The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775 by Betty A. Schellenberg (review)

Book Reviews Betty A. Schellenberg. The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996. 165p. John E. Loftis University of Northkrn Colorado The past decade has been especially rich in studies ofthe early English novel and its backgrounds, and Betty Schellenberg's The Conversational Circle adds yet another new and valuable perspective. Schellenberg informs us about a group of novels created on principles entirely different from the conflictual, linear narratives of the once standard repertoire. Although she concludes that this different narrative project ultimately fails, her provocative study of novels previously considered "minor" revises our understanding ofthe eighteenth-century novel and challenges some assumptions underlying our reading practices and evaluative standards. The conversational circle of her title describes a social and narrative mode of mid-eighteenth-century England in which the motives of"adventure or courtship [are] replaced by settled life, motion by fixity, linear temporality by circular repetition, the closet by the tea table" (5). Thus the "socially threatening individualistic desire" of the male protagonist in conflict with his society which generates the action ofmany novels is replaced by a plot "that models a community of consensus as the ideal unit from which a stable society is constructed" (4). Schellenberg frames her study ofthese novels with early and late chapters focusing on works by Sarah Fielding, with DavidSimple as her prototypical instance ofthe conversational circle and Volume the Lastas the fullest exploration and critique of that model. In her middle chapters, she offers provocative readings ofRichardson's PameL· Part II and Sir Charles Grandison, Henry Fielding's Amelia, Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, and Smollet's Humphrey Clinker. Each of the novels Schellenberg discusses (except for the prototypical conversational circle in DavidSimple??? the insulated family circle in PameL· Part II) presents a feminized conversational circle as an alternate model of narrative and social organization and also demonstrates the limitations or failures ofthat model in the face of social and material realities. Her discussion of Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall nicely epitomizes her overall argument. On the one hand, this "utopian community ofwomen" (88) represents the eighteenth century's "fullest realization ofthe ideal offeminized and intimate conversational community" (88). Their "exchange economy oflanguage" (93) for openly sharing sentiments mirrors their shared property. The community achieves authority as a model because it possesses four culturally important qualities: conversational skill, the power of SPRING 1998 +ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW + 81 action, rational control over the passions, and moral purity (97). As narrative, moreover, the novel rejects the plots ofindividual desire, both the marriage plot and the plot offemale victimization (94-95). On the other hand, the "exclusion of the masculine" because it embodies "individualistic and socially disruptive desire" paradoxically prevents the society's "free expansion into the larger social sphere" and thus guarantees its limited scope (89). Authoritative in its isolation, this community of women nevertheless remains marginalized in its larger heterosexual cultural context (101). Similarly, the dependency ofwomen on men in Grandison (66), the inability to coordinate family and urban society m Amelia (86), the exclusion of the female and rehabilitation of the male in the domestic economy in Humphrey Clinker (1 1 5), and the fundamental materiality, especially economic abuses, ofsociety in Volume the Last (127) also signal the failure of the conversational circle as a social and thus narrative alternative. Rather than revising the canon, Schellenberg says she is merely proposing "a new grouping that foregrounds features that have been overlooked" (3-4). She rightly concludes, however, that this "rich fictional experimentation" deserves more serious critical attention than it has received (132). She offers us new readings of some eighteenth-century novels and a clearer understanding of how broadly and variously the novel conceived of its possibilities in its early years. And ifour literary tastes and values are constructed by our educational and scholarly backgrounds, then Schellenberg's study also offers us an occasion and an avenue for reexaminingour reading experiences and theways in which we evaluate novels. Elsa Nettels. Language and Gender in American Fiction: HowelL·, James, Wharton, and Cather. Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 1997.214p. Patricia VerStrat Washington State University Elsa Nettels's overarching project heredoesn't seem particularly innovative or new...