Habits of Empire and Domination in Eliza Fenwick's Secresy

Habits of Empire and Domination in Eliza Fenwick's Secresy Malinda Snow Eliza Fenwick's novel Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795) displays an unusual collocation of Gothic devices and a Jacobin purposefulness, set forth in an epistolary format. Readers have noted that the novel describes female oppression, also noting Fenwick 's interest in children's education and her association with Mary Wollstonecraft.1 Those who examine specific characters in the novel remark primarily upon Sibella Valmont as someone removed from social convention, a child of nature, a product of her sensibility.2 Readers have not, however, examined Fenwick's references to In1 Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock was largely inaccessible to modern readers until the publication of the Pandora edition (London, 1989), with introduction byJanet Todd, followed by the Broadview Press edition, ed. Isobel Grundy (Peterborough, Ont., 1994; 1998). For biographical information, seeJanet Todd, "Eliza Fenwick," in British Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide (New York: Continuum, 1989), pp. 241-42. Further information may be found in Grundy's introduction to her edition. Eliza Fenwick and her husband John, a sometime translator and journalist, were part of the publisherJoseph Johnson's group of radical writers and were well enough acquainted with the Godwins that Eliza attended MaryWollstonecraft Godwin upon her death in 1797 (Todd, " Eliza Fenwick," p. 242). Terry Castle's review of the Grundy edition, "Sublimely Bad," London Review ofBooL·, 23 February 1995, pp. 18-19, with the subsequent debate over the novel's merits, was the first extensive modern critical comment on Fenwick's work. Several full-length articles or chapters have since then appeared, promising more inclusion ofthis novel in discussions ofprose fiction of the 1790s. See Charlene E. Bunnell, "Breaking the Tie That Binds: Parents and Children in Romantic Fiction," Family Matters in the British and American Novel, ed. Andrea O'Reilly et al. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), pp. 31-53;Julia M. Wright, "? Am 111 Fitted': Conflicts of Genre in Eliza Fenwick's Secresy," Romanticism , History, and the Possibilities ofGenre: Re-formingLiterature 1 789—1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 149-75; and Sarah Emsley, "Radical Marriage," Eighteenlh-Cenlury Fiction 11:4 (1999), 477-98. 2 Katherine M. Rogers calls Sibella "a female Noble Savage." Feminism in Eighteenth-Century EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Number 2,January 2002 160EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION dia and the English exploitation of Indian wealth. Isobel Grundy actually sets aside the references to India as secondary, arguing that the novel's chief concern lies with condemning "the parental generation."3 A reader examining the parental or familial domination of Sibella, nevertheless, will find the details relating to India pertinent to the theme offemale oppression. Caroline Ashburn, the principal epistolary narrator in Secresy, looks with alarm upon the treatment of her friend Sibella. Likewise, Caroline regards with discomfort and distrust her own family's sojourn in India, where her parents grew wealthy. Thus it is Caroline's analytic gaze that ties the two circumstances together and prompts the reader to find similarities between familial and imperial behaviour. In considering the oppression of Sibella and of India, Caroline is discomforted by her suspicions that innocent victims have suffered while selfish predators have stolen their freedom and their resources. What I shall argue is that the novel is not principally about Sibella as female rebel or as "natural" heroine, or about Caroline, or overbearing parents, but that it concerns itself more generally with exploitation and oppression , and with the moral discernment required to detect such inhumanity. Moreover, the references to India, without constituting a developed plot in the novel, push us to engage our own moral discernment and to reflect on the relationship between public and private governance. Students of later eighteenth-century English society will find frequent mention ofIndia and extensive debate about appropriate economic and public policy for that country, along with condemnation of the figure called the "nabob"—the man who goes out to India as a youth, often employed by the East India Company as a "factor," gets rich, then returns to England with his wealth. Among Secresy's England (Urbana...