Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century ed. by Tiffany Potter (review)

The engagement of eighteenth-century women with popular culture, then and now, produces a few success stories, a few outright or near failures, and a large number of highly ambivalent outcomes—a fact that this collection amply demonstrates. Part I is compelling and cohesive. Ms. Potter closely reads Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That Pope trivializes Belinda and her interest in fashion offers no surprises; that Grahame-Smith’s zombies “provide a literalization of the threat of a social death in spinsterhood” proves an apt and entertaining premise. Ms. Potter’s juxtaposition of eighteenth- and twenty-first-century texts mirrors that of the collection; however, the choice of texts by male authors subtly undercuts the notion of women’s cultural contributions.

The remaining essays in Part I emphasize women’s ability to use and alter popular culture in ways that empower them and influence others. Berta Joncas focuses on ballad opera, a genre that “stereotyped, derided and censured women,” and how two singers, Lavinia Fenton and Kitty Clive, “shaped and popularized the works they performed” through careful manipulation of their performances of femininity. Paula Backscheider’s essay examines eighteenth-century revivals of Otway’s Venice Preserved, a popular play “available for volatile interpretations over time”; in particular, the actresses playing the part of Belvidera—Elizabeth Barry, Ann Barry, Susannah Cibber, and Sarah Siddons—could alter interpretation by emphasizing either pity or horror. Actresses also provide the focus of Jessica Munns’s essay, which demonstrates how “Female aristocrats and lower-class actresses were mutually involved in circuits of representation in which they drew on each other’s manners and appearance.” Last, Elaine Chalus examines how eighteenth-century women used fashion in order to make political statements and to influence political outcomes: “politicized fans . . . provided women with an additional way of expressing political opinions, commenting upon national and international developments, and adding to the overall politicization of the spaces through which they moved.”

If the majority of essays in Part I demonstrate that women could use popular culture to shape and influence public opinion, essays in Part II show the failure or near-failure of their efforts. Robert James Merrett show that English women cookbook writers privileged English bourgeois dishes over French haute-cuisine, nationalism, middle-class readership, and pressures from the publishing industry; however, “female cookbook authors contributed to the stratification that disadvantaged their gender” and “cookbooks addressing middle-class women impeded the thoughtful amalgamation of erudite and peasant cooking that leads to great cuisine.”

Isobel Grundy explores the “shifting fashions in the English female letter-writing subject, her voice and her self-construction, largely through the topic of fashion in its most basic sense (styles of clothing) and resistance to that kind of fashion,” with close readings of letters by Damaris Masham Cudworth, Lady Mary Pierrepont (later Wortley Montagu), and Mary Pendarves (Mrs. Delany). While all three women mention fashion in their letters, only Delany revels in providing details of fashionable dress. Mary Chadwick investigates riddle books, which were consumed largely by women from the middle stations with leisure; yet riddle books and riddles paradoxically critiqued this unproductive use of female time, with its use of conduct-book tropes and themes, as well as stereotypes of women. For Ms. Chadwick, Emma reveals the late eighteenth-century culture of enigma solving.

Holly Luhning examines Haywood’s amatory fiction to argue that Haywood “turned her intangible skills of intelligence, creativity, and acute social insights into a product—her writing—and in doing so created for herself a position of authority in which she possessed significant cultural currency.” Ms. Luhning’s close, persuasive reading of D’Elmont’s body in Love in Excess, shows how Haywood “subverts the popular image of masculine rake by exposing him to feminine disorders.”

Part III centers on twenty-first-century novelistic appropriations of eighteenth-century culture, as well as screen adaptations of the novels of Jane Austen. These are beyond the...