Romanticism and Gender

277 Pages·1993·3.685 MB·English

by  Anne K. Mellor

ROMANTICISM
8!GENDER
ROMANTICISM
GENDER
&
ANNE K. MELLOR
I~ ~~o~!~~n~~~up
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Published in 1993 by
Routledge
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Copyright © 1993 by Routledge,Taylor and Francis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mellor, Anne Kostelanetz.
Romanticism and gender / by Anne K. Mellor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-90111-1 (HB) ISBN 0-415-90664-4 (PB)
1. English literature-Women authors-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 2.
English literature-19th century-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 3. English
literature-18th century-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 4. Feminism and
literature-Great Britain-History. 5. Women and literature-Great Britain-
History. 6. Authorship-Sex differences. 7. Romanticism-Great Britain. 8.
Sex role in literature. I. Title.
PR468.F46M45 1992
820.9'9287'09034-dc20 92-22902
CIP
ISBN 0-415-90111-1 (HB)
ISBN 0-415-90664-4 (PB)
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
FOR LYNNE TIDABACK HANLEY
in sisterhood
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Romanticism, Gender and Genre
Part 1: Masculine Romanticism 13
1 Gender in Masculine Romanticism 17
Part 11: Feminine Romanticism 31
2 "A REVOLUTION in Female Manners" 31
3 The Rational Woman 40
4 Family Politics 65
5 Domesticating the Sublime 85
6 Exhausting the Beautiful 107
7 Writing the Self/Self Writing:
William Wordworth's Prelude/
Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals 144
Part 111: Ideological Cross-Dressing:
John Keats/Emily Bronte 171
Conclusion: Why "Romanticism"? 209
Notes 213
Works Ci ted 247
Index 267
vii
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian
National University for providing both the time and the support
necessary to complete this project. Many friends and colleagues
were generous with their suggestions and criticisms: I especially
wish to thank Susan Wolfson, Peter Manning and Ruth Bernard
Yeazell, to whom this book owes an enormous debt, as well as Paul
John Aikin, R. A. Foakes, Paul Sheats, Alexander Welsh and John
Bender. I learned a great deal from the participants in the Semi-
nars which I gave in Australia on aspects of this material, from the
members of the UCLA Romantic Study Group, from the members
of the Ad Hoc Faculty Feminist Theory group at UCLA and from
the students in my graduate seminars on Romanticism and Gen-
der, to all of whom I am deeply grateful. Portions of chapter four
appear in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed.
Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992).
For their continuing support and affection, I thank Ron and
Blake Mellor. I dedicate this book, with love and admiration, to my
sister.
IX
Introduction
Romanticism, Gender and Genre
What difference does gender make to our understanding of British
literary Romanticism? Does Romanticism have a gender? In this
speculative book, I will argue that our current cultural and schol-
arly descriptions of that historical phenomenon we call Romanti-
cism are unwittingly gender-biased. Whether we interpret British
literary Romanticism as a commitment to imagination, vision and
transcendence, as did Meyer Abrams, Harold Bloom and John
Beer, or as a questioning, even systematic demystification, of the
very possibility of a linguistically unmediated vision, as have Geof-
frey Hartman, Paul de Man and a host of others, or as an ideology
located in specific political and social events, as urged by Carl
Woodring, Jerome McGann and the school of new historical Ro-
manticists inspired by their work, or as a complex configuration
derived from all of these recent critical approaches, we nonetheless
have based our constructions of British Romanticism almost ex-
clusively upon the writings and thought of six male poets (Words-
worth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats).
What happens to our interpretations of Romanticism if we focus
our attention on the numerous women writers who produced at
least half of the literature published in England between 1780 and
1830? It will be the argument of this book that a paradigm shift in
our conceptual understanding of British literary Romanticism oc-
curs when we give equal weight to the thought and writing of the
women of the period. The establishment of the lending library,
which spread rapidly through England in this era, meant that
books were widely accessible to a new and ever-growing reader-
ship, a readership composed in large part of upper- and middle-
1
2 Introduction
class women who preferred to read literature, and especially
novels, written by women. When we look at this female-authored
literature, we find a focus on very different issues from those which
concerned the canonical male Romantic poets. For the purposes of
this book, I will take as representative of this enormous body of
female literary production (there were over 200 publishing women
poets and at least as many novelists, as well as several playwrights,
essayists, memoirists and journalists) only twenty or so women
writers acknowledged at the time or later to be the most influen-
tial, gifted, or widely read: Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Anna Lae-
titia Barbauld, Mary Brunton, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth,
Susan Ferrier, Mary Hays, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Han-
nah More, Amelia Opie, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Ann
Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Jane
Taylor, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy
Wordsworth. Some of these writers have already received extensive
critical attention to which my discussions will be much indebted
(e.g. Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley,
Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth); but most of them are
relatively or entirely unknown to current scholarship. I realize that
my selection is both limited and arbitrary: no description of this
female literary corpus can be reliably accurate until we know the
work of most of the women writing during this period.
This book can attempt only an initial, exploratory mapping of
this new literary terrain, the uncharted expanse of women's liter-
ary Romanticism. It will require decades of research and hundreds
of books before we fully grasp the complex intellectual and formal
configurations of this terra incognita. But even a cursory, introduc-
tory survey reveals significant differences between the thematic
concerns, formal practices, and ideological positionings of male
and female Romantic writers. To mention only the most immedi-
ately obvious, the women writers of the Romantic period for the
most part foreswore the concern of their male peers with the ca-
pacities of the creative imagination, with the limitations of lan-
guage, with the possibility of transcendence or "unity of being;'
with the development of an autonomous self, with political (as op-
posed to social) revolution, with the role of the creative writer as
political leader or religious savior. Instead, women Romantic writ-
ers tended to celebrate, not the achievements of the imagination
nor the overflow of powerful feelings, but rather the workings of
the rational mind, a mind relocated-in a gesture of revolutionary
gender implications-in the female as well as the male body. They
Introduction 3
thus insisted upon the fundamental equality of women and men.
They typically endorsed a commitment to a construction of subjec-
tivity based on alterity, and based their moral systems on what
Carol Gilligan has recently taught us to call an ethic of care which
insists on the primacy of the family or the community and their
attendant practical responsibilities. They grounded their notion of
community on a cooperative rather than possessive interaction
with a Nature troped as a female friend or sister, and promoted a
politics of gradual rather than violent social change, a social
change that extends the values of domesticity into the public
realm. These introductory and necessarily crude generalizations
will in the future need to be refined by taking into account the
many subtle distinctions that exist, not only between the men and
women writers of the Romantic period, but also-and more im-
portantly-between one woman writer and another.
In writing this book, I have used a structural model which is in
itself deeply problematic and whose limitations I wish to acknowl-
edge at the outset. In order to recover the erased and neglected
voices of Romantic women writers, I have grouped their writings
together under the heading of what I have called "feminine" Ro-
manticism. I have tried to identify the concerns and ideological po-
sitions which they held in common with the other women writers
of their day, and I have contrasted this material to what we have
traditionally defined as "Romanticism," which I have rechristened
"masculine" Romanticism. This binary structure has the initial,
and it seems to me necessary, advantage of allowing us to see what
has hitherto been hidden, the difference that gender makes in the
construction of British Romantic literature.
But the use of a model grounded on polarity is both theoretically
dubious and critically confining. As the obsession of the male Ro-
mantic poets with the principle of polarity might indicate-think
of Blake's Contraries, Coleridge's enduring concern with the rela-
tion of the subject to the object, Shelley's opposition of analytical
reason to synthetic imagination-a binary model is already deeply
implicated in "masculine" Romanticism (it receives its ultimate
philosophical statement in Hegel's dialectic). The principle of po-
larity, of Fichte's ego versus non-ego, of thesis versus antithesis, re-
quires the construction of an Other which is seen as a threat to the
originating subject. At both the theoretical and the psychological
level, the women writers of the Romantic period resisted this
model of oppositional polarity (as the foundation of both the natu-
ral and the human worlds) for one based on sympathy and likeness.