Armstrong's theory of
the novel is distinct from Watt's, as she places greater emphasis on the
history of female subjectivity and the written word. In Desire and
Domestic Fiction Armstrong
argues that the novel serves as a mirror of class conflict rather than a
struggle for power and the centrality of the personal, feminine, and erotic
aspects. She also acknowledges the dominant contribution of women writers in
eighteenth-century novels, which are predominantly written by women.
Armstrong's approach to constructing a history of the modern woman involves a
synthesis of literary theory, Marxist class consciousness, Foucauldian
"history of sexuality," and feminism, using each to complement the
other. She criticizes Foucault for ignoring gender and the bourgeois feminism
of Gilbert and Gubar for its lack of historical specificity and perpetuation of
the female as victim. Armstrong prefers to use her power as a woman of the
dominant class to name her power as a form of power rather than disguise it as
the powerlessness of others.
Armstrong's central thesis is that domestic fiction actively sought to
disentangle the language of sexual relations from the language of politics,
introducing a new form of political power. In the old "political"
paradigm, people were identified and valued according to their status, lineage,
and wealth. After this domestic-discursive revolution, first female characters,
then real women, and finally respectable persons were identified by their
essential qualities of mind.
The literature devoted to producing the domestic woman appeared to ignore the
political world run by men, but these strategies that distinguished private
from social life and detached sexuality from political history were political,
allowing the middle class to achieve hegemony while pretending to define a
separate and female sphere. The personal is the political.
This thesis challenges traditional interpretations of the novel, highlighting
historical and theoretical issues. While earlier didactic texts like Richard
Brathwait's English Gentlewoman (1631) and Halifax's Advice to a Daughter
(1688) use political language, they also establish a separate sphere of
"soft" authority and assign women special power over emotionality and
identity-formation. Halifax asserts that women are compensated for male
domination by their influence in the nursery and their sexual power.
Brathwait's perfect gentlewoman transforms her household into a "feminine
government," where everyone serves with more love than fear.
The domestic novel is distinct from most fiction, as social issues and
political themes are evident in various works, such as Jacobinovelists, Scott,
Maria Edgeworth, Dickens, and George Eliot. The domestic novel is different
from most fiction, making it difficult to consider its political history.
The book is enriched by an impressive range of extra-literary materials,
including Puritan treatises on domestic relations, Elizabethan proclamations,
Locke and Rousseau, the People's Charter, The Descent of Man, and conduct books
that brought about the switch from status-definition to gender-definition and
created the modern feminized individual. Armstrong's historiographical model is
discontinuous and revolutionary, always trying to identify the "remarkable
moment" or decisive new breakthrough.
Puritanism is both a precursor of the Richardsonian novel and a manifestation
of the old order. Pamela proves Richardson's decisive break with both the
conduct tradition and "the common sort of novels and romances" and
the total fusion of novel and conduct-book. Conduct literature illustrates
"Enlightenment epistemology" and the formation of female subjectivity
in later eighteenth-century Britain, but it is exemplified by Jacques Du
Boscq's LHonneste Femme.
It might have been more useful to distinguish the precise ideological, generic,
and historical dimensions of these didactic texts rather than invoke the
general concept of "writing." The notion that one can identify
"the moment when writing invaded, revised, and contained the
household" assumes that such entities already existed before and outside
of writing.
Armstrong's book on the rise of female authority in the novel is surprisingly
reluctant to discuss actual novels from the period generally considered as its
Rise. A large proportion of her texts, both fictional and didactic, come from
the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with non-fiction dominating.
Armstrong offers a powerful and illuminating reading of Pamela's resistance to
"paranoid conspiracy" and class aggression, emphasizing her utter
dependency on words in this battle for her very existence. She makes acute
observations on the return of political and economic language into a supposedly
moral and domestic discourse.
Armstrong is absolutely right that forms of language, and genres of fiction,
are inextricably bound up with forms of sexuality. Women authors themselves
articulated this connection clearly. Jane Barker deliberately revived the
genre-term "Romance," for example, in her fictional campaign against
libertine sexuality. Elizabeth Boyd, in contrast, boldly accepted the term
novel, correspondingly arguing for a morality that tolerated female as well as
male frailties, and creating male characters whose linkage of new sexuality and
new language foreshadowed the Age of Sensibility.
Armstrong's thesis would be strengthened by these cases, but in practice she
neglects the resource of women's writing and muffles the complicated
connections between "Notions of Life," "Tastes of Love,"
"Words," and "new Being." She quotes the conventional
condemnation of "novel and romance" as polluting, without exploring
contemporary shifts in the conceptualization of these key terms.
She promises to show the emergence of "a specifically modern form of
desire," but in practice defines "desire" in a way that reduces
its specificity and equates it with eligibility for marriage. As a
"history of sexuality" and a "political history of the
novel," then, this book remains suggestive rather than definitive.
In conclusion, Armstrong's book on the rise of female authority in the novel is
a powerful and illuminating exploration of the relationship between forms of
language, genres of fiction, and forms of sexuality. However, Armstrong's
thesis is often criticized for neglecting the resource of women's writing and
muffles the complicated connections between "Notions of Life,"
"Tastes of Love," "Words," and "new Being."
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