Eva Figes Sex and Subterfuge

Introduction THROUGHOUT the eighteenth century women had been writing popular novels, largely for the consumption of other women, and both production and consumption were viewed with considerable contempt by the superior sex. But during the last decade of the eighteenth century a change took place: women began to write novels with a skill and authority which commanded the respect of both sexes, and over the next fifty years they colonised the medium and made it their own. They took over the novel in England, gave it a new shape, structure and unity of intention which was to have a lasting impact to this day. If there is such a thing as the classical novel in English literature, and I think there is, then women were responsible for defining and refining it. The novel which women took over from men towards the end of the eighteenth century was a bulky, amorphous affair. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, expressed the hope that women writers would, in the future, write novels which were rather shorter than those of men. Her own novels are certainly a good deal shorter than those of Joyce, Proust or Mann. But if she had looked at the history of the novel to her own time she would have realised that most women have tended to value brevity. Evelina, although an epistolary novel, is much shorter than anything by Richardson; Austen pruned and polished Pride and Prejudice for years before she sent it off to a publisher; Charlotte Brontè, making notes for a possible first novel while a student teacher in Brussels, reminded herself to 'Avoid Richardsonian multiplication' and aim for 'As much compression as little explanation as may be'. On the whole the best of women's fiction tends to be short and compressed, certainly compared with the best output by male writers. George Eliot, writing at the peak of the Victorian era, building on the groundwork done by earlier women writers and competing against male professionalism in a way that Austen or the Brontès or even Mrs Gaskell had never done, did go in for bulk. But George Eliot's structures were still basically female structures, an elaboration of what the best women writers had done in the sixty or seventy years before she began to write. The typical male structure 2 SEX AND SUBTERFUGE was inherited from Fielding; it was linear, episodic and picaresque The hero moved from adventure to adventure, scene to scene, characters popped up and then vanished for an age; often there were tales told by a peripheral character within the main narrative. It is a technique aptly satirised in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, where much is said but the hero never even suceeds in getting himself born. This is the male mode taken over and adapted by Dickens and to some extent by Thackeray. It lends itself to serial publication, particularly when the aim is to get as much financial gain as possible from one storyline, and also to spin it out. 'There are superb passages in it; but what defective composition!' Flaubert wrote to George Sand after reading Pickwick Papers, perhaps not a fair example, although Dickens simply developed that early technique. Flaubert goes on to comment: 'All English writers are the same; Walter Scott excepted, all lack a plot. That is unendurable for us Latins.' Not only Walter Scott, but every woman writer between Austen and Eliot must also be excepted. Bulk in England has tended to be associated with committed professionalism and the need or wish for financial gain. The women who wrote long novels at this period tended to be women who turned to writing as a means of gaining an independent existence, Charlotte Smith, for instance, Mrs Radcliffe, and the later Fanny Burney. Financial considerations were also important to George Eliot once she was established as a novelist and could give up literary hack work. But women writers, the best of them, seem never to have lost sight of the need for aesthetic integrity, the need to see a novel as a whole. While Dickens and Thackeray wrote chapter by chapter to a deadline for serial publication, Charlotte Brontè and George Eliot refused to be published in this way because it was clearly damaging to the idea of the novel as a whole. When Mrs Gaskell was lured into serial publication by Dickens she refused to adapt or compromise in the way serial publication demanded, and cost Dickens many of the readers he had been assiduously wooing with his own work. It is the intention of this book to examine the literary progress of women novelists during this key period in their emergence from the shadows of obscurity. We are so used to thinking of the "disadvantages' of women (if we are women) and the 'inferiority' of women (it we are men) that it might come as a surprise to both to find a situation where disadvantages turned out to be advantages and the supposedly inferior sex showed itself to be unexpectedly superior. FINDING A STRUCTURE 13 of Sentiment made his appearance in fiction. It was a fiction that, at least in theory, did not condone the sexual double standard. And, of course, as far as the novel is concerned, it must not be overlooked that a growing female readership offered literary opportunities to male novelists as well as female ones. Fielding and his admirers might scoff at Richardson, but not only was there an increase in women readers who would choose his work in preference, but a growing number of fond and anxious fathers who, in opening their libraries for their daughters to use, must have felt that Richardson was far more suitable for general family entertainment than Fielding or Smollett. The argument between Richardson and Fielding became one of morality rather than literary structure. Richardson, himself a pious Christian, objected to Tom Jones on moral grounds, and expected his own books to serve a didactic purpose. Certainly Sir Charles Grandison could be called the most comprehensive conduct novel of all time. When Dr Johnson appeared to lend his considerable weight to the Richardsonian side, there could be no doubt that the scales would ultimately come down in his favour. Writing to The Rambler in 1750, he sees fiction as dangerous fodder for the young, very much the attitude taken at the time on the novels written for young women: These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life. They are the entertainments of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account. It therefore followed 'that nothing indecent should be suffered to approach their eyes or ears'. Selectivity rather than realism is to be the aim of fiction: "If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account'. The 'use' of fiction being 'to initiate youth by mock encounters in the art of necessary defence, and to increase prudence without impairing virtue'. While conceding that it is necessary for vice to be depicted, he emphasises that it should * always disgust', and it is 'to be steadily inculcated, that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness' 14 SEX AND SUBTERFUGE Johnson's essay reveals a certain contempt for fiction and the readers of fiction. Although he does not mention women, he must have been perfectly well aware that women were the main consumers of new novels, and the paternal, protective didacticism he favours was to become the prevailing attitude to the 'problem' of women's addiction to novels. Writing so soon after the publication of Roderick Random (1748) and Tom Jones (1749), both of which enjoyed great popularity, it is not improbable that Johnson was coming down in favour of Richardson in the literary and moral debate which was going on between these authors. In a sense we are talking about the feminisation of literary taste, and Richardson was winning the argument anyhow. Fielding may have found Pamela sufficiently ridiculous to parody it, but he admired Clarissa (1747-8) enough to be influenced by it. After its publication Fielding published Amelia (1752), much admired by Fanny Burney's father, and Smollett wrote Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), both novels in which attempted seduction and the machinations of an intriguing rake are treated with a new seriousness. The moral division between Fielding's picaresque novel and the epistolary novel of Richardson is illustrated very clearly in Maria Edgeworth's Ormond (1817). Edgeworth was unusual for her period in being as interested in the moral development of her male characters as in her female ones and her hero, Harry Ormond, is a good-hearted but raw young man who gradually becomes wiser and better. It is a Bildungsroman, and Harry's behaviour is strongly influenced by the novels he reads. (Edgeworth, like Dr Johnson and all the women novelists of her period, was quite sure that novels influenced behaviour for good or ill.) First of all Tom Jones falls into his hands, and he immediately identifies with its hero: • he was charmed by the character - that of a warm-hearted, generous, imprudent young man, with little education, no literature, governed more by feeling than by principle, never upon any occasion reasoning, but keeping right by happy moral instincts; or when going wrong, very wrong, forgiven easily by the reader and by his mistress, and rewarded at the last with all that love and fortune can bestow, in consideration of his being - a very fine fellow. Closing the book, Harry Ormond resolved to be what he admired - and if possible to shine forth an Irish Tom Jones. For FINDING A STRUCTURE 15 this purpose he was not at all bound to be a moral gentleman, nor, as he conceived, to be a gentleman at all he might begin by being an accomplished - blackguard, Ormond starts off his career as an Irish Tom Jones by trying to seduce a village maiden, but is saved from going too far when he discovers that a local lad loves the girl and wants to marry her. Shortly after this Harry reads Sir Charles Grandison and finds a new hero to emulate, one who: touched the nobler feelings of our young hero's mind, inspired him with virtuous emulation, made him ambitious to be a gentleman in the best and highest sense of the word. In short, it completely counteracted in his mind the effect of Tom Jones - all the generous feelings which were so congenial to his own nature, and which he had seen combined in Tom Jones, as if necessarily, with the habits of an adventurer, a spendthrift, and a rake, he now saw united with high moral and religious principles, in the character of a man of virtue, as well as a man of honour; a man of cultivated understanding and accomplished manners . Ormond has often declared that Sir Charles Grandson did him more good than any fiction he ever read in his life. 4 Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey, which is essentially a novel about the novel, and its influence on everyday life, also gives a special mention to Sir Charles Grandison. It is a book which Catherine Morland's mother is in the habit of reading, and which is 'not like Udolpho at all' 5 With the feminisation of literature in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the emphasis on sentiment and sensibility, for which the Richardsonian epistolary novel was such a suitable vehicle, went an explicit reaffirmation of Christian values and a new didacticism. With so many women reading and writing novels moral content was a form of self-justification, the only defence against the charge that women scribblers were filling young girls' heads full of romantic nonsense. Novelists like Eliza Haywood claimed that their stories of sexual seduction and abduction, of imprisonment and remorse, were written as a warning to young ladies. A rather more convincing case can be made for the novels on courtship and marriage, which told young ladies how to conduct themselves along FINDING A STRUCTURE 17 But even Sir Charles Grandison, in spite of its gentility, its sympathy for women, its emphasis on tact and delicacy and good manners, proved an unsatisfactory model for later women novelists as far as structure was concerned. The epistolary style, which Richardson associated with the female voice - subjective, emotional, and suggestive of a highly sedentary way of life - proved to be one which women novelists rarely used, and then almost always badly, for the same reason as they avoided the tragic mode. A woman who is trying to come to terms with a world and with values where she is object and not subject, an outsider, regarded as an inferior dependant with no rights or voice of her own, must at all costs avoid the subjective voice if she is to conform to standard morality and at the same time remain in control of her material. Conformity was required of her both on a personal level and as an author, and in this situation she is at her best when she employs the detached irony of the authorial third person Richardson, as a man who had no doubt of the ultimate superiority of his own sex, could afford subjective outpourings on the part of his female heroines. A woman writer could not. Burney did use the epistolary form with great success in Evelina, but she severely restricts her heroine's self-expression and uses the form more to contrast the voices of innocence and experience. The very fact that her heroine is so young and naive assures the author an ironic detachment. Edgeworth wrote one epistolary novel, Leonora, easily her dullest novel and said to have been written in that form to please a man who wanted to marry her. Austen, after her juvenile burlesques of the epistolary novel, tried the form again in Lady Susan was clearly not at home with the form, and abandoned the book Perhaps she was also partly influenced by the fact that Leonora was published in 1806, just about the time she was writing Lady Susan, and has a very similar plot. One is forced to the conclusion that women writers, while admiring Sir Charles Grandison as the most ladylike novel ever written by a man, really did not learn very much from Richardson, and owed far more to the despised women novelists who were always being sneered at by men. Anxious to disassociate themselves from such female romancers, who certainly lacked artistry, they found that Richardson's novel provided a convenient status symbol, a link with the great male tradition. Austen could hardly have made Catherine Morland's mother read Eliza Haywood in preference to Mrs ANXIOUS APOLOGIES 23 the heroine is tempted by a drawer full of rings and brooches at the subscription library, which afforded all the useless things in the world that could be done without'. But then the heroine picks up a book: "it happened to be a volume of Camilla. She had not Camilla's youth, and had no intention of having her distress, - so she turned from the drawer of rings and brooches repressed farther solicitation and paid for what she bought. " Austen knows Camilla, and clearly expects her readers to be equally familiar with the novel. This is typical of women's novels at this period. In spite of their defensiveness about being women writers, they constantly refer to other novels by women and clearly expect their readers to know what they are talking about. In this case, Austen is referring to an author she admires. Her heroine, we are given to understand, is a better and wiser young woman after reading Camilla, since she decides not to spend her money on unnecessary trifles. A defence of the right kind of novel, one which preached good sense and the importance of maidenly propriety. But examples of the deleterious effects of the wrong kind of novel, mostly foreign ones, are much easier to find in the novels of this period. Young women without the economic necessity of earning a living might write their first novel, usually anonymously, with a great sense of freedom and enjoyment. But later, if they acquired a reputation, the social and moral pressure on them was enormous, even if insidious. One can see this kind of pressure being exerted on both Burney and Edgeworth, and in the case of both these writers their first book remained their best one. Fanny Burney published Evelina as a youngish woman without the knowledge of her family. She did it, she claimed, for a "frolic', and her father was not told she was the author until it had become a success. Of course she was aware of the opprobrium attached to the reading of novels by young women, and although her preface contains the usual defence, her tone is joking, almost ironic, and she certainly does not claim to be writing for the moral betterment of her readership: Perhaps were it possible to effect the total extirpation of novels our young ladies in general, and boarding-school damsels in particular, might profit from their annihilation: but since the distemper they have spread seems incurable, since their contagion bids defiance to the medecine of advice or reprehension, and since they are found to 32 SEX AND SUBTERFUGE only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature &c. &c. - She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel- readers & not ashamed of being so 16 Of course it was not only the Austen family who were avid fiction readers. All the novels of the period are full of cross-references, and their authors assume a comprehensive knowledge of contemporary fiction in their readers, including the books which were supposed to undermine character. Northanger Abbey assumes a knowledge of Udolpho, in Mansfield Park the reader is expected to know the plot of Kotzebue's Lovers' Vows, and even the plain Englishman in Leonora is familiar enough with Rousseau to know when life is imitating art. If the novel was an object of 'contemptuous censure' for so many years it was principally because women had taken over the form and were now its predominant exponents. If women could write novels, and were doing so in such large numbers, it clearly followed that novel- writing must be a trivial and silly occupation. Of course there were plenty of bad women novelists, just as there have always been plenty of bad male poets, but without bringing poetry into disrepute. As a result women of intelligence and ability found themselves in something of a double-bind when they began writing. They tried to disassociate themselves from the run-of-the-mill writers; they took refuge in a sense of social responsibility to justify their art; they apologised in advance for the crime of writing novels, and did exactly what Austen accused them of doing. But by the time Austen died in 1818 she and her female contemporaries had achieved enough, and were sufficiently respected, to make her posthumous defence of the novel unnecessary. That does not mean, however, that women novelists were now being regarded as the equals of men. When Frankenstein was published in 1818 the author was generally assumed to be a man, possibly Shelley himself. Reviewing Valperga in March 1823, Blackwood's wrote that they had been in error in assuming it to be the work of Mr rather than Mrs Shelley, "and then we most undoubtedly said to ourselves, "For a man it was excellent, but for a woman it was wonderful.' Thirty years later Charlotte Brontè wrote that she and her sisters had chosen ambiguous pseudonyms because "we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice'. 17 The 'weapon of personality' she accuses critics of using has not grown rusty since, nor has the habit of designating certain modes of writing and thinking as 'feminine' 5. The Gothic Alternative IN the last chapter we have seen how Fanny Burney was torn between her natural instincts and the social pressure to conformity. For the woman novelist who did not write for a living there was the emotional pressure of her family and friends, whilst the professional writer had to contend with market forces, which favoured conservative attitudes in dealing with the position of women. Of course, even the amateur 'lady' writer was unlikely to see her work in print if her work represented a radical departure from prevailing attitudes. In addition to these social pressures on women writers we also have to consider the restriction imposed by the imagination itself. Most novelists, most writers, are concerned with showing the world as it is, not as it might or ought to be; the tendency towards conservatism which can be noted in most great writing of the past is due to this fact. Good writers are concerned with truth, and truth compels the writer to tell it how it is, not how he or she would like it to be. Visionary writers are a comparative rarity. The language of the novel at this period gave women very little scope for an alternative vision of female destiny. During the eighteenth century there were only two basic plots for heroines. There was the story with the happy ending - the comic courtship plot with its emphasis on conduct; and the story with the unhappy ending, that of seduction, abduction and ruin. The latter variety tended to be disapproved of by the moral guardians of young ladies who frowned on the habit of novel-reading, and could only be justified on didactic grounds. Women novelists, so uneasy about their occupation, tended to stick to the safer ground of the comic courtship novel with a happy ending, often contrasting the exemplary conduct of their heroine by having a sub-plot in which a young woman is brought to ruin and disgrace by some variation of the second plot. If the comic plot can be labelled the Grandison story, and the tragic one Clarissa, there is a third, hybrid archetypal plot which could aptly be called the Pamela plot. This is the story of the woman who is a victim of male abduction but through personal initiative and fortitude wins through to a happy ending of respectable marriage, usually with THE GOTHIC ALTERNATIVE 57 a fortune thrown in. This was a basic plot which women novelists, particularly the more popular ones, did seize on and develop. It offered more scope for a story full of adventure and incident than the courtship novel with its emphasis on social propriety. For professional women writers aiming at a wider market it had the added attraction of allowing them to portray women in situations which required them to be self-reliant and courageous without outraging social convention since their heroines were the victims of wicked males. Fanny Burney made a gradual switch from dependent lady to independent professional woman, and we saw how this affected the tone of her novels. For a woman like Charlotte Smith, starting her career as a novelist in order to support herself after an unsatisfactory marriage, a heroine who was forced by circumstances to take charge of her own destiny and act on her own initiative had obvious attractions. It was a story-line that provided a viable female alternative to the male picaresque, as long as certain constraints were observed: the heroine must not lose her virtue, and must act in an unconventional manner only under duress. The elaboration of suitable adventures for such a heroine, that is, of dangers which left the heroine essentially unscathed, being rooted in fantasy rather than reality, led to the development of the Gothic mode. And the Gothic mode eventually became an imaginative_ vehicle for feminism, since it provided a radical alternative to the daylight reality of conformity and acceptance, offering a dark world of the psyche in which women were the imprisoned victims of men. We can see the problem involved in presenting a radical alternative through fiction in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. She was not, admittedly, a born novelist, and would probably never have tried her hand at the form if it had not been considered the most obvious one for women of her era to attempt. Her first novel, Mary, was published in 1788, the same year that saw the publication of Charlotte Smith's Emmeline. Wollstonecraft's novel is a disastrous attempt at radical realism, an autobiographical novel which attempts to show a heroine trying to live by different tenets from the conventional ones, but it is unconvincing and, one suspects, unconvinced. Emmeline, on the other hand, is a rattling romantic yarn on the Pamela model. The heroine resists seduction, abduction and the bullying of rich and powerful males through a series of adventures, some with Gothic overtones which inspired Mrs Radcliffe. But at the time of her death in 1797, three years after the publication of Udolpho and nearly a decade after 58 SEX AND SUBTERFUGE she first read Emmeline and reviewed it in disapproving tones,' Mary Wollstonecraft was herself using the Gothic mode to write a protest novel, one which showed far more imaginative power than the more realistic Mary. In Mary the central figure is given all the rhapsodic emotions which more conservative women novelists tried so consistently to discourage, and considered dangerous for personal survival: 'Sensibility is the most exquisite feeling of which the human soul is susceptible: when it pervades us, we feel happy . . .. It is this quickness, this delicacy of feeling, which enables us to relish the sublime touches of the poet, and the painter *2 But it is in action, not sentiment, that the novel reader will find a prescription for reality, and the plot of Mary is unspeakably lame, in fact it confirms the warnings of conservative novelists that unconventional ideas and a romantic sensibility will do a heroine nothing but harm. Forced into a loveless marriage at an early age, Mary, like Wollstonecraft, travels to Lisbon to nurse a dying friend. There the heroine meets her true soulmate, a sickly man called Henry. She protests against her married state and asks herself: have I desires implanted in me only to make me miserable? Will they never be gratified? With these notions can I conform to the maxims of worldly wisdom? Can I listen to the cold dictates of worldly prudence, and bid my tumultous passions cease to vex me 73 Unfortunately the answer offered by the author to these rhetorical questions in terms of plot are yes, these desires are implanted only to plague, no, they will not be gratified, yes, our heroine can and will conform to worldly wisdom, and will also listen to the cold dictates of wordly prudence, which leaves the conservative novelists of sense and prudence clear victors of the field. Although Mary returns from Lisbon determined not to live with her husband ('I will work, ' she cried, 'do any thing rather than be a slave') her resolutions come to nothing. Henry dies, Mary agrees to live with her husband, but his touch fills her with disgust, she suffers from poor health, travels a good deal, throws herself into good works, and seems destined for an carly grave. It is decidedly an evasion, with the heroine avoiding both the indignities of adultery and plain sewing. Since Mary Wollstonecraft was herself to live with a man who was THE GOTHIC ALTERNATIVE 59 not her husband it is unlikely that she was prevented by personal prudery from giving a different ending to her story, though consideration for the reactions of her readers might have been an inhibiting factor. But my over-riding feeling is that for Wollstonecraft, who was not a novelist of originality and genius, there simply were no satisfactory literary models for her to draw on. Having created a heroine trapped in a conventional morality but emotionally at odds with it, there was nowhere for her fictional Mary to go, and she simply stagnates within her situation instead of changing it. At the same time Wollstonecraft clearly felt that to concoct a happy fictional ending would be a falsehood. Real life did not provide women with contrived endings. In real life women stayed imprisoned in their situation. No doubt it was this latter consideration which prompted her to criticise Charlotte Smith's Emmeline when she reviewed it anonymously in the Analytical Review in July 1788: The false expectations these wild scenes excite, tend to debauch the mind, and throw an insipid kind of uniformity over the moderate and rational prospects of life', she wrote, but the end result is to make her critical voice indistinguishable from that of her most conservative sisters, who always aimed to make their young women readers realise that their prospects were severely limited and that marriage was the doorway to duty and responsibility, not freedom and romance. The fact is that, for all her radical ideals, Wollstonecraft had no alternative reality to offer her readers, or through which she could propel her heroine. Within the realistic mode she was as fettered as Burney or Austen, and it was only through fantasy that any alternative, or some form of escape, was possible. Of course, unlike more conservative women novelists, she tended to have a clearer understanding of cause and effect. Writing of Mary's mother at the beginning of the book, she says: As she was sometimes obliged to be alone she sent to the metropolis for all the new publications, and while she was dressing her hair, and she could turn her eyes from the glass, she ran over those most delightful substitutes for bodily dissipation, novels." At one level this is the conventional indictment of novel-reading, but Wollstonecraft is unusual in seeing why women become addicted to fiction - as a substitute for the life they cannot live 60 SEX AND SUBTERFUGE Whatever their personal life styles or conscious political ideas, the fact is that at this period there was very little difference in attitude between the Jacobin and anti-Jacobin stance as far as women's fiction is concerned. For any writer aiming at realism, reality proved too strong a fetter. In addition, radical women who were interested in revolutionary ideas, as Wollstonecraft was, found precious little in radical male ideology to change the image of woman. It was precisely because of this blind side in her idol Rousseau that Wollstonecraft was stirred into writing her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In 1791, three years after Wollstonecraft's rather lame first venture into fiction, the actress Mrs Inchbald, a friend of William Godwin, from whom she apparently received literary advice, published A Simple Story, a novel which enjoyed both critical and popular success, and was much admired by Edgeworth." Mrs Inchbald undoubtedly led an unconventional life, she moved in radical circles, but her novel purveys all the conventional wisdom meted out to young women by the most staunch supporters of Burke. So the heroine of the first half of the book, Miss Milner, is brought to a bad end by her own lack of prudence and self-control: From her infancy she had been indulged in all her wishes to the extreme of folly, and habitually started at the unpleasant voice of control - she was beautiful, she had been too frequently told the high value of that beauty, and thought those moments passed in wasteful idleness during which she was not gaining some new conquest - she had besides a quick sensibility, which too frequently discovered itself in the immediate resentment of injury or neglect - she had acquired also the dangerous character of a wit. Even if one makes allowances for the author's desire to maximise her profits from writing, one feels she might have taken a slightly less hard line, and at least allowed her a little wit. In the second half of the book her daughter Matilda, in sharp contrast to her dead mother, is a model of female virtues, quiet and submissive. She never blames her father for his cruel rejection, and when she is abducted, rescued by her father, and taken to his bosom, she behaves in the approved manner: 'she feared to speak, or clasp him in return for his embrace, but falling on her knees clung round his legs, and bathed his feet with her tears.'7 The situation of Matilda is not unlike that of Evelina, THE GOTHIC ALTERNATIVE 61 except that it is treated quite without irony, and in conclusion the reader is told that she: has beheld the pernicious effects of an improper education in the destiny which attended the unthinking Miss Milner- on the opposite side, then, what may not be hoped from that school of prudence - though of adversity - in which Matilda was bred? It needs a very careful eye to detect much difference of outlook between Mrs Inchbald and some of her conservative contemporaries. She does tend to show her characters in the grip of overpowering emotions which they are quite unable to control, whereas novelists of 'sense' like Austen, West and Edgeworth tend to assume that it is always possible to control emotions which reason and judgement teach us to overcome. But in the process she also seems to be undermining the little autonomy which women could claim. Burney's depiction of heroines who feel, love and suffer but nevertheless learn to cope satisfactorily with the conflict between interior feelings and exterior reality without falling a victim to either in the long run seems both less simplistic and more constructive. But in order to escape the restrictions imposed on a woman of good family it was necessary to escape into a world, not just of romance, but of fantasy. Fantasy not only gave scope to the imagination, but made it possible for a heroine to act on her own initiative, to show positive rather than negative virtues. As we shall see, it is characteristic of Mrs Radcliffe's Gothic mode to he highly artificial, that is, the reader is constantly aware of being involved in a charade of make-believe. This was an important factor for a society that believed in keeping its daughters pure in thought, word and deed. Women writers became increasingly concerned to promote positive virtues in their women readers. They soon became dissatisfied with preaching merely prudence and propriety, the conduct of courtship. The Gothic novel not only unleashed the imagination, but made it possible to show women acting boldly on their own behalf, with fortitude and courage. In this sense the Gothic novel was itself only a link in the chain, since it was followed by more realistic novels showing young women coping with adversity and disaster. Mary Brunton's Self-Control, published in 1812, which shows a heroine coping with the death of a parent, poverty, and the unscrupulous 94 SEX AND SUBTERFUGE Sensibility. Closer to a didactic tract than a novel to the bemused modern reader, it is the most definitive expression of the attitudes embodied in the courtship novels of sense. Love is portrayed ' not as an ungovernable impulse, but as a sentiment arising out of qualities calculated to inspire attachment in persons under the dominion of reason and religion'.22 The education of girls for matrimony is expatiated on at length. Mr Stanley, father of the prospective bride, proudly states: The inculcation of fortitude, prudence, humility, temperance, self- denial - this is education .. Perseverance, meekness, and industry . I make it a point never to extol any indications of genius Nor am I indeed over much delighted with a great blossom of talents. I would give every girl, in a certain station in life, some one amusing accomplishment ... Religion alone can counter-act the pride of talents.23 There are constant warnings against women who are encouraged to display their artistic accomplishments, something which was to be constantly echoed in later novels by Edgeworth: A woman, whose whole education has been rehearsal, will always be dull, except she lives on the stage, constantly displaying what she has been sedulously acquiring. Books on the contrary, well chosen books, do not lead to exhibition. The knowledge a woman acquires in private, desires no witness; the possession is the pleasure. It improves herself, it embellishes her family society, it entertains her husband, it informs her children. The gratification is cheap, is safe, and always to be had at home.24 Burney's* Cecilia, Edgeworth's Belinda, Austen's Fanny Price, a great preponderance of these heroines like to devote much time to private reading. When Elizabeth Bennet plays and sings to the company she does it with a charming lack of real accomplishment, and the reason is to be found in the constant warnings against women who like to show off their accomplishments in public. As Cœlebs has been told by his father: 'you will want a COMPANION: an ARTIST you may hire'.25 It was one of the ironies of well-to-do society in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth that, THE SUPREMACY OF SENSE 95 having taken pride in teaching their daughters such leisure arts as piano-playing and singing at a time when it was no longer economically necessary for them to spend so much time on domestic chores, they should then have to warn young women against showing off unduly in company. One wonders to what extent these strictures were inspired by a belief in the need to exhort women to modesty, and to what extent they were simply the result of tedious hours spent listening politely in the drawing room. But of the desirable end- product of female education there was no doubt. Mr and Mrs Stanley had manufactured the perfect wife for Cœlebs: She enlivens without dazzling, and entertains without overpowering. Contented to please, she has no ambition to shine Of repartee she has little, and dislikes it in others. Taste is indeed the predominating quality of her mind; and she may rather be said to be a nice judge of the genius of others than to be a genius herself.26 Maria Edgeworth was to develop the theme of the perfect wife in Patronage, where her heroine has all the attributes approved of by Mrs More, and who is chosen by a very distinguished man who has come to England for the specific purpose of finding himself a wife. Other female characters in the novel are contrasted with the heroine, and are particularly guilty of the vice of 'display'. They show off at every opportunity and take part in amateur theatricals, which Thomas Gisborne considered an unladylike activity in his Duties of the Female Sex, published in 1797. Although Austen for the most part disliked perfect heroines she was for a time influenced by the evangelical trend which Hannah More's book represented, and in Mansfield Park, published in the same year as Patronage, she did aim to create a perfect heroine with all the rather negative virtues listed in Celebs. In a sense Mansfield Park, the most consciously schematic and "evangelical' novel she ever wrote, the most devoted to Christian and conservative values, marks a turning point in Austen's writing life. Her first three books all had an element of parody, were a conscious reaction to or reaction against previous fiction, and with the parody or mimicry went a hidden ambiguity. Sense and Sensibility seems dogmatic and conformist enough in its treatment of poor Marianne Dashwood, who has a charm for the modern reader that the sensible 152 SEX AND SUBTERFUGE Burney, in particular, stifled what was at the very least a strong uneasiness about social injustice in order to keep the favour of her royal patrons. Edgeworth, whose life was in many ways atypical for the women writers of her period, did venture into the realms of social comment. Her experience of estate management in Ireland led her to criticise English absentee landlords in The Absentee, where she exposes the abuses to which Irish tenants are reduced when English landlords never come near their estates. And in Patronage, published two years later in 1814, she offers a very ambitious analysis of the evils of private patronage in the sphere of politics, as a form of corruption which is bad for individuals and bad for the state. But, like Burney, Edgeworth was nervous of going too far: she hesitated before daring to criticise pressgangs in the novel, and there is nothing in either of the two novels which could offend a Burkean conservative. In Patronage the evil and corruption of patronage are contrasted with independence and endeavour, and in The Absentee the absentee English landlord is contrasted with the good English landlord who looks after his tenants in a paternalist fashion. When women did begin to comment on the social system in fiction their outlook was essentially humanist. Leaving aside isolated statements on the position of their own sex, which occur in the writings of all women, from Jane Austen to Mary Wollstonecraft, they tended to stand aside from and, indeed, distrust political systems and solutions and view the problems they described in terms of human relations. In attempting to analyse the breakdown and failure of human relations they tended to blame male behaviour, and see the solution in terms of the feminisation of society. Though unlike anything written before or since, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818, is in fact a critique of destructive masculine values on a social, even global level. Victor Frankenstein and the Arctic explorer who discovers him, tells his story, and is almost his double in temperament, represent male ambition and endeavour which is essentially mechanistic, destructive, and anti- humanist, whilst humanist values are represented by the female characters which their behaviour helps to destroy. While the Arctic explorer has left behind a sister to follow a deadly and unnatural ambition by going into regions of cold and ice, Victor has left behind his adopted sister and intended bride to create his unnatural monster. Ironically, he is trying to create a human being