The Reputation of a Woman: Female (Self) Authorship, Journaling, and the Rise of the Epistolary Novel
“Remember, my dear Evelina, nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman; it is at once the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things” (Evelina)
In her best-selling, contemporary books and lectures on her psychological research, such as the viral Power of Vulnerability, in which she articulates research findings through the art of storytelling, Dr. Brene Brown defines herself as both a researcher and a storyteller–often to the chagrin of those booking her much sought-after public speaking talent, who wish to market the event by summing-up her “self,” succinctly, to others. Brown has stated, “When you own your story, you get to write the end.” This means that survivors of trauma, for instance, are empowered to own their story, so as not to continue to wallow in the depths of victimhood. Writing, then, enables people to move from victim–object–to writer–subject; writing being synonymous here as both process and product (identity) in the journey of self-actualization. The process of writing is the path on which to become a writer of your own life story. Often, when victims of trauma–or really just humans in general–are caught up in their life story, this constitutes a false sense of self, otherwise known in psychological terms as the ego.
If existing, male-created and enforced, power structures require people to fashion and deploy an ego, or false (I prefer the more friendly term, fictional) sense of self, in order to survive, operate and perhaps even succeed/thrive in this world, then the right to construct, or fashion, an ego has hinged on women’s ability (tenacity) to write their “own” fictions–both “real” (in so far as that fictional sense of self clearly operates on the external world, or objects/events), and imagined–fictional stories. The most appropriate format for women, conventions dictated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was that of the novel–a new/“novel” genre whose structure was free for the making/taking during this time of self- and empire-expansion, as Brett McInelly expertly shows in his 2003 article, “Expanding Empires, Expanding Selves: Colonialism, the Novel, and Robinson Crusoe.” However, as McInelly’s article title indicates, traditionally, scholars’ studies of the “self” tend to focus on the development of the male self under the assumption that females were not allowed to, so did not, articulate/participate in the practice of self-authorship (or as Greenblatt puts it in his seminal, Foucaultian power work/treatise, Renaissance Self-fashioning).
One need look no farther than Ian Watt’s structuralist, seminal work in novel studies, The Rise of the Novel, which famously excludes women–the primary authors and readers of novels–from acknowledgement in the rise of novel, to show how women’s sense of and ability to author (1) works (2) themselves, has historically been denied and/or ignored. Research in the field of novel studies since Watt has shown a different perspective: that in the eighteenth and on into the nineteenth centuries, well-known and typically regarded as the period in which our modern sense of self, powered by the technologies of colonization, industrialization, the printing press, and more, saw the expansion of the female sense of self, and that the sense of self ought not to be reduced to that of the male self, just because males had more of an apparent, exterior “proof” of their expanding selves. For instance, in The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning, Lynch deconstructs this notion of “character” and shows that it was socially constructed during a specific time in history: the eighteenth century. She examines the narrative arc of the growth of character(s) from flat to round, and from early to Burney to Austen novels, deconstructing In Watt’s structuralist tendency that round characters such as Austen’s are a natural progression from the flat characters that preceded it.
My research has, in addition to Lynch’s and that of other eighteenth/nineteenth century scholars, shown that females, though the external “proof” of an expanded self is not as apparent as, say, McInelly’s take on that of Robinson Crusoe (as personification of the need for an expanded self to project upon expanding empires/bodies such as Friday’s), females’ sense of selves did expand–albeit on the interior. This expanding sense of the female self, because it happened on the interior not exterior due to existing male power dynamics/structure, can best be charted through novels written by and for women, and those female authors’ senses of selves which they attempted to author/articulate in their journals/diaries, and letters. In this response specifically, I will chart this sense of self from the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries, through Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, to Frances Burney’s early diaries and her first novel, Evelina: Or, the History of a Young Woman’s Entrance to the World, to Jane Austen’s early-nineteenth-century Pride and Prejudice and finally, the penultimate female sense of self (authorship) as shown in Charlotte Bronte’s Byronic/romantic 1847 heroine, Jane Eyre.
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Time of Expanding and Contracting Female Agency
I argue that it is a time of expanding and contracting agency for women in that women’s agency on the exterior contracted and their agency on the interior expanded–if they so chose, and if they combatted successfully the male encroachment attempts onto their interior realms/psyches that power dynamics during this time period necessitated/allowed for. It is interesting to note that women were not supposed to write their own stories. But women who did author both fiction and their life stories in their journals were able to take advantage of the affordances and constraints unique to this time period of “expanding empires, expanding selves” as Mcinelly puts it. In her earliest diaries, for instance, Frances Burney writes of the danger that came from misplacing her diaries. Fortunately, it was just her father who found it; also fortunately, her father, rather liberal at the time, advised her daughter as to the dangers of even keeping a journal–but still permitted her to do so. Burney writes of the surreptitious process of deception in which she had to engage in order to simply write down her thoughts on the day that passed: “The fear of discovery, or of suspicion in the house, made the copying extremely laborious to me: for in the day time, I could only take odd moments, so that I was obliged to sit up the greatest part of many nights, in order to get it ready” (Early Diary, 1777). When her secret writing was discovered–cleverly, to “Nobody,” as the following paragraph will show–by her father, Burney writes:
As ill fortune would have it, papa went into the room–took my poor Journal–read and pocketted it. Mama came up to me and told me of it. O Dear! I was in sad distress–I could not for the life of me ask for it. …. I was so frightened that I have not had the heart to write since, till now, I should not but that — in short, but that I cannot help it! As to the paper, I destroy’d it the moment I got it (Early Diary, 1877).
In her journals and within her novels, Burney authored both private and public selves/personas in which to operate in this world. In her journals, Burney’s audience was “Nobody”; in her novels such as her debut success, Evelina, about a woman’s “Pains and Pleasures of Coming Out,” as Julie Park’s influential essay likening the process to coming out to the inner workings of the automaton, puts it, her audience was the English reading-public, the emerging middle-class and also the upper classes such as those in her inner circle such as Queen Charlotte and the artistic circle of her famous father’s, Charles Burney, she grew up in under the mentorship of Samuel Crisp and also later, Samuel Johnson. Burney, a woman, as the above and following quotation shows, had to police her own writing/self even in her own diaries, for fear they might be discovered; women were not supposed to keep diaries, to author their own selves: “To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved, to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity, to the end of my life!” (Early Journals). It wasn’t even safe to address her own self; for “to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved.”
In Evelina, the brutal Captain Mirvan, the seafaring, anti-French-and-anything-not-English character who symbolizes British industrial/capital/colonization, sums up females’ supposed non will to power in that he challenges his daughter not even to have/display a public opinion in his presence. Evelina writes in her letter to her adoptive father, the Rev. Mr. Villars:
We both, and with eagerness, declared that we had received as much, if not more pleasure, at the opera than any where: but we had better have been silent; for the Captain, quite displeased, said, “What signifies asking them girls? Do you think they know their own minds yet? Ask em after any thing that’s called diversion, and you’re sure they’ll say it’s vastly fine-they are a set of parrots, and speak by rote, for they all say the same thing: but ask ‘em how they like making puddings and pies, and I’ll warrant you’ll pose ‘em. As to them operas, I desire I may hear no more of their liking such nonsense; and for you, Moll” (to his daughter,) “I charge you, as you value my favour, that you’ll never again be so impertinent as to have a taste of your own before my face. There are fools enough in the world, without your adding to their number. I’ll have no daughter of mine affect them sort of megrims. It is a shame they a’n’t put down; and if I’d my will, there’s not a magistrate in this town but should be knocked on the head for suffering them. If you’ve a mind to praise any thing, why you may praise a play, and welcome, for I like it myself.” This reproof effectually silenced us both for the rest of the evening (Letter XXIII).
Typically, the expanding sense of self is examined in terms of the male self because it is assumed by critics that female agency and sense of self was not allowed to expand, so did not. But it did expand, to allow for the penultimate, rebellious sense of self in spite of not because of the power structure employed. While Captain Mirvan’s speech “effectually silenced” his daughter and her friend, Evelina, “for the rest of the evening”–he reprimands them in order to silence the other men in their party, who had the audacity to ask the women as to their opinion on the opera. He silences the men by silencing/demonstrating authority over his daughter, his property, in front of them when he commands her, after devaluing her by ridiculing her face in public, to “never again be so impertinent as to have a taste of your own before my face.”
“Real”/Imagined Herstories
In The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox–with male censure-ship from none less than the likes of Samuel Johnson, Richardson and Henry Fielding–created a textual universe in which a woman, due to her vast beauty, rank, and estate, and other feminine qualities of value, including the natural tendency to retreat into nature and not partake in makeup–artifice, or deception. In this early novel, Lennox satirizes French romances in the mode of Don Quixote (heralded by many scholars as the first-ever novel), but rather through an older man’s point of view, through a female attempting to author her own self after the death of her daughter, primarily using the romance texts she read throughout her life-long retreat in the country. The above-mentioned qualities–not least her striking beauty (similar to Evelina’s)–gives the heroine, Lady Arabella, the opportunity to display the erratic behavior she adapts from the French romances that have engulfed her mind, absorbed her sense of self. She is truly an individual, due to her retirement and rank, unaffected by the whims of court, gossip and idle chatter that the narrator insists/shows that so many other women are guilty of. Arabella’s reading of romances show the power of literature to “regulate our Actions, form our Manners, and inspire us with a noble Desire of emulating those great, heroic, and virtuous Actions, which made those Persons so glorious in their Age, and so worthy Imitation in ours?” (The Female Quixote).
Novels, according to Lennox in this, her most famous novel, are the necessary replacement for women, for the French romances which previously governed their behavior/expectations in the physical world. The Female Quixote’s swiftly concluding chapter, many people assumed from Lennox’s contemporary time until the 1970’s when her journals and letters were unearthed and publicized/studied once again, that Samuel Johnson or Henry Fielding had written this section. While Lennox’s letters between her publishing connections in the industry reveal she valued and implemented many of her male mentors’ opinions, she in fact wrote (owned) the end of her story.
The “Meaning” of Authorship: Print Culture, Novels, and Fiction as a Path to Feminine (Self-)Authorship
During the eighteenth century when the novel was defining itself, and the value of fiction was under defense, it was important, according to critics such as Johnson and Fielding, to ground novels as “histories” and to make them realistic as possible so as to separate them from the fantastical “French” romances so demonized during this time, and against which the novel was attempting to separate itself as a genre. We see this perfectly in the Female Quixote, which takes the fantastical elements of the French romances and sets them apart, using them as a means of defining the novel as separate from what it is not. At the end of the Female Quixote, notably, Lennox (thought to be Johnson) takes a didactic, mansplaining type approach in the words of the clergyman whom Arabella seeks to “cure” her of her illnesses and misconceptions before she dies. It is interesting to note also, that the cure for her romance-laden brain starts first in a woman, a countess–yet the woman, called to assist her father in daughterly duties, disappears from the action and Lennox lets the man finish the job–the man of authority as authorized by the church to set the record straight. The female first relegates romances to their historical place; the man relegates them to show that parts of them survive and tells her just what parts ought to play a role in her/one’s life to maintain a healthy distance. Neither states romances are not to be used.
In Technologies of the Self, Foucault argues that the self is really a product of the technologies available at that time in history. Technologies of the Self can be seen as a late-life extension of his essay in Truth and Power, “What is an author?” Foucault examines the sense of self in terms of Christian confessional practices as technologies necessary for self-expression, self-cleansing and self-reinvention–or so the participants in those customs thought. He writes, “Maybe our problem is now to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history” (Hermeneutics 222-223). Taking Foucault’s notion of the technology of the self, and applying it to the context of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century technologies, such as the printing press and the novel and the journal-writing practice as a form of (self) authorship, reveals writing processes as a proving ground for the female sense of self to develop alongside the culture’s power dynamics of consumerist, expansionist technologies.
The irony is that women, in their attempt to author their own senses of self, is that they are authoring a false sense of self that will operate in a male world, on men’s terms, such as Foucault’s power dynamics and that articulated by Nietzsche’s (cynical) concept of the will to power. The sense of self that women authors have been hoping to accomplish, through authorship, must burst from the interior through the societal blockages and into the male-dominated world. Lennox came close–with the help of influential male censure–to articulating/envisioning/authoring a female-powered world in which compassion, not power/domination, is a virtue; Burney authored a world, in Evelina publicly and in her diaries privately (“to Nobody”) that dramatized but did not offer solutions, to the dynamics in which women were forced to operate. By the time that we arrive at Jane Austen, the domestic is still the arena in which individual women, such as Lizzie Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, exert their authority and sense of authorship by asserting power in men that they were “prevailed upon to marry” such as Mr. Darcy. Later, Bronte articulates a radical, Byronic/romantic notion of the female sense in Jane Eyre in which the birth of the modern sense of self is articulated:
“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal — as we are!” (Jane Eyre ch. 23).
Lennox’s Female Quixote in the early eighteenth century harnessed “beauty and much wealth” which “made it hard for” her suitor Mr. Glainville to leave her. Burney’s Evelina possessed “beauty and much wealth”–though her wealth was a secret, and rightly unknown by her upper-class suitor, Lord Orville, who proposed to her without knowing or caring about her wealth. Her wealth, though, shows that on some level he, known as a “connoisseur of beauty” in the novel by his competitor Sir Clement, Orville intuited Evelina’s “true” value and made her (in his words) “all my own!” Lizzie Bennett’s beauty is not classical like her sister Jane’s, the aesthetic beauty of Pride and Prejudice, nonetheless, her internal beauty, wit, and self-sufficiency–the individualism of her interior as displayed through the integrity of her exterior actions–land her a richer, more powerful husband. By the time we arrive at the nineteenth century, we are ready (or are we?) for a “poor, obscure, plain, and little” romantic heroine. Because of female authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writing at the time in which the novel and the modern sense/technologies of the self were “entering the World” like Burney and her character and novel, Evelina and Evelina, the romantic sense of the “soul”–a woman who has the audacity to state “I have as much soul as you–and full as much heart!” is able to enter the scene.
As females continue to seek to empower themselves past the role of victimhood and into subjecthood, to operate and succeed/thrive in this world, the novel and novel studies might prove more essential than ever. Scholars such as Suzanne Keene, a prominent mainstream narrative theorist, are seeking to “place the study of narrative empathy on firmly scientific grounds,” Vermule states in the conclusion of Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Our ability to empathize with literary characters places novels and works of fiction (and arguably also literary/creative nonfiction) in a unique cultural position as teacher and bridge between people and worlds.
