Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-Century Women Transforming Public and Private (review)

The goal of the collaborative project by Diane E. Boyd and Marta Kvande is not only to explore further the revolutionary moments that women, both literary and real, have enacted, but to reevaluate prior scholarship on the public/private binary. The collection of nine essays, written primarily by junior scholars, expounds on the grey area between the two spheres, highlighting in depth the complexity of binarisms in several ways. First, this work treats the topic itself; second, it is coedited by two scholars: one younger and the other more seasoned; third, the collection highlights newer readings over older ones; fourth, the collection is intentionally "stepping outside of hierarchy" (back flap) in academic publication. Binaries highly conflated within the collection itself (in title, editorship, and essay authorship) reveal the exactness with which people understand the bifurcated world of public and private.

The collection exposes not only revolutionary moments but also periods that endured and helped to encourage social reform where necessary. For example, the essay by Brett C. McInelly focuses on Methodist women who broke through gendered spheres to profess their faith, unashamedly prizing individual faith over societal restrictions. McInelly's essay contributes to the collection as it breaks through the academic binary of political and religious, one that tends in effect to prioritize the political over the religious, which, he argues, proves the "other[ing]" (136) of religious experience within academic circles. Aruna Krishnamurthy exposes how the poet Mary Collier disrupts the standard social conventions of the binary. She argues that the poet deliberately confounds notions of binary division between paid male laborers and unpaid women domestic farm tenders when society institutionalizes "the new competitive spirit between laboring men and women" (71). Allistaire Tallent's reading of French memoir-novel prostitutes as heroines calls into question a public/private divide when the first-person narration is written by male authors. These "hack writers" (119) were, Tallent proves, part of an underground literary sphere that, in hopes of subversive, clandestine publication, "ventriloquized" (119) women's voices and private experiences. The heroine-prostitute also blurred the rigid binary by conducting business in private spaces and equally provoking private moments in public.

Although the previous essays treat religious, social, and poetic themes, the majority in the collection is based and centered on the novel. Emily Smith elucidates the binary of art/nature in eighteenth-century writing when carving words into trees becomes revolutionary vandalism: engraving symbolizes a violent incision into yet another binary, that of the English/Canadian geographical divide. Furthermore, the epistolary genre of the novel destabilizes the geographical divide with the exchange of trans-Atlantic missives that undermine dominant discourses of love, sexuality, and linguistics. The epistolary form reappears in an essay by Marta Kvande in which she discusses the ruses played in both Evelina and Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph that counter the rash delineation of public/private. The letter writers wittingly play both spheres to their advantage, coyly using figures of speech as well as "a serious display of disobedience" (171).

Two chapters in the collection cleverly use literal images to deconstruct the paradigm. In Diane E. Boyd's essay, she convincingly proves how the coach as chronotope in Belinda represents a barrier breakdown, as it goes between the public and private, conforming at times to the needs of both. Likewise, Shea Stuart identifies artistic framing of public/private in Mansfield Park to explain how manor houses divided the public from the private by framing natural borders for the private purposes of scenic "emparkment" (209). Mansfield Park becomes its own "liminal space" (207) in relying on itself as private to re-create its own public functions.

The first and last articles appropriately "bookended" (24) the collection. Cheryl Nixon's work shows how, despite being legally voiceless, women defied the public/private paradigm in legal matters of the time. Using literature alongside legal archives, the author convincingly demonstrates in which manner real and fictional women of...