Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French Revolution (review)

REVIEWS335 Lisa Wood. Modes ofDiscipline: Women, Conservatism, and theNovel after the French Revolution. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003. 189pp. US$39.50. ISBN 0-8387-5527-5. LisaWood's Modes ofDüciplineis a welcome addition to the growing number of critical books that have appeared in die last ten years on British novels after die French Revolution. These works include Chris Jones's Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (1993), Gary Kelly's Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827 (1993), my own Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists ofthe 1790s (1993) and Empowering theFeminine: TheNarratives ofMary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 (1998), Nicola Watson's Revolution and theForm oftheBritishNove1 1 790-1825 (1994), ClaudiaJohnson's Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995), Paul Keen's The Crisis ofLiterature in the 1 790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (1999), Angela Keane's Women Writers and the Englhh Nation in the 1790s (2000), and M.O. Grenby's TheAnti-Jacobin Novel: Brituh Conservatism and the French Revolution (2001). Of these books, the only ones that focus exclusively on conservative and antiJacobin novels are byWood and Grenby, as most of the other works examine revolutionary, or at least not overdy conservative, writers in the "war of ideas" between radicals and reactionaries. These studies ofBritish conservatism are important to our understanding of the period. Although names such as William Godwin and MaryWollstonecraft have become more familiar to us as post-revolutionary writers, as Grenby notes, "the reality was that antijacobin novels outnumberedJacobin fictions and oudasted them too" (p. 2). Grenby considers the fifty or so overtly conservative novels of the period as socio-historical documents, looking at diem as "a single aggregate text" that owed their existence "to a perceived desire amongst the public for such works" (p. 11). He is not interested in reading diese novels as individual texts, but rather as a group ofworks that display a coherent strategy. They share three objectives: to show the horrors ofthe French Revolution, to caricature the "new philosophy" of the radicals, and to expose Jacobinism as a threat to hierarchy, status, and wealth (pp. 11-12). Lisa Wood offers less breadth but more literary analysis and close reading of die works. She is informed by feminist literary history and approaches the novels through socio-cultural and genre theories. Wood discusses such elements as narrative strategies, didacticism, Evangelicalism, and the use of history in novels by Jane West, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, andJane Porter. Wood argues that the period "spanning die years from 1793 to 1815 was perhaps the most tolerant ofovert didacticism in the history ofBritish fiction" (p. 12). Didacticism was important because it "provided the means forwomen to conceive ofthemselves as writers, die rationale for the act ofwriting, and die basic form of the text produced" (p. 12). Her thesis is not dazzling or highly original, but perceptive and thoughtful observations appear throughout the 336 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION16:2 book. Though a number of die writers expressed their discomfort with the novel form and the "pernicious" effects of reading on young ladies, these didactic writers took up their pens in an effort to "control the spread of revolutionary ideas in Britain" and to counter the positions ofsuch women as Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Helen Maria Williams (p. 13). Realizing that the emphasis of didacticism on a clear and single message runs counter to poststructuralist criticism and also Romanticism's valorization ofimagination and individualism, Wood is nevertheless unapologetic about her writers' production and achievements, dieir promotion of "political, social, religious, and literary conformity," and strong belief in "Christian virtues such as temperance, modesty, and submission over imagination and emotion" (p. 20). Though die novel plots that she explores tend to be predictable and even tedious, Wood's analysis is nuanced, discerning, and intelligent. In particular, I found her discussion of the techniques used by didactic novelists to be insightful and informative. According to Wood, these writers used certain strategies to establish authorial control, including "embedded statements, such as, 'she knew dien,' or 'she finally understood' which implicidy support the text's moral basis," a "narratorial ideological supersystem that puts in their...