Love as Father Figure in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Fiction by Eleanor Wikborg (review)

139 argues that subjectivity is historically contingent—nothing new here—but claims that reading Erica Jong’s parodic Fanny in conjunction with Cleland opens Cleland’s text to a readerly reappropriation not constrained by Cleland’s misogyny . In Launching Fanny Hill, the incoherence of critical anthologies works positively to convey the strong diversity of recent Cleland scholarship. The volume thus serves as a valuable compass for the erotic geography of Cleland’s Hill. Todd C. Parker DePaul University ELEANOR WIKBORG. Love as Father Figure in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Fiction . Gainesville: Florida, 2002. Pp. xi ⫹ 184. $55. Haywood’s immensely popular first novel, Love in Excess, is now famous as an example of the amatory fiction of the early eighteenth century: a hymn to the irresistible force of sexual desire, titillating its readers with the multiple interrupted attempts of D’elmont to consummate his passion for Melliora. Another successful first fiction, Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, appearing in a changed and chaster fictional market nearly eighty years later, allows its heroine a choice between two very different suitors: she resists the passionate pursuer Delamere , and ultimately marries the far-lessvolatile Godolphin, who wins her love from a respectful distance. Yet it is not just in his ultimate success that D’elmont has more in common with Godolphin than Delamere. As Ms. Wikborg shows in this fine study, Godolphin deserves to win Emmeline because he is willing to restrain his own impulses— even the impulse to take revenge on the man who seduced his sister—in deference to her judgment and her wishes. D’elmont, while too much the creature of Haywood’s code of love to be able to ‘‘do more than want to comply with Melliora ’s appeal’’ to safeguard her honor, is fundamentally unlike the selfish Delamere : ‘‘he really is concerned, if ineffectually , to put Melliora’s welfare before his own gratification.’’ In their concern for the desirability of male self-restraint, Haywood and Smith share a central female fantasy that unites the women novelists of the period, cutting across critical divisions into early amatory and later respectable writers, and into radical and conservative thinkers: the fantasy of ‘‘the man who demonstrates at length his willingness to curb his power and discipline his desires for the sake of the woman he loves.’’ Ms. Wikborg explores such structures of desire across women’s fiction,describing plot and incident in lively detail. She is more interested in what happens than in how it is conveyed, with the result that writers as different in tone and technique as Manley, Elizabeth Griffith, and Austen sometimes sound like each other. But the strength of her approach is clear in the patternsthatemerge.Respondingtoastill patriarchal world in which Lockean individualism is in the ascendant, raising the issue of whether and how women can be autonomous persons, the novelists address women’s desires and fears through their treatment of fathers, father-figures, and lovers who act as quasi-paternal mentors. From Jane Barker’s Turpius— the father of the attempted rapist—to Austen’s Mr. Knightley—the fatherly lover who holds back till the heroine has discovered her own desire—they attestto the emotional significance of the fatherdaughter relation and to women’s need for male validation of their worth. While some treat the mentor with more skep- 140 ticism than others, nearly all are agreed that the heroine needs educating and that the best mentor is the one who will allow her some freedom. A contrasting figure, the ‘‘ideal patriarch ,’’ Sir Charles Grandison, is a point of reference for Richardson’s successors, but his invulnerable rightness is not echoed in the women’s heroes, who are valued for the imperfections that allow the heroine to escape being locked in a posture of eternal gratitude to them. In their portraits of mentors who sometimes get it wrong, as well as their more direct criticisms of the abuses of paternal power, women novelists are imagining alternatives to the cultural models of their time. They are seeking accommodation with patriarchy, not its overthrow, but they do create ‘‘a set of quiet resistances to the idea that the rational autonomous self must be gendered as primarilymale.’’Ms. Wikborg’s comprehensive...