Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (review)

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 spectral argument about Smollett's version of the novel and his representation of women remains elusive throughout Spector's book, and that is a pity. Smollett is always a problem for historians of the eighteenth-century British novel; he is not considered at length by Ian Watt, Lennard Davis, or Michael McKeon. Thus, someone who knew Smollett as well as Spector does and who was interested in these larger questions might use this material to reconnect Smollett to the current discussion of the eighteenth-century novel. Although there are hints of such a reconsideration of Smollett, Spector fails to go beyond those hints. His discussion of "masculine sensibility" amounts to little more than a summary of highly predictable attitudes towards women, and his consideration of Smollett's use of the novel form becomes little more than an occasion for the repetition of his wellknown argument about the centrality of the picaresque in Smollett's fiction along with acknowledgments that the author of Humphry Clinker also drew upon Restoration comedy and the romance. Spector seems only glancingly familiar with recent work on the novel. Thus, when he discusses the novel and romance, he makes no use of McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, and his discussion of the treatment of women in conduct-books and of the power of eighteenth-century British women in the domestic sphere reveals no familiarity with Nancy Armstrong's DesireandDomestic Fiction. The studies of Rosalind Ballaster, Davis, and Jane Spencer do not even appear in Spector's bibliography. Do these objections amount to nothing more than the traditional regret that the author did not write the book that the reviewer would have had him write? I think not. To engage these issues at this moment and to ignore much of the important work that informs discussions of gender in eighteenth-century literature as well as the debate over the novel is to write a book that may be of interest to students of specific narratives by Smollett but that cannot speak to most scholars interested in the very issues that Spector seems to engage in his title. Robert Mayer Oklahoma State University Syndy McMillen Conger. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language ofSensibility. Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. xxviii + 214pp. US$39.50. ISBN 0-8386-3553-9. Sensibility, in the second half of the long eighteenth century, is ubiquitous but protean. Neat definitions elude both its proponents and its historians. Frequently it appears with its various opposites—sense, sentiment, sex, or the realities of everyday life. In each of these pairs it takes on different characteristics—further complicating the matter. Someone who embodies sensibility can be irrational, idealistic, intellectually passionate, suicidal, REVIEWS 163 or a combination of all these. In the 1950s Northrop Frye inaugurated the definition of what he called "an age of sensibility," which was further defined by Louis I. Bredvold in 1962, and by myriad others, including Jean Hagstrum, who in 1980 published his Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Lovefrom Milton to Mozart. Now, as Syndy McMillen Conger first showed in her 1990 anthology honouring Hagstrum, sensibility is a matter of "creative resistance," capable of frequent "transformation." A recent article on French sensibility and sentimentalism took as its sole subject the current stage of research on this matter. Given this context, Conger's book on Mary Wollstonecraft enters a vigorous, ongoing debate which Conger herself has already joined, not only with the Hagstrum festschrift, but also with her influence...