"French principles" and English women: The novel of feminist exposure, Wollstonecraft to Austen.

Abstract

During and shortly after the French Revolution, women in England were writing politically significant, socially important novels that challenged, and continue to challenge, literary standards of various kinds. Women with aesthetic techniques and approaches as diverse as those of Frances Burney, Hannah More, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Jane West and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others, published novels that confronted and criticized in different ways the status quo in the political, social and literary arenas. Despite these women's literary innovations and political commentaries, literary and even feminist studies dealing with this period generally have focused only upon "romantic" works, ignoring or denigrating those productions deemed somehow out of step with the Romantic Movement. Drawing upon M. M. Bakhtin's formulations of the dialogic and the novel, feminist theories about authority and subjectivity, and cultural studies of the period, I argue that the above authors created a new literary genre that marginalized concerns with the internal life of its characters in order to expose the ways in which various institutions of power attempted to control the thinking and behavior of women. Although all of these writers published in other genres, I focus on their novels as the vehicle that best enabled them to communicate their sometimes radical messages of reform in a time when such communications were politically as well as personally risky. Within the novel, they enact dialogic confrontations of various discourses and points of view, thereby subverting the authority of those discourses as they assert their own. In singling out for particular examination their appropriations and reconstructions of the discourses of history, sensibility and morality, I suggest that these women were involved in a multi-layered dialogic relationship with the unstable politics of the period, certain types of masculinist eighteenth-century novels, romantic ideology, and each other. The rhetorical and narrative strategies employed in novels of feminist exposure may be detected in subsequent novels with similar political and social agendas, suggesting the need to reconsider both literary and feminist history.