Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  (p. 48); she believes them ‘real Pictures of Life’ and from them ‘drew all her Notions and Expectations’ (p. 7). It is an absurd scenario, and might well seem madness, were it not for the activating premise: the seclusion of her upbringing that has shielded her from knowledge of a world in which the instruction offered by romance is useless. Arabella’s father had once been one of the most powerful men in England – he had ‘in a manner governed the whole Kingdom’ (p. 5) – until driven from office by his enemies. He then turned his back on the world and retired to grand and contemptuous isolation, taking with him his wife (who dies in childbirth), and compelling her daughter, Arabella, to grow up knowing nothing of the world, enclosed within the woods and gardens of her father’s estate – an ‘Epitome of Arcadia ( FQ, p. 6) –

  with only her voluminous romances, a legacy from her dead mother,

  152 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre for company and leisure. The total seclusion of her upbringing (which mimics the limited experience of the world that, it is argued, makes women susceptible to romance fantasies) explains her belief in the authenticity of romances and their relevance to her own times, as well as her susceptibility to their influence. Romance has had 17 years unin-terrupted reign in Arabella’s life, and the only influence of the outside world has been to confirm romance’s domain. For young girls are not the only ones susceptible to outlandish romantic gestures – in fact it is her father’s romantic gesture that has put her in a position in which romance is able to exercise absolute sway. Her father has done a Prospero: plotted against and ‘dethroned’, he makes his own world in enforced retirement, devoting himself to his daughter’s education so that her mind will be as beautiful as her person, and engineering her marriage to her cousin.

  Published in 1752, The Female Quixote satirizes a passion for French heroic romance that, according to Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1785), was already well past its fashionable height. They were the books that ‘pleased our grandmothers’,36 though in Arabella’s sequestered time-warp they are all she knows of a world beyond her father’s estate, and no rival reality – and no rival fiction – has intruded to question them. For Arabella, the heroines of Scudéry and La Caprenède become models, not simply of virtue but also of social behaviour (including speech and dress), and their heroes and villains shape Arabella’s expectations of her own experience, in which all women worthy of her acquaintance are presumed inviolably virtuous, and all men are either languishing in helpless adoration or preparing to take violent measures to abduct her. Preoccupied, then, with imaginary plots against her, Arabella is oblivious to, and hence innocent of strategic intervention in, the actual plots in which she is involved.

  Read as instruction in the values governing virtuous behaviour, Arabella’s romances are not contemptible. As The Progress of Romance points out, while romance might encourage young women ‘to deport themselves too much like Queens and Princesses’, it also teaches young people ‘that virtue only could give lustre to every rank and degree. – It taught the young men to look upon themselves as the champions and protectors of the weaker sex; – to treat the object of their passion with the utmost respect; – to avoid all improper familiarities, and, in short, to expect from her the reward of their virtues’ .37 And this, of course, is precisely the result at which Pamela’s advice is directed. But, as Reeve observes elsewhere, any kind of fiction ‘may be abused, and become an instrument to corrupt the manners and morals of mankind; so may

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  poetry, so may plays, so may every kind of composition; but that will prove nothing more than the old saying lately revived’ – “that every earthly thing has two handles.”’38 Romance might teach young people to esteem invincible valour, unbounded generosity, and inviolable fidelity, but if it is read as embodying, not values, but rules for the conduct of ordinary life, then it can be seen as harbouring an impossible and dangerous ideal, in which ‘the Sublimity of Love, and the Quintessence of Valour … if possessed in a superlative Degree, form a true and perfect Hero, as the Perfection of Beauty, Wit, and Virtue, make a Heroine worthy to be served by such an illustrious Personage’

  (p. 151). It is an impossible ideal because it allows for no degree of worthiness other than the superlative, and it is dangerous because love and valour are a heady mix, encouraging women to seek distinction, not in a man’s estimation of her worth, but in the deeds performed in her honour. As part of Arabella’s eventual ‘cure’, she is forced to acknowledge that these books can ‘teach Women to exact Vengeance, and Men to execute it; teach Women to expect not only Worship, but the dread-ful Worship of human Sacrifices. Every Page of these Volumes is filled with such extravagance of Praise, and expressions of Obedience as one human Being ought not to hear from another’ (pp. 380–1).

  This fantasy, not so much of power but of consequence, proves remarkably resilient, and Arabella relinquishes it at the crunch because it is safer to acknowledge the viciousness of an ambitious fantasy than to confront the shame of an erotic fantasy. The ‘worthy Divine’ who has been enlisted to bring Arabella to her senses (after she has nearly killed herself by leaping into the Thames to escape abduction and ravishment by some innocent bystanders) points out that all this bloodshed is committed in the name of love: ‘Love, Madam, is, you know, the Business, the sole Business of Ladies in Romances’ (p. 381). At this point his arguments ‘begin to be less agreeable to [her] Ladyship’s Delicacy’ (p. 381), and Arabella concedes the argument on the safer ground of the disgracefulness of encouraging unnecessary bloodshed. The point she does not want to confront is that the adventures in which she believes herself engaged are all about forestalling sexual conquest – which is a particularly dangerous erotic fantasy to entertain in ordinary life.

  According to Duncan Isles, Lennox’s original intention may have been to bring Arabella to her senses by being persuaded to set aside her romances and to read an exemplary novel – namely Richardson’s Clarissa.39 Clarissa would have provided Arabella with a portrait of a

  ‘real-life’ heroine who is everything she wishes to be, for Clarissa is

  154 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre indeed ‘the Perfection of Beauty, Wit, and Virtue’, beloved by every-one who has the honour to know her, but at the same time just a well-to-do, genteel young woman who is modest and retiring, who tries to live by the motto ‘Rather useful than glaring’, and who wishes nothing more than to please her friends and relatives, care for her chickens, and perform charitable works. But Clarissa would also have provided Arabella with a sickening lesson in the danger with which she flirts when she talks glibly of ‘ravishment’, telling the history of a young woman who is seized and carried off and imprisoned by a dashing young rake who, when he has her helpless and insensible, proceeds to rape her. Equipped only with her romance reading, Arabella seems not, in fact, to understand what

  ‘ravishment’ might entail – not only because the romance heroine is always providentially rescued from the danger, but also because the vagueness of the term was often exploited. As Jocelyn Catty argues in Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘rape’ and ‘ravishment’ were often conflated with abduction and elopement, with or without sexual activity, and with or without the woman’s consent.40 Arabella’s naivety is, then, perhaps understandable when, on an earlier occasion, she falls into ‘a Swoon, or something she took for a Swoon’

  (p. 300), after a young man intrudes into her chamber and she then insists that her maid relate the mischief done while she has been

  ‘unconscious’, since that is how it happens in romance. The equanimity with which she can entertain the possibility of ravishment may testify to her confidence that a heroine’s chastity will always be preserved, but it also suggests that she has little conception of what she might be asking her maid to relate.

  As repositories of ‘rules … for the general conduct of
life’, Arabella’s romances almost prove fatal, though the problem lies as much with the literalism of Arabella’s reading practices as with the substance of the tales: she ‘could not separate her Ideas of Glory, Virtue, Courage, Generosity, and Honour, from the false Representations of them’ in the actions of her imaginary heroes (p. 329). Arabella tries to do everything by the book, not distinguishing between literary and social conventions, and insisting, for example, that her maid, Lucy, observe the romance custom of the servant’s recital of the heroine’s adventures, a task that leaves the maid justifiably baffled. Her literal-mindedness, however, does not simply extend to the faith she places in her romances as the source of all useful knowledge. She is also incapable of recognizing sarcasm, does not understand the point of hyperbole, and

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  in general seems unable to recognize rhetorical figures. When Arabella assumes, for example, that Miss Grove’s writing master must have been a nobleman in disguise, Miss Glanville is unconvinced:

  Indeed, Lady Bella, said Miss Glanville, smileing, you may as well persuade me, the Moon is made of a Cream Cheese, as that any Nobleman turned himself into a Writing-master, to obtain Miss Groves –

  Is it possible, Miss, said Arabella, that you can offer such an affront to my Understanding, as to suppose, I would argue upon such a ridiculous System; and compare the Second glorious Lumi-nary of the Heavens to so unworthy a Resemblance? I have taken some Pains to contemplate the Heavenly Bodies; and, by Reading and Observation, am able to comprehend some Part of their Excellence: Therefore it is not probable, I should descend to such trivial Comparisons; and liken a Planet, which, haply, is not much less than our Earth, to a thing so inconsiderable, as that you name –

  (p. 142)

  Arabella is no fool, and she is certainly much more learned than Miss Glanville, who has not studied astronomy, and trusts her own eyes to see that the moon is no bigger than the gardener’s face, just as she trusts the evidence of plain sense that says the writing master is a writing master and not a nobleman in disguise. Arabella, in contrast, is prepared to believe that things are not what they seem (whether it be the size of the moon or the identity of the writing master), but she expects language to mean what it says – so that when Glanville, for example, is so maddened by Arabella’s obtuseness that he resorts to hyperbole and threatens to hang himself, Arabella is disgusted: ‘Hang yourself, repeated Arabella, sure you know not what you say? – You meant, I suppose, that you’ll fall upon your Sword. What Hero ever threatned to give himself so vulgar a Death?’ (p. 318).

  Loving with honour

  Glanville no more means to be taken at his word than Mr B, who in part one of Pamela four times tells Pamela that he cannot live without her but without showing any signs of anxiety about his own mortality.41 Even when Mr B takes to his sickbed after Pamela leaves for home, no one (surely?) expects him to die of unrequited love, though Pamela is allowed an apprehensive shudder at the thought of

  156 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre occasioning his death and to flatter herself that he may owe his life to her return. She is allowed, in fact, the conventional recourse of the romance heroines upon whom Arabella is modeling herself when she goes to Glanville’s sickbed, commands him to recover and permits him to love her ‘in order to make the Life [she] has bestowed on

  [him], worthy [his] Acceptance’ ( FQ, p. 136) – a graciousness Mr B

  can cherish (‘Life is no life without you!’ [ P, p. 291]) but that leaves Glanville speechless with chagrin. The different responses are entirely understandable: Pamela has not sailed into the sickroom unannounced, pulled open the curtains on the bed, orated her heartening commands, and hurried out again. Rather, Pamela has been invited in to raise Mr B’s spirits, and the extent of her graciousness is limited to acceding to a request that the master has given his servant the power to refuse. But the sickbed convention, even though Mr B’s illness is naturalized as a fit of vexation rather than originating in a broken heart, nevertheless lives on in the novel as a strategy designed to allow the heroine gracefully to negotiate ‘so great a Difficulty, as that of giving [a man] Permission to love her’ ( FQ, p. 137).

  For all their differences in rank, upbringing, temperament, and, it must be said, lucidity, Pamela and Arabella are both seeking a solution to the problem of how a woman can love with honour. Their two contrasting models of female conduct – the shrewdly pragmatic model of feminine best practice that emerges in Pamela’s reflections on the management of courtship in Pamela 2 and the salon romance model of heroic womanhood to which Arabella is devoted in The Female Quixote

  – both defer to the precept that a woman’s will is not her own but also, paradoxically, ensure that a woman’s will remains within her keeping until the moment she chooses to surrender it. Arabella’s elaborate, precedent-bound display of disinterest in the attentions of even a worthy lover, like Pamela’s notion that a young lady should ‘ withdraw into herself … to reflect upon what she owes to her parents, to her family, to her character, and to her sex’ ( P2, IV. 426), assumes a strength of will that, in the modern romance, can alone ensure the integrity of a woman’s love. In a fictional world in which ‘truth and nature’ are expected to have the last say, the closest that a woman can come to a match made in Heaven is a match made without either effort or desire on her part, and this is precisely the safe haven that Pamela and Arabella attain. In Pamela’s case, it is perceived almost as a point of honour that her marriage to Mr B comes about without her having done anything except her level best to put him off. In the prefatory matter to Pamela, for example, a congratulatory letter

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  applauds Pamela’s passivity within her own story, arguing that she finally marries Mr B

  without ever having entertain’d the least previous Design or Thought for that Purpose: No Art used to inflame him, no Coquetry practised to tempt or entice him, and no Prudery or Affectation to tamper with his Passions; but, on the contrary, artless and unpractised in the Wiles of the World, all her Endeavours, and even all her Wishes, tended only to render herself as un-amiable as she could in his Eyes.42

  In Arabella’s case, her role in her own story is to be acted upon, to be as passive as the Countess in her relation of the ‘History of a Woman of Honour’: ‘I was born and christen’d, had a useful and proper Education, receiv’d the Addresses of my Lord – through the Recommendations of my Parents, and marry’d him with their Consents and my own Inclination’ (p. 327). With the exception of the ‘useful and proper Education’, this is essentially Arabella’s story, passives and all, despite her belief that she is actually engaged in another story, one in which she has more adventures in one day than a woman of honour ought to expect in a lifetime.

  7

  ‘It Was Happy She Took a Good

  Course’: Saving Elizabeth Bennet

  in Pride and Prejudice

  There is an intriguing structural parallel between the plots of Sidney’s Arcadia and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which two sisters – one spirited, witty, and self-possessed and the other sweet, placid, and unassuming – are courted by two friends, one of whom tries to talk the other out of his love, before succumbing to the demeaning passion himself. In the background is a father who fails in his parental responsibilities and whose neglect endangers his daughters’ happiness; in the background also is an aunt with matrilineal ambitions bent on promoting the marriage of her own child. This particular abstraction of Arcadia in terms of the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who fall in love with the two sisters, Pamela and Philoclea, daughters of the neglectful Basilius, and victims of their aunt Cecropia’s family ambitions, is obviously slanted towards a comparison with Pride and Prejudice’s two friends, Darcy and Bingley, who fall in love with two sisters, Elizabeth and Jane, daughters of a neglectful Mr Bennet, and victim (at least in the case of Elizabeth) of Darcy’s aunt, Lady Catherine, and her championing of her
family’s interests. The way in which the parallel has been drawn clearly ignores some pertinent differences: Bingley, for a start, hardly needs to disguise himself as an Amazon in order to insinuate himself into Jane’s household; Mr Bennet’s nemesis is not oracular prophecy but the custom of entail; neither he nor his wife is intent on secluding their daughters from potential suitors; and, despite Mr Bennet’s suggestion that Bingley might like his wife better than his daughters, since she is as handsome as any of her girls, Mrs Bennet is not accused of harbouring amorous desires, like Basilius’s wife Gynecia, for her daughter’s lover. A different slant on Pride and Prejudice might also draw profitable parallels elsewhere – with Cinderella, for example, or Fanny Burney’s Cecilia.1 There 158

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  is, moreover, no evidence that Austen had read Arcadia,2 and it is certainly not our intention to argue that Austen is consciously or even unconsciously borrowing from Sidney. What interests us more is a shared narrative dynamic and the fictional solutions it continues to generate in different cultural and generic contexts.

  Looking at Pride and Prejudice through a lens already focused on Arcadia allows us to recognize aspects of Austen’s novel that are more thoroughly grounded in narrative conventions than its finely wrought social specificity might suggest. Notoriously delineated as ‘3 or 4

  Families in a Country Village’ – ‘the very thing to work on’3 – Austen’s highly circumscribed and culturally specific settings are not a million miles away from the pastoral insularity of Arcadian ‘no-places’ that rely upon the intrusion of strangers to provide the motive force for things to happen. At the same time, however, Austen’s novel also takes seriously, as substantive issues, the gender and, more specifically, the class frictions that in Arcadia are for the most part artificially contrived.