Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson by Bonnie Latimer (review)

In recent years, literary scholars have expressed a growing desire to move past Clarissa in order to consider the fresh terrain of Samuel Richardson’s largely overlooked final novel, Sir Charles Grandison. Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson amply rewards this new interest. Recognizing its importance in eighteenth-century literature and culture, Bonnie Latimer sets out to lift Sir Charles Grandison from its relative modern obscurity and install it as an essential text for those who study the eighteenth century. The argument of Making Gender is guided by the question, “How does Richardson’s canon—and perhaps even the mid-century novel—look different when viewed through the lens of Grandison?” (3). Rather than moving chronologically through Richardson’s oeuvre as critics usually do, Latimer organizes her analysis according to the “qualities essential to eighteenth-century ‘individuality’”—reason, moral agency, piety through performance, and the tension between singleness and communality—that Sir Charles Grandison so comprehensively explores (3). Making Gender illuminates Richardson’s interrogation of these qualities by tying his work to an impressive range of cultural contexts, including popular anti-female satire, prostitute narratives, Anglican devotional literature, and marriage writings related to the Hardwicke Act. Showing how Richardson engages with these discourses, Latimer argues that the novels “redefine the fictive self” and, in particular, that they “are instrumental in a cultural shift according to which women became imaginable as individuals” (1, 3). Chapter 1 begins, in the form of an epigraph, with Nancy Armstrong’s declaration that “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman,” and Latimer’s indebtedness to Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) is apparent throughout the book.

Building on Armstrong’s seminal work, Latimer identifies reason as the central quality of Richardson’s construction of female value and moral discrimination. It is his heroines’ sophisticated understanding that alters novelistic discourse in favour of female individuality. Chapter 1 sets the stage for Richardson’s intervention by explaining how Scriblerian tropes of female irrationality “bleed” into the early novel (21). “By exploiting and superseding the logic of early and mid-eighteenth-century figurings of femininity,” Latimer contends, “Richardson’s heroines suggest themselves as differentiated, rational, critical participants in culture” (10). Throughout the book, Latimer offers incisive and convincing readings of how Richardson’s protagonists exploit discourses of the period to their advantage. Yet, by establishing Richardson’s heroines as “novel” alternatives to the conventions of anti-female prose and satire, she perhaps overlooks his appropriation of older models of female heroism—the virtuous Lady in John Milton’s Comus, for example, and classical archetypes like Lucrece. A broader look at the female representations with which Richardson was familiar might reveal how the perception of women was not as uniform as Latimer’s attention to Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift would lead us to believe.

While Richardson’s originality in rethinking gender may be overstated, the complexity of his engagement with the meaning of virtue is not. Although the book’s main focus is on the construction of the Richardsonian heroine as a “novel individual,” far more interesting to me is how Latimer so cogently scrutinizes the intricate ideological texture of the novels (7). By providing a “recuperative reading of Richardson’s slippery mixture of radicalism and conservatism, his innovation and recalcitrance,” Latimer explores what I believe to be the reason for Richardson’s current appeal: his ability to funnel the competing ideologies of eighteenth-century culture into rich, contradictory novels, thus achieving a sophistication of moral vision that discredits the perception of him as merely a didactic writer (6). For example, chapter 4 embarks from William Warner’s reading of Clarissa’s rhetorical cunning to explain how the “rhetorically manipulative, artificing nature of Richardson’s heroines and their writing” is a feature of...