SOURCE: Rajan, Tilottama. “Autonarration and genotext in Mary Hays' Memoirs of Emma Courtney.” In Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789-1837, edited by Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright, pp. 213-39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Rajan refutes critics who consider Memoirs of Emma Courtney scandalously autobiographical, suggesting instead that the novel is a self-conscious attempt to explore the relationship between experience and textuality.]

I

Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman, long written out of the canon by being used as a source-book for her life, has recently become an object of serious attention. Mary Hays' Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796),¹ however, remains the victim of a reduction of text to biography that fails to recognize its complex interimplication of textuality and reality. Hays' novel is based on the story of her unreturned passion for the Cambridge radical William Frend. Its autobiographical nature led contemporaries to see it as a scandalous disrobing in public, and the novel is still dismissed as a monologic transfer of “life” into “text.” Memoirs, however, self-consciously draws upon personal experience as part of its rhetoric, so as to position experience within textuality and relate textuality to experience. From the distinctions by Schiller and the Schlegels onwards, between classicism as impersonal and Romanticism as the revelation of personality, the inscription of the author in the text has been a characteristically Romantic move: expressive not of the egotistical sublime, but of the text as the unfinished transcription of a subject still in process. Hays' text can be seen as part of a larger (post)-Romantic intergenre that I shall call autonarration, which is also used (though differently) by male writers such as Rousseau and Wordsworth. Far from collapsing the boundary between life and text, autonarration effects a series of “trans-positions” (to borrow Kristeva's term)² among ideology, life, and fiction. The transposition of personal experience into fiction recognizes “experience” as discursively constructed. That Hays draws on her own experience is a way of authorizing what she does, and of reciprocally implicating the reader in the text. But it is also a way of putting the finality of the text under erasure, by suggesting that what it “does” or where it ends is limited by its genesis in the life of a conflicted historical subject.

This paper argues for the importance of Hays' novel to both the feminist and Romantic traditions, and in the process works out a phenomenology of autonarration. But because the novel is relatively unknown, it is necessary to begin by describing it and by saying something about Hays herself. Mary Hays was born in 1760 into a middle-class family of Rational Dissenters near London.³ Her early engagement to a fellow Dissenter John Eccles ended in tragedy when he died shortly before their marriage. Through the preacher Robert Robinson she met some of the leading intellectuals of the day, and eventually became a member of Joseph Johnson's radical circle. Thereafter Hays made a tenuous living by writing and reviewing, and produced essays, other novels, her own vindication of women's rights entitled An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), as well as a six-volume attempt to construct a gynocentric tradition under the title Female Biography (1805). Although her relationship with Robinson and William Godwin was purely intellectual, Hays became notorious among her contemporaries for throwing herself at men who apparently did not return her affections. Through Frend she met Godwin, whom she introduced to his future wife Wollstonecraft, and with whom she carried on a long correspondence. Her letters were not only about her (non)relationship with Frend but also about its ramifications: a sexual economy that constructed women only for marriage, and the resulting predicament of single women untrained for a profession. It was Godwin who encouraged her to write a fictionalized version of her experiences. She wrote the novel, she implied to him, for reasons that were neither purely literary nor kathartic but political: “My Manuscript was not written merely for the public eye—another latent, and perhaps stronger, motive lurked beneath—… my story is too real.”⁴

Hays is best remembered as the author of Wollstonecraft's obituary and the person who was at her bedside when she died. But though she has consequently been identified with or dismissed as a more outrageous version of Wollstonecraft,⁵ there are significant differences between the two. Hays' attitude to passion and to the tradition of romance and sentiment was more positive than Wollstonecraft's.⁶ Moreover, Memoirs is the work of a woman who could not or did not enter the marriage circuit. For although Wollstonecraft felt it would have been more appropriate for the novel to end with the death of the male protagonist and thus the unavoidable termination of Emma's love,⁷ Hays has her heroine outlive the conventional ending of novels about women in death or marriage. Curiously enough, while The Wrongs of Woman is about much more than its love interest, Wollstonecraft seems unable to see her way beyond Darnford's possible treachery. But although Memoirs seems to be about nothing but romantic love, the terms of Emma's life are not really defined by that love. In fact the novel is concerned less with Emma reenacting or even remembering her love than with her writing and potentially reading it, so as to understand women's representation in the symbolic order.⁸

Drawing on Hays' own letters to Frend and Godwin (who appears in the novel as Francis), the novel focuses on the one-sided correspondence between its title character and the man she chooses to love, Augustus Harley. Emma, like so many nineteenth-century characters for whom the family is an imposed structure, has lost her mother and her aunt early in life, has been brought up by an absent father, and has been transferred after his death to the care of an uncle. It is in her uncle's house that she meets the destructively passionate Montague, as well as the highly rational Francis, with whom she exchanges ideas and to whose not entirely sympathetic eyes she later confides the story of her love. Augustus enters Emma's story by way of a violent coach accident to which I shall return, and in which he saves her and Montague from death but is badly injured. Seeming to encourage her friendship at first, he later becomes evasive and refuses to answer her letters. His ostensible reason is his uncle's will, which stipulates that he will forfeit his legacy if he marries. Emma is never entirely convinced by the purely pecuniary motive but her declarations of love and pleas for frankness are met by injunctions to be less selfish and more restrained. Eventually it emerges that Augustus is actually married, to a foreign woman he no longer loves, and whose existence he has concealed for fear of losing the legacy.

This disclosure ends their (non)relationship and Emma, now under financial pressure, marries Montague. She is a faithful wife and mother until a second coach accident outside her home brings Augustus back into her life. She learns that Augustus, having been reduced to poverty, has lost his wife and two of his children to illness. Emma nurses him until he dies, and inherits the guardianship of his remaining son, Augustus Jr. From then on her marriage deteriorates, culminating in Montague's murder of his child by a servant girl and his subsequent suicide. Emma tells her story partly through a series of letters: passionately rational letters to Augustus, and rationally passionate ones to Francis, to whom she writes about the economic predicament of single women and the relationship between reason and passion. The letters are interspersed with narrative to make up the memoirs of the title. But the memoirs are also framed by two letters to the now adult son of Augustus, who is himself involved in a passionate relationship. Ostensibly Emma conveys her (hi)story as a cautionary exemplum to her adopted son. But the epistolary form is potentially transgressive, crossing the bounds of private space so as to say what cannot be said in public, and claiming a certain immediacy and presence. In putting her letters within her memoirs, Emma had allowed their radicalism to be contained within the mode of pastness. But the framing of the memoirs themselves within a return to the epistolary form suspends this cautionary closure, by once again transposing the question of passion from the past to the unresolved present.

Crucial to Hays' novel is the concept of Desire. Desire is part of the text's functioning in ways to which I shall return. But it is also thematically central to a novel that questions the opposition between reason and passion, so as to reposition female subjectivity within the psychosocial economy. Felicity Nussbaum has described how women's sexuality posed a threat to this economy in specifically material ways having to do with the inheritance of property and thus the maintenance of the class system.⁹ Emma's aspirations are also subversive because of the social implications of a woman taking the initiative in love. But her desire has to do with more than sexuality. Thus I use the word partly as it is used by Lacan, for whom desire is always in excess of its object, the object being only a partial representation of something beyond it, and thus implicated in a chain of deferrals and transferences. Memoirs is not about Emma's desire for Augustus but about something else that is signified by that desire. Moreover, because it suggests the substitutive and still “symbolic” character of the object(s) of desire, the Lacanian term avoids the positivism sometimes associated with political reading. For marriage to Augustus remains a signifier within the symbolic order, while the further transference of Emma's desire to his son is still what Fredric Jameson calls a symbolic resolution: one that allows her to be Augustus' mother, the mother who teaches but also the mother of his desire, and yet as mother in a paradoxical position of origination and subordination. Hays herself recognizes the nature of her project when she points in An Appeal to the difficulty of positing women's identity, given that men have so constructed them that “they have lost even the idea of what they might have been, or what they still might be”:

We must therefore endeavour, to describe them [women] by negatives. As, perhaps, the only thing that can be advanced with certainty on the subject, is,—what they are not. For it is very clear, that they are not what they ought to be, that they are not what men would have them to be, and to finish the portrait, that they are not what they appear to be.¹⁰

But if the currently Lacanian connotations of “desire” allow us to approach Memoirs in terms of the “negativity” of the signifier, there are limitations in his version of the concept. In tracing the history of desire from Jean Hyppolite's influential rereading of Hegel, through Sartre, to Lacan, Judith Butler comments on the attenuation that occurs as desire is transposed from a dialectical to a psychoanalytic and structural framework.¹¹ Not only does Lacan dissociate desire from any sense of subjective agency, he also denies that desire can be “materialised or concretised through language,” whether directly or negatively.¹² Moreover, because he sees desire as endlessly metonymic and unsatisfiable, he dispossesses the means by which it signifies itself of historical specificity or facilitating value, making the signifier no more than a position in an empty series.

In using the word desire, then, I continue to have in mind Hyppolite's rereading of Hegel as part of a negative dialectic that is particularly (post)Romantic. Desire is the “very existence of man, ‘who never is what he is,’ who always exceeds himself,” and who in that sense “has a future.”¹³ As such, it is the power of the negative in experience, as well as the reflexivity of a consciousness that must know itself partly as an other and as existing for another.¹⁴ Put differently, Emma's love is an articulation of the imaginary within the symbolic, or in Hegelian terms of the subjective within the objective. Beginning as the idealism of a highly romantic subject who resists being confined by things as they are, Emma's desire can express itself only in the socially prescribed form of heterosexual love. Her desire is doubly negative, in the sense that it resists the symbolic order through an identification with the masculine that sets it at odds with itself. Yet this negativity is dialectical and not deconstructive, because desire makes the negative into “something to be labored upon and worked through.”¹⁵ For Emma this working through occurs through the epistolary format of the novel, which makes of self-consciousness an intersubjective process. For Hays herself it occurs through the act of writing, in which she must become other than herself in the text in order to know herself.

That Emma articulates herself through romantic love has to do with the way women have been constructed in the social text. She herself makes this point when she refuses to abandon her love of Augustus, referring to it as the mind's necessary “object” and “pursuit,” and arguing, “I feel that I am neither a philosopher, nor a heroine,—but a woman, to whom education has given a sexual character” (M [Memoirs of Emma Courtney], 120). Thus although Hays' critics found Emma's epistolary pursuit of Augustus unseemly and her concern with her feelings narcissistic, to see the novel as fetishising desire is to miss its pathos. Memoirs is strategically rather than essentially about female sexuality. From the beginning Emma's desire is excessive: it exceeds the objective correlative it tries to find in Augustus Harley, and even at the end it survives the dismantling of its object. At first Augustus encourages Emma “in the pursuit of learning and science” (M, 71), so that her need for a relationship with him is also a desire for access to knowledge (M, 79). Given women's exclusion from all but the domestic sphere, this love is also a desire for the enunciative position within the social order that a woman could have only in relation to a man. But as the convenient vagueness of the word “desire” suggests, it would be wrong to give it a precise referent. For when Emma does acquire the status afforded by marriage to Montague, domesticity becomes an empty signifier that does not satisfy her.

Emma's desire is all the more difficult to characterize because it is not even initially sexual: as she says, it involves a transference of her affection for his mother (M, 59), in which she loves in him what he must inherit from her. What begins as a desire for everything effaced from her own patriarchal upbringing is thus androgynously transcoded onto the masculine as the only sanctioned object of adult female love. Thus it is significant that Emma's specifically sexual desire is set in motion before she actually meets him by Augustus' portrait (M, 59). This mobilizing of desire by an image that precedes its re-presentation in a real person anticipates texts such as Shelley's Alastor, where the protagonist unites in an image “all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture,” before he actually goes in search of his epipsyche.¹⁶ Figuring the precedence of the signifier over the signified, the portrait marks the fundamentally Romantic structure of desire, not simply as lack, but also as a form of Imagination subversively knotted into the symbolic structures of representation and the family.¹⁷

If the word desire suggests a non-coincidence of the subject with its object, we also need to set it beside Hays' own more positive term “passion,” and to read them as intertextual glosses on each other. The frequent discussions of “passion” in Memoirs involve Emma's struggle to rethink the position of women by examining the identification of emotion as the site of feminine weakness. Hays' views on this subject are highly conflicted. On the one hand, in representing her memoirs as a warning against error, Emma accepts the dominant devaluation of passion and related terms such as “romanticism” and “imagination.” On the other hand, Hays differs from Wollstonecraft in arguing for passion as a form of strength. Writing to Francis, Emma asks, “What are passions, but another name for powers?” (M, 86).

The questioning of the hierarchy between reason and passion links Hays to a re-examination of this opposition in Romantic thinking from Blake to Schopenhauer. But whereas Schopenhauer will argue that the representations produced by reason are no more than disguised expressions of the will, Hays' protagonist suggests that passion can be deeply rational. Writing to Francis, she argues that reason and passion are not necessarily opposed, and indeed that reason begins in passion: “do you not perceive, that my reason was the auxiliary of my passion, or rather my passion the generative principle of my reason?” (M, 145). This statement significantly revises her earlier condemnation of herself on the grounds that “my reason was but an auxiliary to my passion” (M, 61). If reason is originally the elaboration of passion in a series of general principles, the outward circumference of energy as Blake would say, then passion remains vitally necessary to the reconsideration of what would otherwise congeal into law. For Emma's passion causes her to rethink the social structures that condemn that passion as outrageous, and thus her desire also becomes the site of her emergence as a political subject. Or as she tells Francis, “Had not these contradictions, these oppositions, roused the energy of my mind, I might have domesticated, tamely, in the lap of indolence and apathy” (M, 145).

Hays' use of the term passion remains highly conflicted, for the active thrust of the word is continually negated by Emma's acceptance of its patriarchal encoding as something that one suffers and by which one is infected. However, a reading of the term purely in terms of lack does not convey the force of Hays' project. If desire does more than eroticize female powerlessness, that is because the discourse of desire in the tradition to which Hays' text belongs is allied with the modes of autonarration and epistolarity. These forms, which will be the concern of the remaining two sections, implicate author and reader respectively in the process of desire. Linda Kauffman has provided a valuable account of how amorous discourse is elaborated through epistolarity, so that the text becomes a letter to the reader,¹⁸ thus putting desire in circulation. But a further untheorized element in her discussion is the “auto-graphing” of many of the texts she describes, either by the author or by the reader. Jane Eyre is curiously subtitled an autobiography, and Kauffman's discussion focuses on its correspondence with Brontë's letters to Constantin Heger, the Belgian schoolmaster with whom she fell in love as a young woman. As interesting is the reception history of The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, which testifies to a compelling desire to make the nun into a historical person.¹⁹ As Ruth Perry points out, eighteenth-century readers liked to see fictional characters as “real,”²⁰ in striking contrast to readers nursed on contemporary theory. The blurring of the line between fiction and reality potentially allowed readers to write themselves, or to pursue the trace of their desire, through the text. This conflation of the fictional and the real becomes in the Romantic period a powerfully dialectical use of the subjective as a sub-version of the objective world.

II

Memoirs of Emma Courtney can be seen as an example of autonarration, an intergenre characterized by its mixing of private and public spaces. Autonarration is part of a larger discursive formation characteristic of Romanticism, in which writers bring details from their personal lives into their texts, speaking in a voice that is recognizably their own or through a persona whose relation to the biographical author is obvious. Thus Coleridge's conversation poems are situated within his life through specific references to the time and place of their composition, to friends such as Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, and to incidents from his domestic life. Somewhat differently Shelley in The Triumph of Life and Keats in The Fall of Hyperion inscribe in their texts what are best described as subversions of themselves referred to by the pronoun “I.” Subjectivity, however, is not always indicated by the use of the first person or of local and topographical markers. Thus the Byronic hero is a third person character, but is nevertheless a figure for a public persona that is recognizably a projection of the author himself.

Criticism from Eliot to the present has taught us to exile the author from a supposedly ironic or decentered text, and insofar as the Romantics deviate from this standard of impersonality, the author's presence in the text has been seen as a form of egotistical sublimity. But the author's self-representation through a textual figure is quite different from her presence. On the one hand, subjectivity offers the writer an enunciative position within the social syntax that she is precluded from occupying by the aesthetic grammar of (neo)classicism and (post)modernism. As a subject who is not quite inside the space of the public, she can articulate desires that are different from (or that defer) the received genres of experience. On the other hand, these desires are textualized rather than literalized, so that the writer, in leaving life for text, ceases to be a transcendental ego and confesses her situatedness as a historical subject. Nor is it simply the case that “life” is made into a text. For the historical (as distinct from the fictitious) first-person position also inscribes the textual within the Real, by marking its genesis in and its continued importance for a historical subject.

As a specific form of this larger discourse, autonarration involves not simply the author's entry into the text through the first-person pronoun, but a sustained rewriting in fictional form of events from the author's life. Autonarrations are not fictions but they are also not autobiographies. Thus Hays' text is a highly fictionalized version of her life in which the main character is nevertheless writing her memoirs, thus inscribing the text itself as a sub-version of the autobiographical project. I use the term autonarration rather than autobiography or self-writing quite deliberately. As a subset of biography, autobiography assumes a straightforward relationship between representation and experience that allows the subject to tell her life-story either in the form of constative or of performative utterance: either as it was, or as it becomes through the act of rewriting. By contrast the term self-writing refers to a textual articulation of the self that is already not the real self, but the self as it is produced within existing discourses. Self-writing, however, includes diaries, journals, and letters as well as narratives. Autonarration is thus a form of self-writing in which the author writes her life as a fictional narrative, and thus consciously raises the question of the relationship between experience and its narrativization. It is not exclusively a women's genre, because some of Kierkegaard's writings fall within this category. Its use, however, tends to put the writer in a female subject-position.

In this sense, Wollstonecraft's first novel Mary is not a fully fledged autonarration, because it does no more than evoke the interimplication of life and texts through the titular reference to the author's name. The Wrongs of Woman, by contrast, contains sustained parallels between Maria's life and Wollstonecraft's relationship with Gilbert Imlay. These parallels, moreover, are deliberately imperfect in that Maria's lover Darnford occupies the positions of both Imlay and Godwin. He resembles Imlay in being Maria's first real lover, but in the fragmentary endings he also resembles Godwin in being the father of her second child.

The fact that the author is and is not represented by her textual surrogate has significant consequences for the reading process. For instead of generating a series of identifications in which the author recognizes her alter ego in the mirror of the text, and thus enables the reader to find and identify with the autobiographical subject within the text, the reading process involves a series of (mis)recognitions in which we cannot be quite sure of the relationship between textuality and reality. These misrecognitions generate a series of complex intertextual relationships between what is and what could be. For instance, one of the pivotal events in Wollstonecraft's life was Imlay's betrayal of the desires that she symbolically invested in him: desires that were social and political as well as romantic. That Darnford is both Imlay and Godwin narrates the possibility of a repetition that did not happen in quite that way in Wollstonecraft's life. At the same time the transposition of this betrayal into the text is effected through its displacement into an ending that she did not integrate into her novel. This displacement suspends the inevitability of betrayal, both in the text and in life: it removes the betrayal from a climactic position in the text, and by repeating it within a text, it also exposes betrayal as part of a discourse into which women are written and therefore write themselves.

As these preliminary comments indicate, autonarration puts under erasure the assumption made in autobiography that the subject can tell her own story. It is not autobiography because it is still fiction, but it is not just fiction because of its genesis in the life of a real individual. Crucial to the genre is the movement that occurs between the zones of life and fiction. We should not, however, think of the relationship between these zones as being similar to that between story and discourse. “Story” is a foundationalist concept which implies that certain events really happened in a certain order. By transposing her life into fiction, Hays recognizes that her life itself takes shape within a social text. Autonarration therefore involves a double textualization of both the narrative and the life on which it is based. At the same time its genesis in experience is crucial in complicating this textualization by inscribing the Real as what Jameson would call the absent cause of the narrative process.²¹ In gesturing beyond the text to the author's “experience,” it points us to something that cannot quite be represented in either the text or the public life of the author. This something is what impels her to articulate herself in the two different media of life and text, as if each requires the supplement of the other. Indeed both Hays and Wollstonecraft use a third medium, that of the political tract, although it is the mixed genre of autonarration that sensitizes us to the intertextual and supplementary position of seemingly simpler signifying materials such as “life” and political prose.

But the term life itself needs to be further broken down: into Hays' public history, and the autobiographical pre-text that precedes her interpellation into a social script. The pre-text is a provisional articulation of drives at the level of what Kristeva calls the “semiotic” (R [Revolution in Poetic Language], 25). As such it finds no adequate objective correlative in the history of Mary Hays or her fictional counterpart, but can only be sensed through a symptomatic reading of the differences between Hays' history and its further narrativization in Emma's memoirs. Insofar as we can describe it this provisional articulation involves desire: a desire that is at once metaphysical, political and sexual. However, any expression of this desire is already a narrativization of the pre-text produced within the psychosocial structures of the family. In this narrative desire attaches itself to an animus or more properly a masculine equivalent to what Shelley calls the epipsyche. We can note Hays' tendency to idealize men with radical political commitments: whether as mentors like Godwin, or as potential lovers like Frend. Although Johnson eventually published her Appeal, Emma Courtney recapitulates the position of a younger Mary Hays in having to express her views on the construction of gender in late eighteenth-century society in a series of private letters to a male correspondent. Hays sought relationships with men because they were her means of access to knowledge, and because the discourse of emotional relationships gave her a way of locating for herself an admittedly ambiguous enunciative position within the social text. Where her relationships with male mentors preserved the gender hierarchy that Emma struggles against in her correspondence with Francis, her more passionate relationships promised (at least ideally) a union with the male that would lead to a transcendence of hierarchy and difference.²²

If Hays' public history already writes her desire in certain pre-set social forms, Memoirs of Emma Courtney tries to displace and defamiliarize this anterior social text. Crucial to this process are the differences between the novel and the “events” that it symbolically transforms. These differences, rather than the events themselves or their fictional counterparts, are what allow us to sense the autobiographical pre-text misrepresented in Hays' public life. For it is not that Hays rewrites things as they are in her life into things as they should be in her novel: indeed Emma's life is not resolved with any more outward success than Hays' affair with Frend. Rather, by enacting her relationship with Frend in two different signifying materials, Hays dislodges the mimetic authority of either version and allows the reading process to operate in primarily negative ways that impede its premature closure. That the text does not exactly repeat Mary Hays' history opens up the possibility of a history that could have been different. On the other hand the novel, as a deflected repetition of the life, is both a deferral of that hi(story) which continues to haunt it and to reinscribe its utopian project in the structures of eighteenth-century society, and it is also a difference from its own ending, which could be written differently if transposed into an alternative set of circumstances.

We shall focus only on the most significant of the divergences between life and text: Hays' representation of Augustus. Unlike Frend, he is apolitical. Indeed his concealed passion for his foreign wife marks him as much closer to Emma than he admits, but utterly different from her in his hypocritical attitude to the feelings. Most significant of all is his secret marriage, given that Frend himself married only much later. This change is important not simply because it makes him unworthy of Emma's love, and not because it hints that she could have had Augustus if the plot of her life had been different, but because that possibility destigmatizes her desire and frees the reader from having to judge it in terms of the failure which may well be our only reason for condemning it. At the same time it is crucial that we not rewrite the plot as it is worked out in the symbolic order of Hays' history or that of Emma Courtney, by substituting for it an imaginary ending which discloses the marriage of Emma and Augustus as the text's hermeneutic secret. For this repositing of the subject within the existing social order is negated both by the displacement of the secret marriage onto a wife who is effaced from the text, and by the (dis)appearance of Emma's namesake daughter, whose early death prevents the marriage of Emma and Augustus from being consummated in the second generation. The possibility of a marriage exists as no more than a trace, which defers the outcome of Hays' life so as to make us think about it differently. But it is important that Emma's desire should not succeed, because the nature of that desire is that it exceeds its articulation as sexual desire. Augustus' unavailability renders Emma's desire pure excess, a desire that cannot have an object. It also renders this desire innocent, both of the failure that leads us to dismiss it and of the sexuality that cuts off the political radicalism of women's desire in the scandalous memoirs of writers like Charlotte Charke and Laetitia Pilkington alluded to in Hays' title.²³

Insofar as the pre-text is accessible only through the zone of possibilities generated by the differences between Hays' and Emma's histories, we have been tacitly assuming two further areas of signification in the interaction between text and life, namely the phenotext and the genotext of the novel itself. I borrow these terms from Kristeva, who defines the phenotext as that which communicates “univocal information between two full-fledged subjects.” The genotext, by contrast, is a “process” or “path” that articulates ephemeral structures and that can be “seen in language” but “is not linguistic” (R, 86-87). The phenotext, though quite different from Hays' public history, is its intratextual equivalent because both are produced within the symbolic order. It includes the mimetic and pragmatic (as opposed to expressive) dimensions of the novel: its plot, and its use of the letter as a way of forwarding the memoirs to their addressee as a cautionary tale. The genotext, according to Kristeva, is the unformulated part of the text, evident for instance in rhythm as that which exceeds statement.

Kristeva elaborates the notion of a genotext through writers such as Mallarmé and thus with reference to lyric. Moreover, her association of the semiotic with lyric and of narrative with the symbolic (R, 90)²⁴ constitutes a privatizing of the semiotic that can sometimes come across as a failure to retrieve its political potential. Yet in spite of the connection between plot and the symbolic order, writers such as Hays and Wollstonecraft choose subjective narrative rather than lyric because it provides them with a way of entering history. Where lyric allows for the expression of subjectivity, narrative positions this subjectivity in relation to the other, so as to open the genotext to political reading and so as to put it into history. One of my concerns here is therefore to explore what constitutes the genotext of narrative, and more specifically of autonarration. As we have seen, the genotext exists partly as an intertext or connective zone between the biographical and diegetic worlds, which is to say that it consists of the possibilities released by the negation of the various scripts into which the subject has been or could be written. But in addition the genotext is also intratextual. If the phenotext includes the plot and its characters as positive terms in a narrative syntax, the genotext is something the reader senses in the form taken by content: in the rhythms or processes of emplotment and the spaces between characters and generic components. It is also important to remember that the drives produced in the semiotic chora and reproduced in the genotext already bear the imprint of cultural structures. The genotext, as something which is not linguistic but is seen in language, is the overdetermined site of an entanglement between residual, dominant, and emergent discourses. Insofar as it generates the gaps in which desire can emerge, this desire is produced within the symbolic order as a transgression of this order.

Where the phenotext is positive in the sense of communicating information or positing identity, the genotext can be conceived only as a negativity. As negativity (which is a process) rather than negation (which is thetic) (R, 109-13), the genotext can be located first of all in the diacritical relations between generic components and characters. An obvious example would be the way the affirmative element in Emma's passion emerges not from what she does, but as something not quite stated and thus never confirmed in the difference between her behavior and the self-destructive passion of Montague.

A far more complex version of the functioning of differance and the trace as part of a genotext involves the conspicuous doubling of the first generation protagonists of Hays' novel in the second generation, combined with a simultaneous maintenance and reversal of the symmetry that contains the doubling within the boundaries of gender. Emma is repeated as her daughter Emma and Augustus as his son Augustus, with a symmetry that seems at first to perpetuate the gender positions of the first generation. But then Augustus' death becomes little Emma's death, while Augustus Jr. occupies the position in the plot occupied by Emma Sr., in that his own involvement in a passionate love affair provides the pretext for her to send him her memoirs. Or to put it differently, the plot in the second generation does away with the woman and allows the man to survive, but only after the man has come to resemble Emma more than his father. In a metaphoric sense the surviving Emma dies as the woman her child might have been, while her desire survives in the younger man who, by occupying a female subject-position within the social syntax, allows Emma at last to occupy the same subject-position as a man.

This complex rearrangement of the first generation in the second is genotextual, in the sense that we must read it as a psychosocial text (dis)organized by certain rhythms. As important to this text as its characters are the processes by which gender and plot functions are mapped and remapped onto each other. Implicit in my use of the word “processes” is the assumption that narrative (or at least subjective narrative of the sort written by the Romantics) is not simply the plot with its characters. Rather it is an autogenerative mechanism which produces and disposes of events and characters, in such a way that its movements are themselves a symptomatic part of the text's content. In this case the narrative begins by doubling its main characters along familial lines that preserve the separateness of male and female, by giving Emma a daughter and Augustus a son. But then it crosses these lines by partially reversing the roles played by the younger Emma and Augustus in the political economy of the text. The reversal is incomplete, because little Emma resembles Augustus Sr. only in one respect: they both die. It is, however, this incomplete turn, from the maintenance to the rearrangement of gender lines that forms a part of the genotext. The movements of the narrative are traces of something whose provisional articulation in the genotext is itself imprinted by the sexual structures of the symbolic order. In other words, Hays' vicarious self-doubling of Emma as Augustus Jr. narrates her desire for a social order in which the division between reason and passion, male and female, will no longer obtain. This desire, however, is haunted by the possibility that Emma may after all be her daughter, that her desire may die, like so many Romantic projects, before it has lived. It is also haunted by the possibility that Augustus may still be his father's son, that his future may not vindicate the rights of the woman who is no more than his adoptive and metaphoric mother in a family that is an ideal rearrangement of his actual family. Finally this desire is itself produced within the gendered economy that it resists. For the symbolic resolution it projects, provisionally and genotextually, has Emma survive through her masculine counterpart at the cost of killing off the very female self she has sought to vindicate.

At the same time this ambiguous transgression of the social order is connected to a (mis)identification with the role of mother that allows the death of little Emma to function in more than one symbolic register. Emma Sr. survives as (the younger) Augustus' symbolic mother, and can transmit her memoirs to a future reader only by assuming this role, which affords her a position in the social syntax. It seems, moreover, that she can enter the symbolic role only after transiting the literal function of motherhood. At the same time she is not really Augustus' mother, and occupies the role of literal mother only briefly. Even as it marks the loss of what she wants to preserve, little Emma's death is what enables motherhood to be no more than a rite of passage for Emma. It marks her reinscription into the structures of genre and family as the uneasy assumption of a position rather than of an identity, as symbolic rather than imaginary in Lacan's sense.²⁵ Implicated as it is in more than one signifying path, little Emma's death exemplifies the functioning of the genotext as process rather than thesis, as a conflictual flux that is simplified by any attempt at paraphrase.

If the genotext emerges in the spaces between characters and between characters and their roles, it can also be seen in the structuring of the plot. As distinct from “structure,” a concept that codifies a mimetic reading of the plot in terms of what happens in it, what I call “structuring” or “emplotment” are concepts that call for a symptomatic reading of plot in terms of the pathology of its de(form)ation. The most crucial example here is the novel's emplotment through what is itself a highly charged signifier: the mechanism of repetition. Emma and Augustus first meet through an accident in which the coach in which she is travelling with Montague overturns and they are rescued by Augustus, with both men being badly injured. The plot ends with an uncanny recurrence of this accident, in which Augustus is fatally injured, with equally fatal ramifications for Emma's marriage to Montague.

The framing of Emma's passion in terms of violent accidents is a conspicuous departure from Hays' life, for both she and Frend lived on into their eighties. The accident inscribes the end of the affair in highly conflicted ways. In phenotextual terms, the association of passion with violence and ultimately death signifies its destructiveness. But such a conclusion in no way sums up the complexity of the relationships between characters. Throughout the novel Emma's passion has been distinguished from the ultimately murderous passion of Montague. Although she seems destined to meet Augustus, that meeting could just as easily have occurred at his mother's house. That her love for him is associated with scenes of destructiveness is thus accidental. Or to put it differently, at the level of the genotext the accident is itself a figure for the way passion and death are associated in the symbolism of the social text. It comments on the inscription of “passion” within the symbolic order, by marking this association as accidental, the result of a metonymic proximity. We can locate the disturbance of the phenotext in the symmetrical neatness of the plot, which deflects our attention from the text as mimesis to the processes that produce figures mimetically as truths whose rigidity is symptomatically registered in this symmetry.

This second reading of the accident is genotextual in focusing on the text as body rather than as mimesis: in focusing not on what the text says, but on what it does not say through its resistance to the rigid skeleton of the plot. As important is the simultaneously structural and psychic mechanism by which the ending is inscribed. For the recurrence of the accident should be read not simply as another stage in the plot but also in terms of what Jameson calls the form of content,²⁶ or in terms of a de-formation of content that shifts attention from the event itself in the phenotext to its structuring as a return or repetition. The event itself, Augustus' death, is not particularly surprising. Indeed if we think of an ending as a text's self-conscious recognition of its unconscious, of what has already happened emotionally, Augustus' death is simply the plot's delayed reaction to his departure from Emma's life some years before. What is shocking is the way the story ends, with an uncanny repetition that foregrounds structure in such a way as to make form take the place of content. In marking its structural mechanisms in this way, the narrative knots the signified within the signfier, so that one must attend not only to what the text says but also to the form in which the abortion of Emma's passion is communicated. This mechanism is all the more conspicuous because it involves a symptomatic rewriting of the novel's pre-text, in which the circumstances of Hays' meeting with Frend and the eventual dissolution of their relationship are much less remarkable.

As a signifier, the mechanism of repetition is highly overdetermined, and can be read in several ways on which we can only touch. On one level, Augustus' departure from Emma's life in the same way he entered it brings the plot full circle. This circularity has the function of purgation as well as closure: the end returns to the beginning to correct it, by disposing of Augustus and thus correcting Emma's initial error. But on another level this confusion of beginnings and endings within the motif of the return undoes the entire project of ending. It is not simply that the second accident reawakens Emma's passion for Augustus, contaminating the present with the past. It also reopens the whole issue of passion as the material site of women's struggles.

At this level the repetition of the accident is connected to other forms of repetition: to the novel itself as memoir or return, and to autonarration as the author's return to her past. Repetition is most obviously a form of obsession: a return to something that cannot be disposed of because it has not yet been worked through. But it is also an occasion for revision, and in this sense it is linked to another instance of repetition in the novel: the repetition of the first generation in the second. This figure, which was to become increasingly common in nineteenth-century narrative, often signifies the taming and attenuation of the past in the present, as in Frankenstein's repetition as Walton or the return of Heathcliff and Cathy as their Victorian children.²⁷ The repetition of Emma's letters as her memoirs purports on one level to be just such an act of self-taming. But given the curious reversal by which it is the present that functions as a shadowy type of the past in these texts and not vice versa, the typological drive that mobilizes repetition remains curiously unfulfilled, making the figure the site of a lack. As a moment of irresolution and unfulfillment, repetition figures the survival of desire within the asceticism imposed by the symbolic order, infecting or affecting the reader with this desire, by making reading into another form of repetition. The link between repetition as a motif in the plot and the functioning of the figure on a hermeneutic as well as a diegetic level is explicitly made through Emma's forwarding of her memoirs to Augustus Jr., who as inscribed reader embodies the potential for repetition as re-vision, and as Emma's male surrogate embodies repetition as the possibility of progress.

III

Crucial to autonarration is its implication of the reader in the continuation of its project. The genre thus participates in what I have elsewhere described as the major transgeneric form of Romanticism: a transactional text whose significance must be conceived historically, and must be developed and renegotiated through its reading.²⁸ The question of reading is foregrounded in Hays' novel by its semi-epistolary format. Emma conveys the story of her life through her letters, and she thus displaces attention from plot to reflection, from the outside to the inside but also the other side. For unlike the Portuguese Nun, Emma does not simply write about her love to her lover: she also writes to Francis and Augustus Jr. Thus the novel is not simply about desire, but also about the communication and continuation of desire within an economy in which there is more than one reader, and thus potentially more than one law.

Much of the recent work on epistolary fiction has approached it through a vocabulary of presence and absence that emphasizes the textuality and supplementary status of the letter.²⁹ Alternatively, the letter has been seen socioculturally as a site of the alienation that results from the commodification of language.³⁰ Either way, epistolarity has been associated with a split between language and experience, and a consequent loss of power. There is no question that Emma writes her love because she cannot act it, and that both her love and her ideas are confined within the space of representation. On the other hand, the very limitations of letters are also enabling conditions. Because of their marginality in relation to speech and print, letters were often associated with pietist or dissenting communities and thus with oppositional culture.³¹ Emma herself draws attention to the advantages of the letter when she comments that she can express herself “with more freedom on paper” (M, 39). For her meetings with Francis are generally in the company of others, and even her occasional private walks with him are constrained by an uncertainty about his own relationship to the existing social order. Writing to him without these constraints, she can write to a subject dialectically split between the real and the ideal, between what he is and what he could be.

As the site of a crossing between actual and possible worlds, the intimate letter also blurs the boundary between public and personal space. It says what one is not supposed to say and thus renegotiates the terms of the social contract. Letters were not necessarily read only by the person to whom they were addressed, and for women they occupied a space midway between the private and the public in the information network.³² Hays herself wrote about her relationship with Frend in letters to William Godwin. Godwin was not only a friend, he was also the author of Political Justice. As such he occupied a position whose ambiguity blurred the boundary between the personal and the public, and thus allowed his correspondent a strategic enunciative position on that boundary. Moreover Hays' letters may also have been read by Mary Wollstonecraft, who certainly read her novel, and who in turn wrote to Godwin and criticized him for his masculine response to Hays.³³ In publishing the novel, Hays formalized what had already happened in her writing of the letters: she placed her situation and her responses to it within a communicative circuit that was not confined to the addressee of the letters or the designated reader(s) of the novel.³⁴

A discussion of Memoirs as a letter to the reader must begin with a curious anomaly. The novel in so many ways seems to call for a “female” reader. But whereas Wollstonecraft's Maria addresses her memoirs to her daughter, redirects them to Darnford and Jemima, and then uncertainly brings back her daughter, Emma Courtney's readers are exclusively male. However, the turn to Augustus Jr. should not be read phenotextually as the positing of an actual addressee. In writing to her daughter, Wollstonecraft's protagonist turns towards the future, but also returns to someone whose fate may repeat her own. Hays turns against such doubts by allowing Emma's daughter to die. Yet in so doing she turns not to the male reader addressed in An Appeal, but to the wounded masculine³⁵ in herself: to that part of herself which cannot survive except by figuring itself as male. The recourse to a male reader must be taken in conjunction with the fact that the novel's male protagonists all die, except for Francis who simply drops out of the narration. These various deaths register the bankruptcy of the patriarchal order, and displace Emma's investment in it to the level of a signifier she is constrained to use. Moreover, the disappearance of Francis, once he has served his purpose as an intersubjective stimulus for Emma's ideas, marks the fact that the male reader is less the designated reader of the text than a facilitating position within a communicative grammar that is still historically situated. In gendering her addressee as male, Emma allows herself a position from which she can be heard. Both positions (that of the writer and that of the addressee) shift even within the space of the novel, with the replacement of Francis by Augustus Jr. For Francis is characterized in sufficient detail to limit what Emma can say to him. Although she transgresses those limits by pleading her passion as well as discussing it rationally, Francis, as a representative of the liberal male public of the time, cannot really hear her. Augustus, by contrast, takes no significant part in the novel's action, and we have no way of guessing his responses. His extradiegetic status thus allows him to figure the possibility of a reading not constrained within the present order.

Through the young Augustus, in short, Emma inscribes within the text a space for (re)reading, and associates the reader with a future dialectically connected to her own past. As a figure for the reader, however, the young Augustus is ambiguously within and beyond the novel's diegesis, between the symbolic and imaginary orders. Although the relatively little we know about him leaves us free to imagine his responses to Emma's memoirs, the one thing we do know is the name of his father. Thus what the turn to Augustus allows Emma to do is painfully knotted in to what it disables her from doing. For it requires her to survive in a space that remains symbolic because, in Kristeva's words, it connects “two separated positions” (R, 43): that of desire and the means of its signification through an inscribed reader, through a signifier which is still part of the economy of gender.

It is therefore important to remember that Augustus is only the temporary addressee of the memoirs. Through the shift from Francis to the younger Augustus, Hays formalizes what may have been instinctive in the correspondence. She disengages us from identifying with the novel's intratextual readers, using them to create a space within the text which can and will be occupied differently by different readers. This space can be described as the “reading-function,” and must be distinguished from concepts such as the “designated reader,” the “implied reader,” or the “superreader,” in that it is a structural position within the text, rather than an ideological position identified with a certain category of person and thus given a specific content. In the writing of the novel the text's communicative grammar is necessarily given such a content in ways that are historically determined. But it is here that the embedding of the novel in the writer's biography becomes important. For by situating her text in the life of a historical subject, Hays asks us to read beyond the ways in which she herself is constrained to write its ending and to inscribe its reading.

The reading-function is implicit in the “temporal polyvalence” which Janet Altman notes as one of the features of epistolarity, but which once again has been associated with the letter as failed communication. Epistolary communication does not occur in a shared space and time like conversation, but instead involves several times: the time of the act, its writing, and its reading.³⁶ Introducing the notion of time as perspective, epistolarity also introduces the possibility of understanding as historical, and of history as rereading. One of the earlier examples of amorous epistolary discourse is The Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669).³⁷ In the movement from the nun, who writes only to her uncaring lover and writes only about her passion, to Emma Courtney who writes about social as well as amorous issues, we witness an expansion from the erotics to the politics of desire, effected through a deliberate exploitation of temporal polyvalence. In a sense, however, this expansion had already occurred in the reception history of the Letters and analogous texts, and had thus modified the hermeneutics of epistolarity in ways that were crucial to writers such as Hays. For although the nun writes only to her lover, real people write back to the fictional character, culminating in the multiple-authored Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters (1972). This process of revision had already begun in the eighteenth century, with an imaginary sequel that supplied the lover's missing responses to the nun, thus rewriting life through fiction.³⁸

Crucial to the way the text reaches beyond its inscribed readers to an extratextual reader is the hermeneutics of the autonarrative genre itself. We have demarcated four zones of signification in autonarration: the autobiographical pre-text, which is entirely nondiscursive and which constitutes something like what Jameson calls the Real; the public life of the author; the phenotext of the novel; and the genotext, an area of affect and signification that is not so much in the diegesis as it is in a symptomatic reading of its psychotropology. Where a purely fictional text could be approached simply in terms of the last two areas, the four zones are part of the more complex dynamic of creation and reception specific to the genre under consideration. By writing their lives as texts that are themselves about women writing their lives, novelists such as Hays and Wollstonecraft register an awareness of their lives as textually constructed. On the other hand, this taking of life into the text is itself taken back into life, because the Memoirs have their origins in the experience of a real woman whose life will be affected by their reading. The constant crossings between life and text are represented in the novel by the way characters and functions cross over between the extradiegetic and intradiegetic worlds. As author of the memoirs, Emma is an extradiegetic narrator who is also a character in her own story, and who functions as an intradiegetic narrator in this story when she writes her memoirs for Francis. In the text itself the position of subject is thus shown as moving between the extra- and intradiegetic worlds. Similarly the function of reading is transferred between intradiegetic readers such as Augustus and Francis, who receive Emma's letters, and Augustus Jr., who does not participate in the action of the novel.

These transfers between extra- and intradiegetic worlds analogically interimplicate life and text so as to draw the extratextual reader into the text. But it is the specifically auto(bio)graphic nature of a text such as the Memoirs that stops this process from becoming aestheticized as the play of mirrors it becomes in many self-reflexive texts. For in making her personal life public Hays takes certain risks all too evident in the ridicule to which she was subjected, and this “signing” of her text (to borrow a word from Bakhtin)³⁹ asks us to reciprocate by transposing the text into our own lives. We return here to the importance of desire in this novel. Because autonarration mixes text and life, it also mixes the signifier into the signified in ways for which a purely deconstructive theory of the sign cannot account. The desire which is the subject of the novel transmits itself metonymically to its mode of functioning, so that desire is not simply what the text is about, but is also the means by which its subject is signified. Transposing her desire into the symbolic world of the novel, Hays implicates her text within the desire of a reader for whom reading too is an autonarrative process. It is through this reader that the novel's genotext enters history.

Notes

1. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (London: Pandora Press, 1987). All references to this text (M) will hereafter be in parentheses in the text.

2. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 59-60. References to this work (R) will hereafter be in parentheses in the text.

3. My biographical information is drawn from Gina Luria, “Mary Hays' Letters and Manuscripts,” Signs 3 (1977): 524-30; and from Luria's introduction to her reprint of Hays' Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (New York: Garland Press, 1974).

4. Hays continues in the same letter by insisting that her aim is to show “the possible effects of the present system of things, & the contradictory principles which have bewilder'd mankind, upon private character, & private happiness” (quoted in Luria, “Mary Hays' Letters,” 529-30).

5. See for instance Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), 241, 245; James Foster, History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1949), 259-60. Another example of the automatic dismissal of Hays is provided by Allene Gregory's The French Revolution and the English Novel (London: G. P. Putnam, 1915). Gregory also “deals” with Hays by absorbing her into Godwin, despite her concession that the novel by Godwin to which Memoirs bears a “striking resemblance” was published much later (223), and despite the fact that Emma corresponds with Francis on the assumption that opposition is true friendship.

6. While sharing Wollstonecraft's sense that the Rousseauian model of romance wrote women into a male script, Hays may also have found in Rousseau a compelling version of the discourse of desire. Emma Courtney is in the middle of reading La Nouvelle Héloïse when her father disapprovingly takes the book away, so that she reads about Julie's passion but not its correction. The resulting misprision shapes her life in ways that are both disastrous and constitutive of her subjectivity. Emma's early interest in romance is sharpened by her father's insistence that she read history, with the result that romance offers her the only available position from which she can express female desire. As such, it is a version of what Lacan calls the imaginary, which attaches the subversiveness of this desire to imagos that are part of the symbolic order.

7. Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 376.

8. I use this term in the sense used by Lacan and Kristeva, to indicate the order in which we are constructed as speaking subjects: the order of syntax, which is also the order of the law and the family. This order is “symbolic” in the sense that the individual's identity within it is always other: a representation of her as something else, for and by someone else.

9. Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 179-80.

10. Hays, Appeal, 70, 67.

11. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 186.

12. Butler, Subjects of Desire, 186-87, 192-98.

13. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 166.

14. Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, 162-68.

15. Butler, Subjects of Desire, 9.

16. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Preface” to Alastor, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 69.

17. We might note in passing the frequent use of certain proto-Romantic words and concepts: “image,” “imagination,” and “portrait” (M, 53, 82, 89, 93, 122); “ideal” or “romantic” (M 20, 60, 80, 84, 103, 171); and “visionary” (M, 46, 84).

18. Linda Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

19. See Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, 160-78 and 92-97. Kauffman seems to endorse the feeling of the authors of the New Portuguese Letters that “it is immaterial whether the experience and emotions described in the nun's letters is fictive or real” (283). My argument, that it is rhetorically if not factually material, is slightly different.

20. Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980), 74-80.

21. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 35, 81-82.

22. Augustus refers to Emma as his sister (M, 71), the role which Mrs. Harley ultimately assigns her (M, 156), and which marks the incestuous and forbidden nature of this union within the terms of the symbolic order. Similarly, Emma Jr. and Augustus Jr. are brought up as brother and sister.

23. The scandalous memoirs are discussed by Felicity Nussbaum, who describes them as the first significant form of women's self-writing other than spiritual autobiography (Autobiographical Subject, 180). Nussbaum sees the scandalous memoirists as both confirming and contesting the dominant ideology, and further notes the conflicted position of these writers given the relegation of “unlicensed sexuality to the lower classes” (179). I would further argue that the memoirists' identification of desire with sexuality aborts the emergent radicalism of their texts, and that Hays' representation of a love that is and is not sexual is a way of retaining her right to address a middle-class liberal audience.

24. An exception to this statement is Kristeva's recent article “The Adolescent Novel,” in Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1990), 8-23. Here too she focuses on a series of symbolic positions assumed by the subject of narrative. But inasmuch as these positions are experimental, her concern is (at least potentially) the engendering of narrative, the desire that results in the subject assuming different positions in the symbolic order.

25. The imaginary and the symbolic can be seen as different ways of relating to an identity that is always already specular. In the imaginary the subject identifies with the image (or imago) in the mirror. In the symbolic she is uneasily aware of it as a representation.

26. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 242.

27. A less well-known example of this motif is Arnold's “Tristan and Iseult,” in which the dark passionate Iseult is repeated as Tristan's paler, fairer, and more domestic second love. Arnold's text parallels Victorian novels such as David Copperfield in its linking of repetition to the domestication of the Romantic, the conversion of revolutionary energy into evolutionary caution.

28. See Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and “The Other Reading: Transactional Epic in Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth,” in Milton, The Metaphysicals and the Romantics, ed. Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 20-46.

29. Ruth Perry treats the epistolary form thematically, as an expression of separation and isolation (Women, Letters, and the Novel, 93-118). Roy Roussel approaches it in terms of presence and absence in “Reflections on the Letter: The Reconception of Presence and Distance in Pamela,” ELH 41 (1974): 375-99. Although her argument becomes increasingly political as the book proceeds, Linda Kauffman's early chapters associate epistolarity with a Lacanian form of desire. Thus she describes desire as “infinitely transcribable, yet ultimately elusive, and … therefore reiterated ceaselessly,” and she refers to the “metonymic displacement of desire” (Discourses of Desire, 24-25).

30. Thus W. Austin Flanders in Structures of Experience (Columbus: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), links the letter to “the production of language as a commodity through the use of paper and writing utensils as tools and its consequent distance from primary experience” (79).

31. Katharine Goodman, Dis/Closures: Women's Autobiography in Germany Between 1790 and 1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 77.

32. Goodman, Dis/Closures, 79.

33. “I think you wrong … You judge not in your own case as in that of another. You give a softer name to folly and immorality when it flatters—yes, I must say it—your vanity, than to mistaken passion when it was extended to another—you termed Miss Hays' conduct insanity when only her own happiness was involved” (Collected Letters, 404).

34. It is further worth noting that epistolary fictions such as the Letters to a Portuguese Nun often resulted in revisionary sequels. Not only were fictional letters treated as though they were about real life persons, writers/readers also responded to these novels-as-letters, by creating further fictions in order to rewrite ‘life’ through fiction (see Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, 72-84, 111).

35. I owe this term to Ross Woodman.

36. Janet Gerkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 129-35. Ruth Perry sees “the time lag of long-distance communication” primarily as a cause of misunderstanding (Women, Letters, and the Novel, 108).

37. See the account by Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, 91-118, 271-312. Kauffman points out that the letters were enormously popular in the eighteenth century, provoking numerous English translations, imitations and sequels (95). It is therefore quite likely that Hays would have read them.

38. See Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, 111.

39. While recognizing that texts and actions are intersubjectively produced and do not have their origin in a transcendental ego, Bakhtin nevertheless sees the subject as implicated in his or her text. “Signature,” according to Morson and Emerson, means “making an act one's own, taking responsibility for it” (“Introduction,” in Rethinking Bakhtin, ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989], 16).