Radical Renovations in the House of Fiction

Abstract

The narrative patterns available to British and American women novelists have too often been structured by implicit christianised standards. The restrictive fictions about women represented in Jewish and Christian religions have strongly influenced the fictional ‘reality’ perpetuated in novels. Recently feminist critics have uncovered the strong female tradition of the British novel. Before Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson were ‘fathers’ of the British novel, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood and Delariviere Manley, among others, were chronicling the adventures of fictional heroines, and the majority of the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were written by women. As Jane Spencer and Nancy Armstrong have found, however, women were able to achieve success in this profession by conforming to prescribed formulae, a code for female conduct, set out by the conduct books which flourished at the time, and reinforced by Samuel Richardson (in Pamela and Clarissa) and other guardians of female purity.¹ Thus the adventurous heroines of early British fiction, including Betsy Thoughtless in Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Olinda in Catharine Trotter’s Olinda’s Adventures (1693), gave way to the christian ideal of the virtuous retiring maiden in need of the protection of father, husband, home and church.