edition of Ellinor, 'nothing is known.' Her conservative views, however, emerge clearly in the novel, published in 1798, which consistently celebrates old ways in preference to new. Its heroine proves fairly orthodox in her femininity, although more self-reliant than earlier fictional young women forced to make their way without the sanction of known families. She saves herself by virtue of her 'powerful and energetic mind'-a characteristic now no longer assigned only to men. A peripheral character, Lady John, embodies the virtues of the «masculinized» woman. If she makes herself slightly ridiculous by her predilection for riding and hunting, she acts with unostentatious benevolence and with high regard for the freedom of others. Moreover, Lady John employs a rhetoric of deep conviction:
I have, from the time I threw off my frock, stood up a champion for the rights of women; have boldly thrown down my gauntlet to support their equality, — 254- immunities, and privileges, mental and corporeal, against the incroachments of their masculine tyrants. If this then was the rule of my conduct; if I dared to judge and act for myself, at sixteen, allowing no guide but rectitude, no monitor but conscience; fearless of the judgment, careless of the opinion of [the] world…
If, she continues, she acted thus at sixteen, certainly she will behave in comparable ways at forty. The association between rectitude and «masculine» freedom and assertiveness in a woman demonstrates how thoroughly new ideas had, by the century's end, permeated literary culture. Even through a clumsy novel, fresh breezes blow.
Anna and Lady John, claiming male prerogatives, yet remain sexually conventional. Anna angrily rejects Clifton's proposal of cohabitation; Lady John enters a loveless marriage at her father's behest and lives in chastity after separating from her husband. But other conceptions of the new woman include more daring sexual possibilities. In
The titles or subtitles of several of the period's novels- Ellinor; or, The World As It Is; Man As He Is; Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not;
The distinction between «being» and «doing» often attaches itself to gender dichotomies, with 'being'-the more passive role-assigned to women. Hermsprong is far from passive. His ideological importance -255- consists partly in his redefinition of being in relation to doing-and of manliness. The word manly assumes ever more complex meanings as it recurs in the novel.
In the imaginative and ideological scheme of Hermsprong, the antithesis of man is not woman but child-and women and children do not categorically resemble one another. Men and women do, or should. Hermsprong's speeches about his own nature and his lectures on characteristics of women as they should be emphasize comparable attributes. Early in the novel, he describes himself:
I cannot learn to offer incense at the shrines of wealth and power, nor at any shrines but those of probity and virtue. I cannot learn to surrender my opinion from complaisance, or from any principle of adulation. Nor can I learn to suppress the sentiments of a freeborn mind, from any fear, religious or political.
He expects of Caroline, whom he loves, the same kind of noncompliance. She too must respect her own freedom, must defend her opinions, must refuse to surrender. The crucial issue between Hermsprong and Caroline concerns her dutiful deference to her tyrannical father. Hermsprong's insistence that a higher duty commands her to follow 'the truth of things' threatens to separate them permanently. (Caroline successfully justifies herself- introducing an unexpected note of relativism into a work largely organized by absolutist statements-by pointing out that she has followed the path that she thought right, and that no one can do more.) Women, Hermsprong maintains, waste their energies on trifles. They deserve educations that will enable them to use those energies in ways comparable to men's.
Caroline's father, Lord Grondale, is Hermsprong's chief antagonist. A self-absorbed, self-satisfied, arrogant man who assumes his right to absolute power, Lord Grondale has never before encountered real opposition. Hermsprong's explanation of why even a woman can and should defy such a man (he is speaking to Mrs. Garnet, an elderly and impoverished, hence repudiated relative of Lord Grondale's) summarizes his moral position, and the novel's:
Can you fear a man… whose mind is mean-so mean as to incite him to commit acts of injustice, of inhumanity! can he be feared? He, whose life has scarce been marked by one act of energy? who owes the little consequence he possesses to his title and his money? How feeble must be the resentments of a man humiliated by his vices? Oppose him with the manly spirit of conscious rectitude, you will find him a child; a sulky, pouting one indeed; but still a child. -256-
His invocation of 'manly spirit' to a woman emphasizes his insistence that both genders can and should share the same moral qualities. Long-standing convention has labeled courageous spirit «manly»; Hermsprong considers it equally appropriate to women. Moral qualities, and the energetic acts they generate, define adulthood. Lacking them, even the most socially powerful human being reveals himself a child.
Hermsprong's 'being,' dependent on that moral integrity he recommends to others, changes the meaning of his action. Although Hermsprong occupies himself mainly in benevolence (along with his talking and thinking), the significance of such conduct differs from that of comparable behavior in, say, The Man of Feeling or A Sentimental Journey. When Harley, in The Man of Feeling, bestows money on a worthy recipient or weeps over a good woman gone wrong, he declares his difference from, and implicitly his superiority to, the objects of his generosity. The feelings such figures allow him to experience constitute their narrative and moral justification. Hermsprong delineates a new version of benevolence. Its hero's acts of charity often occur 'offstage,' and are only briefly reported. Many of those he helps-Mrs. Garnet and the local curate are important cases in point-attract his attention specifically because of their moral resemblance to him. He wants to learn from Mrs. Garnet, he says; he admires the curate. Hermsprong acts not to indulge his feelings but in the service of justice and of moral equality. Even his more generalized charity-for example, his bestowing of money and help on inhabitants of a storm-ravaged village- rarely emphasizes social or moral difference. Hermsprong considers benevolence more an obligation than an indulgence.
Bage does not imagine Hermsprong in altogether innovative terms: his wealth allows his defiance of Lord Grondale; his high birth facilitates his marriage to Caroline. The novel relies upon even as it deplores class hierarchy. But it presents a protagonist whose moral substance locates his heroism, who insists on and as much as possible enforces the moral equality of women, who needs not fight or pursue adventure to declare himself a man: a representation of considerable consequence.
In 1796 William Beckford published a little book called Modern Novel Writing, following it a year later with Azemia, a parodic merging of Oriental tale and sentimental novel. Both works employ pastiche to criti-257- cize the English novel, emphasizing incoherence and sentimentality as principal weaknesses of the genre. Beckford focuses on such characters as Sterne's mad Maria and Richardson's Pamela, from much earlier in the century, as founding figures of sensibility, but he also evokes the divided aims of such a novel of the 1790s as Ellinor, with its intricate plot, its intermittent stress on sensibility, and its claim of bold originality. The effort to combine sensibility with originality often led to the kind of narrative muddle that Beckford mocks. It also had more provocative consequences
