SOURCE: "Sarah Scott and The Sweet Excess of Paternal Love," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 32, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 511-35.

You must take it well to be prun'd by so kind a Hand as that of a Father…. Some inward resistance there will be, where Power and not Choice maketh us move. But when a Father layeth aside his Authority, and persuadeth only by his Kindness, you will never answer it to Good Nature, if it hath not weight with you.¹

Introducing the collection Daughters and Fathers, editor Lynda E. Boose notes a "distressing scarcity of models of benevolent fatherhood" in myth and literature: "Tyrannical paternity seems to mar the father-daughter text even more conspicuously than that of father and son."² Sentimental novels of the eighteenth century, now receiving renewed critical attention after many years of neglect, would seem at first to provide an exception to Boose's generalization, abounding as they do with tender and affectionate fathers. A closer examination, however, reveals that such "models of benevolent fatherhood" can exert their own peculiarly inexorable form of tyranny.³ My epigraph, from Halifax's Advice to a Daughter (1688), a popular conduct-book throughout the eighteenth century, suggests that kindness and "pruning" go hand in hand for the loving father; the daughter has no alternative but to "take it well," concealing any "inward resistance" which might disrupt the appearance of filial "Good Nature." A father who "layeth aside his Authority, and persuadeth only by his Kindness" is not necessarily less effective in his methods of coercion.⁴

The implications of this paternal pruning for the daughter are clearly visible in Agreeable Ugliness (1754), a little-known sentimental novel once thought to be the work of Sarah Scott, but now known to be her translation of La Laideur Aimable (1752) by Pierre-Antoine de la Place.⁵ La Place, probably best known as the first French translator of Tom Jones and popularizer Shakespeare, had also translated a number of plays by Otway, Congreve, and Rowe, as well as Sarah Fielding's novel David Simple and the anonymous History of Charlotte Summers, texts in which intense father-daughter relationships proliferate. Scott herself shared not only this network of influences but also many of the preoccupations of La Laideur Aimable. Seen in the context of her own novels, the misattribution of Agreeable Ugliness is not only plausible but illuminating. It is not so much a blind alley as the entrance to a labyrinth of father-daughter fictions, in which Halifax's advice offers at least some kind of landmark.

Happily Ever After: The Advantages of (Paternal) Education

Agreeable Ugliness has almost the flavor of fairy tale in its exaggerated contrasts between beautiful elder and ugly younger sister. In this story, however, it is Beauty—"the Fair Villiers"—who is a beast: selfish, spoiled, lazy, and immoral; while the ugly duckling, or "Shocking Monster," as her mother insists on calling her, enjoys "the Triumph of the Graces," thanks to the tender pedagogical care of her father.⁶ Madame de Villiers and her favorite daughter have their own brief triumphs; competing suitors flock round Beauty, but are always repelled by her shallowness and duplicity. The height of the Fair Villiers's success, in Paris, where the streets are paved with shining fortunes and prostrate noblemen, collapses into ruin with her abduction at a masquerade. Her attacker accuses her of being an infected prostitute, and she finds herself under arrest, while her frenzied mother is mocked as she screams for help. Her reputation shattered, she marries a bankrupt confidence trickster by whom she has a stillborn child, is forcibly separated from him by her father, and ends her days in a convent, patronized by her smug, successful sister.

For the Shocking Monster ends the novel surrounded by adoring family and friends, fruitfully married to the man she always wanted, not only untouched by scandal, but universally applauded. At each stage of the novel—entry into society, trip to Paris, return to the country, marriage, and childbirth—the younger daughter triumphantly takes the place of her successful-then-fallen sister. Her achievements are made possible by the peculiarly close relationship she enjoys with her father; but that relationship exacts its own heavy penalties from her, as exclusion from it does from mother and elder daughter.

This polarization of the family begins even before the birth of the narrator-heroine; whereas the Fair Villiers is born while her father's "Desire of carrying his Wife to his Country Seat was forced to yield to her Fondness for Paris," the Shocking Monster is born in the country, the child of frustration and disappointment:

I suppose it was in some Moment of Vexation, when Mr. de Villiers's Mind was a Prey to gloomy Disquiet, that he took it into his Head to beget me. I confess I never had the Air of a Child of Love…. I entered the World in native Ugliness.

(pp. 12-13)

Engendered in "Vexation" and "gloomy Disquiet," by a father whose "Desire" no longer yields to the mother's "Fondness," the de Villiers's second (and last) child is a constant reminder of what is shocking and monstrous in the conjugal bed, and she is constantly reminded, by her mother's unkindness and her father's resentment of it, how little she is "a Child of Love."

While her doting mother educates the Fair Villiers in "Ribbands, Silks, and Fashions" (p. 20), Mr. de Villiers gives his younger daughter an education in "useful Knowledge" and morality, making it "both his Pleasure, and his Duty," she says, "to form my Heart and my Understanding" (p. 14).⁷ She rejoices in "my Father's Fondness, the only Treasure this World afforded me" (p. 15); he tells her (rather surprisingly, since she is only nine at the time): "you will live to be your Father's greatest Consolation, and I will now be yours" (p. 18). The complicated nature of Mr. de Villiers's love for his younger daughter is established very early in the novel, when he finds her weeping and quiets her fears that the Fair Villiers will usurp her place in his heart:

I think it my Duty to make you some kind of Compensation for the superior Advantages your Sister possesses; this adds a Tenderness to my Love for you, which all my Fondness for her can neither extinguish, nor equal.

(p. 17)

Paternal tenderness as duty and consolation prize creates in the daughter a double bind of gratitude and humiliation; unlike other people in Agreeable Ugliness who claim to love her, the Shocking Monster's father never suggests that her ugliness is agreeable to him. What draws him to her is precisely that vulnerability, which his declaration of love is calculated to maintain at a gratifyingly high level; though he disguises it better than his child can do, his emotional need is as powerful as hers.

For the daughter, the filial bond is the site of agonies and ecstasies; her "tender Affection for my Father" and emotional dependence on him make her "obliged to respect and submit to his Will" in everything (p. 84). When she and young St. Furcy fall in love, she cannot bear the thought of incurring her father's disapproval. Refusing St. Furcy's proposal, she accepts instead the suitor her father favors—the middle-aged Mr. Dorigny. She judges herself harshly for having dared to love anyone without her father's approval, but resolves to atone for this through her marriage to Dorigny:

Fear nothing, my dear Father, you have in your own Hands the Punishment which so blameable a Weakness deserves. Oh, Dorigny, how much shall I be indebted to thee, if thy Hand saves me from the Precipice, on whose Brink I am now placed!

(p. 74)

Dorigny is not only the savior, snatching her back from desire-as-precipice, but her father's instrument, held in readiness to punish her for desire-as-weakness.

The violence of the heroine's repressed desire surfaces only in madness, after her husband's death: Dorigny is fatally wounded, defending the Fair Villiers at the masquerade. In an attempt to shock the young widow out of her hysteria, her friends send for St. Furcy. This traumatic confrontation with the man she loves releases a flood of sexual guilt and anxiety in the heroine:

What Cruelty is this! cried I, … take from me that Object which wounds me to Death; would that Monster deprive me of my Life? Immediately I melted into Tears … I thought my Soul was forsaking my Body…. I was suffocated by my Tears.

(pp. 164-65)

Dorigny's death is intimately connected for the narrator with unruly female desire: the ambition of her mother and sister, resulting in the fracas at the masquerade during which Dorigny is stabbed; but also her own passion for St. Furcy, whom she is now free to marry. "That Object which wounds me to Death" is not only a recollection of the sword which killed Dorigny, but also the reluctantly phallic St. Furcy. She experiences his presence as a sexual assault, an attack on "my Honour and my Life" (p. 165). Similarly, though the life-threatening "Monster" should, from the context, be St. Furcy (or the threat of male desire which he represents), the reader is by now so used to the heroine's identification and self-identification as Shocking Monster that other meanings inevitably jostle for prominence—her feeling that she is the monster responsible for depriving her husband of life, for example, or her fear that her desires are monstrous, and will be the death of her. The physical language of the passage—melting, suffocation, the soul forsaking the body—is of the kind used (e.g. by Cleland) to portray female orgasm; mental crisis reproduces the signs of sexual climax.

Daughterhood has its own code of bodily signs—kneeling, fainting, tears, incoherence, speechlessness, and cries. At one point in the narrative, however, the power of filial ecstasy threatens to disrupt that code, when (as Dorigny lies dying) the daughter awakes from a swoon to find her father embracing her:

I could not restrain an Exclamation, I believe I may say of Transport as well as Astonishment…. How tender were the Embraces! how exquisite the Joy! how relieving to the Heart were the Tears, how greatly insinuating were the Pleasures that succeeded! Enchanting Sensations! which Nature cannot repel; you have the Power of suspending for an instant others which are not less dear to us, but you are not able to destroy them!

(p. 157)

Though the context of the passage indicates wifely anxiety temporarily displaced by filial pleasure, the intensity of that pleasure confounds filial and marital love. "Transport" and "tender Embraces," "exquisite Joy" and "greatly insinuating Pleasures"—even within the language of sentimental fiction, the daughter's response seems extravagant, her "Enchanting Sensations" too passionate for comfort.

Filial hyperbole finds its echo in Mr. de Villiers's "Oh my dear Child, what a Slave is thy Father to his Love for thee!" (p. 226), but desire for the dutiful daughter is not confined to the enslaved and possessive father. Her godfather, the Count de St. Furcy, father of the man she has always loved and wanted to marry, so admires her "Resolution and Duty" (p. 241) that he shocks his friends by declaring a passion for her:

The Marquis de Beaumont could not hear this Declaration but with Horror…. The Marchioness, his Mother, cried out, You, Sir! and the Count replied with Warmth, Yes, Madam, myself.

(p. 242)

The threat of incest, which has been present, though unvoiced, in the exclusive intensity of the father-daughter relationship, finally emerges in another form: a proposal from the man who calls her "our dear Daughter," and loves her "as my own Child" (p. 222).

His dear daughter makes the only choice she knows how to make; submission to the fathers. Rather than turn him against his son by a refusal, she tells the old man, she will gladly become his wife:

There is my Hand, Sir … and from this Moment, to you I dedicate for the remainder of my Life, all the Obedience and Tenderness to which, as my Husband, you are going to have a just Claim.

(p. 252)

The gamble of hyperbolic sacrificial gesture pays off; old St. Furcy, overwhelmed by her "Fortitude" and "Virtue," reveals that he was not serious after all:

I only wanted to try you thoroughly. Oh! you are my Daughter, and deserve to be so….

I sprung into his Arms, and he was embracing me with all the sweet Excess of paternal Love, when his Son, trembling, and doubtful yet of our general Felicity, came, and threw himself at his Feet.

(pp. 252, 253-54)⁸

Recognition as old St. Furcy's worthy daughter marks the final crisis in the fortunes of the Shocking Monster; purified by paternal love, she is transferred at last to the doubtful and trembling St. Furcy, never a credible sexual threat to the older generation, more plausible as a brother than as a husband. Despite her two marriages, the heroine remains firmly in thrall to "the sweet Excess of paternal Love," her only possible act of autonomy or surprise to show herself as submissive and self-sacrificing beyond even the call of exemplary filial duty.

Swords and Sacrifice: La Place Translating

A year or so before the publication of his own first novel, La Laideur Aimable, Pierre-Antoine de La Place had prefaced his translation of Tom Jones with a strangely revealing letter to Henry Fielding:

Cette dernière production de votre plume m'a séduit au point qu'il ne m'a pas été possible de résister à la tentation de la traduire dans ma langue naturelle…. Que je serai content, si le respectable père de l'amante de Jones daigne ne pas méconnoître une fille chérie, sous un habillement françois! Ne craignez point, monsieur; elle est toujours la même: c'est toujours cette même Sophie, digne objet de votre complaisance & de notre tendresse.⁹

Not Fielding himself, but the (female) production of his pen has seduced La Place into translation; nevertheless, La Place assures Sophie's "father," his irresistibly seductive daughter has not fallen from grace or been damaged. Despite her French dress, she is still "the same Sophie," and her (English) father and (French) lover share the same "tendresse" for her. In the event, La Place's Tom Jones, though it softens the Western-Sophia relationship, offers little to illuminate the extraordinary father-daughter dynamic of La Laideur Aimable.¹⁰ The heroic tragedies and sentimental novels La Place had translated, however, are rich in sensational encounters between fathers and daughters.

Like the Shocking Monster, the heroines of Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1682), Congreve's The Mourning Bride (1697), and Rowe's Tamerlane (1701) and The Fair Penitent (1703) are involved in a struggle for adequate naming and recognition. Whereas she must prove herself as the Count's surrogate daughter before she can marry his son, a process which leaves her still under the shadow of incest, they must force their own fathers to see and acknowledge them as daughters, and to see and name themselves as fathers. Paternal violence is much more in evidence, with fathers trying to kill daughters seen as sexually disobedient or treacherous, daughters driven to madness by their fathers' threats, curses and (proleptic) accusations of parricide. Both sides reproachfully invoke idealized versions of the father-daughter bond; fathers bitterly contrast the daughter's exemplary infancy with her present wickedness, while daughters appeal to absent paternal tenderness:

And yet a Father! think I am your Child.
Turn not your Eyes away—look on me kneeling;
Now curse me if you can, now spurn me off.
Did ever Father curse his kneeling Child!
Never: For always Blessings crown that Posture.
Nature inclines, and half-way meets that Duty,
Stooping to raise from Earth the filial Reverence;
For bended Knees, returning folding Arms,
With Prayers and Blessings, and paternal Love.¹¹

Description here fails to work as prescription; the father-daughter tableau remains incomplete as Manuel refuses to acknowledge the infallibility of "that Posture"; Almeria's failure to compel paternal recognition drives her, temporarily, into madness.

For father and daughter alike in two of the novels La Place had translated, on the other hand, recognition becomes an undeserved and almost unbearable pleasure. The first of these, Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple: Containing an Account of his Travels through the Cities of London and Westminster, in the Search of a Real Friend (1744), focuses on an innocent, good-hearted young man. David's quest for true friendship exposes the defects of contemporary manners and morals, but does also bring him true friends: gentle, affectionate Camilla, whom he eventually marries; her brother Valentine; and clever, strong-minded Cynthia. The second, The History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl (1750), has an anonymous author/narrator who claims to be the first-born, illegitimate son of the author of Tom Jones, though he says he does not expect to fix a marriage on the Squire, or get him to acknowledge his offspring. Taking after his famous "father," this novelist offers a comic story of a girl adopted by a charitable lady, who has to leave home because her benefactress' son falls in love with her. She has many adventures, defending herself gamely throughout against everything from unwanted proposals to attempted rape. Finally, the reappearance of her long-lost father gives her a place in society, enabling her to marry the man she loves. Though these two novels are quite different in temper, their treatments of encounters between fathers and daughters are remarkably similar: begging forgiveness for their sexual transgressions, the fathers receive instant and joyous absolution from their overwhelmed and swooning daughters.

In David Simple, Camilla's reunion with her father makes her scream and faint; her father carries her upstairs, crying out "Oh! give me way, for in finding my Child I have for ever lost her: But, dead or alive, I will hold her in my Arms, and never part with her more."¹² Camilla moves from swoon to speechlessness to tears to speech, hardly able to believe that "my Father thinks me worthy his Regard." Her father in turn is "entirely overcome with Extacy" (p. 295); the joy of reunion and forgiveness "was more than he could bear, and almost deprived him of the Power of Speech" (p. 294).

Camilla's widowed father, whom she loves with "inexpressible Fondness," has spurned his daughter's unconditional devotion—caring for him and anticipating his wants, she claims, "was all the Pleasure I had in Life" (p. 137)—for the charms of his second wife, a scheming, mercenary woman who accuses Camilla of having an incestuous relationship with her brother, and incites her husband to neglect, resent, and, finally, strike his daughter. Camilla is unable even to relate this last incident; speechless and trembling, she faints at the recollection. Her father, however, had at least "no Fault, but that of having been misled by a too violent Passion" (p. 294). Charlotte Summers's father, despite his infidelities and physical cruelty to her mother, nevertheless experiences equal paternal delight at rediscovering his lost daughter:

Oh Heavens! this is too much to bear, my Happiness is too supream. The Life the Idol of my Soul, all my Hopes, and the Spring of all my Joys, at once in my Arms….

[Charlotte faints, but recovers and kneels to him, saying:] Bless me Sir, and confirm my Happiness, for tho' all is Mystery and Wonder, yet my Blood confesses its dear Original, and my Heart tells me I behold my Father.¹³

The scene is ritualized within the novel by its echoing of an earlier inset narrative in which an adopted girl dreams of reunion with her real father: "I thought … I should have died with the Joy, and was so transported, that I could not utter a Word." Their actual meeting rehearses the pattern of kneeling, raising, embracing, and blessing unsuccessfully invoked by Congreve's Almeria. "Heart" and "Blood" again confess recognition (1:95).

For Almeria, the "Heart" proclaims her father's "wounding Wrath," which "cuts deeper than the keenest Sword, / And cleaves my Heart" (The Mourning Bride, IV.i.307-309). Rowe's heroines, Selima in Tamerlane and Calista in The Fair Penitent, find the metaphor concretized when, like Belvidera's husband, their fathers stop speaking daggers to them and start using some. Belvidera's alternating pleas for mercy and death in Venice Preserv'd, and the embrace with which she greets her prospective murderer, are echoed by Selima in Rowe's play:

Selima's responsive "Life" and the exchange between her gushing heart and Bajazet's "Spring" also recall Belvidera's comparison of death at her husband's hands to the act of intercourse:

When our sting'd hearts have leap'd to meet each other,
And melting kisses seal'd our lips together,

…..

So let my death come now, and I'll not shrink from't.

(V, 247-50)

Selima too conditions for the manner of her death, when Bajazet orders his slaves to strangle her, exposing herself to gain her father's personal (even when murderous) attention: "Oh! let me die by you! Behold my Breast! / I wo'not shrink; oh! save me but from these" (V, p. 150).

The significance of the father's or husband's sword seems, to a post-Freudian age, almost too crude to be true, though Belvidera's association of daggers and desire makes it difficult to ignore. Such symbolism is enjoyably burlesqued in The History of Charlotte Summers, in which Charlotte awakes screaming from a nightmare about her two suitors "with each a drawn Dagger, which … they seemed to threaten to plunge into her Bosom," but fails to impress her maid:

Phoh, phoh, says Margery, is that all; I thought one of them, at least, had been here, ready to plunge a Dagger, or something else; but I warrant neither of them will hurt you. It is a Sign, Child, that they both love you; but you need not have dreamed that, they have told you as much broad awake.

(2:36)

Margery's instant dream-analysis does not transfer very comfortably to a father-daughter setting, since paternal daggers as "Signs" of violent love would threaten a violation of the incest taboo. In one available context, however, the father's death-dealing sword could be seen as the clearest possible sign of his protective love for his daughter; it is the story of Virginia, a story which, significantly, Sciolto tells his son-in-law in The Fair Penitent:

Hast thou not read what brave Virginius did?
With his own Hand he slew his only Daughter,
To save her from the fierce Decemvir's Lust.
He slew her yet unspotted, to prevent
The Shame which she might know.
(IV.i, p. 222)

The appearance of at least three plays and two stories on the theme of Virginia in the mid-1750s testifies to a renewed investment in this image of father and daughter. Reviewing the third of the plays, Frances Brooke's unperformed but recently published Virginia (1756), the Critical Review regretted the author's decision to deprive readers by setting her catastrophe offstage:

With all due deference to Aristotle, Horace, and the French critics, we should have been pleased to see that august, affecting, horrid scene, in which the father sacrifices his darling daughter.¹⁴

The context of sacrifice purifies Virginius's sword; Virginia's death restores what (according to Blackstone's Commentaries) was already the Roman father's right—the power of life and death over his child.¹⁵ Virginia's story (cited in the Roman de la Rose as an example of legal corruption), shows the law as inadequate, easily manipulated by the false witness who denies Virginius's paternity and the corrupt judge who wants Virginia's body; father and daughter take the law into their own hands, acting outside the letter to preserve the spirit. Sciolto's account, with its bravery, ferocity, lust, and slaying, casts Virginius as hero but barely sketches paternal emotion; the Critical Review, still focusing on the father though the tragedy is nominally Virginia's, finds the scene "affecting" as well as "august" and "horrid." Brooke's play, like Samuel Crisp's Virginia of 1754, allows Virginia to play an active part in her own fate; in this, both are closer to Chaucer than to Livy or the Roman de la Rose:

Blissed be God, that I shal dye a mayde!
Yif me my deeth, er that I have a shame;
Dooth with youre childe youre wyl, a Goddes name!¹⁶

Filial love and chastity are more important even than the desire for life; Virginius's sacrifice and Virginia's willing submission offered a powerful myth for the 1750s, the decade in which Mary Blandy's unfilial and indecorous passion brought her to trial and execution for the murder of her father, and the new Marriage Act attempted to reinforce parental control over unruly filial desires.¹⁷ The appropriateness of La Laideur Aimable as a text for translation by a mid-century English woman writer becomes much clearer in this context.

Pleasing Papa: Speaking Filial Duty in Sarah Scott's Novels

In the light of Sarah Scott's own history, though, the novel approaches the status of ironic autobiographical commentary. Born on 21 September 1723 into a Yorkshire gentry family, Sarah was the younger daughter of Matthew Robinson and his wife Elizabeth (Drake). Because of her great likeness to her beautiful older sister Elizabeth (nicknamed "Fidget"), Sarah was known to family and friends as "Pea," a nickname which persisted even after Sarah's disfiguring attack of smallpox at the age of seventeen.¹⁸ Both girls were well educated and encouraged by their parents to vie with their seven brothers in intellectual debate; Elizabeth, as Mrs. Montagu, would become Dr. Johnson's "Queen of the Blues," while Sarah turned her attention to writing novels and histories.¹⁹ The sisters evidently quarreled over Sarah's marriage, early in 1751, to George Lewis Scott, subpreceptor to the Prince of Wales—a marriage which ended in 1752 with Sarah's family taking her away from her husband. The fact that Mr. Scott returned half of Sarah's marriage portion and made her an annual allowance was taken as a sign that she was not to blame for the collapse of the marriage. Elizabeth thought her sister's income (which her writing now supplemented) a small one; her own marriage to the much older Edward Montagu ensured the continuation of her social and material comforts at a much higher level. After staying with Elizabeth for a while, Sarah sought retirement near Bath with Barbara Montagu ("Lady Bab"), her inseparable friend of four years' standing, in what Elizabeth jokingly called their "convent." Apart from Sarah's writing, the two women busied themselves in the kind of educational and charitable works later depicted in Sarah's best-known and most often reprinted novel, Millenium Hall (1762). Though her later years were dogged by poor health and headaches, Sarah was to survive her companion by thirty years, dying in November 1795 at Catton, near Norwich.

Like Sarah Scott and Barbara Montagu, the ladies of Millenium Hall have chosen a life of retirement and good works, though on a larger scale made possible by inherited wealth and property. But for all their financial independence, Miss Mancel and Mrs. Morgan, the founders of the Millenium Hall community, have both experienced the miseries of filial dependence. Miss Mancel, orphaned at the age of ten, is adopted by a libertine who, boasting to his friends of "the extraordinary charms which were ripening for his possession," cloaks his sexual advances under paternal caresses; his death releases her unscathed from the conflict between sexual morality and gratitude to "a man, whom she loved and honoured like a father," but leaves her destitute.²⁰ Her beloved Miss Melvyn is forced, by her scheming stepmother's false accusations of unchastity, and her father's refusal either to trust his daughter or yield to her tears and entreaties, into marriage with the Solmes-like Mr. Morgan, whose first act is to separate her from Miss Mancel. Reunited after Mr. Morgan's death, the friends share twenty years of utopian seclusion, joined by other ladies who share their views and experiences of life and their commitment to (carefully regulated) Christian charity. Their system of education (described at greater length in Scott's later novel, The History of Sir George Ellison, in which the male narrator of Millenium Hall revisits the community which so impressed him) is graduated according to social class, intended to fit girls for their station in life. It also fits them for matrimony, which the ladies encourage in others though rejecting it themselves; in Millenium Hall, the ladies' pupils are sought after as wives by the local farmers. Nevertheless, the abiding impression of the novel is not one of limitation or conservatism, but of women empowered by experience and eventual good fortune to choose the direction of their own lives and to benefit those of others.

"There is no divine Ordinance more frequently disobeyed than that wherein God forbids human Sacrifices," comments the wise old nurse Sabrina, teller of exemplary tales in Sarah Scott's A Journey Through Every Stage of Life, "for in no other light can I see most Marriages."²¹ Sabrina's language recalls that of conduct-book writer Richard Allestree in The Ladies Calling, who denounces mercenary and forced marriages as "a more barbarous Immolation then that to Moloch; for tho that were very inhumane, yet … the pain was short: but a loathed Bed is at once an acute and a lingring [sic] Torment."²² But Sabrina's amplification of her example significantly shifts the blame from sacrificer to (self-) sacrificed:

Every one that reads in ancient History of human Sacrifices, exclaims against the horrid Practice, and trembles at the Relation, tho' scarcely one of the female Readers, if of a marriageable Age, but will, the next Moment, begin to deck her Person like an adorned Victim, in hopes of tempting some golden Idol to receive her as a free-will Offering.

(1:17)

This shift reveals the impossibility for the "female Reader," the marriageable daughter, of getting it right; wanting to marry for love against your parents' wishes is wrong, and punishable, but wanting to marry for money or interest (which may also be what your parents want) is wrong too. As a recent study of fictional fathers and daughters concludes, the daughter "must learn, above all, not to be found wanting";²³any kind of active desire signals filial failure.

In Scott's last novel, The Test of Filial Duty (1772), the lively Charlotte teases her friend Emilia, whose parents have promised never to push her into marriage, about the possible disadvantages of such freedom:

We follow the dictates of our inclinations with some dignity, when we can pretend that our compliance arises from an effort of duty. "To please you papa," is a delicate kind of consent; but, "it pleases me papa," is a bolder speech than your immoderate bashfulness will ever suffer you to pronounce; if therefore you are to continue single till then, you will certainly die an old maid.²⁴

Charlotte herself finds it almost impossible to pronounce that particular speech and is only saved from pining away by paternal intervention; Emilia, in love with and loved by the man her father wants her elder half-sister to marry, has enough trouble not saying "to please you papa" to her father's attempt to marry her off to a wealthy nincompoop:

I could make no answer, but, more dead than alive, retired to my chamber, where for some time I remained like one thunder struck; my heart scarcely beat, my blood seemed stagnated, my senses suspended.

(1:207)

Emilia manages to rebel, briefly and privately, in conversation with her mother, demanding, "Am I not equally his daughter with Miss Sophia? … why then am I to be sacrificed to her?" (1:210); but her mother's response is not very comforting: "Leave him time to cool on a prospect so propitious to his designs, and paternal love will resume it's power" (1: 211). Rebellion against a sister's interests is possible; rebellion against a father's designs is not. Interest suspends the power of Mr. Leonard's paternal love:

I assured him, "I would sacrifice myself to his will, if he insisted upon it, whatever were the consequences, but entreated his compassion, and to be spared this hard trial of my duty." I washed his hands, his feet with my tears.

(1:230)

Tears, prayers and other sacrificial gestures fail to achieve the desired effect; but, Charlotte warns, this failure could set a dangerous precedent: "If a daughter, so dutiful as you have ever been, cannot obtain indulgence, it will discourage any one from attempting to follow your example" (1:225-26). Like Anna Howe, Charlotte has no patience with paternal self-aggrandizement at the daughter's expense:

Should … the best of daughters sacrifice her happiness to his caprice; how dreadful must be his unavailing repentance! Could pride or obstinacy offer him any consolation, were he … [to see] sorrow stealing from her effectually, though slowly, a life which nature designed should prove beneficial to many?

(1:227-28)

Not death, however, but exile awaits Emilia; her father, no longer intent on forcing her into marriage, determines instead to send her to some solitary retreat. Her response—ecstatic gratitude—startles him:

I threw myself at my father's feet, and thanked him for his indulgent goodness, with such tokens of excessive joy, as drew tears from his eyes. "How is it possible," said he, "my Emilia can rejoice in the prospect of so forlorn a situation? How great indeed must your aversion be to this marriage! and yet you would have obeyed me, had I required it! Oh! my child, how affecting is your obedience!"

(1:250-51)

Emilia's "tokens of excessive joy" achieve what her pleas for mercy could not; her father offers to revoke the sentence of banishment, but she insists on carrying it out. Only Charlotte remains refreshingly unaffected and ironic in the face of such excessive filial duty:

One has to be sure, read of fathers, who sacrificed their daughters…. You were most uncommonly formed for such parents; had you been Jephtha's daughter, you would not even have asked the respite of forty days, to bewail your untimely fate; on the contrary you would have curtsied low, thanked papa, and desired him to give the salutary blow, as quickly as his kind heart could desire; and then have received the stroke with a smile of gratitude.

(1:258-59)

Jephtha's daughter—or Virginius's. Charlotte's sarcastic protest is never an option for Emilia, not simply because, of the two, she is Clarissa to Charlotte's Anna, but because such protest, at any length, on one's own account, is seen in The Test of Filial Duty as melodramatic and self-indulgent—as it is, for example, in the response of Emilia's half-sister Sophia on learning that her father would like her to marry her cousin:

[She] began lamenting most pathetically her hard fate; wishing herself some cottage nymph, some foundling … rather than be persecuted as she was, about a man she could not love…. "[I]s it not immensely cruel … that he should wish a thing he sees I infinitely detest? … Cruel, inhuman father! Must I be sacrificed to a caprice? No; barbarous parent! filial obedience does not exact such a submission." Thus she ran on in heroics for a long time … [S]he was sensible an undistressed heroine would make a very uninteresting figure.

(1:120-22)

Sophia's "heroics" and her missish slang point her out as a target of satire; but, Emilia discovers, filial obedience may exact precisely "such a submission." Sophia the incurable romantic, who ends by eloping through the window ("which," as Charlotte says, "she no doubt would have chosen had all the doors been set open" [2:214]), is right about one thing; her father is quite capable of being a "barbarous parent"—but it does not do to say so.

Discussing the duties of children to parents, William Blackstone states that they "arise from a principle of natural justice and retribution," but that English law does not follow this principle through to its logical conclusion, as Athenian law did, by exempting, for example, "those whose chastity had been prostituted by consent of the father" from the performance of filial duty:

[English] law does not hold the tie of nature to be dissolved by any misbehaviour of the parent; and therefore a child is equally justifiable in defending the person, or maintaining the cause or suit, of a bad parent, as a good one; and is equally compellable, if of sufficient ability, to maintain and provide for a wicked and unnatural progenitor, as for one who has shewn the greatest tenderness and parental piety.²⁵

The story of Miss Almon in Scott's The History of Sir George Ellison (1766) recounts the distress of a daughter whose chastity comes very near to being prostituted by her father's consent when she finds herself in danger of being raped by his libertine friend:

[W]hat had I not to fear in a house where every vice seemed licensed, and where even my father would not protect me! The anguish of my mind was inexpressible. A wretch placed on the brink of a precipice, without any visible means of retiring, could not feel greater terrors than those I lived in. I tried to move my father when alone; but he laughed at my distress.²⁶

Once again, the threat of sexual "fall" fixes the daughter on the brink of a precipice; this time, however, the father's sexual degradation prevents him from seeing that which threatens his daughter, or from offering her assistance, since it is his mistress who encourages the libertine's visits and has even offered to sell Miss Almon to him for £1000. Indeed, the daughter realizes when she learns of the plot against her, her father "could not be entirely ignorant of this transaction" (2:107). She escapes and lives as an impoverished recluse, reluctant to tell her story even to the benevolent George Ellison: "a father's shame ought as much as possible to be concealed," she tells him (2:116).

Miss Almon is praised by Ellison for her filial reticence, "for nothing so well became a child as to conceal the failings of her parents" (2:117); she is not only "justifiable in defending … a wicked and unnatural progenitor" but (Blackstone's comment and Ellison's approval suggest), expected to do so. When Halifax advises his daughter that she "must take it well to be prun'd by so kind a Hand as that of a Father," he does not say what she should (or can) do if the "Hand" proves unkind. "A father's shame ought as much as possible to be concealed," but in Sir George Ellison the failings of the fathers repeatedly prove unconcealable, reluctantly exposed by dutiful but damaged offspring, to be rectified by Ellison the surrogate father; his explicitly paternal care extends even to his slaves in Jamaica, who are heartbroken when he decides to return to England:

He assured them, that he looked upon them all as his children, and promised no one should supply his place, that did not consider himself as their father. Instead of being satisfied with this promise, they exclaimed, "all fathers not good; no father like you."

(1:82)

The slaves' exclamation is borne out in the novel. All fathers indeed are "not good," governed by their passion for bad women, dragging down good ones through alcoholism, gambling, extravagance, or perversity, and no father is like Sir George—no father in this novel, that is. The Test of Filial Duty shows traces of the early volumes of Clarissa, The History of Sir George Ellison betrays its debt to The History of Sir Charles Grandison. Unlike Sir Charles, Ellison has children of his own but the novel's emphasis falls as much on his metaphorical as on his actual paternity. Apart from Miss Almon and the slaves, Ellison acts as a father to a young man imprisoned for his dead father's debts, as well as to his own future wife and her children by a previous marriage. It is in caring for one of his step-daughters, Louisa Tunstall, that he comes closest to Mr. de Villiers's role in Agreeable Ugliness.

Sarah Scott's interest in La Laideur Aimable, it has sometimes been suggested, is part of her general preoccupation with the problems of plain or disfigured women, and is ultimately traceable to her own disfigurement by smallpox at the age of seventeen. Sabrina, in A Journey, observes caustically that "the Life of Woman is more curtailed by the Fancy and Caprice of Men, than by Age or Distempers…. [W]hen a Woman is dead in Beauty, she might as well be dead in Law" (1:6); in Sir George Ellison, Scott suggests establishing "a new kind of bill of mortality" for departed beauty: "as for example, of late hours, forty-eight; of morphew, five; of pimples, twelve" (2:229). Like her creator, "the youngest Miss Tunstall" is ravaged by smallpox; paradoxically, Louisa's mother considers it "no small blessing," since it restrains the potentially dangerous "torrent of her vivacity" (2:224), precluding any possibility of sexual misconduct. Her parents, like the Shocking Monster's father, never try to conceal her physical defects, but instead encourage her to turn to intellectual pleasures and prepare for the single life; they also show "even more tenderness for her than for her sisters" to compensate for "the neglect of others" (2:226).

Her desire "to be distinguished too" (2:227) meets with an obstacle which the Shocking Monster's did not, however; like Sarah Scott's own sister, Elizabeth Montagu, Louisa's sisters and stepsisters are beautiful and brilliant. Catching up means losing sleep and forgoing company, but it is worth it:

[S]he obtained so much time, and so industriously employed it, that she united in herself the various accomplishments wherein her sisters separately shone … and she found so much pleasure in the pursuit [of] knowledge, that she frequently considered as an happiness that her form was such as did not deserve any share in her attention.

(2:230-31)

Once again, the really plain but well-educated heroine gets a suitable husband—young, virtuous, and rich—as the reward of her agreeable ugliness:

The uncommon qualifications of Miss Louisa, the excellence of her temper, heart, and understanding, had entirely captivated his affections, and given him such a prejudice in favour of her person, that … he thought it perfectly agreeable.

(2:287)

Scott comments that Louisa "must have had little of her sex in her composition, if her vanity had not felt great gratification in so unexpected an event" (2:288); but the oddest thing about the young female Tunstalls and Ellisons is how little of their sex, or even of degenerate human nature, they seem to have in their composition:

Nor was it possible to say which of all these young ladies was most tenderly dutiful to her parents, or most affectionate to her brothers and sisters. They were entire strangers to envy; Miss Louisa would with pleasure assist in adorning their lovely persons, and they with delight observed her extraordinary accomplishments.

(2:231-32)

Entire strangers to envy? Surely even the strongest sisterly affection could hardly ensure that; some in-ward resistance there must be, though it cannot disrupt the smooth perfection of the Ellison family. In the broken and fallen family of Agreeable Ugliness, the luxury of unsisterly feeling runs riot, with the clear conscience of the translator.²⁷

At the end of Agreeable Ugliness, the heroine's family and friends share in her happiness: "The Dowager Marchioness, the Marquis, his lovely Wife, and my Father, shed Tears of Joy; and to the Count's succeeded their tenderest embraces" (p. 256). Conspicuous by their absence are Madame de Villiers and her elder daughter, who arrive to gloat over the Shocking Monster's supposed impending marriage to old St. Furcy, only to be thrown into confusion on discovering their mistake, and laughed out of the room by the rest of the company. Mother and sister have to be expelled and humiliated one more time, not simply because of their unpleasantness, but also because of what they represent: "les dangers de la beauté," as La Place's subtitle has it.²⁸

The question of sexual attraction is one which father and younger daughter have earlier discussed with a curious mixture of frankness and obliquity:

In short, Sir, can the most amiable Women long preserve the Love and Esteem of their Husbands? As for Love, I am formed neither to give it, nor to render it lasting; and how, without Love, can a Husband have for me those Attentions, which, [when] mutual, alone constitute the Happiness of a married Life? You are under a Mistake, my dear, interrupted my Father; in Marriage, Beauty has less Power over the Hearts of Men than you imagine; Possession too often deprives it of its Charms, and effaces all its Merits; the Understanding and Goodness of the Heart and Temper, can only create a lasting Passion.

(pp. 62-63)

Mr. de Villiers's remarks about beauty may sound like conduct-book wisdom ("Marriage, indeed, will at once dispel the enchantment raised by external beauty," pronounces Dr. Gregory in A Father's Legacy to his Daughters),²⁹ but their exactness of application to his own marriage robs them of conduct-book impersonality. Madame de Villiers, for all her beauty, has not preserved her husband's "Love and Esteem"; how then can the Shocking Monster, who isn't "formed" to give or receive sexual passion, have "the Happiness of a married Life"? The father's reply suggests that his daughter, because she has no illusory external beauty, will neither inflict nor incur her mother's disappointments, and will therefore be more powerful in her marriage. But for all the allegedly demystifying effects of "Possession," the idea of a rationally inspired "lasting Passion" seems no nearer to fulfilment by the end of the book. Beauty's power over the hearts of men remains, the riddle of what we desire, and why, unsolved by closer acquaintance. Desire, in Agreeable Ugliness, is always treacherous: women who arouse it must be repeatedly rejected (though they will still be desired); and a woman who admits to feeling it would be a monster indeed. "To please you papa," not "it pleases me papa," is the only way the daughter can speak her desire.

"Though a woman has no reason to be ashamed of an attachment to a man of merit," Dr. Gregory writes in A Father's Legacy,

yet nature, whose authority is superior to philosophy, has annexed a sense of shame to it. It is even long before a woman of delicacy dares avow to her own heart that she loves; and when all the subterfuges of ingenuity to conceal it from herself fail, she feels a violence done both to her pride and to her modesty.³⁰

Gregory's doublethink constructs "a sense of shame" as simultaneously natural and superimposed, unnecessary and unreasonable, yet sanctioned by the superior authority of patriarchal society, which he calls "nature." Instilling in its daughters "a sense of shame" about even those desires which it is prepared to countenance (attachments to men of merit), patriarchy tightens control on those desires which it finds unacceptable; sentimental novels, like Gregory's prescriptive accounts of how "a woman of delicacy" behaves, participate in that control.

"Divines divide Sacrifices into Bloody, such as those of the Old Law; and Bloodless, such as those of the New Law," Chambers's Cyclopaedia noted in 1728.³¹ Even when paternal swords have been beaten into ploughshares, or rather pruning-hooks, under the "new law" of sentimental fiction, their coercive force remains, however internalized.³² The truly dutiful daughter carries within herself the authority her father can now afford to lay aside; if, as Gregory argues, avowing "to her own heart that she loves" constitutes internal violence, how can the daughter possibly avow it to anyone else? Self-censorship will prevent her from speaking out of turn, or she "will never answer it to Good Nature." The new sacrifices patriarchy demands may be "bloodless," but they are still human.

Notes

¹The Complete Works of George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax, ed. Walter Raleigh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), pp. 1-2.

² Lynda E. Boose, "The Father's House and the Daughter in It," in Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), p. 37.

³ Margaret Anne Doody has called attention to the replacement in eighteenth-century writing of authoritarianism with paternal "emotional blackmail" or authority through tenderness, a shift which she relates to the decline of actual paternal authority during the period; see her Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 24.

⁴ A similar view of the repressive force of benevolent paternal government, as seen in Locke's theory of education, appears in Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, "Milton's Daughters: The Education of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers," Feminist Studies 12, 2 (Summer 1986): 275-93.

⁵ The only extended study of Sarah Scott is Walter M. Crittenden's largely biographical The Life and Writings of Mrs. Sarah Scott, Novelist (Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1932); the correspondence of her sister, Elizabeth Montagu, in Emily J. Climenson's Elizabeth Montague, the Queen of the Blue-Stockings, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1906) and Reginald Blunt's Mrs. Montagu, "Queen of the Blues," 2 vols. (London: Constable, [1923]) yields some biographical detail. John Doran's A Lady of the Last Century (London: 1873), on Elizabeth Montagu, has more extensive passages from Sarah Scott's letters. Jane Spencer's short introduction to Millenium Hall (rprt. London: Virago Press, 1986) is also useful, as is Sylvia Harcstark Myers's The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). The Huntington Library's collection of Elizabeth Montagu's papers includes those letters by Scott which were not, as she had requested, destroyed after her death.

⁶ Sarah Scott, Agreeable Ugliness: or, the Triumph of the Graces. Exemplified in the real Life and Fortunes of a young Lady of some Distinction (London: 1754), p. 13. All subsequent references to this work will appear in the text. La Place's original styles its heroine "le petit monstre"; "Shocking" is Scott's amplification.

⁷ There are other cases in eighteenth-century literature of overlap between father-daughter and teacher-pupil relationships, but Mr. de Villiers is unusual in concentrating on only one of his children, and in doing so while his wife is still alive. More characteristic examples include Camilla's father in Sarah Fielding's Adventures of David Simple (1744), which La Place had translated; Mr. Villars in Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778); La Luc in Anne Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest (1791); and St. Aubert in her Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The closest parallel is that of Mr. Dudley in Jane West's A Gossip's Story (1796), who educates only one of his daughters, Louisa; the other, Marianne, who has been identified as a possible model for her namesake in Sense and Sensibility, is spoiled by her maternal grandmother. Self-indulgent sensibility ruins Marianne's life; paternally inculcated self-control insures Louisa's reward in the love of her father's benefactor, whom Marianne has previously rejected.

⁸ La Place's taste for this plot item, the last-minute marital transfer, is shown by his re-use of it in his second novel, Mémoires et Lettres de Mademoiselle de Gondreville et du Comte de Saint-Fargeol (1788).

⁹ Pierre-Antoine de la Place, "Traduction d'une lettre écrite à M. Fielding," in Collection de Romans et de Contes, 8 vols. (Paris: 1788), 5:5-6.

¹⁰ For La Place's version of Sophia and Squire Western, see Lillian B. Cobb, Pierre-Antoine de la Place, Sa Vie et son Oeuvre (1707-93) (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1928), pp. 98-103.

¹¹ William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (London: 1697; rprt. in The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis [Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967]), IV.i.318-26. See also Priuli's encounter with the veiled Belvidera in Act V of Venice Preserv 'd, in The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932), vol. 2; Bajazet's hostile reception of Selima in III.i of Tamerlane (Three Plays by Nicholas Rowe, ed. J. R. Sutherland [London: Scholartis Press, 1929], p. 99); and Sciolto's confrontation with Calista in V.i of The Fair Penitent (Three Plays, p. 234). All subsequent references are to these editions and will be cited in the text.

¹² Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (London: 1744; rprt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p. 292. All references are to this edition, and will be cited in the text.

¹³The History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl, 2 vols. (London: 1750), 2:310-11. All subsequent references will be cited in the text.

¹⁴The Critical Review (April 1756), p. 279. This review, like Brooke's preface, refers to the existence of two recent plays on the same theme, one of which was Crisp's Virginia, performed at Drury Lane in 1754. The Gentleman 's Magazine issues of February and March 1754 list two different publishers' offerings of "the story of Virginia," as well as (favorably) reviewing Crisp's play and including its prologue and epilogue in the poetry section for March.

¹⁵ "The antient Roman laws gave the father a power of life and death over his children; upon this principle, that he who gave had also the power of taking away." William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: 1765-69), 1:440.

¹⁶ Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Physician's Tale," lines 248-50, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 147. Brooke's Virginia at first intends suicide, but gives her father the dagger, saying "Your Daughter gives her Honour to your Hands: / This was her only Pledge of Liberty"; Frances Brooke, Virginia, a Tragedy (London: 1756), IV.viii. The Critical Review (see note 14 above) describes this incident as "great, noble, and tremendous."

¹⁷ Susan Staves's article "British Seduced Maidens," in Eighteenth Century Studies 14, 2 (Winter 1980-81): 109-34, argues that the stricter controls of Hardwicke's 1753 Marriage Act were a tacit confession of how little power parents actually had over their offspring's desires. She reads later sentimental portrayals of seduced daughters and grieving fathers as nostalgia for increasingly obsolete paternal authority. Staves's view of the Marriage Act is supported by the pamphlets reprinted in The Marriage Act of 1753, ed. Randolph Trumbach (New York and London: Garland, 1985), which emphasize the Act's status as a highly controversial response to an acute anxiety.

¹⁸ See Climenson, 1:67-68, 78-79.

¹⁹ Sarah Scott's works are as follows: The History of Cornelia (1750); A Journey Through Every Stage of Life and Agreeable Ugliness (1754); The History of Gustavus Ericson, King of Sweden (1761); A Description of Millenium Hall and The History of Mecklenburgh (1762); The History of Sir George Ellison (1766); The Test of Filial Duty and The Life of Theodore Agrippa D'Aubigne (1772).

²⁰ Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall … (London: 1762), pp. 63, 61. All subsequent references to this and Sarah Scott's other novels will appear in the text after the first citation.

²¹ Sarah Scott, A Journey Through Every Stage of Life, Described in a Variety of Interesting Scenes, Drawn from Real Characters. By a Person of Quality, 2 vols. (London: 1754), 1:16.

²² Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (Oxford: 1673), Part 2, p. 58.

²³ Lynda Marie Zwinger, Daughters of Sentiment: Father-Daughter Relations in the Novel (SUNY, Buffalo, Ph.D. thesis, 1985), p. 102 (my italics).

²⁴The Test of Filial Duty. In a Series of Letters between Miss Emilia Leonard, and Miss Charlotte Arlington. A Novel, 2 vols. (London: 1772), 1:159.

²⁵ Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:441-42.

²⁶The History of Sir George Ellison, 2 vols. (London: 1766), 2:102-103.

²⁷ It is tempting to think that Sarah Scott found a certain sharp pleasure in translating a novel which effectively reversed the Robinson sisters' fates; though the preface she adds apologizes in the narrator's voice for the novel's treatment of Madame de Villiers, no apology is offered for its treatment of the Fair Villiers.

²⁸ Pierre-Antoine de la Place, La Laideur Aimable, et les Dangers de la Beauté, 2 vols. (1752; rprt. Liege: 1770), title page. La Place's subtitle divides the novel equally between the two female camps; Scott's focuses exclusively on the narrator-heroine's triumphs and tribulations.

²⁹ Dr. John Gregory, A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (Dublin: 1774; 2nd edn., London and Edinburgh: 1774), p. 129. Gregory's book, itself an interesting text for the study of father-daughter relations, is among those attacked by Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

³⁰A Father's Legacy, p. 67.

³¹ Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences, 2 vols. (London: 1728); see under SACRIFICE.

³² Carol Houlihan Flynn discusses the progress and effects of such an internalization in Richardson's heroines; see her recent essay, "The Pains of Compliance in Sir Charles Grandison" in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 132-45.