the quicksand and Lucy into her grave; the Ashton sons die without heirs; the wounded bridegroom, heir at law, leaves Scotland never to return. We look in vain to the last chapter's summing up for the sign of continuation, of fertility and order, that always is History's mark in the Waverley Novels. -324-
The sign is there in the novel though, in the great feast that precedes the final tragic movement of the novel, a feast that takes place, as it must, in the only thriving place in the community. Not the ancient Ravenswood tower where Edgar lives, its larders and movables cleaned to the walls at novel's opening by the funeral feast for his father. Not the usurped manor of Ravenswood itself, where the Ashtons have been making sterile 'improvements,' but the small port of Wolf's Hope, once a purely feudal dependency of the Ravenswoods, now learning and consolidating its new commercial and political freedoms under British modernity.The man who had 'headed the insurrection' by which the villagers had taken back control of their property and labor while the Ravenswoods fought the Ashtons over the larger properties is John Girder, the cooper, an artisan whose now well-furnished and plenished house, lovingly described several times in the novel, hosts the Master of Ravenswood and his kinsman the Marquis of A. for the meeting that unites the two Ravenswoods on the path, as they think, to their reinsertion into History. Magic will divert Edgar from that path, and the Marquis of A. will get his trivial time at the top of party politics, says the narrator. But it is the artisan and his «insurrection» that is really marked to enter Universal History. If John Girder's head is 'weelnigh dung donnart' with his sudden elevation to Queen's cooper and with the hosting of aristocrats, if he remains a little bit pompous in his good fortune, if his new authority has the dangerous undertow of setting him to 'build castles in the air' about his future, nevertheless his «oration» at the end of the feast has the tempered certainty that is the sign of Universal History in the Waverley Novels: 'Let the house be redd up, the broken meat set by. Let every man and woman here set about their ain business, as if there was nae sic thing as marquis or master, duke or drake, laird or lord, in this world.'
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A Novel of Their Own: Romantic Women's Fiction, 1790–1830
IN the opening decades of the nineteenth century, women dominated both the production and the consumption of novels. The success of the circulating or lending libraries, which spread rapidly throughout England during the late eighteenth century, meant that hitherto prohibitively expensive books were now available to a new and ever-growing readership, a readership composed in large part of increasingly literate and leisured upper- and middle-class women who preferred to read literature, and especially novels, written by women. The contents of the ten leading circulating libraries in London in 1800, tabulated by the
Historians of the novel, especially those concerned with documenting the 'great age of the novel'-the Victorian period-and including feminist literary historians interested in tracing the development of the novel as a female literary tradition, have tended to overlook the significance of this enormous body of female-authored literature. Focusing almost exclusively on Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and a recent addition to the canonical history of the novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, historians of the novel have usually identified the Romantic novel either with a nationalistic and bourgeois recuperation of the past (as in Scott's historical fiction), with an equally conservative celebration of a morally reinvigorated gentry class (in Jane Austen's fiction), or with a Gothic evocation and criticism of the excesses of sensibility (in the work of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley). Even perceptive feminist critics of the novel have asserted that the female-authored fiction of the Romantic period registers the triumph of a patriarchal domestic ideology. Basing their conclusions primarily upon conduct books and religious tracts written by men and women, including Addison and Steele's Spectator, they have eloquently argued that women writers of the Romantic era were either forced to accommodate themselves to, indirectly subvert, or gain power wholly within a cultural construction of the proper lady as a modest, domesticated woman, one confined to the private sphere, one who did not speak in public.
A closer look at the large number and wide range of women's fiction produced between 1790 and 1830 suggests a rather different story. Despite recent arguments to the contrary, Romantic women novelists did not resign the construction of 'feminine discourse' in the novel to men, obediently reproducing the hegemonic ideology of bourgeois capitalism and relocating it in an idealized middle-class patriarchal family. In the Romantic period, women novelists more frequently employed their writing as a vehicle for ideological contestation and subversion, exploiting the novel's capacity for disruptive humor and sustained inter-328- rogation of existing social codes, and for what Bakhtin called its «heteroglossia» and «dialogism» (its ability to present and maintain opposing voices and points of view). While the psychological and rhetorical accommodations noted by many critics undoubtedly occurred in writing by women of the Romantic period, I emphasize here the existence of an equally strong Romantic female literary tradition that openly challenged and revised the patriarchal domestic ideology in powerful ways. We can no longer assume that the doctrine of the separate spheres, the sexual division of labor into the public/male and the private/female realms, was universally accepted during the Romantic period.
Although several of these women novelists invoked a modesty topos in introducing their work to the public, the sheer bulk of their publications suggests that they did not succumb to the debilitating female 'anxiety of authorship' assigned to them by recent feminist critics. Many were capable of the authorial self-confidence-even arrogance-exemplified by Harriet Lee, who, in her introduction to the Standard Novels edition of her
I think I may be permitted to observe, that when these volumes first appeared [in 1797], a work bearing distinctly the title of 'Tales,' professedly adapted to different countries, and either abruptly commencing with, or breaking suddenly into, a sort of dramatic dialogue, was a novelty in the fictions of the day. Innumerable «Tales» of
