Memoirs of Modern Philosophers by Elizabeth Hamilton (review)

HUMANITIES 243 tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The study on Böhme reception claims that there is no Böhme reception. We are facing a navelgazing Romantic intellectualism armed against historical dialogue. There is no Wirkungsgeschichte. Moreover, Mayer=s critique of reception is in effect programmatic, and not restricted to the case of Böhme. Even the introductory blurb speaks of >a striking example of how the past is appropriated ... in the service of self-affirmation.= The notion of >influence= at least still acknowledged a >flow= in the genesis of culture B in German (more aptly) Überlieferung. More than this excellent young author, our age of relativistic >discourse= study may be to blame for such loss of historical consciousness. What about the verdict of a >Böhme myth=? Did the Shakespeare reception of the time not similarly create a >Shakespeare myth=? And who would deny Shakespeare a powerful impact on German culture? Does not the making of myth out of myth, to codify a cultural self, imply Überlieferung ? Why did the Romantics engage in that >unaufhörliche Rühmen und Preisen des Jakob Böhme= (Heine)? They surely understood themselves in this darkly poetic mirror B philosophical hermeneutics called such understanding Horizontverschmelzung (fusion of horizons). They were inspired by a prominent representative of an ancient Neoplatonic-mystic tradition, a mythologic paradigm they recognized as their own, and which was about to enter a new horizon, and blossom in poetry and idealistic thought. Any such comparative interpretation, however, will now have to start with Paola Mayer=s book. It sets a scholarly standard which no future work in its field can afford to fall behind. (HANS SCHULTE) Elizabeth Hamilton. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Edited by Claire Grogan Broadview Press. 420. $15.95 Gaining reputation steadily as a press which produces attractive, affordable, and well-annotated texts, Broadview Literary Texts has added an interesting parodic novel from the late eighteenth century to its series. Elizabeth Hamilton=s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, first published in 1800, participates in and recapitulates the revolutionary debates of the 1790s, debates Marilyn Butler has termed the >war of ideas.= As Claudia Johnson has observed, in the decade following the French Revolution, domestic subjects were >brought to the forefront of national life= and >women=s education, their manners, their modesty, their reading, their opinions about personal happiness, their power of choice in matrimony, and their expectations from married life were all matters of increasingly anxious public concern.= Memoirs of Modern Philosophers raises all these issues about women through the interrelated stories of three heroines: Bridgetina Botherim, a crude caricature of the radical Mary Hays; Julia Delmont, a sentimental 244 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 heroine who falls prey to a French hairdresser; and the virtuous Harriet Orwell, a young woman steadfast in her Christian faith. Hamilton=s satiric humour and lively wit work best when readers are familiar with Mary Hays=s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and William Godwin=s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), both mocked and often quoted in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. The title is an obvious echo of Hays=s novel and the conservative Edmund Burke=s comments in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly 1791 where he says that >modern philosophers= represent everything that is >ignoble, savage, and hard-hearted.= Like Fielding=s Shamela, Hamilton=s Bridgetina perfectly replicates not only the sentiments, but also the cadence, the diction, the bodily gestures of the philosophizing woman after whom she is modelled. Thus, Bridgetina speaks endlessly of her >sensations, passions, powers,= her >romantic, frenzied feelings of sensibility,= the obstacles to perfectibility, and the false prejudices of society. Grogan=s edition, the only available modern text of the work, provides a valuable introduction which includes information about the political, historical, and social contexts, and about the author, who >held a middling position which espoused the view that females were intellectually capable but that an inadequate and poorly directed education system failed to develop the female=s potential.= Grogan directs readers to the secondary female characters in the novel and argues that these older women provide an important backdrop to the three young heroines. They >instruct the reader how...