V . .... .M. 9n“ n . w}... .2. is .17 ea; _ .9 . a ‘2... {A llllllllllllllllllllll"'lllllll Mllllllllllr 31293 017 This is to certify that the thesis entitled Conduct Literature and the Novel: Eighteenth-Century Constructions of the Ideal Woman Date q be! Tq 0-7639 presented by Brooke Elizabeth Harrison has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for ' Ph.D. English degree in Willi W Major prLfessor MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution LIBRARY Michigan State University PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. To AVOID FINE retum on or before date due. MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE 00 . .. AUG 1 02004 TUTTI—U— 1m clam-9051114 CONDUCT LITERATURE AND THE NOVEL: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE IDEAL WOMAN BY _Brooke Elizabeth Harrison A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1999 ABSTRACT CONDUCT LITERATURE AND THE NOVEL: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE IDEAL WOMAN BY Brooke Elizabeth Harrison If one accepts the claim that literature represents ideologies that help construct lived experience, then we can see that literature helps create society and is not merely reflective of it. Contributing to women's literary history, this dissertation recovers that dynamic relationship at the intersection of conduct literature, the novel, and female education. Eighteenth-century conduct literature, because it is by definition prescriptive, is an excellent example of a source of ideology that portrays women as cultural objects. Conduct literature served to both perpetuate and challenge the ideology of the "feminine" in eighteenth- century culture. Recently scholars have turned to conduct literature as a way to access a version of the lived experience of women. Yet much of this scholarship relies on overgeneralizations that depict conduct literature as monolithic. This false cOnstruction fails to recognize the diversity among texts, covering the social and political spectrum from revolutionary to reactionary. In order to break down that monolith this dissertation approaches conduct literature as a study in women's education. The dissertation has two main sections. The first two chapters deal primarily with conduct literature itself. Chapter one examines conduct literature as a century-long tradition; its focus on education serves to illuminate a genealogy of the discourse of independence. Chapter two identifies the overlooked disjunction between courtship novels and conduct literature, which demonstrates the subversiveness of some courtship novels and how they represent ideological battles over gender role definitions. The second major section of the dissertation applies the nuanced reading of conduct literature in part one to test cases of eighteenth-century novels that are explicitly concerned with women's education. The reading of Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote in chapter three links reading, imagination, and desire to demonstrate the subversion of conduct literature's "archenarrative" that defines what makes young women marriageable. Chapter four employs Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to demonstrate challenges to the ideology of marriage that conflates moral and financial interests. Finally, chapter five examines the importance of the revolutionary moment of the 17903 for (re)defining women's "sphere," demonstrating the attempt by Mary Hays in Memoirs of Emma Courtney to reform society as a whole rather than to reform women's place within it. In short through a fuller appreciation of conduct literature, each of these chapters attempts to problematize that ubiquitous--but not-- monolithic eighteenth-century vision: the ideal woman. To my parents who helped me begin To my husband who helped me finish iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the members of my guidance committee from the Department of English at Michigan State University: Professors Judith Stoddart, A.C. Goodson, Ellen Pollak, and especially my director, Professor Robert Uphaus. Their support of my education generally and this project in particular has been invaluable. Their rigorous scholarship and professional standards are valued models. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 Independence or Obedience: Conduct Literature . Discourse on Female Intellectual Education ................ 10 CHAPTER 2 Imagining a Wife: Courtship Novels and Conduct Literature.. ...... . ............................... 49 CHAPTER 3 From Fiction to Fact: Authoring a Self in the Female Quixote ... ................................. 82 CHAPTER 4 Mansfield Park and the Moral Inadequacy of the Female Accomplishments...... ...................... 109 CHAPTER 5 Mary Hays: Using Sentimentality in the Service of Virtue ......... ....... ........................ 139 WORKS CITED .............................................. 177 vi INTRODUCTION Of all the systems . . . which human nature in its moments of intoxication has produced; that which men have contrived with a view to forming the minds, and regulating the conduct of woman, is perhaps the most completely absurd. Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain The combination of feminist scholarship that has recovered female authors of the eighteenth century who are outside the traditional canon and historicist scholarship which has broadened both how we interpret history and what kinds of evidence we view as relevant to its interpretation, has opened new avenues for literary study." Margaret Ezell, in Writing Women's Literary History, advocates uniting historicism and feminism: "Historicism--new historicism, cultural materialist historicism, feminist historicism-- enables us to begin to glimpse a past separate from our perception of it" (9). Although Ezell acknowledges that feminist literary scholars cannot escape ideology, historicism can promote a "self-conscious study of the past" (13). That self-consciousness promotes an awareness not only of the past that is the object of study, but the past which has intervened between that period and the present. Ezell's historicism demands that we strive to be self- consciousof our own language, assumptions, and commitments 1 as we try to understand the language, assumptions, and commitments represented in women's literature. If one accepts the claim that literature represents ideologies that help construct lived experience, then we can see that literature helps create society and is not merely reflective of it. As a cultural history this dissertation recovers that dynamic relationship at the intersection of conduct literature, the novel, and female education. Eighteenth-century conduct literature, because it is by definition prescriptive, is an excellent example of a source of ideology that portrays women as cultural objects. Mary Poovey describes both the historical significance of conduct literature today and its function in its own time: Conduct material is instructive . . . because, as products of the everyday discourse of eighteenth- century propriety, the essays are themselves expressions of the implicit values of their culture. Indeed, in many respects this conduct material provides the best access both to the way in which this culture defined female nature and to the ways in which a woman of this period would have experienced the social and psychological dimensions of ideology. For in reproducing the ideological configuration that protected bourgeois society, both the hierarchy of values and the rhetorical strategies contained in these works provided real women with the terms by which they conceptualized and interpreted their own behavior and desires. (16) Although I will argue that conduct literature challenged the ideology of the dominant culture, and not merely reproduced it, Poovey is correct to identify the eighteenth-century strategy of naturalizing what today we (often) recognize as a social construct: femininity. Whether used by conservative or liberal, the claim that any particular 2 behavior or desire or social practice is "natural," inherent to who women are, was commonly employed both to perpetuate and challenge prevailing social structures. There can be little doubt that conduct literature was a powerful transmitter of social ideology in the eighteenth century. Both recorded references to conduct literature by readers and the sheer volume of conduct literature published in the long eighteenth century attest to its cultural ubiquity. Hundreds of titles were published during the course of the century, many directed at audiences of particular social classes, professions, ages, and genders. Some were translated from other languages, notably French. And the most popular titles were republished in editions that spanned the entire century. Although conduct literature, especially that directed toward women, has traditionally been far outside the literary canon, it has by no means been forgotten by literary scholars. Though the total scholarship on conduct literature is small in volume, it has appeared with remarkable regularity in the twentieth century. The first half of the century saw primarily archival work aimed at cataloguing titles and content or categorizing by purpose or audience.1 The transitional piece of scholarship that leads into what Ezell calls feminist historicist work is 1See Virgil Heltzel's Check List of Courtesy Books in the Newberry Library; John E. Mason's Gentlefolk in the Making; Maurice Quinlan's Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners, 1700-1830; and Joan Wildeblood and Peter Brinson's The Polite World: A Guide to English Manners and Depprtment from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Century. 3 Joyce Hemlow's 1950 catalog of references to conduct literature in the works of Fanny Burney, for here is scholarship linking the traditional categories of the belletristic with the practical. With the rise of feminist scholarship and interest in female readers and writers, there developed an increased awareness in conduct literature as a way to access a version of the lived experience of women. The mid-19805 saw a surge of interest, beginning with several anthologies of excerpts of women's writing which relied heavily on conduct literature.2 This period also saw prominent and important scholarship on female authors begin to use conduct literature as an entree to a variety of social practices, primarily courtship and marriage. Mary Poovey's Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Jane Spencer's Rise of the Woman Novelist, and Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction introduced conduct literature as an important but neglected literary historical resource. Now, in the late 19905, one important gauge of the ever increasing interest in conduct literature is that it is coming back into print. Currently there are three presses (Routledge/Thoemmes, William Pickering, and Woodstock) with series devoted either to conduct literature or women's education, topics which overlap. Whether reprints or new editions, these series make important texts, such as those 2See Angeline Goreau's Whole Duty of a Woman; Bridgett Hill's Eighteenth-Century Woman; and Vivien Jones's Women in the Eighteenth Century. by James Fordyce and John Gregory, available to a much broader audience than microfilm and the special collections of research libraries ever could. This availability promises to engender even more research. Even so, it is Nancy Armstrong who deserves primary credit for promulgating conduct literature as a crucial component in both the rise of the domestic novel specifically and social formation generally. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and Ideology of Conduct (1987), the collection of essays she edited with Leonard Tennenhouse. Armstrong's influence on scholars of women and the novel has made the use of conduct literature a common, if not standard, practice.3 Her methodology has also influenced the ways that we read and use conduct literature. Didactic works have moved from the margins to a central place in our understanding of how gender roles in the eighteenth century were formulated and disseminated, and how these gender roles and their representations participated in the rise of the middle class. Armstrong challenges readers not to fall into the error of believing that "gender transcends history" 3The presence of conduct literature is ubiquitous in studies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Hannah More. Recently, Jacques Carré's entire collection of essays is devoted to conduct literature, Katherine Green's The Courtship Novel relies heavily on it, and two collections of essays on eighteenth-century culture, Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Roy Porter and Marie Roberts, and History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Beth Tobin, include essays on conduct literature. 5 (Desire 8), reminding us instead to question hgw the world has become gendered. In fact, the general direction of Armstrong's argument is what makes works such as the present one possible. But if Armstrong's strength lies in reconceptualizing long- sweeps of literary and social history, the weakness of her argument lies in her representation of the particular. I agree, 6n the general level, with Armstrong's assertion that didactic literature defined "what made a woman desirable" and that narratives which seemed to be concerned solely with matters of courtship and marriage in fact seized the authority to say what was female, and that they did so in order to contest the reigning notion of kinship relations that attached most power and privilege to certain family lines. (Desire 5) Yet even with this substantial claim for the importance of didactic literature (meaning both conduct literature and novels of education), Armstrong elsewhere and repeatedly undermines the potential usefulness of conduct literature through her failure to individuate texts: "[a]fter reading several dozen or more conduct books, one is struck with a Sense of their emptiness--a lack of what we today consider 'real' information about the female subject and the object World that she is supposed to occupy" (Ideology 97). The Sheer amount of conduct literature—-hundreds of titles published over the course of more than a century--assures diversity among texts, covering the social and political Spectrum from revolutionary to reactionary. Further, such totalizing statements as Armstrong's belie the 6 representation of personal emotions and experiences which are present in many of the treatises, ranging from sadness to bitterness, from defiance to stoicism. There is no denying the element of repetition to which Armstrong alludes. That repetition, however, has lulled readers into the belief that conduct literature presents a monolithic view of the ideal woman. In revaluing the relationship between conduct literature and the novel, this dissertation breaks down that monolith and shows the diversity and complexity of eighteenth-century conduct literature. To gain a fresh perspective on conduct literature I have chosen to approach it as a study in women's education. This serves to broaden the examination of how conduct literature promulgates ideology beyond the economic (although, I must emphasize, it is always that), to examine gender individuation and the institution of marriage. Eighteenth-century women's education is a field that is woefully underexamined, not least because readers of the late twentieth century often fail to recognize the education of young women for wifehood as any kind of education at all. This dissertation also serves as a critical reception history of eighteenth-century conduct literature for women and how its representations of ideal woman intersect with those in novels by and about women in the same period. The dissertation has two main sections. The first two chapters deal primarily with conduct literature itself. Chapter one examines conduct literature as a century-long tradition and 7 refutes the construction of conduct literature as a monolith. Its focus on education serves to illuminate a genealogy of the discourse of independence. Chapter two focuses on the overlooked disjunction between courtship novels and conduct literature. This disjunction I demonstrates the subversiveness of some courtship novels and how they represent ideological battles over gender role definitions. The second major section of the dissertation applies the nuanced readings of conduct literature in part one to test cases of eighteenth-century novels that are explicitly concerned with women's education. The reading of Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote in chapter three links reading, imagination, and desire to demonstrate the subversion of conduct literature's "archenarrative" that defines what makes young women marriageable. Chapter four employs Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to demonstrate challenges to the ideology of marriage that conflates moral and financial interests. Here, Fanny is revelatory of the eighteenth-century debate regarding definitions of marriage, duty, and virtue. Finally, chapter five examines the importance of the revolutionary moment of the 1790s for (re)defining women's "sphere," demonstrating the attempt by Mary Hays in Memoirs of Emma Courtney to reform society as a whole rather than to reform women's place within it. In short, through a fuller appreciation of conduct literature, each of these chapters attempts to problematize that ubiquitous--but not monolithic--eighteenth-century vision: 8 the ideal woman. Chapter 1 INDEPENDENCE OR OBEDIENCE: CONDUCT LITERATURE DISCOURSE ON FEMALE INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION In a comfortable situation, a cultivated mind is necessary to render a woman contented; and in a miserable one it is her only consolation. Mary Wollstonecraft Thoughts on the Education of Daughters Conduct literature treats a variety of topics as essential to female education: the "pleasing arts" such as dancing, drawing, singing, playing musical instruments, and needlework, filial duty, conjugal duty, virtue, modesty, and acceptable social behavior and activities.1 Each of these is usually dealt with in relation to two stages of female life: before marriage and after marriage. What remains unsaid in the phrase "the pleasing arts" is who is pleasing whom and for what purpose. The very title of Thomas Marriott's Female Conduct, Being an essay on the art of pleasing, to be practised by the fair sex, before, and after marriage (1759) is revelatory of social expectations. This 1What is frequently missing from secular conduct literature is religious devotion, which is most often mentioned only in passing. Secular educational works in which religion holds a central place, such as Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), are unusual. Conduct literature appears to assume religious faith and duty, treating it as transparent and beyond debate except when called into service supporting other kinds of arguments. 10 version of women's education deals with how to become *marriageable. In order to get husbands women must learn to please men. To do so, in spite of the eighteenth-century conduct ideal of the "natural," women are taught to be artful, that is, devote themselves to perfecting the accomplishments and personal appearance. Thus these concepts become elided; it is "natural" for women to be pleasing. Most conduct literature for women throughout the eighteenth century, whether written by male or female, conservative or liberal, is consistent in addressing these feminine accomplishments. A topic that is less reliably approached is what I will call intellectual education, which, in contrast to the accomplishments listed above, encompasses such subjects as classical and modern languages, history, philosophy, geography, mathematics and sciences. The term intellectual education is preferable to the more common term with a similar meaning today--formal education-- because the.term "formal" implies a regularity that can be misleading. Female education was haphazard, and even at the end of the century many schools for young women, where today we would situate "formal" intellectual education, focused almost exclusively on the accomplishments. In terms of school attendance, home education, and adult autodidacticism, there is no predicting who might get an education in the accomplishments only and who might get even a partial intellectual education. 11 .The recommendations by conduct authors regarding women's intellectual education are as varied as conduct literature itself. Some authors are suspicious of any intellectual learning by women, others wish to control it by dictating its shape (often numerous subjects, but with I little depth into any particular field). Some authors advocate learning French but not classical languages , (considered a male domain), while others believe French leads to ostentatious self-display and to reading debauched French romances. Proposals for schools ranged from secular convents or colleges to boarding schools to day schools. Always there is the undercurrent of ridicule of educated women captured in Carolyn Williams's phrase "half-learned ladies," which epitomizes the fear of disturbing the "natural order" of gender relationships. A common argument against the intellectual education of woman was that "it would be wickedly irresponsible to tamper with her feminine submissiveness by filling her head with notions of independence and liberty. It was her task to obey, not to think for herself" (Williams 25). Focusing on the intellectual education of women in the eighteenth century should be of vital importance to feminist scholars of the period, for "pro-education arguments and proto-feminism are the firmest of partners in women's writing" (Myers, "Domesticating Minerva" 174). There is little question that women's education, at least in terms of literacy, improved dramatically during the course of the 12 long eighteenth century. "Dramatically" because women's education was so abysmal during the Restoration period.. Writing primarily about wealthy and aristocratic women, Ruth Perry points out that "education for Englishwomen had been seriously in arrears for over a century, since schools and libraries in women's monastic orders had been disbanded during the Reformation" and these sites of female education were never replaced (103). By the last quarter of the seventeenth century "learned women were rare . . . . Even wealthy girls were not trained to read and write but to embroider," and "gender had become a more important determinant of educational status than social class" (Perry 104). Among those authors who do advocate female intellectual education there are several recurring arguments marshalled in its support, but two are central. First, beginning at least as early as Bathsua Makin's Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673) and (more familiarly) Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), is the claim that educated women make better mothers, particularly as concerns health, morality, and what might be called common sense.2 .As mothers were often responsible for the earliest education of their children it was a necessity that they have enough education to teach their children during early childhood. Even in the late- 2See Myers's "Reform or Ruin" on how this argument was shaped and used over a century later in the 17905, especially regarding Wollstonecraft and Hannah More. 13 seventeenth century it was a conduct literature commonplace that raising healthy, moral, sensible children (particularly boys) leads to a stronger nation because of improved personal and public morality, domestic economy, role models for the "lower orders," and future national leadership.. Further, providing female intellectual education would supposedly improve marital relations: wives would become both friend and advisor to husbands and the morality of marriages would improve because husbands would be less likely to seek society outside their homes (code for adultery). Second, among early authors of the period women's intellectual education was depicted as a religious duty. Since God created woman both as rational and educable, man is disobedient when he keeps woman ignorant. It is woman's duty to practice active (rational) rather than passive virtue (childlike obedience without understanding): "it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason" (Wollstonecraft, 239W 21). Although there are many references to arguments that women do not have souls or rationality, these often appear to be straw arguments designed to show the author's magnanimity (by making concessions) or enlightenment (in comparison with Middle Eastern or Asian practices).3 What 3The latest publication I have found that maintains the absolute inferiority of woman is the anonymous Man Superior to Woman; or, A Vindication of Man's Sovereign Authority over the Woman (1739), written in response to the "Sophia" tracts. 14 does persist throughout the century, however, is the argument that women's rationality is essentially different in kind from men's, and therefore women do not need the same type of education as men. But how to make sense of this multiplicity of female educational advocacy? In an article treating Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, Vivien Jones identifies the calls for female intellectual education as a "discourse of independence" ("Seductions" 130). This is a particularly useful term because 'discourse' allows space not only for the polarities for and against the intellectual education of women, but also for authors who are less extreme on either end of the continuum, rather than simple classification as radical or reactionary. This is important, as Mitzi Myers points out, because we so easily pigeonhole authors: by, for example, failing to consider the positive redirections factored into the ostensible traditionalism of reformers like [Hannah] More. Conversely, overaccenting Wollstonecraft's iconoclasm obscures the degree to which her demands are typical of a wide spectrum of writers. ("Reform or Ruin" 201) Myers rightly catalogs "radicals," "moderates," and "religionists," all of whom nevertheless "vigorously attacked the deficiencies of fashionable training and values. In their different ways they seek to endow woman's role with more competence, dignity, and consequence" ("Reform or Ruin" 201). As is by now well-known, "the first meaning of 'independence' when applied to women in the period is 15 economic," or, more specifically, whether women had the economic means that "would give them the freedom to make an independent marital choice" (Jones, "Seductions" 130). However, what is often overlooked, but still of strong interest in the period, was women's emotional and intellectual independence. Although today some would argue that such independence is impossible under conditions of economic dependency, many eighteenth-century authors held it distinctly possible and desirable. Even within the likely economic security of marriage, conduct authors view education as one way for women to find fulfillment in what might be a less than satisfying domestic sphere, a way to find happiness within oneself rather than depending on the society of others (including husbands) or the questionable public entertainments. When one tries to separate these different kinds of economic, emotional, and intellectual independence they seem to become even further intertwined. What is perhaps then most important is that we expand our understanding of "independence" to include not only marital choice or earning a living in the absence of marriage, but the independence of mind that can render one happy through emotional self- sufficiency. Such advice recognizes, sometimes explicitly (as with the epigram to this chapter), that women must find their own happiness because they often will not find it in marriage. One resource for this self-reliance is women's intellectual 16 education. Jones makes a nice exploration of this topic with her comparison of Astell and Wollstonecraft, but this commonplace pairing does reinforce the way in which "the two Marys" despite (or perhaps because of) spanning a century, have become iconic representations of women's educational writing. Thanks to the prevalence today of historically and contextually informed scholarship, there is general knowledge of other important writers in the field of women's education (Mitzi Myers, in particular, has consistently written on this topic). Still, the continued over—reliance on Astell and Wollstonecraft creates a scholarly oxymoron, as both are recognized as radical (albeit in different ways) and yet, by implication of their prominence, taken as representative. While there has been some scholarship on Makin and Mary Hays,‘ the absence of work on Catherine Macaulay, to take just one example, is troublesome, particularly because she wrote prigr to Wollstonecraft. It is well known that she is acknowledged by Wollstonecraft as a source of inspiration, and there are many easily identifiable echoes of Macaulay in ‘Perry's book on Astell is by now a landmark of feminist historical literary scholarship. Important for contextualizing Wollstonecraft's writing is Conger's Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility. Other works which address her educational writing include Kelly's Revolutionary Feminism and Myers's "Pedagogy as Self- Expression." On Makin see Smith, Sizemore, and Myers's "Domesticating Minerva." On Hays see Kelly's Women, Writing and Revolution and Rogers's "The Contributions of Mary .Hays." 17 Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman. That Rights of Woman nevertheless continues to occlude Thoughts on Education needs remedy. The use of Astell and Wollstonecraft as the (radical) bookends of women's educational writing also begs two . important questions: what happens to the subject of women's education during the intervening century; and, as isolated icons, are their views really as radical as we make them out to be, or, are they actually representative of eighteenth- century social practices and attitudes? What follows, then, is a genealogy of the discourse of independence for women as manifest in the debate regarding their intellectual education. Choosing a starting point for a genealogy is necessarily arbitrary.5 Putting aside the claim that Bathsua Makin's Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen is "unarguably . . . the first published feminist statement in English belles lettres" (Mulvihill 208), it is nevertheless a useful starting point. The Essay treats so many of the arguments surrounding women's intellectual education that recur during the eighteenth century that it is indeed emblematic. Myers rightly points out that Makin, treading on socially unstable ground, produces an uneven text that 5Smith catalogs a number of authors in addition to Astell and Makin publishing on women's education from 1650: Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, Elizabeth Elstob, Anna Van Schurman, and Hannah Woolley (79), to which I would add Daniel Defoe. l8 repeatedly advances the cause of women's education while retreating from some of its implications. Even so, as all educational discourse is bound up with power, that is ultimately Makin's subject as well, and Myers usefully interprets Makin's approach so as to avoid anachronistic late-feminist expectations, stressing not "control and dominance gygr, but . . . capacity, capability, competence, energy, influence" ("Domesticating Minerva" 176). This recognition of Makin's challenge to the patriarchal system from within is important because it has been too easy to overlook Makin's essay because of a few peculiarities. First, as the title indicates, Makin is concerned only with the aristocracy and what she sees as a declining rate of education for this narrow segment of elite women. Her argument for improving these women's education is based on the idea that historically women have been better educated, and that the current state of education is disgraceful to English society. As evidence she provides "epic roll calls" that oddly place real women alongside mythic ones in an undifferentiated manner (Myers, "Domesticating Minerva" 176). Second, depending on one's point of view Makin pragmatically or disappointingly tempers her claims for the results of improved female education by suggesting that men will maintain their dominion over women, since "To ask too much is the way to be denied all. God hath made the Man the Head, if ydu be educated and instructed, as I propose, I am 19 sure you will acknowledge, and be satisfied" (4). Although women's learning should equal men's (5), that does not mean she desires gender equality (29).6 She is clear about women's duties: "I do not intend to hinder good Housewifery, neither have I called any from their necessary Labour to their Book. My design is upon such Persons whose leisure is a burthen" (31). .Finally, from today's perspective, perhaps the most damning choice Makin makes is to write the Esssy using male personae, making (complimentary) reference to herself in the third person. Yet despite these vagaries, Makin's Esssy remains a remarkable work. She uses inflammatory language to describe the nature of the spousal relationship, accusing men of keeping women "ignorant, on purpose to be made slaves" (5) and returns to the slave metaphor at least three more times (23, 34), along with challenges to the woman-as- chattel viewpoint: "Had God intended Women only as a finer sort of Cattle, he would not have made them reasonable" (23). Unlike many of the writers who would publish in the interim between Makin and Wollstonecraft, Makin acknowledges that changing the education and behavior of women will require a change in the education and behavior of men, whom she twice calls "sots." Educating women "will either 6We should remember that even Wollstonecraft resorts to reassurances about male dominance in the face of educated women, since men will never relinquish their physical superiority over women (VROW 8). 20 reclaim the Men; or make them ashamed to claim the Sovereignty over such as are more Wise and Vertuous than themselves" (4); the "greatest hurt" that can result to society from educating women would be requiring sons to study more diligently "that they may be Superior to Women in Parts as well as in Place" (5). The current state of education and marriage for both sexes of the aristocracy she characterizes as "Marmosets married to Buffoons, who bring forth-and breed up a generation of Baboons,-that have little more wit than Apes and Hobby-Horses" (32). It is difficult to argue with the use of anonymous male narrative personae if that is what allows Makin freedom to lambast cultural practices so thoroughly. Makin sees education as the remedy for this sorry state. 'In the following rationale, Makin combines-a number of arguments that.will ultimately become codified in women's educational advocacy. Again, using a male persona she argues on behalf of women: God intended Woman as a help-meet to Man, in his constant conversation, and in the concerns of his Family and Estate, when he should most need, in sickness, weakness, absence, death, &c. Whilst we neglect.to fit them for these things, we renounce God's Blessing, he hath appointed Women for, are ungrateful to him, cruel to them, and injurious to ourselves. (23) Here woman's role is rightfully as a wife subordinate to her husband, but one who is a close companion and advisor regarding both running and supporting the family. Although the husband is "the head" the wife is a full partner, one who can run the family domain when needed, including 21 independently as a widow. Not only can wives play a useful role in addition to childbearing, it is God's intention that this be so. While this is a fuller partnership than many would prescribe for women in the period, what is even more telling about the sweep of Makin's argument for female participation and independence is the educational program she outlines to prepare women to assume this role. Because of her promotion of the practical uses of education we might expect to see a purely practical program, which she defines as, "physic" and enough botany for nursing the family, enough math to keep household accounts, enough reading and writing to teach young children and to study the Bible. But Makin never allows herself to be hemmed in by the mere household utility of education; she refuses, unlike so many subsequent writers, to bar any branch of learning from women: "I cannot tell where to begin to admit Women, nor from what part of Learning to exclude them, in regard of their Capacities. The whole Encyclopedia of Learning may be useful-some way or other to them" (24): including science, religion, grammar, rhetoric, logic, medicine, Greek, Hebrew and other languages, mathematics, geography, history, music, painting, poetry, and law. Makin may not argue that aristocratic women should be equal to men in all spheres, but there are no holds barred in the sphere of education. In Perry's comparison of Astell and Makin, Makin comes off second best, because Makin "did not believe the aim of 22 education was to teach women to think more rigorously" (l4). Makin rationalized women's intellectual education as helpful to men, while "Astell, of course, emphatically denied that being helpmeets to husbands was the purpose and end of any women's creation" (Perry 14). It is true that Makin does write exactly that, and also expects women to marry and be economically dependent upon their husbands. Still, both Makin's rhetoric regarding male/female relationships and her program for female education belie this supposedly easy acceptance of women's subordination. One issue that would preoccupy authors throughout the century was what would become of educated women. At the outset Makin acknowledges that people are fearful of learned women because they seem to upset the natural order. Williams argues cogently (and is corroborated by Hilda Smith) that intellectual education was a completely gendered concept: "In consequence, learning was perceived as a sexual characteristic . . . . The connection between learning and manliness needed no explanation. It had acquired the status of a conditioned reflex" (25). Makin addresses the fear head on that "If we bring up our . Daughters to Learning, no persons will adventure to marry them," by claiming that, on the contrary, education is insurance against failure to marry (30).7 Wollstonecraft ”Perry notes that around this time there were seventy- seven men for every one hundred women in London (105). 23 treads the same ground a century later in her attempt to co- opt the derogatory term "masculine women" (259W 8, 11). The end of Makin's Esssy proposes educational methods and provides an advertisement for her school. Here also she is ahead of her time, for many subsequent authors advocated rote learning for both boys and girls. Makin's experientially and empirically based methods, on the other hand, preceed those found in John Locke's Thoughts on Education (1693). Both stress acquiring useful content rather than form: "greater care ought to be had to know things, than to get words" (Makin 34), acknowledging the tendency toward virtually meaningless memorization and recitation. In learning languages Makin, who knew at least six languages herself (Mulvihill 208), observes that "words are the marks of things" and should be learned by perception and need rather than rote (Makin 36). Makin's is an ambitious program, one possibly not equalled for women until Erasmus Darwin's a century later. Regardless, the systems advocated by Makin and Astell were not destined to be the benchmarks by which women's education was measured.8 The next work that gsslg be highly influential regarding the education of women, both at the time of its publication and through many subsequent editions, was the Spectator. 8Perry writes that "no other woman writer picked up where Astell left off . . . . By 1710, the feminist impulse that Astell had fanned into being . . . was dying back into embers again . . . . [W]omen's place in society ceased, for a while, to be a regular topic in the popular media" (330). 24 It is a commonplace to connect casually the Spectator to the tradition of female conduct literature because of its overt preoccupation with social behavior. In fact, with the exception of the Bible, it may be the work cited above all others in conduct literature for women as arbiter of polite society, and is a rarity in being included on virtually all approved reading lists for young women. Although relatively few issues of the Spectator are directed specifically to women, let alone the topic of female education, it nevertheless set the terms of that discourse for at least the next-fifty years. Calling the Spectator "powerfully instrumental in defining an ideological identity for the emergent middle class," Vivien Jones characterizes women's conduct literature generally as unconcerned with intellectual education, and this is how most of the Spectator's advice might be characterized as well: '"how women might create themselves as objects of male desire, but in terms which will contain that desire within the publicly sanctioned form of marriage" (Wsmss 14). If marriage is seen as the first priority for an aspiring middle class readership, then it makes sense that education in virtue and the pleasing arts would be the first concern in women's education, rather than the intellectual education touted by Makin, Astell, and others. Coming twenty years after Makin and ten years after Astell, the Spectator fills a new literary, cultural, and class niche. While much of its advice is not new, what is 25 new is the Spectator's audience and purpose.9 Terry Eagleton, describing the function and influence of both the Tatler and Spectator, claims these periodicals participated in the formation of a "bourgeois public sphere" in which the professional classes, the gentry, and the aristocracy could participate in a "free, equal interchange of reasonable discourse, thus welding themselves into a relatively cohesive body whose deliberations may assume the form of a powerful force" (9). Thus it is no longer class which empowers individuals to participate in the formation of public opinion, "but the degree to which they [individuals] are constituted as discoursing subjects by sharing in a consensus of universal reason" (9). He calls the Tatler and Spectator the "central institutions" in the "English bourgeois public sphere in early eighteenth century" (10). Their "major impulse is one of class consolidation, a codifying of the norms and regulating of the practices whereby the English bourgeoisie may negotiate an historic alliance with its social superiors" (Eagleton 10). The Spectator's plan is laid out in the dedicatory epistle of the first number on March 1, 1711. Its aim is to "Cultivate and Polish Human Life, by promoting Virtue and Knowledge, and by recommending whatsoever may be either Useful or Ornamental to Society" (1). The goals for the 9See, for instance, Halifax's The Lady's New Year's Gift (1688) and Allestree's The Ladies Calligg (1673), which are still aimed at the aristocracy and are more traditional pieces of advice literature than Astell's or Makin's. 26 Spectator's women readers are'made explicit a few issues later, and it is here not only that the intentions are explicitly outlined, but the tone and attitude towards female readers is implicitly delineated: As my Pleasures are almost wholly confined to those of the Sight, I take it for a peculiar Happiness that I have always had an easie and familiar Admittance to the fair Sex. If I never praised or flatter'd, I never belyed or contradicted them. As these compose half the World, and are by the just Complaisance and Gallantry of our Nation the more powerful Part of our People, I shall dedicate a considerable Share of these my Speculations to their Service, and shall lead the Young through all the becoming Duties of Virginity, Marriage, and Widowhood. When it is a Woman's Day, in my Works, I shall endeavor at a Stile and Air suitable to their Understanding. When I say this, I must be understood to mean that I shall not lower but exalt the Subjects I treat upon. Discourse for their Entertainment, is not to be debased but refined. . . . In a Word, I shall take it for the greatest Glory of my Work, if among reasonable Women this.Paper may furnish Tea-Table Talk. (no. 4) In the event, there were relatively few women's days, but Addison and Steele did hold to the plan of educating their readers to participate successfully in polite society. And, however much the Spectator might regret that "in our Daughters we take Care of their Persons and neglect their minds" (no. 66), it nonetheless was the primary source of identifying and codifying the nature of female education, society's ideals of femininity, and female stereotypes that focused on the social rather than the intellectual. The stereotypes, compliments, defenses, and demands the Spectator placed on women were not new and had been seen in aristocratic conduct literature before. It may, however, be 27 the first venue for a broader audience and continued where more elite publications left off. The contradictory nature of the way it approached advice for women-~often building up only to fence in more narrowly--would become a standard tactic in subsequent popular conduct literature. The - Spectator revered female beauty while accusing women of spending too much time and care on appearance (no. 41). It saw the potential of the undeveloped female intellect (nos. 41, 37), but made clear that female temperament will keep women inferior to men (no. 144). The greatest legacy that the Spectator makes to the discourse on female education is the clear identification of what girls were to be educated for: marriage. While Addison and Steele as Mr. Spectator may occasionally complain about the education that is the result of the desire of girls and parents alike to make young women marriageable (see especially no. 66), they nonetheless are the self-appointed definers of female marriageability. Michael Ketcham's analysis of the Spectator emphasizes its interest in appearance, calling its advice "social coercion through the pressures of fashion, money, or parental insistence" recognizing that, "education, particularly, is a medium of coercion" (56). As much subsequent conduct literature would, the Spectator pays lip service to love: "The happy marriage is, where two Persons meet and voluntarily make a Choice of each other, without principally regarding or neglecting the 28 Circumstance of Fortune or Beauty" (no. 149). Nonetheless, women cannot be trusted to choose a husband wisely on their own: they will prefer a rake to a virgin (no. 154), or frivolous characters and simpleminded fops (no. 128), or superficial appearance (no. 58) to responsible and . respectable men. The female attribute that threads through all these discussions, whether laudatory or derogatory of women, is that of virtue. ‘Virtue, and its sister, modesty, are made attractive themselves by being touted as attractive to the Opposite sex (potential husbands); in fact, the "Honour" paid to women by men "is only upon Account of their conducting themselves with Virtue, Modesty, and Discretion" (no. 53). What goes unsaid in such definitions is that the nature of that conduCt is passive. Not only are male authors prescribing the female ideal, it is an ideal which, by definition, (virtuous) women cannot challenge. In short, through its easy assumption of authority for the aspiring professional classes and the light social satire of and simultaneous respect for women, the Spectator helped codify gender roles and relationships. It ostensibly supported female intellectual education in the abstract, but it paradoxically (perhaps inadvertently) codified a definition of female education as that of the accomplishments, making clear their function as husband bait. This woman-as-ornament perspective, although already in the air, took firm hold in subsequent didactic 29 publishing, helping to define the "character of woman" (a negative stereotype) as well as the feminine ideal (a model of perfection requiring self-effacement). In Ketcham's formulation, "what the spectator sees in the physical person is not a set of features, but a close connection between one's self-concept, physical appearance, and social presence" (60). Around mid-century, the wide ranging topics of the Spectator began turning up in more formal and longer conduct literature directed solely at young women. But before moving on to them it is worth noting what could be termed an intermediary text that, while still directed at both. genders, continues to expand its intended audience in terms of class and narrows the focus to marriage as the primary concern of female education. Samuel Richardson's letter- writing manual, sometimes known today as Familiar Letters on Important Occasions, originally had a typically loquacious Richardsonian title: Letters Written to and for particular friends, On the most important occasions, Directing not only the reguisite style and forms to be observed in writing familiar letters; But how to think and act justly and prudently, In the common concerns of human life (1741). The long title signals Richardson's dual intent, not only to improve letter writing, but to influence social values and behavior. While that is not unusual, three things about this text are. 30 of ti conce varie wide be 01 parer betwe and c few. the t guard the 1 is di men, keep: RiCha and 1 the w Const First, of 173 sample letters in the manual almost half of them deal with courtship or marriage, making this "common concern" far and away the most significant of the book. The variety of subtopics regarding courtship and marriage is wide: clandestine courtships and marriage (which would not be outlawed until 1751), marriage for love versus money, parental approval and disapproval of suitors, choosing between rival suitors, suspected adultery of one's husband, and conducting courtship at the proper pace, to name but a few. — . Second, an additional score of letters are designed for the use of women on other topics (for example, servants, guardianship of female orphans, widowhood). Combined with the letters on courtship and marriage, over half the manual is directly aimed at women. (The remainder, usually between men, address "male" behavior such as drinking, gambling, keeping a horse, choosing a profession or conducting trade.) Richardson's cultivation of female readers is well known, and I would argue that Familiar Letters signals a change in the way that texts whiCh are intended for both genders are constructed. For example, while the Spectator did have occasional "women's days" Addison and Steele also made clear that they expected women to read and benefit from all the issues, regardless of the topic (see, for example, no. 66, following the series on wit). .Richardson, on the other hand, works much harder for his female readers--appealing not only to their perceived interests, but also treating 31 women with seriousness and respect, something which was often absent in subsequent conduct literature. Third, Richardson goes further than the Spectator regarding advice for different classes, addressing letters for the propertied alongside those for maidservants and apprentices (although advice for the titled is notably absent). Brian Downs cites a letter Richardson wrote about the plan for Familiar Letters, making clear his intention to influence how "low," "country" readers act as well as write (ix). In the preface Richardson writes that his purpose is to "inculcate the principles of virtue and benevolence; to describe properly and recommend strongly the social and relative duties . . . that the letters may serve for rules to think and act by" (xxvii). This openness regarding class would not be sustained throughout the century. The Spectator and Familiar Letters, popular and influential works, helped lead the way to redefining the genre of female conduct literature and framed the nature of female education for decades. Their version of instruction became extremely popular, in spite of mutating into less female friendly versions. The advice of course lost its freshness, and, perhaps because of the entry of clergy into IZhe authorship, became sterner and more serious, often 1Lhreatening and accusatory. Some of these subsequent works educating young women on becoming marriageable were extremely popular, so much so that in 1792 Mary WOLIlstonecraft still felt compelled to write vehement 32 refutations of works that were each approaching twenty to thirty years in print, but which viewed education as social rather than intellectual.10 This social education for women remained the dominant form until the last decades of the eighteenth century. As such it is worth study, but is outside the scope of this chapter, and I address it in chapter two. So I will now leap ahead to pick up the thread of women's intellectual education in the conduct literature of the last quarter century. There are three main moves that educational writing for women makes as the eighteenth century begins to wane: first, there is a renewed call for extensive intellectual education for women (most frequently symbolized today by Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman [1792], although she was not the first in this wave of advocates); second, there is a backlash against women's intellectual education, particularly in the form of both overt and covert attacks on Wollstonecraft after Godwin revealed her personal history in the Memoirs (1798);11 and third, there again arises a loGregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774), Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1765), and Rousseau's Emile (1762, in French). 11Janet Todd speculates that the reason there was not backlash against Macaulay's Letters on Education (1790) was that she had been dropped by polite society prior to its publication because of her "scandalous" marriage to a man thirty years her junior. This may also be why the Letters were not more influential at their publication, despite the popularity of and respect for Macaulay's previous publications. 33 sustained discourse regarding female schools. As mentioned above, Hester Chapone, a member of Richardson's circle of learned women, wrote Letters on the [Improvement of the Mind (1773). The text is an anomaly among later conduct literature for putting religion squarely and strongly at the center of female (and male) education.12 But she is unusual for another reason as well, for she may be alone among the "religionists" (including prominently More and Jane West) for advocating a substantial and wide-ranging intellectual education. Because Chapone's primary concern is so clearly (and unusually) religious faith and duty, her work was perhaps deemed unassailable. Even Wollstonecraft, usually not timid with criticism, is unwilling to take on Chapone, even though Wollstonecraft does not "always coincide in opinion with her" (239W 105). Without implying a cynical intent on Chapone's part, one may still note that the unexceptionable religion may have the effect of no exception being taken to what was at the time an unusual advocacy of female intellectual education. Chapone goes into great detail describing what subjects should be taught at what age and in what depth, and with lists of recommended textbooks. This level of detail is ialso a departure from much of the popular conduct literature 12See Sizemore on the fragmentation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religion-based courtesy literature into different subgenres, including what would become eighteenth- century conduct literature. 34 published in the 17503 and 603. Chapone's Letters are designed as a practical rather than polemical work, making her take-it-for-granted advocacy of intellectual education all the more noteworthy.> Chapone's priorities are, in order, Christian virtues, domestic management, and the "graces and accomplishments" (174). Of the last the most important attribute is to be "well-read" (187).. By this Chapone seems to mean (as do other authors of the period such as Wollstonecraft, Macaulay, and Hays) not only belles lettres but systematic reading across a wide variety of the humanities and sciences. Chapone assumes an autodidactic education, which may be why she goes into such detail with her educational program. She recommends typical conduct literature attainments: French, dancing, perhaps Italian, orthography, and "common arithmetic" (187); however, the recommendation of reading poetry to feed the lively female imagination is unorthodox (as we will see in subsequent chapters, many authors are interested in limiting female imagination). Chapone believes young women's principal study (other than religion) should be world history (192), which in turn :necessitates studying world geography. Natural philosophy (science) is limited to what is "naturally observable" (199), which may be an allusion to the pedagogical methods of Locke and Rousseau. Despite Chapone's piety, novels and romances are not banned, but they should be chosen with extzreme care (204), while she unreservedly recommends "moral 35 essays" such as the Spectator, the Rambler, and similar periodicals. Chapone asserts that by no means should a young woman be "remarkable for her learning" (190), but anyone who followed her educational system would be remarkable indeed. If Chapone's work can be viewed as transitional-- simultaneously advocating status quo domestic relations and expansive intellectual education for women--perhaps the work that first embraces the revolutionary ideology of women's rights and education of the 17905 is Catherine Macaulay's Letters on Education. As Janet Todd points out in her headnote to Letters, Macaulay was the "sole female pamphleteer of the political crisis of the 17605 and 17705" (n.p.) and sided with the Americans in the War of Independence. Thus her interests in civil rights were well established by the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution, which served as an occasion for much of the writing on women in the 17905. The similarities between Macaulay's Letters and Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman are remarkable and deserve a full length study outside the scope of this genealogy. .Macaulay's Letters is more learned and less polemical than Igights of Woman and is often more concerned with general (xivil rights (for people of all classes and races), than with women in particular. Macaulay draws heavily on her bar2kground as a published historian in her argument (reaminiscent of Makin's) that the ancient education of women 36 was much better than the modern, and that England as a whole can only benefit from improved female education. As Wollstonecraft would later, Macaulay draws heavily on the educational methods of Locke and Rousseau, while repudiating, in particular, Rousseau's separation and subordination of women, views that reduce "the man of genius to the licentious pedant" (206). True to her republican leanings, Macaulay advocates universal public education--not just for women of the upper classes but for all women and men--funded by an education tax graduated by "rank and fortune" (18). Further, boys and girls should be educated together and precisely the same way, with the exception of the more physical sports such as cricket and fencing (142). Macaulay is squarely against spending too much time on the female accomplishments, for "the industry of a long life is hardly sufficient for the attainment of wisdom" (64) and accomplishments appear designed primarily to "get rid of time" (62). Unlike the male conduct authors of mid-century who define female virtue, in part, as blind obedience, Macaulay is clear that there is no morality without rationality: "It 'is one thing . . . to educate a citizen, and another to educate a philosopher. The mere citizen will have learnt to obey the laws of his country" without understanding their basis in religious and rational principles, and therefore cannot be "truly moral" (198). Rationality is not masculine; it only seems so because historically the male 37 mind has been the standard (204). _Macaulay wants all citizens to be rational, as opposed to rational men and obedient women. This ungendering of intellect would necessarily lead to a change in domestic relations, and it is worth returning one more time to the carrot that is often dangled in front of women in conduct literature: that of education leading to wives becoming "friend and advisor" or a "helpmeet" to their husbands. Since this narrow domestic role may be precisely what twentieth-century feminism has wanted liberation from, it is important to recognize that in the eighteenth century, for upper class women, this could actually be an improvement. Macaulay uses Lord (flhesterfield's infamous misogyny as an example of one version of spousal relations: women are only children of a larger growth . . . . [For] solid reasoning, and good sense, I never in my life knew one that had it . . . . A man of sense only trifles with them, as he does an engaging child; but he never consults them, nor trusts them in serious matters. (qtd. in Macaulay 209) This attitude that wives should be seen and not heard, that they are useful primarily as breeders or for the transfer of property, can help us understand Makin's, Wollstonecraft's, or Macaulay's attraction to the female role of "friend and advisor" to a husband. Given the intellectual inconsequence advocated by Chesterfield, the role of "helpmeet"--a partner, however unequal-—5uddenly seems a much more significant and attractive one. Further, the role has a 38 strategic usefulness in being a moderate position in change advocacy, reformative rather than revolutionary. As the decade moves on, however, there begins to be a reaction against female intellectual education. It is identifiable not simply as a continuation of the conduct literature ideal of propriety, obedience, and accomplishments of the 17505 and 605, but as a call for maintenance of gender, class, and racial spheres. Unlike the general trend in conduct literature at mid- century, which worked to articulate and codify social practices, conduct literature of the 17905 had a substantial body of literature on women's education with which new authors had to come to terms. In other words, conduct authors were now writing within an established tradition of ‘conduct literature. Advice books had always made reference to a variety of particular texts, most commonly the Bible, novels and romances, and periodicals such as the Spectator and Rambler. But as the body of conduct literature grows, it becomes more common to make reference to other educational authors. Rousseau and Locke are perpetual presences, as are French authors such as Francois Fénelon and Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis. Dissenting responses to Macaulay's Letters and .Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman were quick to appear, though in the genteel tradition of conduct literature these are not the sites of the vituperative attacks that appear elsewhere. Clara Reeve contrasts her own Plans of Education 39 (1792) to Macaulay's Letters, suggesting that both Macaulay's polemic and her "plan" are too complex (vii). And it seems likely that John Bennett's peculiar work, Strictures on Female Education (1795),13 is structured as a response to Macaulay, as both works, although opposed, are based on the history of women's education. Bennett does make reference to Macaulay as a female prodigy (a suspect category), who is an exception that proves the rule of the limited nature of female talent, and who is exalted "to an unnatural and invidious eminence" (43). Hannah More's reaction, in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, goes furthest, directly attacking Wollstonecraft as representative of a "cool, calculating, intellectual wickedness" (I.52). More's biting allusion to the "Epistle to a Lady" is meant to identify Wollstonecraft's desires as overreaching: The beauty vindicates her own rights, the wit, the rights of women; for the beauty fights for herself, the wit for a party; and while the more selfish though more moderate beauty 'would but be Queen for life,‘ the public spirited wit struggles to abrogate the Salique law of intellect, and to enthrone 'a whole sex of Queens.‘ (More 2.18) The reference to Pope's satire on female wit intensifies More's caricature of Wollstonecraft, while reference to the French Salique law suggests that Wollstonecraft is challenging the 'natural order' of the intellectual 13Unlike most conduct literature about women, this work is addressed to a male audience. 40 hierarchy. More plays on the common fear that educated women will desire supremacy rather than equality. More important than Reeve's or More's reactions against other authors, however, are their own plans for female education. Much of Reeve's work consists of unoriginal~ borrowings from other authors (often unnamed). Thus what is most interesting in her work are her arguments regarding the aim of education, who should receive it, and what it is for, rather than any "plan" she puts forward. Reeve argues, as will More less than a decade later, that manners and morals are the primary purpose of education and that the welfare and moral health of the state depend upon the behavior and example of the upper classes in this regard (29). She is similar to previous conduct authors in her focus on marriage, and perceives an alarming trend: "the decrease of marriages, the increase of divorces, the frequency of separations . . . leave any doubt remaining of this general declension of manners" (131). The cure for this malaise is.a system of education that will "restore the national character of virtue, modesty, and discretion" (132). But even Reeve's system of female education, focusing on "religion and virtue . . . elegant female accomplishments and the most useful social and domestic qualities" (137) rather than on the intellect, is explicitly 22E for everyone. Only the "quality" should be educated, the rest of the population should be educated only to follow their 41 example. Reeve goes into depth describing "gradations of rank and fortune" (64), dividing England's population into numerous "classes" of such fine distinctions as old and new nobility, old and new wealth, "inferior gentry," the "genteel professions" and the "lowest mechanics and artizans, and the whole peasantry of the land" (69). This overt preoccupation with class is virtually unheard of in conduct literature before this period. Both Reeve and More recognize the potential for class levelling through education, and part of the ideological program of each author is to use education (and the lack thereof) to maintain class distinctions. After morality, the greatest problem Reeve sees with current education is that people are being educated above their stations: "children of farmers, artificers and mechanics, all come into the world as gentry.--They send them to the same schools with the first gentry in the country, and they fancy themselves equals" (60-1). The result of this overeducation is, among other things, disruption of the marriage market: young ladies are "disdaining to match with their equals, aspiring to their superiors" (61). Reeve also opposes universal literacy, specifically naming "paupers" and "negroes" among those who should not be taught to read or write (86-7), not least because it will benefit the nation as a whole: "In a well regulated state, a right and true subordination is beautiful, where every 42 order is kept in its proper state, and none is allowed to encroach upon, or oppress another" (71). One might guess from this allusion to Pope's Essay on Man that Reeve's fears regarding encroachment that she is most concerned about the lower classes' oppression of the upper classes. Like Pope, she defends the status quo as both the will of God and beneficial to all, and his words are especially salient to Reeve's position on education: For Wit's false mirror held up Nature's light; Shew'd erring Pride, whatever is, is right; That Reason, Passion, answer one great aim; That true Self-love and Social are the same; That virtue only makes our Bliss below; And all our Knowledge is, ourselves to know. (Pope iv.393-8) As stated above, Hannah More's beliefs regarding the responsibilities of the gentry are congruent with Reeve's, emphasizing that "women of the higher class" have the influence to "raise.the depressed tone of public morals" (1.1, 4). Unlike Macaulay, Wollstonecraft, or even Reeve, each of whom expresses positive interest in the French Revolution, More is writing after the Reign of Terror, and her fear of change in the social order, whether regarding gender or class, is explicit (1.5, 23; 2.16-17). These suspicions extend to the intellectual education of women, and More is clear to separate "mere" knowledge from usefulness (1.32-3; 2.4). Her focus on female domestic duty and public morality cause More, like many more liberal authors, to speak out against the female accomplishments. Still, her class allegiance is strong, and paradoxically she 43 still wants the accomplishments off limits to the middle classes because the pleasing arts are class markers that belong "exclusively to affluence" (1.76). Female schools are, of course, precisely the sites for the kind of class leveling that More fears, for the ability to pay appears to be the only prerequisite for admission. Many conduct authors, including More, ran schools or worked as governesses, which makes the debate over schooling at home by a mother, by a governess, in "public" day schools, or in boarding schools both self-interested and ironic. Trying to appear unbiased, several conduct authors who also ran schools assert that home-schooling by mother is best; however as schools are sometimes necessary (due, of course, to inadequate mothers) they go on to offer elaborate plans for curricula. Reeve, in particular, uses this tactic, but More, Wollstonecraft, and-Bennett each represent a variation on this theme. We can look to Erasmus Darwin as representative of progressives for the cause of female intellectual education at the very end of the century. Darwin's Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797) stands in direct contrast to a more traditional work like Burton's Lectures on Female Education and Manners (1793). The lectures are designed to be read to female boarders every Sunday evening and stress, first, female virtue and obedience to fathers and future husbands; second, domestic duty; and third, the accomplishments. Burton is explicit 44 that the nature of female intellect (a question he‘ explicitly refuses to address) is irrelevant because "the respective employments of the Male and Female Sex being different, a different mode of education is consequently required" (1.107). 4 Burton views the possible aims for female education as two-fold: either domestic economy or social graces. He himself uses.a servant/mistress metaphor for his view of the limits of the female sphere (1.109). Ultimately he recommends a blend of the two, suggesting women should only be educated insofar as it renders them useful and pleasing to men; he does not entertain development of intellect as serving any such purpose (let alone benefitting or pleasing women themselves). Rather, the aim of education for women is to render "obedient Daughters, faithful Wives, and prudent Mothers. . . . The accomplishments, therefore, which you should acquire, are those that will contribute to render you serviceable in domestic, and agreeable in social life" (1.111). To be fair, it must be said that Burton does allow limited female learning of astronomy, philosophy, and natural history (although not the "learned" languages), but apparently not as part of the school curriculum (2.158). Darwin, on the other hand, suggests that rather than scaring off potential husbands, women learned in science should be interesting and appealing to men (40-1). Unlike many educational authors, Darwin spends relatively little space justifying women's intellectual education. He takes 45 its benefits virtually for granted, and instead lays out an elaborate plan for the curriculum of a female school. For the younger ages Darwin is similar to Locke and Rousseau in making recommendations for everything from clothes to food to exercise to sleeping quarters. For older students he offers extensive lists both of subjects and recommended texts. Recognizing that his plan is too ambitious for most schools, Darwin also advocates his plan as a reading list for a lifetime of self-directed learning. For example, under the rubric of science he lists botany, chemistry, mineralogy, and "natural philosophy," the last of which includes astronomy, mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, electricity, and magnetism (42). Parents must also participate in furthering their daughters' educations during summer recess: touring the "arts and manufactories, which -adorn this country," including.cotton works, potteries, iron-foundries, and factories in Birmingham, Manchester, and Nottingham (43). Though the format and scope of their works are distinctly different, Darwin's interest is clearly similar to Macaulay's: that is, the education of a citizen rather than the education of a woman. Like Makin's Ssssy, Darwin's Eléfl serves a triple purpose: an argument-for female intellectual education, a specific system for that education, and an advertisement for a school (in Darwin's case, run by his two illegitimate daughters). The actual offerings of both schools, while 46 perhaps remarkable in comparison to their respective contemporaries, do not match the ideal model laid out by the authors. Although spanning a century, both works call for a female intellectual education that, despite the extraordinary education of individual women, still does not exist in any standardized way. The debate regarding the "natural" intelligence and rationality of women is another issue that remains unsettled by the end of the century. The most that can be said is that the nature of the question changes from that of whether women's intellect equals that of men (which is basically conceded) to one.of type. That is, the question becomes how are women's and men's intellects different, and how does (and should) that difference affect their roles in society. On the other hand, what has changed is who wrote and read women's educational literature. No longer was it by and for the aristocracy. By mid—century participation in this discourse was moving beyond the gentry, and although middle-class participation was still contested in the 17905, the objections are clearly a rearguard action. As Wollstonecraft recognized, all education is ideological: it can be used to challenge or maintain social relationships. Education is not hermetic, but has a symbiotic relationship with the larger culture. Wollstonecraft does not believe education can work the wonders which some sanguine writers have attributed to it. Men and women must be 47 educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. . . . It may be fairly inferred, that, till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education. (VROW 21) Central to this observation is the question of what woman should be educated for: To catch a husband? To be a docile and obedient wife? To in turn educate her own children? For class solidarity and discrimination? To practice rational virtue? To pass time productively? To earn an independent income? To participate in intellectual discourse? In the eighteenth century the function--and therefore the nature--of woman's education is contested precisely because the function of woman is contested. 48 Chapter 2 IMAGINING A WIFE: COURTSHIP NOVELS AND CONDUCT LITERATURE If I was called upon to write the history of a woman's trials and sorrows, I would date it from the moment, when nature has pronounced her marriageable. Rev. John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady (1789) Your whole life is often a life of suffering.... You must bear your sorrows in silence, unknown and unpitied. You must often put on a face of serenity and cheerfulness, when your hearts are torn with anguish, or sinking in despair. John Gregory, A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774) The state of matrimony is necessary to the support, order, and comfort of society. But it is a state that subjects the women to a great variety of solicitude and pain. James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women (1766) Trials and sorrows? Suffering, anguish, and despair? Subjection, solicitude and pain? Can these portrayals of married life for women taken from eighteenthecentury conduct literature possibly describe the same.institution that numerous courtship novels of the same period depict as supremely desired and desirable? Can marriage be the ‘UItimate source of misery in One and the ultimate source of happiness in the other? I will account for this discrepancy if! the two genres' portrayals of marriage by showing that, be<:ause of theeighteenth-century belief that fiction is botzh mimetic and didactic, it served the same function of 49 configuring social relationships as conduct literature. Thus, even though conduct literature and fiction are different genres, they were in direct competition for social influence. The discrepancies in their marriage paradigms are therefore revealed as ideological battles over gender role definition. For this study I will use representative conduct literature spanning the long century: Allestree's Tss Ladies Calling-(1673), Halifax's Lady's New Year's Gift, or Advice to a Daughter (1688), Essex's Young Ladies' Conduct (1722), Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1766), Bennett's Letters to a Young Lady (1789), and Gisborne's Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797).1 I have deliberately chosen only male-authored conservative conduct literature for this chapter. This conservative ideology of marriage, using Fordyce's words in the epigram, seeks to maintain "the support, order, and comfort of society," consciously to put the welfare of others above personal happiness. This selection makes a nice contrast to courtship novels of the period, which have been shown by Katherine Sobba Green to constitute a "feminized genre"--primarily by and for women. 1Of these six works only Essex's did not go into multiple editions. Bennett's went to four editions in fourteen years, but was even more popular in the United States, where there were ten editions through 1856. Both Gisborne's and Fordyce's works went to fourteen London editions, staying in print fifty and forty-eight years respectively. Allestree went to twelve editions in fifty- nine years (1727); after a hiatus of sixty years a new edition was published by Joseph Johnson in 1787. Halifax's work enjoyed the greatest longevity, staying in print for over a century, with a seventeenth edition printed in 1791. 50 Although female-authored conduct literature generally depicts marriage in no better light than the texts used here (see Astell, Pennington, and Lambert for example), I do believe the female authors' tone, strategies for coping, and attitudes toward their female readers are not surprisingly much more sympathetic than their male counterparts. The titles selected for this study collectively (along with Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters, used in the epigram) reveal both the intended audience and the varieties of authority employed by these writers. Each of the works is addressed to unmarried young women of the gentry or aristocracy and details their duties in late adolescence, through courtship, and on into marriage. The number of titles mentioning the private relationship of fathers and daughters in what are public documents implies the assumption of paternal authority on the part of the writers and an expectation of filial duty in their readers. Through their titles these authors establish a paternalistic writer/reader relationship that enables them to demand the same type of absolute authority as the reader's real father. Simultaneously, the authors can also exploit the role by suggesting that they feel parental benevolence for the reader/daughter's welfare. Such a concern is purportedly what prompted them to compose the volume in the first place. Fordyce's use of the term 'sermons' in his title employs another variety of authority that all these author's revert to at some point: female duty based on Christian dogma. 51 This version of patriarchal relationship can be very similar to the filial one, and is also used by these authors to silence dissent by their readers. Despite original publication dates spanning more than a century, the contents of these works are remarkably similar: women should expect emotional pain and unhappiness from marriage, but marriage is nonetheless an absolute duty. This open pessimism regarding women's roles is in marked contrast to the many novels of the period in which a marriage is synonymous with a happy ending. Conservative conduct literature tries to preserve patriarchal social structures by making women moral objects rather than moral agents. Courtship novels, on the other hand, are frequently concerned with female agency. They often depict departures from patriarchal control by placing value on female happiness, independence, and power. The two paradigms of marriage can be illustrated in terms of genre differences--particularly by briefly considering the role and reception of fiction in the eighteenth century. Two recent scholars have turned to Johnson's Rambler 4 (March 31, 1750), "On Fiction," to characterize the uneasy place of the novel in eighteenth- century society. In his aptly titled essay, "The Fear of Fiction," Robert Uphaus reminds us that it is anachronistic of modern scholars to separate moral or didactic fiction from mimetic fiction, as both the ethical content and the 52 imitative form were treated as critical imperatives in eighteenth-century criticism (184). According to Uphaus, in Rambler 4 "Johnson coherently summarizes the principal grounds for the eighteenth-century fear of fiction, a fear which grew out of the view that the novel, in its preoccupation with imitating ordinary experience, would break away from the classical assumption that 'the chief means of moral education is the telling of stories' " (186). In other words, Johnson's concern is not that fiction is mimetic or didactic-~it is expected to be both--but that fiction might relinquish the positive didactic function by being indiscriminately mimetic. As Uphaus reads Johnson's defense of the novel, "the idea of virtue provides the moral center of mimetic fiction" (189). This assertion by Johnson is meant to counter attacks suggesting that morality and mimesis could not coexist. Further, Uphaus points-out, there was concern that not only might the novel dangerously influence ethical behavior, it might even displace "such traditional avenues of moral education as conduct books, moral tracts, the sermon, and perhaps scripture itself" (183). In a consonant reading of Johnson, Joel Weinsheimer, in his essay "Fiction and the Force of Example," states that eighteenth-century critics recognized the novel as both potentially dangerous and powerful: -"For good or ill, novels have consequences and produce effects; they are not only imitative but potentially formative of the reader's 53 experience, and that 'efficacy' explains why they must be taken seriously" (1). Weinsheimer reads Johnson as suggesting that when art is most effective, there is a doubling of mimesis: "art is imitation that generates imitations, for imitation is not only the essence of art but its end" (12). Weinsheimer points out that fiction not only generates imitation, but stimulates imagination as well. Using Arabella from the Female Quixote and Don Quixote as models familiar to the eighteenth-century reading public of readers affected by their reading, Weinsheimer describes the cognitive process of reading which would have been feared by eighteenth-century opponents of the novel: "reading not only recapitulates our experiences but formulates our hope and gives us something to desire" (6). The example of Arabella shows how perceptions are governed by desires which in turn are governed by reading (Weinsheimer 5). This: formula of influence appears in conduct literature in both guises: asva condemnation of novels and the young women who read them, and as a prohibition against imagination. Thus these two genres were competing not just in the marketplace (for readers), but in social space (for influence in social configuration). Both genres were perceived as mimetic ssg didactic; both had social efficacy. Both genres treated similar subject matter: the marriage of young women and the definition of their roles as wives. Given these significant similarities, the divergence of the 54 two genres in their depiction of marriage and wifehood becomes extremely important for understanding both genres, their functions in eighteenth-century society, and the struggle for dominance of different gender roles (particularly within marriage) which they depict. The very act of writing conduct literature, a genre which is overtly prescriptive of social behavior, implies belief in that genre's social efficacy. Therefore, conservative conduct authors are put on the defensive regarding fiction and the variety of alternative social models it represented. These conduct authors respond remarkably uniformly with what Uphaus terms "fear of fiction." Because these authors do not approve of the paradigms for social relationships and gender behavior represented in fiction, they respond by demonizing it. A frequent goal is to ban fiction altogether, while preserving conduct literature as the ascendant genre for prescribing female behavior. A survey of the conduct literature in this study shows that the authors? fear of fiction is tied explicitly to its .nnaginative qualities. Fiction can stimulate the-reader's imagination by portraying a wide variety of social roles and relationships-~wider than a reader might otherwise encounter. This stimulus to the imagination can thus easily result in a stimulus to a desire for recreating in the reader's own life the types of roles and relationships found in her reading--the efficacy of fiction Weinsheimer 55 describes. Because it is a highly particularized genre, fiction showcases the personality, needs, and desires of the individual. These are things which conduct authors cannot abide. In fact, this is the underlying point where the two genres diverge fundamentally, as conduct literature subsumes the individual to social duty and actively tries to control imagination. Imagination is dangerous because, not bounded by reality, it is less bounded by society, duty or even likelihood. Imagination gives one the power to imagine, and thus desire, an alternative self and an alternative world. The conduct authors' fear is the ability of female imagination to stimulate dissatisfaction with the status quo, to challenge male authority, to increase the importance of the female individual, to author and authorize both the desire and even demand for female happiness. In this way, "fear of fiction" can be read as the fear of reconfiguration of gender roles. In conduct literature women's imagination is attacked on two fronts, both of which are connected to the alleged idleness of middle and upper class women. One attack discredits the free play of imagination generally--something akin to idle daydreaming; the other prohibits almost all novel reading (Clarissa is a frequent exception) as a dangerous stimulus to the imagination. The expanding leisure of the female gentry, as well as the growth of circulating libraries, provided the opportunity for reading, fantasizing, and daydreaming. These are corrupt activities 56 "frequently occasioned by vacancy of thought, and want of occupation which expose the mind to every snare" (Fordyce 1.105). These conduct.authors sanction only "productive" imagination--that which is the result of some approved female accomplishment such as needlework, drawing, or painting. This selectivity is evidence for Weinsheimer's assertion that it is not the arousal of imagination that is feared, but the nature of that imagination (7). As with many other prescriptions found in conduct literature, control is at the root of the issue. In this case the attempt is to control women's minds and thus their desires, and not simply their outward behavior, or, more precisely, to control behavior by controlling imagination. Acknowledging the prevalence of boredom for female gentry, Bennett suggests, "The very first thing I should recommend after religious duties as absolutely essential to your private comfort, is self-government in the fullest sense of the word," the most important aspect of which is "discipline of the imagination" (1.158, 159). Essex agrees, devoting an entire chapter to industry and the abhorrence.of idleness, since superfluous labor is better than inactivity for preventing women's thoughts and imagination from wandering. It is Fordyce as sermonizer who wishes to put the fear of God into his readers, promulgating a "sobriety of mind" (1.62-3) to which imagination is antithetical: Is it enough for a young woman to be free from infamy, from crimes? Between the state of virgin purity and actual prostitution are there no intermediate degrees? Is it nothing to have the 57 soul deflowered, the fancy polluted, the passions flung into a ferment? Say, is it nothing to forfeit inward freedom and self-possession? (1.48) By painting the two extremes, Fordyce manages to denounce everything short of total control as sinful. The terms he uses regarding the imagination--deflowered, polluted, V ferment—-are tied to the physicality of desire rather than the abstractions of mind or cognition; they are meant to show decay and generate an abhorrence of imagination and anything which stimulates it. The warnings against imaginative literature are no less severe than those against imagination generally. Writing before the novel was well established, Allestree believes the danger of reading romances is that readers will believe the fictional world is real and attainable. He refers to the novel as "a courtesan dressed like a queen" (1.215), suggesting that readers of novels are consorting with whores--if not actually prostituting themselves outright. Bennett is afraid that both novels and poetry-can inspire unrealistic desire; even poetry "heightens [a woman's] natural sensibility to an extravagant degree and frequently inspires such a romantick turn of mind, as is utterly inconsistent with all the solid duties and proprieties of life" (1.208). Bennett's allusion to "natural sensibility" is to the belief that women were more susceptible to the stimulus of imagination and desire, a belief that was used as reason to keep novels out of the hands of women. Essex suggests that unrealistic expectations due to reading are 58 responsible for "one half of the Ails of women" (xxvi). Left unspoken is that whatever ails women will in turn ail men. By banning novel reading these authors attempt to shut off a source for models of alternative constructions of femininity and simultaneously demand that women accept social relationships. Marriage is the premier gendered social relationship with which conduct authors are concerned. Defining the nature of the spousal relationship and the roles and responsibilities of husbands and wives is a method of ordering a very large segment of society. Fordyce succinctly asserts the importance of marriage in his Sermons: "The state of matrimony is necessary to the support, order, and comfort of society." In Fordyce and all the conduct authors treated here, the appeal for the maintenance of marriage is closely associated with religious and moral duty and cloaked in the language of necessity. Susan Staves, in her extensive work on the econdmics and law of marriage, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833, provides us with a persuasive reason for abstracting the idea of social order from religious duty. Arguing that all laws are ideological, Staves shows that eighteenth-century marriage laws are part of the patriarchal system set up explicitly for maintaining the economic status quo--and that both marriage and women are central features of this ideological apparatus: A principal feature of these deeper patriarchal structures was that women functioned to transmit 59 wealth from one generation of men to the next generation of men. Patriarchy...is a form of social organization in which fathers appear as political and legal actors, acting publicly for themselves and as representatives of the women and children subordinated to them and dependent upon them in families. In the property regimes of patriarchy, descent and inheritance are reckoned in the male line; women function as procreators and as transmitters of inheritance from male to male. (Staves 4) Staves asserts that during the course of the long eighteenth century there was an "increasing subordination of marriage to the accumulation of wealth" (Staves citing Habakkuk, 96). What this suggests is that what modern readers consider the "traditional" reasons for marriage--morality, children (as objects of love, rather than as heirs), religion, and love-- were not the prime motives for marriage during this period. Still, even in this period these were often the ostensible reasons for marriage, with conduct literature most concerned with the first three and fiction with the last. This economic emphasis may seem extreme until one considers the social functions of marriage as described by Gayle Rubin in her essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." Approaching marriage, gender, and social roles from an anthropological perspective, Rubin cites a multitude of cultural uses for marriage, including acquisition and consolidation of wealth. For my purposes, the most important aspect of Rubin's argument is recognition of the underlying and unarticulated functions of marriage and the domestication of women. Using, with some reservation, Levi-Strauss's term "exchange 60 of women," Rubin defines the social order that marriage helps define and perpetuate: -the social relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin. In this sense, the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves. The exchange of women becomes an obfuscation if it is seen as a cultural necessity. . . . (177, my emphasis) Conduct literature does indeed portray marriage as a cultural necessity. Patriarchal control of both the marriage contract and spousal relationship is necessary for maintaining social order--but, significantly, it is legitimized as necessary for Christian morality rather than economic gain. Perhaps even more interestingly, conduct literature often portrays certain female conduct within marriage as a cultural necessity. Male conduct authors' desire for control in the extreme may be explained by Rubin's formulation that, "Kinship is organization, and organization gives power. If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it" (174). In Rubin's model men are the exchange partners, even though the marriage is between man and woman. Even if one accounts for the decline of arranged marriages during the long eighteenth century, there is still a profoundly unequal relationship between the prospective bride and groom. As has been often noted, initiating marriage negotiations (the male prerogative) is 61 not at all the same thing as the opportunity of refusal (the female prerogative): This remains true even when the girl's feelings are taken into consideration, as, moreover, is usually the case. In acquiescing to the proposed union, she precipitates or allows the exchange to take place, she cannot alter its nature. . . . (Rubin citing Levi-Strauss, 174-5) Here, the hidden (or not so hidden, as when Staves considers the legal perspective) reasons for promulgating marriage are economic, not moral or religious. The conflation of economic order and religious duty conveniently adds force to conservative paradigms of marriage. That conduct-book authors of the period recognized propriety as a commodity is implied by their assumption that a woman might be given a pattern by which to "make" herself. But . . . making the self by prescription became inseparable from the appropriation and use of that self by the prescribers. (Kirkpatrick 201) Conduct authors have found a way to promote gaining, preserving, and maintaining capital without using that language at all. Further, in adopting the cry of Christian duty they have made it extremely difficult to resist. Eighteenth-century acknowledgment of the economic function of marriage can be found in a "digest" on the legal status of women published anonymously in 1777 under the title The Laws Respecting Women. Here, individual concerns and the interests of society are at least coequal: "Marriage is an institution calculated to promote the private happiness of individuals, and the most essential interests of society" (23). But when these essential interests are enumerated the economic motives become 62 explicit:- "marriage seems to have been at first instituted as necessary to the very being of human society: for without the distinction of families there can be no encouragement to industry, nor any foundation for the care of acquiring riches" (23). I Considering the economic motives for marriage points to another interesting, and telling, gap between representations of marriage in conduct literature and fiction. Novels discuss the economics of marriage much more freely than conduct literature. Intuitively, one might expect the case to be reversed, with novels about romance oblivious to the financial facts of life, and hard-nosed conduct literature demanding brutal practicality. But the opposite is the case. It is in novels that onereads about heroines and suitors having so many pounds per year, entailments, or inheritances. It is in novels that the heroine's 'friends' are openly interested in the prospective couple's economic security, whether represented by the man's status as eldest or younger brother, profession, or standard of living. Conduct literature eschews these considerations. Could it be that the underlying issue is that of choice? Courtship novels make explicit what the choices are and how options are considered; that is, as will be seen in subsequent chapters, they teach women how to make these choices responsibly. 63 The variety of fiction most frequently concerned with marriage is the courtship novel. This subgenre of the novel has been called variously the conduct novel, didactic novel, courtesy novel, and novel of manners. I will use Katherine Sobba Green's term "courtship novel" because it emphasizes the teleological goal of most of these narratives, making a nice parallel to that conduct literature for women which emphasizes becoming a desirable object for marriage and being a dutiful wife. In her study of courtship novels spanning the years 1740 to 1820, Green defines the subgenre as one which typically began with the heroine's coming out and ended with her wedding. It detailed a young woman's entrance into society, the problems arising from that situation, her courtship, and finally her choice (almost always fortunate) among suitors. Thematically, it probed, from a woman's point of view, the emotional difficulties of moving toward affective individuation and companionate marriage despite the regressive effects of female role definition. (2) Green argues that these novels collectively mark an ideological shift, both in cultural practice and in representation in novels, from arranged to "companionate marriages," although the focus on the "disposal of the female body" persisted as these novels' primary concern (3). This shift is signalled by the increased participation by the daughter in what often had been a patriarchal decision: whom she would marry. Green is correct to problematize the possibility of female individuation given women's repressive social roles. But she (like many other scholars) commits a logical error 64 in equating negotiation of the marriage contract with the marriage itself. The term 'companionate marriage' is used by Lawrence Stone in his still highly influential work, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977, 1979). Although never adequately defined, the term appears to I signify the move among families of the gentry and aristocracy from patriarchally arranged marriages based largely on economic gain to marriages based more on mutual attraction of the young couple (though, as stone points out, familial pressure on the young people continued and self- selection in terms of class remained common). The term is a useful one thus delineated. Problems arise in Stone and elsewhere, however, with the subsequent simplistic equation of spousal friendship with love or, more precisely, marriage based on mutual attraction with spousal equality. Other scholars-of the family--for example, Trumbach, who uses the term "egalitarian family" to much the same effect as Stone's companionate marriage, or MacFarlane, Gillis, and Roussell who take up Stone's term uncritically-- apparently do not recognize the paradox of asserting admittedly varying degrees of equality while also recognizing hierarchical spousal relationships as the norm. Kathryn Shevelow, on the other hand, explicitly examines the inherent inequality of maintaining separate spheres for men and women (12-14). I do not wish to argue that the nature of the spousal relationship was static during this period. But I do 65 believe these scholars, aside from Shevelow, conflate the category of courtship with that of marriage, thus assuming sentimentally and anachronistically that the changes leading 39 marriage automatically signal a concomitant improvement in the spousal relationship EEEEE marriage. Staves . attributes this mistake to some historians' acceptance of an illusion that there can be a clear separation between, on the one hand, a public and economic .sphere, and, on the other, a private domestic sphere of true feeling and personal authenticity. In this aspect of their work, they have accepted the very ideological formulation created by eighteenth-century advocates of domesticity. (223) Reading conduct literature for women, even that published in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in no way suggests spouses were close to being equal, despite their ‘separate spheres. Further, in an important critique of scholarship on the family, Susan Moller Okin argues that alterations in the institution of marriage, such as the decline of arranged marriages so important for arguing the improved status of women, was actually detrimental to women. What Okin calls the "sentimental family," rather than simply increasing the status of woman's role in the home served also to confine her to the home, providing "a new rationale for the subordination of women" (65). Rather than balancing the spousal relationship, the new domestic ideology served "as a reinforcement for the patriarchal relations between men and women" (74).. Okin's argument that the "sentimental family" was at bottom a new justification for subjugating 66 women severely undermines scholars who see the advancement of women in the decline of the economic function of marriage. Green lists forty-seven novels devoted to chronicling female courtship from 1740 to 1824 (163-4). By no means did all of these novels have the traditional "happy ending" of the heroine's making a fortunate marriage to the man of her choice with familial or social approval. Nevertheless, the number which do (works by Austen, Burney, and Lennox are among the most familiar) are sufficient to make clear that marriage was usually expected and desired by the heroines and, by extension, the readers who made these novels popular. However much the patriarchal decision-making process might be challenged in these texts, the institution of marriage itself rarely was. Heroines might have reservations about marrying particular suitors (even preferring single life over marriage to the "wrong" man), but these reservations do not extend to questioning the "right" suitor, married life, or motherhood. In fact, many of these novels portray remarkably little marriage in any depth. The significant number of heroines who are orphans, are removed from their parents, or who have at least one dead or absent parent (which conveniently gives virtuous heroines unprecedented autonomy) makes impossible the depiction of the heroine's nearest spousal relationship- --that of her parents. Representations of marriage, therefore, are often pushed to the secondary characters, 67 which, with some exceptions of course (the Harrels and Delviles in Cecilia, or the Crofts in Persuasion), are not treated extensively. Thus while marriage is the primary goal for the heroines of courtship novels, the spousal relationship is under-represented and the institution under- examined. Reading conduct literature against courtship novels, however, can reconstruct a dialogue available to readers of the time but which has been lost to scholars just as conduct literature has largely been lost to today's readers. When we recover the misogynistic model of marriage in conduct literature the iconoclasm of the novels with which they were competing for social influence becomes clearer. Modern readers are accustomed to recognizing in novels the significant social change represented by depicting marriage based on personal preference rather than patriarchal choice. Reading conduct literature teaches us to go further, to recognize that depictions of mutual love and respect--the ideal presented in courtship novels--are in themselves iconoclastic. Conduct literature can be read as participating in a dialogue concerning the ideology of social reproduction and social change through standardizing marriage practices and gender roles. Kathryn Shevelow's analysis of the ideological function of women's periodicals in the eighteenth century can be extended easily to conduct 68 literature. In fact, women's periodicals are often considered one form of conduct literature, and frequently share with conduct literature direct address to a female audience and a prescriptive, even judgmental, stance regarding female behavior. Shevelow suggests periodicals were concerned with addressing and figuring their women readers, and in so doing constructed a normative definition of femininity. So that reading the periodical not only brought readers into engagement with 'images of women' but also implicated them in a process of reading which itself was gendered and ideological, exerting normative force. (15-16) Like periodicals, conduct literature routinely puts forth "images of women"--usually ideal--which were explicitly designed as models for imitation. These models of perfection were nonetheless promoted as achievable goals for female behavior. They defined the behavior that is both desired and desirable. The conduct literature examined in this chapter delineates a conservative paradigm of marriage against which courtship novels should be understood. Many conduct manuals begin with the demonization of spinsterhood. It has become a commonplace that because of extremely narrow employment opportunities for female gentry, .spinsters were a drain on the families upon which they were dependent. -Further, spinsters did not contribute to society by being productive (running a household) or reproductive (having children and thus perpetuating both the family and social class). Therefore, it benefitted society generally to put heavy pressure on individuals to marry and to make 69 failure to do so repugnant. But Staves points out that heavy emphasis on the economic effects of spinsters on society may be a misunderstanding of how eighteenth-century society perceived the problem (203). Studies show the celibacy rate (defined as never married by age fifty) for daughters of peers during the eighteenth century range from twenty to twenty-seven percent (Staves 217). Historians have suggested that this high rate is due to women possessing independent wealth and making a choice not to marry. Staves takes the opposite tack, suggesting that many women, as was often the case for younger sons, simply could not afford to get married. Economics notwithstanding, reading much conduct literature suggests an additional reason for this heavy pressure: there was general acknowledgment that with wifehood came every possibility of unhappiness; therefore if left to their own devices women might choose to remain single. With the burdens that marriage put on women common knowledge, matrimony had to be presented to women as an absolute religious and social duty. Halifax's statement to his daughter that "the Institution of Marriage is too sacred to admit of a Liberty of Objection to it" (31) is meant to forestall any objection that individual claims (even those of his own daughter) are stronger than society's. Alluding to the fact that marriage laws are easier on husbands than wives, he concedes that the Supposition of your being the weaker Sex, having without all doubt a good Foundation, maketh 70 it reasonable to subject it to the Masculine Dominion; that no Rule can be so perfect, as not to admit no Exceptions; but the law presumeth there would be so few found in this case, who would have a sufficient Right to such a Privilege, that it is safer some Injustice should be conniv'd at in a very few Instances, than to break into an Establishment, upon which the Order of Human . Society doth so much depend. (31-2) ‘fizaglifax's subordination of the female individual to Jgeeligious and social duty is not surprising in 1688. However, we find this definition of a wife as a legal entity ( or nonentity) almost a century later: "By marriage the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended; or at least it is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband" (1:915. 65). Thus the ideology of law and the ideology of religion are synchronized, and the force of the message doubled. Bennett suggests spinsterhood is "dangerous" and "lonely" and spinsters are "the object of ridicule" and "Often reproached"; after all, "What are the highest blessings, unsweetened by society?" (2.162) . One can have everything one psegs, but without husband and children there is ‘no happiness. His recital of the social criticism single Women can expect is designed to assure that women will Sasifiiégss marriage-—even though, as he later paradoxically acknowledges, they cannot expect to find much happiness in it - Fordyce resorts to threats by suggesting that women who are independent forfeit their rights of protection by sOCiety: "an intrepid female seems to renounce our aid, and in some respects to invade our province. We turn away and 71 leave her to herself" (2.113). Thus, in addition to the economic pressures placed on women, these social pressures (ultimately rooted in economics) are designed to make women feel they really have no choice about whether or not to marry. - Another common tactic employed to make marriage desirable is to portray married women as more socially attractive than single women. Married women supposedly have more substantial interests (the welfare of husband and children) than single women. They have loved more, and they have lost unnecessary reserve because the society of men This argument increases their intellect (Bennett 2.164-5). appears disingenuous when considered in light of the large number of novelists of the period who demonstrate a marked preference for representing the single over the married State for their heroines. - Such a contradiction probably would not be lost on readers of the period. The issue of whether young women should have the lihearty to choose their .own husbands is one of the few areas which evolves over time in this sampling of conduct literature. The two seventeenth-century works acknowledge I the "unfortunate reality" that "young women are seldom pel'e‘rxiitted to make their .own choice" of a husband (Halifax 25) . However, all of the eighteenth-century authors admit, at the very least, that parents should not "force" daughters t0 marry against their wills (Gisborne 241). Nevertheless, 72 most of these authors maintain the right--and rightness--of parental influence . One of the reasons that these authors defend the parental right of "influence" is the fear that women's standards for husbands will be too high. The authors demand chastity and monogamy in women, but they are not shy in telling. women they cannot expect the same from their suitors or husbands. Further, they do not want women agitating for modification of male behavior. While acknowledging that marrying for money is a form of "legal prostitution," Bennett informs women they need not be "too fastidious" in their choice of husband (2.164), as a woman's home will provide her with more happiness than her husband will. Women must be content with economic support, because given the current state of immorality in men, if. a woman wants to marry she will have to compromise: "She must be content w i th a fortune merely, without expecting many good or great qualities annexed" (Bennett 2.180). Fordyce and Gisborne, as usual, go furthest in curtailing women's self- determination. Gisborne suggests parental desires are more important than those of the daughter (24) and Fordyce argues for choice only on the part of men (2.56). There is a consensus among these authors in at least a l lowing daughters the right of refusal, but while the authors ssy they advocate female choice this is really as far as their benevolence goes. In suggesting that women make foolish choices based on superficial considerations, 73 21nd that parental considerations are more important than those of the individuals immediately involved they limit women's abilities .and authority. Conduct authors' acknowledgment of choice may be a surrender to the changing SOClal practices of the period, but they are unWilling simply to relinquish all control. Once the subject in conduct literature moves from courtship to wifehood there is little attempt by these authors to paint marriage as attractive for women. This openness suggests that knowledge of the burdens of married 1 i fe was common enough that there was no point in trying to hide or deny it. emotional pleasure or fulfillment derived from one s leisure or relationships-~is not to be r e sponsibilities , Nonetheless, they do A modern conception of happiness-- thought of according to these authors. Their references to happiness conSist treat the subject. e lther in a denial of its desirability or an affirmation that its source is in sacrificing individual desires to t hose of society. Bennett is typical when in his introduction he suggests that women's life rewards are in heaven, not on earth N 0then must be moderate and realistic in their expectations for finding happiness in marriage, as female married life is a:I—I'l'lost universally lonely, in large part because of absent Additionally, the double standard of lbi‘tlsbands (1. xiv, 1. 7). "Q rel behavior for women and men is portrayed as an o 74 (>pportunity for developing Christian virtues such as Ipatience, tolerance, and forgiveness: Ladies are often put upon these toils in the usual course of life; I mean that marriage, wherein your Virtue obliges you to give the greatest Proofs of Fortitude and Constancy. What can be a greater trial of a woman of virtue and sense, than to be forced to the bed of a man who is either a fool, or a Sot, or perhaps both; and one whom, if it was not for the Ties and Duty of a Wife, she would morally hate. . . . This takes extreme fortitude to deal well with. (Essex 67) lSI<:>1t only must wives guard their own virtue and reputation, 1::Jhleey must overlook in their husbands the very behavior for ‘V~rl1i;ich they themselves would be vilified. The authors who take an ostensibly sympathetic stance toward the plight of women employ a rhetorical move that recurs frequently in conservative conduct literature. Shevelow observes correctly that Halifax "adopted a tone of l;>iEirt:ernal concern to express a cynical acceptance of women's S ubordination to men and the sexual double standard" (17) . Ru th Perry calls The Ladies New Year's Gift the "seventeenth ‘:=‘E!I)tury locus classicus of patriarchy," which lays out "the III<:>£3t controlling set of injunctions that a protective or 3 ealous father could think up" (160). Halifax and others isl<==lcnowledge that marriage places a great burden of tolerance on women. These authors do not conceive of marriage as l§>i§lztrtnership, as modern scholars often imply. Rather, as 13:451‘t1hryn Kirkpatrick suggests, "the new domestic woman was to l:"59 constructed precisely for her usefulness to the propertied male" (205). She argues conduct books did not Sil'tlply provide religious or moral precepts (as they 75 (explicitly claim), but simultaneously combat the very desire caf women to 93 subjects (210). An example of this zrhetorical strategy is Halifax's argument against the possibility of divorce, even in the face of adultery: You are therefore to make the best of what is settled by Law and Custom, and not vainly imagine, - that it will be changed for your sake. But that you may not be discouraged, as if you lay under the weight of an incurable Grievance, you are to know that by a wise and dexterous Conduct, it will be in your power to relieve your self from anything that looketh like a disadvantage in it. (32) JEIaanilifax's use of the term "looketh" undermines the possibility that any real grievance exists at all and that ‘t:.111:1§ it. By citing law and custom Halifax refers to almost Jiiljaxnutable authority, taking refuge in a position which needs .111<:> further defense or explication because those institutions EEIJJETGe accepted as more significant than individual desire. IE’Iularther, suggesting that a husband's infidelity or drinking fallrtea curable by the wife through "wise and dexterous conduct" ( ]E>Jretending that the infidelity does not exist, and ignoring it if unmistakably confronted by it) Halifax lays JET‘Eéssponsibility'for a husband's behavior on the wife, thereby It‘isllvert in using male authority for reading and interpreting Scripture for women. 'They structure their claim to authority so as to make it unassailable on two counts: first, women are not sufficiently educated to interpret the Bible for themselves: and second, women cannot be modest ( read virtuous) if they challenge (male) Biblical interpretation. Though frequently unsuccessful, the desired e f'iect of these arguments is to silence women regarding social practices rooted in scripture. Female obedience to ma Je' interpretations (and applications) of scripture is thus transformed into an undeniable Christian duty. After establishing first that it is a woman's duty to marry, and second that she must be an obedient and S ubordinate party within the marriage, these authors are then free toenter into a candid description of what women Can expect in marriage. There is among these authors a general agreement as seen by the epigrams to this chapter, that woman's sorrowsdo indeed begin with marriageability. Male infidelity is the most commonly cited source of unhappiness for wives, but the litany of sins that husbands Q ften engage in includes alcohol abuse, jealousy, avarice, vanity, ill-temper, narrow—mindedness, incompetence and lT‘Qldtal weakness, gambling, and general neglect of their ines. These are in addition to a common acknowledgment that, despite depictions to the contrary in courtship l'IOXIels, wives in no way can expect love, respect, or esteem. 78 53¢) far from that being the case, wives may not even expect natich daily contact with their husbands because of gentry 55<>cial practices which frequently separated spouses, both within the same house (separate bedrooms, for example) and by frequent separations between town and country. ' Although each author who discusses the expectation of male infidelity pays lip service to condemning it, its ubiquity is nonetheless taken for granted by them. The subject is treated as a fact of nature. Fordyce sums up the social expectations placed on wives whose husbands are unzfaithfulin a statement worth quoting at length: I am astonished at the folly of many women, who are still reproaching their husbands for leaving them alone, for preferring this or that company to theirs, for treating them with this and the other .make of disregard or indifference; when, to speak the truth, they have themselves in a great measure to blame. Not that I would justify the men in any thing wrong on their part. But had you behaved to them with a more respectful observance, and a more equal tenderness; studying their humours, overlooking their mistakes, submitting to their opinions in matters indifferent, passing by little instances of unevenness,-caprice, or passion, giving soft answers to hasty words, complaining as seldom as possible, and making it your daily care to relieve their anxieties, and prevent (sic) their wishes, to enliven the hour of dulness, and call up the ideas of felicity: had you pursued ‘this conduct, I doubt not but you would have maintained and even increased their esteem, so far so to have secured every degree of influence that could conduce to their virtue, or your mutual .satisfaction; and your house might at this day have been the abode of domestic bliss. There may, it is true, be some husbands whom no goodness can impress. We owned it before; but still we have ground to believe, that of men who would have turned out better, had they met with discreet and obliging women, multitudes have been lost by the inattention and neglect, as well as not a few by the impertinence and perverseness of their wives. (Fordyce 2.133) 79 As with the Halifax example cited above, this passage points tic: the social and religious double standard: thou shalt not commit adultery, but if the adulterer is male it will be ignored. Fordyce candidly denies women not only the comfort of society's disapprobation about their husbands' behavior, but suggests the husbands' behavior is the fault of the wives. No matter what wives do, if they had done more their husbands would not commit adultery. There is never a point, according to Fordyce's formulation, when a woman can find comfort in the belief that she has done her best to reasonably fulfill her duty. Recovering the context of conduct literature's model of wi :Ee as submissive object clarifies the alternative paradigm O f marriage depicted in courtship novels in which women act as independent agents with at least the potential for a S atisfying marriage. Recognizing the misogynistic nature of ma :rriage as defined by conduct literature prompts us to move beyond mere discussions of the decline in arranged marriages that occurred historically and was portrayed in literature. Rather, by understanding that we must not define the spousal relationship by the methods of courtship, we must see that nOvels which truly depict mutual love, respect, and esteem O f the engaged couple present an alternative, and revolutionary, paradigm of marriage. So far from the heroine merely "dwindling into a wife," novels that end with promising engagements clearly imply 80 1:11at these characters will have a different kind of marriage t;11an that which conduct authors extol. The imagined marriage of these heroines, based on mutual love and esteem, is in direct conflict with the paradigm of marriage Once we recognize the represented in conduct literature. differences in the portrayals of marriage in the two genres it becomes easier to identify how these novels were being We subversive while stillbeing "modest" and. acceptable. understand why certain segments of society feared the novel. the fear of fiction is the fear For these conduct authors, 0 :6 change embedded in courtship novels. 81 Chapter 3 FROM FICTION TO FACT: AUTHORING A SELF IN THE FEMALE QUIXOTE Prove, therefore, that the Books which I have hitherto read as copies of Life, and Models of Conduct, are empty Fictions, and from this Hour I deliver them to moths and mold. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote This quotation articulates two of the myriad of caa;i_ghteenth-century attitudes toward fiction: first, aan;]Lthough fiction presents itself as truth, it is actually fl.:i.es; and second, fiction, because of its truthful appearance, is a model of conduct for its readers. Much <:>];>position to the novel, including that found in <:=<:>nservative conduct literature, is founded on the premise O f protecting young and innocent female readers. Conduct authors' prohibition against fiction binds together an attempt to control female desire (by stigmatizing female Ji—Itlagination) with one of the perceived sources of that desire--reading. One conduct author warns that ‘ A Volume would not be sufficient to expose the dangers of these books. They lead young people into an enchanted country, and open their view to an imaginary world, full of inviolable friendships, attachments, exstacies, accomplishments, prodigies, and such visionary joys as never will be realized in the coarseness of common life. (Bennett 2.64) 82 Bennett's fear is that fiction will model female desire. In the guise of protecting women from unrealizable desires he attempts to control the nature of women's relationships, interests, activities, and happiness. As I have shown in the previous chapter, this pretense of protecting women by circumscribing their desires is played out repeatedly in c onservative conduct literature . The embattled novel suffered similar attacks from other quarters, although with different motives than those of the conservative male authors previously examined. Two female conduct authors who prohibit reading novels, Sarah Pennington in An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to her Absent Daughters (1761) and Anne-Therese Marchioness de Lambert in Advice of a Mother to her Daughter (1727), do so with the a im of protecting young women from developing a desire for 1 eye in marriage. But while the male authors who make the S ame prohibition tell women not to desire marital love because its unattainability will doom them to unhappiness, f emale authors tell women not to desire marital love because love itself dooms womento unhappiness. This advice, while S till marked by significant self-denial, is notable for the autonomy which it advocates for women. The advice of both these authors appears to be based on their own dismal marriages. Pennington, estranged from her husband and in a legal battle with him over finances and ci-JStody or access to her children, used her text as the only way available to communicate with her daughters (Jones 83 viii). At first glance Pennington's advice may sound conformist to the status quo, but as Vivien Jones points CDIJt, "Pennington's strategic manipulation of the power of ‘Epjrint manifests a less self-effacing version of 'prudence'" than she advocates on the surface (xxi). Although a member of the French aristocracy, Lambert gives advice similar to Pennington's (the two works were published together in one «eeciition late in the eighteenth century). Lambert, too, was in a legal battle with her late husband's family (including her own son) for financial support (Jones xi). Lambert holds what could be Characterized as an enlightenment view of human relations. She argues rationality will be a more reliable source of happiness than the "passion" of love (167-71), and that love i s the most cruel situation a rational person can be in" ( 1 68). Central to Lambert‘s Advice is the belief that women mu st be independent both emotionally and economically. Jones argues correctly that, for Lambert, independence " describes a state of mind. It suggests intellectual and Spiritual freedom, rather than the financial security so 0 ften referred to when the term was used of a woman in this This stance is remarkable considering period" (Jones xi). S he was engaged in just such financial issues when she wrote self-denial is a method for the Advice. For Lambert, developing independence, to maintain selfhood. The autobiographical background to both these works i 1 lustrates Pennington's and Lambert's belief that love in 84 marriage, while possible, is neither probable nor even cieesirable. Thus each author's prohibition of works which 1:<3manticize marriage becomes easy to understand. According t;<: Pennington, the "pernicious consequences" of novels is that female readers are drawn on, through a tiresome length of foolish adventures, from which neither knowledge, pleasure, or profit, seldom can accrue, to the common catastrophe of a wedding. . . . [Novels] are apt to give a romantic turn to the mind, which is often productive of great errors in judgment, and of fatal mistakes in conduct. (Pennington 87-8, emphasis added) - Lambert's advice is much the same: she shuns romances because "one should not increase the charms and delusions of Ll.<:>ve" (156). The bitterness both authors exhibit toward Ll.<:>ve and marriage is palpable, and the connections between acreeeading, imagination, and desire are clear: Do not converse with your Imagination; it will paint Love to you with all its charms; it is all seduction and illusion, when she makes the representation: there is always a great drawback when you quit her to come to the reality. (Lambert 169) Despite the similar warnings against fiction, imagination, and love, the differences between the arguments ‘:>IIE the male and female conduct authors lie in whom they are 1:‘—::‘ying to serve with their proscriptions. The male conservative writers, as evinced by their explicit denial ( and demand for women's self-denial) of female happiness, maintain the patriarchal socioeconomic system, to which Pennington and Lambert both made legal challenges. The female authors, on the other hand, while advocating self- denial, also advocate a redefinition of female happiness--a 85 version not found in courtship novels. Although Pennington and Lambert demonstrate little hope for change in the nature of wifehood, it is important to note that they are not defeated in their attempts to empower women. Perhaps hopeless of altering male behavior, they instead offer women a way to cope with it. Thus we see the differing underlying aims of surface similarities: empowerment of women through self—denial versus subjugation of women through self-denial. Just as eighteenth-century male views Of the novel are not monolithic, however, neither are female views. So culturally ingrained was the belief in the social influence of the novel that even some book reviews became quasi- <::<:>nduct literature. Defenders of fiction such as Clara Reeve and Anna Barbauld acknowledge as rational the fear that the novel is--or could be--a significant component of f emale desire for marital -love. Reeve, in the Progress of Romance (1785), and Barbauld i n the British Novelists (1810), take a more moderate view 0 f fiction than earlier conduct authors such as Pennington and Lambert. Each presents a compendium of acceptable t i tles for young women‘ to read, but even the works which they approve often have cautionary statements attached. In the vein of Dr. Johnson, these authors warn against the inexperienced reader's ability first to discern fact from f iCtion and second to control desire. In making her selections of approved fiction Reeve favors a "dull morality" to a "brilliant immorality" (2.77) 86 k>ecause the lessons young people extract from books gives them an authority they do not have a right to: they will " believe themselves wiser than their parents and guardians, whom they treat with contempt and ridicule" (2.79). Reeve's acknowledgment of the influence of fiction goes to the heart of the fear of challenges to the patriarchal control of women . Writing considerably later, Barbauld is nonetheless still in the position of having to defend fiction that is entertaining without being didactic. But her stance is equivocal as she does prefer mimetic fiction because of the acknowledged effects texts have on their readers. Among these effects is the acquisition of unrealistic expectations regarding marriage, specifically that young women may choose their own partners and make love matches: "Love is a [A] false 0 O O passion particularly exaggerated in novels. idea is given of the importance of the passion," because in reality love "acts a very subordinate part on the great 1Z-‘—Zl"1eatre of the world" (1.50). Where love is really felt by a young woman "she will see it continually overcome by duty, by prudence. . . . Least of all will a course of novels prepare a young lady for the neglect and tedium of life which she is perhaps doomed to encounter" (1.50—1). Katharine Rogers sees Barbauld as an acute analyst of bOth the positive and negative effects of fiction on women: "The heroine of a novel, however distressed, is the constant cel’11:.er of attention, as few people in real life can be, 87 especially if they are female. Consciously or not, Barbauld comments on a society that reduced women's lives to monotony and unimportance" (35). Barbauld understands that, to paraphrase Rogers, it is not that women read novels because their heads are empty; they read novels because their lives are empty (35). By arraying these various critics of the novel--male and female, conservative and moderate, proponents and opponents of fiction, conduct authors and literary critics-- we see that, despite their different conclusions regarding whether women should read novels, they do share significant cultural assumptions. First, reading helps construct desire and ultimately the self. Second, what is depicted in novels is not, as much scholarship (frequently based on Stone's Family, Sex, and Marriage) has suggested, merely reflective of the evolving status quo regarding courtship and marriage. And third, the intersection of one and two, of individual desire and the representation of an alternative world, can affect real social relationships. The belief that through reading women will desire love and happiness in marriage implies that such desires <3hallenge the status quo and are in fact unrealistic. The tfloiquity of the arguments regarding the nature of marriage, Peirticularly as it pertains to spousal love, also suggests fILux. This is true despite the numerous courtship novels of tfle period which end with a love relationship between the bertrothed, and which are used by scholars today as evidence 88 that marriage based on love was becoming commonplace and uncontested. Jane Spencer is one of the few scholars who sees beyond the happy ending: "Didactic novels and nonfictional conduct books tended to agree on every point but one: romantic love, disparaged by moralists, was I essential to most novelists" (Spencer 186). While I strongly disagree that conduct authors and novelists agree on most aspects of appropriate female behavior, Spencer is correct in her observation of the disparity in eighteenth- century viewpoints regarding marital love. This disparity goes right to the heart of the need to account for conduct literature in our recovery of the contexts of eighteenth- century novels. Any number of courtship novels could be used to explore changing eighteenth-century cultural ideas and practices regarding female desire, love, and marriage. But when reading novels is implicated as one of the sources of desire for change, one novel in particular stands out: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752). This novel can recover and centralize the debate surrounding four deeply intertwined topics-—fema1e reading, imagination, desire, and nuarriage. The novel enables today's readers to appreciate IKJw the representation of these four topics in fiction participated in larger cultural debates. Lennox explicitly engages with the debate regarding the ianluence of fiction on its (female) readers. The Female 89 Quixote's Arabella is a heroine of marriageable age, largely independent of parental guidance, whose education is heavily indebted to reading romances. Due to her reading, Arabella misinterprets people and events and appears slightly ridiculous because of her mistakes. She is subsequently "re-educated" to comprehend the difference between fact and fiction, and is thus able to make a socially approved and economically advantageous marriage for love.1 The parodies of society's fears regarding female reading are unmistakable, as are the ideals of marriage depicted at the conclusion. As there was opposition in popular conduct literature to both female reading and the ideal of marriage for love, this novel can be seen as advocating social change in the lives of women. In this chapter I will demonstrate that Lennox, despite creating a heroine who is humiliated through her reading, defends women's reading and advocates marital love. She does so by constructing plots which appropriate what I refer to as the "archenarratives" of conduct authors and literary critics who seek to maintain control over female behavior and desire by proscribing fiction. Lennox subverts these (archenarratives by implicating additional social practices (Ither than reading in the errors of her heroine, and by 1The novel is indebted to the popular traditions of 292 QLlixote; see Susan Staves, "Donvguixote in Eighteenth- Cezntury England," and Elaine Kauvar "Jane Austen and The Eggmale Quixote." On Lennox's debt to Cervantes and French romances, particularly Madeleine de Scudery, see David MBJrshall. Deborah Ross also points to Female Quixotism (1808) by Tabitha Tenney. 90 rewarding Arabella with the very thing which conduct literature disdains: spousal love. In this way, the Female Quixote has a dual social efficacy. It argues against prohibitions of female fiction reading, and models an alternative construction of marriage, one which improves the lives of women but is nevertheless nonthreatening to the economy of patriarchy. In an attempt to circumscribe female conduct and desire, conduct authors often create archenarratives regarding the consequences of female novel reading. The recurring picture painted by conduct authors of women who read fiction, in broad terms, is that they are in danger of becoming fallen women. As opposed to the female ideal found in conduct literature (women who are modest, virtuous, submissive, and undifferentiated) fiction readers risk becoming worldly, imaginative, desiring, and knowledgeable individuals. The dire result of this transformation, according to conduct literature, is that female novel readers become unmarriageable. In other words, the archenarrative of conduct literature threatens female readers with spinsterhood. However, when the economic subtext of conduct literature arguments is considered, the claim that female readers are undesirable and unmarriageable is readily revealed as an effort to prevent women readers from becoming ungovernable or uncontrollable (that is, (Remanding change in male behavior or the nature of marriage in.order to improve female lives). 91 The Female Quixote contains numerous examples of Arabella's desire for a heroic life worthy of the French romances which serve as her authority on life. One scene in particular, however, explicitly illustrates the degree of her desire, because it depicts not only her transgressions against authority, but what happens when she has two irreconcilable desires. Early in the novel Arabella's father reveals that it has been his hope since her childhood that she should marry her cousin, Charles Glanville.) Her father's declaration of his wishes reverses the subject/object relationship which one would expect to echo the conventional marriage ceremony; rather than giving his daughter (the object) to a husband (the subject), he speaks of "giving" Glanville to Arabella as a husband (27). But even this representation of an arranged marriage is repugnant to Arabella. Her objection is not that she specifically desires to choose her husband for herself or that she is already in love with someone else. She objects on the principle that she must challenge authority, that, on the model of romantic heroines, she must exercise self-determination. The narrator explains Arabella's thinking: The Impropriety of receiving a Lover of a Father's recommendation appeared in its strongest Light. What Lady in Romance ever married the Man that was chose for her? In those Cases the Remonstrances of a Parent are called Persecutions; obstinate Resistance, Constancy and Courage; and an Aptitude to dislike the Person proposed to them, a novel Freedom of Mind which disdains to love or hate by the Caprice of others. (27) 92 Within this passage Lennox sets forth both the stereotype of female reading she will ultimately challenge and the source of the many subsequent adventures Arabella will have. Conduct authors' fears of insubordinate daughters are made manifest: Arabella disregards her father's wishes simply because they belong to her father, not because of any prior attachment or defect in Glanville. Further, the basis of Arabella's objection is solely in romance reading, not experience or other education. Her reading sanctions her "constancy and courage" in her "resistance" to the will of her father under the belief that she is exercising a "noble freedom of mind." Further, she has so little respect for parental authority that she calls (her father's desires "caprice." Of course, what Arabella fails to recognize amidst her self-approbation is that in her knee-jerk rejection of her father's wishes she is no more exhibiting a freedom of mind than if she had simply accepted her father's matchmaking at the outset. Lennox emphasizes the weakness of Arabella's position when she is physically attracted to Glanville at first sight (28), and subsequently finds much to like in him in spite of herself. It is only through her determination to have adventures and Glanville's alternating inability and unwillingness to satisfy her romantic desires that she is ahue to maintain a distance romantically from a suitor whom sflue believes wishes "to take away her Liberty, either by <fl>liging her to marry him, or by making her a prisoner" 93 (35). A female character privileging freedom above marriage would strike a deep chord in eighteenth-century readers--one which would resonate with those who feared fiction as models for female behavior. This scene is paradigmatic of the errors in conduct Arabella makes based on her reading. While her exuberance and innocence, along with the sardonic humor of the narrator, render Arabella's actions generally inoffensive, her behavior is nevertheless "wrong" according to the mores of conduct literature. In addition to challenging parental authority, Arabella's reading has prompted a belief that her desires should be fulfilled, that she need consult no one in pursuing them, and that she alone should judge her own best interests. Through Arabella's voicing of her desires Lennox embraces the predictions of conduct authors and proceeds to take Arabella to the brink of unmarriageability: Arabella's imagination is uncontrolled and thus her behavior is uncontrollable. The inability of other characters to understand Arabella's behavior ultimately begs the question of her sanity. Sir Charles, Arabella's uncle and nominal guardian, indulges Arabella's "follies" for a time because