Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812

237 Pages·1998·12.11 MB·English

by  Eleanor Ty

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