Speaking Women, Writing Women: Identity and Voice in an Age of Revolution

Angela Keane. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Pp. 200. $54.95.

Deborah Kennedy. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002). Pp. 276. $49.50.

Linda Lang-Peralta, ed. Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999). Pp. 230. $21.95.

Patricia Howell Michaelson. Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Pp. 261. $55.00.

Ashley Tauchert. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine(Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Publishers, 2002). Pp.169. $52.00.

What happens when a woman speaks or writes? Can she speak only "as woman," or can she speak from other social positions? Can she speak, as men can, from the senate, the pulpit or the bar? And if so, does that flexibility in speech roles suggest a like flexibility in women's social roles? When a woman speaks for—or to—other women, what language must she use? In times of great social or political pressure, does women's ability to speak enlarge or constrict? And finally, do women speak differently in an "age of revolution" than in other times?

Each of the volumes under review begins from the same point: the nature of women's speaking and writing. The women these volumes examine share the further similarity of writing (or beginning to write) in the revolutionary decade of the 1790s. Thus, these studies also examine how the issues of gender and social roles are enacted in a discrete social, historical, and political space. Because Patricia Howell Michaelson's and Angela Keane's studies consider broader and more complex cultural issues, I give these studies a longer discussion than the other volumes which consider more narrowly delimited topics.

Michaelson's study offers an illuminating examination of the "relationship of reading and speech in the late eighteenth century," which attempts to answer the question "what happened to a reader when she performed a text?" (xiii). Throughout the first part of the book Michaelson grounds her discussion in the records of "real" women's linguistic practices, in order to contrast the stereotypes of women's language with actual speech. Michaelson's studyis richly nuanced, moving comfortably and informatively from private documents such as diaries and letters to contemporary educational materials, conduct books, elocution and acting manuals. Ultimately, her argument focuses on the oral qualities in written texts, particularly Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, an analysis of which forms the focus of her last chapter. Whereas other studies have tied the "'rise of the novel' firmly to print culture and to silent, solitary reading," Michaelson argues for the primacy of the oral.

Part one, "Performing Gender in Speech," examines the nature of women's language in the late eighteenth century, when middle-class ideologies intending to distinguish the bourgeoisie from the aristocracy placed increasing limits on women's speech. Contemporary language theorists and conduct-book writers conceptualized women as a "single, unified class of speakers," those who spoke solely as "women" (1). Men, however, were allowed the freedom of many potential speech roles: elocution primers trained boy-children to speak in public, suiting them to take their rightful places in "the senate, the pulpit, and the bar" (152). Moreover, all women's language shared the same failings. Women's language was simultaneously "natural"—in the lowest sense of being "uncivilized [ . . . ] disruptive, ungrammatical, and unedifying"—and "overly civilized," replete with "insincerity and formal politeness" (38). Repeatedly, women's language was opposed to the "masculine ideal of rational good sense" (38). Whereas the aristocratic mode allowed some women "to speak with authority and wit," the middle-class distinguished itself by an emphasis on women's modesty, as indicated by her silence. Drawing evidence from contemporary educational texts, literary works, and conduct books, Michaelson...