Into the Public: The Sexual Heroine in Eliza Fenwick's Secresy and Mary Robinson's The Natural Daughter

Into the Public: The Sexual Heroine in Eliza Fenwick's Secresy and Mary Robinson's The NaturalDaughter Anne Close Eliza Fenwick's Secresy; or the Ruin on the Rock (1795) and Mary Robinson's The NaturalDaughter, with Portraits ofthe Leadenhead Family (1799) present sexually informed heroines who challenge familial and cultural mandates of gendered behaviour that require innocence as the emblem of virtue. According to Roxanne Eberle, most novels of this period feature a heroine who "'purchases' the status of wife with her well maintained chastity and the promise to obey a complex set of behavioral rules."1 Secresy's Sibella and The Natural Daughter's Martha, however, develop a critical subjectivity which allows them to reject commonplaces that conflate sexual and moral innocence and identify hypocrisy in those who do. Both women are tested by nefarious fathers and sexual partners whose restrictive codes offeminine deportment demand that they act, as Secresy puts it, like "docile and grateful creature[s]."2 By foregrounding each heroine's rational sincerity—and providing each woman with a female friend for support—Secresy and The Natural Daughter arm 1 Roxanne Eberle, Chastity and Transgression in Women's Writing, 1 792-1897: Interrupting the Harlot's Progress (NewYork: Palgrave, 2002), 3. 2 Eliza Fenwick, Secresy; or theRuin on theRock, ed. Isobel Grundy (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998), 42. References are to diis edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 17, Number 1, October 2004 36 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Sibella and Martha with resources that may potentially rescue them from their families' narrow views of female sexuality and gendered behaviour: Sibella tries to convince her uncle Mr Valmont to allow her to marry his illegitimate son Clement, and Martha endeavours to support herself financially and care for a young ward after her husband accuses her ofinfidelity and expels her from their home. Fenwick and Robinson set out to establish the cultural legitimacy of the sexually experienced woman. But even though Sibella and Martha both challenge normative standards offemale sexual behaviour, they do not meet the same fate. Isobel Grundy's introduction to her edition of Secresy posits that it "remains arguably a reformist rather than a revolutionary text" because Sibella fails to affect positive change and dies heartbroken at the end ofthe novel in spite ofher close relationship with the liberated Caroline (28). I would argue that The Natural Daughter, published four years after Secresy by Fenwick's good friend Robinson, builds upon the earlier novel and transforms it from reformist to revolutionary by rewriting its principal plot and expanding its private family tragedy into the public sphere. Moving from the closed structure of the epistolary novel into a third-person narrative, Robinson successfully positions Martha so that she may interact with large numbers of people and institutions and have the possibility of effecting positive personal change. This essay explores how TheNaturalDaughterrevîntes Secresy's central projectbyplacingits isolated family drama in a broad public context and enabling its heroine to move beyond the constraints ofherfamily, professionalize as awriter, and develop a sense ofintellectual and sexual independence that resists her family's limiting gender ideology. What distinguishes these texts from other protofeminist novels of the period (by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and others) is their radical endings— endings depictingpowerful bondsbetweenwomen thatsupersede relationshipswith parents andsiblings and eclipse the ambiguous promise of romantic love. Fenwick, Robinson, and Textual Transgression in the 1790s In London in the 1790s, Fenwick and Robinson were friends who moved in the same circles. They were acquainted through Mary Wollstonecraft, whose protofeminist philosophy heavily influenced both women's work. They also both turned to novels, at least in part, as a means to earn an income (Fenwick's husbandJohn was at that INTO THE PUBLIC37 time an unreliable source ofincome, and Robinson's failure to collect the Prince ofWales's promised annuity after their affair ended fuelled her career as a professional writer).3 Grundy's statement about Fenwick also holds true for Robinson: "it is clear ... she saw herselfas a radical who aimed at lasting literary fame" (7). Both women were intimate with established radicals like Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and William Godwin; Fenwick was associated, through John, with the London Corresponding Society; Robinson's novel Walsingham: or...