The Political Novel and the Seduction Plot: Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives

The Political Novel and the Seduction Plot: Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives Katherine Binhammer Spurred by the July 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution, critics of English literature have turned in large numbers to the study of fiction from the 1790s.1 The genealogy of the recent critical attention to 1790s fiction can be traced, in part, to our current 1990s interest in the way political meaning functions in the literary text. The impact of new historicism and cultural studies on literary criticism has led scholars to reconsider the interconnection between literature and politics, and the 1790s provide fertile ground for this work. The explicitly feminist novels ofMary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Charlotte Smith, for example, seem pregnant with material for those of us engaged in studying the dissemination of political and gender ideologies through literature.2 Why is it, then, that 1 Recent essay collections dedicated to issues of representation in the 1790s include Reflections on Revolution: Images ofRomanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 1993); Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991); Revolution and English Romanticism, ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Seiden (New York: StMartin's Press, 1990); The French Revolution andBritish Culture, ed. Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and The Novels ofthe 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (forthcoming). 2 For a sampling of this recent feminist criticism see Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women , Politics and the Fiction ofLetters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1995); Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, Revolution: 1790-1827 (Oxford: ClarenEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 2, January 1999 206 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Thomas Holcroft's feminist novel, Anna St. Ives (1792), has been marginalized by some and wholly ignored by other critics participating in the revisioning of 1790s fiction?3 Is it because the women writers from this period, in their combination of the textual and the personal, are too seductive to resist? Is it the problematic issue of men in feminism that keeps critics away? Or is the overtdidacticism ofHolcroft's novel responsible for its lack of popularity? In this essay, I will advance the case for the importance ofAnna St. Ives to a feminist literary history of the novel at the end of the eighteenth century. My argument is not grounded in a qualitativejudgment ofthe text's canonical greatness; rather, I am suggesting thatAnna St. Ives, as arguably the first Jacobin novel, can teach us a lot about how politics and the novel became inextricably linked through the seduction plot in the revolutionary decade.4 In herexcellentbookEquivocalBeings: Politics, Gender, andSentimentality in the 1 790s (1995), Claudia Johnson analyses the profound interplay between sentimental fiction and political debates in the decade. She argues that sentimental discourse merged with the language of politics—for example, in Burke's Reflections—such that the language of the heart and the narratives of sentimental fiction were invested with either a revolutionary or counter-revolutionary meaning. The frequent analogies appearing both in the fiction and the political tracts which linked the state of the nation to the state of the family explicitly underscore the imbrication of politics and sentimental affective relations.5 As Johnson succinctly points out, "During the 1790s ... sentimentality is politics made intimate."6 Sentimental fiction played out the revolutionary debates in the arena of the don Press, 1993); Eleanor Ty, The Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); and Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form ofthe British Novel, 1790-1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 3 Anna St. Ives is included in the major early studies of the 1790s political novel—for example, Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) and Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel: 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). But few contemporary critics, particularly feminist critics, show any interest in, or familiarity with, the text. 4 In her classic study, The Popular Novel in England (London: Constable, 1932), J.M.S. Tompkins designates Anna St. Ives "the first full-blown...