Women and Romance: the Consolations of Gender in the English Novel by Laurie Langbauer ALSO in the SERIES
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CJ<t,aling WOMEN Writing a series edited by Shari Benstock and Celeste Schenck Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel by Laurie Langbauer ALSO IN THE SERIES The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. by Deborah Kelly I<loepfer Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture by Frarn;oise Lionnet Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Te xt, Gnosis by Lisa Ruddick Wotnen and Rotnance The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel Laurie Langbauer Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1990 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1990 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Langbauer, Laurie. Women and romance : the consolations of gender in the English novel / Laurie Langbauer. p. cm. — (Reading women writing) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-2421-2 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-9692-9 (pbk.) 1. English fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870—Characters—Women. 3. Women and literature—Great Britain—History. 4. Romanticism—Great Britain. 5. Sex role in literature. 6. Women in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR830.W6L36 1990 823.009'9287—dc20 90-55116 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Cover illustration: Edmund Blair Leighton (1853-1922), Signing the Register. City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Art Gallery, London. Contents Foreword by Shari Benstock and Celeste Schenck vii Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1. The Romance of History, or Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, Sometimes 12 2. Diverting Romance: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote 62 3· An Early Romance: The Ideology of the Body in Mary Wollstonecraft's Writing 93 4· Streetwalkers and Homebodies: Dickens's Romantic Wo men 127 5· Recycling Patriarchy's Garbage: George Eliot's Pessimism and the Problem of a Site for Feminism 188 Conclusion 233 Works Cited 248 Index 263 v Foreword As the editors of Reading Wo men Writing, we are committed to furthering international feminist debate. To that end, we seek books that rigorously explore how differences of class, race, ethnic background, nationality, religious preference, and sexual choice inform women's writing. Books sensitive to the ways women's writings are classified, evaluated, read, and taught are central to the series. Of particular interest to us are feminist criticism of non canonical texts (including film, popular culture, and new and as yet unnamed genres); confrontations of first-world theory with beyond-the-first-world texts; and books on colonial and postcolo nial writing that generate their own theoretical positions. Dedi cated primarily altlioughnot exclusively to the examination of liter ature by women, Reading Wo men Writing highlights differing, even contradictory, theoretical positions on texts read in cultural con text. Laurie Langbauer' s Wo men and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel, the fourth book in the series, examines the traditional connection between women and the literary genre "ro mance." Her study questions this seemingly appropriate and "nat ural" linkage of gender and genre to discover a new relation that is held not in the content or subject matter of romance but rather in its structure. Romancefiction articulates an economy of desire that resists genre definitions (it is a site of disorder), and in so doing it represents what must necessarily be repressed in order for the genre as a system of representation to exist. The implications of this discovery are at least twofold: the dominant social and literary vii viii Foreword culture derides, and thereby joins, women and romance; romance is the (false) consolation held out to the oppressed gender whose desire moves within-but also reaches beyond-an economy of (false) hopes that the dominant culture both offers and denies. In short, romance represents the Other to the novel: the novel "scapegoats" romance. The observations that romance has been excluded and derided by the novel form and that women's desire has been denied or derided by patriarchal culture are not, in themselves, surprising. Lang bauer, however, examines an unremarked relation among these figures: Why and how does the system that excludes and derides also continually invoke romance, all the while denying that it does so? That is, how do women and romance represent the cultural system's own repressed desires? Her answers are compelling. In formed by the work of Freud, Derrida, and Foucault, Langbauer's book focuses on texts that reveal an awareness of the tensions between the genres of novel and romance. These tensions are always (although not always self-consciously) articulated in gen dered terms. Analyzing works by George Meredith, Charlotte Len nox, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, Lang bauer demonstrates how suppressed forms-women, romance return within the novel to deconstruct its hierarchies. More provocatively, she speculates on why this return of the repressed occurs and what forms it takes. Women and Romance also challenges literary theory and criticism to examine how their own anxieties about the genre "romance" repress (but also invoke) anx ieties about gender divisions and hierarchies. Even the most sophis ticated analysis cannot help but replicate the repressive order of the forms it investigates and (as with feminist criticism) challenges. Langbauer warns us of "the danger of wishful satisfactions, the consolations offered us by totalizing systems that ... neat images of women represent in miniature and draw us back into." She subjects to radical critique the assumption that a system-any sys tem-can be totalizing. Her book thereby opens an important ques tion: Can a genre or gender represent total Otherness? Struggling with this issue, Langbauer urges feminism to recognize its implica tion in the systems-literary, social, cultural-it tries to dismantle. SHARI BENSTOCK CELESTE SCHENCK Acknowledgments I am grateful to the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Swarthmore Col lege Faculty Research Fund, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting my research on this project. I also thank Cynthia Baughman, Margaret Berg, the Cornell University Graduate Feminist Reading Group 1982-85, Te rrence Holt, Elsie Michie, Beth Newman, Andrea Sununu, and Melissa Zeiger for all their help and support. I offer my sincere gratitude to Bernhard Kendler of Cornell University Press and the series editors, Shari Benstock and Celeste Schenck, for their ongoing assistance and consideration. I am especially indebted to Neil Hertz, Mary Ja cobus, and Harry Shaw for their guidance in the early stages of this project and to Deirdre David, Susan S. Lanser, and Mary Poovey for their careful attention to the final drafts of my manuscript. Chapter 2 appeared, in an earlier version, as "Romance Revised: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote," in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 18, no. 1 (Fall 1984). Copyright NOVEL Corp. © 1984. Re printed with permission. A portion of chapter 3 appeared as "An Early Romance: Motherhood and Wo men's Writing in Mary Wo llstonecraft's Novels," in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). A portion of chapter 4, which came to substantially different conclusions, ap peared as "Dickens's Streetwalkers: Wo men and the Form of Ro mance," in ELH 53 ( 1986), copyright © 1986 by Johns Hopkins University Press; another portion appeared as "Women in White, ix x Acknowledgments Men in Feminism," in The Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (April 1989), copyright © 1989 by Yale University. LAURIE LANGBAUER Swarthmore, Pennsylvania Abbreviations AB George Eliot. Adam Bede. Edited by Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 1980. BH Charles Dickens. Bleak House. Edited by Norman Page. New York: Penguin, 197i. DC George Meredith. Diana of the Crossways. Vol. 16 of The Memorial Edition of the Wo rks of George Meredith. 29 vols. New York: Scribner's, 1910-12. DD George Eliot. Daniel Deronda. Edited by Barbara Hardy. New York: Penguin, 1967. E George Meredith. The Egoist. Vols. 13 and 14 of TheMemo- rial Edition of the Wo rks of George Meredith. 29 vols. New York: Scribner's, 1910-12. EL Mrs. Henry Wood. East Lynne. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 1984. FQ Charlotte Lennox. The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella. Introduction by Margaret Dalziel; Appendix by Duncan Isles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. GE Charles Dickens. Great Expectations. Edited by Angus Cal- der. New York: Penguin, 1965. "I&S" Fredric Jameson. "Imaginary and Symbolic in La:can: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject." Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 338-95. M Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary, A Fiction. In Mary and the Wrongs of Wo man, edited by James Kinsley and Gary Kelly, 1-68. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. xi xii Abbreviations MF George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by A. S. Byatt. New York: Penguin, 1979. MM George Eliot. Middlemarch. Edited by W. J. Harvey. New York: Penguin, 1965. OCS Charles Dickens. The Old Curiosity Shop. Edited by Angus Easson. New York: Penguin, 1972. OT Charles Dickens. Oliver Tw ist. Edited by Peter Fairclough. New York: Penguin, 1966. OWT Arnold Bennett. The Old Wives' Ta le. Edited by John Wain. New York: Penguin, 1983. PU Fredric Jameson.