THE BOUNDARIES of the ENGLISH NOVEL, 1763-1818 Jane Lim A
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IMAGINARY TRANSLATORS: THE BOUNDARIES OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1763-1818 Jane Lim A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Nancy Armstrong Laurie Langbauer Thomas Reinert Ruth Salvaggio James Thompson © 2016 Jane Lim ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT JANE LIM: Imaginary Translators: The Boundaries of the English Novel, 1763-1818 (Under the direction of Laurie Langbauer) This dissertation rewrites the history of the English novel as translational and transnational by examining how prose fiction was imagined to cross boundaries through linguistic and cultural “translators.” Previous studies on the English novel, propelled by Ian Watt’s theory of the novel, disregarded the role of translation in favor of a more endocultural and nationalistic paradigm of the novel. Yet the eighteenth-century publishing market was full of translated texts, as well as extranational fiction and “pseudo-translations.” Transcultural imagination fostered by such prose fiction turned the English writers, travelers, and domestic readers as cosmopolitan translators who produce new meaning and relation for both native and English culture. This project expands the scope of translation from textual practice to moments of cultural crossing through writing, thinking, and reading about the relationship between sameness and remoteness, self and other, the British Empire and the “rest of the world.” Specifically, I argue that translation as a metaphor and imaginative process helped the English readers imagine a community different from their own that in turn demarcated boundaries of the English nation, cultural values, and the novel. By attending to the multivalent modes of literal, sympathetic, and cultural translation in the works of Horace Walpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Marsh, and Jane Austen, this project shows how cosmopolitanism works in concert with nationalism rather than against it. The English novel’s engagement with iii transnationalism and transmission through cultural translation, I argue, helped envision a cohesive boundary of nationhood expressed through “the” English novel as national literature. Translation served as a site where English identity can be rehearsed, calling forth a rise of imaginary translators in the eighteenth century. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been completed without the intellectual support of my advisor, Laurie Langbauer, who believed in my project and helped me realize the visions I had. Her patience, intellectual vigor, and emotional support have inspired this dissertation in numerous ways. I also thank my wonderful committee members for all the productive conversations we shared: Nancy Armstrong, Ruth Salvaggio, James Thompson, and Tom Reinert. They have helped me become a more critical reader, thinker, and writer. I’ve also met a number of scholars at Chapel Hill who have fostered a supportive academic culture in which for me to grow. Special thanks goes to Srinivas Aravamudan at Duke University who inspired me to pursue a path in eighteenth-century studies. May he rest in peace. I owe thanks to the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for granting me an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship that allowed me to conduct research at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I also thank the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill for granting me a Booker Fellowship, the Hunt/McLaurin Dissertation Fellowship, and a Fred and Joan Thompson Award for an outstanding dissertation work in 18th and 19th-century British studies. I would also like to thank the alumni of Seoul National University in Chicago for awarding me a SNUAA Chicago Scholarship. v I am grateful for the people I have met along the way— my advisor and mentor from my alma matar, Myung-Sook Ryu, who has always helped me see straight. My wonderful colleagues whose friendship I will always cherish, especially Gale Greenlee, Anika Juede, Maria Obando- Duran, Helen Lee, and Erin Lodeesen. My friends from DuRaleigh church have kept me grounded, as well as Kookjin Lee and Yerim Han who have always cheered me from afar. Last but not least, I would like to thank my loving family, especially my amazing mother, who served as a role model and whose love and dedication I am daily humbled by. I also thank my dad for teaching me patience and perseverance. My entire academic journey, however, would not have been possible without my husband who has always believed in me, no matter what. This dissertation is dedicated to my dear baby boy, who radiates joy, peace, and light everyday. And finally, I thank my awesome God, because He is faithful and full of grace. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ ix Introduction: Translator-Figures and the English Novel ................................................................ 1 Translation in the History of the English Novel ......................................................................... 5 The Stranger, The Spectator, The Translator ............................................................................ 19 Chapter 1. Faking Origins: Pseudo-Translation and Imaginary Translators in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Hieroglyphic Tales ......................................................................... 32 Pseudo-Translation and the Rise of Fictionality ....................................................................... 35 The History of Lies: Pseudo-translation, Literary Forgers, and Impostors .............................. 42 Horace Walpole as Gothic Impostor: The Castle of Otranto .................................................... 52 Hieroglyphic Tales: When East meets West ............................................................................. 62 The Myth of the Lost Manuscript: Authors of Novels as Translators ...................................... 70 Chapter 2. Translating the Orient: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters and Elizabeth Marsh’s The Female Captive .................................................................................................... 79 Travel Writing as Cultural Translation ..................................................................................... 82 History of Women’s Translation and Travel Writing in the Eighteenth Century ..................... 87 Double-Masquerading in Montagu’s Turkish Letters ............................................................... 93 Elizabeth Marsh’s The Female Captive: Pamela in the Orient ............................................... 112 vii Chapter 3. Translating Novel and Novel Objects in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park ........................................................................................................................ 130 Austen’s Ivory: Novel and Novel Objects .............................................................................. 134 “Remember that We Are English”: How to Read like an Englishwoman .............................. 143 Mansfield Park: Reading at Sotherton Court ......................................................................... 158 “The East Room”: Reading as Translation in Fanny’s British Museum ................................ 164 CODA: Looking Out, Looking In ............................................................................................... 178 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 181 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Portrait of George Psalmanazar……………………………………………………..…48 Figure 2: Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count von Rumford (‘The comforts of a Rumford stove’) .........................................................................................151 Figure 3: Luxury, or The Comforts of a Rum P Ford…………………………………………..151 ix Introduction: Translator-Figures and the English Novel Partway through Cervante’s Don Quixote (1606), the readers learn that what they have been reading all along was an unfinished translation. The battle scene of Book 1, Chapter 8 in Don Quixote ends abruptly when the unidentified narrator suddenly declares that “the author of this history, in this very crisis, leaves the combat unfinished, excusing himself, that he could find no more written of these exploits of Quixote.”1 The narrator then goes on to explain how he had obtained an old manuscript in Toledo: he had bought a bundle of copies from the street, and finding the text’s characters to be Arabic, had asked a Moorish rabbi to translate the tale for him. The document, originally written by Cid Hamer Ben Engeli, a fictional Arabian historiographer that Cervantes invented, was then translated from Arabic into Castilian. From this point on, the author is converted into a translator, or a transcriber of a translation. When the “author” confesses that “though I seem to be the father, [I am] really but the Step-father of Don Quixote,” he questions his authorship as the focal point of storytelling because the intervention of an imaginary translator points to the unknown Orient as the source of literary imagination.2 When translatability (i.e. that the novel is a translation) and extranationality (i.e. that this is a translation from a foreign