Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814 (review)

Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers departs from current historicist orthodoxy by organizing its reading of the long eighteenth century around large ethical questions that take female desire, and women's right to articulate that desire, as their starting point. Drawing on the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Kraft advocates desire's relational aspect as an avenue to the divine. The prophet Isaiah's words, "Here I am; send me," underpin a biblical ethics of generosity and response central to the dynamic Kraft traces in her readings. Stories of heterosexual love, in particular, uphold the ideal of reciprocity and responsibility, providing occasions for women to insist on their inclusion in the narratives of desire and the divine that are central to Judeo-Christian culture.

Chapter 1 establishes the theoretical and biblical frame of reference governing the study as a whole. The conversation that has evolved between Levinas, Derrida, and Irigaray on ethics and sexual difference structures Kraft's analysis of the stories of Abraham, Sarah, and Rebekah. The chapter concludes with reflections on the Song of Songs, whose female lover insists on sexual difference as the ground for an ethics of desire. The pastoralism of the Song of Songs then serves as the central motif for a reading of Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. In the Edenic grove of Bellfont, Silvia and Philander "come together in one being while preserving their discreteness as individual and sexual beings" (49). Chapter 3 uses the template provided by the stories of Deborah, Jael, and Rachev to explore Behn's and Delarivier Manley's representations of the relation between sexual desire and political consciousness. In chapter 4, the trope of hieroglyphics in Manley's The Adventures of Rivella and Eliza Haywood's fiction takes us back to Esther and her use of sign and symbol in the palace of King Ahasuerus. The story of Moses and Miriam frames Kraft's reading of Samuel Richardson and Sarah Fielding in chapter 5, with Fielding serving as the corrective to Richardson's ambivalent relation to the authority of women's speech. Chapter 6 jumps forward half a century to the suffering women of Charlotte Smith's The Young Philosopher and Frances Burney's The Wanderer, each of whom channel the spirit of Hagar, "the heroine of the Romantic era" (194). The study concludes by circling back to Elizabeth Inchbald's 1791 novel, A Simple Story, and the story of Lot and his daughters. The fear of the stranger, the demands of hospitality, and the breakdown of family relations write themselves into the story of a Catholic-Protestant marriage. Despite the failure of the marriage between Lord Elmwood and Miss Milner, a new order appears out of its ashes in the final union of Matilda and Rushbrook: "the narrative trades the ethics of the cave, the love of the broken, fearful father, for the face-to-face encounter between 'beings wholly otherwise'" (177).

This study proves fresh and original in its pairing of biblical stories and narratives of desire in the long eighteenth century. But some historical imprecision attends its methodology. For instance, Kraft's sense of the Bible's pervasive influence as an offshoot of common Christian practice fails to account for the specificity of the culture wars that emerged between libertine and Puritan constituencies in Restoration England. Libertinism's interest in freedom from constraint specifically aimed at freedom from theocracy and its claims to scripture-based authority and providential historiography. Behn's anticlericalism, writ large in her translation of Fontanelle, reminds us to take her allusions to scripture with a grain of irony. The Edenic setting of Silvia's seduction, for instance, only heightens our sense of Philander's treachery, already established in the narrative by his involvement in treasonous plots against the king. More generally, I am not persuaded by the claim that...