SOURCE: Sherman, Sandra. “The Feminization of ‘Reason’ in Hays's The Victim of Prejudice.” The Centennial Review 41, no. 1 (winter 1997): 143-72.

[In the following essay, Sherman discusses The Victim of Prejudice as a departure from Hays's belief that reason was instrumental for achieving the independence of women.]

Mary Hays's novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799), is read alongside a cadre of “revolutionary” texts inspired by events in France, rebutting the Reflections of Edmund Burke (1790) which idealized patriarchalism.¹ Yet its address to texts which challenged Burke, and aligned themselves with Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), is pessimistic, complicated by what Eleanor Ty terms a “change in climate by the end of the 1790s.” After the Reign of Terror and Napoleonic invasions, “no longer were the revolutionaries as optimistic in their belief in reason and the perfectibility of man as at the beginning of the decade.”² Hays's rendering of “reason” as fractured into unmanageable, incommensurate counters that shift and collide, distinguishes The Victim of Prejudice even from contemporary, less optimistic texts. She focuses on cognitive breakdown, evincing a universe resistant to woman's mental appropriation, inclined towards excruciating ironies of entrapment. As Ty notes, the heroine's “learning has only made her aware of the peculiar social conditions which contribute to her plight,” rather than releasing her from it.³

In Hays's postrevolutionary epistemology, women's mental exertion is subject to distortion by affective imperatives that reinscribe patriarchal limits, subverting strategies—represented in hopeful, revolutionary terms of “reason”—through which women might become autonomous subjects. The heroine, Mary, cites the vulnerability of reason when confronted by conflicting claims of guardian and lover, both of whom invoke it:

… my reason became weakened by contradictory principles. Thus, the moment the dictates of virtue, direct and simple, are perplexed by false scruples and artificial distinctions, the mind becomes entangled in an inextricable labyrinth, to which there is no clue, and whence there is no escape.⁴

In this article, I trace cumulative warpings of reason in The Victim of Prejudice that render it “perplexed,” and cast “the mind” as “an inextricable labyrinth” troped by patriarchal suggestion. I examine Hays's departure from texts promoting reason as instrumental to woman's moral/financial “independence,” and her use of imaginative prose to “[dis]entangle” tensions created by her own revolutionary exhortations.

In Wollstonecraft's Vindication, as in Hays's version of the same argument, reason and independence are co-ordinate, linked through a program of education focused on autonomy.⁵The Victim of Prejudice refuses this position, depicting women's reason as constituted by ideology premised on female subjection. “Reason” is a mirage, reproducing male-engendered norms that seem “natural.”⁶ The displacement is crucial to Hays's postrevolutionary rejoinder.⁷ Deploying fiction as a heuristic, The Victim of Prejudice tests the theoretical bases of “revolution” in emotionally-fraught encounters with dominant norms. It weighs women's ability to pursue “reason” when historically validated, seemingly evident imperatives alter the contours of reason.⁸

Thus while the text challenges Burke, it also takes issue (on a practical level) with texts (including the author's own) whose politics of “reason” it would ideally adopt. By casting as problematic the notion of female subjectivity premised on rational pursuit of virtuous autonomy, The Victim of Prejudice resonates with Wollstonecraft's posthumous novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman (1799), which bemoans the deadening (but not dead) hand of ideology that the Vindication still sought to defeat. Maria's most vivid minor character, the former prostitute Jemima, recalls “independence, which only consisted in choosing the street in which I should wander, or the roof, when I had money, in which I should hide my head.”⁹ Both novels show women as “entangled,” compromised subjects. The Victim of Prejudice, however, educes the irony that compromise inheres in the touted instrument of female subjectivity, “reason,” a radically unstable formation as likely to entail “entangl[ing]” imperatives as to stand against them.¹⁰

From Hays's ironic perspective, women's approach to autonomy is circular. Seeking shelter from patriarchal institutions, women are drawn to “enlightened” men—expositors of “reason”—whose power to provide shelter depends on their position relative to patriarchal institutions. “Rational” autonomy falls into affectivity, entailing a train of dependence that warps the ideological revolution required to escape it. Even when women regard themselves as rational, “rationality” short-circuits. Female autonomy cannot therefore be realized, as in the Vindication, merely by women's accession to reason since “reason” is always already contingent.

When Mary's guardian, Mr. Raymond, claims to “shelter her from [the] world,” Mary calibrates his claim against his dim view of her own capacity. Automatically, she acquiesces in Raymond's assertion, accepting patriarchal benevolence—compromising her independence, though she does not see it that way—instead of challenging patriarchal formations that make “shelter” necessary:

“No sir,” replied [Mr. Raymond], “I have not the happiness of calling this lovely girl mine, except by adoption. She is an unfortunate orphan, whom it is equally my duty and my delight to shelter from a world that will hardly be inclined to do her justice, and upon which she has few claims.”

There was something in the tone of Mr. Raymond's voice … that thrilled through my heart with a new and indescribable sensation. … a powerful and irresistible emotion; throwing my arms around the neck of my benefactor, I burst into tears, and sobbed upon his bosom.

(8)

Grateful to be saved from “[in]justice,” Mary accepts that “she has few claims,” that the “world” negates her autonomy, making “shelter” her best hope. The excluded middle in Raymond's argument—that rational women make claims—eludes Mary, stirred to acquiesce by a spirit of deference. This spirit, a “powerful and irresistible emotion,” inhibits Mary's capacity to calculate undeferentially, outside affective relationships and outside (what amounts to the same thing) patriarchal ideology. Her response, reproducing ideological convention, concedes emotional dependence, a concession fostered by Raymond. Moreover, out of love, Mary is predisposed to crediting Raymond, the conduit of a disempowering ideology and the source of Mary's fear—two sides of the same coin.¹¹ Fearing injustice, encouraged to do so, she falls back onto patriarchal “shelter,” literally onto its “bosom.”

In evoking the rational/emotional matrix through which Mary defines existence, Hays configures a paradox. In the 1790s, “reason,” “independence,” had altered the lexicon of female subjectivity, as it had regarding subjectivity in general. Yet a world “hardly inclined to do … justice” without reference to gender and class, precipitates emotional strategies in women (rationalizations, not reason) that constrain their potential to reason independently. The grey area between ideologies—“revolution” and accommodation—constitutes the text's mental terrain, presented as Mary's own autobiographical struggle.¹² Reason and independence subsist as discourse, discussed, valorized, evoked; but they are warped by persistent necessity. In the end, reason and affectivity reduce to a false dichotomy, absorbed by patriarchal norms.

Raymond becomes the pivotal figure in Mary's address to revolutionary discourse, encouraging her to apply reason and be true to her own best principles (“amidst the vicissitudes and the calamities of life, a firm and an independent mind is an invaluable treasure” [38]), even as he warns her away from independence as potentially ruinous (“the imperious usages of society, with a stern voice, now command us to pause” [31]). As rendered by Hays, Raymond personifies the dilemma of postrevolutionary patriarchy: compelled by the new logic of female subjectivity, it cannot yet imagine (due in part to its own passivity) that such logic might prevail. Women are caught in the cross-current, their education liberalized while they are effectively constrained. When Raymond tells Mary that “certain prejudices” forbid her marrying despite a mutual love, Mary cites the ironies of Raymond's position, which extend to that of enlightened patriarchy generally:

Unhappy parent! unhappy tutor! forced into contradictions that distort and belie thy wisest precepts, that undermine and defeat thy most sagacious purposes!—While the practice of the world opposes the principles of the sage, education is a fallacious effort, morals an empty theory, and sentiment a delusive dream.

(33)

Raymond's recoil from the “wisest precepts,” debasing his education of Mary into a “fallacious effort,” demands that Mary negotiate the “contradictions.”¹³ That is, Raymond manifests patriarchy's persistent power to shape discourse (even that [en]gendered by women, e.g. Wollstonecraft) and women's response to it. Even after he lays down (and follows) social “prejudices,” Raymond continues to invoke women's rational independence (“a firm and independent mind”), tailoring its meaning, however, to serve his prescription for Mary. Mary is placed in, and accepts, a reactive status, continually acknowledging Raymond's “claims” on her capacity to discern (his “just and irresistible claims” [40], “just claims upon my fortitude” [45]), even when she fails to understand (and struggles to accept) his sociology.¹⁴

No study of The Victim of Prejudice examines Raymond's relation to postrevolutionary epistemology and to “claims” made on women's touted capacity to reason independently.¹⁵ I shall do that, setting Hays's text against Wollstonecraft's prescriptions for women's autonomy, and Hays's struggle with the issue up to The Victim of Prejudice.

.....

The Vindication defines subjectivity as epistemological agency. “Every being may become virtuous by the exercise of its own reason.” “The most perfect education. … enable[s] the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent” [103]. Subjectivity is a rational, autonomous address to the world. Wollstonecraft bridles when women concede autonomy, eschewing reason for “sentiments” of patriarchal ideology: “Indignantly have I heard women argue in the same track as men, and adopt the sentiments that brutalize them, with all the pertinacity of ignorance” (206). If ignorance were dispelled, women could snap “the adamantine chain of destiny” by which they “are never to exercise their own reason, never to be independent, never to rise above opinion” (121). The discursive “track” on which ideology runs—“opinion”—ratifies women's irrational turn: “by the prevailing opinion, [women assume] that they were created rather to feel than to reason” (155). “Feeling” is consequent upon entrapment in discourse. Reason overcomes discourse, entailing autonomous self-reflexivity.

Such logic pivots on “rational will,” a perfected agency that “only bows to God” (121). Women should, therefore, “acquire virtues which they may call their own, for how can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertions?” (141, orig. emph). Reason personalizes the “discerning [of] truth. Every individual is in this respect a world in itself” (143). If a rational self is a “world,” woman's subordination is contingent, persistent only because “man is ever placed between her and reason” (143).

Male mediation casts women as “dependent … on man [for] … advice … neglecting the duties that reason points out” (155). By opposing male “advice” to neutered “reason,” Wollstonecraft assumes that female reason can be independent of “prevailing opinion,” i.e. ideology. Hence she exhorts women to act on themselves, as if from a standpoint outside ideology:

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.¹⁶

(135, italics added)

She assumes the possibility of and endeavors to construct conditions for unmediated female subjectivity. Her project (unlike Hays's) elides the notion that such conditions may irretrievably be “prejudiced” against autonomy.

The invocation to “labour,” as a type of extension into the “world,” concatenates the pursuit of autonomy with material production. In Wollstonecraft's logic, independence is both moral (“virtuous”) and economic (i.e. “virtuous and useful” [264]):

[T]o render her really virtuous and useful … she must not be dependent on her husband's bounty for her subsistence during his life, or support after his death; for how can a being be generous who has nothing of its own? or virtuous who is not free?

(264)

The co-ordinate relationship between moral and economic agency, in which both are required to constitute the autonomous female subject, requires that women be educated for “useful” work. Reason has an instrumental concomitant, enabling a woman to survive even in adversity: “a proper education, or, to speak with more precision, a well-stored mind, would enable a single woman to support a life with dignity” (117). For Wollstonecraft, exhortation transmogrifies into outcome: a woman can work, can “support a life,” provided her mind is “well-stored.” “Education” becomes an overdeterminant, obscuring systemic impediments to women's initiative such as the gendered division of labor.¹⁷

Wollstonecraft castigates a government that “does not provide for honest, independent women, by encouraging them to fill respectable stations” (267). What “stations”? She ignores evidence that women's employability was collapsing in the industrial revolution. As Clara Reeve noted, “there are very few trades for women; the men have usurped two-thirds of those that used to belong to them; the remainder are overstocked.”¹⁸ The Vindication constructs a Robinson Crusoe myth for women, suggesting they can achieve autonomy merely by learning it.¹⁹

Contingencies elided in Wollstonecraft's analysis erupt into The Victim of Prejudice, evincing a persistent ancien regime and an economy administered by men. The novel's disillusion stands against Hays's early texts, which comport with the Vindication, invoking (sometimes skittishly) reason's liberatory potential and eschewing the cognitive dissonance broached in The Victim of Prejudice. Hays's Letters and Essays (1793) assumes that “reason” is uninflected by “feelings” and able to dominate them: “Is there any cause to apprehend that we may subject our feelings too much to the guidance of reason?”²⁰ From the hindsight of Mary's ordeal in The Victim of Prejudice, Letters and Essays sounds idealizing, too attentive to revolutionary formulae: “Let those who love influence seek it by surer methods; bolts and bars may confine for a time the feeble body, but can never enchain the noble, the free-born mind” (23). “Mind” is the constitutive site of autonomy, isolating “reason” from needs that conventionally entail women's dependence. Reason becomes the avatar of revolution (“it is time for degraded woman to assert her right to reason, in this general diffusion of light and knowledge” [84]); it constitutes freedom from dependence, assuring its own purity.

In her first novel, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Hays still accepts the possibility of mental purity. Emma's “philosopher” friend, Mr. Francis, tells her:

He, who tamely resigns his understanding to the guidance of another, sinks at once, from the dignity of a rational being, to a mechanical puppet, moved at pleasure on the wires of a mechanical operator.

(49)

Echoing the Vindication, Mr. Francis insists that “Obedience, is a word, which ought never to have had existence” (49).

Yet Emma Courtney is less convinced than Letters and Essays that “reason” subserves independence. While Emma invokes “reason,” she enacts its inevitable defusion by patriarchy. Her text wavers, evincing frustration with reason. While experiencing throes of unrequited love for Augustus Harley, Emma insists that “reason and self-respect sustain me” (127), but the claim seems rote, self-flattery to quell uncertainty. She is in fact becoming unhinged, and admits that “I am, at least, a reasoning maniac: perhaps the most dangerous species of insanity” (142). The notion of a “reasoning maniac,” evinced in the brief that Emma compiles for Harley touting her perfection as a lover, constitutes an ironic retort to Hays's question in Letters and Essays: “whether … we may subject our feelings too much to the guidance of reason.” Clearly, the answer is yes. Reason can be implicated in “feelings”; it can exacerbate obsession into “insanity.” In so doing, it assumes an ironic relation to emotion: rather than “subject[ing] our feelings,” it makes them grotesque.

Upon admitting an “insanity” linked to reason, Emma affiliates with a loss of autonomy generic to women, admonishing Mr. Francis:

Why call woman, miserable woman, oppressed, and impotent, woman—crushed, and then insulted—why call her to independence—which not nature, but the barbarous accursed laws of society, have denied her? This is mockery!

(143)

The link between reason and “emancipation” invoked by Emma even in extremis, snaps when Emma subjects it to “laws of society.” Intransigent social formations—“laws”—overwhelm theory. Her outburst against independence issues to the “philosopher” Mr. Francis, who is cast as insensitive for advice that fails to distinguish between prerogatives of men and women. “Laws” keep women in subjection, whether or not they adopt “reason.” The view from women's experience, rather than from untested “reason,” establishes enlightened discourse as gendered, its heroism ill-suited to women.

Like The Victim of Prejudice, Emma Courtney depicts reason's frustration in a male-dominated regime of solicitous, ultimately disempowering concern. Harley dismisses Emma's desire to stanch her dependency; it is deferred to another day with her silent complicity, motivated by her respect for and emotional attachment to Harley:

I struggled for more fortitude—hinted at the narrowness of my fortune—at my wish to exert my talents in some way, that should procure me a less dependent situation—spoke of my active spirit—of my abhorrence of a life of indolence and vacuity.

He insisted on my waving [sic] these subjects for the present. “There would be time enough, in future, for their consideration. In the mean while, I might go on improving myself, and whether present; or absent, might depend upon him, for every assistance in his power.”

(74-75)

The encounter, parallel to Mary's conversation with Raymond, initiates a pattern in Hays's fiction in which male “shelter” blunts female contemplation of independence. In both cases, a woman's gratefulness and affectivity consume energies that would otherwise, necessarily, be channeled towards the world:

[Harley's] soothing kindness, aided by the affectionate attentions of my friend, gradually, lulled my mind into tranquility. My bosom was agitated, only, by a slight and sweet emotion—like the gentle undulations of the ocean, when the winds, that swept over its ruffled surface, are hushed into repose.

(75)

Both Mary and Emma experience emotional repletion in the male's sheltering gesture, assimilating themselves into stillness suggestive of sexual consummation. Indeed, Emma's reference to “gentle undulations … hushed into repose” bespeaks a desire for Harley, sublimated into a lapsed “struggle” for independence. The “vacuity” of which Emma complains—mental and economic—is valenced to emotional vacuity; when it is provisionally filled, insistent “revolutionary” concern abates. As Emma directs her mental capacities towards a passion for Harley, she rationalizes that she cannot be the person of revolutionary myth:

The mind must have an object:—should I desist from my present pursuit [of Harley], after all it has cost me, for what can I change it? I feel, that I am neither a philosopher, nor a heroine—but a woman, to whom education has given a sexual character. … Ambition cannot stimulate me.

(117)

Like Mary, Emma excludes the middle term: neither abject nor heroic, she could still pursue an “ambition” encompassing autonomy. But she accepts affectivity as her limit, ironically pursuing Harley instead of enterprise.

Hays's last important text prior to The Victim of Prejudice was the Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798). While the text acknowledges obstacles to autonomy, it reasserts the confident spirit of Letters and Essays:

[A] development of mind would undoubtedly enable [women] to see and reason upon what principles, all the other regulations of society were formed,—which however they may deviate in execution, are evidently founded on justice and humanity—and would consequently enable them to bring home and apply those principles to the situation of their sex in general.

(97)

In the Appeal, “justice” is female, dispelling female despair:

But shall the time never come—Ah! surely it must—when the mysterious veil formed by law, by prejudice, and by precedent, shall be rent asunder,—when justice herself shall appear in all the beauty of simplicity. …

(100)

The logic constructs a Whiggish ascent towards equality, a knowledge shared with men of civil, cultural mysteries. That is, where men and women are educated towards the same (rational) end, their social capacities will be the same.

Together, the three texts preceding The Victim of Prejudice constitute a troubled matrix, in which Hays valiantly asserted the imminence of revolution, even as she articulated its dissipation within the affective/economic limitations of women. Thus The Victim of Prejudice is a key text, resolving Hays's discursively unstable relation to revolutionary ideals. It inverts the premises of Hays's nonfiction, exposing them to psychological imperatives of real human beings, intensifying the reproach to revolutionary discourse in Emma Courtney.²¹

.....

Chapter 1 of The Victim of Prejudice begins with Mary's education. Raymond, who has “contempt for vulgar prejudices,” encourages in her “a cultivated understanding, and a vigorous intellect” (5). Yet lingering over such enlightenment are signs that Raymond's “contempt” for prejudice is tinctured with acquiescence, a weakness that could perplex Mary's “understanding.” When Mr. Pelham presents his sons, Edmund and William, for tutoring by Raymond, he requires they be kept from “improper acquaintance, or humiliating connections” (8). He enquires into Mary's status. Raymond identifies her as adopted, “an unfortunate orphan” whom it is his “duty and delight to shelter” (8). Mary, however, bursts into tears, and perceives her sudden incongruity when Raymond recoils from the passion “he had unwarily excited” (9). Raymond, it seems, wishes not to display before Pelham the attachment between himself and Mary. Withdrawing his embrace, he “propose[s] that [Mary] should accompany the young gentlemen into the garden.” In the text's first ironic reversal, the “garden” becomes an anti-paradise, a place of expulsion from fatherly shelter:

For the first time in my life, I had been sensible to an embarrassment, and a temporary feeling of depression and apprehension; a prelude, as it should seem, to those anxieties and sorrows which have since pursued me with unmitigated severity. …

(9)

Implicit in Raymond's action and the “depression” it causes is Mary's sense that paternal “shelter” is unstable, that at a fundamental level fathers may reverse premises (and promises). Raymond's bivalent shelter/expulsion instantiates the logic of his relationship with Mary. As the text proceeds, his preceptorship subverts counsel that it also promotes, leaving Mary (as she is with William) “weakened by contradictory principles.”

William, with whom Mary shares an intense affection, compounds Mary's early exposure to epistemological uncertainty. Tempted by grapes in Sir Peter Osborne's greenhouse, he urges Mary to filch them, appealing to a mutual affection. Mary capitulates: “To a young casuist these reasonings bore a specious appearance: assuming the respectable forms of generosity and tenderness, they dazzled and finally prevailed” (13-14). The passage evokes the chameleon quality of “reasonings,” the capacity of “specious” arguments to “assum[e] … respectable forms.” Its movement depends on Mary's fascination with “reasonings” (they “dazzled”), and its ironic consequence: her response to a man's “reason” through emotion, whereby his urgings seem to rise from her own.²²

Yet if Mary is a “casuist,” it is to vindicate “right” and “wrong”—in practical terms, “justice.” Returning home, wounded by Sir Peter who discovered the theft, she lauds “blows acquired in the cause of humanity and friendship” (22) and asks: “Have you not taught me, dear father, that, in the cause of right we should contemn bodily pain?” (23). Mary idealizes absolutes, the correlative of “cause[s].” Well into her narrative, she reflects the Appeal's conviction that “justice herself shall appear.” Only later does she acknowledge that reason's revolutionary co-ordinate, justice, is also implicated in gender and class. Such early optimism explains why only “temporary … apprehension” grips her on expulsion to a garden—a “world”—of “anxieties and sorrows.”

Writing her memoirs from a perspective of a subject in collapse (“Despair nerves my hand; Despair justifies the deed” [168]), Mary reconstructs the mental processes of agents whose minds affected hers. In the chapter preceding the dreadful encounter where Raymond observes “You can never be the wife of William Pelham” (32), Mary imagines his thoughts:

Painful suspicions assailed him: he began to doubt whether, in cultivating my mind, in fostering a virtuous sensibility, in imbuing my heart with principles of justice and rectitude, he had not been betraying my happiness.

(25)

The passage imaginatively recreates the enlightened male's dilemma: having “cultivat[ed]” a woman's mind and imparted notions of justice, Raymond suspects such notions may backfire. He responds to revolutionary discourse, aware of a disjunction between the life of the “mind” and life. The virtuous man is in a bind. Unable to ignore texts such as the Vindication and Appeal, neither can he accommodate their logic to his own experience.²³ Where “prejudice” is normative (Mary is an orphan, William is wealthy) such men reinscribe injustice. In Raymond's custody, Mary's education becomes an instrument of ironic inversion, implicating revolution (and its male supporters) in women's emotional, epistemological breakdown.

Yet whatever misgivings Mary projects onto Raymond of “betraying my happiness,” he initially adopts the revolutionary line, arguing that Mary was educated towards “happiness”:

The first and most earnest purpose of my cares and precepts has been, by forming you to virtue, to secure your happiness: for this end, I have laboured to awaken, excite, and strengthen, your mind. An enlightened intellect … affords us an inexhaustible source of power, dignity, and enjoyment.

(28)

The problem with Raymond's formulation, which he links to “habits of self-government and independence of mind” (28), is that he equates “independence” with rational submission to prejudice, a compromise of “independence” that acknowledges the undertow of class and gender. In effect, Mary must reason her way out of reason's prerogatives, deny passion for a man above her station, find “happiness” with less “power, dignity, and enjoyment.” While Raymond tells her to “triumph over … passion … yield only to the dictates of right reason and truth” (29), he deploys revolutionary language to reinforce the status quo, endorsing non-revolutionary ends that jibe with Burkean apologetics.

Mary's response betrays the depth of Raymond's ambivalence towards female autonomy. Having raised her to be “independent,” he clearly imparted as well an allegiance to himself entailing patriarchal conventions of deference. Mary exclaims:

Name the sacrifice you require; distrust not the mind you have formed; your dictates and those of reason are the same, they have ever been uniform and invariable. Behold me, my father, resigned to your will!

(30)

In this jarring passage, Mary makes no distinction between mentor and patriarch, deploying language of abject submission as she cleaves to Raymond's “reason.” She is guided by emotion. Ironically, though Raymond warned her away from “passion,” he welcomes (is “visibly affected” [30] by) her zealous embrace of his “dictates.” In this embrace, Mary recapitulates Raymond's inversion of revolutionary language, using it to recuperate patriarchal norms. The continuity of Mary's mental processes with Raymond's is stunning. Mary abdicates rational autonomy to “the mind you have formed,” to “dictates” that “are the same” as “reason.” While this cannot seem “reasonable” to Raymond, Hays does not mean it to; his reaction evinces the enlightened male's complicity in female dependence.

Irony compounds as Raymond admits that if “right reason and truth” must “triumph over … passion,” it is unreason that dictates such “triumph.” Alluding to his pledge to Pelham to preserve William from “any improper acquaintance, or humiliating connections,” Raymond states:

Were it not for certain prejudices, which the world has agreed to respect and to observe, I should perceive your growing tenderness with delight … but I am responsible to another tribunal than that of reason and my own heart for the sentiments and conduct of this young man, and I dare not betray my trust. … [T]he imperious usages of society, with a stern voice, now command us to pause. Her mandates, often irrational, are, nevertheless despotic: contemn them,—the hazard is certain, and the penalty may be tremendous.²⁴

(31)

Raymond accepts William as a pupil because he needs income;²⁵ he enforces Pelham's prejudices (“the imperious usages of society”) not out of conviction, but in deference to money and power—to Burkean class structure—as to law, “another tribunal.” Yet why does Raymond accommodate this “tribunal” of injustice? He could refuse Pelham, whose exactions are repugnant to enlightened aims.²⁶ However, Raymond is willing to compromise ideology, to teach reason but accept the “often irrational.” He asks Mary to do likewise, instantiating the predicament of the enlightened man: mediating between classes and genders, he may “betray” his own and others' autonomy (and hence revolution) under financial pressure. It is Pelham's “trust” Raymond “dare not betray.”

Mary is bewildered by Raymond's advice, which he mystifies into “a subject too subtle for reasoning” (36). What could be more subtle than reason? In fact, subtlety is not the issue, but reeducation, an unlearning of what Mary was taught: “time and experience can only evince the propriety of my conduct” (36). Raymond shifts from inculcating “reason” to advocating its opposite, a gross empiricism subservient to ideological reality. This departs from his prior recommendation that reason be the basis of Mary's stifling her passion for William. He seems uncertain, though his compromise with Pelham suggests he was never firmly committed to reason. In any case, by opposing “reason” and “experience,” Raymond evinces Hays's own tense relation to revolution, already evident in Emma Courtney. It is Mary, the absolutist—the Hays of the Appeal—who seeks to reconcile justice with her situation:

What tyranny is this? When reason, virtue nature, sanctify its emotions, why should the heart be controlled? who dare control it? … For the first time in my life, I was ready to accuse my guardian of injustice and caprice. It was many hours ere I reasoned myself into more composure.

(35)

But Mary's “reasoned” composure is an affective response, the consequence of love for Raymond: “I confide, without shrinking, in your judgment and affection” (37). He accepts her “shrinking” from her own “judgment,” or rather, he allows her to identify with his.

In light of Raymond's recasting of “reason” as compliance with prejudice; denial of “reason” in justification of his conduct; and delight in Mary's deferral of rational autonomy, his parting words (prior to Mary's leaving his household) seem strained: “[A] firm and an independent mind is an invaluable treasure and a never-failing support” (38). What can he mean, having so disorganized and dismissed the rational life? For Raymond, the “independent mind” still yields to governing norms (“contemn them,—the hazard is certain”).²⁷ It dwells (if uneasily) in ideological compromise, a split consciousness that allows Raymond to obey a “tribunal” he hates, eschewing “reason and my own heart.” It allows him to assuage guilt—“I impose no fetters. I will trust to the rectitude of your feelings” (45)—knowing that Mary, who responds through “feelings,” will affiliate her mind to his: “my patron read in my eyes the law I imposed on myself” (45). Raymond wants Mary to internalize norms he cannot (without guilt) “impose,” making them seem a natural consequence of Mary's moral/intellectual deference.

Away from Raymond at the Nevilles, Mary's conviction wavers. She struggles with “senseless prejudices to which I have tamely submitted, whose nature I am utterly unable to comprehend” (48). But as on the previous occasion, she “reason[s]” herself into “composure” when William (who learns of her retreat) challenges her integrity: “[Y]ou are a victim of control, you have tamely submitted to a tyranny that your heart disavows” (52). Mary responds with the fractured “reason” she has “reasoned” herself into as a result of her affection for Raymond:

Mr. Raymond, in the sacrifice which he requires of us, is guided by considerations the most disinterested: he imposes nothing, he appeals to my reason and affections, and his claims are resistless.

(53)

Mary's assertion that Raymond is “disinterested,” elides his admission that he “dare not betray” Pelham's “trust.” Even more basic are Mary's contradictions. If Raymond “requires” sacrifice, how is it that he “imposes nothing”? If he casts his action as “too subtle for reasoning,” how is it that he “appeals to reason?” Is “reason” compatible with “resistless” “claims”? The key to Mary's denial/confusion is her pernicious coupling (at Raymond's behest) of “reason and affections,” driving her to defer to Raymond, to abandon rational autonomy. In this formulation, Mary's state makes “sense”: Raymond is caught in a force field of contradiction (revolution and Mr. Pelham) which he negotiates by making Mary seem to herself the initiator of “sacrifice.” She struggles to naturalize the counter-intuitive, to “impose” “tyranny” on herself.

The narrative of Mary's mother inscribes Mary into, indeed virtually enforces Mary's perplexed relation to Raymond. Her mother (also named Mary) regrets eloping with a cad “raised by fashion and fortune to a rank seducing to my imagination,” for whom she rejected young Raymond “whose reason would have enlightened me” (63). Failure to appreciate Raymond, she believes, led to forsaken paternal shelter and a life of blasted virtue:

Unaccustomed to reason, too weak for principle, credulous from inexperience, a stranger to the corrupt habits of society, I yielded to the mingled intoxication of my vanity and senses, quitted the paternal roof, and resigned myself to my triumphant seducer.

(63)

From her prison cell, she consigns the fruit of her dissipation—Mary—to Raymond, pleading that he “cultivate her reason,” “rouse her to independence,” “teach her to contemn the tyranny that would impose the fetters of sex upon her mind” (69). Yet the missive's subtext complicates this plea, endorsing a “paternal roof” whose virtue devolves onto Raymond, valencing female “independence” with “enlightened” male shelter. This is why Raymond shows Mary the letter. If it adopts rhetoric of the Vindication and Appeal, it also speaks from the position of Raymond's compromising ideology, offering compromise as balm to “inexperience.” The letter serves Raymond's ends, admonishing Mary against men “raised by fashion and fortune” (read: William), and establishing Raymond personally and generically (“the paternal roof”) as proper arbiter of Mary's “independence.”

Raymond uses the letter to constrain Mary's “independence”—her class-jumping attachment to William—since a consummation would challenge his sexuality, repressed since he lost Mary's mother to another wealthy, fashionable young man. Though Raymond imposes a discipline of “reason” on Mary, it operates through her to deny William sexual opportunity missed by Raymond with Mary's mother.²⁸ In the battle to possess Mary (Raymond her mind, William her mind and thereby her body), Mary is her mother's surrogate; “reason” masks irrational forces at work in Raymond, sublimated into paternal concern.²⁹ The mother's admonitions are refracted through Raymond's will to an effect she may never have intended. Hays's insight is in exposing the contingency of “reason,” its potential absorption into male sexual contention. Raymond's gloss on the mother's letter is deeply ironic as he tells Mary: “In the eye of the world, the misfortunes of your birth stain your unsullied youth: it is in the dignity of your own mind that you must seek resource” (71). Not Mary's “birth,” but Raymond's failure to have caused it, produces “misfortune.” It precipitates his assault on her “dignity,” his arrogating her “own mind” into service of his sexual conflicts.

Since William's contention with Raymond turns on the proper application of “reason,” he turns Raymond's logic on its head, claiming that “reason indignantly revolts” at the “senseless chimera” he urges (75). Astonishingly, Mary seems to do the same:

I do not deny that I am sensible of its injustice; an injustice that my reason and my affections equally contemn.

(76)

Logically, in yet another troping of “reason,” Mary is allied with William. But Raymond has so warped the rational autonomy he seems to recommend, that in her ultimate response Mary falls back on Burkean apologetics: “who am I, that I should resist … the customs which use has sanctioned … ?” (76)³⁰ Her posture is a stunning abdication of Wollstonecraft's “rational will,” collapsing into its opposite. As if directly countering Wollstonecraft, she tells William: “it is virtue to submit to a destiny, however painful, not wilfully incurred” (77). With its reinscription of Burke and denial of his most vociferous female opponent, Mary instantiates an almost brain-dead acquiescence in the status quo. Hays depicts the power of patriarchy, operant through a single, well-meaning (but tortured) father, to disrupt forces promoting reason and justice for women.³¹

Volume 2 concerns Mary's quest for economic “justice,” the chance to pursue financial independence outside marriage. She is initially optimistic: “I am young, active, healthy, and able to labour” (93). Her grit tests by way of experience prescriptions in the Vindication and the Appeal. They are sorely tried. Upon arrival in London she is kidnapped to the house of her nemesis, Osborne, who rapes and tries to confine her. But Mary rebels, claiming she will take him to law: “Think not, by feeble restraints, to fetter the body when the mind is determined and free” (117-18). Confronting this most unregenerate representative of the old order, Mary throws down the gauntlet. Responding to his taunt that residence with him has “irretrievably injured [her] reputation” (118), and to his question, “Who would support you [at law] against my wealth and influence?” (119),³² Mary claims that her “spirit … rises above the sense of its wrongs,” that she “will seek, by honest labour, the bread of independence” (119).

Back on the streets of London, “friendless and unknown” (121), she encounters William, who nurses her through delirium. During this time of “wandering reason” (123), her “wandering”—not “reason”—disinters history, embodied in her fallen mother: her “visionary form … seemed to flit before me. … [A]ll pallid and ghastly, with clasped hands, streaming eyes, and agonizing earnestness, she seemed to urge me to take example from her fate” (123). Mary's mother is History, the gendered, alternative trajectory to a theorized “reason” that (as Mary loses her “mind”) seems almost irresistible.³³ Yet Mary interprets history as the plea of “reason” against the overdetermination of events. She “sought to recall … reason” (123), to reinstate “rational will.” Thus William's ministrations fail. Now married to an heiress of his father's choice, he pleads with Mary to let him serve her. But Mary, intent on avoiding a “fate” as William's mistress, invokes the same rhetoric that previously turned him away: “With a mind, a resolution, yet unimpaired, I do not, indeed I do not, yield to despair” (128).

This is more than a refusal of William. It is a refusal to concede that her “mind” is already captured by patriarchal formations, that history inscribed Mary's fate when she “sacrificed” William to Raymond. In history, Mary succeeded her mother in Raymond's “family romance,” a narrative belonging to a male. But Mary does not project from her mother's experience—does not imagine history as proleptic, the seed of emplotted narrative—and so she imagines a future “independent” of history, “determined” by her own “resolution, yet unimpaired.” The Victim of Prejudice, not the “victim of prejudice,” connects history to a woman's fate. In Mary's “determined” search for economic justice, Hays reflects on women's revolutionary “mind,” bound to a gendered destiny but convinced it can break free. William challenges Mary's idealism, claiming that “the consolations of a spotless fame were for ever denied [her]; that the prejudices of the world, unrelenting to [her] sex, would oppose to all [her] efforts insuperable barriers” (128). But idealism dies hard. Invoking the moral self-reflexiveness of early revolutionary discourse, Mary vows to accept “ruin … but not the censure of my own heart” (128-29). From a position of such radical theoretical detachment, The Victim of Prejudice redacts Hays's own conflicts, ranging discourse against history as to the “fate” of women's “mind.”

For Mary, history remains in “visionary form,” foreboding but refused. A domestic position falls through when the elder Pelham, claiming “motives of justice,” recounts Mary's “residence at the house of a libertine baronet,” her “seductions of his son,” and “infamous” birth (135). When a messenger transmits these “cruel calumnies,” Mary passes into reverie:

O God! how terrible were the first indignant feelings that rent my heart on the perusal of this barbarous recital! New to world, to its injustice, the wrongs I had suffered appeared to me as a dream, the reality of which was wholly inconceivable.

(135)

How can such treachery seem dreamlike? Pelham twists history, claiming as “justice” “injustice.” His rendition emerges as history, strained through patriarchal imprimatur. Such authority allows him to hijack epistemology: Mary's potential employer (a woman!) finds it “not possible … to doubt … the principal facts alleged” (137).³⁴ Not only is Mary caught in history, but in a version that bespeaks patriarchal dominance in history, enforced by female complicity. Yet Mary associates Pelham's calumny, and the rebuff that follows, with “dream,” ontologically “inconceivable.” Just as the “visionary form” of her mother fades, leaving the trajectory of history but a faint streak in Mary's “mind,” so this latest indignity is assimilated to a diaphane. Though Mary recalls her mother—“‘O wretched and ill-fated mother! … what calamities has thy frailty entailed upon thy miserable offspring!’” (136)—once again, as history her reality is disallowed. Reacting to the rejection of her attempt to explain, Mary shakes off a wish to have been “strangled … at birth,” turning history on its head:

This new instance of injustice operated to mitigate than to increase my distress … my spirit, conscious of its purity, rose with dignity superior to its woes.

(137)

Mary's “dream”-world, without a history inscribed by men, without her mother as avatar of such history, seems perverse, obsessed with spiritual “purity” which no one notices or values. In Mary, “rational will”—which should snap the link between history and “destiny”—is its ironic opposite: narcissism, debased autonomy, the last refuge of “revolution” when it has nowhere to go.

Mary's sojourn through London takes her to a series of deceptive employments. When she takes up “the art of drawing and colouring plants and flowers” (138), a profession recommended to women, her employer tries to seduce her, taunting, “Sir Peter Osborne and Mr. Pelham found less difficulty” (140). Yet again, with agonizing predictability, Mary faces history: “I perceived that the fatal tale of my disgrace pursued and blasted all my efforts” (140). Her response seems overtly narcissist:

“I am guiltless,” I repeated to myself; “why then should I then affect disguise, or have recourse to falsehood? In every honest and consistent means of safety I will not desert myself …”

(140)

Mary insists on herself (“myself … myself”), as if she were historically transcendent, her own construction. Yet in a context where economic autonomy is repeatedly filched, such insistence is out of place, a parody of revolutionary exhortation.³⁵ The language of female autonomy comes full circle: self-assertion does not issue in success, it is incapable of effecting change.

Mary continues to look for work as an engraver, an embroiderer. She almost succeeds in becoming a companion, until Osborne gossips to the family about “former incidents” in Mary's life, claiming that her “present distress” is “wilful” (145). She is then arrested for debt. Osborne turns up offering her release, a “legal settlement … independence” (150) in exchange for Mary's favor. But she reviles him. His usage of her, his smug derogation of language (“independence”?) evinces the decadent potential of a prerogative asserted (arrogantly) by the elder Pelham and (defensively) by Raymond. When Osborne leaves, he invokes Mary's frailty relative to his will, her subjection by a legal machine that he controls: “Let the law, then, for the present … take its course” (151).

Miraculously, Raymond's old servant, James, finds Mary and pays her debt. With money left him by Raymond, he has, moreover, rented a farm from Osborne, and together they set off to work it. Still believing she may “triumph over [her] malignant fortune” (155), Mary defines “triumph” as apolitical economy, a state of “mind”:

Let us rather look forward; my mind, unviolated, exults in its purity; my spirit, uncorrupted, experiences, in conscious rectitude, a sweet compensation for its unmerited sufferings. The noble mind, superior to accident, is serene amidst the wreck of fortune and of fame.

(156)

The mind's “unviolated … purity” recuperates Mary's violated chastity. Her history is erased. She claims agency for herself independent of prior personal narrative, subverting “ideology” by disentangling self from discourse. But in this rarefied arena of “spirit,” “superior to accident,” Mary's economy is a zero-sum: “uncorrupted” “mind” is “sweet compensation” for “sufferings,” while fortune's “wreck” remains unrecovered. For her, economy is coterminus with mind.

But as she begins to farm, “tast[ing] the sweets of independence” (159), weather ruins her crops, she is harassed for debt, and Osborne haunts the area spreading gossip. Mary is helpless against “the influence of wealth and power, the bigotry of prejudice, the virulence of envy” (163). No one intervenes. James dies. Osborne seizes the day, finally offering “legal title to his hand and fortune” (164). But Mary shuns him, demanding he restore “my fame, my honour, my friend, my unbroken mind” (165). “Mind” and the accoutrements of virtue—“fame … honor”—are still Mary's obsessive concern. However, her rhetoric consigns them to the past. She acknowledges that “toils that entangle,” debauch “unviolated … purity.”

After Osborne departs, Mary's situation becomes desperate. Her creditor sues out a writ against her. She molders in jail, recalling her mother, history, which she can no longer dismiss:

Involved, as by a fatal mechanism, in the infamy of my wretched mother, thrown into similar circumstances, and looking to a catastrophe little less fearful, I have still the consolation of remembering that I suffered not despair to plunge my soul in crime … and struggled in the trammels of prejudice with dauntless intrepidity. But it avails me not! … [E]njoyment, activity, usefulness hope, are lost forever.

(168)

Mary acknowledges defeat, the failure of “mind” to overcome material conditions, to procure revolution over “prejudice.” After two years, “reason faultered and nature yielded” (169). In Mary's experience, mind becomes as vulnerable as physical “nature”; it is not disembodied “rational will,” persevering “superior to personal injury” (119).

Mary is rescued by the Nevilles, but too late. Mrs. Neville remarks: “over your stronger mind, injustice has triumphed, and consigned you to an early grave” (172). Mary's potency, her reality as a counter to “prejudice,” is diminished to that of Mrs. Neville, who admits “I had no individual existence; my very being was absorbed in that of my husband” (173). Heroic womanhood and that of the utmost banality share a common inconsequence. In such an equation, Hays's indictment of revolutionary discourse is extreme: it is as if it never were.³⁶ Mary answers such discourse in terms of total negation: “the powers of my mind wasted, my projects rendered abortive … I have lived in vain!” (174). Her only qualification of such negativity is itself submissive to history—male-engendered history: she hopes to become history, “kindl[ing] in the heart of man, in behalf of my oppressed sex, the sacred claims of humanity and justice” (174).³⁷ Her words evoke “reason” as a bare, ruined category, reproaching Mrs. Neville but routing revolutionary vision:

Reason derides the weak effort; while the fabric of superstition and crime, extending its broad base, mock the toil of the visionary projector.

(175)

It might be the epitaph of revolution, except that its sentiments became common coin. That same year, in A Letter to the Women of England, Anne Frances Randall wrote of generic despair that projects Mary's life into universals:

Supposing that a woman has experienced every insult, every injury, that her vain-boasting, high-bearing associate, man, can inflict: imagine her, driven from society; deserted by her kindred; scoffed at by the world; exposed to poverty; assailed by malice; and consigned to scorn: with no companion but sorrow, no prospect but disgrace; she has no remedy. She appeals to the feeling and reflecting part of mankind; they pity, but they do not seek to redress her: she flies to her own sex, they not only condemn, but they avoid her. She talks of punishing the villain who has destroyed her: he smiles at the menace, and tells her, she is, a woman.

(7-8)

Hays's chillingly modern perception is that “the feeling and reflecting part of mankind” menaces revolution by seeming to support it.

Notes

1. On Hays's literary context, and the sorority of writers whose ideas she shared, see Eleanor Ty, Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993), as well as Ty's introductions to The Victim of Prejudice (Peterborough: Broadview P, 1994), and Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996). See also Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993), and Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Saint Martin's P, 1992); Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975); Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984). In Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), Claudia Johnson describes Burke's patriarchalism: “in self-proclaimed contrast to crazed French ideologues who would break with time-honored traditions in order to create a new society based on rational principles, Burke apotheosizes … the retired life of the country gentleman, the orderly transmission of property, the stabilizing principle of generational continuity, the grateful deference of youth to venerable age, and of course the chastity of wives and daughters which can guarantee the social identity of men and heirs” (5).

2. Unsex'd Revolutionaries 71.

3. Unsex'd Revolutionaries 62. The irony of female “reason” was that it failed to liberate, producing only a disappointed self-awareness. In A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (London, 1799), Anne Frances Randall remarks: “woman is taught to discriminate just sufficiently to know her own unhappiness” (84).

4. Victim of Prejudice 54.

5. Wollstonecraft argues that if women are “really capable of acting like rational creatures, let them … cultivate their minds, give them the salutary sublime curb of principle, and let them attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves only dependent on God.” The goal is agency: “I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.” Miriam Brody, ed., A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Penguin, 1992) 121, 156. Mary Poovey notes that Wollstonecraft never escaped “the myth of personal autonomy,” failing to see that an “individual's opportunities” are in “important respects, delimited by one's position within culture.” The Proper Lady 109. In Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (London, 1793), Hays argues that “the vulgar of every rank,” “terrified at the very idea of our feeling and asserting our rights to rationality, raise innumerable cavils and objections, all originating from the same source, a pertinacious and jealous adherence to a narrow and mistaken self-interest, and the petty word authority” (22).

6. In a stunningly modern intuition, Hays suggests that (even revolutionary) “reason” does not transcend ideology, but reproduces it. For theorizations of ideology elaborating this position, see James Kavanagh, “Ideology,” in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 306-20, and Julian Henriques, et al., Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (London: Methuen, 1984).

7. David Simpson notes that “in the writings of the late eighteenth century there is an unusually widespread preoccupation with the problem of knowledge. … All specifications of what ‘is’ come to be accompanied by concerns about ‘who's asking,’ and why. … Not a little of the long- and short-term failure of the rationalist project of the 1790s, as argued by Paine, Godwin, and others, must be explained in reference to the sheer anachronism, then and since, of proposing to defend a model of objectivity so much at odds with other besetting contemporary convictions.” See “Romanticism, Criticism, and Theory,” in Stuart Curran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 1-24, 21, 22. Hays suggests that when it is a woman “who's asking,” the “problem of knowledge” is acute. She reflects “besetting … convictions” concerning the pathology of patriarchy.

8. On the capacity of imaginative literature to tease out contingent meanings of abstract concepts, see Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: U of California P, 1996). Speaking of “justice” (one might substitute abstract “reason”) Dimock observes: “We might think of literature, then, as the textualization of justice, the transposition of its clean abstractions into the messiness of representation. We might think of it as well as the historicization of justice, the transposition of a universal language into a historical semantics: a language given meaning by many particular contexts, saturated with the nuances and inflections of its many usages” (10).

9. Janet Todd, ed., Mary; Maria / Mary Wollstonecraft. Matilda / Mary Shelley (New York: New York UP, 1992) 85.

10. Anca Vlasopolos expresses the common view that after the Vindication was published, Wollstonecraft's oeuvre (including her private, unpublished writing) “increasingly recognizes the role of emotions, of grand passions in shaping a human being's mind and experience.” See “Mary Wollstonecraft's Mask of Reason in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Dalhousie Review 60 (1980): 462-71, 469. The Vindication was, of course, Wollstonecraft's manifesto for extending the Rights of Man to women—for masculinizing female epistemology by separating “reason” and “feeling”—and so I treat it as the benchmark for Hays's own idealizing aspirations. Hays's ultimate view that reason is ideologically freighted, and hence aligned with the disruptive potential of emotion, distinguishes her epistemology from Wollstonecraft's. While the war between reason and emotion is the common coin of late eighteenth-century women's texts, Hays complicates this dichotomy.

11. Raymond's proleptic knowledge of the “world”—it “will hardly be inclined” to favor Mary—comports with and reinforces his power as patriarch, taken for granted by Mary. On the mutual engagement of power and knowledge, see Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), and Henriques 115-18. Mary's commitment to Raymond (her incapacity to attenuate the relationship by questioning his acumen) reflects a definition of self as tied to the relationship. In Toward A New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon P, 1976), Jean Baker Miller notes that “women's sense of self becomes very much organized around being able to make and then to maintain affiliation and relationship” (83).

12. The “Female Novel of Education and the Confessional Heroine,” Dalhousie Review 60 (1980) 472-86, Virginia Tiger observes that Hays “creates a confessional heroine whose defining characteristic is the capacity to think. Traditionally, when confessional novels center on the thinking heroine, the critical action is not outward, but rather the inward progress to judgment …” (472).

13. Raymond—the “father”—is a riposte to Burkean family romance: operating at the level of epistemology, he disorganizes the “daughter's” apprehension of language within the social convention of “shelter.” As such, he adumbrates modernist themes. In “The Paradox of the Individual Triumph: Instrumentality and the Family in What Maisie Knew,” South Atlantic Review 53.4 (1988): 77-85, Lee Heller notes that in Henry James's novella, “the family, that place where first meanings are assigned, is the source of this instability [“where identity and meaning are contingent”], not a safe haven from it (as it is in so many nineteenth-century novels). … What Maisie must learn is that ‘language is contextually, not absolutely significant—meaning arises out of what language does, not what it is’” (79-80).

14. Mary's grateful imputation to Raymond of “claims,” typifies late eighteenth-century disciplinary regimes. By that time, fathers no longer controlled daughters by intimidation, educating them instead to become “self-regulating, self-policing” agents of the paternal will. See Caroline Gonda, Reading Daughters' Fictions 1709-1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 32. In Their Fathers' Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace argues that such “new-style patriarchy” dispensed with overt paternal prerogative, appealing instead to “reason … and noncoercive exercise of authority.” Instead of threatening punishment, it operated “according to the more compelling themes of guilt and obligation” (110). The girl “internalized the voice of paternal authority as her own” (21); she “must say [yes] sincerely and as though she has posed the question herself” (Lynda Zwinger, Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality [Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991] 8); her “desire for paternal approval becomes an effective method of control” (Gonda, Reading 179). Training daughters to be dependent on paternal love and esteem, made them “least likely to view [fathers] critically” (Kowaleski-Wallace, Fathers' Daughters 97). Paternal discipline and patriarchal “ideology” constituted reciprocal, internalized brakes on female autonomy.

15. Even Ty's exemplary study sees Hays's attack on patriarchy as seeking “to disprove and dispel the Burkean myth of the benevolent country squire as an adequate miniature head or ‘monarch.”’ In the context of Burkean myth, she characterizes Raymond as Mary's “benevolent guardian.” Unsex'd Revolutionaries 60, 61.

16. I disagree with Poovey's judgment that “Wollstonecraft is generally not challenging women to act. When she calls for a ‘revolution in female manners,’ for example, she is not advocating a feminist uprising to overthrow manners but rather a general acquiescence in the gradual turning that the word ‘revolution’ was commonly taken to mean in the eighteenth century.” See The Proper Lady 79 (orig. emph.). Without debating “feminist,” I suggest that “revolution” resonates with the cataclysm in France, and as such implies that women should “act” to obtain the means of production of autonomous subjectivity. Wollstonecraft's concatenation of reason and agency resonates with a “humanist position [that] tends to see the individual as the agent of all social phenomena and productions, including knowledge. The specific notion of the individual contained in this outlook is one of a unitary, essentially non-contradictory and above all rational entity.” Her account differs, therefore, from those presenting the individual “not as a pregiven entity but as a constituted ‘always-already social’ being, a being locked in ideological practices.” Henriques 93, 95.

17. On this point, see Mary Poovey, above at n. 5, and Moira Gatens, “‘The Oppressed State of My Sex’: Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling, and Equality,” in Mary Shanley and Carole Pateman, eds., Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991) 112-28.

18. Reeve, Plans of Education (London, 1792) 119-20. The notion that appropriate, remunerative work could be had by most women conflicts with economic reality and contemporary literary representations. In Women Writing About Money: Women's Fiction in England, 1790-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), Edward Copeland notes that “the spectre of lessened expectations haunts women's fiction” of the period” (37). In Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1981), Judith Newton observes that what lay behind an “incursion [by her father and “Daddy Crisp”] upon [Frances] Burney's status and autonomy was to a large degree the declining economic stature of genteel young women in the eighteenth century, for women of all stations had lost and were continuing to lose their previously recognized economic value” (26). In The Age of Manufactures 1700-1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain (London: Routledge, 1994), Maxine Berg states that as the century progressed, “the introduction of new technology further increased unemployment for women” (150). “Women were left to perform the manual tasks while men used the efficient equipment,” which effectively “‘enhanc[ed] the prestige of men’” (155). In London in the Age of Industrialization: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), L. D. Schwarz notes that “when they were no longer employed in service, eighteenth-century women were reputed to crowd into the few available jobs that paid any money worth earning, and to compete with each other for work and for pay” (17). “The restrictions on female employment were one of the major causes of the poverty and exploitation suffered by women” (46). On men's organized efforts to keep women out of the labor market and to depress their wages, see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995) 119-40. Mary Ann Radcliffe's The Female Advocate: Or, An Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (London, 1798), castigated “the vile practice of men filling such situations as seem calculated, not only to give bread to poor females, but thereby to enable them to tread the paths of virtue” (409).

19. For the classic reading of Crusoe as “self-made” man, typifying emergent capitalism, see James Watt, “Robinson Crusoe as Myth,” in Norton Critical Edition of Robinson Crusoe (New York: Norton, 1975) 311-31. See also Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968) 188-204. Kramnick argues that Crusoe typifies a type of “projecting man … shaping his own world and his own destiny” (194).

20. Hays, Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (London, 1793) 21.

21. Hays's use of “experience” to test theory was becoming a feature of women's novels. As Tiger points out, “the novel offered a place for women writers to respond creatively—beyond protest at privation—to their generic concerns, their shared experience of being female. Eighteenth-century radical and conservative women seized upon the novel, transforming an atraditional literary genre into a medium for female, sometimes feminist education.” “The Female Novel of Education” 476. Hays's attempt to calibrate theory and experience anticipates modern feminist advocacy. In Breaking Out: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology (London: Routledge, 1993), Liz Stanley and Sue Wise argue that while feminists tend to “go beyond the personal, into structural and more abstract work which develops [its] themes in more conventionally theoretical forms,” they should attend to work “deeply rooted in variations in, and kinds of, experience” that can “help us to understand, in a way that abstract theory can't, the complexities and contradictions of our own, and other women's, experience” (77). See also Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992) 22-40.

22. With William as tempter, Mary becomes a type of Eve, losing her innocence before men as she did once already when Raymond expelled her. Troped as Mary/Eve (virgin/whore), hence as a staple of patriarchal discourse, Mary cannot avoid compromise by such discourse. On the ideology of the virgin/whore, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).

23. Both the Vindication and Appeal exhort men. Neither explores the confusion, even guilt, such exhortation provokes. In Raymond, power to affect a woman's life, combined with impotence to dispel “prejudice,” triggers moral/emotional contradiction. For another approach to this dilemma, see John P. Farrell, Revolution as Tragedy: the Dilemma of the Moderate from Scott to Arnold (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980), citing the gulf between “revolution as a thought and revolution as an action” (30).

24. Raymond admits that Mary's “childish association [with William] has been a reciprocal source of moral and mental improvement” (31). His sudden effort to separate them therefore wrenches Mary, recapitulating Raymond's dismissal of her to the garden (traceable as well to the elder Pelham's dictates). In both cases, Raymond acts to disrupt patterns he seemed to reinforce, disorganizing Mary's sense of security, continuity, and the “natural” order of things. In this respect, Raymond's actions distort what Veronica Machtlinger refers to as the “development of a positive Oedipus complex and its attendant wishes directed toward the father.” See “The Father in Psychological Theory,” in Michael E. Lamb, ed., The Role of the Father in Child Development, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1981) 113-53, 139. Machtlinger argues that “this would be ideally a relationship in which the girl would ‘discover’ and experience the first extensions of her femininity in a ‘safe’ relationship with an admiring and responsive father. … It is difficult to conceive of a girl developing a healthy and secure gender identity without such a gradually developing awareness of what her femininity is and means to her” (139). Raymond instead suppresses Mary's emerging sexuality, negating her healthy and innocent feelings towards William. Machtlinger departs from Sigmund Freud, who abandoned the parallel Oedipus complex for girls. See “A Child is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origins of Sexual Perversions,” in Standard Edition, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth, 1955).

25. Mary's notes that “some embarrassments of a pecuniary nature assisted in determining my patron … to acceed the more readily to the proposal of his friend” (7).

26. As the Vindication observes: “From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind” (257).

27. Hays dramatizes what was perceived as intellectual misfeasance, where knowledge is imparted to women but its use prohibited. In A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), Anne Frances Randall states: “The parent … who enlightened [a woman's] understanding, like the dark lantern, to spread its rays internally only, puts into her grasp a weapon of defence against the perils of existence; and at the same moment commands her not to use it. Man says you may read, and you will think, but you shall not … employ your thoughts beyond the boundaries which we have set up around you. … Why expand the female heart, merely to render it more conscious that it is, by the tyranny of custom, rendered vulnerable?” (83-84).

28. Raymond's attempt to deny sexual opportunity to William is a species of the “cognitive mastery” one male asserts over another by seducing a female. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), 56. His suggestion that Mary marry a local farmer would “consummate” such “mastery,” constituting as well a typical, patriarchal marriage of convenience.

29. Elizabeth Fishel observes that “the Patriarch's posture as a moral arbiter is often used to camouflage the irrepressible sexuality he makes every effort to repress. So before she can be a free agent, the daughter of the Patriarch must come to terms with both her father's repressed sexuality and her own burgeoning sexuality.” The Men in Our Lives: Fathers, Lovers, Husbands, Mentors (New York: William Morrow, 1985) 67. It is possible, moreover, that an eighteenth-century reader would have seen Mary's dismissal to the Nevilles as instantiating Raymond's fear of his own attraction to her—is she her mother's surrogate in still another sense? On father/guardian attraction to the daughter/ward in eighteenth-century novels, see Gonda, Reading, ch. 1.

30. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), Burke opined: “Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our natural character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers.” See Geoffrey Tillotson, et al., eds. Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Fort Worth: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1969) 1282.

31. Raymond yields to the extent of telling Mary that William should “try the world, and prove his boasted strength.” If he remains uncorrupted, he may claim Mary's “invaluable heart” (81). However, Raymond knows that Mary has internalized his “wishes” (“I see in you all that my most sanguine wishes presaged” [57]), and that appearing not to “impose” will only strengthen his moral authority. When William in fact proposes to Mary prior to departing for two years at his father's behest, Mary speaks as if her father's mouthpiece: “What! shall I first bind my fate to your's, and then suffer you … to expose your yet-uncertain virtue to the contagion of the world?” (84). Unlike the young man who seduced Mary's mother, William does seek to marry Mary; but she rejects him, anticipating that class-based norms (which bewilder her) will nonetheless wreck the marriage. This is Raymond's logic.

32. Osborne's question reflects the assumptions of Squire Falkland in Godwin's Caleb Williams (London, 1794), which attacks class bias in the legal system. On the substantial impediments to convictions for rape in the eighteenth century, see Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845 (London: Pandora, 1987).

33. Hays perceives history as a heuristic, “not exclusively as the record of changes in the social organization of the sexes but also crucially as a participant in the production of knowledge about sexual difference.” See Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia, 1988) 2.

34. James Turner notes that “as consumers and as traders, women whose sexual ‘credit’ was broken could not obtain financial credit or employment.” “Court records show that sexual defamation did have serious economic consequences.” “Male discourse and gesture actually did control reputation, and that reputation translated directly into financial life or death.” See “‘News from the New Exchange’: Commodity, Erotic Fantasy, and the Female Entrepreneur,” in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995) 419-39, 427.

35. In A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), Linda Hutcheon proposes that parody inheres in “trans-contextualization,” radical displacement into an inappropriate context.

36. In The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), Marianne Hirsch argues that women's novels of the nineteenth century indulge a fantasy of “the heroine's singularity based on a disidentification from the fate of other women, especially mothers” (10). Hays refuses, indeed repudiates, such fantasy. Hirsch also observes that “female plots … attempt to subvert the constraints of dominant patterns [i.e. of patriarchal discourse] by means of various ‘emancipatory strategies’—the revision of endings, beginnings, patterns of progression,” and that such a process of “resistance, revision, and emancipation” is “a feminist act defining a feminist poetics” (8). Hays eschews such “strategies,” denying Mary any “heroic” singularity.

37. Gary Kelly argues that English “revolutionary” novelists frequently show “how self-reflection and its resultant political consciousness can break the cycle of institutional reproduction of evil and error”; this new consciousness is “expressed socially, as a confessional self-vindication or warning to others—the text of the novel itself or an inset narrative within it.” See “Romantic Fiction,” in Curran, ed., Cambridge Companion 196-215, 204. Hays, however, short-circuits the monitory aspirations of both Marys' texts, compounding the irony of trying to “break the cycle” of patriarchy by producing monitory texts.