The Law of the Father: Inchbald’s A Simple Story

Abstract

Evelina depicts the failings of the most prominent representatives of patriarchy, but it draws back from the open critique of the institution itself. The father figure is cleared of wilful negligence or cruelty towards his daughter, and the blame is laid entirely at the door of the lowest class, represented in the figure of the nurse. Inchbald’s novel is more radical. If Evelina is unnecessarily terrified of the sight of her father, Inchbald’s father figure appears truly terrifying, ‘an unmasked version of the figure of authority’ in a radically different world.¹ Between the appearance of the two novels a cataclysmic event across the Channel shook the world, which may have contributed to the way in which Inchbald conceived the second half of her novel, depicting the life of her coquettish heroine’s daughter. Scholars assume that the novel was originally conceived in the 1770s and was redesigned and extended in 1789–90.² By 1791, the figure of the despotic patriarch had become de rigueur. This same year saw the publication of Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and Charlotte Smith’s Celestina, both of which draw very critical pictures of patriarchal tyranny. Part 1 of A Simple Story focuses on the rebellious figure of the coquette, while Part 2, perhaps influenced by the political events following the French Revolution, offers a totally different story. The two generations of this novel truly live in different eras. This is frequently alluded to in the text itself, nowhere as clearly as at the end, in its moral: the reader ‘has beheld the pernicious effects of an improper education in the destiny which attended the unthinking Miss Milner.