Subjectivity in the Romantic-Era Novel

Although Miriam Wallace saddles “Jacobin” with quotation marks, every word of her title could bear the same treatment, including the dates. In addition to its customary meaning, as self-conscious agents active within a public sphere, “subjects” also invokes theoretical notions of social construction where we discover our subjectivity as something always already made. “Revolutionary,” therefore, points to both the tumultuous times, and to an innovative stage in the making of the modern subject where radicals argued, for the first time, that we are prisoners of opinion, of ideology, as we now say, prompting the coining of the now necessary word, and where they also began to realize, in a dawning, belated fashion, that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, that the language that imprisoned their unenlightened peers was operative still in their own efforts to realize themselves as emancipated subjects. In such a perspective, dates are frankly arbitrary. “English,” meanwhile, refers to geographical origin and a contested identity, for something that was both a fact and a fiction. Strangely, in a title of such studied ambiguity, “Jacobin” is singled out for the double treatment. Whereas for Gary Kelly, author of The English Jacobin Novel (1976), and for most commentators since, it went without saying that the identity was ironic and contested, because foisted upon its unwilling subjects by a reactionary press as a canny means of imprinting an ineradicable stigma, Wallace seems to feel that it needs to be said. While she belabors the point, to the certain benefit of students unfamiliar with the subject, the larger reason for doing so is her desire to dissolve, then reconstitute, the critical categories that had begun to crystallize within the much neglected field of the English Romantic novel. If there were Jacobins, there were also Loyalists; if some were realists, others were romancers; if some were men, others were women. As Wallace points out, these retrospective categories misrepresent the fundamental fact of English literary activity during this period, which was that it was deeply networked. Writing did not happen in isolated cells demarcated by geography, gender, genre, or even politics. Jacobin, then, gets the double treatment because Wallace wants to break up the critical model left by her single most important progenitor: Gary Kelly. Jacobins and Loyalists, men and women, mixed, in various genres (not just novels), drawn together, in part, by their shared experience of the revolutionary project, of realizing themselves as sovereign subjects at a time of unprecedented political strife and transformation.

As mentioned, Kelly’s The English Jacobin Novel is one of Wallace’s principal critical forbearers; Robert Kiely’s The Romantic Novel in England (1972) would be the other. Wallace’s edited book, Enlightening Romanticism, joins two other recent collections that have revitalized study of the English romantic novel: a special issue of Novel devoted to the topic, edited by Wil Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy (2001), and Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780–1830, edited by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman (2008). As Wallace notes in her introduction, the essays in Enlightening Romanticism “tread lightly” on the assumption that the novel takes a “Romantic turn” during the period (15), with many essays stressing either continuity between early and late, or the bewildering variety and heteroglossia of the novel form that defies such neat categorization. By contrast, Revolutionary Subjects adopts a more determined posture. For Wallace, the romantic turn is most evident in the English Jacobin novel, in features first principally advanced by Gary Kelly, who distinguishes writers with a residual Enlightenment sensibility, such as Robert Bage and Thomas Holcroft, “from writers like Godwin and Wollstonecraft, whose narratives in their messy exploration of internal contradictions and moral ambiguity point toward a newly developing Romanticism” (252). Without ever saying as much, Wallace develops a case for the romanticism of the English Jacobin novel on the basis of such...