Certain Lively Episodes: The Articulation of Passion in Eighteenth-Century Prose (review)

REVIEWS 385 The book is argued soundly, taking its cues about fairy tales from Bruno Bettelheim and Gilbert and Gubar, and its cues about divided consciousness from Mary Poovey and Krisdna Straub. But the special interest of the book is in the sensibility the author brings to the Western tradition of love-and-marriage which raises up an insignificant girl to riches and power. As an indigenous tribe would be interested in an ethnographer's description of Üieir traditions and beliefs, so one is interested in the degrees of overreading and underreading in this book, the interpretation of our mythology by someone who has not been raised on it and is not tempted by it. For example, this author seems to me to overestimate the religious valences of the struggles between heroines and their enemies—the degree to which good and evil are figured in those conflicts; on the other hand, she underestimates the symbolic significance of virginity to the consciousness of a Western woman. Although interested in the dialectical movement between self-assertion and self-denial in these texts, she does not really believe in romantic love or in the affirmation of the self-in-loving (or the drama involved in claiming a desiring consciousness) that is a cornerstone of our post-Freudian individualism. She does not credit Pamela's feeling for Mr B. for instance, Mary Crawford 's loving admiration for Edmund, or Emmeline's genuine attraction to Godolphin. The result is to foreground the heroine's calculation in these episodes, her conscious manoeuvring for her own advantage. This grants these heroines more intelligence and more agency than standard readings within the tradition accord them, but also constructs them more on the pattern of Fielding's scheming Shamela than is generally assumed. Thus, in Mansfield Park, she emphasizes the "Crawford" side of Fanny, as she calls it, "her vital awareness of her own interests, will, and feeling" (p. 92), where other critics have emphasized Fanny's self-repression. Her chapter on Charlotte Smith's Emmeline foregrounds die eponymous heroine's cool-minded and designing circumspection, her calculation radier than her artlessness. In Emma she especially tunes into Jane Fairfax's effective machinations , and in Mansfield Park observes mat Mrs Norris's original suggestion has the effect of raising "herself to the status of a Bertram through this joint project of charity " (p. 100). The effect is a salutary corrective to our inherited Victorian assumptions about passive victimization. The book ends with Tiananmen Square. Back in China now, Huang Mei is only too painfully aware of where an overvaluation of individualism leads one. This book is a record of how she, a Chinese student blooming in the cultural thaw of the late 1980s, struggled to "absorb and resist that which is Western," in a series of readings of Englishwomen's fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ruth Perry Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alan T. McKenzie. Certain Lively Episodes: The Articulation of Passion in Eighteenth-Century Prose. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. ix + 265pp. US$35.00. The idea of the eighteenth century as an "Age of Reason" is one which has by now lost most of its authority. In place of a haven of neoclassical order and cool rationality, recent scholarship has given us a very different period: one disturbed from below by the energies of the carnivalesque, and governed from above, not by the dictates of a timeless reason, but by the prejudices and traditional assumptions—the hegemonic ideology— characteristic of an ancien régime state supported by the triple pillars of monarchy, 386 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:4 aristocracy, and church. These features of the revisionists' eighteenth century are of course still battlegrounds of scholarship. Nevertheless, they serve to show how far the debate over the nature of this area of die English past has moved on from the days when a generation of scholars working between the wars made of it a Shangri-La in me image of their idea of the world they had lost. Alan McKenzie's book contributes to this returning of the eighteentfi century to itself . After a series of introductory chapters which sketch me tradition of discussion and...