Book Reviews/
Critiques de livres
Too Much is Never Enough: Austen’s Texts and Contexts
Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity
by Janine Barchas
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
328pp. US$45. ISBN 978-1-4214-0640-4.
Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works, ed. Linda Bree, Peter Sabor,
and Janet Todd
Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2013.
414pp. CAN$14.95. ISBN 978-1-55481-058-1.
Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures by Claudia L. Johnson
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
240pp. US$35. ISBN 978-0-2264-0203-1.
Jane Austen In and Out of Context by Shinobu Minma
Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2012.
174pp. JPY 4,000. ISBN 978-4-7664-1961-0.
Emma: An Annotated Edition by Jane Austen, ed. Bharat Tandon
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.
572pp. US$35. ISBN 978-0-674-04884-3.
Review by Jodi L. Wyett, Xavier University
Jane Austen’s legacy is everywhere: an award-winning web series; a
dis­pute with an American pop star over jewelry; an art piece rising
out of the Serpentine Lake at Hyde Park in the form Mr Darcy, the
beloved hero of Pride and Prejudice. Austen has been zombified, fightclubbed, theme-parked, and, in case you missed this stunning synec­
doche of her current commodification, she is soon to appear on the
British ten-pound note. This ubiquity inspires the question, “How
much is too much?” Is Austen overexposed? Has Jane Austen “jumped
the shark”? (That last question was the title of a 2013 American Society
for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference panel.)
Claudia L. Johnson’s most recent work suggests that when it comes
to all things Austen, too much is never enough. Johnson opens her
long-awaited book, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, with a ghost story
to evoke the ways in which Austen—body and spirit—has preoccupied
her ardent readers since the nineteenth century. Johnson tells her
own tale of visita­tion, risking evoking the incredulity of her fellow
academics, but, like the book itself, the ghost story serves to effectively
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challenge the barriers between the physical and metaphysical and
Austen scholar­ship and Austen fandom. In this way, Johnson offers
a timely intervention in a long-held if rapidly dissolving divide and
deftly places herself among the Janeites at the outset of a beautifully
rendered piece of scholarship. Lucid prose, meticulous research, and
cogent analysis, together with a generous number of illustrations,
make this book not only essential reading for Austen scholars, but
also that rare monograph with appeal for readers beyond the academy.
Indeed, where do such distinc­tions lie when the New York Times offers
a board game of “recent Austen industry highlights” that positions
eminent Austen scholars beside the giant visage of the Nessie-like
Mr Darcy menacing London last summer? (Mary Jo Murphy and
Jennifer Schuessler, “Jane, Plain No More: A Year of Austen Glamour,”
8 August 2013, http://tinyurl.com/q8fl3lq).
As Johnson points out, the desire to claim some version of Austen
and her works as “the” authentic or accurate Austen is long-lived, yet
she suggests that academics have much to learn from other readers,
who can “inspire us to re-read Austen in surprising and stunning ways”
(15). She proves as much by analyzing some of the myriad ways in
which Austen—icon and symbol for her corpus of writing—has been
read throughout history, venturing answers to the questions of how and
why Austen has become vested with such magical, legendary status. The
enduring tendency to fetishize relics of Austen’s person is a function,
Johnson argues, of both the paucity of material evidence of her life and
body and the tendency to confer uncanny power on Austen’s works.
Johnson’s content ranges from Victorian versions of a fantastical
fairy Austen and debates about the authenticity of various portraits of
Austen, to the ways in which Austen’s work has been read during war­
time, to, finally, the history and inventory of the Jane Austen’s House
Museum at Chawton. Regarding the portraits, while Johnson makes
her own case for some hitherto dismissed images, she also focuses
on what the controversies surrounding these pictures say about those
who adhere to or reject their legitimacy. She contends that by the
mid-twentieth century “Austen’s face purveys something as grand as
England itself ” (30). Such prescient commentary had me wondering
why there has been little discussion of the image that represents Austen
on the pending ten-pound note. Apropos to another recent chapter in
the chronicles of Austen’s modern afterlife—Kelly Clarkson’s unsuc­
cess­ful bid to buy Austen’s turquoise ring—Johnson’s work reveals
how this episode fits into patterns tied both to the need to reify a now
over­deter­mined “Jane” and to the ways in which Austen represents
Englishness. American collector and Jane Austen Society founding
member Alberta Burke, whose bequest to her alma mater makes up the
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bulk of the Jane Austen Collection at Goucher College, was compelled
to donate a lock of Austen’s hair to the newly forming Jane Austen’s
House Museum in the 1940s. Burke bought the rare Austen relic at
auction only to witness her fellow founders bitterly bemoan the loss
of such an item to an unknown American. Johnson holds that bits of
Austen ephemera such as the lock have become both overvalued and
potentially empty signifiers, and she reads these against the dearth
of descriptive detail about objects in Austen’s own works. While she
argues relations between people—not things—carry weight in Austen’s
novels, Johnson nevertheless acknowl­edges that Austen revelled in her
public reputation, something we recognize in our own time as a process
of commodification. As such, perhaps Austen would enjoy the fuss
made over her ring. Louise West, a fundraiser for the Chawton House
Museum, offered to USA Today that “it is very good for Jane Austen
PR that a young, famous American pop star expresses a love for her”
(Maria Puente, “Kelly Clarkson’s Jane Austen Ring May Stay in Britain,”
12 August 2013, http://tinyurl.com/owam9e9).
In contrast to her otherworldly explorations into the uses of Austen,
Johnson expands on some of her influential, previously published
work in order to chronicle the reception of Austen’s novels during
both twentieth-century world wars, questioning some long-held crit­
ical practices in the process. Johnson’s scrutiny of the influential
essay “Regulating Hatred,” for example, praises author D.W. Harding
where he reads Austen’s work closely and chides him when he does
not because “Austen becomes in his hands ... emphatically resexed
as feminine” (148). Johnson argues we have become too beholden to
this feminization of Austen, begun by her Victorian readers, revived
by Harding, and perhaps unwittingly perpetuated by feminist critics
today. Certainly modern Austen scholarship, significantly influenced
by feminism, has taken us away from the Victorian version of diffident
Jane, but what we have not done so successfully is remove Austen’s work
from the gendered binaries—proper or radical, private or public—
established in that era. In contrast, Johnson proffers readers during
World War i who connected the experience of war to the tragedy and
confine­ment of Austen’s characters, fragile humans navigating brutal
opposi­­tion, thus dissolving illusory boundaries between the domestic
realm and the battleground and, in turn, between what is purportedly
women’s purview versus men’s. In a time when we tire of the theory that
Austen adaptations remain popular only for their nostalgic appeal to a
better time, we may be surprised to hear that though some cited this
escapist impulse as a reason to read Austen in times of war, still others
saw her as an ally, not a deserter from the cause.
In her afterword, Johnson notes that today’s cults of Austen form
in a decidedly visual culture, one that has a different relationship to
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embodi­ment than those cultures she explores in her book. While
Johnson claims not to offer much on what Janeism means today—to us
or to the understanding of Austen’s works—I beg to differ, as my own
musings illustrate. She has provided an invaluable history on which we
can ground our insights going forward.
Shinobu Minma’s Jane Austen In and Out of Context turns our
attention away from the madding crowd of Austen admirers through
the centuries and back to the novels. The six chapters, one devoted to
each novel, have all been previously published in some form over the
course of the past twenty-five years, and therefore the book does not
evidence the pointed cohesion that marks a thesis-driven monograph.
The essays do share a careful attention to close reading and a vision of
Austen as a product of the “age of reason,” at once keen to uphold her
society’s rules of propriety and to condemn rigid turn-of-the-century
moral codes. Ultimately, Minma holds that Austen’s novels promote
the need for order within reason, reinforce the centrality of hierarchy
in maintaining community, and attend to the ways in which persistent
solipsisms that individual humans may evince are both symptomatic of
and contributors to social degeneracy.
Minma’s reliance on mid-twentieth-century scholarship to establish
what he identifies as the facts of Austen’s contexts can be problematic. He
predicates his interpretations of the novels on some sweeping historical
claims, such as that eighteenth-century English people were known for
their “easygoing indifference to manners and morals,” whereas rigid
propriety reigned in Regency England owing to reactionary fear of
the French Revolution and the influence of the Evangelical movement
(55). Outright errors, such as that Mary Wollstonecraft married Gilbert
Imlay, distract (43). Yet the nuances of context do not appear to be the
aim here. Minma argues that Austen was more concerned with human
nature than specific reactions to her own political context and that this
quality of her work allows it to transcend her own time. Minma insists,
“Jane Austen directed her attention to [human society’s] immutable and
enduring, rather than topical and transitory, aspects” (109).
While Minma’s criticism is really much more “out of ” than “in” con­
text, and more formalist than historicist, his focus on characteriza­tion
and psychological motivation proves to be the most perceptive aspect
of his readings. He argues that the qualities of many of Austen’s char­
acters—from Sir Thomas’s empty adherence to a strict code of morality
that proves too flimsy when his ambitions are better served in the
breach, to Emma’s abuse of rank and privilege as a mark of pseudogentry fear that more recent social climbers might outstrip her—reflect
a more general problem with the disruption of traditional values and
hierarchical social systems rather than with the particular disrupters
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of that order such as the rise of Evangelicalism or the ascension of the
nouveaux riches.
In his last chapter, Minma takes to task the twentieth-century critical
commonplace that maintains that Persuasion champions meritocracy
over the traditional social order, figured in the navy versus the gentry
and Captain Wentworth versus Sir Walter. Austen’s target is the deteri­
oration of the grounding of the social hierarchy, not the hierarchy itself,
he contends. With high rank comes great social responsibility, but Sir
Walter’s selfishness and his inability to recognize what he ought to
do threaten the social order. Good manners cannot be only a matter
of appearance; they must reflect inner moral strength and certitude.
Furthermore, Minma argues that naval officers were as likely to come
from the ranks of the landed gentry as from the lower orders, thus
exposing the false dichotomy between the gentry and the navy. Again,
Minma focuses on the value of hierarchy, arguing that the efficiency of
the British navy was due to adherence to strict rules, its order borne out
of the necessity to protect lives.
Janine Barchas also questions the too-easy binary of the baronetage
versus the navy, but she does so from a radically new perspective in
Austen studies in her Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location,
and Celebrity. While humbly claiming only to establish “the persistent
historicist impulse behind [Austen’s] choices of names and settings,”
Barchas demonstrates extraordinarily detailed historical referents for
many of Austen’s people and places, paying particular attention to
what Austen could have read, seen, or learned (257). Barchas argues
that reading Austen’s works as deeply tied to her context allows us to
see aspects of her artistry that would have been readily apparent to
her contemporaries but have been lost to readers over time, especially
as critics have favoured biographical and domestic interpretations of
her work. Matters of Fact in Jane Austen helps to debunk the persistent
characterization of Austen as a retiring, proper spinster. Instead, Barchas
builds a portrait of a writer invested in allu­sions and connections to
celebrity culture, including disputes over estates between some of
the most visible peers of the realm, true histories of past murder and
intrigue that put Ann Radcliffe to shame, and the “Hell-Fire Club”
of licentious eighteenth-century playboys whose revels were held at
Francis Dashwood’s bawdily landscaped estate. As Austen’s letters show
and careful readings of her novels reveal, she was no prudish old maid.
Barchas’s research offers a cosmopolitan author, working well beyond
her own, now hackneyed, description of “3 or 4 Families in a country
Village” (Jane Austen’s Letters, 4th ed., ed. Deirdre Le Faye [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011], 287).
Barchas presents several ways to rethink or dig more deeply into
some of Austen’s long-recognized themes, such as interest in landscape
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gardening, and weighs in on some composition and style disputes. In
the latter case, her work offers new insight into when Lady Susan may
have been written and illustrates how thorough contextual history might
answer critical complaints about the purportedly awkward disjunc­tions
between Northanger Abbey’s two settings. Attention to precise geo­
graph­­­ical locations and architectural features, as well as the histories of
both, reveals similarities in the ways in which Austen maps Bath and
Northanger Abbey, subsequently tying together the two volumes. Her
readers have long noted Austen’s scrupulousness about factual accuracy,
but Barchas takes this to new levels. While still arguing that Austen never
sacrifices realism to a possible allusion, Barchas questions the critical
orthodoxy that describes Austen as eschewing biographical and historical
particularity in favour of generalizations that serve to heighten realism.
Critics have often recognized Austen’s care with locational details in
particular, but have done little more. Barchas’s compelling geographical
and spatial arguments in “Mapping Northanger Abbey to Find ‘Old Allen’
of Prior Park” had me reading with my iPad in hand, toggling between
various maps of Bath and the book to find the described landmarks
and trace the routes of Catherine Morland’s carriage rides with John
Thorpe. Although the book includes many excellent illustrations, the
maps were too small for detailed perusal. A Google maps assignment
awaits my England summer study-abroad students-cum-surveyors,
but Barchas’s work could as easily inspire graphic learners to map out
complex family trees. Barchas relates her exhaustive research on his­
torical personages and family lines that are echoed in the names of
Austen’s characters. At times, the connections seem dubious, and the
resulting interpretative claims smack of over-reading. Nevertheless, this
work reminds us of the fluidity of the eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury social system, less a matter of binaries—high and low, new and
old—and more a matter of complex connections among people in all
walks of life and circumstances. Social “place” could be tenuous, ties
broken and sutured, thus begging us to do the difficult work of reading
Austen’s writing for these complexities rather than simply accepting
long-established and often too simple patterns.
Oxbridge rivalries, arguments over collaborative digital versus juried
print editions, feuds among modern academics—these may not be as
sexy as the eighteenth-century bacchanals Barchas cites as context for
Sense and Sensibility, but public intellectuals can still splash into the
headlines, especially when controversy surrounds the editing of Austen’s
works. Kathryn Sutherland’s biting review of the Cambridge Edition of
the Works of Jane Austen (Review of English Studies 63 [April 2012]:
333–37) took aim at the manuscript volumes in particular, faulting the
editors for focusing on historical context and readability rather than
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the texts as visual objects and the history of R.W. Chapman’s editorial
practices. The new Broadview Press paperback edition of Jane Austen’s
Manuscript Works draws directly on two volumes of the Cambridge
Edition, the juvenilia edited by Peter Sabor and the later manuscripts
edited by Linda Bree and Janet Todd. Notably, Sutherland offers a
competing resource to those efforts: Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts
Digital Edition (http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html), which the
editors of the Broadview paperback edition judiciously footnote in
their introduction, though with more than a hint of dubiousness about
Sutherland’s claims in the press that the lack of paragraphing and spelling
inconsistencies in the manu­scripts are evidence that Austen’s published
novels owe much to her editors.
Those who prefer a paper and ink text, especially for teaching pur­
poses, will welcome the Broadview edition of the manuscripts. Despite
the dissent, the Cambridge Edition volumes have quickly become the
gold standard in Austen scholarship. Priced at around one thousand US
dollars for the nine-volume set, they are clearly beyond the reach of most
of the professoriate, not to mention students and even many libraries.
An accessible, rigorous scholarly edition of most of the manu­scripts
based on the Cambridge Edition assures that texts such as Lady Susan,
which Barchas laments has not received the scholarly consideration it
deserves, will receive more attention in the future.
This Broadview edition will be of particular use in graduate-level
courses that devote time to exploring print practices and editorial issues.
Because Broadview editions aim to illuminate texts in the classroom,
they offer relevant introductions and appendices of particular value
to undergraduate students as well. The introduction addresses editing
practices, Austen’s style and themes, and differences and similarities
between the published and unpublished works. The requisite brief
chronology and select bibliography appear, as well as several short
appendices. The bulk of Austen’s manuscript works are here, including
over half of the juvenilia and all of the later works, perhaps explaining
why the appendices are uncharacteristically brief for a Broadview edi­
tion. The appendices contain excerpts from Austen’s letters to her niece
Anna about fiction writing. They also include some of the attempts at
con­tinuations of the juvenilia by Anna and Austen’s nephew, James
Edward Austen (later Leigh), which might instigate discussions of
Austen’s legacy in the nineteenth century or even a creative assignment
for students to write their own continuations. Finally, the editors append
work by contemporaries Frances Burney and Mary Wollstonecraft, to
offer ideological and stylistic connections, and Walter Scott’s review of
Emma, to establish how Austen’s talents were recognized at what many
deem their height. It is unclear why these contextualizing documents
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made the cut; they surely represent a small fraction of the ways in which
teachers and scholars can connect Jane Austen’s manuscript works to
the writing of her contemporaries and the ideas of her time.
If your inner Janeite is still in hiding at this point, the Belknap Press
annotated edition of Austen’s Emma, edited by Bharat Tandon, will bring
it out. This edition appeals to both the textual and the visual sense of what
it now means to “use Austen.” Too expensive for a college class­room text
and yet quite reasonable for a scholarly text, this book is clearly meant as
a keepsake to appeal to a broad spectrum of Austen devotees. Popular
culture Austen appears in the form of screen shots from recent film
adapta­tions: Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, where Cher, back­lit by a colourful
fountain, glosses Emma’s realization that she is in love with Knightley
(457); and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, where an image of Colonel
Brandon carrying a rain-soaked Marianne serves as an illustration of
romantic adventure akin to Harriet being besieged by gypsies (379).
A large, visually arresting book, this is nevertheless a scholarly edi­
tion of the novel, and Tandon’s editorial notes, discursive and illustra­
tive, provide a carefully chosen and thoroughly researched appara­tus
that illuminates Emma for readers of all stripes. Most of the multiple
illustra­
tions are splendid exemplars of late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century contexts: people, places, animals, furniture, cloth­
ing, food, leisure activities, even a facsimile of an 1802 acrostic (423).
The introduction covers the novel’s publication history and reception,
explains Austen’s use of free indirect discourse, and addresses some of
the novel’s most com­pelling themes and attributes—the construction of
reality, both among individuals and in novels; psychological interiority
and social relations; a lack of narrative details coupled with a precision
in the details that do appear; the question of whether or not Austen
engaged with the historical particulars of her day.
The notes and illustrations are printed in columns directly facing the
text or embedded within it rather than relegated to the bottom of the
page, or in the even more cumbersome location at the back of the book,
making this an interactive reading experience. Tandon’s notes address
the thematic and stylistic concerns that he lays out in his introduction,
concentrating often on the ways in which Austen’s use of what may seem
like quotidian details can actually illuminate the text and its context.
Explaining his editorial motivations and practices in the introduction,
Tandon seeks to explore Austen’s contexts in ways that strike a balance
between providing simple facts and “interpretative coercion” (6). To
illustrate this distinction, I will use the example of Mr Cole’s cheese,
which Mr Elton enthusiastically mentions to Harriet in chapter 10 of
volume 1 of Emma. In the Norton critical edition of Emma, an excellent
choice for classroom use, George Justice succinctly glosses “the north
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Wiltshire” as a reference to a popular cheese ([New York, 2012], 65). The
column containing Tandon’s note on cheese runs the length of the page,
citing two scholarly sources and one contemporary novel (Burney’s
Camilla) to explore how the Stilton and North Wiltshire cheeses Elton
mentions are “another of Austen’s subtle intimations of social relations
through objects” (122). Cole’s cheese choices and Elton’s enthusiasm
for them indicate their modern consumptive practices, as these trendy
morsels had to be brought in from other parts of the country. For those
who would rather avert their eyes from the proliferating spectacles of
Austenmania in the media but nevertheless revel in Regency cultural
context, rest them on the pages of this edition. Blinker the margins and
focus on the centre if you dare. Even those of us who welcome Austen’s
popularity always return to the writing, with its immeasurable capacity
to charm, to evoke, to dazzle.
Jodi L. Wyett, associate professor of English at Xavier University, teaches
eighteenth-century British literature and culture, women’s literature, and
gender theory and has published on Jane Austen, Frances Brooke, and
animals in the long eighteenth century.
Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–1816
by Claire Grogan
Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012.
xii+174pp. US$99.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6688-2.
Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and
Richard Brinsley Sheridan by David Francis Taylor
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
xiv+280pp. €55. ISBN 978-0-19-964284-7.
Review by Sylvana Tomaselli, University of Cambridge
David Francis Taylor’s Theatres of Opposition originates in his doctoral
thesis, and the questions behind Claire Grogan’s Politics and Genre in the
Works of Elizabeth Hamilton also first took shape during her gradu­ate
research into the politics of British women’s writing in the late eighteenth
century. The books share relatively little besides. They seem to pull their
subjects in different, if not entirely opposed, directions. Both do, of
course, endeavour to make us see their respective authors as we should,
both encourage us to shed our sense of stylistic or disciplinary boundaries
to do so, and, as is to be expected, both posi­tion their own nuanced
interpretations precisely within the wealth of scholarly publications on
their chosen subject or relevant topics. Yet, whereas shining a true light
on Richard Brinsley Sheridan requires Taylor to teach us to think of him
as his contemporaries did on both the theatrical and political stages at
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once, Grogan would like us to extricate Hamilton from the revolutionary
debates in which critics normally situate her, or at least she would like us
to do so long enough to appreciate that it is through her unique use of a
variety of literary genres rather than more conventional political inter­
ventions that she participated in revolutionary deliberations.
Densely written, rich in detail, and the product of not only careful
reading, but also extensive research in the theatrical and political con­­texts
in which Sheridan was seen to act, Theatres of Opposition is a demanding
but rewarding study. The Sheridan that emerges from its pages is more
than the successful author of The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal
(1777): he is a major cultural figure of the time. Having bought David
Garrick’s share in the Theatre Royal in 1776, Sheridan remained a key
personage in Drury Lane until the theatre’s destruction by fire in 1809. A
journalist as well as theatre manager and dramaturge, he was elected to
the Commons in 1780. A gifted speaker, he rose within the Whig party
and became the subject of numerous cartoons, which attest to his fame as
a politician. A number of these are reproduced in Theatres of Opposition
and contribute to Taylor’s case that Sheridan was, and was seen to be,
an actor and politician in one, a single body on two stages illustrated by
James Gillray’s portrayal of Sheridan as Harlequin. The stages themselves
were more than contiguous: they too formed but one platform.
Considering Sheridan as a writer, orator, and manager, Taylor
focuses on the playwright’s engagement with the imperial questions
that America, India, and Ireland posed to the defenders of liberty in the
last decades of the eighteenth century. Of the many interesting facets of
his thesis is the argument deployed in chapter 3, “Tyranny in India or,
Britain’s Character Lost. A Tragedy.” Here we are shown that Sheridan’s
parliamentary speeches on the impeachment of Warren Hastings
broke down the distinction between political oratory and dramatic
performance, although the five-and-a-half-hour speech he delivered on
7 February 1787 was phenomenally successful, praised in the highest
terms by fellow Members, including Edmund Burke, and did transform
Hastings’s trial, as Taylor comments, into “a spectacular event.” What
we learn is to appreciate the tensions inherent in theatricalized politics.
Agreeing with Sara Suleri’s contention in The Rhetoric of English India
(1992), Taylor argues that the difficulty Hastings’s indictors faced was
the invisibility of the victim, the absence of the colonial body suffer­
ing, the lack of a tangible pain to sympathize with. He shows how
Sheridan used tragic modes to compensate for the initial void in the
affec­tive imagination of the metropolitan public. Taylor also goes on
to acknowledge that “in the process of this dramatization of imperial
power, however, it is finally the damaged body politic of Britain, not the
op­pressed bodies of the Indians, that becomes the tragic protagonists in
need of political catharsis” (72–73).
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This is not to say that he derides Sheridan’s political interventions. On
the contrary, he is more than eager to demonstrate that this eighteenthcentury figure was a true humanitarian, a believer in the natural rights
of man, and a politician of conviction, not the vain opportunist he often
was, and continues to be, dismissed as. Taylor does not think his work
completed. His book is, he mentions in an epilogue, a first step towards
a rehabilitation of Sheridan “as a political thinker and activist” (249).
That Taylor has done much to bring to the fore the activist, the artful
political performer, and that no reader of Theatres of Opposition will ever
be able to think of any of Sheridan’s plays outside of the intricate web
of political discourses dominating his time is unquestionable. That “in
the 1790s, Drury Lane provided a site for ... opposition” is undoubted.
That “Sheridan’s playhouse functioned not only as an area for political
expression, but as a space in which radicalism existed in the very dynamic
structure of performance” is more than likely (193–94). But was it and is
it ever exceptional? Is speech not inherently volatile, and all the more so
in a revolutionary situation?
As to whether Sheridan is a contender for the title of political thinker
obviously depends on how much weight one puts on the accolade. But
does he need it? In any event, who could manage not to be a political
thinker in the later part of the eighteenth century? Even women could
not fail to engage with the politics of the day. Sheridan does come out a
greater man from this book, but there are moments in it when one might
be lured into thinking that the battles his hero fought against censorship
and freedom more generally were fought by Sheridan alone. And to cast
the critical net a little further, one might ask whether to be great requires
one to be on the side of the political angels or whether activism was an
un­con­tested virtue even among the defenders of liberty? As is frequently,
but nonetheless truthfully, said in moments like this, the fact that Taylor’s
work triggers these and other questions bears testimony to its merit.
One woman who does not seem to need to be rehabilitated as a politi­
cal being is Elizabeth Hamilton. In fact, judging by Politics and Genre
in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–1816, what she requires is a
degree of de-politicization. Grogan seeks to ex­tricate Elizabeth Hamilton
from the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin prism through which her works are
commonly read and discussed. Using this political paradigm, Grogan
argues, has distorted our understanding of Hamilton’s writings and
produced wildly contradictory accounts of her political views; these
contradictory accounts fail to appreciate her political ambivalence and
how, for her, political partisanship took second place to Christian faith.
What mattered to Hamilton above all was the dissemination of Christian­
ity and the promotion of education. Grogan argues that studying “the
question and deployment of genre reveals a political coherence in
Hamilton that has been absent from traditional readings that employ the
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Jacobin/Anti-Jacobin paradigm” and that “her use of genre rather than
her party politics uncovers a determined and sustained effort to challenge
pre­vailing views on female intellect and capabilities and so repositions
Hamilton as a significant player in the debate about women’s rights” (25).
If she is relatively neglected today, Hamilton was well known and
much appreciated in her time, not least for her authorship of Cottagers
of Glenburnie (1808). She published a variety of literary, historical, and
educational works, and in recognition of her promotion of “the cause of
religion and virtue,” George iii awarded her a pension in 1804. The aim
of Grogan’s book is not only to counter the current misinterpretations of
her subject’s intentions, but also to raise her in our estimation. This is a
laudable and valuable enterprise. Hamilton should be better known and
now will be, thanks to this penetrating new study.
While it is all well and good to expose baneful dichotomies for what
they are and in so doing also to restore writers to their rightful place in
intellectual history, to do so through comparisons and contrasts to what
are at best caricatures of better known figures such as Mary Hays or
Mary Wollstonecraft more than defeats the purpose. Yet, though Grogan
herself rightly deplores this tendency in the body of her text, this is how
she chooses to introduce Hamilton: the measure of Hamilton appears to
be Hays, Hannah More, or some other late eighteenth-century woman.
Relating one author to another is something encouraged by publishers
and is highly desirable if only for reasons mentioned above, but if one
is to free one writer from the radical/anti-radical split or any other such
division, then it is crucial not to do so by depicting others in those very
terms. That, of course, is easier said than done. Dichotomies, especially
when they are taken head on, have a way of insinuating themselves into
our psyche. Those relating to the left/right political spectrum have been
around since 1789 at least and are difficult, if not impossible, to shake. It
is unnecessary and in the present case particularly unjustifiable to rate
Hamilton somewhere between the “compulsively anti-revolutionary (like
Jane West or Hannah More)” and the “characteristically pro-revolutionary
(like Wollstonecraft and Hays)” (4). Referring to women like Hamilton as
occupying “the middle of the political spectrum” does not constitute an
escape from party politics (26).
Turning to the analysis of Hamilton’s first major publication, Trans­
la­tions of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Grogan notes that it has
always been a challenging work to classify. Is it, as various critics have
claimed, an oriental satire, a satir­ical novel, a general satire, a quasifictional work? Her study provides a helpful review of the various readings
of Hamilton as well as a discussion of the complexity of Orientalism that
led up to the claim that, in appropriating the voice of a male orientalist,
Hamilton “creates tensions in her text because while, on the one hand,
she reinscribes the male/female, powerful/powerless dichotomy, on the
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other hand she simultaneously and perhaps unintentionally merges these
opposites” (48). Writing as an Orientalist subverts the established order,
Grogan contends and concludes that “since Hamilton’s gender precludes
her joining the ranks of male Orientalists her writing creates a new
category to contain her: that of the female Orientalist” (49).
In her concluding comments, Grogan reminds her reader of the aim of
her monograph, namely, to introduce Elizabeth Hamilton to the modern
reader and “to offset the frustrations that contemporary and modern
critics alike faced in their attempts to position and secure Hamilton with
a political grouping by replacing the political paradigm with a literary
one” (155). By focusing on genre rather than the pro-/anti-revo­lu­­tion­
ary paradigm, she hopes to have revealed Hamilton’s effort to chal­lenge
the then-prevailing ideas about female intellectual com­­petence. Cap­tur­
ing the intention and contribution of past authors is a laudable aim. If
this requires moving away from debilitating para­­­digms, as Grogan con­
vincingly argues, it presents a formidable challenge.
Sylvana Tomaselli, Sir Harry Hinsley Lecturer in History, St. John’s
College Cambridge, works principally on eighteenth-century authors and
is the author of articles on Raynal, Mary Wollstonecraft, Montesquieu,
and many others.
Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age
of Sensibility by Hina Nazar
New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
x+182pp. US$45. ISBN 978-0-8232-4007-4.
Review by James Horowitz, Sarah Lawrence College
In this brisk and engagingly polemical study of eighteenth-century
theories of judgment, Hina Nazar attempts to counter the postmodern
suspicion of liberal-humanist values like autonomy and self-sovereignty
as mere ideological fictions designed to justify structures of power and
privilege. In Nazar’s self-professedly “Enlightenment-friendly” read­
ing, three architects of these ideals, David Hume, Adam Smith, and
Immanuel Kant, are described as offering a vision of judgment and civic
participation that is both radical and humane in its egalitarianism and
respect for plurality of opinion (38). Far from mystifying the creation of
standards of judgment, or denying the role of culture in shaping social
norms, the Scottish and German philosophers are all shown to stress
the communal, intersubjective origins of belief systems in general—
the ways in which normative judgments can and should emerge, not
from the autonomous reflections of self-authorizing critics but rather
through the co-ordinated deliberations of an intellectually engaged
citizenry. As Nazar acknowledges, her constructivist reading of Kant
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draws heavily on earlier pro-Enlightenment scholars such as John Rawls
and, especially, Hannah Arendt. More than Rawls or Arendt, however,
Nazar emphasizes the impact of affect and aesthetic experience on the
formation of judgment, in part to situate Hume, Smith, and Kant not
only in a continuity of Enlightenment thought but also in the Enlighten­
ment’s less reputable alias, the “Age of Sensibility.”
To this end, Nazar, a professor of English, dedicates three of her five
chapters to literary evidence, exploring how Hume, Smith, and Kant’s
accounts of judgment and consensus-building are reflected in two of
the most celebrated novels of sensibility, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, as well as in Jane Austen’s equivocal
critique of sentimental fiction, Sense and Sensibility. Henry Mackenzie’s
Julia de Roubigné and William Godwin’s Fleetwood also receive attention.
In Richardson and Austen no less than in Hume and Kant, according
to Nazar, powerful feelings are or ought to be subjected to a tribunal
of open-minded but dispassionate judges, or, as is so often the case in
these novels, a virtual community of mutually observant letter writers.
(“Peer-review” is Nazar’s witty phrase for this process of epistolary
critique.) This is not to say that characters in sentimental fiction always
succeed in finding such an audience of constructive critics, or that each
novelist fully honours what Nazar sees as the emergent Enlightenment
ideal of universal participation in the public realm. Richardson emerges
from Nazar’s analysis as a divided figure, ambivalent about the potential
of femmes soles like Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe to construct and
defend a system of values that would justify Clarissa’s disobedience to
her father (a problem Richardson solves, according to Nazar, by hav­
ing Clarissa ultimately transfer her obedience from Mr Harlowe to a
heavenly patriarch), while Rousseau, in the least original portion of
Nazar’s book, is shown yet again to promote disparate standards of
virtue for men and women.
By introducing Clarissa Harlowe to the sage of Königsberg, Nazar
helps bring sentimental fiction out of its claustrophobic recesses, closets,
and monastic cells, reminding modern readers of its interest in matters
of civic concern and the exercise of public reason. Yet her read­ings,
both of the philosophical tradition and of sentimental fiction, some­
times feel tenuous. This is in part because of the book’s brevity, which
is impressive given the intellectual and physical heft of the material it
covers, but which sometimes detracts from the thoroughness of Nazar’s
analysis. Her reliance on Arendt in her discussion of Kant, for instance,
which she touts as one of the book’s innovations, has the frustrating
consequence of distancing us from Kant’s own language and logic, apart
from familiar axioms like the one from the second Critique about “the
starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (56). (We also
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learn that Thomas Hobbes considered life in the state of nature to be
“nasty, brutish, and short” [19].) Even Nazar’s readings of Hume and
Smith, so central to her account of British sentimental culture, are often
short on novelty, and it is difficult to see how her analysis of Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments deviates from an uncontroversial work of
exposition such as D.D. Raphael’s recent The Impartial Spectator: Adam
Smith’s Moral Philosophy (2009), which she cites.
The most surprising aspect of Nazar’s book is its almost total neglect
of the most influential theorist of discourse ethics, Jürgen Habermas.
Nazar’s decision to rely on the less fashionable Arendt could mark a
promising intervention in eighteenth-century studies, whose romance
with Habermas may be drawing to a close, but she would have to
explain why such a move is desirable. Specialists in each area of study
canvassed by Nazar—the radical Enlightenment, epistolary culture,
Richardson and Austen studies—will have no trouble thinking of other
major scholars whose work Nazar overlooks or cites only sparingly
(for me, Lawrence E. Klein and Jonathan Israel come to mind). There
are also times when her insistence on the prominence of reason in
the discourse of sensibility feels overstated: it is one thing to say that
judgment plays a role in sentimental fiction, and quite another to claim
that “sentimentalism ... pivot[s] around the capacious motif of judg­
ment” (119). But some exaggeration is probably necessary in order to
make Richardson and his followers into forerunners not only of Kant but
also of Arendt’s idiosyncratic version of Kant. Nor will all be convinced
by her enthusiastic acquittal of Hume, Smith, and Kant from charges of
reproducing the social status quo in their hypothetical communities of
judgment, and her closing meditation on the Austen­ian drawing-room as
a forum for “critical thinking and public participa­tion” provides an ironic
reminder of how exclusive and homogenous such social formations
could be (144). Habermas and his critics would have provided useful
correctives here.
Nazar must be commended for writing a lively and accessible intro­
duction to eighteenth-century philosophy and sentimental literature, as
well as a study that is refreshingly interested in the modern-day applica­
tions of its subject. Nazar praises Arendt for bringing “Kant’s moral
writings in a context-sensitive, this-worldly direction” (6), and the same
could be said of Nazar’s own work.
James Horowitz is assistant professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence
College, and is working on a book about the representation of political
partisanship in England from 1678 to 1717.
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The Literary Historian as Historian of Science and Medicine
Ends of Enlightenment by John Bender
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.
xvi+294pp. US$25.95. ISBN 978-0890474212-2.
Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France:
Medicine and Literature by Mary McAlpin
Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012.
xii+196pp. £55. ISBN 978-1-4094-2241-9.
Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century
by Jenny Davidson
New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
312pp. US$35. ISBN 978-0-231-13878-9.
Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics and Theology of Natural Knowledge,
1690–1730 by Gregory Lynall
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
224pp. US$80;£50. ISBN 978-0230343641.
Review by Raymond Stephanson, University of Saskatchewan
A few kind words, please, for the literary historian who tackles the
history of science or the history of medicine. Sometimes viewed as
ener­getic poseurs, cross-over fakes making quickie raids on history, or
well-meaning cultural-studies riff-raff trying to bulk up their readings
of the canon by soft appeal to Isaac Newton, Richard Bradley, Thomas
Willis, or Erasmus Darwin—name your name or substitute a category
such as mechanism, vitalism, the Daniel Turner/James Blondel debate—
we humble literary historians and our publications often puzzle our
es­teemed colleagues who profess the history of eighteenth-century
science and medicine full time, and who may have never even heard of
the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Those colleagues have been
known to remark—at times, even, to protest—that we are caught up
in words, words, and more words, making castles of meaning through
an exquisite attention to language that seems painfully and perhaps
even comically divorced from a truer world of physical action, scientific
belief and experiment, politics and power, specialized technologies, the
soci­ological frameworks of knowledge production, virtual witnessing,
and the emerging culture of scientific proof. This protest can reveal a
measured contempt for the per­ceived evils of “Theory,” specifically of
some postmodern torment of common sense. I have some sympathy for
these scepticisms about what we lit-crit types might do with the histories
of science and medicine because disciplinary training and protocols do
count for much. And—tit for tat—from my vantage point, precious few
his­torians of science or medicine are particularly adept at untangling the
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complex archeological record contained within some literary artifacts.
Some of these scholars prefer the simplistic view of literature as a secondorder mirror that can only reflect those other greater truths entrusted to
“History Departments.” The Lilliputian battle royal is that we are our own
“Two Cultures” writ small, and, in the badlands of interdisciplinarity,
truth is in the eye of the beholder: “we” get it, but “you” certainly do not.
Gird your loins, literary brothers and sisters.
I am being facetious, of course, and exaggerating what is surely a
friendly divide between the two scholarly camps (which both contain
considerable methodological diversity within their ranks), but I call
attention to these clichés—historians deal with chronologies of facticity,
and literary critics deal finally only with words—because there are now
so many literary historians who write about eighteenth-century science
or medicine, and because we do well to ask ourselves yet again just exactly
what sort of “history” of science or medicine does literature contain? And
more importantly, what can the literary historian who dares to meddle in
those dangerous borderlands between disciplines hope to contribute to
the histories of science or medicine?
How we understand the history of “Literature and Science” for the
period, or how the two came to be differentiated as discourses and as
ways of making observations about the world, has been informed by
scholarly accounts of “origins.” It seems generally agreed that for much of
the seventeenth century readers did not distinguish creative imaginative
works from what we would now call “science” or those printed materials
dealing with aspects of the natural world.1 In this version of how things
happened, certain generic features were common to both—dialogue,
metaphor, narrativity, hypotheses as types of fiction—and the literary
regularly contained within it the ideas and concerns of the new science
(for example, Matthew Prior’s Alma, georgic poetry). As well, many
natural philosophers deployed what we now think of as literary elements
in their writings: Francis Bacon used many proto-novelist techniques;
Thomas Willis wielded key tropes and metaphors as a kind of imaging
technology; late seventeenth-century botanists keyed on analogy to
convey their ideas of the sexes of plants. Not infrequently, the interests
of the natural philosopher and the poet existed happily in the same man
or, in the case of Margaret Cavendish, the same woman. In this account,
some originary common ground is imagined, a prelapsarian condition, if
you will, in which the literary and scientific overlapped happily, occupying
1 See, for example, Juliet Cummins and David Burchell, Science, Literature and
Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 2;
and Frans De Bruyn, “The Classical Silva and the Generic Development of
Scientific Writing in Seventeenth-Century England,” New Literary History 32,
no. 2 (2001): 348, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057662.
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a common rhetorical register and sharing a handful of generic features
linking mutual interests rather than separating discursive modes.2
The interesting (and predictable) part of this story is that some sort
of rupture or break occurred (conceivably even by the early eighteenth
century), precipitating a complex process by which the two came to be
differentiated as kinds of writing and as forms of knowledge about the
world.3 The causes of this divergence are various­ly explained: the insti­
tutionalization of practices and practitioners through the estab­lish­ment
of bodies such as the Royal Society or the Académie des sciences;4 the
movement from ornate prose styles to an artful plainness (or some
version of R.F. Jones’s thesis from the first half of the twentieth century);5
the development of the figure of the natural philosopher;6 the advent
of the experimental report and new protocols for sci­entific prose;7 the
invention of increasingly technical vocabularies;8 the emergent figures
of the professional author and the professional scientist; the developing
literary marketplace; and the new marketplace of scientific lectures,
demonstrations, and publications for both polite and capitalist worlds.9
Whatever spin we like to put on it, scholars seem to agree that “Literature
2 See, for example, John R.R. Christie, introduction to The Figural and the Literal:
Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800, ed.
Andrew E. Benjamin, et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987),
4; and Jan D. Kucharzewski, Propositions about Life: Reengaging Literature and
Science (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Heiderlberg, 2011), 20.
3 Mark L. Greenberg, “Eighteenth-Century Poetry Represents Moments of Sci­
entific Discovery: Appropriation and Generic Transformation,” in Literature
and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1990), 116.
4 Gowan Dawson, “Literature and Science Under the Microscope,” Journal of
Victorian Culture 11, no. 2 (2006): 311, http://tinyurl.com/kwzufl4.
5 R.F. Jones, “Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seven­
teenth Century,” in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English
Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1951), 75–110.
6 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
7 See, for example, Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre
and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1988), 59–149; and Frederic L. Holmes, “Argument and Nar­
rative in Scientific Writing,” in The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument:
Historical Studies, ed. Peter Dear (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia
Press, 1991), 164–81.
8 Paradis, “Bacon, Linnaeus, and Lavoisier: Early Language Reform in the
Sciences,” in New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication: Research,
Theory, Practice, ed. Paul Anderson, John Brockmann, and Carolyn R. Miller
(Farmingdale: Baywood Publishing, 1983), 201.
9 Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural
Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­
versity Press, 1992).
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and Science” became two different species sometime in the early
eighteenth century, with proliferating literary responses to the new
science (both panegyrical and satirical) serving to sharpen the per­
ceived difference.10
If this précis of current views is a reasonable account of what we most­ly
agree on, I do not wish to suggest that there have been no arguments or
debates, particularly about causal relationships and directions of influ­
ence. Did eighteenth-century literature merely reflect or incorporate
what was going on in natural philosophy—Jonathan Swift reacting
to certain sci­entific practices and theories in Gulliver’s third voyage;
Newton’s optics influ­encing light and colour imagery in poetry—or did
the lines of influence work the other way as well? In some complex loop
effect, was it possible that the literary influenced, shaped, or predicted
the scientific,11 as perhaps with literary dramatizations of “Sensibility”
shap­­ing medical approaches to nervous sensibility?12 Some historians of
science have resisted claims that eighteenth-century scientific dis­course
also had its own literariness, that, despite the insti­tutional ap­proval of a
plain language, scientific writing was never completely re­moved from or
impervious to figur­ative constructions that concealed (or called atten­
tion to) ideological baggage, that, for example, Erasmus Darwin’s sci­
entific thinking was deeply influenced by his literary reading.13 When
“Theory” washed over English departments in the 1980s, one reaction
was to treat the histories of science and medicine as dis­courses like any
other, something framed by language and thus subject to the kind of
socio-textual unpacking we were all learning to do with literary works.
Most historians (but not all) resisted this extreme attempt to remove
the differences between “Literature and Science,” as did some influential
literary critics who acknowledged that science is not simply language, but
also a diverse set of practices including technologies and things that do
or do not work in real time.14 And yet we all mostly agreed that both the
10 Greenberg, 116.
11 For more on this possible loop effect, see, for example, David F. Bell, “Balzac
with Laplace: Remarks on the Status of Chance in Balzacian Narrative,” in
One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, 197; and Kucharzewski, 167–70.
12 G.S. Rousseau, “Discourses of the Nerve,” in Literature and Science, 44.
13 See, for example, Gillian Beer, “Problems of Description in the Language of
Discovery,” in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, 42; L.J. Jordanova,
introduction to Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature,
ed. Jordanova (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 15–47;
Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Repre­sentation in Newtonian
England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Sophie
Vasset, introduction to Medicine and Narration in the Eighteenth Century, ed.
Vasset (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), 2.
14 George S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility
(London: Palgrave, 2004), 233–34.
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literary and the scientific ultimately came out of the same set of cultural,
political, and religious contexts which could frame the deeper motivations
and responses of creative writers and natural philosophers alike.
Part of the difficulty has been to develop a reliable set of interpretive
prac­tices when we encounter the literary within scientific/medical writ­
ing or science and medicine within literature. How do we explain the
dramatic literary personification in Carl Linnaeus’s account of plant
sexuality? Saying that he got the idea from Sébastien Vaillant or drew
on his familiarity with Swedish wedding poetry does not get us very
far, and feminist accounts of the Linnaean system as a replication of
eighteenth-century gender politics only partly explain the origins of
Linnaeus’s literariness. From the other side of the ledger, consider some
famous literary uses of science or medicine, some of them satirical:
Thomas Shadwell’s crack-brained virtuoso, Swift’s lunatic scientists,
Laurence Sterne’s erudite medical references embedded in Tristram’s nar­
cissistic ramble, Tobias Smollett’s doctoring curmudgeon. Is it simply that
science and medicine appear in these works so that some aspects can be
mocked by the author or have they deeply informed the literariness of
the work—its form, content, rhetorical fashion, characterization, angle
of vision on the world? When we encounter the literary in scientific
writing—metaphor, analogy, personification, the novelistic moment—
do we inquire after the natural philosopher’s literary reading habits, or
guess about the general influence of then-dominant literary fashion, or
imagine that for a moment his scientific guard was down and in slipped
the literary tic with all its unchecked connotations? And then there is the
case of poetry as science or medicine, or science and medicine as poetry:
witness John Armstrong and Erasmus Darwin. Part of the problem lies
within us. No matter that many of us carry the flag of interdisciplin­
arity as the promise of freedom from narrow disciplinary constraint,
the fact remains that it is tremendously difficult to prevent the reflex
action within that mentally separates the arts from the sciences. Despite
best efforts, we occupy a historical place where it is difficult to imagine
any true overlap or deep symbiosis.
Some notable shifts have occurred. Notions of origins and directions
of influence—the horizontal left-to-right model—have been replaced on
occasion by more supple concepts of connection and interrelationship.
Coming out of a common underlying cultural base, the literary and
scien­tific are two of many epistemological systems that interlock, overlap,
and contradict one another.15 The literary elements that one might
detect in scien­tific writing do not necessarily originate in literature but
can be narrative elements that move across genres and disciplines.16 The
15 Beer, “Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Sci­
ence,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 44 (1990): 97.
16 Vasset, 5.
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inter­con­nect­edness of eighteenth-century science and literature can be
understood as their participation in common discourses (social, religious,
political) that already cut across disciplinary boundaries.17 There have
been other useful caveats and reminders: differentiating pro­­fes­sional
science—the meaning of natural philosophy/science as it is understood
by the natural philosopher—from cultural science and its various social
or pop-culture meanings;18 remembering that science is not monolithic
then or now, but rather a diverse set of competing interests.19 There is
also that special relationship between science/medi­cine and the novel:
keeping in mind that the “new” science and the “new” novel have parallel
histories of emergence, one might search for the points at which authors
of fiction, in particular, began to use features of scientific knowledge and
technology seriously, perhaps in ways that we would now label science
fiction. The standard claim is that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is
the first such work, but is there not also a pre-1818 history of writers
who turned science into fiction in ways meant to emphasize plausibility
or some willing suspension of disbelief?
So, back to that question of what sort of history of science or medicine
does litera­ture contain? To begin with simple answers: the literary can
certainly reflect or mirror what is happening, either in superficial fashion
(Shadwell) or in more complex commentaries (Gulliver’s Travels). Novels
of “Sensibility” can show how aspects of science and medicine were ab­
sorbed and relocated as social and psychological paradigms. Literature
can also deploy science and medicine in ways that suggest their cultural
positioning in relation to other interests and concerns (Mark Akenside’s
use of nervous physiology to craft a view of creativity and Britishness in
“The Pleasures of the Imagination” [1738]; James Thomson’s Newtonian
georgic, “A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton” [1727],
as a vehicle for nationalistic moralizing). Literature reflects, but it also
incorporates; it adapts, but it also offers a cultural commentary or
critique—a remix of discourses and practices both scientific and nonscientific. In the archaeological dig that is eighteenth-century history,
the literary artifact sometimes deploys scientific or medical elements in
adjectival ways: one modifier working with many others can provide a
glimpse into the nature of cultural interactions, like the shards buried in
the sand revealing complicated truths about how things might have been
interconnected in a bygone world. None of this will be news to literary
historians, who are most certainly my readers here, but historians of
science and medicine might be surprised to see how seriously we take
17 Cummins and Burchell, 5–6.
18 Daniel Cordle, Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and the Two Cultures
Debate (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1990), 51.
19 John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Nature Transfigured: Science and
Literature, 1700–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 4.
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ourselves in these matters, and wonder if there is a good reason to learn
some of the protocols of literary-critical analysis, just as we lit-crit types
must be prepared to get into the demanding details of eighteenth-century
science and medicine. Perchance a truce in the Lilliputian battle royal? I
might not get it entirely, but I am willing to try if you are.
The four studies under review come from scholars whose basic train­
ing is in literary studies, and each book in its own way offers convincing
evidence that literary historians have much to offer to the histories of
science and medicine. John Bender is a well-known mover-and-shaker
on the scene, and his Ends of Enlightenment—a collection of ten essays
(two of them co-authored) published from 1987 to 2010—presents an
extraor­dinary agility of mind. He discusses novels as knowledge systems;
the historical separation of scientific and novelistic writing; virtual wit­
nessing in science and William Hogarth; specialized versus everyday
language in David Hume; Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, Dracula and
the myth of the real; the public sphere in Henry Fielding; ideological
impli­ca­tions of contradictory narration in Oliver Goldsmith; free indirect
speech and the violating gaze in Caleb Williams; rational choice theory
in Choderlos de Laclos; the end of classical rhetoric and the shift from
speech to writing. Often difficult but always rewarding reading, Bender’s
academic prose provokes and challenges, pushing us beyond comfortable
clichés and asking us to reflect on the fissures and contradictoriness of
Enlightenment discourses as well as on their problematic legacies and
potential for readers today. Although he sometimes calls his arguments
“thought experiments” or refers self-consciously to “the theoretical eclec­
ticism of this essay” (153), a hallmark of his style is a remarkable com­bin­
a­tion of erudition and intellectual play that requires his reader to make
con­ceptual and contextual connections which will likely either dazzle
or startle with their inventiveness and novelty. By “play,” I do not mean
self-indulgent intellectual creativity; Bender’s ingenious bracketing of
materials we might not otherwise connect is play of a very high order,
and in his revisioning of possibilities he offers rich and profitable new
vantage points.
But it is the strength of Bender’s deeply engaged questions about the
inter­connectedness of science and the novel that most interests me, and it is
clear he gives to the literary artifact a cultural force that is both connected to
science and, in ways that might disturb colleagues in the history of science,
is in some ways superior to it: not only is “the eighteenth-century novel ...
an Enlightenment knowledge system that over­lapped with those of science
and philosophy in a period before the modern disciplines were marked off
from one another” (4), but it also allows “a formally distinct arena where
political and social contradictions become accessible to analysis. This is
because works of art—perhaps the novel above all—attempt the unified
representation of different social and cultural structures—the residual, the
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dominant, the emergent—simultaneously in a single frame of reference”
(142–43). For Bender, the literary artifact can “clarify structures of feeling
characteristic of a given historical moment and thereby predicate those
available in the future. This is the specific sense in which they may serve as a
medium of cultural emergence through which new images of society move
into focus and become tangible” (143). In “Enlightenment Fiction and
the Scientific Hypothesis,” he offers a sophisticated account of the parallel
histories of eighteenth-century science and the novel that will surely stand
as one of the most persuasive interpretations we currently have. He first
“compare[s] the staging of experience in the novel with experimental con­
trivance in science [the hypothesis, the case] and claim[s] that fictionality
is central to both” (6), noting that “a certain denial of fictionality marks
both the earlier eighteenth-century novel and early science” (43) as they
attempted to ground their force as truth observations about the world. But,
“when the Scientific Revolution disrupted the old continuity between the
hypothetical and the fictional” by eschewing any whiff of fictionality and
promoting a plain non-figurative language about inductive proof, the novel
responded (at mid-century, according to Bender) “by abandoning claims
to literal, historical fact of the kind Defoe had worked so strenuously to
maintain and, by asserting its own manifest fictionality [his chief example
is Fielding], strove ... toward the representation of higher truths and toward
a more intense emotional identification between readers and novelistic
fictions” (49). It is from this moment, he says, that science and literature
would begin to define their differences. In my view, Bender’s essay will be
one of the important touchstones in future accounts of eighteenth-century
literature and science.
Another side to Bender’s approach to the literature/science/medicine
nexus is evident in a remarkable three-page “Postscript on My Gross
Anatomy Lab,” in which he describes taking classes with three firstyear medical students in a 1995 introductory course in gross anatomy
and dissecting the body of a fifty-year-old woman dead of heart disease.
Seldom do literary scholars write about their experiences of learning,
and more rarely do they accept the personal challenges of tackling the
practical and conceptual protocols of the science or medicine they write
about as literary historians. Commitment to interdisciplinarity of this
order is an example to all of us who wish to cross boundaries and borders.
Mary McAlpin’s Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlight­
en­ment France: Medicine and Literature examines the emerging impor­
tance in the 1760s of a new genre—“the adolescent hygiene treatise” (1)—
that responded to the perceived physical and moral degradation caused
by the evils of civilization. One of the significant threats was the premature
awakening of sexual desire in children, particularly girls, or what McAlpin
refers to as the “urban ingénue” (78), and from the 1760s both vitalist
hygiene treatises and novels focused on “the ripe young virgin and ... her
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liminal status as both child and woman” (2). What made the female virgin
“the trope of choice” (3) or a barometer of cultural well-being was her
precarious perch on the cusp of innocence and experience, nature and
civilization, virginity and knowledge. Female weakness reflected cultural
malaise. For McAlpin, “the ingénue was the original ... cause of medical
concern in that she embodied ... the central problematic at the heart of
the Enlightenment: the pull between the benefits of nature and those of
culture. The complex discourse on civilization and nature epitomized by
the ingénue is the central cautionary tale of the Enlightenment project as
a whole, one common to physiological, fictional, and ultimately, political
discourse” (22). Examining physiologies of puberty warning of the rush
of sexual fluids, McAlpin explains how the hygiene treatises on adolescent
sexuality cautioned parents that they would need to protect their children
from premature stimulation (imaginative or physical) and that, when
puberty unleashed its powerful fluids, they would need to have their
offspring quickly married to the right person. Until then, the female urban
ingénue in particular needed to be protected from all knowledge of what
she was about to become. This figure played a starring role not only in the
medical treatises but also in novels by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Choderlos
de Laclos, Sade, and in Marie-Jeanne Roland’s autobiography—literary
materials that McAlpin examines in four of her seven chapters. Specialists
will find much of interest in these literary analyses.
Her position on the nature of the connectedness of literature and
medi­­cine begins on a promising note. Reminding her reader firmly of
“the impossibility of separating eighteenth-century writers into such
deline­­­ated categories as ‘novelist,’ ‘physiologist,’ ‘political theorist,’ or
‘philosopher,’” she adds that “even the most medically focused of the
[medical] treatise writers whose works I examine create strikingly novel­
istic tableaux in their writings” (5). As it turns out, McAlpin’s aim is not
to examine the presence of literary elements in medical discourse, despite
the irony that there was a common “link made by the physiologists
between novel reading and moral degradation” (79). Instead, having built
up the psychological profiles that pervade the physiological treatises, she
steps away from such considerations and examines literary treatments
of the ingénue to very good effect. This helpful book takes a medicineinfluences-literature stance, with the novelistic examples offering “a
revealing mirror of the eighteenth-century cultural imagination” (3).
One of the most striking things about Jenny Davidson’s Breeding: A
Partial History of the Eighteenth Century is her eclectic approach to what
is an enormously involved and difficult subject that crossed many areas
of interest—generation, heredity, improvement of species, eugenics,
manners, social status, nature versus nurture—and elicited discursive
treat­ment ranging from reproductive biology to religion, politics, litera­
ture, botany, plant and animal breeding, morality, and race. Unlike
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McAlpin’s project, in which the variations of a single human profile can
be subjected to expert examination in a handful of medical and literary
specimens, Davidson’s challenge is somehow to give voice to what was
already in the eighteenth century a multiplicity of interests and practices,
not all of them directly connected: “I have chosen from that mass what
seemed to me the most intriguing and suggestive elements and have laid
them out in a sort of mosaic that shows unexpected and revealing facts,
not just of eighteenth-century discussions but also of the ways in which
we continue to explore and explain human nature” (2). Her aim is “to
make these pages a sort of parliament, an auditorium in which the voices
of actors in and commentators on the story of heredity in the eighteenthcentury can be heard” (7–8). In teasing out the many fascinating strands
that created parallels among animal, plant, and human improvement, she
sought to pattern “the material not so much like a monograph as like
an oratorio or a grand country dance, so that echoes and responses and
recapitulations would emerge from a congeries of voices” (12). The result
is a sequence of more than thirty sections—spread across an introduction,
six chapters, and a conclusion—that present a sort of cross-section of the
different angles from which breeding might have been given a voice and a
centre. Despite the engaging nature of her approach, it is difficult to make
everything hang together as a conventional chronological history of the
subject would; and yet the juxtapositions she makes—of the scientific,
literary, and socio-political elements—are impressively illuminating.
Hers is a different test case for how we might ask questions about
the relations of literature and science or literature and medicine: where
do we place our modern sense of discursive or disciplinary differences
and interconnectedness in the case of a historical subject of wide and
variously inflected interest to almost everyone in the eighteenth century?
Davidson’s position on these issues is a reasonable one: “To separate out
the literary from the scientific from the medical from the philosophical,
I have come to feel, does a violence to the matters with which all of these
disciplines are concerned—disciplines which, by the way, we perceive as
being distinct only as a consequence of developments newly underway
during exactly this period” (8). One of the advantages the literary
his­tor­ian has by virtue of her or his training is hunting for the many
places where subjects come to be voiced within a culture; perhaps by
placing them all together in a story that is about science and literature
and animal breed­ing and more, we momentarily undo the mental dis­
ciplinary separa­tion that is our current default position.
Gregory Lynall’s Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics and Theology
of Natural Knowledge, 1690–1730 situates the relentlessly topical and
richly allusive Swift at a moment when “the new natural philosophy had
not yet established supremacy” (1) and “‘science’ as we know it did not
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exist” (3). Sifting through Swift’s reactions to the work of Robert Boyle
(in A Meditation upon a Broom-Stick), Thomas Burnet (in The Battel
of the Books), Richard Bentley (in Battel), Isaac Newton (in Gulliver’s
Travels), and Samuel Clarke (in “Directions for a Birthday Song”),
Lynall challenges the notion “that Swift was vehemently opposed to
the methods and purposes of science” (2). Most scholars would agree
that Swift’s satire of certain natural philosophers or aspects of scientific
practice does not automatically mean some universal condemnation
of the new science. Swift’s satire is far more complex, given its supple
nuances of tone and odd moments of fierce rhetorical aggression, and
especially so with his mimicry and ventriloquism that often place him
within the heart of enemy country speaking their lingo with surprising
fervour. The twofold task of Lynall’s book is to “make a case for why
Swift attacked science (on those occasions he does),” and also “to
explore how he incorporates scientific knowledge within his writing,
using it as a source of creative potency, but also exploiting the comic
possibilities of scientific experiment, debate and contemplation” (16).
Other scholars have had similar ambitions, but Lynall’s pursuit of the
how—the function of science as part of Swift’s literariness—takes us
to some important new ground in understanding how features of the
history of science might inform literary practice at deep levels.
His primary materials for explicating Swift’s literary deployment
of scientific elements are allusion, allegory, and fable, three referential
modes notoriously resistant to unequivocal decoding and susceptible
to over-reaching. Lynall is acutely aware of this issue but nevertheless
examines his evidence through a literary microscope, hunting through
small details, possible echoes, and arcane hints that might reveal Swift’s
reaction to and creative use of scientific materials. He recognizes the
siz­able interpretive difficulties in tactical impersonation and voicing
modula­tions as slippery as Swift’s—that is, the trouble in nailing down
the “real” Swift—but in erudite fashion he chases down allegorical and
allusive possibilities even when he has to acknowledge that many of
his readings are just possibilities: “In moments of the Tale such as this,
one can fleetingly glimpse the opinions of the ‘Swift’ hiding amongst
the patch­
work of discourses. But such identifications can only be
reductionist in method, in that much of the power of this passage
comes from the clash of seemingly paradoxical moral values within the
narratorial persona ... it is difficult to know where to stop reading the
fable allegorically” (45, 64). Yet the achievement in this short book is
considerable in its close-in demon­strations of how Swift might have
used details of scientific contexts not only as occasions for content
but also, more importantly, as informing aspects of narrative tone,
rhetorical structure, or the voicing of persona.
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An interesting question is how (or if) these four books might prove
useful to the historian of science or medicine. We need to hear more from
our colleagues in history departments about how studies such as these
improve their knowledge, not only of what they do but also of what we
do. Bender, McAlpin, Davidson, and Lynall have certainly added much
to what we literary historians will understand about how the histories
of science or medicine converge with, impinge upon, run parallel to, or
are used by the authors we read and teach. These four scholars have also
widened the scope of how we might understand the inter­relationship of
literature and science or of literature and medicine within eighteenthcentury culture more generally. And I think all four, in different ways,
demonstrate that the kind of history—of science or medicine—that the
literary record contains is vitally important to under­standing science
and medicine in the eighteenth century if we seek to advance a true
interdisciplinarity that maps the discursive ter­rain of the period we all
care about so deeply, however demanding that pursuit may be. In the
archaeological dig that is eighteenth-century history, many shards are
buried in the sand, and the literary artifact is one of them, a rich and
vibrant encoding of cultural materials.
Raymond Stephanson teaches eighteenth-century literature at the Uni­
versity of Saskatchewan and is author of The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity
and Sexuality, 1650–1750 (2004). He is currently studying the origins of
science fiction in the mid-eighteenth century.
The Culture of Disaster by Marie-Hélène Huet
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
x+262 pp. US$45. ISBN 978-0-226-35821-5.
Review by Marshall Brown, University of Washington
Not much eighteenth-century fiction can be found in Marie-Hélène
Huet’s Culture of Disaster—chiefly a few pages on Jean-Jacques Rous­seau’s
continuation to Émile, entitled Émile et Sophie; Ou, Les Solitaires. But
do not let that stop you. It is a terrific book: good to read, good to think
about, wide-ranging, varied, and continuously suggestive, as well as a
great model for students.
Huet writes more as a cultural historian than as a literary critic. In
com­pact chapters, the first three sections survey three natural disasters
(the 1720 plague, the Lisbon earthquake, and the 1832 cholera epidemic),
three political disasters (Rousseau writing about Rome, the institution
of the Revolutionary calendar and the execution of its inventor Gilbert
Romme, and Chateaubriand’s career), and two exploration catastrophes
(the shipwreck of the Medusa and John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to
seek the Northwest Passage). Varied mosaic assemblages review actions,
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contemporary reports, documents, historical accounts, iconographies,
and fic­tion­al­iza­tions. As the portraits take shape, Huet pauses to
reflect both autono­mously and with reference to an impressive range
of theorists, includ­ing Agamben, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Freud,
Jameson, Ronnell, Žižek, and (more casually) numerous others. The
texture is rich and rewarding.
Disasters challenged theodicy, initially because of their dubious
justice, but then, as Huet elegantly shows, because much of the misery
is wreaked by mankind. Even the effects of the Lisbon earthquake were
exacer­bated by urbanization, and plagues were spread by commerce.
By focusing on circumstances, the Enlightenment turned the page to­
wards secu­lar­­iza­tion, away from the tremblement de terre and towards
the trembling of people (55), that is to say, towards human involvement
and human response. In her introduction, Huet quotes Horkheimer
and Adorno’s characterization of the Enlightenment program as “the
dissolution of myths and the substitu­tion of knowledge for fancy” (9).
So, for instance, “for Chateaubriand, cholera was ... a natural disaster that
could only be fully understood when redefined in political terms” (2). But
who ever attempted to fully understand an act of God? The more plausible
aim is, arguably, more modest: as “our culture thinks through disasters,”
writes Huet, they “shape our creative imagination” (2, her italics, stressing
that more is involved—or less—than thinking about disasters). That is
still a tall order, largely filled in the ensuing chapters.
As the book consists of a collection of episodes, so each chapter con­
sists of an array of snapshots. The biographically focused chapters on
Rousseau and Chateaubriand felt rather meandering to me, and the
overly general comparisons of Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, drawing
only on deconstructive criticism, seemed the least well-grounded pages
in the book. Even these chapters, though, gather coherence towards the
end. And most of the remaining chapters weave a tight and intricate web,
with seemingly disparate bits and pieces falling into perfectly pat­terned
mosaics. The disseminative method becomes radiant, for instance, as
Géricault leads to da Vinci and Vasari, to Rubens, and finally to MerleauPonty, or as Verne leads to Poe and Freud and then, spec­tacu­larly, to a
specular Magritte painting, where a mirror reflects a copy of Poe’s ship­
wreck narrative, Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym. It is not incidental
that the only sustained close reading arrives in the cul­minat­ing Verne
chapter. For in this book, as imagination comes to the fore, history
gradually becomes literature.
Three themes recur, more inconspicuously than they might. First,
disaster is “fragmentation itself ” (158), manifested under numerous guises:
ruins (82), dissolution (92), disorder (108), fracture (134), but initially
and most intriguingly, dispersion (38) and dissemination (58). The plague
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spreads in minute particles “that participate equally in the organization of
life and the dissolution of consciousness,” not as “a foreign disorder” but as
“an intricate part of nature itself ” (38). Hence, disasters are, in their own
way, identities, subliminally consolidated by 75 (too many) occurrences of
the word “itself.” Disasters are a form of being, not a denial, and they can
therefore be faced rather than shunned: “To paraphrase Jean-Luc Nancy,
interpretation begins after disaster, if only because disaster strikes ... a dread
that must be overcome by analysis and reasoning” (178). (Huet is a model
of graceful ease in her paraphrases of thorny theorists.) The second theme,
mythology, suggests that analysis and reasoning, like full understanding,
are not the true response. Rather, in both the Enlightenment and its long
aftermath, disaster is redeemed allegorically. Striking images of ghosts and
gods decorate several of the chapters; the discussion of the French Revo­
lution concentrates on the reformed calendar as a counter-mythology,
an “auda­cious attempt to place history under the powerful symbolic
align­­ment of the stars” (105); and afterward looms Verne’s late novel,
The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, and the Medusa, whose hair haunts Huet as
it haunted the painter Géricault, “weav[ing] multiple symbolic threads
between the Revolution and its legacy, threads that were as terrifying as
Medusa’s gaze” (152). Huet’s mode is evocation, not demonstration. Hence
the third underlying theme, “tone,” a term she derives initially from Kant
but really employs in the spirit of Spinoza and Deleuze (55). The type of
recomposition, or reweaving, that Huet undertakes finally depends not
on reconstructing a coherent narrative but on evoking the atmosphere
governing the world of disaster. The real contribution of the book is its
ensemble of case studies that communicate the feel of disasters and then
the feel of human responses to disaster. It is a heartwarming book about a
chilling subject. Disaster, surely, has never been so much fun.
I do have a couple of small complaints and one major. First, the
chap­­ters do not really need to begin with teasers. Sometimes you have
to get to the last sentences of the chapter to understand what the first
sentences are doing. In such cases, the reader is the author’s experimental
subject rather than her partner. I would rather be a player than a pawn.
Second—this is for the publisher—it is burdensome to have to keep
flipping back for the notes. Mostly they are just documentary, but some
are substantive and interesting, and you never know on the page which
variety it will be. Layout programs can handle the mechanics without the
expense that setting footnotes once occasioned. Book designers often
think a clean page is more attractive to look at. Maybe it is, but books
should be designed for readers, not for lookers.
And third, there is a fourth section with a last chapter that I have not
mentioned yet, “Now Showing Everywhere,” on Francis Coppola’s movie
The Conversation, its predecessor Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up, and
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its successor Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The title is doubly mis­lead­ing,
since the movies had mixed success, and disasters inher­ently cannot
show up everywhere. The discussion continues the book’s theme, but in
method the chapter seemed to belong to a differ­ent enterprise, with ear­
nestly extended descriptive paraphrase often depen­dent on secondary
litera­ture rather than the wide-ranging reading in evidence elsewhere,
and stylis­tically too dependent on emotive adverbs. It is conscientious,
but for my money—though maybe just because I am generally not
much interested in cinema—you can skip it.
Marshall Brown is professor of comparative literature at the Uni­versity of
Washington and editor of Modern Language Quarterly; his most recent book
is “The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul”: Essays on Music and Poetry (2010).
Fictions déjouées: Le Récit en trompe l’œil au xviiie siècle
par Zeina Hakim
Genève: Librairie Droz, 2012.
312pp. US$60. ISBN 978-2-600-01580-6.
Critique littéraire par Françoise Gevrey, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
Cet ouvrage reprend, en l’enrichissant, une thèse qui portait sur la
théorie de la fiction au xviiie siècle. En élargissant les perspectives
ouvertes notamment par Jan Herman à propos des préfaces et dans Le
Roman véritable (2008), l’auteur tend à montrer que la croyance est alors
chez le lecteur des fictions un « aveuglement consenti » dont jouent les
romanciers en sachant que ce lecteur va à la fois céder à l’illusion et s’en
arracher. Pour ce faire, l’étude s’appuie sur un corpus qui va des pseudomémoires de la fin du xviie siècle aux Salons de Diderot en passant
par Lesage, Prévost et Marivaux. Des micro-lectures sont destinées à
appuyer la démonstration.
Zeina Hakim commence par rappeler les théories concernant la
fiction (Genette, Hamburger, Cohn, Schaeffer, Pavel) pour en dégager
les pro­priétés ou les enjeux et pour en préciser minutieusement le
lexique. Elle ne souhaite pas réduire la fiction à la pratique de la feintise,
ni se limiter à une lecture sémantique; elle entend donc dégager les
divers régimes de vérité pour définir ensuite la lecture comme un jeu
auquel les romanciers se livreraient avec scepticisme.
L’étude est conduite selon un plan dialectique qui se divise en trois
chapitres. Dans un premier temps (66 pages) il s’agit d’examiner la
« fiction du non-fictif ». Les exemples sont pris dans les pseudomémoires de Courtilz de Sandras qui, par l’ensemble de leurs procédés
d’authentification et par leur usage de l’histoire imposent ce type de
fiction; il en va de même pour les préfaces de Prévost ou de Marivaux,
et pour les « jeux d’accréditation » pratiqués par le narrateur de Gil Blas.
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La démonstra­tion s’étend à la manière dont Diderot noue un pacte de
lecture et utilise le dialogue dans les Salons.
Au-delà de cette « croyance provisoire », il s’agit d’examiner dans
un deuxième temps « la fiction avouée » (80 pages): les procédés
de dis­tanciation mis en œuvre (discordances, restrictions de champ,
découpages, labyrinthe chez Prévost, refus des informations chez
Marivaux, pratique de la métalepse dans les Salons), sont autant de
façons de rompre l’illusion. La fiction paraît alors souvent se caractériser
par l’hétérogénéité et par l’inachèvement, autant de raisons de cultiver
l’incrédulité du lectorat.
Dans une dernière partie bien plus courte (25 pages), l’éclairage
est dirigé sur le lecteur ainsi « mis en jeu » dans les paradoxes de la
représentation. Hakim s’interroge sur la réception. Quels sont les effets
produits sur le lecteur ainsi pris dans ce double mouvement? Elle
convoque alors les théories de la lecture, autour de la coopération du
lecteur, du besoin de le faire douter de la nature du texte (ce qui met
le genre en question). Elle revient sur l’importance de la métalepse
(après Genette et Michelle Bokobza-Kahan), sur la transgression, sur la
porosité des récits. Il s’agit bien en effet de repenser les rapports que la
littérature entretient avec le monde, et de souligner combien la fiction
s’ouvre alors aux vérités nouvelles, politiques ou philosophiques, en
étant le lieu d’une pensée critique. Les dernières pages, qui font un peu
de place à Rousseau auteur des Confessions, tendent à nuancer le propos
en revenant sur le fait que la littérature échappe à la théorie, et qu’on ne
doit pas en oublier la « fragilité épistémique » (Y. Citton). Néanmoins
le pouvoir de la fiction tiendrait à la dispersion, et l’histoire du roman
pourrait s’écrire alors comme celle de sa subversion.
Comme on le voit, le projet est ambitieux et très bien informé sur le
plan théorique. Il permet de montrer l’intérêt d’œuvres qu’on lit moins
souvent comme celles de Courtilz de Sandras dont on a peu d’éditions
critiques; il donne aussi des remarques pertinentes sur l’usage que fait
Diderot de la fiction dans l’écriture de sa critique d’art. Cependant on peut
s’interroger sur la constitution du corpus, à la fois disparate et lacunaire.
Cette analyse manque aussi quelque peu de dimension historique: il est
bien connu maintenant que le xviiie siècle fut philosophe parce qu’il fut
une « ère du soupçon », qu’on y pratiqua la porosité des genres et des
formes; mais les conclusions générales sur la fiction seraient-elles toutes
aussi justes dans les périodes qui précèdent ou qui suivent le créneau
retenu? La question méritait d’être posée.
Cet ouvrage paraît très utile et stimulant pour inviter à mettre en
regard les textes et les théories convoquées. Cependant on regrette parfois
que les « micro-lectures » soient peu originales dans le choix des citations.
De même certaines pages (par exemple la conclusion, 141–43) cèdent au
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« démon de la théorie » dans la mesure où elles ne sont qu’un assemblage
de citations critiques qui submergent l’expression personnelle. Il ne fait
nul doute que Hakim se libèrera bientôt de ce carcan pour donner de
nouvelles études des textes dont elle aime observer le jeu.
Françoise Gevrey, auteur de travaux et d’éditions portant sur la fiction, est
professeur de littérature française du xviiie siècle à l’Université de Reims
Champagne-Ardenne.
Revisiter la “querelle des femmes”: Discours sur l’égalité/inégalité
des sexes, de 1750 aux lendemains de la Révolution,
ed. Éliane Viennot et Nicole Pellegrin
Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2012.
206pp. €24. ISBN 978-2-86272-603-8.
Review by Karen Offen, Stanford University
This deceptively small volume is packed with important scholarship. The
result of a 2008 colloquium (the first of a series) organized by SIEFAR
(Société Internationale pour l’Étude des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime),
the book gathers together path-breaking analyses by some of the
finest Francophone scholars working in the period (Sandrine
Lely, Huguette Krief, Caroline Fayolle, Martine Reid, Sabine Arnaud,
Anne Morvan, and Geneviève Fraisse). The scholarship is accompanied
by significant documents from the period and a stunning bibliography
of publications in French, German, and English. This volume (1750–
1814) is the first of a series, which includes a volume covering 1600–
1750 and another on 1400–1600 (forthcoming).
The critical introductory essay by Eliane Viennot, founder and pastpresident of SIEFAR and animatrice of the colloquia, provides a smart
overview and analysis of the historiography on the “querelle des femmes.”
She challenges the long-hallowed characterization of the “querelle” as
“merely a literary quarrel,” and asserts that instead it was a “gigantic
polemic” over women’s role and place, involving protagonists from every
literate sector of society. Its dominant themes were women’s “nature,” love
and marriage, women’s education, and the question of which professions
women could—or should not—exercise. Viennot also discusses the varied
approaches to establishing a chronology of the “Querelle” and queries
why the works of so many male contributors to these debates exhibit such
violent hostility, sometimes bordering on misogyny. Obviously, mascu­
line privilege was perceived to be under serious threat.
Viennot addresses the arguments of Joan Kelly in her important Signs
essay (“Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400–1789,”
Signs 8, no. 1 (1982): 4–28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173479) and
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Gisela Bock’s Women in European History (English edition, trans. Allison
Brown; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002;). Applauding much of what Kelly
depicted, Viennot objects nevertheless to Kelly’s collapsing of what she
calls the clergé (that is, the educated intellectual elite who monopolized
the administration of the early modern state) and the bourgeoisie (21–22),
arguing that these were entirely separate and competing elites. Viennot
asserts that the sources of the Querelle des femmes lie in perceived threats
to the monopoly of the clergé on knowledge and positions, and its efforts
to limit competition by excluding Jews, laymen, and, obliquely, women.
Viennot laments that these debates over the relations of the sexes remain
too little known and that, even today, they are rarely the subjects of study
and teaching. (SIEFAR, of course, is committed to making the pro­
tagonists and their arguments better known, notably through the group’s
colloquia, publications, and especially their website www.siefar.fr). This
foundational essay on the historiography of the “querelle des femmes”
should be required reading by everyone interested in early modern
European history and culture, not only by those who specialize in France.
The contribution by Sandrine Lely, on the debate concerning the
“place” of women in French art between 1747 and 1793, provides
depth to the dispute over what women were capable of accomplishing.
Hostility to women’s candidatures to the Royal Academy of Art and
Sculpture began to mount, says Lely, from the 1680s on; in fact, the
Academy forbid women’s candidacies from 1706 to 1720. But the public
(and better-documented) debates over the general topic of “the place
of women painters in French art” (46) only began in the late 1740s, in
conjunction with the rise of published art criticism, centring around
exhibitions such as the exclusionary Salon de peinture (restricted to
members of the Academy) and focusing on renderings of the human
body. Based in a “lecture croisée” of art commentary, observations by
the philosophes, and the treatises of physicians (all male), Lely con­
textualizes the discussion of women’s place in art, situating it in a more
general concern about the “decadence” of French art and how to “renew”
it by re-masculinizing it—“only the male eye could be the arbiter of
beauty” (51). From there, it was only a short step to paying attention to
the sex of the artist. The arrival in the 1783 Salon of paintings by two
accomplished women—Adélaïde Labille Guyard and Louise Élisabeth
Vigée-Lebrun—provoked some critics to suggest that their work met
the criterion of “virility.” Could the sex of the painting differ from the
sex of the artist? Critics came down on both sides of this question,
according to Lely. The spectre of “concurrence” led the Academy, later
in 1783, to impose quotas on the admission of women (no more than
four at any time) and to debate (1787) whether women should be
admitted to the still all-male art schools. Thus, the emergence of these
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two exceptionally talented women artists unleashed a venomous antifeminism. In 1793, the Société Républicaine des Arts decided to refuse
to accept women artists, a measure that was upheld in 1795, when the
academies were reconstituted.
Huguette Krief analyzes eighteenth-century debates over whether
women had genius. She examines a series of “classic” published opinions
that range from Voltaire and Rousseau in the 1760s, passing via
Condorcet’s rebuttal in the late 1780s, to women writers such as Sophie
Cottin, who had internalized the anti-feminist judgments of Rousseau,
but also to Félicité de Genlis, Fanny de Beauharnais, Constance de
Salm, and Germaine de Staël, who all eloquently defended the existence
of female genius and who spoke out against those who disparaged
women’s intellect and publications. In their post-Revolutionary works,
the latter two writers addressed the story of Sappho, rewriting the
Ovidian narrative from a woman-centred perspective. Krief ’s inspiring
essay demonstrates that important women writers actively “defended
the idea that women were equally capable with men to manifest genius
and to aspire to perfection” and “that the identification and celebration
of feminine genius did not compromise either women’s cause or their
demands for education, knowledge and citizenship” (76).
Another short article by Viennot examines the discourse (or lack
thereof) around women’s right to rule in France between 1750 and 1789,
against the claims made by supporters of the supposed Salic Law, whose
origins and trajectory as a fraud have been addressed in earlier works by
Viennot and by the American scholar Sarah Hanley, whose signal con­
tributions are not referenced here. Viennot argues that, in view of her
research, the Enlightenment was “plus occupé à faire régresser l’égalité des
sexes qu’à la faire advenir; et le complément d’enquête réalisé ici n’a fait
que me confirmer dans cette impression” (80). Viennot’s essay reminds
readers that women had ruled at different times in France, usually as
regents for their minor sons, but with full powers. She underscores the
importance of the complex of dictionaries of famous women, anthologies
of women’s writings, and published studies concerning notable women,
as antidotes to the erasure of queens regnantes. And she examines the
works of women writers of the time—Thiroux d’Arconville, Keralio,
Gacon-Dufour, Coicy—none of whom directly challenged the “big lie”
of the Salic Law. “The taboo,” Viennot states, “remained in place” (90).
Carolyn Fayolle asserts that the question of education became politi­
cized and central to the revolutionary project. Could education become
the instrument of equality between the sexes, she asks, examining the
debates during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary years. She
concludes that the turn to “complementarity” actually masked the return
to sexual hierarchy during the Napoleonic period. Martine Reid offers
a thoughtful sequel to Fayolle. She discusses three well-known writers
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of the post-revolutionary period—Mme de Genlis, Constance Pipelet
(later de Salm), and Germaine de Staël—who defend women’s right to
authorship. Mme de Genlis comes across as the most audacious defender,
even invoking a sisterly solidarity among women writers. None of them,
Reid argues, were “pleading for equality,” but they did demand a space for
women’s authorship in what was still a male-domin­ated society. Her essay
provides clear evidence of the gendered back­lash that arose to counter
revolu­
tionary currents. Providing more evidence of the developing
backlash, Sabine Arnaud examines analyses of women’s nervous disorders
in the publications of two male doctors (1750–1820), at which point the
hysteria diagnosis became applied ex­clu­­sively to women. Similarly, Anne
Morvon examines masculinist theories of the family (Rousseau, Toussaint
Gueraudet, and Bonald), all of which argued a case for the sub­or­dina­
tion of women and the pre-eminence of the family over the individual. A
more abstract essay by the feminist philosopher Geneviève Fraisse, whose
well-regarded book, Muse de la Raison, focuses on debates during the
post-Revolutionary period, lays out a sequence whereby the “querelle”
becomes a “procès” and then a “controverse.” While I do not have room
in this short review to do justice to most of these important essays, let me
assert that this entire volume should appear on the must-read list of all
scholars of the eighteenth century.
Karen Offen is a historian, affiliated with the Clayman Institute for Gender
Research, Stanford University. She is the author of European Feminisms,
1700–1950: A Political History (2000; now also available in French trans­
lation) and editor of Globalizing Feminisms, 1789–1945 (2010).
Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century
Britain and France, ed. Shaun Regan
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.
viii+256pp. £44.95. ISBN 978-1-61148-478-6.
Review by Leah Orr, Dickinson College
Reading 1759 calls attention to an interesting and pivotal moment in
British and French history and reading culture by bringing together
eleven essays on different aspects of the literature of that year. As Shaun
Regan explains in his introduction to the volume, the year 1759 is
particularly suited for this kind of cross-disciplinary study because it
was the mid­point of the Seven Years’ War and was marked by cultural
events such as the public opening of the British Museum, as well as
the publication of major literary works by Voltaire, Samuel Johnson,
Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke
(1–2). By encompassing the literature of both Britain and France,
Reading 1759 invites a more transnational approach to literature that
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better approximates what readers at the time could have experienced.
Regan explains that “the purpose of the new essays collected together in
Reading 1759 is to investigate the literary culture of Britain and France
during this remarkable year” (2). Taken as a whole, the volume does
this quite well.
The standout essays in this collection are those that draw on at least
two of the three main connecting topics (literature, culture, and the
particular historical contexts of 1759). Nigel Wood’s essay on Smith’s
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a good example of how the focus on
a single year can change how we understand a canonical author. Wood
points out that “Smith would not have been associated with economic
theory in the year 1759,” and argues that “the first edition of the Theory
was, in fact, a significant intervention in a persistent debate, dur­ing the
1750s, about one’s social obligations” (57, 58). Similarly, Adam Rounce’s
essay on “Young, Goldsmith, Johnson, and the Idea of the Author in
1759” calls attention to the print culture of 1759 in order to conclude
that “the authorial temper of the moment ... was one of contradictory
veneration of the past and acknowledgement of the shifting present”
(110). While these essays examine the direct literary contexts of
particular works, the opposite approach is taken by Kate Rumbold,
who looks at Shakespeare alongside Sarah Fielding’s The History of the
Countess of Dellwyn to argue that “Sarah Fielding epitomizes the way
that mid-century novelists at once construct an impres­sion of authority
for Shakespeare, and exploit it for their own ends” (190). By focusing on
the specific literary moment of 1759, these essays illuminate some of the
broader cultural changes in the eighteenth century.
Many of the other essays focus on individual works published in
1759. Simon Davies’s piece on Candide and Moyra Haslett’s on Tristram
Shandy help to fill out the coverage of the volume to include the major
literary works from the year. Rosalind Powell’s essay on Christopher
Smart’s Jubilate Agno and Burke’s theory of aesthetics does a good job
of contextualizing a work that is a notorious outlier. The two essays on
Rasselas—James Watt’s piece on the topicality of Rasselas and James
Ward’s on the connection of that work with Hume’s philosophy—balance
each other and provide complementary ways of reading the novel. Mary
Peace’s essay on “1759 and the Lives of Prostitutes” reveals an interesting
and often overlooked corner of printed matter, but as the only essay
on popular literature it seems out of place in this collection. Rebecca
Ford, in her piece on the Encyclopédie, takes the reverse perspective of
most of the essays in the volume by arguing persuasively that “although
the events of 1759 may have made the Encyclopedists rather more
wary than they had been previously, the project’s philosophical focus
remained essentially the same” (135). These pieces will primarily be of
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interest to those scholars working on the relevant texts or authors, as
they are fairly specific.
My main criticism of Reading 1759 is not its individual essays, but
the organization and scope of the project. The collection is divided into
five parts of two essays apiece (plus an introduction and conclusion),
but some of these couplings seem randomly chosen. Part 3, titled
“Authorship and Aesthetics,” for example, contains one essay focusing
on authorship and one on aesthetics, and they do not seem to relate to
each other. Regan suggests in his introduction that “the collection can
then also be regarded as a testing ground for the practice of single-year
studies” (7). In that regard, it seems to show some of the problems of
such a focus. The relationship between the works of literature studied
here is their year of publication rather than connections between the
writers themselves; we have no reason to suppose that Smart was reading
Voltaire (let alone the lives of prostitutes). The reading culture would
be more broadly represented with further attention to non-canonical
works. Other than Peace’s essay, all of the works under examination
are by major authors, and they are mostly prose. Regan’s conclusion on
“Writers, Reviewers, and the Culture of Reading” examines reviewing
in the 1750s to provide a helpful overview of how these various
authors were received in their own time. I would have liked to have
seen a few more chapters like this tying together the various elements
of the collection. Certain themes—such as taste, history, and social
obligation—recur throughout the essays in this volume, but are difficult
to trace through the particularized arguments on different literary texts.
In short, Reading 1759 offers an overview of major authors and
works from this year of literary, historical, and cultural change. While
I am glad of the dual focus on Britain and France in this period when
the two countries were so culturally connected, the collection seems to
be trying to encompass too much. Reading 1759 does much of what it
proposes to do, but leaves the reader wanting more.
Leah Orr is a visiting assistant professor of English at Dickinson College,
and she has published on eighteenth-century fiction, book history, and the
classical tradition.
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The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790–1814
by Morgan Rooney
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013.
viii+223 pp. $85. ISBN 978-1-61148-476-2.
Review by Richard Cronin, Oxford Brookes University
Edmund Burke’s response to Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our
Country began a debate on the significance of the Glorious Revolution
of 1688. Morgan Rooney argues that, in the pamphlet war that Burke’s
Reflections instigated, the debate rapidly became one in which each
of two rival ideologies might properly claim to have history on its
side. Rooney supports his argument by examining a “representative”
selec­tion of texts. Since a text is identified as representative only if it
accommodates “a sustained engagement with the period’s historical
discourses” (4), the argument is circular, but this is not a matter of
great concern because the contention will strike most students of the
period as pretty much self-evident. Rooney’s first two chapters set out
this argument with admirable concision and clarity. His originality lies
in his insistence that the debate was asymmetrical. It was a contest in
which Burke emerged as the victor. This was not necessarily because,
as earlier conservative historians have argued, events—the guillotining
of Louis xvi and Marie-Antoinette, the Terror, the outbreak of war be­
tween Britain and Revolutionary France—proved Burke right (although
Rooney has some sympathy with this view), but because Burke was able
to enlist in his support a trope more powerful than any that his opponents
could muster. The freedoms that the British enjoyed were not natural
rights but came to them as an inheritance, bequeathed to them by their
ancestors. The constitution resembled one of Britain’s great estates: the
present owners were custodians, whose duty was to pass on the estate,
undiminished and, if possible, improved, to the next generation. For the
radical reformers, by contrast, historical development was a competitive
process in which ideas were contested, and either refuted or confirmed.
The great engine of this process was the printing press, and the press
also serves as the most powerful symbol of the process (52–53), but it
did not prove powerful enough to counter Burke’s vision of a historical
development secured by a process of legitimate inheritance.
Not all Rooney’s readers will accept that Mary Wollstonecraft,
Thomas Paine, James Mackintosh, and William Godwin were so clearly
bested in argument, but for Rooney the compelling evidence is supplied
by the history of the English novel in the two decades that followed
the pamphlet war. The anti-Jacobin novelists constructed fictions in
which threats to legitimate inheritance are averted, and the reforming
novelists responded by accepting the primacy of Burke’s metaphor.
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Their plots also hinge on inheritance, but subject the heritable principle
to a sceptical scrutiny. This is the argument pursued in Rooney’s third
and fourth chapters, which are valuable because Rooney grants equal
representation to anti-Jacobin and Jacobin fiction, challenging a critical
consensus that has until now privileged the voice of the reformers. His
choice of representative novels is odd though. The anti-Jacobins are
represented by George Walker’s The Vagabond, Jane West’s A Tale of the
Times, and Robert Bisset’s Douglas. The novel of reform is represented
by Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House, Godwin’s St Leon, and
Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. It is an asymmetrical selection,
but not in the sense that Rooney proposes. The Old Manor House and
Castle Rackrent were successful novels. Bisset’s Douglas, to take the
most extreme example, attracted little notice when it was published
in 1800 and disappeared into oblivion until its reissue in 2005 as one
of a selection of anti-Jacobin novels. Rooney’s case, I suppose, is that
Smith and Edgeworth, by their use of plots that centre on inheritance,
attest to the power of the Burkean trope. But before the pamphlet war
just as much as afterwards novels very often centred on problems of
inheritance: Tom Jones, The Castle of Otranto, The Romance of the Forest.
Rooney invokes the notion of “reframing” to support his claim that the
inheritance plot has a different significance after Burke than before, but
the argument is not wholly persuasive.
In his final chapter, Rooney argues that the novel’s turn towards history
had its origin in the pamphlet war and culminated in the invention of
the historical novel, which was not, as Georg Lukács would have it,
the single-handed achievement of Walter Scott, but was prefigured in
novels by Jane Porter and Sydney Owenson. When party antagonisms
cooled, history exerted an aesthetic rather than an ideological appeal,
as is most clearly evident in Scott’s Waverley (1814). The contention that
the historical novel has its origins in the 1790s is compelling, although
it is odd that Rooney should support it by reference to Waverley rather
than to The Antiquary, Scott’s own novel of the 1790s. It is also perhaps
a little too neat. For Rooney, the reformist novel supplies an antithesis
to the anti-Jacobin thesis, and Waverley synthesizes the two positions
(132). He means, I take it, that Waverley reconciles the Jacobin emphasis
on history as a sequence of ruptures with the Burkean emphasis on
continuity. Rooney acknowledges the critic’s obligation to balance
the “need for particularity” with the contrasting need for “narrative
coherence” (5), but he favours the second imperative. Charlotte Smith,
for example, is inadequately represented simply as a radical novelist.
Her political position is so fluid that the novels, as Rooney at one point
recognizes, resist “easy classification” as Jacobin or anti-Jacobin (131–
32). It is, after all, the central business of her great poem of the 1790s, The
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Emigrants, to chart the ideological journey that she undertook in the few
months from November 1792 to April 1793. Similarly, it is too simple
to argue, as Rooney does, that the preoccupations of Porter, Owenson,
and Scott were aesthetic rather than ideological. Certainly, Rooney’s
view needs more persuasive support than Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
benign assertion that Scott’s fiction gives equal weight to the desire for
permanence and the need for change. Coleridge was writing in 1820,
a year after the Peterloo Massacre, an event that divided the nation
more widely than it had been divided since the 1790s. Coleridge and
Scott knew very well on which side of the division they stood. Neither
was it for nothing that the first number of the Tory Quarterly Review
accommodated a violent attack on a novel by Owenson. Nevertheless,
Rooney’s central assertion that the development of the British novel
in the twenty years before the publication of Waverley has at least one
important origin in the pamphlet war of the 1790s is compelling and,
despite my quibbles, persuasive.
Richard Cronin is a professor at Oxford Brookes University. His most
recent books are Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (2010)
and Reading Victorian Poetry (2012).
Daniel Defoe, Contrarian by Robert James Merrett
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
xx+410pp. CAN$75. ISBN 978-1-4426-4610-0.
Review by Ashley Marshall, University of Nevada, Reno
This is a smart, learned, genuinely interesting book, if not an easy one
to read. Robert James Merrett’s scope is enormous: unlike almost all
non-biographical accounts of Daniel Defoe, this study draws on a large
number of fictional and non-fictional works and includes observations
in the realms of religion, language, politics, culture, literary tradition,
marriage, and gender, among others. Methodologically, Daniel Defoe,
Contrarian is based on wide reading in discourse analysis, semiotics,
and cognitive psychology, and Merrett’s grasp of his secondary sources
is matched only by his remarkable command of the varied and volu­mi­
nous corpus associated with Defoe.
This is not a book susceptible to tidy characterization. Most broad­ly,
Merrett is concerned with Defoe’s use of words—his sense of “how words
work, how they are articulated and voiced, how humans per­form as
speakers, and especially about how we talk to ourselves” (xii). Defoe was,
Merrett argues, very conscious “of the inevitability of verbal and narrative
illusion” (xii). He traces the ways in which Defoe asks his readers “to draw
inferences from his texts rather than to rest single-mindedly on fallible
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narrative generalizations” (xii). Attention to language is inseparable, for
Merrett, from attention to theology: Defoe’s works “open up equally to
linguistic, semantic, rhetorical, theological, semiotic, and narratological
analyses,” and (crucially) “verbal, situational, and dramatic ironies
domin­ate his writing because of his belief that figures of speech advance
spiritual apprehension of the world” (xiii–xiv).
Perhaps the most central of the several big claims made in this book
has to do with what Merrett takes to be Defoe’s sophisticated interest
in reader response. Many complicated formulations of this argument
appear throughout the book, but let me quote one of the simplest:
Defoe “encourage[d] readers to develop spiritual acuity by searching for
biblical words in their interior monologues” (xv). Defoe’s use of voices,
masks, irony, semantic vagueness, polysemy, and a variety of other
narrative devices and techniques is explained in terms of didacticism
and the promotion of biblical hermeneutics. Merrett offers richly in­
formed, wonderfully nuanced, if varyingly convincing, discussions of
Defoe’s sense of form and of theological instruction.
No review can begin to do justice to the entirety of the contents of the
eight wide-ranging chapters. The premise of chapter 1 is that we should
be reading Defoe’s texts “less from the standpoint of literary realism and
more from linguistic and cognitive perspectives” (4). The argument (at
this point rather abstract) is “that Defoe is a verbal artist committed
more to expressive than logical language and a rhetorician with an acute
sense of the reciprocity of semantics and ontology” (44). Chapter 2
traces the multiple uses to which Defoe puts a favourite phrase (“just
Reflections”). Merrett’s point, crudely, is that when Defoe’s characters
make their “just Reflections,” they are frequently “mentally confused
and spiritually unfulfilled,” the acknowledgment of which serves as an
invitation to “readers to think reflexively in [the characters’] stead” (45).
Defoe’s fiction illustrates the “necessity for readers to draw inferences
from narrative contradictions” (66). The subject of chapter 3 is the third
volume of Robinson Crusoe: Merrett reads Serious Reflections “in light
of the tensions between [Defoe’s] prophetic and self-effacing ... voices as
he propounds how he wants readers to interpret his famous work” (xv).
One of the more accessible claims of this often indigestible chapter is
that “Defoe bases literary theory on theology and biblical hermeneutics,”
believing that “rhetoric should serve rather than oppose theology” (104,
105). Defoe, Merrett contends, wished “to root narrative’s purposive
functions in ... Christian doctrines” (109). Chapter 4 examines Defoe’s
use of “Biblical Allusions as Narrative Resources,” or his embedding of
biblical references and parables in texts, so as to push readers to search for
them, thereby enhancing their spiritual perspicacity.
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Chapters 5 and 6 connect less clearly than the others to the overall
argument of the book; their concern is with politics and with explicating
“Defoe’s institutional conservatism with regard to regal authority” (200).
These chapters are not as thematically coherent as the others, and the
interpretive payoff is more obscure than elsewhere. Chapter 7 explores
“Defoe’s narrative deployment of ideas about sex, family, and marriage”
(230), and it includes a rich examination of sexual politics in Moll Flanders,
Colonel Jack, and Roxana. The long and complex final chapter (“Defoe’s
Imaginary”) is not reducible to a single summarizing statement, but the
crux has to do with Defoe’s use of narrative traps as a means of schooling
readers and of heightening their critical self-consciousness. Discourse
analysis, Merrett concludes, allows us “to unfold the experimental
pluralism of [Defoe’s] expository and narrative stances, defining and
illustrating his ‘polarity thinking’ so as to explicate his protean and manysided commitment to reader response” (283).
Often frustratingly over-ambitious, the treatments in this book of
politics, love, and marriage seem a distraction from the more pointed
analysis of the relations between narrative theory and theology. If there
is a unifying concept, it is Defoe’s use of “contraries”—his polarity
thinking—and the implications for readers’ interaction with the narrative.
The epigraph to chapter 1 is from Robinson Crusoe: “We never see the
true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries.”
Merrett argues that Defoe’s protagonists frequently glimpse “contraries,”
which then “fall back into contradictions in order to stimulate readers’
inferential responses” (230). Such contraries often have to do with
ecclesiastical/theological conflicts, as in The Conduct of the Christians
Made the Sport of Infidels, where rival churchmen affirm two different
“Contraries, one of which only can be true” (quoted on 24).
This is a difficult book conceptually, and Merrett’s long, syntactically
tortuous sentences and monster paragraphs do not help. The effort
required of readers of this study is either highly appropriate or painfully
ironic, given Merrett’s interest in the ways in which Defoe makes his
readers work to learn his lessons. I admit to a major reservation about
one of the book’s fundamental premises: Merrett supposes and seeks
to show that Defoe was an “artist in words” (283), and he assigns quite
complex, conscious, deliberate agendas that seem out of keeping with
Defoe’s hasty composition and with the manifest sloppiness of some of
his work. That Defoe actually possessed “a dialectical awareness that
foster[ed] ... the reciprocity of traditional and progressive authorial
modes” (283) I very much doubt. But, though Merrett’s contentions
are sometimes less than cogently rendered, his linguistic, semantic,
and rhetorical criticism is sober and judicious, and his notions of the
reciprocal relationship(s) between characters and readers are always
provocative. Anyone interested in narrative technique in the middle of
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the eighteenth century will find much with which to reckon here. Daniel
Defoe, Contrarian is an impressive piece of work, closely grounded in
primary sources, and scholars working with those sources will benefit
from serious engagement with this study. In scope and erudition, it is a
book to admire.
Ashley Marshall is an assistant professor of English at the University of
Nevada, Reno. She is the author of The Practice of Satire in England, 16581770 (2013), as well as several articles on late seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury literature. She is currently working on a book entitled “Swift and
History: Politics and the English Past.”
Alexandrovodas the Unscrupulous (1785) by Georgios N. Soutsos,
intro. and trans. Anna Stavrakopoulou
Istanbul: Isis Press, 2012.
124 pp. US$15. ISBN 978-975-428-462-1.
Review by Yota Batsaki, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
The title of Georgios N. Soutsos’s 1785 play, Alexandrovodas the
Unscrupulous, refers to a historical figure who lived during the second
half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth.
The name is a composite of a first name, Alexandros (Mavrokordatos
Firari), and the title Voevod, or ruler of the Danubian principalities of
Moldavia and Wallachia. These two positions, alongside those of Grand
Dragoman and Dragoman of the Fleet, were by the eighteenth century
occupied by members of an elite group of Orthodox Christians known as
the Phanariots, named after their district of Phanari (Turkish Fener) in
Constantinople. Both the author and the protagonist of the play, which
was never performed but circulated in manuscript in Constantinople
and the Danubian principalities, were eminent Phanariots, and the
work provides a fascinating and intimate glimpse into the interrelated
domestic and political worlds of the Phanariots.
The text of the play, collated from several manuscripts and supported
by extensive archival research, was first published in Greek by Dimitris
Spathis in 1995. The translator of this edition, Anna Stavrakopoulou,
assistant professor of theater studies at Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki, builds her introduction on Spathis’s research to stress
the unusual and paradoxical nature of this “eponymous libel set in an
exotic setting” (12) and to make it available to non-Greek literature and
history scholars. The play is unique in its overt reference to a powerful
historical contemporary, and in the realism with which it portrays him
as a corrupt philanderer, intent on plotting the murder of his highborn
wife in order to enjoy the services of a plebeian mistress. The playwright
Soutsos, who also wrote a number of more traditional, brief allegorical
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dramas, portrays Alexandrovodas in a domestic context steeped in
profanity and explicit sexual jokes, surrounded by scheming relatives
and associates, all keen to profit from the positive turn in their master’s
fortunes. The play is poised at the moment, replete with machinations
and avarice, between Alexandrovodas’s investiture and his preparations
for moving to the Danubian principality, and the reversal of his for­
tunes triggered by the dismissal of the Grand Vizier (his protector) and
the changing landscape of the Ottoman Court. While politics deter­
mines the plot, its motor is Alexandrovodas’s lust; Soutsos defames
Alexandrovodas by dwelling on his sexual infidelity within the network
of venality and corruption that surrounds him.
Although Soutsos’s libel is fuelled by the competing interests of the
Phanariot clans in which he and Alexandros Mavrokordatos belonged,
Stavrakopoulou, agreeing with Spathis, also ascribes the playwright’s
enmity to the difference between Soutsos’s conservative religious and
moral outlook and the cosmopolitanism of Mavrokordatos, who had
spent time in Russia and who was fluent in Greek, Ottoman, Russian,
French, and German. Exposure to European ideas is portrayed as
self-avowed “Machiavellianism.” Acquaintance with “Europe” in this
play is effected through Alexandrovodas’s sojourn in Russia; in the
long soliloquy that ends the second act, he notes that he abandoned
his “superstitions ... upon visiting Russia” and that he has resolved to
embrace pleasure and self-preservation as his sole divinities before dis­
integrating “to nothing, from which we sprouted.” The play concludes
that his attachment to “Europe and then again Europe” has transformed
Alexandrovodas into an “ingrate, a philanderer, a wrongdoer, and an
atheist” (76). The displacement of the European centre to Russia is a
reminder that the play’s location is not the European periphery but an
alternative imperial context, that is, cosmopolitan, diverse, polyglot,
and subject to elaborate structures of governance that included the
Christian Orthodox Phanariot elite.
The Phanariots were distinguished by nothing more than the inter­
national networks in which they moved or with which they were in
frequent communication. This movement was facilitated by their multi­
lingual prowess, which they put to the service of Ottoman diplomacy. The
language of the play is the vernacular of these polyglots, a hybrid Greek
dialect replete with Ottoman expressions of office, Italian catchwords,
French transliterations, and everyday Rumanian and Bulgarian vocabu­
lary. The mix is surprisingly convincing and appeal­ing, but it is also a
linguistic maze whose navigation is an impres­sive feat by the translator.
The thread is followed with agility and skill; the translation maintains
the oral, colloquial texture of the characters’ language, and the reader
unfamiliar with the original gains a glimpse of its variety by means of a
concluding glossary of Turkish Ottoman words.
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The play’s hybrid imperial context is also brought out by the intro­duc­
tion to this translation, which aims “to make the play available to Ottoman
historians, Europeanists, and theater scholars who have no direct
access to Greek texts” (11) as a contribution to the “treasure trove of
information on late eighteenth-century Ottoman politics and society”
(55). The lively, surprising play and its avail­ability in paperback will be
a compelling resource for all students and researchers of the Balkans
and the eastern Mediterranean. A recent study of the Phanariots
(Christine Philliou, Biography of an Empire [University of California
Press, 2011]) makes a strong case for the inclu­sion of Greek sources in
the study of Ottoman governance before nineteenth-century modern­
iza­tion. The publication of an English translation of a Greek play by a
Turkish publisher (Isis Press, Istanbul) is proof of the solid comparative
work in studies of empire in the eastern Mediterranean. More widely,
the comparability of the Ottoman Empire within the wider framework
of empire studies is now firm­ly established, following the revision
of the “decline thesis” and the debates that it has engendered over the
past half century (Cemal Kafadar, “The Question of Ottoman Decline,”
Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 4, nos. 1–2 [1998]: 30–75).
As a religious minority whose political ambitions and affiliations did
not always align with the emer­gence of nationalist movements in
the Balkans, for instance, the Phanariots challenge categories of reli­
gious and eth­nic definition, even as their success is a reminder of the
flexibility and efficiency of Ottoman toleration of difference with­in
the empire (Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in
Comparative Perspective [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008]). Stavrakopoulou’s trans­­la­tion of this intriguing and unusual play
adds an interesting literary source to the resources of Ottoman and
Modern Greek Studies; it also makes a valu­able contribution to studies
of empire at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Yota Batsaki is the executive director of Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection, in Washington, D.C.
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Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and
the Ideology of Domesticity by Marilyn Francus
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
xiv+298pp. US$55. ISBN 978-1-4214-0737-1.
Review by Natalie Roxburgh, University of Oldenburg
As the story goes, being a mother was counted among the domestic
ideals of the eighteenth-century woman. A woman’s place was in the
(then somewhat novel) private realm of the home, and one of her
hallmark duties was that of raising the children of the family, an insti­
tution that was becoming increasingly important for the nation state.
However, this role was fraught with tension, for eighteenth-century
mothers had the sole capacity of producing the nation’s offspringcitizens but simultaneously had to contend with prohibited female
power. Marilyn Francus proceeds from this interesting discrepancy,
ex­pos­ing a problematic disjunction between maternal experience in
the eighteenth century and the cultural representation thereof. Francus
complicates discourses on domesticity prevalent in literary and historical
contexts by analyzing texts in various genres written by both male and
female authors. In so doing, she rightly asks us to rethink what critics
and theorists have called “domestic ideology.”
Monstrous Motherhood situates itself within the past three decades
of scholarship on female identity in the context of the family. Domes­­
ticity, essentially a prescription for desired female behaviour, includes
maintaining the household and should (at least according to con­tem­
porary conduct books) encompass the practice of mother­hood, which also
belonged to the private realm. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic
Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987) set the ground­work for understanding the role that conduct books
played in cultivating female subjects who were capable of reigning in
the household. According to Armstrong, domesticity originated around
the time of the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740. But,
as Toni Bowers points out nearly a decade later, Armstrong’s lack of
atten­tion to motherhood ironically reveals the denial of the political
relevance of maternity. Bowers, in The Politics of Motherhood: British
Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), argues that the primary female task came to be seen as
reproduction, a duty that ensured women would have to submit to men.
Francus takes this discussion a timely step further by focusing on written
accounts of motherhood when such representation implies grudg­ingly
acknowledging female power.
Whether eighteenth-century mothers are consistently “monstrous” is
the question the reader of this monograph is forced to confront. While
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the reader easily follows the concept of “monstrous motherhood” in
Francus’s first and second chapters, later chapters feature mothers who
murder their offspring, stepmothers, and mothers who are missing or
spectral. While early chapters clearly explain what is so monstrous about
the represented mothers, later chapters suggest a post-monster reality,
after domestic ideology has done its work of normalizing the subject. In
other words, Francus’s analysis suggests a more nuanced concept of the
monster than she herself provides: the mother sometimes seems less of
a monster and more of a necessary evil to the power structure, a figure
whose representation is tellingly reluctant.
The allegorical figures of “Criticism” in Jonathan Swift’s The Battle
of the Books (1704) and “Dulness” in Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad
(1728) offer the most compelling (and perhaps most obvious) examples
of monstrosity. The procreative body of the fertile woman is a ready
parallel to the threatening contemporary proliferation of print, an overproduction that is itself a site of swelling outside of categorical norms.
This threat to norms and values helps us to see what Foucault meant when
he said that the monster provides us with an account (albeit through
caricature) of the genesis of differences: a new form of power came into
existence with the capacity to destabilize authorial hierarchies, and it
must simultaneously be acknowledged but also contested. This sort of
monstrosity fits well with the chapter that presents a key example of
an actual, biological “monstrous” mother in Hester Thrale, who was
perpetually pregnant for more than a decade (much to the chagrin of
her family and friends). In both of these chapters, the argument for
“monstrous motherhood” is compelling.
The reader often loses track of the monster in later chapters,
however. Infanti­cide takes up a substantial portion of this monograph
and is revealed to have been domesticated: for example, some cases
reflect an acceptance that poor mothers dispose of their unwanted
children rather than burdening the state. Stepmothers, whom Francus
discusses in a compelling account of the Burney family, are difficult to
reckon with precisely because their power (or lack thereof) does not
come from biology. These two chapters speak less to monstrosity and
more to the ways in which the contemporary negative judgment of
mothers rendered domestic ideology problematic.
What the monograph expertly confronts us with is a need to flesh out
what we mean by “domestic ideology.” In this sense, the final chapter (on
the spectral mother) is convincing. The magic of fiction (in the works
of Ann Radcliffe, Sarah Fielding, Amelia Opie, Daniel Defoe, Frances
Burney, and Mary Hays, for example) is that we can put the mother where
we need to; we can pay our dues but also write her into the outskirts
of the plot. The conclusion of Monstrous Motherhood asks readers to
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consider whether it is possible for a mother to enact or be at the centre
of a domestic narrative at all. Do these displacements and disguises of
mothers in fiction indicate a mode of dissent, as Francus suggests (201)?
How one responds to this question might have something to do with
how one registers ideology in general. If domestic ideology is, as Francus
argues, one that “fixes” mothers by assigning priority to maternal psy­
chology and behaviour through social pressure, one wonders if the very
con­cept of motherhood that these later chapters deal with is also very
much a post-monster one (198). The question is then whether there is
an “outside” to domestic ideology that provides the mother with a place
for such resistance. Are these outskirts another domestic space where she
manages her household? Or has the work of fiction, by giving her power
even while placing her on the outside of the core narrative, liberated her
political agency?
Natalie Roxburgh, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of
Oldenburg in Germany, works on eighteenth-century and contemporary
fiction, focusing on the ways in which novels engage with the sciences.
Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of
Samuel Richardson by Bonnie Latimer
Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2013.
xii+216pp. US$99.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-4632-3.
Review by Anna Deters, Washington University in St. Louis
In recent years, literary scholars have expressed a growing desire to
move past Clarissa in order to consider the fresh terrain of Samuel
Richard­son’s largely overlooked final novel, Sir Charles Grandison.
Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson
amply rewards this new interest. Recognizing its importance in
eighteenth-century literature and culture, Bonnie Latimer sets out to
lift Sir Charles Grandison from its relative modern obscurity and install
it as an essential text for those who study the eighteenth century. The
argument of Making Gender is guided by the question, “How does
Richardson’s canon—and perhaps even the mid-century novel—look
differ­ent when viewed through the lens of Grandison?” (3). Rather
than moving chronologically through Richardson’s oeuvre as critics
usually do, Latimer organizes her analy­sis according to the “qualities
essen­tial to eighteenth-century ‘individuality’”—reason, moral agency,
piety through performance, and the tension between singleness and
communality—that Sir Charles Grandison so comprehensively explores
(3). Making Gender illu­minates Richardson’s interrogation of these
qualities by tying his work to an impressive range of cultural con­texts,
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including popular anti-female satire, prostitute narratives, Anglican
devotional literature, and marriage writings related to the Hardwicke
Act. Showing how Richardson engages with these discourses, Latimer
argues that the novels “redefine the fictive self ” and, in particular, that
they “are instru­mental in a cultural shift according to which women
became imaginable as individuals” (1, 3). Chapter 1 begins, in the form
of an epigraph, with Nancy Armstrong’s declara­tion that “the modern
individual was first and foremost a woman,” and Latimer’s indebtedness
to Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the
Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) is apparent throughout
the book.
Building on Armstrong’s seminal work, Latimer identifies reason
as the central quality of Richardson’s construction of female value and
moral discrimination. It is his heroines’ sophisticated understanding
that alters novelistic discourse in favour of female individu­ality.
Chapter 1 sets the stage for Richardson’s intervention by explaining
how Scriblerian tropes of female irrationality “bleed” into the early
novel (21). “By exploiting and superseding the logic of early and
mid-eighteenth-century figurings of femininity,” Latimer contends,
“Richardson’s heroines suggest themselves as differentiated, rational,
critical participants in culture” (10). Through­out the book, Latimer
offers incisive and convincing readings of how Richardson’s protagon­ists
ex­ploit discourses of the period to their advantage. Yet, by establishing
Richard­son’s heroines as “novel” alterna­tives to the conventions of antifemale prose and satire, she perhaps over­looks his appropriation of
older models of female heroism—the virtu­ous Lady in John Milton’s
Comus, for example, and classical archetypes like Lucrece. A broader
look at the female representations with which Richard­son was familiar
might reveal how the perception of women was not as uniform as
Latimer’s attention to Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift would lead
us to believe.
While Richardson’s originality in rethinking gender may be over­
stated, the complexity of his engagement with the meaning of virtue
is not. Although the book’s main focus is on the construction of the
Richardsonian heroine as a “novel individual,” far more interesting to me
is how Latimer so cogently scrutinizes the intricate ideological texture
of the novels (7). By providing a “recuperative reading of Richardson’s
slip­pery mixture of radicalism and conservatism, his innovation and
recalcitrance,” Latimer explores what I believe to be the reason for
Richardson’s current appeal: his ability to funnel the competing ide­
ologies of eighteenth-century culture into rich, contradictory novels,
thus achieving a sophistication of moral vision that discredits the per­­
cep­tion of him as merely a didactic writer (6). For example, chapter 4
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embarks from William Warner’s reading of Clarissa’s rhetorical cun­
ning to explain how the “rhetorically manipulative, artificing nature
of Richardson’s heroines and their writing” is a feature of an Anglican
“morality concerned with ends” (38, 108). Offering an erudite reading
of Sir Charles Grandison contextualized by latitudinarian thought,
Latimer in effect synthesizes Pamelist and anti-Pamelist interpretations
regarding the moral integrity of Richardson’s protagonists. Rather
than being evidence of unethical behaviour, deceit and trickery
serve an enduring good when used with virtuous intention. Latimer pro­
duc­tively examines the tension between the polyvalent slipperiness of
Richardson’s novels and his heroines’ moral and narrative authority.
Latimer’s sharp analysis, clear and engaging prose style, and master­
ful enlacing of contextual and literary material make her book a pleasure
to read. Making Gender should be essential reading for scholars of the
eighteenth-century novel as well as for Richardson specialists. Given
Richardson’s influential role in imagining moral and rhetorical female
agency, which Latimer abundantly demonstrates, the book will be of
value to those interested in the period’s conception of gendered self­
hood and, even more broadly, to anyone who investigates how literature
creates, reproduces, and challenges cultural discourses.
Anna Deters recently completed her PhD in English literature at
Washington University in St. Louis.
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