Smollett's Women: A Study in an Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility (review)

REVIEWS 161 For a historical account of Elizabeth Canning, in my opinion, one should tum to John Treherne's The Canning Enigma (1989); for the bibliography, to Lillian Bueno McCue's "Elizabeth Canning in Print," expanded, updated, and chronologically reordered in my Harvard Law School exhibition catalogue, The Virgin and the Witch (1988). For a canny, partisan, and imaginative rendering of the "mystery," I can recommend Moore, but I long for some future account of the politics of the case: who were the "Canningites" and why was the Lord Mayor so opposed to them? That seems to me to offer more gripping narrative possibilities than any mystery. Hugh Amory Houghton Library, Harvard University Robert D. Spector. Smollett's Women: A Study in an Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility. Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 1994. 196pp. US$55.00. ISBN 0-313-28790-2. The title of Robert D. Spector's most recent book on Smollett seems to announce a fascinating project: a study of an early modem "masculine sensibility" through the lens of an important writer's representations of women. Unfortunately, although the book contains some fresh readings of a number of Smollett's female characters, it fails to live up to its enticing title. Too often the author fails to connect his discussions of individual characters and narratives to larger questions about either gender roles in eighteenthcentury literature or the nature of the novel or the relationship between these two issues. Since the material itself seems to demand consideration of such points, Smollett's Women, although revealing Spector's deep knowledge of and appreciation for Smollett's fiction, finally strikes one mainly as a series of missed opportunities. Spector presents his book as a modest corrective to the prevailing "critical opinion [which] has consistently denied Smollett's ability to deal with women and their emotions" (p. 6). Citing his subject's "strongly male personality," his belief that women were naturally "attendant upon men," and his "admiration for the manly [i.e., heterosexual] values of his time," Spector acknowledges the limitations of Smollett in this area but nevertheless asserts, quite correctly, that his novels contain a rich variety of female characters (pp. 8, 10, 13). In separate chapters, Spector classifies and analyses three basic types of women in Smollett's fictional world: idealized heroines, fallen women and victims, and comic and grotesque figures. Along the way, Spector uses his discussion of these characters to reflect upon the status of women in eighteenth-century Britain as well as on Smollett's attitude towards women. Since Spector has worked on Smollett for many years, it is not surprising that he has some sound things to say about this material. His discussions of Emilia in Peregrine Pickle and Lydia in Humphry Clinker, for example, demonstrate that Smollett's heroines are not all of a piece and that at least those two, like some of his fallen women and victims, are reasonably complex figures possessed of strength and wit. Similarly, Spector's treatment of the women traduced by the dark protagonist of Ferdinand, Count Fathom reminds us why A.R. Humphries argued forty years ago that no novelist gives us the harsh reality of eighteenth-century life better than Smollett, and at the same time shows how Smollett used his many women characters as vehicles for satire on a variety of subjects. But Smollett's Women never rises above the level of an amply annotated taxonomy of Smollettian character types of the female persuasion. 162 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 Some intriguing questions are raised by Spector about the relationship between the ways Smollett represented women and the kinds of fictional narratives that he wrote. Spector argues that the idealized heroines are the product of "Smollett's addiction to the romance tradition that he repeatedly satirizes in his work" (pp. 44-45), that the relative complexity of Lydia is due to the author's use of the epistolary form in his last work of fiction, and that Emilia must be understood as a response to Richardson's Clarissa. Also, according to Spector, many of the fallen women in these fictions are characters that indicate their author's debt to the picaresque tradition. But a...