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Novels of the 1790s: Action and Impasse

NOVELISTS of the 1790s articulated new ambitions and claimed new status for their genre, often abandoning the defensive tone that had dominated earlier justifications of the novel. Richardson's elaborate proclamations of moral purpose, for instance, had presupposed the prevailing belief that fiction generated dubious moral effects, encouraging the young to think too much about love and fostering idleness, fantasy, and the substitution of sentimental self-indulgence for benevolent action. Theoretically, imaginative like literal history could teach its readers about life. In practice, the multiplying «histories» of young men and young women faced with such problems as confronting the sexual advances of a titled and lascivious London woman or escaping the horrors of a secluded Italian castle might instead cause their readers to find actual experience unsatisfying. Virtually all eighteenth-century novelists announced their impeccable moral intent, but little evidence suggests that even avid consumers of fiction thought its principal effects uplifting.

Political actualities in the century's final decade altered literary as well as other possibilities. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, British and Continental thinkers alike grappled with freshly articulated questions about individual rights and social responsibility. Although the Terror in France, particularly the execution of the king and queen, aroused horror on the other side of the English Channel, the impetus to imagine a more equitable social order remained powerful. In response to radical insistence on the inadequacies of current social arrangements, Parliament instituted a series of fierce repressive mea -247- sures. Printers of «revolutionary» material were prosecuted and imprisoned. Those who attended as well as those who addressed «seditious» public meetings risked their freedom. Writers took sides. One thinks most readily of Burke and Paine as symbolic literary antagonists in the period, but a host of novelists likewise entered the fray, both on the side of the established order and in support of new political imaginings.

At the eighteenth century's end, novelists made explicit ideological claims and manifested new kinds of theoretical self-awareness. Their consciousness of the possibility of changing minds and hearts matters more to their fictions' effect than do their specific political positions, which range across a broad spectrum. 'Every writer who advances principles, whether true or false, that have a tendency to set the mind in motion, does good,' Mary Hays maintains in her preface to Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Truth matters less than energy. The activity of the mind, to whatever end, is a self-evident good. The argument that fiction's moral function depends not on the doctrine it advances but on the action it produces marks the new emphasis of the 1790s. William Godwin, in a preface to Mary Wollstonecraft's fragmentary Wrongs of Woman, suggests that 'these sketches,' if 'filled up in a manner adequate to the writer's conception, would perhaps have given a new impulse to the manners of a world.' He too claims that fiction generates productive action. Late-century novelists implicitly acknowledge the contested nature of all doctrine as they articulate new social possibilities or defend established custom against perceived threats. They seek and sometimes find innovative ways 'to set the mind in motion.'

Novels written well before the 1790s, it goes without saying, had managed to set their readers' minds in motion. Debate about the characters of Clarissa and Pamela, and consequently about the import of the novels they inhabited, began with Richardson's earliest readers, continued despite his insistent and explicit asseveration of his novels' moral meaning, and has only intensified over the centuries. Defoe and Smollett, sentimental novels and Gothic: virtually all more or less «canonical» eighteenth-century fiction has stimulated controversy over its psychological or ideological significance. But the statements of intent by such writers as Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft establish an unprecedented context for novelistic endeavor by subordinating the importance of fixed meaning to that of energizing action.

The postulate that the novel may spur intellectual and ultimately social action implies not only a new sense of fiction's importance but a -248- specific set of problems for novels of the 1790s. For instance, novelists faced the challenge of imagining worthy action for characters as well as for readers. If a novel aspired not only to instruct its reader in norms of virtuous and mannerly behavior but to provoke mental activity, must it not reconceive the possibilities of human conduct? Old plots, familiar characters doing familiar things, would not energize the mind, yet new models for action seemed hard to come by. Benevolence, sanctioned by the tradition of the sentimental novel, provided the established way to manifest active virtue. Even Hermsprong, Robert Bage's idealized version of 'man as he is not,' finds little to do with himself beyond bestowing good on others. He offers verbal defiance to an oppressor, and he stops a runaway horse, saving the heroine's life. But mainly he gives away money to worthy recipients, calms social unrest, and helps the poor and the sick. Like most of the period's protagonists, he also talks a lot, offering the rhetoric of a new vision that seldom manifests itself in radically new forms of action.

Far from acting in powerful, exemplary ways, male protagonists often assume the role of victim. Caleb Williams, the title character in William Godwin's remarkable 1794 novel, gets in trouble by virtue of a quality labeled «curiosity» but subsequently struggles mainly for survival, a goal that leads him to self-defeating revenge and finally to despair. Walsingham Ainsworth, protagonist of Mary Robinson's Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature (1797), fills four volumes with letters reporting his own helpless misery. His eventual happiness, briefly related, results from no action of his own. Orlando Somerive, the central male figure of Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House (1794), declares his right of self-determination in his choice of a bride but exercises no choice in the matter of a career, becoming a soldier because someone gives him a commission. Sent to America to fight in a war he does not understand, he suffers as the victim of incomprehensible social forces. Like Caleb, he seeks to survive.

As for heroines, they too-with the notable exception of Anna St. Ives-often function as victims or as reactors rather than as self-sustaining actors. Matilda, the second-generation heroine of Elizabeth Inchbald's Simple Story (1791), in its structure and its implications one of the period's most strikingly original novels, reads and weeps and gazes out the window but performs no willed action more significant than caressing her father's hat. The central female figure in Hermsprong vacillates between doing what her father wants and what her lover -249- wants. What she herself wants can only determine her action insofar as it conforms to the will of male authority. The heroine of The Old Manor House suffers and suffers. Her noteworthy action, like that of Gothic heroines, consists of escape.

For women in these novels (again, Anna St. Ives constitutes the startling exception), marriage still determines fate. In other words, despite novelists' implicit and explicit claims to help innovate ideological possibility, existing social frameworks impose themselves at the level of assumption. Writers have difficulty imagining around them. Their perplexity about what fictional characters can do perhaps suggests why the period's novelists, seeking to effect action in their readers' minds, emphasize in their characters the importance of internal rather than external activity-'energy of mind.' Internal vitality alone, late-eighteenth-century fiction suggests, allows new behaviors to be imagined. Even those claiming ideological purpose understand its fulfillment to depend on individual psychology.

The problem of how characters act within the plots of 1790s novels leads to further questions about action, none consistently resolved in the period's fictions and all crucial to subsequent developments. Four of these questions will organize my discussion of the period's fiction. How does the problem of action implicate the imagining of character? What is the relation between feeling and action in the generation of plot? How do «public» and «private» action bear on one another? How does the notion of action affect that of form? To investigate these questions will help to clarify ideological aspirations and insufficiencies in these novels and to define sources of the emotional and intellectual energy manifest in the texts themselves.

Action and Character