The very act of writing was full of contradictions, as Kowalesky-Wallace observes in Their Father’s Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth and Patriarchal Complicity (1991) when analysing women writers he refers to as ‘daughters of Eve’. These daughters of Eve find themselves in the midst of a paradox, as this entails their struggle “simultaneously to find one’s place within a preexistent narrative that dictates women’s marginality and to be allowed to adapt the strictures of that narrative” (1991: int 23). Coming to terms with a preexistent narrative is a conflict all the women writers I will analyse in this thesis need to face. What is interesting is the ways in which they do so, the manner through which they adapt such strictures to suit their own narrative purposes.
Michelle A. Massé’s In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (1992) reflects on the repercussions this conflict has for writers of the Gothic genre. In the Gothic the notion of trauma acquires a special significance. Such trauma is not something remote, inaccessible but rather something very real “in the present and in the implied future of the narrative, when the heroine 'wakes' from a dream of trauma to find it represented in the real world" (1992: 15). Hence, Gothic heroines must face their
‘demons’ and find ways to escape an existence that is marked by “silence, immobility and enclosure” (1992: 18).
47 This proves true not only in Gothic narratives but in domestic fiction as well.
Domestic heroines also find themselves trapped within the limits of their narrative, surrounded by the same silence, immobility and enclosure typical of Gothic tales.
Domestic heroines, too, must struggle to find ways to cope with such enclosure and also, crucially, to somehow transcend it.
Anne Jessie Van Sant’s Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (1993) also revolves around the pressure exerted by accepted, culturally prescribed notions of femininity which determined the configuration of heroines. He notes that “women were culturally constrained to exist in an idealised rather than a physicalised sensibility” (1993: 114). Hence, the insistence on women’s need to openly display their acute sensibility responded to the demands of idealised configurations rather than to corporeal ones.
Nicola J. Watson’s Revolution and the Form of the English Novel, 1790-1825:
Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (1994) points out that, in the post-revolutionary period, letters in fictional accounts “are always liable to go astray, to engage in duplicity and deception” (Watson 1994: 17). Thus, both the breaking of barriers and the attempt to oppose social and cultural expectations appears to be a preoccupation transmitted through the letter form. Letters become mediums through which to voice dissasfaction, to express a desire to reconcile opposed elements pertaining to the tension between the personal and the social.
In her chapter in the volume Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837 (1994), Carol Shinner Wilson also analyses the difficult position women find themselves in when the attempt to voice some opposition, as the woman who dissents inevitably “finds herself in an ironically fortuitous position, possessing a political voice without the drawback of belonging to the corrupt interests of established
48 power" (1994: 92). This was extremely difficult to reconcile, as the mere act of voicing their dissent would place women in a compromising position, a position that did not permit them to actively engage in political debates. Female dissent always needed to be implied, subliminal; otherwise it was viewed as threatening, as a ‘violation’ of the status quo.
In The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1996) John Richetti identifies Pamela’s difficulties to transcend morality and express the ‘true’ state of her heart by pointing out that the desire she feels towards Mr.B must remain hidden, even from herself:
if she were to admit that, she would be lost, falling into the degrading position that Mr.B wants her to assume, and injuring herself deeply. But Pamela’s inner as well as outer conflict may awaken inquiry as to why society dictates such conflicts” (1996: 104)
Eleanor Ty’s Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 (1998) reflects on this demand to deflect passionate states, as he notes that ‘good’ heroines ought to be sexually contained and
“derive their strength from Christian suffering, from having to sacrifice their own feelings and desires in order to submit to parental or spousal duty” (1998: 91). As I will argue in my chapter on Frances Sheridan, this proves to be the case in Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph, as Sidney’s suffering largely derives from her constant insistence on submitting her own desires to filial obedience, with catastrophic consequences.
Warner’s analysis of Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister in her study The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (1998) highlights the possible ways in which the limitations concerning desire could be transcended. In Behn’s narrative love appears to “offer a magical reconciliation of freedom and
49 necessity, bodily impulse and circulation within a social symbolic” (Warner 1998: 83).
The strict code of values that prevented the free expression of bodily impulses is
‘violated’ within this text in ways that provide some sort of conciliation between personal autonomy – what the individual desires – and the pressure exerted by social requirements.
2.7. The Self-Conscious Female Narrator: Towards an Authentic Representation of