"Sir Charles Grandison": The Compleat Conduct Book (review)

REVIEWS 77 Scenarios of the Imaginary propose une lecture nouvelle et stimulante d'auteurs du XVIIIe siècle. Il fait aussi le constat de l'échec de la critique moderne dans ses tentatives pour dominer le réel. Marie-France Silver Collège Glendon York University Sylvia Kasey Marks. "Sir Charles Grandison" : The Compleat Conduct Book. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1986. 173pp. Sylvia Kasey Marks's monograph devoted to Richardson's last novel—a critical "first"—must be seen not only as capping the minor upswing of interest in Sir Charles Grandison sparked by Jocelyn Harris's superb edition of 1973, but also as participating in the recent explosion of publications dealing partly or wholly with the intertextuality between early modem conduct books and the eighteenthcentury novel. The criticism of Mary Poovey, Rita Goldberg, Nancy Armstrong, and Leonard Tennenhouse, among others, constitutes a revisionist, subversive, radically politicized school of thought which exposes the tension-ridden conductbook ideology of class and gender and its ambiguous deployment in the novels. Marks's study, however—with its recommendation of the "wholesome precepts" of Pamela, Part II (p. 52)—stands apart as belonging to a more traditional school of largely uncritical and ostensibly apolitical influence studies, epitomized by Joyce Hemlow's "Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books" (PMLA, 1950). Marks's aim is to rectify the discrepancy she illustrates between the laudatory contemporaneous reception oí Grandison and the novel's depreciation in modem criticism, by arguing that it is not a failed novel but, in intent and form, a successful conduct book. By the standards of the revisionist school, this aim seems questionable, though the author argues from exhaustive scholarship, with sincere enthusiasm. The first three chapters offer the rationale for her project and its background material, such as a succinct synthesis of Richardson's debts to other genres. Most of this goes over well-trodden ground but provides a view of the extent to which the Richardsonian novel is an imitation of literature rather than of life and, in a more original vein, shows some ways in which Grandison also deliberately plays against the conventions of certain genres. Her discussion of the development of the conduct book itself opens our eyes to the variety of its fictionalizing devices. In conjunction with her later analysis of the didactic techniques employed in Grandison, the discussion certainly narrows—though it does not eliminate—the differences between novel and conduct book of that 78 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION period. In particular, she makes a cogent if brief case for the extensive influence of Defoe's conduct books on the form and content of Richardson's fiction. The chapter which whips through Richardson's life, correspondence, and earlier work to prove that Grandison was the "completion" of Richardson's lifelong "plan," shows a continuity—if not really a culmination—of interests and purposes extending through the last novel; an argument which, though exaggerated, is perhaps a healthy corrective to Harris's insistence in her edition that "Sir Charles Grandison was the book that Richardson had no desire to write" (I, vii). These opening chapters, however, depict Richardson as unremittingly didactic, a preacher manqué (p. 49); conspicuously missing is any acknowledgment of the by now notorious conflicts between the pedestrian moralist and the innovative artist in Richardson, between the righteous monitor and the provocative rogue in his fiction and correspondence. More disturbingly, these pages introduce an unviable subtext (made explicit in the "Epilogue")—that all of Richardson's novels, not just the problematic Grandison, are conduct books (for example, pp. 14, 44, 50)—although Marks herself admits that Pamela raised more questions about conduct than it answered (p. 52) and though the passionate, ongoing debate over the moral status of both Clarissa and Lovelace bears witness to a fictional complexity that precludes any definition of Clarissa as a conduct book. In the two focal chapters of Marks's argument—"The Compleat Gentleman" and "The Ladies' Calling"—we find issues of class and gender, respectively, denied their due. In the first, Marks argues that Charles fulfills all the contemporary criteria for the ideal gentleman and more than satisifies the requisite duties to neighbours and to God, though (with her impeccable...