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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Idle Stories: Interpolated Tales and the Anglophone Novel, 1740–1800 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4tw3h1v2 Author Charles, Katie Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Idle Stories: Interpolated Tales and the Anglophone Novel, 1740–1800 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Katherine Genevieve Charles 2016 © Copyright by Katherine Genevieve Charles 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION: Idle Stories: Interpolated Tales and the Anglophone Novel, 1740–1800 by Katherine Genevieve Charles Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Felicity A. Nussbaum, Chair From the earliest days of the novel, people have been threatening to kick interpolated tales out of the genre. Miguel de Cervantes, Henry Fielding, and Walter Scott all vilify interpolated tales as “foreign to the purpose,” “extravagant and incredible,” and “tiresome and unnecessary.” And yet, their novels, Don Quixote, Joseph Andrews, and Redgauntlet, all brim with such “idle stories.” For eighteenth-century Anglophone authors writing in the wake of Cervantes, taking Don Quixote as exemplary of the novel form meant including interpolated tales as a constitutive part. Though such interpolated tales are everywhere in eighteenth-century English novels, their function can be hard to hold in critical focus; as a concept, they elude us. While scholars have seized on these tales as a “site for critical performance” that has yielded scores of publications, as yet, there is no full-length work on the topic. This study explores the cultural value assigned to interpolated tales in a transatlantic range of novels by Sarah and Henry !ii Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, William Earle, Jr., and the ever-present “Anonymous.” Interpolated stories remain only loosely defined as “tales within a tale” or “twice-told tales.” The tales themselves are materially present and sometimes overtly marked with titles or other paratexts, but their function is less clear. So often, interpolated tales are negatively framed: they distract, they digress, they mar. Or, in rejoinder, they delight, they beautify, they whet the appetite. I begin from the recognition that their bifurcated reception—their perseverating place in or out of the novel as a genre—constitutes a defining feature of the device. By operating as parts within the whole and as whole narratives in their own right, interpolated tales occur both in and potentially outside of the novels that contain them. This dual status translates to several registers. Interpolated tales are both inside and outside, part and whole, novelistic device and the form created by that device. Their partial assimilation makes for an awkward fit. However, it also allows these tales to mediate alternative perspectives without assimilating them fully into the primary narrative and its point of view. Set apart by an ironizable edge, interpolated tales are uniquely positioned to advance critiques of all kinds, whether of the primary narrative or of traditional ways of conceptualizing subject categories like gender, race, class, and the individual self. The switching of storytellers inherent to interpolated tales acts as a warrant for the plurality of those who are licensed to be storytellers and the completeness of subjectivity afforded to them. Thus, interpolated tales play a crucial role in the construction of subjectivity and difference as well as in the emergence of the novel. Paying attention to idle stories as awkward yet mighty forms can transfigure the way we read eighteenth-century fiction. !iii The dissertation of Katherine G. Charles is approved. Helen Deutsch Jonathan H. Grossman Christopher Looby Mary Terrall Felicity A. Nussbaum, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 !iv To my parents, Mary Lee and Roger Charles, who filled our house with love and love of learning, and who made the library a second home, and my grandparents, Agnes and Lawrence Carr, and Frances and Delmon Charles, whose love, curiosity, and hard work planted the seeds of my education some ninety years ago. !v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One Introduction 1 I. Interpolated Tales: “A Critical Survey” 13 II. Interpolation, Lost and Found: The Test Case of Vertue Rewarded, or The Irish Princess 21 III. Chasing a Flickering Form 29 Chapter Two Interrupting Women: “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” and “Leonora” 33 I. Authorship and the Celebrity Body 38 II. Questions of Form and the Pickle Plot 45 III. Lady Vane and her Paratexts 57 IV. Lady Vane’s Memoirs: Character and Form 70 V. Women Talking about Women: “The History of Leonora” 79 Chapter Three Didactic Experiments: Form and Community 97 I. Redistributing Point of View in David Simple 99 II. Volume the Last: Storytelling in Bad Faith 113 III. The Governess: Moral, Fable, and Point of View 121 IV. Charitable Patterns in Millenium Hall and The History of Sir George Ellison 139 Chapter Four Tell-Tale Hearts: Sentimental Plot-Making 162 I. Tragedy Turns Comedy: Miss Price’s Tale Interrupts The Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph 167 II. First Hand, Second Generation: Conclusion of the Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph 184 III. Oliver Goldsmith’s Other Lives of an Interpolated Tale 199 IV. Charlotte Temple: A Broken Narrative Circle 208 V. Nicholas Nickleby: Interpolated Tale Turned Subplot 212 Chapter Five “Who is Speaking?”: Mediated Voices in Obi and The Female American 216 I. Speaking Culture in Obi 218 II. Cross-cultural, Cross Narrative in The Female American 232 Epilogue Whither the Interpolated Tale? 246 !vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Like the eighteenth-century novels made vibrant by the tales of Lady Vane, Leonora, and friends, this dissertation is the product of many voices. A slew of interpolated tales would be necessary to acknowledge in full my teachers, friends, and colleagues for their contributions to this work and to my education, in its many guises. An abundance of thanks is due. To Felicity Nussbaum, who lit my way to the eighteenth century with her course on Johnson, Garrick, and the Blues. Her presence is to some extent visible in this work, but that shadow is slight when I consider the countless hours we have spent in conversation, the hundreds of citations she has fished out of her teeming eighteenth-century memory, the incessant flow of emails bearing insight, critique, and encouragement. My fondest memories are of sitting on Felicity’s couch, being handed exactly the right book from her almost-magical bookcase, and, always, of swapping anecdotes and talking plays. To Helen Deutsch, a model of how to translate the eighteenth-century life of the mind to our twenty-first century moment. Time and again, a passing comment from Helen provided the apt phrase or big-picture concept I was straining to find. Meeting with Helen, surrounded by her totems of Freud and superheroes, made for happily Johnsonian conversations, and I continue to hang on every word. To Jonathan Grossman, whose scrupulous attention to form is outdone only by his open- hearted commitment to his students. Our marathon whiteboard sessions snapped this project and its argument into focus; he gave interpolated tales their “flicker.” In hindsight, I recognize that I !vii first saw their glimmer in Jonathan’s classes, in the form of Dickens’s “very queer small boy” and the interpolated tales in Pickwick. To Chris Looby, who spent so many late afternoons meeting with me, talking over Charles Brockton Brown and Modern Quixote as the light was drawing in. There is no one I would rather hear recapitulate a plot, be it of Indian Summer or 45 Years. To Mary Terrall, who was a stalwart reader and encourager of this work. Thank you for channeling Abigail Adams, and her crucial admonition, “remember the ladies!” So many others hands and voices helped to shape this project over the past four years. The members of my shadow committee, Taylor Walle, Cailey Hall, Sarah Kareem, Cristina Ricchieri Griffin, and Dehn Gilmore, read gobbets of undigested thought and helped me to work it into prose. At UCLA, the 18th-Century/Romantics Working Group and 19th Century Group gave form to inchoate chapters. Special thanks are due to their organizers, Angelina Del Balzo and James Reeves, and Jonathan Grossman, Anahid Nersessian, Cailey Hall, and Lindsey Wilhelm. I owe further gratitude to the keen participants of these workshops, including Anne Mellor, Michael Cohen, Sarah Nicolazzo, Leigh-Michil George, Cristina Ricchieri Griffin, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Bea Russell, Taylor Walle, Dan Couch, Grant Rosson, Claire Kim, Sydney Miller, Alex Zobel, Megan Smith, Jessica Horvath, Ellen Truxaw, and Sam Somers. The English Reading Room, under the watchful eye of Lynda Tolly and Hilary Gordon, has been my home away from home. In the English Department at UCLA, no work is done without the unstinting support of Janet Bishop, Jeanette Gilkinson, and Mike Lambert, who are a kind yet formidable presence. !viii Farther afield, I have given portions of this dissertation at conferences run by the many societies for eighteenth-century studies, ASECS, WSECS, and ISECS, as well as at the David Nichol Smith Seminar. Particular thanks are due to Roland Greene, Jocelyn Harris, Nicholas Paige, and Ian Duncan, who directed me to key sources or graciously shared their own unpublished work. Months spent at the Huntington Library, Chawton House Library, and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library produced three chapters of writing and began conversations with new friends that I hope have many decades ahead of them. A debt of gratitude is also due to the many institutions that have funded my research throughout graduate school. This dissertation exists thanks to the combined support of the Clark Dissertation Fellowship, the W. M.