The Novel

by Steven Moore

  BLUESTOCKING NOVELS

  While the majority of female English novelists fed the reading public’s bottomless appetite for love stories, a minority wrote novels that explored cultural and social issues, especially those relating to women’s education and rights. Around 1750, Elizabeth Montagu formed the Bluestocking Society to discuss such issues, their name taken from the informal, blue worsted stockings they wore in contrast to the formal, black silk stockings worn in high society. Sarah Fielding was a member, and The Cry could be considered the first bluestocking novel, though that distinction usually goes to A Description of Millenium Hall (sic, 1762) by Montagu’s sister, Sarah Scott (1721?–95). She had published two earlier novels, a conventional romance entitled The History of Cornelia (1750) and a frame-tale narrative called A Journey through Every Stage of Life (1754), consisting of eight stories about “protagonists of saintly virtue and christian fortitude amounting to heroism.”290 Millenium Hall is a hybrid of that genre and utopian fiction: an older, unnamed male narrator and a 25-year-old “coxcomb” named Lamont stumble upon “a female Arcadia” in Cornwall, founded and maintained by two childhood friends who experienced disappointments as young ladies—one raised as a mistress, the other forced into a loveless marriage—and who, after inheriting fortunes, fled to Cornwall to establish a Christian community for other oppressed women and the deserving poor in the neighborhood. The narrator meets a cousin who relates the backstories of the two founders and three other early members (based on members of the Bluestocking Society; Montagu appears as Lady Brumpton); these didactic, conduct-book narratives occupy two-thirds of the novel, the rest devoted to a description of the activities of this charitable community, with obsessive attention to neatness, cleanliness, and Christian principles. Young Lamont, instead of playing the wolf in this henhouse of unprotected females, is quickly converted to their religious views and is last seen reading the New Testament. Millenium Hall has its heart in the right place—its inhabitants have understandably abandoned “an indissoluble society” where “dissipation and extravagance are now become such universal vices” (164) and admirably devote themselves to charity work and nonprofit industry—but it’s all too didactic, too goody-goody, and too religiose. (Any woman who doesn’t recognize the role religion plays in her oppression is sleeping with the enemy.) It’s as though Scott didn’t want to shock her readers with anything too radical, and bent over backward to make her orderly, passionless community sound more like “a community of saints,” as the narrator calls it (171), than a separatist feminist collective. The writing is as bland as the content, and consequently Millenium Hall disappoints both as fiction and as polemic.

  Four years later, Scott published a sequel entitled The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), the name of the older visitor in the previous novel. Impressed by what he saw, this self-made millionaire buys a home in Dorsetshire and begins practicing charity in the same philanthropic spirit, and the novel is essentially an admiring account of all the good he does over the years. There’s little drama; he loses out on the woman he’d like to marry because she’s previously engaged—and he’s so good he gives her $200K for a dowry—but when her husband later dies, Ellison marries her, and thus overcomes even this minor setback. Scott apologizes in the preface if Ellison “is too good to have existed anywhere but in imagination,” but her goal was to provide a model for millionaires, not a realistic character. Sir George Ellison is noteworthy for being one of the first British novels to address the evils of slavery—Ellison reluctantly owned slaves in Jamaica, but he educated them and treated them more like employees—and perhaps for supplying Jane Austen with a book title.291 But, as with Millenium Hall, the didactic, schoolmarmish tone is tiresome. To be sure, Scott viewed fiction as a vehicle for social reform, not one for artistic expression, and consequently she shouldn’t be faulted for an absence of the latter. Both novels were popular and reprinted.

  A more artistically satisfying example of socially engaged fiction is The Triumph of Prudence over Passion (1781)—a scrotumtightening title if ever there were one—recently attributed to Elizabeth Sheridan (1758–1837), daughter of the author of Sidney Bidulph.292 This short, epistolary novel is set largely in Ireland in 1779 and 1780, when the Irish Parliament contested the English government’s unfair trade policies and asserted its authority to make its own laws. These issues are discussed by the novel’s two principal correspondents, 23-year-old Louisa Mortimer and her teenage friend Eliza Fitzgerald, in between the “little novels” of Eliza’s love life and those of their mutual friends. (The “little novel” trope is made often; this is a playfully self-conscious fiction.) “How some of the wise heads would laugh at a girl pretending to give an opinion in politics,” the Dubliner Louisa writes Eliza (out in the country tending an ailing mother); “it is not, I believe, a very usual subject for young ladies to correspond on, but I know you have been taught to think the welfare of our country is of as much consequence to women as men” (18). Eliza agrees: “I know most men disapprove of women pretending to any opinion on these subjects, but the men of your family and mine were above that vulgar prejudice, and took some pains to make us capable of judging with some degree of precision; and I think we are obliged to them for it, since it enables us to converse sometimes on matters of importance, and not be always confined to trifles; a little of each is agreeable” (19). As the author entertainingly alternates between “matters of importance” and “trifles,” she politicizes the personal; it is an English woman who tries to steal Eliza’s Irish fiancé, and Louisa compares the “selfish, illiberal” English to an insincere rake: “a little time will show what dependence we can have on their affection, that is, provided we give them an opportunity; for no doubt they will dissemble till they are sure of carrying their point” (18). Louisa, a self-described “enthusiast in the cause of liberty and my country” (1), doesn’t allow anyone to seduce her out of her independence; as offended by the word “obey” in the marriage ceremony as the Irish were by tyrannical English policies, she defiantly remains single at the end, despite a standing offer from a daycent Munster man. Like her country, she wants to be independent, and as a prudent (but not priggish) woman, she triumphs over the passions—lust, jealousy, fear, anger—that bedevil the lives of her friends. Though the word “Bluestocking” doesn’t appear in this smart, assured novel, Louisa Mortimer is precisely the kind of new woman they would have welcomed to their gatherings.

  Both Scott and Sheridan avoid making their heroines too radical, as though agreeing with Burney’s Mrs. Delvile that the most “odious” attitude a woman can have is “a daring defiance of the world and its opinions.” Not so Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), whose startlingly original novella Mary: A Fiction (1788) is daringly defiant, beginning with its subtitle. She called it “a fiction” to distinguish it from mainstream romance novels, “those most delightful substitutes for bodily dissipation,” as her fiercely intellectual protagonist calls them.293 In her preface, Wollstonecraft announces that she “attempts to develop a character different from those generally portrayed” in the novels of Richardson and Rousseau; her autobiographical Mary is closer to Goethe’s Werther: melancholic, bookish, romantically sensitive to the natural world, contemptuous of conventional society, and utterly unlike any previous female protagonist in English fiction. Although she doesn’t commit suicide at the end like her German counterpart, she’s miserable throughout the novel, beginning with her neglected childhood. The young Mary likes to read “tales of woe,” and as an adult she moves woefully through a world of sick and dying people, of disappointment and poverty. (Like Scott’s Bluestockings, she does charity work whenever she can rouse herself from her “death-like sadness” and “apathy” [23].) The style is defiantly different, alternating between blunt, sketchy sentences and rhapsodies to “sensibility” (see pp. 862–63 below), along with some Old Testament fulminations against society. (Mary has a touch of religious mania as well as clinical depression.) Mary is underdeveloped, underdramatized�
�we’re told more than we’re shown—which is evidently deliberate: in her preface, Wollstonecraft calls her novella “an artless tale, without episodes,” meaning that she has left out all the linguistic and dramatic stuffing that could have expanded this 60-page novella into a conventional three-volume novel. Taut and bleak, Mary portrays the difficulties an unconventional young woman faces when forced to educate herself and find a place in a world that has no place for unconventional women like her.

  After publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, Wollstonecraft planned to write a second part to her manifesto, but then decided instead to dramatize her views in a novel entitled The Wrongs of Woman (aka Maria). It’s unfortunate that she died after writing only a third of it, for those 100 pages (and the 14 pages of drafts and fragments that her husband William Godwin published along with them in 1798) have the makings of a major novel. Its purpose is clear: to exhibit “the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society” (Preface), along with “bitter reflections on the situation of women in society.”294 The main story concerns a sensitive girl named Maria who is pushed too early into marriage by her tyrannical father, then mistreated by her boorish, unfaithful husband for six years until she walks out on him. Since she’s the heiress to a fortune, he tracks her down and arranges to confine her to a madhouse—a common ploy back then. (A subplot of Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves dramatizes a similar situation.) There she meets a well-read man named Darnford who was likewise railroaded by greedy relatives; considering herself divorced from her husband, Maria cohabits with him and, after they escape from the madhouse, agrees to live with him. While he’s away in Paris trying to recover his money, Maria’s husband hauls her into court and sues her for adultery. She makes an eminently reasonable defense of her actions, but is found guilty by the judge, who “always determined to oppose all innovation, and the newfangled notions which encroached on the good old rules of conduct” (17). There the finished portion ends; Wollstonecraft’s notes indicate that Maria later learns Darnford has been unfaithful to her in Paris and decides to end it all by overdosing on laudanum. Several interpolated stories concern the wrongs done to other women, indicating the systemic nature of female oppression.

  Unlike the conservative judge, Wollstonecraft is all for innovation and structures her novel contrary to the good old rules of fiction. She begins with Maria awaking in the madhouse, with Gothic imagery suggesting she’s trapped in a castle “filled with spectres and chimeras” (1), brilliantly launching the pattern of bondage imagery that runs throughout the novel, for “Was not the world a vast prison and women born slaves?” (1).295 Uncertain of her future or the whereabouts of her baby girl, Maria pens an autobiographical letter to her daughter, but the author postpones conveying the contents to us. First she wants to establish Maria’s intellectual bona fides, dramatized as she reads and comments on the books she borrows from Darnford, especially Rousseau’s Julie, and which establishes them as intellectual soul-mates before they even meet. Only after she meets and comes to trust him does she give him/us the manuscript to read (chapters 7–14), and to make sure we take away the right message from it, she has Danford restate its thesis: “ ‘the absurdity of the laws respecting matrimony, which, till divorces could be more easily obtained, was,’ he declared, ‘the most insufferable bondage. Ties of this nature could not bind minds governed by superior principles; and such beings were privileged to act above the dictates of laws they had no voice in framing, if they had sufficient strength of mind to endure the natural consequence’ ” (15). The Wrongs of Woman is as didactic as any other Bluestocking novel, but Wollstonecraft structures her novel so that the didacticism is organic: Maria’s memoir is not a novel—where didacticism is a downer—but a feminist alternative to the conservative conduct books of her day, like A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774), a popular book by John Gregory that Wollstonecraft criticizes in A Vindication. Even the didactic message is complicated when we learn from Wollstonecraft’s notes that “minds governed by superior principles” can also make mistakes: Darnford is unfaithful, and Maria lacks the “strength of mind” to persevere. Those are the choices a novelist makes, not a polemicist, and Wollstonecraft’s superior use of figurative language, literary allusion, and dramatization (compared to Mary) indicates she was well on her way to becoming a first-rate novelist when she died of complications resulting from childbirth. (Fortunately, the child lived, and went on to write Frankenstein.) Even in its unfinished state, The Wrongs of Woman is a powerful, consciousness-raising achievement.

  Wollstonecraft admired a novel that had appeared a few years earlier by her friend Mary Hays (1759–1843) entitled Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). Like Mary, it features a bookish romantic contemptuous of conventional rules for women, and like The Wrongs of Woman it takes the form of a memoir intended for a child. Like so many late-18th-century British heroines, Emma Courtney is orphaned before she reaches her twenties, then falls in love with the son of one of her benefactors. Defying the rule that a woman should never reveal her love for a man, Emma lets Augustus Harley know that she would be honored to become his wife, an offer he sidesteps for a mysterious reason. In subsequent letters to him, she badgers him to reveal his secret, letters which he ignores for months at a time. This understandably drives Emma crazy, especially since—as a miseducated woman raised only for marriage—she has no other interests: “The social propensities of a mind forbidden to expand itself, forced back, preyed incessantly upon that mind, secretly consuming its powers” (2.10). Eventually learning he’s secretly married, Emma reluctantly accepts the marriage proposal of another man who has been hounding her for years. Fate—or rather, melodramatic plotting—brings Harley back into her life a few years later when he suffers an accident near her house (recalling their initial meeting, when Emma helped him after another accident), dying right after he asks Emma to raise his son from that secret marriage. Further melodrama (infidelity, infanticide, suicide) removes her unloved husband from the picture, and many years later, Emma writes this memoir for her adopted son, also named Augustus Harley.

  Like Wollstonecraft’s earlier works, which Emma has read and quotes, Hays’s novel seethes with justified outrage at “the customs of society” that “have enslaved, enervated, and degraded women,” a society in which men can “pursue interest, honor, pleasure, as accords with their several dispositions,” while women “remain insulated beings, and must be content merely to look on, without taking part in the great, though often absurd and tragical, drama of life” (1.13, 26). Emma is smart enough to know there’s “something strangely wrong in the constitutions of society,” and while she recognizes that a “reformation” is underway, she suffers a “moral martyrdom” (2.37) because she lacks the independent means to do anything about it—except write about it. It doesn’t occur to this well-read woman to write a novel, but fortunately William Godwin adviced Mary Hays to do so, and in acknowledgment she includes a character based on him. (Many of Emma’s letters to “Mr. Francis” are taken verbatim from hers to Godwin.) Emma Courtney is a refreshing change from most British novels of the period. Emma dares to be different, scorns the rules young women are expected to follow out of “delicacy” (how I’ve grown to loathe that word!), displays her learning by citing numerous philosophers, voices bold opinions (she calls soldiers “murderers”), and expresses herself in a fleet, unencumbered style that replicates the darting activity of her sharp mind. “On my return to my friends,” the young Emma writes, “I quickly regained my health and spirits; was active, blythsome, ran, bounded, sported, romped; always light, gay, alert, and full of glee” (1.3). The sketchy style serves her well in times of high emotion: “He struggled to free himself from me—my apprehensions gave me strength—I held him with a strenuous grasp—he raved—he stamped—he tore his hair—his passion became frenzy!” (2.24). As Emma struggles to free herself from restrictive customs, Hays frees herself from the heavy furniture of the formal Eng
lish sentence. Emma Courtney is a compelling dramatization of the gender inequalities that inspired the founding of the Bluestocking Society a half-century earlier, and an acute psychological analysis of the kind of martyrdom some women suffer, and will suffer, as long as those inequalities persist.

  Wollstonecraft liked Emma Courtney, but Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) loathed it, and four years later mocked it in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). Outraged by Hays’s novel and especially by Godwin’s anarcho-utopian Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Hamilton dramatizes the dangers such works pose for women by way of the intertwined stories of three teenagers living in an English village: Bridgetina Botherim (a cruel caricature of Hays), an enthusiastic reader of anarchist philosophy who chases after a man who has no interest in the squat, squinty, shrill egghead; Julia Delmond, whose weaknesses for romance novels facilitates her conversion to Godwin’s philosophy by a sleazy opportunist; and Harriet Orwell, a Christian angel who doesn’t read anything. (She’s read to.) Bridgetina and Julia belong to a group of radicals—which includes Godwin as “Benjamin Myope” and the Goddess of Reason visiting from Paris—who plan to join what they believe is the perfect society of the Hottentots in southern Africa, but both come to grief before leaving England, while dutiful, thoughtless Harriet remains virtuous. An accurate and funny/sad account of how young women can get swept up in radical movements they don’t understand, Modern Philosophers overshoots its target by arguing that it’s stupid for women to think there is a “nobler path to glory than the quiet duties of domestic life.” “Whether the unrelenting laws of society with regard to our sex are founded in justice or otherwise is not for me to determine,” born-again Julia acquiesces near the end. “Happy they who submit without reluctance to their authority!” (3.13). And that authority goes all the way to the top: on her deathbed Julia wishes “I had been taught to devote the actions of every day to my God . . . instead of encouraging a gloomy and querulous discontent against the present order of things” (3.14), as Wollstonecraft and Hays do in their novels. Memoirs of Emma Courtney is written in liberated first-person; Memoirs of Modern Philosophers is written in authoritarian third-person.