The Rise of the Gothic Novel (review)

REVIEWS 549 to scientific law and the novel devoted to the realm of exceptions—also constitute the enduring dilemma posed by the history of liberalism. Disputes about the proper sphere of government are the very stuff of liberalism. Since the debate in the 1790s about "outdoor relief," the notion that the state should ensure its citizens the minimum conditions for economic existence has been perpetually countered by the claim that only the market can "make work." The Business of Common Life demonstrates the fruitfulness of engaging British novels—represented here by Frankenstein, Radcliffe's The Italian, Scott's Waverley, The Antiquary, and Ivanhoe, and Austen's Persuasion—in these terms. It is interesting to speculate with Kaufmann about how novels might compete with and complement economics in their efforts to segregate the domain of civil society from that of the state. It is interesting to think about how the Waverley novels depend on the parable of progress— the claim that economic growth will settle the conflicting claims of commutative and distributive justice. Scott argues that revolution will not be political—as his Jacobite characters imagine—but will depend on what citizens "secure in the spheres of the private and the social (that is, below the threshold of political consideration and demand) are able to make of themselves and their lives" (pp. 104-5). However, in comparison with his incisive reconstructions of the arguments between Burke and Paine, and Malthus and Ricardo, Kaufmann's discussions of novels (with the exception of the chapter on Scott) often feel sketchy. Predictability and blindness to nuance characterize the most disappointing of his readings. Thus Kaufmann resorts to commonplace reflections on the escapism of female Gothic to finish off a chapter that aligns the providential framework of The Italian with the theodicy underwriting Malthus's notions of market discipline. The Radcliffe who appears in The Business of Common Life—as, strangely, "Mrs." Radcliffe—is not the Radcliffe whom we meet in Emma Clery's superb The Rise ofSupernatural Fiction (1995). Clery's attention to the heroine's relation to property enriches her assessment of Radcliffe's ambivalent relation to commercial modernity; by contrast, the condescending "Mrs." Kaufmann adds to Radcliffe's name is all too well suited to the prim, uninteresting figure he depicts. The chief problem with the way Kaufmann writes literary history is that, as he foregrounds the interrelations of the novel and economics, he frames his materials so that individual novels resemble each other much more often than they challenge one another . His book does not make room for inquiries into how, for instance, the political idioms that Radcliffe employs in the 1790s might differ from those of novelists writing in the second decade of the nineteenth century, or how the definitions of economic citizenship tendered in the Waverley novels might be conditioned by Scotland's distinctive experience of economic modernization. Kaufmann provides scholars of romantic fiction with the framework for an important project, but there is still much work to do. Deidre Lynch State University of New York, Buffalo Maggie Kilgour. 77ie Rise of the Gothic Novel. London and New York: Routledge , 1995. viii + 280pp. US$17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-415-08182-3. The title of this engagingly written genealogy of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel alludes to Ian Watt's influential The Rise of the Novel, but not to his teleological and evolutionary model of genre development. Maggie Kilgour's model, following Charles 550 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:4 Nicholl, but also amalgamating the work of Evelyn Fox Keller and Susan R. Bordo (p. 241n24), is the struggle between the "alchemical relational stance" (p. 102) and the oppositional posture of the Baconian tradition. One important early chapter is called "Everything that Rises Must Converge." Alchemy is the "relational"—that is, pre-industrial, androgynous—aspect of science, the repression of which by the "masculine" scientific revolution in the seventeenth century leads to the polarization of gender required by industrial capitalism and is "crucial to the emergence of modem notions of identity" (p. 241). These assumptions give Kilgour plenty of scope to contextualize the rhetoric of the Gothic in mainstream political history; in particular, the battle in English culture between possessive...