Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women (review)

REVIEWS 149 energy and its interest, however, derive from what I might call—intending my adjective to carry only positive implications—its author's quirky mind. The concluding sentences of Gallagher's introduction constitute an engaging textual moment and perhaps an implicit acknowledgment of quirkiness. "I invite the reader to enjoy these constructions, savor their ironies, analyze their mechanisms, and discern their complex exigencies; I do not recommend believing in them as universal truths. 'Caveat emptor' is the motto of this study" (p. xxiv). At the book's end, its author stresses the existence of alternative interpretative possibilities, suggesting that different inclusions or exclusions would have implied different stories. Individual critics, as these disarming admissions hint, cumulatively create the rationalizing categories of literary history, as individual poets, playwrights, and novelists collectively accumulate the substance of that history. In the play of Catherine Gallagher's reflective, engaged, and engaging mind as it adumbrates a new history of the novel and ponders the specific nature of cultural embeddedness, a reader can indeed take pleasure—and find, if not universal truth, at least much substance for further thought. Patricia Meyer Spacks University of Virginia Catherine Craft-Fairchild. Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. US$30.00 (cloth); US$14.95 (paper), ? + 190 pp. ISBN 0-271-00919-5. Catherine Craft-Fairchild's polemical point of departure is Terry Castle's Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (1986). Castle, she notes, largely "celebrates eighteenth-century masquerade as 'a World Upside-Down' and insists that 'the masquerade threatens patriarchal structures'" (p. 2). For Craft-Fairchild, this emphasis is at best one-sided and misleading. Castle "neglects to stress that, to the extent that masquerade assemblies were tolerated, they had to conform in some ways to the dominant culture" (p. 2). Thus, many of Castle's "readings both of historical detail and of fiction" (p. 2) should be reassessed. Craft-Fairchild's own focus, however, is not on "historical detail." She reconceptualizes Castle's claims in relation to feminist theory by interpreting texts that her book jacket tells us were authored by "a judiciously selected group of eighteenth-century women writers." Masquerade and Gender's critical method is judiciously selective. It gives a concentrated statement of feminist claims that seems likely to serve as a reference point in much further discussion. But Craft-Fairchild's method raises as many doubts as the position it challenges. Masquerade and Gender aims "to avoid oversimplifications" (p. 6) in examining "complex attitudes" (p. 174) in women's writing—attitudes that are "more complex and ambiguous" (p. 53) than Castle suggests. Indeed, Craft-Fairchild's repeated reference to "problems" (pp. 34, 83, 112) and to what is "problematic" (pp. 6, 66, 120, 171) unmistakably points to the complexity of the female dilemma. However, through her avowedly ahistorical use of feminist theory, a sweeping simplification does organize the evidence and argument in this study. Masquerade and Gender is feminist interpretation that pauses at the crossroads of theory and history—and chooses theory. 150 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 The theory that shapes this study is mainly psychoanalysis. Craft-Fairchild investigates Aphra Behn's The Dumb Virgin; or. The Force ofImagination (1700), Mary Davys's The Accomplished Rake; or, Modern Fine Gentleman (1727), Eliza Haywood's The Masqueraders ; or, Fatal Curiosity (1724—25), Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1724), and The City Jilt; or, The Alderman Turn'dBeau (1726), Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791), and Frances Burney's The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814). In each case, her analysis seeks to specify masquerade as the psychological model of "the construction of femininity in eighteenth-century fiction by women" (p. 6), while she especially aims to "counter any straightforward celebration of masquerade as a female-dominated sphere" (p. 6). Masquerade fictions, Craft-Fairchild tells us, "both uphold and subvert ideologies that inscribe 'femininity' as the mirror double of 'masculinity'" (p. 21). But her double theorization of female disguise as both submission and resistance to patriarchal standards is by no means symmetrical. Her argument veers decidedly towards the view that female "masquerade...