attempts to create a new aristocracy, possessing spontaneity, warmth, and delicacy of feeling, in place of an existing aristocracy perceived as emotionally artificial, cold, and coarse.

The sentimental novel often deals with adolescence, but in one way or another the onset of adulthood, the goal of the bildungsroman, is obstructed, evaded, or undone. The sentimental novel shows change -181- stopped or reversed-and often time along with it. The bildungsroman treats time respectfully, as not only measuring but fostering the processes it celebrates. In the sentimental novel time becomes a major enemy, the agent of feared or despised changes. Various strategies are devised to arrest or fragment its ongoingness, and to retrieve or redeem moments that seem to stand outside time or otherwise defy it. One such strategy is to break down the linear, causal, sequential flow of narrative into discrete episodes; another is to arrange episodes in nonchronological order (as Sterne does), or to introduce digressions (as Sterne and Mackenzie both do), or to posit gaps (as Mackenzie does with his «lost» chapters), all tending to disrupt temporal continuity. If the sentimental novelist is to free his hero from the ordinary effects of time, drastic tactics are called for, since narrative is always threatening to imply progress simply by unfolding in time. Such tactics as Sterne's and Mackenzie's, sometimes regarded as experimental departures from the realistic conventions of the standard novel, or as attempts to get beyond the «literary» artificiality of inherited narrative modes, are especially appropriate to the sentimental novel because of the significance attached to time. What is most benign about time in the bildungsroman-its efficacy as agent of growth and development-becomes in the sentimental novel its most malign feature: the power of time to transform boys into men and sons into husbands is the very thing that the sentimental novel tries to elude or deny.

We tend to think of the language of sentimentalism as an affected or exaggerated jargon: "tears and flapdoodle," as Mark Twain was to call it. Yet what is most characteristic of sentimentalism is not the set of terms with which it attempts to revivify the language of emotion, for these terms quickly dwindle into clichés, but rather a fundamental skepticism about the adequacy of language itself as a medium of expression or communication. The distinctive sentimental attitude toward language is to be discovered not in the shibboleths of its pioneers but in the conviction of sentimentalists of each generation that language, like the world that uses it, is profoundly debased: better suited to self-disguise than self-revelation, more often employed to exploit than to enlighten, ideally to be avoided but at all events to be used, if used it must be, with mistrust. Sentimental writers have responded to this impasse with two centuries of narratives in which articulateness is associated with villainy, and true heroism is more or less tongue-tied. Sentimental figures tend to be babes linguistically (as in other ways), out of whose mouths comes much odd-sounding sense. -182-

The menaced sentimental hero yearns for silence and the pure expressiveness of preverbal gesture. True, he may seldom reach this state-Mackenzie's Harley comes closer than most-and there may be something inherently paradoxical about the very attempt to represent it in words. All the same, Harley and his brethren prefer childish prattle to adult Babel, and the splash of a single tear is the next best thing to the perfect stillness of womb and tomb. The sentimental hero denies the desirability as well as the necessity of mastering language. Shunning forbidden knowledge-and to him there is really no other kind-he naturally repudiates the word, which is its key. He is disturbed less by the arbitrariness or artificiality of a system of verbal signs, which he finds equally in other social institutions, than by the enormities of adulthood to which language-learning is a kind of forced initiation. Eighteenth-century British fiction contains a number of wise fools, comic characters like Smollett's Win Jenkins, who utter truths greater or other than those they intend. But the sentimental hero belongs rather to a tradition of saintly fools, whose most eloquent testimony to truth is often garbled or mute.

The heroes of most sentimental novels are humorless. The image of the outside world is that found in satire: most people prove to be selfserving, callous, hypocritical, and so on. Moreover, the narrators are capable of considerable irony, as in The Man of Feeling. But the sentimental hero himself is generally lacking in irony and devoid of wit-perhaps owing to the authorial realization that wit is itself a form of control, a way of ordering, judging, and mastering one's world that would run contrary to the passive, victimized posture of most sentimental heroes.

Some critics have seen sentimentalism as springing from a basic optimism that renders satire unnecessary (men are naturally good, and need to be reminded of their latent goodness rather than their manifest shortcomings); or ineffectual (men's goodness can be elicited better through sympathetic tears than scoffing laughter); or immoral (satire indulges impulses in author and reader just as base as those it purports to chastise). In this view, later eighteenth-century literature exhibits a gradual moderating-some would say a blurring and emasculating-of the rigorous Augustinian or Augustan visions of man and society on which the satire of Swift and Pope had been based. This demanding ethos is supposed to have given way to a bland faith in progress-a confidence that though the world is not yet all it might be, philanthropy -183- and forbearance will bring it around, since its defects lie more in reformable institutions than in human nature itself.

Others have seen sentimentalism as the expression of a thoroughgoing pessimism: the belief that one can scarcely hope to improve society, but at most to escape from it. The idea of progress is not only an illusion but a snare, tempting man to linger in a city of destruction that he had better flee, even if flight inward (or backward) is the only route open to him. In this view, too, the individual may be inherently good, but society turns him into a predatory beast, and its customs and institutions are so incurably vile that the good man must be an exile or a victim-never the active, socially engaged hero of traditional epic or comedy.

In practice, the sentimental novel seldom subscribes completely to either of these extreme positions. Often the hero seems to spring from the sunnier conception of human nature, even though nearly everyone else in the same book reflects the more despairing vision. But if the philosophical or theological assumptions about human nature that underlie the sentimental novel are somewhat ambiguous, sentimentalism seems clearly if indirectly indebted to the English religious tradition in another of its functions: namely, as a technique for reviving the role of emotion in human conduct. Stigmatized as «zeal» or «enthusiasm» during the Restoration, the ardor associated with Puritanism had become suspect. Sentimentalism arises in the eighteenth century partly as a reaction against this taboo, and represents a kind of return of the repressed, a reopening of channels through which a broad range of human emotion, from passionate intensity to exquisite delicacy, might once again find expression. As a rehabilitation of enthusiasm, sentimentalism seeks legitimacy by appealing not to tradition or authority but to its truth to nature. The overtly secular character of much eighteenth-century sentimentalism seems, to adapt T. E. Hulme's remark about Romanticism, a matter of spilt religion-of religious instincts or energies reasserting themselves, but adjusting to a world in which their religious pedigree could be a liability rather than an asset. (When sentimental novels do set themselves the task of religious advocacy, as in Chateaubriand's Atala at the end of the century, religion itself becomes highly emotionalized and aestheticized).

It is worth observing the spirit in which Sterne introduces religious considerations into a work like A Sentimental Journey. Of all the early novelists, Sterne appears to be the adherent of sensibility most remote from Puritanism and most in accord with the affable, undemanding -184- worldliness of the Anglican establishment. Yet behind the gregariousness of Yorick (and of Sterne himself) lies an individualism that is always threatening, as in the Puritan past, to dissolve into downright solipsism. Communal, fraternal, and sexual bonds bring people together only very partially, tentatively, and precariously. The test of behavior is not its conformity to some divinely imposed, biblically sanctioned norm, but rather its capacity to amplify, intensify, and elevate one's own sensations. In this respect Sterne is closer to D. H. Lawrence, and both are closer to what can be labeled Puritanism, than to the ideals of moderation and social accommodation invoked from many Anglican pulpits in the eighteenth century. To the pure all things are pure, as Sterne slyly reminds us, and whether we call this a religion of self-cultivation, a religion of the heart, or a latter-day recrudescence of Antinomianism, it clearly embraces enthusiasm in place of restraint, and prefers the redeeming excess to the prudent, Pharisaical mean.

Yorick is intent on confirming his membership in an aristocracy of the spirit, and on identifying and attaching himself to other chosen vessels. Discriminating between different kinds and degrees of feeling thus becomes a constant and crucial task; and in its analytical aspect as well, Yorick's absorption in his own emotional life draws on earlier religious habits of self-scrutiny. A preoccupation with nuance can lead to subtleties akin to those of the seventeenth-century French romance, with its elaborately refined cartes de tendre, and may owe something to this tradition. Yet English novelists probe the niceties of sentiment less out of punctilio than from a conviction that they offer the best and almost the only gauge of one's true status, social or spiritual. Outside the pages of Richardson, what is at issue is seldom salvation versus damnation in any literal sense. But when the question is whether one belongs to Yorick's elite or to the herd of Smelfunguses and Mundunguses, almost as much can seem to be at stake. Phrased in this way the problem may sound trivial, yet Sterne demonstrates that this secular variant of the central Calvinist worry-am I after all a sheep or a goat? — can be at once droll and all-important.

The main traits of the sentimental novel can be found as early as Sarah Fielding's David Simple of 1744 and Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1754), and the genre begins to flourish in the 1760s in such works as Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), and Henry Brooke's Fool of Quality (1766–1772). But the fullest expression -185- of the genre is Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771). As author, Mackenzie puts himself at three or four removes from his hero, Harley. There is first an editor who introduces the book, telling how he got the fragmentary manuscript from a country curate who was using it as gunwadding on their hunting expeditions. The curate in turn had come upon it among the effects of its presumed author, a "grave, oddish kind of man" who shunned adult company but was "gentle as a lamb" and enjoyed "playing at te-totum with the children." This author figure, finally, is a friend of Harley-but he is also an omniscient narrator, capable of recounting not only Harley's unexpressed thoughts and feelings, but his actions when alone. The supposititious author and editor are not only sympathetic toward Harley but in important respects just like him; at the same time, both are assigned a capacity for urbane irony that Harley does not share.

Like most sentimental novelists and most sentimental readers, Mackenzie takes a somewhat equivocal position toward his subject. In his horror at the brutality and treachery of ordinary adult «civilized» life, and in his sympathy for its victims, he is very close to his hero. But the very qualities that distinguish Harley as a sentimental hero tend to keep him from judging the world harshly or condescendingly: to allow him such attitudes would be to confer on him a power to retaliate that would belie his character as humble, charitable, downtrodden innocent. Mackenzie, however, wants to register not only Harley's helpless dismay, but his own active indignation at the world's villainies, and it is through his editor, his narrator, and other spokesmen who turn up in the course of the story that Mackenzie can pass judgment on them. Moreover, there are some features of his hero with which Mackenzie evidently does not wish to be identified: by making his subordinate narrators speak of Harley from time to time with gentle but wry amusement, the author can prevent our supposing that he is as naive or ineffectual as this "child in the drama of the world." In short, Mackenzie presents himself as a genuine man of feeling but also as something of a man of the world: framing devices permit him this necessary combination of oneness with the hero and distance from him.

This pattern also holds true of the hero's relation to characters within the book, and to the reader. Like other sentimental heroes, Harley exercises generosity and compassion toward those less fortunate than he. The objects of his alms and tears sometimes reciprocate with tales of their own beneficence toward others still lower on the ladder of help-186- lessness and woe. Whether or not one's feelings of pity necessarily imply a sense of superiority to their object, the sentimental novel suggests that for pity to be a pleasurable emotion some such comparison, favorable to oneself, must be drawn. Not that the principle is openly avowed. To declare baldly, as Hume does in his Treatise on Human Nature, that "the misery of another gives us a more lively idea of our happiness," and "therefore, produces delight," would be fatal to the entire enterprise. Within the novels, gestures of commiseration are portrayed as uplifting to both parties; that the bestower is in some sense gratified at the expense of the recipient, whom he has a certain interest in not raising to his own level, is unthinkable. At any rate, the thought does not occur to the sentimental hero; nor can the thought occur to the reader without destroying the flattering illusion that his pleasure in witnessing so much distress does credit to the goodness of his heart.

However we choose to regard our benevolence toward a hero like Harley, this response does seem to involve a certain distance between us and him. Another kind of distancing results from the attitude of our culture toward sentimentality itself: we laugh uneasily at so-called heroes who cry so easily and so copiously; we find ludicrous and embarrassing their tendency to exaggerate; we are disturbed yet contemptuous about what we take to be their self-indulgence. This would be enough to account for the condescending tone in most modern criticism of sentimental fiction, even if there were no more legitimate aesthetic grounds for it. Yet distancing is not the whole story. The modern sensibility recoils with amusement from the traits I have just mentioned, yet it hankers on some level for the pastoral world that these qualities serve to create. Here people are still capable of intense emotions; here they still care about each other; here they do not disregard one another's pain and suffering. The outer world Harley encounters is anything but pastoral, and may be more cruel, rapacious, and gross than our familiar one. Yet his sheer responsiveness to it constitutes a kind of pastoral alternative to the cynical, «adult» blunting of response that the world more commonly induces. Thus Harley's spontaneity, naïveté, and innocence make him a pastoral figure with whom a part of us wishes to identify, despite (or perhaps because of) our own compromised, inhibited worldliness.

Moreover, Harley witnesses or is told about instances of such melodramatic wrongdoing that his reaction is one of pure revulsion. Villains and villainy are presented so starkly that he is not perplexed by difficulties of evaluation, nor are we. Instead, we are invited to check the inten-187- sity of our response against the example set us by the hero. What matters is not the qualitative accuracy of moral judgment, but the quantitative adequacy of moral feeling-the goodness not of our heads but of our hearts. The focus within the novel is not on actions, which involve choice and responsibility, but on reactions-particularly reactions so abrupt as to preclude deliberation. The very idea of pausing to weigh motives and circumstances is alien to the man of feeling; it smacks of the prudential, calculating, worldly wisdom that the sentimental novel sets out to discredit, and introduces an element of cold-blooded circumspection into a process which (in the sentimental view) ought to be instinctive and instantaneous.

A further source of appeal in books like The Man of Feeling should be mentioned. Within the story, Harley is not exactly quiescent, since his feelings are in constant turmoil, yet action is not something he initiates or performs, but something he undergoes and responds to. His life touches him deeply, but he seems powerless to affect its shape or outcome. In all this his role resembles that of a reader more than that of a conventional hero, and the resulting emphasis on passive responsiveness relieves the reader of certain burdens just as it does Harley. We are not challenged to bestir ourselves, to gird up our loins, to sally forth as pilgrims or soldiers in one or another cause, as we are by much other literature. This is seen as a problem by Hugh Murray, author of The Morality of Fiction (1806), who remarks that "there is perhaps only one point of view in which the tendency of [Mackenzie's] writings may perhaps be objected to. They seem to contain something peculiarly enervating and unfavourable to active exertion."

Throughout the book the orphan Harley is sentimentally in love with the unattainable Miss Walton. But sex is everywhere associated with betrayal, and is one of the chief sources of evil and misery: the Misanthropist is soured by a trusted friend eloping with his fiancée, the Prostitute is driven to the brink of the grave by the conventional consequences of a conventional seduction, and Signor Respino nearly ruins an entire family out of "criminal passion" for the incorruptible wife. «Passion» of the sexual variety is invariably "criminal"-which puts Harley in an awkward position as a lover. When Miss Walton eventually reveals to him that she is not unattainable but had secretly loved him all along, death is the only way out of his impasse.

Marriage represents the ultimate threat to Harley's innocence; sexual consummation would be a betrayal of his essential childlikeness and -188- an assumption of all the compromises, grossnesses, and responsibilities of adulthood in a fallen world. His gentle retreat into death is thus a more consistent and plausible finale to his brief career than marriage would be. Death is alluded to throughout the novel, not as the steady goal of a unified plot, but as an object of wanly pleasurable contemplation for those condemned to a world they long to escape. The book begins as it ends with the author in a state of pleasing melancholy, discussing graves. Mackenzie repeatedly sets up death as an alternative to sexual consummation, analogous to it but more desirable-especially if, as in Harley's case, the hero can be "buried in a certain spot near the grave of his mother." At the same time, by not actively pursuing death, Harley remains a purer sentimental hero than someone like Goethe's Werther; the childlike Harley cannot be so bold or resolute-in short, so "manly"-as to perform any decisive action, let alone commit suicide.

The bildungsroman attaches such importance to learning processes that the question of whether man is innately good or depraved is not crucial to it. The sentimental novel not only introduces actual infants in idealized roles, but finds in childhood some of the same virtues imputed to the noble savage during the eighteenth century. Sentimentalism is akin to primitivism insofar as it looks upon social institutions as thwarting or perverting human dignity. Normal education thus represents a force for evil. In the bildungsroman, satires on education aim at practical reform, and assume that one can and must learn to live in the world, whereas the sentimental novel challenges not only the methods but the goal of conventional education.

Skepticism about formal education is only one expression, however, of the more general sentimental principle that the path from innocence to experience is a downhill one. Henry Fielding may attach positive value to a young man's acquisition of prudence, but for the sentimental novelist the wisdom of the serpent does not complement but rather contaminates the innocence of the dove. In the sentimental novel, at any rate, the hero does not mature or degenerate, largely because those two processes are regarded as synonymous, and also because process itself is a sentimental bête noire.

When character change does occur in sentimental fiction, it is reminiscent of the Protestant (and ultimately Pauline) pattern of dramatic conversion. Such works hold out the possibility of sudden, total transformation that comes about not through reflection, resolution, and -189- deliberate action but rather through something like an infusion of grace. The notion of conversion explains the perplexing fact of human change by postulating sudden leaps or twitches that mark a basic alteration of course. But the clearest instances of this abrupt movement from darkness to light occur in sentimental works of the following century-for example, in the Scrooge of Dickens's "Christmas Carol." In such novels as The Man of Feeling, the action may be as peripatetic as that of Tom Jones, and the hero may encounter as socially and morally varied a series of other characters, but the result tends to be a reiterated confirmation of the attitudes he set out with, not a revision or revaluation of them. In Mackenzie's novel, the indictment of the world becomes more comprehensive with each episode, but not more complex or profound. Great stress is laid on openness to experience, but only in the sense that the hero must be prepared to have his susceptibilities set a-jangling in all sorts of odd moments and unlikely places; such openness does not extend to the point of allowing the hero to be transformed by his experience. Affected yet not changed, he may become sadder, but he cannot grow wiser. Far from being embarked on a voyage of discovery, in search of something he doesn't already know or have, he is on a mission of recovery, trying to recapture a sense of fixity amid distressing flux, or to regain a long-lost haven of secure devotion.

Another way of illustrating the incompatibility of the sentimental novel with the bildungsroman, with education, and with process generally is to consider briefly the convention of love at first sight. The sentimental ethos, prizing instantly formed bonds of sympathy between strangers, tends to regard such moments of heightened sensibility as both possible and creditable to the parties involved: what better example could there be of benign directness and spontaneity in human affairs? The adversaries of sentimentalism not only challenge the substance and worth of sudden attachments, but also put forward an alternative conception of love as something gradual and cumulative, to be established only over time. According to this view, one does not fall in love, but learns to love. (Austen's Sense and Sensibility embodies both aspects of the latter position: on the one hand, it satirizes the giddy and groundless infatuation that Willoughby inspires in Marianne; on the other hand, it presents Edward Ferrars as an unhandsome hero whose manners require intimacy to make them pleasing). In love as in other matters, the bildungsroman insists on our constantly testing and revising what Austen calls first impressions, and like any educative process, — 190- this takes time. Only through a careful monitoring of their unfolding experiences can heroines come to know what others and they themselves are really like, and we are expected to read their stories in the same spirit. The sentimental novel demands something quite different from its heroes and its readers: we are expected to react instantly to good and evil with appropriate degrees of sympathy or abhorrence, but there is little question of our having to learn better how to tell them apart, since there are no gradations between innocence and depravity in the morally melodramatic world of sentimentalism. The kind of ethical workout so edifying to characters and readers alike in the bildungsroman, and so central to the educative pretensions of most eighteenth-century novels, is largely absent from the sentimental novel.

The convention of love at first sight helps to bring out a political aspect of sentimentalism as well. To conservatives, the notion of love at first sight is not merely silly but dangerous: it breaks through the barriers of class, circumvents the testing rituals of courtship, and allows the sexual relationship between individuals to overshadow the social and economic relationship between families that has always been the chief basis for upper- and middle-class marriage. Love at first sight transforms strangers into intimates, as happens repeatedly in A Sentimental Journey; and although Sterne balks at carrying this process (or any other) to its ultimate conclusion, others saw and drew out its implications. Love at first sight does for two persons what Christian conversion had done for one: it holds out the possibility of an immediate and total remaking of their essential situation. It thus lends plausibility to the notion that sudden transformation is possible on a more extended, perhaps even universal scale. If all mankind could be brought to undergo the change of heart represented in religious terms by Christian conversion and in more secular terms by love at first sight, the millennium could arrive overnight. A sentimental doctrine such as love at first sight thus appears subversive insofar as it helps discredit the belief that significant social relationships, including those between men and women, have to develop over time and cannot be formed or altered all at once. Sentimental fiction acknowledges that in the world as presently constituted, the distances between classes may be great, but it suggests the arbitrariness of those gaps by showing that they can collapse under the force of a single soulful glance.

The sentimental mode emphasizes the primacy of individual feelings, and this emphasis has sometimes been seen as revolutionary-as -191- tending to subvert the principles and duties that support institutions like the family, the church, and society at large. Customary rules of conduct and belief seem cold, oppressive, and inauthentic in competition with the keen promptings of impulse; in prizing the latter, the sentimental mode seems to place in jeopardy the entire moral and social system. The maintenance of order depends (according to its defenders) on a subordination of individual to social considerations, and of feeling to judgment; by reversing both priorities, sentimentalism seems to level or overturn an established, hierarchical scheme of things.

Some pioneers of sentiment, such as Rousseau, recognize and welcome the political consequences of preferring feeling to thought. Yet most of its early English devotees seem innocent of any leveling intention when they value the heart over the head. They assume that the existing order will remain intact; their highest hope is to find shelter from it and to relieve some of its victims, not to topple its institutions. When four kindred souls achieve a harmonious "little society" at the end of David Simple, or when some women establish a more extensive utopian community in Sarah Scott's Millennium Hall (1762), the result is an oasis amid a world of distress, to which the new creation poses an appealing alternative but not, as each author is careful to make clear, a real threat.

From the beginning, sensibility encourages patterns of sensation and expression that-although held up as natural-differ from those of the generality of mankind. From Sterne onward there are those who value sensibility for its not being widely shared, for its representing a more elevated state of emotional and moral development than most people have attained. But like the signs of grace for which earlier Calvinists had to scrutinize themselves, the tokens of belonging to the sentimental elite have to be watched for and nurtured, as we see Yorick doing so sedulously in A Sentimental Journey. This makes for a curious paradox. On the one hand, the surest evidence of possessing sensibility is a capacity for spontaneous stirrings of benevolence toward others, an acute responsiveness to touching scenes and incidents in life as well as art. On the other hand, one's own feelings can displace the ostensible objects of those feelings as one's chief concern. Thus the very egotism that sentimentalism sets out to overcome can taint sentimentalism itself. As Hugh Murray observes in The Morality of Fiction, "the votary of sentiment is… often found to bestow too great a share of his benevolence on himself. There is a selfish, as well as a social sensibility; and, — 192- when this is the case, we cannot wonder that the former should sometimes predominate. It is fostered by that minute attention to his own feelings, which forms one of his favorite employments."

In the later eighteenth century, philanthropic movements of all kinds, including efforts to abolish the slave trade, to improve the condition of prisons and madhouses, and to make better provision for orphans, fallen women, and animals, were inspired and sustained by the ethos of sensibility. These struggles for more humane treatment of society's outcasts or victims have been regarded as progressive in spirit, creditable to the minds and hearts of their promoters, and as evidence of egalitarian stirrings. The Wedgwood medallion, from which an enchained African pleads, "Am I not a man and a brother?" has thus seemed an apt emblem of sentiment in the service of liberty and fraternity, if not of equality.

What has been investigated less, even by those hostile to sentimentalism, is its tendency to leave the existing social hierarchy intact or stronger than ever. For one thing, the high degree of stylization and artifice of most of this writing situates it in a cultural context that is unmistakably and unshakably genteel. Like the tradition of pastoralism, with which it has many affinities, sentimental literature allows both author and audience to explore the delights of simpler, more spontaneous, more «natural» life without having to give up the morally equivocal pleasures of power, privilege, and worldly protocol that they enjoy within existing society. A work like Sterne's Sentimental Journey may call into question some of the artificial distinctions and stratifications of eighteenth-century culture, yet its very texture as a work of art-all the deft posing, all the playful rococo embellishments, all the self-consciousness and wit and lightness of touch-tends to celebrate, at a much deeper level than any overt social statement, the grace, the polish, and the erotic inexhaustibility of artifice itself. Along the way, in Sterne's book as in others, there may be a dabbling in the pleasures of the primitive; Yorick will temporarily renounce Paris and the children of art for provincial peasants who are children of nature, Werther will read Ossian to Lotte, René will abandon Europe for the wilds of America, and the mothers of Paul and Virginia will retreat to bucolic Mauritius. But short of death, this "going native" never reaches the point of throwing off once and for all a concern for civilized, hierarchical customs and values. The heroine of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul and Virginia (1788) drowns because she insists upon keeping her clothes on, — 193- and despite the presence of various egalitarian motifs in the book, Virginia's fully dressed fate is an emblem of the ultimate stability and inescapability of the status quo in sentimental literature. As in the pastoral, the element of pathos here can be regarded as a cathartic reinforcement of the existing scheme of things rather than a challenge to it. In this respect the sentimental novel can be thought of as profoundly conservative, implying as it does that the actions of sentimental heroes and heroines have little impact beyond their own immediate circle.

This sense of inconsequentiality may be acknowledged in a jocular or a melancholy spirit, as the different endings of Paul and Virginia, The Man of Feeling, and A Sentimental Journey demonstrate. Despite their great tonal range, however, these works and most others of their kind do not hold out much hope of changing the ways of the world-or even much prospect that a sensitive soul can come to lasting terms with the world, except through defeat, exile, or death. This is not a conservatism that endorses things as they are, but one that may strengthen the hold of existing conditions by suggesting that they are immutable and inevitable.

In the area of relations between the sexes, sentimental fiction appears, on the face of it, to question hierarchical values in the name of more egalitarian ones. The ethos of sensibility challenges a number of prevailing gender assumptions: that the public, civic realm is more important than the private, familial realm; that dominance is a worthier posture than submission, strength more creditable than weakness, determination better than diffidence; and that ways culturally defined as «manly» must take precedence over the concerns and characteristics thought of as inherently "feminine." Sentimental fiction calls into question this subordination of feminine to masculine values, but not in the interest of equality. Sentimental novels tend to assert that the constellation of feeling and behavior ordinarily regarded as feminine is not merely the equal of the masculine one, but is preferable to it in all essential respects. This position can reflect a genuine concern with women's status and welfare, particularly when it appears in works by women, such as Sarah Fielding's David Simple; but male authors like Sterne and Mackenzie seem motivated rather by a wish to challenge the customary conception of what men themselves are and should be. They do so by attaching the highest value to traits ordinarily despised as womanish, such as emotional sensitivity, delicacy, and expressiveness-the prime example being the capacity of the sentimental hero to shed tears, and his pride in doing so. -194-

Sentimental novels often involve a quest for a haven secure from the world, but the very nature of this goal tends to prevent any but fleeting, partial, or symbolic attainments of it short of death. This helps to account for the failure of sentimental novels to achieve much in the way of genuine resolutions, let alone triumphant finales, except when death is the ultimate answer to the problems of hero and author. And sentimental novels usually lack the kind of cumulative development that eventually transforms the hero of a bildungsroman into an adult. But different social assumptions about masculinity and femininity make sentimental novels about young women different in each of these respects from those about young men. In the eighteenth century, the idea of a woman of feeling was much less anomalous and paradoxical than that of a man of feeling, for it tended to reinforce rather than subvert common assumptions about femininity. Proneness to tears is weakness, weakness is effeminacy, and effeminacy is shameful-unless one happens to be a woman, in which case such traits are natural and becoming. The sentimental hero violates gender stereotypes and is praised for doing so, but this calls for a great deal of authorial justification. The creator of a sentimental heroine is spared the necessity for this kind of special pleading, and is released from the need to portray the sentimental figure as misunderstood, despised, and alienated from the bulk of society. Since she shares the dovelike innocence and diffidence of the sentimental hero, the sentimental heroine will be similarly vulnerable to the aggressions and duplicities of worldlings; but since the qualities that make her vulnerable are those that the community values in young women, the fact that she has them may facilitate her integration into adult society. The sentimental hero is called upon by the world to renounce childlike virtues for manly ones, and chooses not to; the sentimental heroine faces no such impasse, since the virtues demanded of her as a woman are the same ones prized in her as a child. The transition from boy to man is seen from the sentimental perspective as a fall from grace, and from the worldly perspective as a necessary and desirable shedding of puerility, but in either view as a drastic change. Between girl and woman, all parties see a fundamental continuity.

Since the sentimental view of woman is not at odds with the view of her held by the world at large, the glorification of sentimental heroines poses no such ideological challenge as the idealization of sentimental heroes. When the main character is female, there need be no incompatibility between the sentimental novel and the bildungsroman. -195-

Although the sentimental heroine (like her male counterpart) is seen as a superior person, there is nothing eccentric in her position, either in relation to the rest of her own sex or to the opposite sex. Such merging of the sentimental novel with the bildungsroman and of the sentimental heroine with her environment can be seen in a work like Burney's Evelina (1778), which has as its subtitle The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. Many features of this world are perceived as alien and threatening: the rakish aggressiveness of Sir Clement Willoughby, the encroaching vulgarity of the Branghtons and Madame Duval, the heartless boisterousness of Captain Mirvan, the mindless arrogance of Mr. Lovel; but instead of driving Evelina out of "the World," they themselves are gradually pushed to its margins so that Evelina can assume her rightful place at its center. Moreover, this happens without Evelina having to relinquish her feminine passivity. Evelina's worst tormentors, Madame Duval and Lovel, are both brutally scourged by Captain Mirvan, and although critics have been puzzled and disturbed by all the Punch-and-Judy-style violence on the part of the Captain, its evident function in the book is to settle scores with Evelina's persecutors without imputing any vengefulness to the heroine herself.

Evelina is commonly regarded not as a sentimental novel but as a kind of bildungsroman enlivened by social comedy, or as a social comedy given substance and continuity by the "Entrance into the World" plot. In a book about a young woman, however, such features can coexist with sentimental ones in a way hardly possible in books about young men. For Mackenzie's Harley, to marry would mean taking on the assertiveness and authority he is intent on avoiding; for an Evelina, marriage involves not a betrayal but a public validation of her submissiveness and dependence. For this to be so requires playing down any evidence that she is physically attracted to the man, which would jeopardize the innocence indispensable to her character as sentimental heroine. On this matter Burney is very circumspect, not only in her presentation of Evelina herself, but in the antithesis she sets up between the young men in Evelina's life, Sir Clement Willoughby and Lord Orville. Burney's aim and method come out clearly in Evelina's words:

I could not but remark the striking difference of [Sir Clement's] attention, and that of Lord Orville: the latter has such gentleness of manners, such delicacy of conduct, and an air so respectful, that, when he flatters most, he never distresses, and when he most confers honour, appears to receive it! The former -196- obtrudes his attention, and forces mine; it is so pointed, that it always confuses me, and so public, that it attracts general notice.

The imagery of the second sentence suggests that more than mere attention is at issue: Sir Clement's obtrudes, is pointed, and Evelina feels violated and pained by it. However one interprets Evelina's language, it is clear here and elsewhere that Sir Clement is the embodiment of aggressive masculinity, unsettling to the heroine and to society at large. Lord Orville, on the other hand, is desexualized-"so feminine his delicacy," Evelina exclaims at one point-without being altogether emasculated. He can act boldly, responsibly, and decisively among men, as when he flings out of the room the monkey that has attacked Mr. Lovel and terrified everyone else, yet he is all gentleness, modesty, and tact among women, and particularly with Evelina. This combination-the lion among men who is a lamb before women-marks Lord Orville as distinctly the hero of a female sentimental novel, since the hero of a male sentimental novel tends to be more uniformly lamblike.

The sentimental implications of a book like Evelina can be summed up as follows. In a novel focusing on a young woman, the sentimental ethos can be reconciled with "Entrance into the World," since the sentimental heroine epitomizes the popular ideal of what a young woman should be; and such a book can culminate in marriage without ceasing to be a sentimental novel, since the traits that go to make up a sentimental daughter or sister are those that society continues to look for in wives and mothers. Where women are concerned, sentimentalism can be a powerful agent of socialization, a process scarcely possible for the hero of a male sentimental novel. In the female sentimental novel, however, the sentimental male himself need no longer be at odds with society. A modicum of conventional masculinity is allowed him, but it is quarantined in clearly designated spheres of male activity, so that he is made amenable to the same kind of socialization and domestication as the heroine herself.

The fact that it could thus be enlisted in the service of social stability helps to explain the enduring popularity of the female sentimental novel, for it holds out to women the gratifying prospect that their psychological and moral ideals will not unfit them for the world, but rather guarantee their admittance to it on the best possible terms. With the male sentimental novel, this has never been the case.

G. A. Starr

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Selected Bibliography

Barker Gerard A. "David Simple: The Novel of Sensibility in Embryo." Modern Language Studies 12, no. 2 (1982): 69–80.

Barker-Benfield G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Braudy Leo. "The Form of the Sentimental Novel." Novel 7 (1973): 5 -13.

Brissenden R. F. Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974.

Brown Marshall. Preromanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Chapter 5, "The Economy of Sensibility."

Mullan John. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Platzner Robert L. "Mackenzie's Martyr: The Man of Feeling as Saintly Fool." Novel 10 (1976): 59–64.

Rawson Claude. Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Spacks Patricia Meyer. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Todd Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Tompkins J. M. S. "Didacticism and Sensibility." In The Popular Novel in England. London: Constable, 1932."

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Frances Burney and the Rise of the Woman Novelist

THE novelist, playwright, biographer, and diarist Frances Burney has had considerable political importance in the last ten years of academic thinking about the eighteenth-century novel. Feminist reevaluations of women's literature and history are in large part responsible for this importance. More than any of the hundreds of women who wrote novels during the eighteenth century, Burney is likely to turn up on reading lists for comprehensive examinations and on syllabi outside of women's literature courses. Her name joins that of Jane Austen, who for twenty years or so had been the token woman included in the canon of eighteenth-century British novelists. While Burney may be in danger of slipping into the role of token, twin to Austen, the importance of her presence on these lists and syllabi may take some of its charge from Virginia Woolf's famous recommendation that women writers since the eighteenth century should lay a wreath upon her grave in gratitude for being the first respectable, middle-class woman to earn money by writing. Woolf was not exactly accurate in granting Burney this honor, but her remark associates Burney with something rather more helpful to women than tokenism: Burney's is a name that emblematizes a change in terms of the subject matter available to women writers and in the ideological and artistic possibilities open to them. As Woolf suggests, after Burney, it was imaginable for a woman of her class to trade her traditional role as financial dependent for the equally respectable but more autonomous role of working woman. -199-

However conventional and respectable her family life may have been (and there is reason to doubt the veracity of her image as a traditional daughter, wife, and mother), Burney was also a careerist and, more importantly, she was seen as such by her contemporaries. That is to say that her life was shaped by work, as well as the other way around. The popular image of Jane Austen hiding her manuscripts in progress so as not to contaminate her personal life with her artistic one has, however reductively if not falsely, served to contain the impact of her artistic accomplishments, to keep them from suggesting how a woman's writing might have a direct and liberatory impact on her life.

That Burney was singled out by Woolf for exercising professional autonomy while retaining her status as a respectable, middle-class woman is also significant. In the eighteenth century, retaining such a status while working for money as a writer meant more than simply taking charge of one's life by writing one's own life script. Besides constituting a departure from the norm that a «lady» would not make her living outside the domestic roles prescribed for her by eighteenth-century gender ideology, it meant a careful and responsible reimagining of the lives possible for eighteenth-century, middle-class, white Englishwomen. Burney's writings show a keen, lifelong interest in assessing the culturally determined options for defining female life and identity, in realistically assessing the force of those possibilities, and in exploring what women, particularly women writers like herself, might make of these possibilities through their own exertions. This careful but innovative negotiation of the "life stories" available to women of her class and race is an aspect of her life that is certainly found in her works-particularly her novels. One way of reading Burney's fiction is as imaginative castings into the cultural reservoir of plots available to eighteenth-century middle-class women for creating themselves and their lives. Her novels all implicitly ask the question, What can a woman do with the stories she is given to represent female life? How can she control these stories, make them work for instead of against her? Burney's fiction both embodies and thematizes the labor of reworking the plots available to eighteenth-century middle-class women for imagining the trajectory of their lives and the nature of their identities.

I will focus on these questions as they are asked in Burney's fiction, but I also want to consider the ways in which Burney herself becomes a sort of heroine in a number of stories implicitly or explicitly narrated about her by modern critics of her work and of the eighteenth-century -200- novel in general. One does not usually think of critics or literary historians as storytellers, but in writing about literature, one often finds oneself narrating a kind of story. A book about the eighteenth-century novel, for example, tells us the story of its «rise» from humble beginnings in romance to the exalted status of "high art." Individual writers as well as genres are fitted into plot structures, and Burney has been habitual fodder for narratives that depict rising and falling fortunes. As I will argue later, the dual plot possibilities of rising and falling are inextricably tied to gender and have wide-reaching implications for women's lives and identities in the eighteenth century. How does Burney's gender affect the «stories» that are told of her? The same dualistic structure of rising and falling that dominated the heroines' plots that Burney sought to rework in her fiction tend to determine the ways in which her life and works have been represented and evaluated in academic criticism. It strikes me as ironic that gendered narrative patterns seem to play a major role in shaping the image of a writer who was such a self-conscious (and angry) critic of the stories available to women for imaging their lives. By pointing out this irony, I hope to engage, with Burney as my model and mentor, in my own reworking of feminine plots and possibilities.

Love Stories: The Rise and Fall of the Heroine

Beginning early in the century, as Jane Spencer notes, love was popularly identified as the most «natural» subject for women writers, and love plots are important in eighteenth-century novels written by both men and women. The course of love for heroines follows a paradigmatic trajectory in eighteenth-century novels. Heroines usually either rise or fall. This formulation is, of course, a deliberate oversimplification, but it identifies for us a skeletal structure and gives us a place to begin thinking about the formal conventions that faced writers such as Burney. What, exactly, does it mean to «rise» and to «fall» in the love stories of eighteenth-century fiction? Love plots entail repeated rises, falls, and paradoxical movements-one falls in love in order to rise to perfect happiness-and even a "downward," tragic plot, as in Richardson's Clarissa (1748), can entail an ascension of the heroine to perfect (if unearthly) bliss. Heroes share the dual prospect of tumbling down to a bad end or rising in stature and happiness. Tom Jones is either "born to be hanged" or destined to the heights of marriage to the perfect Sophia -201- and inheritance from Squire Allworthy, just as Pamela is either to be seduced and abandoned or ascendant through an «upward» marriage.

Most important for our purposes is what rising and falling signified within eighteenth-century ideologies of femininity and the effect of that significance on the public image of the woman writer. The tendency to conflate the writer with the heroine-to view the former's story as of a piece with the latter's-was particularly evident in popular representations of women who wrote. Hence, the rises and falls of fictional heroines could not always be kept at a distance from the public images of their creators. And the narrative possibilities represented by the rises and falls of women-be they heroines or writer-heroines-are inextricably connected with women's sexuality. For a heroine as well for her female author, to rise meant marriage-not marriage in all its everyday pleasures, pains, interests, and boredoms, but a transcendently happy union with an ideal husband, perhaps accompanied by a radical improvement in class and financial standing, as in a Cinderella story. To fall, on the other hand, meant «ruin» in a specifically sexual sense. This duality is inextricably tied to the reduction of feminine identity to a simplistic «angel-whore» dichotomy. As Penelope Aubin expressed it in her novel Charlotta Du Pont (1723), "Youth once vitiated is rarely reformed, and Woman, who whilst virtuous is an Angel, ruined and abandoned by the Man she loves, becomes a Devil."

This is not to say that all eighteenth-century novels with love plots slavishly adhere to one or the other trajectory, sending their heroines either to marital bliss or to sexual ruin. Rising and falling, in the love story, are a pair of extremes that are always in tension with less spectacular possibilities for representing life. In Defoe's Roxana (1724), for instance, the tragic fall of the heroine is oddly balanced against the accretive detail of Roxana's story of successful sexual self-management. Clarissa's ascendence to otherworldly virtue lies in tension with Anna Howe's earthbound domestication in marriage to Hickman. In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1751), the marriage of the admirable hero with the equally admirable heroine is less a climax than an occasion for painting in bustling, cheerful detail a broad canvas depicting the social and material order in which the couple will live. Indeed, the decisive nature of the heroine's rise or fall is often depicted in novels (and in other eighteenth-century literary forms) as a matter for romance having little to do with the life that is allegedly the stuff of novels. The rise of Belinda's curl at the end of Pope's Rape of the Lock -202- suggests a cynicism about such romantic transcendence that is frequently articulated within a long novelistic tradition of satirizing the literary extremes of romance, of which Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752) is perhaps the best-known example. My point, then, is not that all writers plotted their heroines' lives according to this simplistic pattern of rise or fall; rather, rising and falling are among the repertoire of romantic tropes that eighteenth-century novels incorporated in a variety of complex ways, from straightforward repetition to total rebuttal or transformation. As Michael McKeon has argued, eighteenth-century novels both articulate and transform romance elements. The treatment of the rise and fall of heroines is part of this process of articulation and transformation.

Having made this qualification I return to the issue of how the rising and falling of heroines in eighteenth-century novels affected the way women writers of the century were thought of and perceived themselves. Using two brief examples-one drawn from the fiction of Jane Barker, one from the diaries of Frances Burney-I want to show how the heroine's dual possibilities placed certain expectations upon women writers as they imagined their own stories and, hence, their own selves. These expectations circumscribed women's thinking about their work as writers; but they also provided starting points, ideological and formal materials for the work of imagining lives beyond those limitations.

Jane Barker's fictional character Galesia, in her novels Bosvil and Galesia (1713) and, A Patch-Work Screener the Ladies (1723), stands as the figure of a writer who represents, as Spencer says, the authorial concerns of Barker herself. While it would be difficult to substantiate the strictly autobiographical nature of the character, it is obvious that Galesia is at the least a vehicle for articulating some of Barker's hopes and anxieties as a writer. Galesia, with a good deal of ambivalence, gives up on her personal love story in order to concentrate on literary work, as she wryly notes: "I, finding my self abandoned by Bosvil, and thinking it impossible ever to love again, resolved to espouse a Book, and spend my Days in Study." Galesia neither falls into ruin nor ascends to perfect marital bliss, and in this sense she resists the pull of the romantic dichotomy. But her representations of her aspirations as a writer almost obsessively repeat the dual possibilities of rising and falling. In verses dedicating herself to poetry, Galesia draws on the traditional imagery of the Muses and poetic «flight» in order to express her desire to follow -203- the example of the (safely dead) poet Katherine Philips, the «Orinda» of the poem:

The «Follies» are specifically sexual; poetry, like the reputation of Orinda, is the chaste opposite, according to Spencer's reading of these lines, of her relationship with the problematic Bosvil: "Then gentle Maid cast off thy Chain, / Which links thee to thy faithless Swain, / And vow a Virgin to remain."

In this same vein, Galesia dreams of climbing a mountain (Parnassus?) associated with literary achievement, and learning from an unidentified higher power that such heights preclude "Hymen."

Rising, for Galesia, would seem, then, to offer a way out of the determining structure of rise versus fall implicit in her sexuality. The price for this escape seems a large one-the renunciation of her sexuality-and Galesia has a hard time avoiding that sexuality in any case, as it tends to emerge at the most inopportune moments of poetic flight. In the second edition of Bosvil and Galesia, Bosvil appears in this dream sequence and attempts to cast her down from her mountain. Even more tellingly, in A Patch-Work Screen Galesia finds a lofty retreat specifically associated with her intellectual and literary pursuits, but this retreat is violated and denied her by the literal entrance of female sexuality "in ruin." Like an early version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, gazing from the leads of Thornfield with its soon-to-emerge sexual secrets, Galesia finds only momentary release from the claustrophobia of middle-class female life:

Out of this Garret, there was a Door went out to the Leads; on which I us'd frequently to walk to take the Air… Here I entertain'd my Thoughts, and indulg'd my solitary Fancy. Here I could behold the Parliament-House, Westminster-Hall, and the Abbey, and admir'd the Magnificence of their Structure, and still more, the Greatness of Mind in those who had been their Founders.

Just as Jane's moment of mental expansion is interrupted by the maniacal laughter of "Grace Poole," actually the mad and sexually depraved Bertha -204- Bertha, Galesia's is broken in on by a character who epitomizes the sexual ruin of a woman. As though she stepped from the pages of an eighteenth-century romance by Eliza Haywood or Aphra Behn, she has been seduced, abandoned, and left pregnant. She knocks on the door of Galesia's refuge while fleeing parish officers across the rooftops of London. Galesia's mother forbids her daughter further use of her garret retreat for fear that she might encounter, even in a passive way, similar or even more «pernicious» "Adventures." Thus even though Galesia herself resists the love plot of marriage or "ruin," her flight from that plot is obstructed by the sexuality that she must deny in order to «rise» as a writer.

This scene hints rather broadly at the personal and professional struggles of many eighteenth-century women writers, and it has a good deal of relevance for women in the late twentieth century who seek to define themselves, in a traditionally masculine way, through their work rather than their sexuality. Barker's fiction suggests that women's sexuality is the force that ultimately gives their lives its shape and meaning. It portrays the reductively and rigidly dichotomous possibilities of marriage versus «ruin» that that sexuality imposes on women's lives. The scene on the leads calls into question Galesia's denials of her sexuality; even more forcefully, however, Barker depicts the way a woman's sexuality hobbles her dreams of shaping her life through work rather than love. In the dream mountain scene, Bosvil threatens to topple Galesia from Parnassian heights. Spencer reads this threat as Galesia's fear of seduction, but her reading also admits the possibility that what Galesia fears is marriage-the «up» side of the coin. Barker's fiction assumes the incompatibility of marriage with a literary career; the romantic «rise» into marital bliss might mean a fall for the woman writer. On the other hand, the young woman who spoils Galesia's garret retreat, her "Cave on the Top of Parnassus," obtrudes into her literary and intellectual work space the opposing possibility of women's fall through sexual "ruin." Significantly, Galesia's life is not forced into the mold of either rising or falling in the feminine, sexual sense, but it is impossible for her to get on with her life and work without feeling the limiting effects of that mold.

After the successful publication of Evelina in 1778, when she was twenty-six years old, Frances Burney found herself, figuratively, out on the leads with Galesia and Jane Eyre. Like her predecessor and her successor in rooftop ruminations, Burney found the new heights she achieved through intellectual labor heady and exciting. But also like them, she could not escape feeling the threat of a fall: -205-

I am now at the summit of a high hill; my prospects on one side are bright, glowing, and invitingly beautiful; but when I turn around, I perceive, on the other side, sundry caverns, gulphs, pits, and precipices, that, to look at, make my head giddy and my heart sick. I see about me, indeed, many hills of far greater height and sublimity; but I have not the strength to attempt climbing them; if I move, it must be downwards. I have already, I fear, reached the pinnacle of my abilities, and therefore to stand still will be my best policy. (Diaries and Letters, volume 1)

Burney's pessimistic conviction that her literary rise must be followed by a fall derived, at least in part, from her conception of the female maturing process and the diminution of happiness and power she supposed it entailed. In sum, Burney's sense of her destiny as a woman writer was, like Barker's, inevitably affected by the plots available to women for imaging female life. These plots overwhelmingly suggested that the only sure escape from «ruin» was marital bliss-if such could be found. But even a happy marriage could be problematic for a woman's literary ambitions, as Galesia's dream suggests. Burney was to be more successful than Galesia could have imagined at combining a happy marriage with a literary career, but, as Doody and others point out, Burney's success in both the literary and domestic realms was earned through tough choices and hard work. The point remains that among the plots available to both Burney and Barker for imagining their lives, none offered much room for a woman's work substantially to shape her life's trajectory. The prospect of rising or falling still haunted both a woman's career and her personal life, since both were presumed to be influenced overwhelmingly by her sexuality.

Burney's fiction thematizes the sexualization of women's labor through the ideological process of defining femininity. Her heroines in Cecilia (1782) and The Wanderer (1814) both try to take some control over their lives through work. And both discover the ways in which that work is inevitably redefined according to the heroine's sexual destiny. Cecilia turns to books and study when she is bored by the vapidity of London social life, and, like Galesia, throws herself into work-this time philanthropic as well as scholarly-when the hero, Delvile, disappoints her romantic expectations. But Cecilia's love story, however unsatisfactory, will not go away; it repeatedly intrudes upon her Rasselas-like search for a meaningful "course of life" outside the framework of love. Try as she does to get on with her life through books, good deeds, and friendship, the romantic extremes of marital bliss versus «ruin» (the -206- unspoken significance behind her secret marriage to Delvile) continue to undermine her sanity to the point of actual madness. Juliet, in The Wanderer, takes up, one by one, a series of the limited number of vocations available to women, only to find that none of them protect her from the physical and emotional abuse to which her gender exposes her. As she sews in a milliner's shop her face and body are on display along with the goods she produces, and she finds herself the target of an opportunistic male's sexual predation. Even working as a paid companion to an irascible old lady puts her at the mercy of the latter's misogynist son. The problem with all of Juliet's lines of work is, quite simply, that none of them give her any power over others and the way in which they treat her. As a result, her work is hopeless: it cannot change any of the «plots» to which those who are more powerful-either by virtue of class, material advantage, or gender-care to subject her.

Acting, music, sewing, commerce, and domestic labor successively fail to bring Juliet more than momentary comfort or safety. She finally achieves both in marriage to her man of choice, but Burney suppresses the redemptive powers of Prince Charmings by giving Juliet a pointedly ineffectual hero to fall in love with. In the novel's conclusion, Burney explicitly attributes Juliet's survival of "the DIFFICULTIES of The Wanderer" to her own "resources," describing the heroine as

a being who had been cast upon herself; a female Robinson Crusoe, as unaided and unprotected, though in the midst of the world, as that imaginary hero in his uninhabited island; and reduced either to sink, through inanition, to nonentity, or to be rescued from famine and death by such resources as she could find, independently, in herself.

If the careers available to women do not afford them control over their own stories, but rather lead to the same predicaments their sexuality brings upon them, what are the «resources» to which Burney refers? I will argue that these resources lie in intelligent, controlled resistance to the plots of rising and falling, to the romantic extremes into which the love story tends to cast women's lives.

Working over the Plot

Burney's heroines cannot, like their author, shape a love story directly through the work they do. Burney literally helped to make possible her marriage to the penniless Alexandre d'Arblay by earning enough money -207- with Camilla (1796) to build her family a home, Camilla cottage. But she knew the odds against women of her class gaining significant material rewards from their labor; as The Wanderer makes clear, occupations other than writing offered women even less hope of financial power and the concomitant authority to create their own «plots» and identities. (And writing was, as Burney well knew, a tenuous career available to only a few.) Burney's heroines, then, illustrate the limits imposed on female labor as a means of controlling the course of one's life. Alternatively, Burney's novels suggest that women's best resources lie in an intelligent skepticism toward the romantic modes in which the plots of marriage or sexual ruin would place them. Rising and falling are exposed by Burney's fiction as the melodramatic (and destructive) extremes of life to which overly reductive expectations of feminine identity subject women.

Burney's first novel, Evelina, demonstrates the utility of such skepticism. A beautiful young woman who lacks a family name that would give her a definite place in the class structure, Evelina finds she is cast in the role of either angel or whore by men like Sir Clement Willoughby. Sir Clement falls in love with Evelina in his own fashion, which means that he either idolizes her as "an angel," as he does upon first seeing her at a ball, or he assumes just the opposite, that she is a "devil." Later, finding her unexpectedly without a protector in a public place, an unthinkable position for a respectable young lady, Sir Clement responds to Evelina's embarrassed inability to explain her situation by assuming the license to make his own "construction." In both instances, Sir Clement's «constructions» follow the drearily bipolar model of ascension or fall, angel or «ruined» woman.

Sir Clement is not the hero of the novel, so his behavior cannot be taken as the best that Burney expected from men. But the best that she does seem to expect is oddly unlike the Prince Charming required in a Cinderella love story. Rather than confirming the romance plot of rising or falling, Burney's heroes function, in different ways, as points of resistance to the female plot of «rising» angel or «fallen» whore. The hero, Lord Orville, is a more cautious interpreter of Evelina than Sir Clement. His response to Sir Clement's effusions over the «angel» Evelina-"a pretty modest-looking girl"-suggests a slightly more subtle if not overly imaginative interpretive framework. Like Harleigh, Juliet's beloved in The Wanderer, Orville can value the heroine even when the signals of her social status are mixed: he does not leap to the obvious, extreme conclusions. But this ability depends less on elevating -208- the heroine to angelic heights and more on rather pedestrian forms of lifting. In an important scene just before Evelina marries him, Orville lifts Evelina into a chair to protect her from a monkey that the misogynist prankster, Captain Mirvan, has unleashed on the company. This scene illustrates the extent and importance of the heroine's elevation in Burney's fiction: the most that can be expected from the heroine's «rise» into married bliss is a slightly removed vantage point from which to observe the social violence that is the stuff of Burney's plots.

Lord Orville is usually identified as the most idealized of Burney's heroes. The rest are often described as somewhat flat-disappointing as characters and as romantic figures. The disappointed and sometimes puzzled responses that readers have had to Burney's heroes may result from the ways in which Burney uses male characters to subvert the dichotomous possibilities of the heroine's plot. Burney's heroes expose the overly simplistic extremes of rising or falling, either by positing commonsensical alternatives or by embodying-with a vengeance-a slavish adherence to the dichotomous definition of femininity. Camilla is the most explicit of Burney's novels in its exposure of the misogynist tendencies implicit in limiting women to rising or falling. Whereas Sir Clement's reductive interpretations of the heroine in Evelina are marginal to the main love story, in Camilla the romantic hero, Edgar, is instrumental in instigating and driving a plot of rise or fall that nearly destroys the heroine. Edgar is advised by a blatantly woman-hating mentor to assume that any symptom of moral weakness in Camilla, the girl he wants to marry, automatically disqualifies her to be his wife. As Doody argues with brilliant hilarity, the novel is less about the heroine's failure to deserve her marital reward (who would, on those terms?) than it is about the absurdity and destructiveness of Edgar's expectations. I would add the observation that Camilla is a narrative about the gap between a young, middle-class woman's experience and the romance plot that divides women into deserving angels or fallen women. The gap has its comic effects at the expense of the deadly Edgar, but it also nearly destroys the heroine's health and sanity and can only be closed when the hero wakes up to the romanticism of his expectations.

Camilla, like The Wanderer, discounts the redemptive powers of Prince Charmings; one of the common themes of the two novels is women's frustrations as they try to control their lives through their own efforts. While The Wanderer focuses on the futility of women's labor, Camilla treats another, particularly feminine form of labor under capi-209- talism: consumption. Like Juliet's labor, Camilla's consumption only binds the heroine more tightly to the distortions of the romance plot and reinforces Edgar's reductive misinterpretations. Throughout the novel, Camilla incurs expenses that culminate in a climactic act of disastrous feminine consumption. Camilla purchases a new ball dress that she cannot afford because she has bought into a romantic fantasy that Edgar will see her at the ball in all her splendor and fall in love with her once more. The plan backfires horribly, of course, marking Camilla's final attempt to create her own story of romantic success. The dream of the heroine's control over the romantic plot is, in fact, a nightmare. In a dream sequence, Camilla literally confronts her inability to write her own plot. Ill and delirious, she dreams that she is dying and is asked by a supernatural voice (like the one heard by Galesia on her mountaintop) to write her claims to justice with a stern and unforgiving "iron pen." Julia Epstein points out that this scene dramatizes the violence and pain that was associated with writing for Burney, as a woman who found it both central to her sense of self and a cultural no-woman's-land. When Camilla tries to obey the injunction, she cannot write: the pen makes no mark. This writer's nightmare sums up Camilla's futile attempts to control her own story when «writing» to an audience as radically binary in its thinking about heroines as Edgar.

Paradoxically, then, Burney's plots are often about the inadequacy of plotting. Perhaps no Burney character illustrates this inadequacy better than Elinor Joddrell in The Wanderer, who, until recent feminist interpretations, has been read as Burney's conservative commentary on the new political ideologies of the French Revolution. Julia Epstein and Margaret Doody give us more subtle readings of the feminist and revolutionary politics of this character, but I want to focus on Elinor to suggest that one of the points she illustrates most forcefully is the folly, for women, of «overwriting» their life plots according to the extremes of rising and falling.

Elinor falls in love with Harleigh, who does not return her passion. Since she cannot «rise» in the plot of romantic love, Elinor decides to fall, dramatically, by killing herself for love. As Doody suggests, Elinor's elaborately staged public suicide evokes the recent suicide attempt of Mary Wollstonecraft in despair over the lost affections of her lover, Gilbert Imlay. While there is no explicitly sexual element in Elinor's "fall," then, it is taken for granted that her «ruin» is possible, if not accomplished. By "falling," Elinor stages the ultimate gamble to win -210- the love of Harleigh, but her scheme, like Camilla's ball dress, yields the opposite result. Elinor «falls» to a self-inflicted knife wound, but Juliet's reactive fall into a faint at the sight of Elinor elicits more concern from Harleigh than Elinor's romantic suicide attempt. Elinor's repeated attempts to be a romantic heroine who gives up her life for love make her seem silly even to herself, as she admits to Juliet while asking her to arrange a final «conference» with Harleigh:

No! the soft moment of indulgence to my feelings is at an end! When I allowed my heart that delicious expansion; when I abandoned it to nature, and permitted it those open effusions of tenderness, I thought my dissolution at hand, and meant but to snatch a few last precious minutes of extacy from everlasting annihilation! but these endless delays, these eternal procrastinations, make me appear so unmeaning an idiot, even to myself, that, for the remnant of my doleful ditty, I must resist every natural wish; and plod on, till I plod off, with the stiff and stupid decorum of a starched old maid of half a century. Procure me, however, this definitive conference. It is upon no point of the old story, I promise you. You cannot be more tired of that than I am ashamed.

Elinor's words reveal the ineffectuality of female plotting in a life more prone to «delays» and «procrastinations» than climactic extremes. Elinor must learn to «plod» rather than «plot» in order to get on with her life. And this lesson entails a certain loss of elevation, as Elinor finally reflects: "'Alas! alas! she cried, 'must Elinor too, — must even Elinor! — like the element to which, with the common herd, she owes chiefly, her support, find, — with that herd! — her own level? "

The characterization of Elinor illustrates two themes that are central to Burney's fiction. First, it points to the cultural odds against a woman's control over her own «plot» and the subtlety and strength necessary to counter those odds. Elinor's direct approach to controlling her own plot through dramatic self-display inevitably becomes a ridiculous self-parody. On the other hand, Juliet's methods of self-imposed silence and sparing self-disclosure are not unproblematic options, as the misinterpretations to which she is subjected attest, but they are her best choice in a culture that denies women the direct control over their lives to which Elinor aspires. As Juliet wryly points out to Harleigh, a direct approach to "female difficulties" will only expose her to the reductive interpretations that she seeks to avoid. Telling Harleigh about the marriage into which she has been forced and enlisting his aid to help her escape it would ultimately cast Juliet in the role of conniving "devil." Even men like Harleigh are not to be trusted with all of the informa-211- tion about the experience of feminine victimization. Second, it shows us the silly reductiveness of romantic extremes. Women, Burney's fiction suggests, are both more commonplace and more complex and interesting than the fallen or ascendant heroine. Elinor is more attractive and interesting at the level of self-deprecating «plodding» than in her passionate extremes. Women's lives are simply not like the dramatic ups and downs of romance plotting.

One of the major accomplishments of Burney's fiction lies in its resistance to the tendency of romantic plots to stifle the complexity of feminine identity and experience by reducing them to dichotomous extremes. This resistance lies, as we have seen, in Burney's curiously «disappointing» heroes, the errors her heroines commit through a mistaken trust in romantic conventions, and even in their occasional commonsensical skepticism about romance. Another way in which Burney struggles against the reductive tendencies of female plotting is through the structure of her novels. Like Elinor, Burney tells us that women's experience is more about «delays» and «procrastinations» than rising or falling. This message is conveyed through two features common to Burney's work. One is that Burney's romantic love plots are characterized by the strategy of waiting and delay. The course of true love is circuitous in Burney's novels. The other feature is that Burney's endings tend more toward the whimper than the bang: they emphasize openendedness, lack of closure, and the «plodding» rather than «plotting» aspect of feminine life and experience.

In a fascinating discussion of Burney's "The Witlings"-an early attempt at writing a comedy for the stage that was repressed by the order of her father, Charles Burney, and her adopted "daddy," Samuel Crisp-Margaret Doody points to the innovative nature of the play's dramatic action. Burney, Doody argues, has written a play that thematizes waiting. By doing so, the play comments on social time-wasting and provides an aesthetic solution to the "stilted quality" of much eighteenth-century drama by incorporating "the real essential waiting of late eighteentcentury comedy in the structure of the play." Waiting is also a large and important part of the plot structure of Burney's novels. While things do happen to Burney heroines, even romantic things, the pacing of the plot often serves to undermine climactic structures so that they crumble even as they seem to build. The most striking example of this strategy is the sequence in Cecilia in which the unfortunate Harrel commits suicide at the public pleasure grounds of Vauxhall. Doody points out the oddity of -212- this part of the novel, which drags on for a considerable number of pages after the shooting, recounting the anticlimactic actions of characters as they wait, in the aftermath of the tragedy, until they can go home. Less dramatically, perhaps, but just as strikingly, Burney's heroines from Evelina through Juliet spend large portions of their time waiting for their constraining circumstances to change so that they can move on, both physically and psychologically. Evelina must wait for carriages; Cecilia sits through the tedium of social calls; Camilla is, literally, stranded up a tree; Juliet is continually waiting for some character or other to leave the room so that she can escape from embarrassment and emotional pain. While the heroine waits, Burney gives us the often violent, almost always painful satiric scenes that have earned her, rightly or wrongly, her reputation as a novelist of "manners." These scenes should not be read, however-as they sometimes have been-as removed from the love stories of Burney's heroines; they provide a pointed commentary on those love stories by dramatizing what eighteenth-century writers on middle-class women's employments and education well knew-that little of women's time is spent in romantic climax or the depths of ruin, and much of it is spent in the tedium of waiting for someone else, usually male, to make something happen.

Another characteristic feature of Burney's plots is the frustration of the heroine's attempts to direct action. Elinor Joddrell is an extreme example of a woman whose attempts to take charge of her life meet with continual defeat. But Burney's heroines often find themselves frustrated in their attempts to direct events by the sheer randomness of experience. Evelina's letter to Orville miscarries in an early example of how happenstance derails the romance plot, but Burney's later heroines all encounter some character or characters who, like Mr. Dubster in Camilla, stall the action of the novel into stretches of comic tedium by their unintended obstructions. The benevolent but absent-minded Giles Arbe in The Wanderer is perhaps Burney's most accomplished plot-spoiler: his inability to deliver notes and to remember who should or should not be privy to certain information renders all Juliet's plans useless. While clearly marked as a «good» character, Arbe stands for the randomness of life's events that thwarts the heroine's attempts to control the course of her life.

Waiting and anticlimax are woven into the very experience of reading The Wanderer. The name of the heroine is not revealed until well into the novel, and when it is, it proves no great revelation, as it might -213- in an earlier novel by Haywood or Behn. Her story, the tale of her identity as the product of an aristocratic secret marriage, is a carefully guarded secret until very late in the novel, and when it emerges it does so in an oddly offhand way when a friend of the heroine lets it slip to someone she thinks is already in the know. The romantic plot of a concealed true identity so dear to novelists ranging from Behn to Henry Fielding is submerged to the point of unimportance in the snarled plot lines of "female difficulties." William Hazlitt's famous, negative review of The Wanderer inadvertently stumbled on this characteristic feature of the Burney novel: "The difficulties in which she involves her heroines are, indeed, 'Female Difficulties';-they are difficulties created out of nothing." What irritates Hazlitt, as Epstein observes, is precisely Burney's point. The story of women's experience that Burney tells is about stalled plots, arbitrary obstacles, and random difficulties.

Hazlitt also had difficulty with Burney's endings, which are another means she uses to resist the constraining plots of the rising or falling heroine. "The whole artiface of her fable," he assesses quite rightly, "consists in coming to no conclusion. Her ladies stand so upon the order of their going, that they do not go at all." Indeed, while Burney's endings are in some ways conventionally romantic (depicting the happy marriage of the heroine), Hazlitt is not alone in finding something oddly inconclusive about her novels. Cecilia is the most explicitly antiromantic in its conclusion; while the hero and heroine end up married, Cecilia must give up her fortune to achieve this status, and Burney makes a point of qualifying her heroine's happiness:

Yet human it [Cecilia's life] was and as such imperfect! she knew that, at times the whole family must murmur at her loss of fortune, and at times she murmured herself to be thus portionless, tho' an HEIRESS. Rationally, however, she surveyed the world at large, and finding that of the few who had any happiness, that there were none without some misery, she checked the rising sigh… and… bore partial evil with chearfullest resignation.

Burney records her friend Edmund Burke's objection to this ending:

He wished the conclusion either more happy or more miserable; "for in a work of imagination," said he, "there is no medium."

I was not easy to answer him, or I have much… to say in defence of following life and nature as much in the conclusion as in the progress of a tale; and when is life and nature completely happy or miserable? (Diaries and Letters, volume 2) -214-

Further defending Cecilia's conclusion to her mentor Samuel Crisp, Burney speaks against the extremes of "every other book of fiction" and her wish to avoid them:

I think the book, in its present conclusion, somewhat original, for the hero and heroine are neither plunged in the depths of misery, nor exalted to UN human happiness. Is not such a middle state more natural, more according to real life, and less resembling every other book of fiction? (Diaries and Letters, volume 2)

Even when Burney's novels end more unequivocally in marital happiness than Cecilia, the romantic exaltation of the heroine is suppressed, for readers such as Hazlitt (and myself), in relation to the repetitions and circumlocutions of the plot. Even the almost fairy-tale ending of Evelina, in which the heroine returns to her native Berry Hill and "the arms of the best of men," calls conclusive endings into question. "The best of men" in Evelina's language identifies either her new husband, Lord Orville, or her adopted father and mentor, Mr. Villars; is Evelina's happy ending exaltation into married bliss or a return to where the novel began, with her adopted father? There is an implied circularity here that introduces ambiguity to even the most «exalted» of endings for Burney's heroines.

In sum, Burney's novels are shot through with skepticism about rising or falling heroines. The "middle state" is more "according to real life," in Burney's view, because it resists the oversimplification of feminine identity and experience according to a dichotomous model of rising or falling, angel or demon. Feminine happiness or misery, Burney knew, could not be represented or interpreted apart from the dichotomizing influence of the prevailing gender ideology, and her fiction represents a lifelong effort to work against reductive representations and interpretations of women's lives. Hence, there is considerable irony in the ways in which that gender ideology has shaped the representations of Burney's career as a novelist for over two hundred years of literary history.

The Rise (and Fall) of Women Novelists

Burney's fiction and her career as a novelist have been persistently read through the lens of her gender. Criticism contemporary with Burney's work and published soon after her death tends to assess her work as that of a "very woman," as Julia Epstein says, either the precious craft of an -215- infantilized author or the tired, overdone product of a decaying coquette's last flash of literary vanity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, critical attention has shifted from her fiction to her published diaries, bringing to the surface the earlier, implicit emphasis on Burney's life as a woman as opposed to her work as a novelist. Despite important dissenting arguments, the overwhelming tendency in Burney criticism has been to characterize her career as an initial, meteoric rise in youth (never mind that she was nearly thirty when she published her first novel) followed by a steady fall through Cecilia and Camilla that ended with a resounding bump-The Wanderer.

Even recent critics such as Spencer retrace this trajectory in discussing Burney's career, albeit from a feminist point of view: "Burney's anxiety for paternal approval and her fear of public exposure led her on a search for correctness of language and sentiment that tended to kill her early vitality." The tenacity of this view of Burney's work and literary reputation should be analyzed in the light of the historical use of the rising and falling metaphor in eighteenth-century fictional representations of women. When applied to the women who wrote the fiction, the metaphor has the same reductive effects. Women's work tends to be sorted according to a dichotomy of falling or rising, and-as Burney's alleged rise-and-fall career suggests-what goes up must come down. In other words, the same gendered logic of rise and fall that shaped eighteenth-century women novelists' plots tends to shape literary and historical accounts of those novelists.

I would suggest that the metaphor of "the rise" that informs so many studies of the eighteenth-century novel (chief among them Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, 1957) is, like many of our richest, most historically burdened metaphors, implicitly gendered. And like many other gendered metaphors, it reduces historical complexities to orderly narratives and taxonomies. Watt, for example, admits the historical reality that the majority of novelists during much of the century were women, but the story he tells of the novel's rise to "formal realism" is the tale of a masculine dynasty. (Austen is the only woman novelist he discusses at any length.) It seems that when there is rising to be done, men will do it, and Watt is neither alone nor especially to blame for perpetuating this cultural "structure of feeling," as Raymond Williams would call it. As Terry Lovell points out, the reputation of novel writing was threatened by its «feminization» through the large number of women who wrote novels during the eighteenth century and enhanced by the emer-216- gence of a greater number of male writers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During the period of the novel's "first expansion," Lovell suggests, "writing might have become a feminized occupation, with all the characteristics of such occupations-low pay and low status." It took male novelists to bring this reputation "up."

Watt has often been attacked for eliding the work of eighteenth-century women novelists, and McKeon's and J. Paul Hunter's subsequent books on the beginnings of the novel include a wide range of writers-not all male, not all novelists-in their narrations of the English novel's early history. But their complex and rich histories include women in their stories of the novel's development but do not specifically address how femininity figures in those stories. McKeon's dialectical process complicates Watt's story of the novel's rise in relation to capitalism, and Hunter's sophisticated sense of how literary form develops from broad social and literary contexts similarly complicates Watt's tale of a male dynasty. Women are included in an "equal opportunity" fashion that does not allow for much attention to historical differences between how men and women were represented in eighteenth-century culture and how these differences might, in turn, affect the representation of women novelists. The investigation of gender differences is not, of course, McKeon's or Hunter's project, and my point is not to denigrate their work but to suggest that the inclusion of women writers does not in itself advance our understanding of the complex relationship between eighteenth-century ideologies of gender and the historical trajectory of the novel's form and definition.

Watt's novel rises in relation to an ascending middle class; Hunter's novel reaches higher levels of social and literary respectability; McKeon's follows a path of uneven, dialectical development. None of these "big stories" is helpful in accounting for why women have traditionally been left out of accounts of the novel's rise and why Frances Burney's career has repeatedly been characterized in terms of rise and fall. While they allow the woman novelist to rise just like the men, such stories of the novel's emergence, which accept the metaphor of rising without thinking through its implications for both heroines and women writers, have not been helpful in analyzing the specific phenomena of women's literary careers in the eighteenth century.

A similar reductionism with respect to eighteenth-century women's writing results when feminist literary historians and critics pursue uncritically the project of charting the rise of the woman novelist. Jane -217- Jane's Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen argues that women novelists rose to a position of respectability and literary authority in the eighteenth century by means of a feminist fall. That is, women novelists rose to public acceptance by giving up their earlier critiques of masculine authority, particularly as that authority affected women's sexuality. Spencer sees the early fiction of Eliza Haywood as more liberating than her later novel, Betsey Thoughtless, for instance, and the novels of Frances Burney are a political falling-off from those of Delariviere Manley and Jane Barker, notwithstanding the gains in public acceptance represented by Burney's respectability and professional success. Spencer writes that this feminist fall from political critique was arrested by the polemical fiction of the 1790s, particularly that of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays. But this conception that the woman novelist's rise in public acceptance was facilitated by her fall from feminism is belied, in part, by Spencer's interesting and complex discussion of a range of novels that resist such sorting. Resistance to oppressive notions of women and their sexuality occurs, it seems, in «subversive» forms in much of the fiction that fails to meet Spencer's feminist standards. Spencer's book reveals the deficiencies of the very paradigm of rising and falling that it espouses in its title and central thesis. Historical narratives of rising and falling, whether they reflect a feminist outlook or some other political perspective, tend to reinforce a Calvinistic, damned-or-saved taxonomy of texts and writers. Burney's fiction could teach us of the dangers of such a taxonomy, especially for the historically silenced and underrepresented.

This is not to say that feminist politics have no place in women's literary history. In fact, as I said at the outset of this chapter, Burney's importance as a writer is explicitly and profoundly political. What I argue here is that gender identity and gendered experience are encoded not only in the stories told by a culture's fictions, but in the stories we tell about those fictions. Just as Burney knew that she could best tell effective new stories of female identity and experience by careful and knowledgeable reworkings of the old ones, feminist critics and literary historians do some of their best work by knowing and reworking the «plots» of literary history. Otherwise, it is too easy to repeat the oppressions of past narratives in our haste to write new stories. The vast and complex range of narratives in eighteenth-century women's fiction is best understood if we in turn understand the political implications of the historical narratives we write about them. -218-

Much of the enormous amount of exciting, revisionary critical attention received by the work of Frances Burney in the last few years is symptomatic of a healthy trend in women's literary history toward making the big historical narratives of rising and falling literary forms more reflective of the specificity of the writers' texts and lives, rather than the other way around. The feminist reassessment of Burney's fiction does not guarantee the emergence of a literary history that self-consciously questions the political implications of its own rises and falls, of course, but it is a positive signal that tomorrow's students of the novel's history will find room within the historical narratives of the novel's development for serious consideration of the rich array of stories told by eighteenth-century women writers.

Kristina Straub

Selected Bibliography

Doody Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3, no. 4 (July 1991), special Evelina issue.

Epstein Julia. The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Poovey Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Ross Deborah. The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women's Contribution to the Novel. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

Schofield Mary Anne, and Cecilia Macheski, eds. Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.

Spencer Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

Spender Dale. Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen. London: Pandora, 1986.

Straub Kristina. Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987.

Todd Janet. Feminist Literary History. New York: Routledge, 1988.

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The Gothic Novel, 1764 -1824

THE first Gothic novelist celebrated his literary inspiration with all the fanfare of a bored aristocrat telling his dreams over breakfast. "I waked one morning… from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle… and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour." Because this particular bored aristocrat was Horace Walpole, and because his literary ambitions were a match for his midnight reveries, the Gothic novel was born.

Walpole told his readers in the preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764) that he had attempted "to blend the two kinds of romance" in the novel. What Walpole called "the two kinds of romance" are what literary critics now call the «romance» and the "novel." Walpole claims that the romance favors "imagination and improbability" while the novel gives preference to copying "nature," with the result that "the great resources of fancy have been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life." Otranto uses "the great resources of fancy" as the occasion for an outrageously improbable «political» tale-what I would call the paradigmatic Gothic plot-one of nefarious usurpation and ultimate revenge, set against a vaguely historical (hence "Gothic") backdrop, enlivened by scenes of supernatural agency, brutal sexual aggression, undisguised incestuous longings, sadomasochistic fantasy, and an astonishingly lurid and versatile architectural motif. Although it was almost thirty years before the Gothic novel achieved its greatest popularity, Walpole anticipated its full range of concerns and techniques for handling those concerns in his tour de force. -220- Of course, as Walpole himself may have understood, there is always more than authorial agency at work in the creation of literary genres. Various literary historians have attempted to pinpoint the origins of the Gothic novel. Antiquarian interest in Gothic architecture, changing popular tastes, frustration with "reason," new concepts of subjectivity and emotional response, including theories of "pleasurable terror" or the "sublime," the politics of individualism, the French Revolution-all these things have been posited, more or less successfully, as explanations for the emergence of the Gothic novel in the later eighteenth century. Walpole's paradigmatic text, however, provides a less circumstantial explanatory resource. The Castle of Otranto itself reveals the degree to which Gothic fiction provides the terms for its own analysis.

Otranto tells a story of sex and power linked at so many points and in so many ways that the two can only be understood in terms of one another. Walpole was not alone in imagining the intersections of sexuality and power in the middle of the eighteenth century; the French cultural historian Michel Foucault, for example, has studied the ways in which «sexuality» emerged as a function of ideological control during this period. He argues, for instance, in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, that specific relations in modern society-such as those of the family, the school, and the medical profession-institutionalized a relation between sexuality and power. Walpole's novel crystallized a particular vocabulary for documenting this relation and for dramatizing the virulence with which various repressions-"damming-ups," in Walpole's terms-exercise the control inherent to "bourgeois culture."

The Gothic novel, emerging as it does at the moment when the battle lines of cultural reorganization are being formed in the later eighteenth century, shimmers with subversive potential. If the emergence of the novel itself celebrates the codification of middle-class values, as several critics have argued, the Gothic novel records the terror implicit in the increasingly dictatorial reign of those values. Gothic fiction seems particularly, if not aggressively, open to interpretation from various social, political, and sexual points of view. The Gothic novel achieves this potential precisely because it reflects, in perhaps predictable but nonetheless powerful ways, the anxiety that culture itself generates in its members. Gothic fiction thereby challenges the cultural system that both commodities desire and renders it lurid and pathological.

Manfred, the usurper and sexual aggressor of The Castle of Otranto, who turns every relation into a perversion and who finds ways to turn -221- the very passages of the castle into a sexual nightmare for the vulnerable heroine, is the perfect figure to memorialize the anxieties that Walpole is chronicling. Manfred acts out of a personal ambition that gives political ramifications to a desire that is at once ruthless and self-serving. The first victim of this megalomania is his "sickly puny" son Conrad, who early in the novel is "dashed to pieces" by an "enormous helmet" that crashes into the court of the castle on Conrad's wedding day. The story of the indirect murder of a sickly child by a politically important and abusive father who mistreats his wife and indulges his own urges finds an analogy in Walpole's own personal situation. The author was the effeminate son of the «great» Sir Robert Walpole, a statesman of unparalleled power during the first half of the eighteenth century; and he adored his mother as much as he detested his father's mistreatment of her. Because this novel establishes the "dysfunctional family" as a Gothic trope or central metaphorical device, it is tempting to suggest that Walpole's Gothic is a reflection of his own family life. Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex could easily be applied to a case such as Walpole's. Whatever the sources of the Gothic in Walpole's own psyche, however, there are Oedipal tensions enough in culture itself. Jacques Lacan, an influential post-Freudian theorist, sees the "Oedipus complex" as a precondition of cultural awareness, what he calls "cultural subordination": in order to become a member of a culture, what Lacan calls "the Symbolic order," it is necessary to suppress private desire in the ways that Freud's analysis outlines. You cannot kill your father or marry your mother, so you make little compromises that trap you into working against your own «best» interests. Gothic novelists refuse to settle for these compromises. In this sense, what Walpole begins to articulate in The Castle of Otranto becomes a complex gesture of cultural defiance. The impulse to connect prince, unauthorized sexuality, and Gothic convention in a single narrative of unmistakable force anticipates the technique of psychoanalysis, but Walpole's is a psychoanalysis that draws out «madnesses» rather than trying to contain them. He provides, in other words, a counterpoint to the narratives of cultural subordination that abounded in the «realistic» fiction he was resisting.

After his son dies, Manfred, in what would have been understood by contemporary readers as an incestuous gesture, courts the dead boy's fiancée, Isabella, throwing over his indulgent wife and insulting his daughter Matilda in the process. When Isabella resists him, she -222- becomes the victim of sexual aggression so violent that it turns the castle itself into a Gothic nightmare. Her flight through the castle is depicted in vivid detail:

The lower part of the castle was hollowed in to several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened in to the cavern. An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness.

Here Walpole introduces what becomes the hallmark of Gothic fiction: in a single image he combines the sexual anxiety of a victimized female, the incestuous desire of a libidinous male, the use of the physical features of the castle itself to represent political and sexual entrapment, and an atmosphere deftly rendered to produce terror and gloom. This scene is retold hundreds of times in Gothic fiction; it is absolutely basic to the form. Because he understands that Gothic fiction can represent abject terror and frenzied aggression in ways that other fiction only approximates, Walpole's depiction of this moment, and others like it, takes on a kind of talismanic importance in the history of the form. If he fails at the level of plot or larger structures, here at the moment of Gothic intensity Walpole demonstrates just how and why the Gothic can succeed as it does.

Between the publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 and the apparent waning of interest in the Gothic novel in the 1820s literally hundreds of Gothic novels were consumed by the British reading public. (A bibliography of over three hundred Gothic titles, organized by year, can be found in Maurice Lévy's comprehensive Le roman «gothique» anglais.) Writers inspired by Walpole's experiment developed the Gothic in various directions. In the pages that follow, I will outline what I see as the most interesting of those directions and a few of the works that exemplify them.

Female Gothic

Some writers took inspiration from the historical setting of Walpole's work and the narrative possibilities of an inherently threatening past: abandoned rooms may be haunted, locked chests may harbor dreadful secrets, tattered manuscripts may divulge horrifying transgressions. -223-

Although different from one another in countless ways, these writers shared the tendency to use the conventions of Gothic fiction to add excitement to tales that were primarily historical (and sentimental) romances, committed more to the heroine's tears than to her terrors. Often they used a heroine's own suspicions as a way of instructing her as to the foolishness of Gothic imaginings: the ghosts that wander unchecked in The Castle of Otranto here turn out to be explainable in physical terms, in obedience to rules of realism-"the limits of credibility," as Clara Reeve calls them. Gothic writers like Clara Reeve and Charlotte Smith were unwilling to violate these limits, and they use Gothic effects simply to heighten the moral lessons of otherwise sentimental tales.

Reeve called The Old English Baron (published as The Champion of Virtue in 1777) "the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto," but it is a far cry from Walpole's lurid masterpiece. In it she tells a tale of wrongful usurpation and uses some of the less shocking devices of Otranto, such as "incoherent dreams," a «haunted» chamber, even «ghosts» and a skeleton. But her imagination is less engaged by scenes of haunting than by the legal squabbles of a group of petty aristocrats, and her attempts to articulate «sentimental» codes of social interaction seem far more deeply felt and dramatically persuasive.

Smith, in such novels as Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), Ethelinde, or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789), and The Old Manor House (1793), brings the use of setting to a new level of Gothic sophistication. As Lévy says, ""No one before Radcliffe could better transcribe the secret impulse of terror felt by a young girl given up to an architecture, where the softest sound and the lightest shade are amplified by the resonance and obscurity of the vaults to fit the dimensions of a nightmare"" (my translation). In the last of these novels, Smith tells the story of a persecuted heroine, Monimia, and her «lover-mentor» Orlando. Less interested than Walpole in the Gothic dimensions of her plot, she still uses such techniques as seemingly supernatural events and unreasonable persecution of the heroine to heighten the emotional intensity of her tale. In doing so she also insists on female education and the importance of female clear-headedness. She thus anticipates some of the central concerns of later writers and suggests the intersection of Gothic and sentimental fiction more directly than her contemporaries. Her novels also help to demonstrate the degree to which the Gothic became a crucial element in female education, and at the same time they help to -224- explain what may have inspired some of Radcliffe's less satisfying turns, especially in the direction of "explanation."

What both Reeve and Smith contribute to the Gothic novel cannot be summed up, however, in a list of techniques or literary concerns. Literary history, even in a volume of this kind, does not work that way. What they did, independent of their specific accomplishments, was to make the Gothic available for respectable female readers and writers. Their refusal to violate the letter of the law of realism has at times worked against their popularity with critics of the Gothic. But their works are never completely tame and rational. For what such writers achieve in the way of local emotional intensity can never be fully undermined by the stern dismissal of the supernatural with which they bring their works to a close. Moreover they pose challenges to any pat notions of what Gothic novels can accomplish.

Recent feminist rereadings of Gothic fiction have added considerably to the sophistication with which these novels and other examples of "female Gothic" are discussed. The place of female characters within Gothic works has always been problematic, as the description of Isabella's plight in The Castle of Otranto might suggest. No Gothic novel is without its suffering heroine, who is both «sexualized» as an object of desire and «victimized» by a powerful aggressor who is also a potential rapist. The first task of feminist criticism was to articulate the problem of the abuse of the female in Gothic fiction and to explore the ways in which female novelists subverted or reinscribed the cultural norms of female sexualization and victimization. Just as feminist theory moved from simple "identity politics" to a more rigorously theoretical stance, which emerged from rereadings of Marx and Freud and, more recently, Lacan, so feminist criticism of the Gothic has moved from descriptions of the role of women in the tales themselves to a more sophisticated analysis of how women could be drawn to Gothic fiction as both writers and readers and what they could discover in it for themselves.

One of the most intriguing of such rereadings of the Gothic, Claire Kahane's "The Gothic Mirror," articulates a position that challenges previous modes of understanding the Gothic. Kahane suggests that the Gothic castle offers the typically motherless heroine a setting in which her own victimization can be confronted and somehow overcome. She does this by «maternalizing» the space that threatens her-the subterranean regions of the castle. These secret spaces, dark and womb-like as they are, come to represent the maternal space that the heroine both -225- desires and fears. Kahane says, "What I see repeatedly locked into the forbidden center of the Gothic which draws me inward is the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront."

This kind of interpretation offers a great deal to critics who are attempting to understand the attraction Gothic fiction might have held for the thousands of females who read and wrote them. It is too easy to say that female readers are attracted to the thrill of illicit sexuality or the masochistic enjoyment of their victimization that the Gothic everywhere represents. Kahane's position offers another way to understand what is attractive to women in these works and why the plight of the Gothic heroine has such seemingly universal power.

A key work in this regard is Sophia Lee's Elizabethan romance, The Recess (1783). The peculiar space signified by the novel's title comprises a set of subterranean chambers constructed under an abbey, which in the near past of the novel is a retreat in which the sister-heroines of the work, Matilda and Ellinor, spend their childhood. Formerly a convent, the space is cavelike but consists of various rooms, centered on "a vaulted passage" whose light "proceeded from small casements of painted glass so infinitely above our reach that we could never seek a world beyond." This remembered space assumes a suggestive, womb-like quality, and the distinctly charged memories of this childhood world are suffused with the idea of the girls' mother, the majestic but threateningly distant (and doomed) Mary, Queen of Scots. Just as Mary is a mother both inaccessible and dangerous-should the girls be acknowledged publicly, their lives would surely be in danger-the maternal space is the scene of horror (the incestuous relation of their foster parents, their own brutal incarceration and near-rape) as well as love (both between the sisters and between them and their historically important male companions, Leicester and Essex). The tale of unhappiness and loss that besets them-each is doomed to misery in love and to wretchedness in life-returns repeatedly to this exotic space and the ominous happiness that it represents. In the end, however, it can only torment these girls with all they lack. The literally absent mother, glimpsed distantly only once before her execution, hovers over the work with a similarly threatening presence that always seems to promise happiness but in fact brings misery and despair. If later Gothicists create maternal specters to challenge heroines with the limits of their own -226- subjectivity, Lee tries to maternalize history itself as harrowing and fraught with danger in a particularly female way. By doing so she offers Gothic fiction as a medium for female novelists, perhaps most especially for her student Ann Radcliffe.

Ann Radcliffe's evocation of female anxiety in works such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) has earned her the title "Mistress of Romance." When Emily St. Aubert first sees the Castle of Udolpho, where she will live with her aunt and her aunt's villainous husband, Montoni, it has an almost animate presence for her:

Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni's; for though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object… Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign.

Emily's first view of the castle connects it to its owner, and there is every reason to think that the castle itself, "gloomy and sublime," is a constant reminder of the evil Montoni. Such descriptions were inspired by the philosophy of Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) popularized the notion of pleasurable terror and outlined an entire range of techniques for engaging the emotions associated with the Gothic. Radcliffean «sublime» always involves a fascination with what is fearful. This fascination could be equated with desire, but it is not necessarily a desire for the «owner» of the castle. Later, when Emily has suffered enough mental abuse from her stepfather to realize that she is in real danger, she finds the dreary castle itself more terrifying and more attractive than anyone who inhabits it: in seeking her aunt in a distant tower, for instance, she "proceeded through a passage adjoining the vaults, the walls of which were drooping with unwholesome dews, and the vapours, that crept along the ground, made the torch burn so dimly, that Emily expected every moment to see it extinguished." She then looks through "a pair of iron gates" to see "by flashes of uncertain light, the vaults beyond, and near her, heaps of earth, that seemed to surround an open grave." These descriptions are more specific than Walpole's "long labyrinth of darkness," and the details help to draw a picture that makes understandable the critics' desire to connect passages of the castle and passages of memory. Emily seems drawn into these dim, — 227- vaporous, and unwholesome spaces; she sees them uncertainly, and she fears for her own safety, even as she insists on penetrating further into the gloom and secrecy of this dark interior. The spectral presence of the castle itself has an alarming "uncanniness," as if Emily, trapped in the passages of repressed memory, recognized in these threatening spaces something about herself that she had always known.

Kahane argues persuasively that when the «secret» of the castle turns out to be the history of the sexually transgressive Madame Laurentini, this threatening maternal figure becomes, in a way, the «meaning» of the work. "As a victimizer victimized by her own desire," Kahane says, " Laurentini is presented as Emily's potential precursor, a mad mothersister-double who mirrors Emily's own potential for transgression and madness." "Female Gothic," in other words, confronts the heroine with her own desires and thrills her with the possibility of transgression. In Radcliffe's novels the impulse toward transgression is not acted upon but remains only a threat-one that is always contained by the forced conclusions upon which the author insists. Emily as heroine cannot transgress, and readers do not for a moment imagine that she will.

As heroine, however, she can-indeed she must-suffer. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that the attraction a heroine like Emily comes inexplicably to feel for the inward reaches of the castle is in fact the sign of a repressed masochistic desire for the dark hero himself. Cynthia Griffin Wolff calls this figure the demon-lover: "Despite the fact that the man is darkly attractive, the woman generally shuns him, shrinking as from some invisible contamination. Too often to be insignificant, this aversion is justified when he eventually proves to be a long-lost relation: an uncle, a step-father, sometimes the biological father himself-lusting after the innocent daughter's chastity." In Wolff's analysis, the demon-lover, who "dominat[es] the fiction as its undeniable emotional focus," is secretly attractive to the heroine and becomes the source of a power that releases her from the confines of a sentimental world.

Such a description seems even more appropriate to Radcliffe's earlier Romance of the Forest (1791) than it does to The Mysteries of Udolpho. Not only is the Marquis de Montalt, the villain of that novel, physically attractive and almost kind to Adeline, the heroine, he is urbane; and his chateau, unlike the usual Gothic setting, is beautifully if oppressively decorated and showy in its luxuriance-"fitted up in the most airy and elegant taste." -228-

It would be tempting to say that this world of negative possibility is in some way deeply attractive to the novelist and her heroine and that Radcliffe gives voice to secret desires in her depiction of this powerful paternal figure. But from another perspective, the world of male prerogative gives rise to Gothic experience throughout the text. The terror invoked is not a thrilling and titillating frisson but real, uncompromising fear. According to this reading, Radcliffe portrays female experience as fraught with actual rather than imagined danger.

Where Adeline does find consolation is in the bosom of a sentimentalized family structure, that of the sympathetic M. La Luc, and more specifically in the person of his ineffectual son, Theodore. Adeline's attraction to Theodore is immediate and compelling. The structure of the novel, however, requires that they be separated for most of it. This is convenient in two ways: first, it allows Adeline to undergo the ordeal of her repeated flight and incarceration on her own and to discover the kind of power that even her attachment to Theodore would deprive her of; second, it allows her to imagine him, as she does at regular intervals throughout the bulk of the novel, in terms like these:

Even when sleep obliterated for a while her memory of the past, his image frequently arose to her fancy, accompanied by all the exaggerations of terror. She saw him in chains, and struggling in the grasp of ruffians, or saw him led, amidst the dreadful preparations for execution, into the field: she saw the agony of his look and heard him repeat her name in frantic accents, till the horrors of the scene overcame her, and she awoke.

Such moments of fearful imagination abound in The Romance of the Forest, as they do in each of Radcliffe's novels, and their function is clear. Adeline heightens suspense and her own dread by imagining Theodore in chains, Theodore bleeding, Theodore suffering untold torments. But she also challenges the assumptions of patriarchy by finding this ineffectual and indeed emasculated hero a desirable alternative to the stern and powerful Marquis de Montalt. The "exaggerations of terror," in other words, offer Radcliffe a way of imagining an alternative to the ideology that places women under the power of men. Her «man» is never depicted as powerful, nor does he seem particularly able to extricate himself from the hold that law and society-in the form of the army and the Marquis-have over him. Insofar as the Marquis de Montalt comes to represent the source of power in a phallocentric system, Theodore, pathetic as he is (or as Adeline imagines him), — 229- represents a conceivable alternative. In his suffering lies his power, both to capture the heart of Adeline and to undermine the unequivocal power of the Marquis. Theodore's suffering, and Adeline's imagination of his pain, place him in the only relation that will allow her to feel attraction. Theodore plays on Adeline's emotions precisely to the degree that he is restrained, controlled, victimized, and emasculated. To the degree, that is, that Theodore becomes like a woman, he is attractive to the heroine of The Romance of the Forest.

If Adeline can become a sister-lover to the suffering Theodore, that is not to say that the relation is naturalized in an unerotic way. For Radcliffe the Gothic centered upon discovering the threat of desire in the domestic realm, to which female novelistic characters were increasingly restricted, and then learning how to accommodate that desire to lived experience in the world. The Radcliffean endings, which have been decried for chasing away the ghost in disappointing "explanations," are nevertheless an attempt to bring the fantasy of female power back into a space in which it might have some real meaning. That space for Radcliffe is a maternalized space, just as her novels establish the maternal as the area of Gothic exploration. With this focus Radcliffe looks forward to later female writers, such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, for both of whom the maternal specter holds a particular fascination and whose vision of male subjectivity is complicated in similar ways.

The other Radcliffe, Mary-Ann, whose publications traded on the popularity of her predecessor, can serve to suggest some of the more lurid contours Radcliffean «sublime» can assume. In Manfroné, or, The One-Handed Monk (1809), the demon-lover, who appropriately loses his hand in a duel with the heroine's father at the moment of attempting to rape her, soon returns as the mysterious monk who mumbles from behind his obfuscating cowl to «haunt» the heroine, Rosalina, first in the candlelit aisles of the abbey adjoining her father's castle; then in the subterranean passages that elaborately connect the abbey and the castle and contain in assorted dungeons pathetic prisoners variously thought to be murdered or otherwise victimized by Rosalina's hotheaded father; and finally as her father's guest in the castle itself. Rosalina laments the loss of her mother and learns the details of her history, slowly coming to realize that her father is a murderous tyrant who only stops short of killing her, in a crucial scene, because he is distracted by the shouts of his soldiers. -230-

The novel is replete with midnight trysts, threatened sexual violence, and mere physical brutality, and it creates a «Gothic» atmosphere of unrelieved gloom. Nowhere are there the shimmering vistas of Ann Radcliffe, the picturesque moments that dispel the darkness with rays of hope. Here the misery and the victimization are total. The hero, Montalto, in this case a strong if ineffectual rival of both the father and Manfroné, manages to fight to save Rosalina from the villain, who has finally decided to stop at nothing to «possess» her. Montalto, like Theodore before him, must suffer symbolic castration before earning the right to rescue the heroine: "Twice was the murderous dagger upraised and twice did it drink the blood of Rosalina's fond lover! — Groaning, he sunk on the pavement, and the shades of death encompassed him." Later, surprisingly, he rises from this symbolic death of his masculinity into a union with the heroine, whom he frees from the father and the villain to join him in a bracing, if muted, conclusion.

Discussions of "female Gothic" have often centered on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). I will discuss that novel in a later section of this chapter, but it will be helpful here to mention some recent feminist readings of Frankenstein by such critics as Kate Ferguson Ellis, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Barbara Johnson, and Mary Poovey. They have suggested that Shelley's tale has as much to do with female as male desire and that Victor Frankenstein's imaginative aspiration and his ungainly creation are by no means a celebration of male creativity. For Ellis, Frankenstein is a critique of bourgeois family life and an attempt to show that the «guilt-imposing» home is as nefarious as the public world of male domination. Gilbert and Gubar see the creature as a reflection of the silencing and oppression of the female in patriarchal culture, and they hear the creature's pleas as the entreaties of the author herself from within a marriage that was by no means "liberating." Johnson argues that the novel expresses the anxiety of motherhood and the horror of maternal responsibility that Shelley herself experienced. Finally, Mary Poovey suggests that the novel is about the conflict between the codes of Romantic «originality» and Victorian "female domesticity" and becomes "a troubled, veiled exploration of the price [Shelley] had already begun to fear… egotistical self-assertion [as an author] might exact." These are only a few of dozens of feminist readings that the novel has received, but they begin to demonstrate how rewarding such analysis can be.

All these critics seem to suggest that "female Gothic," while it hardly -231- freed women from the limitations placed on them in contemporary culture, at least suggested ways in which their victimization-in the world outside Gothic fiction as well as within it-could be subverted both to turn patriarchal violence against itself and to claim a space for women. As Michelle Massé explains in her excellent chapter on Gothic masochism, many things can be named as sources of conflict in Gothic fiction, "but all point, in the best Gothic tradition, to something more ominous." In her analysis, that «something» is "the refusal of the heroine's existence as subject." That is why the idea of female space is so fraught in these works, both haunted and supported by the spectral mother who challenges patriarchy with the threat of undomesticated female power. Even the more «shocking» of these novels, such as Manfroné, insist on a resilient and even at times intrepid heroine. The thrill of survival is complemented, what is more, not by a paternal suitor who will protect but rather by a feminized hero who will join the heroine in her experience of the world and its vicissitudes. Admittedly, this seems little better than the brutally patriarchal closure that seemed inevitable in novels by the 1790s. But even this "little," I believe, begins to explain why "female Gothic" became popular for women in the later eighteenth century and remained so for ensuing genserations.

Imps of the Perverse

The simple air of sexual violence in The Castle of Otranto — in which, because of Manfred's desire, his son Conrad is "dashed to pieces," his son's fiancée is brutalized, and his daughter is sacrificed to his unbridled lust-is raised to an eloquent expression of sadomasochistic, incestuous, homoerotic, and otherwise perverse transgression in a series of works that take their inspiration from the more sensationalistic imitators of Walpole. Among the first of such imitators is William Beckford, whose Vathek (1786), although not strictly a Gothic novel, provided a model for erotic brutality in fiction that became immediately available to Gothic writers. Such writers emphasized the horrific and sensational details of Gothic narrative at the expense of historical or even narrative credibility. As diverse in their specific concerns as any group of writers is likely to be, these authors all took such delight in moments of sexual intrigue, physical abuse, or monstrous psychological torment that any didactic aim of fiction was seemingly lost. What they shared, however, and what still attracts their audiences, was their willingness to -232- confront areas of experience that were traditionally ignored. Inspired perhaps by the convention of the "imp of the perverse" sent from the devil to tempt hero or heroine with pleasures of the flesh and other modes of infernal seduction, these writers explored various forms of «perverse» or transgressive sexual practice: sadomasochism, incest, miscegenation, cannibalism, necrophilia, and homosexuality. They treated these issues as intelligently as they were treated anywhere at the time, including in medical literature or social science.

Vathek (1786) is more an «Oriental» tale than a Gothic novel. Concerned as it is, however, with necromancy and sensual indulgence, it has earned a place for itself in discussions of Gothic works. The title character, "ninth Caliph of the [proverbially pederastic] race of the Abassides," is an Eastern Faust, who has his own Mephistopheles in the form of Giaour, a monstrous emissary of the devil who goads him on to ever more energetic perversion. Various examples of what Beckford's own society would have considered sexually grotesque find praise in the novel. Vathek's appropriately named Palaces of the Five Senses, for instance, seem in themselves blissfully innocent, and it is only when the hero turns from physical satisfaction to intellectual pursuits that his desires begin to seem corrupt. An "insatiable curiosity" for knowledge leads him from the delectable pleasures of the flesh to the frustration of secret knowledge, until he is ready to sacrifice everything for the ability to know.

Vathek's approach to the world of forbidden knowledge is littered with corpses and animated with hatred. Children sent to celebrate his munificence are cast into the maw of his desires, and subjects who try to save him from a fire are consumed by the power of his will. Vathek's destructive self-indulgence and his desire for nefarious satisfaction may seem like an unconscious exposure of the author's own pederastic fascination. His appetites, after all, are a source of positive energy and could even save him from destruction, just as love seems to offer him freedom from the confines of morality. But instead both desire and love cause Vathek to feel that he is already damned, trapping him in a position of concupiscence and shame. This paradox the novel tries not so much to resolve as to bring into vivid relief: when Vathek achieves final damnation, his «burning» heart suggests that his very desire has consumed him.

In the continuation of Vathek that Beckford planned but never executed, other damned souls were to share with the caliph in the Halls of Eblis fully developed stories of pederasty, masochism, necrophilia, and -233- incest. They were going to tell, that is, Gothic tales of their own damnation, which would defy the silence that culture imposes on such "perversity." Beckford himself knew the cost of violating that silence: he was hounded out of England on account of a handful of love letters penned to a young nephew. In a sense, Vathek is his own history of perversity, his own refusal to settle for the terms that culture offers.

In other novels that involve soul-selling, such as Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or, The Moor (1806), sexual desire is equally central to the damnation of the individual. In this novel, Dacre tells the story of the proud Victoria, who finds herself attracted to her husband's brother's immense servant Zofloya, who lures her with compliments and flattering asides. In a carefully constructed tale of gradual dissipation, Victoria sacrifices her relations to satisfy her seemingly insatiable desire, only slowly realizing that Zofloya alone can soothe her soul. Even at his first appearance in the novel, she finds herself obsessed with the darkly handsome servant. "Why he should be connected with her dreams, who never entered her mind when waking, she could not divine: but certain it was, that his exact resemblance, though as it were of polished and superior appearance, had chiefly figured in her troubled sight." Later, when he has encouraged her to murder her husband, attempt the seduction of her brother-in-law, Henriquez, and imprison and torture his fiancée, her relations with the Moor become more explicit. After Henriquez has killed himself, and Victoria is fleeing the authorities, she meets Zofloya in the mountains. Here she sees the Moor in "his proper sphere":

Dignity, and ineffable grace, were diffused over his whole figure;-for the first time she felt towards him an emotion of tenderness, blended with her admiration, and, strange inconsistency, amidst the gloomy terrors that pressed upon her breast, amidst the sensible misery that oppressed her, she experienced something like pride, in reflecting that a Being so wonderful, so superior, and so beautiful, should thus appear to be interested in her fate.

The implications of creating an "imp of the perverse" who is a seductive «Moor» has vast cultural and psychological implications. Anyone familiar with eighteenth-century literature knows that miscegenation was as frightening a «perversion» as incest or homosexuality to the cultural imagination. In the context of the present discussion, however, it is easy to see how Victoria's «desire» for Zofloya is precisely what leads her to destroy herself as she does. Her desire for the «Moor» falls out-234- side what is socially acceptable and therefore subjects her to the Law that marks her as an aberration. In killing her husband and throwing herself at her husband's brother, Victoria is only playing out what desire itself has already rendered inevitable. External evil, in the form of Zofloya, is really only the evil of desire, insofar as it marks Victoria and places her, or rather displaces her, in a social structure. In an effective display of the ways in which private desire can be projected as ruthless Law, Zofloya himself casts Victoria into oblivion with a "loud demoniac laugh" at the novel's close. This is the «perverse» laugh of the desiring heroine herself as culture represents her.

Matthew G. Lewis's central plot in The Monk (1796) — that of the seemingly virtuous Monk Ambrosio, who is seduced by the scheming Matilda, herself disguised as the young novice Rosario-is fraught with uncontrollable sexual desire and motivated by «perverse» sexual transgression throughout. The ambiguous sexuality of Rosario/ Matilda provides a backdrop of homoeroticism against which the larger dramas of the plot are played out. When Matilda herself turns out to be an agent of Satan-the catalyst of "perversity"-gender recedes as the determining factor in desire. Ambrosio's «lusts» would in any case be difficult to categorize.

After Ambrosio's desire for Matilda cools, he turns his lascivious attentions on the young Antonia, daughter of the proud Elvira, his confidante. Having employed occult arts to enter Antonia's bedchamber and render her defenseless against his lust, Ambrosio is interrupted by Elvira, who challenges and accuses him. He responds by murdering Elvira in one of the most brutal scenes of Gothic fiction: he grabs her, throws her on the bed, stifles her face with a pillow, kneels on her stomach, and struggles mercilessly as she wraps her arms around him in her final agony, until he realizes that she has become a "Corse, cold, senseless, and disgusting."

More than a hundred pages pass before the reader is informed that this woman with whom Ambrosio is struggling on the bed of his proposed sexual violation is in fact his own mother. The excessive emotion of what turns out to be the only "bed scene" in the novel, a scene between a sexually confused young man and his mother, seems in retrospect the emotional center of the work.

Antonia, who is therefore Ambrosio's sister, is not spared the incestuous obsession of the unfortunate friar. Toward the close of the novel, he discovers her in the underground vault of the Convent of St. Claire: -235-

Naturally addicted to the gratification of the sense, in the full vigour of manhood, and heat of blood, he had suffered his temperament to acquire such ascendancy, that his lust was become madness… He longed for the possession of [Antonia's] person; and even the gloom of the vault, the surrounding silence, and the resistance which He expected from her, seemed to give a fresh edge to his fierce and unbridled desires.

After Ambrosio accomplishes Antonia's «dishonour» in the "violence of his lustful delirium," he curses her fatal charms and blames her for his fall from grace. He determines further that she must never leave the dungeon. When she tries to escape, he kills her by plunging his dagger twice into her bosom-suggesting at once his incestuous desire and the murderous impulse it harbors.

Such scenes are usually dismissed as merely sensational. It seems to me that however sensationalistic such scenes seem, they are also as political as anything in late-eighteenth-century fiction. It is the nature of patriarchy to make incest, for instance, its most basic prohibition; for unless the terms of familial desire are carefully controlled, according to the logic of patriarchy, the fabric of society will break down. Studies by anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and others have demonstrated that the distribution of power depends on the control of intrafamilial relations by means of an «exchange» of women and that the incest taboo serves as much a political as a sexual function.

When Ambrosio «rapes» and murders his mother Elvira for getting in the way of his desire for Antonia; and when he rapes and murders his sister Antonia because she comes to represent the hideousness of his own desires; he violently transgresses the most basic law of patriarchal culture. After Ambrosio is informed of his incestuous violations, during the closing pages of the novel, he is horrified. But this horror comes so late that the effect of the incest is at least potentially subversive and that by abusing the relations between himself and his mother and sister he is doing more than giving his villainous character an appallingly misogynist twist. The act of incest is political because it defies the attempt of society to control desire. Cultural critics have suggested that the regulation of marriage ties is a restriction that serves the purposes of the patriarchy; Ambrosio at the very least defies such a restriction in his experiments with "perversion." In raping and murdering the women in his life, moreover, Ambrosio underlines the other, the forbidden desire that Rosario at first represented. At one point in the midst of Ambrosio's decline into wickedness, the narrator tells us that in a -236- moment of reflection "He regretted Rosario, the fond, the gentle, and submissive." If Ambrosio must be forced to fulfill the role of the male in patriarchal culture, he does so violently, with none of the subterfuge at work in the society around him. He turns the romantic fiction inside out in order to show that sexuality is always about power and that power, perhaps more importantly, is always about sexuality.

Michel Foucault, the French historian of sexuality, would argue that this attempt at subversion is not only doomed to failure but is in fact an aspect of the extension of cultural control that he calls "the deployment of sexuality." Foucault claims that sexuality itself becomes a mode of social knowledge and control. "In a society such as ours," he says, "where the family is the most active site of sexuality, and where it is doubtless the exigencies of the latter which maintain and prolong its existence, incest… occupies a central place; it is constantly being solicited and refused; it is an object of obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispensable pivot." But Lewis exposes this "affective intensification of the family space" and ridicules the terms of the Oedipal «fantasy» almost as directly as Foucault does. By turning the Oedipal «fantasy» into vivid and horrifying reality, Lewis exposes the very process of cultural control that Foucault came later to describe. What Foucault calls the pathologization of pleasure has its fictional equivalent in a novel like The Monk, in which sexuality becomes a form of public madness that defies the culture that would attempt to control, contain, or even know it.

The characters in Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth The Wanderer (1820) manage not to succumb to the nefarious skill of the infernal Melmoth, the «perverse» emissary who appears in each of the several interpolated tales of the novel to tempt them with «escape» from present difficulties. They do not need to sell their souls to the devil, however, when their bodies have already condemned them to a hell on earth.

In the most famous of the interpolated tales, for instance, "The Tale of the Spaniard," Alonzo de Monçada tells the story of his own incarceration at the hands of the Inquisition. The political abuses of the Inquisition are hideous and disturbing, as are the intrusions of infernal temptation; but Maturin makes the body itself the site of transgression. The body, in other words, traps the subject within an ideology that literally dismembers the body for its own purposes. When Monçada and a guide are pushing their way through an underground passage, which is so con-237- stricted it almost to causes suffocation, Monçada says that he "could not help recollecting and applying" a story about a group of travelers exploring the vaults of the Egyptian pyramids. "One of them… who was advancing as I was, on his hands and knees, stuck in the passage, and, whether from terror, or from the natural consequences of his situation, swelled so that it was impossible for him to retreat, advance, or allow a passage for his companions." When the others realize that this companion threatens their own survival, their guide "proposed, in the selfishness to which the feeling of vital danger reduces all, to cut off the limbs of the wretched being who obstructed their passage." At this suggestion, the companion manages somehow to squeeze himself out of the way. "He was suffocated, however, in the effort, and left behind a corse." What is interesting here is not just the vivid portrayal of the physical effects of fear. Notice that the community of travelers is beset by fear because one individual has «blocked» their passage. They have no trouble planning to free their own way by dismembering the person before them. It could be said that this act, this brutal and self-centered substitute for castration, helps to dramatize the ways in which bourgeois culture handles the individual. Castration, figurative or literal, is all there is for those who stand in the way of what the culture values most, in this case its own survival.

When later in his tale, Monçada hears the tale of illicit heterosexual love in the confines of a monastery, the result is strikingly similar. In this case, his companion tells him the story of a novice and her growing sentimental attachment to a young monk. The narrator, a "parricide," gives the following account:

One evening as the young monk and his darling novice were in the garden, the former plucked a peach, which he immediately offered to his favourite; the latter accepted it with a movement I thought rather awkward-it seemed like what I imagined would be the reverence of a female. The young monk divided the peach with a knife; in doing so, the knife grazed the finger of the novice, and the monk, in agitation inexpressible, tore his habit to bind up the wound. I saw it all-my mind was made up on the business-I went to the Superior that very night. The result may be conceived. They were watched.

After setting a trap for the two, after he is certain that they have arranged to spend the night together, the parricide brings the Superior and other monks to witness the depravity: "we burst into the cell. The wretched husband and wife were locked in each others arms. You may imagine the scene that followed." -238-

The convent's Superior, "who had no more idea of the intercourse between the sexes, than between two beings of different species," is so horrified at this spectacle of "two human beings of different sexes, who dared to love one another," that his own sexual proclivities may be called into question. If they are; if, that is, he represents the «homosexuality» implicit in monastic life, he also helps to explain how what is transgressive in one context becomes the very agent of cultural control in another. The kind of surveillance that comes «naturally» in a convent-religious life builds surveillance into its communal system-here has had the salubrious effect of ferreting out heterosexual desire and extirpating it from the society in question. Such surveillance succeeds by employing those who would otherwise find themselves in violation of the Law they are so desperate to serve.

What does happen is that these lovers are lured, as they try to escape, into the underground passages of the convent and are trapped there by the parricide in a chamber that is nailed shut and from which they can never escape. Before long they turn on one another, and before the narration ceases, the husband sinks his teeth into the wasted flesh of his mate. This cannibalistic conclusion to a tale of sexual transgression is not unique to Maturin, but it is presented here as a deft reminder of the relativity of desire. Love becomes literally an appetite, and desire becomes indistinguishable from murderous aggression. By walling these young lovers up in the subterranean passage and listening to their moans, the parricide acts out the cultural mechanism that the Gothic harbors at its core.

If male homosexuality is one of the secrets of Gothic fiction, as it seems at first to be in the scene just cited, and as it is in Vathek and The Monk as well as in Frankenstein and in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which I shall discuss, it includes the subversive potential of desire that is not subject to the Oedipal fantasy that patriarchy has provided for the control of relations. What has happened in these works is that a particular version of cultural subversion has been codified, with the result that desire itself becomes a cause for the particular forms of cultural hysteria suggested in repeated scenes of mob violence, brutal beatings, and even murderous conflagrations. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued that identification and desire are inextricable in «homosocial» relations. Where she sees male heterosexual empowerment, however, I think it is also possible to discern the beginnings of an organized «homosexual» protest against the status quo. For -239- it is not just that the relations among men tend to exclude women, but also that the desire that is articulated between men seems only to be expressible in terms of violence and abuse. Gothic fiction is at least partly about "homosexual panic," the fear of acknowledging those forms of desire that threaten society's regulation and control of sexuality. But it is also, in the cases I outline, about the debilitating quality of that control. The force of cultural subordination is itself a Gothic nightmare, and these novelists are as ready as anyone to acknowledge that force and perhaps to defy it.

What is powerful about these works is their ability to articulate this «horror» without flinching at its cultural implications. In Maturin's account especially, the values of the culture, the force of "good," is represented by a man who has murdered his father. The Law of the Father, in other words, is a self-victimizing law, a system that inevitably defeats itself. Gothic fiction looks at how that defeat occurs and posits an anarchy of desire outside of social control. Or at least it tries to posit such desire, for of course in an ideological system such as that flourishing in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as in our own, there is no "escape."

Double Vision

The relation between an individual and the cultural constraints that define her or him is most vividly portrayed, both within Gothic fiction and without, in the figure of the evil twin, the alter-ego, the double. Doubles appear often enough in Gothic novels to be thought of as the sine qua non of the genre. This last section discusses the conventions of the double as they are employed in three more works of Gothic fiction.

Sedgwick argues persuasively in Between Men that a certain strain of Gothic fiction finds an analogy in Freud's case history of Dr. Schreber, the state judge who published an account of his own bizarre psychological experiences that was later studied by Freud. For Sedgwick it is clear that "paranoia is the psychosis that makes graphic the mechanisms of homophobia." Sedgwick describes a "large subgroup" of classic Gothic novels, "whose plots might be mapped almost point for point onto the case of Dr. Schreber: most saliently each is about one or more males who not only is persecuted by, but considers himself transparent to and often under the compulsion of, another male." In Freud's case history Schreber tells, with shame but without equivocation, of his sense that -240- an ever-watchful God has chosen him for a special communication. In order to receive this communication, which would come in the form of divine rays preferably through his anus, Schreber felt that God insisted on his dressing in woman's underwear in order to create the «voluptuousness» appropriate to the «wife» of God. Freud interprets Schreber's paranoia as an elaborate displacement in which Schreber avoids confronting his own homosexuality.

Ignoring the homophobia that is rife in Freud's own text, I find two things useful for my argument here: first, he has made explicit the connection between paranoia and sexuality, and, second, he shows how, in the Schreber case, the source of patriarchal law becomes the very agent of sexual transgression. Schreber «loves» the very God who is watching and who will punish him. Surveillance and desire, in other words, are inextricably bound in the workings of Schreber's private "nightmare." But Schreber's private nightmare is, in fact, the nightmare of culture itself. God, authority, and Law become the brutal, victimizing «top» in a sadomasochistic configuration of desire.

In Caleb Williams (1794), William Godwin portrays such a configuration. The novel tells of the personal obsession of a young man for the elusive secrets of an older, mysterious benefactor. James Thompson suggests that the novel is a story of "surveillance," in which psychology and politics are both at work and in which paranoia becomes a political as well as a psychological condition. "To put this as simply as possible," Thompson says, "surveillance in Caleb Williams should be seen not merely in terms of the function of an authoritarian state, the professionalization of the police force, and the development of the penitentiary… As an anarchist, Godwin was vitally interested in the mechanisms by which the state extended its influence of power into the lives of individual subjects." Lacan says that "desire becomes bound up with the desire of the Other, but that in this loop is the desire to know." Desire/Other/Knowledge: this figure emerges repeatedly in Gothic fiction as the figure of haunting. The double stands precisely at the «junction» of desire and knowledge, which, for Lacan, is the "junction… out of which revolutions come."

Caleb Williams anticipates this triad in a vivid portrayal of male-male desire. Caleb's obsession with his master, Falkland, and the history of Falkland's relation with his enemy Tyrrel form the dramatic center of the work. The socially fraught relations between these three men are sexualized in various ways: Caleb's interest in Falkland has sexual over-241- tones from early in the novel, and he talks openly, even aggressively, about his «love» for his benefactor; Falkland, who in turn is described as having "polished manners… particularly in harmony with feminine delicacy," becomes locked in rivalries with both Caleb and his uncouth neighbor Tyrrel; Tyrrel mocks Falkland "as an animal that was beneath contempt" and clearly displays his jealousy of this ladies' man; Falkland in a fit of rage stabs Tyrrel from behind; and so on. Sexuality itself is understood in terms of power in each of these relations. Desire personalizes power inequalities in a way that makes the police state an inevitability, as Thompson argues. For the minute that Caleb finds his master interesting enough to "know," Caleb's entire story falls into place. He seeks knowledge and then he is sought by it. When Falkland becomes the hunter, with Law on his side, Caleb is doomed. Once drawn into the ideological structure that is figured in the triad Desire/Other/Knowledge, in other words, he is trapped in the structure of the Law itself, from which there is no escape.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) tells the tale of a very different young man, but one with similarly «unspeakable» longings: "It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn," Victor Frankenstein tells us. In his "fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature," Frankenstein articulates a desire that is not a mere physical response to people in the world, but rather an intellectual response to the physical workings of the world itself. It is strange, therefore, that the terms in which his desires are worked out are so strikingly familiar; the challenge to authority and the incestuous terms of his project are established by methods almost identical to those used in other works I have considered.

Victor Frankenstein creates a second self out of the assorted body parts he finds in his assiduous trips to graveyards and charnel houses. When he first encounters his creation, however, he greets it with something less than pleasure:

I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed: when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.

This passage centers itself, as all of Gothic fiction does, on the confrontation with the horror that is oneself, the horror that one's relation -242- to the world is painfully inappropriate and distorting to the privacy of self and that the life that one wants so desperately is really only a death that one can barely escape. Moonlight is used here to create a world between light and darkness and to suffuse the scene with its unsettling glare. Just as the animated corpse seems a figure of death-in-life, so the moonlight is a light that suggests darkness-later it becomes metaphorically associated with the creature. Here, it "forced its way through the window shutters," as a way of suggesting that Frankenstein cannot shut out the light of knowledge he has discovered; nor can he himself hide from the pursuit of his creation, who here peeps into the bed where he has sought refuge. A waking dream? The detail of observation-the eyes, the grin, the hand-all suggest the grotesque reality of this vision. The personal pronoun «I» is the real center of attention, and the creature exists as an object, to be observed, to be feared, and to be rejected. Desire/Other/Knowledge: Victor Frankenstein has worked hard to take control of the forces of this triad. In doing so, he has created the myth that is a part of modern culture, and he has given his name to that myth. Frankenstein and his creature have become one in the popular imagination because culture makes certain that Frankenstein's desire is turned back on himself.

James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) dramatizes the haunted relationship between Robert Wringham and his satanic double Gil Martin. In the first of the novel's two parts, "The Editor's Narrative," the bookish and lonely Robert Wringham forms an emotional attachment to his lively and athletic older stepbrother, George. Gradually Robert, variously described as "devilishlooking," "moody and hellish looking," with "a deep and malignant eye," becomes a kind of «shadow» to George, who tries in vain to avoid the inevitable physical confrontation that leaves Robert a bloodied victim, symbolically castrated and feminized. George begins to see Robert as a "limb of Satan" and starts to feel that he is haunted by "some evil genius in the shape of his brother." Shortly later, George is struck down (from behind) and Robert, after various complications, disappears.

In the second part of the novel, "Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner, written by himself," Robert tells the story of his own haunting by a double. In a narrative that suggests a paranoid relation to the world, he admits seeing the "beauty of women… as the greatest snare to which mankind are subjected." Isolated in his particularly virulent misogyny, he becomes «open» to the seduction of the mysterious Gil Martin, who teaches Calvinist «justification» as a creed that legitimates -243- the acting out of suppressed desires, and which leads Robert into a series of self-justifying acts of violence against other men. Not surprisingly, the only relations charged with emotion are those between men: Hogg is exposing the inner workings of a culture that objectifies women and places male relations under strict scrutiny. "I had heart-burnings, longings, and yearnings, that would not be satisfied," Robert Wringham tells his readers: his desire literally consumes him, and his alterego has become a function of ego itself.

In her discussion of this novel, Sedgwick says that "As [Robert] pushes blindly, with the absurdly and pathetically few resources he has, toward the male homosocial mastery that alone and delusively seems to promise him a social standing, the psychologized homophobic struggle inside him seems to hollow out an internalized space that too exactly matches the world around him." The double works as an effective fictional representation of this replicated vision. Gil Martin has an intimate knowledge of his «subject» because internal paranoia and cultural conditioning are one and the same. The paranoia Robert Wringham expresses, in other words, is the paranoia that culture breeds in those among its members who are tempted to transgress the narrow limits of the "normal." As a «late» Gothic hero, Robert Wringham recognizes that the guilt he feels, as well as the special justification he claims, are the prices that culture exacts for offering him even his tentative place at its margin. In this novel, then, subjectivity itself is the source of the haunting. «Transgression» and «perversity» have been planted within the individual psyche in order to do the work of culture more effectively. Gothic fiction has dramatized this transition and has decried its effects in various ways, but nowhere more effectively than in these double visions.

Gothic Success/Gothic Failure

In the eighties and early nineties, there has been a resurgence of critical interest in the Gothic, which at the time of this writing shows no sign of waning. Excellent studies, such as those listed in the bibliography, and others by Margaret L. Carter, William Patrick Day, Annie LeBrun, Ellen Moers, David Punter, Joseph Wissenfarth, and Judith Wilt, have moved the Gothic from the margins of literary history and criticism to the center of the debates on cultural, psychological, social, and political criticism. At least one critic, however, argues that Gothic fiction is a failure: Elizabeth Napier claims that "the imprecision and -244- extremes to which the Gothic has been subjected are in part a result of instability and cross-purposes in the form itself." It is important to understand, however, that the instability of Gothic «form» is a function of Gothic content. For if I am right in describing the Gothic as the scene of conflicted emotion, «aberrant» desire, social torment, public transgression, and patriarchal victimization, then no "formal stability" could represent the implicit contradictions, inconsistencies, and subversive impulses that give Gothic its energy of resistance.In Gothic fiction, writers, readers, and critics are engaged, to some degree in spite of themselves, in an enterprise that breaks fictional codes in order to bring into high relief the inconsistencies of normative culture. That it can be neither systematically described nor legally codified is one of its strengths. For Gothic fiction both reflects and reacts to the increasingly ruthless limitations that "cultural subordination" imposes. Maternal specters, incestuous desire, intrafamilial aggression, sadomasochistic relations, romantic friendship, homosexuality, necromancy, or necrophilia-all signify resistance to the culture's impulse to define and deny "perversity."In Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form, I described the attempt of Gothic writers to find in the «tale» the appropriate affective form for the expression of private obsessions. But in their frenzied brutality and uncensored sexual explicitness, in their broken narratives and strings of «local» effects, Gothic novels refuse to subscribe to the cultural «narratives» that were being written to control and contain private desire. However conventional they are, or however predictable in their horrors they become, Gothic novels resist the mechanisms of repression and work to subvert literary expectations and cultural assumptions. If this is their perversity, it is also their power.

George E. Haggerty

Selected Bibliography

Ellis Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Foucault Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1980.

Gilbert Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer -245- and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.

Haggerty George E. Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.

Johnson Barbara. "My Monster/My Self." Diacritics 12 (1982): 2 -10.

Kahane Claire. "The Gothic Mirror." In Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Springnether, eds., The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Keily Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Lacan Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.

Lévy Maurice. Le roman «gothique» anglais, 1764–1824. Toulouse: Associations des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Toulouse, 1968.

Massé Michelle A. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Women Reading Women. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Napier Elizabeth R. The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an EighteenthCentury Literary Form. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

Sedgwick Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosexual Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Thompson James. "Surveillance in William Godwin's Caleb Williams." In K. W. Graham, ed., Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, 173 -98. New York: AMS Press, 1989.

Wolff Cynthia Griffin. "The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Female Sexuality." Modern Language Studies 9 (1979): 98 -113.

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Novels of the 1790s: Action and Impasse

NOVELISTS of the 1790s articulated new ambitions and claimed new status for their genre, often abandoning the defensive tone that had dominated earlier justifications of the novel. Richardson's elaborate proclamations of moral purpose, for instance, had presupposed the prevailing belief that fiction generated dubious moral effects, encouraging the young to think too much about love and fostering idleness, fantasy, and the substitution of sentimental self-indulgence for benevolent action. Theoretically, imaginative like literal history could teach its readers about life. In practice, the multiplying «histories» of young men and young women faced with such problems as confronting the sexual advances of a titled and lascivious London woman or escaping the horrors of a secluded Italian castle might instead cause their readers to find actual experience unsatisfying. Virtually all eighteenth-century novelists announced their impeccable moral intent, but little evidence suggests that even avid consumers of fiction thought its principal effects uplifting.

Political actualities in the century's final decade altered literary as well as other possibilities. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, British and Continental thinkers alike grappled with freshly articulated questions about individual rights and social responsibility. Although the Terror in France, particularly the execution of the king and queen, aroused horror on the other side of the English Channel, the impetus to imagine a more equitable social order remained powerful. In response to radical insistence on the inadequacies of current social arrangements, Parliament instituted a series of fierce repressive mea -247- sures. Printers of «revolutionary» material were prosecuted and imprisoned. Those who attended as well as those who addressed «seditious» public meetings risked their freedom. Writers took sides. One thinks most readily of Burke and Paine as symbolic literary antagonists in the period, but a host of novelists likewise entered the fray, both on the side of the established order and in support of new political imaginings.

At the eighteenth century's end, novelists made explicit ideological claims and manifested new kinds of theoretical self-awareness. Their consciousness of the possibility of changing minds and hearts matters more to their fictions' effect than do their specific political positions, which range across a broad spectrum. "Every writer who advances principles, whether true or false, that have a tendency to set the mind in motion, does good," Mary Hays maintains in her preface to Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Truth matters less than energy. The activity of the mind, to whatever end, is a self-evident good. The argument that fiction's moral function depends not on the doctrine it advances but on the action it produces marks the new emphasis of the 1790s. William Godwin, in a preface to Mary Wollstonecraft's fragmentary Wrongs of Woman, suggests that "these sketches," if "filled up in a manner adequate to the writer's conception, would perhaps have given a new impulse to the manners of a world." He too claims that fiction generates productive action. Late-century novelists implicitly acknowledge the contested nature of all doctrine as they articulate new social possibilities or defend established custom against perceived threats. They seek and sometimes find innovative ways "to set the mind in motion."

Novels written well before the 1790s, it goes without saying, had managed to set their readers' minds in motion. Debate about the characters of Clarissa and Pamela, and consequently about the import of the novels they inhabited, began with Richardson's earliest readers, continued despite his insistent and explicit asseveration of his novels' moral meaning, and has only intensified over the centuries. Defoe and Smollett, sentimental novels and Gothic: virtually all more or less «canonical» eighteenth-century fiction has stimulated controversy over its psychological or ideological significance. But the statements of intent by such writers as Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft establish an unprecedented context for novelistic endeavor by subordinating the importance of fixed meaning to that of energizing action.

The postulate that the novel may spur intellectual and ultimately social action implies not only a new sense of fiction's importance but a -248- specific set of problems for novels of the 1790s. For instance, novelists faced the challenge of imagining worthy action for characters as well as for readers. If a novel aspired not only to instruct its reader in norms of virtuous and mannerly behavior but to provoke mental activity, must it not reconceive the possibilities of human conduct? Old plots, familiar characters doing familiar things, would not energize the mind, yet new models for action seemed hard to come by. Benevolence, sanctioned by the tradition of the sentimental novel, provided the established way to manifest active virtue. Even Hermsprong, Robert Bage's idealized version of "man as he is not," finds little to do with himself beyond bestowing good on others. He offers verbal defiance to an oppressor, and he stops a runaway horse, saving the heroine's life. But mainly he gives away money to worthy recipients, calms social unrest, and helps the poor and the sick. Like most of the period's protagonists, he also talks a lot, offering the rhetoric of a new vision that seldom manifests itself in radically new forms of action.

Far from acting in powerful, exemplary ways, male protagonists often assume the role of victim. Caleb Williams, the title character in William Godwin's remarkable 1794 novel, gets in trouble by virtue of a quality labeled «curiosity» but subsequently struggles mainly for survival, a goal that leads him to self-defeating revenge and finally to despair. Walsingham Ainsworth, protagonist of Mary Robinson's Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature (1797), fills four volumes with letters reporting his own helpless misery. His eventual happiness, briefly related, results from no action of his own. Orlando Somerive, the central male figure of Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House (1794), declares his right of self-determination in his choice of a bride but exercises no choice in the matter of a career, becoming a soldier because someone gives him a commission. Sent to America to fight in a war he does not understand, he suffers as the victim of incomprehensible social forces. Like Caleb, he seeks to survive.

As for heroines, they too-with the notable exception of Anna St. Ives-often function as victims or as reactors rather than as self-sustaining actors. Matilda, the second-generation heroine of Elizabeth Inchbald's Simple Story (1791), in its structure and its implications one of the period's most strikingly original novels, reads and weeps and gazes out the window but performs no willed action more significant than caressing her father's hat. The central female figure in Hermsprong vacillates between doing what her father wants and what her lover -249- wants. What she herself wants can only determine her action insofar as it conforms to the will of male authority. The heroine of The Old Manor House suffers and suffers. Her noteworthy action, like that of Gothic heroines, consists of escape.

For women in these novels (again, Anna St. Ives constitutes the startling exception), marriage still determines fate. In other words, despite novelists' implicit and explicit claims to help innovate ideological possibility, existing social frameworks impose themselves at the level of assumption. Writers have difficulty imagining around them. Their perplexity about what fictional characters can do perhaps suggests why the period's novelists, seeking to effect action in their readers' minds, emphasize in their characters the importance of internal rather than external activity-"energy of mind." Internal vitality alone, late-eighteenth-century fiction suggests, allows new behaviors to be imagined. Even those claiming ideological purpose understand its fulfillment to depend on individual psychology.

The problem of how characters act within the plots of 1790s novels leads to further questions about action, none consistently resolved in the period's fictions and all crucial to subsequent developments. Four of these questions will organize my discussion of the period's fiction. How does the problem of action implicate the imagining of character? What is the relation between feeling and action in the generation of plot? How do «public» and «private» action bear on one another? How does the notion of action affect that of form? To investigate these questions will help to clarify ideological aspirations and insufficiencies in these novels and to define sources of the emotional and intellectual energy manifest in the texts themselves.

Action and Character

Many novelists of the 1790s found gender-to their minds a primary constituent of character-problematic. Conventional eighteenth-century assumptions about gender will even now sound familiar. Women defined their femininity by passivity, concern for others, and «natural» preoccupation with pleasing those around them. The good woman, rigorously chaste, devoted her life to service: to caring for parents, husband, children, to charitable efforts in the community. Emotion dominated her character and often determined her actions; reason belonged especially to men, although the novel of sensibility had established the -250- principle that feeling might also signify male virtue and that women too must cultivate reason. Men were above all manly-a word novels obsessively reiterate to imply courage, fortitude, assertiveness, and moral uprightness. Men's superior intellectual powers and superior strength entailed the obligation of leadership. Men decided-"naturally"-what women should do.

None of these truisms remained unchallenged as the century neared its end. A new wave of feminism, stimulated by the French Revolution and its doctrine of equality, affected even conservative writers. Hannah More herself, who held fast to old truths and was unwilling even to read Mary Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Woman (on the ground that women already had more power than was good for them), believed that women deserved education to bring them closer to parity with men. And far more radical ideas made their way into fiction.

Perhaps the most economical novelistic expression of the challenge to gender categories appears in Walsingham. Its protagonist whines interminably about his persecution by his cousin Sidney, who has deprived him of a privileged position with his aunt and uncle and who Walsingham believes has seduced his beloved Isabella. Isabella marries another, announcing that she has always considered Walsingham a brother. The novel's last two pages explain everything: Sidney is a woman. She has lived in male disguise from infancy, the victim of her mother's avarice. (Her father's will provides greater rewards to his widow if she bears a male child.) She loves Walsingham as a prospective husband. Ecstatic, Walsingham writes his confidante of

the heroic virtues of my transcendent Sidney! Indeed, 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 [sic] the effects of a masculine education, that I do not lament past sorrows, while my heart triumphs, nobly triumphs in the felicity of present moments.

A woman with heroic virtues and feminine manners, with "dignity of feeling" (not sloppy, feminine feeling) and energy of mind, feminine in manners, masculine in education, a woman who transcends the limitations ordinarily attached to her gender-such a woman can compensate a man for any suffering.

The androgynous ideal suggested by Sidney's rather unconvincing transformation invested other newly imagined characters as well. Anna St. Ives (1792) and its eponymous heroine exemplify the fresh novelis-251- tic possibilities. The fairy-tale plot of low-born lover winning rich and beautiful lady assumes an unfamiliar form, given Thomas Holcroft's innovative conception of female thought and action. The result-a work that retains dramatic excitement despite an abundance of doctrinal lectures by its virtuous characters-demonstrates how assumptions about gender delineate the parameters of novelistic action.

From Clarissa and Pamela through Evelina and Cecilia to Wollstonecraft's Mary, novels titled with women's names abound in the eighteenth century. In most of them, including even Wollstonecraft's, the heroines react-sometimes ingeniously and courageously-to situations created by men. Anna St. Ives generates situations to which men must react. Initially she allows herself to be courted by Coke Clifton, a man chosen for her by others. Even this acceptance of outside influence, however, stems from her own determination to make Clifton into a man who will contribute greatly to social good. Meanwhile, Frank Henley, son of her father's steward, loves her. She leads him to confess his love, acknowledges hers for him, kisses him (extraordinary behavior for an eighteenth-century heroine), and persuades him to join her in improving Clifton's character. Later, having decided that Clifton does not merit their effort, she announces her intent to marry Frank instead. Clifton arranges to abduct the lovers, confining them in separate impregnable strongholds. Anna escapes, climbing a wall to do so. Frank, also eludes captivity, wounding Clifton in the process. Anna presides over the subsequent arrangements, which promise a ménage U+00EO quatre (with Clifton's sister its fourth member) designed to make everyone happier and better, whatever their personal desires.

On what basis, Holcroft's novel inquires, do men and women accept preestablished limits on their opportunities for action? Why can't a woman kiss a man, if a man can kiss a woman? Why can't a woman climb a wall? Why can't a man be instructed by a woman? Why can't a woman initiate moral action? To imagine such possibilities fulfilled surpasses all bounds of "realism"-although aspects of Clifton's response seem almost comically realistic, as he experiences the frustration of dealing with a woman who refuses to act like one. Clifton belongs to the world as it is. Anna, behaving as though no such world exists, provides a blueprint for the future.

Frank and Anna resemble other eighteenth-century protagonists in their marked «sensibility» and in their orthodox insistence on the importance of controlling passion by reason. But they differ from their -252- fictional predecessors in maintaining an equation between pure energy and passion under the control of reason. Both characters, as they repeatedly stipulate, place the good of society before their own. Both test their own conduct by its utility for social improvement. Both see themselves (and each other) as energized by their high social goals. Initially Anna sees Clifton too as a possessor of striking energy, as someone worthy of her effort. As it becomes clear that Clifton believes the fulfillment of his individual desires to be a sufficient reason for his existence, Anna feels increasingly contemptuous toward him. When he confronts her, intending rape, she sounds like Clarissa as she argues that her soul is above him, but she invokes no religious authority, instead claiming androgynous internal power. "Courage has neither sex nor form: it is an energy of mind, of which your base proceedings shew I have infinitely the most." Given that fact, it follows, in her view, that she will triumph, and so she does.

Not only does Anna kiss Frank, she tells Clifton's sister and Clifton himself about it. Her fiancé feels angry, but he dissembles. Anna does not anticipate his anger. Her motives, she considers, are pure, for her highest principle is "truth." Because of her conviction that truth will always prove its power, it does not occur to her that her action, and her proclamation of it, might be misinterpreted. The kiss-and-tell episode may seem to support the charge of psychological implausibility frequently brought against Holcroft, but in fact this novel's enterprise depends on the transposition of psychological terms into moral ones. Although the major characters announce their intense and complicated feelings, those feelings express themselves most persuasively through their convictions. Even Clifton, making atrocious plans for kidnap and rape, invokes hallowed principles of male supremacy to justify his behavior toward Anna and truisms about class hierarchy to explain his detestation of Frank. Frank's avaricious and reprehensible father acts on the basis of self-love, a principle he explicitly endorses. He feels as profoundly justified in embezzling money as Frank and Anna feel in planning their own union in order to improve the state of society.

The text never explicitly suggests that rationalization allows these characters to fulfill their desires. Indeed, the elevated tone in which Frank and Anna declare their high intentions seems to endorse them. Yet meretricious as well as admirable behavior allows for justification by principle. If the central characters' energy derives, as they claim, from their ability to use their passions under the control of reason, the novel's -253- energy stems partly from its capacity to hint at the ways in which passion may direct reason even as reason loudly proclaims its dominance. Frank and Anna, after all, get what they want most: each other. And they take subtle revenge on Clifton, forcing him to exist within their domestic system. They accomplish the aims of passion by dedicating themselves-passionately-to the service of principle. Clifton, with more dubious principles, suffers from conflicting passions. He can't win.

Holcroft does not demonstrate a capacity for delicate psychological analysis. But his imagining of a somewhat androgynous hero and heroine shows his ability to depict the use of abstract concepts to serve personal ends. Anna (like Sidney in Walsingham, but more convincingly) has the courage, knowledge, and moral force of a man, with the gentleness, grace, and compassion of a woman. Frank, likewise possessed of courage and integrity, willingly subordinates himself to a woman's leadership. His ambiguous status as the son of a servant, prevented by his father's greed from receiving university education, provides a metaphorical equivalent for his «feminized» aspect, which is signaled most loudly by his unfailing compassion and helpfulness. Both characters embody political ideals. They thus indicate new ways to imagine fictional heroes and heroines.

The woman possessed of male as well as female virtues appears even in novels by writers of politically conservative orientation. About Mary Ann Hanway, Gina Luria observes in the introduction to a modern facsimile edition of Ellinor, "nothing is known." Her conservative views, however, emerge clearly in the novel, published in 1798, which consistently celebrates old ways in preference to new. Its heroine proves fairly orthodox in her femininity, although more self-reliant than earlier fictional young women forced to make their way without the sanction of known families. She saves herself by virtue of her "powerful and energetic mind"-a characteristic now no longer assigned only to men. A peripheral character, Lady John, embodies the virtues of the «masculinized» woman. If she makes herself slightly ridiculous by her predilection for riding and hunting, she acts with unostentatious benevolence and with high regard for the freedom of others. Moreover, Lady John employs a rhetoric of deep conviction:

I have, from the time I threw off my frock, stood up a champion for the rights of women; have boldly thrown down my gauntlet to support their equality, — 254- immunities, and privileges, mental and corporeal, against the incroachments of their masculine tyrants. If this then was the rule of my conduct; if I dared to judge and act for myself, at sixteen, allowing no guide but rectitude, no monitor but conscience; fearless of the judgment, careless of the opinion of [the] world…

If, she continues, she acted thus at sixteen, certainly she will behave in comparable ways at forty. The association between rectitude and «masculine» freedom and assertiveness in a woman demonstrates how thoroughly new ideas had, by the century's end, permeated literary culture. Even through a clumsy novel, fresh breezes blow.

Anna and Lady John, claiming male prerogatives, yet remain sexually conventional. Anna angrily rejects Clifton's proposal of cohabitation; Lady John enters a loveless marriage at her father's behest and lives in chastity after separating from her husband. But other conceptions of the new woman include more daring sexual possibilities. In Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Mary Hays's heroine makes high moral claims for herself and for her sex in terms by now familiar ("Shall I, then, sign the unjust decree, that women are incapable of energy and fortitude?") and dares to declare her sexual passion for a man before he reciprocates it. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman (1798), depicts her heroine, Maria, as willingly entering a sexual liaison while married to another man. Maria also passionately offers her own plea in a divorce court, and the novel's tone and substance insist that the reader should not condemn her.

The titles or subtitles of several of the period's novels- Ellinor; or, The World As It Is; Man As He Is; Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not; Caleb Williams; or, Things As They Are (Godwin's title for the first edition) — emphasize the degree to which writers concerned themselves with social actualities in relation to imagined options. An improved social order, as the foregoing accounts have suggested, depends-so fiction has it-on new kinds of character to create it. Hermsprong selfconsciously invents the new hero, a young man whose moral force derives from his upbringing among American Indians. If Robert Bage has some difficulty conceiving new things for Hermsprong to do, he vividly imagines new ways for his hero to be.

The distinction between «being» and «doing» often attaches itself to gender dichotomies, with "being"-the more passive role-assigned to women. Hermsprong is far from passive. His ideological importance -255- consists partly in his redefinition of being in relation to doing-and of manliness. The word manly assumes ever more complex meanings as it recurs in the novel.

In the imaginative and ideological scheme of Hermsprong, the antithesis of man is not woman but child-and women and children do not categorically resemble one another. Men and women do, or should. Hermsprong's speeches about his own nature and his lectures on characteristics of women as they should be emphasize comparable attributes. Early in the novel, he describes himself:

I cannot learn to offer incense at the shrines of wealth and power, nor at any shrines but those of probity and virtue. I cannot learn to surrender my opinion from complaisance, or from any principle of adulation. Nor can I learn to suppress the sentiments of a freeborn mind, from any fear, religious or political.

He expects of Caroline, whom he loves, the same kind of noncompliance. She too must respect her own freedom, must defend her opinions, must refuse to surrender. The crucial issue between Hermsprong and Caroline concerns her dutiful deference to her tyrannical father. Hermsprong's insistence that a higher duty commands her to follow "the truth of things" threatens to separate them permanently. (Caroline successfully justifies herself-introducing an unexpected note of relativism into a work largely organized by absolutist statements-by pointing out that she has followed the path that she thought right, and that no one can do more.) Women, Hermsprong maintains, waste their energies on trifles. They deserve educations that will enable them to use those energies in ways comparable to men's.

Caroline's father, Lord Grondale, is Hermsprong's chief antagonist. A self-absorbed, self-satisfied, arrogant man who assumes his right to absolute power, Lord Grondale has never before encountered real opposition. Hermsprong's explanation of why even a woman can and should defy such a man (he is speaking to Mrs. Garnet, an elderly and impoverished, hence repudiated relative of Lord Grondale's) summarizes his moral position, and the novel's:

Can you fear a man… whose mind is mean-so mean as to incite him to commit acts of injustice, of inhumanity! can he be feared? He, whose life has scarce been marked by one act of energy? who owes the little consequence he possesses to his title and his money? How feeble must be the resentments of a man humiliated by his vices? Oppose him with the manly spirit of conscious rectitude, you will find him a child; a sulky, pouting one indeed; but still a child. -256-

His invocation of "manly spirit" to a woman emphasizes his insistence that both genders can and should share the same moral qualities. Long-standing convention has labeled courageous spirit «manly»; Hermsprong considers it equally appropriate to women. Moral qualities, and the energetic acts they generate, define adulthood. Lacking them, even the most socially powerful human being reveals himself a child.

Hermsprong's "being," dependent on that moral integrity he recommends to others, changes the meaning of his action. Although Hermsprong occupies himself mainly in benevolence (along with his talking and thinking), the significance of such conduct differs from that of comparable behavior in, say, The Man of Feeling or A Sentimental Journey. When Harley, in The Man of Feeling, bestows money on a worthy recipient or weeps over a good woman gone wrong, he declares his difference from, and implicitly his superiority to, the objects of his generosity. The feelings such figures allow him to experience constitute their narrative and moral justification. Hermsprong delineates a new version of benevolence. Its hero's acts of charity often occur "offstage," and are only briefly reported. Many of those he helps-Mrs. Garnet and the local curate are important cases in point-attract his attention specifically because of their moral resemblance to him. He wants to learn from Mrs. Garnet, he says; he admires the curate. Hermsprong acts not to indulge his feelings but in the service of justice and of moral equality. Even his more generalized charity-for example, his bestowing of money and help on inhabitants of a storm-ravaged village-rarely emphasizes social or moral difference. Hermsprong considers benevolence more an obligation than an indulgence.

Bage does not imagine Hermsprong in altogether innovative terms: his wealth allows his defiance of Lord Grondale; his high birth facilitates his marriage to Caroline. The novel relies upon even as it deplores class hierarchy. But it presents a protagonist whose moral substance locates his heroism, who insists on and as much as possible enforces the moral equality of women, who needs not fight or pursue adventure to declare himself a man: a representation of considerable consequence.

Feeling and Action

In 1796 William Beckford published a little book called Modern Novel Writing, following it a year later with Azemia, a parodic merging of Oriental tale and sentimental novel. Both works employ pastiche to criti-257- cize the English novel, emphasizing incoherence and sentimentality as principal weaknesses of the genre. Beckford focuses on such characters as Sterne's mad Maria and Richardson's Pamela, from much earlier in the century, as founding figures of sensibility, but he also evokes the divided aims of such a novel of the 1790s as Ellinor, with its intricate plot, its intermittent stress on sensibility, and its claim of bold originality. The effort to combine sensibility with originality often led to the kind of narrative muddle that Beckford mocks. It also had more provocative consequences when novelists seriously confronted the problem of how to reconcile a high valuation of personal feeling with a concern for social issues.

Many commentators have discussed Mary Wollstonecraft's difficulties over sensibility. As Vindication of the Rights of Woman makes clear, she believed that female sensibility constituted female weakness, an educational and social imposition on women. Yet her novels rely heavily on sensibility to characterize her heroines and the men who attract them. A characteristic passage from The Wrongs of Woman:

Active as love was in the heart of Maria, the story she had just heard made her thoughts take a wider range. The opening buds of hope closed, as if they had put forth too early, and the happiest day of her life was overcast by the most melancholy reflections. Thinking of Jemima's peculiar fate and her own, she was led to consider the oppressed state of women, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter. Sleep fled from her eyelids, while she dwelt on the wretchedness of unprotected infancy.

Maria, who has just listened to Jemima's narrative of the disasters afflicting an unprotected working-class woman, employs the conventional language of sensibility ("the opening buds of hope," "the most melancholy reflections") to comment not only on her personal situation of requited romantic love but also on social actualities. Her love for her infant merges with her awareness of women's plight; her justifiable worry about her own immediate predicament grows as she ponders Jemima's experience. Wollstonecraft's novel criticizes sensibility but indulges in sentimental flights, as though exquisite sensitivity alone responds adequately to the suffering women endure and witness.

Sensibility rarely impels action. Jemima, hardened by her experience, proves more forceful than Maria in planning and in expediting. Maria, however, acts powerfully-although only verbally-in the courtroom, defending Darnford against the charge of seduction and incidentally -258- defending her own adultery. Her ability to do so depends explicitly on her transcendence of sensibility: "A strong sense of injustice had silenced every emotion, which a mixture of true and false delicacy might otherwise have excited in Maria's bosom." Like "delicacy," the "sense of injustice" constitutes an emotion-but emotion of a kind that promises fresh narrative possibilities. In its inclusiveness-it implies reaction to a whole class of human beings rather than to suffering individuals-and in its implicit invocation of principle as well as sentiment, it differs from the emotional responsiveness that had governed many previous fictional heroes and heroines. Delicacy suggests weakness, a sense of injustice promises strength. Delicacy reacts to minute stimuli, the sense of injustice claims large ones. Maria fails in the courtroom. The judge considers her reasoned, energetic plea irrelevant and relies instead on the ancient principles of male supremacy and male possession. Yet the power of that plea energizes Wollstonecraft's text, dramatizes her argument, and strengthens her fictional character.

Sensibility in the old sense continues to display itself in late-century novels. But these novels also render less familiar sorts of feeling. Mary Hays's Emma Courtney sometimes resembles a much earlier heroine: "[My] tender and faithful heart refuses to change its object-it can never love another." But she does not accept the traditional female fate of passive waiting for male response. Her attachment organizes her life and provides her with energy, not only because of its powerful sexual component but because she uses it as a stimulus to thought. Her thinking leads her to a complex awareness of women's categorical situation as social victims, oppressed by "the barbarous and accursed laws of society." But it also enables her to make compelling claims for herself. Passion, she says, has brought her to reason. She writes to a male correspondent about his admiration of "the destructive courage of an Alexander… the pernicious ambition of an Augustus Caesar, as bespeaking the potent, energetic, mind!" Then she asserts her own comparable potency and energy. Although she bemoans her victimization, she more insistently argues-and the argument is revolutionary-that her self-destructive passion constitutes strength rather than weakness, stimulating intellectual and emotional vitality.

The assumption, exemplified in every novel I have mentioned, that energy in itself embodies value implies consequent valuing of new sorts of emotion. If an admirable character can plausibly admire the energy of destructive courage and pernicious ambition, it follows that even -259- such feelings as resentment and rage may measure worth and incite action. Anna St. Ives, Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Maria, Hermsprong, Emma Courtney-all experience intense anger at manifestations of social injustice. Fictional women, of course, had found anger a source of energy much earlier in the century: Pamela and Clarissa come readily to mind. But such heroines feel angry because of what has happened to them. They do not characteristically generalize their conditions. Protagonists of late-century novels, whose anger pervades and stimulates more action than does that of their fictional predecessors, can usually justify their emotion in social terms.

The novels so far considered in this chapter lack the psychological intricacy and depth that twentieth-century readers expect. For that matter, they lack the psychological intricacy and depth of Richardson's first two novels. In late-century novels, political and moral agendas often supersede psychological ones; notation of emotion substitutes for its exploration. Two novels of the period that have attracted recent readers, however, Caleb Williams and A Simple Story, provide richly inflected psychological analysis. Elizabeth Inchbald's anything-butsimple story offers new kinds of emotion and new ways of thinking about them.

A Simple Story (1791) tells a two-generation tale of fathers, literal and metaphorical, and daughters. The first-generation protagonist, Miss Milner, falls in love with her guardian, a Catholic priest named Dorriforth. Freed from his vows by a relative's death, through which he inherits an important estate, Dorriforth, now Lord Elmwood, marries his ward, despite the prolonged opposition of another priest, Sandford, and despite Miss Milner's willfully and provocatively bad behavior. When Lord Elmwood has to go abroad and then to stay longer than he had planned, his wife lapses into infidelity. Before his return, she flees. Lord Elmwood sends their small daughter, Matilda, after her, wishing never to see either female again.

After Lady Elmwood's death, Lord Elmwood allows Matilda, now seventeen, to inhabit one of his residences, on condition that he never see her. When they accidentally encounter one another, he banishes her. From the cottage where she takes refuge, she is abducted by a lascivious nobleman. Lord Elmwood rescues her, learns to love her, and marries her to her cousin, now heir to his estate.

The novel's power derives from its capacity to render emotional nuance with remarkable spareness and to suggest links between such -260- nuance and the pressures of social reality. A Simple Story ends with an explicit moral: "And Mr. Milner, Matilda's grandfather, had better have given his fortune to a distant branch of his family… so he had bestowed upon his daughter A PROPER EDUCATION." The "proper education" here endorsed appears to be Matilda's harrowing education in the school of adversity. Whatever ironies it conceals, the statement clearly insists that Matilda's experience and Miss Milner's carry social as well as personal significance.

Dorriforth and Miss Milner are distinguished from their fictional contemporaries by the rendered intensity of their sexual feeling, conveyed both by direct statement (Lord Elmwood, on hearing that Miss Milner loves him: "For God's sake take care what you are doing-you are destroying my prospects of futurity-you are making this world too dear to me") and by physical gestures such as Miss Milner's changes of color, her fainting, her weeping, her setting down of a coffee cup. But pride, jealousy, envy, and anger also become objects of detailed investigation, not of moral condemnation. Such feelings of course permeate works of fiction from early romance to postmodern narrative (and nonnarrative). Rarely in the eighteenth century, though, are they explored rather than deplored.

After their engagement and before their marriage, Miss Milner and Lord Elmwood struggle for power. Pride controls both antagonists, pride given different forms and different kinds of authority. Miss Milner takes seriously the truism that a woman holds power over a man only before her marriage. She wishes to test her control. Why didn't she keep her lover in suspense longer, she asks herself, so that she could have seen her dominion's extent? Would he love her still if she behaved badly? How badly can she behave and get away with it? Deliberately she disobeys her fiancé. Although she knows that she risks alienating him, she continues to declare (to a confidante) that he loves her too well to reject her. If he fails to forgive her when she does something unforgivable-well, he doesn't love her enough. After she performs the «unforgivable» action and Lord Elmwood announces his plan to go abroad for an indefinite period, breaking the engagement, she refuses to acknowledge openly her grief and despair. Pride makes her follow polite forms and disguise her feelings.

Lord Elmwood's sense of his own dignity forbids him to submit to a young woman's defiance. His ungenerous (though not implausible) interpretation of Miss Milner's behavior as betraying incurable frivolity, — 261- and his unwillingness to discuss rather than simply to command her conduct, suggest a rigidity and self-importance confirmed by his subsequent actions. The intersection of this man's and this woman's individual pride promises precisely the kind of disaster that the narrative enacts.

A third person initially dominated by pride is Mr. Sandford, who urges Lord Elmwood to marry a woman characterized by her lack of capacity for intense feeling. Arrogant in his conviction of rightness, Sandford encourages Lord Elmwood to view Miss Milner as immoral. With equal arrogance he suddenly decides-apparently on the basis of the young woman's appearance as she struggles to conceal her emotions-to command the marriage he has previously opposed, suggesting that marriage alone will allow Lord Elmwood dependably to control the flighty young woman he loves.

The novel's second half documents, not as moral triumph but as psychological process, the transformation of pride in the two central characters. (Sandford also relinquishes his pride, but more by authorial fiat than by emotional or moral logic.) Each recognizes the wrong he or she has committed, without acknowledging, as the novel in its totality does, the positive as well as negative value of their pride. The psychological complexity of Inchbald's achievement derives partly from her examination of the range of meanings attached in her historical moment to inclusive moral categories. Pride, A Simple Story demonstrates, signifies many kinds of feeling, motivates many kinds of action. If Anna St. Ives energizes its narrative by dramatizing individual uses of moral interpretations to control dangerous feeling, Inchbald's novel finds energy in an opposite movement: from moral inclusiveness to emotional discrimination.

The novel narrates only in summary fashion Lady Elmwood's infidelity, remorse, and self-abasement. On her deathbed she announces that she has no will but her husband's. She consequently makes no formal provision for her daughter, although she pleads with Lord Elmwood, in a letter posthumously delivered, to care for their child. Her pride becomes humility because she knows herself to have sinned. What she fails to know-what, indeed, she can no longer afford to know-is that her personal force has depended on just the kind of selfassertion that has led to her misbehavior. Inchbald, however, draws her readers to understand this fact and to recognize the pathos of how much a woman, by virtue of her gender, must yield. Lord Elmwood, — 262- with characteristic reticence, neglects to tell his wife about the illness that delayed his return. Believing herself willfully abandoned, she embarks on adultery in a misguided claim of autonomy. The novel does not invite its readers to condone such behavior, but it allows us to understand the action's origins in a pride that signifies not arrogance but striving for independence. Lady Elmwood's betrayal paradoxically testifies to the intensity of her love as she reacts to apparent neglect. The laws of ethics and of society condemn this woman. She rightly condemns herself. But the pride that leads her to break her marriage vows when her husband appears to lose interest stems in part from an admirable rejection of the indignities routinely visited upon women.

Lord Elmwood's pride takes longer to yield, both because society reinforces it due to his gender, rank, and wealth, and because he has not in any such obvious sense as his wife done wrong. After his wife's death, his pride manifests itself in his refusals: he insists that no one mention his wife or daughter, that his nephew never oppose him, that his personal prohibitions carry absolute force. His daughter exists in total emotional deprivation, the consequence of his sadistic arrangement that she live in his house without encountering him. Only her abduction allows Lord Elmwood to obviate his own forbiddings. Rescuing her, he learns-although he never explicitly admits it-his mistake: his daughter's emotional deprivation has entailed his own. He relinquishes pride for paternity.

In the rigidity and inflexibility of his pride, Lord Elmwood appears monstrous: an appropriate mate, in fact, for the young woman Sandford wanted him to marry. But his pride conceals-or perhaps constitutes-an emotional malady that largely results from society's gender arrangements. If Miss Milner painfully conceals her feelings, Lord Elmwood has little capacity to express his. Emotionally inarticulate, he cannot discuss with his fiancée the difficulties between them; he cannot tell her of his physical weakness (the illness that keeps him away); he cannot deal with his own suffering, so he forbids anyone to remind him of it. His cry when his daughter faints in his arms ("Her name did not however come to his recollection-nor any name but this-'Miss Milner-Dear Miss Milner. ") signifies a continuing anguish never verbally acknowledged. To the novel's end he exercises an autocrat's control, yet the discovery of a channel for his emotions has disrupted the action of his pride, a pride that, like Miss Milner's, conceals its own pathos. -263-

Matilda has little pride: her painful «education» has humbled her. Capable of resentment, she remains incapable of defying a father or of self-initiated action. Never deviating from virtue, she receives her reward in a father's love and a young man's devotion. Far more than her mother, she resembles the conventional eighteenth-century heroine of sensibility: a reactor, a weeper, an actual or potential victim, the product of a "PROPER EDUCATION." Inchbald attaches the epithet «proper» to the education that generates sensibility, the education Wollstonecraft deplored. «Proper» meaning appropriate? respectable? conventional? Certainly all three-the novel demonstrates how precisely Matilda's education in submissiveness coincides with the demands of a society organized on the basis of paternal power. On the other hand, it also demonstrates, in a way virtually inconceivable before the 1790s, that paternal power entails a train of emotional problems, for fathers as well as for daughters. Lord and Lady Elmwood, in their emotional complexity, experiencing the incompatibility of fully experienced personal feeling with reason (to use eighteenth-century terms), capture the narrator's interest as well as the reader's. Matilda, less demanding and less provocative, displays only the kind of feeling that «reason» allows: «reason» meaning (a crucial perception, this) the structure of rules ordained by society. Matilda, as a consequence, can only react. Her parents create action.

In novels of the late eighteenth century the relations of feeling to action, like those of character to action, indicated experimental directions for fiction. Like the question of character, that of feeling was now seen to involve matters of social actuality and possibility.

Public and Private Action

That novels might discuss social and political phenomena was hardly a new idea. Fielding had satirized doctors and lawyers and urban immorality; Smollett incorporated diatribes about London and Bath and about government corruption into the fabric of his novels. A sentimental hero encountering a neglected old soldier inevitably reflected on the inadequacies of a government that failed to reward him. Novels of the 1790s often continued a familiar tradition in a familiar way; Walsingham and Ellinor offer typical examples.

The most important new development in the treatment of politics and society by novels of the 1790s was an emphasis on analogies -264- between private and public experience, for example between the situation of individuals within families and that of citizens within a nation. Like set-piece discussions of social ills, such analogies could find crude or subtle, explicit or implicit statement. Wollstonecraft is explicit. When Maria asks the rhetorical question, "Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?" she establishes the theoretical groundwork for The Wrongs of Woman, which simply elaborates the metaphor by following the experience of Maria, the immediate victim of imprisonment, and Jemima, her warder. Maria, already victimized by sensibility before being confined to the madhouse, has made an unfortunate marriage, the result of romantic fantasies that led her to misinterpret her future husband's character. The man turns out to be a libertine, the father of an illegitimate child, an alcoholic gambler, and interested primarily in Maria's money. When he tries to sell her sexual favors to a friend, she flees with their baby girl. England offers her no protection: her husband repeatedly finds her, often through the betrayal of other women. She attempts to flee to the Continent, but his agents waylay her, separate her from her infant, and relegate her to the madhouse. Jemima tells a yet more horrifying story of working-class sexuality, betrayal, deprivation, and suffering.

Both Maria's autobiography (recorded in a memoir for her daughter) and Jemima's (presented in an oral narrative) narrate kinds of events familiar in eighteenth-century novels. The representation of female suffering in Wollstonecraft's fiction, however, exists to stimulate generalization rather than just to titillate. The particular case in all its lurid specificity exemplifies social malaise. Comments by the characters-Jemima herself, Maria and her lover Darnford listening to Jemima's story, Maria as she tells her own tale-and by the narrator insist that individual instances embody social evil. Several novels of the period flirt with the notion of social determinism. Wollstonecraft makes it specific and insistent, demonstrating in detail processes of cause and effect that create the inevitabilities of female lives.

Already a polemicist, Wollstonecraft predictably employed the novel as a vehicle of social commentary. More surprising cases abound. Charlotte Smith, whose first novel, Emmeline (1788), a considerable popular success, presents itself as pure romance, in the 1790s used the romance framework politically. Desmond (1792) followed three earlier romances. Unlike its predecessors, it offers a male protagonist and an explicit (and explicitly justified) concern with politics. The Old Manor -265- House, written a year later, returns to familiar elements of romance: a poor, oppressed heroine, a gallant soldier-lover, an old house scaring its inhabitants with mysterious noises and happenings. But it also suggests that personal experiences have political meanings.

Monimia, Charlotte Smith's romantically named heroine, exists as an orphaned dependent in a great house, nominally cared for by an aunt who actually exploits and envies her. Pretty and good, she early attracts the attention of Orlando Somerive, son of a neighboring family related to the mistress of the house. He sees her from the beginning as victim of «injustice» and "oppression," but she has no rebellious spirit and no obvious way of rebelling, since she lacks family and money. Orlando, the younger son of a father with limited income whose elder son has squandered the family's assets, holds a marginally more comfortable position. For years he meets Monimia secretly at the manor house. Then the time comes when, for the good of his family and for the sake of his own independence, he must assume a profession and leave Monimia. Having no particular vocational interest, he gladly accepts the offer of a commission from a man who (unbeknownst to Orlando) wishes to seduce his sister, and soon finds himself in the midst of the American Revolution. Hardships follow, for him and for Monimia, but eventually he returns to England, they marry in poverty, and the discovery of a secreted will brings them prosperity.

Little in this plot suggests political awareness or purpose. But an incidental reference to "the politics of Rayland Hall" at the end of a passage describing the servants' reactions to the news of Orlando's plans to become a soldier (the butler expects as a result to seduce the maidservant; the housekeeper hopes to find out what Monimia is up to) indicates the prevailing narrative consciousness that happenings in a house resemble those in the larger world. Most consistently emphasized is the powerlessness of poverty. Monimia has been reared to believe that her poverty in effect constitutes a sin. She reacts with wonder and gratitude to Orlando's revelation that the amount of money a person possesses does not determine the degree of his or her human rights. Orlando says that the tyranny of the privileged, resisted, will fall. Monimia's aunt governs her only by "usurped authority." Such lessons help Monimia to value herself for the first time (the text says so explicitly). Implicitly, they fortify her when, left alone, she must resist the dangers of country and city.

Meanwhile, Orlando acquires further political wisdom as a soldier, — 266- realizing that he fights for politicians, not for his country, and that the Americans are fighting for values to which the English pay lip service. He sees that governments endeavor to keep their populations in ignorance, which alone creates unquestioning obedience. When he returns to London, to experience firsthand the chicanery of lawyers and to hear about that of doctors, his fight for his rights is informed by the knowledge that his individual plight resembles that of millions. He differentiates himself by his knowledge, his ability to apply it, and his willingness to act on it.

The plot of threatened powerlessness relieved by unexpected wealth duplicates that of countless earlier works. Orlando's political sentiments sound fairly commonplace, and the political comprehension of the novel as a whole hardly goes beyond them. Nonetheless, the implication that conventional romance problems have a place in larger political structures represents an important development in the history of the novel

Tyranny and usurped authority constitute central threats within The Old Manor House and preoccupy many novelists of the period, as one might expect in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions. A Simple Story, for instance, beyond its mild allusions to Catholic politics and to the frivolity and viciousness of fashionable life, manifests little concern with the realm outside the domestic. On the other hand, it concerns itself centrally with issues of authority and power. Instead of the familiar plot of generational conflict over a daughter's marital choice, it converts a lover (an ex-Catholic priest, remember) into a metaphorical father and plays out essentially the same conflict in terms that render it both more ostensibly equal and more intimately painful. Now it becomes clear that the «daughter» can't win: either she destroys her marriage (as Lady Elmwood does) or she submits, in her own view, to becoming a cipher. The second-generation daughter, the real daughter, has learned the lesson of cipherhood. In the context of the period's other novels, this becomes a political plot.

Hermsprong makes explicit the political implications of fatherdaughter relations with the hero's personal defiance of Lord Grondale as tyrant and his insistence that the lord's daughter also resist tyranny on abstract grounds of justice. Hermsprong's antipathy toward him seems to Lord Grondale intensely personal: the nobleman personalizes all resistance. Through Hermsprong's doctrine, the novel insists that such efforts to interpret behavior on the basis of individual feeling -267- themselves amount to political acts. As for the traditional arrangement by which fathers dictate their daughters' marriages, that exemplifies the authoritarianism that threatens the country. The hero passionately articulates his understanding of how personal and political mingle in human experience:

I cannot, I fear, submit to be fettered and cramped throughout the whole circle of thought and action. You [the English] submit to authority with regard to the first, and to fashion with regard to the last. I cannot get rid of the stubborn notion, that to do what we think is right to do is the only good principle of action. You seem to think the only good principle of action is to do as others do.

Fashion and authority constrict equally. To resist both establishes the only moral basis for action, political or personal-and the action of resistance, the novel suggests, is inevitably political.

William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) explores more thoroughly than any other novel of the period the painful intersection of political and personal history. Its interest for many modern readers derives primarily from its psychological clarity, subtlety, and intricacy, but such qualities, from Godwin's stated point of view, serve to emphasize the revolutionary social message he wished to impart. As he says in his preface, he wrote in "a high state of excitement," telling himself, "I will write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before." He wished to make people understand how tyranny works. In England as it actually exists, the novel maintains, justice does not operate for the poor. Caleb, the protagonist, determines to win justice for himself and fails, not only because of the manifest inequities of the social system but because of the ways in which he has internalized its assumptions.

Godwin announces as his novel's central psychological principle the rather old-fashioned theory of the ruling passion. Curiosity fatally governs Caleb; concern for reputation as disastrously controls his employer, Falkland. The novel's action turns on Caleb's discovery of Falkland's secret: the man with a reputation for impeccable virtue has murdered an enemy and allowed two other men to be executed for his crime. Falkland promises his young secretary a terrible penalty for this knowledge. Although Caleb leaves Falkland's house, he cannot evade his power: the power of the upper class to decide the fates of their inferiors. Wherever -268- Caleb goes, news of his manufactured crime (Falkland accuses him of treacherous theft) follows him, making all communities shun him. When he finally decides to fight back, when he actually appears in a courtroom to testify against Falkland, his persecutor presents himself ravaged by illness and psychic distress. He dies shortly after Caleb's public accusation, and Caleb feels himself a murderer too, destined to desperate unhappiness even after Falkland has expired.

The characteristic that drives Caleb to uncover Falkland's secret manifests itself less as curiosity than as intolerance of ambiguity. After Caleb leaves Falkland's house, curiosity does not reveal itself as a crucial trait, but impatience with ambiguity-a need to clear things up, to make them straightforward-remains. Falkland's compulsion to keep his reputation unstained is, by assertion, rather more consistent than Caleb's curiosity, yet it inadequately elucidates his relentless and ingenious persecution of Caleb.

The effort to interpret that persecution has compelled generations of readers. I argued earlier that new kinds of emotion become the subjects of investigation in novels of the 1790s. The thesis applies to Caleb Williams perhaps more aptly than to any other single work. What makes the novel so curiously absorbing is its ambiguous representation of an intense relationship between two men, an indissoluble tie based on a quasi-paternal-filial connection, a link of love assuming the form of hate, an affiliation finally converted into identification. To call the feeling between Caleb and Falkland love masked as hate clumsily hints at the intricacy of an emotional tie never adequately labeled within the text. Caleb must flee and must not escape. Falkland must pursue as retribution but also as protection (for example, he prevents Caleb's imprisonment and even arranges for him to receive a small financial donation). Caleb cannot Fathom what is going on. His ultimate reliance on legal process constitutes, among other things, a final, unsatisfactory effort at clarification.

The problem of interpretation exists vividly within the text, presenting a challenge to characters as well as readers. In this respect as in others, Caleb Williams resembles other novels of the period. Walsingham, for instance, an epistolary novel with a single point of view, narrates the experience of a man who interprets every occurrence as persecution. If the reader gets the impression that the narrator inadequately understands his own experience, the denouement with its gender conversion dramatically confirms the ubiquitousness of misinterpretation in Wals-269- Wals-'s letters. A Simple Story raises the interpretive problem in relation to Miss Milner's premarital behavior. Before Dorriforth meets her, he receives two diametrically opposed accounts of her behavior and character. When she embarks with apparent enthusiasm on a life of frivolity, those around her develop radically different explanatory theories. And Dorriforth/ Elmwood in fact never adequately grasps his fiancée's or his wife's nature.

Caleb Williams makes the problem of interpretation explicitly political, at least in part. The novel obsessively reiterates the difference between laws-both literal legal sanctions and general social rules-for the rich and for the poor. That difference, in practice, depends on interpretation. The same act performed by a rich man and a poor one is understood as having utterly different meanings. The poor have no rights because the law always assumes that truth inheres in the rich. Such assessment on the basis of class manifestly carries social meaning, but even efforts at personal understanding derive from and register in the social order. Thus Caleb, defying ambiguity and announcing to himself his «freedom» as he leaves Falkland behind, perceives that "every man is fated to be more or less the tyrant or the slave." He decides that he himself will remain «disengaged» from this corrupt system and will "never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer"-this at the moment he sets forth on the path that destines him to face precisely that choice of roles in relation to Falkland. He can suffer at his former employer's hands or he can «oppress» by revealing the older man's crime. He has no other choice, and his efforts to explain the operations of the social system so as to avoid its most sinister effects are necessarily doomed to failure.

Nonetheless, Caleb continues his interpretive struggle, which, like his refusal to be tyrant or slave, most often involves an attempt to declare his individuality, his specialness. In prison, for instance, he develops an elaborate mental life, imaginatively placing himself in every conceivable situation and planning the conduct appropriate to every human difficulty. He believes himself uniquely prepared for all experience, triumphantly self-sufficient. This reading of his situation, like his earlier ones, proves insufficient to the actualities that soon assail him. His self-interpretation cannot survive society's pressures.

The conflict between Falkland and his irrational enemy Tyrrel, which ends in Tyrrel's murder, turns in its early stages on questions of interpretation. Tyrrel, predictably, understands interpretation as a kind -270- of fraud. He takes his own view as simple truth. Falkland's effort to convince Tyrrel of his obligation of charity toward his social inferiors meets a significant negative response: "I always knew you had the wit to make good your own story, and tell a plausible tale. But I will not be come over thus." Despite his brutality and obtuseness, Tyrrel has perceived an important fact. Individual interpretations-the «stories» or «tales» that people tell-indeed belong to the interplay of power that defines human relations. Substituting physical for mental power and using his social position to maximum advantage, Tyrrel exploits the weapons available to him. But so do Falkland and Caleb.

The particular subtleties of the emotional connections between Falkland and Caleb indeed seem "particular," not just the effects of social forces. On the other hand, the structural duplication of the father-son bond in the situation between the two men suggests that the most delicate idiosyncrasies of domestic relations involving inequalities of power inevitably reflect larger social patterns. Dramatizing a prolonged effort at both literal and metaphorical escape, Caleb Williams insists at every level on escape's impossibility.

In its unrelieved pessimism, Godwin's novel shows every avenue of hope systematically blocked, enforcing a fiercely negative view of the human prospect. Although like Godwin's they investigate with more or less consistency the connections between the «private» and the "public," the period's other works of fiction characteristically discover a way out of despair in the imagined nature of an energetic individual-a Hermsprong, an Anna St. Ives, even a Sidney. Godwin alone faces the possibility that the idea of individualism is itself a fiction, an interpretation necessary for hope but antithetical to logic.

Action and form

In a preface to the Standard Novels edition of Caleb Williams, Godwin emphasized not only the book's political purpose but its formal intensity. He explained how he plotted backward, beginning with the events of the third volume, "a series of adventures of flight and pursuit," then working back to the narrative of secret murder, the second volume's project, and finally telling the story of Falkland's early career, which lends pathos to his later corruption. A rigorous sense of narrative logic governed his planning. In the finished work, the results of that logic help to create both the painful impression of inevitability that governs -271- Caleb's repeated frustration and bafflement and the more generalized impression that hope constitutes only an illusion.

If Godwin shared Mary Hays's project of putting the mind in motion, he pursued this endeavor partly by blocking accustomed paths of thought and feeling. His narrative of composition suggests his recognition that a fiction's shape helps determine its most profound effects. Judging by their novels' evidence, few of his contemporaries shared that recognition; if they did, few could find narrative patterns that would provoke energetic reaction. It is perhaps for this reason-that the new imagining of the novelistic enterprise did not typically include the imagining of new forms-that novels of the 1790s, despite their large ambitions, have not found a wide audience. Often the period's novelists poured their new wine into old bottles.

Formal conventions, in short, lagged behind ideological innovations in the novels of the 1790s. Anna St. Ives and Walsingham, both epistolary in form, thus appear to declare themselves old-fashioned, even as they articulate fresh ideas. Memoirs of Emma Courtney, also loosely epistolary, tells its story in long letters from Emma to her foster son that incorporate shorter letters from the past. The epistolary mode implicitly announces personal relations as the preeminent subject of the novel. For writers who wished to make their readers think about the social implications of personal experience, reliance on fictional correspondence conveyed a contradictory message by allowing readers to relax into familiar and relatively passive ways of reading.

As for third-person narratives, also employed during the period, they most often preserve the loose one-thing-after-another structure made familiar by the picaresque novel. Ellinor and The Old Manor House exemplify the type. They do not lack plot, but events often take place on the page ma0inly for their own sake; the reader is invited to interest herself in the multiplicity of happenings as instances of the infinite possibility of circumstance, not as episodes stimulated by the novelistic pattern of action in itself, however energizing a doctrine the fiction advances.

Only a few 1790s novelists appear to acknowledge a need for fictional form to emphasize ideological meaning. In Hermsprong Bage invents a narrator who himself plays a peripheral part in the novel's happenings. Gregory Glen, an illegitimate child with no clearly defined social place, has the potential to provide an outsider's perspective on conventional structures and thus to insist on social meanings even within a romance plot. His view of the world, as a "child of nature" in quite a different sense -272- from Hermsprong, might present a slightly skewed counterpart to the hero's and participate in a rich interplay of attitudes. Hermsprong is wealthy and titled; Gregory is poor and lacks even a real last name. How provocative to pursue the conjunctions and disparities of attitude between them! Bage does not, however, pursue anything of the sort. Only intermittently does he give his narrator a distinctive voice and character. For long stretches, Gregory offers no commentary beyond almost sycophantic approval of Hermsprong. At the outset he suggests his own moral and political position, but that position soon disappears from view. The novel hints at but never fully achieves structural innovation.

Godwin and Inchbald, alone among the writers discussed in this chapter, successfully developed-at least in single novels-expressive structures of novelistic action. Many critics have considered the two-part structure of A Simple Story a flaw. It reflects a possible historical disjunction: Inchbald may have written the first section in 1779 and ten years later combined it with a second. Sandford's nature appears to have changed between the two parts, and Catholicism no longer constitutes a plot issue. Yet a profound unity-indeed, the unity of action recommended by Aristotle, who in 1792 had been newly translated and annotated-controls the novel as a whole. In different keys, the two parts tell the same story: of a daughter's longing for and eventual union with a father (or "father"). Part 1 ends, apparently happily, with the unexpected marriage of Lord Elmwood and Miss Milner. Part 2 undoes the marriage and kills the woman, then tells the story of a well-trained girl's achievement of apparent happiness through a career of flawless compliance. The first part appears to reward a spirited female for her spirit. Its sequel reveals that assertiveness, willed autonomy, and desire for power are unacceptable components of female nature. The combination of reiterated action with divergent implication exerts a powerful effect. The revisionary moral weight of the second section bears heavily on the transgressive imaginings of the first, effecting an uneasy reconciliation by means of the stated «moral» about a proper education, which reinforces retroactively the negative interpretation of Miss Milner's premarital behavior. On the other hand, the daring vision of a young woman in love who yet ventures to claim power also affects one's understanding of its more orthodox aftermath. The shadow of a challenging, inventive mother stands behind the sublimely well-behaved and altogether uninventive daughter, implicitly commenting on the high cost, for a woman, of achieving social approval. Here as in the century's conduct books, a -273- proper education instructs a woman in giving up-giving up her hopes, her autonomy, her revealed energy. But Miss Milner's presence in the background provides a graphic reminder of the loss entailed.The two-part pattern that enables this ironic conjunction reinforces the narrative's impact and dramatizes the harsh alternatives that delimit every female prospect. Like the tight plotting of Caleb Williams, the apparently more diffuse structural arrangement of A Simple Story precisely suits the fable it contains. When Godwin, in the same preface that reported his mode of plotting, revealed his hope that his novel would constitute an epoch in the reader's mind, he suggested no necessary connection between the plotting and the grand effect of which he dreamed. Yet the relentless logic of his plot contributes to the moral disturbance the novel creates, as does the bipartite division of Inchbald's work. Both novelists demonstrated the possible interplay of form and function in ideological fiction. Inchbald, unlike Godwin, makes no ideological claims for her accomplishment, presenting it as only "a simple story." But her novel, too, arguably constitutes an epoch in the mind: a work that significantly shifts our perception of moral possibility.

Patricia Meyer Spacks

Selected Bibliography

Butler Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

Butler Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Castle Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.

Johnson Claudia. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Kelly Gary. The English Jacobin Novel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.

Paulson Ronald. Representations of Revolution 1789–1820. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983.

Schofield Mary Anne, and Cecilia Macheski, eds. Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986.

Spacks Patricia Meyer. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Tompkins J. M. S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

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Jane Austen

JANE AUSTEN lived from 1775 to 1817 and wrote six novels. They were composed in a slightly different order, but completed and published as follows: Sense and Sensibility, 1811; Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Mansfield Park, 1814; and Emma, 1816. Both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1818, though the former was written long before and only slightly revised for publication. Austen also left in manuscript several volumes of short fiction-juvenilia-brief, highly ironic sketches that satirize various forms of popular fiction, especially sentimental fiction. Also left were several unfinished works, including an early novella, Lady Susan, a dark fragment from her middle years, The Watsons, and the beginnings of a very different style of novel that she was working on when she died, Sanditon. Though she never married, Austen was very close to her elder sister Cassandra, to whom she wrote hundreds of letters, which have been collected and published; what we know about her life comes largely from these letters.

For a number of reasons, Jane Austen's novels occupy a crucial place in literary history. Her writing has remained well loved for a remarkably long time. She has a following inside and outside of academia, as indicated by the many inexpensive paperback editions of her books that are available, the global membership of the Jane Austen Society, and the steady stream of articles and books that continue to appear about her novels, which themselves have remained in print ever since they were first published. If, as Roland Barthes remarked some time ago, literature is what gets taught, Austen's works are among the few that belong -275- on both sides of the fence. Her novels would be read even if they were not taught; like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice is a novel that many people would read anyway.

To literary historians, Austen's novels occupy an important place in literary history not simply because of the presumption of intrinsic quality but for their innovations in narrative form. As early as 1815, Sir Walter Scott recognized in his review of Emma that this novel was distinctively different-a new species of writing about common life. The most influential discussion of Jane Austen's technological innovations in narrative is Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, where he argues, in effect, that after the many fits and starts of eighteenth-century novelistic form-the various experiments in first- and third-person narratives, epistolary novels, and other clumsy devices-with her "technical genius" Austen finally got it right. In his epistolary novels, Richardson mastered a realism of presentation, and so was able to achieve a high degree of verisimilitude in conveying the minutiae of daily life. In his turn, Fielding, with his omniscient and judgmental narrators who see directly into the hearts of characters, achieved a mastery of realism of assessment. Jane Austen, however, was the first novelist capable of conveying both the interior and exterior of human life, in her «reconciliation» or synthesis of Richardson's psychological skills and Fielding's sociological scope. By the use of a nonintrusive but still omniscient narrator, Austen developed the means of representing the totality of human life.

In two pages, Watt brilliantly sums up the conventional literary historical view of Austen's "successful resolution" of the eighteenth-century novel. Austen followed Burney and Richardson "in their minute presentation of daily life," but unlike them, Austen could also stand far enough away to display everyday life objectively and comically because hers were not first-person narratives in which the autobiographer or letter writer was the main actor. Like Fielding's, her third-person narrators were free to judge the action, but hers were more judicious and less interfering. In sum, Austen achieved the best of both worlds:

Her analyses of her characters and their states of mind, and her ironical juxtapositions of motive and situation are as pointed as anything in Fielding, but they do not seem to come from an intrusive author but rather from some august and impersonal spirit of social and psychological understanding. At the same time, Jane Austen varied her narrative point of view sufficiently to give us, not only editorial comment, but much of Defoe's and Richardson's psy-276- chological closeness to the subjective world of the characters. In her novels there is usually only one character whose consciousness is tacitly accorded a privileged status, and whose mental life is rendered more completely than that of the other characters… Jane Austen's novels, in short, must be seen as the most successful solution of the two general narrative problems for which Richardson and Fielding had provided only partial answers.

The function that Austen's work serves here, or the problem it is asked to solve, is not merely technical, because almost inevitably in discussions such as this, technical issues or issues of narrative form modulate into moral or ideological questions that turn on the truth of her vision. Watt continues: "She was able to combine into a harmonious unity the advantages both of realism of presentation and realism of assessment, of the internal and of the external approaches to character; her novels have authenticity without diffuseness or trickery, wisdom of social comment without a garrulous essayist, and a sense of the social order which is not achieved at the expense of the individuality and autonomy of the characters." What is at stake here is no longer technical prowess but harmonious authenticity, not the way she conveys life stories but what she conveys, which is another matter entirely.

Austen described her purview in a letter as "pictures of domestic life in country villages," a scale that is condensed even further in another selfdeprecating and trivializing description of her own novels, "the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush." But despite this small scale, Austen found the means of displaying the inside and the outside of human life, how her characters think and feel, along with how they interact with others. Inaugurating the Great Tradition of the English novel, as F. R. Leavis puts it, Jane Austen "makes possible" George Eliot. In sum, Austen's novels have been valued so highly and she has been accorded such an important place in the history of the novel for formal as well as substantive reasons. Both views, however, turn on assumptions about the value of realism and presuppose that the purpose of the novel is to represent human life stories accurately or truthfully and convincingly; whether for her improvements in the way lives are shown or in what aspects of human life are shown, Austen has long been celebrated as a masterful innovator as well as a brilliant practitioner.

To begin to explore some of these innovations and their connections with truth, let us look at an unremarkable passage that exhibits these formal skills or features. In her earliest novel, Northanger Abbey, the -277- very ordinary protagonist, Catherine Moreland, has fallen in love with Henry Tilney, only to be separated from him by his father, the selfimportant and manipulative General Tilney. At the conclusion, Henry unexpectedly turns up at Catherine's house, and the lovers are reunited in Austen's typically understated manner. After Catherine's abrupt return home from an extended visit to Bath and then to the Tilneys' estate, Catherine's mother finds her daughter's spirits depressed, and sets out to remedy Catherine's repining with an apt moral essay from The Mirror.

On entering the room, the first object she beheld was a young man whom she had never seen before. With a look of much respect, he immediately rose, and being introduced to her by her conscious daughter as "Mr. Henry Tilney," with the embarrassment of real sensibility began to apologise for his appearance there, acknowledging that after what had passed he had little right to expect a welcome at Fullerton, and stating his impatience to be assured of Miss Moreland's having reached her home in safety, as the cause of his intrusion.

The physical space in which this scene takes place is given minimal description: we can only figure out by inference that it is downstairs, and that it contains the preoccupied, listless, disappointed Catherine, for whom Mrs. Moreland went in search of the therapeutic essay "about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance"-the mother's diagnosis of her daughter's disaffection. All the room contains are the three human figures, with Catherine at "her work," occupied with the perennial needlework of middle-class domestic women. Rather than relying on a multitude of physical or descriptive details, Austen chooses to set the scene with the social relations, sketching the concerned mother and the affectionate but distracted daughter, each more or less occupied by a range of domestic chores that are more gestured toward than they are described. In short, the characters are simply situated "at home." Into this scene Henry Tilney is inserted without any further detail about his appearance, equipage, or dress. Instead he is furnished with an appropriate social explanation for his call: polite and appropriate concern for the well-being of Catherine, a recent guest and friend of his sister's. Austen's focus here is not on physical space but on social relations, on what brings these three together and on what ties them together-the nets of concern, affection, duty, or responsibility. The author sets her stage with emotional explanations. The paragraph continues by recounting Mrs. Moreland's response to Henry's explanation: -278-

He did not address himself to an uncandid judge or a resentful heart. Far from comprehending him or his sister in their father's misconduct, Mrs. Moreland had been always kindly disposed towards each, and instantly, pleased by his appearance, received him with the simple professions of unaffected benevolence; thanking him for such an attention to her daughter, assuring him that the friends of her children were always welcome there, and intreating him to say not another word of the past.

Again what is conveyed here has little to do with the material world of possessions, objects, and appearances but has all to do with a world of social obligations. Mrs. Moreland and Henry Tilney, who have never before met, initiate a social bond that follows the pattern of deference and obligation. What matters is unaffected benevolence, thanks, and assurance. With that assurance, the three figures in this vaguely sketched interior space are tied together in a clearly delineated social relation of both polite and genuinely concerned conduct.

But while this conventional bond is drawn, it is significant that Austen has chosen to narrate this scene from the perspective of the least knowledgeable figure, for Mrs. Moreland is not aware of the affection between Catherine and Henry. Apart from the conventional benevolence, thanks, and assurance, another separate and entirely different relation exists, and that is the one readers are most attuned to-Catherine's romance with Henry. The narrative pattern of this paragraph has a slightly defamiliarizing effect on the reader, shifting our outlook from the customary one that follows or is embodied within Catherine. The narrative apparatus briefly pulls back to occupy the position of conventional maternal authority. And after providing maternal assurances, the next paragraph turns to Henry's awkward subject position:

He was not ill inclined to obey this request, for, though his heart was greatly relieved by such unlooked-for mildness, it was not just at that moment in his power to say any thing to the purpose. Returning in silence to his seat, therefore, he remained for some minutes most civilly answering all Mrs. Moreland's common remarks about the weather and the roads.

This subsequent conversation is the equivalent of white noise, unimportant filler. Twentieth-century readers may have the advantage of familiarity with hundreds of subsequent domestic romances, and therefore we know what Henry has come for, but what we are explicitly given by the narrator is noise about roads and weather. The principal figure in the landscape has disappeared; nothing has been said about her since -279- the «conscious» (i.e., self-conscious) Catherine introduced Henry a page earlier. After a page of this noise that brings the interaction to a standstill-the equivalent of "meanwhile back at the ranch"-the narrative finally returns to its customary center of attention:

Catherine meanwhile, — the anxious, agitated, happy, feverish Catherine, — said not a word; but her glowing cheek and brightened eye made her mother trust that this good-natured visit would at least set her heart at ease for a time, and gladly therefore did she lay aside the first volume of the Mirror for a future hour.

Here the narrative explicitly acknowledges and exploits the gap between inside and outside, between the internal happy Catherine, that contradictory list of states of feeling, and the external Catherine, her glowing cheek and brightened eye. The highly compressed description of interior state-six words contained within and demarcated by dashes-is quickly superseded by Mrs. Moreland's kind but obtuse view, with some sly mockery of the supposed efficacy of moral essays (which are always recommended by social commentators, while novels are just as regularly denigrated as distracting if not injurious). In short, ever so briefly the narrative probes inside, beneath the skin, to give us a tantalizing glimpse of what Catherine is really feeling. But instantly that view is withdrawn, and we are brought back to the social surface. The narrative displays its capacity to move within, but it does so only to highlight the disparity between interiority and exteriority.

Thereare several ways to describe this phenomenon. The focus of the whole is not entirely on the gap between inside and outside, for that distinction is largely immaterial to Mrs. Moreland and even to Henry. It could be said that the narrative follows a pattern of increasing interiorization or idealization, starting from firm social relations and moving toward highly individualized happiness. It could also be said that the focus of the narrative circles about this trio until it finally settles briefly on Catherine. All the way through the reader is teased with the contrast between initiated (Catherine and Henry) and uninitiated (Mrs. Moreland). Furthermore, this sequence could be read as a narrative tour de force designed to display technique: the narrator shows off what she can know and what she can tell. This last point implies that the scene involves more than just these three subjects, for it also necessarily contains or implies a narrator and a reader. If the narrator is showing off with a brief flash of what she can do, so too she is staking a sort of claim. -280-

It is Catherine's character and Catherine's decorum or reputation that is safely contained within those dashes: Catherine's feelings are displayed ever so gently and briefly; the anxious, agitated, happy, feverish, Catherine, with glowing cheek and brightened eye ever so delicately suggests a physical body and its pleasures. The narrator exposes an affectionate concern for her creation not at all unlike the maternal affection of Mrs. Moreland (which in turn is not dissimilar from the propriety interest evident in the narrator's phrase "my heroine"). Unlike earlier passages in the novel where Catherine's capacity for heroism is doubted, and the middle sections of the novel where her naïveté and her fondness for the Gothic make Catherine look very foolish, here the narrator does not make fun of Catherine, but rather seems to express her affection for the anxious, agitated, happy, feverish, Catherine, and, in a way, to privilege these emotions, at least in contrast to the mundane thoughts of the remedial essays that construct girls as correctable objects. Catherine's happiness could easily be mocked or minimized as the giddy feeling of a silly girl, but it is not. One might even say that this novel offers a generic choice, rejecting the exaggerations or extravagances of the Gothic in favor of the humble domestic romance. Here at the end of the novel Catherine's happiness is presented as the appropriate end to her conduct, and marriage to Henry as a suitable reward.

After a lengthy paragraph that takes up most of a page, the narrative finally gets Catherine and Henry alone:

His first purpose was to explain himself, and before they reached Mr. Allen's grounds he had done it so well, that Catherine did not think it could ever be repeated too often. She was assured of his affection; and that heart in return was solicited, which, perhaps, they pretty equally knew was already entirely his own; for, though Henry was now sincerely attached to her, though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine's dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.

Represented apart from Mrs. Moreland, these two reach an understanding that is not rendered in dialogue but only reported after the fact; but no veil has been decorously thrown over the pair, for the narrator is capable of describing both Henry's and Catherine's motivations, which, it is implied, are clearer to the narrator and her readers than to -281- the characters. And thereafter, focus on the lovers is dissolved in a direct address of narrator to reader about matters of invention. The arch or wry voice, so typical of Austen, implies that men's attractions to women are very commonly stimulated by women's partialities; but the whole matter of courtship in general, and Henry and Catherine's in particular, has been replaced by the matter of fiction with the terms romance, heroine, and imagination. As so often happens in Northanger Abbey, the narrator insists upon the constructedness of this tale even while she insists that this tale is much more believable and reasonable than the common run of novels, those mere romances that precede it.

With this insistence on fictionality, the scene necessarily comes to be understood as one constructed out of a series of characters situated between the narrator and the reader. And what is understood about character becomes less a matter of realism, depth psychology, and accuracy in portraying life stories, and more a matter of what the novelist can invent and what she chooses to tell. As such, these last few sentences about the heroine's dignity are a fitting end to a passage that has demonstrated the author's magisterial skills at telling. From sentence to sentence it becomes clear that this is less a matter of revealing truth than of the narrator's deciding what she wishes to tell. For the narrative shifts all the way through, from one subject position to another and from one consciousness to another, and finally steps back and sets the three constructed consciousnesses, or subject positions, into a pattern. From a high seat of surveillance, the all-seeing narrator decides what they can know and what we can know. That is, the narrator intrudes into and recedes from interior space at will, at the very same time as she concedes that she is constructing this space.

Little of this swirling, shifting, and variable narration registers with readers because the shifts are rendered so fluid and unmarked through the technique of free indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse is the term used for paraphrase or condensed dialogue, presented indirectly by the narrator without the signal of quotation marks or "he said/she said." Furthermore, free indirect discourse can dispense with "she thought/he thought," so that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between what is said and what is thought. Consider the following sentence: "Far from comprehending him or his sister in their father's misconduct, Mrs. Moreland had been always kindly disposed towards each, and instantly, pleased by his appearance, received him with the simple professions of unaffected benevolence; thanking him for such an attention to her -282- daughter, assuring him that the friends of her children were always welcome there, and intreating him to say not another word of the past." It is apparent that the first clause represents Mrs. Moreland's thought-she would not speak of "his father's misconduct" to Henry; but the rest of the sentence could be a condensation of her genial remarks of welcome, presented indirectly to the reader. While all of this is clear enough in the reading, the intriguing part comes in the all but invisible transition (here signaled only by a semicolon) from thought to speech. It is this very technique that renders character transparent in narrative, enabling the narrative to move fluidly from exteriority to interiority, showing both the inside and the outside of character, mind and body-in this case, individual judgment in the first half of the sentence and social interaction in the second half. It is this technique that enables the novelist to represent both the nature of character and its position in social space, producing the impression of a totality.

Let us compare this early novel with a later one containing a similar encounter between the protagonists. Here, toward the end of Emma, is a paradigmatic moment in Austen's work, as a character carefully analyzes a minute detail of social interaction: Mr. Knightley's acknowledgment of Emma's reparation for her unkindness to Miss Bates at the Box Hill outing. Distressed by Mr. Knightley's condemnation of her thoughtless and cruel sport of Miss Bates, the very next morning a chastened Emma makes a penitent call on the Bateses to make up for her slight. When Mr. Knightley comes to call, her father praises Emma for her attention to the Bateses, praise that both Emma and Mr. Knightley know she does not deserve:

Emma's colour was heightened by this unjust praise; and with a smile, and shake of the head, which spoke much, she looked at Mr. Knightley.-It seemed as if there were an instantaneous impression in her favour, as if his eyes received the truth from her's, and all that had passed of good in her feelings were at once caught and honoured.-He looked at her with a glow of warm regard. She was warmly gratified-and in another moment still more so, by a little movement of more than common friendliness on his part. He took her hand;-whether she had not herself made the first motion, she could not say-she might, perhaps, have rather offered it-but he took her hand, pressed it, and certainly was on the point of carrying it to his lips-when, from some fancy or other, he suddenly let it go.-Why he should feel such a scruple, why he should change his mind when it was all but done, she could not perceive.-He would have judged better, she thought, if he had not stopped.-The intention, however, was indubitable; and whether it was that his manners had in -283- general so little gallantry, or however else it happened, but she thought nothing became him more.-It was with him, of so simple, yet so dignified a nature.-She could not but recall the attempt with great satisfaction. It spoke such perfect amity.-He left them immediately afterwards-gone in a moment. He always moved with the alertness of a mind which could neither be undecided nor dilatory, but now he seemed more sudden than usual in his disappearance.

Unlike the compact and economical encounter in Northanger Abbey, this whole paragraph focuses on some very slight gestures. Communication, such as it is here, is perfectly silent, gestural, and physical. Various things seem to be communicated: a message of correction, advice taken and acted upon; a message of approval that the advice was taken. There are also distinct undercurrents of desire and the pleasure of physical touch. Emma's desire for Mr. Knightley has yet to be acknowledged by herself, and he has yet to declare himself-so there are several levels of signification here, the most diffuse of which is that Emma's sense of well-being is more dependent on his good opinion than she has yet realized. These undercurrents complicate Emma's relatively simple attempt to indicate that she is in agreement with Mr. Knightley. And because their interaction is gestural, the narrator emphasizes that it is one-sided; the whole paragraph consists of Emma's interpretation of his gestures, punctuated by a whole series of words like seemed, might, and could. The paragraph then consists of an unusual mixture of assurance and tentativeness. The dashes indicate the rapid flow of thought, as Emma quickly runs through all the possible meanings of his gesture. Like the poetry of surmise in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper," where he tries to understand the Gaelic song-"perhaps the numbers flow / For old, unhappy, far-off things"-the meaning can only be imagined, never known. The most significant difference between the representation of this encounter and that in the earlier novel is that here the narrative does not move around from one character to another; in fact, throughout the novel, we see directly into Mr. Knightley's consciousness only once, and even this insight is qualified by the quotation of Cowper's doubting line, "Myself creating what I saw." The present passage is definitely Emma's view of Mr. Knightley, her train of thought. Compared with Northanger Abbey, the narrative here is much more single-minded focusing on Emma's interpretation of what Mr. Knightley may have meant by that gesture. One consequence of such a focus is a -284- powerful sense of interiorization, as if the whole paragraph takes place within Emma's consciousness and exteriority has been diminished to the momentary grasp of the hand. Additionally, by concentrating so insistently in the later novels on the interpretation of others' words and gestures, Austen turns penetration or interpretation of character and the corresponding transparency or opacity of character into an overt theme in the narrative; in passages such as this, characters anatomize what one can know of another. This thematization of opacity occurs when the technique is most assertively transparent-seeing directly into the heart of Emma, we are asked to doubt her capacity to know another. In Emma, this contradiction is particularly rich because Emma always assumes she knows more than she does. But still, while there are impediments, character is knowable here. This thematization presumes a depth of character, a desire to know, and finally, knowability-seeing into the heart of Emma, we are not encouraged to doubt the depth or consistency of her character. In sum, one can stress the power of the narrator, and her motive of order, or one can stress how little the characters can know of others.

To look at an example in the middle of Austen's career, let us turn to Pride and Prejudice. As many have noticed, this narrative seems to shift in the middle from an exterior, comic or satiric form that conveys Elizabeth's pride in her superior judgment to a more introspective, subjective, and reflective narrative in which she contemplates her mistakes. Up to Darcy's first proposal of marriage at the Hunsford Parsonage, the narrative is largely cast in dialogue and is presented by a narrator who is an arch and intrusive social commentator, but the tone of assurance is fractured by Elizabeth's humiliating discovery that she has had overmuch confidence in her judgment. After rudely spurning his proposal of marriage (only to find to her mortification that she has vastly misjudged him), Elizabeth accidentally meets Darcy by touring his home, after she has had plenty of time to reflect on her mistaken judgment of him. The magnificence of Darcy's estate, Pemberley, along with the extravagant praise of his loyal housekeeper, unsettle anew Elizabeth's opinion of him:

They were within twenty yards of each other, and so abrupt was his appearance, that it was impossible to avoid his sight. Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush. He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immoveable from surprise; but shortly recovering himself, advanced towards the party, and spoke to Elizabeth, if not in terms of -285- perfect composure, at least of perfect civility.

She had instinctively turned away; but, stopping on his approach, received his compliments with an embarrassment impossible to be overcome. Had his first appearance, or his resemblance to the picture they had just been examining, been insufficient to assure the other two that they now saw Mr. Darcy, the gardener's expression of surprise, on beholding his master, must immediately have told it. They stood a little aloof while he was talking to their niece, who, astonished and confused, scarcely dared lift her eyes to his face, and knew not what answer she returned to his civil enquiries after her family. Amazed at the alteration in his manner since they last parted, every sentence that he uttered was increasing her embarrassment; and every idea of the impropriety of her being found there, recurring to her mind, the few minutes in which they continued together, were some of the most uncomfortable of her life. Nor did he seem much more at ease; when he spoke, his accent had not of its usual sedateness; and he repeated his enquiries as to the time of her leaving Longbourn, and of her stay in Derbyshire, so often, and in so hurried a way, as plainly spoke of the distraction of his thoughts.

At length, every idea seemed to fail him; and, after standing a few moments without saying a word, he suddenly recollected himself, and took leave.

Despite the concern with Elizabeth's and Darcy's feelings, this scene remains grounded in its surroundings, Darcy's estate, Pemberley. Elizabeth never forgets where she is, as the narrative reminds us of the scenery, and Darcy's social status is never allowed to recede from notice. Up to this point, the narrative could easily function as stage directions for a play, for everything that is supposed to transpire within registers on the face as blush or across the body as start. From here on, however, the narrative turns within, and follows Elizabeth's emotional reaction to Darcy's unexpected appearance:

The others then joined her, and expressed their admiration of his figure; but Elizabeth heard not a word, and, wholly engrossed by her own feelings, followed them in silence. She was overpowered by shame and vexation. Her coming there was the most unfortunate, the most ill-judged, thing in the world! How strange must it appear to him! In what a disgraceful light might it not strike so vain a man! It might seem as if she had purposely thrown herself in his way again! Oh! why did she come? or, why did he thus come a day before he was expected? Had they only been ten minutes sooner, they should have been beyond the reach of his discrimination, for it was plain that he was that moment arrived, that moment alighted from his horse or his carriage. She blushed again and again over the perverseness of the meeting. And his behaviour, so strikingly altered, — what could it mean? That he should even speak to -286- her was amazing! — but to speak with such civility, to enquire after her family! Never in her life has she seen his manners so little dignified, never had he spoken with such gentleness as on this unexpected meeting. What a contrast did it offer to his last address in Rosing's Park, when he put his letter into her hand! She knew not what to think, nor how to account for it.

They had now entered a beautiful walk by the side of the water, and every step was bringing them forward to a nobler fall of ground, or a finer reach of the woods to which they were approaching; but it was some time before Elizabeth was sensible of any of it; and, though she answered mechanically to the repeated appeals of her uncle and aunt, and seemed to direct her eyes to such objects as they pointed out, she distinguished no part of the scene. Her thoughts were all fixed on that one spot of Pemberley House, whichever it might be, where Mr. Darcy then was. She longed to know what at that moment was passing in his mind; in what manner he thought of her, and whether, in defiance of every thing, she was still dear to him. Perhaps he had been civil, only because he felt himself at ease; yet there had been that in his voice, which was not like ease. Whether he had felt more of pain or of pleasure in seeing her, she could not tell, but he certainly had not seen her with composure.

In free indirect discourse, the train of her thoughts is recounted in full, grammatical, and neatly constructed sentences; urgency or passion is only marked by the series of exclamation points. And though the scene conveys Elizabeth's agitation, none of it is represented in an agitated style-the narration still conveys order, control, and rationality. Her emotional state is carefully assessed in an abstract, Johnsonian vocabulary of embarrassment, shame, and vexation, vocabulary that negates the particularity and subjectivity of her emotions: anyone meeting her spurned suitor in such circumstance would feel shame and vexation. What most distinguishes this passage from the early example from Northanger Abbey is that the narrative does not tell us about Darcy, only Elizabeth; aside from one unusual passage about Elizabeth's "fine eyes," Darcy's consciousness is never represented in Pride and Prejudice. And as such, his character remains opaque and inaccessible: "She longed to know what at that moment was passing in his mind" speaks of a desire that can never be fulfilled. But of course, if his subject position is said to be impenetrable, hers is an open book, open for all the readers of Pride and Prejudice. In a contradiction that is not so different from the high modernist perspective of, say, Virginia Woolf, Pride and Prejudice may assert that complex characters are not easily known, that their riches consist of a hyperinteriority, but such an assertion has the -287- obvious effect of raising the price of interior riches, of the depths of character to be plumbed in an Elizabeth Bennet or a Mrs. Dalloway, both of whom are to be immensely valued over the shallow and easily known Mr. Collinses of the world. Reuben Brower writes, in a typical view, that "what most satisfies us in reading the dialogue in Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's awareness that it is difficult to know any complex person, that the knowledge of a man like Darcy is an interpretation and a construction, not a simple absolute… A reasoned judgment of character [is] reached through long experience and slow weighing of possibilities."

The most remarkable reunion scene in Austen occurs in her last finished novel, Persuasion. Seven years earlier, Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth were engaged to be married, but because his calling was unsettled, and due to the persuasion of elders, Anne calls off their marriage. At the opening of the novel, Captain Wentworth has returned wealthy, secure, and, though affecting indifference to Anne, still resentful. The first meeting of these former lovers takes place at the home of Anne's sister, Mary. Mary is now married to Charles Musgrove, and Captain Wentworth has come to go shooting with Charles; Wentworth stops to say hello to Mary, where Anne first sees him:

The others appeared; they were in the drawing-room. Her eye half met Captain Wentworth's; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice-he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing: the room seemed full-full of persons and voices-but a few minutes ended it. Charles shewed himself at the window, all was ready, their visitor had bowed and was gone; the Miss Musgroves were gone too, suddenly resolving to walk to the end of the village with the sportsmen: the room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could.

"It is over! it is over!" she repeated to herself again, and again, in nervous gratitude. "The worst is over!"

Mary talked, but she could not attend. She had seen him. They had met.

They had been once more in the same room!

Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years has passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinction! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals, — all, all must be comprised in it; and oblivion of the past-how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life.

-288-

Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.

Now, how were his sentiments to be read? Was this like wishing to avoid her? And the next moment she was hating herself for the folly which asked the questions.

In the later novels such as Emma or Persuasion, when the narrator shows the interior state, she does not summarize it with such conventional terms as embarrassment and vexation. By conveying her agitation in the style and sentence structure (a whole series of inelegant, short, stubby clauses), the narrator does not have to say that Anne Elliot is uncomfortable, and, as a consequence, we get the most dramatic and immediate use of free indirect discourse to achieve transparency. Here, the external event is minimized, rendered in almost phantasmagorical fashion-"the room seemed full-full of persons and voices"-as the text concentrates only on Anne's response. The dialogue is background noise that the narrative doesn't even bother to repeat. The narration no longer conveys order, control, and rationality, for the event, while ordinary, is painful and irrational-in fact, most of the passage consists in Anne's difficult struggle to impose rationality on it. Like much of Persuasion, this passage is Wordsworthian in its focus on memory, the pain of remembering, and how memory separates one individual from another. Austen's most solitary protagonist, Anne Elliot suffers alone. The intensely subjective passage quoted represents an interior sermon in which she cautions herself to expect nothing but changes, alienations, and removals, none of them for the better. A few lines later, Mary relates to Anne Wentworth's comment on their meeting again after all these years: "'Altered beyond his knowledge! Anne fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification."

Her mortification is followed by the narrator's summarizing of Wentworth's attitude in indirect discourse:

Frederick Wentworth had used such words, or something like them ['You were so altered he should not have known you again'], but without an idea that they would be carried round to her. He had thought her wretchedly altered, and, in the first moment of appeal, had spoken as he felt. He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill; deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity. -289-

Wentworth's response is given in shorthand as petulance and misunderstanding. His and Anne's responses to the encounter are kept entirely separate. And the responses are gendered: the range of emotions she feels is conveyed, following the path of pain and reaction, but his feelings are summarized, condensed, reported as a state, not conveyed as a process. Their thoughts are both transparent, but they are rendered differently. Their alienation and emotional distance are embodied in the very shape of the narrative: hers painful and slow, his curt, conventional, and clichéd-she had used him ill. The passages discussed so far have all been part of courtship plots within domestic novels of courtship and marriage, and they have all dealt with the relations between the female and male protagonists. There are of course many scenes of large social gatherings, scenes of solitary heroines' meditations, and scenes of female characters interacting. Save for the solitary meditations, none of these other configurations results in the detailed examination of consciousness or reflects the relation between one consciousness and another. The configuration examined here is explicitly gendered because the reflections are not symmetrical; they usually concern the female interpretation of the male ("she longed to know what at that moment was passing in his mind"). Such scenes therefore accept the assumptions of heterosexual monogamy, that marriage between male and female is the goal of social intercourse, that the unmarried state is unstable and seeks the rest or stability of marriage. The gender difference in responses becomes more pronounced as the narration becomes more interiorized, implying that women differ from men more on the inside than on the outside, more in their emotional than in their physical lives.

Austen's most difficult novel is Mansfield Park, the only one admirers are regularly willing to admit that they have to work at liking. Its scenes of reunion illuminate Austen's narrative technique and presentation of consciousness. Also, because the moral and historical arguments about aristocracy, responsibility, and the state of England are so explicit in Mansfield Park, it is here easiest to see the connection between narrative form, how the protagonist's subject position is constructed, and theme-what that subjectivity signifies. Claiming that Pride and Prejudice was too "light, bright and sparkling," with Mansfield Park Austen apparently set out to compose a more serious and less comic novel, "on a complete change of subject." Unlike the witty and confident Elizabeth Bennet before her or Emma after her, Mansfield Park's heroine seems -290- humorless and often prudish. Fanny Price is a Cinderella figure, a poor relative subject alternately to abuse and neglect as she is brought up as a dependent among her rich relatives at Mansfield Park. Only her cousin Edmund fully appreciates Fanny's worth, and she has to endure the unwanted attentions of the lively Henry Crawford along with the jealousy aroused by Edmund's attraction to Henry's equally lively sister Mary. Such a plot produces a solitary and unusually silent protagonist with no confidants-only the narrator and the reader are privy to her interior struggles and resentments. As a consequence, both Fanny's consciousness and the narrator's presentation of it assume unusual prominence in the novel, and interpreters struggle to decide if we are asked to take Fanny as the authorial spokesperson; that is, should we believe that she is always right-a moral paragon like Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility or Anne Elliot-or are her judgments often self-interested and partial, fallible like Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse? Fanny and Edmund are reunited after her long exile to her parents' house in Portsmouth, during which time a whole series of disasters have been visited on the Bertrams of Mansfield Park: the eldest son is mortally ill, and both daughters have eloped (the eldest daughter, Maria, ran off with Henry Crawford, who was supposed to marry Fanny). Edmund travels to Portsmouth to bring Fanny back to Mansfield Park:

By eight in the morning, Edmund was in the house. The girls heard his entrance from above, and Fanny went down. The idea of immediately seeing him, with the knowledge of what he must be suffering, brought back all her own first feelings. He so near her, and in misery. She was ready to sink, as he entered the parlour. He was alone, and met her instantly; and she found herself pressed to his heart with only these words, just articulate, "My Fanny-my only sister-my only comfort now." She could say nothing; nor for some minutes could he say more.

He turned away to recover himself, and when he spoke again, though his voice still faltered, his manner showed the wish of self-command, and the resolution of avoiding any farther allusion. "Have you breakfasted? — When shall you be ready? — Does Susan go?" — were questions following each other rapidly. His great object was to be off as soon as possible. When Mansfield was considered, time was precious; and the state of his own mind made him find relief only in motion. It was settled that he should order the carriage to the door in half an hour; Fanny answered for their having breakfasted, and being quite ready in half an hour. He had already ate, and declined staying for their meal. He would walk round the ramparts, and join them in the carriage. He was gone again, glad to get away even from Fanny. -291-

He looked very ill; evidently suffering under violent emotions, which he was determined to suppress. She knew it must be so, but it was terrible to her.

This is a curiously mixed passage-of great emotional conflict and suffering, yet seen almost from afar. Very little dialogue is rendered directly, only Edmund's elliptical address to Fanny; the rest is reported indirectly. Fanny appears to say nothing of significance here at all, though as is usual in this novel, it is her response, her feelings that matter. By conveying so clearly the sense of containment of emotion, of that which is too painful to speak, Austen has captured the contradiction of intimacy and distance in the very form of the narrative. Edmund's feelings are physically transparent and yet distant: they can be assumed, conjectured at, even seen, but not told directly.

The whole scene is rendered from Fanny's perspective, though not really from within her, as is common earlier in the novel; here, we are looking through her or with her as she solicitously watches Edmund. With its isolated and vulnerable protagonist, the watcher who sees all of the others' flaws and failures, Mansfield Park more than any of Austen's previous novels thematizes the connection between subjectivity and selfishness, the consequences of toying with another's feelings, of thinking too much of oneself and too little of others, of the unwillingness to harmonize one's feelings and desires with others. In these last few chapters there is no longer any room for irony between a knowing narrator and Fanny's adolescent gushes on picturesque nature or the jealousy and resentment of the Crawfords Fanny indulged in earlier. By this point in the novel, Fanny has grown into the role of silent watcher, judge of others' conduct. Upon her return to Mansfield Park from Portsmouth, Fanny becomes a mature, fully developed protagonist, one who is not simply the moral center, the angel of the house, but rather has grown into the position of the narrator; in the last few chapters, Fanny's subject position becomes indistinguishable from the all-wise perspective of the narrator.

Fanny watched him [Edmund] with never-failing solicitude, and sometimes catching his eye, received an affectionate smile, which comforted her; but the first day's journey passed without her hearing a word from him on the subjects that were weighing him down… She looked at him, but he was leaning back, sunk in a deeper gloom than ever, and with eyes closed as if the view of cheerfulness oppressed him [the spring landscape], and the lovely scenes of home must be shut out." -292-

As Fanny's subjectivity assumes the wider purview of the narrator, in turn the narrator's role expands into assertive authorial omniscience and manipulation. In the last two chapters, the narrator sums up and closes by distributing punishment to the vicious and reward to the virtuous. The narrator opens the last chapter with this vast, providential overview:

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault with themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

My Fanny indeed at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of every thing. She must have been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt or thought she felt, for the distress of those around her. She had sources of delight that must force their way. She was returned to Mansfield Park, she was useful, she was beloved; she was safe from Mr. Crawford, and when Sir Thomas came back she had every proof that could be given in his then melancholy state of spirits, of his perfect approbation and increased regard; and happy as all this must make her, she would still have been happy without any of it, for Edmund was no longer the dupe of Miss Crawford.

Fanny never speaks again in this last chapter, but she does not need to: she has assumed ascendancy in the household and become the domestic guardian of virtue. It is as if the narrator has been grooming Fanny to take over both Mansfield Park and Mansfield Park.

At issue in the preceding discussion has been the development of the quintessential novelistic technique for representing subjectivity, the way that Austen uses free indirect speech to convey interiority. Literary historians tracing the development of novelistic technique uniformly conclude that Austen was the first great English novelist to master this technique of narrated monologue. In Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn writes:

The pattern set by Jane Austen thus unfolds throughout the nineteenth century: precisely those authors who, in their major works, most decisively abandoned first-person narration (Flaubert, Zola, James), instituting instead the norms of the dramatic novel, objective narration, and unobtrusive narrators, were the ones who re-introduced the subjectivity of private experience into the novel: this time not in terms of direct self-narration, but by imperceptibly integrating mental reactions into the neutral-objective report of actions, scenes, and spoken words.

Free indirect discourse is not, however, merely another technique in the progression to develop the best method of rendering character, such -293- that Austen is better at it than Richardson, Fielding, or Burney. Conventional literary history has assumed that the rise of the novel is the rise in formal realism: representing everyday life more accurately, more persuasively, better. But there are historical and ideological issues at stake here as well. Given the nationalist and conservative political climate of the period in which Austen wrote, beginning with the French Revolution and extending through the Napoleonic Wars, unbridled subjectivity or Romantic celebration of the freedom of the individual subject as conveyed in radical Jacobin novels such as Mary Wollstonecraft's or William Godwin's could be construed as coming at the expense of-indeed as an enemy of-social constraint and custom: individualism is necessarily set against preexisting social rules and order. Thus Austen's representation of subjectivity has considerable bearing on whether she is read historically as a conservative or a progressive writer, whether she celebrates or deplores the new Romantic individualism. In depicting in such detail the interior states of her protagonists, does Austen ask us to believe that there is a preexisting, immanent set of rules of conduct that all individuals must come to respect and obey? Or do her protagonists rely on their inner resources to determine for themselves what they should do and desire?

The significance of Austen's use of free indirect discourse and her representation of subjectivity is by no means a dead topic. Just as with Ian Watt's discussion of Austen's innovations in narrative technique, technical analysis soon modulates into moral issues, so that what sets Austen apart is the truth of her characters, and thus the nature of the novel as such-its truth and thus its moral force. It is evident that free indirect discourse has a lot to do with the representation of social order and authority. Literary historians concerned with such matters often connect the novel as a discourse with the issues of discipline as defined by theorist Michel Foucault: the ways in which a social formation orders itself and individual subjects within it by means of its various knowledges, technologies, and disciplines. The novel is one such technology and the authority of novelistic discourse is crucially dependent on its vision-what John Bender calls its transparency: "Transparency is the convention that both author and beholder are absent from a representation, the objects of which are rendered as if their externals were entirely visible and their internality fully accessible." What has been identified as free indirect discourse is but one aspect of "narrative as an authoritative resource": "novelistic conventions of transparency, com-294- pleteness, and representational reliability (perhaps especially where the perceptions being represented are themselves unreliable) subsume an assent to regularized authority"-i.e., what Theodor Adorno calls the administered life.

The use of Foucault to describe the function of novelistic authority by contemporary critics can be seen as an extension of an insight provided long ago by Jean-Paul Sartre, when he wrote of the nineteenthcentury novelistic narrator:

He tells his story with detachment. If it caused him suffering, he has made honey from this suffering. He looks back upon it and considers as it really was, that is, sub specie aeternitatis. There was difficulty to be sure, but this difficulty ended long ago; the actors are dead or married or comforted. Thus, the adventure was a brief disturbance which is over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and wisdom; it is listened to from the viewpoint of order. Order triumphs; order is everywhere; it contemplates an old disorder as if the still waters of a summer day have preserved the memory of the ripples which have run through it… Behind [even] the inexplicable, the author allows us to suspect a whole causal order which will restore rationality to the universe.

Novelistic narrative derives its authority from its transparency and employs that authority in a regulative or constitutive fashion, representing ordered subjects in an ordered world. This is what Fredric Jameson means by his assertion that "the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social contradictions." Behind Jameson is the pioneering work by Georg Lukács from 1920, The Theory of the Novel, in which Lukács argues that the novel is fundamentally organized backward, representing the world as backdrop to the fortunes of the individual subject: "the novel is the epic of an age in which the immanence of life is no longer directly given, in which the meaning of life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality." That is to say, while focusing so relentlessly on the particular life, the novel still aspires to show the meaning of the whole; the novel is thus both a representation and an interpretation of life, an attempt to show it as it is while implicitly, through the necessary ordering of its form, showing how the world ought to be.

The representation of subjectivity or interiority of character is the crucial step in the novel's ordering. However idiosyncratic a particular character, it is at the same time typical of human behavior. Character is -295- thus a representation of human subjects, but it is also an interpretation of how they behave and how they ought to behave; as Sartre puts it, the novel "is explanatory; it aims at producing a psychological law on the basis of this example." Psychological law presumes that characters are consistent and predictable; that is to say, character is ordered and ultimately rational, however irrational individual acts may be. Social order is thus dependent on the assumptions of individual stability and readability, for without stable and consistent character, no stable and consistent or even meaningful society can be represented. In Bender's words, "the nature and function of novelistic realism lie in its ability to produce meaning by containing its own contradictions and thus to leave the impression that consciousness and subjectivity are stable across time."

To return to the point with which we began, Jane Austen's work is accorded a special place in the history of the novel, for her work functions as a marker of transition, her novels provide a convenient bridge between the eighteenth-century novel and the nineteenth-century novel, from the genre's rise to its triumph (in conventional terms), from a society organized by custom and tradition to one organized around the individual subject's development, from outside to inside. This transitional function cannot in itself explain Austen's appeal, but her position in literary history as great innovator and her position in the canon as great novelist are related; discussions of the former inevitably seem to end up as discussions of the latter. For Watt, because Austen has a foot in the psychological world of Richardson and a foot in the sociological world of Fielding she is uniquely capable of negotiating that most fundamental contradiction of novelistic discourse, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the individual subject position and collectivity. Despite the increasing transparency of her narrative, and its increasingly subjective form, Austen retains an authoritative narrative voice that checks the subjectivity of her protagonists.

The most famous discussion of Austen's narrative virtuosity and its perfect harmony between exteriority and interiority is Wayne Booth's analysis of Emma. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth emphasizes the ironic distance the narrator has to maintain in order to ensure the reader's sympathy with Emma despite her many faults, and Austen achieves this by using "the heroine herself as a kind of -296- narrator." Seen entirely from the outside, Emma would be distasteful; but seen from the inside she can be comically sympathetic, for we can see through all her self-deception. But despite the sympathy, we long for her reform, because of the reliable narrator who establishes the social norm: "her most important role is to reinforce both aspects of the double vision that operates throughout the book: our inside view of Emma's worth and our objective view of her great faults." In a passage of profound admiration, Booth concludes that Austen's combination of transparency and authority produces human truth and perfection:

When we read this novel, we accept her [" Jane Austen" or the narrator] as representing everything we admire most… She is, in short, a perfect human being, within the concept of perfection established by the book she writes; she even recognizes that human perfection of the kind she exemplifies is not quite attainable in real life… The «omniscience» is thus a much more remarkable thing than is ordinarily implied by the term. All good novelists know all about their characters-all that they need to know. And the question of how their narrators are to find out all that they need to know, the question of "authority," is a relatively simple one. The real choice is much more profound than this would imply. It is a choice of the moral, not merely the technical, angle of vision from which the story is to be told.

The object of admiration here has come a long way from free indirect discourse, for it is no longer Austen's representation but her interpretation, not her showing of the world but her judgment of it. What is being celebrated is a specific vision of order, authority, and judgment, and what is not fully acknowledged is the historical specificity of that order, authority, and judgment. Austen represents the world as it ought to be, but we have to add that what we mean by this is the way one individual may have wanted it to be in 1816. In equating this one vision with perfection, we negate or occlude the historical tendrils that root a text in its time. These tendrils include assumptions about class, gender, and sexuality-a whole set of assumptions that we may no longer find appropriate in deciding what makes one indvidual better than another.

Marilyn Butler makes the argument about Austen's connection between character and morality from a historical perspective, seeing Austen as a conservative opponent to Romanticism and the French Revolution: "Where the heroine is fallible, the novel as a whole can be said to enact the conservative case; where the heroine is exemplary, she models it." This is a reasonable argument, but on the level of form it is

-297- exactly backward, because whatever the personal politics of the novelist, the novel as such cannot enact the conservative case. Produced by the Enlightenment, novelistic discourse enacts the liberal dilemma: preserving individual freedom-not so much protecting it from the tyranny of a despotic state as preventing it from encroaching on the individual freedoms of others. The essential tension of novelistic discourse-between the individual and the collective-is always resolved by or collapsed into subjectivity because the novel explains the social by way of the individual-as Lukács argues, the world is but a frame to situate the individual: "The novel tells of the adventure of interiority; the content of the novel is the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and by proving itself, to find its own essence." Austen's novels are no different in this respect, for each assumes the outward form of a biography of a problematic individual-"The development of man is still the thread upon which the whole world of the novel is strung"-but they are among the last to retain an authoritative narrator who assumes the collective voice of judgment with its inevitable irony. Despite their separate and individual protagonists, Austen's novels evoke a powerful nostalgia for a past when collective judgment perhaps seemed possible and desirable. But it is not simply the keenness of judgment that readers find so appealing in Austen's novels; it is rather the sense of balance between the individual and the social. Austen's innovations in narrative technique enable a dialectic between interiority and exteriority, individual and collective; her novels present the illusion of perfect balance, negotiating the fundamental social contradiction of her time, and not coincidentally of the novel itself.

James Thompson

Selected Bibliography

Bender John. Imagining the Penitentiary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Booth Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Butler Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.

Cohn Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Jameson Fredric. Political Unconscious. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981.

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Lukács Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. 1971. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978.

Sartre Jean-Paul. What is Literature? and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Watt Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957.

-299-

Walter Scott: Narrative, History, Synthesis

ONE of the great comic moments in eighteenth-century fiction occurs in the early chapters of Samuel Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison. Delivered a wrathful carte from the double-dyed villain from whom he rescued a lady in peril, the double-dyed hero responds tranquilly, yes, I'll meet him-for breakfast.

We don't usually think of Sir Charles Grandison as a comedian, far less an ironist. Yet he is in fact quite aware that his disruption of the approved code for settling things, establishing Right by Might Between Men, will stop the breath of all hearers somewhere between laughter and horror. Lest the laughter dismantle his manhood and shake his domestic authority, Sir Charles hastens to add that he will wear his sword to that breakfast-undrawn, loosened, for defense only. He modestly indicates that in the past his sword, when sanctioned by its defensive role only, has bested all comers.

Commenting two generations later on his key predecessor, Walter Scott noted that readers could not identify with Richardson's prudent paragon because the novelist had endowed him with such unvarying firmness of character and perfection of education, rooted in such absolute worldly and familial security, that his revolutionary refusals had no force. In the thousand pages of his existence Sir Charles's major actions are always to waive action, to hang fire-while his rakish and stupid father sets up a mistress, tyrannizes his daughters, and wastes the estate; while the macho young aristocrats of two continents challenge him to duels; while the dark lady and the fair lady who each have his affections await his determining move. History lies sleeping around -300- him, offering no challenges from or invitations to the turmoil of public life, while heredity effaces itself, sending forth no troubling images of a past or a patrimony to be matched, eluded, or redeemed.

It was Scott's own project as a novelist to wake this sleeper, History, to articulate those troubling psychodomestic images, and to integrate them with each other and with Richardson's manly prevaricator, producing in the long-running, multiple "passive hero of the Waverley Novels" the most influential of his culture's essays in modernity, even with the competing accomplishment of Byron. For Byronic modernity explored its visions in registers of irony and fragmentation, its lyrics and dramas reaching after the consolidations and consolations of narrative without real faith in it. Scott's vision, hitting modernity's true notes of loss and limitation, of risky investment in self-creation and blue-chip respect for self-undermining, partakes of narrative faith. So does his culture, even when (especially when) contemplating its contaminated and bulky beginnings and its huddled, obscure conclusions. Complaining about the bulky beginnings and huddled conclusions of each Waverley Novel was a national pastime Scott initiated himself, but as a faithful recorder of his culture's understanding of history he could follow no other form.

Scott often fell short of wholeness and proportion as a plotmaster and as a philosopher of Western history, but he sought such coherence. His commitment was to that «Universal» and «continuous» History, time seen all of a piece, all of a pattern, whose first form he studied in his late novels of Christian chivalry, whose modern form, born out of the Scottish Enlightenment and consolidated in narrative in the Scottish/English Waverley Novels and articulated by Macaulay and Hegel, was liberalism.

This Universal History was dreamed and rationalized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a linear process, unstable and somewhat arbitrary at its beginning and end but governed by a dynamic middle made up of surges toward "synthesis," a process duplicated as form by nineteenth-century fiction itself. Readers of the Waverley Novels-historians and critics from 1814 to the present-have always recognized that the novels of Scott are a rich moment of exposure of this process and of the discourses of fiction and history which, allied with and contesting each other within the precincts of the republic of letters, aspired to articulate it. The project, the Universal Liberal History of Western Culture, imagined a human communal pattern moving psy-301- chologically from the irrational toward the rational, and politically from the sacred to the economic, while the horizon of expectations widened toward the accommodation of moderate change and desire was rechanneled from glory to security, diverted away from war toward the hundreds of new adventures of mind and spirit and body made possible-at least for the middle and upper classes-by security.

As Nietzsche saw, as science-fiction writers from Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon to Frank Herbert and Arthur Clarke have seen, Universal Liberal History might, so conceived, come to an end, either defeated by an unruly antithesis or immobilized, confounded by its own success. Indeed it was recently argued, in a controversial essay and book by conservative historian Francis Fukuyama, that the History that the Waverley Novels so indelibly and anxiously premised has come to an end. In a 1989 essay amplified in a 1991 book, The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama returned to the question whether there is a universal and directional human history leading toward Liberal Democracy, broadly conceived, and argued that there is, looking not only at contemporary South America and Eastern Europe but at the macropolitics of the last four hundred years, and working from contemporary versions of the definition of "human nature" found in classic philosophical literature.

For Fukuyama, History bears, is bearing out, Liberal Democracy's claim to exercise in wholeness the Platonically conceived threefold nature of man-his Reason, his Desire, and his "Thymos," the latter a complex element of the spirit, which requires that the self stand forth, alone and/or in company with a community or a community's significant values, as most valuable, that it stand forth in worth-full identity, be recognized. To know; to do; to be known to do. Recognition, the last of these virtues, is the cause of History, of History's brilliant constructions of "values," of its dark dramas of competing, captured, resisting values. And Liberal Democracy, constructing or tolerating so many forms of recognition, striving to equalize recognition for all, does, according to Hegel and now Fukuyama, formally answer all three of these elements of human nature.

Fukuyama, interestingly, sees two possible alternatives, or as yet unabsorbed possibilities, in this scheme of things, two grits in the wheel of the wagon of Universal History wending west to Liberal Democracy. These are the political and value systems of Islam and of feminism. Walter Scott, in his way, saw the same alternatives. The Saracen's head, — 302- debased on pub signs, swings over many a European town in the Waverley Novels: the madwoman laughs and groans at the crossroads. The narrative strives to integrate them into the synthesis, or leave them behind, but the consolidation is never complete, as I shall argue.

The Waverley Novels still await a full-scale treatment of their Orientalist impulse and of the ways in which this enables (and disables) Scott's vision of race in Universal History; though many have touched on the loss-gain equation in the novels' treatment of various British races, the powerful contemporary theorizing of race in culture and its fictions has not quite reached Scott criticism. But the equally powerful contemporary theorizing of gender has. Gone are the days when a critic might complacently note, as Andrew Hook did in the 1972 introduction to the Penguin edition of Waverley, that Scott rescued the novel from "the danger of becoming the preserve of the woman writer and the woman reader," offering "a new masculinity," which allowed the novel to become "the most appropriate form for writers' richest and deepest imaginative explorations of human experience." In one of the best of the recent books on Scott, Ina Ferris has linked the anxieties and diffusions of gender within the Waverley Novels to the drama of competing discourses-history, fiction, and criticism-at the turn of the century. Literary criticism, hungering for the adult authority of historiography, which was culturally gendered masculine, faced a new, huge, middleclass reading public already gendered female, already reading "the novel," also culturally gendered feminine. The transformation critics sought made use of a category crucial to evolving Western culture, the "feminine," or «proper» novels of Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth. This new kind of novel, replacing the amoral and sensual Gothic, and distinguished by such linear qualities as moral fineness, "accuracy," and "observation," cleared a space for a still newer kind of novel, whose fine and «feminine» observation and accuracy could also accommodate those "richest and deepest" qualities that had been languishing since Shakespeare, or since Fielding, waiting for a masculine vessel, the necessary receptacle for lost "height and depth."

Shakespeare the writer-actor had, of course, taken his work to his public in the flesh; the narrator of Tom Jones abominated the "little reptile of a critic" whose discourse had by the eighteenth century aspired to mediate the relationship of artist and public and to "give laws" to govern that new province of writing, the novel. But Walter Scott was a critic before he was a novelist, and a lawyer before that, and a collector -303- of historical artifacts and songs before anything. This was the perfect biography for one aspiring to the masculine space cleared by a new kind of criticism that was gaining authority from the policing, so to speak, of the novel as it moved from «female» romance through "proper feminine" moral acuteness to that «masculine» height and depth which included "history."

Yet even as he acquiesced in this transformation, this usurpation of the feminine novel by the masculine (historical) novel, Scott was ambushed by-and accepted the ambiguity of-gender. In culture, even in history, as in biology, masculinity often seems in its very strenuousness the less stable, the more artificial construct. For one thing, critical reception of the Waverley Novels during the sixty years after their publication provoked a gender migration similar to that which took place for the American classics. First these novels cleared a space for men to write novels; then they became novels for novelists' characters to read and then for readers' children to read, culturally set aside from the topos of (now masculine) writing, enmeshed in the (still feminine) topos of reading. Second, historiography itself, thus challenged, aspired to organize a narrative of "the highest and deepest," moving from the polemic and controversialist passions of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries through the ironic stance of the rationalist and the amateur worship of separated scraps and fragments of the antiquarian, to the sweeping and ultimately mythic narratives of the Universal Historian.

Contemporary psychohistorians of History like Michel Foucault and Hayden White have linked this mythic historiography, this dream of continuity, the flow of all that disappears in fragments into a recomposed unity, with that fascination with androgyny, with the "oceanic," ultimately with the Good Mother, that underlay the nineteenth century's more conscious strivings after masculinity and the disciplines of the Father.

A key element in the construction of the long narrative that makes up the Waverley Novels and accelerated these changes in the genre was anonymity, a sly, spry baiting and baffling of the public that was its own publicity, a spectacle of Thymos which Plato could hardly have dreamed of, and which even yet enchants and irritates. The Walter Scott we recognize was born in 1771 into Georgian Scotland and died in the Reform Bill England of 1832. He followed his father into the Law at age fifteen, his multiplex culture into translation at twenty-two, — 304- his ambition into the Edinburgh Review and the Sheriffdom of Selkirk at twenty-eight, his antiquarianism into collecting, translating, and publishing The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border at thirty-one, and his aristocratic lineage into poetry at thirty-four with The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which embellished an ancient tale of his own ancestors. These are selves Scott could himself recognize, legitimized by all that was open and precious in his history. The author of the Waverley Novels was a being he could not quite recognize himself, and so anonymous publication of Waverley: or 'Tis Sixty Years Since, in 1814, became the foundation of a new body of work generated by a new self, the Author of Waverley, a being recognized and lionized from the start as the Great Unknown.

Walter Scott told himself and his friends a number of disarming reasons for this turn to prose anonymity. He had written some chapters of the story in 1809 while working on the poem The Lady of the Lake, but mislaid them until they surfaced during a hunt for fishing tackle in 1813. His poetic drama Rokeby that same year had not had the huge momentum of his first three poems; both he and his publisher were looking for a novelty to replace the perhaps fading and too-muchknown Walter Scott. The Bridal of Triermain, an Arthurian questromance issued anonymously in the summer of 1813, had given him a taste for this particular jest.

The artist as fisher, as jester, as self-marketer-these are powerful components of an identity, but they don't fully explain Scott's commitment to this identity. No one in public life, and few in the reading public, doubted that the Great Unknown was Walter Scott. Yet for twelve years and thirty-two novels and tales this open secret gave Walter Scott unprecedented control over the drama of recognition by which the novelist and the historical novel itself were formed and (to exaggerate only slightly the influential analysis of Marxist critic Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel) simultaneously helped to construct the bourgeois culture of Victorian Britain.

No sooner did this drama of doubleness begin, however, than multiplicity joined anonymity as its hallmark. We can already discern the several voices in the single narrator who tells the stories of Waverley (1814) and Guy Mannering (1815). In The Antiquary (1816) the title character feels the stress of multiple motives, the jostling of several aesthetic personae: he is, like the Author of Waverley, a lover of discrete objects, patterns, and plots found in the papers, attics, and earths of -305- History, and also a historian, writer, and critic. By this time Scott is conceiving his tales as well as his tellers as multiples. In the now-proliferating editorial front and back matter of The Antiquary the Author of Waverley himself "takes respectful leave, as one who is not likely again to solicit" readers, while Scott is conceiving a four-story Tales of My Landlord to follow, narrated by a new cast of quarreling personae.

Out of the Author of Waverley, that open secret, that hidden publicist, he created complaining antiquarians, antagonistic secular and sacred historians, keen-eyed editors and literary philosophers of the Fieldingesque ironic and the Byronic Romantic schools to call attention to all the elements of his composition but one-genius, greatness, originality. In the most comprehensive study to date of this self-multiplication, Jane Millgate follows the ins and outs of "the anonymity game," as Scott's genuine humility and his respect for Augustan generic form diffuses his will to recognition, enabling him to conceal even from himself the originality of both his fiction and his view of history.

The anonymity game extended its second phase after the first three novels, and its third phase after three series of Tales of My Landlord comprising The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose (1819). Rob Roy (1817) intervened in this series. Something magical and compulsive seems to be at work in the writer's imagination here, a leap after or into "three," which perhaps prepares us for the extraordinary blend of the realistic and ironic with the fey that characterizes the second half of Scott's career, what we might call, with an eye to subsequent intellectual history, the pre-Raphaelite novels of chivalry. Scott originally wished to publish the first of these, Ivanhoe (1819), in the name of its fictitious narrator, Laurence Templeton, who had been conceived as an English imitator of the Scottish Author of Waverley, thus creating a third Unknown, but was talked out of it by a publisher who feared that Scott's much-prized multiplicity was becoming simple confusion. But Scott needed, and created, several new casts of narrating characters to take him where he wanted to go, first to the epic matter of England (Ivanhoe, The Monastery [1820], The Abbot [1820], Kenilworth [1821], The Fortunes of Nigel [1822], Woodstock [1826]) and Britain (The Pirate [1821], Peveril of the Peak [1823], St. Ronan's Well [1823], Redgauntlet [1824], The Fair Maid of perth [1828]) and France (Quentin Durward [1823]) and Switzerland (Anne of Geierstein [1829]), and ultimately to the more general epic of East and West in the Tales of -306- the Crusaders (The Betrothed and The Talisman [1825]), Count Robert of Paris (1831), and the never-published Siege of Malta.

This movement among the various locations of Universal History relies also on a Universal Psychology which, however clearly «developing» in the main, continually throws up unabsorbed elements of antique personality and psychological «sports» that continue to anchor modernity in its origins. As Scott claimed the reason for the anonymity and multiplicity of his writing self was humility and not fear or ambition, so he claimed the attraction he felt for chivalry, the historical origin of modernity, came from chivalry's idealization of loyalty and love and its sublimation of violence, and from the curious and elaborate rituals by which these idealizations and sublimations were both licensed and channeled. He saw himself inside a historical synthesis striving to bring an end to war, the absorption of Thymos by economics, as Fukuyama would say. And he came to feel and depict by Tory instinct rather than Marxist critique that qualm many in the West felt and still feel about the probability that war is not sublimated but rather enlarged by commerce, and that loyalty is not rechanneled but erased.

The large body of prefaces, postscripts, and narrative interventions exfoliated in the Waverley Novels (and I don't even count here the additional series of slightly obfuscatory tell-all prefaces written between 1829 and 1831 as part of the best-selling Magnum Opus edition), is part of a long-running fable of composition that began even before the novels, when Scott developed a prose-framing apparatus for his first poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The plot of this fable, like the plot of chivalry, is the expression and attempted diffusion of wrath-wrath in this case connected not only with the springs of personal and national history but also with the situation of fictional composition itself in these early decades of modernity.

The personal sources of Walter Scott's subtle wrath are of his gender and of his time: a wife not his first love, a family to support, a lawyerfather to love and subvert, a lost male heroism to «harness» (his favorite description of composition, as it was to be Dickens's) in work, a schizoid national-imperial identity to attack and defend. The sources of the wrath of the composer of fiction are what they always are: a kingdom of fantasy leased, not owned, invented in whorish negotiation with progenitors, competitors, and critics.

Scott's novels have one more aesthetic source, also of his gender and his time. The less than noble satirical squabbling of Richardson -307- and Fielding and the less than serious self-communing of Sterne have given way at the turn of the century to the feminized scene of the "proper novel," whose moral safety is grounded in a serene narrative persona distinguished by "accuracy and observation." At this time too the partisan polemics of antiquarian and apologetic historians has given way to the «stately» narratives of turn-of-the-century History. With serenity and safety and stateliness, dullness threatens. The woman novelist who leavens serenity with the language of narrative color and excess, or the male historian who returns to partisan violence, trespasses gender and genre boundaries hardening into shackles in the early nineteenth century. But in the new historical novel Walter Scott can lay hold of all these values, both these genders, both genres. In the new form, the «excess» of the past is an element licensed to the novelist as «variety» and to the historian as "truth." The crossdisciplinary consequence here is a new variety in what is allowed to constitute history, as well as a new truth standard-Universal History, Universal Psychology-to which fiction must be held by that third discipline, criticism, which was stabilized in the cauldron of the Waverley Novels.

Inside the Synthesis

Still central to the analysis of both history and psychology in Scott's novels is Alexander Welsh's recognition that the hero of the Waverley novels never kills anyone-though men die, and causes and institutions die. The hero carries a sword, and indeed draws it (often, as with Old Mortality's Henry Morton, successively on both sides of the same cause), but the plots of modernity check his swing at the crucial moment. The sword of his fathers hangs minatory or inviting on the castle wall, but the hero always has more than one father, and the pen of the lawyer, the purse of the merchant, the tempered tongue of the diplomat and the latitudinarian have intervened, and beckon too. The old codes of chivalry, for all their apparent allegiance to invisible realities, issued in solidly material consequences; the stakes of personal and communal honor were an eye for an eye, blood for blood, the Right made good body to body. The new codes of modernity, for all their apparent ensnarement by the merely carnal, issue from invisible exchanges of credit and debt, the stakes of personal and communal honor counted in increments of physical restraint and delayed emo-308- tional gratification. The times are with the temporizer: the sword is too blunt for its object.

Readers have rightly made much of the first Waverley hero's first act depicted in the opening retrospect: the five-year-old Edward Waverley reaches passionately for his uncle's carriage and coat of arms, emblem of the "idea of personal property." Equally important, though, is the opening moment of the novel's present time: disentangling itself finally, six chapters in, from its retrospect, the narrative opens the library door along with the uncle, where the teenage Edward is practicing swordplay with the ancestral weapon from the wall.

Our young hero is «acting» a romantic battle here, readying himself for the sport of military captaincy that will succeed the sports of shooting, fishing, and reading, which he has in turn picked up and abandoned during a desultory and neglected youth whose main reality has been dreaming about his own and his culture's past. But, interestingly, it is not so much the active deeds of a more vibrant ancestry that mesmerize Edward as he haunts the long avenues and ruined monuments of Waverley Honour. Singled out from the ancestral store, rather, are two keen memories of loss and self-abnegation. One is the moment when Sir Willibert of Waverley, returning at last from the Crusades to see his betrothed give her heart to the man who had protected her at home, "flung down his half-drawn sword, and turned away forever from the house of his ancestor": the other is the moment when the youngest son of the seventeenth-century Waverley, sent out from the Hall by his Royalist mother during the civil war to draw off Commonwealth pursuit of the king, was brought home successful, and dying. Presumably, the older son carried on the line.

Edward Waverley is the son of a younger brother who, because he assumed the older one would marry and carry on the line, the title, the property, turned aside from the house and politics of his Royalist ancestors to build a new domain in the shifting sands of Whig politics. The title and property are held by the infertile older brother. The tale that ensues, Waverley: or 'Tis Sixty Years Since, seems at one level the story of a man seeking the dream of the active sword and the fertile bride that are the conditions of holding title, holding ground, entering the synthesis of Universal History. Edward goes north on a Whig captaincy obtained by his politic father and diverts himself from his duties to vacation with his uncle's Scottish Royalist friend Bradwardine; he explores political and erotic outlawry with Bradwardine's Highland -309- rival and ally Fergus MacIvor and his sister and fellow Royalist Flora, and finally joins the army of the Young Pretender in the most serious of the Jacobite uprisings of 1745.

Yet even the dream of chivalry in Scott is only the half-drawn sword, its nightmare is the death of the (younger) son at the behest of (mother) country, its still deeper nightmare the death of the father at the hands of the son. These deaths are all accomplished by Edward-by proxy. Scott's language and his plots deal us moment after moment of innuendo and rumor whereby Edward (half) draws his sword, (half) kills with it, (half) dies by it. A Scottish outlaw steals Edward's identifying seal and creates with it a phantom Waverley who induces his troop to mutiny, and the loving Rose Bradwardine hears a rumor that that traitor Waverley was captured and executed. The real Edward does join the rebel army, but hates the life (and death) of the sword. And most necessary of all to Scott's plots, when the time-serving Sir Richard Waverley dies near the end of the revolt, a newspaper falsely prints that his son's reputed activities in the rebel army resulted in death for both the elder Waverleys, and "Good God! Am I a parricide?" cries Edward.

No, he is not. That particular dream, often elaborated in the Gothic novel that was fiction's first grasp at history, brushes by as a rumor and is put to flight by reason. But there is more to these dramas of proxy crime and guilt than the Universal Historian's patterned movement out of war toward law, out of monarchy through pretenders and parties to universal representation. Underneath, as Alexander Welsh argues, is a shifting in Universal Psychology around the bargain of man with death itself.

Once, as Scott sees it, the outrage of mortality was assuaged by "glory," the immortality attached to the name of the warrior. Now a man comes to consciousness, to the "real history of his life," awash in ambiguous and even inglorious names: Edward Waverley bears no fewer than four aliases while the plot maneuvers him toward the Scottish manor of his bride-to-be, whose property, in a complicated legal, political, financial, and moral «redemption» at the end, replaces his entailed English property as "home." No glory here, just the modern bargain with death called bodily survival, domesticity, fertility, whose emblem is the half-drawn sword, the passive entry into the killing field where other men do history's killing and suffer its death. The Waverley Novels feature a succession of ingenious endings (many readers feel they are clumsy) in which an alter ego or accidental third party or coin-310- cidental fatality disrupts the final duel between the hero and his enemy, saving the protagonist's «credit» while it refashions his «honor» into historical survival. "Honour is a homicide… but credit is a decent honest man," says the legal authority (and merchant) in Rob Roy. Honor is also a suicide, as Baillie Nicol Jarvie's literary ancestor Falstaff knew.

Scott set at the head of Waverley, and thus in some sense as the touchstone for all the Waverley Novels, and perhaps of all the historical novels of the Western tradition, the moment from Henry IV: Part II when all authority, legal, national, even personal and moral, wavers, shifts uneasily, then passes to its diffused modern form. The realist and sensualist Falstaff, making merry with «Justices» named Shallow and Silence, sees his friend Pistol arrive, big with tidings, and Justice Shallow importantly steps forward to receive and interpret the news on the grounds that "I am, sir, under the king, in some authority." The swaggering soldier's challenge-"Under which king, Besonian? Speak, or die"-is on the title page of Waverley.

As Universal History, the phrase points to the drama of choices, and speeches, by which authority is composed, and recomposed, both under the king and as the king, and to the link in that composition between the world historical personage of "the king" and the professional and middle classes who increasingly exercise authority in the West. It points to the change in that composition from the divine right of Richard II through the tainted alliances of the usurping Henry IV to the selfmythicized energies of Henry V and the modern construction of the bureaucratized Tudor state. As Universal Psychology the phrase points to the struggle of the male to enter a personal history situated somewhere between slavish imitation of the legitimate father and slavish rebellion with the illegitimate one, Falstaff; that is, to his struggle to formulate an identity in which the choice of independent personhood is somehow harmonized with the continued possession of the oedipal property that is his destiny.

The maneuvering of the self, and of events, until one's personal choice coincides with one's patriarchal destiny, exposes to the hero-and the reader-of the Waverley Novels the fictiveness both of authority and of identity. Like Shakespeare's Hal the male protagonists move quickly off the paths of their fathers into the domain of the outlaw. For whether the counterpaternal world is the elevated realm of suicidal honor or the earthy precinct of the jester-cynic (and like Shakespeare, Scott usually provides counterfathers at both poles), it still offers the -311- necessary standpoint from which a son can face and assess the inevitable thievery, outlawry, and moral compromise of his domestic and social heritage. As with Hal, Scott's protagonist always makes his way back to the paternal world, hyperconscious of the selves he has put on and put away, of the underlying arbitrariness by which he has designated one experience a «dream» and another an "awakening."

For Shakespearean comedy, of course, the counterpaternal world is most often "the green world" outside history, the greenwood of merriment, sensuality. This holds essentially true too of the English history plays. Only in the classical history plays, a Troilus and Cressida, an Antony and Cleopatra, does the Shakespearean protagonist awake, like Edward Waverley and many a Waverley hero after him, to the nightmare of modern history-to find that he has drawn his sword in the camp of the enemy against the fatherland.

However, some element of Shakespearean pastoral still governs Scott's imagination of the «dream» from which one «awakens» to the real history of one's life, an element to which Scott's building of the medieval house and reforesting of the medieval acres of Abbotsford is testimony. Scott's conflation of the greenwood and the camp of the enemy most often carries a comic and progressive view of Universal History: Ivanhoe's Robin Hood, like As You Like Its Duke Senior, holding alternative court under the greenwood tree. Shakespeare's only Scottish history harbors a more ambiguous and dangerous image of the conflation, a disinherited son reclaiming his father's ground as both the camp of the hereditary English enemy and the greenwood tree, when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. I will return to this image at the end of this chapter with a look at The Bride of Lammermoor, Scott's Macbeth.

From Waverley on, choosing a king shapes both Universal Psychology and Universal History in Scott's novels. If the choice seems at first to be between a pure king-of-honor associated with the timeless values of the greenwood and a king-of-credits contaminated by timely commerce with shifting ideals, turning coats, and mobile markets, it soon grows less simple. The incident that catapults Edward Waverley across the Highland Line into the greenwood is an example of Scott's instinct for the materialist basis of History. His first truly royal figure, the exotic Highland Chief Fergus MacIvor, controls an economy in which the romantic credits of fealty, mystery, and love circulate alongside the real credits of coins, lands, and titles. What looks at first like a Highland -312- thieving of Lowland cattle is really a momentary breakdown in the complex network of «protection» by which the supposedly peaceable Fergus feeds a tenantry too large for a farming community, but large enough for an army. More deeply still, the thieving is actually an exercise in quarrel and reconciliation designed by Fergus to produce emotional capital in old Lowland and Highland cavaliers, capital to be expended in the Jacobite rebellion for the Stuart Pretender.

Edward's journey north through Fergus's land to the camp of the Stuart brings him face to face with that homicidal, suicidal honor from which he instinctively recoils, leaving it to Fergus's opposite number, the Hanoverian Prince's chieftain, Colonel Talbot, to negotiate Edward's return to his king. The credits Talbot employs to buy Edward back his reputation and his estate include a complex transference of land and cash but also, and importantly, the new modern capital of his "vote in the House" of Parliament.

Scott's first novel thus sets up a narrative of historical process. The story begins by referring, through the Shakespearean headnote, to the macro beginning of modernity in the duel between Plantagenet cousins, and dramatizes, by reference to Edward's early fixation on the death of the youngest Waverley son in the service of King Charles II, the acceleration of this process in the seventeenth-century civil war that produced everywhere houses with a Hanoverian brother and a Stuart brother, swords half-drawn upon each other. It ends by enforcing a unity on the warring human houses, transferring the war to the fictive house of political parties. Colonel Talbot's negotiations result in a property transferred from Scottish Jacobite to English Hanoverian ownership.

The allegiance to Hanoverian government by the father, Sir Richard Waverley, was an ignoble matter of a younger son's looking to survive and prosper: the allegiance of the son, Edward, to the same government is now a fealty laid hold on from a rational distance after a thick experience of doubt and dream and contemplation-the authentic, if speckled, fealty of modernity. The Waverleyan drama finds its synthesis in unions; the freely chosen (every reader feels it destined) marriage of English Edward and Scottish Rose grounds, well after the fact, the Scottish-English union of 1707, that confirming icon of Universal History's "desire."

But if between 1814 and 1832 Scott and the enormous reading public of the Waverley Novels accepted and enacted the fact of union as -313- History's desire, the terms of union were always still up for renegotiation. Walter Scott, sheriff and "writer"-to the court, to the people under the authority of the British Empire-was yet, as Peter Garside and others have demonstrated, a Scottish patriot in his own way. And it is interesting to note that the two elements of Scotland almost erased in the synthesis of union, which Scott is most famous for (almost) restoring to some degree of separateness within the synthesis, are the Royal Scottish Regalia and the Scottish bank note. These are fitting symbols of the old and new nationhood the Waverley Novels held unerased within that synthesis, a nationhood degenerated somewhat into spectacle and game, yet speaking of the price of unity and the uncertain solubility of elements of that nationhood.

The "Soldan' and the Lady

As postcolonial theorists study the long and devious meditation of English literature upon English imperialism, the Waverley Novels might rightfully achieve an unexpected new prominence. The enforced union of England and Scotland in 1707 marked the formal beginnings of an English imperialism confirmed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by an unusually large presence of Scotsmen in the military and commercial brigades of conquerors/light-bringers. It seems quite likely that the writer, and especially the readers, of the Waverley Novels understood, however obscurely, that in the dramas of imperial union on and among the islands of Great Britain-dramas highlighting the consolidation of various races Celtic, Pictish, and Scandinavian under the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon-they were together experiencing, even at some level promoting, the imperial elation that accompanies the rationalizations of "unity."

The excitement of empire, as the West has known it, is intimately bound up with the awe of origins, the desire for mingled with fear of the primitive and even the prehuman, symbolized for the West primarily by the ancient civilizations of the East. As a philosophical channel for this excitement, Universal History constructs from these materials a coherent «development» by which all that has been (East) is restored or rearranged in what is, and is coming to be (West). As Edward Said formulated it in his influential Orientalism (1978), the «discourse» of Orientalism had its beginnings roughly contemporary with the Waverley Novels. Orientalism used the new disciplines of linguistics and anti-314- quarian anthropology and history to manage and domesticate an East whose imaginative parameters were an almost boundaryless sexuality and a sacred origin: both real and fictional journeys to the East were invariably imaginatively cast as returns. Yet what the Western imagination saw in the Orient was a series of terms that countered the identity the West had constructed for itself. To the rational certainty, linear progressiveness, and shapeliness of the West is opposed the Oriental world of uncertain, fluid dreams infinitely multiplying themselves past resolution, definition, materiality.

These qualities of "the other," iconically both Eastern and female, make "the lady" and "the Soldan" (or Sultan) close relatives in literary forms of Orientalism. The Western adventurer pilgrim who crosses water to engage with this dyad in its own land meets what Freud would call the oceanic of his own origins, the contradictory elements of his identity whirled asunder. Should he try to master it, or marry it, he may, devolving, become it. Scott's imagination of the Crusades, from the brief background references in Waverley to the open treatment in Ivanhoe and The Talisman, is haunted by the figure of the Templar, the Roman Catholic priest-knight whom he sees as devolved because of long residence in the East, fallen-in terms borrowed from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire-from «Roman» rationality and civilization back to the «barbarian» Orientalism from which he came. Within this Orientalism stand the sensual pasha or the Turk or the "Soldan," the "unbelieving dog" the Templar has himself become, and the harem girl who confirms the Templar's reversion. The ancestor of the hero of the Waverley Novels is the Crusader, who has on the contrary neither married nor mastered the Orient; instead he has been humbled, even humiliated, by it.

It is in this light that we should see the romantic triangle of Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, the priest-knight Brian de Bois Gilbert, and the Oriental Rebecca of York. In this light as well we should view the truly astonishing shape-shifting and momentary Orientalizing and feminizing of the Scottish hero of The Talisman. Both the Saxon Wilfrid of Ivanhoe and the Celtic David, Prince Royal of Scotland, are depicted as having broken with and been disinherited by their fathers for following the Normans, perhaps the first major imperialist race of the West, into the Orient. In each novel an Oriental redefines the Christian purpose of the Crusades. Isaac the Jew's comment that "the noblest of you will take the staff and sandal in superstitious penance and walk barefoot to visit -315- the graves of dead men" and the Kurdish Saracen Sheerkohf's marveling at "that insanity which brings you hither to obtain possession of an empty sepulchre" both point to still another aspect of Orientalist discourse. This is the Western tendency to regard the East as exhausted, emptied. The breasts of Jerusalem, "communis mater-the mother of all Christians" as Ivanhoe's Prior Aymer calls her, remain flat until reengorged by the violent visitations of faith-bearing Crusader sons. In both novels the faithless Templar has reverted not to the faith of his Islamic enemy but to the Eastern brand of folk magic and demonology that the faith system of Islam sought to contain and reorganize even as the faith system of early Christianity sought to contain and reorganize the folk and earth magic of Western pre-Christian culture.

In both novels what Scott calls in Ivanhoe the "habits of predominating over infidel captives and Eastern bondsmen" have transformed the Crusader governments into Sultans contemptuous (and fearful) of the complexly chartered and peopled third space of government between the ruler and the people that is just beginning to be constructed in Western law. "I have caught some attachment to the Eastern form of government," proclaims the baron of the Crusader kingdom in The Talisman, complaining about the feudal privileges Richard Coeur de Leon is forced to allow his barons. The Talisman begins in fact with a debate between East and West on "liberty." The Westerner claims the "Christian freedoms" of modern indulgence in pork and wine that have replaced the rigidity of the old Semitic law, while the Oriental argues that the «slavery» of chivalric love and marriage limits a man in the most precious part of his manhood. Thus are the complex "freedoms"-of the Western female to give laws to her knight and of Western knights and barons to win charters from their rulers-contrasted with the Oriental's primitive, lascivious, and tyrannical patriarchal rule over his harem and his councillors.

This is a species of self-congratulatory Orientalism fundamental even to the Western liberal construction of gender roles: see for instance George Meredith's liberal Diana of the Crossways, who complains that "men may have rounded Seraglio Point: they have not yet doubled Cape Turk." Less liberal thought, of course, is always backsliding out of the evolving synthesis of contracted freedoms and toward the life of "the Turk," a backsliding dramatized not only by Scott in the harem-yearning, skirt-wearing priest-warriors of the Temple, but also, interestingly, by the Scott of Redgauntlet and later the Thackeray of Henry -316- Esmond. Both novels feature Stuart «Pretenders» whose political «cause» fails because they link their rights as rulers to the right to keep a mistress. Writing in the Regency England of George IV, Scott was perfectly aware of the propensity of the Hanoverian kings to keep even more mistresses than the Stuarts: it was simply that as the psychic «sports» and «throwbacks» of Universal History the Catholic Stuart kings had to be not only feminized but Orientalized, like the Templars.

In this Orientalizing light the "dark lady" of Scott's romance plots stands forth not only as the symbolic psychic double of the hero's forbidden desire but specifically as the racial "other," the locus of the return forbidden and prized by Universal History (the Oriental) and Universal Psychology (the mother). We can see this pattern dimly in Waverley's Flora MacIvor, educated in Paris and transported to the Highlands. Her recovery of Celtic tradition and Gaelic language, and her devotion to Stuart and Highland liberties are «purer» than they can be for the brother who seeks entry into the political and commercial synthesis of Great Britain, and her toleration of the English youth Waverley's attraction to her is entirely maternal. We can see this atavism in the witches and «gypsies» of the Scottish novels that followed, all imagined by their «superstitious» countrymen to be chattels of the "black man" of Semitic and Persian myth systems. We can also see it most clearly in Ivanhoe, in the witch Ulrica, parricide arsonist, reverted to the pagan chants of Saxon destroyer gods. And of course in Rebecca, whom Ulrica mistakes at their first meeting for a Saracen or an Egyptian. The most memorable of Scott's Oriental/dark women, the Jewess Rebecca, stands for the ultimate blocked return to the communis mater. As the Oriental woman she both attracts and repels the chivalrous Wilfrid striving toward the Norman-Saxon synthesis; as the Oriental woman she obsesses the Orientalized Templar, Sir Brian de Bois Gilbert.

When Ivanhoe opens his eyes and ears to the lady who has nursed him after being wounded in the tournament at Ashby de la Zouche, he hears an «unintelligible» language and sees «Eastern» clothing and so begins speaking to her in Arabian. He responds with sexual arousal and «emotion» to her as an Oriental, but turns at once "cold, composed and collected" when she reveals the specific of her race. Something hard, even incestuous, retards the full assimilation of the Jewess into the Orientalist fantasy. «Composed» he might be, this man of the new synthesis, and courteous in the exchange of healings and rescues that marks his relationship with Rebecca during the plot. Yet, as Scott says in a -317- famous ending, "it would be inquiring too curiously to ask" whether this figure of multiple and guilty fantasy did not continue to challenge Ivanhoe's composure and the Western bride Rowena who confirmed it.

If it is part of Universal History to celebrate contemporary Western freedom by locating slavery (of women and workers) in the Oriental past, then we expect to find the black man standing with the Oriental woman at the edge of the synthesis. Brian De Bois Gilbert, himself "burned to almost Negro blackness" by the Palestinian sun, appears attended by two African slaves richly dressed to mark their master's importance and carrying Turkish daggers and Saracen javelins. Orientalized Templar and African slaves speak «Arabian» together, as Reginald Front de Boeuf does with the "sable functionaries" who do his torturing for him. Scott's descriptions emphasize the naked black skin of the slaves, and his footnote disingenuously explains that he uses them both for dramatic visual contrast to the white protagonists and to point up the Orientalization of the Templars: "What can be more natural" than that these corrupted Westerners copy the corrupt Saracens who enslaved the Africans.

For all his tolerant humanism, then, Scott instinctively plotted according to the duplicitous racial dynamic laid down by Universal History. The Westerner, Front de Boeuf, had "perhaps learnt his lesson of cruelty" in the East, while the chivalrous and witty Easterner who meets the Crusader in the opening pages of The Talisman had "caught a part of [the Crusaders' Western] manners." Black male and female slavery is a primitive Eastern habit caught by the worst in the West, chivalry a Western achievement imitated by the best in the East.

This exchange is strangely figured in the extraordinary bodily transformations of Kenneth, the protagonist of The Talisman, who undergoes both black male slavery and femininity before he reclaims his real Scottish persona. Forbidden by his venal and politically astute father to fight in the East under the banner of the Norman English king, the heir to the Scottish throne masks his royalty (or puts it to sleep) in the frayed silk and unwieldy steel of a poor knight whose half-defaced coat of arms "seems to read," ambiguously enough, "I sleep-wake me not." He falls in love, between battles, with a Plantagenet princess whom Richard of England destines as Saladin's bride: if the jealousy and prudence of his Western allies will not let him win the Orient in battle, the monarch will, if necessary, marry it. -318-

Angry at the presumptuous knight, Richard transfers him as feudal dependent to the Saracen whose talisman cured him: the Saracen paints the knight black and sends him back to Richard as a «Nubian» body slave to guard him from Western-hired Moslem assassins. Richard guesses the deception when he makes to suck the assassin's poison from the wounded (and dyed) skin of his protector, but sends him, thus degraded, to deliver the Soldan's proposal of marriage to Edith, hoping his cousin will be «disgusted» by the black skin of the man standing in for the «Paynim» who wants her for his harem. The scene in which Edith rages at the mute black Sir Kenneth, both for being the enslaved and enslaving Oriental in his black skin and for being in features the white Western man she loves and cannot have, is perhaps the novel's most powerful one. It is a schizoid moment of Orientalist desire and disgust that the subsequent untangling of the plot and reordering of races-the killing of white evildoers, marriage of white protagonists, and brotherhood of Western chivalric monarch with Westernized Eastern monarch-cannot quite reprogram into the synthesis.

And the novel is not yet finished with strange moments of desire/disgust. His body dissolved across racial lines, Sir Kenneth is immediately afterward subjected, symbolically, to another transformation across gender lines in a long ballad sung at Richard's command by his minstrel Blondel, whose hero Sir Kenneth is explicitly called by his king to emulate. In this long ballad a lady requires her knight to fight a tournament dressed only in her nightgown. He does so, and she rewards him by wearing the bloody rags to dinner that evening.

These fantastic visions of racial and gender blurring constitute an excess familiar to readers of Gothic novels and of the Romantic and often Orientalist tales of Byron and Southey. The excess is referrable, in part, to new visions of the role, and necessity, of imagination in Universal Psychology. But it also points to a genuine new consciousness of race and gender in the movement of history, as well as to the limitations of that consciousness.

Magic

For all its engagement with utilitarian politics and the new realism of character, with Universal History and the complex psychology of the modern mind within the patterns of history, the historical novel is fundamentally a descendant of the Gothic novel. The reading public being -319- created through the novel in the late eighteenth century first experienced «history» there as prophecy-a pleasurable consciousness of doom associated with the painful reign and inevitable fall of the proud and the powerful, and with the continuing poignant revelation of the inadequacy of reason. For English Gothic fiction, history was a place where one could explore and experience the disappearing engines of unbridled wrath, pride, and lust. The barons and clerics of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve and M. G. Lewis, exercised a prepolitical, ahistorical brand of power drawn in rationalist terms as a kind of madness. The immense dilation of power and ambition, the preternatural humanity, of the great Gothic villains, could be safely walled off in the past, which because it was the prerational time could contain an accompanying preternatural apparatus of omens, tales, and powers prophesying, actually accomplishing, the fall of the preternatural human and the return of the rest of the world to Christian salvation history.

The Gothic historic could present the fall of magnified humanity, trace its «backslidings» through paganized Christian and Islamic forms of belief further back to prehistoric magic and superstition, because it thought it knew, through Universal History, which direction was forward. In the evolving syntheses of Universal History those cultures of the past driven by preternatural humans under supernatural compulsions, prerational cultures of earth and air magic and their descendants, tragic and comic myth, are left behind, or more often aestheticized, and returned to the synthesis as entertainments.

Scott takes a prominent role in this effort, as collector-purveyor of the supernatural tales first of Scotland and then of the wider West and finally the Orientalized East, through his poetry, prose fiction, and nonfiction essays, and through the legendary-artifact-stocked museum-dwelling of Abbotsford itself. He is convinced of this developmental view of magic, even lends it, anachronistically, to some of his favorite heroes. The Talisman's Saladin, for instance, chants a set of verses about Ahriman, the ancient Persian Manichean Lord of Darkness, claims descent from him, and takes the moderate modern view that it is well neither to erase his culture's memory of origin in "Elementary Spirits" nor to organize the heterogeneity of magic too rigidly into the categories of modern psychology and ethics; rather one should «memorialize» them both, let them roam loosely within the synthesis of Islam. One of the things Scott likes best about his medieval novels is that his -320- Protestant characters of that time can chide the medieval Catholic church for its accommodating preservation of pre-Christian elements in its «worship» of saints and stones and bones and fountains, while the narration itself preserves both Catholic heterogeneity and Protestant morality equally, and almost as equals, in the amber of its tolerant irony.

Although developmental narrative shapes the synthesis of Universal History (and vice versa) and the view of those like Saladin who are the narrative in character-disguise, the view of history most poignantly felt, even pursued, by characters experiencing rather than directing time is quite different, more "Gothic." Not evolutionary but revolutionary (and ceaselessly counterrevolutionary). Reversal, not synthesis, is the form of time: "the world turned upside down," as the outlaw Rob Roy comments, like an hourglass constantly reset by some fatal hand. Primitive magic, sometimes whimsical, sometimes fatally prophetic, is the hallmark of this form.

All the Waverley Novels pay homage to this primitive sense of History. The accommodation to "real history" (that is, narrative synthesis), by which the hero shoulders the reward/burden of marriage, inheritance, continuation, life itself at the end of the narrative, almost always contains some element of that curious quality one sees most vividly in the finally successful lovers of Old Mortality, man and woman gamely continuing, but stunned in some vital organ by one too many magic reversals. All the Waverley Novels pay homage too to magic as the origin of religion and philosophy. Tidily packed away in whimsical tales or fatal prophecies, magic is traded, preserved, energized by the lower classes, and pondered and critiqued by the powers of the synthesis, the clerics and lords, the politicians, the narrators. The typical hero, himself a man of reason, will "despise most of the ordinary prejudices about witchcraft, omens, and vaticination, to which his age and country still gave such implicit credit that to express a doubt of them was accounted a crime equal to the unbelief of Jews or Saracens." But it was precisely the point of the Gothic Historic in the Waverley Novels to take readers to the age and country where the older and wilder form of "vaticination," visionary prophecy, contested with the Jew and the Saracen for the position at the origin of the Western Christian synthesis. Staging this contest on the prepared ground of Universal History, the Waverley Novels carry forward, almost by accident, an element of history as unruly as the witches and omens, and linked with them-the politics of class. -321-

The man quoted above striving to «despise» the primitive visionaries closer to him than Jew or Saracen is Edgar, Master of Ravenswood, the protagonist of The Bride of Lammermoor, the last novel the Scottish "Author of Waverley" wrote before Walter Scott created the new cast of narrating characters who produced the English Ivanhoe. Abundant allusions and analogies would seem to make the novel Scott's Macbeth, a historical tragedy of magic. If it is, it is a Macbeth without a Malcolm, without the figure who returns to shoulder the inheritance and carry it forward from the timeless oscillation of revenge and reversals to the evolving synthesis of history.

Shakespeare's Malcolm, dispossessed heir, man of reason turned to war, shrewdly associates himself with the Christian magic of English Edward the Confessor, and approaches his usurped patrimony of Dunsinane «screened» not only by the leaves of Birnam Wood but also by the passionate anger of MacDuff, who kills Malcolm's enemy for him in the way many a minor character does for the hero of the Waverley Novels. Edgar of Ravenswood, last son of a Scottish Cavalier family dispossessed by a Whig lawyer married to an ambitious Douglas, seems at first to be placed as the Malcolm of this drama. And in fact, the political history around him is poised to carry this most modern of the antique and choleric Ravenswoods, this reflective, tolerant, and selfcritical mind, forward into the synthesis that preserves the best of the aristocratic races if they embody the changes called for by Universal Psychology. For the Scottish Tories are due for a period "on top" in the politics of British union in the novel's time, and had not Edgar, like Macbeth, turned his face from the rational "prospect of belief" urged by the novel's various Banquos toward the "witchcraft, omens and vaticinations" of women in the wild, he would have gone with the tide to virtual restoration of his heritage. Once fixed in the «prospect» of magic, however, Edward's particular combination of virtues and flaws bring him to Macbeth's fate: the best he can do, after manifold struggles, is to plunge directly into the prophecy which organizes his death.

Two interesting modern differences characterize Scott's use of the standard women-in-the-wild stewardship of magic. Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare's human witch, the wife «unsexed» by spirits of the air, becomes in Scott's novel the mother and the daughter of Edgar's usurping enemy. Lady Ashton has not brought forth men children only: defending her usurped castle against Edgar, she needs her wrathful son Sholto, her fey teenage son Henry, and especially her romantic daugh-322- ter Lucy to divert Edgar from the restoration that Universal History has in mind for the Ravenswoods to the destruction that prophecy has in mind. The daughter's love and the mother's hate combine to attract Edgar toward the dueling ground where the drawn swords of both Whig opponents and Cavalier allies call to his own half-drawn one, a killing ground he has repeatedly tried to leave or transform.

Falling in love with the daughter of his enemy promises a transformation, but the wrathful mother in control of the daughter has lost sight of the rational goal of her fight-security for her family and a foot in both camps of the evolving synthesis. For Lady Ashton, history is simply a series of violent reversals, which she means to arrest while she is at the top. Manipulating Lucy into another marriage to block Ravenswood is a small price to pay. The maddened bride's attempted murder of her husband, even the bride's death in fits, is a small price, for it gives the «grieving» family the right at last to the trial by arms that Edgar refused in the early chapters.

When Edgar rides out to meet Sholto Ashton in the last pages of the novel he might, like Macbeth, be thinking of two magical prophecies that attached his death to an apparently impossible condition. One is a verse from Thomas Rhymer claiming that the "last Lord" of Ravenswood will die when he "stables his horse in the Kelpie's [quicksand's] flow" on the way to claim a dead bride. The other is a legendary tale chronicling the fatal love meeting between a sixteenth-century Ravenswood and a supernatural lady at a Gothic fountain on the ancient grounds. At the behest of his Christian counselors, the tale goes, he tested her humanity; she plunged back into the fountain, bloodying the waters, and his death followed. The story and the fountain became the bane of the family.

Scott creates two «witches» of the peasant classes to evoke and deploy this antihistorical prophecy within the sensitive minds of the declining aristocrat, Edgar Ravenswood, and the ascending one, Lucy Ashton. The politics of class are strong on this level of the plot. While the movement of Universal History seeks the alliance of blood and brain-the moderate aristocrat and the lawyer's daughter-in a revitalized and democratized ruling class, the plots of prophecy in Scott most often carry the contravening grievances of the poor, who take the short view, not the historical one, looking at close quarters for revenge and reversal.

The better-educated, blind Alice Gray's scorn is for the newer rulers: when called «witch» by an Ashton she swears she will go willingly to the -323- stake if "the usurer, and the oppressor, and the grinder of the poor man's face, and the… subverter of ancient houses" burns at the same stake. The more chilling and fantastic Ailsie Gourlay, one of those who commit real crimes under pretense of magic, is in the pay of Lady Ashton, but scorns all the "great ones": "They wad gie us whinstanes for loaves, if it would serve their ain vanity, and yet they expect us to be gratefu', as they ca' it, as if they served us for true love and liking." Alice wields the plots of prophecy to separate Edgar from Lucy out of genuine fear of the probable bloody renewal of the Ravenswood/ Ashton feud. Ailsie taunts Edgar and terrorizes Lucy with them partly for pay but mostly out of a diabolical love of mischief-making and a classic professional interest in death: with her fellow Shakespearean hags Maggie and Annie, Ailsie presides at the washing and winding of the neighborhood's corpses. Prophecy, and its aestheticized sister tragedy, are interested in glorious deaths; Universal History in sometimes inglorious survivals.

Scott's witches and wizards operate the plots of magic either to gain power over the great or out of self-delusion, often both. A fascinated rationalist, a commercial enchanter, Scott can never erect a supernatural structure without a probable rational origin: even the tale of the suicidal nymph of the Ravenswood fountain, the narrator speculates, sounds like the aristocrat's deliberately garbled version of a more sordid occurrence, the Ravenswood baron's murder of a lower-class mistress who crossed him. Ordinarily Scott makes the plots of magic, belief not assimilated to the synthesis of Univeral History, work with History, clearing the ground of figures unequipped to stay in the synthesis. Such is the case in Waverley, where the ancient superstition of the Bodach Glas, the death-bringer of his clan, seals Fergus MacIvor's resolve to die, leaving Edward Waverley free of his dark glamor. Such is the case in Ivanhoe, where Ulrica's invocation to the Saxon demon makes hotter the fire that eliminates the Norman villain Front de Boeuf, and opens the gates of Torquilstone Castle for the invading Saxons.

Only in The Bride of Lammermoor do the plots of magic erase and humiliate the plan of History. No Ravenswood, no Ashton, survives to take the inheritance, marry, bear children, enter History. Edgar disappears in the quicksand and Lucy into her grave; the Ashton sons die without heirs; the wounded bridegroom, heir at law, leaves Scotland never to return. We look in vain to the last chapter's summing up for the sign of continuation, of fertility and order, that always is History's mark in the Waverley Novels. -324-

The sign is there in the novel though, in the great feast that precedes the final tragic movement of the novel, a feast that takes place, as it must, in the only thriving place in the community. Not the ancient Ravenswood tower where Edgar lives, its larders and movables cleaned to the walls at novel's opening by the funeral feast for his father. Not the usurped manor of Ravenswood itself, where the Ashtons have been making sterile "improvements," but the small port of Wolf's Hope, once a purely feudal dependency of the Ravenswoods, now learning and consolidating its new commercial and political freedoms under British modernity.The man who had "headed the insurrection" by which the villagers had taken back control of their property and labor while the Ravenswoods fought the Ashtons over the larger properties is John Girder, the cooper, an artisan whose now well-furnished and plenished house, lovingly described several times in the novel, hosts the Master of Ravenswood and his kinsman the Marquis of A. for the meeting that unites the two Ravenswoods on the path, as they think, to their reinsertion into History. Magic will divert Edgar from that path, and the Marquis of A. will get his trivial time at the top of party politics, says the narrator. But it is the artisan and his «insurrection» that is really marked to enter Universal History. If John Girder's head is "weelnigh dung donnart" with his sudden elevation to Queen's cooper and with the hosting of aristocrats, if he remains a little bit pompous in his good fortune, if his new authority has the dangerous undertow of setting him to "build castles in the air" about his future, nevertheless his «oration» at the end of the feast has the tempered certainty that is the sign of Universal History in the Waverley Novels: "Let the house be redd up, the broken meat set by. Let every man and woman here set about their ain business, as if there was nae sic thing as marquis or master, duke or drake, laird or lord, in this world."

Judith Wilt

Selected Bibliography

Farrell John P. The Dilemma of the Moderate from Scott to, Arnold. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980.

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Ferris Ina. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Fleishman Avrom. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.

Johnson Edgar. Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

Millgate Jane. Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.

Welsh Alexander. The Hero of the Waverley Novels. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963.

Wilt Judith. Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

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A Novel of Their Own: Romantic Women's Fiction, 1790–1830

IN the opening decades of the nineteenth century, women dominated both the production and the consumption of novels. The success of the circulating or lending libraries, which spread rapidly throughout England during the late eighteenth century, meant that hitherto prohibitively expensive books were now available to a new and ever-growing readership, a readership composed in large part of increasingly literate and leisured upper- and middle-class women who preferred to read literature, and especially novels, written by women. The contents of the ten leading circulating libraries in London in 1800, tabulated by the London Statistical Society (cited in Richard Altick's The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900, 1957), suggests that the bulk of the writers for and the subscribers to these libraries were female. Three-quarters of the two thousand books in circulation were either "Fashionable Novels, well known" (439 volumes) or "Novels of the lowest character, being chiefly imitations of Fashionable Novels" (1008 volumes). Two additional categories also appealed primarily to women readers: «Romances» (76 volumes) and "Novels by Miss Edgeworth, and Moral and Religious Novels" (49 volumes). A cursory survey of the literary reviews of the period suggests that by 1830 over two hundred living women writers could claim authorship of at least one novel, and that by far the most prolific novelist of the period was "A Lady." After surveying both the number of editions of individual novels and their reception in the leading literary reviews, Ann H. Jones concludes in Ideas and Innovations: Best-Sellers of -327- Jane Austen's Age that the most popular novelists of the period from 1800 to 1820 were women: Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, Mary Brunton, Jane and Anna Maria Porter, and Sydney Owenson. Only two men are on the list, Walter Scott and Thomas Surr. By 1830, several more women novelists would rival these seven in popularity: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Susan Ferrier, Marguerite Gardiner (Countess of Blessington), Elizabeth Le Noir, and Jane West-and, posthumously, Jane Austen.

Historians of the novel, especially those concerned with documenting the "great age of the novel"-the Victorian period-and including feminist literary historians interested in tracing the development of the novel as a female literary tradition, have tended to overlook the significance of this enormous body of female-authored literature. Focusing almost exclusively on Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and a recent addition to the canonical history of the novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, historians of the novel have usually identified the Romantic novel either with a nationalistic and bourgeois recuperation of the past (as in Scott's historical fiction), with an equally conservative celebration of a morally reinvigorated gentry class (in Jane Austen's fiction), or with a Gothic evocation and criticism of the excesses of sensibility (in the work of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley). Even perceptive feminist critics of the novel have asserted that the female-authored fiction of the Romantic period registers the triumph of a patriarchal domestic ideology. Basing their conclusions primarily upon conduct books and religious tracts written by men and women, including Addison and Steele's Spectator, they have eloquently argued that women writers of the Romantic era were either forced to accommodate themselves to, indirectly subvert, or gain power wholly within a cultural construction of the proper lady as a modest, domesticated woman, one confined to the private sphere, one who did not speak in public.

A closer look at the large number and wide range of women's fiction produced between 1790 and 1830 suggests a rather different story. Despite recent arguments to the contrary, Romantic women novelists did not resign the construction of "feminine discourse" in the novel to men, obediently reproducing the hegemonic ideology of bourgeois capitalism and relocating it in an idealized middle-class patriarchal family. In the Romantic period, women novelists more frequently employed their writing as a vehicle for ideological contestation and subversion, exploiting the novel's capacity for disruptive humor and sustained inter-328- rogation of existing social codes, and for what Bakhtin called its «heteroglossia» and «dialogism» (its ability to present and maintain opposing voices and points of view). While the psychological and rhetorical accommodations noted by many critics undoubtedly occurred in writing by women of the Romantic period, I emphasize here the existence of an equally strong Romantic female literary tradition that openly challenged and revised the patriarchal domestic ideology in powerful ways. We can no longer assume that the doctrine of the separate spheres, the sexual division of labor into the public/male and the private/female realms, was universally accepted during the Romantic period.

Although several of these women novelists invoked a modesty topos in introducing their work to the public, the sheer bulk of their publications suggests that they did not succumb to the debilitating female "anxiety of authorship" assigned to them by recent feminist critics. Many were capable of the authorial self-confidence-even arrogance-exemplified by Harriet Lee, who, in her introduction to the Standard Novels edition of her Canterbury Tales in 1832, claimed:

I think I may be permitted to observe, that when these volumes first appeared [in 1797], a work bearing distinctly the title of "Tales," professedly adapted to different countries, and either abruptly commencing with, or breaking suddenly into, a sort of dramatic dialogue, was a novelty in the fictions of the day. Innumerable «Tales» of the same stamp, and adapted in the same manner to all classes and all countries, have since appeared; with many of which I presume not to compete in merit, though I think I may fairly claim priority of design and style.

Following Harriet Lee, I suggest that the Romantic woman's novel played a key role in the construction of a new ideology of gender, which I have called "feminine Romanticism" and which I discuss more fully in Romanticism and Gender (1992). Repudiating the economic and gender systems promoted in the eighteenth-century novels of Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, and Mackenzie, and rejecting the political assumptions of the male Romantic poets, the female novelists of the Romantic era celebrated not the achievements of the imagination or the overflow of powerful feelings, but rather the workings of the rational mind, a mind relocated-in a gesture of revolutionary gender implications-in the female as well as the male body. They thereby insisted upon the fundamental equality of women and men. Typically, they endorsed a commitment to a development of subjectivity based on alterity, and -329- grounded their moral systems on what Carol Gilligan (in In a Different Voice, 1982) has taught us to call an "ethic of care," one that insists on the primacy of the family or the community and their attendant practical responsibilities over the rights of the individual. These writers based their notions of community on a cooperative rather than possessive interaction with Nature-imaged as a female friend, mother, or sister-and promoted a politics of gradual rather than violent social change, a transformation that extends the values and practices of the domestic affections into the public realm.

In opposition to the conservative domestic ideology so well described by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, many Romantic women novelists used their fiction to promote significantly different social agendas. Some rejected the public sphere altogether as irredeemably brutal, corrupt, and self-destructive, and construed the ideal male as one who in the end is absorbed entirely into the feminine, private sphere. Charlotte Smith, for example, in The Old Manor House (1794), offers a wide-ranging critique of masculinity in all its cultural forms. She first condemns the eighteenth-century "new man of feeling" by parodying the lyrics of Gray, Collins, and Cowper. The spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling in a man, expressed in her protagonist Orlando's "Ode to Poverty," functions in her novel as a sign of self-indulgence and social irresponsibility, like Orlando's momentary failure to provide his wife with a home and income. She then calls into question the aristocracy's chivalric code of honor from which Orlando's name is derived, not in the name of the rights of the common man, as William Godwin did that same year in Caleb Williams, but rather in the name of gender transformation. In Smith's novel, Orlando gives up both the chivalric and the democratic constructions of masculinity in order to take up the subject position of a woman. He is finally portrayed as feminine, the vulnerable dependent of a wealthy aristocratic woman, delicately featured, refined, loving, loyal, and passive-in short, as a modest heroine. When he goes to America to fight in the war against the colonies, he is immediately captured and-in a subversion of the popular racist and sexist American captivity narratives-cared for by a noble Indian chief. Orlando's femininity embodies a critique not just of the political elitism of feudal aristocracy but also of patrilineal bourgeois capitalism. His revulsion at the brutality of imperialist wars, at primogeniture and the indulgence of the eldest -330- son, and at the greed of modern commerce are all endorsed in Smith's novel.

Other female novelists of the Romantic period contested the political domination of the patriarch-whether benevolent or tyrannical-by presenting all-female families or communities as the only sites of personal fulfillment. In Adeline Mowbray (1804), Amelia Opie tracks the damage done to a woman who tries to live out Godwin's radical notion of free love without marriage and his abstract system of political justice. At the conclusion, Opie offers as her radical social alternative (both to free love and to patriarchal domesticity) an all-female family of choice (Mrs. Pemberton, Mrs. Mowbray, and the West Indian Savannah), whose members overcome class and racial differences and collectively take on the responsibility of rearing Adeline's motherless daughter. A similar female family of choice emerges in the second draft for the conclusion of Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), where Maria-abandoned by both her husband and her lover-decides that she will "live for" her daughter, together with the lowerclass Jemima.

More powerfully, many Romantic women novelists openly challenged the patriarchal doctrine of the separate spheres-the doctrine that would, in a classic example of antifeminist backlash, triumph as the official ideology of Queen Victoria's reign-by articulating a very different domestic ideology. The feminine Romanticism embodied in women's fiction from 1790 to 1830 constitutes (to use feminist author Rita Felski's term) an alternative "counter-public sphere." Many women novelists of the