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Becoming a feminist reader: Romance and re-vision
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Becoming a feminist reader: Romance and re-vision
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BECOMING A FEMINIST READER:
ROMANCE AND RE-VISION
by
Mary Beth Tegan
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2004
Copyright 2004 Mary Beth Tegan
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UMI Number: 3145300
Copyright 2004 by
Tegan, Mary Beth
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Acknowledgements
Becoming a feminist reader—in writing and in life—would not have been
possible without a great deal of guidance and support, and I have been blessed
with a community of very generous readers.
Hilary Schor has been a consistent source of inspiration and
encouragement, imaginatively framing my writing pitfalls as adventures becoming
a heroine. She stepped in to act as co-chair at a crucial moment in my writing
process and suggested a particularly clear revision strategy through which I
(appropriately) find my voice. While her encyclopedic memory and quickness of
mind often leave me speechless, she always gives me a great deal to think about,
not least of which was the suggestion that writing dissertation is about growing up.
Judith Stacey welcomed me, and indeed all her graduate students, into the
profession with genuine interest and grace. I adored her interdisciplinary class in
feminist theory: crafting a “discontinuous history” that contextualized the material
richly and rigorously, Judith helped me to connect with feminism on a
considerably deeper level. Most appreciated, though, was her take on “academic
writing,” for she challenged her students to experiment with what can be a stifling
discourse and gave the unconventional assignments that give rise to such writing.
Joe Boone’s influence—and his red, blue, and black ink—are marked
unmistakably on numerous early drafts of this dissertation. A wonderfully
imaginative close reader, he opened up one of the key metaphors of my Mary
Wollstonecraft chapter draft, suggesting for the piece a much-needed “through-
ii
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line.” From Joe I’ve learned how to delight in my students: his 102 class on the
love-plot rippled with a narrative pleasure enjoyed by all, though his pre-qual
“formalist” lectures were probably delivered more with Michael and me in mind.
(A belated thank you, Joe!)
Jim Kincaid too braved the 100-page monster that was chapter 2, and his
enthusiasm and insights helped me to nail down my model. He also offered a
great deal of help in articulating Wollstonecraft’s theory of genre—a pivotal
argument that will most likely ground my subsequent essays on this material.
Well-known and much-loved for his generosity to students, Jim has given a good
deal of his time to assist me in this most arduous task, and I’m not even one of his
own.
The scholars who participated in this study cemented my belief in the bond
between feminist collective energy and narrative desire: the enthusiastic
encouragement, the constructive criticism, the informal chatter, and the revisions
themselves left me giddy with delight and speculative pleasure, giving me the
much-needed motivation to wrap-up what one participant so aptly named “our
project.” Beth Binggelli, Jan Cohn, Julia Colyar, Shantanu DuttaAhmed, Molly
Engelhardt, Theresa Gregor, Kris Hackel, Sid Hicks, Sylvia Kelso, Patricia Koski,
Nancy K. Miller, Tania, Modleski, Kay Mussell: I truly couldn’t have done it
without you.
My graduate school peers have also given me much: support and food and
drink and perspective. Many of them have been readers as well, and I’d like to
acknowledge most particularly Molly Engelhardt, Michael Blackie, and Mike
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Reynolds. Other friends have offered companionship and the opportunity for
reflection during the writing process: Kris Hackel, Ruth Kwon, Beth Binggelli,
Elizabeth Bleicher, Jeff Bohn, Lauri Mullens, Cindy Sarver, Anne Thorpe, Vida
Aggarwahl, Ned Schantz, and Shantanu DuttaAhmed.
Certainly my students have taught me well, and I will always think with a
smile of my CORE 111 class in 1998 who believed this dissertation would be
more aptly titled: “Conventionally Fucked: Becoming a Feminist Reader through
Romance and Re-Vision.”
Friends outside the classroom—most especially Sid Hicks and Richard
Marin—have consistently provided the perfect balance of interest and silence
about the dissertation, as well as much-needed infusions of vicarious shopping and
the frou-frou cocktails I can’t afford. Also appreciated was the curiosity exhibited
by Cindy Chyr, Bill Kelly, and Katharine Tessin, and the “great escape” with
Nancy Tarankow.
Amy and Paul Tegan, my parents, have always been my biggest
champions: licensing (and often financing!) my discoveries, and encouraging me
to study abroad, to go back to school, to finish the degree. Offering their love and
support without limits, they have shown great patience and confidence as I’ve
meandered along, finding my way. Keen readers themselves, they have no doubt
made some discoveries as well. (At the very least, we may be able to forget my
1.6 GPA that spring semester at Chico State. . . .)
And, finally, I’d like to thank Tania Modleski, my chair, without whom
this project could not have been imagined. She has given the gift of her honesty
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and integrity: sharing her experiences as a feminist scholar, challenging me to
embrace conflicts in my writing, and respecting the boundaries between faculty
and student. It was in Tania’s class on women’s narrative that I rediscovered
romance, and my sense of our compatibility was only enhanced when I discovered
a favorite passage of mine in an essay she’d written. In “Scandal of the Mute
Body” Tania argues that feminist critical writing embodies a promise, a deeply felt
echo of Sartre’s challenge to the reader: “the writer’s universe will only reveal
itself in all its depth to the examination, the admiration, and the indignation of the
reader; and the generous love is a promise to maintain, and the generous
indignation is a promise to change, and the admiration a promise to imitate.” It is
a promise she has kept.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements.............................................................................ii
Abstract............................................................................................. vii
Caught in the Web of Romance........................................................ix
Introduction: A Feminist Reader’s Return to Romance.................. 1
Chapter One: (A) Feminist Romance and Re-Vision.................... 12
Chapter Two: Romance and the Rites of W omen...........................67
Chapter Three: Re-educating Romola
and Other Tales of Instruction........................................................ 135
Chapter Four: The Romance Revised—
An Object of Collective D esire.......................................................205
Bibliography..................................................................................... 284
Appendix A ...................................................................................... 301
Appendix B ...................................................................................... 309
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Abstract
The romance narrative has vexed feminist thinkers for over two hundred
years, provoking ardent responses that range from delight to disquiet to disdain.
Highly conscious of the power romance has—in its many discursive forms—over
women’s psychic and social existence, their desires and expectations, feminist
critics have been anxious to understand its enduring appeal; they are considerably
less eager, however, to examine their own histories as readers of romance. And
yet the feminist reader’s construction of her critical persona, and of her
determinedly conscious “re-visionary” practices, owes much to her romance
reading double—the novel-gazing naif whose fantasies dim a more communal
awareness. This dissertation reviews the uneasy bond between feminist criticism
and romance reading, moving from the present critical scene to the past in order to
recover buried strategies for romance reading and a hermeneutic history
“becoming” a feminist.
Tracing the concerns of present-day romance critics to their two most
influential and censorial predecessors—George Eliot and Mary Wollstonecraft, I
excavate a lost language of romance criticism: recurrent and unexpected
metaphors of ingestion and entrapment which tell the tale of an unconscious reader
caught in a web of fantasy, irrationality, and vanity. But the critical views of both
take on a kaleidoscopic complexity in their fiction, where the plots of romance
reading heroines reflect a strong ambivalence about the narcissism fueling their
ambitions and affirmations. Recasting the familiar objects and ends of romance in
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a more realistic light, the novels continue to perform a critical function, offering
implicit instructions for reading romance.
Engaging more intimately and immediately with the form, and highlighting
the critical power of collective readings, these two writers shed “new” light on the
act of feminist revision. I have followed their lead, asking my colleagues,
contemporary literary critics who claim the label “feminist,” to rewrite a romance
that compels their return. Blurring the boundaries between research subject and
object, and reader/critic/ writer, the revisionary readings with which I conclude
demonstrate that feminist readers can learn much indeed by losing themselves in
romance.
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Caught in the Web of Romance
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Introduction: A Feminist Reader’s Return to Romance
Text o f bliss: the text that imposes a state o f loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point o f
a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’ s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the
consistency o f [her] tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis [her] relation with language.
— The Pleasure o f the Text, a romance by Roland Barthes'
I f her life had been more conventional.. . she mused — immediately recognizing the impossibility
considering her circumstances. Conventionally Indian? Conventionally white? Conventionally
female? What constancy was the proper choice? She didn ’ t conveniently fit any o f the
categories—an asset at times and at others, a distinct conundrum.
—Forbidden, a romance by Susan Johnson2
The faint uneven breathing of the slightly asthmatic cat occasionally
broke the silence as she read, nestled under the aubergine and taupe coverlet
she’d sewn a few years earlier, settling easily into the romance novel assigned for
class. She read comfortably, complacently—sleepily perusing the familiar
descriptions of fichus and Aubusson rugs, smugly noting the weight of adjectival
and adverbial clauses— confident that her return to the texts of her youth would
be triumphant: she would overcome. Having emerged from a couple of erotically
predictable passages unscathed, she began a third. The quiet murmurings of the
sleeping cat became rhythmic—his syncopated interruptions no longer
signified—the silence had won. She read on. “Smiling up at the Due, who had set
his champagne glass down, she let the shirt slowly slide down her shoulders and
arms until it lay in puddled white ripples on the deep purple of the cushions”
(Johnson 116). She read on, somatically if not critically aroused, lost in the
pleasure of the text. The dreaming cat’s body suddenly twitched; the violent
movement claimed—no, seized—her attention! Mary Beth awoke—he slept on.
Her gaze was drawn from Hal’s now still body to a black mark near his head on
the coverlet, a stain left over from the writing of her Master’s thesis, a time when
books and uncapped pens littered the right side of the bed, even as she slept.
Heloise’s hint was unhelpful: the hairspray had not erased the mark of the
feminist scholar; the stain remained. Mary Beth turned back to the novel and
found her place, but the mood had been broken; she no longer read comfortably.
How could a room of one’s own become so suddenly claustrophobic? She averted
her eyes from the increasingly disruptive romance, catching sight of her
reflection in the armoire mirror: Conventionally feminine? Conventionally
feminist? Conventionally fucked! Tossing the book and the covers aside, she
strode out of the room, away from—out of—this impossible women’s narrative.
1 Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure o f the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang,
1975.
2 Johnson, Susan. Forbidden. New York: Bantam, 1991.
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When I encountered the romance—after many years’ abstinence—in a
seminar on women’s popular narrative, I felt conflicted, self-conscious, at a loss.
My return to the preferred genre of my youth via Susan Johnson’s Forbidden
threw me into crisis, much like Barthes’ blissfully unstable reader and Johnson’s
similarly conflicted heroine.3 I “didn’t conveniently fit any of the categories”—
feminist, scholar, wanna-be Duchess, and I lost all sense of my relationship to text,
so rapid were my vacillations while reading. At one moment feeling a sense of
critical mastery, at another losing myself in a torrent of sensual description, at
almost every moment feeling cheated by the promises the romance makes.
Exactly where in all this critical anxiety could one locate the subject?
Not only was she, oh, I, careening between identities, identifications, but I
seemed to be traversing time as well, reliving in seconds a history of reading
selves. My sense of delight in rediscovering the pleasures of an earlier self was
soon eclipsed by my dismay at not being above such pleasures. After all, I’d like
to think that several years of exposure to “good” writing and feminist theory would
make me immune to the pleasures of that sort of text, and yet given my own
response to the impossible narrative—the text of bliss that “unsettled the
consistency of [my] tastes, values, memories”—I had to reconsider (14). For
despite (because of?) the utterly predictable plot, despite (because of?) the
3 Written in the rhythms of seduction it seeks to analyze, Barthes’ discussion o f narrative desire
teases the reader on, reveling in repetition, deferring resolution. His criticism exceeds its
boundaries shamelessly— flirting with meaning, refusing easy definitions— much like the romance
plots I allude to above. Barthes suggests, in fact, that the “text of bliss” is an exceptionally active
object of desire, a notion that complicates reader-response theories by refusing to locate the origins
o f desire within the reader or the text, and one that begins to explain my sense o f subjugation, my
loss of critical confidence, as I read.
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anachronistic references to gender and ethnic oppression, despite (because of?)
such sentences as “[s]he came up for breath after that fierce, staggering, intense,
immoderate, artistically imaginative kiss that seeped downward like a luscious
dream and, half-breathless still, said ‘You’re very good’”: I was engaged. And
intrigued—my erratic response suggested my pleasures and displeasures were
multiple, a consequence of converging discourses. I enjoyed the “awful”
sentences because, quite simply, they aroused me—a satisfaction that soon
subsided because I felt manipulated by a text over which I should have more
control. I enjoyed them because they gave me a sense of superiority—a rather
smug sense of pleasure derived from my learning and my (marginal) disciplinary
location but one that also quickly waned when I considered that Johnson’s
messages about gender and racial oppressions, if anachronistic and oversimplified,
were reaching a wider, more resistant audience than the choir I currently
addressed. I enjoyed, however fleeting, the recovery of an earlier self who read
differently (uncritically), though her presence soon felt intrusive, oppressive.
Return o f the Lady Reader
The return of this ghostly reader—a figure George Eliot might have
slightingly termed “the Lady Reader,” was acutely felt. And yet for all her present
disruption, she was once a reader in retreat. Armed with the novels of Phyllis
Whitney and Victoria Holt, she would steal into her room, close the door, and
welcome the loneliness she could not elude. Days at school were spent in motion:
if she kept moving between the bulletin boards and the bathrooms and the lunch
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room tables, her isolation might go unnoticed. The wandering at school was
emblematic of life in general. Three junior high schools in three different states
provided no stability or community as her family fell to pieces, each member
seeking to escape the others in his or her own way. Not surprisingly, the mind
followed suit, shirking theorems and logic to re-view in Sirkian splendor the days’
embarrassments and triumphs. To sink into the stillness of her room was a relief.
Once alone she could feel powerful again. Taking cover within book
sleeves and bed sheets, she could burrow into a fantasy world so familiar it seemed
her own. There she could avoid the interpersonal risks that might diminish her
singularity; there she could take control, center stage—take whatever she damn
well pleased really, but without having to own her boundless desire. Everything
she deserved would be hers, yet another would assume the responsibility for
making sure she got it. Becoming a heroine demanded nothing, passivity: the
protagonist’s inaction mirrored her own. Her want of ambition—so ladylike, so
becoming—was the very thing that made her loveable and guaranteed her happy
ending. The romances she read featured always an innocent who discovers her
desiring self through the hero’s touch and attention. That her pleasure, her social
standing, her very identity depended upon him was perceived as no great problem.
She was recognized and closely read—the heroic reader secondary, insignificant.
In fact, he didn’t truly signify at all, and this was important. The men she
encountered amid the pages of romance were interchangeable, predictable, and
utterly manageable—heroes who demanded nothing but gave everything.
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Appreciative and attentive, they were nonetheless absent, occupying her mind as
shadow men only. Such narcissistic fantasies encouraged her autonomy; they also
elicited a rather curious form of autoeroticism. As she read deep into the night,
door shut, she would often find herself resting her head upon her hand, bent
backward, a right-angled prop. The head would grow heavy; the hand would grow
numb. Unfeeling, it would begin to explore her decolletage: a passive example of
sexual activity, a way of taking responsibility for her pleasure but in a limited,
ladylike fashion. The coquettish object of her own desire, she required an other,
mediating object—one that might be held accountable in her stead. She found it in
romance, a form that remained forever written on the body. “This text is a fetish
object, and this fetish desires me” (Barthes Pleasure 27).
To this day, she marks its indelible impression on her identity and
relationships, traces of the romance in her expectations, her desires, her disasters.
Demonstrating a deep-seated unwillingness to separate the man from the text, she
sought shadow men long into adulthood. There was that embarrassing Fabio
phase— -the graduate student with the tired blond mane and the womanly ways; he
was a very hard read, so propelled by the pleasures of endless speculation she left
a well-known lover to pursue him. Equally telling was the book-shredding
problem—her inevitable response to a break up or the kind of argument that leads
to one. A lover of books, she nevertheless found herself, again and again, tearing
through lines of a poetry text (so sorry, Blue Booby); bending back spines to
wrench out the pages; destroying Natalie Angier’s Woman simply because it had
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come from a man. Signifying the end of pleasure, these highly tactile moments of
loss were always preceded by a less perceptible disintegration: the unavoidable
process by which the heroic cipher begins to resist her idealistic projections and
she his .. . the oft-rehearsed plot of the disappearing man.
Becoming a Feminist
That end alone should suggest a fundamental compatibility between the
romance and feminism, but the connection between the two has been tenuous at
best. For over two hundred years feminist thinkers have railed against romance:
Mary Wollstonecraft blames “the reveries of stupid novelists” for inciting
women’s single-minded pursuit of happiness through love; George Eliot regrets
the “mischievous form of feminine silliness . . . that confirm[s] the popular
prejudice against the more solid education of women”; Virginia Woolf disdains the
“incessant and remorseless analysis of falling into love and falling out of love”;
and Adrienne Rich deplores the “womanly, selfless love . . . defined and ruled by
the weight of an entire culture.” And no wonder they demur, as the romance
curtails curiosity and offers a particularly limited channel for ambition and desire,
exalting the female protagonist’s amorous adventure over all other achievements.
With the binding of man and wife as its primary end, the romance is heterosexual
love’s panegyric and the single woman’s obituary.
And yet for this particular reader of romance, feminism became the perfect
substitute—embodying many of the same promises. The romance promised both
the loss of self and the most perfect recognition imaginable—love at first sight;
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feminism offered a perspective that broadened her awareness of the “Other” and of
the self. The romance promised she would find herself in a soul-mate, the perfect
complement; feminism offered a likeness in the guise of other women who would
help her awaken and recreate herself. The romance fed a melodramatic
imagination drawn to love and opposition; the story of feminism too is an obstacle-
ridden narrative, propelled by the promise of social progress and individual
happiness—a happy ending that similarly strains credulity. And if its wish-
fulfillment fantasy promised a tranquilizing effect, the romance also taught her to
want— to nurse unrealistic expectations, to long for recognition and
transformation, to desire, in effect, desire. Kindling an ambition that knew no
proper ends, her romance reading left her with vague longings and a dissatisfaction
that proved to be fertile ground for feminism.
Not unlike the romances she read, her progression toward feminism was
wandering and largely unconscious. Were one to trace the path, she might begin
with a reading of Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, a sentimental novel
this Lady Reader devoured for the first time in fifth grade and one that whet her
desire for more of the same. It was the first time she had truly wanted to ‘master’
a narrative, wring every bit of meaning from it, and she read with the dictionary in
her lap—primarily so she could imagine more vividly the fashionable ensembles
worn by Fanny Shaw, the “city-mouse-friend” of the novel’s heroine, Polly
Milton. Fanny’s duds were detailed in a way Alcott’s true heroines’ never could
have been, and our reader spent weeks after finishing the book trying both to
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render them on paper and reproduce them for her diminutive “Dawn” dolls. (A
way to prolong the narrative or one of her first attempts at revision?) Eager to
learn whether Polly or Fan would get her man first, she would have read over the
references to nineteenth-century feminism: Polly’s plan to “deliver lectures on
Women’s Rights,” or what could only be a Boston marriage between artists who
“take care of one another in true Damon and Pythias style.” Still these ghostly
roles remained, resting somewhere deep in her mind, until the moment she could
consciously claim them.
Her trajectory toward feminism continued in its meandering fashion—she
enjoyed a nine-year romance with the only son of the first feminist she knew and
loved well, a woman who introduced her to Collette and Margaret Atwood. It was
Lady Oracle, Atwood’s novel about a romance writer who plots her own demise in
order to escape an increasingly unbearable domestic situation, that most enthralled
her, but the familiar enthrallment had this time a distinctly curious energy. She
recognized in the gothic novelist, Joan, a woman divided, herself: anxious to
please but resentful about it; an agreeable and attentive listener who silently
judged (and rather harshly at that); a haphazard control freak who sought to
contain her selves within a wall of excess weight. Gleefully, gratefully led by
Atwood’s duplicitous romance writer (who finds it increasingly difficult to
dispense with the aggressive “other woman” and wind up her heroine’s plot), she
found herself delighting in the unexpected turns and irresolution of the love plots.
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If any union were promised at all, it was the psychic integration of the heroine, and
for the first time, this seemed more than enough.
The first of a series of transitional texts that prompted her conversion to a
feminist reader, Lady Oracle cast the elements of her beloved romance in a
markedly different light, compelling her to re-see and reevaluate their meanings.
Though equally instructive, the mirror held up by George Eliot was much less
flattering, for she couldn’t ignore her resemblance to Rosamond Vincy, narcissistic
foil to the highly empathic Dorothea Brooke. Tiring of her husband, Lydgate—
once the heroic ideal of her most ambitious daydreams, Rosamond engages a
series of infinitely substitutable shadow men, and her creator’s gloss on such
behavior is cuttingly apt: “the easy conception of an unreal Better had a
sentimental charm which diverted her ennui.” The desire for a better “end” was
felt even more keenly with Edith Wharton’s The House o f Mirth where once again,
in Lily Bart, she recognized herself: regretfully not Lily’s grace nor her sylph-like
figure, but certainly her wavering sense of purpose when it came to marriage and
the grandiose expectations that prevented her from “settling.” Like Lily and
Rosamond, she found in her romantic ideals a form of resistance, but just what she
was resisting, and what she wanted in its place, remained very unclear. It was only
when she began to commit more fully to her post-baccalaureate classes in English
that an answer of sorts was suggested in the utterly fanciful attachments she
formed “with” her male professors.
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A crush on one begat her first, almost wholly unaware, attempt as a
feminist critic—an essay on the Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story titled, “The
Non-conformist in ‘“The Yellow Wallpaper.’” In his evaluative comments, her
instructor had mused, “It seems as though you really want to make a feminist
argument but are dancing around it—say what you mean.” Though the intention
had nearly eluded her, his comment nevertheless gave her a label to apply to her
vague wanderings, and when she was given the opportunity to take a “feminist
approach” a year later in a literary criticism survey class, she was intrigued enough
to attempt Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One. Another male professor,
another crush, this one had little patience with “French and faddish” criticism, so
the assigned text’s very discourse (and difficulty) signaled that a feminist “take”
was yet another essay in poor taste. But if Irigaray’s was not exactly the text to cut
one’s critical (or feminist) teeth on, it did provide a vocabulary and a perspective
and a pleasure that she began to seek elsewhere.
Turning increasingly from the works of men to those of women, she found
validation and enlightenment and anger in abundance, eloquent reason, evocation,
and play. She took refuge in feminist writing the way she had once with romance,
when she had borrowed books from friends, grabbed them off her mother’s
bookshelves, retired to her room. Then too the books had come from other
women, older women, a fact that licensed her to explore, safely still, her
developing sexuality. She hadn’t needed to take full responsibility for her sexual
desire and the satisfaction of it; the shame was shared, the guilt collective.
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Feminism licensed her desire in other areas, offering an impassioned defense of
ambition so that she, oh, I, might gradually assume responsibility for my longings,
manage the uncomfortable feelings that accompanied action. It also supplied the
requisite mediation, helping me to imagine new narratives and plot new ends. And
because the course of true romance is never an easy one, I wander on, to wonder
further in the chapters that follow— to trace the more diffuse forms of women-
centered desire that circulate in the “remorseless analysis of love,” and to speculate
on the sexual-textual pleasures of this most promising object of desire.
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Chapter One: (A) Feminist Romance and Re-Vision
My recent reading has caused me fo r some reason to remember m yself as I was when a young girl,
reading high Romances and seeing m yself simultaneously as the object o f all knights ’ devotion
— an unspotted Guinevere— and as the author o f the Tale. I wanted to be a Poet and a
Poem. . . . It may be that this is the desire o f all reading wom en.. . 4
A romance reader’s reflections lie obscured in the leaves of a little read volume,
carefully annotated by an ambitious young woman of letters who begins her work
in the 1950s. She would rather have written about the possibilities for true
conversation, of intimacy and the failure of communication, in the love poetry of
the woman’s husband, but her male advisor dissuades her. To compensate for her
intellectual loss and thwarted desire, he gives her a critical housekeeping task:
she will edit the woman’s journal and letters and prove her scholarly worthiness.
She catalogues all the woman’s writings—her household lists, her recipes, her
daily diary entries—untiringly. She is bored at first but is soon seduced by the
woman’s silences, as well as her occasional outbursts or insights. As she
continues her painstaking work, she discovers she enjoys discussing the
extravagant images of women with her female students; it occurs to no one that
such talk could prove fruitful, so she sets these questions aside and presses on
with her work. Alas, for all her diligence and care, the scholar is awarded no
PhD; she “had been brought up to look for Influences and Irony and there (Ts^
little of either” in the writing she mines.5 Had she begun writing later, she
might have found a feminist dissertation amid the silences, the headaches, the
unceasing care the woman provides her poet-husband. But she has been trained
to read as a man, and the fragmentary accounts of a woman’s life resist the ready
made meanings she is prepared to assign. The wisdom of the romance reader will
remain unobserved, for the scholar reads in isolation, as her subject did before
her.
She says Romance is a proper form fo r women. She says Romance is a land where women can be
free to express their true natures. . . . She said in Romance, women’ s two natures can be
reconciled. I asked, which two natures, and she said men saw women as double beings,
enchantresses and demons or innocent angels. 'Are all women double? ’ I asked her. 7 did not say
that, ’ she sa id . 6
A writer’s reflections roam freely amid the pages of a journal intime,
eagerly sought by three feminist literary critics in their own Quests for
knowledge and institutional power. They are drawn by the language, the
imagery, the stories— reading for new meanings and the gendered history a
recovered perspective provides. They long to know more of the elusive authority
figures who will affirm their experience and ambitions, and aid them in the
4 Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. 136.
5 Byatt, 129.
6 Byatt, 404.
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construction of a female literary tradition. Like the young woman who hangs on
the words of her poet-cousin, they seek the signs and structures through which
they might redefine Woman, explore and expand female identities. Their avid
pursuit (and the invocatory repetition of the aspiring writer’s “she said”) is
suggestive of the shifting value of women’s words, for such words were once
absent from the histories of men. This journal’s reception is markedly different
because assumptions about the proper objects for study and the profile of the
critic have changed: female scholars now enjoy tenured faculty positions, an ever-
expanding readership, a collaborative community. The conversations about
women’s representations the earlier scholar enjoyed in hallways and cluttered
offices are now held in grand hotels and prestigious journals, the feminists’
arguments heeded by male colleagues. Difficulties and differences still arise, but
for today’s ambitious young female scholar the road has been adequately paved,
the plot quite eloquently written. She need never read alone.
‘Tis a fiction to be sure (and a ventriloquised one at that), but the
submerged story of A. S. Byatt’s romance Possession is the true history of the
feminist reader— a tale of textual encounters that are seldom acknowledged and
trajectories that merge in mysterious ways. It is a fragmented history that has been
read—and in many other novels and critical essays, but it has not yet been written,
so fixed have we been upon one particular story of feminist reading. The
prevailing story of feminist criticism is represented in Possession and elsewhere
quite boldly: the collaborative ethos, the interpretive strategies, the commonalities
n
and differences. Yet if we set the readers and the read side by side, invoking
7 In general, critics who have attempted to tell feminist criticism’s story tend to give it a tri-partite
structure: the early critique of male-authored texts; the subsequent shift of attention to works by
women authors, the establishment of a literary tradition and the gradual institutionalization of
feminist hermeneutical practices; and the subsequent re-evaluation o f feminism’s key terms and
questions through the lens of critical theories “engendering difference” (Gubar 881). The first
stage— a “critique” of male-authored texts as Susan Gubar, Adrienne Rich, and Elaine Showalter
term it— commences with 1970 and continues through the mid-1970s; Sara Mills and Lynne Pearce
are careful to note in Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading, however, that the once “revolutionary”
practice of exposing the sexism in male-authored works is continued today, and one might say the
same for most of the critical practices I will be highlighting. The second stage entails the
“recuperation” of forgotten or devalued female writers and the widespread attempts to establish a
“feminist poetics” (Showalter 125), which would lend feminist scholars a unified or systematized
set of theories and practices that would allow them to answer the methodological challenges and
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muted voices to initiate a different conversation, a very different history begins to
emerge. It is a history I will plot throughout this dissertation, turning to other
readers and writers and engaging them in a “true conversation” where the
exchange of ideas and selves is effected. But dear Reader, be warned: as with all
histoires, the line between historical fact and historian’s fancy is not always
perfectly clear, and in this—my—history of the feminist reader Romance plays a
central role. Fictional characters converse with their creators; feminist critics
become writers of romance; well-defined roles collapse: in a true exchange of
selves, after all, one must be willing to identify differently, occupy a fluid position
between reader and read, participant and voyeur. Romance is the perfect vehicle
for such implausible identifications; uniting Poet and Poem, demon and angel, its
conciliatory powers and generic instability make possible the telling of new tales.
If we agree to follow its wandering course, seek out the obscured voices as we
travel more familiar paths, we can bring the master narratives about feminist
reading and romance reading together to recover the hidden history of the feminist
reader and begin a new conversation around and within romance.
dismissal they encountered in a male-dominated field. Spanning the latter half of the 1970s and the
first half of the 1980s, this phase of feminist criticism’s evolution was perhaps the most
accelerated: Nancy K. Miller remembers, “The rise of feminist scholarship as an institutional force
derived at least in part from the sense of self-, but finally, collective authorization, that ‘working on
women’ provided” (“Decades” 40). It is also a moment when “other” marginalized voices began to
make themselves heard more clearly. The third stage begins in the mid-1980s with what Barbara
Christian has called “the race for theory,” a period when the nature and experience of women—
largely taken for granted within the first two phases— is called into question vis-a-vis various
critical theories, including deconstruction, postcolonialism, and new historicism. It is worth noting
that what I am choosing to call the “third” stage, or what Rachel Blau DuPlessis has lyrically
termed “poly vocal poems and the pluralist feminism-plus of cultural studies” (107), is for Gubar an
anomalous, and therefore provocatively distinguished, “fourth phase of metacritical dissension”
(886).
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Once upon a time, or so the authoritative history of feminist reading goes,
women who wanted to devote their lives to the study of literature had to learn to
read like men, employing a set of interpretive strategies and questions that required
them to ignore their own experience and perspective, as well as the ignominies of a
woman’s (p)lot in fiction. These critics relinquished their own obsessions and
ideas, as Byatt’s Beatrice Nest does when she abandons the longing for true
conversation in literature and life to immerse herself in Ellen Ash’s writings. Her
isolation as a reader is complete: not only is she excluded from the dominant
critical conversation which focuses on the writing of men and a (very) few
“special” women but she cannot even enjoy a discursive intimacy with her subject
because Ash’s writings do not signify. In effect, they cannot be “read” within the
current interpretive paradigm. Even more poignant is her unconscious reliance on
an internalized male perspective; unable to make sense of Ellen Ash’s words—her
reflections on Poet and Poem, she believes the failure of communication to be all
her own.
How much more fortunate are the three questing feminist readers of later
decades: they understand the necessity of seeing texts through “fresh eyes,” of
resisting the male gaze that blinds “poor old Beatrice” to the truths of her
journaling subject (36). They possess the critical authority and tools to revisit old
texts, to re-name what had previously been known, and to recover lost voices and
buried stories. Supported by a community of like-minded scholars and well-
versed in the re-visionary reading strategies of that field, Maud Bailey, Leonora
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Stern, and Ariane Le Minier can engage much more productively with the journal
of Sabine de Kercoz because they are determinedly conscious readers. They know
to look for signs of a woman’s anger, her thwarted ambitions, her subtle
subversions. Trained to listen for other, muted voices, they strive to uncover
stories of young women struggling toward self-expression, quite probably because
such struggles mirror their own. The scenes of literary instruction between Sabine
and her cousin, the poet Christabel LaMotte, are rife with conflict and desire,
demanding the notice of the feminist reader. And yet what remains unseen, what
is too easily overlooked in the readings they perform, is the role of romance: in the
novel’s primary plot, in the writer’s account of her mentoring, in their own stories
of becoming.
The oversight is a reasonable one, a consequence of literary lessons well-
learned, for every female critic knows that romance is a dangerous territory for
“serious” readers. While Ellen Ash may wax about the “desire of all reading
women” and Christabel LaMotte may convince her cousin that “romance is a
proper form for women,” Beatrice Nest and the feminist readers after her know
better. Well-acquainted with the master narrative told about the romance reader—
her penchant for pleasure and withdrawal, they view her less as a fellow reader
with whom they might identify than as a foil for their own critical identities. Too
excessive and emotive a form for the androcentric female critic, the romance poses
even greater problems for the feminist critic, whose practice is shaped by a raised
consciousness. It is the romance reader, after all, who is most likely to lose herself
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in her reading; enslaved by narratives that lead inevitably back to men, she is
equally incapable of maintaining the proper (critical) distance. Indeed, the solitary
practice of romance reading, its association with escape and unconscious
identifications, is viewed as a rather dangerous practice, and one that is
diametrically opposed to the avowedly conscious and collective readings of the
feminist critic.
If, however, we set aside the highly seductive and authoritative accounts of
the feminist reader and her romance-loving alter ego and attend to the lost voices
and buried wisdom of the private journals tended by our critical readers, we find
there are other stories to tell. Ellen Ash does indeed read LaMotte’s romance in
isolation, but her thoughts are of other reading women and the desires they share in
common—a preoccupation that aligns her not only with LaMotte but with the
feminist reader who would shun her practice. Remembering a long-forgotten
desire to be both Poet and Poem, this romance reader evokes a lost story about
romance-reading and feminine narcissism—the way in which reading romance
feeds a narcissistic desire to be both subject and object, reader and read, creator
and creation, lover and loved. It is a tale twice told by earlier critics of romance,
including George Eliot and Mary Wollstonecraft, but one that has passed into
oblivion with the advent of late twentieth century romance scholarship. And yet
with the many feminist revisions of Freud’s theory of feminine narcissism, the
story of romance reading and vanity takes on a markedly different aspect. This
dissertation attempts not only to recover but to recuperate that lost tale,
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demonstrating that the desire of all women readers, and especially feminist
readers, is to be both Poet and Poem—to (re)create themselves through the mirror
of romance.
Equally suggestive is the muted dialogue about romance between LaMotte
and her young cousin, which echoes the earlier discussions within and around
romance in the 17th and 18th centuries, and raises important questions about the
conversational possibilities of a form associated most recently with solitary
reading and regression. Determined to recover yet another lost story about the
nature of romance reading, I will argue, with the poet, that romance is a uniquely
accommodating form, one “where women can be free to express their true
natures,” begin conversations that promote communal feeling and critical
awareness. Because one romance narrative always seems to beget another—
encouraging conversation, analysis, and desire between women, it provides a
unique opportunity for connection, self-transformation, and the “raised”
consciousness we most often associate with early second-wave feminism. It is a
collective voice, after all, that romance writers Linda Barlow and Jayne Ann
Krentz attribute to their form, a voice so well-known and beloved that their
readers’ “voices ring out, through [them], as strongly as [their] own” (28).
Touting a genre where “our lips speak together” and the voice of the silenced other
rings through, LaMotte and her real-life counterparts suggest that romance is more
than just a “proper form for women” readers, it’s a promising form (for) becoming
a feminist reader.
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And this, precisely, is the dirty little secret of feminist criticism. For what
remains untold in the field’s official histories is that romance lies at the heart of
feminist literary criticism. Because “history” is a narrative concerned most
frequently with the representation of public or collective events, the personal
reading histories of feminist critics are often ignored. Yet these submerged stories
are highly suggestive: many of the readers who invented the field of feminist
criticism first experienced their love for reading within the pages of romance, and
even those who claim they never liked the form cannot help but be written by it;
like the androcentric and feminist critics who are caught within the web of Byatf s
o
romance, they are inscribed by, and implicated within, its narrative structure.
Indeed, if we view the history of the feminist reader as a story of self
transformation, it becomes clear that the feminist critic’s escape is impossible,
since self-transformation for the female reader has always depended on romance.
The story of feminist reading is a tale where a woman’s quest for identity,
knowledge, and sexual-political power is paramount, and where her adventurous
inquiries lead her farther into the vaguely menacing structures of patriarchy.
Feminist criticism’s readers are seduced and strengthened by its ego-enhancing
effects, its promotion of identification and desire, and in this they are not unlike
the readers of romance. That feminist readers would repress their romance-
reading histories, however, makes a great deal of sense when one considers the
8 Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey, paraphrasing Stevi Jackson in their introduction to Romance
Revisited, claim the discourse of romance is “one of the most compelling by which any one o f us is
inscribed; throughout the world there are cultures in which individuals are educated in the
‘narratives of romance’ from such an early age that there is little hope o f immunity” (12).
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romance reader’s reputation as a highly impressionable, emotional reader;
(obvious) affect has no place in literary criticism, especially when the critic is
writing from a gendered position that has long been associated with the “non-
rational” or “passionate.” Owning one’s romance reading past became even more
difficult when critics began codifying their interpretive practices through
metaphors like re-vision and resisting readers—strategies that were meant to make
possible conscious engagements with the texts that “oppress” female readers. And
yet the romance—a story of love and conflict—does, in many ways, drive the
practice of feminist criticism, from the “blissful” beginnings that animated the
collective endeavors of early second wave feminism, to the preoccupation with
love and egoism, to the “lovers’ quarrels” that erupt over the choices made by
woman-identified critics concerning interpretive models, authors, genres, and
texts.9 Ellen Moers has argued that “it is the feminists who have written most
urgently and insistently about love” (146), and that very urgency should raise
questions about the shadow histories of feminist readers. In placing the romance
reader under the glass and exploring her taboo text, feminist critics of romance
have probably come closest to exposing the dark corner of the field’s collective
unconscious. Following them down the wayward path of romance scholarship, I
hope to bring the two histories together, to show that the researcher’s glass is, in
9 When feminists critics recall the early moments of their collective history, they often do so with
surprisingly Romantic language: writing of the “salad days of feminist criticism,” Rachel
Brownstein avows, “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (299). “Bliss” characterizes these
beginnings for Sandra Gilbert as well (Madwoman xx), suggesting the euphoric pleasure we often
associate with the early stages of a romantic relationship.
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fact, a mirror, and to demonstrate that the true history of the feminist reader lies on
the other side of the looking glass.
Becoming a Feminist Reader
Most histories of Anglo-American feminist reading cite the introduction of
Adrienne Rich’s discourse-shaping trope “Re-vision” as feminist criticism’s
originary moment (Miller “Decades” 44).1 0 A remarkably apt umbrella term for
the many conscious interpretive practices employed by feminist readers over the
last few decades, “Re-vision” has an almost religious resonance for feminist
critics: the term’s metaphorical richness, citational power, practical applicability,
and initiatory status are acknowledged (and augmented) every time a feminist
reader chooses to employ it in her writing. When it first captured the collective
feminist imagination in 1970, Re-vision was defined as a critical strategy of
revisiting male-authored texts, re-seeing the images of women presented, and re
naming what had previously been known. It later entailed the recovery of female
authors, the critique of male hermeneutical models, and the search for a female
1 0 In 1980, for instance, Sandra Gilbert was asked to represent the growing field of feminist literary
criticism for a special meeting of the Association of Departments o f English, and to provide an
answer to the question, “What Do Feminist Critics Want?” Addressing an audience full of
“chairmen” (29), she explained that “words beginning with the prefix re- have lately become
prominent in the language of feminist humanists, all of whom feel that, if feminism and humanism
are not to be mutually contradictory terms, we must return to the history of what is called Western
culture and reinterpret its central texts” (32). Nineteen years later Gilbert addressed an audience of
feminist literary scholars who had assembled to celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of The
Madwoman in the Attic. Here too she invoked the R-word, describing her experience of the field’s
earliest phase as one of “revisionary transport” (Gilbert and Gubar xx). In her essay “Decades,”
Nancy Miller first locates the beginning of feminist criticism with the publication of Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics (1970) and Mary Ellman’s Thinking About Women (1968), but observes in her
endnotes that her own personal history is at odds with that of “feminist criticism in English studies”
(44). She continues: “the Chicago MLA of 1970 is the scene of feminist criticism’s originary
event: a session sponsored by the Commission on the Status o f Women in the Profession (formed
in 1969) at which Adrienne Rich read “When We Dead Awaken” (44).
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essence that would help scholars to identify woman-centered themes, styles, forms,
and creativity. In its more recent incarnations, re-vision might describe the meta-
critical processes through which feminist critics examined the theories and
practices of their predecessors, attempting to bring a more precise and nuanced
understanding to their meaning-making enterprise. Yet despite the variation
between these practices, one can see in Rich’s original definition the inspiration
for all that came after. Presenting feminist readers with a blueprint for engaging
with the male-authored texts that diminish them, she writes:
Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of
entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women
more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until
we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we
cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for
women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of
the self-destructiveness of a male-dominated society. A radical
critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work
first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how
we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has
trapped as well as liberated us, and how we can begin to see and
name—and therefore live—afresh. [...] We need to know the
writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever
known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.
(537)
Rich’s language here is unabashedly polemical, charged with the conviction of the
insurgent class and the urgency of its mission. Women, she argues, cannot even
know themselves, so completely has patriarchy blinded them to the realities of
their situation; the images of women they must confront when reading deny their
perceptions, even their very existence. Identifying no “place” or role for the
female reader within the writing of men, Rich casts her as an ingenious David
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engaged in exegetical combat with the canon, patriarchy’s textual Goliath—an
oppositional stance that parallels the position of her counterparts in the women’s
movement. The reader’s “liberation” from the subtle forms of oppression found in
the literature she has been taught to revere and enjoy depends on reading with a
high degree of suspicion and imagination. Even more, it requires “doing violence”
to the language she loves, disavowing the identifications she has unwittingly been
making, fighting back to insure her survival.
So began feminist criticism’s preoccupation with the unconscious aspects
of the interpretive experience—the identifications readers make, questions of
control and impressionability in the dynamic between reader and text, pedagogical
possibilities and the potential for self-transformation. If androcentric women
readers are unconscious of the largely invisible influences of the male-authored
text, the feminist reader is one who attempts to resist such textual oppression, “and
by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcizing the male mind that has
been implanted in [her]” (Fetterley xxii).1 1 She gradually learns to read more self
1 1 In her immensely influential The Resisting Reader (1978), Judith Fetterley explores the female
reader’s encounters with male-authored texts and, like Rich, she attempts to instruct female readers
how they can become more conscious about their unconscious reading processes. Highlighting the
psychic damage experienced by the female student o f literature who is trained to deny her own
experiences, what and how she knows, in order to accept as universal the logical processes and
knowledges of men, she argues that a woman reading the texts of men is a woman divided against
herself. Fetterley explains the troubled relationship between the female reader and the literature
she consumes:
The major works of American fiction constitute a series of designs on the
female reader, all the more potent in their effect because they are
“impalpable.” [...] American literature is male. To read the canon of what
is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as
male. [...] In such fictions the female reader is co-opted into participation in
an experience from which she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify
with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to
identify against herself, (xi-xii)
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consciously, that is, “as a woman,” to notice her absence within (and in relation to)
the text, and to employ a range of re-visionary strategies in order to honor her own
experience and perspective. Recuperating the works of rejected or forgotten
women writers helps her achieve a new (non-resistant) relationship to literature,
one where she might engage more fully, achieve a greater intimacy with text
because she doesn’t have to fight its inaccurate and demeaning representations.
Rather, she is invited to identify with the female protagonist, establishing a textual
connection that enables self-love, self-examination, and self-transformation (the
very stuff of a successful consciousness-raising session). When critiquing a text,
the feminist critic often relies on her own experiential knowledge (or that of her
“sisters” in another era), reading with an eye towards character and plot, then
judging whether or not they succeed in depicting women’s lives and feelings
faithfully. She develops additional re-visionary strategies for dealing with
women’s texts, looking for submerged plots and subversive stories that cannot be
expressed openly in the author’s repressive culture, for a “double-voiced
discourse” that features both hegemonic and muted meanings, for “extravagant”
narrative acts and “italicized” expression that speak to a woman’s culturally
Significantly, these male-authored texts are possessed of such a strong subjective agency that they
not only have “designs” on the female reader, but are capable of instilling in that reader a feeling of
“powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self’ (xiii). Indeed, so
unconscious are most female readers of the male perspective that shapes the questions and
assumptions they bring to the interpretive act, they fail to even question the misogynistic
representations they encounter there. The answer, argues Fetterley, is for feminist readers to take a
consciously oppositional or “resistant” position in relation to these works. To “dis-identify” or
refuse identifications with the images of women encountered in male works is to enact greater
interpretive agency and locate a psychologically “comfortable” position vis-a-vis the text.
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• • • • 12 *
“implausible” ambitions. Equally important are the self-reflexive critiques of the
feminist reader, as she re-evaluates the key assumptions, questions and models of
her field through various critical theories, including deconstruction,
• • • I T • •
postcolonialism, and new historicism. Indeed, with every re-visionary tool the
feminist reader adds to her cache, she steadily gains more interpretive agency—
choosing to read with or against the grain, and taking a greater degree of control in
the dialectic between reader and text. And while she may acknowledge that her
unconscious will always play a role in her reading process, she confidently
1 2 An attention to the instability of language was common among feminist critics in the 1980s,
including Elaine Showalter who advises feminist readers to look for a “double-voiced discourse”
that featured both dominant and muted meanings or stories (“Wilderness” 266); other critics
highlight the fragmentation o f narration and the mingling of genres as typically feminine, while
others point to narrative temporality and discontinuity. Bonnie Zimmerman, for instance, claims
that “lesbian literature is characterized by the use of the continuous present, unconventional
grammar, and neologism” (213), while Barbara Smith points to a refusal to be linear” in “innately
lesbian literature” (175). Nancy Miller’s “Emphasis Added” (1981) borrows from structuralist
Gerard Genette and Freud to construct a poetics defined by the narrative “implausibilities” in
literature by women. Focusing on thematic elements that defy what Genette would term
vraisemblance (“plausibility”) and bienseance (“propriety”) in women’s novels, Miller is able to
read a heroine’s plot against the social mores and expectations of a particular place and moment in
time (thereby avoiding any universalizing claims), and to identify the narrative acts that would
seem “extravagant” to the author’s readers (36). She also revises Freud’s argument concerning
women’s fantasies, ceding to the woman writer wishes that are ambitious as well as erotic and
arguing that more egoistic desires would manifest themselves in the work as “an impulse to power”
(41). Because such an impulse would be “implausible” in the mind of most contemporary readers,
it would have to be registered in a different quality of voice— one of repetition and emphasis, a sort
of “italicization” that would mark its departure from the norm (38).
1 3 A powerful desire for visibility and autonomy spurred on the earlier re-visionary readings of
(predominantly) white feminists, but by the early 1980s their methods were being turned upon their
own writings by marginalized feminists, a process of methodological critique that continues to this
day. For women of color and lesbians, that visibility was more easily achieved through
autonomous movements and critical schools than through the dominant force of white feminism.
These autonomous fields proliferated in the mid to late 1980s, when Chicana, Asian-American, and
Native American feminists such as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Norma Alarcon, Amy Ling, and
Paula Gunn Allen began to publish work on their respective traditions. Central to the experience of
all of these critics are the painful negotiations required between deeply felt ties to their ethnic
communities and their commitments to feminism and scholarship. While their criticism may have
evolved from political contexts similar to those of white feminists, and their collective recoveries
as (parallel) first steps toward a coherent form of criticism, these scholars made it impossible to
ignore that the key issue for feminism in the future would not be relegated to the difference
between men and women but that the acutely felt differences within feminism itself required our
attention.
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believes her critical practices will save her from the hermeneutic hazards of the
more impressionable reader.
Bemoaning the Romance Reader
Indeed, one might well argue that the feminist reader’s perception of her
semeiological self is defined as much against this impressionable female reader as
it is against the male reader. Hence her long-abiding interest in that most
ridiculous of all impressionable readers: the reader of romance. Branded since the
1660s when Nicolas Boileau first attacked French romance (Ross 2), scorned in
the eighteenth century by a host of literary critics, including Mary Wollstonecraft,
mocked as the devotee of “silly novels” by George Eliot in the nineteenth century,
and examined with much critical ado in the twentieth, the romance reader has long
been an object of fascination for those concerned with the dangers of reading for
pleasure. Strong speculation about the romance reader’s moral and intellectual
malaise made for a well-developed master narrative by the early eighteenth
century, so when the discourse of liberal feminism first emerged in the
revolutionary era, proponents of female equality chose to work within rather than
against the parameters of that master narrative. Wollstonecraft’s polemical views
on the perils of “flimsy” novels are well-known to readers of A Vindication o f the
Rights o f Woman, a seminal work in the history of feminist criticism and an
important legacy for the feminist plot within the official history of romance
reading. It is in her much livelier essays for the Analytical Review that her most
vivid images for romance reading emerge, the most prominent of which is the web
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as metaphor for the romance form. Describing the sentimental novel Edward and
Harriet, or the Happy Recovery as a “heterogeneous mass of folly” (Contributions
207), Wollstonecraft suggests here (and in numerous other pieces) that the
conventions of the romance form will invariably ensnare the unconscious reader in
a web of fantasy, irrationality, and vanity. This metaphor occurs frequently in the
criticism and fiction of George Eliot as well, emerging in an early essay “Women
in France” (68), as Hetty Sorrel’s “web of folly and vain hopes” (295) in Adam
Bede, as Maggie’s “web of fantasy” in The Mill on the Floss (494), and as an
epigraph to the chapter “Maidens Choosing” in Daniel Deronda, alluding to “ideal
webs of innovation” (278).1 4 Associated most frequently with the fancy and the
act of fantasizing, the web metaphor in Wollstonecraft and Eliot’s writing suggests
that careless readers will get “caught” by the gossamer threads of romantic
illusion, obscuring their view of reality and others, and “enfolding” them in a
narcissistic haze that alienates them from duty and family. It is no small
coincidence that both writers were accepted into the leading (male) intellectual
circles of their time, nor that each earned a reputation as a “special woman”—an
identity that depended to some degree on establishing her difference from her silly-
novel-reading sisters. The figure of the special woman is another important legacy
1 4 Eliot’s description of Hetty as she fantasizes about her future with Arthur Donnithorne is worth
considering closely, for it expresses beautifully the idea of a woman enfolding herself in the vague
and perilous promises of romance. Hetty is presented as “a woman spinning in ignorance a light
web of folly and vain hopes which may one day close round her and press upon her, a rancorous
poisoned garment, changing all at once her fluttering, trivial butterfly sensations into a life o f deep
human anguish” (AB 295). Invoking the death o f Medea’s rival, Eliot implies that the magic of
romance (and our ideals about love and marriage) can prove deadly. And while Hetty may not be a
novel reader, she is consumed by her thoughts of love, and Eliot takes great pains to employ
images suggestive of false chivalry and romance whenever Hetty and Arthur meet.
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in the tradition of feminists reading romance, for “she” remains a singular and
spectral identity the feminist reader must embrace and/or resist, a choice that
inevitably shapes her perspective on the act of romance reading.
While they ultimately sought to establish an intellectual community apart
from men, such “special women” as early second wave radical feminist critics
Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Adrienne Rich also imagined a reader
ensnared by cultural myths about love and romance. Lacking the critical
perspective and practices that “raise” her consciousness, this reader is blinded by
romance, “a cultural tool of male power” [that] keep[s] women from knowing their
conditions” (Firestone 139). Kate Millett expressed concern as well about this
vehicle for false consciousness, claiming in Sexual Politics that courtly and
romantic love works both as a “palliative to the injustice of woman’s social
position” and as a “technique for disguising it” (37). Subsequent critics of
romance (Jan Cohn, Tania Modleski, Leslie Rabine, Janice Radway, Lillian
Robinson, Ann Barr Snitow, et al) followed their predecessors in observing the
form’s complicity with the institutions of patriarchy and the largely unconscious
identifications made by romance readers, but they also took the needs and desires
of these readers seriously and examined why these texts should prove so
compelling. Flighlighting moments in the narrative where the heroine’s
experiences speak to readers’ longing for nurturing and recognition, these critics
argued that romances not only worked to soothe the anxieties and ambivalences of
a subordinate class but that the subtext of romance even allowed for the fleeting
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and vicarious pleasures of revenge on, or resistance to, the male oppressor. With
the discursive constraints loosened by these dissenting critics, romance critics (e.g.
Cora Kaplan and Michelle Masse) were free to explore the possibility that
romance readers’ identifications might not lead inexorably to their subjection.
More recently, a new generation of romance scholars have taken issue with the
critiques of their feminist forbears, aligning themselves with the vast majority of
romance writers and arguing that readers have a great deal of control over the text
and are not at all as impressionable as critics of the form have believed.1 5 Yet
despite the disagreement between critics over time (and at any given moment), one
thing remains clear: feminists wishing to write about romance must engage with
the question of textual control. To wit, is the romance reader a slave to the text or
does she seek her narrative pleasure with a keen awareness of the form’s
limitations? Clearly, the individual observer’s proximity to the romance reader—
whether she herself is one, or writes for one, or examines one solely for research
purposes—has everything to do with the way the consciousness in question is
perceived and discussed; it is no surprise to find that those analysts who can move
most fluidly between observer and participant offer the most complex take on the
1 5 Romance writers are particularly vocal about their readers’ conscious engagements with text,
arguing they are not only very clear about what they want from romance (a testament to their
powers of discrimination) but are, “for the time it takes to read one, in charge of their own
destinies” (Estrada 42). Similarly, Lynn Coddington— a feminist sociologist who is also a romance
writer— ponders the charges of an earlier generation of scholars who relegated the romance reader
to the “blind corridors of unwitting social reproduction and false consciousness” (59); pointing to
the work of Janice Radway, Tania Modleski, and Kay Mussell, she refutes the idea of a
“dysfunctional literacy” around romance, and the development o f reading behaviors that “negate
personal control and critical, informed, rational engagement with one’s world” (59).
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romance reading process.1 6 And while more recent feminist scholars, and romance
writers and readers, may depart from their critical predecessors in claiming the act
of reading romance entails some degree of control, they all tend to speak of
unconscious processes—explicitly or otherwise.
For, significantly, the language and metaphors readers use often echo those
of feminist critics who assume a loss of hermeneutic control; Dot Evans, Radway’s
“native informant” in her Smithton ethnography, might be channeling Mary
Wollstonecraft (who refers repeatedly to the “intoxicating” effects of novel
reading) when she observes “romance novels provide escape just as Darvon and
alcohol do for other women” (qtd. in Radway 88). Addiction analogies are often
made (Radway 62), reinforcing perceptions of a reader who is not in full
possession of her faculties. Romance writers also imply a certain reflexivity when
they discuss their readers’ experiences, and this despite their protestations.
Discussing the conventions of their form, Linda Barlow and Jayne Ann Krentz
write:
In our genre (and in others, we believe), stock phrases and literary
figures are regularly used to evoke emotion. This is not well
understood by critics of these genres. Romance readers have a
keyed-in response to certain words and phrases (the sardonic lift of
the eyebrows, the thundering of the heart, the penetrating glance,
the low murmur or sigh). (21)
1 6 In her study of “slash” fandom, Constance Penley ponders her role in relation to the readers and
writers o f zines that feature Star Trek characters Kirk and Spock in pornographic romance
scenarios: “was I going to the conference as a fan, even perhaps a potential writer o f K/S stories, a
voyeur o f a fascinating subculture, or a feminist academic and critic? [...] I finally decided I was
all three, a fan, a feminist critic, and perhaps inescapably, a voyeur [. ..] an interesting position in
itself, since the voyeur is always far more implicated in the scene than the fantasy of observation at
a distance acknowledges” (484). She later observes that she didn’t feel so much as if she were
analyzing the fans as “thinking along with them” (485).
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This “keyed in response” sounds suspiciously like an internalized or unconsciously
emotional reaction to the text, and the frequency with which readers themselves
discuss feeling with the heroine suggests that if they are not (con)scripted they are
• 17 . . .
at least (inscribed by the narratives they encounter. One participant in
Radway’s study, Maureen, makes this observation about her relationship to a text
that features the heroine’s rape: “I could not handle that in my own life. And
since I’m living as the heroine, I cannot handle it in a book. And I hate myself for
reading them. But if I start it, I have to get myself out of there, so I have to read
my way out” (69). When questioned by the interviewer about the necessity of
finishing, Maureen responds, “Yes, I have to finish it. Even if it’s only skimming,
one word per page—or sometimes I just read the ending. I have to finish it. But it
leaves a bad taste in my mouth forever” (69). Referring to a complex
identificatory relationship that speaks to a merger of minds where the reader is
both very much present and at the mercy of the text, this dialogue suggests that
while the romance reader may not be the cultural dupe early second wave
feminists suspected, she cannot avoid getting “caught up in” the web of romance.
Even when the reader finds the action repellent, as Maureen does, her sense of
“living as the heroine” precludes a clean escape.
1 7 Radway observes that the gothic novelist Phyllis Whitney “understands that women [...] project
themselves into the story by identifying with the heroine” (69), a phenomenon that suggests a loss
of self. This is also implicit in Dot Evans’s remarks about her readers’ “out of body” experiences:
distinguishing between men’s self-consciousness and the romance reader’s absorption, Evans
observes, “they are always consciously aware of where they are [. ..] but a woman in a book isn’t”
(91). While Radway reads this as evidence of the reader’s “high level of attention” (91), I think it
might also be read as a moment of abandon.
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Not surprisingly, assumptions about the inevitability of a female reader’s
identification with the romantic heroine remain central to the master narrative
about romance reading, and most scholarly discussions about romance in the
1980s took this as a given, informed as they were by two highly influential works
of object-relations theory (e.g. Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction o f Mothering
1 8
and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice). Their assumption is shared by the
majority of romance readers and writers, although when non-scholarly enthusiasts
discuss identification they treat it as a comparatively uncomplicated process,
pointing to the reader’s desire to find both herself and her ideal in the heroine she
meets.1 9 Discussing the compelling attraction of identifying with a heroine,
Rachel Brownstein writes:
1 8 As noted previously, a few romance scholars emerging in the late 1980s and 1990s discovered
another way to give the reader a bit more identificatory latitude, turning back to the models of
Freud and Laplanche and Pontalis— a step that would have been censured in the late 1960s and
early 1970s but one that seemed to give the reader more (unconscious) freedom. Cora Kaplan and
Michelle Masse both use Freud’s essay “A Child is Being Beaten” (1919) and Laplanche and
Pontalis’s “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” (1968) to explore the “structure of fantasy,” and
within this structure they find considerably more “play” than had previously been imagined.
Because the figures or participants in the fantasy scenario are subordinate to the scene itself (are
really mere functions within it), readers might identify with the heroine or the hero or the fantasy
scene itself; they might assume a masochistic role, or a sadistic role, or a spectator role, or even all
three at different points while reading. Their work parallels that of Elizabeth Cowie and Teresa de
Lauretis in film theory; these critics sought to locate other possible pleasures for the female viewer
besides the masochistic identifications discussed by Laura Mulvey, and they did so by recuperating
Freud vis-a-vis Laplanche and Pontalis. Jackie Stacey’s qualitative study of movie-goers in the
1940s also depends on these psychoanalytic models, but she introduces a new term to the critical
conversation: fascination. Perceiving in the responses of the film fans a longing not only to be like
their favorite star but also a desire to have her, Stacey argues that desire plays as much of a role in
such relationships as identification. Regretting that most critics o f romance (and other popular
forms) tend to ignore feminist film critics’ studies of female spectatorship, Constance Penley
discusses the influence of Chodorow’s model in “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of
Popular Culture.” One possibility for Chodorow’s shaping influence is that the earlier critics of
romance wished to emphasize specifically feminist revisions of Freudian theory, rather than
reifying the models of patriarchal psychology.
1 9 Critics of the romance have assumed that female readers cannot help but identify with the heroine
since the seventeenth century, as one might gather from the way anti-romances of the next century
like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote could take as a given a young reader’s
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the subtler fantasy the English novelists nourish is hard to repudiate
or shake: the inclination to see oneself as a heroine. Thinking one’s
story over and seeing its pattern, discerning in that the meaning of
one’s integral self, is an exquisitely self-defeating mode of claiming
mixed literary and moral distinctiveness—of becoming a heroine—
that continues to be tempting. The traditional heroine-centered
novel can be faulted, I suppose, for persuading susceptible readers
to look at their own lives as if they were novels, and see themselves
as unseen, unsung heroines, heroines by virtue of their keen eyes
and ears and understandings. (140)
Because the heroine’s thoughts and feelings are almost always present to the
reader of romance, and because the narrative world both inhabit is focalized
through this protagonist’s consciousness, the reader cannot help but think of
herself as (“living as”) a heroine. Even more significantly, the heroine’s relentless
questioning mirrors the reader’s own interpretive work, reinforcing the sense of
two consciousnesses in alignment. Furthermore, as a figure who represents both
the real and ideal, the heroine is the perfect identificatory object—a faultless
object of (the reader’s) narcissistic desire. Is it any wonder that the heroine’s
discovery of her plot should move the reader to desire her own coherent tale of
heroic becoming? Accompanying the heroine on her path of narrative
impressionability. Two hundred and fifty years later, most of the writers contributing to Writing
Romances: A Handbook by the Romance Writers o f America discuss the importance of a heroine
with whom the reader can identify at length, and while none o f them define that process explicitly,
their instructions to would-be writers imply the importance o f representing the real and ideal
woman through the figure of the heroine. See in particular Rita Clay Estrada (43), Helen
Mittermeyer (55, 57), Jude Devereaux (119-20), and Janet Dailey (186-87). The confluence of the
real and ideal in identification is discussed in much greater depth by Rachel Brownstein, who
synthesizes Freudian arguments about identification and narcissism with particular lucidity.
2 0 Describing the heroines she creates, romance writer Helen Mittermeyer explains, “these are the
women I write about and believe in because I want to be one” (Writing Romances 57). The heroine
must seem enough like and unlike her readers to prompt their identifications with her, and this can
only be achieved by striking a balance between the nonexistent ideal and the all-too-familiar real.
Theorizing the paradoxical nature of the romantic heroine, Rachel Brownstein observes, “The
novel heroine is both a representation (a girl trembling on the brink o f a sexual and moral decision)
and a metaphor (for an erotic-moral-aesthetic-psychological ideal). She is not only a believable
image o f a person but also the image of an ideal” (xxii).
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construction, and accustomed to seeking patterns in literature, the reader is bound
to begin seeking patterns in her own life. For this reason, contemporary critics of
romance have paid particular attention to the romance heroine’s plot, analyzing the
nature of its conflict and resolution and crafting a peculiarly feminist her-story of
romance reading.
The heroine’s plot is recognized as a quest no less determined than the plot
of the chivalric knight, for while the heroine herself may be unaware of her steady
movement toward love and marriage (and an altered identity through that union),
every reader who seeks her company knows she is struggling toward the discovery
21
of everlasting love and a “new sexual self-consciousness” (Cohn 21). Driven by
conflicts that are predominantly romantic and/or sexual, the heroine’s quest for
love is a source of anxiety for most feminist readers in part because the plot is not
hers alone; the omnipresent one-on-one relationship between the heroine and hero
leaves little room for the goals and ambitions they value most. That the heroine’s
adventures are rather limited in scope seems to bother few true lovers of romance,
a point Jayne Ann Krentz makes abundantly clear when she attempts to define the
genre by what it is not.
2 1 While traditionally the dance o f seduction is the most common form o f opposition, there are
additional mechanisms for prolonging the sense of delay, including repeated misunderstandings
between the lovers. Romance writers are well aware of the need for obstacles in plotting, and the
general rule of thumb seems to be the more internal or psychological the conflict, the more
emotionally satisfying the resolution will be for readers (Barlow Writing Romances 112).
Common obstacles that must be overcome by the lovers are pride and class snobbery, philosophical
differences, conflicting goals, misunderstandings caused by jealousy, and romantic delusions or
unrealistic expectations. Least satisfying for readers are the love triangles that involve other men
or women and an early instance of forced sex that proves difficult to get past. The conflicts
introduced in the course of the narrative must, of course, be neatly resolved at the novel’s close
(and this is where the romance novel fails, quite frequently), for the most important element o f an
“ideal romance” according to Radway’s readers is the happy ending (67).
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A romance novel plot does not focus on women coping with
contemporary social problems and issues. It does not focus on the
importance of female bonding. It does not focus on adventure. A
romance novel may incorporate any or all of these elements in its
plot, but they are never the primary focus of the story. In a
romance novel, the relationship between the hero and the heroine is
the plot. (108)
For romance writers and their most passionate readers apparently, the intellectual
and emotional force of the heroine (and her hero) must be directed almost
completely toward one another—a “libidinally conservative” arrangement that
enhances the conflict they will engage in through most of the novel. But for
feminist critics, this not only reinforces heterosexism, encouraging women to put
men at the center of their lives, it provides identifying readers with no other
possibility for growth or self-transformation. Misdirecting or thwarting the other
ambitions women might otherwise harbor, romances celebrate the appropriation of
power through heterosexual marriage; rather than seeking her fortune and striving
for equality in the public sphere, the heroine is content to settle for a marriage of
(apparent) equals after domesticating her sexually-adventurous and financially
powerful antagonist (Cohn 21-35). Candy-coating the heroine’s lack of power and
selflessness, the narrative teaches women they should strive to repudiate their own
desires (Brownstein 186, Modleski 48-49); only through self-effacement and
repression can women realize their goals. Because the romance narrative largely
depends on the heroine’s lack of self-awareness concerning her own desire, the
reader learns that such ignorance works to her benefit. Lest we present too one
sided a picture however, it is important to note that more positive aspects of the
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romance reader’s unconscious identification with the heroine have also been
documented in the feminist history of romance reading. Rather than taking the
romance narrative at face value, critics have mined the subtext and found a latent
desire for power (Cohn 3-5), the capacity for resistance (Light 22), and a secret
yearning for revenge (Modleski 45-8). Less subversively perhaps, romance
reading provides a temporary escape from the boredom and chaos of a wife and
mother’s life, feeding the reader’s desire for recognition and affirmation and
endorsing her choices, especially in those plots that showcase the heroine’s
nurturing skills. Moreover, the reader who feels “with” her heroine is likely to
experience a vicarious sexual thrill, a form of autoeroticism that has been
comprehensively treated by Ann Barr Snitow. Yet whatever form of selfhood is
constructed within and through the romance narrative, the transformative
experience of the heroine (and her identifying reader) depends upon the
heterosexual dyad: without it, “she’s” nothing.
Small wonder, then, that feminist critics should view the official story of
the romance reader as incompatible with their own history of becoming: dependent
upon what might be termed a “libidinally conservative dyad,” the trajectory
tendered by romance is a path of regressive ambitions and limited desire and of
limited intersubjective focus and emotional energy. Because the one-on-one
heterosexual union requires the lion’s share of the would-be heroine’s affect and
• 22
attention, there is little left over for the development of communal feeling.
2 2 At first glance, the heterosexual union seems a simple (re)solution , for the limited emotional
focus seems to promise the heroine and her identifying reader recognition and the conservation of
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Presenting a heroine who is singular among women, the romance encourages an
individualist orientation, one that works against class-consciousness or
community-building or even friendship among women.2 3 And if any one element
is central to feminist criticism’s collective history, it is the much-vaunted
affectionate bond between women that fueled feminist activism and scholarship.
How could a woman-centered history of collective reading be reconciled with the
story of a reader whose desire for “private time” not only ensures her isolation
from other women but soothes the ambivalences that promote a desire for change?
Promoting “escape” rather than the sort of focused engagement valued by the
feminist reader, romance reading encourages a decidedly passive approach to
interpretation. The problem of a “raised consciousness” (or lack thereof) for
feminist critics of romance reading is similarly thorny; neither the heroine nor her
reader interrogates her movement toward a troubling resolution, and the latter’s
tendency to get “caught up” in the “web of romance” suggests a lack of
interpretive freedom that is unthinkable for the feminist critic. Yet despite the
apparent incompatibilities of the two master narratives about romance reading and
feminist criticism, this particular feminist critic wishes to argue they are one in the
same: indeed, if “one is not born but rather becomes a feminist reader,” one of the
surest paths she can take is that of the reader of romance.
sorely needed female energies. And yet, as many feminist scholars have argued, for most women
in such relationships, this seldom turns out to be the case, as they tend to assume more
responsibility for the bond of intimacy.
2 3 Lynne Harne and Elaine Hutton, whose essays are featured in Hutton’s anthology Beyond Sex
and Romance?: The Politics o f Contemporary Lesbian Fiction, offer an interesting spin on the idea
that romance undermines communal relationships between women: both regret that an emphasis on
romantic love between lesbian partners has worked (in Harne’s words) “against women’s
autonomy and the sustaining o f feminist movements” (125). See also Hutton (175).
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Romance and Revisionist History
As the many various memoirs and essays of feminist readers suggest, the
master narrative of feminist criticism begins rather too late, suppressing many
critics’ humble origins as readers (and “writers”) of romance. Numerous feminist
readers (who are, significantly, romance scholars) admit to being romance readers
in their youth: Rachel Brownstein, Alison Light, Tania Modleski, Lilian Robinson,
Helen Taylor, and Judith Wilt to name a few. More surprising, perhaps, are the
more censorious critics of romance like Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot
whose letters reveal them to have been avid romance readers as young girls. Still
other feminist readers remain “closeted” fans of romance, as academic feminist
turned romance writer Jennifer Crusie Smith observes of the many “professors
who would come up to [her] after [she’d] speak on romance and whisper that they
read them, too. Some of these women had tenure, and they were still afraid to
come out of the closet.” And if the “closets” of countless other feminist readers
appear consistently “cob-web” free, one might well question the urgency with
which they denounce the romance form. Compelled to dismiss the romance reader
as a victim of false consciousness or unwitting complicity, feminist readers may,
in fact, be trying to deny a core aspect of collective self. Inscribed by the
discourse of romance no less than their romance reading sisters, many feminist
critics have been forced to acknowledge that the web of romance is inescapable,
and those who persist in denying their involvement inevitably reveal themselves to
be nonetheless enmeshed. Consider Wollstonecraft’s critical review of Louis and
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Nina, or an Excursion to Yverdun, one of the era’s many lackluster imitations o f A
Sentimental Journey.
In these most dismal tales, sentimental to the very marrow, the
tender feelings are torn to tatters, and the shreds vain gloriously
displayed. Sudden death, everlasting love, methodical madness,
bad weather, a breaking heart, putrid body, worn out night cap, etc.
etc. Nothing but sentiment! the finely fashioned nerves vibrate to
every touch - Alas poor Yorick! If an earthly wight could punish
thee for having, in the mere wantonness of unbridled vanity,
scattered unseemly weeds amongst the sweet flowers genius had
culled, thou wouldst be condemned to review all the sentimental
wire-drawn imitations of thy original interesting pages - not a dash
shouldst thou be allowed to pass over, without measuring it with
thine eyes. In sober sadness lost, we might then listen in vain for
the magic transitions which bid us weep, and smile amidst our
tears” (Vol. VII, 222)
There is an obvious sense of play and enjoyment in Wollstonecraft’s mimicry, but
her imitation of the style of Louis and Nina itself reveals a writer so well-versed in
the generic tongue as to raise suspicions about the depth of her disdain. The
formal movements of the paragraph itself are highly suggestive: the cause/effect
linearity of the first sentence gives way to a long list of conventions that builds in
intensity, spewing forth a stream of sentiment that belies a punitive purpose.
Embodying the rhythms and pleasures and dangers endemic to the romance form,
Wollstonecraft’s paragraph makes apparent the mechanisms of self-seduction and
its dependence on familiar fantasy forms and repetition; it almost seems as if the
critic were carried away on the tumescent energy of enumeration. Caught up in
the very narrative she deplores, this highly influential feminist critic suggests the
discourse of romance is one that can sweep away the most determinedly resistant
of readers.
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Equally provocative is the way in which romance informs the field of
feminist criticism, not only in terms of the explanatory stories scholars tell of its
origins but also the manner in which it shapes their theories and practices and the
way they regard and engage one another. If feminist critics begin, to some degree,
as romance readers, it is little wonder their early collective experiences should
reflect, even (re)create that structure. Rachel Blau DuPlessis remembers the
“blissful” early moments of feminist criticism:
We were newly in love with women, with ourselves, with each
other, with our possibility for changing everything: marriage,
beauty, writing, media, law, opportunity, education, stereotypes, art,
history, childcare, sex divisions of labor. We thought all women
were us, and we were all women. Of course we knew better even
then, but wanted, I think, to share with all women the power of our
effervescent politicization. (101)
The “effervescent” solidarity that DuPlessis and many of her peers remember was
an effect of many converging energies: the general revolutionary spirit of the time,
the more particular optimism and vitality of the women’s movement, the absence
of any institutional support for feminist thought, and the (apparently) monolithic
power of “patriarchy,” which bred a keen oppositional awareness. It was also the
result of an uncommon connection, in which women turned from men to each
other, discovering a new sense of purpose, pleasure, and encouragement. As
DuPlessis suggests with the dramatically telling title of her retrospective piece,
“Reader, I Married Me,” in finding each other, second wave feminists had found
themselves, discovering a bond that met the most romantic of expectations, one
that provided both power and intimacy. Theirs was a bond that depended largely
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on identification, DuPlessis also intimates, and if individual feminists were
certainly aware of their differences, a Platonic desire to be one—to dissolve
boundaries and distinctions—nevertheless persisted. Such a “will-to-bliss” is the
very stuff of romance, and the history of feminist criticism does, in many ways,
mirror the romance as a story of love and conflict—an obstacle-ridden narrative
propelled by the promise of a happy ending where social change and individual
happiness are ensured (but not yet realized). Although it is a story of affection
between women, the spectre of man (and his institutional power) is never quite
absent, so the inevitable conflicts that drive any romance narrative derive quite
often in the history of feminist criticism from the choice one makes in answer to
the question “whom do you love?” To choose rightly, that is as a woman-
identified critic, has for many feminists in the past meant rejecting male models
for reading, male-authored texts, and male-centered plots; the romance, as a form
largely written by and for women about the quest for a man, consequently
becomes a vehicle around which emotional energies circulate with great intensity.
Feelings of rivalry and exclusion, exhilaration and hope, betrayal and anger,
invisibility and loss: the web of feeling about and within the dynamic structure of
romance is seldom discussed but well worth chronicling. Acknowledging the
powerful desires that fired and formed feminist theory and practice from the very
beginning allows for an illuminating disciplinary revision, a self-reflexive glimpse
into the field that contrasts markedly to the usual critiques and histories generated
by feminist readers.
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Re-examined through the lens of romance, many of the re-visionary
reading practices favored by feminist critics take on a rather different (and
surprisingly familiar) aspect.2 4 Defined by Adrienne Rich as an act of
imagination, revision is itself a decidedly romantic practice, generating a crucial
counter-narrative to the (male) hegemonic perspective women readers encounter in
much “realist” fiction. The subsequent identificatory reading practices, which
focus upon “women’s texts” (works by and about women) and derive from
consciousness-raising, might now be seen as reflections of a desire for (textual)
intimacy and recognition. Such desires are, of course, very familiar to the
2 4 If one were to invoke the imagery of chivalric romance instead of its less “disciplined”
descendent, one might argue that the relationship between feminist readers and their hermeneutical
goals resembles the quest adventures of knights, seeking to slay the patriarchal dragon (and, later,
to save the damsel in distress). Patriarchy was understood in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a
monstrously oppressive force, and the earliest feminist literary critics brought a radical sensibility
to their academic work, engaging fiercely with the canon and using their intellect and anger to
expose the masculinist perspective that dominates literature and oppresses female readers. Not
surprisingly, a sense o f Manichean opposition fired their sense of collective purpose and group
cohesion, as it informed their initial hermeneutic practices. Like the talismans of the questing
knight, the interpretive strategies of feminist critics made possible the discovery of hidden
meanings, the rescue of women (readers and writers), the prolonged battle (with a male-defined
canon and models for reading). Indeed, the field upon which feminist critics first made their claims
was one of strenuous conflict and revolutionary fervor, their triumphs nothing less than “act[s] of
survival” (Rich 537).
2 5 Differentiating between the “dialectic of control” imagined by the male reading theorists and the
reading relationship she sees evidenced in Adrienne Rich’s writing on Emily Dickinson, Patrocinio
Schweickert takes the latter as a template for her own model, which conceives of a non-
hierarchical, intersubjective relationship between reader and text. Unlike the earlier models of
feminist reading, which assumed a male-authored text and a female reader who needed to resist
subordinating her perspective to that of the text, encounters between female readers and female-
authored texts could become a process of mediation and an opportunity for connection (543).
Schweickert defines her intersubjective model in this way:
In the dialectic of communication informing the relationship between the
feminist reader and the female author/text, the central issue is not of control or
partition, but of managing the contradictory implications of the desire for
relationship (one must maintain a minimal distance from the other) and the desire
for intimacy, up to and including a symbiotic merger with the other. (544)
She then makes a point of distinguishing her model from that of Poulet (which also represents
reading as intimate and intersubjective) because his provokes both excitement and anxiety,
revealing her own underlying assumption: that the (reading) relationship between “women” will
not prompt the psychological distress the female reader has encountered elsewhere. It is an
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romance readers who cannot apparently help but become seduced by the texts they
encounter. Reading for “subtext” is a strategy that the romance reader and
feminist reader share; feminist critic Bridget Fowler (89) and romance writers
Krentz and Barlow (15) point to the hidden codes or subtexts to which their
readers become attuned. Because the pleasures of reading for subtext depend in
part on the knowledge that one sees what others cannot (be it the heroine who has
no knowledge of the hero’s love or the “patriarchal reader” who hasn’t the
perspectival edge of the feminist), the reading habit formed with one genre can be
transferred to the other by highlighting the pleasures of the reader’s ‘knowing”
position. Similarly, attention to a double-voiced discourse is not at all new to the
romance reader, who quickly learns to read (or read beneath) the glint in the hero’s
eye, his hard voice and thundering brow to recognize what he has not yet revealed.
Some feminist critics have already recognized the powers of discrimination
(Brownstein 36) and analysis that are enhanced by romance reading. Modleski,
for instance, discusses the “mystery of masculine motives” that consumes the
heroine and her reader, and while the heroine’s critical faculties are operating with
an aim to please, the analytical skills her identifying reader develops can be
redirected toward different ends. Consider as well the chivalric impulse
motivating much feminist critical writing: scholars discuss the importance of
erroneous assumption (and one shared by numerous feminist readers in the 1970s and 1980s), a
consequence, perhaps, of reading selectively. Schweickert’s insight early in the essay is worth
considering further; she writes, “for feminists, the question of how we read is inextricably linked
with the question of what we read” (532), and I believe this to be absolutely true. For to
understand the very real anxieties that might emerge in her utopian “dialectic of communication,”
we need only return to romance and the very real conflicts that erupted around it.
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“rescuing” women writers from obscurity or “saving” women readers from the
dangers of romance reading (or, conversely, from being labeled as cultural dupes).
And if one really wished to push the comparison, the feminist critic’s more
agonistic encounters—her choice to confront “oppressive” male text with
suspicion and to grapple with the dominant male models for reading—might be
compared to the antagonism between the hero and heroine of romance.2 6
Perceived anew through the gaze of this romancer, the textual engagements of the
feminist reader and her more “impressionable” double appear considerably less
incongruous. But an even more compelling likeness emerges if we continue along
the path of romance, seeking other stories and voices, and stepping behind the
looking glass to stand in the romance reader’s shoes.
For there is a hidden history of romance reading as well, a composite of
two submerged stories that reveals the unobvious resemblance between romance
readers and their feminist counterparts. The first story concerns the “lost”
connection between romance reading and feminine vanity established by Mary
Wollstonecraft and George Eliot. In their reviews of contemporary literature, both
critics saved their most scathing remarks for the sentimental and fashionable
novels written by other women, and one of their key concerns was the way
2 6 The choice to use male models for reading had its institutional advantages, certainly, but, for
many feminist literary critics who had turned their sights from the literature o f men, the question
that remained was whether they should (or could) similarly reject their theoretical models, assert a
fundamental methodological difference. A theoretical model “of woman bom,” it was suggested,
would valorize women’s experience and knowledge, dispense with the need to maintain ties to the
“malestream,” and, most importantly, perform an autonomous legitimizing function. Feminists
who were concerned with developing a hermeneutic model that would reflect their particular
experience were motivated by more than just a sense of gender and/or sexual difference; they were
often driven by differences of race, class, and sexual desire.
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romance reading heightened the vanity of women readers, reinforcing a
preoccupation with self and distancing women from more legitimate love objects.
Yet in more recent indictments of the form, this concern is largely absent; indeed,
when early second wave feminist critics like Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith
Firestone and Adrienne Rich discussed the association between love and egoism,
they regretted that women prioritized others over self, interrogating the masculinist
assumptions of psychoanalysis. And while their work in turn prompted
recuperative studies of romance, investigations into the unacknowledged
compensations of romance reading remain uninformed by their predecessors’
critical insights concerning romance and feminine narcissism. With the revised
tale told by feminist followers of Freud, feminine narcissism, and its “binding”
relationship with romance reading, can be explored differently. To that end, I will
explore the more recent story about egoism and love told by second wave
feminists (which largely ignores the role of romance reading) alongside the story
told by Eliot and Wollstonecraft, tracing significant metaphors to uncover the
more affirmative aspects of romancing the feminine ego.
Simone de Beauvoir was the first to draw a tacit connection between
women’s oppression and heterosexual romantic love, and it is perhaps no small
coincidence that her chapter on the “Women in Love” in The Second Sex is
preceded by a chapter on “The Narcissist.” Ten or so years later, radical feminists
like Shulamith Firestone, and Adrienne Rich drew a great deal of attention to
love’s function in veiling women’s oppression in marriage and motherhood. Intent
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upon putting love at the core of feminist critical conversation, Firestone makes the
case for a rigorous review of the discourse of romantic love in The Dialectic o f Sex
(1970):
A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a
political failure. For love, perhaps even more than childbearing, is
the pivot of women’s oppression today. [...] It is portrayed in
novels, even metaphysics, but in them it is described, or better, re
created, not analysed. Love has never been understood, though it
may have been fully experienced, and that experience
communicated. There is reason for this absence of analysis: women
and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the
very structure of culture. (121)
For Firestone, examining the functions of women and heterosexual love in
Western culture is the first step toward a radical refashioning of the institutions
that limit women’s freedoms. Marriage, upon close analysis, cannot sustain the
culture’s rosy projections; it rather reveals itself to be an ultimately unsatisfying
substitute for the public recognition and respect a woman desires but cannot obtain
in a sexist society. Longing to “realize herself through activity” in the public
sphere but rarely given the opportunity (132), a woman soon comprehends that it
is “easier to try for the recognition of one man than of many” (132). Most women,
Firestone argues, end up making this choice—giving up their greater ambitions for
economic dependence and the “validation] [of] their existence” one man can offer
(132). The romantic dyad, celebrated by novels, films, and metaphysics as the
source of true happiness and social acceptance, becomes a site of sacrifice for
women, for such a limited structure cannot possibly provide the self-supporting
vitality of the public recognitions they renounce.
4 6
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Adrienne Rich points as well to the arguably non-volitional “choice”
offered to women who are looking for their “way of being in the world” (540), and
she casts the sacrificial love demanded of them in opposition to the egotism of
men, suggesting the former feeds the latter in a parasitic fashion. Indeed the first
“revision” she argues must be made in “When We Dead Awaken” is to the
accepted definition of love:
The choice still seemed to be between ‘love’—womanly, maternal
love, altruistic love—a love defined and ruled by the weight of an
entire culture; and egotism—a force directed by men into creation,
achievement, ambition, often at the expense of others, but
justifiably so. For weren’t they men, and wasn’t that their destiny
as womanly selfless love was ours? We know now that the
alternatives are false—that the word ‘love’ itself is in need of re
vision. (547)
What is most interesting about her grammar in this passage, however, is that while
love and egotism are clearly opposed, their positions within similar clausal
structures reinforce one’s sense of their relatedness, their substitutability.2 7 The
(female) egoism that might be directed into (public) creation and ambition is
instead most frequently channeled into (private) spousal and maternal love, which
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In this equation, Rich inverts Freud’s argument in “On Narcissism” (1914) concerning the
manner in which each sex’s libido is distributed. He assumes a distinction between the ego- and
object-libidos, claiming that an intensification o f one necessarily depletes the other (although
whether the two energies are essentially different is open to question, as both Freud and his critics
suggest). While the same basic assumption underlies Rich’s claim as well, she rejects his schema’s
gender bias, offering a formula that accords more easily with historical realities. Freud claims that
the male ego-libido (or narcissistic energy) is redirected through “complete object-love” (554);
most women, on the other hand, tend to experience an “intensification o f the original narcissism”
(554), a trait that then attracts men who have “renounced part of their own narcissism” yet
unconsciously mourn the loss o f it (555). Essential to an individual’s self-regard, the narcissistic
libido is reinforced by “everything a person possesses or achieves” (560), including the love of
another person. Hence, the love of one can support, even feed, the egoism of the other. That Freud
could feel justified in attributing this peculiar function to men can only be explained by the
innumerable literary testaments to the great loves of the male species and a great deal o f projection.
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promise limited validation and a mediated or vicarious sense of achievement2 8
Acknowledging that such alternatives are false, she then suggests that women
might have it both ways, strike a balance between the egoism or self-enrichment
denied us and the love we’ve been primed to cultivate and desire: we need only
redefine what we mean by “love.” Firestone takes up this challenge,
differentiating between a narcissistic love that seeks to incorporate the other and a
love that is “physically wide-open to another,” one that is imagined as an
“exchange of selves” (121). Ideally, in such a relationship, one might discover
identificatory or narcissistic benefits (the validation provided by a self-mirroring
“other,” and the transformation promised by the self-modeling of an idealized
“other”) and provide the same to others by recognizing them as “like subjects.”
Rich’s conundrum—how to define love differently, seek a balance between
selflessness and egoism— might be solved (or so it seemed to early second wave
feminists) by the romance of feminism, where in loving other women, we could
also love ourselves.
2 8 While Rich characterizes womanly love as “altruistic,” and certainly the cultural ideal of such
love demands such selflessness, Firestone roundly refutes this characterization, following Freud’s
less developed insights in “On Narcissism” to argue that “love is the height of selfishness” (122).
She writes, “The initial attraction is based on a curious admiration [...] for the self-possession, the
integrated unity, of the other and a wish to become part of this Self in some way (today, read:
intrude or take over), to become important to in that psychic balance” (122-3). Love, then,
becomes a relationship through which “the self attempts to enrich itself through the absorption of
another being” (123). Jessica Benjamin concurs in Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995), arguing that
the “point Freud got right here was that women engage in ‘narcisstic’— that is, identificatory— love
when they love in a man the ideal self they would have wished to be” (58).
2 9 In Like Subjects, Love Objects, Benjamin describes this “exchange of selves” as an
“intersubjective relationship”— one where difference is acknowledged and integrated, “preserving
rather than assimilating different self-positions” (16).
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Still another possibility is suggested by the critics of romance who have
discussed the regressive elements of the romance form, bringing us closer to the
heart of the problem (and its potential solution). Rosalind Coward and Ann
Snitow have argued that romances promise the kind of pre-oedipal love that
dissolves ego boundaries, thereby infantalizing the reader (Coward 191, Snitow
143, 153-54). Their concern with what Freud and his followers have called
“primary narcissism”—a developmental stage theorist Jessica Benjamin equates
with identificatory love for the mother and the feelings of omnipotence and
grandiosity experienced by the developing child (71, 89), might be viewed in a
considerably more optimistic fashion, however. Radway, for instance, has
explored the link between gothic romance and the desire for the lost mother (154),
and if one considers that one of the key metaphors for discussing the consumption
of romance narratives is, in fact, the ingestion of food and drink, it seems that
romance reading might substitute for mother-love and the nourishment provided
therein.3 0 Critics from Mary Wollstonecraft onward employ recipe analogies to
comment on the formulaic nature of these narratives, and in discussing what
romance does for readers, they frequently reflect on how it “feeds” the various
desires of readers (Brownstein 30, Cohn 41-42), most of whom expend great
energy nurturing others. Chapter 2 of this dissertation explores in detail the
complexity of Wollstonecraft’s use of the ingestion metaphor, moving from her
remarks about how the “insipid tastes” which promote vanity are nourished by
3 0 Primary narcissism is, o f course, the developmental stage where the infant’s sexual instinct is
undifferentiated from the survival (or feeding) instinct, making clearer the connection between the
autoerotic consolations of romance reading and the desire for satiation.
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romance, to her fictional representation of Maria, her eponymous heroine who
“devours” La Nouvelle Heloise to “prop” herself up while imprisoned in the
asylum. Metaphors of hunger and satiation point to a desire to want more, to be
more, and to have more; because women so often occupy social roles that require
them to repress desire, they forget how to desire, and the capacity for desiring can
t
be nurtured by romance and feminism alike. Equally suggestive of the link
between primary narcissism and romance reading are metaphors of incorporation,
which occur in both Wollstonecraft and Eliot’s writing. One of Eliot’s few
representations of a Lady Author occurs in Impressions o f Theophrastus Such, and
the silly novelist is described as a “portly lady” with a “double incorporation” of
self-importance (121). That romance writing (as well as romance reading) might
engender a greater sense of self is worth exploring further. Analyzing the memoir
of Mme Anna de Noailles in her essay on “The Narcissist,” Simone de Beauvoir
excerpts a passage where the writer remembers her “early childhood,” a time when
she “felt keenly” the “need to remain whole, to be twice myself’ (631). The desire
for a “doubly-incorporated” self is not difficult to understand in a culture that
consistently diminishes women, and romance reading is one of the most common
means by which women attempt to “incorporate” another, more idealized self
3 1 Many of the critical essays and memoirs I encountered in my research on the history o f feminist
criticism also employed metaphors that speak to nourishment and a desire for more. Note Gloria
Hull’s language as she remembers her first encounter with Barbara Smith: “Connecting with
Barbara Smith [at the MLA] in December 1974 proved to be a significant event for me with
positive, long-term consequences... . Having begun our work on Black American women writers,
we were vainly searching for relevant sessions and making frustrated, irreverent jokes about the
usual ‘old boy’ fare from which we had to choose. We ended up hanging out in our rooms and in
offbeat restaurants, talking with Zora Neale Hurston called ‘hungry eagerness’ about our writers
and Black feminist literary criticism” (59).
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through the figure of the heroine. Amplified by the mirror of romance, the reader
sees herself larger than life, twice herself.
The desire for an amplified self, and its relationship to the narcissistic
grandiosity or omnipotence encouraged by romance reading, has been suggested
before, and quite compellingly, by Rachel Brownstein. Citing Freud in her
introduction to Becoming a Heroine, she muses on the “self-sufficiency” he
associates with feminine narcissism and how it serves as a “compensation for
social restriction” (Brownstein xiv-xv). Brownstein views the reader’s
identification with an idealized heroine to be an essentially narcissistic one,
reading the reader’s admiration for the heroine as “love for an idealized image of
[her] self ’ (xiv) and speculating on the way it encourages women not only to see
themselves as objects of desire but also how it disengages them from reality,
throwing them into a fantasy life where all action revolves around them. “The idea
of becoming a heroine, which can organize the self, can also enclose it”
(Brownstein xix), alienating the would-be heroine (or reader) from others,
thwarting intimacy, and redirecting ambitious energies inward. And yet there is an
undeniably positive aspect to this promotion of vanity or feminine narcissism
through romance reading. If the identifying reader imagines herself the deserving
recipient of devoted love, it may train her to expect more from her lover—a
“literary lesson” that counteracts that of the selfless love the heroine seems to give
so freely. Readers of romantic novels tend to “develop a sense (exaggerated) of
their own importance, possibilities, destiny, power” (Brownstein 242), a
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consequence that nourishes the desire to be more and have more. A number of
feminist theorists have reframed Freud’s discussion of the narcissistic, self
contented woman, including Jessica Benjamin and Sarah Kofman. Lou Salome
Andreas, a contemporary of Freud and one of his first critics, corresponded with
him frequently and wrote several articles on the topic of feminine narcissism.
Inflecting the trait with a Romantic quality or energy that protects the individual
under siege, she regards feminine narcissism as a source of power that helps
women negotiate conflicting demands and desires. Writing about Salome, Biddy
Martin observes, “she attributed her capacity to resist social constraints and still
engage in social life to an essential feminine narcissism and self-sufficiency that
protected her from the anxiety, the ambition, and the aggressiveness that
characterized what she called a masculine approach to knowledge and to the
world” (210). If romance reading can feed an ego-energy that protects the female
reader in a man’s world, then it is well worth examining further, and, indeed, part
of this project is to re-see the relationship Rich identifies between egoism and
love, re-view the role of vanity in romance-reading, and recuperate narcissism as a
powerful force in the feminist story of self-transformation.
That feminist thinkers could find value in the romance reader’s ability to
develop her narcissistic energies—strengthening her will, her sense of what she
deserves, and her capacity for desiring—is not unthinkable, but it must certainly
give many pause that her romance reading encourages her to maintain an
individualist orientation. Not only can her repeated, private encounters with the
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romance text potentially alienate her from other women and their politics, much of
the desire generated through reading can be constrained within the heterosexual
dyad. The problem, then, is this: how to convert the isolated, narcissistic reader of
romance into a collectively-minded feminist reader? The solution can be found in
the second submerged story of romance reading, a plot that requires an ambling
approach and the romantic revisiting of scattered moments and ideas. To
(re)construct this history, we must first consider the pre-oedipal urges that are
satisfied by romance reading—the feeling of omnipotence, the desire for
recognition, the longing for intimacy, merger, connection, turning next to an
insight of Rachel Brownstein’s. Offering the seed of a story she chooses not to
write, the critic muses upon how reading romantic novels can feed a woman’s
ambition to be more:
To want to become a heroine, to have a sense of the possibility of
being one, is to develop the beginnings of what feminists call a
“raised” consciousness: it liberates a woman from feeling (and
therefore perhaps from being) a victim or a dependent or a drudge,
someone of no account, (xix)
While the implicit argument concerning romance reading and a woman’s self-
regard is of great interest, supporting as it does the idea that a woman’s narcissistic
yearnings can protect her, what is even more provocative is the idea that such
reading might help the reader to develop the “beginnings” of a “raised
consciousness.” Grasping the possibilities of a narcissistic “beginning,”
Brownstein points intriguingly to the method by which countless feminists found
their voices and articulated their desires. This rather surprising connection raises
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interesting questions and suggests an important element in the conversion narrative
I’m weaving—the role of women’s talk. The relationship between the self-
reflecting narcissist and feminist conversation is rather difficult to fathom at first,
but returning to de Beauvoir’s story about “The Narcissist,” a tale that shares quite
a bit in common with Brownstein’s story of the would-be heroine, makes it more
comprehensible. Explaining the ways in which the narcissist can engage with her
likeness, de Beauvoir writes, “the mirror is not the only means of obtaining a
double, though the most favored. Everyone can try to create a twin through
inward dialogue. Alone most of the day, doing boresome housework, woman has
leisure to build up an appropriate figure in imagination” (633). The romance
reader, who enjoys encountering her image in the figure of the heroine, may also
enjoy the pleasures of daydreaming about romance, and the internal conversations
she generates might well prove central to our conversion narrative. For if we
convert the desire for internal dialogue, escape, and privacy into a desire for
conversation with other women, transforming the longing for private discourse
into public, the narcissistic romance reader might move from the beginning stage
Brownstein identifies to a space more conducive to change, a space where the
passive desire for self-transformation becomes actualized. Indeed, the solution to
the problem of the romance reader’s conversion may be to make the most of her
desire for pre-oedipal connection, a desire between women while bringing the
symbolic into play: embracing and encouraging conversation about her favorite
mirroring text.
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The romance is a form that is particularly accommodating to women’s
storytelling and conversation, yet this fact has often been obscured by feminism’s
dominant narrative about the genre, which tends to emphasize the libidinally
conservative dyad over such moments of confidence between women and
therefore traces contemporary popular romance back through the Brontes, to
T9
Austen and finally to Richardson. By taking another look at the romance
tradition, where conventions come and go with a coquette’s ease, we encounter a
broader range of generic examples, some of which represent a communal, women-
centered erotic economy and the conversational delights of women in love. This
more collective erotic structure has its earliest incarnation in the triangles of
chivalric romance, where the ties between the knight, his liege, and the lord’s lady
make for a sexually unsatisfactory but narratorially sound arrangement,
necessitating the deferred desire and anticipation we associate with romance
3 2 The tendency among late twentieth-century romance scholars to draw this particular historical
line is a function, perhaps, of their particular discursive context: informed by the oppositional
politics of early second wave feminist criticism and a keen awareness o f women’s subordinate
status, their search for generic patterns centered around the form’s libidinally conservative dyad.
That focus is warranted too by the preferences of most romance readers, who favor a simple dyadic
relationship where the struggle remains oppositional over love triangles (Radway 123), which are a
constant element in chivalric romance (and the romance “revisions” o f Wollstonecraft and Eliot).
As a result, the one-on-one relationship between hero and heroine became the dominant “linking”
convention in works like Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance (36), Cohn’s Romance and the
Erotics o f Property (30-32), and, more implicitly, Rachel Brownstein’s Becoming a Heroine (xxi-
xxv), where the author’s discussion of the paradigmatic romantic heroine begins with Richardson,
moves directly to Austen, and then on to Charlotte Bronte. A bit more peripatetic is the line
established by romance writers Deborah Camp and Daphne Claire, although this is probably less an
indication o f their comprehensive view than an attempt to legitimize their widely disdained genre.
Camp highlights the romance’s path from “the early origins of Greek and medieval tales through
Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters [to] Johanna Lindsey and Nora Roberts” (46), while Clair, who
also highlights the Austen and Bronte connection, includes as well such eighteenth century writers
as Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Ann Radcliffe.
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narratives today. The male-heavy triad was reversed in the seventeenth-century
French romances of Honore d’Urfe and Madeleine de Scudery that Arabella, the
isolated Female Quixote, reads with a mimetic eye, longing for a confidante who
will be responsible for recounting her story.3 4
Writing about the romance L ’ Astree (1610-1627), which shaped Scudery’s
oeuvre significantly, Deborah Ross observes that its cross-dressing hero must pose
as the heroine’s female friend for much of the narrative, establishing a relationship
dynamic that changes little after his unmasking. She writes, “Friendship between
women is thus a model for romantic love, and the differences between the sexes,
both physical and psychological, are minimized” (5). Friendship and conversation
between women became even more prevalent in the romances of Scudery, who
gave her heroines “a consciousness not unlike that of the author or [. ..] reader,
thus opening up new possibilities for ‘friendship’ among the women inside and
outside the text” (Ross 6).3 5 Drawing, perhaps, upon the salons that she held (and
romance writer Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette—author of The Princess o f
Cleves—attended), Scudery represents highly analytical discourse about love
3 3 For further discussion on the love plot and its origins in chivalric romance, see Joseph A.
Boone’s Tradition Counter Tradition (34-43).
3 4 Charlotte Lennox’s heroine, The Female Quixote Arabella, addresses an inquisitive suitor with
this explanation: “for certain Reasons, I can neither give you my History myself, nor be present at
the Relation of it. One of my Women, who is most in my Confidence, shall acquaint you with all
the Particulars ofmy Life” (120).
3 5 The potential pleasures of female friendship and conversation vis-a-vis the romance is suggested
in the original ending Charlotte Lennox had planned for her novel. Her intention was for the
Countess, well-read in the romance herself, to read the novel Clarissa with Arabella; a small
reading community, a mentoring relationship, a sympathetic connection are all sacrificed for the
more realistic pedagogical relationship between male doctor and patient suggested by Lennox’s
mentor, Samuel Richardson. The sacrificed ending raises an interesting question: might the
discursive pleasure enjoyed by the two women around the romance have been a hidden consolation
amid the rigors of re-education?
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among women friends in romances like Clelia (1654-61) and anticipates the
eighteenth-century scandal chronicles of Delariviere Manley.
Romance is presented in Manley’s works as a tool of seduction, and
predatory males often encourage their virginal quarry to enjoy them at leisure.
And yet despite the negative light in which she casts the romance form, Manley’s
works depend largely upon the discourse of and about romance, and she uses, in
fact, a fanciful instance of storytelling between women to frame the entire
narrative of The New Atalantis (1709). Here the goddesses Intelligence, Virtue,
and Astrea discuss the inhabitants of Atalantis, who stand in for Manley’s scandal-
seeking contemporaries (Ross 40). The loose narrative structure resembles a
rambling and gossipy conversation among friends, with one goddess describing the
choices and adventures of the populace and another casting judgment on them. In
this they are rather like the all-female “Cabal” that captures Astrea’s attention in
the second volume, so unfamiliar do the laughing women seem with a “certain
portion of misery and disappointments allotted to all men” (Manley 153-54).
Devoted to romantic love and each other, these women place their commitments to
one another over those to their husbands, and when one of their “novices” seeks to
marry (an unavoidable necessity), she must obtain “the mutual consent of the
society” (Manley 156). The women of the Cabal also spend a great deal of time
discussing matters of love and sex, “fortify[ing] themselves in the precepts of
virtue and chastity against all [men’s] detestable undermining arts” (Manley 155),
enjoying a community that observes its own rules and rituals, and maintaining
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secrecy in order to protect that society. Because Manley presents one brief illicit
encounter after another in a highly episodic fashion, and the goddesses themselves
form a community while discussing that of Atalantis, the reader takes away from
the roman a clef a much greater sense of communal erotic action than dyadic
romance.
The role of community and conversation diminishes considerably in the
“amatory novellas” of the 1720s, and in the novels of the 1730s and 1740s, which
define themselves largely against their more lascivious predecessors. These works
appropriate the Manichean figures associated with the chivalric quest while
establishing the narrative rhythms of an oppositional relationship between “hero”
and heroine that carries through to later broad generic examples. Because so much
narrative time is spent chronicling the resistance of the virginal prey, these forms
leave considerably less room for conversation between women—a pattern that is
repeated in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Pamela, who writes first to her
parents and then in a journal of her woes, is deprived of a confidante and so all the
more dependent upon Mr. B. Her isolation no doubt reinforces the heterosexual
dyad and heightens the dramatic tension for the reader intent upon her seduction;
however, I would argue that a great deal more pleasure might be found in Clarissa
Harlowe and Anna Howe’s speculations about the machinations of Lovelace, for
they heighten the reader’s suspense and her investment in the heroine’s struggles.
The discursive pleasures to be had in reading Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48)
may explain, to some extent, why this particular novel drew such impassioned
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responses from its female readers. Given the opportunity to participate vicariously
in the smart and loving conversations of the heroine and her friend, readers like
Sarah Fielding and her circle felt moved to respond: Fielding with her own
Remarks on Clarissa (1749), a pamphlet in which the novel becomes the subject of
conversation for a group of fictional readers; and Lady Echlin, even more
energetically, with An Alternative Ending to Richardson’ s Clarissa (1754-55), also
written shortly after Clarissa was published. Clearly something special must have
been going on with this novel, which differs from other predatory romance plots
most noticeably in its exploration of female consciousness, and in its narrative
reliance on a women’s friendship for a good deal of that exploration, for
Richardson’s readers to engage with this novel in such a remarkable fashion.
It is, however, to Pamela that most critics of women’s popular romance
turn for originary insights, and it is worth noting that the courtship novels of Fanny
Burney and Maria Edgeworth are rarely discussed either in the context of a
women’s romance tradition, even though Austen was greatly influenced by
Burney’s novels. Concerned with the heroine’s interpretation and negotiation of
social codes and manners, the courtship novelists present us with heroines who
enjoy a much wider range of intercourse and action than is often found in popular
romances, which focus more narrowly on what occurs between hero and heroine.
The emotional energies of the courtship heroines are perhaps overly diffuse;
Edgeworth’s eponymous heroine Belinda shares much too complex a relationship
with Lady Delacour, for instance, to serve as a model for formulaic heroines to
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come. And while one might argue that Austen creates too rich a social and
familial environment for her heroines to be easily distinguished from those of
Burney and Edgeworth, it may well be that Austen remains a pivotal force within
scholarly discussions of the romance tradition because of one book— Pride and
Prejudice. The aristocratic hero and the reluctant heroine are, of course, staples of
romance literature, with the heroine’s “prejudice” against her inscrutable social
better serving as the primary obstacle to their inevitable union. But the
conversations between Elizabeth Bennet and her sister Jane about the dangers of
romance (think, for instance, of their worries about George Wickham), and the
frank discourse between Elizabeth and Charlotte Lucas about the concessions of
marriage, and even the memorable intervention of Lady Catherine de Bourgh are
too often eclipsed by this unforgettable heroine and hero. Conversation and
mind/heart reading may be essential to popular romance, but the witty banter and
psychological insights must be exchanged between two. Hence, the necessity of
revisiting the French romances, the scandal chronicles, and the courtship novels of
an earlier era; offering a communal, conversational, and women-centered erotics
alongside the heterosexual love plot, they will help us tell a different story about
the generic pleasures to be discovered and provide a different model for feminist
reading.
Consciousness-reading
Having rediscovered the lost byways of the romance tradition to recover
women-centered romance, we arrive at my particular re-visionary contribution to
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the history of feminist criticism—“consciousness-reading.” This novel
opportunity for “seeing with fresh eyes” is achieved through collective readings of
romance: a method for transforming the narcissistic reader of romance into a
collectively-minded feminist reader, for illuminating feminist reading processes
and practices, and for recreating the ardent energies of early consciousness-raising
groups in order to revitalize the field. Consciousness-reading involves a “true
conversation” or exchange of selves where romance readers and feminist critics
cross diegetic boundaries, meeting textual objects as “like subjects” and joining an
intersubjective dialogue about romance; the arguments of chapters 2 and 3 of this
dissertation in fact emerge from tacit “conversations” with the narrators and
romance-reading heroines of Wollstonecraft and Eliot. Cognizant of the manner in
which Byatt’s characters provided mediation and guidance in the recovery of
hidden histories which illuminate feminist critical practices, we might endeavor to
supply the narcissistic reader with her own mediating figure: a “like self’ in the
manner of Esther Lyon whose own conversion narrative will provide implicit
instructions for the reading of romance, or perhaps the narrator who judiciously
comments upon the romance of Maria Venables or Rosamond Vincy and models
strategies of critique and revision. Conversations with other readers of romance,
including feminist readers, can be equally productive, for discussing romance with
other women channels the narcissistic energies more productively—toward critical
thinking, other plots of ambition, and intersubjective relation.
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While one might not imagine the conversations between romance readers
and feminist critics could produce many moments of identification, the desire for
recognition and self-transformation is keenly felt by both. Flip sides of the same
narcissistic coin, recognition answers the need to be known as ourselves by others,
while the desire to transform one’s self speaks to the lure of the ideal, the person
we wish to become. The desire for recognition propelled the re-visionary critiques
of male-authored images of women, the recovery of a submerged literary tradition,
and the battles between feminists over visibility and exclusion; it also moves the
romance reader to seek herself amid the pages, see her roles and values mirrored in
the life of the heroine. The desire to change her life may be less obvious in the
romance reader’s literary escapes, but what draws her to a story where an idealized
representation of herself leaves a known identity and familiar space for uncharted
territory—geographical, psychological and emotional— can be acknowledged, and
amplified, and channeled differently.3 6 Highlighting the faint promise of change
against the comforts of the familiar (i.e. the formulaic nature of the genre and her
repetitive reading), exchanging confidences with women around the form can
bring the vague longings and dissatisfactions that motivate romance reading into
consciousness. Rachel Brownstein remembers the “urgency” with which women
began such conversations in the early days of second wave feminism: “Women
3 6 In their introduction “The Heart of the Matter” Pearce and Stacey highlight the “possibility of
becoming someone else through a romantic relationship,” arguing that this “transformative promise
holds out possibilities of change, progress and escape, which the romance facilitates through its
power to make anything seem possible and to enable us to feel we can overcome all adversities”
(18). Brownstein (140) and Cohn (5) also highlight the promise of self-transformation found in
romance, and Brownstein discusses how her forays into romantic fiction can help the reader in her
self-fashioning experiments (150, 300).
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who had majored in psychology or physics or music talked to me about English
novels [. . .] with peculiar urgency, the way they talked about joining
consciousness-raising groups or going back to work” (23-24). Why not tap into
this urgency, creating a space for conversations that take affect as a proper object
and method for exploration? The romance reader is, after all, seeking the words of
other women—women who recognize her longings and take them seriously, as do
the romance writers she revisits again and again. Feminist scholars can take these
desires seriously too, not only by acknowledging their importance to romance
readers but by bringing our own shadow histories and desires to light, by
recognizing the other within, and by embracing the looking glass that guides our
community of “like subjects.”
This is precisely my method in chapter 4, where I examine the “romance
revisions” of feminist critics who have accepted the roles of romance readers and
writers, choosing a romance narrative that compels their return and then revising
their selection so that it speaks more directly to their own desires—desires that
have been shaped in part by their feminist readings. Intrigued by my own
complicated responses when reading romance (as any narcissist must be), I have
asked subjects like me, other feminist critics, to engage more intimately,
immediately with the romance text, integrating the pleasures (and displeasures) of
public and private reading. My impulse toward a more affective, collective
account of romance reading has emerged elsewhere in the field, most notably
among the writers who collaborated on “Reading Romance, Reading Ourselves”
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(1996), crafting a collage of insightful musings, conflicting critical arguments, and
spicy romance excerpts that eroticize the domination and objectification of
women. Significantly, the polyvocal essay begins with one woman’s reflections
about a picture of herself and a friend reading Harlequin romances as teenagers
(she now longs to “wrest that book away from her hands” [356]) and ends with a
novelistic description of a dorm room scene in which she and a male partner
decide to take things more slowly. Angie Moorman writes: “The Harlequins of
my summer disintegrated into the dark of the room, floated up to the ceiling and
joined the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to my ceiling” (372). Effectively rewriting
the romance to reflect her own needs and longings, this reader-writer reveals not
only herself but also a truth about the form’s transformative powers: the romance
can become whatever one wishes but it also transcends time and place, again and
again and again. Because its elasticity and endurance make it a particularly
unstable object, I make use of feminists’ critical practices and creative processes,
examining not what they say about romance in this chapter but rather what they do
with it, and within it. By acknowledging that the critic is always, already inscribed
by and implicated in romance, and making that involvement explicit through
collective revisions of romance, contemporary feminist critics can continue to
work within the master narratives about romance reading and feminist criticism
but do so differently.
Within this more fluid critical scenario— a fantasy-centered scene where
one might occupy the positions of romance reader or writer or critic, the feminist
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critic is able to duplicate the practice of the “unconscious” romance reader who
-1 7
identifies multiply. She might maintain the critical distance of the critic-voyeur
(which, as Constance Penley has noted is nonetheless an implicated position),
wield the control of the writer and subject her heroine to desperate longings (or
untold horrors), or even “become” the romance heroine—allowing “Scarlett
(myself) to wind up with Ashley,” as critic Judith Wilt spoke of doing in an email
concerning this project. Accommodating a true exchange of selves, this
revisionary exercise achieves more than enlightenment through multiple
identifications, it actually produces desire: the energy of participating critics, the
enthusiasm with which they responded to my requests for help and discussed their
own revisions, (re)awakened my curiosity in and commitment to this project. I
was, in effect, “turned on” by the narrative and critical desires that animated their
writing—the (no longer guilty) pleasures to be discovered in their romance
revisions as well as the lengthy emails that interrogated the project’s design. My
sense of purpose and confidence as a feminist critic was rekindled, and my own
3 7 Feminist readers borrowing from Freud and Laplanche and Pontalis have amply theorized the
possibilities of the structure of fantasy in their romance scholarship, but it is interesting to note that
romance writer Laura Kinsale also places an emphasis on “place” and “placeholding” in her essay
“The Androgynous Reader.” Arguing that the reader makes a complex double identification,
Kinsale claims that the female reader becomes the (more powerful!) hero but not the heroine; rather
the heroine serves as a “placeholder” for the reader, who maintains a certain analytical distance,
judging the heroine more because she “competes” with her (31). Watching the heroine “through
her own and the hero’s eyes” (35), the reader rarely loses her analytical edge, but when that
distance collapses and she finds herself “spontaneously identifying” with hero and heroine, the
“experience of the story is [so] utterly absorbing and vital” she loses herself in the text (35). In
accounting for the reader’s judgment o f the heroine, Kinsale’s model obviously accords the female
reader a conscious agency the structure of fantasy model doesn’t, yet the emphasis on scene or
place in both allow for a certain flexibility in readers’ fantasies. Furthermore, the triangular
relationship that emerges in both models— allowing for both identification and desire, and for
(analytical) distance and merger— seems a crucial configuration for the reader’s pleasures, and one,
I would argue, appropriate to the feminist critic as well.
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writing greatly enlivened, by their contributions; indeed, the pre-oedipal pleasure
and support suggested by one respondent’s reference to “our project” has helped
me to realize the power and potential of women speaking together in an Irigarayan
fashion. I believe this sense of power and pleasure can be enhanced even further
(in the future) by inviting the romance reader into our conversation, collapsing the
distinction between critic and reader, subject and object, and raising our collective
consciousness about the desires we share in common. For if we take Byatt’s
romance reader at her word—accept that the “desire of all reading women” is to be
both “Poet and Poem”— we can explore more effectively the tension between
women’s desire to craft their own stories and explanatory narratives, and their
longing for mediation—to have their tales told by someone they can trust,
someone who sees them clearly and can help them become their most perfect
selves. Romance may, in fact, be the perfect vehicle through which feminist
readers (and their doubles) explore what it means to be both Poet and Poem: the
subjects and objects of our own speculative endeavors, the ambitious authors of
our own collective story, the beloved creation of our best collaborative efforts, the
deserving recipients of our own chivalry and devotion.
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Chapter Two: Romance and the Rites of Women
Mary Wollstonecraft’s preoccupation with romance-reading, or what she
would have termed “flimsy” novel-reading, emerges even in her earliest
publications, Thoughts on the Education o f Daughters (1787) and Original Stories
(1788). Shaped by observations she made while running a school for girls with her
“eternal friend” (Todd viii), Fanny Blood, and her sisters, Eliza and Everina, the
chapter “Reading” in Thoughts argues that young women should be prevented
from reading works that give a “wrong account of the human passions” until their
“judgment is formed, or at least exercised” (50). So “intoxicating” are the effects
of flimsy-novel reading that young minds will be kept “in a continual ferment”
(50), a prospect that worries the young pedagogue greatly. Her concerns about the
general “light-headedness” or impaired judgment of these impressionable readers
echo those of educators James Fordyce (Sermons to Young Women, 1766), and
John Gregory (A Father's Legacy to his Daughters, 1774) and of numerous other
Enlightenment intellectuals, giving her a notably sturdy platform from which to
opine.3 8 Yet when she begins to write literary criticism for Joseph Johnson and
Thomas Christie’s Analytical Review the following year, her opinions ripple with
rhetorical power, as she mounts a three-pronged attack on the flimsy novel form,
its fabulists, and its fans. She continues this censure in A Vindication o f the Rights
3 8 In her 1790 review o f Rev. John Bennett’s Letters to a young Lady, on a Variety o f useful and
interesting Subjects; calculated to improve the Heart, to form the Manners, and enlighten the
Understanding, Wollstonecraft mentions the following works of moral instruction for young ladies,
remarking upon their significance and elegance: John Gregory, A Father’ s Legacy to his Daughters
(1774); Hester Mulso Chapone, Letters on the Improvement o f the Mind (1773), A Letter to a New
Married Lady (1777); Lady Pennington, An Unfortunate M other’ s Advice to her Absent Daughters
(207); and James Fordyce Sermons to Young Women (1766).
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o f Woman (1792), where her “animadversions” on the form and its readers hum
with derisive energy and a searing contempt that threatens to break through the
restrained periods of neoclassicism.
It is with this moment in her career trajectory that most contemporary
feminist readers are concerned, looking back to Vindication, one of the earliest
instances of “re-vision,” for a remarkably astute analysis of eighteenth-century
British sexism and insight as to how one might “read as a feminist.” Re-viewing
the influential works of authors she once lauded through a gender-critical lens,
Wollstonecraft identifies the ways in which they contribute to the continued
subordination of women; a righteous anger infuses her readings of text, and she is
justifiably hard on her long-time favorite Rousseau, and Drs. Fordyce and
Gregory, whom she criticizes for “lover-like phrases” and “dissimulation,”
respectively (94, 99). Somewhat paradoxically, she also displays an internalized
misogyny that can be vexing for woman-identified critics, sharply criticizing the
general behavior and reading habits of middle and upper class women. Because
feminist readers who are not also Wollstonecraft scholars encounter her views on
romance most often within the context of Vindication’s powerful polemical
readings, it is not surprising that they should fix upon the dangers of romance
reading and imagine the pastime to be incompatible with feminism. What they
miss in the work, however, are the telling scattered fragments that signal a more
complicated relationship between this highly influential reader and romance.
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To see and make sense of these almost imperceptible fissures, and to
understand the complex ways in which her sense of romance reading shapes her
feminist reading practices (and vice versa), we must return to the earlier Analytical
Review essays and to Maria, Or the Wrongs o f Woman, rereading her comments in
Vindication within the context of that extended history. We must also pay careful
attention to the metaphors that traverse her writings on romance reading, for they
help to define the dangers she perceives: images of ingestion, venery, and
cobwebs—the most “flimsy” of structures and a popular pejorative descriptor in
the eighteenth century for an insubstantial novel. Indeed, if feminist readers
approach these texts recursively, examining how, say, Vindication informs Maria
and what Maria might reveal about the earlier reviews, it becomes possible to see
a different story. Not only will we be able to better understand that the
vindicative musings about novel reading women are shaped greatly by
Wollstonecraft’s role as a “satiric” reader of romance for the Analytical Review,
but we might also understand how her feminist forays in Vindication prepared her
to reread La Nouvelle Heloise with the eponymous heroine of her unfinished
novel. Writing Maria allowed Wollstonecraft an opportunity to re-examine the
form with the “fresh eyes” of a re-visionary reader who had honed her critical and
emotional faculties in the writing of Vindication. Developing a higher level of
comfort with the affective component of public readings through her charged
encounters with male-authored texts, the critic was able to approach romance
reading in the novel not from the satiric stance of the spectator-critic and would-be
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reformer but from a more emotionally immediate and interrogatory position. This
flexibility allowed her to identify with her (largely autobiographical) heroine and
to recognize what her metaphors suggest she had long (unconsciously) known: that
romance reading delivers both consolations and collective actions. Initially
offering solace and escape, the romance may ultimately provoke feminist analysis
and action—blurring the boundaries between pleasure reading and critical review,
and initiating change in the private and public lives of women.
Re-viewing the Romance in the Analytical Review
Writing to her editor in July of 1788 with a sharp and enviable confidence,
Mary Wollstonecraft mentions her recent assignments for the Analytical Review:
“I send you all the books I had to review except Dr. J ’s Sermons, which I
have begun. If you wish me to look over any more trash this month—you must
send it directly” (Collected Letters 179). Two of the nine works she reviewed for
the first two issues of the Analytical Review were “contemptible] imitations” of
Laurence Sterne (179). The other seven examples of “trash” she perused were
women’s novels. Assigned this task undoubtedly because she herself was a
woman, Wollstonecraft’s first review is characterized by the palpable irritation of
the above missive, and she blasts Edward and Harriet, or the Happy Recovery: a
Sentimental Novel by a Lady, remarking upon the impossibility of writing literary
criticism in response to such novels. Because this review makes explicit to her
newly formed audience Wollstonecraft’s primary concerns about novel-reading as
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well as a few of the recurring metaphors employed in her reviews of sentimental
“trash” by and for women, it is worth reproducing in its entirety.
The Happy Recovery is an heterogenous mass of folly, affectation,
and improbability. /
Metaphors and vulgarisms abound. The countess, ‘wrapt up in the
sable and all-encircling mantle of despair, is seized with a violent
puking of blood.’
An analysis of novels will seldom be expected, nor can the cant of
sensibility be tried by any criterion of reason; ridicule should direct
its shafts against this fair game, and, if possible, deter the
thoughtless from imbibing the wildest notions, the most pernicious
prejudices; prejudices which influence the conduct, and spread
insipidity over social converse.
Young women may be termed romantic, when they are under the
direction of artificial feelings; when they boast of being tremblingly
alive all o’er, and faint and sigh as the novelist informs them they
should. Hunting after shadows, the moderate enjoyments of life are
despised, and its duties, neglected; the imagination, suffered to
stray beyond the utmost verge of probability, where no vestige of
nature appears, soon shuts out reason, and the dormant faculties
languish for want of cultivation; as rational books are neglected,
because they do not throw the mind into an exquisite tumult. The
mischief does not stop here; the heart is depraved when it is
supposed to be refined, and it is a great chance but false sentiment
leads to sensuality, and vague fabricated feelings supply the place
of principles. (Vol I, 207-208)
This review, although the first of many Wollstonecraft will write for the
Analytical Review, already evidences imagery and the primary critical strategy she
will employ when addressing such novels over the next four years. The first
sentence anticipates an image that recurs often in her analytical essays, suggesting
faintly the “flimsiness” and web imagery that cling to subsequent reviews and
portions of A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman. Surfacing most frequently
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when generalizations about the novel form are made (as in a review of Charlotte
Smith’s Emmeline, which Wollstonecraft characterizes as a “woven web” [Vol 1,
333]), the web metaphor is employed to suggest how the flimsy novel’s fragile
narrative lines, tenuously strung, nevertheless retain the power to “ensnare” the
reader through intricacies of plot, the description of violent emotions, and a
superfluity of adventures. Talk of cobwebs and flimsiness would situate
Wollstonecraft firmly in the line of satiric literary critics who practice their
analytical craft with an eye to correcting human folly and vice; yet while she
clearly hopes to reform readers of romance through the use of ridicule and satire,
she herself risks becoming “ensnared” in the tradition that supports her
construction of a familiar (and authoritative) critical persona. I will discuss this
trope at length shortly, but it is important to highlight briefly the venery images
employed in this passage, which also underscore her method of engagement with
the novels and novelists she encounters.
Observing that “an analysis of novels will seldom be expected, nor can the
cant of sensibility be tried by any criterion of reason,” the feminist critic asserts
that “ridicule should direct its shafts against this fair game,” protecting
“thoughtless” readers from the empty, artificial language that too frequently passes
as the sign of heightened feeling and perception. The metaphor fashions a Diana-
like guise for the critic, dressing her as one who possesses a divine right to
preserve the innocence and virtue of young women. Resolutely antagonistic to all
things amatory, her weapon of choice will be ridicule, and her targets the
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language, incidents, characters, and settings of the amorous novels, as well as the
writers who reproduce them willy-nilly. While in this first review she limits her
ridicule to one example of the laughable “vulgarisms” that mar the novel, in others
she dedicates much of her allotted space to such re-presentations, delighting, it
seems, in highlighting the more absurd instances of linguistic folly and plot
improbabilities. Like George Eliot years later in her essay “Silly Novels by Lady
Novelists,” Wollstonecraft makes liberal and rather sadistic use of the original
texts she evaluates, quoting lengthy passages and exercising her own sentimental
skills in what seems to be an odd combination of critical incisiveness, misogynistic
spite, and mimetic delight. In order to save some women, she must apparently
attack others, a choice that points to the predatory impulse suggested by the
hunting metaphor, and puts the critic in a highly vexed position. For
Wollstonecraft also flirts with the libertine’s creed by invoking Lovelace’s
ubiquitous phrase “the fair sex” through her use of “fair game” (Vol I, 208),
aligning herself with a decidedly male(volent) figure who seeks to ruin
innocents—an indication that the critical persona she’s constructing is an unstable
one. Yet both figures—the libertine and the celestial hunter—are apt: the
pedagogically-minded Wollstonecraft does clearly mean to protect, even while as
her incisive commentary disables women intellectually and exposes the risks of
using ridicule to reform.
3 9 It should be noted that Wollstonecraft is much easier on the female novelists who write because
of economic necessity; in two reviews of Charlotte Smith’s work, she highlights the author’s
statement of need, validating her labor since it doesn’t derive from vanity.
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The third striking image in Wollstonecraft’s first review, and the only one
to appear in her writing throughout her career, is ingestion—a metaphor that
signifies the critic’s anxieties about passive readers and the values and desires they
introject unconsciously through reading. Reflecting upon “thoughtless” young
women possessed of “dormant faculties,” she seems to view the young readers of
romance as little more than bodies that “imbib[e] the wildest notions and most
pernicious prejudices” and “spread insipidity all over social converse” (Vol I,
208). The term “imbibe” occurs most frequently in her reviews (and later in
Vindication), and it alludes to the inevitable cultivation of “false sentiment,”
“depraved” tastes, and vanity that result when young readers consume undissected
and unanalyzed the “flimsy” content of such works. Consumption, contagion,
incorporation: Wollstonecraft clearly has anxiety about the unrestrained
“coupling” of reader and text, and it is, perhaps, because she perceives the reader’s
attachment to her textual (love) object to be so all-consuming, that she advocates
such strong measures for reform. A violent response is required to sever reader
from text and to re-establish the boundaries of self; the incisive analyses and
cutting remarks of the satirist trade on otherness, difference, domination—defenses
that betray a fear of bodily merger, penetration, or obliteration.4 0 Yet there is
another aspect to the ingestion metaphor that surfaces years later in Maria, albeit
4 0 Significantly, the etymology o f “satire” points to the Latin satira, later form of satura, which
links it both to the familiar literary practice of ridicule and critique and the consumption of food.
The OED observes: “The word is a specific application of satura medley; this general sense
appears in the phrase per saturam in the lump, indiscriminately; according to the grammarians this
is elliptical for lanx satura (lit. ‘full dish’” lanx dish, satura, fern, of satur full, related to satis
enough), which is alleged to have been used for [...] food composed o f many different
ingredients.” Given that vanity or feminine narcissism is one of the chief follies Wollstonecraft
wishes to correct, the incidence of satis or enough is quite compelling.
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in a very different form. Seeking solace, the imprisoned heroine turns to Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Heloise in desperation, “devouring” the
novel in a very short time. A much more active and desiring kind of romance
reading is suggested by this particular ingestion image, for this heroine has
“formed” and “exercised” her judgment” (Thoughts 50), and she reads and re
enacts the fantasy scenario with her prison guard, Jemima, and her listless lover,
Darnforth, to very productive ends. And, indeed, even in her first review where
Wollstonecraft casts the female reader’s mind as a passive, impressionable
entity— responsive to every delicate touch in the novels she encounters, her
language ultimately betrays her. Possessed of a “straying” imagination that is
incapable of staying its course, the reader who “hunt[s] after shadows” is not
unlike the wandering knight of chivalric romance who spends years getting caught
in one adventure after another; her very capacity for “hunting” promises a more
active intellect if cultivated with care, and, more significantly, aligns her with the
predatory critic who has disavowed the pleasures of romance reading (Vol I, 208).
It is in a later review of Juliet; or, The Cottager. A Novel in a Series o f
Letters (March 1789) that Wollstonecraft’s perceptions of her role as a critic are
clarified and her definition of the “flimsy” novel genre is presented.4 1 Tracing its
lineage from the French romances through Samuel Richardson’s novels, to the
(illegitimate) Burney progeny of the moment, the reviewer implies that it is in the
4 1 It is worth noting that the flimsy novel tradition Wollstonecraft describes is akin to the tradition I
present in chapter 1, although this feminist reader perceives a more progressive strain in the French
romances than does the eighteenth-century critic.
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nature of the genre to reproduce and revise itself endlessly—an “issue” she will
attempt to diminish through satirical means.
It has been judiciously observed by one of our brother Reviewers,
that the publication of Miss Burney’s novels formed a new aera in
this flimsy kind of writing. A varied combination of the same
events has been adopted, and like timid sheep, the lady authors
jump over the hedge one after the other, and do not dream of
deviating either to the right or left. Richardson destroyed the giants
and dwarfs that figured away in romances, and substituted old ugly
women to keep the beauteous damsel in durance vile; however she
still had to protect her chastity with vigilant care against violent
assaults, and after having passed unsullied through the ordeal trial,
a demi-hero freed her, and matrimony wound up the plot, etc. etc.
Now the method is altered; the fortress is not stormed, but
undermined, and the belles must guard their hearts from the soft
contagion, and not listen to the insidious sigh, when the hand is
gently pressed, nor trust the equivocal protestations of love - and
then they obtain a husband, etc. etc.
The author of this novel has tripped back; the sentimental heroine is
twice carried off, but no harm ensues, except that she is hurried by
sorrow to the very brink of the grave, where her true love
opportunely appears to bid her revive, and the drooping flower
raises its head, to lean on the offered support.
More minute criticism on the novel would be absurd, as it sinks
before discriminate censure. (Vol III, 345)
To begin mining this incredibly rich review, we will begin first with the
“judicious” observation of Wollstonecraft’s “brother Reviewer,” exploring his
view of “this flimsy kind of writing” and returning to the question of generic
reproduction.
In framing her far-reaching view of the genre through a male gaze that
belittles even Burney, Wollstonecraft shows that she has adopted the biased
outlook and critical persona of her brethren—satirical reviewers who delight in
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diminishing the literary production of women. It is no coincidence that the term
“flimsy” makes its second appearance that year in conjunction with a reference to
Alexander Pope’s infamous comment about women’s character, a sign that
Wollstonecraft has adopted the poet’s method, his cobweb imagery, and, perhaps
unintentionally, “imbibed” a draught of his misogyny. Her 1789 review of The
Fair Hibernian begins:
It has been sarcastically said, by a snarling poet, that most women
have no character at all: we shall apply it to their production. -
Novels. The one before us, evidently written by a lady, is so like
many other flimsy novels we have reviewed that we scarcely know
how to characterize it. The story is short, and has neither
probability nor novelty to render it interesting. (Vol V, 488)
The “feminist” critic’s opening comment is telling: while she characterizes Pope as
“snarling,” she is nevertheless willing to reify his view of “characterless” women
by citing him in order to censure women’s novels. While no clues are given in
either review to suggest the less obvious connotations of the term “flimsy,” one
need only consult Pope’s sneering paean to his “scribbling” peers, “Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot, Prologue to the Satires” (1735) in order to get a better sense of its
contemporary usage.4 2 Pope writes:
Who shames a Scribbler? Break one cobweb thro’,
He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew:
4 2 Wollstonecraft probably lifted the term directly from Pope, although it may have come from the
critical lexicon one o f her male contemporaries; there seems to be no shortage of sources if one
examines the OED entry for “flimsy.” In an extended text-based search, I discovered the following
181 1 ' century occurrences in addition to Pope’s usage: 1756, Warton, “Walsh was in general a flimsy
and frigid writer”; 1764, Shenstone, “flimsiness of poetry”; 1775, Watson, “I hate the flimsy
womanish eloquence of novel readers.” Such usage continued in the 19th century: 1847, Hunt,
“Poor, flimsy, witty, wise, foolish Horace Walpole”; and 1853, Lynch, “The flimsy individual who
has read fifty novels in a year, but nothing else.” Tracing the synonymous use o f the word “flimsy”
in other dictionary entries, I found under “airy” b: 1710, Shaftesbury “These may easily be
oppressive to the airy Reader”; and 1712, Hughes, It was determined among those airy Criticks.”
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Destroy his fib, or sophistry, in vain,
The creature’s at his dirty work again,
Thron’d in the center of his thin designs,
Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines! (89-94)
Wollstonecraft no doubt felt that many of the eighteenth-century monster-novels
she had to review were comprised of a “vast extent of flimsy lines,” lines that lack
the substance of truth and reason.4 3 Contrasted with weightier works, the flimsy
fantasies proffering “beauteous damsels” and “insidious sighs” are works of
“sophistry,” and the “self-pleasing threads,” spun as they are from vanity, cannot
help but imbue the same in readers 4 4 Equally troublesome are the “thin designs”
of flimsy works: the plots possess “neither probability or novelty” as she argues
above, and it becomes clear not only that “flimsiness” refers to a lack of logical
causality or consequence (as in the episodic adventures of the errant French
romances) but also to a lack of novelty; both elements are essential for adherence
to the developing doctrine of realism. The satirist’s frustration with the “proud”
4 3 That Wollstonecraft associates the flimsy form with the long and loosely structured French
romance is evident in her 1789 review of The Castle o f Mowbray: an English Romance. She
writes:
A mass of intricate adventures and hair-breadth escapes; thus could we concisely
characterize this [French] romance, [.. .] for young females may be amused by
the quick succession of incidents, though they outstrip even that lax kind o f
probability necessary to give interest to fiction, and weary instead of amusing the
panting reader, who might have been affected, if one dismal adventure had not
tripped up the heels of another. (Vol IV, 350)
This descriptive introductory clause functions as the verbal equivalent o f the visual image
Wollstonecraft will increasingly employ, linking the episodic plot structure(s) that comprise the
contemporary “woven web” with the chivalric romance form popularized in seventeenth century
France. Suggesting here, and elsewhere, that the seeds o f the later form might be attributed to
French romance, she reveals that her generic theories are developing in conjunction with her
hermeneutic model of textual seduction.
4 4 There are numerous instances in 1789 where she characterizes the novel form as a web-entity:
“A series of wonderful intricate adventures, and strange accidents . . , and [a] gross disregard of
truth . . . appears throughout the tangled skein of nonsense” (Vol IV, 352); an “absurd series of
misfortunes, which are accumulated and tangled together, without a shadow of probability to lend
them support or excite sympathy” (Vol V, 98), and “spun out to a tiresome length” (Vol V, 97).
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Scribbler seems as much a consequence of his own impotence as the writer’s
unceasing progeny; no matter how hard he, the critic, works to “break one cobweb
thro’,” he finds the writer “at his dirty work again.”
Pope’s irritation is analogous to Wollstonecraft’s own, for she consistently
bemoans the incessant (re)production of flimsy works and the blind conformity of
their creators. Characterizing the “lady authors” as “timid sheep [who] jump over
the hedge one after the other, and do not dream of deviating either to the right or
left” (Vol III, 345), she conjures up the image of an ever-growing flock from
which she intends to distinguish herself. Indeed, if we consider the images of
reproduction (women authors) and coupling objects (novels and girls) that surface
repeatedly in Wollstonecraft’s reviews, it becomes easier to see why the critic
wishes to distance herself from those impure women “at their dirty work again.”
Anxious to establish her reputation as a special case among scribbling women, she
is particularly scathing when it comes to “characterizing” their production, and this
tendency is only aggravated when she imagines the writers she reviews are driven
by vanity rather than necessity.4 5 In this sense too, the “flimsiness” of the cobweb
is apt, for Arachne, weaver of webs and arrogant opponent of Wisdom, is the
classical poster girl for productions of vanity; it surprises little that the humiliation
she experiences at the hand of Minerva should make an impression upon
4 5 She often makes excuses for Charlotte Smith, Fanny Burney, and other writers who are beset by
financial difficulties. In her review of Smith’s Desmond, Wollstonecraft allows the author to speak
for herself, highlighting the economic imperative to write: “. .. it was in the observance, not in the
breach of duty, I became an author; and it has happened, that the circumstances which have
compelled me to write, have introduced me to those scenes of life, and those varieties of character
which I should otherwise never have seen ...” (Vol XIII, 429).
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Wollstonecraft, who is quite happy to subject her more vain and shameless sisters
to ridicule.4 6 Offering an implied answer to Pope’s query, “Who shames a
Scribbler?” she makes the discourse of her contemporaries (even) more ridiculous
with such parodies as the line “the drooping flower raises its head, to lean on the
offered support.” Pope had elsewhere observed that “those who are ashamed of
nothing else are so of being ridiculous” (qtd. in Abrams 166), a belief reflected in
Wollstonecraft’s persistent ridicule of reading and writing women. Sadly, her
critical persona, crafted in the likeness of misogynistic critic and his brethren, not
only distances the writer from other women, it distances her from herself.
Viewing male critics as “like subjects” and disavowing potential
identifications with other women writers, Wollstonecraft has little opportunity to
reinforce a crucial aspect of self; it is not altogether surprising, then, that she turns
on the abject others and fixes upon their vanity or feminine narcissism, as
demonstrated by the proliferation of ingestion images in her reviews. The first
review suggested how terms like “imbibe” can function to signal the development
of “false sentiment or taste,” and here, again, in her 1789 review of the recently
translated German novel Heerfort and Clara, she praises the novel for
“containing] little food for vanity” (Vol V, 487). Wollstonecraft observes: “a
taste vitiated by perusing our flimsy novels, will turn with disgust from one in
which neither gallantry nor coquetry is introduced—where they will find no
4 6 It is interesting to note that numerous references to Minerva—herself the female incarnate of
wisdom, abound in Wollstonecraft’s prose; the figure’s attraction may well lie in her “immaculate”
birth: born of Jove and unsullied by the (pro)creative faculties of woman, she is the perfect model
for a writer who wishes to distance herself from those less “immaculate” women, immersed in their
“dirty work.”
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imaginary pictures of lords and ladies, polite conversations, and court dresses”
(Vol V, 487). False taste and vanity are almost always linked to novelistic scenes
that depict fashionable amusements and conspicuous consumption, or to the
overwrought declarations of love and admiration visited upon the heroine in scene
after scene; both would undoubtedly “feed” the ego-libido of the identifying
reader. The attention of the female reader is drawn consistently to the external
order of things: to the social buzz as the sign of intrinsic value, and to the heroine’s
function as an object of desire overshadowing the brilliance of all other desirable
commodities. In one of the more positive reviews of her earliest work (1788),
Wollstonecraft distinguishes Henrietta o f Gerstenfeld: A German Story from the
“mis-shapen monsters” that prey upon the virtue of the young female reader:
. .. this story is much superior to the generality of mis-shapen
monsters, daily brought forth to poison the minds of our young
females, by fostering vanity, and teaching affectation. It does not
delineate the character of a duchess, or even a countess; we have
not long descriptions of midnight amusements, or splendid dresses
exhibited to the gazing crowd. The heroine, though ‘in the noon of
beauty’s power’, has not a train of adorers. Domestic happiness is
the theme.—Such descriptions, though they may mislead the
judgment, do not vitiate the heart (Vol I, 209).
This example stands apart because it does not emphasize spectacle or the public
display of self and wealth, opting instead for a glimpse into the comparatively
quiet life of a heroine who possesses beauty and modest means. Implicitly
belittling scenes that showcase the charms and adornments of the heroine, the
critic seems to be warning against the effects of such exaltation, objectification.4 7
47
In Julia, a Novel written by Helen Maria Williams in 1790, Wollstonecraft finds few elements
that will corrupt young readers, “for no scenes of dissipation are here sketched by the dancing
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The young female reader may learn to see herself as yet another object among
many, while her heightened awareness of the perceptions of others may train her to
look outward for admiration, validation, and opinions. As she becomes
increasingly attuned to the follies and fancies of the outer social sphere, she may
lose faith in her ability to decide for herself and define herself, relying on received
knowledge and fashionable criteria in her judgments. Vanity is to be feared, then,
not simply because a girl’s thoughts are directed toward her own person but
because her image of self is refracted through a narcissistic awareness of others,
resulting in affectation and extreme self-consciousness which serve to distance her
4 8
further from her own “internal” sense of herself and her place in the world.
Perhaps even more distressing to Wollstonecraft is that an identificatory desire for
admiration and drama and adventure will inevitably create unrealistic expectations
and a faltering sense of domestic duty. Caught in a perpetual state of dreaminess
and longing, the wife will fail to meet the needs of her husband and children,
growing increasingly alienated from her family and proper role. The “insipid
uniformity” produced by false expectations seems almost a homogenizing force
that threatens a woman’s ability to perceive and appreciate the nuances and
fluctuations of her own domestic life. Misreading histrionics and the overwrought
spirits of an intoxicated imagination; nor dresses described with the earnest minuteness o f vanity”
(Vol VII, 98). A few years later, Wollstonecraft would develop a close friendship with Williams in
Paris, and in an interesting reversal of the kind of sexual transactions that occur “between men”
eventually inherits Gilbert Imlay, one-time lover of Williams, and bears his child out of wedlock.
(Rather gossipy, probably unnecessary, but kind of interesting tool.)
4 8 In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Rene Girard develops one example o f his triangular desire
theory around Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Pointing to two relationship triangles - one
amorous, the other economic - he argues that both depend on a vaniteux as a desiring subject who
adopts the desires o f a “mediator” in absence of his own. Girard observes: “The vaniteux - vain
person - cannot draw his desires from his own resources; he must borrow them from others” (6).
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display of disappointed ardor for the signs of “true love,” the young wife might
perceive her own marriage as lacking and so set aside an active interest in husband
and children for the stuff of fantasy.
Wollstonecraft’s anxieties about the contagious nature of “insipid” writing
and the vanity it fosters are suggested in her comments about the “mis-shapen
monsters brought forth daily”, a phrase that speaks to a never-ending reproductive
cycle for the genre. Brought forth daily, the female-authored monsters are
positioned almost simultaneously as the impossibly proliferating “issue” of
irresponsible women writers and as unfit literary parents who “foster” vanity in
“our” young females—a sign, perhaps, of Wollstonecraft’s anxiety about the
unceasing reproduction of the genre and the impossibility of locating the true
source of the form’s regeneration. If the genre produces vanity, and vanity is one
of the primary motivators of women who take up the pen, then where exactly does
responsibility for the genre’s reproduction lie? Wollstonecraft seems to waver on
this question; while she periodically censures the writers for corrupting young
women, she more frequently assigns responsibility to the texts, dismissing most
writers as easily swayed by the conventions of the genre and denying them the
subjective agency to seduce or corrupt readers themselves.4 9 Unable to imagine
4 9 A year after her review of Emmeline, Wollstonecraft examines Smith’s Ethelinde and,
acknowledging the agency of the author, regrets the characterization choices she has made: “we
cannot help wishing that Mrs S. had considered how many females might probably read her
pleasing production, whose minds are in a ductile state; she would not then have cherished their
delicacy, or, more properly speaking, weakness, by making her heroine so attentive to preserving
her personal charms, even when grief, beauty’s cankerworm, was at work” (Vol V, 485). It seems
the critic is more likely to assign responsibility to those author’s she believes possess some talent
and intelligence, while dismissing less capable, conventional novelists as “sheep” or the members
o f a “herd,” as she refers to them in a footnote to Vindication. Seeking an example to illustrate that
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most women occupying the role of active seducer, or anxious about the
implications of such cross-gender role-playing, she denies the majority of female
writers an active part in the reproduction of such texts, a sexual sleight of hand that
requires a great deal of rhetorical work. Readers, she seems to argue, are most
entranced by the scenes and language of the novels, a theory that informs many of
her commentaries and emerges again in her review of Emmeline. Employing a
rhetorical version of the ubiquitous gothic expression “words cannot express,” she
writes, “Such an exhibition of violent emotions and attitudes follows as we cannot
describe or analyze; yet, we fear, the description will catch the attention of many
romantic girls, and carry their imaginations still further away from nature and
reason” (Vol I, 331). The “catch and carry” imagery suggests an abduction motif
that complements the seductive nature of the novel form, while also presaging the
“entrapment” and ultimate debasement of the impressionable reader’s mind.
“Caught up” by descriptions that may “lead the understanding astray,” the young
reader (Vol I, 333) is in grave danger of intellectual ruin and contagion—a critical
plot that mirrors the seduction process detailed in the genre’s cautionary sub-plots
or suggested by the timely episodic intervention of wiser virtuous characters.
V indicative Musings on the Flimsy Novel’s Fans
When she writes A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman in 1792,
Wollstonecraft still imagines herself as that wiser, virtuous savior of imperiled
class of women who possess an “unnatural delicacy,” Wollstonecraft points to “the herd of
Novelists” (33). Linking those women who mistake highly conventionalized expressions of
sentiment for signs of passion, imagination, and originality to the ever-increasing “herd” of women
novelists, she seems to fear that vanity and fantasy lead inexorably to a crass reproduction of the
same.
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young women, wielding the satiric critic’s “shafts of ridicule” (Vol I, 208) when it
comes to “reading” their hermeneutic habits. Yet while her comments on women
readers suggest an alienated position within the class of women whose rights she
means to claim, her “resistant” readings of male-authored works are charged with
a force that is equal parts anger and intellect—the sign of a more “present” critic,
and one who is becoming increasingly skeptical of the male perspective she herself
unconsciously embraced. I do not wish to say much about Vindication here: the
primary issue I am concerned with—the critic’s views on flimsy novel reading in
the work has been addressed by Wollstonecraft scholars and other feminist
readers, and her use of the key metaphors changes very little until Maria. I am,
however, interested in the subtle shifts of her role as a reader in the process of
writing Vindication as well as her more evolved method for reforming readers, for
it is in this work that she most clearly defines how and why a satiric approach
works best.
Wollstonecraft maintains a high level of confidence in the pedagogical
powers of mockery, touting its efficacy in A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman
four years after her first entry in the Analytical Review. In chapter 8, entitled
“Some Instances of the Folly Which the Ignorance of Women Generates,” she
outlines more comprehensively her preferred practice for reader reform:
The best method, I believe, that can be adopted to correct a
fondness for novels is to ridicule them: not indiscriminately, for
then it would have little effect; but, if a judicious person, with some
turn for humour, would read several to a young girl, and point out
both by tones, and apt comparisons with pathetic incidents and
heroic characters in history, how foolishly and ridiculously they
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caricatured human nature, just opinions might be substituted instead
of romantic sentiments. (185)
This prescription, informed in part by her experience as both a governess and the
proprietor of a school for girls, raises some interesting questions, especially given
Wollstonecraft’s anxieties about the proliferation of such narratives among her
reading innocents.5 0 If ridicule does promote the cultivation she recommends,
exchanging “just opinions” for “romantic sentiments,” how does such a
transformation occur? And is taking advantage of the pleasures outlined above
(and other suspect pleasures explored below) justifiable? And finally, why does
Wollstonecraft continue to champion such a strong-arm approach?
Because she characterizes the minds of most young female readers as
passive and readily impressionable, presenting “dormant faculties [that] languish
like the sickly pampered pug-lovers who populate Vindication (Vol I, 208), the
transformation of such minds might be achieved by “taking advantage” of young
women’s predilection for playful interactions and turning a bad social habit to
good use.5 1 Wollstonecraft had first-hand knowledge of the pleasures of
5 0 Wollstonecraft’s pedagogy seems influenced as well by the resolution Charlotte Lennox plots for
her heroine Arabella in the 1752 novel The Female Quixote, for the method described here is the
one undertaken by the kindly, well-humoured doctor who “cures” the feverish romantic. It is
highly probable that Wollstonecraft would have been acquainted with Lennox’s novel and the
doctor’s conversation with the naive reader.
5 1 Wollstonecraft had considered ridicule and its role in the development of young women of
character earlier, highlighting its ubiquity and the objectification it promotes. In her 1789
collection o f “the most useful passages o f many volumes . . . for the improvement o f females”
entitled The Female Reader (Preface, iii), the editor excerpts the eighth letter from Hester
Chapone’s 1773 work Letters on the Improvement o f the Mind. In this letter, Mrs. Chapone
admonishes young women about subjecting their elders or indeed anyone to ridicule, noting the
frequency with which she observes “I am sorry however to say that I have too often observed it
amongst young ladies, who little deserved that title whilst they indulged their overflowing spirits in
defiance of decency and good-nature. The desire o f laughing will make such inconsiderate young
persons find a subject of ridicule, even in the most respectable o f characters” (Female 12).
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deprecation, and she may have assumed that young women who claimed a
fondness for novels were likely to “indulge their overflowing spirits” in the
ridicule of others. Knowing that many young women indulge in this crude form of
discrimination, Wollstonecraft may have regarded a talent for ridicule as a
foundation for the cultivation of taste. The critic emphasizes that “apt
comparisons” must be made between the fantastic incidents that litter such
narratives and historical scenes of pathos and heroism, emphasizing the differences
and helping the young woman to make finer distinctions. “Cutting remarks” may
pave the way for more discriminating, highly nuanced evaluations, while the
“dormant faculties,” stimulated by the activities of division and classification, may
be awakened and refined. The nai've female reader is, in effect, deprived of her
hermeneutic innocence and seduced into exercising her mind more rigorously.
Wollstoncraft models this process in her earlier writing for the Analytical
Review, mocking the titles and prose fashioned by the writers and displaying the
pleasures of satirical engagement. Because Johnson at the Analytical Review
explicitly instructed writers to summarize the plots and arguments of the works
they read, many of the reviews featured are heavier on summary than analysis, and
Wollstonecraft’s commentaries are no exception. She turns this requirement to her
advantage, however, taking care to highlight the most ridiculous episodes or
scenes in her extensive plot summaries when she disliked a work. Even those
novels she does commend for moral content and stylistic grace like Charlotte
Smith’s Emmeline are not spared if the incidents depicted include wildly emotional
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scenes between tearful, trembling lovers. In fact, one sixth of her seven-page
review of Emmeline is dedicated to describing the “temporary frenzy” of the
eponymous heroine’s would-be lover (Vol I, 329), a scene replete with outbursts
like “Alack-a-day! ‘tis the young lord. He is gone mad, to be sure, for the love of
Miss, up stairs” (329). As the most extensive summary is frequently written to
capture moments of hysteria and absurdity, so are the more ridiculous sentences
highlighted over restrained lines. In her review of Julia de Gramont
Wollstonecraft strings together some examples of the author’s prose style,
skewering sentence and scribbler at once: “We shall subjoin some quotations,
many sentences we only present, as a mere collection of words, for the meaning
they were designed to convey, we could not comprehend” (Vol I, 334).
Recognizing her own delight in the darts of derision perhaps, she exploits the
sense of self-satisfaction and validation afforded, presuming the pleasures of
ridicule—and the distance it effects from textual objects and others—will
outweigh the pleasures of passivity and a “languishing “ mind.
There are risks to reform via ridicule, however, the most obvious of which
is that the ridiculer may just enjoy the creative turn, missing the “critical” point
and adding her own reproductive energies to the production of “misshapen
monsters” (Vol I, 209). Furthermore, if mimicry is to achieve its critical aim, it
must be cast before an audience familiar with the conventions of the genre and
with the criteria by which literature is judged; knowledge of such criteria enables a
certain degree of distance from the text. In most of her mimetic passages
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Wollstonecraft is writing for a more sophisticated reader, one who is trained to
appreciate the gap between the original object and a parodic copy, one who is able
to maintain a safe, ironic distance from the object she beholds. The critic’s
objective, “to teach and delight,” depends, in this instance anyway, on an already
enlightened readership that can establish a sense of ironic distance from the
reproduced text and perceive the “nudge-wink” that accompanies it. The shared
knowledge and assumptions that underscore this ironic distance create an alliance
between the critic and her more sophisticated readers, but this bond depends in
turn on another instance of distancing—the simultaneous “othering” and
subordination of the lightweight novelist and her giddy or “thoughtless” readers.
For “those in the know,” ridicule affords pleasures that can be characterized by a
certain smugness, playing on the vanity of the learned reader who can easily
maintain an alienated position from the text and power over her less
hermeneutically gifted peers.
This satiric, even sadistic, impulse was justified (by the critic) in the name
of reforming young women, both in the passage above from chapter 8 and in the
earlier reviews. But in other sections of Vindication, Wollstonecraft’s turns from
the imperiled young women who have long been a concern to the “ignorant”
(mature) women who read novels and nurse “wanton” desires.
Ignorant women, forced to be chaste to preserve their reputation,
allow their imagination to revel in the unnatural and meretricious
scenes sketched by the novel writers of the day, slighting as insipid
the sober dignity and matron graces. (186)
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Exploring the connections between literature and life, a “vitiated taste” and the
forms of depravity that follow, she suggests that because women are unable to
experiment with desire firsthand, they turn to poor substitutes. Such works
redirect and debase their “natural aims” and inclinations, argues Wollstonecraft,
and they begin to dismiss “the matron graces” that characterize their domestic
situation. Her move to include married women in her project is an interesting one,
and, again, I believe it speaks to a sharp anxiety about the merger of reader and
text, and the power such texts hold over women who are “impressed” by their
scenes. Why that anxiety should grow more pronounced in the writing of
Vindication might be explained by the humiliation the critic experienced when she
her own experience with a private fantasy made public. Janet Todd, in her
“Introduction” to Maria, writes about the writer’s “first documented “irrational’
passion” for Henry Fuseli, entertained while she was writing her feminist tract.
By now she was apparently enacting Rousseau’s La Nouvelle
Heloise rather than Goethe’s Young Werther and she contemplated
a real-life version of the book’s heady trio of lovers, Saint-Preux,
Julie and the passionate female friend Claire. To the Fuselis she
suggested a menage a trois with herself as intellectual friend, but
her offer was rejected by the wife marked out for the fleshly part,
(xi)
Attributing her longing at least partially to Rousseau’s novel, Todd’s anecdote
suggests that Wollstonecraft herself was prone to the dangerous impressions of
novel reading—a phenomenon that helps to account for her fierce anxiety about
female readers and the transformation of her role as a feminist reader. For when
she chooses to reread La Nouvelle Heloise with her heroine, Maria, five years
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later, she no longer maintains the distant and arrogant stance of the satirist.
Having discovered that the ridicule she practices to protect others is insufficient
for her own self-protection, Wollstonecrafit learns that the best method for
“correcting a fondness of novels” is to read romance in the company of women.
Rereading the Romance with Maria
The anger Wollstonecraft was able to access while writing Vindication
helped her to reread the romance form in 1797 from a more integrated and
powerful position, a position that allowed the critic more identificatory freedom so
her role vis-a-vis the text was not fixed as either a highly suggestible or a satiric
reader. Both moved by and critical of the texts she encounters by the time she
writes Maria, Wollstonecraft fashions two female protagonists who embody these
impulses to great effect, providing a model not only for intersubjective readings of
romance but also for the more engaged feminist readings the critic was performing
at the time of her death. Given that she was continually revising her methods of
reading throughout her critical career, it is perhaps appropriate that her trajectory
should culminate in this highly revisionary text.
And, indeed, Maria is replete with revisionary moments: the author retools
popular contemporary structures like the didactic novel, the gothic, and the
cautionary memoir (e.g.Lady Pennington’s Unfortunate Mother’ s Advice to Her
Absent Daughters), creating a rather uneven hybrid text that disrupts the
distinction between fiction and critique at the extradiegetic and intradiegetic levels.
In addition to these generic revisions, Wollstonecraft highlights her heroine’s
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rereading of the widely-read love story La Nouvelle Heloise (LNH), and the text
remains central to her own novel’s structure and action, despite her misgivings
about its suitability for young female readers.5 2 While she makes significant
changes within the tradition of the sentimental novel LNH exemplifies, the French
novel’s prominence in this instance suggests that the feminist’s theories about the
relationship between text and reader had been considerably revised by the end of
her career, as had her views about the pleasures and dangers of the romance form.
Because Wollstonecraft’s first eponymous heroine Mary rhapsodizes about
sensibility, summarizing some of Rousseau’s basic tenets concerning man’s innate
goodness and the corrupting influence of society, and in Vindication the critic
censures the extravagant emotions of women and tries to expunge the affective
elements of her own thought and expression, it seems clear that Maria signals a
return to an earlier confidence in sensibility as a means for progressive change and
to a rediscovery of her passionate self.
The novel features the ingestion images that proliferate in her earlier
critical work, but in this instance they are framed more actively; she seems to
perceive something productive in the engagement between reader and text,
especially in the revisions enacted by a (sexually) experienced woman. This time
5 2 In her review of Letters on the Confessions o f J. J. Rousseau, Wollstonecraft questions the need
to defend his memoir - the explicit purpose of the editor M. Guigne - observing that those who
have not been moved by Rousseau’s own words toward an understanding of the heart, will likely
remain unmoved by these defenders. She does, however, remark on the unsuitability of his writing
for young readers, singling out La Nouvelle Heloise as his “ justly celebrated novel.” She writes:
“The confessions of J.J. Rousseau will ever be read with interest by those persons of sensibility
who have pondered over the movements of their own hearts; but for youth, we must gravely assert,
that such delineations of human frailty appear to us, in common with many in his justly celebrated
novel, improper, because they inflame the passions, and furnish excuses for sensual indulgence
before either the mind or body arrive at maturity” (AR, Vol XI 1791, 526).
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the heroine is aware, constantly, of the pleasures and dangers of such texts, and her
reading becomes a conscious negotiation process that Wollstonecraft makes
explicit. Moved by loss and desire and maintaining an incisive awareness of her
own potentially dangerous engagement, Maria "devours" LNH while imprisoned,
then recreates its “chimerical” world for solace and companionship, enlisting her
guard Jemima as her Claire-like confidant and Darnforth as Saint Preux. The
heroine’s love plot prompts the self-reflexive story told by Jemima, who is so
moved by the “air of confidence that breathed around her, that she voluntarily
beg[ins] an account of herself’ (79). Jemima’s history, which details the life-long
exploitation of a woman of little means, and Maria’s memoir to her own “absent
daughter” all but obliterate the developing romance narrative, and, told together,
the tales provide a sharp analysis of the effects of class difference on the rights and
expectations of women. The heroine’s revisionary fantasy—symbolizing a
recuperation of the radical sensibility embodied by Rousseau’s text—becomes,
then, not only an occasion for increased self-consciousness and gender critique but
an opportunity for empathic identification and cross-class solidarity.
Wollstonecraft draws on the conventions of the “didactic” or “social
problem novel” form as well as the cautionary memoirs and conduct books
popularized in the last decades of the 18th century—forms that do not run counter
in purpose to Rousseau’s epistolary novel; indeed, Wollstonecraft’s didactic
purpose is underscored by her heroine’s chosen text in a number of ways. LNH is
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a highly reflexive reworking of the relationships referenced in the 12th century
Letters o f Abelard and Heloise: both works represent a pedagogical relationship
that spins into an illicit love affair and back again; the power structure is
destabilized upon the lovers’ return to learning—a moment when increased
institutional power is conferred upon the women; and in the later example
especially, the pupil instructs her former teacher in the ways of the social order.5 3
Yet if Rousseau desired to link “morality and marital fidelity, which are at the root
of all social order” and to foster “harmony and the public peace” with his novel as
he claims in Confessions (405), his wayward follower chooses to turn his purpose
on its end by depicting the travails of a married woman whose trust in her husband
and the larger social system is cruelly betrayed—a theme so far removed from the
themes of domestic happiness her early reviews commended it makes the head
spin. Wollstonecraft instead presents a highly critical version of the conventional
woman’s “sad tale of woe” that treats women’s difficulties with courtship and
marriage, seeking rather to “exhibit the misery and oppression, peculiar to women,
that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society” (Author’ s Preface, 59).
Wollstonecraft’s response to Rousseau’s tale both repeats and amends; she
rejects the voyeuristic, spectatorial delights constructed by the epistolary for a
more restrained narrative structure, but moves back and forth between a narrative
5 3 While the title might suggest otherwise, the 12th century letters are not romanticized in
Rousseau’s work, nor is the conduct of the ambitious scholar. In a highly suspect reference to their
letters, which somehow “fell into [Julie’s] hands,” Saint Preux exhorts her to “remember what [he]
said to [her] about reading them and about the conduct of that priest” (68). He admits his pity and
admiration for Eloise, who “had a heart made for love,” but censures Abelard’s unvirtuous and
unloving ways, observing that he “deserved his fate” (68). He then compares their consummated
love affair with his own “virtuous” one, condemning the first as a “shameful relationship” and
promising to maintain his love, duty, and honor. This promise is not kept.
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that aims to engage (or enthrall) the reader through empathic identification and the
polemical arguments that would have been familiar to readers of Vindication. She
also employs the narrative structure implicit in the 12th century correspondence
between Abelard and Eloise that informs Rousseau’s text: one story of misfortune
is answered by another, and the characters’ personal histories frequently lead to
moments of abstraction or generalization not unlike those in 20th century feminist
consciousness-raising sessions. Each of her three primary characters has the
opportunity to share his or her own tragic tale, but while the first-person narrative
of Darnforth offers little fodder for theorizing and is quickly dispensed with, the
two women’s stories have much greater emotional and instructional impact,
following in the tradition of Abelard’s “letters of direction” and contemporary
cautionary memoirs or conduct books. Jemima’s history is the rarely told tale of a
woman of little means—the degradation she experiences in an unfeeling social
environment and her attempts to improve herself through the reading of literature,
and Maria’s memoir to her estranged daughter is framed as an attempt to instruct,
offering a form of “counsel, which is meant rather to exercise than influence [her]
mind” (95). Both are indications of Wollstonecraft’s best hopes for women’s
narrative. Indeed, Maria’s purpose is her creator’s own, and the latter’s
deployment of Rousseau’s own subtly didactic novel underscores her desire to
promote more active reading and thinking among members of her female
audience.
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Our introduction to Wollstonecraft’s heroine is prefaced by a reference to
fantastical structures that would be familiar to readers of the gothic novel. The
narrator observes:
Abodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled
with specters and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of
genius to harrow the soul and absorb the wondering mind. But,
formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, what were they to the
mansion of despair, in one corner of which Maria sat, endeavouring
to recal her scattered thoughts! (61).
This seems, at first, a rather odd opening for a work many critics have classified
within the social problem novel genre (Myers 107), but the primacy of such
fantasy structures is highly suggestive: not only do they point to the gothic as a
form conducive to the emergence of feminist questions and ideas but they also
raise questions about how public and private fantasies function in the lives of
women in general, and feminists in particular. Because Maria’s appearance is
heralded by these literary phantoms, one perceives these structures somehow
antedate her current confinement, an indication that the heroine’s predicament, and
her psychological distress, may be the consequence of reading such works. It is
also possible, however, that these all too familiar structures have been invoked as a
form of comfort and stimulation in an unfamiliar, alienating setting. Indeed, there
seems to be a more complicated, recursive relation between the heroine’s state of
mind and body and the uncanny presence of these spectral entities—a recurrent
fascination that derives from the heroine’s inchoate sense of the form’s impact on
her psychology and its compensatory and generative possibilities. The fantasy
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structures introduced in the first lines remain with us throughout the novel,
haunting a reading experience that asks us to respond empathically while training
us to theorize the plight of women; I’d like to suggest that these formal shadows
demonstrate Wollstonecraft’s awareness of the gothic form’s suitability for her
purposes as well as her intuition that such public fantasies can serve to stimulate
and mediate women’s growing knowledge about themselves and their limited roles
in a claustrophobic society.
Yet if her first sentences situate the novel firmly within the gothic tradition,
they simultaneously signal its difference, and while women readers’ acceptance of
the form may make unfamiliar, even threatening ideas like Wollstonecraft’s easier
to “absorb,” they must prepare themselves for the introduction of strange material
and a resolutely anxious feeling as they read. Her explicit, and immediate,
conjuring of the gothic form is an attempt to limit and frame her work’s reception
within and against the evolving women’s narrative tradition; the gothic form, in
contrast to the reassuring courtship novels that constitute the generic majority,
presumes a fair amount of knowledge and experience on the part of the heroine.
As Tania Modleski observes in Loving with a Vengeance, the gothic form speaks
more directly to the anxieties and experiences of the married woman than to the
unknowing heroine of the romance novel, which is centered on courtship and
anticipation; it highlights the older heroine’s past and her attempts to make sense
of that past in her present circumstances (60). Rousseau himself observed that
LNH was “ideally suited to women readers, for whom its ‘gothic tone’ is more
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appropriate than that of a philosophy book,” but that young girls should not be
allowed to read novels at all (Ray 423). Clearly, the gothic is a vehicle not for the
girlish but for the womanly heroine and reader. And yet the more conventional
romance narrative—the absent “formal other” as it were—haunts Maria’s
confinement within the gothic structure, for her earliest desires and expectations
have been shaped by the form. The romance novel’s ending is the gothic’s
beginning; it serves almost as an answer to, a sequel of, the impossibly optimistic
courtship plot, and as we read, in the back of our minds lurks the recognition that
this comparatively bleak setting is the inevitable outcome of our earlier hopes and
desires. Modleski’s comments on the function of the gothic provide one clue to
Wollstonecraft’s reasons for using the form toward feminist ends: “Gothics to this
day perform the contradictory function of showing women that while there is some
basis for their paranoid fears, they must also struggle against succumbing to them”
(64). The form allows the writer to explore the causes of women’s confinement,
misery, and oppression, while at the same time enabling her to suggest how they
might acknowledge their disappointments and initiate change.
The first thing one might notice about Wollstonecraft’s heroine is that she
is not beset by tears and flutters; she is attempting, rather, to restrain her passions,
to subordinate them to reason and to “exercise her understanding” (Vindication
184). The next paragraph describes not her person, but the workings of her mind:
Surprise, astonishment, that bordered on distraction, seemed to have
suspended her faculties, till, waking by degrees to a keen sense of
anguish, a whirlwind of rage and indignation roused her torpid
pulse. One recollection with frightful velocity following another,
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threatened to fire her brain, and make her a fit companion for the
terrific inhabitants, whose groans and shrieks were no unsubstantial
sounds of whistling winds, or startled birds, modulated by a
romantic fancy, which amuse while they affright; but such tones of
misery as carry a dreadful certainty directly to the heart. (61)
Wollstonecraft takes her heroine’s thoughts and feelings very seriously in this
instance, and makes a point of distinguishing between the unsubstantiated
imaginings of a feverish sensibility and the very real horrors Maria has witnessed.
Her reference to “whistling winds” and “startled birds,” signifiers of the manifold
reasonable explanations that characterize the conventional gothic’s conclusion,
serves more to trouble than to reassure, and she makes no attempts to minimize her
heroine’s peril. We learn soon after that the distress Maria experiences is maternal
anguish, not virginal terror—another indication that her fear is not the misdirected
libidinal anxiety of a sexual innocent but the consequence of a sensibility that has
been sharpened by the experiences of passion and the knowledge thereby gained.
Her perceptions of the “disordered” courtyard outside her grated window reveal
much about her finely honed sensibility: as she contemplates the decaying
buildings and the fallen stones that have not been returned to the ever-weakening
structure, she notes that the “ivy had been torn off the turrets,” an unmistakable
metaphor for the knowledge she’s gained about the institution of marriage.
Twining ivy, the classical symbol of matrimony, is notable for the structural
damage it causes, and Maria’s observation suggests that her view of the
relationship between marriage and state differs markedly from Rousseau’s; she
may be a well-read heroine with plenty of imagination, but she tempers it with a
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critical point-of-view and the self-awareness that results from disappointed ideals.
Her repeated attempts to “recal her scattered thoughts” or “brace her mind to
fortitude” suggest she is mindful of the dangers of isolation and enforced leisure; it
is as if she had read the gothic before and fully understood its implicit message.
Maria has taken heed of such tacit warnings and will continue to do so throughout
the novel, a response that signals her interpretive skill and her maturity.
Maria’s novelistic adventures begin when she resolves to act in order to
obtain her freedom, and it is no insignificant detail that at the very moment of
resolution Jemima is introduced. While the confidante-figure is fairly common in
novels about singular and/or solitary women who find themselves in confining
spaces (e.g. Clarissa’ s Anna Howe and LNH’ s Claire d’Orbe), she makes a less
frequent appearance in the gothic novel; Wollstonecraft’s recasting of the figure is
markedly different, for Jemima’s role far exceeds that of a passive actor in the
drama that unfolds. When we meet her, she is a less than wholly sympathetic
ear—a point the narrator stresses when characterizing her as “suspicious” and
“doubting” (63). Jemima’s transformation vis-a-vis the arousal of sympathy is
narrated in conjunction with Maria’s tale, so readers are able to witness her
recovery, the rediscovery of “feminine emotions” that had been suppressed by
years of ill treatment and poverty. Unlike Anna and Claire, who demonstrate a
perfect and unlimited capacity for compassion in confidential moments, Jemina’s
empathic feelings must be awakened and tested. She responds first to the pathos
of Maria’s arguments rather than to their content: “The manner, rather than the
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expostulations, of Maria made a slight suspicion dart into her mind with
corresponding sympathy, which various other avocations, and the habit of
banishing compunction, prevented her, for the present, from examining more
minutely” (63). Unmoved by the logic of Maria’s statements, Jemima’s response
- simultaneously skeptical and sympathetic—is, to a large degree, unconscious
and involuntary. We learn that despite the strength of self-interest and the duties
of servitude, Jemima feels compelled to participate in these moments of
confidence, “though she never seriously fathomed her own intentions” (64). Her
mother’s ruin, and her own imperiled beginnings, prevent her from “heroically
determin[ing] to succour an unfortunate” (64), but she begins to seek Maria out at
every moment she can escape notice to listen to her tale, and if a “lively sense of
injustice” is not roused initially, her heart is noticeably “touched” (64). The
guard’s affective response is never adequately explained, though her compulsive
returns to the storytelling scene are suggestively linked to the loss of her mother at
birth.
Indeed, it is as if she already knows Maria’s story, feels the outcome of her
unfinished tale; while she cannot rationally comprehend her growing curiosity, she
is nevertheless drawn to the other woman’s knee like a child in search of a bedtime
tale. The narrator is careful to note what narrative details move (and do not move)
the listener:
Jemima [. . .] could patiently hear of Maria’s confinement on false
pretenses; she had felt the crushing hand of power, hardened by the
exercise of injustice, and ceased to wonder at the perversions of the
understanding, but, when told that her child, only four months old,
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had been torn from her, even while she was discharging the
tenderest maternal office, the woman awoke in a bosom long
estranged from feminine emotions, and Jemima determined to
alleviate all in her power, without hazarding the loss of her place,
the sufferings of a wretched mother, apparently injured, and
certainly unhappy. (64)
Desiring to soothe the pain of a mother who has lost her child, identifying in some
sort of preternatural way with the protagonist’s estranged infant, Jemima
participates in the scene as a surrogate for the lost object of desire. Maria is not
yet consciously aware of Jemima’s own loss, but she longs for her companionship
and readily intuits the woman’s growing willingness to aid her in revising the end
of her (own) orphan’s tale. A sense of the uncanny prevails in their storytelling
situation, as it does in many gothic novels where secrets about mothers and
daughters abound. Modleski discusses the uncanny elements of the gothic form,
arguing that the genre presents female readers with one means of resolving
conflicted feelings about familial relationships, in particular the vexed relations
between mother and daughter. She observes “in a great many of the novels the
heroine has the uncanny sensation that the past is repeating itself through her .. .
feel[ing] a strong identification with a woman from either the remote or the very
recent past” (69). Feeling is inextricably linked with knowing, and if this felt
sense of knowledge in the gothic situation seems often too hazy and all-enveloping
to foster conscious action upon the part of the female protagonist, her novelistic
“end” nevertheless seems to hinge upon on a strong identification with (or desire
for) the “other” whose story she longs to hear. Jemima betrays a stronger interest
in Maria the mother-figure than Maria the wronged wife, a bias the narrator has
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not yet explained; instead Jemima’s unconscious desire to hear the mother’s side
of the story is highlighted, as is her determination to act before she fully
comprehends her own motives. Despite her lack of psychic clarity, we entertain
no doubts as to the wisdom of her impulse, for the narrative persona clearly
valorizes the feminine emotions, linking them with “a sense of right” and the
“simplest act of reason” (64).
The connection between affect, the understanding, and moral action is
emphasized again in the next paragraph, and it is interesting to note that all three
are once more associated with a return to the past and unconscious desires.
Wollstonecraft writes of Jemima’s budding transformation:
Maria’s conversation had amused and interested her, and the natural
consequence was a desire, scarcely observed by herself, of
obtaining the esteem of a person she admired. The remembrance of
better days was rendered more lively; and the sentiments then
acquired appearing less romantic than they had for a long period, a
spark of hope roused her mind to new activity. (65)
It is difficult to know from what cause, exactly, Jemima’s admiration and hope
springs: Maria’s story or the “remembrance of better days” it occasions. What
does seem clear is that her new perspective on her long dormant emotions depends
on the retelling of a tale she knows painfully well; if “the sentiments then acquired
appear less romantic” now, it is because she has been given the opportunity to feel
them once again—the “truth” or verisimilitude of those feelings becoming more
pressing through repetition. Revisiting earlier feelings of loss and abandonment
through Maria’s tale awakens not only Jemima’s desire, it “rouses” her intellect
and prompts her to offer Maria literary sustenance. We learn later, in chapter 5
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when Jemima narrates her own history, that ballads and books eased her suffering
as a youth, so her consolatory gesture is motivated, albeit unconsciously, by
experience, memory, and renewed sentiment. And when Maria’s memoir, written
for her estranged daughter, is presented to readers in chapter 7, it becomes clear
that Jemima’s act is uncannily appropriate: appreciated by no one as a girl but her
melancholy tutor (and uncle), Maria sought comfort in the novels and conversation
he provided. It may be significant that the first action motivated by storytelling in
the novel highlights the compelling losses and complementary desires of the two
women, as well as the compensatory function of literature; the tenuous bond
between them depends on knowledge of the other, though each remains largely
unconscious of the knowledge she possesses. Modleski has observed that because
“women have more difficulty establishing a separate self, their sense of the
uncanny may actually be stronger than men’s” (71), and the developing
relationship between these female protagonists suggests that this “sense of the
uncanny” persists despite class difference. Indeed, the pattern of narrative desire
established within the first five pages of Wollstonecraft’s novel (chapter 1)
depends on a complementary structure supported not by the losses of two
heterosexual lovers but by those of a mother and daughter, and it is this union that
is most often proffered in the novel’s numerous fragmented endings; one must
wonder if the bond depicted between two women is a more accurate representation
of the compensatory function of the romance, its recasting of our primary
attachment. The rhythms of desire—its movement between sentient and affective
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states, is propelled by the energies of the past, energies accessed through (and fed
by) the consumption of literary texts, as the highly reflexive offering of books at
the chapter’s end suggests.
Maria’s use of the reading material Jemima provides recalls some of her
creator’s earlier comments about the dangers of novel reading, but the narrator’s
explicit remarks upon the consolations of literature, and the undeniably active
manner in which her reading experience is characterized suggest a different kind
of relationship between reader and text. Like Jemima, Maria responds to the “tales
of fictitious woe” she encounters with a creative burst of “new activity” (65); the
“phantoms of misery” she “conjures and embodies” while reading soon give way
to the writing of a memoir meant to instruct and protect her estranged daughter
(65).
The books she had obtained, were soon devoured, by one who had
no other resource to escape from sorrow, and the feverish dreams of
ideal wretchedness or felicity, which equally weaken the
intoxicated sensibility. Writing was then the only alternative, and
she wrote some rhapsodies descriptive of the state of her mind; but
the events of her past life pressing on her, she resolved
circumstantially to relate them, with the sentiments that experience,
and more matured reason, would naturally suggest. (65-66)
Unlike the “impressionable” young girls of Wollstonecraft’s early reviews who
“imbibe” sentiment to escape boredom and responsibility, Maria, devours books to
allay grief and to bolster the “intoxicated sensibility” wasted by fantasies. Echoing
terms from her critical past, Wollstonecraft nevertheless distinguishes, albeit
subtly, between the relatively passive, aimless form of reading suggested by
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“intoxication” and “impressions” and the impassioned, need-driven “devouring” of
texts we witness now.
The heroine’s voracious appetite for books, the energy she absorbs when
digesting their content, seems to feed a creative desire that becomes increasingly
purposeful—moving between past and present, self and other with force and
speed. She begins by writing in her journal—an attempt to manifest or express the
fluctuations of her mind, and in her attention to present emotions, finds herself
pressed by scenes from her past. Her immediate intention—to protect her
daughter—sparks an internal fire, which in turn gives “life” or “soul” to her
writing, an observation followed immediately by mention of her retrospective
activities. The soulful animation of Maria’s writing seems motored by the spatial
and temporal tensions of a recursive, intersubjective relationship that exists as
much between present and past selves as between maternal self and daughterly
other. It is almost as if the pressure of past emotions—a pressure that increases
with every “return” that the literature and her musings allow—builds to such a
point that her libido threatens to dissolve the boundaries of her social self; Jemina,
watching her work, wonders at “the very energy of Maria’s character, [which]
made her suspect that the extraordinary animation she perceived might be the
effect of madness” (66). The force of Maria’s “revived emotions of youth” is
nevertheless restrained in her memoir by the “sentiments that experience, and
more matured reason would naturally suggest” (66).
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That Jemima is simultaneously drawn to and wary of the “very energy of
Maria’s character” becomes even more evident in the latter half of chapter 2 when
the heroine receives a “fresh parcel of books,” “[takes] them up with emotion,”
and rapidly consumes them (68), a repetition of her earlier receptivity that initiates
a much more dramatic mode of fantasizing and reflection. Her initial sympathetic
identification with the owner of the books—another inmate and her future lover—
is intensified when she begins to observe the “force and taste” of his marginal
comments and notes that his political views are characterized with a “degree of
generous warmth” that is “perfectly in unison with [her] mode of thinking” (68).
Like Jemima, who reacted primarily to the “manner” of her narration, Maria
responds not so much to the content of the prisoner’s glosses as to the “warmth” or
feeling of his expression. Once the affective element she discovered has moved
her to review his commentary repeatedly, she begins to notice the more incisive,
intellectual qualities of his writing.
She read them over and over again; and fancy, treacherous fancy,
began to sketch a character, congenial with her own, from these
shadowy outlines. - Was he mad? She re-perused the marginal
notes, and they seemed the production of an animated, but not of a
disturbed imagination. Confined to this speculation, every time she
re-read them, some fresh refinement of sentiment, or acuteness of
thought impressed her, which she was astonished at herself for not
having before observed. (68)
Her re-reading is highlighted three times in this brief passage, as if to emphasize
revision’s role in the movement between affective and critical readings and to
suggest readers’ desire to connect (again and again and again) with another
consciousness vis-a-vis the text may be motivated at least as much by a longing for
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emotional connection as intellectual understanding. Note that she imagines a
“character, congenial with her own,” and appears to muse about the “creative
power” of an “affectionate heart,” a narcissistic projection given her recent
productivity (68). The affections seem to play a crucial part in the fictional
feminist’s critical drama, not only because she is longing for companionship and
support but also because they serve as the bedrock of creativity and critique.
Significantly, Maria is most interested in a third, “marginal” consciousness here—
one that occupies the position of respondent to the author’s writing and expresses
itself with feeling; she seems to be seeking a “ like subject” who can respond in
kind, with the same “degree of generous warmth” she herself brings to the reading
situation (68). The other reader she imagines is familiar, non-threatening—a
figure who seems so much like (her)self that she feels bolstered, supported by the
textual emotion she perceives. The heroine’s own emotion, fanned by the ardent
textual other, now resists the disciplinary restraints of reason, and, by metaphorical
extension, mitigates her sense of confinement and alienation. She grows quickly
tired of a psychology text that features “cold arguments on the nature of what she
felt,” discarding it largely because it attempts to intellectualize her emotions
“while she was feeling” them. Instead, perhaps in order to maintain the warm
feeling evoked by the marginalia, Maria “snap[s] the chain of theory” to read the
tale of Guiscard and Sigismunda (69), a tragic love story drawn from Bocaccio’s
Decameron, and one that was originally told by one of the female travelers. The
women’s narrative, albeit one mediated by a male author, serves, then, as a
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substitution for the emotional connection she has most recently put aside, itself a
surrogate bond that must supply the warmth and protectiveness she has forsaken
with the abduction of her child.
Maria begins to fantasize actively about the unseen reader possessed of an
“animated imagination,” questioning Jemima about his predicament and hoping
for more of his marginal notes. Her desire for contact increases as she wonders
whether he might help her to escape from confinement and watches for him in the
garden below her window. Her musings take a surprisingly reflexive turn,
however, when she reflects “on the little objects which attract attention when there
is nothing to divert the mind; and how difficult it was for women to avoid growing
romantic who have no active duties or pursuits” (69). Expressing the kind of
insight that emerges frequently in the criticism of her creator, Maria demonstrates
a keen awareness of the social or environmental causes of her romantic tendencies
as well, perhaps, as a wisdom gleaned from her past mistakes as a reader of
romance literature. And she recognizes the link between her deprivation and her
desire for an intersubjective experience, suggesting the degree of the latter may be
dependent on that of the former. It is no small coincidence that Jemima soon
delivers La Nouvelle Heloise (one of Maria’s favorites as a youth), nor that the
heroine’s description of her isolated and desiring situation recalls Wollstonecraft’s
description of Rousseau’s fantasy life in her April 1790 review of the second book
of his Confessions. Here she describes in great detail the inception of his novel, a
product of the “chimerical world” Rousseau created to escape from loneliness and
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satiate the “devouring but barren flame” of undirected desire consuming him
(Confessions 400). The critic represents his struggle in her review of Seconde
Partie des Confessions de J. J. Rousseau (1784):
He felt himself alone, his heart having no real object for his
imagination to adorn - it quickly created one, and he peopled an
ideal world with beings after his own heart. The trees shaded him,
the birds sung, whilst he conversed with these charming phantoms,
and so eager was he to return to their society, that he ate his meals
in haste, and when any importunate visitor came to detain him at
home, he could scarcely conceal his displeasure: it is almost
unnecessary to say that this exaltation of his imagination produced
the new Eloise. His plan was at first very vague; but this fiction, by
being so often reflected on, fixed itself in his brain under a
determined form. Then the fancy seized him of describing some of
the situations and of indulging the flighty desire of loving, which he
had never been able to satisfy, and with which he felt himself
devoured. (AR Vol VI, 385)
This faithful, if abbreviated, representation of Rousseau’s creative process is one
that may seem strangely familiar to close readers of Maria, for the conditions
under which Rousseau labors and the language he and Wollstonecraft use to
describe this period return uncannily in the scene where Maria receives La
Nouvelle Heloise.
The description of the heroine’s reception is a thinly veiled recreation of
Rousseau’s own period of fantasy projections. Maria, who devours books as he is
devoured by his desire to love, seems “animated” by the desiring, creative spirit of
the author her creator has studied, and if we dismiss the possibility of plagiarism,
she seems almost to “channel” his world view through a reading of his text, moved
to see how he has seen.
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She had read this work long since; but now it seemed to open a new
world to her - the only one worth inhabiting. Sleep was not to be
wooed; yet, far from being fatigued by the restless rotation of
thought, she rose and opened her window, just as the thin watery
clouds of twilight made the long silent shadows visible. The air
swept across her face with a voluptuous freshness that thrilled to
her heart, awakening indefinable emotions; and the sound of a
waving branch, or the twittering of a startled bird, alone broke the
stillness of reposing nature. (70)
Rousseau disdains food, Maria sleep, but the passage is nonetheless a slightly
anxious version of the French writer’s own experience. The “new world” Maria
wishes to inhabit is Rousseau’s own, while her perceptions of her surroundings
echo faintly his ruminations; it is almost as if she wishes to re-see her environment
through his eyes, and if a waving branch, a startled twittering bird, and long silent
shadows reflect a melancholy state of mind, she nevertheless seems to have moved
into a comparatively utopian space. The similarity becomes even more
pronounced a paragraph later when Maria, distressed by having just missed a
glimpse of the shadowy prisoner who owns the novel she’s been reading, “[flies]
back to Rousseau, as her only refuge from the idea of him, who might prove a
friend” (71). Her flight parallels the dissatisfied creator’s own flights back to his
chimerical world and to his three beloved characters—two women friends and a
“young and pleasant” man who is lover to one woman and “tender friend” to the
other. Observing that his return to his “fantastic amours” left him with ideas “a
little less exalted,” Rousseau describes his fantasy world:
I imagined love and friendship, the two idols of my heart, in the
most ravishing of forms, and took delight in adorning them with all
the charms of the sex I had always adored. I imagined two women
friends, rather than two of my own sex, since although examples of
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such friendships are rarer they are also more beautiful.. . . I gave
one of them a lover to whom the other was a tender friend and even
something more; but I allowed of no rivalry or quarrels or jealousy
because I find it hard to imagine any painful feelings, and I did not
wish to discolour my charming picture with anything degrading to
Nature. Being captivated by my two charming models, I identified
myself as far as I could with the lover and friend. But I made him
young and pleasant, whilst endowing him also with the virtues and
faults that I felt in myself. (Confessions 401).
Rousseau peoples his fantasy world by personifying love and friendship, then
“feeding” on these sentiments through identification with the young Saint Preux,
who is positioned at the center of a scene of desire.5 4 The fantasy scenario, rooted
in longing for the mother and an unsatisfied desire to love, is shaped substantially
by the writer’s return to the feelings of his youth. Maria’s act of imagination,
prompted by similar feelings of maternal loss and the desire for companionship, is
crafted in turn by the ideals manifested in this “work read long since” (70).
As noted earlier, this reproduction of Rousseau’s fantasy structure is not
Wollstonecraft’s first, and I believe its centrality in her last novel speaks to her
own experience with a private fantasy made public. Discussing his late wife’s
feelings for the painter, William Godwin terms her infatuation “a Platonic
affection,” explaining it as an instance of idealizing projection: “The delight she
5 4 Rousseau delays manifesting his “ravishing forms,” content to “fill [his] imagination with
pleasant objects, and [his] heart with those feelings on which it loves to feed. This fiction, by
constant repetition, finally assumed greater consistency and took a fixed and definite shape in [his]
brain” (emphasis added, 401). He then begins to concretize his world by “establishing] [his]
young pupils at Vevey,” his mother’s birthplace (401). This signifies a number of “returns” for the
writer: a return to maternal love and support, a return to the feelings o f his youth, a return to the
split-subject status associated with the child’s discovery of his image in the mirror. Imagining a
desire he experiences actively and passively, he writes: “It was then that the whim seized me to set
down on paper some of the situations that it suggested to me and, by recalling all that I had felt in
my youth, to give some sort o f expression to my desire to love which I had never been able to
satisfy, and which I now felt was devouring me” (emphasis added, 401).
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enjoyed in his society, she transferred by association to his person” (qtd. in Todd
xi). This is, of course, exactly what Maria does with her husband in the first stages
of courtship and with Darnforth later on, and it is clear that Wollstonecraft’s own
real-life “enactment” of Rousseau’s fantasy scenario is figured through her
heroine’s compulsive return to the same object of textual desire in a time of great
distress. Because she has experienced first-hand the humiliating consequences of
a wholehearted immersion in Rousseau’s novel of sensibility and an uncritical
acceptance of its tenets, Wollstonecraft returns to his text a much wiser woman.
Indeed, both Wollstonecraft and her fictional counterpart look back from a
position of sexual maturity and self-knowledge—a situation that allows them to
“enter an old text from a new critical direction.” Encountering “the feelings of
[their] youth” and the ghostly presence of an earlier reading self, both women
experience the work with a heightened awareness of the problems and possibilities
generated by a reading of the text as well as their own processes of self- definition
and development. Wollstonecraft’s revisionary experience continually de-
emphasizes the heterosexual romance her heroine embarks upon, privileging the
deep friendship Maria develops with a woman of a lower class—a suggestion that
the second reading performed by author (and heroine) has focused at least
unconsciously on the bond between Julie and her cousin Claire.
Having used Rousseau’s fantasy production to set the stage for Maria’s
fantasy projection, Wollstonecraft highlights a self-conscious, self-consoling, and
thought provoking repetition of the heroine’s earlier fantasy projection involving
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her estranged husband (99). In Maria’s memoir to her daughter, we learn that as a
young girl she was highly influenced by the books and ideas of her beloved uncle
(who is also her tutor); having “imbibed” his sentiments, she cannot help but
“form an ideal picture of life” (97). Tutored thus by novels, when she meets her
future husband George Venables, a man who “press [es] her hand at parting and
utter[s] expressions of unmeaning passion,” she assigns the meanings “suggested
by the “romantic turn of [her] thoughts,” and “fanc[ies] [her]self in love—in love
with the disinterestedness, fortitude, generosity, dignity, and humanity, with which
[she] had invested the hero [she] dubbed” (99). While her earlier cipher resisted
her loving projections, Maria’s second Pygmalion figure is a dashing
amalgamation of the ideal and the real; if drawn from the texts she has within
reach, he nonetheless seems to support her idealizations through his sentimental,
evidentiary glosses. Distressed by having just missed a glimpse of the shadowy
prisoner she knows only marginally well, she “[flies] to Rousseau, as her only
refuge from the idea of him, who might prove a friend” (71). The narrator
continues:
the personification of Saint Preux, or of an ideal lover far superior,
was after this imperfect model, of which merely a glance had been
caught. [...] But if she lent St Preux, or the demi-god of her fancy,
his form, she richly repaid him by the donation of all St Preux’s
sentiments and feelings, culled to gratify her own, to which he
seemed to have an undoubted right, when she read on the margin of
an impassioned letter, written in the well-known hand - ‘Rousseau
alone, the true Prometheus of sentiment, possessed the fire of
genius necessary to pourtray the passion, the truth of which goes so
directly to the heart’ (71).
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The heroine’s flight to Rousseau temporarily satiates her desire for impassioned
contact with an other, though whether she is drawn by the author’s or reader’s
sentiments remains unclear; indeed, one seems conflated with the other, a collapse
that is further suggested by her inability “to quit either the author or the window”
(71). Rousseau’s fictionalized perspective becomes the window through which
she views the shadowy stranger, while the stranger’s elusive form gains substance
through the “donation” of St Preux’s feeling. Cross-identifying with the male
author at least as much as his female heroine, and feeding her own desires with the
borrowed energy of his, Maria creates a “chimerical world” in order to ease her
loneliness and suffering, enlisting the shadowy reader as her would-be suitor and
Jemima as her confidante. She identifies with Rousseau in the act of fantasizing,
as well as in her creation of a hero who embodies her sentiments and feelings, and
like the mediator of her desire seems ultimately to take more of an interest in the
relationship between women. Her revision of the earlier, self-effacing “Pygmalion
project” may incorporate Rousseau’s fantasy structure, but she is mindful of
experience and thoughtful about her present situation as she takes her literary
nourishment. There is no unconscious imbibing of values and sentiments; in a
day’ s time, she devours the borrowed text and the consciousnesses it harbors with
a voracious desire born of loneliness and loss. Her capacity for an incisive
analysis of her predicament and her keenly felt desire suggests she is a woman
with teeth—able to question the fixity of roles within the fantasy structure and to
sever constraints when necessary.
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Maria’s fantasy scenario, firmly established by the end of chapter 2 and
antecedent to any of the three personal narratives that follow (beginning with the
entrance of the “hero” in chapter 3), seems to “complete” Wollstonecraft’s model
of the feminist reading process; she has demonstrated how the two female
characters process the stories they hear and read—highlighting the importance of
the past in present interpretations and the characters’ attempts to restrain their
sympathetic and romantic (imaginative) impulses, which are nevertheless crucial
to their creative, critical, and political actions. Her attention to the characters’
hermeneutic similarities and differences is a way of providing the reader with tacit
guidelines for responding to the stories that follow and emphasizing the
importance of collective readings. In isolation, the two women’s narrative
interactions have little chance of producing life-changing results, but if one notices
the way the readings and their consequences interact together, the outcome is quite
different. The reader is asked to observe this dynamic and learn from it, and we
are presented in this chapter with an opportunity to participate in the collective
reading process—and to exercise our own judgment, relying on the clues that have
been presented thus far in the text as well as our past romance reading experiences.
When Darnforth is introduced, we are told repeatedly that he cannot control his
desire; “accustomed to submit to every impulse of passion” (73), Maria’s hero-in-
the-making is presented as a suspect figure. We realize that the female
protagonists’ struggle between affective impulses and experiential knowledge is
contrasted pointedly with Darnforth’s lack of restraint and reflection—a sign that
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our reading process should model that of the women. This suggestion is reinforced
by his description of a past reading experience: “Confined to my bed, or chair, by a
lingering cure, my only refuge from the preying activity of my mind, was books
which I read with great avidity” (75). His description recalls the languishing,
passive female reader of Wollstonecraff s earlier criticism, and his failure (or
refusal) to integrate the “preying activity” of mind with the consolations afforded
by literature is a sign of hermeneutic surrender. A counter-example to the kind of
reading the feminist critic hopes to encourage, Darnforth also serves to illustrate an
earlier theory about the gendered dangers of novel reading. In A Vindication o f the
Rights o f Woman, she had differentiated between the insipid fantasies of the
female reader and those “men [who] carry the same vitiated taste into life, and fly
for amusement to the wanton, from the unsophisticated charms of virtue, and the
grave respectability of sense” (186). His narrative is replete with amorous
incidents and decisions that show a lack of commitment, and the savvy reader of
romances recognizes almost immediately the kind of “shadow hero” who will
inevitably let the heroine down. His narrative concludes quickly, leaving Maria
“to the ‘never ending, still beginning,’ task of weighing his words, recollecting his
tones of voice, and feeling them reverberate on her heart” (77). The reader,
exercising more caution than the heroine, recognizes the dangers of her highly
emotional response and compulsive analysis, and proceeds to read the unfolding
love plot with a sense of skepticism and dismay.
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The narrator intrudes directly after this passage to comment upon the
heroine’s susceptibility and to preface the events of chapter 4, which reads in
many ways like a microcosmic version of the more typical romance texts.
Echoing Maria’s reflections about the conditions conducive to romantic notions,
the narrator theorizes the events that follow:
Pity, and the forlorn seriousness of adversity, have both been
considered as dispositions favourable to love, while satirical writers
have attributed the propensity to the relaxing effect of idleness;
what chance then had Maria of escaping, when pity, sorrow, and
solitude all conspired to soften her mind, and nourish romantic
wishes, and, from a natural progress, romantic expectations? (77)
Wollstonecraft had denounced frequently those novels in which “the theory, of
what is termed love, [is] taught” in her earliest reviews (AR Vol 7, 20), so it is no
surprise that she attempts to proffer a different sort of theory on love here. The
theoretical warnings presage a not-so-happy ending for the couple, undermining
the developing love plot, yet the tension between the narrator’s decidedly
unromantic theory of love and the novel’s romantic elements is not so easily
resolved, as certain narratorial reflections and the chapter’s outcome will
demonstrate. After describing Maria’s person—a key narrative act in the romance
genre—the narrator returns to the theoretical discussion underway, reflecting on
the fragile distinction between a passionate sensibility that kindles a truly fine
intelligence and one that destroys a woman’s capacity for judgment and
usefulness.
The youths who are satisfied with the ordinary pleasures of life, and
do not sigh after ideal phantoms of love and friendship, will never
arrive at great maturity of understanding, but if these reveries are
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cherished, as is too frequently the case with women, when
experience ought to have taught them in what human happiness
consists, they become as useless as they are wretched. (77)
Rousseau’s radical sensibility emerges in this trace of his comments on “love and
friendship, the two idols of [his] heart” (Confessions 401), an allusion that also
serves to invoke LNH, the novel born of the “idols” he identifies. Recalling that
Maria has form[ed] an “ideal picture of life” through the books she has read (97),
and that she “was too much under the influence of an ardent imagination to adhere
to common rules” (77), it becomes clear that the novel has played a key role in her
self-development, a plot Wollstonecraft clearly means to recommend, albeit with a
judicious recognition of the dangers along the way. What, then, do we make of the
narrator’s observation concerning the link between the act of fantasizing about
“ideal phantoms” and the growth of understanding? The fantasies—public and
private—that spark and continue to fire ardent imaginations are akin to
inflammatory material that must be consumed very carefully, lest they consume
the consciousness aflame with hope and desire. Laying waste to women whose
“reveries are cherished,” the passions primed by fantasy can be tempered solely
through reflection on the lessons of experience—a struggle that is mirrored in the
intertwining of the unfolding romance plot and the narrator’s expository checks. If
we are to take in the pleasures of the romance narrative, we are to take them with a
heavy dose of skepticism and repeated reminders about the dangers of romance
reading.
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And yet while the narrator seems determined to check our reading
pleasures, she too demonstrates a vulnerability to the seductive energies of the
genre. The irrepressible pleasures of the romance are most evident at the midway
point of the chapter when the narrator declares “[w]e mean not to trace the
progress of this passion” and proceeds to do just that. The scene she details reads
not wholly unlike those in the “flimsiest” of novels, even though the narrator
provides cues to the insubstantial aspects of the scene.
A magic lamp now seemed to be suspended in Maria’s prison, and
fairy landscapes flitted round the gloomy walls, late so blank.
Rushing from the depth of despair, on the seraph wing of hope, she
found herself happy. - She was beloved, and every emotion was
rapturous. To Darnford she had not shown a decided affection; the
fear of outrunning his, a sure proof of love, made her often assume
a coldness and indifference foreign from her character; and, even
when giving way to the playful emotions of a heart just loosened
from the frozen bond of grief, there was a delicacy in her manner of
expressing her sensibility, which made him doubt whether it was
the effect of love. One evening, when Jemima left them, to listen to
the sound of a distant footstep, which seemed cautiously to
approach, he seized Maria’s hand - it was not withdrawn. They
conversed with earnestness of their situation; and, during the
conversation, he once or twice gently drew her towards him. He
felt the fragrance of her breath, and longed, yet feared, to touch the
lips from which it issued; spirits of purity seemed to guard them,
while all the enchanting graces of love sported on her cheeks, and
languished in her eyes. Jemima entering, he reflected on his
diffidence with poignant regret, and she once more taking alarm, he
ventured, as Maria stood near his chair, to approach her lips with a
declaration of love. She drew back with solemnity, he hung down
his head abashed; but lifting his eyes timidly, they met her’s [sic];
she had determined, during that instant, and suffered their rays to
mingle. He took, with more ardour, reassured, a half-consenting,
half-reluctant kiss, reluctant only from modesty; and there was a
sacredness in her dignified manner of reclining her glowing face on
his shoulder, that powerfully impressed him. (78)
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Maria’s blushing responsiveness, the mutual doubts concerning reciprocity, and
the timid dance of intimacy: all are standard flimsy novel fare. And yet there is a
significant difference. Jemima—the figure of skepticism—is a constant
interruption here, performing the restraining function of the narrator’s cautionary
remarks. But if she witnesses the drama with worry, she also receives much
pleasure from the scenes before her. Indeed, Jemima is soon so thoroughly
subdued by the “animated [. . .] accents of tenderness” in the couple’s speech that
“a tear of pleasure trickl[es] down her rugged cheeks” (79). We learn that this is
the first tear she has ever produced in response to social enjoyment and that the
“cloud of suspicion cleared away from her brow” (79). The character is drawn
into the “confidential” structure of fantasy Maria has formed on the model of
Rousseau’s confidence-swapping trio, supporting the “friendship” angle of the
triad, as Claire had supported it in her creator’s triangular_representation of “love
and friendship” (Confessions 401). Observing that “the world contained not three
happier beings” (79), the narrator draws an unmistakable parallel with the earlier
novel and strongly emphasizes Jemima’s role in the scene of desire. There are key
differences between Wollstonecraft’s triangular structure and that she models,
however; for instance, while the love affair between Julie and St Preux takes
center page in Rousseau’s novel, narratorial interest here seems to lie not so much
in the dramatization of the amorous scene as in Jemima’s affective response to it.
She is, in fact, “so softened by the air of confidence which breathed around her,
that she voluntarily begfins] an account of herself ’ (79). The confidante’s show of
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emotion, and her desire to respond with a narrative of her own, easily eclipses the
scene she witnesses, drawing the reader’s attention from the heterosexual lovers.
This focal shift also foreshadows Jemima’s ultimate usurpation of the hero’s
position within the structure, highlighting the bond between women over the
traditional dyad and supporting the author’s earlier claim: “the most holy band of
society is friendship” (Vindication 30).5 5 In this way Wollstonecraft disrupts the
existing pattern or flow of desire within the structure, redirecting the pleasure we
take in the romantic embrace to a pleasure in the female spectator’s emotional
awakening, her “coming to voice,” and her capacity for heroic actions.
Wrought under ignoble circumstances that preclude any romantic
revelations concerning long-lost legatees, Jemima’s orphan tale emerges from a
brief and brutally realistic version of Pamela. The loss of her mother in the
earliest moments of her life determines her trajectory, a reflection she makes well
into her storytelling, and one that has a spontaneous, ephiphanic quality. “Now I
look back, I cannot help attributing the greater part of my misery, to the misfortune
of having been thrown into the world without the grand support of life—a
mother’s affection. I had no one to love me; or to make me respected, to enable
me to acquire respect” (82). So cruel is her environment, so predatory her masters,
the bastard daughter cannot help but fall in the mother’s footsteps. When
55 Wollstonecraft’s take on Rousseau’s “idols” is notably different: in Vindication Wollstonecraft
identifies love and friendship as the two primary passions, but derogates the former as a “common
passion” associated with “blind admiration and the sensual emotions of fondness” while exalting
friendship’s “calm tenderness [and] confidence o f respect” (30), a distinction reinforced by M aria’ s
various fragmentary conclusions.
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discussing her time spent as a prostitute she observes, “I have since read in novels
of the blandishments of seduction, but I had not even the pleasure of being enticed
into vice” (85), a qualification that exposes the immense gap between experience
and the novelistic felicities of a servant girl’s rise to power and influence. Her tale
is frequently interrupted with asides that betray an anxious awareness of the
emergent conventions of realist narrative and a strong desire to disassociate her
story from the melodramatic material of the bourgeoisie and the sentimental stuff
of the genteel class. Acknowledging the limits of her storytelling situation, she
remarks, “But I will not attempt to give you an adequate idea of my situation, lest
you, who probably have never been drenched with the dregs of human misery,
should think I exaggerate” (82). Jemima’s anxiety is, of course, a mirror of
Wollstonecraft’s own, and both narrators attempt to control the reception of their
stories. Educating the privileged in the miseries of the underclass is their
overriding purpose, and the working class woman’s tale is glossed repeatedly with
fragments of social theory, which comment upon the inhumane treatment of those
in servitude, the abuses (as well as the benefits) of prostitution, the corruption of
law enforcement officials, and the brutal negligence of those writers who
romanticize the state of poverty or the ascendant possibilities of the individual
will. That Jemima’s tale must bear the brunt of the novel’s instructional burden
hints at the class biases Wollstonecraft cannot fully escape, as do the
generalizations put forth by Maria and Darnforth during her telling; if the
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disenfranchised are entitled to the telling of their tales, theorizing them is the right
of the educated, sentimental bourgeoisie.
Maria observes that Jemima’s “narrative gives rise to the most painful
reflections on the present state of society” (89), and, indeed, she is so moved that
thoughts of love and happiness give way to “melancholy reflections” (92): first, on
the “peculiar fate” of Jemima and herself; then, on the “oppressed state of
women’; and, finally, on the misery her daughter is likely to experience as a
woman. When Jemima returns to her cell in the morning with a love letter from
Darnforth, Maria quickly throws it aside in order to discuss the thoughts occupying
her mind. A narrative sequence in which the discourse of heterosexual romance is
displaced by the “melancholy reflections” of women is now firmly established, for
Jemima’s history, which derailed the lovers’ scene in chapter 4 and dominated the
whole of chapter 5, fuels the heroine’s internal dialogue in chapter Six, and
prefaces Maria’s memoir—replete with acutely felt reflections on her own bitter
disappointments and the enslavement of middle class women through conventional
morality and property laws. The heroine’s lackluster love object, signifying the
aims of the more traditional form of narrative desire, occupies an increasingly
diminished role, positioned finally as a mere cipher who is “plastic in [Maria’s]
impassioned hand—and reflected all the sentiments which animated and warmed
her” (138). Her imagination is paramount, her sentiments the central concern, and
this remains the case for the next nine chapters as her personal narrative unfolds.
The love plot is deferred until the end of chapter 15, which opens with a few
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epistolary reflections on the absurdity of marriage laws, advances quickly to the
moment when the lovers fall into a “confidential discourse” we cannot witness
(138), and concludes with the heroine weighing the emotional consequences of her
active fantasizing. The reader is given no opportunity to enjoy the lovers’
discourse; the scene’s brevity, and the chapter’s coda, precludes her becoming
ensnared as she might with a more conventional fantasy structure. Working with
the narrator to limit readers’ ability to project a happy ending onto her experience,
Maria glosses our reading, demonstrating her awareness of the dangers of her
fantasy projection. Observing “she had rather trust without sufficient reason, than
be for ever the prey of doubt” (138), the heroine embraces the consolations of her
fantasy structure—a moment that should resonate for feminists critiquing the
romance form, as should the narrator’s subsequent reflective commentary.
What are we, when the mind has, from reflection, a certain kind of
elevation, which exalts the contemplation above the little concerns
of prudence! We see what we wish, and make a world of our own -
and, though reality may sometimes open a door to misery, yet the
moments of happiness procured by the imagination, may, without
paradox, be reckoned among the solid comforts of life. (138)
Taking care to emphasize that the romance before us is a product of imagination,
the narrator, echoing our heroine, argues for fantasy’s role in our lives - even
when prudence dictates otherwise. And while her comments may at first seem to
strike a rather conservative note, fantasy offers women far more than solace in
their unhappy lives; indeed, when fantasy structures are re-entered from a position
of experience and social awareness, they can elicit a much richer body of theory,
the sort of “melancholy reflections” that move minds and bodies alike.
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Maria’s return to Rousseau’s fantasy structure is characterized by greater
positional freedom (alluded to earlier) and movement between more active and
passive modalities; she identifies not only with Julie, the heroine, but, in creating
her own version of the triad, the author himself. She becomes a spectator in her
own romance scenario as well whenever she reflects self-consciously on the
pleasures and dangers of her engagement, assuming the distanced perspective of a
mature woman with few illusions, yet her commentary is all the richer for her
movement and the experiences each position signals. As her more fluid fantasy
structure now allows for a greater range of behaviors and consolations, including
those of a self-conscious spectator, so do the theories proffered in her memoir
embody the complexities of affect and desire, becoming all the more moving for
their “animated” character. Maria’s “melancholy reflections” are just that—
emotionally charged insights that simultaneously reflect her contemplative
position and her various roles within and in relation to the structure of fantasy (e.g.
duped, then disappointed wife). She disdains the arguments of those “advocates
for matrimonial obedience, who, making a distinction between the duty of a wife
and of a human being, may blame my conduct.—To them I write not—my feelings
are not for them to analyze” (121). Echoing an earlier moment in the novel when
she “snapt the chain of theory’ to immerse herself in a tragic love story, Maria
suggests here that a theory devoid of sentiment is a theory worth dismissing.
Having argued in A Vindication o f the Rights o f Woman that “passions are
spurs to action, and open the mind” (30), five years later the feminist critic has
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attempted to show how two women move recursively from fantasy to feeling to
thinking to acting; what appears crucial is that they travel the path from “see[ing]
what we wish” to “mak[ing] a world of our own” together (138). Maria’s fantasy
projection has not only elicited the sort of “melancholy reflections” and strongly
felt generalizations upon which feminist theory depends, it has fully awakened
Jemima’s dormant emotions in a way the retelling of her own orphan’s tale could
not as well as opened up new possibilities for heroic identifications and actions.
Directly after the narrator has warned us of Darnforth’s cipher-like qualities at the
end of chapter 15, we witness Jemima aiding Maria in her escape from the asylum
and effectively displacing Maria’s illusory “shadow hero.” In the fragmentary
conclusions compiled by Godwin, we observe in almost all that Darnforth
abandons the heroine, who loses his child by miscarriage and is left distraught,
and, in two fragments, suicidal. Yet in the most developed of the possible endings,
Jemima awakes Maria from her laudanum-induced “sleep of death” (147), and
presents her with the daughter she had believed dead. Informing Maria she had
“suspect[ed] that [her] husband and brother had deceived [her], and secreted the
child” (147), Jemima “snatched her from misery” and begged Maria to heed the
lessons of the tale she first told. Performing reconnaissance work, rescuing her
from the clutches of another inmate during their frenzied escape, reuniting her with
her daughter, forming a new triad composed solely of women: Jemima’s
usurpation of the “plastic” hero’s role demonstrates the elasticity of the fantasy
structure, suggesting the “worlds of our own” that might be created through cross-
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identifications within the romance scenario. Darnforth, who “reflect[s] all the
sentiments which animated and warmed” Maria (138), and has proven to be
incapable of the restraint and reflection that temper a fervent imagination, is
clearly a poor match for the impassioned heroine; the languishing romantic is also
the wrong partner hermeneutically, while Jemima, possessing the materialist’s
skepticism, the wisdom born of harsh experience, and a willingness to be moved to
heroic action, embodies the traits needed to complete the engaged critical dynamic.
In effect, Wollstonecraft has recast the complementary roles of hero and heroine in
the typical romance structure, allowing class differences to supplant the gender
gap. For while the thoughts and actions of both women depend on the excitation
of emotion, Jemima’s talents, at least as they are showcased here, are restricted to
empathic response, the narrative re-action it begets, and (typically male) heroic
action. Maria’s class position and education, on the other hand, prepare her for
such acts of imagination as active fantasizing, abstracting from the particulars of a
given tale to theorize about class oppression, and writing instructive memoirs and
polemical letters for the court of law. It is quite telling that Wollstonecraft thwarts
Maria’s rhetorical attempts to escape the confines of marriage while making her
dependent on Jemima, a woman of the lower classes, when storming out of the
asylum that emblematizes her situation—that of being “bastilled for life” in a
disastrous union (115). Yet it is Maria’s imagination, and her fervent desire to
bond with another, to which Jemima responds, a clear indication that women’s
fantasy and solidarity are essential for the creation of “new worlds.”
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Wollstonecraft takes great pains to emphasize the bond between Maria and
Jemima, positioning the former as representative of romantic thinking and the
latter as a figure for social realism; clearly by the time she began writing her last
novel, she saw the need for both systems working interactively. Jacqueline Rose,
in her 1996 work States o f Fantasy, echoes the feminist critic writing 200 years
earlier when she explains how fantasy relates to the socio-political landscape:
“fantasy is not... antagonistic to social reality; it is its precondition or psychic
glue. But fantasy surely ceases to be a private matter if it fuels, or at least plays its
part in, the forging of the collective will” (3). Rose argues here that private
fantasies can and do shape public realities, most probably by fueling the desires
that make coalitions, ideologies, and political actions possible. Wollstonecraft’s
theory about the structures of fantasy that feed and inflame the passions may be
much more tacit and fragmentary, but the coincidence of certain dissonances in her
earlier criticism and the hermeneutic histories of our “complementary couple”
provide us with sufficient data to construct a model for feminist readings of
romance.
* H = *
Wollstonecraft’s fiction and criticism is saturated with the stories of “returning
readers”: the novelists who reproduce the romance form, spreading its insipid
discourse everywhere; the love-plot-lorn who depend on their novels for a whiff of
passion and/or escape; and the less typical readers, like Maria, who revisit their
beloved texts with an acute sense of their capacity for influence and identification.
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The last section explored the heroine’s use of the love story La Nouvelle Heloise,
highlighting the rather surprising, far-reaching consequences of her very active
reading; a brief review of the scene of Maria’s revisionary adventures may provide
contemporary feminist readers with a model for these acts of repetition, as well as
a greater understanding of the form’s seductions and the feminist critic’s own
complicated returns. The novel’s female protagonists are presented with several
opportunities to revisit earlier scenes of emotional response (the telling of their
histories, the witnessing of a love story, and the retelling of the orphan’s tale), but
it is the conscious deployment of fantasy structures that interests me most here, as
it indicates most clearly how the act of revision might be performed and why it can
be defined as the “act of survival” Adrienne Rich celebrates. What, exactly, do we
observe in the novel to guide us in this crucial activity? The heroine’s attempt at
re-vision can be distinguished from her earlier reading(s) of LNH by the
experiential knowledge and life disappointment she brings to the task, and by her
cache of feminist beliefs. No longer the impressionable, virginal naif who
swallows novelistic sentiment whole, Maria has honed her analytical skills, cut her
critical teeth. Devouring the 1000+ page novel in a day, she acknowledges not
only the desires that draw her hither, but also the susceptibilities of a woman who
should know better. Yet there is a shadow of the young Maria in the woman who
darts to the window for a glimpse of her St. Preux, long before we meet her in the
memoir; it is as if the rereading cannot help but invoke the ghost of an earlier
reading self. A split subject who perceives the gap between present and past
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readings, ideal and real expectations, the heroine must confront anew the long
repressed emotions and energies that attended her first reading and propelled her
pursuit of a chimerical world. Re-engaging this fantasy structure from a sexually
mature and critically acute subject position, Maria is able to maintain a certain
degree of spectatorial distance while experiencing once again, in a Wordsworthian
sort of “re-action”, the emotions and optimism of a younger self.
After all, the fantasies we feast upon at an early age never leave us entirely;
they lurk under our conscious awareness—feeding some desires, blocking others.
The direction of those desires depends largely on the identifications and object
choices made. Once the reader has achieved a certain degree of temporal or
analytical distance from a much-loved work, however, her experience of it can
never be entirely the same. She has become a temporally split-subject, viewing
and participating in the scenario with the knowledge and emotional complexity of
a mature woman and the re-emergent feelings of an inexperienced girl. If
uncomfortable, repeating an earlier interaction with the romantic textual other—
much like encountering an ex-lover—can prove to be a highly educational and
liberating experience. One can identify more clearly the inter-relational moments
and elements that created conflict while recognizing the attractions of such an
engagement in the first place; textual reunions provide the reader with an
opportunity to retrace her desires—to observe moments of fervent advancement,
disconnect, and hitherto unseen elements that prompt new emotional or intellectual
responses. Even the “light reader” who lacks the increased self-awareness and
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subjective flexibility of the heroine reader, is unlikely to play out the same,
repetitive dynamic; she will take more control in her second reading—skipping
slow, scenic passages or laborious exposition, while the more energetic or
“vainglorious” among her type may even attempt textual reproduction. The
increased level of self-awareness and fragmentation occasioned by revisionary
readings enables the heroic female reader to challenge the limited roles within the
fantasy structure and the apparent restrictions imposed on her involvement and
mobility. Although limited in her movement to some degree by social roles and
values, she can identify multiply (especially if she chooses to do so consciously),
and the shifting identifications she might make can provide insight into all the
desires represented within a structure. It is this flexibility that allows
Wollstonecraft to use a heterosexual love scene to first catch her readers’ attention
and harness our narrative desires, then to redirect our gaze to Jemima’s emotional
response and our pleasure to women’s sensual and perceptual awakening. Like the
heroine and her cohorts, we are “entering an old text from a new critical direction”
(Rich 537), engaging in a new form of speculative pleasure that depends upon our
split-subject status and an awareness of the conflicts presented by our re
engagements with an all-too-familiar text.
The returning reader might identify, once again, with the heroine, as Maria
does with the beloved Julie, attaining the comfort and companionship she longs for
when feeling isolated, confined. She might seek excitement—escape from the
mundane, the obligatory, while basking in the reflective glow of a textual hero’s
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cherishing recognition. She will also be able to see, however, as an older,
differently wiser woman, the advantages presented by these interactions and to
acknowledge, and, perhaps more importantly, accept her desire for such
satisfactions. The reader might also cross-identify to secure more satisfying ends,
as in Maria’s flexible fantasy structure where Jemima usurps the hero’s position,
privileging the bond between women and female heroism over a more
conventional resolution. Similarly, Maria’s identification with the male creator of
the original scenario allows her to assume the author-ity of a celebrated
philosopher, to see the world through the eyes of another, and to tap into the
creative passions and energies of his text. If such cross-identifications are made
more difficult by political realities, they nevertheless open up a speculative space
where new social identities and relations might be imagined—the reconfigured, all
female triangle being a prime example. Both protagonists assume at one point or
another the position of the less romantic, feminist spectator—a witness who is
keen to the seductive pleasures and dangers of the scene of desire, and it is from
this particular vantage point that the feminist reader is most likely to enter the
fantasy scenario anew. This returning reader, closely akin to Maria who muses on
the origins of a “romantic turn of mind”, is mindful of the socio-political reasons
for women’s repeated returns to the romance, and she looks more pointedly for
previously unobserved elements in the text—objects of desire and “other” hidden
relations that might prove more satisfying in the long run. She anticipates quite
often an anxious textual encounter—one that is characterized by psychological
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discomfort, although the rapid identity shifts and conflicting interests she is likely
to notice while reading may enhance her pleasure in the text as much as disrupt it.
Recognizing that there are compelling non-intellectual reasons for one’s attraction
to the textual other, the (re)visionary reader takes a greater interest in her affective,
energetic, bodily responses to a work and welcomes (while watching for) those
moments when she begins to lose her critical edge. Such moments offer an
opportunity to re-embrace disavowed desires and needs, and to reintegrate earlier
aspects of self that remain unacknowledged. Like Jemima, whose sleeping
sensibilities are awakened by Maria’s tale, the returning reader must first have
passed through a skeptical stage, revisiting earlier feelings in order to form new
political alliances. It may be no small matter that the protagonists’ unconventional
ending is bound up in the contiguities and connections of the mother/daughter
bond, an indication, perhaps, that Wollstonecraft’s own experience as a mother
enabled her to reinterpret the possibilities of a bond between women and the
different truths recast or recuperated relations enable. A theory bereft of feeling is
unsatisfying, oversimplified, an issue Maria makes clear when she “snap[s] the
chain of theory” to read a love story instead (69). Re-entering an old structure
from a highly speculative position—one that allows for wonder and reflection and
investment (casual or serious)—can elicit the “melancholy reflections” that
comprise a richer body of feminist theory, a more sensuous form of knowledge.
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Chapter Three: Re-educating Romola and Other Tales of Instruction
Desiring to promote interpretive rigor and that lesser-known form of
narrative desire, sympathy, George Eliot is most challenged by the novel-gazing
segment of her audience identified as “Lady Readers.” Her impatience with their
love of self and of “silly novels” is detailed in her criticism for the Westminster
Review and in her early novels, Scenes o f Clerical Life and Adam Bede, and if one
examines her earlier letters it becomes clear that her anxieties about feminine vanity
and its reinforcement through romance reading run deep. What careful attention to
her fictional representations of romance readers reveals, however, is that a strong
current of sympathetic identification for the lady reader does, in fact, emerge over
time. When rereading the romance with Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss
her own sympathies are awakened, and she begins to take interest in how the
romance narrative might actually serve female readers. Indeed, Eliot’s return to
romance reading with Maggie marks the beginning of her conversion plot, a plot in
which she becomes an increasingly empathic and interested reader of romance
readers. This curiosity is only augmented in the writing of Romola, the novel that
deals most directly with the question of how female readers develop interpretive
agency. Like Maggie, Romola Bardi’s encounters with romance emphasize the
compensatory liberatory possibilities of the form: how it serves as a vehicle for
escape or a substitute for love; how it sparks desires so often suppressed as to be
unrecognizable; how it prompts imaginative activity; and how it allows for a degree
of resistance within a confining social sphere. It is, in fact, through romance reading
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that Romola begins to exorcise the male mind within and discover the value of her
own felt knowledge. And because the romance is central to the heroine’s
hermeneutic plot, her story becomes a “test case” for Eliot’s developing theory
concerning the role romance might play in a female reader’s transformations. She
then turns her attention back to the egoistic reader of romance, instructing them
through their beloved romance plot to read with more feeling and sympathy.
Presenting not-so-model readers with whom they can identify—Esther Lyon,
Rosamond Vincy, and Gwendolen Harleth, Eliot exposes the primary risk of
desiring that plot, reinforced egoism, and presents the reader with an allegorical
intersubjective model for reform.
George Eliot’s literary career began with her translation of Richard Strauss’s
The Life o f Jesus, a task so arduous and discouraging that the young writer
complained often of violent headaches, fatigue and severe depression in her letters
to friends. While physically shattering, her role as translator allowed her to
experience the challenges of speaking for another—of representing faithfully
Strauss’s perceptions and arguments, of sustaining an English voice that captured
some of the essence of his original German, and of managing elegantly what might
finally be viewed as a collaboration between two distinct centers of consciousness.
Given what we know of Eliot’s aesthetic standards and her intellectual rigor, it is
no great surprise that this collaboration should prove depleting, for an artful and
accurate translation would demand a high degree of receptiveness, as well as the
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capacity and willingness to subordinate one’s own point of view.5 6 It also
explains, to some extent, why she would later show impatience with writers and
critics (and ultimately a much broader readership) who failed to demonstrate a
similar capacity for ‘“receiving deep impressions’” which she viewed as ‘“the
foundation of all true mental power’” (qtd. in Carroll 5).
As the sole contributor to the “Belles Lettres” section of the Westminster
Review between July 1855 and January 1857, Eliot had ample opportunity to define
her literary values and goals, and to recognize certain obstacles to the hermeneutic
training she longed to provide readers. Perhaps the most succinct expression of her
credo emerges in her essay in the April 1856 issue on John Ruskin’s “Modem
Painters, Volume III,” where she links the ‘doctrine of realism’ taught by Ruskin
with the elicitation of sympathy:
The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism—the doctrine
that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful
study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by
imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial
reality. [...] It is not enough simply to teach truth; that may be done,
as we all know, to empty walls, and within the covers of unsaleable
books; we want it to be so taught as to compel men’s attention and
sympathy. (248-49)
Here too Eliot commends the “humble study,” a process of observation and
representation that subordinates the personality of the artist to that of the life or
5 6 This self-effacing quality of Eliot’s is the focus of Alison Booth’s Greatness Engendered, a
study o f the authorial personas constructed by George Eliot and Virginia W oolf in response to the
demands o f a literary marketplace and audience largely defined by men. Booth argues that both
writers employed “strategies o f impersonality” (82) in their fiction, striving for a disembodied
narrative voice that lent them the authority they lacked as female writers and enabled them to claim
a certain degree of (male) objectivity when representing the world around them. While their
narratorial “egolessness” may indeed be a response to their precarious positions as women writers,
in Eliot’s case especially, I find myself wondering if her early experience with translations may not
also have shaped her values concerning the place of the ego in writing and reading.
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object before her. Insisting upon faithfulness, verisimilitude, she advocates familiar
settings realistically rendered, characters that resemble one’s neighbors and friends,
probable plots, appropriate language. This commitment to truly recognizing the
object or “other” in the quest for “truth and beauty” is not enough, however; the
result of prolonged humble study—the novel—must invite another intersubjective
exchange, that between text and reader. One might view it as a sort of echo of the
initial engagement, a case where the reader forgets self, thinks and feels with
another, so deeply impressed is she by the truths encountered in the realist novel.
While Eliot might hope to promote among general readers interpretive rigor,
thoughtful judgments, and sympathy, the proliferation of “Silly Novels by Lady
Novelists” threatens to undermine her project for a number of reasons, the most
significant of which may be the egoism they encourage. Eliot writes:
The most mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form,
because it tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the more
solid education of women. When men see girls wasting their time in
consultations about bonnets and ball dresses, and in giggling or
sentimental love-confidences, or middle-aged women mismanaging
their children, and solacing themselves with acrid gossip, they can
hardly help saying, “For Heaven’s sake, let girls be better educated”;
[...] But after a few hours’ conversation witji an oracular literary
woman, or a few hours’ reading of her books, they are likely enough
to say, “After all, when a woman gets some knowledge, see what use
she makes of it!” [.. .] Instead of being subdued into modesty and
simplicity by a larger acquaintance with thoughts and fact, she has a
feverish consciousness of her attainments; she keeps a sort of mental
pocket-mirror, and is continually looking in it at her own
“intellectuality” (“Silly Novels” 312).
Eliot openly states in the passage above that this “form of feminine silliness” works
against the “solid education of women,” and while she addresses most directly in
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this passage the perceptions of the male audience who controls access to institutions
of education, she makes it abundantly clear elsewhere in “Silly Novels”(as well as in
other reviews and her early novels) that the form works against the reader’s
education in “solids”—the material facts and truths that only the realist novel
provides. Instead, these popular novels trade in wonderful heroines, lofty settings,
overwrought language, perfect love, and improbable plots: all bred, no doubt, “by
imagination on the mists of feeling” (“Modern Painters” 248). The “silly novel,” by
exalting the unfamiliar and implausible, fails to offer women readers any compelling
reason to attend to or value the details of their everyday lives. Even more
dangerously, it may encourage them to long for, even expect, the impossible, and to
seek escape from the care and drudgery of daily existence.
One need only note the deep feeling and energy that fuel Eliot’s biting
sarcasm when she comments upon the vanity of lady novelists to perceive that
feminine egoism is her critical bone, and the most prominent obstacle to her
hermeneutic project. The long passage above is replete with images of feminine
vanity, and while the critic pokes fun at the “consultations about bonnets and ball
dresses,” her real target in this instance is the writer who wields the pocket-mirror—
one of the most recognizable signs of narcissism. Preoccupied with her own
intellectuality, the lady novelist is incapable of representing realistic characters and
situations that will elicit the sympathy of her readers, and she makes exceptionally
poor use of her publishing opportunity by foregoing a meaningful connection with
others in order to draw attention to herself. Eliot comments amusingly on her
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scribbly demands for our notice: “she struts on one page, rolls her eyes on another,
grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth” (312). The strong physicality of
this description suggests a grotesque body emerging from the text—some sort of
“italic-id” or the equally horrifying image of a writing woman making a spectacle of
herself. Inclined, like Wollstonecraft, to make exception for the women who must
write to support themselves, Eliot observes with disgust that this isn’t the motivation
for the lady novelists she discusses: “It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs,
with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to
publishers’ accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of
brains” (298).5 7 Their confinement within “elegant boudoirs” prevents them from
experiencing the vicissitudes of the wider world and the panoply of plots that might
be found there, restricting their attention to the erotic and solipsistic. For Eliot,
female vanity is inextricably tied to women’s limited education and narrow
experience; she regrets that the lady novelist has not been “subdued into modesty
and simplicity by a larger acquaintance with thoughts and fact” (312), asserting a
clear causal relationship between a lack of learning and experience, and unbridled
egoism. Doubly obstructive and mutually reinforcing, women’s “poverty of brains”
and vanity make Eliot’s challenge particularly daunting.
This project only becomes more complicated when Eliot begins writing
fiction in September of 1856, a mere ten days after completing “Silly Novels”
(Ashton 163). No longer sermonizing from the distant pulpit of the critical
5 7 Herr Klesmer’s advice to Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda clearly echoes this view; there is no
room for amateurs, or navel gazing, in the artist’s practice.
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evangelical, and faced unavoidably with that same “impoverished” novel-reading
population she dismisses in her criticism, she must decide how, or even if, to engage
with them. She chooses at first to confront this audience directly, although such
moments of direct address occur only in her early fiction (where she is, perhaps,
most defensive regarding her authorial status). Significantly, mention of the lady
reader (as extradiegetic interlocutor and intradiegetic character) is never made
without reference to the romance narrative, an association which surfaces repeatedly
in Scenes o f Clerical Life, yet most memorably in Adam Bede, the next fictional
work Eliot published. The chapter titled “In Which the Story Pauses a Little” opens
with an act of ventriloquism, as the narrator first exclaims in the horrified voice of
her collective lady readers, then answers their (single) complaint—initially by
disavowing sarcastically the “lofty vocation” of the clever (lady) novelist who is
able to “represent things as they never have been and never will be” (221), then by
mounting a sincere and impassioned lecture that elaborates upon the creed she offers
in her review of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters.” Her address is interrupted only once
by a lady reader’s interjection, midway through an oft-cited passage where Eliot
celebrates the everyday icons of Dutch realism while abjuring the more fanciful
forms of romance.
I turn without shrinking from cloud-borne angels, from prophets,
sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower
pot, or eating her solitary dinner [...] I turn to that village wedding [.
..] where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a high
shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends
look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart
pots in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable
contentment and good will. ‘Foh!’ says my idealistic friend, ‘what
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vulgar details! What good is there in taking all these pains to give an
exact likeness of old women and clowns? What a low phase of life!—
what clumsy, ugly people!’
But, bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome,
I hope? [...] I have a friend or two whose class of features is such
that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly
trying; yet to my certain knowledge tender hearts have beaten for
them, and their miniatures—flattering, but still not lovely—are kissed
in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron,
who could never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she
had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer [...]. And I
believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and
feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything
more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in
middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles” (AB 224).
Significantly, the lady reader appears at the very moment when Eliot must transition
from her study of the details of realistic portraits to the feeling their subjects elicit in
others, an effect (and affect) that belies the subjects’ commonplace, uninspiring
appearance. In what appears to be a novelistic working through of Eliot’s theory
about how truth should be taught—“so as to compel men’s attention and sympathy”
(“Modern Painters” 248-49), the sudden re-emergence of the lady reader is
intriguing. Does she serve here merely as an instructive tool, an object of
semeiological shame whose presence is calculated to inspire Eliot’s better readers to
reform their hermeneutic habits? Or is the lady reader central to Eliot’s project, a
subject worth considerable pedagogical effort?
On the one hand, Eliot’s direct addresses to the lady reader seem to function
to construct her as ‘other,’ a scapegoat who enables a community of more
enlightened readers to coalesce. Few readers would wish to identify themselves
with the addle-brained, narcissistic wearer of “fronts” who can only say “Foh!”; it is
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even less likely that they would willingly seek membership in a community of
readers Eliot describes thusly: “[those] select natures who pant after the ideal, and
find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence
and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest” {AB 229). The
“narrowest and pettiest” reader is the egoistic reader, one who possesses a limited
imagination and cannot sympathize with her pantaloon-wearing peers, and so is
incapable of participating in the community Eliot hopes to build. Sacrificed for the
greater good of Eliot’s more educable audience, the lady reader helps Eliot to define
the core values of this newly established community, which aligns its perspective
more closely with the narrator’s point-of-view in the act of exegetical exclusion. In
this light, the risk of alienating the lady reader, acknowledged in “Mr. Gilfil’s Love-
Story,” seems a well-calculated risk.
And yet the lady reader may, in fact, mean more to Eliot than her role as an
object of ridicule and calculated exclusion implies, for the author does evidence
some interest in her subjectivity. The narrator’s dialectical movement between the
elements of realism and romance in the passage above touches most frequently upon
the rituals and relationships of love: a country wedding, a beloved visage, a loving if
unpoetical couple, and that most enticing of memorabilia— a “packet of yellow
love-letters.” Cherished by the lady reader who has encountered them most often
through the “pink haze of romance” {Essays 332), these signifiers of eros function
differently when presented in the somber golden light of realism. Becoming “new”
objects, in effect if not essence, these signifiers are (re)presented to elicit that lesser-
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known form of narrative desire, sympathy. And one might well wonder just whose
sympathy Eliot hopes to prompt here. It is, after all, highly unlikely that Eliot’s
choice to highlight these particular rituals and relationships is simply a function of
association (lady reader, love), and, when we consider her edict that a reforming
purpose should not be interwoven with the “vicissitudes of a love-story” in the
Bremer review three years earlier, her choice becomes downright perplexing.
If it is difficult, even impossible, to ascertain the lady reader’s role in Eliot’s
fiction at this moment in her career trajectory, it is quite clear that Eliot’s
ambivalence concerning the lady reader is suggestive. Alison Booth has observed
that “[n]either the liberal nor the sentimental reader is, of course, Eliot’s ideal
reader” (78), and I would agree; she writes primarily for a well-educated readership
that will appreciate her fine insights and complex moral distinctions. Yet I don’t
believe that Eliot has entirely given up on the shallow, poorly educated lady readers
she dismisses so cavalierly in her criticism and asides; she seems to possess a latent
desire to include them in her community of readers and to instruct them as well in
the ways of sympathy. Adam Bede features the last direct address to lady readers in
Eliot’s fiction, and I read their absence less as a final act of exclusion than as a
subtle sign of acceptance. Indeed, careful attention to her subsequent engagements
with female readers of the romance, who appear not as extradiegetic interlocutors
but as bona fide characters in her fiction, will shed considerable light on Eliot’s
change of heart.
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Where the lady reader in George Eliot’s first two novels was most often
figured as a “vague form” or ghostly foil for the didactic narrator, in her third, The
Mill on the Floss, we encounter Maggie Tulliver, the author’s first “definite,
substantial” reader of romance (“Modern Painters” 248-49). Maggie is regarded by
many critics as the heroine with whom Eliot felt the most passionate identification:
Rosemary Ashton observes that Mill is more “directly autobiographical” than Adam
Bede, and Eliot herself admitted to being “beguiled by love of my subject” in writing
the first two volumes of the novel (Ashton 235). It is, perhaps, in part this enraptured
return to her own past, and Maggie’s psychic proximity, that occasions her re-
evaluation of romance reading. The youthful Maggie is described as a “creature full
of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all
knowledge” (250), an adolescent girl who receives little encouragement or empathy
from her family and so turns to books for support. Relating Maggie’s feelings after
she has had yet another quarrel with Tom, the narrator lapses briefly into free
indirect discourse—conflating her voice with that of the protagonist, and confusing
the boundaries between narratorial subject and object.
In books there were people who were always agreeable or tender, and
delighted to do things that made one happy and who did not show
their kindness by finding fault. The world outside the books was not
a happy one, Maggie felt; it seemed to be a world where people
behaved the best to those they did not pretend to love and that did not
belong to them. And if life had no love in it, what else was there for
Maggie? (249)
The phrase in question, while delivered in the language of absolutes
more appropriate to a child than the far-seeing narrator of Eliot’s
novels, nevertheless captures the feeling for books, and the desire to
inhabit them, many adult readers acknowledge possessing. It also
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suggests the author is feeling with her young protagonist, re-
experiencing the lure of the ideal or romantic in books as well as their
soothing, sustaining properties.
Eliot depicts Maggie’s retreat into fantasy (literary and otherwise)
repeatedly, and such escapes consistently coincide with her feelings of
rebelliousness, powerlessness, and resignation; linking her heroine’s discontent with
her rich fantasy life, Eliot anticipates Sigmund Freud’s insight in 1908 about the
nature of daydreaming.5 8 When upset by her parents’ inability to nurture or shamed
by Tom’s reproaches, Maggie’s “brain would be busy with wild romances of a flight
from home in search of something less sordid and dreary; she would go to some
great man—Walter Scott, perhaps—and tell him how wretched and how clever she
was, and he would surely do something for her” (303). In the midst of this family
romance the voice of her own wish-forbidding father “pierce [s] through [her] like a
sword” to demand slippers (303), and she is recalled to the duties of her unhappy
existence. For a young girl who feels acutely the power of her filial bonds and little
of the love that should ease them, romance plays an important compensatory role. It
also serves as a substitute love object, a function that becomes clearer later in the
novel after Maggie meets Stephen Guest—the first man to whom she attaches her
erotic desire. While Maggie ultimately pays a very high price for her failed love
plot, Eliot doesn’t seem to begrudge her heroine the literary object of desire. Indeed,
what the author seems to rediscover through her sustained, and highly empathic,
5 8 In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” Freud writes: “a happy person never fantasies, only an
unsatisfied one. The motive forces of fantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single fantasy is
the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality” (713).
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engagement with Maggie and her longings is a more deeply felt knowledge of
romance: its pleasures, its dangers, its generative potential for revision.
However, it is in Romola, Eliot’s attempt at a historical romance in the
tradition of Scott as well as the novel most explicitly concerned with women’s
reading and interpretive agency, that this embodied knowledge becomes evident.
Set in fifteenth century Italy, this backward looking romance allows Eliot to
continue the exploratory work she began in her retrospective Mill on the Floss
with a good deal more freedom. Dorothea Barrett, in her introduction, suggests
that with Romola Eliot is “trying something new, straining the generous limits of
what she can do, rather than repeating or refining her earlier accomplishments”
(xvii).5 9 Having discovered new depths to that generosity while rereading the
romance with Maggie, in her next woman-centered novel she begins in earnest to
extend her community of readers and to explore those “desires that history and
reality cannot accommodate, desires that can find their fulfillment only in the
imaginative world of romance” (Barrett xvii).
Here Eliot surveys comprehensively and compassionately the
“implausible” desires of a young woman whose choices are limited by the
authority she, and her culture, unquestioningly grants to men of philosophy and of
religion. Our first encounter with her heroine, Romola Bardi, is in chapter 5—a
meeting that has been deferred while the narrator recounts the comic/romantic
5 9 Alison Booth agrees, arguing that the experiment “may have seemed necessary for her to gain the
privilege of variable genius” (172). Eliot’s own remarks concerning the novel are worth noting
here: “If One is to have freedom to write out one’s own varying unfolding self, and not be a
machine always [.. .] spinning the same sort of web, one cannot always write for the same public”
(qtd. in Booth 172).
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adventures of the handsome and wily Greek wanderer, Tito Melema, who will
eventually become the heroine’s husband. Intriguingly, the narrator, who has been
telling Tito’s story in the past tense, abruptly shifts to the present tense, preparing
the reader for her entrance into the Bardi library. “We follow Maso across the
antechamber to the door on the left hand, through which we pass as he opens it.
He merely looks in and nods, while a clear young voice says, ‘Ah, you are come
back, Maso. It is well. We have wanted nothing’” (47). The voice we hear is, of
course, the title character’s, although our visual introduction to her is delayed for
yet another paragraph, which catalogues the antiquities that also populate the
room. The guiding quality and immediacy of the narrator’s statement (“We
follow,” “we pass”) and our twice-delayed introduction to Romola give us a keen
sense of both narratorial presence and control. This is only heightened when we
witness, alongside our visibly intrusive narrator, Romola’s first action in the novel:
she reads aloud Eliot’s own translation of Politian’s Miscellanea. Echoing the
moment observed in Mill on the Floss when the line between narrative subject and
object blurs, this weaving of intradiegetic and extradiegetic voices suggests a
certain identificatory relationship between author and heroine, one where
Romola’s education in reading is mirrored by her creator’s more focused self-
instruction in reading the romance. It is significant that Eliot’s translation skills
are highlighted in this moment, for she, like her young heroine, has learned to
privilege masculine forms of knowledge over “visions and romance” (Essays 332);
she too has struggled to serve as a mouthpiece for the presumably wiser words of
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men. Eliot’s narrator may speak with authority here, but the authority assumed is
hard won (even anxious)—the control displayed perhaps necessary to introduce
the primary “problem” of the novel. To wit, how does a female reader achieve
interpretive agency? And what does love have to do with it?
Prior to her courtship plot, her conversion plot, and her Florence
Nightingale plot is Romola’s hermeneutic plot—a trajectory toward interpretive
agency that commences with her role as a reader in the service of her father. As
she reads from Politian’s text, she appears to act as a sort of visual and
orthographical instrument through which her father can absorb the language, and
her description of her task only reinforces the reader’s sense that Romola’s role is
a passive one:
‘Father,’ said Romola, with a sudden flush and in an injured tone, ‘I
read anything you wish me to read; and I will look out any passages
for you, and make whatever notes you want.’ (51)
While her description minimizes her intellectual contribution, suggesting she
performs a mere mechanical reading, it is important to note that her comments are
made in defense; Romola is responding to her father’s critique of the feminine
mind as too “wandering” and “vagrant” (51) for scholarly work.6 0 Messer Bardo
has been careful to keep his daughter from developing relationships with other
women—devaluing their knowledge, authority, and desires, teaching her to view
6 0 Applied with great persistence to the feminine mind in the Western patriarchal tradition, these
terms were also used frequently by Wollstonecraft and Eliot to describe the mind of the romance
reader. What I find most fascinating about the blind father’s analysis of exegesis (and a woman’s
inability to perform such an act) is that it stems from his frustration with his inability to continue
his project: “that great work in which I had desired to gather, as into a firm web, all the threads that
my research had laboriously disentangled” (51). Unwilling to work without a male “coadjutor,” he
declines his daughter’s intellectual assistance in weaving a web that sounds as romantic and elusive
as Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies.”
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herself as an “exceptional woman,” and promoting what could easily have become
a contempt for her sex. Presenting the either/or dilemma with which many
intellectually ambitious women have been confronted—“adopt our standards,
values, and discourse if you wish to be lauded,” he convinces her she has “a man’s
nobility of soul” (54), singling her out among her kind and reaffirming his own
privilege in the process.
‘thou hast never fretted me with thy petty desires as thy mother did.
It is true, I have been careful to keep thee aloof from the debasing
influence of thy own sex, with their sparrow-like frivolity and their
enslaving superstition, except, indeed, from that of our cousin
Brigida, who may well serve as a scarecrow and a warning.’ (54)
Romola has learned to view other women as weak, silly, and superstitious—guided
by nothing stronger than their own narrow fantasies and visions. Indeed, she
acquires a horror of a more intuitive form of knowledge, developing a strong
distrust of her own sensibilities and the skills that might enhance her reading.
Because she associates this more affective insight with the women and religious
“fanatics” derided by her classicist father, and she cannot yet conceive how the
intuitive and inductive processes might inform one another, she becomes
increasingly alienated from other women, and the knowledge and knowledge-
making forms they possess. She is also alienated from her disobedient and highly-
feminized brother, a priest whose visions have moved him to place his duty to God
and the Church above his duty to his father and classical scholarship. Dino’s
visions are denounced by his father, but they ultimately prove to have some truth-
value when he foresees Romola’s unhappy marriage to the “Great Tempter” (157).
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Distrusting the power of a form of knowledge that encourages rebellion and
perceptual autonomy, Bardo is eager to limit Romola’s interpretive agency,
teaching her to read not even as a man, but rather for a man.
Duty-bound and gently demeaned, Romola must read to satisfy her own
desire when her father sleeps—a secret delight she recalls when talking with Piero
di Cosimo. The painter asks if she hasn’t read the stories of Giovanni Boccaccio,
and she replies ‘“ Some of them a great many times over, when I was a little girl. I
used to get the book down when my father was asleep, so that I could read to
m yself” (421). The wandering romance tales of The Decameron to which she
turned must have stood in stark contrast to “the condensed story of Romola’s self-
repressing colourless young life, which had thrown all its passion into sympathy
with aged sorrows, aged ambition, aged pride and indignation” (128). A lonely
young woman with only the most nebulous, unnamed desires and a strong
awareness of her filial duties, she expects to experience few of life’s pleasures
until she meets Tito. Possessed of a cipher-like quality that attracts many
admirers, Tito appears at first to be a figure drawn from her romantic daydreams,
as Romola explains once they are engaged.
‘Everything I had felt before in all my life—about my father, and
about my loneliness—was a preparation to love you. You would
laugh [...] if you knew what sort of man I used to think I should
marry—some scholar with deep lines in his face [. ..] and with
rather gray hair, who would agree with my father in taking the side
of the Aristotelians, and be willing to live with him. I used to think
of the love I read of in the poets, but I never dreamed that anything
like that could happen to me here in Florence in our old library.
And then .you came, Tito [...].’ (178)
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Romola reads love stories as a young girl and longs for a conventional female plot
(falling in love/happy ending) but she’s resigned to something else—marriage to a
wizened Casaubon-like scholar whose primary alliance is with her father. Imagine
her delight when she meets Tito, who brightens the old library and seems eager to
please both father and daughter. Exposed to little pleasure beyond the covert
romance reading she has enjoyed, Romola is indeed well-prepared to love the
romantic “Shipwrecked Stranger” whose spare history must resonate with one of
her favorite tales from The Decameron—the story of Gostanza—to which she will
return in her time of crisis. She describes her longing for Tito to her father, using
language suggestive of a wish-fulfillment fantasy: “Nothing has ever come to me
before that I have wished for strongly: I did not think it possible that I could care
so much for anything that could happen to myself’ (128). Nevertheless, Romola’s
desire is colored always by the duty she feels toward her scholarly father, and her
first thoughts are of the empty place Tito might fill, the services he might provide.
Declaring her love, she cries, “I love Tito—I wish to marry him, that we may both
be your children and never part” (128), effectively cementing the bonds between
men and marrying duty with desire.
Tito, a pleasure-seeking creature who wants Romola to know the
“happiness of nymphs” (181), attempts to train her to read for pleasure only; in this
triangle, however, duty and desire become rather confused, as her desires are
secondary to his own, and his desires must take precedence over her longstanding
duties to her father. Having noticed upon first meeting her that “her eyes must be
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her father’s interpreters” (70), Tito is drawn to Romola’s hermeneutic docility and,
like her father, eager to control the meaning she makes from the signs around her.
He continues her education in male-directed reading, revising tales to emphasize
life’s pleasures and choosing dangerous models who forsake, as he does, their past
ties. Wanting a gift for his bride-to-be, Tito visits Piero di Cosimo and explains
that he wants to commission a “delicate miniature device taken from certain fables
of the poets” (184). His frequent use of the word “device” is suggestive of his
perception of the function of art: he is seeking a tool of instruction in delight. Tito
wishes the painter to depict Ovid’s version of “the triumph of Bacchus and
Ariadne, but [...] treated in a new way” (184). The image of Bacchus suits his
hedonistic and tyrannical nature perfectly; the choice of Ariadne and her presence
in this scene, however, are a bit more unsettling. A woman betrayed by her lover
(after betraying her own father for the lover’s gain), Ariadne stands in for the
many men who have drowned in the storm created by Bacchus; we see only the
triumph, not the devastation that precedes it. Tito’s instructions to the painter
emphasize the importance of selection in narrative representation:
‘I want to have the fair-haired Ariadne with him, made immortal
with her gold crown—that is not in Ovid’s story, but no matter, you
will conceive it all—and above there must be young Loves, such as
you know how to paint, shooting with roses at the points of their
arrows.’ (184)
The new treatment blissfully obscures the losses of the father—a significant
omission given that Tito’s justification for turning from his duty to Baldassare is
his desire for Romola—her goodness, her love, her disappointment should he fail
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her. It also anticipates Tito’s demands upon his wife, for he will ultimately force
her to choose between her duty to father and husband, destroying their marriage in
the process.
While his new wife’s male-centered education has hardly encouraged
active interpretation, Tito must feel some anxiety about his representational
control, for when he presents Romola with the painted case his instructions for her
interpretation of the text are very detailed, highlighting pleasure and ease,
downplaying duty and service.
‘You will look every day at those pretty symbols of our life
together—the ship on the calm sea, and the ivy that never withers,
and those Loves that have left off wounding us and shower soft
petals that are like our kisses; and the leopards and tigers, they are
the troubles of your life that are all quelled now; and the strange sea
monsters, with their merry eyes—let us see—they are the dull
passages in the heavy books, which have begun to be amusing since
we have sat by each other.’ (199)
His descriptions of the ivy, the leopards and tigers, are all very faithful to Ovid’s
text, but his interpretation leaves out a good deal, as noted above. Romola,
delighted with the scene yet saddened by the crucifix hidden underneath (and the
memories of her brother’s warning it elicits), is not wholly satisfied with his
presentation of the gift or the limitations prescribed. She asks her husband, ‘“you
will give me the key?”’ (201). This is Romola’s first explicit request for
interpretive power, and it is denied instantly by her new husband.
‘Not at all! Said Tito, with playful decision, opening his scar sella
and dropping in the little key. ‘I shall drown it in the Arno. [. . .]
My Ariadne must never look backward now—only forward to
Easter, when she will triumph with her Care-dispeller.’ (201)
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Tito attempts to prevent Romola from looking “backward” to consider
longstanding family ties, and beneath to that source of knowledge signified by her
brother’s crucifix—spiritual, intuitive, visionary. Yet despite Tito’s attempts to
control her perceptions, Romola is receiving crucial information in this exchange;
she is just not prepared at this moment to recognize or use it. Romola’s challenge
is to learn to question the motives underlying male readings and to develop her
own interpretative value system: she must look back, connect present events with
past occurrences, and trust the instincts, desires, and “shudders” that register a
form of knowledge she’s been taught to ignore.
She begins to read more actively when her romance-inspired illusions are
dispelled instead of her cares, and her romance plot begins to resemble the
conscience-stricken Maggie’s. The narrator observes that Romola’s
dream of a triple life with an undivided sum of happiness had not
been quite fulfilled. The rainbow-tinted shower of sweets, to have
been perfectly typical, should have had some invisible seeds of
bitterness mingled with them; the crowned Ariadne, under the
snowing roses, had felt more and more the presence of unexpected
thorns. (243)
Revisiting Tito’s “Love-laden” triptych to accentuate the gap between the
romantic and the real, the narrator highlights the “invisible seeds of bitterness” and
the “unexpected thorns” that underlie the pretty picture of marriage originally
presented.6 1 Such an explicit recasting of the romance plot requires the reader to
acknowledge not only the limits of “happily ever after” but also the hidden dangers
6 1 This narrative ploy is not altogether new: as discussed earlier in this chapter, Eliot’s narrator
operates similarly in Adam Bede when she attempts to broaden the sympathies of her audience by
casting a new light on elements familiar to readers of romance.
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that commingle with the form’s pleasures. These “invisible” signs of danger,
moreover, must be experienced physically—one tastes the bitterness of the seeds
or feels the sting of the thorns; they cannot be seen. It is no great surprise, then,
that as Romola’s disappointment with married life mounts, she grows more
attuned to a kind offelt knowledge. The first sign of her husband’s fear and
betrayal to which she reacts strongly is the coat of armor he wears under his
garment. “This fear—this heavy armour. I can’t help shuddering as I feel it under
my arm. I could fancy it a story of enchantment—that some malignant fiend had
changed your sensitive human skin into a hard shell. It seems so unlike my bright,
light-hearted Tito!” (250). Invoking a fairy-tale fantasy to articulate what she
senses but cannot verify, she hits directly upon the truth. Her shudder is
appropriate, her “fancy” perceptive: Tito’s fear, and the series of poor choices his
self-serving, pleasure-seeking nature has led him to make, do ultimately transform
him into a hard-hearted, malignant fiend. At this moment, however, he is still
eager to dispel Romola’s fears, and he downplays them, gently mocking her fairy
tale truth: “you have a touch of fanaticism in you. I shall have you seeing visions,
like your brother” (251). Linking her newly-found knowledge with the visions
she’s been taught to dread, Tito unwittingly provides Romola with the “key” she’s
been seeking.
For Romola will be seeing visions like her brother in the next few
months—visions that portray Tito in a much different light. During this period of
increasing alienation, Romola visits Piero di Cosimo to see about his portrait of
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her father as Oedipus and happens upon a painting that shows her husband gripped
by fear and Baldassare—the adopted father whom he left in slavery after stealing
the gems that would free him. The painter tries to distract her, “but Romola, [. ..]
had the fact of the armour in her mind, and was penetrated by this strange
coincidence of things which associated Tito with the idea of fear” (255). It is at
this point that she begins to make connections, and after Tito betrays her father’s
memory by selling his library, she returns to the armor, asking: “Have you robbed
somebody else, who is not dead? Is that the reason you wear armour?” (286). Her
stab in the dark is a direct hit; and while she cannot be certain she guesses
correctly yet, the “invisible seeds of bitterness” (243) that accompanied the sweets
of romance have sprung forth in full bloom, awakening the “pride and fierceness
of the old Bardi blood [...] in her for the first time” (285).6 2 Animated by a
righteous anger she has never felt before, Romola rejects the “little philosophy”
supporting Tito’s “clever,” “shallow” rhetoric (283), and, even more forcefully,
rebuts his argument that “[t]he very care of a husband for his wife’s interest
compels him to that separate action sometimes” (284). Romola’s critique of Tito’s
“separate action,” occasioned by a bitter disappointment in her husband and a
growing confidence in her intuitive and interpretive abilities, signals a turning
point in their marriage, which will never support “rainbow-tinted” illusions again.
As the chapter entitled “A Revelation” comes to a close (along with Volume I),
6 2 These increasingly obvious “seeds of bitterness” sow more than discontent; they bear the fruit of
feminist analysis. Claudia Dreifus, author of Woman’ s Fate: Raps from a Feminist Consciousness-
Raising Group, argues that origins of 1960s consciousness-raising are to be found in the “Speak
Bitterness” meetings held by rural Chinese women during the socialist revolution.
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Romola’s marriage is in shambles, her consciousness has been raised, and Eliot’s
serial readers have gotten a new twist on the romance narrative’s “happy ending.”
Eliot continues to develop her heroine’s consciousness-raising plot vis-a-
vis Tito’s tarnished romance imagery in an early Volume II chapter called
“Ariadne Discrowns Herself.” It opens with Romola witnessing the dismantling of
her father’s library, an event that signals her diminishing reliance on the authority
of father and husband and anticipates her epistemological crisis later in the
chapter. Deeply disillusioned, and dismayed by the prospect of a life “from which
love and delight were gone” (318), Romola makes preparations to leave her
husband and Florence—and the status that protects but no longer pleases her. The
narrator muses about her reasons for doing so:
She was not acting after any precedent, or obeying any adopted
maxims. The grand severity of the stoical philosophy in which her
father had taken care to instruct her, was familiar enough to her ears
and lips [...] but she had never used it, never needed it as a rule of
life. [...] She had appropriated no theories: she had simply felt
strong in the strength of affection, and life without that energy came
to her as an entirely new problem. (320-21)
Romola’s affections have always served as her epistemological compass, yet once
she is betrayed by the “crowning” object of her affections, her faith in their powers
is shaken. And while the affections alone are an insufficient guide to life, she has
no doctrine to take their place; she has found her treacherous husband’s “little
philosophy” insupportable, her father’s inapplicable, and the “maxims [that] told
her to feel less” ineffectual (320). As she sits in the darkness, her thoughts a
“tangled web [...] in her mind” (324), Romola attempts to sort out her future amid
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an unmanageable morass of assorted belief-systems. Woven into “a pathetic
mixture” of “childish romance” and the experiential wisdom gained by “her
woman’s trials” (322) are two seemingly incompatible strands of knowledge—her
father’s philosophy and “the chance flame of wandering vapours” or visions he
abhorred (324). And it is at this moment of epistemological crisis that the most
common of women’s plots gives way to a brave new alternative.
No longer bound by male omniscience or love, Romola rejects the
conventional paths open to unhappy Florentine wives and imagines a historically
“implausible” end that many feminist critics would applaud: she will go to Venice
and join the “most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele” in order to
learn how “an instructed woman could support herself in a lonely life” (322).6 3
Hoping she “might be wise enough to write something which would rescue her
father’s name from oblivion” (322), Romola discovers a role for her father’s
philosophy in her future; she dismisses his proscriptions about women and
scholarship, and crafts a plot of borrowed ambition, taking her father’s desire for
fame as her own. In this highly improbable and imaginative plan, spun from the
tangled web in her mind, a lingering sense of duty to her disappointed father is
evident, and yet Romola is also drawn to Venice, albeit unconsciously, by the
promise of female companionship and guidance—a key component of the
“childish romance” she will choose to inhabit later in the novel. A subtle sign of
6 3 In plucking her heroine from her familiar but limiting love plot, Eliot eschews what Nancy K.
Miller would term a “plausible plot” for women; she argues in “Emphasis Added” that Freud’s
theory concerning wish-fulfillment fantasies in “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” a theory
shaped by history and highly influential, imagines women possess only erotic wishes, making any
plot that turns on ambition an “implausible” one for female characters.
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this latent interest in more feminine forms of knowledge and connection is her
concurrent search for the elusive key to the Ariadne triptych, which holds her
brother’s crucifix. As she seeks the “key” her husband has denied her, she recalls
her brother’s vision concerning her unhappy marriage, recognizing the “new
meaning” she has learned to give his “remembered words” (322), and feeling, for
the first time, a sympathy with those “men and women who were led by such
inward images and voices” (323-24).6 4 Eliot makes an explicit connection
between this act of remembering, the lessons of failed romance, and Romola’s
interest in a new way of knowing: “she was conscious of something deeper than
that coincidence of words which made the parting contact with her dying brother
live anew in her mind, and gave her a new sisterhood to the wasted face. If there
were more of such experience as his in the world, she would like to understand it [.
. .]” (324). Seeking the key to hermeneutic empowerment, Romola discovers a
new sense of “sisterhood” and a new seat of knowledge—resources that will
inform her subsequent readings, and provide a counter-influence to the masculine
logic and philosophy that had once dominated her attempts at reading.
Romola’s growing interpretive independence is demonstrated the next
morning, as she makes her final preparations to leave Florence. Gazing at the
wedding triptych before retrieving the cross beneath, she begins to revise the story
her husband (re)presented to her at the time of their engagement, seeing it now
6 4 The narrator makes clear that Romola’s state of mind at this moment bears a good deal of
resemblance to that o f her brother and other like visionaries, representing Dino’s vision through a
web-like metaphor: “o f these threads the vision was woven” (323)
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through the wisdom of disappointed experience, and echoing the narrator’s earlier
revision of the pictorial romance:
Romola looked at the familiar images with new bitterness and
repulsion: they seemed a more pitiable mockery than ever on this
chill morning, when she had waked up to wander in loneliness.
They had been no tomb of sorrow, but a lying screen. Foolish
Ariadne! with her gaze of love, as if that bright face, with its
hyacinthine curls like tendrils among the vines, held the deep secret
of her life! “Ariadne is wonderfully transformed,” thought Romola.
“She would look strange among the vines and roses now.” (327)
Romola no longer sees herself as a “special woman,” the heroine of an epic love
story, while the ivy, like the beautiful curls of her godlike hero, begins to resemble
the marital ties that bind her against her will. Most disappointing, most altered, is
her view of the “bright face,” for Romola will never again look to her husband for
the epistemological certainty he once made possible. Acknowledging that she can
no longer fulfill the role defined by the lying screen, she leaves a letter for her
husband and steps out of her place in the garb of a sister, looking forward to her
“new life—a life of loneliness and endurance, but of freedom” (328).
Despite her resolve, and her growing awareness, Romola’s alternative plot
is almost immediately circumvented by another heroic figure: Fra Girolamo
Savonarola. A substitute for both husband and brother, the visionary priest
intercepts her outside the city walls and convinces her to turn back to Florence,
and her duties as wife and citizen. Savonarola proves a heady influence,
representing to the young heroine a confluence of the more “feminine” form of
knowing she seeks (but still fears) and the masculine authority long familiar to her.
Eliot writes:
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All that ardour of her nature which could no longer spend itself in
the woman’s tenderness for father and husband, had transformed
itself into an enthusiasm of sympathy with the general life. [. . .]
Fra Girolamo’s voice had waked in her mind a reason for living,
apart from personal enjoyment and personal affection, but it was a
reason that seemed to need feeding with greater forces than she
possessed within herself, and her submissive use of all offices of
the Church was simply a watching and waiting if by any means
fresh strength might come. (388-89)
Hungering for a new defining purpose in life, and an object for her ardour that will
help her to sustain herself at this time of epistemological (and ontological) crisis,
Romola turns to Savonarola, whose “grand energies” and reformist agenda help
her “transform” her culturally mandated love for man to a more “general” love for
mankind (389). She continues to nourish herself through the fellowship and
service he recommends for two years, acquiring a more nuanced perspective on the
powers (and dangers) of intuition; Robin Sheets links Romola’s epiphany
concerning the “sacredness of rebellion” with the wisdom she has gained from the
priest, who counsels “there comes a moment when the soul must have no guide but
the voice within it” (qtd. in Sheets 4).6 5 During this period, Romola also deepens
her understanding of the many-sided “others” she encounters, knowledge that will
prove significant later in the novel when she is able to identify the double
meanings of Savonarola’s confession under torture.
Yet while Romola’s interrupted quest-adventure enables her to develop her
sympathies at home—always a boon with Eliot, Savonarola’s intercession remains
suspect nonetheless. He is, after all, driven by a form of personal ambition not
6 5 I’ve referenced Eliot’s text as it is represented in the pages of Sheets’s essay “History and
Romance: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Agnes of Sorrento’ and George Eliot’s ‘Romola’”; the
Penguin edition I use features the quoted material on pages 468 and 490, respectively.
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wholly unlike that of her selfish husband, and he harbors misogynistic beliefs that
resemble those of her father; such resemblances must raise questions about his
fundamentally conservative role in urging Romola back into a conventional female
plot.6 6 Sheets, commenting on the sermon Savonarola gives in chapter 12
disparaging women as “cows, and lumps of flesh, and wantons, and mischief-
makers” (125), observes that Eliot’s fictionalized representation is “considerably
more mean-spirited and misogynistic than the original in Savonarola’s Book of the
Widowed Life (1491)” (Sheets 5). Similarly, Eliot’s account of the activity
surrounding the “Pyramid of Vanities” emphasizes the degradation of art and
women, highlighting the destruction of texts by Ovid, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—
Romola’s own childhood favorite, as well as “all the implements of feminine
vanity—rouge pots, false hair, mirrors, perfumes, powders, and transparent veils
intended to provoke inquisitive glances” (419). We also witness, uncomfortably,
the gratuitous humiliation of Romola’s elderly aunt, Monna Brigida, at the hands
of “beardless inquisitors” (420), who wave her false braids about and expose her to
the laughter of the crowd. A detailed and pitiless dramatization of the ridicule
Eliot exposed “lady readers” to in her critical writing and early fiction, this scene
makes evident the darker side of public censure. More significantly, it suggests
that the writer may be exorcising her own misogynistic demons. Illuminating “all
the implements of feminine vanity” and assorted love stories by the light of a
6 6 Certainly many contemporary critics found little to quibble with concerning Savonarola’s
influence over the heroine: Richard Simpson, in his essay on Eliot’s novels for the October 1863
edition of the Home and Foreign Review, observes, for instance, that Romola’s gradual
improvement can be attributed to the priest, “who turns her noble but ill-directed impulses into the
channel of duty” (qtd. in Carroll 230).
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profoundly unsympathetic religious fanaticism, Eliot suggests that such censure
must be tempered by sympathy and understanding. In the spirit, then, of all
diversionary romances, Romola’s delay achieves a surprising end: “Monna
Brigida’s Conversion” may well mark George Eliot’s own.
Romola’s “childish romance” resumes when she is left despairing over a
triple loss: her beloved godfather, Bernardo del Nero, is executed after her
husband betrays him; she loses faith in Savonarola, who refuses to intercede on her
godfather’s behalf; and she discovers that Tito has a family he conceals in the
countryside. As in the previous crisis when masculine authority was severely
undermined, she finds herself confused and without a sense of purpose. The
difference lies in the degree of her disillusionment and her willingness to listen to
her inner voice, which she relies on to resist the arguments of Savonarola, and to
intuit the relationship between Tito and the peasant family she encounters.6 7
Sitting with Tito’s unacknowledged wife and offspring, Romola holds the lock of
hair the unwitting Tessa gives her and experiences again the shudder that recalls
her to the past, enabling her to make the connections that will free her.
A slight shiver passed through Romola as the curl was laid across
her fingers. At Tessa’s first mention of her husband as having
come mysteriously she knew not whence, a possibility had risen
before Romola that made her heart beat faster, for to one who is
anxiously in search of a certain object the faintest suggestions have
a peculiar significance. And when the curl was held towards her, it
seemed for an instant like a mocking phantasm of the lock she
herself had cut to wind with one of her own five years ago. (464).
6 7 Booth argues that Savonarola assists Romola most effectively by teaching her “the failings of the
law o f the father” (194).
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Romola’s sense of the uncanny, her susceptibility to “faint suggestions,” is now
informing, with greater strength than ever before, her more empirically oriented
perceptions.6 8 No wonder, then, that the favored fantasy of youth, the “childish
romance” that motivated, if unconsciously, her earlier plan to flee to Venice,
emerges with greater force, propelling her toward the shores of the Mediterranean.
For if the dim desire for a new form of sisterhood was once displaced, her life-plan
redirected, by the “arresting voice” of Savonarola (500), Romola is now prepared
to turn her back on the realist plot favored by her priest, her husband, and her
culture, and return to the implausible romance that will fulfill the “desires that
history and reality cannot accommodate” (Barrett xvii).
While many critics since the novel’s publication have dismissed this
episode as fantastic or anomalous, Eliot herself in a letter to Sara Hennell, notes
that “‘the ‘Drifting Away’ and the village with the plague belonged to [her]
earliest vision of the story and were there by deliberate forecast adopted as
romantic and symbolic elements” (qtd. in Levine, “Romola” 82-83).6 9 Such
deliberation suggests that the romance plot, and its model—Gostanza’s tale, is
6 8 Romola’s inner voice alerts her also to the identity of Baldassarre, for when he observes that she
would have been his daughter, she “divine[s] the facts that lay behind that single word, and in the
first moment there could be no check to the impulsive belief which sprang from her keen
experience of Tito’s nature” (447). Experience and intuition, which is linked here with the “divine”
or the Coleridgean idea of the mediating soul, combine to provide a keener sense o f perception.
6 9 An anonymous reviewer for the October 1863 edition of Westminster Review writes: “Romola’s
history after her second flight is strangely disconnected with the rest o f the tale. The pestilential
village and its call upon her sympathies is another o f those extravagantly fortuitous circumstances
of which the author makes such free use. All sense of probability is here sacrificed for a moral
effect” (qtd. in Carroll 219-20). More recently, George Levine has argued that the romance
episode fails to resolve the problems raised elsewhere in the novel, raising the question of its
superfluity (“Romola” 96). Leslie Stephen’s prescription, if less thoughtful, is most expedient:
remarking upon parallels between Maggie and Romola, he quips o f the latter, “she clearly ought to
have been drowned, like Maggie” (qtd. in Booth 171).
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central within the larger narrative structure. Romola’s romance begins in earnest
when Ariadne—queen of Tito’s marriage plot— is dispatched once and for all.
Thus, she resumes her alternative plot a different woman—one in whom a “new
rebellion had risen [...],” as well as a “new despair” (500). She can no longer
sustain herself on “that which men call duty” without the crucial complement,
“some form of believing love” (500); duty and desire must go hand in hand. With
no aim or purpose, with no object of affection or desire, Romola finds herself
longing “for that repose in mere sensation which she had sometimes dreamed of in
the sultry afternoons of her early girlhood, when she had fancied herself floating
naiad-like in the waters” (502). Making the connection between Romola’s listless,
undirected desire and the daydreaming she enjoyed as a young girl more explicit,
the narrator continues:
The clear waves seemed to invite her: she wished she could lie
down to sleep on them and pass from sleep into death. But Romola
could not directly seek death; the fullness of young life in her
forbade that. She could only wish that death would come. [...] In
her longing to glide over the waters that were getting golden with
the level sunrays, she thought of a story which had been one of the
things she had loved to dwell on in Boccaccio, when her father fell
asleep and she glided from her stool to sit on the floor and read the
Decamerone. It was the story of that fair Gostanza who in her love
lornness desired to live no longer, but not having the courage to
attack her young life, had put herself into a boat and pushed off to
sea; then, lying down in the boat, had wrapt her mantle round her
head, hoping to be wrecked, so that her fear would be helpless to
flee from death. The memory had remained a mere thought in
Romola’s mind, without budding into any distinct wish; but now, as
she paused again in her walking to and fro, [. . . ] [she
contemplated] her opportunity of buying that smaller boat. She had
not yet admitted to herself that she meant to use it, but she felt a
sudden eagerness to secure the possibility of using it, which
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disclosed the half-unconscious growth of a thought into a desire.
(502)
This story comes to Romola at her most desperate moment, and the depth of her
unhappiness and uncertainty propels her to take the act of fantasizing one step
further: she allows the tale to guide her actions, lying down in the boat and setting
out to sea as Boccaccio’s heroine did before her. Her choices are hazy, confused:
she wants “to be freed from the burden of a choice when all motive was bruised, to
commit herself, sleeping to destiny which would either bring death or else new
necessities that might rouse a new life in her!” (503). I believe that Romola’s
desire is directed elsewhere: toward the community of women who save Gostanza,
helping her to find not only a sense of purpose but also the love she thought she
had lost forever.
Boccaccio’s tale from the Decameron proves helpful in explaining the
origins of Romola’s fantasy of a new life, particularly when one notes what is
omitted in Eliot’s representation (as the narrator noted the omissions of Tito’s
twice-told tale from Ovid). The scene painted by Eliot shares much in common
with Boccaccio’s own description of the desperate Gostanza—the desire, the
mantle, the disappointed love; all are present. What remains un-represented—
perhaps unconscious in Romola’s case, perhaps un-narratable in her creator’s—is
the original heroine’s prolonged attachment to a community of artistic, working
women. And while their existence is to some degree negated in Eliot’s telling, the
very presence of the tale and Romola’s earlier plan involving Cassandra Fedele
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• • 70
suggest the heroine is moved by the memory of them nonetheless. Significantly,
the story Romola loved as a girl is narrated by a woman, Madam Amelia, one of
the few female voices with whom she would have engaged, and one which would
not have been dismissed by her father as others were, if only because he knew
nothing of his daughter’s secret pleasures. Madam Amelia announces
straightaway that her tale is a romance and that her narrative is meant for women;
she addresses her audience as “Noble Ladies” and observes that she “would rather
desire to walke along by the paths of pleasure, then dwell on any ceremonious or
scrupulous affectation”—linking the first trajectory with her Queene, and the
second with her “melancholly King,” and alluding to the gendered aspect of
different discourses (246). Moving rapidly through her account of the love
between a beautiful young “Damosell” of wealth and her “well conditioned” but
poor suitor who leaves Liparis to seek his fortune (246), she begins (in the third
paragraph no less) to describe in great detail the grief-stricken response of the
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heroine Gostanza when she learns her lover has been shipwrecked. Remarkably
close in language to Eliot’s description of Romola’s resignation, Gostanza is
characterized as lacking “the heart, to lay any violent hand on her selfe, but rather
to end her dayes by some new kinde of necessity” (247). Madam TEmelia narrates
Gostanza’s first encounter with one of the women who will help her, emphasizing
7 0 Equally suggestive is the meandering progress of Romola’s once-unconscious desire in the
passage above: the “to and fro” quality—the move from mere thought, to distinct wish, to desire—
suggest the blurred stages of a fantasy becoming reality.
7 1 In the details of this tale, we can better understand not only Romola’s actions late in the novel,
but also her earlier attraction to Tito, the “shipwrecked stranger” of the novel’s open.
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the importance of sympathy and a common language in the forming of bonds
between women:
Now it came to passe, that as the boate was driven to the shore, a
poore woman stood at the Sea side, washing certaine Fishermen’s
Nets. [...] The poore woman perceyving by her habite that she
was a Christian, demanded of her (in speaking Latine) how it was
possible for her, being all alone in the boate, to arrive there in this
manner? [...] [Responding to the bitter weeping of Gostanza] the
good Woman did greatly compassionate her case, and prevailed so
well by gentle speeches, that she conducted her into her owne poore
habitation, where at length she understoode, by what means shee
hapned thither so strangely. (247)
The “good Woman” gives Gostanza food and drink, and the heroine begins to feel
“her hopes quicken againe” and pleads with her rescuer, Carapresa, to “take pitty
on her youth, and helpe her with such good advice, to prevent all injuries which
might happen to her, in such a solitary wofull condition” (248). Desirous of the
wisdom of this older, working woman (as Romola is with Cassandra), Gostanza
accompanies Carapresa to the home of the Sarazine Lady, who is so moved by the
heroine’s tale that she agrees to take her in. The Sarazine Lady leads her “further
into her house, where dwelt divers other women (but not one man) all exercising
themselves in severall labours, as working in all sorts of silke, with Imbroideries of
Gold and Silver, and sundry other excellent Arts beside” (248). Gostanza’s
voyage has led her to a community of artistic women (most likely weavers and
needle-workers), who live apart from men. Discovering a new sense of purpose
and showered with affection, Gostanza lives happily among the women until she
discovers her lost love lives in a town nearby and her female companions help her
to claim him. When reunited with her lover, Gostanza must tell her tale once again
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to the King he serves in a high capacity, and the King is so moved by her account
of her struggles that he sends “for very costly Jewels, and rich presents, the one
halfe of them he gave to her, and the other to Martuccio (250). The novell ends
with Gostanza and Martuccio sailing off to their homeland, Carapresa in tow.
Romola’s “end” is not the conventionally happy one Gostanza’s tale and
the romance form promise. She experiences no reconciliation with her true love,
enjoys no reward in the form of jewels and other sumptuous goods. Yet I would
disagree with the narrator’s gloss on the heroines’ parallel plots, which questions
whether Romola “discovers anything like the dream of her girlhood,” then
answers, “No” (504). Romola’s end is Gostanza’s middle, her trajectory a
departure from formal expectations. The greater part of Madam Amelia’s story
focuses on the struggles of the despairing heroine and the loving home she finds
with the women of Susa (a rather nice inversion of the chivalric romance of her
day); Romola’s experiences after “drifting away” might well be described in the
same fashion. Consider too the heroine’s thoughts when she awakens to find
herself surveying “a deep curve of the mountains [where] lay a breadth of green
land, curtained by gentle tree-shadowed slopes leaning towards the rocky heights”
(550). As she regards this feminine space, it seems to her that “the afternoon
dreams of her girlhood had really come back to her” (550). Like Gostanza, she
spends months with her newfound community, nursing the plague-stricken
villagers and restoring order to their lives; like Gostanza, she is showered with
affection and gifts, in her case honey and cakes—the villagers’ offerings to “the
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Blessed Lady” (558). Revered above the priest who fled from the community’s
sorrows, Romola possesses an authority that derives from her sympathy and
commitment to serve, while the independence she realizes in this arduous but
romantic realm allows her to remain “free to act, unrestrained by the injunctions of
male relatives or the barriers of law and custom” (Sheets 7).
When she returns to Florence, Romola is, to a large degree, still free to act
of her own will. It is significant that she spends the greater part of her plot
struggling with and against the pronouncements of fathers and husband, but that in
the end, “[ljike the highest ranking survivor in a tragedy, Romola has the last
word” (Booth 192). Critics have been divided, often along gender-political lines,
as to the appropriateness of this ending. Writing in 1863, R. H. Hutton believed
the priest’s moving final words would have been a “far higher artistic ending to
her story than the somewhat feeble and womanish one with which it concludes”
(qtd. in Sheets 8), while an unnamed reviewer for Saturday Review (who the editor
notes is most likely John Morley) observes of Romola’s household: “there is,
perhaps, a little exaggeration of romance in this, but her general treatment of Tessa
gives us her measure” (qtd. in Carroll 212). More recently, feminist critics have
also taken issue with the ending, arguing that Romola remains confined within a
domestic framework instead of taking a more active role in Florentine public life.
But others have read the conclusion as a challenge to a sexist status quo. Caroline
Levine, for instance, argues that Romola has “radically revised conventional
relations between wife and mistress, having adopted her husband’s lover as her
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own partner. Affirming a startling independence, the women run the household
together, free from the demands of men” (qtd. in Levine, Cambridge 15). Alison
Booth makes a similar claim: “she has also triumphed over the patriarchs, as the
last scenes of the novel make clear” (191). My interpretation of the ending aligns
more closely with these last readings, although I believe that the nineteenth-
century reviewer who likened the ending to “romance” identifies a key, if buried,
component to the ending.
The romance plot, generally assumed to refer to Romola’s time away from
Florence, may be, in its characteristic fashion, wandering farther than intended at
the outset. The trio that sailed back to Liparis at the end of Gostanza’s tale
anticipates the triangular nature of Romola’s new household when she returns to
Florence, for she has indeed usurped the position of her husband (who nevertheless
remains enough of a presence to occupy Romola’s final story). She has also
created a loving community of women who share in the work of childrearing, the
ghostly desire that has haunted her choices through much of the narrative. And as
a widow of property, Romola enjoys the financial independence and security that
Gostanza’s portion of jewels provided, which, all considered, is not a bad position
77
for a woman who once depended so fully on male readings of her experience.
Commenting upon the character’s development throughout the novel, George
7 2 Robin Sheets’ material on the perceptions about Renaissance widows and the rights they enjoyed
is very illuminating: discussing the threat posed by these women of independent means, she writes,
“Preachers and moralists attempted to instruct widows in appropriate dress, behavior, and
conversation, but it was ultimately impossible, lamented one humanist, to ‘reduce widows . . . to
our own customes [sic.]’” (9). Eliot would have been aware of the common wisdom about widows,
so Romola’s position as head o f the household at the end of the novel can be read as a sign that her
creator wished to give her the freedom she sought upon first leaving Florence.
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Levine observes in “‘Romola’ as Fable,” that the heroine’s “full moral experience
depends on her liberation from external guidance and an absolute confrontation
with self, regardless of the pressures of the external world” (90). What is notable
is that such a confrontation occurs within the romance re-enacted at the novel’s
end, an indication that Eliot recognized that the fantasy-form provides a space for
self-confrontation and transformation. In Romola’s narrow experience, it is left to
the romance to spark desires so often suppressed as to be unrecognizable and to
reaffirm the truths told by women. Serving Romola as far more than a means for
temporary escape, the romance revisited provides a form of liberation—not merely
from “external guidance” but from male authority and the male consciousness
within.
George Eliot’s Unrepentant Romance Readers
That Eliot should discover some redeeming elements in the romance form
while re-viewing it through the eyes of Romola and Maggie is not remarkable; both
heroines possess an ardent desire to improve themselves and please others, and their
attraction to romantic tales seems primarily to be a diversion from their unhappy
lives, a substitute relation for those characterized by unreturned love and attention.
What is remarkable is Eliot’s subsequent treatment of romance readers in her fiction,
for Esther Lyon, Rosamond Vincy, and Gwendolen Harleth initially share little in
common with the self-denying pair critics often read autobiographically. Holding
sway over a narrow social sphere, smugly satisfied with their beauty and feminine
charms, showing little interest in others’ woes and joys: these three novel readers are
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considerably more complacent and egoistic—fictional representations of the lady
readers Eliot once satirized. They enjoy not the Waverly romances beloved by
Maggie (and Eliot in her youth), but fashionable novels of the “mind and millinery
species,” which feature “dazzling” heroines who are heiresses or socially ascendant,
and who hold court o’er all while “men play a very subordinate part by [their] side,”
as “the final cause of their existence is that they may accompany the heroine on her
‘starring’ expedition through life” (Silly Novels 296-97). The grandiosity of such
wish-fulfillment fantasies is duplicated in the plans of the three romance-reading
characters, who imagine themselves floating to the top of the social hierarchy and
moving gracefully through mirrored corridors that reflect their countless beauties.
Yet Eliot’s portraits of Esther, Rosamond, and Gwendolen, informed by the insights
she gleaned in the writing of Mill and Romola, are considerably more complex and
engaging than those of past lady readers, an achievement that speaks not only to her
ever-expanding sympathies but also to the possibility of enlarging the sympathies of
her characters’ real-life counterparts.
With these later readers, Eliot continues to explore the lure of the ideal and
improbable, but her interest seems deeper in that other highly problematic
component of romance reading: feminine vanity. Eliot, like Wollstonecraft before
her, is most fixed on what she perceives to be the ego-inflating properties of the
form and the constraints self-love places on a woman’s ability to care for her family.
Yet she reveals a subtle ambivalence about the female ego—one that intensifies as
she moves from writing Felix Holt, to Middlemarch, to Daniel Deronda. In
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recognizing the link between the idealizing properties of the romance and women’s
vanity—which may also be the connection between the self-affirming elements of
romance and a woman’s “self-contentment” Eliot anticipates Freud’s theory “On
Narcissism” (1914) as well as the work of feminist critics who later revised his
theories (Freud 554). While Freud emphasizes (and presumably regrets) the failure
of most women to experience “complete-object-love”, a consequence of their
“intensified] original narcissism” (554), many of his feminist followers have re
evaluated the function of the narcissistic or ego-libido within the context of
patriarchal relations, uncovering the shadowy possibilities for resistance and self-
support in a world that celebrates feminine docility and domestic care.7 3
Eliot’s (narrative) theory of feminine vanity and romantic illusion not only
anticipates a number of Freud’s insights it ultimately surpasses his speculations in
complexity and contextual awareness.7 4 Fler exceptional female characters—the
Maggies, Romolas and Dorotheas—might easily fit Freud’s descriptions of the
special women who, in the masculine manner, have successfully diverted their
innate narcissism toward an appropriate love object and/or an ideal ego that
privileges duty. She, like Freud, imagines that a narcissistic bent in women will
7 3 Inflecting the trait with a Romantic quality or energy that protects the individual under siege, Lou
Salome Andreas regards feminine narcissism as a source of power that helps women negotiate
conflicting demands and desires. Writing about Salome, Biddy Martin observes, “she attributed
her capacity to resist social constraints and still engage in social life to an essential feminine
narcissism and self-sufficiency that protected her from the anxiety, the ambition, and the
aggressiveness that characterized what she called a masculine approach to knowledge and to the
world” (210).
7 4 Perhaps more significantly, her fiction takes narcissism and erotic daydreaming seriously, as in
the manner of Nancy K. Miller’s revision of Freud, “Emphasis Added”: recognizing that the plots
of ambition for women would have to be forsaken for plausible narratives, the critic cedes to
women writers wishes that are ambitious as well as erotic and argues that the more egoistic desires
would manifest themselves in their works as “an impulse to power” (41).
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result in an insufficient supply of affection for those who deserve it most—her
husband and children, and both seem to agree that narcissistic energy is fueled
largely through the cultivation of a rich fantasy life. Yet Freud does not develop this
aspect of his argument much in “On Narcissism”; one must reference an earlier
work, “Creative Writers and Day Dreaming” (1908), to complete the tacit
connection that Eliot makes explicitly, linking feminine vanity with the silly novels
and cultural myths that nurture “small feminine ambitions” (Scenes 88). When
discussing the fantasy lives of young men and women in “Creative Writers,” Freud
makes a sharp distinction between the “ambitious wishes, which serve to elevate the
subject’s personality” and the erotic wishes (713). Blinded by the limited role
assigned to middle class women in the public sphere, he associates the erotic wishes
with women and both types with men: “In young women the erotic wishes
predominate almost exclusively, for their ambition is as a rule absorbed by erotic
trends. In young men egoistic and ambitious wishes come to the fore clearly enough
alongside of erotic ones” (713).7 5 The young women in Freud’s theory entertain
only erotic fantasies when daydreaming, but Freud makes no attempt to explain why
this might be the case in a culture where women’s social relevance depends almost
wholly upon the choice she makes in marriage. Eliot recognizes this fact in her
7 5 Freud’s language here is a bit ambiguous, for his choice o f the word “absorbed” does, in fact,
suggest that the egoistic or ambitious wish might be subsumed within the erotic; the question is
whether such absorption functions to elide or unite such desires. And while his subsequent
comment about young men’s ambitious wishes emerging “alongside” the erotic implies that both
types retain their essence while coexisting, his following example suggests a hierarchical
relationship: “in the majority of ambitious fantasies, we can discover in some comer or other the
lady for whom the creator of the fantasy performs all his heroic deeds” (“Creative Dreaming” 714).
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fiction, and her recognition depends on the knowledge that erotic and ambitious
wishes for women of her time were largely one in the same.
With scant opportunity to rise in the world through their own talents and
determination, women of the more leisured classes who wished to “elevate”
themselves concentrated their hopes most often on hypergamy. Little wonder, then,
that the hypergamic success story should be so popular among woman, given its
capacity for fulfilling both the erotic and ambitious wishes of its readers. Eliot is
careful to narrate the contents of her more egoistic characters’ daydreams, and we
witness Hetty, Esther, Rosamond, and Gwendolen painting rosy pictures of their
futures with men of higher social status. The ambitious-erotic wishes of the last
three are both nurtured and illustrated by the novels they read, and in their stories
Eliot takes pains to establish the continuity between their visions and the images
they absorb from silly novels. This moment from Felix Holt is quite typical:
[Esther’s] mind had fixed itself habitually on the signs and luxuries of
ladyhood, for which she had the keenest perception. She had seen the
very mat in her carriage, had scented the dried rose-leaves in her
corridors, had felt the soft carpets under her pretty feet, and seen
herself, as she rose from her sofa cushions, in the crystal panel that
reflected a long drawing room, where the conservatory flowers and
the pictures of fair women left her still with the supremacy of charm.
She [...] had had her servants about her filled with adoring respect,
because of her kindness as well as her grace and beauty; and she had
had several accomplished cavaliers all at once suing for her hand [. .
.]. (473-74)
Esther’s imagination—shown here to be vivid and “ready”—is nonetheless
consumed with the “signs and luxuries of ladyhood”; these class markers speak as
well to the contest by which women win such a place, securing a life of elegance and
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ease. Her daydreams, which place her at the center, surrounded by adoring servants
and suitors, recall the “mind and millinery” novels that chart the heroine’s
“‘starring’ expedition through life” (“Silly Novels” 297). Most interesting, perhaps,
is the prominence of the crystal panel that reflects her image emerging from sofa
cushions suggestive of indolence and sensuality. Catching sight of her own
reflection in the daydream, Esther sees her image among those of other women who
have attained her dream—a commodity among other commodities, yet the fairest of
them all. Her vanity is tightly bound with fanciful images and shallow ambitions,
her sympathies stretched only so far as the circle of admirers reflecting her charms.
Presenting a young woman at the center of story who obtains recognition and
admiration for the very qualities and talents the narcissistic reader herself might
possess, the romance evidences, and encourages, the sort of grandiosity one might
associate with early omnipotence. Love stories and vanity are therefore inextricably
bound in Eliot’s criticism and fiction. Consequently, her desire to spark the
sympathies of the egoistic reader depends first upon extending the courtship plot
beyond the “happy ending” to sketch the shattered dreams of newlyweds like
Dorothea and Edward Casaubon, Rosamond and Tertius Lydgate, and Gwendolen
Grandcourt; in so doing, Eliot debunks the idealistic notions held by readers of the
romance, throwing them into consciousness with the disappointed heroine and
teaching them to identify the pitfalls of an unsympathetic and idealizing relation to
text and world. She then provides her female protagonists (and their real-life
romance-reading counterparts) with a new form of intersubjective connection that
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proves a source of energy and empowerment, substituting new objects of affection
or ambition to compensate them for the romanticized other lost in the novelistic
destruction of quixotic ideals. The shift from a devastated egoism to a revitalizing
empathy is a climactic moment in the trajectories of Esther, Rosamond, and
Gwendolen, and their arcs signal the author’s interest in the various means by which
an egoistic reader might receive “deep impressions” (Carroll 5) and awaken to the
events and others around her. In each of her romance readers’ individual plots, Eliot
reproduces the conditions of her own conversionary experience, providing her
extradiegetic readers with the opportunity to become wise to the more idealizing,
egoistic elements of the plot while enlarging their sympathies through the progress
of her heroines’ successful (or unsuccessful) romance plots. In each case, we are
initially distanced from the protagonists, and take, quite often, great pleasure in
judging them; as they grow increasingly troubled, however, our sympathies are
enlisted, and their awakening becomes our own.
Of the three romance readers’ trajectories, Esther Lyon’s plot in Felix Holt
most resembles a conventional romance narrative, one that is fully developed in
Eliot’s fiction only once, and one that aligns neatly with Freud’s preferred
development schema. The key problem of the novel is whether Esther might, in the
words of her ultimate love object, be “kindled to a better ambition” (213), and she
does in the end prove tractable, an “exceptional” woman in Freud’s point of view.
(Eliot improves upon Freud’s story of the exceptional woman, however, by offering,
through Esther, a critique of the “mean” realities of a woman’s life.) Why the novel
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should be named Felix Holt when the difficult path toward self-knowledge and
contentment is clearly Esther’s is a bit of a mystery—unless one considers the
eponymous hero’s function as a projected ideal made real. Like Daniel Deronda
who follows, Felix is not only the ideal love-object (for both heroine and creator) he
serves as a conscience for Esther, and as the means of her conversion from a
narcissistic daughter to a sympathetic wife.
During their first encounters Felix chastises Esther for reading “mawkish
stuff’ (210) and expresses his dissatisfaction with her avid interest in the trivial
matters of fashion, etiquette, and “ornaments” (209). Declaring he wants her to
change and acknowledging her “power of choosing something better” (210), Felix
challenges her to live by her father’s principles and to open her eyes to the misery of
men and women in the world around her. He continues to address the unrepentant
romance reader with “pedagogic attention” (150), and Esther slowly begins to “lose
[her] sense of superiority in an awakening need for reliance on one whose vision was
wider, whose nature was purer and stronger than her own” (264). Eliot clearly
approves of his pedagogical project: observing that Esther’s life and her thoughts are
a “heap of fragments” (264), the narrator reflects that “some great energy was
needed to bind them together” (264), referring obliquely to Felix.
That “binding energy” is felt with electrifying keenness in chapter 22 when
an intimate, intersubjective tie is established with Felix, who possesses a “wider
vision,” a “purer nature,” a greater soul in the Wordsworthian sense. Esther feels “a
pang swift as an electric shock dart[s] through her” (321) and imagines for the first
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time that if she “had a mind equal to his, and if he loved [her] very dearly” she might
choose his path (321), despite its difficulties. The narrator observes momentarily
that Esther’s “favorite Byronic heroes were beginning to look something like last
night’s decorations seen in the sober dawn. So fast does a little leaven spread within
us—so incalculable is the effect of one personality on another” (322). Esther has in
this scene been “kindled to a better ambition,” revitalized by the energy of a more
sympathetic other who possesses the intuitive power and intelligence to inspire
transformation. The fragments of romance that have cluttered her mind for so long
begin to lose their luster as “some great energy” takes hold of her (264), catalyzing
her imagination and awakening her own latent sympathies.
Wed to Felix—who serves as both love object and ideal, Esther is insured of
maintaining this higher ambition; her connubial conscience guarantees that her
narcissism will be appropriately directed. Writes Eliot, “He was like no one else to
her: he had seemed to bring at once a law, and the love that gave strength to obey the
law” (369). The novel’s resolution sees the heroine thoroughly domesticated and
grateful for her conversion—one of the few conventionally happy endings Eliot
gives us in her fiction. Certainly Esther’s bond with Felix is preferable to the
“padded yoke” she would have worn with Harold (538) or the marriage plot Mrs.
Transome describes with devastating insight (488). Esther’s beloved will not turn
her love to fear, nor will he delight in mastering her. But he has demanded that she
give up her plot to take his own, and her will has been bent, her ambition redirected.
There is undeniable pleasure in the outcome of this novel, yet the one-sided nature
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of the romance-education plot, the conflation of law and love object, leaves
something to be desired. While the Freudian reading might suit Felix Holt, it fails to
account for the richer readings of narcissism, romance, and sympathy one finds in
Eliot’s characters Rosamond and Gwendolen. Indeed, when the extradiegetic
romance reader finds Esther sewing rather than reading in the parlor preceding her
love scene with Felix, it can only feel as if Eliot still occupies the position of the
strict analyst, chastening the reader and educating her into the conventional female
plot.
Perhaps this is one reason for Eliot’s return to the female narcissist’s
romance plot in Middlemarch, where she presents us with a romance-reading
heroine who resists such reform and remains committed to the vision she has
constructed —well past the point of marital disappointment and disillusionment.
There is, in fact, a startling repetition in the narrator’s running commentary on
Rosamond Vincy’s fantasies and the plot of development they obstruct; there is no
real progress or arc in her narrative, for with every turn of her lovely neck, she
renounces reality and returns to romance, spinning new variations on the old plot,
which lends itself so beautifully to endless repetition. When first encountering
Rosamond, readers might well imagine that her plot will develop along the lines of
Esther Lyon’s trajectory, so similar are their beginnings, so ripe are both for reform.
And yet “the lot” that Felix fears “Miss Esther is preparing for some man or
other”—in which a man’s “fine purpose” must be set aside because his “wife is nice
[. ..] and her feelings will be hurt if she is not thought genteel” (F H 166)—is the
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very plot that ensnares Lydgate, who arrogantly believes his superior reason will
prevail in his romance. What he and other learned readers of romance fail to
recognize is that lady readers and would-be heroines have their own ideas about the
romance plot and their “social lot” (M M xiv), and “the limits of variation are really
much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure
and the favourite love-stories in prose and verse” (MMxiv). It is through
Rosamond’s plot of resistance—so enmeshed with that of romance—that Eliot
examines the lesser-known energies of a genre long associated with escape and
ennui.
The most unrepentant egoist of the three romance readers, Rosamond is a
textbook example of Freud’s theory of feminine narcissism, and Eliot seems to
relish representing her in the shimmering light of the looking glass and her own
self-obsessed fantasy projections. One of our earliest glimpses of her is before a
mirror at Stone Court, where she primps while talking with Mary Garth. Noting
that both young women are caught by the reflection, the narrator remarks:
Mary Garth seemed all the plainer standing at an angle between the
two nymphs—the one in the glass, and the one out of it, who
looked at each other with eyes of heavenly blue, deep enough to
hold the most exquisite meanings an ingenious beholder could put
into them, and deep enough to hide the meanings of the owner if
these should happen to be less exquisite. (76)
The image of two nymphs at the glass is striking, with Rosamond
performing doubly as a creature of fancy and Mary providing contrast as a young
woman “who neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own
behoof’ (77). In this scene, Rosamond is quite taken with her image, turning
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repeatedly toward it for a “new view of her neck in the glass” (77)—a detail that
will prove significant in the unfolding plot of resistance through romance. She is
also presented as possessing a cipher-like quality that allows her male pursuers to
project their fantasies upon her, and it is not inconceivable that her narcissistic
“self-contentment” would attract men like the many admiring Middlemarchers and
the second husband who is content to worship at her feet. Already prone to
idealizing women, Lydgate will be undone by the illusion Rosamond creates,
recognizing too late the “feminine impassibility revealing itself in the sylph-like
frame which he [...] interprets] [initially] as the sign of a ready intelligent
sensitiveness” (409).
After marriage, when her initial romance plot has come to its “happy end,”
Rosamond diverts herself with daydreams that center upon her relation to Lydgate’s
socially prominent family and his Byronesque friend, Will Ladislaw. Not having
read much “French literature later than Racine” at Mrs Lemon’s (nor, apparently, the
chivalric romances of the medieval era), she is delighted to discover that a married
woman might still factor significantly in the romance narrative (301). The narrator
remarks,
vanity, with a woman’s whole mind and day to work in, can construct
abundantly on slight hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility
of indefinite conquests. How delightful to make captives from the
throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side—
himself in fact a subject—while the captives look up for ever
hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much
the better! (301)
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As Rosamond and Lydgate’s disappointment in each other mounts, she flirts with
her husband’s cousin, Captain Lydgate (“the baronet’s third son” [401]), anticipates
“letters and visits to and from Quallingham” (401), and relishes the idea that
Ladislaw absents himself out of jealousy over the Captain’s attentions to her. With
the endlessly renewable romance plot, she is able to energize her ego-libido and
fight the encroaching ennui: she need only reconstruct the triangle, feature new
supporting actors, maintain her starring role. I would argue these visions play a
crucial role in Rosamond’s life—supporting and feeding the resistance Lou Andreas
Salome associates with feminine narcissism and enabling her to thwart her
husband’s resolve with “dumb mastery” (511).
We witness Rosamond “turn[ing] her neck” at every almost every demand or
recommendation her husband makes (410, 414, 449, 521), and we learn that “in her
secret soul she was utterly aloof from him. The poor thing saw only that the world
was not ordered to her liking, and Lydgate was part of that world” (448). Such are
the conditions for engaging the romance, and Rosamond does indeed draw
sustenance from it, but what is perhaps most interesting about her use of the
romance fantasy is that she turns it deftly against her husband, making him feel the
guilt for her own delusions. Eliot writes of Lydgate: “he had a growing dread of
7 6 Expanding on Rosamond’s “little romance which was to vary the flatness of her life” (520), the
narrator clarifies the nature of her feelings for Will: “Will Ladislaw was always to be a bachelor
and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an understood though never fully
expressed passion for her, which would be sending out lambent flames every now and then in
interesting scenes. His departure had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly increased
her weariness of Middlemarch; [...] Since then the troubles of her married life had deepened, and
the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful rumination over that thin romance which she
had once fed on” (520). Employing two ingestion metaphors within one sentence, the narrator
suggests that the romance fantasy feeds something within; I’d like to suggest it is the ego-libido.
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Rosamond’s quiet elusive obstinacy, which would not allow any assertion of power
to be final; and again, she had touched him in a spot of keenest feeling by implying
that she had been deluded with a false vision of happiness in marrying him” (456).
His dread and her resistance are both dependent on the unruly energies of the
romance plot, and because Rosamond has few “real” concerns and more than ample
time to focus her erotic-ambitious energies she will emerge triumphant every time
when the desires of husband and wife conflict. It is only when she confronts a will
greater than her own, a Will possessed of an even more powerful romantic dream,
that her image of self is shattered and she experiences the dread that signals, in
Eliot’s work, a character’s potential for sympathetic conversion.
Rosamond experiences only a temporary transformation under the influence
of the ardent, empathic Dorothea, but their exchange marks the climax of her plot: a
provocative revision of the “great soul” plot of Felix Holt which presents readers
with an animating source that is female, a set of “binding energies” between women.
As the scene unfolds, the two women find themselves in an increasingly inclusive,
intersubjective relationship, one that bears a close resemblance to the bond Jessica
Benjamin identifies with primary narcissism. Dorothea reflects at one moment that
she and Rosamond “could never be together again with the same thrilling
consciousness of yesterday within them both” (549) and decides that this “peculiar”
relation might give her a “peculiar influence” over the other troubled young woman.
Commenting on Rosamond’s state of mind (and reinforcing our sense of a fluid
maternal-infantile relation), the narrator observes:
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It was a newer crisis in Rosamond’s experience than even Dorothea
could imagine: she was under the first great shock that had shattered
her dream-world in which she had been easily confident of herself
and critical of others; and this strange unexpected manifestation of
feeling in a woman whom she had approached with a shrinking
aversion and dread, as one who must necessarily have a jealous
hatred towards her, made her soul totter all the more with a sense that
she had been walking in an unknown world which had just broken in
upon her. (549)
While Rosamond is depicted in this moment as the more childlike of the two, a mere
two sentences later it is revealed that Dorothea “looked almost as childish” (549);
social identities, rank, decorum, and narratorial distance dissolve amid tears, and this
question emerges, resisting attachment to any one consciousness: “What was the use
of thinking about behaviour after this crying?” (549). Sharing the “same thrilling
consciousness,” relinquishing pride (549), regarding self and other anew through the
cleansing power of unfettered emotion, Dorothea and Rosamond occupy a liminal,
liberating space: here they can evade the judgment and anxiety associated with their
relative value as objects of exchange; here they can expose truths too often obscured
and obstructed by social delimitation.
Critics often read Rosamond’s confession as wholly responsive, referencing
the narrator’s observation that Rosamond’s “generous effort” is a “reflex’ of
77
Dorothea’s “own energy” (551). I too believe that Rosamond is animated by
Dorothea’s ardent energy and does, to some degree, reflect or “echo” her
companion’s greater emotion as she once did her music master’s playing. I would
7 7 See Jerome Beaty’s “Middlemarch: The Writing of Chapter 81,” where he examines the changes
that Eliot made in her 1874 revision of the novel introduced in eight books during 1871-72. In the
revised scene, Beaty argues, Eliot takes great care to emphasize the unconscious quality of
Rosamond’s confession about Will; in the first version Rosamond seems to choose to confess
whereas in the later one she is compelled to confess.
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argue, however, this compulsion is more a consequence of relation, of the emotional
energies released in this inclusive, uncommon bond between women. The reflexive,
mirroring effect that Jerome Beaty and the narrator identify is unquestionably
present—the childish tears (549), the feelings of weakness, (548, 550), the
comforting gestures (548, 550), the guilt of extramarital attraction (550), and yet the
original source of reflection is not always as clear as these observers would have us
believe. The emotional current (or “binding energy”) running between these two
highly vulnerable women is reflected, redirected by each admission and affectionate
display, and its energy refracted—the effect of the combined current being much
greater than the sum of its parts (as an image might be, were it caught in a hall of
mirrors). When Rosamond makes her confession and “deliver[s] her soul under
impulses she had not known before” (550), it may indeed be a reflexive move, yet
her echo offers more at this moment than it has ever offered before: she delivers
Dorothea a truth that is unknown to her, setting aside her own interest to console
another.
The function of Rosamond’s echo here recalls a less frequently remembered
detail of the myth of Echo and Narcissus, one that is beautifully foregrounded in
Ovid’s version. Before she pines away for the self-loving lout whose story eclipses
her own, Echo loses her voice—not for spreading tales (as some versions suggest)
but because Juno wishes to punish her for alerting Jupiter’s conquests that his
jealous wife approaches. Resisting the established order, the nymph puts her
sympathy for other women before her desire to protect self or a patriarchal system
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that requires women to avenge themselves on each other instead of the men who
degrade them. Rosamond’s echo, then, has special resonance in this scene, gaining
new force and truthfulness because significant feelings and confidences are shared
between women. The popular perception of chattering nymphs and Middlemarchers
may suggest otherwise, but talk among women can generate important, love- and
life-saving truths, resist well-established hierarchies, and circumvent internalized
misogyny. It can even redirect the flow of “traffic in women,” making objects of
men who usually do the choosing, as is the case here, when Rosamond makes a gift
of her “will” to Dorothea. Caught by a vision as fanciful and heartening as any her
romance readers might spin, Eliot rechannels the energies of Rosamond and
Dorothea’s romantic triangle to create the most surprising, if not moving, love scene
within all her fiction.
Rosamond’s sympathetic awakening is short-lived, of course; she and
Dorothea are never depicted together again, and we learn that she resumes her
inflexible ways, continuing to frustrate her husband through “stratagem” until he
dies at an early age (575). Yet her brief moment of intersubjective relation, and
her unceasing loyalty to Dorothea (575), does prompt one to wonder about the
power of sustained connection and its animating possibilities. Had Rosamond
maintained contact with Dorothea, had she fully committed herself to her music,
could she have channeled her ambitious energies more productively? If contact
with a highly sympathetic other or with one’s art is sustained, will the ego-libido
be redirected, a higher ambition achieved? More importantly, will new objects of
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affection and/or ambition enable the more egoistic heroine to find happiness?
Eliot examines these plot possibilities in Daniel Deronda, where she introduces
another romance reader, Gwendolen Harleth, whose ambitions are greater than
those of Esther and Rosamond but who finds no outlet for them. She shares with
Rosamond a penchant for “doing as she like[s]” (173) and a strong-willed nature
that is signaled by the winding of her neck (40), but initially resists the
conventional hypergamic plot that Rosamond depends upon. Like Esther, she
discovers the self-improving possibilities of an attachment to the ideal love object
but she is not allowed Esther’s happy ending. No cultural dupe, Gwendolen is
much more self-conscious and ambivalent about her relation to romance and
nurses other undirected desires—a sign that her creator now recognizes other
possibilities for the consumption of romance. Resisting closure at the novel’s end,
Gwendolen’s plot is more anxious and compelling than either of her predecessors,
raising important questions about the dearth of plots for women of ambition.
When it comes to realizing her rather vague desires, Gwendolen’s biggest
challenge is her imagination, which is vivid and lively but severely limited by her
narrow field of vision. With no clear object(ive) to focus her “inborn energy of
egoistic desire” (71), she can only define her goals through negation, refusing the
common paths presented to young women of her class. Eliot writes:
She rejoiced to feel herself exceptional; but her horizon was that of
the genteel romance where the heroine’s soul poured out in her
journal is full of vague power, originality, and general rebellion,
while her life moves strictly in the sphere of fashion; and if she
wanders into a swamp, the pathos lies partly, so to speak, in her
having on satin shoes.
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[...] What she was clear upon was, that she did not wish to lead
the same sort of life as ordinary young ladies did; but what she was
not clear upon was, how she should set about leading any other, and
what were the particular acts which she would assert her freedom
by doing. (83-84)
Having encountered no real disappointment or hardship, Gwendolen’s sense of
pathos is about as deep as that inspired by the swampy horrors of a beautifully
shod heroine; her life has been made easy by a doting, guilt-ridden mother, and she
has traveled in very narrow social circles. She wishes to set herself apart from
“ordinary young ladies,” but her lack of experience and her shallow awareness of
others’ needs and troubles preclude any real knowledge of life’s possibilities.
Unlike Mirah whose tragic life has prepared her well for passionately sensitive
artistry (and the life of beauty and struggle she will presumably share with Daniel),
Gwendolen has nothing to draw upon except a life of fashionable ease and the
pleasures of drawing-room exhibition in order to satisfy her vague sense of
ambition and longing. Yet while her accomplishments are very much aligned with
those of the fashionable heroine, the path presented by the genteel romance does
not appeal to her as it does to Rosamond and Esther. Gwendolen is not inspired by
the love plot; indeed, although “it is easy to make them do it in books” she cannot
understand how “girls manage to fall in love”—clearly “men are too ridiculous”
(110). What she finds compelling about the romance is the singularity of the
heroine, and the opportunity to occupy center stage.
Recognizing that there is a form of influence and power to be gained in the
wifely role, and wanting above all to hold sway over others (as she does in her
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mother’s household), Gwendolen is still fiercely ambivalent about the romance
plot that promises such power but at a cost she, unlike many other girls, cannot
ignore.
[. . .] her thoughts never dwelt on marriage as the fulfilment of her
ambition; the dramas in which she imagined herself a heroine were
not wrought up to that close. To be very much sued or hopelessly
sighed for as a bride was indeed an indispensable and agreeable
guarantee of womanly power; but to become a wife and wear all the
domestic fetters of that condition, was on the whole a vexatious
necessity. [...] Of course marriage was social promotion; [. . .] and
this delicate-limbed sylph of twenty meant to lead. [. ..] She meant
to do what was pleasant to herself in a striking manner; or rather,
whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get
in that reflected way a more ardent sense of living, seemed pleasant
to her fancy. (68-69)
Gwendolen’s focus here centers not upon winning the heart of a great man or
experiencing the thrills of courtship that so excite her peers, and if she perceives
that there is something to be gained from being desired as a bride, it is primarily
the communal response to her acknowledged desirability that interests her. She
demonstrates a very pragmatic, even calculating view on the vicissitudes of love
and marriage, remaining resistant to the “domestic fetters” the latter no doubt
entails. Desiring the attention and admiration that is the bride’s due but also aware
of the inevitable tedium and constraint, Gwendolen is reluctant to commit to such
a path, yet knows no other clear cut way into the hearts and minds of a larger
community. Her narcissism requires a very deep fount of love to maintain itself,
so her most obvious, easily articulated desire is to win the admiration of others.
Underlying that desire, however, is an intense longing for the ardor or passion she
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imagines she will experience reflexively; she is merely incapable at this point of
recognizing such a need.7 8
Keenly attuned, then, to the responsiveness of her various and potential
audiences, Gwendolen applies the knowledge gained from her romance reading in
a particularly self-conscious manner. Eliot highlights these moments of practical
application, showing Mrs. Davilow’s distress at the worldly knowledge her
daughter has gained from “such books” and depicting Gwendolen as she practices
her tutored charm on others (129). In a brief aside to other young lady readers, the
narrator communicates the following in a parenthetical statement: “(Here should
any young lady incline to imitate Gwendolen, let her consider the set of her head
and neck: [...])” (100). By pointing to the possibility that other romance readers
will learn from Gwendolen’s flirtations, Eliot draws attention to her heroine’s own
oft-practiced book knowledge. Later, in a highly amusing internal dialogue that
shadows Gwendolen’s initial conversation with Henleigh Grandcourt, we are privy
to her calculations as she assesses her own performance and his likely response to
it; the parenthetical observations which document Gwendolen’s rapid projections
capture beautifully the sort of analytical skills that a young girl given to romantic
daydreaming might develop. Beginning with “Pause, during which Gwendolen”
“thought” or “wondered” or recalled” (146-48), these asides evaluate Grandcourt’s
suitability as a husband (147), the pleasures of a hunting season with two horses to
ride at will (147), and the possibility that the most admirable women are
sometimes passed over in novels (148). In another moment she makes “several
7 8 Gwendolen’s search for passion at the gaming table evidences this submerged desire.
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interpretations of her own speech” (146), suggesting a high degree of self-
conscious control as well as a very quick mind. Shown here turning plots over in
her mind while she participates in her own blossoming romance, Gwendolen
displays a remarkable sense of self-possession. She also possesses a surprising
capacity to resist the romance, refusing to get carried away as many other female
readers seem to do.
Her great act of resistance comes after she meets Lydia Glasher and
decisively rejects the romance resolution Grandcourt offers her. Approaching this
meeting with the sense of dread that never truly leaves her, Gwendolen is shaken
by the Whispering Stones that shield Lydia from her sight and cannot help
wondering what is on the other side. What “if there were nothing at all?” (188).
Her anxiety speaks metaphorically to the marriage plot she entertains; she does not
know what to expect from marriage, and her ignorance of its oppressive elements
will cost her dearly. When she learns of Lydia’s relation to Grandcourt,
Gwendolen feels “revulsion” and a general hatred (190). She also feels a “sort of
terror: it was as if some ghastly vision had come to her in a dream and said, ‘I am a
woman’s life’” (190). While Gwendolen has never had much faith in romantic
illusions, she has not been prepared by her reading for this kind of knowledge or
choice (193), and her disgust and her terror propel her away from Grandcourt and
the erotic-ambitious plot she had begun to accept. Feeling a much keener desire to
remain single, an exceptional woman, she must now consider other possibilities:
the talent for performance for which she has been lauded in her non-exacting
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social sphere seems to suggest another route for her ambitions—one that will not
require her to endure the constraints of a hollow marriage. This question becomes
even more pressing when her mother’s fortune is lost, and she begins to wonder if
“she need take a husband at all—whether she could not achieve substantiality for
herself and know gratified ambition without bondage” (295).
Gwendolen therefore decides to seek Herr Klesmer’s advice about
beginning a career as a singer and actress upon the stage since he has both admired
her “magnificent bit ofplastik” (92) and censured her singing, which has the
“passion and thought of people without any breadth of horizon” (79). She informs
him she would like, “of course,” to “take a high position” in the field (295), but he
points to her inexperience and laxity. Stressing the compulsory elements of
training for the stage by “uttering these three terrible musts ” (297), Klesmer
suggests she is ill-equipped for such demands, living as she has (and desiring as
she does) a life of ease and personal sovereignty. He stresses: “you must subdue
your mind and body to unbroken discipline. Your mind, I say. For you must not
be thinking of celebrity; —put that candle out of your eyes, and look only at
excellence” (299). For a young woman who has long looked forward to living in
the spotlight and lording over others, such counsel is profoundly unsettling.
Worse still, his description of the relationship between the artist and his art is too
much akin to the romantic relationship that Gwendolen disdains and Freud holds
ideal, in which the lover’s ego-libido is directed outward, focused solely on the
object of desire. Discussing the life of an artist, Klesmer explains:
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I say, it is out of the reach of any but choice organizations—natures
framed to love perfection and to labour for it: ready, like all true
lovers, to endure, to wait, to say, I am not yet worthy, but she—Art,
my mistress—is worthy, and I will live to merit her. (298)
Through Klesmer, Eliot suggests another channel for the narcissistic impulse, but
it is one that Gwendolen is unlikely to embrace, bent as she is on immediate
gratification and admiring recognition. Her lack of imagination here is fatal, for
the “ardent sense of living” that she hopes to find in “a reflected way” through the
adoration of others could be found in her own commitment to an endeavor larger
than herself (69); art too reflects the personality and passion of the creator, but
unlike the audiences she must win over and over again, its reflection is eternal and
self-sustaining.
After this profoundly disappointing exchange, Gwendolen’s ego is
damaged in a degree that recalls Rosamond’s shattered self-image after her
confrontation with Will. The narrator observes:
For the first time since her consciousness began, she was having a
vision of herself on the common level, and had lost the innate sense
that there were reasons why she should not be slighted, elbowed,
jostled—treated like a passenger with a third-class ticket, in spite of
private objections on her own part. [. . .] Every word that Klesmer
had said seemed to have been branded into her memory, as most
words are which bring with them a new set of impressions and
make an epoch for us. (306)
Like her predecessor whose consciousness has been “burnt” by Will’s words
(Middlemarch 537), Gwendolen is in a highly sensitive state, “branded” by
Klesmer’s truthful evaluation and susceptible to new impressions and trajectories.
It is at this crucial turn in her heroine’s narrative that one might expect Eliot to
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launch the conversion plot of Felix Holt or the alternative plot of ambition
suggested above. But she resists those paths, binding the great soul, Deronda, to
another woman and subordinating the artist’s story to the background in the all-
too-brief romance between Catherine Arrowpoint and Herr Klesmer, and the
defensive recollections of the Alcharisi. In effect, Eliot surrenders Gwendolen to a
tragic but plausible marriage plot, choosing a temporary resolution that
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foreshadows her heroine’s abandonment by the ideal ego at the novel’s end.
Newly vulnerable and with no other possibility on the horizon, Gwendolen decides
to “take a high position” within fashionable society, accepting Grandcourt and
performing the spousal role in a plot she knows to be more sinister gothic than
conventional romance.
Resigned to an unhappy marriage, she tries at first to enjoy the distractions
and intrigues of a fashionable young wife. Unlike Rosamond who finds a kind of
contentment in the idea of extramarital admirers, however, Gwendolen takes no
real pleasure in her opportunities for self-exhibition or the fascination she inspires
in others; she imagines admiring men “clad in her own weariness and disgust”
(484), unable to provide the brilliant, flattering reflection of self she desires. With
little “appetite” for the shallow successes (484) that have fed her egoistic energies
in the past, and overcome with remorse and helplessness, she seeks a “new
footing” (484), or self-supporting foundation, and begins to wonder how Daniel
7 9 Gwendolen’s “abandonment” by Deronda has been read more positively by Eileen Sypher, who
argues that in her isolation and inscrutability Eliot’s heroine resists subjection by Deronda, who is
attempting, like Grandcourt (albeit with more gentleness), to train her to accept her proper place
within patriarchal society. Such an interpretation requires, however, that we overlook her acute
distress at this loss.
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Deronda views his relation to the world. Associating him with an acute sense of
dread from the moment she first spies him across the table at Leubronn (42),
Gwendolen turns to him for guidance at this moment of crisis, when her strongest
sensations echo that initial perception. Her attachment to Daniel— who like Felix
Holt personifies the qualities of the ideal-ego or conscience—initially offers a
means for redirecting her inborn egoism; perceiving him as a “terrible-browed
angel” from whom she cannot conceal any misdeed (737), she looks to him as one
might a love object for strength and support. Daniel, responding to her pleas for
help, asks her to “‘know more of the way in which [her] life presses on others, and
their life on [hers]’” (508), and advises her to “‘[k]eep [her] dread fixed on the
idea of increasing that remorse which is so bitter to [her],’” to ‘“take hold of [her]
sensibility and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision’” (509). Demanding an
intersubjective awareness of self and world from Gwendolen, Daniel prescribes
she make use of this dread—a sign of a different mode of awareness, one attuned
to the unseen, and absent, a faculty that operates like the ideal-ego he represents.
Eliot writes of Daniel’s role in shaping Gwendolen’s shifting sense of identity,
“his influence had entered into the current of that self-suspicion and self-blame
which awakens a new consciousness” (485). While this would seem to inaugurate
the “great soul plot” in which the egoistic heroine will be animated by the new
object of desire—a plausible exchange for the redirected ego-libido, it is important
to note that his energy enters an already existent stream: Gwendolen possesses her
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own sense of dread, the quality that foretells her capacity for receiving deep
impressions and turns the tide of her egoism.
It is, in fact, this very capacity that makes a union with Daniel unnecessary,
redundant, for if the strength of Gwendolen’s internal dread is insufficient to
sustain her when she first meets him, by the novel’s close her husband’s death has
exponentially increased its value. There are signs early on of Gwendolen’s
“dreadful” powers, such as her vision of Lydia Glasher’s unspoken truth—“I am a
woman’s life” (190) and her vivid idealization of Daniel as an object of dread.
When he asks her, then, to further develop her dreadful sensibilities he is
enhancing her access to a different sort of “binding energy,” one that is self-
sustaining and self-supporting in the manner of the artist’s relationship with his or
her art. Indeed, in refusing the romance plot that the novel’s opening pages seem
to promise, Daniel and his creator deny Gwendolen an object (himself) through
which she can absolve herself of the need to develop her dreadful faculty. Judith
Wilt argues in Ghosts o f the Gothic that Gwendolen’s internal conflict is between
“the immediate ego-preservation that will murder if necessary and the
apprehension of larger, less personal values that first makes itself known as dread”
(177); cast as opposing forces, Gwendolen’s egoism and her dread are currents of
comparable strength for much of the novel, and the tension between the two are
highlighted frequently enough to suggest the resolution of this particular conflict
may be one of the novel’s primary problems. When we leave Gwendolen in the
arms of her mother she lapses continually into the “fits of shrieking” we have
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come to associate with her dread, and yet she is able to muster the will to reassure
her mother: “Don’t be afraid. I shall live. I mean to live” (879). Experiencing an
overwhelming sense of dread, a sympathetic concern for mother, and a self
preserving impulse all at once, Gwendolen seems to have entered a new state—
one approximating both the intersubjective awareness and omnipotence Jessica
Benjamin has linked with primary narcissism and the felt knowledge of her
historical experience. The final scenes may present no clue as to which path
Gwendolen will embrace in the romance plot’s stead, but they do depict the
process by which the dreadful faculty (or ideal ego) is strengthened, suggesting
that is the end, in and of itself. Gwendolen’s plot can have no resolution because
she is left with no apparent object, objective; we see only the movement of her
newly bound energies as she is left by her creator to begin life anew. For if
Esther’s successful conversion might be attributed to her romantic union with
Felix, and Rosamond’s failure to an all-too-fleeting connection with Dorothea,
Gwendolen’s narrative takes us beyond the echo, the animating moment, to that
painful process by which a great soul is bom.
To read the three characters’ conversion plots as allegories for reforming
the egoistic romance reader we need only consider the method she employs in
Adam Bede (discussed on pages 8 and 9). Representing iconic symbols of love
(weddings, couples, love-letters) in a new light, Eliot presents her readers, in
effect, “new” objects in order to enlist their sympathy. The transformations of the
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three young women might then be interpreted by attending to the “object” she
presents them at their moment of awakening, and by speculating on that object’s
signification. In refusing the attentions of the polished but “master[ingj” Harald
Transome (488) and accepting Felix Holt as her primary love object, Esther Lyon
turns from the airy attractions of her romance texts and takes up her sewing—a
sign of the good and useful work she will perform in the world. While it is, of
course, possible that Eliot might recommend romance readers throw down their
silly novels completely, she still gives us a rather moving and satisfying love
plot—a choice that suggests she would like to see them take up the kind of
romance narrative she herself has delivered, one with “wider vision.” Esther may
“marry up,” the goal of many a romance plot, but it is a significantly different form
of “up”: the romance reader seeking to emulate Esther’s actions in her own reading
habits would seek a “higher” example of the romance narrative—perhaps the
works of Scott or Richardson, as both were beloved by Eliot. Rosamond, the most
recalcitrant of the three romance readers, has her greatest moment in the arms of
Dorothea, but returns to her marriage and then forms another, with the same
expectations. The romance reader looking to her plot for guidance would have to
fix upon the women’s intersubjective moment and learn to read with women—
preferably exceptional women. Dorothea and Rosamond’s oblique discussion of
their own love plots provides one model: bring women together to read and discuss
romance. But another possibility here is the turn to women’s writing—again,
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exceptional women’s writing in the manner of the Brontes or Elizabeth Gaskell.
The love plots remain, but the romance reader gets a good deal more besides.
Because Gwendolen’s character, and her plot, is by far the most complex
and compelling of the three egoistic readers, her conversion experience is a bit
more perplexing and difficult to read. Eliot leaves her story unresolved, giving her
no object but herself. If we recall, however, Gwendolen’s fierce ambivalence
about her own marriage plot, her highly self-conscious and controlling
engagements with the romance text, and, most significantly, the newly bound
energies she is left with at the novel’s end, her allegorical function becomes
clearer. Early on, in her first courtship scene with Grandcourt, Gwendolen displays
a knack for plotting romance and for assessing her own performance; left with the
binding energy that is, I argued, self-sustaining and self-supporting in the manner
of the artist’s relationship with his or her art, and having suffered loss as Mirah
once did, Gwendolen is perhaps better positioned to assume the life of an artist.
She is alone, and relatively unencumbered by the demands of filial duty; she need
make no painful sacrifices, nor require others to make them for her, as the
Alcherisi did before. Looking for guidance from the performance-minded
Gwendolen, the more active and ambitious romance reader might begin by
enhancing her intersubjective awareness and “dreadful” sensibilities, so that when
she picks up the pen (for she must pick up the pen), she fashions the sort of love
plot that reflects a deeper consciousness.
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While Eliot’s characters provide guidance to the egoistic reader seeking
self-transformation, she herself provides a compelling model for how feminist
readers might engage with the “lady readers” who resist their hermeneutical goals.
By engaging more directly with romance readers, and by seeking to ‘characterize’
them more fully, we can recognize more clearly, completely, the complicated
relationship they have to texts. Maggie turned to romance in the absence of love
while Romola found not only the opportunity for self-confrontation and
transformation but also a new path and her community of women. Highly dutiful
daughters whose own needs and desires were subordinated in the name of fdial
love, the romances they read provide them with a much-needed escape and the
narcissism that might fuel other ends. Once feminist readers better understand the
needs and desires of romance readers, they can set about crafting their own
“transitional plots,” plots that expose the conventions of the romance form and
“wean” lady readers from an exclusive attachment to their textual love objects.
Eliot employs the romance plot as a vehicle for working out problem of
transforming the reader because she associates it most strongly with vanity (and
the desire to fashion a bigger, better self), because she recognizes its unstable
energies (regressive and progressive), and because she recognizes it’s the most
familiar plot for feminine readers. Characterized by an excess of feeling, the
romance narrative is an effective means for conversion: the reader cannot help get
caught up in it, carried away by it. Harnessing the emotional energies evoked
through romance reading and directing them toward other “ends” is one of the
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primary goals of chapter 4, in which feminist readers revisit the romance to create
their own “transitional texts.”
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Chapter Four: The Romance Revised—An Object of Collective Desire
Charting a narcissistic desire for connection and self-transformation in the
previous chapters’ “collective readings,” this “revisionary” history has traversed
diegetic boundaries, meeting “textual objects” as “like subjects” to explore the
uneasy bond between romance and feminist criticism. In this final chapter my
histoire continues on its meandering path, wandering not within the cloistered
garden of the medieval princess, nor atop the high slopes of the Appenines, nor
even across the well-trod grounds of Pemberley, but rather to and fro amid the
fields of feminist criticism—a fertile (if unforeseen) ground for romance. Inviting
feminist critics to embrace what they cannot escape when they turn to romance—
the potential seduction, the emotional entanglement, the end of resistance, I am
inspired by the revisionary acts of Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot, whose
critical views of the romance took on a kaleidoscopic complexity in their fiction.
Re-vision in this instance ceases to mean solely re-seeing or re-reading, for it
requires of the feminist romance reader an actual rewriting. I therefore begin by
taking another look at what late twentieth-century readers have to say about the
romance form and its potential for feminist re-invention, then move on to re-view
the romance revisions of my professional “like subjects”—feminist literary critics
whose strategies as “resisting readers” are considerably and variously taxed by this
most troublesome text.
Most often readers who feel the influence of books acutely, reviewers and
critics possess a missionary zeal that moves them to both protect the literary object
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of desire and to guide others in their responses to text. An act of mediation as
much as projection, this attempt to shape another reader’s experience, to make
sense of the text alongside self and world, demands nothing from the critic if not
control. Simultaneously accessing and suppressing emotion, wrestling an
argument from a thousand impressions, confronting the endless imagined
responses of one’s own readers: such Sisyphean tasks require an act of will that
comes more easily to some than others. The challenges faced by women who
would claim a critic’s authority have been chronicled in my twice-told tale of the
female scholar (cf. chapter 1), a passionate struggle Lynne Pearce theorizes in
Feminism and the Politics o f Reading (1997). In constructing a model that
accounts for the vicissitudes of a reader’s “romance” with a text and the various
“others” within that entice, Pearce relies on Roland Barthes’ insights in A Lover’ s
Discourse and manages to resist the hermeneutic focus of most theoretical
discussions about reading. Examining the feminist reader’s affective reading
process in contradistinction to her considerably more conscious practices, she
concludes that her emotional responses and her aesthetic/political analyses come
O A
from “different—and mutually incompatible—discursive sites” (23). The
feminist reader’s training in literary analysis has helped her to develop a number of
8 0 While I agree wholeheartedly with Pearce’s arguments about the conflicted position of feminists
who must “commute” between the two models of reading and the “discomfort” this occasions, I am
less convinced that the two models are mutually incompatible. Perhaps it is because I suspect that
the feminist reader might begin to internalize the re-visionary strategies she employs, that these
practices may themselves become to some degree unconscious. It seems to me that if learning to
read as a man might become a dangerously unconscious practice for women, learning to read as a
feminist might also in time grow more reflexive. Or, perhaps I’ve merely reconciled myself to the
lingering “lady reader” within: because she coexists with my feminist self—an undeniably
conflicted subjectivity I illustrate in the introduction— I have to believe that some sort of
integration is possible.
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strategies to avoid becoming “implicated” in the texts she encounters (27),
including an appraisal of the work’s aesthetic excellencies, its psychological
realism, and its adherence to generic conventions. Equally useful in helping her to
distance herself from the “textual others” that threaten to undermine her mastery
are her politically conscious readings, which take gender and other identities into
account—a task performed largely with the cache of re-visionary tools I discussed
in chapter 1.
The critic’s preoccupation with interpretive control is only heightened
when the text in question is romance. Hence the persistent interest in the form’s
enduring appeal and its ability to resist the most resistant of readers. Certainly, the
emotional energy rippling through three hundred years’ sentences on the perils and
pleasures of reading romance speaks volumes about its power over the reader,
while other, more personal, documents suggest that the form may affect us even
more deeply. Long associated with the landscape of dreams, the romance seems to
encourage—perhaps more than any other genre—a childish apprehension and
grandiose expectations. The unconscious identifications romance readers make,
and the values they “introject,” are thought by many to promote regression—
diminishing the reader’s agency as they “nurse” a narcissistic desire for complete
security and supremacy.8 1 Consider, for instance, the metaphors employed in a
letter the young Mary Ann Evans wrote in 1839:
8 1 See Gillian Beer’s formalistic survey of The Romance (1970), in which she argues that “romance
writers draw upon archetypal patterns [like Jung’s libido, anima, and shadow] which meet an
understanding in the reader without necessarily formalizing into consciousness” (19); pointing to
the pre-linguistic, pre-conscious associations afforded by romance, Beer gestures toward the “deep
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I was constantly living in a world of my own creation [...].
Conceive what a character novels would give to these Utopias. I
was early supplied with them by those who kindly sought to gratify
my appetite for reading and of course I made use of the materials
they supplied for building my castles in the air. (qtd. in Ashton 17)
The fantastic alienation described by Eliot, who exalted realism as the sole artful
source of human sympathy, suggests a strongly felt knowledge of romance
reading’s infantilizing properties. Vividly illustrating the depths of her feeling for
such books, the letter also suggests how a sensitive critic’s own vulnerability
might shape her perception of her impressionable “other”—the “real” reader of
romance. Even more pointedly, it raises the question of critical “proximity” and
the role “distance” plays in one’s textual engagements, one’s passionate struggles
for control.
Indeed, if the conflicts raging around the question of romance reading
during the last thirty years can tell us anything definitive, they indicate strongly
that a feminist critic’s proximity to the text, and to its most loyal readers, will
greatly influence her approach and perspective, and the way her work is perceived
by others. There is her level of emotional investment in the form, and her
awareness o/'that investment: the radical feminist critiques of the late 1960s and
1970s were fierce in their polemical attacks, so much so that one cannot help but
question their omissions and the too-easy triumph over romance. Conversely, the
structures” that concern feminist critics, past and present. The figures of romance appeal, she
argues, because they “revive our sense of our own omnipotence, which, though constantly assailed
by adult experience, survives in the recesses of personality even after childhood” (3). And while
Beer writes primarily about the “higher” avatars of romance, she acknowledges its link to the
popular imagination in all eras, and her sense of the dynamic between reader and romance is
echoed by critics and authors who speak more pointedly to the popular.
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tenor of much more recent romance criticism is positively glowing but ultimately
just as one-sided. Such emotional extremes may be unavoidable with this text, a
situation noted by Beverly Lyon Clark, who observes that the “discussion of
romance in ‘Feminist Criticism’ usually turns inward, as the romances encourage
us to, to focus on our own desires” (368). Given what seems to be a
preponderance of highly personal, idiosyncratic responses to romance, critics
would do well to consider how their attachments inform their criticism, as would
the readers who consult their texts. Many of the conflicts that arise between
scholars of romance can be traced to differing levels of personal investment and
the way their involvement with text is negotiated: does the critic read romances
herself? how well acquainted is she with the genre, and its many different sub
genres or examples? is she up-to-date on significant changes within the tradition?
Equally important is the emphasis the scholar places on the text in relation to its
readers: does she study the texts to gain insight about their readers? or does she
engage with readers more directly through questionnaires and ethnographic
conversations? Is the critic’s knowledge limited by her distance from her reading
subjects? And what do the varying attachments, the various methods and
concerns, of these critical mediators tell us about feminism’s shifting relationship
to romance? Such are the questions that shape the first “collective reading” of
romance I’ve staged—an act of revision that will highlight how critics re-view the
romance in order to accommodate feminism.
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Collective Reading, Act 1
When feminist literary critics began to take the romance and its readers
seriously in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were attempting to complicate
feminist readings of the genre produced by critics whose work was often informed
by a Marxist perspective. Concerned with the sociological and psychological
effects of literature—especially in its popular forms, these critics tended to
emphasize the dangers of romance, as a covert ideological influence and a conduit
to escapist fantasies. Lillian S. Robinson was one of the first feminist literary
critics to take issue with these arguments in her essay “On Reading Trash” (1978),
where she argues that scholars should consider women’s enduring fascination with
romance fiction. Acknowledging her own “addiction] to trashy fiction,”
Robinson troubles the distinction between critic and mass reader and challenges
her colleagues to recognize their counterparts’ subjective experiences: “A fully
feminist reading of women’s books must look at women as well as at books, and
try to understand how this literature actually functions in society” (205). In her
comparative analysis of Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen’s novels, the critic
draws on her own promiscuous reading history, enumerating the undeniable formal
differences while emphasizing the deeper question concerning the “materials
women use to make their lives” (205). She writes, “In both its high and its popular
avatars, this sort of novel centers on the private concerns of women, domestic,
marital, and personal” (221). This attention to deeper structures—both
psychological and textual—is evident in Ann Barr Snitow’s “Mass Market
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Romance: Pornography for Women is Different” (1979), a study of formula
romance that takes the exploration of “the personal” to extremes. Examining the
“underlying structure of the sexual story” (158) in order to learn something about
“selected elements of female consciousness” (143), Snitow discovers that
“romance is a primary category of the female imagination” (160). And while she
is clearly not an avid reader of Harlequins (she admits to describing the formula
and its appeal with “insulting” language [142]), she treats the texts and their
readers fairly, taking the women’s movement to task for ignoring “this fact of
female consciousness” (160).
Tania Modleski (Loving with a Vengeance, 1982) and Kay Mussell
( .Fantasy and Reconciliation, 1984) also depend on textual analysis and the search
for underlying structures to gain insight into women’s experience; like Robinson,
they make explicit their identification with the readers they are studying and
perceive deeper continuities between canonical and popular romance. The
establishment of taxonomies and the identification of archetypal elements is
8 2 Modleski explains her purpose in Loving with a Vengeance as an attempt to correct the generally
dismissive and derisive criticism popular romance narratives received. She writes, “1 try to avoid
expressing either hostility or ridicule, to get beneath the embarrassment, which I am convinced
provokes the anger and the mockery, and to explore the reasons for the deep-rooted and centuries-
old appeal of the narratives” (14). As she makes clear in her later work Old Wives Tales (1998),
this “centuries-old appeal” is something she experienced firsthand as an adolescent reading
Harlequin romances— a form for which she found “halfway decent substitutes” in the novels of
Austen and the Brontes (53). Mussell dates her interest in the popular romance to the moment she
recognized commonalities between the books her female high-school students read (Victorial Holt,
Mary Stewart, and Heyer) and the works of Austen, James, and Wharton (Fantasy xii). While she
acknowledges a preference for “such classic authors as Mary Stewart, Georgette Heyer, Victoria
Holt, Roberta Gellis, and Anya Seton,” she acknowledges enjoying “some o f the more creative
category writers o f the early 1980s” (“Where’s Love” 13). Notably, Snitow departs from the other
three critics on the question of continuity between high and low, for she claims, “serious women
novelists treat romance with irony and cynicism” (160), an oversimplification if one considers the
romantic resolutions of novels by Austen, the Brontes, and George Eliot.
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common in these works as well as in Julianne Fleenor’s The Female Gothic
(1983), a reflection not only of the emphasis on tradition-building and “sameness”
in the larger field of feminist criticism but also of assumptions about formula
fiction that emerge in works like John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, and
0-5
Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976). Modleski and
Snitow can focus narrowly on Harlequin romances but feel confident their
examples will allow them to say something more general about the appeal of
romance reading; and even Mussell, who establishes a “typology” of romance
formulas or “subgenres,” identifies the series romances as the “purest and
simplest” romance type {Fantasy 30).8 4 Insight into how the deep structures of the
psyche and of the story interact is offered by the last critic, who cites a highly
influential work of reader-response criticism, The Dynamics o f Literary Response
(1968) by Norman Holland. Glossing Holland’s view of the reader’s
“introjection” or internalization of the fantasy world, Mussell argues that the
reader “takes the entirety of a protagonist’s life history and circumstances as a
temporary substitute for her own” {Fantasy 151).8 5 The events of the archetypal
8 3 Both Modleski and Mussell cite Cawelti’s work in their studies, and their approaches seem very
much in keeping with his own. Cawelti views formula as a “means of generalizing the
characteristics of large groups of individual works from certain combinations of cultural materials
and archetypal story patterns. It is useful primarily as a means of making historical and cultural
inferences about the collective fantasies shared by large groups of people and of identifying
differences in these fantasies from one culture or period to another” (7).
8 4 Because feminist critics in the last fifteen or so years have given these scholars such flack about
this choice, it is worth noting that Mussell (who is often praised for her study’s specificity and
comprehensiveness), found as late as 1997 that “some category romances, such as those published
by the British firm of Mills and Boon and distributed in North America by Harlequin, continue to
rely on older patterns” (“Where’s Love” 3-4).
8 5 In arguing that this process involves regressing to an earlier oral state, Holland is, in effect,
echoing the claims about novel-reading made by Mary Wollstonecraft (cf. chapter 2) and
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story are therefore emphasized by most critics writing during this time: Modleski
briefly summarizes both the romance and the gothic plots (36, 59); Snitow
identifies four successive moments in the sexual pas de deux (158-9); and Janice
Radway pieces together the fragmentary responses of her Smithton readers to
forge the structure of the “ideal romance,” identifying thirteen narrative events
(134) in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(1984). Because her approach is ethnographic, Radway’s study can be viewed as
one answer to Robinson’s challenge six years earlier, for research on romance
reading still depends on identifying many of the same patterns that more openly
“textual” critics discussed.
Their orientation toward seeking archetypal story structures and figures, as
well as shared assumptions about the oppressive nature of patriarchy and the
highly ambivalent function of the romance, undoubtedly frames what these critics
perceive in their reviews of the literature. While all the critics identify a hero
who is a sexually-experienced if emotionally benighted synecdoche of the
patriarchal order, they differ on the degree to which he typifies various hyper
masculine attributes.8 7 Innocent, studiously surveyed, and sexually passive, the
anticipating those of Snitow, who contends that Harlequins “ feed certain regressive elements in the
female experience” (italics mine 143).
8 6 Two other texts worth mentioning from this time are Alison Light’s ‘“ Return to Manderley’—
Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality, and Class” (1984) and Words o f Love (1984), a collection of
essays and bibliographical information compiled by Eileen Fallon, an editor of popular romance.
The latter text offers a helpful history of the various avatars of romance and past writers of
romance, though its survey of the contemporary scene is obviously outdated.
8 7 Snitow and Modleski find in Harlequin romances a vaguely threatening hero who is obviously
interested in the heroine but maintains a mocking distance, while Radway’s readers suggest the
ideal hero is more androgynous— strong but with nurturing capacities. Fleenor and Mussell both
identify two basic types: the former’s “strong male” and “shadow male” seem synonymous with
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heroine is the perfect complement (as well as ten or fifteen years younger); and,
indeed, Radway speaks for her peers’ general sense of romance heroines’ function
when she observes they are “symbolic representations of the immature female
psyche” (126).8 8 She herself sees the typical heroine as an ultimately dependent
figure, remarking upon the Smithton readers’ perceptions of her as intelligent and
independent and reading their characterization as a sign of their “apparently
unconscious desire to realize some of the benefits of feminism within traditional
institutions and relationships”: “The high value attached to the simple assertion of
the heroine’s special abilities” she seems to read as evidence of their longing for
the autonomy promised by the women’s movement (79). The romance structure’s
capacity for resisting or embracing feminism is clearly a pressing concern, and
each of the critics discussed believes it is elastic enough to do both, though this
ambivalence seems to favor the status quo. Snitow “observe[s] in these books
neither an effective top down propaganda effort against women’s liberation, nor a
covert flowering of sexuality” (143) while Radway regrets that the Smithton
readers are “significantly more inclined than their feminist critics to recognize the
inevitability and reality of male power and the force of social convention to
circumscribe a woman’s ability to act in her own interests” (89). The constraining
the latter’s “passionate” and “competent” heroes: while the passionate type frequently exudes
sexual charisma, mystery, and menace, the competent hero’s power derives from his “self-
assurance, self-control, and uncompromising principles, which prepare him to appreciate the
heroine” (Fantasy 124).
8 8 Paraphrasing Joanna Russ, Snitow argues that heroines are “loved as babies are loved, simply
because they exist” (154); Modleski reflects that the female protagonist is rewarded for her naivete
and her importance enhanced, even established, by the designs of her hero.
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and enabling energies of the form are perhaps most succinctly summarized by
Mussell, who writes:
Romance formulas exhibit astonishing resilience and flexibility
over time, most recently to the accommodations of romance
publishers to feminism and the sexual revolution. [...] Some recent
romances feature women with career commitments and sexual
experience, but the essential characteristics of romances remain
constant, even though the relative popularity of specific formulas
may have shifted. (Fantasy 11)
The appearance of heroines who achieve economic self-sufficiency and
express their sexuality more fully leads Carol Thurston to argue in The Romance
Revolution (1987) that the new erotic romances of the 1970s (e.g. The Flame and
the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss or Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers)
have “traced the evolution of the ‘liberated’ American woman with a
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responsiveness unmatched by any other mass entertainment medium” (7). Her
case rests largely on the rise in explicit sex scenes in 90% of the subgenre’s
examples, which she concludes is evidence of feminist desire expressed in the
manner of Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck.”9 0 Taking pains to distinguish her
8 9 Thurston attributes the generic revolution to an on-going exchange between readers and
publishers, arguing that romances not only began to reflect but to promote important feminist
ideals: “It was primarily during the latter half of the 1970s that romance readers became critics
rather than simply fans. Feedback from readers to publishers, both sought and volunteered, began
to produce changes in sex-role portrayals (in thoughts, words, and deeds), which, in concert with
other forces in society, contributed to further change in readers, which in turn produced still further
change in the romance texts” (7). This account is somewhat supported by Kathleen Gilles Seidel,
who writes: “in the mid-1980s there was considerable editorial pressure on writers to conform to at
least the appearance of a more feminist fantasy. [. ..] During this time, some writers were
extremely unhappy, wearied by struggles with young, politically conscious editors. The authors
felt an alien sensibility was being forced on their work, that they weren’t being allowed to speak to
their readers in their own voices” (Seidel 170).
9 0 She also discovers more oral sex (depicted in 43% of books); heroes urging women to be open
about their desires; discussion about contraception; and heroines possessed of more education than
the average woman of a given era (in 80% of books).
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arguments and methods from those who preceded her, Thurston aligns her project
with that of sociologists Josephine Ruggiero and Louise Weston, who “were bold
indeed to suggest that modern gothic romances might even be considered
forerunners of the new women’s movement. The data, analyses, and conclusions
about popular romantic fiction and its readers presented [in Revolution] follow in
this heretical tradition” (6).9 1 Her predecessors Thurston censures for not
recognizing the emergence of this new form, and she attributes this collective
oversight to the narrow selection of representative texts. She also takes issue with
the general tendency to speculate on readers’ responses through psychoanalytic
theory and literary analysis, preferring to engage with readers more directly
through sociological methods like interviews and questionnaires which supplement
her content analysis. Dismissive of the structural preoccupations of the earlier
studies and celebrating the liberatory possibilities of the form, Thurston establishes
the mode of critical engagement for subsequent romance scholars, some of whose
work is featured in the 1997 Paradoxa issue discussed later. “Her” hero and
heroine nevertheless approach the archetypal, however, for she identifies an
“unexpected number of heroes [who] are androgynous types [...], tender, caring,
9 1 The “heretical tradition” Thurston claims strives to follow proves unwieldy upon a close reading
o f text: in a footnote to chapter 4, she notes that the Ruggiero and Weston study (1983) is “fuzzily
reported,” gives no indication of how many novels were examined, and is “riddled with small
errors” (90). I found myself equally disenchanted with her own heretical arguments, for her
counter-claims are too frequently staked by presenting the exceptional text to refute another critic’s
rule and her readings have to do a bit too much work to convince. Discussing the heroines featured
in her study’s novel’s who have been raped (54%),or forced into marriage (28%) and prostitution
(11%), Thurston argues: “To simply call them victims would be to miss the crucial point, however,
because hardship is the device used to set the stage for what readers prize almost as much as the
developing love relationship— the heroine as a woman of indomitable spirit and wit, a fighter who
‘gives as good as she gets’ and overcomes by ‘holding her own ground’” (80). I can easily imagine
plotting other forms of hardship— economic, filial, professional— that would prove less debasing,
but I suppose there is less fun to be had in these.
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and adaptive enough to understand the strivings of strong heroines, whom they
admire above all others” (72). The “New Heroine” pursues individual
achievement beyond domestic roles, and she embodies both the “plain-na'ive-
domestic-selfless-passive-chaste heroine and the beautiful-sophisticated-worldly-
selfish-assertive-sexually active Other Woman” (8).
Other feminist critics examined the heroine’s growing commitment to her
career at this time, though their sense of how her achievements in the workplace
might be read is not quite so optimistic. Leslie Rabine attributes Harlequin’s
“dramatic growth in popularity to the fact that the romances now respond to
specific needs of working women” (249) in “Romance in the Age of Electronics:
Harlequin Enterprises” (1986), but she worries that the “romances also sexualize
[the heroine’s] impotence” at work (256). Jan Cohn’s The Erotics o f Property
(1988) also remarks upon the mixed messages about working heroines, calling into
question the depth of commitment allowed: “ In choosing the heroine’s work, the
romance writer must walk a very narrow line: work must appear meaningful
enough to absorb the heroine’s interest, keeping her mind off marriage, and at the
same time not so meaningful that she would either prefer it to marriage or want to
continue to pursue it independently after marriage” (103-04). And indeed when
the heroine is financially independent, her career plot exists almost always to serve
her romance plot, requiring her to put her love-life on hold, a sacrifice that
inevitably lays the groundwork for the age-old sexual awakening. Great sex and
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meaningful work seem difficult to achieve even in fantasy, raising the decidedly
unromantic question of “having it all.”
Equally concerned with the “progress of romance” and how it relates to
feminism but less invested in methodological differences than a consideration of
“difference,” participants in the 1984 History Workshop Conference on Popular
Literature at Ruskin College, Oxford examined how class, race, and sexuality
inflect the reading and writing of romance.9 2 A collection of essays drawn from
this conference and edited by Jean Radford, The Progress o f Romance (1986)
considers both popular and literary, and ancient and contemporary, examples of
the form, suggesting structural continuities while attending closely to historical
specificities. Ann Rosalind Jones ponders in “Mills and Boon Meets Feminism”
the extent to which writers can adapt to new economic and ideological currents
while still maintaining the form’s generic integrity, identifying feminism as an
“emergent” ideology in conflict with the “residual” form of romance. She too
discovers in the series’ novels a sexually self-aware heroine committed to her
work, and she observes that the heroine’s demand to be loved as a working woman
must be negotiated before the novel’s close. Also promising is the way several of
the novels move beyond traditional class and nationalist values. But the narrative
perspective still privileges the male gaze while the female gaze is decidedly
narcissistic, as the heroine is frequently reaffirming her desirability in mirrors and
shop windows. Relationships between women are still marginalized, and the
9 2 Besides the two essays discussed above, see also Radford’s “An Inverted Romance: The Well of
Loneliness and Sexual Ideology,” Anna Clark’s “The Politics of Seduction in English Popular
Culture, 1748-1848,” and Michele Roberts’s “Write, She Said.”
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narratives most often use feminism in mocking or slight ways, primarily to create a
fleeting sexual friction between hero and heroine. Jones writes, “What happens
is that certain positions put forward by feminism are taken for granted, along with
the economics and ideological benefits it has brought many women, while the
movement itself is perceived as alien, threaten, excessive” (201). She closes her
argument by suggesting that feminist writers might “steal” into popular markets
through genre-subversion or temporary literary camouflage—a challenge explored
in a later section of this chapter.
Helen Taylor’s “Gone with the Wind: The Mammy of Them All” from the
same collection considers the role of the racial Other in romance and the danger of
identifying “deliciously” but “uncomfortably” with the “‘wrong’ kinds of women
in terms of feminist/socialist ideology and practice” (115). Arguing that the
feminist reader is likely to identify with Scarlett O’Hara because of her uneasy
relationship to her gender and class positions, she cautions against reading over the
frequent allusions to the heroine’s “whiteness” and the romance resolution that
glorifies the antebellum South. Taylor contrasts this vision of “a reborn South,
safely in the hands of strong [.. .] white women, vindicated and supported by the
passive, loving ‘endurance’ of Black womanhood which knows its (subordinate)
place” (132) with James Baldwin’s view of the red earth of Tara, which has been
romanticized through much of the novel. He writes: ‘“I could not suppress the
thought that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that dripped down
9 3 Thurston disagrees, observing that with the Other Woman’s disappearance, competition for the
hero becomes virtually non-existent and the heroine quite often has a close female friend she can
trust.
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from these trees. My mind was filled with the image of a Black man . . . hanging
from a tree, while white men watched him and cut his sex from him with a knife’”
(133). Leaving her feminist readers with this devastating image, Taylor makes a
memorably incisive point about the blindness of much populist feminist
. . . 9 4
criticism.
The potential accommodations of the romance form continue to be a
concern in the mid-1990s, and in their introduction to Romance Revisited (1995),
Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey observe that one of the most exciting conclusions
to be drawn from their collection of essays is the extent to which “traditional
narratives of love are being re-written” (14). This may be, in part, because the
contributing writers choose to view the category of romance much more broadly,
considering “narratives” that cross the “common sense boundaries of ‘fact’ and
‘fiction’, ‘representations and lived experience’, and ‘fantasy and reality’” (15).
Here the term “romance” is applied to media representations of Charles and Di’s
9 4 The intersection of race and romance is considered from another angle in Linda K. Christian-
Smith’s Becoming a Woman through Romance (1990), a bilateral study that uses ethnographic and
literary methods to explore how adolescents make use o f romance fiction in their self-development.
Noting that there are few references to races other than “white” in most o f the novels she examined
(thirty-four over a forty-year period), she observes that in the three where black women and girls do
take center stage, they have a markedly different relationship to work and domesticity than their
white counterparts. While white women’s working lives are often underrepresented in teen
romance, Christian-Smith observes that when “women of color are present wage work is as much a
part of their identities as housework” (71), and even in the 1980s novels when half of the white
women were employed (72), most of the black women characters were still portrayed as paid
domestics (73). White teenagers are represented doing light housekeeping and babysitting while
black teens are shown completing heavy domestic tasks. Intriguingly, the only text examined that
depicted college as a path to meaningful work in the future, as opposed to a “finishing”
opportunity, features a black heroine. Christian-Smith argues that in this instance “race works
through gender and class to render college a way out o f dead-end work and the key to social
mobility and power” (78). Her findings suggest that feminist critics would do well to consider how
changes in the formula are managed: the progress o f romance depends in large part upon the
sensitivity with which writers negotiate the intricacies of race, class, and gender relationships.
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courtship, to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and to actual interracial
relationships—straight and gay, and although such choices do afford great insight
into the way romance narratives shape our real-life relationships and sexual
encounters, they tell us less about changes to the genre than about how critics
wield the power of definition in their readings of romance.9 5 The interest in
highbrow examples occasioned by this generic elasticity (a trend in the earlier
Radford collection as well) raises an important question: does popular romance
fiction prove more confining than its literary counterpart? And how exactly are
accommodations made within the popular romance tradition? While both
questions will be explored in greater depth later on, Jenny Wolmark’s “The
Postmodern Romances of Feminist Science Fiction” suggests one possible answer
to the second: “genre-bending.” Borrowing plot lines, settings, and other elements
from alternative popular genres may help the writer to resist the constraints of
romance by invoking other “worlds,” a strategy Wolmark gestures toward when
she contemplates the inverse.9 6 Feminist sci-fi, she argues, draws on popular
romance narratives to “offer fantasies of female pleasure and power” (158), but
“because that desire is achieved only within the existing relations of dominance
9 5 For example, Lizzie Thynne uses Luce Irigaray’s revision o f Freudian theory to reread the art
film Anne Trister and recuperate the mother/daughter bond, which she views as incompatible with
Freudian or Lacanian schemas of individuation and attachment; she then highlights how the film
reverses the romantic heroine’s typical (Freudian) rite of passage— foregoing the love of the mother
for that of the father-substitute— by representing a woman’s shift from heterosexual to homosexual
identity (104). The emphasis on high art, mothers and daughters, and lesbianism takes us rather far
out of the realm of conventional romance.
9 6 In “Where’s Love Gone?” Kay Mussell recognizes the wide range o f subgenres in romance
which make use o f conventions from science fiction, mysteries, and Westerns, suggesting that such
transformations enhance the form’s compatibility with feminism. It may well be that it takes an
equally strong fantasy genre like science fiction to resist the strong closures and containments of
romance.
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and subordination characterising contemporary gender relations, identity remains
fixed rather than fluid” (162). Her answer is to rely on cyborg protagonists whose
bodies and identities change constantly throughout the narrative, effectively
destabilizing the power relations of the typical romance narrative. Alternatively,
Bridget Fowler highlights the significant role sub-plots can play, turning to two
romances that feature working class protagonists and reading the primary love
plots alongside sub-textual stories of “dispossession and oppression” (96). And
Helen (charles) explores the dynamics of sex-play or “‘scene’ enactment” in her
analysis of Ann Allen Shockley’s The Mistress and the Slave Girl (1987). In this
work, the enslavement scenario that Thurston defends in 1970s erotic novels is
provocatively recast, enabling the author, charles argues, to trouble widespread
assumptions in the lesbian community about black women’s resistance to
domination games. Observing that Shockley is clearly in control of her
story/fantasy, the critic questions whether “the original colonial discourse on white
exploitation of the black (slave) body” exceeds that control (206). What she
ultimately concludes is that while the romance narrative supports various taboo
desires through the figure of the white mistress, “the colonial fantasy is maintained
[but] without the horror of the white master who rapes” (207). Selecting scenes or
settings that force readers to acknowledge the real, political origins of their
fantasies—a potentially uncomfortable experience for many, may provide another
way of bringing feminism and romance together. Indeed, the stories we choose
conjure associations that can be made more or less explicit, making it crucial for
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writers and critics to consider the various ways in which inter-textual references or
“double-coding” might be read.
These kinds of changes, celebrated by Pearce and Stacey in their
introduction “The Heart of the Matter,” are discussed by Jayne Ann Krentz and
other contributors to Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women (1992) with far less
enthusiasm. Such resistance is not surprising given the collective investment in
the genre, for each essayist is also a writer of romance (and a staunch defender of
her craft). Krentz especially takes issue with the criticisms of feminist scholars
and the young editors they influenced, honoring her form and the conventions her
readers hold dear. The four she sees as particularly irksome to critics are the
alpha-male hero, the aggressive seduction of the heroine, the heroine’s virginal
status, and the “core stories” (e.g. abduction narratives and man-taming tales)
authors depend on repeatedly. Kathleen Gilles Seidel, a Ph.D. in English who has
won many awards for her romance fiction, argues that the novels have been
“extremely responsive to the social issues raised by mainstream feminism” (170),
but she too resists calls for revisions designed to promote political change: “These
are not self-help books. They are fantasies. [...] Such real-life change, is not, I
think, the standard by which we should judge our work” (173). Jennifer Cruisie
Smith reframes the question of reality and fantasy in the later collection of essays
comprising Paradoxa’ s 1997 issue “Where’s Love Gone? Transformations in the
Romance Genre,” charging feminist critics Janice Radway and Jeanne Dubino
with presuming “the only reality worth writing about is the politically correct
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version of what a woman should want” (83). Arguing that the “best” romance
novels tell “the story that reflects a woman’s reality as it could be and as it often
is” (92), Cruisie faults feminist critics’ tendency to read too narrowly within the
genre, as “romance fiction in its multiplicity reflects myriad realities” (83).
Methodological efficacy is an issue in a number of the Paradoxa essays,
and the primary problems raised by Carol Thurston—sampling procedures and
underlying assumptions about the romance’s regressive properties—in 1987
emerge ten years later (quite often in response to the same early 1980s
scholarship), along with questions and analytical approaches informed by
postmodern theory.9 7 Kay Mussell speaks to revisions both formal and
methodological, observing that “an important subtext in many of these essays,
including my own, is an attempt to redefine a feminist criticism that will include
and valorize romance” (Mussell 12). The celebratory tendency of these essays
may be attributed largely to critics’ proximity to the romance and its readers: many
confessed to being long-time readers (and even writers) of romance, and their
investment in the genre undoubtedly shapes their responses. Yet unlike the
majority of 1980s romance scholars who also wrote from experience (two of
whom are featured in this collection), many of the newcomers tend to stress only
the enabling properties of the form, a consequence of oversimplifying and then
9 7 See, for instance, Deborah K. Chappel’s “La Vyrle Spencer and the Anti-Essentialist Argument”
in which she claims that “many women’s romances are centrally concerned with denying the reality
of traditional essentialist dualisms (male/female, subject/object, reason/emotion, etc.) and with
illustrating the problems such dualisms create in the lives of women” (108). Also illustrative are
Lynn Coddington’s arguments about romance writers and readers who “deliberately play with the
stigmatized language and rhetoric of romances, much in the nature of feminist tricksters” (62) in
“Wavering Between Worlds: Feminist Influences in the Romance Genre.”
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denouncing earlier feminist arguments. The role of proximity is reflected in
another methodological change—the significant rise in single-author studies, of
which a particularly fine example is Sylvia Kelso’s “Stitching Time: Feminism(s)
and 30 Years of Gothic Romances.” Kelso examines the gothic romances of
Barbara Michaels, finding both explicit references to feminism and illustrations of
feminist narratological principles in over thirty years’ work. In addition to
sympathetic glosses on the feminist movement, Michaels’s novels also feature
“allusions to recuperated feminist history like the Married Women’s Property
Act.” Even more suggestively, her 1974 novel House o f Many Shadows draws on
“feminist intellectual initiatives and newly-developed feminist, sensibilities in a
way that destabilized the Gothic formula itself (167). Kelso observes as well the
presence of “double narratives” that work to expose past wrongs and right them by
“retelling the story ‘properly’” (168); a particularly striking example— Stitches in
Time (1995)—depends on a young black woman, “who doubles for the heroine in
the past narrative” (174). Also in keeping with feminist narratology is Michaels’s
refusal of a happy ending in Someone in the House (1981), a choice Kelso argues
is “more remarkable than the plot renovations of canonical fiction, which
experiences nothing like the same pressures from both ideological project and
readership” (170).9 8 What Kelso suggests here is that the popular romance text is
9 8 Kelso makes another interesting point about the commodious properties of the genre, suggesting
that some categories are more compatible with feminism than others. She argues at one point that
Michaels’s Someone in the House “completes the critique that Wollstonecraft could not finish in
The Wrongs o f Woman, [for] she ruptures not only the plot but the seductive dream underlying the
genre, o f the perfect romance” (170). She concludes later that she “came to believe that Female
Gothic and feminism were linked more closely than other romance writing” and, glossing Luce
Irigaray, suggests that “the One Doesn’t Move Without the Other” (175).
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considerably more confining than its highbrow sister when it comes to making
room for feminism, though clearly she and other critics do believe popular
romances have evolved over time.
Generic trends reflecting a feminist awareness are enumerated by Mussell
as well, who observes that in addition to changing representations of the heroine’s
sexual and professional identities, the social worlds of the hero and heroine have
been enlarged to include networks of friends and former lovers. She also notes
that “new social and psychological issues—domestic abuse, rape recovery, post-
traumatic stress disorder, infidelity, illiteracy, mental retardation, physical
disabilities, epilepsy, cancer survival, and infertility—provide conflict and are
handled by many writers with knowledge and sensitivity” (5). As potential
“motors” for the movement of plot, such issues offer the possibility of alternative
story-lines that can provide the sort of “self-help” insights Seidel marks as inimical
to fantasy. Most significant, perhaps, is that the key characters in romance reflect
the growing diversity of the American population, with less emphasis on the well-
to-do, and increased representation of other ethnicities and sexualities. One essay
that examines the convergence of lesbian identities and contemporary romance
with particular depth is Suzanne Juhasz’s “Lesbian Romance Fiction and the
Plotting of Desire: Narrative Theory, Lesbian Identity and Reading Practice,”
published the following year (1998). Through a close reading of one novel, Sarah
Aldridge’s Keep to Me, Stranger (1989), Juhasz explores whether the lesbian
romance plot necessarily replicates hegemonic social structures and concludes it
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does not, because “maternal, sororal, and homoerotic relationships and institutions
are both the grid that situates the plot and the network that produces it” (281)."
Plot and character development in the lesbian romance are therefore crucial, with
the acknowledgement of sexual identity serving often as the major problem or
impediment to the couple’s union (284). In Juhasz’s chosen text the romance
between the two women not only brings both out of the closet, it functions to
“reveal a world of feminosociality behind the veneer of the heterosocial” (Juhasz
288). While the importance of character-representations has arguably always been
taken for granted, the claims of Juhasz, Mussell, and Kelso suggest that narrative
structure is still an object worthy of considerable speculative interest: how plot is
generated and propelled, how female “heroism” is defined through the actions
performed, the extent of narrative time allotted to those potentially feminist
actions, and the conflicts, climaxes, or endings that give shape to the narrative can
tell us a great deal about a novel’s responsiveness to feminism.
This question of responsiveness—the degree to which the romance has
been able to resist the influence of feminism and the feminist reader, romance—is,
of course, the central question with which I undertook this first revision—the re
viewing of late twentieth-century conversations about romance. And the romance
has been revised in noteworthy ways. The balance of power between the hero and
heroine has shifted markedly in the economic sphere if not the erotic, and the
9 9 Two essays that argue the limitations of the romance form and its problematic emphasis on
monogamous couples at the expense of women’s communities and feminism are Elaine Hutton’s
“Good Lesbians, Bad Men, and Happy Endings” and Lynne Hame’s “ Beyond Sex and Romance?
Lesbian Relationships in Contemporary Fiction" in an anthology of the same name (1998).
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multiple plots in which a heroine figures are more varied, allowing for other
avenues of ambition. Also characteristic of more recent romances is the
representation of a broader network of relationships, which leave the hero and
heroine less dependent upon one another for love and support. And perhaps most
significantly, the racial and sexual “other” who were not long ago written into
romance solely to support, service, or educate the white heterosexual couple have
taken center stage, though it is considerably rarer to encounter a lesbian heroine in
mainstream romance.
It may well be, however, that the greatest change has occurred in the
feminist critic’s relationship to romance. Overall, critics seem less resistant to the
form, more likely to acknowledge that the romance both enables and constrains.
Their increased acceptance may have less to do with actual changes to the form
than with the proliferation of feminisms, a broadening of perspective that leaves
room for alternative readings. In the late 1990s there seems to be greater
disagreement among feminists who study this form, a situation that underscores
the impossibility of an un-conflicted encounter with romance. Also operative is
the influence of postmodern theories about identity and sexuality that destabilize
our sense of self and community and allow for the sort of cross- identifications that
diminish a controlling point-of-view. Readers too are ceded a higher degree of
interpretive authority, and while references to identity and the process of
identification still obtain, discussions of readers’ unconscious processes (and the
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psychoanalytic framework that supported them) are rare indeed.1 0 0 And yet if the
reader is off the “cultural dupe” hook, her critical counterpart is now very much
implicated, as scholars are engaging more emotionally, and positioning themselves
more explicitly in relation to the texts they study. Indeed, as the boundaries
between critic, writer, and reader grow increasingly blurred (Mussell “Where’s
Love Gone” 7), and our sense of “like subjects” expanded, we find ourselves
ready to embrace another kind of re-vision—one that asks the reader to relinquish
the control gained through revisionary strategies and to lose herself in romance.
Collective Reading, Act 2
Because the critic’s authority depends largely on her disciplinary training,
and her “speaking subject” status the unschooled “other” who reads more for
pleasure, I have attempted to craft a model that troubled the distinction between
the subjects and objects of conventional research, a move that echoes the collective
readings presented in chapters 1-3, where authors, fictional characters, and their
real-life counterparts read the romance side by side. I have also tried to position
my study between the two prevailing forms of feminist research on the romance—
ethnography and textual analysis, to focus first on the textual products of
participating “like subjects” and then to “test” my analytical findings in a
conversation where the studied “talk back.”1 0 1 Each contributor was asked to
1 0 0 With the exception of three out of twenty essays in Romance Revisited, there is considerably
less discussion about the structure of fantasy and its effects on women readers. Postmodern
theories informed the majority of essays in Paradoxa, and while writers like Stevie Jackson may
talk about how “romantic ideals are embedded in our subjectivities” (56), the process by which that
occurs is discursive.
1 0 1 While the project’s evolution took it far afield from my original goal of performing a feminist
ethnography, the writings of ethnographers, most particularly Judith Stacey, Ruth Behar and
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select a romance narrative that somehow compelled her return and then to revise it
so it spoke more directly to her own desires; as a consequence, participating
feminist readers are very much “implicated” in their readings of romance, in effect
becoming romance writers, and thereby troubling the presumably fixed roles of
reader/writer/critic.1 0 2 Sylvia Kelso describes the process of revising the romance
in response to my final questionnaire (see Appendix A):
When you write as a critic you fillet the book theoretically. When
you write a revision, although it’s feminist-based, that is, comes
from the same political standpoint, the considerations are from the
writer’s point of view. How can I unpick this woman’s plot-knots,
rather than, what has this woman done in here in theoretical terms?
And, where can I diverge, and how do I graft mine into hers before
I get it to diverge at all?
If Kelso’s rather violent metaphor is suggestive of the critic’s forcefulness as she
performs her more conventional task of revision, her comments about the
alternative process suggest a significant loss of control. Not only is she
constrained by the writer’s choices, but because she must begin to think like the
Deborah Gordon, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Kamala Visweswaran, guided me a great deal in the early
planning stages— especially around questions o f ethnographic authority and narratorial control.
The final product’s more “literary” aspect is much more in keeping with both the histories I
construct and the methods of my discipline, but I do have regrets about de-emphasizing this
component of the project. I had high hopes initially, seeing my project as an attempt to make good
on Visweswaran implicit challenge in Fictions o f Feminist Ethnography (1994): “Self writing
about like selves has thus far not been on the agenda of experimental ethnography” (32). In the
next incarnation of this project, I hope to bring back some of the ethnographic elements I’ve let
go— a more longitudinal design, a proper “triangulation” of perceptions, and a narrative
representation o f actual dialogues emerging in the research process.
1 0 2 Pearce’s “implicated reader” is one who reveals her reading process as she practices her craft, a
critical act that requires she acknowledge a “sympathetic interlocutor of the ‘reading’ (actual or
implicit)” and “offer a narrativized and/or participatory engagement with the text (as opposed to an
‘abstract’/distanced ‘evaluation’” (239). Analyzing the “implicated reading” produced by one of
her subjects, Pearce observes that “the text has become overlaid with the reader’s own parallel
story: traces of the original show through in places, but as the reader lets go of the need ‘to make a
reading’, another reading, which is also a writing, begins” (240). One might say the same of these
romance revisions, and I read them as products of a collaborative effort between the multiple facets
of our fragmented subjectivities.
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“creative” writer, she enters the realm of fantasy—a space where the unconscious
dominates and she is relegated to chasing the ever-elusive wish.1 0 3
The feminist reader’s “return to romance” in my study occurs in at least
one of two ways, both of which re-iterate the fictional revisions of Mary
Wollstonecraft and George Eliot once they ceded a critic’s control. The first,
ubiquitous choice involves revising the romance so that new light is shed on
familiar formal elements. The most significant changes to original texts are
achieved through strategies of “resistance” like satire, inversion, or hyperbolic
play—techniques employed more frequently by critics who rewrote a canonical
text. In fact, with the exception of one writer whose revision ran roughshod over
the form, the eight participants who rewrote a popular romance stayed remarkably
close to generic expectations; in contrast, three of the five canonical rewrites
included wildly anachronistic plot lines and characterization. Given scholars’
persistent interest in deep textual structures, I attend closely to the narrative events
revised, reading the change as indicative of the moment where narrative pleasure
shuts down, or, as Sylvia Kelso elegantly put it, the point at which one “transforms
1 0 3 The creative writer’s inevitable loss of control is suggested in Freud’s “Creative Writers and
Daydreaming,” which explores how creative writing— defined here as the “less pretentious” novels
and romances with the widest, most eager audiences (714)—engages the writer’s unconscious as
well as her past, present, and future. Linking the act of creative writing with daydreaming, fantasy,
and play, Freud writes: “Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking
occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject’s major wishes. From
there it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this
wish was fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents a
fulfillment of the wish. What it thus creates is a daydream or fantasy which carries about it traces
o f its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus past, present, and
future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them” (714).
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from an assenting to a resisting reader.”1 0 4 The other method is that employed by
Wollstonecraft and Eliot’s eponymous heroines, Maria Venables and Romola
Bardi, who return to a romance beloved in their youth—an active revisiting of an
early self-defining fantasy. Biddy Martin suggests how a consciousness might be
raised through revisiting those books that “generated a desire to read, the books in
which we most thoroughly lost ourselves in that process through which the losing
becomes the finding, or vice versa” (35), and certainly the plots of the two noted
heroines perform the important task of instruction. Seven out of thirteen
participants chose this option, and the self-reflexive commentary I received with
each revision suggests that a more textured implicated reading is produced when
one has to confront a more “ghostly” reading self in the process. But despite these
methodological differences, both approaches allow the feminist critic to perform
her mediating role “undercover,” and in this somewhat veiled position she stands a
much better chance of “kindling [her readers] to a better ambition” (Eliot FH 213).
1 0 4 If one wished to generalize about feminist critics’ concerns over time (and of course one does),
the relevance of deep textual structures remains consistent, emerging in questions about “double
narratives,” subplots, cross-genre tales, and the inter-textual references that tell an(o)ther story.
The question of closure is, in fact, the subject of a whole section in Romance Revisited called
“Refusals”; Pearce and Stacey explain, “an alternative to the classic ‘happy ending,’ refusing
romance may be the preferable option for many feminists” (41). Most recently, Pamela Regis’s
The Natural History o f the Romance Novel (2003) reveals a defiantly structuralist approach to
romance, opting for no other theoretical frame than Northrop Frye’s taxonomy o f forms. Her
examples range from Richardson’s Pamela (1740) to recent novels by Janet Dailey and Nora
Roberts, and analysis centers around the eight events of the romance novel: a definition of society
(always corrupt) that romance will reform; the meeting of heroine and hero; an account o f their
attraction for one another (chemistry, friendship, shared goals, etc.); barrier(s) to love (internal and
external, with the former giving more pleasure to readers); the point of Frye’s “ritual death” (when
the reunion of the lovers seems impossible); recognition (new information about the self or other)
that fells the barrier; the declaration of love; and the betrothal (14). Regis views the point of ritual
death as most significant event, arguing that when the heroine escapes this end, there is “an
overthrow o f the most fundamental sort” (15).
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The catalyzing, intersubjective force imagined by Eliot in Felix Holt is
perhaps more familiar to twentieth-century feminists in the form of consciousness-
raising (CR), a “romance” between women that similarly enables self-love, self-
examination, and self-transformation. In an essay on the “symbolic communities”
formed by feminists in three Western countries, Teresa de Lauretis discusses the
revisionary practices of autoscienza, an Italian CR method that includes, “ the
reading or rereading of women’s writings; taking other women’s words, thoughts,
knowledges, and insights as a frame of reference for one’s analyses,
understanding, and self-definition; and trusting them to provide a symbolic
mediation between oneself and others, one’s subjectivity, and the world” (15).
The mediations achieved through re-reading are further augmented by rewriting,
and when describing this expanded notion of revision de Lauretis observes that the
Italian feminists “treated the texts as they would have their own words, as parts of
a puzzle to be solved by disarranging and rearranging them according to
extratextual, personal associations and interpretations, and thus erasing the
boundaries between literature and life” (24). Exposed through their writings as
well as their readings, these feminists are primed for a more “layered,” and
potentially more honest, consciousness-raising dialogue. I attempt to replicate this
dynamic through a series of staged conversations: first through reviewing the
revised romances side by side in a metonymic, Irigarayan gesture that allows them
to speak together and as one; and second, by bringing participants together in a
“salon setting” that encourages them to speak to the process of rewriting
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romance.1 0 5 What emerges is a poly vocal critical narrative that cannot be
contained by the single scholarly voice struggling for authorial control—a
situation I am both proud of and frustrated by.
The feminist readers who comprise the second “collective reading” group
are thirteen in number: they are women who represent a range of positions within
the academic hierarchy, varying in age across approximately thirty years. The
sample is predominantly American (including one Australian scholar) and white,
though considerably more diverse in terms of socio-economic backgrounds and
sexual identities. The sample includes feminists from the “first” generation to
write seriously about romance in late 20th century (Jan Cohn, Nancy K. Miller,
Kay Mussell and Tania Modleski) and those who’ve written more recently
(Theresa Gregor, Sylvia Kelso, Pat Koski, and myself). When I began assembling
my “CR” group in the summer of 2002,1 contacted thirty-nine critics who’d
written on romance, the poetics and forms of women’s narrative, and feminist
reading practices, consulting bibliographies and citations within the various
articles as well. I also acted upon referrals given by those contacts and strong-
armed my colleagues in grad school and my dissertation advisor. To individualize
each contact letter, I carefully reviewed each recipient’s work and explained how
her work had shaped my own (see Appendix A, “Sample Solicitation Letter). Of
those I contacted, almost all responded generously—either with an enthusiastic
“yes,” or with encouragement and their regrets, or with lengthy emails that helped
1 0 5 This last conversation is inspired as well by the reading practices o f seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century women who read the romance together and by the dialogic romance criticism of
Sarah Fielding and Clara Reeve.
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me to interrogate my assumptions and methods.1 0 6 Though time consuming, this
highly personalized approach seems to have been key, for while a total of fifteen
published critics agreed to participate, my considerably less rigorous plea to my
peers won only fifteen assents from the twenty-eight scholars contacted. And, not
surprisingly, the final consciousness-reading group is considerably smaller than
the one with which I maintained correspondence on and off again for a year; my
colleagues’ attrition was most often a consequence of other writing commitments,
although some just “disappeared.”1 0 7
The benefits of using “like subjects” have been many, not least of which
was their assumption of authority as such—questioning my terms and
methodological premises, re-defining them to accommodate their own perceptions,
and ignoring or modifying the guidelines given (often with great results). Indeed, I
was bowled over by the amount of time and energy they were willing to put into
this project, communicating with me over email to clarify details, sharing their
insights and materials, even suggesting (through their rigorous contextualization of
their own readings) what additional information I needed from respondents and
1 0 6 Some of the regrets gave me insight into possible methodological problems: speaking o f the 1.5
hour time limit I imposed for rewriting the romance, Carolyn Heilbrun could not “imagine how
[she] could do what [I] want in two hours or even two weeks” (email 9/08/02), a concern echoed by
Helen Taylor; while other contacts—Nina Auerbach, Jennifer Cruise Smith, and Judith Wilt—
didn’t feel like they “fit” the sample, an indication to me that I had perhaps framed my goals, and
perhaps, implicitly, my definitions o f “romance” and “feminism” in too limiting a manner.
1 0 7 For this reason, when I widen my pool of participants for publication, I will cast a wider net but
with more selective aim. The ideal subject, I now see, would be a feminist reader who has an
attachment to romance; she should feel the tug between the political and the emotional.
Additionally, the current sample is not large enough for much more than identifying suggestive
patterns, working through the methodological problems, and refining the major questions and goals
shaping the project.
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how to go about analyzing their revisions.1 0 8 The collaboration began almost
immediately. In my solicitation letters, I had framed the project as a consequence
of my longing to learn how other feminist literary critics dealt with “suspect
desires”—how they managed the tensions between their convictions as feminists
and the pleasures or displeasures they discovered reading romance (see Appendix
A “Sample Solicitation Letter”). While I had a pretty strong sense of the way the
genre had evolved over time to accommodate a wider range of identities and
desires (especially in the last thirty years), and I recognized that feminist readers
managed all kinds of complex negotiations as “split subjects,” I remained
convinced that the generic parameters defined by romance writer Jayne Ann
Krentz (and many other romance writers and scholars) would prove limiting for
most feminist readers.1 0 9 Of all the assumptions I had made, this particular one
generated the most ardent response. Early on in the study, Kay Mussell asked if I
believed that “no romance can be truly feminist” and therefore assumed that “all
romances could use some feminist ‘touching-up.’” It was a question that gave me
pause (and the opportunity to work through my ideas a bit further), and, as a result,
1081 am particularly indebted to Sylvia Kelso, whose “reading profile” helped me to construct the
questionnaire I distributed to participants after receiving their revisions. She also helped me to
identify one o f the key analytical questions I’ve posed: what narrative event or convention has been
revised, signaling the reader’s “transformation from an assenting to a resisting reader?”
(“Prolegemona” 2).
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Krentz writes:“A romance novel plot does not focus on women coping with contemporary
social problems and issues. It does not focus on the importance of female bonding. It does not
focus on adventure. [It] may incorporate any or all of these elements, but [...] the relationship
between the hero and the heroine is the plot. (108). Her requirements are not necessarily
incompatible with feminism, but this feminist reader would like to believe that other plots of
ambition and relation might share equal time with the love plot in romance. And while I certainly
don’t view feminism and romance as two monolithic and opposed entities that create an easily
defined conflict for feminist readers, I can imagine fantasies that might fall more easily under the
label of “feminist” which do contrast markedly with many romance fantasies.
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the “loose guidelines” I sent to participating subjects begin with some introductory
comments about those very issues (see Appendix A). I had assumed participants
would want to make at least some changes in order to approximate their own ideal
fantasy, but as I discovered, certain texts, like Pride and Prejudice, are apparently
inviolable.1 1 0 Other critics felt no real need to revise the romances they read: Cora
Kaplan, for instance, explained: “the specific task you ask me to perform for the
project would be rather hard for me. You see I DON’T want to rewrite these
romances particularly [. ..] I like the sad endings and the happy ones; I’ve no
impulse to make Gone With the Wind more PC or revise Katherine” (email
8/24/2002) Furthermore, my assumption that feminist readers would have an
uncomfortable experience reading romance was challenged by Judith Wilt’s
musing upon her own habits: “the way I ‘deal with my suspect desires, and with
the romance narrative in particular’ while striving to be a feminist as well is .. .
pretty much to keep both sets of desires unchanged, despite the internal
incoherence” (email 7/23/02). Wilt’s response, and comments made by Kaplan,
Modleski, and others, potentially confirm Lynne Pearce’s assertion about feminist
readers and the way the political and the emotional pull apart: these readers seem
able to “compartmentalize” their different reading experiences in ways that
suggest the professional discursive site shuts down while the more personal is
engaged.
1 1 0 Jan Cohn, when discussing her choice of a text to revise, writes: “I did briefly consider a
revision of Pride and Prejudice, but since I think that novel is perfect as it is, I could not imagine
any purposeful revision or even any revision that would not impair its perfection” (“Gone With the
Wind” 1).
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The other contentious conversation to emerge circled around issues of
textual choice, the most pressing of which was the novel’s status.1 1 1 In fact, the
distinction as to whether a text might be classified as canonical or popular romance
became a persistent methodological question and one that will accompany me into
the project’s next stage. A number of critics, including my own readers and
contacts, made the compelling argument that I was giving feminist critics too
much latitude by letting participants define romance for themselves. That each of
the published romance scholars in the study chose to rewrite a popular novel is
telling, and the revisions of Jan Cohn, Sylvia Kelso, Pat Koski, Tania Modleski,
and Kay Mussell demonstrate both an understanding of the genre’s parameters
and, more significantly, a respect for its limits, remaining in all cases but one very
close to the formula. As Kelso observes, and Ann Rosalind Jones suggests,
literary or canonical romance may well be less “restrictive,” for it is somewhat
1 1 1 The other methodological issue concerning textual choice arose because I had issued
inconsistent instructions for rewriting the romance. In the original letter I’d sent explaining my
goals, I’d merely asked critics to “choose a favorite romance novel and explain how it was
representative o f the genre, but in the “Loose Guidelines” I sent later (see Appendix A), I instructed
respondents to choose a text they cared deeply about or one that made them long to read more of
the same. The option that invited the most heated response was choosing a “favorite”: at least five
o f my initial contacts argued the pointlessness of this particular task. As Jennifer Cruisie Smith put
it, “if it’s her favorite romance, why would she change it? I’ve read plenty o f flawed romances, but
my favorites I wouldn’t touch. They’re complete in themselves” (email 9/07/02). The possibility I
became most enamored with, however, was the other “Loose Guidelines” request for critics to
“write themselves into” the fantasy scene. This, I thought, would surely force feminist critics to
engage more actively with the taboo text, and as I argue in chapter 1 and above, the critic’s
implication in the romance (both in terms of cultural narratives and the underlying structure of her
feminist critical practices) requires that she make her involvement more explicit. I’m not at all
sure, however, that many critics would or even could participate in this fashion, as Jan Cohn made
clear: “As to your request that I place myself in the story, I am afraid that I cannot imagine myself
written into the romance structure. [...] I remain outside Gone With the Wind, a committed, even
fascinated, reader, but not a character within the story. I would like to add, as an aside, that on
reflection, I do not believe I read myself into any fiction. I do “lose” myself in stories, even stories
that I have read many times, but that loss o f self-awareness does not translate into any kind of
metamorphosis into the heroine.” (“Gone With the Wind” 1-2).
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sheltered from the pressures of the mass market and the hegemonic values holding
sway there (“Stitching Time 170). Romance writer and former academic Jennifer
Crusie Smith raised the question of generic constraints more pointedly in a series
of emails about the project two years ago. Recasting the project as a study of how
“academic women try to redefine romance fiction to include fiction they’re not
ashamed to admit they’ve read,” she argues: “the very elasticity of your definition
of romance seems to be defeating your purpose [because] when you let your
subjects define romance fiction in any way they want, you give them an out”
(email 9/13/02). I think Crusie makes two points worth considering: by collapsing
the distinction between canonical and popular romance I have potentially lessened
the risks of reading romance, but perhaps this “redefinition” of romance fiction
itself might be framed as a strategy of resistance—a uniquely feminist way of
“dealing” with romance.
Choosing canonical romance over popular may, in fact, be the most
effective means of resisting what Kay Mussell has called the “purest and simplest”
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romance type (Fantasy 30). All of the chosen texts have traits that appeal to the
political reader, and three of the five novels were chosen specifically for that
1 1 2 At the same time, I can’t help think there are some risks attending the reading of the literary
form as well: what of the critic who returns again and again to Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering
Heights? Is it possible that canonical romance is more insidious, layering helpful fantasies over
those that stoke our knottier desires, and offering all in a package that need embarrass no one?
That its seductions may ultimately be even greater, aided by the beauty of the language itself? Julia
Colyar observed in conversation that the teen romances she used to read, the similar films she still
enjoys, are easier to manage because of their formulaic, “containable” quality: “I recognize it’s
romance, so it’s harder to internalize it”; this is not, however, the case with more literary romances
like those of Austen (Jan. 7). Because the literary text can prove perhaps even more unmanageable
for feminists, in the following discussion I speculate about certain crossover conventions that prove
troublesome for participants but maintain the fundamental distinction between the two types.
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reason. Nancy Miller’s avowedly “feminist text” is well-known for its refusal of
the erotic plot associated with romance, and Theresa Gregor’s return to Ramona by
Helen Hunt Jackson is similarly motivated. Acknowledging that the novel
includes all of the elements of popular romance, she observes that the “best part
for [her] is that it attempts to provide a racial critique of early California”
(“Ramona Revisited” 1), that, in fact, the novel is itself a (romance) rewrite of
Hunt’s first book—A Century o f Dishonor, which was a much more overtly
political, critical work. My political impulse was considerably more unconscious,
for when I reread Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, the “romance” that
piqued my interest in the genre, I was stunned to find references to “women’s
rights” and “Boston marriages”; still, as my committee member, Hilary Schor,
remarked at the time, “part of [me] must have known it was there all along,” a
knowledge that may have prompted my return. These reflections and the reliance
on “higher” or avant-garde forms in the collections of Pearce and Stacey and of
Radford suggest that literary examples are more “accommodating” to feminism
and so entail less risk for the feminist reader who wishes to avoid an
“uncomfortable” experience. Equally suggestive is that the writers of the
canonical revisions seem considerably less inhibited by the original; indeed, the
comparatively open structure of these more literary texts seemed to encourage
much wilder flights of fancy in three out of the five writers, while the other two
were able to alter their endings substantially without affecting the narrative “logic”
of the original text.
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It is not altogether surprising that most of the readers who chose to “return”
to a well-thumbed text selected the more “capacious” literary examples, as a novel
would have to consistently appeal to the reader as she herself changed through
time. Of these, Beth Binggelli, Molly Engelhardt, and Theresa Gregor chose
personal favorites; I, on the other hand, revisited a novel that made me long to read
more, and Nancy Miller made a rather different return—to a “romance” she’d
critiqued in her highly influential essay “Emphasis Added.” What is intriguing is
that all of these revisions focus almost exclusively on the heroine and her
relationships with women; when the hero still is a presence, he is a very muted
one, as in Engelhardt’s “Wuthering Heights Revisited.” It is Cathy and her desire
to establish a less masochistic relationship to the novel that draw Engelhardt back,
and if Heathcliff figures in the beginning of the revision when his beloved rescues
him on the moors, he all but disappears when they arrive at a gypsy camp. She
writes:
Cathy and Heathcliff dismount, but just as their feet hit the ground,
three dark-skinned, mean-looking men step up from behind them
and encircle Cathy, and the largest of the three sweeps her up into
his arms (she’s very light and his brawny arms push against her
large breasts) and carries her over to the tent where the party is
going on. Heathcliff steps in front of the man, blocking his way,
his fists clinched, but Cathy says, “No Heathcliff. I’ll handle this.”
(“Wuthering” 2)
Reading more like popular romance than the classic we know so well, the forceful
seduction scene that should, in all fairness, be Heathcliff s is here refigured as a
potential gang rape. He is not even allowed the role of heroic savior, for Cathy
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insists she can protect herself. And indeed she can, presenting herself as the
phallus personified in the next scene as the revision continues:
Once inside the tent, the man puts Cathy on the ground and she
immediately stands erect with her head held high staring defiantly
into the eyes of the women sitting on the floor in front of her. These
are some kind of women too. They are dark-skinned with black,
wild hair and red lips, open in laughter at the sight of the young,
angry Cathy; they wear big hooped earrings and colorful gowns that
swoop all over the floor. They are everything that you could
imagine beautiful, gypsy women being. So what ends up
happening is that the Queen of the gypsies takes a particular liking
to Cathy and wants her to join the migrant tribe. [. . .] It takes no
time at all for everyone to realize how smart Cathy is and how
strong she is physically and after a year she becomes the queen’s
right-hand woman, known to everyone as the horse handler.
(“Wuthering” 2)
What interests me here is that the gypsy women become objects of fascination for
Cathy, and the objectifying gaze that notes their skin and hair and lips and attire is
her own. The bearer of the look is so often in romance still written as male, and
yet here we meet a heroine who has both the power of the voyeur and the political
clout of next in command. Managing to enjoy legislated sex once a year with
another male in the gypsy camp for the sake of tribal order (while Heathcliff
remains faithful), Cathy concludes her full life by taking up the pen to chronicle
her time “with the gypsies” (“Wuthering” 3). She writes not of Heathcliff, turning
her storytelling talents from romance to that of another genre—autobiography or,
quite possibly, the political memoir.
Not surprisingly, Nancy Miller’s heroine Madame de Cleves also pursues
an authorial plot of ambition that is autobiographical, “writing a novel about a
hopeless relationship between a man and a woman at the court” (“Princesse” 1).
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This is clearly an allusion to the focal love plot of La Princesse de Cleves, which
Miller regards as feminist text, and it is striking that she gives Lafayette’s heroine
an opportunity to write her own story. The tale of a virtuous and beautiful young
wife who finds herself pursued by the dashing Duke de Nemours, Princesse
chronicles the longings of the hero and heroine but places almost equal emphasis
on the despair of her husband and the moral corruption of the adulterous courtiers
around them. When the husband dies of a broken heart, the Princesse is free to
marry her beloved but chooses instead to sequester herself at home and in a
convent for the rest of her days. Miller’s discussion of Princesse in “Emphasis
Added” seeks to explain the “implausible” actions of the heroine who abandons
the erotic plot expected of her, opting instead for a life of solitude and virtue that is
more compatible with 1980s’ feminist ideals. Reading the Princesse’s choice as a
“refusal of future suffering,” Miller argues that her “self-mastery” may occasion
“another kind of pleasure and power” (1). Nevertheless, the ending leaves Miller
feeling somewhat unsatisfied, especially given its emphasis on “saintly
occupations” (2), a closure she attempts to correct by imagining an alternative
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resolution for her heroine. Repeating verbatim the first sentence of the novel’s
last paragraph, Miller writes:
lb For Miller as for many feminist critics, the “ending” remains the crucial narrative event,
determining to a large extent how the rest of the work is to be understood. The significance of
“writing beyond the ending” was brought home with particular force when I received a regret from
Carolyn Heilbrun, who assumed that by “revision” I must necessarily mean alternative closures.
She cordially writes, “I’m grateful to you and Nancy Miller for thinking of me in connection with
different endings for romances” (email 9/8/03). Engelhardt’s changes too were motivated by her
dismay at the heroine’s end, so she returns to the novel’s middle, reconstructing the trajectory so
that it moves in a much “happier” direction.
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Madame de Cleves lived in a manner that gave no indication she
would ever return. She invited a few of her friends, who were also
young widows, to spend part of the year with her in her home and
in her country estate in the south of France. Madame de
Bauffremont, Madame de Longueville, and Madame de
L’Espinasse were happy to join the Princess and escape from their
own loneliness for a few months of every year. The young women,
who were all beautiful as well as talented, enjoyed the time they
spent together away from the demands and the gossip of the court.
In both residences, the houses were large enough for each woman
to have a separate apartment, with living quarters for her servants,
as well as a study. The women decided to spend the mornings
alone, reading and writing, but to come together in the afternoons
for shared activities. Depending on the weather, they would ride
horses or play music indoors. They would separate again for a few
hours before dinner to pursue the arts. Each woman played a
musical instrument and painted. At dinner, which in the warm
summer months, was held out of doors, the women would discuss
their works in progress—Madame de Cleves was writing a novel
about a hopeless relationship between a man and a woman at the
court—and reminisce. They loved to talk about marriage and how
boring it was; Madame de Longueville and Madame de L’Espinasse
said they hoped their daughters would never marry but they were
resigned to the likelihood that they would. Often, friends living on
nearby estates would join them after dinner for music or long walks
along paths that led from the surrounding forest to the river.
Invitations to the house were never turned down because everyone
knew that to enter this world meant entering a world of exceptional
pleasure.
Seeing to it that each of Madame de Cleves’s friends has a “room of her own” in
which to create, Miller gives her heroine a female community reminiscent of the
fantasy Eliot’s heroine Romola is motivated by; the artists’ colony organized by
Madame de Cleves is the perfect “support system”as she labors, re-imagining her
persistent longing for the Duke de Nemours as a “scene [in] part of her novel” (2).
Re-channeling her desire for the Duke into a secondary love plot is a more
effective strategy than marriage for holding him forever, and Miller seems to
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suggest through this “italicized” act that narrative is the only place where such
intense feeling can endure. Banishing the Duke to relative obscurity in her
heroine’s anonymous novel, the critic redefines “pleasure” to describe a world of
ambitious pursuits, conversation, and female companionship. Certainly the
heroine’s friends, who regret the inevitable marriages of their daughters, offer a
not-so-subtle critique of the marriage institution, while the fact of the
“disappearing man” arguably takes the “romance” right out of the tale.
While Miller’s revision exposes the mechanics of the romance plot by
foregrounding the pleasures of desiring (or lacking), Beth Binggelli ‘s “Jane X”
does so most frequently through inversion and a hilarious form of hyperbole that
extends the story far beyond the bounds defined by the original text. From the
moment the reader meets the “pink pudding of a housekeeper” Mister Fairfax, she
knows she’s in a strange world, and with the introduction of Louisa May Alcott’s
March family who function here as Jane X’s “proto-punk girl band,” Jane Eyre,
the classic romance becomes virtually unrecognizable. The “other women” of the
original novel—Blanche Ingram and Bertha Rochester—become Jane X’s band-
mates, joining Jane Eyre in an all-night jam session after Fairfax and Rochester
prepare a meal for the women “under the guidance of Beth [March’s] sword”
(“Jane X” 2). Binggelli writes:
Fairfax and Rochester sat in a dark corner of the room and observed
the women from a distance. When he found the courage, Rochester
approached Jane X during a break. She was drenched in sweat
from her exertions, her hair hanging in loose snakes around her
shoulders, her teeth smeared with lip rouge, her voice raspy from
screaming lyrics. She smelled, he thought, like an earthy
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combination of Thornfield’s dank, thrice-flooded root cellar, old
Spanish port wine, and a bounding wooly dog. In her presence he
had a sensation he never had before: he felt himself fall away, felt
his substance evaporating to a fine mist, burning in a crucible to a
smoke that coiled around the ceiling and bled through the windows
to the ashen hills outside. Only this woman had made him feel so
incomplete, so unfulfilled, so imperfect. Every fantasy of his own
mastery in the steaming stew pot of her presence boiled away to
nothingness. Jane smiled at Rochester’s rapturous face and asked
him to hold her chewed gum during sets. He cradled it like a relic.
That night he finally set down a weight that had burdened and
dragged him down his whole life, and in his lightness now
appeared, in Jane’s eyes, kinda cute. Just before finishing the last
set, she slipped her room key in his hand. (2)
Depicted here as the passive, fretful romance heroine, Rochester observes the
heroine from the sidelines, in much the same manner that the original Jane Eyre
watched him. Possessed of a typical heroine’s consciousness, he is consumed with
the mystery of the more powerful lover’s motives. The scene also turns the post-
Freudian preoccupation with “the female enigma” on its end by exposing what is
really at stake: man’s terror in the face of his own vacuity. Consider Rochester’s
sense of himself as a “fine mist, burning in a crucible to a smoke that coiled
around the ceiling and bled through the windows to the ashen hills outside.”
Rochester’s “incomplete” characterization is emblematic of the “disappearing” or
“shadow” men in the last two revisions, and by keeping the uneven power
dynamic intact but inverting the players, these examples perform to a tee the kind
of feminist revision one might expect. The other technique that is typical of
feminist narratology is intertextual revision, which raises the question of whether
narrative pleasure might be enhanced through a layering of fantasies: such
incorporations give the reader access not only to the familiar (and widely
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divergent) delights associated with Jane Eyre and Little Women but also to the
somewhat perverse pleasures of seeing her own desires thwarted through textual
disruptions like hyperbole or inversion. I can enjoy the transformations inherent in
the bildungsroman (or the portrait of the artist as a young woman), the uncommon
displays of female anger and jealousy, and the discovery of true and unforeseen
loves, while simultaneously getting a big charge out of seeing Jane X walk out on
Rochester. The intertextual revision therefore appeals to a larger number of
progressive (and regressive) desires than the original, and to our many reading
selves within.
My own encounter with the repressed reader of Alcott’s An Old Fashioned
Girl was illuminating; I found she “imbibed” a good deal more than macaroons
and pelisses when I reread the book after many years. The two-volume novel tells
the story of “country mouse” Polly Milton, who changes the lives of Fanny Shaw
and her Bostonian family over the course of ten years. Polly is “old-fashioned”
and comes from an Alcott-like family that is rich in education but lacking in
capital. The Shaw family, on the other hand, is newly wealthy, and their
conspicuous display of the wealth is emphasized repeatedly. The heroine doesn’t
exert much influence over her friend Fanny until the family is ruined, and the latter
must reform her fashionable ways to win her beloved. Polly too is rewarded with
the love of Tom, Fanny’s brother, who must prove himself man enough for her by
seeking his fortune out west and succeeding. The scene I chose to rewrite calls
Fan’s fashionable pursuits into question, for it takes place in the home of two
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young women—a sculptor and an engraver who “take care of one another in true
Damon and Pythias style.” As if the allusion to the two Greek friends weren’t
enough, Fan’s comment “Let a lover come between them and their friendship
won’t last long” is answered by Polly’s refutation: “I think it will. Take a look at
them, and you’ll change your mind.” Fan is, in fact, enthralled by the art of
Rebecca—the sculpture of a beautiful woman, and she impresses the artist and her
friends with her ‘reading’ of the piece. She marks especially the figure’s
“imposing” air. Upon Fan’s suggestion that the sculpture might be a queen of
sorts, Rebecca observes that “women have been called queens a long time, but the
kingdom given them isn’t worth ruling,” and declares her woman is to “stand
alone and help herself.” Fan is at first uncomfortable with this notion, and
wonders aloud, with a little curl of her lip, if the figure is to be “strong-minded.”
What follows is a discussion of how that woman might be rendered even more
imposing, and options like “giving her a child” are dismissed, while “giving her a
ballot-box” is embraced along with other objects that speak to her talents: “a
needle, pen, palette, and broom.” (I’d like to think this last is a witchery
reference.) It is a prime pedagogical opportunity, and Fan is subtly changed by her
time with the women. Alcott writes:
Fanny had been to many elegant lunches, but never enjoyed one
more than that droll picnic in the studio; for there was a freedom
about it that was charming, and artistic flavor to everything, and
such a spirit of good-will and gayety, that she felt at home at once.
As they ate, the others talked and she listened, finding it as
interesting as any romance to hear these young women discuss their
plans, ambitions, successes and defeats. It was a new world to her,
and they seemed a different race of creatures from the girls whose
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lives were spent in dress, gossip, pleasure or enuui. They were girls
still, full of spirits, fun, and youth; but below the lightheartedness
each cherished a purpose, which seemed to ennoble her
womanhood, to give her a certain power, a sustaining satisfaction, a
daily stimulus, that led her on to daily effort, and in time to some
success in circumstance or character, which was worth all the
patience, hope, and labor of her life, (emphasis added 177)
On the brink of self-discovery and a new purpose for living, Fanny seems poised
for a new plot, but it is brought to an abrupt halt and subsumed back into the more
conventional “reform” plot that will end with her winning her love object through
her transformation into a more Polly-like woman. Watching the girls and
reflecting upon the beauty of their lives, she muses that girls like these would
easily earn the respect and love of men, “for in spite of their independence, they
are womanly.” She wishes she had a talent to live for, imagining that it would
make her more interesting to the much-desired Sydney (“dear to everyone” in fact)
and acknowledging that she would like these things for herself—things “money
can’t buy.”
I want another plot for Fanny; in fact, I want Book 2 to be about her self
transformation, and I want it begin here. Why focus on Polly who is already
perfection? Fanny is conflicted, she’s struggling for something more, and I think
she draws the wrong lesson from this exchange. I want Fanny to see beyond the
conventional love plot (she can have that too, down the line, and with someone
more interesting than Mr. Sydney, who is constantly assessing her through
comparisons with her friend). In Alcott’s plot, she encounters much hardship
when her father loses their fortune, and it is her ability to cope fairly well (with
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Polly’s guidance) and provide her parents with comfort that convinces Sydney she
is worth loving. I want Fanny to help differently—to make her family’s fortune
and send money home, using the talent and knowledge she has gained as an avid
consumer of women’s clothing. In an earlier doll dressmaking scene, Fanny
shows a great deal of interest in the design of a “red merino frock”: I want her to
tap into this interest and to develop her vision and skills with the help of the
artistic community Polly has provided. Fanny will, therefore, return to see these
women, who will help her shape her aesthetic sensibility and encourage her to go
to Paris on her own—not to buy gowns but to design them. With fashions cut for
the new woman Rebecca envisions in her sculpture, Fanny will become a sort of
Coco Chanel, a girl from the “provinces” who takes Paris by storm. Some of the
narrative might highlight her struggles as an American who must become
acquainted with the subtle codes for conduct and discourse in Parisian society, but
I think most of her difficulty will come through the conflict generated by her
corset-less designs, which allow for more freedom of movement and expression.
She will eventually return to America, setting up a house that rivals those of Paris
and making it possible for women to buy at home. Clearly there is more than
“one” reader at work here—the youthful original who thrilled to the details of
dress and design, her shadowy elder who longs for the road not taken, and their
feminist counterparts; what delights me most about revision is that the process can
accommodate us all.
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Like mine, Theresa Gregor’s revision Ramona Revisited recasts a moment
that interests her politically. Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel is about a young Native
American woman who leaves the Mexican family with whom she has grown up in
order to follow her lover Alessandro—a ranch hand who dies before the novel’s
end and leaves the heroine widowed with child. Gregor chooses to rewrite the
ending, and what is perhaps most intriguing about her revision is that she doesn’t
bring Ramona’s husband back to life but focuses instead on Felipe’s assessment of
Ramona’s motives at the novel’s close.
Felipe Ortegna has asked the widowed, single-Indian-mother
Ramona to return to Mexico with him because California is
increasingly hostile to Mexican rights. When she agrees to go, he
surmises ‘that she would spare her daughter the burden she had
gladly, heroically borne herself, in the bond of race.’
However, we catch a glimpse into Ramona's thoughts and her
reason for going to Mexico is not so much to spare her daughter any
racial turmoil, but to chart a new destiny for her daughter.
‘[Ramona’s] imagination was kindled. An untried future
beckoned—a future which she would embrace and conquer for her
daughter.’ This passage intrigues me because both representatives
of the two largest racial groups in California at this time (the
Indians and the Mexicans) are removed, literally written out of the
novel's landscape, in the end. An end that many American settlers
actually wished for since it would resolve the nagging ‘Indian
question’ (what to do with them when their land was wanted) as
well as address the problem of dealing with the previous colonizers,
the Mexicans. For this reason, and for all of Jackson's claims to
advocate for Indian reform, it seems that in the end, she was
incapable of imagining any other kind of world except for a white
one. I imagine, on the other hand, another ending for Ramona. She
remains and teaches her daughter to survive in California.”
Gregor’s imagined ending is much more satisfying politically, delivering an
implicit critique of race relations and American imperialism as it valorizes the
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mother-daughter bond. This is, significantly, the only revision to deal directly with
the question of race, suggesting that despite feminist romance scholars’ growing
sensitivity to this set of issues, the “assumed whiteness” of romance persists (Perry
172).1 1 4 Broadly outlining her heroine’s new life trajectory, Gregor’s revision
commences with the act of choosing:
Ramona refuses to move to Mexico with Felipe. Instead she tells
him that she wishes to return to San Jacinto and live at her and
Alessandro's home on the mountain. Felipe adamantly rejects
Ramona's proposal at first. He confesses his love to her and tells her
that he would do anything for her except allow her to live out a
barely subsistent life with her child.
Ramona's resolve is steadfast. Her calm, quiet nearly ethereal
demeanor finally convinces Felipe that Ramona is living in another
realm and that she has never accepted Alessandro's death. Felipe
finally begins to understand that Ramona would feel closer to
Alessandro if she were at their home.
Before Felipe sails for Mexico he shows Ramona the Senorita
Ortegna's letter describing Ramona's birth origins and the jewels
that Ramona inherited from her father Angus Phail. Felipe explains
to Ramona that she is entitled to take the treasure. She reluctantly
accepts the jewels, and then is heartened at the prospect of
becoming completely independent of Felipe. She now has the
resources to provide a comfortable life for her small family. Felipe
offers Ramona several other gifts—tokens of his love really—but
she quietly refuses all, except for Baba and Benito—her loyal
steeds.
Gregor’s Ramona is considerably less pliable than the original, refusing the
protection of the wealthy, faithful Felipe and insisting upon making her own way.
Her decision to accept her inheritance is predicated on her desire for autonomy,
1 1 4 Arguably, Engelhardt’s revision engages with race implicitly, for Cathy’s fascination with the
gypsy women is attributed to their “dark-skin, black, wild hair and red lips, open in laughter”
(“Wuthering” 2). Whether the white English heroine’s speculative pleasure comes at the expense
of the racialized, eroticized “other” is questionable, though Cathy’s deep attachment to the Queen
suggests otherwise.
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but it also mirrors her commitment to her own daughter’s destiny. I believe
Gregor’s choice to highlight the significant role played by property in women’s
attempts to secure independence is suggestive, and it’s a factor addressed by Miller
and Engelhardt’s revisions as well. It is, however, largely maternal love that
motivates these choices: Romona wants to provide Little Majella with a
community and history that reinforces her racial affiliation, and she puts these
even before her own quasi-filial ties to Felipe.
That mother-daughter relations are closely linked to the narrative desires of
romance is a theory given much play by romance scholars past and present, so it
isn’t terribly surprising to recognize its centrality in revisions like Gregor’s and
this rewrite of The Thornbirds. The novel by Colleen McCullough is a highly
unconventional romance itself, focusing on the love that develops between an
ambitious priest and the young woman who has known him all her life. Written by
a critic who wishes to remain anonymous, this revision pursues a “taboo”
relationship of a different sort, recovering the buried plot of Anne, Meggie’s
landlady at Himmelhoch and recasting the women’s relationship as lesbian
romance, Highly critical of marriage, and of emotionally draining husbands and
lovers, Anne is by far the most subversive of the romance revisions, in part
because the heroine’s trajectory is the most developed and her consciousness the
most examined, but also because the lesbian affair between Meggie and Anne is
both central and contextualized. The concluding scene in this overflowing text (6
pages) brings many of the strands together—the secret love of Anne and Meggie,
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the vanquishing of Ralph her weak and fickle lover, the unspoken understandings
between mother and daughter:
One by one everyone excused themselves to their bedrooms leaving
just the three of them: Fee, Meggie, and Anne. They sat in near
silence, each attending to whatever trivial task she had chosen to
distract her. Once when Anne looked up from her book to catch
Meggie looking at her she could swear she saw Fee, out of the
corner of her eye, observe the exchange. But by the time Anne
noticed, Fee’s eyes were once again fixed on what she was doing.
Anne closed her book, gathered up her crutches, “Good night
Meggie, Fee,” she said as she struggled to get to her feet and
balance herself leaning on the crutches. Meggie looked up and
smiled warmly, as she said her good nights. Fee just nodded. Anne
did not look back as she exited the room and made her way to her
cottage, but she had a good idea of what was happening in the main
house. Meggie would wait a respectable length of time, then put
down the sewing she was pretending to work on. She would rub
her eyes, tired from so much attention to the detailed stitching, and
bid Fee goodnight. Then she would come to Anne, like she had
whenever possible since Anne had arrived. They had come
together without thinking, as if it was something that they had both
always known. They had always shared in each other’s secrets;
now their love for one another had become their most passionate
secret. Meggie never stayed. That was the one thing that they both
regretted, but neither was certain of what the others in the house,
the family, would say. Anne suspected that they would, in fact, say
nothing at all, but could never quite bring herself to press Meggie
on this. The Catholic in Meggie was not quite extinguished. “But,”
thought Anne, “I have the one I have always loved, the one I have
wanted, the one I gave to that priest, the one who returned from his
bed to mine. If Ralph only knew.” In fact, if Mary Carson knew,
she would be so envious. She had used all of her vast power and
wealth to take down the arrogant priest, but this cripple had all but
done the same thing with much fewer resources, and was still alive
to enjoy it.
Inside the main house things had proceeded much as Anne
predicted. After thirty minutes Meggie rubbed her tired eyes and
put aside the sewing that she actually had been working on. She
walked over to Fee’s desk and said a somewhat stiffly formal
goodnight. Fee responded in kind, and Meggie walked quickly
from the room.
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Moments later the light went out in the main room and Fee, unseen
by anyone, stood by the window looking out. She didn’t have to
wait long until she saw her daughter hurry along the path leading to
Anne’s cottage. Standing silently in the dark watching her daughter
enter the cottage, a ghost of a smile briefly crossed her face. And
she turned and went to her own bed. (5-6)
The desire for the mother’s acceptance is as much an undercurrent here as the love
between the two women, a parallel that recalls Lizzie Thynne’s reading of the film
Anne Trister, in which the bond between mother and daughter stands as the
psychoanalytic origin of the heroine’s affection for her female lover. There is a
kind of “warrant” established in this revision, with the mother quietly licensing the
unacknowledged desires of the daughter. Matriarchal power is suggested through
the figure of Mary Carson—however problematic her power may be, by the fatal
business of Anne’s own midwife mother, and by the small female community’s
preeminence at the end: all suggest that Fee’s ghostly smile does “mean”
significantly. This revision does in many ways support Suzanne Juhasz’s
contention that the lesbian romance is most often simultaneously a “coming out”
story, with the “closet” serving as the primary obstacle to love and the mechanism
by which the development of plot and character are brought together. As the sole
example of lesbian romance among the collected revisions, Anne also offers the
only sustained glimpse into the heroine’s mind and provides a much more striking
example than one would find in heterosexual romance of the process by which one
claims a new identity through love.
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While the previous revisions written by “returning” readers pretty much
took the “man” out of “romance,” those remaining conform more to generic
expectations by keeping men at the center of the heroine’s plot and consciousness.
I have therefore organized the pieces by Pat Koski, Julia Colyar, Kristiina Hackel,
Sylvia Kelso, Tania Modleski, Jan Cohn, and Kay Mussell in a rather rough
schema that moves from those revisions with a lesser male presence to those in
which the hero figures more prominently. Exhibiting considerably less resistance
to the romance form, these writers not only chose texts that were more emblematic
of popular formulas, they also show a greater willingness to engage more
immediately with the text—an “intimacy” achieved by rewriting actual scenes and
grappling with the language of the text. Their willingness to “get their hands
dirty” in this fashion may reflect a greater degree of intellectual or emotional
investment: with the exception of Colyar and Hackel, these writers are published
romance scholars. Pat Koski’s revision of Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting
turns on Linda Martin’s interior monologue in a moment of crisis, as she attempts
to give the heroine greater confidence in her own judgment. A romantic suspense
novel, this particular example is often mentioned by feminists who admit to liking
romance—a choice that is not difficult to understand if one considers the equal
importance of the mystery plot. Linda Martin is an English governess who returns
to her French origins in order to care for the young heir of the de Valmy family,
Philippe. Ensconced in their isolated chateau, she must hide from her employers
the flawless French she speaks and manage the vague menace she detects in almost
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every corner and figure in the house. She falls in love with the second son and
guardian of young Philippe, but for much of the novel he too is suspect. In one of
five revisions that engage with the language of the novel directly, Koski observes:
. . . if I could rewrite parts of Nine Coaches Waiting, I would
change Linda Martin to recognize her own strength, and to compare
herself more favorably both in terms of gender and wealth. This
would be made clear when she finds that there is a plot to kill the
child under her care and she is told that the man she loves is
involved in that plot. I’m willing to understand why she doesn’t
immediately discount this news—after all, she cannot really take
the chance that she is wrong, as it involves a child’s life. My
rewriting of this scene [will allow her to] trust her motives. The
specific passage from the book will make clear what I mean.
“.. .1 had seen even while shock reacting on weariness had driven
me stupidly and headlong from him up the stairs. And now I saw
the look that came down over his face, bleak bitter pride shutting
down over anger, and I knew that I had turned my world back to
cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands. I
couldn’t speak, but I began to cry...” (234)
Well, I mean really “stupid, wicked hands”? My rewriting:
“.. .1 had seen even while shock reacting on weariness had driven
me
headlong from him up the stairs. And now I saw the look that came
down over his face, bleak bitter pride shutting down over anger, and
I knew that he could have been trusted. Nonetheless, my reasons
for
protecting Philippe were sound and I would have to make Raoul
understand.”
What the juxtaposition of the original and rewritten texts makes clear is that the
heroine’s capacity for meaningful action—signaled by her focus on her “hands”—
is being called into question as much as her judgment and understanding.
Eradicating not only the heroine’s negative characterization of her hands (and
metonymically her actions) but the allusion to the “Cinder”-ella ending she has
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potentially lost, Koski presents a considerably more realistic and favorable self-
assessment, but she loses a degree of the heroine’s imaginative insight and the
richness of her fantasy-life. She also brings the two male figures out of the
shadows by naming them, and Linda’s more embodied awareness of the hero,
Raoul, reinforces his status as more than an idealization and hers as a woman
firmly grounded in the “real” world.
Julia Colyar’s revision of the first Sweet Valley High romance Double
Love is similar to Koski’s in both its adherence to the formal requirement “girl gets
guy” and its greater interest in female consciousness. The teen novel Double Love
is about two identical twins: Elizabeth—the good student and selfless daughter,
and Jessica—her irresponsible, promiscuous sister. Elizabeth has fallen for a boy
named Todd, and while Jessica likes many other boys, she decides to play for
Elizabeth’s crush in what amounts to a sibling rivalry plot. Describing the process
of “Rewriting the Bad Twin,” Colyar remarks,
I kept coming back to the picture of [the twins] Jessica and
Elizabeth on the cover. There are good girls and bad girls, and you
can tell by looking at them which is which. Eve chosen to revise a
scene in which the two young women are talking after they get
home from a school dance. In the original, Jessica invents a grabby
‘goodnight kiss’ with Todd; she describes it to Elizabeth as a means
of punisher her date for a less-than-spectacular time. (“Bad Twin”
1).
While the original makes significant use of the “other woman” figure that
romances were allegedly foregoing in the 1980s, the revision “reforms” the bad
girl, whose selfish, devious ways undermine her bond with her sister. Jessica now
recognizes the “need to come clean, to tell Elizabeth everything. She couldn’t
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imagine keeping Elizabeth and Todd apart any longer. What had she been
thinking? Why was she competing with her sister for a guy?” (“Bad Twin” 2). I
read this initially as a lovely metaphor for the real competitive dynamics of women
in our culture and feminism’s (utopian) desire for all women to see beyond their
status as objects of exchange and the sense of rivalry that develops as a
consequence. But when Colyar had the opportunity to comment herself on the
bond she redefined between her fictional “sisters,” she expressed disappointment
that she hadn’t been able to transcend formal constraints.
In the end it still ends up being the girl and the guy together. So
I’m still drawn into that. The conflict for me arises in both the
difference between the intellectual and the fantasy or desire, and
because I understand that I’m having that conflict. Which is
irritating. [...] Why couldn’t I just have written it so Elizabeth
says “Jessica, we shouldn’t fight over a guy. This guy isn’t good
enough for either one of us. Let’s just send him away. Hooray.
The end. (Jan. 7)
Even with the clear intention of repairing (and privileging) the relationship
between women, this revisionist couldn’t give up the heterosexual romance in the
end. Seen in this light the bad twin’s reform is very much in service to the status
quo —another testament to the enduring power of the romance narrative and to the
subordinate function of the “other woman” who might serve (as she does in
Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle) to interrogate the terms of exchange.
Like the two immediately preceding critics, Kristiina Hackel chose to
rewrite a key narrative event—in her case the moment of attraction between hero
and heroine. Her revision is of Jennifer Cruisie’s Fast Women, a novel that
follows the professional and sexual adventures of a recent divorcee. Through
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family connections, Nell gets a job as secretary to a private investigator, Gabe
McKenzie. While attracted to one another, they disagree on just about everything
when it comes to running the office. They begin a relationship, but their conflicts
prove to be too great and Nell quits. Although she would rather go into business
with her former sister-in-law, Suze, she is forced to take another job among
family, giving her access to information Gabe needs to solve a case in which he is
personally implicated. When she is caught, Gabe must rescue her from death by
refrigeration. They reconcile and she goes back to work with him as a partner.
Hackel’s revision reproduces most of the text verbatim, the changes she makes
significantly alter the heroine’s sexual experience. Attributing the revision to her
own “longing for romantic models slightly different from ‘he pursued me and I
fought and I yielded’” (“Fast Women” 1), Hackel gives the heroine considerably
more agency in her first erotic encounter with the hero.
Nell didn’t beat around the bush. “I’m quitting.” Gabe looked
surprised. A flicker of regret flashed across his face, and then he
scowled. “You can quit as soon as we find a replacement.”
Nell shook her head. “I’m quitting, effective now. Say, ‘I accept
your resignation.’ Trust me, it will be better for both of us.” Gabe
stared at her with a touch of anger and a look of complete
incomprehension.
She took a deep breath and walked over to him. She pushed his
chair back and stepped between him and his desk. So close to him,
the pull between them reasserted itself and she could see his frown
soften.
Gabe’s eyes met hers, full of question and then understanding. He
didn’t hesitate. “I accept your resignation.”
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“Smart man,” said Nell. She hooked her foot under his chair and
pulled him back towards her. Straddling him, she began to
unbutton her gray suit. (“Fast Women” 2-3).
Here, Nell is not only the one to initiate sex but she takes control of her
professional destiny in the same moment—a double coup that speaks to Hackel’s
discomfort with the original heroine, who “domesticates her man with Windex”
(Jan. 7). That work and pleasure don’t mix is suggested by Sylvia Kelso’s first
revision of the same text, for she, like Hackel, forces Nell to leave her position as
Gabe’s office manager. Writing of her enthusiasm for Nell’s initial decision to
leave and “found her own business” (“Prolegemona” 2), Kelso recounts: “Yes, I
cheered, and it was a gut-deep response. Go on! But she didn’t. Instead, the text
carefully worked out a compromise where Gabe, who considered Nell had neither
the right nor the experience to be treated like a partner, came to feel she was
actually as necessary as he was, but in a different way—and Nell accepted the
compromise and remained as his wife and officer manager” (2). The commitment
to the heroine’s sexual and professional desires shown by these two revisions is
evident in their authors’ refusals to subsume the ambitious plot within the erotic by
honoring Nell’s “compromise.”
Kelso provides another revision to the novel, this time focusing on the
novel’s ending—the “limitingly heterosexual vision [that] remains one of [her]
main political and imaginative problems with romance” (“Prolegemona” 3).
While this second piece also guarantees the requisite happy-ending, it is not so
conventional a closure as the first, which maintains the romantic heterosexual
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dyad. Reflecting on the other “sticking point” that motivated her rewrites, Kelso
identifies the moment when
Nell and her close mate Suze veered toward lesbian sex, got as far
as trying a kiss, and found it “vanilla” (Crusie, Women, 281). “I’m
... into penetration,” says Nell (274). As a heterosexual reader, I
had no trouble figuring why Nell would want to jump Gabe and go
on doing it. As a fantasy reader and a long-term feminist, I had a
good many second thoughts about that other lost opportunity. In
both cases, I felt, as I once felt about the love-ties in A. S. Byatt’s
Possession, that the text had suffered from a lack of imagination.
Or, in this case, perhaps, from an unconscious acceptance of the
limits of its genre.”
She herself chooses to push at those limits, first allowing Suze to rescue Nell from
the freezer where Gabe originally finds her, then bringing Suze’s love interest,
Riley, in at the crucial moment to witness their attraction. Kelso writes:
Riley is devastated. Gabe is furious and devastated. Suze’s
husband is furious and devastated and wants to make the scandal of
all time, but is gagged by the revelation of the Dysart-Ogilvie
crimes. Margie, busily selling off her china on E-Bay after
brushing off her accountant lover, says mildly, “We could always
go to New York and find Janice.” Battered by conflicting desires,
family disbelief, and the uproar of a major scandal, Nell and Suze
find themselves saying, Why not?”
Nell’s son Jason lets the word slip to Gabe’s daughter Lu, who tells
Gabe. Gabe and Riley descend on the women as they are packing.
After a long and desperate confrontation, Suze and Nell reach a
compromise. “We’re leaving,” Suze tells the men, “but perhaps not
permanently. We need time to sort this out. To sort ourselves out.
And to let you sort yourselves out. We’re flying to New York with
Margie, tonight. [. . .] We’re planning to stay a while. All three of
us. But it needn’t be forever. If you decide you want us back—all
three of us—you can let us know. (“Fast Women” 3).
This emphasis on “three” at the revision’s conclusion suggests one way in which
Kelso makes good on the epigraph with which she begins: “One is not enough, and
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two is only one possibility” (Donna Haraway). The other, of course, is through the
choice she gives this reader—and, indeed, “choice” seems to be the paramount
concern in the two revisions—alone and together. Both endings offered by Kelso
function as compelling critiques of the institution of marriage: the first because it
points to the need for women to establish a life (and identity) separate from (but in
addition) to the marriage, and not just because that “other” life makes the wife
more interesting to her husband; and the second because it suggests that women
might be happier if they recognized that they will never find happiness if they put
all their energy into one limiting role.1 1 5 Even if a woman chooses not to limit
herself in this fashion, the weight of that cultural imperative, and the expectations
that arise from it, continue to shape the perceptions of most women concerning
their single or married status. The more stories circulating that question the
“happy-heterosexual-couple-ending,” as Kelso calls it, the more choices women
may perceive. Certainly, the “both/and” demand made by the women at the end is
a welcome alternative for the woman who “wants it all,” but the ending also makes
clear that the women are confused and conflicted, that the costs of “both/and” are
not negligible.
In marked contrast, Tania Modleski’s revision of Nerd in Shining Armor
attempts to reinscribe the formulaic gender roles of romance by reversing the
1 1 5 Beth Binggelli’s JaneX, and Nancy Miller’s Princesse display a similar savvy when it comes to
experiential knowledge and romantic expectations: Nell learns from her previous marriage that
owning a business with a husband can result in self-effacement and so resists that choice the second
time around; the Princess is convinced from her period at court that love cannot endure within the
bonds of marriage, and she and her friends delight in discussions about its boredoms; Jane X
refuses Rochester based on her knowledge that she’d make a “crappy wife” and Bertha’s report.
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original author’s “nerdification of the hero” in order to resuscitate the alpha male
figure and recuperating the oppositional erotics of the 1970s bodice ripper. Using
the feminist technique of “inversion” to re-establish the generic status quo, she
resists the accommodations of Nerd, which is itself a rewrite of the form that Carol
Thurston celebrates in The Romance Revolution. The original novel thwarts
readerly expectation by presenting an office romance that goes awry when the
alpha male “hero” turns out to be a truly dangerous man. Gen, the heroine, has
fallen for her boss Nick, who takes her and a “computer nerd” by the name of
Jackson on his private plane, but then stages a plane crash so that he can escape
with embezzled money and parachute to safety while leaving them to die. Gen and
Jackson manage to crash land the plane, and much of the plot depends on their
struggle to survive on a deserted island. Their difficulties allow them to recognize
in each other an equal partner, and the novel ends with their union and Nick’s
capture. In Modleski’s version Jen is a filing clerk who works in one of Nick’s
many corporate offices, and the two have a history together—an early sexual
encounter that stops just short of consummation. She has taken “a couple of
courses in feminism” at college, which helps her to recognize Nick is still a “male
chauvinist pig” (2), but she nevertheless finds herself “melting” whenever she
encounters him in the filing room. Emphasizing that Jen’s “principles are at odds
with the attraction she feels” (2), Modleski uses the character’s feminist politics to
establish the first significant obstacle to her inevitable union with the hero. (The
second is the budding romance between Gen and Jackson.) That she is putting her
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pleasure before her own politics as well is suggested by her adherence to formula,
and Modleski makes her recuperation of romance explicit in her protagonists’ first
exchange:
“Let’s face it, you need taking care of,” he murmurs . . .
“Oooo, you are insufferable, a cave man, a throwback to the dark
ages of the 70s; I can take care of myself, I. . He cuts her off
with a swift brutal kiss, then pinning her against the wall with his
hard muscled body, says “Yeah? Who would you rather be
stranded with on a desert island? Him or me?”
“See? That’s my point, Nick. Nobody ever does get stranded on a
desert island anymore. You’re obsolete.”
He reminds her of his vast real estate and corporate holdings.
“Then how did I get to the top of the ladder if I’m obsolete? I got
there because I’m the original Robinson Crusoe. (3)
When Jen declares she’d “rather take her chances with Jackson on a desert island”
(3), Nick arranges a little experiment, flying the two to a desert island and leaving
them stranded. While Gen “proves herself to be highly resourceful” (4), Jackson
disappoints considerably, and Gen soon realizes that Nick has orchestrated the
whole adventure. She retaliates by staging a hot romance with Jackson, which
brings Nick to the island. Hoping to disrupt what is only a phony affair, Nick
“arrives just in time to save Gen and the wimpy Jackson from a very real danger
by slashing in two a huge snake that’s about to attack them or something of the
sort. Never has anyone appeared so magnificent; Gen realizes at once that for
good or for ill, she is really in love with Nick” (Modleski 4). While his
misperception of her feelings for Jackson keeps Nick from declaring his love, the
two are shortly reconciled. After inviting him over for champagne, which he
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presumes they will share with Jackson, she sends him into the bathroom to change
his attire: “they each emerge simultaneously (of course!) from their rooms, he
wearing a loincloth, she wearing the tatters of a skimpy dress, with a bodice that
looks eminently rippable” (Modleski 4). This conclusion to her romance—which
highlights once again the fantasy of eroticized gender inequalities and the 1970s
form that immortalized it, suggests that Modleski is concerned here far less about
shaping the romance for feminism than saving the romance from it.
Jan Cohn—another of the three romance scholars who wrote first about the
form in the 1980s—takes on the classic Gone with the Wind, a work inviting
particularly compulsive repetitions “because in the reader/viewer's secret heart, she
hopes the story will turn out differently this time” (“Wind” 1). Like Modleski,
Cohn rewrites the novel, and, most significantly, the ending, so it conforms to the
parameters of the popular romance. She writes:
Considered in the terms of romance, the problem is that the hero
and heroine, though married, have not achieved a happy ending,
have not admitted their mutual love. What I want here is a ‘real’
happy ending, Rhett and Scarlett contentedly— and passionately—
in each other's arms. [...] I want to rearrange things so that Scarlett
can outgrow her feelings for Ashley before it is too late—in time
for a happy ending to take place. As the novel stands Melanie's
death bed scene serves to bring Scarlett to her senses; she realizes
that she loves Rhett and not Ashley. That's fine, of course, but it's
too late. The scene that should bring Scarlett to her senses takes
place when Rhett carries her to her bed and—here come all the
asterisks that indicate wild, passionate sex. That sex should, of
course, cement their love or, if one thinks that Scarlett does love
Rhett and is simply too besotted with her memories to recognize
this, it should make her understand that Rhett is indeed her true
love. (That is, I imagine, the point. Romance heroines cannot have
wild, passionate sex with men they don't love.) Of course,
everything goes wrong: Rhett is abashed and Scarlett, now ready to
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fall permanently into his arms, is dismayed and hurt by his
brusqueness. (This scene, by the way, makes me crazy! Here is
where I do want that happy ending.) Another problem with this
scene is that it comes too early in the novel, before Melanie's death
and thus before it is time for the resolution.
[.. .] as in the original, [Scarlett] rushes home. But instead of
finding Rhett angry, fed up, and prepared to leave her, she finds no
one there. Scarlett broods and paces, waiting for Rhett. But no
drinking, no nipping brandy! She should, though, become
somewhat distraught, as revealed in her hair and clothing. In other
words, her defenses are down. Rhett returns and Scarlett's disarray,
and dishabille, awakens both his sympathy and his lust. At this
point, he carries her up the stairs for that asterisked scene, and then
everyone lives happily ever after. (“Wind” 3).
Her Scarlett is considerably reformed—no tippling, no hiccoughing, and, more in
keeping with popular formulas, incapable of enjoying rapacious sex with her
husband while still in love with another man (as she is in Mitchell’s version). She
is also less avaricious and hard-bitten. Cohn’s revision centers much more upon
the heroine’s character largely because she believes Rhett has earned his heroic
status by rescuing the women from the Atlanta siege and embracing in the South’s
lost cause in the final hour. Explaining that she feels more sympathy for the pre
war heroine, she offers an alternative revision, which ends the book midway
through. Recognizing Scarlett’s romance with the Old South is for many as
seductive a story as her love plot with Rhett, Cohn considers leaving Tara much
more intact after Sherman’s march. After the trek from Atlanta, Scarlett will
return to find her mother alive and her father “striving courageously” at home,
where she will await Rhett’s return from war sheltered in the bosom of her family.
While Cohn presumes that all will end happily, the resolution is nonetheless
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“open,” and she de-emphasizes it in relation to the version excerpted above. As
she herself implies, most at issue for Cohn is the requisite “happy ending” of
romance, and what intrigues about her choice is that the original’s “refusal” of the
conventional closure is what has secured its reputation with feminist readers as
“antiromance.”
While Kay Mussell attempts to balance the gender inequalities desired by
Modleski and Cohn, she nevertheless manages to keep the romance formula intact.
Her revision is much more implicit than implicated, for she remains at arm’s
length, taking the more conventional revisionary approach by commenting on what
dissatisfies. What doesn’t work for Mussell is the “declaration scene” between
hero and heroine in Georgette Heyer’s Frederica, a novel that features a Marquis
who is also a determined bachelor, much to the chagrin of the London ton. He
becomes the guardian of a longtime friend’s orphaned children, and finds himself
greatly charmed by the two young women and three young boys in his care.
Frederica is the eldest girl, a young woman determined to capitalize on her
younger sister’s beauty in the marriage market that masks as “the Season.” She
herself ends up winning the love of the Marquis, Alverstoke, and making a much
better match. Mussell argues that the scene in which the hero declares his love to
Frederica “undermines the heroine’s competence and understanding and ends by
reinforcing unequal gender relationships” (“Commentary” 1). She writes of the
bothersome resolution:
the only issue to be resolved is Frederica’s lack of awareness of
Alverstoke’s feelings for her as well as hers for him. The
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impediment to their betrothal is slim indeed and easily fixed.
Although Alverstoke has been of great help to her throughout the
book as she attempts to deal with raising three siblings on her own,
Frederica is capable, sensible, and intelligent and has won his
admiration through her independence and competence. Until this
scene, the relationship between them has never seemed unequal.
The overt power disparity in the declaration scene, then, comes as a
surprise and reinforces the disparity in their social stations and
gender. Alverstoke never really bends or changes. He says he
wants to marry her because she has never bored him, because he is
interested in her brothers, because he can’t live without her. But
there appears to be no emotional intensity in these statements,
which seem distant and ironic rather than sincere. Frederica, in
turn, takes on the role of child/student when he teaches her that
what she feels for him is really love. (“Commentary” 1)
Frederica—who has shown herself to be a skillful problem-solver throughout the
novel is uncharacteristically overwhelmed in this scene, and her teeming emotions
are contrasted sharply with Alverstoke’s seeming detachment and self-control.
She “trembles,” her “brain in a whirl” (Heyer 382), and her lengthy, confused
response to his claim that “he cannot live without her” is all but silenced when “his
lordship [takes] her ruthlessly into his arms” (384). With Frederica emerging from
“an embrace which threatened to suffocate her” (384), the erotics of dominance
identified by Mussell becomes difficult to refute. And yet the control exerted by
the critic herself is also worth noting: reinterpreting the revision guidelines to
accommodate a critical approach that is more familiar, Mussell manages a
considerably more distanced engagement with Frederica by avoiding an actual
rewrite. She reproduces, in fact, a critical reading she made almost twenty years
ago, but while the scene obviously haunts her, the discomfort she feels is not
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sufficient to prompt “real” changes to text.1 1 6 I can’t help wondering—given the
test of time—is if there isn’t something appealing about the hero’s unwavering
self-control after all. Ostensibly most pressing for the critic is the restoration of
Frederica’s “competence,” but perhaps her interest in competence is really
associated more with Alverstoke; he is, after all, one of Mussell’s exemplary
“competent” heroes—a taxonomical term used in her earlier work to describe
heroes like Mr. Darcy in contrast to the more passionate, mysterious men of the
Bronte novels. The critic’s own display of self-control when challenged to
implicate herself more fully is telling, for it serves to remind us that revision is a
task undertaken most frequently with an eye toward protecting one’s self and one’s
interests.
At the other end of the “implicated reader” spectrum is the anonymous
writer who wrote Anne. In that revision the romance is all but obliterated by the
heroine’s successive trauma—a displacement that echoes the narrative dynamic in
Wollstonecraft’s Maria, where Jemima’s tale of misery brings the budding
romance to a halt. As the author makes clear in her response to the post-revision
questionnaire, her highly unconventional fantasy scenario owes much to her
immediate psychic situation:
1 1 6 While discussing the relative power of Heyer’s hero and heroine in Fantasy and Reconciliation,
Mussell focuses on the hero’s agency and the didactic role he assumes: “Alverstoke seems less
authoritarian than some other romance heroes because he does not know how Frederica feels, but
he has enough authority to define love for her and to give her the information she requires to
respond properly to his proposal. Male knowledge and authority in matters of love are constants in
romance fiction; but, paradoxically, expertise in human relationships belongs to woman’s sphere.
Conventionally, in the act of being chosen—when the hero makes his declaration— a woman
knows she has earned the right to take on the responsibilities inherent in her intuitive expertise. He
bears the responsibility of making the choice before she can perform her womanly duties” (137).
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[At the time of writing] I was forced to deal with some pretty
unpleasant real-life stuff that involved spending lots of time in a
shock-trauma unit of a hospital (this, I think, is probably evident in
the resulting text). When I sat down to start writing I found it much
easier than I thought I would—though I had to cut out some of the
detail that I had envisioned because it was getting pretty long. To
be honest, I sort of felt that it wrote itself, like I didn’t really have
control over the process” (email 5/6/04).
Suggested in these reflections (as well as in the revision they comment upon) are
the limits of the romance formula’s binding power: while it may accommodate
certain feminist ideals and principles, what it cannot do so easily is contain the
energies of its readers’ real-life sorrows and struggles. This writer’s revision
experience is clearly cathartic, facilitating a rush of emotion that doesn’t so much
“control” or “act upon” the text as exceed it; the writer has made the text almost
completely her own, displacing the primary plot and redirecting the flow of desire.
What is highlighted by the anonymous author and Mussell’s rather polarized
textual engagements is the way revision—when imagined differently—can enable
a productively unfamiliar relationship to a familiar text. It can bring affect to the
fore, unleashing the unconscious within for one “reader,” yet allow another to keep
the “threatening” romance at “arm’s length.” This is apparently a much more
comfortable distance for Beth Binggelli, whose comments in a series of email and
actual conversations illuminate the complicated performance such implicated
readings entail. Having approached this task by “writing herself into” Jane Eyre—
the most “engaged” position I had imagined, she reports, “I’m in there, but I’m
wearing a disguise. I’m definitely in it, but no one would recognize me” (Jan. 7).
Yet despite her immersion in both text and task, she felt that her self-conscious
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satire left her feeling more in control. And perhaps most intriguing (and surprising
to me) was that she felt more empowered in the act of rewriting romance than she
had writing about the form in the more conventional mode of feminist criticism.
Binggelli writes:
Writing about the genre made me feel vulnerable; rewriting the
romance made me feel powerful. I [wrote] an essay [...] on my
relationship with the romance called “Intolerable Texts”—
something very autobiographical. [...] Strangely, the revision also
feels very personal, but in an incredibly controlled way. The essay
on the genre felt like confession; the revision felt like vengeance.
Of course, vengeance feels much better! (email 5/3/04)
Testifying to her highly personal encounter and the control she felt, this feminist
reader suggests that agency need not be sacrificed to affect nor the reverse, an
experience that challenges the idea that feminist reading and emotional
responsiveness come from “mutually incompatible” discursive sites. And when
juxtaposed with the other readers’ experiences, Bingelli’s reveals the idiosyncratic
nature of this form of revision, which brings the feminist reader beyond a
sanctioned set of practices to illuminate each participant’s very unique process and
her own peculiar desires.
Not surprisingly, then, the motivations for revision among participants
varied greatly: Cohn and Modleski expressed a desire to “write to formula”;
Colyar, Kelso, and Hackel wished to “fix” something that left them feeling
dissatisfied; Engelhardt, Miller, and I wanted “livelier” trajectories for our
heroines. But Binggelli’s comments about her own impulses toward revision
helped me to frame our varying purposes in a more harmonious light. Writing of
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an earlier instance where she found herself “compelled” to rewrite a Katherine
Mansfield short story called “The Little Governess” she reports making the same
general changes she did for Jane X: “reverse gender roles, empower women, make
men do the cowering for a change. And what is even weirder about this is that I
LOVE Mansfield (definitely an author with feminist sensibilities), so my impulse
was not to fix something that was evil and broken but to save it for me, to force a
space where it could be saved for me” (email 7/17/2003). The two occurrences of
“save” in this statement of purpose are provocative, pointing as they do to two
possible meanings (which may, ultimately, be two sides of the same narcissistic
coin). The first possibility recalls the chivalric imperative that underlies much
feminist criticism—a persistent desire to “save” imperiled texts, as well as their
authors, their characters, and their readers. Modleski, Mussell, and Robinson once
sought to redeem the readers of romance by explaining the texts’ appeal, Miller to
explain the Princesse de Cleve’s preferences to a critical community that found her
choice “implausible,” and Kelso to demonstrate the feminist ideals of gothic
novelist Barbara Michaels. And the heroic motivations of chivalric romance—
paterfamilias to the popular form—emerge in the revisions as well: Binggelli
imports the entire March family so Jane is not without protection and
companionship, Engelhardt saves Cathy’s life; there is even the case of text saving
reader, as in Anne, where solace is provided vis-a-vis the romance. Indeed, all of
the revisions feature some element of rescue or recuperation, and one could easily
view most of what is written by feminist critics as motivated by this generous
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impulse toward the “other.” But “saving,” as Binggelli’s comments suggest, is a
rather complicated response for the feminist reader because saving others is
simultaneously “saving a space for me”—a way of asserting the self, a way of
becoming a heroine.
The merger desired here might be viewed as an act of intellectual
penetration, recalling Wolfgang Iser’s notion that “filling in the gaps” is a way of
taking control of the text. Alternatively, it might signal a desire for greater textual
intimacy or for a prolonged connection with the authorial subject or a beloved
character like Jane Eyre.1 1 7 Most probably, of course, the heroic desire to
“save/save a space for me” is about achieving all three—omnipotence,
inter subjective connection, and the recuperation of what has been lost, to wit the
omnipotence and merger associated with primary narcissism. And as many other
feminist critics have suggested, the projection of one’s self, one’s fantasies, into a
textual encounter is clearly unavoidable. In an email exchange I had with Judith
Wilt, I suggested that if she were short on time, she might authorize my use of her
essay on Richardson’s Clarissa— “He Could Go Nor Farther—as a revisionary
text.1 1 8 Because Lovelace’s dream is central to her analysis, I became quite taken
with the idea that feminist criticism might function itself as a form of fantasy. She
1 1 7 Because Lynne Pearce’s discussion of intersubjective connection and the feminist reader’s
longing for the “textual other” is particularly elegant, I will not take time to elaborate upon this idea
here but rather refer the reader to Feminism and the Politics o f Reading. She too recognizes the
feminist reader’s desire to save a space for herself and observes that readers move about in texts
voyeuristically, exploring our textual others from all angles and “looking for ways in which we
may make them respond to us and include us in their script” (18).
1 1 8 In this essay Wilt speculates about the possibility that the women actually rape Clarissa and that
Lovelace is impotent, and because it raises the possibility that he has not truly obtained the object
of his desire, it leaves at least this reader with a keen sense of pleasure (as well as the horror that
she may be victimized by other women).
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wrote that she was “fascinated by [my] notion that [her essay] might be a feminist-
fantastic revision of Clarissa, that it made her “start thinking about ALL her
critical work in that way” (email 7/23/02). Are feminist readers simply another
group of fantasizing woman readers, recasting their pleasures as their politics?
When we critics read, are we always “romancing” the text—that is, creating our
own fantasy of meaning?
I think of my own writing here and the fantasy of reconciliation that
underscores so much of this dissertation. My romance with romance, and then
with feminism, informs everything I’ve observed and argued, and even my desire
to couple the two so completely speaks to my omnipresent longing for the romance
resolution. In early drafts, I tended to elide the conflicts between women,
emphasizing the “bliss” feminist critics remembered and the oppositional energies
directed toward men, and even now I still find it difficult to resist the urge toward
“oneness.” My “will-to-identify” emerges in another notable way—the impulse to
universalize my own experience through an emphasis on plots of self
transformation and the significant role that women play within and around the
romance narrative. And yet I do believe this experience has been more than a one
way transaction, for I have found myself sorely in need of an energy infusion at
different points in the writing process. At such moments it was the enthusiastic
encouragement, the constructive criticism, the informal chatter, and the revisions
themselves that left me giddy with delight and speculative pleasure, giving me the
much-needed motivation required to wrap-up what one participant has so aptly
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called “our project.” And so I shall, evoking the unruly narrative desires of my
like subject’s one last time, return to my persistent fantasy scene: a group of
women (and one gay man) coming together to read and reflect on romance.
Collective Reading, Act 3: Talking Back
In January of this year eight local participants gathered at my home, where
I promptly plied them with wine and food and the objects of voyeuristic desire—
each other’s romance revisions—all in the hopes of seducing them into talking
about romance. It was the first time I’ve hosted a dinner party where the guests
were largely silent as I finished the pasta, but I must say that the sight of everyone
hunched over in their chairs, silently reading their romances, was strangely
familiar and not at all awkward. Interspersed with a bit of commentary to provide
context and focus, the following fragments of conversation are taken from a taped
conversation—represented to both trouble the foregoing narrative and to speak
into some of the silences I’ve created by refuting, correcting or appending.1 1 9 One
of my key arguments in the dissertation has been that the romance novel is
primarily a narrative about a woman’s self-transformation, but what follows
suggests that for many readers of romance this is not the case. As in many
conversations, especially those fueled by red wine and too much sugar, we found
ourselves wandering down a number of tangential paths; this dilatory tendency,
however, seemed perfectly in keeping with the romances we read. We had been
1191 had originally hoped for a much more thorough “triangulation” than the one occasioned here,
for the key benefit o f ethnography as I see it is the textured richness of experience that multiple
layered accounts can represent. And while the writer’s narratorial control is always an issue given
her final editorial role, much interesting work has been produced that manages to highlight the
disruptions within the dominant narrative constructed.
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discussing whether The Simple Life could be read as romance (and whether the
viewer can identify with Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie) when Beth Binggelli got
us back on track.
Beth: So getting back to the romance novel... is there a way that in our
enjoyment of a text that we consciously or intellectually feel dubious about we are
taking the same stance of feeling superior? Do you know what I mean?
Kris Hackel: I do know what you mean. But I think for me it is about a
transformation. Any story I find compelling is about someone who starts off
problematic and unappealing or somehow troubled and by the ending is lovely and
attractive and is getting lots of attention.
Mary Beth Tegan: And the love plot is the key mechanism for this transformation?
Kris: Yes, or, that the transformation engages the love plot. [...] I love the idea
that you can take yourself as malleable material and turn it into something
wonderful.
Beth: Yeah, but isn’t there something horrible about that?
Kris: Absolutely. I’m not saying that this isn’t a terrible value or that I’ve been
brainwashed by culture. [...] Nonetheless, if we look at it in the abstract, to say
that she can change herself by an act of will, become her fantasy, is appealing.
Tania Modleski: Well, you have to read Fay Weldon’s Life and Loves o f a She-
Devil. It takes this interest in self-transformation in . . . wonderful, surprising
directions. But this question is at the heart of it.
Shantanu DuttaAhmed: I love that story where you can willfully change
something; it really triggers something in me.
Kris: You’re not stuck in who you are; there’s this sentimental assumption that
who you are is somehow not appealing enough, and then if you just are strong
enough to become this new thing, all of a sudden—success.
Shantanu: And usually it’s at the level of the body.
Tania: This is not romance. Because romance is where you’re perfect as you are
and loved for yourself.
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Molly Engelhardt: And everyone loves you because you’re so fabulous.
Kris: I think the appeal of the older romances is that your soul is somehow
recognized—that the exterior is not so important.
Molly: No, no.
MB: I think of the two as going hand in hand. One of the most influential
romances ever is Pride and Prejudice, and that’s all about Darcy and Elizabeth
learning something about themselves before they can be together.
Tania: But popular romances aren’t about any kind of character arc; they’re about
misunderstandings.
Julia Colyar: But couldn’t we say that if you transform from the homely girl to the
beautiful girl you’re actually becoming yourself? [a chorus of ‘yes’s] So that in
the end, the romance isn’t about having to change; could we say that the girl with
the bun and the glasses isn’t really herself because she hasn’t yet blossomed and
she becomes her true self when she finds love?
Tania: Well, exactly. But in popular romances these changes are very superficial.
The heroine’s not three hundred pounds.
We left the question after agreeing that the degree to which self-transformation is
an issue may have everything to do with questions of high and low culture, and
that the attraction many of us in the room felt toward the self-transformation plot
may have occasioned our resistance to the popular romance. Because many of my
ideas about what it means to “become a heroine” are taken from the more
character-driven canonical romances I study in chapters 2 and 3, it gives me
something to consider more carefully in the project’s next stage. That said, the
split itself is intriguing: some felt that the achievement of a more idealized self was
key to their pleasure; others that the hero’s recognition of the absolutely loveable
self was necessary—the fact that readers can get both attests to the broad
seductions of the romance narrative and its considerable flexibility.
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The other key concern for me throughout the writing of this dissertation
was the place for women’s friendships and alliances within the romance narrative,
a question posed by Rosalind Coward in “Are Women’s Novel’s Feminist Novels”
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(1981). All of the canonical revisions highlighted the bonds between women, as
did some of the popular: Nancy Miller’s princess and Beth Bingelli’s Jane Eyre are
surrounded by creative companions; Kay Mussell, Julia Colyar, and Molly
Engelhardt’s heroines all had their romances (or sexual escapades) arranged in part
by other women; and Sylvia Kelso and my anonymous respondent rewrote the
romance to accommodate lesbian desire. Here I broach the topic of my overriding
interest in women’s relationships:
MB: At every point in the dissertation I want to make everything nice between
women. And I saw the same thing in Julia’s revision where you have to make
everything okay between the two twins, and in Jane Eyre—things cool between
Blanche and Jane, but when I really started thinking about it one of the things I
really groove on in romances is the downfall of the other woman. I love it when
the richer, more beautiful, more powerful woman is brought to her knees because
she doesn’t have the virtue or domestic goodness of the other one.
Molly: Well, that’s a problem.
Tania: And in a way you want to make a dissertation about romance be about
women.
MB: It’s true. I’m taking the men right out of it. Which is sort of disingenuous.
Tania: No, it’s just something to analyze.
[silence]
1 2 0 She argues that the novel’s action should either make explicit the protagonist’s allegiance to the
woman’s movement or, at least, make it clear that she has had an influential encounter with the
milieu and aspirations of feminism. She also suggests that the heroine’s knowledge or
understanding be developed in a sphere apart from that of love, marriage, and sexuality,
highlighting the importance of the consciousness-raising process.
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Beth: Well, that’s sort of like the Nelly Olsen factor. A lot of it is class—a
comeuppance of the rich. I can definitely sympathize with that.
Tania: But of the rich woman—because the rich man you’re going to marry.
MB: Because you want that for yourself, really.
Tania: And you earned it because you were poor, [laughter]
The rather uncomfortable question that I had to confront here was whether
my interest in women’s relationships is ultimately an attempt to resist or evade the
heterosexual romance plot, and whether that might be typical of the feminist
romance reader. For certainly I’m not alone in this impulse: Rochester, Heathcliff,
Ralph de Bricassart, and the inconstant Duke de Nemours are all depicted as weak,
shadow males; keeping the uneven power dynamic intact but inverting the players,
such examples perform the kind of feminist revision I had initially envisioned.
But the problems posed by attempting to evade the heterosexual romance are
perhaps best illustrated by Beth Bingelli’s revision. In this tale, satire is not
enough to escape the romance ending in which “Jane has to marry Rochester”;
Bingelli must import a whole gang of women to protect Jane from Rochester’s
charms. And think of the noise those women make “jam” into the night, with Beth
on base, Bertha on steel drums and Blanche on tambourine. I wonder now if this
scenario might not be viewed as a metaphor: considering all the word-work
feminists have done to render the romance less powerful, where has it really gotten
us? The Bachelor.
And yet the “disconnect” between mainstream readers of romance and
their “like subjects” in the field of feminist literary criticism might be somewhat
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illuminated by the sharp division among participants in this study. With one
group opting for hyperbolic changes in which the original becomes almost
unrecognizable and the other beholden to a formula that arguably reinforces the
status quo, the subversive middle ground sought by Ann Rosalind Jones in 1984
seems a romance resolution indeed. Challenging writers to subvert romance
conventions through “literary camouflage,” Jones urged a form of generic guerilla
warfare that still seems viable to me, and yet the changes made by feminist critics
of romance here suggest that individual acts of “resistance” are generally either
too subtle or too extreme to influence. If readers will find few alternative female
plots in the less resistant revisions, it is likely they’ll find even fewer elements to
engage their longings in the utopian, woman-centered romances. On the other
hand, the idiosyncratic nature of our responses, and the ultimate polarization of
the two groups, seems the very stuff of romance, so perhaps it’s the dream of
consensus we should resist, opting instead for a collective cacophony of narrative
desires. After all, it is within the web of a messy morass of digressive plots that
the romance reader finds herself again and again, and in this she is not unlike her
feminist sister. For the romance of feminism does endure—despite (because of?)
the numerous conflicts, despite (because of?) the mis-readings made, despite
(because of?) the players’ drive to the finish. . ..
Molly: If all these women are reading romances, and you’re writing romances, you
have to adhere to the formula—it’s got to be a little different, but it can’t be so
different that you’re going to lose them. That’s tricky.”
Tania: Yes, it is.
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Molly: And then if you really do have a mission, and you really want to help them
have better lives—well, that’s pretty noble.
Tania: Do I have that mission? I don’t think I have that mission.
Molly: Well, I would imagine you must. You don’t want to be rich, [laughter]
But isn’t your number one goal to reach out?
Tania: No, I think I wanted to write them because I’ve always been so compelled
by them. [...] I think what is revealed in this conversation is that we have such
different relationships to the romance—but yet there is the romance that doesn’t
change much, or it changes very slowly over time. Right? So it’s got to have its
hooks in us all in some way that we ought to be able to explain, but when we start
to talk there are so many divergences.
Kris: Obviously that’s the strength of the form.
Beth: Yes, that’s what’s really interesting. We can all be so different but somehow
we manage to fit this form into our lives—be it through ironic detachment or with
sincere pleasure, or . ..
Shantanu: Or erotic expectation.
Beth: That somehow we fit it in, that we have the desire to fit it in—the fact that it
still touches all our lives is somehow strange.
Tania: Okay, so given the fact that this is the culmination of your project...
MB: Oh, god! What can I say about anything?
Tania: Wait, wait.... getting women to bond over the romance—is this what has
happened?
MB: No—oh! [laughter] No, no. It’s good. You know my m.o. I’m just always
searching for those commonalities, and I think that our feelings about romance
may be just too idiosyncratic or personal to generalize about. And the
generalizations I have made in my first draft of chapter 4 are all going out the
window tonight. But I think I can write about that—about the elasticity of the
romance and how accommodating it is. And even though when people come
together to discuss the romance and their desires around romance, which are very,
very different, it still somehow accommodates. And therefore it’s a good model
for feminism?
Molly: And why?
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MB: I don’t know. I need to work that out more.
Kris: Say more.
Tania: Sameness versus difference.
[Chorus of yes’s—we are so ready to wrap things up.]
Molly: How about that?
MB: Well, I guess that’s what I’m saying. Everyone is seeing a totally different
thing, nothing is fitting in.
Molly: Which is exactly what feminism is right now.
Tania: Right. Or maybe ought to be.
Molly: And it should be.
MB: Right.
Molly: That’s good.
MB: So this is one of the reasons why feminism and romance are such a good fit—
because the romance can accommodate that kind of difference, as can feminism.
Molly: There you have it. That’s good.
Shantanu: It’s done.
Kris: Write it up.
Shantanu: It’s done.
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Brace Jovanovich, 1967.
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Appendix A
Sample Solicitation Letter
Helen R. Taylor
Professor o f English and Head of School
Department of English
University of Exeter
Exeter EX4 4QH
United Kingdom
Dear Professor Taylor,
I have read your essay “Gone with the Wind: The Mammy o f Them All” numerous times over the last
few years - first while formulating my approach to feminist readings o f the romance and studying for
my qualifying exam, then while writing my dissertation prospectus, and again in the review o f literature
for the introduction to my dissertation. I laughed out loud at your comments about the “massive
coming-out of romance freaks” (a ‘ha!’ still glosses the passage) and felt a strong investment in the
analysis at the outset because of its subject (I must have read GWTW fourteen times between the ages o f
eleven and fifteen) and your references to other “like” readers. Yet the very attachments (or critical
identifications) your essay allowed rendered your key arguments about the novel’s racist and
reactionary elements all the more disturbing; it was impossible to feel good about celebrating feminist
moments in the text, especially when viewing them alongside the example of James Baldwin’s response
to the “red earth o f Tara.” Engaging at least this reader on a highly personal level, your argument
provided a wonderful model for discussing the “delicious” if uncomfortable identifications of the
feminist reader - the lure o f gender confusions and role-swapping, the disgust at race and class
assumptions underlying characterizations and plotting. Because your work has helped me to articulate
my own interests and questions, and to ground and shape my inquiry, I am writing to ask you for your
help with my dissertation project. I recognize that you are very busy, and that you have your own
students to guide; I am nevertheless hoping that I can pique your interest and persuade you to
participate in my ethnographic study.
I am an English PhD student, enrolled at the University of Southern California and working under the
supervision of Tania Modleski. Joseph A. Boone, Hilary Schor, and Judith Stacey are also serving on
my committee. In “Becoming a Feminist Reader: Romance and Re-vision” I explore how feminists
negotiate fantasy and feminism in their readings and revisions of the romance narrative, mapping out
these tensions by tracing the tenacity of romance conventions amid feminist convictions. My method
relies heavily on the two prevailing forms of feminist research on the romance - ethnography and
textual analysis, but I am attempting to position my study between the two models - to design a project
that focuses on the textual products of my ethnographic subjects. In this instance, the subjects produce
and account for their own fantasies rather than relying primarily upon the interpretive skills of the
ethnographer. The “romance revisions” I examine therefore include the contributions o f my own
colleagues, feminist literary critics from American Studies, Comparative Literature, English Studies,
and Ethnic Studies, as well as novels written by Mary Wollstonecraft {Maria), George Eliot (Romola),
Virginia W oolf {Night and Day) and other contemporary “romances” that fall within the feminist
“canon.”
This project has been evolving since my second semester in graduate school when I enrolled in a
seminar on “Women’s Popular Narratives” and began catching up on the conversation feminist scholars
were having about the romance. Until that point, I hadn’t recognized the impact the romance had had
on my identity and my relationships, and my experience re-reading the romance after many years’
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abstinence and my own earlier feminist “conversion” was both uncomfortable (i.e. arousing and
embarrassing) and illuminating. I began to wonder how other feminists dealt with their suspect desires
and with the romance narrative in particular, and while there was a good deal o f excellent material on
how women engage with the romance, there was very little focusing on specifically fem inist interactions
with the form. (The Jean Radford collection The Progress o f Romance in which I found your essay was
a very welcome exception!) My project is an attempt to promote conversation about feminists “reading
the romance,” and I’d very much like to involve you and the other feminist critics who got me thinking
about these issues.
While a wide range of critical responses to the genre inform my analysis, my argument focuses less on
what feminist critics say about the romance than what they do with it. In effect, I turn the lens back on
the professional or critical reader, asking each participant to choose a favorite romance novel, to explain
briefly why she chose that particular text as representative o f the genre, and to revise the plot so that it
more closely approximates her ideal. I recognize, however, that I am asking a great deal of very busy
people and that my attempt to trouble traditional subject/object relationships comes at a rather high
price. Because I want to be respectful of my colleagues’ time, and because I believe that time
constraints may help reduce the self-censoring impulses that seem unavoidable given the subject matter
I’m asking respondents to contribute no more than two hours to their revision.
I’ll be contacting each participant a few months after collecting and analyzing the romance revisions in
order to share both my preliminary readings and my own revision of Louisa May Alcott’s An Old
Fashioned Girl. I’m hoping that many of my respondents will then comment on my analyses and my
romance revision so that I can attempt a kind of “triangulation”; this portion o f the study is
supplemental, however, and I can assure you that follow-up analytical work will be minimal. In
addition, 1 promise anonymity for all participants unless, of course, acknowledgement is desired. I will
also be happy to share those romance revisions that have been cleared for circulation, and I intend to
communicate my findings to all participants.
If you can spare the time to help me by revising a favorite romance o f your own, you’ll be making a
much-valued contribution to a collective feminist project. I would also love to hear from you if you
have any questions or thoughts regarding my project. And finally, if you’d like more information
before making your decision, I’d be happy to send you my dissertation proposal. I truly appreciate your
time, and the work you have done.
Sincerely,
Mary Beth Tegan
Department of English
University of Southern California
tegan@usc.edu
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Some Loose Guidelines for Revising the Romance
Reflections on the romance from a feminist perspective
Since I began thinking about feminist encounters with the romance novel, I have been
working under the assumption that a critic’s experience with feminist readings of text
would either diminish (or heighten) her romance reading pleasure - and vice-versa -
depending on her negotiation of public and private selves. The statements I’d make, for
instance, in a public exchange about a given romance text would be somewhat different
from the things I’d note or enjoy in a private reading, which might focus on whether there
were enough explicit sadomasochistic sex for my liking, or whether there were sufficient
highly pleasurable sadistic mind games going on, or whether I liked the fact that the
heroine had to compete with some other beautiful, nasty, wealthy woman for the hero and
triumphed. I wouldn’t really want to own these kinds of responses as my public, feminist
self because I believe feminism has taught me to value differently.
At the same time, I don’t want to force any useless dichotomies. When I began to analyze
my own critical and romance reading experiences, I discovered that there are moments
when one reading self encroaches on the other: in writing a paper on Villette for a
conference or encountering a new text for the first time, I still want the kinds of dominant
plots and resolutions I get when I read the romance at home, alone; in reading the romance
I often long to know about the heroine’s friends, or the books she reads, or how she makes
sense of her current desires in the context of past experiences and desires. I also recognize
that my private reading self loves escaping into the romance, enjoys it more even because
I know it’s an experience that is not wholly consistent with the work I do as a feminist
critic.
In the project I’m trying to integrate those public and private reading selves, thwart the
disconnect between our sense of ourselves as public or critical readers and as private
readers of the romance. My primary questions are “how exactly would a feminist
romance read? what particular conventions speak to feminist needs and desires? might
there be elements within the romance plot that help readers to construct a feminist identity
and/or community?” For answers to these questions, I’ll be turning to your revision,
analyzing how your text repeats, redefines, or embraces specific elements in the romance
narrative. In my dissertation, I will discuss the concessions made to convention,
questioning whether the conventions of feminism or the fantasy form predominate.
Suggested Steps:
1 . Begin by choosing a favorite romance text, or consider returning to the novel that
made you long to read more of the same, a method suggested by Biddy Martin’s
explorations in her essay “The Hobo, the Fairy, and the Quarterback.”1 2 1 Please
1 2 1 The romance I’m revising, for instance, is Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Girl, for it is
the first romance narrative I remember losing myself in as a 5th grader, tucked away, out of sight on
my family’s screened-in porch. It made me hunger for more, and I began rifling through my
mother’s shelves, moving from Margaret Mitchell to Victoria Holt to Barbara Taylor Bradford in
rapid succession. I couldn’t get enough of them, and every book I picked up, even well into my 2n d
or 3ld year of graduate school, was a bit of a bore if the primary plot deviated too much from my
romance-inspired expectations.
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identify your choice at the top of your revision and share a few of your reasons for
selecting this particular text. Since I will be reading the text you have chosen
“against” your revision, there is no need to present a summary of the original.
2. It may help to imagine yourself written into the romance structure: where would
you, Elizabeth Guzik - lover of Southern gothic and former sorority girl, fit into
the scene of desire? If you didn’t fit easily into the romance structure as it is,
what kinds of changes would you make in order to imagine yourself in the text
more completely or comfortably? (This was how I conceptualized the revision
process initially, but because I didn’t want to assume that identification was the
only possibility for a romance reader’s experience of the text, I re-framed the
relationship between reader and text to offer a range of reading possibilities.)
3. Revise the romance focusing on whatever elements interest and/or trouble you
most. You might consider the plot (or ending), selecting a new focal character,
changing key characters’ attributes, altering the setting, or addressing any other
textual elements that pique your fancy. I’m asking for broad outlines of character
and action only; unless there is a key speech (along the lines of “Frankly, my dear,
I don’t give a damn”), you probably won’t have time to consider or address
dialogue. Please limit yourself to two hours’ writing: I hope the time constraint
will a) make the task more agreeable and manageable, and b) reduce the various
self-censoring impulses that seem unavoidable given the subject matter.
I will be mailing you a copy of my own romance revision after receiving yours, and I
invite any comments or insights you’d like to share. I had considered sending my revision
along with the guidelines to clarify my requests, but I felt that any kind of “model” would
tend to limit the possible range of responses. My primary objective is to allow room for
personal, idiosyncratic responses to the romance texts, and if patterns develop in
participants’ revisions, they will not be strongly determined by example. After receiving
your romance revision, I will also be sending you a brief questionnaire asking you to
reflect upon the changes you made; my discussion of literary critics’ negotiations between
fantasy and feminism will then begin with respondents’ insights concerning the revision
process.
If I can answer any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I know these
guidelines are rather vague, but I really do want to avoid over-determining participant
responses.
Thank you so much for your time, Elizabeth; I really couldn’t do it without you!
M ary B eth T egan
4631 V i Clarissa Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90027
323/644-7335
tegan@usc.edu
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Sample Post-contact Communication
Dear Professor Regis,
I'm so happy and appreciative that you're willing to participate in my project (allowing for
deadlines which may prevent you from doing so); it's wonderful that you've already been turning
possible scenarios over while driving - I'm a big fan of the car (and shower) as productive space! I
apologize for taking so long to get back to you; I've been out of town since the 1st visiting friends
and family in New England. I also have to tell you; I *loved* your tag line — Reader, I married
him — so much so that I made a note of it in my files. Very funny.
In answer to your questions, I'd be pleased to have you look over my proposal, and will attach the
document file to this email. The text you choose to revise can be *any* that features a love plot
prominently — both 'high' and 'low' examples have been chosen by other participants. (I must say
I'm very curious about the Forster! though Jane Eyre seems to be a front runner so far, and that's
quite interesting too. I haven't read the Hull, but I'm always looking for convincing justifications
for jumping into another novel and your plan with it sounds tantalizing...) When I was
establishing the parameters for the study, one of my committee members suggested that I give
participants a list from which to choose, but I felt strongly that the choices made might be
suggestive (especially if certain texts like Jane Eyre were chosen frequently) and that the revisions
themselves would be more vivid and telling if there were fewer constraints.
I'm also attaching a set of loose guidelines for revising the romance. In response to questions
raised by one o f the participants, I begin the guidelines with a brief explanation of one of my
grounding assumptions about feminists reading the romance. I’d been asked if I believed that “no
romance can be truly feminist” and was therefore assuming that “all romances could use some
feminist ‘touching-up.’” It was a question that gave me pause (and the opportunity to work through
my ideas a bit further), and I’m hoping my introductory comments will help to further clarify my
position and the task itself.
A discussion of the questions and issues that arise during this whole process is an important
component of the ethnographic “thick description” I’d like to present in the final project. For
instance, I think your comment about the imagined revision being 'more so' (and others like it)
frame the endeavor in important ways. Having learned in my first small-scale attempt at this project
that the questions or responses prompted by respondents’ attempts to engage with the model reveal
as much, and often more, than the material generated in direct response to the guidelines I ’ ve set, I
am committed to remaining as open and as flexible as possible. One o f my primary
methodological goals is to attempt a feminist ethnography, one that allows me to utilize the creative
and interpretive talents of the subjects of this study, to thereby trouble the traditional ethnographic
subject/object relationship, and to foreground ethnography as an interpretive act rather than a
descriptive one. If you have any questions or suggestions concerning the means or methods of
adding to our knowledge about romance reading, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I’d very
much like to make these conversations explicit in my dissertation.
I hope to have the revisions collected by the end of September and to begin sending out brief
questionnaires to interested parties (detailed in the attached "loose guidelines") within the first
couple of weeks of October. Thank you so much, again, for responding to my plea. If you would
like hard copies o f these documents sent to your home address, please let me know; I'd be happy to
oblige.
Best wishes,
Mary Beth
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Sample Final Letter to Participants
Dear Professor Cohn,
When I first contacted you almost two years ago, I longed to learn how other
feminist literary critics dealt with what I called “suspect desires”—how they
managed the tensions between their convictions as feminists and the pleasures they
discovered reading romance. I knew I was asking a great deal from my colleagues
at the time, and that was well before I began receiving your enthusiastic responses
to my plea and your romance revisions started trickling in. What you gave frankly
blew me away: your trust, given the risks of self-exposure; the time it took to
reacquaint yourself with your chosen text and rewrite it; the scenarios themselves
which left me giddy with delight and speculative pleasure; and the thoughtful
commentary about your choices and the changes you made. I just want to let you
know how much I appreciate this truly “feminist” act and thank you again for
extending yourself so generously to join in what one of the participants has called
“our project.”
I defended the dissertation last August and have been reworking the material in
order to send it out to various journals and to file it officially with my university.
Your revision helped me in the writing of the fourth chapter, which I originally
presented to my committee in the (rather too) experimental form of a “salon
conversation” that wove fragments of participants’ romance-writing and critical
commentary together around a few key questions and issues. A question I found
particularly compelling was the degree to which feminists could “resist” the
romance structure (or certain elements within it), so I read the changes you made
as indicative of the moment where narrative pleasure shut down, then speculated
as to why the original narrative event might have occasioned your “transformation
from an assenting to a resisting reader.”11 also examined the strategies or
techniques for resisting the romance: satire, inversion, intertextual layering or
genre-bending, and hyperbolic play (i.e. extending the story far beyond the bounds
defined by the original text). When possible, I considered these narrative
techniques alongside the feminist reading strategies (and/or arguments about
romance) I identified in your critical work. Finally, because I’d been exploring the
narrative consequences of a more intimate and immediate encounter between
feminist critic and romance text in the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft and George
Eliot, I was anxious to see whether such resistance was more difficult in the act of
fictional revision than critical “Re-vision.”
I intend to continue researching these questions after I file, but it became clear
during the writing process that my method will need to be revised considerably.
My desire to maintain an elastic generic definition derived both from my sense of
the extended tradition and a belief that certain “crossover” conventions between
1 I am indebted to one participant, Sylvia Kelso, for this wonderfully pithy construction.
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canonical and popular romance might be identified, but a number of my readers
and contacts suggested that I was giving feminist critics too much of an out by
letting participants define romance for themselves. More problematic were my
suggestion that participants rewrite a “favorite romance” (‘what’s the point?’ many
asked) and the too-varied suggestions I made concerning possible approaches to
the task. And, finally, as much as ethnographic goals and methods informed the
project’s design, I can’t frame it as feminist ethnography because I haven’t
compiled adequate contextual data about our community of readers. I’ve therefore
jettisoned the idea of asking participants to comment on my speculative findings
and each other’s revisions, which in hindsight is altogether too much to ask given
the time you’ve already committed.1 2 2 That said, if you would like a copy of the
chapter that makes use of your romance revision as well as a copy of those
revisions I’ve been licensed to share, I would be more than happy to send them
through the mail or by computer file. I would of course appreciate tremendously
any thoughts or criticisms you may have, especially on interpretations of your
romance that jar against your own sense of it.
If you could help me one last time with brief answers to the following questions,
I’ll be able to wrap the first phase of this project up and treat your contribution in
the manner most comfortable to you.1 2 3
Thank you so much for everything,
Mary Beth Tegan
1221 did, however, hold a dinner party for local participants who were able to read each other’s
romance revisions before we gathered to discuss the changes, and this conversation (which I taped)
is replicated to some extent in the revised chapter.
1 2 3 There are a total of 7 wrap-up questions, but I have been able to glean some of the information I
need from your emails, attached commentary, or criticism published elsewhere.
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Final Questionnaire for Participants
1. May I reproduce your romance revision in its entirety for the dissertation
and any subsequent publications?
2. Do you desire anonymity in the dissertation on record? Do you desire
anonymity if material is published in a journal or book?
3. Have you ever read popular romance novels for pleasure? Do you still? If
you have in the past or still do, how frequently? Is romance reading
something you are open about with your colleagues?
4. Have you written critically on the text you chose to rewrite? What other
romance texts (popular or canonical) have you written on?
5. In what way was the process or feeling of revising your romance different
from that when writing criticism about the form?
6. Do you perceive a conflict between feminism and romance? If so, how
would you describe it?
7. When revising your romance, which instructions did you follow (e.g. did
you revise the romance with an eye to how yon would function within the
scene of desire? Or did you revise the text by focusing on those elements
that interested and/or troubled you most?
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3 0 8
Appendix B: Romance Revisions
Jane X, Beth Binggelli
The road from the village was a poor one, rutted and overgrown, not the kind of
welcome to a grand house one might expect. Thomfield Hall itself crouched in the
dark folds of an ashen hillside, seeming to situate itself for neither comfort nor
aspect.
Mr. Fairfax, the pink pudding of a housekeeper with whom they had corresponded,
opened the heavy door. “May I help you?” he asked.
“I’m Jane X,” responded loudly, assuming from his appearance that the pudding
likely suffered from a broad range of sensory infirmities. Fairfax eyed Jane X’s
platinum blonde hair, a shade with which he was completely unfamiliar, her torn
fishnet stockings revealing a good cubit of exposed leg, and her eccentric shift,
which seemed to have been hastily composed of an ancient corset and a tattered
Flanders lace pillowcase. Her eyes were edged in burnt cork in the manner of an
Egyptian princess. Fairfax was, momentarily, struck dumb.
“I’m sorry,” he replied after recovering himself. “Mr. Rochester is awaiting a Jane
Eyre. ”
“That’s us,” Jane X replied, gesturing toward the tour bus behind her on the gravel
drive. “ Jane Eyre, proto-punk girl band.”
“There are others?”
“Surely, you wouldn’t expect me to venture here unescorted?” Jane X replied.
“Let me introduce them.” A troop of sexy, bedraggled women lurched down the
stairs of the bus, led by a dark, diminutive dreadlocked chick with fairy wings
stapled to her canvas jacket. “That’s Amy, lead guitar,” Jane said. Amy blinked
into the bright light and took a quick swig off a hip flask. A tall, Amazonian
woman was next: she was clad entirely in leather and a bronze breastplate. Fairfax
noted the broadsword that swung at her side. “The tall one’s Beth: base. And the
one with the inky sleeves balancing the stack of books on her head is Jo—she’s
our band archivist and keyboarder.” A plump, older woman with braids nearly
reaching the ground followed. Morning glories, carefully gathered from the
roadside, had been twisted into her hair. “That’s Marmee, drums,” Jane said
proudly. “We never go anywhere without her. We left Meg at home, though,
because she was being tedious.”
A tiny pale girl in a tutu peered out of the house from behind Fairfax. “Do you
need any roadies?” she asked Jane in a heavy French accent.
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“Oh, mais oui, ” Jane replied warmly. Little Adele pirouetted with pleasure.
“You’ll have to stop doing that, though,” Jane said. Adele understood.
Fairfax found rooms for all the band and allowed Jane X, lead singer, to be led into
the drawing room where Mr. Rochester was waiting. “You’re plain,” he said,
before she had taken a chair.
“You’re a moody bastard and no great shakes yourself,” Jane said, lighting a
cigarette and flicking the match at his silk cravat. “Go ahead, face something
reflective.”
“I advertised for a governess. ”
“Check the ad, Chester, because it says, ‘WANTED: GOVERNANCE.’ That’s
what we’re here to supply.”
“Your independent and haughty spirit intrigues me,” he said, inching forward.
“Despite numerous obstacles obvious and concealed, I am strangely attracted to
you.”
“So much for being plain,” Jane said. Just then Fairfax ushered in a statuesque
woman in a tiara and silver evening gown. When her glance settled on Jane, she
raised an eyebrow. “Good Evening, Edward,” she said.
“Are you Blanche,” Jane asked the woman, “Blanche Ingram of thrasher group
North Country Gold Diggers? ”
Blanche was suddenly disarmed. “Why yes! Most people don’t recognize me—
I’m just—just the tambourine girl.”
“Just nothing!” Jane exclaimed, rushing forward and taking her hand. “You play
hella good tambourine! You and that right hip of yours are legend back at
Lowood, this communal house I used to live in. Lots of the girls had etchings of
NCGD in their prayer books.”
Blanche gaped. “Gosh! I had no idea. Here I was trailing after this jerk for some
coin when I could make more on my own with my right hip.”
Jane nodded. “Absolutely. You can jam with the band later— Jane Eyre is
upstairs.”
“No shit! I’m there!” Blanche turned to leave, then turned back, walked up
quickly to Rochester, removed the tiara from her ebony tresses and placed it on his
head. She quickly exited the room.
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After a moment of stunned silence, Rochester flung the tiara from his head,
dashing it up against the far wall and upsetting a small porcelain obelisk. He
gazed into the fire and said in a low voice, “Now that you have so skillfully
eliminated your obstacle, I will marry you, Jane X.” Just then a pained wail went
up through the house, echoing through the stone fireplace.
“I would imagine that’ s another ‘obstacle,’” Jane X said angrily, stubbing out her
cigarette in a garish carpet likely acquired through colonial plunder. “Now give
me the key!”
Rochester turned white. “What are you talking about?”
She grabbed him by the lapel, shook him and snarled. “We heard someone
playing the steel drums on our drive up, and it would seem well within your
character to lock a wife up from the West Indies in your attic. I understand that
this may be fashionable among brooding morose types, but it is also criminal.
Now, surrender the key or I will extract it from your person myself, in such a way
that it is unlikely to be surreptitiously titillating.”
Rochester surrendered it. Once Bertha Rochester was freed and given a hearty
meal as prepared by Fairfax and Rochester—under the guidance of Beth’s
sword—she felt much better and joined the jam session, which went well into the
night. Fairfax and Rochester sat in a dark corner of the room and observed the
women from a distance. When he found the courage, Rochester approached Jane
X during a break. She was drenched in sweat from her exertions, her hair hanging
in loose snakes around her shoulders, her teeth smeared with lip rouge, her voice
raspy from screaming lyrics. She smelled, he thought, like an earthy combination
of Thornfield’s dank, thrice-flooded root cellar, old Spanish port wine, and a
bounding wooly dog. In her presence he had a sensation he never had before: he
felt himself fall away, felt his substance evaporating to a fine mist, burning in a
crucible to a smoke that coiled around the ceiling and bled through the windows to
the ashen hills outside. Only this woman had made him feel so incomplete, so
unfulfilled, so imperfect. Every fantasy of his own mastery in the steaming stew
pot of her presence boiled away to nothingness. Jane smiled at Rochester’s
rapturous face and asked him to hold her chewed gum during sets. He cradled it
like a relic. That night he finally set down a weight that had burdened and dragged
him down his whole life, and in his lightness now appeared, in Jane’s eyes, kinda
cute. Just before finishing the last set, she slipped her room key in his hand.
Rochester was, for all practical purposes a virgin, Jane quickly discovered.
Despite his marriage to Bertha, his history with Adele’s mother and, more
recently, Blanche, the poor boy hardly knew which way was up—literally. Jane
was patient, though, and found the whole experience charming. He was, in her
arms, a boy again, new to the world, ushered into the bright possibilities of a
young planet. He tried on her corset and let her lacquer his nails. He was left
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breathless with knowledge of the fantastic new geographies of his own anatomy.
For her, it was a reasonably good lay; while awkward, he had admirable stamina
and a positive work ethic—two qualities she could work with. Rochester awoke
alone, and Jane’s scent was all over him. In the gray morning light, he heard the
tour bus engine turn over.
He ran down the stairs and outside in his nightshirt. “Jane! Where are you going?
I want you to be my wife!”
Jane opened the bus doors and leaned down from the driver’s seat. “Sorry, I’d
make a crappy wife. Besides, Bertha here has told us stories about being Mrs.
Rochester, and I’m not too fond of attics. But last night was cool, and I’ll
definitely swing by again.” She gave him a thumbs-up. He felt it insincere.
“But in my dreams I heard you calling out to me!” Rochester wept, his lacquered
toes clenching the damp morning grass.
“That was just Adele testing our amps for us this morning. We’ve got to hit the
road for a gig at the St. John Rivers Arena up north. They really need some
governance up there, too.” Jane shut the door on a still weeping Rochester and
headed up the gravel drive.
“Jeez, what was he so bent about?” Jo asked.
Jane smiled. “Jo . . . I buried him.”
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The last paragraph of the novel The Princess o f Cleves, Nancy K. Miller
Madame de Cleves lived in a manner that gave no indication she would ever
return. She spent part of the year in this convent and the rest at home. She lived in
retreat with more saintly occupations to busy her than those in the most austere
religious orders. The short life left to her afforded inimitable examples of virtue.
Madame de Cleves lived in a manner that gave no indication she would ever
return. She invited a few of her friends, who were also young widows, to spend
part of the year with her in her home and in her country estate in the south of
France. Madame de Bauffremont, Madame de Longueville, and Madame de
L’Espinasse were happy to join the Princess and escape from their own loneliness
for a few months of every year. The young women, who were all beautiful as well
as talented, enjoyed the time they spent together away from the demands and the
gossip of the court. In both residences, the houses were large enough for each
woman to have a separate apartment, with living quarters for her servants, as well
as a study. The women decided to spend the mornings alone, reading and writing,
but to come together in the afternoons for shared activities. Depending on the
weather, they would ride horses or play music indoors. They would separate again
for a few hours before dinner to pursue the arts. Each woman played a musical
instrument and painted. At dinner, which in the warm summer months, was held
out of doors, the women would discuss their works in progress—Madame de
Cleves was writing a novel about a hopeless relationship between a man and a
woman at the court—and reminisce. They loved to talk about marriage and how
boring it was; Madame de Longueville and Madame de L’Espinasse said they
hoped their daughters would never marry but they were resigned to the likelihood
that they would. Often, friends living on nearby estates would join them after
dinner for music or long walks along paths that led from the surrounding forest to
the river. Invitations to the house were never turned down because everyone knew
that to enter this world meant entering a world of exceptional pleasure.
Sometimes, the friends brought Madame de Cleves news of the Duke de Nemours,
who never failed to try and get them to deliver a letter, even though they always
refused. At the beginning, she would flush angrily and tell them she didn’t want to
hear about him. But after a while, she found that she perversely enjoyed hearing
about his adventures, and finally—a few years later— about his marriage to a very
young, extremely blond, princess who had just come to the court. She never
stopped feeling a sharp stab of pain and a rush of desire at the sound of his name,
but she came to tolerate the stories because they confirmed her in her conviction
that although she believed that he had loved her for many years—and maybe still
did—that if they had married, their love, as she told him when they parted, would
not have protected her from his infidelities. There was something sad about being
right, nonetheless it was better than suffering the agonies of jealousy. When she
was alone, she allowed herself to look at his portrait, but instead of weeping as she
did in the early days of their passion, she imagined the scene as part of her novel.
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The women lived in harmony for almost twenty years. Madame de Cleves
published her novel anonymously. Readers suspected that she was the author but
she never admitted this publicly and her friends never betrayed her. They enjoyed
reading the reviews, especially the ones that said the novel could only have been
written by a man. One day, when she was riding by herself, her horse stumbled
and Madame de Cleves took a bad fall, even though she was an excellent rider.
Despite the best of care, she only lived a few days after the accident. Her friends
stayed by her bedside, seeing to her every need. The Duke de Nemours sent
flowers everyday and the friends placed them in her room. Madame de Cleves
never admitted that she knew who had sent the flowers but she allowed herself to
enjoy their beauty—and the thought of their sender.
After her death, the women continued to visit the house, which the Princess had
bequeathed to them and their daughters. Once a year, they gathered to read aloud
from the novel and remember their remarkable friend.
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3 1 4
Gone With the Wind, Jan Cohn
Back to the question of revising Gone With the Wind. I have two proposals. First, and
from a point of view perhaps less interesting to you, I would consider ending the novel
with Scarlett's return from Atlanta to Tara. The Scarlett who dominates the second half
of the novel is not a character for whom I feel the same sympathy as I do in the earlier
portions of the story. There are certainly some wonderful scenes in the post-war section
of the novel, but the ever-richer and ever-harder Scarlett is a heroine of some kind of
fiction other than romance. (I realize that some of these ideas are expressed in the
analysis o f Gone With the Wind in my Romance and the Erotics o f Property, but I have
been scrupulous in not rereading my work before responding to your request.) So, if the
book ended with the return to Tara, there would have to be some way for the romance
between Scarlett and Rhett to come to a happy ending. How?
Well, at this point Rhett has certainly reached the point of conversion necessary for
romance heroes. He demonstrates his love for the heroine with the heroic rescue, his
nurturing aspect with his care for post-partum Melanie, and his excellent character - past
appearances to the contrary—by going off to join the failing Confederacy. With the
hero so nicely prepared for the happy ending, there is only the heroine to attend to...and
of course the state of the heroine's world, Tara (and the rest of the Old South).
Mitchell's brilliance, at least one aspect of it, is the way in which she ties Scarlett to the
South, both in its old romantic glamour and in its desperate fight for survival after the
war. In other words, Scarlett's symbolic tie to the South would somehow have to be
severed if she were to
fall into Rhett's arms while Atlanta is in flames and Tara in ruins. And if that tie cannot
be severed, then Tara would have to have survived Sherman's march better than it did.
Perhaps Scarlett could return to her home and find her mother alive and her father
striving courageously to manage the plantation and to feed the folks remaining there. If
that were the case, Scarlett would have less of a struggle, or at least she would not be so
alone in that struggle.
Having said that, here's a possible revision. Rhett takes Scarlett all the way to Tara
rather than leaving her at the bridge, declares his love, and leaves for the war. Scarlett,
finding her home and family intact, admits her love for Rhett, and the book ends with
the promise of a happy ending once the war is over.
That attempt at revision demonstrates without question that I am a lousy romance
writer! Mitchell's construction of the end of the first part of the novel is much more
compelling—and more realistic, too—than my revision.
My second proposed revision—or set of revisions—takes into account the novel as a
whole, including the post-war section. Considered in the terms of romance, the problem
is that the hero and heroine, though married, have not achieved a happy ending, have not
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admitted their mutual love. What I want here is a "real" happy ending, Rhett and
Scarlett contentedly—and
Passionately—in each other's arms. In order for that to happen, Scarlett will have to
give up her infatuation with Ashley and, perhaps equally important though not
emphasized as much in the structure of the story (the way in which Melanie's death
immediately precedes the ending of the novel), the death of Bonnie Blue cannot take
place, symbolizing as it does the failure and infertility of this union. That death is easily
handled in revision; just eliminate it. (I don't think it would be much of a loss; this is
hardly the strongest part of the novel.)
In regard to the more significant revision, I want to rearrange things so that Scarlett can
outgrow her feelings for Ashley before it is too late—in time for a happy ending to take
place. As the novel stands Melanie's death-bed scene serves to bring Scarlett to her
senses; she realizes that she loves Rhett and not Ashley. That's fine, of course, but it's
too late.
The scene that should bring Scarlett to her senses takes place when Rhett carries her to
her bed and—here come all the asterisks that indicate wild, passionate sex. That sex
should, of course, cement their love or, if one thinks that Scarlett does love Rhett and is
simply too besotted with her memories to recognize this, it should make her understand
that Rhett is indeed her true love. (That is, I imagine, the point. Romance heroines
cannot have wild, passionate sex with men they don't love.) Of course, everything goes
wrong: Rhett is abashed and Scarlett, now ready to fall permanently into his arms, is
dismayed and hurt by his brusqueness. (This scene, by the way, makes me crazy! Here
is where I do want that happy ending.) Another problem with this scene is that it comes
too early in the novel, before Melanie's death and thus before it is time for the
resolution.
Here, then, is my revision. Melanie is dying and Scarlett attends her death-bed,
learning—as she does in Mitchell's version—that she does indeed love Rhett. Again, as
in the original, she rushes home. But instead of finding Rhett angry, fed up, and
prepared to leave her, she finds no one there. Scarlett broods and paces, waiting for
Rhett. But no drinking, no nipping brandy! She should, though, become somewhat
distraught, as revealed in her hair and clothing. In other words, her defenses are down.
Rhett returns and Scarlett's disarray, and dishabille, awakens both his sympathy and his
lust. At this point, he carries her up
the stars for that asterisked scene, and then everyone lives happily ever after.
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Rewriting the Bad Twin, a revision of
Double Love, from the Sweet Valley High series, Julia Colyar
“[Jessica] placed her hands lightly on his shoulders and swayed close to [Todd].
‘Oh, Todd,’ she breathed, closing her eyes and raising her face for a kiss.
But the kiss, when it came, was nothing like what she’d expected. Jessica’s heart went
into a tailspin. A kiss on the cheek! Like he was her brother, for cripe’s sake! She’d
never been so humiliated in her entire life!
And he was gone.
‘You creep!’ Jessica said aloud as she stood there by herself. ‘Todd Wilkins, I swear I’ll
get even with you if it’s the last thing I ever do!”’ {Double Love, p. 127)
— or—
Jessica placed her hands lightly on his shoulders and swayed close to Todd. For the first
time that evening, she looked directly into his brown eyes. And she stopped. He doesn ’ t
have feelings for me, she suddenly thought. All night long, h e’ s been looking at
Elizabethl
She turned her face and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for a nice evening, Todd,” she
said as she took a step back. “But I was just thinking—shouldn’t you be with Elizabeth
right now?”
Elizabeth, back early from the dance and already in bed, turned on her light when
she heard Jessica come in the front door. She pulled back her covers and walked to
her bedroom door. “I hope Jessica had a good time,” she thought to herself. “Todd
is such a sweet and good-looking guy!”
Jessica knocked on Elizabeth’s bedroom door just as her twin was opening it. “Can
we talk for a minute, Liz?” she asked. “I’ve been thinking...”
“Sure, Jess. Tell me all about it. I’ll bet you had one fabulous time tonight!”
“Fabulous?” Jessica moved and sat down on Elizabeth’s bed. She smiled at her
twin.
“Well, of course. An evening with Todd. Good-looking, good dancer, super-nice
guy. What more could you want?”
“I guess it’s really more a question of what Todd wants...” Jessica began.
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“What do you mean?” Elizabeth furrowed her brow and stared at Jess. “What are
you talking about?”
As Jessica looked across the room at her sister, she knew needed to come clean, to
tell Elizabeth everything. She couldn’t imagine keeping Elizabeth and Todd apart
any longer. What had she been thinking? Why was competing with her sister for a
guy? Elizabeth was her best friend! She had to make everything right again.
“Elizabeth, don’t be mad at me.. .Todd doesn’t want me, he wants you. I’ve been
selfish and jealous, and I tried to make him fall in love with me. But you. You’re
the one he should be with.”
“You mean, all along, Todd liked me?” Elizabeth squeaked? She could hardly
catch her breath.
“Well, you can ask him. He’s downstairs right now, waiting to talk to you. I’m so
sorry Liz; I never should have manipulated Todd, and I really shouldn’t have lied
to you.”
Elizabeth’s heart skipped a beat. What, she thought? But I ’ m in my pajamas, my
hair is a mess! Jessica, who knew what her twin was thinking, said: “don’t worry
about your hair. You look beautiful, as always. Go downstairs.”
Elizabeth stopped to hug her sister, but then raced out of her room. Todd stood in
the foyer; he looked up at her as she came down the stairs.
Jess sat on Elizabeth’s bed for a while, thinking about the dance and the events of
the past week. How complicated! she thought. She reached up and took off her
earrings, then shrugged her shoulders. When she got up and walked to her own
bedroom, she glanced downstairs. Todd and Elizabeth stood hand-in-hand. Yes,
she thought. This is right.
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Revision of Fast Women (I), Sylvia Kelso
SYNOPSIS (MAIN STRAND)
Nell, Suze (Susannah) and Margie have each at some stage married one of the
Dysart brothers, white collar professionals in an Ohio city, but all three women
either have or will become divorced/ separated. Margie is also the daughter of
Trevor Ogilvie, patriarch of the Dysart and Ogilvie law firm. When the story opens
her husband Stewart Dysart has long since embezzled money from the firm and
disappeared. Nell’s husband Tim Dysart has just divorced her after 22 years in
their top-flight advertising agency. Jack Dysart, the handsome and amoral senior
legal partner, has made Suze his third trophy wife, but she is finding herself stifled
by his need to keep her as a jobless young thing when she is now 32.
Still reeling from her divorce, Nell goes for a job interview as secretary to Gabe
McKenzie, head of a private inquiry agency closely connected with Dysart and
Ogilvie. Gabe’s father Patrick was a crony of Trevor Ogilvie, and the old boy
network has masterminded Nell’s interview. Gabe’s previous secretary has
ostensibly suffered a back injury, so the job is spelt out as only temporary.
However, Nell quickly finds that “Lynnie” has been swindling the agency on petty
cash and cleaners’ fees, and her substitution becomes permanent.
Nell also finds Gabe attractive, but they clash more and more fiercely as the state
of the agency impels her to remedy matters, from cleaning the bathroom to
replacing the office furniture to taking the law into her own hands over a dog
whose owner is supposedly abusing it. Despite the friction Nell is invigorated by
the work and begins to lose the numbness of her post-divorce period, even having
a one-night stand with Riley, Gabe’s cousin and partner. Gabe is equally
exasperated and attracted, and eventually they become lovers on the office floor at
New Year’s Eve. Nell finds in Gabe the man she has always wanted, a man who
can stand up to her rather than forcing her to become passive, as her husband did, a
man who, when she pushes, will push right back.
Gabe, however, is increasingly maddened by Nell’s refusal to stop changing
things, and the repeated cycle of fight, sex, reconciliation, win-for-Nell. As Riley
tells Suze, “[Hej’s a quiet kind of guy, he wasn’t bom to be that mad or that
happy” (404). Gabe and Riley’s conversations offer the male perspective. Nell,
Gabe says, makes him understand why men punch women. “[Wjhen you can’t
make her do what you need her to do, and you can’t live without her (386)
Meanwhile Suze and Margie have become involved in office life, Suze acting as a
part-time “decoy” to trap faithless husbands, Margie managing the tea-shop next
door, owned by Gabe’s ex but still very friendly wife Chloe. Suze’s husband Jack
makes her stop work, but Margie defies her long-time lover - also an accountant at
Dysart and Ogilvie - and keeps working part-time. A further complication is the
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hint of dirty secrets in the agency’s past, where Gabe’s father has apparently
helped Trevor Ogilvie cover up something as dangerous as the murder of Margie’ s
mother, Helena, and been paid with a dollar sale for Gabe’s treasured ‘70s
Porsche. As Suze’s marriage finally founders and she begins to develop an interest
in Riley, Nell and Gabe discover most of Helena’s diamonds hidden in the office
couch where they have just been making love. Trevor Ogilvie explains that
Stewart Dysart actually killed Margie’s mother and stole some of the diamonds,
but Gabe’s father helped cover it up. He sees nothing wrong in any of this, since,
he says, Helena would have bankrupted the law firm for her divorce settlement.
At this point Nell and Gabe have their final disastrous clash over a change to the
agency business cards, Gabe calls Nell “just a secretary” (436), and she quits.
Confiding in Suze, she asks her to become a business partner in some enterprise,
Suze’s choice, with Nell as her office manager.
ORIGINAL
Suze cannot think of an independent business project for the two women, but she
takes over Nell’s job in the office and her relationship with Riley develops. She
decides that she really wants to work for the firm as a researcher and operative, the
way Riley himself does. Jack Dysart offers Nell a makework job in the law firm,
but she uses the chance to research their records, and finds a tie between Stewart
Dysart and the now mysteriously dead Lynnie. Meanwhile Nell’s son Jason has
fallen in love with Gabe’s daughter Lu, who pressures him to get married, and Nell
has to sell some of her valuable china collection to pay for the ring. Suze and Riley
get together, and Suze and Nell discover that Stewart is actually dead, probably
killed by one of his brothers or his father-in-law, and stashed in Margie’s basement
freezer. The body disappears before they can take it to the police, and someone
burns Nell’s apartment to the ground, destroying the rest of her china, though she
and her dog escape. Next, however, she is trapped by Trevor Ogilvie at the office,
where he tells her that the mysterious search was for a letter that Gabe’s father left,
outlining the old scandal, which Riley’s mother, the then secretary, filed wrongly.
Having got it from the records in an antique freeze-room, he locks Nell in and
leaves, but he mishandles Gabe’s Porsche and crashes, and Gabe rescues Nell in
time to save her life.
With Suze and Riley together, Margie finally separated from her accountant, Lu
convinced by her father’s warnings about his own mistakes not to force Jason into
marriage, and the villains either locked up or discredited, Gabe proposes to Nell,
saying that he has become convinced that she is as necessary to the agency as he
is, because if the letter had not been misfiled none of the ensuing chaos could have
happened. He has also bought back her remaining china. He sketches a fixture
where she has half of his half of the agency, and Suze takes half of Riley’s, and
with this economic and romantic security, Nell accepts the “dare.” “Marriage is a
gamble and a snare and an invitation to pain” she thinks, and takes it anyhow.
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VARIATION 1
Suze turns down the offer of business partnership and tells Nell she is still thinking
as a support person. Nell wails that she can’t think of a project, and Suze says,
You’re an office manager, right? You organize messy offices, right? It’s cost you
your marriage, your husband, and now your lover, because you can’t let well alone
until it’s perfect. Well, start a business fixing up messy offices. Be an office
management consultant. Fix them, charge exorbitant rates for it, and then get out.
After considerable qualms, Nell decides to try. When Jack Dysart offers her a job,
she tells him she will advise on office organization, but nothing else. Pressured by
the need to conceal the past, Jack agrees. Nell uses the time to check records for
other possible clients. Finding a candidate firm currently advertising for a
secretary, Nell applies, re-organises their office, asks them for a reference and has
three more possible clients mentioned immediately.
Meanwhile Suze and Riley are becoming involved, Gabe is missing Nell badly but
more determined than ever not to ask her back, and the pressure of the scandal
increases. Someone’s attempt to search Gabe’s office is foiled by Suze and Riley
accidentally returning at the wrong time. A couple of nights later Nell’s flat is
torched.
Nell and her dog escape, but the china is destroyed. Suze, Riley and Gabe all
arrive in the aftermath, and Gabe persuades Nell, who is as shaken as he is, to stay
in his apartment above the agency, at least for the night. They end up in bed after a
distraught encounter and a passionate reconciliation, but when Gabe wants Nell to
come back, take her old job, and offers to put up with whatever changes she wants
to make, Nell says, No. It would only reverse the situation, she says, and Gabe
would end by hating her as she now hates her ex-husband.
Nell goes back to work at her current client’s office, and in their records chances
on a photo of Lynnie the ex-secretary with Stewart Dysart. She knows Gabe and
Riley must see it. She calls their office and sets up a meeting, but Trevor Ogilvie
comes in just after she leaves, and sees the photograph on Gabe’s desk. Realising
the game is up, he finds a pretext to lure Gabe into the freezer-room, holds him up
with a gun, makes him fetch out the incriminating letter, and locks him in to die.
As he leaves he crashes the Porsche. Suze and Riley see the wreck as they leave
work, and Suze calls Nell. Nell thinks Gabe has been killed and rushes to the
scene, but when she sees Trevor Ogilvie being extricated from the wreck she
guesses what has happened and races back to the office, in time to rescue Gabe.
In the ensuing reunion, Nell realizes that she cannot give up Gabe as well as the
job. When Gabe, equally determined not to lose her, offers marriage and a share in
the partnership, she says, Yes, I will marry you, but I’m keeping my own business.
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I’ll train your new secretary - and you’d better not sleep with her like you did with
me - but I’ll never be anyone’s secretary again.
VARIATION 2
Nell confides her troubles to Suze just before Thanksgiving. Things are still
undecided when Suze begs Nell to come to Thanksgiving dinner, to offer some
leavening among her husband Jack, her mother-in-law, and Nell’s ex-husband and
his new wife. Afterwards Nell and Suze are sharing girl-talk and leftovers in the
kitchen when Suze suggests that, with both their love lives a disaster, they ought to
try lesbian love instead. Nell agrees, jokingly, that it might be a good idea, in case
there ever is a plague and all the men die. But when they kiss, they discover that it
is more than a joke.
Nell goes back to work next day distraught, divided and in chronic disbelief. She
cannot believe she has made love to another woman. She can see no way to live
her current life and fit a woman lover into it, and no way she could give Suze up.
Suze too has been thoroughly shaken by the feelings they have roused. While Nell
is still reeling, her ex-husband calls, wanting a meeting, where he and his new wife
attempt to make Nell pay for trashing his office when she found he had been
cheating on her. Nell takes Suze for support, Suze warns Gabe and Riley, and they
turn up too. In the course of exchanging insults, Nell finds herself claiming she has
slept with everyone at the table, excluding the new wife but including Suze. She
and Suze are angry enough to brazen it out, and Gabe and Riley are actually
excited by the idea, Gabe to the point where he whisks Nell off back to bed.
At a girls’ breakfast Margie asks about the scene, and Nell and Suze jokingly
claim they went all the way, to find what they would do if a plague killed all the
men. At this the placid Margie stuns Nell and Suze by observing that she would go
to New York and find her own lesbian lover, Janice, who taught her more about
sex than anyone.
While both women try to ignore or refuse the new perspectives opening in their
lives, the search for the mysterious secret at the agency escalates to its finale. But
at the last, it is Nell who Trevor Ogilvie forces to find the missing letter, and
leaves locked in the freezer-room. And it is Suze, when Nell does not arrive at
Margie’s place after the discovery of Stewart’s body, who realizes what must have
happened. She rushes to the office, which is locked, but she bangs on the door
until she fetches Riley from the other apartment upstairs. When he unlocks the
freezer door, the ensuing scene between Nell and Suze cannot be misread.
Riley is devastated. Gabe is furious and devastated. Suze’s husband Jack is furious
and devastated and wants to make the scandal of all time, but is gagged by the
revelation of the Dysart-Ogilvie crimes. Margie, busily selling off her china on E-
Bay after brushing off her accountant lover, says mildly, “We could always go to
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New York and find Janice.” Battered by conflicting desires, family disbelief, and
the uproar of a major scandal, Nell and Suze find themselves saying, “Why not?”
Nell’s son Jason lets the word slip to Gabe’s daughter Lu, who tells Gabe. Gabe
and Riley descend on the women as they are packing. After a long and desperate
confrontation, Suze and Nell reach a compromise. “We’re leaving,” Suze tells the
men, “but perhaps not permanently. We need time to sort this out. To sort
ourselves out. And to let you sort yourselves out. We’re flying to New York with
Margie, tonight. Janice is going to introduce to her Wiccan coven. They’re
Eclectic tradition, they welcome lesbians. We’re planning to stay a while. All three
of us. But it needn’t be forever. If you decide you want us back - all three of us -
you can let us know.”
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3 23
Anne, a Revision of The Thornbirds
“Damn!” Anne cursed as the stack of plates clattered noisily to the floor. Having
lived here on Drogheda for the last several years she knew the broken dishes were
not going to be an issue. She was merely castigating her own body for its
unrelenting clumsiness. Though her bitterness had largely subsided, emerging
now only in blackly humorous jokes about crippled legs and crutches, the wounds
left by the polio were still occasionally quite raw. It was, of course the event that
both took away the life she had envisioned and eventually helped her to carve out a
new one. Picking up the pieces of the broken dishes she recalled that time in her
life, almost as vividly as if it were yesterday. She remembered the agonized
screaming, the blood, the pungent smells of the births she’d attended as a child
with her mother, the county’s midwife.
Often they’d have to travel miles on horseback or in a carriage, just the two of
them, mum and Annie, out into the outback at night, or in the sweltering heat of
the day, or in the downpours of the rainy season. At first Annie had been terribly
frightened by all of the unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells, the worried families
looking to her, at eight or nine years old, for some kind of reassurance. Peter
Turner must have been in his fifties when his young wife went into labor with their
first child. He paced frantically, with nervous jutting hands, making and drinking
pot after pot of strong coffee. And when she cried out in pain in the next room
Peter looked to Annie with undisguised panic in his eyes. Marjanne had been a bit
ill lately. She’d been feeling feverish and weak. Mother assured him that it would
be alright, that it would be over soon and they would have a brand new baby to
look after. But as the night wore on and his wife’s cries became weaker, his eyes
took on a look of fixed defeat, as if he were anticipating the worst. By dawn the
big rough man was clinging in tears, his whole muscular body wracked with sobs,
to this small child, begging for hope that even she was no longer able to provide.
Periodically her mother would emerge from the back room to bark orders or to
give abrupt reports. The baby wouldn’t turn. Marjanne was losing her strength. It
was just after dawn when her mother had emerged from the room and requested
that Annie help her. This, she knew, was not typical. Annie was almost never
allowed into the room. So she entered slowly, being careful to avoid getting in her
mother’s way, and approached the bed, which had gone dark with blood and so
much straining. And she watched soundlessly as her mother took the knife,
curiously uncleaned, though her mother was usually fastidious in her cleanliness,
and made a large incision in the woman’s abdomen. Marjanne did not cry out. If
fact, Marjanne seemed hardly to react at all. Annie’s mother, who was usually
curt, became even more so, acting as if her young daughter was a fully trained
assistant, ordering her to pull back here, or mop up the pooling blood there. Annie
watched disconnectedly as her mother cut, revealing different layers of unique
color and texture. When she finally pulled the baby out Annie could see through
the blood and other stuff that covered it that he was a dusky bluish color. All her
attention was focused on the baby as her mother cleaned his mouth out and used
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all of her tricks to get him to cry. It seemed like an eternity as she watched her
mother with that little thing. It was so small and so blue. It didn’t even look like a
baby. The eternity went on and Annie’s attention drifted onto Marjanne Turner.
Her blonde hair was spread out on the pillow in disarray; her mouth, with its
perfectly straight teeth, hung open, and her blue-green eyes stared vacantly at the
ceiling. Her abdomen was spread open; there was no more bleeding. The baby
began crying weakly, as though sobbing.
No one spoke as they cleaned up and prepared to leave. Anne carried the tiny
baby out into the main room to where Peter stood, dazed and desperate. Her
mother merely walked past the man, not looking at him. His pleading eyes held
Anne’s as she kissed the child lightly, then handed it to him and walked away,
keeping her eyes on his until the door obstructed her view.
It was exactly three weeks later when she awoke with a fever and weakness so
profound she couldn’t even get up from her bed. For weeks it went on, the pain in
her legs increasing. Her mother could do nothing. The doctor, fetched from his a
neighboring farm nearly 40 miles away, could do nothing. They spoke in hushed
tones, periodically risking a glance back toward Anne, who was unable to hear
their words, but knew all she needed to from their faces. And she never again got
out of bed without assistance, from her mother, the dorm mother, then later her
husband. The shriveled legs, the braces, and crutches, it seemed to her, were the
marks of her own failure.
The solitude of Anne’s long recovery period was broken by the books brought
home by her mother. Few words came out of her, but she devoured them as if she
drew her very life from the words of the books she read. And she believed that
any book suitable for her was suitable for her child. Children didn’t need to be
protected; they need to learn about the world, and about people. And Anne came
to devour these books with almost the same vigor as her mother. What her body
refused to do, her mind took up with ease.
She collected the largest of the broken pieces of glassware, kicking some of the
smaller ones over to the corner. Muttering curses under her breath Anne made her
way back out into the main room where everyone was busily setting up
decorations for Christmas. The maids and Meggie worked on the tree while
Justine pretended to be helping to set up the table decorations. Fee, of course, sat
hunched over her books, making certain that each of the station’s expenses was
accounted for to the last penny. She looked as though she was thoroughly
immersed in the accounts, but Anne knew that the woman was keenly aware of
every movement and every snipet of conversation in the room. Meggie had told
her stories of her mother when she had lived at Himmelhoch, how she had
weathered the time in the shabby head stockman’s house, overseen the move into
the big house, held the family together after one tragedy after another, but Anne
suspected that Meggie really did not know her. Daughters are often so blind about
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their mothers. Meggie didn’t truly know Fee, and Fee didn’t know her daughter.
And the cycle was repeated with Meggie and Justine as well. And Anne just
observed from her privileged position as an outsider, one who had been taken in
and allowed access to the intricate workings of the family. Or was she now a part
of that family?
When Meggie had come to live at Himmelhoch, Anne had been struck by both her
beauty and her determinedness. And that Luke had treated her horribly. She often
wondered what could possibly have possessed him to keep away from such a
young lovely wife, who obviously wanted to be with him. She had even helped
Meggie with her plan to trick Luke into having a child. But Meggie’s sadness was
always more than just Luke’s abandonment. When she’d gone into labor with
Justine and lay calling out for someone called Ralph she thought she’d found the
source of the unhappiness. And Anne continued to believe that for many years,
even sending Meggie away to be with him. Anne had looked at Ralph with a kind
of detached disdain. He was just so inadequate, a man who refused to be a man, a
priest who cold not be just a priest. But, she learned, Ralph wasn’t even the root
of her sadness. Anne had come to believe that it was innate, unalterable.
It was Anne who was there through the birth, through the labor and delivery the
almost cost Meggie her life. When the baby refused to turn Anne looked at
Meggie and saw Marjanne Turner. She could not let that happen. Yet she felt the
same helplessness that she had as a small child. And when Ralph arrived he
wasn’t even helpful; he just began praying to his God. “As if God cares,” she’d
thought. She remembered the look in Peter Turner’s eyes when his wife was
fading, but when she looked into Ralph’s eyes she saw not the loving concern of a
husband for his wife, or a father for his child, or even of a priest for his
parishioner, but rather a proprietary concern. And he referred to her as “my
Meggie.” “His Meggie,” she snorted in anger. “How dare he presume to own
her?” Despite her seething anger, which seemed only to increase as the hours
dragged on though she knew it was entirely disproportionate to Ralph’s offense,
Anne managed to focus on the matter at hand. Meggie was losing strength and
losing blood, and the baby was in danger. Throughout the pregnancy Anne had
come to see the baby as somehow hers, and she couldn’t bear to lose it now, at her
own hands, because of her own failures. Almost without thinking she did what she
had seen her mother do in these desperate situations. There was a lot of blood and
the baby was limp, but it was out— she was out. And soon Justine started to cry
and scream, and wail. The baby was inconsolable and Meggie was hardly able to
care for her so Anne and Luddie filled in, treating young Justine just like she was
theirs.
And while Jussy was thriving, Meggie seemed to be wasting away. Luddie had
been the one to suggest that she get away for a while. He’d been the one to make
the arrangements for her. It was a good idea, Anne agreed. It would be just what
Meggie needed. But when Ralph came looking for her it was different. She knew
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that sending him to her would ultimately take her away from Himmelhoch, from
their home, from her. But she also knew that Ralph would once again reveal his
true loyalties, and that they were not to Meggie. It was a risk, but Anne new that it
was the right thing to do. Luddie had, of course, known all along how his wife had
felt about their young guest. He knew that Anne loved him as well, but that was
different. He took care of her. He needed her; and she needed him. And their
marriage had always been pleasant, Anne mused. Luddie never wanted children
so that was not demanded of her. He was her friend, her companion, her
confidant, and sometimes, much to her dismay, her caregiver. That is, until his
stroke. After that he had been unable to even speak. She just held his hand and
delegated the work of the farm to the hired hands. And she read to him, all of the
banned books that he had managed to procure for her. When he died she closed
the book and placed it back on the shelf. She never finished it.
When the phone rang, Anne straightened up as best she could and pushed aside her
memories of Luddie. A ripple of excitement went through the room when Meggie
announced that it was Dane. Everyone became animated sharing news items to be
relayed to him, or craning close to the phone to try to catch a hint of his voice.
Even Fee looked up from her account books to inquire about his plans to visit.
Anne wondered silently if she was the only one, other than Meggie herself, who
know that Dane’s father was in fact the good Father himself. She had always
presumed that she was. Luddie was too innocent to suspect such a thing. And
most others just didn’t have reason for suspicion at all. But living here had given
her a new insight. There was something about Fee that led her to believe that she
might know. Meggie’s old mother seemed to have an uncanny sense about these
things. She seemed to know everything without ever having been told. But, of
course, she would never let on if she did know. There was undoubtedly a
complicated and passionate buried beneath that efficient, icy, and wrinkled
exterior, but Fee certainly kept that hidden well.
The evening wore on and the decorations were finished. One by one everyone
excused themselves to their bedrooms leaving just the three of them: Fee, Meggie,
and Anne. They sat in near silence, each attending to whatever trivial task she had
chosen to distract her. Once when Anne looked up from her book to catch Meggie
looking at her she could swear that she saw Fee out of the comer of her eye,
observe the exchange. But by the time Anne noticed, Fee’s eyes were once again
fixed on what she was doing. Anne closed her book, gathered up her crutches,
“Good night Meggie, Fee,” she said as she struggled to get to her feet and balance
herself leaning on the crutches. Meggie looked up and smiled warmly, as she said
her good nights. Fee just nodded. Anne did not look back as she exited the room
and made her way to her cottage, but she had a good idea of what was happening
in the main house. Meggie would wait a respectable length of time, then put down
the sewing she was pretending to work on. She would rub her eyes, tired from so
much attention to the detailed stitching, and bid Fee goodnight. Then she would
come to Anne, like she had whenever possible since Anne had arrived. They had
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come together without thinking, as if it was something that they had both always
known. They had always shared in each other’s secrets; now their love for one
another had become their most passionate secret. Meggie never stayed. That was
the one thing that they both regretted, but neither was certain of what the others in
the house, the family, would say. Anne suspected that they would, in fact, say
nothing at all, but could never quite bring herself to press Meggie on this. The
Catholic in Meggie was not quite extinguished. “But,” thought Anne, “I have the
one I have always loved, the one I have wanted, the one I gave to that priest, the
one who returned from his bed to mine. If Ralph only knew.” In fact, if Mary
Carson knew, she would be so envious. She had used all of her vast power and
wealth to take down the arrogant priest, but this cripple had all but done the same
thing with much fewer resources, and was still alive to enjoy it.
Inside the main house things had proceeded much as Anne predicted. After thirty
minutes Meggie rubbed her tired eyes and put aside the sewing that she actually
had been working on. She walked over to Fee’s desk and said a somewhat stiffly
formal goodnight. Fee responded in kind, and Meggie walked quickly from the
room.
Moments later the light went out in the main room and Fee, unseen by anyone,
stood by the window looking out. She didn’t have to wait long until she saw her
daughter hurry along the path leading to Anne’s cottage. Standing silently in the
dark watching her daughter enter the cottage, a ghost of a smile briefly crossed her
face. And she turned and went to her own bed.
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Wuihering Heights Revisited, Molly Engelhardt
Okay, let’s fast forward to the scene in book I when Heathcliff overhears Cathy
tell Nellie that she’s going to marry Edgar and he slips out. When Cathy finds out
that Heathcliff has been listening and is now gone, she goes out into the rain to
search for him. But, smart girl that she is, rather than sitting up all night in wet
clothes in the cold kitchen and getting sick with brain fever, she comes back into
the Heights and puts on that trusty dairy maid’s cloak and runs out to the stable to
saddle the fastest,most spirited horse there—the one that only she in the family can
ride, of course (think Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet). Off she goes, her face
set with determination and while tears run down her face, they are tears of love
and new found resolve. We forgive her because she is going to repair the damage
that she did to poor Heathcliff. So off she goes, yelling, “Heathcliff!!!, the storm
building, the wind knocking debris through the air. She sees him up ahead
walking slowly, head down and she screams at him to stop. He stops, turns around
in surprise, sees who it is and starts to walk slowly toward her, a frown on his face.
She throws herself off the horse and into his arms and says the words he has never
been able to hear, “My love for [you] resembles the eternal rocks beneath.. etc.
So she jumps back on the horse, waiting there for her, natch, and pulls Heathcliff
up behind her and off they ride in the storm, galloping fast, going they know not
where, but definitely not back to where they came from. After about an hour of
riding they spot lights way off in the distance and before too long come to an
encampment with tents and colorful tapestries closing off the entrances and fires
with yummy smelling meats cooking over them. They hear singing and laughing
from one of the largest tents and outside are dozens of wine bottles (a good vintage
year too) neatly stacked A disheveled looking woman comes out and, when she
sees them there on the horse, runs back inside. Cathy and Heathcliff dismount, but
just as their feet hit the ground, three dark-skinned, mean-looking men step up
from behind them and encircle Cathy, and the largest of the three sweeps her up
into his arms (she’s very light and his brawny arms push against her large breasts)
and carries her over to the tent where the party is going on. Heathcliff steps in
front of the man, blocking his way, his fists clinched, but Cathy says, “No
Heathcliff. I’ll handle this.” Once inside the tent, the man puts Cathy on the
ground and she immediately stands erect with her head held high staring defiantly
into the eyes of the women sitting on the floor in front of her. These are some kind
of women too. They are dark-skinned with black, wild hair and red lips, open in
laughter at the sight of the young, angry Cathy; they wear big hooped earrings and
colorful gowns that swoop all over the floor. They are everything that you could
imagine beautiful, gypsy women being. So what ends up happening is that the
Queen of the gypsies takes a particular liking to Cathy and wants her to join the
migrant tribe. Cathy keeps looking strangely at the woman over the next few days
and when asked why, she says that she feels certain they have met before. As it
turns out, the gypsy queen looks like Heathcliff and is in fact his mother, and we
discover that Heathcliff s father is not Mr. Earnshaw, as he has always privately
thought, but the King of some small country in the middle east. So Cathy and
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Heathcliff join the gypsies and it takes no time at all for everyone to realize how
smart Cathy is and how strong she is physically and after a year she becomes the
queen’s right-hand woman, known to everyone as the horse handler.
The gypsy men respect Cathy, but they also hate her because she doesn’t put up
with their shit. Which of course means that every man in the tribe is sexually
obsessed with her and can’t keep their eyes off of her. Trouble starts, in-fighting
and Heathcliff is beside himself with jealousy. But Cathy loves the Gyspy queen
and doesn’t want to leave the tribe. After many conferences between Heathcliff,
his mother (the queen) and Cathy, they decide that what needs to be done is a
reward system that would require Cathy and Heathcliff to loosen their Victorian
mores and transform into real gypsies. Every year on the anniversary of Cathy and
Heathcliff s arrival, Cathy will choose one man who is particularly deserving to
spend the night with her in a specially made reward tent. This works because the
men desire Cathy so much that they clean up their act all year and try their hardest
to do good gyspy work so that they will be the chosen one. Cathy loves Heathcliff
exclusively but agrees to have sex once a year with whomever she chooses for the
sake of the tribe. This continues for about 20 years, at which time, Cathy becomes
pregnant and this time she doesn’t take the concoction mixed by the medicine
woman because she wants to keep the child. The queen is now old and sickens.
During a tearful bedroom scene, the Queen tells Cathy and Heathcliff that she has
been accumulating wealth and property over the years and has land by a river with
a small house already on it in a distant land. She gives them the necessary
documents to take ownership of the estate. She dies and they go off with their
child—if s Heathcliff s and they all know it—to live a quiet, middle-aged life in
comfort and peace. Cathy writes her story of life with the gypsies.
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Ramona Revisited, Theresa Gregor
The place that I would revise the novel is at its end. On page 347, near the novel's
end, Felipe Ortegna has asked the widowed, single-Indian-mother Ramona to
return to Mexico with him because California is increasingly hostile to Mexican
rights. When she agrees to go, he surmises "that she would spare her daughter the
burden she had gladly, heroically borne herself, in the bond of race."
However, we catch a glimpse into Ramona's thoughts and her reason for going to
Mexico are not so much to spare her daughter any racial turmoil, but to chart a
new destiny for her daughter. "Her [Ramona's] imagination was kindled. An
untried future beckoned— a future which she would embrace and conquer for her
daughter."
Place o f revision: Directly after Felipe asks her to go to Mexico.
Ramona refuses to move to Mexico with Felipe. Instead she tells him that she
wishes to return to San Jacinto and live at her and Alessandro's home on the
mountain. Felipe adamantly rejects Ramona's proposal at first. He confesses his
love to her and tells her that he would do anything for her except allow her to live
out a barely subsistent life with her child.
Ramona's resolve is steadfast. Her calm, quiet nearly ethereal demeanor finally
convinces Felipe that Ramona is living in another realm and that she has never
accepted Alessandro's death. Felipe finally begins to understand that Ramona
would feel closer to Alessandro if she were at their home.
Juan Canito and Marda agree to move with Ramona and the baby. They are old an
do not want to return to Mexico when California is there home. They decide to live
out the rest of their days helping care for Ramona.
Before Felipe sails for Mexico he shows R. the Senorita Ortegna's letter describing
R.'s birth origins and the jewels that R. inherited from her father Angus Phail.
Felipe explains to R. that she is entitled to take the treasure. She reluctantly
accepts the jewels, and then is heartened at the prospect of becoming completely
independent of Felipe. She now has the resources to provide a comfortable life for
her small family. Felipe offers R. several other gifts— tokens of his love really— but
she quietly refuses all, except for Baba and Benito— her loyal steeds.
When R. returns to Mount San Jacinto she learns that the old Soboba Indian
woman kept up the place and managed to take care of the small herd of sheep in
R.'s absence. In no time at all, R., Marda, and Juan Can, with the help of the
Soboba woman, create a beautiful mountain sanctuary home. The home soon
becomes an almost sacred site for many Indians that live near or travel by. Ramona
eventually constructed a shrine of stone, catholic saints, and flowers on the ground
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where Alessandro died. The shrine came to be known and revered by all. The old
Indians still talk about the beautiful garden of stone and rare flowers that grows on
top of Mt. San Jacinto.
Ramona maintains a cordial but changed friendship with Aunt Ri and her family.
They often visit from San Bernardino but Ramona rarely leaves the mountain. R.'s
only outings are to the nearby Indian villages of Soboba and Cahuilla where she
travels to nurse the sick, feed and clothe the hungry and poor, and to teach Spanish
and English to interested children and adults. Her daughter, Little Majella, always
accompanies her on these visits.
Felipe faithfully corresponds with R. and tirelessly sends for her to join him. He
remains unmarried and dies at the young age of fifty they say of a broken heart. He
leaves the remains of the Ortegna estate to Ramona and her daughter.
Ramona donates the entire inheritance, splitting it between Father Salvierderra’s
College and the Indian villages of Soboba, Cahuilla, and especially Pechanga.
No one knows when she died or what happened to her daughter. It is rumored that
Little Majella married an Indian man from one of the villages and also lived an
reclusive and quiet life, but there are too few elders left to recall any more details.
THE END
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3 3 2
An Old-Fashioned Girl, Mary Beth Tegan
I chose this novel because it was the first book I felt self-conscious reading around
my family, making a point to find a place where I could be alone to read—in this
case, a shady porch in the humid heat of summer. I was in 5th grade when I
discovered it among my mother’s childhood books, and having read Little Women,
Eight Cousins, and A Rose in Bloom I knew I was in for a pleasurable afternoon.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how Polly’s story would send me running for the
dictionary to look up words like ‘velocipede’ (I was convinced it had to be another
name for a horse given the family panic—was it possible Tom, Polly’s nascent
love interest, had only fallen from a bike?). It was the first time I remember truly
wanting to ‘master’ a narrative, wring every bit of meaning out of it. I had loved
the descriptions of clothing and decor in the other books, but Fan’s fashionable
ensembles were detailed in a way the “reformed” Rose’s never could have been,
and I remember trying to draw some of them after finishing the book. (A way to
prolong the narrative or one of my first attempts at “revision,” perhaps?)
Conquering the young Rose’s vanity is one of her uncle’s chief goals in Eight
Cousins, but since Fanny Shaw is set up as “bad girl” in contrast to Polly’s “good
girl,” her character is given all kinds of faults and affectations. I’m betting Alcott
enjoyed developing this character a great deal because there are all kinds of
delicious little details not only about Fan’s dress but also about her “fast set,” her
incessant (and indolent) novel-reading, and her smug sense of superiority over her
‘best’ friend, Polly—the country mouse.
Looking back, it’s easy to see why this book drew me in so completely: I think it
appealed to me in all kinds of contradictory ways. I sympathized strongly with
Polly’s “outsider” status and the sense of awkwardness she feels at times in the big
city among Fan’s fashionable friends; we moved around a lot when I was young
for my father’s work, and I was constantly having to break into groups governed
by conventions that I hadn’t yet learned. My younger brother was very athletic,
which helped him make friends easily, but my interests were more solitary. I also
longed to be Fan—someone who was already established, had a large group of
friends, even though they were mean to Polly (mmm, probably because they were
mean to Polly). When Polly comes to Boston from a small town outside the city,
Fan makes much of her “queer ways” and “countrified” observations, asking Polly
to keep her opinions to herself. Tom, Fan’s younger brother, is quite relieved upon
meeting Polly at the railway station only to discover”she isn’t a bit of a young
lady, thank goodness.” (Fan, he tells Polly, couldn’t come to meet her because she
is afraid her hair will frizz in the damp.) Polly continues to win the admiration of
all the men in the novel—Tom, his father, Mr. Shaw, and Mr. Sydney, Fan’s
longstanding love object, because she is, as Sydney observes, “a refreshing little
piece of nature.” When Polly is out sledding with Tom and the youngest Shaw,
Maud, Fan stays at home to read the novels that are beloved by her set, like The
Phantom Bride or Breaking a Butterfly. In fact, much of the narrative depends on
the contrast between Polly’s “old-fashioned” but charming ways and her friend’s
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city-bred affectations. Class differences are highlighted frequently too, for Polly
comes from an Alcott-like family—rich in education but lacking in capital. The
Shaw family, on the other hand, is newly wealthy, and their conscious display of
that wealth is emphasized repeatedly.
Because of these differences, Fan is embarrassed by Polly, and Polly shamed by
Fan, and much of the extended (four month) visit is a disappointment for both
girls. I think I must have been fascinated by the representation of the girls’
conflicts, in the same way I love the way Margaret Atwood writes about the
nuances of women’s friendship today. Unfortunately, it’s usually Fanny who is at
fault, with the patient Polly repressing a good deal of embarrassment and making
excuses for her friend, who hasn’t the influence of loving parents and siblings to
make her better. (I’d like it much better if Polly weren’t quite so perfect herself.)
In one of the more painful scenes, Fan, Tom, and Maud go through Polly’s trunk,
laughing at her “queer” things and reading her diary. Fan and Tom are both
embarrassed by some of the less flattering truths expressed in the diary about them
and each affirms Polly’s insights about the other, making for a particularly cutting
learning experience. Polly walks in on them—overhears some of their insults
about her stuff and sees the diary in their hands; there are many tears, but the girls
make up after their cathartic experience, parting ways a couple of chapters later
with renewed affection.
The first book ends with Polly’s departure from Boston, and the second begins six
years later when she arrives in Boston to teach music. Alcott published this
“sequel” in response to her young readers’ hunger to leam more about Polly and
Tom, Fan and the rest. When she returns, Polly is still the same good girl, but Fan
has changed—still fashionable but more critical of her set and their ways. Fan is,
in many ways, a much more interesting character because she’s unhappy and
bored, and she cannot figure out how to find any joy in life. Polly has struggles of
her own, but they are primarily that of a young woman who is trying to establish a
living, and her positive attitude carries the day. If in the first book I probably took
some pleasure in Polly’s humiliations (which were, in some ways, similar to my
own), in the second, I took pleasure in Fan’s comeuppances, especially when Mr.
Sydney, takes a shine to Polly, even asking her to marry him. She, of course,
refuses because she has always loved the fault-ridden Tom, who has become quite
the dandy and makes fun of Polly’s interests—joking that she’s returned to Boston
to “deliver lectures on Women’s Rights.” This detail, in fact, blew me away when
I reread the book for my qualifying exams; I didn’t remember anything explicit
about feminism in this work, and yet there is also a chapter devoted to what could
only be a Boston marriage between artists. Worried about Fan’s ennui or
depression, Polly takes her to meet these two friends in a chapter called “The
Sunny Side.”
The chapter begins with a conversation between Polly and Fanny; the latter is
worried that Mr. Sydney has been courting Polly and tries to learn more in a
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roundabout way. After this game of cat and mouse (in which both girls are hiding
things and Polly tries to get information about Tom), Polly recognizes what Fan’s
true concerns are and calls her on it. Fan bursts into tears, and asks Polly to tell
her about herself and how she is able to remain so upbeat. Polly offers to show
her, taking her to meet some of the new influences in her single-girl-life. They
make the rounds, eventually arriving at the home of two young women—a sculptor
and an engraver who “take care of one another in true Damon and Pythias style.”
As if the allusion to the two Greek friends weren’t enough, Fan’s comment “Let a
lover come between them and their friendship won’t last long” is answered by
Polly’s refutation: “I think it will. Take a look at them, and you’ll change your
mind.” Fan is, in fact, enthralled by the art of Rebecca—the sculpture of a
beautiful woman, and she impresses the artist and her friends with her ‘reading’ of
the piece. She marks especially the figure’s “imposing” air. Upon Fan’s
suggestion that the sculpture might be a queen of sorts, Rebecca observes that
“women have been called queens a long time, but the kingdom given them isn’t
worth ruling,” and declares her woman is to “stand alone and help herself.” Fan is
at first uncomfortable with this notion, and wonders aloud, with a little curl of her
lip, if the figure is to be “strong-minded.” What follows is a discussion of how
that woman might be rendered even more imposing, and options like “giving her a
child” are dismissed, while “giving her a ballot-box” is embraced along with other
objects that speak to her talents: “a needle, pen, palette, and broom.” (I’d like to
think this last is a witchery reference.) It is a prime pedagogical opportunity, and
Fan is subtly changed by her time with the women. Alcott writes:
Fanny had been to many elegant lunches, but never enjoyed one
more than that droll picnic in the studio; for there was a freedom
about it that was charming, and artistic flavor to everything, and
such a spirit of good-will and gayety, that she felt at home at once.
As they ate, the others talked and she listened, finding it as
interesting as any romance to hear these young women discuss their
plans, ambitions, successes and defeats. It was a new world to her,
and they seemed a different race of creatures from the girls whose
lives were spent in dress, gossip, pleasure or enuui. They were girls
still, full of spirits, fun, and youth; but below the lightheartedness
each cherished a purpose, which seemed to ennoble her
womanhood, to give her a certain power, a sustaining satisfaction, a
daily stimulus, that led her on to daily effort, and in time to some
success in circumstance or character, which was worth all the
patience, hope, and labor of her life, (emphasis added 177)
On the brink of self-discovery and a new purpose for living, Fanny seems poised
for a new plot, but it is brought to an abrupt halt and subsumed back into the more
conventional “reform” plot that will end with her winning her love object through
her transformation into a more Polly-like woman. Watching the girls and
reflecting upon the beauty of their lives, she muses that girls like these would
easily earn the respect and love of men, “for in spite of their independence, they
are womanly.” She wishes she had a talent to live for, imagining that it would
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make her more interesting to Sydney and “dear to everyone” and acknowledging
that she would like these things for herself—things “money can’t buy.”
I want another plot for Fanny; in fact, I want Book 2 to be about her self
transformation, and I want it begin here. Why focus on Polly who is already
perfection? Fanny is conflicted, she’s struggling for something more, and I think
she draws the wrong lesson from this exchange. I want Fanny to see beyond the
conventional love plot (she can have that too, down the line, and with someone
who is much more interesting than Mr. Sydney who is constantly assessing her
through comparisons with her friend—of course their friendship would be
compromised). In Alcott’s plot, she encounters much hardship when her father
loses their fortune, and it is her ability to cope fairly well (with Polly’s guidance)
and provide her parents with comfort that convinces Sydney she is worth loving. I
want Fanny to help differently—to make her family’s fortune and send money
home, using the talent and knowledge she has gained as an avid consumer of
women’s clothing. In an earlier doll dressmaking scene, Fanny shows a great deal
of interest in the design of a “red merino frock”: I want her to tap into this interest
and to develop her vision and skills with the help of the artistic community Polly
has provided. Fanny will, therefore, return to see these women, who will help her
shape her aesthetic sensibility and encourage her to go to Paris on her own—not to
buy gowns but to design them. With fashions cut for the new woman Rebecca
envisions in her sculpture, Fanny will become a sort of Coco Chanel, a girl from
the “provinces” who takes Paris by storm. Some of the narrative might highlight
her struggles as an American who must become acquainted with the subtle codes
for conduct and discourse in Parisian society (might get a bit Jamesian here), but I
think most of her difficulty will come through the conflict generated by her corset-
less designs, which allow for more freedom of movement and expression. She will
eventually return to America, setting up a house that rivals those of Paris and
making it possible for women to buy at home. Hmm, maybe she could launch one
of the first ready-to-wear lines, enabling the working women who helped her to
launch her career obtain affordable fashion! And maybe, just maybe, if the
character still wants to, she can have her Sydney—though he will have to be
reformed, perhaps undergoing a test while she’s in Paris. Maybe she can have a
premarital affair and he’ll have to get over it. Maybe an affair with another
woman. . .
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Nerd in Shining Armor, Tania Modleski
The romance I’m revising is one recommended by Kelly of “Regis and Kelly” for
her book club. I chose it because I think this is the kind of romance I’m supposed
to like as a feminist and the kind some romance fans and critics would point to as
evidence of how much more “feminist” these novels are today than they were a
few decades ago.
Nerd in Shining Armor is obviously an attempt to rewrite in a humorous vein the
70s romance/bodice ripper. The guy our heroine loves, named Nick, is her boss,
the archetypical alpha male, aloof and arrogant. The heroine, Gen (short for
Genevieve), attributes to him the very motives given by romance writers to 70s
heroes who possess these traits—in particular she supposes that he had some bad
experience with a woman in the past and that that experience has soured him on
women.
Nick, however, really is a jerk—he didn’t need any help from a two-timing woman
to make him that way—and he is a thief and would-be murderer to boot.
In the office where the two work is a man named Jackson Farley, a computer nerd
who wears glasses and gaudy plaid suits and has a huge crush on the beautiful
Gen, who scarcely notices him.
Nick takes the two of them on an airplane and, for reasons I don’t remember,
decides to crash the plane and kill the other two, while he parachutes out of the
plane and gets away with money he’s embezzled or something of the sort.
Jackson manages to crash-land the plane, hyperventilating all the while (“Lord in
heaven, you’re scared,” Gen exclaims).
They swim to a desert island; Jackson has to carry the heroine because she hurts
herself somehow, and he does so clumsily, arms aching (they finally topple over).
At the same time, he’s getting off on becoming marginally manlier, and when she
calls him “Jack” he decides to keep the name—it seems to suit the new person he’s
becoming. Still, his lack of alpha qualities are stressed to a degree that would
astonish 70s readers—Gen and Jack decide, for example, that one of them needs to
climb a cliff. Who should it be? “That decision was easy. He wouldn’t
jeopardize Gen’s life. ‘Not in my wildest dreams.’ Putting her life in danger was
enough of a reason that he wouldn’t have to admit the other one, that the very
thought of going up that cliff, which was high enough to be very scary, made his
stomach pitch.”
Another time, he begins to shake when he hears a loud noise that sounds like a
man hollering; it turns out to be the bark seals, as Gen laughingly informs him.
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The pair have various adventures together, each of them exhibiting a rough parity
in terms of competence. Nick returns somehow and they manage to capture him,
and bring him back to civilization and justice.
The novel explains away some of Jackson’s nerdiness: for instance, his preference
for loud colors in clothes turns out to be an unfortunate consequence of his being
color blind (but what explains the plaid?—maybe his vision has been pixelated, to
coin a term, by the computers).
Nevertheless, there remains the fact that Jack is the kind of hero who shakes when
he hears seals barking; and nothing can explain away that fact, or, in my view,
excuse it.
In my rewrite, Nick and Gen would have had some earlier encounter—let’s say
she was underage, and he didn’t know it, and they went right up to the verge of
having sex, but were rudely interrupted by her parents or guardians who revealed
the truth. Nick goes away, builds up an empire, acquires a few islands, etc. Gen
goes to college, takes a couple of courses in feminism, thinks of Nick more than
once, but thanks her lucky stars she never got together with such a male chauvinist
Pig-
She has to drop out of college, unfortunately, to take care of her father who is
dying of a lingering illness. It turns out that he had a gambling habit,
unbeknownst to his daughter, who after his death finds herself saddled with his
debts! (Men!) She doesn’t know what to do because she hasn’t any skills, and
never got her degree. She works for a while as a bagger in a grocery store, but
when the supermarkets go on strike, she doesn’t know where to turn. She decides
to answer some ads in the paper for file clerks, and lands a job in one of Nick’s
corporate offices. He discovers she’s there, but she has no idea he’s the big boss.
He makes sure she gets a very large salary for a file clerk.
So of course they run into one another and all the old chemistry kicks back in. He
comes on to her all the time—in the Xerox room, the conference room,
everywhere. Whenever he kisses her and such, she finds herself melting, but she
keeps trying to resist. Her principles are so at odds with the attraction she feels for
this man, whose arrogance and forcefulness have only increased with his years and
the wealth and power he’s accrued. One day, he shows up at her house on some
flimsy pretext and they have incredible steamy sex described in minute detail.
Meanwhile, there’s a guy in the office, Jackson, who’s kind of a computer geek,
wears outlandish clothes, is a little clumsy and totally unworldly. Gen thinks he’s
probably a real intellectual (not that he furnishes a great deal of proof of it)
whereas she doubts whether Nick ever picks up a book from one decade to the
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next. Gen feels a certain attraction to Jackson, mostly because he seems so very
sweet and she feels she needs someone who is sweet and caring in her vulnerable
state, newly orphaned as she is. They go out on a couple of dates, exchange long,
sweet kisses—initiated by her, of course. She thinks she may be in love. What
she feels for Nick is surely only lust, and everyone knows how long that lasts! It’s
true that conversation with Jackson isn’t really easy but she reasons that he’s shy
and will loosen up over time.
Nick experiences a cold fury unlike anything he’s felt before when he gets wind of
the budding office romance between Gen and Jackson. He is on the verge of firing
the guy, but realizes that that would make it harder for him to control or fight the
situation. More steamy scenes ensue as he tries to convince Gen that the one she
really wants and needs is him (of course, he’s not thinking of love—yet). “Let’s
face it, you need taking care of,” he murmurs . . .
“Oooo, you are insufferable, a cave man, a throwback to the dark ages of the 70s;
I can take care of myself, I ...” He cuts her off with a swift brutal kiss, then
pinning her against the wall with his hard muscled body, says “Yeah? Who would
you rather be stranded with on a desert island? Him or me?”
“See? That’s my point, Nick. Nobody ever does get stranded on a desert island
anymore. You’re obsolete.”
He reminds her of his vast real estate and corporate holdings. “Then how did I get
to the top of the ladder if I’m obsolete? I got there because I’m the original
Robinson Crusoe.”
She snorts. “Well, that may be all well and good in the business world. But when
it comes to a relationship you don’t have a clue. How come you never married,
Nick?” She knew she was treading on dangerous territory, but she was maddened
by her attraction to this man, and driven to try to push him away by goading him.
“Maybe you are like Robinson Crusoe when it comes to affairs of the heart.
Wasn’t there another man on the island.”
Nick, whose masculinity is not easily threatened, laughs.
“The island is just a metaphor,” he drawls lazily.
Gen blinks.
“Yes, I know what a metaphor is. If you think just because Jackson wears those
nerdy glasses from Pearl Vision that he reads poetry or anything but computer
manuals, I’d wager you’re sadly mistaken—the guy’s clearly an emotional cripple.
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“The island is a metaphor, he resumed; why do you think shows like Survivor are
so popular? Because they tap into the brutal and uncivilized aspects of ourselves,
something as elemental as you and me, man and woman.”
“You know what, Nick? I’d take my chances with Jackson on a desert island. At
least I wouldn’t be driven to murder him when he infuriates me and then wind up
all alone.”
Nick decides to put this to the test. He arranges for Jackson and Gen to go off on a
business trip together, and has the pilot (of his own personal jet) fake some
problem with the engine and pretend to have to emergency land. He then has the
pilot steal away. He makes sure he has men in the area monitoring the situation in
case any real danger threatens, and he stays in close contact with them.
Of course, Jackson just whines and complains about the inconveniences of desert
living, while Gen proves herself to be highly resourceful. Not being a dummy, she
figures that all of this was engineered by Nick, and one day she thinks she spots
someone in the distance— someone undoubtedly in Nick’s employ! She decides to
have fun with the situation. So she figures out where the men are who are spying
on them, and she puts on a show with Jackson, as if the two of them have resorted
to a primitive stage of lust. This is very hard to do because Jackson is so irritable,
complaining of the sand in his pants and so on. But Gen figures the men are far
enough away that they are getting the right (that is to say, the wrong) idea. “Well,
take your pants off, Jackson,” she suggests, making sure that their observers get an
eyeful.
Upon learning that his scheme has apparently backfired so badly, Nick hires a
helicopter and gets flown in, intending to pretend he has tracked them down and is
now rescuing them. He arrives just in time to save Gen and the wimpy Jackson
from a very real danger by slashing in two a huge snake that’s about to attack them
or something of the sort. Never has anyone appeared so magnificent; Gen realizes
at once that for good or for ill, she is really in love with Nick. Nick, on the other
hand, has come to accept the fact that, the severed anaconda notwithstanding, Gen
really does love Jackson and what’s more that it was his fool scheme has in fact
brought about their union. Talk about your bitter ironies.
He puts the two of them in the helicopter and awaits another. Back in civilization,
he keeps away from the office, and one day sends Gen a basket of champagne and
caviar for her and Jackson. She calls Nick up and invites him to come over to
share it with them that evening; he protests that three’s a crowd, but she manages
to make him feel petty for not coming over to wish her and Jackson happiness and
to share in their joy. When he arrives she is in the bathroom; she peeks her head
out the door and calls for him to come in, and then tells him there’s something in
the bedroom she’d like him to put on especially for the occasion. He’s pretty
puzzled, but heads for the bedroom as instructed. Meanwhile in the bathroom she
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hears his bark of laughter (which reminds her of the seals she heard on the island).
They each emerge simultaneously (of course!) from their rooms, he wearing a
loincloth, she wearing the tatters of a skimpy dress, with a bodice that looks
eminently rippable.
THE END
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Commentary on Frederica and Sylvester, Kay Mussell
While Frederica is one of Georgette Heyer’s best-loved books, and has much to
recommend it, the ending is disappointing. The declaration scene undermines the
heroine’s competence and understanding and ends by reinforcing unequal gender
relationships. Much more satisfying is the interrupted declaration scene at the
ending of her Sylvester, in which both characters come to understand themselves
and each other while also forging a relationship based on equality and respect.
Although both declaration scenes involve the intervention of an outsider
(Alverstoke’s sister, Sylvester’s mother), the roles of these external agents are
different. In the first case, the prodding of Alverstoke’s sister is unnecessary and
appears intrusive. Alverstoke will get around to proposing to Frederica in his own
time, having once been put off by her understandable distraction regarding her
brother’s illness. Indeed, Frederica has given him explicit reason for delay in a
previous conversation after an ill-timed proposal from another character. The
comments of his sister and his secretary provide some comic dialogue but do little
to advance the plot.
The intervention of Sylvester’s mother is more critical. Unlike Alverstoke, who is
fully in control of his emotions and the situation, Sylvester has made a thorough
going mess of his proposal to Phoebe. Like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, which
was quite possibly a conscious or unconscious model for Heyer, Sylvester has
managed to insult Phoebe by leaving the impression that his proposal to her was
against his will and his better judgment. Like Elizabeth Bennet, Phoebe takes
offense. The misunderstandings between the two have been constant throughout
the novel. Both have high tempers and a way with words, a combination that
regularly puts them at cross purposes with each other.
The difference between the two endings is underscored by the contrasting
relationships and conflicts that shape the declaration scenes. In the first case, the
only issue to be resolved is Frederica’s lack of awareness of Alverstoke’s feelings
for her as well as hers for him. The impediment to their betrothal is slim indeed
and easily fixed. Although Alverstoke has been of great help to her throughout the
book as she attempts to deal with raising three siblings on her own, Frederica is
capable, sensible, and intelligent and has won his admiration through her
independence and competence. Until this scene, the relationship between them has
never seemed unequal. The overt power disparity in the declaration scene, then,
comes as a surprise and reinforces the disparity in their social stations and gender.
Alverstoke never really bends or changes. He says he wants to marry her because
she has never bored him, because he is interested in her brothers, because he can’t
live without her. But there appears to be no emotional intensity in these
statements, which seem distant and ironic rather than sincere. Frederica, in turn,
takes on the role of child/student when he teaches her that what she feels for him is
really love.
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In Sylvester, the two declaration scenes are far more in keeping with the
established characters and their relationships, so much so that when they finally
understand each other few words are necessary. They have both already said far
too much to each other that could hurt or wound or, worse, be misunderstood.
Both have been knocked out of their complacency by the force of their feelings for
each other. The two inept and almost incoherent speeches in which Sylvester tries
to explain himself in the first scene are evidence of his unaccustomed lack of
mastery. Phoebe understandably misreads him. By the time of the first
declaration, she has revised her opinion of him enough to realize vaguely that
something in his behavior does not ring true, but it is not until his mother explains
Sylvester’s vulnerability to her that she is finally able to see him as he is.
Immediately after the second and almost wordless “declaration,” they engage in
another spirited but light-hearted argument, which is clearly the way their marriage
will be conducted after the book ends. The clear implication is that these two have
come to a condition of respect and rough equality, despite the difference in their
social stations.
Frederica succumbs to Alverstoke’s superiority and arrogance. Phoebe will
always provide a much-needed check to Sylvester’s high-handed good intentions
and need to control. The ending of Frederica, then, disappoints not only because
of the unequal status in which the two characters are left but because the
conditions of their coming marriage appear to negate the effective partnership they
had forged throughout the text.
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Mary Stewart Rewritten, Pat Koski
Novel: Nine Coaches Waiting, by Mary Stewart. New York: Fawcett World
Library. 1958
Novel: My Brother Michael, by Mary Stewart. New York: Fawcett World
Library. 1959.
Somewhat contrary to my instructions, I have included two novels in my remarks,
for reasons I will describe momentarily.
I have always been an avid reader, and my novel of choice is a good mystery. But
if there is some romance thrown in as well, so much the better. I discovered Mary
Stewart when I was an adolescent and I have read (and own) all of her
mystery/romance novels. I have changed residences many times since my teen
age years, but I have always boxed and moved her books, and I return to them
from time to time, even now. I believe that Mary Stewart is an excellent
storyteller, and her heroines were strong, independent women, which appealed to
me as well.
Still, as I reread these novels, I find myself wishing that the heroines weren’t quite
so, well.. .girlish. Despite being strong and independent in their actions, Ms.
Stewart’s heroines viewed themselves as less competent than men, deferred to
men, and doubted their own abilities. This tendency to deprecate themselves is
what I would change; and since the changes I would make are relatively small (not
really changing the plot), I have included two novels.
I have chosen My Brother Michael because it is an excellent example of this
“fault” with Ms. Stewart’s heroines.
I have chosen Nine Coaches Waiting because it is so quintessentially a romance
novel - the dark, brooding, rich and handsome male, the governess from a less
privileged background, the manor house, the cast of characters with unknown
motives. And yet, Linda Martin is not the quintessential helpless female.
So, if I could rewrite parts of Nine Coaches Waiting, I would change Linda Martin
to recognize her own strength, and to compare herself more favorably both in
terms of gender and wealth. This would be made clear when she finds that there is
a plot to kill the child under her care and she is told that the man she loves is
involved in that plot. I’m willing to understand why she doesn’t immediately
discount this news - after all, she cannot really take the chance that she is wrong,
as it involves a child’s life. However, there is a scene toward the end of the book
in which this man (Raoul de Valmy) finally finds her and the child hiding. Rather
than trust him for help, she tells the child to run. This, of course, sets up the rest of
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the book. It seems to me that at this point - after all, help is only moments away -
she should have trusted her love for this man, at least provisionally. Failing that,
she should understand that her unwillingness to trust him was based on perfectly
valid reasoning - she didn’t know him very well. My rewriting of this scene, then,
would take one of two paths: either she would allow herself to trust him or she
would trust her motives. The specific passage from the book will make clear what
I mean:
.. .1 had seen even while shock reacting on weariness had driven me
stupidly and headlong from him up the stairs. And now I saw the look
that came down over his face, bleak bitter pride shutting down over anger,
and I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship
with my own stupid, wicked hands. I couldn’t speak, but I began to cry...
(page 234)
Well, I mean really “stupid, wicked hands”? My rewriting:
.. .1 had seen even while shock reacting on weariness had driven me
headlong from him up the stairs. And now I saw the look that came
down over his face, bleak bitter pride shutting down over anger, and
I knew that he could have been trusted. Nonetheless, my reasons for
protecting Philippe were sound and I would have to make Raoul
understand.
In My Brother Michael, the changes are similarly small. In this book, Camilla
Haven refers to herself as incompetent and cowardly in a number of ways and
many times throughout the book, and she explains her lack of ability or bravery as
following from her gender. While society’s devaluation of women is sometimes
defiantly contested, she typically sees men as more competent and brave than she.
The following quotes are examples of this:
“I suppose I’m a bit of a fool where money is concerned. Philip
ran all that and how right he was...” (page 10)
“But life never does seem to deliver itself into the hands of females, does
it?” (page 12)
“But at least you’d [a man] have managed the adventure properly! It seems
to me that it’s not enough to be bold; one has to be competent as well.
You’d never have got stuck in Arachova - and if you had, you’d have been
able to back the car!” (page 34)
In fact, Ms. Haven is quite a strong and brave person: she has left a fiance who
was not a good match; she has traveled alone to Greece; she has taken advantage
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of the hands of the fates when they landed a car in her lap; she drove herself (by
herself) from Athens to a town quite far away; and she is willing to take part in an
adventure once there.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, there were very few strong female images. As I look
back, I realize that I chose to read those few authors who did center their plots on
such women (the Nancy Drew mysteries are another example). Thus, given the
times, I must applaud Ms. Stewart for the characterizations she drew. However, if
I could go back and rewrite them for her, I would add to her characters a self-
confidence based on a knowledge of their own strengths and weaknesses, and I
would have them apologize less for being women.
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3 4 6
Fast Women (II), Kristiina Hackel
Nell sat there at her desk. She could feel the blood still welling up from the cut on
her cheek, but she couldn’t bring herself to wipe it away. She had to change her
life. What was she thinking? Smash up Tim’s office and then come back to clean
up Gabe’s? Be a secretary again, fix up Gabe’s business? Hadn’t she done that
once before? Why spend another 22 years fixing up someone else’s life when she
needed to fix her own.
Nell sighed. She needed to work for herself. She didn’t even know what that
would mean, but she could see now that cleaning someone else’s bathroom and
fixing someone else’s business cards was maybe not the best use of her talents.
When Gabe came out of his office a few minutes later, she was staring hopelessly
into space.
He started to say something and then stopped to stare at her. “What happened to
your cheek?”
Nell touched the cut. My old life happened to it. “Flying glass.”
“Oh, hell, stay there,” Gabe said, his voice exacerbated as usual. He went into the
bathroom and came out with a damp paper towel and the first aid kit.
“Really, it’s okay.” Nell rolled away from the desk a little. “I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding all over the office.” He hooked his foot around the bottom of
her chair and pulled her back. “Sit still.” This is the closest we’ve got to medical
benefits, so take advantage of it.”
He dabbed the cut clean and then smoothed antibiotic cream on her cheekbone, his
fingers surprisingly gentle even as he scowled at her, so she sat quietly as he cut a
tiny butterfly bandage to hold the cut closed, and tried to enjoy being taken care of.
She watched his eyes while he worked, intent on her, and when he was finished, he
glanced at her and the glance caught. She stopped breathing for a minute because
he was so close, and he froze too.
He caught himself a second later. “You’re all set.” He went back into the office
and closed the door. Nell released her breath and shook her head, trying to clear
her head. But the attraction she had just felt stayed with her, powerful and
compelling.
She looked down at her desk: the neat appointment book, the gold pen. She
looked at her cheerful coffee maker and china cups. This office was not the same
as Tim’s office, but she’d been trying to make it into that. Her relationship with
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Gabe was not the same as her relationship with Tim, but she’d been trying to
recreate that, too. And it sounded like Gabe wanted to repeat his own story—both
of them were heading down the same old path: affair, marriage. She needed to
find what she wanted. And if she wanted Gabe, as she was beginning to suspect
she did, she didn’t have to answer his phones to have him.
She walked over to the bookcase and, with a sense of finality, unplugged her
coffeemaker. She’d have to wait until it cooled off. That would give her a little
time. Quietly, she began to gather her things.
A few minutes later, she opened the door to Gabe’s office. She stepped in and
shut it behind her. Gabe looked up from the desk. He had tacked the blind back
up and the office had regained its customary gloom, just thin lines of light cutting
up the darkness.
Nell didn’t beat around the bush. “I’m quitting.” Gabe looked surprised. A
flicker of regret flashed across his face, and then he scowled. “You can quit as
soon as we find a replacement.”
Nell shook her head. “I’m quitting, effective now. Say,‘I accept your
resignation.’ Trust me, it will be better for both of us.” Gabe stared at her with a
touch of anger and a look of complete incomprehension.
She took a deep breath and walked over to him. She pushed his chair back and
stepped between him and his desk. So close to him, the pull between them
reasserted itself and she could see his frown soften.
Gabe’s eyes met hers, full of question and then understanding. He didn’t hesitate.
“I accept your resignation.”
“Smart man,” said Nell. She hooked her foot under his chair and pulled him back
towards her. Straddling him, she began to unbutton her gray suit. (“Fast Women”
2-3).
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