The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

REVIEWS 273 Chapter 5, devoted to the sentimental novel's "challenge to power," seems to me particularly original and valuable in taking "sentimentality" seriously as a radical expression of eighteenth-century liberal humanism, and in refusing to accept the current Marxist dismissal of the sentimental as an illegitimate bourgeois assertion of the status quo. I certainly agree that the 1750s and 1760s "foreshadow" twentieth-century developments : Smart and Sterne imply Pound and Joyce (my observation, not Spacks's). There is real "anger" and social criticism to be found in Brooke, Sterne, Mackenzie, and others . Spacks's reading of Evelina stresses Burney's very compartmentalized "rage and aggression" (p. 140), though I think she might go further in pursuing the implications. The "essential fantasy" in Burney, that evil does not "determine much of human experience " (p. 145), is certainly what the text is made to imply, but a deconstructive reading would give us a Burney who is a covert but eloquent witness against herself. Another chapter I particularly commend to the reader's attention is the seventh, on "Energies of Mind: Novels of the 1790s," which originally appeared in EighteenthCentury Fiction. Spacks follows Gary Kelly in stressing the "links between Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novelists" (p. 175). Few readers have really liked these didactic novels, or felt comfortable with them. Spacks asks "what makes things happen" and "what the plot proves" in the course of trying to define an "ideology of harmony" sought in these novels. I do not altogether accept the terms of the discussion, but this is certainly one of the best attempts to date to treat 1790s fiction as a link in the development of novel form and ideology. Overall, I find the antitheses and resolutions of this book too tidy; but since they are not really the point, this is not a serious complaint. One reads this book with pleasure for its author's good sense, clear prose, and obvious liking for the material. Again and again Spacks throws out sharp comments and passing observations that provoke, illuminate, clarify. One example: a discussion relating to "security" in 77ie Italian. The concept could be usefully applied to most of the books under discussion, but Spacks is much too undoctrinaire to use this or any other device mechanically. The reader leaves the book without a tidy list of the "Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century Novels," but with a sense that he or she has traversed the ground in the company of an eminently skilful and sensible reader. Robert D. Hume Pennsylvania State University Felicity A. Nussbaum. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. xxii + 264pp. US$29.95. Felicity Nussbaum's critical practice is explicitly concerned with politics. Unlike previous studies of autobiography, Nussbaum's treatment strives to formulate a politics, rather than a poetics of the genre (p. 10). Such a practice, she claims, "requires a methodology that turns its technology on itself." Examining, as Foucault might say, both the Sultan's ring and the hand that wears it, feminist political criticism must attempt to "disclose its ends, and examine ... its own interest in adopting certain positions, its own stake in the power/knowledge relationships it seeks to unveil" (p. 15). In "The Politics of Difference" (Nussbaum's introduction to the special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies for Summer 1990), the author clearly articulates her own stake in political criticism, asking how we 274 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:3 "might reconfigure the eighteenth century in terms of the present while acknowledging the 'difference' of the past" (p. 377). As a genre explicitly concerned with representing the self, eighteenth-century autobiography serves as a rich source for exploring the intersections and connections of difference, in particular as it becomes inscribed, textually and materially, within ideologies of class and gender. In its attention to previously marginalized and often unpublished texts, as well as in its conscious meshing of "history" and "theory," Nussbaum's study analyses eighteenth-century autobiography as a particularly important location for "the construction of bourgeois subjectivity in relation to the material conditions of literary production" (p. xii). Nussbaum theorizes both ideology and subjectivity from within...