The Spirit of Cleavage: Pedagogy, Gender, and Reform In

THE SPIRIT OF CLEAVAGE: PEDAGOGY, GENDER, AND REFORM IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH WOMEN'S FICTION A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon BY Lisa M. Robson November 1997 O Copyright Lisa M. Robson. 1997. All rights reserved. National Library BiblioWque nationale of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellingtort OttawaON KIA ON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pennettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, preter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la foxme de rnicrofiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts &om it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent Btre imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. Permission To Use In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freeIy available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor who supenised my thesis work or, in his absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis. Requests for permission to copy or to make other use of material in this thesis in whole or part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of English University of Saskatchewan 9 Campus Drive Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the University of Saskatchewan, the College of Graduate Studies and Research, the English Department, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generously supporting my doctoral programme. Much appreciation goes to my supervisor, Dr. Len Findlay, for guiding me through this project and for teaching me a great deal about being a scholar as well as a teacher. I extend my deepest gratitude to my family and friends for their ongoing emotional and spiritual support; to each of you I offer my continuing respect and affection. I dedicate this work to my parents, Perry and Mona Robson, as we11 as to my grandparents, Earle and Irene Robson and Bertha Hardy, for providing a legacy of strength, compassion, and integrity. Abstract By the end of the eighteenth century, women's education had become a topic of serious cultural debate. In my dissertation I examine the ways in which six early nineteenth-century noncanonical British women novelists-Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Amelia Opie, Hannah More, Sydney Owenson, and Maq Bmnton-attempt to reconstruct cdtUridIy dominant gender representations through their discourse on education, whiIe I measure the possible efficacy of these reformist efforts in light of the political and cultural forces and conditions which demand their suppression or co-option. My analysis suggests that these writers were accomplished readers of the polemics and politics of their period, creativeIy appropriating turn-of-the-century inte1Iectual and philosophical debates and constructing an alternative history through their fictions. Far from homogeneous in their responses to the cultural text of their era, these women and their fictions are marked by differences in politics, nationality, class, and religion, yet they all attempt to transform female pedagogical practices and dominant gender constructions through an appeal to balance and reconciliation. For disparate reasons, these novels defy customary, binary constructions of complementary sex-based schooling by revalorizing or rewriting culturally prevalent notions of a properly feminine education in the decorative accomplishments and arguing for women's access to masculine, rational pedagogy in both form and content. Because education plays a pivotal role in the ideological construction of gender, in envisioning a comprehensive alternative mode of femde instruction which reconciles the masculine and feminine, these novelists also construct an alternative gender representation for the early nineteenth-century woman, a vision of gender parity which translates into expanded .. 1ll opportunity, cultural agency, and socio-political significance for British women. In challenging dominant notions of rationality, furthermore, these novelists also rewrite conventional terms of cultural cohesion in an attempt to augment communal benefits and individual happiness. Such efforts, however, are qualified by the authors' limited concern with reconstructing gender through education for the turn-of-thecentury male, as well as by the shift in emphasis in the underlying logic for these educational and gender reforms from a matter of rights to one of religion, a transition which gradually lends to an appropriation of these disruptive efforts by the dominant order. Nevertheless, through heir discourse on education these women breach any illusions of social consensus and stability, thereby creating the fissure, the opening, the "spirit of cleavage" in the cultural fabric that remains to disrupt dominant prescriptions throughout the nineteenth century. By choosing education as their point of intervention, these six writers adopt the position of the intellectual, a primary site of opposition that helps clear a space from which to gain the perspective, resistance, and mobility necessary to begin to envision and effect lasting, far-reaching cultural change. Table of Contents Permission To Use ............................................................ i . Acknowledgements ........................................................... 11 ... Abstract ................................................................... ru Table of Contents ............................................................. v Chapter One: The Spirit of Cleavage .............................................. I Chapter Two: If I Only Had a Brain .............................................. 3 1 Chapter Three: Mary Wollstonecraft and Rational Education .......................... 72 Chapter Four: Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays. and New Directions ........................ 104 Chapter Five: Amelia Opie, Hannah More, and the Art of Indirection .................. 145 Chapter Six: Sydney Owenson. Mary Brunton, and Feminism in the Isles ............... 200 Conclusion .........................................,..................256 Workscited ............................................................... 264 Chapter One: The Spirit of Cleavage But the dominant will never completely silence the words of the marginal and the less powerful . Cacophony, though muted, will persist. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg The last decade of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth witnessed an outpouring of novels by British women writers, the production of a body of material that, to date. remains largely unstudied. In particular, many women. influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Righrs of Woman and the Jacobinism of the Godwin circle, turned to education as a specific concern in their domestic fiction. Among these novels which use pedagogy as both theme and method are Eliza Fenwick's Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock (1793, Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Coumey (1796), Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray or The Mother and Daughrer (1804), Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1 808), Sydney Owenson's (Lady Morgan's) Woman: or, Ida of Athens (1 809)' and Mary Brunton's Discipline (1814). That these women tumed with such intensity to a study of education at this particular historicai moment warrants critical attention. In an effort to reclaim these works from the relative obscurity to which they have been too habitually relegated and to assess their literary as well as cultural significance, I intend to explore the ways in which early nineteenthcentury noncanonicd British women novelists attempt to reconstruct culturally dominant gender representations through their discourse on education. 2 The period during and after the French Revolution but prior to the British Reform Bill of 1832 was volatile in Britain, witnessing serious and unprecedented political, economic. and social unsettlement At the height of what Raymond Williams terms the "decisive period" of the Industrial Revolution (Culwe and Sociezy 3 I), turn-of-thecentury Britain was experiencing the trauma of its socio-economic shift from feudalism to capitalism, from an agrarian aristocracy to a developing bourgeoisie dependent on expanding domestic and mercantiIe trade. The social confusion

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