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The Female Aesthetic Subject: Questions of Taste, Sublimity and Beauty In The Female Aesthetic Subject: Questions of Taste, Sublimity and Beauty in Women's Prose, 1778 to 1828, with Particular Reference to the Works of Clara Reeve, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Elizabeth Hamilton and Jane Porter. Fiona Louise Price Submitted for the degree of Ph.D. Department of English Studies University of Durham September 2000 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published in any form, including Electronic and the Internet, without the author's prior written consent. All information derived from this thesis must be acknowledged appropriately. 1 9 SEP 2001 1 Abstract Fiona Louise Price The Female Aesthetic Subject: Questions of Taste, Sublimity and Beauty in Women's Prose, 1778 to 1828, with Particular Reference to the Works of Clara Reeve, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Elizabeth Hamilton and Jane Porter. Examining a broad range range of their works, this thesis shows that Clara Reeve, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Elizabeth Hamilton and Jane Porter investigate questions of taste and defmitions of the sublime and the beautiful in order both to enhance their own status as critics and to comment on political life. The introduction provides a context for the thesis, exploring trends in the aesthetic thought of the period, particularly as they concerned women writers. The first chapter then shows how Reeve, reflecting her Old Whiggish upbringing, used romance to emphasise the importance of morality to the country. In doing so, she allotted women a wider socio-political function. Her use of the roles offered by romance and romance criticism was essential to this. Reeve's later work explored the application of romance and its aesthetics to bourgeois readers. Chapter II shows how the uncertain political status of the romance was interrogated by the Lees. Suspicious of the construction of literary and historical authority and of aesthetic disinterestedness, the Lees revealed the way in which such narratives elided certain voices from the culture. They scrutinised the beautiful and examined how public narratives pressure the individual into the sublime of terror. Partly due to Mary Wollstonecraft's treatment of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), during the 1790s romance was connected by radicals with prejudice or corrupt subservience. For conservative thinkers it was associated with sceptical philosophy and political ruin. Chapter III explores how Elizabeth Hamilton distanced herself from sceptical "metaphysicks" and emphasised her hostility both to romance and to the associated models of chivalry, metamorphic beauty and terror. Nevertheless, she exploited both associationist thought and Scottish common sense philosophy to redefine the sublime and the beautiful, promoting an unusually democratic version of taste. As shown in Chapter IV, Porter rehabilitated metamorphic beauty. She developed an enclosed, feminine, patriotic sublime which could be used in the context of the everyday. Porter, whose work has been misinterpreted due to her association with Walter Scott, increasingly exploited folk traditions to create a sense of an enduring national identity. 2 Contents Acknowledgements 4 Editorial Note 5 Introduction 6 Chapter I Clara Reeve 56 Chapter II Harriet and Sophia Lee 1 1 I Chapter III Elizabeth Hamilton 156 Chapter IV Jane Porter 202 Conclusion 259 Bibliography 264 3 Acknowledgements I would like to record particular thanks to Fiona Robertson who supervised this thesis with insight, dedication and sensitivity. Thanks are also due to Robin Dix who was shrewd in his criticisms and unfailingly generous with his time. I am grateful to Simon James for his patience, perspicuity and attention to detail. The hospitality of my friends in London, and the tact of those elsewhere, were invaluable in completing this thesis. A Durham University Postgraduate Alumni Award helped fund this research and a Deans Fund award facilitated travel for the purpose of research. The British Library and Durham University Library Archives and Special Collections kindly gave me permission to cite their manuscript materials. I would like to thank my parents for their unflagging faith, support and encouragement. 4 Editorial Note The MLA style guide has been followed in this thesis, with certain modifications. In particular, fuller publication details (including names of publishers) have been given for publications issued before 1900. On the first reference to a text full bibliographic details are given in a corresponding footnote. Further page references to the work are given in the text, in parenthesis with the author's name, or, if more than one work by the particular author is referred to, an abbreviated version of the title which will have been indicated in the initial referencing footnote. In cases where an abbreviated title is used for referencing within the text, but the author's name is not obvious, both author's name and abbreviated title are given. 5 Introduction This thesis seeks to explore an uneasy conjunction frequently noted in modern criticism of eighteenth-century women's writing: the conjunction between standard aesthetic judgments and a non-standard - sometimes muted, sometimes defiant, sometimes troubled - insistence on the female observer. In her 1797 essay "On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature" Mary Wollstonecraft comments: A taste for rural scenes, in the present state of society, appears to be very often an artificial sentiment, rather inspired by poetry and romances, than a real perception of the beauties of nature. But, as it is reckoned a proof of refined taste to praise the calm pleasures which the country affords, the theme is never exhausted. Yet it may be made a question, whether this romantic kind of declamation, has much effect on the conduct of those, who leave, for a season, the crowded cities in which they were bred. [. .1 I have 'brushed the dew away' in the morning; but, pacing over the printless grass, I have wondered that, in such delightful situations, the sun was allowed to rise in solitary majesty, whilst my eyes alone hailed its beautifying beams. The webs of the evening have still been spread across the hedged path, unless some labouring man, trudging to work, disturbed the fairy structure; yet, in spite of this supineness, when I joined the social circle, every tongue rang changes on the pleasures of the country. Wollstonecraft displays a common eighteenth-century literary fascination with genius and originality. Her location of the most "natural" (and by implication, best) 6 poetry in the "infancy of society" reflects the period's primitivistic discourse.' In short, her words, as one might expect, are coloured by the intellectual and aesthetic concepts of her time. What is more unusual is her trenchant positioning of herself as the arbiter of taste. Other writers on aesthetics of course assumed similar positions of authority but generally they did so more subtly or urbanely. 2 Wollstonecraft, in contrast, is quite blunt. Her forthright use of "I" places her as the sole person with genuine taste amongst a group of supposedly discerning individuals. Wollstonecraft is prepared to see for herself; her vision is unmediated by cultural products, as "printless" as the grass she walks upon. Her emphasis in this essay on the importance of seeing for oneself signals that her aesthetic is politically charged. Her community of late sleepers consists, by implication, of those vitiated in body and mind, mentally vacant and morally lax. Participants in the kind of country-house society Wollstonecraft had experienced when governess in the family of Lady Kingsborough, these dedicated followers of fashion are reminders of the tyrant/slave morality Wollstonecraft attacks in her political writings.' 1Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works ofMary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering, 1989) 7:7 ; subsequently Works. As Todd and Butler note, the essay "On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature" was first published in the Monthly Magazine (April 1797): 279 — 82, and thereafter was placed by Godwin in the 1798 Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, vol. iv (Wollstonecraft, Works 7: 4). Todd and Butler have used the text from the latter. 2See, for example, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), rd ed. (1759), ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); subsequently Enquiry. In the "Introduction on Taste," prefixed to the 1759 second edition of the Enquiry Burke notes it is necessary first to establish that taste has "fixed principles [. .] as it must be judged an useless, if not an absurd undertaking, to lay down rules for caprice, and to set up for a legislator of whims and fancies" (12). Burke supposes that the enquiry will lead him to be a "legislator," yet at the same moment minimises the impression of the amount of authority he is assuming. 3See Mary Wollstonecraft, Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights ofMen: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (Oxford: World's Classics-Oxford UP, 1994); subsequently Political Writings. Her preference for aesthetic experiences stimulated by nature rather than by art parallels the independence she believes necessary to "break the ignoble chain" of implicit submission to authority in 24 Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and it is intimately linked to her vision of women as rational creatures (Political Writings 12). However, in her study Mary Wollstonecrajl: Writer (London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1994) Harriet Devine Jump argues that Wollstonecraft's position in the essay is "in direct contradiction to the view expressed elsewhere in Wollstonecraft's work: that mankind is constantly moving in the direction of greater perfection. Both the poet's imagination and the reader's response are seen as being eroded by the advances of civilisation" (151). Nevertheless, while Wollstonecraft is suspicious of the moral laxity connected with civilisation (and fashionable society), her emphasis on mental independence is consistent with the rest of her work.
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