The Prison of Womanhood: Four Provincial Heroines in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Elizabeth Sabiston (review)

128 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 melled free spirit who keeps his revolutionary faith in dark times. But all these images are transcended by that of the thinker who rises above facile mid-twentieth-century liberalism in the most dazzling and the wisest essay in this book, in which Stanley Fish shows how Areopagitica deconstructs itself before our eyes, on premises that Milton offers the reader from the start. Fish goes on to deal with another tension that runs destructively through this essay collection: self-questioning and selfdoubt within the Academy itself. His affirmation of the institution's soundness, essential sanity, and good health is triumphant and moving. This book is sometimes irritating but it seldom fails to excite. Its underlying dialogue about the role ofthe Academy will be a monument to a nervous contemporary crise de conscience even when Milton studies have moved on to fresh theories and new issues. (DEREK N.C. WOOD) Elizabeth Sabiston. The Prison of Womanhood: Four Provincial Heroines in Nineteenth-Century Fiction Collier Macmillan 1987. 169. $41.95 'Alas!' exclaims the author-narrator of Northanger Abbey, 'if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?' Don Quixote is the ur-hero of the novel, and forever enshrined in the hearts of novelists and their readers, because he takes his fiction seriously. The female Quixote - not just the one in Charlotte Lennox's novel so named, but the figure considered as a species - has a similar resonance and recurrence. Literary people, whether readers, or writers, or characters inside novels, take to her and 'patronize' her, as one who engagingly confuses life with art, and so blurs those boundaries between them that we, too, often wish away. The female protagonists examined in Elizabeth Sabiston's The Prison of Womanhood: Four Provincial Heroines in Nineteenth-Century Fiction are all the kind of heroines who do patronize the heroines of other novels. They are Emma Woodhouse, Emma Bovary, Dorothea Brooke, and Isabel Archer: female Quixotes all. By way of defining the species, Sabiston provides an opening chapter on 'Emma's Daughters.' Unlike the delicate and submissive 'Pamela's Daughters' described by Utter and Needham, Emma's daughters tend to be physically strong, socially dominant, and literarily informed (though educationally deprived). They draw on literature as the model of experience. And marriage is likely to be not the end but the beginning of their problems. They are seen, characteristically, in visual and spatial terms, as 'portraits': each novel is in some sense a Portrait of a Lady, a portrait of an artist, or a portrait of the artist. And the lady's consciousness is recurrently figured forth in architectural metaphors. Hartfield in Emma, Lowick in Middlemarch, the Palazzo Roccanera in The Portrait, and the HUMANITIES 129 Bovarys' bourgeois quarters in Yonville become symbolic projections of the constraining 'prisons' to which these provincial women are confined. Each heroine is subjected to 'the tyranny of her surroundings.' These 'fictional sisters' even look alike: they are brunettes who are sometimes physically contrasted with unsympathetic blondes such as Harriet Smith and Rosamond Vincy. They would probably concur with Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (who could also be counted among the fictional sisters) in her rejection of 'books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness ... I want to avenge Rebecca and Flora MacIvor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones.' The likenesses that Sabiston musters are impressive, and sufficient to establish that she is dealing here with a shared vision, almost a recognizable subgenre of the novel. As she traces the similarities and differences in the treatment of the shared theme through her individual chapters on each of the four novels, what emerges as the most interesting element is the interaction of the moral and aesthetic strands: Emma Woodhouse's ethically dubious enterprise of turning the people around her into the material for her imaginist's artifact, Emma Bovary's reduction of herself into a passionately palpating object, Dorothea's moral sense that has thriven at the expense of the aesthetic, Isabel's self-surrender to barren aesthete. An early passage in...