Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers (review)

Elizabeth Kraft's book defends a thesis that, on the face of it, seems absurd: the amorous fictions of women writers like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood, which created scandal in their own day, have at their core a strong ethical component, one that is absorbed and re-articulated in later fictions by Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald. Instead of tantalizing and titillating, such matriarchs of the English novel — increasingly seen as feminine counterparts to the patriarchal triad of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding — were articulating a specifically feminine form of desire, which is responsive to the demands of an other. Within an exchange of "double desire," such writers therefore anticipate the ethical utopia envisioned later by, for example, Immanuel Kant: a realm of universal subjectivity, free from the dehumanizing force of objectification.

If these women could not find a reasonable model of ethical desire within the writings of contemporary men, Kraft argues, they did have models within Scripture. Turning especially to three Biblical women — Sarah, Rebecca, and the anonymous speaker of the Song of Songs — Kraft traces what she describes as a feminine erotics, which refuses the possessive inequalities of male desire. Sarah's enigmatic laugh within the tent of Abraham, for example, is shown to represent "the gift of laughter and joy in love" (20). Rebecca's marriage to Isaac embodies an ideal, in which "self and other meet without possession" (27). And the speaker of the Song of Songs possesses the freedom and individuality to speak openly "of mutual passion and of sexual difference and of transcendence through erotic love" (29). Taken as a threesome, such women exemplify a desire that is redemptive rather than demeaning. According to the theory of Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher whose ethical writings underpin Kraft's book, desire offers a means of experiencing the infinite — but only when it is "chiastic," symmetrically overlapping in the manner of a Greek "X." Some of the best moments in the book come as Kraft, aided by commentary from Luce Irigaray, traces the ramifications of this chiastic desire: "the point of crossing is really a moment of surrender, an admission of inadequacy or vulnerability, in which one voice demands of the other voice 'interrupt me'" (26).

The bulk of the book extends this examination of chiastic desire to the case of the eighteenth-century novel, more particularly to works written by women about women. (The only exception is a brief look at Richardson's novels, which are seemingly too important to ignore — but even this discussion focuses strongly on female reactions to his work.) The analysis, which is often quite illuminating, proceeds by viewing certain Biblical heroines as antecedents, or in Kraft's words "paradigms," for heroines of the long eighteenth century. Thus, Deborah, the paradigmatic woman of politics, models the political struggles of Isabella within Behn's "History of the Nun." Esther, the great interpreter of signs, models the type of "hieroglyphics of desire" found within works by Manley and Haywood. Hagar's sufferings model those of Ellis within Burney's The Wanderer. And Lot's daughters, who find themselves in an erotic quagmire, model the situation faced by Miss Milner and her daughter Matilda in Inchbald's A Simple Story. The argument is not that Biblical texts were directly influential: "The older texts are not mined as source material, but are invoked as records that speak to perennial concerns, especially about love, sexual desire, and spiritual longing" (1). This assertion will no doubt invite methodological questions: could not the links be drawn more strongly, perhaps by demonstrating the cultural capital of Biblical narratives as a model for ethical thought? And, if these ethical concerns are "perennial," especially for women, then do they not compromise the uniqueness of the answers offered by such writers? But such questions may misread the intentions of the project, and the present reviewer, for...