Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.

Publication: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Rice University

There are two novels that many of this year's studies refer to either directly or obliquely. They are Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Sophia Lee's best seller, The Recess. Both of these Gothic novels question closely and acutely from the angle of women's experience the relationship between romance and history, and find in history and historical techniques of authentication opportunities to develop the range of romance. Also they tell stories in which the relation between metropolitan systems of authority and remote or exotic habitats is complicated by tastes and expectations that are not as easily regulated as people (inside and outside the narrative) might think. To this extent Jane Austen and Sophia Lee dominate the three major themes of the year 2000 in eighteenth-century studies. In gender studies this is the discovery of a more intricate set of reactions between domesticity and the public sphere than had previously been considered possible. In genre studies it is a growing appreciation of the dialect ical subtleties of genre, particularly in the period of the Gothic novel. And in postcolonial studies it is an awareness of how the tide of ideas and practices flowing back and forth between the metropolis and its periphery blurs the starker outlines of national identity and imperial purpose, and brings to the surface the anomaly of Creole identity and creolized ideologies. These three avenues of inquiry depend upon a knowledge of the trade in print, which is clearly the next important area of basic research in the period. These are exciting developments, apt for a new century of literary criticism.

Despite the increasing emphasis on cultural, sociological, and economic forces governing the production and consumption of literature in the eighteenth century, the "rise of the novel"--the history of the origin and development of a genre-still exerts a strong fascination over scholars. To help them arrange and fix their ideas, Michael McKeon has edited a notable supplement to his Origins of the English Novel (1987). His Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach is an anthology of pieces ranging from Georg Lukacs to Nancy Armstrong, Northrop Frye to Clifford Siskin. Although it covers a set of issues that have arisen or become more prominent since the eighties, such as domesticity, nationalism, cultural identity, and character, the anthology has two grand underlying themes. They are the nature of genre and the laws of generic change. Genre is distinct from a mode (such as narrative), for while a mode is transhistorical and unchanging, a genre is contingent and conventional, and is changing all the time. The big theories arrayed here relativize this distinction by operating between the extremes of a refined formalism (Jose Ortega y Gasset) and a resolute empiricism (Ian Watt). McKeon, who appears here self-anthologized, believes the novel emerges from an unstable period of history to represent a new division of knowledge and a fresh relation of truth to virtue. His dialectical history of the genre emerges from what mathematicians would call a feedback loop, where each succeeding solution to the problem of form and content presents the terms of the new problem to be solved. Thus the "naive empiricism" that underwrote the realism of the first novels acquires various forms of self-conscious detachment and parodic extension in the later period. How is the strong feminist emphasis on the domesticity of fiction to fit into this overarching theory of generic change, since domesticity seems to be no more than the colony of the new division of knowledge, not its native ground? In the work of Gillian Brown the anthology f inds a dialectical account of domestic fiction, where the Lukacsian homelessness of the novel is figured as a contest between the private and public spheres that is resolved at the level of the domestic female, the latest in the novelistic line of singular individuals to establish a provisional accommodation with social norms. Free indirect discourse is a further step in pursuit of an interiority that can be represented in a detached and public way. When, in the modernist novels of Virginia Woolf, this interiority is so fully developed that its "capillary expansiveness" demands a new kind of envelope, then realism is transformed into a technique resembling symbolism, anticipating the magic realism of postcolonial fiction, while the singularity of the domestic female is re-presented as the focus of psychological and cultural energy.

THE NOVEL, THE CANON, THE GOTHIC, AND TASTE

Although the final section on the postcolonial novel is thin, the anthology provides not only a splendid guide to thinking about the novel, but also a useful warning against assuming that fiction is merely the instrument of those who wish to dampen revolution, forge national identities, and build empires. Although in British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830 Miranda J. Burgess appreciates "the force of generic fluidity and aggregation" (p. 6), and goes a step further than McKeon in calling the novel a species and its history of changes an evolution, she instances Sir Walter Scott and Austen nevertheless as genre reformers, capable of renovating history through their fiction and becoming anti-Jacobin legislators of the new order (p. 152). This seems a big claim to make for the efficacy of the novel and the freedom of the will. How far novelists, editors, and agents can influence public opinion and judgments of value is a question posed in The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richa rdson to George Eliot by Leah Price with respect to McKeon's own vehicle, the anthology. She has in mind those florilegia called "Beauties," "Garlands," and "Elegant Extracts"-the same compendious sources of wisdom that arm Catherine Morland's mind before her encounter with the perils of Northanger. Price is chiefly concerned with the excerpting of novels, whose length presented a more formidable task of reduction and exemplification than poetry or drama. Thus the anthologized novel is the result of a particularly tendentious and bowdlerizing approach to its surplus prose, for "the parts have been chosen for their difference from those left out" (p. 6). At its most schematic, the anthology hierarchizes and genders its readers, either by supplying them with what they deserve of the text, or by giving them only those portions of them that will do them good. Here in its starkest shape is the conscious effort to tame the dialectical energy of the genre. Price faces a problem insofar as anthologies were not for th e most part limited to fiction, and even when they were, their intention was not so blatantly different from compilations of the Spectator or William Cowper. Her premier examples from Samuel Richardson, who anthologized his own novels, illustrate this, for although A Collection of Sentiments (1751) might bid fair to be an anthology of Clarissa, the Meditations are quotations of quotations from scripture, and contribute to a more disturbing sense of the novel and a less summary design upon the reader. Similarly, Ann Radcliffe's use of poetical fragments to "brake and break the narrative" (p. 94) harks forward to Northanger Abbey, and the reinforcement Gothic fiction obtains from Palgraved poetry. But Price catches very well the anomalous quality of the whole exercise, for in seeking to supervise the reading of fiction, anthologists at once acknowledge and to some extent encourage a habit of reading they might under other circumstances wish to suppress: namely, skimming and dipping. Thus is it that those who ma ke books out of other books end up representing "the experience of those who consume texts without producing others" (p.96).

In his study, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, Michael Gamer argues that genre is the upshot of warfare between writers and readers, and that the troubled reception of novels is where the real ideological work is carried out, not in subsequent anthologies and extracts. Still, he hews closely to the pattern of Price's argument in seeing various institutional positions on moral virtue being undermined by a genre that indulges, whether deliberately or by accident, the voluptuous tastes of readers. Also, like Price, he situates Northanger Abbey-specifically Catherine Morland's attack on history, and Jane Austen's ironic defense of her sister novelists-at the heart of his argument. He believes there are two periods of generic instability that allow the Gothic to extend its influence. The first is 1769-90, when an alignment of romance and history threatens the basis of novelistic verisimilitude and of historical veracity. The second is divided from the first by the watershed of Ma tthew Lewis's The Monk, the most notorious of the Gothic novels, and comprises the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, when Gothic nostalgia serves to buttress a nationalist wartime fantasy. This periodization is not intended to limit the versatility of this emergent genre. Gamer cites Elizabeth Moody's anonymous review of James Thomson's The Denial (1790) in which a woman reviewing a Gothic novel written by a man, who believes that he ought to be a woman, pretends to be a man. The boundaries dividing authority from tutelage are plainly permeable, despite the efforts of reviewers and anthologists to regulate the reading public, and when Henry Tilney tells Catherine that men as well as women, and clever people as well as dull folk, read Gothic novels with pleasure, he is a character in a Gothic novel talking to a naive female reader, but managing for all that to tell the truth, and to be understood.

Fully to appreciate the diversity of Gothic taste and to measure its ideological contribution to British politics and culture, it is necessary to consider the dialectic of its own formation prior to its reinvention as a romance that demolishes only to resurrect the truth-claims associated with the novel's naive realism. This is a connection E. J. Clery and Robert Miles aim to supply with another anthology: Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1 700-1820. Unfortunately it is not linked by headnotes or by any but the briefest of introductions to each of the six sections, perhaps because the editors feel such an apparatus would obscure "the permeable nature of Gothic." In the note on "Gothic Origins," they choose John Aikin's edition of Tacitus (1777), observing that the British Library lists only one previous English translation, John Dryden's of 1698. This is not only not the case; it omits the most important of the translations (which is held by the British Library), namely Thomas Gordon's Works of Tacitus (1728- 31) in two volumes. Gordon was John Trenchard's collaborator on Cato's Letters, an important Patriot Gothic manifesto, and he dedicated the second volume of his Tacitus to Prince Frederick, the leader of the Patriot Opposition, upon whose cult of a "Gothic" past it is generally agreed to have exerted a strong influence. To miss this translation of Tacitus is to obliterate one of the key moments in the evolution of the Gothic.

This gap is happily plugged by Edward H. Jacobs in Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology of Gothic Discourse, which has a whole chapter on Lord Bolingbroke's Craftsman papers. Jacobs's argument suffers from a Foucauldian bias, which places every datum within the categories of a "statement" or a "discourse" in a way both tedious in itself and foreign to the purpose, since Bolingbroke was pitching his journal against a very successful and long-lived administration of which he was never to form a part. These were the statements and discourses of a dissident and volatile group of people who had no direct links with political power. Nevertheless Jacobs has tried to situate Gothic within the spectrum of a political debate, and in the process he has paid commendable attention to periodical journalism and circulating libraries. His bibliography has some very useful entries on the book trade.

There remains to be written an account of literary production in the middle and later eighteenth century that uses the insights of Colin Kidd and Christine Gerrard to explore the rise of the Gothic novel. But in the meantime Trevor Ross has written a learned, modest, and lucid history of canon formation: The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century. Unlike recent contributions to this debate, Ross's does not originate directly in the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns (discussed hereafter), or in the revolution in philology promoted by Richard Bentley, although it has an explanation for these events. Ross sees a contest between symbolic capital--roughly the fame of poets sustained by the circulation of their works--and cultural capital, where the value of literature is determined by editorial accreditation and by its successful intervention into the market for print. These are not new ideas--Ross owns his debts to Terry Eagleton and John Guillory--but they ca st refreshing light on the issues of generic change. He is reluctant to ascribe this to any primary cause, such as the growth of the book trade or the onset of localism and nationalism; but he points out rightly (as Howard Caygill did in 1989) that the notion of taste and the standard of taste become critical to the marketing of texts and the regulation of readers during the eighteenth century. The certification of the value of literature, and the supervision of its distribution and consumption, are organized by means of aje ne sais quoi, an insubstantial something-and-nothing that is the source of many of those contradictions noticed by Price and Gamer. The determination to accumulate cultural capital out of judgments of taste is the impetus behind the anthologization of the novel, the philological precision of Bentley, the antiquarianism of Scott's romances, and Joseph Addison's eighteen Spectator papers on Paradise Lost. They formed an ideology of consumption based apparently on a disinterested and indispu table technique of authentication, but relying in fact on nothing more solid than an undemonstrable sensuous effect. In some respects the Gothic romance represents the recovery of a sense of that mystery, a veiled something that is central to the novel, but which no one can describe or announce.

A new edition of Sophia Lee's The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times, edited by April Alliston, arrives apropos to many of the discussions of Gothic (and even postcolonial) fiction, being the first of the historical Gothic novels when its three volumes were published between 1783 and 1785. Hugely popular, and raided by Scott for Kenilworth, The Recess told the story of Mary Queen of Scots's two natural children by the duke of Norfolk, raised in a secret subterranean cell. It was widely regarded as a true story and provided an early example of how, in spite of Catherine Morland's doubts, a historian can become happy in her flights of fancy. Lee's reintegration of naive empiricism with romance (in fact an alliance as old as Cide Hamete Benengeli's "punctual and impartial historiography") was greeted by the Gentleman's Magazine (1786) as an effort worthy to be compared with the work of the best historians: "The writer seems well acquainted with the times she describes. The truth of character is rigidly preserved , for the peculiarities of Elizabeth and James are not delineated with more exactness in [David] Hume or [William] Robertson" (p. xvi). Alliston uses this remark to develop an ingenious insight into the dialectics of genre, for she notes that history and Gothic romance both place the truth of character before the truth of incident, so that character, instead of being the function of verisimilitude, actually precedes and organizes it. Here she touches on an important debate already begun, under rather different agendas, by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (excerpted in McKeon's anthology) and Deirdre Lynch.

The history of taste is an important topic for anyone interested in the vagaries of genre and the evolution of the Gothic. Barbara M. Benedict's Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry sits at the center of a number of inquiries into the nature and value of material objects during the Enlightenment, when nil admirari (the refusal to wonder) was the alleged principle of all polite and scientific observers. On the stage and in the laboratory this was not the case, as Lorraine Daston, Simon Schaffer, and Bruno Latour have been telling us. Nicholas Thomas has written an important essay on curiosity in the age of Pacific discovery, showing that Joseph Banks was nicely poised between the Linnaean community of tabulators and taxonomists on the one hand, and on the other the Society of Dilettanti whose members pursued rarity (in the earl of Shaftesbury's scornful phrase) for...

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