Fall 2006 Issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies
Volume 40, Issue 1
Alison E. Hurley: “A Conversation of their Own: Watering-Place Correspondence Among the Bluestockings.”
Hurley’s essay examines how the spas at Bath figured into the correspondence and friendship of the women who formed the bluestocking circle. Hurley begins by emphasizing the isolation experienced by many women in the later 18th century. Unlike men, whose interactions were shaped by institutions such as the schools, professions, civic service and club membership, social convention tended to stifle interaction between women, restricting relationships on the basis of familiar tenets such as class but also according to reputation, clearly an aspect of identity vulnerable to outside manipulation and distortion. Hurley goes on to assert that Bath, and to an even greater extent the public watering-places in that town, allowed women an opportunity to operate outside of these restrictions. Further, reporting the news at Bath was a form of writing that was discouraged as unmanly, opening the door to women who wanted to write publicly without completely sacrificing their reputation. Hurley repeatedly emphasizes the fact that women were in the mix at Bath in a way that they weren’t in London, giving them lively subjects for their writing and allowing them to comment on the world in much the same tradition as the popular essayists of the day, rather than having to spin their writings completely from scratch as they would in London or the country. Because of these aspects of the watering-place, seaside resorts become a fertile site that allows women to imagine much more complex and public kinds of feminine community.
Julie Park: “Pains and Pleasures of the Automaton: Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out.”
Park begins by recounting a brief history of the cultural importance of automatism in the 18c, noting that some particular versions of femininity are explicitly connected to the automaton through preciseness, regularity, etc. In other words, a good woman is supposed to be more like a machine than a woman. She also notes a more gender-neutral strain of this language in philosophers such as Hobbes, who celebrated the “Artificial Man” who would prove much more successful than natural man (who is, of course, wretched under Hobbes’ system). Park’s main argument is that free indirect discourse provided a technology that allowed Burney simultaneously to represent the woman as object and subject, echoing the anxieties engendered by their social position. Further, she argues that the social ritual of coming out (or debuting) entails what she calls a necessary “psychological casting out,” by which she seems to mean something like the psychological issues associated with courtship. Park analyzes Burney’s response to this liminality that is expected of women, the simultaneous depth and shallowness that they are expected to display in public, noting that this delicate balance between subject and object positions often manifests itself as a state of abjectness, a state that Burney is particularly interested in and particularly skilled at illustrating and analyzing through free indirect discourse.
Emma Pink: “Frances Burney’s Camilla: “To Print My Grand Work… by Subscription.”
Pink presents an analysis of the subscription publication of Burney’s third novel, Camilla, based on Pierre Bourdieu’s “dynamic model of the cultural field” (51). Pink argues that the decision of how to publish Camilla was a difficult minefield to navigate, but Burney did so with startling acuity. After marrying a relatively impoverished Frenchman and having a son, Burney was in need of money. Publishing by subscription, if handled correctly and if it involved an author with friends in high places, could be a very lucrative endeavor, but it also tainted the writer with the stain of commercialism. Burney was quite aware of this fact, and carefully decided on how subscriptions would be gathered and published in the subscription edition. All told, Burney cleared over £2000 on Camilla without considerably decreasing her literary reputation. Indeed, when she sold her fourth novel, The Wanderer, she was able to garner over £3000, a shockingly high figure.
J.A. Downie: “Who Says She’s a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen’s Novels.”
Downie argues that much confusion in Austen studies has resulted from confusion about terms like “bourgeoisie,” “gentry,” “genteel” and “middle class,” many of which have different meanings in American and British vernacular. The crux of his argument is that it is improper to call Jane Austen or many of her most prominent characters middle class, because in Britain this denoted a group who had no connection to the aristocracy. Downie insists that, well into the 20th century, the British aristocracy consisted of titled nobility AND the well-off, landed country gentry. Jane Austen and her family clearly belonged to the latter group, though this only placed them at the lowest fringes of the aristocracy. In addition to making this argument about Austen’s own social place, Downie argues that Emma Woodhouse, Sir Thomas Bertram and a number of Austen’s other characters occupied a similar social sphere.
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