Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

NOTES CHAPTER 1 1. Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 66–67. 2. Richardson, Selected Letters, 65. 3. Richardson, Selected Letters, 65. 4. Bradshaigh to Richardson, 25 September, 1753, Forster Collection Manuscripts, Victoria and Albert Museum, XI, f. 26v. All future citations appear as Forster MSS. 5. Denis Diderot, “Eulogy of Richardson” in Clarissa: The Eighteenth Century Response: 1747–1804: Volume 1, Reading Clarissa, ed. Lois Bueler (New York: AMS Press, Inc. 2010), 393. 6. Diderot, “Eulogy of Richardson,” 395. 7. Diderot, “Eulogy of Richardson,” 398. As Mary Helen McMurran observes, the initial problems with Prevost’s translation seemed to provoke a connec- tion between fidelity of translation and fidelity to the sentimental heroine. Richardson himself called Prevost’s translation a “mutilation,” a label that in McMurran’s words, “deploy[s] the thematic of the novel itself to hint that injuries to the text are an immoral violation of the heroine’s body.” See McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 123–124. Although McMurran does not focus on the discourse of friendship, she reads Diderot’s “Eloge” as envisioning a “spatial and © The Author(s) 2017 217 B. Mangano, Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48695-6 218 NOTES temporal universality of readership” (The Spread of Novels, 127), an angle I also explore through the narrower scope of language pertaining to amity. 8. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 67. Lukács contrasts the novel’s necessary reflexivity, ironic self-reference, and formal self-justification with the epic voice’s confidence in the cultural context to ensure the transmission of meaning, which appears textually as indifference toward the responsiveness of the audience. 9. Ronald. A. Sharp, Friendship and Literature: Spirit and Form (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1986), 9, 51. Sharp’s argument is that friendship, like literature, requires mediation of both creative forms and rituals, despite the fact that the rhetoric of modern friendship is often plagued by fallacious idioms of pure expressivity and total transparency. Throughout the book, Sharp links various authors who have represented the necessity of drawing on form in creative ways to forge successful friendships. I entirely concur with Sharp’s emphasis on the role of mediating forms, but I focus more directly on the reciprocity between an author’s depiction of creative friendships and their own creative engagement with audiences. 10. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 218. 11. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, ed. Sheridan Baker (New York: Norton, 1995), 595. 12. Fielding, Tom Jones, 596. 13. See also Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). In this text, Booth sketches out a methodology for evaluating literary forms on the basis of their proffered friendship. Booth’s treatment of friendship is partly Aristotelian, partly his own amalgamation of ethical virtues. While I also owe great debts to this work, I am here pursuing an historically situated discussion of what defines friendship ideals in the eighteenth century. 14. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvin New and Joan New, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vols 1 and 2 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1978), 9. Future in-text page references are to this edition. 15. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 76. 16. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 20. 17. Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth- Century British Fiction (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 16. NOTES 219 18. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 19. In the final part of her study, Tadmor discusses but deals briefly with the legacy of classical friendship norms in eighteenth-century life. Tadmor, Family and Friends, 239–245. 20. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997). 21. Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9. 22. Shannon, Sovereign Amity,8. 23. Tadmor, Family and Friends, 239–245.Tadmor reveals how the seven- teenth-century theologian Jeremy Taylor’s treatise on friendship, widely read throughout the eighteenth century by authors and general readers, embodies precisely this effort to synthesize Christian and classical friendship ideals with various spheres of eighteenth-century life. 24. Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 25. Todd, Women’s Friendship,3. 26. Although manipulative and erotic friendship often stand in tension with idealizations of friendship, they also serve to shadow the pursuit of friendships that are defined against eroticism (Chapter 5), that are paranoid about deception (Chapter 4), and that depend on deception for didactic purposes (Chapter 2). 27. Clifford Siskin and William B. Warner, “This is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument” in This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William B. Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1–33. 28. Siskin and Warner, “This is Enlightenment,” 32–33. 29. Marta Kvande, “Printed in a Book: Negotiating Print and Manuscript Cultures in Fantomina and Clarissa,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46.2 (2013): 240. 30. Lori Nandrea, Misfit Forms: Paths Not Taken by the British Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 31. Jody Greene, “Captain Singleton: An Epic of Mitsein?” The Eighteenth- Century: Theory and Interpretation 52.3–4 (2011): 403–421. 32. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987). In McKeon’s well-known account, questions of truth reflect a dialectic between romance, empiricism and skepticism, and questions of virtue reflect a dialectic between aristocracy, progressive individu- alism, and conservatism. The quixotic idealism of many eighteenth-century 220 NOTES friendships may seem to fit under the heading of “romance idealism,” but McKeon’s dialectic of virtue does not implicitly accommodate the presence of friendship ideals and their influence on narrative forms. His notion of conservative ideology, as a tenuous negation of both aristocratic and progressive ideol- ogies, offers the closest approximation; though, even in this case, it is not clear that conservative ideology, in its association with “extreme skepticism,” can account for the faith that binds characters in friendship. The value of a collectiv- ity without hierarchy or kinship often presented by the period’s friendship ideals does not fit neatly into the categories of virtue that McKeon offers. 33. Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1998); Scott Paul Gordon, ThePracticeofQuixotism:Post- Modern Theory and Eighteenth-Century Women’sWriting(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Susan Staves, “Don Quixote in Eighteenth-Century England,” Comparative Literature 24.3 (1972): 193–215. 34. Gordon, The Practice of Quixotism,34–40. 35. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 36. Emrys D. Jones, Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Politics of Private Virtue in the Age of Walpole (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 37. Catherine Gallagher observes that literary authorship in mid-eighteenth- century Britain becomes less explicitly political as women authors help to transform scandal and political allegory into fictions about “nobodies.” Thus, the general de-politicization of fictional characters makes the notion of readers “befriending” a character appear politically neutral, or at least non-partisan. See especially Gallagher’s discussion of Delarivier Manley and Charlotte Lennox in Chapters 3 and 4 of Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 38. The economic relation between authors and readers is almost always less direct than the implied virtual friendship cultivated by the rhetoric of fiction. In each case study, I attend to the differing professional circumstances that underlie the rhetoric of amity. 39. Allan Silver, “Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and Modern Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 95.6 (1990): 1479. Silver bases his argument primarily on the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Ferguson. Of course, even this notion of the individual as an end-in-itself, detached from commerce, must be thoroughly scrutinized. NOTES 221 40. Tadmor argues that Richardson’s

Load more