John Richetti - The Columbia History of the British Novel

Some feminist literary historians have attributed the devaluation of Behn, Manley, and Haywood to their gender. However, even before Richardson and Fielding won ascent from the market for their novels of the 1740s, the moral improvement of the novel of amorous intrigue was undertaken by Elizabeth Rowe, Jane Barker, and Penelope Aubin. Explanations based upon taste, political history, and gender fail to come to terms with the particular way in which the novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood were devalued and overwritten in the 1740s.

The erasure or forgetting of earlier cultural formations is an obscure -13- process. Unlike material objects, cultural ideas and forms do not become used up or out of date. Cultural forms-from letters and love stories to national constitutions-can be rejuvenated by new technology, foreign transplants, and political strife. In other words, recycling seems to be the rule rather than the exception in culture. Thus, for example, the novel of amorous intrigue, developed in the late Restoration by Behn under strong influence from the Continental novella and the aristocratic literature of love, was exploited for politically motivated scandal and satire by Delariviere Manley in the New Atalantis (1709). Then, following the spectacular success of Love in Excess (1719–1720), this species of novel was turned into repeatable "formula fiction" on the market by Eliza Haywood in the 1720s. To remove elements from culture one must understand «forgetting» as, in Nietzsche's words, "an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression." The incorporation of the novel of amorous intrigue within the elevated novel of the 1740s is one of the means by which old pleasures are disowned and effaced. As I have noted above, novelists like Richardson and Fielding promote this forgetting, first by defacing the novel of amorous intrigue and then by providing their own novels as replacements for the novels they characterize as degraded and immoral. These new novels overwrite-disavow but appropriate, waste but recycle-the novels they spurn.

Reeve and Dunlop do not commit their literary histories to exercising a "good memory." Unlike certain late-twentieth-century counterhegemonic literary histories-whether feminist, African-American, or gay and lesbian-the works of Reeve and Dunlop do not set out to counteract a biased cultural memory. Instead they are constrained by the protocols of a culturally elevating literary history to be critical and selective, and thus forgetful. In the introduction to The Progress of Romance, Reeve tells her readers that she seeks "to assist according to my best judgment, the reader's choice, amidst the almost infinite variety it affords, in a selection of such as are most worthy of a place in the libraries of readers of every class, who seek either for information or entertainment." The effacement of Behn's novels from those literary histories written in the wake of the novel's elevation does not depend upon the good will of the literary historian. Thus, while Reeve is generous with Behn-"let us cast a veil of compassion over her faults"-and Dunlop is severe, both ignore all her novels except Oroonoko. By contrast, the novels of Richardson and Fielding are given positions of -14- special priority in both accounts of the novel's rise. The success of the elevated novel in the 1740s-its appearance in culture as the only novel worthy of reading, cultural attention, and detailed literary history-means the early novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood will be pushed into the margins of literary histories, where they nonetheless never quite disappear but serve-as they do in Richardson and Fielding's texts-as an abject trace or degraded «other» needed to secure the identity of the «real» (i.e., legitimate) novel.

From Reeve forward, scholarly literary history develops a paradoxical relationship to the forgotten texts of the past. It retrieves from the archival memory of culture and reads again what its contemporary culture has almost completely forgotten. This activity pushes Reeve toward a certain regret about the shifts in cultural value that can look quite arbitrary to one who has looked long enough down the "stream of time."

Romances have for many ages past been read and admired, lately it has been the fashion to decry and ridicule them; but to an unprejudiced person, this will prove nothing but the variations of times, manners, and opinions.-Writers of all denominations, — Princes and Priests, — Bishops and Heroes, — have their day, and then are out of date.-Sometimes indeed a work of intrinsic merit will revive, and renew its claim to immortality: but this happiness falls to the lot of few, in comparison of those who roll down the stream of time, and fall into the gulph of oblivion.

This passage naturalizes the process of disappearance and forgetting-by its reference to the wheel of fortune that gives "princes and priests, bishops and heroes… their day" and then takes it away, as well as by its metaphorical characterization of the movement of a "work of… merit" down "the stream of time" into "the gulph of oblivion." These analogies obscure the particular cultural strife at work within shifts in cultural memory. Thus the differences of gender, politics, and class that separate Behn and Richardson, casting the first down into «oblivion» while the second is raised up into prominence, are conducted through the literary histories that translate them for a later age. Though literary historians attempt to be «unprejudiced» (Reeve) and embrace an ethos of "judgment, candour, and impartiality" (Coventry), and though their histories aspire to secure general moral or universal aesthetic grounds for critical judgment, the actual practice of literary history does not occlude but instead reflects cultural division. -15-

Since one of the meanings of gulf is a "whirlpool, or absorbing eddy," I can accommodate my thesis about the novel's rise to Reeve's metaphor. The elevation of the new novel over the old novel of amorous intrigue produces a vortex or whirlpool within the land/seascape of eighteenth-century British culture. Where one kind of reading is thrown up, another is thrown down; where one kind of pleasure is licensed, another is discredited. This turbulent vortex of reciprocal appearance and disappearance is mis-seen as the origin of the novel. But in order for the elevated novel to appear, the novel of amorous intrigue must be made to disappear into a gulf of oblivion. Thus birth requires a burial, but only after the murder of the other novel. While this vortex first appears in the cultural strife of the 1740s, it is also readable in every subsequent literary history devised to tell of the novel's rise.

To apprehend "the rise of the novel" as a vortex of cultural conflict helps to refocus the way gender difference and strife crosscut the expansion of novel reading in early modern culture. In aligning romances with French fashions and insisting that both are distinctly female addictions, Coventry was repeating one of the clichés of his age. The romance was associated with women because of its popularity with women readers. Reeve, by casting The Progress of Romance in the form of a series of salonlike lectures and debates between Hortensius and Euphrasia (with Sophronia acting the role of a nonpartisan judge), inscribes the debate about romance and its value within a battle of the sexes. Euphrasia rejects Hortensius's sweeping critique of romances, first by asking how Hortensius can banish all «fiction» of questionable moral standards-for this would mean indicting the classical authors boys study in their youth-and then by rejecting any double standard by which novels might receive sweeping censure because they are the favorite reading of women. By exfoliating her account of the novel's progress in a series of lessons that finally wins the willing conversion of a skeptical male, Reeve's text acquires the shape and feel of a seduction. Hortensius seems to relent in his opposition to romance because of his high regard for Euphrasia. But the resolution of this staged debate does not overcome the deeper resonances of the gendered contest around romances and novels. The pejorative terms applied to romance (fanciful, wishful, out of touch with reality, etc.) are also applied to women. The favorable terms applied to novels (realistic, rational, improving) are congruent with those that describe the male as a politically responsible member of the public sphere. -16-