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  • Relocating Femininity:Women and the City in Mary Brunton's Fiction
  • Martha Musgrove

Widely regarded in her own time (and well beyond) as simply an "entertaining, moral and improving" Evangelical reformer, Mary Brunton (1778–1818) is now being reconsidered in a more complex key by critics who have become alert to the proto-feminist energies of her novels.1 All the same, she continues to be identified with a genre of domestic-didactic fiction that promotes a femininity derived from a "national tale" for England in which the country is conceived as "rural, not urban; agrarian, not industrial."2 In this model of community, "domestic woman" is associated with emotion, the private realm, and nature, and is consequently placed in opposition to rationality, public life, and—especially—the alien city. Thus critics continue to include Brunton among those women writers who are, as Lynne Vallone notes, "committed to the construction and sanctification ... of the private space of the home."3 Even as Brunton's writing provides evidence for such a reading, her two completed novels—Self-Control [End Page 219] (1811) and Discipline (1814)—make exposure to the modern metropolis central to their exploration of femininity. Other women novelists of the period also place their female protagonists in urban settings: Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice (1799); Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1802); Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (1804); and Fanny Burney, The Wanderer (1814), for example. What makes Brunton's women distinctive is the degree of self-reliance they achieve as a result of their city experiences. Such independence, in turn, equips them to serve as mediators between traditional and modern social formations.

Because of her keen interest in the mutually constitutive relationship between women and the city, Brunton's novels may be usefully considered within a framework of sociological accounts of modern urbanism, especially the work of Michel de Certeau and Georg Simmel. Brunton rewrites the domestic heroine by immersing her in an urban environment, but the experience is less that of the much-discussed female consumer of commercial culture than that of the "practitioner" of the city, Certeau's influential figure of individual urban presence.4 In constant motion, Brunton's heroines imprint the city on their bodies as they negotiate its streets by private carriage, hackney coach, and on foot. At the same time, their presence reformulates the meaning of urban space. Their identities profoundly shaped by their concrete encounters with town life, her protagonists exemplify a femininity that downplays the powers of sentiment and feeling to align itself with, rather than remove itself from, the pressures of the modern city. In an important way her fiction overlays the domestic model of femininity with the characteristics of what Simmel calls "the metropolitan type": a subjectivity fashioned out of the sharpened intellect, emotional reserve, and pragmatism generated by urban modernity.5 Although he wrote of the late nineteenth-century city, Simmel's analysis is equally relevant to an earlier period when the effects of rapid urbanization were becoming increasingly evident. Attending a performance of an oratorio during her first visit to London in 1812, Brunton herself [End Page 220] experienced the diversity and unexpectedness that characterized Simmel's metropolis. Having been encouraged to sit in the pit, she found herself in a heterogeneous audience, including drunken sailors and their women, and witnessed a near riot when a performer refused an encore. She later confided to her travel journal "I have seen Covent-Garden and a row!"6 Simmel's analysis, among the first to theorize a connection among spaces, spatial practices, and subjectivities, offers an explanation for the radical transformation experienced in the city by Brunton's women because he explicitly contrasts the psychological consequences of urban and rural life.7 To read her novels through Simmel's notion of the metropolitan type is to highlight largely erased dimensions of Brunton's modernity, and to suggest that women's fiction of the early nineteenth century stood in a more positive relationship to the city than generally recognized.

The Practices of City Space

Central to Simmel's account of modern life is the struggle by individuals "to preserve ... autonomy and individuality," a challenge made particularly acute in an unstable urban environment...

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