Their Fathers' Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity

Their Fathers' Daughters

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Their Fathers' Daughters Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity

ELIZABETH KOWALESKI-WALLACE

New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1991

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Kirachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1991 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200,Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth Their fathers' daughters : Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and patriarchal complicity / Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-506853-X. 1. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Women and literature—Great Britain—History. 3. English fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 5. More, Hannah, 1745-1833—Political and social views. 6. Edgeworth, Maria, 1767-1849—Political and social views. 7. Fathers and daughters in literature. 8. Patriarchy in literature, I. Title. PR858.W6K68 1991 90-45534 823'.5099287—dc20 "Milton's Daughters: The Education of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers" is reprinted from Feminist Studies, Volume 12, Number 2, (1986): 275-293, by permission of the publisher, Feminist Studies, Inc., c/o Women's Studies Program, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742. "Hannah and Her Sister: Women and Evangelicalism," copyright 1988, was published originally in Nineteenth Century Contexts, and is reproduced by permission of Nineteenth-Century Contexts. "Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda,™ published originally in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 29, pp. 242-262, is printed by permission of the publisher, Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock, TX 79409-1037. 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

In memory of my mother DOROTHY KUBALA KOWALESKI (1929-1984)

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PREFACE

When I began this book, I had three basic questions: "What does it mean for a woman writer to identify with her father and with the patriarchal tradition he represents? What factors—psychological, social, historical, or otherwise—motivate such identification? What are the consequences of this identification?" To answer these questions, I turned to the late eighteenth century; because this period saw important changes in the family structure, changes that marked an important shift in the ideology of the family, it is an appropriate place to begin. And I chose three late-eighteenth, early nineteenthcentury women writers, a triptych: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney. At a glance, it seemed apparent that these three were poised at a critical moment and that their biographies were fraught with significant conflicts indicating crucial alterations within the positions of the nuclear family. Their careers reflected and played out the specific demands of a new domestic ideology; their works carried the signs of contradiction as the writers struggled to accommodate themselves to the content of a new domestic ideology. Most important, all three were "their fathers' daughters," that is, strongly male-identified women whose biographies were marked by extraordinary accomplishment in the field of letters. This dedication to the father made all three problematic subjects for a feminist study. If feminist study has been characterized by the search for foremothers, women with whom we can identify and to whom we can turn for inspiration, what kind of a model is a "daddy's girl"?1 Obviously, Fanny Burney is no longer a major part of my investigation, and this book could be said to be organized around an absence. For during the last five years, something interesting has happened to Burney: she has been taken up into a new feminist canon and, even though to some extent she continues to be "her father's daughter," she is no longer a writer who makes feminists uncomfortable. This change in Burney's status, a change manifest in excellent new work by Kristina Straub, Julia Epstein, and Mar-

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garet Anne Doody, places her in a new category removed from the other two writers in the book, neither of whom has been similarly recovered.2 What interests me about the history of Burney's reception is that her example demonstrates an important process of feminist recuperation. Burney's works themselves are, of course, the primary motivation for such recovery. We have uncovered the wealth of her novels which, with the exception of Evelina, had almost disappeared into oblivion. But, more important, we have rediscovered the intricate details of Burney's life story. If the earliest feminist responses to Burney had been (as Kristina Straub intimates) somewhat apologetic (for Burney failed to meet early feminist expectation for consistent resistance to patriarchy), later feminist responses incorporate the notion that contradiction was central to Burney's experience as an eighteenth-century woman writer and therefore to her art. If Burney's texts refused to conform to preestablished feminist expectations, new critical methods had to be devised for discussing Burney's strategies. But a critical factor in devising those methods had to be the willingness to let Burney speak for herself, even when her message may have seemed contrary to specific feminist ideals. In the end, Burney has become not only an important figure, but also an instructive one for feminists working in the period. She has taught us to be wary of our preconceptions, to open up our inquiry to the important force of contradiction, and to forego the task of "assessing" women writers in order to comprehend them. While my sense of Burney's importance changed due to the emergent, powerful new scholarship on her life and works, the nature of my project has altered as well. I see the lessons taught in the literature on the "new Burney" as resetting the stakes for feminist criticism. Reintroducing Burney has entailed not only canon revision—questions about what we read and teach in the classroom—but also new methodologies—questions about how we read and what we seek to learn. The point is not merely to make room for another woman writer but also to reformulate the kinds of questions that should be introduced into literary study. As I see it, what is potentially at stake is a fundamental shift in feminist literary study away from the author—or even specific literary texts—toward significant issues. In the case of Burney, for instance, the issues are manifold: an "ideology of romantic love" versus "an

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ideology of powerlessness"(in Straub's work); the appearance of an "aggressive violence" in Burney's "decorous" life and works (in the work of Julia Epstein); the high costs of the father-centered family (in Doody's work). From these approaches, we gather useful knowledge about larger patterns and responses to patriarchy, as Burney's biography provides the occasion for an important meditation on these issues. The chapters that follow will be of interest to anyone engaged by the theme of patriarchal complicity. Although my immediate subjects—the occasion for my meditation—are Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth, my larger project is a commentary on patterns of complicity. My strategy is to scrutinize selected aspects of the biographies and careers of More and Edgeworth as a means of investigating the source of women's attraction to patriarchy. My intention is not to make an argument about the place of More or Edgeworth in relation to the canon. Nor do I seek to provide a study of their "life and works," even though I employ both biographical and literary materials. Instead, I hope to contribute to a feminist revision of literary study several readings, literally some "essays" (in an earlier sense of that word, as a tentative effort or trial) in which I try to understand why patriarchy has been such an efficacious force in women's lives. There are obvious implications in my argument, claims that warrant further explanation. For example, to categorize More and Edgeworth as "daddies' girls" is to enter into immediate controversy, for some will take exception to this label, finding evidence of their "resistance" to patriarchy. It is not uncommon, for instance, to find Edgeworth described as "an enlightened woman and a moderate feminist."3 Similarly, More's political activities have been defended—sometimes passionately, and eloquently—as consistent with a feminist project of maternal "empowerment."4 This point of view discovers models of female "agency" in the lives and works of "progressive" women writers such as More and Edgeworth. However, in dissenting from these points of view, I want to query the significance of terms like "enlightened," "progressive," or "liberal" for feminism: what does it mean to argue that women have been "empowered" from within patriarchal discourse? After an introduction to the themes and practices of what I propose to call "new-style patriarchy," Chapters 2 and 3 discuss two

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aspects of More's "daughterly compulsions," first her relationship to Milton, second her relationship to Evangelicalism. In both chapters More positions herself as a "daughter," and in both she assumes certain attitudes, duties, and responsibilities consistent with a daughter's role. Paradoxically, in both situations, she aligns herself with a benevolent patriarchal figure in order to escape the worst effects of misogyny. Each time, however, despite the impulse to avoid being categorized as "a daughter of Eve," she finds herself ultimately consigned to patriarchal categories. Thus, for Hannah More there are implicit tensions in situations that metaphorically replay a family dynamic. For her, terms such as "father" and "mother" have both real and symbolic valence as she struggles to accommodate herself to the contradictions implicit in the discourse of the family. Similarly, the works of Maria Edgeworth repeatedly thematize the family, rehearsing in particular the roles to be taken on by daughters and mothers in relation to patriarchy. Chapter 4, on domestic ideology in Belinda, investigates the tensions resulting from Edgeworth's commitment to a particular domestic ideology by focusing on Lady Delacour's narrative of "failed" maternity. Chapter 5 applies the discourse of the family to Ireland, where a class of Anglo-Irish landlords stand in as benevolent patriarchs overseeing the activities of an infantilized rural population: what is to be the mother's—and the daughter's—role? The last chapter foregrounds the presence of the marginal daughter whose problematic existence suggests some important qualifications to domestic ideology. Obviously, this book is divided into two parts, each with its own structure and themes. Though the two parts are not quite symmetrical, they are meant to be parallel, and I hope that important repetitions will surface. For example, in both parts a strategy for avoiding a confrontation with the more frightening aspects of maternal power leads a woman writer to consider a definition of maternity. In both parts, a gesture that begins as empowering ends up as constraining. The two parts, then, through the use of different, yet parallel, examples are meant to arrive at the same conclusion: that it is not enough for women to attempt to reverse the patriarchal categories that have consigned them to a position of deviance and error. Instead, the categories themselves must be confronted and overturned.

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Acknowledgments In its earliest stages, the research for this book was funded by grants from the Kenyon College Faculty Development Fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Program, and the American Council of Learned Societies. I wish to thank Jerry Irish for his support and encouragement. I first saw this project most clearly as a book with the help of Jane Gallop, who helped me to clarify a number of critical and theoretical issues in the summer of 1985. Paula Cohen, Shelia Conboy, Alan Richardson, and Sandra Zagarelle read portions of the manuscript and provided commentary and counsel. As my reader at Oxford, Claudia Johnson also offered me incisive commentary and suggestion for revision. Much of this book was written with the invaluable assistance and support of my writing group—Helena Michie, Robyn Warhol, and Jo Ann Citron. Their insightful criticisms and comments, their excellent readings at many stages of the writing, facilitated—and indeed made pleasurable—what once seemed like an endless project. My children, Rebecca, Clarissa, and Ian, generously allowed me to test my abstract notions of family against the realities of motherhood, bringing me great joy in the process. My husband Jim has made it possible for me to lead my triple life as mother-teacherscholar, even though this often means he has had far less sleep than I. Boston September 1991

E. K.--W.

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CONTENTS

1 Their Fathers' Daughters: An Introduction, 3 2

Milton's Bogey Reconsidered, 27

3

Hannah and Her Sister: Women and Evangelicalism, 56 An Introduction to Maria Edgeworth, 95

4

Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Belinda, 109

5

Good Housekeeping: The Politics of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, 138

6

Monstrous Daughters: The Problem of Maternal Inheritance, 173

7

Coda: Charlotte Bronte and Milton's Cook, 198 NOTES, 209 INDEX, 231

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Their Fathers' Daughters

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1 Their Fathers' Daughters: An Introduction

Neither Hannah More or Maria Edgeworth is anthologized in a recent collection entitled First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799, edited by Moira Ferguson, although More is indirectly represented. As patron to the working-class poet Ann Yearsley (sometimes called the Bristol Milkwoman), whose picture graces the cover of the collection, More is evoked as an "establishment" figure. Indeed, all published accounts suggest More treated Yearsley badly: she was both condescending and vituperative toward Yearsley as soon as the "Milkwoman" began to assert her independence from More's control. Here, for example, is More's response to Yearsley's attempts to manage the money resulting from the publication of her poems. Attacking Yearsley for her insufficiently subordinate attitude, More wrote, "I cou'd weep over our fallen human nature. . . . I hear she wears very fine Gauze Bonnets, long lappets, gold pins, etc. Is such a woman to be trusted with her poor children's money?"1 Such a comment betrays the class prejudices that were to make More and Yearsley bitter enemies. In First Feminists we are given Yearsley's version of the story, as the anthology provides us with her impassioned narrative of the event. It is easy to see why this is so: Yearsley is clearly the more sympathetic character, the one who seems more like us in her astute perceptions of gender and class prejudice. Nonetheless, the selection of Yearsley's account has its price, for it means that here woman is set against woman, while the larger cultural context that may have conditioned More's response to Yearsley is not discussed. Nor does the anthology provide an examination of the relationship 3

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between class oppression and sexual oppression in the MoreYearsley affair. Reformulating this observation as a question, what was the connection between More's need to assert "class privilege" and her particular psychological and cultural needs as a woman within patriarchy? If we only examine the situation from Yearsley's point of view, how can we begin to understand how More may have been part of a larger social and sexual dynamic? Yet More herself was placed at the service of a greater, Evangelical class ideology, and an understanding of her motives might be critical to a radical critique of the way patriarchy positions women against themselves. As Gerda Lerner reminds us in her recent study, "Class differences were, at their very beginnings, expressed and constituted in terms of partriarchal relations. Class is not a separate construct from gender; rather class is expressed in genderic terms."2 Lerner's observation implicitly exhorts us to investigate the complicated interplay of class and gender issues, but this can only occur after an investigation of the entire context of the More-Yearsley interaction. Our response to More cannot be simply to shun her politics as "unacceptable." We must confront the late eighteenth-century circumstances that allowed More to rise to the heights of bourgeois respectability at the expense of her working-class sisters. Ferguson's anthology is useful as a point of departure because it highlights the problems attending the selection of a representative group of eighteenth-century feminists. To begin with, the women most celebrated in their day are not necessarily those we most admire. Ferguson's choice of a frontispiece makes this discrepancy apparent. Richard Palmer's painting entitled "Nine Living Muses" (1779) depicts nine eighteenth-century women thought most accomplished and noteworthy in their day: Hannah More, Elizabeth Montague, Elizabeth Griffin, Catherine Macaulay, Elizabeth Carter, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Linley, and Charlotte Lenox. Of the nine women, only two, however, are represented by selections in the anthology. The omission of Kauffman is explained, of course, by her status as a painter. But what of the other six women writers? What are we to make of their appearance on the frontispiece, and what is the relation of the frontispiece to the rest of the collection?

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To some extent, these questions are answered by Ferguson's explanation of her criteria for selection. In her preface she writes that "beginning in 1578 [her book] traces through the writings of twenty-eight British women the evolution and growth of feminist ideas and connections between and among women over two centuries. By feminist I mean those ideas and actions that advocate women's just demands and rights, or that counter or offset, at any level, the socio-cultural, sexual and psychological oppression and economic exploitation of women." She adds, "I recognize that what we would define as feminist is dependent upon and changes within different historical periods."3 Thus, presumably the women in Palmer's painting were not as representative of a feminist consciousness as were the other writers in the collection. Nonetheless, the six "uninvited guests" continue to exist; like the bad fairy not invited to participate in the celebration of Sleeping Beauty's birth, they cast a shadow over the festivities already in process. To ignore them is not to make them go away; for these women will not leave the party without protest, or perhaps without casting some malignant spell on the project of canon revision. They are, after all, our relations, our unacknowledged godmothers: their appearance in the frontispiece represents the problematic status of all women writers who, for whatever reason, resist our effort to remake the century in our own image. This book is an attempt to understand and reevaluate two women writers who, like uninvited guests, make the process of celebrating our heritage as women more difficult. It is also an attempt to contextualize some political choices that are bound to trouble or disturb, choices that may account for the exclusion of Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth from a feminist anthology like Ferguson's. When we encounter what seems to be a strain of political conservatism in the works of writers such as Hannah More, it is only natural that we would gravitate instead toward the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft; it is far easier to identify with Wollstonecraft's revolutionary sympathies. The parameters of a thwarted female life presented by Wollstonecraft in Maria are far more familiar to those trained to see the world through a feminist lens than is a model of domestic fulfillment presented by Edgeworth in Belinda, published only three years after The Wrongs of Woman.

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Yet only a gesture that opens out to embrace the more elusive—and less attractive—literary foremothers can offer us a profound understanding of our situation. In an essay entitled "'Mistresses of Orthodoxy': Education in the Lives and Writings of Late Eighteenth-Century Women Writers," Miriam Leranbaum's effort to account for the contradictions in the lives of ten eighteenth-century women intellectuals suggests the discomfort felt by many feminist scholars of the era. Yet her essay also provides one model for addressing such discomfort.4 Leranbaum begins her essay with the assertion that, in the case of the ten eighteenth-century women writers she studied, "what each biographer fondly supposes to be circumstances unique to his or her subject turns out instead to be a group phenomenon of considerable importance" (282); in other words, "this particular group of women share a common set of unconventional and intellectual experiences that set them clearly apart from their female contemporaries and appear to have shaped their future careers and values" (284). This observation leads Leranbaum to speculate on the social conservatism that characterized the polemical content of the works of these women: why didn't these women propose educational programs for women that would differ from those proposed by the patriarchal establishment? Why didn't they recommend for other women the educational opportunities that they themselves were privileged to receive? Leranbaum dismisses the possibility that the conservatism of this group was unnatural or forced; the women themselves were more likely "hyperconscious" of their difference: "The effect of this hyperconsciousness about their own 'masculine' education and its specialness sometimes seems to have had the paradoxical effect of making them adopt attitudes of protectiveness towards other women even more conservative than those adopted by most enlightened men of the same period" (300-301). Motivated by this insight to clear these women from the taint of a serious contradiction between their conservative attitudes and their more radical lifestyles, Leranbaum proposes that the example of their lives outweighed any particular pronouncement they may have made: "Whatever the underlying reasons, the direct and indirect views on female education expressed by the women under consideration would have tended to undermine the literary aspirations of future

An Introduction

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generations of women, had not their lives and careers told a different story" (301). The key word to Leranbaum's interpretation of the vexed issue of eighteenth-century women conservatives is "hyperconscious," for she attributes to the women themselves some awareness of the contradictions they lived and experienced daily. According to Leranbaum, it is not merely an oversight or an embarrassing "fact" that More or Edgeworth enjoyed greater power or privilege than the female subjects about whom they wrote; instead, the discrepancy between their lives and the female program they prescribed is one direct result of the pressures they experienced as "daddies' girls" under patriarchy. Thus Leranbaum opens the way for a discussion of the complex and often contradictory position of the eighteenth-century woman intellectual. To her discussion, I would like to add the following questions: What does it mean for a woman to have been educated within the ideological boundaries of the nuclear family in the last decades of the eighteenth century? What were the specific familial circumstances shaping concepts of femininity during the eighteenth century? To what extent does the evolution of the family structure have an impact on the history of feminist consciousness? Where Leranbaum discovers eighteenth-century literary women to be "mistresses of orthodoxy," Mitzi Myers finds the same women to be involved in a very different sort of politics, that of a radical bourgeois reform galvanized to critique "a society governed by worldly libertine males."5 The strength of Myers' essay, entitled "'Reform or Ruin': A Revolution in Female Manners," lies in its suggestive readings of the categories that normally divide women like Hannah More from women like Mary Wollstonecraft along party lines and, in Myers' reading, the works of Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft, which are often thought to embody antithetical sensibilities of domesticity versus radicalism, resemble each other more than they differ. Along with other women of their generation, both Wollstonecraft and More, for example "dwell on the disjunction between functional education for ethical living and the current 'frenzy of accomplishments' geared merely to seduce success in a disadvantageous marriage market" (202). Similarly, female moral reformers like Wollstonecraft and More "were recasting that ethic fof useful industry and family] in women's terms for women's benefit, suiting to their own needs the general middle class

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protest against aristocratic license and inutility and inflecting bourgeois modes to fit the feminine sphere of endeavor" (203-204). But the dominant position given to a social anthropological model, one that emphasizes the relationship of women's "muted" culture to the larger social construct and insists on woman's "socially functional centrality" (211), means that another significant dynamic at work in the writings of More and Wollstonecraft is given less weight. In the works of both More and Wollstonecraft, the attack on artistocratic sexual license often functions metonymically as an expression of what the two women fear most about human sexuality; at base, both women betray a level of ambivalence about unmonitored female sexuality in particular. In the case of More, what horrifies her most about the excesses of the upper classes is the potential for what she fears most within herself. Her efforts to reform both the artistocratic and the working classes share an urgent message about the necessity for "control" of the appetites that threaten the unwary, yet this same urgency functions as a leitmotif in More's own diaries during the years when, having withdrawn from the temptations of society to the hills of Cheddar, she found herself still battling "the enemy within." More's own battles were to reach an intense pitch during the later years of her life. The particular symptoms she records—violent headaches, fainting spells, apparently epileptic attacks—suggest the surfacing of the energies that she had tried to repress throughout her career. For Wollstonecraft, that the licentiousness of the aristocracy is coextensive with her own anxiety about female sexuality becomes apparent in a passage, cited by Mary Poovey, about the indecorous eating habits of women. While Wollstonecraft initiates a discussion of the indelicacy of those idle, rich French women who talk publicly of their "indigestion," she quickly moves on to a description of such women as "the slaves of casual lust. . . who are, literally speaking, standing dishes to which every glutton may have access."6 According to Poovey, Wollstonecraft implies that female sexuality might be even more voracious than male desire (Poovey, 75). Moreover, almost "parenthetically, and almost certainly unconsciously, Wollstonecraft betrays her fear that female desire might in fact court man's lascivious and degrading attentions, that the subordinate position women have been given might even be deserved" (76). It is important to recognize the presence of such sexual anxiety in the

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writings of More and Wollstonecraft, not only to reveal the ways in which their arguments might be said to undercut themselves (e.g., as Poovey does in her examination of the writings of Wollstonecraft) but also to expose their ongoing investment in the various and subtle forms of patriarchal discourse. In its most persuasive forms, patriarchal discourse helps women to bind their ambivalence about their own sexuality. For Hannah More, Evangelicalism gave her not only a political role, one that Myers rightly identifies as socially central, but also a particularly compelling psychological construct that promised to contain in a meaningful way the clamorous force of her own energies. The investment of eighteenth-century women in patriarchal discourse is, however, a frustrating phenomenon to pin down. To understand fully the significance of such an investment, a feminist critic must be attentive to the dual feminine motivations of anger against and desire for what patriarchy offers women. Too often, hostility against patriarchal restriction in the works of eighteenthcentury women writers can mask some equally strong longing for the father's sanction. For example, Mary Poovey's reading of Frances Burney's Evelina1 astutely perceives the novel as the record of the "trauma of growing up female." Poovey attributes various narrative aggressions, in particular those that attend Evelina's confrontation with her father, to the ghost of Evelina's mother, Carolyn Evelyn, who empowers her daughter to act on her behalf; in this way, "through the apparently insignificant daughter, the mother is vindicated, and both wronged women imaginatively triumph" (43). Whereas the mother is motivated to avenge herself for her husband's scandalous treatment of her—for his refusal to recognize their marriage and so on—Evelina's motivation for aggression against her father is still more elusive. Working with Chodorow's models, Poovey argues that the girl child who is still strongly identified with her mother turns to her father in the hopes that he might offer her autonomy. The daughter soon perceives, however, that "The promise of social autonomy is in fact false . . . the girl sees that her relationship with her father has been largely idealized; and she intuits, however dimly, that the man she has idealized is, in fact, the tyrant of patriarchal society" (54-55). However, Burney's novel at least intimates that Evelina experiences an equally powerful desire for the father figure who is so vital

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to her larger project of individuation and differentiation from her mother. To privilege the absent mother in Burney's novel is to read the mother-daughter relationship as empowering, despite significant narrative tensions arising from the relationship between Evelina and the various displaced mother figures in the novel—Madame Duval or Mrs. Selwyn, for example.8 Recognizing the father, in Poovey's words, as the "tyrant who blocks a woman's social and psychological autonomy, who destroys domestic tranquility, and who reduces both mother and daughter to 'daughters' within the home that should shelter them" (56) does not preclude our also recognizing feminine complicity in that patriarchal structure. Moreover, the daughter's acknowledgment of the mother's victimized status does not necessarily result in her unconflicted identification with her mother or with the historically devalued feminine gender. Evelina's struggles for sociosexual maturity are unmistakably reminiscent of Burney's and, as Margaret Doody explains in her recent biography, Burney's relationship to her own father was deeply ambivalent. Although Charles Burney was a self-centered and self-preoccupied man, he managed to convince his children that he had only their best interests at heart, and Frances in particular found it difficult to rebel against his interventions in her life.9 Despite the presence of very convincing evidence of Burney's dissatisfaction with the restrictions of patriarchy,10 her biography makes equally obvious the force of her desire for her father's constant approval and love, indeed, for her father in any capacity; it suggests as well that Burney's oedipal involvement continued well into her adult years. Thus Evelina's tribulations carry the full weight of Burney's deeply ambivalent relationship with her father. Consider an early example in which Burney (at age 26) describes a trip to her father's inner sanctum to receive his verdict on her first literary production. I was almost afraid—& quite ashamed to be alone with him—but he soon sent for me to his little gallery cabinet—& then with a significant smile that told me what was coming, & made me glow to my forehead with anxious expectation, he said, "I have read your Book, Fanny—but you need not blush at it—it is full of merit—it is really extraordinary," I fell upon his neck with heart-beating emotion, arid he folded me in his

An Introduction

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arms so tenderly that I sobbed upon his shoulder—so delighted was I with his precious approbation. But I soon recovered to a gayer pleasure more like his own.11

Given the innuendoes of the passage—the embarrassment at exposure to her father's "gaze," the revealing blush, the climax involving increased pulse rate followed by tender caresses—one might well make the case that Burney wrote the novel to "seduce" her father and that she succeeded. Not literally, of course, although in psychoanalytic terms the scene is rife with meaning. In choosing to court her father's approval by imitating his masculine literary discourse, Burney represses the feminine discourse associated with her stepmother and, presumably, with her dead mother as well. Her stepmother encourages Frances' skill with the needle, while her father teases her into writing. If she wrote Evelina to seduce her father, she did so only because she had been previously seduced by what he had to offer.12 Like Frances Burney, many eighteenth-century literary women allowed themselves to be seduced by a masculine literary discourse and by the apparently benevolent patriarch who was the bearer of that language. Literary daughters are speical kinds of daughters, women who adapt themselves to both a familial and a literary hierarchy. The terms of the family romance suggested by modern psychoanalysis might be used metaphorically to describe the daughter's apprenticeship to her father's patriarchal literary tradition. Willingly forsaking her literal mother, the woman writer accepts her place in a literary heritage that is not her own. The psychological dependencies generated by this situation are poignant. At the age of 37 Maria Edgeworth felt that without her father she would "sink into that nothing from which he raised me."13 For Elizabeth Carter, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, the choice of the patriarchal literary tradition was facilitated, perhaps even necessitated, by the death of the real mother. For Hannah More, the real mother seems to have been inconsequential, while her father represented an entire erudite tradition inaccessible through her mother. At her father's knee she heard stories of classical heroes, told first in their original languages and then in translation. But her father also stopped teaching her mathematics when he grew "frightened at his own success."14

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Such anecdotes remind us that the perpetuation of patriarchal structures depends on the participation of both masculine and feminine parties; it is not simply the case that women are "duped" into daughterly submission. Each of these women subscribes to the "myth of the benevolent patriarch" in her own way, and such a "myth" gains currency upon the daughters' complicity in the hierarchical structure that privileges masculine literary discourse at the expense of an identification with the literal mother. The myth of the benevolent patriarch is generated on both sides according to the needs of both parties, as Dorothy Dinnerstein's analysis suggests. She explains that "patriarchy remains a refuge that we are afraid to dismantle. We feel that the reign of the early mother is waiting for us just outside its walls; and besides, we must balance our dislike of constraint against our fears of freedom."15 Women then, as now, gravitated toward their fathers to escape their mother's claustrophobic embrace or, more important perhaps, the claustrophobic life history the mother bore with her. But only history can provide the contours of that life history; only history describes the particular dimension of the walls situating the mother-child dyad. Thus the relational models proposed by psychoanalytic theory must be considered against the backdrop of historical details that can enhance and enrich our understanding of what it means to live under patriarchy. In this book, I have chosen to examine biographical moments in the lives of two representative late eighteenth-century literary women—Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth. Even though both were widely known, read, and acknowledged during their lives, and although both were extremely successful into the early decades of the nineteenth century, neither is part of our current literary canon. Nor is my purpose necessarily to argue for their inclusion in the canon, although implicitly I do wish to suggest that much that they wrote is of value and significance. Instead, I contend that Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth warrant our attention as "daddies' girls." That is, they are worth our attention as case studies in complicity. Their stories can tell us something important about what it means for women to participate successfully in a masculine literary discourse that, at best, creates a female subject according to its own bias and interests. As case studies, then, More and Edgeworth can provide us with insights that may be relevant to the lives of other women writers.

An Introduction

13

My strategy for treating these two women is to examine various kinds of texts—biographical, autobiographical, fictional—for tensions generated by and filtered through the family structure. The goal of this strategy is neither a full-scale biographical study of More and Edge worth nor a systematic, close reading of their major texts, but an analysis of some significant and symptomatic moments in their biographies. Such moments illuminate both the temporary efficacy and the implicit limitations of patriarchal paradigms for the female subject. They show us, in other words, both what patriarchy has offered women historically and how it has failed them ultimately. Although the careers of More and Edgeworth entail problematic social and political affinities, in my study I try to avoid apology. I seek to disclose the complex psychological motivation behind their choices. Instead of searching for the signs of feminine resistance to patriarchy, I am trying to uncover the dual motivations of desire for and reaction to the presence of a patriarchal discourse that offers to bind the awful power of female sexuality. Examples of complicity such as these demand a rigorous, if at times uncomfortable, investigation of the investment of all women in patriarchy. As Juliet Mitchell eloquently argues: The longevity of the oppression of women must be based on something more than conspiracy, something more complicated than biological handicap and more durable than economic exploitation (although in differing degrees all of these may feature). It is illusory to see women as the pure who are put upon: the status of women is held in the heart and the head as well as the home: oppression has not been trivial or historically transitory—to maintain itself so effectively it courses through the mental and emotional bloodstream. To think that this should not be so does not necessitate pretending it is already not so. On the contrary, once again we need pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.16

The "pessimism of the intellect" to which Mitchell refers should not be confused, however, with determinism, nor must the reference to psychoanalytic models in this study be construed as prescriptive. As Jacqueline Rose explains, psychoanalysis does not produce definitions of femininity; rather, it "gives an account of how that definition is produced."17

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THEIR FATHERS' DAUGHTERS

As an account of how definitions of femininity are produced, psychoanalysis can be usefully employed within an historical model. Although often thought to be exclusive, the categories of the psychoanalytic and the historical can be mutually enlightening, as some feminist theorists have recently argued. For example, in a recent issue of M/F consisting largely of a translation of I'Ane Dossier., Marie Christine Hamon points to a distinction to be made between the social parents of a child at any given moment, that is, the "actual," or real biological people who nurture and attend to the child's physical needs, and the parental "imago" as it is made the focus of psychoanalytic attention. Just as Lacan separated the "actual father" from the "paternal metaphor," Hamon seeks to separate the mother into her several functions. She explains that "The mother of the unconscious is not the 'actual' mother. Freud indicates this on a number of occasions while discussing that quite other reality 'psychical reality.*"18 Parveen Adams reiterates her point: ". . . the level of psychical life is not the same as the level of reality at which a mother 'manages' her child." In addition, "Freud's work does not emphasize the individual mother's performance in respect to her child. . . . Freud is speaking of the mother in the unconscious, a mother who introduces the child to lack, to castration, to representation."19 The significance of Lacan's paternal metaphor is that it allows us to imagine that, whether the actual father is present or not, certain patriarchal processes take place. The paternal metaphor operates independently of the existence of any single man. Similarly, what the work of Hamon and Adams points to is the existence of something like a "maternal metaphor." The operation of this maternal metaphor would also occur regardless of the presence of an actual mother. The point of differentiating between the actual mother and the maternal metaphor is to expose the coercive elements of "normative" models for mother-child interaction and to insist, as does Adams, that "the child's psychic health is not the gift of the mother"; that is, "no child-rearing practice would guarantee normality" because "that would be to abolish the unconscious" (44). But the distinction drawn by Hamon and Adams is also useful in another way. If the maternal metaphor—like the paternal metaphor—exists outside of time, the actual mother is nonetheless very much the product of her age, and she bears the mark of ideology.

An Introduction

15

Her practices are subject to change and alteration, and they have specific characteristics, depending on the age in which she is situated. Unlike the maternal metaphor, the practices of the actual mother are socially constructed. For example, we know that during the middle decades of the eighteenth century the agency of the newly empowered medical profession—the "authority" on childbirth and child-rearing practices—placed new value on the act of intimately mothering one's own child.20 Two consequences of such a shift in focus were the renewed emphasis on breast-feeding and an insistence on a high level of physical contact between mother and child.21 Both moves circumscribed the independence and freedom of movement of a class of leisured women who formerly would have employed the services of a wet nurse. But the wet nurse was only one among a category of household domestics whose services increasingly were thought to interfere with the "natural" intimacy between child and parent. As early as Locke, writers on household management discouraged dependency on such help while advocating more direct interaction among family members. These kinds of historical details suggest that maternity was given a distinct configuration during this period in the eighteenth century. In contrast to maternity, we could define the "maternal" as the representation of the feminine principle as it manifests itself outside of any specific practices of child rearing. While the practices of "maternity" are carried out by what Hamon calls the real or actual mother, the maternal is akin to the psychic mother; it corresponds not to any social woman, but to an internalized sense of female power, and it attends the timeless perception of woman as creator (as well as destroyer) of life. Thus when, during the latter decades, women writers like Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth seek to invest motherhood with as much significance as possible, they are participating in the historical construction of maternity. More's exhortation in Strictures on a Modern System of Female Education that women should "come forward and contribute their full and fair proportion towards the saving of their country," that they should "raise the depressed tone of public morals [and] awaken the drowsy spirit of religious principle,"22 relies on a specific concept of "womanhood," and it implies a distinct form of female agency. Similarly, Edgworth's call for the rational education of female children functions within a specific

16

THEIR FATHERS' DAUGHTERS

discourse about gender. Yet, paradoxically, as I will show, these same writers often evince an anxiety about the devalued maternal. In the presence of a wild and unrestrained "Nature" More finds a frightening female image, while Edgeworth's domestic novels isolate—and repress—a "freakish" female presence that acts beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior. However, for these writers a politicized argument about maternity can coexist with a fear of the maternal because, as a construction, the function of maternity is to regulate and contain the more frightening aspects of the maternal. In other words, maternity channels maternal energies, which might otherwise seem undisciplined or anarchic, into acceptable social practices. During the same period that saw maternity being constructed along the lines we still recognize today, paternity was similarly changing. In key works of the time, the position of the father is infused with new meaning as various educational discourses prescribe a revitalized dynamic of patriarchal control. Historians of the family have, however, tended to overlook the importance of such discourse to the institution of a new kind of patriarchal authority. For example, in his detailed account of the evolving family structure in the eighteenth century, Lawrence Stone finds evidence for the decline of patriarchal authority in changing property settlements and the decline of family prayers. According to Stone, new attitudes toward death and increased attention to personal and bodily privacy mark the ascendancy of "affective individualism."23 But Stone here limits patriarchal power to its external manifestations. In the words of Michel Foucault, Stone examines the "mechanism of power" from a distance, ignoring its "capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives."24 Similarly, Randolph Trumbach underestimates the importance of such "capillary forms of power" when he identifies "domesticity" as a new pattern of aristocratic family life in which a "limited degree of equality" between husband and wife existed and the servants were excluded. Later Trumbach concedes, however, that "domesticity" was more often a variation on than an alternative to the old style in that "men who were convinced that only possession

An Introduction

17

created love were prepared to assert (in the name of a higher morality than that of pure interest) their ownership of the sexuality of their children and the law."25 Like Stone, Trumbach overlooks the extent to which the father's growing attentions to the education of his children constituted the preservation of patriarchal prerogative, albeit in a more benevolent guise. Under new-style patriarchy, paternal tutelage more often involved inculcation into a particular stance to be taken in relationship to the father's authority than it did any particular subject matter. By educating his dependents into the ways of deference and obedience without making obvious the terms under which such submission was demanded, the patriarch assured his own paternal authority while establishing familial loyalties among members. Most important, this process was most often implemented without any visible coercive power. For this reason, the great educational text for the eighteenth century was Locke's Some Thoughts Upon Education, in which the philosopher posited the method to assure parental authority through nontyrannical means. As Jay Fliegelman has noted in another context: The great challenge of eighteenth-century politics, familial and national, was to make authority and liberty compatible, to find a surer ground for obligation and obedience than "the fear of the rod." If imperiousness and severity create in men a slavish temper and a dissembled obedience that awaits but the right moment to throw off all restraint, force must be replaced by reasonableness, the imposition of absolute will with the creation of shared values.26

While historians have long recognized the implications of Lockean psychology for eighteenth-century political life, the special consequences of the popularization of Locke's educational theories for the female child have received virtually no attention. But substitute "women" for "men" in the preceding Fliegelman quotation and a new series of questions appears. What would have been the impact of a Lockean pedagogy designed to inculcate familial and political allegiances in a young girl? Locke certainly intended his theories to be applied to female children, as he acknowledged in a letter to Mrs. Clarke: "Since therefore I acknowledge no difference of sex in your mind relating . . . to truth, virtue

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THEIR FATHERS' DAUGHTERS

and obedience, I think it well to have nothing altered [in his text] from what is [writ for the son],"27 That. Locke's text was extraordinarily popular is well documented,28 and Fliegelman traces modified Lockean tenets as they appeared in well-known conduct books, such as Dr. Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters. Since records reflecting actual parental schemes for home education— especially of daughters—are rare, the traces of Locke's pedagogical paradigm must be discerned elsewhere, in family correspondence or memoirs, for example, or in the very terms in which the grown woman continues to address her father.29 To isolate Locke's text is not to trace the complicated issue of complicity to a single source, but rather to emphasize the ways in which one enormously popular pedagogic attitude fed that phenomenon. In this view actual curriculum is less important than a pedagogic stance or attitude. While the women under discussion may have been exposed to different educational materials during their formative years, they shared a similar psychological experience under their fathers' authority. The key elements of Locke's plan, especially as they are relevant to the female child, are threefold. First, Locke's parents are naturally benevolent; they are neither tyrants nor ignorant of the child's desires. Locke assumes a great deal of natural affection, even leniency: "Parents, being wisely ordain'd by Nature to love their Children, are very apt, if Reason watch not that natural Affection very warily, are apt, I say, to let it run into Fondness. They love their little ones, and 'tis their Duty: But they often, with them, Cherish their Faults too" (EW, 130). The parent must struggle against such faults—the child's natural obstinacy or willfulness in particular—in order to foster the child's sense of discipline. Locke's second point is that a sense of filial obligation must be created. Advocating the early establishment of parental authority, Locke recognizes the potency of parental power, provided that the power is not merely physical. The exercise of mere physical power corrupts the child and encourages a violent temper. More important, mere physical power soon loses its effectiveness: "For I am very apt to think that great Severity of Punishment does very little Good; nay, great Harm in Education . . . whatsoever Rigour is necessary, it is more to be used, the younger Children are, and having by a due Application, wrought its Effect, it is to be relaxed, and changed into a milder Sort of Government" (EW, 146-147).

An Introduction

19

Locke's "milder Sort of Government" amounts to a psychological manipulation of the child's natural affections, a seduction of the child's loving predisposition. The parent begins early to win the child's allegiances in order to assure a lifetime of loyalty. Thus Locke's third important assertion is that only by imprinting loyalty on the child's mind first by means of "fear and awe" and later by means of "Love and Friendship" will the parent rest secure in the child's continuing fidelity. The child's fear of the tyrannical father might provoke "a counterfeit Carriage" and a "dissembling outside" of loyalty and obedience, but habits "woven into the Very Principles of Nature" will truly influence the child's life and establish the necessary political allegiances (EW, 146). Locke stresses the importance of such psychological imprinting: it must be "begun early, and inflexibly kept to, till Awe and Respect be grown familiar, and there appears not the least Reluctancy in the Submission, and the ready Obedience of their minds" (EW, 147). Locke's position may be summarized as follows: If therefore a strict Hand be kept over Children from the Beginning, they will in that Age be tractable and quietly submit to it, as never having known any other: And if, as they grow up to the Use of Reason, the Rigour of Government be, as they deserve it, gently relaxed, the Father's Brow more smooth'd to them, and the Distance by Degrees abated; his former Restraints will increase their Love, when they find it was only a Kindness to them, and a Care to make them capable to deserve the Favour of their Parents, and the Esteem of every Body else. (EW, 146)

Although Locke's proposed plan applies to governance by both parents, it should be clear that the mother and the father act together as one force in the service of the established ideology; this educational paradigm serves patriarchy particularly well in that it assures no mere obedience, but thorough dedication to the value system under which one grows to political maturity. Locke views the family as a model for the state, and his ultimate goal is the ongoing security of the existing social contract.30 The mother's role in such a process is purely ancillary. Acting as the intermediary between father and child, she is to have no voice of her own. The girl child is especially vulnerable to the effects of Locke's program

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THEIR FATHERS' DAUGHTERS

to the extent that the cornerstone of his program is the establishment of "fear and awe." Because of her perception of the father's disproportionate status in the domestic setting, the young girl is particularly susceptible to such impressions when the father turns his attentions to her tutelage. With its increased emphasis on internalized control, the Lockean paradigm implements a stronger superego and a concomitant sense of guilt that, although not gender specific, is more forceful in the case of the daughter whose attraction to her father compels her to seek his approval. The real father's presence thus exacerbates the internalized voice of the father as "superego." In this way a deeper drama of oedipal boundary confusion is likely to result from the female child's early exposure to her father's tuition under Locke's rubric. Loyalty to the father's value system results in unconscious tensions, most notably confusion about one's self-worth as a woman. In the words of one contemporary feminist, in order to identify with the father, "the daughter must give up her own preoedipal tie to the mother, and often take on the father's contemptuous devaluation of and contemptuous attitude for the mother and, by extension, for women as a group."31 Memoirs, diaries, and letters of literary women from the period intimate the unresolved conflict continually being replayed. Many literary women suffered debilitating headaches. Elizabeth Carter, for example, encountered the first of her lifelong headaches when, despite her father's conviction that she had no talent for languages, she taught herself Latin and Greek.32 Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth shared her symptom. At other times extreme self-deprecation for infantile dependencies intimate the continuing psychological crisis generated by early dependencies on paternal approval. The Lockean paradigm putatively establishes moral and physical independence while, in fact, its emphasis on "normative values" precludes the female child's development of the capacity to imagine a discourse existing outside the prevailing social structure.33 Locke's paradigm particularly frustrates the female child's selfdefinition because of the context in which the tuition occurs: despite evidence to the contrary, the father insists that he is acting as her own best friend in her own best interests. In Dr. Gregory's version of this:

An Introduction

21

A father's zeal for his daughter's improvement, in whatever can make a woman amiable, with a father's quick apprehension of the dangers that too often arise, even from the attainment of that very point, suggest his admonitions, and render him attentive to a thousand little graces and little decorums, which would escape the nicest moralist who should undertake the subject on uninterested speculation.. . . You will hear, at least for once in your lives, the genuine sentiments of a man who has no interest in flattering or deceiving you.34

Eternally vigilant, with an eye to every potential danger that besets the female sex, the Lockean father anticipates his daughter's every step and serves her truly where others would falsely seduce her. Rebellion becomes doubly impossible in a situation where, on the one hand, no obvious signs of tyranny or repression exist and, on the other hand, the girl child has internalized the voice of paternal authority as her own. By claiming love, friendship, an amatory disinterestedness in his daughter's situation, the father deflects potential anger and hostility toward his restraint back toward the daughter herself. The additional significance of Locke's educational paradigm lies in its establishment of a paternal presence, a particular attitude or pose against which the child finds it difficult to assert herself, as Maria Edgeworth's correspondence with her father illustrates. Reading Richard Edgeworth's letters to his daughter, one is struck by the claustrophobic atmosphere generated by the father's solicitude. Marilyn Butler notes that Maria liked to refer to herself as "little i" in her letters. On one occasion, writing to thank her father for a present of 500 pounds, she received the following reassurances from him: I have given you 500 pounds to make you independent for Subsistence—I think every grown up person should by degrees be rendered independent as to the necessaries of life—I shall always keep you dependent upon me for a degree of Esteem, affection entertainment & Sympathy that you will find it difficult to obtain from any but a husband & to a good husband I will make over all my rich possessions in your heart—I am therefore under no apprehension of losing you & you may sew my name to my Bond without offending your Heart or Understanding—that is your antithesis you know.

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Citing this letter out of context, Butler does not explain the ways in which Edgeworth felt her "Heart" and her "Understanding" antithetical. Later in her biography Butler remarks that Edgeworth's attitudes as a grown woman writer reflect the decade in which her father grew to intellectual maturity.35 Gilbert and Gubar make this same point in other terms: "Maria Edgeworth solved this problem of what we have been calling 'the anxiety of female authorship' by writing as if she were her father's pen."36 This lifetime commitment to her father's values and ideals, even when those values were in conflict with her own, issues from Edgeworth's early experiences under her father's tuition. The dependency that Butler recreates (although she herself does not find it problematic) comes in part from the father's Lockean pose as reflected in the preceding letter. Edgeworth's psychological dependencies are exacerbated by her financial dependencies; it should be of little wonder that she should repeatedly articulate a discourse not her own, given the circumstances under which her father tutored her. Nonetheless, despite the extreme efficacy of the Lockean educational paradigm, the ambivalence and even anger felt by fatherdependent women continue to manifest themselves in subtle ways. For example, the following comment by Frances Burney in her Memoirs of Dr. Burney betrays the unresolved ambivalence remaining as she reminisces about the ways in which her father educated her: The second child, Frances, was the only one of Mr. Burney's family who was never placed in any seminary and never was put under any governess or instructor whatsoever. Merely and literally self-educated, her sole emulation for improvement, and sole spur for execution, were her unbounded veneration of the character, and affection for the person of, her Father; who nevertheless had not, at the time, a moment to spare for giving her lessons, or even for directing her pursuits.37 In words that curiously echo Evelina's own (e.g., "I have often thought my fate particularly cruel, to have but one parent, and from that one to be banished forever—"), Burney suggests that, as her teacher, her father was continually absent yet always present; he taught her nothing and he taught her everything. His mere presence as her father was enough to inspire the formation of her intellect.

An Introduction

23

Here we see a dynamics of dependence at work, as well as a subversion of any articulated position of rebellion. Frances Burney had legitimate reasons to complain of her father's inconstant attentions but, since paternal existence gives shape and meaning to her own life, to speak directly of his failings would be to undermine the terms of her own self-image. Writing as a grown, married woman, Frances Burney still stands in fear and awe of her father and refuses to question outwardly his role in her psychological growth and development. In contrast to Burney, who returns again and again to her relationship with her father, Hannah More disencumbered herself of her real father only to involve herself in a series of paternal seductions that resolve themselves in a neat symmetry: if she first courted the clergyman who gave her a sixpence for reciting her catechism so prettily, she last surrendered her heart to the ultimate benevolent patriarch, the Evangelical Christ. For More, the dynamics of "daughterhood" on several levels—literal, literary, and religious— were of preeminent concern. In retrospect, her life was contained by her biographer William Roberts within the neatness of a single metaphor: No picture, or exemplar, is affected to be drawn; nothing but the sincere life of a daughter of Eve, beginning her course amid the vanities of the world, and advancing in excellence, under the impulse of extraordinary faculties, but more especially under the guidance of that grace without which all labour is strife, and all prudence folly.38

More's biographer thus circumscribes the remarkable history of More's life within a single discourse, a Christian discourse that recognizes woman first and foremost as a daughter to her mother Eve. To be thus identified is an equivocal experience at best; as a daughter to Eve, More is implicated in an entire history of feminine error, folly, and misdirection. Yet, in having led a "sincere" life, she presumably distanced herself from the associations of her first mother's deviancy. To lead a sincere life as a daughter of Eve is to live a paradox, for it is simultaneously to find one's place within a preexistent narrative that dictates woman's marginality and to be allowed to adapt the strictures of that narrative. Still, every useful or "good" feminine act can only serve to amend—and never deny—

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a woman's prior identification with her mother Eve. Roberts' choice of this metaphor, in other words, symbolizes the extent to which patriarchal discourse predetermines the shape of the mother-daughter interaction: once cast within the terms of a symbolic system such as Evangelicalism, the mother-daughter relationship inevitably becomes a rivalry between the daughter, who now identifies herself with her father, and the mother, who continues to represent possibilities not contained by the discourse. On another level, Roberts' metaphor also effectively undercuts the role of More's biological mother; being daughter to Eve, she is no longer daughter to Mary Grace More, "a young woman of plain education, the daughter of a creditable farmer" (MLC, I, 15). Indeed, Roberts barely disguises his discomfort over Mrs. More's declasse origins as he hastens to assure his readers that she was "endowed like himself [her husband Jacob More] with a vigorous intellect: and to the soundness of her judgment in the culture and regulation of her children, the credit and success which has attended them has, in great part, been deservedly attributed." Despite such words of praise, Roberts fails to mention the name of Hannah More's mother once (although he gives several sentences to the paternal grandmother). As he opens the biography, he tells us only that Hannah More was "the youngest but one of the five daughters of Jacob More"; in this way her filiation obscures her biological daughterhood. What follows is a brief history of her father's life and family connections, in particular his acceptable social and church associations. This repression of the biological mother occurs in the service of the Christian discourse that demands that Roberts inscribe his female subject within a particular filiative network; such repression of the biological mother is symptomatic of certain kinds of patriarchal discourse, in particular, of monotheistic JudeoChristian discourse, as Julia Kristeva's analysis suggests.39 Yet More herself ironically contributes to Roberts' reading of her character by self-consciously inscribing herself within the same Christian discourse. Roberts' first use of the metaphor is mirrored at the end of the text by another reference to Eve, this time More's own. In the last days of her life, having outlived her family and most of her intimate friends, More was living alone at Barley Wood, her estate in the Cheddar Hills, dependent on the attentions of her domestic staff. It was eventually discovered, however, that while

An Introduction

25

More remained sequestered upstairs, the servants took full advantage of the situation by ransacking the storerooms and even hosting parties at More's expense. When the behavior of the servants was finally exposed, More was forced to leave her home of 25 years. As she was helped into the carriage, according to Roberts, "she cast one pensive parting look upon her bowers, saying, 'I am driven like Eve out of Paradise; but not, like Eve, by angels'" (MLC, II, 416). There are many ironies in this situation, and not everyone would be inclined to read the scene sympathetically. That More, who had proselytized on the properly subordinate position of the lower orders, should then be put at the mercy of those same lower orders, without maintaining their respect or esteem, may satisfy those who abhor More's collaboration with the force of antidemocratic politics. The more forceful ironies, I would suggest, stem from More's designated position as mediator between the Evangelical discourse of the church fathers and the working classes. As a daughter to the church, she came to believe that she deserved the deference and obedience due to the ambassador of the Christian fathers. The fact that the servants felt free to cheat her extensively reveals both their lack of respect and their perception of her true powerlessness. In other words, in her final days, alliance with the superior powers of the church establishment failed to empower her. Having acted as mouthpiece for Evangelical doctrines, she found herself voiceless at just that moment when the symbolism of church power and hierarchy, of all that More had tried to represent within the church, should have protected her. This is not necessarily to say that, had More been a man, she would not have been cheated,40 but that the alliance of women like More with the Evangelical church must be seen for what it was—a provisional arrangement at best, one in which women were given access to power precariously and irregularly. The real irony of the situation is that we are tempted to read More's parting comment as an ultimate expression of vulnerability, a curious but inadvertent admission of woman's error once more, for to be driven out of paradise like Eve is to be expelled for some transgression, no matter who holds the flaming sword at the gates. Although More obviously speaks ironically by inverting the angels who guard paradise for the "devils" who guard her estate, she nonetheless evokes the myth of Eve's expulsion, puts herself in

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Eve's place, and suggests that she shares Eve's feelings of loss, confusion, and possibly guilt. She alludes to the "prelapsarian" aspects of her existence in a home of her own making, but the reference to Eve's paradise reminds us that Eve discovered herself to be only a guest to God's hospitality, one who could be expelled for breaking the rules. Similarly, what seemed to be More's own earthly paradise turned out to be her provisional home, the terms of that provision being still less clear than Eve's; More's expulsion from paradise seems particularly cruel in that it results from no single identifiable transgression on her part. The fact that More did not command the respect and obedience that would have allowed her to remain mistress of her own home highlights the vulnerability of all women who shelter themselves within a patriarchal discourse: any woman's earthly paradise can fail to sustain her as long as she is only a privileged guest within the larger structure of patriarchy. That is, any woman's accommodation within patriarchal discourse is similarly provisional, subject to arbitrary interruptions or cancellation, as long as she remains a daughter to Eve.

2 Milton's Bogey Reconsidered In Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, Hannah More vindicates Milton's paternal character.1 Defending Milton, she implicitly defends her own father as well, while she manifests a tendency to identify with Milton's daughters. According to More, Milton merely enforced the "strict domestic regulations of his age" in having his daughters read Greek and Latin to him. However, she overlooks the point of the anecdote: Milton's daughters were said not to have understood the languages they read. In denying it a hardship "that an affectionate child" should amuse an afflicted parent, More obscures the significance of the story. The plight of Milton's daughters suggests the plight of all literary daughters who participate in a literary tradition to which they have only limited access. What, then, are we to make of More's desire to be one of Milton's daughters? After all, to position oneself in this way is implicitly to internalize a number of potentially misogynistic notions concerning the female character: the daughter who commits herself to the act of reading for the father without knowing the language is the daughter who accepts her own ignorance. More's failure to consider the experience of Milton's daughters is the implicit sanctioning of patriarchal hierarchies demanding the daughter's subordination. In this particular defense of Milton's paternal character, his bogey looms large, assuming the very shape of the father himself. As Gilbert and Gubar point out, however, Milton's bogey is a protean specter who appears sometimes as the father and sometimes as the many characters he created. Eve herself, "inferior and Satanically inspired," may have just as often "intimidated women and blocked their view of possibilities both real and literary." Building a case for this assertion through a careful reading of 27

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Milton's imagery in Paradise Lost, they find textual evidence for the linking of Satan, Sin, and Eve. They reconstruct what they imagine to have been the reading experience of the early nineteenth-century woman writer: . . . for sensitive female readers brought up in the bosom of a "masculinist," patristic neo-Manichean church, the latent as well as the manifest content of such a powerful work as Paradise Lost was (and is) bruisingly real. To such women the unholy trinity of Satan, Sin and Eve, diabolically mimicking the holy trinity of God, Christ, and Adam, must have seemed even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to illustrate that historical dispossession and degradation of the female principle which was to be imaginatively analyzed in the twentieth century by Robert Graves, among others.2

This argument draws its force from salient examples of nineteenthcentury women writers whose work demonstrates both a thorough internalization of Miltonic concepts and the desire to be rid of the burden of his literary legacy. As Bronte responds to Paradise Lost in Shirley or as Shelley rewrites the story of the fall in Frankenstein, these women struggle with the ponderous presence of Milton's bogey. Yet Gilbert and Gubar's examples work so well because these women writers can be shown to have reacted to Milton with emotions that seem, at least on some level, recognizable to us. Evidence can be produced to demonstrate that these women shared our own vexed feelings toward Milton. They are our sisters by virtue of their response to Milton; their righteous indignation in the face of disturbing images of the female principle is our indignation. In the passage cited, the parenthetic aside—"(and is)"—underscores the continuous nature of a reading experience that has always placed women in a troubled relationship to Milton. Moreover, the proof that these women writers were somehow "on target" in their response to Milton appears, paradoxically, in the twentieth century in the text of a male author. But what of the woman writer such as Hannah More whose reading experience seems to have differed from our own? If we assume that Milton told his daughters only one story, the story of "dispossession and degradation" recognized by Bronte and Shelley,

Milton's Bogey Reconsidered

29

then we can only assume that More must have been thoroughly "brainwashed" by patriarchy. Why else would she have failed to respond indignantly, even angrily, to the patterns of imagery illuminated by Gilbert and Gubar? How else could she have adopted Eve's story as her own? But to dismiss More's response as brainwashing is to give insufficient weight to the question "What does it mean for a woman to encounter a masculinist text?" since the thoroughness of More's investment suggests a more intricate pattern of response. Gilbert and Gubar's model, even though it works well for the writers in their discussion, cannot account fully for a reading such as More's, which is so obviously complicitous in its response to Milton's philosophy. Furthermore, such a model leaves unanswered the question "Why embrace Milton's bogey?" On one level, More's choice of a mentor implies an opportunism, a chance to elevate her own reputation by associating herself with Milton's greatness. On another level, however, Milton offered Hannah More a particular vocabulary, a way of thinking about her own female psyche. The relationship of this literary daughter to Milton is clearly a complicated one. While she explicitly invests herself in the defense of Milton's character, identifying him as the champion of her sex, that same investment is rife with tension, for it is the nature of this relationship between the literary father and his daughter to replay and extend the dynamics of the family. At stake is a series of familial positionings and postures. To Gilbert and Gubar's account of the relationship between women and misogynist literary tradition as an interaction between the father and the daughter, we need to add a third— and invisible—element: the mother whose repression is essential to the daughter's gravitation toward the father. To replace the mother in this familial dynamic is to identify the origins of an anxiety that propels women like Hannah More into league with patriarchy, and it is to uncover a significant pattern of female complicity. I

As a young woman, Hannah More had always been attracted to older, intellectual men whose interests resembled those of her father. Like her later involvement with Milton, these encounters

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metaphorically replay the scene with which Roberts opens the Memoirs (see Chapter 1): time and again we find More "poised at the knee" of male literary and cultural mentors. At age 16, for example, she contrived to meet the elder Thomas Sheridan, then lecturing in Bristol. A little later she "formed an acquaintance" with a linen draper named Peach who had been a friend of Hume's. Similarly, tutorial relationships followed with Dr. John Langhorne and Sir James Stonehouse. Her fixation with older men was exacerbated by a love affair at age 23 with a man almost 20 years her senior. Her fiancfe postponed the wedding three times before her sisters insisted that she break the engagement and arranged for an annuity of 200 pounds in recompense. With this money, More was able to move to London, where she began her literary career. Between 1773 and 1785, when she moved back to the provinces, she established her reputation as a literary figure: she published poems such as "Sensibility" and "Bas Bleu," winning the approbation of Dr. Johnson, among others; wrote plays, one of which was presented at Covent Garden in 1777-1778; and was associated with important literary circles. During this time, many of her closest friends continued to be older men, among them David Garrick and Horace Walpole. One modern biographer wryly summarizes More's social connections during her stay in London: "Hannah wrote lovely obituaries for several wives but appears to have had no earlier interest in them." While she quickly made her way into the heart of the Bluestockings, much of her energy was dedicated to her relations with older men.3 For example, when she first arrived in London during the winter of 1773-1774, she made pilgrimages to a number of great literary men—Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Edmund Burke and, of course, Samuel Johnson. The aspiring young author from the provinces— at 28, More was not yet an old maid—must have especially anticipated this meeting with the celebrated Dr. Johnson, by then an eminent literary figure in his 60s. Her sister recorded the first visit to the author of Rasselas: "Not finding Johnson in his little parlour when we came in, Hannah seated herself in his great chair, hoping to catch a little ray of his genius; when he heard it, he laughed heartily and told her it was a chair on which he never sat."4 If More's gesture tells us something of her ambition at this momentnothing less than to share the seat of Johnson's greatness—it also

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tells us of her impossible distance from the literary father whose power she intends to usurp. For Johnson never sits in the chair, and nothing is to be gained from this symbolic act of appropriation: the literary father bequeaths nothing to this young woman. Johnson might well have laughed at a gesture so flattering and so harmless. That Hannah More presents herself to him as a potential rival can only be a jest: she is, after all, a woman young enough to be his daughter. And so the pair strike up a friendship that culminates in a trip to Oxford in 1782. In a letter to Mrs. Garrick, Hannah More describes the journey as a particularly intimate occasion. According to More, Johnson acted as her "principal cicerone," taking her on a tour of his old college: He would let no one show it to me but himself. . . . He ran over with pleasure the history of the juvenile days he passed there. When we came into the common room, we spied a large print of Johnson, framed and hung up that very morning with this motto: "And is not Johnson ours, himself a host?" Under which stared you in the face, "From Mrs. More's Sensibility." This little incident amused us;—but alas! Johnson looks very ill indeed—spiritless and wan. However, he made an effort to be cheerful, and I exerted myself much to make him so. (MLC, 1,151-152)

Despite its ostensibly cheerful content, the tone of this letter is unsettling. While More's own self-importance increases in the passage, Johnson's stature seems to wane (literally) before our very eyes. Johnson's visit to the site of youthful memories, a time for the literary father to reminisce and draw on the strength of old memories in the presence of his daughter, is diminished by the presence of the writer of the letter. The scene is framed "coincidentally" by an immodest reference to More's own celebrity: More had published the poem "Sensibility" just that year. It is not that we begrudge More her moment of importance, but that her gesture seems opaque. There is something uncomfortably aggressive in her position, a need, perhaps, to have Johnson for her own purposes. She cannot resist the act of appropriating Johnson as the subject of her art, and she does what the good daughter goes not do: she upstages the father. In the letter to Mrs. Garrick, she is paying tribute to Johnson only to claim him as her own.

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This behavior seems to have especially alienated Johnson's favorite son. According to Boswell, Johnson was less than totally charmed by the initial impression More made on him. Boswell records that on one occasion, More "began to pay court to [Johnson] in the most fulsome strain." "Spare me. I beseech you, dear Madame," was his reply. She still laid it on. "Pray, madame, let us have no more of this," he rejoined. Not paying any attention to these warnings she continued her eulogy. At length, provoked by this indelicate and vain obtrusion of compliment, he exclaimed: "Dear lady, consider with yourself what your flattery is worth before you bestow it so freely."5

Biographical evidence points to an intense, almost immediate antipathy between these two rivals for Johnson's affection.6 Such an antipathy would partially account for the very different tone in these two descriptions of More's acquaintance with Johnson. In Boswell's version, Johnson is far less impressed with More's flattery, which is itself worth "so little." Still, Boswell's own motives are somewhat transparent: surely a great man like Dr. Johnson should have been immune to More's charms; at stake is Boswell's record of Johnson's imperviousness to the effects of someone—a woman, in particular—of lesser stature. Despite these motives, however, Boswell's letter conveys the same message as the letter from More's sister: More's strategy around Johnson was unceasingly to adulate him, yet that adulation was a necessary kind of self-promotion. Further evidence suggests that More's sisters actively encouraged her pursuit of celebrity. When Hannah received notice for the publication of her poem "Sir Eldred," one sister wrote home in jest: "if a wedding should take place before our return, don't be surprised,—between the mother of Sir Eldred and the Father of my much-loved Irene; nay, Mrs. Montague says, if tender words are the precursors of connubial engagements, we may expect great things, for it is nothing but 'child,' 'little fool,' 'love,' and 'dearest'" (MLC, 1,46). In this scenario, More's sister playfully imagines that Hannah might be wed to Johnson's greatness. Despite the ambiguity of Johnson's terms of endearment (objectively, his "tender words" are not necessarily those of a husband), she projects the union of the literary daughter and her father. Literary motherhood transforms

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the daughter to wifely equal, and "tender words are the precursors of connubial engagements" in more ways than one. Literary production is the act that transforms the nature of the daughter's relationship to the father. The sister's letter is a whimsical, selfconscious fantasy, but also a telling commentary on the nature of Hannah's relationship to Johnson, since it renders transparent the desire motivating More's behavior around Johnson: the desire to possess the father, to "marry into" an inheritance otherwise inaccessible to her, and to achieve a union with the father and all the power he represents. The sister's metaphors are appropriate for a situation that is fraught, on yet another level, with familial tensions. If there is going to be a marriage, it will be a marriage of unequal partners. Nonetheless, Hannah More's relationship to Johnson only rehearses some of the major themes reappearing during her long career as a literary daughter. The position she assumes relative to Johnson—a particular posture that bespeaks a daughterly humility even while it allows for necessary self-promotion—will be repeated at other moments. Throughout her life, More chose her "fathers" carefully, even shrewdly, in order to obtain what she needed. Her selection of Milton as a symbolic literary father was no exception. Indeed, she seems to have enjoyed playing her two "fathers," Johnson and Milton, against each other. Despite her contention that she provoked Johnson's ire only once (the occasion was her glib citation of that "horribly wicked" book Tom Jones [MLC, I, 101]), it is clear that she and Johnson often disagreed strenuously on the subject of Milton. While Johnson was certain of Milton's domestic tyranny, More refuted any such notion. While Johnson participated in a charity on behalf of Milton's granddaughters, More argued that Milton's behavior warranted no justification and implicitly identified herself as one of Milton's daughters. To be sure, some of Johnson's dislike of Milton was due to Milton's status as a regicide, and More must certainly have recognized this problematic aspect of her defense. However, her willingness to persist as Milton's champion—even in the face of such compelling evidence of the "wrongness" of Milton for her age—suggests that she saw Milton as having a valuable message for the female reader, one that must be heard despite Milton's low status among the royalists. More's debt to Milton is apparent from the beginning of her career: in her very first published work, a pastoral drama based very loosely

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on Comus, four young girls search for an absent mother who bears the name of Milton's muse, Urania. Later, in the 1801 preface to her Collected Works, when More candidly confessed to the presence of "either plagiarisms [in her own work] of which [she] was not aware, or coincidences which will pass for plagiarisms," she was thinking perhaps of the many Miltonic allusions and echoes pervading her work. In the introduction to her "Sacred Dramas," for example, she had cast her project in Miltonic terms. Even while she had regretted her failure to reach Miltonic heights, she had proposed to "sing/ The ways inscrutable of heav'n to man." In the 1801 preface she continued, "Blending with the new judgment of the critic, the old indignation of the poet, who of us in this case is not angry with those who have said our good things before usT1

This stance clearly begs interpretation: to be angry with the father for having said "our good things before us" is at once to pay the ultimate tribute to patriarchal authority and to express implicit hostility toward that same authority. Here the daughter is frustrated not by the father's attempts to impose his will on her, but by the fact that he bespeaks her own interests so well. Thus she acknowledges the primacy and the priority of the father's words even while she accuses him of blocking her by anticipating every move she makes. Like the benevolent patriarch who knows his daughter only too well, Milton is there before her. By saying her best things before her, he thwarts her efforts at self-expression. Nonetheless, the turn toward this father is compelling, indeed inevitable, because only he can give her what she needs: a legitimate place from which to speak, a place where she can identify herself and claim her patrimony. The ultimate usefulness of such patrimony is that the identification of the daughter's paternal inheritance obscures the mother's imprint, an imprint construed as the source of the daughter's wayward impulses. When Coelebs, More's protagonist "in search of a wife," wishes to defend Milton's Eve, he does so by citing Adam's epithet from Book IV: "Daughter of God and Man, accomplished Eve."8 But Adam's praise (and Coelebs' in turn) depends precisely on the repression of Eve's relation to her "Mother Nature": as a daughter of God and man, Eve is here celebrated as daughter of no mother. Although Milton's phrasing certainly can be explained by way of Christian typology, it cur-

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iously recalls More's own position as a daughter.9 As she struggles to become the accomplished daughter of God and man, she leaves the mother behind in the process. But who is this mother whose repression is so necessary? In More's case, she is less the biological mother (although she is this too) than she is a symbolic mother, "Mother Nature," a female-identified figure whose claim over her daughter makes her threatening. To find her, we must turn away from the father and back to an early text in which More encodes Nature as the maternal. II

Among the documents published against the slave trade in the latter decades of the eighteenth century was a poem published by Hannah More in 1790. Invoking the "sober goddess," of liberty, More distinguished the "pure daughter of the skies" from her dangerous impostor and sketched a horrifying portrait of "that Mad Liberty" who is too often made the object of the poets' song. She stipulated that the bard should court only true liberty: Not that unlicens'd monster of the crowd, Whose roar terrific bursts in peals so loud, Deaf ning the ear of Peace; fierce Faction's tool, Of rash Sedition born, and mad Misrule; Whose stubborn mouth, rejecting Reason's reign, No strength can govern, and no skills restrain; Whose magic cries the frantic vulgar draw To spurn at Order and to outrage Law; To tread on grave Authority and Pow'r, And shake the works of ages in an hour; Convuls'd her voice, and pestilent her breath, She raves of mercy, while she deals out death: Each blast is fate; she darts with either hand Red conflagration o'er th' astonish'd land; Clamouring for peace, she rends the air with noise, And to reform a part, the whole destroys. Reviles oppression only to oppress, And, in the act of murder, breathes redress.10

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Many aspects of More's depiction of this allegorical, "unlicensed monster" participate in a representational pattern that associated the revolutionary with an aberrant female sexuality. In the iconography of the French Revolution, for example, liberty was often shown possessing a Medusa's head, with a "phallic nose" and large mouth predominantly displayed.11 To More, Milton's Sin would have been the appropriate prototype for contemporaneous renderings, as she also produces a dreadful sound: "About her middle round/A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark'd/With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and ring/A hideous Peal" (II, 652-655). More internalizes Sin's hell hounds so that cacophony results from Mad Liberty herself. In addition, she transposes Death's dart (line 671) onto her image of revolutionary fervor so that Mad Liberty functions as an agent of both Sin and Death.12 Unlike Milton, however, More centralizes the mouth and uses it metonymically. As a displaced representation of revolutionary license, the mouth is magnified and animated, and it seems to have a life of its own. It is an orifice of corruption, with its foul odor and its "pestilent" breath, suggesting still other orifices of the body. The noise that issues from that mouth is reminiscent of similarly disruptive female noises, the song of the sirens, for example, yet the volume of this particular noise suggests the passions made audible, or even clamorous. In addition, this monster resembles a malevolent Mother Nature. Like Milton's Sin on her entry into the Garden of Eden, she lasciviates in an orgy of destruction. Working to solidify the imagined connection between Mad Liberty and Mother Nature are words such as "pestilent," "rave," and "blast," words often used to describe Nature's destructive potential. Both Mad Liberty and nature are here represented as an inhuman savagery that must become subject to human control and domination. More's image of Mad Liberty depicts an unbridled energy that is associated with both natural excess and—through its connections to a tradition of female monstrosity—an aberrant female sexuality. Through its allusions to traditional female monstrosity, More's imagery suggests the conflation of nature's "otherness" with a female "otherness." Revolutionary energy, here perceived as a force resisting containment, is located at that moment when the twin images of a female "otherness" and nature's "otherness" coalesce.

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That nature is depicted as a disturbing "otherness" in a poem such as this one is consistent with a pattern identified and discussed by Margaret Homans in Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing. According to Homans, "it is against identification with nature that women writers stage their ambivalent defenses against becoming identified with the literal and the object." Projected onto women by masculine texts, internalized and reproduced by women writers, an identification of the mother with nature might seem to offer women access to power, since taking the form of nature, the literal is the final, maternal object of desire. Yet because the desired object is also feared by androcentric culture, to accept this identification might be to stop writing and speaking intelligibly within the symbolic order.13

For example, a character like Cathy in Wuthering Heights identifies with nature and, despite her powerlessness, seeks to "protect nature from figurative and literal killing at the hands of androcentric law": "But the Cathy who thus envisions a powerful maternal presence in nature is mad and dying. From the perspective of Bronte the author, Cathy's identification with nature's pain is madness; the restoration of the mother's presence is likewise madness from the point of view of Bronte's models for successful writing" (79 and 80). Critical to Homans' discussion is the notion that the woman writer's ambivalence toward her Mother Nature has been "projected onto [her] by masculine texts." But how does such ambivalence become "internalized"? What is the mechanism for the "projection" Homans describes? As Homans also suggests, ambivalence toward Mother Nature also evinces an anxiety about materiality, about what it means to be made of and related to a world of matter. Appropriately, Mother Nature becomes the focal point for that same anxiety, since her very name—"Mater"—puns on her relationship to the world of material. Nature becomes the ghastly reminder that all that lives is precisely material; being "of its Mother Nature," it is subject to decay and dissolution. Simultaneously, ambivalence toward nature can also indicate a self-loathing centered in the body—yet another kind of "material"—for it is specifically the body that threatens to disintegrate. Thus, two accounts provide further explanation for the origin of an ambivalence toward nature.

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First, Ernest Becker suggests that attention focused on the body's most distasteful aspects reflects a human "horror" of the "basic animal condition, a condition that [the human being] cannot—especially as a child—understand and a condition that—as an adult—[the human being]—cannot accept." Becker continues, "The guilt that [the human being] feels over bodily processes and urges is 'pure' guilt: guilt as inhibition, as determinism, as smallness and boundness. It grows out of the constraint of the basic animal condition, the incomprehensible mystery of the body and the world."14 Human beings dread most, argues Becker, the signs of their own mutability and mortality: as creatures who are "half animal and half symbolic," we must live with the certainty of bodily disruption and, ultimately, disintegration, the consequences of being made of matter. Becker's theories find their correspondence in the works of feminists, who also identify a profound human ambivalence rooted in our "materiality." Like Becker, feminist theorists note the process whereby the maternal body becomes the site onto which such ambivalence is projected. Since the publication of DeBeauvoir's classic study The Second Sex 40 years ago, theorists have hypothesized that our tendency to view woman and nature as contiguous— and to subject both to domination in order to forestall their "disruptive capacities"—arises as a result of specific arrangements for child rearing in western culture. Most recently, Dorothy Dinnerstein has described the ambivalence toward "otherness," which characterizes human attitudes toward both woman and nature as an ambivalence toward life itself. Illuminating the human tendency to connect the "not-male" with the nonhuman, Dinnerstein hypothesizes that such a connection results from certain patterns of child rearing that limit children's first perceptions of the "other" to women who are exclusively responsible for their care. Dinnerstein further suggests that in this early association of woman as an "it" subject to its "I," children learn to equate nature with women and to project their ambivalence about woman's "otherness" onto the natural world. She elaborates on the child's perception: Because the early mother's boundaries are so indistinct, the non-human surround with which she merges takes on some of her own quasipersonal quality. In our failure to distinguish clearly between her and nature, we assign to each properties that belong to the other: We cannot

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believe how accidental, unconscious, unconcerned—i.e., unmotherly— nature really is; and we cannot believe how vulnerable, conscious, autonomously wishful—i.e., human—the early mother really was. Our overpersonification of nature, then, is inseparable from our underpersonification of woman.15

In Dinnerstein's account, the mother—and the image of the maternal body in particular—becomes the repository for human ambivalence toward that which we cannot control, that which resists containment. Similarly, in Becker's terms, the "horror, terror, contempt" (as Freud wrote) that children feel toward the mother's body is "part of their own fantastic perceptions of a situation they can't stand" (40). Through psychoanalysis, Becker and Dinnerstein thus illuminate a pattern that is at once transhistorically human and universal or "global," as the maternal body typically sets into motion "horror" and "terror." However, although both theorists rightfully describe the conflation of women who mother with "Mother Nature" (the personification of materiality itself), their analysis omits two critical considerations: the significance of gender and the role of history. While their evidence suggests that the anxious response to materiality and to the mother who becomes the projected site of such anxiety is universal, it also seems that human strategies for dealing with that anxiety are both gender specific and historically conditioned. In other words, men and women have, at different historical moments, developed different strategies for mediating bodily anxiety, even while they do so out of the same universal impulse that sets them in motion away from the maternal body. For example, as the male child responds to the mother's "otherness" with a characteristic matrophobia, surely the female child's response to the mother is more complex, since her matrophobia inevitably must be ambivalent, as we have already seen.16 Her response to maternal otherness must be self-reflexive in a way that the son's is not. Moreover, male strategies have been culturally mainstream. Historically, male control of political, legal, medical, and educational discourses has made these the channels for the containment and mediation of bodily anxiety, while women's marginality has meant the adoption of different methods of mediation including, at times, complicity with male strategies.

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Hannah More's response to her Mother Nature illustrates one historically specific female strategy for dealing with matrophobia. What we recognize in her writings on the revolutionary is that she was compelled to militate for the containment of Mother Nature's disruptive potential. Doing so, she rejects the image of a benevolent, nurturing "Mother" and postulates instead a savage, unwelcoming natural principle. In a pamphlet entitled Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont, for example, her tone is scathing as she considers the content of revolutionary arguments in favor of the rule of nature. Rejecting Dupont's plea that "Nature and Reason, these ought to be the gods of men!" More is utterly contemptuous: If the same astonishing degeneracy in taste, principle, and practice [as predominates among the French], should ever come to flourish among us, Britain may still live to exult in the desolation of her cities, and in the destruction of her finest monuments of art; she may triumph in the peopling of the fortresses of her rocks and her forests; may exult in being once more restored to that glorious state of liberty and equality, when all subsisted by rapine and the chace; when all, O enviable privilege! were equally savage, equally indigent, and equally naked; her sons may extol it as the restoration of reason, the triumph of nature, and the consummation of liberty, that they are again brought to feed on acorns, instead of bread! Groves of consecrated mistletoe may happily succeed to useless corn fields; and Thor and Woden may hope once more to be invested with their bloody honours.17 In this Hobbesian scenario, the return to nature is a return to the scene of primal aggression and pagan worship. Rejecting any notion of natural benevolence, More characterizes nature as severe and even brutal. In nature, "savages" subsist on rapine and the chase. In nature, gnawing appetites are unassuaged by acorns or "useless" corn fit only for beasts. Envisioned here is an unwelcoming, unnurturing landscape, one that must be subjugated before it can be of any use. More's facetiousness—"O enviable privilege!"— conveys how little patience she has with those who evoke nature's benevolence as a model for human beings. More's contempt for the idea of natural benevolence extends to what she believes to be "natural" in the human constitution. Thus she writes that atheistic revolutionary behavior corroborates her belief "That no degree of wit and learning, no progress in com-

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merce, no advances in the knowledge of nature, or in the embellishments of art, can ever thoroughly tame that savage, the natural human heart, without RELIGION" (Dupont, 313). Further evidence of the savage within the human breast untempered by religion is to be found in revolutionary arts and beliefs themselves. In a series of related metaphors, the rhetoric of the revolutionaries is described as "monstrous," an "intoxication," and a "licentious wildness." Those who prescribe the revolutionary goals of liberty and universal brotherhood pursue an ignis fatuus. In a direct appeal to the reader More cautions: You are gazing at a meteor raised by the vapours of vanity, which these wild and infatuated wanderers are pursuing to their destruction; and though for a moment you mistake it for a heaven born light, which leads to the perfection of human freedom, you will, should you join in the mad pursuit, soon discover that it will conduct you over dreary wilds and sinking bogs, only to plunge you in deep and inevitable destruction. (Dupont, 284) Revolutionary enthusiasms seductively beckon the unwary into an excess, a dissipation from which there can be no return. In this way, revolution is an act of self-abandonment, a yielding to the principle of dissolution that the collapse into nature only mirrors. With its evocations of a bacchanalian frenzy, revolutionary fervor first is to be repulsed and then ultimately contained by religion. Thus, in writing about the "revolutionary," Hannah More both contains it and assigns it its place; for More, antirevolutionary politics serve to manage the threat of an unregulated natural force. More's comments on Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman further suggest that her conservative politics also functioned to allay an anxiety rooted in the perception of female "otherness," as her remarks testify to her belief in the basic "instability" at the heart of the female character. Writing to Horace Walpole on the subject of Wollstonecraft (whose work she denied reading), More articulated her belief in a female deviancy to be checked by patriarchal hierarchies: "To be unstable and capricious, I really think, is but too characteristic of our sex; and there is perhaps no animal so indebted to subordination for its proper behavior as woman." More hastened to assure Walpole of her

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sincerity on this point, while making obvious her awareness of the political consequences of such a view: I have soberly and uniformly maintained this doctrine, ever since I have been capable of observation, and I used horridly to provoke some of my female friends, mattresses femmes, by it, especially such heroic spirits as poor Mrs Walsingham. I believe they used to suspect me of art in it, as if I wanted to court the approbation of the other sex, who, it must be confessed, politically encourage this submissive temper in us; but I really maintained the opinion in sincerity and simplicity, both from what I felt at home and have seen abroad. (MLC, I, 427) Referring to the events "abroad" in France in connection with Wollstonecraft, More intimates that Wollstonecraft's philosophies could only lead to the unleashing of revolutionary excesses; in this way once again a putative female disorderliness and the force of revolution are implicitly linked, as if one somehow indirectly leads to the other. Alluding to the potential for social and political chaos to be introduced by Wollstonecraft, she distorts the import of Wollstonecraft's work, for in her writings on the "rights of woman," Wollstonecraft describes only the necessity for full intellectual and moral development for women. In fact, despite its radical approaches, Wollstonecraft's philosophy leaves patriarchal hierarchies in place. As readers have often noticed, the attitudes of More and Wollstonecraft toward women's education were actually remarkably similar.18 But More seems to feel that Wollstonecraft advocates the dissolution of the structures of patriarchal authority responsible for the containment of dangerous female, revolutionary excess; in Wollstonecraft's philosophy, she seems to have rediscovered the figure of Mad Liberty. The accuracy of her reading of Wollstonecraft is less important here than is the particular psychological investment conveyed in this letter. If More has "misread" Wollstonecraft (or, indeed, not read her at all), her comments nonetheless typify her response to the very idea of "revolution" as a special kind of "chaos" provoked by a female challenge to patriarchal hierarchies. The connection between Wollstonecraft and disorder is reiterated in Strictures on a Modern System of Female Education, where More attacks Wollstonecraft for her positions in The Wrongs of

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Woman. Referring to Wollstonecraft as "The Female Werter," she classes her among "the whole wide range of modern corrupters, who effect the most desperate work of the passions, without as much as pretending to urge their violence, in extenuation of the guilt of indulging them."19 The dense, naturalistic imagery of the passages that follow once again conflates the corruption of nature with the corruption of a "revolutionary" argument, implicating Wollstonecraft in a deathlike scenario. According to More, the "cool, calculating wickedness" promoted by writers like Wollstonecraft "eats out the very heart and core of virtue, and like a deadly mildew blights and shrivels the blooming promise of a human spring." Moreover, "the ravages which some of the old offenders against purity made in the youthful heart, by the exercise of a fervid but licentious imagination on the passions, resembled the mischief effected by floods, cataracts, and volcanoes" (Strictures, 52-53). This metaphorical "flooding" is reminiscent of the fluidity associated, by Irigarary and Cixous, with the maternal body,20 but here that fluidity overwhelms and destroys. As More imagines the aftermath of this "flood" of the passions, all is bleak, devastated. The rebirth of the blighted landscape might follow, she writes, but the heart once infected with this newly medicated venom, subtil though sluggish in its operation, resembles what travellers relate of that blasted spot the dead sea, where those devoted cities once stood, which for their pollutions were burnt with fire from heaven. It continues a stagnant lake of putrifying waters. No wholesome blade evermore shoots up; the air is so tainted that no living thing subsists within its influence. Near the sulphurous pool the very principle of being is annihilated. All is death, "Death, unrepealable, eternal death!" (Strictures, 54)

Yet, at the very last moment, More pulls back from this vision of devastation to insist that "virtuous laws" might still prevail against the tide of corruption. Once again, More discredits the idea of a natural, maternal benevolence and replaces it with an angry, destructive power. Here the maternal waters, which should represent the possibilities of rebirth, are transformed into a vision of death: life-engendering

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waters turn poisonous and suffocating before our eyes. This is the landscape ultimately imagined by More as she charts the results of Wollstonecraft's writings, and Wollstonecraft is herself aligned with a malignant and deathly power. As "Nature's daughter," she is the instigator of all that Hannah More most abhors. However, if Mary Wollstonecraft is one kind of daughter, Milton's Eve is another, very different kind of offspring. More rejects Wollstonecraft's appeal to female sensibility and turns instead to Milton, where she finds much solace in the portrait of a "domesticated" daughter. Ill

For feminism, the unfortunate dimension of Hannah More's relationship to Milton may well be that he spoke to her interests so very well. More willingly positions herself as Milton's daughter, willingly becomes an advocate for his teachings on women, and willingly writes the father's script because he serves her precise needs: he gives her a way to imagine how she might distance herself from her Mother Nature. In the author of Paradise Lost More believed that she had discovered someone who could help her to define herself as other than "her mother's daughter." Above all, Paradise Lost insists that the daughter may, despite her resemblance to her Mother Nature, play a part in the father's overall scheme of things; she can be redeemed, rescued from her initial state of identification with nature. So compelling did More find the themes of Paradise Lost that her only novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808), is an attempt to rewrite the story of Eve from a "modern" point of view. From the earliest pages, the male narrator speaks of his intention to locate the latest equivalent of Milton's Eve: "I confess that, as the Sophia of Rousseau had her young imagination captivated by the character of Fenelon's Telemachus, so I early became enamoured of that of Milton's Eve. I never formed an idea of conjugal happiness, but that my mind involuntarily adverted to the graces of that finished picture" (Coelebs, I, 1). After a long journey through a social wilderness pitted with marriageable daughters, he finds just the paragon he desires in Lucilla Stanley. In Coelebs, as More liberally borrows from Milton, shaping her own fiction to match the tenor of his work, she allays her own anxieties about woman's

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relationship to nature. She discovers and deploys an image of woman designed to counter contemporaneous, misogynist stereotype. Yet paradoxically (as we will see), that same image perpetuates aspects of the very misogyny it is designed to contradict. One twentieth-century critic has written that "Paradise Lost is the first epic whose scene is, in effect, the home, woman's traditional sphere, rather than the world of warfare and quest outside."21 Although this view of the text differs profoundly from romantic readings like Blake's, which continue to dominate Milton criticism, it is nonetheless closer to More's sense of the poem. Like Blake, Byron, or even Mary Shelley, contemporary readers are more likely to identify with the energetic pursuits of Satan than they are with the details of Eve's housekeeping. However, to read Paradise Lost as a domestic epic is to begin to understand why More might have been attracted to Milton's poem and why she might have believed that the poem spoke to her particular interests. Embedded in Coelebs are a number of clues about More's relationship to the poem. These begin with her choice of an epigraph from Book VIII. For not to know at large of things remote From use, obscure and subtle, but to know That which before us lies in daily life, Is the prime wisdom, (lines 191-194)

Speaking here of the mind or fancy, Adam locates the local and domestic focus that is the goal of life before the fall. He identifies as well a central theme—that the "appetite" for greater knowledge must be curbed. Both points, the appropriate focus and control to be exerted in the process of daily life and the need for a curb on appetite, are important to More's polemic about domestic life. That More's interest in the poem is arrested by the sight of a particular, domesticated landscape over which the first couple rule is again apparent when the narrator explains the "powerful charm" to be found in the descriptive parts of Paradise Lost. He asserts that "Eden itself, with all its exquisite landscape, would excite a very inferior pleasure did it exhibit only inanimate beauties. Tis the proprietors, 'tis the inhabitants, 'tis the live stock of Eden, which seize upon the affections, and twine about the heart. The gardens, even of Paradise, would be dull, without the gardeners" (Coelebs,

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II, 196). The natural landscape is of concern primarily because it occasions the opportunity for important lessons in the art of domestic management: not the garden per se, but the gardeners, the human subjects who exercise control over nature's prolific display, are of primary significance. At the same time, Coelebs gives little indication of More's attraction to Satan's seductive inner turmoil or to the fantastic geography of Hell. While readers from the post-Romantic era are drawn by Milton's portrait of a fallen angel, More's attention is caught by a separate set of concerns: the human dimensions of a struggle to be part of, yet separate and distinct from, Mother Nature. As one critic argues, to the eighteenth-century reader Milton's genius lies in his representation of a world "more correctly wild," that is, in his careful mediation of classical and romantic impulses toward the natural world.22 In such a reading, there is much in Paradise Lost that initially might seem to be empowering to women, for Milton's poem can be read to show women gaining dignity in the process of performing their household duties, as Coelebs explains, at some length, to the female audience. Moreover, the domesticated garden that is Eve's dominion is the inversion of Satan's kingdom. To the extent that Hell is depicted at all in More's revision, it is transmuted into a critique of masculine enterprise and economic exploitation associated with a rampant consumer economy. In Coelebs, modern descendents of Mammon spend vast sums of money on a proliferation of material goods. Such wanton and lavish "spending" indicates a high degree of moral laxity. In a passage that prefigures Ruskin while it echoes Wordsworth, one character lambasts the spiritual consequences of an addiction to materialism. "I believe," said Sir John, "that an overflowing commerce and the excessive opulence it has introduced, though favorable to all the splendors of art, and mechanic ingenuity, yet have lowered the standard of taste, and debilitated the mental energies. They are advantageous to luxury, but fatal to intellect. It has added to the brilliancy of the drawing room itself, but deducted from that of the inhabitant. It has given perfection to our mirrors, our candelabras, our gilding, our inlaying, and our sculpture, but it has communicated a torpor to our imagination, and enervated our intellectual vigour." (Coelebs, II, 199)

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It is no coincidence, then, that Coelebs finds his bride against the backdrop of a natural setting—far from the world of mirrors, candelabras, gilding, inlaying, and sculpture—for in the country women come into their own. There they best demonstrate their skills as domestic managers; there, through an action of both literal and symbolic significance, they exercise control over the potential chaos of a material world. The image of Lucilla Stanley carefully tending her garden, eschewing the gaudy show of conspicuous consumption, is also an image of a woman who demonstrates appropriate forms of self-control and restraint. Lucilla's selfdisciplined, rural life-style is an important alternative to the dissipation of urban life. Yet the very terms of Lucilla's empowerment are dependent on her prior identification with the natural setting: Lucilla's own father thinks of her as a plant to be carefully tended. Elucidating his pedagogy, Mr. Stanley explains, "I am a gardener, you know, and accustomed to study the genius of the soil before I plant" (Coelebs, II, 280). If Mr. Stanley is the gardener or cultivator, what he cultivates is a natural phenomenon, his daughter, and the process of education is also a process of domesticating the "wild."In Coelebs, as in Paradise Lost, a perspective that empowers woman by giving her control over nature simultaneously perpetuates the idea that she is closer to nature. Recent criticial analyses have paid special attention to images of nature in Milton's poems and to the relationships among woman, nature, and Milton's authority. In her reading, for example, Christine Froula persuasively demonstrates how, in the nativity scenes of Paradise Lost, "the repression of the mother is the genesis of Genesis."23 Still more relevant here is Froula's discovery, in "the deep structure" of Adam's hierarchy over Eve, of "a defense against the apparent ascendency of Eve's power" (330). Froula reads Paradise Lost as an allegory about the triumph of invisible authority over the visible nature of Eve's experience. Two points can be gleaned from her reading. First, the power of nature that initially enthralls Eve and claims her as its own is precisely the power of "Mother Nature" as it has been defined for us by Dinnerstein: this nature possesses an "otherness" with "quasi-personal" qualities that the child has a tendency to conflate with the maternal body. Second, if Froula is correct about the nature of Milton's authority (as I believe she is), then the attraction of a woman writer like

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More to a text like Paradise Lost signals a persistent matrophobia, one not restricted to men alone. Whereas Froula identifies "hierarchical dualism" as "the means of establishing paternal authority, a compensatory effort on the part of the male to control a natural world to which he is bound in relatively remote and mediated ways" (334), it seems clear that women can also participate in that dualism. In particular, a woman writer like More evinces a tendency to identify with Milton's need to compensate for his relationship to nature and, by endorsing his text and the message it contains, she perpetuates his efforts to control the natural world: at stake is her own relationship to that natural world. Returning to Milton's poem, we remember that Eve's first awakening is full of imagery that marks her as the daughter of her Mother Nature, even while it suggests the narcissism implicit in the Mother Nature-daughter relationship. Waking on a bed of flowers, Eve first hears a voice that calls her to herself. This voice, "a murmuring sound/Of waters issu'd from a Cave and spread/Into a liquid Plain, then stood unmov'd/Pure as th'expanse of Heav'n." Here watery imagery conveys the amorphous and flowing qualities of the natural principle luring Eve into communion with herself. As Northrop Frye explains, Milton borrowed the sexual symbolism of such imagery from classical mythology. However, this same imagery partakes "of the darkness, mystery, lost direction, and concealment characteristic of religions of nature without the daylight of revelation."24 Thus, Eve's experience is encoded as paganistic. As Froula points out, Eve's symbiosis with the visible and seductive presence of nature must yield to a higher and invisible authority, that of God the Father. As she bends into the lake to see her reflection, it "seems to her another sky," as if the earth were undifferentiated. She then sees, in this boundaryless place, "a Shape within the watery gleam," her own reflection (IV, lines 45 Iff). If Eve, like Narcissus, is poised at the edge of a dangerous fascination with the self, she is also framed by a natural setting, lake and sky resembling each other, which threatens to fix her to the spot. Recognizing, on some level, the appeal of her Mother Nature, Eve can only remain stationary and static until the voice of the Father leads her away. But if Milton sets this scene in a way to suggest Eve's perilous proximity to her Mother Nature, a proximity that nearly immobil-

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izes her, he only artistically renders a common cultural perception: that woman is closer to nature. Anthropologist Sherry Ortner enumerates possible reasons for the persistence of this transcultural, transhistorical perception: . . . woman's body and its functions, more involved more of the time with "species life" seem to place her closer to nature . . . woman's body and its functions place her in social roles that in turn are considered to be at the lower end of the cultural process than man's. . . and woman's traditional roles, imposed because of her body and its functions, in turn give her a different psychic structure, which, like her physiological nature and social roles, is seen as being closer to nature.25

What distinguishes the representation of Eve in Paradise Lost from other representations of women is, however, Milton's insistence that Eve, by nature of her activities, can gradually "rise above" the natural setting that is her backdrop. Emphasis on Eve's skill as a gardener shows her gaining control over the natural. As she, at her husband's side, "prunes and lops" nature's luxuriance, she demonstrates her superiority to the natural world. Symbolically, she differentiates herself from nature's uncontrolled abundance: she becomes the mistress of that which would otherwise dominate her. Similarly, as she prepares a meal for Adam and Raphael she mediates between nature and culture. In Levi Strauss' terms, as Marcia Landry explains, she takes raw, natural materials and transforms them into cultural products.26 By designating Eve the "Daughter of God and Man," Milton most clearly removes Eve from nature's influence. No longer daughter to her mother, Eve is placed within a familial hierarchy that obscures maternal inheritance. Yet such familial placement preserves Eve's fundamental similarity to her mother. Typologically, she resembles a garden, as Raphael's salutation suggests through its allusions to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Eve is "Mother of Mankind, whose fruitful Womb/Shall fill the world more numerous with thy Sons/Than with these various fruits the Trees of God/Have heap'd this table" (V, 388-391). Used emblematically, this image of Eve as a fertile, cultivated garden asserts her role as mediator between natural process and the higher command of patriarchal religion. Thus, in summary, Milton's Eve is at once a part of the natural

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world and discrete from it by virtue of her activities: through compliant subordination, she is given the opportunity to become an agent in the cultural process and to transcend nature's "disruptive" influence over her. Like Milton's Eve, More's Lucilla is also closer to nature than her male counterparts. A series of visual metaphors emphasizes that Lucilla's impact depends on Coelebs' approving eye.27 Paradoxically, she strikes him "at first sight" because of the fact that she does not particularly stand out; she embodies the perfect union of "the simplicity of nature to the refinement of good breeding." Like Wordsworth's Lucy, to whom she bears a strong resemblance, Lucilla is a paradox: "She enlivens without dazzling, and entertains without overpowering. Contented to please, she has no ambitions to shine" (Coelebs, I, 186). The point of such details is to convey the extent to which Lucilla both is and is not intimately related to the natural setting that contains her. Like the appeal of Wordsworth's Lucy, Lucilla's attractiveness is enhanced by the fact that she almost—but not quite—fades into the natural background that produces her. In a significant example illuminating More's use of Milton's poem, Coelebs describes Lucilla's talent for gardening. In imitation of her first mother, Lucilla reforms "flow'ry Arbors," pruning and lopping nature's wanton growth. Yet this modern Eve not only gardens, she also exercises control over the natural world in such a way as to assert her inherent domination over the mutability associated with natural process. On her own initiative, Lucilla cultivates a small nursery, turning waste ground into a productive garden. The saplings from the nursery, significantly apple and other fruit trees, are given to the neighborhood poor as wedding presents. The money for the project comes entirely from Lucilla's own pocket. Here both domestic economy and charity operate: money that Lucilla might use to feed the machinery of conspicuous consumption, thereby engendering envy and competition among her social inferiors, is directed instead toward this unselfish project. Lucilla's act is didactic as well: only those who have successfully channeled their sexual energies into matrimony benefit from her generosity (Coelebs, II, 93-96). While her activity mutely imitates her first mother, her success at subordinating—and exploiting—nature's prolific but amorphous bounty emphasizes her difference from Eve.

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That is, the domesticated, eighteenth-century garden over which Lucilla reigns is clearly a strongly feminine and feminized image— and a critical reworking of an important image in Paradise Lost as well. While Lucilla admits the inspiration for her project came directly from Paradise Lost, she criticizes Milton for trivializing Eve's sentiments upon leaving paradise: "the sorrows of Eve seem too much to arise from being banished from her flowers. The grief, though never grief was so beautifully eloquent, is rather too exquisite, her substantial ground for lamentation considered" (Coelebs, II, 330). In More's revision Lucilla Stanley's garden is not just a place for the appreciation of pretty flowers; it is meant to be a very real, alternative feminine economic and poetic "solution" to economic imbalances that are seen to arise in the urban setting. In Coelebs, this kind of "reinterpretation" of significant detail reflects the source of More's attraction to Milton as someone who focuses on woman's relationship to nature, yet that same reinterpretation suggests her ongoing need to be reassured of the importance and place of woman's more "natural" impulses. One detail is particularly revealing of More's preoccupation with details of feminine subordination: whereas Milton's Eve was clothed only in her "unadorned golden tresses" that waved "Dishevell'd, but in wanton ringlets," More insists that Lucilla Stanley is as neatly clothed "as the strictest delicacy demands" and "as fashionable as the strictest delicacy permits," though "her nymph-like form does not appear to less advantage for being veiled with scrupulous modesty" (Coelebs, I, 189). While it is certainly true that no eighteenth-century maiden could go unclothed, it is significant that More chooses to emphasize that Lucilla is a hybrid creature, one whose outward appearance reiterates the proper relationship of the "wild" or the "natural" to correct form: while her "nymph-like form" is not obscured, it is modestly checked by her neat modern dress. And More beckons to us to read these details symbolically. As Lucilla's dress restrains her female body, so too does her upbringing allow her to check her "natural" instincts. More's modern Eve is distanced and protected from the potentially chaotic influence of the natural world by her intensive training and education. In this way she is the opposite of the novel's antiheroine, who is described as displaying an abundance of "wild animal spirits." Like the fruit trees she so carefully nurtures, Lucilla is a domesti-

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cated creature. By embracing her father's loving authority, Lucilla places herself out of nature's way, and she is in turn allowed to become mistress of nature's bounty. Yet even as More insists upon the ways in which Lucilla's training makes her "safe," she reminds her readers of Lucilla's fallen state. The need for vigilance increases ever more in the postlapsarian world and, after all, "the fairest creature is a fallen creature." Lucilla is given an especially keen, though gentle, conscience designed to monitor any narcissistic inclination. Yet while this conscience checks Lucilla's egotism, it also keeps her dependent on her parents' authority, as Lucilla's mother explains: "Poor thing! her conscience is so tender that she requires encouragement rather than restraint!" (Coelebs, II, 157). That is, while Lucilla is protected against her own undisciplined impulses, the price she pays for such protection is a profound "disease," an ongoing infantilism that inhibits her ability to act on her own authority. Lucilla elaborates on the persistent self-doubt that characterizes her sense of self. . . . nothing humbles me more than compliments; for when I compare what I hear with what I feel, I find the picture of myself drawn by a flattering friend so utterly unlike the original in my heart, that I am more sunk by my consciousness of the want of resemblance, than elated that another has discovered it. It makes me feel like an impostor. (Coelebs, II, 148) As Lucilla's self-image is mirrored back to her through the efforts of "a flattering friend," she experiences a moment of profound disorientation. In this adaptation of Eve's seduction by the serpent, the promises of the snake are transformed into the compliments of a flatterer; Lucilla's response (unlike Eve's) is to compare her inner feelings to the picture provided for her. What the latter-day Eve discovers in the process of this comparison is that she cannot possibly embody the standard set for her by the flatterer. More important, the process of flattery only precipitates a crisis of identity: the "original in her heart" to which she refers is explicitly the picture of the fallen (and true) version of herself but, because Eve provides the prototype for this picture, Eve's reflection surfaces. Thus it is Eve from whom Lucilla can never quite differentiate herself, and it is Eve who inhibits Lucilla's sense of self. Further-

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more, it is the very persistence of Eve's imprint that makes Lucilla feel like an impostor. In other words, the representation of Lucilla's particular anxiety intimates a kind of matrophobia: in her heart she fears she is her mother Eve's double and extension, and all her Christian training cannot efface the memory of her mother Eve's origins in the natural setting. Here, Hannah More's character is subverted by the very identification meant to empower her. Moreover, Lucilla's plight suggests the author's own anxiety, that is, the fear that with one slip, one lapse, one moment of inattention, woman is plunged into some cataclysmic encounter with her own wild, undisciplined, disordered, and chaotic nature. Froula writes that "Milton's Eve brings the threat of woman's self-articulation into focus: it is the danger posed by her speaking from her body, from an experience that exists outside patriarchal authority, as did the untutored, selfreflective consciousness Milton represents as narcissistic" (335). Hannah More's revision of Paradise Lost is a female rendition of this same fear, one reminding us that historically some women have also been wary of the power of "an experience that exists outside patriarchy authority." This chapter has described how the relationship between the literary daughter and her father rehearses the dynamics of the family: as the daughter moves away from the mother and threatening materiality she embodies, she moves closer to the father, embracing the constraints implicit in his discourse. In conclusion, I would like to consider one recent defense of Milton's "paternity." In Feminist Milton Joseph Wittreich sets out to demonstrate that Paradise Lost is "a poem that was itself engaged in the dethroning of authority and in the formation of new gender paradigms, [. . .] a poem inscribed with, not by a received ideology concerning the sexes, which, instead of transmitting, it would transform."28 As Wittreich makes his way through appropriate supporting details, however, another argument emerges: that Milton understood the position of women and that his texts, with their subtle attack on what Wittreich calls orthodoxy, actually speak for the interests of women. Wittreich credits "Milton's early female readership" with having seen the truth about Milton, and he accuses contemporary feminist critics who fail to perceive Milton's subversive intentions of having

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been "seduced by patriarchal culture" and of "promoting its traditions [and] purveying its attitudes by perpetuating its readings and interpretations" (xix). In this account, it is not difficult to see Milton as a father once again and to imagine the relationships described by Wittreich in familial terms. Milton's female readers are metaphorically figured as his daughters, who divide themselves into two groups. "Good" daughters, the earlier readers who understood Milton in Wittreich's terms as a spokesman for their interests, as well as a few contemporary female readers, deserve a place at Milton's feet. "Bad daughters," contemporary feminists who align themselves with the wrong men, the fathers of "new historicism and affective stylistics" (111) and who persist in their attack on Milton, are exiled from the family circle. They are "seduced" by men who have turned them against their true champion. However, in dividing female critics among themselves, Wittreich perpetuates the familial tensions that have always riddled Milton criticism. His argument is notable, however, in that it transforms the defense of Milton's paternal character into a discussion of the worthiness of his daughters. Wittreich begins by correctly asserting that Milton's early female readership saw him as "rising up against the patriarchal tradition of Scripture" (7). As I have argued, a woman reader like Hannah More would have believed that there is a "critique of misogyny cradled within the text of Paradise Lost" (12). Wittreich is also correct to comment that male writers may have used the text— against Milton's own intentions—to further their own narrowly misogynist purposes, while female readers like More may have used the text more creatively. However, what is "revolutionary" about a text like Paradise Lost for a reader like Hannah More is specifically what is problematic for contemporary feminism. While contemporary feminism can appreciate the compulsion leading More toward a text like Milton's, it must also scrutinize the very facet of Paradise Lost that More embraces: its depiction of a mediated female relationship to nature. Despite Wittreich's contention that "Paradise Lost is written not to promote self-loathing in women, but to prevent it" (64), I remain skeptical about the means that Milton's text offers to achieve such a goal. Is it possible that in Paradise Lost (and elsewhere) a strategy used to deflect female anxiety about woman's putative identification with nature is deployed at too high

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a price? This is, at least, what my reading of Coelebs in Search of a Wife seems to suggest. Even though Wittreich proposes to speak on behalf of feminism, he cannot resist the temptation to assume the father's role himself, that is, to tell feminists how, as "good" daughters of Milton, they might behave, how they might, for instance, "conspire with Milton's early readership against those who would hide the ideology of Milton's last poems" (146), or align themselves with "eighteenthand early nineteenth-century women, who knew all along the perils of privileged interpretation and waged meritorious battle against it" while eschewing the company of the "trend-setting men of our century" (147). In his haste to celebrate Milton's rejection of one kind of readily accessible misogyny (one that makes women creatures of lesser social or political status), he fails to recognize another, more subtle, and even more pervasive kind of misogyny at work in Paradise Lost, that is, the kind of misogyny located for us by Becker or Dinnerstein. This other kind of misogyny is far more difficult to exorcise, for it is not simply about women's place in the social—or even divine—order of the world. It entails, instead, a persistent anxiety about what Froula calls the visible authority of nature and women's putative relation to that authority. In any attempt to understand the plight of Milton's daughters, we cannot afford to lose sight of this subtler but more enduring misogyny.

3 Hannah and Her Sister: Women and Evangelicalism

To read the Mendip Annals as a feminist is to encounter an arresting series of female attitudes and poses. Compiled by Hannah More's sister Martha (known to her family as Patty), this record of Evangelical activity presents us with an unsettling view of women's philanthropy in early nineteenth-century England. In a characteristic passage, Patty describes her efforts to "civilize" the parish women of rural England. After tea (during which, to do them justice, [the parish women] all behaved incomparably, and I believe a day's associating with their betters, as it is called, has brought them forward at least ten years in civilization).. . . They have so little common sense, and so little sensibility, that we are obliged to beat into their heads continually the good we are doing them; and endeavoring to press upon them, with all our might, the advantages they derive from us. It is really true, and oftentimes it is with difficulty we can keep from downright laughing.1

The tone of Patty's comment, with its explicit class tensions, forcefully testifies to the presence of a class consciousness much stronger than any gender identification. As heirs to a modern liberal tradition, we expect Patty to recognize that she and "they" share the same plight as women. But she perceives only the evidence of the parish women's different "moral fiber" and "constitution." Where we might assume that gender and class oppression are twin evils, Patty remains so invested in oppressive class politics that she never perceives the way the patriarchal system employs her to further its 56

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own purposes. Like her sister, Hannah More affiliated herself with an Evangelical party which, while it explicitly promoted relationships among women in the interest of a religious politics, rested upon an ideology serving to divide woman from woman, sister from sister. To examine the history of More's involvement with Evangelicalism, then, is to uncover a narrative with particular interest for a feminist analysis. For above all, Hannah More's relationship to the Evangelical movement was paradoxical: if, as an Evangelical woman, she was often empowered by the movement and inspired to identify with other women, such empowerment depended simultaneously on her positioning herself as the social "superior" to her lower-class sisters. And so a feminist analysis of More's involvement with Evangelicalism must look at both the benefits and the cost of that movement for women. In addition, if, under the guise of Evangelicalism women like More were allowed to assume an important social and political position as "maternal agents," their empowerment was ultimately limited by a discourse insisting upon persistent cultural stereotypes for female behavior. With its double dimensions of empowerment and containment, agency and dispossession, the story of Hannah More's involvement with Evangelicalism reveals the interdependency of gender and class in British women's history.

I By 1785 a generation of literary mentors had passed from Hannah More's life: the death of David Garrick in 1779 was followed by that of her father Jacob More in 1783 and Dr. Johnson in 1784, Such passing necessitated the search for new father-figures. Beginning in the 1780s, church fathers replaced literary fathers, as More apprenticed herself to Evangelical Christianity. In many ways, her gravitation toward Evangelical Christianity was inevitable, for late eighteenth-century Evangelicalism directly addressed her particular physical and psychological needs. Contact with key Evangelical figures like John Newton and William Wilberforce was critical for the second half of More's career, as these men gave her a sense of purpose and direction, a specific Evangelical goal to pursue, one now sanctioned by a still higher paternal authority. But what was

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the particular social and political tenor of late eighteenth-century Evangelicalism, and what was its special significance for women? Once dismissed as a reactionary religious and political movement associated with regressive social policies, Evangelicalism more recently emerges, in the words of Mitzi Myers, as "a militant vanguard of emergent middle-class consciousness . . . [an] ascendant bourgeous ethic sanctifying useful industry and family, an ideology which was at that historical juncture for the most part progressive, criticizing not celebrating the status quo."2 Her overview of the movement is based upon the work of scholars like V. Kiernan, Asa Briggs, G. F. Best, David Spring and Isaac Kramnick. For the last, late-eighteenth-century middle-class consciousness was the challenger of dissipated aristocratic values, radical and progressive in its policies and programs,3 and, when seen as related to other forms of dissent, Evangelicalism becomes a middle-class movement in just the terms Kramnick employs; it too is the vanguard of progressive change. For example, David Spring points to an active, sophisticated Evangelical engagement in social affairs differing from the provincialism which characterized the religious revival of the 1730s and 1740s. Citing Evangelical organization, business-sense and use of public opinion, he concludes, "it is plain [Evangelicalism] helped to establish a pattern of social and political action close to what was commonly held to be radical. Its weapons were in large measure those of a fluid not fixed society." That society, he stipulates, helped to "ur. jermine the old order."4 Similarly, the entire premise of Ian Bradley's 1976 book, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians, is that Evangelicalism was a "reaction against the worldliness and complacency of eighteenth-century England. Specifically it was a protest against the prevailing attitude toward religion and morality." In his terms, Evangelicalism was an active, vital movement leading to social and political regeneration.5 Such arguments concerning the essentially "progressive" impulses underlying the movement have been extended to include a feminist defense of Evangelicalism. For example, Myers writes that the movement "testifie[d] to female agency and ratifiefd] woman's socially functional centrality" (Myers, 211). For Myers, More's career is a case in point, as she reads More's biography as a successful paradigm of early nineteenth-century female agency. Myers asserts, "The 'ideal of passive womanhood' frequently attrib-

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uted to the Evangelicals is very much a misnomer. For at the heart of [More's work] lies a pattern of female domestic heroism, an image of activity, strength, fortitude, and ethical maturity, of selfdenial, purity, and truth." Furthermore, according to Myers, for the Evangelicals, woman is "a creature of rationally educable mind and aspiring soul, a potent spiritual agent whose most exigent duties are personal improvement and social regeneration" (Myers, 204). In contrast, Olive Anderson, examining the role of women preachers later in the century, finds patriarchal hierarchies persisting within church structures, although she ultimately concedes the ways in which religious movements such as Evangelicalism led to a wider range of opportunities for women. If "public religious activities allowed an increasing number of women to satisfy to some extent their frustration and desire for status and occupation . . . the same religious attitudes which fostered this independent female activity also taught female subordination outside it." Yet from a secular point of view it is precisely this contradiction which gives these developments their interest. To begin with, it demonstrates beyond all doubt that in these [religious] circles both the functions of women and received ideas about what these functions should be were altered and enlarged not because of the women's rights movement, but as a result of certain religious beliefs and practices.6

Thus, although Myers and Anderson agree about the extent to which women were central to church politics, they disagree about the meaning of such participation. If both maintain that Evangelicalism coincided with the consolidation of a particular class with clearly defined interests and views, they differ on the issue of how this formation is to be interpreted. Kiernan best summarizes the ways in which the Evangelical revival was "a double-edged weapon" to be used equally against those already in power and those aspiring to gain power. This dual impulse at the heart of the movement continues to allow for diverse interpretation: "The dogma of original sin and the depravity of human nature, for instance, has had in its periods of influence a dual significance, fitting it to stand at the conflux of dual forces. It contains a censure on the powers that be, including the absentee prelates and selfish aristocrats, as well as a dissuasive from popular rebellion."7

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I want to suggest, however, that the importance of Evangelicalism for feminism lies in its particular familial configuration. From the beginning, Evangelical dynamics resembled those of the family as, during the latter decades of the eighteenth century, Evangelicalism extended the features of the new-style patriarchal family into the realm of religion itself. Postulating the figure of a more intimately paternalist god, Evangelical doctrine altered the nature of the relationship between the divinity and human beings; at the same time, it projected a new alliance between the Evangelical clergy and women. Moreover, it is important to recognize the ways in which the Evangelical middle class formed itself along the lines of a family; like a family, the Evangelical middle class was hierarchical and designated roles according to gender, assigning tasks based on perceptions of biological difference. To recognize these features of Evangelicalism—its distinctly familial and hierarchical cast grounded on presumed gender differences—is not to make the claim that these qualities uniquely belong to Evangelicalism, but it is to clarify the particular significance of this religious movement for feminism. It is, in addition, to query what it means to call such a movement politically "progressive." When William Wilberforce writes of the Evangelical Christ, he evokes a figure who is both accessible and loving, a figure not unlike the benevolent patriarch described by Locke in his influential treatise Some Thoughts Upon Education; even though this father may be absorbed in responsibilities elsewhere, he nonetheless deeply cares for his children and expects obedience not out of fear of punishment but out of love: "The children of Christ are here [on earth] separated indeed from the personal view of him; but not from his paternal affection and paternal care."* The appropriate response to such a god is to make Christ "the just object of our warm affections": "He exhibits not himself to us 'dark with excessive brightness,' but is let down as it were to the possibilities of human converse. We may not think he is capable of entering into our little concerns, and of sympathizing with them. . . ." (Wilberforce, 127), but Wilberforce hastens to assure his readers of Christ's direct and intimate paternal concern. Such emphasis on religious intimacy validates not "law" but "emotion" as the seat of morality, as Evangelicalism stresses "the language of the heart" in religious communica-

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tion. In consequence of such intimacy, obedience to God becomes a matter of loving deference, a willing surrender to higher law as the religious subject internalizes the noncoercive—but deeply guiltinducing—voice of authority. At the same time, Christ as the figure of Law wears a benevolent, nonthreatening countenance. In More's own rendering, the connections between the ideal Lockean father and the Evangelical Christ are made still clearer. In a central chapter on filial obedience in Strictures on a Modern System of Female Education, she rejects the doctrine of paternal austerity because "it drives the gentle spirit to artifice and the rugged to despair. It generates deceit and cunning, the most hopeless and hateful in the whole category of female failings."9 In a direct reworking of the Lockean educational principles, now designed to counteract the child's natural corruptions, she advocates the early establishment of paternal trust encouraging the child's sense of dependency while circumventing secrecy: "The dread of severity will drive terrified children to seek, not for reformation but for impunity. A readiness to forgive them promotes frankness: and we should, above all things, encourage them to be frank in order to get at their faults" (Strictures, 175). At the heart of this revision lies the image of a religious father figure to whom the daughter is to pledge her affections. More's Christ is, above all, a figure who can be approached: "Endeavor to make your pupil feel that all the wonders exhibited in [God's] life do not so overwhelm the awakened heart with rapture, love, and astonishment, as perpetual instances of humility and weakness, with which the Gospel abounds" (Strictures, 186). Her Christ minimalizes physical strength to elevate the feminine values of sufferance and endurance. He is the domesticated patriarch whose power is manifest in the most self-effacing activities such as washing his disciples' feet or preaching to the poor. We identify with this Christ, explains More; all of his self-abnegating acts remind us "that they are not only adorable but imitable parts of his character. These are not speculative and barren doctrines which he came to preach Christians, but living duties which he meant to entail on them" (Strictures, 187). Like Locke's benevolent patriarch, More's Christ teaches primarily by example and, while his authority is noncoercive, it is also deeply influential: "in contemplating we must imitate," explains More, "in admiring we must practice" (Strictures, 188).

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This is not to say that the Evangelical Christ was neither stern nor demanding. To the contrary, the claims made on the individual soul continued to be taxing, although the force of such claims was mitigated by the familial terms of the pact between Christ and the individual. Furthermore, Evangelicalism compensated for its demands by granting the individual renewed importance, as Elisabeth Jay reiterates: "Evangelicalism's emphasis on personal relationship with God, its rejection of the corporate authority of the Church, and the premium it placed upon the individual's judgment assured a man of significance frequently denied him in secular society."10 If Evangelicalism rejected the "corporate authority of the Church," it nonetheless granted new status to the minister who, as the earthly representative of God, was to imitate Christ's loving "paternity." In this capacity, the minister extended a special invitation to women, encouraging them to join with him and to embrace a collective responsibility for the salvation of God's children. As the embodiment of the maternal principle, the Evangelical woman was to complement the minister's loving "paternity."11 The image offered to women potentially moved them from the margins of society into the center of an Evangelical "family," and many women responded to the Evangelical call because of its opportunities for self-expression and meaningful activity. In 1798, establishing the precedent for women's contributions in the perception of biological difference, Wilberforce insisted that the female sex "seems, by the very constitution of its nature, to be more favorably disposed than [the male] to the feelings and offices of religion; being thus fitted by the bounty of Providence, the better to execute the important task which devolves on it—the education of our earliest youth" (Wilberforce, 288). Yet women are delegated responsibility as the maternal educators of youth precisely because their situation most closely resembles that of the child; for example, like the child's, the woman's mind is, according to Wilberforce, "soft and ductile," "more easily susceptible to the impressions which we desire." In addition, unlike men, whose contact with the outside world hardens them to devotional feelings, women enjoy protected status guaranteeing their receptivity to religious sensibility. For these reasons—their naturally "more ductile" temperaments and the circumscribed life-style following from their temperament—Wilberforce enjoined women to become the "medium of

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[men's] intercourse with the heavenly world, for the benefit of both the present and the rising generation" (Wilberforce, 288-289). Within a few years, women like Hannah More were to take Wilberforce's message to heart. When William Wilberforce approached Hannah More and her sister Patty with his concern for the impoverished living in the hills of Cheddar in 1789, the two sisters eagerly responded to his proposals. Since the death of her close friend David Garrick, Hannah More had been spending increasing amounts of her time away from literary and cultural circles in London. Continually drawn back to the provinces, she built a cottage at Cowslip Green in Wrington, Somerset, in 1785. In 1787, through a circle of mutual acquaintances involved in the abolition movement, she first met William Wilberforce. Although he was only 28 (she was then 42), her constantly self-deprecating posture in relationship to Wilberforce suggests that she saw in him yet another father figure in a series of similar figures; his enormously influential social and political ties, as well as his access to large sums of money offered in support of various Evangelical projects, would have made him an appropriate object of More's deference and attention. Under the influence of Wilberforce and other leading Evangelical figures, More quickly took up the abolitionist cause. According to her biographer, "She was ingenious in devising new methods of propaganda, selling prints of Mrs. Bouverie's portrait in oils of a negro boy, urging her friends, as early as 1788, to taboo the use of West Indian sugar in their tea. She carried about with her a copy of Clarkson's famous plan of an African slave ship, and showed it to interested and horrified guests at evening parties."12 More's involvement in the abolition movement culminated in 1790 with the publication of her poem "The Slave Trade."13 In the meantime, however, Wilberforce had recognized a better arena for More's talents, one closer to home and in many ways more challenging: the "civilization" of the rural communities in the vicinity of More's native Bristol. The story of this project was recorded in the diary of Patty (Martha) More from 1789 until 1801. The Mendip Annals (eventually published in 1859) constitutes a reservoir of information about both philanthropic activities of the More sisters and their attitudes toward themselves and the people with whom they were associating. It provides us,

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moreover, with access to a portrait of a class in the process of consolidating its interests and of the special place of women in that process. According to Patty More, upon moving to Cowslip Green, the sisters first "extolled the beauties" of the wild and distant Cheddar Hills. When Wilberforce visited them in 1789, they soon learned to readjust their perspective. Unable to eat his dinner after a tour of the hills, Wilberforce withdrew to consider what had to be done about the poverty and distress he had witnessed. Offering financial support to the sisters, he proposed that they might establish a series of charity schools in the region. The purpose of these would be the modest religious education of a few children and young adults. The sisters were to organize the schools, seek out suitable school buildings, and appoint mistresses to teach the children. They were then to supervise the progress of the children who would learn to read the Bible (even though they would not be taught to write) and to assimilate simple Christian tenets. Eventually, it was hoped, newly inspired religious feeling would spread from children to parents; thus the entire community would come to embrace Evangelical doctrines. Wilberforce's proposal implicitly meant a grueling physical ordeal for the two sisters, neither of whom enjoyed good health. Their work would require travel by horseback for ten or even twenty miles on barely passable roads into isolated places. Thus, from the beginning, Wilberforce's vision offered Hannah and Patty More an opportunity to participate in a meaningful—if difficult— way. Impressing on the sisters the value of their particular contribution, Wilberforce encouraged them to think of themselves as a vital part of the movement, and he endorsed their sacrifices as a significant part of their contribution. Hannah and Patty immediately seized on the opportunity as their own private African campaign. In 1792 Patty wrote of the parishes as being "as dark as Africa," and she connected early Evangelical efforts at bringing Christianity to the African continent with her own efforts closer to home: "I do not like the thought that, at the day of judgment, any set of people should be thought to have perished through ignorance who were within my possible reach" (Mendip, 26). As the sisters began their attempt to persuade the rural community of the value of their project, they encountered severe resistance from the farmers whose cooperation they sought

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and the poor intended to benefit from the schools. The farther they traveled, the more difficult their mission, until they wrote of their trials as if they were indeed penetrating some dark continent. In the parishes of Shipham and Rowberrow, finding "the people savage and depraved almost even beyond Cheddar, brutal in their natures and ferocious in their manners," Patty writes of the rural poor as if they were an alien race (Mendip, 28). More often than not, in their correspondence with Wilberforce and elsewhere, the two sisters refer to the rural populace as "savages." As late as 1792, Hannah More was writing to Wilberforce of the children as a "stupid race" who made progress slowly (Mendip, 51). It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which the culture that the Mores encountered was indeed savage, brutal, or even uncivilized.14 Sometimes their use of such terms seems to have been occasioned by the rural ignorance of dominant cultural practices and beliefs, for example, the simple notion that children are educable and worth educating.15 On one occasion parents had to be assured that children attending the Mores' schools would not be sold into slavery; on another occasion several parents demanded payment before releasing their children to the Mores' custody. While such behavior struck the Mores as "savage," we might see in it a different set of operative values for childhood and family. At times the Mores seem to have equated the excessive use of alcohol with "brutality," and which sexual practices they found shocking is left largely to the imagination, although in a letter to Mrs. Bouverie Hannah does mention a father and mother and four children "of all ages and both sexes" sleeping together in one bed.16 Throughout Mendip Annals, the imagery of the savage indicates the sisters' perception of the rural culture they were encountering for the first time and demonstrates their awareness of the necessity to position themselves simultaneously in relation to the rural population and their Evangelical audience. In 1798, in a letter written to Wilberforce, for example, Hannah described a visit to one wealthy farmer. We found that friends must be secured at all events; for if these rich savages set their faces against us, and influenced the poor people, we saw that nothing but hostilities would ensue; so we made eleven more of these agreeable visits; and as we improved in the art of canvassing, had

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THEIR FATHERS' DAUGHTERS better success. Miss Wilberforce would have been shocked, had she seen the petty tyrants whose insolence we stroked and tamed, the ugly children we praised, the pointers and spaniels we caressed, the cider we commended and the wine we swallowed. After these irresistible flatteries, we inquired of each if he could recommend us to a house [for the purpose of establishing a school]; and said that we had a little plan which we hoped would secure their orchards from being robbed, their rabbits from being shot, their game from being stolen, and which might lower the poor rates. (Mendip, 17)17

Particularly striking here is the tone of More's comment, for she is proud of her ability to move the farmer to assist her plan. And yet, of greater signifiance than the explicit content of the letter is her transparent need for Wilberforce's approval and praise, a need only thinly disguised by the coy description of her "scandalous" behavior. More readily assumes a middle stance, halfway between the utter "savagery" of the rural people and the safe, civilized position represented by the Wilberforce household; writing as someone who mediates between the two worlds, she establishes her own position and authority over the farmer. Here her task is carefully delineated; she is to stroke, caress, pretend to share in the savage customs of those around her. Above all, she is to tame the savage monster who bares his teeth. The use of such metaphor, which subtends much of the Mendip Annals, is more than coincidental. Nor is it peculiar to the Mores alone. After visiting Cowslip Green in 1791, John Newton wrote the following letter to the sisters in which he articulated his vision of their project and enunciated the larger implications of their work. I am not often charged with flattery, and here I mean not to flatter, but to encourage you in the name of the Lord. He has highly honored you, my dear Madame; He has allotted you a post of great importance, and for which, perhaps, no person in the kingdom has equal advantages with yourself. Zeal, perhaps, to attempt something in the same way might be found in many, but other requisites are wanting. If a prudent minister should attempt such an extensive inroad into the kingdom of darkness, he might expect opposition as few could withstand; but your sex and your character afford you a particular protection. They who would try to trample one of us into the dust will be ashamed openly to oppose you. I say openly—I believe you do not expect they will thank you, much less

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assist you. There are those who will probably shew their teeth, if they are not permitted to bite. But you are prepared for the consequences. (Mendip, 46-47)

Writing as a minister, Newton carefully distinguishes the potential efficacy of a man of the cloth in these matters from that of the "ladies." The minister can hope for less success because of his gender; after all, his masculinity makes him available for the attack of the monster who immediately senses the nature of the threat before him. Yet, paradoxically, as if in a fairy tale, this same monster is bound to retreat—or at least behave—before the (apparently) helpless feminine presence; as members of the "weaker sex," they are naturally granted certain civilities. The Mores are congratulated for their "realistic" attitude in the face of their enormous task while they are also being defined as the tamers of this particular beast. Newton ascribes to the female gender its "inevitable" function as the mediator between the savage and civilization, a function made possible by its protected status. Unlike the minister, the "ladies" can anticipate successful contact, yet such success ultimately depends on their ability to interact with the monster on its own terms. But how does the Evangelical woman "tame" the savage beast? In Hannah's account of the visit to the local farmer, the monster's ferociousness exposed itself as a terrible hunger to be assuaged by means of flattery. For the rural poor, however, a literal satisfaction of that hunger seemed appropriate, and so the Mores included in their program the promise of large, annual outdoor meals "as a bribe for good behavior during [their] absence" (Mendip, 36). In 1791, in the first of a long series of "anniversary feasts," 517 schoolchildren feasted on 13 large pieces of roast beef, 45 plum puddings, 600 cakes, assorted loaves of bread, and a cask of cider. After dinner, the children repeated Bible chapters and sang "God Save the King." Patty More wrote in her journal, "Thus were five hundred seventeen children and three hundred others, made happy, and really feasted for the sum of fifteen pounds" (Mendip, 37). When the anniversary feast was repeated in 1793, 100 children were fed, while the total number of people gathered for the event was 7000 to 8000 (Mendip, 87-88). With the older women, ceremonial teas often served the same purpose as the picnic. Even though less

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physically "hungry" than the schoolchildren, these women were perceived by the Mores as having the "appetite" for contact with their betters. A second and equally effective strategy used to "tame" the rural poor was the offer of "respectable" garments viewed both as a badge of social mobility and a mark of the physical self-discipline demanded by the Mores. The sisters annually gave away clothing— a hat, shirt, and pair of shoes to the boys, a calico apron and a tippet to the girls.18 One of their most popular practices was to reward the older girls who demonstrated moral restraint. As Hannah explained to one correspondent, "any girl bred in the school, who continues when grown up to attend its instructions, and has married in the past year with a fair character, is presented on [her wedding] day with five shillings, a pair of white stockings, and a new Bible."19 The key to this passage is the conditions governing the gifts; the young woman tacitly agrees to submit herself to a form of sexual restraint until she has been married. The stockings themselves—which in the Mendip version of the same story were knitted by More's own hands (7)—are the mark of respectability among the poor. They cover the body's nakedness and insure the young woman's sense of bodily propriety. In other words, the philanthropic work in which the Mores were engaged can be interpreted in two ways. Literally, the act of providing warm clothing is certainly charitable, as warm stockings can keep away the cold and damp. Symbolically, the same act also emblematizes the Mores' efforts to establish a particular kind of bodily discipline among the rural poor: the stockings are associated with a different way of living the body. She who wears the stockings—and is no longer bare-legged—putatively changes her behavior to correspond to the difference in her wardrobe; she adapts a kind of self-discipline. Similarly, the act of feeding the poor also has its symbolic dimension, because the act of curbing an appetite is also an act of controlling potentially disruptive and disorderly inclinations. In other words, acts of middle-class charity bring to our attention a particular way of viewing the lower-class body as a site of explosive tendencies that the reformer sets out to master. This way of viewing the lower-class body has been explained for us by Stallybrass and White in their reworking of Bakhtin. Borrowing

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from Bakhtin, they suggest that what is at stake here is the perception of the "grotesque body." Such a body has its own "discursive norms." . . . impurity (both in the sense of dirt and mixed categories), heterogeneity, masking, protuberant distension, disproportion, exorbitancy, clamour, decentred or eccentric arrangements, a focus upon gaps, orifices and symbolic filth (what Mary Douglas calls 'matter out of place'), physical needs and pleasures of the 'lower bodily stratum,' materiality and parody.20 Their point is that the "grotesque body" often becomes "a primary, highly-charged intersection and mediation of social and political forces, a sort of intensifier and displacer in the making of identity" (25). In the Mendip Annals certain details signal the presence of the grotesque body and make clear how the Mores are able to displace an anxiety about the disruptive possibilities of the human body onto the body of an "Other." In one salient example, Patty's vehement campaign against dancing in several of the parishes manifests her ongoing concern with the labile potential of the human body imaged in a Sunday dance. In 1792 she was particularly dismayed to discover that in the parish of Shipham "an infamous woman" had set up a ball in competition with the prayer meetings. Two years later, the dancing was gradually diminishing, but Patty wrote the following letter as a warning to those still tempted. She begins by asking, "What were the consequences?" of the dancing in Shipham. Inquire of the neighboring Justices; they can give the best account of the Shipham dancing. Dreadful, indeed, was the intelligence, such as modesty forbids me to repeat. Let every young woman who hears me tremble and avoid the miserable fate! 'But what,' will a stranger ask, 'were all the young women led astray?' Oh no, the instances were few, but fatal; may they be a warning to the rest! (Mendip, 112) Other activities also simultaneously serve a philanthropic and class-related purpose. The establishment of women's clubs, for example, introduced the rural women into middle-class values such as

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cleanliness, orderliness, and thrift. But the clubs also became a source of conflict in which the Mores met serious opposition to their efforts to impose their own standards of bodily propriety on a population committed to another set of standards. When the sisters supervise the implementation of a "sick fund," a savings plan to benefit pregnant women, the women object, insisting that a lying-in should not be more expensively provided for than a funeral (Mendip, 64-65). The women persist in asserting their values over the Mores', until the sisters reestablish control by offering "seven and a sixpence for a lying-in" (107). The expenditure of the money only masks a deeper conflict between two competing ideas about how the body "is to be lived," since parturition and death carry different cultural significance for the two groups. As the Mores attempt to enforce their point of view, they seek control of the symbolic "body" of the rural women. The biggest challenge facing Patty and Hannah More came in the coal-producing village of Nailsea. Even though by then inured to many of the shocking sights around them, the two sisters were unprepared for the vision of men and women working together in the glasshouses, that is, the factories for making glass. Once more drawing parallels between the African campaign and her own work, Patty wrote "we could not help thinking [the village] would become our little Sierra Leone" (Mendip, 43). Several elements seem to have contributed to the horror experienced by the More sisters when they were confronted by the glass factories for the first time.21 The conditions of the work broke down the barriers between the sexes, while the body itself seems subjected to the rhythms of the labor; the result is yet another vision of human savagery. Whatever we had seen before, was of a different nature, and though we had encountered savages, hard-hearted farmers, little cold country gentry, a supercilious and ignorant corporation, yet this was still new, and unlike all other things—not only differing from all we had seen, but greatly transcending all we had imagined. Both sexes and all ages herding together; voluptuous beyond belief. The work of a glass-house is an irregular thing, uncertain whether by day or night; not only by infringing upon man's rest, but constantly intruding upon the privileges of the Sabbath. The wages high, the eating and drinking luxurious—the body scarcely covered, but fed with dainties of a shocking description.

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The high buildings of the glass houses ranged before the doors of the cottages—these great furnaces roaring—the swearing, eating, and drinking of these half-dressed, black-looking beings, gave it an almost infernal and horrible appearance. (Mendip, 61-62)

Patty's horror is registered in particular by adjectives such as "voluptuous" and "luxurious," terms that mark the licentiousness resulting from the collapse of bodily restraint. What is still worse, the Nailsea workers indulge their expensive appetites: Patty finds it shocking that in the midst of this setting, "two joints of the finest meat were roasting in each of these little hot kitchens, pots of ale were standing about, and plenty of delicate looking vegetables." Their high wages allow for the purchase of such unnecessary indulgences, while the great furnaces—like the fires of hell—induce a dangerous relaxation of the defenses against the animalistic urges of the body. The result of such labor is the transformation of the working poor into "blacklooking beings," creatures of both physical and spiritual darkness, the not-so-distant kin of the African slave. Despite such inauspicious beginnings, the sisters are soon able to pride themselves on their progress. When they return to Nailsea in 1793, Patty writes the following. We were again agreeably surprised as well as affected, for every one of the dismal-looking beings laid down their tools, and immediately surrounded us, speaking in the civillest terms, calling the great boys out of their black holes, and using really persuasive language to them to induce them to listen to us, and do what we wished. (Mendip, 91)

Like animals who have been tamed, the glasshouse workers, still under the evil influence of their environment, approach the sisters humbly and complacently. Even the most savage among them— those boys called out of their holes—now begin to yield to the sisters' charm. Patty reads such behavior as testimony to the power of their "civilizing" influence. In this scene as in others, the sisters' distinct separation from the world they observe is most apparent. Although present at the scene with the overt intention of bringing some relief into the lives of these miserable beings, the sisters are also constantly assuring themselves of their discreet distance from the "monsters" they seek to tame.

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Thus, because the activities of Hannah and Patty More occur within a larger, patriarchal, class context, they must be considered on two levels. On the first level, we can read their ministrations as immediate evidence of a kind of female empowerment: here women are granted the agency to assume control of a complex network of social services. However, the imagery informing the description of these activities promotes a second level of understanding. Words that position the rural poor as "savages" requiring domestication, gestures that show that the Mores locate the "grotesque body" in the physicality of the rural poor, suggest another understanding: the Mores are controlled by a class politic that demands that they differentiate themselves from the rural poor. They do so by asserting that they live their bodies differently from the poor. Each time Patty and Hannah locate in the rural "Other" some savage characteristic to be bound up by their philanthropic efforts, they also effectively dismiss the possibility that such savagery could possibly exist within themselves. They displace an anxiety about the "grotesque body" with its volatile potential, its very possibilities of rebelling against and resisting containment, onto the body of the working-class "Other." They are able to do so precisely because, as Stallybrass and White explain, "The body is neither a purely natural given nor is it merely a textual metaphor, it is a privileged operator for the transcoding of [social formation, symbolic typography, and the constitution of the subject]."22 Here the Mores are able to define themselves as women of a particular class against the rural poor whose physical presence provides an image of a symbolic "body" over which the Mores can assume control. By definition, they are "ladies," women who distinguish themselves by their demonstrated ability to control and delimit the "grotesque body" as it is imaged in the cultural and social practices of the rural population. From another perspective, Frederic Jameson reminds us that "The nineteenth-century notion of middle-class 'distinction' . . . separates middle-classes from workers in their way of living their own body." Moreover, "it is an often-taught and often-forgotten lesson that ideology is designed to promote the human dignity and clear conscience of a given class at the same time that it discredits their adversaries."23 The Mendip Annals illustrates the very ideological processes Jameson describes; throughout the text, two distinct ways of "living the body" are brought into conflict. More than

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the impulse toward philanthropic reform is at stake here. At the base of Patty's campaign against certain kinds of traditional rural revelry or Hannah's efforts to reform sexual mores is a process of self-definition: only by defining themselves as what they are not and, in the process, discrediting the social and cultural practices of the rural poor can the Mores come to know what they are. Thus the impulse to assert control over the lives of the rural poor functions as part of a class dynamic. Still, gender is not irrelevant to this narrative. Instead, it is extremely significant that the relationship between the sisters and the rural poor is mediated through a series of activities assigned to Hannah and Patty on the basis of their gender, as Newton's letter suggested. In other words, if the Mores are centrally positioned in such a way as to assert the identity of their class in opposition to the poor, they are also part of a much larger social and sexual dynamic, one that places them at the service of a greater class ideology. The particular tasks assigned to them by Evangelical fathers such as Wilberforce—the feeding, clothing, educating, and disciplining of the body—are precisely those of a mother and, within the larger dynamic structure of class formation, the Mores assume the mother's role. For Hannah and Patty, the very appeal of the Evangelical invitation lies in the opportunity it affords for the displacement of anxiety about the body through the activities of maternal agency. Historically, in the act of maternal nurturing, women have contributed to the purposes of patriarchy; similarly, the Mores serve the purposes of the Evangelical fathers: just as the mother's role is to lead the child out of its newborn "savagery" into the socialized world of adult human beings so, too, do the Mores lead the rural poor into social respectability. Their maternal work serves a larger function not unlike the designated function of any mother within patriarchy: the inculcation of values necessary for the perpetuation of the patriarchal structure. However, like all maternal projects within patriarchy, this one, too, is fraught with ambivalence. Women who have been taught to see themselves as mothers exclusively find it difficult to accept the maturity of their children. Similarly, the Mores resist signs of independence among the schoolmistresses. Tension rises when two young women become engaged without consulting the Mores: "It is but a very few months since they have been brought to manage the

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business entirely to our satisfaction, and now they are planning a new situation for themselves," Hannah grumbles (Mendip, 135). They, like another schoolmistress who insists on marrying a man below her in class, must be dismissed (Mendip, 184), and the Mores never quite forgive them for manifesting their independence.

II

I have argued that Evangelicalism offered women such as Hannah and Patty More a singular opportunity to participate in important philanthropic activities. Evangelicalism recognized women's special gifts; it acknowledged a female contribution and encouraged "feminine talents" at a time when the notion of female agency was increasingly limited. But Evangelicalism also involved women in an important dynamic: by assuming control over the symbolic body of an infantilized, working-class "Other," the Evangelical woman defined herself in relation to what she was not; her supreme bodily self-discipline became the identifying mark of her class privilege. Thus a characteristic gesture is repeated throughout the Mendip Annals, one that facilitates patriarchal class relations at the same time that it advances a particular kind of female self-definition. However, this gesture is found not only in Patty More's diary; it also recurs in three Evangelical texts produced by Hannah More: her Cheap Repository Tracts, or short moral tales written for the "lower orders"; her stories for "Persons of the Middle Rank"; and her works addressed to the upper classes, especially "An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World" and "Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great." Of the three kinds of texts, the Cheap Repository Tracts, with their apparently antirevolutionary content, have generated the most discussion.241 want to argue here that, despite their different ostensible subjects, the three kinds of works are, in fact, engaged in a similar kind of "cultural work." In Jane Tompkins' terms, the plots, characters, and rhetorical approaches of these texts can be seen as "providing society with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which [More and her readers] shared, dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions."25 As I will argue, all three

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kinds of texts implicitly express an ongoing preoccupation with the containment of explosive appetites that continually introduce the presence of the grotesque body. Part of their cultural work is, then, to contain those "disruptive" energies, which we more commonly might identify as the workings of desire, by means of a specific discourse about how the body is to be lived. In The Politics of Language Olivia Smith describes how More's Cheap Repository Tracts might have worked on two levels addressed to the lower and middle orders simultaneously. She asserts that: Hannah More's ability to write simple, calming and vividly detailed stories describing the lives of the poor might have comforted readers who had been publicly defined as immoral, vicious, and incapable of self-control by the Liberty and Property series. Without question, however, they comforted wealthier readers who grasped on to her tracts to allay fears which former conservatives had done their best to instill.26

The truth of Smith's second assertion is borne out by what is perhaps the most famous of the Cheap Repository Tracts, "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain."27 In her discussion of the tracts, Smith is certainly correct to isolate the "simplicity" of More's language as well as her ability to "bring dignity to labour, unspectacular characters, and ordinary settings by the degree of attention which [she] manifestly gives them" (92), for More's talent does lie in a kind of pre-Romantic "realism." Nonetheless, it is also true that More is characteristically concerned with the boundaries between the privileged and the unprivileged, the virtuous and the dissipated. In "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain" this is especially the case. Here the narrator, a visitor from the outside named Mr. Johnson, celebrates the impoverished family of the shepherd for its successful preservation of certain bodily proprieties despite the poverty that presses in on them. In particular, he praises the neatness and cleanliness of the shepherd's worn but patched garments. But the appeal of his narrative depends heavily on the extent to which the "realistic detail" also contributes to a metaphoric subtext. Here, for example, the shepherd's clothes provide the opportunity for a meditation on the relation of the "inside" to the "outside."

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THEIR FATHERS' DAUGHTERS [The shepherd's] coat, though at first it had probably been of one dark colour, had been in a long course of years so often patched with different sorts of cloth, that it was now become hard to say which had been the original colour. But this, while it gave plain proof of the shepherd's poverty, equally proved the exceeding neatness, industry and good management of his wife. His stockings no less proved her good housewifery, for they were entirely covered with darns of different worsted, but had not a hole in them; and his shirt, though nearly as coarse as the sails of a ship, was white as the drifted snow and mended where time had either made a rent, or worn it thin. (Tracts, I, 2-3)

Here the shepherd's neatly patched suit of clothing telegraphs a series of messages concerning the virtues that he has internalized. Poverty has not given way to slovenliness or wantonness. If the shepherd's limited material circumstances fail to provide him with good quality broadcloth, nonetheless his wife's extreme diligence assures that her husband's body continues to be properly covered, neatly enclosed within the suit of clothes that testifies to an attentiveness to certain bodily decorums. In other words, the patched suit successfully banishes any hint of the "grotesque" body. The shepherd explains that his eight children are similarly garbed, right down to shoes and stockings on their feet for, as the father explains: "My wife and I cannot endure to see our children (poor as they are) without shoes and stockings, not only on account of the pinching cold which cramps their little limbs, but because it degrades and debases them; and poor people who have but little regard to appearances, will seldom be found to have any regard for honesty and goodness" (Tracts, I, 10-11). Like the stockings knitted for the parish girls by Hannah More, the children's outer clothing assures & sense of bodily propriety that makes possible their modest behavior. All the garments function synecdochically: as the body is neatly enclosed or "contained" by its clothes so, too, are potentially disruptive wants or "appetites" for any physical comfort not currently available circumscribed by a Christian philosophy that turns the family's suffering into a privilege. When questioned about his hard labor, the shepherd replies, "If king Saul had continued a poor laborious man to the end of his days, he might have lived happy and honest, and died a natural death in his bed at last, which you know, sir was more than he did.

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. . . Besides, sir, my employment has been particularly honored— Moses was a shepherd in the plains of Midian" (Tracts, I, 5). When questioned about his hovel, he answers, "How many better men have been worse lodged! How many good Christians have perished in prisons and dungeons, in comparison of which my cottage is a palace. The house is very well, Sir; and if the rain did not sometimes beat down upon us through the thatch when we are a'bed, I should not desire a better, for I have health, peace, and liberty, and no man maketh me afraid" (Tracts, I, 8). Unlike the workers in the glasshouse, the shepherd's tastes are well within his means. As a sign of his tremendous control over his bodily appetites, when given a few coins, the shepherd denies himself a piece of bacon in order to pay a doctor's bill. At the end of the tale, impressed with all he has seen, Mr. Johnson delivers the following speech. Shepherd, if I were a King, and had it in my power to make you a rich and great man, with a word speaking, I would not do it. Those who are raised, by some sudden stroke, much above the station in which Divine Providence has placed them, seldom turn out very good, or very happy. (Tracts, I, 33-34)

He concludes, "I am not going to make you rich, but useful," He therefore provides them with a better house (this one to have two rooms), appoints the shepherd Sunday school master (a job that is not meant to take him away from his weekday employment), and makes the shepherd's wife mistress of a small school teaching useful industries to small girls. The shepherd's response: "Not rich, sir? How can I ever be thankful enough for such blessings? And will my poor Mary have a dry thatch over her head? And shall I be able to send for the doctor when I am like to lose her? Indeed, my cup runs over with blessings, I hope God will give me humility" (Tracts, I, 35-36). In summarizing this tale, it is difficult to convey its emotional appeal, for it is surprisingly effective, both emotionally engaging and satisfying.28 Taken out of context, the shepherd's thanks sound pathetic and contrived, yet within the melodramatic context of the story, the ending elicits genuine pleasure, for the tale successfully evokes and then taps the reader's own fantasies about the ways in

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which physical desires can be satisfactorily contained. With a kind of pre-Wordsworthian impulse, it manages to convince us that the shepherd's neat hovel is infinitely better than our own luxurious residences. He, after all, lives in a place of great simplicity, of few luxuries but many pleasures. Observing from a distance the shepherd and his family gathered together on a Sunday, Mr. Johnson anticipates signs of squalor induced by poverty. I cite at length to convey something of the voyeuristic pleasure provided by More. Mr. Johnson, however, on looking round could discover nothing but the most perfect neatness. The trenchers on which they were eating were almost as white as their linen, and notwithstanding the number and the smallness of the children, there was not the least appearance of dirt or litter. The furniture was very simple and poor, hardly indeed amounting to bare necessaries. It consisted of four brown wooden chairs, which by constant rubbing, were become bright as a looking glass; an iron pot and kettle; a poor old grate, which scarcely held a handful of coal, and out of which the little fire that had been in it appeared to have been taken, as soon as it had answered the end for which it had been lighted, that of boiling their potatoes. Over the chimney stood an old-fashioned broad bright candlestick, and a still brighter spit; it was pretty clear that this last was kept for ornament rather than use. An old carved elbow chair, and a chest of the same date, which stood in the corner, were considered the most valuable part of the shepherd's goods, having been in his family for three generations. (Thzef, I, 20-21)

Needless to say, most prized of all the shepherd's possessions is his family Bible. Clearly, there is something very appealing about the shepherd's austere life-style. To read this description is to have privileged access to a perfect world in miniature: the effect is like viewing some period room from behind a velvet rope. Both situations encourage a fantasy about the life experienced by the inhabitants of such a room. Both invite scrutiny of physical details, because they tell a story in which we would like to participate. It is pleasing to find so much evidence of order, control, and simplicity within such constrained circumstances. Yet the apparently "realistic" tenor of More's details scarcely accords with reality: any parent will readily wonder how eight small, hungry children so easily inhabit a single room with a leaky roof and an inadequate supply of heat. More's

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purpose is to celebrate a particular way of life imposed on the shepherd by his poverty, and yet her text evokes a fantasy, a dream world in which the possibilities of conflict are lessened if not altogether obliterated. As if to reiterate her message, within this tableau she frames the shepherd in the act of giving thanks over a dish of potatoes, a brown pitcher, and a piece of brown bread. Nothing disrupts the harmony of this family; no one craves or demands more than is provided. No one, in fact, seems to desire anything. On another level, the image of the shepherd's hovel also negates the possibility of any guilt over his privations. The philanthropic scenario at the end improves the shepherd's standard of living just enough to convince the readers that his suffering does not deepen; More's purpose is not change the conditions of the shepherd's life but to reward him for his forebearing attitude. Any more generous solution to the shepherd's problems would be less effective, not to mention contradictory, because the purpose of the tale is to celebrate the binding, not the eliciting, of desire. But just -whose desire is at stake here? Olivia Smith suggests that the lower orders would have appreciated More's portrayal as a corrective to extremist representations of their culture, yet arguably the tale engages someone who finds the fantasy of containment meaningful. To the reader who wants bread or a decent suit of clothes, the message of deferred gratification is problematic at best. "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain" uses the real sociohistoric details of poverty to meditate on physical self-restraint as a precondition for spiritual enhancement; however, this meditation is only likely to mean something to someone privileged enough to have felt the dangers arising from a life of luxury. Thus, on one level, "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain" displaces onto the scene of workingclass life a middle-class preoccupation with the derivation and consequences of its own desires. It uses the representation of working-class poverty as a scene on which to enact symbolically the drama of its own spiritual life. If "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain" is a story about the successful sublimation of desire, another story from the tracts, "Black Giles, The Poacher," provides us with a portrait of someone whose desires resist mediation. While the shepherd's neat hovel reflected his sense of propriety, the home of Black Giles images his resistance

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to discipline or work: he lives at a "Mud Cottage with broken windows, stuffed with dirty rags." The roof has ragged tiles and "loose stones which are ready to drop out from the chimney; though a short ladder, a hod of mortar and half an hour's leisure time, would have prevented all this, and made the little dwelling tight enough" (Tracts, I, 60). Thus Black Giles evinces none of the self-discipline demonstrated by the shepherd. The product of this squalid home is a bunch of "ragged brats, with dirty faces, matted locks, naked feet and legs" who are sent to beg from passersby. The narrator records her indignation: "Thus five or six little idle creatures, who might be earning a trifle by knitting at home, who might be useful to the public by working in the field, who might assist their family" do not contribute to society. Instead, their father teaches them to tumble for the diversion of travelers who might throw spare change in their direction (Tracts, I, 62). Thus the children of Black Giles learn nothing of the self-control that the shepherd instills in his children. Instead, the bad father teaches his children to act on impulse, to fulfill any desire or appetite, no matter how inordinate, by stealing from others. The family filches eggs, milk, goose down, and fish, all possessions prized by their owners who have worked hard and who are deprived of the products of their labor. Lest Black Giles' "appropriation" of his neighbor's property be seen as any kind of "primitive socialism," More realistically depicts the victims of their crimes as people who can scarcely afford to lose anything. Widow Wilson, whose prize apple tree is stripped while she is at church (Giles' family is especially busy on Sundays), suffers from rheumatism and is defenseless against Giles and his brood. Tom Price, who is eventually framed for the theft, is a modest and self-effacing youth. Thus, "Black Giles, the Poacher" provokes the reader's indignation against those who want what is not theirs and who will employ any means to gratify their desires. Black Giles helps himself to the products of others' labor; what seems especially offensive here is the notion that he never actually works for luxuries he enjoys. His story can be viewed as a parable about what it means to want—and to obtain— what you do not deserve. Black Giles is killed when, in the process of trying to steal a net hooked to a wall, the wall crumbles and falls on him. Thus Giles is literally crushed by his inordinate appetites for stolen goods.

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Just as scholars have always been quick to identify the flaws in More's approach, they have long debated the extent to which the working class would have actually responded to the political content.29 Robert Altick, for example, lists the ways in which More's tales would have missed the mark of their intended audience. Injunctions to ceaseless diligence had a bitterly ironic ring when there was no work to be had; recommendations of frugality were irrelevant when there was no money to save; admonitions to leave one's fate in the hands of an all-wise ruling class were ill-timed when desperate workingmen were being mown down by the rifles of soldiery or sentenced to transportation for forming trade unions. The contrast between the writer's bland assurance that all would be well and the actual state of affairs as social tensions mounted was too blatant to be ignored.30

To Altick's observation another comment should be added: the Cheap Repository Tracts bears witness to a compulsion to control the narrative of the "Other" as a way of defining one's own status. Gazing on the lower orders, focusing on the putatively realistic details of their life-style, affords the occasion for class positioning and self-definition. It is not that the texts are "insincere" in their content, since certainly they do intend to "speak to" the lower orders. Instead, it is important to recognize how the Cheap Repository Tracts functions within a discourse of middle-class self-definition and self-promotion. To see how this discourse works in another context, we turn to Hannah More's treatises addressed to the upper classes. In "An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World," for example, More simultaneously identifies the tendencies that make the fashionable world what it is, tendencies that set it apart from the subordinate orders, and delineates a series of prescriptions designed to curb upper-class excess.31 What is interesting about More's essay is that it describes the upper classes in many of the same terms that, for her, characterized lower-class life: a tendency toward licentiousness and self-indulgence. More begins by describing the life of the "fashionable world." Emphasizing its profligacy and lack of discipline, More deplores an "increased dissoluteness" among the superior classes, a conditon that she links to certain behaviors among the lower classes who imitate their betters (Estimate, 3). She faults a

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"modern style of luxury" (Estimate, 49), asserting that modern educational practices are to blame: "In no age have the appetites been excited by such early stimulants, and anticipated by such premature indulgences" (Estimate, 79). Thus, once again, "appetite" is deployed as a key metaphor in a discourse about how the body is to be lived. An upper-class laxity can exacerbate a "hunger" that is just as dangerous as a craving resulting from depravity. In the face of the evidence that hers is an "Age of Benevolence," More takes no comfort in the fact of charity: "If an increased benevolence now ranges through and relieves a wider compass of distress; yet still, if those examples of luxury and dissipation which promote that distress are still more increased, this makes the good done bear little proportion to the evil promoted" (Estimate, 45). Money does not "counteract the mischief of wrong example at home" or "atone for that infectious laxity of principle which spreads corruption wherever its influence spreads" (128). Key words such as "luxury," "dissipation," "mischief," and "infectious laxity" highlight the nature of the problem: the upper classes seriously lack the necessary self-discipline to allow them to rise above the dictates of the body. To succumb to "luxury" is to let the body dictate a course of action to the soul. It is, writes More, to let the body "tyrannize." Thus, the "great secret of religion" "consists in training young men to an habitual interior restraint, an early government of the affections, and a course of self-control over those tyrannizing inclinations, which have so natural a tendency to enslave the human heart" (Estimate, 89). Here words like "tyrannizing" and "enslave" are especially resonant because they effectively link upper-class dissolution to the language of revolution. Those who, in a radical context, would be said to "tyrannize" and "enslave" others are here said to be enslaved themselves. "Revolution" is thereby redefined as a matter of change in behavior, not as political action. The effect here is to redefine the political differences that normally divide upper from lower classes and to suggest that the same prescription would serve for both: a strong dose of self-discipline, felt from within. Like the lower classes, the "fashionable world" must learn to endure "a regular course of self-renunciation" in order to prevent "appetite, temptation, or vanity" (Estimate, 63-64) from becoming the determining force. Only those who have learned to

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control their own appetites can be in a position to modulate the appetites of others. Thus, in a text like this one, Hannah More positions herself between two classes in order to prescribe to one how better to manage the other. Promoting particular values and standards associated with an Evangelical life-style, she advances herself in the role of mediator between the two classes, thereby implicitly defining herself against the other two classes. This mediating function becomes clearer and is elaborated on in texts where More self-consciously assumes the voice of the "middle ranks." In "The Cottage Cook, Or Mrs Jones' Cheap Dishes: Shewing the Way to Do Much Good with Little Money," for example, Mrs. Jones learns that the best gift she can offer the poor is "economy," here construed as the practice of living well within one's means (Tracts, II). As the events unfold, she instructs the poor to inform on a defrauding baker, to turn in dishonest shopkeepers, and to use ready money, not credit. She also convinces the rich to leave cheap meats for stews for purchase by the poor, urges the poor women to bake bread at home (she supervises the building of parish ovens), works to replace pub beer with home brew, and arranges for the sale of milk in half-penny worths. In addition, she teaches the young women how to "make and mend," wash and iron, and make cheap, nourishing dishes—and she includes the recipes for such meals. Clearly, the point of this tale is to sketch out an important role for the middle classes who are to help the working classes learn the necessary self-discipline allowing for the containment of desire, and Mrs. Jones' actions exemplify a middle-class agency. But what kind of agency is at stake here? It has been argued that such fiction "encodes reformist aims and reflects female cultural bias." Reading the Cheap Repository Tracts as "a meaty chapter in that bourgeois renovation of manners and morals which marks the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century," one critic discovers not so much "Tory political stasis" as "a woman's brand of bourgeois progressivism—pedagogy, philanthropy, and purification [were] [More's] cures for the old order's social ills."32 Yet three questions implicitly arise from such a perspective. First, what makes the cultural bias identified here distinctly female? Second, in what sense does the kind of progressivism posited here constitute "a woman's brand" of reform? Is "a woman's brand" of progressivism different from a male version of

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the same phenomenon? Third, how "progressive" is "a woman's brand" of progressivism? The answers to these questions are important to clarify the argument and also to illuminate the relation of gender to class issues in Evangelical politics. Among other ideas, the Mendip Annals suggests that Evangelical women such as Patty and Hannah More positioned themselves in response to "cues," recommendations, and prescriptions offered, on both an unsubtle and subtle level, by Evangelical fathers. Those "cues" about a woman's role in the movement were issued (as we saw in Practical Christianity) based on the perception of biological difference. Women such as Patty and Hannah More were able so readily to define their particular kind of female agency because, in a sense, it had been laid out for them by men such as Wilberforce and Newton. This is not to suggest that the Mores were simply "manipulated" by the men, for clearly they were also utilizing a situation that they believed to be rife with potential. Instead, my point here is that the very concept of a distinctly "female" agency must be scrutinized against the backdrop of patriarchal relations that produces such a term. If, as Foucault has taught us, power lies not in individuals but in the institutions that deploy them, then the activities of Hannah More and women like her cannot be properly understood without an examination of the entire apparatus that makes it possible for them to speak. Moreover, the "female"— including all those attributes implied here as intrinsic to the female sex (compassion, nurturance, pragmatism, etc.)—is a cultural product; it cannot be conceived as existing beyond or outside of the patriarchal control that marks all our actions as men and women. Thus, I am suggesting that to celebrate "the female" in Evangelicalism is to resort to a problematic biological determinism. To answer the second and third questions together is a more difficult task, since the category of the "progressive" is vexed and thorny. To begin, to utilize the term "progressive" as a category is to refute what has been called the "social control argument" (i.e., the argument that the tracts were really concerned with the "social control" of the lower classes). Yet the usefulness of Stallybrass and White's paradigm for class relations is the insight that any program for implementing social reform necessarily entails two parties who oppose each other precisely in their ideas about how the body is to be lived; in the end, one class will impose its view on the other. In

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other words, "bourgeois progressivism" must be seen in its wider context of class conflict. There can be no doubt that certain "progressive," "bourgeois reforms"—the implementation of sounder business practices or higher standards of cleanliness, for example— can result in an improved life-style: those no longer cheated by the baker do get more for their money, and better hygiene can prevent the spread of disease. But many of the examples provided by More in Mrs. Jones' campaign for reform also reflect important truths concerning class struggle: the idea that class identity is formed in the moment when a speaker promotes a particular way of living the body.33 In an important way, the body remains a central image in "The Cottage Cook," as many of Mrs. Jones' reforms serve to alter or control the way the rural poor live their bodies. Although details such as recipes can be cited as evidence of a pressing and immediate concern with the quotidian,34 they can also be said to literalize the concern with "appetite" that pervades More's Evangelical discourse. If, for example, the poor can be taught to satisfy themselves with economical stews, made from cheap cuts of meat left over from the pots of wealthier citizens, it is not likely their unruly appetites will provoke them into acts of insurrection. While cheap stews literally fulfill the appetite, they also metaphorically contain the rampant desire for more than the status quo will provide. In another example, Mrs. Jones instructs the housewives in the art of home brewing, so that their husbands will no longer go out to the public alehouse. Here, two sites, the private hearth and the public gathering place, are put symbolically into competition. The private hearth represents domesticity and the turning inward toward the "fortress" that protects its inhabitants against the dangers of the outside world, while the public alehouse was often conceived as a far more dangerous place, for there one had contact with the challenges of the outside world. Thus, to advocate one place over the other is to implicate oneself in the advancement of a particular notion about social life, one deeply fraught with ideological implication, and the competition between the two sites encapsulates a much larger debate about the nature of social life.35 Still more problematic is the argument that the criticism of Mrs. Jones' reforms is the product of "male historians."36 This view promotes the idea that, as women readers, we identify with Mrs.

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Jones and with the program she represents and we will readily dismiss the "social control" argument that has haunted our reading of the tracts. Yet the issues hardly seem to divide themselves along gender lines, as female historians have been equally disturbed by the implications of More's progressivism.37 In addition, if the representation of Mrs. Jones' motives is marked by any of the ambiguity I have suggested, then to call these works "progressive" is problematic for feminism because such a label omits important evidence of class conflict. As feminists, we need to consider two truths simultaneously: if Evangelicalism afforded middle-class women an opportunity for self-definition and self-advancement, that advancement also exacted its price: the perpetuation of an unequal class system. Ill

We have observed how Hannah More sought out strategies for binding an anxiety that fixates on images of the grotesque body. We have watched her operate in conjunction with various patriarchal systems—with Evangelicalism in particular—and we have seen her position and define herself in relation to the body of an "other." The latter years of her life were characterized by a chilling irony, as she became a victim of the very system she worked to implement. The events of the so-called Blagdon Controversy (1801-1803)—a key moment in Hannah More's biography—graphically remind us of the implicit limits to Evangelical participation as a strategy for allaying anxiety about the body.38 The first phase of the controversy officially began in April 1800 with an attack on More's appointed schoolmaster, Henry Young, by Thomas Bere, curate of Blagdon. Bere accused Young of performing acts more properly the duty of an ordained minister; worse still, Young seems to have been involved in Methodistical practices, among them holding private prayer meetings behind closed doors and eliciting prayers and confessions. The charges intensified as the controversy progressed.39 Directly relevant to this discussion, however, is More's role in the controversy; when Bere made his attack, instead of relinquishing her power over the school, More chose to resist Bere. For a brief time, her strategy of calling on her Evangeli-

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cal friends, among them the powerful Sir Abraham Elton, for support worked, and Young stayed in place as More's schoolmaster, But then Here gathered thirteen depositions against Young, charging him with various transgressions of ecclesiastical practice. These led to a trial in November 1800 at which it was decided—in Bere's favor—that Young had to be removed from the Blagdon school.40 More responded by closing the school. Meanwhile, Bere found himself under attack by the rector of Blagdon, Dr. Grossman, for antitrinitarianism; he received notice that he was being removed as curate in February 1801. It is worth speculating that this attack on Bere occurred at More's instigation, in retaliation for Bere's criticism of her schoolmaster.41 Throughout these incidents, Bere issued a series of pamphlets in which he defended himself at length and "exposed" the culpability of both the Mores and their sympathizers. The pamphlets also included detailed exposition of the ways in which the Mores not only condoned but promoted Methodistical practices in their schools.42 After much correspondence on both sides, the first phase of the Blagdon Controversy ended. More sent Young off to Ireland, and Bere remained on as curate. Throughout this first phase, the events of the controversy point to a larger power struggle occurring between High Church and Evangelical parties. As the local curate, Bere seems to have been threatened by the Mores' encroachment into his territory.43 He seems to have been even more disconcerted to find that he lacked the support—and sympathy—of powerful men like Dr. Grossman and Bishop Moss, who apparently sided with More against the ordained minister. The trial at which Young's guilt was proven should have been Bere's moment of triumph. Instead, that triumph led him to experience the force of More's power—and he was reminded of a network of Evangelical affiliation representing a new kind of power operating outside the High Church authority. In this way, the more local struggle between Hannah More and Thomas Bere, Curate of Blagdon, over the place of a Sunday school master reflected a larger battle over the kind of ecclesiastical power that was to determine rural parish life. The actual issues brought forth by the attack on Young—the charges, for example, that he engaged in extempore prayer or read unsanctioned sermons—are merely symptomatic of another, deeper concern with control over the

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religious life of local parishioners.44 Local clergymen such as Bere disliked and distrusted not only the Methodistical practices of men like Young, but also the very fact that such practices occurred outside their control—and, what was worse, under the supervison of a woman like More. Furthermore, Here's anxieties were shared by others dedicated to the High Church. In "An Expostulary Letter to Elton" published in 1801, an anonymous clergyman questioned Sir Elton's judgment in acting as advocate for More and attacked him for letting More go too far. He concluded by reminding Elton of the hierarchies that must not be circumvented by powerful women like More, even while he acknowledged her work might have some significance if placed under High Church supervision. I believe that Mrs. More, with the purest and most upright intentions, might pursue her schemes of piety and religious instruction to an extent that would establish, what the Author of a letter to our Metropolitan lately terms an "imperium in imperio" in our church system. . . . But you must be aware, sir, that the constitution has placed this duty in other hands; and blind, indeed, must be your zeal, if you do not perceive the force and strength of a great part of what has been stated on that subject by the author just alluded to. In a word sir, I am of the opinion it would be a blessed thing, both for the rising part of the present generation, and for that which is descending, if there were an Hannah More in every parish, invested, under the controlling superintendence of the resident minister, with powers to carry into effect all benevolent purposes.45

Although this correspondent never explicitly attacks More's gender, fueling his rhetoric is the implicit assumption that More's local, female authority spells a loss of power among church fathers; in other words, along with her particular network of associations, More brings the threat of an "emasculation" of the more centralized High Church authority.46 In a second phase, the Blagdon Controversy continued and intensified as an attack on More herself. The significance of this second phase is that it indicates how Evangelical women, despite their demonstrated abilities and contributions to the movement, continued to be associated with images of misguided, uncontrollable "enthusiasms," excesses of both body and spirit. In More's case,

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evidence was called forth to prove that she had, on more than one occasion, hired schoolteachers knowing of their Methodistical inclinations; it was further charged that she preferred to hire teachers of such persuasion. Still more serious was the accusation that she had taken communion at William Jay's dissenting chapel.47 Edward Spencer, the most hostile of More's critics, intimated a darker plot on More's part, one in which she conspired to gain power for her own purposes: "I have often wondered what [More] can possibly have to do with the government of the established Church? Why is she so particularly anxious to take that beautiful structure under her fostering wings?"48 By means of such rhetoric, More's Methodistical inclinations became conflated with her conniving, "female" strategies to subvert the existing order. In other words, such rhetoric exposes the deeper anxiety behind an attack like Spencer's—that More's control of the Sunday schools indeed allowed her too much power, and that such power was specifically "emasculating" in its effects. In 1802 Spencer wrote, "A religion matured by the wisdom of Cranmer, Hooper and etc. and which for ages has withstood the bitter blasts, the most contortuous gusts of Hume, Paine and Volney's whirlwinds, cannot surely require at this day to be fringed and laced by a female Fanatic."49 In this context, the word "Methodist" was employed to describe the transgressive nature of More's particular power. Publicly she herself strongly resisted the label Methodist, and yet her enemies were able successfully to make the term apply because, as More's biographer explains, "'Methodism' at the time was a measure of enthusiasm, not a doctrinal term capable of definition. The clear-cut distinction between Methodist and Evangelical accepted in later times was not then in common use, as contemporary writing testifies."50 Despite this persistent difficulty with the definition of the term, certain associations inevitably arose in conjunction with the latecentury use of the term. First, Methodism was often perceived as a lower-class phenomenon that spoke most persuasively to impoverished, disenfranchised rural people, and some of More's defensiveness about being labeled as Methodistical would have resulted from her sensitivity about class differences. Second, Methodism was sometimes characterized as a less intellectually rigorous, more "effeminate" religion—and historically the movement did have special

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meaning for women.51 All the charges brought to bear against More and her schoolmaster emphasized a number of stereotypically "feminine" characteristics—for example, intimacy, secrecy, spontaneity, emotionalism, and enthusiasm. The last quality in particular has traditionally been identified as a feminine weakness, one that George Hickes once proposed to contain by the establishment of women's colleges.52 And yet, like Methodism, the term "enthusiasm" is indeterminate; when used by those who seek to contain it, it seems to imply something like "great emotionalism," but it can also denote something closer to "religious hysteria." In the hands of the Evangelicals, the term would have been far less pejorative since, as Wilberforce explains, emotion is the seat of all religion. The enemies of Evangelicalism, however, tended to locate in religious enthusiasm the seeds of revolutionary discontent; and they equated the emotional fervor of Methodism with the unleashing of all sorts of desires leading to political upheaval. As an expression of this logic, in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin, More's enemies asserted a connection between her Methodistical sympathies, sympathies implicitly engendered by her natural feminine tendency toward enthusiasm, and her putative sympathies with the cause of revolution at home.53 This last charge is particularly surprising given the explicit purpose of More's polemic as described in the Mendip Annals (as well as the Cheap Repository Tracts): to contain working-class "desire" by subjugating the various bodily energies to a Christian discourse. By some ironic twist of fate, More herself became the locus of attack from those made anxious by the forces supposedly called into play by Methodism, forces that she herself both abhorred and feared, forces that she herself saw as inimical. Whereas More became involved in the Sunday school movement because, on a psychic level, it offered her the opportunity to displace her own anxieties about the grotesque body with its explosive impulses onto the working-class "other," she now found herself identified as the instigator who made possible the unleashing of those same revolutionary desires. In other words, those undisciplined and uncontrollable forces that More sought to displace through Evangelical activity now returned to haunt her in the accusations of her most hostile enemies. The aftermath of the Blagdon Controversy provides the clearest evidence of the ways in which, for Hannah More, Evangelical

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involvement proved an inadequate strategy for allaying anxiety about the explosive potential of physicality: in response to the controversy, her body once again took its revenge and subjugated her to its own cruel tyranny. Though her symptoms were no doubt real, her physical sufferings mirrored the accusations of her critics, as we witness a body gone out of control, a body in the throes of its own mad enthusiasm. Since childhood More had experienced devastating illnesses that were said to have had their origins in a nervous sensibility. One of the most stunning examples was recorded by More in a letter to Wilberforce in 1798. I was attacked with one of my violent spasms in my head on Saturday night. . . . This pain continued almost intolerable during two days and two nights, and left my nerves in a high state of irritation. On Monday, being alone, I fell down from the place where I was sitting in a fainting fit. I dashed my face against the corner of a stone wall, and lay a long time without giving any signs of life. My sisters found me in a posture which must soon have suffocated me,—with my face frightfully disfigured, and the floor sprinkled with blood. There was a strong contest between life and death, but it pleased merciful God to raise me up. (MLC, II, 23)

Although we have absolutely no reason to question the events as described, we must wonder about More's purpose in sending this description to Wilberforce, Ostensibly her goal is to win his approval for her Christian transcendence of such suffering, and yet the passage intimates a darker agenda. More here describes the very conflict "between life and death," between the soul that seeks to transcend its bodily container and the body that seeks its own destruction. That Wilberforce should be made the spectator of this violent scene of self-division is appropriate, for it was he who implicitly first promised More that, through Evangelical participation, the relationship of the self to the body might be mediated. Such self-division never disappeared from More's autobiographical writings, and the body's revenge intensified around the time of the Blagdon Controversy. From 1803 to 1805 she suffered what she called "my great illness." The period was characterized by sporadic and difficult periods of invalidism and spells of profound selfdoubt. Ten years later she testified to Wilberforce that ". . . in that

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long affliction, though at one time I seldom closed my eyes in sleep for forty days and nights, I never had one hour's great discomposure of reason, though in health very liable to agitation." If "reason" never left her, however, neither did the need for intensive and painful self-scrutiny, a compulsive need to reassure herself of God's favor. In correspondence with John Newton, she once wrote of God's "unpromising and unworthy instruments," suggesting that she felt herself among them: "It always gives me the idea (if the idea is not too low and familiar) of a great author writing with a very bad pen" (MLC, I, 476). A sense of inadequacy to the task pervades More's journals and letters. At the same time, however, the belief that she was nothing more than an "instrument" allowed her to place in perspective the intense physical suffering she experienced. Prolonged periods of pain that might otherwise have seemed arbitrary or cruel took on new significance in light of her imagined relationship to God. I have been blessed with more friends of superior cast than have often fallen to the lot of so humble an individual. Nothing but the grace of God, and frequent attacks through life of very severe sickness, could have kept me in tolerable order. If I am no better with all these visitations, what should I have been without them? No, my dear sir, I have never yet felt a blow of which I did not perceive the indispensable necessity; of which, on reflection, I did not see and feel the compassionate hand of Divine mercy—the chastisement of a tender Father. (MLC, II, 239)

Such paternal "chastisement" often took the form of headaches, toothaches, and severe fevers and deliriums. After one bout, she was left without smell or taste for six weeks (II, 237). These are all common ailments for the time, ailments shared by many of her generation, yet the lengthy record of More's struggle with them proves her resilience. Any one of these spells might have killed someone of lesser fortitude (and More came to her "deathbed" several times)—and yet, from her account, we sense some deeper investment in the act of suffering itself. Each spell of cerebral pain attests to the volatility of the spirit within, a spirit that, in the act of seeking its own transcendence, seems to resist the embrace of a tender father.

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Evangelicalism had much to offer a woman like More but, in the end, several ironies characterize her participation. Invited to complement the minister's loving "paternity," to "tame the savage beast" by means of maternal agency, Hannah and her sister Patty could anticipate that they might transcend cultural stereotyping of the female body, a practice making them the site of dangerous and uncontrollable enthusiasms. As we have seen, however, such transcendence proved impossible. To identify the turn to Evangelicalism as a female strategy for allaying anxiety about the body is to explain, in part, female complicity in patriarchal class operations. It is also, however, to remind ourselves of the ways in which such strategies have proved tragically inadequate.

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An Introduction to Maria Edgeworth Literary history has not been kind to Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the eminent father of a celebrated daughter. In the words of another celebrated daughter of an eminent father, Virginia Woolf, Richard Edgeworth was "Byron's bore, Day's friend, Maria's father, the man who almost invented the telegraph, and did, in fact, invent machines for cutting turnips, climbing walls, contracting on narrow bridges, and lifting their wheels over obstacles—a man meritorious, industrious, advanced, but still, as we investigate his memoirs, mainly a bore."1 In response to such characterization, Marilyn Butler sought to reclaim Richard's reputation in Maria Edgeworth, a Literary Biography, In particular, she redressed the persistent belief that Richard was an overbearing or dominant father who thwarted his daughter's artistic and creative development.2 Despite her evidence, however, many critics—and feminist critics, in particular—remain skeptical of a reading that renders Richard's paternal influence more disinterested or benevolent. Perhaps Butler's defense came too late. According to Butler, even as Maria began the task of editing her father's memoirs—a duty that he had left to her before he died—she "recognized that her father had made enemies" (Butler, 406) and that she would have to proceed cautiously in presenting his character to an audience who had prejudged his character as unduly "patriarchal" (in the oldfashioned sense of that word). Yet all of Maria's devotion did not save her father from his most hostile critics; in a curious way her sentimental testimony actually fed their worst suspicions about Richard's overbearing character.3 What the nineteenth-century daughter could not forestall, the twentieth-century biographer 95

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could not prevent either, and readers remain uneasy about the extent of Richard's paternal "interference" in his daughter's career. Even now the debate continues: was the effect of Richard's influence on his daughter primarily prohibitive or productive? It is surely curious that Maria Edgeworth's biography should be so dominated by the debate over the nature of her father's influence. The effect—which my study can neither escape nor deny—is to subordinate the figure of the daughter to the father, as attention is inevitably shifted away from Maria to Richard, even in feminist accounts of the relationship. An approach that "contextualizes" Maria's accomplishments in relation to her father, whether to defend or attack him, necessarily problematizes any consideration of her status as a woman writer. Either way, we are reminded of how her biography demands to be read against the backdrop of a series of patriarchal relations. Maria Edgeworth's public record on the subject of Richard Edgeworth further exacerbates the problem of how to read this fatherdaughter pair. Above all, she valued what she considered to be her "partnership" with her father, that is, the times when she collaborated with him to produce books on education. Even though she was the author of over twenty volumes by herself, she insisted that her own texts paled alongside those that she had produced with her father. Butler writes, "Characteristically, even when she was joking the books she thought of were the ones she wrote with her father, not her two recent resounding successes, Castle Rackrent (1800) and Belinda (1801)" (185). This "partnership" ended with the painful and laborious task of editing her father's memoirs. In an era heavily populated with "daddies' girls," Maria Edgeworth stands out as a particularly strong example of a male-centered woman. Few women writers have been so self-effacing. Maria Edgeworth's "little i," a diminutive she chose for herself (Butler, 102), signals a larger drama of daughterly complicity. In the end, it may not be overly simplistic to decide, as did one critic, that "[Richard] Edgeworth's crime was not so much that he was a rather pompous and opinionated utilitarian but that he so conducted himself as to cause his daughter to love him uncritically and therefore to adopt his precepts on literature and life unquestioningly."4 The dynamics of the Lockean educational paradigm forcefully suggest how such unconditional love might be elicited.

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Paradoxically, the most powerful kind of patriarchal control is one that is least coercive, one that, in making the daughter so dependent on her father's love and esteem, makes her least likely to view him critically. As we have seen, the most powerful kind of patriarchal control is precisely a seduction. In addition, that a literary daughter like Edgeworth should become the mouthpiece of her father indicates the thoroughness of her investment in his discourse. Privileging his voice in her texts, time and again, she speaks for him and through him to argue for the benevolent effects of patriarchal training. If the gesture temporarily empowers her by lending her paternal authority, it can also disquiet us: at what price does this kind of empowerment occur? Like the biography of Hannah More, then, the biography of Maria Edgeworth introduces paternal themes as well as a maternal subtext. First, both life stories foreground the presence of a strong father who assumed responsibility for his daughter's education. In More's case, the role of the biological father was readily filled by a series of father figures, both real men and internalized images, who continued to give shape and direction to the daughter's life. For Edgeworth, the biological father remained a consistent presence, a single man who nonetheless can be said to possess several faces: to his daughter, Richard Edgeworth was simultaneously a superior presence and an intellectual partner, a moral guardian and a literary consultant. Like Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth found meaning and direction in a series of clues given to her by a strong paternal presence. In addition, for both Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth the problematic status of the biological mother most likely enhanced the father's position. If More's mother is all but erased in the chronicle of her progress as a "sincere daughter of Eve," Edgeworth's mother is relegated to near oblivion in her biography. The unhappy Anna Maria Edgeworth, the first of Richard's four wives, died in childbirth in 1773 while her husband was abroad. Maria was only five at the time and she later claimed that she remembered little of her mother except approaching her deathbed for a farewell kiss. Butler writes that Anna Maria's death was followed by a short bout of angry, self-destructive behavior that ceased once Richard returned home. In a scene that enacts only too literally what Margaret Homans describes as the "Lacanian view that the operation of

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symbolic language depends upon the death of the mother,"5 Richard's reentry into his daughter's life is described by her stepsister. Suddenly she heard a voice which she says she has a distinct recollection of thinking quite superior to any she had heard before—and the doors being opened she saw a gentleman in black and her imagination was instantly struck by his being sublimely superior to all she ever saw before. (Butler, 46)6

This kind of impression served effectively to make Richard the preeminent parent in his daughter's development, to insure that it was his voice that mattered, and to establish his presence as the determining force in her life. While Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth resemble each other in their tendencies to identify themselves as their "fathers' daughters," they also exhibit certain kinds of behavior suggesting an identification with patriarchy. We have seen, for example, that More's attraction to Milton led her to produce certain kinds of texts in which the themes of a "domesticated" female nature are foregrounded. Then, involvement with Evangelical fathers led her to take on a "maternal" role, one that temporarily empowered her even while it perpetuated certain stereotypes about the nature of maternal power. I will suggest that Edgeworth's involvement with Anglo-Irish politics represents a comparable moment to More's involvement in Evangelicalism. For Edtjeworth as for More, identification with a patriarchal politics provided an opportunity for selfdefinition. For Edgeworth as for More, a chance for authority and for limited empowerment was to be found in the tasks and assignments given to women under a patriarchal rubric, in this case, under the program for the reform of Ireland under Anglo-Irish rule. Also like More, Edgeworth embraced the opportunities offered to her and gladly assumed the role given to her as a lady of the "Great House." But Edgeworth's biography is also comparable to More's in that her affiliation with a patriarchal organization resulted in some troubling political attitudes. In particular, much of Maria Edgeworth's interest in reforming an indigenous Irish population depended on her assumption that they represented an infantilized "body" to be "domesticated" and made safe. Her record of the intricate details of their lives becomes her appropriation of

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everything that marks the Irish as "other" and "different" from the Anglo-Irish. To read Edgeworth in this way is bound to evoke controversy, since—with notable exception7—conservative implications of Edgeworth's patriarchal affiliation have not often been emphasized. Yet I think there is a good explanation why feminists have said relatively little about Edgeworth's Anglo-Irish attitudes, namely, the explicit and immediate content of so much of what she wrote on the subject of woman's potential. In Edgeworth's writings on women's education in particular there is much that seems reasonable and even enlightened, much that seems notable to a feminist point of view. These texts, then, are the texts that have tended to attract the attention of feminist readers. On one level, Edgeworth seems to have been extremely aware of the kinds of limitations patriarchy had placed on women, and she seems consciously to have struggled against patriarchal constraint. For example, in Letters to a Literary Lady Edgeworth, writing in the voice of a "gentleman," refutes the notion that women are irrational or that education is a "dangerous" force leading to the misuse of power. Instead, argues the rationalist, education benefits women: that is, "Women have not erred from having knowledge, but from not having had experience: they may have grown vain and presumptuous when they have learned but little, they will be sobered into good sense when they have learned more."8 Like Hannah More, then, Edgeworth dedicated herself to refuting the categorization of women as foolish or silly creatures who are at best circumscribed by patriarchal rules. Edgeworth's attitudes—attitudes both endorsed and promoted by her father—resemble More's in Strictures on a Modern System of Female Education (1799); both women stridently seek to define female potential in terms of the capacity to transcend stereotyping that consigns them to weakness and folly. Consistent with this tendency to exhort women to reject patriarchal classification—and also attractive from a feminist point of view—is the response of Edgeworth and More to certain male perspectives persistently denying women the possibility of a full, rational development. For Edgeworth and More, the paradigmatic example of a male author who blocks women and thwarts their development is Rousseau. In Strictures, More accuses Rousseau of

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confusing the categories of vice and virtue, of employing a kind of "metaphysical sophistry." More declares: . . . he debauches the heart of woman by cherishing her vanity in the erection of a system of male virtues, to which . . . he tempts her to aspire; powerfully insinuating that to this splendid system chastity does not necessarily belong: thus corrupting the judgment and bewildering the understanding as the most effectual way to inflame the imagination and deprave the heart.9

In contrast, for Edgeworth in Belinda (1801), the critique of Rousseau is the impetus for a subplot concerning Virginia St. Pierre. The character of Clarence Hervey, who is determined to raise his own Sophia in the manner of Rousseau, is often thought to be based on Thomas Day, an intimate friend to Richard Edgeworth. In real life Day had attempted his own Rousseau-like experiment with less than satisfactory results.10 In the novel, Hervey's discovery of an orphan-child, raised far from the corrupting influence of society, offers him the opportunity to implement his plans to raise his own "Sophie." Edgeworth uses this subplot to expose the inherent flaws in an educational plan that seeks to make women creditable partners for their husbands by denying them the opportunity to exercise their own judgment. Though Virginia becomes an affectionate, loyal young woman, she is anything but the partner Hervey seeks, and Hervey himself announces the lesson to be learned from his experience. Nothing could be more absurd than my scheme of educating a woman in solitude to make her fit for society. I might have foreseen what must happen, that Virginia would consider me as her tutor, her father, not as her lover, or her husband; that with the most affectionate of hearts, she could feel for me nothing but gratitude.''

Virginia's fate is to fall in love with another, while Hervey finds himself attracted to the more self-aware protagonist, Belinda Portman. Thus this subplot allows Edgeworth to protest against Rousseau's implicit infantilization of women, a practice that thwarts the development of an adult attachment, and to reiterate her point that

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only women who are trained as equals to exercise their full intellectual capacity can be attractive partners. For Maria Edgeworth, then, as for Hannah More, an explicit investment in the concept of a "rational" female, of a woman who can be educated to transcend weakness and folly, who can be nurtured to become her husband's intellectual "partner," counteracts an history in which women had been cast as the very principle of irrationality. Shedding light on that history, Ruth Salvaggio, in Enlightened Absences: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine, has demonstrated how the classical discourse of the Enlightenment participated in "woman's suppression by configuring that which violatefd] cohesive, systematic structure as feminine." In particular, in the works of Newton, Pope, and Swift, whatever is excessive, amorphous, or shadowy becomes conflated with the feminine. Moreover, writes Salvaggio, "classical systematicity is possible only when the feminine remains absent."12 Speaking also of the place of women in classical discourse, Valerie Walkerdine has written that, although since Descartes, "reason has been located in the body . . . the body in question is not any body." Over the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, "women's bodies became understood as incapacitated for reason. Hystericized and medicalised, they were capacitated for the reproduction of the species, not the production of knowledge."13 A major instance of what Walkerdine calls the "hysterization" and "medicalization" of the female body can be seen in the proliferation of middle eighteenth-century medical texts on maternity. A quick survey of these texts suggests how the female body was being constructed primarily in terms of the maternal function. As the issue of maternal breastfeeding is foregrounded in the medical texts, so is a series of themes about how the female body is to be positioned in relation to the family. The issues raised by the medical men later become the subject of debate for women writers such as Wollstonecraft and Edgeworth. Even though the argument for maternal breast-feeding existed well before the middle decades of the eighteenth century, it was not common for women of means to nurse their own children.14 Most often, a wet nurse was employed, since the child was sent away from

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the mother at a very young age. Beginning in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, however, a series of important texts appeared, written primarily by medical men, arguing that the biological mother should commit herself to the care of her own infant; in particular, she should nurse the child herself. From the modern perspective, their argument concerning the benefits of maternal breast-feeding for the child seems accurate and even wise, for the abuse of infants at the hands of irresponsible wet nurses is well documented. From a feminist perspective, it is also apparent, however, that the proliferation of these texts also served an important ideological purpose. What emerges from these texts is simultaneously a concern for the health of the infant and mother and an implicit subtext concerning the "naturalness" of a domestic arrangement that restricts the mother's scope of activity to the care of the small child. To persuade women of their "natural" function as mothers, male writers often resort to language that is psychologically coercive, as I will describe in Chapter 4. At the same time, however, medical discourse on maternal breast-feeding also becomes a place where male authors seek to regulate and control female sexuality. In one salient example of the new medical discourse on maternity, writing in 1758, William Cadogan begins by insisting on the superiority of medical expertise on childbirth and child-rearing practices. In my opinion, this business [of nursing the children] has been too long fatally left to the Management of Women, who cannot be supposed to have a proper knowledge to fit them for such a Task, notwithstanding they look upon it as their own Province. What I mean, a Philosophic Knowledge of Nature, to be acquired only by learned Observation and Experience, and which therefore the Unlearned must be incapable of.15 Thus, Cadogan usurps a body of female expertise and redefines it within the parameters of rational activity. Because they are "unlearned," women suffer, in Cadogan's account, from an inability to understand the exact nature of the task being entrusted to them; therefore, the male doctor must be enlisted for his superior knowledge. If a woman now entrusts herself to her doctor, she also must place herself under the purview of the father of her children. He

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attends her every move so that he can assure himself that she carries out her duties. Cadogan writes, for example, "I would earnestly recommend it to every Father to have his Child nursed, under his own Eye, to make use of his own Reason and Sense in superintending and directing the Management of it; nor suffer it to be made from one of the Mysteries of the Bona Dea, from which Men are to be excluded" (24). No longer an activity under the jurisdiction of the "good goddess," maternal breast-feeding now occurs under the surveillance of the father, who oversees the activity so reclaimed in keeping with the interests of science and medicine. Rational, scientific knowledge triumphs over the ignorance of women mothering outside the parameters of medical discourse and, most important, the male doctor-father appropriates a female biological function in order to assume control over it. Cadogan ends his essay by referring to his own experience: "I shall only add by way of Persuasive to those who may be inclined to make Trial of the Method I recommend, that I am a Father, and have already practiced it with most desirable success" (34). Clearly a paradox emerges from this situation: later in the century, when a writer like Mary Wollstonecraft make the mother's right to breast-feed her child an issue, she is advancing a cause that resembles a modern feminist concern: her point seems to be that women must have the right to self-determination in matters of sexuality, reproduction, and motherhood. Yet, paradoxically, her commitment to maternal breast-feeding as every woman's right is consistent with the ideological intentions of the medical men: both mean a heightened intimacy between mother and child, with all that such intimacy means in terms of the mother's ability to conceive of herself as an individual outside the family. Where the medical men would insist that all women must naturally nurse their children as befitting their role as wives and mothers, Wollstonecraft would argue that women must be free to choose to nurse as an expression of their self-determination. Thus two points of view, even though informed by opposite political arguments, can serve the same ideological end.16 When Edgeworth's Belinda foregrounds once again the issue of maternal breast-feeding, it is responding directly to a major issue of its time. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth does not make any explicit claims about women's necessary control over reproduction

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or mothering. Instead, she offers a psychologically compelling portrait of a woman who finds herself responding to conflicting ideological signals. An important element in that portrait is the idea that the recourse to "rationality" will solve all: as I will demonstrate, Lady Delacour's conflicts over maternity and the maternal role are resolved by a "rational" medical man who offers her the perspective she needs. At stake for Edgeworth is the notion that Lady Delacour, despite her flagrant transgressions, can be reclaimed for the purposes of the "enlightened" and "progressive" family. It is scarcely surprising that Edgeworth should remain so invested in the idea of a "rational" resolution to Lady Delacour's struggles with maternity. To reclaim Lady Delacour is implicitly to argue that all women can have an important place in a new domestic order and that every woman, no matter how conflicted her sense of herself, can find a meaningful role in the patriarchal family. Once again, Edgeworth's insistence on the power of "rationality" and on the ultimate perfectibility of the female character reflects her awareness of misogynist categories that would otherwise consign women to excessiveness, weakness, and marginality. Thus, her investment in "rationality" initially seems to be consistent with a feminist inclination to make certain kinds of claims about women's political centrality under a new and more benevolent order of patriarchy. If we read Edgeworth this way, however, what are we to make of the persistent shadows of an irrational force, one that never quite disappears from her work? For it is surprising to notice that, despite the explicit investment in "rationality," what often surfaces simultaneously in Edgeworth's novels is the evidence of a powerful counterforce, one frequently imaged as a deviant female character. The aptly named Harriot Freke, who constantly disrupts the narrative action of Belinda, is only the most obvious example of such a presence. In "Letters of Julia and Caroline," the ill-fated Caroline chooses to follow a hedonistic path rather than the safer course of domesticity. Other examples include Lady Dashfort in The Absentee and Miss Hauton in Patronage. All of these examples suggest that the thematic link between women and "irrationality," that is, between women and a force that defies rational mediation, persists in Edgeworth's work despite an explicit investment in rational discourse.

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As I will argue in Chapter 6, Edgeworth often returns to what we might call a "master narrative": I will suggest that this plot entails the representation of the containment of dangerous, explosive energies associated with the female body by the ruling or restraining force of patriarchy. This narrative is often staged as an inspection of erratic maternal behavior, evidence of a subversive female "inheritance," while paternal affiliation is privileged as the mark of stability and predictability. According to the master narrative, the mother is frequently under surveillance, as the nature of her influence cannot be assumed. Indeed, as demonstrated in Edgeworth's last novel, Helen, because of a line that makes her the daughter of Eve, the "failed" mother can become the locus of instability itself. How do we reconcile the existence of this master narrative with Edgeworth's explicit commitment to the idea of the "rational" perfectibility of the female character? How may we account for the female figure whose shadowy presence significantly complicates Edgeworth's insistence that all women can find meaning and direction under patriarchy? Valerie Walkerdine suggests that the simultaneous presence of the discourses of rationality and irrationality in conjunction with women's bodies may be a sign of an important ideological gap. The result of the "hystericization" and "medicalization" of women's bodies was a paradox; women's bodies became the "place where the production of reasoning beings as children was assured and yet a constant source of danger." That is, through their roles as mothers, women became, writes Walkerdine, "the producer of reason"; and certainly, as we will see, much that Edgeworth has to say on the subject of the maternal role bears this out. Yet because maternity as a child-centered phenomenon necessarily "occluded" the question of the mother's sexuality, what persisted was an anxiety about the nature of that sexuality. As Walkerdine writes, "a constant threat was the intrusion of the irrational. Medicalisation of women's bodies became a surveillance of passion, of active sexuality." Walkerdine explains further, "This is the point of fear for it contains the irrational which permits rationality, constantly threatening to erupt through its surface."17 Walkerdine's comments are especially relevant to the biographies of Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth. In the case of Hannah More, the circumstances of the Blagdon Controversy might, for example, be explained in the terms Walkerdine describes. For in the

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hills of Cheddar the task of Hannah and Patty More was precisely to "produce reason" in the rural poor, to bring them out of the "darkness" and "ignorance" of their rural culture into the "light" of Christian doctrine. Yet, at the same time, Hannah More was readily feared and identified as a force responsible for the spreading of the irrational, of the excessive practices of "enthusiasm." This could happen because of an ideological gap between the notions of woman as producer of reason and woman as the persistent site of dangerous, illicit energies. Walkerdine's description also helps us to think about More's relationship to Milton. As we saw, Hannah More privileged Milton's Eve because she seemed to be the mother who was not "Other," that is, the mother who, by virtue of her position as daughter of God and Man, is the daughter who successfully transcended her maternal inheritance. Milton's Eve is, metaphorically, the daughter who exists in the light of reason. But a text such as Coelebs in Search of a Wife fails entirely to banish the hint of the "irrational," of what is not entirely explicable, of what defies rational interpolation; as daughter to her mother Eve, a protagonist like Lucilla continues to be shadowed by doubts concerning her own status as daughter. Here again the "irrational" persists in conjunction with the "rational" depiction of womanhood, despite an explicit investment in the categories of rationality. Thus we can say that Hannah More was attracted to Miltonic concepts because they seemed an attractive antidote to certain kinds of misogyny. In particular, a text such as Paradise Lost seems to offer the eighteenth-century woman reader the hope of transcending certain kinds of misogynist labels. In Milton's version of a "domesticated epic," the reader, like More, finds an image of active, productive, useful womanhood. This image reassures women that they are not merely vain, foolish creatures who must be relegated to a life of marginality; instead, Milton intimates that women can participate in Christian life in a meaningful way. However, it must be noted that while Milton extends an invitation to the daughters of Eve, he continues to offer them categories that are persistently patriarchal; as Walkerdine suggests, to claim woman under the rubric of the "rational" is to continue to situate her within a patriarchal economy that will locate "irrationality" somewhere in her vicinity. As long as that economy depends on the repression of

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women's sexuality, the threat of "irrationality" never entirely vanishes. For Hannah More, then, Evangelicalism and Miltonic concepts become attractive—although problematic—strategies for counteracting a powerfully misogynist tradition. If her attraction to these strategies is apparent so, too, are the inherent limitations of these strategies. For Maria Edgeworth, educational discourse provides a comparable strategy, a comparable moment when the voice of misogyny seemed silenced. Above all, the educational texts Edgeworth wrote with her father seem to offer women some hope of achieving political centrality, of becoming useful and productive citizens of the state. Yet, to return to an earlier point, although educational discourse explicitly rejects the idea that women are "irrational," the category of the irrational is constantly reiterated, even in Edgeworth's most "enlightened" educational texts. In a volume entitled Letters for Literary Ladies, for example, a rationalist defense of female education coexists with another story. That second story, told in a series entitled "Letters of Julia and Caroline," is a tale of explosive and "irrational" female energies. This reiteration of the irrational occurs because, even though educational discourse explicitly allows women to participate in the rational, it nonetheless perpetuates the categories of the rational and irrational. At best, educational discourse allows women to move from one side of the rational-irrational dichotomy to the other. However, educational discourse as it is formulated in the work of the Edgeworths and others never entirely banishes the categories that resulted in the problematic categorization of the female character in the first place. In order to dissipate the category of the irrational and to make certain that the irrational is not figured as feminine, one would have to begin by attacking the apparatus that configured the rational as male and the irrational as female in the first place. Thus a deeper critique of misogyny—and a more incisive response to patriarchy— is not to change the categories that patriarchy constructs for men and women (as Edgeworth does in her educational discourse or as More does in promoting Miltonic concepts of women) but to investigate the conditions under which such categories are constructed in the first place: who does the constructing and why? What holds such constructions in place? Not until the nineteenth

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century would women writers be able to ask these questions in a systematic way. The ultimate irony informing the biographies of Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth is that their most "progressive" impulses may have been their most complicitous. This is true because at moments when More and Edgeworth are most "progressive," that is, at moments when they committed to making claims for women's political centrality, they are also most thoroughly invested in patriarchal categories. To work from within a patriarchal model, to make claims for women in response to an agenda already set by the fathers, is necessarily never to question how the issues were defined in the first place.

4 Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Belinda Unlike Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth's most popular work, Belinda has never been a favorite with her critics. The novel's central fault may lie in the eponymous character, as the author herself suggested: "I really was so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone Belinda, that I would have torn the pages to pieces; and really, I have not the heart or patience to correct her. As the hackney coachman said, 'Mend youl better make a new one.'" Particularly striking here is Edgeworth's own admission that nothing could have rescued the heroine from her cursed insipidity: Belinda seems condemned to her very tameness by the didactic purpose of the novel, a purpose that demands her unyielding perfection. Indeed, one of the novel's major flaws is the complacency of the main character, for such complacency leaves little room for tension. Belinda undergoes very little self-scrutiny or self-exploration. Unlike Fanny Burney's comparable heroines, she experiences little self-doubt and rarely any convincing inner conflict.1 As a novel, Belinda is further complicated by its tripartite structure of interlocking narratives, each with its own special demands. Belinda's story—her quest for authentic self-expression in a world where female social behavior is very often characterized by deceit— is only the first of the three narratives. In juxtaposition to her efforts is the third plot, that concerning the innocent and beautiful Virginia de Saint Pierre, often assumed as a commentary on a reallife experiment of the eccentric Thomas Day. In the novel, Virginia's history corresponds to Belinda's struggle to disprove the negative social stereotype signifying female deviancy. But it is the second plot, that of the elegant but dissipated Lady Delacour, to whom 109

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Belinda has been sent in order to enter society, that has most often received critical attention and that will be my main focus here. Belinda's position as confidante to Lady Delacour, whose life story unfolds as a long, interpolated tale in Volume I, suggests that the author intended the young protagonist to learn an important moral lesson from this profligate character. However, Belinda's persistent adherence to higher moral standards than Lady Delacour's, her very immunity to the charms of a social life surrounding her, precludes real moral growth or instruction for the heroine.2 Instead, Lady Delacour stands to learn a great deal from Belinda and, by the end of the novel, Belinda's role approximates the author's own: at the conclusion both Belinda and the author have labored to "shape" a rehabilitated Lady Delacour who triumphantly assumes her proper role as wife and mother. In short, Belinda is not about Belinda. Instead, this domestic novel takes as its subject the implementation of a particular mode of domesticity necessary to the purposes of new-style patriarchy. As we have seen, over the course of the eighteenth century, older-style patriarchy, with its emphasis on paternal prerogative, hierarchy, and the exercise offeree, had gradually yielded to new-style patriarchy with its appeal to reason, cooperation between the sexes, and noncoercive exercise of authority. From another perspective, new-style patriarchy no longer operates according to the fear of punishment or injury but according to the more psychologically compelling themes of guilt and obligation. Although all three narratives in Belinda indirectly address this movement, the Lady Delacour subplot, displaying Edgeworth's most creative and engaging narrative skills, carries the burden of its author's polemical intentions. In privileging (inadvertently, perhaps) Lady Delacour's narrative, Edgeworth not only draws attention to the image of domestic fulfillment, but also illuminates the ways in which women accommodated themselves only with difficulty to the content of a particular ideological argument. Lady Delacour's narrative records the process of internalizing a specific image of womanhood, and it registers the sense of maternal guilt and obligation that was to be a necessary component of that process. En route, the novel insists on the inevitable appeal, indeed, the very "naturalness," of a particular domestic arrangement in which supreme satisfaction is to be garnered from the intimate relation-

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ship of a biological mother to her children. To accomplish this purpose, however, the narrative must also deny important female desires that thwart the kind of female selflessness necessary to the performance of the maternal function and that threaten the economic management of the separate spheres. Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, such a denial is the mark of a particular domestic ideology at work. Far from representing a society that has "lost its interest for us now,"3 Belinda warrants our attention, for it exemplifies the ways in which ideological tensions can simultaneously structure and produce a problematic and ungainly literary work.

I Although Belinda was the first of Edgeworth's full-length, domestic novels, it had been preceded by a number of fictions in which the themes of new-style patriarchy had been predominantly featured. Written during her teens, Edgeworth's short moral tales and lessons provided her with an opportunity to explore intrafamilial dynamics under new-style patriarchy. Such works initiate the discussion of domestic ideology by defining the nature of the parent-child interaction, and they establish the important tensions that later disturb a novel such as Belinda. In tales like "The Purple Jar" (later reprinted as part of a series called Rosamond), while paying tribute to the theories of her father, Edgeworth defines the experience of childhood as a process of coming to terms with self-limitation and of learning the need for careful reasoning in matters of choice. In "The Purple Jar," for example, Rosamond is attracted to the bright colors of a purple jar in the window of a chemist's shop.4 Her mother then gives her the choice of the purple jar or a new pair of slippers, which Rosamond sorely needs. Rosamond unwisely chooses the jar but soon discovers that it was nothing more than an ordinary glass container filled with colored liquid. Meanwhile, the need for a suitable pair of slippers hinders her movement and deprives her of a number of pleasures that require a pair of comfortable walking shoes. And so Rosamond learns her lesson: to be wary of appearances, to choose wisely among a number of apparent "pleasures," and, most important, to think for herself. "The Purple Jar" warrants two observations. First, such a work is

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based on a particular construction of childhood, one in which the child is depicted for the first time as an autonomous individual who can be brought to accept the value of "truth" through a series of carefully monitored experiments. It reflects, in other words, what Valerie Walkerdine calls the "modern conception of the individual" positing "the rational independent, autonomous child as a quasinatural phenomenon who progresses through a universalised developmental sequence towards the possibility of rational argument. This 'normal development' is taken to be facilitated by a sequence of cognitive developments on the other hand and language development on the other, both being viewed as depending on the presence of the mother."5 Second, then, and perhaps less obviously, "The Purple Jar" indicates a particular construction of parenthood. If, for example, "The Purple Jar" addresses its young readers about the necessity for a series of virtues, it speaks with equal clarity to their parents about the important role they are to assume in the instruction of those virtues. In the process, it defines the very act of parenting as a particular kind of intimate, parent-child interaction. That is, while Rosamond of "The Purple Jar" is just an "ordinary little girl," her parents are far more exemplary figures. Her mother, in particular, never fails to do just the right thing to benefit her daughter's moral and psychological growth. In other words, the portrait of the mother on whom the responsibility for the development of this newly defined individual is to devolve is, in Edgeworth's tales and lessons, as I will demonstrate, both a fantasy and an important ideological construction. Tales such as "The Purple Jar" offer the reader the representation of a particular domestic world that depends for its stability on the ideal performance of a "perfect mother," of a woman who lives exclusively for and through her children and who finds fulfillment in the very act of forming her children into certain kinds of individuals.6 As the comments of Edgeworth and her father make apparent, however, the benefits of new models of parenthood were not immediately obvious to the parents who were to adopt them. Writing in 1814, Richard Edgeworth favorably reported on the ways in which, during the last decade, parental attention had shifted in the child's favor; his notice reminds us that parents had to be taught to recognize the child's special needs and interests and that those needs and interests could be defined in a specific way: "At present the

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attention of parents is more extended; they endeavor to give their pupils reasonable motives for industry and application. They watch the tempers and dispositions of children; they endeavor to cultivate the general powers of infant understanding, instead of labouring incessantly to make them [into] reading, writing, and calculating machines."7 In addition, Richard Edgeworth's attention to the difficulties real parents experienced when confronted with the new models is apparent in the "Preface to Harry and Lucy," one of the Edgeworths' most popular tales. He concedes: Perhaps parents may pity the father and mother, in "Harry and Lucy," as much as they pity the children; and may consider them as the most hard worked, and hard working people, that ever existed, or were ever fabled to exist. They may say, that these children never had a moment's respite [from their lessons], and that the poor father and mother had never any thing to do, or did any thing, but attend to their children, answer their questions, and provide for their instruction or amusement. This view of what is expected from parents may alarm many, even of those, who have much zeal and ability in education. But we beseech them not to take false alarm. Even if they were actually to do all, that the father and mother of Harry and Lucy are here represented to have done, they would not, in practice, feel it so very laborious, or find that it takes up so preposterous a portion of their lives, as they might apprehend.8 A factitious edge—as indicated by a concern for the reader's "pity" for the overworked child or parent—bespeaks an underlying defensiveness in Edgeworth's position, one that fails to disappear entirely even if one grants that the tone is self-consciously wry. The arch exaggeration of the writer's response to a parent's "alarm" similarly positions writer and reader in opposition to one another for, with whatever degree of humor, the writer assumes that he will encounter some degree of resistance to the ideas he puts forth. While he actively seeks to reassure the anxious parent, he inadvertently underscores the newness and the persistent difficulty of the parent's task. Having thus dismissed any "inappropriate" response, Edgeworth reassures his readers that mothers and fathers need spend only a small portion of their daily time with their children and, for example, that a father need not devote an hour to experiments before

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breakfast (as did the father in "Harry and Lucy") or that a mother need not suspend her toilette while the children blow bubbles. He recommends more feasible methods for parental involvement. For example, the parent might use an everyday object such as a cane chair for a lesson in weaving. Similarly, while seated at the breakfast table, a father might discuss the steam from the tea urn as a lesson in physics. The backbone of a fish eaten at the family dinner provides a lesson in physiology. The issue here is not the substance of Richard's lessons (as some parents may agree with his objectives). It is important to recognize, regardless of the content of his lessons, what Richard Edgeworth offers is precisely a construction of parenthood, an attitude and form of behavior that must be learned, internalized, and finally accepted as the norm. Written with her father's philosophies in mind, Maria Edgeworth's early texts on the family often privilege the mother who confronts the range of responsibilities before her; her stories sometimes include the very marks of resistance to the ideal parental mode. "The Good French Governess," for example, features the progress of one mother who must be schooled in her maternal duties and responsibilities.9 As a sign of the conflict inherent in the implementation of the new mode of domesticity, a tension arises between Edgeworth's explicit purpose—to illuminate the pleasures awaiting the woman who dedicates herself to family life—and her implicit message—that women do not inevitably accept maternal responsibility, for the demands of social life represent an equally strong attraction in another direction. Thus women must be gradually instructed in the benefits of domestic life. This same tension later becomes the paradox at the heart of Belinda. In "The Good French Governess," Madame de Rosier, exiled from France during the reign of Robespierre, becomes governess to the children of Mrs. Harcourt, a widow. Although not incorrigible, the Harcourt children have previously exhausted the patience of their previous governess who tried to rule them primarily through strict discipline and proscription. In Madame de Rosier, however, the children soon discover a different kind of educator. Like the mother in Rosamond, Madame de Rosier wisely allows the children to discover their own interests at their own pace, in accordance with their own strengths and weaknesses. A critical part of her educational strategy is the attention to toys. Madame de Rosier takes the

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children to a large toy warehouse or "rational toy-shop," where they are delighted to find carts, sports equipment such as battledores and shuttlecocks, cabinets for collecting mineral specimens, supplies for making baskets and bellropes, a little loom, a printing press, gardening tools—in short, an entire catalog of "creative playthings."10 The children respond enthusiastically to their new educational toys and, their attention piqued by the possibilities inherent in such toys, they learn quickly. Along with their scientific and historical lessons, the children assimilate the processes of abstract reasoning. For example, Madame de Rosier teaches young Herbert the difference between "mine and yours," so that the young master eventually understands the rights of property. Similarly, she teaches him the difference between obstinacy and reason. Such lessons are critical to the understanding of a young boy who is one day to fulfill the new-style patriarchal role. Finally, Madame de Rosier teaches the children to respect and love her. Yet, once this is achieved, Edgeworth must transfer the children's affection from the governess to the mother, because the purpose of the tale is gradually to convince Mrs. Harcourt that she herself could do for her own children what Madame de Rosier has done in her absence. Edgeworth includes several key scenes in which the mother, on her way to an evening party or a similar activity, views the happy domestic scene before her and experiences some regret. The first time Mrs. Harcourt takes herself away, Madame de Rosier's "lesson" has not yet taken hold: as her carriage is announced: "I must be gone!" cried Mrs. Harcourt, starting from her reverie. "What am I doing here? I ought to have been away this half-hour. . . . How happy you all look," continued Mrs. Harcourt, "and I am going to one of those terrible great dinners—I sha'nt eat one morsel; then cards all night, which I hate as much as you do, Isabella—pity me, Madame de Rosier!—Good by, happy creatures!"—and with some real and some affected reluctance, Mrs. Harcourt departed. (37-38)

As Madame de Rosier becomes more and more successful—and more and more beloved by her pupils—Mrs. Harcourt slowly appreciates the possibilities of domestic fulfillment that might be hers if she were to quit her dissipated, fashionable life and dedicate

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herself to her children. Gradually the superficial attractions of social life cease to enthrall her. The narrative in no way glosses over the mother's difficulty in adjusting herself to this new perspective. Mrs. Harcourt's early attempts to involve herself with her children do not succeed, and she must return several times to Madame de Rosier's example before she learns to perform the maternal role. Her efforts are thwarted by the interference of her own maid, the villainous Grace, who tries to bribe the children behind Madame de Rosier's back and who distorts the children's affections to the mother. Grace's position as scapegoat—at the end of the novel she is exposed and ignominiously dismissed—suggests that Edgeworth displaced onto this minor character some of the tension brought into play by the mother-child dynamic. In other words, by making Grace the principle of evil resistance to Madame de Rosier's good mothering, Edgeworth dissipates the biological mother's own indisposition to the function of maternity: after all, her reluctance to become involved in the lives of her children results from Grace's manipulations, not from any real failure of maternal identification. All that remains is for Mrs. Harcourt to assume the exemplary role implicitly laid out for her by the good governess. At the end of the story, Madme de Rosier finds her long-lost son, whom she had believed dead, and discovers that her property has been restored to her by the new government of France. The superiority of her character thus assured by this attribution of her proper rank, Madame de Rosier leaves Mrs. Harcourt to begin anew with her family. The tale concludes with this assessment of the mother's progress. Mrs. Harcourt, who now foresaw the probability of Madame de Rosier's return to France, could not avoid feeling regret at the thoughts of parting with a friend to whom her whole family was sincerely attached.—The plan of education, which had been traced out, remained yet unfinished, and she feared, she said, that Isabella and Matilda might feel the want of their accomplished preceptress. But these fears were the best omens for her future success; a sensible mother, in whom the desire to educate her family has once been excited, and who turns the energy of her mind to this interesting subject, seizes upon every useful idea, every practical principle with avidity, and she may trust securely to her own persevering cares.—Whatever a mother learns for the sake of her children, she never forgets. (188-189)

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With its plot of two mothers, one who comes from the outside to embody the maternal ideal under new-style patriarchy, the other who must gradually learn to forsake her "self-indulgent" life-style and embrace domestic responsibility in order to do what is naturally "best" for her children and herself, "The Good Governess" reflects an important shift from one mode of female existence to another. Here the mother's selfish extravagance must yield to the selfless concentration on children and the home. In this tale Edgeworth depicts the female commitment necessary to the purposes of a newly self-enclosed domestic world that new-style patriarchy makes its objective. However, as Cathy Urwin writes in an essay entitled "Constructing Motherhood: the Persuasion of Normal Development," here "the impenetrability of the account [of a child's normal development] rests heavily on the ways in which the needs of the mother, her independent interests, her conflicts in defining her own priorities are rendered inaccessible through the emphasis on child-centeredness, which is itself reinforced through practices which view the health of women as mothers or potential mothers rather than as women."11 Or, as Valerie Walkerdine writes, "women . . . in the necessity to ensure a stable, nurturant and facilitating environment, are the price paid for autonomy, its hidden and dispensable cost."12 Is Edgeworth herself aware of this cost? On the one hand, her texts seem to indicate the very real difficulty that women encounter when confronting the domestic role that is handed to them. For example, by demonstrating Mrs. Harcourt's persistent attachment to the fashionable world, or (as we will see) by depicting the real and metaphorical pain experienced by Lady Delacour in relation to maternity, Edgeworth seems attentive to the elements of coercion in domestic discourse. On the other hand, however, her texts repeatedly dissipate this kind of tension in favor of domestic closure, and ultimately the mother is depicted as fulfilled in her role as wife and mother. Ultimately, her characters serve a new order of paternity, and the theme of the mother's psychological turmoil is subordinated to another end: the purpose of their maternal practices is to instill in their children a series of attitudes and behaviors consistent with new-style patriarchy. The children learn to respect authority when that authority wears a benevolent and disinterested countenance, to conform to the values of their parents and, as boys and

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girls, to commit themselves cheerfully to the demands of their separate spheres. It has been argued that the figure of the mother represented in these tales, as well as the maternal persona Edgeworth assumes for herself as narrator, is both empowered and empowering. Women are thought to have identified with the principle of female agency implicit in these tales and to have found in them a "construct of mothering" that "unites self-respect and responsibility with an active and resistant virtue which is neither self-indulgent nor unaware."13 To what extent, however, do the mothers depicted here actually possess power? Invoking Foucault, Valerie Walkerdine argues that "power is not a single possession of an individual, nor is it located in a unitary, static sense. Rather, power is shifting and fragmentary, relating to positionings given the apparatuses of regulation themselves." . . . From this it follows that women have power only in so far as they are positioned as mothers in relation to certain practices concerning the regulation of children. In this sense, although the effects of the regulation of a child are to be understood as real, they are not caused in any simple sense by the mother but by the very regulation and constitution of mothering in modern practices of child rearing.14 Moreover, it is important to recognize the terms of female empowerment depicted in tales like Edgeworth's. In the world represented by Maria Edgeworth, the power assigned to mothers depends on the simultaneous restriction of female activity to the domestic sphere; if women are accorded power at home over the education and development of their children, at the same time they are prohibited from participating directly in other aspects of social and political life. As we have seen, new-style patriarchy recognizes the power of maternal energy at the same time that it concerns itself with the harnessing of that energy to serve its own purposes. For this reason, the message that Edgeworth's maternal persona most often conveys to its female readers is the necessity for the cultivation of a separate series of female attributes and virtues.15 In "The Bracelets," for example, the schoolgirl Cecilia faces a difficult moral dilemma when she sells a precious gift once given to her by her best friend in order to buy a more elaborate and expen-

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sive present for a younger girl whose favor she courts. Reflecting on her error, she calls to mind the example of her brother George, who once confessed to a comparable misdeed, thereby winning the approval of their father. As Cecilia ponders the relevance of her brother's action to her own situation, the narrator enters and delineates Cecilia's error. In repeating to herself the father's message that "they who confess their faults will make great and good men": [Cecilia] forgot to lay that emphasis on the word men, which would have placed it in contradistinction to the word women. She willingly believed, that the observation extended equally to both sexes, and flattered herself, that she should exceed her brother in merit, if she owned a fault, which she thought it would be so much more difficult to confess.16

Even so, Cecilia does not have the courage to confess to her friend, but she will eventually learn of her mistake and of the value of true friendship. At the end of the tale Mrs. Villars, the schoolmistress, summarizes Cecilia's hard-learned lesson: "Remember, that many of our sex are capable of great efforts, of making, what they call great sacrifices to virtue or friendship; but few treat their friends with habitual gentleness, or uniformly conduct themselves with prudence and good sense" (74-75). In this way "The Bracelets" fulfills its purpose: to teach young girls the necessary social skills that enable them to accommodate themselves to a life with and among other women. Cecilia must discern and internalize a particular social strategy that allows women to live interdependently in the restricted domestic world to which they have been assigned. She learns, in other words, a set of prescriptions that, although genuinely useful, are gender specific. In addition, such prescriptions bind her to one kind of experience exclusively. If Cecilia learns the value of moral "choice," the very concept of choice has already been constrained by a world in which the largest choices have been made for her on the basis of her gender. In "The Bracelets," furthermore, a separate feminine, domestic sphere to which Cecilia must learn to accommodate herself is presented as a "given." That the text deflects the reader's attention away from this given is a function of its ideology, for the given is not really a given at all but a careful representation of a specific

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familial, social, and economic mode of existence. As Terry Eagleton explains, ideology, an "inherently complex formation," is not a simple translation of meaning, but a "production" of meaning. As such, ideology creates its own reality: it "so produces and constructs the real as to cast the shadow of its absence over the perception of its presence. It is not merely that certain aspects of the real are illuminated and others obscured; it is rather that the presence of the real is a presence constituted by absences and vice versa."11 In this case, even though Edgeworth's moral lessons refer to the presence of a particular domestic reality, in truth they only point to a representation of domestic reality, one that excludes or "makes absent" everything not consistent with that representation—for example, the ways in which Cecilia might envy or resent the range of opportunities available to her brother. Thus the ideological inclination of a tale like "The Bracelets" is twofold. On the one hand, the story convinces its female readers of the necessity for certain modes of behavior, but the need for that behavior already depends on the division of the world into separate spheres, as if there were no alternative to this social arrangement. On the other hand, the story effectively banishes any suggestion that Cecilia's needs or desires might transcend her circumscribed situation. In much the same way that Edgeworth's early tales offer representations of domestic life that are fraught with ideological tension, Belinda works to disguise the roots of resistance to a particular construction of domesticity, despite the intimation that resistance to domesticity is often real and deep. In Belinda the relevance of Eagleton's definition of ideology is immediately clear through an examination of familial dynamics of the Percivals. Here scenes of the Percivals function as the ideal representation of a new-style patriarchal family and allow Edgeworth to establish the maternal ideal against which all other kinds of female behavior must be measured. Such representation begins with a description of the children: a bright, inquisitive group, they seem incapable of petulant or unruly behavior. As one visitor enters the household, they are prettily clustered around a bowl of goldfish that provide them with the opportunity for observation and recreational study. Scenes of the family at dinner display the children to their best advantage; the children were "treated neither as slaves nor as playthings, but as

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reasonable creatures" (II, 130). In tribute to her father's pedagogy, Edgeworth adds, "Without force or fictitious excitements, the taste for knowledge, and the habits of application, were induced by example, and conformed by sympathy" (II, 130). But the amenability of the children only testifies to the success of Lady Anne Percival's maternal counsel. The visitor soon learns that, under the direction of her husband, Lady Anne oversees and superintends all aspects of her children's progressive education. Later in the novel, Belinda similarly notices that the Percival children benefit directly from the full attention of their mother and the cooperative spirit of their parents, for the very coherence of the family must be attributed to Lady Anne's pivotal role. In her capacity as wife, she manages to attract her husband to the domestic sphere where, dedicating himself to his wife and children, he discovers a self-fulfillment radically unlike Lord Delacour's senseless dissipation far from home. Lady Anne Percival had, without any pedantry or ostentation, much accurate knowledge, and a taste for literature, which made her the chosen companion of her husband's understanding, as well as of his heart. He was not obliged to reserve his conversation for friends of his own sex, nor was he forced to seclude himself in the pursuit of any branch of knowledge; the partner of his warmest affections was also the partner of his most serious occupations; and her sympathy and approbation, and the daily sense of her success in the education of his children, inspired him with a degree of happy social energy, unknown to the selfish solitary votaries of avarice and ambition. (II, 131-132)

Here the narrator explicitly celebrates Lady Anne's ability to keep her husband at home. The reader's attention is directed away from the male potential for excess toward the wife, whose behavior results not only in a specific domestic life-style, but also in a particular domestic economy, which will be discussed later. For now it suffices to recognize the features of this family portrait: with Mr. Percival as its generous yet firm head, with the devoted Lady Anne yielding to his superior wisdom while contributing her own enlightened touches, with the children happily thriving under the affectionate attention of both parents, who work in harmony with each other, this romanticized depiction of family life constitutes the

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polemic center of the novel. It is the purpose of the novel to insist on the "naturalness" of this representation and, through Belinda's progress toward this model, the novel will sanction this vision explicitly. However, in a rare aside, the narrator displays a degree of selfconsciousness about the Percival family as she hastens to defend her representation against its potential critics. Those who unfortunately have never enjoyed domestic happiness, such as we have just described, will perhaps suppose the picture to be visionary and romantic; there are others—it is hoped many others—who will feel that it is drawn from truth and real life. Tastes that have been vitiated by the stimulus of dissipation might, perhaps, think these simple pleasures insipid. (II, 132) To be sure, the appreciation of domestic pleasure is a paradox. While the Percivals embody the most appealing mode of human existence, which the unvitiated would "naturally" choose, the taste for such pleasure can be corrupted; such taste for domestic pleasures—although natural—must be taught to those who fail to recognize them. The inadvertent effect of this aside is, however, to call attention to what the depiction of the Percivals necessarily banishes or "makes absent": the equally powerful and corrupting influence of the "stimulus of dissipation." In the numerous celebratory descriptions of the Percival family, the narrator must never give rise to the suspicion that another, equally compelling mode of human life—one with equally "natural" claims to the human heart—might exist beyond the parameters of the domestic sphere. The ascendency of the ideal new-style patriarchal family depends, in other words, on the important negation or absence of all other competing modes of social life. But the absences or the "not-saids" of a work are precisely that which "bind it to its ideological problematic: ideology is present in the text in the form of eloquent silences. . . . What the text says is not just this or that meaning, but precisely their meaning and separation. . . . An ideology exists because there are certain things which cannot be spoken of" (Eagleton, 89-90). In Belinda the "not spoken of"—or, rather, what the novel takes pains not to articulate—is the way in which human desires, female desires in particular, do not always accommodate themselves to the

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exigencies of domestic life. Yet this is something that Edgeworth manages to convey nonetheless because, while the explicit intention of Lady Delacour's narrative is to enhance the primacy of the representation of domestic life seen at the Percivals, her interpolated narrative is rife with a number of tensions that, as will be demonstrated shortly, belie that very purpose. Unlike Lady Anne, whose character is remarkable for the extent to which she (apparently) fails to experience inner conflict, Lady Delacour is a deeply divided creature. Emphasis on the public "mask" of Lady Delacour signals that she plays a part not entirely of her own choosing. The first "face" presented by Lady Delacour is "all life, spirit and good humour," while at home she is: listless, fretful and melancholy; she seemed like a spoiled actress off the stage, over stimulated by applause, and exhausted by the exertions of supporting a fictitious character. When her house was filled with welldressed crowds, when it blazed with lights, and resounded with music and dancing, Lady Delacour, in the character of the mistress of the revels, shone the soul and spirit of pleasure and frolic.—But the moment the company retired, when the music ceased, and the lights were extinguishing, the spell was dissolved. (I, 11)

Whereas her "surface" indicates a vibrant, social creature who thrives on the excitement of her company, underneath she is disaffected, unhappy with herself and the demands of her social life. The public Lady Delacour, the narrator insists, is thoroughly "unnatural," and words such as "actress," "fictitious," and "character" underscore the artificial dimension of her experience. She reveals the key to her artificial experience and the resulting self-division in her narrative, a long, interpolated tale told to Belinda. Both Belinda and the reader learn that, if Lady Delacour is "unnatural," what she deviates from is her "natural" calling as a wife and mother. Taking Belinda into her confidence, Lady Delacour tells of her unfortunate marriage and the dissolute social life she pursues as compensation for the emptiness of her union. Her intrigues are many, including an extramarital flirtation leading to the death of her lover in a duel and elaborate, scandalous plots designed to strike out at her social "enemies" and to assure her own preeminent position. In short, "ambitious of pleasing universally,

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[she] became the worst of slaves—a slave to the world" (I, 83). As if by coincidence, she turns from the description of her driven lifestyle to a brief history of her maternity. Yet the two prove inextricably related, for the same "enslavement to fashion" corrupts her attitude toward mothering. Her first child, a son, is born dead. Under the sway of fashionable opinion, she decides to nurse the second child herself: "There was a prodigious rout made about the matter [of maternal nursing]; a vast deal of sentiment and sympathy, and compliments and inquiries; but after the novelty was over, I became heartily sick of the business; and at the end of about three months my poor child was sick too—I don't much like to think of it—it died" (I, 85). For this her remorse persists: "If I had put it [the child] out to nurse, I should have been thought an unnatural mother; but I should have saved it's [sic] life" (I, 85). Thus the narrative argues that the practices of maternity cannot be merely "adopted" according to fashionable dictate but must be felt from within. Still, the "feelings within" prove hardest to regulate, and much narrative attention is devoted to the question of Lady Delacour's deeper attachments to her children. After the death of her second child, Lady Delacour refuses to show her grief in public, leading to her mother-in-law's belief that the mother was worse than Medea, an unfeeling mother whose existence defies the human imagination. Only Lady Anne suspects the truth, that Lady Delacour is not an "unnatural" mother, only one alienated from her true feelings. The death of Lady Delacour's second child, the inevitable consequnce of her failure to perform the maternal function with more than an affected sensibility, convinces her to send her third child, Helena, off to a wet nurse. Yet, without the duties of motherhood to absorb her attention, she turns to Harriot Freke—the very personification of aberrant female behavior—as a companion.18 I beg your pardon, my dear, for this digression on nursing and schooling, but 1 wanted only to explain to you why it was, that when I was weary of the business, I still went on in a course of dissipation. You see I had nothing at home, either in the shape of husband or children, to engage my affections. I believe it was this 'aching void' in my heart which made me, after looking abroad for a bosom friend, take such a prodigious fancy to Mrs. Freke. (I, 87)

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Engagement with Harriot Freke is, in other words, a desperate attempt to fill the void left by Lady Delacour's failed attempt at maternity. As is commonly acknowledged, in the original sketch for the novel Lady Delacour died from a breast cancer that would have been the "fit emblem of her failure as a wife and mother" (Atkinson, 94). In the final version, however, Edgeworth saves her life by a sleight of hand that changes the cancer into a delusion, a figment of Lady Delacour's slightly hysterical imagination; a rational medical man assures her that she suffers only a severe bruise. Marilyn Butler notes that in the second version, the character of Lady Delacour is "treated with more depth and sympathy . . . her most unpleasant characteristics are transferred to a new character, Mrs. Freke" (Butler, 282). In other words, Edgeworth bifurcated the character of Lady Delacour and projected onto Harriot Freke the problematic aspects of Lady Delacour that ultimately would have made possible her death as a tragic heroine. As is often the case in eighteenth-century novels, Freke's deviancy manifests itself in her masculine behavior; her aberration is especially obvious in her predilection for transdressing, for tall, phallic boots in particular. Her vulgar, sadistic behavior images the experience of living in a "world turned upside down," where women boldly attempt to usurp male prerogative.19 As the embodiment of those tendencies purged from the original Lady Delacour, Harriot Freke also mirrors the gentlewoman, reflecting repressed tendencies within her character—for example, her inclination to dissipation— that must be exorcised for Lady Delacour's "cancer" to be cured. A crucial scene from the novel underscores this connection. On the night before her examination, a time of many exaggerated anxieties for Lady Delacour, she is visited by a ghost, the specter, she believes, of a former paramour who died in a duel fought over her love. But the ghost is soon exposed as Harriot Freke in drag, and the intruder is caught in a mantrap. This exposure fully convinces Lady Delacour to go forward with her treatment. Her "cure" makes possible her rehabilitation as a wife and mother, absolving her of her obsessive guilt in the process. Thus Harriot Freke's entrapment symbolizes her isolation, exposure, and containment of the "freakish" part of Lady Delacour that must be eliminated before her rehabilitation can take place. While Edgeworth's resort to the de-

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vice of the mantrap in order to insulate Lady Delacour from Harriot's "freakishness" is arguably excessive, it nonetheless serves her polemic, for the novel insists that such "freakishness" must always yield to the principle of rationality. Significantly, it is under Harriot Freke's influence that Lady Delacour first receives the terrible blow to her breast, for the breast later becomes an image central to the novel's ideological purpose. On one occasion, incited by Freke's offer of any wager, she agrees to become involved in a duel with another woman. She also agrees, under Freke's supervision, to wear the masculine clothes that mark her deviancy from suitable female behavior. During the aborted duel, while wearing her male disguise, Lady Delacour's weapon recoils, and she receives a severe blow to her breast. This injury subsequently becomes the locus of her guilt and anxiety as she channels the feelings introduced by her earlier failure as a wife and mother into an hysterical symptom. She convinces herself that she has an incurable breast cancer, and this "cancer" becomes her dark and guilty secret. When, during a trial visit to her mother, her daughter Helena attempts to embrace her mother, Lady Delacour screams from the pain caused by her daughter's embrace and pushes the confused child away. The injured breast, in other words, is the center of her excruciating hurt, the psychic wound that she suffers in connection with her inability to perform the mother's role. That same injured breast becomes the locus of Lady Delacour's vulnerability. Her putative cancer makes her dependent on the services of her maid, who then abuses the familiarity engendered by the situation to tyrannize over her mistress. Similarly, a quack doctor preys on her weakness, offering her addictive opium as a treatment. Her ability to reason thus weakened, Lady Delacour succumbs to dangerous religious enthusiasms and begins reading Methodistical writings: how is Lady Delacour to be saved from such psychological, physical, and moral chaos? Witnessing all these forms of Lady Delacour's inner torment, Belinda decides to dedicate herself to her rehabilitation. Through Belinda's persistent efforts, Lady Delacour gradually is persuaded to submit to treatment at the hands of a real surgeon. Seen through the enlightened eyes of a real medical man, her cancer is exposed as a mere bruise, a superficial, curable wound.

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Simultaneously with her cure, Lady Delacour is convinced to take her husband into her confidence, to disclose both the injured breast and the unquiet heart contained within it. Moved by his wife's vulnerability, Lord Delacour gradually becomes attentive to his duties as a husband and father. Eventually, the exiled daughter Helena is brought back to assume her place as child to the reunited couple. Lady Delacour's restored health enables her to embrace her child free from both literal and symbolical pain. Her performance of a mother's duties will now compensate for her earlier maternal failures. Thus, Lady Delacour's cure initiates a chain of events leading to the reconstitution of her family. Once more, the wife's role in the family is pivotal, as both the husband and child depend on her health for their own happiness. The image of the healed breast emblematizes Lady Delacour's restored mental health—and her acceptance of her maternal position—which makes possible the didactic resolution of the Delacour subplot of the novel. If such a "cure" is less than plausible, it is also transparent. After all, little in the narrative prepares the reader for the idea that the wound is more superficial than it seems. Belinda herself is totally shocked by the sight of it. In the first volume of the novel, the wound has the unspecified horror of the vision that so thoroughly shocks—and mesmerizes—Coleridge's Christabel when the Lady Geraldine similarly reveals her breast to the young girl. The image of the mutilated breast in both Belinda and Coleridge's poem possesses, in other words, the force of a psychic symbol: the spectacle of it evokes fascination and repulsion, indeed, an obsession with it. In both works, the viewer's response suggests that the breast is being objectified in keeping with a primal process of projection and introjection described by Melanie Klein as characteristic of child's earliest object relations with the maternal breast. Such relations, Klein asserts, constitute the very center of the child's emotional life. According to Klein, the child's first form of anxiety "is of a persecutory nature." These persecutory feelings from inner sources are intensified by painful experiences for, from the earliest days onwards frustration and discomfort arouse in the infant the feeling that he is being attacked by hostile forces. Therefore the sensations experienced by the infant at birth and the difficulties of adapting himself to entirely new conditions give rise to

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persecutory anxiety. . . . The infant directs his feelings of gratification and love towards the "good" breast, and his destructive impulses and feelings towards what he feels to be frustrating, i.e. the "bad" breast.20

In the early part of Belinda, the heroine symbolically confronts the "bad breast," the breast that is made the locus of displaced infantile anxieties about being "persecuted" or attacked by destructive forces; that is, she views the breast that seems to fail to protect and sustain life. By process of association, Lady Delacour's "bad breast" singles her out as the logical target for such anxiety; after all, she has failed to mother her children, failed to protect them against "persecution" and destruction. The mutilated breast is the appropriate synecdoche for her failed maternity, and Belinda and the reader consider this image with all the anxiety native to the child's projection. And yet, having introduced such anxiety, the narrative assigns it not to the viewer but to Lady Delacour herself. Even though the narrative insists that the guilt over failed maternity is the "natural" mark of woman's deviancy, in fact, it is the trace of the implementation of a particular domestic ideology. In failing to complete his poem, Coleridge left the significance of Lady Geraldine's breast—as well as the anxiety it introduces— indeterminate.21 Edgeworth, however, seems compelled by a vested interest in a particular domestic enclosure to contain such anxiety, and to insure both herself and the reader that the "bad breast" might be made good; at stake here is a fantasy of maternal perfection that demands the restoration of the "good breast." This fantasy ultimately silences the voice of Lady Delacour's very real doubts about maternity in favor of a comic ending that "naturally" dissipates her initial indisposition to mothering. Although critics have often remarked on the appropriateness of the image of the breast as a sign of Lady Delacour's maternity, they have failed to query the ideological significance of such representation. Once again, what the novel must avoid saying is key to the discussion of its ideology. In this case, the novel cannot articulate that the rehabilitation of Lady Delacour, the domestic "resolution" that subjects her to a particular regimen of maternal behavior, "curing" her breast in the process, depends on the repression of competing desires that are alluded to in her various escapades with Harriot Freke. Yet the

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presence of such competing desires makes her the most recognizably human—and interesting—character in the novel, as many readers have noted.22 Moreover, one could argue that the novel works at cross-purposes in allowing Lady Delacour to narrate her adventures with Harriot Freke, for that narration is memorable for its imaginative display of high energy. In retrospect, the scene in which the dueling women are rescued from the outrages of the mob by Clarence Hervey, who arranges an impromptu race between a herd of pigs and a flock of turkeys, is one of the most original—and entertaining—in the novel. Lady Delacour's subsequent remorse fails to quell the boisterous memory of such spirited high jinks—and this kind of high adventure is not to be found at home. The novel's purpose demands that the author "tame" Lady Delacour, despite the character's expressed fears that a domesticated Lady Delacour "would fare the worse" (II, 366). In curing the wounded breast, Edgeworth offers new-style patriarchy as the "solution" to the guilty obsessiveness that so impels Lady Delacour's character. If this "solution" does not feel satisfactory, nonetheless the power of a novel like Belinda lies in its evocations of psychological turmoil facing women who try to adapt themselves to the practices of maternity. II

Edgeworth's employment of the image of the healed breast connects this novel to important, contemporaneous discussions concerning the derivation and direction of maternal "energy." These arguments lend Belinda its narrative tension, and they define the structure of psychological coercion that real mothers might have confronted. Moreover, such discussion is directly related to a separate effort to define the structure of a particular "home economics" that was critical to the purposes of new-style patriarchy. In William Buchan's Advice to Mothers on the Subject of Their Own Health, for example, the maternal breast also functions synecdochically as the representation of maternal commitment, while a mother's willingness to nurse her child becomes the test of her selfless dedication to domestic life—and

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of her "true worth" as a wife and mother. First published in 1803, Buchan's work belongs to a series of similar works taking maternal responsibility as their subject. The proliferation of such books, all of them speaking polemically against mothers who refuse to nurse their own children, suggests that a significant change in the concept of the maternal function was in progress.23 Buchan begins by acknowledging maternal power: "the more I reflect on the situation of a mother, the more I am struck with the extent of her powers, and the inestimable value of her services" (2). Yet such praise functions only to underscore his overt polemical intention: to argue that only those women who willingly perform their maternal duties can be truly "healthy." For example, he positively asserts "that a mother, who is not prevented by any particular weakness or disease from discharging that duty, cannot neglect it without material injury to her constitution" (99). In denying that a mother can fail to nurse her own child and maintain her own health, Buchan implicitly makes maternal health dependent on the mother's performance of a specific function. Although the issue is ostensibly maternal health, in fact, Buchan's choice of rhetoric, his allusion to maternal "duty," suggests that more is at issue here; his position demands that the mother adapt herself to a particular mode of maternal commitment. Thus, if Buchan prescribes maternal breast-feeding for the sake of the mother's health, he simultaneously proscribes other mother-child arrangements, for example, the mother's use of a wet nurse.24 Exploiting the weight of medical authority, his argument is both exacting and coercive. Playing on the new mother's real fears about the extreme susceptibility of her own health following the birth of her child, Buchan's rhetoric focuses her guilt around a particular issue—her successful performance of the maternal function. While Buchan's overall polemic is scarcely novel, his text is notable for its recourse to specific, colorful anecdotes that prove that the paradigm for maternal self-sacrifice is located in the New World, that is, in nature itself to the extent that, within a particular imagistic lexicon, the New World exemplifies the world of "nature." Although lengthy, such anecdotes warrant quoting in their entirety, for Buchan's obsessive instance on such examples gathered "from nature" testifies to his need to construct a particularly forceful

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representation of motherhood, one that convinces through its exploitation of graphic details. The wives of the American savages are said to extend this mark of motherly tenderness and solicitude [i.e., breastfeeding] even to infants that die upon the breast. After having bestowed upon them the rites of burial, they come once a day for several weeks, and press from the nipple a few drops of milk upon the grave of the departed suckling. I have seen a drawing taken from nature by a gentleman at Botany Bay: it represents a female of that country, after having opened one of her veins, and made an incision in the navel of her sickly child, endeavoring to transfuse her blood into its body, and hoping thereby to restore its health and prolong its existence. Observation and experience had taught her, that the umbilical cord, or navel string, was the medium through which the foetus, while in the womb, received nourishment from its mother; she fancied, therefore, that she could transfer her blood through the same channel, and renovate a life which was dearer than her own! Let the mother in civilized society, who, from motives of selfish ease and imaginary pleasure, denies her infant the vital stream with which she is abundantly supplied for its sustenance, think of the poor savage, and start with horror at her own unnatural depravity. (99-101)

Based on these anecdotes "from nature," Buchan intends to prove that even the "least civilized" of all women recognize and take seriously their true maternal calling. Holding up the example of the savage woman's grief, he aims to evoke and then focus the guilt of the mother who would "waste" her precious, life-giving milk, even while that milk might be a source of life for her own child. The second anecdote makes the mother's blood and milk analogous substances. Buchan insinuates that the mother who fails to nurse "from motives of selfish ease and imaginary pleasure" (for, barring ill health, there are no other motives) is herself, in comparison to the savage mother, uncivilized, depraved, and "unnatural." Throughout Advice to Mothers, Buchan returns to the theme of the "unnatural" or monstrous mother who ignores the dictates of nature, often appealing directly to the authority of Rousseau. In a later passage, he turns his view away from civilization once more, this time citing the example of wild animals who "never degenerate" because the females "obedient in every thing to the impulses of

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nature, nurse their offspring, and watch over them with most tender solicitude, till they can provide for themselves—." Not only the inhabitants of the howling wilderness, the she-wolf and the fell tygress, but even the monsters of the great deep, draw out the breast, and give suck to their young. Will woman then suffer herself to be stigmatized as the only unfeeling monster that can desert the issue of her own womb, and abandon it to the care of another? Will she alone entail the curse of her unnatural conduct on her hapless posterity? (215-216) Within this passage, Buchan's imagery tellingly works against itself: the same evocative words used to describe the "monsters of the great deep" (the whales), within the very next sentence, coerce the human mother into conformity with "natural" behavior. Yet the repetition of the word "monster," here used in two slightly different senses ("an animal of huge size" as opposed to "a person of horrible cruelty"), betrays Buchan's implicit anxiety of the "natural," for in appealing to the "natural," Buchan's imagery points to evidence of the possibility of excess within nature itself. At the same time, however, the explicit purpose of Buchan's argument is to denigrate the idea of choice about the matter of maternal breast-feeding and to render obligatory women's participation in a specific mode of maternal behavior. The last two rhetorical questions necessarily frame the mother as another kind of "monster," and they make her complicitous in this act of framing; in reply to such an utterance, a mother can only answer that she will not be an unfeeling monster, that she will not deviate from nature's way. Paradoxically, that one element that distinguishes her from the beast—her ability to choose whether to suckle her own child—is that which, by the logic of Buchan's own argument, marks her as "unnatural," while all evidence gathered from nature points to critical similarities between her ability to nurture and the monster's. Although mothers may indeed find fulfillment in the act of nursing their children, Buchan's rhetoric obscures the issue of female satisfaction in favor of a far more coercive argument eliciting full conformity to a particular maternal "ideal." Writing for the interest of his gender, Buchan's own investment in such an ideal is transparent; a woman who would refuse to give of herself to her children might similarly refuse to dedicate herself to her husband's concerns. Worse still, she

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might deceive her husband into believing she was committed to motherhood, while she secretly yearns to escape from such responsibilities. Buchan insists on this point: "Let not husbands be deceived," he writes, ". . , Neither conjugal love, fidelity, modesty, chastity, nor any other virtue, can take deep root in the breast of the female that is callous to the feelings of a mother." He refers to "the little tricks that are so often played off by new-married women to keep up the show of a wish to nurse their children, while every engine is secretly employed to make the deluded husband conjure her to relinquish her design." The woman who will not suckle "ought to abstain from procreation. The woman who cannot discharge the duties of a mother, ought again and again to be told, that she has no right to become a wife" (217-218). Elsewhere in his text Buchan resorts to a telling choice of metaphor, for this kind of rhetoric also serves an argument about a particular kind of "home economics." The modern phrase, with its allusions to a distinctly female sphere of activity is, of course, redundant when applied to the eighteenth-century context, for prior to the nineteenth century, economics meant "the science or art of maintaining a household." In Buchan's text, the husband must carefully maintain or manage the expenditure of family resources— not just the family's finances, but the wife's "energy" as well. It is important to recognize that what Buchan perceives as the configuration of "female energy" is yet another aspect of his representation of the wife. The preoccupation with such energy signals concerns more symbolic than real. In his text, the use of certain key words— "spend "(according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to pay out, to disburse, as well as to incur expenditure of money; also to use up, exhaust, or consume by use), "discharge" (to send out or pour forth), "dissipation" (the wasteful expenditure or consumption of money, means, or powers)—alerts the reader to his implicit purpose to be achieved in the process of representation: to shape an argument about the ways in which female energy, maternal energy in particular, is to be managed within the domestic sphere. According to the logic of Buchan's argument, only the husband's careful direction of maternal practices assures that his wife's energy is not wasted—or worse. For example: "Women, ennervated by luxury, allured by a false taste for mistaken pleasure, and encouraged by shameless example,

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are eager to get rid of their children as soon as possible in order to spend the time thus gained from the discharge of duty in dissipation or indolence" (217). From Buchan's argument we interpolate that the woman who dissipates her time or energy in fashionable pursuits—"luxury" or "pleasure"—instead of dedicating herself to nursing her children, refuses to spend her time in the service of a domestic economy. She literally dispenses an income on the requisite items of fashion, ignoring her husband's efforts to superintend the household. She is, in all probability, a "slave of the world," a slave to the demands of a separate economy with its different patterns of consumption. The implications of such enslavement are numerous, for a woman's refusal to submit herself to the discipline of her husband's management spells the potential economic disintegration of the family. In fact, real changes in the structure of a consumer society reinforced such anxiety for, as Neil McKendrick demonstrates, the "commercialization of fashion," among other changes, made women increasingly vulnerable to manipulation by early forms of advertising and marketing. Similarly, upper- and middle-class women came to depend on lavish and expensive fashionable displays as a means of distinguishing themselves from the lower classes.25 This "evidence" of female consumerism, symbolizing yet another kind of female "consumption," would have fueled the debate over female profligacy, as the perception of market patterns contributed to an ideology insisting on the necessity for domestic restraint. At the same time, the metaphoric density of Buchan's language also discloses significant, underlying sexual tensions that shape the terms of this argument. As Barker-Benfield has argued in another context, the obsessive need to exert control over women's spending suggests one form of "displacement of men's need for order onto women, given men's commitment to the anarchy of their individualist malehood."26 Thus the formula "men earn—women spend" was typically employed to give voice to an ideology that was at once economic and sexual: "The spending female 'wrung [her husband's] heart.' . . . her spending action was insatiable . . . [and] she absorbed man's earnings, man's heart's blood, into her own absorbing system" (194). Barker-Benfield's analysis reveals the unstated tensions structuring the argument: in attempting to control his wife's spending, the husband attempts to exert his control over what he

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perceives to be his wife's explosive sexual energies. Whether she threatens to "spend out" her husband or to "spend" her own time and energy in the pursuit of pleasures that fail to benefit his interests, the wife's conspicuous consumption threatens the husband's domination. Applying Barker-Benfield's terms to Buchan's text, we see that the language of economics is both literally and symbolically expressive. In prescribing maternal breast-feeding, Buchan creates the conditions for the practice of a specific economy that assures that maternal energy will not be wasted but spent on the legitimate practice of maternity, a practice that enriches—not depletes—the family coffers. The insistence on maternal breast-feeding thus represents one strategy for controlling female energy. Yet the presence of such a strategy manifests a concern with the persistent problem of female desire, a problem that texts such as Buchan's can neither acknowledge nor name explicitly. Buchan's text has been paired with Edgeworth's in order to establish suggestive connections between the two texts and to propose that, although marked by important differences, the novel is informed by similar anxieties over the control of putative female energy and that it, too, seeks to domesticate such energy. First, like Buchan's text, Belinda does not sanction the recalcitrant power of female desire. Instead, domestic influence in the novel is deemed the appropriate substitute for women's real economic power. The novel demonstrates that, prior to the implementation of domestic economy, Lady Delacour's spending represented a substantial threat. Having relinquished her fortune to Lord Delacour in her youthful ignorance, Lady Delacour spurns the influence that might be hers, choosing instead to dissipate the family income—as well as her own energies—on her social life-style, a life-style notable for its conspicuous expenditure. She herself confesses that her husband's attempt to manage her scandalous behavior provoked her into a "fresh career of extravagance" (I, 77). In response to her husband's entreaties for fiscal prudence, she ridicules his authority and answers sarcastically "that economy was a word which I never heard of in my life, till I married his lordship; that, upon second recollection, it was true, I had heard of such a thing as national economy; and that it would be a very pretty, though rather hackneyed topic of declamation for a maiden speech in the house of lords" (77). While Lord

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Delacour's dissipation is depicted as horrifying and reckless, it is Lady Delacour's spending that almost leads the family to ruin, and her extravagance represents her truancy from the "legitimate" exercise of female influence that, in ideal circumstances such as those seen at the Percivals, leads to the practice of a prudent and conservative domestic economy. Her inability to nurture Lord Delacour's children only prefigures her inability to preserve the integrity of her family and her flagrant disregard for the necessity of a "home economics." Conversely, the first sign of her rehabilitation occurs when, through the effort of her own obliging graces, she keeps Lord Delacour home, thereby controlling his profligate tendencies, and he misses nothing of his life abroad: "the perception that his talents were called out, and that he appeared to unusual advantage, made him excellent company: he found that the spirits can be raised by self-complacency even more agreeably than by burgundy" (II, 296). Although the wife here seems to manage her husband, she does so only by graciously making herself subject to his needs and interests. In this way, Belinda endorses the practice of home economics. The tensions arising from this endorsement have already been described. Yet if the endorsement of home economics suggests that Edgeworth herself shared Buchan's anxieties over the control of female energy, several crucial differences distinguish her strategy for the containment of such energy from his. In contrast to Buchan's text, the authority of Edgeworth's fiction is narrative, not medical or scientific. Nor is it exacting. Edgeworth's choice of the novel form allows for an empathetic treatment of the issues, as Lady Delacour's guilt is both represented and foregrounded. Unlike Buchan's text, Edgeworth's is attentive to the initial awkwardness of domestic sensibility. Belinda recognizes, on some level, what it means to have to conform to prescribed forms of behavior, even if it ultimately mutes the voice that bespeaks the difficulty of domesticity for some women. Whether the author intended it or not, what emerges from Belinda is a statement about the psychic cost of making women the regulators of a new domesticity. Paradoxically, at the end of the novel, Edgeworth must depend on the "domesticated" Lady Delacour to elicit Belinda's confession of love for Clarence Hervey and to catalyze the resolution of the plot. As the author's own despairing assessment of the character

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makes clear, the "stick or stone" protagonist could not have been expected to recognize the presence of her own passions. Only Lady Delacour—a former denizen of those dangerous reaches beyond the domestic sphere and associate to Harriot Freke—can possibly name the heroine's secret desire. In other words, that Belinda's character fails to achieve its fullest dimensions attests, finally, to the demands of the domestic ideology that has been imposed on the novel. At the same time, readers' persistent attraction to the unrepentant Lady Delacour—always the more interesting and complex character— intimates our own dissatisfaction with the claustrophobic closure resulting from the practices of home economics. As a novel, Belinda remains most engaging not when it tells us of the safety to be found at home, but when it allows us to participate vicariously in Lady Delacour's transgressive life abroad.

5 Good Housekeeping: The Politics of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy

In Mary Leadbeater's Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry (1811) Jem explains his decision to postpone marriage until he and his fiancee have saved for a good house with a chimney and furniture. He declares he would shun life "in a mud hovel without a chimney; the parents and children all pig together, on the same wisp—the father goes out to look for food, and when the mother prepares it, they all fall to, and tear it with their fingers and devour it. In the evening they smoke and afterwards—." He is then interrupted by his friend Tim, who reports that his father's family lives in just the manner described by Jem. The imagery of this passage is both horrific and fraught with ideological tension. Depicted here is the voracious "hunger," the all-consuming drive for instant gratification, that is thought to characterize the life of the Irish peasant. Concerned only with the immediate indulgence of their appetites, such a family knows nothing of the self-discipline so advocated by Jem as a means of raising the body above its animalistic impulses. As the author of the passage, Leadbeater intends to draw the reader's attention to the connection between the outside and the inside, the life of the body and the life of the soul, for the squalor surrounding the indigent peasant suggests something of the chaos within his undisciplined constitution.1 The key word here is "pig": used as a verb, "to pig" means "to huddle together in a disorderly, dirty or irregular manner" or "to 138

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crowd together like pigs." Thus Jem's use of the word enforces the long-standing connection between the Irish and their pigs, as seen, for example, in Engels' Condition of the Working Class, where he wrote, "The Irishman allows the pig to share his own living quarters. This new, abnormal method of rearing livestock in the large towns is entirely of Irish origin. . . . The Irishman lives and sleeps with the pig, the children play with the pig, ride on its back, and roll about in the filth with it."2 No wonder then, that Jem's fiancee Rose distinguishes herself from the hapless Nan by building a proper sty for her pig. To do so is to imitate middle-class practices of housekeeping, but it is also symbolically to raise oneself out of the mire traditionally associated with the life of the Irish peasant. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression Stallybrass and White suggest that the pig—an image of the "low grotesque"—"is a site of competing, conflicting, and contradictory definitions."3 Like other images of the grotesque, the pig fixed the gaze of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, who were simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the possibilities it represented. In Leadbeater's text, as in the texts of many nineteenth-century, middle-class reformers, the pig introduces a complex dynamic of class positioning, and that class positioning occurs primarily around a series of prescriptions about how the body is to be lived. Because it conveniently symbolizes what the middle class "has repressed in order to become what it is" (Stallybrass and White, 59)—its own attraction to filth and dirt, as well as its own indiscriminate appetites—the pig enables a process of class self-definition. For several reasons, Leadbeater's text, with its imagery of the Irish and their pigs, provides an appropriate point of entry into a discussion of Anglo-Irish politics. First, Cottage Dialogues was written in imitation of Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts, and Leadbeater's intention seems to have b6en to extend More's message to the lower classes of Ireland. If the purpose of More's tracts was to counteract other revolutionary writings in England, then Leadbeater's text similarly attempts to contain insurrection in Ireland. As I will argue, Cottage Dialogues thus replicates many of Hannah More's concerns with the control of the lower-class body; here the "exact representation" of an indigenous Irish "manner of being" provides the occasion for the Anglo-Irish gentry to promote

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and define its own interests in opposition to the Irish peasantry. Like the Cheap Repository Tracts, Cottage Dialogues is a text by a woman author that foregrounds class issues. Both warrant special attention because they disclose the special role of women in a process that deploys images of the body as way of focusing class issues. But Leadbeater's text is also a point of entry into a discussion of Maria Edgeworth's position within Anglo-Irish politics, for Edgeworth chose to edit and promote the Dialogues. As we will see, Leadbeater's dialogues express the very concern that preoccupied Edgeworth throughout her career: how the Irish lower orders chose to "live the body" differently from their Anglo-Irish "superiors." From the beginning, Edgeworth was fascinated by images of the grotesque body that she found displayed in the undisciplined practices (to her eye) of the indigenous population. This fascination— simultaneously an attraction and a repulsion—later resurfaces as a major theme in two of her Irish works, Castle Rackrent and Ennui. But it is also present in a range of biographical materials, from early letters to her father's Memoirs, which she edited and completed after his death. My purpose in reading all these materials is to isolate certain telltale moments in which a "class voice" makes itself audible as the writer's attention converges on imagery of the body. I will maintain that, at such moments, class concerns take precedence over gender, as Edgeworth's voice is less expressive of her gender than it is of her class. Thus, for example, when Richard Edgeworth provided editorial apparatus for Castle Rackrent, or later, when the daughter completed the project of the father's memoirs, it is often more difficult to distinguish male from female "voice" than we might expect. Instead of a conventionally gendered voice, what we hear is a voice of a particular class in the making. And yet my purpose is not to efface gender, since I also maintain that gender can be an instigating factor in women's complicity in patriarchal class relations. In this case, Maria Edgeworth's discovery of the Irish peasant as a subject resembles Hannah More's discovery of the rural poor as a symbolic body onto which she was able to displace her own bodily anxiety. Yet, like More, Edgeworth may have felt that anxiety all the more acutely because she was a woman.

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I

Maria Edgeworth's investment in Anglo-Irish, Protestant Ascendancy politics emerges against a family history in which her ancestors had assumed the role of landowners: Edgeworthstown first became a family possession when James I granted Francis Edgeworth 600 acres of Irish land in accordance with royal policy of "settling Protestants of English descent on lands confiscated from Irish Catholics."4 In subsequent generations, the estate was lost once, when the family was temporarily dispossessed in 1689, and nearly lost again later through the poor management of her greatgrandfather Frank. Such near losses made the issue of ownership pressing to Maria's father Richard, who spent most of his adult life cultivating estate lands, making them both profitable and "safe" against the threat of loss.5 Brought up in Ireland, Richard completed his education at Oxford and married in England. His 1782 decision to make Edgeworthstown the family home was neither totally expected nor inevitable, for many Irish landowners often spent their entire lives abroad in England or on the continent, at a considerable distance from their responsibilities.6 Furthermore, Richard's earlier attempts to manage the family estate had not been encouraging (Butler, 38). Richard's return to his family estate in 1782 can be construed simultaneously as a benevolent, disinterested move, prompted by nothing less than the desire to "improve his country," and as a shrewd political calculation designed to preserve Ascendancy privilege. In Richard's own words: In the year 1782,1 returned home to Ireland, with a firm determination to dedicate the remainder of my life to the improvement of my estate, and to the education of my children; and farther, with the sincere hope of contributing to the melioration of the inhabitants of the country, from which I drew my subsistence.7

In order to understand Richard's motives within their context, we must first reconstruct the vision of the "home" that the Edgeworths returned to reclaim. How would Ireland have appeared to this returning Anglo-Irish gentleman and his family—particularly to his oldest daughter, then 14 and the product of British schools?

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Predominantly rural, uncultivated, and even primitive by British standards, Ireland experienced a sudden and rapid population expansion during the latter decades of the eighteenth century. The preference for early marriage and large families seemed to contribute significantly to such rampant population growth and, to the outsider, the Catholic rural population seemed undisciplined. Protestants often viewed radical differences in Irish Catholic culture and religion as testimony to the less "civilized" state of the native race, as the impoverished conditions of the rural population seemed to result in a disinclination for "self-improvement."8 Several months after her arrival, Maria sent her first impressions to Fanny Robinson. According to Marilyn Butler, her letter "owed much more to her study of law and political economy" than to firsthand impressions. Still, if the adolescent writer echoes a moralistic political philosophy, her imagination remains fixated on the physical conditions of Irish lower-class life-style, for such conditions clearly demarcate her class from the other. The Irish are perhaps the laziest civilized nation on the face of the Earth; to avoid a moment's present trouble they will bring on themselves real misfortunes... for this indolence peculiar to the Irish Peasantry several reasons may be assigned, amongst others the most powerful is the low wages of labor 6d a day in winter and 8d in summer; the demand for labor must be very little indeed, in a country when the day labourers in it can find it answer [sic] to go over to a foreign nation, in search of employment. They live in a hut whose mudbuilt walls can scarcely support their weather-beaten roofs: you may see the children playing before the cabin sans stockings sans every thing—The father of the family, on a fine summer's day standing in the sunshine at his door while his house is ready to fall upon his head and is supported only by two or three props of wood; perhaps out of charity you go up to him and tell him he had much better set about, repairing his house.—he would answer you 'Oh (pronounced Ho) faith Honey when it falls it will be time enough to think of picking it up.'" (Cited by Butler, 90)

Here Edgeworth deplores both adverse economic practices that exacerbate native "indolence" and that indolence itself; the father's cavalier indifference toward the imminent collapse of the family hut images his very unwillingness to better his own circumstances,

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while his nearly naked children testify to the family's utter disregard for bodily proprieties. The balance of the letter praises Irish hospitality and charity; yet the charity of the higher classes is cited as "one of the greatest checks to industry," for such charity seems to stifle self-initiative. While the letter responds favorably to lowerclass eloquence and "volubility," remarking the demise of Irish language, it also conveys an early interest in appropriating that language for the benefit of an English audience. Edgeworth soon makes her observations the substance of an amusing letter to be sent home: "The Irish language is now almost gone into disuse, the class of people all speak English except in their quarrels with each other, then unable to give vent to their rage in any but their own they have recourse to that and they throw it out with a rapidity and vehemence which I can give you no idea of . . ." (91).9 Later Edgeworth would accompany her father on his visits to the tenants, and she would perceive firsthand the ways in which an established, corrupt system of aristocratic management had elicited the worst kind of peasant duplicity and cunning. Accustomed to relying on "favor," the arbitrary mark of preference, the tenantry responded with guile and manipulation. As Butler explains, Richard Edgeworth found that "the tenants were highly practised at making up for some of the inequalities of the Irish land system" (86). With no middle class to buffer the extreme positions of the empowered and the powerless, Maria Edgeworth would have found herself positioned on one side of a cultural and political divide. In Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene Michael Hurst draws suggestive analogies between the situation of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland and other early nineteenth-century colonial settlers. In particular, he asserts that, like other colonialists abroad, the Edgeworths would have known firsthand the experience of living in a potentially explosive political climate. For example, "During the first half of the nineteenth-century some forty-six government measures were sought to establish 'Coercion' in the land. The life of the Anglo-Irish remained as ever the life of the frontiersman. 'Whitefeet' rural terrorists could ruin peace of mind every bit as effectively as 'Blackfoot' Red Indians."10 To some extent Hurst's observations are accurate, in that the fear of physical violence and the destruction of property was well known to the family at Edgeworthstown.11 Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, "defenders"—or bands of roving

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Catholics organized to protect themselves against Protestant attack—represented a considerable threat to Anglo-Irish property (see Butler 114-115). In 1796 Maria wrote of the family's strategies for dealing with the situation. Even though they slept with the "doors and windows unbarred," she explained that it was "only those doors and windows that have neither bolts nor bars that we leave unbarred, and these are more at present than we wish, for the reputation of our valor." During the day, the family anxiously searched for traces of charcoal, which might have been used to obscure the face of a hostile intruder at night. All that I crave for my own part is, that if I am to have my throat cut, it may not be by a man with his face blackened with charcoal. I shall look at every person that comes here very closely, to see if there be any marks of charcoal upon their visages. Old wrinkled offenders I suppose would never be able to wash out their stains; but in others a very clean face will in my mind be a strong symptom of guilt, clean hands proof positive, and clean nails ought to hang a man.12

No doubt the tone here is highly exaggerated, perhaps even comic, to allay anxiety among family members abroad. Still, the apparent levity of the passage exists alongside the admitted compulsion to scrutinize everybody, young and old alike. Edgeworth's gaze rests on the face in particular, for here the marks of subversion are most likely to appear. Yet the face that betrays a terrorist only speaks metonymically for a "body in revolt," and the face becomes the site onto which it is possible to project a series of anxieties concerning the possibility of violence and subversion. That same face will later haunt Edgeworth at the end of her career. In 1798 the threat of violence took a different and still more immediate form when the French landed in County Mayo. The approach of a small but ominous army of 20 or 30 Catholic rebels forced the Edgeworths to flee their home. During the brief period of "invasion" that followed, the reputation of family members saved the estate from destruction, although ironically this preservation of the estate was later construed as proof of Richard Edgeworth's sympathy for the French and the Catholic rebels.13 In her father's memoir, Maria remembered the relief the family felt on returning to find the house as they had left it: "Even the most common things

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appeared delightful; the green lawn, the still groves, the birds singing, the fresh air, all external nature, and all the goods and conveniences of life, seemed to have wonderfully increased in value, from the fear into which we had been put of losing them irrecoverably" (Memoirs, II, 232). Still, if, as Hurst suggests, the Edgeworths shared with other colonialists the fear of violence and loss of property, other aspects of their experience define the nature of their presence on Irish soil. For example, Anglo-Irish landowners often demonstrated a marked sense of racial superiority to their Irish tenants, yet the very concept of "race" should be defined in terms of profound difference: Henry Louis Gates' definition of race as "a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which—more often than not—also have fundamentally opposed economic interests"14 is directly relevant here. In Ireland, such difference was perpetuated by a mentality that made the Irish Protestant into a "conqueror and yet a colonial, a patriot, but one whose interests set him against the majority of his countrymen." As Thomas Flanagan writes, the Anglo-Irish landowner was "a member of the Garrison."15 Indeed, like many in their class, the Edgeworths resisted selected aspects of the indigenous culture, preferring to see Ireland as an extension of England. Richard Edgeworth once speculated in a letter to Josiah Wedgewood that "if the inhabitants are excited to industry by the present opportunity of becoming manufacturers," Ireland could develop into the best remaining British possession. Citing such evidence as proof of Edgeworth's "much more positive and idealistic attitude towards his homeland between 1780 and 1782," Butler traces Edgeworth's thinking to Adam Ferguson's Essay on Civil Society (1766), or more probably Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (Butler, 76-77). But Richard's reformist philosophy owed much to the fact that he continued to see himself as a race apart from the very people whose interests he claimed to serve. Moreover, if the rationalist philosophy of the Lunar Society is to be seen at work in Edgeworth's decision to go home so, too, are the principles and practices of new-style patriarchy that he had first employed in the area of education.16 Several factors made estate management analogous to the management of a family, but on a larger scale. For example, with a history of extreme reliance on a

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system of aristocratic favor, as well as a tradition of abuses, corrupt management, and inefficient land use, the rural tenantry would have represented—in the most immediate and pressing terms—the returning landlord's paternal responsibility, the metaphorical equivalent of his dependent and needy children. Richard Edgeworth responded to the pressures of his responsibility by making his return the occasion for the construction of a particular kind of patriarchal authority. Such authority was characterized not by the threat of external coercion, the traditional mark of aristocratic prerogative, but by a disinterested concern, a benevolent "influence" over the lives "and fates of his tenants.17 According to his daughter's account, Richard first turned his attention to the condition of the estate itself. The manor was his first concern. Wisely avoiding extreme actions, Richard neither overbuilt the family home, excessively burdening family resources in the process, nor forced his family to live in a "hovel." His restoration of the manor house was characterized by prudence and moderation, qualities that Richard soon applied to other aspects of the estate management as well. Rapidly establishing himself with the tenantry, he collected rents himself, thereby making unnecessary the services of the "drivers," or ruthless overseers, as well as the middlemen whenever possible. In this way, he gained more direct access to the tenants. Maria testifies that her father "became individually acquainted with his tenantry—saw, heard, talked to them, and obtained a full knowledge of their circumstances and characters" (Memoirs, II, 16-17). Furthermore, he implemented a series of reforms designed to convince the tenants of his fairness. For example, he absolved the "claims of duty fowl—of duty work, man or beast" characteristic of the old leases and no longer bound his tenants to have their corn ground at any particular mill. He omitted a variety of remaining feudal fines and penalties, except for an "alienation fine," that is, a fee imposed on tenants who relet divided land (Memoirs, II, 20-21). (Maria particularly deplored the practice of reletting, since it victimized both the landlord who lost control of his tenants as a result and the tenant who found himself at the mercy of unscrupulous middlemen.) Avoiding the older practice of long leases, he instead preferred "one life" leases that, as Maria explains, "gave him the power to encourage and reward" (Memoirs, II, 26). In addition,

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such an action "act[ed] as a motive for exertion; it [kept] up the connexion and dependence, which there [should have been] between the different ranks, without creating any servile habits, or leaving the tenants insecure as to the fair reward of his industry" (Memoirs, II, 26-27). No doubt such reforms ultimately led to the more efficient management of estate resources and properties. However, as Maria's explanation indicates, such changes also facilitated the implementation of a particular landlord-tenant relationship, one in which a sense of "connexion and dependence" was essential to the preservation of the status quo; in Maria's account, the changes preserved the difference that should have been between ranks. In this way, Richard's reforms adhered to the Lockean principles of paternalism, which were similarly designed to guarantee the status quo. In Some Thoughts Upon Education Locke had warned that the fear of patriarchal tyranny would provoke in subordinates a "counterfeit carriage" and a "dissembling outside" of loyalty and obedience—a response both untrustworthy and dangerous—whereas the psychological imprinting of "awe" and "respect" would insure a lifetime of loyalty and political allegiance. Similarly, Richard wisely eschewed despotism and instead imparted to his tenants a sense of his own disinterested, unbiased generosity. He convinced them that he was acting on their behalf without eliciting their indignation; most important, he made them dependent on him without making them resentful. According to Maria, "In his attempts to make any improvements in managing [the tenants'] domestic business, or their moral economy, he used example more than precept, exhortation, or authority" (Memoirs, II, 40-41). Maria further explains that, like the children in the Lockean paradigm, the tenants responded to the rational delineation of patriarchal authority. If they had detected any leniency in Richard's behavior, they would have "cheated, loved, and despised a mere easy landlord, and his property would have gone to ruin without permanently bettering their interests or their morals." As a result, Richard worked to convince them of his "strictness in punishing, as well as [. . .] his desire to reward" (Memoirs, II, 31), thereby forestalling the possibility that his tenants might exploit him. For example, he refused to "skreen" or protect his tenants if they infringed on the law by poaching, and he made it a point never to

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favor any one of his tenants (Memoirs, II, 35-36). Such impartiality extended to a respect for the tenants' religious differences. Yet fairness practiced in the service of sound estate management did not mean an utter indifference to the tenants' political affiliation. To the contrary, a landlord might expect return for his demonstrated impartiality, especially at election times when the tenants could be expected to vote according to their landlord's interests. In a letter to her brother written in 1835 Maria elaborated on the ways in which paternal "influence" could exert itself after the fact, without any visible signs of coercion. I quite agree with you, as you do with my father, in the general principle that according to the British Constitution the voters at election should be free, that the landlords should not force their tenants to vote. But a landlord must and should and ever will have influence, and this is one way in which property is represented and the real balance of the constitution preserved. My father in fact always did use the influence of being a good kind of landlord, as well as the favour of leaving a hanging half year in their hands. I never knew him in any instance revenge a tenant's voting against him, but I have heard him say, and I know it was his principle, that he was not bound to show favour or affection to any tenant who voted what is called against his landlord. (A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth, III, 169)

As historians document, the period in which Maria refers was an important moment in the history of "landlord influence." Prior to 1793, the landlord's control over his tenants had been negligible: "The peak period of landlord influence at elections begins with the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, which, while maintaining the exclusion of Catholics from parliament, conceded them the right to vote."18 During this first phase in which landlords exerted control through financial obligation, fear, or loyalty, one especially persuasive landlord convinced his tenants to vote more than once—"a thing they could do only by personating other voters on the register and so risking criminal prosecution" (745). Although the first period of landlord influence was to culminate in 1826 with the appearance of serious rival candidates supported by the Catholic clergy, in fact landlord influence persisted until education and rising prosperity eventually altered the balance of power. Ascendancy control was

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not to be lessened until an Irish Nationalist movement came into being. An important element in landlord control was the so-called "hanging gale" (or "hanging half," as Maria calls it in the letter to her brother). Following this practice, new tenants did not pay rent for at least six months. Although Maria cites her father's adherence to this custom as a sign of his generosity, historians frequently describe the consequences of the "hanging gale" in far less sanguine terms. According to one, as a result of the arrangement, tenants were "permanently in debt to their landlord, who could at any time distrain on them for arrears, and have their cattle impounded—a fate which, at a time when so many Irish peasants lived practically on the subsistence line, might actually be hardly less disastrous to them than outright eviction."19 There is no evidence that Richard Edgeworth ever used the arrangement to such sinister ends. Nonetheless, as Maria's elaboration makes apparent, the ultimate goal of Richard's benevolent reforms was precisely to control the rural tenantry, to instill within the tenants a pressing sense of obligation to the landlord who had so served their interests, and to make certain of their loyalty in potentially devisive political situations. Richard's tenants were to vote for his interests not because they dreaded punishment, but because they feared the withdrawal of his "affection." In other words, Richard's benevolent, intimate interest in the lives of his tenants was to contain and regulate impulses that might otherwise become inimical or hostile to his purposes. That the Memoir never explicitly draws attention to the issue of political control is scarcely surprising, for the ideology of Ascendancy politics depends on the repression of the very possibility of the tenants' self-determination. Whereas, in Belinda, the function of domestic ideology was to repress competing social modes so, too, in the memoirs of Richard Edgeworth's return to Ireland, the function of ideology is to "make absent" all competing modes of social or political life. For all its emphasis on progressive reform, the daughter's rendering of the father's life never questions the very assumptions on which Ascendancy rule was predicated; it never asks, for example, whether the tenants might not have benefited still further from an altogether different system of property and land distribution (a possibility that Maria's Irish novels later acknowledge only to deny). Neither does it ever call into question the notion of

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"privilege" so essential to Ascendancy rule. New-style patriarchy, as exemplified in the reforms implemented at Edgeworthstown, improved on the ancient practices of aristocratic abuse while leaving the power structure essentially intact—or better still, inviolable because established from within. In this way, new-style patriarchy served the purposes of colonial rule in Ireland. Animating Maria's account of her father's return to Ireland is a particular discourse of power that equally determines the representation of her father and the tenants. If her father's benevolent authority is implicitly celebrated here, the independent life of the Irish tenantry is subordinated to that authority; the radically different cultural, social, and even religious beliefs of the tenants disappear into the discussion of Richard's effective management. Yet ironically, as an important innovator of the regional novel, Maria Edgeworth is most famous as the astute—and faithful—recorder of Irish "differences" in language and culture. What is often overlooked, however, is the extent to which her transcription of Irish cultural life is simultaneously an appropriation and containment of volatile political tensions. In Castle Rackrent, for example, the comic "difference" that characterizes Thady Quirk is simultaneously evoked and controlled by the authority of Edgeworth's fiction. II

Gilbert and Gubar's feminist appreciation of Castle Rackrent in The Madwoman in the Attic is only one version of a reading that celebrates Thady Quirk, finding in him fascinating psychological depth and complexity—evidence of Edgeworth's ability to project into and to sympathize with Thady's character. Gilbert and Gubar believe that Edgeworth specifically identifies with Thady's ambivalence in the face of exploitative male power; to them, Castle Rackrent is "a critique of patriarchy." They assert that Edgeworth criticizes the "male aristocratic line" because "it exploits Ireland, that old sow, leaving a peasantry starved and dispossessed. Rackrent means destructive rental, and Castle Rackrent is a protest against exploitative landlords."20 Yet which patriarchy is being critiqued here? As Richard Edgeworth's improvements at Edgeworthstown

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suggest, patriarchal authority could have several different faces, and the several generations of Rackrents represent different phases of Irish history as well as different models for landlord-tenant relations; the ascendancy of Thady's own son Jason at the end of the novel is only the most recent historical phase of patriarchy, one to which Edgeworth responds ambivalently.21 The notion that Castle Rackrent protests against "exploitative male power" makes most sense when applied to Thady's narrative about Sir Kit, the third master, and his "Jew Lady Rackrent."22 Indeed Sir Kit personifies the worst of the landlords; he bleeds the tenants and practices many of the abuses Richard Edgeworth had so wisely eschewed. When unable to raise any more funds off the land, he marries abroad, choosing a rich Jewish heiress as his bride. Thady's narrative of her experiences—of the mental and physical tortures to which her husband subjects her because she will not relinquish to him a valuable diamond cross—conveys a strong degree of sympathy for her plight. As Gilbert and Gubar write, "Starving inside the ancestral mansion, the literally imprisoned wife is also figuratively imprisoned inside the husband's fictions" (150). However, if Thady's narrative allows insight into a situation where patriarchal prerogatives exploit and victimize an innocent woman, that insight is problematized by Thady's split loyalties. On the one hand, he cannot help but feel sorry for the wife, and he clearly believes her imprisonment is an extraordinary cruelty. He writes, for example, that "When she was lying, to all expectation, on her deathbed of a broken heart, I could not but pity her, though she was Jewish. . . . " (32). On the other hand, his ability to sympathize with her plight is limited by his persistent loyalty to the Rackrent family. This loyalty precludes any explicit criticism of Sir Kit (as Thady admits on several occasions). Moreover, the narrator's anti-Semitism frequently colors his response to the foreign bride. Thady's attitude toward the wife's religious difference provides Edgeworth with the material for comedy at his expense, as when Thady passes the wife for a "nabob" in the kitchen in order to account "for her dark complexion and everything" (26). In the process of exposing the wife's ignorance about indigenous Irish practices, Thady more often exposes his own. For example, he is astonished that Lady Rackrent has never heard of a "barrack-

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room," a word that is then defined in the glossary for the British audience. Edgeworth here satirizes Thady's inability to perceive the strangeness of his own culture to an outsider. Ultimately, Thady is not the opponent of patriarchal exploitation because of his investment in the very system whose abuses he registers and, in the end, he blames Lady Rackrent for the demise of Sir Kit. But from first to last she brought nothing but misfortunes amongst us; and if it had not been all along with her, his honour, Sir Kit, would have been now alive in appearance. Her diamond cross was, they say, at the bottom of it all; and it was a shame for her, being his wife, not to show more duty, and to have given it up when she condescended to ask so often for such a bit of a trifle in his distresses, especially when he all along made it no secret he married for money. (36)

Through the absurdity of the last comment, Edgeworth effectively conveys her own critique of the way property figures into marriage, and the story of Sir Kit's Jewish wife can be read, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, as a protest against the powerlessness of women caught and imprisoned through the dishonest and unscrupulous practices of corrupt patriarchs. Yet the fact that Castle Rackrent is radical in its perception of women's social and economic victimization does not mean that it is radical on all levels. The narrative of Sir Kit and his Jewish wife is only one of many stories told in Castle Rackrent, If, at times, Thady exposes his masters, offering subversive readings of their actions in spite of himself, at other times the function of his narrative is still more complicated. While he implicitly attacks some aspects of the Rackrents' patriarchal power, Thady facilitates other aspects, namely their efficacy as colonialist rulers. In an essay entitled "The Significant Silences of Thady Quirk" Maurice Colgan describes the "large opaque area" in the center of Thady's transparent narration—"an area which covers everything relating to the colonial status of the country."23 To render visible that which Castle Rackrent does not say or makes obscure, as does Colgan, is to reconstruct the ideological thrust of the novel and to expose the ways in which the novel structures class relations. It is, furthermore, to suggest the shortcomings of a reading that posits Edgeworth's

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inimical relationship to patriarchy in general and patriarchal class relationships in particular. Colgan points to important distortions or "anachronisms" in the text. First, Thady relates that the Rackrents are descended from the ancient kings of Ireland. Yet, "As a matter of fact, by mid-century, few native landed families survived in Ireland. Like the Edgeworths themselves, most gentry were of English origin, and such strong concentration in the vicinity of Castle Rackrent of Gaelic 'survivors' calls for explanation."24 Second, through significant details Edgeworth gives the impression that the Rackrents were Catholics. Yet, "despite this, Sir Condy is elected to parliament, at a time when Catholics were barred from both Houses of Parliament, and did not even have a vote." Surely, Colgan maintains, if Sir Condy's religion were different from that of his ancestors, or if he had recanted, Thady would have mentioned this fact. Third, Colgan believes that, if indeed we are to assume that the Rackrents are Catholic, then the representation of their inheritance is historically inaccurate, since the family fortune would have been dissipated "by the law of gravelkind (which divided Catholic estates equally among the sons) or by the laws which enabled Catholic heirs to be disinherited." Fourth, Edgeworth allows Thady's son Jason, once destined for the priesthood, to become an attorney despite the fact that Catholics could not enter the legal profession until after Langrishe's Relief Act of 1792. (As Colgan reminds us, the title page of the novel indicates it is set in the period preceding 1782.) Fifth, Colgan maintains that Thady's narrative ignores the effects of the penal laws: "the fact that Catholics were not allowed to purchase land, and were not allowed to obtain leases for longer than thirty-one years must have been an important factor in keeping many families on or below the poverty line." In short, Edgeworth "presents a picture which obscures the realities of the Irish situation" (42-43). Colgan further refutes the premise of loyalty on which the representation of Thady's character depends. Suggesting that his relationship to the Rackrents is more typical of an English feudal situation than an Irish context, he asserts that Edgeworth resolves the real and historical tensions that would have existed between landowners and tenants "by making the Rackrents an ancient Gaelic, Catholic family, and giving them, throughout the novel, the

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status and privileges of the Protestant Anglo-Irish" (43). The point, then, of Colgan's essay is to reveal the ways in which Castle Rackrent functions as an implicit defense of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy through the creative "repression" of important political tensions that would have seriously challenged Edgeworth's own vested interests in the status quo. The editorial apparatuses—the preface, notes, and glossary— appended to Thady's narrative provide further testimony to a process of representation consistent with Colgan's critique. Many readers have chosen to repress the editorial rubric and to treat the novel as if it consisted of Thady's narration alone, for editorial commentary seems to dampen the spirit of Thady's engaging first-person narrative. Yet to do so is to read only a portion of the text, while to foreground the authorial voices introduced in the editorial commentary is to reconsider the larger social and political context in which the novel functions; Edgeworth's decision to append the glossary in particular demonstrates the process of class and racial positioning that underlies the act of writing the narrative. According to Marilyn Butler, Edgeworth and her father compiled the glossary after returning from a trip to England in 1799. She suggests that the purpose of this addition to Thady's narrative was to answer the issues recently raised by the possibility of union with England: "Suddenly it must have seemed to the Edgeworths that the onus was on the Irish to prove that the English were getting a bargain; so that the light entertainment Maria was about to produce, which presented the Irish as comic and irresponsible, was anything but timely." In addition, the Edgeworths feared that British readers would fail to detect irony in Thady's curious assertions, and they wanted "to disassociate themselves from his primitive attitudes" (Butler, 354-355). Only by means of an additional voice, this one decidedly not Irish, could the necessary sense of distance be created. Through the authority established in the editorial persona of the glossary, an authority borrowed from literary tradition, Maria Edgeworth first disassociates herself from, and then controls and circumscribes, the problematic tensions—for example, the fierce irrational loyalties or the implicit validation of dissipation— that Thady's narrative brings into play. As the final word on Thady's eccentric observations, the glossary thus reminds the reader of the "appropriate" moral response to his narration.

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The significance of the glossary is best seen by means of a specific example of the interplay between Thady's narrative and the editorial commentary: the discussion of Sir Patrick's funeral. This example serves as a brief, yet important, representative moment in which a class voice makes itself audible. In fact, the Irish wake had been, for some time, an issue for English observers of Irish culture.25 However, by calling attention to the event, Castle Rackrent participates in and perpetuates a tradition that divides one culture from another along the lines of bodily expression. In this instance, Maria Edgeworth borrowed her father's voice, as he contributed the notes intended to supplement Thady's narration of the wake. Yet, regardless of its origin, that voice contextualizes Thady's commentary, and it establishes a characteristic opposition between the perspective of the authors and the perspective of the character. Thady's description of the funeral of the well-beloved Sir Patrick reads as follows. Never did any gentleman live and die more beloved in the country by rich and poor—his funeral was such a one as was never known before or since in the country! All the gentlemen in the three counties were at it— far and near, how they flocked! my great-grandfather said, that to see all the women, even in their red cloaks, you would have taken them for the army drawn out. Then such a fine Whillaluh! you might have heard it to the farthest end of the country, and happy a man who could get but a sight of the hearse! (11)

From Thady's perspective, the funeral and wake are social events of legendary status. According to his cultural belief, the greatest testimony to a man is to be found in the way he is mourned, and the very dimensions of this funeral attest to the dimensions of the man. The event is memorable as a public event—it is a colorful, celebratory, even joyous occasion. In the context of Thady's narration, the lawmen's seizure of Sir Patrick's corpse for debt comes across ironically; the reader recognizes that the great man does not even "own himself" in death. Thady sees no significance in the seizure, nor does he read a connection between the melodramatic entrance of the law and the elaborate funeral of a man who lived—and died—beyond his means. Thady undergoes no moment of enlightenment concerning the possible ostentation of the celebration; he

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never perceives in the very dimensions of the funeral the metaphoric expression of Sir Patrick's extravagance. In fact, he actively resists finding meaning in the juxtaposition of the funeral and the seizure of the body: "It was whispered, (but none but the enemies of the family believe it) that this was all a sham seizure to get quit of the debts which he had bound himself to pay in honour" (12). In contrast to Thady, the editorial comment conveys an awareness of the ironies inherent in the situation and makes explicit a moralistic assessment of the circumstances surrounding the funeral. This note, which far exceeds in length the incident itself, begins with a brief explanation of the word "Whillaluh, Ullaloo, Gol, or lamentation over the dead" and continues to include a history of the funeral song. Quoting the fourth volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society, which in turn cites Cambrensis in the twelfth century, the note describes the rituals of mourning in their ancient forms. Such description affords a certain dignity to the older practices; under the direction of the Celtic bards, mourners were said to have followed a highly ritualized format that allowed for the expression of the "genealogy, rank, possessions, virtues and vices" of the deceased. The balance of the note concerns the decline of the practice of Ullaloo from ancient times to the present—a decline that culminates, much to the editor's dismay, in the mock representation of the practice in comic theatrical entertainments in Dublin. The editor writes, "It is curious to observe how customs and ceremonies degenerate. The present Irish cry, or howl, cannot boast of such melody [as in ancient times], nor is the funeral procession conducted with much dignity" (101). The cacophony of the mourners is cited as proof of a decline in custom; in another context their voice would overwhelm his own, thereby subverting his authority. The voice of certain women in particular testifies to their power within the community: "Certain old women, who cry particularly loud and well, are in great request, and as a man said to the Editor, 'Every one would wish and be proud to have such at his funeral, or at that of his friends.'" Yet the voice of the women must also be effectively quieted—if not altogether silenced if the editor's perspective is to prevail. The persistent discrediting of funereal practices is thus a strategy for containing a competing voice. For example, the editor accuses the women of viewing the wake not as an ancient, hallowed practice but as an opportunity for public

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display of sentiment as well as an escape from everyday tedium. Moreover, he exposes a "spurious" sense of connection beneath their social and familial ties: "The lower Irish are wonderfully eager to attend the funeral of their friends and relations, and they make their relationships branch out to a great extent" (102). In other words, the editor finds more than one critical difference between the ancient practice and its modern version; to his eye, what was once a carefully orchestrated ritual of great cultural significance has now degenerated into an excuse for licentiousness. The discipline that marked the ancient practice of mourning has collapsed into public dissolution. In the editor's account, the movement from the authority of the Celtic bard to the Catholic priest mirrors the demise of a culture, as cultic celebration yields to superstitious indulgence. The editor registers his indignation over the changes in practice. To attend a neighbor's funeral is a cheap proof of humanity, but it does not, as some Imagine, cost nothing. The time spent in attending funerals may be safely valued at half a million to the Irish nation; the Editor thinks that double that sum would not be too high an estimate. The habits of profligacy and drunkenness which are acquired at wakes are here put out of the question. When a labourer, a carpenter, or a smith, is not at his work, which frequently happens, ask where he is gone, and ten to one the answer is, "Oh, faith, please your honour, he couldn't do a stroke today, for he's gone to the funeral." (102)

In a subsequent note, he elaborates on the ways in which the wake has become the occasion for the collapse of moral restraint: "In Ireland a wake is a midnight meeting, held professedly for the indulgence of holy sorrow, but usually it is converted into orgies of unholy joy" (84). Although he concedes the ways in which "good and bad are mingled in human institutions" (e.g., the burning of the straw on which the sick man lay is a preservation against infection), his attention remains directed to the sensual indulgences incited by the wake itself: "After a fit of universal sorrow, and the comfort of a universal dram, the scandal of the neighborhood, as in higher circles, occupy the company. The young lads and lasses romp with one another, and when their fathers and mothers are at last overcome with sleep and whiskey (vino et somno), the youth become

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more enterprising and are frequently successful. It is said more matches are made at wakes than at weddings" (113-114), Thus, according to the editor, if the ancient rituals of mourning helped to consolidate community, modern practices contribute to its disruption. Here, however, the narrator's logic contradicts itself: whereas he raises the issue of lascivious behavior at the wakes in order to prove his assertion that funerals contribute to the dissolution of community, in fact he cites the very evidence suggesting that, to the contrary, such conduct enhances the community. The innumerable "matches" to which he alludes could also be seen as sexual couplings that occur as a result of the festive atmosphere. Such couplings are likely to lead to a growth in population and the expansion of the communal boundaries. In other words, the narrator's rhetoric represses an underlying concern with the reproductive proclivities of the Irish poor. Like much of his commentary, his reference to the lascivious conduct of the mourners discloses his fundamental discomfort with the sexuality of the peasants. What, however, is the overall effect of the editor's discourse on Thady's narration? What, moreover, is the author's relationship to the editorial comments? In answer to the first, in providing the larger history for an event such as the Whillaluh, the editor contextualizes Thady's more localized, idiosyncratic commentary; Thady's description of Sir Patrick's wake is infused with additional meaning when seen against the backdrop of history. Thady's narration suddenly expands to encompass new ironies beyond his comprehension. Knowing what we do about the abuses associated with the Whillaluh, readers further question Thady's interpretation of the event as a tribute to a great man himself. In short, the editor's discourse provides another means for exposing Thady's limitations as a narrator. But if the glossary contextualizes Thady's narrative authority, it also allows for the representation of the editor's own authority, an authority that only assumes significance in opposition to Thady's limited viewpoint. In addition, the glossary makes visible the ways in which issues of the body can provide the opportunity for the constitution of authority. The editor's authority characterizes itself as being in control of what Thady cannot possibly know but, in this instance, what eludes Thady is the way in which the body has been lived differently; Thady's localized perspective

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on the wake precludes his awareness of the extent to which the contemporary Irish Ullaloo signals the collapse of bodily restraint, the demise of a disciplined, ancient culture. What Maria Edgeworth thought of her father's editorial comments can only be an occasion for speculation. If Butler is correct that both Edgeworths wished to "disassociate" themselves from Thady, then certainly his voice would have spoken for her as well. I have been suggesting that Maria's Anglo-Irish interests involved her in a series of attitudes toward indigenous Irish culture and that, although much about that culture intrigued her, much also seemed to demand that she distance herself from the "otherness" on display before her. It seems that, at the moment of union with England, Anglo-Irish Protestants such as the Edgeworths defined themselves as a class not necessarily in terms of "superior blood," or even in terms of economic privilege (although these continued to be a factor) but, instead, in terms of a particular awareness of how the body was to be lived—a knowledge that was thought to be the product of a superior culture and education. Written without the editorial apparatus of Castle Rackrent, Ennui (1809) offers another salient version of this same process of self-definition. When viewed in conjunction with the earlier novel, Ennui strongly suggests that Maria Edgeworth would have condoned the qualifications offered by the editor of Castle Rackrent. Overshadowed by the accomplishment of Castle Rackrent, Ennui has received scant critical attention. When discussed at all, it has been most often faulted for its improbable plot elements.26 Yet, among all of Edgeworth's works on the subject of Ireland, Ennui best thematizes class relations along the lines of bodily self-awareness and self-discipline. More important, it locates the figure of the Irish mother at the center of those class relations, as it constructs her as the symbol of lower-class physicality. In the novel, the absentee Earl of Glenthorn is lord and heir to "an immense territory annexed to the Castle Glenthorn in Ireland" (5), Although born in Ireland, he is raised in England "in luxurious indolence" leading to his chronic and unshakable "ennui." Urged by his old Irish nurse Ellinor to return to his ancestral estate, he discovers, through a chain of circumstances including a conspiracy against his life, that he is not who he thinks he is. In fact, Ellinor is not his nurse but his

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mother, who had substituted her own infant son for the legitimate heir, a puny and sickly child. Lord Glenthorn then decides to relinquish all rights of the estate to the true lord, a man who believes himself to be the humble Christy O'Donoghoe. Before he learns of his true identity, the early part of the novel concerns itself with Glenthorn's comically inept attempts to manage his estate. In contrast to the competent, new-style patriarchal techniques of his Scottish agent, Glenthorn's efforts are overly ambitious, self-promoting, and inappropriate to the circumstances. One example in particular establishes the tenor of the narrative and initiates a series of underlying connections to which the narrative only obliquely refers. When Glenthorn first returns to Ireland, he immediately goes in search of his old nurse Ellinor (whom he does not yet know to be his mother). As he rides up to her house, he looks down on the following scene. We came to Ellinor's house, a wretched-looking, low, mud-walled cabin; at one end it was propped by a buttress of loose stones, upon which stood a goat reared on his hind legs, to browze [sic] on the grass that grew on the housetop. A dunghill was before the only window, at the other end of the house, and close to the door was a puddle of the dirtiest of dirty water, in which the ducks were dabbling. At my approach, there came out of the cabin, a pig, a calf, a lamb, a kid, and two geese, all with their legs tied; followed by cocks, hens, chickens, a dog, a cat, a kitten, a beggar-man, a beggar-woman, with a pipe in her mouth; children innumerable, and a stout girl, with a pitchfork in her hand; altogether more than I, looking down upon the roof as I sat on my horseback, and measuring the superficies with my eye, could possibly have supposed the mansion capable of containing. (94-95)

Gazing on this scene from his (literally) higher position, Lord Glenthorn is both bemused and fascinated. The reader participates in his perspective and, as the scene builds to its comic climax, the effect is reminiscent of the famous "state-room scene" in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (but in reverse). Like the stateroom, the cabin seems to burst at its seams, to overflow and expand with the numbers and varieties of its inhabitants. Yet, while the description is decidedly humorous in tone, it is also marked by details that bespeak a physicality thought to characterize the life of the peasantry. For Ellinor's magical cabin, with its overflowing parameters,

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is also an emblem for her soul. Made of mud and roofed with grass, the house seems continuous with—not separate from—the natural setting in which it is placed. At the same time, it threatens to collapse around its inhabitants, much like the hut recorded in Edgeworth's adolescent letters. The proximity of the dunghill signals Ellinor's tolerance for the unclean, while the proliferation of animals—not only the telltale pig, but other animals as well— suggests her affinity with a certain bestial element. The details of her homestead serve, in other words, to identify the mistress as someone who barely distinguishes herself from the natural world. Moreover, the scene that awaits Lord Glenthorn is fearfully noisy. When he asks if Ellinor is at home, "the dog barked, the geese crackled, the turkeys gobbled, and the beggars begged with one accord, so loudly, that there was no chance of my being heard." Thus, speaking in concert, the inhabitants of the scene have a single "voice," one that drowns out the voice of the gentleman. All of the textual details suggest that what is being depicted here is another encounter with an image of the grotesque. As the synecdochical representation for Ellinor herself, the homestead contains all the characteristics marking the grotesque: impurity, heterogeneity, disproportion, and clamor, to name just a few.27 The intention of the narrative is both to register the comic dimensions of Ellinor's physicality and to satirize Lord Glenthorn's response to that physicality, as becomes apparent in a sequel to this encounter. Wishing to reward Ellinor for her faithful attendance (and still not knowing of her true relationship to him), Lord Glenthorn builds her a neat farmhouse with a slate roof to replace her leaky, thatched cabin. But in a short while he rides out to find that his generous gift has been "trashed." He discovers Ellinor "sitting at her wheel, in the midst of the wreck and litter of all sorts of household furniture," singing her favorite song. "There was a lady lov'd a swine, "Honey! says she, "111 give ye a silver trough. "Hunk! says he!"

Lord Glenthorn mournfully responds: "Ellinor seemed, alas! to have as little taste for the luxuries with which I had provided her, as

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the pig had for the silver trough" (122-123). Tellingly, the pig surfaces once again as a focal image in this comic struggle between two competing ways of living the body—Lord Glenthorn's, adapted from the British practice, and Ellinor's, the indigenous Irish manner. While the narrative satirizes that competition, it also preserves the tension between the two parties, as the imagery of Ellinor's song suggests. For if, on one level, she is like the pig in the silver trough, Lord Glenthorn is, quite self-consciously, like the ridiculous old woman who provides so inappropriate a gift to so unlikely a recipient. This pair of analogies would seem to make them equally the object of satire. Lord Glenthorn's excessiveness, however, is tempered by a degree of self-knowledge. He soon recognizes that his error was to build the house for Ellinor. That is, he mistakenly struggled to impose on her from the outside what she must internalize from within: a series of domestic behaviors and attitudes. As he himself later realizes: "I did not consider, that it must take time to change local and national habits and prejudices; and that it is necessary to raise a taste for comforts, before they can be properly enjoyed" (126). The ability to reason in this fashion redeems Lord Glenthorn from his earlier mistakes. Although initially he is as foolish as Ellinor, and therefore equally a satiric target, his position is validated in the end. Simultaneously, the song relegates Ellinor to an uneasy position. As her favorite, the song is a revealing anthem, for it is about a woman who so loved a pig that she wanted to marry him; the silver trough is her attempt to get the pig to say "yes" to her proposal, to which he responds only with a "Hunk!" If there is humor in this situation, it occurs at the expense of Ellinor who is so thoroughly identified with an image of the grotesque that she is metaphorically wedded to it. To call this scene misogynist is to risk sounding humorless, yet the scene loses some of its humor when we remember that Ellinor is Lord Glenthorn's mother.™ As "mater" she is inextricably related to an ominous show of "materiality" that so fascinates Lord Glenthorn. As Stallybrass and White remind us, like all members of his class, the gentleman still possesses an innate love of filth and dirt, a love that he has repressed in order to become what he is. However, as his (unrecognized) mother, Ellinor entices her son with an unruly display of matter. Beyond the narrator's

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interest in the state of Ellinor's affairs lies an obsession with the possibilities of her life-style; his attention is riveted by her addiction to dirt, disorder, and chaos. There may be, as some philosophers assure us that there is, an innate love of order in the human mind; but of this instinctive principle my poor Ellinor was totally destitute. Her ornamented farm-house became, in a wonderfully short time, a scene of dirt, rubbish, and confusion. (123)

Among the definitions of material is "of or pertaining to matter or body, corporeal." As Ellinor is associated with the ruinous material of her house, she is also depicted as being corporeal or "of the body," but here that body—the maternal body—is displayed most eccentrically. Thus in this scene the maternal body is implicitly conflated with the grotesque. Lord Glenthorn's eye lingers on a broken window stuffed with shoes, a hat, and some rags (124). Such a detail provides compelling evidence of another, "unacceptable" attitude toward waste. In the symbolic register, it signals a tolerance for the messy, the untidy, the unclean, which runs so contrary to his own British standards of neatness, and it implicitly aligns the maternal with such a tolerance. But if Ellinor is the disorderly, grotesque body, she is also the body from which Lord Glenthorn comes. This connection, however, is repressed in the narrative; once Lord Glenthorn learns his true lineage, he will spend the balance of the novel demonstrating that he, unlike Ellinor, has mastered the wayward impulses of his own body. Ultimately, as Ellinor's house collapses around her, it also collapses back into a "more natural state" in which—as in her previous home—the limits between inside and outside are not so clearly observed. To prefer a thatched roof and smoky rooms is to revert to a more naturalistic mode of existence in which the indoors feels more like the outdoors. In her willful destruction of the cottage, we can read her aggressive choice to embrace the "wild" over the civilized. Thus, as "mother," Ellinor is identified with "Mother Nature." Yet simultaneously she also indicates the state of Ireland, since her cottage collapses due to the shoddy workmanship and the sloppy habits of the Irish laborers, as well as of its tenant. Lord Glenthorn remarks on plaster and paper hastily applied, woodwork

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carelessly painted, attributing these to Irish incompetence: "In Ireland they have not faith in the excellent Dutch proverb, 'Paint costs nothing.* I could not get my workmen to give a second coat of paint to any of the sashes, and the wood decayed" (123-124). Because of their resistance to other standards of the workplace, the Irish laborers facilitate the collapse of the domestic structure imposed on Ellinor. In summary, Ellinor is at once the displaced image of Lord Glenthorn's repressed corporeality and his own "nature." At the same time, she is the embodiment of Ireland, the representation of what he must learn to subordinate and control through the careful practices of new-style patriarchy. That she is actually his mother, the body from which he issued, symbolizes his origins. Yet the balance of the novel demonstrates how, regardless of "blood," Lord Glenthorn possesses the internalized sense of self-discipline that makes him the legitimate ruler of the estate. This demonstration depends on the successful repression of the grotesque body and—to the extent that the grotesque body is maternal—the mother. As soon as his real identity is revealed to him, Lord Glenthorn relinquishes the fortune that accompanies the estate. He quickly learns the art of fending for himself, of traveling without servants, for example, or of making himself known without the benefit of a title. Under the name of O'Donoghoe, he experiences the hardships of those who must make their way without rank or fortune. Eventually he decides to become a lawyer, dedicating himself to five years of difficult study. He is rewarded for his efforts with newly found prestige and the hand of the desirable Miss Delamere in marriage. The significance of all these details is that, by means of his efforts, the ex-Lord Glenthorn proves that he is a self-controlled being who can willingly subject himself to a regimen of hard work and selfsacrifice. Unlike the mother he leaves at home, he uses his mind to discipline his body. Moreover, his very choice of a marriage partner—Miss De-la-mere—suggests that he wins for himself a "new mother," a new line of maternal inheritance with a different relationship to the body. As if to underscore the significance of the ex-Lord Glenthorn's progress, the narrative also depicts the fact of the "real" Lord Glenthorn, the man who has been raised as Ellinor's son. Demonstrating that "blood" alone is insufficient for leadership, he quickly

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proves himself unequal to the task of ruling the Glenthorn estate, He fails to control his extravagant wife, who fills the castle "with tribes of her vagabond relations," insisting that she is descended from the kings of Ireland. The estate is constantly plundered, while its inhabitants recklessly squander the family fortune. Eventually the castle is burned down through the carelessness of an alcoholic son. Finally, this Lord Glenthorn acknowledges his limits, and he writes and urges his foster brother to return to his former position of authority. Unlike the protagonist, this "real" Lord Glenthorn reveals himself as Ellinor's son; he is a man who fails to take control over the disruptions happening all around him. At the end of the novel, having learned from example and experience what he needs to govern effectively, the protagonist returns to his former position of authority. His decision to assume his wife's family name, Delamere, coincides with his symbolic rebirth as the newly legitimized head of the estate, a rebirth that effectively severs his ties both with Ellinor and with his Irish heritage; now he assumes a new matrilineage. In addition, now he is neither the indolent absentee landlord Glenthorn nor the son of an Irish peasant O'Donoghoe but someone else: the exemplary embodiment of a newly empowered professional class of patriarchs, a class of men who rule by law and reason. In this way, the novel implicitly validates the position of the Anglo-Irish landlords—like the Edgeworths themselves—but it does so by insisting that true authority must issue from a superior sense of self-discipline represented in the novel by Lord Glenthorn's experiences as a social outcast and his arduous legal training. This self-discipline is acknowledged both as a cultural product—for Glenthorn has had to learn it—and as the identifying mark of class privilege. If the story of Glenthorn can be read as a defense of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, other aspects of Ennui parallel the author's situation. First, as a landlord Glenthorn learns precisely what Maria Edgeworth and her father learned: to control the local population by controlling their own responses to them. In Ennui satire is employed as a means of enlightening Lord Glenthorn; after his initial errors, he assumes command of the events. He recognizes Ellinor for what she is, and he can rule over her more effectively as a result of his insight. By learning to control his anger and disappointment over her behavior, he learns what it is to be master. Similarly, the

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Edgeworths assumed control over the Irish tenantry by assessing the local character and by adjusting their methods accordingly. Second, the representation of Lord Glenthorn's attraction to Ellinor's life-style suggests Maria's own attraction to the peasantry, as evidenced in her adolescent letters, for example. What is at stake for Glenthorn in the defense of Anglo-Irish privilege is also what is at stake for Edgeworth: the successful containment of specific images of the grotesque, or excessively physical, body as they appear among the Irish peasantry. Despite its obviously humorous intentions, despite its successful attempts to represent the comic dimensions of Irish social relations, Ennui conveys a series of profound truths about Anglo-Irish political life. Indeed, the novel uses humor in just the way that Freud has taught us to understand it: as way of displacing and dealing with the deepest kinds of anxiety. Edgeworth's experience may be a considerable distance from that of her protagonist and yet, in the end, she too symbolically resists the embrace of Ellinor and all Irish mothers like her. In Mary Leadbeater's Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry the mother is once again at the center of a discussion of Irish physicality. However, unlike Ennui, Cottage Dialogues offers us two female characters, one who will successfully triumph over her bodily impulses, the other who will not. Although praised by Maria Edgeworth as "an exact representation of the manner of being of the lower Irish, and a literal transcription of their language," the bifurcated story line of the Cottage Dialogues belies the notion that Leadbeater has realistically captured the life-style of the peasantry.29 For here the events unfold as transparently as a fable; Leadbeater contrasts the lives of Rose and Nan, who begin as servants, choose husbands, set up households, and eventually establish themselves as wives and mothers. Since Rose's actions are always marked by modesty, good sense, and prudence, her fate is to marry a loving man (but one not without need of her gentle correction), to reap the fruits of her careful domestic practices, and to live happily and well respected by her community. Nan, in contrast, has none of Rose's virtues. She marries a man with a penchant for drinking and fighting and experiences a number of domestic tragedies, including the death of a child whom she refused to have

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vaccinated. The child's death leads to the disintegration of her family, while Nan's own carelessness leads to still another disaster: ashes carelessly dropped from her own pipe ignite a neighbor's barn. Nan's husband dies, and she herself takes to drink. Eventually she dies unloved and unmourned by all but Rose. Within the framework of this didactic structure, it is difficult to construe the ever exemplary Rose and the ill-fated Nan as anything more than stereotypes. What, then, are we to make of Edgeworth's praise for Leadbeater's characters as realistic renderings? Was Edgeworth, who surely knew the difference between a "faithful" and a formulaic depiction of the Irish "manner of being," merely being disingenuous or polite in her praise? As the issues in Cottage Dialogues unfold, it becomes clear that her commitment to and interest in Leadbeater's text may have had more to do with its expression of a particular domestic ideology, crucial to the purposes of Ascendancy politics, than it did with its attempt to recreate Irish culture and language. On the literal level, Cottage Dialogues provides a series of lessons about important practices of housekeeping. Rose, for example, saves money earned by knitting in her spare time to buy a cow, and she takes the time to build a proper sty for her pig. In contrast, Nan's pig—like Ellinor's—ranges free and eats her cap. Rose uses manure from the sty to fertilize her garden, where she carefully raises herbs. Shunning the tawdry and cheap, Rose exemplifies thrift. Moreover, she demonstrated self-control when she waited to marry until she and her husband could save for a good house with a chimney and furniture. Rose's neat cottage is a far cry from Ellinor's house. Architectural details—the chimney upright and secure—convey a permanence, a resistance to the pressures of the natural world. But more than housekeeping is at stake here; the two women, with their different attitudes toward the management of a household, embody two competing modes of social existence with two very different philosophies concerning the way in which the body is to be lived. While Rose's ready adaptation to the author's standards of housekeeping reflects her willingness to internalize certain kinds of self-restraint, Nan's hapless addiction to immediate gratification reflects her refusal to incorporate bodily discipline as a principle of control. One need not debate the relative merits of the two modes

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(for surely aspects of Rose's life, e.g., her willingness to vaccinate her children, are an improvement) to recognize how the narrative has been structured to discredit Nan and Tim's more traditional Irish lower-class culture. Seen from another perspective not allowed by Leadbeater's narration, Nan's life-style would not appear merely as disorderly, violent, or irresponsible; it would be said to emphasize, instead, different cultural and social values that allow for another kind of relationship to the body. Still, Leadbeater's representation of the domestic tranquility enjoyed by Rose and her husband is also an image of political violence forestalled, and Cottage Dialogues, like Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts, advocates the containment of latent, explosive energies within the boundaries of the domestic sphere. Also, as in More's Repository Tracts, what has been contained is the eruptive potential of the body, because Rose's careful housekeeping results in a predictable form of existence where no one need ever be uncomfortable, discontent, or—still worse—drunk, disorderly, or violent. The purpose of Rose's domestic ministrations is, after all, to keep her husband happy at home, proud of himself and his accomplishments, to make him, in other words, immune to revolutionary stirrings promulgated by discontented, "outside agitators." This point in particular seems to have caught Edgeworth's attention as she elaborates on the significance of the text in a note. All true friends will wish to raise in Ireland that English spirit of independence, which maintains, that 'every man's house is his castle,' which scorns to open his gate, even for his Majesty, unless his Majesty (God bless him!) axes civil. The more every man is made to think and feel that his house is his castle, the more zealous he will be in the defense of his castle, the more attached to 'that dear little hut, his home.' The just spirit of independence is far, very far different from a discontented, disaffected temper; far more safe to trust, as well as more pleasant to see, than the sneaking, cringing 'As your honour pleases'—(332n, emphasis added)

In response to Leadbeater's dialogues, Edgeworth here fantasizes about a world in which striking cultural, racial, and political differences have been rendered innocuous. The reformed Irish husband lives exactly as his English counterpart, although perhaps on a

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reduced scale. Taking pride in his own domicile, he seeks only to defend what little is his; he cares only to keep the outside world out and the inside world in, and he pays no heed to the larger political scene beyond his neighborhood. Unlike Ellinor, he observes the boundaries between the self and the world outside; he resists, moreover, the chaos associated with the flux between inside and outside. A man of such a clear sense of limits poses no threat to the political status quo. On the contrary, he contributes to its stability. In demonstating the self-discipline necessary for domestic tranquility and prosperity, Rose and Jem implicitly announce their intolerance for disruption, anarchy, or chaos. Domesticity is particularly effective in that it works from an internalized sense of self-worth, one "far more safe to trust," as Edgeworth writes. If years earlier she had scrutinized the faces of the peasants around her for those telltale traces of charcoal, now her anxiety is lifted; in Leadbeater's depiction of reformed Irish domestic life she perceives the comforting reflection of her own beliefs and values, and surely faces as clean scrubbed as her own can pose no threat. That something within the human spirit proves resistant to this kind of domestic containment is suggested by Irish historical events during the next 20 years of Edgeworth's life; the Irish Nationalist movement emerges in an explosive political climate as the peasant's standard of living continues to fall and repressive government policies—a series of coercive acts in particular—restrict individual liberties. Meanwhile, the Great Famine of the 1840s literalized the concern with appetite that had been imaged in a work like Cottage Dialogues. During this time, Maria Edgeworth's political beliefs became increasingly conservative.30 Parallel to this conservative trend was her increased sense of despair over the project of accurately representing Irish life and culture. Writing to her brother in India in 1834, she explained why her new novel Helen was not an Irish one. I should tell you beforehand that there is no humour in it, and no Irish character. It is impossible to draw Ireland as she is now in a book of fiction—realities are too strong, party passions too violent to bear to see, or care to look at their faces in the looking glass. The people would only break the glass, and curse the fool who held the mirror up to

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nature—distorted nature in a fever. We are in too perilous a case to laugh, humour would be out of season, worse than bad taste. Whenever the danger is past, as the man in the sonnet says, "We may look back on the hardest part and laugh." (A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth, III, 87)

If humour had served her well in earlier works such as Castle Rackrent or Ennui, it can no longer be employed in the mediation of significant tensions; there is nothing funny about the current state of Irish affairs. Edgeworth stipulates that Ireland can no longer be represented; no narrative structure can give adequate shape to or provide adequate control over the complexities of Irish life. If in retrospect works such as Castle Rackrent circumscribed Irish differences within Anglo-Irish political discourse, here Edgeworth openly regrets that such circumscription is no longer possible. To try to represent the people would be "to play the fool," since the crowd is far too intolerant to be shown its own reflection. Appearing by way of synecdoche—their "faces"—the Irish people "break the glass" in a contemptuous rejection of what she shows them. Those contorted faces are the imagistic displacement for the "body" of the Irish masses, as if Edgeworth dare not evoke the full power of their presence. It is the nature of that body to resist containment, as distorted Nature herself seems in league with its anarchy. Later in the letter, Edgeworth invokes Sir Walter Scott, who once asked her to "explain to the public why Pat, who gets forward so well in other countries, is so miserable in his own." Yet Edgeworth reports she cannot provide an explanation: "a very difficult question: I fear above my power." Vowing "to think of it continually, and listen, and look, and read" (III, 88), Edgeworth promises not to abandon the project of articulation so crucial to her own security. The exact form of the "danger" that she felt imminent becomes clearer in another letter written during the same time period. Describing the "fear" that "we have too much to go through in this country before we come to quiet, settled life, and a ready obedience to the laws," she wrote: "There is literally no rein of law at this moment to hold the Irish; and through the whole country there is what I cannot justly call a spirit of Reform, but a spirit of REVOLUTION, under the name of reform: a restless desire to overthrow what is, and a hope—more than a hope—an expectation, of gaining

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liberty or wealth, or both, in the struggle."31 Paradoxically, for Edgeworth the "liberation" sought by the revolutionaries is only another form of oppression since, if the mob does gain either liberty or wealth, "they will lose both again, and be worse off than ever— they will afterwards quarrel amongst themselves, destroy one another, and be again enslaved with heavier chains." The point is that what oppresses the mob is precisely those chaotic, undisciplined impulses that emerge from within; "unliberated" from these, the triumphant mob "would only tear each other to pieces and die drunk or famish SOBER." Thus revolution offers the spectacle of the undisciplined body triumphant, as it reduces the mob to its most base and animalistic aspects. In response to this nightmarish vision, Edgeworth constructs her own political philosophy. I am, and have been all my life, a sincere friend to moderate measures, as long as reason can be heard; but there cornes a time, at the actual commencement of uproar, when the ultimate law of force must be resorted to, to prevent greater evils. That time was lost in the beginning of the French Revolution—I hope it may not be lost in Ireland. It is scarcely possible that this country can now be tranquillised without military force to re-establish law; the people MUST be made to obey the laws, or they cannot be ruled after any concessions.. . . The misfortune of this country has been that England has always yielded to clamour what should have been granted to justice. (Zimmern, 185-186)

In this passage aural imagery—the "uproar" and the "clamour" associated with the revolution—gives the undisciplined mob a voice, even while such imagery once again represses the spectacle of the revolution as "the body in revolt." To yield to the "clamour" of the mob is to succumb to its mad logic, while to subordinate such chaos is necessarily to impose restrictions and limitations on its unruly presence. These excerpts from Edgeworth's later letters suggest that, in this case, the language of political conservativism could be read both literally and symbolically. Throughout her life, Edgeworth had experienced a literal threat to the body in the form of real political violence. During her formative years as an adolescent in Ireland, the surge of political rebellion posed a real menace to the stability

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and order of her life at Edgeworthstown. Various political strategies for containing the possibilities of violence, as recorded later in the Memoirs, correspond to Edgeworth's attempts as an author to mediate symbolically those same disruptive possibilities through the act of writing her Irish tales. Fictions such as Castle Rackrent or Ennui isolate and fixate on images of the body, strategically deploying them as a means of self-definition. But, as Stallybrass and White remind us, the lower-class body, often perceived as "grotesque," is not merely the body of the "Other"; it is also a displaced image of what the bourgeoisie represses to become what it is. Thus, the representation of the lower-class, grotesque body in Edgeworth's Irish tales mirrors back what she has denied within herself. When the mirror of representation no longer served its purpose, Edgeworth ceased writing about the life of the peasantry. For all their valuable insight, however, Stallybrass and White do not mention an important connection—that between the grotesque and the maternal body, Edgeworth's works consistently demonstrate that the grotesque body is often gendered as female. It is, moreover, imagined in relation to the body of Mother Nature herself. In a work like Ennui, the grotesque, the mother, nature, and Ireland are all conflated into one figure. Finally, Ellinor is, symbolically, mother to Edgeworth herself. The embodiment of human materiality and of those physical, nearly animalistic impulses which lie beneath the structure of civilized behavior, the figure of old Ireland herself, Ellinor is what the author has struggled not to become. In this representation, Mother Ireland fails to claim this daughter as her own.

6 Monstrous Daughters: The Problem of Maternal Inheritance To readers of Belinda, it would not have been surprising to discover with the novel's protagonist that Harriot Freke enthusiastically espouses the cause of sexual revolution, as disclosed in the following manner. Belinda is alone at the Percivals, reading one of the many books that Mr. Percival has recommended to her, when Harriot Freke—who has no formal acquaintance with the family— bursts into the room. Insisting that Belinda not be the "prisoner" of the Percivals any longer, Harriot Freke tries to drag Belinda from the room. Claiming that she has sworn to "set the distressed damsel free, in spite of all the dangers in Christendom," Freke offers herself as Belinda's knight in shining armor. Although she pretends to be Belinda's advocate, in truth she comes only to take advantage of her; her plan is to carry Belinda off to a ball at Harrowgate in order to win a bet on the superiority of Belinda's beauty. Freke's transgressive behavior is doubly offensive; not only does she ape masculine aggressiveness, she also models herself on the worst kind of male model—that of the old-style tyrannical patriarch who pretends to offer a woman his protection only to exploit her for his own purposes. In imitation of the worst sort of male misogynist, Freke tries to manipulate Belinda by appealing first to her vanity, then to her "understanding," believing that Belinda—like Eve—is especially vulnerable on this score. She succeeds only in misquoting Milton and inadvertently exposing her own ignorance and her unconscious identification with Satan. When Mr. Percival enters the room, a conversation ensues in which Edgeworth opposes the 173

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rational, disinterested philosophy of the new-style patriarch with the irrational cant of the "feminist." Whereas Percival (whose very name signifies he is Belinda's true knight) advocates female delicacy, insisting on certain male protections of female innocence, Freke argues that women are enslaved by convention, the prisoners of a system that makes them unhappy. She declares herself to be "a champion for the Rights of Women," while Percival offers himself as "an advocate for their happiness."1 It may seem curious that the tyranny associated with old-style patriarchy here comes in the guise of a female "radical" who espouses the revolutionary upheaval, yet Edgeworth means to connect Freke's notions with a regressive, not progressive, political program.2 The narrative insists that, like the undisciplined lower orders who similarly advocate radicalism, Freke mistakes "liberation" for "tyranny." In offering to "free" Belinda from Percival's domestic protection, she proposes to subjugate Belinda to another kind of oppression far worse than any discipline to which new-style patriarchy would subject her. In short, she threatens to introduce Belinda to the tyranny of an unbridled female passion. To be under Freke's tutelage is to experience the most arbitrary, willful, and aggressive impulses of such passion. In contrast, under the aegis of a particular domestic economy, Percival offers Belinda "useful strategies" for the sublimination of female passion, a lesson the heroine takes seriously to heart. Throughout this scene, Freke is never more than an amusing caricature, the comic embodiment of a series of crude, unmediated female energies that take the erroneous form of some mistaken identification with masculine prerogative. Evoking the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, her philosophy of the "rights of woman" is neither coherent nor clear.3 And yet this final "exposure" of Freke's excessiveness is both deliberate and central to Edgeworth's purpose, for this discrediting of radical philosophy is another essential step in the implementation of a domestic ideology that demands the repression of competing modes of social life. A firm believer in the "progressive" nature of domestic ideology, Edgeworth can only paradoxically frame radical sympathies as "regressive" impulses; hence the association of Freke with an older form of oppressive patriarchy follows. However, while Freke's excesses look back to old-style patri-

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archy, her behavior simultaneously anticipates contemporaneous, revolutionary stirrings. If she shares the mob's confusion about the difference between "liberation" and "tyranny," not recognizing that discipline must first come from within, she also resembles the undisciplined lower orders in other ways; with her tendency to dangerous, irrational enthusiasms, she too is depicted as raucous and crude, unwilling to yield to the voice of authority. Demonstrating a disinclination for self-restraint, she is hedonistic in the pursuit of her own immediate gratification. Last, she also lives her body in a grotesque, explosive fashion, as her physical energies are used most often to perpetrate cruel tricks on those around her. These correspondences suggest, in other words, that Edgeworth was intent on alerting her audience to the similarities between aberrant female passion embodied in Freke and the undisciplined lower orders or "mob" alluded to in her later letters; both are "monstrous" forces threatening the stability of the status quo. This connection is scarcely unusual, since revolutionary iconography had often exploited the image of a powerfully sexual female figure.4 In Edgeworth's novel, however, the critical difference between Harriot Freke and Belinda or the reformed Lady Delacour is that Freke knows no boundaries and observes no limits; she foregrounds, in other words, the disruptive potential of all women who operate beyond proper circumscription. Functioning as the displaced site of what the properly domesticated woman must repress, Freke's presence intimates that something occurs within the female psyche itself that must be controlled lest anarchy result. Thus, in the binding capacity of new-style patriarchy Edgeworth seems to have read a solution to both political agitation threatening from without and an internal disruption threatening from within the female character itself. In this way, her complicity in new-style patriarchy emerges as a strategy for escaping the imagined consequences of woman's putatively deviant potential. As an explosive presence on the narrative scene, Harriot Freke seems to come out of nowhere. Because she has no place within any particular familial network, because she has no affiliation, it is easy to forget that she is a daughter, a renegade offspring. Her monstrous behavior can be traced to no apparent cause other than, perhaps, her status as a daughter of Eve. But Freke is not the only aberrant female character to surface in Edgeworth's fictions. In

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novels such as The Absentee, Patronage, and Helen, similarly disruptive female characters appear. Unlike Freke, these characters are specifically identified as daughters whose maternal lineage makes them problematic figures, Initially their plight resembles that of the woman writer who similarly finds herself confronting an obscure maternal inheritance, and yet these daughters are not merely the author's doubles. Instead, their appearance testifies to the persistence of an underlying disruption that works against everything the narrative explicitly seeks to contain. In other words, these monstrous daughters qualify the larger process of inculcating the values of new-style patriarchy; if, as has been argued, new-style patriarchy seeks to regulate maternal energy in the service of domestic ideology, the appearance of the deviant daughter intimates the limits of such regulation. In two of Edgeworth's novels, The Absentee and Patronage, the marginalized "deviant" daughter provides evidence of "monstrous" power at work, while in Helen, Edgeworth's last novel, writing itself is characterized as the daughter's "monstrous" act. To concentrate on such characters is to belie the opinion of one contemporaneous critic who asserted that Edgeworth presented her readers with "no hyperbolical representations of uncommon characters, no monstrous exhibitions of exaggerated passions"5 for, from their position of marginality, these daughters characteristically introduce an element of high melodrama. In addition, despite their marginality, they tell us something important about the very nature of the task to which Edgeworth dedicated her life.

I In The Absentee6 Lord Colambre finds himself enamored with the charming and beautiful Lady Isabel. He quickly untangles himself, however, when the beautiful enchantress reveals herself to him. Lord Colambre enters the library unperceived by Lady Isabel, so lately the emblem of female innocence, and is shocked to find her discussing her earlier flirtation with a married man. The narration now enters Lord Colambre's point of view to reveal the horrifying "truth" about Lady Isabel. Yet his misogynist viewpoint will be

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validated by the narrative itself, as Lady Isabel's metamorphosis is essential to the overall structure of the plot. The face, the whole figure of Lady Isabel, at this moment, appeared to Lord Colambre suddenly metamorphosed; instead of the soft, gentle, amiable female, all sweet charity and tender sympathy, formed to love and to be loved, he beheld one possessed and convulsed by an evil spirit—her beauty, if beauty it could be called, the beauty of a fiend. Some ejaculation, which he unconsciously uttered, made Lady Isabel start. She saw him—saw the expression of his countenance, and knew that all was over. (V, 113) Observing first the face, then the entire figure, Lord Colambre watches a transformation occurring within a tradition that assigns women the power to trick and deceive men by assuming an innocent shape. "Possessed" and "convulsed" by an ambition that drives her to ensnare innocent men, Lady Isabel belongs to a gallery of similarly demonic female characters; hers is a portrait Edgeworth's audience would have recognized. Here Lord Colambre learns an important—if somewhat overdone—lesson: to be wary what lies underneath the mask of female innocence, since what seems to be compliant and yielding in the female sex may indeed be only a mask or disguise obscuring the lamia within. In The Absentee Lady Isabel has special significance, however. As the daughter of the aggressive, "masculine" Lady Dashfort, whose unwelcome presence forces itself on the hero, she powerfully demonstrates the effects of corrupt maternal training. At this moment, she is truly her mother's daughter, and her "monstrous" transformation only literalizes the effect of her mother's prompting. The lesson Lord Colambre learns here must be applied more widely. Although Lady Isabel ceases to be a major character in the novel at this point, her sinister energy is dissipated throughout the story, where it continues to take more abstract form. Throughout The Absentee the specter of Lady Isabel haunts Lord Colambre in the form of a persistent doubt concerning the true nature of his beloved Grace Nugent. Although faultlessly raised by Lord Colambre's own mother, Miss Nugent seems to be the illegitimate product of a shadowy liaison, of two impetuous lovers, both

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now dead. Again and again the young protagonist must ask himself whether his lover is truly "that which she seemed to be." This suspicion, initiated by the experience of Lady Isabel's transfiguration, menaces not only the union of Lord Colambre and Miss Nugent but the heroine's self-image as well, since she internalizes the guilty shame brought into play by the absent mother's history. When Lord Colambre's doubt over Miss Nugent's character leads him to sever his ties with her, she humbly accepts his decision without further question. After all, she reasons, her own inferior position as a woman of no particular "inheritance" dictates the necessity of another choice for the son of an Irish lord. Ironically, while she fears her lack of an inheritance separates her from her lover, he keeps his distance, believing she does have an "inheritance": the "inheritance" resulting from her mother's illicit sexual union. Significantly, Lady Dashfort, who embodies the principle of maternal corruption, first raises the issue of Grace Nugent's supposed illegitimacy. This issue proves impossible to ignore; as long as the scandalous mystery of Miss Nugent's dead mother persists, neither she nor her lover is free to confront her or his own desire. At the end of the novel Grace Nugent understands too well the suspicion under which her own character must necessarily have fallen. First indignant to hear of the stigma that had been attached falsely to her mother's name, she then reconsiders Lord Colambre's past behavior toward her: "Grace sighed, and acknowledged that, in prudence, it [i.e., the mother's putative indiscretion] ought to have been an invincible obstacle—she admired the firmness of his decision, the honour with which he had acted towards her." Moreover, she now fully understands "if I had been the daughter of a mother who had conducted herself ill, he would never have trusted me!" (VI, 428-429). Thus Miss Nugent reiterates her lover's convictions and a central theme of the novel: how can anyone be sure of the daughter's character? Lacking the details of the mother's history, how could Lord Colambre have been certain of the daughter's constitution? Until deciphered, the story of her mother's life haunts Grace Nugent like the threat of an impending disease. Eventually, the shameful history of "it," of the mother's indiscretion too terrible to be named, is put to rest, as the truth of her mother's lawful—but secret— marriage is uncovered; Miss Nugent assumes her legitimate status

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as heir to the rich old Mr. Reynolds. At last she is awarded her true patrimony.7 Such patrimony is important on several levels. First, it rewards Miss Nugent for her faithful dedication to her lover and his family, in particular, for her ceaseless and uncomplaining devotion to Lord Colambre through times of adversity. The "fortune" awarded to her at the end of the novel is only the metaphoric compensation for the undeserved suffering she endures throughout the novel. Moreover, as part of the novel's comic resolution, Miss Nugent's patrimony makes possible her marriage to Lord Colambre and the establishment of a new, younger, and more worthy generation of landowners central to Edgeworth's vision of a restored Ireland. But the establishment of Miss Nugent's heritage also serves another important function: to eliminate the anxiety put into play by the question of the mother's influence over the daughter. Once her mother's motives have been cleared, Grace Nugent and her lover are assured that she could never become Lady Isabel, that she, despite her consistent demonstration of female virtue, will never transmute into some "monstrous progeny" like Lady Isabel. But Grace and her mother cannot be vindicated until Lord Colambre can find the mother's father-in-law until, in other words, the mother has been assigned her place within a legitimate filial network. The attribution of Grace's patrimony, which occurs in the process of clearing the heroine's mother, is necessary in order to negate the threat and danger of female monstrosity. Thus The Absentee recuperates the figure of the absent mother in order to clear the daughter from dubious maternal effects. Insisting on the significance of "maternal inheritance," the novel argues that one does well to study the entire line of female ancestry, for the daughter's origins determine her legacy, as Lord Colambre learns in conversation with Count O'Halloran. The count speaks here of the relationship between Lady Isabel and her mother Lady Dashfort, although the hero applies this principle to Grace Nugent's situation; "In marrying, a man does not, to be sure, marry his wife's mother; and yet a prudent man, when he begins to think of the daughter, would look sharp at the mother; ay, and back to the grandmother too, and along the whole female line of ancestry" (VI, 339-340), The Absentee implicitly endorses such reasoning, even while it obviates it by clearing the name of Grace's mother.

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As the novel makes clear, the daughter's "maternal inheritance" is neither simply genetic transmission nor the effects of her training, but a combination of the two. The count's assertion that one must look back "along the whole line of female ancestry" brings us back, inevitably, to Eve, even though the narrative assures us that, with proper training, women are not doomed to repeat the first mother's error. Still, if women must be trained, such training is necessary because of the daughter's "inheritance"—because of the enduring propensity for error that lies within the female heart. With or without the benefit of education, the daughter inherits not only her mother's character directly, but also the possibility of some distortion that is the mark of the first mother's errant "desire," a possibility to be watched for and guarded against throughout the careful process of education. Paradoxically, then, while education is evoked as a force strong enough to counteract the effects of the daughter's "inheritance," the very insistence on the necessity of such education attests to the problematic nature of the female psyche. Patronage* expands on the theme of the daughter's "inheritance" through its presentation of two daughters—one whose position is central to the unfolding of narrative events and who performs according to patriarchal expectation, the other who is displaced to the margins of the text and who resists patriarchal management. As its title indicates, the theme of Patronage is the exercise of paternalistic prerogative. A derivative of "pater," a "patron" is literally "one who stands to another or others in relations analogous to those of a father." "Patronage" refers to the corrupt and "outdated" habits of political favoritism associated with old-style patriarchy, especially nepotism, that dominate social relations. In the novel such "patronage" is personified in the character of Lord Oldborough and is soon discredited. In contrast, Mr. Percy practices the ideals of a newstyle patriarchy, believing only in the strength of individual character and the individual's ability to rise on his own merit. The plot centers around the gradual rise of the three Percy sons into respectable bourgeois professions—law, medicine, and the military. Alfred, Erasmus, and Godfrey undergo three parallel ascensions marked by a radical independence from a slavish outdated system of patronage, and their professional histories occupy most of this 600-page novel. In addition, the Percy sons have two sisters,

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Caroline and Rosamond, whose own trajectories can take them to one single "profession"—marriage. Focusing on the story of Caroline Percy, the elder daughter, allows us to read Patronage as a "traditional" novel centered around the classic "wedlock" plot.9 After a series of protracted delays (to which I will return later), her story successfully "closes" with her marriage to Count Altenberg, a man who is, on all accounts, an "excellent catch." Moreover, Caroline's story makes it possible for both the novel and the patriarchal family whose determination is central to a novel such as Patronage to "close" against uncertainty, doubt, and disruption. And yet shadowing this exemplary female figure is another daughter whose history threatens to disturb the explicit narrative investment in an ideology of romantic love. To describe Caroline Percy, one might best report that she is not, as the narrative insists, the stereotypical "heroine" usually cast as the romantic protagonist. Instead, she is rational, responsible, and predictable. Over the course of many pages, she rejects a series of possible attractive suitors, refusing to play the coquette or in any way to compromise the impeccable moral standards that have been instilled in her by her parents. Such behavior proves especially vexing to her younger sister Rosamond who, as the voice of "comic relief," constantly chides her sister for her unromantic inclinations. An Austenian insistence that Caroline is not a "heroine" demands repeated emphasis on the mundane, prosaic quality of Miss Percy's story.10 The narrative also insists that Caroline is "transparent" and can be "looked through" at any given moment. A scene in the novel literalizes the effect: her future husband becomes enamored when viewing a representation of Caroline heroically rescuing her old nurse from a fire, which has been painted on glass. But if Caroline can be "looked through," what lies on the other side of her surface? The question is best answered by a consideration of Caroline's symbolic position in the novel. As the eldest daughter, she is a figure poised between two families, a family of origin and a new family. Her position makes her the medium of exchange, while her marriage to Count Altenberg symbolizes the union of separate estates, the creation of a new family that unites and mediates the interests of the separate parties through conjugal ties. In this arrangement it is absolutely essential that Caroline's virtue be inviolable, lest the legitimacy of her children be thrown into

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question. Thus, to "look through" Caroline Percy, as does the count, is to see an image of female sexuality that complies with the requirements of a patriarchal economy of exchange. The exemplary and "faultless" behavior of the elder Miss Percy assures that the duplication of the family structure will occur, undisturbed by the force of any illicit or unsanctioned desire, since such desire would have the power to nullify her marriage contract. The reader's ability to "look through" Caroline entails the assurance that she will never transgress the boundaries of the new family to which she has pledged herself. In this sense, as Caroline's story "closes" in the final pages of the novel, so too, does the new family structure that she has created. However, the full significance of Caroline's position emerges most clearly against the story of another daughter whose story is displaced to the margins of the novel. In contrast to Caroline, Miss Hauton (later the Marchioness of Twickenham) seriously problematizes the issue of reading a woman's character. If Caroline's surface is transparent, Miss Hauton's is murky, as she constantly sends out contradictory messages. Innocent in appearance, she disguises the history of her mother, a notorious divorcee. Moreover, in every aspect of her behavior, she threatens to repeat that history. The exact nature of her character is demonstrated by her flirtations with Godfrey, the naive but wellintentioned youngest Percy son, who is temporarily (and mistakenly, so the narrative will insist), seduced by her charms. More than a foil to the elder Miss Percy, Miss Hauton embodies all that the exemplary daughter is not—she is enticing, duplicitous, and dangerous. A close relation to the lamialike Lady Isabel, she provides access to a problematic female desire necessarily repressed in the representation of Caroline Percy. Miss Hauton's story is brief. Because of her mother's indiscreet past, she bears a social stigma that places her at a social disadvantage. Attracted to one man, she is ruthlessly sacrificed in marriage to another, whom she does not love, by her uncle, Lord Oldborough, who seeks political gain by means of this alliance. Soon afterward, she has an affair, bears a child, and is separated (but not divorced) from her husband. Her story, relegated to the background, is only interpolated through the major characters. The particular details are unrepresented, perhaps in keeping with the author's fear of offending her audience by introducing "improper"

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material. Perhaps, also, Miss Hauton's story was considered only too predictable since, as in The Absentee, the narrative argues that the daughter raised by an "immoral" mother can do nothing but follow her mother's example; the mother's indiscretion writes the daughter's plot before she ever acts on her own behalf. The details of a lengthy conversation among the Percys concerning Miss Hauton's character, strategically placed early in the novel, highlight Miss Hauton's situation as a significant phenomenon working against the larger narrative movement. That Edgeworth returns to the theme of "maternal inheritance" first introduced in The Absentee suggests her ongoing concern with the issue. Godfrey has just returned from a party where he has made Miss Hauton's acquaintance. He begins by defending her innocence and by proposing that "she ought not be blamed for her mother's faults, and nothing could be more unjust and cruel than to think ill of the innocent daughter, because her mother had been imprudent" (I, 129). In answer to his son's position, Mr. Percy expresses strong doubts concerning Miss Hauton's character, doubts that the narrative will later substantiate. He further rationalizes that, even if Miss Hauton does not repeat her mother's immoral behavior, the social severity extended to the "innocent" progeny of infamous mothers can be defended as beneficial to society as a whole: "The certainty of shame descending to the daughters would be a powerful means of deterring mothers from ill-conduct; and might operate more effectively to restrain licentiousness in high life than heavy damages, or the now transient disgrace of public trial and divorce" (I, 129). A system that seeks to proscribe maternal desire does not work unless all mothers can be equally certain that their daughters will fall under public opprobrium should they err. According to Mr. Percy, the daughter is—and must be—the most effective means of controlling the mother's behavior. As an effective extension of the law itself, her function is precisely to regulate maternal desire. Moreover, her presence makes her the clearest and most effective indicator of the consequences of maternal transgression. Thus Miss Hauton's appearance initiates an important discussion concerning the daughter's role in the practices of patriarchal exchange, and it illuminates the principles that make possible the enforcement of the patriarchal marriage contract. Mr. Percy further criticizes the practice of awarding dowries so large as to obscure the

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issue of the mother's character, for the daughter's "regulatory" function also touches economic concerns: "Surely a mother living in open defiance of the virtue of her sex should not see her illegitimate offspring instead of being her shame become her glory" (I, 131). He also stipulates, "It appears to me highly advantageous that character should descend to posterity as well as riches or honors, which are, in fact, often the representations, or consequences, in other forms, of different parts of character, industry—talents— courage" (I, 130). His language exposes the nature of the problem: if a woman's "currency" is her virtue, no one should be allowed to debase the terms of the coin. Revealed here, in other words, is an anxiety about women assuming illegal control of a bourgeois economics of marriage, which equates "virtue" with financial gain. The immoral mother who successfully puts her daughter "on the market" corrupts the standards of exchange in the process. As Mr. Percy's position makes clear, patriarchy appropriates the daughter in order to insure the "market value" of its system of relations. Yet patriarchal appropriation can seem enabling to the daughter who suddenly finds herself empowered by the father's authority, as Edgeworth herself might have testified. However, this passage makes clear the very conditions under which such empowerment occurs, since it stipulates the terms under which even a "bad" daughter can come to serve the purposes of patriarchy. The speaker is now Mrs. Percy, who reasons that, if Miss Hauton (unlike Lady Isabel, for instance) "had been separated in early childhood from the mother, had never been exposed to the influence of example, had, on the contrary, been educated carefully in strict moral and religious principles, it would be cruel, because unnecessary, to object to an alliance with such a woman.—The objection would appear inconsistent, as well as unjust, if made by those who professed to believe in the unlimited power of education" (I, 133). By reiterating the power of education, Mrs. Percy reintroduces the tension between the daughter's "inheritance" and her training seen earlier in The Absentee. That those who "professed to believe" in the power of education might ever object to the well-bred daughter of an infamous woman intimates that even a progressive educational system fails to banish the anxiety elicited by her presence: an "inconsistent" or "unjust" suspicion concerning her character is a suspicion that persists nonetheless.

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In reply to his wife's comment, Mr. Percy seems to concede, but the very words of his reply detract from an argument that grants education the power to negate maternal influence, because ultimately education matters less than the terms of the daughter's ascent. Undoubtedly, exceptions fto the rule of shunning the daughter of an infamous woman] must not merely be allowed, but will force themselves in favour of superior merit, of extraordinary excellence, which will rise above every unfavorable circumstances in every class, in any condition of life in which it may exist, which will throw off any stigma, however, disgraceful, counteract all prepossessions, however, potent, rise against all power of depression—redeem a family—redeem a race. (I, 135)

Although put forth as a concession, Mr. Percy's comment implicitly—and inadvertently—returns the conversation to a problematic female desire. He describes the mythical ascent of one daughter who transcends all connections to a family of origin, one who "makes herself" regardless of the impression of maternal deviancy; this daughter is no longer daughter to her mother as she "throw[s] off the stigma" of her mother's disgrace. The prototype for her who "redeem[s] a family—redeem[s] a race" is, of course, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who amends the first human transgression by giving birth to Christ. As daughter to her mother Eve, Mary is similarly positioned under the shadow of a maternal deviancy. But the story of Mary's redemptive act, of how she distinguishes herself from her mother Eve, is a narrative untouched by the taint of illicit desire, since the conception of Christ is a miraculous event leaving Mary's virginity intact and the question of her sexuality moot. Thus Mr. Percy's comment intimates that, like Mary, only the daughter who has never experienced what her fallen mother experienced—an illicit desire—can ever truly "redeem a family, redeem a race." The repressed term in his remark is precisely the mother's illicit desire, since what distinguishes the "redeemed" daughter from her mother is the lack of any such desire. When the ingenuous Rosamond suggests that, under different circumstances, her sister Caroline might have been such a daughter, Mr. Percy laughs in reply: Caroline's "transparency" makes the very suggestion not only unnecessary but also absurd. Applied to Miss

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Hauton, however, these paternal warnings prove prescient, for the divorc6e's daughter soon repeats the history of her mother's illicit desire. Paradoxically, the all-too-predictable course of her life brings the unpredictable into her marriage: when she gives birth to a son, his legitimacy is thrown into question, and the narrative leaves the issue unresolved (IV, 86). In other words, instead of "closing" satisfactorily with her marriage, Miss Hauton's story remains open to an unresolved and disturbing ambiguity: whose son did she bear? The failure of her story to "close" is matched by the failure of her familial connections. Thus the marchioness' history indicates how daughters can refuse to participate in a patriarchal economy of exchange. Her story exposes a residual and recalcitrant "maternal desire," an impulse passed from mother to daughter, which inevitably circumvents patriarchal management. The tragedy of the marchioness' life—that her own mother so carelessly raised her with no concern for her daughter's virtue, that her uncle sacrificed her to his own political ambitions, and that she herself repeated her mother's transgressive behavior—suggests the tentative nature of a patriarchal strategy that appropriates the daughter for its own purposes. Earlier in the novel, punning at the expense of Miss Hauton's humiliation, the narrator tells us that she "suffered herself to be led, in fashionable style, to the hymeneal altar by the Marquis of Twickenham. This denouement satisfied Lord Oldborough" (I, 277). But her "toleration" of the event is no passive acceptance of the distress it inflicts on her and, finding unbearable the denouement that has been provided for her, Miss Hauton subverts her uncle's attempts to "close" her story. Her means of rebellion is her adultery, an act that undermines Lord Oldborough's best efforts to manipulate and control a series of familial connections. In giving birth to a son whose legitimacy cannot be determined, the Marchioness of Twickenham reproduces only the indeterminacy of political alliances based on dubious and forced patriarchal connections. Finally, to foreground the marchioness' history is to discover another plot in which a daughter finds the means to subvert patriarchal efforts to manipulate a certain kind of closure.11 Thus it may seem that Miss Hauton's adultery provides evidence of a hidden resistance to patriarchy. But Patronage is, at best, ambivalent about the outcome of the marchioness' story and the

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subversive power it intimates. If the marchioness could be said to "retaliate" against her uncle for his misuse of patriarchal prerogative, no gain is represented. The novel retreats from a critique of all forms of patriarchal appropriation to stress that other—better— kinds of patriarchal management (as exemplified, e.g., in the "enlightened" attitude of the Percys toward marriage) could have prevented this tragedy. Simultaneously, the narrative remains preoccupied with the concept of the exemplary heroine whose very evenness is explicitly lauded by the narrator.12 Furthermore, the "good" daughter is a transparent rendering of the female author who writes the patriarchal script; like Miss Percy, the female author exposes herself to patriarchal scrutiny in order to win approval and a place in the system of patriarchal relations. Like the mythical daughter whose ascension Mr. Percy imagines, the woman author effectively transcends a dubious maternal "inheritance" in order to redeem her race; her own illicit desire for whatever patriarchy will not sanction must be repressed in the process. Still, in the difficulty with which Caroline Percy's story "closes," we can read a commentary on the dilemma facing a woman writer like Edgeworth. Although Caroline's engagement to the Count is settled in Chapter 39, her marriage is delayed for several chapters more. A protracted series of events (including a plot development, borrowed from The Vicar of Wakefield, which imprisons the family temporarily) make it seem as if Caroline's marriage will never take place. While such delays arguably retard the action of the novel unnecessarily, they also suggest, perhaps, an underlying reluctance to close the heroine's story. If, as it has been argued, closure resembles a kind of death to the heroine, then the delay of Miss Percy's marriage signals a resistance to such closure.13 As an author, Edgeworth seems to have confronted two choices: either to open up the story and relinquish her exemplary heroine to uncertainties or ambiguities that, as Miss Hauton's story indicate, can only be construed as transgressive, or to close it in a way that metaphorically brings her death. In other words, the story told in the margins of this novel is the story of what happens beyond closure, but what happens proves unimaginable. No wonder, then, that the choice of a metaphorical "death" for her heroine over the open-ended possibilities of transgression should occur with apparent reluctance.

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II

In contrast to Caroline's wedding at the end of Patronage is the sensational ending of Helen, Edgeworth's last novel, published in 1834, which suggestively closes with husband and wife reunited over the dead body of the wife's mother. The only full-scale fictional work Edgeworth wrote for adults after her father had died, Helen reverberates with tensions generated by the act of writing itself. This novel shows that to write as a daughter is to implicate oneself in a familial struggle between the father who reads all his daughters as Eve's descendents and the mother whose counsel, inadequate to her daughter's needs, subjects her to the rigors of patriarchal analysis. The culminating work in Edgeworth's career as a novelist, Helen14 foregrounds the issues of the daughter's writerly "authority" and, in the process, explores the nature of "daughterly" writing itself. Like Belinda, Helen Stanley is a faultless young woman who must make her way in the world without the benefit of family or fortune. Forced to depend on the generosity of others, she is urged to make her home at Clarendon Park, the estate of her childhood friend Lady Cecilia, lately married to the reserved General Clarendon. Intimate access to Lady Cecilia's mother, Lady Davenant, for whom Helen has a special affection, helps to make life at Clarendon Park pleasurable, as does the presence of General Clarendon's fascinating but impetuous ward, Granville Beauclerc, to whom Helen eventually becomes engaged. The novel thus establishes two mother-daughter pairs: Lady Davenant and Lady Cecilia, and Lady Davenant and Helen. Much of the narrative concerns the limits of the first and the dynamics of the second, as Helen becomes Lady Davenant's surrogate daughter. Details from this plot rehearse themes witnessed earlier in Edgeworth's domestic novels: once again, at issue is the mother's failure to provide adequate counsel to the daughter. Taking Helen into her confidence, Lady Davenant begins her personal narrative with an account of the failings of her own mother. She explains that her "too sanguine mother" led her "into the very danger against which she should have warned [her]": hopeless romanticism (I, 127). Her faulty upbringing leads her to one disastrous engagement, followed by her marriage to Lord Davenant. Yet her marriage was fraught

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with tension, because she could not relinquish an "inappropriately" masculine craving for power and fame, an undying ambition to excel in her social circle. Humiliated to discover that she was mocked behind her back, she soon realized the foolishness of her aspirations. Meanwhile, her mother's persistent demands for money for her pet projects threatened to destroy her marriage, until Lady Davenant recognized the superiority of her husband's wisdom and authority on domestic and political issues alike. Thus Lady Davenant's narrative, akin to that of Lady Delacour, introduces several important issues. Like Lady Delacour, Lady Davenant has difficulty accommodating herself to a domestic life, as seen in her craving to love unconditionally and to excel socially. But also like Lady Delacour, she finds inner peace only when she submits herself to her husband's supervision. Yet the more important issue in this narrative is the failure of the mother-daughter relationship. If Lady Davenant's mother failed to prepare her daughter adequately for marriage, Lady Davenant fails her daughter Lady Cecilia in refusing to communicate the benefit of her experience and the depth of her love, despite Helen's insistence that Cecilia would profit from the narrative just disclosed. As a "surrogate" daughter, Helen is privy to the narrative that might have helped Cecilia. Without her mother's counsel, Cecilia falls from grace in the following way. In the second volume, a packet of anonymous, incriminating love letters, written by Cecilia before her marriage to one Henry D'Aubigny, recently deceased, suddenly appear at Clarendon Park, where they receive the notice of General Clarendon. Cecilia fears the worst—that her husband, who married her on the express understanding that her heart had never belonged to anyone before him, will reject her if he learns that she wrote them, and that her mother, who is the victim of dangerous nervous attacks, will be destroyed by her daughter's disgrace. Cecilia therefore asks Helen to claim temporarily the letters as her own, promising to reveal the truth to her husband immediately after her mother's departure for Russia. Helen agrees, even though she is extremely reluctant to enter into Cecilia's deception. But Lady Davenant's departure fails to elicit Cecilia's confession. For the next 300 pages, although guilty of nothing except keeping Cecilia's secret and protecting Lady Davenant, Helen pays the price for Cecilia's indiscretion as she

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becomes increasingly implicated in the efforts to cover up the deception. Further evidence indicts Helen as duplicitous, and scandalous gossip nearly ruins her reputation, until the general is forced to break off the engagement between Helen and his ward Beauclerc. Helen then goes into exile in Wales with the general's sister (who alone recognizes Cecilia's deception), where she suffers a nervous collapse. Meanwhile, Cecilia bears the general a son, still refusing to clear her innocent friend. Upon the return of her mother from Russia, she finally confesses and, as feared, the general seeks a separation. In the final scene, Lady Davenant throws herself at the general's knees, imploring him to take back her daughter and to protect her from "the world of slanderers." Moved at last by this dramatic gesture, the general yields and takes his wife in his arms. Lady Davenant blesses them, joins their hands, and dies. This final tableau, in which the lovers are reunited over the corpse of the mother, warrants attention, because this moment of high melodrama is intentionally didactic. As Lady Davenant dies, she assumes full responsibility for the events that have transpired, and she fully absolves the general of any responsibility, despite his role in Cecilia's "fall." After all, had he never placed such exacting standards on his wife, she would never have felt the need to resort to deception. Moreover, the fact that he insists on perceiving the "proof" of Helen's duplicity, despite all the obvious evidence to the contrary, marks him as inflexible in the extreme. Yet to read the novel as a critique of patriarchal harshness, of impossibly high standards arbitrarily imposed on innocent women, is to ignore Lady Davenant's dying words: "Now I give to my daughter a husband worthy of her, and she more worthy of that noble heart than when first his. Her only fault was mine—my early neglect: it is repaired—I die in peace!" (Ill, 322). In this way, the self-recriminating mother not only implicitly endorses the exacting standards that her son-in-law has imposed on her daughter, but she also insists that her daughter has been strengthened by the trial, which has ultimately tested her moral character; finally, Cecilia's willingness to expose herself to the general's judgment has made her a superior wife. At the same time, the novel carefully establishes a motive for the general's uncompromising position. Lady Davenant explains to Helen that her son-inlaw had previously witnessed "two or three scandalous intrigues,

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followed by 'the public brand of shameful life'" (I, 53). He vowed therefore to marry neither any "travelled lady" nor "any woman with whom there was a danger of a first love." His position is, then, meant to be reasonable, and Lady Davenant further exonerates her son-in-law's character; although inferior to her daughter in wit, literature, and genius, he remains far superior in that ruling power, "strength of mind" (I, 58). Thus Lady Davenant's ultimate act of self-blame occurs against a range of textual details designed to preserve the general's credibility. Outside the parameters of the text, in a letter addressing the moral of the novel, Edgeworth reiterated her sense that Helen was ultimately to be read as indictment of Lady Davenant's failure to counsel her daughter and not of patriarchal standards themselves. But the moral I draw from Helen is from that fine Lady Davenant's character that mothers talented mothers should take care not to make their children afraid of them so as to prevent them from telling the truth & trusting them with faults & secrets at the time when youth most want anothers counsel & assistance. In short the moral of Lady Davenant's character is that talents should make themselves objects of Love not fear.15

This insistence that the plot of Helen evolves out of Lady Davenant's flawed maternal role seems problematic at best, however; to reduce the story to Lady Davenant's failure is not to account satisfactorily for the excruciating trial that the innocent protagonist is made to endure. That so much of the last volume is concerned with the daughter's inner torment, a psychological state compellingly and convincingly drawn, contradicts the author's efforts to impose a singular interpretation on the fiction. Nor is the persistent problem of patriarchal suspicion banished by the author's attempts to give the general a motive, since the devastating impact of that suspicion has been evoked too keenly to be dismissed. Finally, then, Edgeworth's overdetermined attempt to "explain" the novel fails to give sufficient weight to the daughter's traumatic experiences. For above all, Helen is the story of a daughter who "authorizes" something she cannot control and who must then bear the consequences of that act. Cecilia is a figure for the woman writer who similarly confronts the consequences of her writing, but Helen's

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position in the novel suggests that she is Cecilia's double. Both are the "daughters" of Lady Davenant and, more important, both write (at least to some eyes) with the same hand. Initially the general is easily convinced that Helen is the author of the packet of letters because he cannot distinguish her handwriting from his wife's. Moreover, early in the novel, when asked by Lady Davenant whether Henry D'Aubigny had ever been an admirer of hers, Helen makes no answer: "Her thoughts had gone back to the time when Colonel D'Aubigny was first introduced to her, which was just before her uncle's illness, and when her mind had been so engrossed by him, that she had but a confused recollection of the rest" (I, 47). The awkwardness of the syntax of this sentence introduces an ambiguity. Clearly the "him" who so engrossed Helen refers to her dying uncle, yet her very confusion conflates the uncle with D'Aubigny; the possibility that D'Aubigny "engrossed" her (like Cecilia) is present, and Lady Davenant interprets Helen's silence as proof of her involvement with D'Aubigny (I, 48). In other words, while the narrative explicitly insists on Helen's total "innocence," textual details conspire to implicate her in Cecilia's illicit passion and to suggest that no woman is ever totally blameless. The bond between Cecilia and Helen is further illustrated by means of a miniature included in the packet of letters. The miniature is a portrait of Helen that had been painted by Cecilia and stolen by D'Aubigny not, we are told, because of its subject but because of its value as a work by the artist. This portrait further "signs" the letters as Helen's, even though the portrait is itself signed "CD." and inscribed on the reverse with the name Henry D'Aubigny. The miniature "miniaturizes," in other words, a series of relations in the novel; Cecilia controls the fate of Helen's reputation, yet both the image and Helen's representation are appropriated by D'Aubigny, so that both women find themselves circumscribed by male control. Thus, if Cecilia is a figure for the woman writer, her "other half" is any daughter of Eve who is similarly involved in the act of representing herself against the backdrop of Eve's transgression, whether or not she ever puts pen to paper and attempts to "authorize" herself. In two crucial ways, then, Edgeworth's last novel comments on the nature of her own experience as an author. The double daughters suggest the divided nature of the woman writer's experience:

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while a part of her struggles to keep the mother's counsel, another part is alienated from the mother through her act of writing. The woman author is both Helen and Cecilia, both the daughter who is continually "framed" according to patriarchal suspicion and the daughter who attempts to manipulate her own fate through the act of writing. But second, Cecilia's situation suggests the dangers awaiting any woman who makes herself an author. Writing to Henry D'Aubigny, Cecilia first "authorizes" the force of her youthful passion. She subsequently discovers that her control over that passion, a force now put into free play, is challenged to the limit, for to write as a daughter of Eve is precisely to give unwitting authority to expressions that demand the utmost responsibility and vigilance. If Cecilia painfully learns her lesson about the nature of this responsibility, the novel also issues a warning about the importance of never "authorizing" in the first place what is best left unwritten. To be sure, the dangers of "authority" are apparent to writers of either gender. And yet, given the very meaning of the word author, and the tentative nature of the daughter's participation in "authority," the problems of authorial "molestation" are bound to be more acute for her. As Edward Said points out, the word "author," which is etymologically related to the word "authority," can be defined as "a person who originates or gives existence to something, a begetter, a beginner . . . ," in other words, & father.16 Thus, it is particularly relevant that Helen was the only work of adult fiction Edgeworth wrote without her father. Butler documents the special care with which Helen was written. Since she could no longer depend on the advice of her father who had died in 1817, Edgeworth was forced to rely on the opinions of other family members who assiduously read and commented on early drafts of this last novel (459-464). She herself admitted that she was "more anxious far (and for good reasons) about this book than any I ever sent into the world" (Butler, 463). This anxiety may well be traced to the change in Edgeworth's status as "author" of her own text. Throughout most of her life as a writer, she had depended on her father's proximity as a means of simultaneously locating and embodying authority in the paternal body, that is, in a body other than her own: as long as he lived, Richard Edgeworth was, both literally and metaphorically, "author." As "partner" to her father/author, Edgeworth vicariously

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participated in that paternal authority, sharing in the particular powers identified with it, without necessarily claiming it as her own. To write without the father is to be forced to locate authority elsewhere than in the father; it is to experience a "crisis in authority." Appropriately, Helen depicts the perils experienced by the daughter as writer, Cecilia's troubles with the letters are inextricably related to her status as a daughter, and the entire plot is predicated on the idea that to have written illicitly from the position of a daughter, without either patriarchal protection or the kind of maternal supervision allowed for by patriarchy, is to have compromised one's integrity, to have made oneself susceptible to manipulation, and to have conformed to the very worst suspicions of daughterly behavior. To have written as a daughter outside the parameters of patriarchal control and protection is, in short, to have created the conditions for one's own molestation. Particularly intimidating to Cecilia's sense of authority are the letters themselves, which accrue tremendous power over the course of the novel. First bound within a single packet, they seem to be easily destroyed. Yet when Cecilia believes that she has burned them all, a single, particularly indiscreet letter—along with the miniature—suddenly pops out of a drawer in the drawing room, provoking Beauclerc's first doubts about Helen's character. A plausible explanation for this occurrence follows, but the reappearance of what Cecilia believes to have been destroyed gives the letters the status of the irrepressible. For the rest of the novel, try as she might, Cecilia can control neither the letters nor their explosive content. Once in London, she discovers that somehow the "secret" existence of the letters is known by society. She watches in horror as scandalous newspaper accounts hint at their content, although Helen is still identified as their author. During a sequence of events unmatched by any other narrative feat in Edgeworth's career, a sequence remarkable for its skillful execution of suspense and timing,17 Cecilia goes in pursuit of a printed, but not yet published, version of the memoirs of the late Colonel D'—that has left the bookseller's. This edition contains copies of Cecilia's original letters, plus additional forgeries designed to titillate an audience still further. She discovers, in other words, that not only are her written words irrepressible, but that they also have the capacity to generate further scan-

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dal. The letters seem to have the power to duplicate themselves beyond her control, accruing still more notoriety in the process. After Cecilia succeeds in rescuing an advance copy from the clutches of Lady Katrine Hawksby (who would certainly have used the manuscript for her own sinister ends), she rushes back to the bookseller's, only to discover that General Clarendon has already purchased—and burned once and for all—the remaining copies of the offensive book in order to insure Helen's reputation. In their capacity to reappear when least expected, to pop out of drawers, to assume ever more public and sinister shape, Cecilia's letters become almost animated. Although the novel provides a viable "explanation" for their mysterious appearance (Carlos, a treacherous page, first sent the letters to Clarendon Park in order to take revenge on Helen for exposing his perfidy), as well as for their subsequent public circulation (Lord Beltravers wanted to ruin Helen's reputation in order to advance his sister's chances with Beauclerc), they clearly gain an additional valence as the novel progresses, a valence that overpowers narrative explanation. If the letters have the status of the irrepressible, as well as the ability to regenerate themselves in still more sinister form, they suggest the explosive potential of writing itself. As an image of writing, they convey the dangers implicit in the act of putting pen to paper, of committing to words those feelings best left unarticulated. In Helen it is the nature of writing itself to resist control, to thwart the daughter's authorial power. In short, writing itself has become the monster that menaces the daughter as author. As an image of the "monstrous," writing is a far more serious and formidable opponent than Harriot Freke or any of her counterparts, since this "monster" can no longer be marginalized or displaced from the center of the narrative, and it cannot be banished. Edgeworth's double heroine, a figure for the woman author, now finds herself threatened by the product of her own pen. In Helen, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the act of writing is like the act of reproducing, of "giving birth" to a "hideous progeny" that returns to haunt its creator.18 Edgeworth's Helen depicts that monstrousness just as forcefully as Shelley's novel literalizes the monstrousness of the woman writer's creative act. Thus Edgeworth's last novel marks an important moment in her career; it signals a persistent and fundamental tension in her life-

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long attempt to mediate and displace anxiety by means of an involvement with the discourses of new-style patriarchy. In choosing to write the patriarchal script, whether in the form of domestic novels or Irish fictions, Edgeworth may well have believed that she could gain control over the "monstrousness" that threatened from within. As Helen demonstrates, however, the monstrousness could manifest itself in innumerable ways, not just as the mob or the deviant daughter of an aberrant mother, but as an aspect of the writer's own creativity. What Edgeworth could not have known was the very source of the monstrousness that could not be banished: the painful and monstrous nature of psychic life itself. Speaking of the affinity between feminism and psychoanalysis, Jacqueline Rose reminds us both insist "there is a resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life." Moreover, psychoanalysis in particular recognizes "as more than a fact of individual pathology that most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as women, if indeed they do at all."19 Edgeworth's career attests to the truth of this psychoanalytic perspective, as time and time again her works entail a struggle to accommodate the female subject to the role that is being prescribed for her. It is a role that the female subject finds neither entirely "natural" nor painless (despite narrative insistence to the contrary), as the shadowy presence of the monstrous daughter signals. But the failure of accommodation is not to be simply dismissed as an inevitable result of patriarchy; indeed, it is the very process of accommodation, a process at once necessary and compelling, that repeatedly elicits tension in Edgeworth's career. The various "solutions" she devised to facilitate such accommodation could only be tentative or provisional at best since, as Rose also writes, ". . . there is no stability of sexual identity, no position for women (or for men) which is ever simply achieved" (91). That Edgeworth never recognized the greater circumstances propelling her into complicity with patriarchy cannot be considered as a "failing" on her part. Instead, Edgeworth's biography as "case history" illustrates with great clarity how complex and intricate is the experience of the human subject under patriarchy. One of the last great literary daughters of the eighteenth century, Maria Edgeworth helped to implement the ideals of a domestic ideology with profound implications for gender relations in the nineteenth cen-

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tury. For the next several generations, women novelists would continue to struggle with the exigencies of life under new-style patriarchy; these ninteenth-century daughters would also encounter that monstrous element that symbolizes an aspect of the human psyche itself. But unlike Edgeworth's double heroine, they would learn both to "authorize" the monstrousness and to make it a useful image of their experience under patriarchy. If we were to read a nineteenth-century woman's novel like Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights against Helen, we would begin to recognize all the dimensions of the literary daughter's struggle to tell her own story. In the later works, the doubleness that pulls Helen apart becomes part of the psychological complexity of the main characters. And yet the virtue of a novel like Helen is that it renders accessible those ongoing anxieties that characterize the psychic life of a "daughter of Eve."

7 Coda: Charlotte Bronte and Milton's Cook Throughout this book my project has been a study of patterns of complicity—of the motivations behind women's identifications with their fathers, of the forms their complicity can take, and of the consequences of that identification. A major factor in this book on male-identified women has been the mother, and I have argued that complicitous behavior can be traced to a persistent matrophobia. For example, in Hannah More's responses to Paradise Lost, Eve emerges as the mother from whom one must differentiate oneself. To be "daughter of God and Man" is to be the daughter of no mother; it is to be the daughter who takes control of Mother Nature's prolific bounty and who asserts her independence from Nature's sway. Similarly, in Edgeworth's texts on Ireland, "Mother Ireland" (best symbolized, perhaps, in Elinor, the Irish nursemother of Ennui) is an undisciplined and unregenerate (if somewhat endearing) presence who must ultimately yield to a new order of self-disciplined offspring. These offspring are depicted as the children of a new and superior Anglo-Irish order, and Edgeworth implicitly places herself among them as she attempts to assert her difference from her Mother Ireland. In the end, then, both Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth define themselves in opposition to a representation of nature that is consistently "Other." This self-definition has profound political implications; it entails a range of political attitudes that are the extension of their attempts to distance and control the otherness of nature. For More, antirevolutionary politics curb the threat of a range of "natural" behaviors putatively associated with the force of revolution. In Edgeworth, an indigenous Irish culture must be 198

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contained and prevented from living the body in a more "naturalistic" way. These situations suggest that, historically, women have dealt with the perception of their own otherness—a perception that is itself the product of a patriarchal culture—by projecting the fear of otherness onto another party, where it assumes (an apparently) manageable form. That other party is often another class. But the situation I am describing is by no means prescriptive. The perception of Nature's otherness might, in fact, also lead the woman writer as daughter to consider another range of possibilities; the otherness of Mother Nature might be less threatening and more empowering. This becomes the case in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, a novel that culminates a series of themes I have been tracing throughout this book: the question of the daughter's origins; her placement in relation to her father(s); and her identification with or rejection of certain qualities perceived as belonging to the mother. Most important, in Chapter 18 Shirley addresses the daughter's ongoing relationship to Milton. Unlike Hannah More or Maria Edgeworth, Bronte finds much that is objectionable in Milton's Eve, and she seeks to redress Milton's concept of the first mother. But if Chapter 18 rewrites a series of Miltonic and familial relations, it also brings forth elements of the class tension that have pervaded my discussion. It is significant that Bronte's radical attack on Milton's rendering of female otherness does not dissipate the category of the "Other" in her text. Instead, Chapter 18 splinters the category of the "Other" and demonstrates how persistent and recalcitrant that category may be. Thus, in the end, BrontS's novel can teach us an important lesson about how our rejection of the father must be extended to a critique of the categories that accompany a patriarchal reading. One sultry summer evening, Shirley and Caroline wend their way toward the church. Anticipating a long and dreary sermon, Shirley decides not to enter. In contrast to the image of the clergymen with their pedestrian accounts of church schism, Shirley evokes the image of her Mother Nature, "now at her evening prayers: she is kneeling before those red hills." Thus, two kinds of worship are juxtaposed; the first is depicted as characteristically male, claustrophobic, and sententious; the second is depicted as female, expansive, and unselfconscious. Similarly, the discourse of the men in the

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church is convoluted and oppressive, while the discourse of Mother Nature is inspiring and simple. To Shirley, Nature is "like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth."1 Then, in response to Caroline's comparison of Nature to Milton's Eve, Shirley attacks the central misconceptions behind Milton's famous portrayal: "Gary we are alone: we may speak of what we think. Milton was great; but was he good? His brain was right; how was his heart? He saw heaven: he looked down on hell." Conceding that Milton saw Satan, Sin, and Death and that his perspective was truly epic in proportion, Shirley nonetheless asserts that Milton "tried to see the first woman; but, Gary, he saw her not." Whom, then, did Milton depict in Paradise Lost! According to Shirley, "it was his cook that he saw; or it was Mrs. Gill, as I have seen her, making custards, in the heat of summer, in the cool dairy . . . preparing a cold collation for the rectors" (315). Rejecting Milton's Eve as the image of "his cook," or Mrs. Gill, is indeed (as Caroline reminds Shirley) a "bold" move, yet it is also a highly symbolic one. Bronte means to lambast the inadequacy of Milton's depiction. For, no matter how pastoral the terms that describe her, Mrs. Gill is the image of lower-class, domestic servitude. To Shirley, her prosaic activity—the preparation of a meal for the rectors—testifies to the failure of Milton's imagination. Unlike Hannah More or Maria Edgeworth, Shirley finds no comfort in the idea that Milton offers his reader the portrait of a woman who mediates between nature and culture. Her ideal representation of Eve does not mediate but predominates. She is a powerful, energized renegade who dares to assert herself and who ultimately gives birth to Christ himself. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence: the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage,—the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages,—the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immorality, which, after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a Messiah. (315)

Shirley's rendering of the first mother is an important corrective to Milton's Eve. Here she rewrites the history of the primary

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mother-daughter bond: in her vision, the "first woman" is not alienated from, but continues to take her vitality from her Mother Nature. She possesses a powerful fecundity akin to Nature's own. In choosing to stay outside "with my mother Eve, in these days called Nature," Shirley chooses mother over father, power through identification. The radical difference of Nature has to be respected, but it can also be courted and internalized. However, while Shirley's vision takes her in the direction of a powerful female presence, it also takes her away from the very real and disempowered figure whose image provoked her vision in the first place: Mrs. Gill. By dismissing the possibility of anything heroic in Mrs. Gill and by insisting that, as a prototype for Milton's Eve, Mrs. Gill is a figure with whom she cannot identify, Shirley inadvertently perpetuates difference among women. To Shirley, Mrs. Gill must always be nothing more than a working-class woman without the refinements characteristic of a "lady." She cannot be a proper model for the "first woman" because of her class. Indeed, the very fact that she must work for her living seems to condemn her to a most prosaic realm. Thus, while Shirley's vision is a fantasy about female empowerment, it is a fantasy based on certain assumptions about class as a category of experience that divides sister from sister. In short, Shirley's feminist vision fails to include the notion of solidarity among women. Yet, arguably, Shirley's vision is also paradigmatic. As I have suggested throughout my discussion, moments of female empowerment often are also moments when class tensions become palpable. Frequently, a necessary moment of self-assertion for the middle-class woman is the moment when she defines herself in opposition to another who frequently belongs to another class. Thus Hannah More garners her authority from philanthropic activities performed for the benefit of a "savage," rural people while, as an author, Maria Edgeworth promotes the virtues of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy over an indigenous rural population. During the moment under discussion, Bronte seems unaware that the feminist vision of the privileged heroine bears certain implications; once brought into play, the otherness between Shirley and Mrs. Gill is never obviated. If Shirley's revision of Eve reconciles mother to daughter on the symbolic level, Caroline's discovery of her biological mother is the

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literal enactment of that same reconciliation. While Shirley discovers her mother in the images of the natural world, Caroline discovers hers in the image of Mrs, Pryor, the governess. Significantly, the issue of class first severed this mother-daughter pair. Mrs. Pryor explains that she did not reclaim her child at an appropriate moment because she saw "blooming the delicacy of an aristocratic flower—'little lady' was written on every trait." Because she associated her daughter with the aristocratic husband who wronged her, she could not embrace her. I had too recently crawled from under the yoke of the fine gentleman— escaped, galled, crushed, paralyzed, dying—to dare to encounter his still finer and most fairy-like representative. My sweet little lady overwhelmed me with dismay: her air of native elegance froze my very marrow. In my experience I had not met with truth, modesty, good principle as the concomitants of beauty. A form so straight and fine, I argued, must conceal a mind warped and cruel. (413-414)

Bronte's scene thus duplicates the mother-daughter distrust that, throughout this book, has divided mother from child. As Mrs. Pryor studies the image of the father's daughter, she feels herself defenseless against the evidence of the father's authority: "I had little faith in the power of my education to rectify such a mind; or rather, I entirely misdoubted my own ability to influence it" (414). To the mother, the daughter's face seems to prove the power of the father to assert himself even from beyond the grave. In other words, to the mother, the father's daughter is the living reminder of the malevolent power that will always thwart the mother. It is important that Bronte deploys class difference as the key indicator of initial otherness between mother and daughter. Class difference, in this scene, is the appropriate metaphor for a profound otherness between women that arises under patriarchy. Caroline's subsequent reunion with her mother constitutes a fantasy about how such otherness may be overcome. This fantasy depends on Mrs. Pryor's gradual recognition of her mistaken perception of Caroline's appearance; and the novel is invested in the notion that, if only the mother had the occasion to see the daughter for what she is, she would come forward to claim her daughter and otherness would cease to divide mother and daughter. The differences that

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separate Mrs. Pryor from her daughter—differences that result, after all, from the father's influence—can be eliminated with the act of careful consideration. Thus Shirley offers us two parallel incidents, two parallel plots that foreground a theme of class tension. In the first, Shirley defines herself in opposition to the working-class woman. Her vision of empowerment, of union with her Mother Nature, occurs at the expense of Mrs. Gill, who is isolated and left behind. In the second, the mother initially perceives her daughter as different because of her class, an attribute she inherits from her father, but an attribute that the mother is eventually able to disregard. What is the mechanism that allows Mrs. Pryor—unlike Shirley—to transcend class as a category of difference? In the second instance, the class difference is attributed directly to the father; implicitly, the differences separating Caroline from her mother can be traced to a patriarchal source that leaves its imprint. The mother can eventually see beyond that imprint. But Shirley's dismissal of Mrs. Gill results from nothing other than her own class prejudices; in this case, the perception of difference between women lies in a woman herself. She herself remains accountable for the category of otherness, even though she may have originally learned that category under the tutelage of patriarchy. Yet Shirley is never held accountable for her blind spot; in fact, nothing at this point in the novel indicates Bronte's consciousness of it. Thus Bronte's novel seems most lucid when critiquing otherness as a category that is instigated and perpetuated by men, and it seems less self-conscious about the role of women themselves in a hierarchical class system. It is telling that Shirley's feminist vision in Chapter 18 is followed by two encounters with working-class male characters, William Farren and Joe Scott. Reiterated in these encounters is the variety of ways that individuals, men and women, remain "Other" to each other. As a misogynist, Joe Scott stands for the worst kind of man. Citing St. Paul, he argues for the ultimate silencing of women. His position issues directly from his conviction that women's otherness demands their subjection to male authority. His extreme comments caricature antifemale rhetoric. In response to his provocation, Shirley takes up the challenge he offers with good humor. Indeed, she does not take him altogether seriously, as she remarks that "There is not a better nor a kinder husband in Briarfield" (323),

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Still, real consequences follow from the kind of antifemale position Scott embodies. Moreover, his assessment of the two "fine ladies" with whom he speaks has some striking elements. In particular, he distinguishes his wife—"a hard-working, plain woman"—from the "misses" who have nothing better to do with their time than visit. As he goes on to describe an occasion when he noticed Caroline visiting the countinghouse, it becomes clear that his view of Caroline gives her very little credit. He noticed that she was unable to do a sum even though "it were only a bit of sum in practice, that our Harry would have settled i' two minutes. She couldn't do it; Mr. Moore had to show how, and when he did show her, she couldn't understand him" (324). Shirley refutes Joe Scott's claim, yet the accuracy of his description does not seem to be the issue here. Instead, at stake is Scott's imaginative construction of Caroline from the outside. Whether she is what he says, he believes and acts toward her as if his perception of her were true. It is odd that, at this particular moment, Bronte allows her heroine to be seen from an outside—and very unflattering—point of view. Joe Scott recounts how Caroline hung on every word Moore said. . . . so attentive like, as if she followed him word for word, and all war as clear as a lady's looking glass to her een; and all't while she's peeping and peeping out o' t' window to see if t' mare stands quiet; and then looking at a bit of a splash on her riding-skirt; and then glancing glegly round at wer counting-house cobwebs and dust, and thinking what mucky folk we are. . . . (324)

Why does Bronte include this description? In part, she surely means to telegraph how unfair Scott's description is. Readers know Caroline to be far more sympathetic to the workers than Scott's description allows; they will reject his outside view as superficial and prejudiced. If Caroline noticed the dust at all, she probably did not pass judgment on the inhabitants of the countinghouse. And this may be Bronte's point: that a "lady" like Caroline is bound to be unfairly categorized and dismissed by ill-informed workers like Scott. Despite the fact that she is in a position to help him, Scott blocks any kind of understanding between them. In other words, this encounter highlights the way in which middle and upper-class women are cast in the role of Other by workers who know nothing

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of the women's true capabilities. Caroline's gender and her class make her doubly alien to Scott. Moreover, he seems to conflate gender, class, and political affiliation into the same troublesome category of difference. When asked by Shirley whether he is a Tory or a Whig, Scott replies, "as to being a Tory, I'd as soon be an old woman, or a young one, which is a more flimsier article still" (321). Thus the last scene of Chapter 18 mirrors the first one; both scenes expose and critique a male practice of casting woman as "Other" and of giving insufficient credit to women's potential and capabilities. In between these two scenes, however, comes the encounter with William Farren. Unlike Scott, Farren is pleasant and humble. Through the details of Bronte's description, he comes across as both domestic and domesticated. Shirley and Caroline first see him outside the church, where he has come to quiet his twoyear-old child. The narrator establishes his character: "Before gentlemen—such as Moore or Helstone, for instance—William was often a little dogged; and with proud or insolent ladies, too, he was quite unmanageable, sometimes very resentful; but he was most sensible, most tractable to, good-humor and civility . . . " (317). Caroline and Shirley like William; "it was their delight to lend him books and give him plants" (318). While such an assertion is meant to elevate Farren—to suggest that he is someone worthy of their attentions—it has the inadvertent effect of infantilizing him, of constructing him as someone whom they can adopt and take care of. In other words, despite the narrator's intention to promote sympathy between the ladies and Farren, Farren is problematically cast as a subordinate, someone depending on the gracious condescension of Caroline and Shirley. The narrator moves inside Farren's mind to give his assessment of the ladies. Caroline, in particular, "he had known from her childhood: unconsciously, she was his ideal of a lady. Her gentle mien, step, gestures, her grace of person and attire, moved some artistfibres about his peasant heart: he had a pleasure in looking at her, as he had in examining rare flowers, or in seeing pleasant landscapes" (318). It is not difficult for us to see, I think, that Farren's internalized perception of Caroline is just as artificial and distorted as Scott's, and yet this passage works very differently from the one at the end of the chapter. To begin with, William is depicted as so harmless, so endearing, that his view of Caroline is meant to be

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flattering to her; we imagine that she would be flattered. But the idea that Farren so idealizes Caroline seems highly fanciful; it resembles a wish on the part of the narrator. This passage is troubling because Bronte seems so unaware of the inappropriateness of her gesture in assigning William an internalized view of Caroline: how can Bronte know, any better than her heroine, what happens within a man like Farren? In presuming to attribute thoughts and motives to Farren, a presumption based only on an exterior view, is she not guilty of the same act for which Milton and Scott were implicitly indicted: the act of projecting otherness onto an unknown subject? Yet Farren's function here is to act as "Other" to Caroline, to be the repository of her ideal image of herself. And so the theme of otherness permeates the encounter with Farren as well. As "low persons," Mrs. Gill, Farren, and Scott are ironically anticipated in the chapter title: "Chapter 18: Which the Genteel Reader is Recommended to Skip, Low Persons being Here Introduced." On one level, the purpose of the title is to counteract class divisions. The narrator, who is so self-consciously wry as to admonish the "Genteel Reader," is someone who is not elitist; Bronte means ironically to signal her democratic openness to characters like Farren and Scott, as well as her impatience with those who insist on clear class distinctions in the novel. But the ironic tone only carries so far and, in the end, the narrator's gesture toward inclusiveness is limited by the fact that men such as Farren are never given their full due in the novel. It would be easy to isolate the first part of Chapter 18 and to celebrate its feminist vision. Shirley gives us a mother we would eagerly claim, for she tells us that "The first-woman was heavenborn: vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation" (315). But it is significant that Shirley's vision occurs in the context of a broader discussion; in Chapter 18 the effort to reclaim the first mother, to find strength and power in her example, is balanced by other political and social concerns. The pursuit of feminist origins does not occur in a vacuum for Bronte, nor does it for us. In Chapter 18 Bronte sets out—admirably, I think—to attack patriarchy for persistently using the category of "Other" for

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women. But a vision like Shirley's is, at best, a partial solution to patriarchal categorization. Because Bronte's chapter never explicitly interrogates the category of otherness, it never banishes that category. Instead, as we have seen, otherness becomes fractured and dissipated: Mrs. Gill is "Other" to Shirley; Caroline and Shirley are "Other" to Joe Scott; William is "Other" to Shirley and Caroline; the male worker is "Other" to Bronte. All of this suggests that, while assessing our status as "our fathers' daughters," we need not only to refuse the role that patriarchy has given to us. In addition, we must recognize how patriarchy perpetuates certain categories; we must consider that we may have, on occasion, been implicated in the act of perpetuating those categories. In the process of discovering and embracing our mothers, let us not leave the cook behind.

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NOTES

Preface 1. I want to acknowledge the special resonance of this term in current critical discourse. My use of this term owes much to Jane Gallop, who has used psychoanalytic criticism to develop a different—but related—argument about seduction. See The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 2. Kristina Straub, Divided Status: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1987); Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988). 3. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 96. 4. In the work of Mitzi Myers, to which I respond at length here.

Chapter 1 1. Cited by Moira Ferguson in her article "Resistance and Power in the Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, 27 (1986), p. 251. 2. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 213. 3. Moira Ferguson, ed., First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press and Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1985), p. xi. 4. Miriam Leranbaum, '"Mistresses of Orthodoxy': Education in the Lives and Writings of Late Eighteenth-Century Women Writers," Publications of the American Philosophical Society, 121 (1977), 281-301. The ten women discussed by Leranbaum are: Clara Reeve, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Montague, Hester Chapone, Hannah More, Ann Barbauld, and Mary Wollstonecraft. 5. Mitzi Myers, "'Reform or Ruin': A Revolution in Female Manners," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 11 (1982), 203. 6. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 78. 7. Mary Poovey, "Fathers and Daughters: The Trauma of Growing Up Female," Women and Literature, ed. Janet Todd, Vol. II (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), pp. 38-58.

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8. A consideration of Jane Flax's theory as expressed in "The Conflict Between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships within Feminism," Feminist Studies, 4 (1978), 171-189 or "Mother-Daughter Relationship: Psychodynamics, Politics and Philosophy," in The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980), pp. 20-40, might have led Poovey to consider the tension within the mother-daughter relationship. For another reading of the father in Evelina, see Irene Fizer, "The Name of the Daughter: Identity and Incest in Evelina" in Refiguring the Father, eds. Patricia S. Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 78-107. 9. Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney; The Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988). The classic example of Charles Burney's interference in his daughter's life was his prompting her to accept a position as deputy keeper of the robes in the court of Queen Charlotte. The position proved inimical to Frances; she was unable to write very much and almost lost her health altogether (see Chapter 5). 10. Especially representative of this viewpoint are Rose Marie Cutting, "Defiant Women: The Growth of Feminism in Fanny Burney's Novels," SEL, 17 (1977), 515530, and Judith Lowder Newton, "Evelina," in Women, Power and Subversion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981). Most recently, Kristina Straub, in Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1987) and Julia Epstein, in The Iron Pen (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) have also argued for Burney's resistance to patriarchy. 11. Henry W. & Albert Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation, Ms. 658 of the Early Journal of Fanny Burney. (Cf. Burney's retelling of the event in the Memoirs of Dr. Burney under the "Publication of Evelina," where the third person narration considerably alters the immediacy of the event.) 12. For anecdotes concerning the tension between Dr. Burney's and her stepmother's views of Frances' writing, see The Early Diary of Fanny Burney, ed. Anne Raine Ellis (London: George Bell & Sons, 1907). 13. Cited by Marilyn Butler in Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 207. 14. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 2 vols. (New York: Harper Brothers, 1834), I, 18. 15. Dorothy Dinnerstein, Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 189. 16. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 362. 17. Jacqueline Rose, "Introduction II" in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecolefreudienne, eds. Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1982), p. 57. 18. Marie Christine Hamon, "The Figures of the Mother: A Study," Af/F, No. 8 (1983), 34. A considerable portion of this issue—Hamon's essay included—consists of a translation of an issue of the L'Ane Dossier, No. 2 (1981). 19. Parveen-Adams, "Mothering," M/F, No. 8 (1983), 42.

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20. See the comment of Eric Laurent: "Women are asked to identify more and more with a mother, and to acquiesce in the symptom which is hers: the desire for a child. But let us not be duped: the desire for a child is the offspring of a historically specifiable alliance. The shift in medical discourse which made possible the invention of this new symptom of the woman was made precisely between 1740 and 1760." See "A New Symptom of the Woman: The Mother Effect," M/F, No. 8 (1983), 23. In an essay entitled "Constructing Motherhood: The Persuasion of Normal Development," Cathy Urwin discusses how a group of contemporary mothers internalize a series of assumptions about their responsibilities. She provides a fascinating account of how the construction of motherhood continues to occur today. See Language, Gender and Childhood, eds. Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and Valerie Walkerdine (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1985), pp. 164-202. 21. See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), especially Chapter 2. See also Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), especially pp. 426-432. Unlike Donzelot, Stone tends to assume maternal intimacy as a "norm" to which most women would naturally aspire. More attuned to the ways in which maternal intimacy was a cultural construct is David Hunt, who explains the ways in which, in seventeenth-century France, nursing was regarded as "a dangerous, debilitating undertaking for a mother fresh from childbirth." He adds, "It should be remarked that this line of reasoning is based squarely upon the assumption that childrearing is not a pleasurable or rewarding experience, but simply an obnoxious task which might be well passed on to someone else." See Parents and Children in History (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 102. Thus Hunt seems alert to the fact that attitudes toward child rearing are, at least, culturally relative. For an account of the ways in which images in painting in France during the period both mirrored and reinforced the newer discourse on motherhood, see Carol Duncan, "Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eighteenth-Century French Art," in Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 200-219. 22. Hannah More, Collected Works, 8 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1801), VII, 4-3. 23. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 239-258. 24. Michel Foucault, Power I Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 39. 25. Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 120 and 185. 26. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 14. I have found Fliegelman's reading of Locke most influential for its insistence that "Locke's concern here [in the pedagogical essay] is not with circumscribing paternal authority, but with rendering it more effective by making it noncoercive" (p. 13). 27. James T. Axtell, ed., The Educational Writing of John Locke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 344, Hereafter cited parenthetically as EW.

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28. See, for example, J. H. Plumb, "The First Flourishing of Children's Books," Early Children's Books and Their Illustration (Boston: Godine, 1975), xvii. See also the Axtell edition for a checklist of all printings of the essay from 1693 to 1966. 29. Presumably plans for women's education in the home were rarely schematic enough to yield such records. Although sons were more often educated according to set programs, a father might abandon such a program when convenient. Richard Edgeworth, for example, originally planned to educate his son using Rousseau's theories but, when a new scientific project absorbed his attention, the son was sent to a Catholic seminary [Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 37 and 44], Thus, even for sons, discrepancies between theory and practice often occurred. 30. On the Lockean contract, see Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political nought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). To his credit, Locke carefully distinguishes between Eve's subjection to Adam as divine law and as human custom: "God, in this text [Gen. 3:16], gives not, that I see, any Authority to Adam over Eve, or to men over Wives, but only fortels what should be the Womans Lot, how by his Providence he should order it so, that she should be subject to her husband, as we see that generally the Laws of Mankind and customs of Nations have ordered it so; and there is, I grant, a Foundation in Nature for it." Yet it is partly my contention that human "contracts," when they are rooted in some psychological dynamic, can be the most coercive of all. See Peter Laslett, ed., Two Treatises on Government by John Locke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 192. See also Catherine Hall, "For both Hobbes and Locke the fundamental subject matter of political philosophy was not the adult human individual but the male-headed family" ["Private Persons versus Public Someones," in Language, Gender, and Childhood, eds. Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and Valerie Walkerdine (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1985), p. 14]. 31. Jane Flax, "Mother-Daughter Relationship: Psychodynamics, Politics and Philosophy," in The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), p. 37. See also Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), especially Chapters 6-8. 32. Rev. Montagu Pennington, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, 2 vols. (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1816), I, 7-9. 33. Cf. Fliegelman: "Neither Locke nor Rousseau believed that daughters should be encouraged to the same spirit of independence as their male counterparts. , . . [W]hereas sons were freed from parental dependence by the development of autonomous reason, daughters, whose virtue must always have a protector, were to find a similar liberation through marriage" (p. 126). This is one of the rare occasions on which Fliegelman mentions Locke's text in relation to women's situations. The passage depends on Rousseau for its support; no quotation from Locke explains this assertion. We can question whether marriage ever provided a daughter's liberation from the psychological dependencies generated within the family structure. 34. Dr. John Gregory, A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774; rpt. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974), pp. vi and 6. 35. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, pp. 102-103 and p. 266. For a relevant discussion of the ways in which economic dependence can thwart

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a daughter's independent thinking, see Virginia Woolf's discussion of female "influence" in the first part of Three Guineas, 36. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 151. 37. Madame d'Arblay, Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 1 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1832), I, 197-198. 38. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 2 vols. (New York: Harper Brothers, 1834), I, 14. Hereafter cited parenthetically as MLC. 39. See Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), pp. 19-21. 40. Indeed, Ford K. Brown records a similar incident, known to More herself, in which "Soame Jenyns had philosophically assigned three hundred pounds a year to cover such losses." See The Father of the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 531.

Chapter 2 1. "Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education," in Collected Works 8 vols. (1799; rpt. London: T. Cadell, 1801), VII, 174. That More feels compelled to defend Milton's paternal character runs counter to Dustin Griffin's recent assertion that "readers in the late eighteenth century found little offensive in the demands Milton placed on his daughters": why would More publish such statements unless Milton's character needed to be vindicated? As Griffin also notes about this instructional "scene of misery," "even Johnson himself asks whether the daughters or the father 'are to be most lamented.'" See Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 24. 2. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 199. 3. M. A. Hopkins, Hannah More and Her Circle (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1947), p. 26. For information on More's London relations, see especially Chapters 4-10. See also Henry Thompson, The Life of Hannah More (London: T. Cadell, 1838), or the most recent biography of More, M. G. Jones, Hannah More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952). More's relationship to a number of older women, including Mrs. Garrick, Elizabeth Carter, and a number of the Bluestockings, is a fascinating topic that would provide plenty of material for a separate analysis. 4. William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More, 2 vols. (1834; rpt. New York: Harper Brothers, 1836), I, 37. Further references to this text are cited parenthetically as MLC. 5. G. B. Hill, ed., Boswell's Life of Johnson 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), IV, 341. 6. In the Memoirs, for example, one incident shortly after the death of David Garrick is recorded. More writes to her sisters that she was "heartily disgusted with Mr. Boswell, who came up stairs after dinner, much disordered with wine, and

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addressed me in a manner that drew from me a sharp rebuke, for which I fancy he will not easily forgive me" (I, 124). 7. "Preface," Collected Works, I, xiv. More was perhaps also thinking of a scandal during 1779 when, during the presentation of her play "The Fatal Falsehood," the playwright Hannah Cowley publicly accused her of plagiarism. 8. Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 1 vols. (London: T. Cadell & W. Davis, 1808), I, 9. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Coelebs. 9. The thesis of Diane McColley's argument is, for example, that "Eve's relation to Adam is the image of the Son's relation to the Father. For both, obedience is a response to goodness inseparable from unhampered creativity and capable of infinite increase." See '"Daughter of God and Man": The Subordination of Milton's Eve," Familiar Colloquy: Essays Presented to Arthur Edward Barker (Ontario: Oberon Press, 1978), pp. 197-198. 10. "The Slave Trade," 1790, rpt. in Collected Works, I, 98-99. 11. Neil Hertz, "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure," Representations, 4 (1983), 27-54. Hertz ties the image of French liberty to castration anxiety. In the same issue, Catherine Gallagher responds by arguing that the same revolutionary figure could be related to "the possibility of completing chaotic reproduction." Hertz's example, she writes, demonstrates "not a fear of the weakness of the vagina, but a fear of its reproductive power" (55-72). See also Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women 1660-1750 (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1984). 12. More's portrait of Mad Liberty is, for example, highly reminiscent of Hogarth's illustration "Satan, Sin, and Death" which, when engraved in 1767, was hung in David Garrick's collection, where she might have seen it. 13. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 84-85. 14. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Macmillan Co., 1973), p. 35. Becker's work is, of course, heavily indebted to the ideas of Norman O. Brown, as is that of Dorothy Dinnerstein. 15. Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 108. 16. See the influential argument of Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1978). 17. "Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont," 1792; rpt. in Collected Works, VI, 315. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Dupont. For an account of the writing and reception of the pamphlet, including More's own comments on the subject, see Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, I, 420 ff. This pamphlet also reflects the influence of Edmund Burke, a friend of More's whom she had supported politically. See Jones, pp. 19-20. 18. See the comment of More's contemporary, Mary Berry, in Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Mary Berry, ed. Lady Theresa Lewis, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1865), II, 91-92. 19. Collected Works, VII, 51. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Strictures. 20. As Cixous writes, woman "belongs to the race of waves." See "Sorties," in

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The Newly Bom Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 85. Cited by Ruth Salvaggio, whose discussion of "fluidity" in Swift I have found very useful, in Enlightened Absences: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine (Urbana: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp.77-82. 21. Joan Malory Webber, "The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost" Milton Studies (12) 1980, 12. Cf. Dustin Griffin: "The arena for heroism in Paradise Lost is the private life, and significant action has been internalized. Milton's emphasis falls on faithfulness, patience, and on the performance (or misperformance) of domestic duties, the responsibilities one must discharge in obeying a parent or supporting a spouse" (90), 22. See The Influence of Milton of English Poetry, where Raymond Havens cites Milton's "fundamental classicism" among his reasons for the poet's popularity in the eighteenth century. The phrase "more correctly wild" is cited from Robert Lloyd's Poetical Works. Dustin Griffin omits any consideration of Satan from his book on Milton and the eighteenth century because, in his estimation, "On the whole Satan is not problematic for the eighteenth century—and thus not attractive. Johnson, untroubled, says simply that Satan speaks and acts as you would expect the devil to act" (x). 23. Christine Froula, "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Authority," Critical Inquiry, 10 (1983), 338. See also Edward Pechter's response to Froula in Critical Inquiry, 11 (1984), 163-170 and Froula's response to Pechter, 170-178. 24. Northop Frye, "The Revelation to Eve," in Paradise Lost: A Tercentenary Tribute, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1967), pp. 22-23. 25. Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" in Women, Culture, and Society, eds. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 67-68. Marcia Landry also uses Ortner to read Eve. See "A Free and Open Encounter: Milton and the Modern Reader," Milton Studies, 9 (1976), 18. 26. See Marcia Landry, "Kinship and the Role of Women in Paradise Lost," Milton Studies, 4 (1972), 3-18. 27. For an interesting comparison, see Homans's discussion of Molly in Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughter, who is also paired with Wordsworth's Lucy (Bearing the Word, pp. 260-262). See also Claudia Johnson on Lucilla: "By recommending a diffidence so complete as almost to amount to contented self-erasure, More encounters aesthetic as well as logical problems. The invariably dutiful and retiring Lucilla is only talked about." See Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 18. 28. Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. x. Further references are cited parenthetically.

Chapter 3 1. Martha More, Mendip Annals: Or the Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Patty More, ed. Arthur Roberts (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1859), p. 67. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Mendip.

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2. Mitzi Myers, '"Reform or Ruin': A Revolution in Female Manners," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 11, ed. Harry C. Payne (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 203. Further references are cited parenthetically. Earlier this century, G. M. Young did as much as anyone to perpetuate the notion that Evangelicalism was essentially repressive: see the opening of Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 1-2. 3. Isaac Kramnick, "Religion and Radicalism: English Political Thought in the Age of the Revolution," Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy, V (1977), 505-534. See also his essay "Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Capitalism in the Later Eighteenth Century," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 12, ed. Harry C. Payne (Madison; University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 11-44. 4. David Spring, "The Clapham Sect: Some Social and Political Aspects," Victorian Studies, V (1961), 42; 43-44; 45. See also "Some Reflections on Social History in the Nineteenth-Century," Victorian Studies, IV (1960), 53-64 and "Aristocracy, Social Structure and Religion in the Early Victorian Period, Victorian Studies, VI (1963), 268-280. 5. Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 19. 6. Olive Anderson, "Women Preachers in Mid-Victorian Britain," The Historical Journal, XII (1969), 467. For another summary and description of the place of women in Evangelicalism, see Catherine Hall, "The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology" in Fit Work for Women, ed. Sandra Burman (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1979), pp. 9-32. While accurately detailing the features of a domestic sphere that was to become a hallmark of Evangelicalism, Hall does not consider the psychic and social conditions motivating such a construction. 7. V. Kiernan, "Evangelicalism and the French Revolution," Past and Present, I (1952), 54. 8. William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (1798; rpt. Philadelphia: Key and Biddle, 1835), p. 128 (emphasis added). Further references are cited parenthetically. 9. Hannah More, "Strictures on a Modern System of Female Education" in Collected Works, 8 vols. (1799; rpt. London: T. Cadell, 1801), VII, 175. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Strictures. 10. Elisabeth Jay, Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 7. 11. See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Random House, 1977) on the similar alignment of women and the clergy in nineteenthcentury America. The key difference here is, however, that the British Evangelical clergy were not politically disenfranchised. 12. M. G. Jones, Hannah More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 84. 13. On "The Slave Trade," see Ford K. Brown's analysis in Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 109-110.

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14. Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost (1965; rpt. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1971) provides one of the best surveys of life in preindustrial England. Most of what he has to say about village life would help to establish the contexts for the Mores' remarks. 15. On the different ways in which adults respond psychologically to children, as well as an attempt to ground these responses historically, see Lloyd deMause, "The Evolution of Childhood." He reminds us that the modern construction of childhood depends on the parents' "empathic reaction" to the child, that is, their ability to project into and gratify the child's needs. See The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), p. 6. 16. Jones, p. 156. 17. Like several accounts in the Mendip Annals, this one is duplicated in William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 2 vols. (1834; rpt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836). See I, 339. 18. M. A. Hopkins, Hannah More and Her Circle (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1947), pp. 165-166. 19. Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 2 vols. (1834; rpt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836), I, 392. Further references to this edition are cited parenthetically as MLC. 20. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 23. 21. The response of the More sisters to the glasshouse workers anticipates the response of later nineteenth-century reformers who, for example, on first learning of the work in the coal mines initially reacted not to the inhumane conditions of the labor per se, but to the ways in which the labor induced "immoral" behavior. 22. Stallybrass and White, p. 192. 23. Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 380. 24. For a complete bibliography of the Cheap Repository Tracts, see G. H. Spinney, "Cheap Repository Tracts: Hazard and Marshall Edition," The Library, 4th series, No. 3 (December 1939), 295-340. Typical of the treatment given to the tracts is William Richardson, "Sentimental Journey of Hannah More: Propaganda and Shaper of Victorian Attitudes," Revolutionary Worlds, 11 (1975), 228-239. See also the discussion by Ford K. Brown in Fathers of the Victorians, pp. 123-155. In Phillip McCann's essay "Popular Education, Socialization and Social Control: Spitalfields 1812-1824," he argues that More's tract "The Delegate" "exemplified the fundamentally counter-revolutionary nature of the whole charitable and educational enterprise." See Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 78. For an interesting treatment of the theme of social mobility in one tale in particular—"The Two Wealthy Farmers"—see P. J. Miller, "Women's Education, 'Self-Improvement' and Social Mobility—A Late Eighteenth-Century Debate," British Journal of Educational Studies, 20 (1972), 302-314. 25. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 200. For a similar

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definition of cultural work, see Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 3-9. 26. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 96. 27. I am using the 1798 version of the tracts, published as The Cheap Repository Tracts (London: R. & C. Rivington, J. Evans, J. Hatchard and Bath: S. Hazard, 1798) 2 vols. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Tracts with reference to volume and page. 28. Many readers point to the emotional appeal of the tracts in general and of "The Shepherd" in particular. In her appreciation, Mitzi Myers isolates "the commonplace details of domestic realism" which "ground [More's] considerable achievement . . . the everyday discipline of domestic heroism is the way [More] measures psychic power and the key through which she seeks social regeneration." See "Hannah More's Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology," Fetter'd or Free?: British Women Novelists 1670-1815, eds. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), p. 269. In contrast, on a supremely—and unusually—laudatory note, Brown cites "The Shepherd" as More's masterpiece. Where Myers discovers domestic realism, Brown finds a fine-tuned masterpiece of a different sort: "The greatest of Mrs More's tracts and of all tracts, it towers over similar works like another Agamemnon, a flawless masterpiece perfect in conception and in execution, likely to remain forever peerless on a height the moral tale will not reach again" (p. 144). 29. In the words of Mitzi Myers, the Cheap Repository Tracts represents "one of the great success stories in eighteenth-century female authorship"; two million copies were sold in England during only the first year ("More's Tracts for the Times," 266). See also M. G. Jones, pp. 138-144, on the marketing of the tracts. Unfortunately, circulation figures cannot tell us who read the tracts, or how they were read, only that they were widely available. E. P. Thompson claims that "many of Hannah More's halfpenny tracts were left to litter the servants' quarters of the great houses," although this intriguing assertion is unsubstantiated. See The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 344. Similarly, Roger Sales: "Hannah More's [tracts] were sold to the rich by the yard and then distributed among the poor and the needy. Most of the evidence suggests that, although the paper came in useful, the views expressed in it were not heeded." See English Literature in History 1780-1830 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), p. 24. 30. Robert D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 106. 31. Hannah More, An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (London: T. Cadell, 1791). Hereafter cited parenthetically as Estimate. 32. Mitzi Myers, "Hannah More's Tracts for the Times," 269, emphasis added. 33. See Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression for more on this idea. See also Chapter 5. 34. This is Myers' observation on p. 270 of "Hannah More's Tracts for the Times." 35. The attack on ale houses is consistent with Susan Pedersen's notion that the tracts represent "a broad evangelical assault on late eighteenth-century culture." See

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"Hannah More's Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, Popular Culture in Late 18th Century England," Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 87. 36. Myers, "Hannah More's Tracts for the Times," p. 275. 37. I am thinking again of Susan Pedersen, or Olivia Smith, or Catherine Hall. See an essay entitled "Private persons versus public someones: class, gender and politics in England, 1780-1850" in Language, Gender and Childhood, eds. Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and Valerie Walkerdine (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1985), pp. 10-33. 38. For a complete list of the pamphlets generated by the Blagdon Controversy, 21 in all, see Brown, pp. 539-541. See also his account of the controversy in Chapter 6, "Gangrening the Principles of the Country." While not entirely unsympathetic to More, Brown fails to consider the issue of gender in the controversy. 39. Bere's charges are recorded in "The Controversy between Mrs Hannah More and the Curate of Blagdon, relative to the conduct of her teacher of the Sunday School in that Parish" (London: J. S. Jordon, 1801), "An Appeal to the Public on the Controversy Between Mrs More, the Curate of Blagdon, and the reverend Sir. A. Elton" (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1801), and "An Address to Mrs Hannah More, on the Conclusion of the Blagdon Controversy" (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1801). Among Bere's more provocative charges was the claim that Young had "wished all the clergymen's heads in England were on a block, that they might be chopped off at one stroke." See "Controversy," p. 21n. 40. Writing to Hester Thrale Piozzi on January 6, 1801, Thomas Whalley called Bere's trial—held in an ale house—a "mixed mealy mock Court of Conscience." In his letter Whalley also wrote of his belief that More was in danger of dying from the attack on her faith. See Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Thraliana, ed. Katharine C. Balderstone, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), II, 1029n. 41. Although Brown never actually makes this charge, he clearly believes More was capable of such behavior. See, for example, p. 213, where he writes, "There is probably no reason to doubt that [Bishop Porteus] did secretly exert his influence for Mrs. More against Bere, certainly no doubt that the Anti-Jacobin believed so." More herself consistently denied such allegations. 42. In "An Appeal to the Public . . ." among other charges, Bere accuses More of appointing a Methodist preacher at Yatton, Methodist teachers at Banwell, and of dismissing a teacher who lacked "zeal" at Axbridge in order to appoint one who made extemporaneous prayers. In general, he insisted, she tolerated Methodist practices at all her schools. In "An Address to Mrs More" the attack was sharpened; "Mrs More," he wrote, "never had an establishment in this country, (the parish of Blagdon only accepted) where Methodism did not settle and thrive" (p. 57). 43. The case that Bere felt threatened by the More sisters can be made on the basis on several pieces of evidence. First, as recorded by Patty More in the Mendip Annals, the sisters were invited lo Blagdon by Bere's own parishioners, one of whom, a six-foot man, testified "there were places where they were personally afraid to go." Just before the arrival of the sisters, a woman had been condemned to death "for attempting to begin a riot and steal some butter from a man whose prices were thought unreasonable" (166). Such records suggest that Bere was scarcely "in control" of the spiritual life of his parishioners prior to the Mores' arrival, and that their

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presence might have served to emphasize his ineffectiveness. Further evidence suggests that Bere perceived the activities of the More sisters as competitive with his own. According to Dr. Grossman, after trying to dissolve the More sisters' school, Bere had written to him on 14 November 1800 with plans to establish his own Sunday School. Bere, he insists, failed to include that letter in his account ["Appendix to 'A Letter to the reverend Thomas Bere, occasioned by his late unwarrantable attack on Mrs Hannah More'" (London: Cadell and Davies, 1801)]. 44. Cf. M. G. Jones' assessment of the situation: "Hannah More was attacked because she represented, during the year of the prolonged war of nerves, two unpopular concepts, 'a calumniated religion' and a radical innovation, each of which was a challenge to her age. The one was an implied criticism of the lives and religion of orthodox clergy and laymen, deeply resented by them, the other was an open challenge to the monopoly exercised by big farmers and little gentry over the bodies and souls of the children of the rural poor" (Hannah More, p. 179). 45. "Expostulary Letter to the reverend Sir Abraham Elton, in consequence of his late publication addressed to the reverend Thomas Bere" (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1801), pp. 33-34. Brown speculates that the Reverend William Shaw—who later attacked More in a vicious satire—wrote the letter. 46. Although in far subtler fashion, Brown's version of the events conveys the same idea: that to be subject to More's surreptitious command of the events was somehow emasculating. For example, he writes that "Mrs. More was not wholly satisfied with Sir Abraham, admirable in rank and wealth but a man of some timidity who had to be whipped on" (200). When Elton is replaced by Dr. Thomas Sedgwick Whalley, Brown finds in the documentation sufficient evidence to describe More by means of the following imagery: "Mrs. More is seen as the field commander of her forces, planning, scheming and directing, leading Whalley along with her intelligent flattery, instructing him in the smallest details and it seems even if necessary revising his compositions" (201). It is not the veracity of the events I question here, but Brown's tendency to discredit the legitimacy of More's power based on her gender alone. 47. In fact, More did take communion at William Jay's chapel, as he himself describes in his autobiography. See The Autobiography of the Reverend William Jay, eds. George Redford and John James, 3rd ed. (London: Hamilton & Adams Co., 1855), p. 329. Various explanations were offered for this act but, in truth, More herself seems not to have thought very seriously about the matter until her enemies attacked. 48. Edward Spencer, "Truths Concerning Mrs. More's Meeting Houses and the Conduct of Her Followers" (Bath: W. Meyler, 1802), p. 64. 49. Spencer, p. 47. 50. Jones, 179. More often responded with some irritation to the use of the word in conjunction with her schools. See, for example, her letter to the Bishop of Bath and Wells (Dr. Beadon) in 1801 (MLC, II, 67-68). 51. Among those who have written on this topic is Robert Wearmouth, who declares "The emancipation of womanhood began with John Wesley." See Methodism and the Common People (London: Epworth Press, 1945), p. 223. See also John Rogal, "John Wesley's Women," Eighteenth-Century Life, I (1974), 7-14. On the

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ways in which women Methodists were viewed as threatening, see I. B. O'Malley, Women in Subjection (London: The Camelot Press, 1933), pp. 130-133. See also George Eliot's Adam Bede. 52. See George Hickes, "Sermon Preached at St. Bridget's, April 1,1684." Hickes saw "enthusiasm" as a "hazard" to which women were exposed at private schools. He recommended the founding of women's colleges "as a security in Government, that the Daughters of the Land should be bred up according to the Religion now established in it, for the unconceivable advantage of the Publick, in rooting out Enthusiasm, with her daughter Schisme, both of which are upheld by nothing among us so much, as by the women, who are so silly and deceivable for want of Ingenius and Orthodox Education, and not for want of parts." 53. See, for example, Edward Spencer's comparison, by means of some rather inflammatory rhetoric, of More's religious principles to various "revolutionary" impulses, among them those leading to the Civil War and the American Revolution (71). Brown's account includes a full discussion of the role of the Anti-Jacobin in spreading such farfetched accusations. Needless to say, More was incredulous. (See MLC, II, 71, for example).

Introduction to Maria Edgeworth 1. Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series (1925; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1953), pp. 113-114. 2. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Further references are cited parenthetically. 3. See Emily Lawless, Maria Edgeworth (New York: Macmillan Company, 1904) or Helen Zimmern, Maria Edgeworth (London: W. H. Allen, 1883) for two salient examples of this kind of thinking. 4. P. H. Newby, Maria Edgeworth (London: Arthur Baker, 1950), p. 18. 5. Margaret Romans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 64. 6. I discuss this passage at length in an essay entitled "Reading the Father Metaphorically," in Refiguring the Father, eds. Patricia Yaeger and Beth KowaleskiWallace (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 296-311. 7. See Michael Hurst, Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene: Intellect, Fine Feeling and Landlordism in the Age of Reform (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1969); Maurice Colgan, "After Rackrent: Ascendency Nationalism in Maria Edgeworth's Later Irish Novels, Studies in Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. Heinz Kosok (Bonn: Bouvier, 1982), pp. 37-42; Catherine Gallagher, "Fictional Women and Real Estate in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent," Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 12 (1988), 19-25. 8. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, ed. Gina Luria (1795; rpt. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974), p. 56. 9. Hannah More, "Strictures on a Modern System of Female Education," in Collected Works, 8 vols. (1799; rpt. London: T. Cadell, 1801), VII, 34-35.

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10. See Butler, p. 39n. 11. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, 3 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1801), II, 345. 12. Ruth Salvaggio, Enlightened Absences: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. ix and xi. 13. Valerie Walkerdine, "On the regulation of speaking and silence: subjectivity, class and gender in contemporary schooling," in Language, Gender, and Childhood, eds. Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and Valerie Walkerdine (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1985), p. 208. 14. This fact is noted by Lawrence Stone in Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). He notes with some surprise that "In 1716 even so independent a woman as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was against maternal breast feeding" (426). 15. William Cadogan, "An Essay Upon the Nursing and Management of Children from Birth to Three years of Age," 2nd ed. (London: n.p., 1758), p. 3. Further references are cited parenthetically. 16. See also Timothy Reiss, "Revolution in Bounds: Wollstonecraft, Women, and Reason," in Gender and Theory: Dialogues in Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 13-49. 17. Walkerdine, pp. 208-209 and 235.

Chapter 4 1. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, 3 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1801). All references are to this edition. For representative readings of the novel, see Walter Allen, The English Novel (New York: Dutton & Co., Inc., 1954), p. 112; Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 308; Emily Lawless, Maria Edgeworth (New York: Macmillan Co., 1904), p. 98. Maria Edgeworth is cited in A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth with a Selection from her Letters, [Frances Beaufort] Edgeworth, 3 vols. (not published) printed Joseph Marks and Sons, 1867, I, 229. 2. Critics often note this limitation. For example, Elizabeth Harden writes that as a character Belinda is "little more than an abstract embodiment of principles— 'goodness itself, and gentleness, and prudence personified.'" See Maria Edgeworth (Boston: Twayne Books, 1984), p. 52; similarly James Newcomer comments that Belinda is "simply too virtuous to be interesting, too virtuous to provide problems of moral depth. . . ." See Maria Edgeworth the Novelist: 1767-1849, A Bicentennial Study (Fort Worth: Texas Christian Press, 1967), pp. 25-26. 3. Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Scene (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1934), p. 171, cited by Newcomer. 4. "The Purple Jar," Early Lessons, 5 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1801-1803), Vol. III. 5. Valerie Walkerdine, "On the regulation of speaking and silence: subjectivity, class and gender in contemporary schooling," in Language, Gender and Childhood, eds. Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and Valerie Walkerdine (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1985), p. 203. For a very different perspective on the

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construction of childhood, see also "The New World of Children in EighteenthCentury England" by J. H. Plumb in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, eds. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 286315. 6. On the persistence of the fantasy of the "perfect mother" in feminist circles today, see Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contralto, "The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother," Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, eds. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, Inc., 1982), pp. 54-71. 7. Richard L. Edgeworth, "Address to Mothers," Continuation of Early Lessons, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1814), I, viii. 8. Richard L. Edgeworth, "Preface to Harry and Lucy," Continuation of Early Lessons, II, 107. 9. Maria Edgeworth, "The Good Governess," Moral Tales, 5 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1801), V. 10. See Practical Education for the same discussion of toys. 11. Cathy Urwin, "Constructing motherhood: the persuasion of normal development," in Language, Gender and Childhood, p. 196. 12. Walkerdine, "On the regulation of speaking and silence," p. 212. 13. Mitzi Myers, "Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children's Books," Children's Literature, eds. Francelia Butler, Margaret Higonnet, and Barbara Rosen, 14 (1986), 54. 14. Walkerdine, "On the regulation of speaking and silence," p. 220. 15. In some ways, the discussion over the significance of the separate spheres for women in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rehearses the debate over the significance of the separate sphere witnessed in American studies in the late 1970s. See, for example, Nancy Colt's response to Ann Douglas' reading of domestic ideology in The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 197. In American studies, as in British studies, scholars continue to debate whether the separate spheres were ever truly empowering for women. My own position is that, while the separate spheres no doubt occasioned important moments of intimacy, if not solidarity, among women who found themselves drawn together by their isolation, I remain skeptical about the extent to which an enforced doctrine of separatism can be said to have been beneficial for women. Moreover, I continue to be troubled by the degree of psychological coerciveness that characterizes the discourse of domesticity: the doctrine of separate spheres does not argue that some women will find fulfillment in motherhood and the domestic world, but that all women should do so. It casts as aberrant any woman who chooses otherwise or who somehow fails to accommodate herself to this world. 16. "The Bracelets," in The Parent's Assistant, or Stories for Children, 6 vols, (London: J. Johnson, 1800), III, 58-59. Further references are cited parenthetically. 17. Terry Eaglcton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso Editions, 1976), p. 69. Further references are cited parenthetically. 18. On the representation of Harriot Freke—especially possible original models and similar types—see "Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Women's Rights," by Colin

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B. Atkinson and Jo Atkinson, Eire-Ireland, 19 (1984), 94-118. The Atkinsons warn us against the easy assumption that Harriot Freke is meant to be a "freak" or monster. They remind us that the Oxford English Dictionary lists no usage of the word "freak" to indicate a monster in the modern sense of that word until 1847. Instead, they argue, in context a "freak" merely suggests a "capricious humor or whim." Still, as the Atkinsons acknowledge, the very extent and degree of Freke's "capricious" behavior suggests that she embodies something far more threatening. As I argue here based on textual evidence, Freke personifies an anarchic energy— specifically, aberrant female energy—that continually resists containment within domestic enclosure. 19. For a discussion of the significance of the image of the "woman on top" from an anthropological viewpoint, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe." Davis argues that elsewhere the image was "multivalent" and she speculates that "the ambiguous woman on top of the world of play made the unruly option a more conceivable one." See The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 175. Yet Edgeworth seems intent on isolating and controlling the energies Freke represents, not celebrating them, as I argue here. Frances Burney's novels offer similar example of such male-identified women—see, for example, Mrs. Selwyn in Evelina or Mrs. Arlbery in Camilla. 20. Melanie Klein, "The Origins of Transference," in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works (New York: Macmillan, Inc., 1975), pp. 49-50. The theory of the "good" and "bad" breast pervades Klein's work. For a Kleinian reading of "Christabel," see Marjorie Durham, "The Mother Tongue: Christabel and the Language of Love" in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 169-193. 21. For a reading of Coleridge and the themes of paternity, see Patricia Yaeger, "The Father's Breasts" in Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy, eds. Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 3-21. 22. Among the readers responding enthusiastically to Lady Delacour's character prior to her "rehabilitation" is Walter Allen, who writes that Maria Edgeworth creates a woman "who, as long as she is allowed to remain alive, is one of the greatest achievements in English fiction. . . . She is a most striking conception, and rendered with great brilliance, a tragic heroine any novelist might have been proud to invent. But Miss Edgeworth's Belinda gets to work on her, and though her brilliance is never wholly dimmed, she ends up as the incarnation of domestic virtues" (The English Novel, 112-113). Similarly, James Newcomer: "Lady Delacour's—dissipated, fashionable, headstrong, fascinating—are frequent enough in fiction and drama, but Miss Edgeworth's Lady Delacour surprisingly suffers from cancer of the breast, shows psychological complications other than those of the usual fine lady of the novel" (138). See also O. Elizabeth McWhorter Harden's appreciation of Lady Delacour's character in Maria Edgeworth's Art of Prose Fiction (Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 78-107 and the comments of William Dean Howells in Heroines of Fiction, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1901), I, 28-36. I read

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all these appraisals not only as a tribute to Edgeworth's "skill" but also as testimony to ways in which she creates fascinating depth in Lady Delacour's character, only to sacrifice that depth to the novel's ideological purpose. 23. William Buchan, Advice to Mothers on the Subject of their Own Health (London: T. Cadell & Davies, 1803). Further references to this edition are cited parenthetically. For a discussion of the proliferation and impact of the new literature on child rearing in general and nursing in particular, see Chapters 4 and 5 of The Rise of the Egalitarian Family by Ralph Trumbach (New York: Academic Press, 1978). Chapter 5 provides an excellent bibliography of primary sources. 24. I readily acknowledge that Buchan's argument benefits the child who, under the care of an irresponsible wet nurse, might have suffered all sorts of adverse consequences. My argument is not that Buchan's prescription has no positive value, but that in the process of arguing for the child's health, he necessarily manipulates and coerces the mother's feelings. 25. "The Commercialization of Fashion" in The Birth of a Consumer Society. See also "Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution," Historical Perspectives in English Thought and Society, ed. Neil McKendrick (London: Europa Publications, 1974), pp. 152-210. 26. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Towards Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 191.

Chapter 5 1. Mary Leadbeater, Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry, ed. Maria Edgeworth (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1811), p. 76. Further references are cited parenthetically. 2. Cited by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 132. As they point out, "Engels was wrong; there was nothing specifically Irish about keeping pigs in town, which was a common English practice." 3. Stallybrass and White, p. 49. 4. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 13. Further references are cited parenthetically. 5. For the history of Edgeworthstown, see The Black Book of Edgeworthstown and Other Edgeworth Memories, eds. Harriet Jessie Butler and Harold Edgeworth Butler (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927). 6. On the abuse and mismanagement of Irish lands, see David Large, "The Wealth of Greater Irish Landowners 1750-1815," Irish Historical Studies, 15 (1966), 21-47. Large writes, for example, "It seems probable that what really happened was that Irish landlords as a class grasped more rapaciously after increased rents than did English landlords, but often did so without paying as much attention as was done in England to the improved farming methods necessary to sustain rent increases" (29). Moreover, "rents were swallowed and debts created by [an] elaborate

226

NOTES

system of family charges" (42). Richard's decision to return to Ireland and oversee the estate himself represented, on one level, his desire to improve on such traditionally counterproductive practices. 7. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, The Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. Begun by Himself and Concluded by His Daughter, 2 vols. (London: R. Hunter, 1820), II, 1. Further references are cited parenthetically as Memoirs. 8. See The Population of Ireland 1750-1845, by K. H. Connell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950); The Making of Modern Ireland 1603-1923 by J. C. Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), especially chapters 8 and 9; and Pre-Famine Iretandby T. W. Freeman (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1957). Also, for a late eighteenth-century, Protestant response to Ireland, see Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland, ed. A. W. Hutton, 2 vols. (1780; rpt. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970). For a Catholic response to the Protestant stereotyping of Irish customs and people, see Michael Sadler, Ireland: Its Evils and Their Remedies (London: John Murray, 1829), The classic representation of the life of the Irish peasantry from a sympathetic point of view belongs to William Carleton (1794-1869). See especially Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 3 vols. (1833; rpt. New York: Garland Press, 1979) or Tales and Sketches Illustrative of the Character of the Irish Peasantry (1845; rpt. New York: Garland Press, 1980). 9. For an analysis of the ways in which Edgeworth "commodified" Irish language and culture, see Catherine Gallagher, "Fictional Women and Real Estate in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent," Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 12 (1988), 11-18. 10. Michael Hurst, Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene: Intellect, Fine Feeling and Landlordism in the Age of Reform (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1969), p. 20. 11. For a still more compelling narrative of the events of the 1798 rebellion, and a most graphic account of the violence inflicted on Protestants and Catholics alike, see the memoirs of the Quaker Mary Leadbeater in The Leadbeater Papers, 2 vols. (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), I, 221-278. 12. A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth, with a Selection of her Letters, [Frances Beaufort Edgeworth] 3 vols. (not published) printed for Joseph Marks & Sons, 1867, I, 68-69. Further references are cited parenthetically. 13. See Augustus J. Hare, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1895), I, 62-63. 14. Henry Louis Gates, "Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes," Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), p. 5. 15. Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists: 1800-1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 58. 16. To Flanagan, the effect of Richard Edgeworth's reforms was like that of "concentric rings": "he aimed first at the education of his children, then at the improvement of his lands and the schooling of his peasants, and finally at the perfection of his nation and the world at large" (62). 17. For a real-life of example of old-style patriarchal prerogative, see the account of Francis Thomas Fitzmaurice, third earl of Kerry, who remembered his grandfather in the following terms: he "reigned, or rather terrorised, equally over his own

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family and the neighboring country as if it was his family, in the same manner as I suppose his ancestors, lords of Kerry, had done for generations since the time of Henry II, who granted to our family 100,000 acres in those remote parts in consideration of our service against the Irish." Cited by J. S. Alger, "The Irish Absentee and His Tenants 1768-92," English Historical Review, 10 (1895), 664-665. 18. J. H. Whyte, "Landlord Influence in Elections in Ireland 1760-1885," English Historical Review, 80 (1965), p. 742. 19. Whyte, p. 743. See also O'Connell, pp. 74-75. 20. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 150. 21. See Butler, p. 357, for one reading of Edgeworth's attitude toward Jason. 22. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, ed. George Watson, 1800; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 37. Further citations are taken from this edition. 23. Maurice Colgan, "The Significant Silences of Thady Quirk," Social Roles for the Artist, eds. Ann Thompson and Anthony Beck (Liverpool, England: The University of Liverpool Press, 1979), pp. 41-45. Also reprinted in Family Chronicles: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, ed. Coilin Owens (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1987), pp. 57-61. 24. Of course, Colgan does not entertain the possibility that this genealogy is another one of Thady's mistaken notions, one to which Edgeworth herself does not subscribe. Nonetheless, the point still seems valid in that through Thady's narration—whether accurate or not—Edgeworth creates the impression of a purely Irish ancestry for the Rackrents. 25. The Irish wake was often cited by Anglo-Irish observers as an example of the Irish tendency to extreme dissipation (as it still is today). See also Arthur Young. A Tour of Ireland 1776-1779,1, 249. Maria Edgeworth also writes polemically against the wake in her notes to Cottage Dialogues, p, 30n. 26. "Ennui," Vol. 1 of Tales of Fashionable Life, 3 vols. (1809; rpt. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1978). Further citations are taken from this edition. For a representative reading of the novel, see Elizabeth Harden in Maria Edgeworth (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984). She writes, for example, that, despite its many flaws, Ennui "is still important as the first full-scale picture of Irish society in fiction and the first serious study of Irish landlordism" (107). In contrast, Marilyn Butler writes appreciatively of the novel as one that "helped to inaugurate a new style of sociological realism" (365). 27. I borrow, once again, from Stallybrass and White (see Chapter 3), 28. When Stephen Dedalus identifies Ireland as "the old sow that eats her farrow" in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the association of woman, pig, and Ireland loses all of its comic overtones (New York: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 203). 29. Mary Leadbeater, p. iv. 30. For the details of various political campaigns in which Edgeworth involved herself during the final decades of her life, see Michael Hurst, Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene. 31. Cited in Helen Zimmern, Maria Edgeworth (London: W. H. Allen, 1883), p. 185. Further references are cited parenthetically.

228

NOTES

Chapter 6 1. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, 3 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1801), II, 152-163. 2. For an explanation of the way in which the world "revolution" evolved during the latter decades of the late eighteenth century, see Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 47-56, Paulson explains that "the original naming of the word was astromical, referring in both Latin and the vernacular to the rotation of bodies . . . a circular motion returning to its point of origin" (50). 3. Warren Roberts believes that Harriot Freke represents Mary Wollstonecraft "in thinly disguised fictional form." See Jane Austen and the French Revolution (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1979), p. 184. In a more detailed study, Colin Atkinson and Jo Atkinson elaborate on the possible origins of Freke's philosophy. They conclude, however, that "though Mr. Percival is civil to [Freke], and appears to treat her ideas seriously enough refute them, there is no real discussion. The author's purpose seems to have been to dismiss Harriot Freke's ideas as outrageous, or silly, and only by implication dangerous, given the war between England and France." See "Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Women's Rights," Eire-Ireland, 19 (1984), 113. In yet another explanation for Freke's appearance, Marilyn Butler speculates that Edgeworth may have used this caricature to position herself in relation to other feminists. By isolating a more radical "fringe," Edgeworth frees herself from the charge of feminism, while making feminist points nonetheless. See Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 96. 4. See the discussion of Hannah More's revolutionary iconography in Chapter 1. 5. Lord Dudley in The Quarterly Review, cited by Augustus Hare, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 1 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), I, 173. 6. "The Absentee," volumes five and six of Tales of Fashionable Life, 6 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1812). Hereafter cited parenthetically with reference to volume and page. 7. Marilyn Butler notes that many readers have been unable to connect the main plot of the novel concerning the Clonbrony's and their son Lord Colambre and Grace Nugent. She explains that Lord Colambre's scruples "do not arise from his pride of rank, but because he knows that as a small child Grace was brought up by her mother. If it is true that this mother was unchaste, the dominant influence on Grace's early education was a corrupt one. Colambre's refusal to overlook this fact is another attempt by Maria to prove that environment and early education determine character." Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 123. This explanation is not entirely satisfactory, however, since Edgeworth establishes that Lord Colambre's own mother "had bred [Grace Nugent] up and had treated her with consistent kindness." Thus the predominant maternal influence over Grace's life does not seem to have been that of her mother. 8. Patronage, 4 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1814). Hereafter cited parenthetically with reference to volume and page. 9. See Joseph Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), especially Chapter 3. Boone's

NOTES

229

excellent overview leaves out one possibility—that of the "traditional" novel (like Patronage) that contains within it another plot that, although not exactly "countertraditional" in his terms, has the power to disturb the romantic ideology that so impels the marriage plot. 10. Examples of such insistence appear in Chapter IV, where Rosamond teases her sister for her failings as a "heroine," Chapter XIII, where Mrs Percy distinguishes the behavior of her daughter from that of a heroine, and the beginning of Chapter XXXIII, where the narration echoes Northanger Abbey. 11. Paradoxically, the novel ends with a kind of postscript in which Lord Oldborough discovers his illegitimate son. His final words—"now—I am happy,—now I also Mr. Percy may be proud of a son—I too shall know the pleasures of domestic life"—suggest that, through the introduction of his son, his story is far from "closed." In reproducing for Lord Oldborough the son necessary for his recovery, another woman, his (now dead) lover, disrupts another kind of closure that would have condemned Lord Oldborough to suffer the consequences of his mistakes and allows instead for the continuation of his story. 12. For examples of such narrative endorsement, see the end of Chapter III or Chapter XXIX. 13. See an unpublished paper by Jo Ann Citron entitled "The (im)perfect happiness of the union': Jane Austen and the Problem of Closure" delivered at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention at the University of Massachusetts in 1987. 14. Helen, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1834). Hereafter cited parenthetically with reference to volume and page. 15. Cited in Butler, p. 476. 16. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 83-84. 17. Butler finds the last volume of Helen "superior to anything else in Maria's tales" (473). 18. See the preface to Frankenstein. 19. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality and the Field of Vision (London: Verso Press, 1986), pp. 90-91.

Chapter 7 1. Charlotte Bronte', Shirley (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 315. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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Index Adams, Parveen, 14 Alehouses, 85 Altick, Robert, 81 Anderson, Olive, 59 Anglo-Irish relations, 145-59 in Castle Rackrent, 152-59 in Ennui, 165-66 Atkinson, Colin and Atkinson, Jo, 223n.-24n., 228n. Authority, of the woman writer, 19194 Barker-Benfield, George, 134-35 Becker, Ernest, 38, 39 Bere, Thomas, 86-88 Body in Anglo-Irish class relations, 159 in class relations for Edgeworth, 9899, 140-44, 170-72 in class relations for More, 72, 76, 85 "grotesque," 72, 76, 164, 172 as indicator of class, 139 Boone, Joseph, 228n. Boswell, James, 32 Bradley, Ian, 58 Breastfeeding, 101-103, 129-35. See also Cadogan, William and Buchan, William Bronte, Charlotte class tensions in, 201, 203-7 231

mother-daughter relations in, 201-3 on Paradise Lost, 200-201 Shirley, 199-207 Brown, Ford. K., 213n., 218n., 219n. Buchan, William, 129-35 Burke, Sir Edmund, 30 Burney, Frances Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 22 relations with father, 9-11, 22-23 reputation, vii-ix Butler, Marilyn, 21-22, 95, 96, 97, 209n., 227n., 228n., 229n. Cadogan, William, 102-103 Carter, Elizabeth, 4, 11, 20 Chodorow, Nancy, 9, 214n. Citron, Jo Ann, 229n. Cixous, Helene, 43 Coleridge, S. T., 127, 128 Colgan, Maurice, 152-54 Colonialism, in Ireland, ideology of 149-50 Complicity, 12-13 Consumption, of women, 134-35 Cott, Nancy, 223n. Cultural work, 74-75 Daughter of Eve, 23-24, 25-26 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 224n. Day, Thomas, 109 DeMause, Lloyd, 217n.

232 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 12, 38-39, 47 Domesticity, 166-69 Donzelot, Jacques, 21 In. Doody, Margaret Anne, viii, ix, 10, 210n. Douglas, Ann, 216n. Eagleton, Terry, 100, 103-4, 109ff. Edgeworth, Anna Maria, 97 Edgeworth, Maria Anglo-Irish politics, 98-99, 141ff., 154ff. anxiety about writing, 193-96 on breastfeeding, 103-4. See also Belinda on domesticity, HOff., 166-69 on female desire, 136 and feminism, 99, 173-75 on feminism, 175-75 on Irish peasants, 142-43, 168-69 on materiality, 159-66 on maternal body, 105, 172 on maternal inheritance, 177-180, 183-87 on monstrous daughters, 175ff. on mother-daughter relations, 188ff. See also Helen on mothering, 15-16, 117, 114-17. See also Belinda and new-style patriarchy, 75, 1 lOff. and old-style patriarchy, 151-52, 173-74 political conservatism of, 99, 169-72 relations with father, 11, 21-22, 9596, 97-98, 193-94 relations with mother, 97-98 on revolution, 170-72, 173-75 on Rousseau, 100-101 on separate spheres, 118-20 Edgeworth, Maria, works of The Absentee, 104, 176-80 Belinda, 5, 100, 103-4, 109ff., 173-74

INDEX

"The Bracelets," 118-20 Castle Rackrent, 150-59; editorial apparatus of, 154-59 Ennui, 159-66, 198 "The Good French Governess," 114-17 Helen, 169-70, 188ff. Letters to a Literary Lady, 99, 107 Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 95-96 Patronage, 104, 180-87 "The Purple Jar," 111-12 Edgeworth, Richard as a father, 95-96 history of family, 141 on Irish wake, 155-59 as a landlord, 141ff. on parental roles, 112-14 reputation of, 95-96 Elton, Sir Abraham, 87 Engels, Frederich, 139 Epstein, Julia, vii, ix Evangelicalism, 58-63 and women, 62-63, 73-74, 84-85, 88-89 Eve, and Mother Nature, 35, 48ff. Ferguson, Moira, 3-5 Flanagan, Thomas, 145 Flax, Jane, 210n., 212n. Fliegelman, Jay, 17 Foucault, Michel, 16, 85 Froula, Christine, 47-48, 53, 55 Frye, Northop, 48 Gallagher, Catherine, 226n. Gallop, Jane, 209n., 21 In. Garrick, David, 30 Gates, Henry Louis, 145 Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, 22, 27-28, 150, 151

233

Index Gregory, John, 18, 21 Griffin, Dustin, 213n., 215n, Hall, Catherine, 212n. Hamon, Marie Christine, 14, 15 Harden, Elizabeth, 222n. Hickes, George, 22In. Homans, Margaret, 37, 97-98 Home economics, 133-35 Hopkins, M. A., 213n. Housekeeping, symbolic nature of, 164-85 Hunt, David, 21 In. Hurst, Michael, 143 Identification with patriarchy, 98-99 Ideology, 120, 122 Ireland, 142 political violence in, 143-45, 169-72. See also Anglo-Irish relations Irigaray, Luce, 43 Irish wake, 155-59 Irrationality, and women, 105-108 Jameson, Frederic, 72 Jay, Elisabeth, 62 Jones, M. G., 220n. Johnson, Claudia, 215n. Klein, Melanie, 127 Kiernan, V., 59 Kramnick, Isaac, 58 Kristeva, Julia, 24 Lacan, Jacques, 14 Landry, Marcia, 49 Laslett, Peter, 212n., 217n. Leadbeater, Mary Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry, 138-39, 166-69 Leranbaum, Miriam, 6-7 Lerner, Gerda, 4

Locke, John educational paradigm, 96-97 and Evangelicalism, 60-61 Some Thoughts upon Education, 1720, 147 and women, 17-21

M/F, 14

McKendrick, Neil, 134 Maternal metaphor, 14-15, 16 Maternity, 15, 16 Matrophobia, 53 Methodism, 89-90 Milton and Eve, 34-35 and women, 106 and women readers, 27-29. See also More Misogyny, 55, 106 Mitchell, Juliet, 13 More, Hannah and Ann Yearsley, 3-4 Blagdon Controversy, 86-93, 105-6 and charity, 67-74 and charity schools, 64ff. class definition of, 72-73, 74 and Dr. Johnson, 30-33 Evangelicalism, 8, 25, 57, 61. See also Blagdon Controversy father-figures, 57 God-as-father, 92 and intellectual fathers, 29-33 on Mad Liberty, 35-36 on materialism, 46-47, 50-51 and Methodism, 90 on Milton as father, 27, 44ff. and Milton as mentor, 33-34 on mothering, 15-16 on nature, 40ff. and Paradise Lost, 25-26, 44ff., 5153, 106, 198 relations with father, 11, 22-23

234

More, Hannah (continued) on Rousseau, 44, 99-100 and rural poor, 65ff., 72-74 sickness, 91-92 and slavery, 63 and Wilberforce, 63-64, 66, 92-93 on Wollstonecraft, 41-44 More, Hannah, works of "Black Giles the Poacher," 79-80 Cheap Repository Tracts, 74, 81, 168 Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 44-53, 106 "The Cottage Cook," 83, 85-86 An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, 74, 81-83 Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont, 40 "The Slave Trade," 35-36 "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," 75-79 Strictures on a Modern System of Female Education, 27, 42-44, 61, 99 More, Jacob, 24 More, Mary Grace, 24 More, Martha (Patty) class attitudes, 56-57, 65, 69-71 Mendip Annals, 56, 63 Mother actual, 14-15 as material, 163-64 power of, 118 relationship to children, 110-11, 112, 117-18, 129ff. sexuality of, 105 Motherhood natural paradigm for, 130-32 Myers, Mitzi, 7-8, 58-59, 209n., 218n., 219n., 223n. Nature, as Other, 198-99 Newby, P. H., 22In.

INDEX

Newcomer, James, 222n. Nature, 37-39 ambivalence towards, 37ff. Newton, John, 66-67 Ortner, Sherry, 49 Palmer, Richard, 4 Parenting as historical construction, 112ff. Paternal metaphor, 14 Patriarchy new-style, definition, 18-21, 110 Pedersen, Susan, 218n.-19n. Pig, 138-39 Poovey, Mary, 8-9 Progressivism, 83-84 Psychoanalysis, 13, 196 Rationality, and women, 101, 104, 105-8 Reiss, Timothy, 222n. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 30 Roberts, William, 23-24 Rose, Jacqueline, 196, 210n, Said, Edward, 193 Salvaggio, Ruth, 101 Schochet, Gordon, 212n. Separate spheres, 119-20, 223n. Smith, Olivia, 75, 79 Spring, David, 58 Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, 68-69, 84, 139-172 Stone, Lawrence, 16, 21 In., 222n. Straub, Kristina, vii, viii, ix Thompson, E, P., 218n. Tompkins, Jane, 74 Trumbach, Randolph, 16-17 Urwin, Cathy, 117

235

Index Walkerdine, Valerie, 101, 105, 117, 118 Walpole, Horace, 30, 41 Wearmouth, Robert, 220n. Webber, Joan Mallory, 215n. Whyte, J. H., 227n. Wilberforce, William, 60-63 Wittreich, Joseph, 53-55

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5, 8-9, 41-44, 103 Woolf, Virginia, 95 Writing, as monstrosity, 195-97 Yaeger, Patricia, 224n. Yearsley, Ann, 3 Young, Henry, 86, 87