The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (review)

364 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 2:4 The main virtues of this book are, first, the complexity and elegance of its thesis and, second, the refusal to decline into easy political positions where feminist issues are concerned. Van Boheemen shows, for example, that Joyce's semiosis only seems to subvert the law. She shows that, though the content changes with regard to feminist matters, the structure tends to remain the same, so that any complacent thought that we have escaped from patriarchy may be premature. There is, in addition, something original in the writing here that deserves fuller deployment: a style of conversational intelligence that perhaps looks towards a new kind of writing. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth University of Maryland—Baltimore Janet Todd. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800. London: Virago Press, 1989. vii + 328pp. The title of Janet Todd's book alludes to a character in Aphra Behn's play The Rover, a prostitute who displays a provocative portrait of herself as sign and invitation. For Todd she exemplifies both the female capacity for socialized self-construction and the dangers of that capacity: Angellica cannot have the man she wants because her blatant seductiveness makes her unacceptable. The development of women's fiction, in Todd's version of it, involves steadily changing constructions of the female with shifting relations to social actuality. Women's novels move from open concern with female signs and with sexual manipulation to an increasingly sentimental kind of moralism and finally, at the end of the eighteenth century, to assertive claims of moral authority. The movement is not equivalent to simple literary "progress"—Todd argues, for instance, that the sophisticated acuity of Aphra Behn was never duplicated by her successors—but it demonstrates the devious ways that social change finds reflections in literary works. The very existence of this book calls attention to a great recent shift in literary assumptions . Only a few years ago, it would have seemed inconceivable to write, or to read, a literary history of the Restoration and eighteenth century focused entirely on women. Now, the undertaking appears, if anything, overdue, at a moment when Frances Burney takes her place in most syllabi for the eighteenth-century novel, and Charlotte Lennox, Mary Wollstonecraft, even Elizabeth Inchbald make frequent appearances in university courses. Todd considers in some detail dozens of female writers, from the Duchess of Newcastle to Ann Radcliffe. She locates them, at least sketchily, in a changing political , social, and economic scene. And she demonstrates conclusively—this may constitute her most valuable contribution—the variety of attitudes, concerns, and techniques employed by women during a century and a half. No more than men do women assume a monolithic stance by virtue of their gender. Like men, they respond in diverse ways to diverse pressures. The literary history that fully contains them must itself demonstrate a high degree of subtle responsiveness. Janet Todd makes a start towards such a history. Her book works most persuasively when it undertakes extensive accounts of individual writers. The chapters that offer generalized summaries of female accomplishment sound often like a reviewer's précis of Todd's earlier Dictionary ofBritish and American Women Writers 1660-1800, full of entertaining bits, impressive in range of names dropped, but hardly rich in literary insight or in historical acumen. On the other hand, particularly in dealing with such early writers as Delarivière Manley and Eliza Haywood, Todd displays in her textual investigations an admirable capacity to see her material freshly, unpolemically, and to specify its grounds of interest. Thus she quotes an extended erotic REVIEWS 365 scene from Manley's The New Atalantis, a rather hackneyed description of the bed of love strewn with flowers and bearing the body of an expectant though apparently unconscious lover, in order to call attention to the startling fact that here "the gaze is female and the languorous artful seductiveness of the body is a man's" (p. 89). Manley dreams, Todd argues, of equality in sexuality. But with the realism characteristic of the early generation of female writers, she recognizes that equality can only precede consummation: "Despite her active, lusty, possessive gaze, when the sexual act occurs, the...