effacement of Behn's novels from those literary histories written in the wake of the novel's elevation does not depend upon the good will of the literary historian. Thus, while Reeve is generous with Behn-'let us cast a veil of compassion over her faults'-and Dunlop is severe, both ignore all her novels except Oroonoko. By contrast, the novels of Richardson and Fielding are given positions of -14- special priority in both accounts of the novel's rise. The success of the elevated novel in the 1740s-its appearance in culture as the only novel worthy of reading, cultural attention, and detailed literary history-means the early novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood will be pushed into the margins of literary histories, where they nonetheless never quite disappear but serve-as they do in Richardson and Fielding's texts-as an abject trace or degraded «other» needed to secure the identity of the «real» (i.e., legitimate) novel.
From Reeve forward, scholarly literary history develops a paradoxical relationship to the forgotten texts of the past. It retrieves from the archival memory of culture and reads again what its contemporary culture has almost completely forgotten. This activity pushes Reeve toward a certain regret about the shifts in cultural value that can look quite arbitrary to one who has looked long enough down the 'stream of time.'
Romances have for many ages past been read and admired, lately it has been the fashion to decry and ridicule them; but to an unprejudiced person, this will prove nothing but the variations of times, manners, and opinions.-Writers of all denominations, — Princes and Priests, — Bishops and Heroes, — have their day, and then are out of date.-Sometimes indeed a work of intrinsic merit will revive, and renew its claim to immortality: but this happiness falls to the lot of few, in comparison of those who roll down the stream of time, and fall into the gulph of oblivion.
This passage naturalizes the process of disappearance and forgetting-by its reference to the wheel of fortune that gives 'princes and priests, bishops and heroes… their day' and then takes it away, as well as by its metaphorical characterization of the movement of a 'work of… merit' down 'the stream of time' into 'the gulph of oblivion.' These analogies obscure the particular cultural strife at work within shifts in cultural memory. Thus the differences of gender, politics, and class that separate Behn and Richardson, casting the first down into «oblivion» while the second is raised up into prominence, are conducted through the literary histories that translate them for a later age. Though literary historians attempt to be «unprejudiced» (Reeve) and embrace an ethos of 'judgment, candour, and impartiality' (Coventry), and though their histories aspire to secure general moral or universal aesthetic grounds for critical judgment, the actual practice of literary history does not occlude but instead reflects cultural division. -15-
Since one of the meanings of gulf is a 'whirlpool, or absorbing eddy,' I can accommodate my thesis about the novel's rise to Reeve's metaphor. The elevation of the new novel over the old novel of amorous intrigue produces a vortex or whirlpool within the land/seascape of eighteenth-century British culture. Where one kind of reading is thrown up, another is thrown down; where one kind of pleasure is licensed, another is discredited. This turbulent vortex of reciprocal appearance and disappearance is mis-seen as the origin of the novel. But in order for the elevated novel to appear, the novel of amorous intrigue must be made to disappear into a gulf of oblivion. Thus birth requires a burial, but only after the murder of the other novel. While this vortex first appears in the cultural strife of the 1740s, it is also readable in every subsequent literary history devised to tell of the novel's rise.
To apprehend 'the rise of the novel' as a vortex of cultural conflict helps to refocus the way gender difference and strife crosscut the expansion of novel reading in early modern culture. In aligning romances with French fashions and insisting that both are distinctly female addictions, Coventry was repeating one of the clichés of his age. The romance was associated with women because of its popularity with women readers. Reeve, by casting The Progress of Romance in the form of a series of salonlike lectures and debates between Hortensius and Euphrasia (with Sophronia acting the role of a nonpartisan judge), inscribes the debate about romance and its value within a battle of the sexes. Euphrasia rejects Hortensius's sweeping critique of romances, first by asking how Hortensius can banish all «fiction» of questionable moral standards-for this would mean indicting the classical authors boys study in their youth-and then by rejecting any double standard by which novels might receive sweeping censure because they are the favorite reading of women. By exfoliating her account of the novel's progress in a series of lessons that finally wins the willing conversion of a skeptical male, Reeve's text acquires the shape and feel of a seduction. Hortensius seems to relent in his opposition to romance because of his high regard for Euphrasia. But the resolution of this staged debate does not overcome the deeper resonances of the gendered contest around romances and novels. The pejorative terms applied to romance (fanciful, wishful, out of touch with reality, etc.) are also applied to women. The favorable terms applied to novels (realistic, rational, improving) are congruent with those that describe the male as a politically responsible member of the public sphere. -16-
Within the context of the debate about novels, it is not surprising that male and female critics offer different pathways toward the novel's elevation. In elevating the novel, Coventry follows Fielding's attempt to splice classical knowledge and criticism into the reading of the novel. Although John Dunlop, like Reeve, applies a modern, historicist, more or less tolerant horizon of scholarship to the novel, his appeal to philosophical grounds for evaluating fiction helps push the novel toward a monumental cultural role. In elevating the novel, Clara Reeve (like Mary Wollstonecraft and Laetitia Barbauld later) turns the novel into a form for transmitting social knowledge. Reeve ends her literary history by offering two lists to parents, guardians, and tutors, 'intended chiefly for the female sex': 'Books for Children' and 'Books for Young Ladies.' This two-stage course of reading includes fables, spellers, conduct books, periodical essays, and only one item on the second list we would describe as a novel-'Richardson's Works.' Following this curriculum prepares young female minds for an informed and critical reading of the romances and novels Reeve has described in The Progress of Romance. Literary history acquires the pedagogical function it still serves in literary studies: it becomes a reading list with its entries contextualized by narrative.
The gendered divide that expresses itself throughout the course of the institutionalization of the novel in England and in the various accounts of its «rise» is only one instance, though perhaps the most pervasive and important one, of the partisanship David Perkins has detected in much literary history. Given the way literary history is used to shape pleasure and define value, how could it be different? Thus the various positions upon what constitutes the first novel, and implicitly, what is the most valuable paradigm of novelistic authorship, work within the earliest literary histories of the elevated novel, and are reflected in the divergent critical valuations of Richardson and Fielding. In this way, the rivalry of Richardson and Fielding on the market during the 1740s was reproduced in the earliest literary criticism and history of the novel. Coventry ignores Richardson in proclaiming Fielding's unheralded achievements, while Johnson's prescription for the novel's cultural role is rigged to favor Richardson's fictional practice. The antagonism of Richardson and Fielding expresses itself through the writings of Hazlitt, Coleridge, Scott, and every subsequent literary historian of their differences. This antagonism shows little sign of dissipating in our own day. It is not just that different values reflect themselves in diver -17- gent accounts of our cultural repertoire. There are also always different agendas for the future dispositions of pleasure and value. Thus recent feminist critics have found Richardson most useful in their critical work, but Fieldingnot.
The elevation of the novel and its countersigning by literary history is neither simply right nor wrong, good nor bad. New discursive formations-like the elevated novel-incite new and valuable cultural production. Thus, however unfair or tendentious its judgments about the early novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood, literary history's sublimation of 'the novel' enables the ambitious novelistic projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One example is the quixotic ambition to write 'the Great American Novel.' Literary history does not have to be fair, or oriented toward the categories we would now credit, in order for it to bear its effects into culture. Yet its judgments are also always-and interminably-open to revision. The appeals court of culture is always in session. The recent feminist revaluation of the women novelists of the early eighteenth century seems to depend upon a contemporary reinterpretation of what is happening in the novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood: explicit treatments of gender, sexuality, and power that have critical currency in our own time.
This chapter's account of the cultural scandal of novel reading, and of the inventive responses of novelists and literary historians to that scandal, suggests a signal tendency of most literary histories of the novel. Like a museum, literary history turns the strife of history into a repertoire of forms. It does so by taking differences that may have motivated the writing or reading of novels within specific historical contexts-differences of religion, politics, class, social propriety, or ethical design, to name a few-and converts them into differences of kind. Thus, for example, the polemic between Richardson and Fielding about the sorts of narrative and character fiction should possess comes to represent, within literary history, two species of novel: the Richardson novel of psychology and sentiment, and the Fielding novel of social panorama and critique. The novels of amorous intrigue written by Behn
