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Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (review)
- Eighteenth-Century Fiction
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 13, Number 4, July 2001
- pp. 593-595
- 10.1353/ecf.2001.0004
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Reviews Richard A. Barney. Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. xii + 402pp. US$49.50. ISBN 0-8047-2978-6. This is obviously an intelligent, widely researched book, published by a good publisher, and recommended by blurbs from first-rate scholars. Moreover, Richard Barney has a nose for many ofthe hot topics in our field, which includethe problem ofthe specialization ofdiscourses in the eighteenth century, the question ofempire, of nationhood, of hybridity, of gender ideology, the narrativization of discourse, the emergenceofthe novel, and the relationship between the public and the private. It transpires that all of these issues, and more, inhere in Barney's central theme, which is the relationship between Lockean and post-Lockean theories ofeducation and the form and function of the novel of education, not to be confused with the less specific Bildungsroman. Given these interests, the book follows a predictable but sensible path, devoting three chapters to various dimensions of the model, and two chapters which explicate specific novels (Robinson Crusoe, The Female Quixote, and Betsy Thoughtless). En route, we are treated to discussions of an impressive range of seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts, as well as pertinent critics and theorists of many different stripes. Specifically, Barney argues that, in Some Thoughts concerning Education, Locke crystallizes and initiates a distinct conception of personality ("improvisational subjectivity," p. 16), which mediates between the reduction of identity to some occult interiority or to some purely public definition of character. Such personality is fostered by what Barney calls "supervisory pedagogy," which is similarly neither mechanical nor free-form in nature, and which typifies both Locke's and the novels' "pedagogical agenda" (p. 2). Barney realizes that for his argument to hold water, he must prove two things: first, that Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education represents a turning point EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 13, Number 4, July 2001 594 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 in the history of education; and second, that the novels register the nature of that change either by responding to Locke directly, or by demonstrably manifesting analogous features and attitudes. Unfortunately, I disagree with Barney's substantive reading of Locke's role in educational theory, and have difficulties with the methods by which Barney (unsuccessfully, I think) tries to link his conception of Lockean education with the exemplary function of the novels he chooses. Two verbs that virtually saturate Barney's book are "emerge" and "suggest" and their cognates ("nascent," "new," "inaugurate," "materialize," "innovation": see pp. 54, 6, 19, 23, 66, 100, 104, 106, 126, 133, 302; "parallel," "relate," "resemble," "corresponds to," "finds an analogue in," "a kind of," "recalls": see pp. 5, 6, 29, 81, 82, 86, 107, 162-63, 175). The use of "emerge" reveals the extent to which Barney's interpretation of Locke's position in the history of education reproduces the standard line. By noting Locke's sensitivity to the child's temperament and resistance to punishment, for example, most histories of education since the 1920s have revealed their fundamentally progressivist view of Locke, one encouraged by Rousseau's citing Locke's influence on Emile, and exacerbated by blurring the distinctions between educational theory and educational practice, by which any theory such as Locke's can be conveniently contrasted with the rigidities of rote learning. Locke is consistently treated as the first of the moderns when a strong argument could and should be made for treating him as an ancient, a schoolfellow ofDryden's, and pupil of the most famous classical headmaster in the seventeenth century, Dr Busby. Paradoxically, Barney lights on the very metaphors which, rather than declaring Locke's originality, most clearly reveal his conscious debt to the tradition of paideia, which has of course a Greek (specifically Spartan) and more recently a Ciceronian genealogy, namely gardening (p. 61ff.), medicine (pp. 62, 72), and drama (p. 85). To take one example, the metadramatic metaphor for the process of learning is central to De Oratore, the single most important text in educational theory from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century. In cultivating humanitas, Cicero always remembers how the bearing involved in intellectual comportment—the central topic of Some Thoughts...