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Women's Textual and Narrative Power

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Women's Textual and Narrative Power IN HER HANDS: WOMEN’S TEXTUAL AND NARRATIVE POWER IN THE ROMANTIC NOVEL by SARAH PAIGE ELLISOR-CATOE (Under the Direction of Roxanne Eberle) ABSTRACT This project examines the hybridity of the Romantic novel through the twin lenses of feminist and corporeal narratology. Romantic women novelists, in particular, manipulate narrative forms; these innovations often place a woman editor at the heart of the narratives and plots of novels, a role that reflects the increasing status of actual women editors during the period. To this end, Romantic women novelists emphasize the real and tangible nature of embedded texts and often put these embedded texts in women’s hands, a convention that I argue stresses women’s textual and narrative power. I survey how the embedded text legislates power for these women editor figures throughout the sub-genres of the Gothic, historical, and epistolary novels. Though my project is specifically a study of the narrative structure of the Romantic novel, I examine the long-ranging influence of these narrative experiments in the genre by linking these novels to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. INDEX WORDS: Romantic novel, Editor, Narrative structure, Embedded text, Corporeal narratology, Feminist narratology IN HER HANDS: WOMEN’S TEXTUAL AND NARRATIVE POWER IN THE ROMANTIC NOVEL by SARAH PAIGE ELLISOR-CATOE B.A., Presbyterian College, 2003 M.A., University of Georgia, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2012 © 2012 Sarah Paige Ellisor-Catoe All Rights Reserved IN HER HANDS: WOMEN’S TEXTUAL AND NARRATIVE POWER IN THE ROMANTIC NOVEL by SARAH PAIGE ELLISOR-CATOE Major Professor: Roxanne Eberle Committee: Tricia Lootens Richard Menke Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School University of Georgia 2012 iv DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my Mina. I look forward to seeing her narrative unfold. v Acknowledgements I want to thank my family for providing great love and support as I have completed my graduate schooling. I especially want to thank my mother for first introducing me to strong heroines during our weekly library trips together. Ramona Quimby, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Nancy Drew led me here, and I am grateful. My friends have provided inspiration, humor, and a helpful hand along this journey. I especially treasure the times I have spent with Lisa Ward Bolding and Sara Steger—two of the greatest cheerleaders, colleagues, and friends a girl could have. My committee members have provided valuable help throughout this project. I appreciate their willingness to help me be a better writer, scholar, and teacher. Finally, I want to thank my husband, John Catoe. He has endured countless sacrifices so that I could complete my graduate school work. He has often taken up the slack so that I could finish reading for my classes, check hundreds of books off my comps lists, and complete the seemingly never-ending process of writing and revising a dissertation. I look forward to spending more quality time with him; our precious daughter, Mina; and our loving dog, Athena. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v Introduction: “This New Species”...……………..………………………………………..1 Chapter One Women Editors: Factual and Fictional………………………………….26 Two The Corporeal “Female Gothic”: Narrative Spaces and Found Documents……………………………………………………………….60 Three Textual Possession: The Generic and Formal Innovation of Sophia Lee’s The Recess……………………………………………………………..…89 Four Collecting Letters: The Embedded Texts of the Epistolary Novel….…116 Conclusion: The Influence of the Romantic Novel…….......………………………….142 Works Cited…..……………………………………………………………………..….160 1 Introduction: “This New Species” The Critical Review’s anonymous review of Charlotte Smith’s first novel, Emmeline (1788), opens with praise: “As we have lately been able to fix a new aera [sic] in novel-writing, we are happy at being able to point out another example of this new species, which reflects so much credit on its author” (477). The Romantic novel, the product of this “new aera,” was a successful venture; for example, the initial print run of Emmeline sold out almost instantaneously and gave rise to second and third editions (Fletcher 9). Yet the reviewer’s characterization of the novel as a “new species” foreshadows the many ways in which Romantic novelists’ choices in form would complicate the reception of the genre for years to come. The writer’s conclusion of the review suggests just how distinctive this new type of novel was. After praising the characters, story, and scenic description, the reviewer states, “We will not mutilate these pleasing volumes by taking one line from the story: Mrs. Smith will excuse us for transcribing one of the sonnets […] Even fetters may be made to hang with grace, and add to beauty, though our fair author does not always put on the chains which so strictly bind the Italian sonneteer” (478). The review ends by quoting in full “I love thee, mournful, sober suited night,” one of two sonnets and an ode that are included in the novel. Smith sets these poems off from the rest of the prose of Emmeline and demarcates them with titles, if only that of “Sonnet.” However simple such a title is, it also recalls Smith’s prior publication, the immensely successful Elegiac Sonnets (1784). These poems, though tied to the main plot of the novel, also function as 2 independent texts unto themselves. In fact, in addition to the Critical Review, both the European Magazine and the Monthly Review include the full text of a sonnet in their reviews of the novel. Furthermore, Smith included both sonnets in the fifth edition of Elegiac Sonnets, published in 1789. Though the inclusion of such works highlights the poetic natures of her characters, it also displays one of the most fundamental characteristics of the Romantic novel, which the reviewer suggests in his characterization of the novel as a “new species”: its innovative hybridity. Marshall Brown names Charlotte Smith as “the earliest regular practitioner of the ‘Romantic novel’” because her novels feature verse within them (112). And, as the initial reviewer notes, even Smith’s sonnets are experimental, for they break from the standard Petrarchan form. While Brown’s pronouncement reflects the importance of poetry as the dominant genre of the period, it also invokes the multi-faceted nature of the Romantic novel, a critical experiment in form, as a defining feature. Whether they damn or celebrate the formal innovations of Romantic fiction, most scholars agree that textual and generic interplay is a foundational element of the Romantic novel. Generic mixing and overlapping has been celebrated in Romantic poetry, where poets such as William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley have been revered for their experiments in hybrid works; however, the novel has not enjoyed the same level of praise.1 1 In his landmark study, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, Stuart Curran discusses the success of hybrid works, including Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Byron’s Don Juan, and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Curran argues that these poems are “the most daring and sophisticated formal experiments in British Romantic poetry” (204). 3 Noting that the Romantic novel has long been rejected in favor of the more “successful” genre of the period, poetry, Robert Miles points out the absurdity of such an exclusion: “It is surely very strange that Romanticism, alone of our conventional periodizations, customarily includes the texts of a single genre in its list of canonized works” (182). The Romantic novel is missing from many key studies of the novel, such as Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957); Watt’s neglect of the Romantic texts certainly contributes to the wide-ranging dismissal of the novel. More and more contemporary critics, however, recognize the value of Romantic fiction in the development of the genre. Women novelists of the period have also become a new focus of critical analysis. Many non-canonical writers, though popular and respected in their day, are just now benefitting from more serious study. Critics in the last few decades—such as Anne Mellor, Eleanor Ty, and Adriana Craciun—have worked hard to bring the likes of Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley—to mention just a few—into critical conversations. The historical tendency has been to suggest that the genre, often considered to have been in its infancy during the Romantic period, was an apt choice for women writers struggling to find an accessible form for their voices. Jane Tomkins, for example, cites inexperience as the motivating force for women novelists to choose the genre: “Here, as they apprehended it, was a new and unexacting literary form, hedged round by no learned traditions, based on no formal technique, a go-as-you-please narrative” (119). Tomkins, author of The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (1932), stresses the ease with which novice women writers could navigate such a new terrain. Moving on from her slightly condescending view, I instead champion the sense of formal experimentation that women writers inculcated in the developing genre. Through this 4 study on women novelists and the narrative form of the Romantic novel, I seek to join the ranks of the critics listed above—those who have broadened our understanding of Romantic women writers beyond Tomkins’s historical short-sightedness. Thus, rather than the hybridity inherent in the Romantic novel making it a fit territory for inexperienced women writers, I suggest that women novelists deliberately invoke multi-layered narratives in their works. The compound nature of these works does not bear the mark of a juvenile foray into a new land; instead it demonstrates the intentional innovation of their formal choices in the genre. The generic hybridity of the Romantic novel frequently results in multiple levels of narrative, among them, embedded narratives.
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