Enlightenment and Romance: Gender and Agency in Smollett and Scott by Robert P. Irvine (review)

65 trast to Shaftesbury’s connection of the beautiful with an ideal state order, later writers would refashion the beautiful to represent the private realm of polite sociability , valorizing sensibility and good taste. Although Addison and Steele, and particularly Addison, are given full creditfor their major roles in the complex discursive shifts in the meaning of beauty and also its relationships to virtue, few analyses of their words are included, aside from a short discussion of the Spectator passage on Addison’s ‘‘Man of Polite Imagination’’in the first chapter. The ‘‘Introduction ’’attributes this omission to the familiarity of most eighteenth-century scholars with Addison and Steele’s moral programs, and instead uses Joseph Highmore as an example. In general, Mr. Jones’stechniqueofusing less-knownfigurestoilluminatetreatments of the major theoreticians works well to create rich contexts. His attention to nuance is exemplary, as he deploys comparative readings to clarifyandrefine individual positions. Shaftesbury, for example , is effectively juxtaposed with Akenside and contrasted with Spence. Less appealing is the somewhat erratic punctuation, unless British and American practices of comma placement are diverging in increasingly bizarre ways. More basic problems with this study stem from the same sources that Johnson noted in Rambler 92: ‘‘It has been long observed that the idea of beauty is vague and undefined, different in different minds, and diversified by time or place.’’ Gender and the Formation of Taste is strongest in tracing how the idea is ‘‘different in different minds’’ and ‘‘diversified by time’’ during this period in England and, not surprisingly, weakest in coming to terms with the maddeningly ‘‘vague and undefined’’nature of theconcept . But Mr. Jones is admirably honest about this and other terminological instabilities in his analyses; the word ‘‘ambiguity ’’and associatedexpressionsrecur in the text. As Johnson himself admitted, ‘‘To trace all the sources of that various pleasure which we ascribe to the agency of beauty, or to disentangle all the perceptions involved in its idea, would, perhaps, require a very great part of the life of Aristotle or Plato.’’ Given such parameters, Mr. Jones’s convincing insights and astute analyses are significant achievements. Martine Watson Brownley Emory University ROBERT P. IRVINE. Enlightenment and Romance: GenderandAgencyinSmollett and Scott. Peter Lang: Bern, 2000. Pp. 225. $37.95. Bolingbroke seems to be the improbable hero of Mr. Irvine’s book, as it is his discourse (especially in The PatriotKing) that resuscitates the spirit of romance in the public sphere, providing a legitimization for romance in the novel, as it struggles to find an appropriate expression for subjectivity against the pressure of deterministic historical forces. Mr. Irvine ’s placing of Smollett in this world of shifting values is patient, if not entirely persuasive. In Roderick Random, adherence to traditional ‘‘country’’ values is contradicted by a sordid modern world of selfish materialism. The only refugefrom this pressure is into subjectivity, and rather against the critical grain Mr. Irvine points Random in that direction—a sentimental fiction before its time, owing more to Roderick’s wife Narcissa than it knew. In Humphry Clinker, Smollett’s one epistolary novel, the theme is pursued in 66 several parallel ways: 1) the satiric valetudinarian Bramble, castigator of Bath and London, succumbs later in the novel to the charms of Scotland—wherehealso regains his health; 2) Bramble is ‘‘feminized ’’ in the process, moving from his early impatience with fertility to the acknowledgment of his own natural son (Clinker himself); 3) this feminization foregrounds the letters of his niece Lydia , which represent a ‘‘rival novel’’within Clinker, and confirms the passing of authority and influence from the masculine to the feminine author; 4) all of these processes reflect and indeed enact the generic shift ‘‘from a humanist version of history . . . to an Enlightenment account of History.’’ Mr. Irvine’s close reading of Clinker makes a good case, but the drift of his argument requires elision and simplification and willful misreadings. Citing Jery’s letter from chez Smollett, with its reference to ‘‘female authors, who publish simply for the propagation of virtue,’’ he fails to recognize the evident irony of Jery’s description, which undermines rather than establishes female authority. Likewise, it is surely tendentious toassert that Lydia’s letters imply transformative ‘‘agency,’’ where those...