Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

108 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 To construct a picture of "Georgian libertinism" almost entirely out of Fielding's works and twentieth-century criticism of them seems to me profoundly misguided methodology. Robert D. Hume Pennsylvania State University Brian McCrea. Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998. 242pp. US$39.50. ISBN 0-87413-656-3. Brian McCrea's readings of a set of now-canonical eighteenth-century novels constitute part of a useful collégial dialogue with recent feminist critics. After opening with consideration of Don Quixote and Paradise Lost, McCrea looks at Moll Flanders, Roxana, The Female Quixote, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Clarissa, Evelina, and A Simple Story, frequently disagreeing, politely, with Patricia Meyer Spacks, Margaret Anne Doody, Terry Castle, and Eleanor Ty, among others. He is concerned that feminist readings have unduly totalized "patriarchy" and he seeks to present a more historicized understanding of the vagaries of patriarchy in the eighteenth century, particularly as they affected the novel. He is struck by the fact that many of the characters who seem to represent patriarchal power in novels have troubles and worries of their own that make them weak and incapable of exerting power or unwilling to do so. Having read recent social history about the "demographic crisis" in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries , he is also struck by the many novelistic plots featuring families in which there is no son to inherit father's estate. In contrast to feminist critics who have stressed patriarchal power as oppressive to daughters (and wives), McCrea finds the impetus of the eighteenth-century novel in "the absence rather than the presence of patriarchal authority" (p. 18). Patriarchs lacking biological sons are tempted to experiment with fictive filiations, as in Burney's Cecilia, where Cecilia Beverley 's uncle famously writes a will making her his heiress, but requiring any future husband who wishes to enjoy her inheritance to take the Beverley name. McCrea has a thorough familiarity with the canonical novels and offers more detailed close reading than many recent critics; his attention to male characters he thinks feminist critics have tended to overlook is valuable, especially his attention to Lord M. in Clarissa, Sir John Belmont in Evelina, and Dorriforth in A Simple Story. For instance, he points out that despite Evelina's obeisance to Sir John in the recognition scene, Sir John is not able to derivejoy from the discovery of his child or even to endure her presence, being "wounded rather than healed by events" (p. 150) and anxious to secure the marriage and acceptance of his "fictive daughter," Polly Green. Evelina McCrea reads as recognizing both biological and fictive kinship, as Evelina honours both her foster-father, Mr Villars, and her biological REVIEWS 109 father, Sir John, and recognizes her fictive sister, Polly. A Simple Story, in contrast, McCrea sees as dedicated to revealing "the cost ofthose 'pious fictions' ofkinship practiced by the eighteenth-century elite" (p. 17 1), as Dorriforth becomes a victim when he has to give up his priestly vocation and his name in order to become Lord Elmwood. Similarly, in The Female Quixote, McCrea looks closely at Glanville to argue that in his "peculiar status ... Lennox complicates any attempt to place a patriarch at the novel's center" (p. 155). He rightly emphasizes Glanville's willingness to enter (partially) into Arabella's "sign system" and Glanville's reservations about older patriarchal duelling codes, generally finding the marriage of Arabella and Glanville more euphoric than recent feminist critics have. Although generally interested in the instability of signs, McCrea here I think misses the richness and subtlety of Lennox's comedy, which poignantly shows us moment after moment when Glanville's language of realistic "common sense" misses truths for which Arabella's romance language has words. For example, when Arabella speaks to the "prostitute" at Vauxhall, a young girl who is being sadistically terrorizedby a naval officer and scoffed at by the crowd, only Arabella can see her fear, her "Woe," and that she is, indeed, an "Unfortunate." That in her marriage to Glanville Arabella will be able to "'use...