The English Novel in History, 1700-1780 (review)

The English Novel in History, 1700-1780. By John Richetti. London: Routledge, 1999. x + 290 pp.

The history of the British novel continues to attract more than its fair share of scholarly attention. From the pioneering studies of Ian Watt and B. G. MacCarthy; through the now familiar but still indispensable works by Dale Spender, Nancy Armstrong, Janet Todd, Lennard Davis, and Michael McKeon; to the more recent treatments by Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, and William Warner, scholars delight in using the development of the novel as an opportunity to rethink the changing cultural life of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. A case in point is John Richetti. The English Novel in History, 1700-1780 is every bit what we would expect from a well-known scholar with more than thirty years in the field: richly detailed, broadly conceived, and consistently rewarding.

Richetti's book, part of the Novel in History series edited by Gillian Beer, begins with the obligatory references to Watt and Habermas and changing notions of "philosophic realism" and the "public sphere." Richetti's claim, neither groundbreaking nor commonplace, is that "eighteenth- century novels render a bargaining for identity and authority which is at the heart of the profound changes in consciousness taking place in those years"; he sets out to "examine how these various narrative transformations are responses to social change and, to some extent, agents of that change or influences upon it" (15). The narrative transformation of greatest concern in the first hundred pages is from the amatory fiction of Behn, Manley, and Haywood to the overtly didactic novels of Richardson and Fielding. In his first full-length chapter Richetti traces the emergence of British amatory fiction out of Continental romance and French scandal fiction. We are introduced to Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87), Manley's New Atalantis (1709), and Haywood's Love in Excess (1719) and Rash Resolve (1724). Richetti carefully distinguishes the strategies by which each author represents sexual passion and also notes the different relationships portrayed between individual desire and the public sphere. At his best, Richetti is surprisingly sensitive to the psychopolitical implications of narrative strategy:

Love-at-first-sight passages are the key event in Haywood's novels, an electrified version of the more gradual, transactional attachments that lovers experience in Behn's and Manley's fiction. Seduction becomes largely irrelevant or unnecessary in Haywood's imaginative universe, and in place of the manipulative discourse that lovers exchange as one of them at least jockeys for advantage, we have often enough a wordless encounter in which lovers are jolted by a current of high-voltage attraction and simultaneous vibration. Such encounters challenge rationalized notions of personality and moral agency, presuming a depth of absolutely compelling sexual desire and a unique authenticity as a sort of emotional personal sublime in which every reader is invited to participate vicariously and uncritically. (43)

As insightful as his readings are, Richetti feels compelled to deride the very fiction he ostensibly seeks to understand. While Behn occasionally moves past the self-enclosed rhetoric of "amatory vaporizing" out "into the public world of human contact and progressive interaction" (24), her characters generally "cannot be called reflective; they take their world of sexual opportunity for granted, and she does not allow them to be troubled in the extraordinary privileges by thinking of those complicated socioeconomic layers that support their hedonistic movements. They dwell, we may say, in an enclave that shields them from knowledge of a supporting totality" (27).

Similarly ineffectual, Manley's New Atalantis is a "crude political polemic," a "declamatory melodrama" whose "steamy and sometimes wickedly funny pages" seem at odds with the political ends they purportedly serve (30-33). Whereas Behn and Manley at least claim a political purpose, Haywood remains sequestered in autoerotic revelry. Her novels "render an intense and irresistibly infectious sexual passion" (39), but her voice is "entirely and deliberately formulaic, a breathless...