The Novel

by Steven Moore

  For a romantic comedy, The Reformed Coquette is rather frank and brutal at times, especially the near-rape scenes. After he’s captured, Froth nastily tells Amoranda “how I would have used you had fortune been so kind as to have put you in my power; know then, proud beauty, I would―” (33). Amoranda cuts him off before he gets down to the dirty details, but she later quails as another would-be rapist threatens, “This minute, by the help of thy own servant, I will enjoy thee; and then, by the assistance of my arm, he shall do so too” (59). During an attempted stagecoach robbery, a man is shot in the head; horses are burned to death in a barn fire; Froth and Callid kill each other; and a subplot involves incest. The author assures us early on that there will be a happy ending, but Davys departs from convention by filling her comedy with the stuff of tragedy. She also colors outside the lines by using several different rhetorical registers, ranging from romancese to Restoration wit to coarse servants’ talk. She borrows the crossdressing device from older novels, but also plays them for laughs when two “ladies” take up cudgels and beat Froth and Callid almost to death. Another transvestite is so affectionate toward Amoranda that lesbianism rears its head, though our 15-year-old flirt, like Queen Victoria, can’t imagine such a thing exists. The Reformed Coquette is a witty, cleverly plotted novel that exceeds generic expectations, even if—as the author frankly admits on the first page—it was written for money.

  At first glance, Davys’s final novel, The Accomplished Rake (1727), looks like a male counterpart, for it dramatizes the conversion of a young rake into a married man, but it is much darker, sleazier, and more complex. At age 14 John Galliard loses his father, and is allowed to run wild by his irresponsible mother; at age 20 he is shocked to catch her in bed with a footman, so he abandons plans to attend Cambridge (where he planned to party, not to study) and goes instead to London and quickly becomes what Davys sarcastically calls (on the title page) a “modern fine gentleman” and “a person of distinction.” Galliard gambles, whores, and boozes away his nights with fops like Sir Combish Clutter and Cockahoop Clownish until he is deep in debt and weakened by venereal disease. Then he runs into Nancy Friendly, the 14-year-old daughter of a country neighbor, as dizzy a flirt as Amoranda; frustrated in his attempts to seduce her, Galliard drugs her one night with doped macaroons and rapes her while she’s unconscious, leaving her puzzled and ashamed a few months later to discover she’s pregnant. Though he experiences a few pangs of remorse when he learns Nancy has given birth to a boy, Galliard continues his rake’s progress for another few years—he could have posed for Tom Rakehell in William Hogarth’s graphic novel of that name (1735)—until another potential rape victim named Belinda shames him into recognizing his child and marrying Nancy. Davys concludes this sordid tale by informing us she has “set two spies to watch his motions and behavior, and if I hear of any false steps or relapses, I shall certainly set them in a very clear light” (226). But unlike Amoranda, who seems to have been scared straight, Galliard gives no indication he has reformed, and will probably start harassing the maids before the month is out.

  The reader can make that assumption because of the care with which Davys prepares the psychological ground for her protagonist. His mother’s “airy, roving temper, unconfined and free” (127) deprives Galliard of the moral guidance he needs during his adolescence—his tutor Teachwell tries but fails to live up to his Bunyanesque name—and Galliard’s discovery that his mother resumed sexual activity after her husband’s death fills him with Hamlet-like disgust and sends him into the self-destructive spiral in London. As Belinda fends off Galliard’s attempt to seduce her, she unknowingly but effectively stops him in his tracks by referring to his mother: “You are, ’tis true, a baronet by birth, but your mother has been some base, some faulty sinner, has violated a chaste marriage bed, and you are the abominable product of her vice, the spawn of some of her footmen” (193). Galliard realizes this might be true, and that destroys what’s left of his self-esteem. That, and his mother’s failure to instill moral values at a crucial age, ensures that it won’t be long before he makes “false steps or relapses.” The mother is the real villain in this novel, and Davys keeps after her in a subplot concerning her further relations with Tom the footman and his wife Margaret.

  Although The Accomplished Rake, like its predecessor, is indebted to Restoration comedy for many character names and plot elements, it more significantly looks sideways to the French libertine novel and forward to the novels of Richardson and Fielding. Drugging a woman for the purpose of coitus occurs both in Challe’s Illustrious French Lovers and later in Richardson’s Clarissa, and Galliard earns his libertine credentials in one lurid scene when he is initiated into the notorious Hellfire Club: this entails going to a cemetery in the middle of the night, and on a tombstone set with wine and glasses, drinking a toast to the devil and renouncing “the BEING” (171). Davys’s style, like Fielding’s, is bold, allusive, and ironic; he might have written this description of the mother’s reaction to her husband’s death: “Lady Galliard had too much resolution and courage to struggle with grief, but like an expert fencer gave it one home thrust and silenced it forever, hardly allowing the decorum of a month’s confinement in a dark room, though her wild behavior told the world she was but too well qualified for such an apartment forever” (129).153 The language is often coarse: the terms “bitch” and “whore” are tossed around freely, and others like “slut” and “harlot” are ill-disguised by dashes; one character says, “Honor, like a virgin’s virtue, is too nice to be fingered by every dirty hand that knows not the value of what they sully” (143), and another character, returning from rabbit-hunting, asks Galliard (in Belinda’s presence), “tell me how you like my game, b- G―e ’tis better hunting hares than whores, for here have I in half an hour got one, and was half a year in pursuit of the other bitch and lost her at last, so we will have this puss for our supper, and let the D―l take the other for his” (208–9). The novel oozes with venereal disease, and a husband Galliard cuckolds deliberately has sex later with a “peppered” whore so that he can infect his wife and her other lovers with syphilis. Galliard literally licks his lips at the sight of a new girl in town. Although a few female writers like Behn and Haywood got a little smutty at times, Davys sounds more like Fielding and Smollett. The novel appeared anonymously, and if not for the fact it was published by subscription, its readers could be forgiven for assuming the novel was written by a man.154

  And like Fielding, she employs an intrusive narrator, comically so when she toys with the narrative concept of limited omniscience. After Galliard leaves for London, the narrator travels back and forth from there and his country home:

  Sir John seemed very sensible at so kind an offer, and when they got to London accepted of it, to which place three days more conveyed them, where I shall for a while leave Sir John and cast an eye back to Lady Galliard, whose story would end very abruptly unless a little further pursued. I left her somewhat uneasy in mind . . . (145)

  In short, she [Galliard’s sister, another victim of the mother’s negligence] had more of the mother than the father, and here I leave her for some time to get ahead, then catch her again, when she thinks herself out of my clutches. (146)

  . . . and since I have nothing to say of the knight [Galliard] at present, rather than lose so much time, I think fit to return into the country and see how things are transacted at Galliard Hall, where I no sooner entered than I saw Tom and his wife arrive . . . (148)

  [Tom] promised to give up his accompts the next day, and desired she would be easy until then. What other discourses they had I know not, because I was called away to lend an ear to Lady Galliard and Busy [her maid]. (152)

  Every new minute filled [Tom’s] mind with tender sentiments succeeded by grief, till at last revenge took place, of which more hereafter, for I am this morning going to take coach for London again, where I left my young knight . . . (154)

  I will now leave them a while to compare notes together and step
back to the bagnio to see what becomes of the two antagonists, they were both got into the house before I came . . . (162)

  The silly idea of a narrator literally traveling between locations to report on her protagonists is a ploy Fielding and Sterne will play with, and justifies the narrator’s use of the term “tragi-comedy” (197) to characterize this otherwise grim novel. The Accomplished Rake did not reach as wide an audience as The Reformed Coquette, nor is it as popular with the few critics in recent years who have written about Davys; this neglect has obscured its importance as England’s first libertine novel and its anticipation of the great English novels of the 1740s.155

  There are many other novels of the 1720s by female authors, but with the exception of Barker and Davys, they belong to the history of pop culture, not literature. Along with Haywood and Aubin, they are the daughters of the Grub Street hacks Swift and Arbuthnot mocked a generation earlier, “content in simple narrative to relate the cruel acts of implacable revenge, or the complaints of ravished virgins blushing to tell their adventure before the listening crowd of city damsels” (John Bull, 94). I certainly enjoyed sitting in on Jane Barker’s sewing circle, but like Galesia I’m begin to overdose on “ladies affronted, maids deluded by lovers,” &c &c. I need to clear my head with a man’s novel, and fortunately one is at hand featuring a man with a phallus big enough to put out a palace fire.

  Popularly known as Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726) challenges conventional ideas of genre. “Is Gulliver’s Travels a novel?” Northrop Frye asked over 60 years ago. “Here most would demur, including the Dewey decimal system, which puts it under ‘Satire and Humor’ ” (303), and including contemporary critics like Robert Letellier, who states flat out, “Gulliver’s Travels is not a novel.”156 Is so, and here’s why: First, as Michael McKeon cautions, “the retrospective standards by which we judge what is ‘novelistic’ are of problematic relevance to the generically uncertain narratives that are native to the period of the novel’s gradual stabilization” (341). Second, form, not content, should determine the classification of a literary work. If a writer relates an imagined matter in verse, it’s a poem; if in dramatic form with dialogue distributed among actors, it’s a play; if in prose fewer than (say) 40 pages, it’s a short story; if in prose long enough to be published separately as a book, it’s a novel. Frye goes on to make a distinction “between fiction as a genus and the novel as a species of that genus” (303), but I’ve argued all along that the novel is a genus—fiction is the family classification one level above, which consists of two genera: short fiction (tales, short stories) and long fiction (novels)—and “species” should be used for various genres: detective novel, bildungsroman, fantasy novel, Western, realistic novel, erotica, YA novel, science fiction, and so forth, each of which has subspecies. In the introduction to the Oxford edition I’ll be citing, Paul Turner writes, “Gulliver’s Travels starts like a novel, . . . The adventures, however, soon become too fantastic for a novel, and the characterization of Gulliver is not always of central importance” (xv). Turner makes the common error of assuming that realism is the defining feature of the novel, rather than merely one of many modes a writer can choose from, and further assumes an element of fantasy disqualifies a work of fiction as a novel, meaning works like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gravity’s Rainbow are not really “novels,” which would come as a surprise to their authors, publishers, and readers. Even realistic novels contain elements that are unrealistic—just as the most outlandish fantasy novels contain some realistic elements—and who is to say when and where a work of fiction becomes “too fantastic” to be considered a novel? Critics can argue until Doomsday about which species a book-length fiction belongs to—is Gravity’s Rainbow a war novel, a Menippean satire, an encyclopedic novel, a transhistorical hippie trip, a hysterical realist novel, a____________?—but it makes more sense, given the creativity of novelists and the ever-mutating diversity of the genre, to classify them all under the genus Novel.

  Not only does Gulliver’s Travels illustrate the formal definition of a novel (a book-length work of fiction), but it is a classic demonstration of its masterplot: “The novel records the passage from a state of innocence to a state of experience, from that of ignorance which is bliss to a mature recognition of the actual way of the world.”157 Gulliver’s Travels is not merely a series of cartoonish adventures, a parody of travel books, or a satire of 18th-century English politics, but more importantly the story of a conventional, patriotic citizen whose eyes are opened to “the actual way of the world” and is disgusted by what he sees. Turner is wrong to say “Gulliver is not always of central importance”—he does not disappear into the text, as Ishmael does in Moby-Dick—for everything he sees (and we see) is filtered through his sensibility and elicits a response from him. (Turner goes on to say, correctly, “As Gulliver progresses through this series of world-views, his own character and attitudes change” [xxi].) The reader is easily distracted by miniature people, giants, mad scientists, and talking horses, but behind all that, formally and thematically, there is a novel about a man undergoing a midlife crisis as he gradually realizes everything he thought he knew about life is wrong, and his subsequent failure to get it right.

  You know the story: a middle-aged doctor named Lemuel Gulliver, too honest (he implies) to profit by his medical practice, becomes a ship’s surgeon in 1699; after surviving a shipwreck, he finds himself on a tiny island called Lilliput (north of Australia), where he is 10 times larger than its citizens. Initially suspicious, the Lilliputians come to an understanding with the “Man Mountain,” except for a faction that eventually drives him off to a neighboring island, from whence he returns to England in 1702. Restless after this adventure, Gulliver sets off again, but in June 1703 he is abandoned off the coast of Brobdingnag (near Alaska), where he is 12 times smaller than everyone. After three years, shaken to the core by the king of Brobdingnag’s brutal pronouncement on the human race, Gulliver decides to return home, but 10 days after arrival he accepts an offer to travel again; in 1707 his ship is captured by pirates and he is abandoned on the island of Balnibarbi (east of Japan), beneath the floating island of Laputa. Tiring after three years of conversing with Laputa’s crackpot scientists and philosophers, Gulliver leaves by way of Japan and returns to England in 1710. After five months, he accepts an offer to command his own ship, but his crew mutiny and abandon him near the island of Houyhnhnmland (north of Tasmania), populated by intelligent horses and a tribe of subhumans called Yahoos. Gullible Gulliver comes to regard this as a rationalist utopia, but after four years the horses ask him to leave, so he sorrowfully makes his way back to England in 1715, so repelled now by humankind that he avoids his family and hangs out in the stables. Five years later, he writes this account of his travels, publishing the teachings of the Houyhnhnms in the hope of “seeing a full stop put to all the abuses and corruptions” of his homeland.158

  As the dates above indicate, Gulliver’s travels occur during the same period as The History of John Bull by Swift’s fellow Scriberlian. That was the story of how an average Englishman got wise to the legal and political “abuses and corruptions” around him, learned to take matters into his own hands, and triumphs over them. Gulliver faces the same challenges, but goes down in defeat. Something of a failure when he leaves England, his ego receives a much-needed boost in Lilliput, where his colossal size makes him the personification of British sea power and the might of the English empire. A commoner back home, Gulliver is ennobled by the emperor and aristocrats, and is made a nardac, the highest honor in the land. It’s even rumored that the wife of the court treasurer “had taken a violent affection for my person” and “came to me incognito” (1.6), which Gulliver humorlessly denies, too naïve to see how ludicrous that charge is, or how closely Lilliput resembles his own “beloved country” (1.8). But his naïveté and patriotism are taken down several pegs by the king of Brobdingnag, who grills Gulliver for sever
al days on English and European history and customs, and then delivers a crushing blow to his ego: “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” (2.6). In the next chapter, a rattled Gulliver tries to explain away the king’s verdict, but it’s obvious the king has made him feel small—literalized and confirmed when Gulliver reads a gigantic book on “the weakness of humankind” (2.7).

  It is at this point that Gulliver’s misanthropy sets in, for after he’s rescued from Brobdingnag by sailors his own size, he regards them as “the most little contemptible creatures I had ever beheld” (2.8). This contempt deepens during his time in Laputa, especially so when he visits the nearby island of Glubbdubdrib, whose sorcerer-governor calls up the spirits of famous Europeans (from Alexander the Great to Descartes) to converse with Gulliver and give him the inside story: “How low an opinion I had of human wisdom and integrity when I was truly informed of the springs and motives of great enterprises and revolutions in the world, and of the contemptible accidents to which they owed their success” (3.8). That opinion drops even lower in Houyhnhnmland, where the Yahoos represent human nature at its worst. Rejected by the Houyhnhnms for being little better than a Yahoo, Gulliver adds self-loathing to his loathing for humankind, and ends up a miserable misanthropist.