Romantic Narrative Rajan, Tilottama Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Rajan, Tilottama. Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.474. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/474 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 13:53 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Romantic Narrative This page intentionally left blank Romantic Narrative Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft TILOTTAMA RAJAN The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rajan, Tilottama. Romantic narrative : Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft / Tilottama Rajan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-9721-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8018-9721-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. English fi ction—18th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 4. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Hays, Mary, 1759 or 60–1843— Criticism and interpretation. 6. Godwin, William, 1756–1836—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759–1797—Criticism and interpreta- tion. 8. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. PR447.R28 2010 820.9Ј145—dc22 2010001218 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. 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In memory of my father, Balachandra Rajan, March 24, 1920–January 23, 2009, the reason for everything I have achieved and for my mother, Chandra Rajan This page intentionally left blank contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi List of Abbreviations xxvii 1 The Trauma of Lyric: Shelley’s Missed Encounter with Poetry in Alastor 1 2 Shelley’s Promethean Narratives: Gothic Anamorphoses in Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, and Prometheus Unbound 46 3 Unbinding the Personal: Autonarration, Epistolarity, and Genotext in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney 82 4 The Scene of Judgment: Trial and Confession in Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Other Fiction 117 5 Gambling, Alchemy, Speculation: Godwin’s Critique of Pure Reason in St. Leon 144 6 Whose Text? Godwin’s Editing of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman 174 Notes 215 Works Cited 257 Index 275 This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments I struggled to fi nish this book before my father’s death, and completed a long prospectus (a fi rst version of the Introduction) on the day he died. It was cremated with him: my fi nal tribute to someone who was my intel- lectual and personal example. Writing of Flaubert, Michel Foucault says that his “entire work is dedicated to the confl agration” of the archive, “this primary discourse: its precious ashes, its black, unmalleable coal.” For me that has not occurred yet, but this book is dedicated to my par- ents: my father, Balachandra Rajan (well known as a scholar of English literature), and my mother, Chandra Rajan (an eminent translator of San- skrit texts), who has been a constant personal support. I also want to acknowledge the past and recent support of many friends and colleagues, particularly Anand and Madhu Bhalla, Shemim Chaudhry, Angela Cozea, Chris Keep, Sally Vernon, and Susan Wallace for their understanding and loyalty during a diffi cult time. I am also grateful to Steven Bruhm, Kul and Louise Bhatia, Nandi Bhatia, Antonio Calcagno, David Clark, Milda Danys, Corinne Davies, Helen Fielding, Bush Gulati, Linda Hutcheon, Monika Lee, Madeline and Tom Lennon, Penelope Lister, Mervyn Nicholson, Jan Plug, Chitra Reddin, Eric Savoy, Peter Schwenger, Clara Thomas, Jane Toswell, Brian Young, Charlotte Wolters, Julia Wright, and Archie and Mary Young. I have been blessed with stu- dents and former students, whom I respect and admire, both personally and intellectually. My particular thanks go to John Vanderheide, who has done much more than help with the preparation of this manuscript. My thanks also go to Naqaa Abbas, Adina Arvatu, Chris Bundock, Rebecca Gagan, Josh Lambier, and Jonathan Murphy. Thomas Pfau has read the entire manuscript, and I am grateful to him for his incisive comments and intellectual and professional support. Although I do not like to burden people with reading my work, given all of the claims on our time, Ross Woodman and Joel Fafl ak have read parts of the manuscript, and their ix interest in seeing me set aside my abstruser researches in German Idealism to return to work that, in its earliest form, was done many years ago was important in encouraging me to complete this book. I am particularly grateful to Ross Woodman for his ongoing support and that rare negative capability that allows him to enter into another person’s work. Beyond that I have benefi ted from the work and the presence in the fi eld of many fellow Romanticists, who have heard parts of this project at conferences and offered intellectual and personal support over the years: in addition to some of those mentioned above, Ian Balfour, Christoph Bode, Marshall Brown, Julie Carlson, David Collings, Elizabeth Fay, David Ferris, Denise Gigante, Gary Handwerk, Mary Jacobus, Theresa Kelley, Jacques Khalip, David Farrell Krell, Arkady Plotnitsky, Marc Redfi eld, and Richard Sha. This project was initially funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to which I am grateful not only for fi nancial support but also for my self-instilled guilt, which made me feel that, inasmuch as I had received money, I ought to consolidate my thinking into a book. I am also grateful to the Canada Research Chairs program for continued funding and release time. A shorter and substan- tially different version of Chapter 3, with the same title, “Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney,” appeared in Studies in Romanticism 32. 2 (1993): 149–76; copy right Trustees of Boston University. A much shorter and different version of Chapter 2 appeared under the title “Promethean Narrative: Overdetermined Form in Shelley’s Gothic Fiction,” in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 240–52; permission to reprint is hereby acknowledged. Finally, I am also grateful to Greg Nicholl and Trevor Lips combe, at the Johns Hopkins University Press, for their support, and to Barbara Lamb and Kim John- son, for their help with the manuscript. x Acknowledgments introduction arly in Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfi nished text, The Wrongs of EWoman; or, Maria (1798), the heroine gives up writing lyrical effu- sions to begin a narrative of her life, which is circulated, also in unfi nished form, among various readers inside the text. Her choice raises several is- sues about the relative value of literary modes. In Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel Ian Duncan, using Sir Walter Scott as his centerpiece, argues that by the early nineteenth century the (masculine) novel had absorbed a (feminine) romance, thus gendering narrative for generations thereafter.1 Yet Wollstonecraft sees narrative as a means to authority and contestation, even as she struggles with the plots into which Maria is written by both romance and realism. Wrongs does not, how- ever, support the argument that the Romantic novel was a marginalized female form—on and increasingly by women—while men claimed the higher status of “poetry.”2 For it is poetry that is conventionalized as feminine, while narrative initiates Maria’s growth as a political and indi- vidual subject. Indeed, as Mary Favret notes, writing on the fetishized use of poetic inserts in novels by Charlotte Smith and Anne Radcliffe, these inserts, which are “separable, artifi cial, and disposable,” “correct, con- tain, and hypostatize the feminine in the novel,”3 instituting poetry itself as feminine. At the same time, Maria does not actually dismiss poetry, but only a specifi c form of poetry: what she calls “rhapsodies descriptive of the state of [her] mind.”4 Nor is it clear that she writes a novel in Dun- can’s sense, unless we take “novel” nongenerically, as the literary vehicle of the “new(s)” or in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of the novel as marking a new sense of time oriented to the future rather than the past and resulting in the “novelization” of adjacent genres.5 Starting from the unwritten theory in Wollstonecraft’s text, this book xi has three general aims. First, it offers a theory of narrative or, rather, of a “narrativity” opposed to the disciplinary apparatus of the Novel, where the word Novel, with a capital N, signifi es a sociopolitical institution that developed through the nineteenth century and on whose normalizing role in the public sphere critics from Jürgen Habermas to Clifford Siskin have written.6 Second, in focusing on this narrativity, this study questions the association of narrative with what Peter Brooks calls “reading for plot,”7 which derives from a unigeneric reduction of narrative to the (Vic- torian) Novel. And fi nally, it refl ects on what the category of Romantic narrative can tell us about disciplinary issues raised by historical study that are of particular urgency at this point.