by Steven Moore
But this smarmy, reactionary novel has its moments, partly because Hamilton sounds like Swift eviscerating the “modern philosophers” of a century earlier, and partly because Hamilton goes after bad novelists as viciously as she does bad philosophers. Though at one point she has Julia praise Cervantes and Fielding, Hamilton obviously didn’t think much of novelists: after Bridgetina writes a speech filled with such phrases as “mental sensation, pernicious state of protracted and uncertain feeling, congenial sympathy, delicious emotions,” and so on, the author adds this at the bottom of the page:
Note, for the benefit of novel-writers.—We here generously present the fair manufacturers in this line with a set of phrases which, if carefully mixed up with a handful of story, a pretty quantity of moonshine, an old house of any kind, so that it be in sufficient decay and well-tenanted with bats and owls and two or three ghosts, will make a couple of very neat volumes. Or should the sentimental be preferred to the descriptive, it is only leaving out the ghosts, bats, owls, and moonlight, and the above phrases will season any tender tale to taste. (3.4)
Hamilton is just as hard on novel-readers: like some novelists of the 1750s, she likes to taunt her readers, as though she suspects they are as gullible as Julia. Her disdain for the genre is obvious from the first page, which actually begins in the middle of chapter 5 because (its fictitious editor explains) the first 50 pages of the manuscript were “torn off to kindle the morning fire” by its previous owner. She mocks novelistic tropes like a character’s secret noble birth, adventures on the road, and tyrannical parents, and sometimes stops the story to discuss her authorial options on how to proceed. At one point, after writing that an upper-class female character receives “a hearty welcome” wherever she goes, she imagines a u-c female reader’s likely response:
“A welcome!” repeats some lovely fair one, as with a yawn she throws down the book at the conclusion of the last chapter. “La! how vulgar! What a bore to find one’s friends at home! I am fatigued to death at the very thoughts of it. What odd notions these low authors have of the manners of the fashionable world!”
Stay, dear lady, and be convinced that we are not so ignorant, or so little accustomed to the world of fashion, as you seem to imagine. Well do we know that in dropping your tickets [card] at the splendid dwellings of the dear friends, whose names ye in return expect to swell your porter’s list, ye have neither end nor object in view but the gratification of your own vanity; a vanity which might be somewhat humbled were ye obliged to witness the mortification that would be inflicted on your dear friends by your tiresome and insipid company. (3.3)
Dayum! Earlier novelists teased their readers, but they rarely insulted them. In the novel’s concluding chapter, Hamilton notes that “the serious part of our readers may, perhaps, be of opinion that with the last chapter our history ought probably to have concluded; . . . But how could we have the heart to disappoint the Misses by closing our narrative without a wedding.” She will marry off the principals (Christian Barbie and her Ken doll boyfriend), but “we cannot possibly contrive to marry every individual of our dramatis personae in the last scene. [¶] ‘And pray, why not?’ exclaims a pretty critic,” the first of five Misses who suggest hackneyed ways of pairing up the rest. Hamilton spends the remainder of the conclusion shooting down their suggestions, though the sappy Christian ending she does provide is as hackneyed as any sentimental novel. Hamilton’s religiosity and rejection of gender issues is reactionary, but her rejection of romance clichés is progressive and may have turned some of her audience into better readers, which seems to have been Hamilton’s purpose. As Katherine Binhammer argues, “Hamilton is not censuring what one reads but how one reads”—Bridgetina and Julia make the mistake of confusing theory (political and romantic) with practice—and by her metafictional remarks to the Misses hopes to “transform the female reader from a consumer into a critic.”296 This disqualifies Harriet as a model: she’s never “run wild in the fairy field of fiction” (2.4), but she couldn’t exist outside the pages of a sentimental novel, and is by inference an uncritical reader of the Bible. Nonetheless, Hamilton shared with the other novelists in this section a deep concern for women’s education, though I suspect she wore black rather than blue stockings.
ORIENTAL TALES
The enormous popularity of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) reminded publishers and writers of the ongoing appeal of Oriental tales, so they responded with a number of such works over the next 40 years, including a bland sequel to Rasselas by Ellis Cornelia Knight called Dinarbas (1790), in which Rasselas finds happiness in marriage, turning Johnson’s frowning novel into a smile. (Henceforth, the two novels were often coupled in a single volume.) With one exotic exception, however, most of these works are forgettable; a few writers took advantage of “the political resonance of a form which presents a potentially powerful critique of the conservative ideology implicit in the then-dominant forms of realistic prose fiction,” Robert L. Mack argues, and wrote things they “might not otherwise have been capable of writing in a more realistic form of fiction.”297 But Robert Irwin seems closer to the mark: “In general, English writers working in the Oriental mode failed to match the wit and licentiousness of their French contemporaries. Indeed, most English Oriental tales tended to be leadenly moral” (242).
Johnson’s friend John Hawkesworth (1720–73) had published several Oriental tales in the 1750s in his magazine the Adventurer (modeled on Johnson’s Rambler) before writing a short novel entitled Almoran and Hamet (1761). This too was sometimes paired with Rasselas in later editions because they share a common theme—“suppress the wishes which thou canst not fulfill, and secure the happiness that is within thy reach”298—but Almoran and Hamet is much closer to The Arabian Nights in style and substance. The title characters are twin sons of the king of Persia, who makes them coregents upon his death. Ambitious Almaron is selfish and tyrannical, while humble Hamet is passive and cooperative; since they represent extremes, the king had hoped they would balance each other on the throne, but they are polarized after the arrival of Almeida, the fair-skinned daughter of the ambassador of Circassia. She favors Hamet after he rescues her from a fire, and at that point a genie appears to aid Almaron in his desire for her, which involves mysterious public announcements, strange weather, and a talisman that allows Almoran to switch bodies with others. After some further complications that test the resolve of both Ameida and Hamet, the good brother triumphs over the bad one, whom the genie turns to stone, for he too was impersonating an evil genie to test Almoran. The short novel is a fair imitation of a tale from The Arabian Nights, aided by the presence of a wise counselor, a eunuch-guarded seraglio, a dungeon, references to Muhammad and the Quran, scimitars, and other Oriental trappings. But the novel is also an allegory of occidental concerns: Almoran’s reliance on phony miracles associates him with superstitious Catholicism, in contrast to Hamet’s Protestant-like morality, and in the twins’ different political styles it’s easy to see an allegory of absolute monarchism versus parliamentary government. The novel is dedicated to the newly crowned George III, whom Hawkesworth hoped would recognize the superiority of the latter.
A newly crowned king is likewise featured in The History of Nourjahad (1767), which Frances Sheridan penned in between the two volumes of Sidney Bidulph, and which superficially couldn’t be more different from those dreary soap operas. Sultan Schemzeddin of Persia is tempted to make his childhood friend Nourjahad his prime minister, but his counselors advise against that, arguing that he is avaricious, irreligious, and licentious. The sultan decides to test him by way of an elaborate ruse (which isn’t revealed until 10 pages from the end) in which a genie offers Nourjahad endless riches and immortality, but with a catch: every time he deviates from “sober and regular conduct” he will fall asleep for an extended period. Needless to say, newly rich Nourjahad deviates and is punished: he gets drunk, and sleeps for four years; he commits blasphemy and is knocked out for 40 years; he murders an old woman in
a rage and is sentenced to 20 years of sleep-time. He finally realizes the errors of his ways, decides to commit himself to “temperance and decency,” and begins distributing his vast fortune to the deserving poor. Shortly after, Schemzeddin reveals the complicated game he has been playing over the last 14 months, and lays down the leaden moral: “Let this dream of existence then be a lesson to thee for the future, never to suppose that riches can ensure happiness; that the gratification of our passions can satisfy the human heart; or that the immortal part of our nature will suffer us to taste unmixed felicity in a world which was never meant to be our final place of abode.”299
Nourjahad is an ingenious imitation of Arabian fiction (which features similar stories of such ruses), and Nourjahad himself an intriguing character: at first, he displays Faustian ambitions to use his wealth and immortality to travel the world, consult the learned, and develop a godlike view of history, all while indulging his passions to the hilt. Realizing immortality bars him from paradise, he defies heaven by attempting to create his own paradise: in the novella’s raciest and most blasphemous episode, he asks his harem girls to dress up like the houris of the Islamic paradise—they argue about what to wear: some want to go naked, but they settle on dresses “of the thinnest Persian gauze” (150)—and gets his favorite concubine to impersonate Muhammad’s first wife, while he plans to play the prophet. Unfortunately, for him and the reader, Sheridan puts him to sleep before the blasphemous orgy commences (there’s a word for women like her) but the preparations are enough to earn Sheridan a fatwa. On the one hand, Nourjahad is a weak man who can’t resist temptation; on the other, he is “self dependent for [his] own happiness or misery” (192), which may sound admirable to modern readers but is sinful under both Islam and Sheridan’s Christianity, for only their gods can dispense those qualities. (One of the unintended consequences of Sheridan’s tale is to reveal that Islam and Christianity have more in common than their followers realize.) The moral of Sheridan’s fairy tale fails because she’s as deluded as Nourjahad regarding a god and immortality—like it or not, we are indeed self dependent for our own happiness or misery—and Nourjahad was right to attempt to create paradise on earth: not necessarily by staging orgies but by using his wealth at the end to improve the lives of others. Despite its conduct-book message, Nourjahad is a cunning artifact and one of the most successful examples of the Anglo-Oriental tale.
A decade after publishing the popular Chrysal, Charles Johnstone returned with The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis (1774), a mediocre novel set in the 7th century. After defeating the prophet Muhammad in battle, a general asks an intriguing prisoner-of war named Selim to tell his story. A rambling, episodic tale follows for three-fourths of the novel, after which the general frees Selim to fight on his side, which eventually leads him into battle against the king of Betlis, who turns out to be Selim’s father. Recovering his birth name, Prince Arsaces marries his beloved, and the novel concludes with the fatalistic moral “that true wisdom consisteth in humble obedience to the will of heaven, without arrogantly presuming to scan its ways” (2.4.7). There are a few wonders, like a subterranean city populated by bug-eyed dwarfs, and interpolated stories in the manner of The Arabian Nights, but “not one soft scene of love,” the author assures us in his preface, “or sentiment of loose desire,” primly forgoing the erotic possibilities of an exotic setting that the French were happy to exploit.
It is perhaps for that reason that the most famous and influential Anglo-Oriental novel of the 18th century was written in French. Vathek (1786) was composed in 1782 by the 21-year-old William Beckford (1760–1844), who turned it over to his tutor, an Orientalist named Samuel Henley, to translate into English. With Beckford’s encouragement and occasional participation, Henley also added voluminous, erudite notes to the short novel, which—along with the researches of later scholars—reveal that Vathek is not what it appears to be when reprinted, as is often the case, without these notes: it is not a bizarrely imaginative opium-dream of a novel, but a creative collage of Arabian tropes, myths, and superstitions culled from dozens of books, ranging from scholarly tomes like d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (1697) to Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights and the French imitations that followed, specifically those by Anthony Hamilton, whom Beckford named as his primary inspiration. But knowing where Beckford got the ingredients for his Arabian feast doesn’t detract from the phantasmagorical results.
Vathek, an actual 9th-century caliph (al-Wathik Bi’llah) who was a patron of the arts and sciences, becomes in Beckford’s hands a hedonistic aesthete whose genuine intellectual curiosity is perverted by his evil Greek mother Carathis, who takes advantage of her “hare-brained” son’s “love of the marvelous” and “insatiable curiosity” to lead him to the dark side.300 She encourages him to visit the underworld, where a prophecy promises to reward him with “the talismans that control the world” and “the treasures of the pre-Adamite sultans” (which she plans to share) and advices him to ignore the alternative prophecy that warns “Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant, and to undertake that which surpasseth his power” (11). An Indian merchant convinces him to renounce Islam and offer a human sacrifice of 50 boys, which Vathek does (though we later learn that they are spirited away to a kind of heaven for boys who remain forever young; not uncoincidentally, bisexual Beckford caused a scandal at the time by consorting with a 13-year-old lad). On the road to hell, Vathek picks up a gold-digging girl named Nouronihar, and eventually they arrive at the hall of hell, where a “throng of Genii and other fantastic spirits of either sex danced lasciviously at the sound of music, which issued from beneath” (109). There they meet the owner of Club Hell, Eblis (the Muslim Satan), a young man with large eyes and flowing hair, who sadly informs them that they can enjoy the talismans of power only for a few days, after which they are damned to eternity. Beckford’s sublime description of hell is followed by a ridiculous moral that seems to parody the ones with which earlier British writers concluded their Oriental fables: “the condition of man upon earth is to be—humble and ignorant” (120).
Vathek is impressive because it is excessive, for Beckford took fuller advantage of the liberties available in the Oriental genre than his British and French predecessors. Vathek is more opulent, more outrageous, more sensuous, more violent, more blasphemous, more shocking—and at times more ridiculous. (There are enough authorial winks and nudges to indicate we shouldn’t take this lurid stuff too seriously.) There is more drunkeness and feasting, more stripping and nudity, more random sex acts: just before Vathek’s caravan leaves for the Palace of Subterranean Fire, some “gallants” sneak into the carriage containing his harem and start humping the girls before they are driven off by the eunuchs; while Carathis visits a cemetery, her Negresses make out with ghouls. There are more supernatural effects, more magical animals—talking fish, Muslim bees, a demonic camel—more drugs, more vertiginous heights, vaster halls, deeper gulfs, more exquisite perfumes and fouler stenches, more everything. Verging on sensory overload, Vathek is the literary equivalent of a riotous weekend in Vegas, and bequeathed to literature the concept of decadence: its influence can be seen in the writings of Lautréamont, Gautier, Poe, Swinburne, Mallarmé (who wrote a preface for a French edition), Huysmans, Wilde, and Lovecraft, where hyperaesthetic sensibility, occultism, and abnormal sex come together in a hideously beautiful way. Vathek also left its mark on the Gothic novel, Romantic literature (Byron was a huge fan), the grotesque, and supernatural fiction.
While waiting to hear their fate in hell, Vathek and Nouronihar listen to the tales of three other sinners awaiting judgment: these are the Episodes of Vathek that Beckford intended to publish in the same volume as Vathek before Rev. Henley spoiled his plan by rushing the latter into print (and claiming it was an anonymous tale translated from the Arabic). The three episodes that survive focus on sexual transgression—pedophilia, rape, and incest—and push Beckford’s work even further bey
ond the bounds of 18th-century decorum.301 Together, Vathek and the Episodes represent the most “powerful critique of the conservative ideology implicit in the then-dominant forms of realistic prose fiction” (to quote Mack again), for even though Vathek is dutifully punished at the end, Beckford takes and gives too much pleasure in his reckless characters and their contemptuous disregard for conventional behavior, and like Vathek (but unlike his Calvinist mother) he did not think that “it was necessary to make a hell of this world to enjoy paradise in the next” (1).
We’re not through with Beckford (see pp. 894–97 below), but we’re through with the 18th-century Oriental novel, for no one could top Vathek.
MIXED MEDIA
A few weeks after the debut of George Colman’s first play Polly Honeycombe at the Drury Lane Theater on 5 December 1760, Colman (1732–94) published a book version with the unusual subtitle A Dramatic Novel of One Act. A satire on naïve readers, it dramatizes a hectic day in the life of a teenager addicted to novels, for “A novel is the only thing to teach a girl life, and the way of the world”—which, for better or for worse, was true, given the limited education girls received then. Polly Honeycombe is in love with a law clerk named Scribble, who craftily speaks and writes to her in novelese. “He writes as well as Bob Lovelace,” gushes this Richardson fan, and later fishes for a compliment by asking him, “D’ye think I am as handsome as Clarissa, or Clementine, or Pamela, or Sophy Western, or Amelia, or Narcissa, or—.” When Polly’s parents insist she marry a businessman instead, she laments, “I am now for all the world just in the situation of poor Clarissa,” and vows to use the unwelcome suitor “worse than Nancy Howe ever did Mr. Hickman.” When her parents persist, she attempts to elope with Scribble, citing numerous examples of the heroines of novels high and low—she doesn’t distinguish between Tom Jones and The History of Dick Careless—and after she is caught and returned home, she vows she will have Scribble “though we go through as many distresses as Booth and Amelia,” and exits, but not before telling her parents’ choice of husband “I hate you. You are as deceitful as Blifil, as rude as the Harlowes, and as ugly as Doctor Slop.” After everyone leaves the stage, her exasperated father turns to the audience and complains “a man might as well turn his daughter loose in Covent Garden as trust the cultivation of her mind to A CIRCULATING LIBRARY.”302
