Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (review)

The argument of Helen Thompson's book is founded upon a deceptively simple insight: what influential critics such as Carol Pateman have presented as the "paradox characterizing [marriage as] an institution of political modernity in which ... naturally free citizens exercise conjugal power over naturally subject wives" is deliberately represented by the eighteenth-century domestic novel "as a contradiction" (5). In her elaboration of this insight, Thompson suggests that the practice of "ingenuous subjection" by characters such as Pamela or Evelina, which feminist criticism has read as, at worst, exposing the novel's acquiescence in gendered systems of political power, or at best, masking covert forms of agency, is in fact a form of agency in itself. This agency, first, ideally serves a "transitively modernizing function," transforming Locke's potentially authoritarian husband, exercising arbitrary power as the sign of his freedom, into an individual who freely acts out of virtuous desire—thereby enabling his full realization as the Lockean individual. Second, however, and more significantly for Thompson, the moments in these novels when the heroines fail to embody a perfectly willed compliance expose the contradiction inherent in the conjugal contract, wherein the modern individual subject's exercise of arbitrary authority over another individual is unjustifiably grounded solely in difference of sex.

Thompson's guide through these texts is Mary Astell's "feminist physiology," which counters Locke's assumption that "moralized liberty" is restricted to sons with an argument for its potential development in "a person who is not preemptively sexed" (37). Read in Astell's terms, the domestic novel's critique of contractarian theory depends on that theory's understanding of the self as essentially material and physiological (though not originally differentiated by sex) and therefore as able truly to subject itself only through an involuntary conjunction of desire (passion) and the will. While not claiming the direct influence of Astell's polemics, Thompson identifies points in each of these texts where a gap is opened between a daughter's or wife's supposed natural subjection and the fact that such compliance with an arbitrary or inferior male authority must be coerced, faked, self-consciously rationalized, or romanticized, in an act of violence against a free virtue activated by desire.

Thompson traces the two operations of women's ingenuous subjection—its modernizing influence on husbands and its failure in the face of a conjugal right based solely on sex—in conduct writings by Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood and in novels by Daniel Defoe (Roxana), Mary Davys (The Reformed Coquet), Samuel Richardson (Pamela), Eliza Haywood (Anti-Pamela , Betsy Thoughtless, and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy), Charlotte Lennox (The Female Quixote), and Frances Sheridan (Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph). In demonstrating that the articulation of modern subjectivity in the eighteenth century proceeded through fictions either of the desirous body's willing subjection or of its inability to subject itself, Thompson posits a continuous line through the domestic novel from the work of Astell to the "active virtue" insisted on by Mary Wollstonecraft for both male and female citizens. Thompson suggests, further, that this insistence points the way beyond what she terms an "impasse" in the methodology of feminist literary history: the assumption that agency consists only in overt expressions of an abstracted individual will, an assumption that, ironically, replicates the blind spot of contract theory by accepting the limitation of such agency to male individuals only.

In the course of her carefully nuanced readings of conduct writings and novels, Thompson invokes the expected political thinkers—Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith—as well as the natural philosophy of Descartes, Malebranche, Willis, and Cheyne. This distributed method of bringing contemporary theory to bear on the domestic novel contributes to the accessibility of the argument, while demonstrating the engagement of these novels in the political and physiological discourse of the time. At the same time, it occasionally risks creating an impression of...