Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  10 Kate Lilley, Introduction to Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World and Other Writings, p. xi.

  11 Richardson’s Pamela objects in similar terms to Mr B’s fear that someone will rob him of his pretty maid by helping her to escape: ‘how came I to be his property?’ she asks. ‘What right has he in me, but such as a thief may plead to stolen goods?’ ( P, p. 163).

  12 Miseria’s ignorance of feelings clearly evident to readers as well as the Prince suggests a pre-dating of the (in this case perhaps not) ‘radical disjunction between knowing reader and unselfconscious heroine’ that Ballaster argues is introduced with Marie de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves in 1679 (p. 55).

  Notes 213

  13 See Warner’s assumptions about the heroine’s intentions in ‘disguising’

  herself as a country lass in Richardson’s Pamela, discussed in the following chapter.

  14 George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, Advice to a Daughter, 6th Edition (London: 1699), pp. 98–9.

  15 Halifax, p. 104.

  16 In a roundabout way her virtue also acquires divine sanction by means of her ability to escape the common fate of young women in her situation, unprotected and travelling alone. It is in many respects, a very odd moral that prefaces Cavendish’s tale, the endeavour being, she claims, ‘to show young women the danger of travelling without their parents, husbands or particular friends to guard them’ (p. 47) – a lesson that none but the most relentlessly literal-minded would be likely to draw from the tale. But Miseria’s survival, virtue intact, attests to heaven’s blessing, for ‘those are in particular favoured with heaven’, Cavendish observes, ‘that are protected from violence and scandal, in a wandering life, or a travelling condition’ (p. 47).

  17 Dorothy Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to William Temple, 1652–54, ed.

  Kenneth Parker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 182.

  18 The History of the Nun, in Backscheider and Richetti, p. 24, hereafter cited parenthetically ( HN).

  19 Ballaster, p. 83. Isabella is said to choose the church by strategy and inclination – by the strategy of her aunt, the Lady Abbess, who does everything she can to secure a young woman whose perfections would do credit to her house and whose fortune would be sorely missed, and by her own inclination, though that inclination has been shaped by an upbringing that has left her entirely ignorant of the unenclosed world.

  20 Aphra Behn, The Fair Jilt, in Two Tales: The Royal Slave and The Fair Jilt (Cambridge: The Folio Society, 1953), p. 147.

  21 Isabella smothers Henault and, on the pretext of securing the sack containing Henault’s body that Villenoys carries over his shoulder, sews Villenoys’s clothes to the sack, consigning him to the river as well when he throws the body from a bridge. In Jane Barker’s retelling of this story in The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726) it is enough that the lady murders her first husband; the second husband’s coat is accidentally sewn into the sheet in which the body is carried.

  22 Yeazell, p. 51.

  23 Yeazell, p. 51.

  24 Kathryn King’s critical biography Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 describes Love Intrigues (or The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, under which title Barker later reissued the novel) as a ‘special case’ in the oeuvre of arguably ‘England’s leading producer of Jacobite fiction’, the rest of her work characterized as ‘highly allusive political meditations designed to express the hopes and anxieties’ of Catholic and Jacobite readers (p. 149). The special status of Love Intrigues derives, she suggests, from the autobiographical element, acknowledged in the preface to what is assumed to be the first, unauthorized publication in 1713, but erased in Barker’s 1719 edition, where she also apologizes to the countess of Exeter for the dedication having been published without first having been granted her patronage: ‘I was extreamly confus’d … to

  214 Notes

  find my little Novel presenting itself to your Ladyship without your Leave or Knowledge’ (quoted in King, p. 182).

  25 Fed up with Bosvil’s calculated negligence, Galesia finds a reason to quarrel with him when he puts forward a friend as a suitable husband for her.

  She writes to him, telling him she can only assume the friend has been advanced as a jest since he knows her preference for the single life, and suggests that he leave her alone and stop tormenting her. She assumes, however, that Bosvil will understand ‘the natural Interpretation of these Words, See me no more’, since only a fond mistress could be offended by his championing of someone else, and that, if he loves her, he will attend her despite the prohibition and make amends by offering marriage (p. 101).

  Bosvil either does not get the message or does not care to respond to it. He goes off and finds someone else.

  26 Margaret Williamson suggests that Galesia is modelling herself upon Orinda (Katherine Philips) in turning to poetry and in writing ‘her commitment to a single life upon a tree, the old pastoral lover’s gesture’ ( Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650–1750 [Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1990], p. 246). Philips wrote poems to a circle of friends, each of whom was given a classical pseudonym. Philips’s was ‘Orinda’ and her close friend was ‘Lucasia’, the name of the friend to whom Galesia addresses her story in Love Intrigues.

  27 In her expectation that romance conventions will provide practical solutions to commonplace problems of social life, Galesia can perhaps be seen as a precursor of Arabella in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote.

  28 The introduction to Love Intrigues in Backscheider and Richetti’s Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730, for example, speaks of Galesia trying on

  ‘a number of roles for women’ (p. 82), and Jane Spencer in ‘Creating the Woman Writer: The Autobiographical Works of Jane Barker’ ( Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2.2 [1983]) argues at some length that while ‘Galesia criticizes her dedication to study, medicine, and poetry … she leaves no doubt that these vocations are the most important parts of her life’ (p. 172).

  29 Spencer, p. 171.

  30 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 82.

  31 The assumption that only a prior love could make a woman unreceptive to the family’s choice of husband was justified by a conception of femininity as innately accommodating. Thomas Gisborne, for example, suggests that this natural ‘flexibility’ is part of the providential design: ‘Providence, designing from the beginning, that the manner of life to be adopted by women should in many respects ultimately depend, not so much on their own deliberate choice, as on the determination, or at least on the interest and convenience of the parent, of the husband, or of some other near connection; has implanted in them a remarkable tendency to conform to the wishes and example of those for whom they feel a warmth of regard, and even of all those with whom they are in familiar habits of intercourse’ ( An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex [New York: Garland Publishing, 1974], p. 116).

  32 John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774; rpt. New York: Garland, 1974), pp. 80–1.

  33 In Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, ‘Eliza’ (glossed by Pope as Eliza Haywood) is represented as a ‘Juno of majestic size, / With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes’ (II: 163–4), and is offered as the prize in a pissing competition

  Notes 215

  between two booksellers, one of whom (William Chetwood) was the publisher of Love in Excess. In his accompanying note Pope explains: ‘In this game is exposed, in the most contemptuous manner, the profligate licentiousness of those shameless scribblers (for the most part of that sex, which ought least to be capable of such malice or impudence) who in libellous memoirs and novels, reveal the faults or misfortunes of both sexes, to the ruin of public fame, or disturbance of private happiness’ ( Alexander Pope, ed.

  Pat Rogers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], p. 471). (For an illuminating discussion of ‘copiousness figured as female’,
see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, p. 31).

  34 Haywood, Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Inquiry, p. 86, hereafter cited parenthetically ( LE).

  35 Haywood is at pains to insist that a woman’s love is as passionate as a man’s, and in its nature much the same, even in the case of the virtuous Melliora. We are later told, for example, that Melliora, in the garden one night with D’Elmont, feels ‘a racking kind of extasie, which might perhaps, had they been now alone, proved her desires were little different from his’ (p. 122). Certainly little is left to the imagination when D’Elmont steals into her room one night when she is asleep, lies down beside her, and she, in her sleep and dreaming of him, flings her arm around his neck; he is delighted to hear his charmer ‘in a soft and languishing voice, cry out, “Oh D’elmont, cease, cease to charm, to such a height – Life cannot bear these Raptures. – And then again, embracing him yet closer, – O! too, too lovely Count – extatick ruiner!”’ (p. 116).

  Ballaster argues that ‘Under cover of the dream state, Haywood can even bring her heroines to orgasm without undermining the conviction of their virtuous principles’ ( Seductive Fictions, p. 171), but what Haywood is doing here is in essence no different from what countless writers have done before and since: trying to find ways of showing that a woman’s love for a man is as overpowering as his for her, but without suggesting that she is acting upon it, or doing anything to expedite a man’s attraction to her. Melliora retains her virtue, not by the absence of desire, but by the absence of self-interested, goal-directed behaviour that would realize that desire.

  36 See, for example, Gregory’s no less extraordinary assertion that, in England at least, unless a man’s attachment to a woman excites a gratitude that can develop into a preference, ‘there is not one of a million of you that could ever marry with any degree of love’ (p. 83).

  37 Tania Modleski suggests that this is a consideration that still prevails today:

  ‘[women’s] most important achievement is supposed to be finding a husband; their greatest fault is attempting to do so’ ( Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women [1982; rpt. New York: Routledge, 1990], p. 48).

  Chapter 5

  Poor in Everything But Will: Richardson’s

  Pamela

  1 Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 67–8.

  216 Notes

  2 From ‘To my worthy Friend, the Editor of Pamela’, in The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela 1740–1750, ed. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), I: 14. The letter, appearing prior to the publication of Pamela in the Weekly Miscellany 408 (11 October 1740) and included in Richardson’s Preface, has been attributed to the Rev. William Webster.

  3 Richardson, Selected Letters, p. 232.

  4 John Mullan, ‘High-Meriting, Low Descended’, London Review of Books, 12 December 2002, p. 29.

  5 T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, ‘Richardson’s Revisions of Pamela’, Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 88. Even given speculation about the authority of revisions not published in Richardson’s lifetime, our preference for the final revised edition has also been guided by the principle of allowing the author the last word on what book he wanted to write.

  6 The closest Sidney’s Pamela comes to having to negotiate the gap between self and representation is in the letter that she writes at the end of Arcadia, when the lovers have been captured and Musidorus and Pyrocles are under sentence of death. It is only as a princess that she can assert the authority of self-representation, for if she is still a princess, and Basilius’s heir, her word is her captors’ will: Musidorus ‘is a prince, and worthy to be my husband, and so is he my husband by me worthily chosen’ ( NA, p. 828). But if her captors kill Musidorus, she argues, they also have to kill her, because whatever guilt they attribute to him extends to her and implicitly renders her, not a princess but a ‘private person’, without the authority to speak. As it happens, Pamela’s right to speak is neither confirmed nor denied because the letter is intercepted and remains unread.

  7 By his own admission, Richardson was not a great reader, and even direct quotation of other works, as Eaves and Kimpel point out, does not imply

  ‘first-hand acquaintance’: ‘Three quotations in Pamela, five in Sir Charles, and no less than 43 in Clarissa are to be found in Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry’ ( Samuel Richardson: A Biography [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971], p. 572). Even the fact that Richardson’s firm printed the 1724/25 three-volume edition of Sidney’s works is no guarantee that he had read Arcadia, even in part. William Sale’s analysis of printer’s ornaments suggests that Richardson printed parts of this edition, but, it seems, he printed everything other than Arcadia: only the introductory matter for Volume 1 (also containing Books I and II of Arcadia), none of Volume 2 (containing Books III, IV, and V of Arcadia) , and all of Volume 3 (containing the ‘sixth book’, Richard Belling’s continuation of Arcadia, together with Sidney’s other works) ( Samuel Richardson: Master Printer [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1950], p. 204). More recently, Keith Maslen has confirmed Richardson’s role in the printing of Sidney’s Works in Samuel Richardson of London, Printer (Dunedin: University of Otago, 2001, p. 139); however, he states that Volume 3 contains the Arcadia – possibly a confusion of Belling’s

  ‘sixth book’ with Sidney’s work.

  8 The Arcadia in common currency might include details such as Pamela’s name, perhaps by way of Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband (or, somewhat less likely, by way of Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Miss Blount); a few odd phrases (most notably Pamela’s representation of herself as ‘a fine sporting-piece for the great, a mere tennis-ball of fortune!’ [p. 280], though this too

  Notes 217

  might have come secondhand, by way of Shakespeare); or, more generally,

  ‘the idea of the adventure’ in which the heroine is imprisoned by her enemies, ‘imploring heaven that her virtue may be preserved’ (J. J. Jusserand, The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, trans. Elizabeth Lee [1890; rpt.

  London: Ernest Benn, 1966], p. 249) – perhaps by way of the controversy surrounding Charles II’s borrowing of Pamela’s prayer in her captivity, attacked by John Milton as ‘stol’n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction’

  ( Eikonoklastes, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes [New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957], p. 793).

  9 Walter Allen, The English Novel (1954; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 25.

  10 Jacob Leed, ‘Richardson’s Pamela and Sidney’s’, AUMLLA 40 (1973): 240–5.

  11 Gillian Beer, ‘ Pamela: Rethinking Arcadia’, in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor, pp. 23–39 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 23.

  12 Barbauld, 1: xviii.

  13 Beer, p. 29. What was once an aristocratic name acquired, after the popularity of Richardson’s Pamela, distinctly plebeian overtones. By the mid-nineteenth century, Charlotte Yonge in her History of Christian Names (1884; rpt. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1966) suggests that Richardson used the name from Sidney’s Arcadia ‘as a recommendation to the maid-servant whom he made his heroine’, and notes that ‘Pamela is still not uncommon among the lower classes’ (p. 464). According to Leslie Dunkling’s frequency count in First Names First (London: Dent, 1977), it has subsequently found particular favour in the colonies (see, for example, p. 225).

  14 Ian Watt, ‘The Naming of Characters in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding’, Review of English Studies 25 (1949): 329. Watt suggests ‘in choosing the name Richardson was himself unconsciously aware of the ambiguities of Pamela’s character and motivation’ (p. 329).

  15 Pope, Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture, l. 52, p. 48.

  16 See, for example, Richard Steele, The Tender Husband: or, The Accomplish’d Fools, II. ii, in The Plays of Richard
Steele, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 238. In what looks very much like a rearguard action, this play becomes the object of some scathing observations from Richardson’s Pamela in Pamela 2.

  17 Samuel Richardson, Pamela Part II, vols III and IV of The Works of Samuel Richardson, 19 vols (London: James Carpenter and William Miller, 1811), IV: 94, hereafter referred to as Pamela 2 and cited parenthetically ( P2).

  18 Milton, p. 793.

  19 Richardson was also prepared to acknowledge that the benefits might be very much one-sided. He observed to Solomon Lowe, for example, that

  ‘it is apparent by the whole Tenor of Mr. B.’s Behaviour to Pamela after Marriage, that nothing but such an implicit Obedience, and slavish Submission, as Pamela shewed to all his Injunctions and Dictates, could have made her tolerably happy’ ( Selected Letters, p. 124).

  20 Beer, p. 29.

  21 Leed, p. 240.

  22 Beer, p. 29. Leed and Beer go on to raise other possible parallels: the grotes-queries of their keepers; the similarities between Cecropia and Mrs Jewkes; the transformation of eclogues into hymns; the threat of forced marriages

  218 Notes

  deflected by the dictates of filial obedience; the ‘problem of love between persons placed high and low in society’ (Leed, p. 243); and meditations on suicide.

  23 Murray L. Brown, ‘Learning to Read Richardson: Pamela, ‘Speaking Pictures’, and the Visual Hermeneutic’, Studies in the Novel 25.2 (1993): 141.

  24 Brown, 142. Brown argues that Richardson is deliberately invoking Arcadia, but the danger also applies to uninvited parallels between Richardson’s heroine and her namesake.

  25 Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 58.