ECF book reviews for issue 26.1 - Eighteenth

Book Reviews/
Critiques de livres
The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
by Christopher Flint
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
xi+282pp. US$99;£63. ISBN 978-1-107-00839-7.
Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation
in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Christina Lupton
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
xi+184 pp. US$55;£36. ISBN 978-0-8122-4372-7.
Review by Betty A. Schellenberg, Simon Fraser University
The title puns of The Appearance of Print and Knowing Books refer
to the elusive Eldorado of book history and print culture studies:
demon­stra­tion of how the material form of the printed book shaped
the practices of authorship and reading, as well as the socio­economic
fields and cul­tural institutions in which these practices take their part.
In its most well-known formulation: to what extent is the medium the
message? While it has become generally accepted that something defin­
itive occurred in eighteenth-century Britain—that the nation’s media
ecology finally tipped, roughly two centuries after the arrival of movable
type, irrevocably towards print dominance—it has been more difficult
to determine exactly how writers and readers changed their thinking
and interactions as a result of an existence that was in every dimension
increasingly medi­ated by print. In the tradition of critics such as Janine
Barchas, Deidre Lynch, Tom Keymer, and Clifford Siskin, who have
brought graphic phenomena together with shifting ideas about the origin
of texts, the acts of reading and writing, and the recognition and negoti­
a­tion of modern­ity, Christopher Flint in The Appearance of Print and
Christina Lupton in Knowing Books set them­selves the task of identifying
the link between the printed page and forms of consciousness. At the
same time, they align with most recent work in explicitly eschewing
tech­nological deter­minism: their interest, in Lupton’s words, is in “the
human, rather than the technological, force behind texts displaying
consciousness of their own production and circulation” (10).
Like the first three forebears mentioned above, both studies devote
much of their attention to novels at the time when that genre was attaining
the forefront of popular aware­ness within an entrenched culture of print
and was becoming one of the most thoroughly commodified of print
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 26, no. 1 (Fall 2013)
ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | DOI: 10.3138/ecf.26.1.143
Copyright 2013 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University
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forms, though not the most common. However, in keeping with their
shared emphasis on the reflex­ive nature of fiction, their interest is not in
a realist effect that renders the medium invisible, but in what Flint sees as
“the seeming paradox that a genre supposedly invented to make mundane
reality trans­parent, visibly recorded the self-conscious manipulation of its
typo­graphical nature” (1), and what Lupton describes as “fiction [that]
was produced through, and productive of, participant awareness—of
genre, of epis­temology, and even of print” (2). Flint’s category of fiction
ex­pands beyond the novel to include such works as Charles Gildon’s
loosely organized collection of fictional letters beginning with The PostBoy Robb’d of His Mail (1692); lends equal weight to the continuously
canonical, such as Jonathan Swift’s The Tale of a Tub, and the more
locally influ­ential Thomas Amory’s Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756); and
extends chrono­logically from Gildon to Jane Austen. Lupton’s more
restricted time­­frame, the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s, nevertheless encompasses
an even broader ge­ner­ic range, including chapters on philosophical
writing (Hume and Beattie), printed sermons, and writing in various
sentimental genres that represent print as inscriptive, fragmentary, and
unsympathetic to human designs. Both rightly consider the hack and
her or his pro­ductions as fertile grounds for an examination of instru­
mental pub­lica­tion, as work “that points with remarkable candor to the
actual conditions and materials of [its] writing” (Lupton, 4).
The two approaches can be illustrated by their parallel chapters on
“it-narratives,” those tales told by inanimate narrators such as coins,
quill pens, coats, and hackney coaches, which achieved their height
of popularity in the 1750s to 1770s. For Flint, the descriptively titled
“Inanimate Fiction: Circulating Stories in Object Narratives” offers
an opportunity to explore representations of “an implicit theory of
culture in which literary dissemination and economic exchange appear
homologous” (155). As representatives of authorship, the objectnarrators “signal the wide-scale transference of text” and “the mutations
of narrative identity and authority” that concerned writers in the period
(155). Specifically, the circulation of these objects within their narra­
tives, paralleled by the circulation of the works themselves, dramatizes
not only the disappearance of the author through a series of marketplace
ex­changes, but also the related unprofitability of writing to its original
owner; the author can thus be seen either as alienated and disempowered,
or as autonomous and unaccountable. At the same time, social relations
in it-narratives are represented as fragmented and venal, as operating
within a kind of debased public sphere and nation state consisting of
impoverished subjectivities (this effect is especially noticeable in the
many narratives told by some type of currency). Readers also do not fare
well in these narratives: potentially cheated and isolated through failures
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of mediation, they are “trapped in a baffling circuit of communica­
tion,” at once “needing dependable printed matter” in order to achieve
enlighten­ment, but not yet enlightened enough to apply the standards
that would in turn rationalize the print industry (185). Nevertheless,
“these narratives presuppose that only by participating in market rela­
tions can storytellers discover their own forms of consciousness” (187),
since authors, pub­lishers, texts, and readers are embedded, for better
or for worse, in “an unpredictable discursive field” (188). While the
objectification of the narrator for Flint represents above all the unen­
viable condition of authors within a commodity culture of print, it
also figures the status of texts and readers, as well as the state of the
national public sphere and the nature of storytelling as an exchange.
All are characterized by undoing and dysfunction, although in the
concluding movement of the chapter, Flint suggests a parallel and para­
doxically empowering objectivity, empathy, mobility, usefulness, and
self-discovery that it-narratives ascribe to encounters with books. This
thorough and multi-faceted exploration of the sub-genre ultimately
delivers, not a through-line to a comprehensive conclusion, but a range
of options among which no single interpretation is privileged.
For Lupton, in the chapter titled “What It-Narrators Know about
Their Authors,” it-narratives represent the conditions of commodity
exchange, not primarily as a means of critiquing the conditions of
pro­duction suffered by authors, but in order to highlight the status of
objects as possessing a kind of “reduced agency” through the social
prac­tices which give them a meaning beyond that of mere objects.
Most importantly, this is a level of agency that they share with their
readers, and with the human narrator/authors of other texts. Thus, they
are not only more knowing than their own producers, but they also
make no effort to represent author figures as anything more than hacks
whom they objectify, and to whom their own experience makes them
superior. This latter effect is created by the standard scenes in many of
these narratives of encounters with an author in his garret, or pleading
with a bookseller, or clapped up in a debtor’s cell—scenes that make
no effort to elevate either such authors or the texts in which they figure
above the level of the merely market-driven, formulaic, and disposable.
As a result, the “text[s] reflect in what comes to seem like real time
on the process of its material and social mediation” (65). This special
con­­di­tion, a “flat style of reflexivity” which Lupton posits as the basis
of these narratives’ popularity as entertainment, allows them “to move
papers across the threshold between the fictional worlds and reality,
mak­ing documents more compelling than anything that appears in the
body of their text” (66). Because the reader is made to feel fully aware of
the mediation, of the processes of production and circulation, he or she
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is also conditioned to acquiesce to such processes as “entertaining and
value-free,” thereby paving the way to complacency rather than political
transformation of a commodity system of literary production (69).
Each of these books makes fresh and exciting contributions to the
study of the material text in the eighteenth century. Flint brings into
focus what might simply be read as a transparent cliché in his dis­
cussion of the metaphoric density taken on by paper as medium and
moulder of self-expression, symbol of national pride, bearer of cultural
value, and enabling substrate of the print trade in the writings of Swift
and Gildon, among others, while his comparison of differing uses
of printer’s ornaments in Amory’s John Buncle, Swift’s Tale of a Tub,
Richardson’s Clarissa, and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy offers a convincing
picture of authorial self-consciousness as it might be manifested on the
page. Lupton’s analysis of the mid-century analogy between novel
reading and coach travel as a means of highlighting the “imaginative
transport” provided by fiction, not as a disembodied transcendence
of mediation, but rather as an experience of powerlessness before the
medium’s mechanical and commercial nature, similarly re-materializes
a familiar trope. In another case, her argument that a mid-century
demand for Anglican clergy­men to deliver handwritten sermons as a
test of their personal sincerity was in itself a creation of print marketing
and mediation is at once original and elegant; I will return to it in the
future as a model of criticism as much as for its suggestive thesis.
Both studies, in their conscientious consideration of a wide range
of evidence, move forward the project of linking the material and the
cultural. However, their approach to the state of the field conveys rather
different impressions about the contribution of print culture meth­
odologies to eighteenth-century studies. In a sense, The Appearance of
Print exemplifies “Things as They Too Often Are,” whereas Knowing
Books points to “Things as They Should Be, at Least Sometimes.” Begin­
ning with a substantial chapter that surveys the “Contexts of Literary
Production” in the period, Flint carefully notes both conflicting period
assessments and more recent critical debates about whether the over­all
tendency of the period is towards an increase or decrease in authorial
status (citing disagreement over the effect of the Donaldson v. Becket
decision, for example), whether readers were brought towards interi­
orized individualism or sociable consensus through print culture, or
whether novels became culturally significant in the period or not. The
effect of his inclusive approach to his materials and their interpreters is
reflected in regular summaries of the situation as “complex” or simply
impossible to resolve: “To say that eighteenth-century British readers,
writers, and publishers preferred realist fiction might be, if true, less
presumptuous (if less handy) than to proclaim the rise, or appearance, or
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origins of the novel in the early, middle, or late part of the century” (58).
While perhaps simply a rhetorical tic, this study’s tendency to resign the
issues it raises to the solution of complexity (or “paradox,” loosely defined)
creates a sense of a crushing weight of conflicting evidence, an impasse.
Even Darnton’s communications circuit, ostensibly supplying the
book’s overall structural frame—with two major sections titled “Author
Book Reader” and “Reader Book Author”—in the end seems more to
produce a kind of methodological exhaustion in which “the point of
this organization is to show the difficulty of assessing exactly what force
prompts the activity of any agent in the book-making process” (22).
Flint appears most interested in examining the conditions of authorship;
it is the appearance of the writer of fiction on the page that this book
returns to most insistently, and I suspect a more explicit allegiance to
this perspective would have strengthened its focus and argument. As it
stands, the book serves at points to remind the reader that print culture
studies, while rich and capacious, must be guided by critical selection and
interpretation if they are to avoid being reduced to mere data collection.
Lupton has taken a bolder but in my view more productive approach
to the tradition of book history or print culture scholarship by allowing
its insights to be informed by those of compatibly materialist approaches
to history—in particular, Marxian, poststructuralist, “thing,” and media
theories. The guiding principle is the ineluctable evidence offered by
“knowing books” themselves—those texts “written so as to suggest that
they have an artificial intelligence of their own,” yet whose knowingness
reflects “the preparedness of people to imagine consciousness of things”
as an entertaining illusion, “fore­ground[ing] a view of technology that
is both knowing and accepting” (ix–x). From this starting point, Lupton
is as critical of current the­oretical attitudes towards media history as
she is of technological determinism, for their tendency to overlook
eighteenth-century media self-consciousness because of an assumption
that self-consciousness and resistance must go hand in hand. Her
provocative conclusion, that “the fascination of eighteenth-century
readers and writers with making the process of mediation visible comes
at the cost of underplaying the fun­damental ability of people to own
that process and use words to shape the world they live in” (150), is
facilitated by recent work on remediation and the sociology of subjectobject relations. Lupton demonstrates that attention to the material
form of the book can be enriched and guided by a judicious use of
related theoretical paradigms.
Both The Appearance of Print and Knowing Books set a high standard
of historically specific and detailed scholarship on print phenomena.
The Appearance of Print demonstrates the breadth and almost unman­
age­able complexity of the evidence, and of the print universe from
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which we extract it. Knowing Books, while it examines a more focused
field and is more selective in its case studies, goes a step further in
demonstrating the generative value of a historicist methodology that is
situated within a broader field of reflection about the meaning of our
own critical enterprise.
Betty A. Schellenberg is professor of English at Simon Fraser University.
Her most recent books are The Professionalization of Women Writers in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (2005) and volume 11 of The Cambridge Edition
of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (forthcoming). She is currently
writing a study of the interface of manuscript practices and print in mideighteenth-century Britain.
Le Bonheur au féminin: Stratégies narratives des romancières
des Lumières by Isabelle Tremblay
Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montreal, 2012.
186pp. CAN$29.95;€27. ISBN 978-2-7606-2279-1.
Review by Katharine Ann Jensen, Louisiana State University
For scholars and students familiar with women’s novels of eighteenthcentury France, the idea that feminine happiness is a dominant theme
might strike us as unlikely or, at least, surprising. Feminist critics have long
argued, after all, that many eighteenth-century French women novelists
evaluate the costs their heroines pay in a society that privileges men at
women’s sexual, political, and cultural expense. These costs, whether to
a heroine’s physical or emotional well-being, might facilitate a woman’s
self-definition, but they often seem to preclude happiness. Thus, Isabelle
Tremblay’s argument that women writers and novelists of Enlightenment
France depict feminine happiness in ways that are discernibly linked to
individuality provides a new and promising critical perspective.
At the outset of her book, Tremblay defines feminine happiness as “un
état de conscience procédant du recueillement, de l’introspection et de
la connaissance de soi” (18). She bases this understanding of happiness
on non-fictional texts by du Châtelet, Lambert, Puisieux, and d’Épinay,
which themselves reflect the Enlightenment’s increasing emphasis on
individuality and interiority as positive values (17). Tremblay’s project is,
then, to illustrate the ways in which French women novelists depict their
heroines’ expressions of individuality—their sense of interiority and selfknowledge—as synonymous with happiness.
The degree to which Tremblay’s readers find that her study provides a
new and fresh understanding of how feminine happiness-as-interiority
figures in novels by French women writers of the Enlightenment will
depend, I think, on whether we read the book for depth or for breadth.
The strength of this book is its broad sweep. Tremblay presents an im­
pres­­sive corpus of women’s novels (well over fifty), extending over a
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capacious time frame (1699–1804), and ranging from the well known
(for instance, Riccoboni’s Lettres de Fanni Butlerd and Lettres de Juliette
Catesby; Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne; Charrière’s Lettres écrites
de Lausanne and Lettres de Mistriss Henley) to the less read (for
example, Beauharnais’s L’Abailard supposé, ou Le sentiment à l’épreuve;
Kéralio, Adélaïde, ou Les Mémoires de la marquise de M***; and Milly,
Histoire du cœur par Mlle de M.). Tremblay’s study is a bibliographical
goldmine where primary texts are concerned and will certainly inspire
other scholars to add to their reading lists. Although Tremblay also has
an extensive bibliography of feminist critical works, she does not engage
with this criticism in a sustained or rigorous way. I would have liked to see
Tremblay locate her own analyses around more of the arguments that
other feminist critics (such as Joan Stewart, Lesley Walker, and Carol
Sherman) have advanced in relation to the same texts and themes.
Insofar as Tremblay covers a large corpus arranged thematically under
categories such as marriage, motherhood, love, friendship, she does not
analyze any specific text in depth. For me, this is a weakness because
this thematic approach excludes some close readings with crucial
impli­­ca­­tions for the notion of feminine self-knowledge, interiority,
and happiness—the very foundation of Tremblay’s argument. For in­
stance, in her chapter on motherhood, Tremblay illustrates how the
role of mother-educator provides a woman with the authority “qui lui
permet de s’affirmer en tant que sujet” (72). Tremblay then interprets three
novels featuring mothers educating daughters: “La veuve des Mémoires
de Mme la baronne de Batteville (1756) ... est charmée de former sa fille
à sa fantaisie précisément parce qu’en se prolongeant dans l’existence
de celle-ci, qui porte son nom et qui épouse son amant, la baronne de
Batteville se dédouble en quelque sorte. Ce duo féminin est fondé sur
une ressemblance parfaite entre la mère et la fille. A son tour, la fille de
l’héroïne du roman de Mme de Belvo enchante sa mère précisément
parce qu’elle est formée à son image ... Dans La paysanne philosophe
(1767), Flore est prise en charge par Mme d’Arenville à qui elle ‘servai[t]
précisé­ment de joujou’” (73–74). By forming daughters into replicas of
them­selves or playthings, the mothers in question seem to feel a great
deal of narcissistic gratification (happiness?), but the boundary confusion
between mother’s and daughter’s identities has negative implications
for the daughter’s subjectivity if not also for the mother’s, for how can
either mother or daughter feel that she possesses or knows her own emo­
tions and thoughts when these emotions and thoughts mirror the other
person’s? At the very least, the mother’s self-affirmation as subject in pro­
ducing a daughter–alter ego comes at the expense of that daughter’s selfdistinction and thus subjectivity. Rather than addressing questions like
these that are germane to her argument about happiness as “un état de
l’introspection et de la connaissance de soi,” Tremblay concludes: “Ces
mères mentors reproduisent le modèle patriarcal en modelant leur fille
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à leur image” (74). While it may be the case that this mirroring structure
is patriarchal, Tremblay does not show how, nor does she underscore the
paradox of seeking to affirm oneself by creating a second self.
Similarly, in her chapter on female friendship, Tremblay states that in
epistolary novels by women writers, the role of female friend-addressee
plays a key role in the writer’s self-knowledge/happiness (115). In all
her epistolary examples of this enabling female friendship, however,
the narratives are monologic, and the friend-addressee functions—
im­plicitly to be sure—as an alter ego for the female writer (115–23).
Given Tremblay’s interest in the relationship between self-knowledge
and happiness, I would have liked to see her interpret why the women
authors of these epistolary novels create a friend-addressee who func­
tions as a projection of the female letter writer: what does this say about
the possibilities and limits of female friendship and self-knowledge in
the epistolary novels reviewed?
While lacking analytical depth in its ambitious coverage of primary
texts, Tremblay’s book raises provocative questions for future analysis,
thereby continuing the critical dialogue.
Katharine Ann Jensen is professor of French Studies at Louisiana State
University and the author of Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter
Dilemma in French Women’s Writings, 1671–1928 (2011) and Writing Love:
Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605–1776 (1995).
Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and
the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century by Simon Dickie
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
xviii+362pp. US$45. ISBN 978-0-226-14618-8.
Review by Kathleen Lubey, St. John’s University
In Cruelty and Laughter, Simon Dickie proves that cultural shifts towards
sympathy and benevolence in eighteenth-century England did little to
displace an enduring comic tradition that delighted in the misfortunes
of cripples, beggars, orphans, illiterate servants, rape victims, and fish­
wives. He also leaves us wondering if the apparent rise of sentiment
exemplifies any real centripetal pull towards a lived standard of polite­
ness. Dickie’s wide constellation of comic literature evokes a cacophonous,
schizo­phrenic climate of textual consumption in which a reader might
weep alongside Clarissa one day and guffaw at punch lines from an Old
Bailey rape trial the next. Content with the confused coexistence of dis­
parate responses to human suffering, Dickie insists, satisfyingly, on an
ongoing irresolution in this culture’s sensibility rather than a grand
synthesis of its deep contradictions. Most impressive are his deeply archival
research and the buoyant, unpretentious style in which he delivers his
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findings. Focused tightly between 1740 and 1770, Dickie brings to light
unstudied bodies of texts—jest books, low “deformity verse,” courtroom
sessions papers, comic miscellanies, “ramble fiction”—and dynamically
conveys their content. Indispensable for scholars of the novel, manners,
reading, disability, and humour, this book would also be genuinely
teachable to the newest students of the eighteenth century.
Much recovery work aims to legitimate the discoveries of the archive
by arguing for the literary or historical value of neglected authors or
genres. The textual record has been transformed in the last few decades
by scholarship, especially on women writers, that reveals the diversity of
literary production in the eighteenth century, often uniting little-known
works with distinct literary or philosophical traditions. Dickie inverts this
scholarly project, explaining how seemingly worthless texts constitute a
forgotten comic canon that was readily consumed by an eager reading
public but that has little redeeming value. As Dickie asks of much comic
fiction in the period, “How bad are these books?” (265). Quite bad, it
turns out, and therefore indicative of modes of reading—rushed, inat­
ten­tive, uncharitable, lewd—we typically leave unrecognized. Also often
over­looked, Dickie claims, is the influence of low humorous modes—
“deformity jokes,” “wallops and smut,” “slum realism”—on fiction that has
gained a reputation as literary (46, 156, 260). Lovelace’s pranks, Colonel
Trim’s failed eloquence, and Matt Bramble’s hypochondria incor­porate
the farcical energies of low humour not to socially trans­formative ends,
but to appeal to readers’ comfort with socially con­servative comedy that
worked at the expense of the disadvantaged. A chapter devoted to Joseph
Andrews shows Henry Fielding’s satire, for instance, to be perpetually
loosening into straight comedy in spite of the novel’s ethical claims. A rich
treatment of a familiar work, this fourth chapter brilliantly demonstrates
the foundational presence of the unfamiliar archive, discussed in fore­
going chapters, within the field’s central texts.
Such discoveries lead us backward to a persistent social tradition that
celebrates the essential difference between fortunate and unfortunate
persons. The indigent and disabled are consistently represented in this
comic tradition as lacking not only intellect and refinement but also feel­
ing, honesty, and cleanliness. Such attitudes were not limited to unfeeling
libertines but defined politeness itself: “laughing at social inferiors was
part of becoming a gentleman” (124). Recognizing the complexity of the
social order and some definitive shifts towards compassionate attitudes
in the period, Dickie gently resists any optimism that might arise from
social histories of the eighteenth century, finding in “the laughter of the
elites” an elemental confidence that their distinctions of class and wealth
were not under threat by new mobilities within the ranks of the poor
and labouring (130). Gender, too, remains hierarchical in this account, a
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point made disturbingly clear in a chapter on rape jokes. Various forms
of sexual violence “are presented as little more than the ongoing comedy
of plebeian life,” and the victim’s word is suspicious and unreliable (243).
Dickie’s unsentimental perspective is a powerful counterpoint to accounts
of the novel from critics such as Watt, Armstrong, and McKeon, or even
Bakhtin, that see the genre as definitively critical of the status quo.
The effect of Dickie’s attention to the pervasiveness of cruel humour
amounted to, for this reader, an entirely new way of understanding aspects
of eighteenth-century fiction that previously seemed like eccentricities
and aberrations, even in works minimally discussed by Dickie. Betsy
Thoughtless’s delight in teasing her suitors appears now as a feminine
appropriation of a prankish mentality typically espoused by men. Friday’s
tormenting of a bear brings him one step closer to English masculinity. I
even gained a fresh perspective on Pamela: dark and predatory elements
of the plot appear predictably farcical, of a piece with the filthy and violent
habits so often portrayed in comic literature. Mrs Jewkes slaps Pamela for
her impertinence; John redirects her letters to Mr B; Mr B accosts Pamela
physically, displays her to his wealthy neighbours, and humiliates her
weepy father. Each of these aggressive, performative, uncompassionate
acts has familiar precedents in the low comic literature that Dickie
surveys. The singularly villainous Mr B begins to appear more typical,
sillier, less strategic in his machinations; Pamela, in turn, seems hysterical,
incapable of recognizing comic mischief. One of the field’s most socially
visionary novels looks in this archival context like the story of a squirrely
heroine unduly distressed by the pranks of a typical English gentleman
and his servants.
So transformative is this angle on literary history that I at times wished
for stronger, clearer claims regarding the payoff of joining the familiar
canon with the newly recovered archive of comic literature. For all these
texts’ explicitness, Dickie’s conclusions about their contextualizing effect
are occasionally understated. A thread on theatre, and specifically physical
humour, in a chapter on disability is provocative but fleeting. Disability
appears to be a category so capacious that it includes ailments from
limb­lessness to smallpox scars. Accounts of drunken rioting and male
“buckishness” are unconnected to important scholarship on masculinity
and manners. These are, though, minor complaints about a work whose
primary aims are amply delivered: Dickie dramatizes this archive in
exquisite detail and unearths its structures and patterns in familiar major
works. He argues with conviction and clarity that the period’s reading
practices include the vulgar and the polite, and that these disparate
modalities were seen as entirely compatible, not indicative of immorality
or lewdness. To the contrary, it would seem the period’s literacy required
deftness with filthy description, bawdy punch lines, and “static comic
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stuffing” (266). In closing, Dickie warns against feeling too certain that
we have shrugged off the pleasures of cruel humour in our own time.
And, indeed, one feels newly equipped to make sense of “texts” such as
Jersey Shore and Jerry Springer, where offences like promiscuity, ugliness,
and sloth invite boisterous condemnation from an audience certain of its
moral superiority.
Kathleen Lubey is associate professor of English at St. John’s University
and author of Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain,
1660–1760 (2012).
Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century:
Seduction and Sentiment, ed. Toni Bowers and Tita Chico
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
viii+274pp. £52. ISBN 978-0-230-10867-7.
Review by Pam Perkins, University of Manitoba
Readers might initially find this book diffuse and sprawling, despite
its relative brevity in page length. Originating from a session called
“Seduc­tion and Sentiment” held at the 2008 meeting of the American
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the collection includes essays
on texts ranging from Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”
through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French romance and
to early nine­teenth-century American productions of The Merchant
of Venice. What links this diverse material is the authors’ and editors’
shared interest both in breaking down and interrogating “the fixed
boun­daries that were assumed to divide physical sensation, emotion
and rational thought” (3) and in resisting any tendency to circum­
scribe those intellectual devel­op­ments within national boundaries. The
result­ing lively collection signifi­cantly expands our understanding of
the complex and varied concepts of “sentiment” that developed over a
century and a half and across a wide geographic area.
As Toni Bowers and Tita Chico explain in their introduction, they
chose to extend geographic reach of the volume as widely as possible
in order to combat a recent scholarly tendency to use “‘Atlantic’ ... as
a synonym for ‘American’—itself often deployed, reductively, to mean
‘United States’” (6). Their intention is to move beyond such relatively
parochial concerns and to “restore to view specific, previously neglected
points of interconnection and difference across Atlantic spaces” (6).
This is a laudable goal, even if it is not always immediately clear how
moving beyond early American literature and expanding what is com­
prehended by the adjective “Atlantic” contributes to the analysis of
some of the individual works discussed in the book. Melissa E. Sanchez
nods towards the wider colonial implications of Marvell’s poetry, but
the heart of her essay is a deft, tightly focused close reading of the
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gender politics of “Upon Appleton House,” a reading that Sanchez uses
to establish the poem’s contribution to shifting concepts of Inter­reg­
num masculinity. Likewise, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis offers a rich and
sophis­ticated argument about witch belief and the anti-sentimental
elements of Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, but the fact
that Fielding was travelling on the Atlantic seems merely tangential to
the main argument.
These forays into an expanded concept of “Atlantic” culture are also, at
least at first glance, somewhat overbalanced by a more familiar ver­sion of
the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, as a significant part of the volume
focuses on key figures in the early American literary canon: Charles
Brockden Brown, Gilbert Imlay, Phillis Wheatley, and Susanna Rowson,
whose Charlotte Temple features in three of the essays. Despite the wide
temporal sweep of the volume, more than half of the articles con­cen­trate
on the very end of the period covered. In addition to the work on Brown,
Imlay, Wheatley, and Rowson are essays by Bryan Waterman on the ways
in which a notorious seduction scandal played into the political and
social debates in post-Revolutionary Boston and by Heather S. Nathan on
the representation of Jewish women in the early American theatre. Yet,
as Nathan emphasizes the inescapably trans­atlantic, even multi­cultural,
elements of American society in the opening years of the nine­teenth
century, she also situates her reading of the­atrical tastes and prac­tices in
a context that moves towards the wider concept of Atlantic culture that
Bowers and Chico sketch out in their introduction.
Nathan is far from alone in the transatlantic reach of her arguments.
Eve Tavor Bannet and Juliet Shields open the volume with a pair of
essays that do a particularly fine job of highlighting the intersections
of gender, sentiment, and nation on both sides of the later eighteenthcentury Atlantic. Shields focuses on Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants, a
novel in which, as she argues, “an American domesticity founded in
genu­ine sentiment” rejects “England as foreign, and as morally inferior”
(45)—but inevitably, as it does so, implicitly relies upon that “foreign”
culture to define “Americanness.” Bannet might appear less immediately
concerned than Shields with transatlantic cultural politics: focusing
on the contemporary taste for novels featuring women tormented by
“adulterous sentiment,” she explores the concepts of female autonomy
and individuality presented in the many late eighteenth-century novels
in which women stray emotionally (rather than physically) from their
husbands and then seek comfort in female friendship. Despite this
emphasis on sentiment and individual psychology, Bannet still in­vites
consideration of the ways in which geography inflects popular culture,
as she builds her arguments on works of both European and American
fiction—including, perhaps inevitably, Charlotte Temple. Just as inter­
est­ingly, Bannet also calls attention to the ways that the American
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publication history of these European novels of sentiment reinforces
arguments about the transatlantic impact of this literary fashion.
These individual essays provide intriguing insights into the trans­
atlantic cross-currents shaping ideas about sentiment, but the major
strength of the collection lies in how the arguments in one essay can
often help to illuminate other contributions to the volume. Articles
on literary representations of European/First Nations relationships
by Carolyn Eastman and Laura M. Stevens are a case in point: while
Stevens focuses on more-or-less jocular and bawdy popular literature
about British women deliberately or inadvertently seducing Mohawk
and Cherokee men, Eastman examines travel writers’ sentimental
accounts of Aboriginal women abandoned by their European lovers.
On their own, both Eastman and Stevens offer stimulating readings of
some lesser-known literature; read together, they reinforce each other’s
argu­ments about the multiple and shifting ways in which such trans­
atlantic ex­changes shaped Anglo-American racial and gender politics
throughout the long eighteenth century.
Other articles work together in somewhat more unpredictable ways.
This is particularly the case with Thomas DiPiero’s analysis of seven­
teenth- and eighteenth-century French romance and pornography, which
might at first seem distinctly out of place with the rest of the volume.
DiPiero’s essay remains firmly entrenched on its own side of the Atlantic,
and it is the only essay in the book focused on non-English language
material (although Bannet does include a discus­sion of Thomas Holcroft’s
English translation of Isabelle de Montolieu’s Caroline of Lichtfield).
DiPiero’s analysis of the French “libertine project of embodied knowl­
edge” (184) resonates beautifully, however, with the volume’s final essay,
George Haggerty’s analysis of the failure of the physical senses to convey
reliable knowl­edge in Brown’s Wieland. As DiPiero explores the ways
that “bodies produce knowledge” in Diderot and Sade while Haggerty
analyzes the way that Brown shows the physical “senses ... fail[ing] to con­
nect one to experience” (228), the essays work together to highlight both
the contin­uities between the sorts of epistemological questions being
raised in different parts of the Atlantic world and the varied approaches
taken to answering or exploring them. Bowers and Chico are opening
up some large and complicated scholarly questions through the ways
in which they frame this volume. If their concept of “Atlantic” culture
remains loose and open-ended, the collection illustrates the value of such
generous scholarly inclusivity.
Pam Perkins teaches in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre
at the University of Manitoba and is currently working on a study of late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century narratives of North Atlantic travel.
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Le Féminin en Orient et en Occident, du Moyen Âge à nos jours:
Mythes et réalités, ed. Marie-Françoise Bosquet
and Chantale Meure
Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2011.
436pp. €24. ISBN 978-2-86272-548-2.
Review by Carolyn Vellenga Berman, The New School, New York City
Several comparative studies of representations of “the feminine” have
appeared in recent years, including two similar titles in French, Le
Féminin en miroir entre Orient et Occident, ed. Jamal-Eddine El Hani
and Isabelle Krier (2005), and Femmes d’Orient, femmes d’Occident, ed.
Colette Dumas and Nathalie Bertrand (2007). What distinguishes the
collection under review here is its vast range across time, space, and
literary languages. The unusual scope is made possible in part by the
location of the con­ference that spawned the book: the Indian Ocean
island of Réunion. As the editors explain, the geographical object of
their study, “cet Orient à la fois réalité et mythe,” is here understood in
its “sens le plus extensif en privilégiant l’hémisphere sud et la zone de
l’océan Indien” (8). This allows for a broader exploration of questions
typically restricted to the Mediterranean—for example, in French en­
counters with North Africa. This expansion comes at price, evident in
the book’s cumbersome title and its unwieldy thematic structure. With
29 short essays on topics ranging from a seventeenth-century voyage
aux Indes orientales to twentieth-century Japanese women, from an
eleventh-century Muslim poetess to late twentieth-century China, and
from Indian theatrical traditions dating to the seventeenth century to
twentieth-century South African and American writings—with bib­lical
material thrown in for good measure—sustained argument is im­pos­sible.
Even the silent conclusions that might be drawn from a chrono­logical
or geographical movement are fore­closed, as the work moves instead
from part 1, “Mirages du féminin/mirages de l’Orient et démystification”
towards part 3, “Frontières du féminin entre Orient et Occident.”
Yet the refusal to move on—or to cordon off parts of the East or
West—creates a wealth of openings, as it launches new conversations. The
editors emphasize four major topics at the heart of the collection. First is
the study of comparative representations of the “feminine” in the East and
the West. (What is the history of these representations?) Second is the
related history of the idea of female freedom and power as an index of the
differences between civilizations. For Diderot, to take only one example,
women were “autant de thermomètres des moindres vicissitudes des
moeurs et des usages” (quoted on pages 9–10). Third, the collection
ex­plores the overlapping “mysteries” of women (or “the feminine”) and
the Orient, asking what this enigma reveals about those who develop it
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(such as fears of androgyny). Fourth, the contributors ask how female
and “Eastern” writers take up these topoi and materials, and to what
effect. (This is described as an effort to identify an “écriture-femme”
and “écriture orientale” on page 11.) All of these questions have a clear
significance for eighteenth-century studies; it should come as no surprise
that one-third of the essays are devoted to materials from this century.
Three chapters in particular explore the “feminine” in eighteenthcentury French fiction, with an eye not only for its projections upon
the East but also for its adoption of Eastern models or materials. JeanFrançois Perrin’s “Le Complexe de Tirésias,” for example, examines
eighteenth-century French imitations and adaptations of the framingstory structure in Mille et une nuits and other translated Eastern
collections. His thoughtful exploration of Mille et un jours, Aventures du
mandarin Fum-Hoam, Le Sopha, Montesquieu’s Histoire véritable, and
Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets expands our understanding of the eighteenthcentury “fantasme du sérail” by tracing “l’inquiétude de la différence
sexuelle telle qu’elle se trouve figurée dans certains contes orientaux”
(83, 85). Similarly, Guilhem Armand’s essay on L’Histoire d’une Grecque
moderne stresses how this 1740 novel draws upon the Orientalist vogue
as well as a real-life scandal, to surprising effect. As Armand describes
it, “La femme orientale devient, pour Prévost, l’instrument d’une remise
en cause du discours romanesque, voire du lien plus général entre la
parole et la vérité” (74). Angélique Gigan goes perhaps even further in
her reading of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie in light of
his thoughts on female education and his travels to the French islands in
the Indian Ocean. Likening the “petite société” formed by single mothers,
their children, and slaves in Bernardin’s novel to what Rousseau called
a “petite gynécocratie,” Gigan discovers a Utopia of sexual equality in
the novel’s uterine “bassin” and the “quasi-fetal fusion” of its offspring,
evoking “la figure mythique de l’androgyne” (49, 50, 53).
Our understanding of this fiction is amplified by fresh readings of
European travel narratives as well as Indian Ocean perspectives in
other chapters. Jean-Michel Racault’s reading of Le Voyage de François
Leguat (1707) is typically incisive. In “Réflexibilité de la question
féminine entre Orient et Occident chez Robert Challe,” Chantale Meure
usefully interrogates the relationship between Challe’s travel narratives
and his Illustres Françaises. Nicole Crestey also offers an intriguing
account of Jeanne Barret, a governess who assisted her employer on
his botanical expedition around the world, disguised as a male servant,
only to be unmasked in Tahiti in 1768. Related chapters consider the
documentary history of clothing in eighteenth-century Île Bourbon
as well as the legendary tale of an eighteenth-century princess in
Madagascar. Finally, readings of contemporary fiction by the Mauritian
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writers Shenaz Patel and Ananda Devi offer a striking counterpoint to
the eighteenth-century materials. The pertinence of such a perspective
is revealed in Mireille Habert’s careful reading of the story of staging
Olympe de Gouges’s 1789 L’Esclavage des Noirs within Emmanuel
Genvrin’s play Étuves, performed at a bicentennial celebration of the
French Revolution in Réunion in 1989.
Provocative and wide-ranging, the collection poses important ques­
tions and assembles a new corpus, while occasionally revealing the
limi­­ta­­tions of its terms. After all, “Oriental” may preclude a more flex­
ible understanding of the colonial gaze in, say, de Gouges or Raynal’s
Histoire des Deux Indes, and the “feminine” is too often reduced to the
study of female genitalia (as in the fascinating chapters on mermaids and
menstruation). An engagement with sexuality studies might rem­edy this,
particularly in light of current “Western” debates over gay mar­riage. As it
is, Le Féminin en Orient offers a timely convocation with a new centre of
gravity, usefully shifting our horizons.
Carolyn Vellenga Berman, the author of Creole Crossings: Domestic
Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery (2006), is an associate professor
of literature at The New School in New York City.
Femmes, rhétorique et éloquence sous l’Ancien Régime,
éd. Claude La Charité et Roxanne Roy
Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2012.
419pp. €35. ISBN 978-2-86272-608-3.
Critique littéraire par Zeina Hakim, Tufts University
Ce volume collectif est issu des travaux du septième colloque interna­
tional consacré aux femmes d’Ancien Régime qui s’est tenu à l’Université
du Québec à Rimouski en septembre 2007. Il rassemble 29 articles ayant
pour objectif d’interroger les rapports qu’entretiennent, de la Renaissance
à la Révolution, les femmes et la rhétorique. En effet, comme le souligne
avec beaucoup de clarté Claude La Charité dans son intro­duction, « à
première vue, personne ne semble plus étranger que les femmes d’Ancien
Régime à la rhétorique » (7), celles-ci étant exclues de l’enseignement
formel de la rhétorique dispensé dans les collèges et reléguées à la sphère
domestique. Et pourtant, note le critique, « nombreux sont les témoins
qui insistent sur l’éloquence remarquable de leurs contemporaines » (7).
D’où l’interrogation qui soutient tout le volume: Comment les femmes
peuvent-elles faire entendre leur voix dans des sphères d’activités dont
elles sont généralement exclues? Y aurait-il une forme d’éloquence
féminine étrangère à la rhétorique? Ce sont ces questions auxquelles
vont répondre les diverses contributions du recueil, proposant une
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réflexion stimulante sur un ensemble de phénomènes déterminants
pour notre compréhension de cet « art de persuader par la parole »
que représente, depuis l’Antiquité, la rhétorique. Les chercheurs anglosaxons se sont penchés, depuis plus de vingt ans, sur cette question et
ils se sont inter­rogés en particulier sur les stratégies rhétoriques que
les femmes mettent en œuvre pour légitimer leur prise de parole: on
peut penser notamment à l’article pionnier de Karlyn Kohrs Campbell
intitulé « The Rhetoric of Women’s Libera­tion: An Oxymoron » (1973),
à l’ouvrage collectif Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early
Feminist Rhetoric (1989) ou à l’anthologie récente Rhetorical Theory
by Women before 1900 (2002). Toutefois, la critique francophone est
restée relativement silencieuse sur la question et cet ouvrage se présente
comme « le premier en français à s’intéresser à une telle problématique »
(7) et à offrir une réflexion d’ensemble sur le sujet.
Les contributions du volume ont été regroupées en trois parties. La
première, intitulée « Pédagogie, théorie et modèles rhétoriques », examine
les multiples modalités par lesquelles les femmes ont été exposées à la
rhétorique sous l’Ancien Régime. Elle a pour intérêt majeur de rendre
compte de la diversité des sources d’exposition, « depuis les manuels de
politesse jusqu’au traité de Gaillard, en passant par les éloges de femmes,
les personnages féminins de la littérature et les manuels d’épistolographie »
(9). La deuxième partie du recueil, intitulée « Éloquence et pratiques
épistolaires », aborde la question de la pratique de la lettre par les femmes.
Le principal mérite de cette partie tient dans sa remise en cause d’un
lieu commun courant qui prétend que la « simplicité », le « naturel »
et la « naïveté » du style féminin prédisposeraient les femmes à
l’écriture épistolaire. Or ces contributions démontrent clairement
que « la diversité et la complexité des pratiques épistolaires depuis les
princesses de la Renaissance jusqu’à la duchesse du Maine, en passant
par le genre de l’épître versifiée ou les comptes rendus épistolaires publiés
en périodique » (10) empêchent d’appréhender les liens qu’entretiennent
les femmes avec la lettre dans un rapport si réducteur. La troisième partie,
intitulée « Pratiques rhétoriques, sociabilité et politique », dépasse quant
à elle le seul genre épistolaire pour inclure toutes les autres manifestations
rhétoriques chez les femmes d’Ancien Régime, « que ce soit au sein des
salons, dans les polémiques religieuses, dans le roman, dans le conte, en
poésie, dans les controverses historiographiques ou dans l’essai politique »
(11). Ici encore, on ne peut qu’admirer la richesse des contributions qui
révèlent avec efficacité que l’éloquence féminine ne peut en aucun cas être
réduite au genre de la lettre ou à l’art de la conversation et qu’elle dépasse
le carcan étroit dans laquelle elle a souvent été cloisonnée.
Cette enquête apporte un éclairage nouveau sur deux aspects au moins
de la question: d’une part, elle met en lumière le fait que les femmes
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ont pris une part foncièrement active dans le modèle rhétorique, et ce
dès la Renaissance et durant tout l’Ancien Régime, « depuis le barreau
jusqu’à la chaire, en passant par le salon, le savoir-vivre, la conversation,
la littérature et l’ensemble des arts » (12). D’autre part, l’étude révèle
qu’il paraît problématique, voire impossible, d’opposer, d’un côté, une
rhétorique théorique telle qu’elle est apprise à l’école et, de l’autre, une
éloquence naturelle et spontanée. Au contraire, conclut Claude La
Charité, « la rhétorique et l’éloquence constituent un tout sans solution
de discontinuité, au sein duquel la parole féminine jour un rôle éminent
et en vient même à exercer une sorte de magistère » (12). Cet ouvrage
se distingue en outre par la diversité internationale de ses contributeurs
et contributrices (venant du Canada, des États-Unis, de la France, de la
Suisse, de l’Allemagne et des Pays-Bas) et par l’originalité des approches
critiques présentées, en particulier en ce qui concerne leur caractère
inter­disciplinaire: la littérature française y est mise en dialogue avec la
littérature étrangère, l’histoire, la musique, la politique ou encore l’histoire
de l’art—autant de perspectives qui révèlent, chacune à leur manière,
l’importance du paradigme rhétorique analysé ici dans sa dimension à la
fois méthodologique, pédagogique, théorique et pratique.
Zeina Hakim est professeure associée de littérature française à Tufts
University. Elle est l’auteure de « Fictions déjouées: Le Récit en trompe-l’œil
au xviiie siècle » (2012).
Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland
by Hal Gladfelder
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
xiv+312pp. US$54.95. ISBN 978-1-4212-0490-5.
Review by Andrea Haslanger, Tufts University
For many years, the answer to the question “Who is John Cleland?”
has been “the author of Fanny Hill.” Even during his lifetime, Cleland
struggled to escape the notoriety of that book, wishing it were “buried
and forgot” (2). While that particular wish of Cleland’s shows no signs
of coming true, Hal Gladfelder’s new book, Fanny Hill in Bombay: The
Making and Unmaking of John Cleland, offers a historical and critical
account of Cleland’s life and work that attends to all of Cleland’s major
writings. Gladfelder’s book opens significant new avenues of study,
not only because it shows Cleland to have been seriously engaged in
thinking about literary form, but also because of the connections it
draws between Cleland’s legal and political writings and his works of
fiction. Gladfelder brings Cleland to life as an author who falls into
writing without entirely intending to, and who reinvents his interests
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and affiliations as he goes, moving between pornography, romance,
translation, etymology, politics, history, and other fields.
Fanny Hill in Bombay follows Cleland’s career as an author, combining
biographical and critical readings with careful archival work to generate
what we might call a critical biography: Gladfelder states that this “is
not a biography in the usual sense of the word,” but rather “a history
or case study of the writer writing” (5). What is so exciting about this
work is what “the writer writing” entails: Cleland writes across locales
(Bombay, London) and genres (legal brief, novel, medico-sexual
pamphlet, newspaper column). The concerns that emerge repeatedly
across Cleland’s corpus have to do with servitude (in prostitution and
in colonialism), with sexuality, and with fictionality, both in political
rhetoric and in the literary field.
The book’s seven chapters are arranged chronologically and survey
major episodes in Cleland’s life and work. The first chapter follows him
to Bombay, where he spends twelve years working for the British East
India Company, drafts Fanny Hill, and participates in legal cases as an
attorney and a defendant. In one case of particular interest, Cleland,
a slaveholder himself, is accused of harbouring a sea captain’s slave
who has fled abuse. In Gladfelder’s analysis, Cleland’s defence reveals
how the sea captain is simultaneously assuming the slave to be free
(to give testimony) while still effectively enslaved (and therefore his
property). These issues of speech and servitude, Gladfelder suggests,
bear clear relation to Fanny Hill, which itself “insinuate[d] that sexual
exploitation, analogous to that found under slavery, was rife even within
the domestic realm of mid-century England” (32).
Gladfelder goes on to discuss Cleland’s 1740 return to London, a
trip that begins a “trying, tumultuous decade” in which Cleland unsuc­
cessfully attempts to found a Portuguese East India Company and has
a public falling-out with Thomas Cannon (39). Cleland’s association
with Cannon, the author of Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated
and Exemplify’d, provides the groundwork for a comparative reading
of Fanny Hill and Ancient and Modern Pederasty as sodomitical texts
that incorporate and overturn anti-sodomitical discourse. From here,
Gladfelder moves to consider Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure alongside
Memoirs of a Coxcomb, offering an account of their formal similarity—
both are tales of sexual awakening that end in marriage, but Coxcomb,
crucially, is not pornographic. The remaining three chapters tackle a
stunning variety of material. Under the heading of Cleland’s hack
writing, Gladfelder reads a tract decrying the government response to
riots at brothels in the Strand, The Case of the Unfortunate Bosavern
Penlez, and a translation of an Italian text about a lesbian cross-dresser,
the Case of Catherine Vizzani. The penultimate chapter considers
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Cleland’s late fiction as a further engagement with the conventions
of romance, and the book concludes with a fascinating survey of
Cleland’s etymological writing, his search for Britain’s Celtic past, and
his claim that ancient Britain “was purely democratical ... and never
under kings” (231).
As this brief summary will suggest, it is impossible to come away
from Gladfelder’s book without being overwhelmed by the range
of Cleland’s productivity and engagement. The sheer scope of the
works considered—and significant gaps exist in the archive, making
it impossible to recover certain details of Cleland’s life—militates
against a singular or unified reading of this writer. Gladfelder draws
out, rather than resolves, the contradictions of the author who wrote
exuberant fiction about prostitution but also likened prostitution to
slavery, remarking in a pamphlet published the same year as Memoirs
of a Woman of Pleasure that “nothing, no, not her [the prostitute’s] own
Person, is her own Property, or at her own Disposal” (155). Similar
complexities emerge in Gladfelder’s reading of Cleland’s political com­
mitments and his representations of sexuality.
By virtue of being a critical biography, Fanny Hill in Bombay ex­
poses its readers to a tremendous quantity of material, much of which
is new; it does not, however, always offer lengthy readings of the texts
it engages. Instead, it frames the questions that future critics may want
to pursue. These questions fall into two broad categories: (1) How can
the thematic connections within Cleland’s corpus produce new read­
ings of his life and work? (2) How do Cleland’s works besides Fanny
Hill contribute to our understanding of genre, and of genre’s relation
to sexuality? Given the complexity of Cleland’s engagement with sexu­
ality, some readers may wish for a more robust theorization of the
sexual categories at play, but this is not what Gladfelder sets out to do,
so decrying its absence may not be fair. Regardless, there are many
scenes and texts awaiting further discussion: for example, the vampiric
passage from Memoirs of a Coxcomb, in which a female libertine hires
a nursemaid to breastfeed her ailing lover and servant. Gladfelder reads
this as a “crisis ... of masculine authority”; that it may be, but it is also
evidence of the text’s intolerance of female libertinism (128). Because
Memoirs of a Coxcomb is dismissive not only of prostitution but also
of most expressions of female sexuality, and goes so far as to discipline
another female libertine, Miss Wilmore, until she is reformed by love,
its differential treatment of female and male sexuality—a far cry from
the fungible bodies that populate Fanny Hill—deserves a more ex­
tended reading.
Fanny Hill in Bombay, in its final chapters, makes increasingly
frequent reference to Edward Said’s On Late Style. What the use of Said
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seems to capture is a sense that difficult, peripheral, even odd texts
are of critical value, especially when we think about them as part of a
corpus. While some of Cleland’s writings analyzed here may not in turn
produce an efflorescence of new criticism, many of them will, thanks
in part to the ways in which Gladfelder has accounted for, framed, and
analyzed them. This book gives us the opportunity to think about how
we use authorship as a critical heuristic, and how canonization can
direct critical attention towards certain texts and away from others.
Gladfelder has recovered the Cleland beyond Fanny Hill, and though
this Cleland may not be quite so tireless at generating euphemisms,
he is, as Gladfelder demonstrates, engaging many of the concerns that
preoccupy our field today.
Andrea Haslanger is assistant professor of English at Tufts University; her
most recent article, “From Man-Machine to Woman-Machine: Automata,
Fiction, and Femininity in Dibdin’s Hannah Hewit and Burney’s Camilla,”
is forthcoming in Modern Philology.
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