The Rise and Fall of the Eighteenth Century's Authentic Feminine Voice

The Rise and Fall of the Eighteenth Century's Authentic Feminine Voice Rhonda Batchelor In 1818, after British society had had ample time to reflect on the social implications of France's political revolution, Mary Wollstonecrafi Shelley published Frankenstein. Within this text, we can detect suggestions of the British patriarchy's effort to arrest what was increasingly feared as a free fall into the potential anarchy believed to be at the heart of the feminized consciousness. Whether Shelley intended it or not, Frankenstein offers formal and thematic echoes of the revolutionary philosophy that made cultural room, of an ever-evolving shape and nature, for the fictional interventions in political and social realms by women such as Mary Wollstonecraft in The Wrongs ofWoman; or, Maria (1798); Ann Radcliffe in The Italian (1797); and Jane Porter in The Scottish Chiefs (1808). In order to discuss the presence of this changing interaction among gender, politics, and narrative space in Frankenstein, I must first establish the sequence in which these changes occurred. Because The Wrongs of Woman, The Italian, and The Scottish Chiefs all have female authors and all reflect particular social perspectives of woman at different stages in the cultural revolution, successively indexing each stage to Shelley's novel will provide a literary guide by which the masculine sublation of feminized subjectivity in Frankenstein may be traced. Once this course EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 4, July 1994 348 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION has been traced, I will consider the manner in which the four authors' narrative strategies (given authority by the novelistic genres they refer to in varying degrees—the sentimental, the Gothic, and the historical) contribute to a fictionalized revelation of a real social process. By the end of this examination, we will see how the taking up and taking over of the feminized consciousness by eighteenth-century men eventually left nineteenth-century women with a "self that was still regarded as "authentically" feminine but possessed little social value or presence. This "self expressed itself meaningfully and morally only through the silence and stillness of a male-dependent domestic life. The feminine subjectivity that Mary Wollstonecraft represents in The Wrongs ofWoman is from the beginning of the novel overtly and radically political. Maria's memoirs to her daughter reveal "The circumstances which, during [her] childhood, occurred to fashion [her] mind."1 As Wollstonecraft 's background in Enlightenment and sentimental philosophies insists it must be, Maria's subjectivity is politicized the moment she becomes aware of herself as an individual whose identity is arbitrated by her subordinate position in the network of relationships that constitutes her social existence. As "a mere child," Maria was forced into "continual restraint in the most trivial matters; [and] unconditional submission to orders which ... [she] soon discovered to be unreasonable, because inconsistent and contradictory" (p. 125). She realizes that this constrained identity is the artificial creation of social existence when she contrasts "the unnatural restraint of [her family's] fire-side" to the "volatized humours " enjoyed in the natural world, a "paradise" of "open air and freedom" (p. 126). Maria's liberally educated uncle teaches her to trust and act upon these subjective perceptions of her authentic, naturally expressed self under attack by a tyrannical social other: "He inculcated, with great warmth, self-respect, and a lofty consciousness of acting right, independent of the censure or applause of the world; nay, he almost taught me to brave, and even despise its censure, when convinced of the rectitude ofmy own intentions!" (p. 128). It was an education that empowered young Maria to ignore the merely social determinations of individual worth, and to undertake a charitable "project of usefulness" that aids a 1 Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 126. References are to this edition. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE FEMININE VOICE 349 Frontispiece portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) from William Godwin, Memoirs ofthe Author ofa Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnston, 1798). Engraved by James Heath (1757-1834) after a design by John Opie (1761-1807). Reproduced by permission of McMaster University Library. 350 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) at...