UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The English Novel's Cradle: The Theatre and the Women Novelists of the Long Eighteenth Century Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q32j478 Author Howard, James Joseph Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The English Novel‘s Cradle: The Theatre and the Women Novelists of the Long Eighteenth Century A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by James Joseph Howard March 2010 Dissertation Committee: Dr. George E. Haggerty, Chairperson Dr. Carole Fabricant Dr. Deborah Willis Copyright by James Joseph Howard 2010 The Dissertation of James Howard is approved: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my appreciation for the guidance and encouragement provided during this project by my Dissertation Committee Chair, Dr. George Haggerty, and the positive support of the other committee members, Dr. Carole Fabricant and Dr. Deborah Willis. I would also like to thank Dr. John Ganim, who served on my doctoral examination committee, for his helpful insights before and especially during my oral examination, and Dr. John Briggs, for his initial encouragement of my entering the doctoral program at UC Riverside. I also extend my gratitude to all the English faculty with whom I had the pleasure of studying during my six years at the Riverside campus. Finally, I must make special mention of the English Graduate Staff Advisor, Tina Feldmann, for her unflinching dedication and patience in resolving not only my own interminable queries and needs, but also those of her entire ―family‖ of English graduate students. My experience at UC Riverside English Department has been consistently pleasurable and meaningful, thanks to all those mentioned above, as well as the many others who contribute this successful institution, including my fellow students. iv DEDICATION My dissertation is dedicated to all those who encouraged me and supported me in this late-in-life project: my father, Vincent; my sisters, Patti and Michelle; my son, Rob; and my colleagues at Selkirk College, and my friends; as well as Marti, who first inspired it, and Madelyn, who persevered with me in seeing it through. It is especially dedicated, however, to my mother, Frances Theresa Germaine Howard (nee LaRochelle), for whom my achievement is the fulfillment of her maternal aspirations for her son, who is forever grateful for her faith in him. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The English Novel‘s Cradle: The Theatre and the Women Novelists of the Long Eighteenth Century by James Joseph Howard Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, March 2010 Dr.George Haggerty, Chairperson This dissertation examines the relationship between the drama and the novel in the ―Long‖ Eighteenth Century, with the focus on the women who wrote in both genres during this period and on the impact of female playwriting upon the evolution and refinement of the emerging English novel. Ten such writers are the subject of this study, starting with Aphra Behn and concluding with Frances Burney. The uneasy relationship women had with the theatre of the period has been well documented, and conventional wisdom has been that as the eighteenth century progressed, the novel became the preferred (or perhaps culturally imposed) literary venue for most female authors. However, my research reveals the succession of women writers who began their careers as dramatists, or wrote for the theatre soon after attempting other genres, continued unbroken throughout the eighteenth century. Most of these writers persisted in writing plays, even after they achieved success in fiction. It is true the production of novels, largely written by and for women, increased exponentially; but in a revised ―feminist‖ version of the ―rise of the novel‖ narrative, the dramatists in this study, such as Eliza vi Haywood, figure prominently in the development of the new genre, alongside their iconic male counterparts. There was a pattern of conformity and resistance in the work of these writers. They sought to achieve literary acceptance in the paternalistic public forum of the theatre by espousing traditional literary standards and conventions, and by extending those standards into the evolving genres of prose fiction. They also resisted, in their fiction, at least, ―feminizing‖ trends that were developing as a result of the bourgeois fashions of sentiment and domestication, often by adopting the ―masculine‖ classically based model of the novel established by Henry Fielding. Frances Burney‘s oeuvre represents the culmination of the eighteenth-century relationship between play writing and novel writing by women, but deviates from the pattern. As a frustrated, failed playwright, Burney sublimated her dramatic impulse more extensively into her fiction, especially Camilla and The Wanderer, infusing her novels with a distinctive, theatrical motif that anticipates the narrative innovation of Jane Austen‘s novels. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER ONE: ―Astrea on Stage‖: Aphra Behn………………………………..13 CHAPTER TWO: ―The Female Wits‖: Pix, Trotter, Manley and Davys…………40 CHAPTER THREE: ―Mrs. Novel‖: Eliza Haywood…………………………………79 CHAPTER FOUR: ―The Second Wave‖: Lennox, Brooke, and Griffith..…………118 CHAPTER FIVE: ―The Play‘s the Thing‖: Frances Burney……………………….167 EPILOGUE…………………………………………………………………………....218 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………..232 ENDNOTES…………………………………………………………………………. 248 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………258 viii INTRODUCTION This project is about the relationship between the drama and the novel in the ―Long‖ Eighteenth Century, in particular the women writers who worked in both genres during this period. While the notion of literary artists writing in several popular genres may not seem extraordinary to contemporary observers, the practices of play-writing and novel-writing during the eighteenth century have been considered as quite distinct by commentators then and now. The drama was regarded a long-standing male bastion of traditional literary values, while the novel, or at least its immediate predecessors, was the new-fangled preserve of female hack writers. However, the former, subject to increasing censorship, restricted venues and changing tastes, was being transformed, and in the minds of some commentators, deteriorating, as the century progressed; while the latter, according to Ian Watt, et al., was ―rising‖ in popularity and perhaps respectability, as a new literary genre during the same time. In addition, the rapidly increasing participation of women in professional writing and theatre during this period also coincided with the development of the novel and may have contributed to it. Writing about developments in English drama between 1660 and 1760 in relation to the emergence of the novel, Laura Brown in her English Dramatic Form (1981), declares that the ―rise of the novel defines the decline of the drama‖ since ―in the end, the eighteenth-century moral action could not find adequate expression in drama‖ (184). One might expect, if Brown‘s analysis were accurate, that the female practitioners of the new ―rising‖ genre would have ignored or abandoned the writing of plays, as their male 1 counterpart, Henry Fielding seems to have done. Yet, Nora Nachumi, a critic who has also recently explored the relationship between novel and play writing during the later Eighteenth Century, observes in her book Acting Like a ‘Lady’: British Women Novelists and the Eighteenth-Century Theater that of ―383 female novelists who published between 1660 and 1818 … 92 or one-fifth of that number, were actresses and/or playwrights" (xxiii). She adds that a ―few were theater managers. Others were members of theatrical milieus; often they also were related to someone involved with the professional theater. Overall, at least 135 women, or approximately one third of the total, were involved in the theater‖ (ibid). Given that the majority of writers developing the new genre of the novel during this period were women, Nachumi‘s study seems to suggest a possibility opposite to Brown‘s declaration: that eighteenth-century drama may have had a significant role in defining the rise of the novel. It is this intriguing possibility that has inspired this project and appears to be one that has been largely ignored by scholars to date. The other component of Brown‘s thesis relevant to this study is her claim that eighteenth-century drama was in ―decline.‖ What is fascinating—and troubling—about her contention is that the ―decline‖ Brown charts corresponds with the emergence in England of the female professional writer, in particular women dramatists and prose fiction/novel writers. It is significant that contemporary complaints of some kind of ―decline‖ in the quality of British theatre began simultaneously with the success of female dramatists, such as Aphra Behn, Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Susanna 2 Centlivre on the London stage. Of further interest is the association of the alleged decline of the theatre with its immorality, most