The French Revolution as a romance: Mary Robinson's Hubert de Sevrac.(Hubert de Sevrac A Romance, of the Eighteenth Century )(Critical essay)

Publication: Papers on Language & Literature

Publication Date: 22-MAR-06

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When Mary Robinson wrote Hubert de Sevrac A Romance, of the Eighteenth Century (published November 1796), public opinion in England had turned against the French Revolution, and freedom of speech was under attack. Charlotte Smith's pro-revolutionary Desmond. A Novel (1792) had "lost [Smith] some friends, and furnished others with an excuse for withholding their interest in favour of her family, and brought a host of literary ladies in array against her" (Scott 27). (1) After a mob attacked the King's carriage in 1795, William Pitt moved aggressively to crush dissent, forcing the Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings bills through Parliament and cracking down on the London Corresponding Society. The Gagging Acts silenced many orators and writers who had been agitating for political reform. Charles James Fox, Robinson's former lover and a charismatic leader in the Whig party, was demonized as a Jacobin and traitor for advocating peace with France (Mitchell 131, 141). Given the widespread Francophobia and anti-revolutionary hysteria in England, Robinson's publication of a romance that celebrates the storming of the Bastille as an expression "of the proudest energies which humanity is capable of evincing" risked alienating and even outraging many of her readers (Hubert de Sevrac 3: 97). Contemporary reviewers of Hubert de Sevrae tended to focus, however, on Robinson's debt to Ann Radcliffe, the most famous and successful writer of romances during the 1790s, rather than on the book's politics. In the May 1797 issue of Analytical Review, Mary Wollstonecraft notes that "Mrs Radcliffe appears to be [Robinson's] model; and she deserves to rank as one of her most successful imitators" (523). (2) Another critic dismisses Hubert de Sevrac as "an imitation of Mrs Radcliffe's romances, but without any resemblance that may not be attained by a common pen" (Critical Review 472), and the Monthly Review claims that the book "possesses many of the beauties, and some of the faults, which characterise that species of modern novels called Romances" (91). (3) By classifying Hubert de Sevrac as a Radcliffean romance, which portrays "[t]he mysterious, the horrible, the pathetic, and the melancholy" (Critical Review 472) rather than the "real life and manners" (Monthly Review 91) examined in novels like Desmond, these reviewers suggest that it is too fanciful to be taken seriously as a commentary on the French Revolution. (4)

Both Radcliffe and Robinson were political liberals. (5) In A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (1795), Radcliffe boldly praises a monument erected in Kendall in honor of the Glorious Revolution of 1688:

At a time, when the memory of that revolution is reviled, and the praises of liberty itself endeavoured to be suppressed by the artifice of imputing to it the crimes of anarchy, it was impossible to omit any act of veneration to the blessings of this event. [...] [W]e had a view of the country, over which [the obelisk] presides; a scene simple, great and free as the spirit revered amidst it. (389)

However, whereas Radcliffe relegates her liberalism to the subtext of her novels--on the surface, they appear politically conservative--Hubert de Sevrac is overtly radical. (6) The anti-feminist clergyman Richard Polwhele declares in The Unsex'd Females (1798) that Robinson's novels "merit the severest censure" for "containing the doctrines of Philosophism," or the deistic tenets of the French philosophes, but he singles out Radcliffe for praise: "In her Mysteries of Udolpho, we have all that is wild, magnificent and beautiful, combined by the genius of Shakspeare [sic], and the taste of [William] Mason" (17n; 34n). (7) A reviewer for European Magazine writes that Hubert de Sevrac is "of a more sober and probable cast than [Radcliffe's The Italian]," published in 1797, and complains that Robinson employs "the cant of French Democracy" to express her "partiality towards French Philosophy" (35). Evidently, the more "probable" the romance appeared to anti-Jacobin readers, the more politically subversive they deemed it.

Late eighteenth-century readers would have been struck by the many similarities between Hubert de Sevrac and Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance (1794). Like Mysteries, Hubert de Sevrac is subtitled A Romance, has a French heroine, is set mostly in Italy, employs literary epigraphs, and contains poems ostensibly composed by the novel's characters. In both works, all of the apparently supernatural events that bedevil the heroines turn out to have rational explanations. Robinson's Sabina de Sevrac, like Radcliffe's Emily St. Aubert, struggles against her superstitious fears, is persecuted by a powerful and ruthless man who attempts to force her into an unwanted marriage, and bestows her affections on an inconstant lover. As Rictor Norton points out, Radcliffe frequently alludes to Ariosto in her works, and in Hubert de Sevrac "the abandoned chateau Montnoir has a wonderful Gothic library on whose shelves is a volume of Ariosto which serves as the spring which opens a secret panel, and thus becomes literally the key to the world of romance" (133-134; see Hubert de Sevrac 1: 50-51).

Unlike Mysteries of Udolpho, however, Hubert de Sevrac is a pro-revolutionary Bildungsroman. Whereas Radcliffe sets The Mysteries of Udolpho in the sixteenth century and The Romance of the Forest (1791) in the seventeenth century, Hubert de Sevrac takes place in the 1790s. (8) Mysteries never refers explicitly to the French Revolution, but it contains a short passage from Charlotte Smith's The Emigrants (1793), a poem about victims of the Revolution who find asylum in England. The quotation is from the perspective of a "feudal Chief" who loses his sanity after his castle has been sacked and his family murdered: it evokes the sufferings of the dispossessed nobility rather than those of the downtrodden lower classes (Smith 159; Mysteries of Udolpho 71). According to Claudia L. Johnson, "The Mysteries of Udolpho [...] baffles the reader who expects a Bildungsroman. Repetition brings no insight; rather than foster 'progress' or 'growth,' it turns from it" (113). Moreover, as Mary Poovey notes, the plot of Mysteries is circular: "the new order ushered in at the end of the romance simply restores the traditional, paternalistic community of Emily's childhood" (327). While Emily's worldview remains static and apolitical, Sabina renounces the superstitions and religious bigotry she learned in childhood, argues with her politically unenlightened father, and, as "the light of [her] intellect expand[s]," becomes a fervent supporter of the revolution that has driven her family from France (2: 143). Unlike Radcliffe's isolated heroines, who search for a real or surrogate parent, Robinson's Sabina, whose father and mother accompany her for most of the romance, searches for political justice. (9)

Writing during a period of political reaction in England, Robinson embeds her revolutionary sympathies in a sensationalistic Gothic narrative, seeking both to entertain and to provide political guidance to her readers. She focuses on the plight of aristocratic French emigres struggling to survive in Italy rather than the revolutionary violence convulsing France. Whereas Smith, in her novels set during the French Revolution, speaks "the politics a woman cannot directly address" through her male protagonists (Miller 340), Robinson ventriloquizes her political sentiments through both her male title-character and his daughter Sabina. (10) Hubert de Sevracis a feminine as well as masculine Bildungsroman. Like the aristocratic French emigre hero of Smith's novel The Banished Man (1794), Hubert de Sevrac eventually abandons the chivalric, elitist ideology of the old regime and assumes a new identity as an expatriate and family man. (11) Self-expression and censorship are central themes in the novel, written when the Pitt administration was effectively using the Gagging Acts to silence political reformers in England. As Hubert struggles with his chivalric and national identity and his conflicted attitude toward the revolution, he borrows imagery from the Scottish bard Ossian (as "translated" by James Macpherson) and words from the English historian Edward Gibbon. Sabina's political education is hindered by superstitions, religious bigotry, and a nocturnal terrorist who temporarily censors her speech.

Hubert de Sevrac responds to Edmund Burke's excoriation of the Revolution and celebration of chivalry in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and William Godwin's argument, in An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), that irrational ideologies like chivalry retard rather than promote human betterment. (12) By using a romance to critique Reflections, Robinson recalls Burke's sentimental and hyperbolic presentation of Marie-Antoinette as a beautiful and virtuous heroine persecuted by brutal, murderous villains. As Johnson observes, Burke's account of the Queen's narrow escape from assassins is "not an unadulterated narration of historical fact, but [...] a scene from the pages of gothic-pathetic literature" (3). Like Burke's Marie-Antoinette, Radcliffe's heroines and Robinson's Sabina de Sevrac are threatened with rape and murder by ruffians, but in Radcliffe's and Robinson's romances the villains are impelled by greed or lust rather than revolutionary frenzy. And like Godwin's novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), an exploration of the injustices of late eighteenth-century society, Hubert de Sevrac examines social issues within the context of a Gothic narrative. Robinson's romance reflects her admiration for the ideals, if not the practices, of the French Revolution and her opposition to "things as they are."

HUBERT DE SEVRAC'S IDENTITY CRISIS

Hubert de Sevrac's political enlightenment begins as his family flees from Paris:

It was at that awful hour, that de Sevrac examined the retrospect of his prosperous days. All the phantoms of delight purchased by the sufferings of the people, all the irritated tribes of wretchedness, whose wants had hitherto been unregarded, now conspired to taunt his imagination. He probed his lacerated bosom; and he found, that though no act of oppression, immediately proceeding from himself, had contaminated its feelings, he had been accessary [sic] to crimes, and deserved to participate in their punishment. (1:8)

Hubert recognizes that he has benefited from the "crimes" of the old regime and therefore deserves impoverishment and exile. His situation as a persecuted refugee in a foreign country, however, precipitates an identity crisis. As he evolves from an old regime French aristocrat to a Scotophilic emigre and paterfamilias, he must contend with a conspiracy led by Monsieur Ravillon, an upwardly mobile gamekeeper's son who twice impersonates him, and an insult to his honor that threatens his chivalric identity and sanity.

Ravillon is a forerunner of the polygraphs featured in Robinson's subsequent novel, Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature (1797). In Walsingham, a polygraph is an impersonator who poses as an aristocrat, "his noble original" (374), seeking to be mistaken as his prototype. Similarly, Ravillon attempts to assume Hubert's identity, first replacing him as the previous Marquis's son and heir, then impersonating him to incriminate him in a murder, and finally claiming to be the Marquis de Sevrac while fleeing to Sicily. Near the end of the novel, de Sevrac learns that during his childhood his father shot Ravillon's father "for some trifling offence" (3: 307) during a...

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