American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)

The Courtship Novel, 1740-1820: A Feminized Genre. by Katherine Sobba GreenReview by: Patricia Meyer SpacksEighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 112-115Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS).Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2739244 .

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112 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

KATHERINE SOBBA GREEN. The Courtship Novel, 1740-1820: A Feminized Genre. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. Pp. viii + 184. $23.

The tradition of courtship novels that Katherine Sobba Green isolates begins with Eliza Haywood and extends to Jane Austen. Most of its prac- titioners are female. Its achievements include justifying for an audience of women the developing ideology of companionate marriage. According to Green's argument, novels of courtship and marriage, often stigmatized in their own time as essentially frivolous, and recently analyzed by Nancy Armstrong as contributing to the hegemony of conservative domesticity, actually served a protofeminist agenda, providing new ways of imagining emotional possibility. In support of this thesis she marshals evidence from an array of writers including Mary Collyer, Frances Brooke, Jane West, Mary Brunton, and Maria Edgeworth as well as more canonical figures: Richardson, Burney, and Wollstonecraft.

In Green's view, later-twentieth-century critics frequently misread courtship novels by failing to bring adequate historical perspective to the task of interpretation. From the point of view of someone reading these works today, the suggestions they offer about female lives seem tame indeed. They speak for marriages based on love rather than money, for the value of women's education, for the dangers of yielding automatically to patriarchal assumptions. Their positions, sounding far from revolutionary, can readily be subsumed under the rubric of domestic ideology. Yet when one remembers that the notion of women as media of exchange in family economies survived in some circles throughout the eighteenth century, even modest protests reverberate. Green attempts to chart the reverbera- tions.

The theoretical underpinnings she claims include Bakhtin and Paul Smith (Discerning the Subject); she cavalierly rejects Marxist and feminist ap- proaches as reductive. But in fact theory plays little part in her argument, surviving mainly in irritatingly reiterated phrases ("subject position," "tro- pological commodification") that often appear to substitute for thought. Her method depends, rather, on minimally inflected plot summary and on notation of overt ideological clues. A characteristic analytic sentence will suggest what cumbersome prose and what banal conclusions this procedure can generate: "Louisa in effect claims a natural virtue and positions herself as a rebel, against Dorilaus's power as her guardian, against the authorita- tive word ('duty') she has internalized, and against the worldly ideology and status system represented by the fashionable crowd" (p. 27). On the other hand, the fact that Green deals largely in the obvious lends paradoxical authority to her writing. The ideological positions she claims for them appear self-evident in the texts she cites. But no one previously has read

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REVIEWS 113

these works in conjunction with one another in order to call attention to the "self-evident. "

Treating courtship novels in roughly chronological order, Green orga- nizes her study thematically as well as historically. The Courtship Novel contains five sections. The first, "A Feminized Genre," contextualizes early novels of courtship by considering them in relation to contemporary conduct books and women's periodicals. Although female writers in these modes often echoed the advice of men, they also introduced new concerns: emphasis, for instance, on the importance of women's education. Women writing fiction, wishing to escape the ancient equivalence of sexuality and textuality, retreated from stress on seduction and betrayal (the themes of seventeenth-century romance) to plots in which interest in marriage as the goal of love displaced the body and allowed room to consider female middle-class values and assumptions. Eliza Haywood, whose fiction shifted in the middle of her career from seduction-plots to marriage-plots, provides an appropriate focus of literary attention in this context. So does Mary Collyer, an early experimenter in the new mode who speaks for female sensibility and its association with marriage and motherhood. Both novel- ists, Green points out, call attention to male rhetoric as an instrument of power and of deception. They thus suggest the social significance of their own literary acts.

Feminized courtship novels implied and anticipated female audiences. In a second section on "Early Feminist Reception Theory," Green argues for novelists' deliberate targeting of women readers. She challenges Terry Eagleton's reading of Clarissa on the basis of Eagleton's consistent neglect of gender in favor of class, pointing out Richardson's explicit invocation of female readership and his equally explicit concern with female conduct. In a provocative and persuasive reading of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, she demonstrates how completely the romances that distort the heroine's sensibility reflect masculine assumptions. Arabella's ultimate re- jection of the role of romance heroine in favor of realistic wifehood amounts to a choice of female (i.e., domestic middle-class) values over male ones. Less impressive interpretations of a later Lennox novel and of Frances Brooke's enormously popular History of Miss Emily Montague conclude the section.

A cursory but suggestive account of Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1752 plausibly opens the section entitled "The Commodification of Hero- ines," which investigates ways in which exchange value figures as an ele- ment in fictions of marriage. Burney's Cecilia is the only novel treated at length here, but passing references to Sir Charles Grandison and Evelina help to substantiate Green's view that even novelistic accounts of compan- ionate marriage draw on the realities and the conventions of matches made for economic reasons. The "blazon," a set of signs of the heroine's worth, survives as a convention throughout the eighteenth century, frequently

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114 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

ironized by self-aware female authors-as in Mr. Collins's proposal to Elizabeth (Pride and Prejudice), with its precise listing of the woman's attributes of value, a listing that bears no relation to the final measures of Elizabeth's merit. Green shows that Austen's predecessors had lavishly used the same device.

Part IV, "Educational Reform," contains few surprises, calling attention to fictional contexts in which discussions of female education flourished. Even conservative writers such as Hannah More believed that women should receive education as rational creatures, not simply as social orna- ments. Green sees the discussion of learning in Sir Charles Grandison as inaugurating a series of comparable exchanges within novels, where women excessively concerned to display their knowledge attract as much negative criticism as those who know nothing.

A concluding section, "The Denouement: Courtship and Marriage," uses Edgeworth's Belinda and Austen's Pride and Prejudice as culminating examples of tension over desiderata of marriage. Green observes, rightly, that our foreshortened perspective on the past may lead us mistakenly to understand the shift from economic to companionate marriage as occurring smoothly and "naturally" at a specific historical moment. In fact, the change, involving altered power relations of parents and children, took place slowly and only as a result of many contested arrangements. Belinda, which opens with an account of the recurrent matchmaking efforts of Belin- da's aunt, altogether committed to an economic view of marriage, and Pride and Prejudice, with the economically oriented figures of Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh vivid presences in the lives of the young, reveal how conflicting assumptions about marriage long continued to inform the novelistic imagination.

Neither patriarchy nor domesticity is monolithic. Over and over, The Courtship Novel reminds its readers of this important fact, one obscured by much recent Foucauldian analysis. As Green points out toward the end of her study, to read eighteenth-century novels solely as revelations of class dynamics "is both to undervalue the dynamic relationship between female writers and readers and to impose an anachronistic mistrust of the domestic on one's reading of eighteenth-century texts" (p. 158). Inasmuch as this analysis historicizes a body of literature while insisting on its ideological significance, it usefully contributes to the developing discourse on early modern fiction and on the evolution of feminism. Moreover, its stipulation of a coherent tradition that includes novels as well-known as Clarissa in conjunction with works as unfamiliar as A Gossip's Story and Self Control makes a serious critical point, emphasizing how the arbitrary arrangements of twentieth-century literary history obscure as well as reveal the past. Many of the novels here treated exist in most critical memory as titles rather than texts-if, indeed, they exist there at all. Green helps to initiate their restoration to critical life.

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REVIEWS 115

The value of her work inheres more in its overriding argument, which I find persuasive, than in the analysis that supports it, analysis often lacking both theoretical and interpretive subtley. Plot summary occupies too much space here. It frequently serves little obvious purpose beyond making readers cursorily acquainted with unfamiliar fiction. As for Green's ideo- logical investigations of these novels, they make diverse works sound very much alike. Over and over we learn that female novelists interrogate female subject positions, or that patriarchal authority has been unsettled, or that a work celebrates marriage based on sensibility. If such assertions seem plausible enough, they also come to seem uninteresting: one yearns for more discrimination. The energy and wit of Pride and Prejudice and all its distinctiveness vanish in such a summary sentence as this: "Implicitly, in her divergence from marriage-market calculations and decorums, Austen's heroine recommends to the identificatory reader the new ethic of female behavior, the new subject position from which to consider societal wisdom about equal marriages" (p. 156). Moreover, for all her talk about "the identificatory reader," Green offers no evidence about actual contemporary readers. Instead, she provides such unsupported assertions as the unlikely contention that Jane West's contemporaries "decoded with full understand- ing the piquancy of an old-maid authoress quizzing the intellectual ability of her own sex" (p. 119). The Courtship Novel has a strong idea as its foundation-but its execution proves far inferior to its conception.

PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS University of Virginia

ELIZABETH BERGEN BROPHY. Women's Lives and the 18th-Century English Novel. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991.

Professor Brophy's purpose is to see whether eighteenth-century novels really did represent everyday life for women in "basically realistic" ways (p. 1). She wants to know both "what everyday life ... was like" for "the normal, everyday woman of the century," and how "the depiction of women in fiction" might have "influenced the women of the time" (pp. 1-2). Her goal is to "access" the "accuracy" and the "influence" of novelistic represen- tations of women's lives, by setting them against manuscript materials that describe their writers' daily experiences in great detail.

Brophy's strongest suit is her knowledge of a very large number of unpublished manuscript sources. In the course of a year's residence in England, she consulted letters and journal manuscripts written by "more than 250 women," from which she quotes extensively throughout the book. Her work is immeasurably richer for these sources. Brophy not only deals

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