EMPOWERING THE FEMININE: THE NARRATIVES OF MARY ROBINSON, JANE WEST, AND AMELIA OPIE, 1796-1812 This page intentionally left blank ELEANOR TY Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 19 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4362-3 Printed on acid-free paper Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Ty, Eleanor Rose, 1958- Empowering the feminine : the narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4362-3 1. Robinson, Mary, 1758—1800 — Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. West, Jane, 1758-1852 - Criticism, interpretation, etc. 3. Opie, Amelia Alderson, 1769-1853 - Criticism, interpretation, etc. 4. English fiction - Women authors - History and criticism. 5. Feminist fiction, English - History and criticism. 6. English fiction - 18th century - History and criticism. 7. English fiction - 19th century - History and criticism. 8. Women in literature. 9. Feminism in literature. I. Title. PR868.W6T92 1998 823'.7099287 098-931826-5 University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Contents PREFACE Vll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi Introduction 3 Part I: Mary Robinson (1758-1800) 21 1 Engendering a Female Subject: Mary Robinson's (Re) Presentations of the Self 23 2 Questioning Nature's Mould: Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham 42 3 Fathers as Monsters of Deceit: Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend 57 4 Recasting Exquisite Sensibility: Robinson's The Natural Daughter 72 Part II: Jane West (1758-1852) 85 5 Abjection and the Necessity of the Other: West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story 87 6 Politicizing the Domestic: The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times 101 7 Displaying Hysterical Bodies: Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father 116 Part III: Amelia Opie (1769-1853) 131 8 Re-scripting the Tale of the Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter 133 vi Contents 9 The Curtain between the Heart and Maternal Affection: Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray 145 10 Not a Simple Moral Tale: Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie' s Temper 161 Afterword 178 NOTES 185 INDEX 219 Preface This book examines selected narratives by three female writers who lived in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In linking together Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, I hope to show the ways in which three women, though of different ideological and social backgrounds, attempted to negotiate with the period's prevailing notions of gender, identity, and female selfhood. Robinson, West, and Opie each explored the various ways women could empower themselves and be empowered without necessarily breaking with cultural definitions of the feminine. Writing in the particularly turbulent years after the French Revolution and after the radical feminist ideas of Mary Woll- stonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, these authors were con- scious of the political and cultural implications of their works. They understood that novels, for instance, could not only influence and shape a young female reader's thinking about marriage, motherhood, and family relations, but that books could also help define an individual's position in society and outline the way one's subjectivity was constituted. They were aware of the connections between the home and the political arena, and often sought to redefine the terms in the domestic realm in order to show a range of possibilities for both women and men in the private and public sphere. My readings are based on close analysis of the texts themselves, though I have attempted as much as possible to situate the works in their historical, literary, and social milieu. In some cases, I have linked the narratives to biographical information about the author where this is available; in others, I have made references to specific books to which the novelist was reacting. For example, William Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political fustice was an influential text for these women, whether regarded positively or viii Preface negatively. My discussion has also been informed by poststructuralist and feminist theories about the construction and the formation of the subject. Following the theories principally of Lacan and Foucault, feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler have proposed theories of language and subjectivity that are useful for understanding the way women are repre- sented and constituted. Assumptions about the female sex and sexuality in the late eighteenth century, as in the twentieth century, interpret what is 'natural' and proper behaviour for women. Female identity then, and to a lesser extent, today is bound in many ways to social institutions and customs such as those of courtship, marriage, and domesticity. In the novels by Robinson, West, and Opie, these issues, as well as those involving female chastity, maternity, and motherhood, figure prominently as they were contentious and in the process of being reconfigured. In discussions about motherhood, I have used Adrienne Rich's influential Of Woman Born, which is based on a woman's experience, observations, and reflec- tions as a mother. Though the conditions of our lives in the twentieth century are different from those of women in the late Enlightenment and Romantic period, a number of the same premises and problems occur. We are still shaped by many of the Western cultural myths and patriarchal paradigms that were pervasive some two hundred years ago despite our great sense of technical progress. Since feminist critics are not in agreement about the value of psychoana- lytic theories of development as a critical practice and as a means of promoting social change, it is necessary to say a few words about this approach at the outset. One of the problems often raised by those who are sceptical of psychoanalytical theories is that of transhistoricity. Is it possi- ble to speak, for instance, of female desire, when social and cultural conditions are so different for the twentieth-century and for the late eighteenth-century woman? This problem is linked to the larger question of how and where to locate femininity, as Teresa Brennan points out. On this issue, psychoanalytic theorists and sociologists agree that femininity is not innate or essential to women - 'masculine' and 'feminine' identity are not fixed by biology. But they differ as to how most women become feminine subjects. In her useful and intelligent essay 'An Impasse in Psychoanalysis and Feminism,' Brennan elucidates the difference between 'psychoanalytic theory of psychical sexuality and the socio-historical con- cerns of feminism.'1 She argues that psychoanalysis cannot make a socio- logical distinction between 'an innate sex and a socially defined masculinity or femininity' because 'psychical sexuality has certain structural trans- historical determinants, buat... it is also, necessarily, a socio-historical prod- Preface ix uct.'2 In other words, as long as women and men assume their subjectivity through language that is gendered, then issues of identity, sexuality, and power remain problematic regardless of historical conditions. What does change are the particulars of the fantasy or desire, which vary depending on the society and age in which one lives. Let me briefly explain this argument. We remember that in Lacan's theory, the small being becomes human when it is placed in language, when it accepts the symbolic dimension that divides the mind into the conscious and the unconscious, the male and female. In becoming a sexed subject, and in order to think thoughts from the standpoint of 'I,' one necessarily has to repress some ideas while selecting others through an acceptance of the phallus as the marker of difference. With this accept- ance, the being becomes the distinct, separate individual who is able to speak and express meaning. What is expressed through speech, however, is very limited. It is only what one is able to demand through language. The subject cannot express all that underlies the demand, and that which is left unarticulated is desire.3 Psychoanalysts argue that this desire is often for oneness, for the state of being not separated, and for the qualities of the other, which the subject had to repress in order to be separate. The force of desire, the force of fantasy varies because of individual or social historical contigencies, and this is why sexual identity or the social division of labour changes. The theory accounts for why many women experience conflict between 'feminist reason and sexist desire.' As Brennan notes, 'fantasies which are psychically derived are projected into social relations; and thus have their own ideational impact ... psychoanalysis is a theory of ... how fantasies go out over there.'4 When I speak of empowering the 'feminine' in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the feminine to which I refer is a subject who, like women in the twentieth century, has been psychically defined as the subject lacking the phallus, but who, unlike women today, is deprived of legal existence after marriage, who could not hold public office, and whose primary role in life was to be a wife and mother.5 While the specificities of woman's desire or fantasy might be different because of differing ideological expectations of woman over the past two hundred years, I contend that what most women want is still what they do not have. To a great extent, this consists of the power and accompanying privileges that are conferred to the other, the male subject. Robinson, West, and Opie articulate some of these desires in their works. But more importantly, they invest the feminine subject with dignity by redefining the roles women play in society, by highlighting her capabilities both within and outside of