Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Play of Fiction: Novels and the Theater, Haywood to Austen (review)

Emily Hodgson Anderson's interesting but ultimately frustrating book analyses work by five women writers, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, and, briefly, Jane Austen. All are best known as novelists, but they also wrote plays, and their novels incorporate, and are shaped by, tropes of theatricality. They "depict characters who perform their feelings" (7), thereby challenging eighteenth-century, and our, assumptions about subjectivity. The stage offered a "model of identity that assumed the possibility of a gap ... between external appearance and internal essence" (9), and the authors appropriate this model in their prose fiction. In different ways, they "privilege emotion as the defining, consistent component of identity": for Haywood the key emotion is love; for Burney suffering; Inchbald "treats feelings much more comprehensively"; and Edgeworth, for whom drama is primarily a tool of her lifelong concern for education, "associates thinking and feeling" (10, 11). Hodgson Anderson meticulously and suggestively shows how key themes and techniques of the plays are continued in the prose fiction. Moreover, she considers not only the literary work of these writers, but also the work of self-construction, emphasizing how the obstacles they face as women writers are represented through theatrical metaphors. For an eighteenth-century woman, writing, and even claiming a self, become "theatrical" acts (12). These assumptions are substantiated in some subtle and suggestive close reading.

Today's recession-panicked scholarly publishers favour short books, and Hodgson Anderson's (only 139 pages exclusive of acknowledgments and notes) has the strengths and weaknesses that this truncated format imposes. It is concise, focused, and properly selective; but at the same time I would have liked to see some links developed more, or at least made more explicit, and at points more time needs to be spent on signposting the argument and explaining key terms. As well, surprising gaps remain: Aphra Behn, an obvious candidate for consideration as an author of both fiction and drama, is relegated to a few brief mentions. (Admittedly, she is not an author of the eighteenth century, technically considered; but neither is Jane Austen, who dominates the epilogue.)

More seriously, the pressure to be concise generates abstractions and generalizations when the reader would sometimes like something more weightily specific. It can also sometimes leave the reader wishing for clearer development of some of the identified paradoxes. Is Haywood's Fantomina raped by Beauplaisir? She forms a "Stratagem" to enable her to be "sweetly forced," a stratagem that might be as much about her "desire for expression" (23) as her desire for sex, but is being forced a mode of expression? When Fantomina is exposed by going into labour in public at a ball, in what sense is what betrays her not "the body per se" (33)? The reader is mobilized to take part in the debate, to fill in those parts of the argument that seem to be missing or vestigial.

In addition, the argument sometimes has odd holes in it. The enlightening section on Burney's Cecilia (1782), for example, focuses on "what happens to women who are silenced," and argues that "Burney's fascination with the spectacle of the insensible female body" manifests itself in scenes of the performance of "collapse and insensibility" (56, 57) that are central to the novel. This is demonstrated entirely through the figure of Albany's nameless fiancée, dead long before the novel opens, whose story is read in detail as symptomatic of what happens to women who internalize injunctions to be silent, proper, decorous. Burney's life-writings show numerous examples of performances of femininity so exaggeratedly decorous that one suspects them of being acts of rebellion, and so this reading is convincing. But it is strange to read this marginal figure but not the central episodes in which Cecilia herself also collapses into insensibility. Cecilia is, after all, the heroine, and Hodgson...