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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century. By George Haggerty. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
These two studies give literary critics yet two more books in the growing bibliography of works on both marginalized and mainstream British women writers from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Empowering the Feminine focuses on three novels apiece by Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, while Unnatural Affections concentrates on a veritable cornucopia: the novels of Sarah Fielding, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, Sophia Lee, Clara Reeve, Jane Austen, Sarah Scott, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Lennox, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, and Mary Ann Radcliffe. Empowering the Feminine is straightforward in its organization and rather modest in its claims. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about Unnatural Affections. What distinguishes these two works and why they make such a timely comparison at this particular historical juncture is their use of very different critical methodologies. Although both books are examining ostensibly the same subject--middle-class women writers from the same historical period and milieu--they do so in radically different modes and with varied intentions.
Empowering the Feminine is Ty's second study in which she seeks to bring long overdue attention to largely forgotten British women writers of the late eighteenth century. By my count, only three of the nine novels she discusses are currently in print. The others--as I know from experience--have to be copied page by page from microfilm. With the advent of Broadview Press in Ontario, committed to publishing long out-of-print women's novels, several of these titles should eventually become available. That problem aside, Ty performs a valuable scholarly service in bringing to our attention the most important novels of each of these writers: Robinson's autobiographical Memoirs (in print) alongside her Walsingham, The False Friend, and The Natural Daughter; West's A Gossip's Story, A Tale of the Times, and The Infidel Father; and Opie's The Father and Daughter, Adeline Mowbray, and Temper.
Ty's stated focus is literary depictions of "empowerment" for female characters as well as women authors, none of whom wanted to be seen as "breaking with cultural definitions of the feminine" (vii). Such a notion--which I label "passive aggression" in my Gothic Feminism (1998)--is obvious in women's fiction. The more interesting and problematic issue is how to talk about "empowerment" through pretended weakness in a theoretical way that is both grounded in the historical background of the period and at the same time is informed by current psychoanalytic attempts to understand female psychology. Ty sets the historical stage by beginning her book with an Introduction that focuses on "the turbulent legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft," "the fascination with female bodies, female suffering, and fallen women," and "radicalism at the turn of the century." Wollstonecraft's writings--particularly her polemical pieces--were blatantly concerned with issues affecting the empowerment of women, but the backlash that set in after Godwin's publication of the Memoirs (1798) caused women with liberal sympathies to distance themselves from Wollstonecraft's politics (or her personal life). In making her case, Ty would like to believe that the scapegoating of Wollstonecraft caused the increasing conservatism of the women writers examined here. But the dates on Robinson simply do not bear this out. Robinson had virtually stopped writing fiction by 1798 and was dead by 1801. Opie wrote her major novel--Adeline Mowbray--as a critique of Godwin and Wollstonecraft's ideas, and West's works stand in a different (radically Methodist) universe altogether. In other words, Wollstonecraft does not fully signify as explaining the themes and concerns of these novels, nor is she relevant here except as one voice among many--Burke, Rousseau, Helvetius, Paine, Holcroft--in a complex and often contradictory historical period.
As for her use of psychoanalytical paradigms to shed light on the persistent patterns of self-abuse, victimization, masochism, and cross-dressing, Ty resorts largely to Kristeva's theory of abjection and Lacan's theory of differance. Both of these approaches are too familiar to literary critics to need rehearsing here, and they...
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