Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel by Helen Thompson (review)

51 or even contradict her conclusions. Throughout, she argues that the sentimental novel had to be, at least, pushed to the periphery. H. Rider Haggard’s She and Bram Stoker’s Dracula exemplify the novel’s inability to incorporate sensibility in its progress toward creating citizen-subjects. The final chapter parallels the movement of feminist criticism with the direction the nineteenthcentury novel took, specifically that ‘‘formulating a more adequate notion of the human is to find a way of articulating what we lack in positive rather than negative terms.’’ This way of writing and reading, she says, is in contrast to reading novelistically, that is identifying ‘‘a lack in the protagonist that he [sic] must overcome.’’ Mostly about the nineteenth-century novel, this book is also thought-provoking and stimulating to Scriblerian readers. It works through pairs and parallels, and Robinson Crusoe seems to become a miniature version of her history of the individualistic novel character . She sees young Crusoe as the perfect example of the bad subject and misfit who through the accumulation of intellectual property transforms himself into the self-governing subject and then a figure of discipline. Although she describes him as having ‘‘solved the problem implicit in . . . the social contract, namely, how to produce individuals who want to submit to the state,’’ she finds this Crusoe less interesting and to have lost the special kind of misfit ‘‘moral energy.’’ As colonial governor, Crusoe, however, is frightening and more individualistic as he beats that out of others. Ms. Armstrong says that Roxana ‘‘is simply too hostile to respectable society for her to remain there,’’ and yet in his cynical, exploitative control of the island ’s people and in Farther Adventures , doesn’t Crusoe approach deserving to be eradicated ‘‘in the name of humanity ’’? His willingness to lie, to kill and get others to kill, his exploitation of the island’s resources and later neglect of the island’s settlers are the rails on which empire ran. Moreover, he abounds in ‘‘moral energy’’ in Farther Adventures, a book sold and read with the first volume throughout the century . In it, he is expelled from a series of communities for his individualistic judgments and actions carried out from his excessive moral energy. Ms. Armstrong’s allegory exposes the work novels do and suggests that, rather than with feminism, the book should have concluded with postcolonialism. Every novel she chose closely to examine bears traces of British imperialism and efforts to contain the Other. Paula Backscheider Auburn University HELEN THOMPSON. Ingenuous Subjection : Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth -Century Domestic Novel. Philadelphia : Pennsylvania, 2005. Pp. 278. $59.95. Why does Pamela give in? After spending so long demanding to be treated as a spiritual and moral equal to Mr. B., why does Pamela, once she is married , feel that she should submit to Mr. B’s stringent rules for wifely behavior? Readers have lurched along with Pamela ’s awkward personality shift, and critics have sought to explain it. Ingenuous Subjection, however, gives us an invaluable political and philosophical context for understanding this conundrum . Looking at the phenomenon of wifely subjection across eighteenth- 52 century fiction from Behn to Burney, Ms. Thompson sees the feminine practice of compliance as a complex negotiation of emergent ideas of gender and selfhood in the eighteenth century. Ingenuous Subjection focuses on the feminist dimensions of the intersection of eighteenth-century political theory and the emergence of the novel as a dominant genre. This territory has not been explored significantly since Carol Kay and Carole Pateman addressed it in the late 1980s. Since then, feminist work on the rise of the novel has been more concerned with the materialist (even sociological) approaches suggested by Marxist or Foucauldian theory. In returning to the relationship between early modern political theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume and representations of women and marriage in the novel, Ms. Thompson brings the work of more recent thinkers, such as Judith Butler, to bear on the thorny problem of women’s subjection, advancing the conclusions of Kay and Pateman. If most political theory imagines an unsexed form of political virtue that contractually grants power to a sovereign , how can we account for...