The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women's Contribution to the Novel (review)

REVIEWS 179 and on the other hand the need to secure a material basis for independence of conscience, without which an individual's power to determine his own acts would be forfeit, which requires the extension of the original property right which an individual enjoys over his body to cover the fruits of his labor" (p. 82); or "For another thing, part of my object in this book is to explore the resources of a certain critical point of view: a point of view from which what is of interest is certainly the textuality of the text, but from which textuality appears not as something isolating the text from any power to influence our relationship to the extra-textual, but as something which gives it power" (p. 7). People who enjoy rereading sentences will find many opportunities to ply their trade here. Harrison's discussion of the fallibilities of Derrida and the myopia of the traditional humanists does serve a valuable function of trying to break up the intellectual logjam that is now a feature of many post-prandial, postmodem discussions. If there are answers to the paradoxes of Derrida's arguments as they are thrown in the way of readers who want to see more in texts than just linguistic markers, then such answers will only be found by critics who are not afraid to break with orthodoxies. In this sense, Harrison's work can be read and even celebrated as one petard hoist in the path of the Juggernaut of the Derridean difference machine, as well as at the conservative bystanders waving flags expressing the wish that literature would return to the good old days of eternal truths. Lennard J. Davis Binghamton University Deborah Ross. The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women's Contribution to the Novel. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. US$29.00. xi + 249pp. ISBN 0-8131-1764-X. The paradox in Deborah Ross's title lures us. What does she mean by the excellence of falsehood! The answer is complex. Ross's subject is the rise of the novel, her aim to supply a much-needed bridge between feminist histories of that genre and synoptic overviews. Her argument is that what she calls "mainstream" critics—Lennard Davis, J. Paul Hunter, John Richetti, and Michael McKeon, for example—have defined the novel in such a way as to marginalize women writers, isolating their work, perceiving their fiction as flawed and unoriginal. Feminist critics, on the other hand, have pursued definitions that cannot be joined to the mainstream. Influenced by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eighteenth-century feminist critics such as Kristina Straub emphasize text and subtext, stressing women's divided minds. This feminist paradigm, Ross argues, does not really apply to eighteenth-century women's writings; it is more apposite to the nineteenth century. Ross's claim is that her own template, "the interplay of romance and realism" (p. 1 1), will allow men's and women's writings to be considered as equal. She takes as her epigraph and her title Charlotte Lennox's statement that 'The only excellence of falsehood ... is its resemblance to truth." The terms of the paradox, then, are that romance is equivalent to falsehood, and realism is synonymous with truth. In Lennox's Female Quixote, the clergyman who makes this statement means to attack the absurdities of romance fiction. In Ross's terms, however, as the novel develops throughout the century, the "falsehood" and the "truth" become interleaved with one another. The truth invades the falsehood, and the falsehood inhabits the truth. 180 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:2 Ross traces the process of this change chronologically from Aphra Behn through Jane Austen, with chapters along the way on Delarivière Manley, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Bumey, and Ann Radcliffe. Ross starts with Behn because "by combining romance elements with true, topical stories, Behn may have founded the English novel" (p. 16). Behn's theoretical distinctions between romance and other forms of writing were rather blurred, and, indeed, it was not disparity but unity she strove for—the unity of "love." The mixture of romance and realism she in fact adopted is resistant, and occasionally jars the...