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Affected Behavior: Deceptive Unities in Eighteenth Century Conduct Books

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Affected Behavior: Deceptive Unities in Eighteenth Century Conduct Books Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2018 Affected Behavior: Deceptive Unities in Eighteenth Century Conduct Books Dominique Angela Bruno Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Bruno, Dominique Angela, "Affected Behavior: Deceptive Unities in Eighteenth Century Conduct Books" (2018). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 7164. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/7164 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Affected Behavior: Deceptive Unities in Eighteenth Century Conduct Books Dominique Angela Bruno Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Eighteenth Century British Literature Adam Komisaruk, Ph.D., Chair Susan Greenfield, Ph.D. John B. Lamb, Ph.D. Rosemary V. Hathaway, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2018 Keywords: Jane Austen, Frances Burney, British, Hester Chapone, Conduct, Eighteenth- Century, English Literature, James Fordyce, John Gregory, Novel, Sarah Pennington, Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft Copyright 2018 Dominique Angela Bruno ABSTRACT Affected Behavior: Deceptive Unities in Eighteenth Century Conduct Books Dominique Angela Bruno My defense argues that the eighteenth-century British middle-class conduct manual written for women is a suitable genre for beginning to understand the impossibility of a literature of advice. The inquiry is framed by the analyses and close readings of Nancy Armstrong, Margaret Anne Doody, and Mary Poovey. In the first chapter, I discuss the tension between intention and reception in the rise of both the conduct book and the British novel, by analyzing Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind. In chapter two, there is a discussion of motherhood and the inconsistent parental voice in Sarah Pennington’s An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters, and Frances Burney’s Evelina. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is paired with James Fordyce’s, Sermons to Young Women in the third chapter, where my critical inquiry focuses on how Austen commandeers Fordyce’s tone, his religious language, and his ideas to create her narrative, while still mocking and satirizing his project. The final chapter highlights the differences between good conduct and virtue, and will expose the untenability of the conduct ethos, through the work of John Gregory in A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In the Epilogue, I discuss how these inconsistencies are still present in contemporary advice- giving, in both the book and the advice-column format. I conclude by suggesting that what the contemporary advice columnist is offering readers, is the possibility that intrinsic hypocrisy is not fatal; it is just a symptom of the disconnect between any reader and any writer of any text anywhere. Table of Contents Title Page i Abstract ii Table of Contents iii Dedication iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Conducted to Abstraction: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of 11 the Mind Chapter 2: Conducted to Anxiety: Frances Burney’s Evelina and Sarah Pennington’s An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters 41 Chapter 3: Conducted to a Happy Ending: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women 69 Chapter 4: Conducted to Absence: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Doctor John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters 95 Epilogue: Conducted Beyond 119 Works Cited 142 Acknowledgements 153 iii Dedication To my grandmother Angela Bruno—whose tenacious and passionate pursuit of knowledge continues to inspire me—I gratefully dedicate this dissertation. iv Introduction My experience as an academic advisor for undergraduate psychology majors has taught me that, when reality becomes overwhelming or difficult, the human impulse is either to control painful feelings and sensations, or to escape that which cannot be controlled. The literature of advice, by which I mean self-help books, advice columns, and manuals for proper behavior, has long been used as a tool to facilitate both of these impulses, with varying degrees of success. My dissertation argues that the eighteenth- century British middle-class conduct manual written for women is a particularly suitable genre for beginning to understand the impossibility of a literature of advice. Conduct books and literature of advice-giving still have great influence today, since they help to create the fantasy that an “ideal” life is possible, while allowing the reader simultaneously to sympathize with and judge others from a safe literary (and emotional) distance. For all its attempts to arrest moral flux, the conduct manual is an intrinsically anxious genre, attempting to unify elements and ideas that are always in contradiction to each other. Conduct manuals were meant to represent social norms, particularly regarding gender. But despite a tone ranging from gentle confidence to paranoid concern, they did not halt the march of time, cure social ailments, or usher in a new utopian era of perfected female citizens. Yet they were still published and avidly reprinted far into the nineteenth century, and versions of them are still printed in our own time.1 In trying to regiment gender norms, conduct manuals lay bare the impossibility of such a task. 1 Lynne Vallone charts this trend, as does William St Clair. 1 Though extensive research2 has already been done on the genre of the conduct book as a political tool, as a representative piece of culture, and as a representative piece of early feminist/gender theory, little has been written on its inherent structural instability. I will suggest that conduct books work towards their own failure by relying on a unifying definition of goodness (with which every reader supposedly can identify) while still being forced to engage with the fundamental differences present in ethical judgments and in human nature. My argument rests on the fact that the act of reading is both objective and subjective. Kathryn Steele, in “Hester Chapone and the Problem of the Individual Reader,” claims that eighteenth-century conduct literature works through injunction instead of recommendation, meaning that it tells readers what not to read and think, as opposed to what to read and think. Identity and morality are therefore created through absence, which becomes problematic when trying to define what is truly good. Moreover, the literature of advice writing is attempting the impossible, because following the advice does not determine holistic or intrinsically good character. While eighteenth-century writers prescribe female conduct to project their own fantasies of moral consistency, the anxiety within the community of readers that suffuses the advice manuals themselves exposes this fantasy as unsustainable. I hope to prove that 2 The work of Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Kristina Straub, Patricia Meyer Spacks, and Joyce Hemlow has all helped to establish the link between conduct books, the eighteenth-century novel, and gender performance/identity. I believe that contemporary scholars such as Amanda Vickery focus too much on how conduct manuals represent their culture and not nearly enough on their efforts to shape it. 2 the conduct manual as a genre3 is intrinsically unstable because it attempts to present moral goodness as a universal whole, yet its tools are ideas that are consistently in contradiction with one another. A conduct manual strives to be seamless, but it works with goodness in the only way possible: i.e. in pieces. The word “conduct” originally meant “to lead with,” and implied a private rather than a public concern. Ralph Robinson, in Christ All in All (1656), wrote that “It doth not become a sheep to refuse the Shepherd's conduct,” meaning that divine guidance should be accepted silently (OED). By the seventeenth century, it came to refer to a public performance; good conduct was tied to good citizenship, and people who displayed it knew their place in society. The eighteenth-century conduct book acts as a mirror that society holds up so that a woman can see an idealized version of herself, but this idealized reflection is in itself a distortion. In the act of reflecting and behaving, there is a chance for the reflected behavior to be distorted, since the intended audience of the conduct book is behaving the way other people tell her to, not the way she wants. One of the basic precepts I am working from is the fact that conduct literature may be generically unstable. The writer of the conduct book intends for their advice to be followed, or else there’d be no reason to write it; but the reader knows there is no external authority to control her following of the advice, so instead she can internalize it, and even ignore it if she chooses. Writing conduct literature in this way is a formal parallel to hypocrisy in moral practice. Moreover, the writer knows that the advice will most likely not 3 By “genre,” I am referring to the conduct manual as a readable text. The tones of conduct manuals, with its occasionally religious platitudes, are meant to inspire comfort, but usually inspire judgment.
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