confirmed by his subsequent actions. The intersection of this man's and this woman's individual pride promises precisely the kind of disaster that the narrative enacts.
A third person initially dominated by pride is Mr. Sandford, who urges Lord Elmwood to marry a woman characterized by her lack of capacity for intense feeling. Arrogant in his conviction of rightness, Sandford encourages Lord Elmwood to view Miss Milner as immoral. With equal arrogance he suddenly decides-apparently on the basis of the young woman's appearance as she struggles to conceal her emotions-to command the marriage he has previously opposed, suggesting that marriage alone will allow Lord Elmwood dependably to control the flighty young woman he loves.
The novel's second half documents, not as moral triumph but as psychological process, the transformation of pride in the two central characters. (Sandford also relinquishes his pride, but more by authorial fiat than by emotional or moral logic.) Each recognizes the wrong he or she has committed, without acknowledging, as the novel in its totality does, the positive as well as negative value of their pride. The psychological complexity of Inchbald's achievement derives partly from her examination of the range of meanings attached in her historical moment to inclusive moral categories. Pride, A
The novel narrates only in summary fashion Lady Elmwood's infidelity, remorse, and self-abasement. On her deathbed she announces that she has no will but her husband's. She consequently makes no formal provision for her daughter, although she pleads with Lord Elmwood, in a letter posthumously delivered, to care for their child. Her pride becomes humility because she knows herself to have sinned. What she fails to know-what, indeed, she can no longer afford to know-is that her personal force has depended on just the kind of selfassertion that has led to her misbehavior. Inchbald, however, draws her readers to understand this fact and to recognize the pathos of how much a woman, by virtue of her gender, must yield. Lord Elmwood, — 262- with characteristic reticence, neglects to tell his wife about the illness that delayed his return. Believing herself willfully abandoned, she embarks on adultery in a misguided claim of autonomy. The novel does not invite its readers to condone such behavior, but it allows us to understand the action's origins in a pride that signifies not arrogance but striving for independence. Lady Elmwood's betrayal paradoxically testifies to the intensity of her love as she reacts to apparent neglect. The laws of ethics and of society condemn this woman. She rightly condemns herself. But the pride that leads her to break her marriage vows when her husband appears to lose interest stems in part from an admirable rejection of the indignities routinely visited upon women.
Lord Elmwood's pride takes longer to yield, both because society reinforces it due to his gender, rank, and wealth, and because he has not in any such obvious sense as his wife done wrong. After his wife's death, his pride manifests itself in his refusals: he insists that no one mention his wife or daughter, that his nephew never oppose him, that his personal prohibitions carry absolute force. His daughter exists in total emotional deprivation, the consequence of his sadistic arrangement that she live in his house without encountering him. Only her abduction allows Lord Elmwood to obviate his own forbiddings. Rescuing her, he learns-although he never explicitly admits it- his mistake: his daughter's emotional deprivation has entailed his own. He relinquishes pride for paternity.
In the rigidity and inflexibility of his pride, Lord Elmwood appears monstrous: an appropriate mate, in fact, for the young woman Sandford wanted him to marry. But his pride conceals-or perhaps constitutes-an emotional malady that largely results from society's gender arrangements. If Miss Milner painfully conceals her feelings, Lord Elmwood has little capacity to express his. Emotionally inarticulate, he cannot discuss with his fiancée the difficulties between them; he cannot tell her of his physical weakness (the illness that keeps him away); he cannot deal with his own suffering, so he forbids anyone to remind him of it. His cry when his daughter faints in his arms ('Her name did not however come to his recollection-nor any name but this-'Miss Milner-Dear Miss Milner. ') signifies a continuing anguish never verbally acknowledged. To the novel's end he exercises an autocrat's control, yet the discovery of a channel for his emotions has disrupted the action of his pride, a pride that, like Miss Milner's, conceals its own pathos. -263-
Matilda has little pride: her painful «education» has humbled her. Capable of resentment, she remains incapable of defying a father or of self-initiated action. Never deviating from virtue, she receives her reward in a father's love and a young man's devotion. Far more than her mother, she resembles the conventional eighteenth- century heroine of sensibility: a reactor, a weeper, an actual or potential victim, the product of a 'PROPER EDUCATION.' Inchbald attaches the epithet «proper» to the education that generates sensibility, the education Wollstonecraft deplored. «Proper» meaning appropriate? respectable? conventional? Certainly all three-the novel demonstrates how precisely Matilda's education in submissiveness coincides with the demands of a society organized on the basis of paternal power. On the other hand, it also demonstrates, in a way virtually inconceivable before the 1790s, that paternal power entails a train of emotional problems, for fathers as well as for daughters. Lord and Lady Elmwood, in their emotional complexity, experiencing the incompatibility of fully experienced personal feeling with reason (to use eighteenth-century terms), capture the narrator's interest as well as the reader's. Matilda, less demanding and less provocative, displays only the kind of feeling that «reason» allows: «reason» meaning (a crucial perception, this) the structure of rules ordained by society. Matilda, as a consequence, can only react. Her parents create action.
In novels of the late eighteenth century the relations of feeling to action, like those of character to action, indicated experimental directions for fiction. Like the question of character, that of feeling was now seen to involve matters of social actuality and possibility.
That novels might discuss social and political phenomena was hardly a new idea. Fielding had satirized doctors and lawyers and urban immorality; Smollett incorporated diatribes about London and Bath and about government corruption into the fabric of his novels. A sentimental hero encountering a neglected old soldier inevitably reflected on the inadequacies of a government that failed to reward him. Novels of the 1790s often continued a familiar tradition in a familiar way; Walsingham and Ellinor offer typical examples.
The most important new development in the treatment of politics and society by novels of the 1790s was an emphasis on analogies -264- between private and public experience, for example between the situation of individuals within families and that of citizens within a nation. Like set-piece discussions of social ills, such analogies could find crude or subtle, explicit or implicit statement. Wollstonecraft is explicit. When Maria asks the rhetorical question, 'Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?' she establishes the theoretical groundwork for
Both Maria's autobiography (recorded in a memoir for her daughter) and Jemima's (presented in an oral narrative) narrate kinds of events familiar in eighteenth-century novels. The representation of female suffering in Wollstonecraft's fiction, however, exists to stimulate generalization rather than just to titillate. The particular case in all its lurid specificity exemplifies social malaise. Comments by the characters-Jemima herself, Maria and her lover Darnford listening to Jemima's story, Maria as she tells her own tale-and by the narrator insist that individual instances embody social evil. Several novels of the period flirt with the notion of social determinism. Wollstonecraft makes it specific and insistent, demonstrating in detail processes of cause and effect that create the inevitabilities of female lives.
Already a polemicist, Wollstonecraft predictably employed the novel as a vehicle of social commentary. More surprising cases abound. Charlotte Smith, whose first novel,
