Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney by Jessica A. Volz (review)

In Joseph Addison's periodical The Spectator, he remarks that "words, when well chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a Description often gives us more lively Ideas than the Sign of Things themselves" (qtd. on 1). Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth, and Burney tracks the use by these women writers of visuality in their novel writing, the careful shaping of pictures in the reader's mind that Addison describes. In Volz's view, this formal practice indicates the four writers' self-conscious awareness of the role of culture in shaping the experience of sight, be it imagined or literal (4). All four embraced visuality, Volz argues, in order to convey to readers otherwise inexpressible themes, so that even undetailed descriptions could "enhance[e] [the reader's] view beyond the reality" alluded to but neither directly shown nor completely described (1).

The book tracks the ways that works by these four women writers showcase a paradigm and literary technique that can also be observed in other contemporary novels. These writers in particular emphasize what Volz identifies as "visuality's inherence" in works from this period and her text serves "as a lens through which the evolution of strategic communications, visual and verbal portraiture and definitions of cultural identity can be viewed and interpreted" (214). Volz presents her findings nonchronologically, to make visuality's "inherence" more apparent. She takes a lot of what is familiar about these authors' styles (Austen's free indirect discourse, Radcliffe's Gothic convention, Edgeworth's male narrators, Burney's style) and expounds upon them under the theoretical umbrella of cultural and gender-bound visuality, the text's methodology. Volz's treatment of visuality's variant nature makes her work stand out in the larger body of critical work that explores how women novelists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century responded to the culture of patriarchy in their writing.

Volz explains that "seeing became distinctly self-conscious and culturally choreographed" as, with the popularity of publications like the aforeformented Spectator as well as The Female Spectator "looking itself became visible" (5). Visuality possesses a concreteness, but one that is able to be manipulated through efficient use of language. Volz's clearest use of the concept is her use of it to discuss how visuality "operates as a functional continuum linking the limits of visual description and verbal depiction," whereby visuality "resists prescriptive formulas" (11). She refers to Murray Cohen's work on English linguistic practices to emphasize that by the end of the eighteenth-century, there is a distinct shift in the way writers view their linguistic power, seeing themselves as struggling against the limits of language. This shift is a culturally conditioned one and enables visuality to function as another mode of expression, bridging the gap between what can and cannot be expressed. In the works that Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney explores, the "visual techniques and manipulation of self-referential coordinates show that societal perceptions of 'model' heroines were beginning to allow for some display of human fallibility and self-direct views, even if the preference for classical conceptions of taste prevailed" (20). This sense of women's fallibility invites an ideological shift that has direct bearing on verbal and visual expression. While Volz remarks that there was not necessarily a watershed moment, the late eighteenth-century exhibits how "visuality, more than free indirect discourse, provided women novelists with a discreet means of shifting views and viewpoints in order to show that even if their heroines conformed outwardly, they were beginning to see and think in ways that called appearances and patriarchal authority in question" (22). Each chapter addresses a different woman novelist, each bearing the weight of her gender and the cultural restrictions surrounding it, while showing the implicit power of thematizing and subsequently morphing these restrictions to offer a new insight of female expression, whereby they "become heroines...