Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.

  … Its province is to bring about natural events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder: it is therefore precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance, and can neither employ giants to snatch away a lady from the nuptial rites, nor knights to bring her back from captivity; it can neither bewilder its personages in desarts, nor lodge them in imaginary castles.8

  But while he could ridicule the implausibilities of the old-style romance, its very absurdity and remoteness from ordinary life at least meant that

  ‘the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself’:

  the virtues and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity; and he amused himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and persecutors, as with beings of another species, whose actions were regulated upon motives of their own, and who had neither faults nor excellencies in common with himself. 9

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  Problems arise, though, ‘when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man’; in such circumstances, all fiction is understood implicitly as providing, if not ‘rules … for the general conduct of life’, at least predictive models of behaviour for young people with similar hopes and desires who might one day ‘be engaged in the like part’.10

  Anxiety about the harmful effects of fiction, particularly on young readers and even more so on young female readers, was not new –

  Michael McKeon observes, for example, that, certainly as far as romance fiction is concerned, ‘from Dante on, the fear that women’s morals will be corrupted by reading romances is quite conventional’11

  – but by the eighteenth century this anxiety extended to so many aspects of the reading experience that no facet of a human life could be considered safe from contamination.12 To the modern reader, the list of ill effects of avid reading, and the often direful language accompanying it, can seem ludicrously sensationalist, though at least some of the dangers targeted would be familiar from media campaigns in recent decades decrying the perils of television, and then videos, and then the internet. In the eighteenth century, novels were accused, for example, of enfeebling the physical constitution and disrupting domestic routine;13 of encouraging mental laziness,14 inflaming the imagination, creating false expectations of life, and breeding discontent;15 and of corrupting morality16 and fostering antisocial tendencies.17 It is an alarming catalogue of sins, many of them deriving from the danger Johnson identifies in fiction that represents ordinary men and women in common life, thereby encouraging readers to apply the story to themselves,18 though the level of anxiety also testifies to the more particular dangers of a new kind of compulsive reading experience and its capacity to entangle readers emotionally in the fictional world.19 There is evidence that ordinary readers were themselves conscious of how easily fiction could merge with life when the passions were engaged – Mrs Heathcote, writing to Jemima, Marchioness of Grey, for example, while defending herself for ‘feeling the distresses of others though the object of ones compassion is only fictitious’, acknowledges her folly when she has ‘insensibly steped from Fiction to Reality’, for ‘les tendres attachmens nous mènent plus loin qu’ on ne pense.’20 But the most pressing danger was seen to lie in the seduc-tiveness with which one book first engrosses the reader and then leads to another and another with what Thomas Gisborne described as an increasingly ‘indiscriminate and insatiable avidity’.21

  146 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre In Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, his readers are warned in melodramatic tones of the dangers of an ominously encroaching appetite:

  Thus a habit is formed, a habit at first, perhaps, of limited indulgence, but a habit that is continually found more formidable and more encroaching. The appetite becomes too keen to be denied; and in proportion as it is more urgent, grows less nice and select in its fare. What would formerly have given offence, now gives none.

  The palate is vitiated or made dull.22

  Gisborne might be condemning the indulgence of any profligate desire, but the particular dissipation he targets here is the lust, not for food or flesh, but for reading fiction. It is an activity that he acknowledges has undoubted pleasures, and even, at first, unexcep-tionable moral tendencies if directed by a fastidious taste. But such is the seduction of fiction that one book speedily leads to another until the mind is ‘secretly corrupted’. Gisborne’s specific concerns are typical of eighteenth-century criticism of novels and romances: most are unfit ‘to be perused with the eye of delicacy’; they breed an ‘aversion to reading of a more improving nature’; and, preoccupied with

  ‘the vicissitudes and effects of a passion the most powerful of all those which agitate the human heart’, they create ‘a susceptibility of impression and a premature warmth of tender emotions’ that are bound to lead to grief.23 But what Gisborne also highlights with uncommon clarity is an important reason for the new urgency in these warnings. Fiction may always have been unsafe, but it had never before been so easy to enjoy.

  Only a reader accustomed to novelistic conventions of narrative (or not accustomed to reading very much at all) could confidently assert, as Gisborne does, that ‘that story must be uncommonly barren, or wretchedly told, of which, after having heard the beginning, we desire not to know the end’.24 By the time Gisborne was writing one of the defining features of novels had become, not so much their realistic as their dramatic format – but ‘dramatic’ in the sense of having the concentrated focus of a play, with a unified action centring on a single protagonist, with one more or less clearly defined end in view.25

  The style of the narrative tended to be less prolix, its development more tightly directed, its progress less frequently checked by elaborate descriptive flourishes; and readers, if Elizabeth Montagu’s letters are any guide, were becoming increasingly intolerant of lavish diversion-

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  ary tactics that did little to promote the action. Writing to the Reverend Mr Freind (1741), she confesses:

  I am reading Sir Philip Sidney, but am ashamed to own I do not relish him; not even the exceeding eloquence with which he describes the exceedingness of Philocleas’ beauty, the exceedingness of which exceeded all other beauty; for as much as the mind’s excellence did, as it were, shine through the excellent beauty of her person, insomuch that no one could determine whether that the eye in beholding, or the ear in hearing, did more receive the sound, or objects of delight; but together they wrought in the mind’s eye a goodly admiration: so beautiful was her voice, and so harmonious her person, as did strangely divide the affections; which after long doubting what to admire, at last consented to admire, without knowing what was admired, where every thing was admirable.

  Thus does Sir Philip, with expression of craftiness, or rather craftiness of expression, so entirely puzzle my brain, and so overcome me with battles (for, like Bayes, he prefers that one quality of fighting to all others in a hero), that I cannot keep my attention for half an hour.26

  Pamela 2 lacks the strong narrative drive that, even by 1741, Elizabeth Montagu had come to associate with fiction; it is not simply lacking in incident but also in a propelling desire that would move the story toward a keenly anticipated conclusion. Betty Schellenberg points out that the novel, rather than concluding Pamela’s story, instead frag-ments itself ‘into an anthology of exemplary narratives’, supporting the critical claim ‘that a narrative without a unified plot and without a protagonist embodying individualistic desire is neither viable nor readable’.27 Pamela does have desires, most centring on the means of achieving a fu
lfilling marriage when there is still unfinished business to be settled (her family to be, politely, put in its proper place, Mrs Jewkes to be brought to reckoning, Mr B’s family to be won over, a husband’s prerogatives to be accommodated), but her desires are in the main subsumed under the all-encompassing virtue of complaisance, which directs her to seek her happiness in obliging others. Even desire itself is framed in terms of what is good for Mr B: ‘It is no compliment to him to be quite passive, and to have no will at all of one’s own’ (IV: 19).

  In Pamela 2, Margaret Doody observes, Richardson has ‘a case to prove, but no story’,28 though not simply because he forgoes the opportunities for incident (limb-breaking and mansion-torching)

  148 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre recommended by well-meaning friends.29 He has, in fact, Schellenberg argues, ‘gone to great lengths to arrive at unreadability’,30

  though the ‘unreadability’ of Pamela 2 is perhaps a measure of changing expectations of an explanatory plot that is read ‘in anticipation of retrospection’.31 The principle of the plot of Pamela 2 is prospective rather than retrospective, a series of prudential interventions designed to forestall anticipated developments. The most notable is the ‘trial’ to which Pamela subjects herself in order to nullify Mr B’s notion of ‘polygamy’ that would see him married to Pamela but living in ‘open sin’ with the Countess (IV: 192): she takes on his guilt, holds herself to account for not being woman enough to keep him steady, and surrenders to a worthier rival (with the unsurprising but, theoretically, not anticipated result – a contrite Mr B restored to home and hearth). In terms of the representation of female desire, however, the most interesting intervention is Pamela’s contribution to the re-education of four neighbouring young women, each ‘dancing upon the edge of a precipice’ of indiscreet love (IV: 406). Pamela’s discourse at this stage resembles the ‘virtu-oso emplotment’ of an earlier style of narrative, where ‘potentially unfortunate states [are] dexterously avoided by “woordes well placed”’, 32 and the argument comes replete with the stock military analogy. In defence of her over-familiarity with young men, which Pamela likens to fraternizing with the enemy in the ‘continual state of warfare between the two sexes’, one young woman cites the case of the ‘late czar’, who, she had read,

  took a better method with the Swedes, who had often beat him; when, after a great victory, he made his captives march in proces-sion, through the streets of his principal city, to familiarize them to the Russes, and shew them they were but men. (IV. 411) But, as Pamela points out, the czar’s strategy was necessary only because the Russes had so often been defeated by the Swedes and consequently thought too highly of them, a weakness on which the Swedes were able to capitalize. It is an oddly incongruous foray into a male domain, even for a young woman who affects to be well read in

  ‘histories of kingdoms’, but Pamela wins the point, and goes on to strike at the heart of a female weakness on which men are only too eager to capitalize: that first-sight love that ‘exalts the other sex, and debases her own’.

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  The dangerous notion of a first-sight love

  In her advice to these young women, all of whom are dancing on the edge of that precipice of indiscreet love, Pamela offers an extraordinarily comprehensive account of purely pragmatic reasons for adopting as strategic policy behavioural constraints that are perhaps more safely understood as innate, though in the process she manages to inject into the mystique of romantic love the rare voice of common sense. Her target is ‘first-sight love’, that ‘dangerous notion’ propagated by fiction

  – and particularly by the kind of fiction that prompts Miss Stapylton to style herself ‘Philoclea’ in her clandestine correspondence.

  Love at first sight would have been the undoing of Pamela in her battle with Mr B – and, for many readers, even today, it is still her undoing, despite her best efforts to deny it. Even sensible, savvy, street-wise adolescents will turn to love at first sight as the only ‘reasonable’

  explanation, not simply for Pamela’s lingering in Mr B’s household, but for her ability to love him after all he has done to her. (It is harder, it seems, to believe in someone falling out of love after a kidnapping, imprisonment, and attempted rape than to believe in someone falling in love in the same circumstances.) In fiction, at least, love at first sight performs an indispensable function, averting potentially damaging speculation about what else, aside from love, might explain two people’s attraction to each other, though it remains unproblematic only while it is understood as a kind of magic engendered by the moral universe to endorse the rightness of a union made, implicitly, in heaven. Let loose in a contingent, adventitious universe – one that admits, for example, the statistical improbability of an eighteenth-century English gentlewoman happening upon, among the limited number of people of her acquaintance, the only person in the world that can make her blissfully and permanently happy – love at first sight can be far too easily mistaken for sexual desire, and certainly implies, as Pamela observes, an amorous proclivity on both sides ‘which, however it may pass in a man, very little becomes the female delicacy’

  (IV: 425).

  Pamela’s objections to this dangerous notion are overwhelmingly prudential, bringing commonsense and propriety to bear on a convention deeply embedded in narrative practice but already becoming naturalized, for these four young women in particular, as an experiential truth. The dangers are obvious. Love at first sight explicitly precludes conscious deliberation, committing both parties without opportunity

  ‘for caution, for inquiry, for the display of merit and sincerity, and

  150 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre even the assurance of a grateful return’ (IV: 426) – a ‘random shot’, therefore, that ‘three chances to one’ does not end happily. It also places the woman in the invidious position of declaring her hand prematurely, ‘giving up the negative voice, which belongs to the sex, even while she is not sure of meeting with the affirmative one’. And on the basis of what? of a heart that seems ‘too much in the power of her eye’

  (IV: 426).

  There are clearly good prudential reasons for not loving at first sight, but the convention does not, of course, admit of choice: love is something into which one ‘falls’, helplessly and spontaneously, and, for equally good prudential reasons, the quicker the better if a first sight love is to protect a woman from an ulterior desire. In Pamela’s formulation, however, a first-sight love is simply a delusion fuelled by fancy, nothing more than a liking based on first impressions and brooded over and hatched into love by a mind randomly prepossessed. A liking, she argues, is conquerable by a woman prepared to ‘ withdraw into herself’ and consider her duty, for ‘every man and woman has a black and a white side; and it is easy to set the imperfections of the person against the supposed perfections, while it is only a liking.’ The difficulty lies in first overcoming a susceptibility to flattery, and the not unnatural impulse to think well of a person’s judgement in finding you so attractive, and, in compliment to your own judgement, to search out reasons for confirming first impressions (IV: 426–7).33

  Pamela’s advice makes good sense, but at a cost. Her analysis of the mechanics of love removes desire from the nuts and bolts of its opera-tion, but it can also be seen to relegate female virtue to the level of instrumentality in the power play of sexual politics, for her chief objective seems to be to counteract the effects of that soft, and softening, passion that puts a woman too much in a man’s power. For men as for women, love can come at the expense of self-worth – Mr B certainly complains of it often enough – but the consequences are more devastating for women, who are physically and socially more vulnerable.

  As Pamela observes in the case of Miss Sally Godfrey, Mr B’s earlier conquest and whose child Pamela persuades him to take into his care:

  ‘tis another misfortune of people in love; they always think highly of the belove
d object, and lowly of themselves: such a dismal mortifier is love!’ (III: 64).34 But if, as Pamela argues, liking is not allowed to hatch into love, imperfections are still capable of being set against perfections, and a woman is not only in a better position never to allow love to hatch should family and friends object, but she is also better equipped to maintain ‘a consciousness of merit, a true dignity, such as

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  becomes virgin modesty, and untainted purity of mind and manners’

  that will ensure she is addressed with ‘reverence and respect’ (IV: 445) and help maintain a position of power in the courtship.

  This is, of course, a specifically matronly account of courtship, and possibly only a woman in Pamela’s position – already safely wed, and having never herself been able to demand the reverence and respect she suggests a young woman ought to claim as her right – can afford to be quite so candid about the profit to be gained in the courtship stakes by being an ‘angel among men’ (IV: 445). It is a power that is conventionally attributed to women for the brief dominion of courtship, though it is a power more properly felt than exercised, and the effect of virtue rather than its occasion.

  The sublimity of love and the quintessence of valour

  If marriage and a courtship the very reverse of polite allow Pamela to acknowledge the advantage that is surrendered by a first-sight love, then madness, according to Scott Paul Gordon, allows Charlotte Lennox’s Arabella to claim a similar position of power but without using it to promote her own best interests. Madness functions in The Female Quixote, Gordon argues, as ‘a fictional strategy that divides deliberate from unplanned, aware from unaware, individuals who act strategically from those who cannot.’35 The main symptom of Arabella’s madness is her answer to the question Pamela contemptuously asked of romance: what is the instruction that can be gathered from such pieces for the conduct of common life? For Arabella, it is from romance – and specifically from the French heroic romance of the seventeenth century – that ‘all useful Knowledge may be drawn’