Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s—Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney and Austen (review)

434 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:3 Frédéric Deloffre in the Pléiade edition of Marivaux's Œuvres dejeunesse (1972); in her own footnotes, Rubellin refers, where appropriate, to both previous editions. In sum, the present work should do much to increase our knowledge and understanding of the corpus of Marivaux's work: it is a most welcome addition to existing scholarship and deserves the widest possible dissemination. D.J. Culpin University of St Andrews, Scotland Claudia L. Johnson. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s—Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney andAusten. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. xi + 239pp. US$34.95 (cloth); US$14.95 (paper). ISBN 0-226-40183-9. Claudia L. Johnson's fascinating new work should attract numerous readers. It offers a new reading of a number of texts and casts light on one of the most important decades in modern Western history and literature, a very vexed and vexing decade that produced new styles, new fashions of thought, and literary works not easily subject to classification. Johnson sees the decade of the 1790s as fundamentally marked—or marred—by a dedication to sentimentalism or reactions against it. Incidentally, what is customarily termed "sentimentalism," a philosophical and psycho-social movement (and one in which I believe we are still involved), Johnson calls "sentimentality"—a condescending term that seems to beg the question. The nature of sentiment, Johnson believes, underwent redefinition in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France at the beginning of the 1790s. (Johnson actually exceeds her decade dealing with both The Wanderer [1814] and Emma [1816] in the latter part of her book.) Burke emphatically underwrote and thus recast the eighteenth century's growing belief in the value of sentiment in the male— the male who has gentle and delicate feelings, emotional ties, responses or prejudices that hold him to his native land—irrational and easily moved associations. The new "chivalry" adumbrated in Burke gives to the male the gift of a feminine position and psychology. Woman becomes (even more than hitherto) an object of male feelings and gaze. The image of the lovely Queen Marie Antoinette surrounded by ruffians is an image used by Burke to solicit the throbs and tears of the new man, and to repress the rational analysis and stolid objectivity once required of Enlightenment males. An over-rational approach is now to be associated with a suspect and even detested republicanism which denatures the human categories and bonds that Burke re-natures by his own theatricality. Women do not profit from this arousal of the new male in face of supposedly horrifying spectacles. The fresh emotions of the new men, Johnson suggests, required a supply of Gothic effects involving female suffering in order to be stimulated: "It is clear to each of the writers I discuss here [Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, and Austen] that the spectacle of immanent and outrageous female suffering may not be the unthinkable crime which chivalric sentimentality forestalls, but rather the one thing needful to solicit male tears and the virtues that supposedly flow with them, and the preposterousness of their work emerges from and engages this horrifying realization" (p. 15). Basing her work on that of G.J. Barker-Benfield and of Mary Poovey, Johnson argues that the new style of conservatism which erupted at the very outset of the French Revolution made gender itself freshly uncertain: "the conservative insistence upon the urgency of chivalric REVIEWS 435 sentimentality fundamentally unsettled gender itself, leaving women without a distinct gender site. Under sentimentality, all women risk becoming equivocal beings" (p. 11). Female characters in both theoretical writings and fictions by English women of the 1790s exhibit the stresses and distortions brought about by impossible accomodations to the new way of doing things. Far from demanding stout common sense, logic, and reason from men, the new ethos had co-opted tears and responsiveness. If men are now "feminine," women who act in a traditionally "feminine" manner are now represented as frivolous, ridiculous, or hysterical. Women are now supposed to adopt the (formerly "masculine") qualities of common sense, reasonableness, and stoic lack of complaint— although all these qualities are subjected to censorship and surveillance, and are...