The Eighteenth-Century Oriental Tales of Eliza Haywood, Frances
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THE ORIENTAL TALES OF HAYWOOD, SHERIDAN AND KNIGHT THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORIENTAL TALES OF ELIZA HAYWOOD, FRANCES SHERIDAN AND ELLIS CORNELIA KNIGHT By SUZANNE BYRL GIBSON, B.A. (HISTORY), B.A., M.A. (ENGLISH) A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate studies in Partial Fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University ©by Suzanne Byrl Gibson, June 1996 McMASIER UNJ.YERSJ.IY .L:lB~ DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (1996) McMaster University (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: The Eighteenth-Century Oriental Tales of Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan and Ellis Cornelia Knight AUTHOR: Suzanne Byrl Gibson, B.A. (History, University of Calgary), B.A. (English, University of Calgary) M.A. (English, University of Calgary) SUPERVISOR: Professor Richard Morton NUMBER OF PAGES: vii, 245 ii ABSTRACT The Oriental tale in the eighteenth century was a very popular form which has been ignored until fairly recently. Furthermore, woman's contribution to this popular but marginalized form has been almost utterly neglected. Beginning with Eliza Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai. Princess of Iiaveo, through Frances Sheridan's History of Nouriahad and concluding with Ellis Cornelia Knight's Dinarbas; A Tale Being£:!: Continuation of Rasselas, Prince gfAbissinia, this study chronologically follows the rise of the domestic woman in the decidedly undomestic Oriental tale as these three authors negotiate genre, their culture and their gender through the writing of Oriental tales. The Oriental tales as written by these women represent an opposing voice to developing literary realism so beloved of the middle classes. While Oriental tales are at least partially reactionary in their inflection of earlier romance conventions, they are also as necessary as realism for the development of capitalism: capitalism relies not only on an ethic of saving, generally associated with realism, but also on an ethic of spending. Emphasizing sumptuous description and luxury, they reinforce expenditures, which punctuate periods of working and saving, and women are absolutely central in the development and construction of their culture through their writing and through iii their gender association with consumption for their culture. iv Table of Contents Descriptive Note ......................................................................................................ii Abstract. ................................................................................................................. .iii Acknowledgements..................................................................................................v Dedication ............................................................................................................... Yi Table of Contents...................................................................................................vii Introduction.............................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1 Pretexts and Contexts.................................................................... 29 Chapter 2 Eliza Haywood and the Transformation of Women.............................................................42 Chapter 3 The Home, the Seraglio and the Self: Frances Sheridan's Adventures of Nourjahad............................. 104 Chapter 4 Late Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Modem Woman: Ellis Cornelia Knight's Dinarbas ................................................. 156 Conclusion Genre, Politics, Class, Gender, Race .......................................... 199 Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 214 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My debts are many. I would like to thank first and foremost my supervisor Professor Richard Morton for his wisdom, kindness and patience. My friend Jams Svilpis, who introduced me to Oriental tales and their wonderful century, has been a constant, gentle and enthusiastic supporter of my efforts. Both he and Geoff Cragg have read various chapters and delicately pointed out where my writing was ugly and my infinitives split. My women friends both at McMaster and Calgary-Helen, Donna, Chris, Lizzie, Laura, Jane, Connie, Sharon, Joan and Sylvia-have also provided strength and advice. Ted and Joan have provided humour and practical advice. Finally, I would like to thank Phil. v Dedication For my grandmother, Ella Byrl McCaffrey (nee Smith) vi When a man has given his thoughts a form upon paper, submitted them in that shape to the perusal of the world, is he from thenceforth to be obliged to speak in laboured sentences, and to utter only the aphorism of wisdom? Carrying my reasonings upon this subject a little farther, I was almost tempted to conclude, that the manners of even a female author, might not differ much from that of other women!-but this, you will thlnk was carrying the matter rather too far. -Elizabeth Hamilton (Translation of the Letters of g Hindoo Rajah 2:138) Introduction The Orient is fundamental to Western discourse. "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and "Seven Voyages of Sindbad" have introduced us at an early age to representations of the East-in eighteenth-century Britain occurring exch~sively in print but in my generation occurring in both print-the bedtime story-and film media-Alan Ladd, in brown face, turban and baggy pants. The children of today watch the animated Disney movie of Aladdin with its (loudmouthed) genie, heroine being forced into marriage, Horatio Alger hero, gullible ruler and evil vizier; and here they meet in less than subtle ways the 1 2 discourse of orientalism, classism and sexism, from which no one escapes unscathed. For example, the title of this study contains within itself one of those loaded, ethnocentric hierarchies of value-the "Oriental" in Oriental tale. But the question is, of course, oriented to what? The response is clear: from the centre of the world, the Occident. Carried by the two signifiers and the space between them, this ideological freighting of the Occident as central and the Orient as marginal presents a problem that Edward Said addresses in his influential Orientalism. Orientalism, as Said sees it and which lies at the basis of this study, is not an objective description of the world; it is a Foucauldian "mode of discourse" which has little to do with the reality of Asia and far more to do with the Occident's architecture of power inherent in the discipline of orientalism (Orientalism 2-3). 1 Homi Bhabha, another critic of imperial 1 In his inaugural lecture on assuming the Arabic and Islamic chair at the University of Exeter, Aziz Al-Azmeh makes a similar point: . I understand by Orientalism the deliberate apprehension and lmowledge of the Orient; I see Orientalism as an ideological trope, an aesthetic, normative and ultimately political designation of things as Oriental in opposition to Occidental. It endows such things with changeless, "Oriental" properties, some repellent and others charming, that go beyond history, that violate the changing nature of things, and that inf[o]rm them in a distant and irreducible specificity transcending the bounds of reason and 3 domination, builds on Said but also deconstructs and dismantles the totalizing power of Said's ideas which constitute at once both Bhabha's precursor's strength and weakness. (See also O'Hanlon, et al. 157.) Borrowing from Lacan, Bhabha theorizes in, for example, his concept of mimicry that the subaltern subjects of colonialist discourse deconstruct the subordinating essentialism of colonialist and post-colonialist discourse and disseminate their resistance and defiance through language. The 'objects' of orientalist discourse are not passive and silenced victims but unstable, contestatory subject (See "Of Mimicry and Man"; "Signs Taken for Wonders," esp. 104). 2 This study uses "orientalism" and things "Oriental" in a similar fashion: not as naive adjectives and nouns, transcendental, binary and absolute, but signifiers which contain within them a disobedient Mr Christian who, while being constituted by colonialism, also refuses the colonialist imperatives of his captain. The 11 0rient11 and 11 0riental," like mutinous mariners, can and often do turn round to fire behind the line. Certainly more sophisticated and perhaps more widespread than that of current juvenile movies, an eighteenth-century vogue took place in things Oriental: Oriental dress, Oriental landscape gardening, Oriental architecture, Oriental furniture, Oriental foodstuffs and, the subject of this study, Oriental forever valorizing common phantasy and folklore (2). 2 See also Dennis Porter for an account of Said's totalization of colonial discourse and failure to adequately historicize colonialist texts. 4 tales. Oriental tales were a very popular, if disreputable, form of prose fiction in the century and represented a competing narrative to the developing realist forms which were only marginally more respectable. Realist and non-realist fiction struggled throughout the century for dominance in the cultural and symbolic practices of the era and, although realist fiction did not become the absolute victor in this struggle, it did become the dominant form preferred over the guilty pleasures of non-realist forms like gothic fiction and Oriental tales. Michael McKeon in Origins of the English Novel has credibly theorized that this struggle was manifest through a dialectic reaction which incorporated but also disavowed earlier romance forms. I see non-realist forms, such