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Introduction: Interrupting the Harlot's Progress

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Introduction: Interrupting the Harlot's Progress Notes Introduction: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress 1. I am thinking here of Joyce Hemlow’s work, as well as other critics from the fifties and sixties. More recently, critics including Margaret Anne Doody, Julia Epstein, and Kristina Straub have re-evaluated earlier assumptions about Burney. 2. I will note here that authors continue to play with the provocative possi- bilities of intersecting the “domestic” path toward marriage with the dangerous “harlot’s progress” in a range of texts from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, including Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline (1784), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). The later two texts, in particular, draw upon the evocative image of the “wandering woman” in representations of their beleaguered heroines. 3. Armstrong’s sole reference to Wollstonecraft merely alludes to an early piece of conduct writing (65). In The Sign of Angellica Janet Todd also priv- ileges an ideologically potent if socially conservative history of women’s writing. 4. Much eighteenth-century literary criticism averts its gaze from representa- tions of the sexually transgressive heroine in order to focus upon the domestic heroine. See Patricia Meyer Spacks and Susan Staves for analyses of eighteenth-century “fallen women”. 5. Although I commit an anachronism by imposing the term “feminism” upon the “rights of woman” debates of the eighteenth and early nine- teenth centuries, I do so in order to avoid the technically correct but unwieldy phrase “rights of woman woman”. Since I believe that the polit- ical and philosophical work of Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries represents “a germinal feminism in process” I usually refer to it as “proto- feminism” (Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue 272). 6. In The Heroine’s Text Nancy Miller suggests that the eighteenth century generates two “femnocentric” narratives: the “euphoric” text which ends with integration into society through marriage and the “dysphoric” text which concludes with a sexually transgressive heroine’s early death. Miller does note that her focus on male-authored texts limits her analysis to plots that inscribe masculine fantasies about “female destiny” (x–xi). The female- authored narratives I examine try to avoid both marriage and death. 7. In Imagining the Penitentiary, John Bender argues that in the very act of constructing a “narrative penitentiary” detailing the corrupt power struc- tures complicit in Moll’s “tragic” destiny (for example, the Church and Bridewell) Hogarth also implicitly suggests that the “institutions we see might intervene to retell [Moll’s story]” (120). 8. While I find Homans’s argument to be useful in demonstrating narrative experimentation, I read The Wrongs of Woman very differently. 244 Notes 245 9. See the debate waged between feminist narratologists, including Susan Snaider Lanser and Robyn Warhol, and “traditional” narratologists such as Gerald Prince and Seymour Chatman. My own integrationist approach aligns me with Lanser and Warhol rather than Prince and Chatman. 10. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Claudia Johnson (Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel), and Anne Mellor (Romanticism and Gender), and Lisa L. Moore. 11. For years, Victorian criticism on the “fallen woman” was dominated by studies that focused on the seamy “underside” of Victorian culture. Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians, led to the work of innumerable literary critics and historians, including Michael Pearson, Fraser Harrison, and Eric Trudgill. Françoise Basch’s 1974 study of the fallen woman inaugurates feminist considerations of Victorian sexual transgression. See, for example, the work of Nina Auerbach (The Woman and the Demon), Sally Mitchell, and Helena Michie. 12. Although texts written in the 1820s and 1830s do represent “fallen women”, I have not found any that significantly engage in narrative inter- ruption as I have defined it. The sexual transgressors of Letitia Landon’s Ethel Churchill and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, for example, both published in 1837, are either minor characters or remain securely within destructive rather than proactive plots. 13. My specific interest in writers actually working within the social reform movement does limit my focus to Gaskell and Rossetti in this study. Certainly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) might generate an interesting reading based upon the thesis I set forth here. Although Marion Earle’s role in the text is never quite equal to that of the epony- mous heroine, her narrative powers are significant, as is her self-aware analysis of the social forces that have propelled her into the subject posi- tion of sexual transgressor. 1. Imagining the Sexualized Heroine 1. See Frances Ferguson’s exchange with Timothy Reiss in Gender and Theory as well as Anne Mellor’s critique of Susan Gubar’s argument in “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria”. 2. Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) is a significant intervening text between the Vindication and Wrongs of Woman. Its narrator, “Mary”, moves easily between the public discourse of the trav- elogue and the private exchange of “love” letters. She possesses the voice of the confident social critic from a Vindication and, without excuse, also occupies a series of other subject positions. A travel writer, intent upon collecting data, “Mary” is a celebrant of nature and the imagination. A nursing mother dedicated to her daughter, she writes passionate and loving letters to the father of her child that suggest a somewhat “irregular”, and probably doomed, relationship between the couple. Although Wollstonecraft ends a Short Residence abruptly, it would seem likely that the narrator’s ability to act as writer, “Romantic” thinker, and mother will possibly interrupt the sad end suggested by her lover’s desertion. Indeed, in 246 Notes a powerful reading of the text, Gary Kelly argues that the presence of the narrator’s “Appendix” precludes a dystopian ending by “reaffirming” the “‘female philosopher’s’ confidence – or hope – that the divided social order that seemed to have retaken her in the last letter is after all passing away, and will leave her and humanity free at last” (Revolutionary Feminism 193–4). 3. See Catherine N. Parke, Tilottama Rajan’s The Supplement of Reading, and Mellor’s “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria”. 4. See Laurie Langbauer and Shawn Maurer on the role of motherhood in The Wrongs of Woman. 5. See Kate Ferguson Ellis as well as the fifth chapter of Mellor’s Romanticism and Gender. 6. I have found Rajan’s work in The Supplement of Reading to be particularly helpful to my understanding of how political fiction might prompt politi- cal action in The Wrongs of Woman, as well as other Romantic texts. 7. Rajan argues for the first reading. She suggests that Maria’s “plea for divorce is simply a plea to reenter the matrimonial system over again” (The Supplement of Reading 179). In Revolutionary Feminism, Kelly argues for a more optimistic reading: Maria “reclaims female sexuality from [an] instru- ment of the trivialization and oppression of women in court society to [a] manifestation of women’s subjective equality of ‘mind’” (215). 8. Poovey argues that in idealizing the consummation of Maria’s relationship with Darnford “the narrator – and, by implication, Wollstonecraft herself – has just fallen victim to the very delusion it is the object of this novel to criticize” (98). Coda to Chapter 1 1. See Mitzi Myers, William St. Clair, and Anna Wilson. 2. See also Daniel O’Quinn, “Trembling: Wollstonecraft, Godwin and the Resistance to Literature”. 3. Godwin destroyed Wollstonecraft’s comedic representation of her relation- ship with Imlay. In the Memoirs he writes, “In January 1796, [Wollstonecraft] finished the sketch of a comedy, which turns, in the serious scenes, upon the incidents of her own story. It was offered to both the winter-managers, and remained among her papers at the period of her decease; but it appeared to me to be in so crude and imperfect a state, that I judged it most respectful of her memory to commit it to the flames” (255). 4. Wollstonecraft writes: “Yet thus to give a sex to mind was not very consis- tent with the principles of a man who argued so warmly, and so well, for the immortality of the soul” (Vindication 42). 5. The Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination was first published under the pseudonym of Anne Frances Randall. In the “Advertisement” to the second edition (also published in 1799) Robinson declares herself the author. The Letter is also listed amongst Robinson’s works in the Memoirs of Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself (1801). 6. In The Female Advocate (1801), the author enters the debate over “the long exploded subject of female merit” after hearing an “arrogant assumer of Notes 247 male merit” assert that a woman had “arrived at [her] zenith of improve- ment, at the age of twenty-one” (4). In response, she suggests that men prefer young and naive women because they are then most vulnerable to “the wicked, cruel, and insinuating art of gallantry and seduction” (6). Like Robinson, she recommends that a young woman’s education should include at least a vicarious knowledge of seduction. “What infinite conse- quence and importance is it to us”, she wittily advises, “that we read both men and books” (22). 7. Robinson numbers herself among the forty women writers she lists at the end of her text. Her descriptions of each woman’s literary output stress the range of their writing. Authors noted by Robinson include Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah More, Clara Reeve, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Anne Yearsley. 2. ‘To think, to decide, and to act’ 1. Examples of the wandering Romantic transgressor are found in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art, as well as William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn”.
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