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REVIEWS 87 to read real letters as literature. Her lingering amidst Üie mutually contradictory "editorial " footnotes to Julie is another original move. It enhances the irresolvable confrontation she stages convincingly between Julie's predominantly metonymical world view and the two versions of metaphor propounded by Üie male protagonists wim whom Üie novelist has often been more rigidly identified—notwithstanding his self-designation as berger extravagant. MacArthur's Rousseau kills off Julie in a tag ending which leaves Julie in a state of imperfect closure. That the same "conclusion" has been reached by other reading strategies not only validates MacArthur's partial findings but also highlights her innovative approaches and their widespread applicability. Susan K. Jackson Boston University Mary Anne Schofield. Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in Feminine Fiction, 1713-1799. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1990. 217 pp. US$34.50. Though many modern feminist scholars have been dismayed by the changing or crystallizing ideology of woman's nature and woman's place in the course of the eighteenth century, Mary Anne Schofield's analysis of the use by women novelists of the "masquerading romance" suggests that by the advent late in die century of die works of Charlotte Smith, in some regards at least the climate for women writers had ameliorated . What she has identified as the patriarchal marriage plot in the traditionally canonical eighteenth-century novel (in this study "romance" remains a somewhat undefined term) has rightly fallen under critical scrutiny as perhaps not the only inevitable romance shape, and her thoughtful study contributes to the marriage plot's further anatomization . She paraphrases Rachel Blau Du Plessis: "What one quickly discovers is that one cannot have both love and quest, both selflessness and selfishness. The two texts—male and female—cannot exist simultaneously. The woman cannot be both selfless martyr to the man and true to herself (p. 27). The closure of the marriage plot at the culmination of courtship—the marriage—may obscure the inherent ideology of female powerlessness, but simultaneously endorses that ideology through its suggestion that independent female initiative and development will henceforth be of less consequence . Schofield's main point, then, is that although the women fiction writers of the eighteenth century perforce utilized the plot prescribed, they subverted it in various ways in order to express their rebellion or at least their discomfort; and tiiat in order to subvert it, they made an important use of disguise not entirely confined to die prevalent masquerade topos, but using often instead the disguise or masquerade trope. Schofield has developed her thesis of dual masculine and feminine plots in women's fiction from work on nineteenth and twentieth-century women writers by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nancy Miller, Carol Christ, and Annis Pratt, and on eighteenth-century women writers by Katharine Rogers, Dale Spender, and Jane Spencer. She has developed her analysis of Üie masquerade topos from Terry Castle, turning her attention, with fruitful results, to the adaptation of Üie topos by women authors. And she has effectively demonstrated her thesis tiirough the analysis of fictions we should know better by Elizabeth Boyd, Penelope Aubin, Eliza Haywood, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Jane West. Her work is therefore in the best sense a contribution to, deriving out of and developing further, the field of feminist criticism. 88 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:1 The analysis of the consistent use of Üie masquerade topos in the novels of the 172Os to 1740s is compelling. Schofield demonstrates its use by women authors to subvert the marriage plot: the heroine in masquerade, for instance, can express and explore her une, aggressive, and sexual self and at the same time expose the cruelty of men. But what is to become of the heroine who has experienced the heady quest for selfhood? The novelist must mask herself to tell the approved romance story of courtship and feminine acquiescence, often displacing her anger into the character of the virago in order to unmask "the facile and fatuous fictions they are supposed to be writing" (p. 24). What then must be the fate of adventuresome heroines? In diese early years and...

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