The Columbia History of the British Novel

when novelists seriously confronted the problem of how to reconcile a high valuation of personal feeling with a concern for social issues.

Many commentators have discussed Mary Wollstonecraft's difficulties over sensibility. As Vindication of the Rights of Woman makes clear, she believed that female sensibility constituted female weakness, an educational and social imposition on women. Yet her novels rely heavily on sensibility to characterize her heroines and the men who attract them. A characteristic passage from The Wrongs of Woman:

Active as love was in the heart of Maria, the story she had just heard made her thoughts take a wider range. The opening buds of hope closed, as if they had put forth too early, and the happiest day of her life was overcast by the most melancholy reflections. Thinking of Jemima's peculiar fate and her own, she was led to consider the oppressed state of women, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter. Sleep fled from her eyelids, while she dwelt on the wretchedness of unprotected infancy.

Maria, who has just listened to Jemima's narrative of the disasters afflicting an unprotected working-class woman, employs the conventional language of sensibility ('the opening buds of hope,' 'the most melancholy reflections') to comment not only on her personal situation of requited romantic love but also on social actualities. Her love for her infant merges with her awareness of women's plight; her justifiable worry about her own immediate predicament grows as she ponders Jemima's experience. Wollstonecraft's novel criticizes sensibility but indulges in sentimental flights, as though exquisite sensitivity alone responds adequately to the suffering women endure and witness.

Sensibility rarely impels action. Jemima, hardened by her experience, proves more forceful than Maria in planning and in expediting. Maria, however, acts powerfully-although only verbally-in the courtroom, defending Darnford against the charge of seduction and incidentally -258- defending her own adultery. Her ability to do so depends explicitly on her transcendence of sensibility: 'A strong sense of injustice had silenced every emotion, which a mixture of true and false delicacy might otherwise have excited in Maria's bosom.' Like 'delicacy,' the 'sense of injustice' constitutes an emotion-but emotion of a kind that promises fresh narrative possibilities. In its inclusiveness-it implies reaction to a whole class of human beings rather than to suffering individuals-and in its implicit invocation of principle as well as sentiment, it differs from the emotional responsiveness that had governed many previous fictional heroes and heroines. Delicacy suggests weakness, a sense of injustice promises strength. Delicacy reacts to minute stimuli, the sense of injustice claims large ones. Maria fails in the courtroom. The judge considers her reasoned, energetic plea irrelevant and relies instead on the ancient principles of male supremacy and male possession. Yet the power of that plea energizes Wollstonecraft's text, dramatizes her argument, and strengthens her fictional character.

Sensibility in the old sense continues to display itself in late-century novels. But these novels also render less familiar sorts of feeling. Mary Hays's Emma Courtney sometimes resembles a much earlier heroine: '[My] tender and faithful heart refuses to change its object-it can never love another.' But she does not accept the traditional female fate of passive waiting for male response. Her attachment organizes her life and provides her with energy, not only because of its powerful sexual component but because she uses it as a stimulus to thought. Her thinking leads her to a complex awareness of women's categorical situation as social victims, oppressed by 'the barbarous and accursed laws of society.' But it also enables her to make compelling claims for herself. Passion, she says, has brought her to reason. She writes to a male correspondent about his admiration of 'the destructive courage of an Alexander… the pernicious ambition of an Augustus Caesar, as bespeaking the potent, energetic, mind!' Then she asserts her own comparable potency and energy. Although she bemoans her victimization, she more insistently argues-and the argument is revolutionary-that her self-destructive passion constitutes strength rather than weakness, stimulating intellectual and emotional vitality.

The assumption, exemplified in every novel I have mentioned, that energy in itself embodies value implies consequent valuing of new sorts of emotion. If an admirable character can plausibly admire the energy of destructive courage and pernicious ambition, it follows that even -259- such feelings as resentment and rage may measure worth and incite action. Anna St. Ives, Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Maria, Hermsprong, Emma Courtney-all experience intense anger at manifestations of social injustice. Fictional women, of course, had found anger a source of energy much earlier in the century: Pamela and Clarissa come readily to mind. But such heroines feel angry because of what has happened to them. They do not characteristically generalize their conditions. Protagonists of late-century novels, whose anger pervades and stimulates more action than does that of their fictional predecessors, can usually justify their emotion in social terms.

The novels so far considered in this chapter lack the psychological intricacy and depth that twentieth-century readers expect. For that matter, they lack the psychological intricacy and depth of Richardson's first two novels. In late-century novels, political and moral agendas often supersede psychological ones; notation of emotion substitutes for its exploration. Two novels of the period that have attracted recent readers, however, Caleb Williams and A Simple Story, provide richly inflected psychological analysis. Elizabeth Inchbald's anything-butsimple story offers new kinds of emotion and new ways of thinking about them.

A Simple Story (1791) tells a two-generation tale of fathers, literal and metaphorical, and daughters. The first-generation protagonist, Miss Milner, falls in love with her guardian, a Catholic priest named Dorriforth. Freed from his vows by a relative's death, through which he inherits an important estate, Dorriforth, now Lord Elmwood, marries his ward, despite the prolonged opposition of another priest, Sandford, and despite Miss Milner's willfully and provocatively bad behavior. When Lord Elmwood has to go abroad and then to stay longer than he had planned, his wife lapses into infidelity. Before his return, she flees. Lord Elmwood sends their small daughter, Matilda, after her, wishing never to see either female again.

After Lady Elmwood's death, Lord Elmwood allows Matilda, now seventeen, to inhabit one of his residences, on condition that he never see her. When they accidentally encounter one another, he banishes her. From the cottage where she takes refuge, she is abducted by a lascivious nobleman. Lord Elmwood rescues her, learns to love her, and marries her to her cousin, now heir to his estate.

The novel's power derives from its capacity to render emotional nuance with remarkable spareness and to suggest links between such -260- nuance and the pressures of social reality. A Simple Story ends with an explicit moral: 'And Mr. Milner, Matilda's grandfather, had better have given his fortune to a distant branch of his family… so he had bestowed upon his daughter A PROPER EDUCATION.' The 'proper education' here endorsed appears to be Matilda's harrowing education in the school of adversity. Whatever ironies it conceals, the statement clearly insists that Matilda's experience and Miss Milner's carry social as well as personal significance.

Dorriforth and Miss Milner are distinguished from their fictional contemporaries by the rendered intensity of their sexual feeling, conveyed both by direct statement (Lord Elmwood, on hearing that Miss Milner loves him: 'For God's sake take care what you are doing-you are destroying my prospects of futurity-you are making this world too dear to me') and by physical gestures such as Miss Milner's changes of color, her fainting, her weeping, her setting down of a coffee cup. But pride, jealousy, envy, and anger also become objects of detailed investigation, not of moral condemnation. Such feelings of course permeate works of fiction from early romance to postmodern narrative (and nonnarrative). Rarely in the eighteenth century, though, are they explored rather than deplored.

After their engagement and before their marriage, Miss Milner and Lord Elmwood struggle for power. Pride controls both antagonists, pride given different forms and different kinds of authority. Miss Milner takes seriously the truism that a woman holds power over a man only before her marriage. She wishes to test her control. Why didn't she keep her lover in suspense longer, she asks herself, so that she could have seen her dominion's extent? Would he love her still if she behaved badly? How badly can she behave and get away with it? Deliberately she disobeys her fiancé. Although she knows that she risks alienating him, she continues to declare (to a confidante) that he loves her too well to reject her. If he fails to forgive her when she does something unforgivable-well, he doesn't love her enough. After she performs the «unforgivable» action and Lord Elmwood announces his plan to go abroad for an indefinite period, breaking the engagement, she refuses to acknowledge openly her grief and despair. Pride makes her follow polite forms and disguise her feelings.

Lord Elmwood's sense of his own dignity forbids him to submit to a young woman's defiance. His ungenerous (though not implausible) interpretation of Miss Milner's behavior as betraying incurable frivolity, — 261- and his unwillingness to discuss rather than simply to command her conduct, suggest a rigidity and self-importance