Sarah Fielding and the Salic Law of Wit

What daring female is't who thus complains,
In masculine Pindaric strains,
Of great Apollo's Salic law? ¹

The structure of satire would seem to make it an appropriate, though admittedly complex, form for women who have ready access to the doubled vision that satire requires. In a masculine-normative culture, where women know the culture intimately but have good reasons not to identify with it, educated women possess the insider's knowledge and outsider's perspective that is satire's special mark. It would surely be odd if such women did not satirize. Yet satire is conventionally a masculine genre, excluding women from the tradition by what this anonymous seventeenth-century critic calls "great Apollo's Salic law." Eighteenth-century female satirists challenge this gendered convention when they assert their own satiric authority, and, as the concept of gender changes in the eighteenth century, their strategies of challenge change as well.

Recent feminist critique of satire has focused on early figures such as Aphra Behn, Delarivière Manley, and Eliza Haywood, woman writers who claim satiric authority through the figure of the prostitute. ² However, Nancy Armstrong has argued that by the 1740s, new assumptions about the nature of women become associated with the interests of an emerging middle class and are advanced by the emerging genre of the novel. ³ Haywood's move from the explicit representation of female sexual desire in her early amatory texts to such morally charged novels as The History of Betsy Thoughtless (1751) signals this major cultural shift in gender constructions. ⁴

By the middle of the century, the notion that Ellen Pollack calls "the myth of passive womanhood" replaces the idea of the sexually active and politically involved Restoration woman. The passive woman is not a new idea, of course, but Pollack, like Armstrong, attributes the change in emphasis to the rise of the middle class: "the passive female virtues of obedience, modesty, and compassion, were, of course, valued in aristocratic circles earlier . . . but a nobility where social status depended on the secure prerogatives of birth rather than on the contingencies of property per se could afford to be more casual about the inculcation and fulfillment of those virtues than a 'rising' middle class influenced by Puritan religious and economic imperatives." ⁵ In her study of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, Pollack examines the way in which "woman" emphasizes meekness, modesty, and piety rather than the more active qualities associated with earlier notions of femininity. By midcentury, Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, and James Boswell condemn witty and sexual women writers as morally reprehensible and unreadable for that reason. The female satirist, if she is to be heard, must reconcile her wit with cultural demands for modesty and self-effacement.

In her first novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its sequel Volume the Last (1753), Sarah Fielding opens a new and uneasy space for a female critical voice. Choosing the medium of the novel for her satire, she allows certain strains within an overwhelmingly male satirical tradition to intersect with a newly developing sentimental discourse that is more amenable to women. If we look closely at the way in which one female author appropriates elements within the masculine conventions of satire, and then examine the restrictions on her voice that are an unavoidable by-product of that appropriation, we can begin to appreciate the enormity of the task faced by those mid-eighteenth-century women who see the world from a satirical perspective and wish to critique it from a position of virtue, constrained by, but not limited to, domesticity.

I

As the discourse of sentimentality begins to develop in the middle of the eighteenth century, some women enter the satiric tradition through the limited but real power that this discourse offers them. Satire and sentimentality, both unstable and complicated, intersect at a number of points but in none so obviously as...