The Columbia History of the British Novel

agreeable society, and their home the attractive centre of happiness.

While Edgeworth's heroines do not work outside the home and are not political leaders, as Wollstonecraft advocated, Edgeworth does share the latter's conviction that men as well as women must commit themselves to the domestic affections and the education of children as the bases of all personal and public happiness.

The dangers of excessive sensibility and of sexual passion for men as well as for women are spelled out in Helen Maria Williams's Julia (1790). A woman's answer both to Rousseau's La nouvelle Héloïse and to Goethe's Werther, this novel tracks the enormous emotional havoc wreaked by a young man who cannot restrain his passion. Williams's Julia is a young woman of refined sensitivity, poetic tastes, modest genius, and affectionate disposition, who prefers the 'satisfactions of home' to the frivolous joys of dissipation in London society. She is joined by her closest friend and cousin, Charlotte, a sweet-tempered girl who worships Julia. When Charlotte goes on a tour of Italy with her father, she meets and falls in love with Frederick Seymour, a young diplomat who combines a good understanding with an 'enthusiasm… — 337- awake to every generous impression' and a 'warmth of feeling.' Frederick is moved by Charlotte's modest simplicity and good-heartedness-she is so different from the vain and silly society women he has hitherto encountered-and soon proposes to her. She accepts with perfect joy.

But when the engaged lovers return to London, Frederick meets Julia, whose superior beauty attracts his eye and whose intelligence can understand the subtleties of his thought and wit in ways that Charlotte cannot. His passion is aroused; despite his pledge to Charlotte, he is overwhelmed with love for Julia. And even though in other circumstances, Julia might have returned his love, her intense affection for her cousin and her uncle effectively stifles her sexual response; as Williams tells us, her 'exquisite sensibility was corrected by the influence of reason.' Despite several encounters in which Frederick manifests his love and once even saves her life, Julia maintains her self-control. Frederick, honor-bound, marries Charlotte, but cannot hide his passion for Julia from prying eyes. During her first pregnancy, Charlotte finally discovers Frederick's love for Julia, and in her misery turns away from Julia, who suffers this loss of her earliest and best friend in painful silence. His constitution weakened by his emotional turmoil, Frederick dies of a winter cold on the night of his son's birth, in unrelieved misery caused by his hopeless and uncontrolled desire, which has destroyed not only his happiness but that of his wife and his beloved Julia.

As opposed to Goethe and the masculine Romantic Sturm und Drang school, Williams explores the damage done by a prohibited and irrational passion, the cruelty it wreaks on innocent bystanders, the ways in which it destroys a potentially happy family. When Julia sees a painting of 'Charlotte at Werther's Tomb,' which anticipates Frederick's death, she comments that Werther' is well written, but few will justify its principles.' In Julia, passion destroys Frederick. But Williams, deploring the gender restrictions in England, insists that such erotic desire is even more dangerous for women since they cannot distract themselves with the routines of business or the dissipations of pleasure as men do, but must bear their sufferings in a silent conflict for which 'life is frequently the atonement.'

As did Wollstonecraft and Edgeworth, Williams firmly endorsed the enduring domestic affections over unlicensed sexual passion as the basis of true love and benevolence. 'Our affections are not constantly active, they are called forth by circumstances; and what can awaken them so forcibly, as the renewal of those domestic endearments which -338- constitute the charm of our existence?' Julia's lifelong affection for her father, uncle, and cousin lead to the numerous acts of charity she eagerly performs for those in need-an old soldier, hungry peasants, a young child-even wounded animals. That attachment is the foundation of the happy family unit she and Charlotte eventually construct after Frederick's death, which includes Charlotte's father and son as well as the two women. Williams clearly implies that heterosexual passion does not contribute to domestic love: she firmly excludes it from her happy family.

From The Advantages of Education, or, The History of Maria Williams (1793) by 'Prudentia Homespun' (Jane West) through Mary Brunton's Self-Control (1810), Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814), and Lady Blessington's The Governess (1839), and countless others, Romantic women novelists advocated rational rather than erotic love. Fully aware of the prevailing sexual double standard, these women writers knew that sexual desire too often left their female friends and heroines seduced, abandoned, and pregnant-with only prostitution-the career of the 'fallen woman'-available to them. Several writers directly challenged the injustice of this double standard, none more powerfully than Mary Hays in A Victim of Prejudice (1799) or Amelia Opie in her tale 'The Father and Daughter' (1801), but all warned young women against trusting their passions over their judgment.

The education of women, rational love, egalitarian marriages, an ethic of care-these are the cornerstones of the feminine Romantic ideology laid out in the leading women's novels of the Romantic era. Jane Porter, for instance, made them the basis of her historical fictions. Although her protagonists, Thaddeus in Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and William Wallace in The Scottish Chiefs (1810), are men, they consistently regard the values of the domestic affections and loyalty to the family and its ideals as their highest commitments. She thus prepared the way for Walter Scott's commitment to domesticity and a feminine Romantic ideology in his historical fiction.

While most of the women novelists of the Romantic period endorsed these values overtly, a few powerful writers focused instead on the horrors of their absence or violation. The leading writers of the female Gothic tradition displayed the violence that results, especially to women, when a society fails to sustain gender equality and an ethic of care. The novels of Ann Radcliffe, Clara Dacre Byrne, Regina Maria -339- Regina Maria (The Children of the Abbey, 1796), and, most powerfully, Mary Shelley expose the dark underside of the doctrine of the separate spheres, of the sexual division of labor, and of patriarchal economic systems, both pre- and postindustrial. The father, whether as patriarch or priest, is here unmasked as the author of violence against women, the perpetrator of sadistic tortures and even incest, and thus as the violator of the very bonds of affection and responsibility that constitute the family-politic. His crimes almost always occur amid Alpine landscapes, the loci of the sublime that Edmund Burke had identified with the terrifying revelation of God's divine power. By moving the exercise of sublime power out of nature and into the household, this female Romantic Gothic tradition domesticates the terror of the sublime as the experience of paternal transgression-represented as father-daughter incest-that is everywhere most monstrous and most ordinary.

The novels of Ann Radcliffe exemplify this paradigm. A devotee of Salvator Rosa, the acknowledged master of sublime landscape painting, she repeatedly invokes his images to create the settings for her novels, employing them to a twofold purpose. On the one hand, Radcliffe uses Rosa's Alpine landscapes of dark nights, mountainous peaks and chasms, raging torrents, and fierce storms to establish an environment in which human cruelty and physical violence can flourish. Her sublime landscapes are characteristically peopled by banditti, fierce gypsies, hired assassins, and pirates. Traveling peacefully at night along the road to Rousillon in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Emily St. Aubert and her father must skirt a blazing fire around which a predatory group of gypsies are dancing. Similarly, Count de Villefort and his daughter Blanche, seeking respite from a raging midnight storm among the French Alps, find themselves the prisoners of a gang of thieves, assassins and pirates. And in The Italian (1797), Vivaldi and his servant Paulo, looking for Ellena through the mountainous regions of the Puglia, find themselves 'among scenes, which seemed abandoned by civilized society to the banditti who haunted their recesses.'

Radcliffe's purpose, however, is not to reinscribe Burke's and Rosa's sublime landscapes as settings in which one fears for one's life at the hands of both natural and human forces. Instead, as Kate Ferguson Ellis has suggested, Radcliffe believes that sublime horror originates not in nature but only in men. She calculatedly moves the terror of the sublime from the outside into the home, that theoretical haven of virtue and safety for otherwise «unprotected» women. In The Mysteries of -340- Udolpho, banditti not only rove among the savage Alps but actually inhabit the homes of the female characters.

Montoni, for example, is the husband of Emily St. Aubert's aunt and is Emily's legal guardian, but he is also the leader of a fierce band of condottieri, paid mercenaries who function as little more than bandits and murderers. Montoni's status as one of the banditti is established by his willingness to protect Orsini, a confessed assassin, and by the persistent rumor that he has murdered his cousin, Signora Laurentini, in order to inherit the Castle of Udolpho. Within the castle itself, Montoni reenacts the role of the legendary Bluebeard, tormenting his wife, imprisoning her when she is ill, and refusing her medicine and care until he can sneeringly rejoice at her early death.