Abstract
The dramatic political debates that embroiled the English in the 1790s were not limited to discussions concerning the rights of men alone. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft famously broke new ground with her controversial A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and inspired similar treatises by other early feminists, such as Mary Hays’s Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in behalf of Women (1798) and Mary Robinson’s A Letter to the Women of England (1799). These writers and others who wished to see a reform of the status of women in contemporary Britain also used the format of the popular novel to draw attention to the ways in which women were oppressed by their domestic duties, by the limited professional options open to them, and by their extremely limited legal status.
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Notes
See Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 185 (New York: Persea Books, 1988), 56–57.
For readings of Caleb William as a Gothic novel, see Kenneth Graham, “The Gothic Unity of Caleb William,” Papers on Language and Literatur 20, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 57–59; Donald R. Wehrs, “Rhetoric, History, Rebellion: Caleb Williams and the Subversion of Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Studies in English Literatur 24 (1988): 497–511; Betty Rizzo, “The Gothic Caleb Williams,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Centur 305 (1992): 1387–89; Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 54–56; Barbara M. Benedict, “Radcliffe, Godwin, and Self-Possession in the 1790s,” in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 89–110; and Marshall Brown, The Gothic Tex (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 149–58. Marilyn Butler examines the limits of this mode of approaching the novel in Jane Austen and the War of Idea (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 57–75. For a full discussion of Caleb William and The Wrongs of Woma in the context of Gothic fiction, see Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Nove (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 47–95.
For Emily Melville’s role as a sexual victim, see Kenneth Graham, The Politics of Narrative: Ideology and Social Change in William Godwi’ Caleb Williams (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 16–22. Mona Scheuermann also analyzes Emily’s role in the novel in Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and Society from Defoe to Auste (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 144–48, as does Nancy Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the Law: Critiquing the Contrac (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 117–20.
Godwin himself acknowledged this alteration of the tradition in relating his plot to the fairy tale of “Bluebeard”. See his preface to the “Standard Novels” edition of Fleetwoo in 1832, reprinted in Caleb William, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Marldey (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000), 443–50. For the symbolic implications of Caleb’s assumption of the role of the victimized heroine, see Alex Gold, Jr., “It’s Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin’s Caleb William,” Texas Studies in Language and Literatur 19 (1977): 135–60; Mona Scheuermann, Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Nove (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 153–54, 165; Ellis, The Contested Castl, 151–60; Robert J. Corber, “Representing the ‘Unspeakable’: William Godwin and the Politics of Homophobia,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990) 85–101; Barbara Benedict, “Radcliffe, Godwin, and Self-Possession in the 1790s,” 89–110; Eric Daffron, “‘Magnetical Sympathy’: Strategies of Power and Resistance in Godwin’s Caleb William,” Criticis 37, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 225–26; Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the La, 124–25; Gavin Edwards, “William Godwin’s Foreign Language: Stories and Families in Caleb William and Political Justic,” Studies in Romanticis 39 (Winter 2000): 550–51; and A. A. Markley, “The Success of Gentleness: Homosocial Desire and the Homosexual Personality in the Novels of William Godwin,” Romanticism on the Ne 36–37 (November 2004–February 2005), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n36–37/011139ar.html.
For readings of the novel as an extension of Wollstonecraft’s agenda in the Vindicatio, see Mitzi Myers, “Unfinished Business: Wollstone-craft’s Mari,” The Wordsworth Circl 11 (1980): 107–14; Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Auste (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 94–113; Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–183 (London: Longman, 1988), 38–42; Marilyn Butler, general introduction to The Works of Mary Wollstonecraf, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto; New York: New York University Press, 1989), I:27; Anne K. Mellor, “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mari,” Nineteenth-Century Context 19, no. 4(1996): 413–24; Elaine Jordan, “Criminal Conversation: Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woma,” Wome’s Writin 4, no. 2 (1997): 221–34; Susan C. Greenfield, Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to JaneAuste (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 94–102; Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the La, 140–44; and R. S. White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 109–16. For Wollstonecraft’s uses of Gothic conventions in The Wrongs of Woma, see Ellis, The Contested Castl, 92–98; E. J. Clery, “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s,” in Reviewing Romanticis, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (London: Macmillan, 1992), 69–85; Eleanor Ty, Unse’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 33–35; and Anna Neill, “Civilization and the Rights of Woman: Liberty and Captivity in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Wome’s Writin 8, no. 1 (2001): 109–10. Miranda Burgess discusses the novel as an amalgamation of differing genres in British Fiction and the Production of Social Orde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142–49.
William Godwin, preface to The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraf, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto; New York: New York University Press, 1989), I:81.
See Myers, “Unfinished Business,” 109–10.
Ralph Wardle, ed., Godwin & Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), Letter 31, 27–28.
See Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Nove, 75. For assessments of Woll-stonecraft’s balance of politics and sentiment in The Wrongs of Woma, see Janet Todd, “Reason and Sensibility in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woma,” Frontier 5, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 17–20; Poovey, The Proper Lad, 105–6; Ty, Unse’d Revolutionarie, 31–45; and Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1995), 47–69.
Maggie Kilgour discusses this passage as “an invocation and then exorcism of conventions” ( The Rise of the Gothic Nove, 81–82).
For discussions of the relationship between the two novels see Tilottama Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” Studies in Romanticis 27, no. 2 (1988): 221–51; Scheuermann, Her Bread to Ear, 175–76; Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Nove, 75–95; and Gavin Edwards, Narrative Order, 1789–1819: Life and Story in an Age of Revolutio (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 139–58. Kilgour calls the stories in Caleb William and The Wrongs of Woma “obsessive repetitions of a single one: variations on the Rousseauian pattern in which, because of the corruption of the social system, people develop into … social outcasts” ( The Rise of the Gothic Nove, 84).
Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin,” 229–30. Nicola Watson also reads the novel as a response to Rousseau in Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seduction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 51–57.
Claudia Johnson discusses Jemima’s significance in the novel in “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels,” in Equivocal Being, 66–69, and in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraf, ed. Claudia Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 204–207. See also Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–180 (London: Virago, 1989), 247–52, and Roxanne Eberle, Chastity and Transgression in Wome’s Writing, 1792–1897: Interrupting the Harlo’s Progres (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 21–54. Vivien Jones analyzes Jemima and her narrative alongside the “fallen” heroines of Inchbald’s Nature and Ar and Hays’s The Victim of Prejudic in “Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narrative,” Wome’s Writin 4, no. 2 (1997): 201–20.
For interpretations of The Victim of Prejudic, see Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–182 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 118–25; Ty, Unse’d Revolutionarie, 60–72, and “The Imprisoned Female Body in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudic,” in Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 133–53; Terence A. Hoagwood, Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Text (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 122–39; Julie Shaffer, “Ruined Women and Illegitimate Daughters: Revolution and Female Sexuality,” in Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Centur, ed. Katharine Kittredge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 302–5; Anjana Sharma, The Autobiography of Desire: English Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790 (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2004), 168–72; White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticis, 163–67; and Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fictio (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 251–53. For the novel’s similarity ofpurpose to The Wrongs of Woma, see Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: from Aphra Behn to Jane Auste (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 130–37, and “Of Use to Her Daughter’: Maternal Authority and Early Women Novelists,” in Living By the Pen: Early British Women Writer, ed. Dale Spender (New York and London: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1992), 207–8; Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Nove, 49–51; and Tilottama Rajan, “Disfiguring Reproduction: Natural History, Community, and the 1790s Novel,” The New Centennial Revie 2, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 211–52.
See Sharon Setzer, “Romancing the Reign of Terror: Sexual Politics in Mary Robinson’s Natural Daughte,” Criticis 39, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 535; and Julie Shaffer, “Ruined Women,” 309–10.
Setzer discusses Martha and Mrs. Sedgley/Lady Susan as doubles in “Romancing the Reign of Terror,” 540–42. See also Ty, Empowering the Feminin, 80–82; Shaffer, “Ruined Women,” 292–96, 306–7; and Anne Close, “Into the Public: The Sexual Heroine in Eliza Fenwick’s Secres and Mary Robinson’s The Natural Daughte,” Eighteenth-Century Fictio 17, no. 1 (2004): 35–52.
Nancy Johnson discusses Desmon as an ideal and altruistic hero in contrast to Verney in The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property, and the La, 71–83. Allison Conway considers his role as a sentimental hero in “Nationalism, Revolution and the Female Body: Charlotte Smith’s Desmon,” Wome’s Studie 24, no. 5 (1995): 395–409. See also Jones, Radical Sensibilit, 163–67, and Katharine Rogers, “Romantic Aspirations, Restricted Possibilities: The Novels of Charlotte Smith,” In ReVisioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–183, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 76–77.
For a discussion of this aspect of the novel’s ending see Bowstead, “Charlotte Smith’s Desmon,” 247–52; Elliott, “Charlotte Smith’s Feminism,” 110; Fry, Charlotte Smit, 78–80; and Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biograph (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1998), 150–51. Stuart Curran discusses contemporary reviewers’ reactions to this aspect of the novel in the introduction to his edition of Desmond, Works of Charlotte Smit, V:xv—xvi. For Josephine de Boisbelle as Geraldine’s double, see Ty, Unse’d Revolutionarie, 140–42; Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Nove, 38–39; Binhammer, “Revolutionary Domesticity,” 35–37; Mellor, Mothers of the Natio, 117–18; and Sharma, The Autobiography of Desir, 183–84.
Allison Conway analyzes the darker nuances of these parallels in her essay “Nationalism, Revolution and the Female Body,” as does Angela Keane in Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belonging (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86–90.
See Elliott, “Charlotte Smith’s Feminism,” 110–11; Susan Allen Ford, “Tales of the Times: Family and Nation in Charlotte Smith and Jane West,” in Family Matters in the British and American Nove, ed. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Elizabeth Mahn Nollen, and Sheila Reitzel Foor (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1997), 24–25; and Mellor, Mothers of the Natio, 118–21.
Angela Keane provides an insightful interpretation of the role of many of the novel’s disenfranchised minor characters in Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790, 96–102.
Julia M. Wright discusses Secres as a “mosaic of the gothic, the romantic, the libertinist, and the didactic (of various ideological stripes) under the general generic rubric of the epistolary” in “‘I Am Ill Fitted’: Conflicts of Genre in Eliza Fenwick’s Secres,” in Romanticism, History and th
Malinda Snow develops a related interpretation of Secres in light of England’s growing imperialistic agenda in India in “Habits of Empire and Domination in Eliza Fenwick’s Secres,” Eighteenth-Century Fictio 14, no. 2 (January 2002): 159–75.
Colin B. and Jo Atkinson enumerate the novel’s parallels to Evelin in “Maria Edgeworth, Belind, and Women’s Rights,” Eire—Irelan 19, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 97–98. For more on Burney’s influence on Belind see Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biograph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 308–11, and Jane Austen and the War of Idea, 140–44.
See Butler, Maria Edgewort, 243. For critical interpretations, see Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelis, 161–62; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 391; Julie Shaffer, “Not Subordinate: Empowering Women in the Marriage Plot—the Novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen,” Criticis 34, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 61–64; Susan Greenfield, “‘Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belind,” PML 112, no. 2 (March 1997): 222–24, and Mothering Daughter, 119–23; Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Spher (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 203–4; Mitzi Myers, “My Art belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth and the Pretexts of Belinda Women Writers and Patriarchal Authority,” in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century ‘Wome’s Fictio’ and Social Engagemen, ed. Paula Backscheider (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 104–46; Catherine Toal, “Control Experiment: Edgeworth’s Critique of Rousseau’s Educational Theory,” in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Context, ed. Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 212–31; Cliona O Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Natio (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), 37–47; and Joanne Cordon, “Revising Stereotypes of Nationality and Gender: Why Maria Edgeworth Did Not Write Castle Belind,” in New Essays on Maria Edgewort, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 147–56.
Edgeworth, Original Sketch of Belind, from Frances Edgeworth’s Memoir of Maria Edgewort, with a selection from her letters (1867), in Belind, ed. Siobhan Kilfeather, The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgewort, gen. ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), II:439.
For analyses of Harriet Freke and her role in the novel, see Cohn B. and Jo Atkinson’s reading of her as an expression of Edgeworth’s views on women’s rights in “Maria Edgeworth, Belind, and Women’s Rights,” 94–118. Barker-Benfield reads Freke as an attack on Wollstonecraftian feminism in The Culture of Sensibilit, 388–91. For additional readings, see Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dicken (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 18–21; Darryl Jones, “Frekes, Monsters and the Ladies: Attitudes to Female Sexuality in the 1790s,” Literature and Histor 4, no. 2 (Autumn 1995): 15–18; Greenfield, “Abroad and at Home,” 217–18; Lisa Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Nove (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 75–108; McCann, Cultural Politic in the 1790, 184–92; Toal, “Control Experiment,” 225–26; and Alison Harvey, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belind,” in New Essays on Maria Edgewort, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 1–29.
For interpretations of Lady Delacour’s role in the novel see Figes, Sex and Subterfug, 87–88; Beth Kowaleski—Wallace, “Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Maria Edgeworth’s Belind,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretatio 29. no. 3 (Fall 1988): 242–62; Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibilit, 257–58, 386–92; Heather MacFadyen, “Lady Delacour’s Library: Maria Edgeworth’s Belind and Fashionable Reading,” Nineteenth-Century Literatur 48, no. 4 (March 1994): 423–39; Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 190–94; Greenfield, “Abroad and at Home,” 216–24, and Mothering Daughter, 111–16; Nicholas Mason, “Class, Gender, and Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belind,” The Eighteenth-Century Nove 1(2001): 271–85; Jordana Rosenberg, “The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth’s Belind,” ELH7 (2003): 575–96; Jennie Batchelor, Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literatur (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 151–77; and Patricia Matthew, “Corporeal Lessons and Genre Shifts in Maria Edgeworth’s Belind,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studie 4, no.1 (Spring 2007), http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue42/matthew.htm.
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Markley, A.A. (2009). Incarcerated Women and the Uses of the Gothic. In: Conversion and Reform in the British Novel in the 1790s. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617858_3
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