Reform or Ruin: "A Revolution in Female Manners"

R e fo r m o r R u in : "A R e v o lu tio n in F e m a le M a n n e rs" M I T Z I M Y E R S ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Charting domestic reformation in 1798, the TSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA A n n u a l R e g is t e r main­ tained that the French Revolution had 'Illustrated the connection between good morals and the order and peace of society more than all the elo­ quence of the pulpit, and the disquisitions of moral philosophers had done for many centuries." An early adherent of the view that the English grew Victorian as the French turned republican, this journalist sketches a cultural turnabout from the alarmingly prevalent "levity and licentious­ ness of French manners" in the upper ranks and the fashionable circles who mimicked them to reverence for religion, marriage, and domesticity as the guarantors of social cohesion.1 The R e g is t e r thus summarizes the interconnected topics of the escalating reform or ruin polemic which is a distinctive strand in the decade's ideological warfare, motifs milked for all they were worth not only by reactionaries, but also by reformers of every persuasion, from radicals to Evangelicals.2 Among these interlocking themes, woman's role is stellar. Long-term cultural and economic shifts —expanding female education, the increas­ ing impact of middle-class ethics and affluence, the rise of Evangelicalism —united with the explosive hopes and fears kindled by the French Revo­ lution to make woman's influence and activities a matter of grave con­ cern. In the new climate of moral seriousness engendered by the complex (and complexly used) example of dissolute France, the female population was recognized as vital to the nation's well-being. If the decay of states re­ sulted from a general depravity of manners, woman provided a focal 199 200 / MYERSZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA point for moral regeneration. Indeed, of all the dangers menacing Eng­ land, none, claimed that busy pamphleteer John Bowles, was so destruc­ tive to the "social machine" as female modesty sacrificed to Gallicized aristocratic fashion, "a much more formidable enemy than Buonoparte himself." Bowles's obsession with feminine manners stems from the (sup­ posedly) "obvious and indissoluble connection, which Providence has been pleased to establish between female chastity and the welfare and safety of civil society," a link endlessly rehearsed from the TSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA A n t i-J a co b in and the B r it is h C r it ic to scores of novels.3 Women moralists too called for "a revolution in female manners," for a reconstituted domestic ideal, as a key means of preserving and purifying the country, but, converting prob­ lem into opportunity, they maneuvered the issue with an adroit and ambi­ tious mastery which far outstrips the simplistic hysteria of such male reac­ tionaries as Bowles.4 This essay explores representative female writers' exploitation of moral reform as a woman's issue, challenging the stereo­ typical opposition of the ideologies of domesticity and feminism and sug­ gesting some ways of reading, some revisionist strategies for decoding the period's mentorial advice. "Changes of Times, and Fashions, still demand I New Lessons to in­ struct the Female Band," remarked one mid-century conduct book writer.5 No period more aptly illustrates his observation than the revolutionary decades, which witnessed an energetic proliferation of both radical and conservative directives to women. The conventional interpretation of the new lessons for females in that time of convulsive change has recently been reiterated by Lawrence Stone, whose formulation follows closely that of Maurice Quinlan forty years since. Quinlan's pioneering inquiry into how Victorianism antedated Victoria locates the nineties as a "turn­ ing point in English social history," the era when a conservative corpus of manners was fathered by reaction to the revolution and mothered by edu­ cators like Hannah More who lauded a newly created standard of wom­ anly excellence, the "model female." Quinlan reads the R ig h t s o f W o m a n as sui generis, a radical call for female self-assertion which leagued all other preceptors against the...