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277 Pages·1993·3.685 MB·English
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ROMANTICISM 8!GENDER ROMANTICISM GENDER & ANNE K. MELLOR I~ ~~o~!~~n~~~up NEW YORK AND LONDON Published in 1993 by Routledge An imprint of Routledge, Taylor and Francis 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Transferred to Digital Printing 2009 Copyright © 1993 by Routledge,Taylor and Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or uti- lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 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.

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