[In the following excerpt, Ty discusses Smith's first novel, suggesting that although Smith was constrained by financial considerations and the need to please her readers, her critique of patriarchy is as powerful as those of her more radical peers.]

Like Wollstonecraft's Mary, a Fiction and Inchbald's A Simple Story Charlotte Smith's first novel, Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle, may be considered a pre-revolutionary novel because of its composition and publication date of 1788. Yet in this early work Smith already demonstrates a strong feminist sensibility because she, like Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Inchbald, does not hesitate to criticize patriarchy and its ideals, especially the belief in the male figure of authority. Unlike the other more radical and outspoken writers we have examined, Smith often takes an oblique approach in her critique. The reasons for this caution or indirectness are financial and practical: the subsistence of Smith's family depended on the popularity of her work, and so her novels were written to please and entertain a general public, rather than to offend. Smith's experience with the translation of Manon Lescaut, for example, taught her that English morals were not as liberal as French, and therefore not all topics were acceptable to the English public.¹ Because of her pecuniary straits, she had to be careful of the subject matter and tone of her compositions.

What I want to demonstrate, however, is that Emmeline is by no means merely a light, delightful, and, by implication, rather innocuous piece of fiction, as some contemporary readers seemed to believe. Sir Walter Scott had praised it as a ‘tale of love and passion, happily conceived, and told in a most interesting manner.’² Sir Egerton Brydges called it an ‘enchanting fiction with a new kind of delight’ and wondered about the author: ‘How a mind oppressed with sorrows and injuries of the deepest dye, and loaded with hourly anxieties of the most pressing sort, could be endowed with strength and elasticity to combine and throw forth such visions with a pen dipped in all the glowing hues of a most playful and creative fancy, fills me with astonishment and admiration.’³ However, its criticism of patriarchy, of the customs of marriage and domestic life, is as vehement as those levelled by more forthright and radical feminists such as Wollstonecraft and Hays. In fact, the novel is a rich blend of romance, sexual politics, and social critique. While I agree with Jane Spencer, who notes in A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1600-1800 that Smith's ‘feminist interests are evident in her attempt, particularly in the later novels, to portray strong heroines whose fortitude and intelligence show them to be the equals of men,’⁴ I would argue that Smith's feminism is not limited to just the portrayal of role models or ‘strong heroines’; rather, it consists of a questioning of the basis of patriarchal ideology. In Emmeline, Desmond, and The Young Philosopher Smith examines and deconstructs the traditional definitions of domestic felicity and the ideal wife, as they would be presented in the mid-1790s by conservative writers such as Jane West and Hannah More. Mary Anne Schofield says that Smith ‘displays her tendency toward unmasking and realism,’ and ‘uncovers several romantic conventions in Emmeline.’⁵ It is this rejection and yet, at the same time, conscious employment of romantic convention that create much of the tension in Smith's fiction. She challenges accepted eighteenth-century notions of the importance of woman's sexuality in male/female relationships but seems as if she is perpetuating existing ideologies. Through textual strategies such as multiple plots and double discourses Smith rewrites these concepts, revealing the weaknesses of the ideal, and the constraints on female subjectivity and desire.

Read in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, or double-voiced discourse,⁶Emmeline becomes a complex narrative containing both a ‘dominant’ story and other ‘muted’ stories, what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar identify as a ‘palimpsest.’⁷ The dominant story, that of the sweet, helpless orphan Emmeline, conforms to the conventions of the romance: the young heroine, relying on her beauty and goodness, survives the trials and tribulations of her entrance into the world and finally marries a worthy and wealthy suitor.⁸ But behind this dominant story are two muted ones which do not fit into the fairy-tale-like, happily-ever-after mould. Mrs Stafford's history shows the plight of an intelligent woman of the eighteenth century who is united to an insensitive brute whom she has to respect as husband and authority figure, while Lady Adelina's case examines adultery from the point of view of the so-called ‘fallen’ woman. Both tales demonstrate the need for reform in the existing social and marital customs. As well they serve to balance or undercut the romance of the dominant narrative.

The female protagonist, Emmeline, is very close to a paragon of virtue, and as Egerton Brydges noted, she is very much like Smith's other heroines. Brydges comments on Smith:

What are the traits which characterize every heroine delineated by her pen? An elevated simplicity, an unaffected purity of heart, of ardent and sublime affections, delighting in the scenery of nature, and flying from the sophisticated and vicious commerce of the world; but capable, when necessity calls it forth, of displaying a vigorous sagacity and lofty fortitude, which appals vice, and dignifies adversity.⁹

This description of Smith's female characters suggests a valorization of a number of qualities which have also been praised by the other women novelists of this study: simplicity, closeness to nature, personal rather than public or social values, morality, and strength of character. As I have argued in the case of Inchbald's dichotomy of nature and art, the tendency to prefer the natural, the affective, or the unsophisticated reveals an affinity for the traditionally feminine, and in the light of Burkean politics of the 1790s, may also suggest a non-conformist attitude towards the male-dominated world ruled by the Law of the Father. Like Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Inchbald, Smith demonstrates a hesitancy to endorse fully the symbolic or the public sphere, particularly as that world is depicted as greedy, shallow, and artificial.

Like Inchbald's two Henry figures, Emmeline grows up in virtual exile, away from the corrupting influences of society. Up to the age of sixteen Emmeline is brought up by a housekeeper ‘in a remote part of the county of Pembroke,’ in ‘an old building’ which belonged to ‘the ancient family of Mowbray’ (1). This isolation from the materialistic and self-seeking society, combined with her intelligence and ‘intuitive knowledge’ (2), makes her into a heroine who is capable of thinking and acting independently of conventional societal values. We admire Emmeline from the outset because of her spirited nature. In the all-important question of marriage, for example, she unfailingly makes the right decisions. At the beginning of the novel, though believing herself penniless and friendless, Emmeline nevertheless rejects young Frederic Delamere's professions of love for her even though he is the only son and heir of Lord Montreville. Her thoughts of becoming Delamere's wife show her sound understanding and judgment:

Splendid as his fortune was, and high as his rank would raise her above her present lot of life, she thought that neither would reconcile her to the painful circumstance of carrying uneasiness and contention into his family; of being thrown from them with contempt, as the disgrace of their rank and ruin of their hopes; and of living in perpetual apprehension lest the subsiding fondness of her husband should render her the object of his repentance and regret.

The regard she was sensible of for Delamere did not make her blind to his faults; and she saw, with pain, that the ungovernable violence of his temper frequently obscured all his good qualities.

(73)

Notice that neither rank nor fortune, the values of conventional society, entices Emmeline into ‘carrying uneasiness and contention into [Delamere's] family.’ She does not wish to let worldly ambition affect familial ties and at the same time is level-headed enough not to be blinded by youthful passion.

In contrast to Emmeline are a number of silly girls in the novel, such as Miss Ashwood, who

had learned all the cant of sentiment from novels; and her mama's lovers had extremely edified her in teaching her to express it. She talked perpetually of delicate embarrassments and exquisite sensibilities, and had probably a lover, as she extremely wanted a confident … Of the ‘sweet novels’ she had read, she just understood as much as made her long to become the heroine of such a history herself.

(229)

This passage shows that Smith understood the conventions of romance and was not entirely unaware of the ideological implications of art, of the fact that literature can ‘interpellate’ the reader, offering the reader the position which is most obvious, that of the ‘subject in ideology.’¹⁰ In Emmeline Smith attempted to create a heroine who, although constrained by her position as a female with no family or fortune, is able to act according to her sense of honour and self-esteem rather than according to the values of the bourgeois or aristocratic world.

One reader who felt that Smith's heroine was a bit too faultless and perfect was Jane Austen, whose character Catherine Morland is a deliberate inversion of Emmeline.¹¹ Emmeline, with no formal education, only with her ‘uncommon understanding, and unwearied application,’ ‘acquired a taste for poetry, and the more ornamental parts of literature’ (2, 4). At sixteen ‘her understanding was of the first rank’ (6). Later she even teaches herself to draw miniature portraits and to sing, with her voice ‘soft and sweet’ (41). In Northanger Abbey Austen makes fun of Emmeline's flawlessness by making her heroine unable to learn anything before she was taught, unable to play any instrument, and deficient with the pencil.¹² This deliberate parodic treatment, however, does not mean a total condemnation of Smith's works. Parody can often reveal a grudging admiration for the master text.¹³ Indeed several scholars have shown how Austen was in fact indebted to Smith and other lesser-known female authors of the 1790s.¹⁴ Nevertheless, Austen's criticism does raise an interesting question of authorial awareness on Smith's part.

Because of the details of Smith's own marriage and other life experiences, we know that the author herself could not have endorsed whole-heartedly the model of docility, submission, and self-sacrifice represented by a heroine such as Emmeline. For in her characterization of Emmeline, Smith adheres to almost all the accepted notions of the ideal woman, one that West and More would have approved of. One could read the character of Emmeline almost as a deliberate exaggeration of the conventional notions of the feminine since she is frequently referred to in epithets of perfection, from the discourse of romance novels, which verge on the ludicrous. For instance, she is an ‘angelic friend’ (445), one possessing the ‘lovely purity’ of character (388); Godolphin, her suitor, in ecstatic happiness, pronounces her to be ‘adorable, angelic goodness … best, as well as the loveliest of human creatures’ (446); he is enchanted by her ‘softness,’ thrilled that he is dear to her ‘angelic bosom’ (488). In her infallibility, her purity, and her self-sacrificing attitude towards both Delamere and Adelina, Emmeline comes close to the incarnation or all the qualities that Virginia Woolf would later term the ‘angel in the house’ figure:

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily … in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure.¹⁵

Woolf explains that it was this figure who haunted her when she came to write, and speaks of the necessity of murdering this angel or phantom: ‘Had I not killed her she would have killed me … For … you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex.’ According to Woolf, if women are to be this ‘angel in the house’ figure, they cannot write because they ‘must conciliate, they must … tell lies if they are to succeed.’¹⁶

I suggest that the dilemma Woolf articulates is precisely the problem which faced Smith as she wrote her many novels. As a woman living in a predominantly patriarchal society, Smith was aware of the subject-position expected of her; she was conscious of the need to sympathize and sacrifice, to ‘conciliate’ and ‘tell lies.’ Yet her experiences as wife and mother, as sole supporter of her large family, taught her how difficult it was to sustain this role and even perhaps made it necessary for her to act otherwise in order to survive. In Emmeline we see how she works out this predicament by presenting us with multiple versions of the feminine. Consistent with the model of female psychological maturation proposed by such a feminist as Nancy Chodorow, Smith does not confront or ‘murder’ the ‘angel in the house’ figure; instead, she attempts a compromise and an accommodation.¹⁷ In her first novel she portrays the ‘angelic’ figure as well as two other non-stereotypical ones which are more in keeping with her own experiences as a woman and wife in a male-dominated society.

The heroine of the dominant story, Emmeline, embodies all the traditional, proper ‘feminine’ virtues. In the area where she grew up, for example, the ‘ignorant rustics’ saw Emmeline as possessing ‘the beauty of an angel, administering to their necessities and alleviating their misfortunes, looked upon her as a superior being, and throughout the country she was almost adored’ (5). Emmeline's friend Mrs Stafford asserts that Delamere will nowhere meet with ‘a more lovely person, a better heart, a more pure and elegant mind’ than Emmeline's (62). The narrator comments that unlike others who are ‘attentive to pecuniary or selfish motives’ Emmeline ‘was liable to err only from the softness of her heart’ (97). In many instances we are shown her generosity and her sympathy: with Mrs Stafford, who is in difficult financial straits; with Lady Adelina, who needs a nurse and a friend; even with the infatuated Delamere. It is almost as if Smith consciously tried to depict her heroine after a paragon for public approval.

Just as Richardson's Pamela uses elements of the Cinderella fairy tale, so Smith's Emmeline employs this story of a poor girl turning princess in her novel. Indeed the dominant story can be read as a theme of ‘virtue rewarded.’ Like Fielding's Tom Jones, Emmeline is a fortunate ‘foundling’ in many ways. In the beginning she is believed to be an illegitimate, penniless orphan, the ‘natural daughter’ of Mr Mowbray (1); but by the end, through some papers discovered in ancient caskets, she is recognized as the legitimate ‘heiress to a large fortune’ (472), the rightful ‘princess’ and owner of Mowbray Castle. Her aunt, Lady Montreville, who seems always ready to call Emmeline by ‘harsh and injurious appellations’ (55), and who is full of ‘pride and malignity’ (133), is a fairly close recreation of the wicked stepmother. Though Emmeline does not attend a ball, like Cinderella, she is swept off her feet by a dashing young prince from the Isle of Wight, Captain Godolphin. Godolphin, noble, generous, and patient, acts as Emmeline's knight in shining armour and escorts her through her difficult period of trials and adjustment. His unselfish nature is demonstrated early on in his friendship with Emmeline: upon discovering that ‘his heart was irrecoverably gone,’ he avoids her in order ‘not to embitter her life with the painful conviction that their acquaintance had destroyed the happiness of his’ (304). He also successfully wards off Emmeline's inappropriate suitors, the gallant Chevalier Bellozane and the impetuous Delamere.

This charming romance, which affirms the belief in moral goodness, the belief that passive female suffering will be ultimately rewarded, is doubtless the aspect of the novel that so delighted contemporary readers like Hayley¹⁸ and Brydges. However, this fairy-tale-like narrative is not the only story in Emmeline. Without destroying the appeal of the sentimental tale, Smith nevertheless undercuts it or renders it ironic with the more realistic or ‘literal’ stories of two unhappily married women. In essence, the ‘muted’ stories of Mrs Stafford and Lady Adelina deconstruct the myth of the princess as exemplified by Emmeline. Their presence in the novel calls into question the very feminine ideals that Emmeline seems to represent for those around her. For example, female ‘purity,’ so highly extolled as a virtue in Emmeline, does not become an issue in Lady Adelina's case. Lady Adelina has violated the codes of what Mary Poovey terms the ‘proper lady’ by not conforming to the ideal of the tractable female, and by flaunting her sexual desire in her adulterous relationship with George Fitz-Edward.¹⁹ But in Smith's novel the detection and the punishment of the sexual transgression are not the key issues. Rather, through the disinterested concern of Emmeline for the so-called ‘fallen’ woman, readers are given an example of the positive effects of female generosity, benevolence, and charity. Smith outlines the social and psychological reasons behind Adelina's infidelity and, in so doing, makes her readers sympathetic allies rather than judges of her case.

Smith is careful to suggest that it is the circumstances surrounding Adelina's matrimony and domestic life which are responsible for her subsequent action, and not an inherent ‘weakness’ or susceptibility to depravity in woman that causes the adultery. At fifteen, Adelina, ‘just out of the nursery, where [she] had never been told it was necessary to think at all’ (211), consents to wed the first gentleman who dances with her at the request of her father. Note that the age of Adelina and the motives of marriage closely parallel the details of Smith's own life. The gentleman's love for her is compared to his fondness for a ‘favourite hunter or a famous pointer’ (213). ‘Neither a friend or a companion … not even a protector,’ Trelawny ‘was hardly ever at home’ (216). The ‘young men of fashion, who call themselves his friends … make love to [her], with as little scruple as they borrowed money of him’ (214). Adelina complains that his conversation ‘consisted either in tiresome details of adventures among jockies, pedigrees of horses, or scandalous and silly anecdotes about persons of whom nobody wished to hear’ (217). Like the author's husband, Benjamin Smith, he gambles away their fortune, goes abroad to flee his creditors, and leaves Adelina to fend for herself.

This situation, somewhat similar to what Smith herself experienced in marriage, sets the stage for Adelina's extra-marital relationship. In her despair Adelina turns to George Fitz-Edward, who tenderly alleviates Adelina's physical, emotional, and, eventually, sexual needs. His appearance at a moment of vulnerability, when she feels abandoned and disillusioned with her husband, makes his actions seem more heroic than usual in Adelina's eyes. Her ‘partiality’ for him increases until she feels that ‘it was no longer in [her] power to live without him’ (219, 222). The liaison results in Adelina's pregnancy, and her attempt to hide from Fitz-Edward, from her own ‘family, and from all the world’ (224). That Smith did not want her readers to think she condoned Adelina's actions is shown in her careful attempt not to be lenient towards Adelina. When Emmeline meets Adelina, she has become a sincere, almost ‘extravagant,’ penitent,²⁰ wishing only ‘to remain, and to die … unknown’ in seclusion (224). Throughout the novel Smith does not have Adelina see Fitz-Edward again, and only in the last pages of the novel, after the death of Adelina's husband, does she suggest a possible reunion between them.

However, Smith's sympathetic treatment of Adelina, the fact that she allows the heroine to befriend her,²¹ as well as the similarities in the depiction of the ‘pure’ and the ‘fallen’ woman suggest a challenging of conventional dichotomies. One example of Smith's subversion of Puritanical values may be the perhaps unintentional lexical confusion of descriptions of Emmeline and Adelina. Both characters are described in practically the same terms, suggesting affinity rather than obvious or distinct differences. For instance, Emmeline is alluded to as the ‘lovely orphan’ (250); while Adelina has a ‘lovely figure’ (227). Adelina is full of ‘sorrow’ and ‘regret,’ and possesses a ‘great sensibility of heart’ (227), while Emmeline, too, has a ‘tender and susceptible mind’ (73), and is frequently depicted as ‘melancholy and repining’ (72). One could argue that these repetitive passages are clichés from sentimental fiction, but Smith may be using these analogous portraits to question the stereotypical binary opposition of the traditionally ‘good’ and ‘bad’ woman, or of the angel and whore figures.²² Despite her infidelity to Trelawny, for Smith, Adelina is as ‘pure’ as the virginal Emmeline.

Another subversive strategy is in the conclusion of the Adelina subplot. By not dooming Adelina to a tragic death or to a life of prostitution, the conventional endings for the unfaithful wife who dares defy patriarchal rules of propriety,²³ Smith is implicitly giving a critique of the society and of the literary conventions which support the belief that a woman who expresses admiration, and subsequently, sexual preference for a man to whom she was not legally bound, is in fact a depraved ‘monster.’ For Lady Adelina, while not ‘virtuous’ in the traditional sense, is not ‘corrupt’ either. Her example shows that the distinction between good and evil, purity and iniquity, madonna and temptress, is in fact a more complex issue than the question of mere sexual chastity.

In addition, her affection for Fitz-Edward asserts the presence and validity of female desire, which is a notion contradictory to the ideas espoused by conduct books and by writers such as Gisborne, More, and West. These and other traditional thinkers believed that a wife should have no desires of her own, but should be ‘like a Mirrour which hath no image of its own, but receives its stamp from the face that looks into it.’ A woman must not only obey her husband, but must bring ‘unto him the very Desires of the Heart to be regulated by him so far, that it should not be lawful for her to will or desire what she liked, but only what her husband should approve and allow.’²⁴ In depicting Adelina's love for a man who is not her husband, Smith is defying these beliefs in female subservience and submission to the male authority figure in her home. Implicitly, she is also opposing the belief in the necessity of the effacement of female desire in matrimony.

Similarly, the history of Mrs Stafford challenges the plausibility of a woman's achieving happiness or domestic felicity solely through marriage and the traditional family. Specifically, her case examines and rejects what Burke would later defend as the notion of the benevolent patriarch as the best ruler of the household. Like the author herself Mrs Stafford is married to one who is not her intellectual equal. In fact, the story so strongly resembles the experiences of Charlotte and Benjamin Smith that biographical studies of the author's life have tended to quote directly from Emmeline for illustrations of Smith's own life.²⁵ One contemporary critic censured Charlotte Smith for mixing life with art. The poet Anna Seward wrote the following after reading the first novel of her rival literary lady: ‘Whatever may be Mr. Smith's faults, surely it was as wrong as indelicate to hold up the man, whose name she bears, the father of her children, to public contempt in a novel.’²⁶ Seward's charge of Smith's ‘indelicacy’ may be true, but it is precisely the exposition of the unpleasant ‘truth’ of many domestic arrangements that Smith desired. The Stafford sub-plot not only illustrates the inadequacy of the patriarchal ideal, but also illustrates a woman's economic and social helplessness, and her total dependence on the whims of her husband once she embarks on the marital state.

Like the other revolutionary writers discussed in this book Smith was aware of the illusory pleasure of marriage and was wary of idealizing it as the ultimate goal for every woman. Though many of her own novels have the conventional ending of matrimony, this closure must be read in the context of her own life, as well as the digressive tales or sub-plots of the other female characters in the novels. The inclusion of Mrs Stafford's unhappy conjugality in Emmeline makes visible women's frustrations and disappointments. Trapped as a writer as her characters are trapped as women, Smith may not have invented a new ending for her heroine, as Williams did, for example, but she does articulate her dissatisfaction with the social, economic, and psychological reality of marriage. Through Mrs Stafford, Smith demonstrates some of the difficulties encountered in the construction of female subjectivity. Mrs Stafford's subject-position as wife is antithetical to her subject-position as an adult capable of reason and judgment. For as wife in the social order of the eighteenth century she has to submit to the caprices of her husband, even while recognizing their foolishness. Like Geraldine Verney's situation in Smith's most radical novel, Desmond, Mrs Stafford's narrative demonstrates that by social and legal definition, a wife was virtually a piece of property to be disposed of as the husband wished.

Mrs Stafford's tale can be read as a ‘double-voiced discourse’ because of a potentially radical critique behind its seemingly conservative façade, sentimental discourse, and moralistic lesson. While seeming to extol traditional female virtues of compliance, self-sacrifice, and acceptance of woman's lot, the story actually decries the injustice of the power relations structured in matrimony. Mrs Stafford's problem is as follows: despite possessing a ‘very superior understanding,’ a mind ‘originally elegant and refined … highly cultivated, and embellished with all the knowledge that could be acquired from the best authors in the modern languages’ (43), Mrs Stafford is forced to submit to the caprice of her husband, who, ‘ever in pursuit of some wild scheme,’ was ‘fond of improvements and alterations’ which never amounted to anything but expense and disappointments for his family (44, 190). Though he is married ‘to a woman who was the delight of her friends and the admiration of her acquaintance,’ Mr Stafford grew ‘irritable in proportion as his difficulties encreased’ and ‘sometimes treated his wife with great harshness; and did not seem to think it necessary … to excuse or soften to her his general ill conduct’ (177). At one point Mrs Stafford, like the author herself, is reduced to either following ‘her husband to a prison, or prevail[ing] on him to go to the Continent while she attempted anew to settle his affairs’ (301). Like Wollstonecraft in The Wrongs of Woman Smith lets her heroine speak at length about her afflictions, demonstrating that the woman is affected not only by the degradations of her physical conditions—her clothing, food, and shelter—but that she has to undergo mental and spiritual agony as well.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment in Mrs Stafford's marriage is the descent from an upper-middle-class society to that of her husband's lower-middle-class or commercial circle. Mrs Stafford explains:

… born with a right to affluence and educated in its expectation, with feelings keen from nature … to be compelled … to solicit favours, pecuniary favours, from persons who have no feeling at all … I have endured the brutal unkindness of hardened avarice, the dirty chicane of law … I have been forced to attempt softening the tradesman and the mechanic, and to suffer every degree of humiliation … Actual poverty, I think, I could have better borne.

(458)

While Smith makes an impassioned plea on behalf of herself and her heroine, this appeal is limited in its scope to a specifically middle-class sensibility. Here Smith is not advocating a total system of reform which would benefit all who are oppressed, but targets her criticism to a specific social and cultural phenomenon which often circumscribed middle-class women.

Reviewing Emmeline in the Analytical Review, Mary Wollstonecraft called Adelina ‘a character as absurd as dangerous’ because of her adultery and her subsequent melodramatic repentance, and contrasted her with the admirable Mrs Stafford and her ‘rational resignation.’ At this time, relatively young and inexperienced herself, Wollstonecraft praised Mrs Stafford for turning ‘to her children instead of to romance’ when disappointed in her husband.²⁷ While Mrs Stafford does seem to be a model of ‘resignation,’ as Wollstonecraft suggests, the fact that Smith embeds her disagreeable experiences in the midst of a conventional romance draws the reader's attention to the shortcomings of both the literary practice of ending with a matrimonial celebration, and the socio-cultural custom of viewing marriage as the answer to every single woman's search for fulfilment. That both Adelina's and Mrs Stafford's experiences, which are in the background, influence Emmeline's story, which is in the foreground, is revealed by the heroine herself. At one point when Delamere tries passionately to persuade her to meet and marry him secretly, she refuses as ‘she had lately seen in her friends, Mrs Stafford and Lady Adelina, two melancholy instances of the frequent unhappiness of very early marriages; and she had no inclination to hazard her own happiness in hopes of proving an exception’ (230). This comment is an ironic reminder of quotidian reality and hard truth amidst the easy flow of fantasy which seems to characterize the rest of the novel.

Finally, one other aspect of the novel which has often been regarded as Smith's specialty is the use of Gothic elements. In Emmeline the Gothic castle with its dark and mysterious passages, the secret papers in ancient caskets, and the tyrannical uncle suggest a similarity to perhaps the most highly developed romance of the 1790s, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, which was written a few years later. Indeed Smith has been regarded as a forerunner of the genre of Gothic romance.²⁸ However, the use of the Gothic in Emmeline is rather scant and is different in many ways from how it is used by Radcliffe and her followers. Whereas Emily St. Aubert is transported from a pastoral, idyllic landscape to the terror of the castle in Udolpho, Emmeline begins in Mowbray Castle and is restored to it as its rightful owner by the end. For Emmeline, unlike other abducted maidens in unfamiliar surroundings, the castle represents a place of comfort and familiarity: ‘There she had passed her earliest infancy, and had known, in that period of unconscious happiness, many delightful hours which would return no more’ (36). When she leaves the castle, which was ‘still frowning in gothic magnificence’ with ‘its venerable towers … the ruins of the monastery … the citadel … covered with ivy,’ (37), it is with sadness and melancholy. For Emmeline the castle is not a prison; rather, it is a haven or, as one critic says, ‘a refuge from … power.’²⁹

It is only with the intrusion of males from the public or symbolic world of the Father that the castle poses any danger to the heroine. Kate Ellis suggests that ‘Terror appears in Emmeline when she is confronted with sexuality, and thus with a need to assert herself,’³⁰ but I think terror stems from male invasion and not from female sexuality itself. When besieged, Emmeline eludes those who would assault her virtue by deliberately running into dark, bewildering passages which are known to her. In Smith's novel it is the men who are frightened of the dark. For example, Lord Montreville's French valet, Millefleur, missing a turn, blunders ‘about till the encreasing gloom, which approaching night threw over the arched and obscure apartments, through windows dim with painted glass, filled him with apprehension and dismay’ (14). When he encounters Emmeline, he attempts to molest her, but she flies ‘hastily back through those passages which all his courage did not suffice to make him attempt exploring again’ (15). With Delamere, Emmeline similarly escapes from his attention by running ‘lightly thro' the passage, which was very long and dark’ (33). Emmeline deliberately lets her candle ‘fall after her’ to confuse Delamere and leave him in ‘total darkness’ (33). This ability to negotiate the dark long passages of the castle, which are often associated with the feminine, the female body, the mysterious, and the chaotic, suggests an affinity to what Kristeva calls the ‘semiotic’ or the pre-symbolic world. This capability to function in dark and mysterious passages may also imply a knowledge of or, at least, a certain connection with female sexuality and the body. Implicitly Smith may be pointing out Emmeline's latent female desires or sexuality while depicting her as a seemingly ‘pure’ and ‘angelic’ heroine. Appropriately, the castle is where Emmeline experienced youthful ‘unconscious happiness’ (36) with her care-giver and substitute mother, Mrs Carey. With the death of this mother figure Emmeline is displaced from the cosiness of the feminine Gothic castle, and thrown into the male-dominated world of power and greed.

In psycho-linguistic terms we can read the castle as the place without the Father, where male power, male desire, and even male logic cannot penetrate. The long, darkened corridors where Emmeline moves without a light, ‘feeling her way’ (31) until she reaches what she believes to be safety is analogous to the area Irigaray describes in ‘La Mystérique,’ the ‘place where consciousness is no longer master, where, to its extreme confusion, it sinks into a dark night that is also fire and flames.’³¹ By making her heroine agile at escaping from male predators in a landscape they are unfamiliar with and terrified of, Smith suggests a realm of ‘other’ which is not dependent upon the symbolic authority of the Father. Emmeline triumphs over her would-be assailants, but the victory is short-lived and rather limited because soon after these incidents she is expelled from the familiar world of Mowbray Castle. The dark passages offer a temporary refuge, but one cannot stay there forever. In a sense, Emmeline has to be educated and exposed to the world outside with its symbolic representation and masculine values before she returns to the castle as its legitimate owner.

In her use of the Gothic, Smith, like Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft, and Inchbald, makes connections between politics and terror, the incompatibility of human reason and a society based on fear and tyranny.³² In Emmeline she hints effects of male domination, arbitrary authority, and the misuse of power as her heroine is forced to flee from one threatening man to another. Paradoxically it is mostly outside of the maternal, dark, and mysterious castle that Emmeline is at risk. Without parental protection, Emmeline is persecuted by the unwanted attentions of the steward, Maloney; young Delamere; the rich old banker Mr Rochely; the handsome but presumptuous Bellozane; and a host of other suitors. She is kidnapped by Delamere at one point but escapes injury because of high fever and her determination not to yield to his impetuosity. However, unlike the novels written after the French Revolution, Emmeline does not offer a consistent parallel between castles and tyrants, between domesticity and monarchy. The authority figure in the novel, Emmeline's uncle, is not a complete tyrant or villain like Radcliffe's Montoni. Lord Montreville does show compassion for Emmeline on several occasions, even to the point of defending her against the snobbery of his wife (183), but Smith depicts him as avaricious, self-centred, and, if not cruel, certainly an inadequate patriarch. He claims to possess Mowbray Castle and embezzles the sum of ‘four thousand five hundred a year’ (433) from the orphan heroine, though almost inadvertently. His legal and financial adviser, Sir Richard Crofts, conceals the truth of Emmeline's birthright from him, thus leading to believe she has no legitimate claim to the estate. However, the fact that Montreville cared so little about his affairs as to trust everything to the cunning Crofts may suggest a subconscious wish to believe in, and a willingness to comply with, the lucrative propositions of his lawyer.

On the whole, the novel is not as radical or forthright as those written by Wollstonecraft, Hays, or even Inchbald. Feminism in Emmeline is often manifested in more subversive ways, as we have seen. Through narratives that seem to contradict each other, through the conflation of seemingly ‘pure’ and corrupt characters, or the depiction of apparently kind-hearted figures who turn out to be not so benevolent, Smith questions the moral and social values of her contemporary society. The explicit challenge to patriarchy was to culminate in a work written four years later, Desmond, a Novel.

Notes

1. The celebrated English critic, George Stevens, severely censured Smith for her choice of an immoral work. He believed that the passion in Manon Lescaut was an apology for licentiousness and ought to be condemned. As a result of this outcry Smith withdrew the work. See Florence Hilbish, ‘Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist (1749-1806)’ (PHD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1941), 118-19.

2. As quoted by Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, ‘Introduction,’ Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle, by Charlotte Smith (London: Oxford University Press 1971), vii. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

3. As quoted by Hilbish, ‘Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist,’ 131

4. Jane Spencer, ‘Charlotte Smith,’ in A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1600-1800, ed. Janet Todd (London: Methuen 1984), 289

5. Mary Anne Schofield, Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in Feminine Fiction, 1713-1799 (Newark: University of Delaware Press 1990), 150

6. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press 1981), 324

7. As quoted by Elaine Showalter, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,’ in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon 1985), 266

8. This plot summary fits a number of novels written in the eighteenth century, including, for example, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Frances Burney's Evelina, and Jane Austen's Emma and Mansfield Park.

9. Egerton Brydges, Imaginative Biography (1834), 2:95-6, as quoted by Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, ‘Introduction,’ Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972), 14

10. See Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York: Methuen 1980), especially chapter 3, ‘Addressing the Subject,’ for a further discussion of this topic.

11. Several critics have noted that Catherine Morland is a parody of Smith's Emmeline, among them, Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, in her ‘Introduction’ to Emmeline, xi; and Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1939), 60-3.

12. See the first chapter of Northanger Abbey.

13. Linda Hutcheon suggests that ‘parody is a form of serious art criticism’ and ‘has the advantage of being both a re-creation and a creation, making criticism into a kind of active exploration of form’ (A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms [New York: Methuen 1985], 51).

14. See, for example, Kenneth L. Moler, Jane Austen's Art of Allusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1968); Frank W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1966); Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975); William H. Magee, ‘The Happy Marriage: The Influence of Charlotte Smith on Jane Austen,’ Studies in the Novel, 7, no. 1 (Spring 1975), 120-32; and Eleanor Ty, ‘Ridding Unwanted Suitors: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Charlotte Smith's Emmeline,’ Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5, no. 2 (Fall 1986), 327-29.

15. Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women,’ reprinted in Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett (London: Women's Press 1979), 59

16. Ibid., 59, 60

17. According to Nancy Chodorow, ‘a girl usually turns to her father as an object of primary interest from the exclusivity of the relationship to her mother, but this libidinal turning to her father does not substitute for her attachment to her mother. Instead, a girl retains her preoedipal tie to her mother … and builds oedipal attachments to both her mother and father’ (The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender [Berkeley: University of California Press 1978], 192-3). On the basis of Chodorow's theories Mary Poovey suggests that ‘it may well be the case that woman's psychological relation to authority may involve accommodation rather than confrontation; in other words, it may be more in keeping with her psychological development to identify with and accept a number of role models instead of trying to usurp the place of her authoritative forebears’ (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984], 254).

18. Hayley was quoted as observing that Emmeline, ‘considering the situation of the author, is the most wonderful production he ever saw, and not inferior, in his opinion, to any book in that fascinating species of composition.’ Hayley is quoted in a letter of J. C. Walker to Bishop Percy, 16 September 1788, in John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (1848), 708, as noted by Ehrenpreis, ‘Introduction,’ Emmeline, vii.

19. See the first chapter of Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer.

20. Jane Spencer, in The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986), says that ‘Adelina proves herself not really ruined by this one error by the extravagance of her repentance’ (128).

21. Eva Figes, who sees similarities between Smith's Emmeline and Frances Burney's Cecilia, points out that the incident with Adelina illustrates the difference between Smith's and Burney's fictional worlds. Figes observes: ‘… no Burney woman would have been allowed to be friends with a pregnant woman … Smith's heroines constantly express active sympathy for women in distress’ (Sex and Subterfuge: Women Novelists to 1850 [London: Macmillan 1982], 64).

22. The kind of feminist criticism that seeks to identify stereotypical portraits of women has been labelled ‘feminist critique’ by Elaine Showalter in ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’ and ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,’ both reprinted in Showalter, ed. The New Feminist Criticism. One early example of this type of feminist criticism is Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women (New York: Harcourt 1968).

23. One classic case is Defoe's Moll Flanders, who is seduced by an older brother, but marries the younger brother, Robin. Moll subsequently becomes a prostitute and thief. In Inchbald's A Simple Story Miss Milner is unfaithful to Dorriforth and is exiled to die unloved and alone in Scotland. In Smith's Emmeline another adulterous figure, Lady Frances, who, because of vanity and boredom, embarks openly on an affair with Chevalier de Bellozane, is disciplined for her indiscriminate actions by a ‘lettre de cachet, which confined her during pleasure to a convent’ (525).

24. Edwin Hood, The Age and Its Architects, as quoted by Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, 247

25. See, for example, the first chapter, ‘Formative Influences,’ of F. Hilbish's ‘Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelists,’ where she cites Mr and Mrs Stafford's ‘history’ as the experience of Benjamin and Charlotte Smith (88-91, 95-9).

26. Quoted by Ehrenpreis, ‘Introduction,’ Emmeline, viii

27. Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Review 1 (1788), 333

28. See, for example, J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (London: Constable 1932), 266, 375, who first pointed out that Radcliffe was profoundly indebted to Smith. Similar views are expressed in James R. Foster, ‘Charlotte Smith, Pre-Romantic Novelist,’ PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 43 (June 1928), 463-75; and Ehrenpreis, ‘Introduction,’ Emmeline, xi.

29. Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 194

30. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1989), 86

31. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1985), 191

32. David Morse, in Romanticism: A Structural Analysis (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble 1982), argues that ‘the gothic is a field of discourse saturated with political connotations and addressing itself to issues raised in the work of Godwin and Paine: the incompatibility of reason and humanity with a society based on domination and fear; the critique of secrecy and the insistence that healthy society must be based on frankness, openness and sincerity; the suggestion that in a society governed by despotism and permeated by religious hypocrisy and bigotry natural human impulses will become warped and distorted; the conviction that relationships between individuals on any basis other than that of freedom and equality must necessarily be alienating, even for … those who coerce and manipulate’ (3).