The Columbia History of the British Novel

the same stamp, and adapted in the same manner to all classes and all countries, have since appeared; with many of which I presume not to compete in merit, though I think I may fairly claim priority of design and style.

Following Harriet Lee, I suggest that the Romantic woman's novel played a key role in the construction of a new ideology of gender, which I have called 'feminine Romanticism' and which I discuss more fully in Romanticism and Gender (1992). Repudiating the economic and gender systems promoted in the eighteenth-century novels of Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, and Mackenzie, and rejecting the political assumptions of the male Romantic poets, the female novelists of the Romantic era celebrated not the achievements of the imagination or the overflow of powerful feelings, but rather the workings of the rational mind, a mind relocated-in a gesture of revolutionary gender implications-in the female as well as the male body. They thereby insisted upon the fundamental equality of women and men. Typically, they endorsed a commitment to a development of subjectivity based on alterity, and - 329- grounded their moral systems on what Carol Gilligan (in In a Different Voice, 1982) has taught us to call an 'ethic of care,' one that insists on the primacy of the family or the community and their attendant practical responsibilities over the rights of the individual. These writers based their notions of community on a cooperative rather than possessive interaction with Nature-imaged as a female friend, mother, or sister-and promoted a politics of gradual rather than violent social change, a transformation that extends the values and practices of the domestic affections into the public realm.

In opposition to the conservative domestic ideology so well described by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, many Romantic women novelists used their fiction to promote significantly different social agendas. Some rejected the public sphere altogether as irredeemably brutal, corrupt, and self-destructive, and construed the ideal male as one who in the end is absorbed entirely into the feminine, private sphere. Charlotte Smith, for example, in The Old Manor House (1794), offers a wide-ranging critique of masculinity in all its cultural forms. She first condemns the eighteenth-century 'new man of feeling' by parodying the lyrics of Gray, Collins, and Cowper. The spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling in a man, expressed in her protagonist Orlando's 'Ode to Poverty,' functions in her novel as a sign of self-indulgence and social irresponsibility, like Orlando's momentary failure to provide his wife with a home and income. She then calls into question the aristocracy's chivalric code of honor from which Orlando's name is derived, not in the name of the rights of the common man, as William Godwin did that same year in Caleb Williams, but rather in the name of gender transformation. In Smith's novel, Orlando gives up both the chivalric and the democratic constructions of masculinity in order to take up the subject position of a woman. He is finally portrayed as feminine, the vulnerable dependent of a wealthy aristocratic woman, delicately featured, refined, loving, loyal, and passive-in short, as a modest heroine. When he goes to America to fight in the war against the colonies, he is immediately captured and-in a subversion of the popular racist and sexist American captivity narratives-cared for by a noble Indian chief. Orlando's femininity embodies a critique not just of the political elitism of feudal aristocracy but also of patrilineal bourgeois capitalism. His revulsion at the brutality of imperialist wars, at primogeniture and the indulgence of the eldest -330- son, and at the greed of modern commerce are all endorsed in Smith's novel.

Other female novelists of the Romantic period contested the political domination of the patriarch-whether benevolent or tyrannical-by presenting all-female families or communities as the only sites of personal fulfillment. In Adeline Mowbray (1804), Amelia Opie tracks the damage done to a woman who tries to live out Godwin's radical notion of free love without marriage and his abstract system of political justice. At the conclusion, Opie offers as her radical social alternative (both to free love and to patriarchal domesticity) an all- female family of choice (Mrs. Pemberton, Mrs. Mowbray, and the West Indian Savannah), whose members overcome class and racial differences and collectively take on the responsibility of rearing Adeline's motherless daughter. A similar female family of choice emerges in the second draft for the conclusion of Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), where Maria-abandoned by both her husband and her lover-decides that she will 'live for' her daughter, together with the lowerclass Jemima.

More powerfully, many Romantic women novelists openly challenged the patriarchal doctrine of the separate spheres-the doctrine that would, in a classic example of antifeminist backlash, triumph as the official ideology of Queen Victoria's reign-by articulating a very different domestic ideology. The feminine Romanticism embodied in women's fiction from 1790 to 1830 constitutes (to use feminist author Rita Felski's term) an alternative 'counter- public sphere.' Many women novelists of the Romantic era whom I can discuss only briefly in this essay-including Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Brunton, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, Mary Shelley, and others-explicitly or implicitly advocated the 'domestic affections' as a political program that would radically transform the public sphere. Inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft's call, in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), for a 'REVOLUTION in female manners,' they proclaimed the importance of female education, rational love, an ethic of care, and gender equality in a challenge to the domestic ideology that relegated women to the home, and to the laissez-faire capitalist system that placed the rights of the individual, rational choice, and an ethic of justice above the needs of the community as a whole. The values of this 'counter-public sphere' have much in common with the socialist call for equitable distribution of -331- public goods and services, and should be recognized as a viable alternative political ideology, one that would give women not just a room (or a novel) but a nation of their own.

In endorsing Wollstonecraft's belief that females were capable of the same rational and moral development as males, in presenting us with heroines who think as well as feel, who act with prudence, avoid the pitfalls of sexual desire, and learn from their mistakes, Romantic women novelists explicitly corrected the tradition of eighteenth-century fiction by women that Jane Spencer has called 'the didactic tradition' of 'reformed heroines.' In these didactic novels the author-or a male mentor-functions as a moral teacher, guiding the development of the heroine from her fallible youth to her mature acceptance of the status quo and the role of dutiful wife. This is the plot of such female bildungsromans as Mary Davy's Reform'd Coquet (1724), Eliza Haywood's History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Frances Burney's Evelina (1778).

Such Romantic women novelists as Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, Susan Ferrier, and Jane Austen transformed this tradition by putting forth a subtle critique of masculinity, highlighting the flaws in intelligence and moral virtue demonstrated by their male and female characters as well as the dangers of passionate love, sensibility, and the creative imagination for both men and women. By focusing as much on the failures of traditional marriages as on the heroine's acquisition of a meritorious husband, these Romantic novelists resisted the conservative tendencies of a Hannah More-who in Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808) and elsewhere argued that the rational woman, however powerful at home, should uphold the doctrine of the separate spheres and acknowledge the superiority of men in the public realm. In its place they put forth a telling critique of the authority of the father and husband, a defense of egalitarian marriages, and the claim that the domestic affections provide the only viable foundation for all public and private virtues and happiness.

In her compelling novel Belinda (1801), Maria Edgeworth paints the portrait of the new woman who will replace Pope's 'fairest of mortals' as the envy of her age. Belinda Portman is an attractive young woman of sound sense, wide reading, prudence, personal modesty, and a loving heart who can resist the negative female role models set before her in the self-indulgent, irresponsible aristocrat Lady Delacour and the overly aggressive, masculinized Harriet Freke. In introducing this macho -332- woman as a «freak» or «caprice» of nature, Edgeworth reveals what Patricia Juliana Smith has called her 'lesbian panic.' At the same time Edgeworth introduces a more balanced feminism, one that does not insist, as Harriet does, on the superiority of women, but would combine the best moral and intellectual qualities associated with each gender. Belinda Portman preserves the sensibility and modesty associated with femininity but unites them with shrewd judgment, a personal sense of honor, sound moral principles based on reasoning and observation, earned self-esteem, and a generous capacity for loyalty and love. She is thus rationally and morally superior to both her lovers, the compulsive gambler Mr. Vincent and the misguided Clarence Hervey (who, taking a page from Rousseau's Emile and Richard Edgeworth's friend Thomas Day, has reared an innocent, passive, obedient Sophie to be his wife, but eventually finds her insufferably boring). Belinda is a textbook example of the new feminine Romantic ideology. Belinda, the rational woman, achieves a marriage of equality and compatibility with Clarence Hervey, one modeled on the egalitarian marriage of their middle-class friends the Percivals; and the Herveys' goodwill and tactful intervention finally succeed in reconciling the vivacious but tormented Lady Delacour with both her husband and her daughter.

In The Absentee (1812), Edgeworth makes clear that such egalitarian marriages