The English Realist Novel

Start Free Trial

Female Sexuality and the Referent of Enlightenment Realisms

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: "Female Sexuality and the Referent of Enlightenment Realisms," in Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre, edited by Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast, Cultural Politics, No. 10, University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp. 11-27.

[In the following essay, Alliston argues that there were several distinct types of realism at work in the early novel.]

Twentieth-century historians of the novel generally distinguish the emerging genre from earlier (romance) narrative by its increased "realism," variously defined in terms of referentiality to the details of a quotidian experience shared by readers.' Judged by this standard, theorized as it is from the practice of nineteenth-century high realism, most eighteenth-century novels tend to appear underdeveloped, still uncomfortably close to the romance genre satirized in one of the first novels, Don Quixote (itself, of course, hardly "high realist"). Early novels may well be making a gesture of reference to something they identify as "the real," and in that sense it is appropriate to call them "realist." But it is not appropriate to assume that the logic of that gesture remains the same over the course of the novel's history, enabling critics to judge more and less successful expressions of the realist endeavor by a single, and often anachronistic, standard. The logics of referentiality at work in eighteenth-century fiction are multiple, and are based on conceptions of evidence that differ importantly from the one that came to dominate the later high realist tradition.

One effect of the normalized failure to recognize the multiplicity of realisms in eighteenth-century fiction is the marginalization of early women novelists. Accepted histories of the novel tend to associate women's work at the origins of the genre not with alternate concepts of how truth (or "reality") is evidenced, but with an underdeveloped execution of a singular model of realism. This critical judgment repeats the gesture of high realism itself in excluding alternate systems for representing reality from the literary canon, most often by adopting the very nineteenth-century metaphor of "natural" selection. After outlining a typology of the main varieties of eighteenth-century realism as I see them, I hope to open to debate the gender politics of various realist strategies, and then of twentieth-century criticism that describes the history of the novel in the rhetorical terms of biological evolution.

Three Types of Evidence, Three Types of Realism

The eighteenth-century novel differs starkly from later fiction in its frequent claims to factual truth, in the documentary forms of narration with which it evidences those truth claims, and in the wide acceptance of them by contemporary readers. The truth claimed was, generally speaking, a private truth (even when it concerned public figures, as in the "scandalous histories" of Delariviere Manley and Eliza Haywood). The documentary forms were therefore private documents or personal, eyewitness accounts: familiar letters, journals, memoirs, travelogues. Up to this point, I remain in agreement with Ian Watt's classic description of eighteenth-century realism. But where Watt constructs an ultimately unitary conception of "formal realism" as vacillating dialectically through the eighteenth century until it achieves synthesis in the novels of Austen, I would like to propose a nonhierarchical tripartite model of Enlightenment realisms.2 I do not assert that three categories of realism exist by theoretical necessity, but that there were during the period at least three distinct types, representing three significantly different conventions for referring to reality, and that these intersected and competed with one another.

Watt refers to the "realism of representation" because these forms did not represent "reality" or events as much as, and except insofar as, they presented private testimony. But Watt conflates the technique of presentation with reliance upon a sense of plausibility for the construction of nontraditional plots. That is where I would like to draw an important distinction. More often than not, eighteenth-century novels presented reality as fantastic truth rather than plausible fiction.3 Defoe's fictional A Journal of the Plague Year was initially read as a factual account, Diderot's reclusive friend actually made an effort to assist the fictive nun in distress, and Americans wept all the way through the nineteenth century at the grave of their first fictional heroine, Charlotte Temple (her tombstone still stands in New York's Trinity Churchyard).4 These contemporary responses to eighteenth-century fiction do not by any means indicate that Defoe's remarkable episodes, the scenes of lesbian sex in a downright Gothic setting of incarceration and torture related by Diderot's nun, or the moral beatification of a young woman who "falls" and is abandoned as a result of her error corresponded to any Enlightenment sense of verisimilitude. What it does indicate is that the documents of private testimony, regardless of mechanical reproduction, were taken seriously as evidence of truth, and that such evidence was if anything supported by the implausibility of the events related.5 Indeed, the idea of plausibility has always been accompanied by a certain awareness, more or less uneasy at different times, that its law is a law for narration, for the accounting for fact, and not for the facts themselves, which often seem to have no regard whatsoever for its dictates. What established the relationship of a text to the real for the eighteenth-century reader, then, was not the plausibility of a representation, but rather the presentation of documentary evidence of a firsthand or eyewitness account.6 I shall refer to this form of realism as evidentiary realism.

If evidentiary realism prevailed during the first half of the eighteenth century, another type came to prominence with the works of Richardson and Rousseau, coexisting to the end of the century with "evidentiary" works like Charlotte Temple, but becoming increasingly important as the century proceeded. I shall distinguish this type from the first with the term exemplary realism. Whereas in evidentiary realism the (re)presentation of proof—documentation and eyewitness accounts—establishes the factuality of the account for the reading public, in exemplary realism the perceived exemplarity of the account begins to create factual truth according to its own model. In evidentiary realism, the text's status as presentation (of evidence) takes precedence over its status as representation (of what is proven by the evidence); in exemplary realism, the text's status as exemplum again takes precedence over its status as representation, so that it is read in terms of imitation rather than in terms of mimesis. That is, the text asks to be read as an example capable of generating real action through imitation, rather than as an imitation of real action. The church bells rang for Pamela's wedding and young men shot themselves in yellow vests that matched Werther's not because there was anything plausible about such representations (as Fielding so acidly observed), but because their perceived moral exemplarity generated its own imitative reality.7

Evidentiary and exemplary realism are in fact closely connected to one another in both conception and practice (especially Richardson's). Only a shift of emphasis differentiates them: the truth claim of exemplary realism no longer emphasizes as much the establishment of the exemplary person or event's individual and unique existence as fact; rather, it simultaneously asserts the exemplar's uniqueness and her existence, or at least her potential existence in multiple reproductions, by dint of imitation. Her "truth" as exemplar is supported by this double proof: she is unique (otherwise she would not be exemplary) and at the same time she is presented as worthy of imitation. This shift in emphasis also entails one from event to character. Not events, but characters, generally though not always female ones, are held up as examples. The emphasis on character remains in force for mimetic realism, and, like it, is very much alive to the present day.

The high realism of the nineteenth century takes the figure of example and turns it from the logic of imitation to that of mimesis. The characters of mimetic realism are presented as examples, like those of "exemplary" realism, but another shift of emphasis has occurred, this time in the meaning of the term example. The characters of mimetic realism are no longer examples in the sense that they are presented as models for imitation, but they are examples in the other, evidentiary sense: they are the particular instances that prove a maxim or precept—in this case an implicit statement of general truth about "reality"—by standing for it, representing it. 'What connects all three is the private nature of the truth in question, whether that truth be evidenced through documentation, presented as example, or mimetically represented. All the documentary forms mentioned above enact the public disclosure of private truth. When public truths are referred to (such as the actions of public figures in the early scandal chronicles or well-known historical events in mimetic realism), the gesture of the fiction is to involve those public truths within a private context that must remain a matter of public ignorance or doubt, unprovable by any but uncertain forms of evidence: that of private, unsubstantiated testimony; that of circumstantial evidence; or that of the authority of an omniscient narrator.

The Reality of Legitimacy

The truth-referent of realism, then, is historically a private truth. Eighteenth-century novels in England, France, and Germany come back obsessively to one private truth in particular: the truth about female sexuality and its conformity (or lack thereof) to patriline control. This preoccupation is so characteristic of fiction of the "longer eighteenth century" in Western Europe that it would almost be deceptive to describe it from a reading of specific instances.8 The anxiety over woman's virtue and its corollary, man's legitimacy, is a preoccupation that the novel inherits from romance. Eighteenth-century realisms represent a search for new ways of either demonstrating or destabilizing the old romance truth about legitimacy of succession and transmission in terms of Enlightenment conceptions of evidence. In patriline terms, the question of female sexuality is identical with the question of legitimacy, and hence of legality; thus the logic of its demonstration historically follows changes in the dominant forms of legal evidence, culminating in the hegemony of mimetic realism's logic of verisimilitude.

The link between realism and patriline anxiety over legitimacy has its roots in classical aesthetics, where "recognition" as an essential aspect of mimetic representation is theorized by Aristotle from the praxis of tragic recognition. "Recognition" in Greek tragedy is generally recognition of a kinship relation; thus, I would trace it to the epic anxiety over recognition as evidence of patriline legitimacy.9 "You must be, by your looks, Odysseus' boy?" says Athene (and Nestor, and Menelaos) to Telemachos, "Yes, how like him!" Telemachos replies, "thoughtfully": "My mother says I am his son; I know not/surely. Who has known his own engendering?"10 A mother's word has never been, and by definition cannot be, adequate evidence to establish the legitimacy of a child in patriline terms. From this point of view, much of Western narrative since Homer has been an exercise in not simply taking women's words for it—a search for evidence that would establish the truth or falsehood of a mother's word on legitimacy without allowing her to remain the ultimate authority on the subject.

Michael McKeon describes the novel as a dialectical motion away from romance that negates it even while commemorating its ancient knowledge that "lineage existed to resolve questions of virtue and truth with a tacit simultaneity, making both a causal claim of genealogical descent attesting to an eminence of birth, hence worth, and a logical claim of testimonial precedent validating all present claims as true.11 What is left out of this convincing account is that what most persists from that romance knowledge, and persists well through the period of mimetic realism's heyday, is the cultural value of patriline legitimacy, along with the anxious recognition, as represented by Telemachos's answer to the question of his lineage and his identity, of the very fragility of its own evidence.

Although anxiety about control over female sexuality and the evidence of legitimacy is as ancient as patriarchy, Enlightenment discourse moves the scene of recognition from the public theater of tragedy (or of Renaissance romance), itself originally modeled on the Athenian law court, to a domestic theater. Clarissa stages the "trial" of its heroine's virtue in the family sitting room, complete with pleading, testimony, material evidence (the letters), jury, judge, accuser, and incarceration of the defendant between sessions, in a kind of private theatricals taken seriously as courtroom drama (whereas playful private theatricals will become, for Jane Austen, a frivolous threat to the very feminine virtue these are staged to discover).12 The real jury, of course, is not the Harlowe family, but the reading public. The members of the real jury are moved to sympathize with the defendant, not directly by her performance or by the pleadings of those who speak on her behalf, both of which fail to move the fictive jury, but rather by the evidence of their own senses, by the familiar letters, which they see as evidence of her sincerity. The letters are of course the very thing the Harlowe family, the jury in representation, views as evidence of her disobedience, regardless of their content.13 What changes the perspective is an intersection of two things: the differing personal investments in the interpretation of the evidence for the jury of characters and the jury of readers, and the differing amounts and types of evidence presented to each. Only the readers see all the correspondence, with its several perspectives that tend further to verify the heroine's sincerity. To complement the presentation of evidence, a sympathetic response outside the situation of the courtroom drama is inscribed within the text in the mother-daughter relation.

Richardson takes advantage of the readers' lack of personal (i.e., private) investment in Clarissa's acting according to the will of her family—despite the fact that the same readers are likely to be so invested when it comes to real daughters in their own families—to present the more comprehensive evidence that proves Clarissa's virtue. Thus, he creates the illusion of having proved that Clarissa's word can be taken for her own virtue, and also demonstrates the narrowness and bias of the familial perspective. In placing the question, not only of a heroine's virtue, but moreover of her sincerity, of whether her own word can be taken for the truth of her virtue, within the play of difference between readers' and characters' evidence and interpretation of the evidence, Richardson is working (to his own different ends) with a feminine strategy of resistance to the norms of verisimilitude that points back to Marie de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clves.'4

Virtue and Verisimilitude

In La Princesse de Cleves as in Clarissa, a woman's statements about her own fidelity to patriarchal norms of female sexual conduct are judged by a fictive audience that possesses only the partial evidence of the senses (the Harlowes' of Clarissa's performance and her partial correspondence; the prince of Cleves's of his manservant's glimpse of Nemours going over the garden wall), as well as by readers of the novel, who are in possession of fuller evidence: a more complete correspondence in the case of Clarissa, and the omniscient narrator's presentation of the princess's private thoughts and actions in the other. Those private thoughts and actions include the princess's famous aveu. The aveu is a pledge of fidelity, of faithfulness to patriline law, but it is one whose evidence, for its fictive judge, consists in nothing other than its own status as a free, unforced confession.15 It is thus paradoxical, because the confession of female desire inherently threatens the very law to which it pledges fidelity. Such an act of confession already constitutes a transgression, for both fictive and actual readers, of the law of verisimilitude, which prescribes that women maintain the appearances of female fidelity, as interpreted and judged by an authoritative male viewer or male-dominated community of viewers.16 Writers throughout the eighteenth century, most of them women, imitated and transformed the "inimitable" strategy of the princess of Cleves for resistance to the normative hegemony of verisimilitude as an unstable category whose interpretation would always be manipulated in the service of the ruling hierarchy.17 The princess's strategy for resistance to the demand for the evidence of plausibility, for the appearances that would prove, according to the evidentiary logic particular to the law of verisimilitude, the truth of the narrative of female virtue, is to attempt to keep the scene of that narration entirely within the realm of the private. The princess is unsuccessful in this project, and has to relinquish desire in order to become mistress of her own private state, estate, status, and story.

Rather than expose, like Richardson, the trials of woman's virtue to the reading public on its domestic bench, eighteenth-century women novelists often attempt to circumvent the trial scenario altogether, by turning the nonfictional private documentary forms and the perceived instability of history in relation to verisimilitude (the recognition, referred to above, that plausibility is a category of narrative and not of reality) into forms of evidence that would force the reader's recognition, and hence legitimation, of the authority of the woman as narrator to determine the truth value of her own narrative.18 Even when they do stage the heroine's trial of virtue, thereby conforming to a law of verisimilitude for what women authors might publish, they quite often undercut the reader's ability to judge of that trial on any evidence but that of the heroine's own word. They do so by writing the trial in the form of a letter- or memoir-novel that includes no masculine or skeptical demand for corroborating evidence, except where the heroine's own testimony portrays that skepticism as mistaken and its demand as silencing.

As I have said, the ultimate private truth, the truth that would always lack authoritative testimony and have to be judged by the standards of plausibility, was identified by Mme de Lafayette in La Princesse de Clves as the truth about female sexual conduct and its conformity (or lack thereof) to the reproduction of patriline legitimacy. This indeed remains the ultimate truth for fiction in France and England, at least through the time of Dickens and Collins, for example, or of Balzac, whose work consistently explores questions of legitimacy and legitimate transmission. Lafayette and the writers who followed her (many of them women or "feminocentric" writers like Richardson) authorized private testimony in opposition both to traditional received authority and to the new logic of plausibility. Private testimony was identified with feminine narration through the linkage of the domestic sphere with femininity, and its truth value was evidenced not by plausibility, but by the very implausibility of the act of free "confession" of female desire, which constituted an inherently transgressive act in its potential threat to patriline legitimacy. Throughout the eighteenth century this strategy of free feminine narration—a hallmark of sentimentalism—competed in fiction with the authority of plausibility, which quickly came to dominate legal and historical proof (Northanger Abbey itself, a parodic commentary on the implausibility of Gothic romance, is a good example of this conflict). The logic of plausibility eventually won out in fiction, too, in the mimetic realism of the nineteenth century. This conflict and its resolution accounts for the shift from the immense popularity of epistolary fiction in the eighteenth century as a form of private documentary testimony to the use of letters in nineteenth-century fiction more exclusively as material evidence: conclusions drawn from the material evidence of the letter supersede the authority of its text as testimony.

The period between the publication of Richardson's novels and the triumph of mimetic realism saw the production of a strong body of fiction by women that presents the history of a heroine's virtue strictly through the private documentation of the heroine's own letters and their sympathetic reception by a female confidante. This form limits the evidence of virtue, and the force of its example, to the woman's own word for her history and conduct. Given the long history of literary anxiety over how the reality of a woman's sexual fidelity can be faithfully represented, it cannot be a matter of pure chance or pure aesthetic value that this pattern of evidence is not the one to be found in the canonical works of the same period that also present the exemplary history, in letters, of a virtuous heroine.19 Neither Richardson, Rousseau, Burney, Laclos (whose skepticism about female virtue and its evidence is only more extreme than the others), nor Austen limits the evidence of the heroine's virtue to her own account, so that Austen, on the verge of high realism, at last drops the letters altogether in favor of a skeptical, omniscient narrator. In doing so, she demands of any heroine who is to prove her virtue the utmost fidelity to the principles of verisimilitude.

Conclusion: The Legitimacy of Reality

Although evidentiary and exemplary realisms, the realisms of Defoe and Richardson, may seem clunky and archaic when viewed, as they tend to be, as Cro-Magnons in the "evolution" of the novel as the genre of transcendent mimetic realism, contemporary women's fiction, whenever it has been subjected to the same standard of comparison, comes out looking like a horde of Neanderthals. Were they capable of speech? critics seem to be asking of early novels by women. Were their brains as big? Were these strange-looking texts the ancestors of the novel as well, did they contribute equally to the genesis of the genre of realism, or do they simply constitute a dead-end freak mutation?

The rhetoric of the "evolution" of the realist novel turns out to be identical with the discourse of mimetic realism itself; it is no accident that this metaphor is borrowed from the period of mimetic realism's heyday. One emphasizes the formal "perfection" of the representation, the other the "reality" that is to be perfectly represented, but both discourses locate the value of the representation or the represented in terms of a logic akin to that of patriline legitimacy. If the idea of plausibility is based upon the fiction of a consensus of likelihood, centered on and originating in a masculine, first aristocratic and then bourgeois consensus about the likelihood of female sexual conduct and of the truth of a woman's word about it, the idea of evolution similarly devalues the production that it labels as indeterminate (for plausibility, the reality of paternity and the truth of a woman's word; for evolution, mutation or the production of new forms) by judging it according to the criterion of "selection." The logic of natural selection, like that of patriline descent, ascribes a higher value to that which it designates as "fit" or "legit" by distinguishing it from and opposing it to a field of other possibilities defined as an indiscriminate chaos of production (or reproduction). In so doing, both allay potential anxieties about the reality of indeterminacy by creating a legible line of descent, whether of the "fit" or of the "legit," that cuts through what would otherwise be, it seems, not a history but a cacophony.

Some individual historians of the novel overtly emphasize or even insist on an evolutionary metaphor, but even when they overtly reject it, some version of it often pervades their language, an inevitable connotation of words such as development and rise. John J. Richetti's main objection to Watt's The Rise of the Novel, for example, is what he identifies as the latter's "teleological bias," which "imposes an untenable pattern of growth and development upon the history of prose fiction. This preconception reduces any study of the material in question to the rather thankless, and to my mind meaningless, task of pointing out small 'advances' in realistic technique in various otherwise hapless hacks." I could not agree more with this critique of the evolutionary conception of literary history. Yet Richetti, too, in his epilogue, significantly titled "The Relevance of the Unreadable," leaves his hacks, most of them female hacks, as haplessly unread and unredeemed as ever—and for the same reason. He, too, is trying to read them through the dark glasses of late realism: "Defoe's narratives are often garrulous and disjointed by modern standards of narrative coherence; his imitators are merely diffuse or incoherent without any of his saving realism."20 Richetti is willing to give Defoe the benefit of his historical difference on the score of "narrative coherence" because his "realism" is at times more akin than others' to the mimetic realism, with its logic of plausibility, that has since been codified as the transparent representation of a reality that can never be diffuse or incoherent.21

I have just argued that the metaphor of literary evolution so pervasive in writing about the history of the novel as a genre, like all metaphors of descent in a patriarchal culture, masks the indeterminacy inherent in relations of patriline descent, in much the same way that Athene, Nestor, Helen, and Menelaos reassure Telemachos about the undecidability of Penelope's honesty by telling him that he looks just like his father. Those who use the metaphor most self-consciously, however, do emphasize the role of indeterminacy in evolutionary processes. English Showalter writes: "The evolutionary analogy describes quite well how progress emerged from such chaos" (i.e., the diversity of fictional forms produced in eighteenth-century Europe). Chaos exists, the chaos of diverse possibility, as Telemachos would be the last to deny; indeed, it is only the acknowledgment of the indeterminate as all too real that creates the anxious necessity of social and symbolic systems to devalue it. What emerges from the reality of chaos through these processes of selection, we must reassure ourselves, is at once natural (as implied by the rhetorical force of the evolutionary analogy) and representative of "progress."

Showalter continues:

Given the literary situation, ranging from the tastes of potential readers to the mechanics of publishing, certain elements had greater fitness for survival than others. Whenever such an element occurred, it naturally seemed outstandingly successful, and was therefore imitated by subsequent writers, most of whom added nothing to it, but a few of whom perhaps advanced the genre one more evolutionary step by some new idea or device. During these prehistoric days, many offshoots of the original genre were headed for extinction; the gigantic romances of the seventeenth century resemble dinosaurs in more ways than one. At the same time, the early ancestors of the modern novel were toiling away in obscurity, profiting from their insignificance to adapt better and faster to new conditions.22

I have included the above passage because it vividly describes, with the detail of a Natiopal Geographic artist's rendition, two recurrent aspects of the evolutionary analogy that might seem to clear it of the present critique: the fittest literary forms (and their authors are originally "insignificant" and "obscure" (although, apparently, also outstandingly successful from the outset), laboring in the shadow of such "dinosaurs" as the roman de longue haleine, a strongly feminine-identified genre. When this strategy of representation is examined, the outlines of romance emerge: what we have in the evolutionary analogy taken at its word is a romance of the novel, in which the genre-hero begins in an orphaned obscurity of unidentifiable lineage, but, recognized in time by its own inherently superior merits, ends by becoming fully legitimated, its ancient lineage seen to stretch back, finally, to the heroic epic. The evolutionary discourse modifies this implicit romance narrative, to be sure, by shifting the evidence mark of superiority from "nobility" (in its full sense, in which the ideas of "best" and "purest" include and occlude that of class superiority) to "fitness," a term that implies a more relative sense of superiority, not necessarily absolute superiority, but one determined by environmental necessity.

One of the most recent, and certainly the most rigorous, of the proponents of the evolutionary analogy for the history of the novel repeats the twin moves just described in Showalter's work. Franco Moretti more strongly insists upon the role of indeterminacy in producing literary forms in the eighteenth century, and on that of "social necessity" in selecting from among them the fittest genre for survival into the nineteenth: the Bildungsroman, which he also identifies as the "most bastard" genre.23 Thus he repeats and develops further perhaps not so much a romance as a Bildungsroman of the novel's development: in his Marxist adaptation of natural selection he is careful to de-emphasize strictly aesthetic values ("saving realism" or "pleasing readers") in favor of social norms as the determining factors, just as, he argues, the Bildungsroman abandons the romance interest in the inherently extraordinary or noble to mark the "normal" as worthy of interest.24

In any case, like the orphaned nobles of romance or the obscurely normal heroes of Bildungsromane, the "bastard genre" ends by becoming ligitimated. As Moretti writes, "The most bastard of these forms [i.e., of the various novelistic forms competing for survival at the end of the eighteenth century] became—the dominant genre of Western narrative."25 It became so, as always, at the expense of the other bastards who remain bastards, thereby maintaining the meaningfulness of the opposition between the bastard and the legitimate. If the Bildungsroman is a "bastard" genre because it is a hybrid (a term more in keeping with the evolutionary rhetoric, whereas bastard evokes romance), then the women's novels of the eighteenth century described in the preceding sections might fairly contest with it for the title of "most bastard," for they actually undo the opposition of "classification" to "transformation," which, according to Moretti, finds its compromise position in the Bildungsroman, thus giving it the flexibility to survive the conflict between the two.26 They combine the marriage plot identified with "classification" with the open-ended form identified with "transformation," and they do it through an embedded repetition of similar narratives that combine differing, multiple versions of "classificatory" endings, resisting the prioritization of any one of them, and thus resisting classification itself by creating an undecidable, open-ended form. They, too, are bastard forms, but they have remained the bastards of literary history as well, instead of becoming "the dominant genre of Western narrative."

What is the reason for the difference in the histories of these two bastards? Moretti identifies the selective factor, in keeping with his adaptation of the evolutionary metaphor to a Marxist literary history, as "social necessity."27 "Social" it indubitably is; "necessity"—there's the rub. What Moretti's most evolved species of the evolutionary analogy allows us to see is that it does indeed provide an accurate representation of the processes of modern literary history, though not an absolute standard for judging the value, the perfection, or the readability of literary works. Insofar as the former—the accurate representation of what happened in literary history—was the project of all of the critics I have just mentioned, as I believe it was, they are right. The problem is that to represent the social in terms of a discourse of natural necessity is to perform, if inadvertently, a rhetorical gesture parallel to that of mimetic realism: one of its effects is to mask the social contingency and the constructedness of reality—whether of an individual's or of a genre's history—as something natural (or real), and hence unquestionably necessary. Romance becomes biology—or perhaps biology is simply post-Enlightenment romance. We need (which, as usual, means some of us need; it has now become "socially necessary") to question the investment of such critical moves, for of course the representation of literary history retrospectively affects the readability of literary works. In order to reread early women's novels, we will have to rethink literary tradition.

A feminist reconsideration of fiction judged as archaic and unreadable by the standards of mimetic realism—which are the standards promoted and perpetuated by the discourse of literary evaluation—allows not only for a more informed appreciation of early women's novels through an understanding of the political differences in their epistemology and referentiality, but also for a greater awareness of the politics of epistemology and referentiality concealed in mainstream Enlightenment evidentiary and exemplary realisms, in the mimetic realism that succeeded them in the nineteenth century, and in contemporary constructions of the history of the novel.

Notes

1 See, for example, Robert A. Day, Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction before Richardson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990); John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992 [1969]); English Showalter, The Evolution of the French Novel, 1641-1782 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).

2 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 295-97.

3 Delariviere Manley's preface to The Secret History of Queen Zarah (London, 1711) clarifies the latter distinction: "He that writes a True History ought to place the Accidents as they Naturally happen, without endeavouring to sweeten them for to procure a greater Credit, because he is not obliged to answer for their Probability; but he that composes a History to his Fancy, … is obliged to Write nothing that is improbable"; "To the Reader," n.p. See also Hunter, Before Novels, 193-96.

4 Cathy N. Davidson, "Introduction," in Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), xiii; Robert Mauzi, "Preface," in Denis Diderot, La Religieuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 9-13. I am grateful to Paula R. Backscheider for this information about Defoe's work.

5 As David Hume lamented in 1748, "When anything is affirmed utterly absurd and miraculous, [the mind] rather the more readily admits of such a fact, upon account of that very circumstance, which ought to destroy all its authority." Of Miracles, ed. Antony Flew (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985), 35.

6 This is in contrast to the later turn taken by both legal evidence and fictional representation, as Alexander Welsh argues in Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 8: "By strong representations, I mean those of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that openly distrust direct testimony, insist on submitting witnesses to the test of corroborating circumstances, and claim to know many things without anyone's having seen them at all."

7 See also Robert Darnton on Julie: "Reader and writer communed across the printed page, each of them assuming the ideal form envisioned in the text." "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity," in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1985 [1984]), 248-49.

8 To illustrate from well-known examples, however, one might mention Clarissa, Tom Jones, Corinne, La Nouvelle Heloise, La Princesse de Cleves, The Castle of Otranto (and indeed the Gothic in general, notably the works of Radcliffe and Lee), Die Marquise von 0; Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim.

9 See Sheila Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); Marylin Katz, Penelope's Renoun: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the Odyssey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

10 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1961), 20.

11 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1750 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 420.

12 I refer to Mansfield Park, of course. The word trial appears on every other page of Clarissa; both the legal and religious senses of the word are played upon throughout the novel. See Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 34. See also Susan Pepper Robbins, "Jane Austen's Epistolary Fiction," in Jane Austen's Beginnings: The Juvenilia and "Lady Susan," ed. J. David Grey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989). Robbins notes that Jane Austen "knew that Clarissa's letters were documents in the case against Lovelace" (219).

13 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985 [1747-48]). See, for example, 364-65.

14 Although Richardson, too, is resisting verisimilitude (as Fielding noticed), his "different ends" may be those identified by Paula Backscheider in "'The Woman's Part': Richardson, Defoe, and the Horrors of Marriage," Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (Spring 1994); or by Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): to place women at the center of domestic ideology rather than to have them threaten patrilineage by controlling the meaning of their own words.

15 See Joan DeJean, "Lafayette's Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity," PMLA 99 (October 1984): 896-97.

16 See my Virtue's Faults; or, Women's Correspondence in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, forthcomin'g); on the relation between female "fidelity" and verisimilitude, see, again, DeJean, "Lafayette's Ellipses"; and Nancy Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 25-46.

17 On the instability of plausibility in the history of legal argument, see Welsh, Strong Representations: "Thus circumstances typically told against the individual brought to trial as Johnson's definition of the word implies" (15). "[By the mid-Victorian period, when] defendants were fully represented, the weaknesses of circumstantial evidence could be advertised to the jury" (18).

18 This is the case in Eliza Haywood's The British Recluse (London, 1724 [1722]), Mme Riccoboni's Histoire de Miss Jenny Revel (Paris, 1764), Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Frduleins von Sternheim (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclamjun., 1983 [Leipzig, 1771]), and Sophia Lee's The Recess (London, 1783-85), to name only a few. On the instability of the relations among history, fiction, and verisimilitude in seventeenth-century France, see Showalter, The Evolution of the French Novel, 15-16, 53-56.

19 See, for example, the works by Riccoboni and Lee mentioned in note 18. For a full account and bibliography of this fiction, see my Virtue's Faults.

20 Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, 5-6, 262; emphasis added.

21 Though Crusoe may infer plausibility from circumstantial evidence, as Welsh argues (Strong Representations, 3-6), Defoe relies precisely on the force of the forms of eyewitness testimony to persuade his audience of Crusoe's truth.

22 Showalter, The Evolution of the French Novel, 5-6; emphasis added.

23 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1988 [1983]), 264; Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 10. Moretti emphasizes chance as that which distinguishes his Darwinian version of the metaphor from a Lamarckian one that would see formal variations as "'oriented' and 'preferentially inclined towards variations"' (Signs Taken for Wonders, 262).

24 Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, 262; Showalter, The Evolution of the French Novel, 349; Moretti, The Way of the World, 10-13.

25 Moretti, The Way of the World, 10.

26 Moretti borrows the terms classification and transformation from Yuri Lotman: the former "establishes a classification different from the original one but nevertheless perfectly clear and stable"; under the latter, "the opposite is true: what makes a story meaningful is its narrativity, its being an open-ended process" (The Way of the World, 7-9). On narrative structure in eighteenth-century women's epistolary fiction, see Alliston, Virtue's Faults.

27 Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, 263.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Representing Reality: Strategies of Realism in the Early English Novel