The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century (review)

Reviews Robert W. Uphaus, ed. The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century. East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1988. ? + 143pp. US$26.00. Though its title may suggest something more compendious, this slim volume includes only six relatively concise essays, written specifically for the occasion, and a very brief editor's introduction. This is the more surprising since its actual historical scope extends beyond the eighteenth century, from Bunyan and Defoe through Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth's Rosamund stories, the last of which appeared in 1821. Obviously, it moves through a century and a half on seven-league boots. However, I am happy to report that if it does not really live up to its title, the stronger essays in it are so good that I consider the time I devoted to reading it a very profitable investment. The most consistently impressive and illuminating essays seem to me to be John Richetti's "The Novel and Society: The Case of Daniel Defoe" and John Dussinger's "The Language of 'Real Feeling': Internal Speech in the Jane Austen Novel." Though I have some reservations about its literary foci, me most tíiought-provoking essay is Mitzi Myers's "The Dilemmas of Gender as Double-Voiced Narrative: or, Maria Edgeworth Mothers the Bildungsroman." Richetti sees eighteenth-century novels, including Defoe's, as concerned with the "issue of social totality," but seldom and only fitfully reflective of the comprehensiveness of social vision that Jonathan Arac has found in nineteenüvcentury fiction. Instead, they generally reflect and dramatize "the difficulty of imagining die ultimate social coherence mat nineteenüvcentury novelists take for granted" (p. 47). He applies to the eighteenth-century universe of socio-aesthetic discourse Anthony Giddens's concept of a "class-divided" society , evolving towards a "modem nation-state" but still short of being one, a society in which many social institutions and behaviours "retain dieir independent character in spite of me rise of the state apparatus" (p. 49). However one may feel about the general validity of this concept, so applied, it certainly allows Richetti most iiluminatingly to discuss the tension between the radical, near-amoral individualism of Defoe's characters and social views and his "moments of totalizing social vision," principally "stirred by what EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 2, January 1991 166 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:2 he saw as the grand spectacle of 'trade,' a socio-economic sublimity visible in the market system's wonderful and mysterious combination of finely calibrated efficiency and sweeping, all-encompassing variety" (p. 52). When he probes dus tension in specific instances , die result is critical analysis of a very high order: a most convincing exegesis of Moll Flanders's Newgate experience, for example, and a riveting discussion of Colonel Jack, centred upon the scene in which Jack and a companion witness the public whipping of two pickpockets by the city hangman of Edinburgh. The strengths of Dussinger's essay are easily described. He magisterially and shrewdly analyses Austen's subtle and various use of "free indirect discourse," putting it into far clearer focus than anything else I have read on the subject. He also—and most helpfully— pulls together in his text and notes all of the important previous discussions of free indirect discourse in Austen, and makes a convincing case for the importance of his principal source, Willi Biihler's "almost wholly overlooked" monograph of 1936: Die "Erlebte Rede" Im Englischen Roman: Ihre Vorstufen und ihre Ausbildung im Werke Jane Austens. Dussinger's essay left me far better informed about a familar subject— and prepared to tackle Biihler's discussion before I next teach Austen. My only cavil is tíiat die essay seems a little too dismissive of the use of free indirect discourse by earlier English novelists. Mitzi Myers's essay on Edgeworth's Rosamund stories treats them as a "mothered text" (p. 77), as accounts of educational-maturational interactions between mother and adolescent daughter that point towards an alternative Bildungsroman pattern in women's fiction, "a coherent reconceptualization of me female development plot" (p. 71). She stresses that they are not concerned with heterosexual awakening and pairing at the brink of aduhhood, but with female...