"Belonging to No/body": Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter, and Rewriting Feminine Identity

"That is amazingly astonishing!" cried the baronet. "There is something wonderfully famous in belonging to nobody."¹

Sir Lionel Beacon's typically ironic comment on one of the two outcast daughters referred to in the title of Mary Robinson's The Natural Daughter (1799)—lady Susan Sherville's illegitimate child Frances (or Fanny, as she is affectionately called)—is a provocative statement about the eighteenth-century script of femininity. The baronet's seemingly whimsical declaration provides a useful, flexible trope that can help to explain the nuances of Robinson's feminist thinking as it unfolds over the course of the novel. For, as I will demonstrate, Martha Morley of The Natural Daughter can be described as both "belonging to nobody" (because she has escaped the possessive grasp of a husband who conceives of women as the property of men) and as "belonging to nobody" (because she has refused the confines of an identity defined primarily by the body).² Robinson presents a woman who doubly belongs to no/body as a legitimate, sustainable alternative to the suffocating scripts of illegitimacy and the fallen woman.

More broadly, The Natural Daughter problematizes late eighteenth-century notions of femininity. The novel suggests the need for women to escape the rigid confines of a culturally constructed and assigned identity—defined by passivity, obedience, and virginity/chastity, as well as the conventions of sensibility (a separate but not unrelated eighteenth-century script)—and to write out a different conception of female identity. In The Natural Daughter as well as in some of her other works, Robinson presents feminine self-authorship, especially in the form of literal authorship, as a strategy for challenging pervasive notions of femininity. For her, authorship is a means of escaping the body—of escaping the limitations of eighteenth-century conceptions of the female body by refusing the logic that locates a woman's identity primarily by way of her bodily virginity and her supposedly non-intellectual nature. Instead, Robinson seeks to ground feminine identity in women's authorial capacities.

"The eighteenth-century script of femininity" is a phrase used here to evoke two distinct but overlapping contexts. It suggests first what Eleanor Ty calls "those qualities of compliance, gentleness, sympathy, submission, modesty, reserve, [and] innocence" that were supposed to define femininity.³ The phrase also refers to Michael McKeon's "broad thesis about how and why the modern system of gender difference was established during the English Restoration and eighteenth century."⁴ McKeon argues that, as a result of the "separation of the sexual from the social" that occurred in this period, "sexual 'identity' became more rigidly defined, at the same time that socioeconomic 'identity,' freed of its traditional subservience to biological criteria of blood, became more variable. The emergent class system programmatically encourages mobility within its overarching structure of oppositional conflict; whereas the system of sexuality exists to enforce an innovative standard of differential stasis."⁵ Inscribed in the eighteenth-century script of femininity is the historically specific idea that sexuality implies a fundamentally different, natural, unalterable identity based on gender and rooted in the body—which, in the case of women, is construed as a lack or a shortcoming—a notion that the emerging middle-class culture was already in the process of rendering obsolete. McKeon's suggestion that the eighteenth century understood a woman's identity primarily in terms of her body also informs my representation of "the script of femininity." As Vivien Jones points out, authors of the period's conduct-book literature construct "a conventional moral narrative ... for public consumption," a narrative for and about women's public and private performances that emphasizes and celebrates non-bodily attributes.⁶ Moreover, whether with contempt or admiration, many cultural commentators of the period note "a general 'feminization' of culture."⁷ David Hume, for example, is one of many eighteenth-century writers...