25 July 2004 at 12:18 PM, post #56

#12-unrevised Brown, Gillian. "Consent, Coquetry, and Consequences." American Literary History 9.4 (Winter 1997): 625-52.

Gillian Brown examines Hannah Webster Foster’s critique of coquetry in The Coquette, viewing coquetry as a “critique and an appropriation of consent” (627). Agency, writes Brown, is not enough for the heroine of an 18th century seduction story. Though coquetry implies a certain level of female self-determination, “what Foster delineates in Eliza’s practice of consent is the limits in which consent always operates” (626). Brown looks to Lockean consent theory, or the idea that the consent of the governed establishes legitimate government, to explain the social system which operates around female consent and the subversiveness of coquetry, the refusal to give or deny this consent.

Brown devotes pages to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s depiction of the coquette, his denial of the existence of rape, and view that woman, created to serve man, is by nature sexually consenting. Compounded with the dissimulation inherent in the idea of coquetry and the historical identification of women as deceptive, Brown paints a picture of the opposition faced by feminist readers of seduction stories. She cites Catherine Macauley as a critic of the 1790s who responded to Rousseau with anticoquetry rhetoric that placed blame on the actively consenting woman, not the entire gender, and believed that coquetry derived from social inequality between genders.

Brown examines the disjunction between consent and consequences, the association of coquetry with monarchical power, and the very idea of female consent in a society which still often viewed women as property. She goes on to discuss Charlotte Temple’s ambiguous consent as well as evidence in the seduction story—destroyed and created bodies as proof of consent and the subversiveness of eliminating these elements from a story, as was done in The Coquette.

On the subject of determinism, Brown writes, “Converting the liberal paradox of freedom and determinism into a causal sequence, both narratives [The Coquette and The Power of Sympathy] aim to identify an accountable agent, to reduce the number of actors or agencies active in consent to one authorizing agent or source” (638). Blame is thus placed on the coquette, her seducer, and the practice of coquetry itself.

21 July 2004 at 3:57 PM, post #55

#11-unrevised. Carey, Janet Eldred and Peter Mortensen, Gender and Writing Instruction in Early America: Lessons from Didactic Fiction. Rehetoric Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Fall 1993. P. 25-53. Eldred and Mortensen address the dearth of eighteenth century composition research, citing such rare exceptions as Dennis Baron's Grammar and Good Taste. They examine the period between the American Revolution and the "rise of the Republican Mother and female academies in the last decades of the 1700s," with special interest paid to letters, novels and other such forums for female rhetoric (27).

Hannah Webster Foster's instructive novel, The Boarding School, is described as "at least one woman's imagined ideal of composition instruction for women in the new nation" (28). Foster's preceptress character tells anecdotes meant to fill young girls with virtue, guard them against the seducer's rhetoric, impress upon them the danger of illiteracy. Eldred and Mortensen argue that Foster turns sensationalism to the purpose of highlighting its opposite, morality.

Eldred and Mortenson discuss the female academies after the Revolution, before which girls were often compelled to read, but not to write. Female academies were a form of secondary education for women, offering academic and not ornamental studies. Foster's fictional boarding school, Harmony Grove, boasted a curriculum of "physical exercise, productive free time, moral lessons, and academic instruction" (35). The idea was to cultivate reason, not rote learning. "The aim of a woman's education is twofold: to be an interesting conversant, even in the company of men, and to be a teacher of young children" (43). Further, the authors claim that Foster meant to show society's responsibility for women's performance, and discredit the popular logic that women are defective by nature.

The epistolary form, write Eldred and Mortensen, was particularly prominent as an art which women could perfect. Letter-writing guides like Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind encouraged morality and craft in correspondence, which was meant to be public more than personal.

The authors conclude that Foster's text is a useful supplement to factual primary source material and a "point of departure for inquiring into multiple forms of literacy" in 1790s Connecticut (44). Final reflections are made on the develoment of the Carnegie Center of Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky.

14 July 2004 at 3:41 PM, post #53

#10-unrevised

Krause, Sydney J. “Ormond: Seduction in a New Key.” American Literature, Vol 44, No. 4 (Jan., 1973), 570-584.

Krause opposes Donald Ringe’s point that Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond is an artistic failure. He cites the book’s unusually complex seduction story and the “ironic variation on the stock situation of a master seducer being mastered” (571). The seduction, writes Krause, is more protracted and subtle than in many works of gothic and sentimental literature, and the growing resistance of the heroine and boldness of the hero create a heightened tension within known moral prohibitions.

Krause moves into a study of the explicitness of seduction scenes in sentimental literature and gothic novels of the late eighteenth century. The muted or implied seductions in Ormond, Richardson’s Clarissa, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple are expanded into more explicit scenes in gothinc novels like The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Monk, and The Italian. Krause points out that these novels are concerned mainly with the practical implications of seduction, whereas Brockden Brown delved into the psychological implications.

The rest of Krause’s article is an analysis of the text of Ormond. Constantia is a sympathetic heroine who is actually attracted to her seducer and Ormond is a highly rational and enlightened man, not a “single-minded gothic villain” (578). Krause summarizes the novel’s plot at length. The end of the novel, in which Constantia stabs Ormond, gaining physical mastery over him, and in which Ormond’s argument for sex free from moral disgrace stands unrefuted, supports Krause’s point that Ormond is a seduction story of outstanding irony and complexity.

14 July 2004 at 1:55 PM, post #51

#9, unrevised.

Tennenhouse, Leonard. “Libertine America.” A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11.3 (1999) p. 1-28.

Tennenhouse challenges Ann Douglas’ claim that American reading tastes in the end of the eighteenth century gradually shifted from masculine to feminine and from an “authentic American tradition of letters” to popular fiction. He reviews the criticism which supports Douglas’ theory of the feminization of American readership and outlines modern critics who oppose Douglas such as Shirley Samuels, Julia A. Stern, and Elizabeth Barnes. Then he constructs an argument that American readers saw themselves as neither feminine nor masculine in the way that Douglas implies. He also suggests that the figure of the libertine in this “feminized” literature was a social experiment: “The seduction stories so popular during the early republic offered an American readership experiments in imagining just who could marry whom, thus new ways of reproducing class distinctions” (6).

Variations within the seduction genre tell us that it is not a heroine’s education or sexual restraint which determine the outcome of her story. It is the “interiority,” or the moral and emotional struggle within the heroine, vital in British seduction stories such as Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela which Tennenhouse points out as lacking in American seduction stories. He posits that the American seduction story replaces female interiority with a preoccupation with men’s relationships with other men through the economic and social medium of women. With regard to “the impact of libertinage on kinship relations” and class privilege he analyzes William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (8).

Tennenhouse writes that when the novel became popular in the nineteenth century, the libertine transgressed boundaries of race as well as class. He describes Cassy’s seduction by her white owner in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a seduction story, her owner the traditional libertine. “Once race is entangled with kinship through the institution of slavery there seems to be no way to legitimate the family produced by the libertine” (20). Tennenhouse also examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables as a novel in which a libertine must interfere repeatedly with two houses of different social standing before they can be united.

Tennenhouse concludes that the disruptions of the American libertine infuse the reader with the desire to save the “common collective body” of the nation (24).

02 July 2004 at 2:09 PM, post #33

Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1997.

#1
Stern proposes that "those eighteenth-century novels best remembered for impassioned excess...contemplate the possibility that the power of genuine sympathy could revivify a broadly inclusive vision of democracy" (2). Stern suggests that the sensationalism of these 1790s novels gives voice to "invisible Americans": the poor and marginalized factions of society. Stern writes in her introduction, "I hope to reveal an unappreciated level of novelistic creativity--one that expresses a dialectic of inclusion against exclusion, thereby enacting and to various degrees discomposing the way an elitist culture contains the dissent at its margins. The constitutive power and simultaneous unraveling of sympathy as an operative cultural fantasy become the abiding metaphors through which eighteenth-century American fiction figures problems of social and political cohesion" (3). Stern devotes chapters to the study of "fellow feeling" in Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Forster's The Coquette, and Charles Brockdon Brown's Ormond.

In the titular chapter, Stern provides a brief historical sketch of the 1790s as well as a discussion of spectacle, sympathy, trauma, post-Revolutionary grief, the "feminization of narrative voice," (13) and epistolarity. She also focuses on depictions of slavery and incest in prominent novels of the decade, among those previously mentioned, Charles Brockdon Brown's Wieland and William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy.

The second chapter, "Working through the Frame: the Dream of Transparency in Charlotte Temple," explores the cultural significance of seduction and the "problem of female dissent from patriarchal authority" (34). It pays close attention to Rowson's use of structure to communicate the "psychic separateness" of melancholia (60) as well as meaning, maternal sympathy and separation.

The third chapter, "Beyond 'A Play about Words': Tyrannies of Voice in The Coquette, examines two opposing modes of sympathy set forth in the novel--one connected to "the idea of a material self-sufficiency that enables the transcendence of personal 'interest'" and one connected to "an understanding of the commonweal predicated on the well-being of solitary citizens" (73). Stern addresses the Coquette's implications about the propriety of female possession of political voice, taking into account ideas of female love, "fancy" and spectacle.

The fourth and last chapter, "A Lady Who Sheds No Tears: Liberty, Contagion, and the Demise of Fraternity in Ormond" addresses the text's post-Revolutionary unraveling of sympathetic relations, the link between liberty and violence, and misrepresentation.

#2
Fisher, Carl. "The Crowd and the Public in Godwin's Caleb Williams." Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta, Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s. Michigan State University Press: Michigan,1999. 47-67.

Fisher examines the relationship between the individual and the public in Caleb Williams to understand "the essential interaction of the individual and the collective in the polarized political world of the 1790s" (48). Fisher suggests that Godwin is critiquing the "heavy-handed paternalism of the gentry" and subordination of a public who become "agents for the status quo, unaware of either the need or the possibility of change" (48). Caleb Williams is here interpreted to be a response to Edmund Burke's conservatism in the wake of the French Revolution.

Fisher goes on to highlight Godwin's "sense of an information-based social economy," (52) pointing out the abuse of information in the instance of Falkland's unjust libel of Caleb, with which he draws a parallel to the handbills distributed to denounce Thomas Paine. He writes that Godwin delineates the public sphere as a world of rationalism and high-minded debate, while the popular sphere is retrogressive and vulgar; these two must be "bridged by rational discourse" (52). The fear of impotence in this popular sphere governs the characters of the novel, as Fisher illustrates with textual references.

Fisher claims that Godwin employs specific plot devices in a conscious critique of popular culture--particularly Caleb's attempts to live in the margins of society and his final inability to wrest himself from the tyrannical public sphere. However, Caleb's resort to rational discourse instead of violence at the novel's climax, or the moment of revolution, points to Godwin's construction of "a reader who will not be violently transgressive, but who can develop a new sensibility of social relations (61). Fisher writes that Godwin "hopes to bridge the critical 'inequality of information' which defines history" (62) and draw his common reader from the popular to the public sphere.

#3
Benedict, Barbara M. "Radcliffe, Godwin, and Self-Possession in the 1790s." Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta. Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s. Michigan State University Press: Michigan,1999. (47-67).

Barbara Benedict argues that William Godwin's Caleb Williams is influenced by Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho on the grounds that both works "portray curiosity as a cultural ambition that dangerously sexualizes identity and threatens the very integrity of the self" (89). Despite Godwin and Radcliffe's ideological differences, Benedict points out their textual critiques of despotism and sentimental excess, as well as the value they place on the cultivation of rational understanding.

The curiosity of the protagonists of the two novels, she writes, leads them to question repressive social custom and seek social equality. The values implied by these actions place the writers in the tradition of "post-revolutionary rejections of political oppression" (91). However, in both cases, inquiry compromises the virtue of the protagonists and the stability of society. "Their curiosity, the same impulse that drives them to seek the truth and see justice done, marks them as discontented, possessed by irrational, antisocial urges, even superstitious: motivated by impulses antagonistic to neoclassical ideals of control and self-possession" (95). Benedict examines this paradox and the literary-historical treatment of curiosity.

Benedict goes on to differentiate between the outcomes of curiosity in the two novels: Radcliffe's Emily learns to control her curiosity, while Godwin's Caleb does not. Emily's final obedience to patriarchy is constituted as "reason" and cures her of the crime of curiosity. Caleb's curiosity, on the other hand, is his tyrannical ruling passion and his downfall, or "the product of reason turned into passion" (99).

Benedict concludes with a study of the sexualized sense of self in these works, "the tendency of curiosity to fragment identity" (102), "the dynamic between the possessing self and the possessed self" (105), and mankind's "immutable, appetite-driven nature" (105).

#4
McLean, Clara D. "Lewis's The Monk and the Matter of Reading." Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta, Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s. Michigan State University Press: Michigan,1999. (47-67).

Clara McLean encourages the reader of Mathew Gregory Lewis's The Monk to approach the text as the characters within approach their own mysteries; "as the mystery deepens it becomes apparent that the urge to pursue it is as much carnal as rational--a ravenous animal digging" (111). McLean stresses the sexual nature of the male explorations of female secrets, the indistinguishability of the veil from the female form, and the "worming" action of the characters and narrative of the novel toward truth or understanding.

McLean pursues this "worming" idea at length. Referring to Lewis' textual use of the phrase "worm out the secret" (cited in Lewis, 213), McLean extends the idea of worming to the investigation of mystery, or the pursuit of knowledge, as well as to the reader's investigation of text. "A deliberate twinning and overlapping of the rational pursuit of knowledge and the distinctly irrational pursuit of animal lust goes on throughout The Monk, in ways which, as I will elaborate, carry broader implications about the possibilities and limitations of any reading of the evidence" (115). This worming, writes McLean, is often toward a sexual goal represented by the rose, which "invites penetration but suggests the ideal of an infinite deferral" (116). McLean illustrates this point with references to the deflowering of Matilda and Antonia, and the idea that the deflowered woman vanishes, the veil of her virtue torn away. McLean thus equates Ambrosio's "desire to penetrate virgin space" with his "addiction to discovery" (117). She moves into a Freudian analysis of function of the worm, and puts the concept in context with references to Michel Foucault and the Marquis de Sade.

Next, McLean addresses the depiction of desire in the novel. She writes that "There is a kind of anorexic logic at work here, a paradoxical logic by which even as the body disappears into that insubstantiality required by desire, it becomes nothing but flesh, just as tissues wasting away become waste" (122). The worm finally renders Ambrosio's own flesh thus irrelevant, which McLean interprets as a possible feminization of Ambrosio.

Finally, McLean points out that the reader repeats the structure of the worm and the rose in investigating the mysteries of the text, and that the critic acts similarly as a destructive worm, penetrating and corrupting the flesh of the novel.

#5
Mayhew, Robert J. Latitudinarianism and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.3 (2002) 273-301.

Mayhew seeks to shed light on the novels of Ann Radcliffe by placing them in the context of the intellectual milieu from which Radcliffe came,especially with regard to the Latitudinarian school of Anglicanism which, claims Mayhew, is the key to her writing (274). After a brief summary of common critical takes on Radcliffe, Mayhew moves into an explanation of Latitudinarian theology, defining it as a tolerant and rational branch of Anglicanism, led during Radcliffe's time by the influential preacher William Paley. Latitudinarianism is, according to Mayhew, very closely related to natural religion. Often referring to Latitudinarian scientist Robert Boyle, Mayhew explains the difference between the providential and the miraculous in Latitudinarian theology, the proof and attributes of the Latitudinarian God, acceptance of scientific knowledge, groundedness in the Bible, God's presence in, but not conflation with, nature, and skepticism about the supernatural.

Mayhew then demonstrates the agreement of these tenets of Latitudinarianism with Radcliffe's novels: her presentation of landscape imagery, her use of the explained supernatural,and her narrative closure. The sheer frequency with which Radcliffe links viewing the landscape with ascending to a mood of devotion is consonant with a Latitudinarian position, given the unusual emphasis it placed on naturalistic proofs of God (285). Mayhew is careful to point out, however, that this is not a deist stance, and that characters who confuse God and nature in Radcliffe are generally evil. Further, it is the natural world, not organized church services, which has the power to rivet Radcliffe's characters attentions to God. While Radcliffe's Latitudinarianism leads her to disdain the superstitions of Catholicism, summarizes Mayhew, neither does it appeal to the irreligion of deism.

The convention of the explained supernatural,writes Mayhew, is a Latitudinarian-inspired demonstration of chains of natural events leading to providential outcomes (290). The supernatural, then, is continually undermined as the product of evil intentions playing upon the credulity of overactive imaginations (292). In Radcliffe, virtue is rewarded and vice punished, and providence guides the virtuous. Mayhew attributes the attacks of contemporary and modern critics on Radcliffe's radicalism and feminism coupled with "egregious conservatism" to the extremes to which Latitudinarianism was dragged between 1789 and 1832.

#6
Cohen, Emily Jane. Museums of the Mind: The Gothic and the Art of Memory. ELH 62.4 (1995) 883-905.

Cohen argues that the Gothic is "part of a search for a sacred that is, of necessity, personalized, and that is driven by the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility," which urges us to find personal fulfillment through interactions with the world. (883). Cohen's treatment of the Gothic includes the eighteenth-century passion for collecting and the popularity of tours in England to demonstrate the desire to create personal histories, "in which all of life is experienced as a kind of museum" (883). To support her points, she calls on the novels of William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole.

Cohen demonstrates the Gothic fear of insensibility and the concept of personal identity espoused by the "cult of sensibility" with references to Locke and Descartes. She points out the popularity of the classical Greek reverence of memory and the classical model of memory as a museum through which we can stroll to retrieve stored information. She then gives a brief history of the rise of collecting and tourism between 1770 and 1830 and the roots of this in the contemporary English fascination with the remote, the marvelous, the curious, and the sublime. She supports her museum model with descriptions of wax musiums, public punishment and the Gothic novel's conventional depictions of parade and pageantry. She draws an analogy between people and their property, especially their residences, in Gothic fiction.

Finally, Cohen explores the Gothic tendency to prefer "the mediated, 'backward' experience to the 'straightforward' one" (898) and the role of eloquence in the art of memory, as attributed to the respect given pulpit oratory. The stylized vocabulary, repetition, and the reader's anticipation of Gothic convention render the Gothic a "system of artificial memory, hanging poetic or epigraphic images on walls of prose and turning us into literary tourists" (901).

#7
Gamer, Michael. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000.

Gamer's book explores the association of gothic and romantic literature at the end of the eighteenth century, taking into account the effect of readers, critics, and publishers on genre formation. Citing a number of critics, Gamer reviews the various meanings that these terms have taken on over time and the "economic and ideological processes that have insured their lasting separation" (10). He looks for dialogue between romantic and gothic conventions not only in criticism and reception, but also within contemporary literary texts, working primarily with William Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie, and Walter Scott.

The first two chapters are dedicated to the context and production of gothic fiction. Gamer uses David Richter's work on the reception of gothic fiction to frame his depiction of the threat posed by gothic fiction to the political and social order, the biases of review publications and the cultural position of the 1790s periodical. Gamer treats the reception of gothic literature as an economic force within British market publishing. He then touches on historical and contemporary critical debates over gender, literature as education, the import of eighteenth century circulating libraries, and obscenity.

The chapter on Wordsworth "posits the production of the first and second editions of Lyrical Ballads, and especially of its Preface, as subject to similar contextual pressures" to those acting on gothic fiction. Gamer describes Wordsworth's literary relationship with Coleridge, their outraged reviews of gothic novels, attempts to redirect public taste, and their revisionist treatment of gothic conventions; treating gothic subject matter with " authorial distance, textual density, persona, parody, and a theoretical framework that will underwrite the liability of the materials themselves" (115). By this treatment, Wordsworth and Coleridge hoped to reject sensationalism while maintaining the value of extreme states of consciousness.

Gamer focuses on Baillie as "a writer hailed with the publication of Plays on the Passions as an antidote to the dramatic excesses embodied by Lewis' Castle Spectre yet in our own day regarded as primarily a gothic dramatist in the tradition of Lewis" (130). He sees Baillie's handling of gothic conventions as a middle road between popular dramatic taste and Shakespearean drama. The cultural xenophobia which made people suspicious of German ideology made dramatic experimentation even more difficult.

Finally, Gamer explores Scott's "extensive and lifelong ambivalence toward the gothic and its practictioners" (165). Scott divided gothic fiction into masculine and feminine subgenres, argues Gamer, in order to identify himself with the masculine, the national, and the antiquarian authentic, and thus "self-consciously transforming himself from the translator of the German and disciple of Lewis to antiquarian scholar and national bard" (166).

#8
Brown, Marshall. "A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel." Studies in Romanticism 26, No. 2. (1987).

Brown sets out to view the Gothic novel as an experiment in thought, proclaiming Frankenstein's monster to be "a thought, not a thing" (276). "The gothic substance is a thing whose materiality has been sublimated into a freedom from all conditioning factors, making it at once madness, dream, and play" (277). He opens with a discussion of the destruction of the physical, the gothic tendency to depict a transcendent reality, free from "empirical limitations" (279).

In his second section, Brown draws a parallel between Immanuel Kant's transcendental imagination and that of the gothic novelist. Brown cites Michel Foucault's notice of the proclivity of Kant as well as the Marquis de Sade and Ann Radcliffe toward trangressing "the limits set on rational understanding" (282).

To investigate the idea of the gothic novel as transcendent in this way, Brown uses the example of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in his third section. Brown writes that Melmoth sets forth a question posed also by Kant, "What Does It Mean: To Orient Oneself in Thought?" (285). "The gothic offers three answers to the question of orientation" (285): madness, sin and "regeneration from within" (286). This last orientation is a state of purity which we contemplate in the gothic novel but cannot reach in life.

In his fourth section, Brown explains that "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein illustrates how the technical concerns of the transendental analytic emerge from the gothic quest for pure-impure origins" (288). The discussion of Frankenstein moves from transcendent purity to the Kantian system of Transcendental Logic, a categorical system of logical judgments. Brown analyzes the novel in detail on the basis of these categories, concluding with the idea that in both Kant and the gothic tradition, "it is not the final triumph of good or evil, explanation or irrationality, free will or fate that makes a gothic atmosphere, but the lingering uncertainties along the way" (299).

22 June 2004 at 5:08 PM, post #21

Sarah's 5th annotation

Mayhew, Robert J. “Latitudinarianism and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.3 (2002) 273-301. (accessed through Muse, 20 pgs)

Mayhew seeks to shed light on the novels of Ann Radcliffe by placing them in the “context of the intellectual milieu from which Radcliffe came,” especially with regard to the Latitudinarian school of Anglicanism which, claims Mayhew, is the key to her writing (2). After a brief summary of common critical takes on Radcliffe, Mayhew moves into an explanation of Latitudinarian theology, defining it as a tolerant and rational branch of Anglicanism, led during Radcliffe’s time by the influential preacher William Paley. Latitudinarianism is, according to Mayhew, very closely related to natural religion. Often referring to Latitudinarian scientist Robert Boyle, Mayhew explains the difference between the providential and the miraculous in Latitudinarian theology, the proof and attributes of the Latitudinarian God, acceptance of scientific knowledge, groundedness in the Bible, God’s presence in, but not conflation with, nature, and skepticism about the supernatural.

Mayhew then demonstrates the agreement of these tenets of Latitudinarianism with Radcliffe’s novels: her presentation of landscape imagery, her use of the “explained supernatural,” and her narrative closure. “The sheer frequency with which Radcliffe links viewing the landscape with ascending to a mood of devotion is consonant with a Latitudinarian position, given the unusual emphasis it placed on naturalistic proofs of God” (8). Mayhew is careful to point out, however, that this is not a deist stance, and that characters who confuse God and nature in Radcliffe are generally evil. Further, it is the natural world, not organized church services, which has the power to rivet Radcliffe’s characters’ attentions to God. While Radcliffe’s Latitudinarianism leads her to disdain the superstitions of Catholicism, summarizes Mayhew, neither does it appeal to the irreligion of deism.

The convention of the “explained supernatural,” writes Mayhew, is a Latitudinarian-inspired demonstration of chains of natural events leading to providential outcomes (12). “The supernatural, then, is continually undermined as the product of evil intentions playing upon the credulity of overactive imaginations” (13). In Radcliffe, virtue is rewarded and vice punished, and providence guides the virtuous.

Mayhew attributes the attacks of contemporary and modern critics on Radcliffe’s radicalism and feminism coupled with “egregious conservatism” to the extremes to which Latitudinarianism was dragged between 1789 and 1832.

22 June 2004 at 1:18 PM, post #11

Sarah's 2nd Annotation

Fisher, Carl. "The Crowd and the Public in Godwin's Caleb Williams." Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta, Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s. Michigan State University Press: Michigan,1999. (47-67).

Fisher examines the relationship between the individual and the public in Caleb Williams to understand "the essential interaction of the individual and the collective in the polarized political world of the 1790s" (48). Fisher suggests that Godwin is critiquing the "heavy-handed paternalism of the gentry" and subordination of a public who become "agents for the status quo, unaware of either the need or the possibility of change" (48). Caleb Williams is here interpreted to be a response to Burke's conservatism in the wake of the French Revolution.

Fisher goes on to highlight Godwin's "sense of an information-based social economy," (52) pointing out the abuse of information in the instance of Falkland's unjust libel of Caleb, with which he draws a parallel to the handbills distributed to denounce Thomas Paine. He writes that Godwin delineates the public sphere as a world of rationalism and high-minded debate, while the popular sphere is retrogressive and vulgar; these two must be "bridged by rational discourse" (52). The fear of impotence in this popular sphere governs the characters of the novel, as Fisher illustrates with textual references.

Fisher attributes to Godwin that Caleb's attempts to live in the margins of society and his final inability to wrest himself from the tyrannical public sphere are a critique of popular culture. However, Caleb's resort to rational discourse instead of violence at the novel's climax, or the moment of revolution, points to Godwin's construction of "a reader who will not be violently transgressive, but who can develop a new sensibility of social relations (61). Fisher writes that Godwin "hopes to bridge the critical 'inequality of information' which defines history" (62) and draw his common reader from the popular to the public sphere.

Sarah's 3rd Annotation

Benedict, Barbara M. "Radcliffe, Godwin, and Self-Possession in the 1790s." Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta, Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s. Michigan State University Press: Michigan,1999. (47-67).

Barbara Benedict argues that William Godwin's Caleb Williams is influenced by Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho on the grounds that both works "portray curiosity as a cultural ambition that dangerously sexualizes identity and threatens the very integrity of the self (89). Despite Godwin and Radcliffe's ideological differences, Benedict points out their textual critiques of despotism and sentimental excess, as well as the value they place on the cultivation of rational understanding.

The curiosity of the protagonists of the two novels, she writes, leads them to question repressive social custom and seek social equality. The values implied by these actions place the writers in the tradition of "post-revolutionary rejections of political oppression" (91). However, in both cases, inquiry compromises the virtue of the protagonists and the stability of society. "Their curiosity, the same impulse that drives them to seek the truth and see justice done, marks them as discontented, possessed by irrational, antisocial urges, even superstitious: motivated by impulses antagonistic to neoclassical ideals of control and self-possession" (95).Benedict examines this paradox and the historical literary treatment of curiosity.

Benedict goes on to differentiate between the outcomes of curiosity in the two novels: Radcliffe's Emily learns to control her curiosity, while Godwin's Caleb does not. Emily's final obedience to patriarchy is constituted as "reason" and cures her of the crime of curiosity. Caleb's curiosity, on the other hand, is his tyrannical ruling passion and his downfall, or "the product of reason turned into passion" (99).

Benedict concludes with a study of the sexualized sense of self in these works, "the tendency of curiosity to fragment identity" (102), and "the struggle to possess the self in a world oppressed by tyranny from without and shaken by its internalized effects that threaten to dismantle identity from within" (105).

Sarah's 4th Annotation

McLean, Clara D. "Lewis's The Monk and the Matter of Reading." Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta, Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s. Michigan State University Press: Michigan,1999. (47-67).

Clara McLean's evocatively worded article encourages the reader of Mathew G. Lewis's The Monk to approach the text as the characters within approach their own mysteries; "as the mystery deepens it becomes apparent that the urge to pursue it is as much carnal as rational--a ravenous animal digging" (111). McLean stresses the sexual nature of the male explorations of female secrets, the indistinguishability of the veil from the female form, and the "worming" action of the characters and narrative of the novel toward truth or understanding.

McLean pursues this "worming" idea at length. "A deliberate twinning and overlapping of the rational pursuit of knowledge and the distinctly irrational pursuit of animal lust goes on throughout The Monk..." (115). This worming, writes McLean, is often toward a sexual goal represented by the rose, which "invites penetration but suggests the ideal of an infinite deferral" (116). McLean illustrates this point with references to the deflowering of Matilda and Antonia, and the idea that the deflowered woman vanishes, the veil of her virtue torn away. McLean thus equates Ambrosio's "desire to penetrate virgin space" with his "addiction to discovery" (117). She moves into a Freudian analysis of function of the worm, and puts the concept in context with references to Foucault and the Marquis de Sade.

Next, McLean addresses the depiction of desire in the novel. She writes that "There is a kind of anorexic logic at work here, a paradoxical logic by which even as the body disappears into that insubstantiality required by desire, it becomes nothing but flesh, just as tissues wasting away become waste" (122). The worm finally renders Ambrosio's own flesh thus irrelevant, which McLean interprets as a possible feminization of Ambrosio.

Finally, McLean points out that the reader repeats the structure of the worm and the rose in investigating the mysteries of the text, and that the critic acts similarly as a destructive worm, penetrating and corrupting the flesh of the novel.

22 June 2004 at 11:19 AM, post #8

so far, on top of Gamer's Romanticism and the Gothic and Stern's The Plight of Feeling, I claim:

(from Women, Revolution and the Novels of the 1790s):
-Clara D. McLean's article, Lewis's The Monk and the Matter of Reading
-Carl Fisher's article, The Crowd and the Public in Godwin's Caleb Williams
-Barbara Benedict's article, Radcliffe, Godwin, and Self-Possession in the 1790s

and also Robert J. Mayhew's Latitudinarianism and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe

21 June 2004 at 3:13 PM, post #3

I'm not sure how this works as an annotation of a book...but here's something. Something too long.

Julia A. Stern proposes in The Plight of Feeling that "those eighteenth-century novels best remembered for impassioned excess...contemplate the possibility that the power of genuine sympathy could revivify a broadly inclusive vision of democracy" (2). Stern suggests that the sensationalism of these novels of the 1790s gives voice to "invisible Americans": the poor and marginalized factions of society. Stern writes in her introduction, "I hope to reveal an unappreciated level of novelistic creativity--one that expresses a dialectic of inclusion against exclusion, thereby enacting and to various degrees discomposing the way an elitist culture contains the dissent at its margins. The constitutive power and simultaneous unraveling of sympathy as an operative cultural fantasy become the abiding metaphors through which eighteenth-century American fiction figures problems of social and political cohesion" (3). Stern devotes chapters to the study of "fellow feeling" in Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Forster's The Coquette, and Charles Brockdon Brown's Ormond.

In the titular chapter, Stern provides a brief historical sketch of the 1790s as well as a discussion of spectacle, sympathy, trauma, post-Revolutionary grief, the "feminization of narrative voice," epistolarity and depictions of slavery and incest in prominent novels of the decade, among those previously mentioned, Charles Brockdon Brown's Wieland and William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy.

The second chapter, "Working through the Frame: the Dream of Transparency in Charlotte Temple, explores the cultural significance of seduction and the "problem of female dissent from patriarchal authority" (34). It pays close attention to Rowson's use of structure to communicate meaning, maternal sympathy and separation, and the "psychic separateness" of melancholia (60).

The third chapter, "Beyond 'A Play about Words': Tyrannies of Voice in The Coquette, examines two opposing modes of sympathy set forth in the novel--one connected to "the idea of a material self-sufficiency that enables the transcendence of personal 'interest'" and one connected to "an understanding of the commonweal predicated on the well-being of solitary citizens" (73). Stern addresses the question of who should possess political voice as put forth in The Coquette, taking into account ideas of female love, "fancy" and spectacle.

The fourth and last chapter, "A Lady Who Sheds No Tears: Liberty, Contagion, and the Demise of Fraternity in Ormond" addresses the text's post-Revolutionary unraveling of sympathetic relagions, the link between liberty and violence, and misrepresentation.

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