The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747-1800

THE SEDUCTION NARRATIVE IN BRITAIN, 1747–1800

Eighteenth-century literature displays a fascination with the seduction of a virtuous young heroine, most famously illustrated by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and repeated in 1790s radical women’s novels, in the many memoirs by fictional or real penitent prostitutes, and in street print. Across fiction, ballads, essays and miscellanies, stories were told of women’s mistaken belief in their lover’s vows. Katherine Binhammer surveys seduction narratives from the late eighteenth century within the context of the new ideal of marriagefor-love and shows how these tales tell varying stories of women’s emotional and sexual lives. Drawing on new historicism, feminism and narrative theory, Binhammer argues that the seduction narrative allowed writers to explore different fates for the heroine than the domesticity that became the dominant form in later literature. This study will appeal to scholars of eighteenth-century literature, social and cultural history, and women’s and gender studies. k a t he r i n e b i n h a m m e r is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.

THE SEDUCTION NARRATIVE IN BRITAIN, 1747–1800 KATHERINE BINHAMMER

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521111348 © Katherine Binhammer 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Binhammer, Katherine, 1962– The seduction narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 / Katherine Binhammer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-521-11134-8 1. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 2. Seduction in literature. 3. Love in literature. 4. Women in literature. 5. Feminism in literature. 6. Seduction – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 7. Love – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 8. Women – Great Britain – History – 18th century. I. Title. pr448.s34b56 2009 820.9′3543 – dc22 2009011371 isbn 978-0-521-11134-8 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page vi 1

Introduction 1 Knowing love: The epistemology of Clarissa

20

2 The whore’s love or the Magdalen’s seduction

40

3 After knowledge: Married heroines and seduction

72

4 Seduction in street literature

108

5 Melodramatic seduction: 1790s fiction and the excess of the real

138

Notes Bibliography Index

176 219 240

v

Acknowledgments

This book’s path into print, like that of the seduction narratives upon which it focuses, maps a highly variegated terrain of knowledge, both affective and intellectual. My first and formative thanks go to Ann (Rusty) Shteir whose mentoring from our first meeting in her graduate class on eighteenth-century women writers has been superlative; the reproduction of Elizabeth Inchbald’s portrait she brought me from England still hangs by my desk to inspire. Alison Conway’s twenty years of friendship is written into every page of this book. She not only read the entire manuscript but suffered daily emails from me voicing the micro-anxieties of academic life. Dianne Chisholm’s comments on the manuscript were always perceptive, especially in pointing out my argumentative leaps. For sharing work and reading chapters, I thank Ava Arndt, Jennie Batchelor, Megan Hiatt, Kathryn R. King, Mary Peace, Laura Rosenthal, Christine Roulston and Corrinne Harol (who deserves special thanks for being not only a sage reader but also a savvy colleague). Sezeka (aka Kathryn R. King) provided both research and social necessities at the British Library and beyond. Betty Schellenberg has been a supportive and challenging ally in this manuscript’s progression into a book. Giles Bergel answered my annoyingly ignorant inquiries in the British Library about ballads and chapbooks. Marcia Pointon and David Mannings answered queries about the identity of the mysterious painter “Mr P.” Isobel Grundy always had her physical and electronic door open to answer questions and I thank her and fellow Orlandians for their commitment to feminist literary history. The students in my senior undergraduate classes on “Seduction and the Novel” and graduate classes on “Reading Clarissa,” “The Whore’s Story” and “Truth in Fiction” helped me enormously in formulating the contours of this project and many became as obsessed with Clarissa as I was (which is saying a lot). Writing is difficult without a sense of who one is writing for and thus, for providing my imagined reader, I thank the American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies (especially, the Women’s Caucus and the Lesbian and Gay vi

Acknowledgments

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Caucus) and the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I particularly wish to thank: Jody Greene, George Haggerty, Susan Lanser, April London, Sally O’Driscoll, David Robinson, Peter Sabor and Hans Turley (sadly, in memoriam). Tita Chico and Toni Bowers deserve thanks for a stimulating 2008 ASECS panel on seduction. At a time when the research trip is increasingly supplanted by electronic resources, I was fortunate to travel to rare books libraries and indulge the pleasure of reading and feeling books. I thank the staffs at the British Library, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (including librarian extraordinaire, Jennifer Schaffner), the Huntington Library and the Bruce Peel Special Collections at the University of Alberta. I owe the funding that was instrumental in completing this book to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Alberta. I am tremendously grateful for the hours of meticulous and creative research assistance that Susan McNeill-Bindon dedicated to this project. A version of Chapter 1 and a section from Chapter 2 have been previously published in, respectively, ELH: English Literary History 74.4 (Winter 2007) and Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20.4 (Summer 2008). I live amongst a brilliant group of women, my own virtual Millenium Hall, all of whom have brought me enormous pleasure and support over the years and deserve more than kisses: Spencer Coleman, Mo Engel, Sue Fisher, Lauren Gillingham, Becky Helfer, Julie Murray, Teresa Zackodnik, Heather Zwicker and the entire Booby Orr hockey team. For diverting me with the Rocky Mountains down the home stretch, thanks to Cori Brewster, Jacqueline Hutchinson and River Hutchinson-Brewster. Earl Chisholm treated me to many a sustaining Sunday dinner and I am grateful for his support. Beau Coleman has been my partner in all kinds of crime and her intelligence and imagination bring great joy into my everyday life. My parents, Bob and Bev Binhammer, have proven themselves, over and over again, to be the solid foundation from which everything else grows; this book is published in the fiftieth year of their loving marriage and I cannot thank them enough for their example. My sister Kris Savage and my niece and nephew, Emily and Nicholas Savage, have supported and celebrated every step of this long journey. Lastly, words cannot express the gifts Dianne Chisholm has given to me over the course of writing this book, not the least of which is an attentiveness to the occupatio in this sentence and the literariness of the world. I began this book the summer her best friend, Anna Pellat, lay dying and since that time when the earth shifted, Dianne has accompanied me on adventures near and far, to fairy houses and mountain retreats, and into back-countries, both literal and metaphorical.

Introduction

The repetition of a story at a particular moment in time – in the case of this book, the story of seduction in the later half of the eighteenth century in Britain – prompts at least two different interpretations of how history relates to narrative. The same story might be repeatedly told in order to popularize and naturalize a new historical idea, foregrounding a relation of similitude and emphasizing the mimetic or didactic function of narrative. Or the repetition of a story could denote difference where the deviations within similarity point to a dynamic relation between material conditions and imaginative narratives; in this case, the fact of a story’s repetition would indicate both that changing historical conditions open up new objects of understanding and that narrative helps to constitute and to resolve conflicts posed by those new objects. The Seduction Narrative assumes the second formulation to explain how history and narrative interact in the “later eighteenth-century’s preoccupation with seduction,” as one historian names the obsessive retelling of the tale.1 The plot of seduction – where a virtuous young heroine is seduced into believing her lover’s vows – dramatizes women’s consent to sex at a historical moment when, for the first time, women have “a right to a heart,” as Clarissa boldly claims.2 The period in Britain under study (1747–1800) witnesses the emergence of companionate marriage as a dominant cultural ideal and this revolution in the history of love carries with it a new social and cultural imperative for women to know their hearts and make choices based upon those affective truths.3 This book argues that the story of women’s failed knowledge of the heart – that is, the story of seduction – is compulsively repeated across fiction, non-fiction, ballads, essays and miscellanies in the second half of the eighteenth century not to naturalize a domesticated and de-sexed model for knowing one’s heart but to resolve a historical contestation over what it might mean for women to have a right to feel love and erotic desire for their conjugal mate. Contemporary feminist interpretations of the seduction narrative predominantly assume a unitary and mimetic model for reading seduction 1

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

stories in which the repetition of the narrative, especially as told in domestic fiction, functions to indoctrinate women into restrictive ideas of female chastity. Stories of virtuous young women who are seduced, abandoned and ruined by evil, libertine men, the argument goes, reflect the growing fetishization of female virtue and they discipline female readers not to have desires, not to go out in public, not to marry without familial consent. Anna Clark, for instance, interprets seduction as analogous to contemporary ‘date rape’ where women are always passive victims, sex is never consensual and seduction narratives enact the increasing sexual constriction of women.4 Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction gave us the most persuasive articulation of what I call the ‘domestic woman thesis’; by interpreting female consent during the period through a Foucauldian lens where it turns out to be a form of coercion, she argued domestic fiction created the female subject who chooses her own sexual and domestic confinement.5 I recognize the importance of this critical tradition, especially as a corrective to earlier criticism’s refusal to acknowledge male sexual violence in literature. Roy Roussel, for example, in The Conversation of the Sexes, argued seduction denotes erotic play between two equal partners, leading him to suggest that Pamela invites sexual assault.6 My own reading of seduction, however, suspends the critical binary that pits female agency against victimization to narrate the murky, open and undefined territory where ‘yes’ could – but does not always – mean ‘yes’ for women, and where no one truth about the meaning of seduction yet dominated cultural representations. The organizing thesis of The Seduction Narrative follows from my understanding of repetition as difference: I argue that the popularity of seduction tales in the period reflects the absence, rather than the presence, of a dominant ideology that would constrict female desire and that seduction narratives are not punitive and didactic texts, punishing women who act on their feelings, but exploratory and probing texts, pursuing questions about the nature of women’s affective and erotic lives. I survey stories of virtuous young women who are seduced into love and sex, some of whom fall and others who do not, in order to demonstrate that contradictory and competing versions of the tale existed and that these differences point us toward the untold possible narratives buried under the weight of a bourgeois ideal of femininity that comes to dominate by the end of the eighteenth century. The seduction narratives I highlight – both famous ones like Clarissa and lesser known ones like the chapbook Innocence Betrayed, and Infamy Avowed: Being the History of Miss Maria Thornhill – show that there were many different seduction stories exploring the new affective landscape of marriage by choice and not all of them end in the dominant plot of

Introduction

3

middle-class domestic femininity. I place these untold stories within a history of love and relate them to how women came to write and make claims based upon their knowledge of the heart. Seduction narratives in the second half of the eighteenth century serve as the epistemic testing ground for imagining how women can know their hearts in the new romantic landscape and, as such, the knowledge they impart is far from unified. retrospective history and the meaning of seduction The feminist interpretation of seduction as always already reflecting the “desexualization of women,” to use a phrase from Ruth Perry’s groundbreaking essay on the subject, invokes a larger historical argument about women in the later eighteenth century that this book hopes to challenge.7 As many scholars and critics have described, female sexuality over the course of the eighteenth century was re-imagined as essentially passive against an earlier image as innately active.8 This desexualization, along with the emergence of a bourgeois domestic sphere, is often used as evidence that the period witnesses the beginning of the end for women’s sexual freedom and their public or political subjectivity. Scholars may disagree on the effects of the gender revolution but they concur that the eighteenth century marks a number of major shifts in thinking about women, gender and sexuality, notably: the emergence of the ideal of companionate marriage and the replacement of a hierarchical model of sexual difference with a complementary model where women are imagined as innately chaste and essentially different from men, not inferior versions of the superior male.9 A feminist critical commonplace now assumes that the social, economic and ideological changes happening to women, sex and marriage over the century ultimately resulted in less freedom for women and that the domestification and sentimentalization of women produced overall negative effects. Jane Spencer was one of the first to voice this assessment of the long eighteenth century in The Rise of the Woman Novelist when she read the shift from amatory to sentimental seduction novels as compromising the feminist message implicit in writers such as Delariviere Manley and Eliza Haywood.10 Ruth Perry provides a more recent example in Novel Relations where she identifies a transformation in the structure of kinship “from a consanguineal to a conjugal basis for family identity” and argues that this shift resulted in a “net loss” for women.11 What interests me about the “net loss” thesis is not whether it is empirically verifiable (it is probably not a question of less or more freedom, but of different kinds of freedoms and restraints) but how it has structured

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

what it is we now know about women in the later eighteenth century, a knowledge I would like to expand. In contrast to a negative historiography, I emphasize a sub-cultural history, a history focused on narratives subordinated to the one that becomes dominant.12 The Seduction Narrative abandons the retrospective gaze of the ‘domestic woman thesis’ which operates from a teleology that reads the nineteenth-century ideal of passive, domestic and desexed femininity (‘the Angel in the House’) as always already the inevitable outcome of a gender ideology in flux during the eighteenth century. I do not assume that the ideal of bourgeois femininity was a lived reality for women in the nineteenth century either since the hegemony of ‘the Angel in the House’ is also a matter of debate.13 But I do argue, especially in Chapter 5, that it achieves dominance as an ideal following the revolutionary decade of the 1790s and that this later dominance has skewed our interpretation of the second half of the eighteenth century. Susan Staves notes in her Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 that the “terminus ad quem” or the end date for history determines the shape of an historical narrative since it is structured “to explain how that point got reached.”14 By suspending the ending of the story of the eighteenth-century gender revolution, I reanimate a contested history of women and affective agency. The seduction tale, I argue, provides a forum to query how a woman should act on the new desires of her own heart and furnishes a heterogeneous discourse for determining how women can recognize love. Taken together, seduction narratives ask a series of questions about women, love and marriage. Should a woman marry a man she does not love out of family duty? Does affective choice constitute a legitimate justification for disobeying parents? Can a woman love twice? Can love without money sustain a relationship? Is love outside the bonds of marriage ethically superior to mercenary sex inside marriage? What is the relation between passion and emotion, love and sex? This book argues that these questions were answered in many different ways, ways that have been effaced by the answer that comes to dominate. The endings of seduction narratives by the nineteenth century may suggest that the road to virtue is straight and narrow, but the paths to erotic love traced within later eighteenth-century tales provide many alternative routes for where a woman’s heart could lead her. In Uneven Developments, Mary Poovey argues, in relation to mid-Victorian gender ideology, that the story of a dominant ideology is never as clear as its dominance suggests; in contrast, she reveals “the extent to which what may look coherent and complete in retrospect was actually fissured by competing emphases and interests.”15 In suspending an historical narrative about women’s loss of

Introduction

5

power over the course of the eighteenth century, I hope to trace the fissures and dispersals of meaning that seduction references. My rejection of a history in which the repetition of seduction seamlessly evidences the rise of domestic ideology comes out of this book’s concentrated and expansive readings across a large sampling of seduction narratives, in canonical novels such as Clarissa and Henry Fielding’s Amelia, in lesser-known novels by women such as Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art and Elizabeth Griffith’s History of Lady Barton, in chapbooks and ballads circulating in cheap print form and in newspapers, miscellanies and memoir accounts of and about penitent prostitutes. A closer look at this large cross-section of texts delays the presumption that a conventional story was in place during this period. By the turn of the nineteenth century we can expect to find the generic plot of seduction: that of a young, innocent, naive orphaned country girl who travels to London where she falls for the false promises of an upper-class rake who abandons her and where, forced to earn her bread through prostitution, she eventually dies a penitent death. The Penitent Daughter; Or, The History of Elinor de Burgh exemplifies this conventional narrative in which “the world is full of seduction” and Elinor’s fate is sealed when her family loses its money and sends its beautiful sixteenyear-old daughter to live with a vain widowed aunt in the city.16 But in later eighteenth-century texts, I argue, the narrative path does not always and inevitably lead straight to ruin from the moment the beautiful, innocent and naive heroine opens her first novel, or takes her first glass of wine, or likes fine dresses, or travels to London, or accepts help from an old woman she does not know. In other words, her first step is not necessarily her last. In the History of Lady Barton, for example, we do not know how the story will end and if Louisa will find her way to Lord Lucan’s bed, either licitly or illicitly. In many of the Magdalen penitent prostitute narratives, the seducer is not, in fact, a seducer (a man who entices a woman to yield under false pretenses), but an authentic lover whose right to be loved by the heroine the tale staunchly defends. The first-person account of “The Life of an Authoress” which prefaces Literary Amusements; Or, Evening Entertainer begins with a story of virtue as risk: her mother having died in her infancy, the author is orphaned when her clergyman father passes away as she comes of age; her guardian aunt and cousin despise her because she is beautiful and intelligent so they send her to London to dispose of their competition; upon arrival, she loses her box with all her money and the address for where she is to go into service; alone, beautiful, innocent and vulnerable, she stands on the precipice of seduction and ruin. The twenty-first-century reader may quickly interpret the signs within the story as anticipating an inevitable tale

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

of ruin but the seduction never arrives. Instead, she falls into writing and her story ends up as a complaint about women’s relation to print culture. She cannot sell her novel or her sermons and thus she is forced to enslave herself to translations for money. The swerve in the narrative from virtue at risk to a feisty rant against the barriers to a woman’s professional life charts one fissure of many in the dominant meaning assigned to seduction’s narrative.17 In order to provide a narrative analysis of the divergences in seduction’s meanings, this project employs a broader definition of the seduced maiden than the one Susan Staves uses in her seminal article on the subject, “British Seduced Maidens”; there she defines her object as “young women of previously fair fame who are persuaded to consent to illicit intercourse.”18 Since Clarissa is raped Staves omits Richardson’s novel, as she does any text that includes a heroine who fights off her seducer.19 My definition is more expansive because I want to suspend the assumption that the ending is known in the beginning and to hold out the possibility that the heroine’s consent may not have been attained through persuasive coercion. I include stories with varying sexual climaxes from seduction (that is, consent to illicit sex under false pretenses) to romantic love consummated (both illicitly or licitly) to rape and to chaste virginity. The common thread weaving seduction together is that the heroine is in danger of misreading the signs of illicit sex for the signs of love or, vice versa, of misinterpreting authentic love as feigned. Seduction narratives tell the story of a woman’s struggle to decode the new semiotics of courtship and love and they offer ways to determine when to believe a lover’s vows and when to recognize deceit. The heroine of The Adventures of Miss Lucy Watson points toward this epistemological plot when she writes of her lover who promises marriage: “I know not what to think of Sir Edward. I think he speaks truth, and yet I have strong suspicions of the contrary.”20 Her suspicions turn out to be mostly correct as Sir Edward marries another after abandoning her and her daughter, though he later regrets not marrying Lucy whom he truly loved. Lucy’s query into what to think of love grounds the hermeneutics of suspicion that I argue defines later eighteenth-century seduction narratives. What links the tales that I discuss in this study is that reading the signs of love within the narrative necessarily and radically involves learning how to read the feelings of one’s own heart. Because my definition of seduction foregrounds the semiotics of love and relates it to knowledge of the heart, my project highlights what Charles Horne, in his hysterical attack on the evils of lost female chastity, Serious Thoughts on the Miseries of Seduction and Prostitution, called the “most cruel, unmanly, and destructive” type of seduction:

Introduction

7

I have pretty fully described the miseries attending seduction and prostitution, but I have forgot to define seduction in so plain a manner as I ought, I shall therefore divide seduction into three distinct heads, viz. The first I shall call seducing the affection, the second I shall term the seducing of the person, and the third, the seducing the mind, and occupying it by vanity, idleness, and gaiety … The most cruel, unmanly, and destructive, both to families and society, is the seducing the affections.21

The worst form of seduction for Horne is neither enticing a woman to yield her physical chastity, nor corrupting her mind, but inducing her to give her heart where that affection is not reciprocated. This hierarchy of seduction implies that a woman’s heart is deeper and more difficult for a seducer to penetrate than either the mind or the body and my study precisely thinks about what this ranking might mean to an understanding of gender. I see the narrative focus on a consenting heart – how a woman knows when to say ‘yes’ – to be what distinguishes seduction narratives in the second half of the eighteenth century from both earlier and later tales. seduction’s knowledge of the heart Seduction tales in the later eighteenth century foreground, almost entirely in first-person narration, the inner lives of a woman’s heart in consenting to sex and, in so doing, they mark a shift in representations of female subjectivity through seduction. Critics have long noted the important influence of women’s amatory fiction on sentimental writers such as Samuel Richardson but the two traditions are crucially distinct in their representation of seduction.22 Seduction in amatory fiction is mostly told in third-person narration, it concentrates on “seducing the person,” to use Horne’s categories, and it functions as part of a plot of intrigue less attuned to characterization than to action, or to interiorized models of subjectivity than to exteriorized ones.23 Later eighteenth-century seduction narratives are also distinct from their nineteenth-century counterparts which revert to largely third-person narration and are no longer concerned with the inner affective lives of their heroines since they assume that all women are passive victims of the evil crime. The assumption of victimization leads to fatalistic seduction narratives where the end is known in the beginning since the heroines’s feelings could not change the plot. The heroine of Victim of Seduction (1811) is precisely what the title pleads, a victim, whose innate lack of sexual desire means that she could never have consented to sex and, thus, only the arts of an evil seducer could bring about her fall.24 In between amatory physical intrigue and Victorian victim discourse lays the heart’s knowing consent to desire.

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

In arguing for the particularity of seduction narratives in the second half of the eighteenth century, my interpretation of seduction differs from, and yet also confirms, Toni Bowers’s work on seduction stories. In her survey article “Representing Resistance: British Seduction Stories, 1660–1800,” Bowers reads the narrative as representing a “cover story” where “[p]lots featuring coercive heterosexual relations … [are] used as ‘cover stories’ for otherwise dangerous or incendiary ideas.”25 She reads seduction narratives, for example, as telling political allegories about Tory resistance or about revolutionary politics rather than as plotting female desire in and of itself. Thus, she concentrates on early eighteenth-century Tory narratives and 1790s fiction, leaving the ground between Richardson and Mary Hays left uncharted. I agree with Bowers that revolutionary politics fundamentally changes seduction’s landscape at the end of the century, a discursive event that I discuss in the concluding chapter of this book. But in between Clarissa and Victim of Prejudice we can place countless retellings of the seduction plot that are not covers for political stories about broken vows but are primarily interested in the emotional signification of choosing love. Probing the nature of a woman’s knowledge of her heart, then, is the basis upon which I make claims for the historical specificity of seduction narratives in the period under study. Something happens in and around the mid-eighteenth century that makes women’s inner affective lives narratable and this something was not entirely about restrictive sexual and domestic ideologies. In her exceptionally astute early article on seduction narratives, Susan Staves shows how seduction reflects gender attitudes in transition since the plot is only possible with increased emphasis on women’s freedom: “If women have no rights over their own bodies but are simply the property of men to use as they will, as female slaves were the property of slaveowners, the idea of seduction is incomprehensible. On the other hand, if men and women are perfectly equal, seduction does not make much sense either.”26 Seduction requires the cultural belief that women’s consent in sexual relations is necessary, a consent which includes women in modern forms of subjectivity or what Lawrence Stone has termed “affective individualism.”27 Yet it also requires the sexual double standard where female chastity is unequally valued and male sexual freedom accepted, for, as Elizabeth Hardwick notes in pronouncing the death of the seduction plot in the twentieth century: “You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value.”28 This study pauses in the moment where seduction represents neither women’s erotic agency nor their passive victimization but a complex in-between where anything is possible.

Introduction

9

Critics as distinct as Susan Staves and Jean Baudrillard agree that the heightened cultural fascination with seduction disappears at the beginning of the nineteenth century which places the historical phenomenon at the moment in the history of love when the need for a female subject capable of knowing her own heart emerges.29 If, as Laura Kipnis argues in Against Love: A Polemic, “our version of romantic love [is] a learned behaviour that became fashionable only in the late eighteenth century,” this book asks, what role does seduction play in teaching us how to love?30 I look at seduction narratives as providing the classroom, as it were, to explore love’s new meanings. Culture’s obsessive retelling of the plot of seduction reflects the search for answers to the questions that become askable for the first time: Who is the female self capable of choosing her marriage partner? How does she know her own desire? How does she speak her will? How does she recognize her heart’s truth? The seduction narrative dramatizes the battle for a woman’s consent to sex for love (often against the will of her family who represent the older hierarchical style of patriarchy where sex is for lineage) and thus provides the perfect paradigm to explore these questions. In linking the truth of the female self to the truth of her heart, I am revising Michel Foucault’s famous thesis on sexuality and subjectivity in The History of Sexuality. There, Foucault argued that the proliferation of discourses about sex in the eighteenth century evidences a new subject whose very identity is determined by the truth of sex. Who we are in the modern age, Foucault argued, is centrally a matter of sex: “Whenever it is a question of knowing who we are, it [sex] is this logic that henceforth serves as our master key … Sex, the explanation for everything.”31 The truth of sex is crucially a hidden truth, concealed both within ourselves and to ourselves; thus, Foucault shows, it requires extensive new systems of knowledge to uncover it (the science of psychoanalysis, gynecology, pornography, etc.). I revise Foucault’s emphasis on the epistemological authority of sexual desire by asserting that love, not desire, is the “master key” for female subjectivity. By saying this, I am not reiterating the stereotype that women’s interest in men is about romance whereas men’s interest in women is entirely sexual. What my proposition denotes – and it applies to both men and women – is that the eighteenth-century shift in understandings of the self had more to do with a history of emotions than a history of sexuality. The seduction narrative’s epistemology of the heart, then, is part of the larger movement of sentimental philosophy, as evidenced in the writings of the Earl of Shaftesbury or Francis Hutcheson, that seeks to give greater authority to feeling as a way to truth. Seduction’s particular focus on the female heart places romantic love, rather than familial or neighborly

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

love, as the subject of its knowledge. Thus the phrase “knowledge of the heart,” ubiquitous in the period’s literature, almost always refers to knowledge of a person’s romantic affections.32 I use “the female heart” throughout this study catachrestically, to signify how a woman’s affections come to ground epistemological statements and thus become a space where truth lies. Seduction narratives develop a system of knowing, a semiotic apparatus that produces a hermeneutics, not of sexual desire, but of the truth of a woman’s feelings or of “the female heart.” I argue that love, not sex, is the master key because, in a fashion unprecedented in British history before the mid-eighteenth century, Woman formed the direct object of inquiry and the discursive site for knowing Woman is carved out as the female heart. How women feel comes to define what it is they know. The discursive explosion of interest in women’s difference interrogated the female self through an infinite number of questions from the very general (‘What was woman’s nature?’) to the particular (‘Should women study the sexual systems of plants or was it an immodest endeavor?’).33 Taken together, the quest to know Woman pursues these questions through a woman’s inner affective life such that the truth of her heart ultimately speaks the truth of who she is. In locating knowledge of self in a woman’s heart, the new epistemology requires this heart to speak, accounting for the proliferation of first-person female narrators.34 The claim that ‘I know my own heart’ emerges in the second half of the eighteenth century as an oft-repeated epistemological statement whose truth becomes comprehensible through seduction’s discursive structure. One of Richardson’s favorite phrases, ‘I know my own heart’ permeates novels and memoirs through the period and allows women to take authority in determining affective relations.35 In a search on the period from 1700 to 1746, Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line (ECCO) produced 192 hits for the phrase ‘I know my own heart,’ most in theological texts referencing a knowledge of God. But in the period from 1747 to 1800, there were 621 hits and the context shifts from theology to fiction where the object of the heart’s knowledge is a male lover, not God.36 Not only is the phrase mostly found in fiction, but it appears most often in the voice of a female narrator or epistolary writer. Indiana Danby, for example, writes to her unwanted suitor, encouraging him to marry another: “if I know my own heart, your happiness is my principle inducement [in recommending the marriage].”37 Almost every man in The History of Indiana Danby desires Indiana but she authoritatively refuses them all (including the one who attempts seduction and then abducts her) on the basis of her knowledge of the heart. Heroine after heroine invokes the phrase either to lend authority

Introduction

11

to the affirmative choice of a lover or to rejecting a lover chosen by their family. The real-life love letters between Elizabeth Griffith and her husband Richard see Elizabeth appealing to her heart to confess she favors him above any other man: “if I know my own Heart, I would prefer you to all of them.”38 On the other hand, Sidney Bidulph, in Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, appeals to her heart in rejecting Faulkland and advising him to marry Miss Burchell instead: “If I know my own heart, I think I do most sincerely wish he may make her his wife.”39 As these examples demonstrate, a woman’s knowledge of her heart allows her to speak and act with authority. Even with these few references, we can see the development of a pattern: ‘I know my own heart’ is almost always contained within a subjunctive clause preceded by ‘if ’: “if I know my own Heart, the liking of all Men, but of one, is a Matter quite indifferent to me,” declares Amelia to Mrs. Ellison in Henry Fielding’s novel.40 What is the status of this ‘if ’? The subjunctive both lends weight to and destabilizes the authoritative claim that follows. In Sidney Bidulph’s case the ‘if ’ is a skeptical one as she later discovers that she does love Faulkland and that a woman’s knowledge of the heart can be wrong. But the claim also acts to shore up emotional sovereignty by rhetorically implying that the woman who owns the heart is the best person to know its truths. On the basis of that privileged knowledge, women refuse to marry men where the heart feels no love. By raising the possibility that a woman’s knowledge of her heart may or may not be correct, the ‘if ’ registers a central tenet of this book: I argue that what defines modern love – whose birth we are witnessing in seduction literature – is that it is a problem that needs to be understood, a truth that requires a new semiotics to be decoded. Love is not an always already known affect but an inquiring subjunctive to be tested and explored, a proposition that requires time to unfold and develop. Seduction narratives pose the semiotics of love as precisely the problem: the heroine misreads the signs of the seducer’s words and actions and her misinterpretation – which the reader is almost always aware of – is based upon her belief in the primacy of the heart over other forms of knowing (for instance, rank, for if she were to read the signs as signifying in terms of class status, she would interpret the aristocrat’s vow of love as false). If we take seduction to be the “action of inducing (a woman) to surrender her chastity” as the OED does, then by its very definition it is an action that takes time to plot.41 Elizabeth Hardwick writes of seduction’s temporality that “the word ‘seduction’ indicates effort of a persevering, thoughtful sort.”42 The seducer’s plotting and the woman’s struggle for meaning constitute seduction as a process of understanding (and

12

The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

thus, as narrative, a relation I discuss below) and the process is directed at the epistemological problem of how one knows one’s own heart. Ostensibly, the tale is told to teach young female readers how to read the signs properly and how to interrupt the process before they ‘surrender’ their chastity. By avoiding the steps the fallen heroine took, the reader’s understanding of the heart’s truth will be closer to that truth. Preface after preface didactically asserts that the female narrator is only laying bare the errors of her heart so that other young women will know what she did not know in order to save themselves from ruin. ‘Misella’ in Samuel Johnson’s famous Rambler essays justifies her storytelling as follows: “I am convinced that nothing would more powerfully preserve youth from irregularity, or guard inexperience from seduction, than a just description of the condition into which the wanton plunges herself, and therefore hope that my letter may be sufficient antidote to my example.”43 Yet, as this study shows, there is no clear antidote. The claim that there is a static and easily knowable lesson to learn from the telling of the heroine’s lost innocence is confounded by the seduction tale’s obsessive retelling: if the tale only needs to be told once to save women from ruin, why is it endlessly and increasingly repeated? Why, if the telling of the tale will save more women from having to tell their tale, are there more seduction narratives as the century progresses, not fewer ? Partly, the lesson refuses to be learnt because modern love makes claims for uniqueness and singularity that no convention can represent: the man you marry is the only man you will love until death do you part. At the heart of many seduction narratives lies the tension between the heroine’s belief in love’s singularity and the danger that she is not recognizing seduction’s conventionalities. Is the lover’s invitation a snare that has been laid many times before to entrap women or is it a unique expression of his love? Choderlos de Laclos plays with the tension between singularity and repetition in his famous French novel of seduction, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The reader laughs at the dramatic irony when Cecile, doomed to fall into Valmont’s trap, believes that her love for Danceny is so unique that conduct book lessons do not apply to her (“But the fact is that I don’t think anyone has ever been in a situation like mine”).44 At the same time that Laclos makes fun of Cecile’s naive blindness, we are led to hope that Valmont’s use of conventional tricks to seduce Tourvel will transform his feelings into an authentic and unique love like the one she feels for him. Seduction is poised at the precipice between uniqueness and convention: are you the one or one of the many? Love’s uniqueness sets it up to conflict with the didacticism of the exemplary repetition yet it is the repetition that distinguishes seduction from love. Modern love requires that the female lover trust the feelings of

Introduction

13

her heart rather than view the world as already-written for her but seduction represents the danger of not recognizing the conventions that, if known, would have prevented ruin. George Wright notes this problem in his “Warning to Young Women Respecting Seduction” when he paints a portrait of a generalized female victim of seduction: When any little fears arise, which lead to foul mistrust, her undissembling heart calls up its own sentiments, and for a moment sets them in opposition to her virtue; and concludes, from her ignorance of mankind and the artifices of seduction, that it is impossible for human nature to be so treacherous, so deceitful, so deliberately base. The fatal examples of others, if, at any time, they invade her guileless bosom, are considered as bearing not the least affinity to the point in question; for, others might have fallen voluntary victims to their own sensual inclinations.45

Women’s ignorance leads them to believe their seducer yet even if they have the knowledge, love resists thinking it is one of many. The fact that love must risk being wrong, and that each heart must be known in its uniqueness, is the drama that seduction poses and the plot that opens up the female heart to knowledge. Seduction narratives, I argue, provide women with a hermeneutic frame through which to seek out love’s meanings.

seduction’s narrative hermeneutics The second main tenet of this book builds upon the first: if seduction presents modern love as a problem that needs to be understood, it offers narrative as its solution. Seduction narratives – and not the plethora of expository prose about seduction – provide the reader with a hermeneutics of love because narrative presents an enigma that the reader must unravel.46 Narrative precisely allows seduction’s meanings to unfold as a process of interpretation, one that maps the enigma of meaning onto the enigma of love. Roland Barthes argues that narrative does not represent anything of the “mimetic order,” rather, it calls up the reader’s “passion du sens”: “Narrative does not show, does not imitate; the passion which may excite us in reading a novel is not that of a ‘vision’ (in actual fact, we do not ‘see’ anything). Rather it is that of meaning.”47 The reader’s passion for meaning propels them to keep reading toward the ending; whether or not they arrive at meaning’s completion is not the point of reading, but what attracts them to stories is, for Barthes, “the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.”48 From the simple question ‘what happens next?’ to more complex questions of motivation, narrative presents enigmas that the reader participates in solving. Seduction narratives map this passion for meaning

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

onto the passion of the heart such that the enigmas of love and meaning are located within the female heart. Insofar as narrative presents problems of meaning that it promises to resolve, Peter Brooks observes that it can be thought of as an “‘overcoding’ of the proairetic by the hermeneutic, the latter structuring the discrete elements of the former into the larger interpretive wholes, working out their play of meaning and significance.”49 Barthes defines the proairetic in S/Z as the code of actions (or “the Voice of Empirics”) and the hermeneutic as the code “by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated” (or “the Voice of Truth”).50 The hermeneutic overcodes the actions in the text to produce signification. In the case of seduction, the narrative takes the events of love – the meeting, the pursuit, the declaration, the vow, the consummation – and overcodes them as a hermeneutic or an enigma whose resolution will speak the truth of a woman’s heart. Clarissa presents us with a hyper-magnified overcoding by the hermeneutic insofar as the multi-vocal epistolary structure incessantly repeats an action in order to interpret its significance from different points of view. But all the seduction narratives I discuss combine the plot of possible love with the pursuit of the heart’s truth. When ‘how do you know your own heart?’ is the question overcoding ‘what happens next?,’ we can see the interweaving of epistemology with narrative, the way the telling of a story charts a way to know. Hayden White addresses this interweaving when he asserts that narrative, both historical and literary, presents the solution to “the problem of how to translate knowing into telling.”51 This book works backwards from White’s formulation, and investigates how these “tellings” produce various ways of “knowing,” for built into the logic of seduction is an emphasis on telling. Unlike any other genre, seduction tales almost always dramatize the act of narration. The heroine narrates the telling of her tale repeatedly throughout the telling of her tale, both in the frame narrative (often an epistolary address) where she justifies why she is telling her story, and in the stories within the story where her story is told to an intra-diegetic listener. For example, Agnes in Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter (discussed in Chapter 5) is seduced and abandoned in the opening pages of the novel and then proceeds to repeat the story of her seduction to multiple listeners with different effects: she tells her tale to Mr. Seymour in order to gain his support and he then repeats it to the governors of the charity hospital to solicit their help; Agnes tells her story to the doctor treating her father for the madness brought on by his daughter’s ruin for she believes it necessary to tell “the whole of her sad history … [so] that the doctor should know the cause of the malady for which he was to prescribe.”52 The novel ends with her seducer hearing the

Introduction

15

sad story of a fallen woman who has just died and his recognizing it as the story of Agnes. By repeatedly staging their own telling as events in the plot, seduction narratives incorporate multiple ways of knowing as each telling experiments with the way meanings are determined within a narrative context. Along with the plot of virtue in distress is another plot, that of truth, where certain tellings of the heroine’s heart accrue credibility and others end in its denial, thus representing the very contest of meaning that the enigma of seduction promises to resolve. The meta-narrative elements place seduction’s meanings within a situation where the social context overcodes the woman’s claim to truth and for this reason we must pay specific attention to the stories within the stories of seduction (this formal structure is the topic of Chapter 3). Ross Chambers, in Story and Situation, stresses the way narrative functions as “a transactional phenomenon,” establishing relationships between the teller and the told such that a story’s situation is crucial to understanding its meaning.53 Since narrative “mediates human relationships and derives its ‘meaning’ from them,” the hermeneutic process requires an attention to both what a narrative says and who is saying it to whom, when and for what reasons.54 Insofar as seduction narratives foreground their stories’ situation, they invite readings which historicize their meanings and attend to when, where and to whom women speak their hearts. Especially meaningful are those narrative acts which stage when this truth has power and when it fails to persuade its listeners. The penitent prostitute, for example, must tell her story to the governors of the Magdalen hospital in order to gain admittance and since the truth claims of her narrative are literally being judged for their veracity, her story is intricately bound to its situation. Formal concepts of narrative theory can help us decode seduction’s semiotics of love but, as the Magdalen example shows, we also require an understanding of the story’s historical context. By making the act of narrative part of its formal structure and thus requiring an attention to the historical context of enunciation, the seduction narrative presents a particular challenge for narrative theory. Many critics, notably feminists, have argued that narrative theory, especially in its structuralist form, resists addressing – and even explicitly refuses to address – questions of politics and history. Susan Lanser was one of the first to introduce contextual material to narrative theory and the attack on her influential essay “Toward a Feminist Narratology” demonstrates the resistance to history and the determination of narratology to produce a transhistorical science of narrative.55 The Seduction Narrative builds upon Lanser’s feminist narratology in its dialogue between the formalist terms of narratology and the historical claims of gender. I understand feminist narratology

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

through Robyn Warhol’s definition as “the study of narrative structures and strategies in the context of cultural constructions of gender.”56 Each chapter of this book analyzes a specific context of enunciation – the speaking of seduction by Clarissa, by penitent prostitutes, by married women, by laboring-class heroines and by feminists – by pairing a narrative structure or strategy with a particular historical context. Chapter 1 thinks about Clarissa’s reception history and how female readers responded to the novel in light of Jonathan Culler’s understanding of the distinction between ‘story’ and ‘discourse.’ In the process, I uncover an alternative ending written into the text but not the one Richardson actually wrote. Chapter 2 turns to seduction tales narrated by penitent prostitutes and provides an original reading of the differences between Magdalen narratives, a body of texts most often considered as homogeneous. I read penitent prostitute tales in relation to both the history of the Magdalen hospital and Michael Riffaterre’s analysis of verisimilitude as a narrative effect to argue that many early narratives of the Magdalens, most particularly, the anonymous novel Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, represent the penitent prostitute as best encapsulating the ideal of non-mercenary love. Chapter 3 addresses seduction tales narrated by married women as embedded stories within their own story (Amelia, Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph, The History of Lady Barton). I highlight these scenes of narration to analyze the relationship between the embedding and embedded stories and what the interaction of narrative levels reveals about the historical interweaving of wife and seduced woman in the period. Especially in Elizabeth Griffith’s under-read The History of Lady Barton, I demonstrate how the interpolated seduction narrative allows for the creation of a social taboo against a woman marrying without love. Chapter 4 uncovers an original archive of seduction narratives circulating in street literature and asks: what happens to Pamela’s story when it is told not within a sentimental novel but in cheap prose narrative chapbooks and in popular ballads? The chapter thinks about the difference in cheap print’s narrative voice – street literature widely employs third-person narrators – to analyze how the plot of seduction pursues questions of love’s economic materiality. While Richardson uses the erasure of class difference made possible by the new economics of individual merit to construct a gendered subjectivity in Pamela, street literature inverts this equation, using the new gender ideology of ‘virtue knows no class’ to prompt a class politics. Chapter 5 focuses on seduction narratives from the 1790s and argues that revolutionary politics changed seduction’s significations, displacing its epistemological pursuit of how a woman knows her own heart onto a political

Introduction

17

allegory that presupposes a singular and fixed understanding of that heart. Thus, I conclude the book by analyzing four feminist novels from the decade – Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, Mary Hays’s Victim of Prejudice and Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter – to argue that their use of a melodramatic tone exposes the restrictive and static understanding of female sexuality that had come to dominate seduction’s meanings through its political tellings. Individual chapters and the book as a whole are arranged to combine a diachronic reading, one that traces developments chronologically, with a synchronic reading, one that thinks about specific enunciations of the seduction tale across the fifty years under study. I begin with Clarissa and end with 1790s feminism but in between I collectively discuss texts that cross the second half of the century. As well, my division of texts based upon who is speaking – Clarissa, prostitutes, married women, laboringclass women, feminists – is subject to categorical blurring since many of the narratives could fit into more than one of these categories. John Corry’s The Gardener’s Daughter of Worcester; Or the Miseries of Seduction could be read in the chapter on penitent prostitutes as easily as I read it within the frame of laboring-class heroines and, vice versa, The History of Miss Sally Johnson, Or, the Unfortunate Magdalen which I discuss as a Magdalen narrative is also an example of seduction in street literature. The Seduction Narrative contemplates both how narratives construct meaning and how meaning is constructed through a narrative’s historical situation and thus my focus is on seduction’s significations in discourse and not on historical cases of actual seduction. I look to the representation of seduction and not to living women who were seduced and abandoned in this period. Some of the stories I analyze claim to be ‘true,’ that is to say, empirically verifiable, but my analysis highlights how their stories mean and not what they reveal about what happened (I precisely interrogate narrative’s relation to such appeals to historical veracity in Chapter 2). Lawrence Stone and Randolph Trumbach both provide empirical histories of actual women who were seduced and abandoned but their conclusions leave me with more questions than answers and, with both, I query whether they often mistake the representation of seduction for the reality. Trumbach asserts that the majority of prostitutes in London were seduced and that “[t]he seduction could be more or less coercive, and it could be a seduction either first into premarital sexual relations, or more directly into prostitution.”57 Trumbach’s evidence is largely the penitent prostitute narratives I read but their claim to authenticity must be contested and contextualized which he does not do. Lawrence Stone argues from the increase in illegitimacy

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

rates that the actual seduction of women was on the increase and that more women were saying ‘yes’ to premarital sex and more men felt less pressure from family, community and workplace to marry a woman as promised; these factors combined, according to Stone, to produce a growing number of abandoned women (I discuss the rise of illegitimacy rates in more detail in Chapter 4). His interpretation of higher illegitimacy rates as proof of increased cases of seduction assumes that women would never knowingly consent to sex outside marriage or the promise of it.58 Since historical knowledge of a woman’s state of mind is almost impossible to determine, I query Stone’s assumption and resist making claims about sexual practice. In contrast, my emphasis is on seduction as a discursive practice where ‘discourse’ is understood as the system of thought within which knowledge is produced. Foucault describes discursive practices as “characterized by the delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories.”59 Seduction’s discursive practice develops over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century and produces objects (i.e., romantic love, the heart, Woman) and explores who can speak with authority and to whom (i.e., a particular ‘I’ of the text) and under what conditions the heart is true and when it is false. What do seduction narratives, understood as creating a new set of discursive practices around ‘love,’ allow us to see about why certain truths about women come to be ‘common sense’ by the nineteenth century while others are no longer legible? While my focus is not on the lives of actual women who were seduced, my own claims to knowledge assume that the meanings produced by and through seduction narratives ultimately have real effects. Mme de Staël said that “the abduction of Richardson’s Clarissa was one of the most important events of her girlhood” by which I take her to mean that reading a fictional story caused real effects on her understanding of what it was possible for her to do and to feel.60 Lincoln Faller traces the effects of Clarissa on the lived experience of a number of women involved in criminal trials (in particular, Elizabeth Blandy who was charged with murdering her father on her lover’s behalf and Ann Bell who ran away from her father’s house and was kept by a man who murdered her) and argues that the novel centrally shaped the representations and self-representations of these women. I am partial to Faller’s Bakhtinian focus on how fiction “shaped and informed … the imaginations, actions, and self-images of real people,” but I make no claims here to present a causal explanation for the relation of seduction narratives to reality.61 I am, however, interested in the representation of the causal

Introduction

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effects of reading seduction narratives within seduction narratives themselves. By the end of the eighteenth century, reading novels came to be represented as causing the actual event of seduction and writers repeatedly insist that a young woman’s novel-reading will likely cause her ruin. “Among the main incentives to seduction, that of Novel reading most assuredly ranks as one,” Rev. Edward Barry claimed in his essay on “Seduction.”62 What specifically intrigues me is the increase in representations of fiction’s power to seduce in seduction novels themselves, as heroines are portrayed as incited by reading seduction novels into being seduced. Maria, in Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, reads Rousseau’s novel of seduction, Julie: ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, and imagines Darnford, her own possible seducer, as the “the personification of St. Preux.”63 While Clarissa reads no fiction, heroines of seduction narratives read more and more novels of seduction as the century progresses.64 Why does the empirical power of reading seduction stories in order to discover love come to be represented within stories of seduction in the late eighteenth century? One way to interpret this cultural phenomenon is that narratives begin to perform the function within the narrative that they had been fulfilling outside of it, that of shaping women’s knowledge of their affective and erotic lives. How heroines determine the knowledge of their heart in many later eighteenthcentury texts occurs through their own reading of other seduction narratives. If Clarissa stands as the ur-text where the repetition of the telling of an event from multiple points of view speaks to the absence of firm discursive practices around seduction, Wrongs of Woman stands at the other end of the spectrum where the repetition of reading as an event points to a more solidified set of practices. What needed to be told over and over again, from multiple perspectives, by the end of the century, is read over and over again, from multiple perspectives. The Seduction Narrative charts the horizon of possible tellings and readings that seduction animates in between these two texts. From the untold story of Clarissa’s love, to the non-mercenary celebrations of the whore’s love, to the challenge that interpolated seduction tales pose to legitimate marriage, to the reclamation of the seduced victim as the heroine in a class war and, finally, to the melodramatic representation of the wrongs committed against the seduced woman, the seduction narratives I analyze provide alternative endings to seduction than the one that ultimately becomes dominant. My intent in telling these subjugated stories is to re-vision what it was possible for women to feel and to know during an emergent or transitional period, knowledge that became unknowable by the nineteenth century and remains buried today.

chapter 1

Knowing love: The epistemology of Clarissa

Samuel Richardson’s critics, both past and present, agree that Clarissa demonstrates an unprecedented ‘knowledge of the heart.’ After reading Clarissa, Thomas Edwards wrote to Richardson: “you are so absolute a master of the heart”; Samuel Johnson said of the novel that it was “the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart.”1 But what knowledge of the heart does this first-person epistolary text provide? What do we learn about love from reading fiction? Richardson’s contemporary readers approached the novel as a test of the heart where passing or failing depended upon recognizing the exquisite virtue of its title character. Edward Young in a letter to the Duchess of Portland wrote that “I look on it [Clarissa] … as a sort of touchstone for the readers of this virtuous age, who, while they think they are only passing their judgment on another’s ingenuity, will make a discovery of their own hearts.”2 Reading Clarissa became a litmus test for an entire generation, examining the reader’s sentiment regarding the nature of Woman and her choice in marriage. Clarissa boldly claims her own “right to a heart,” meaning the freedom to marry according to her feelings and to reject the Harlowes’ mercenary plan to wed her to the degenerate and sexually repulsive Solmes.3 But how does Clarissa know what truth her heart has a right to? Many have seen the novel proposing a proto-feminist vision of female autonomy through its call for women’s affective freedom.4 Yet this “right to a heart” seems to come at a cost for women, notably, the cost of an impossible standard of female Virtue. Paula Backsheider provides a tonic to those feminist critics who, she writes, see Richardson as “something of a hero” when she argues that Richardson establishes the ideal of femininity as “the beautiful, dead chaste saint,” thus inscribing “the patriarchy approvingly on Clarissa’s death.”5 Clarissa marks the starting point of this book’s history of seduction because of the phenomenal way its narrative launches a quest into the nature of women, their sexuality and their rights in marriage. The novel provides a paradigmatic exploration into the emerging contours of a woman’s heart and 20

Knowing love: The epistemology of Clarissa

21

her sexual will and, in its greyness, provides enough evidence to justify both feminist and anti-feminist interpretations. As Tom Keymer’s documentation of the novel’s eighteenth-century readership demonstrates, Clarissa has had a spectacularly rich dialogic history since its publication, soliciting a multiplicity of interpretations that Richardson, himself, invited.6 The popularity of Richardson’s novel and the plurality of responses it invoked reflect how profoundly it spoke to a cultural awareness of, and interest in, the new inner world of women. This chapter argues that the novel opens up many different ways for understanding the female heart but that the answers it provides to the paradigmatic questions – who is the female self capable of choosing her marriage partner? how does she know her own heart? how does she speak her will? – are not singular, nor do they constitute a unified vision of femininity. The novel’s semiotics of love has attracted innumerable critics over the centuries, in part because its code for understanding the inner affective life of its heroine remains sublimely confounding. My own interpretation of the novel reads into the text a story of the female heart that is neither feminist nor misogynist but an in-between product of an historical moment when women’s relation to love and desire was in transition. In my story, told through an analysis of the novel’s multiple discourses, Clarissa loves Lovelace but not within the novel’s diegesis, and it is not a love reducible to her sexual desire or lack of it. I argue that Richardson’s novel sets into motion the possibility of a female subject divorced from her sex – ‘sex’ understood as both her sexuality and her gendered biological sex – through its probing of seduction’s narrative possibilities. As Tassie Gwilliam has noted, Richardson’s novel stands at the crossroads of “the project of defining sexual difference.”7 While the ending of the novel unquestionably contributes to a bourgeois redefinition of Woman as essentially chaste, the beginning invites other radical configurations. Richardson’s female readers certainly felt the pull of this alternative path when they passionately resisted the inevitability of the rape of Clarissa.8 While female readers felt traumatized by Clarissa’s rape and death and pleaded with Richardson for mercy, he saw the rape as a victory for women: “Clarissa has the greatest of triumphs even in this world,” he writes to Lady Bradshaigh, “The greatest, I will venture to say, even in and after the outrage, and because of the outrage, that ever woman had.”9 That a woman – and not just any woman but “a Clarissa” – needs to be raped to prove that women are essentially virtuous is not a triumph to be celebrated (816). To see Clarissa, however, as simply an emblem – good or bad – of a perfectly formed bourgeois female subject who triumphs over Lovelace’s misogynous older-style belief that ‘every woman is at heart a rake,’ misses the possibilities for another version of love that the novel plots in its probing

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800

of seduction. My reading of Clarissa suggests that there is – at least – a third alternative raised in the novel that imagines the truth of Woman as not linked to the truth of her sexuality but to the truth of her autonomous and free heart. Love, not sexual desire, is the master key for understanding the female self in the novel. Using love as the key to Clarissa stands in contrast to late twentiethand early twenty-first-century scholars who most often read the truth of Clarissa’s heart as a hidden sexual truth. Critics from Ian Watt to William Warner pursue the epistemological problem of the novel as one of uncovering what Clarissa’s heart – understood as synonymous with her writing – conceals. Does she know her own desire or is her heart duplicitous? Posing the problem in this way frames the novel in terms of a modern theory of subjectivity and sexuality. Indeed, many see Clarissa’s representation of psychological interiority through its first-person ‘writing to the moment’ as the defining feature of a new secular modern subject, one whose desires are hidden from itself and whose heart is capable of acting without its knowledge. Ian Watt claims “the real tragedy” of the novel is that its heroine withholds her desires “from her own consciousness”; therefore “we are fully entitled to suspect Clarissa herself of not knowing her own feelings.”10 In other words, part of the truth of Clarissa’s heart is that the reader knows there are parts of the heart – the parts involving sex – that are unknown, even to the person who owns it.11 The key to understanding Clarissa’s heart would then involve a complicated hermeneutics of sexual desire, a depth interpretation to coincide with the depth of the heart, and one that introduces the troubling question of Clarissa’s sexual agency. Since she now has the “right to a heart,” she also has a will to feeling, the power to bestow or withhold sexual consent, and, thus, the question becomes: to what extent could she or could she not have avoided her ruin? If she had acted differently, could she have saved herself from rape? The question of Clarissa’s culpability has bewildered critics since Albrecht von Haller first suggested that the heroine’s faults contributed to her own rape.12 But many contemporary scholars, including feminists, take the concern further: Carol Flynn definitively asserts that “Clarissa’s complicity in her own rape is … disturbing”; and Toni Bowers calls her agency “compromised” by her decision to meet Lovelace at the garden gate.13 For Flynn, Clarissa’s culpability derives from her naïveté: she should have known better. Flynn writes, “Clarissa cannot or will not, recognize the signs of her dilemma” and Flynn queries why Clarissa insists on drinking the tea even though she knows it tastes suspicious.14 That women can be taught how to avoid ruin implies they have sexual agency, even if only in the negative, the will and the knowledge

Knowing love: The epistemology of Clarissa

23

to say ‘no.’ Once they are imagined as knowing subjects, they become culpable for not knowing, including not knowing what they could not know, that is, their unconscious desire for rakes. What makes contemporary critical suggestions of Clarissa’s culpability particularly disturbing is that critics place themselves in the same position as Lovelace, claiming to know more about Clarissa’s desire than she does herself (in Lovelace’s own words: “like Tiresias, [he] can tell what they [women] think, and what they drive at, as well as themselves” [441]).15 My own wager is that the retrospective reading that sees contemporary modes of knowing represented in Clarissa blinds us to another model for knowing the heart that, while failing to become dominant, is present in the narrative, indeed, is an effect of Richardson’s narrativizing. In this model, Clarissa has sexual – and, thus, moral – agency but it is separate from her “right to a heart.” Whatever Richardson’s ‘knowledge of the heart’ is – whether it be a didactic assertion of Woman as Virtue, an opening of the heart to duplicity or, as I suggest, a heart freed from sexual difference – it is intimately connected to novelistic discourse, to the way he tells his story. clarissa’s ignis fatuus and richardson’s narrative maze If women could learn how to avoid seduction and ruin by reading expository prose instead of fiction, then Clarissa should have been able to escape rape by reading Richardson’s own earlier conduct book Familiar Letters on Important Occasions (1741). There he counsels women on what to do if they find themselves in the precise predicaments in which, a few years later, he places his heroine. Had Clarissa read Familiar Letters, she would have learnt how to fend off unwanted letters from a clandestine correspondent by getting a wise friend to intervene.16 She would have known never to trust a man like Lovelace as “men are deceitful, and always put the best side outwards.”17 Indeed, all Lovelace’s strategies would have been revealed to Clarissa had she taken Richardson’s advice to “despise the man who seeks the aid of back doors, bribed servants, and garden-walls, to get access to your person.”18 Familiar Letters even warns young ladies against the dangers of London where procuresses often appear in the guise of gentlewomen. How much more explicit does Richardson have to be to successfully save women from ruin if telling is all that ‘knowledge of the heart’ entails? But this knowledge requires more: it requires narrative, and not just any narrative form, but Richardson’s specific ‘writing to the moment.’

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Frances Sheridan attests to how women felt the pull of the narrative’s representation of women’s feelings when she wrote to Richardson that “[n]obody, like you, has the art to penetrate into the secrets, and unwind the mazes of a female heart.”19 Those mazes only exist because of the multivocal epistolary style. Richardson had good reason to refuse “to give a narrative turn to the letters,” as he says in the preface to the novel; he rejects one reader’s suggestion that he shorten the novel by speeding up the action, since, he argues, length and multi-vocality are intrinsic to the novel’s meaning and to probing “the mazes of the female heart” (36). In order to read the knowledge of the heart that the multiple ‘I’s of the text provide in Clarissa, I want to briefly compare Richardson’s novel with its popular abridgment, The Paths of Virtue Delineated; or, the History in Miniature of … Clarissa Harlowe … Familiarised and Adapted to the Capacities of Youth (1756).20 The difference in length and narrative strategies between the two texts crystallizes the argument that Clarissa’s meaning is an attribute of the novel’s discourse, not its story. Narrative theory distinguishes between story (the actions and events of the novel) and discourse (the way those events are ordered and told).21 The story of Clarissa is monumentally thin but discourses proliferate, and this proliferation results from Richardson’s attempt to ‘carve’ out a new space for both female desire and a new understanding of love. In adapting Richardson’s novel for “the capacities of youth,” The Paths of Virtue makes three crucial changes to the original: it prunes Clarissa’s 1,500 pages down to a skeletal story of 139 pages; it shifts the narration from first-person epistolary to third-person omniscient; and it transposes the tense from present to past. The decision to switch the narrative point of view and the tense seems extraneous to the project of abridgment. As Leah Price has pointed out in her discussion of the text, “[b]revity has no intrinsic connection with narrative distance: a sentence phrased in the past tense and the third person is no shorter than one in the present and the first.”22 The abridgment remains as close as possible to Richardson’s original phrasing yet shows no scruples in changing the tense and narration. What is gained by making these changes? How do tense and narration effect our understanding of the story? The shifts turn the novel into what Paula Backsheider accuses the original of being: a patriarchal entrapment of women by an impossible standard of saintliness. The grey areas in the original – the intimations of Clarissa’s culpability and the possibility that her plot could have followed an alternative path – are painted in black and white, endowing its central heroine with the essential and stable identity of the chaste female saint. Nothing – not education, not desire,

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not circumstances – could change Clarissa’s status as Virtue and the adaptation turns her into an allegory displaying the lesson that “innocence is the best security against danger.”23 The shift from present to past tense, and the reordering of events this entails, makes the sainthood of Clarissa indisputable. Instead of Richardson’s psychological arrangement with its extensive use of analepsis (the narration of events from the past), The Paths of Virtue tells the story chronologically. We read the complete description of actions as they occur, leaving no room for doubt and for the reader’s imagination. Instead of a time lapse between Clarissa’s arrival at St. Albans and her description of the abduction, for example, the reader of The Paths of Virtue learns of the abduction before Clarissa arrives at St. Albans. Similarly, the rape is narrated in chronological order, leaving no time for the reader’s imagination to wander into other scenarios of how the affair could have occurred. In so doing, the abridgment forecloses narrative possibilities that the original opens up even if it does not ultimately follow them. While the original unfolds the prospect that Clarissa could have willingly left her father’s house even though she did not, the abridgment allows for no such momentary moral ambiguity. The Paths of Virtue makes the heroine’s fate fated from her introduction in the first sentence as “Miss Clarissa Harlowe, a lady possessed of every excellence.”24 Not only does the order of events constrict the moral universe of the novel, but the third-person narration turns the story into an excuse for moral maxims, telling rather than showing virtue in distress. Following the description of the battle at the garden gate, the narrator provides a morally unambiguous interpretation: “Thus was the beautiful and accomplished Clarissa, who had till lately been the delight and the boast of her relations, the admiration of all who knew her, and had been justly admired as a pattern of virtue and prudence, forced by those very relations, and the specious arts of the designing Lovelace, into his protection; into the protection of a rake of abandoned principles.”25 Could Clarissa have acted differently? Clearly not in The Paths of Virtue. While at the end of Clarissa the reader might agree with the above construction of the garden gate scene, the original narrative importantly introduces an alternative reading, a path not taken. Through Clarissa’s narrative style, Richardson opens up his heroine’s heart to the possibility that it could have felt and acted differently and he gives Clarissa moral agency through the assertion of her will. The novel may ultimately constrain her will through an ideal of femininity as Virtue Incarnate, but it begins, I argue, with a different narrative discourse where a woman can be essentially virtuous and possess sexual agency. In the opening

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volumes, Richardson ventures into new territory and begins to portray a heroine with both Virtue and sexual will, who is chaste while having an autonomous desire, and who knows love without being enslaved to desire. Clarissa searches for a way of knowing love that does not reduce what she knows to hidden desire or carnality, and the knowledge of the heart she thus strives for translates into a different way of telling. While invoking many of the motifs that come to be associated with a bourgeois romantic love plot, Clarissa’s own attempt to tell her story unfolds another plot, one that I will call the ignis fatuus plot of unsexed love.26 While the final volumes of Clarissa can be read as ultimately propping up a bourgeois epistemology enforcing female virtue, Clarissa’s own discursive rendering of the story suggests the possibility that women’s knowledge is not always reduced to carnality or the absence of it (that is to say, desexed Virtue), and that she can have an ontological status which is not sexed (that is to say, gendered feminine). This freedom from her sex – understood in terms of both her sexuality and her gender – dramatically ends with the rape, an event which, while disproving Lovelace’s misogynist definition of female sexuality, ties women to another form of sexuality in which they are essentially chaste. However, the discursive frame implied by Clarissa’s emplotment prior to the rape leads the reader to expect events to be different. Richardson’s female readers, from the evidence literary historians have gathered documenting their responses, seem to have followed Clarissa’s ignis fatuus plot with a passion.27 Why did they insist on a comedic ending if all signs pointed to the contrary? I propose that Clarissa’s discourse actually writes into the novel the future event of her love and opens the possibility of another series of events, unanticipated by Richardson yet present in the novel and marked by the horrified response female readers had to the rape. Lady Bradshaigh succinctly affirms in a letter to the novel’s author that Clarissa “did love him,” regardless of what Richardson intended.28 Mary Delany insists, also in a letter to Richardson, “[i]n love she certainly was.”29 How can both women persist in their assertion of Clarissa’s love even after the heroine is raped and dies? They did so, I argue, because Clarissa’s telling of her story introduces a new discourse – a new epistemology – of love where the event of her love occurs, though in fact it never happens within the novel’s diegesis (that is, the time–space universe created by the narrative). In “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative,” Jonathan Culler analyzes the relation of ‘story’ to ‘discourse’ to suggest a double logic functioning in narratives, one that I see at work in Clarissa and perceivable in the gap between how Clarissa tells her story and how the events unfold. Culler argues that while narrative theorists often presume ‘story’ precedes ‘discourse’

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(i.e., that the story’s events exist before they are plotted through discourse), it is also the case that discourse causes events, that is, the meaning of the narrative prompts the event by rendering that event inevitable. He writes: “One could argue that every narrative operates according to this double logic, presenting its plot as a sequence of events which is prior to and independent of the given perspective on these events, and, at the same time, suggesting by its implicit claims to significance that these events are justified by their appropriateness to a thematic structure.”30 Culler provides the example of Oedipus in which the hero accepts that the event of killing his father occurred without evidence of it because the narrative discourse has introduced a series of meanings that determine that the event must have happened. Culler concludes: “Instead of the revelation of a prior deed determining meaning, we could say that it is meaning, the convergence of meaning in the narrative discourse, that leads us to posit this deed as its appropriate manifestation.”31 Published in installments, Clarissa’s readers had plenty of time to ponder the novel’s thematic structure and, in the early volumes especially, I argue that Clarissa’s discourse – her convergence of meaning – renders the deed of her love for Lovelace, like Oedipus’s murder of his father, indisputable, though not yet having occurred. As we will see shortly, Lovelace wants to plot the events in Clarissa’s life as a libertine story in which her first step is her last, but if we follow Clarissa’s discursive emplotment, we see a different future story, one that does not reduce subjectivity to sexuality. Before turning to her discourse of love, I want to lay out the more traditional and predictable discourse of love provided by Lovelace’s libertine plotting. love as an encroacher; or “once subdued, always subdued” Nowhere is Richardson’s debt to an older amatory discourse for telling the story of love more apparent than in Lovelace’s plotting. In his plot, love is a battle of the sexes in which sexual intrigue does not lead to marriage, sexual events happen in quick succession with no interior meditations, and sexual consummation is not suspended until death or the final marriage scene. The story Lovelace tries to plot is the story Dorothy Van Ghent imagines when she provocatively claimed that the rape, or, as she calls it, “the deflowering of a young lady,” was “a singularly thin and unrewarding piece of action … one which scarcely seems to deserve the universal uproar which it provokes in the book.”32 Lovelace would agree. Indeed, he repeatedly claims that Clarissa is making too much of a trivial event and that 999,999 times out of a million a woman does not die from rape (1,439). Women, in this plot, are

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either sexually insatiable, or they are like Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Madame de Merteuil, skilled manipulators in the game of love. Within the field of knowledge that the plot of sexual intrigue traverses, there is no question Lovelace is masterful. His minute knowledge of the way the amatory plot of seduction conventionally unfolds allows him to manipulate the action in the novel ad nauseam. He knows the sexual power he gains when women yield and he knows how to manipulate them into yielding; indeed, he – and, no doubt at times, the reader – revels in the details of his plotting. Lovelace sees the plot so clearly that he believes if he can get his prey beyond the first event in the series of events that he has already succeeded in ruining her. If she writes him a letter, if she leaves her father’s house, if she acknowledges any feelings for him, then she has yielded carnally. His repeated mantra “once subdued, always subdued” demonstrates his sense of how the events of seduction are sequenced (675). The first step is the last and once the bird has been caged, she will ultimately give in and eat (557). In this necessary cause and effect relation, Lovelace reads the events of the abduction as “the Rubicon,” the point of no return (387). The effect of Lovelace’s plotting is to collapse the time of narrative, to see the end in the beginning. For this reason, he thinks consent is retroactive, and that the end of sex will turn Clarissa’s ‘no’ into ‘yes,’ thus demonstrating his expert knowledge that sexual insatiability is the true nature of women. Like Lovelace’s description of the caged woman who eventually eats, he believes that all women eventually cave in to desire. In this synchronic plot, love, like the seducer, “creeps” and “encroaches.” Lovelace masterminds the ipecacuanha episode (where he feigns serious illness with the help of the poison) with this in mind, anticipating that once Clarissa has acknowledged love, she will consent to sex: “Love, when found out or acknowledged, authorizes freedom; and freedom begets freedom; and I shall then see how far I can go” (673). Lovelace interprets the event of Clarissa’s revelation that she feels for him as another “fatal step”: “the woman who resents not initiatory freedoms must be lost. For love is an encroacher. Love never goes backward. Love is always aspiring. Always must aspire” (704). Once subdued, always subdued. In collapsing the diachronic pattern of events into a single act, the plot of sexual intrigue reduces love to sex. An admission of throbs is as good as yielding in bed. Interestingly, Anna Howe’s frame for understanding love corresponds to Lovelace’s; indeed, she is his alter ego, a position Lovelace acknowledges: “If Anna were a man … she’d have outdone us all in enterprise and spirit” (634). Like Lovelace, Anna recognizes that the plot of love is a creeping trap for women and that once love enters, women are ruined if they cannot

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secure marriage. In her oft-cited letter 10, Anna warns her friend of the dangers she faces from an unacknowledged desire that Anna reads into Clarissa’s latest letter. She approvingly cites Lovelace’s own observations that “[l]ove takes the deepest root in the steadiest minds” (71). Once rooted, even in a Clarissa, the weed is impossible to kill. She is relieved when Clarissa denies love and congratulates her “on your being the first of our sex that ever I heard of who has been able to turn that lion, Love, at her own pleasure, into a lap-dog” (73). But Anna does not really believe “Love” can be turned into a lapdog. The “lion” creeps and encroaches and can never be tamed; thus, Anna retrospectively plots the events as if they were always already scripted by the fact of Clarissa’s early feelings for Lovelace. In her letter intercepted by Lovelace in which she discloses the truth that Sinclair’s house is a brothel, she re-plots the story as one of Clarissa’s erotic love. Anna knows now that “love had pretty early gained footing in” Clarissa’s heart (748). When she believes that Clarissa has received her letter and yet has returned to Sinclair’s, she exclaims: “What an intoxicating thing is this love ? – I always feared, that you, even you, were not proof against it” (993). Richardson’s emphasis on “always” is telling. Like Lovelace, Anna believes once love first enters, once the first step has been taken, all is lost. The libertine epistemology of seduction certainly provides both Lovelace and the reader with a form of mastery. But, simultaneously, the narrative carves out the ways this epistemology is inadequate. While much attention has been showered on Lovelace’s masterful will to knowledge as power, little has been said of his ignorance.33 As narrator of the story, Lovelace believes he is in control of plotting events and, for the middle three volumes, he is able to prognosticate and to create the events which confirm for him and for the reader the explanatory power of his epistemology. However, the ultimate impotence of his plot to account for Clarissa’s post-rape actions allows the reader to experience the limitations of his way of knowing. While he believes that “there is in every woman a yielding, or a weak-resisting moment to be met with” and that “once overcome, she would be for ever overcome,” Clarissa proves him wrong, despite Lovelace’s “appealing to all [his] experience, to all [his] knowledge of the sex” (971–972). That she does not yield means that all his knowledge of the sex has been wrong. At this point in the novel, he begins losing control of the circulation of knowledge, as letters pass between correspondents without passing through him, as Belford passes along Lovelace’s letters to Clarissa, as Clarissa begins to speak the truth without his discursive manipulations, as he fails to properly decode Clarissa’s allegorical use of “my father’s house” and travels to Harlowe Place (1,233). Lovelace’s failed knowledge in the second half of

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Clarissa not only serves to prove that he is an evil and unreformable libertine; it also provides a larger commentary on the question of how love signifies and the possibilities for a new knowledge of the female heart. If the will to knowledge is the will to carnal knowledge in Clarissa then Lovelace certainly is master of it, but the novel shows that his model of sexual difference and love is monumentally ignorant when it comes to reading Clarissa’s heart. Belford is the one to point out Lovelace’s ignorance. In one of his late letters critiquing the position of “we rakes and libertines,” he writes: Our early love of roguery makes us generally run away from instruction; and so we become mere smatterers in the sciences we are put to learn; and because we will know no more, think there is no more to be known. With an infinite deal of vanity, unreined imaginations, and no judgements at all, we next commence half-wits; and then think we have the whole field of knowledge in possession … Thus, as to useful knowledge, while others go to the bottom, we only skim the surface; … and, shutting our eyes, move round and round (like so many blind mill-horses) in one narrow circle, while we imagine we have all the world to range in. (1,130–1,131)

Belford links the rake’s ignorance to his limited field of knowledge, which is to say, sex. Because the rake thinks the will to sexual power defines knowledge, he thinks he knows it all when in fact he is a mere smatterer, a half-wit, a blind mill-horse plodding the same ten feet day after day. His mastery of the conventions of seduction chains him to the same predictable terrain; Lovelace may think he is outwitting women when he gets them to do what he wants, but he is merely performing, in contrary fashion, the most superficial understanding of the female heart. Belford is pointing to the ways that Lovelace lacks inventiveness and imagination, how he is unable to see outside his own limited sexual field. Clarissa has a similar insight when she acknowledges to Anna that he is “artful” but that his thirst for revenge and his rage against the Harlowes prove him to be superficial: “I do not think him so deeply learned in human nature, or in ethics, as some have thought him” (184). As such, many events in the novel escape Lovelace’s discursive frame; his way of telling, of making meaning, proves inadequate to the task. Is Clarissa any more successful? Clarissa’s narrative plots the events diachronically and by slowing down the plot of love, by not seeing the end in the beginning, her telling of the story presumes a different discourse, one that emerges from an epistemology where love and sexual intercourse are not reduced to the same act, and where women are not always defined by their sex, that is to say, gender. Both the libertine and bourgeois discourses of love lead women

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to the same place: one that sees the whole story of women as being the story of their sexuality. The first, the libertine amatory version, sees love as reducible to sexual desire and the second, the bourgeois sentimental, sees sexual desire as reducible to love but both plots assume sexuality to be the master key to female subjectivity and define Woman entirely in relation to love and sex. To invoke Rousseau, both imagine love’s plot following the dictum that “[t]he male is only a male now and again, the female is always a female.”34 Women never escape their sex in either narrative mode, their plots are fated in both, but Clarissa’s narrative, I argue, imagines love and sex separately and by disarticulating female knowledge from sexual experience, her discourse of love tells a different story, one in which the event of her love is plotted. clarissa’s new discourse of love Clarissa is often characterized – by both Lovelace and her critics – as the innocent lamb whose lack of knowledge of the world and pride in thinking she knows too much cause her fall. She may be innocent and inexperienced, but, I propose, she is far from ignorant in her knowledge of sex and love. Clarissa is both innocent and knowledgeable, a radical and destabilizing combination for both libertine and bourgeois discourses that see women as either knowing nothing or knowing everything about sex. In contrast to Clarissa, Anna gained her knowledge the traditional libertine way: through her own sexual experience. “I knew by experience,” Anna writes in a warning letter to Clarissa, “that love is a fire that is not to be played with without burning one’s fingers” (748). Her experience allows her to see what Clarissa cannot see – or so she thinks. But therein lies the trap, the misogyny, of the libertine’s construction of female knowledge: women need to know in advance of love what not to do in order to save themselves from falling; only the experience of the burn gives them knowledge of the fire. Lovelace, the expert in the field, observes that “nothing but experience can teach [women] how to disappoint us” (472). Clarissa, however, has a different relation to knowledge, one grounded in critical perception, not experience. Her sharp critical faculty discerns the plot of sexual intrigue from the very beginning with no experience. She identifies Lovelace as the “encroacher,” doubts his moral character, and suspects his methods early in the novel (283, 381, 446). She does not fall in love at first sight; after their first meeting, Clarissa already perceives his arrogance and vanity: “he seemed to have too good an opinion both of his person and parts to have any great regard to his wife” (46). She masterfully displays her knowledge of the libertine

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seduction plot when she ironically narrates the story of her sister Arabella’s response to Lovelace’s courtship, a courtship Arabella does not recognize as feigned. Clarissa quickly perceives Arabella’s use of “consenting negatives” – her playing hard to get – and understands that women’s power in the courtship plot can only be negative, the power of saying ‘no’ even if they desire ‘yes’ (44). The ironic tone of her narration demonstrates her knowledge of how hearts cannot be read simply and transparently and that neither Lovelace nor Arabella are saying what they mean. Later, when Clarissa accepts Lovelace’s offer of his family’s protection and he reads too much into her acceptance, she is prescient enough to interpret his response in terms of the collapsed temporality of the libertine plot, ringing the bell of caution: “How one step brings on another with this encroaching sex! How soon may a young creature who gives a man the least encouragement be carried beyond her intentions, and out of her own power!” (345). Since she is able to decode the seducer’s arts before she leaves her father’s house, she proves that experience is not necessary for knowledge. As Belford is the one to judge Lovelace’s intelligence, so too is he the one to sketch Clarissa’s intellectual capabilities, and the comparison works much to her favor. While Belford concludes that Lovelace thinks he knows more than he does, he comes to see that Clarissa knows both more than all the rakes who surround her, and more than those rakes think she does. He first meets her at Sinclair’s brothel where he immediately recognizes her acute critical faculties, commenting on her “very uncommon judgement” (711). But from his own libertine perspective where women are either innocent or experienced he initially believes that “her wit wants that maturity which only years and experience can give it. Her knowledge … must be all theory” (711). When he hears her speak her sentiments, however, his judgment changes: “[I] took notice of that searching eye, darting into the very inmost cells of our frothy brains, by my faith, it made me look about me,” at which point he observes that she is not smiling at his racy witticisms (711). He is forced to acknowledge that the libertine brain is shallow in comparison to a penetrating mind like Clarissa’s: “the wit of all the rakes and libertines I ever conversed with, from the brilliant Bob Lovelace … consists mostly in saying bold and shocking things with such courage as shall make modest people blush,” whereas Clarissa knows true wit, reciting Cowley and refusing the cheap trick of a licentious jest (712). Even Lovelace fears Clarissa’s intellect is better than his, rejecting her as a suitable mate if her intellect proves superior since “[what a] pitiful figure a man must make, whose wife has, or believes she has, more sense than himself ” (412). Closer to the rape, Lovelace explicitly acknowledges “the

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superiority of her mind” and is taken aback when Clarissa frankly agrees: “My mind, I believe, is indeed superior to yours, debased as yours is by evil habits” (853). Clarissa’s disdain for carnal jokes and evil habits does not originate from ignorant innocence, but from the knowledge that the rake’s rhetoric is empty and superficial. If Clarissa is as knowledgeable in the seducing arts as I have suggested and has such penetrating perceptive abilities without experience, why, then, does she fall into Lovelace’s trap? Why does her knowledge fail to anticipate the rape? In order to answer the question, we need to read how Clarissa plots her own story. I argue that Clarissa’s ignis fatuus – the imaginary light she is drawn toward that extinguishes whenever she gets close – is her dream of freedom from her sex, from being Woman, and of knowledge without carnality, of a plot of love that could recognize her autonomy. She keeps walking toward the shimmering apparition of a woman living an independent life and making choices based upon her own heart, only to discover that in doing so, she is, instead, further entrapped by the social codes of femininity. But she plots the events in her life as if her story of love could have been different. Clarissa’s discursive emplotment of her pre-rape story importantly makes a distinction between love and sex. Prior to the rape, Clarissa believes it is possible both to acknowledge love without relinquishing her body sexually and to admit sexual desire without this entailing love. She tries to plot her feelings for Lovelace accordingly, but if these feelings are to become love, they require time and the right social conditions to develop. Love, for Clarissa, is not instantaneous; it does not erupt at first sight as desire. Because of this, Clarissa is never able to tell the story of her love in a present tense chronological order. In trying to narrate a story of love that does not have the end in the beginning (and, thus, may not even end up being a story of love), her attempts are always frustrated by external forces that refuse such a narrative: her family, Lovelace and the broader social world of propriety and the law. Even Anna, “the sister of her heart,” does not allow Clarissa to move outside the conventions of amatory seduction, reading her heart as throbbing and panting when it is stretching and broadening (1,472). Anna jumps on Clarissa’s relative admission of a “preferable favor” for Lovelace and warns her of the danger she is in of falling in love (70). Clarissa rejects Anna’s vision of love as a dangerous weed that has taken root but she admits “a conditional liking” which, for her, is, importantly, not love: I cannot but say – that this man – this Lovelace – is a person that might be liked well enough if he bore such a character as Mr Hickman bears; and even if there were hopes of reclaiming him: but Love, methinks, as short a word as it is, has a broad sound

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with it. Yet do I find that one may be driven by violent measures step by step, as it were, into something that may be called – I don’t know what to call it – a conditional kind of liking, or so. But as to the word Love – … it has, methinks, in this narrow, circumscribed, selfish, peculiar sense, no very pretty sound with it. (135)

Love, to Clarissa, should be broad and limitless, and is something much different than the “preferable favor” she feels toward Lovelace (66). The “conditional kind of liking” may be the first step on a long road to marriage for love, but it is not, in itself, love. Clarissa dreams of a higher, wider, allembracing love that reaches beyond sexual desire and recognizes the many facets of her being, not only the physical. Her feelings for Lovelace may turn into an enduring love, but at this point in the narrative, they are not defined as love. While Clarissa insists that love has a long developing narrative that does not always include sex, she also acknowledges her sexual desire for Lovelace, a desire divorced from love. She is not a prude but simply believes her admission of sexual attraction toward Lovelace does not require love, or physical surrender. She comments on Lovelace’s looks throughout the novel, but is insulted when her aunt suggests she has acted inappropriately simply because she admits to thinking Lovelace attractive: “she [her aunt] has a poor opinion of the purity she compliments me with, if she thinks that I am not, by God’s grace, above temptation from this sex. Although I never saw a man, whose person I could like, before this man; yet his faulty character allowed me but little merit from the indifference I pretended to on his account” (507). Clarissa distinguishes between sexual attraction and knowledge of the heart and while acknowledging “the figure of the man” is something – Clarissa, for example, is very aware of her sexual repulsion toward Solmes – it is not all and, counter to what Anna claims, it is not love (181). “[I]f you have not the throbs and the glows,” Anna says, “you have not; and are not in love” (73). Throbs, for Clarissa, are not love. Tragically, Clarissa’s story of a love that is not reducible to desire, nor desire to love, finds no place within the diegesis of the novel and so the truth of her heart is never externalized, never given an existence in her fictional world. While I argue that Clarissa’s love for Lovelace is an event in Clarissa, I acknowledge that it is an event that finds no place within the novel’s storytime, it is only ever written into the text in conditional and relative statements, as an expected future event that never arrives. When Clarissa does attempt to speak the truth of her heart, it is most often in response to another’s attempt to tie it down to one stable and definitive story of her sex. One of Clarissa’s favorite expressions in the novel is “I know my own heart” which other critics have taken to mean she is proud and firm in

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her knowledge, but, read in context, what she says she knows is always conditional, negative and tentative, reaching for, rather than proclaiming, knowledge.35 Nowhere is her conditional knowledge clearer than in her protracted trial with her mother. Her mother cross-examines her, repeatedly asking her “if your heart be free” (91). The painful recognition that if Clarissa declares her heart free, her family will enchain her to Solmes, brutally registers how Clarissa’s knowledge of her heart cannot be plotted the way she wants and how the female heart is not allowed to roam outside the either/or of one man or the other, Solmes or Lovelace. In this instance, what she knows about her heart comes out in the form of a double negative: “I know not my own heart, if it be not absolutely free” (90). But the declaration of a free heart is immediately followed by a challenge to her mother to define why she must relinquish control of her heart: “And pray, let me ask, my dearest mamma, in what has my conduct been faulty that, like a giddy creature, I must be forced to marry, to save me from – from what?” (90). What, indeed? Repeatedly in the novel, Clarissa distinguishes herself from a “giddy creature” who is ignorant and dangerously sexualized. She refuses to see herself as someone who needs to be saved from her own desire and she loudly declares her intention to live a single life. Her request to live single (for “why … must I be pushed into a state [marriage] which, although I reverence, I have no wish to enter into?” [67]) and to follow a different path through the courtship narrative that she finds herself in, is never taken seriously by her family. The Harlowes only recognize a woman’s heart as existing in relation to a man. When she realizes the cage they have her in, she changes her “style” and, after her mother asks her countless times “if her heart be free,” she admits a “preferable regard” for Lovelace, hoping that by saying her heart is not free, they will back down on the marriage to Solmes (136). Her attempt to manipulate how the world reads her heart, and thus to plot her own story, fails miserably. The admission only increases the misogyny of the forced marriage plot. Her declared preference – not love, but “preferable regard” – only serves as proof to her bachelor uncle that “[t]he devil’s in your sex,” that all women prefer “whoremongers” because they are all whores (154). The trial with her mother is one of the novel’s slowed-down sections that Richardson refused “to give a narrative turn.” The story does not progress while Clarissa writes approximately 21,000 words in two days. In her telling, we see her trying to find a way out of the snare, attempting multiple strategies that all lead to the same dead end where “the female is always a female.” The length and repetition in this section – how many times must she answer “if her heart be free”? – prompts the reader’s desire

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for Clarissa’s story to be different. The reader, along with Clarissa, imagines alternative routes that should be possible – most specifically, an identity not attached to a man – but are not. The effect of this repetition is both to lay out the horribly constricted territory within which women can plot their love and to mark, by negation, the alternative routes. The frustrating duration of this passage, or the relative closeness of its discourse-time (the time it takes to read the novel) to its story-time (the time that passes within the novel) is the necessary effect of a historical process that was opening up new paths for women in the period. In the slowness of the narrative, we see Clarissa’s discourse proliferating as she explores the new ideological space given to women’s voices and we see her searching for alternative possibilities not offered within the conventions of amatory seduction narratives where the first step is the last. While Clarissa is never able to state her love in the affirmative, she does plot it in a conditional past. The strongest indication we get of the truth of her heart is “I once could have loved him” which she repeats twice (992, 1,341). To her surrogate mother, Mrs. Norton, she puts the stress on the past: “I once could have loved him,” adding that “he never deserved my love” (992). The use of the conditional registers Clarissa’s conviction that love requires particular social and sexual conditions to flourish, conditions her world within the novel never contains. The plot that her love would have had to follow exists outside the novel’s diegesis, but that the plot is marked as an alternative – though unwritten and unknown – route is clear. After she utters “I once could have loved him” to Belford, she adds, “This is saying more than ever I could say of any other man out of my own family!” (1,341). “More than” is not saying everything; it only intimates that within this particular field of men, Lovelace is the one she could have loved and only if he had deserved her love. If Lovelace’s character had been different, she could have loved him but her own internal feelings of love are not enough to constitute love. The broad, the serious, the reaching sense of love for Clarissa – the love that frees her from her sexual difference – requires an external world, both a lover and a family, to nourish it so that it could exist within the novel’s space–time. The novel marks the limit of knowledge in Clarissa’s world and prompts the reader to imagine other possibilities that it does not write into being. Critics have often noted how painfully slowly Clarissa dies but this is not the only protracted section. In addition to the trial with her mother noted above, the narrative time between her leaving her father’s house and the rape unfolds at a snail’s pace and, in so doing, is critical to Clarissa’s emplotment and provides a way of understanding why she fails to anticipate the central

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event in the novel, the rape. Most seduction narratives before Richardson and many, if not most, after Clarissa, collapse the heroine’s loss of the protection of her father’s house into her sexual fall; the two events happen close together in the text and thus the reader comes to expect the second when she reads the first. But not so in Clarissa. She leaves her father’s house at the end of the second volume and is not raped until the fifth. The extension of the discourse-time between the two events repeats the effect of the slowed-down rhythm of Clarissa’s trial with her mother and shows Clarissa again and again chasing her ignis fatuus only to have it recede into an un-narrated future. The publication time between volumes allowed the novel’s first female readers to pause and linger in the moment when the inevitability of her fall is suspended and the slowed temporality allows them to imagine a world in which Clarissa’s fate could have been different. Lady Elizabeth Echlin’s alternative ending, for instance, follows Richardson up until the fire scene in Volume IV and then saves Clarissa from rape.36 Both Lady Echlin and her sister, Lady Bradshaigh, see Lovelace as reformable. It is in the volumes between Clarissa leaving her father’s house and the rape that Lady Bradshaigh wants to see Lovelace begin his slow and steady reformation: “I would, by choice, have him drawn by easy steps, and as it were insensibly, to reflection.”37 Richardson, of course, refuses Lovelace’s reformation because, unlike his female readers, he insists Lovelace’s character was plotted from the beginning and that “in the very first letter of Lovelace, all those seeds of wickedness were thick sown.”38 His female readers resist the imperative to see the end in the beginning and follow the suggestions of what “once could have” been for Clarissa. Indeed, Richardson’s heroine, after she leaves her father’s house, can also be read as resisting the fated-ness of her fate because she, too, hopes her actions in the world can bring about change and that she can be a free-willing agent of her own story. Immediately after she leaves, Anna advises marriage, arguing that she has no choice: she must be under either her father’s protection or her husband’s in order to maintain her reputation. “[Y]ou must bend a little,” Anna’s pragmaticism encourages (467). Initially, Clarissa does not accept these options, refuses to bend and hopes to be reconciled with her family on her terms. She lives as if she is in a world that would allow her autonomy and a social position other than daughter or wife. After leaving her father’s house, Clarissa begins to acknowledge her mistakes and sees them as mistakes of inexperience, but, importantly, she resists change because that would mean conforming to a cynical view of the world. She chides herself for being tricked into leaving Harlowe Place and realizes too late that she should have suspected Lovelace. Yet she resists

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accepting this model of knowledge because in order to know in advance, she would have had to assume that the world unfolds as a libertine seduction plot defined by male power and female objectification. “[W]hat a life to live for a spirit so open, and naturally so unsuspicious, as mine?” she exclaims, acknowledging what she would have to give up in order to suspect the world and the people in it of constantly dissembling (410). She knows that “an obliging temper is a very dangerous temper” yet the alternatives are too grim to accept (374). Even after her abduction, she, like Lady Bradshaigh, holds out hope for Lovelace’s reform because to relinquish hope would be to accept the unacceptable terms of patriarchal love. In response to more of Anna’s cautions about Lovelace’s sincerity, Clarissa affirms his earnestness because she refuses to believe that “the heart of man [could] be so very vile” (452). Either she believes all men are vile, or she hopes for change and hangs on to, what Lovelace and Anna repeatedly call, her “over-niceness” (384, 744). The battle in these middle volumes between Lovelace trying to pin Clarissa to sex and Clarissa trying to free herself from sex ends with the rape. At this point, Clarissa’s struggle with maintaining hope in the face of a limiting world ends and after the rape, she develops a misandry to match Lovelace’s misogyny, refusing the company of all men. While Richardson’s unreformable Lovelace does not succeed in reducing Clarissa to an insatiable sexuality, neither does Clarissa remain free from sexual difference. The rape reintroduces the shackles of sexual difference, only now women’s essential nature is innately virtuous rather than insatiable. While her will is unviolated in the rape, she has learnt the deeply cynical lesson that she is only a woman, that no matter what she does or thinks or feels, her story is plotted for her simply because of her sex. Clarissa’s dating of her death as April 10th – the day she left her father’s house – is a sad acknowledgment that the world did not allow her her dream of freedom from sex. That leaving her father’s house turned out retrospectively to have been her fatal step does not mean, however, that it always already was. Whether or not one sees Clarissa’s legacy as reasserting the patriarchy in a softer, sentimental and bourgeois form depends upon the weight endings have in fixing meaning. Certainly, the plot of rape propels us toward the end of Clarissa’s troubling ‘triumphant’ death. In his classic formulation of plot, Peter Brooks describes the process of making meaning as “the active quest of the reader for those shaping ends that, terminating the dynamic process of reading, promise to bestow meaning and significance on the beginning and the middle.”39 But the fact that we read as if endings will confer meaning on beginnings, does not mean that they necessarily do or do so unequivocally. Our desire may be propelled toward totality, but this “narrative totality,” as

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Brooks notes, “never is and never can be realized.”40 I have tried to demonstrate that the desire of Richardson’s female readers for the novel to end differently is, in fact, an alternative ending that the text propels its readers toward through the discourse of Clarissa’s story; the meaning of her discourse moves us toward an ending in which Lovelace recognizes her autonomy in love. To prioritize the ending that the novel actually writes, an ending that fixes meaning in terms of a restrictive bourgeois femininity, is to ignore the other endings that the novel makes possible and that reflect the heterogeneous terrain for knowing love in the mid-eighteenth century. Richardson’s novel did not necessarily have to reinscribe patriarchy as the novel also offers an alternative way of knowing woman, one that has intimately and affectively resonated with the novel’s female readers. The ending of Clarissa, I hope this chapter has shown, was not always already written into the first sentence.

chapter 2

The whore’s love or the Magdalen’s seduction

Samuel Richardson’s vindication of female virtue through his emplotment of seduction in Clarissa participates in the same movement to redefine sexual difference that gives rise to the new image of the penitent prostitute as a victim of seduction in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. The prostitute became an object of pity and charity, in part, because women’s essential nature had been re-imagined to exclude innate vice. William Dodd, a central figure in the Magdalen Hospital and its chaplain, rationalizes the charity’s mandate to reform prostitutes by invoking the new definition of essential femininity: “every man that reflects on the true condition of humanity, must know, that the life of a common prostitute, is as contrary to the nature and condition of the female sex, as darkness to light.”1 Unsurprisingly, Richardson was a supporter of the Magdalen charity from the beginning and, like its founders, he understood the prostitute as a victim of seduction, abandoned to poverty but essentially innocent.2 We see this in his enthusiastic defense of T. C. Phillips when she published her courtesan narrative shortly after the appearance of Clarissa in 1748. In a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, he indites Phillips’s initial seducer, Grimes, and vindicates Phillips’s virtue because he believes her initial fall happened without her consent: “What, think you, has not Mr Grimes to answer for in the ruin of Constantia Philips … if the story she tells be true? What ruins, the consequences of her ruin, may not be laid at his door?”3 His sympathy is conditional upon the truth of her rape and seduction story; that is, that Grimes tricked her into visiting his rooms for the King’s birthday fireworks, that he plied her with Barbados wine and then attempted her virtue, that she fought him off with tears and prayers, that he tied her to the chair and ripped off her clothes with a penknife, and that he promised, after raping her, to love her eternally.4 In Richardson’s interpretation of the penitent prostitute’s plot, the victim of seduction and rape will inevitably either die or be forced into prostitution and thus, culpability for her actions rests entirely with the man who first preyed upon her virtue. Since Phillips only 40

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turns to sexual commerce out of economic necessity, she remains an innocent victim. Samuel Johnson refers to the seduced victim’s prostitution as “the necessity of guilt,” thus registering both the prostitute’s sexual guilt and her moral innocence, a destabilizing division of sexuality from morality that underwrote much of the early Magdalen reform literature.5 The seduction tale, as Richardson’s and Johnson’s representations reveal, takes center stage in the sentimental whore’s story by refashioning the image of the prostitute into an economic and sexual victim. By the time the Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes opened in Goodman’s Fields on August 10, 1758, the sentimental portrait of the prostitute as a victim of seduction had taken shape in British culture. Her sprightlier sister, the voracious trickster harlot, remained in circulation throughout the later eighteenth century (for example, in the scandalous memoirs of Maria Brown and Ann Sheldon) but most scholars agree that the period witnesses a shift in the dominant representation of the prostitute from a sexual predator to an economic victim.6 Propagandists for the Magdalen Hospital such as John Fielding, Jonas Hanway and Robert Dingley, represent the prostitute as virtue in distress, and by testifying that her loss of virginity was caused by seduction, not willful desire, they create the pathetic object for their institution. Robert Dingley’s Proposals for Establishing a Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes (1758) provides a good example of the rhetorical force of the sentimental portrait of the seduced victim: I appeal to every mind, from its own experience, if there can be greater Objects of Compassion than poor, young, thoughtless Females, plunged into ruin by those tempations [sic], to which their very youth and personal advantages exposes [sic] them … Surrounded by snares, the most artfully and industriously laid, snares laid by those endowed with superior faculties, … what virtue can be proof against such formidable Seducers, who offer too commonly, and too profusely promise, to transport the thoughtless Girls from Want, Confinement, and Restraint of Passions, to Luxury, Liberty, Gaiety, and Joy?7

Note the complete absence of the words ‘prostitute’ or ‘whore’ in Dingley’s description. The repetition of the seduction story throughout the Magdalen polemical tracts works to collapse ‘prostitute’ into ‘seduced woman.’ Indeed, ‘seduction’ and ‘prostitution’ are often used interchangeably in the later eighteenth century because prostitution was imagined as the invariable fate of the seduced woman. Tim Hitchcock recounts the new pervasive story: “the prostitute of the mid-century and beyond was inevitably the victim of the honeyed words of a young rake who seduced and then abandoned the now ruined object of his attentions.”8 The collapse was so effective that by the

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1780s, the Magdalen Hospital made the logical step to change its admission policy to prioritize genteel women who had been seduced but were not yet technically prostitutes in the hopes that such women had spent less time living in vice and were thus more likely to reform.9 The last section of this chapter charts the path to this policy change and I hope to explain why a charity that rejected one of its first applicants in 1758 precisely because she was not a prostitute, ended as a hospice for single women who had been sexually active but had not yet sold their bodies for money.10 A few years after the publication of T. C. Phillips’s story and his initial supportive comments, Richardson retracted his sympathies. He had grown to doubt the truth of her narrative and includes her, along with Laetitia Pilkington and Lady Vane, in his “Set of Wretches, wishing to perpetuate their Infamy.”11 What seems particularly of concern to Richardson is the publicity and profit these writers accrued by making public their sexual histories. The tension between moral culpability and economics is never far from the Magdalen figure. While economic necessity exculpates the act, the penitent prostitute must never demonstrate a commercial interest, since a desire for money would compromise the moral innocence her victimization demands. The Magdalen Hospital’s admissions policy circles around this tension as it refused applicants who came in search of material, not spiritual, sustenance. “One of the early difficulties,” Rev. S. B. P. Pearce notes in his history of the charity, “was that of deciding whether the motive which drove the applicant to the step was that of penury rather than penitence. The Committee were aware of this and advised the rejection of such women.”12 Pearce does not note the tension between the hospital refusing poverty without moral penitence as a motive for admittance at the same time as it promoted economic necessity as the reason for the prostitute’s fall. The image of the prostitute as victim of seduction had the effect of redefining prostitution from an act of sexual volition to an act of economic necessity, a turn from sex to money that emphasizes the prostitute’s relationship to a new commercial marketplace at the same time as it sentimentalized her fall. The relation between feeling and finance at play in the figure of the penitent prostitute is complex. Partly, the relation is a temporal one where the prostitute’s first fall is caused by sentimental seduction and the second one, into selling sex, is precipitated by financial need. But the mix of sentiment and money also links the Magdalen to the affective economics underwriting companionate bourgeois marriage. The representation of the Magdalen as a casualty of an emerging capitalist marketplace integrates many images central to bourgeois femininity: an innate virtue, a heart that claims a right to love (however misguidedly she may choose the object of her

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affections) and the rejection of a public commercial identity in favour of (a lost) private modesty. In other words, the redefinition of the prostitute mirrors the redefinition of the wife’s sexual role under domestic ideology. Ruth Perry notes the crucial part the figure of the prostitute came to play in debates about the importance of affection versus economics in marriage choice, observing that “[i]t became nearly impossible for anyone thinking about women’s condition to mention wives without mentioning prostitutes or prostitutes without mentioning wives.”13 The belief that affective feelings, not economics, should determine marriage choice provokes the repeated comparison between mercenary marriage and prostitution. The new catch-phrase for mercenary marriage – “legal prostitution” – nicely captures the overlap between the sexual and the economic in the emerging romantic commerce between the sexes.14 While many have noted the similarities between mercenary marriage and prostitution, less discussed is the significant overlap between the whore’s love and affective marriage. I propose to read Magdalen narratives to detail the contribution that the figure of the sentimental prostitute makes to a history of love, not a history of commerce or illicit sex.15 It is my contention that early narratives of the Magdalens, most particularly the anonymous novel The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760), represent the penitent prostitute as best encapsulating the ideal of nonmercenary love and that the seduced woman who is forced into prostitution, at times, provides a better model for a love divorced from commerce than the chaste wife.16 While courtship novels like Burney’s Evelina confuse marriage for love with mercenary marriage by rewarding the heroine with money at the end, sentimental prostitute narratives prioritize love over money in the victim’s initial loss of virtue and firmly separate affective and economic relations. By telling the tales of women who only turn to the sex trade out of economic necessity, after being abandoned by the men they loved for free, these narratives provide an important initial exploration of the dangers and difficulties women faced in negotiating an easy convergence of sex, love and financial support under a rubric of a post-Hardwicke institution of marriage. This chapter ultimately demonstrates that the figure who best exemplifies the commercialization of sex – the prostitute – refashioned in her Magdalen dress, provides a strong example in the mid-eighteenth century of love without interest. In doing so, Magdalen narratives such as The Histories expose the founding aporia in the bourgeois marriage plot: unlike Evelina and many of her courtship narrative sisters, these women trust that their sexual desires speak a truth about their emotional attachments and they claim a right to act upon that knowledge rather than having to learn to control, restrain and

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silence their heart’s desires. Implicit in the dominant courtship plot is the wrestling away of epistemological authority from women’s bodies at the same time as it emphasizes that they act on their heart’s choice; this conundrum involves a displacement of self-authority onto a socialized understanding of love that actually structures that feeling in non-erotic and economic terms. In other words, the whore’s love and the wife’s esteem take their cue from the same cultural movement – away from mercenary marriage and toward affective choice – but the former refuses to codify a marital sex without female sexual knowledge and desire as love. The whore’s love, I argue, renders the economics of love within bourgeois marriage visible. The differences between the various Magdalen narratives, I demonstrate below, show how many of the early penitent prostitute narratives are courtship plots telling the true story of a non-mercenary love. the multiple stories within the magdalen movement My reading of the sentimental whore as representing the ideal of nonmercenary love seeks to add complexity to the scholarly legacy of the Magdalen movement. Many scholars cite the Magdalen movement as evidence that the sentimental revolution was a conservative and disempowering force for women since the disruptive power of the sexual outlaw or performative prostitute in the time of Behn and Defoe is neutralized by a discourse of victimization that disciplines the prostitute through a Foucauldian regime of moral reform.17 Tony Henderson, for instance, argues that with the rise of the penitent prostitute “came a denial of prostitutes’ ability to act as free agents.”18 Vivien Jones reads the Magdalen tales as a conservative force, arguing that the sentimental narrative “seeks to contain … the prostitute as redeemable victim” and that “[a]ttention to the politics of gender reveals humanitarian concern as a form of containment.” For Jones, the reform narrative reclaims the prostitute for the purposes of “returning her to patriarchy.”19 The hospital’s strict rules, outlined in The Rules, Orders and Regulations, of the Magdalen House (1760), coupled with its insistence that patients recognize their moral failings and internalize a surveillance-regime of virtue, lend credence to the conservative reading. However, I want to disrupt this reading and challenge a history that points to the Magdalen movement as hegemonically stripping prostitutes of any form of agency – sexual, emotional and economic. It is my contention that there are many different stories of prostitution circulating within the Magdalen movement, especially in its initial formative decades from the 1750s to the 1770s, and that not all of these stories lead to the prostitutes’ absolute

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victimization. Most cultural historians of prostitution, even those who read for complexity and difference, tend to see penitent prostitute narratives as formulaic and paint a monolithic picture of the Magdalen movement.20 By focusing on the use of seduction, I argue that there are significant differences amongst penitent prostitute narratives, and that these differences reveal how the sentimentalization of the prostitute opened up many radical avenues for envisioning women’s agency. For instance, The Histories unravels and separates out the different forms of agency (sexual, emotional, economic) and reveals a distinctly different dynamic from the one operating both in dominant configurations of bourgeois marriage and in the moral tracts supporting the Magdalen charity. At the heart of the Magdalen movement lies the benevolent belief that a woman who has fallen is not lost to virtue and can be reclaimed for licit relations; as William Dodd proclaimed, the prostitute is “not undone beyond the power of recovery.”21 The sea change in attitudes toward the prostitute had potentially radical effects, including the suggestion that the act of selling sex out of extreme poverty did not define a woman as the base Other to the chaste virgin and virtuous wife. The Magdalen movement’s emphasis on the social and economic conditions which forced women into prostitution focused public attention on the disappearing employment opportunities for women and the damaging sexual double standard. In those first few decades, the movement’s leniency toward the fallen woman promised not just individual but social reform. By the end of the century, the unreformed prostitute might have been relegated to the haunts of Covent Garden as absolutely irredeemable in ‘choosing’ to sell sex rather than to reform, but in the transitional mid-century, when attitudes were still changing, the emerging ideology of prostitutes as victims of seduction and ruin had startling and potentially radical effects on dominant ideas about women and love. The infantalized portrayal of the prostitute as agent-less victim dominates the tracts written in support of the hospital’s founding and, here, the conservative reading finds convincing evidence. Propagandists such as Jonas Hanway and Robert Dingley invariably represent the prostitute as passive virtue in distress, as illustrated in the passage from Dingley quoted above. Since the young “thoughtless” virgins require the protection of the male governors of the hospital, the relationship Dingley imagines between the charity and its patients is a paternalistic and patriarchal one. However, when we turn away from the polemical tracts and look at the narratives about, or supposedly by, penitent prostitutes we begin to see multiple and different seduction stories, including ones telling non-victimized accounts

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of how the heroine found herself on the steps of the Magdalen Hospital.22 When we acknowledge the highly variegated and contested picture of female desire and prostitution that these tales paint, any easy distinction between the whore’s story and the courtship plot, or between the sentimental whore and the bourgeois wife, collapses and the similarities bring into focus epistemological differences in how they conceptualize woman’s new knowledge of love. The Magdalen’s story could be distinguished from that of Evelina or any courtship novel by its tragic, as opposed to comic, ending. But not all Magdalen narratives end with the prostitute’s penitence followed by death or admission to the hospital. While some penitents tell their story from within the hospital or from beyond the grave, others narrate tales of life after prostitution. Fanny Sidney, the title character of Martin Madan’s popular biography, An Account of the Death of F. S. who Died April 1763 Aged Twenty-Six Years (1763), leaves the hospital halfway through her story and her life after reform turns out to be harder than her life as a prostitute.23 Upon release, she faces poverty as a haymaker in Kent, and when she later succumbs to consumption while a domestic servant in Canterbury, she is fired and reduced to begging. As propaganda for the hospital and for penitence this tale clearly fails and the text, while advocating the pleasures of salvation through penitence, provides a stinging indictment of women’s limited employment opportunities.24 In a world with such few ways for women to earn their bread, prostitution ends up appearing as a less physically demanding and healthier alternative. The tale still has a tragic ending (through the benevolent intervention of Madan, Fanny is restored to her mother where she dies in peace), but by writing beyond the hospital, prostitution appears as the most profitable form of women’s limited labor options. Other tales defy the ‘conventional’ tragic ending in more optimistic ways. Far from being either dead or incarcerated in the hospital, many prostitutes go on to lead happy, healthy lives. The heroines of The History of Miss Sally Johnson, Or, the Unfortunate Magdalen (1800?) and “Fanny: Or, the Fair Foundling of Saint George’s Field” (1786) are rewarded with marriage after their lives as prostitutes and their sexual experience enhances their domestic skills, making them even better wives than their virginal sisters. In another comic plot twist, the heroine of The Life and Adventures of a Reformed Magdalen (1763) leaves the hospital, reconciles with her dying father, inherits a fortune and leads an independent, single and virtuous life.25 These diverse endings for the penitent prostitute tale speak to the potentially radical paths that open up for women when all is not lost with the loss

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of virginity. As endings are diverse, so too are beginnings. Not all Magdalen tales commence with a heroine who is an innocent virgin. Married women are the subjects of William Dodd’s “History of a Magdalen” and the last tale in Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House.26 In the 1760s at least, a heroine does not have to be pure and virtuous to be wronged, nor does her sexual transgression inevitability lead to death or incarceration. Perhaps the most telling difference amongst the tales involves the representation of the heroine’s sexual desire. The causes given for her ruin vary enormously as do the descriptions of the initial loss of her virginity. If what makes the prostitute a reformable Magdalen according to the moralists is the fact that she did not consent to the initial sex but fell to the snares of her lover, then a good number of these heroines are not candidates for the hospital. Many, if not most, actually consent to sex the first time and are not as entirely faultless as the figure of the innocent victim in Magdalen tracts would suggest. For instance, the title character in Hugh Kelly’s popular novel Memoirs of a Magdalen: Or, The History of Louisa Mildmay (1767) clearly desires her fiancé, Sir Robert, when she has sex with him the night before their wedding. Her consensual sexual act is repeatedly called “the most convincing proof of her affection” by her fiancé’s friend, Charles.27 After her indiscretion leads to her being disowned by her family, initially rejected by Sir Robert, reduced to poverty, kidnapped and held hostage by a rake, she finds her way to the Magdalen Hospital though she has not sold her body for sex. She remains virtuous and singular in her love for Sir Robert and her love is rewarded with marriage in the end, thus proving her family and friends wrong when they assumed that “the woman who deviates from the rules of virtue with one man, will have very little scruple to indulge the licentious turn of her disposition with another” (70). Louisa understands her erotic desire (which Robert notes is only “natural” in women) as attached to her love and thus, when Robert offers to marry her post-sex though he no longer loves or respects her, she refuses, choosing to honour love over her reputation (46). Charles repeatedly argues that Louisa should not be punished because she loves Sir Robert; “[H]er error,” Charles insists, “was an excess of love, not a vehemence of constitution” (83). The ending confirms Charles’s vision of the purifying qualities of love, and Louisa’s sexual agency in consenting to intercourse ultimately stands as proof of her unique and undying love.28 A few heroines are Clarissa-like in their fall but they are the exception, not the rule, and in the “Story of a Penitent Prostitute,” the plot mimics Clarissa’s moment of ruin but not her chaste and martyred death. She recounts her rape: “in less than an hour [after drinking the drugged wine], as

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I have since been informed, [I] was carried up, senseless, to bed. What a situation was this for a young girl! robbed of her fortune, and, what is still dearer to her, her virtue!”29 Unlike Clarissa, however, she repeats the act undrugged after her lover is contrite and promises marriage. He later abandons her and she resorts to prostitution, ultimately finding her way to the Magdalen Hospital. While she is as virtuous as Clarissa after the first sexual act, her repetition of the act is a problem, as she herself acknowledges (“I consented,” she says of the second time), and the line between sexual innocence and complicity is hard to draw.30 Most penitents are not as dead to sexual desire as the unconscious Clarissa-figure above. Many feel passion and embrace illicit sex as willingly as any early Eliza Haywood heroine. There is little difference between the seductions in Love in Excess and the following description of Lucy’s fall from Dodd’s The Sisters: “[Captain Smith] flew to her arms with more than common rapture, and met from her panting bosom equal transport, which heaved up and down with wild and wishing throbs, tears of pleasure meanwhile overflowing her artless eyes.”31 Dodd’s third-person narrator can explicitly describe Lucy’s “panting bosom” whereas most Magdalen tales are told in the first person, making sexual climaxes more difficult to narrate. Though the narrator’s desire may be more opaque in these texts, it is not absent. When Emily, one of the heroine-narrators in The Histories, comes to describe her moment of ruin the reader will be forgiven for missing it. A sigh to “Fatal Impatience” is the only indication that the sexual climax has been reached (22). But the reader has been previously informed of her budding desire when she writes of her lover, Markland, “I confess I was not always desirous of avoiding him” (20). Her confession acknowledges her desire and attaches this desire to the feelings of her heart; that is, her love for Markland weds sexual and emotional agencies and to act on one, involves the other. Emily’s problem is that she loves, or experiences what she thinks must be love, while ignoring her economic subject position. Her fate (abandonment, poverty, prostitution) registers a split between an active erotic desire wedded to affection and an act of either love or sex wedded to economic commerce. If there is a dominant pattern in the early Magdalen tales, it is this: the prostitute falls the first time for love, and the second time for money. In separating out sex for love from sex for money and rendering the two in distinct narrative acts, the tales plot two different stories of women’s sexual desire and demonstrate the loss of economic agency that romantic love entails. The stories also confuse any clear determination of moral guilt as the first fall – the one that society deems the most significant – is for a love the

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heroine believes to be legitimate whereas the second one, for money, is when the prostitute acknowledges her guilt yet simultaneously underscores that poverty makes the repetition necessary. Maria, a “Grateful Magdalen” who supposedly writes in to Dodd’s The Visitor, recounts her seduction and it is the second sexual act, the one she performs out of poverty, where she “made the first step into known and voluntary guilt.”32 In comparison, her first step into sex, because it was accompanied by love and the promise of marriage, is legitimate. By plotting the two different sexual acts (affective and economic) in a variety of ways, the tales respond to questions about the changing nature of love, marriage and courtship. Whether or not the heroine desires, whether or not she consents to sex and whether or not her first leads to prostitution, the problem of deciphering what love is and when this love equals marriage is staged across all the Magdalen tales. hardwicke’s marriage act; or, the wife as whore The scandalous “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” ostensibly written by Lady Frances Anne Vane and included in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751), provides an interesting perspective on sentimental prostitution’s divisions between sex, love and money. In it, the writer, most probably Vane, defines the prostitute as a woman who takes money for sex but interestingly distinguishes such a woman from one who has illicit sex out of love even when she profits from it. The memoir confirms the analysis that the shift from sex to money defines the late eighteenth-century prostitute, but for Vane, a whore is not just a woman who has sex for money but a woman who has sex for money without love. She is not a prostitute precisely because she loves the men who economically support her: “on the article of love … that was a theme on which I never wanted orators; and could I have prevailed upon myself to profit by the advances that were made, I might have managed my opportunities, so as to have set fortune at defiance for the future. But I was none of those economists, who can sacrifice their hearts to interested considerations.”33 In other words, Vane is not a prostitute (one of “those economists”) because she does not put commercial wealth above all else, though her lovers often support her financially. Mercenary intent is precisely what defines the prostitute in Maria Brown’s courtesan narrative: “Every woman that is desirous of making her way in the world by her person, should imitate the tradesman and have no other object in view but interest and gain. Her heart should always be inaccessible to any real passion.”34 What distinguishes both Vane and the Magdalens from the

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tradesman-whore is precisely their desire for love, not money. Insofar as the Magdalen tales crystallize the distinction between love and money, between the first and second fall, they narrate a new courtship plot that criticizes mercenary marriage and promotes affective romantic unions. If love for Vane, not money, marks when sex is prostitution and when it is not, then love, for the Magdalens, and not institutional marriage, defines when sex is licit and when it is illicit. Legal marriage as a guarantor of sanctioned romantic love fails miserably to perform its task in these tales and this failure is informative. On the one hand, Magdalen stories prop up the new affective discourse that defines a valid marriage as one based on love and not money by demonstrating the purity of feeling over economic interest. On the other hand, the plot’s turn to prostitution, rather than marriage, is often caused by the failure of the social institutions established in support of companionate marriages to sanction love properly, most particularly, Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753. Questions of what constitutes a valid marriage are front and center in the middle of the century and Magdalen tales speak to the cultural anxiety over the new legal definition of marriage. Before 1753, a promise of marriage plus sexual intercourse legally constituted marriage; the act rendered legal only those marriages performed with banns or a license. As scholars have recently pointed out, the Act had the effect of turning those women who believed their suitor’s promise to marry and consented to sex into fallen women and whores, where previously they could claim to be legitimate wives. Eve Tavor Bannet argues that “[a]fter the Marriage Act became law, a woman who contracted to live with a man in the old way, without all the precise ceremonial forms required by the act, was no longer legally a wife … All the seductions, abductions, and clandestine marriages … now made a woman a whore.”35 Ruth Perry concurs: “[a]s its opponents had predicted, the Hardwicke Act made prostitutes of honest women.”36 Magdalen heroines are often just such “honest women.” Charles Horne made the direct link between the Act and prostitution in his 1783 Serious Thoughts on the Miseries of Seduction and Prostitution: “The marriage act I am apt to think the greatest cause of prostitution.”37 Maria, the “Grateful Magdalen,” anticipates Horne’s claim and blames her prostitution on the Marriage Act. A sheltered country miss, Maria falls in love with Mr. G*** and consents to elope with him. When the two arrive in London, he informs her that “by means of the execrable new marriage act, it was impossible for us to get married!”38 Having left her father’s house on the belief that they would marry in London, Maria’s fall is caused by the discovery that the Marriage Act denies her the right to marry without her

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father’s permission. Her lover then brings her a pretended marriage license which she thinks is real, justifying her mistake by her innocent ignorance (“how easy was it to impose on a young girl who knew nothing of these matters?”39). They live as if married, she has a child and then he abandons her and informs her that the marriage was never legal. After trying all means of economic survival, she accepts Mr. S***’s offer to exchange sex for money. Maria’s story is echoed by Emma, “the victim of deluded love,” in Emma; Or the Dying Penitent (1799). Henry gains her “unsuspecting heart” and she consents to sex under the promise of marriage but when her father refuses to consent to the marriage, they cannot get married under the Act.40 Henry then abandons her and she falls into prostitution. In the second tale of The Histories, the anonymous heroine cites the Marriage Act as the cause of her prostitution and, like Maria, she lives as if she were a wife and the reader sees no difference between the false and a real marriage. The narrator begins with a typical courtship plot in which her lover, Mr. Monkerton, proposes a clandestine marriage on the premise that his guardian would not consent. She does everything within her power to ensure that their sex will be licit. She forces him to sign a contract promising not to have sex with her to cover the time between leaving her father’s house and the performance of the marriage ceremony in London. They go directly to the Fleet and marry so she gives “up [her] … contract, as being of no farther use” (61). She follows all the rules of virtue except leaving her father’s house without his consent and this exception highlights how Hardwicke’s law infantilized young women by taking away their power of consent. Mr. and Mrs. Monkerton live happily as a married couple for over a year; she proves herself a worthy wife with her great household economy. But then he tires of her and, citing the Marriage Act, proclaims himself free: “thanks to the law, I am not married,” he brags, “[t]he Marriage Act, my dear … We were neither of us of age; and therefore no marriage between us could be valid, without the consent of our friends” (67). She is stunned: “I had heard the Marriage Act talked of, but had never attended to the purport of it; nor did I believe it could affect the validity of our marriage” (67). Monkerton sends her a copy of the Act and she cannot deny its performative power to turn her marriage-for-love into a repeated act of illicit sex. Ten pages later, she must accept the offer of Monkerton’s friend to be his kept mistress. The tone of The Histories encourages the reader to feel sympathy for the heroine and to call for leniency toward women whose only crime was to love and think themselves legally married when they were not. As the heroine asserts, “I could not accuse myself of want of chastity” (69). The tale forces us to ponder the difference between the Monkertons’

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‘marriage’ and any other affective legal union and we can only conclude that there is none. Her love and domestic virtues constitute a legitimate marriage. In the next section, I want to provide a closer reading of The Histories because the text stands out from all the Magdalen tales as using seduction and the prostitute’s story to provide a critique of the emerging discourse of love. The motif of the Marriage Act in Magdalen tales foregrounds the instability in this new discourse of love; The Histories goes further and unmasks many of the ideological assumptions that come to be held as true about bourgeois marriage: that virginity is a woman’s highest commodity, that she is only chaste when married, that aristocratic men marry middleclass women, or that true love is easy to distinguish from the mercenary interests of parents and second sons. Forty years before Jacobin feminism, The Histories makes a feminist argument about how the wife and the prostitute are linked by women’s financial dependence on men, but it also shows the similarities in their ability to love.41 By the end of the four tales, these prostitutes have paradoxically demonstrated the virtues of monogamy, non-mercenary love and domestic economy at the same time as their tales critique the severe treatment of fallen women, women’s lack of education and their economic dependence on men. the whore’s love in the histories of some of the penitents Originally published two years after the opening of the Magdalen Hospital, The Histories is less a novel about prostitution and more a typical novel of courtship and marriage. All four heroines set out on the middle-class road to marriage but none makes it safely to their destination. In all four tales, The Histories queries what makes a marriage a marriage and answers with the claim that a moral marriage requires informed female sexual consent and reciprocal love. Ceremony, property, duty and familial support do not constitute an ethical marriage, indeed, those issues most often work counter to it. Markman Ellis argues that “[a]s a whole, the novel defends orthodox marriage … But it is not just a defence of marriage as marriage: it also firmly criticises any marriage not based on romantic love and affection.”42 I would go further than Ellis to argue that the form of marriage the novel promotes is not “orthodox” at all, but based on a critique of both traditional forms of marriage as property-exchange and the new post-Hardwicke legal form where women’s sexual desire is silenced in favor of a socialized understanding of love. Unlike other sentimental narratives or conduct literature that sketch out the new bourgeois love as seamlessly bringing love and

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economic property together under middle-class domesticity, The Histories takes seriously the claim that marriage should be based on female consent and instead interrogates how women can act on their desires and make conscious decisions based upon their own heart since these decisions conflict with society, economics and family. The Histories repeatedly stages plots where women mistake themselves as wives and this blurring questions the grounds for determining legitimate marriage. The second heroine’s tale, described above, most obviously critiques the definition of marriage. If the story had ended with Monkerton’s abandonment, we may have read the moral as warning women to refuse all clandestine proposals and only marry or leave their father’s houses with parental consent. But the tale pushes the collapse of wife and kept mistress further and in the second half of her story, she lives as a wife even though she knows she is only a kept mistress. Mr. Senwill, Monkerton’s friend, offers to keep her as a wife and pleads his love: “He assured me he would do all that was in his power to raise my blasted reputation, by treating me as his wife, and consenting to my assuming his name” and since his “principles appeared such as merited my esteem,” she accepts his offer (72, 71). What is the difference between “assuming” and “having” his name? How can a man who offers to keep her have principles to be esteemed? The novel poses but does not answer these questions and introduces ambiguity at every turn. By every standard of companionate marriage, the Senwills are married: they consent to live together and do so for over a year in harmony, happiness, with mutual respect, affection and domestic economy. Even the servants think them married and their performance of marriage is so successful that rumors reach Mr. Senwill’s father that his son is married to a woman of ill repute and the father forces an end to the relationship. She thought herself married in her first relationship though her lover was untrue. The second time around, she knows she is not married but here she has “no doubt of Mr Senwill’s love” (77) and she loves him in return (he is the “man whom [she] … loved with reverence” [79]). The text clearly sides with the second ‘marriage’ because of its reciprocal knowledge of love. An encounter with her sister at a playhouse reinforces the ethical – though not legal – legitimacy of the Senwills’ marriage. Her disfigured sister grew up jealous of the penitent’s beauty: “Like most girls, she [the sister] had been taught to think marriage the ultimate end of her creation; and that woman was made for man,” but realizing that she would not get a husband with her beauty, she hoped to conquer with “her economic virtues” (53). In order to compensate for her unfortunate lot in life, the unattractive sister claims moral superiority, asserting that the penitent’s

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vanity and beauty would win her lovers, but no husband. This background sets the scene for their meeting at the play and creates the expectation that the unattractive sister will claim victory in the marriage match since the beautiful one eloped with a lover who did not marry her. But this is not what happens. At first the sister tries to gloat and claims that she is actually married to the apprentice who accompanies her to the play. On closer investigation, it turns out that the sister, like her beautiful counterpart, has eloped without her father’s consent and is no more married than her sister. Interestingly, the text leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not she is legally married, that is, whether the unattractive sister was of age and did not require her father’s consent. The point is that the circumstances of the two sisters – eloping without their father’s consent – is identical. Senwill further complicates the reader’s ability to identify the real from the fake wife, when he claims to be married. Angered by the hypocritical disdain the unattractive sister has for her fallen sister, he asserts his displeasure that “she should imagine he did not make her sister as good as one [a wife]; for he thought it his duty to make his wife happy” (74). His contention that he made the penitent “as good as” a wife because he is obligated to make his wife happy is convoluted and circular. Is she as good as a wife though not a wife? And if a husband is defined by his duty to make his spouse happy, then is she a wife because he has made her happy? If the second tale in The Histories proposes that reciprocal love and mutual respect – not legality – make a marriage a marriage, the third tale underscores the necessity that this love originate in informed female consent. A woman’s knowledge of her heart, the novel suggests, is a learned behavior that requires female education; thus, an innocence based in ignorance signifies nothing. The story begins with a lost princess plot: Fanny is raised in a poor country household and, at age eight, discovers that she is the illegitimate daughter of a lady of fashion. While Burney’s Evelina gets her birthright restored on her wedding eve, this lost princess’s tale has no such happy ending. Encouraged by the village people to go in search of her mother in London when all she knows is her name, – Madam Tent – Fanny’s fate is determined by her ignorance. Bad luck leads her to a man she mistakes as a Squire because he has lace on his coat; he insists he knows Madam Tent and takes her to this “mother to a great many” (98). We recognize the bawd immediately, but the ignorant Fanny does not. Her ‘mother’ knows the value of Fanny’s ignorance and charges her other ‘daughters’ to maintain the familial delusion until she sells her simplicity to a Mr. Mastin. Fanny’s ignorance is a commodity more valuable than physical virginity.

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Because of this ignorance, the bawd is able to convince Fanny that she is actually married to Mr. Mastin. When Fanny resists Mr. Mastin’s sexual advances, he calls in Mrs. Tent who informs Fanny that Mr. Mastin is allowed to take such liberties with his wife. Surprised to hear she is a wife, Fanny wonders how she could be since she has not been in a church. Mrs. Tent plays upon the challenges to traditional marriage of a new urban middle-class society: “None but low country people make all that fuss about marriage. No other ceremony is required among people of fashion, but for a gentleman to tell a lady that he will marry her daughter; and then, if she consents, they become man and wife” (101). Fanny protests further: the Squire’s daughter in her village had a church wedding and “poor Susan Stokes was made to stand in a white sheet in our parish, because she had a child by a man to whom she had never been married in the church” (102). The bawd’s sophistry reaches its height when she convinces Fanny that Susan’s mother probably did not give consent whereas she has so Fanny is married. Oddly, there is logic to Mrs. Tent’s assertion since, post-Hardwicke, parental consent could distinguish legal from non-legal contracts. With no reference to Fanny’s desire, the argument of parental consent convinces Fanny that she is married and “[m]y scruples being satisfied … I received Mr. Mastin’s visits regularly” (102). Even though Fanny and Mr. Mastin are never technically married, the tale asserts the absurdity of any marriage that would involve women’s ignorance or give primacy to parental consent over a woman’s heart. The tale is also an exception to the rule I noted above, that the penitent prostitute falls the first time for love and the second time for money since, in Fanny’s tale, the falls are reversed. She prostitutes herself in the first half (though her ignorance makes her at first unaware of precisely how her actions signify), and then, in the second half, she loves without the expectation of money (while she eventually becomes Mr. Lafew’s kept mistress, the initial adultery is romantically motivated). The reversal underscores The Histories’ insistence that female virtue and love must be grounded in a knowledge of the world. Unfortunately, this knowledge comes too late for Fanny as her past ignorance taints her present love. The novel contrasts Fanny’s ignorant relationship with Mr. Mastin in the first half of her tale, with Mr. Mastin’s sister’s ideal sentimental marriage in the second half. After tiring of Fanny, Mr. Mastin places her as a maid in his sister’s, Mrs. Lafew’s, house, thus reversing the usual plot direction of the Magdalen who moves from domestic service to ruin, a move most often figured as a shift from innocence (ignorance) to knowledge (sex). In tracing this path backwards, the narrative underscores how much deeper Fanny’s appreciation of the virtuous marriage can be now that she has acquired

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knowledge of the world. Mrs. Lafew is the wife Clarissa was never allowed to be: she helps the poor and sick, she is a loving mother to her children and she esteems her husband. But tragedy enters the Lafew household when scarlet fever brings both husband and wife to the verge of death and only their life-threatening illness allows for the revelation: Fanny loves Mr. Lafew. When Fanny proves herself to be as self-sacrificing and nurturing as Mrs. Lafew by risking her life to nurse the family, Mr. Lafew awakens to his feelings for Fanny which include a sexual desire missing from his feelings for his wife. His later illness allows their reciprocal love to be discovered to each other simultaneously. Fanny replaces Mrs. Lafew after the illness, though the legal wife recovers and no one dies. The context of the affair – Fanny’s great respect for Mrs. Lafew, the way she resists acknowledging her love for Mr. Lafew and the extreme circumstances that lead to consummation – suggests that the real object of Fanny’s desire is Mrs., and not Mr., Lafew. She wants to be Mrs. Lafew, to replace her and have the marriage she now recognizes to be ideal because of the mutual respect and companionship the Lafews share. That Mrs., and not Mr., Lafew is the central figure in this relationship is borne out by the plot. The narrative jumps over the intervening time of the affair – when Mr. Lafew sets Fanny up in a house and she gives birth to their son – and settles on another lifethreatening bedside scene. This time Fanny is the ill patient and Mrs. Lafew, the nurse. Mrs. Lafew learns of the affair and instead of reacting with anger and resentment, she responds to Fanny with tenderness and understanding, respecting Fanny’s love for her husband. Mrs. Lafew’s masochism in putting the needs of her husband above her own, reaches its peak when she is concerned about the anxiety her husband must feel not knowing why Fanny is not responding to his letters (he is out of town when Fanny falls ill). On Mrs. Lafew’s own suggestion, she disguises her handwriting and takes a dictation from Fanny who is too ill to write. The writing ‘I’ collapses wife and mistress into one, a merging that stands as the narrative’s climax. In her masochism and generosity, Mrs. Lafew ultimately proves herself to be the better wife and when Fanny recovers, she repents, relinquishes her claim on Mr. Lafew, enters the Magdalen Hospital and gives her son to Mrs. Lafew to raise. The ideal family that is restored to peace and harmony at the end, however, has been significantly transformed through Fanny’s desire. Mrs. Lafew visits Fanny at the hospital and Fanny notes, “[t]o complete my satisfaction she assured me, that she had never known him [her husband] more affectionate in his behaviour” (128). The plot clearly divides Fanny’s violation of sacred laws from Mrs. Lafew’s virtue so that Christian marriage wins the day; however, Fanny’s shadowing of Mrs. Lafew, the ease with

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which she mirrors her and the way Fanny’s desire ultimately rejuvenates the marriage, making it stronger and larger, challenges the idealism with which this perfect marriage is portrayed. The narrative depends upon an acknowledgment that sentimental marriage erases erotic desire; in contrast to the esteem he feels for his wife, Fanny is capable of giving “rise to warmer passions” in Mr. Lafew (116). At the same time as the text constructs the Lafews’ marriage as the ideal, it also demonstrates that an ex-prostitute can easily reproduce the wife’s behavior and, in some respects, stand in as the better wife because her love includes sexual desire. Fanny is not ignorant when she falls for Mr. Lafew and the affair ultimately shows that, under different circumstances, she could have wedded her erotic agency to a virtuous marriage and been, like Mrs. Lafew without the masochistic erasure of self, a dutiful and loving wife. Fanny’s and ‘Mrs. Monkerton’s’ stories sketch the contours of an ethical affectionate marriage by tracing it from the outside in, and imagining these prostitutes as potential ideal wives under different legal, erotic, educational and social circumstances. The last tale in the novel takes the opposite approach and draws the picture of marriage as a form of prostitution. Unlike her precursors, this heroine is legally married but the marriage is represented as immoral and illegitimate because she does not willingly consent. While the unnamed heroine loves Young Turnham, she is forced to marry the “battered rake” Mr. Merton, a rich old man her mother contracts a marriage to for economic reasons (133). Her non-consent to the marriage is explicit on her wedding day when she faints walking up the aisle and the ceremony proceeds with her “much more dead than alive” (135). The text asserts that marrying without love leads to immorality, as the heroine acknowledges, “mercenary marriage … [was] my first step to ruin, tho’ not a voluntary one” (163). She eventually escapes her abusive husband and, after unsuccessfully trying to reconcile with her family and seek legal means of separation, she begins a ‘left-handed’ marriage to Turnham. Like the Senwills’ relationship, the Turnhams’ turns out to be the best marriage of all, at least for many years. They live together with their three children in harmony; she eventually is forced to become a mercenary prostitute after his death but only because of the demands of motherhood.43 Unable to support her three children by needlework, prostitution is the only way she can feed them. The repetition of the same motif in different forms – love, not money, legality or parental consent, legitimates sexual relations – not only succeeds in giving women’s erotic and affective choice priority in constituting marriage, but it also leads to a larger critique of marriage as a mercenary

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attachment. By constantly blurring the difference, it raises the question of how one distinguishes a real wife from a prostitute since both are capable of love and of exchanging sex for money, and it redraws the line in terms of a woman’s relation to money. If the critique of mercenary marriage as “legal prostitution” highlights the importance of affective choice over money in bourgeois marriage, the representation of the whore’s love highlights the authority of money to legitimate sex. On the one hand, The Histories states the obvious: legal wives who marry for money are prostitutes and non-wives who love for non-mercenary motives are the real wives. But it goes further and defines the whore’s love as pure precisely because these Magdalens repeatedly refuse money in exchange for their love, an act that legal wives are never able to perform. When Monkerton abandons ‘Mrs. Monkerton,’ he offers her a settlement but she refuses: “Destitute as I was of support, I could not accept it from one who had so grievously injured me” (71). Saying ‘no’ to money though she said ‘yes’ to sex, marks the moral purity of her initial love and registers her own moral worth. She repeats the act with Senwill when he wishes to give her an annuity that would leave her above financial need for her lifetime, but she will not take it (81). Fanny, too, could have been economically supported by the Lafews but she prefers to enter the Magdalen Hospital than accept their money. Emily, the first penitent in the novel, furnishes the strongest symbol of non-mercenary and erotic love by her own relationship to money, a relationship that takes up the majority of the narrative’s space. People mistake Emily for Markland’s wife after he sets her up in lodgings because Emily does not act like a kept mistress in her use of money: that is, she is economical and does not spend extravagantly. In Emily’s world legal wives often spend like prostitutes, a desire for luxury that produces moral confusion: “instead of making a mistress pass for a wife, they often occasion one who is really a wife, to be taken for a mistress” (25). The Histories focuses our attention on the moral corruption within Britain’s emerging consumer culture when the wife’s role is to spend money that only her sexual labor has contributed to earning. When ‘whore’ takes on its new economic meaning mid-century, it introduces the necessity of distinguishing between illegitimate sex for love and such sex for money, but it also introduces the far more radical notion that any woman – married or not – whose voracious spending habits are supported by a man is a whore. Emily is not a prostitute precisely because she saves £100 during her time as Markland’s mistress and does not ruin his fortune. If given a chance, Emily’s economic agency could have benefitted a husband, but the tedium with which the text narrates

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Emily’s attempts at economic independence after she is abandoned, serves to prove her virtue and to criticize the lack of employment opportunities for women. On her own, her amazing domestic economy continues: she adds to the £100 by selling her clothes and invests this money in a haberdashery shop which shortly turns a profit, but she is arrested for debt by her ex-landlord and all her goods are seized because Markland never paid the rent. Her economic descent continues and she does everything she can to avoid the inevitable, offering her labor as a domestic servant to a bawd in order to work off the debt she has incurred. She tries to get plain work, but cannot. She tries to get a place but is refused by one house because she is too handsome and by another because she looked too genteel and had no recommendation. On the verge of starving, she offers her labor at half price but even that is used against her: “my industry was made an argument against me, ‘I must be very bad to be reduced to that, and they supposed I intended to steal the other half of my wages’” (44). Prostitution is her only choice and thus, no choice at all. Emily saves and works hard; she does not spend and consume, but the only labor that she can perform and be financially compensated for is sexual. The novel represents this as the general condition for all women, including and perhaps most especially wives, and reveals the moral bankruptcy of such a sexual and economic system. The Histories takes up the cultural imperative that a woman’s heart must be consulted in marriage and highlights the social constraints against such a choice being free. It also disentangles the complicated web that the ideology of sentimental marriage weaves between love, sex and money to show the barriers blocking women’s affective agency from merging with an active erotic and economic life. By distinguishing between affective and economic agency, the novel provides a feminist critique of women’s increasing financial dependency and shifts the question of moral agency from a woman’s own individual desire to her social and economic circumstances. What kind of moral choice do the penitents have in a world that denies them economic agency? Forty years before Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays and other 1790s feminists make the argument that women require economic independence in order to be fully virtuous citizens, The Histories presents this polemic. The Histories, I have noted, figures the poor prostitute who loves as the best guarantee of virtue in the new world of companionate marriage and provides a feminist critique of women’s economic condition within the new economy of love, but not all Magdalen tales are as radical. Many other Magdalen seduction narratives propagate the myth that love and virtue will

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be rewarded with the financial security of marriage only if the heroine retains her virginity. They remain sympathetic to the prostitute’s plight but present her as the abject Other to her virtuous sister. We do not have to wander far from The Histories to find an example of the conservative rendering. William Dodd’s edited and abridged version of Emily’s tale under the title The Magdalen, Or History of the First Penitent Prostitute Received into That Charitable Asylum uses the exact same story but, in its editing of seduction, Dodd crafts an ideologically distinct tale. A comparison of the two highlights the significance of attending to differences between the narrative structures of seduction tales. Dodd’s Magdalen reproduces the original narrative word for word except for the notable deletion of significant passages and the addition of an interpolated tale by another penitent; in so doing, Dodd erases Emily’s moral agency and the same story has a radically different meaning. With the addition of the second tale, Dodd ensures that the reader’s sympathy toward the prostitute is coupled with horror and disgust at her life and, ultimately, Dodd’s Emily stands as a disciplinary warning to women to remain pure. The sections that Dodd deletes from the original are, tellingly, the sections where Emily acts less than innocently. The less innocent she is, the more ambiguous is the line between victim and wife. The more the narrative insists on a woman’s right to her heart, the greater power she is given in acting upon her desires. In contrast, to paint the prostitute as falling from absolute innocence to abject poverty with no erotic or affective engagement on her part, keeps the line between vice and virtue intact. In The Histories, for instance, Emily writes an account of the Markland family to her sister early on in which she knowingly and “from the conscious weakness of my own heart, did not tell her how very amiable Mr. Markland was” (16). Dodd deletes this passage and by censoring Emily’s knowing deletion of her own desire, Dodd paints a different picture of the penitent prostitute, one that emphasizes her ignorance and defines innocence as arising out of a lack of knowledge. The deletion mitigates the power of Emily’s knowledge of her active desire and love for Markland. Whereas Emily knows enough in the original to edit her own desires in writing to her sister, Dodd edits her desire for her. Emily goes from being a moral agent to a helpless victim and in so doing, any critique that her affective and financial choices could make is denied. When she knows “how very amiable Mr. Markland was,” her love is active and the narrative then critiques society’s refusal to allow her to act on it. Dodd’s Emily, in contrast, must not ever knowingly act on love. While Dodd deletes parts of Emily’s tale, he adds the embedded history of “A.F.,” a story that he had published in An Account of the Rise, Progress,

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and Present State of the Magdalen Hospital.44 A.F.’s tale is pathetic and ensures the reader’s sympathy while serving up the poetic justice of death for the prostitute. She is seduced and abandoned, falling into prostitution, but is saved by the Magdalen Hospital and reconciled to her father. However, A.F., unlike all four heroines in The Histories, is not allowed a future and she not only dies but horrifically so, after a small scratch on her leg becomes infected and the leg requires amputation which results in her death. In case Emily’s story did not teach female readers never to stray from the bourgeois path and claim a right to their desires, A.F.’s gruesome tale drives the lesson home. The difference between a radical and a conservative telling of seduction in the Magdalen tales – between the portrayal of the sentimental prostitute as a virtuous love object versus representing her as an abject victim – is legible through the narrative’s structure or how it tells the story of seduction. In the last section of this chapter, I analyze the narrative techniques of Magdalen seduction narratives to show how one particular narrative structure communicates the conservative image of victimization and how this image comes to dominate Magdalen stories at the end of the century. By the 1780s, when the Magdalen Hospital decides to prioritize admitting seducedbut-not-yet-prostituted women, the story that the Hospital Admissions committee and the general public come to recognize as proof of the prostitute’s penitence concurred more with Dodd’s than The Histories’ Emily. But before shifting to this chronological argument, I want to pause on the question of truth in narrative because at play both in distinguishing between the large body of Magdalen tales, and in differentiating the scandalous courtesan from her penitent sister, lies the narrative construction of authenticity and moral truth: how does the reader tell which Emily is the proper object of charity and who is un-reformable? Unlike epistolary courtship novels, penitent prostitute tales always involve prolepsis insofar as the reader begins with the knowledge that the innocent maiden falls. Thus, the enigma that the narrative poses as the problem it will solve is not ‘will she marry happily?’ but ‘is she an authentic penitent?’ Or ‘was she innocent in her fall?’ My discussion of truth in the whore’s story demonstrates how narrative convention – not empirical referentiality or external moral truth – comes to signify the penitent’s authenticity and I show how the Hospital’s shift in policy relied heavily on one particular conventional telling. I argue that fiction becomes the locus of truth in the whore’s story as opposed to its more fact-based sister genre, the scandalous autobiography, and I show how the seduction narrative arbitrates the truth of the prostitute’s fiction.

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In his book Fictional Truth, Michael Riffaterre explores the seeming paradox of “truth-in-fiction” and argues that the “solution” to the paradox “lies in redefining referentiality.”45 According to Riffaterre, empirical verifiability is less an indication of truth than internal textual features: truth in fiction is not based on an actual experience of factuality, nor does the interpretation or esthetic evaluation of fictional narrative require that it be verified against reality. Rather, truth in fiction rests on verisimilitude, a system of representations that seems to reflect a reality external to the text, but only because it conforms to a grammar. Narrative truth is an idea of truth created in accordance with the rules of that grammar. (xiii–xiv)

Riffaterre distinguishes two ways of thinking about truth in fiction – mimesis and verisimilitude – and argues against mimetic correspondence as producing the reader’s acceptance of a fiction as true; instead, he posits internal correspondence: “verisimilitude is found in consecution rather than in the mimesis superimposed on it. It is therefore analyzed as a special instance of motivation, that is, as a compellingly visible coherence in the sequence of causes and effects” (2). The idea of truth that verisimilitude produces, therefore, is an effect of a narrative’s sequencing and of repetition. The reader anticipates an event and thus has the experience of figuring out what is going to happen before it occurs: “[t]his experience is, of course, a sign of truth conquered or unearthed from appearances and also a sign that has a narrative function. Repetition, therefore, is both the technical means for the narrative to progress … and for truth to be revealed” (20). The truth of penitence or verisimilitude in the prostitute narrative, I argue, was in flux in the second half of the eighteenth century and many different effects were produced from the similar cause of seduction. Only in the closing decades of the century did a particular rendering of the seduction narrative repeat itself enough times to become the conventional Magdalen tale; at this point, the narrative structure of the seduction tale distinguishes the penitent from the non-penitent woman. As Richardson’s confusion over whether or not to believe T. C. Phillips demonstrates, the seduction narrative links the courtesan memoir to Magdalen tales in that both construct portraits of virtue in distress and plead for sympathy. Why does Phillips’s seduction tale come to be read as perpetrating vice when the Magdalen tales reflect virtue reformable? The same story of seduction can have such different meanings because of its particular discursive production of internal coherence, its grammar of verisimilitude. On the surface, what distinguishes the courtesan narratives

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of Phillips, Lady Ann Vane, Maria Brown and Ann Sheldon from the penitent prostitute tales of the Magdalens is precisely empirical referentiality: Phillips, Vane, Brown and Sheldon are all historically verifiable subjects with particular and traceable identities whereas none of the Magdalens can be traced even though many of the stories were presented as real.46 On deeper examination, however, the difference between truth (that is to say, reality) and fiction breaks down since the courtesan narratives frequently deploy the fictional techniques of the seduction narrative; Phillips, for instance, was accused of using “‘all possible Art to give [her] Story an Air of Truth’” and, as Vivien Jones states, “[of] self-consciously adopting the ‘pathetic Disguise’ of sentimental fiction as a way of claiming moral authenticity.”47 Why would Phillips gain authenticity by appealing to fiction? The seduction narrative links all these differing prostitute narratives together, a cohesion that we notice by comparing the title pages of Phillips’s Apology and Dodd’s The Magdalen. Both include the exact same epigram from Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent warning “ye Fair” never to trust the vows of men.48 A comparison between them shows that moral truth and virtue are not located in the ontological subjects of these autobiographies but in the epistemology of their narrative form. Penitence is one criterion we could use to separate the scandalous memoirist from her Magdalen sister. Ann Sheldon ironically makes this distinction in her Authentic and Interesting Memoirs (1787–1788). A well-known courtesan, Sheldon was asked to model for an eminent painter (only identified as a “Mr. P.”) for his painting of a Magdalen. She agrees, acknowledging that “in every part of the character, except the repentant one, I was by no means an improper model.”49 Until the moment in the story when the prostitute turns penitent, the courtesan’s and the Magdalen’s plots are identical. Other courtesans, however, do narrate the repentant arc. Maria Brown’s penitence, for example, is ironically caused by her interaction with the Magdalen Hospital. Brown makes an assignation with a lover to meet him at the Magdalen Hospital’s chapel but instead of intrigue, she ends up hearing the pathetic sermon and “the worthy and pious gentleman who preached, set forth in so striking and affecting a manner, the sin and danger of a profligate course, that I was seized with all the horrors of a reproachable conscience.”50 This series of events – a highly coincidental interaction with the hospital leading to the author’s request for forgiveness and help – becomes a standard marker of verisimilitude in Magdalen tales as the century progresses. Brown’s penitence comes late and most of her memoir is penned prior to her reform in a tone of salaciousness, not contrition. Yet, like the anonymous Magdalens, her story ends in the Magdalen Hospital

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with penitence. How do we read authentic penitence when the fake Magdalens are models for the real? My point in drawing and erasing distinctions between the courtesan and Magdalen narratives is to propose alternative defining features, not to suggest that there is no difference. There clearly is. The way to separate the courtesan from her penitent sister has more to do with narrative techniques – duration, tone, voice – than with correspondence to facts or authorial intent. Richardson, and other sympathetic readers of his age, come to decide whether or not “the story she tell be true” – that is, whether she is an authentic penitent or an abandoned whore – by the extent to which the tale corresponds to the narrative techniques of a particular telling of seduction. While the Magdalen tales are ostensibly less ‘real’ than courtesan narratives, a particular version of the penitent prostitute tale becomes more ‘true’ than other prostitute tales by the end of the century. The whore’s story in the second half of the eighteenth century, therefore, is a good place to see how fiction comes to represent a more truthful account of life than factual history. The truth of these fictional tales take on a complicated relation to reality when we remember that the real-life Magdalen’s entrance into the hospital depended upon the truth of her story. In order to be admitted by the charity, a prostitute was required to appear before a committee and plead her case, proving herself to be a good object for reform. This committee, made up of governors of the hospital (all men), determined whether the applicant was an authentic penitent or a hardened prostitute looking for a free meal. The competition to be admitted was stiff: committee records for July 4, 1759 show that of 344 applications received since its opening, the hospital had only admitted 146 prostitutes, a success rate of 42 percent.51 How did the governors decide which of the 344 women’s stories were true? While each woman had to tell her own individual story – and she was encouraged to provide the name of her particular seducer when she did so – the veracity of the story depended upon its conventionality.52 That is to say, the committee members came to recognize the proper penitent to the extent that her story corresponded to the stock seduction tale of virtue in distress. One Magdalen in her tale describes the scene of her admission to the hospital in high sentimental style: “I perceived many of the gentlemen wipe their eyes while I was relating some of my early miseries!”53 Moving the men with sentimental tears was synonymous with authenticity. However, this ‘true’ story was not immediately recognizable in 1758. Without a long history in representation, the penitent prostitute needed to create her story and many of the Magdalen seduction tales serve this purpose.

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The Admission’s committee was less than successful in selecting penitent women since, as Sarah Lloyd notes, “[i]n the 1760s, 43% of inmates were discharged either for ‘misbehaviour’ or as unsuited to hospital life.”54 It could be that many of the women told the true story and were admitted but did not accept their moral culpability. They did, however, need to sign a form letter as part of the admission process that attested to their penitence.55 The irony that a form letter could document the specificity – and, thus, authenticity – of their penitence contains the same logic I see in the movement toward locating the truth of the whore’s story in fiction. In the case of the Magdalens, authenticity was tied to conventionality and the invocation of a general typology of character. A Magdalen is, by definition, an anonymous subject who needs Ann Sheldon to model for her portrait precisely because she cannot be identified in public. Her reality can never have an empirical referentiality. One of the rules of the hospital was anonymity and, once accepted, the penitent was given a new name.56 Penitents were dressed in an identical grey gown and veiled in chapel so that they could not be identified by the public in attendance. Anonymity and generality are the distinguishing features of the Magdalen over her particularized courtesan sister. It makes sense, then, that a fictional character – individual though not empirically individuated – comes to best represent the truth of the Magdalen. In the preface to The Histories, the anonymous writer claims the superiority of fiction for depicting the life of the penitent prostitute precisely for reasons of its individualized anonymity. The writer acknowledges that “[s]ome apology may be judged necessary for a work which assumes real characters, tho’ in the title page it acknowledges itself to be a fiction” (3). Her characters are real insofar as they are anonymous and imaginative renderings of penitents who deserve not to be put out to public shame by telling their stories. But the writer insists that their fictionality makes them no less real and “probable”: “Tho’ I do not pretend the following stories to be real facts, yet I think every one will see so plainly, that the incidents are not only probable, but such as must frequently have happened” (3). Because of their fictionality, they contain greater truths, synthesizing the frequent, while refusing the empirically specific. “Though the facts be imaginary,” the writer claims, “the consequences drawn from them may be real” (8). The fictional seduction narrative, I argue, comes to provide the internal coherence of verisimilitude, the narrative grammar that produces the idea of truth in the penitent prostitute tale, because, by the time the hospital’s policy shifts to prioritize the seduced-but-not-yet-prostituted woman, the tale had been repeated enough to develop a series of conventions that cohered with the Hospital’s new admissions policy.57

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The first grammatical rule of Magdalen narratives is that they involve a repetition of the sexual climax. While Clarissa includes only one sexual act, penitent prostitute narratives must include at least two, and in most cases countless more. The fact of this repetition necessitates a story for, without it, the prostitute could not exist. As noted above, many Magdalens fall the first time through seduction, but it is the second time – when they repeat the act out of economic necessity – that turns their story into a prostitute’s tale. The two sexual events must be plotted in relation to each other – the first time, coerced, and the second, for money – in order for her to explain her presence in the Magdalen Hospital and to convince the reader that she is ‘virtue redeemable’ and not an abandoned whore. Accounting for the repetition, not the initial fall, then, determines the thrust of the Magdalen’s seduction tale and divides the reformable prostitute from those ‘lost to virtue.’ The most telling difference between the courtesan narrative and the Magdalen tale centers on this repetition. While the stories themselves may be identical, the narrative space dedicated to the repetition differs. You can tell the two apart by measuring narrative speed or the difference between ‘discourse time’ (the time needed for reading) and ‘story time’ (the time covered by the event in the story).58 Simply put, the slower the narrative speed between penitence and the initial sexual fall, the less likely it is that the penitence will be read as authentic. The passage of story time is irrelevant – the penitent can live as a prostitute for days, months or years – but the discourse time dedicated to its telling requires brevity.59 If detail is a sign of realism in the novel, only certain details become the sign of truth in the prostitute’s tale. The problem with Maria Brown or T. C. Phillips is that they give far too much detail about their sexual affairs and they spend far too many pages narrating the period of active prostitution. Brown’s narrative includes some of the most graphic depictions of sex in prostitute narratives in the century. The speed of the first volume of her narrative is slow in story time, recounting her initial seduction by Mr. Fitzherbert, ending with her first fall, and if she had sped up when recounting her life as a prostitute, she may have passed for an authentic Magdalen since the seduction in the first volume convinces. Instead, her introductory claim that “[t]he incidents of my life are not much out of the common road of female seduction” lacks credibility only because she spends too much discourse time on her life as a prostitute.60 She is conscious of her narrative switch and opens the second volume with a warning that no Puritan should read it because “I am going presently to open a new scene, full of business, plot, intrigue, and dissipation.”61 The plot quickens as her frequent repetition of the sexual act is described in detail.

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The Magdalen narratives, in contrast, generally pass over the time of prostitution in little discourse time. While the speeds vary among the tales, it is possible to detect an increasing use of the iterative to cover the penitent’s life as a prostitute. The narrator of “Story of a Penitent Prostitute” spends four out of five pages describing her initial Clarissa-like fall leading to her second, economic, one, but she passes over many years of sexual activity with the iterative sentence: “I carried on these infamous practices, uninterrupted, for some years.”62 The iterative becomes more popular as the century progresses and the faster speed comes to stand in for a more authentic penitence. When Dodd published The Sisters in 1754 as propaganda for founding the hospital, however, the truth-through-iteration narrative structure was not yet developed. The Sisters includes the slowest, most detailed account of the prostitute’s sexual activity found in all the Magdalen tales surveyed and demonstrates why such detail undermines authenticity. Lucy’s second fall and entry into prostitution occurs on page 48, but her death remains 250 pages away. In between, the reader learns in explicit detail about Lucy’s sordid life as the prostitute: that the sex is bad, that she is “obliged to counterfeit and dissemble pleasures which she never felt” and that she is likely to be beaten as part of her trade.63 Dodd includes a disturbing extended description of a trick Lucy is forced into with two rakes: At their commands she was obliged to strip naked as she was born, and thus to submit to the hellish purposes of either; and, after having been thus abused, each presented a red-hot poker near to every part as possible; made her dance, as they called it, for their amusements, round the room, swearing if she did not, they would run the pokers into her … at length demanding the perpetration of something too black to be named, too diabolical to be mentioned; which she, with just aversion, utterly refusing, and resolutely denying, determined rather to die; they swore, unless she consented, that they would burn her alive.64

She refuses the act (which I assume to be sodomy) and they set her on fire. She is saved only when her screams bring others to the room. Dodd’s thirdperson narration allows for this horrific depiction of the prostitute’s victimization and abjection; the penitent, herself, could never be this explicit without compromising her modesty. Dodd’s intention is clearly to paint such a gruesome picture of the prostitute’s life that all female readers will run from it out of fear for their lives but it also makes the novel prurient, bordering on pornographic. Clearly, he went too far and he learns to correct this mistake in his later publications. In “An Authentic Narrative of a Magdalen,” included in one of his many publications to raise money for the hospital, it takes “A.F.” five pages to be seduced and abandoned, six pages to describe her time in the hospital and her protracted reconciliation

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with her father but only a short reference to “some time after” denotes the passage of time between her abandonment by her lover and her entering the Magdalen Hospital.65 The emphasis in Dodd’s later publications is on the particularities of the hospital and pitiable scenes of family reconciliation. Perhaps a more telling instance of truth identified through narrative speed comes from measuring the duration between the heroine’s first fall, for love, and her second one, for money. How long does it take the narrator to become a prostitute after being the victim of seduction? Charting the narrative speed between the two falls across a range of Magdalen tales produces interesting results. The Histories dedicates the longest discourse time to the period between falls whereas tales that promote a victimized and passive portrait of femininity tend to briefly pass it over because seduction must inevitably lead to prostitution. This difference maps on to the tension historically present in the Magdalen movement between its potentially radical demystifying of virginity and its punitive and moralizing tendencies. The Histories reflects the first tendency and thus uses the space between sex for love and sex for money to demonstrate the economic wrongs of women. Emily’s tale, described above, is the most forceful example of how the novel slows down its speed to provide a detailed description of the lengths the heroine goes to in order to procure legal employment or reconciliation with her family. Rather than elicit pity by depicting the first fall as unconsenting and the second one shortly thereafter as inevitably following from the first, The Histories arouses its reader’s indignation at the state of women’s employment by placing the focus on the space between the first and the second. Unlike The Histories, Dodd’s “History of a Magdalen” spends little time describing the heroine’s descent into crime, though, like in The Histories, economic necessity is its cause: “believe me, Sir, and I deliver it with the most solemn truth – it was want, the importunate calls of hunger and thirst, which prevailed more than any other persuasive!”66 But we get no description of what she did to feed herself and her children before taking up with Harry. We do, however, get a strong sense of her abjection as her tale begins with a long diegetic account of her own unworthiness and the wonders of the Magdalen Hospital. She – not society – emerges from the text as the one to blame for her prostitution and though she is reformable, she is morally guilty of a crime. She begins: “Though an unhappy person, like myself, (who, by my wilful transgressions, have forfeited all right to the regard and protection of society) can have no reason to expect the least favourable attention,” she tells her story to save others.67 The Histories never reaches this level of abjection. That seduction inevitably should and does lead to prostitution is the ideology

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that supports the Hospital’s shift in policy to prioritize the seduced-but-notyet-prostituted applicants and this shift is readable in the decreasing discourse time between the penitent’s two falls in Magdalen narratives. There are other, less significant, narrative techniques differentiating authentic from false penitent prostitute stories. While duration highlights the most telling distinction, point of view signifies as well. For instance, Magdalen tales contain almost no moments of paralipsis, that is, the narratives never omit the necessary facts or leave the reader asking questions about significant plot details. They create the illusion of telling the complete story and unfold a world with nothing left out. Courtesan narratives, on the other hand, are full of paralipsis. Ann Sheldon keeps returning to the evil bawd, Mrs. Horsham, even after she has discovered her tricks and while the plot poses the problem of why she keeps going back for more, it never answers the question or provides the reader with an explanation. Conversely, Magdalen tales are riddled with paralepsis, or moments when the narrator says too much, not too little. A frequent device in Magdalen tales, as in most sentimental literature, is to shift focalization from the first person narrator to another pathetic character’s point of view. In order to increase the level of sentimental identification, the tales narrate actions from points of view that would be impossible for the ignorant victim–narrator to access. Fanny, in The Histories, tells us precisely what Mrs. Lafew felt when she discovers her husband is having an affair by encountering Fanny’s son who is the spitting image of Mr. Lafew: “she [Mrs. Lafew] could not behold a descendant from Mr. Lafew, and one too who resembled him extremely, without tenderness: but when she considered him as a proof of her husband’s attachment … it shocked her severely” (122). Fanny, we need to remember, is lying unconscious, supposedly on her deathbed, in another part of the house. The reader, however, experiences the vicarious sentimental power of the moment and witnesses Mrs. Lafew’s super-human tenderness in overcoming jealousy to nurture her rival’s son. The narrative features which come to designate truth in the penitent prostitute tale – the grammar of the prostitute’s seduction – were, ironically, inaccessible to the prostitutes themselves. Since most actual Magdalens were from the laboring class, it is doubtful that they either wrote or read the tales. As H. F. B. Compston points out, most of the inmates of the Hospital were illiterate: “A large number of the inmates had to be taught reading and writing, and most of the letters seem to show signs of ‘coaching,’ unless there were numerous Pamelas at Prescott Street.”68 Not only was there no real Pamela, but there were few, if any, empirically verifiable first-person narrating Magdalens. Yet the grammar of the stories affected

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their lives. The truth of penitence had consequences external to the fictions that made it recognizable, though its circulation outside print culture is hard to track. Tim Hitchcock cites the example of Elizabeth Edwards who refused to give the parish the standard ‘seduction and abandonment’ explanation for her bastard child, choosing instead to state plainly that Richard Jones had carnal knowledge of her. Hitchcock surmises that her inability to secure parish support was directly related to her refusal to tell the ‘true’ story of seduction.69 Did prostitutes learn to tell the Hospital’s admission committee some version of the story in order to gain admittance? Since the historical records that document these committee interviews no longer exist, it is impossible to prove this hypothesis; however, we can imagine that they learned to do so.70 Tony Henderson argues that prostitutes deployed the victim typology when it served their purposes: “Many prostitutes made use of this image [the victim of seduction], employing its terminology and narratives of seduction and despair in the courts and elsewhere.”71 Even though, as I have argued, the seduction narrative in the whore’s story did not always already circulate as conservative, by the end of the century the Magdalen Hospital had translated it into a conservative force, and rendered the dominant image of the prostitute as an abject figure with little autonomy. But this does not mean that the story only circulated in disciplinary ways. I like to imagine working prostitutes standing up in front of the court, bringing judges to tears of sympathy with their tales of seduction, successfully procuring their release and laughing all the way back to Covent Garden. I began this chapter with the claim that the prostitute, in her sentimental penitent form, stands as a better example of a non-mercenary love than the bourgeois wife and placed this claim in the initial decades of the charity, when the use of the seduction narrative to imagine the prostitute as essentially virtuous and reformable carried with it radical implications for the understanding of love in a new economy of marriage. I also suggested that a conservative telling of the seduction narrative came to dominate the charity’s literature, to signify the truth of penitence and to justify the charity’s shift in admissions policy in the closing decades of the century. I want to conclude by qualifying this last claim with a recognition that the radical merging of whore and wife that the figure of the sentimental penitent prostitute unleashed in the mid-century is not entirely silenced. The penitent prostitute remains as a troubling shadow within domestic ideology. The remnants of the whore’s exemplary love can be read in the continued repetition of the motif that the reformed prostitute often turns out to be a better wife than the virgin. Jennie Batchelor makes a similar

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observation and notes that the Magdalen supporters’ arguments about how reformed prostitutes would be good wives and mothers actually suggests “[n]ot only is there a place for these women in society, [but] they may prove better citizens than their virtuous contemporaries.”72 The title character in The History of Miss Sally Johnson, Or, the Unfortunate Magdalen proves this to be true. She becomes the “most faithful and indulging wife” who gives her hard-working husband eight wonderful children. The text links her skills as a wife to her past experience as a prostitute. Because she has “suffered by fatal experience,” she expertly manages the household: “she well knew how to go to market, and to cook when she had brought it home … In fact, she made a most excellent wife, and by her conduct made ample amends for every folly which she had formerly been guilty of.”73 Similarly, the prostitute’s previous experience in “Fanny: Or, the Fair Foundling of Saint George’s Field” trains her well for the job of wife. Fanny is reduced to street-walking after being the victim of seduction and ends up in the Magdalen Hospital where she was “instructed in the economics of house-keeping.” After her release, she marries a nice rich farmer who knows her history and “her industry added to his fortunes.”74 In the cost–benefit analysis of sexual experience versus innocence, the experienced woman who has proven her industriousness, and learnt the value of her virtue by losing it before regaining it in the Hospital, turns out to be the best wife. The sentimental prostitute as victim of seduction introduces the surprising possibility that reformed prostitutes make better legitimate wives than ignorant virgins in the new economy of love. My next chapter turns the equation of whore and wife around and focuses its attention on narratives of married women for what they may teach us about the uneasy alliances between legitimate and illegitimate erotic relations when a woman claims a right to her heart.

chapter 3

After knowledge: Married heroines and seduction

The first sentence of Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751) announces the life of a marriage as its plot: “The various accidents which befel a very worthy couple, after their uniting in the state of matrimony, will be the subject of the following history.”1 The novel, however, curiously commences, not with the story of a wife, but with an embedded tale of seduction. Why does the plot of life-after-marriage begin with Miss Mathews’s story of seduction? Amelia is not the only novel in the second half of the eighteenth century that both takes the history of a marriage as its primary focus and centrally includes an embedded narrative of seduction. This chapter analyzes three such novels – Fielding’s Amelia, Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and Elizabeth Griffith’s The History of Lady Barton (1771). My interest lies in the relation between the ostensibly extraneous digression into a seduction tale and the stated primary plot of the eponymous heroine’s life after marriage. What place does seduction have in the lives of wives? Married women, by definition, are no longer sexually innocent and their erotic knowledge renders them beyond the power of seduction. For this reason, married heroines who are also victims of seduction are rare, yet seduction, I argue, is central to their stories.2 Wives are frequently the sympathetic listeners to other women’s seduction tales and this chapter reads these scenes of story-telling to think about what the embedded narratives add to the primary tale. While each novel I read constructs a different narrative relationship between the story of marriage and the story of seduction, all three novels represent the plots of wives and seduced women as necessarily intertwined. I ultimately argue that the women writers, Sheridan and especially Griffith, use the narrative connection to claim a woman’s right to act on the knowledge of her heart whereas Fielding’s embedded tale ends up restraining women’s affective choices. In all three, however, the entanglement of seduction and marriage must be read through their narrative structures, in particular through an analysis of narrative levels. 72

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Embedded tales can serve many narrative functions: they can stand as thematic contrast, provide causal explanations for a character’s actions or be self-contained digressions, to name a few.3 The tales of seduction told within novels of marriage do not serve any one single purpose, but their presence forces the reader to ponder the relationships between marriage and seduction, love inside and outside sanctioned bonds, sexual knowledge and sexual ignorance, and chastity and contamination. The way a writer deploys embedded tales – as contrast, as frame, with a homodiegetic or heterodiegetic narrator (that is, a first-person narrator who is also part of the story versus a third-person narrator who is external to the plot) – reveals much about their attitude toward a woman’s new right to her heart. Tzvetan Todorov describes the embedding narrative as “the narrative of a narrative.”4 By staging the scene of narration – for instance, Mathews locking the prison door to tell her story to Booth in Amelia or Louisa sitting down to hear Olivia’s sad tale in Lady Barton – the tale-within-the-tale highlights the narrative act of the novel itself and provides a mise en abyme for the text’s own reading. “The embedded story,” Mieke Bal points out, “contains a suggestion [of] how the text should be read.”5 In narrating narrating, the text models its own scene of narration. This chapter analyzes the narrative acts of embedded seduction stories in order to gain insight into how the novel’s representation of marriage should be read. The repeated presence of embedded seduction tales within novels about the life of a marriage could be read as confirming the critical supposition that women have no story to tell once they wed, that their lives end in marriage and, thus, their plots must come from elsewhere, from the seduced character’s sexual transgression. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in her feminist classic Writing Beyond the Ending, begins with this critical commonplace: “Once upon a time, the end, the rightful end, of women in novels was social – successful courtship, marriage – or judgemental of her sexual and social failure – death.”6 The married heroine of Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné makes a similar observation, writing to her epistolary correspondent that she has nothing to write since “[c]omedies and romances, you know, always end with a marriage, because, after that, there is nothing to be said.”7 But there are many novels in the period which write beyond the marriage ending and which disprove the supposition that women’s plots cease at the altar or in the grave. Julia de Roubigné, for instance, refutes her own claim when she discovers that marriage does not shield her from the dangers of love. After her marriage to a man she respects but has married to rescue her family from poverty, her husband turns on her, becoming abusive and tyrannical when he discovers her earlier love for a childhood

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friend. Evelina’s famous last words announcing her marriage in Burney’s novel – “All is over, my dearest Sir, and the fate of your Evelina is decided!” – do not hold for a great number of novels in the period which chart an indecisive fate for women after marriage.8 Counter to what the contemporary critical focus on the courtship plot might suggest, novels about marriage are relatively common in the later eighteenth century. Taken together these novels form what Jean Coates Cleary has called “the still unexplored eighteenth-century tradition of the novel of marriage.”9 In addition to the three texts this chapter takes as its focus, we could add: Samuel Richardson’s continuation of Pamela, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1742), Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple, Volume the Last (1753) and The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759), Elizabeth Griffith’s The Delicate Distress (1769), Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s Emma; Or, The Unfortunate Attachment (1773), Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777), Harriet Lee’s Errors of Innocence (1786), Elizabeth Bonhote’s Olivia, or Deserted Bride (1787), Anna Maria Bennett’s Agnes De-Courci (1789), Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia (1790), Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: Or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798).10 Susan Staves observes a tradition of women’s novels of marriage and argues that “[m]uch more than the male novelists, these women novelists [Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Griffith] turn away from the courtship plot to make the relationship of husband and wife within marriage an important subject.”11 What plots do the imagined lives of women follow after marriage? Their stories unfold around a variety of romantic complications post-wedding: a husband’s infidelity, a first love returning, the loss of a spouse’s affection, a husband’s violence and abuse, a wife’s adultery, economic distress and male tyranny. The new marriage-for-love ending is also the beginning of an unknown narrative about the life of romance within marriage, about what kind of love translates into a good marriage or about the costs of consenting to marry a man you do not love. Married women’s plots query what women can expect from marital life after they have chosen their own husband, asking such questions as: Is it a crime to marry without love? Can a woman love twice? What does the future hold for a woman who marries for love but without money? Should love in marriage be passionate or rational? Is it adulterous to love a man not your husband if you do not act on the feeling? How should a wife react to her husband’s infidelity and the loss of his affections? Must a wife obey a husband who acts tyrannically? The answers to these questions necessitate side trips into embedded seduction tales. Jane

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Spencer notes the frequency of such tales in novels by women after 1750, concluding that their presence as digressions within other women’s stories signifies that fallen heroines are demoted to secondary status in this period. Where Eliza Haywood or Delariviere Manley give the seduced heroine center stage, sentimental women writers marginalize them, according to Spencer, and represent seduced women in order to provide a “foil to the heroine,” contrasting purity with contamination.12 Thus, Spencer sees their representation as promoting a rigid definition of female chastity and signaling a conservative narrative turn. In so arguing, she assumes that the embedded tales function as contrasts, that ‘good girls’ are placed beside ‘bad girls’ in order to clarify the difference. But, as I will show, this is not always the case. Even in Amelia, where, on the surface, the relation of Amelia’s to Mathews’s story seems to function as simple contrast, a closer look reveals a far more complicated interaction between the two narrative levels. Seduced and married women are linked in these novels not only by way of contrast but through thematic overlaps, structural causalities and sympathetic identifications. This chapter examines the different purposes embedded narratives serve in order to emphasize the way affective agency links wives and seduced women. Like in Histories of Some of the Penitents discussed in the previous chapter, seduced women become test cases for women’s knowledge of their hearts and how that knowledge translates into legitimate erotic relations. Seduction prompts narrative investigations into the nature of marital love, its limits and possibilities, and the three novels analyzed below arrive at very different conclusions. While Fielding’s heterodiegetic narrator ultimately ensures women have little agency in speaking and acting on their hearts, Sheridan’s and Griffith’s homodiegetic narrators allow their female narrators a greater involvement in pursuing the question of love in marriage. Fielding’s plot revels in the erotic possibilities of a collapse between the embedded and embedding narratives or between virtuous and fallen woman, but the narrative of narratives that embedding offers reaffirms an absolute divide that reduces the fallen victim of seduction to a prostitute. Sheridan and Griffith, in part because of their use of first-person narrators, show leniency toward the seduced victim and use the overlaps between the stories of seduction and marriage to ponder how women can know, and should act upon, the truth their own hearts speak. Sheridan’s message remains ambiguous in the end and her novel never tells the tale of either seduction or the place of erotic and affective agency in marriage, but Griffith is clear. In History of Lady Barton, the embedded tales take over the primary narrative in order to write a new narrative for marriage, one in which

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marrying without love is a crime. While others had portrayed mercenary marriages as criminal and, as Chapter 2 demonstrated, The Histories proposes that sex for love and without money is the true marriage, Griffith is unique for taking both arguments further and proposing that women who take the vow of marriage for familial and social reasons and not for love commit a crime akin to perjury.

amelia’s narrative contract A man can possess nothing better than a virtuous woman, nor any thing worse than a bad one.13

The above epigraph to Amelia introduces the opposition between good and bad women and the absolute value of a good one, a value that the novel underscores when Amelia turns out to be worth her weight in gold, both morally and economically. A virtuous marriage is ostensibly what this novel is about yet that story turns out to be surprisingly thin and, as many critics have noted, unlike Fielding’s other novels, Amelia lacks narrative coherence.14 The marriage may provide little plot, but the epistemology of female character, or, how a man knows when a woman is virtuous and when she is bad, motivates much of the action in the novel. From victims of seduction who turn out to be seducers themselves, to kind old landladies who are bawds in fine dress, many of the plot complications emerge from the instability of female moral character. If his stated aim is “to promote the cause of virtue,” how do we recognize virtue when we see it (3)? When Amelia makes her grand entrance into the prison and into the novel, virtue is absolute and immediately identifiable: “Her virtue could support itself with its own intrinsic worth,” the narrator claims, “without borrowing any assistance from the vices of other women” (154). Yet the novel’s opening descent into the prison stories has already introduced the reader to the slipperiness of Woman: the “very pretty girl” who “had great innocence in her countenance” turns out to be a common street-walker and the poor girl caught walking the streets at night is actually innocent (24, 17). The tension between moral clarity and instability maps onto the difference between the sentimental and satiric plots that critics have long noted Fielding mixed in his last and most experimental work. While Amelia embodies Fielding’s sentimental aims, the novel’s frequent collapse of whores into wives and wives into whores sets into motion the satiric plot. Critics are divided as to whether Amelia’s virtue is untainted by the satiric plot. Angela Smallwood and Patricia Spacks, for instance, argue that Amelia remains “the true wife” and the perfect Richardsonian ideal of virtue whereas Jill Campbell, Terry

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Castle and Alison Conway see her as an ambiguous character.15 My reading argues that the critical division is an effect of Fielding’s narrative contract and that Amelia is, in fact, a double moral subject, simultaneously the ideal of virtue and a mixed character in a plot of sexual transgression. Fielding’s fiction is rife with embedded tales and, in all cases, the stories within the story introduce questions of meta-narrative.16 How is Fielding prompting us to receive his story through the model of storytelling he provides in the novel itself ? From every embedded story we can infer a narrative contract or an agreement implied between the narrator and the narratee on what is exchanged in the telling. In his analysis of storytelling within Sarrasine, Roland Barthes argues that every narrative proposes a contract in which the story, itself, becomes an object of exchange; every narrative, he argues, raises the questions: “What should the narrative be exchanged for? What is the narrative ‘worth’? ”17 The embedded tales within One Thousand and One Nights provide the most obvious example of a narrative contract where Scheherazade exchanges a story for another day of her life. Amelia’s contract, though less obvious, is also readable in the narrative of a narrative suggested by the embedded tales. I argue that the narrative contract of Amelia splits Amelia into both Virtue Allegorized and the titillating subject of plots of desire and the narrator exchanges the sexual instability of the plot for the narratee’s belief in Amelia’s moral stability. The narrative of narrative that Amelia’s embedded tales provide is that a narrative – like a woman – can be more than one thing. While Fielding uses the technique of the embedded tale in all his novels, it is only in Amelia that the stories within stories play central roles in the main plot.18 The tales gain their importance not only because they are narrated by the novel’s main characters and explain how they came to be where they are in the novel’s present, but also because the stories they tell have effects outside their tales and stand, themselves, as actions in the novel (for example, Mrs. Bennett’s telling saves Amelia from ruin). The centrality of embedded narratives to Amelia is reflected in the sheer amount of space they take up, comprising at least one quarter of the text. Mathews’s and Booth’s stories teeter on becoming the novel’s diegesis in the opening volume, relegating the plot of Booth’s marriage to the extra-diegetic in much the same way as Walton’s letter to his sister frames the story of Frankenstein. As soon as Amelia opens, the main plot is halted by Mathews’s seduction narrative, immediately introducing us both to the thematics of female moral character and to its hermeneutics. That is to say, the novels begins with the story of a woman whose virtue is questionable at the same time as her first-person tale provides a mise en abyme on how to read female virtue in Amelia.

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What moral knowledge do we gain by reading both the narrative and the narrative of a narrative of Mathews’s tale? The narrator promises to guide us in our interpretation by framing Mathews’s tale through what Terry Castle has called, the novel’s “logic of inversion” in which everything is the opposite of what it seems.19 In the case of Mathews, we know before we listen to her story that she is bad woman because the frame has unmasked her deceptions in advance, alerting us, in a chapter heading, to the fact “that it is possible for a woman to appear to be what she really is not” (33). In case the reader misses this warning, the narrator places her in a long tradition of wicked women from Dalila to Teresa Constantia Phillips before she begins to speak her history (35). Moral stability is here grounded in the narrative authority of the embedding narrative since the narrator of the first-degree narrative level – that is, the narrator of the main story – has the authority to judge the narrator of the second-degree level or the embedded story, that is, Mathews. We recognize Mathews’s lack of virtue because the highestdegree narrator is the one who establishes the novel’s ‘reality.’ The moral structure is an effect of the formal hierarchy that grants authority to embedding narratives over the tales they embed. What happens, however, if we reverse the hierarchy and do not subordinate embedded tales to the main story? Tzvetan Todorov poses this question in The Poetics of Prose. Instead of analyzing the function of embedded tales within the primary story, he turns the hierarchy around and asks: “why does the embedded narrative need to be included within another narrative?”20 I want to pursue this question by reading Mathews’s embedded narrative as if it were standing alone in order to see what is then added by including it within a frame. What moral truth emerges if we isolate Mathews’s tale? Why does it need to be included in the larger tale of Amelia? Mathews’s own story of seduction does not paint a perfect picture of innocence betrayed and even without the narrator’s framing, the reader suspects her virtue and questions her reliability since she includes assertions of her active desire. She begins her history not with the standard account of her family, but with a confession of her sexual attraction to Booth (37). Mostly, we learn to doubt Mathews’s tale of virtue in distress because it does not follow a clear narrative line of innocence, love, promise of marriage, fall, betrayal and abandonment. She often digresses, and at one point, she goes so far off her story that Booth has to interrupt her and beg her to return to the central plot (48). What should be the climax of her seduction tale – her lover’s refusal to marry and the moment when her “eyes were now opened” – ends up being no climax at all (45). Her faith in him quickly returns, her father does not disown her upon discovering her sexual indiscretion, he

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even attempts to negotiate a marriage, and, when this fails, she repeats her fall by running away with her seducer. When she does not roll over and die after the final betrayal and abandonment, but instead plunges a penknife into Hebbers’s heart, the reader knows that this heroine is no virtuous Clarissa. But neither is Mathews entirely evil. She is also taken advantage of by the cheating Hebbers, she places her faith in love and she seeks a nonmercenary marriage. Taken in itself, “The History of Mathews” is neither an allegory of vice nor of virtue but the tale of a complex and morally ambiguous character, like Tom Jones, who is compromised by the world that surrounds her. From the point of view of the isolated embedded tale, we can turn our gaze back to the narrator’s frame and now see it as overly didactic. As soon as Mathews ends her tale, the frame reasserts moral clarity when the whores at dinner identify Mathews as one of them – “the lady’s a whore as well as myself ” (53). The frame names her a whore but Mathews refuses to confirm or deny the prostitutes’s identification at dinner in much the same way as her embedded narrative resists moral clarity. Because of this ambiguity, the logic of inversion breaks down. If Mathews appears to us as a morally mixed figure, the narrator’s belief that she is not what she appears makes little sense. Rather than establishing a logic of moral inversion, the embedded tale introduces an incommensurability between the two narrative levels, between the teller’s experience and the narrator’s interpretation of that experience. The answer to Todorov’s question – “why does the embedded narrative need to be included within another narrative?” – is that the embedding narrative replaces moral ambiguity with clarity and introduces a double narrative structure. The dynamic between the plot of Mathews’s tale and the moral truth it represents within the main plot produces a narrative of a narrative that breaks down the novel into two simultaneous hermeneutic levels: one, the metadiegetic level (the story within the story) where moral judgments are fraught, and, two, the diegetic or primary level where virtue can be framed as absolute and intrinsic to character. The double hermeneutics I am pointing towards – reading both moral ambiguity and moral certainty in the same story – is importantly not sequential but simultaneous. The mise en abyme of reading performed through Mathews’s tale guides us to read both at the same time – virtue in the novel is simultaneously ambiguous and absolute. The next embedded tale – Booth’s – provides further instruction in this double hermeneutics by showing us how a story can be saying one thing and yet doing another. While Booth’s story is one of virtue, telling it causes the plot’s central moral sin.

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Peeling the frame off Booth’s tale and reading it in isolation reveals a conventional courtship narrative. “[T]he particulars of my courtship to that best and dearest of women,” as he introduces his own story, turn out to be fairly standard events in the plot of marrying for love (57). Amelia’s mother tries to force her to marry for money against the inclinations of her heart, and this proposed mercenary marriage becomes the obstacle the lovers must overcome to live happily ever after. When we step back one narrative level, we see that what the embedding adds to the embedded story is to turn a plot of virtuous love into a scene of vice. As Hal Gladfelder points out, “[i]n Miss Mathews’s room, … the romance of marital devotion Booth tells her … provides the impetus for an acerbically noted drift into adultery, as the eroticism and tenderness Booth evokes in the telling are turned through her interruptions and asides into the occasion of a week-long criminal conversation.”21 Booth’s seduction through storytelling provides an excellent example of Ross Chambers’s argument, in Story and Situation, that “stories are not innocent and that storytelling … derives significance from situation.”22 Chambers reads scenes of tales within tales to show how narrative is “a transactional phenomenon” and that the narrative’s meaning is dependent on the context of the exchange between narrator and narratee. Why is the story told? To whom is it told? Where and when is it told? These questions are central to understanding narrative and to the meaning of Booth’s story. The transaction which underpins Booth’s tale is clearly sexual and whatever the embedded story’s content tells us, the act of narrative is here an erotic one. The situation of Booth’s story turns the tables on the reader to foreground the essential part we play in creating moral meaning. Mathews is an active narratee and her key role within the narrative transaction highlights storytelling as an exchange between listener and teller, reader and writer. Unlike the narratees of embedded tales in The History of Lady Barton, Fielding’s listeners interrupt, comment upon, tease, weep and faint in response to what they hear. In the case of Mathews, her participation is flirtatious, lingering over sexual events and demanding details: “Tell me everything,” she insists (60). That the story of a constant husband causes his infidelity cannot help but introduce into the narrative of a narrative the disjunction between plot and situation, between the content and what the narrative transaction performs. Stories within stories both reveal the importance of a narrative’s situation to its meaning and introduce the scene of telling as an exchange between listener and teller. Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot, argues: “[t]he shapes taken by stories and the reasons for their telling suggest the

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need to explore more fully the narrative situation – narrative in situation between teller and listener – and the kinds of reaction and understanding that narratives appear to want to elicit.”23 Citing Barthes’s observation quoted earlier, Brooks argues that “[a]ll storytelling … is contractual: it asks for something in return for what it supplies.”24 The transaction between the implied writer and the implied reader of Amelia, I argue, is staged by the two opening embedded tales.25 What does Amelia ask for and what does it give in return? Mathews’s tale taught us that we can enjoy a morally ambiguous plot and yet have it represent moral certainty in a larger frame, and Booth’s tale foregrounds the reader’s role in making meaning. The two together propose a contract where the reader accepts the narrator’s assertion of Amelia’s unquestioning moral virtue and, in return, he gives us a story full of the plot delights of sexual intrigue. The contract offered to the reader by the play between the frame and the story exchanges moral certainty for illicit plot. Amelia asks that we believe the sentimental moral in which women are innately virtuous and, in exchange, it gives the reader a satiric plot motivated by the promise of women’s essential sexual insatiability. The opening lengthy digression into Mathews’s and Booth’s storytelling establishes this narrative transaction and leads to the sexual transgression – Booth’s infidelity – that sets off the main plot of Amelia, thus keeping its contractual promise to provide sexual intrigue in a novel of virtue. The exchange between listener and storyteller is very clear when we come to the transactional act of the third and last first-person embedded tale, “Mrs. Bennett’s history.” When we ask what Amelia and Mrs. Bennett get from their narrative exchange – “What is it proposed that it be exchanged for?” – the answer is literally sexual plot for virtue. Mrs. Bennett tells her story of seduction and ruin precisely to save Amelia from experiencing the Noble Peer’s sexual plot. In exchange for getting to keep her virtue, Amelia must place her faith in the truth of Mrs. Bennett’s story of victimhood and not question the moral ambiguity that emerges from her telling. Amelia must believe that Mrs. Bennett is an innocent victim even though there are many signs to the contrary (Mrs. Bennett’s drinking, her deception regarding her marriage, her teasing Amelia about Atkinson’s attraction). Amelia gives Mrs. Bennett her stamp of moral approval when Mrs. Bennett comes to the end of her history, telling her: “you appear highly the object of compassion; and, I shall always esteem you, as an innocent and unfortunate woman” (309–310). The value of telling her tale for Mrs. Bennett, now Mrs. Atkinson, is easily quantified: the annuity she is able to acquire from the Noble Peer for her husband by

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being the virtuous Amelia at the masquerade. The sexual exchange translates into an economic one for her. While Amelia’s virtue, as others have noted, is compromised by her listening to Mrs. Atkinson’s tale, the tale itself provides another reminder of our narrative contract.26 When the maid mistakenly reveals the secret of Mrs. Atkinson’s second marriage, the novel’s narrator interrupts the embedded tale to guide the reader toward a willful blindness of this questionable character. “It is a good maxim,” the narrator proclaims, “to trust a person entirely or not at all” and with this the reader is asked to throw their trust behind Mrs. Atkinson’s story even though she has just been exposed as a liar (305). We can extend the narrator’s maxim to the novel as a whole: regardless of the moral ambiguities introduced by the various satiric sexual plots, the reader is asked to turn a blind eye and to see female character as virtue or vice. What others have seen as the failure of the novel – that Fielding tried to write a moral novel representing female chastity but his love of racy satire got in the way – I see as the narrative’s contract created by the structural hierarchy of embedding. The presence of a shift in narrative levels from the main story to the story within the story has the effect of ascribing the power of ‘reality’ to the central narrative. As Peter Brooks describes: “[o]nly the fully framed tale within the tale offers the possibility of life outside the frame, within what the text presents as ‘reality’.”27 The ‘real’ in the case of Amelia is the sentimental diegetic world and thus the structure of embedding functions to give the heterodiegetic narrator the authority to speak the ‘real,’ that is to say, the moral truth. The use of a heterodiegetic narrator (a narrator who is not a character in the novel) strengthens the ‘reality effect’ since, if the narrator were a character in the novel, his own relationships would compromise his authority to proclaim Amelia’s virtue.28 Ronald Paulson notes that “Amelia is another Clarissa … she represents the ‘virtue rewarded’ ending that Fielding, according to Richardson, wished to accord Clarissa.”29 But at the same time as Amelia is Fielding’s nod to a new reality introduced through Clarissa (without, significantly, allowing his virtuous woman to speak or write herself ), Fielding does not entirely relinquish an older reality in which the novel gains satiric energy from representing female nature as lascivious, slippery and deceitful. Amelia’s narrative contract ultimately props up a moral distinction between chaste wife and fallen woman by reproducing a sexual hypocrisy that, like Booth’s tale, says one thing (women are essentially virtuous) yet does another (represents women as seductresses, full of active desire). The life of a marriage, in the end, never has a female plot since all the action in the novel revolves around the husband’s agency in choosing the Ideal

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of Virtue as the epigraph announced. Amy Wolf observes the following about Amelia’s narrative silencing: “although Fielding would like his novel to center on Amelia Booth, his plot does not. Amelia merely reacts without ever initiating action, and her story is never told by herself … It is Miss Mathews who gives Amelia a story.”30 For all the moral ambiguity that Amelia revels in and for all the moments when whores become wives and wives, whores, the narrator insists that the difference between Amelia and Mathews is as clear as the distinction between the story and the story within the story. There is always a narrator – or, in Amelia’s case, a husband – who “possesses” the story and the virtuous wife with an active desire has no story of her own. That two of the three embedded tales are told by victims of seduction who turn out not to be entirely victimized, and are thus represented as morally questionable, suggests that Fielding holds onto an idea of female erotic agency as dangerous and illicit rather than granting married women the right to act legitimately on their affective and erotic desires. Amelia’s narrative contract is made possible by the structural and moral authority of its heterodiegetic narrator. What happens when we shift to a homodiegetic narrator, when the narrator who frames the embedded narrative is also a character in the novel? The difference is importantly a gendered one. As Susan Lanser has observed, women writers are far more likely to employ homodiegetic narrators because such narrators create a distance between the writer and the narrator, especially ones that increase that space by using private forms, such as diaries, memoirs, letters, in which the narratee is also internal and, thus, the narrator never directly addresses the reader.31 Henry Fielding profits from his narrator’s authoritative direct addresses to the reader, but women writers tend to see such exposure as dangerous. I do not mean to suggest that Frances Sheridan or Elizabeth Griffith were insecure modest muses who did not feel strong enough to assert themselves in print. As Betty Schellenberg has wonderfully documented, mid-eighteenth-century women writers were savvy and active participants in print culture.32 But they both use private forms – Sheridan, the journal, and Griffith, the letter – within which their embedded tales of seduction appear. Their choice of narrative voices produces complex and complicated transferences between the married female narrators and the seduced ‘I’ of their embedded tales. The identifications and dis-identifications between narrative voices and levels function, in both, to question the roles and responsibilities of women to their own hearts in a way that Amelia’s mixing of the stories of seduction and marriage never achieves.

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sidney bidulph’s narrative situations In Frances Sheridan’s novel of marriage, the fates of the married Sidney Bidulph and her seduced counterpart, Miss Burchell, are intimately connected. Sidney’s marriage is caused, in the first instance, by Burchell’s seduction tale: the principled Sidney accepts her mother’s decision that she relinquish all claims to her fiancé, Orlando Faulkland, because her mother believes he has previously seduced and impregnated Burchell, and shortly thereafter Sidney marries Mr. Arnold, a man not nearly as attractive as her first love but one recommended by her mother. All the suffering Sidney experiences – her husband’s infidelity, her loss of reputation, her poverty – spring from Burchell’s story of seduction. The interlaced fates of the two women guide the plot: Sidney refuses to vindicate herself from her husband’s accusation of adultery because she is protecting Burchell; Burchell waits until after Arnold’s death to ask Sidney to intervene with Faulkland on her behalf; and Sidney rejects Faulkland’s second proposal because of Burchell’s continuing desire for him. The plot entanglements that repeatedly bring the two women together in an unquestioned bond of female solidarity stem from Sidney’s sympathetic response to Burchell as a victim of seduction and give the novel a feminist undertone for it repeatedly insists, as Margaret Doody has observed, on “the rights of the woman seduced.”33 That Burchell turns out to be less-than-seduced, to have been an active agent in her moment of ruin, does not undermine the earlier identification between wife and fallen woman. When the truth finally comes out that Burchell was a willing victim, Sidney still supports her prior claim to Faulkland and the novel refuses an ‘all or nothing’ approach to female virtue, instead attempting to hold men, as Susan Staves notes, “to standards of good conduct and chastity as strict as those said to be appropriate to women.”34 The novel’s resistance to a clear divide between wife and fallen woman is an effect of Sheridan’s dual intent to write a novel of marriage that speaks to the new claims of a woman’s right to her heart yet also to align this plot with a plot of filial duty and social propriety. The two narrative threads end up taking Sidney Bidulph in confused and conflicting directions. The novel attempts a reconciliation between marriage for love and marriage for social duty but the untold embedded tale of Burchell’s seduction repeatedly demonstrates that the happily-ever-after ending of marriage for love is not easily attainable. Sheridan repeats the plot in which filial duty is set against the heroine’s affective choice throughout her prose writing. In her juvenilia, Eugenia and Adelaide, Sheridan imagined an optimistic fairy tale conclusion to the conflict and the two

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heroines, after threatened seductions, clandestine meetings and attempted elopements, each marry the man, in the words of Adelaide, who “knew my heart better than I did myself.”35 No such happy resolution is available in Sheridan’s mature writing, including both Sidney Bidulph and its continuation, Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph; in both, love and duty remain an unresolvable tension. The intimate relationship of the two women and their different fates – Sidney’s life contains misery and poverty whereas Burchell gets the man she loves – twists our expectations for poetic justice. In Sidney Bidulph good characters are not rewarded, nor are bad ones necessarily punished. The moral of the novel is announced within the extradiegetic narrative, the story that frames the story of Sidney’s memoir (the editor tells us how he received Sidney’s journal from his friend’s mother, Cecilia, and, in turn, Cecilia introduces the journal and tells us how it came into her hands). The male editor and Cecilia agree that Sidney’s story “may serve for an example, to prove that neither prudence, foresight, nor even the best disposition that the human heart is capable of, are of themselves sufficient to defend us against the inevitable ills that sometimes are allotted, even to the best.”36 The rewards for virtue, the frame insists, are given in the next world. If we isolate Sidney’s memoir from its frame and analyze it without the extradiegetic narrative, the world within which Sidney lives suggests another lesson: Sidney should not have relinquished her moral authority to her mother and that had she claimed her right to act on her heart and married Faulkland, she may have found happiness in this world. In arguing that Sidney’s memoir shows the necessity for women to make their own moral and affective choices and not to blindly follow social and sexual demands, my reading corroborates Betty Schellenberg’s observation that “Sheridan exposes Sidney’s lack of moral authority because she refused to assume moral agency” and that her refusal is represented by Sheridan as a problem.37 If we resist the novel’s explicit didactic framing and concentrate on Sidney’s memoir, we learn the costs of a woman not having a will of her own, not acting on her desire and not challenging the rules of propriety. The sheer misery Sidney endures serves to counteract the rigid moral code of feminine propriety that the extra-diegetic level of the text tries to establish. Even Samuel Johnson found the lack of poetic justice too despairing and questioned its morality: “I know not, Madam,” he is reported to have told Sheridan, “that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.”38 When the novel first appeared in 1761, reviewers acknowledged a similar discomfort. The Monthly Review, while generally praising the novel, argued that Sidney’s distresses were “by no

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means calculated to encourage and promote Virtue.”39 Contemporary critics also note Sidney Bidulph’s mixed message and question the extent to which passive female resignation is the clear moral.40 Anna Fitzer provides an argument close to mine when she asserts that the divide between chaste wife and seduced woman is blurred by Sheridan; over the course of the novel, she writes, “the conventional reading of Sidney as paragon and of Miss Burchell as a cautionary example becomes increasingly unstable.”41 I argue that this moral confusion results from the novel’s inability to answer its central question: how does a woman act on her heart’s choice when there are conflicting claims upon it? Sidney Bidulph follows a series of plot lines in trying to solve the problem – promoting marriages of esteem over passionate love, obedience to parents over self-interest, dutiful wives over selfish lovers – yet the lines often lead to nowhere and more often end in misery, ultimately demanding the reader’s skepticism toward strict lines and absolute principles. In doing so, the novel leaves its female readers with little to guide their affective choices. In the course of telling the story of a marriage caused by the story of a seduction, I suggest, Sheridan is unable to find a code of feminine behavior that would allow Sidney both to sympathize with virtue in distress and to act on the truth of her own heart. The first dawning of Sidney Bidulph’s moral confusion can be traced to the embedded story of seduction, or, more precisely, to the fact that the story is never told. “Miss Burchell’s history” carries all the weight of Sidney’s suffering but it remains untold through most of the novel. The contentless seduction tale provides us with a pregnant example of how seduction’s situation determines its meaning. Ross Chambers persuasively details, in Story and Situation, the relation of the event of narrative to its meaning through the illustration of an Athenian orator who, when he is unable to get the crowd’s attention with a non-narrative speech, shifts into telling a story and his audience stops to listen. The content of the story is not important, as Chambers argues: “It is a story with no intrinsic meaning: it has the form of a story but (in its fragmentary form) does not make sense except as a device for getting attention from the crowd. It is literally uninterpretable except within the framework of the total situation.”42 Similarly, Burchell’s story has no content and its meaning derives entirely from its situation but it acts in the narrative to repeatedly stifle Sidney’s own desires. Below I analyze the multiple narrative acts that constitute Burchell’s story to show how the situation in which each act occurs brings into focus the hermeneutical limitations and complications of determining female sexual knowledge. We never arrive at a fixed meaning of her story, but the situations in which it appears mark the novel’s complex romantic terrain.

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“Miss Burchell’s history” first enters the novel in the form of a letter written by Burchell to Faulkland and anonymously sent to Sidney only days before her marriage; the letter informs Faulkland of Burchell’s pregnancy and calls upon him to help “the most unfortunate woman in the world” (41). Because Sidney is ill and unable to act for herself, her mother, Lady Bidulph, assumes hermeneutic authority in determining the letter’s meaning: Faulkland is a libertine who seduced a poor woman and the engagement must be broken. Her interpretation is grounded in her rigid dichotomous system of sexual difference: she sees the sexes as engaged in an interminable battle in which men attack female chastity, a view that contracts her into universally defending her sex. Sidney describes her mother’s belief system by saying that she has a “partiality to her own sex, and where there is the least room for it, throws the whole of the blame upon the man’s side” (50). Lady Bidulph’s inflexible gender hermeneutics results in her selective reading – and therefore misreading – of Faulkland’s letter to Sir George, a letter that would vindicate him from charges of seduction. When Faulkland tries to defend himself, she lays out the simple ‘facts’: “You acknowledge that she was a fine young woman, and you believe innocent: What excuse can you offer for being her destroyer?” (46). In Lady Bidulph’s eyes, any woman of good reputation who falls, must be an innocent victim. While there are signs in Burchell’s letter that the story is not one of simple seduction – Burchell acknowledges “our mutual fault” and blames “my own weakness” (41) – Lady Bidulph reads these only as reflecting how any virtuous woman would blame herself. Lady Bidulph’s fiancé abandoned her at the altar because he had previously seduced a woman and, thus, she reads her own story into her daughter’s. While Sidney knows of her mother’s prejudice against men and recognizes that her mother’s past colors her present (“I am not surprized at this bias in her,” Sidney comments, “her early disappointment, with the attending circumstances, gave her this impression” [50]), she does not question her mother’s reading of Burchell as a victim of seduction at this point. On the one hand, the novel introduces skepticism about Lady Bidulph’s rigid code by tracing its origins to her personal history. On the other hand, the novel endorses the mother’s principles through Sidney’s consent to the break with Faulkland and her assertion that: “[m]y mother is severe in her virtue, but she is in the right” (53). When Burchell first enters the novel, the reader expects a moment of éclaircissement : either her story will confirm Lady Bidulph’s belief that women are innocent victims, or it will show her to be mistaken, and thereby draw a line between Sidney’s virtue and Burchell’s vice. However, our expectations for clarity are frustrated, a response inflicted upon the reader repeatedly throughout the course of the novel.

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Lady Bidulph is the first listener of Burchell’s tale only because Faulkland, in a highly unusual step for a seducer, “appeal[s] to the lady herself ” and requests that Lady Bidulph interview the fallen woman because she “will be ready to acknowledge that I am no betrayer of innocence, no breaker of promises” (60, 58). When Lady Bidulph finally pays Burchell a visit after she has returned from witnessing Sidney’s marriage, we expect a revelation and a reckoning. The story, however, is halted before it begins by Lady Bidulph’s presumption that she knows what Burchell is about to say; as Kathleen Oliver points out, “Lady Bidulph literally puts the word ‘seduce’ in Miss Burchell’s mouth.”43 The situation surrounding the interview leads Lady Bidulph to jump to conclusions: the house is “a very neat box, with a pretty garden” and an “elegant” dining room; Burchell appears “modest” and her tears reflect her sentiment (101). All signs point Lady Bidulph to proclaim her case one of seduction: ’Tis as I expected, said my mother; Mr Faulkland is an ungenerous man. A young lady of your modest appearance, I am sure, he must have taken more pains to seduce, than he will acknowledge. Miss B. blushed exceedingly – Oh! madam, you have a charitable, generous heart, I was indeed seduced. I knew it, replied my mother. Did he promise to marry you? She coloured deeper than before. I will not accuse him of that, madam. (102)

Lady Bidulph willfully ignores Burchell’s confession that there was no breach of promise involved and focuses on Burchell’s claim that she was “indeed seduced.” “Seduced” functions for Lady Bidulph as the universal signifier of female innocence and, by definition, the woman is wronged and there is no more telling required for the story to be complete. Sidney’s narration of her mother’s encounter with Burchell casts doubts on Lady Bidulph’s interpretation. We can read Sidney’s suspicions of Burchell’s veracity in the paraleptic gaps between the embedded and embedding stories, that is, in the violation of narrative coherence that occurs when Sidney relates more than her mother could have told her. In contrast to Amelia and The History of Lady Barton where changes in narrative levels are marked by a shift in narrators (the first-person voice of the embedded narrator takes over from the embedding narrator), there is no such switch in Sidney Bidulph when Burchell’s tale is told; Sidney remains the narrator. In this instance of Burchell’s situated story, the reader is given Sidney’s narrative of the story her mother told her about her interview with Burchell. Sidney provides her own interpretation of the meeting to Cecile after she has recounted her mother’s:

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I know not, my dear, whether you will be of my opinion, but I cannot help thinking, that there was something like art in Miss Burchell’s behaviour, far from candour which Mr Faulkland seemed to expect from her. My mother mentioned the pains that she supposed had been taken to seduce her; her deep blush at this hint, makes me suspect that her answer was not dictated by sincerity. She saw my mother was not acquainted with particulars, and that she was willing to pass a favourable judgment on her fault – and yet she owned that Mr Faulkland had never promised to marry her – I know not what to think. (103)

Sidney’s confusion stems from a paralepsis in the narrative: if Lady Bidulph is indeed recounting the interview to her daughter, why would she include the damning description of Burchell’s blush and the lack of a breach of promise? The deeper blush immediately registers suspicion yet it is Lady Bidulph who ostensibly describes this deepening and she does not suspect Burchell. The paralepsis is an effect of the novel’s desire both to question Lady Bidulph’s rigid theory of sexual difference and to justify Sidney’s choice to sacrifice her desires for another woman’s. Sidney ultimately rejects the doubts her own narrative has registered and accepts her mother’s interpretation that Burchell is “the unfortunate victim” (60). The text’s confusion over Sidney’s response to Burchell’s seduction story translates into confusion over the place of romantic love in marriage. The novel provides signs both to indicate marrying without love dooms Sidney to misery and to suggest she is rewarded for her conduct-book resignation of her will. She is both better off for not having her heart’s love and worse off by marrying without her heart. Before her courtship with Arnold begins, Sidney’s story is interrupted by the embedded first-person tale of Mrs. Vere who married disastrously for love. The tale serves to caution Sidney and the reader against assuming that passionate love necessarily leads to a happy marriage, a caution often seconded by Sidney’s own heart. The novel answers the ethical question raised by the new marital and sexual code – can a woman love twice? – in the affirmative. Like the heroines of Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné and the Duchess of Devonshire’s Emma; Or, The Unfortunate Attachment, Sidney can overcome a passionate first love to dedicate herself to her husband. Upon discovering Faulkland’s past affair with Burchell, Sidney uses what to readers should be a familiar formulation: “If I know my own heart, I think I do most sincerely wish he may make her his wife” (53). Like Clarissa, she examines her heart and finds no burning fires of love: “I have been searching my heart … [and] I have the satisfaction to find, that the short-lived fire is quite extinct” (86). The novel portrays love as within women’s control and that when the heart’s choice is made incorrectly or irrationally, it can be fixed. Yet, it also suggests that

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a marriage based upon esteem and rational choice without the heart does not bring happiness. Mr. Arnold, far from being the positive rational choice – the Hickman – over the libertine Faulkland, turns out to be more like a version of the repulsive Mr. Solmes. From their first interview, when Arnold chides her for reading Horace in Latin instead of working on her embroidery, the reader knows that Arnold is not a proper mate for Sidney (80). Other telltale signs sharpen this judgment. The only positive attribute Sidney can come up with to describe Arnold to Cecilia is that he plays musical instruments well (79). She is “trying to like Mr Arnold” but can only describe him as “a very tolerable man” (88, 83). This is no Orlando Faulkland who Sidney initially depicts as “a perfectly handsome and accomplished young man” (19). Sidney does not marry for love but because her mother requests her consent. She justifies her decision by declaring her principles: “I am determined to pursue, through life, that rule of conduct which I have hitherto invariably adhered to; I mean, that of preferring to my own the happiness of those who are most dear to me” (93). Her mother’s happiness takes precedence and she surrenders her sexual will to that of her mother: “Fain would I bring myself chearfully to conform to my mother’s will, for I have no will of my own” (85). With the knowledge that Arnold is not the chosen one of her heart and that Lady Bidulph’s judgment is not to be trusted, we question Sidney’s perfect resignation. Our doubts are justified when disaster falls after her marriage: she loses her husband’s affections, he has an affair with the hideous Mrs. Gerrarde, he accuses Sidney of adultery and throws her out of the house, and shortly thereafter loses the family fortune. Marrying without love seems to be represented as a mistake. Yet another interpretation of the Arnolds’ marriage is simultaneously possible for there are many signs pointing to Sidney’s marital happiness. Her decision to marry Arnold turns out, at least initially, to be a good one. They have two children and live happily in retirement. “Arnold-abbey seems a paradise to me now,” Sidney observes (114). This happiness comes precisely because Sidney has resigned her will entirely to her husband’s: “I have laid it down as a rule never to oppose so good, so indulgent a husband as Mr Arnold is” (120). Sidney, herself, acknowledges that she did not love Arnold at the time of the marriage but that the esteem and gratitude she felt were the best foundation for a happy marriage: “I married him with no other sentiments, than those of esteem and gratitude for the great love he bore me. Yet from these seeds sown in my heart, sprung a tender and ardent affection: never did wife love a husband better than I did Mr Arnold” (315–316). In this reading of the Arnolds’ marriage, the misery

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that attends the marriage would find a tonic in the domestic bliss that accompanies the reconciliation. Though the Arnolds are reduced to poverty, never has Sidney known such happiness: “I never, since I was married, enjoyed life until now” (268). “You know my match,” she continues, “was originally the result of duty to the best of mothers; … When I married Mr Arnold, I esteemed him; a sufficient foundation, in the person of a husband, whereon to build love. That love, his kindness and my own gratitude in a little time produced in my heart; and I will venture to say few wives loved so well, none better” (268). Sheridan appears to be leading us down a path where marriage founded upon conduct-book principles produces the most solid love imaginable. However, lest we rest with this principle to guide our marriage choice, the novel allows such happiness only a fleeting existence and shortly after the reconciliation, Arnold dies and leaves his wife in poverty. Meanwhile, Burchell, the seduced woman, lives a comfortable bourgeois life in London and does not suffer because of her dalliance; even Sidney notes: “The girl’s family is not contemptible; her fortune is pretty large, her person lovely; the unfortunate false step she made is an intire [sic] secret” (277). The seduced woman neither dies nor is reduced to prostitution. Whose virtue is rewarded? How are we to interpret the mixed messages Sidney Bidulph contains? The repeated doubling of moral direction – marriage without love results in happiness and it results in misery – leaves the text unsure of whether women should act on their own hearts regardless of their social duty. Sidney’s principled defense of virtue in women – that is, her unrelenting support of Burchell as a victim – also produces mixed results. By protecting Burchell’s reputation and not making her story public to Arnold, she destroys her own reputation and allows her husband to persist in thinking she is adulterous. Will her martyrdom be vindicated? Will her error in not marrying Faulkland for love be corrected? The reader anticipates that Burchell’s seduction story will clarify the novel’s moral framework by speaking the truth of her identity. The plot of the novel is propelled by Burchell’s narrative act and its situations; thus, in holding back the whole story, the novel aligns the reader’s desire for narrative completion with the desire to hear the full truth of the seduction. Unsurprisingly, our desire for clarification is frustrated and Burchell’s final act of storytelling only serves to further complicate the reader’s sexual knowledge. The story is situated at the moment when Sidney can correct her earlier error in obeying her mother’s will. She finds herself widowed, able to remarry, and Faulkland again offers his hand. The doubts cast upon the veracity of Burchell’s story come to a crisis and we expect that the final

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telling will free Sidney to marry her love. Burchell finally admits that she was a willing participant, that Faulkland was “not a seducer,” and that she was less than truthful with Lady Bidulph (306). Counter to the reader’s expectations, the revelation comes with no attending romantic climax. Sidney’s response is to deny that Faulkland has any “interest in my heart” and to continue to assist Burchell: “I can now, said I, assure Mr Faulkland, that you have done him justice” (308). Sidney decides to pursue Burchell’s claim because she believes Burchell has remained true to her love for Faulkland and that she is finally properly contrite (“the confession she had made to me had humbled her” [308]). Rather than seeing the moment of confession as fixing Burchell as a “female libertine” (the name Sir George gives her), Sidney sees it as bringing them even closer together: “She has bound me to her by stronger ties than ever” (383, 310). The reader is again disappointed in our quest for clarity in courtship and love. What are the rules of feminine propriety? Burchell has not followed them and yet her unwavering attachment to Faulkland finds its reward in marriage. Sidney refuses her second chance at happiness even after she knows that Burchell was not seduced. The knowledge gained from the embedded tale’s content does not end up affecting Sidney’s plot even though the tale’s situation set up the expectation that Sidney would live happily ever after with Faulkland after she hears the truth of Burchell’s sexual agency. The disjunction marks a refusal of the clarity that a firm divide between fallen woman and wife would allow the text. The novel does not end with Burchell’s marriage to Faulkland and the final twists in plot only increase, rather than calm, our sense of dislocation. The marriage of Sidney to Faulkland does finally take place but the circumstances of the marriage (Faulkland believes he has killed his wife and her lover, and, in desperation, demands Sidney marry him) and the subsequent discovery that Burchell, now Mrs. Faulkland, is not dead, turn what should be the climax of a courtship plot into the climax of a gothic tragedy. The gothic plot reminds us that marriage – even to “the chosen of my heart, my first love” – does not automatically bring Sidney happiness (447). The moral ambiguity in which the text dwells suggests a different lesson from the one of absolute resignation stated in the novel’s prefatory framing. Since there are no absolutes in her world, the lesson Sidney should learn is that she must rely on her own moral agency and that her moral choices need to adapt to changing circumstances. She needs to give up her “inflexible heart” and not rest on outdated principles like the ones she inherits from her mother (444). The only rule the novel ultimately stands by is that no rule is universally applicable and no sexual category speaks the absolute truth of

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women’s affective experiences. What we have learnt through Burchell’s oftpostponed embedded tale is the importance of situation to acts of meaning and thus the necessity of women assuming the authority to make their own affective and erotic choices. Perhaps this is, in the end, the most useful lesson for Sheridan’s young female readers in a time of change. Sheridan seems to be saying: ‘Do not think that following any rules of conduct or appealing to strict moral standards will ensure safety and happiness in your marriage choice. You must ask questions, pursue doubts, and become your own moral authority.’ Eve Tavor Bannet argues that “Frances Sheridan uses each position to show up the shortcomings of the other and complicates the issues to the point where it becomes apparent that no simple or single, one-time answer will serve.”44 Sidney’s misery is caused, in part, by her unwillingness to act on the doubts she has after Burchell’s initial seduction tale and by her inability to interpret the specific situation of the tale. By not being an active listener and, instead, applying her mother’s “one-time answer,” she brings on the traumas of her own situation. In the last narrative act in the novel, the flower seller’s story, Sidney is able to revise her response to a seduction tale and to become the active listener she should have been to Burchell’s. The embedded tale of Miss Price, a girl Sidney meets on the street selling artificial flowers, seems, at first, superfluous. Only when we view this embedded tale as a corrective to Burchell’s unsatisfying one do we realize its effect on the embedding narrative. Miss Price’s story is a compelling chronicle of sexual exploitation: the evil libertine son of Miss Price’s father’s benefactor, Mr. Ware, preys upon Miss Price’s virtue and though she successfully fights him off and she and her father escape to London, the younger Ware hunts them down and has the father imprisoned on false charges. The girl tells her own story from beginning to end, but Sidney interrupts her when a particular does not make sense (“I could not help from interrupting the young gentlewoman to ask her how it came to pass” [393]); and she later rejoices, “I was glad I had interrupted the thread of her story, as by that means she had obliged me with so many interesting particulars” (395). Sidney becomes especially interrogative when the subject is Miss Price’s claim to sexual victimization: “As I had a mind to try the young girl, I asked her, How came you to receive Mr. Ware’s addresses in the manner you mentioned? how did you know but he intended to marry you?” (399). After hearing the convincing and detailed story, Sidney still does not assume its truth: “Though the girl was very young, and, as I told you, had a modest and ingenuous look, yet as I had seen such cheating faces before, I would not yield up my belief implicitly” (410). Sidney is

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determined not to make the same mistake she made with Burchell’s seduction tale so she pays the father a visit and solicits the story from him to see “if she [the daughter] has falsified in any thing” (411). The two stories are alike in “every particular” and the father also produces the written evidence of Ware’s letters “which convinced me of the truth of every thing” (412). Only with these actively sought proofs does Sidney come to the aid of virtue in distress, not only saving the family from ruin but also marrying Miss Price off to a suitable husband. The telling of this seduction narrative rewrites the happy ending not allowed by Burchell’s story. Sheridan’s Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, published six years after the original, also promises to rewrite – and right – the wrongs of the original, this time in the next generation of Arnolds with the marriage of Sidney’s daughter Cecilia to Orlando Faulkland Jr. The sprightly Cecilia marks her difference from her mother, observing that “she thought her mother had made too great a sacrifice to duty, in giving him [Faulkland] up so easily.”45 The reader expects that no such sacrifice will be demanded of either Cecilia or her sister, Dorothea, and, indeed, we are reassured when Sidney quickly and anti-climactically approves of Cecilia and Orlando’s marriage though she has raised her daughters to think of Orlando as a brother, not a lover. But the happy ending eludes the novel again because, while it can overcome the conflict between love and familial duty, it cannot reconcile the competing claims of two women’s hearts for the same man: Dorothea loves Orlando as well and he had earlier promised to marry no other but her. Dorothea’s mad dramatic interruption of her sister’s marriage ceremony brings to a close all hope that Sidney’s daughters can marry for love where she could not. If Sheridan’s views on the power of female affective agency do evolve, the difference lies in the embedded tale of seduction. In the Conclusion the central act of storytelling – the unfortunate Theodora Williams’s narration of her seduction by Edward, Orlando’s libertine friend, who promised marriage – leads to the vindication, not the obfuscation, of female virtue and desire. Edward, on his deathbed where he lies because Orlando has fatally wounded him in a duel fought to revenge Edward’s abduction of Dorothea, acknowledges Theodora’s rightful claim to be his wife and her story provides the climax to the main plot since she is the one to rescue Dorothea from ruin by Edward. Perhaps the largest revision Sheridan makes in her representation of romantic love is the clarity of her moral lesson. Whereas the necessity of moral and affective agency is implied by Sidney Bidulph, in the Conclusion, this lesson is explicitly stated. In the last sentence of the novel, the editor notes that he has deleted the original narrator’s pious reflections “thinking

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it a compliment due to the judgment of his readers to leave them to make reflections for themselves” (II: 165). The narrative of narrative in both novels ultimately situates the reader as an active agent judging the claims of the heart for herself. I want to stress, in conclusion, that Sidney Bidulph’s moral ambiguities do not emerge, like Amelia’s, from a masterful play between narrative levels nor do they indicate that Sheridan intended one thing and the text’s unconscious produced another. Rather, the novel’s ambiguities reflect multiple visions circulating in her contemporary culture about marriage, love and a woman’s right to her heart. The narrative situations stage the conflict between affective agency and social duty and never resolve it, ultimately representing the two as incommensurable. Unlike Fielding, Sheridan does not return in the end to a portrait of Virtue Allegorized but to a disturbing sense of sexual uncertainty. Sidney Bidulph concludes with Sidney observing: “In my virgin state, when I was a wife, and in my widowhood, I was equally persecuted” (467). Lest a woman think her only fear is seduction, and that if she resists the one false step before marriage, her ending will be happy, Sidney Bidulph reminds her that no female role frees her from persecution. The novel does provide, however, a compelling argument for women’s active participation in moral choices and that abdicating affective and erotic agency to conventional gender rules will certainly not bring women happiness.

lady barton’s narrative translations In Amelia and Sidney Bidulph, a chaste wife is paired with a seduced woman; in The History of Lady Barton (1771), Elizabeth Griffith goes beyond pairing and multiplies her heroines at a dizzying rate such that the central character – Louisa Barton, a recently married woman who does not love her husband Sir William – finds narrative company with over a half dozen women, three found in embedded tales, who suffer from a variety of love and marital problems, including seduction. The effect of this narrative proliferation shifts the relation between seduction and marriage from a binary to a larger continuum where women’s fates are not linked on the level of plot (in fact, unlike the other novels under discussion, in Lady Barton, the embedded heroines’ seduction plots are entirely separate from the main diegesis), but are joined by a mutual desire for women to know their hearts. These narrative differences result in a more radical proposition than the two novels discussed so far about the importance of a woman’s right to act on the knowledge of her heart.

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Following the path of the heart, the novel demonstrates, is fraught with obstacles for all the female characters: Louisa’s sister Fanny (the main correspondent in this multi-vocal epistolary novel) is jilted by her fiancé, Lord Hume, who takes up with a courtesan in Italy; Louisa’s naive stepniece, Harriet, harbors an unreciprocated love for Lord Lucan who is in love with Louisa; her friend, Lucy, loves a man whose father forbids their marrying; her brother Sir George’s fiancée, Delia, thought dead for most of the novel, is imprisoned in a convent by her mother because the mother wants to marry Sir George in Delia’s place. Added to these characters are the three heroines of the two embedded tales: Olivia, the innocent French woman, who is seduced into a false marriage and later abandoned by Colonel Walter, a friend of Sir William; Maria, a penniless heroine, who falls in love with Captain L*** but, after she believes he has left her, marries Mr. W*** for money on her mother’s urging; and, lastly, Mrs. N***, who tells her story to Maria, and who is left in poverty when her mother dies and she is abandoned by Mr. W*** who married her mother but refused to own her publicly. Griffith introduced a similar cornucopia of difficulties brought on by love, marriage and courtship in her first novel, Delicate Distress (1769). The main character there – a wife who has lost the affections of her husband – is one woman in a tableau of many other married and single women, including two embedded narratives. Both novels feature the after-life of marriage in their main plots and both weave an intricate number of women’s stories into that plot to collectively depict the difficulty, yet necessity, of a woman claiming and acting upon the right to her heart. Judging from the popularity of Lady Barton – seven editions by 1788 (four in English, two in French and one in German) – her readership was receptive to her representation of life after marriage.46 The continuum of women’s sexual and romantic situations is not only forged along thematic lines, but built by the novel’s structure of embedding. Women form bonds of solidarity through telling their stories of love and seduction in part because the structure of embedding merges their subjectivities. Unlike Mathews and Burchell, the heroines of the embedded seduction stories in Lady Barton are not also characters in the main plot and, whereas the narratees in Amelia and Sidney Bidulph are active listeners, in Lady Barton the first-person embedded tales are told with little to no interruptions. Louisa cannot “think, or write, upon any other subject, till [she has] … finished” recounting Olivia’s oral narrative in letters to her sister and Fanny becomes equally fixated on transcribing Maria’s epistolary history in letters to Louisa.47 At one point Louisa announces that her letter “shall go on in the narrative stile, at least so far as it relates to Mrs. Walter;

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for as her adventures are intirely [sic] detached from anything relative to us, I will not mingle them with mine” (II: 47). The two stories of Louisa and Olivia are not mingled, at least not diegetically. In both cases, the main story is halted by the embedded one and does not progress until after the personal history of the embedded heroine reaches completion in the narrative present. The continuous and lengthy first-person voices of Olivia and Maria take over the narrative: Olivia’s history consists of 113 pages, Maria’s of 242 pages and together they constitute approximately 40 percent of the entire novel. The length and structure have the effect of erasing their narratives’ situation. Whereas the narratee’s active presence in Amelia and Sidney Bidulph foregrounds their story’s situation, in Lady Barton the reader forgets that we are reading a story told by a character who is not part of the novel’s diegesis. This ‘forgetting’ of the story’s situatedness is as significant to the narrative as foregrounding the situation is to Amelia and Sidney Bidulph. When Olivia’s voice takes over the novel from Louisa’s, the ‘I’ of the embedded tale and the ‘I’ of the letter-frame merge and create the effect of one unending story of female suffering, or, in the case of Maria’s tale, a continuum ad infinitum in which one woman’s story leads into another and then into another. Fanny’s transcription of Maria’s story digresses into Mrs. N***’s story which then becomes the story of Mrs. N***’s mother, Mrs. W***, and the structure of a-story-within-a-storywithin-a-story produces the continuum effect. One could interpret the fact that the heroines of the embedded stories are external to the novel’s diegesis as a distancing technique: the wife in the main story is distanced from the seduced woman in the embedded one by the fact that their “adventures” do not “mingle.” However, the erasure of the narrative’s situation in Lady Barton has the opposite effect: it works to construct an imaginative identification between the teller and the told, between seduced woman and wife. As Louisa becomes Olivia (the ‘I’ of the narrators mixing), the novel appeals to the importance of the imagination in creating bonds of sympathy between women and while their fates are not bound together as are Sidney’s and Burchell’s, their stories intertwine and multiply to become the complicated and multi-pronged story of marriage based upon love. The exchange of stories physically connects all the female characters as storytelling produces an actual exchange of female bodies. In response to Barthes’s question – “What is it proposed that … [the narrative] be exchanged for?” – Lady Barton answers that the stories are given in return for the women themselves. Louisa sends Olivia’s story to Fanny and, afterwards, Fanny requests that she be sent Olivia in order to rescue her from Col. Walter’s garret where Louisa has discovered her sequestered by Walter

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(he refuses to acknowledge their marriage). Fanny then sends Olivia to a convent in France for health reasons where Olivia meets Delia, discovers she is not dead and hears her story of how her mother imprisoned her and publicly proclaimed her dead so that her mother could steal her fiancé, Fanny’s and Louisa’s brother, Sir George. Olivia sends Delia’s embedded story in a letter to Fanny who then goes to the convent and rescues Delia, reuniting her with Sir George so they can marry. Delia’s rescue leads to Fanny’s recovery of Maria’s story amongst the effects restored when she discovers Delia’s mother’s exchange of Maria’s corpse for Delia’s. Maria’s letter is then transcribed by Fanny and sent back to Louisa and the circle is now complete. Telling stories creates both a narrative and physical network of women. Gillian Skinner rightly compares Lady Barton to Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) in the way that storytelling constructs female community: “For the solidarity implied by Louisa’s and Fanny’s sympathetic retelling of and reaction to these stories is the basis for an attempt to change the terms of the conflict, replacing female impotence with collective action.”48 Griffith, herself, invokes a Millenium Hall-esque idea when Louisa calls for the founding of “[a]n asylum for unhappy women to retreat to – not from the world, but from the misfortunes, of the slander of it – for female orphans, young widows, or still more unhappy objects, forsaken, or ill treated wives, to betake themselves to, in such distresses” (II: 56). The embedded stories effect this asylum on the level of narrative structure. The novel’s stated motive for narrating lengthy stories about women who are not part of the main action is comparative and digressive: compared to the sad fates of the embedded heroines, Louisa’s bad marriage and Fanny’s fiancé’s betrayal seem bearable and hearing other women’s stories, as Louisa writes to Fanny, “may serve to divert us both from too close an attention to our own unhappiness” (I: 272). After hearing Olivia’s tale of betrayal in love, Fanny writes: “Like her, I have been forsaken by the man I love; but then I have not, like her, been exposed to want and ignominy” (II: 40). Fanny justifies including Maria’s tale with the claim that “whatever can awaken our sensibility for the misfortunes of others, must, at least for the time, render us insensible to our own” (III: 45). But far from erasing their sorrows, I argue that it extends them – literally extending the time of their own stories by adding over a volume to their letters, but also functioning as imaginative extensions of their fate. Fanny identifies with Olivia and the only difference between the two women is that Lord Hume betrays Fanny before she loses her virginity whereas Olivia has had no such luck. The extensions function like translations, translating Louisa’s and Fanny’s fates

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into another time and place where the female story plays out differently. In fact, Louisa calls her narrative of Olivia’s story “my translation” because it is a literal translation from French into English (Olivia cannot speak English and communicates with Louisa in French) and because it translates Olivia’s oral narrative into written form (I: 229). The lesson in all the women’s stories is the same: a woman’s right to her heart’s choice must be the first principle for marrying. Griffith strongly believed in women’s intellectual and emotional equality and the collective stories of women in Lady Barton insist that marrying the right man, for the right reason – love – is not only the one chance a woman has for happiness but also a moral responsibility that trumps her duty to her parents.49 The main plot in the novel depicts the problems for women in the after-life of a marriage when they do not marry for love; the stories that surround Louisa’s translate the fates of different women who try – with varying degrees of success and failure – to enter into a union of hearts. Together they present a persuasive argument for a woman’s right to freely choose her husband based upon the consent and the mature knowledge of her heart. In claiming this right women may risk seduction or consenting when they should not, but Griffith is adamant that the risk is necessary because the costs of marrying otherwise are too great for women. Griffith spent most of her prolific literary career describing the trials of life after marriage without love. Her concentration on marriage over courtship is unusual for a woman writer of her time. In addition to the two novels with married heroines listed above, her only other novel, The Story of Lady Juliana Harley (1776), follows the trials of a wife who married without love and out of filial duty. Her first staged play, The Platonic Wife (1765), tells the story of a wife who demands that the tender affection her husband gave her during courtship continue after marriage.50 Perhaps Griffith’s most famous marital text is the one that documents her own courtship and marriage to Richard Griffith, a confessed “libertine” who, through the power of Elizabeth’s writing, reforms to become a loving husband.51 In need of money, Richard and Elizabeth published their own letters six years after they were married – A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances (1757) – and the collection was so popular that it went through multiple editions, with more letters added to each edition such that the text ballooned from two to six volumes by 1786. Genuine Letters is a testament to their exemplary reciprocal love, a love founded on mutual respect and a deep intellectual companionship. Because of her experience, the European Magazine proclaimed Griffith an expert in marriage: “when we learn from herself that she passed thirty years of her life in uninterrupted happiness in

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the marriage state, we shall not hesitate to acknowledge, but that she may be deemed qualified to speak with authority on this most momentous of all earthly engagements.”52 Griffith’s oeuvre, as the above demonstrates, is dedicated to the pursuit of happiness after marriage and often questions whether conduct-book propriety leads to such marriages. To Griffith, reciprocal affective relations were central and foundational to marriage; she wrote in her final literary production, Essays Addressed to Young Married Women (1782): “As the union of hearts is universally allowed to be the bond of marriage, so the entering into such a connection without possessing the essence or first principles on which it should be founded must render the ceremony of none effect, and can in reason and equity only be considered as a state of legal prostitution.”53 As I noted in Chapter 2, the argument that mercenary marriage was a form of legal prostitution was a common refrain in the period, but less common was Griffith’s further claim: that marrying without love was a crime because it was a form of perjury. I demonstrated in the last chapter that penitent prostitute seduction narratives often argued that the whore’s love provided the greatest example of non-mercenary love; my reading of Lady Barton argues that the seduction narratives within married women’s tales articulate the way marriage without love – rather than sex without marriage – constitutes the most illicit erotic exchange. Lady Barton creates a taboo – marrying without love – where none before existed and the embedded tales of seduction play a central role in this project. For Griffith, it was not a selfish act but an ethical responsibility for a woman’s heart to accompany her hand in marriage. The seduction narratives serve to shift the taboo away from illicit sex and onto marrying without love; that is to say, the divide between chaste wife and fallen woman is not so much collapsed as displaced by the continuum of stories and chastity is redefined in terms of affection and love rather than sex. Far from fetishizing virginity, the seduction tales in Lady Barton participate in a growing sympathy toward women who love outside the bonds of marriage and women are divided in the novel not by whether their crimes involve sexual transgressions but by whether or not their marriages involve their hearts. Thus, Fanny and Olivia, and Louisa and Maria, have more in common than Louisa does with her sister. Sex outside marriage is not the taboo; marriage without love is. Louisa Barton begins the novel having broken the taboo, though her act only retrospectively registers as such at the end of the novel. Vowing her hand without her heart only gradually takes on the force of illicitness over the course of the narrative, with the help of the embedded tales. Shortly

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after her marriage to Sir William, she discovers that he is a tyrant whom she never loved. He did not show his misogyny before marriage, but does shortly thereafter precisely around her writing the pages which we are reading: “one of Sir William’s most favourite maxims, is, that women should be treated like state criminals, and utterly debarred the use of pen and ink” (I: 2). He makes an exception so that she can write to her sister but she cannot believe that he would proclaim such misogyny so shortly after she has promised to “love, honor, and obey” him (I: 3). Her error in marrying without love is caused by “fatal … inexperience” (I: 67). Because she did not know what love was, she mistook Sir William’s attentiveness and persistence in courting her for love and, with her vanity flattered by his attentions, she “gave away her hand, before she knew she had a heart to transfer” (I: 67). All her suffering can be traced back to her ignorance of love but how does a woman know whether or not what she feels is love? There are hints that Louisa knew something was amiss; she writes to her sister, in a half-accusing tone, that Fanny and Sir George doubted her when she claimed “I knew not what love was” and so she swallows her doubts and marries, discovering too late that she really did not know (I: 66–67). Louisa comes to know that she should have trusted her own knowledge of her ignorance. She acquires her first knowledge of love through an object – Lord Lucan – who is forbidden. Lucan is the companion and lover she should have married because, unlike her husband, he treats her with esteem and respect. He never leaves her bedside after the shipwreck when her husband is off surveying the island; he engages her intellect whereas her husband threatens to bar her from reading and writing. While Fanny and the reader know Lucan loves Louisa and that this love is reciprocated, Louisa remains ignorant of her love until after she hears Olivia Walter’s history. Only then is she able to recognize her own feelings as love. Her story is suspended by her encounter with Olivia and it is not until after the lengthy narrative concludes, and after she discovers Lucan kissing a miniature portrait of herself, that Louisa acknowledges “At that moment my heart first felt … dare I pronounce it, love!” (II: 101). Hearing and telling Olivia’s story allows Louisa to finally name her own desire. Why? Unlike Louisa, Olivia risked everything to marry for love, running away from her evil aunt to clandestinely marry Colonel Walter. But like Louisa, her ignorance of love leads her to misery. She thinks she loves Walter but she is an “uneducated uninformed” fifteen-year-old who falls for his “thousand protestations of the most ardent passion,” including his repeated claim that without her, “he would put himself to death” (I: 212, 215, 214). In part, she misrecognizes her physical attraction as love (“I confess I was struck,

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nay dazzled, with his appearance”) and confuses being “intoxicated with flattery” with feeling reciprocal affection (I: 210, 213). She acts on her feelings in accordance with the rules of modesty, refusing his “unwarrantable liberties” until their supposed wedding day (I: 233). She lives in what she thinks is marital bliss for four months in Marseilles until she discovers herself abandoned, penniless and pregnant. What strikes the reader is the vigilance with which she holds on to her love for Walter, never giving up hope that she can reclaim him. Seduction tales often equate the revelation of abandonment and false marriage with the loss of love but Olivia holds strong to her feelings; even after he has left her for dead, she refers to him as “my still loved, cruel husband” and asserts that his love is her marital right (II: 5). Olivia’s masochistic love comes from her sense that marriage and a child entitle her to reciprocal affection. Only after following him to Ireland, does she relinquish her feelings and entertain pleasing thoughts of death (“To my great joy I perceived I was going fast into a consumption” [II: 33]). She is living solely for her child but is relieved of this burden by finding a sympathetic listener in Louisa. Maternal identity is literally exchanged in this narrative act as Olivia tells her tale while Louisa is stuck at Walter’s estate recovering from her own miscarriage and, after her story, Louisa commits to caring for Olivia’s child if Olivia dies. More is exchanged in this narrative act, however, than maternal identity. Louisa’s listening and telling leads her to overpowering acts of sentimental identification and this identification forces her to translate Olivia’s tale into her own life, an act that makes her literally ill: “the sympathy between us is so strong, that I feel my health wasting as her tale proceeds” (I: 238). Olivia’s love may have been based on false premises concerning its reciprocity, but at least she loved and boldly claims her right to have love returned. Louisa’s identification leads to her recognition that she does feel a passion similar to Olivia’s but the romantic claim she wants to make is adulterous. In her translation, Louisa finds the love that is missing from her own marriage. After Louisa recognizes her love for Lucan, she banishes him from her presence and the novel ponders the ethical implication of her recognition. Does her declaration of love for Lucan constitute adultery? If she does not act on her desire, is the desire, in itself, a sin? Fanny, the disciplinary voice, warns Louisa, before she has acknowledged her love, that “thoughts, even without purposes, are criminal” (I: 95). Louisa, at this point, claims not to have such thoughts but she also challenges her sister’s moralism and wonders why she should be “debarred the chaste indulgence of a virtuous passion” (I: 130). After her love has been acknowledged, she accepts that she must suffer but remains convinced that feelings alone do not constitute

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adultery. “If passion is involuntary,” she argues, “it cannot be criminal,” a claim she repeatedly makes (II: 108–109). “I had considered my attachment to him,” she writes of Lucan, “as perfectly innocent, because it was absolutely involuntary” (III: 5). Even on her deathbed, she admits to being guilty only of a “single trespass of my heart, though an involuntary one” (III: 306). Yet there is one act she consented to that was criminal: her marriage. Her “crime” turns out not to be that she loves Lord Lucan, – an involuntary passion that she cannot be held responsible for and does not act upon – but that she married without love. “Wretched Louisa!” she exclaims to herself, “Thou wert a criminal, in the first act, who wedded without love” (II: 109). Fanny ultimately agrees and, in response, espouses a view of marriage very close to Griffith’s own: “It must be the joining of hearts, not hands, that can insure the marriage rights – I don’t misspell the word – And the woman who stretches out an empty hand, at the altar, but mocks the institution” (II: 116–117). Later she adds, “[t]here are, I am convinced, abundance of ingredients necessary to form an happy union for life; but love is … of all others the most necessary” (II: 120). Women have “rights” in marriage – the right not to be treated tyrannically, the right to respect, the right to be loved – but in order to claim her rights, a woman must form a union of hearts, something Louisa failed to do. If telling Olivia’s story has led Louisa to recognize her own crime in marrying without love, the embedded tale of Maria that follows confirms the crime. Maria’s story is Louisa’s translated into a different time frame and magnified by an act of sexual transgression; Louisa notes, “Maria was certainly more wretched, than I am, by the addition of one circumstance,” the difference being that she had adulterous sex once with her lover Capt. L*** after he comes to rescue her from the castle in which her husband has imprisoned her (III: 248–249). Maria’s story raises the same ethical issues as Louisa’s. Like Louisa, Maria married without love. Unlike Louisa, she had experienced love before her marriage, though she weds thinking that her lover has severed all ties and she discovers too late that L***’s rejection was based on his mistaken belief that she had been untrue. After her husband imprisons her on false charges of adultery and she claims that his actions break her marriage contract (“I will no longer stile him husband”), Maria’s thoughts turn to L*** (III: 108). Does repeating his name, she wonders, constitute “a crime?” (III: 113). The extreme nature of her husband’s cruelty means the answer is negative. But then Maria’s story extends beyond Louisa’s into sexual transgression. Does Maria commit a crime by having sex with L***? She admits it was her “first false step” yet the extenuating circumstances (his chivalrous journey to her castle-prison, the storm, the

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revelation that they were tragically separated by Matilda’s lies) all lead the reader to sympathize with Maria (III: 154). She justifies her actions by reminding her reader: “I had never loved another, and that I still loved him, even when I thought him false!” (III: 152). L*** goes so far as to claim that they are rightfully married since they had vowed eternal love before the misinformation came between them: “he a thousand times exclaimed that I was still his wife, that our hearts were joined by heaven, and that no power on earth, should ever part us more!” (III: 152). The sexual act follows shortly after his declaration of their ethical – though not legal – marriage. In contrast to the union of Maria’s heart with L***’s, her actual marriage to Mr. W*** is mercenary. Before Mr. W***, the penniless Maria had already rejected a Yorkshire baronet’s marriage offer because her heart felt nothing. While her mother is thrilled by the prospect of financial relief, she will not let her daughter marry if she does not love, calling such an act “perjury”: “no power on earth should force me to consent to my child’s perjury” (III: 72). If marrying without love is equated with perjury, it is hard to understand why W***’s proposal is eventually accepted. Her decision is described as a “sacrifice” to her mother’s comfort and as an economic necessity but the marriage is immediately disastrous (III: 94). W*** had earlier demanded “your heart, as well as person … without the first, the later would be worthless” and he realizes shortly after the wedding that he received a “worthless” bride so he begins to abuse her (III: 77). As in Sidney Bidulph, filial duty sanctions marriage but where Sheridan remains ambivalent as to whether such duty can lead to happiness in marriage, Griffith strongly rejects any idea that such a bond would work. Maria’s mother eventually blames herself, acknowledging to her daughter that “[y]our filial duty, more than your own ambition, was the sole motive which has rendered you a victim” (III: 106). Maria’s victimization reaches gothic proportions when W*** discovers her adultery and kills L***, a crime for which she is arrested. Though eventually she is set free and W*** is held responsible, her “perjury” clearly demands her death which occurs in an inn on her way to the convent in France. The morbid exchange of Maria’s corpse for Delia’s by Delia’s mother makes obvious the horrors of following a parent’s wish as filial duty, in the case of Delia, equals her death. Only after Olivia discovers Delia locked in the convent is Delia reborn into marriage with Louisa’s brother. Maria’s death foreshadows Louisa’s. With only fifty pages left in the novel when Fanny finally finishes transcribing Maria’s voluminous letter, the rest of The History of Lady Barton seems anti-climactic. Louisa’s plot presents a simple translation of Maria’s. Like W***, Sir William falsely

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accuses his wife of adultery and banishes her from his presence because of the malicious lies Col. Walter has fed him about Louisa and Lord Lucan. As in Maria’s tale there is a murder, only significantly it is Lucan, not Louisa’s husband, who murders Walter to avenge the false accusations. Unlike Maria, Louisa transforms into an obedient wife and dutifully nurses Sir William through illness, expressing deep contrition for her “involuntary” act of loving another man. Sir William recognizes his mistake, pronounces her innocent and begs her forgiveness which she willingly gives. Yet we know there will be no reconciled happiness; Louisa must die, like Maria, for her “perjury.” Prior to Maria’s embedded tale, Louisa’s plot was headed toward a comic ending. The reader expects Sir William to die from one of his many illnesses and free Louisa to marry her soul mate. Later novels in the period allow such plots: Harriet Lee’s Errors of Innocence (1786) and Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792) both feature heroines who remarry after the fortunate death of their abusive first husbands. Griffith, herself, entertains this comic ending in Juliana Harley when Juliana is released from her first mercenary marriage through death but then is unable to marry her love. After reading Maria’s tale, however, we know that The History of Louisa Barton must end tragically and the speed with which Louisa is reconciled to her husband and dies suggests that her ending needs no narration since Maria’s has already been told. The novel makes clear that Louisa is innocent of the “one circumstance” distinguishing her from Maria but both heroines committed perjury at the altar (III: 248–249). Louisa does not die because she gave her heart to another man, but because she committed the crime of giving her hand without her heart. The embedded tales translate into Louisa’s story, inciting and mirroring her plot. But the translation also works the other way: Louisa’s plot extends into the embedded tale, changing its outcome and helping women claim their rights. Lucan’s duel with Walter to rescue Louisa’s reputation precipitates Walter’s deathbed acknowledgment of his relationship with Olivia and he makes her his rightful heir, restoring her child’s legitimacy. The tale within Maria’s tale of Mrs. N*** comes to a similar resolution with the help of its frame narrative, Maria’s story. W***’s suicide caused by his imprisonment for killing Maria’s lover and Maria’s own death together allow Mrs. N*** to claim her rightful inheritance of W***’s estate. The answer in Lady Barton to the question “what do embedded stories gain from the embedding?” is that they gain legitimacy, both economic and moral. Telling stories within other stories establishes a line of women’s legitimate inheritance. The interaction between the various narrative levels in the novel constructs a network of women who

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are engaged in claiming their rights when they marry for love and suffering the punishments when they do not. Jane Spencer cites Lady Barton to support her claim that seduction becomes too illicit in the late eighteenth century to constitute the central plot in sentimental novels by women: “Griffith gives the story of the seduced woman only a marginal position in the novel. She is a warning to the heroine, instead of being the heroine herself.”54 But it is hard to determine what exactly Olivia would be warning Louisa against since whatever she suffers occurs through no fault of her own and the marriage that her seduction narrative claims as her right is legitimated in the end. Olivia does not die for her sins, in fact she lives to inherit a fortune, whereas Louisa is the one whose crime requires death. Lady Barton does have a conservative undercurrent: in both Delicate Distress and Lady Barton Griffith portrays a wife’s obedience to her husband as obligatory. Especially in Delicate Distress where the heroine, Lady Emily Woodville, must resign herself to silence surrounding her husband’s infidelity, Griffith suggests resignation to marital duty is a requirement. But I interpret this resignation as pragmatic and as part of her project to create a taboo around marrying without reciprocal love. What other choice does a wife have under the current marriage laws but resignation? For this reason, she places the entire weight of a woman’s happiness precisely on the marital vow and the necessity for its basis in reciprocal love. The embedded tales in Lady Barton are central in fetishizing a woman’s heart, not her chastity, as they shift the taboo from sex to loveless marriage. This chapter has analyzed the embedded tales of seduction in three novels about marriage in order to document the wide range of formal and thematic relations sketched between seduced women and wives. In other words, we cannot lay claim, as Spencer does, to one conclusion concerning the interaction between the two narrative levels and we need to resist reading seduction sub-plots as punitive warnings to virtuous heroines. Seduction serves many functions in these novels and the most general claim we can make is that in order to tell the story of women marrying for love, these narratives must digress into stories where women’s affective agency does not end in legal marriage. The recurrence of tales of seduction within tales of marriage suggests a cultural preoccupation with the overlaps between the two figures and an anxiety about how women can know when their heart’s choices are the right ones. If we highlight the “narrative of a narrative” that the embedding of seduction foregrounds, we read a story about epistemological uncertainty, about the problem of discerning truth when that truth has little historical precedent. The story of marriage for love is new and the

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conventions for what that looks like and how to achieve it are impossible to decode from a synthesis of these three novels. We can, however, come to comparative conclusions. While Fielding exploits the overlaps between seduced and married heroines for reasons of plot, he ultimately uses his narrator’s authority to divide the narrative levels. Sheridan’s narrative acts acknowledge the new epistemological authority of women’s hearts but cannot fully accept the implications of women acting on their own affective and moral authority when their acts are outside the bounds of propriety; thus the relation between narrative levels in Sidney Bidulph remains confused and unarticulated. The History of Lady Barton, in contrast, is clear in its interaction of narrative levels and this results in the boldest claims on behalf of the epistemological authority of women’s own hearts. Griffith’s radical position on the necessity of women’s affective agency emerges from the narrative act in which the teller of the tale becomes the listener of another woman’s tale of seduction. Whereas Fielding’s narrator never relinquishes his position, the internal narrator of Lady Barton does, and this narrative exchange, I wish to conclude, is a significant moment in the history of seduction. Perhaps we should not make too much of the publication chronology of the texts examined here, but it is intriguing to think that as the century progresses decade by decade – from Amelia (1751) to Sidney Bidulph (1761) to History of Lady Barton (1771) – the stories of married women become bolder both in their sympathy toward seduced women and in their assumptions of women’s right to affective and erotic agency. The two narratives of wife and fallen women, far from being opposed, become part of the same story.

chapter 4

Seduction in street literature

“My fortune is not equal to your merit,” declares the reformed aristocratic seducer of “Virtue in Distress” (1770) as he proposes to Eliza, a beautiful and virtuous humble laborer.1 The sentiment that a woman’s individual merit provides her with a dowry out-valuing the money of a man of fortune becomes newly comprehensible within the later eighteenth-century’s affective landscape. When individual feeling takes precedence over traditional kinship structures in uniting love with marriage, laboring-class women are theoretically poised to profit the most from companionate marriage’s implied revolutionary economics. Samuel Richardson’s infamous Pamela (1740) was the first text to turn the Cinderella fairy tale into a realistic narrative in which a laboring-class heroine’s virtue could be rewarded with both the love and the hand of her upper-class seducer.2 Though the story, as historians have demonstrated, was not grounded in probable reality, the ‘virtue rewarded’ narrative becomes newly recognizable as a mimetic tale.3 This chapter focuses on seduction narratives that have poor heroines but ones that, unlike Pamela, circulated within street literature, and asks what function the repetition of seduction serves when it is directed at a laboring-class readership.4 What happens to Pamela’s story when it is told not within a sentimental novel but in prose narrative chapbooks and in popular ballads? Two major differences appear when we turn from novels to cheap print: one, the plot of seduction in street literature does not easily or always follow the path of virtue rewarded with marriage but includes non-sentimental comic and tragic tellings; and two, the narratives are primarily told from third-person, not first-person, perspectives. The difference in narrative voice has significant implications in understanding seduction’s meanings for if, as I have argued, seduction narratives in the period narrate the inner lives of a woman’s heart in consenting to sex and thus posit her own heart’s truth as the enigma that the narrative must solve, then first-person narration seems central to this epistemological pursuit. In addition, I argued in Chapter 3 that the question of “who speaks?” 108

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has serious effects on female affective agency and that Amelia’s thirdperson narration provided less authority for the feelings of its female characters than did Sheridan’s and Griffith’s homodiegetic narrators. On the one hand, street literature’s use of primarily heterodiegetic narrators, its telling of the story from an omniscient point of view, structurally distances the narrative from the feelings and actions of its laboring-class heroine. On the other hand, because the third-person voice shifts in focalization from seducer to seduced to family members to the general community, the narration foregrounds the hermeneutic problem modern love poses for laboring-class women: how does the individual subject of feeling claim her own affective truth when that truth is centrally shaped by and within her community? The semiotics of love in street literature, in other words, highlights love’s material and economic conditions to ponder what exactly is the value of virtue to a poor woman and what authority does her heart give her in the face of changing social realities.5 How does the heroine know when rank is an insurmountable obstacle to her love and when to believe her rich lover’s vows? How does she know when her laboring-class lover’s promise of marriage can be depended upon given the fact that he increasingly comes from an anonymous and mobile populace of waged laborers? The problem of a gap between inner feeling and external action is not confined to laboring-class women as the internal desires of genteel heroines like Clarissa certainly come into conflict with the social world; but the dialogue between individual feeling and the community’s interests, I argue, is a more central component of seduction’s plot in street literature. Laboring-class heroines in this literature still pursue their heart’s truth – even, at times, with a vengeance unknown to sentimental novels – but this heart’s truth is significantly shaped by transformations in social communities. If street literature inverts the relation of self to world or of individual feeling to the social found in epistolary fiction, this inversion is readable in the predominant use of third-person narration. By telling the story from a point of view outside the female subject, these tales explore how the emerging discourse of love both opens up a new romantic landscape for poor women and shows how the economic shifts making such a landscape imaginable also produce very different material realities for laboring-class women. The wide range of seduction plots – from comic to tragic ballads, from transgressive to reactionary chapbooks – tell stories of heroines negotiating a new terrain where the belief in individual romantic freedom is brought up against the material reality of the breakdown in traditional courtship practices. The absence that the presence of the seduction narrative

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in street literature speaks to concerns the unknown effects of a changing economic structure on the affective lives of laboring women. The migration of laboring people to the cities, the increased geographic mobility that accompanies waged labor, and the separation of work space from domestic space, all work to weaken the power of traditional community structures in regulating social practices. The most pronounced effect of this weakening can be seen in the sharp rise in illegitimacy rates (this specific issue is taken up in the last section of this chapter). By 1800, at least half of first-born births were conceived out of wedlock and a growing number of these prenuptial pregnancies did not result in marriage.6 This increase in illegitimate births was likely the result of an interruption in the traditional courtship practice of “spousals” where marriage followed a promise to wed plus sexual intercourse and pregnancy. John Rule explains the rise in out-of-wedlock pregnancies as follows: “Expecting marriage, they [women] continued traditional courting practices, but in the absence of the constraints of the traditional community their expectations were often disappointed.”7 Most historians, including, as the editors note, the contributors to a recent essay collection on the subject,“tend towards an economically oriented ‘courtship frustrated’ model of understanding illegitimacy.”8 Seduction narratives, particularly those telling stories of intra-class sexual relations, narrate plots of “courtship frustrated” where heroines engage in sexual intercourse expecting marriage but where the union never occurs. The semiotics of love for laboring-class women, then, increasingly involves distrusting the romantic vows of all men, both rich and poor, and, by reading love’s significations in these narratives, we can see the transition from community-based understandings of affective relations, with family and village enforcing the practice of spousals, to an individualized feeling determining the plot. Historians debate the extent to which the ideology of companionate marriage influenced actual marriage practices within the laboring class. Some argue that the impact of affective freedom was concentrated within the higher ranks since only families with wealth concerned themselves with mercenary marriages in the first place. The poor, not owning property, had no investment in controlling lines of inheritance and therefore had always practiced companionate marriage of a sort. Alternatively, other scholars argue that it was precisely the poor, with limited and fragile economic power, who needed to marry with familial and financial considerations prominent.9 Whether or not actual marriage practices changed, seduction narratives in chapbooks and ballads attest to the fact that ideas of modern love – for example, a love that knows no class boundaries, a love that

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grants authority to individual feeling over community needs, a love that assumes innate female virtue – circulated within laboring-class representational forms though the stories they tell about the heroine’s ability to decode the signs of modern love vary widely across this archive of texts. Some chapbooks present romantic love as conquering all, including class difference, and do so in both sentimental and comic mode (see, for instance, the sentimental The Maid of the Mill; Or, The Cottage Beauty and the comic The Distressed Lady, Or Yorkshire Beauty Made Happy).10 Other stories comically demystify individuated romantic love and show witty chambermaids resisting their master’s seductions for mercenary, not emotional, reasons.11 Still other tales – in fact, the greatest number of seduction narratives found in street literature – are tragic ballads chronicling the broken marriage vows of lovers from the same class. “The Yarmouth Tragedy; Or, the Perjured Sailor” provides a standard example where the virtuous woman who consented to erotic relations only on the promise of marriage is betrayed and dies but returns to haunt the perjured lover to his death.12 Seduction narratives explore the new affective freedom for laboringclass women but they do not do so within a singular story; thus, the diversity, depth and complexity of the tales circulating amongst the poor resist any unified conclusions. Jean R. Freedman, in her succinctly argued “Illegitimate Pregnancy in Scottish Ballads,” demonstrates how folklorists often approach ballads as if they provide such a singular voice, or as if they unproblematically reflect the norms of a community.13 By reading Scottish ballads about illegitimacy, she observes that this is far from the case, concluding that: “Scots ballads, like Greek tragedy, exist not to provide a sum of shared values, but instead to articulate conflicts that arise from unshared values; and, in so doing, the ballads suggest solutions, air grievances, and perhaps defuse or detonate these conflicts by changing them from reality to representation.”14 Like Freedman, I resist a unified reading of seduction’s signification and, instead, this chapter charts the narrative’s multiple uses within street literature to determine the conflicts that seduction helps articulate. The first section focuses on comic cross-class seduction ballads in order to reveal the way these tales capitalize on the new definition of sexual difference in which women are valued for virtue to produce a reconfigured anti-authoritarianism that accounts for a rising middle class. The second section turns to sentimental chapbooks to further seduction’s attention to class over gender and analyzes their inversion of Pamela’s ideology of rank and femininity in constructing a semiotics of love around exterior, not interior, realities. In the final section, I focus on seduction

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narratives with laboring-class villains to argue that these tragic ballads provide a range of responses to the rise of illegitimate births. Taken together, these tales ask questions about what constitutes virtue in a changed social landscape where traditional hierarchies of rank are being overturned and about how women can act on their individual feeling as rural communities are being replaced by a growing urban and mobile society. virtue knows no class: cross-class seduction in comic ballads The call that virtue knows no class is repeated throughout cheap print seduction narratives. The title character of the ballad “Pretty Nancy of Norwich,” a weaver’s daughter, fights off her rich gallant’s seduction attempt by refusing sex outside marriage and asserting her modesty and virtue in the face of her class vulnerability: “I will ne’er blemish my reputation, / For all the riches you can bestow, / I’ll keep myself in modest station, / For you never shall debauch me so.”15 Aligning themselves explicitly and implicitly with Richardson’s Pamela, many chapbook and ballad heroines plead, like Richardson’s heroine, that they would rather “wear Rags, and live upon Rye-bread and Water” than be Harlots to rich men (41). “Although you be rich and I am poor, / Yet nevertheless I will not be your whore,” asserts the heroine of “London Kate.”16 By analyzing the representation of virtue in comic cross-class seduction ballads, this section defines the virtue laid claim to by laboring-class heroines in terms of a class consciousness that values individual material advancement over chastity and aligns rural and urban poor women against both middle-class and aristocratic seducers. The affirmation that the poor share the same notion of virtue as the rich disputes the widespread assumption – held both today and in the late eighteenth century – that sexual morality was less stringent within plebeian culture and that female chastity did not constitute a woman’s value. The author of Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa and Pamela articulates this belief when he criticizes Richardson’s characterization of Pamela: “she was not of that rank or situation in life which could entitle her to those notions of honour and virtue, which are extremely proper and becoming in Clarissa or Harriet.”17 Contemporary historians may disagree with the ideological sentiment behind such associations of chastity with class, but they would concur that the poor in the period demonstrate a greater leniency toward the loss of a woman’s virginity than the upper classes. Anna Clark extensively chronicles plebeian sexual morality in

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The Struggle for the Breeches and argues that “chastity was not necessarily the most important female virtue.”18 She explains the absence of weight placed on virginity through two main factors: the lack of property and, thus, little concern about the legitimacy of heirs, and the introduction of waged labor creating a mobile populace of itinerant workers who cannot afford the stabilizing demands of a rigorous chastity. The evidence brought to support the claim that the ideology of bourgeois virtue did not pertain to the lower classes is the sharp rise in prenuptial pregnancy. Sex outside marriage seems to have been more widely accepted, especially if it was followed by marriage, and, as Clark shows, “[l]oss of chastity did not deny women the claims of kinship or compassion.”19 While bourgeois moral codes required a family to shun the fallen woman, community standards amongst the poor allowed the unwed mother to be supported by family and friends. The definition of virtue as chastity may not have held moral power within plebeian culture, but I argue this does not mean that female virtue held no value, only that virtue was defined in different terms. The plots of innocence betrayed, seduction outwitted and virtue rewarded that are found in ballad literature both confirm the historical claim that chastity held less value among the poor yet reject the conclusion that therefore virtue was considered less important or that sexual morals were promiscuous. Virtue, I argue, is as central to these seduction narratives as it is to Richardson’s Pamela but the virtue upon which these stories rise and fall, that which determines whether a seduction is successful or not, is divorced from chastity and virginity. Virtue signifies through the codes of an economic or material morality, rather than a sexually symbolic one, and affective agency is not linked to the erotic female body as much as it is to an economically savvy female mind. That chastity, or virginity, does not carry much weight in street print overall is the one generalization we can claim about this literature and, thus, our codes for analyzing seduction’s cultural significations must be different from those used to interpret novels. Dianne Dugaw reads popular literature and concludes: “Attention to gender in popular forms disturbs our toofrequent identification of womanhood with class-based ideals of ‘femininity’, domesticity, and propriety.”20 Tanya Evans takes this further, stating that “[i]n chapbooks and ballads, pre-marital sex was represented as commonplace and female sexual desire as given.”21 My reading of seduction in comic ballads corroborates this claim. For example, in “The Jovial Tinker and the Farmer’s Daughter,” the heroine, after being impregnated by a nobleman disguised as a tinker, profits from her sexual exchange by marriage to a local farmer. The nobleman takes responsibility for his desire by offering anyone who will marry her a free farm for “Altho’ she’s lost her

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maidenhead, / pray what the worse is she.”22 The happy ending seems to affirm the lax attitude toward virginity and the nobleman provides her with a dowry of “horses, cows, barrow and ploughs.” In his famous conduct book on bourgeois virtue, Dr. Gregory argued that “[v]irgin purity is of that delicate nature, that it cannot hear certain things without contamination.”23 The heroines of these seduction ballads prove that young laboring-class maidens can hear and do many things without jeopardizing their “virgin purity”: they outwit aristocrats, steal their money and trick them into marriages because they know enough not to believe the vows of upper-class men. Their material savvy translates into a demystified virtue that assigns virtue a very real economic value. If seduction narratives circulating amongst a middle-class readership associate innocence with ignorance and thus the virgin falls because of her chaste lack of sexual knowledge, these comic ballads often associate virginity with sexual knowledge. Servants and milkmaids know enough to suspect that a rich man who vows true love to a chambermaid is probably after sex without marriage and they use this knowledge to set their own traps to ensnare upper-class men and win their money. “The Merchant Outwitted; Or The Chamber Maid’s Policy” tells the story of how a chambermaid’s lack of naïveté allows her to keep her virtue and resist her predatory master.24 The merchant is attracted to his mother’s chambermaid and he attempts to seduce her by bribing her with presents since he assumes all servants are promiscuous and can be bought. Using the ‘poor but virtuous’ plea, she defends herself: “She said, Noble squire, I’m but poor and mean, / And you are a person of honour and fame, / You do not intend to make me your wife, / I’ll not be your harlot so long as I have life.” He shifts to more romantic tactics, threatening to kill himself because he would rather die than live without her. Once again, she knows better than to fall for his vows and matches his dramatic sentimentality with pragmatism: “He took out his rapier, and said, I must die: / I cannot think, she said with a smile, / To die for a Woman is not worth your while.” He vows to marry her if she will give him one night and, feigning modesty, she invites him to visit her in the dark. Instead of his mother’s chambermaid, however, he finds himself in bed with a toothless, smelly, old woman whom the chambermaid has paid to take her place. Enraged by the betrayal, the merchant wakes up the house and when his mother discovers what has happened, she is so impressed by the chambermaid’s craftiness that she tells her son to marry her, “[h]er Virtue and Beauty her Portion must be.” The chambermaid’s refusal to mystify sexual relations as romantic love and her sexual knowledge in hiring the old woman translate into her virtue being rewarded with economic advancement.

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The bed-trick is a standard motif of seduction ballads and it evidences the unique combination of virtue and knowledge particular to heroines in this literature. In order to exchange one woman’s body for another and save her own virginity, the heroine requires anticipatory knowledge of the sexual act and the trick, itself, performs an erotic action which is rewarded in marriage. The heroine of “The Butcher’s Daughter’s Policy: Or, the Lustful Lord well fitted” outwits the Lord’s attempt to steal her “maidenhead” by promising marriage and one hundred guineas if she’ll spend the night with him.25 She agrees but sends a “Blackamoor” woman in her place. In both “The Merchant Outwitted” and “The Butcher’s Daughter” the listener/reader is kept in suspense about the planned trick until after the heroine has consented to sex, though we discover before the lover. The movement from suspicion to belief allows us to celebrate a reconfigured virtuous heroine who knows enough to pay another woman for sex and keep her own virginity for a higher price. Unlike the merchant who discovers the trick midway through sex, the Lord here spends a long and lusty night with his bed-mate, only discovering he has been “kissing the Devil” in the clear light of day. The Lord responds to the discovery with good humour and the realization that “methinks I am fitted’ / For the butcher’s daughter she has me out-witted.” The ballad quickly ends with her virtue – in the form of her wit rather than her sexual innocence – rewarded through marriage.26 If virtue can be sexually knowledgeable, how, then, does it signify? In ballads of cross-class seduction, virtue is synonymous with the refusal of a superior’s desire. The heroine’s virtue in “London Kate,” for example, is detected not because Kate vows she would rather die than lose her virginity, but because she refuses to fall for the wealthy merchant’s whims. The Billingsgate merchant displays his class prejudice and assumes servants are cheaply and easily seduced, but Kate spoils his plan: Although you be rich and I am poor, Yet nevertheless I will not be your whore, So leave off your squeezing, your hugging and teazing, I ne’er was so abus’d in my life before. When he found she could not be led aside, He courted her to be his lawful bride; He fought her, he bought her, jewels, jewels, Then for the wedding he did provide.

Kate’s assertiveness both in refusing to be his whore and in fighting for more and more money shows that she does not give in to class-based authority. She also proves to be worth more than the few coins he initially tosses at her.

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Her virtue signifies not only by her refusal of his sexual advances, but also by her confidence in asserting her own individual value. “The Virtuous Milk-Maid’s Garland” takes the cunning and aggressive definition of virtue further and the class battle it fights involves the “virtuous milk-maid’s” physical aggression. A young squire gives the milkmaid a ring and promises marriage but tries to rape her. Weeping, she pleads: “You promis’d me I should be your lawful Wife, / I’ll ne’er be Whore, I will first loose my Life.”27 Unlike Pamela, who also claims a preference for death over the loss of virtue but prefers crying, fainting and self-immolation as a response to Mr. B.’s rape attempts, this heroine picks up a sword and attacks her rapist, piercing him through and leaving him “a bleedin in Black-mary’shole.” In the utopian world of ballad literature, she is not sent to jail for attempting to kill a superior but, from his sickbed, the Squire reforms and marries her.28 Virtue signifies here through violence. Ballads of crossclass seduction dissociate female cunning and aggressiveness from sexual promiscuity – a link familiar to the novel – especially when that knowledge is used to usurp social hierarchy, and they permit strong agency – sexual, physical, psychological – on the part of their female heroines. In constituting female virtue through wit, sexual knowledge and physical aggressiveness, these ballads narrate seduction stories, in part, to celebrate the anti-authoritarianism of class inversion and the carnivalesque. The difference of rank not sexual difference provides the central conflict worked out through the story, a point confirmed by the significant number of songs narrating stories of lower-class men marrying women from higher ranks.29 While not as common as women marrying up, these ballads demonstrate that the gender of class transgression flows both ways and they foreground how the malleability of class boundaries is the enigma that the narrative needs to resolve. Laboring-class women have access to a discourse of femininity in which individual feeling authorizes cross-class affective bonds but novelistic discourse (witness Pamela) does so by representing chastity as the key to class advancement. As Anna Clark has noted, “[s]exual morality provided a dividing line between the classes” and increasingly those within the laboring class who wanted to mark their rise toward the middling class asserted the importance of female chastity.30 But these comic ballads suggest a different strategy and resist a morality centered on female chastity. They test the discursive terrain of a new romantic class mobility to warn women against being duped by the promise of wealth for chastity. Instead, they comically imagine the rewards of a mercenary skepticism that manipulates that discourse for personal gain.

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Many scholars, most famously Mikhail Bakhtin, have addressed the ‘world-turned-upside-down’ motif central to much street and popular literature where the disenfranchised invert dominant hierarchies such that the lowest of the low rise up to the highest of the high.31 Comic seduction tales fit into this carnivalesque motif, but they do so by realigning it to address shifting distinctions of class in the period. The ‘worldturned-upside-down’ motif traditionally invokes a feudal class hierarchy where the divide between landowners and serfs is absolute. In contrast, the class inversions imagined here involve a variety of economic positions. From a traditional rural dichotomy between a milkmaid and a lord to the more contemporary relations between merchant and domestic servant or between untitled wealth and a tradesman’s daughter, seduction ponders the difference between the vows of both aristocrats and merchants and suggests a structural skepticism towards an emerging middle class. The middle-class merchant is as likely as the aristocrat to try to exploit the poor heroine and thus the lowest of the low rise up against not only the highest of the high but the middle ranks as well. The repetition of seduction in ballads effects a collapse of economic difference where the five guineas a “London Beaux” offers a lady’s waiting maid is comparable to the twenty pounds a “Citizen” offers a country damsel.32 The representation of class difference focuses attention on structural positions and the lover is a potential seducer whether or not he has five or five hundred pounds. The affirmation that ‘virtue knows no class’ decodes love through an economic hierarchy that includes the middle class and thus seduction updates the class warfare traditionally a part of popular literature by reaffirming economic difference – both large and middling – as central to a semiotics of love. In addition, it unites laboring-class heroines from the country with those from the city insofar as milkmaids and chambermaids take up similar positions as witty, aggressive and virtuous potential victims of seduction within the emerging discourse of non-mercenary affective relations. Cross-class comic seduction ballads, to conclude, reveal the cultural contestations at work in re-imagining the laboring class in light of a rising middle and urban class in which mobility through marriage is a new discursive – though not material – reality; the next section pursues these contestations in more detail by focusing on the narratives closest in form to the bourgeois novel: sentimental chapbooks. As in the ballads, cross-class seduction in chapbooks represents female virtue only as the starting point in a plot about class warfare.

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The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 from gender to class: seduction narratives in sentimental chapbooks

The Difference is, a Man ennobles the Woman he takes, be she who she will; and adopts her into his own Rank, be it what it will: But a Woman, tho’ ever so nobly born, debases herself by a mean Marriage, and descends from her own Rank, to his she stoops to. (Pamela 422)

Mr. B.’s concise justification for hypergamy – the custom which forbids women, though not men, from marrying into a lower class – sharply focuses the reader’s attention on Pamela’s investment in femininity rather than rank. As Emma Clery observes about Pamela, “sexual difference takes precedence over class” as constituting the novel’s central concern.33 Whereas Richardson’s novel downplays and ultimately erases Pamela’s status as a servant in favor of her gendered subjectivity, sentimental chapbooks narrating cross-class seduction move in the opposite direction, and shift the focus of the narrative to class from gender. I begin with a discussion of Pamela since its paradigm for thinking rank and sex dialogues in significant ways with sentimental chapbooks. Richardson’s novel must entertain the radical possibility of class leveling in order to divorce a woman’s value on the marriage market from her rank, but the novel ultimately eschews class revolution in favor of its ideological interest in bourgeois femininity. Many critics have noted how Pamela runs away from its democratic class assumptions in the second half of the novel. Once Pamela has consented to marry her attempted aristocratic seducer, her class origins become vague; the novel hints at a lost gentility and defines her exemplary character through qualities – literacy, social manners, grace and beauty – inaccessible to the laboring poor. Christopher Flint, in observing the novel’s ‘forgetting’ of Pamela’s roots, argues that “as the story unfolds, a strange distortion of class relations occurs. When the issue of Pamela’s family background intensifies, at the point where a legal and public transformation takes place (Pamela’s marriage to B.), her family history becomes curiously modified in such a way that the original class conflict is silently erased.”34 The erasure of Pamela’s class background is most successfully accomplished by John Kelly in his spurious sequel Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (1741) in which Pamela notoriously discovers she is of noble birth after all. This class ‘forgetting’ is managed linguistically by Richardson through Pamela’s continued use of the term “master” to refer to Mr. B. even after her status has shifted from servant to wife. Scarlet Bowen summarizes feminist critics’ position on the master/servant–husband/wife dynamic as follows: “it becomes clear that Pamela’s potentially revolutionary class ascent paradoxically entails

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greater subordination from her as a wife to her husband than was required from a servant by her master.”35 Class difference is silenced by the novel’s investment in representing a virtue that conforms to the demands of a middle-class readership. I would argue that Pamela is the exception to my thesis that seduction narratives in the second half of the eighteenth century are not centrally interested in fetishizing virginity as female virtue. In Richardson’s novel the economic value of a domestic servant’s chastity is replaced with the ethereal value of bourgeois feminine virtue and in so doing, the real relations between men and women on the marriage market are mystified.36 When Pamela, herself, registers anxiety that she is not bringing Mr. B. the money someone of his rank should expect from a wife, he argues “you have the best Claim in the World to share my Fortune with me” precisely because of her moral, rather than financial, worth; her value is in her “judgment,” “graces,” “sweetness of temper,” “sincerity” and “beauty” (350). Cross-class seduction narratives highlight the question of value in a way that, for instance, the intra-class tale of Clarissa does not. But the result with Richardson’s first novel is less room for Pamela to maneuver around the codes of bourgeois femininity than there is for Clarissa. As the ‘Pamela Controversy’ demonstrates, many critics of Richardson’s novel did not see Pamela’s virtue as standing outside an economic system of value. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor in “Pamela” in the Marketplace note that while the novel is not, itself, interested in class leveling, the controversy it prompted certainly saw it in that way.37 Eliza Haywood, for instance, rejects Richardson’s mystification of love in her Anti-Pamela and details the commerce of sex that defines her laboring-class heroine’s relation to richer men. Syrena feels “the Effect of Love” after an interview with Vardine which turns out not to be love “of the Man” but of “a very genteel Snuff-Box” she spots on him.38 Even in Pamela we can see the constitutive instability of valuing a female chastity divorced from economics in the constant slippage between the language of money and the language of virtue. Mr. B.’s reference to “the Riches of your Mind” is only one of the innumerable times the novel reaches for economic metaphors to describe Pamela’s value (350). Her own reference to “my best Jewel, my Virtue” is perhaps the most famous example (190). We can add to this list Edward Young’s description of the “second Pamela” he found in his neighborhood as “a fortune herself.”39 The move towards a fetishized female chastity is accompanied by the collapse of “woman” and “fortune” and the body symbolically represents what was in the past the materiality of money and estates. Haywood and others thus respond to Pamela by bringing to life the jewel metaphor that Richardson prefers to represent as a dead one.

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Formal narrative differences between the chapbook versions of Pamela and the novel succinctly highlight the distinction between a material and a mystified value of female virtue and show how, when the interest is in class difference, Pamela’s origins are not so easily erased. In shifting the narration from first person to third, Pamela chapbooks are not interested in the novel’s epistemological construction of the truth of Pamela’s virtue and reformulate the question of her virtue as an economic one. In the thirdperson condensed forms of both the abridgment Paths of Virtue Delineated and Memoirs of the Life of Lady H———, The Celebrated Pamela, the reader could never mistake the heroines for Shamela. The keyhole scene was a particular problem for Pamela because its awkward focalization lent itself to a pornographic voyeurism. Since Pamela was the one to describe Mr. B. gazing upon her own half-naked unconscious body, the scene begged for the satiric re-presentations exemplified by Syrena’s feigning of the faint in Anti-Pamela.40 In the third-person Pamela chapbooks, no such focalization difficulties exist and the heroine’s lack of consciousness does not hinder the heterodiegetic narrator from pronouncing her victimized. The focus of these chapbooks is not the heroine’s character (is she or is she not virtuous?) but the external circumstances in which love occurs (is love enough of a reason to be raised in class?). The heightened significance of the social and material context is readable in the representation of Pamela’s marriage in Memoirs of the Life of Lady H———. Whereas Richardson’s account of the wedding corresponds to his novel’s forgetting of Pamela’s class origins, here marriage brings a reminder that her lower-class roots must be addressed before she can complete her ascent into Lady H———. Pamela is still presented as having a “[n]atural superiority” over the “rude neighborhood girls” and her exceptional status propels her into a higher class, but this exceptionality does not entirely erase her poor background, and after her marriage she requires a tutor to teach her “the Rudiments of genteel, polite Behaviour, and be made capable of conversing with the bestbred Ladies.”41 In a narrative which depends upon external signs of virtue, “natural Endowments alone are insufficient to make a Woman appear with Advantage among Persons of Distinction.”42 The chapbook must confront the material markers of class – from carving meat to playing the spinet – and resolve them within the narrative before closure can be reached. The chapbook materialization of virtue is a product of both its brevity and its third-person narration. The short discursive length of these seduction tales forces the narrative to stick to action as opposed to in-depth characterization and this distinction means the plot highlights external acts over internal struggles. By remembering the material realities of class

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difference, seduction in this form does not necessarily promote a revolutionary politics where all women’s virtue is ultimately valued the same. Neither of these chapbook renditions of Pamela is in any way radical though they show more interest in class and less in gender than the original novel. Other sentimental chapbooks, however, copy the plot and tone of Pamela, but not its sexual politics nor its easy happy ending.43 A notable segment of chapbooks narrate cross-class seduction to highlight the economic conflicts behind such erotic interaction. While some, such as Injured Innocence: Or, Virtue in Distress, do end in marriage, the happily-ever-after ending never occurs seamlessly. In the case of Injured Innocence, the heroine is first ruined before her seducer ultimately repents and marries her. In tracing an extremely rocky road to the wedding day between the poor woman and her wealthy husband, or in ending tragically, these chapbooks perform an inversion of Pamela’s ideology. If Richardson ‘forgets’ his class politics in the interests of gender and bourgeois femininity, these chapbooks capitalize on a Pamela-like gender ideology but forget gender in the interests of a radical class critique. The title of something like Innocence Betrayed, and Infamy Avowed foregrounds its obvious sentimentalism but it uses Pamela’s representation of female virtue to construct women not as productive domestic economists but as soldiers in a class war. Like the comic ballads discussed above, sentimental chapbooks boldly and repeatedly assume laboring-class women’s inclusion in the new definition of innate femininity to claim that virtue knows no class and that a domestic servant or a poor country girl has the same right to virtue as her wealthy counterpart. As farmer Adams says in Injured Innocence: Or, Virtue in Distress after Lord Whatley’s friend attempts to buy his daughter, Fanny, for the Lord: “we may be poor, but we have a sense of honour as well as you” (7). In a letter trying to convince Fanny to marry him in which he explicitly references Pamela, Lord Whatley, himself, promotes the revolutionary economics of ‘virtue knows no class’: “Virtue and Beauty level all distinctions. You have read Pamela: a woman like her in virtues and accomplishments, should, like her be distinguished and rewarded” (10–11). Taking its cue from Pamela, Injured Innocence uses virtue to level the romantic playing field but the game shifts to tactics of money and power, not chastity and domesticity. Whereas Pamela’s letters repeatedly put her in situations that test her virtue in order for that virtue to emerge fully formed, Injured Innocence begins where Pamela ends, assuming its wedding of virtue and poverty: “She is virtue itself,” the narrative declares early on (9). Most of the tension in this third-person narrative is taken up

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by what follows after her – and crucially, her family’s – consent to the marriage with Lord Whatley. Whatley is good-natured and appears to truly love Fanny but he is not immune to class prejudice and allows his friend Sir T and his uncle to convince him to marry Fanny in a fake wedding because a farmer’s daughter is not worth a real one. After “Fanny is sacrificed” by Whatley in favor of the advantageous settlement given by Miss Barry in a legal marriage, the selfish and exploitative greed of the aristocracy comes to the fore (16). Whatley’s uncle offers Adams £1,000 for his daughter’s inconvenience, noting this to be “a sufficient consolation for her disappointment” (16). The uncle ups the value to £2,000 after Fanny’s father refuses, but the offer is never accepted and Adams claims the moral high ground in his refusal: “I am a poor man, ’tis true; but my Lord shall not rob me of my honour. It is my natural inheritance: I hold it from heaven, and no man on earth, not the king himself, shall ever deprive me of it” (17). Adams vows to fight the injustice done against not only his daughter but his family: “I have reason and justice on my side,” he proclaims (20). But, as the text aggressively narrates, British society does not follow the rules of reason and justice. Adams relinquishes his plan to petition the house of Lords when a domestic servant helps him realize that his case would be useless by “represent[ing] to him the authority of the great, who always trample on the rights of the poor with impunity” (22). The poor are left to starve while the rich abuse them and do so with impunity under the present system of laws. In her essay “The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748–1848,” Anna Clark observes that “the image of the poor maiden victimized by the aristocratic libertine provided a very specific symbol of class exploitation and explained familiar traumas … As such, this image of seduction imbued fiction with a political content linking the reader to larger struggles, and inspired the public rhetoric of class struggle with personal, emotional images of oppression.”44 Similarly, Injured Innocence deploys seduction to tell the story of the arbitrary power wielded by the aristocracy against the poor. The deciding battle of the class war in Injured Innocence is fought in a London coffee-house when a friend of the Adams family runs into Lord Whatley and confronts him on his exploitation of a poor woman’s affections. “What did you,” the friend demands of Whatley, “when you imposed on innocence, love, and truth; when yielding to the dictates of your vile accomplices, under pretext of the most sacred and most solemn oaths, you dishonoured an unhappy creature, who received you into the arms of innocence, love, and truth?” (28). Whatley cannot run from the stark truth and he repents. He legally marries Fanny (his rich wife having

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died of a gluttonous lifestyle), and he raises up her brothers through settlements. With these actions, “he returned to the duties of a man, a citizen, and a subject” (39). Significantly absent from this list of social obligations is his duty as a nobleman. The narrative empties out a morality based upon class affiliation and replaces it with the democratic language of ‘citizen’ where the rights of the poor are victorious. Innocence Betrayed mirrors Injured Innocence both in its inversion of Pamela’s class and gender politics and in its vindication of the rights of the poor. At the same time, it copies Pamela in its sentimental tone and firstperson narration.45 This chapbook is the exception to my opening claim that street literature narrates stories in third-person form but the firstperson voice has surprisingly little effect on the story’s class politics. The stability with which Maria narrates her own feelings stems from a different shift in the narrative: if sentimental seduction novels pose the hermeneutic problem of how the ‘I’ of the text knows the truth of her heart, the ‘I’ of Innocence Betrayed pursues with a vengeance the additional problem of how the ‘I’ can know the heart of another. The chapbook begins by taking the lesson of its famous Rowe epigraph to heart; Rowe counseled women to be “cautious whom ye trust” and the Thornhills are obsessively cautious about trusting the wealthy Sprightly (3).46 They begin with a hermeneutics of suspicion that declares the vows of a rich man to a poor girl by definition dishonest. No seduction narrative discussed in this book comes close to matching the rigor with which Innocence Betrayed pursues the question of the lover’s veracity and involves the entire community in this epistemological pursuit. While Pamela suspects Mr. B. might be planning a fake marriage, her father does not accompany Mr. B. to “take out the licence” as Mr. Thornhill does in Innocence Betrayed (13). Mr. Thornhill, more so than Maria, does everything imaginable to ensure his daughter is safely married, so much so that the reader wonders why Sprightly is spending so much time and effort on seducing a farmer’s daughter. They study Sprightly’s character and “[h]is behaviour was modest, never uttering an indecent expression, nor offering any rudeness, notwithstanding our freedom and familiarity” (10). His actions send out all the right signs: he attends church, he does not clandestinely pursue the daughter but approaches her father first with his proposals. Not trusting actions and character, Mr. Thornhill even journeys to London to interview witnesses who testify to Sprightly’s morality, empirically corroborating Sprightly’s appearance. The text exhausts all doubts the reader could possibly have that Maria and her father should have known better or that Maria’s virtue is short of exemplary. Yet she still falls. The combination places all the

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blame and responsibility for her ruin solely on the corruption of the aristocracy. Her fall occurs after an elaborate feigned illness trap is set by Sprightly. Mr. Thornhill allows Maria to attend Sprightly on his sickbed since his sister is there to chaperone (the ‘sister’ turns out to be a past victim of Sprightly’s seductions). Maria sits up with him one night and this proves her downfall: “He drew me towards him, and declared with the most solemn vows his sincerity. I endeavoured to release myself, and called out for help, but in vain, for he clasped me in his arms, and prevented me. He solicited; I denied: He promised; I trembled: He vowed; I believed” (11–12). Her trembling belief in his love turns out to have been her fatal error. A private marriage ceremony quickly follows and they live as husband and wife in London for years until she finally discovers her marriage is false and Sprightly, bankrupted by high living and gambling, abandons her in a bawdy house. After emptying out all doubts that Maria’s heart and her story are anything but innocent and truthful, the narrative’s focus switches to class. The crisis motivating the story and the problem that the narrative addresses concerns how Maria can live by her own virtuous hermeneutic code since men with wealth can twist that code to serve their corrupt interests. When Maria thought herself Mrs. Sprightly and had a London house “elegantly furnished, and servants to attend [her] pleasure,” she was considered a virtuous wife though it turns out she was not so. But when she is a beggar, wandering the streets of London because she refuses to prostitute herself for her bread, she realizes “every one who looked upon me suspected me” and they do so simply because she is poor (23). Her journey into abject poverty after her abandonment provides a powerful instance of wealth’s ability to control the truth. A footman from her former life as Mrs. Sprightly weeps tears when he sees what has become of his kind mistress and he gives her everything he has, “a guinea, four shillings, and a few pence” (25). Maria does not hesitate to underscore the politics of this exchange: “The goodness and gratitude of this person, may serve for admonition to Master and Mistresses to treat their servants with kindness” (25–6). She uses the money to buy shoes since hers have fallen apart from the miles she has walked trying to return to her village. When she drops half a crown, the cobbler immediately has her arrested as a thief because her ragged appearance conflicts with the possession of so much money. Because she is a poor anonymous woman, with no link to the community in which she is accused, she has no defense and is pronounced guilty by the Justice of the Peace: “I informed him where and from whom I received the half

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guinea, but it signified nothing; my accusers were powerful, they knew the Justice, and circumstances were against me.” This (il)logic of signification follows her everywhere and her poverty discredits her calls for justice at every turn. She is thrown out of the village where she was accused of theft only to find herself unjustly charged again, this time by the farmer in whose barn she spends the night before it burns down and she is arrested for setting the fire. Sprightly turns out to be her judge when her case finally reaches the assize court but he does not recognize her, a plot device later used by 1790s feminist novelists (and discussed in Chapter 5 below). She is eventually acquitted though only because her time in prison reduced her to such “a deplorable object that humanity was shocked at the sight” (29). In the process, she confronts Sprightly who, fearing that his new wealthy wife will discover his past, begins his own assault and sends his servants to arrest her again on trumped up charges. The climax of this seduction narrative is not a sexual one but an event within the economic battle for justice. When Maria arrives back at her father’s house just as Sprightly and his men come to take her into custody, a confrontation ensues and she emerges victorious only because she has family and her village to defend her. Her innocence finally attested to by the community in which she grew up, she returns to her father’s house where her virtue has never been in doubt. Truth and virtue, the story suggests, are harder to find when communities break down and individuals become isolated from those who know them. The class war is only partially won at this point since Maria and her family remain miserably poor but rapid plot developments in the final pages of the text bring Maria financial recompense for the injustice she has suffered. A remorseful Sprightly dies and, with his wife’s permission, wills Maria £10,000 as “a token of his sincere repentance for the wrongs done you” (37). Like in Pamela, virtue is rewarded only this time the reward originates in Maria’s victimization at the hands of aristocratic power, not by her marrying into it. At least, not yet. The narrative quickly ends with Maria accepting a marriage proposal from Sprightly’s widow’s brother who we are to unsuspiciously accept as honest and true, perhaps because Maria’s class victory has won her the right to rise. Even more surprising, Sprightly’s wealthy widow proposes to and marries Maria’s brother, transgressing the rules of hypergamy outlined by Pamela. The ending of Innocence Betrayed refuses the gendering of class politics that tempers the revolutionary impetus behind the claim that ‘virtue knows no class’ since brothers can be rewarded as well. The chapbook invokes the codes of bourgeois virtue but uses them to vindicate Maria and her family against aristocratic corruption.

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Injured Innocence and Innocence Betrayed galvanize their lower-class readership by deploying the sentimental assumption of female virtue to critique hypocritical social hierarchies, but they only succeed in their class critique because their heroines vehemently refuse all mercenary desires. Their sentimental tone demands that only affective choice can be the appropriate motivator of the romantic plot, never money or social advancement. A central component of the class war in both chapbooks is the explicit lack of class pretensions on the part of the heroine and her family. Their families do not set out to destroy social hierarchy but reject the rich suitor precisely because they believe the higher ranks have an obligation to maintain their status. Farmer Adams, for instance, instructs his daughter to surmount her attachment to Lord Whatley and to “[m]arry a man of your own rank” (11). We find a similar motif in The Constant Lovers, when Fanny, the propertyless heroine, must prove her virtue by running away and hiding herself so that her lover does not disobey his father’s command not to marry her.47 Like the abandoned fallen women in Magdalen narratives, poor heroines of sentimental seduction chapbooks must actively refuse money in order to maintain their virtue. In the 1790s, when Christian moralists publish seduction chapbooks directed at the poor, their plots centrally involve this tension between affective choice and mercenary interest but they provide a very different resolution. Whereas chapbooks such as Innocence Betrayed and Injured Innocence represent laboring-class heroines as solely motivated by feeling, evangelical chapbooks collapse the emotional with the financial in representing the desires of poor women. The critique of class prejudice found in sentimental chapbooks like Innocence Betrayed becomes retrospectively clearer when we analyze seduction tales from the end of the century. In 1790s chapbooks such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts, the materialization of virtue is represented not to expose class prejudice against the poor, but to affirm that class barriers are insurmountable, even in a romantic landscape that gives primacy to love and merit over duty and rank. Below, I examine three such texts: John Corry’s The Gardener’s Daughter of Worcester; Or the Miseries of Seduction; the anonymous A Short but Tragical History of an Unfortunate Young Girl; and lastly, Hannah More’s “The Good Mother’s Legacy” in her Cheap Repository Tracts. These didactic texts construct the laboring class as in need of a lesson and seduction teaches a very succinct one about the dangers of class mobility. Conservative and cautionary renderings of seduction only emerge within street literature in the 1790s and I argue that they did so because they were responding to the way chapbooks had previously adapted the seduction tale for a more radical class politics. Susan Pedersen,

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in her article “Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” concurs, reading Cheap Repository Tracts as a response to the predominance of antiauthoritarian narratives circulating in cheap print form. While Pedersen acknowledges that 1790s radical politics did have some influence on More’s decision to publish the tracts, she argues, quoting More, that a greater motivation was her distaste for the reading material available to the poor and that she published in order “to combat the ‘vulgar and licentious publications … profane and indecent songs and penny papers’ – in other words, chapbooks – sold by an army of 20,000 hawkers.”48 The last chapter of this book takes up seduction’s function within the larger conservative political backlash against Jacobin politics; here I briefly turn to a few reactionary narratives to focus on their representation of female feeling within the laboring class. More, John Corry and the anonymous writer of History of an Unfortunate Young Girl use the seduction plot to police class boundaries by representing the evils awaiting those who think they can marry up. In all three, women are seduced both by men above them and by their own vanity or ignorance in imagining they could rise through marriage. In The Gardener’s Daughter of Worcester, for instance, Lucy’s fate is sealed when her father takes the advice of a milliner relation in London and sends his daughter to boarding school to raise her prospects. Her mother tries, unsuccessfully, to keep the daughter at home and teach her useful trades but her argument about classappropriate education falls on deaf ears. “I do not see the propriety of a girl in a low station,” the mother pleads, “being taught those fashionable arts which are useful only among the great who as my father often used to say are not also the good.”49 At school, Lucy reads romances which lead her to anticipate “her triumph over the heart of man. Naturally romantic she became a castle builder and considered herself as every way entitled to become the wife of some man of fortune” (7). Rather than marrying her rustic lover, Lucy sets her sights on London and a nobleman. She journeys to the metropolis as a maid with the dissolute aristocratic family of Lady V—— and promptly falls for the lady’s brother, Captain Flash: “Seduced by a promise of marriage poor Lucy crowned the wishes of Captain Flash by consenting to an elopement” (16). Ruined and abandoned, eventually forced into the vilest of street prostitution, Lucy is rescued too late by her honest rustic lover and her father, and she dies a repentant death in the arms of loved ones. Corry also penned The Unfortunate Daughter: Or, the Dangers of Female Education which traces precisely the same narrative only this time it is the mother, and not the father, whose class pretensions result in the fatal

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mistake of sending Eliza to boarding school; here, the heroine does not die or marry in the end but is shipped off to a distant relation in the country after being reunited with her family. Corry targets aristocratic libertinism and critiques the dissolute morals of the upper classes but only so that he can teach laboring-class maidens that all sexual advances made by the rich to the poor are, by definition, illicit. Female mis-education is the focus of Corry’s seduction narratives and he appends an essay on the subject to The Gardener’s Daughter of Worcester. “The Young Woman’s Friend, or a Plan for the Education of the Female Children belonging to the Laborious Classes of Society” argues for a classbased curriculum. On the one hand, the system he lays out for educating poor girls is fairly liberal: girls should be taught to read and write, apprenticed to trades from which they could earn their own independent living. But his curriculum also affirms a static and immovable barrier between the poor and the rich. For example, Corry is appalled by poor girls in London who ape the dress of the women of quality they see walking in St. James and because they dress like St. James ladies – that is, immodestly – men of gallantry mistake them for prostitutes and they fall into that evil trade (25). “But the worst destroyer of female happiness,” Corry insists, “is indolence” since when not employed in a useful trade, they become easy prey for seducers (26). In The Unfortunate Daughter, Corry illustrates his argument through Eliza who is taught genteel manners instead of being kept at home and educated in the family’s grocery business: “By the present preposterous ambition to educate young women of the subordinate classes, with the profusion of those in the highest ranks, many girls are utterly disqualified to fill their places and perform their duties in society; and, in a manner, prepared for seduction!”50 Eliza falls because “Vanity, that most pernicious enemy to female innocence” leads her to believe Lord *** will actually marry her and she does not recognize that he is “a complete proficient in seduction” who fakes their marriage (21, 33). She is ruined, pronounced not only “a sad victim of seduction,” but also “proof of the general impropriety of Modern Female Education” (72). Eliza and Lucy stand as warnings to young women not to listen to the romantic pleas of rich men since poor girls are never raised through affective marriage. Their only hope for greater prosperity centers on hard work and careful domestic economy. The seduction narrative similarly provides Hannah More with plot fodder for sermons against class mobility and here, too, education is of prime concern. In “The Good Mother’s Legacy,” Betty’s fatal error is in believing that she could marry up; she falls under the bad influence of Mrs. Perkins, the waiting maid, who “began by making her dis-satisfied

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with a country life; and told her she was such a pretty figure of a woman, that when she was dressed genteelly, she would look as much like a gentlewoman as any body.”51 She goes to London, falls and returns, ruined, to her family and dies a penitent. Her mother’s “good legacy” consists of turning Betty’s tragic life into a lesson for the whole parish: she requests the curate preach a sermon “to advise all young people to take warning by poor Betty Adams, and to learn to be content and happy in that station of life in which Providence has placed them” (144). More’s evangelical stories are explicitly didactic and the seduction narrative, with its emphasis on knowledge, fits her plan. But the knowledge imparted is structural, not emotional or psychological. Betty does not need to learn the language of the heart but the rules of social rank which determine that the authority granted to female feeling under the discourse of modern love does not apply to laboringclass women. In counseling resignation to one’s place in the economic hierarchy, these tragic seduction chapbooks are patronizing and moralizing but, significantly, they treat fallen women sympathetically and do not vilify them for their breach of chastity. Instead, they extend responsibility to parents and mentors for setting the bad examples which led to the fall and they appeal to the larger community to show sympathy toward the fallen woman. A central plot event in all of these texts is the reunion of the now-penitent victim with her family followed by the family’s forgiveness and their vow to shelter and assist her. The event is drawn out over the last third of A Short but Tragical History of an Unfortunate Young Girl in order to underscore the importance of family leniency. The daughter of a grocer turns to prostitution after being seduced and ruined by a gentleman of fortune and when she first seeks assistance from her family, they refuse her entrance into the house. But then a clergyman intervenes and, after telling them her “sorrowful tale” and lecturing the family on morality, the parents take her home: “they now begin to regain their happiness that they formerly enjoyed, and had they suffered her to die in misery and want, it must in the end, have embittered their days.”52 Since a conservative moral lesson on female chastity would be stronger if death was accompanied by a punitive shunning by family and society, this emphasis on the family reunion stands out. On the one hand, the Christian nature of many of these tales informs their interest in penitence, forgiveness and the good death. But family acceptance is not required for the fallen woman to seek forgiveness from God and die in his grace as Clarissa proves. The same narrative with a genteel heroine, circulating within a middle-class readership, I argue, would not emphasize this part of the plot. The climactic act of the family reunion is

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particular to seduction narratives directed to laboring-class readers and speaks to the very real economic stakes for the community in sexual relations. If every poor fallen woman was abandoned to the streets, the community would have a large social problem on its hands. Both the parish and the community has an interest in families supporting abandoned women, especially since the numbers of single mothers were increasing. In her research on ballad representations of unwed mothers, Tanya Evans observes a similar phenomenon where women are not severely punished for their sexual fall: “[w]omen may have been seduced and deserted but many were treated with compassion.”53 Conservative chapbooks repeatedly counsel compassion over harsh shunning while they simultaneously insist female feeling cannot authorize the transgression of class boundaries. The repetition of narrative climaxes in which the family and community come together to forgive and help the fallen woman suggests an absence of such stable community ties outside representation. If street literature airs social anxieties, these texts foreground concerns over the breakdown of community bonds and represent the dangers of social and geographic mobility. As heroine after heroine leaves the village fold to venture to the anonymous city where ruin awaits her, these seduction stories, nostalgic for pre-capitalist village life, envision urbanization – not aristocratic men – as the villain in the ruin of women. While street literature’s anxiety around the breakdown of traditional community structures can be read in these conservative chapbooks, nowhere is it more obsessively narrated as in ballads recounting the broken vows of men from the same class. The final section of this chapter turns its attention to the largest body of seduction narratives in cheap print – intra-class breach of promise ballads – to discover how the story helps resolve conflicts caused by “courtships frustrated” which left an increasing number of women unwed mothers. seduction’s hauntings: broken vows and the rise of illegitimacy In comic and tragic ballads with laboring-class seducers and heroines, the plot centers on broken marriage vows, indicating where the fault line lies within courtship and marriage practices for the lower class and rendering seduction, here, synonymous with breach of promise. Whereas seduction narratives geared toward the higher and middling ranks place the weight of the narrative on the loss of virginity and whether or not the heroine consents, these narratives reach their denouement in the moment of the lover’s broken promise. “The Yarmouth Tragedy; Or, the Perjured Sailor”

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provides a standard example.54 A sailor courts a woman in Yarmouth whom “for two long years … [h]e many promises and vows, / And solemn oaths to her did make.” On the eve of their wedding, she consents to lie with him and the next day he makes an excuse not to marry her. He eventually abandons her to go to sea and, rather than fainting and falling ill with a fever, she cross-dresses to follow him aboard the ship and to demand he keep his promise. When she discovers herself to him, “[h]e like a rogue did prove unkind” and throws her overboard. Dead but not passive, she appears as a ghost the next night during a storm; child in her arms, she haunts him to his own death: “In a flash of fire, she to him flew, / And he was never heard of more.” The sailor’s lies and his broken vows – not the woman’s lack of chastity – occupy the place of the transgression in the tale. The warning in the ballad’s last stanza threatens men, not women, for their actions: “Let this a warning be to all, / Young lovers of whate’er degree, / Consider, you’ve a soul to save, / And do not act so treacherously.” Intra-class seduction ballads obsess not about the loss of virginity but about what can be done to stop men from abandoning their pregnant betrothed. The motif of the wronged lover returning to haunt the living is not particular to the late eighteenth century but it takes on a new twist in this period with its emphasis on men’s breach of promises. Tanya Evans argues that the focus on male infidelity was specific to the period: “While in seventeenth-century texts unmarried mothers trying to hide their pregnancies were ridiculed, in the eighteenth century they became sources of sympathy who deserved justice and recompense. The emphasis on male responsibility was new to the eighteenth century and was to diminish in the nineteenth century.”55 The problem that the repetition of seduction in ballads like “The Yarmouth Tragedy”’ voices concerns the dramatic rise in illegitimacy rates and a lessening in the number of prenuptial pregnancies that resulted in marriage. In other words, more men were breaking their vows and not marrying women with whom they had sex on the expectation that marriage would follow. While estimates of the number of children born out of wedlock vary and are difficult, if not impossible, to determine with certainty, Peter Laslett’s figures from the parish registers have been reproduced by other historians; his statistics show that the rate of illegitimate births to children born in wedlock from 1661 to 1720 was 1.6 percent and that this figure more than doubled to 4.51 percent for the period from 1781 to 1820.56 Historians generally concur that illegitimacy rates and prenuptial pregnancies rose in the second half of the eighteenth century and that they probably rose at a rate loosely doubling their early eighteenth-century numbers. If the majority of couples engaged in sex prior to marriage, and if, in cases where

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pregnancy resulted in marriage, there was little stigma attached to premarital sex, it makes sense that ballads of seduction demonstrate little concern with the loss of virginity because this did not constitute the moment of ruin. The moment of ruin occurs later, when a man refuses to marry the woman he has impregnated. Explanations for the increase in illegitimate births and prenuptial pregnancies are numerous but current consensus has fallen upon the “courtship frustrated” model first articulated by Louise A. Tilly, Joan Scott and Miriam Cohen in “Women’s Work and European Fertility Patterns.” They argue that changes in the working lives of the poor caused by an emergent mercantile capitalism led to a breakdown in the social cohesion which monitored the practice that premarital sex would result in marriage: “Most [women who gave birth outside wedlock] expected to get married, but the circumstances of their lives – propertylessness, poverty, large-scale geographic mobility, occupational instability and the absence of traditional social protection – prevented the fulfillment of this expectation.” In a changing economic context with an increasingly itinerant workforce, there was an “absence of traditional constraints – family, local community, and church – [which] led to the disappointment of many marital expectations.” In other words, sexual practices did not change (women and men engaged in sex after a promise of marriage), “[r]ather, older expectations operating in a changed context yielded unanticipated (and often unhappy) results.”57 Seduction ballads point towards an increasing anxiety around the social costs of these “unanticipated results” and this anxiety is readable in their high lack of tolerance for men who abandon pregnant women. In emphasizing male responsibility, tragic ballads include a disciplining narrative that takes either one of two forms, both of which can be found in “The Yarmouth Tragedy”: (1) the betrayed woman dies but comes back to haunt her lover until he dies of remorse, and (2) the betrayer prefers murder over performing his promise but is punished with death upon discovery. In both of these plots, the lover pays for his transgression with his life. The ghost theme in ballad narratives is best exemplified by “William and Margaret” (also known as “Margaret’s Ghost”), an entirely rewritten version of an older ballad, “Fair Margaret and Sweet William.”58 The two variants provide an interesting comparative case study. “William and Margaret” is written by David Mallet, who publishes the ballad in 1759 (though he wrote it earlier) with a note remarking that it was inspired by the four lines from “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” that the old knight in The Knight of the Burning Pestle enters repeating: “This was probably the beginning of some

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ballad, commonly known, at the time when that author wrote; and is all of it, I believe, that is any where to be met with. These lines, naked of ornament and simple as they are, struck my fancy: and, bringing fresh into my mind an unhappy adventure, much talked of formerly, gave birth to the foregoing poem.”59 Mallet is incorrect in his claim that the original ballad was lost, a point his contemporary Thomas Percy discovered when he published both ballads in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).60 The four original lines that inspired Mallet set the scene of the ghost of a cast-off lover appearing to her betrayer but the difference between how the two ballads continue allows us to see the particular issues at stake for readers and listeners in the later eighteenth century. Like the original, Mallet begins with the beautiful lily apparition of Margaret standing at William’s feet but, unlike the original, “William and Margaret” shifts into Margaret’s voice. The first person ‘I’ aggressively demands reparation from William for her injuries and insists that he account for his broken vows. Nine of the ballad’s seventeen stanzas contain Margaret’s accusations and demanding questions: Bethink thee, William, of thy fault, Thy pledge and broken oath: And give me back my maiden-vow, And give me back my troth. Why did you promise love to me, And not that promise keep? Why did you swear my eyes were bright, Yet leave those eyes to weep?61

In the face of this haunting truth, William feels immediate remorse, lays himself down on Margaret’s grave, weeps “[a]nd word spake never more.” We do not learn the conditions under which she consented to sex; the entire pre-betrayal is covered by the lines: “But Love had, like the canker-worm / Consum’d her early Prime.” The focus is on the damage done to her body by his broken promise (her red lips turn pale, her face is no longer fair). The consequences of his act haunt the song until he can no longer hide from his responsibility and death is his only option. “Fair Margaret and Sweet William,” a ballad at least as old as 1607 when The Knight of the Burning Pestle was written, contains little emphasis on either Margaret’s ruined body or William’s broken vow. In fact, the ballad makes it clear that their destroyed love does not include a breach of promise nor is there any mention of pregnancy. Margaret dies for love when William informs her that he is to marry another and on the eve of his wedding, he visits her family home where her dead body lies. When he attempts to

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kiss Margaret’s corpse, her angry brothers intervene and tell him to kiss his “jolly brown bride.” He defiantly responds: “If I do kiss my jolly brown bride, / I do but what is right; / For I made no vow to your sister dear, / By day, nor yet by night.” William still dies of sorrow, but not as a punishment for an ethical transgression and the ballad’s focus is on the tragedy of Margaret’s unrequited “pure true love.” While extant copies suggest that “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” was still popular throughout the late eighteenth century, the revised tale of “William and Margaret” can also be found in multiple editions.62 Both tales may be timeless, but the telling of the later version speaks to a particular anxiety in the later eighteenth century; no longer can Margaret assume that the promise of marriage and pregnancy will result in a wedding. Ballads where the seduction plot takes the dark turn of the betrayer’s murder of his pregnant betrothed present an extreme vision of a world in which men interrupt the practice of spousals.63 Many of these ballads predate 1740, but the story of the murdered seduced victim remains a popular one and is updated for contemporary relevance. For instance, “The Berkshire Tragedy; Or, The Whittam Miller” is based upon an older ballad, but a version printed in 1744 claims to reproduce “The last dying words and confession of John Mauge, a Miller; who was executed at Reading in Berkshire, on Saturday the 20th of last Month, for the barbarous Murder of Anne Knite, his Sweet-heart.”64 The ballad recounts how a miller’s apprentice courted an Oxford Lass, “[a]nd I promis’d I would Marry her, / If she would with me ly.” When she finds herself with child and both she and her mother pressure him to marry her, he takes her into the forest and clubs her to death. Only after he has been found guilty and is on his way to the gallows does he confess (which is the first-person ballad we are listening to/reading). He tries to get away with it, but the ballad insists God will always hunt down the guilty. The inevitability of the murderer’s guilt being discovered and punished with death (whether through superstitious or legal means) pervades all the murder ballads and they end with various riffs on the standard warning: “You that have heard these mournful lines, / Don’t prove deceitful in your love; / Lest by your breaking of your vows, / You like him should anger God above.”65 While these tragic ballads register the social anxiety over the growing number of unwed mothers most forcefully, comic ballads also stage the tension, and, in these, the betrayed lover succeeds in her quest to pressure her lover into marriage. Comic ballads include active heroines who refuse to die for their love and who unquestionably pursue justice from their betrayers. They do not wilt with guilt but demonstrate a witty agency

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similar to the agency shown by the crafty chambermaids in cross-class seduction. “The Politick Maid of Suffolk” relates the tale of Nell whose plot to regain her lover after he leaves her is ingenious: she gets a chimney sweep to cover her in black soot, hires his boy and, together, they surprise her lover at night on his way home from courting a new woman.66 She masquerades as the Devil and threatens to take him away the next day unless he marries Nell and the boy lights a fire to demonstrate the Devil’s power. Needless to say, the next day Nell is rewarded with marriage. The ballad not only forces the lover to keep his promise, but it also provides a witty inter-text to tragic ballads such as “The Yarmouth Tragedy” where wronged dead heroines return to haunt their lovers. The climax to comic seduction plots – when the lover changes his mind and agrees to the marriage – is often brought about by the intervention of the heroine’s family. Significantly, kinship structures are represented as central to enforcing the courtship practice of pregnancy followed by marriage, confirming that the moral taboo against the loss of chastity did not require plebeian families to shun the fallen woman. In “The Old Woman Cloathed in Gray,” when the old woman discovers her daughter was “deluded astray, / By Roger’s false flattering Tongue,” the mother marches over to Roger and demands he marry her daughter.67 He does and the ballad never blames the daughter for her lack of moral fortitude in being led astray. The mother of “The Wonderful Magic Pill; for Davie and Bess” acts as enforcer of community standards when she slips Davie a magic pill after he forsakes her daughter “which recovered Davie’s love to Bess, and they were married.”68 Even in comic ballads that do not end in marriage, life after seduction exists for the heroine who had premarital sex. In many ballads, the seduction story ends with the heroine neither married nor dead but living well as her best revenge. The heroine of “The Forsaken Maid’s Resolution” vows not only to live happily without her betrayer but to find another lover: “If I be forsaken, Oh! he is forsworn; / He’s highly mistaken if he thinks that I mourn, / I’ll set as light by him as he does on me, / And I will have a new Sweet-heart, and that he shall see.”69 “The Injured Fair” warns women against believing the vows of men and while the heroine is a “poor unhappy girl” now forced to work upon the town, she revels in her desire for revenge and does not want to marry her betrayer but instead wishes that “he may wed a drunken wife” and be plagued with her all his life.70 Ballad heroines and their families develop a variety of comic strategies to respond to the woman’s prenuptial pregnancy; none of these strategies target her loss of virginity as the wrong needing to be addressed. They register a conflict between decisions grounded in

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individualized feeling and those that include family in affective relations. Indeed, one ballad explicitly stages this conflict and concludes with a warning to women not to marry without their family’s consent. “The Strand Garland” narrates the heroine’s loss of the love and the hand of a rich suitor because she has already secretly married her father’s apprentice who later abandons her: “For her sake young people may well be content, / In that thing call’d marriage, when friends consent, / Such things done in private may great honor blast, / And instead of joy bring destruction at last.”71 Ghosts, murders, weddings, single life – none of the various resolutions that intra-class seduction ballads offer to the problem of the growing population of single mothers includes the moral censure of women for having sex outside formalized marriage. Breach of promise seduction ballads do not isolate the victim of seduction but place her in relation to a larger community and hold that community, especially the men, accountable; we will see 1790s feminists borrowing this strategy in the next chapter. In her recent study on unwed mothers, Tanya Evans argues that the “concept of seduction, a literary trope of the time … largely excluded plebeian women until the nineteenth century.”72 Her definition of seduction assumes an ideology of female sexual passivity which she argues only applies to middle-class women: seduction revolves around an “aggressor/ victim dichotomy” in which women are represented as “objects of male sexual aggression with no sexual desire or expression of their own.”73 Her proposition that the concept of seduction held no purchase for poor women assumes that seduction always already victimizes women and it is precisely this assumption that this book has tried to dislodge. If we think of seduction not as a dichotomy of victim/aggressor but as a cultural discourse that imagines new possibilities for the story of love, then the motif is central to street literature. When female feeling authorizes the discursive space of individual marital choice, new stories – or, as is the case with “William and Margaret,” new versions of old stories – emerge. From chambermaids cunningly translating the plot of Pamela into their own realities, to sentimental heroines turning the tables on a classed gender ideology to depict the rich’s exploitation of the poor, to betrayed lovers narrating seduction as a breach of promise and staking a claim for their lover’s hand, these ballads are united by the discourse of seduction which allows them to voice their heroine’s feelings. The third-person narration does so in a mode different from the first-person epistolary novel, but, as with Margaret’s haunting demands in “William and Margaret,” it often dramatizes and focalizes the heroine’s point of view even as it represents that voice as embedded in

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a community. Margaret speaks rage at William’s false vows but the ballad also provides a telling moment of internal self-questioning when she wonders “why, alas, did I fond Maid, / believe that flattering Tale?” Why did she? One of the answers street literature provides is that Margaret did not know how to read her lover’s vows with a new semiotics grounded, not in the traditional practice of spousals in which love, sex and pregnancy always lead to marriage, but in relation to individualized emotion in which lovers do not always act in the interests of the community.

chapter 5

Melodramatic seduction: 1790s fiction and the excess of the real

In the decades following the publication of Clarissa, as this book has traced, the seduction plot turned the problem of how to read the new signs of love into narrative form, telling many different stories about women’s failure to recognize both internal and external significations. By representing a female-centered semiotics of love as uncharted territory, these tales did not always already contain the end of a restrictive passive femininity nor did their stories dictate a proper domesticated desire. The 1790s, however, mark a shift in seduction’s story and my claim is no longer entirely tenable. Culture’s obsession with the seduction plot disappears at the beginning of the nineteenth century and this chapter argues that it did so because it takes on a static meaning within the political wars of the 1790s, one that replaces affective truth with political truth as the problem that the narrative promises to resolve. The revolutionary politics of the 1790s changed seduction’s significations, displacing its epistemological pursuit of how a woman knows her own heart into a political allegory that presupposes a singular and fixed understanding of that heart. Through an analysis of four feminist novels from the end of the century – Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman (1798), Mary Hays’s Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter (1801) – I argue that their melodramatic tone exposes the static understanding of female sexuality that was becoming dominant through seduction’s political tellings. In other words, these novels represent women’s last stand in claiming seduction as a story that weaves their affective and erotic agency together and places their own quest to know their feelings at its center. Seduction remains a motif within the nineteenth-century cultural tableau, but it finds its place in different stories after the 1790s, particularly in the breach of promise courtroom trials discussed in this chapter’s conclusion. The revolutionary decade catapults seduction into a different signifying system through its moral and political panics over the meaning of the 138

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French Revolution for British politics.1 Both conservative and radical writers use seduction as a tool in the polarized war for political truth and through this, the plot crystallizes around a singular image of femininity. Chapter 4 hinted at this politicized landscape in its discussion of how 1790s conservative chapbooks told the story of seduction to warn the lower classes about the dangers of social mobility. The seduction tale, in this model, provides the “cover story,” to use Toni Bowers’s term, for another story, the story about political rights and democratic citizenship.2 As Nicola Watson, in Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825, argues “[t]he plot of unfolding revolution was … commonly understood by contemporaries as a plot of seduction.”3 In the representational wars surrounding the Revolution, anti-Jacobins accuse radicals of politically seducing the nation and, equally, Jacobin novelists imagine political corruption in the form of the aristocratic seducer leading the nation down the path to ruin. The narrative depicting the ruin of innocence and virtue came to stand in for a threatened political plot, regardless of where this political plot is imagined to originate. Whether the New Philosophy or the aristocracy are cast in the role of the vile seducer, the political discourse of the 1790s assumes a connection between the sexual plot of seduction, with its narrative tension around the truth of the seducer’s moral character, and the political plot of the struggle for truth concerning the French Revolution. By opening up the plot to political stories, the 1790s representation of seduction narrowed its sexual narrative into a conventional tale of female victimization. Political writers may have been polarized in their interpretation of the French Revolution, but they came to a remarkable consensus around a simplified tale of seduction in which female chastity was held to be a national treasure, the loss of it causing irreparable harm. Mary Poovey makes a similar argument when she states that the proper lady emerged fully as the Angel in the House through the political discourses of the 1790s: “The ultimate effect of the revolutionary decades was to intensify the paradoxes already inherent in propriety.”4 The proper lady was both the passive victim of seduction in need of protection from either marauding noblemen or marauding revolutionaries and she was entirely responsible for guarding her own jewel, her virginity, with her life. The image of a femininity that contained no desires and yet one that had to obsessively restrict, silence and surveil the body for any signs of desire, is the result of the particular way 1790s moral, feminist and political discourses converged, especially around seduction. No longer a narrative of suspense where women’s feelings could voice themselves in either consenting or coercive love, the seduction motif in 1790s political discourse told a story entirely defined by misery and

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victimization. The subtitle of John Corry’s The Gardener’s Daughter of Worcester is, significantly, The Miseries of Seduction, a phrase echoed by Patrick Colquhoun in his Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis when he states his goal as “preventing the disasters and miseries which arise from Seduction.”5 Unlike Clarissa, the ending of the 1790s seduction narrative was already written into the first sentence – passive victimization – and this ending brought inevitable misery to its female heroine. Before turning to an analysis of feminist fictional narratives and their use of melodrama as a tactic of resistance, I want to set the scene by laying out the remarkable coherence between feminist and conservative moral polemicists around the syntax of seduction. Whether demanding rights or restricting them, both sides of the moral pamphlet wars invoke seduction as a shorthand for an essentialized image of femininity as sexually passive. However, as Poovey noted, the image of the proper lady was not without its paradoxes, paradoxes that come to the fore in what I refer to as the dead end of seduction. What emerges in the invocation of seduction within these polemics, as opposed to its fictional renderings, is a dual emphasis on female victimization and female agency, or on women as in need of protection and on women with power over their own chastity. The tension leaves the heroines of seduction novels with little room to maneuver, but before charting the space they find, I overview the recurring seduction motifs found within the 1790s discourse of seduction. By ‘the 1790s discourse of seduction’ I mean the set of assumptions and motifs about seduction that come to be held and repeated by feminist and moral polemics published surrounding, though not explicitly concerning, the revolution.6 The assumptions made in this literature about seduction gesture toward the consensus that came to be formed by the end of the eighteenth century around a particular truth of Woman and sexuality. the 1790s discourse of seduction The anonymous writer of The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution (1792) explicitly announces the restrictiveness of the plot that 1790s seduction offers women: “Narrow is the boundary frequently between vice and virtue and a moment may decide her fate and character for ever.”7 An increasing number of writers represent the first small step toward a fall into seduction as a leap off the steepest precipice and, with the end already in the beginning, seduction begins resisting narrative form. Though its appearance as moral shorthand in polemics is widespread, the story itself takes up less narrative space. Mary Wollstonecraft published a favorable review of The Evils of

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Adultery and Prostitution in The Analytical Review, a fact that illustrates the shared language of feminists and moralists around the political uses of seduction.8 T. F. Junior’s endorsement of Mary Ann Radcliffe’s feminist polemic The Female Advocate in his Remarks Upon Seduction also brings into alignment two intuitively different writers.9 Junior, like Radcliffe, supports increased employment opportunities for women yet he also calls women “the weaker sex” and calls upon men to protect them.10 What script do these two different constituencies share around seduction? Below I highlight the following five assumptions held in common by feminist polemicists and moralists about what was increasingly referred to as “the problem of seduction”: (1) male sexual predators are absolutely evil; (2) women participate in their fall by preferring rakes and libertines to rational men; (3) parental neglect causes female ruin; (4) sexualized women are agents of seduction; and (5) improved female education can save women from seduction. All of these points were made throughout the century but only in the 1790s do they solidify across political lines into one dominant and recurring image. Taken together, these ideas lead to an aporia for women in relation to knowledge. Their absolute victimization at the hands of evil men is set alongside a dispersal of blame outwards, to society at large, a double movement that ends up locating sexual culpability in the female subject at the same moment as she is understood as essentially victimized. I refer to this aporia as the dead end of 1790s seduction for after these assumptions congeal into a static image, the narrative of seduction finds itself with nowhere to go, with no story to tell. The woman who falls is the inevitable victim of a crime she should have known how to avoid. A more detailed description of these shared assumptions will lead us down this dead end. First, male sexual predators are absolutely evil. Portrayed as violent, irrational and a blinding force, male sexual lust is understood to be the primary agent of female misery. Wollstonecraft depicts male sexual desire as the foundation of female oppression and argues that men like Rousseau keep women in a state of slavery to service their erotic demands. Moralists, too, berate sexual predators as the cause of women’s ruin, hyperbolically pronouncing against them as criminals. “Murder itself,” writes an essayist in the Town and Country, “almost yields in criminality to seduction – that vice of an unfeeling heart, which destroys at once the present and the future, and which robs society of one of its greatest ornaments, and its most useful members.”11 In demonizing male lust, the discourse of seduction vilifies male libertines but it does not indite masculinity per se. A distinction is made, even in the Vindication, between those politically suspect libertines with their “unfeeling hearts” and rational civic masculinity. The problem is

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not men, but the bad apples amongst them. This literature demonstrates an awareness of the sexual double standard but it does not lead to a lessening of strictures for women; rather, it leads to a call for the reformation of male manners and an insistence that true men of feeling will act as protectors of women who, as victims of male lust, require men’s help (“a woman, being the weaker sex,” T. F. Junior writes, “has an indubitable claim on man’s uniform protection: base is he that witholds it from her!”).12 Second, women participate in their fall by preferring rakes and libertines to rational men. For Wollstonecraft, women’s eroticized education turns them into coquettes and mistresses rather than chaste wives and rational mothers. Since they see their sexuality as the only way to rise in the world, women will always fall for libertines.13 The anonymous writer of The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution traces the problem of seduction to the fact that women do not value chastity in men: “In their choice they seem to make no distinction between the rake and the man of character.”14 The distinction between good and bad masculinity, between heroes and villains, needs to be asserted more rigorously by women. Third, parental neglect causes female ruin. For the encouragement of vanity and indolence, for not instilling the proper domestic virtues, for not restricting their daughters’ activities, for allowing them to go to the masquerade, parents are culpable when their daughters fall to seduction. We saw this in the 1790s chapbooks discussed in Chapter 4 where Lucy and Eliza fall because their parents educated them incorrectly, giving them the wrong knowledge about their affective expectations. We see this as well in “The Story of Fidelia,” told at the end of Radcliffe’s The Female Advocate to illustrate the text’s feminist tenets; because her mother died when she was young and her father taught her to disdain Christianity, Fidelia is no challenge for Sir George’s “practised … arts of seduction.”15 By the 1790s, daughters with absent or vain mothers will inevitably be seduced because of what their mothers failed to teach them. Fourth, sexualized women are agents of seduction. At the same time as the young innocent virgin is everywhere victimized by evil aristocrats or radicals, her counterparts – the kept mistress and the prostitute – are increasingly portrayed as agents of seduction.16 A tradition that dates back to Richardson’s characterization of Sinclair and the whores in Clarissa, prostitutes as seduction’s agents blast onto the public stage with “a renewed urgency … during the 1790s,” as Vivien Jones has noted.17 While prostitution was represented as the inevitable and horrible effect of seduction across the later eighteenth century (see Chapter 2), prostitutes are increasingly represented as agents and seducers themselves. Take, for example, this

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description of a prostitute from An Essay on the Seduction of Women: “With her treacherous Blandishments, she entraps incautious Youth, and with her Poison, like an untimely Frost, nips the tender Buds; … It is impossible to enumerate the Crimes which she must cause, for the Numbers which she seduces will naturally seduce others.”18 The prostitute becomes the origin, the mother, if you will, of the male seducer. Wollstonecraft’s notorious rhetoric around prostitution in the Vindication may not be quite as inflammatory, but her polemic similarly portrays prostitutes as filth and agents who “trample on virgin bashfulness.”19 Fifth and most significantly, improved female education can save women from seduction. By far, the strongest area of agreement between moralists and feminists, and the point made most forcefully across this literature, is the need for better female education. The solution to the now-assumed problem of seduction lay in education. If women were educated, they would know how to avoid the snares which libertine men will invariably set. The very concept of seduction only makes sense to Wollstonecraft in the context of women’s lack of access to knowledge. In supporting a law requiring men to take responsibility for women they have seduced, she notes “this law should remain in force as long as the weakness of women caused the word seduction to be used as an excuse for their frailty and want of principle.”20 If women have equal access to rational thought then they cannot be preyed upon and duped into mistaking illegitimate sex for love. In emphasizing improved female education above all else, both feminist and conservative polemicists, though for different reasons, grant women’s knowledge a transformative and executive power. Feminists exploit the 1790s attack on morals and manners to call for an education that would not be sexualized but for one that would foster rational judgment in women. This rational judgment would then allow women to know a seducer when they met one and female chastity would be enhanced, not compromised, by women’s reasoning. Mary Hays powerfully makes this argument in her Appeal to the Men of Great Britain when she states that had women of virtue “but opportunities of knowing the insinuating, though base arts used by profligate men, to seduce innocent and unsuspecting females, … had a virtuous and humane woman but access to know, and consider all these – she would look inward upon herself ” and avoid the first false step.21 “Access to know” is equated with virtue, merging epistemology with moral philosophy. The insistence that female ignorance does not translate into innocence and that women require education to know virtue was a tenet held by nonfeminist writers as strongly as feminists. John Corry proclaimed: “In this

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polite age it may appear vulgar to assert that the immorality and folly of both sexes originate in the ignorance of women.”22 Many of the moralists spotlight education as curing women of the vanity and weakness that leads to their moral corruption. In language close to Wollstonecraft’s, the writer of The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution argues that the object of female education “should be to make them useful, to find them rational employment, and to furnish them with good principles.”23 According to Adam Sibbit, women fall to the snares of seduction because they read Goethe rather than Milton, The Monk rather than The Rambler.24 While the imperative to improve female education sounds a positive alarm for change, it also shifts responsibility for seduction away from libertine men and onto female ignorance. By encouraging women’s knowledge as a way to avoid seduction, the 1790s discourse of seduction portrays women as victims and yet implies that women who do not know what they need to know in order to avoid ruin are to blame for their lack of knowledge. The epistemological question that I have argued is central to culture’s obsession with seduction – how does a woman know love? – reaches an ironic climax in the call for increased female knowledge. The other side of the coin to the argument that women need knowledge to save themselves from ruin is that women who fall should have known better. Knowledge becomes a moral imperative. The aporia in the 1790s syntax of seduction appears around the trap of female knowledge. On the one hand, they are victims because they did not know their lover was only feigning the signs of love yet, on the other hand, they are culpable because they should have known how to better read those signs. We see this double logic when we follow the two main discursive paths mapped within these polemics: the first guides us to the heightened language of victimization that demonizes male lust and emphasizes the need to protect women who are weak and helpless; and the second splits in multiple directions, proliferating and dispersing the sites for locating the cause of female ruin (education, parental neglect, vanity, prostitutes, female dependence, etc.). The discourse of victimization and the discourse of knowledge collectively lead women to the dead end of disciplinary passive femininity. She should have known better is a new trap that opens up after decades of emphasizing women’s right to knowledge of their hearts. The conservative, anti-feminist journal The Anti-Jacobin Review presents a perverse take on this aporia where female victimhood meets agency; the writer refutes the notion that women can be victims of seduction, arguing that “one of the chief sources of profligacy” in the present age is the fact that “women yield to seduction.”25 The use of “yield” as an active verb allows for the passivity of victimization to be attached to a conscious act of giving in

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and submitting, such that women are at fault for being seduced. This particular version of blaming the victim for coercive sex emerges from sentimental seduction’s epistemology.26 Only because women have carved out their right to know their inner heart can that knowledge expand into the demand that they know their hearts well enough not to be betrayed by others. This dynamic distinguishes sentimental seduction from seduction in early eighteenth-century amatory fiction where a writer like Eliza Haywood can capitalize on female victimhood to produce sexually active heroines (witness Melliora’s rape fantasy in Love in Excess). By the 1790s, the level of interior knowledge women have claimed for themselves ends up implicating them when they are victimized. Thus, whereas Haywood’s heroines can turn that “half-yielding, half-reluctant” kiss into a romping sexual adventure, Maria’s “half-consenting half-reluctant” kiss with Darnford is full of overtones of Maria’s culpability and foreboding loss.27 Feminist fiction from the 1790s invokes many, if not all, of the five assumptions that lead women to seduction’s dead end of active victimization. The novels discussed below include: evil libertine figures (Sir Peter in Victim of Prejudice and George Venables in Wrongs of Woman); dead mothers who necessarily cause parental neglect (Mary’s mother in Victim of Prejudice and Agnes’s mother in Father and Daughter); heroines whose vanity contributes to their falls (Agnes in Father and Daughter and Hannah in Nature and Art); and representations of the inadequacy of female education, a central theme in all the novels but especially in Nature and Art where Hannah’s fall is explicitly linked to her ignorance. When we turn to these four novels, we are confronted by seduced women who are the victims of sources too diverse and dispersed to list and none of the heroines triumph over their seducers. In three of the four novels, the seduced woman ends up dead, the only exception being the unfinished Wrongs of Woman.28 The heroines’ desires are rarely vindicated and their ability to act on the knowledge of their heart is almost entirely non-existent (though they claim it as their right). For instance, Mary is repeatedly and brutally victimized by a torrent of social evils: Sir Peter’s rape, her own beloved William’s betrayal, economic prejudice and poverty, and the tyranny of hypocritical women. Nowhere can she turn to find relief from a world that oppresses women. If one of the arguments of this book has claimed that the seduction narrative does not always already entail a monolithic and impenetrable image of women as victims and that it allows room for female desire and erotic knowledge, then it seems slightly paradoxical – or, at the very least, unsatisfying – to acknowledge that the most victimized portrayal of the seduced woman in texts we have studied so far occurs within these feminist

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novels. Abject, abused, destitute, sexually assaulted and the victims of crimes too numerous to name, these heroines are far from the representatives of female sexual agency modern readers might hope for from early feminist writers. Contemporary critics have placed 1790s feminist representations of female suffering within the larger context of Jacobin political fiction and through this lens, their feminist agendas come quickly to the surface.29 Their realistic representation of ‘things as they are’ corresponds to the political desire, as stated by Wollstonecraft in the preface to Wrongs of Woman, “of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society” (73). The wrongs committed against Maria and Jemima emerge from Wollstonecraft’s realistic portrait of women’s plight, a realism underscored by the novel’s inclusion of many empirically verifiable details.30 These politicized representations of victimized and seduced women, however, are caught in the aporia of seduction where their heroines have little chance of victory and no room for affective agency. Opie’s novel registers an optimism at the end insofar as Agnes, who is seduced and abandoned by Clifford in the novel’s opening pages, succeeds in her quest to regain her father’s and her community’s respect. But the other three novels conclude with no hope that women can find a way through a double victimization in which they are first the victims of evil seducers and rapists, and second, “the victims of prejudice” or of a society that blames them for their falls. While the realism points toward the material conditions of women’s lives that oppress them, I argue that it is the melodrama in these novels that registers the dead end of seduction and presents a tactic of resistance against seduction’s emerging trap. Many have noted but none have seriously investigated the use of melodrama in these texts. Eleanor Ty remarks that Victim of Prejudice illustrates its political arguments with “a dramatic – and sometimes melodramatic – narrative.”31 Mona Scheuermann calls Hannah’s story in Nature and Art “the stuff of melodrama” as do Shawn Maurer and Roger Manvell.32 Tilottama Rajan refers to the ending of Wrongs of Woman as “highly melodramatic.”33 How can we interpret this repeated tendency toward melodrama? My reading does not approach melodrama as a form of romance in order to argue, like others have, that romantic generic considerations interrupt and compromise the realistic political agenda of 1790s fiction; neither do I wish to demonstrate that the feminine sensibility of excessive feeling conflicts with masculine political reason.34 Instead, I show how these novels rehearse and stage the real to excess such that they break into melodrama. The melodramatic eruptions manifest the repressed obvious of

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women’s material conditions and mark a break between the powerful truth of a woman’s inner life and an external world that increasingly blames her for her fall. Wollstonecraft’s novel opens with an example of how the excesses of melodrama are placed in the service of the real. The preface explicitly states that she “restrained … [her] fancy” in order to remain within the realm of probability, but it turns out that reality is far more melodramatic and gothic than any fanciful fiction, as the novel’s opening describes: “[a]bodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres of chimeras,” but nothing can compare to the “mansion of despair, in one corner of which Maria sat” (75). Maria’s literal imprisonment is one example of a melodramatic real but there are many others. Seduction in all four novels invokes hyperbolic displays of female victimization in order to blast through the aporia of 1790s seduction and show how knowledgeable and virtuous women are victimized by sexual injustices that are systemic to patriarchy. melodrama: speaking excessive truth to power While the novels under consideration pre-date melodrama as a theatrical genre, they speak to an aesthetic mode beginning to circulate and linked to revolutionary politics.35 As a generic term, melodrama refers to the use of a sensationalized plot with stereotypical characters, heightened emotional appeal, a battle between a pure virgin and a malevolent male where Virtue is rescued by a hero. Plot is emphasized over the development of character and realism gives way to grandiose scenes with exaggerated displays of emotions. Nature and Art, Wrongs of Woman, Victim of Prejudice and Father and Daughter collectively demonstrate, in fictional form, many conventions of melodrama: the tendency toward the excessive, the heightened emotions, the improbable peripeties, and the dramatic persecutions. Three of the four novels contain climactic prison or courtroom scenes literalizing the heroine’s persecution and, in Nature and Art, the heroine is explicitly persecuted by her own seducer since the judge at Hannah’s trial turns out to be her lover William. Father and Daughter replaces the courtroom with what Peter Brooks has referred to as the “voix du sang” or the climactic recognition scene where a child is reunited with a long-lost parent.36 Mary and Maria are both abducted heroines, kidnapped by their persecutors and variously imprisoned. The novels all include grandiose settings: the dark and stormy night when Agnes encounters her mad father

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in the forest; the madhouse prison where Maria is incarcerated; or the gloomy, misty woods where Hannah abandons her child and later attempts suicide. The drive toward the excessive is brought on in all these texts, I argue, by the plot of seduction. Without the entrapment of seduction, there is no need to call upon melodrama’s narrative techniques. The pull towards knowledge, erotic desire and social subjectivity propels the plots yet that pull simultaneously leads to incarceration, sexual assault and social stigmatization. Melodrama presents a mode for representing the epistemological traps for women around seduction. These feminist texts foreground the importance of knowing love and acting on one’s own heart (Maria most forcefully claims the right to her heart in her courtroom speech), but they also register the dead end of where this knowledge leads (to prison, to a madhouse, to social ostracization). Women are literally trapped by love, victimized by a world that does not recognize their rights or virtues. I read the appeal to melodrama as a form of Irigarayian mimicry, where the dominant is copied “so as to make ‘visible,’ by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible” and thus converts “a form of subordination into an affirmation.”37 The discourse of seduction has closed in upon women and there is no outside, no place like that available to the crafty chambermaids or the Magdalens from which these feminist heroines can speak their desire. The only way to break out is through a repetition to excess, a hyperbolic emptying out of the very terms seduction offers. The hyperbolic repetition of seduction in these novels acts out a meaning that is more complex than the one superficially legible through their staging of a simplistic battle between innocent women and evil men. In his highly perceptive thinking on melodrama, Peter Brooks observes that “[m]elodrama constantly reminds us of the psychoanalytic concept of ‘acting out’: the use of the body itself, its actions, gestures, its sites of irritation and excitation, to represent meanings that might otherwise be unavailable to representation because they are somehow under the bar of repression.”38 While Brooks refers to the acting out of bodies on stage, the notion that melodrama performs an acting out of a meaning that cannot be heard in other forms is a useful one for 1790s fiction. In this way, melodrama can be read as the desire to be understood, the desire to express a meaning that is inexpressible. Melodrama, at first glance, appears to function through the obvious truth of virtue versus vice and, for this reason, it has become a discredited literary genre.39 On another level, the meaning of the mode lies not in the obvious battle between virtue and vice, but in the gesture toward the excessive, the meaning beyond. In the context of seduction’s

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meaning in 1790s feminist fiction, melodrama provides a hermeneutics of hyperbole where the exaggerated victim gestures toward seduction’s epistemological trap. Wollstonecraft’s epistolary exchange with George Dyson over the manuscript of Wrongs of Woman illustrates a reason for melodrama’s necessity. As Godwin recounts in his preface to the novel, Dyson’s response to the novel was not the empathetic one Wollstonecraft had imagined. Dyson did not think that the economic and psychological abuse Maria suffers at the hands of her husband was enough to warrant her running away and taking another lover. Wollstonecraft’s reply foregrounds the politics of the repressed obvious: “I am vexed and surprised at your not thinking the situation of Maria sufficiently important, and can only account for this want of – shall I say it? delicacy of feeling, by recollecting that you are a man.”40 In the face of Dyson’s refusal to recognize Maria’s claims to her own heart, to love whom she chooses and to expect to be loved in return, we can appreciate Wollstonecraft’s drive to melodrama. Perhaps she could make comrades like Dyson see the obvious – women’s right to emotional and erotic agency – if she could portray Venables with exaggerated disgust. The 1790s discourse of seduction erases and renders invisible the material barriers to women’s sexual and political freedom and it is these that feminists make legible through the melodramatic recognition of the not-so-obvious obvious. Martha Vicinus argues in relation to nineteenth-century French theatre that “[m]elodrama always sides with the powerless.”41 In the prehistory of the genre, I would argue that 1790s British feminists understood the dynamic of hyperbole as a tactic of the oppressed. My explication of this tactic below is loosely divided into two halves: the first focuses primarily on the excess of victimization in Wrongs of Woman and Victim of Prejudice; and the second compares the excess of shame in Nature and Art and Father and Daughter. the drama of recognition and the scene of women’s rights The seduction narrative animates the use of melodrama in all four novels but it does not provide the primary focus of the plot since these texts write beyond the usual ending of seduction, and concentrate their narrative energy on recounting the heroine’s struggle to survive post-fall. In Father and Daughter, for instance, Clifford’s seduction and abandonment of Agnes occurs quickly and the real drama surrounds Agnes’s reunion with her father and her community. The focus on what happens to women after seduction

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shifts the problem guiding the narrative from the truth of the heroine’s inner heart to the world’s refusal to recognize her right to that heart and thus to recognize her virtue. The ethical battle in these novels is only nominally about vice versus virtue; rather, it unfolds as a battle between the world and women, or between the world’s refusal to accept that the heroine is virtuous and her demand for the right to a desiring heart. In this way, these novels provide an excellent example of Peter Brooks’s argument that the climax of melodrama surrounds not so much the triumph of virtue but the dramatic recognition of it, especially by the vanquished villain: “[melodrama] not only employs virtue persecuted as a source of its dramaturgy, but also tends to become the dramaturgy of virtue misprized and eventually recognized. It is about virtue made visible and acknowledged, the drama of recognition.”42 1790s feminist fiction precisely narrates this drama of recognition: Mary, Maria, Agnes and Hannah struggle against the prejudices of a world that refuses to recognize their affective truths and allow them redemption. The drama is particularly evident in the climactic ending to Father and Daughter where not one, but two, dramas of recognition are narrated. The first occurs when Agnes’s father wakes from the madness her seduction has caused, recognizes her as his virtuous daughter, forgives her for her error and then dies; Agnes shortly follows him to the grave. The scene of virtue recognized is then repeated with her seducer Clifford who makes a chance appearance at her funeral and recognizes the story of the dead young woman as Agnes’s story, causing remorse to immediately strike him down. His melodramatic recognition of his love for Agnes and his mistake in not marrying her allows the final ethical climax to be reached. In Opie’s optimistic novel, virtue not only triumphs but the world recognizes the injustices committed against the poor innocent Agnes. A similar though muted version of the recognition scene occurs in Inchbald’s novel when William realizes that Hannah is the woman he has condemned to death; he experiences great remorse though it comes too late to save both the woman he has wronged and his illegitimate son. In Wollstonecraft’s and Hays’s novels, however, virtue finds no such vindication, nor is there a climactic scene where the seducer or society acknowledge their wrongs. But the desire for that recognition still drives their narratives, perhaps even more ferociously so since their heroines’ persecutions are spectacularly realized in trials and incarcerations, confirming Brooks’s observation about melodrama’s drama of recognition that “[i]n a striking number of cases, this recognition requires a full-fledged trial.”43 Wrongs of Woman and Victim of Prejudice most clearly stage the drama of recognition and an analysis of them reveals how melodrama makes visible the invisible of seduction’s dead end.

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In the courtroom drama of recognition in Wrongs of Woman, Maria demands that the law acknowledge both her right to divorce her husband and her affective agency in loving Darnford. She accepts the charge of adultery in her dramatic speech, but refuses that of seduction because she knowingly consented to sex (“I voluntarily gave myself ”) and wants the court to recognize her right to love: “I wish my country to approve of my conduct; but, if laws exist, made by the strong to oppress the weak, I appeal to my own sense of justice, and declare that I will not live with the individual, who has violated every moral obligation which binds man to man” (197). The judge denies Maria’s moral claims because of “the fallacy of letting women plead their feelings, as an excuse for the violation of the marriage-vow” (198). Wollstonecraft’s political argument is attached to this failed drama of recognition since the denial of Maria’s right not to love her husband and to love Darnford is caused, the novel shows, by women’s lack of economic and legal autonomy. The melodramatic courtroom scene is the climax to the novel’s story of “matrimonial despotism” but the story opens with the spectacle of Maria imprisoned in the madhouse and proceeds by way of analepsis (74). The problem the narrative sets out to solve is then, ‘What unspeakable travesty of justice has occurred to lock a woman of sensibility in such a place?’ The wrongs inflicted against Maria, it turns out, are excessive and excessively gendered. Because Maria was born a woman under patriarchy, her family exploits her and favors her undeserving brother; her education is ignored, causing “some peculiarities in my character, which by the world are indefinitely termed romantic” (128). Her early years thus explain why she fell in love with the romance both of Venables and of the escape from her family home that he represents. He seduces her into the marriage by acting the role of the man of feeling, faking charity to prove his sensibility; the philanthropic trick of his anonymous donation to poor Peggy’s fund is a recurring motif in seduction narratives (134–135).44 Maria discovers shortly after marriage that Venables was after her money, a mercenary intent she may have decoded had her uncle informed her of the dowry he gave Venables on her behalf. Her husband then becomes her tyrant, legally robbing her of her money to support his libertine habits of gambling, drinking and frequenting prostitutes. In order to make legible women’s psychological, emotional and erotic oppression from such a husband, Wollstonecraft appeals to the melodramatic mode. Perhaps the most daring component of the novel is its assumption of a woman’s right to refuse sex with a husband she no longer desires (she determinedly claims: “personal intimacy without affection, seemed, to me the most degrading, as well as the

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most painful state” [146]). Wollstonecraft ‘acts out’ Maria’s degradation through the use of graphic physical description; witness Maria’s sensational visual imaging of Venables: “I think I see him lolling in an arm-chair, in a dirty powdering gown, soiled linen, ungartered stockings, and tangled hair, yawning and stretching himself ” (147). A few pages later, we smell, feel and see “his tainted breath, pimpled face, and blood-shot eyes” (154). George Dyson may not have thought Maria needed to escape from such a repulsive man, but Wollstonecraft’s pronounced appeal to the senses attempts to overwhelm the reader into a sensational recognition that Maria had no moral choice but to flee. The invocation of sexual repulsion and disgust as a legitimating force behind Maria’s right to divorce her husband is melodramatically realized when Venables attempts to sell his wife’s sexual services to pay off his gambling debts, an outrageous injustice that forces Maria to leave. At this point in the novel, the language of disgust turns into the language of persecution since Venables refuses to let her escape without relinquishing all her uncle’s inheritance, hounding her in a series of assaults that are perfectly legal. “I was hunted” is how Maria succinctly describes his actions not once but twice in the space of a few pages (173, 178). She seeks asylum in the furthest corners of London and repeatedly he tracks her down and threatens her. Maria becomes an animal both preyed upon and “cage[d]” (144). “Marriage had bastilled me for life,” she famously remarks, comparing the plight of women under the present marital regime to the prisoners in the Bastille (155). The Bastille emerges as more than a metaphor when Venables abducts Maria and legally imprisons her in a madhouse, the point at which the narrative arrives at its diegetic present. In the process of unraveling the mystery of how Maria ended up in “the mansion of despair,” Wollstonecraft provides a detailed argument against women’s legal, economic and social oppression, and demands recognition of Maria’s right to her heart, including her right to divorce her husband (75). The drama of recognition in Victim of Prejudice repeats many of the same melodramatic motifs as Wrongs of Woman, including its sensationalized persecution. Mary explicitly aligns herself with hunted prey (“I seemed to myself like an animal entangled in the toils of the hunter”), an identification which symbolically occurs early in the novel when Mary, as a child, rescues a hare from Sir Peter’s hunting party.45 If Wrongs of Woman staged a drama of recognition for Maria’s right to her heart against tyrannical marriage laws, Victim’s melodrama centers on class prejudice as the obstacle to a woman’s virtuous love. The figure of the persecuted heroine demands the acknowledgment of her victimization not only at the hands of the evil

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aristocratic Sir Peter, but by the entire class system that stigmatizes and oppresses her. In this way, Victim of Prejudice has much in common with Innocence Betrayed, and Infamy Avowed, discussed in the previous chapter, since both heroines suffer the most from their inability to make an independent living after their fall and both texts narrate seduction as a fable of class prejudice. Like Maria’s memoir, Mary pens an account of her life from inside a prison (though the reader does not become aware of this condition of production until the novel’s final pages [168]). Mary has been sexually persecuted by Sir Peter but she has also been an economic victim and thus she ends up in debtor’s jail for a sum her jailor wrongly believes Sir Peter will pay. While her persecutions are literalized through rape and imprisonment, the drama for recognition does not involve the novel’s obvious villain, Sir Peter, but works itself out through the social refusal of Mary’s legitimate love for William, a love that only comes into conflict when Mary and William reach maturity and are forced to leave their idyllic sheltered childhood to enter “the world.” “The world” is the true villain of the novel. Raised together and educated alongside each other by Mary’s guardian Mr. Raymond, Mary and William develop a deep and reciprocal love, a love that is described as “natural, virtuous and amiable” (25). But this love is not allowed to become a social reality because Mary is the orphaned bastard of a seduced woman and William is the son of a wealthy nobleman. When they come of age, Mr. Raymond sends Mary away because she “can never be the wife of William Pelham” (emphasis in text, 32). Mary’s response to Raymond’s declaration is full of confusion since her beloved benefactor has asked her to do something contrary to the enlightened principles he, himself, has taught her. Mr. Raymond sadly informs her of the “contagion of a distempered civilization,” and their conversation constitutes her first encounter with the social prejudices of the world (32). The passage anticipates the grand physical gestures of stage melodrama with its lingering over Mary’s weeping, trembling body and its over-reliance on apostrophes and rhetorical questions to emphasize the injustice and irrationality of the forcibly broken love. She ultimately agrees to leave her childhood behind, remarking on “those senseless prejudices to which I have tamely submitted” and she prepares herself for William becoming “a man of the world,” a recurring phrase underscoring that the real battle of this melodrama is between “reason, virtue, nature” and the “tyranny” of class prejudice (48, 32, 53, 70, 35). The conflict between Mary’s enlightened virtuous mind and the corrupt world escalates after she leaves her childhood home and retreats to the

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Nevilles’. William follows her, declares his love and demands that they marry, calling her “a victim … [of ] a tyranny that your heart disavows” (52). On the one hand, she agrees and knows she has a right to love and be loved by William; on the other hand, she realizes that the social dictates of virtue demand she marry with his family’s consent. Drowned in “tears purer than the dew of heaven,” Mary is perched on the precipice of ruin and is only saved by the arrival of her mother’s memoir (55). The narrative act of reading her mother’s pathetic tale of seduction brings home to her the cruelty of the world. Her mother’s suffering is extreme: a “victim of the injustice, of the prejudice, of society which, by opposing to my return to virtue almost insuperable barriers, had plunged me into irremediable ruin” (66). She is victimized not by her “triumphant seducer,” but by a society that does not allow fallen women redemption or economic independence. The memoir’s prose imitates her experience of society’s shunning, listing the barriers to her re-entry in a periodic sentence which obstructs the main clause: Unable to labor, ashamed to solicit charity, helpless, pennyless, feeble, delicate, thrown out with reproach from society, borne down with a consciousness of irretrievable error, exposed to insult, to want, to contumely, to every species of aggravated distress, in a situation requiring sympathy, tenderness, assistance, – From whence was I to draw fortitude to combat these accumulated evils? (64–65)

Mary finishes reading her mother’s memoir with melodramatic fanfare; she “burst into a convulsive flood of tears,” wanders unconscious “till the night shut in, dark and stormy” (71). Haunted by the image of her “wretched mother,” assailed by “terrors,” “agony” and “a shuddering horror,” she finally collapses into a “feverish disorder” (72, 73). The grand battle acted out on her body ends the first volume with a compromise: if after his induction to the manners of the world through a continental tour, William returns feeling the same way, then she will marry him. Her test sets her own heart’s knowledge against the world’s and William’s recognition of it: “If your knowledge of my heart afford you not a security for my faith,” she declares, sending him into the world, “weak indeed were the sanction of oaths” (85). William eventually betrays this knowledge of her heart, confirming that weak indeed are the bonds of “love and virtue” against the bonds of rank (85). The second volume pushes the drama of recognition outside the domestic space when the Nevilles’ bankruptcy (caused by Sir Peter), Mr. Raymond’s death and her own poverty force Mary to become ‘a woman of the world.’ The gender and class difference between William’s entrance into the world and her own is pronounced; the first thing that happens on her arrival in

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London is that she is kidnapped by Sir Peter, held captive and raped. Once again, Hays uses the periodic sentence to dramatize the obstacles women face: Deaf to my remonstrances, to my supplications, – regardless of my tears, my rage, my despair, – his callous heart, his furious and uncontrollable vehemence, – Oh! that I could for ever blot from my remembrance, – oh! that I could conceal from myself, – what, rendered desperate, I no longer care to hide from the world! – I suffered a brutal violation. * * * * * (116–117)

The dashes and asterisks which load the account of her rape perform the literary equivalent of the “muteness” that Peter Brooks notes is a curious characteristic of melodrama: “we encounter the apparent paradox that melodrama so often, particularly in climactic moments and in extreme situations, has recourse to non-verbal means of expressing meanings.”46 What meaning does Hays’s typographical silence allow her to express? The trauma that the textual muteness speaks is not so much the assault on Mary’s body but what follows it: society’s denial of justice and its brutal economic victimization. As Eleanor Ty has pointed out, while the physical violation of Clarissa’s body causes her to die in three months, Mary lives three years after her rape and this fact sets the drama of recognition firmly in the material and social world.47 Hays wants her readers – if not Mary’s friends and neighbors – to be struck with outrage at her treatment postrape. Her virtue and reason remain steadfast – she refuses Sir Peter’s offers of settlements and she rejects William’s offer to be his kept mistress now that he has, indeed, become a “man of the world” and married a rich woman of his father’s choosing. But this leaves her with nothing and no one. All attempts to apply her reason to rational employment fail when she discovers her reputation as a woman of questionable virtue haunts her like her mother’s ghost. Eventually poverty and desperation lead her to the jail cell from which she writes her story and her search for recognition of the wrongs committed against her ends with only her servant, James, and her old friends, the Nevilles, coming to her aid. She remains firm in her declaration of virtue and the righteousness of her battle: “I braved the shocks of fortune, eluded the snares of vice, and struggled in the trammels of prejudice with dauntless intrepidity” (168). But few listen to her battle cry and the novel ends without a dramatic peripety where her struggle and her virtue are recognized. Instead, it ends with a declaration of her feminist principles and a hope that her act of telling will effect future change.48 The drama of recognition in both Wrongs of Woman and Victim of Prejudice is modeled through scenes of storytelling where the dream of

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the world’s recognition is acted out internally. Both Mary and Maria narrate their stories from inside a prison with the hope that by doing so, the specific narratee will respond with the recognition and confirmation that they are victims, wholly innocent of the crimes for which they are incarcerated. When a scene of storytelling does not end in the listener’s recognition of wrongs, the narrative act makes visible the material conditions that silence women. When their stories are ‘heard’ – Maria’s by Jemima and Darnford, Mary’s by James and the Nevilles – the narrative acts result in recognition and vindication. But when they are not – when Maria tells her story to the judge who rejects it or when Mary tells her story to her guardian’s friend who chooses to believe Mr. Pelham’s account that Mary seduced his son – the failure of recognition outlines the ethical stakes behind their stories and it gestures towards the world’s oppression of women. In some ways, the failed drama presents the grander political gesture because in the refusal on the part of the listener to hear the story of victimization, the excessive victimization of the heroine is restaged and repeated, doubling the injustice against the heroine. Not only does Maria have to survive her husband’s abuse but she is then further abused by a legal system that denies her right to freedom from such exploitation. Ultimately, the melodramatic portrayal of Mary’s and Maria’s fates through their dramas of failed recognition points even more starkly to the real of women’s oppression. incomplete melodrama: failed heroes and the excess of love The exaggerated syntax of melodrama, with its battle between virtue and vice and its drama of recognition, allows 1790s feminist writers to represent the world’s persecution of women; but melodrama also includes the polarization of male characters into heroes and villains, a dichotomy that Wrongs of Woman and Victim of Prejudice cannot sustain since their heroes fail to perform the heroic acts of rescuing persecuted heroines. Hays and Wollstonecraft use seduction both to narrate the story of virtuous affective agency (Maria and Mary have the right to consent to sex with men they love) and to narrate a story of female victimization that puts into play the 1790s discourse of seduction. The incommensurability of Maria’s and Mary’s strident claims for female affective knowledge with their overwhelming persecution is readable in the failure of both texts to produce a hero. In other words, the limits of seduction for feminism is written into these novels when melodrama demands a hero that their narratives cannot produce. Nowhere is the conflict between seduction as introducing affective agency

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and seduction as demanding passive victimization as clear as in Maria’s ambiguous and unfinished relationship with Darnford. Darnford’s status as an ambiguous hero has generated much debate about the novel: was Wollstonecraft, herself, seduced into the delusion of Maria’s romance with Darnford? Or does she critique Maria’s desire for love as seduction’s trap? Claudia Johnson observes that “[t]here is considerable disagreement among scholars and critics about the degree to which Wollstonecraft is consciously critiquing the Maria/Darnford relationship, some contending that the novel itself is unwittingly seduced by romance yet again, and others maintaining that it opens out a new space for critical distance.”49 Johnson sides with the latter reading, believing that Wollstonecraft has “narrative control” and her “irony seems clear,” therefore, so is the distance between the narrator and Maria.50 I agree with Johnson until that distance changes in the novel and Maria and the narrator become one and the same in Maria’s memoir. Prior to Maria’s narration of her melodramatic persecutions by Venables, the narrator flashes warning signals about her love for Darnford, educating the reader on how to avoid the seductive snares of love, but after the text switches narrative levels, the relation of love to victimization loses its clarity. The initial critical distance between the narrator and Maria is a product of the text’s extensive use of inter-textuality.51 Maria’s fictive construction of her love leads the reader into a hermeneutics of suspicion where we know to doubt Darnford and thus we watch the heroine heading into seduction’s trap. The narrator clearly registers the danger in Maria’s romantic response to Darnford’s marginalia in the books Jemima brings: “She read them over and over again; and fancy, treacherous fancy, began to sketch a character” (my emphasis, 86). “Treacherous fancy” continues to construct a dangerous heroic ideal when Maria reads Darnford’s copy of Rousseau’s Julie and imagines Darnford as her very own St. Preux, her “ideal lover” (89). As the narrator explicitly asks, “what chance then had Maria of escaping [from falling in love], when pity, and solitude all conspired to soften her mind, and nourish romantic wishes, and, from a natural progress, romantic expectations?” (98). Johnson rightly points out that if Wollstonecraft did not mean the reader to suspect Darnford, Maria’s love would not be something that required “escaping.”52 Indeed, after they meet, the language only confirms romance as a magic trick; love becomes the “grand enchanter” and “[a] magic lamp now seemed to be suspended in Maria’s prison, and fairy landscapes flitted round the gloomy walls” (101, 99). Maria seems to be following a path straight into seduction and Wollstonecraft’s point is to show the conditions under which women too easily fall. The blame is not

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Maria’s, but the material conditions shaping her sense of her heart’s truth since Maria’s susceptibility to love’s delusions is a product of her education and her inability to achieve independent happiness. Maria’s delusional romance with Darnford is interrupted, first by the appearance of the real Darnford and the narration of his own history, second by Jemima’s tale and then, finally, by Maria’s own memoir, recounting Venables’s seduction and tyranny. Johnson comments on the chronological relationship between Maria’s two seduction narratives that “[b]y encountering the memoirs so late, by reading them just as the Darnford– Maria relationship develops, we are placed in a position to recognize how Maria’s love for him recapitulates the error she made with Venables.”53 The inverted temporal order also functions to retrospectively complicate our understanding of Darnford. The introduction of Venables’s seduction increases the novel’s melodramatic tone and within the tableau of melodrama, Darnford is positioned as the rescuer of virtue in distress; but within the narrative of Maria’s delusions of love, Darnford is seen as lesser in degree, though similar in kind, to Venables as a seducer. Maria’s memoir, then, introduces a confusing swerve both in her relationship with Darnford and in the novel’s characterization of him. While the narrator has previously registered doubts about Darnford’s character, after Maria’s memoir, he briefly emerges as our unquestioned romantic hero, during which time the lovers first have sex (188). The narrator then proclaims that Darnford is not another Venables since “Maria now … was happy, – nor was she deceived” (189). In this brief sketchy chapter, the melodrama of Maria’s memoir spills over and the reader is offered the possibility that virtue can be victorious through the heroic love of a man. But this possibility is only a fragment and the novel ends by returning to its suspicions about Darnford as a seducer, hinting at a future abandonment.54 The novel’s ambiguity about Darnford’s status is readable in its earlier confusion over whether he was the man on the stairs who had rescued Maria from a previous abduction attempt by Venables. The novel never clarifies whether Maria had met Darnford before they come together in the asylum and I argue this is the case because it does not know whether to place Darnford within a plot of seduction as melodrama or a plot of seduction as the story of women’s affective agency. Godwin’s editorial note attempts to, but does not, resolve the confusion: “The introduction of Darnford as the deliverer of Maria in a former instance, appears to have been an afterthought of the author. This has occasioned the omission of any allusion to that circumstance in the preceding narrative” (97). Godwin is mistaken in his claim of omission since Wollstonecraft has provided two previous

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references to Darnford’s past appearance; as well, we have no evidence that this is an “after-thought” since her manuscript does not exist.55 The novel reaches an aporia around Darnford; it cannot decide whether he is a seducing villain or a romantic hero because melodrama simultaneously compromises the novel’s feminism and enhances it. If Darnford was the man on the stairs who rescues Maria, then her agency is sacrificed to melodrama’s representation of women as weak, vulnerable and in need of male protection. However, if there was no man on the stairs and if he is not the hero, melodrama’s emphatic inscription of the unjust treatment of women is undermined, lending credence to Dyson’s interpretation that Maria over-reacted to Venables’s actions. What you gain with one invocation of the seduction plot, you lose with the other. Darnford’s status as ambiguous hero then suggests that the seduction plot in the 1790s resists any easy narrative cohesion between female virtue and affective agency. Either Maria’s virtue is vindicated by Darnford’s rescue or she has affective agency in claiming her right to love but the two events can no longer occur within the same plot. The ambiguous hero in Victim of Prejudice has a different genesis than in Wrongs of Woman. Darnford’s greyness originates in the conflict between seduction as primarily concerned with women’s affective agency and seduction as necessarily involving women’s total victimization; William’s ambiguous status as both romantic hero and villain of Hays’s novel emerges from her particular use of melodramatic seduction. Hays’s political point in deploying the melodramatic image of seduction’s absolute victimization is to make obvious society’s economic and social persecutions of women and thus the novel invests little in the individual persecution by the villain Sir Peter; instead, it focuses on the patriarchal and class power that causes Sir Peter’s violence.56 Mary is excessively victimized not by Sir Peter per se but by the omnipresent power of aristocratic patriarchy that he represents and William gets implicated in this power. As a male and as a member of the elite, William cannot escape corruption and the novel therefore refuses him heroic status. Victim of Prejudice’s lack of interest in the particularities of Sir Peter’s villainy is apparent in the cursory narrative space it gives them. Sir Peter is portrayed as mechanically evil and the novel never lingers over his obsessive persecution of Mary. Whenever the text requires her victimization, Sir Peter appears with melodramatic coincidence to serve the purpose, a fact illustrated by his improbable appearance at the Nevilles’ when he ironically rescues Mary from the storm only to threaten her with rape. Sir Peter’s villainy is metonymically extended to the system of power he is a pawn

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within, a system of class and male privilege in which hares and young virgins are legitimate victims of prey. His reach is extensive and his power knows no bounds: he has Mary arrested, bankrupts the Nevilles, and tells every prospective employer in London about Mary’s ruined reputation. Hays’s portrayal of such omniscient villainy serves her political intent to de-individualize male violence in the interests of a larger structural critique of rank and gender. William’s relation to the evils of elitist male power is complicated, but ultimately love is not enough to make him the exception to aristocratic patriarchy’s destructive force. He enters the novel as the romantic hero who will rescue Mary from Sir Peter’s villainy; however, not only does he fail to perform this function, but Mary ends up protecting him from Sir Peter’s abuses. First, she steals Sir Peter’s grapes on William’s behalf and her transgression results in Sir Peter’s assault (14–15). Second, she rescues William during the hunting incident and intercepts the whipping Sir Peter intended for William. “I rejoice in these scars; were they not blows intercepted from William?” she later comments (23). William not only fails to protect or rescue Mary, but he fails as romantic hero when he becomes a “man of the world.” Like Sir Peter, his actions are ultimately determined by his class privilege and the novel ends up placing the two men in a relationship of similarity rather than difference. Hays underscores the parallel between their class positions through a narrative structure that interweaves the two plots. William repeatedly appears immediately following an episode with Sir Peter, and vice versa, though they do not necessarily follow chronologically or diegetically.57 The most definitive narrative link between the two men extends from the rape. Mary escapes from Sir Peter’s house to wander the streets of London and, in one of the unlikely coincidences that define melodrama, William just happens to be walking by and ‘rescues’ her. Significantly, he turns out not to be her savior since, after her bold confession of the rape, William immediately confesses his own sexual betrayal and admits that his mercenary marriage has “forfeited … [his] claims upon her heart” (125). Both William and Sir Peter call upon Mary to sacrifice her virtue in exchange for their protection from society’s exploitation; Sir Peter originally sought Mary out to be his kept mistress and repeats his offer after the rape and William tries to coax Mary into a similar relationship after he ‘rescues’ her post-rape. The way the narrative parallels the two men’s stories acts first to separate them within the tableau of melodrama (lover versus villain) but then shows their similarities through the fact that the political melodrama compares their perpetuation of class and sexual privilege. Roxanne Eberle

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observes the following about the overlap between the two men: “Hays carefully implicates both romantic love and sexual violence in the ‘contagion’ which endangers the heroine.”58 As if to underscore her insistence that male heroism provides no tonic to women’s oppression, Hays closes her novel with an extraneous episode illustrating the limits of melodrama’s representation of excessive love. In the novel’s final pages, the Nevilles improbably reappear to save Mary from prison. After retiring together into the country, Mr. Neville dies, leaving his widow as evidence that women can be victims of love in addition to being victims of prejudice. Mrs. Neville compares her impending death to Mary’s and she points out that Mary has been a victim of “injustice” but she has been “a feeble victim to an excessive, and therefore blameable, tenderness,” that is to say, a victim to love (emphasis in text, 172). Love, in the end, kills her: “I was the slave, and am at length become the victim, of my tenderness. LOVE was the vital spark … that sustained my being; it is extinguished, and I follow to the tomb its object ” (emphasis in text, 173). Mrs. Neville loved her husband too much and her mistake was in not having a life separate from him; thus, when he dies, she has no life remaining. The extraneous story of Mrs. Neville’s excessive love is pertinent to Victim of Prejudice’s melodrama and its feminist argument. Melodrama introduces a semiotics that includes male heroism within its romantic plot but the novel fails to offer any male as such a sign. The ending addresses this failure by warning women against the desire for such a sign or for saviors. Excessive love, like excessive prejudice, oppresses its female victims, it blinds them to seeing the very real material conditions which oppress them. The answer to female victimization is not the one offered by melodrama in either Wrongs of Woman or Victim of Prejudice – that is to say, rescue by a man – but an insistence, to the very end, on female independence and agency. Feminism and female autonomy ultimately get in the way of the very same melodrama that has operatically staged feminism as an ethical necessity and both novels leave their reader with little optimism or hope for the future. shame’s ethical standards: nature and art and father and daughter The dead end of the 1790s discourse of seduction attaches culpability to victimization such that women who fall are caught in the trap that they should have known better. Hays and Wollstonecraft respond by creating heroines who are melodramatically victimized and whose excessive persecutions express their unrecognized innocence since they could not have

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acted otherwise. While Maria and Mary claim affective agency – their right to love Darnford and William – they also do not initially consent to relinquish their chastity for love: Maria is legally married when Venables’s seduction is consummated and Mary is raped, not seduced, though she is unfairly tainted by her mother’s previous consenting sex. Wollstonecraft’s and Hays’s exaggerated portraits of female oppression, then, are grounded in their heroines’ initial virtue. These writers follow one path of 1790s seduction to excess – female victimization – to reveal the impossibility of female culpability. Inchbald and Opie employ a very different melodramatic strategy to represent the aporia. They follow the second path – female culpability – and represent an excess of guilt and shame in order to show how women who consent to sex with their betrayers are victims of a society that is unfairly harsh to fallen women. Both Hannah and Agnes actively love the men who ruin them but the excessive shame they feel after the men abandon them shifts the political focus of these novels from their sexual errors to the social prejudices that block women’s restoration to virtue after a momentary fall. Both heroines express abject guilt through self-loathing. Agnes accepts “the wretchedness into which my guilt has plunged me” and, when some in her community shun her as “the most wicked woman that ever breathed,” she humbly and silently accepts the stigma.59 Similarly, in her letter to William from beyond the grave, Hannah boldly accepts her culpability: “I know I have done wrong.”60 As Katherine Rogers has noted, “[s]elf-contempt is a major source of suffering for Agnes [sic].”61 Insofar as Hannah and Agnes express an excessiveness of shame and self-hatred, Inchbald’s and Opie’s novels contribute to an increased disciplining of the female body and thus are less explicitly feminist than Hays’s and Wollstonecraft’s.62 Inchbald and Opie occupy a moderate ground in responding to seduction’s increasingly restrictive sexual ideology, as Thomas Robinson nicely outlines when he writes to his brother, Henry Crabb Robinson, about Father and Daughter : “I have imagined that Mrs. O. in her production intended to support a middle opinion betwixt the free notion of Godwin, on female chastity on the one hand, and the puritanical prudish doctrine of Miss Hannah More on the other.”63 By sympathizing with their heroines and plotting their heroines’ post-fall journeys back to virtue, Opie and Inchbald compensate for their representation of extreme guilt with an attention to extreme social prejudice. I want to suggest that the melodramatic excessiveness of shame does express a feminist position, one that foregrounds social hypocrisy against fallen women. The wrongs Hannah and Agnes commit are minuscule in comparison to what they suffer at the hands of their seducers and their communities and for which

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William, Clifford and community leaders feel no shame. In both novels, the seducers do ultimately accept guilt in climaxes of recognition but their acknowledgments of the wrongs they have committed come too late, after their victim’s death. The ethical clarity with which the heroines accept their guilt through an excess of shame makes visible the invisibility of society’s hypocrisies toward women. Melodrama allows these novels to make present the absence of a comparable social shame. In her article on shame and queer performativity, Eve Sedgwick observes: “One of the strangest features of shame … is the way bad treatment of someone else, bad treatment by someone else, someone else’s embarrassment, stigma, debility, bad smell, or strange behavior, seemingly having nothing to do with me, can so readily flood me [with shame].”64 Shame, in other words, is an internalized projection of what another should feel but does not. It is my argument that by representing female shame to excess, these narratives make legible their heroines’ bad treatment by men and by society. Nature and Art begins by naming the social hypocrisy of the established elite as the main focus of its satiric fable. Originally entitled ‘Satire for the Times,’ the novel tells the tale of two brothers (and later, their two sons) who follow the very different paths of ‘Nature’ and ‘Art’.65 William becomes corrupted by the desire for wealth and status whereas Henry abandons England to live in a state of nature and raise his son in Africa. The tone of the novel’s first volume is largely satiric, but the second volume shifts dramatically into melodrama when the sons, also named William and Henry, reach the age of sexual maturity and romance enters the narrative.66 Henry’s and William’s very different approaches to love bring into sharp relief the consequences of social corruption for women. William, the embodiment of elitist selfishness, seduces and then abandons the ignorant, illiterate and rustic Hannah. Henry, on the other hand, loves with “tender regard” the educated and rational Rebecca (78). While William only rises in social status after his betrayal of Hannah, his actions cause Hannah, Rebecca and Henry to suffer social stigmatization. Hannah suffers most tragically from William’s cruelty. Her melodramatic plot rehearses countless grandiose scenes where life and death are held in balance: she gives birth to her bastard son shortly after William’s betrayal; she attempts infanticide; her parents die from grief; she is only saved from suicide by Henry; she falls into abject poverty and prostitution and is arrested for theft; at her trial, William sentences her to death, and she is executed, leaving her last dying words. She accepts her fate with a disturbing resignation and the text is haunted by the ghostly specter of Hannah’s “remorse,” a word repeated throughout the novel to register her shame

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and self-loathing (98). “[W]hy respect myself,” she asks herself, “since no other respects me? Why set a value on my own feelings, when no one else does?” (129). The feelings of shame and degradation that she has for herself are precisely the feelings others do not have but should. The narrator describes her descent into prostitution: “[d]egraded in her own judgment, she doubted her own understanding when it sometimes told her she had deserved better treatment – for she felt herself a fool in comparison with her learned seducer, and the rest who despised her” (129). The moment of shaming – when she “felt herself a fool” – comes only when she compares her sense of the world with those who have social power. Her last dying words contain the starkest example of her excessive shame; she acknowledges “the justice of her sentence, not only in respect of the crime for which she suffers, but in regard to many other heinous sins of which she has been guilty” (139). She accepts guilt for things beyond the theft she is accused of, but William, the judge who sentences her to death – the man who forced her into the poverty that necessitates her theft – receives no punishment. Hannah’s pitiful death is extreme but, by contrast, William’s blindness to his own heinous sins seems even greater. At the melodramatic trial climax, his lack of sight is literalized by his inability to see – that is to say, to recognize – Hannah. He asks the accused if she has no one to “speak to [her] … character,” a cruel irony underscored by Hannah’s silent thought “by whom her character had first been blasted” (137). When he pronounces her sentence, she faints, exclaiming “Oh! not from you!” (138). The melodramatic moment allows Inchbald to stage the inter-dependence between the one who feels shame and the one for whom that shame is felt. Precisely because the bad treatment comes “from you,” the text inscribes William’s guilt, a guilt the narrator renders more acute by pointing out that after the verdict, Hannah “was carried back to prison in a swoon; while he [William] adjourned the court to go to dinner” (138). The courtroom trial is not the first time the novel has staged a scene of social hypocrisy where the guilty party sits in judgment over their victim: William’s father, as dean of his parish, earlier arrested Hannah for the attempted murder of her child. While the dean and his social circle jumped to condemn Henry when he was thought to have fathered the bastard foundling, their hypocrisies are exposed by Hannah’s revelation that William is the father. The dean immediately stops the public interrogation and makes his final ruling “‘to hush the affair up’” (117). Justice, the narrator notes, is meted out “according to the rank of the offender” and all those in high ranking offices – the curate, the judge, the clerk and two constables – conspire to keep silent about “some little gallantry” on the part of the dean’s

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son (117, 118). Before William knows that it is Hannah who has been accused of infanticide, he lashes out at mothers who abandon their children, demanding imprisonment for the accused; the text does not let the dramatic irony of William’s false moralism escape when Henry replies, “[i]t struck me, cousin William, … that the father was more deserving a prison: the poor woman had abandoned only one – the man, in all likelihood, had forsaken two” (106). The mathematical simplicity of Henry’s equation translates into an astronomical calculation when the novel as a whole is taken into account. If Hannah is only half as guilty as William and she feels the justice of being condemned to death, then the world does not contain a punishment great enough for William and the social class he represents. While Hannah dies an outcast, Agnes dies a happy death in Father and Daughter after being restored to her community and to her father. This difference aside, both novels focus attention on social prejudice against fallen women; Opie’s text simply allows the narrative of shame to become one of redemption, and for Agnes to be granted the recognition that society denies Hannah, Mary and Maria. The novel’s plot focuses on Agnes’s struggle to regain her place in her community and to return her father to sanity after a madness brought on by her elopement with Clifford. Through a combination of her abject penitence and hard work, Agnes proves that the fallen woman can be restored to virtue, to her family and to her village. Agnes’s impressive industry must be matched by an equally vigorous shame in order for this drama of recognition to occur, but she succeeds in both. She refuses charity because she believes that only “industry shall relieve me” and she labors hard, sacrificing as much of her own wants as mortally possible to save money to place her father in a private hospital (112, 139). As with Hannah’s self-loathing, Agnes’s penitence cannot be easily redeemed for a feminist politics but its melodramatic representation serves to heighten the reader’s moral outrage at society’s shunning of fallen women. The staging of social hypocrisy happens in repeated scenes of misrecognition in the novel, beginning immediately upon Agnes’s discovery, at the theater, that she herself is fallen. She overhears a man tell the pathetic story of a victim of seduction and Agnes does not initially recognize herself as the tale’s heroine (82). When she does and she learns that Clifford is soon to marry an heiress to save his father’s barony, she breaks down into a fit of screaming frenzy. Social shunning occurs immediately as the audience responds to her hysteria by calling for the expulsion of the “intoxicated and abandoned woman”; a man in the next box calls her “a name too gross to repeat” (83). The crowd’s misrecognition of Agnes as a drunken prostitute dramatizes the fate of the fallen woman, where, regardless of her particular

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circumstances, society jumps to identify her as irredeemable. The darkness of the scene, the crowd’s immediate interpellation of her as a social pariah, prefigure the unwarranted prejudices that greet Agnes when she returns to her home town. Mr. Seymour, Agnes’s friend Caroline’s father, is one of the many who treat the penitent as an outcast and a prostitute. Too afraid of “‘what the world will say’” when Agnes calls on him for help, Mr. Seymour “desired her to leave his house directly, as it should be no harbour for abandoned women and unnatural children” (106). Caroline corrects her father’s mistaken identification of Agnes and she convinces him to show sympathy. Mr. Seymour later becomes Agnes’s greatest defender when, once again, a community member treats her punitively. The aptly named Mrs. Macfiendy wonders how Mr. Seymour “could condescend to look at such trash” but he defends Agnes in public and all but Macfiendy resoundingly agree that Agnes is not trash but a member of their community in distress: “‘Poor unfortunate girl! what a pity she should be guilty! – But fallen as she is, she is still Agnes Fitzhenry’” (122). Opie defines Agnes’s identity in terms that do not reduce a woman to her sexuality; Agnes has an existence (“she is still Agnes Fitzhenry”) outside her status as “fallen.” The difference between Father and Daughter and the other three novels discussed in this chapter is that the prejudice and hypocrisy illustrated by the likes of Mrs. Macfiendy are qualities not shared by the majority. The villagers follow in Mr. Seymour’s reformed footsteps and accept Agnes’s desire for redemption through labor. Unlike the numerous potential employers in Victim of Prejudice and Nature and Art who reject Maria and Hannah out of a hypocritical idea that their moral reputation would be compromised, people jump to provide Agnes with work: “the other governors, every one, except the ferociously chaste, was eager to prevent Agnes from feeling pecuniary distress, by procuring her employment” (124). Father and Daughter’s most critical voice against the “ferociously chaste” is Caroline, Agnes’s childhood friend. Agnes’s penitence requires her silent submission and thus Caroline becomes the moral voice of the novel. In a letter addressed to Agnes, enclosed with a large sum to help Agnes pay for her father’s care, Caroline outlines the moral middle ground: It is the slang of the present day, if I may be allowed this vulgar but forcible expression, to inveigh bitterly against society for excluding from its circle, with unrelenting rigour, the woman who has once transgressed the salutary laws of chastity; and some brilliant and persuasive, but, in my opinion, mistaken writers, of both sexes, have endeavoured to prove that many an amiable woman has been for ever lost to virtue and the world, and become the victim of prostitution, merely because her first fault was treated with ill-judging and criminal severity … This

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assertion appears to me to be fraught with mischief; as it is calculated to deter the victim of seduction from penitence and amendment, by telling her that she would employ them in her favour in vain. And it is surely as false as it is dangerous. I know many instances; and it is fair to conclude that the experience of others is similar to mine, of women restored by perseverance in a life of expiatory amendment, to that rank in society which they forfeited by one false step, while their fault has been forgotten in their exemplary conduct, as wives and mothers. (139–140)

One of the “brilliant” but mistaken writers Opie refers to is Mary Wollstonecraft and the allusion serves to distinguish the two writers’s feminisms, particularly around their deployment of melodramatic seduction. Wollstonecraft’s hyperbole targets the inflationary moral rhetoric of her time which doubly victimizes the fallen woman, first by coercive sex and then by leaving her no option to survive but prostitution. Opie’s hyperbole uses Agnes’s overly pronounced “expiatory amendment” to demonstrate that the fallen penitent will not always be treated like trash if she accepts guilt and exerts herself through industry. Roxanne Eberle has noted concerning this passage that “[i]f, on the one hand, Opie’s text critiques Wollstonecraft’s insistence upon chronicling ‘wrongs’, it also generates an imaginative script that represents the ‘fallen’ woman’s return to respectable society, thus fulfilling one of the subsidiary goals of the Vindication.”67 Opie’s melodrama does not dwell on the negative of victimization as Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman does; but by dwelling on excessive shame and moral culpability, she meets Wollstonecraft in a utopian future where the fallen woman finds economic independence and moral integrity. love is never enough in nature and art and father and daughter Nature and Art and Father and Daughter both end with the didactic hope that Hannah’s and Agnes’s stories will warn young women how to avoid the snares of seduction and, by doing so, these texts put into play an emphasis on female knowledge as culpability. The last paragraph of Father and Daughter addresses “she whose innocence is yet secure” and warns her to “tremble with horror at the idea of listening to the voice of the seducer!” (156). The newspaper account of Hannah’s last words closes with the hope that “her death will be a warning to all young persons of her own sex, how they listen to the praises and courtship of young men” (139). What knowledge does the young female reader gain from these novels on how to avoid ruin? Their falls are assigned very different origins – Hannah’s is blamed on

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her lack of knowledge while Agnes’s is caused by her over-confidence in her own knowledge – but both teach their readers to temper their belief in the power of love. Whereas Wollstonecraft and Hays stage a battle between a woman’s right to love and the world that denies her that right, Inchbald and Opie tell a more pragmatic tale, warning women against assuming their love has any material power. Nature and Art and Father and Daughter caution women not to place hope in the dream of affective marriage choice by portraying a world where love wields little social power. Contemporary historians query the practical effects of the new discourse of love in the eighteenth century, interrogating the extent to which choice and love actually overtook familial networks and economic interests as deciding factors in marriage.68 We can conclude from their representations of love that Opie and Inchbald had little confidence that marriage practices had dramatically changed to provide women with more affective power. Nature and Art and Father and Daughter both acknowledge the significance of women’s affective lives, but they both are skeptical toward its power or usefulness. Neither novel suspects their heroines’ feelings are mistaken or inauthentic; they simply show that love is not enough and that the suffering they experience when love fails outweighs the small pleasure derived from its success. Inchbald’s and Opie’s ideas of love are explicitly paralleled when Opie cites Nature and Art as an authority on the subject: Love, however rated by many as the chief passion of the heart, is but a poor dependant, a retainer on the other passions – admiration, gratitude, respect, esteem, pride in the object: – divest the boasted sensation of these, and it is no more than the impression of a twelve-month, by courtesy, or vulgar error, called love. (Inchbald 81; quoted in Opie 67)

In the original, the citation’s context questions Hannah’s feelings only to assert that she possesses “genuine love” and has not committed a “vulgar error” in loving William (81). Opie’s use of the quotation performs a similar function, confirming that Agnes’s love is not a fleeting vanity. The novels never discount the truth of their heroines’ love, even after their falls and love’s betrayal; they simply represent love as ineffectual and superfluous to the real issues. In Nature and Art, these are issues of class; in Father and Daughter, they are familial bonds. Hannah’s fatal error in Nature and Art is not that she loves, but that she thinks love can conquer class difference. She mistakenly assumes that William’s love constitutes an ethical bond to marry her. The narrative emphasizes that William used no trickery or lies in his seduction and that he even loves Hannah (William confesses to Henry that “I love her to

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distraction” [83]). As Shawn Maurer notes, William is “[n]ot a stock villain but very much a man” who feels.69 His refusal to marry Hannah is not a product of evil male libertine lust but of the demands of his social class in which love has little to do with marriage. Maurer astutely observes: It is not so much that William separates sex from love (for he does care deeply for Hannah as well as being sexually attracted to her) as that he distinguishes desire from duty: he cannot ‘love’ Hannah because a poor and uneducated woman, despite her evident possession of tremendous sensibility, cannot be a suitable object for his affection. Although during the eighteenth century inter-class marriage – by definition marriage for love – was part of a constellation of changing attitudes related to an ideology of marital companionship, historians have shown that, at least among the elite, status and wealth remained primary criteria for conjugal attachment.70

William separates love and desire from marriage, the former being a matter of consolidating wealth and status, and he never thinks that loving Hannah means marrying her. As he says to Henry, “I tell you I love her; but not enough, I hope, to marry her” (83). Inchbald’s point is that women should not mistake love for marriage even when the heart speaks truth. Love should entail a moral code of honor, Hannah’s tale suggests, but it does not and women need to be warned to act accordingly. Significantly, William makes a point of not promising marriage to Hannah. As he tells Henry, he wants Hannah to submit to him out of “her own free choice” and he will not use explicit deception to win her consent (83). After William knows he has secured Hannah’s heart, he is ‘honest’ and tells her that her poverty makes a marital union impossible: Bred up with strict observance both of his moral and religious character, William did not dare to tell an unequivocal lie even to his inferiors – he never promised Hannah he would marry her; nay even, he paid so much respect to the forms of truth, that no sooner was it evident that he obtained her heart, her whole soul entire – so that the loss of innocence would be less terrifying than separation from him – no sooner did he perceive this, than he candidly told her he “could never make her his wife.” (82)

The narrator satirizes William’s class pretensions in this passage through an ironic tone: equivocating is all right but an “unequivocal lie” is not, lying to inferiors is somehow better than to your superiors, and one only needs to respect “the forms of truth,” not the content. While William’s behavior is criticized, Hannah’s naïveté and ignorance are also at fault. Illiterate and uneducated, she cannot decipher irony or hidden meaning since tone is precisely what is lost on this simple ignorant country maid. William may

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not lie, but she interprets his words within a romantic narrative that he does not subscribe to. When a letter finally arrives from him after months of silence, she tries “for two weeks, day and night, to find out the exact words of this letter” since she cannot read or write (87). After she deciphers every word, she still misses its meaning since “her whole imagination” compensates for the letter’s coldness; “enthralled by the magic of her passion,” she attaches to the fact of the letter’s arrival, proof of William’s feelings for her. Eventually, even illiterate Hannah must accept William’s betrayal in marrying his father’s chosen Miss Sedgeley but her knowledge comes too late to save her. The text never presents Hannah’s knowledge of her own heart skeptically, but it does treat her ignorance critically, especially as contrasted to the rational intelligence of Henry’s beloved Rebecca.71 Her romantic expectations that true love conquers all constitute her fatal error. Like William, Clifford, the seducer in Father and Daughter, genuinely loves Agnes, or, at least, he loves her “as well as a libertine can love” (75). Love, once again, is portrayed as authentically felt but an irrelevant foundation for making material decisions. Opie’s novel gives primacy to familial bonds over romantic bonds in determining life choices, a hierarchy that is written into the narrative structure. The plot of seduction – which takes up only the first fifth of the text – is subordinated to the central plot of Agnes’s struggle for her father’s recognition and forgiveness. The narrator declares this hierarchy: “I have been thus minute in detailing the various and seducing power which Clifford possessed, not because he will be a principal figure in my narrative, for, on the contrary, the chief characters in it are the father and daughter” (67). The seduction plot dramatizes the conflict between parental and romantic love since Clifford uses Agnes’s love for her father, Fitzhenry, against her: “her affection for her father, … he contrived should be the means of her defeat” (67). Clifford intentionally makes Agnes’s father dislike him so that her father will not support their marriage and then further convinces Agnes that Fitzhenry is plotting against her ever marrying: “The result of this specious reasoning, enforced by tears, caresses, and protestations, was, that she had better go off to Scotland immediately with him, and trust to time, necessity, and their parents’ affection, to secure their forgiveness” (71). Agnes mistakenly believes that eloping with Clifford is the only way to resolve the conflicting demands of the love for her father and that for her lover, and her over-confidence in her ability to read the world defeats her. Opie describes Agnes’s fatal flaw as follows: “She thought herself endowed with great power to read the characters of those with whom she associated, when she had even not discrimination enough to understand her own” (67).

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Clifford does not take her to Scotland to marry her, but to London to ruin her and the plot of seduction demonstrates that the demands of romance and family duty are irreconcilable. The reader has been given hints that Agnes should have known better; in response to her father’s warning against Clifford, the narrator comments: “Alas! Agnes could plead no excuse but that she was in love, and she had too much sense to urge such a plea to her father” (69). In the face of family duty, Agnes senses that love provides a weak argument but she falls because she stubbornly believes she can bring love and family together. Clifford’s abandonment proves she is mistaken, and she spends the rest of the novel trying to return to her life as a dutiful daughter. While Joanne Tong argues the novel shows how the prodigal daughter cannot go home, I contend that the final scene of recognition powerfully reconstitutes the family as the primary site of affective bonds.72 The split between family duty and romantic love is so acute in the novel that it causes Fitzhenry to lose his mind: “when he learnt from authority not to be doubted, that Agnes was living with Clifford as his acknowledged mistress. – This was the death-stroke to his reason” (92). The reader is introduced to the madman immediately following the novel’s seduction narrative, when the diegesis catches up with the melodramatic grandiose opening scene on the heath.73 Portrayed as an unavoidable response to Agnes’s betrayal, Fitzhenry’s madness hyperbolically represents the mortal importance of family bonds. Peter Brooks argues that the grandiose scene in melodrama functions to reveal the way life and death are at stake in the everyday world, and thus it figures “more perfectly than would an accurate portrayal of manners what is really at stake for the characters and in their relationship. … [W]e are, if not in the domain of reality, in that of truth.”74 The truth of the story comes through perfectly in the madman’s utterance to Agnes whom he does not recognize: “I had a child once – but she is dead” (91). Agnes is very much alive in front of him on the heath but her death to her father is more true, a truth uncannily brought home when he tells her that he has been to her funeral and visited her own grave (94). The father’s death of reason foregrounds the catastrophic consequences of Agnes’s breaking family ties to follow romantic desires. The life and death stakes that place family bonds over romantic ones become legible in the novel’s tragic ending when Agnes’s death is brought on, not by Clifford’s betrayal which she survives, but by her father’s recognition which allows her mortal release. Agnes’s inability to anticipate that her romantic love would jeopardize her love for her father results, first, in her symbolic death to him, and then in their mutual material deaths at

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the end of the novel. But their deaths are happy. All her suffering is worth the joy she feels at the moment of her father’s recognition: “I have suffered much; but this blessed moment repays me; – this is the only moment of true enjoyment I have known since I left my home and you!” (151). Restored to each other, they can once again be themselves; Agnes’s immediate response to her father’s recognition is to cry “He knows me! He is himself again!” as if his ontological existence (“he is himself ”) is based upon his knowledge of her (“he knows me”) (150). Their melodramatic deaths confirm the primacy of the primal father–daughter bond over the capricious bond of lover and beloved. conclusion: melodrama and seduction in the courtroom I have argued that 1790s feminist writers deploy the melodramatic mode in their novels as a political strategy, and that melodrama allows them to make visible the invisibility of seduction’s emerging sexual trap for women. In the case of Wollstonecraft and Hays, melodrama offered a way to represent female affective agency as a woman’s right and to reveal the political and economic obstacles blocking women’s access to this right. In the case of Inchbald and Opie, melodrama allows them to critique the social prejudices against the fallen woman and present a moderate argument in favor of sympathy towards the seduced victim. The ultimate effectiveness of melodrama to speak obvious feminist truths against an emerging restrictive sexual ideology is hard to gauge. On the one hand, conservative journals such as The Anti-Jacobin remain blind to the power of feminist melodrama and, in its review of Wrongs of Woman, The Anti-Jacobin makes its own use of hyperbole to collapse Maria’s right to her heart with prostitution: “Here we must observe, that Mary’s theory, that it is the right of women to indulge their inclinations with every man they like, is so far from being new, that it is as old as prostitution.”75 On the other hand, feminist melodrama had a positive after-life outside fiction and in the nineteenth-century courtroom. Breach of promise to marry suits from the early nineteenth century provide a fitting conclusion to this book for the ways they allow us to chart the legacy of late eighteenth-century seduction narratives. Melodramatic representations of female plaintiffs as seduced maidens proved to be a successful courtroom strategy for women who were suing their lovers for damages based upon their abandonment. Susie L. Steinbach, in “The Melodramatic Courtroom: Breach of Promise and the Performance of Virtue,” provides a fascinating analysis of these suits in which she observes that women’s stories of their

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betrayals “were almost always narrativized as melodrama.”76 Women presented their cases as melodramatic seduction tales in which they were the wronged virtuous heroines of villains who had coerced them into sex with a promise of marriage. While the heroines of 1790s feminist novels rarely succeed in convincing the listeners of their seduction tales that they have been wronged, female plaintiffs in the early nineteenth-century courtroom were amazingly successful. According to Steinbach, 87 percent of the cases that reached trial ended in favorable verdicts for the women.77 Even in the case of Maria Foote, Steinbach notes, where it was known that Foote had a “checkered past,” melodrama’s portrait of female virtue in distress was convincing enough to produce a positive verdict for Foote.78 The success of the melodramatic seduction tale in winning damages for women in breach of promise suits attests to how a sexually passive and restrictive definition of femininity had achieved dominance by this time. A verdict for the female plaintiff depended upon the assumption of her virtue and her victimization. If she loved and was previously virtuous, she was automatically assumed to be a victim. In most suits, the fact of the breach of promise was rarely contested, but male defendants argued that their lover’s mercenary intent or their previous sexual history invalidated the engagement contract. In Irving versus Greenwood, the defendant acknowledges that he promised marriage but he argues the contract was voided by his discovery of the plaintiff ’s loose past.79 Significantly, judges overwhelmingly believed in women’s modesty and their tales of victimization against charges of erotic agency; Elizabeth Irving, for instance, was one of the winning plaintiffs counted in Steinbach’s 87 percent success rate. Ginger Frost observes concerning women’s success in these suits that if “[t]he plaintiff played the part of the victimized heroine, … the judge and jury usually sympathized; indeed, judgments for the plaintiff, as long as she played the role properly, were almost automatic.”80 In other words, a woman was not penalized for having sex outside marriage because courts automatically assumed that she was the victim of coercion and not an active and equal partner. While not a breach of promise suit, the 1841 American case of Amelia Norman, accused of the attempted murder of her seducer, also illustrates the effectiveness of seduction’s melodramatic narrative in the courtroom. Norman’s lawyers successfully argued an insanity defense by constructing an image of wronged womanhood. Andrea Hibbard’s and John Parry’s insightful analysis of the case shows how sentimental literature had a real material effect in the courtroom: “the sentimental emplotment of Norman’s life and seduction was not only successful for the way it redescribed the facts of the case according to such

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a familiar narrative pattern but also for the way it marshaled specific ethical judgments and emotions on Norman’s behalf.”81 The legal effectiveness of the melodramatic image of victimized femininity, I argue, attests to the narrowing of seduction’s possibilities in the revolutionary decade. The assumption that only one story was possible – male exploitation of female sexual passivity – allows for the tale of seduction to be used with such clarity and success, an argument supported by the fact that breach of promise cases become popular only after the 1790s. Lawrence Stone notes that while the first action for breach of promise occurred as early as 1653, numbers of suits are very low until the early nineteenth century when “[t]he action took on new life … because of the new moralism inspired by Evangelical religion and a fear of French Revolutionary ideas.”82 In other words, only after the revolutionary decade constricted the seduction narrative into one plot, does it appear in melodramatic form within the courts to help women win damages. Seduction tales within breach of promise suits demonstrate a negative legacy used for positive effect, where the room to manoeuvre in earlier seduction narratives is constrained but where women use the singular image produced by cultural narratives for their own vindication. The positive legacy of the late eighteenth-century version of the tale, however, can also be seen in the value these suits give to a woman’s inner affective life. In awarding damages to women based upon the emotional costs of their lover’s betrayal, breach of promise suits legally recognize a woman’s right to her heart since the breaking of that heart constitutes an entity worthy of financial reward. Frost’s research on the suit shows how compensation for emotional, not financial, loss only becomes the focus of the suit over the course of the late eighteenth century and she cites as her evidence a 1796 case in which Lord Kenyon emphasizes that marriage is an affective and not a financial arrangement based upon a “mutual engagement of the parties.”83 Women were equal partners in the emotional contract and thus the loss of a lover’s affections warranted reparation. Susie Steinbach makes a similar argument when she argues that the working classes use the language of sentimental seduction to show how, even though money was not an issue in the aborted marriage, working-class women “could possess sensibility, and demonstrate their emotional virginity” and that a poor woman’s broken heart required financial compensation.84 The courts debated whether the broken attachment was initially motivated by money or feelings because, if the former, damages were not given, but if the latter, her consent to premarital sex was understandable because love legitimated the act. Late eighteenth-century seduction narratives, this book has demonstrated, were

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critical to producing a cultural consensus around a belief in women’s right to affective agency. Women’s feelings were now legally quantifiable. To conclude, seduction tales within nineteenth-century breach of promise suits confirm this book’s thesis that late eighteenth-century seduction narratives did not always already assume female victimization, though they do so in the negative. Hardwicke’s Marriage Act made the breach of promise suit the only legal avenue available to women who had been seduced and abandoned yet few women actually availed themselves of the suit in the late eighteenth century.85 I argue that women who consented to sex out of love and with the promise of marriage in the decades following the Marriage Act did not automatically see themselves as victims in need of legal redress. The idea that women are sexually passive and therefore victims whose modesty requires defending only becomes dominant at the turn of the nineteenth century and thus can only be exploited in court after that time. The language used to refer to sex in these cases symbolizes the shift in underlying attitudes; often recounted in the passive voice, sex was something that happened to women, not an act originating in affective and erotic choice (in one suit, the plaintiff speaks of “a misfortune that happened to me,” and in another, sex is “[t]he misfortune that befel me”).86 Melodramatic seduction in both 1790s feminist novels and the nineteenth-century courtroom charts a mixed legacy for women’s affective and erotic freedoms insofar as they register both the limit and the attempt to get beyond it. In either case, melodrama points toward a new landscape of seduction for nineteenth-century women where their first step outside the path of virtue becomes imagined as also the last.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1 A. D. Harvey, Sex in Georgian England: Attitudes and Prejudices from the 1720s to the 1820s (London: Duckworth, 1994), p. 62. 2 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; Or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 87. 3 While historians debate the extent to which marriage practices actually changed during this period, they concur that the period witnesses a cultural shift toward the ideal of companionate marriage. Stephanie Coontz writes, “[b]y the end of the 1700s personal choice of partners had replaced arranged marriage as a social ideal, and individuals were encouraged to marry for love,” Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), pp. 145–146. Lawrence Stone first made the argument for the rise of companionate marriage in The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers Inc., 1977). Amanda Vickery provides the most cogent critique of Stone in The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 4 Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770–1845 (London: Pandora, 1987), p. 8. Later in the book, Clark claims that “the rhetoric of seduction obscured the difference between rape and seduction. It portrayed women as helplessly yielding to sexual sin, a surrender which tainted them almost irredeemably. Women were always depicted as the victims of sex, but victims of their own weakness in believing perfidious men. This pervasive discourse often prevented women from being able to articulate the difference between rape and seduction,” p. 82. See also her articles,“Rape or Seduction? A Controversy over Sexual Violence in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1983), pp. 13–27; and “The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748–1848,” in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 47–72. Like Clark, Donna Bontatibus collapses seduction and rape in The Seduction Novel of the Early Nation, stating that one of the goals of her book on American literature is “to explore seduction and rape as the ultimate representations of women’s colonization in a rape culture – a culture that fosters violence against women and uses the fear of being victimized as a means of social control,” Donna 176

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R. Bontatibus, The Seduction Novel of the Early Nation (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), p. 5. Mary Poovey’s groundbreaking book The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), also interprets seduction literature as causing a restriction of female desire: “Despite the ominous spectres of adultery and seduction in eighteenth-century sentimental novels, the function of such flirtations with transgression was actually to sublimate female desire,” p. 116. Toni Reed’s Demon-Lovers and their Victims in British Fiction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988) reads seduction as always already misogynist and Lovelace as the quintessential example of the demon-lover, p. 7. In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Armstrong argued that women were coerced into consenting to their own passivity and constriction by bourgeois femininity; she writes, “I would like to pose the possibility that moral hegemony triumphed in nineteenth-century England largely through consent rather than coercion,” Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 16. Leila Silvana May provides a good analysis and critique of ‘the domestic woman thesis’ in “The Strong-Arming of Desire: A Reconsideration Of Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction,” ELH 68.1 (2001), 267–285. “B finds himself in a curious place. He must seduce as the feminine seduces,” Roy Roussel, The Conversation of the Sexes: Seduction and Equality in Selected 17th and 18th Century Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 69. Pierre Saint-Amand, The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1994) could also be placed in this critical camp, though its focus on French literature provides a very different context for an analysis of seduction. Ruth Perry, “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in EighteenthCentury England,” in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 116. Susan Steinbach describes the shift in Women in England, 1760–1914: A Social History: “During the early modern period, women were thought to be the more sexually voracious of the sexes; during the nineteenth century, though, women, or at least respectable ones, were thought to be less sexual than men” (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), p. 107. Many scholars cite Thomas Laqueur’s historical argument about the disappearance of the female orgasm and the rise of the two-sex model as evidence for this shift, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in The Making of the Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 1–41 and Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) which includes his famous proclamation, “Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented,” p. 149. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace succinctly summarized the shift in theories of sexual difference in an important 1988 article as moving from an “older-style patriarchy

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with its emphasis on paternal prerogative, hierarchy and the exercise of force” to a “new-style patriarchy with its appeal to reason, cooperation between the sexes and the non-coercive exercise of authority,” “Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29.3 (1988), 242–243. It would be impossible to provide a complete bibliography of sources that trace the gender revolution. What follows is a brief list of representative texts: Henry Abelove, “Some Speculations on Sexual Intercourse During the Long Eighteenth Century,” Genders 6 (1989), 125–130; Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction; G. J. BarkerBenfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Bridget Hill, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities: 1700–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Laqueur, Making Sex; Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.3 (1995), 295–322; Helene Moglen, The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Ruth Perry, “Colonizing the Breast” and Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer; Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London and New York: Longman, 1998); Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter ; Dror Wahrman, “Percy’s Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 159 (1998), 113–160. 10 The “feminist message was often compromised, especially in the late-century sentimental novel, by the convention of natural feminine innocence,” Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (London: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986), p. 137. 11 Perry, Novel Relations, pp. 29, 34. She writes: “The transfer at marriage of their subordination from fathers to husbands, the movement from father patriarchy to husband patriarchy, the weakening of their ties with their brothers, and the increasingly child-centered nature of the family, probably resulted in a net loss of social power for women,” p. 34. For an example of the ‘net loss’ thesis in an earlier women’s history article, see Phyllis Mack, “The History of Women in Early Modern Britain. A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28.4 (October 1986), 715–722. Mack writes: “Whatever the reason for the decline in female status … the fact seems to be that the intellectual, economic, and spiritual options open to women of all classes decreased during

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the Enlightenment,” p. 722. Norma Clarke has more recently stated the loss thesis (or, in her terms, the “fall” of the woman writer) and argued, in relation to women’s literary history in the period, that “what had been a relatively secure participation in high status lettered activity in the early eighteenth century became insecure as models of femininity hardened,” The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 338. Insofar as I seek to disentangle seduction narratives from their critical place within a teleology of restrictive femininity, my project dialogues with recent feminist scholarship that reads for complication and nuance in gender ideologies of the period, and does not assume a clear divide between the private and public spheres, nor the absolute dominance of domestic ideology in defining women. Betty Schellenberg’s rereading of mid-century women writers also rejects this interpretation of the century; see her The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially the Introduction. For other representative texts see Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Leonore Davidoff, “Gender and the ‘Great Divide’: Public and Private in British Gender History,” Journal of Women’s History 15.1 (Spring 2003), 11–27; Wendy Jones, Consensual Fictions: Women, Liberalism, and the English Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Joan B. Landes, “Further Thoughts on the Public/ Private Distinction,” Journal of Women’s History 15.2 (Summer 2003), 28–39; Sally O’Driscoll, “Queerness, Class, and Sexuality,” in Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800, ed. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 69–85; Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). See, for example, Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). “In so far as a literary history selects a particular terminus ad quem as the climactic state of affairs to be explained – and, usually, also celebrated – it will organize the narrative teleologically to explain how that point got reached,” Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 17. Poovey, Uneven Developments, p. 3. The Penitent Daughter; Or, The History of Elinor de Burgh (Sommers Town: 1800), p. 10. The preface gives a taste of the increased fetishization of chastity we see in nineteenth-century texts: “Her story will convince the reader, that guilt is ever succeeded by sorrow; and while the bosom of sympathy heaves the sigh of commiseration, let this precept be attended to – That a just reverence for the dignity of female chastity, is essentially requisite to preserve good order and mutual confidence in society,” p. 3.

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17 “The Life of an Authoress. Written by Herself,” Literary Amusements; Or, Evening Entertainer, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1782), Vol. I, pp. 31–46. The miscellany also depicts another fissure insofar as it includes “A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend, Relating the Melancholy Effects of Seduction” where he confesses to wrongly seducing his tenant farmer’s daughter, a male confessional narrative that disappears in the nineteenth century but of which there are other examples in the later eighteenth century, in Literary Amusements, Vol. I, pp. 149–171. Reprinted as “From a Repentant Libertine to his Friend” in Variety. A Collection of Miscellanies, in Verse and Prose, 2 vols. (Dublin: 1795), Vol. I, pp. 149–158. See also The Seducer’s Distracted Confession, In a Poetical Rhapsody to a Brother of the Knife (London, 1782). 18 Susan Staves, “British Seduced Maidens,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14.2 (Winter 1980–1981), p. 114. 19 In this way, I agree with Alison Case who argues for the primacy of the seduction plot to Clarissa over the plot of rape, writing of Lovelace’s rape that it is “an (admittedly desperate) strategic move in what remains a seduction plot,” Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), p. 62. 20 The Adventures of Miss Lucy Watson. A Novel (London, 1768), p. 7. 21 Charles Horne, Serious Thoughts on the Miseries of Seduction and Prostitution with a Full Account of the Evils that Produce Them (London, 1783), Preface, n.p. 22 Two seminal works exploring the influence of amatory fiction on late eighteenth-century writers are: Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) and John Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700– 1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 23 Toni Bowers has argued that many amatory seduction tales are not about sex but are allegories depicting political anxieties after the Glorious Revolution, see her “Seduction Narratives and Tory Experience in Augustan England,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 40.2 (1999), 128–154. For the most comprehensive discussion of amatory seduction, see Rosalind Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 24 [Mary Bishop], The Victim of Seduction; Being an Interesting Narrative of Facts, of a Singular Case of Seduction (London, 1811). “Victim of Seduction” becomes a common phrase in nineteenth-century titles; a sampling of titles include Domestic Misery; or, the Victim of Seduction, A Pathetic Tale (London [1803]); Elizabeth Gunning’s Dangers through Life; or, The Victim of Seduction (London, 1810); and Richard Holbrook, The Victim of Seduction (London, 1811). 25 Toni Bowers, “Representing Resistance: British Seduction Stories, 1660–1800,” in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture, ed. Paula Backsheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 140. 26 Staves, “British Seduced Maidens,” p. 116. Her interpretation of the historical phenomenon is unique in emphasizing both the freedoms and constraints that the narrative offers and this study owes an enormous debt to her work.

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27 Stone first coined this phrase in The Family, Sex and Marriage. The fictional probing of first-person narratives about women is behind Nancy Armstrong’s claim that “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman,” Desire and Domestic Fiction, p. 8. 28 Elizabeth Hardwick, “Seduction and Betrayal,” in Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 208. 29 Staves, “British Seduced Maidens,” p. 109; Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1990), p. 1. 30 Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), p. 61. Kipnis’s book rings the death toll for bourgeois romantic love, imagined within the terms of monogamous domestic marriage, and while she sees it beginning in the late eighteenth century, she pronounces it dead in the twentyfirst. Mary Evans, also assumes the history of our present love begins in the late eighteenth century: “a generalized discourse of romantic love, as we now know it, first made its significant appearance at the end of the eighteenth century when women, just as much as men, become active participants in the discourse of romance,” Love: An Unromantic Discussion (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 7. In A Natural History of Love, Diane Ackerman assumes a continuous transhistorical emotion called love, an assumption this book rejects: “values, customs, and protocols may vary from ancient days to the present, but not the majesty of love,” A Natural History of Love (New York: Random House, 1994), p. xx. 31 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 78. Thomas Laqueur makes a similar argument when he distinguishes, in Making Sex, sex as sociology from sex as ontology: “Sex before the seventeenth century, in other words, was still a sociological and not an ontological category,” p. 8. Elsewhere he writes, “Sexuality as a singular and all-important human attribute with a specific object – the opposite sex – is the product of the late eighteenth century,” Making Sex, p. 13. 32 An example of the phrase can be found in Sophia Briscoe’s The Fine Lady: “He assured her, the knowledge of her heart … left not a doubt in his breast concerning the validity of her assertions,” meaning that he believes she does not love her previous suitor, 2 vols. (London, 1772), Vol. II, p. 80. Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, uses the phrase in The Sylph: “you may gain a farther knowledge of a heart” refers to the character’s romantic feelings, 2 vols. (London, 1779), Vol. I, p. 97. 33 For a discussion of women’s relation to botany, see Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Vivien Jones’s important collection of primary sources, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London: Routledge, 1990) provides a good sampling of the literature constituting what I call ‘the quest to know Woman.’ 34 Nancy K. Miller was one of the first to analyze the phenomenon of female narrators in The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

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35 See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Richardson’s knowledge of the heart. One of the most famous usages comes on the first page of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions when he writes: “Je sens mon coeur et je connais les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux j’ai vus,” translated in the eighteenth century as: “I alone. I know my heart, and am acquainted with mankind. I am not made like any one I have seen,” The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau: with The Reveries of The Solitary Walker, 2 vols. (London, 1783), Vol. I, p. 1. Rousseau’s sense of his own singularity in his use of the phrase – his heart is unlike any other’s – links knowledge of the heart to individual psychological truth and first-person narrative in a way that dialogues with my claims about female affective truth. Anne Lister invokes Rousseau’s phrase in her diary to describe her own unique lesbian love, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791–1840, ed. Helena Whitbread (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 283. 36 Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line (Gale Research Publications, accessed July 2, 2007). While full-text searches of ECCO are not reliable, they can display general patterns in cultural history. A similar pattern occurs on a search of “knowledge of the heart” with 198 hits for the period 1700–1746 and 718 for 1747–1800. 37 The History of Miss Indiana Danby, 4 vols. (London, 1765–7), Vol. III, p. 106. 38 Elizabeth Griffith and Richard Griffith, A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances, 2 vols. (London, 1757), Vol. I, p. 236. 39 Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, ed. Patricia Köster and Jean Coates Cleary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 53. 40 Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 186. 41 Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, 2007; accessed July 10, 2007). 42 Hardwick, “Seduction and Betrayal,” p. 177. 43 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 171 (Tuesday 5 November 1751) in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 16 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), Vol. V, p. 140. 44 Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, trans. Douglas Parmée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 37. 45 George Wright, “The Artful Seducer; A Character Taken from Life. Or A Warning to Young Women Respecting Seduction,” in The Lady’s Miscellany; Or, Pleasing Essays, Poems, Stories, and Examples, for the Instruction and Entertainment of the Female Sex (London, 1793), pp. 27–28. 46 The expository literature on seduction is extensive and includes titles such as: Free Thoughts on Seduction, Adultery, and Divorce (London, 1771); Charles Horne, Serious Thoughts on the Miseries of Seduction and Prostitution; T. F. Junior, Remarks upon Seduction (London, 1799); Edward Relfe, An Essay on the Seduction of Women (Lewes [1780?]). 47 Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 124. 48 Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” p. 124.

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49 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 18. 50 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 21, 19, 21. 51 Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 1. 52 Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter, A Tale, in Prose, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003 [1801]), p. 143. 53 Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 8. 54 Chambers, Story and Situation, p. 4. 55 Susan Lanser, “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” Style 20.3 (1986), 341–63. For an attack on Lanser which clearly demonstrates the resistance to history or politics see Nilli Diengott, “Narratology and Feminism,” Style 22.1 (1988), 42–51. 56 Robyn Warhol, “The Look, the Body, and the Heroine of Persuasion: A Feminist-Narratological View of Jane Austen,” in Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 21. In her introduction to the collection, Kathy Mezei states the essence of feminist narratology to be “the context of how stories are told, by whom, and for whom,” p. 1. For a succinct discussion of the development of feminist narratology, see Case’s Introduction to Plotting Women, pp. 6–17. 57 Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, pp. 134, 136. 58 Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage, p. 641. 59 Michel Foucault, “History of Systems of Thought,” in Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 199. 60 Madame de Staël, An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël, trans. Vivian Folkenflik (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 11. 61 Lincoln Faller, “Tales of a Poisoning Female Parricide and a Prostitute Treated ‘in a Manner Too Shocking to Mention’: Two Criminal Cases and ‘the Clarissa Effect’,” The Eighteenth-Century Novel 5 (2006), 199–200. 62 Rev. Edward Barry, “Seduction,” in Theological, Philosophical, and Moral Essays (London, 1790), pp. 68–69. Another example comes from the anonymous The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution: “The increase of novels will help to account for the increase of prostitution and for the numerous adulteries and elopements that we hear of in the different parts of the kingdom” (London, 1792), p. 54. For critical discussions of the seductive power of novel-reading see Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially Chapter 3; and Katherine Binhammer, “The Persistence of Reading: Governing Female Novel Reading in Emma Courtney and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers,” Eighteenth-Century Life 27.2 (Spring 2003), 1–22.

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Notes to pages 19–20

63 Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 89. 64 My thanks to Susan Brown, a student in my “Seduction in the Novel” undergraduate course, for pointing this out in her insightful essay “Clarissa Reads no Fiction. Or, A History of the Moral Status of the Novel 1747–1792: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Reading and Public Opinion,” unpublished paper. In their scenes of reading, late eighteenth-century seduction novels invoke a repeated motif from earlier amatory seduction, one that disappears mid-century and returns later but with a difference: while Melliora’s scene of reading in Love in Excess narrates her physical and erotic response to fiction, Maria’s reading uncovers the story of her heart. See Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, ed. David Oakleaf (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1994), pp. 113–114. My thanks to Kathryn King for reminding me of Melliora’s reading as well as Charlot’s scene of reading in Delariviere Manley’s New Atalantis. In his chapter on reading in amatory fiction, William Warner writes of New Atalantis: “novel reading becomes the vehicle of a perverse (anti-) education which, by articulating reading with transgression of the Law, makes novel reading constitutive of a new erotic modern subjectivity,” Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 100. Warner’s comment helps point to the difference between early and late eighteenth-century scenes of reading insofar as the focus shifts from the erotic to the affective subject. 1 KNOWING LOVE: THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF “CLARISSA” 1 Thomas Edwards to Samuel Richardson, January 29, 1749, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1966 [1804]), Vol. III, p. 2. Samuel Johnson, Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George B. N. Hill, 2 vols. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), Vol. II, p. 251. 2 Edward Young to the Duchess of Portland, November 22, 1747, quoted in T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 184. 3 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; Or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 87. Hereafter cited in the text. 4 The resurgence of critical interest in the novel in the 1980s and 1990s was spurred largely by the rise of feminist criticism. In addition to the triad of late 1970s and early 1980s post-structuralist readings (William Warner’s Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979]; Terry Castle’s Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson’s “Clarissa” [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982]; and Terry Eagleton’s The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982]), see Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford:

Notes to pages 20–22

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Stanford University Press, 1996); Tassie Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Christine Roulston, Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). For a full discussion of the critical revival of Clarissa see Siobhán Kilfeather, “The Rise of Richardson Criticism,” in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 251–266. 5 Paula Backsheider, “The Rise of Gender as Political Category,” in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Fiction and Social Engagement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 32, 56, 32. 6 Keymer notes that Richardson wanted his readers to be “‘if not Authors, Carvers’ of the text,” Tom Keymer, Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the EighteenthCentury Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. xviii. At the same time as Richardson invites the reader’s participation, he firmly attempted to hold out control of meaning. For discussions of how Richardson’s revisions demonstrate his obsessive desire for control over his text, see Mark KinkeadWeekes, “Clarissa Restored?,” Review of English Studies ns 10, No. 38 (1959), 156–171; and Florian Stuber, “On Original and Final Intentions, or Can There be an Authoritative Clarissa?,” TEXT 2 (1985), 229–244. 7 Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender, p. 90. 8 For a discussion of female readers’ responses to the novel see Elspeth Knight, “‘Daring but to Touch the Hem of her Garment’: Women Reading Clarissa,” Women’s Writing 7.2 (2000), 221–245. See also Keymer, Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the Eighteenth-Century Reader. 9 Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, n.d., Richardson, Correspondence, Vol. IV, pp. 224–225. 10 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971 [1957]), pp. 228–229. Leo Damrosch also asserts Clarissa’s lack of knowledge and argues that one of the things we know about Clarissa is that “without question [she] harbors unacknowledged sexual feelings for Lovelace,” God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 228. 11 Thus, Nancy K. Miller can argue that “Clarissa Harlowe remains in the dark about the nature of her desire,” The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 95. William Beatty Warner also assumes that the female heart is a deep dark continent; he writes that Richardson succeeds “in taking the reader into the mysterious regions of the heart to uncover hidden truth,” Reading Clarissa, p. 222. The repressed depth model of sexuality and subjectivity resonates so strongly with Leo Braudy’s reading that he sees Richardson as Freud avant la lettre, “Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa,” in New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Phillip Harth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 206.

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Notes to pages 22–25

12 Albrecht von Haller, “Character of Clarissa,” Gentlemen’s Magazine 19 (1749), 245–246, 345–349. 13 Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 35; Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 209. 14 Flynn, Samuel Richardson, p. 36. 15 The critical stance that Clarissa’s heart betrays a truth she does not acknowledge also works with the misogynist logic that woman’s ‘no’ really means ‘yes.’ Frances Ferguson’s “Rape and the Rise of the Novel” provides a brilliant reading of the paradox of modern rape law, one that mirrors my argument that the psychological depth model necessarily leads the critic to twist Clarissa’s ‘no’ into ‘yes.’ She illustrates the double logic of rape law through the paradox of statutory rape: saying someone who is ten can never consent to sex even if she consents, Ferguson observes, introduces “a model of internal self-contradiction that is not set aside but merely reversed in the cases involving other kinds of rape. If in statutory rape yes is always taken to mean ‘no,’ in other kinds of rape no is frequently taken to mean ‘yes.’ Thus, rape law continually suggests as a paradigmatic interpretative strategy the reversibility of the terms that seem to be asserted by the charge of rape itself,” Representations 20 (Autumn 1987), 96. Ferguson provides an astute reading of Clarissa in light of this internal selfcontradiction that on the one hand prioritizes female consent and, on the other hand, makes that consent open to reversibility. 16 Samuel Richardson, Familiar Letters on Important Occasions (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1928), p. 129. 17 Ibid., p. 27. 18 Ibid., p. 60. 19 Frances Sheridan to Samuel Richardson, July 24, 1757, in Richardson, Correspondence, Vol. IV, pp. 162–163. 20 The Paths of Virtue Delineated; or, the History in Miniature of the Celebrated Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison, Familiarised and Adapted to the Capacities of Youth (London, 1756). Between 1756 and 1784 the English Short Title Catalogue lists ten editions that included the Clarissa adaptation either on its own or with Grandison and Pamela. Two of these editions were published in America, spurring Leonard Tennehouse to argue that the adaptations were more popular than the original novel in America, “The Americanization of Clarissa,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (1998), 192–193. 21 For the classic articulation of the distinction see Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 22 Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 16. 23 The Paths of Virtue, p. iii. 24 Ibid., p. 29. 25 Ibid., p. 55.

Notes to pages 26–31

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26 The OED defines the phrase as referring to “a phosphorescent light seen hovering or flitting over marshy ground … When approached, the ignis fatuus appeared to recede, and finally to vanish, sometimes reappearing in another direction. This led to the notion that it was the work of a mischievous sprite, intentionally leading benighted travellers astray” (Oxford English Dictionary On-line, 2nd edition, 1989). Throughout the novel, Clarissa refers to the ignis fatuus that she chases. For example, after leaving her father’s house and finding herself thrown disastrously off her path, she writes: “But I, presumptuous creature! must rely so much upon my own knowledge of the right path! – little apprehending that an ignis fatuus with its false fires … would arise to mislead me! – And now, in the midst of fens and quagmires, it plays around me and around me, throwing me back again, whenever I think myself in the right track,” p. 566. 27 See Keymer, Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the Eighteenth-Century Reader; and Knight, “Women Reading Clarissa.” For a description of women’s fictional engagements with the novel, see Isobel Grundy, “‘A Novel in a Series of Letters by a Lady’: Richardson and Some Richardsonian Novels,” in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Doody and Sabor, pp. 223–236; and Ruth Perry, “Clarissa’s Daughters, or the History of Innocence Betrayed: How Women Writers Rewrote Richardson,” Women’s Writing 1.1 (1994), 5–24. 28 Lady Bradshaigh to Richardson, January 11, 1748–1749, in Richardson, Correspondence, Vol. IV, p. 245. 29 Mary Delany to Richardson, April 24, 1751, in Richardson, Correspondence, Vol. IV, p. 37. 30 Jonathan Culler, “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 178. My thanks to Alison Conway for pointing me toward this text. 31 Ibid., p. 174. 32 Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel, Form and Function (New York: Harper and Row, 1967 [1953]), p. 47. For discussions of the influence of amatory fiction on Richardson see Margaret Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) and John Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 33 Warner’s Reading Clarissa exemplifies criticism highlighting Lovelace’s will to knowledge and power. There is evidence for this reading in how Lovelace coerces Clarissa into thinking she is exercising her free will when, in fact, she is only ‘consenting’ to go deeper into his power: her ‘choice’ of Sinclair’s as her London habitation, her ‘choice’ to have Hannah accompany her, and her naive belief that her will has power and that, after her escape, Lovelace will “govern himself entirely by my will” (52). My reading argues, however, that there is an equally strong case to be made for Lovelace’s will to knowledge as ignorant and powerless. 34 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman’s Library, 1986), p. 324.

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Notes to pages 35–41

35 For instance, William Warner states that “[a] quick glance at her own heart usually wins Clarissa vindication from imputed wrong, for there she reads the text of her own innocence,” Reading Clarissa, p. 18. 36 Lady Elizabeth Echlin, An Alternative Ending to Richardson’s “Clarissa,” ed. Dimiter Daphinoff (Bern: Francke, 1982). 37 Lady Bradshaigh to Richardson, n.d., in Richardson, Correspondence, Vol. IV, p. 196. 38 Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, October 6, 1748, in Richardson, Correspondence, Vol. IV, p. 187. 39 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 19. 40 Ibid., p. 60. 2 THE WHORE’S LOVE OR THE MAGDALEN’S SEDUCTION 1 William Dodd, A Sermon on St. Matthew, Chap. IX. Ver 12, 13. Preach’d at the Parish Church of St. Laurence, Near Guild-Hall, April the 26th, 1759 (London [1759]), p. ii. 2 For Richardson’s support of the Magdalen movement, see his letter to Lady Bradshaigh, n.d., in which he refers to “my college for Magdalens,” as well as his description of Lady Bradshaigh’s own “Magdalen,” The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 6 vols., ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, (New York: AMS Press, 1966 [1804]), Vol. IV, pp. 254, 292. Richardson aided Barbara Montagu in publishing the anonymous Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House; for a discussion of his enthusiastic support in his letters to Montagu see Mary Peace, “The Magdalen Hospital and the Fortunes of Whiggish Sentimentality in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain: ‘Well-Grounded’ Exemplarity vs. ‘Romantic’ Exceptionality,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 48.2 (2007), 136–137. 3 Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, n.d., Correspondence, Vol. IV, p. 237. The full title of Teresia Constantia Phillips’s text is An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips, More Particularly that Part of it Which Relates to Her Marriage with an Eminent Dutch Merchant: the Whole Authenticated by Faithful Copies of his Letters, 2 vols. (London, 1748). 4 This description of the moment of ruin occurs in An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips, Vol. I, pp. 35–38. For years, scholars have assumed that ‘Mr. Grimes’ is Lord Chesterfield but research by Lynda Thompson reveals this attribution to be false, The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’: Constantia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington and the Shame of ‘Publick Fame’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 44–53. 5 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 171, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 18 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), Vol. V, p. 145.

Notes to pages 41–42

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6 Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown. Exhibiting the Life of a Courtezan in the most Fashionable Scenes of Dissipation, 2 vols. (London, 1766); Ann Sheldon, Authentic and Interesting Memoirs of Miss Ann Sheldon, 4 vols. (London: 1787–1788). For descriptions of the new sentimental image of the prostitute, see Jennie Batchelor, “‘Industry in Distress’: Reconfiguring Femininity and Labor in the Magdalen House,” Eighteenth-Century Life 28.1 (Winter 2004), 1–20; Vern L. Bullough, “Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century England,” in ’ Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment, ed. Robert Purks Maccubbin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 61–74; Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis 1730– 1830 (London: Longman, 1999), p. 2; Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), especially Chapter 7; Vivien Jones, “Eighteenth-Century Prostitution: Feminist Debates and the Writing of Histories,” in Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality, ed. Avril Horner and Angela Keane (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 127, 135 and “Scandalous Femininity: Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Narrative” in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), p. 55; Laura Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially Chapter 4; W. A. Speck,“The Harlot’s Progress in Eighteenth-Century England,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 5 (1980), 127; Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London. Volume One (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 168. For a discussion of scandalous prostitute biographies in the later eighteenth century see Julie Peakman, “Memoirs of Women of Pleasure: The Whore Biography,” Women’s Writing, 11.2 (2004), 163–184. 7 Robert Dingley, Proposals for Establishing a Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes (London, 1758), pp. 3–4. Other representative texts in support of founding a Magdalen charity are: “Amicus,” Letter to The Rambler, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. V, pp. 207–209; John Fielding, An Account of the Origin and Effects of a Police … To which is added a Plan for Preserving those Deserted Girls in this Town, who Become Prostitutes from Necessity (London, 1758); Jonas Hanway, A Plan for Establishing a Charity-house, or Charity-houses, for the Reception of Repenting Prostitutes (London, 1758); Saunders Welch, A Proposal to Render Effectual a Plan to Remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of this Metropolis (London: 1758). 8 Hitchcock, English Sexualities, p. 100. 9 Stanley Nash argues that “by the 1780s many [of the women admitted] were not prostitutes at all, but rather ‘seduced’ women. These women were given refuge in order to prevent their becoming prostitutes. This policy seems to have developed over a number of years,” “Prostitution and Charity: The Magdalen Hospital, A Case Study,” Journal of Social History 17 (Summer 1984), 619.

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11 12

13 14

Notes to pages 42–43

See also Sarah Lloyd, “‘Pleasure’s Golden Bait’: Prostitution, Poverty, and the Magdalen Hospital in Eighteenth-Century London,” History Workshop Journal 41 (1996), 53. The shift in the Magdalen Hospital’s policy corresponds to a similar shift in the admissions policy of the Foundling Hospital in 1801. Samantha Williams documents the change from a focus on anonymous admissions based upon the welfare of children to constricting admission to only those children of genteel virtuous women who could prove that they had been seduced and abandoned; she argues that the “institutionalization of the discourse of seduction and abandonment at the hospital” is found only after the 1801 policy change whereas a discourse of shame is absent from later eighteenthcentury petitions by unwed mothers, “‘A Good Character for Virtue, Sobriety, and Honesty’: Unmarried Mothers’ Petitions to the London Foundling Hospital and the Rhetoric of Need in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920, ed. Alysa Levene, Thomas Nutt and Samantha Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 93. Mary Truman, one of the first women to apply to the charity, according to H. F. B. Compston, “was rejected, being no Prostitute,” The Magdalen Hospital: The Story of a Great Charity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917), p. 46. Richardson to Hester Chapone, December 6, 1750, quoted in Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 173n. Rev. S. B. P. Pearce, An Ideal in the Working: The Magdalen Hospital, 1758 to 1958 (London: H. B. Skinner and Co., 1958), p. 48. For an insightful analysis of the relationship between the Magdalen’s sentimental discourse and commerce, see Mary Peace, “Prostitution and the Growth of Desire: The Rise and Fall of Sentimental Economics in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Political Subject: Essays on the Self from Art, Politics and Science, ed. Wendy Wheeler (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2000), pp. 62–77. Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 280. Examples of this phrase can be found throughout literature in the period. In Hugh Kelly’s False Delicacy, Rivers states “a union of interest I look upon as a union of dishonour – and consider a marriage for money, at best, but a legal prostitution” (London, 1768), p. 16. In his conduct book, James Fordyce describes women marrying rich men whom they cannot possibly love as follows: “such legal prostitution is usually productive of lasting remorse and misery,” The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex, and the Advantages to be Derived by Young Men from the Society of Virtuous Women (London, 1776), p. 66. Elizabeth Griffith in her Essays Addressed to Young Married Women notes of such marriages that they “can in reason and equity only be considered as a state of legal prostitution” (London, 1782), p. 16. Mary Wollstonecraft famously uses the phrase in Vindication of the Rights of Woman when she argues that as long as women are denied economic independence, marriage will constitute a form of “legal prostitution,” Vindication of the Rights of Woman in The Works of Mary

Notes to pages 43–44

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Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), Vol. V, p. 218. 15 Laura Rosenthal provides an excellent reading of the prostitute in relation to emerging commercial mercantile culture in her astute book Infamous Commerce. See also Laura Mandell, “Bawds and Merchants: Engendering Capitalist Desires,” ELH 59.1 (1992), 107–123; and T. G. A. Nelson, “Women of Pleasure,” Eighteenth Century Life 11.1 (February 1987), 181–198. 16 Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House, As Supposed to be Related by Themselves, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007 [1760]). Hereafter cited in the text. See Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt’s “Introduction” for the most comprehensive discussion of the attribution which is still at issue, pp. xxi–xxiii. Batchelor and Hiatt suggest Sarah Scott as the possible author, though they acknowledge that no definitive evidence exists for any attribution, p. xxiii. The tone, themes and ideology of the text, I agree, are far closer to Scott than to Sarah Fielding, who is often thought to be the author, most notably by Joyce Grossman, “‘Sympathetic Visibility’, Social Reform and the English Woman Writer: The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House,” Women’s Writing 7.2 (2000), 247–266. Peter Sabor makes an equally strong case for why Fielding was not the author, “Introduction,” The History of Ophelia, by Sarah Fielding (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004), p. 10. The novel was reprinted under the title Spectacles for Young Ladies Exhibiting the Various Arts made Use of for Seducing Young Women … As Related by Themselves (Cork, 1768); Dodd abridged and amended Emily’s tale and published it as The Magdalen, Or, History of the First Penitent Prostitute Received into That Charitable Asylum with Anecdotes of Other Penitents (London, 1799 [1783]). Another possible reprint or adaptation is Modern Seduction; or, Innocence Betrayed (1777), attributed to Phebe Gibbes. The Orlando Project notes that the text “purports to be a group biography of women in the Magdalen Hospital, but is probably fiction or adaptation … Its relation to Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, 1759 (probably by Sarah Fielding) is unknown, and cannot be investigated since no copy of Gibbes’s work is known to be extant,” “Phebe Gibbs,” Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, ed. S. Brown, P. Clements and I. Grundy, Cambridge University Press, http://orlando.cambridge.org.login.ezproxy.library. ualberta.ca/ (accessed January 21, 2007). 17 For a Foucauldian disciplinary interpretation of the Magdalen movement see Robert Bataille, “The Magdalen Charity for the Reform of Prostitutes: A Foucauldian Moment,” in Illicit Sex: Identity Politics in Early Modern Culture, ed. Thomas DiPiero and Pat Gil (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 109–122. Miles Ogborn’s chapter on the Magdalens in Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 also interprets the hospital within this framework, placing it within the history of “disciplinary technologies” of self (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), p. 73. Laura Rosenthal supports this Foucauldian reading of the hospital as panopticon, suggesting “Magdalens perhaps make even better examples of regulated subjects than prisoners,

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Notes to pages 44–46

however, for they humbly, voluntarily, and even gratefully submit themselves to the gaze of the reformer, signing a contract that declares their intent to reform and admission of past guilt,” Infamous Commerce, p. 114. 18 Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 5. 19 Jones, “Scandalous Femininity,” pp. 55, 63, 55. Ann Jessie Van Sant concurs, calling the fiction “conservative,” Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 36. 20 For instance, while Jones critiques the binary of agency versus victimization in “Eighteenth-Century Prostitution,” she sets up 1790s prostitute narratives as reacting against a hegemonic and formulaic reading of Magdalen narratives in her “Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the EighteenthCentury Prostitution Narrative,” Women’s Writing 4 (1997), 201–220. 21 William Dodd, The Sisters; Or, The History of Lucy and Caroline Sanson, 2 vols. in 1 (London, 1798 [1754]), p. 222. Donna Andrew notes the novelty of this endeavor: “What is interesting about this attempt [to start a charity to reform prostitutes] is that the founders of the institution believed such regeneration to be a practical possibility. The idea that fallen women could remake their characters and remold their lives, albeit with some philanthropic assistance, was a new one,” Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 122. 22 Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt make a similar observation, arguing that the non-fiction tracts tend to emphasize “the brotherhood of the governors” and objectify the women whereas “The Histories submerges the institution’s governmental fraternity, representing the Magdalen House instead as a sober sorority of virtuous and sympathetic individuals,” “Introduction,” p. xiv. 23 M. M.[Martin Madan], An Account of the Death of F. S. who Died April 1763 Aged Twenty-six Years. In a Letter to a Friend (London, 1763). Reprinted many times including a title change to make the link to the penitent prostitute movement clearer: The Magdalen: Or, Dying Penitent. Exemplified in the Death of F.S. Who died April 1763, aged Twenty-six Years (Dublin, 1781). 24 This could have been Madan’s point as he was an ambivalent supporter of the charity. In 1765, two years after the publication of Fanny’s tale, while the clergy at the Lock Hospital, Madan reported that he “heard sad tales about wicked goings-on among the inmates at the Magdalen” and accused the hospital of immorality, Compston, The Magdalen Hospital, p. 62. Madan’s position is further complicated by his publication of Thelyphthora; or, a Treatise on Female Ruin, in its Causes, Effects, Consequences, Prevention, and Remedy (London, 1781) in which he argues in favor of polygamy as the solution to female ruin. 25 The History of Miss Sally Johnson, Or, the Unfortunate Magdalen (London, 1800?); Mr. McNalley, “Fanny: Or, the Fair Foundling of Saint George’s Field,” in The New Novelist’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Library of Pleasing and Instructive Histories (London, 1786–1787), Vol. I, pp. 177–179; The Life and

Notes to pages 47–51

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Adventures of a Reformed Magdalen. In a Series of Letters to Mrs B*** , of Northampton. Written by Herself (London, 1763). My knowledge of this text is limited to Madeleine Blondel’s revelatory plot summary in “A Minor Eighteenth-Century Novel Brought to Light: The Life and Adventures of a Reformed Magdalen (1763),” Notes and Queries 31.1 (March 1984), 36–37. 26 William Dodd, “History of a Magdalen,” The Visitor, 2 vols. (London: 1764), Vol. II, pp. 63–70. 27 Hugh Kelly, Memoirs of a Magdalen: Or, The History of Louisa Mildmay (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1974 [1767]), p. 78. Hereafter cited in the text. 28 Ruth Perry has a fundamentally different reading of the moral: “The unmistakable message of this novel is that terrible things happen to a woman who does not hold out for marriage before sex. One week – and a legal ceremony – make all the difference in the world between happy respectability or misery, isolation, and infamy,” Novel Relations, p. 264. In my reading, the fact that she is rewarded with happy respectability at the end serves not to prove the dangers of sex outside marriage but to prove that sentiment – love – determines the meaning of sex. 29 “Story of a Penitent Prostitute,” The Yearly Chronicle for M,DCC,LXI (London, 1762), p. 104. 30 Ibid., p. 104. 31 Dodd, The Sisters, pp. 30–31. 32 William Dodd, “To the Author,” in The Visitor, Vol. II, p. 245. 33 Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in which are included Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, ed. James L. Clifford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 504. Attribution of “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” is still undetermined, though Lady Vane clearly had some involvement and consented to her story being made public. For a discussion of the authorship question see Neil Guthrie, “New Light on Lady Vane,” Notes and Queries 49.3 (September 2002), 372–378. See also the entry on Frances Anne Vane in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004 [www.oxforddnb.com. login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/view/article/4374, accessed June 25, 2008]). 34 Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown, Vol. II, p. 157. 35 Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 96. See also Leah Leneman, “Seduction in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland,” The Scottish Historical Review 78.1 no. 205 (April 1999), 39–59. 36 Perry, Novel Relations, p. 278. Magdalen narratives bear out Bannet’s and Perry’s claim in their representation of the Act as causing a woman’s downfall. Thus, I conclude that whether or not the Act had the empirical social effects Bannet and Perry cite, its cultural effects can be read in these narratives. 37 Charles Horne, Serious Thoughts on the Miseries of Seduction and Prostitution (London, 1783), p. 28. 38 Dodd, “To the Author,” Vol. II, pp. 234–235. 39 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 227–228.

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Notes to pages 51–63

40 Charles Letts, Emma; Or, the Dying Penitent. A Poem (London, 1799), pp. 37, 24. 41 Grossman concurs with the comparison to Jacobin women’s text, citing the novel as a forerunner to the prostitute stories of Wollstonecraft, Inchbald and Hays, “‘Sympathetic Visibility’,” 261. 42 Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 183. 43 Maternal love as the justification for prostitution is a common theme in the novel. The first heroine in the novel, Emily, tries every form of menial labor to support herself without turning to prostitution and it is only when the bawd she is in debt to threatens to send her child away that she consents to selling her body: “Delicacy, I say, gave way to maternal love” (p. 42). 44 William Dodd, “An Authentic Narrative of a Magdalen,” in An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Magdalen Hospital, for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes (London, 1776), pp. 33–44. 45 Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), p. xiii. Hereafter cited in the text. 46 Guthrie, for instance, demonstrates the empirical verifiability of the facts in Vane’s memoirs, “New Light on Lady Vane,” 376. In contrast, the Magdalens’ last names are never given and their first-person tales often do not provide personal names. Tales that do provide a first name, such as Dodd’s The Magdalen, Or History of the First Penitent Prostitute Received into That Charitable Asylum in which the heroine’s name is Emily, are challenged by historical research which identifies the first woman to enter the charity as Ann Blore, a native of Ashburn, Derbyshire (Compston, The Magdalen Hospital, p. 46). The only possibly identifiable penitent is the title character of Martin Madan’s An Account of the Death of F. S. The ESTC identifies “F.S.” as “Fanny Sidney, a converted prostitute.” 47 Quoted in Jones, “Scandalous Femininity,” 61. On the other hand, the standard Magdalen seduction tales oftentimes repeat claims that the narrator’s lack of art is proof of its historical veracity. “The Real History of a Magdalen,” for example, garners its ‘reality’ by being “a plain and artless tale” (William Dodd, “The Real History of a Magdalen,” in The Visitor, Vol. I, p. 49). On the subject of fact versus fiction in the Magdalen tales, Sarah Lloyd writes, “in the case of the Magdalen the distinction between fiction and social representation was particularly unclear: fictional accounts were presented as true ones and the hospital featured in explicitly fictional material” (“‘Pleasure’s Golden Bait’,” 58). 48 “Were you, ye Fair, but cautious whom ye trust,/ Did you but think how seldom Fools are just,/ So many of your Sex wou’d not in vain,/ Of broken Vows and faithless Men complain./ Of all the various Wretches Love has made,/ How few have been by Men of Sense betray’d?” Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent, ed. Malcolm Goldstein (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969 [1703]), II.ii.169–174. The passage is also the epigram for many other seduction narratives. In addition to Phillips’s and Dodd’s text it appears on the title page of: John Corry, The Gardener’s Daughter of Worcester; Or the Miseries

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of Seduction (London [1800]); Innocence Betrayed, and Infamy Avowed: Being the History of Miss Maria Thornhill. Containing a Genuine Account of Her Seduction, and the Barbarous Treatment She Afterwards Met with from Mr. Sprightly (Manchester: Printed by A. Swindell, n.d. [orig. London edition 1771?]); The Memoirs of Miss Arabella Bolton. Containing a Genuine Account of her Seduction (London, 1770); and The Theatre of Love: A Collection of Novels (London, 1759). 49 Sheldon, Authentic and Interesting, Vol. IV, p. 106. Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate this portrait or identify “Mr. P” but I am grateful to Alison Conway and Marcia Pointon for their assistance (Pointon suggests it could be Matthew Williams Peters). Sheldon states that her portrait was also painted by Joshua Reynolds, commissioned by one of her lovers, a Sir Peter Lester, but I have not been able to locate evidence of a Reynolds portrait either. I would like to thank David Mannings for his assistance in searching for this portrait. 50 Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown, Vol. II, p. 221. The title page of this work asserts it was “published by the Author of a W** of P***” but most Cleland scholars note the facetiousness of this claim. 51 Compston, The Magdalen Hospital, p. 61. Donna Andrew notes, “admission to the hospital was not obtained easily. Each applicant for admission had to face an examination by a board of governors who questioned and scrutinized her in an attempt to discover how deep and genuine her contrition was. This was an important process – it was essential to distinguish those women who were truly penitent from those who only wanted a temporary vacation from all labor,” Philanthropy and Police, pp. 124–125. 52 “Sunderlandensis” in a letter to “Mr. Urban” in the Gentleman’s Magazine suggested that each poor young woman should “make a short narrative of their case upon oath, that their seducer’s name and infamous artifices might be publish’d in the common news papers and that thereupon a penalty might be levied upon him to be apply’d to the use of the convent,” Gentleman’s Magazine, 21 (April 1751), 165. There is no record that this suggestion was put into practice. 53 William Dodd, “To the Visitor from ‘A Grateful Magdalen’,” in The Visitor, Vol. I, p. 40. 54 Lloyd, “‘Pleasure’s Golden Bait’,” 62. W. A. Speck, in “The Harlot’s Progress in Eighteenth-Century England,” provides more specific statistics on the hospital’s success rate, taken from the Hospital’s Annual Statement for 1795. Of the 2,998 girls admitted since 1758: 1,960 were reconciled to family or friends or placed in service; 98 were found ‘lunatic’ (Speck suggests the insanity was probably caused from mercury poisoning used in treating venereal disease); 61 died; 381 were discharged at their own request; 423 were expelled for improper behaviour; and 75 were still in hospital, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 3.2 (1980), 127–139. 55 After specifying her name, age and parish of birth, the rest of the document was a standard form declaring: “That your Petitioner has been guilty of Prostitution, and is truly sensible of her offence, which has plunged her into the greatest distress, and rendered her destitute of every means of getting an

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honest livelihood,” Appendix II, The Rules and Regulations of the MagdalenCharity, p. 108. 56 In addition to being encouraged to conceal their true identities after admission, the rules specified that all women would be dressed in the same clothes and that “No enquiry into names or family is permitted,” The Rules and Regulations of the Magdalen-Charity, p. 21. 57 Mary Peace traces a similar shift in the representation of the penitent prostitute both in visual narrative and in the sermons preached at the charity and summarizes the shift in the following way: “by the 1790s, it seems, the Magdalen had become a different institution to the one which had been set up in mid century. It abandoned its assertions of innate virtue in favor of the biblical doctrine of the fall, and abandoned its belief in the possibility, or even perhaps the desirability of social rehabilitations, in favor of a commitment to the containment of sinners” (“Prostitution and the Growth of Desire,” p. 70). 58 Gérard Genette defines narrative ‘speed’ as “the relationship between a duration (that of the story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years) and a length (that of the text, measured in lines and in pages),” Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 87–88. 59 While the time spent whoring varies across the tales from days to years, the Hospital did favor admitting younger women on the theory that such women were more likely to be less hardened to vice and thus more able to reform. Stanley Nash documents the age of admission in 1769 as between 15 and 21 (“Social Attitudes Towards Prostitution in London from 1752–1829,” Dissertation submitted to Department of History, New York University, June 1980, p. 243). 60 Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown, Vol. I, p. 2. 61 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 3. 62 “Story of a Penitent Prostitute,” p. 105. 63 Dodd, The Sisters, p. 53. 64 Ibid., p. 118. 65 Dodd, “An Authentic Narrative of a Magdalen,” p. 37. 66 William Dodd, “History of a Magdalen,” The Visitor, Vol. II, p. 67. 67 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 63. 68 Compston, The Magdalen Hospital, p. 201. Tony Henderson’s research shows that “most of the capital’s prostitutes were born into relative poverty, if not outright pauperism,” Disorderly Women, p. 25. 69 Hitchcock, English Sexualities, p. 93. 70 The Magdalen Hospital archives were largely destroyed in the World War II bombing of London. 71 Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 198. 72 Batchelor, “‘Industry in Distress’,” 12. 73 The History of Miss Sally Johnson, pp. 27, 28. 74 McNalley, “Fanny: Or, the Fair Foundling of Saint George’s Field,” Vol. I, p. 179.

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3 AFTER KNOWLEDGE: MARRIED HEROINES AND SEDUCTION 1 Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 13. Hereafter cited in the text. 2 There are exceptions to this rule and we need not look far for them: Amelia’s sexual knowledge does not shield her from almost falling prey to the ‘Noble Peer’s’ seduction, a fate Mrs. Bennett does not avoid though she, too, is married. Marriage does not save the Countess of Dellwyn from seduction in Sarah Fielding’s The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, 2 vols. (London, 1759). While the ending is fragmentary and only suggests Maria’s adultery turns out to follow a seduction plot, The Wrongs of Woman nods towards a plot where past experience does not save a woman from heartbreak and ruin. 3 For a fuller analysis of embedded narratives and the functions they serve see William Nelles, Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). I use the term “embedded narrative” throughout this chapter to refer to any tale within a tale no matter what kind, and I will not be making the specific distinctions narrative theory often does between, for instance, primary narratives embedded in a frame, such as Frankenstein, and tales which are outside the text’s diegesis, such as “The History of Leonora” in Joseph Andrews (for such distinctions see Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen [Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988], pp. 143–149). 4 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 72. 5 Bal, Narratology, p. 147. 6 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 1. 7 Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, ed. Susan Manning (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1999), p. 116. 8 Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1982), p. 406. 9 Jean Coates Cleary, “Introduction,” Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xvi. In agreeing with Cleary that such a tradition exists, I disagree with Patricia Howell Michaelson, who, in her comparison of Wrongs of Woman to Amelia, argues “Amelia and Maria are virtually unique in that, in both, the topic isn’t courtship but marriage,” “The Wrongs of Woman as a Feminist Amelia,” Journal of Narrative Technique 21.3 (Fall 1991), 251. Christine Roulston has begun to correct the lack of critical writing on novels of marriage; see her “Having it Both Ways? The Eighteenth-Century Ménage-àTrois,” in Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700– 1800, ed. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 274–298; and “After the Wedding: Narrating Marriage in the Eighteenth Century,” forthcoming manuscript.

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10 My list is by no means exhaustive but is meant to indicate a larger unexplored tradition of novels of marriage. I thank Isobel Grundy and the Orlando Project for the more obscure references in this list. 11 Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 339. 12 Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 123. 13 Fielding, Amelia, p. 1, quotation from Simonides. 14 From its appearance in 1751, Amelia has been attacked by critics and deemed a failure by some because of its mixing of traditional Fielding satire with a new Richardsonian sentimentalism. George Sherburn notes in 1936 that “There are so many reasons for the relative failure of this novel that critics have tended to attack or defend its reputation rather than to search out just what Fielding was trying to do in it,” “Fielding’s Amelia: An Interpretation,” ELH 3 (1936), 1–2. For examples of the critical discussion of Amelia’s narrative structure and thinness of plot see Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Charles A. Knight, “The Narrative Structure of Fielding’s Amelia,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 11.1 (January 1980), 31–46; and Amy Wolf, “Bernard Mandeville, Henry Fielding’s Amelia, and the Necessities of Plot,” The Eighteenth-Century Novel 4 (2004), 73–102. 15 Angela J. Smallwood, Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and Feminist Debate, 1700–1750 (Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 166; Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Female Changelessness; or, What Do Women Want?” Studies in the Novel 19.3 (Fall 1987), 273–283; Jill Campbell, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Castle, Masquerade and Civilization; and Alison Conway, “Fielding’s Amelia and the Aesthetics of Virtue,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8.1 (October 1995), 35–50. 16 The critical archive on Fielding’s use of embedded narratives, especially in Joseph Andrews, is enormous. I list only a few: Joseph F. Bartolomeo, “Interpolated Tales as Allegories of Reading: Joseph Andrews,” Studies in the Novel 23.4 (Winter 1991), 405–415; Douglas Brooks, “The Interpolated Tales in Joseph Andrews Again,” Modern Philology 65.3 (Feb. 1968), 208–213; Jeffrey Williams, “The Narrative Circle: The Interpolated Tales in Joseph Andrews,” Studies in the Novel 30.4 (Winter 1998), 473–488. Jeffrey Williams also discusses the critical heritage and Fielding’s use of interpolation in Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 82–98. 17 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 89. 18 For this reason, George Haggerty refuses the term ‘interpolated’: “[in Amelia] narrative is sustained by long passages of personal history, which in a novel such as Tom Jones would be called Interpolated Tales. Here, however, they are not

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interpolated but play a direct and essential role in the narrative itself,” “Fielding’s Novel of Atonement: Confessional Form in Amelia,” EighteenthCentury Fiction 8.3 (April 1996), 387. 19 Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, p. 201. 20 Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, p. 76. 21 Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 192. 22 Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 7. 23 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 216. 24 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 216. 25 The distinction between real and implied writers and readers is an important one for narrative theory. I am not claiming that individual writers and readers enter this contract since the motives and interests of real writers and readers are unique and indeterminable. But I am claiming that the novel sets up this transaction between its implied writer and reader. For an explanation of the distinction see Shlomith-Rimmon Kenan, Narrative Fiction (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 87. 26 Terry Castle, for instance, argues that Amelia does not remain uncontaminated by Mrs. Atkinson’s story and her character is compromised by her “disconcerting participation in Mrs. Atkinson’s masquerade ruse,” Masquerade and Civilization, p. 238. The masquerade reveals Amelia – and the narrator – to be capable of deceit as they both keep the exchanged identities secret. There are other indications that Amelia’s virtue is not entirely pure: we find out she has been hiding her knowledge of Booth’s infidelity and that she, herself, feels “a momentary tenderness” for Atkinson (p. 490). 27 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 229. 28 This is why the final paragraph, in which the narrator breaks his contract, jars the reader. There, he enters the novel as a character and, at the precise moment when he declares that “Amelia is still the finest woman in England,” he acknowledges a relationship to her (“Amelia declared to me the other day, that she did not remember to have seen her husband out of humour these ten years”[p. 545]). This shift in the level of narration leaves a bad taste as we query whether the reader has just experienced a long narrative ruse. 29 Ronald Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 286. 30 Wolf, “The Necessities of Plot,” 82. 31 See Susan Lanser, “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” Style 20.3 (Fall 1986), 341–363. 32 Betty Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in EighteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 33 Margaret Anne Doody, “Frances Sheridan: Morality and Annihilated Time,” in Fetter’d or Free: British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986), p. 331.

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34 Staves, Literary History, p. 347. 35 Frances Sheridan, Eugenia and Adelaide; A Novel (London, 1791), Vol. I, p. 153. The novel was written when Sheridan was fifteen; she showed it to Samuel Richardson in 1756 who encouraged her to continue writing. See Richard Hogan and Jerry C. Beasley, “Introduction,” Frances Sheridan. The Plays of Frances Sheridan (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1984), p. 18. 36 Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, ed. Patricia Köster and Jean Coates Cleary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 11–12. Hereafter cited in the text. 37 Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers, p. 38. 38 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), Vol. I, p. 390. For an extended discussion of the issue of poetic justice in Sidney Bidulph see John C. Traver, “The Inconclusive Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph: Problems of Poetic Justice, Closure and Gender,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20.1 (Fall 2007), 35–60. 39 The Monthly Review 24 (March 1761), 260. 40 In this critical camp, I would include: Doody, “Frances Sheridan”; Kathleen Oliver, “Frances Sheridan’s Faulkland, the Silenced, Emasculated, Ideal Male,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 43.3 (2003), 683–700; Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Anna Fitzer, “Mrs. Sheridan’s Active Demon: Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph and the Sly Rake in Petticoats,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 18 (2003), 39–62; and Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the EighteenthCentury Domestic Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Many critics, however, interpret Sidney’s strict obedience to the rules of propriety as denoting Sheridan’s position as a “modest muse,” arguing that the novel presents a conservative vision of marriage. Kathleen Oliver cites Jean Coates Cleary, James R. Foster, Patricia Meyer Spacks and Janet Todd as all focusing on “Sidney’s passivity, caused by her strict adherence to the rigid societal codes prescribed for feminine behaviour,” p. 683. The sources she cites are: Jean Coates Cleary, “Introduction,” in Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph; James R. Foster, “From Sidney Bidulph to the Placid Man,” in History of the PreRomantic Novel in England (New York: Kraus Reprint Corp., 1966), pp. 139– 145; Patricia Meyer Spacks, “The Sentimental Novel and the Challenge to Power,” in Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 114–146; Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago Press, 1989). Betty Schellenberg in The Professionalization of Women Writers provides the greatest critique of the conservative theory, see especially Chapter 1. 41 Fitzer, “Mrs. Sheridan’s Active Demon,” 48. Fitzer rejects a reading of the relation of chaste wife to fallen woman in terms of Spencer’s paragon and foil opposition, claiming that the binary is dissolved by “the very fine line that distinguishes the heroine’s desexualized tender feelings from the tenderness that is a euphemism for Miss Burchell’s active desire,” 53.

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Chambers, Story and Situation, p. 6. Oliver, “Frances Sheridan’s Faulkland,” 689. Bannet, The Domestic Revolution, p. 114. Frances Sheridan, Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph as Prepared for the Press by the Late Editor of the Former Part, 2 vols. (Dublin: 1767), Vol. I, p. 71. Hereafter cited in the text. 46 Dorothy Hughes Eshleman, Elizabeth Griffith: A Biographical and Critical Study (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia, 1949), p. 82. 47 Elizabeth Griffith, The History of Lady Barton; A Novel, in Letters, 3 vols. (London: 1771), Vol. I, p. 228. Hereafter cited in the text. 48 Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800: The Price of a Tear (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1999), p. 106. Marla Harris also sees the embedded stories as producing “female bonding”: “The way in which the voices of other women like Olivia and Maria interrupt and take over Louisa’s and Fanny’s letters makes us recognize all the women in the novel as sympathetic extensions and reflections of one another; the boundaries between women dissolve on the page as they do in the plot,” “‘How Nicely Circumspect Must Your Conduct Be’: Double Standards in Elizabeth Griffith’s The History of Lady Barton,” in Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts, ed. Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 280. 49 Griffith made her claim for women’s equality in A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances, when, writing to her future husband, she asserts “that Souls are not of different Genders” and that all inequality can be traced to custom: “Thus un-educated, and un-improved; or, what is worse, condemned to a wrong Education; it is as unfair to censure us for the Weakness of our Understandings, as it would be to blame the Chinese Women for little Feet; for neither is owing to the Imperfection of Nature, but to the Cruelty of Custom,” (London, 1757), Vol. I, pp. 59, 62. 50 The Platonic Wife, first staged at Drury Lane in 1765, was unsuccessful and Betty Rizzo suggests that its strong feminism was the reason the audience catcalled and hissed at it, “‘Depressa Resurgam’: Elizabeth Griffith’s Playwriting Career,” in Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), p. 127. Rizzo furthers this point in her “Introduction,” EighteenthCentury Women Playwrights, Volume IV: Elizabeth Griffith (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), p. xv. Elizabeth Eger also argues that after her bad experience with the reception of The Platonic Wife, Griffith “abandoned her concern for improving the status of intelligent women,” “Spectacle, Intellect and Authority: The Actress in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to The Actress, ed. Maggie B. Gall and John Stokes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 46. 51 In Genuine Letters, ‘Henry’ warns ‘Frances’ against consorting with a libertine who has no money to offer marriage: “My Character is Libertine, your Fortunes are small, your Experience of the World but little, your Age young, and your

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Guardian old. In such a Situation, you should take Care, not to trust to the charitable Opinion of the World,” A Series of Genuine Letters, Vol. I, p. 124. J. M. S. Tompkins provides a detailed and original analysis of the Griffith’s marriage in The Polite Marriage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938). 52 European Magazine and London Review 1 (March 1782), 197. 53 Elizabeth Griffith, Essays Addressed to Young Married Women (London, 1782), pp. 15–16. 54 Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, p. 126. 4 SEDUCTION IN STREET LITERATURE 1 “Virtue in Distress,” in The Portrait of Life, or The Various Effects of Virtue and Vice … In a Collection of Interesting Novels, 2 vols. (London, 1770), Vol. II, p. 20. 2 Mr. B. convinces Pamela that in comparing “the Riches of your Mind, and your unblemished Virtue, against my Fortune … the Condescension [in marrying] will be yours,” Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 350–351. Hereafter cited in the text. 3 The historical reality of cross-class seduction and marriage presents a different picture than the one realistic fiction makes possible. Such marriages remained exceptions and Randolph Trumbach’s research on illegitimate births in the late eighteenth century leads him to conclude that “most women were seduced by men of their own social class,” Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 234. John Gillis concurs with Trumbach, in particular, arguing that master–servant seduction was rare, “Servants, Sexual Relations, and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801– 1900,” Feminist Studies 5.1 (Spring 1979), 143. Nicholas Rogers goes further and argues that “there was a decline in the proportion of illicit relationships between socially unequal partners and a corresponding rise in relationships of equality” such that in 1700 30 percent of the bastardy cases in Westminster were between social unequals, but that figure falls to 14 percent in the 1780s, “Carnal Knowledge: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-century Westminster,” Journal of Social History 23.2 (1989), 358. See also Cissie Fairchilds’s research on France which suggests that women had dramatically fewer sexual relations with social superiors after 1750, “Female Sexual Attitudes and the Rise of Illegitimacy: A Case Study,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8.4 (Spring 1978), 648. 4 While readership, especially of ephemeral texts, is notoriously difficult to document, their cheap cost, the sales figures for popular printers such as William and Cluer Dicey, and the distribution through hawkers of chapbooks and ballads, provides evidence that this was the literature primarily read within the lower classes. Victor E. Neuburg also makes this assumption, noting that “[d]uring the eighteenth century chapbooks formed the main reading matter available for the poor,” Chapbooks: A Guide to Reference Material on English, Scottish and American Chapbook Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Woburn Press, 1971), p. 1. For general discussions about production,

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distribution, and readership of chapbooks and ballads see Victor E. Neuburg, Chapbooks; Lance Bertelsen, “Popular Entertainment and Instruction, Literary and Dramatic: Chapbooks, Advice Books, Almanacs, Ballads, Farces, Pantomimes, Prints and Shows,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 61–86; Dianne Dugaw, “Women and Popular Culture: Gender, Cultural Dynamics, and Popular Prints” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 263–284; Robin Ganev, “Popular Ballads and Rural Identity in Britain, 1700–1830,” A Dissertation submitted to York University, 2004; Later English Broadside Ballads, ed. John Holloway and Joan Black (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Routledge Reissues, 2006 [1975]); The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation Special Issue on “Ballads and Songs in the Eighteenth Century,” ed. Ruth Perry, 7.2/3 (Summer/Fall 2006); and Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen and Co., 1981), especially Chapter 3. Dating street literature is often impossible and inconclusive. On the (mis)dating of this material see The Eighteenth Century Special Issue on “Ballads and Songs in the Eighteenth Century,” especially Mary Ellen Brown, “Placed, Replaced, or Misplaced?: The Ballads’ Progress,” 115–129 and Maureen McLane, “Dating Orality, Thinking Balladry: Of Milkmaids and Minstrels in 1771,” 131–149. Most of the ballads I examine exist in small 8–12-page chapbooks (while broadside, or single-sheet, production still exists in the late eighteenth century, this period sees the rise in circulation of ballads within chapbooks, informed by the shift from an oral to a print culture). Most of the ballads I examine exist in multiple printed copies; almost all were printed by the Diceys at one time or another, as well as other provincial printers in Newcastle, Tewkesbury and Edinburgh that can be traced to the late eighteenth century. Publication information on prose narrative chapbooks is slightly easier since some do include dates on their title pages but, again, information is often restricted to printers who were known to have been active during the period; for example, Thomas Sabine was one of the more popular purveyors of sentimental chapbooks. For a discussion and a list of Sabine’s chapbooks see Katherine Barber Fromm, “Images of Women in Eighteenth Century English Chapbooks, from Banal Bickering to Fragile Females,” A Dissertation submitted to Iowa State University, 2000. 5 Dorothy Marshall’s The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century remains an important historical account of how the laboring classes were effected by economic changes in the century (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, [1926] 1969). See also John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850 (Harlow: Longman Group Ltd., 1986) and Beverly Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 6 Alysa Levene, Thomas Nutt and Samantha Williams, “Introduction,” Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),

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p. 6. Barry Reay, using his research on rural Kent, quantifies the relation of prenuptial pregnancy to illegitimate and legitimate births: “Of 202 known first births in Hernhill from 1780–1851, 86 (42.5%) were conceived before marriage, 22 (10.9%) were illegitimate, and 94 (46.5%) – a minority – were conceived in wedlock. And this is a conservative estimate. It may be necessary to adjust extra-marital conceptions to a figure of over 60%,” “Sexuality in NineteenthCentury England,” Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture 1.2 (1990), 242. 7 Rule, The Labouring Classes, p. 203. 8 Levene, Nutt and Williams, “Introduction,” Illegitimacy in Britain, p. 9. 9 Lawrence Stone argues that the rise of companionate marriage had little influence on the lower classes who had always practiced freedom of affective choice: “the urban tradesmen and artisans and the rural smallholders of the late eighteenth century were thus probably largely unaffected by the new demands of love,” The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers Inc., 1977), p. 366. John Gillis, in “Affective Individualism and the English Poor,” critiques Stone’s assumptions about the lower classes, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10.1 (Summer 1979), 121–128. Martin Ingram disagrees with Stone as well, arguing that in the lower classes “love and personal attraction played little part in matrimonial calculations – it was far more important to find a wife or husband who could work,” “The Reform of Popular Culture? Sex and Marriage in Early Modern England,” in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay (London and Sydney: Croom Helm Ltd., 1985), p. 134. Sandra Clark challenges the argument that economics played little role in marriage practices among the poor and argues, using the same chapbooks as her evidence, that courtship practices were “dominated by considerations of prudence, economy, the avoidance of waste, and the conservation of profit,” “The Economics of Marriage in the Broadside Ballad,” Journal of Popular Culture 36.1 (2002), 130. 10 The Maid of the Mill; Or, The Cottage Beauty: Being the Real and Entertaining History of ’Squire Richland, and Lucy Arnold (London: Printed by T. Sabine, n.d.) and The Distressed Lady, Or, Yorkshire Beauty, Made Happy. A Faithful and True Story (London: Printed for Andrew Hamilton, 1785). The Maid of the Mill is not a prose reproduction of Isaac Bickerstaff ’s popular comic opera by that name inspired by his reading of Pamela, though the chapbook Maid of the Mill is also familiar with the Pamela story. 11 Examples of such seduction tales are found in the following ballads: “The Merchant Outwitted; Or The Chamber Maid’s Policy,” Revd. Sabine Baring Gould Collection of Ballads, chiefly printed in Newcastle-upon-Tyne between 1730 and 1830 (British Library, L.R.31.b.19), Vol. II, pp. 44–45; “The Butcher’s Daughter’s Policy: Or, the Lustful Lord well fitted,” London, British Library, 1346.m.7 (6); “A Politick Virgin’s Garland, The Young Squire’s Courtship to the Politick Virgin,” London, British Library, 11621.c.5; and “London Kate,” Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, 3 vols., printed 1779–1816 (British Library, 11606.aa), Vol. III (83).

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12 “The Yarmouth Tragedy; Or, the Perjured Sailor,” Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. II (22). This ballad is probably a variant of the popular ballad, “The Faithless Captain, Or, the Betray’d Virgin” in which the lover does not murder his pregnant fiancée but remorsefully agrees to marry her the second they make land; before they do, however, a storm causes her to fall overboard and he follows her to a watery death, Gould Collection of Ballads, Vol. II, pp. 10–11. 13 Jean R. Freedman, “Illegitimate Pregnancy in Scottish Ballads,” Folklore Forum 24.1 (1991), 3–18. Susan Stewart provides an excellent example of the critical assumption that street literature contains the ‘voice of the people’ in her “Scandals of the Ballad”; she quotes from the definition of “the genuine ballad” found in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. George Sampson, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) which reads: “[the genuine ballad] has been submitted to a process of oral tradition among unsophisticated people fairly homogenous in life, habit, and outlook, and below the level at which conscious literary art appears,” Representations 32 (Fall 1990), 134. 14 Freedman, “Illegitimate Pregnancy in Scottish Ballads,” 4. 15 “Pretty Nancy of Norwich,” London, British Library, 11621.e.6 (31). 16 “London Kate,” Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. III (83). 17 Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa and Pamela (London, 1754), p. 35. 18 Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 49. 19 Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 49. Levene, Nutt and Williams concur, noting that the high rate of prenuptial pregnancy “serves at least as a salutary reminder that sexual activity outside marriage was not as strictly prohibited in the past as received wisdom would sometimes suggest,” “Introduction,” pp. 6–7. 20 Dugaw, “Women and Popular Culture,” pp. 279–280. 21 Tanya Evans, “‘Blooming Virgins All Beware’: Love, Courtship, and Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century British Popular Literature,” in Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920, ed. Alysa Levene, Thomas Nutt and Samantha Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 21. 22 “The Jovial Tinker and the Farmer’s Daughter,” London, British Library, 1346. m7 (31). A variant is “The Tinker and the Farmer’s Daughter” in Three Excellent Songs, Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. I (73). 23 John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (London, 1774), p. 35. 24 “The Merchant Outwitted; Or The Chamber Maid’s Policy,” Gould Collection of Ballads, Vol. II, pp. 44–45. 25 “The Butcher’s Daughter’s Policy: Or, the Lustful Lord well fitted” (May 14, 1776), London, British Library, 1346.m.7 (6). 26 In an interesting variant of this ballad, the Squire is made a fool, humiliated in public and forced to support the child he has unwillingly sired by the Blackamoor while the virgin remains chaste and weds another, better, husband, “A Politick Virgin’s Garland, The Young Squire’s Courtship to the Politick Virgin,” collected in The Right Merry Book of Garlands (Newcastle-upon-Tyne [1815?]).

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27 “The Virtuous Milk-maid’s Garland,” collected in The Right Merry Book of Garlands. 28 A comic cross-class seduction chapbook tells a similar story of the heroine’s physical assault on her aristocratic seducer. In The Miller’s Beautiful Daughter; or True Love and Heroic Virtue of Polly Charlton, Polly steals her rapist’s sword and “in the extravagance of her anger, thrust it into his breast. He fell, and the floor was soon cover’d with blood” (London, 1765?), p. 9. From his sickbed, he hears that Polly has been arrested and knows an injustice has been done: “Justice! … any sentence that passes on Polly must disgrace the judge, and shame the prosecutor, unless it be to raise a monument to her virtue; that by her example, passions may be punished as they deserve,” p. 11. Justice for Polly entails rewarding her violent defense of her virtue with marriage. 29 The following is a sampling of such tales: “The Reading Garland; Or, Dick and Kate’s Happy Marriage,” London, British Library, 11621.e.4 (8); “The Bristol Garland; Or, The Merchant’s Daughter of Bristol,” London, British Library, 1568.1016 (19); “The Resolute Lady; Or, the Fortunate Footman,” Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. III (64); “The Love-sick Serving Man,” “The True Lovers Happiness; Or, Nothing Venture, Nothing Have,” “The Dorsetshire Garland,” “The Tragical Ballad: Or, The Lady who Fell in Love with her Serving Man,” Gould Collection of Ballads, Vol. I, pp 69–72; Vol. I, pp. 508–11; Vol. II, pp. 4–5; Vol. II, pp. 206–207. 30 Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, p. 61. 31 See M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Also see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 32 “The London Beaux,” London, British Library, 11621.c.5; “The Northern Ditty; Or, The Citizen outwitted by a Country Damsel,” Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. II (90). In both ballads, the woman tricks her seducer out of his money with her savvy and keeps her maidenhead for another man. 33 E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 96. 34 Christopher Flint,“The Anxiety of Affluence: Family and Class (Dis)order in Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 29.3 (1989), 506. Other critics who have noted this forgetting are Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor who argue that Pamela’s status as working-class heroine has been overrated “because Richardson was careful to modify her lowness with traces of ancestral respectablity,” “Pamela” in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 6. Nancy Armstrong notes how “[i]ronically enough, in making a romance that sought to unite the extremes of the social hierarchy, Richardson had to erase virtually all socioeconomic markings before the male and female could enter into an exchange,” Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 114–115.

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35 Scarlett Bowen, “‘A Sawce-box and Boldface Indeed’: Refiguring the Female Servant in the Pamela–Antipamela Debate,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Julie Chandler Hayes and Timothy Erwin, 28 (1999), 257. For example, following their engagement, Pamela speaks to Mr. B. even more forcefully than before in the language of servitude: “I can have no Will but yours,” she says of him as her husband, Pamela, 272. 36 For a discussion of the significance of immateriality to Pamela’s virginity, see Corrinne Harol, Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 37 Keymer and Sabor argue that the responses to the novel “make plain the extent to which Richardson’s narrative of social disruption and moral disproportion had struck the rawest of collective nerves,” “Pamela” in the Marketplace, p. 7. William Beatty Warner provides another important interpretation of, what he calls, the Pamela “media event” in Licensing Entertainment: the Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 38 Eliza Haywood, Anti-Pamela, in Anti-Pamela and Shamela, ed. Catherine Ingrassia (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004), p. 78. There is another layer in Haywood’s irony as Vardine turns out, like the snuff-box, to be only faking wealth. Syrena’s lesson in valuing love entails learning how to distinguish between real and fake gold. 39 Edward Young to Samuel Richardson, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 6 vols., ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld (New York: AMS Press, 1966 [1804]), Vol. III, p. 57. 40 Haywood, Anti-Pamela, p. 106. 41 Memoirs of the Life of Lady H——— (London: 1741), pp. 2, 2, 49. 42 Ibid., pp. 49–50. 43 My discussion concentrates on two of these tales, Innocence Betrayed, and Infamy Avowed: Being the History of Miss Maria Thornhill. Containing a Genuine Account of Her Seduction, and the Barbarous Treatment She Afterwards Met with From Mr. Sprightly (Manchester, n.d.) and Injured Innocence: Or, Virtue in Distress. An Affecting Narrative; Founded on Facts. Containing the Memoirs of Miss Adams and Lord Whatley (Wolverhampton, 1769). Hereafter cited in the text. For other tales that fall under this category see: Sarah Wilkinson, Albert of Werdendorff; Or, The Midnight Embrace. A Romance (Stirling, 1800?); Constant Lovers; Being the Histories of Miss Charlotte Byersley, and Miss Fanny Calden (London, 1765?); The Maid of the Mill; Or, The Cottage Beauty: Being the Real and Entertaining History of ’Squire Richland, and Lucy Arnold (London, 1770?); The Unfortunate, and at Last Happy Lady, Or, The Reward, Of Virtue and Innocence. Being the History of Clarissa Moore, the Daughter of a Baronet (London, 1780?). 44 Anna Clark, “The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748–1848,” in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 47–48. 45 The proximity in narrative style between Innocence Betrayed and Pamela likely arises from this chapbook’s origins as an extended work of prose fiction: the

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religious writer, James Penn, published the 223-page novel The Farmer’s Daughter of Essex four years before this abridged version appears (London, 1767). 46 “Were you, ye Fair, but cautious whom ye trust, / Did you but think how seldom Fools are just, / So many of your Sex wou’d not in vain, / Of broken Vows and faithless Men complain. / Of all the various Wretches Love has made, / How few have been by Men of Sense betray’d?” See note 48 in Chapter 2 for a discussion of this quotation from Rowe. 47 Constant Lovers; Being the Histories of Miss Charlotte Byersley, and Miss Fanny Calden (London, 1765?). 48 Susan Pedersen, “Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” The Journal of British Studies 25.1 (1986), 87. 49 John Corry, The Gardener’s Daughter of Worcester; Or the Miseries of Seduction. A Moral Tale (London, 1800?), p. 5. Hereafter cited in the text. 50 John Corry, The Unfortunate Daughter: Or, the Dangers of Female Education (London, 1803?), my emphasis, p. 35. Hereafter cited in the text. 51 Hannah More, “The Good Mother’s Legacy,” Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts (London, 1798), p. 135. Hereafter cited in the text. 52 A Short but Tragical History of an Unfortunate Young Girl Who was Seduced by a Gentleman of Fortune (London, ca. 1791), p. 7. 53 Evans, “‘Blooming Virgins All Beware’,” p. 27. 54 “The Yarmouth Tragedy; Or, the Perjured Sailor,” Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. II (22). 55 Evans, “‘Blooming Virgins All Beware’,” p. 28. 56 Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 134–135. Lawrence Stone argues that although illegitimacy rates are hard to pinpoint, we have “incontrovertible proof ” that prenuptial conception rates increased two-fold in rural villages, from 20% to 40% from the beginning to the end of the eighteenth century, “Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England: Again,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11.3 (1981), 508. Jona Schellekens begins his “Courtship, the Clandestine Marriage Act, and Illegitimate Fertility in England” with the claim “Illegitimate fertility in England more than doubled between 1750 and 1800,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25.3 (1995), 433. 57 Louise A. Tilly, Joan Scott and Miriam Cohen, “Women’s Work and European Fertility Patterns,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6.3 (1976), 464, 465, 467. Tilly et. al. were responding to Edward Shorter’s infamous 1975 thesis that the rise denotes a sexual revolution in which women started saying ‘yes’ to sex in greater numbers because of a more individualistic pursuit of sexual fulfillment, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975). For a sampling of the historical discussion on illegitimacy see Laslett; Schellekens; Stone, “Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England”; Gillis, “Servants, Sexual Relations, and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900”; Rogers; Fairchilds; and Reay, all previously cited. In addition, see Belinda Meteyard,

Notes to pages 132–134

58

59 60

61 62

63

64 65

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“Illegitimacy and Marriage in Eighteenth Century England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10.3 (1980), 479–489; Adrian Wilson, “Illegitimacy and its Implications in Mid-Eighteenth Century London,” Continuity and Change 4.1 (1989), 103–164; and Grace Wyatt, “Bastardy and Prenuptial Pregnancy in a Cheshire Town During the Eighteenth Century,” Local Population Studies 49 (1992), 38–50. Other examples of the ghost narrative, in addition to the two mentioned, include: “Miss Bailey’s Ghost,” Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. II (67); “The Plymouth Tragedy,” London, British Library, 11621.e.4 (4); “The Portsmouth Ghost, Or, A Full and True Account of a Strange, Wonderful and Dreadful Appearing of the Ghost of Madam Johnson, a Beautiful Young Lady of Portsmouth,” London, British Library, 11621.e.4 (14). David Mallet, The Works of David Mallet Esq., 3 vols. (London, 1759), Vol. I, p. 7. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our Earlier Poets, 3 vols. (London, 1765), “Fair Margaret and Sweet William,” Vol. III, pp. 121–125; “Margaret’s Ghost,” Vol. III, pp. 310–313. See Dianne Dugaw’s article, “The Popular Marketing of ‘Old Ballads’: The Ballad Revival and Eighteenth Century Antiquarianism Reconsidered,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 21.1 (1987), 71–90, for a fascinating discussion of the popular roots of Percy’s ‘high culture’ collection. For an extensive bibliographic history of this ballad see the entry for “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” in The Traditional Ballad Index, edited by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle, www.csufresno.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html, accessed July 19, 2006. The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads Project also contains bibliographic information (www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/ballads.htm). Mallet, The Works of David Mallet, Vol. I, p. 5. Copies of “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” can be found under the title of “Fair Margaret’s Misfortune” in the Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. II (42), and the Gould Collection of Ballads, Vol. II, pp. 38–39. “William and Margaret” can be found in London, British Library, 11621.b.11 (3) and 11631.aaa.56(10). In addition to the one discussed below and “The Yarmouth Tragedy,” other murder ballads include: “The Wandering Shepherdess; or the Unfortunate Lady in Two Parts” and “The Cruel Lover,” London, British Library, 11621.c.5; “The Oxfordshire Tragedy; Or, The Virgin’s Advice” and “The Staffordshire Tragedy,” Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. II (89), Vol. III (22); “Robert and Richard; Or, The Ghost of Poor Molly, who was drowned in Richard’s Mill Pond” and “The Kentish Tragedy: Or, a Warningpiece to all Perjured Young Men,” in Gould Collection of Ballads, Vol. I, pp. 1–4, Vol. I, pp. 219–222; “The Gosford Tragedy: or, the Perjured Carpenter,” August 1775, London, British Library, 1346.m.7 (30). “The Berkshire Tragedy, or, The Wittam Miller” (Edinburgh: 1744), London, British Library, 1078.k.26 (13). “The Kentish Tragedy: Or, a Warning-piece to all Perjured Young Men.”

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66 “The Politick Maid of Suffolk; Or, the Lawyer Outwitted,” Gould Collection of Ballads, Vol. II, pp. 64–65. 67 “The Old Woman Cloathed in Gray,” in The Laboring Lover’s Garland, pp. 4–6, Collected in The Right Merry Book of Garlands. 68 “The Wonderful Magic Pill; for Davie and Bess,” Elizabeth Davison Collection of Ballads, Vol. I (38). 69 “The Forsaken Maid’s Resolution,” London, British Library, 11621.c.5. 70 “The Injured Fair,” London, British Library, 11621.c.5. 71 The Strand Garland (Tewkesbury, n.d.), London, British Library 11621.e.3 (7), p. 8. 72 Tanya Evans, “‘Unfortunate Objects’: London’s Unmarried Mothers in the Eighteenth Century,” Gender and History 17.1 (April 2005), 129. 73 Evans, “‘Unfortunate Objects’,” 128. 5 MELODRAMATIC SEDUCTION: 1790s FICTION AND THE EXCESS OF THE REAL 1 For a discussion of the narrowing gender and sexual boundaries in the 1790s see Dror Wahrman, “Percy’s Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 159 (May 1998), 113–160; Darryl Jones, “Frekes, Monsters and the Ladies: Attitudes to Female Sexuality in the 1790s,” Literature and History 4.2 (Autumn 1995), 1–24; and Katherine Binhammer, “The Sex Panic of the 1790s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6.3 (January 1996), 409–434. 2 “Precisely because seduction tales dealt with intimate matters and seemed far removed from politics, they could be used as ‘cover stories’ for otherwise dangerous or incendiary ideas,” Toni Bowers, “Representing Resistance: British Seduction Stories, 1660–1800,” in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture, ed. Paula Backsheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 140. 3 Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 4. For a discussion of the politic deployment of seduction in the 1790s, see Katherine Binhammer, “The Political Novel and the Seduction Plot: Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11.2 (January 1999), 205–222; and Claire Grogan, “The Politics of Seduction in British Fiction of the 1790s: The Female Reader and Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11.4 (July 1999), 459–476. 4 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 30. 5 Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, Explaining the Various Crimes and Misdemeanors which at Present are Felt as a Pressure upon the Community; and Suggesting Remedies for their Prevention (London, 1800), p. 632. Also note Charles Horne’s Serious Thoughts on the Miseries of Seduction and Prostitution (London, 1783).

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6 What follows is a list of moral tracts I have included under the rubric of the discourse of seduction: Advice to Unmarried Women; to Recover and Reclaim the Fallen; and to Prevent the Fall of Others, into the Causes of their Alarming Increase, and Some Means Recommended for Checking their Progress (London, 1792); John Bowles, Reflections on the Political and Moral State of Society, at the Close of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1800); Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, Explaining the Various Crimes and Misdemeanors which at Present are Felt as a Pressure upon the Community; and Suggesting Remedies for their Prevention; The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution with an Inquiry into the Causes of their Present Alarming Increase, and Some Means Recommended for Checking their Progress (London, 1792); Charles Horne, Serious Thoughts on the Miseries of Seduction and Prostitution (London, 1783); T. F. Junior, Remarks upon Seduction (London, 1799); Edward Relfe, An Essay on the Seduction of Women (Lewes [1780?]); Adam Sibbit, Thoughts on the Frequency of Divorces in Modern Times, and on the Necessity of Legislative Exertion, to Prevent their Increasing Prevalence (London, 1800); Thoughts on Marriage, and Criminal Conversation, with Some Hints of Appropriate Means to Check the Progress of the Latter (London, 1799); Thoughts on the Means of Alleviating the Miseries Attended Upon Common Prostitution (London, 1799). The feminist polemics discussed include: Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (London, 1798); Mary Ann Radcliffe’s The Female Advocate; Or, an Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (London, 1799); Mary Robinson’s Thoughts on the Condition of Women, And on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (London, 1799); Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols., ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989 [1792]), Vol. V, pp. 63–267. 7 Evils of Adultery and Prostitution, pp. 23–24. 8 Mary Wollstonecraft, Review of The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution, Analytical Review, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. VII, pp. 457–460. 9 In the preface to Remarks Upon Seduction, Junior relates how his pamphlet had first been called “The Female Advocate; or, Remarks upon Seduction, &c.” until he discovered the recent publication of another text by the same name (Mary Ann Radcliffe, The Female Advocate; or an Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation). He endorses the other ‘Female Advocate’ and explicitly aligns his project with hers: “My friends, admire the sentiments of the modest Authoress; and nothing save the pleasure it must afford my joint Advocate to peruse a similarity of ideas, has induced me to send my manuscript to the press, after the appearance of a work, on this identical subject, from abilities so far superior to, T. F. Jun,” Remarks Upon Seduction, n.p. 10 Junior writes, “[i]magine to yourselves, for a moment, the unhappy situation of a young woman that has acknowledged the weakness of her sex, by suffering herself to be undone! Her seducer has cowardly abandoned her: her parents, relations, and friends, have turned their backs against her: she cannot, though never so willing to work, get employment, or a place, for the want of a

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recommendation: where is she to get it? who can give her one?” Remarks Upon Seduction, p. 12. 11 Town and Country 22 (August 1790), 374. 12 Junior, Remarks Upon Seduction, p. 10. 13 Wollstonecraft writes: “till women are led to exercise their understandings, they should not be satirized for their attachment to rakes; or even for being rakes at heart, when it appears to be the inevitable consequence of their education. They who live to please – must find their enjoyments, their happiness, in pleasure!” Wollstonecraft, Vindication, Vol. V, p. 188. 14 Evils of Adultery and Prostitution, p. 56. 15 Radcliffe, The Female Advocate, p. 154. 16 For example, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz paints a portrait of keptmistresses in England who originated as seduced victims but who, in fact, hold all the power: “Many of them [kept-mistresses] have annuities paid them by their seducers, and others settlements into which they have surprised their lovers in the moment of intoxication. The testimony of these women, even of the lowest of them is always received as evidence in the courts of justice. All this generally gives them a certain dignity of conduct, which can scarcely be reconciled with their profession,” A Picture of England: Containing a Description of the Laws, Customs and Manners of England, 2 vols. (London: 1789), Vol. II, p. 90. 17 Vivien Jones, “Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the EighteenthCentury Prostitution Narrative,” Women’s Writing 4.2 (1997), 202. For a discussion of Richardson’s representation of prostitution see Alison Conway, “The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680–1750,” book manuscript. 18 Relfe, An Essay on the Seduction of Women, p. 12. 19 “The shameless behaviour of prostitutes, who infest the streets of this metropolis, raising alternate emotions of pity and disgust, may serve to illustrate this remark. They trample on virgin bashfulness with a sort of bravado, and glorying in their shame, become more audaciously lewd than men, however depraved, to whom this sexual quality has not been gratuitously granted, ever appear to be,” Vindication, p. 192. For a discussion of Wollstonecraft’s difficulty with prostitution see Susan Gubar, “Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of ‘It Takes One to Know One,’” Feminist Studies 20.3 (Fall 1994), 453–473; Jones, “Placing Jemima”; and Julie McGonegal, “Of Harlots and Housewives: A Feminist Materialist Critique of the Writings of Wollstonecraft,” Women’s Writing 11.3 (2004), 347–362. 20 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 139–140. 21 Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain, my emphasis, p. 235. 22 Corry, The Gardener’s Daughter of Worcester, p. 22. 23 Evils of Adultery and Prostitution, p. 72. 24 Sibbit, Thoughts on the Frequency of Divorces, pp. 10–11. 25 The Anti-Jacobin Review, August 1798, p. 163. 26 Blaming the victim had been around a long time before the 1790s but, as Anna Clark sets out, a new version of this discourse comes into being in the late

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eighteenth century, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845 (London: Pandora Press, 1987). 27 Haywood repeatedly uses such phrases, one such instance occurs in The Masqueraders, Or, The Fatal Curiosity: “she more faintly denying, he more vigorously pressing, half-yielding, half-reluctant, she was wholly lost,” in Secret Histories, Novels and Poems, 4 vols. (London, 1725), Vol. IV, p. 41. My thanks to Kathryn King for this reference. Maria’s and Darnford’s first kiss is significantly focalized through Darnford, not the heroine (a further hint that something is not quite right with this kiss): “He felt the fragrance of her breath, and longed, yet feared … [he takes] a half-consenting, half-reluctant kiss,” Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 100. Hereafter cited in the text. 28 My reading of Victim of Prejudice assumes that it is only the first-person narration that causes Mary’s death to remain un-narrated at the end but that it does occur. In this way, I differ from Toni Bowers who concludes that she lives and provides a comparative reading of this ending against Clarissa’s: “Paradoxically enough, there is more hope at the end of Clarissa even though the heroine dies than at the end of The Victim of Prejudice though Mary lives,” “Representing Resistance,” p. 156. 29 For readings of 1790s feminist fiction as Jacobin and political, see Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel: 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) and Tilottama Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 27.2 (Summer 1988), 221–251. 30 For example, Gary Kelly points out in a footnote that “Jemima’s account of the hours, wages, and working conditions of washerwomen is meticulously accurate,” Wrongs of Woman, p. 222 (115 n. 4). 31 Eleanor Ty, “Introduction” to Victim of Prejudice, by Mary Hays (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1994), p. xiv. 32 Mona Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money and Society from Defoe to Austen (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993), p. 174. Shawn L. Maurer writes that the seduction and abandonment plot is “the stuff not of satire but of drama, even of melodrama,” “Masculinity and Morality in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art,” in Women, Revolution and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), p. 165. Roger Manvell calls the tragedy of Hannah “a certain naturalistic melodrama,” Elizabeth Inchbald: England’s Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in 18th Century London (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), p. 109. 33 Tilottama Rajan, “Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” 232. Eleanor Ty makes a similar claim about the ending of Father and Daughter : “[t]he ending of the tale is sudden, melodramatic and tragic,” Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 144. 34 For the classic articulation of this argument see Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, especially Chapters 2 and 3.

214

Notes to pages 147–155

35 To use the term “melodrama” in reference to 1790s fiction is both anachronistic and timely. Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery, staged one year after the last of these four novels in 1802, is credited as being the first British melodrama, a play adding music to a sensational plot. But Holcroft was largely adapting the plays of Guilbert de Pixérécourt whose melodramas were first staged alongside the Revolution in France. For a discussion of Holcroft and the birth of melodrama in England, see Simon Shepherd’s “Melodrama as Avant-Garde: Enacting a New Subjectivity,” Textual Practice 10.3 (Winter 1996), 507–522. Mary Gluck argues that melodrama’s origins are centrally linked to revolutionary politics: “Ultimately, the melodrama was an object lesson in revolutionary justice, transposing onto the plane of private life the abstract moral and ideological values of revolutionary politics,” “Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist,” Modernism/Modernity 7.3 (2000), 360. 36 Peter Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1994), p. 19. 37 Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 76. 38 Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” p. 19. 39 For a defense of melodrama against charges that it is not a serious aesthetic endeavor see Ira Hauptman, “Defending Melodrama,” in Melodrama: Themes in Drama 14, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 281–290. 40 Mary Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 412. 41 Martha Vicinus, “‘Helpless and Unfriended’: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama,” New Literary History 13.1 (1981), 130. 42 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 27, my emphasis. 43 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 31. The courtroom drama in Wrongs of Woman is only one example of the novel’s theatricality that Lisa Plummer Crafton has recently pointed to; her analysis of the theatricality of the novel complements my reading of the text as melodrama, “‘Stage Effect’: Transgressive Theatricality in Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman,” Women’s Writing 14.3 (December 2007), 367–381. 44 The most famous example of this trick occurs in Les Liaisons Dangereuses when Valmont plots Tourvel’s seduction with the help of feigned benevolence, Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, trans. Douglas Parmée (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1995), pp. 42–44. 45 Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice, ed. Eleanor Ty (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1994), p. 141. Hereafter cited in the text. 46 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 56. 47 Ty, “Introduction,” p. xxiv.

Notes to pages 155–159

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48 “The victim of a barbarous prejudice, society has cast me out from its bosom. The sensibilities of my heart have been turned to bitterness, the powers of my mind wasted, my projects rendered abortive, my virtues and my sufferings alike unrewarded, I have lived in vain! unless the story of my sorrows should kindle in the heart of man, in behalf of my oppressed sex, the sacred claims of humanity and justice,” p. 174. 49 Claudia Johnson, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 203. Johnson cites Mary Poovey’s reading of the novel in Proper Lady as her critical example of Wollstonecraft’s participation in the delusion of romance. Elaine Jordan concurs with Johnson, arguing that Maria was not “in the grip of some delusion which the text parodies and invites the readers to mock and avoid,” “Criminal Conversation: Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman,” Women’s Writing 4.2 (1997), 231. Like Johnson, Roxanne Eberle points to the debate and asks a similar question about Maria’s love for Darnford: “is she ‘seduced’ even after she throws off the ‘false consciousness’ of the married woman, hence undercutting the very lessons supposedly learned during her marriage to Venables? Or, does her acceptance of Darnford as a lover signify a necessary sexual experiment in which Maria lays claim to her own body and its desires, even though Darnford eventually betrays her?” Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1792–1897: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 51–52. 50 Johnson, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels,” p. 203. 51 For an extensive and important discussion of Wollstonecraft’s embedded narrative of reading see Rajan, “Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel.” 52 Johnson, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels,” p. 203. 53 Ibid., p. 203. Daniel O’Quinn has observed about the ordering that “the story of Maria’s previous seduction by Venables, effectively repeats the trajectory of Maria itself. The text therefore repeats a seduction narrative, but reverses the chronological order of the events: the most recent seduction precedes the narration of the chronologically anterior seduction. This order of disclosure is significant because it means that the embedded narrative acts as an archaeological critique of the surrounding narrative of events in the asylum,” “Trembling: Wollstonecraft, Godwin and the Resistance to Literature,” ELH 64.3 (1997), 769. 54 The prospective and fragmentary endings appended by Godwin conclude with the plot of seduction, not as virtuous love vindicated, but as romantic love betrayed. They repeatedly hint that Maria was, indeed, deceived by Darnford; one includes the bleak trajectory: “Divorced by her husband – Her lover unfaithful – Pregnancy – Miscarriage – Suicide,” p. 202. 55 The two previous references are as follows: after catching a glimpse of Darnford’s back, “[a] confused recollection of having seen somebody who resembled him, immediately occurred, to puzzle and torment her with endless conjectures” (89). Later, Maria trembles in expectation of Darnford’s visit

216

Notes to pages 159–162

“inspired by the vague hope that he might again prove her deliverer, to see a man who had before rescued her from oppression” (93). 56 In her perceptive reading of the novel, Marilyn L. Brooks makes a similar point about the novel’s villain, though we differ on who or what the real villain is: “although Hays does utilize the conventional apparatus of position, wealth and power, the oppressor, as the relentless rhythm suggests, is too big and controlling to be Sir Peter, or even the class he represents. The oppressor is the concept of chastity, which, although intended to uphold that class, had been reified into woman herself, ” “Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice: Chastity Renegotiated,” Women’s Writing 15.1 (March 2008), 26. 57 An example of the interchangeability of the two men’s stories occurs when Mary returns to Mr. Raymond’s and he reads her pale complexion as a sign of her relationship to William when it is actually a sign of Sir Peter’s bankrupting of the Nevilles, p. 92. 58 Eberle, Chastity and Transgression, p. 83. 59 Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter, A Tale, in Prose, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003), pp. 112, 126. Hereafter cited in the text. 60 Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art, ed. Shawn Lisa Maurer (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2005), p. 141. Hereafter cited in the text. 61 Katherine Rogers, “Elizabeth Inchbald: Not Such a Simple Story,” in Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1992), p. 88. Note Rogers’s use of Agnes to refer to Hannah. In the 1810 edition of Nature and Art included in Anna Barbauld’s British Novelist series, Inchbald changed Hannah’s name to Agnes and one wonders if Opie’s reverent citation to her in Father and Daughter (discussed below) had anything to do with the change; I follow Maurer and others in using Hannah as standard practice, see her “Note on a Text” in Nature and Art, p. 37. For a biblical explanation of the name change see Patricia M. Taylor, “Authorial Amendments in Mrs. Inchbald’s Nature and Art,” Notes and Queries 25 (1978), 68–70. 62 Inchbald’s response to Wollstonecraft’s own fall from chastity positions her as more sexually conservative; she refused to associate with Wollstonecraft following the revelation that Wollstonecraft was not married to Imlay, shunning her publicly at the theatre. For a discussion of this infamous episode in feminist history see Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), pp. 420–421. Opie’s later didactic novel Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter (1805) critiques its Wollstonecraftian character for her sexual politics and, because of this, most critics place Opie within a moderate or even conservative tradition. See Eleanor Ty, Empowering the Feminine, and Shelley King’s and John Pierce’s “Introduction.” Roxanne Eberle’s reading of Father and Daughter, like mine, recuperates the novel for a feminist history; she argues that while Agnes’s death does suggest a certain capitulation to the harlot’s progress, there is another story: “it is important to see the way in which she [Opie] consistently works against the

Notes to pages 162–173

63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

72 73

74 75 76

217

expected narrative of the seduced and abandoned woman: Agnes lives for six years after her seduction and dies only after she has been thoroughly reintegrated into her community,” Chastity and Transgression, p. 105. Thomas Robinson to Henry Crabb Robinson, July 31, 1801, Appendix C, Father and Daughter, p. 269. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 36–37. According to Gary Kelly, this was one of Inchbald’s working titles for the novel, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 93–94. Many critics have commented on the disjunction between the satiric plot of the first volume of Nature and Art and the sentimental plot of the second. William McKee writes that “When she [Inchbald] is half way through the novel the fate of the heroine so absorbs her interest that she largely forgets her sociological intent,” Elizabeth Inchbald: Novelist (Washington, D.C., Catholic University of America, 1935), p. 67. Shawn L. Maurer writes: “Most readers of Nature and Art have been troubled by the apparent split between the largely satirical first volume, with its account of the two brothers, their divergent careers and marriages, and the upbringing of their respective sons, culminating in those sons’ very different sexual relationships, and the tragic, sentimental, indeed even at times melodramatic second volume, which centers primarily upon the declining fortunes of Hannah Primrose,” “Introduction” to Nature and Art, Elizabeth Inchbald (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2005), p. 21. Eberle, Chastity and Transgression, p. 95. See for example Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). I quote Maurer’s discussion of this issue in “Masculinity and Morality” below. Maurer, “Masculinity and Morality,” p. 167. Ibid., pp. 165–166. Marilyn Butler compares the two heroines and negatively judges Hannah: “the simple, innocent Hannah Primrose, who allows herself to be seduced, is compared kindly but unfavorably with the prudent Rebecca Rymer,” Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 43. Joanne Tong, “The Return of the Prodigal Daughter: Finding the Family in Amelia Opie’s Novels,” Studies in the Novel 36.4 (Winter 2004), 465–483. Critics have noted the allusion to King Lear in this scene; for example, Ty, Empowering the Feminine, p. 138. Shelley King and John Pierce point out that this allusion was made explicit in an 1820 dramatic adaptation of the novel by William Moncrieff entitled The Lear of Private Life, “Introduction,” in Father and Daughter, p. 32. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 9. Anti-Jacobin Review, Vol. I (July 1798), p. 97. Susie L. Steinbach, “The Melodramatic Contract: Breach of Promise and the Performance of Virtue,” Nineteenth Century Studies 14 (2000), 2. For another

218

77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86

Notes to pages 173–175

discussion of melodrama and early nineteenth-century seduction narratives, see Anna Clark, “The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748–1848,” in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 47–72. Steinbach, “The Melodramatic Contract,” 10. Ibid., 6. Francis Plowden, Crim. Con. Biography: or Celebrated Trials in the Ecclesiastical and Civil Courts for Adultery and Other Crimes (London: 1830), pp. 136–139. Ginger Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 9. Andrea L. Hibbard and John T. Parry, “Law, Seduction, and the Sentimental Heroine: The Case of Amelia Norman,” American Literature 78.2 ( June 2006), 336. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 83. Lord Kenyon argued that “pecuniary arrangements” have nothing to do with marriage and that “the ground of the promise was the mutual engagement of the parties,” Ginger Frost, “Promises Broken: Breach of Promise of Marriage in England and Wales, 1753–1970,” Dissertation submitted to Rice University, 1991, p. 17. Susie L. Steinbach, “Promises, Promises: Not Marrying in England, 1780–1920,” Dissertation submitted to Yale University, 1996, p. 115. Frost, Promises Broken, p. 15. Plowden, Crim. Con. Biography, pp. 297, 305.

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Index

Abelove, Henry 178 n. 9 abridgment of Clarissa 24–25 of Histories of Some of the Penitents 60 of Pamela 120–121 Ackerman, Diane 181 n. 30 adultery 74, 79–80, 93, 102–104, 151 Adventures of Miss Lucy Watson 6 agency affective 4, 44–45, 59, 75–76, 94–95, 107, 113, 116, 138, 149, 151, 156–157, 174–175 female 2, 44–45, 85, 95, 116, 134–135, 138, 144–145, 149 sexual 8, 22–23, 25, 44–45, 47, 57, 60, 113, 116, 138 amatory fiction 7, 27 Andrew, Donna 192 n. 21, 195 n. 51 Anti-Jacobin Review 144–145, 172 Archenholz, Johann Wilhelm von 212 n. 16 Armstrong, Nancy 2, 206 n. 34 Backsheider, Paula 20, 24 Bakhtin, Mikhail 117 Bal, Mieke 73 ballads 108, 111, 112–117, 130–137 Bannet, Eve Tavor 50, 93, 179 n. 12 Barker-Benfield, G. J. 178 n. 9 Barry, Rev. Edward, “Seduction” 19 Barthes, Roland 13–14, 77, 81, 97 Bartolomeo, Joseph F. 198 n. 16 Bataille, Robert 191 n. 17 Batchelor, Jennie 70–71, 189 n. 6, 191 n. 16, 192 n. 22 Baudrillard, Jean 9 Behn, Aphra 44 Bell, Ann 18 Bennett, Maria, Agnes De-Courci 74 “Berkshire Tragedy” 134 Bertelsen, Lance 203 n. 4 Bickerstaff, Isaac 204 n. 10 Black, Joan 203 n. 4

Blandy, Elizabeth 18 Blondel, Madeleine 193 n. 25 Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads Project 209 n. 60 Bonhote, Elizabeth, Olivia 74 Bontatibus, Donna 176 n. 4 Bowen, Scarlet 118–119 Bowers, Toni 8, 22, 139, 213 n. 28 Bradshaigh, Lady 21, 26, 37, 38, 40 Braudy, Leo 185 n. 11 breach of promise 88, 130–137, 172–175 and nineteenth-century law 172–175 Briscoe, Sophia, The Fine Lady 181 n. 32 Brooks, Douglas 198 n. 16 Brooks, Marilyn L. 216 n. 56 Brooks, Peter 14, 38–39, 80–81, 82, 147, 148, 150, 155, 171 Brown, Maria 41, 49, 63–64, 66 Brown, Mary Ellen 203 n. 4 Bullough, Vern L. 189 n. 6 Burney, Frances 43, 46, 54, 74 “Butcher’s Daughter’s Policy” 115 Butler, Marilyn 217 n. 71 Campbell, Jill 76 capitalism, emergence of 42–43, 109–110, 117, 132 see also class carnivalesque see class inversion Case, Alison 180 n. 19 Castle, Terry 76, 78, 184 n. 4, 198 n. 14, 199 n. 26 Chamber, Ross 15, 80, 86 chapbooks 108, 111, 118–130, 139 Chapone, Hester 190 n. 11 chastity see virginity Chatman, Seymour 186 n. 21 Clark, Anna 2, 112–113, 116, 122, 218 n. 76 Clark, Sandra 204 n. 9 Clarke, Norma 179 n. 11

240

Index class difference and seduction 5, 11, 16, 52, 109, 111–130, 168–170 inversion 116–117 prejudice 115, 121–126, 152–155, 163–165 war 115–117, 121–126, 159–161 see also laboring-class women; love, economics of Cleary, Jean Coates 74 Clery, Emma 118 Cohen, Miriam 132 Colquhoun, Patrick 140 Compston, H. F. B. 69 conduct literature 12, 23, 52–53, 89, 91, 100, 114 Constant Lovers 126 Conway, Alison 76, 212 n. 17 Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn 184 n. 4 Coontz, Stephanie 176 n. 3 Corry, John 127–128, 142, 143–144 Gardener’s Daughter of Worcester; Or the Miseries of Seduction 17, 126, 127–128, 140, 194 n. 48 Unfortunate Daughter 127–128 country in city motif 5, 50–51, 54, 55, 117, 128–129, 130 courtesan narratives 61, 62–69 courtship 6, 9, 31–32, 43–44, 46, 49, 73–74, 99, 110, 130–132 Cowley, Abraham 32 Crafton, Lisa Plummer 214 n. 43 Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa and Pamela 112 Culler, Jonathan 16, 26–27 Damrosch, Leo 185 n. 10 Davidoff, Leonore 178 n. 9, 179 n. 12 Defoe, Daniel 44 Delany, Mary 26 Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of Emma 74, 89 The Sylph, 181 n. 32 Dicey, William and Cluer 202–203 Dingley, Robert 41, 45 discourse, definition of 18 Distressed Lady 111 divorce 151–152 Dodd, William 40, 45 “An Authentic Narrative of a Magdalen” 60–61, 67–68 “History of a Magdalen” 47, 68 Magdalen, Or History of the First Penitent Prostitute 60–61, 63 Sisters, The 48, 67 Visitor, The 49, 50–51

241

domestic woman thesis see ideology, gender; ideology, domestic or bourgeois Doody, Margaret Anne 84, 180 n. 22 Dugaw, Dianne 113, 203 n. 4, 209 n. 60 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 73 Dyson, George 149, 152, 159 Eagleton, Terry 184 n. 4 Eberle, Roxanne 160–161, 167, 215 n. 49, 216–217 Echlin, Lady Elizabeth 37 education, female 52, 54, 127–128, 141, 143, 151 Edwards, Elizabeth 70 Edwards, Thomas 20 Eger, Elizabeth 201 n. 50 Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line 10 Ellis, Markman 52 Emma, Or the Dying Penitent 51 employment, women’s 45, 46, 58–59, 68, 141, 155, 166 endings see narrative, closure epistemology see seduction, narratives as an epistemology or hermeneutics of love Eshleman, Dorothy Hughes 201 n. 46 Essay on the Seduction of Women 142–143 European Magazine 99 Evans, Mary 181 n. 30 Evans, Tanya 113, 130, 131, 136 Evils of Adultery and Prostitution 140–141, 142, 144, 183 n. 62 “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” 132–134 Fairchild, Cissie 202 n. 3 “Faithless Captain” 205 n. 12 Faller, Lincoln 18 “Fanny: Or, the Fair Foundling of Saint George’s Field” see McNalley, Mr. female authorship 6, 72, 83 femininity, bourgeois 2–3, 20–22, 26, 33, 39, 40, 42–43, 118–119, 121, 139–140, 173 compared to laboring-class femininity 112–114, 174 passive sexuality and 3, 139–140 see also ideology, gender feminism, 1790s 52, 125, 136, 138–175 feminist historiography 3–5 feminist narratology see narrative, feminist theory of Ferguson, Frances 186 n. 15 Fielding, Henry Amelia, 11, 16, 72, 73, 75–76, 88, 95, 96, 97, 107, 108–109 Tom Jones 79 Fielding, John 41, 189 n. 7 Fielding, Sarah 74, 197 n. 2

242

Index

Fitzer, Anna 86 Fletcher, Anthony 178 n. 9 Flint, Christopher 118 Flynn, Carol 22 Foote, Maria 173 Fordyce, James 190 n. 14 “Forsaken Maid’s Resolution” 135 Foucault, Michel 9, 18, 44 Freedman, Jean R. 111 Fromm, Katherine Barber 203 n. 4 Frost, Ginger 173, 174 Ganev, Robin 203 n. 4 gender see femininity, bourgeois; ideology, gender gender revolution 3, 4 Genette, Gérard 196 n. 58 Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘Sunderlandensis’ 195 n. 52 Gibbs, Phebe, Modern Seduction 191 n. 16 Gillis, John 202 n. 3, 204 n. 9 Gladfelder, Hal 80 Gluck, Mary 214 n. 35 Godwin, William 149, 158–159, 162 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 144 Gregory, Dr. John 114 Griffith, Elizabeth 11, 74, 83, 190 n. 14 Delicate Distress 74, 96, 106 Essays Addressed to Young Married Women 100 History of Lady Barton 5, 16, 72, 73, 75–76, 80, 88, 95–107, 108–109 Platonic Wife 99 Series of Genuine Letters 11, 99–100, 201 n. 49, 201–202 Story of Lady Juliana Harley 99, 105 Griffith, Richard 11, 99–100 Grogan, Claire 210 n. 3 Grossman, Joyce 191 n. 16, 194 n. 41 Grundy, Isobel 187 n. 27 Gubar, Susan 212 n. 19 Guthrie, Neil 193 n. 33 Gwilliam, Tassie 21, 185 n. 4 Haggerty, George 198–199 Hall, Catherine 178 n. 9 Haller, Albrecht von 22 Hanway, Jonas 41, 45, 189 n. 7 Hardwick, Elizabeth 8, 11 Hardwicke Marriage Act 49–52, 55, 175 Harol, Corrinne 207 n. 36 Harris, Marla 201 n. 48 Harvey, A. D. 1 Harvey, Karen 178 n. 9

Hauptman, Ira 214 n. 39 Hays, Mary 8, 59 Appeal to the Men of Great Britain 143 Victim of Prejudice 17, 138, 145–150, 152–156, 159–162, 166, 168, 172 Haywood, Eliza 3, 48, 74, 75, 119, 145 heart see knowledge of the heart Henderson, Tony 44, 70, 189 n. 6 hermeneutics see seduction, narratives as an epistemology or hermeneutics of love Hiatt, Megan 191 n. 16, 192 n. 22 Hibbard, Andrea 173 Hill, Bridget 178 n. 9 Histories of Some of the Penitents in the MagdalenHouse 16, 43, 45, 48, 51–61, 65, 68–69, 75, 76 History of Indiana Danby 10 History of Miss Sally Johnson, Or, the Unfortunate Magdalen 17, 46, 71 Hitchcock, Tim 41, 70, 178 n. 9, 189 n. 6 Holcroft, Thomas 214 n. 35 Holloway, John 203 n. 4 Horne, Charles 7 Serious Thoughts on the Miseries of Seduction and Prostitution 6–7, 50 Hutcheson, Francis 9 ideology domestic or bourgeois 1–2, 3–5, 43, 70, 113, 136, 162 gender 2, 16, 45, 121 of sentimental marriage 110–111, 169 see also femininity, bourgeois ignorance 13, 29–30, 31, 33, 51, 54–55, 60, 94, 101, 114, 127, 143–144, 145, 169–170 illegitimacy rates, increase in 17–18, 110, 130–137, 164–165 Inchbald, Elizabeth Nature and Art 17, 138, 145–150, 162–165, 166, 167–170, 172 infanticide 163, 164–165 Ingram, Martin 204 n. 9 “Injured Fair” 135 Injured Innocence 121–123, 126 Innocence Betrayed, and Infamy Avowed 2, 121, 123–126, 153, 195 n. 48 Irigaray, Luce 148 Irving versus Greenwood 173 Johnson, Claudia 157, 158 Johnson, Samuel 20, 41, 85, 144, 189 n. 7 ‘Misella’, 12 Jones, Darryl 210 n. 1 Jones, Vivien 44, 63, 142, 181 n. 33, 189 n. 6, 212 n. 19 Jones, Wendy 179 n. 12

Index Jordan, Elaine 215 n. 49 “Jovial Tinker and the Farmer’s Daughter” 113–114 Junior, T. F., Remarks Upon Seduction 141, 142 Kahn, Madeleine 185 n. 4 Kelly, Gary 213 n. 29 Kelly, Hugh Memoirs of a Magdalen 47 False Delicacy 190 n. 14 Kelly, John, Pamela’s Conduct in High Life 118 Kenan, Shlomith-Rimmon 199 n. 25 Kenyon, Lord 174 Keymer, Tom 21, 119, 206 n. 34 Kilfeather, Siobhán 185 n. 4 King, Shelley 217 n. 73 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark 185 n. 6 Kipnis, Laura 9 Knight, Charles A. 198 n. 14 Knight, Elspeth 185 n. 8 Knight of the Burning Pestle 132, 133 knowledge of the heart 1, 3, 7–13, 20–23, 34–35, 54, 75–76, 95, 144–145, 174–175 Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth 177 n. 9 laboring-class women 108–137 see also class; femininity, bourgeois, compared to laboring-class femininity Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, Les Liaisons Dangereuses 12, 28, 214 n. 44 Landes, Joan B. 179 n. 12 Langland, Elizabeth 179 n. 13 Lanser, Susan 15, 83 Laqueur, Thomas 177 n. 8, 181 n. 31 Laslett, Peter 208 n. 56 Lee, Harriet, Errors of Innocence 74, 105 Lemire, Beverly 203 n. 5 Leneman, Leah 193 n. 35 Lennox, Charlotte, Euphemia 74 Lester, Sir Peter 195 n. 49 Levene, Alysa 203 n. 6, 205 n. 19 Lewis, Matthew, The Monk 144 Life and Adventures of a Reformed Magdalen 46 Lister, Anne 182 n. 35 Literary Amusements, “Life of an Authoress” 5–6 Lloyd, Sarah 65 Lock Hospital 192 n. 24 “London Beaux” 117 “London Kate” 112, 115–116 love as master key to subjectivity 9–10, 22–23, 108–109 bourgeois or modern 4, 9–13, 30–31, 52–53, 89–90, 99–100, 110–111, 114 economics of 16, 43–44, 49, 52–59, 89, 108, 109–110, 117, 153 excessive 161

243 history of 1, 9, 11, 43, 106–107, 109, 168 in relation to and distinct from sex 9–10, 22–23, 25–27, 30, 31–38, 47, 114–115 libertine 27–31, 170 right to 20, 151, 174–175 romantic versus familial 9–10, 167–172 singularity of 12–13 versus money 48–50 see also knowledge of the heart; marriage; seduction

Mack, Phyllis 178 n. 11 Mackenzie, Henry, Julia de Roubigné 73–74, 89 Madan, Martin Account of the Death of F.S. 46 Thelyphthora 192 n. 24 Magdalen Hospital 40, 41–42, 61, 64–65, 69 Magdalen narratives 5, 15, 16, 44–71, 100 Maid of the Mill 111 Mallet, David 132–134 Mandell, Laura 191 n. 15 Manley, Delariviere 3, 75, 184 n. 64 Manvell, Roger 146 “Margaret’s Ghost” see “William and Margaret” marriage 42–44, 52–58, 72–107, 110, 151–152 companionate or love 1, 42–44, 74, 84–85, 99–100, 106–107, 110–111, 167–172, 176 n. 3 cross-class 108, 112–117, 118–130, 153, 169–170 mercenary 4, 20, 43, 57–58, 100, 104, 151, 160 see also adultery; class, difference and seduction; courtship; divorce; Hardwicke Marriage Act; love, bourgeois; married women married women 72–107 compared to prostitutes 43–44, 53–59, 70–71, 76–83 Marshall, Dorothy 203 n. 5 Maurer, Shawn 146, 169, 217 n. 66 May, Leila Silvana 177 n. 5 McGonegal, Julie 212 n. 19 McKee, William 217 n. 66 McKeon, Michael 178 n. 9 McLane, Maureen 203 n. 4 McNalley, Mr. “Fanny: Or, the Fair Foundling of Saint George’s Field” 46, 71 melodrama 17, 138, 146–174 Memoirs of Arabella Bolton 195 n. 48 Memoirs of the Life of Lady H —— 120–121 “Merchant Outwitted” 114, 115 Mezei, Kathy 183 n. 56 Michaelson, Patricia Howell 197 n. 9 Miller, Nancy K. 181 n. 34, 185 n. 11 Miller’s Beautiful Daughter 206 n. 28 Milton, John 144 misogyny 21–22, 31, 38, 100–101 Moglen, Helene 178 n. 9

244

Index

Moncrieff, William, Lear of Private Life 217 n. 73 money see employment, women’s; love, versus money; marriage, mercenary Montagu, Barbara 188 n. 2 Monthly Review 85–86 More, Hannah 162 Cheap Repository Tracts 126–127, 128–129 motherhood and mothers 57, 70–71, 85, 102, 113, 142, 145, 154 see also illegitimacy rates narratee 77, 80, 83, 97, 156 narrative 13–16, 23–27, 61–69 analepsis 25, 151 closure 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 19, 28, 38–39, 46–47, 73–74, 84–85, 91, 120, 121, 140, 149–150, 167 contract 77–83 discourse versus story in 24, 26–27 embedded 14–15, 16, 60–61, 72–107, 155–156 feminist theory of 15–16, 83 history and 1, 15–16 paralepsis, 69, 88–89 paralipsis, 69 plot 1, 12, 26, 27–38, 48–49, 72–76, 105, 120, 147, 149–150 prolepsis, 61 repetition 1, 19, 35, 62, 66, 148 time and 28, 35–37, 66–69, 105 truth in 62–70 voice 16, 24–25, 48, 69, 78, 83, 86, 88, 107, 108–109, 120, 123, 136–137; first-person 7, 10, 22; epistolary 14, 24 Nash, Stanley 189 n. 9, 196 n. 59 Nelles, William 197 n. 3 Neuburg, Victor E. 202 n. 4 Norman, Amelia 173–174 “Northern Ditty; Or, The Citizen outwitted by a Country Damsel” 117 Nutt, Thomas 203 n. 6, 205 n. 19 O’Driscoll, Sally 179 n. 12 O’Quinn, Daniel 215 n. 53 Oedipus 27 Ogborn, Miles 191 n. 17 “Old Woman Cloathed in Gray” 135 Oliver, Kathleen 88 One Thousand and One Nights 77 Opie, Amelia Adeline Mowbray 216 n. 62 Father and Daughter, 14–15, 17, 138, 145–150, 162–163, 165–168, 170–172 Orlando Project 191 n. 16, 198 n. 10 Parry, John 173 Paths of Virtue Delineated 24–25, 120–121

Paulson, Ronald 82 Peace, Mary 188 n. 2, 190 n. 12, 196 n. 57 Peakman, Julie 189 n. 6 Pearce, Rev. S.B.P. 42 Pearson, Jacqueline 183 n. 62 Pedersen, Susan 126–127 Penitent Daughter; Or, the History of Elinor de Burgh 5 Penn, James 208 n. 45 Percy, Thomas, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 133 Perry, Ruth 3, 43, 50, 187 n. 27, 193 n. 28, 203 n. 4 Peters, Matthew Williams 195 n. 49 Phillips, Teresa Constantia 40–41, 42, 62–63, 66, 78 Pierce, John 217 n. 73 Pilkington, Laetitia 42 Pixérécourt, Guilbert de 214 n. 35 plot see narrative, plot “Politick Maid of Suffolk” 135 Portland, Duchess of 20 Poovey, Mary 4, 139, 140, 177 n. 4, 213 n. 34, 215 n. 49 popular culture, see street literature “Pretty Nancy of Norwich” 112 Price, Leah 24 prostitution and prostitutes 40–71, 142–143, 163, 164, 165, 172 as economic necessity 40–43, 57, 163 change in attitudes toward 40–43 love and 43–44, 52–58 sex for money versus love 48–50 wives compared to 43–44, 53–59, 70–71, 76–83 see also Magdalen Hospital; Magdalen narratives; seduction, as cause of prostitution public/private debate 179 n. 12 Radcliffe, Mary, Female Advocate 141, 142 Rajan, Tilottama 146, 213 n. 29, 215 n. 51 rape see sexual assault readers and readership 21, 26, 80, 108, 129 of street literature 202–203 n. 4 reading, scenes of 18–19, 154, 157 Reay, Barry 204 n. 6 Reed, Toni 177 n. 4 revolutionary politics, 1790s 126–127, 138–139, 174 Reynolds, Joshua 195 n. 49 Richardson, Samuel 7, 8, 10, 40–41, 42, 62, 64, 82, 200 n. 35 Clarissa 1, 2, 6, 16, 18, 19, 20–39, 47–48, 56, 66, 79, 82, 89, 109, 119, 129, 138, 140, 142, 155 Familiar Letters on Important Occasions 23 Pamela 16, 69, 108, 111, 112, 113, 116, 118–121, 123, 125, 136 Pamela in her Exalted Condition 74

Index Richetti, John 180 n. 22 Riffaterre, Michael 16, 62 Rizzo, Betty 201 n. 50 Robinson, Henry Crabb 162 Robinson, Thomas 162 Rogers, Katherine 162 Rogers, Nicholas 202 n. 3 Rosenthal, Laura 189 n. 6, 191 n. 15, 191 n. 17 Roulston, Christine 185 n. 4, 197 n. 9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 31, 141 Confessions 182 n. 35 Julie: ou la Nouvelle Héloïse 19, 157 Roussel, Roy 2 Rowe, Nicholas, The Fair Penitent 63, 123 Rule, John 110, 203 n. 5 Rules, Orders and Regulations of the Magdalen House 44 Sabine, Thomas 203 n. 4 Sabor, Peter 119, 191 n. 16, 206 n. 34 scandalous memoirs see courtesan narratives Schellekens, Jona 208 n. 56 Schellenberg, Betty 83, 85, 179 n. 12 Scheuermann, Mona 146 Scott, Joan 132 Scott, Sarah 98, 191 n. 16 Sedgwick, Eve 163 seduction 1790s discourse of, 140–145 as cause of prostitution, 40–43, 64, 70, 142–143 definition of 6–7 didacticism and 2, 12, 23, 126–127, 167 false marriage and 49–52, 55, 102, 122, 124 family reunion after 46, 129–130, 135, 147, 165, 171–172 feminist interpretations of 1–2, 3–5, 20–21 in expository versus narrative prose 13, 45–46, 140 in nineteenth century 5, 7, 141 in reality versus fiction 17–18, 61–70, 108, 172–175 libertine 27–31 narratives as an epistemology or hermeneutics of love 3, 6, 9–12, 13–16, 22–23, 29, 46, 106–107, 108–109, 123–124, 138–139, 144, 148–149, 174–175 narratives as exploratory and multiple 2, 4, 9, 20–21, 44–45, 62–70, 106–107, 111, 138–139, 145–146 promise to marry and 50–51, 78–79, 94, 101, 106, 114–116, 130–137, 172–175 reading as 18–19, 127, 144, 157 semiotics of 6, 10, 11, 21, 109, 110, 117, 138–139

245

telling story of 14–15, 61–69, 72–73, 78–79, 81–82, 86, 88, 96–99, 155–156 see also class, difference and seduction; knowledge of the heart; love; marriage sentimental tradition 9, 118–130 and the image of the prostitute 41, 64 and the novel 16, 106, 108 sexual agency see agency sexual assault 2, 21, 38, 40, 47–48, 116, 154–155, 157, 160–161, 176–177 n. 4 sexual difference 3, 21, 30, 38, 40, 87, 111, 116, 118 sexual double standard 8, 45, 142 sexual knowledge 31–33, 44, 73, 114–115 sexuality, female see agency, sexual; femininity, passive sexuality and; love; sexual knowledge. Shaftesbury, Earl of 9 shame 161–172, 190 n. 9 Sheldon, Ann 41, 63, 65, 69 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 77 Shepherd, Simon 214 n. 35 Sherburn, George 198 n. 14 Sheridan, Frances 24, 74, 83 Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph 85, 94–95 Eugenia and Adelaide 84–85 Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph 11, 16, 72, 75–76, 84–95, 96, 97, 104, 107, 108–109 Shoemaker, Robert B. 178 n. 9 Short but Tragical History of an Unfortunate Young Girl 126, 127, 129–130 Shorter, Edward 208 n. 57 Shteir, Ann B. 181 n. 33 Sibbit, Adam 144 Skinner, Gillian 98 Smallwood, Angela 76 Smith, Charlotte, Desmond 74, 105 Smollett, Tobias, Peregrine Pickle 49 Spacks, Patricia 76 Speck, W. A. 189 n. 6, 195 n. 54 Spectacles for Young Ladies 191 n. 16 Spencer, Jane 3, 74–75, 106 Spufford, Margaret 203 n. 4 Staël, Mme. de 18 Stallybrass, Peter 206 n. 31 Staves, Susan 4, 6, 8, 9, 74, 84 Steinbach, Susan 172–173, 174, 177 n. 8 Stewart, Susan 205 n. 13 Stone, Lawrence 8, 17–18, 174, 204 n. 9, 208 n. 56 “Story of a Penitent Prostitute” 47, 67 storytelling see narrative, embedded

246 “Strand Garland” 136 street literature 16, 108–137 voice and 111 Stuber, Florian 185 n. 6 suicide 163 Tennehouse, Leonard 186 n. 20 Theatre of Love 195 n. 48 Thompson, Helen 179 n. 12, 200 n. 40 Thompson, Linda 188 n. 4 Thornill, History of Maria, see Innocence Betrayed, and Infamy Avowed Tilly, Louise A. 132 Todd, Janet 200 n. 40, 216 n. 62 Todorov, Tzvetan 73, 78, 79 Tompkins, J. M. S. 202 n. 51 Tong, Joanne 171 Town and Country 141 Traditional Ballad Index 209 n. 60 Traver, John C. 200 n. 38 Truman, Mary 190 n. 10 Trumbach, Randolph 17, 189 n. 6, 202 n. 3 Ty, Eleanor 146, 155, 217 n. 73 urbanization see country in city motif Van Ghent, Dorothy 27 Van Sant, Ann Jessie 192 n. 19 Vane, Lady Ann 42, 49–50, 63 Vicinus, Martha 149 Vickery, Amanda 176 n. 3, 217 n. 68 victim, woman as 1–2, 7, 8, 40–41, 44–46, 60–61, 68–69, 70, 74, 81, 84, 87, 93, 122, 136, 139–147, 159, 173–175, 176–177 n. 4 Victim of Seduction 5

Index virginity and chastity 1–2, 6–7, 20, 21, 46–47, 52, 54, 68, 70–71, 75, 82, 100, 106, 112–114, 131–132, 139, 166–167 fetishizing 1–2, 75, 119 see also sexual double standard “Virtue in Distress” 108 “Virtuous Milk-Maid’s Garland” 116 voice see narrative, voice Wahrman, Dror 178 n. 9, 210 n. 1 Warhol, Robyn 16 Warner, William Beatty 22, 184 n. 4, 184 n. 64, 185 n. 11, 187 n. 33, 188 n. 35, 207 n. 37 Watson, Nicola 139 Watt, Ian 22 Welch, Saunders 189 n. 7 White, Allon 206 n. 31 White, Hayden 14 “William and Margaret” 132–134 Williams, Jeffrey 198 n. 16 Williams, Samantha 190 n. 9, 203 n. 6, 205 n. 19 Wilson, Adrian 209 n. 57 wives see married women Wolf, Amy 83, 198 n. 14 Wollstonecraft, Mary 59, 140–141, 149, 167, 190–191 n. 14 Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman 17, 19, 74, 138, 145–153, 155–159, 161–162, 168, 172, 197 n. 2 Vindication of the Rights of Woman 141, 142, 143, 144 “Wonderful Magic Pill” 135 Wright, George, “Warning to Young Women Respecting Seduction” 13 Wyatt, Grace 209 n. 57 “Yarmouth Tragedy” 111, 130–131, 135 Young, Edward 20, 119