In the 1990s, there was a growing emphasis on passion. In the previous decades, the cult of sensibility had already established an overt endorsement of sentiments, which nonetheless prevented the display of extreme passionate states.
In Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics: Essays in Honor of Jean H (1990), Syndy McMillen Conger reflects this demand that women exhibit their capacity for deep feeling without expressing too strong emotions was tremendously paradoxical, as women “were acknowledged freely to be men’s superiors in the exercise of feeling, but at the same time they were reminded that excess exhibition of feeling demonstrated weakness of character and inferiority to men” (1990: int 15).
The implication that derives from this is that women ought to openly display emotions but carefully avoiding excessive displays that would compromise their propriety. This careful self-monitoring was a requisite to be recognised as a ‘proper’
woman who knows her place and acts accordingly. Conger notes that a ‘genuinely’
virtuous sensibility is not solely based on women’s acceptance of social mores but also on “the consciousness– individual and uncoerced, yet carefully educated and scrutinized – that one is acting and feeling meritoriously when judged against an ideal standard”
35 (1990: 67). Hence, in order to ‘earn’ the recognition of being truly virtuous, woman ought to fully understand her necessity to adapt her behaviour in all areas of her life so as to make it suitable to the ideal standard against which she is constantly judged against.
The sexual double standard has been repeatedly analysed by critics, who have revolved around the marked differentiation that was established between expected male and female behaviour.
In this respect, Elizabeth Bergen Brophy’s Women’s Lives and the 18th-Century English Novel (1991) revolves around the prevailing assumption that “sexual desire was proper to the male and unbecoming to the female” (1991: 27). Brophy notes that the cultural expectation was that the woman, because of her presumed tendency towards the unreasonable and the sentimental, was much more “vulnerable to sexual temptation”
(1991: 27). This assumed predisposition of females to fall ‘victims’ to their passions was often used to justify the continuous and alert (sexual) monitoring to which women were subjected.
Mary A. Favret’s Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politcs and the Fictions of Letters (1993), introduces the notion that female inner lives could be accessed through letter writing and reading. Their private experience found expression through public means, which dismantled the opposition between private and public, as “the letter typically registered private, interiorized moments – domestic details, closed circles of family and friends, the inner workings of the mind” (1993: 12).
This progression from “private expression to published property pulled the letter out of its fiction of individualism and complicated its ‘feminine’ identity” (Favret 1993:
13). The letter was, by definition, a private document that would only be intercepted by its recipient. This is disrupted through the apparition of the epistolary, through which
36 the private document becomes public knowledge and hence letter-writing ceases to be an individual act and becomes a collective one.
Therefore, as Favret argues, this implied that “the epistolary form was acquiring a public voice: the stories of these fictional individuals and others were the topics of public debate; epistolary characters entered the discourse of the age and became the property of cultural history” (1993: 13).
Laura Brown’s of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1993) reflects upon these same ideas, as Brown identifies the period’s commonplace insistence on identifying “the corruption assigned to the female body and the murderousness attributed to the female figure” (1993: 19). However, interestingly, Brown does not take these widespread assumptions as necessarily putting women at the disadvantage, but actually as those aspects that trigger some sort of resistance because they bring about “the representation of an active female agency”
(Brown 1993: 19). Throughout my thesis, women struggle against widespread social assumptions to which they are expected to willingly submit. Yet, as I will argue in the chapters about the texts, the women depicted in those narratives, though submissive, nonetheless display a certain degree of uneasiness with societal pressures and some resistance to social control is present in the texts, in an implicit way in the case of heroines but in a much more ‘overt’ manner in the case of non-conventional, disruptive female characters.
Brown even notes the presence of some sort of ‘violence’ within women’s subordinate state. Female commodification is introduced as necessary, as a “natural and essential extension of female sexuality” (Brown 1993: 85) but, at the same time, the female body behind that commodification is comprised by the violence it elicits, and it is precisely that violence which becomes “a structural product of the implicit allusion to
37 female power, and thus an ideological assertion of vengeance against the threat of the unruly woman” (Brown 1993: 85).
Brown explores the possibilities that lay behind women’s subordination and commodification and revolves around women’s potential for disruption and resistance against their situation. Their submissive state may very well be the ideal position through which to revolt against their circumstances and become the very unruly, defiant woman they are expected to shun.
Rachel Brownstein’s Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (1994) reflects on the concerns which are constructed around the ideal notion of the heroine. In the process of constructing heroines, many elements come into play, as “to want to be a heroine is to want to be something special, something else, to want to change, to be changed, and also to want to stay the same” (Brownstein 1994: int xv).
Thus, the heroine is not stable a stable category but a constantly changing one, one that includes many – often contradictory – sources of anxiety that move from the desire to explore other possible representations and the wish to retain the essence that is to be embedded to such a characterisation.
The figure of the heroine entails a questioning of the system of values around which it is constructed. Such a figure “explores the connections between the inner self and its outward manifestations - between the personal and the social, the private and the public" (Brownstein 1994: int xix). The heroine carries the ‘weight’ of becoming a perfect role model worthy of imitation and, as such, her inner self must never stand in opposition to the expected outward manifestations of virtuousness she must endorse.
Theoretically, the social, the private and the public must be fused into one, into a perfectly suited entity in which no conflict occurs. Yet, such unison is not always
38 wholly possible, as heroines desires and longings are not always necessarily in complete accordance with public expectations.
The exploration of the lack of accordance between the public and the private, between the inner self and its outward manifestations is a crucial element in my analysis of the texts, both through the figure of the heroine and the secondary female figures that surround her. The detection of hints that point towards sources of anxiety and points of conflict with regards to women’s struggle to find ways to reconcile their private and public selves becomes imperative.
Within the analysis of women’s interior and outward experience, the notion of desire becomes an essential element, as “women, who make the distinctions among feelings as well as inspire them, give the meanings to desire" (Brownstein 1994: 38).
The belief that women are ruled by their emotions turns females into the perfect medium through which to examine the different ramifications, implications and outcomes that desire creates and, hence, to come to a better understanding of the female experience, of their ambitions and yearnings.
Castle’s innovative study The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (1995) also contributes to the understanding of the female experience. Opposing the period’s emphasis on reason rather than superstition, Terry Castle delved on the invention of a thermometer that exactly measured the ladies’ passions so as to reinforce the importance of approaching and, especially, understanding female passions. This assails moralists’ utter refusal of what they identified as “women’s purported incorrigibility, licentiousness, and emotional instability” (Castle 1995: 30) and, instead, turns women’s passionate states into subjects of analysis, objects worthy of study and careful attention which will provide a recognition of the vital role that female passions play.
39 Edward Copeland’s Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England 1790-1820 (1995) gives a significant amount of attention to the economic aspect of women’s lives. Women’s dependency became especially apparent in the economic arena, as "women found themselves vulnerable as economic beings” (Copeland 1995:
17), which reinforced women’s economic dependency on male protection.
Whether married or unmarried, women found themselves “economically at risk”
(Copeland 1995: 17) since their whole existence depends on their “possession of a spendable income” (Copeland 1995: 38), without this they are at a loss and they are perfectly aware of that. This preoccupation is reflected in the fiction of the period, since
“the yearly income is an obsessive motif in women’s fiction at the turn of the eighteenth century” (Copeland 1995: 24).
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook’s Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (1996) stressed the fact that, in the letter form, the monetary subject was one of the most discussed topics, along with a reflection on the possible outcomes of turning heroines into wage-earners. Most authors were reluctant to do so because “the heroine's successful employment would invite the hostility of the very society to which the heroine so earnestly aspires to belong" (Cook 1996: 163). With regards to female employment, the notion of class is essential, as didactic fiction introduce “respectability for those women from the ranks of the pseudo-gentry, the daughters of clergymen and other genteel professionals" (Cook 1996: 163).
In those higher stations, female employment is allowed and respected.
The familiar letter came to be identified as “the somatic terrain of the emotions, as well as with the thematic material of love, marriage and the family" (Cook 1996: 6).
Through letter-writing, women found a means to express their concerns, related to the different areas of their lives, from the affective and personal to the social, economic and
40 familial. Thus, the letter became a medium through which to negotiate and reconcile all of these aspects.
Within this debate around women’s negotiation and reconcilement of the various contradictions that ruled their daily lives, the term female trickster came to be used amongst the critical community to refer to those females who overtly mock convention and unapologetically challenge social mores and traditions.
In Laughing Feminism Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen (1998), Audrey Bilger depicts the figure of the female trickster as a woman who “is the polar opposite of an angel: she is outspoken; she makes people uncomfortable; she willfully violates codes of feminine behavior; and above all, she laughs" (1998: 98). Bilger’s interpretation of the trickster character are in total accordance with my own views regarding these female representations, since I completely share his idea that tricksters act out “the heroine’s transgressive desires”
(1998: 98).
In my analysis of the texts, I do not read female tricksters as opposed to the heroine, but rather as an extension of the heroine herself; a mirror image she is too afraid to acknowledge but which undoubtedly forms part of her persona.
The trickster’s presence does not provide a ‘negative’ example of those attitudes that heroines ought to evade but actually offers the heroine the opportunity to reflect on her own limiting situation and on the very aspects that perpetuate her fettered state. The comparison established between heroines and tricksters somehow obliges heroines “to question the standards that govern their own behaviour as women” (Bilger 1998: 99).
The culturally accepted, idealised image of the ‘proper’ woman is destabilised by the presence of tricksters. Tricksters bluntly refuse to become submissive, passive
41 creatures and they “refuse to be identified by their ability to please; on the contrary, they take pleasure in openly defying patriarchal figures” (Bilger 1998: 108).
Women writers’ tricksters allowed them to utter their dissatisfaction with women’s role in society without being concerned about the criticism they would have to face if they chose to depict their heroines in this ‘improper’ way. When reading a novel by a female author, the public would always first and foremost pay attention to the attributes displayed by the heroine of the story and, hence, tricksters, free from those pressures, became the perfect means to ‘freely’ “stage rebellions against the restrictions on womanhood” (Bilger 1998: 109).
To rightly fulfil the role of the ‘proper’ lady women were required to conceal certain emotions which were considered to be ‘unfeminine’, including outbursts of anger or passionate states, all of which deviated from the perfect, angelic image women were expected to display. Under such pressures, as Bilger rightly asserts, women’s self-assertion was limited and it became apparent that “the eighteenth-century woman who had independent views of selfhood was required to lead a double life” (1998: 59).
Within this double life, the tension between the public image women ought to present and their intimate, private longings was very much felt throughout the period.
This tension is absolutely palpable in all the texts I will analyse in the course of this thesis, all of which revolve around women’s anxieties and the concern that is provoked by the lack of accordance between societal demands and their inner subjectivity.
This tension was also noticed throughout the work of major eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelists, including Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney. These women writers made use of satire and comedy “as an outlet for aggression and as means of social criticism in their lives” (Bilger 1998: 62). As any direct criticism would have proved ineffectual, women writers resorted to the portrayal
42 of humorous episodes so as to give some expression to their uneasiness with regards to women’s subordinate place in their society.
In Laughing Feminism, Bilger also analyses the use of comedy to provide a subtle critique to contemporary manners and conventions was examined. Bilger notes that both women and comedy were suspiciously regarded as “potentionally disruptive to the social order” (1998: 15). The incitement of laughter about widespread assumptions concerning female weakness and male supremacy was a means to both delineate female limitations and hint that such circumstances can be changed or, at least, questioned.