Incest and the English Novel 1684–1814 by Ellen Pollak (review)

113 sivity’’ not only ignores how the ‘‘antecedent Pains and Labours of Criticism’’ determine the ‘‘Art, Culture or Discipline’’ adumbrated by Shaftesbury, but also neglects the complicated evidence that we have of Shaftesbury’s philosophical regimen, and of the intense philosophical life that informed his writing. My sense is that these pages are underresearched, and too captivated by the paradox of the Deist ‘‘moral sense’’ resembling supernaturalprovidence. ThesamecannotbesaidforhischapteronGarrick, an extraordinarily wide-ranging account of how the actor’s versatility became the locus of a challenge to Hanoverian theatrical theory, and its sentimental principle that actors can display convincingly only what they feel sincerely. The culminating chapter is on Clarissa. In what amounts to a major rereading of Richardson’s masterpiece, Mr. Gordon overturns two and a half centuries of ‘‘Mandevilleian (mis)readings’’ of the novel by showing how Richardson withdrawshis heroineentirelyfromthegameofpersuasion and relocates her (and, finally, her readers) to a sphere of involuntary, irresistible, and (as such) disinterested feeling. It is a typically elegant and original argument. The Power of the Passive Self is not without technical problems, although they are to a great extent obviated by Mr. Gordon’s ingenuity and boldness. By employing a coarse Foucauldian model of parallel, transhistorical discourses, Mr. Gordon commits himself to an unyieldingly stiff historiography. The economy of argument requires that Hobbes and Mandeville be discussed together in the Introduction and first chapter, so when Mr. Gordon comes to discuss Shaftesbury in chapter 4 (confusingly, right after a reading of Addison in chapter 3), the opportunity of considering Mandeville’s principal attacks on the Characteristicks (‘‘A Search into the Nature of Society,’’ added to the 1723 edition of the Fable of the Bees) is entirely missed.TheGarrickandRichardson chapters come in the wrong order. These chronological muddles (for whichtheFoucault industry is more to blame than Mr. Gordon) are a symptom of his more general reluctance to make adequate scholarly connections between authors. His interdisciplinarity leaves him lost somewhere between late-1980s critical theory (why Bourdieu?), old-fashioned history of ideas and straight literary scholarship. He is at his worst when practicing the last of these. He notices, for example, how a Hobbesian simile which links human passivity with the convulsive course of a ‘‘tennis-ball’’reoccurs inwritings by his opponent Bishop John Bramhall, and (much later) in Clarissa, without knowing the famous common source of the image in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. His publishers might have insisted that Mr. Gordon’s interminable quotations from recent secondary criticism, which must make up a good fifth of this otherwise compressed study, should be confined to the footnotes. Paddy Bullard St. Catherine’s College, Oxford ELLEN POLLAK. Incest and the English Novel 1684–1814. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2003. Pp. 199. $43.95. What Shelley called one of the ‘‘incorrect things’’ was a stock item in the literary imagination from Dryden on and has been analyzed by an array of specialists, from J. M. S. Tompkins, who called it nothing more than ‘‘an exciting accident’’ that writers in the period used for dramatic effect, to George E. Haggerty, Elizabeth Barnes, and 114 others who approach it from a variety of more sophisticated contemporary theoretical perspectives. Ms. Pollak’s book, however, is the first (and long overdue) full-length study of the topic. The book combines a sophisticated theoretical understanding of incestasadiscursive form with a set of rich textual analyses that study how different stories ofincestintersect with stories of patriarchy both to subvert and support them. Invoking the poststructuralist view of language as a tool that writes rather than captures history, Ms. Pollak cites Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, and others to argue that incest is a perfect figure for ‘‘the absence of origin that haunts all textuality.’’ We have been misled, she suggests, by uncritically buying into the Enlightenment narrative of the progress of knowledge, and this has led to some unfortunate results when it comes to understanding the true ‘‘cultural work’’ of incest narratives. The assumption that modern master narratives of anthropology and psychoanalysis, which are ‘‘themselves rooted in the Enlightenment ,’’ can explain early representations of incest, when, in fact, they are reconstructing them to serve the purposes of self-validation, has led us to miss the...