Reading and Writing Women's Lives: A Study of the Novel of Manners ed. by Bege K. Bowers and Barbara Brothers (review)

250Rocky Mountain Review in criticism alongside more traditional methodology. There is much to ponder, agree with, and dispute for the serious Mörike scholar, and numerous insights to be gleaned by the casual reader of Mörike. ROGER CROCKETT Washington and Lee University BEGE K. BOWERS and BARBARA BROTHERS, eds. Reading and Writing Women's Lives: A Study of the Novel of Manners. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990. 236 p. Assumingthat novels written by and about women deal only with the domestic and personal, critics neglect the novel ofmanners as the subject ofserious study, the editors ofthis excellent volume of essays argue. Critics agree on only two things, they note: Jane Austen wrote novels of manners, and these novels "present something of the 'social customs, manners, conventions, and habits of a definite social class at a particular time and place' " (4). The vagueness of this definition allows them to read the novel as narrative version of the comedy of manners, a reading at odds with nineteenth-century responses to the best known practitioners. Bege K. Bowers and Barbara Brothers define the novel "as focusing on the individual in relation to society," a focus which, as the twelve essays demonstrate, includes the realistic study ofcharacter and historical accuracy of social presentation, and can include moral, political, social, and aesthetic concerns. The volume opens with a convincing reading of Emma as a novel of psychological realism. To understand Emma at the deepest level, Gloria Sybil Gross argues, we must see her actions as the logical consequence ofunconscious, but psychologically determined motives. The famous incident ofEmma's cruelty to Miss Bates, for example, is an instance ofhostility "displaced from her father, for whom it is intended" (23). Emma's hostility stems from the "ritualized imprisonment" Mr. Woodhouse imposes on her, an imprisonment which, while elevating her above all other women, at the same time separates, frustrates, and suppresses her (22). Gross reads evidence of Emma's suppression throughout the text, especially in her adoption of"Harriet as a kind ofsurrogate who can freely indulge prurient interests" (25). Other essays, notably Marylea Meyersohn's, also on Austen, and those on Edgeworth, Eliot, James, and Pym, demonstrate the writers' successes in portraying the individuality and complexity of the self, a far cry from the types promulgated in the comedy of manners. The majority ofthe essays also reject the conservative acceptance ofsociety implied in early definitions, noting instead the political and social critiques. Marie Edgeworth, as Janet Egleson Dunleavy shows, structured her fiction in accord with the novel of manners, but ideas were always her first concern. Finding the "entire society" the problem in Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, Maureen T. Reddy shows that "social problem" and novel of manners are not exclusive terms (68). Gaskell's women are still trained to be "pleasing females," despite the loss ofmoral core consequent on such training, Book Reviews251 and despite the drastic social changes she depicts (71). Similar archaic trends prevail in Barbara Pym's mid-twentieth-century novels: women are free to engage in public life, but the "[mjanners, rituals, and expectations" of the nineteenth century prevail, Barbara Brothers shows, and women continue to struggle against outdated definitions (168). The novels ofTrollope, Eliot, James, and Pym depict disharmony between tainted societies and principled individuals, disharmony which individuals cannot surmount, but to which they must accommodate. James R. Kincaid and Brothers both reveal the fiction inherent in the nineteenth-century division ofpublic and private lives: "[t]he private realm is riddled through with political forces; it always has been" (103). Kincaid's discussion of TAe Duke's Children supports his assertion that "instead of a conservative affirmation of the harmonious beauty of things as they are, Trollope can leave us with the ironic possibility that these things as they are are simply all we have, comfortless and disheartening as that maybe" (94). Bege K. Bowers also shows that the marriage of Dorothea and Will at the end of Middlemarch is not a liberation from society: despite his principles, Will is "willing to accept a settlement from Bulstrode, if necessary, in order to make his way in the world" (116). Like Trollope and Pym, Eliot does not...