Abstract
The rise of nationalism in republican France, and in Britain after the outbreak of war in 1793, rendered ‘feminism’ unpatriotic in both countries.1 In France, the Jacobin administration, after overthrowing the Girondins, excluded women from public affairs, and Marianne was replaced by Hercules as the symbol of the republic. Salonnières and female polemicists were silenced by the execution of Manon Roland and Olympe de Gouges. In Britain, Pitt’s Tory government mirrored the militarisation and masculinisation of political life across the channel. Hannah More became the preferred female role model: her formidable Evangelical energies channelled into loyalist voluntary associations supporting the armed forces and the militia; her publications combating the lower-class ‘enemy within’ through a mixture of religious quietism and jingoism; her public role conceded in return for her repeated insistence that most women were intellectually inferior to men and belonged in the home.
A steady patriot of the world alone,
The friend of every country — but his own.
(Canning and Frere, New Morality, 1798)
‘For, the outsider will say, in fact as a woman, I have no country …’
(Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938)
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Notes
See Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 16.
Quoted by Philip Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (April, 2002), 170–98, 172.
D.O. Thomas (ed.), Richard Price: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 181.
See Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+)’, History Workshop Journal 12 (1981), 8–33; Otto Dann and John Dinwiddy (eds), Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution (London and Ronceverte: The Hambledon Press, 1988), p. 7; David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state in the 1790s’, in Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+).
See Evan Radcliffe, ‘Revolutionary Writing, Moral Philosophy, and Universal Benevolence in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54:2 (Apr. 1993), 221–40, ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+).
Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (eds), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), 5, 66. Henceforth abbreviated to WMW.
M. Ray Adams, ‘Helen Maria Williams and the French Revolution’, in Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.), From Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honour of George McLean Harper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), pp. 87–117, p. 111.
William John Fitzpatrick, Lady Morgan. Her Career, Literary and Personal etc, 2 vols (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1860), 1: 111.
See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 128–60.
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, ed. Kathryn Fitzpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 14.
Ian Dennis, Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 51. For the view that the novel is a seminal formulation of Irish patriotism in the Protestant tradition, incorporating research into Gaelic culture by Protestant antiquarians like Charlotte Brooke and Edward Bunting, see: Elmer Andrews, ‘Aesthetics, Politics and Identity: Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 13:2 (Dec. 1987), ([0-9])–([0-9])9.
See Ina Ferris, ‘Writing on the border: the national tale, female writing, and the public sphere’, in Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (eds), Romanticism, History and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming literature ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 86–106, p. 86.
Joseph Lew, ‘Sydney Owenson and the Fate of Empire’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 39 (1990), 39–65.
See Ada Giusti, ‘The Politics of Location: Italian Narratives of Mme de Staël and Georges Sand’, Neohelicon, 22:2 (1995), 205–19, 207.
See Madelyn Gutwirth, ‘Woman as Mediatrix: from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Germaine de Staël’, in Avriel H. Goldberger (ed.), Woman as Mediatrix: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 13–30.
Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), p. 45.
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© 2005 Caroline Franklin
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Franklin, C. (2005). Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique of Empire: Helen Maria Williams, Sydney Owenson and Germaine de Staël. In: Knott, S., Taylor, B. (eds) Women, Gender and Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554801_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554801_35
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