Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (review)

REVIEWS 87 the spirits of a lady whose principal misfortunes resulted from the dalliance of love"— for that, indeed, is the occasion for the story of "Psyche and Eros," in The Golden Ass of Apuleius. And, if you have seen the recent Disney film version, or better yet Cocteau's, you may wonder whether "the dalliance of love," or erotic desire and its effects, is not precisely what this fairy tale is all about. Given the considerable interest these days in erotic desire in eighteenth-century fiction, McGlathery's study could thus be used quite advantageously to frame—thematically as well as temporally—an approach to this component of the fairy tales written during this century. On the other hand, such an investigation would also inform an issue that McGlathery, unfortunately in my view, chooses to ignore: "the tendency away from an earthy and matter-of-fact attitude about sexual desire to veiled or indirect depiction from Basile to Perrault and Perrault to the Grimms parallels shifts in sensibilities from the Renaissance by way of the Enlightenment to Romanticism" (p. 11). Someone, I hope, will accept the challenge of filling these gaps in McGlathery's study, by establishing the Enlightenment as more than a way station in the history of sexuality, and by exploring the contributions of fairy tales written during that period to an understanding of erotic desire. At the very least, such an investigation could supplement, if not rectify, Foucault's. Howard Cell Glassboro State College Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Fictions ofModesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. xii + 306pp. US$28.75. ISBN 0-226-95096-4. In the past ten years a welcome conjunction of new historicism and feminism has produced a number of impressively researched and thoughtful books on constructions of femininity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ruth Bernard Yeazell's book on constructions of female modesty is not therefore wildly original; it is, however, a particularly fine example of cultural/literary studies. Like Mary Poovey, Janet Todd, and Nancy Armstrong, Yeazell turns to a number of "non-literary" sources to offer a reading of what the modest heroine meant to those who wrote about her; she then looks at six novels to demonstrate her thesis that the idea of the modest heroine allowed narratives "to represent modesty not as a set of rules but as a series of changing responses" (p. ix), to create, in other words, a story of feminine consciousness. In part 1 ("Codifications"), Yeazell devotes five chapters to various discourses on modesty. Her range of materials amply illustrates her argument that female modesty was a virtue constructed by conduct books, periodicals, and philosophical writing. Her close readings of these texts also provide a clear map of the contradictions and gaps in the literature of modesty, as well as a quick recapitulation of why modesty became a gendered virtue: it followed "from the separation of spheres," so that men in the public, commercial world could be aggressive while women at home could take custody of " 'beautiful' but inconvenient virtues" (p. 9.). In a convincing and witty survey of the literature, Yeazell shows how the architects of feminine modesty tried to reconcile the notion of women's natural modesty with their anxieties about unbridled female desire; and how female modesty was supposed to restrain male lust even as it aroused men more than loose behaviour could; how signs of modesty were both innate and easily assumed. Even those 88 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:1 who seem to construe modesty in a pragmatic rather than an overtly moralistic mode fall into traps of inconsistency or elision. For example, Mandeville claims that men are allowed more sexual licence simply because their desires are stronger, thereby exposing moral code as social expediency. Hume's practical position that women's modesty comes from the "need to assuage men's anxieties about the paternity of their children" (p. 21), as Yeazell points out, does not account for the requirement that women beyond childbearing years be modest. Like Wollstonecraft before her, Yeazell saves her strongest and most effective refutations for Rousseau, whose account of the naturalness of feminine modesty she dissects with...