The English Realist Novel

Start Free Trial

Introduction: A Secret History of the English Novel

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: "Introduction: A Secret History of the English Novel," in her The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women's Contribution to the Novel, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1991, pp. 1-15.

[In the following excerpt, Ross traces the early development of women's novels against the mainstream categories and especially the label of "romance."]

The only excellence of falsehood … is its resemblance to truth.
—Charlotte Lennox

A student in an introductory literature course put a plain brown cover on his copy of Willa Cather's My Antonia because he was afraid the feminine title and woman author would make everyone on the bus think he was reading a "romance novel." The cover was meant to prevent attacks on his taste and, more important, on his masculinity. How did "romance," a category that includes works as serious and carefully wrought as Spenser's Faerie Queene, come to suggest something both trivial and feminine?

Triviality, or "vanite," was a basis for attacks on romance almost from its first appearance in the Middle Ages (Douglas Kelly 79-80).1 It was "feminine" in the sense that it chronicled a cultural shift of interest from war to love, and so contained important female characters.2 During the Renaissance romances were increasingly designed for women readers; Sir Philip Sidney wrote his Arcadia, which he called a "trifle," for his sister (Nelson 57). Yet the word and the dedication seem more an excuse for not writing a learned treatise in Latin than a denial of artistic purpose. Not until the late seventeenth century were triviality and femininity linked in serious critical condemnations of the romance.

To understand this development, we will have to go back, briefly, to the fourteenth century, when the word "romance" first came into use in English to denote vernacular, and particularly French, narratives. These stories—at first usually in verse and by the late Renaissance in prose—had two main ingredients: adventure and love.3 Love became the more prominent theme during the seventeenth century. From the beginning, the religious establishment considered these writings "vain" because, unlike the Bible, they were untrue. According to William Nelson, the early Church fathers criticized writers of the classical period for carelessness in separating fact and fiction (6-7). During the Renaissance this criticism became increasingly severe from both Puritan and counter-Reformation quarters (92), culminating in the late sixteenth century in what critics have called a "historical revolution"—a demand for truth about the past.4 This concern could be difficult to reconcile with enthusiasm for newly rediscovered classical texts such as Aristotle's Poetics; for although Aristotle did distinguish "historical truth" from "poetic truth," he accorded more importance to the latter (Chapter IX). In contrast, sixteenth-century critics valued Greek epics, especially over contemporary romances such as Aristo's, because they were supposed to be based on historical events (Parker 44-45).5

To parry accusations of falsehood, romance writers such as Ronsard, Ariosto, and Tasso were driven to one of two defensive postures to gain respect for their art (Nelson 55): they could avoid lying by not pretending to historical truth—deriving dignity from the Greek tradition and its reverence for poetic invention—or they could assert their truthfulness, in either a historical or an allegorical sense (12-13). Somewhere between these two choices was a third: they could make their romances unverifiable and hence possibly true, like the Apocrypha. One way to do that was to set the stories in the distant past and in faraway lands (43-45); another was to write about presentday, ordinary people whose lives were not a matter of public record (107).6 This latter category roughly corresponds to what we now think of as the "novel," a form of prose narrative that began to be distinguished from the romance in the later seventeenth century and that gradually, over the next hundred years—in theory, at least—came to replace it.

In France the term "nouvelle" began to be used instead of "roman" (though not consistently) to denote shorter works of fiction dealing with more recent times, written in plainer style (Davis 33-34); in English the cognates "novel" and "novella" also had associations with "news," or current events.7 "Novels" (even when still called romances) established their veracity through expressed contrast with older romances, which now appeared false in a new way—in their lack of immediacy.8 When, in the 1660s, the immensely influential critic Nicolas Boileau attacked the French romances of his century, he condemned them for inaccuracy about both the past and the present—for making old Roman warriors self-analytical and love-sick and for turning "excessively ugly" real contemporary figures into perfect beauties (Dialogue des Héros de Roman 444-45).9 English critics of this period and after tended to swallow Boileau's pronouncements whole; his judgments are implicit in William Congreve's attempt, in 1692, to define "romance" and "novel" to emphasize the superior truth, or at least verisimilitude, of the latter.10

Such was the official evaluation of romances in the late seventeenth century. Yet often their most severe detractors—including Boileau (444) and, later, Samuel Johnson, who blamed his boyhood habit of reading romances for "that unsettled turn of mind which prevented his ever fixing in any profession" (Boswell 36)—confessed, off the record, to a guilty fondness for them as children. From Shakespeare's time through the eighteenth century, romance maintained a "subliterary" life and popularity, and among its most faithful adherents were women.11 During the seventeenth century women's enthusiasm for romance grew to such a pitch that they began to write them as well as read them, in more or less open defiance of antiromantic criticism that was becoming increasingly anti-feminist as well.

Romance appealed to seventeenth-century women of the upper classes, and gradually to women of the middle class as well, for many reasons—most obviously because it provided an imaginative escape from what for most of them, in a time of arranged marriages, must have been an emotionally dreary life. Romance was associated with imagination by later writers such as Joseph and Thomas Warton, Richard Hurd, and Clara Reeve, who felt their favorite literature had been nearly killed off in the late seventeenth century by an epidemic of "good sense" (Hurd 120).12 Even then there were those who stated openly that the move away from romance was not a sign of progress toward scientific clarity, or of return to the clean Attic prose of the Greeks, but of cultural decline, the triumph of ugly old merchants over ideally beautiful nymphs and swains. But imagination and reality are not necessarily opposites; it was not at all clear to women readers that romances were any less true than what was normally called reality.

To understand how this could be so, we must examine some of the assumptions behind the critical distinction between romance and novel, particularly the meaning of the "resemblance to truth" that was supposed to separate them. "Novel" and "romance" overlapped during this period in more than terminology, for the claim to exclusive truth in narrative could never be met. It was easy enough for the critic to call a romance false, but it was the romance writer or novelist who then had to try to find out what would make a narrative true; their solutions were many and various, and all unsatisfactory.

As far back as Chretien de Troyes, romance writers were claiming a degree of historical truth, usually a greater degree than their relatively "false" predecessors.13 Even verisimilitude (or "vraisemblance") had a number of contradictory meanings in both romances and novels. It might mean observing probability—that is, omitting miracles or coincidences that obscure the workings of natural law, most often what is now meant by "realism."14 Or it might mean observing laws of moral order, a concept relating to "bienseance" or decorum, usually associated with romance (Davis 32-33)—although the "bad morality" of romance was one of Boileau's chief objections to it (445). Or it might mean failing to observe either set of laws and thus including the fantastic coincidences and unfinished justice of "real life," a commonly stated intention of early novels such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, which she called a "history." Both romance and novel writers sometimes claimed that their works were literally true while expecting the reader to know that they were fictional; both were also capable of claiming that their stories were fictional while expecting the reader to recognize in them references to current events.15

Critical definitions were therefore bound to be simpler and cleaner than the works they were supposed to describe, and no fiction writer completely escaped romance.16 Male writers generally took greater care than women to avoid the style and themes of seventeenth-century French romance, its pastoral settings and preoccupation with love, but in doing so they simply went back to the earlier, less feminine quest romance and reserved love for the comic ending. Some, such as Richardson, studiously avoided the external trappings of both older and more recent romance, "a hermit and a wood, a battle and a shipwreck" (Samuel Johnson 3:20); but many did not (Fielding's hermits and Smollett's shipwrecks immediately come to mind). None avoided the romance's basic ingredients-—adventure and love.

"Romance" and "novel" were difficult to separate, not only because every narrative wound up being a "falsehood," but because the "truth" that "excellent" fiction was supposed to resemble was neither absolute nor universal. Whether truth meant history or current events, women, as members of a subculture, were equally removed from it. History could seem to them a rather boring study, as Jane Austen's Catherine Morland would later remark, with "the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all" (NA 108). Nor did women frequent the coffee houses that J. Paul Hunter describes as important centers for the dissemination of "news" ("News" 501).17 In a sense, official truth was merely verisimilitude for women, something lived second hand.18

Romance, however, could seem true to women in several ways. "Adventure" literally denotes events that come to one from without, and therefore the lives of the unempowered are full of it. Though real women were probably not carried off as often as they were in stories, they were commonly given or sold into matrimony—a trend that only became worse as the class of romance writers and readers shifted down from the French nobility to the English bourgeoisie. As for the other main ingredient of romance, love, in "reality" women were supposed not to feel it, for it was a manifestation of self-will that could only be obstructive in a patriarchal courtship system. The marriage for love that by this time formed the standard ending of romance, though "unreal" in the sense that it rarely happened to actual women, was accurate to women's emotional life.

The concentration on love in seventeenth-century French romances made them especially appealing to the female reader; one romance in particular, Honore d'Urfe's L 'Astrée (1610-1627), was an important source of inspiration for Madeleine de Scudery, and hence an important text in the history of women's fiction. This romance puts forth a morality of love, one of the key tenets of which is that a lady by rights belongs to the man who loves her most. Yet, surprisingly, it does not teach the female reader to see herself as a mere object; that was rather the lesson of her experience. In L 'Astrée the feelings she was not supposed to have are the basis of a whole world and a topic of endless metaphysical discussion.

The intensity of male love in the story endows the female will with a sort of divinity: Astree and Queen Galathee are immensely powerful, and even the hero, Celadon, is powerless until he dresses in women's clothes. The rampant cross-dressing in L'Astree, according to Louise K. Horowitz, represents an important step in a historical "feminization" process in fiction: "once knights, then shepherds, now transvestites" (254). Celadon spends a considerable portion of the story as the heroine's "female" friend, and when he casts off his disguise his behavior toward her changes very little. Friendship between women is thus a model for romantic love, and the differences between the sexes, both physical and psychological, are minimized.19 This feature mitigates the effects of the symbolic "otherness" of the romance heroine; it became an important creed in women's "anti-anti-romantic" fiction later in the century.

Of course, the powerful women and sensitive men of L 'Astr&e must have been an escape fantasy for seventeenth-century women readers—and thus, like other romances, it has been seen as a tool used by the patriarchal establishment to support the status quo by "mak[ing] the lives of the dispossessed seem fulfilled" (Perry x).20 Identifying with the heroine as beloved could be self-defeating, as feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft onward have noted.21 Exceptional rather than commonplace, above the rest of her sex, the romance heroine competes with her reader, and in imitating her, readers compete with each other rather than joining forces to bring about social change. In any case the heroine cannot be imitated, for as a symbol she has no real character to imitate. Because she is supposed to be unconscious of her beauty and power, the reader, who displays her own consciousness in the act of reading, cannot resemble her.22 Nevertheless, this heroine could be turned into somebody who would be useful in bringing about gradual improvement in women's lives. When women began writing instead of only reading romances, they were able to make this woman-as-beloved embody their own feelings and perceptions—a necessary step if those feelings were ever to form the basis for action.23

When Scudéry took up the pen, she wrote romances that women readers could enter—both literally, in veiled portraits, and through imaginative projection. Scudéry herself appears as Sappho in Artamenes, or the Grand Cyrus, thus becoming one of a long line of female "moderns" who, for better or for worse, would bear that classical nickname.24 Even the heroines of her romances, while retaining their symbolic perfection, possess a consciousness not unlike that of the author, or of the reader, thus opening up new possibilities for "friendship" among the women inside and outside the text.

Clelia, for example, like her male-created predecessors, rarely initiates action (though she does swim the Tiber, an act of heroism that is later disastrously imitated by Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote); but she does see, and what she sees is her romance's reality. In fact, not being able to act gives her the vantage point that makes her perception reliable, and that makes the male view of reality look skewed. Clelia's father is a Roman despot (not unlike a French or English bourgeois papa) who claims total authority to dispose of his daughter in marriage. She is pursued by two men but obediently refrains from encouraging either. Yet her father blames her for their attention, casting on her all the responsibility for "adventures" over which she has no control (1:46). This tendency to blame the victim was one of the most persistently exposed injustices in women's fiction for more than a century afterward as women writers revealed their own, alternative truth.

Because the heroine does not control the events of her life, the plot of Clelia lacks the "realism" of cause and effect that novel readers later came to require. Instead, it is loosely held together by the heroine's feelings and perceptions, as presented in the allegorical picture of her heart, the famous Map of Tender—a highly detailed representation of the psychology of a woman trying to preserve her dignity under the pressures of a patriarchal courtship system. The map assumes, as Clelia's father does not, that her suitors want her real regard and not just her hand and person. Thus it shows how a man may reach the most honored place in Clelia's heart: tender friendship; "for those I beautifie (beatify?] with the title of tender friends, they are but few in number, and they are before so firmly seated in my heart, that they can hardly make any farther progress" (1:41).25

As Clelia's friend Celeres interprets the allegory: "You see she hath imagined tenderness may proceed from three different causes, either from a great Esteem, Recognizance or Inclination, which hath obliged her to establish three Cities of Tender upon three Rivers, which derive their names from them, and to make three different ways to go thither, so as we say, Cumes on the Ionian, and Cumes on the Tyrrhene Sea, she makes us say, Tender on Inclination, Tender on Esteem, and Tender on Recognizance" (1:42).26 The routes to Tender on Esteem and Tender on Recognizance are dotted with villages, as the progress is by slow stages, requiring, for Esteem, "pleasing verses, amorous and gallant Letters … Sincerity, Great Heart, Honesty, Generosity, Respect, Exactness, and Goodness," and for Recognizance, "complaisance," "Submission," "small cares," "Assiduity," "Empressement," "great services," "Sensibility," "Divine [obedience]," and "constant friendship" (1:42).27 A wrong turn leads either to the "Lake of Indifference … which by its calm streams without doubt lively presents the thing of which it bears the name in this place," or to the "Sea of Enmity … which by the agitation of its waves, fitly agrees with that impetuous passion" (1:42)28

To reach Tender on Inclination, on the other hand, one simply proceeds down a river "which runs with such a rapid course, that there can be no lodging along the shore to go to [from] new Amity to Tender" (1:42).29 "Inclination," then, is a shortcut to Clelia's highest and fondest regard. But the map also makes a contrary statement, for Celeres cites her intention "to describe to us in the Map that she never had love, nor would ever have any thing but tenderness in her heart." She "makes the River of Inclination cast it self into the Sea which is called the dangerous Sea, because it is dangerous for a woman to exceed the limits of friendship, and she makes in pursuit that beyond this Sea is that we call unknown Lands, because in effect we know not what they are … to make us understand in a peculiar manner, that she never yet loved, nor could ever receive any" (1:42).30 Inclination may lead to tender friendship, but it is mysterious and threatening because it may lead beyond it. Its sexual meaning is clearly hinted, both by the danger and by the rapidity of the current, which flows into areas of Clelia's mind which no one, including herself, has explored. By claiming to want friendship rather than love, Clelia sets a limit to the power and importance of sex and hints that she may be happier without it.

But inclination means more than sex; in contrast to tenderness, a passive receptivity that also has sexual overtones, inclination is an active "leaning toward."31 Though potentially self-destructive, it is paradoxically an expression of will. By refusing to surrender to her own inclinations—like George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver when she refuses to go any further down the Floss with Stephen Guest—Clelia means to avoid being conquered. But in the end, despite her denials, she marries for love, and therefore for inclination, choosing the man whose respect allows these various aspects of her will to harmonize. Aronces's inclination, though strong, is subdued by his even greater tenderness; in contrast, the villain Horatius believes he loves Clelia more because he feels compelled to carry her off by force. As in L 'Astree, the heroine is awarded to the man who loves her most; but the man who wins her must be above regarding her as a prize.

The Map of Tender helps to show how the marriage that ends romance could assert the existence and importance of the feminine will. Feminist criticism often points out that the denouement of romance promulgated a myth of romantic love that prevented women from rebelling against matrimony.32 But since romance heroines marry by their own inclination, often in direct opposition to parental authority, fathers had reason to complain, about their daughters' reading habits. Clelia's map could be interpreted as recommending cooperation in arranged marriage, for if a woman is obliged to "recognize" or repay the attentions of her suitors, then the parentally selected candidate was bound to succeed in time, with a little effort. But what Clelia does makes a stronger impression than what she says, and the reader who wished to imitate her by marrying only for love might well oppose her father's plans—or she might imitate Scudéry herself and decline to marry at all. Though known to her friends as the "Princess of Esteem, Lady of Recognizance, Inclination, and Adjacent Lands," Scudéry rejoiced in her "strong propensity against marriage," as she had one of her characters comment in Artamenes: "I know quite well that there are many decent men, but when I think of them as husbands I also think of them as masters, and since masters have a tendency to become tyrants, I can, from that moment, only hate them" (Aronson 43-45).

The subversive tendency of Scudéry's romance caused Boileau, who disapproved of romances in general, to single hers out for special censure. In his Satire X, he describes what happens to the would-be Clelia in real life:

At first you will see her, as in Clelia,
Receiving her lovers under the soft title of friends,
Holding herself back with them to small, permissible attentions:
Then, soon in high water on the River of Tender,
Sail where she will, say everything, hear (understand) everything.
And do not presume that Venus, or Satan
Will let her remain within the terms of the romance.33
[67]

Boileau here helps to establish the French romance's smutty reputation for future generations of English critics. Although Scudéry wrote about love in the chastest and most platonic manner—and although Boileau, kinder to her than later English critics would be to English women novelists, admitted that she was personally untainted by "the bad morality taught in her romances" (445)—he warns that the young girl following her directions in Clelia would find Venus only in the form of Satan: looking for love, she would find sex.34 This cynical reduction of love to sex was common in much male anti-romantic writing and continually elicited romantic opposition from the women writers in this study. Attacks such as this surprised Scudéry, who thought her version of love too obviously idealized for anyone to try for it (Aronson 146). But as we have seen, Boileau was right to sense danger in that "say everything, and understand everything," in the power of the Map of Tender to give form to women's vague desires and discontents.

Further satire of Scudéry in this poem suggests that she threatened more than male domestic authority. For Scudéry was not only a romance writer but a precieuse, a prominent member of several salons in which women as well as men set up for critics and judged the merits of literary works, both ancient and modern. The affected "Belle" of the tenth satire, for example,

Laughs at the vain amateurs of Greek and of Latin;
Places Aristotle and Cotin in a scale;
Then, with a hand still more delicate and more skilful
Coldly weighs Chappelain and Virgil;
Points out many weaknesses in the latter;
However admitting he has some merit.35
[74]

The précieuses are condemned for being on what Boileau considers the wrong side of the "ancients vs. moderns" controversy; although they praise the ancients, they prove themselves deplorably modern by presuming to weigh ancient and modern works in the same balance—an error they cannot help because the ancients were available to most women only in modern translations. On the same grounds romance writers were also deplorably modern, for however much they invoked classical ancestors, their own works were written in the vernacular.36 Scudéry's claim that her works imitated Virgil's epics (Aronson 55-56) was therefore doubly discounted. Yet if she had avoided this criticism by learning Greek and Latin, she would have resembled the female pedant who is also condemned in Boileau's satire. Thus, Boileau permitted women neither to seize the keys to the magic kingdom of criticism by force, nor to earn them by hard work.

As we have seen, romance had long been considered trivial, and it was increasingly being considered feminine; but it was Boileau's satire that first damned both women and romance by mutual association. His attack on Scudéry marks the beginning of a long struggle between male critics and female romance writers and novelists that has yet to be fully resolved—a struggle that will be chronicled in the following chapters.37 Of course, gender aside, it is arguably the theorist's job to create distinctions and the practitioner's job to blur them.38 But this particular battle was clearly, in part, a battle of the sexes, a continued attempt to fortify serious literature against the encroachment of women's writings, which were becoming ever more abundant and popular. When novels were the preferred form, writers such as Henry Fielding scornfully classed Eliza Haywood's productions with French romances. And later, when romance was enjoying a new respectability, writers such as Sir Walter Scott wrote patronizingly of the "realist" Jane Austen. The need to draw and redraw lines that would keep women on the wrong side added zest to critics' attempts to use "resemblance to truth" to separate "romance" from "novel." For their part, women writers often accepted the critical categories in theory; but in practice they showed themselves more interested in combining and harmonizing than in separating and excluding.

The women in this study never fully severed their connection with the d'Urfe-Scudéry tradition. Their works cross categories, not only because romance and novel were not really separable, nor only because, to them, romance had a kind of reality, but because by maintaining some allegiance to a discredited style they could set alternative realities side by side in their fictions and permit them to comment on each other. As a result they revealed large gaps between what women wanted, what they had a right to demand, and what they were likely to receive—especially in love and marriage.39 The attempt to depict in fiction a believable world in which women may love and be respected encouraged readers to claim their basic human right to choose, or not choose, a husband. Thus fiction affected life; and life in turn affected fiction. For as the conditions of women's lives improved, romance and realism could more fully coalesce, creating more consistent narratives. Jane Austen's works may strike readers of today as "modern" in a way those of her foremothers do not, not only because of her own talent, but because the struggles of the previous century created the conditions that permitted her talent to operate.

In the following chapters I will discuss the interplay of romance and realism in selected texts, not to give a comprehensive history of romance during this period, nor of women's fiction, nor even of English women's fiction, but to mark important stages of development. In the earlier works, the relationship between romance and realism is simplest. An ideal romance hero or heroine is brought into contact with the real world and is destroyed by its corruption. The romance world provides love, which the real world tries to kill, and the result is adventure—that is, suffering. Thus Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Imoinda perish at the hands of European capitalists, and women in Delariviere Manley's romantic-satiric allegories sacrifice their reputations and lives to love in a world dominated by heartless, power-seeking men.

By the mid-eighteenth century, tragedy begins to give way to comedy as heroines such as Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless and Charlotte Lennox's Harriot Stuart attempt to succeed at life by renouncing love and romance. But tragedy nearly overtakes them as they learn that love is essential to their happiness and goodness. Thus an ambivalence about the romance emerges. These novels, along with Lennox's The Female Quixote, are partly anti-romances; they endorse love while warning against the adventure it brings. Haywood's and Lennox's objection to the romance is moral as well as practical; the heroines' desire for attention—their willingness to be heroines—stems from the sin of vanity. In Fanny Burney's novels, the sin seems even greater: there romance becomes a symbol of the selfish individualism that threatened to destroy the social order. Burney almost recommends the sacrifice of love to prevent painful and wicked adventure; but in the end she too gives her heroines their romantic denouement.

Burney ultimately found that, despite her literary and moral objections to the romance, she was unable to describe the isolated and adventure-filled lives of her heroines, or to reward them as they deserve, without it. Like Alice's Looking-Glass House, romance was there to greet her at the end of every path that seemed to lead away from it. Each of her novels is more romantic than the one before, so that Ann Radcliffe was able to build a Gothic romance, The Italian, on a plot very similar to that of Burney's Cecilia. Though Radcliffe rejected the realistic novel of manners, her message is similar to Burney's: both novels associate love and adventure, passion and imagination, with insanity. Yet realism seemed less necessary to Radcliffe because in the later eighteenth century critics were showing a renewed interest in older romances, particularly those of the Elizabethan period. This change in the critical climate also affected the novels of Jane Austen by reminding readers that romance, though superficially "false," had once been used to express sacred truths. Austen both satirized and welcomed romance elements in her realistic fictions, using them to describe the relationship between the real lives of ordinary individuals and the encompassing romance, or religious allegory, that to a Christian gave that life meaning.

The progression I will describe is not exactly a "female tradition" of the novel. Most of the writers in this study were less interested in literary sisterhood or daughterhood than in trying to make their own separate peace with critical authority. Haywood renounced the novel as practiced by Manley (and by herself in the first half of her career), Lennox attacked Haywood's morals, and Burney named only men as her literary ancestors in the preface to Evelina. When Radcliffe took up romance instead of the Burneyan novel of manners, Austen responded with a novel of manners that satirized Radcliffean Gothic. Often these writers denied the romance aspects of their writing in order to win intellectual respect as rational creatures, unable to anticipate that once they were finally believed they would simply be dismissed on new grounds. Nevertheless, in affecting and being affected by the conditions of life, these women writers (along with others too numerous to include in this study) did create an important line of development not traced in standard courses and texts on the history of the novel. Despite the efforts of feminist criticism, those courses and texts still mainly consider Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne, though the stretches that are often required to lead students from one to the next should suggest that something important has been left out of the picture.

In contrast, the line of development I see, though it moves the canonical novelists to the periphery, has a logic of its own. I have called the work a "secret history" of the novel in this introductory chapter in part to pay my respects to the popular women writers of romans a clef—Scudéry, Behn, Manley, and Haywood—but also to borrow something of their self-consciously different, perhaps even perverse, "feminine" angle on reality. Just as Behn would describe Monmouth's rebellion in terms of the Duke's affairs of the heart, and just as Manley would characterize the Duke of Marlborough by his amours rather than his campaigns, I have chosen here to describe the history of the novel through the works of a few women novelists. The result is no more comprehensive than male-centered studies—but neither is it less so. Furthermore, whereas women's novels rarely fit well into the theoretical structures designed to explain male novelists, the structure of my own study leaves room for the inclusion of the more standard "major" works in all their complexity. In that sense it is a step toward the more complete, integrative history of the novel that still needs to be written.

One would think that that history would have been written already, given the new availability of editions of neglected women's novels, the proliferation of scholarly discussion of those novels, and the dazzling historicist criticism of the last decade. Studies by Lennard Davis, J. Paul Hunter, and Michael McKeon, for example, subtly and convincingly show the novel rising, or being born, out of social and ideological instabilities of the early eighteenth century. All, reacting against Northrop Frye's archetypal approach (among other approaches), distinguish the novel sharply from the romance; Davis even questions whether romances such as Scudéry's were a substantial influence on the novel at all (25, 41). Yet the social and intellectual currents each of these critics describes did not affect women in the same way that they affected men; nor do the novels of Aphra Behn, a woman who is sometimes called the first novelist, depart as radically from the French tradition as those of Daniel Defoe, the man who is usually called the first novelist.40 These studies break down generic barriers by showing the interrelatedness of novels and other kinds of writing, and other manifestations of popular culture; but while exhaustively explicating one period in history, they play down connections with the past, the similarity between the impulses toward truth and verisimilitude that produced what they call novels and those that affected the earliest romance writers.41 (A broader historical sweep may be found in Nelson's Fact or Fiction, and in Adams's Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel.) And though all these writers make serious efforts to include women novelists, they continue to make theoretical distinctions that do not accurately describe those novelists' practices.

That these and other "mainstream" studies do not fully incorporate the work of feminist scholarship may be due in part to assumptions inherent in some of that scholarship. Since the days of Mary Wollstonecraft, heightened awareness of the impossible conditions under which women artists attempted to create has led to the almost inescapable conclusion that their works must be seriously flawed—especially, as John Stuart Mill believed, with respect to originality.42 Since the 1970s, many writers have been pointing out that women have not been completely powerless—though to prove this they have sometimes had to redefine "power" in some very tricky ways (Newton xiii-xv). Today, as Janet Todd notes in her survey, many branches of feminist criticism denigrate or simply ignore the works of early women writers because they inhabited an unenlightened age, or failed to illustrate Lacan's version of Freudian mythology, or belonged to a privileged class. The American style of feminist literary analysis, best illustrated by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, favors nineteenth-century novels such as Bronte's Villette, which can be made to reveal subtexts containing something like current feminist awareness, but this "double text" approach works less well with earlier authors whose values are more alien to our own (Feminist Literary History 29).43 By regarding these early women's novels with "double vision," some critics conclude that romance elements are a sign of the crushing effects of patriarchy and so perpetuate the sense of their unoriginality, their "minor" status, and their marginality.44

Notes

Note: Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French to English are mine.

Epigraph: Lennox, The Female Quixote, 418.

1 There were ancient Greek and Latin stories that are now called romances, but the word in English originally denoted a modern language phenomenon.

2 See D. Kelly 78; E. Auerbach 141.

3 See Frye, Secular Scripture, 26.

4 Nelson is quoting the title of a book by F.S. Fussner (41). See also Adams 12.

5 See also Nelson 53.

6 Adams notes that all artists were considered liars in the late seventeenth century (82). He discusses several of the fiction writer's defenses against charges of falsehood (88-93).

7 Hunter, "Novels," 480; Davis 45ff. Both McKeon and Hunter place the taste for "news" in the early eighteenth century, though McKeon sees something like it in the previous century; see, for example, McKeon 47-48, 54-55; Hunter, "Young," 261. This shift in taste has been compared to the change in sixteenth-century Spain that produced Don Quixote; see Harry Sieber, "The Romance of Chivalry in Spain from Rodriguez de Montalvo to Cervantes," in Brownlee, 214-17; see also McKeon 292-94.

8 As the encyclopedist Bayle phrased it, "The new Romances keep as far off as possible from the Romantick Way" (Nelson 109; and Davis 38).

9 Not all Scudéry's characters are beautiful; the ugly, satirical Aricidia in Clelia is an example of the psychological realism often overlooked in Scudéry's work. See Schofield, Masking, 21.

10 Hurd shows that even Boileau's own words found their way into the writings of English critics—including Shaftesbury and Addison—who were sympathetic to the romance (79-86).

11 See Nelson (76-77) on ambivalence in Shakespeare; in Spenser's The Faerie Queene (77ff.). In England romance sometimes migrated to the stage; Scudéry's romances were sources for Dryden's heroic dramas. By the 1690s that genre was also largely taken over by women such as Delariviere Manley (Hook, intro. to The Female Wits, ii).

12 See Trowbridge, intro. to Hurd, vi.

13 See D. Kelly 77, 87; Nelson 93; Uitti 137, 141. These early claims of truth, which resemble the "naive empiricism" McKeon attributes to readers in the early eighteenth century, show that one cannot simply distinguish "romance" from "novel" along the lines of Bakhtin's distinction between "truth of idea" and "experiential actual." See Zimbardo 48.

14" The first listing for "realism" in the OED is from Ruskin, 1856; Davis suggests that the concept as well as the term did not quite exist before then either (177-78).

15 See Nelson on Scudéry, 100; Adams notes her accuracy in details about foreign countries, drawn from travel literature (113).

16 On theorists' attempts to simplify the novel, see Davis 113; McKeon 88; and Hunter, "Novels," 498. Beasley counts the persistence of romance elements as one of the defining characteristics of the novel ("Life's Episodes" 21).

17 Hunter notes that the "larger cultural embracing of the present moment as a legitimate subject … for serious discourse" opened the way for women writers such as Fanny Burney ("News" 495, 504); but a personal diary is hardly "news" in the same way that politics is. See Gardiner 205.

18 If one accepts McKeon's theory that the novel appeared only after a painstaking process whereby readers became able to understand a work of fiction as "realistic" rather than true or false, then women's position may have given them a shortcut to this understanding.

19 See Horowitz 257. This "unisex" romance convention runs counter to that noted by Boone (32-33, 40-42), who also refers to texts that show resemblance between the sexes as anti-romantic (12).

20 See Jane Spencer xi.

21 See Kirkham 37, 165.

22 See Warren's argument that men considered romance reading and writing a desirable hobby for women (368).

23 See Frye on the "revolutionary" potential of romance (Secular Scripture 178). Brownstein notes how easily the heroine of male romances could become conscious, since she had nothing to do and therefore had plenty of time to think (35-37).

24 See Spencer 28.

25 Passages from Clelia have been taken from the translation by John Davies, the version known to most seventeenth and eighteenth-century English readers. I suspect that this translation was responsible for Scudéry's bad reputation among some English readers. The original French appears in notes, with only minor changes to conform to modern printing; accents remain unchanged. "Tenderness" and "Inclination" are "Tendre" and "Inclination" in Clelie. For a discussion of the Map of Tender, see Brownstein 38; Aronson 93-95; and Doody, A Natural Passion, 294-97; the map is reprinted in Doody's book.

"Mais pour ceux que je mets au rang de mes tendres Amis, ils sont en fort petit nombre; & ils sont si avant dans mon coeur, qu'on n'y peut jamais faire plus de progres" (1:391).

26 "vous verrez qu'elle a imagine qu'on peut avoir de la tendresse par trois causes differentes; ou par une grande estime, ou par reconnoissance, ou par inclination; & c'est ce qui l'a obligee d'establir ces trois Villes de Tendre, sur trois Rivieres qui portent ces trois noms, & de faire aussi trois routes differents pour y aller. Si bien que comme on dit Cumes sur la Mer d'Ionie, & Cumes sur la Mer Thyrrene, elle fait qu'on dit Tendre sur Inclination, Tendre sur Estime, & Tendre sur Reconnoissance" (1:399-400).

27 "de jolis Vers, de Billet galant, & de Billet doux,… Sincerite, Grand Coeur, Probite, Generosite, Respect, Exactitude, & Bonte"; "Complaisance," "Soumission," "Petits Soins," "Assiduite," "Empressement," "Grands Services," "Sensibilite," "Obeissance," "Constante Amitie" (1:400-403).

28 "Lac d'Indifference … qui par ses eaux tranquiles, represente sans doute fort juste, la chose dont il porte le nom en cet endroit"; "mer d'Inimitie, … qui par l'agitation de ses Vagues, convient sans doute fort juste, avec cette impetueuse passion, que Clelie veut representer" (1:404).

29 "qui va si viste, qu'on n'a que faire de logement le long de ses Rives, pour aller de Nouvelle Amitie a Tendre" (1:400).

30 "faire connoistre sur cette Carte, qu'elle n'avoit jamais eu d'amour, & qu'elle n'auroit jamais dans le coeur que de la tendresse, fait que la Riviere d'Inclination se jette dans une Mer qu'on apelle la Mer dangereuse; parce qu'il est assez dangereux a une Femme, d'aller un peu au dela des dernieres Bomes de l'amitie; & elle fait en suitte qu'au deli de cette Mer, c'est ce que nous apellons Terres inconnues, parce qu'en effet nous ne scavons point ce qu'il y a … de faire entendre d'une maniere particuliere, qu'elle n'a point eu d'amour, & qu'elle n'en peut avoir" (1:405). Note the mistranslation of the last clause above.

31 Sex can even be against inclination, for one can lust against one's will. See Manley, NAt, 2:102; qtd. in Richetti 151.

32 See Newton 8-9, 11, 21; Poovey 241; Schofield, Masking, 27; Boone 2, 7-10. Boone does note that the marriage for love (37), especially between equal partners, as in Spenser and Shakespeare (56-57), could be subversive.

33 "D'abord tu la verras, ainsi que dans Clelie / Recevant ses Amans sous le doux nom d'Amis, / S'en tenir avec eux aux petits soins permis: / Puis, bien-tost en grande eau sur le fleuve de Tendre, / Naviguer a souhait, tout dire, et tout entendre. / Et ne presume pas que Venus, ou Satan / Souffre qu'elle en demeure aux Termes du Roman" (67).

34 Boileau claimed to have abstained from publishing or even writing down the Dialogue des Heros de Roman while Scudéry was alive out of respect (445); but the dates do not bear out this explanation. See notes to the Dialogue in the Oeuvres Compltes and White, Nicolas de Boileau (NY: Twayne, 1969), 19, 77-78. Boileau made other satiric references to Scudéry during her lifetime: in Satire X, as we have seen, and in Canto V, the Battle of the Books, in Le Lutrin (White 76).

35 "Rit des vains amateurs du Grec et du Latin; / Dans la balance met Aristote et Cotin; / Puis, d'une main encor plus fine et plus habile / Peze sans passion Chappelain et Virgile; / Remarque en ce demier beaucoup de pauvretez; / Mais pourtant confessant qu'il a quelques beautez" (74).

36 Davis (27) emphasizes that the word "romance" suggests its Roman ancestry; see M.S. Brownlee 220. There is a class issue here: the "moderns" were associated with the middle class, and Boileau's criticism of the precieuses and of romances had something to do with their vulgarity. This may surprise readers of our own time, accustomed to regarding Scudéry and her circle as aristocratic, but it is an important reminder that class is no more reliable as a means of distinguishing romance from novel than any of the other criteria of criticism; see McKeon 268. Frye sees romance as a periodically recurring "proletarian" reaction against elitist literature (Secular Scripture 23).

37 Attacks on Scudéry herself in England were not always anti-feminist because not everyone knew how many of the works published under her brother's name were really hers.

38 See El Saffar's comments on Cervantes (249-50).

39 See Poovey xv.

40 On the issue of who was "first," see Gardiner. Although Davis questions the "firstness" of Defoe in the light of Behn's contribution, he misses the fact that she, not Fielding, was the first English novelist to include an account of a contemporary historical event, in Love Letters from a Nobleman to his Sister—which, though in many respects close to French romance, thus also fits his definition of the novel (see 201).

41 For example: Davis distinguishes novels from romances by noting that novels claim to be true (36) and distinguishes romantic from novelistic verisimilitude (30-33), yet writes later about novels that are avowed fictions (Henry Fielding's, 200) and about something like romantic "bienseance" in the novel (111). He admits that the roman a clef has characteristics he attributes to the novel, but does not include Scudéry in this category although she wrote them (36). McKeon writes about the gradual evolution of realism, the ability to read something that is neither strictly true nor false, through dialectical struggles with the nature of truth; yet Nelson shows that there was a way of doing this earlier, with the Apocrypha (21-22, 35). Hunter writes that male and female young people needed realistic novels to help them understand their daily lives in the early eighteenth century ("Young" 271-72), but I do not see why Scudéry's romances could not have been read for similar reasons, though by a different group of readers. Adams' premise is that from an international point of view romance and novel are impossible to distinguish; yet even he makes the curious distinguishing statement that "no important dramatist in the seventeenth century wrote fiction of any significance" (31), momentarily and uncharacteristically forgetting Behn. His emphasis on travel in both romance and novel also presents a problem for women, who traveled less as the eighteenth century progressed, and whose travel in earlier fiction is more part of the ravishers' quests than their own. Even Clelia's map (which he discusses, 271) mostly points out routes to male travelers; Clelia is the destination.

42 See The Subjection of Women [1869]: Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice Rossi (Cambridge, MA: MI T Press, 1970), 69.

43 Todd criticizes the separate Norton Anthology for women writers because of this nineteenth-century bias (Feminist Literary History 48). Schofield applies the Gilbert and Gubar type of reading to eighteenth-century novels (Masking 9). Other examples of "double" studies: Goreau (5) writes of two Aphra Behns; Schofield refers to Haywood's "double writing" (Eliza Haywood 5-6); Straub has entitled her study of Bumey Divided Fictions; the introduction to Fetter 'd or Free? calls eighteenth-century women novelists "Janus-like" (1).

44 Conversely, realism is seen as a sign of originality and rebellion. See Simons 24, 32; Spender 21; Figes 16. See also Hunter on the present narrowness of the canon ("Contexts" 128-29, 133-34).

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

The Courtship Novel: Textual Liberation for Women