Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel

Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel l Joan Douglas Peters Florida A&M University, Tallahassee...

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Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel

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Joan Douglas Peters

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola

Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel ^&

Joan Douglas Peters

University Press of Florida Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers

Copyright 2002 by Joan Douglas Peters Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper All rights reserved 07

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peters, Joan Douglas, 1949– Feminist metafiction and the evolution of the British novel /Joan Douglas Peters. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–8130–2431–5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English fiction—History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature—Great Britain— History. 3. Feminist fiction, English—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature— Great Britain—History. 5. Point-of-view (Literature). 6. First person narrative. 7. Women in literature. I. Title. PR830.F45 P48 2002 823.009'352042–dc21 2001043728 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611–2079 http://www.upf.com

To the memory of Sheila Kelly and all she meant

The very activity of the novelist seems to alter in direction when he becomes aware that he has been the unconscious producer of a synchronic model or sign system; then perhaps he decides to do so consciously and self-consciously. Similarly, the activity of the reader is not one of being a consumer of stories, but rather one of learning and constructing a new sign-system, a new set of verbal relations. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Satire and the Woman’s Text: The Novel as Argument in Moll Flanders 22 2. Her Authoritative Text: A Woman’s Rhetoric of Ethics and Genre in Clarissa 51 3. Finding a Voice: Toward a Woman’s Discourse of Dialogue in Jane Eyre 77 4. Ideology, Ethics, and Voice: Privileging the Woman’s Mode in Bleak House 100 5. Performing Texts: Woman and Polyphony in Mrs. Dalloway 127 6. Recovering the Modernist Lawrence: The Function of Woman’s Narrative in The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover 159 Conclusion 192 Notes 197 Works Cited 231 Index 243

Acknowledgments

This book was a long time in the making, and many thanks are due. My deepest gratitude goes to Miriam Fuchs, who was with me through every phase of the manuscript. Her suggestions and best friendship were invaluable; I can’t imagine the book without her. I would also like to thank Craig Howes for his expertise and suggestions on specific chapters and Joseph O’Mealy, Shaun O’Connell, and Thomas Van Laan for their work on drafts at earlier stages. Having them in my life has always meant a great deal to me, and their advice at various points was critical to the project. I want to acknowledge my students, particularly Corrie Martin and the members of my graduate seminars, “English Novel and Criticism,” “Feminist Narratology,” and “Modern British Fiction,” who so enthusiastically spurred my thinking on the concepts developed here. All my students have made this a better book, and I am grateful. The College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at the University of Hawaii at Manoa contributed research grants that got me across the Pacific to primary collections. Former deans Richard Seymour and Cornelia Moore, in particular, helped to make that possible. I would like to thank acquiring editor Amy Gorelick of the University Press of Florida for her help at all stages of revision and for extra help in facilitating the process when I needed it and Jacqueline Kinghorn Brown, project editor, for her excellent editorial work. I also very much appreciate the suggestions of the readers assigned the manuscript by the press. Parts of my reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover were first published in the D. H. Lawrence Review 20 (1988) in “The Living and the Dead: Lawrence’s Theory of the Novel and the Structure of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” though in that essay I came to very different conclusions. The section on The Rainbow first appeared as “Modernist Dialogics of Form in The Rainbow” in D. H. Lawrence: The Cosmic Adventure. Studies of His Ideas, Works, and Literary Relationships, ed. Lawrence B. Gamache (Ontario: Borealis Press,

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Acknowledgments

1996). A version of chapter 3 was published under its same title in Studies in the Novel 23 (1991). I am grateful for permission to reprint from these essays. I would also like to thank Harcourt Brace Inc. and the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf for permission to quote from Mrs. Dalloway and Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Freda Lawrence Ravagli for their permission to quote The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Gloria and Paul Murphy, Raymond and Margery Peters, Sam Black, William Peters, Sara Stalman, and Anne Stern have been a continuous source of friendship and support that I have come to count on in everything. But my thanks go above all to Paul Campbell for his grace in putting our life on hold and for his good humor through it all.

Introduction

In her study of the female Künstlerroman, Gayle Greene points to the 1970s as the era of a new genre of “feminist metafiction” in the novel. Early in this decade, she says, authors such as Erica Jong, Gail Godwin, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood began to use female protagonists to confront in fictional terms the established literary conventions they felt had been imposed upon them as novelists. In all the works that Greene examines, the protagonist is herself a developing writer who must find a way to overcome the dictates of inherited literary codes in order to locate her own voice and devise her own form. Because this struggle is represented directly through a narrative that reflects the character’s thinking, it becomes a part of her story and a part of the fiction that tells her story. The result is feminist metafiction, which, as Greene defines it, is a woman writing about a woman writing—specifically in reaction to conventions for the novel prescribed by established “male” literature. Not surprisingly, according to Greene, the literary tradition most influential and at the same time most oppressive to women writing in English in the twentieth century is the “Great Books” tradition of the British novel. It is in direct opposition to the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century canonical novel, she says, that feminist metafiction defines itself as a uniquely postmodernist genre.1 Greene’s definitional and historical placement of feminist metafiction as outside and against the British “canon” reinforces the adversarial relationship that feminist scholarship has traditionally had to the canonical history of the novel genre. The subversive activity of the texts that Greene examines is conducted in essentialist, binary terms as woman against man, female writer against male novel, contemporary woman writer against the literary establishment. With this study, I look to alter this perspective. I will show that, contrary to Greene’s argument, “woman’s” metafictional discourse did not emerge as a late twentieth-century feminist reaction to

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the canon but had been revising and regenerating the novel from its beginnings as part of the evolution of the canon itself. My analysis looks directly to the traditional British literary canon to examine feminist metafiction and to explore the pervasive influence of woman’s narrating acts on the transformation of the novel as a literary genre. Both male and female writers have used women’s narrations as a way of introducing new concepts of genre into the novel, and women’s narrations have therefore played a crucial role in defining the novel as a genre. My aim is to demonstrate the tremendous influence that women’s narrating acts have had on the study of literature, on our thinking about literature, and, more specifically, on critical developments concerning the novel as a genre. I will show that the strategic use of woman’s narrative was intrinsic to canon formation in the novel and has come to define what we now understand as “novelistic” even in noncanonical texts. To illustrate this argument, I examine seven novels from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries whose authors, both male and female, work generic theory directly into the discourse of their fiction to produce ongoing “underarguments” concerning the novel as a literary genre. These underarguments are performed through women’s narrations that are simultaneously and explicitly set off against discursive representations of existing patriarchal conventions of narrative, objectified textually in the form of literary parody. What results are dialogical discussions on the subject of narration conducted entirely on the level of text. In some cases, the primary woman’s narrative is contrasted with the narration of one or more central male characters. In others, textual parodies of conventional literary discourses are embedded directly into the woman’s narrative in language that is recognizably out of place. In all the novels under study, the textual opposition of female and male discourse creates a gendered dialogic of generic discourses played out on a separate semantic plane, entirely independent of the telling of the story. Central to my enterprise is the idea that the novel has “evolved” over its history and that women narrators have been used to facilitate that evolution in the British canonical text. Margaret Anne Doody takes the novel’s evolution back to the ancient Greeks, and while neither she nor any other historian of the genre would claim that the novel has improved over the course of its many manifestations, she does assume that the “truth” of the novel’s existence today emerged out of the course of its evolutionary history.2 Implicit in this and other historical studies of the novel as genre is that the process of evolution is retroactive, that in the Eliotic sense of

Introduction · 3

“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” new novels change earlier ones by eliciting new ways of reading novels as texts. My own study shares this assumption. It conceives the evolutionary history of the British novel in terms not of progression but of performance—the ongoing deconstruction and revisioning of generic form by individual novelists in individual novels, played out on the level of narrative. This book does, however, take a chronological approach and examines in sequence novels that create textual arguments in dialogic relation to earlier novels or to other literary genres. My thesis is grounded in the principles of dialogical narration proposed by Bakhtin and revised with a view toward Kristeva’s early semiotic theory. Bakhtin has been used by critics primarily in an extraliterary way to examine dialogically the discourses of cultural power contextualized by and through the novel. Bakhtin himself, though, also theorized narratologically about the novel as a genre by looking to the dynamics of the language built into the narrative style of the formal literary text. Specifically, he claims that throughout the novel’s history, authors have used the narrational language of description, commentary, fictional dialogue, and “character zones” to foreground textual parodies of narrative conventions and explicitly contrast those conventions with their own innovative narrational styles.3 In this way, writers have privileged new novelistic concepts in direct textual opposition to conventional narratives while they also legitimized those new concepts by presenting them in conjunction with the established, albeit parodied, forms. This kind of metafictional underargument, Bakhtin suggests, is historically systemic to the early development of the genre, and this is how it will be treated here.4 Kristeva argues that, in contrast to theories of écriture feminine, a “woman’s” voice in narration is not a separate alternative form of discourse but a language that explicitly challenges conventional, phallogocentric modes of telling, whether the author be male or female. In other words, it is a voice identifiable not by its essential female qualities but by its difference from the language of established patriarchal systems.5 Along these lines, my analysis employs Kristeva’s critical paradigm of semiotic discourse, identified with “woman,” as it confronts symbolic discourse on the level of text. It is this feminist, poststructuralist revision of Bakhtin’s principle of dialogic discourse that forms the basis of the argument in this book. I examine the ways that novelists have historically literalized the idea of woman’s voice as semiotic “other” by performing new ideas about the novel through the textual dynamics of women’s narrations. My interest

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is not in the psychology of a particular narrating character or in narrative as a vehicle for transmitting the story. Instead, I foreground narrational voice as a rhetorical, metafictional underargument that pervades the language of the woman narrator’s text. Work versus Text Because this study is concerned with the activity of narrating as a discrete textual phenomenon, its analysis depends not only on distinguishing story from narration in the strict narratological sense but also on maintaining a larger differentiation between work and text. Roland Barthes defines work as story and also as everything that the story hermeneutically suggests; that is, it involves all thematic readings and character analyses, including the psychological and ideological positioning of the fictional narrator in relation to the story being told. In contrast, he defines the text as the language of that literature, which is unanchored to the fiction and produces its own autonomous, constantly changing systems of meaning. Unlike the work, text for Barthes is never predetermined; rather, it is always in process and always in production.6 Barthes, of course, primarily applies text to linguistic wordplay at the sentence level, but Bakhtin, despite his stated antipathy toward linguistics, uses it in much the same general way, shaping the notion of text to his own theories of language and discourse. Bakhtin’s reconception of text to include dialogical discourse premises my own narrative analysis. In “The Problems of the Text,” Bakhtin distinguishes two “poles” of text. The first pole consists of a system of signs that is repeatable from one text to another (as in linguistics). The second pole, which he calls “text as utterance,” is the narrative discourse produced within the context of the specific novel. It functions intertextually in the form of a dialogue between individual language systems, not as a repetition of set systems imposed on one text and then the next. In other words, Bakhtin envisions text in the second pole—“the unrepeatable event of the text”—straddling both text and work, as Barthes defines them.7 The wordplay occurs in the dialogical interaction of the primary language system with the other literary, historical, and ideological discourses embedded in it. Bakhtin insists that this interaction between genres of discourse, although unique to each novel, must remain on the level of text and never shift into storied, materialist constructs: “Dialogical relationships . . . are extralinguistical. But at the same time they must not be separated from the

Introduction · 5

realm of discourse, that is, from language as a concrete integral phenomenon. Language lives only in the dialogic interaction of those who make use of it. Dialogic interaction is indeed the authentic sphere where language lives.”8 While Bakhtin’s concerns extend beyond the formal dynamics of the text, they remain grounded in the novel’s own narratological language systems.9 Critics who apply Bakhtin’s theories of discourse to literary works generally concern themselves with the social contexts surrounding polyphonic narratives rather than with the structural activity of the discourse itself.10 Bakhtin’s ties to poststructuralist semiotics are so strong, however, that one might legitimately argue that his theoretical animosity to linguistics is less one of opposition than of revolution from within. As a linguist and student of Barthes, Kristeva, for one, seems to prefer Bakhtin’s definition of text as “an absorption and reply to another text” (her words) to Barthes’s, and she coins the term intertextuality as a way of describing her understanding of the structuralist component of Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic. Kristeva praises the “dynamic dimension” Bakhtin brought to the field of textual analysis and claims that his major contribution to language theory is in the area of semiotics, in the way he “takes on the fundamental problems presently confronting a structuralist analysis of literature.”11 Toril Moi reemphasizes the close poststructuralist connection Kristeva has to Bakhtin. She goes so far as to suggest that the field of “semiotics or textual theory” may have come about through the concerted, if largely separate, effort of both “to undo—to deconstruct—the old disciplinary barriers between linguistics, rhetoric and poetics.”12 Others have suggested at the very least that Kristeva used Bakhtin with such subversive ambitions in mind.13 Bakhtin himself habitually refers to his own concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia as language “systems,” or semiotic fields, and he seems to have conceived the novel primarily in those terms. “Different linguistic and stylistic forms may be said to belong to different systems of language in the novel,” he says by way of defining the genre. “It is impossible to lay out the languages of the novel on a single plane, to stretch them out along a single line. It is a system of intersecting planes.”14 Whatever uses Bakhtin may be put to in other critical venues, I am treating him as a narratologist, someone concerned with language structures and with the dynamics of language performed on the level of text. Of particular importance to this study is Bakhtin’s adoption of “metalinguistics” in a historical context to describe a language system that oper-

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ates on its own plane and offers a subtext for the novel on the issue of literary language itself. According to Bakhtin, metalinguistic systems are often present within the larger network of the novel’s language schemes and thus give the narration a dual function—to tell the story and, at the same time, to expose the limitations of another literary language through imitation of that language. The particular strategies of metalinguistics— exaggerated stylization, skaz, and oppositional character zones—are carried on simultaneously with the narrating of the fiction, but they also perform textually on a separate parodic level and create a narrational discourse that is inherently double-voiced.15 Bakhtin says that these metalinguistic strategies, which are the stylistic foundation of his theory of literary dialogism, have historically been used by novelists to explore and perform textually specific ideas of genre. The novelist employs them in order to “discourse with” established literary convention and to suggest, in contrast, new ideas. As the following passage indicates, the juxtaposition of the two language systems in a novel does not function merely to contrast different styles of writing. It places in dialogical opposition entirely different epistemological concepts of language for the novel as a literary form: [T]he narrator’s story or the story of the posited author is structured against the background of normal literary language, the expected literary horizon. Every moment of the story has a conscious relationship with this normal language and its belief system, is in fact set against them, and set against them dialogically: one point of view opposed to another, one evaluation opposed to another, one accent opposed to another (i.e., they are not contrasted as two abstractly linguistic phenomena). This interaction, this dialogical tension between two languages and two belief systems, permits authorial intentions to be realized in such a way that we can acutely sense their presence at every point in the work.16 Bakhtin’s notion of text, then, does not, like Barthes’, consist of language that is completely unstable. For Bakhtin, language is always contextualized ideologically, and when he discusses the metalinguistic interaction of literary discourses in the novel, his interest is in the language of literature itself as ideology, one linguistical belief system situated in opposition to another.17 According to Bakhtin, the primary metalinguistic strategy employed by novelists to confront their literary predecessors and propose new narrational forms was parody. “Literary parody of dominant novel-types plays a

Introduction · 7

large role in the history of the European novel,” he writes. “One could even say that the most important novelist models and novel-types arose precisely during this parodic destruction of preceding novelistic worlds.”18 Bakhtin locates all fundamental revolutions of discourse in carnival, so for him parodic discourse always carries with it undertones of “doubt, indignation, irony, mockery, ridicule and the like” toward the embedded text. The novelist who is parodying another, “once having made his home in the other’s discourse, clashes hostilely with its primordial host and forces him to serve directly opposing aims.” As a result, the discourse of the narrative becomes, on a textual level, an “arena of battle” between two opposing literary styles.19 Linda Hutcheon points out, however, that semantically the word parody also allows for a more neutral, a more complex relationship between the two texts (the Greek para meaning simply “side by side”). When parodying another writer or established novel type, a novelist is also placing his or her own work within the larger tradition already occupied by the parodied text. Indeed, as noted earlier, the new text achieves a certain level of legitimacy from being posed in conjunction with the established work. The interaction that occurs between them in that context becomes more a dialogue than an argument, less a matter of ridicule than an issue of comparisons and contrasts. Hutcheon is disturbed by theories like Bakhtin’s which imply that new forms denote “better” forms, that “literary evolution” is synonymous with literary improvement.20 She prefers to define parody as “imitation with critical difference,” and this redefinition allows for another kind of intertextual reading of stylistic parody in the novel. Rather than the new novel showing off its superiority to the more established form, the two texts together enact an equal stylistic discussion on issues of literary genre. While my study generally adopts Bakhtin’s definition of parody as a method of rejecting literary convention, Hutcheon’s variation infiltrates much of the analysis of individual texts. Woman’s Narratives as “Other” Texts The focus of this study is a discernible and important pattern that occurs throughout the history of the British novel. The discourse that novelists have used to represent the “new” novel on the level of text—the discourse against which established conventions were parodied—has repeatedly been performed in the narrational voice of a woman. In Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Madeleine

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Kahn points to the “strikingly frequent use of a female narrator by authors of the early novel” both to reflect contemporary social phenomena and to represent concepts of genre. She claims that because women were regarded as unpredictable, even “mad,” novelists would adopt a woman’s voice as narrator in order to explore cultural issues of boundary transgressions and also to metafictionalize a genre that was itself considered unstable.21 This narrational strategy was particularly useful to male novelists who could metafictionalize in this way while keeping their own patriarchal identity, distance, and control firmly intact. By using female narrators to perform the new genre, men could produce novels without identifying themselves or their reputations too closely with what was still considered an unconventional literary form. As a result, the hegemony of patriarchal literature and language was not essentially threatened—hence her term narrative transvestism. My own theory of a similar phenomenon is somewhat different and comes to a less cynical conclusion about the reasons for and effects of women’s narrating acts. I am arguing that the strategic adoption of women’s narrational voices in the early novel, although making use of assumptions about the marginality of women’s voices, deliberately places women’s discourse in narrational contexts of patriarchy so that the male discourse, including sometimes the male author’s own, is projected as the object of ridicule. Through the juxtaposition of female narratives with narrational parodies of and “dialogues with” established male discourse, early novelists explored and performed the possibilities for new kinds of novels, and in the process, they effectually privileged the discourse identified as “woman’s.” My view of the female voice is therefore also very different from Kahn’s. She proposes that male authors chose female narrators as a way of acting out psychoanalytically, and allegorically, the connection of “female hysteria” to social upheaval and the formal chaos of the early novel. The novel was, she declares, “the very embodiment of the chaos that this age still quite openly and vehemently identified as dangerously female.”22 My own reading of woman’s narrational discourse in the novel (whatever the assumptions about women in general) is that it worked against preconceived ideas of female hysteria. As narrators, women are portrayed in many ways as stronger, more self-analytical, sometimes more passionate, but also more intellectually reliable and complex than male narrators in the very same text or the narrational discourses identifying themselves in that text as patriarchal. Rather than employing woman narrators metafictionally to perform preconceived ideas about the novel as chaotic through culturally prescribed notions of women as unstable, novelists used women as narra-

Introduction · 9

tors to project their own concepts of the novel as legitimately superior to earlier novels. In the same way, they also used woman’s narrations performatively to demonstrate the novel as a genre superior to more traditional literary productions. Considering our very different conclusions about the implications of women’s narrative acts, it is significant that Kahn grounds her study in Freud while I base mine on theories of Bakhtin and on Kristeva’s poststructuralism. Poststructuralism has historically been targeted by materialist critics as being too abstract, too disconnected from the workings of the actual literary text to be reliably feminist.23 This objection is in some sense answered by recognizing that Kristeva’s poststructuralist theory of “women’s” marginalized discourse is, at least on a strategic, functional level, paradigmatic rather than real. As a structural paradigm, Kristeva’s feminist/linguistic revision of Lacan’s construct of the semiotic and the symbolic can be used most productively in concrete critical analysis of narrative strategies, rather than simply as abstract representation buried beneath the totality of the text. According to Kristeva, the function of the primal, chaotic, inarticulate semiotic, identified with but not exclusive to woman, is to challenge, disrupt, and otherwise undermine the symbolic, which is usually identified as male and realized in established phallogocentric discourse. In order to do so effectively and on the same plane, the semiotic must, however, first articulate itself; and this is accomplished through a transition out of the semiotic and into the thetic, the place where semiotic is represented in language and invades the symbolic on the level of text. When the transition into the symbolic is complete, the semiotic-turned-symbolic will itself be challenged, disrupted, and otherwise undermined by a new semiotic or “woman’s” discourse. This is the process through which the symbolic always originates—from the semiotic, through the thetic, to the symbolic phase.24 While Kahn could be said to focus on women’s narration as an allegorical representation of the chaos of the semiotic in isolation, I am interested in woman’s discourse at the thetic phase, the place where the semiotic transforms itself into coherence in order to challenge male symbolic norms. At this phase, the semiotic participates in dialogic interaction with the symbolic because both represent themselves as language systems. It is therefore at this phase where Bakhtinian and Kristevan discursive theories intersect.25 Because the semiotic is prelanguage and because the thetic cannot in fact be distinguished from the symbolic when they are both part of one authored text, semiotic and thetic processes can be produced and identi-

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fied only as structural metaphors, as performing a theory rather than proving it. Kristeva herself is primarily interested in semiotics as a subversive narratological strategy, and she sees this performative aspect as implicit in the working manifestations of her larger theory. She acknowledges, for example, that the whole idea of the semiotic challenging the symbolic in order to replace it is a cognitive process that only exists in a critical reading of a text, not in the actual language itself. She writes: [T]he semiotic that “precedes” symbolization is only a theoretical supposition justified by the need for description. It exists in practice only within the symbolic and requires the symbolic break to obtain the complex articulation we associate with in musical and poetic practices. In other words, symbolization makes possible the complexity of this semiotic combinatorial system, which only theory can isolate as “preliminary” in order to specify its functioning. Nevertheless, the semiotic is not solely an abstract object produced for the needs of a theory.26 When Kristeva applies the term semiotics to the writing of modern novelists such as Proust and Joyce, she is speaking about a technical linguistic performance devised by the author with strategic ambitions in mind. When I demonstrate the ways in which “women’s” narrative voice challenges patriarchal discourse in the novel, I conceive this practice according to a paradigm that performs Kristeva’s larger theory for narratological purposes—the semiotic challenging the symbolic at the thetic phase—not one that represents or is represented by that idea. The textual patterns I recognize, then, act out Kristeva’s structural system in metaphorical rather than representational terms. Moreover, while in critical practice the semiotic has been applied to female discourse and the symbolic to the male, this assumption is also a metaphorical construct, relevant only to a deliberately gendered critical paradigm and not to the psychoanalytic theory behind it.27 In contrast to other poststructuralist feminisms, like those proposed by Irigaray and Cixous, Kristeva’s definition of woman is completely nonessentialist: [A] woman cannot “be”; it is something which does not even belong in the order of being. It follows that a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say “that’s not it” and “that’s still not it.” In “woman” I see something that cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above

Introduction · 11

and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies. There are certain “men” who are familiar with this phenomen[on].28 As Moi points out, “Kristeva does not have a theory of ‘femininity’ and even less of ‘femaleness.’ What she does have is a theory of marginality, subversion and dissidence.”29 My own thesis adopts this premise. The women’s narrative voices foregrounded in this study—the voices that function to undermine established discourse within the novels’ narrative texts—are not functioning subversively as “female” in opposition to “male” but as one kind of novel in opposition to another. However, because this reading also literalizes Kristeva’s paradigm of the thetic by locating the semiotic’s confrontation with the symbolic in the language of the narrating woman, the “marginality, subversion and dissidence” that Moi speaks of does, in practice, become associated with and representational of woman.30 The authors considered here use women’s marginality as a way of privileging marginalized discourse, not as a way of subordinating that discourse to a preferred patriarchy; so their employment of women narrators to represent asexual issues of genre has very definite positive subtextual implications for the representation of women in literature. When novelists identify something quantifiable in the voice of a woman, an analytical and discursive quality that can best perform their ideas of what discourse in the novel should do, they create a paradigm—one kind of novel opposed to another—that is implicitly, fundamentally gendered. Criticisms by feminist scholars that woman’s discourse as “other” actually assumes a male construct, “a place of anterior femininity defined by reference to the masculine norm,”31 are legitimately contradicted by the novels’ use of this narratological frame. Feminist discourse in these texts challenges male discourse in order to replace it, in order to become the norm. When narrative discourse is explicitly identified with a woman’s particular type of analytical discourse (not to be confused with a particular woman’s idiosyncratic style of discourse) and when that discourse is posed against, rather than made supplemental to, patriarchal norms, the discourse itself becomes feminist. By the same reasoning, the critical methodology that examines the effects of that woman’s discourse on narrative patterns in a novel is not only narratological but also feminist in scope. What I am proposing, then, is a new form of feminist narratology for the novel.

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Toward a Textual Feminist Narratology A key problem for feminist scholars also specializing in the field of narratology has been whether, strictly speaking, such a thing as feminist narratology can legitimately be put into practice. The theoretical point of narratology is that narrative structures are autonomous, independent of the story and therefore also independent of any single thematic reading— political, ideological, cultural, or gendered. If critics want to achieve the integration of materialist feminism with narratology into a single methodology, then, this enterprise would seem doomed to self-contradiction. Nevertheless, in response to a growing dissatisfaction with literary theories that confine themselves to issues of language apart from cultural contexts, Susan Lanser proposed in a 1986 essay in Style a new feminist narratology. Her concept, in keeping with most feminist critical practices, envisions an interpretive narratological methodology that is responsive to issues of referentiality and considers the psychology of the narrating character as a woman, one who speaks explicitly or implicitly to women’s concerns. In a subsequent issue, Nelli Diengott asserted in direct rebuttal the unfeasibility of such a narratological scheme, pointing to the seemingly impenetrable line between narrative poetics and interpretive criticism that such an approach would have to cross.32 The exchange between Diegnott and Lanser thus set the terms for the debate between narratology and feminist narratology, a debate that should theoretically have remained at issue for feminist narratologists until the discrepancy between the two methodologies could satisfactorily be resolved.33 In practice, however, Lanser’s concept of feminist narratology as the study of narrative “in relation to a referential context that is simultaneously linguistic, literary, historical, biographical, social and political”34 has become the working definition of the term, and Diengott’s objections have largely been forgotten. Kathy Mezei introduces her book of critical essays, Ambiguous Discourse, by explicitly adopting Lanser’s concept of feminist narratology as the collection’s theoretical frame. After summarizing the debate between Lanser and Diengott, she announces that despite Diengott’s objections on narratological grounds, the “focus of this volume is to show, through close textual reading, how feminist narratology locates and deconstructs sites of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and transgression in aspects of narrative and in the sexuality and gender of the author, narrator, character, and reader” (2, emphasis mine). The assertion in the first part of Mezei’s statement that feminist narratology “locates and deconstructs sites

Introduction · 13

of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and transgression in aspects of narrative” creates a useful definition of an important new approach to narratology. Adding the second (italicized) part, however, undermines that definition and produces yet another interpretive methodology that attempts to account for the entire work from a feminist perspective, and this is not something that narratology is designed to do.35 I believe that it is time to be more precise in defining our methodology and to relinquish all claims that suggest an interpretive approach to the fiction of a book. In this way, feminist narratology can develop on its own terms. It can function to deconstruct narrative structures built up within a text and simultaneously dismantle the rules of a patriarchal narratology to discover all that a narrative can structurally and textually do. This, I contend, is the activity that a “woman’s” narrative encourages. By maintaining focus on text, feminist narratology can make a meaningful contribution both to feminist studies and to the science of narratology. The introduction of feminist narratology into the critical lexicon has had significant and positive ramifications because it expands a fixed system of narratological criticism in important new directions. In her rebuttal to Diengott, an argument more compelling in many ways than her original essay, Lanser calls for narratology to become responsive in a fundamental sense to the literature it investigates and on that basis be open to change. In making her charge, Lanser asks an important question, one that had been conspicuously missing from narratological inquiry: “For where does ‘the system’ come from, if not from what is learned through the reading of texts? Surely no poetician is born with a sense of ‘the system of literature’ apart from her experience of literary texts.”36 To define feminist narratology as a methodology that recognizes in “woman’s” narrative texts a challenging or deliberate undermining of the conventional narratological structures goes a long way toward opening up a field of inquiry that has traditionally been closed and fixed. Feminist narratology energizes set narratological structures by identifying how those structures interact as structures in a given work and how and why they are encouraged to break down. Robyn Warhol, among others, has done very important work in this area. She identifies how women canonical writers have taken narrative elements and refashioned them into subversive, interactive forms that contest both historical convention and the rules of narratology.37 In that way, Warhol and other critics cited later in this book make use of narratological methodology to open up the text instead of structurally enclosing it.

14 ·


A decade ago, Warhol remarked that feminist narratology had not yet engaged itself with narrative discourse on the level of text: To date, no feminist critic has taken a detailed look into gender’s effect on the level of discourse in fiction, using “discourse” strictly in the sense established by Genette, Chatman, Suleiman, and other narratologists. I think that stepping past the level of story to analyze the level of discourse within a framework of questions about gender can bring narratology to the service of a later moment in feminist criticism.38 My ambition with this study is to participate in bringing feminist narratology to that “moment” by looking to the dynamics of discourse in “woman’s” narratives on a textual level, separate from the structures that govern the fiction. With this endeavor, I hope to add another level to critical discussion and further open the feminist narratological field by reading narratology in a different way. Both Barthes and Bakhtin emphasize the role of the reader in producing meaning for the text when narrative is analyzed as text.39 At that level, the reader engages dialogically with the work as part of the ongoing diegetic process of the narrative. When Kristeva takes Bakhtin’s concept of “double-voiced” discourse and defines it more accurately as “intertextuality,” she is equally affirming that all activities of “voice” in a work of literature must occur as “text.” When narratives interact dialogically with other narratives, they do so as texts. The cultural contexts, both fictional and historical, for this activity are also represented in the form of text, and when the reader creates meaning out of textual dynamics, the reader responds as text to the text. Because a textual reading of narrative is not in any way hermeneutic, it cannot attempt to produce a feminist interpretation of the fiction. However, feminist criticism that engages with a novel on this level can add to other, hermeneutic, readings—including feminist readings—at the same time that it challenges those readings by contesting their interpretations as absolutes. Reading the Novels The purpose behind this study is twofold: I want to help make the interactive dynamics of the structure and text, identified with feminist narratology, part of narratology as a methodological approach to literary

Introduction · 15

texts; more important, I want to help centralize women’s place in the canon, so that feminism is viewed as integral to the developmental history of the novel, rather than outside and/or against it. Recognizing the crucial role of “woman’s” subversive activity in both areas takes that activity out of the margins and into the center of critical inquiry. My analyses are not intended to be definitive textual readings of the novels I treat, nor are they presented as feminist interpretations of these works. I am exploring a trend in the history of the novel that implicitly privileges women’s narrations, but I do not assume that women were in any way privileged, socially or representationally, in the culture or the novels that produced the textual activity I recognize. I do believe, however, that authority given to “woman’s” discourse in the canonical development of the novel did have an impact on issues of social and cultural representation and that it therefore served to empower women historically in real and significant ways. These implications will emerge through my textual reading of individual works and are conceptualized in the conclusion. The first two chapters analyze the techniques by which eighteenthcentury British novelists made use of woman’s narrations to discuss issues of genre and to define the newly emerging novel specifically in relation to established and popular literary forms.40 Specifically, I demonstrate how Defoe’s use of a woman narrator in Moll Flanders fuses formal satire with the novel as semiotic text, thereby performing the idea of the novel as rhetorical argument in direct contrast to other fictional genres. My argument is posed in opposition to most narrative interpretations of Moll Flanders, which approach the novel as an example of conventional nineteenthcentury realism. This “male” reading, institutionalized by Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel, ignores the “woman’s” text in Moll Flanders and, as a result, does not recognize the importance of its semiotic activity to the evolution of the novel genre. The next chapter examines how Richardson creates through the epistolary discourse of his primary male and female characters in Clarissa a dialogical interchange of two opposing kinds of generic literary discourse. The narrational discourse of the novel as realistic genre is represented in the quality and concerns of Clarissa’s discursive texts, while the rhetoric of traditional literary genres and, more pervasively, the sentimental novel are performed and parodied in Lovelace’s narrational prose. My analysis shares the assumption of recent narrative criticism of Clarissa that all the letters are intended as rhetorical arguments rather than representations of the characters’ states of mind and that they call for analysis as text, rather than as psychological studies. Unlike other recent critics, I

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argue that deconstructing the rhetorical texts of Clarissa works not to equalize all discourses but to privilege Clarissa’s. A textual reading grants Clarissa’s “woman’s” voice a narrational authority that contrasts with, and to a real extent overcomes, her character's lack of power and establishes a “woman’s” system of cultural and ethical values for the book. The next two chapters consider the ways that nineteenth-century novelists, who assumed realism to be the defining quality of the novel, explored theories of narrative voice through gendered oppositions of narrative mode and structure. First I examine how Brontë makes use of woman’s narration in Jane Eyre to propose a new textual construct of generic voice, specifically in contrast to the voices of conventional novel forms. Through a progression that moves the narrative from parody to interior focalization to dialogue, Brontë prescribes a “woman’s” discourse of dialogue as a “new” narration for the novel; this progression parallels but does not merge with the stages of Jane’s personal evolution into the narrator of her story. My analysis works in conjunction with the other feminist narratological readings of this novel, but it does not scrutinize the character of the female narrator. It treats the narrative as a rhetorical argument rather than as a psychological study. Unlike Jane Eyre, Bleak House is often read narratologically as an opposition between male and female voices, with the male authoritative narration set against the personal voice of a woman. This same gendered structural opposition, however, can also be read as a dialogic of genre, an intermodal textual discussion concerning the narrative possibilities for the novel as a narrative form. Dickens uses Esther’s narrative to explore the possibilities for the first-person narrative as a way of achieving realism in the novel as genre. He does this by objectifying narratological characteristics of that mode—including internal focalization, subjectivity, and storied time—in her narrative, rather than simply using her narration to illustrate those qualities, and he demonstrates through her first-person narrative the novelistic dramatization of ideological and ethical ideas. In direct contrast, the third-person narrative isolates and objectifies the elements of Dickensian satire that dominate the author’s own earlier works and, through this objectification, proves that this narrative mode actually works against the ideological and epistemological realism that Dickens valued in the novel as form. Although the third-person narration, by virtue of its authoritarian pose, appears to be the preferred mode in this novel, Dickens is using Esther’s narrative to experiment with new theories of narrating and is thereby privileging her discourse in the narrative text.

Introduction · 17

In the early twentieth century, modernist writers challenged nineteenth-century conventions of realism—including those of Brontë and Dickens—by experimenting with forms of narrative subjectivity. The final two chapters of this study explore the ways that early modernists also “discussed” their own techniques directly in their novels. I show how Woolf uses the interior narrational discourse of her three main characters in Mrs. Dalloway to juxtapose, on a separate level, narrational conventions current in modern literature. By privileging the discourse of the female narration over the male narrative texts, Woolf exposes as patriarchal various systems of modernist poetics, including the techniques of Eliot and Joyce. At the same time, she proposes a very specific style of “woman’s” narrational discourse as the preferred mode of narration for the novel. Historically, feminist criticism of Woolf has defined itself dualistically as either materialist or poststructuralist. With this reading, I join a growing number of critics who seek to open up definitions of “feminism” in relation to Woolf and other modernist women writers. The last chapter explores the current critical climate against Lawrence, exploring the possibility of a link between Lawrence’s exclusion from the modernist canon and the hostility of feminist critics toward his novels. It suggests that an examination of women’s narrative roles might help to resituate Lawrence in the modernist canon as well as open his work up to feminist analysis. This chapter focuses on two novels where feminist metafiction is embedded in the texts. First it looks at The Rainbow, which Lawrence divides narratologically into opposing parts to create a larger dialogical structure that is explicitly gendered. Ursula’s “woman’s” narrative in the second half of the book discursively performs new and credible ways of narrating for the novel. Spatially, Ursula’s narrative functions to contest the narrations performed in the first half, which include Lawrence’s own experiential, epistemological style. Then the chapter looks at Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Lawrence establishes a similar kind of dualistic structure, dividing the novel narratologically into two parts, each dominated by the epistemological discourse of one of the two major male characters but both narrated almost entirely through the perspective of a woman. By filtering the opposing male language systems through a woman’s narrative consciousness, Lawrence effectively parodies not only the stale conventions of established literatures but also, again, the style of his own sexual, epistemological prose. My selection of texts is designed to represent different methods by which novelists have historically used woman’s narratives to engage dia-

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logically with established convention and to identify a progression in the kinds of discussion that focus on these textual dialogics. These choices are by no means exhaustive. There are certainly other methods and other novels that participate in the historical pattern I recognize. A novel may, for example, invert the usual hierarchical relationship between levels of narrative that are defined by conventional narratological paradigms, and in this way privilege a “woman’s” narration while performatively undermining patriarchal structures that pretend to control it. This occurs when woman’s narration is literally and symbolically contained within a male’s narrative at the same time that the woman’s discourse assumes narrative authority over the larger text. In Wuthering Heights, for example, Brontë assigns the credible narration of realism to Nelly Dean’s embedded narration, while positioning that narrative dialogically within and against Lockwood’s stiff, aristocratic, overly romanticized, distanced and “patriarchal” narrative frame. In that way, Nelly’s literally marginalized “woman’s” narration is privileged in this novel over patriarchal narrative conventions of genre that frame it and give it context. The interaction between the two narrative voices foregrounds issues of gender and class as integral to the realistic novel, in contrast to parodies of Romantic forms, and it does so by authenticating the embedded text of the woman’s narrational voice. In other novels, such as Mansfield Park, woman’s socializing discourse of focalization is controlled, structured, and often indirectly articulated by a larger hegemonic narrator. When viewed interactively, the heterodiegetically fixed narrational scheme becomes unfixed. By pitting the woman focalizor against the narrative structures that attempt to signify her discourse, the novel performs intertextually the ways in which the “new” novel resists the patriarchal conventions that have presumed to define the genre. This kind of subversive activity is further complicated in a work such as Middlemarch, which employs the authoritarian voice of the hegemonic “male” narrator at the same time that it approves the ethical and, I contend, “novelistic” discourse of a woman’s narrative consciousness over that of the male characters in the book. Any novel that narrationally privileges a woman’s voice inherently subjects her discourse, or the discourse surrounding her, to analysis as “woman’s” text. When that novel also contains narrational discourse associated with male characters, includes passages that foreground conventions associated with earlier novels and other literary genres, or represents the woman’s narrational thinking within a strong hegemonic narrative frame, it invites analysis in terms of dialogical, gendered, feminist

Introduction · 19

metafiction. Consequently, there are any number of novels in and outside the traditional British canon that might allow for feminist narratological readings according to the paradigm I suggest. Despite its wide applicability, this paradigm is intended to work in conjunction with other interpretations and approaches; it does not attempt fully to explain a novel in narratological terms. Reading this paradigm into a narrative text produces new areas of activity for analysis and opens up another level to critical exploration. Its purpose is to expand the novel to reveal contexts beyond those suggested by the fiction. “Woman’s” Text and the History of the Novel The aim of this study is to “revision” the history of the British novel so that it includes the substantial contribution of women’s voices to the evolution of the genre. Published histories tend either to ignore the role of women or to focus entirely on women’s literature as a mostly separate, or subversive, movement. Because the novel, particularly in its early stages, defined itself as a “social” genre, broad-based historical criticism has looked to the cultural conditions surrounding the production of texts to generalize on historical issues of genre. Ian Watt was the first to take this approach, but Michael McKeon in Origins of the British Novel and Barbara Foley in Telling the Truth continue and expand on this tradition by reading the history of the novel in Marxist terms.41 Because women did not affect the economy or function in the workplace, they are largely excluded by the theory that premises these “social” histories and consequently also excluded from these histories themselves. Ironically, feminist histories too assume that women’s exclusion from the economic power structures of mainstream English middle-class society necessitates their exclusion from mainstream English literature. In response, they examine the ways that women authors subvert cultural patriarchy to produce a literary subculture inhabited only by women. Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own, Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic and the No Man’s Land series, and other historicized feminist anthologies effectively create a separate canon through which women’s ideological and epistemological concerns, devalued culturally and economically by patriarchal systems, can be thematically authenticated and explored.42 No matter what the approach, however, women’s voices have been silenced in the mainstream British canon through the historicizing of that canon, not by the novels themselves. The most recent history of the early novel, Plotting Women: Gender and

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Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Alison A. Case, demonstrates the consequences. As in this study, when Case examines women’s narratives, she does not confine her analysis to works written by women but considers canonical texts by authors of both sexes; however, unlike this study, her argument assumes that women are essentially subordinate and powerless in their narrative roles, because they are culturally powerless as characters in the stories and during the historical time the stories take place. Her premise is that as narrators women are capable only of producing the “raw material” that the authors or the male narrators then effectively “shape” into coherent narratives. This not only enforces a stereotype. It also precludes, in itself, serious analysis of women’s texts as texts. After reproducing the wonderful idiosyncratic opening of Aurora Leigh, for example, Case concludes only that it “asks us to read her [the female narrator] not as a poet shaping her life into a work of art, but as a woman who does not know her own mind.”43 Moreover, she claims that the interaction between reader and text elicited by women’s narratives occurs only because the reader is required to make sense of women’s erratic plotting and give it the coherence the woman herself is not capable of; this, she says, makes the reader superior to the narrator and necessary to her tale. Eleven of the fourteen novels covered in her study were written by men. Therefore, when Case reduces the role of women narrators to mere spectators in the authors’ fictions and analyzes their narrative strategies as, in effect, failed attempts to “write like a man,” the result is yet another version of the canonical novel as a man’s novel, one that marginalizes women even when it allows them to participate in telling the tale. It seems to me more logical to suppose that in novels where the female voice is privileged, female narration is meant to be read as the preferred narration and analyzed seriously as such. Whether or not the women characters represented in the fictions had social and economic power—and we can assume that they did not—as narrators they have authority in their texts; and the values that they articulate as women are promoted as the values of the novels they narrate. Throughout the novel’s history, writers who privilege women’s narratives are asserting that a woman’s style of thinking and speaking is the most effective for conveying experience and for revealing the processes of interpreting experience that define the novel as genre. When this narration is textually juxtaposed to established literary convention, it also identifies women’s narratives as open and flexible enough to perform concepts of discursive change.

Introduction · 21

Because I am combining a historical approach with a narratological one, my readings will consider the relation of the author to the text in ways not usually identified with narratology. I include intentionality and cultural context in order to situate the narrative historically and generically, to discuss the traits of “women’s” voice, and to define the terms of parody. These issues do not interfere with textual analysis, nor are they used to produce an interpretation of a work. In fact, most often my discussion of intentionality refers to the performance of intentionality or the way text represents intentionality, not to suppositions about historical fact. Since I wish to participate in the community of narratological thinking about the British canon as well as to reexplore its literary evolution, I position my reading of each novel within the context of current critical trends regarding narrative issues in the texts.

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1

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Satire and the Woman’s Text The Novel as Argument in Moll Flanders

Although critical investigations into the eighteenth-century British novel have moved in various directions since Ian Watt published his definitive study on the subject, narratological readings have generally remained rooted in the principles first set down by Watt in The Rise of the Novel.1 Michael McKeon, whose Origins of the British Novel followed Watt’s study, historicizes the eighteenth-century novel in Marxist terms that explicitly distinguish his contextual analyses from Watt’s, yet on the subject of narrative issues McKeon makes a point of retaining Watt’s premises for realistic narration and adopting his formal assumptions about the novel as genre.2 While changes in cultural and historical methodologies continue to expand the scope of eighteenth-century novels as hermeneutic texts, narrational arguments have, for the most part, remained fundamentally the same, and this is largely because of Watt’s continuing influence.3 This influence has manifested itself most profoundly in narrative criticism of Moll Flanders, the work provoking Watt’s strongest categorical statements about the novel as genre. Almost invariably, it is Watt’s pronouncements that determine for critics the parameters of Moll Flanders’s narrative text. Michael Boardman, Gary Hentzl, Selwyn Jackson, Larry Langford, and Steven C. Michael, all writing within the past two decades, cast their arguments on narrational issues in Moll Flanders directly or indirectly in relation to Watt’s work and conduct them essentially in Watt’s terms.4 In this they follow the larger trend of narrative criticism, instituted by earlier established Defoe scholars such as Robert H. Bell, E. Anthony James, Maximillian Novak, and John Richetti, who in the 1970s reignited critical interest in Moll Flanders by agreeing or disagreeing with Watt’s definitive announcements about the book as an ironic text.5 With this chapter, I join these critics in positioning my reading of narratological discourse in Moll Flanders in relation to Watt’s. I do so, however, with the

The Novel as Argument in Moll Flanders · 23

intent to deconstruct the generic premises structuring Watt’s study and the narrative criticism that his theory of this novel has engendered, thereby opening up Moll Flanders, and perhaps other eighteenth-century novels, to different kinds of narrational thinking. Although Watt’s arguments about narration are constantly being challenged, his premises remain largely uncontested, and narratological discussions about the novel are conducted on those grounds. Most important, Watt’s definition of the novel as genre as conforming to the priorities of nineteenth-century realism is generally accepted as the basis for criticism of narrative issues in Moll Flanders, an eighteenth-century text. The result is that, despite its woman narrator, the novel is approached in the patriarchal tradition of the literary classic—with focus on the psychological credibility of its narrator, the chronology of its plotline, and the authority of its narrative commentary. My thesis, in contrast, is that its particular use of a female narrator in the role of satiric persona sets Moll Flanders in direct opposition to those standards of realism which, due to Watt, have been employed as the basis for evaluating it. To analyze the novel in Watt’s terms, I argue, is to turn Moll’s “woman’s” discourse into the type of patriarchal narration that is actually being challenged on the level of text. In The Rise of the Novel, Watt takes issue with critics like Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster who point to Defoe’s expert use of narrative irony and on that basis would elevate Moll Flanders to canonical status.6 He implies with patronizing bemusement that this judgment is relevant only as it exemplifies the tendency of modern readers to project complexities into any work of fiction, regardless of authorial design. From his extensive, if significantly spotty, examination of sample passages in the text, Watt concludes that obvious dramatic, rhetorical, and structural inconsistencies indicate that Defoe “did not plan his novel as a coherent whole, but worked piecemeal, very rapidly, and without any subsequent revision” and therefore without narrational strategy.7 To interpret the novel with any more complexity than the author intended, he claims, is to transform Moll Flanders into a different book and—his larger point—to obscure its more substantive historical importance as an essentially flawed forerunner of the novel, rather than an early example of novel as kind. When Watt argues against Moll Flanders as a “novel,” he does not do so on the grounds of Defoe’s intentions in selecting genre; instead, he maintains that by the standards critics should apply to all novels, Moll Flanders simply does not fit the form. Watt’s definition of generic criteria, however, is clearly and disturbingly prescriptive. With its emphasis on action, con-

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sistent plot, ethical authority, “objective” portrayal of character, and selfevident, coherent structure, it is also transparently and inflexibly male. His pronouncements about the absence of “realism” in Moll Flanders in particular rest upon patriarchal absolutes concerning how reality in the novel must be achieved: Defoe is the master illusionist, and this almost makes him [with Moll Flanders] the founder of the new form. Almost, but not quite: the novel could be considered established only when realistic narrative was organised into a plot which, while retaining Defoe’s lifelikeness, also had character and personal relationships as essential elements in the total structure, and not merely as subordinate instruments for furthering the verisimilitude of the actions described; and when all these were related to a controlling moral intention. It was Richardson who took these further steps, and it is primarily for this reason that he, rather than Defoe, is usually regarded as the founder of the English novel.8 In paradigmatic terms, Watt’s argument is invested in preserving the integrity of a symbolic, phallogocentric novel, instituted by the “classics” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a result, his complaint against critics such as Forster and Woolf who recognize novelistic complexities out of the novel’s own historical literary and social context is shadowed by the fact that his own criteria for judging Moll Flanders come from novels that were also produced after this book was written. At its foundations, then, Watt’s argument depends upon not recognizing the early twentiethcentury semiotic revolution in language and structure, initiated by novelists like Woolf. This revolution, redefining what the novel can do and still be called a “novel,” transformed generic standards retrospectively from set concepts of empirical realism to the methodology used by the novel to create its own kind of coherence.9 Despite Watt’s argument, Moll Flanders certainly is a novel, because whatever the intent, its narration is perfectly consistent with the character that narrates it, and by generic standards this is what is required of a novel in the first-person narrative mode. On the other hand, Defoe probably did intend to use Moll as a narrator of another kind of genre, an assertion that has been made by critics, along the lines of Watt, who have read the book as alternatively a rogue’s tale, a morality play, a confessional, a spiritual autobiography, a criminal biography, or some combination of two or more of these forms. Overriding and, at the same time, subsuming these disparate other genres, I contend, is Moll Flanders’s role as “satiric persona,” a


narrator in the tradition of eighteenth-century satire, a form at which Defoe, as political satirist and pamphleteer, was notably proficient. In this guise Moll narrates from the point of view of the naive moral commentator. She plays the role of the satiric “mask,” who assumes that rhetoric about morality is synonymous with morality, acknowledging but unabashedly ignoring the incongruities between language and substance because it has become the social norm to do so. Through the innocence of its narrator, the book exposes the speciousness of conventional moral language systems shrouding the immorality of social institutions, particularly the compromises made to accommodate the new eighteenth-century mercantilism. As current theories of satire especially make clear, linguistic hypocrisy was often targeted by eighteenth-century satirists on a textual, “ornamental” level as part of their larger political arguments. It is this particular satiric performance that focuses my narrational reading of Moll Flanders and distinguishes it from Watt’s and the line of narrational criticism his study has fostered. In this chapter, I will examine how the interaction of Moll’s dual narrative roles—storyteller and satiric persona—creates a conjunction between the novelistic and the satiric in Moll Flanders that provokes on a textual level an underlying “discussion” about the novel as a literary genre. As an eighteenth-century satire, the pervasive complexities of rhetorical strategies in Moll Flanders’s narrative scheme call attention to themselves as strategies within the activity of the narrative text, and this textual representation of narrative techniques is also characteristic of later semiotic novels. In the tradition of both genres, this linguistic performance also positions Moll’s narrative discourse in direct stylistic contrast to renditions of established genres of prose fiction, which are represented as parodies throughout the narrational text of the book. Alvin Kernan points out that one persistent rhetorical strategy of neoclassic satire is the stylistic ridiculing through imitation of other kinds of writing. “In fact,” he says, “satire draws much of its nourishment from these false styles, delighting in parodying and inflating them until they burst.”10 According to Bakhtin, stylistic parodying of other literary genres was also a fundamental characteristic of the early novel as it struggled to define itself as a serious, canonical form. By juxtaposing literary parody with its own style of narration, the new novel established its superiority to popular genres and at the same time asserted its own place in the larger tradition that had already institutionalized those popular forms. “The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres),” Bakhtin writes in his dialogic history of the novel; “it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes

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out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them.”11 Moll Flanders is one of the earliest examples of this parodic tradition in the novel. Textual parodies of other literary genres are built into the narration as a way of foregrounding the artificiality of established language systems and performatively redefining the novel as a narrative form. Reading generic discourse as literary parody in Moll Flanders requires our recognition that it is not Defoe as author but Moll as narrator who works the language of conventional literary genres into the telling of the story. With this acknowledgment, literary language becomes subject to the same satiric scrutiny as the rest of Moll’s discourse and is not mistaken for some sincere attempt on the part of Defoe to borrow the clichés of conventional genres. As Ian Bell implies, by adopting the rhetoric of convention (e.g., when she interprets her attempts to stop stealing as allegorical battles with the devil), Moll’s narrational aim is not only to legitimize her character’s behavior but also to make credible her own story by forcing both into established literary molds.12 This tactic is so obvious, and her style so broadly stroked, that the other genres are objectified and foregrounded as kinds of discourse and as textual parodies of themselves, not structures that the story is seriously intended to take on. Literary convention itself, then, is one object of satire in this book, and Moll’s style of narrating performs a new kind of genre in part by stylistically rejecting the language of other kinds of texts. It is no coincidence that this metafictional dialogic is performed in the narrational voice of a woman. According to Kristeva’s theory, “woman’s” voice in literature is not defined by qualities that can be characterized as essentially female; instead, it is identified stylistically in its strategic function as “other” to established phallogocentric modes of structure and narration, the semiotic challenging the symbolic at the level of text.13 My larger thesis, explored in the introduction to this book, is that throughout the history of the novel, writers of both sexes have, in effect, literalized the idea of woman’s voice as semiotic “other” by using women narrators to introduce new novelistic concepts directly into the texts of their narrations, particularly in stylistic opposition to established systems of narrating. Moll Flanders not only fits this historical pattern for the English novel but, in fact, began it. Underlying Moll’s narrative is a strong, consistent textual underargument on issues of genre. This underargument not only juxtaposes the novel generically to other fictional forms but also challenges conventional modes of realism for the novel. Critics have often remarked how “unwomanly” Moll is.14 Certainly, Defoe’s purpose in mak-


ing her the narrator was not to reveal the psychological and emotional depths of a woman’s consciousness; he comes much closer to that with Roxana. Instead, Defoe uses a woman narrator in Moll Flanders primarily as “other,” and when her discourse performs on a textual level a specific idea of the novel as form, integral to that idea is the novel in dialogical opposition to established, patriarchal genres. At the same time, by redirecting critical attention from story to the telling of the story, Defoe creates a dynamic of text, distinct from but simultaneous with the dynamic of the fiction. On this level, the woman’s narration investigates generic issues of language, particularly the role of moral language in the new novel form. Whatever Defoe’s intentions, Moll Flanders is not only a “novel” but an ironic novel, and this is because, methodologically, all novels written in the first person are inherently ironic. Watt argues that the main problem with Defoe’s portrayal of Moll Flanders is that he does not offer, directly or indirectly, “an objective view of her personality.”15 The distinguishing feature of the first-person narration, however, is precisely that it offers no “objective view” of the narrator as character. The character who grows into the narrator is only a rhetorical construct of that narrator, a storyteller looking back with a specific agenda in the telling of the tale. The narrator, in turn, is a rhetorical construct of the novelist, who also has an agenda, one that transcends story and concerns the novel as a whole.16 In firstperson narration at its best, the linguistic and thematic purposes of the author do not coincide with those of the narrator but are revealed through “gaps” in the narration, created by what the narrator does not or cannot see.17 The author’s novel begins to emerge as we judge the credibility of narration and learn how to process what is said—discerning the weaknesses, biases, and rhetorical ambitions of the fictional narrator. When the reader knows more about the story than does its own narrator, irony exists, and the novel that employs this narrative technique becomes by definition an ironic novel.18 The first-person novel only “fails” as a novel if the rhetoric of the narration is inconsistent with the personality and language style of the character that narrates it. By this standard, Moll Flanders does not fail. The point of contention among critics, Watt claims, is how to reconcile Moll’s obvious economic priorities with the author’s “moral commitment” for the book. Those who attempt to resolve this central paradox on the assumption that Defoe intended his story to be taken ironically, he says, are ignoring certain historical and social conditions that render such resolution unnecessary. If we could simply accept the fact that neither Defoe nor his immediate audience recognized any disparity between materialism

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and morality, we would not have to indulge our formalist obsession with literary complexities and read into the text an irony that the author himself never intended. Watt does not recognize irony in Moll Flanders because he does not acknowledge the defining features of the first-person narrative mode. We do not need to know about conventions in eighteenth-century society to accept the simultaneous existence of economic and moral motives in Moll’s narrative line. From the moment that the “older brother” presses the first five guineas into her hand—“I was more confounded with the Money than I was before with the love”19—passion and prosperity are united in her mind. The moral rationalizations offered by the brother to legitimate the affair create, in turn, an imaginative connection between the rhetoric of moral promises and the advantages of materialism that becomes the thread linking all of Moll’s own narrative commentary in the novel. Because Moll herself recognizes that her lover’s protestations of moral intent are purely rhetorical (she takes particular pride in twisting his arguments to her advantage), she also recognizes a clear distinction between his language and the money he pays her for her services. When, as narrator, she later brags of the skillful ways she manipulates others for money with only the most perfunctory moral regrets for her behavior, we are encouraged to judge Moll’s rationalizing as part of her character and life experience; we do not simply accept her thinking as legitimate to her time and culture. Contrary to Watt’s pronouncement, the text of Moll Flanders does insist on the disparity between morality and materialism. By demonstrating what it is about Moll’s character and experience that causes her flagrantly to ignore discrepancies between bribery and moral discourse, Defoe encourages his readers to judge the rhetoric of her moral commentary and to recognize it as rhetoric, not as an expression of his own authorial social code. The key to Moll Flanders as a character, in fact, is her talent for and appreciation of the power of rhetoric to get what, by social position and gender, she would otherwise be unable to have. Her first episodic memory is of being paid by rich patrons for saying that she wants to grow up to be a “gentlewoman” even though she knows they do not understand what she means by it, with the ultimate payoff that she is taken in off the streets by a wealthy family and saved from a life “in service.” The older brother of that family teaches her that what counts in “love” is what can be argued, not what is, and by the end of their affair, she is participating in his arguments wholeheartedly and with consummate skill. Along these lines, Moll has no qualms about cheating men into marrying her, as long as they cannot prove that she actually lied about her circumstances; and she goes to


great pains to get her victims to accept her rhetorical premises, forcing them by “logic” to forgive her. As a thief, Moll’s greatest triumphs come in those instances where she is actually caught and brazenly talks her way out of trouble on the grounds of legal technicalities. Even after she has achieved what most critics agree is genuine repentance at Newgate, she nevertheless argues to the court that because her feet were still inside the door of the shop where she was caught stealing she should not be convicted of theft.20 Had she been born to a higher class and different sex, Moll would have made an excellent attorney. More significantly, Moll’s preoccupation with rhetoric translates into her concerns as narrator and profoundly affects the discourse of Moll Flanders’s narrative text. Not only is Moll’s narration rhetorical, rather than descriptive, in style but rhetorical priorities determine the structure by which the events are organized in her life story. Crucial to Watt’s argument against Moll Flanders are his assumptions about what legitimately constitutes narrative structure in the novel as a genre. Not only must the narration of the fiction relate itself to a constant authorial position but the plot must be rendered in a consistent manner, following a realistically connected sequence of events from beginning to end. With this criterion in mind, Watt points to the seemingly random episodic nature of Moll Flanders as that which most emphatically disqualifies it as a novel according to generic standards of structure and form: Nearly all novels employ a combination of two different methods of reporting: relatively full scenic presentation where, at a definite time and place, the doings of the characters are reported more or less fully; and the passages of barer and less detailed summary which set the stage and provide a necessary connective framework. The tendency of most novelists is to reduce these latter synopses to a minimum and to focus as much attention as possible on a few fully realized scenes; but this is not the case with Defoe. His story is told in over a hundred realized scenes whose average length is less than two pages, and an equally large number of passages containing rapid and often perfunctory connective synopses.21 In addition, the inconsistencies in Moll’s story, the way she “forgets” children immediately after giving birth to them, and her failure to sustain focus on a single “relationship” plot over the course of the novel all testify, in Watt’s view, to a fundamental lack of coherence in Moll Flanders as a narrative text and therefore as a novel.22

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The unfortunate effect of Watt’s categorical limitations for structuring in Moll Flanders has been the closing off of investigation into alternative possibilities, structures that inherently challenge the credibility of conventional, plot-driven schemes that Watt establishes as obligatory for the novel form. In discussing Moll Flanders, critics do not consider as they automatically do with Tristram Shandy, for example, that narrational structure is also a rhetorical construct of the first-person narrator and that in this mode the author often uses the narrator’s way of presenting events to perform arguments, both thematic and metafictional, that transcend those suggested by the plot. This oversight has been particularly damaging because it is through its unconventional structure that Moll Flanders achieves the coherence that Watt and others believe is critical for defining the novel genre in terms of its form. Its coherence is realized in the narrational presentation of the story and in metadiscursive performances operating on the level of the text, not in the chronology of events that constitute the fiction of the book. As someone who values her rhetorical skills and the strategic importance of talk, Moll organizes her story primarily in terms of opportunities for discourse, and it is on episodes of rhetorical performance that her narration consistently maintains focus. The short “realised scenes” extending no more than two pages actually occur only in the second half of the story, when Moll is no longer able to engage in the language of courtship. Even in that section, the brief stealing episodes serve mainly to provide Moll with narrational opportunities for moral rhetoric in interpreting those scenes, so these episodes also accommodate themselves to a larger, primarily discursive structural design. Moreover, when given the chance to showcase her talents as speechmaker—in her intricate dealings with the debauched aristocrat and in her confrontations with the law—Moll stretches the narrative into long, detailed descriptions of ingenious schemes for talking her way out of trouble and making a profit from her rhetorical expertise, much in the same mode as her earlier courtship narratives. The juxtaposition of these well-developed sequences with the brevity of the stealing episodes also effectively emphasizes discourse as the primary locus of narrative interest in the whole novel, even when it is not the dominant plotting device. Moll herself makes explicit the irrelevance of dramatic action to her narrative priorities when she pointedly sloughs off opportunities to develop generic adventure plots and resists making them an important part of her story. Describing the events of her first voyage to America, for example, she says:


To give an account of the manner of our Voyage, which was long and full of Dangers, is out of my way, I kept no Journal, and neither did my Husband; all I can say is that after a terrible passage, frighted twice with dreadful Storms, and once with what was still more terrible, I mean a Pyrate, who came on board and took away almost all our Provisions; and which would have been beyond all to me, they had once taken my Husband, but by intreaties were prevail’d with to leave him. I say, after all these terrible things, we arriv’d in York River in Virginia, and coming to our Plantation, we were received with all the Demonstrations of Tenderness and Affection (by my Husband’s Mother) that it were possible to be express’d. (85) Within the context of a narrative where dialogue and rhetorical strategies are elaborated at length, this summary outline of her “terrible passage” and its shorthand reference to those big events (storms and pirates) that would dominate other kinds of fiction is pointedly and humorously brief. It also parodies, in its specifics, the predictability of “event” in conventional adventure narratives in direct textual opposition to Moll’s own more original, “novelistic” concept of plot. Defoe also makes clear that the focus on rhetoric as a structural scheme is directly connected with the character of his narrator as a woman. Not only are women, he suggests, more likely to conceive interactive relationships in terms of talk but, as Moll’s own experience illustrates and her narrative commentary confirms, words were historically the only medium of power for females in a social culture otherwise completely controlled by men. The vital interrelationship between discourse and gender as an issue of power is made explicit in the episode where Moll helps get revenge for a woman who has been jilted by her intended for inquiring into his finances, the only instance in the novel where Moll’s narrative does not concentrate on her own concerns. Moll’s strategy on this occasion is to make use of the power of “talk” to reconstruct the man’s character against him—inventing stories of debauchery, physical cruelty, and financial ruin and then spreading them through women’s rumor networks. The result is that the man not only opens up his finances but also begs the woman to marry him so that his reputation might be restored. In this and in other episodes where she herself talks men into marrying her, Moll establishes persuasive, rhetorical discourse as the province of women, the area of expertise that distinguishes them from men and empowers them in a world where they otherwise have no influence. Narrative emphasis on rhetoric in Moll Flanders, therefore, not only

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foregrounds issues of argument as foundational to the text. It also connects Moll’s primary interest as narrator with her preoccupations as a woman character. This creates an overall coherence to the novel based on the credibility of its first-person narrative mode. One of Watt’s major complaints against Defoe’s narration is that it does not use narrative point of view to analyze the heroine’s psychology or reveal the intricacies of her thoughts and feelings. Watt’s inability to recognize the complexity of characterization in Moll’s narrative portrayal of herself again results from severely limiting the scope of the first-person narrational form: There are two main ways in which later novelists have manifested their powers of psychological understanding: indirectly, by revealing the character’s personality through his actions; or directly, by specific analysis of the character’s various states of mind. Both these methods, of course, can be and usually are combined; and they are usually found in conjunction with a narrative structure designed to embody the character’s development, and to present him with crucial moral choices which bring his whole personality into play. There is very little of these things in Moll Flanders.23 For Watt, the personality of the first-person narrator is revealed by what happens in the book and by the feelings described by the narrator in connection with those events. When critics discuss the complexities of Moll’s character, he says, “our interpretation should not be allowed to go beyond what is positively stated by Defoe or Moll Flanders.”24 Actually, Moll’s narrational rhetoric offers a far more accurate and revealing source of character analysis than the fiction alone can provide.25 Because this is a first-person narrative, the complexities of Moll’s psychology emerge mainly through her narrational strategies and through our implicit recognition of the interconnections between those strategies and the character whose personality and life experience produce and, at the same time, are constructed out of them. For example, even if we dismiss as anachronistic and silly the psychological importance of Moll’s being separated from her mother at birth, kidnapped by gypsies, and therefore never exposed to feelings of love in her formative years, it is nevertheless clear from the way she presents herself and the events in her life that she either does not know what genuine emotion is or has never learned how genuinely to express it. It is apparent, too, that Moll has learned to replace real feelings with rhetorical constructs and arguments for feelings and that this is how she also represents herself in her text. For the reader, deconstruc-


ting the rhetoric of Moll’s dialogue and the language of her narration is where the truly relevant and engaging activity of character analysis lies. The most influential of Moll’s involvements as a character is her early affair with the “older brother.” Through this relationship she learns that feelings are most safely (and profitably) replaced by rhetorical discourse about feelings, a lesson so profound in its impact that interpreting herself rhetorically becomes the basis of Moll’s own emotional makeup as well as her narrating style. After devoting several pages to describing the machinations of the older brother’s efforts to seduce her, his promises of love and marriage, and her feelings of passion for him and for the money he pays her, Moll focuses most of her narration in this first long episode on the exact phrasing of the arguments between them (and other members of the family) once he decides she should marry his brother. Through the early dialogue, and her analysis of it, we witness the performative process by which Moll comes to equate feeling with the quality of emotional discourse necessary to persuade other characters to respond as she wants them to. This rhetorical performance extends into the narrative in the way that she represents herself and her emotions to the reader. Rather than describing her interior response to the older brother’s betrayal, Moll chooses to repeat the arguments she gives to him on that subject, as if public discourse is the best indicator of what her true feelings were. In one particular exchange, Moll senses that her efforts to move her lover by reminding him of his promises are having the opposite effect, and she decides to try another tack (“I found this was a little too close upon him, but I made it up in what follows”). It is this rhetorical strategy, rather than her emotional state of mind, that Moll emphasizes in relating the scene, with the result that the emotions themselves are portrayed as primarily rhetorical constructions: If, then, I have yielded to the Importunities of my Affection, and if I have been perswaded to believe that I am really, in the Essence of the Thing your Wife, shall I now give the Lye to all those Arguments, and call my self your Whore, or Mistress, which is the same thing? And will you Transfer me to your Brother? Can you Transfer my Affection? Can you bid me cease loving you, and bid me love him? Is it in my Power, think you, to make such a Change at Demand? No, Sir, said I, depend upon it, ’tis impossible, and whatever the Change on your Side may be, I will ever be True; and I had much rather, since it is come to that unhappy Length, be your Whore than your Brother’s Wife. (39–40)

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When Moll finally gives in and agrees to marry the younger brother, she refuses to admit that she has no other choice. Rather, she claims that in making the dilemma clear to her, her lover simply had the better style of argument (“He reasoned me out of my reason”). In contrast, her new husband has revealed himself through his courtship to be an expert punster, a joker with words, the sort of partner who would not provide Moll with opportunities for dramatic discourse and argument. It is significant, then, that despite acknowledging that he “had been really a good husband to me, and we live’d very agreeably together,” Moll summarizes her years of married life with the younger brother in the space of a single paragraph and moves on. This same pattern asserts itself as narrative structure throughout the novel; Moll devotes most of her narrative attention to those occasions where she is able to use her talents for rhetoric, and her renditions of those episodes are focused on strategies of argument and dialogue and the events surrounding that style of discourse. Because it reflects the personality of Moll as a character, the novel’s diegetic emphasis on narrative technique becomes integral to the events of the story as well as to the style of the narration, creating a self-conscious metafictional connection between fiction and text. Within the fiction, a focus on rhetorical technique is often represented textually in terms of an opposition of female and male discourse, enacting a dialogic interchange between Moll’s unique “woman’s” narrative style and the conventional language of patriarchal literary genres. In the episode where she is courted for marriage by the man who turns out to be her brother, for example, Moll reproduces a poem etched in glass between them, where each responds to the other in alternating lines to produce a complete poem of rhyming couplets (69–70). Predictably, the man’s contribution is expressed in the jargon of undying love and disinterested passion typical of the diction and sentimentality of conventional romantic verse, whereas Moll finishes each couplet with words of blatant honesty, attesting not only to her poverty but also to her lack of real feeling for him (“She Loves enough that does not hate”). In the context of a courtship poem, Moll’s “truth” is of course misread, just as she intended; her lover interprets her text as coy posturing and does not credit its rhetoric as truth, much to his later regret. On the other hand, the reader of the novel is intended to recognize Moll’s technique as technique, a rhetorical performance designed to persuade the man to marry her for her money while being perfectly honest about not having any (“I had him fast both ways; and tho’ he might say afterwards he was cheated, yet he could never say that I had cheated him”). The written exchange between the female and male characters,


then, enacts a metafictional demonstration of a “woman’s” language flaunting its own creativity and posed in direct opposition to artificially sincere, purely conventional, patriarchal discourse that can no longer recognize, and make original use of, its artifice. Indeed, one consequence of Moll’s preoccupation with rhetoric is a kind of unintended sophistication of narrative technique for the novel, particularly as it shows an awareness of its effect on the reader. When she wants to stress her role as victim, most noticeably in describing the circumstances of her birth in the opening of the narrative, Moll consistently lapses into the passive voice. Later, she calls attention to the usefulness of the passive construction when, for example, she points out that in lifting the goods left behind by another thief, she was really not stealing, but the stuff “was stolen into my hands.” Moll also plays with strict definitions of words in flagrant disregard for their sense (“for really in this case I was not a whore because legally married”), a tactic she wants her audience to recognize and admire. To minimize her own faults she often wraps them up in neat-sounding phrases (“and I kept true to the notion, that a woman should never be kept for a mistress that had money to make her self a wife”), a technique that has the collateral effect of emphasizing the worldly expertise she also wants to instill into her narrative. To validate her own statements concerning her beauty, intelligence, and innocence in the face of blame, Moll quotes the testimonials of other characters on her behalf. This dialogue, as Watt points out, is reproduced in language that sounds suspiciously like Moll’s own; but as a narrative tactic, it also appears so unabashed and so consistently within character, that it plays out as a natural part of the narration’s conscious rhetorical strategy, not as evidence of what Watt calls Defoe’s “carelessness.” We know that putting her words into the mouths of other people for her own benefit is exactly the sort of trick that Moll as narrator might pull, and we also come to expect that the text of her narration will allow us to witness the technique behind the trickery. The conjunction of Moll’s personal obsession with rhetoric and the rhetorical emphases of her narration not only creates narrative coherence for the novel; it also identifies Moll Flanders generically as formal satire. The focus of Moll’s retrospective commentary, as in most early autodiegetic (or “autobiographical”) narratives, is on the moral implications of her story. Conventionally, narrative commentary, provided by the nowchastened character looking back, represents the moral position of the novel. In Moll Flanders, however, this essential narrating activity makes fun of itself, and it is through this parodying of narrative convention that

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Defoe achieves meaning for the text. Rather than reading Moll’s moral commentary as definitive, the reader is constantly made aware of this commentary as rhetorical posturing and is forced to recognize how this posturing impacts the moral and social issues raised by the book. In particular, Moll’s narrative adheres rhetorically to a discursive system of commodified ethics, where moral issues are generally articulated in monetary terms. This is what connects the “novel” of Moll Flanders intertextually with the system of discourse found in eighteenth-century satire. Watt claims that because Defoe and his contemporaries recognized no disparity between moral and economic thinking, Defoe could not have been using Moll’s commercialized narrative discourse ironically to dramatize the hypocrisy of aligning traditional moral issues with economic ones. In response, I contend that the primary target of moral irony in Moll Flanders is not commercialism per se but the language system evolving out of it. Michael McKeon points out that the practices of labor and the marketplace that emerged during the seventeenth century in England necessitated a reconception and rearticulation of accepted principles of virtue to coincide with the new objectives of material prosperity. This created a new lexicon of materialistic moral discourse that became an accepted part of the social vocabulary and the basis of social thinking.26 In Moll Flanders, Defoe demonstrates through the transparently economic rhetoric of Moll’s moral commentary that the new discourse of a commercial economy was being used to legitimize social injustices occurring outside of and immediately (though not actually) unconnected to the day-to-day business of the marketplace. In a separate but related narrative strain, Defoe’s ambition is also to expose the incongruity between social reality and the moral language of established literary forms that purported to interpret it. He accomplishes this by employing the literary narrative convention of moralistic discourse and making that discourse serve rhetorically as its own satiric target. Thus he acts out on a textual level a fundamental lack of connection between the imposed moral commentary and the experience represented in the fiction of the text. In other words, moral language systems associated with commercialism and with literary genre become both the vehicle and the site of the narrational ironies in the text. In the tradition of Watt, most narrational studies of Moll Flanders point to the novel’s preface to determine the issue of irony. They tend to argue that the only way to recognize moral irony in Moll Flanders is either to ignore Defoe’s prefatory moral instructions or to decide that Defoe did not intend those instructions to be taken seriously.27 This obvious misreading of the preface constitutes the foundational error of critical discus-


sions on the subject of irony in the narration of this text. Certainly, the narrative pose of the preface must completely destroy its credibility as a statement of moral intent by the author. To believe otherwise is to assume that Defoe actually found the manuscript in an attic and scrupulously edited it to conform with his own moral principles and those expected of him as an author, or else that he genuinely wanted his readers to believe that this discovery happened and that his text is “real.” On the other hand, to assume that Defoe was arguing against the moral assumptions asserted in the preface, that he intended them to be read ironically, is to disassociate him completely from his time and culture and to negate his other writings on moralist issues. This dilemma is resolved when the preface is read not as a statement of moral intent but as a performative text, where the object of irony is not moral hypocrisy but the moral discourse of fiction. If we compare Moll Flanders to other early novels—Joseph Andrews, Clarissa, even Tom Jones— in which the authors use their prefaces straightforwardly to assure readers and patrons of their proper moral intentions, Defoe’s introduction actually appears more like a parody of that kind of preface than an earlier example of it. The preface begins by distinguishing the forthcoming “private history” from conventional “novels and romances,” indicating from the outset that Defoe intended to use his introduction in a performative mode to explore issues of genre and that the focus on “morality” is conceived in generic terms. Its main purpose is to point out that moral discourse has been added to the story because conventional notions of “virtue” are not inherent in the fictional experience described in the original text. This produces a narrative posturing that deliberately and performatively reverses the standard neoclassic literary tradition, in which the morality comes first and the fiction is devised to fit it. The very fact that he represents his “intentions” in fictional form suggests that Defoe was playing with the conventions of the literary preface rather than adhering to them. In a breakthrough article on narrative technique in Moll Flanders, Larry Langford also suggests that Defoe’s primary intention in creating the preface was, in a sense, to argue against himself as an eighteenth-century literary moralist. He claims that Defoe establishes in the preface the existence of two different characters narrating in the novel, Moll Flanders and the “author” who claims to have edited her text. Because the discourse that Moll adopts in interpreting her story sounds so foreign to her narrative, Langford assumes that it is not actually Moll but the fictional editor who provides the language of the moral commentary throughout the book.28

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He believes that Defoe wanted his readers to see the addition of conventional morality to the realism of Moll’s narrative as supporting a social and cultural theme. Defoe, he claims, makes the addition of moral commentary explicit in order to demonstrate how moral lessons against aberrant behavior are imposed by literature to help ensure the viability of a corrupt class structure, to “protect those who own property and to admonish those who do not.”29 Consequently, he concludes that it is the editor, not Moll, that Defoe wants us to take ironically. While Langford scrutinizes the substance of the “editor’s” moral commentary as inherently ironic, I maintain that the discourse itself is the prime target of irony in this book.30 Defoe demonstrates how the language of morality functions to shift responsibility for social corruption away from political institutions by burying social evils in a barrage of clichés regarding individual conduct. At the same time, the moral dicta imposed by Moll on her experience as an unattached woman among the poor of commercial London is self-consciously scripted in the classic literary style. The incongruity between language and experience enacted in her commentary points to larger incongruity between the new urban experience and the moral language available to literature for interpreting it. Rather than distinguishing himself from Moll, the “editor” of the preface sounds suspiciously just like her. The moral agenda mapped out in the preface is, like Moll’s, overshadowed by a more convincing appreciation of the adventures of the story. The “author” refers to the criminal episodes related in the original text as “delightful”; he points to the “brightness and beauty” with which Moll describes those events and regrets that “two of the most beautiful parts” had to be left out—the rich and sinful life of the governess and the “successful villainy” of the transported husband, Jemmy. Conversely, Moll’s own narrative in the text of the fiction adopts the phrasing of the editor’s moral commentary as literary discourse—the self-consciously generic language of morality common to prefaces—instilling parody of that discourse into the narrational line. Moll repeats the clichés of conventional morality by rote, just as the “author” of the preface does, because she assumes that this is required of her in the role of storyteller. Defoe thereby emphasizes the artificiality of this discourse and uses Moll’s narrative posturing to dramatize the irrelevance of conventional moral rhetoric for defining fiction in the novel genre. By introducing and performing the same rhetorical configurations that will be enacted in the novel, the preface sets up a mode of interpretation that engages the reader both in the satiric machinations of the language and in the entire diegetic process of the text that follows. Most significant


and innovative about Defoe’s preface is the way that it assigns the reader a fundamental role in determining the moral values of the story, rather than locating them, as Watt believes, within the didacticism of the moral commentary itself. The “author” appends nearly every statement of moral intent with the caveat that it is always the reader who must decide how to use what the book has to offer (“this work is chiefly recommended to those who know how to read it”); thus Defoe enacts an important break with conventional, didactic prefaces and also with the didacticism of neoclassic tradition, neither of which represents fundamental principles of morality as open to personal interpretation.31 Moreover, the preface not only encourages reader interaction with the text as a way of determining moral themes but also assumes that the reader will naturally look to the experience of the fiction rather than to the narrator’s moral commentary to locate meaning. This is a precept that Moll as narrator repeats in her own text as well. Just as she is about to relate the last episode of stealing, when she is finally caught and sent to Newgate, Moll explicitly asserts: “The moral indeed of all my history is left to be gather’d by the senses and judgment of the reader. I am not qualified to preach to them; let the experience of one creature completely wicked, and completely miserable, be a storehouse of useful warning to those that read” (268). This acknowledgment, that the morality of the story is articulated through the experience of the fiction rather than didactically by the narrator, is central to Defoe’s moral intentions. It also points to the different levels of narration in the text that function to identify Moll Flanders as a novel in a structuralist, semiotic sense. Our interaction with the novel depends, even in this early text, on distinguishing not only between Defoe as author and Moll as narrator but also, in narratological terms, between Defoe’s “implied” reader and Moll’s “narratee.”32 As narrator, Moll imagines readers who will be so convinced by her rhetoric that they will grant credibility both to her life story and to her translation of her experience into moral and social axioms for general use. As author, Defoe obviously envisions his own audience very differently and assumes his readers will derive moral meaning from the fictional context of Moll’s rhetoric rather than from the rhetoric itself. When Moll addresses her reader with “truisms,” such as “You may see how necessary it is for all Women who expect anything in the World, to preserve the Character of their Virtue, even when perhaps they may have sacrific’d the Thing itself ” (138), the implied reader is obviously not meant to heed as authentic and authorial the wisdom of this advice. Instead, Defoe speaks to his own reader through gaps in Moll’s narration, using her experience to

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demonstrate moral truths about social evils, rather than projecting the narrator’s direct moral commentary as his own. Thus, while Defoe is not advocating along with Moll a moral policy of faking virtue when the thing itself is gone, he does make us understand through Moll’s experience why this might be required, and he “comments” morally against the social conditions that contribute to the necessity of such a ruse. As in any novel, the real morality is located by the reader in the experiences enacted by the fiction, not in the commentary of a fictional first-person narrator attempting to justify or contextualize bad behavior. Moreover, the unique quality of first-person narration is that it allows the reader to be suspicious of the narrator’s rhetoric without dismissing the legitimacy of the values endorsed by that rhetoric. The implied reader accepts many of the moral principles that Moll propounds without embracing the logic that her own actions are in some way morally acceptable or that her personal concept of morality is anything but purely rhetorical.33 When Moll expresses horror at women who abandon their children conceived out of wedlock to the care of strangers (“to neglect them is to murther them”) and rhapsodizes about the affection “plac’d by Nature in the Hearts of Mothers to their Children” (173), the reader can laugh at her hypocrisy or, more precisely, her lack of self-knowledge, while appreciating as legitimate the social implications behind her charge.34 Through Moll’s lens, Defoe looks directly at the specific damage done to children whose mothers cannot afford to keep them and to the epidemic of abandoned out-of-wedlock babies that Moll’s circumstances and her detailed commentary imply. He suggests that conventional moral commentary such as Moll’s, which blankets social issues in irrelevant platitude, provides a way of not recognizing the reality that the novel in its fictional representation of urban conditions makes implicitly clear. The dichotomy between the fiction and fictional commentary, therefore, itself delegitimizes moral discourse in this novel by demonstrating the irrelevance of the imposed moral language to the fiction it purports to interpret. The question of whether Defoe intended Moll Flanders to be read as morally ironic, then, becomes a nonissue if we recognize the existence of the two readers assumed by the text, a duality that is always inherent in any novel written in the first-person narrative mode. With the double-reader, Defoe is not using his narrator to articulate, with or without irony, his personal didactic views. He is establishing the narrator as a rhetorical construct around which to demonstrate his own thematic ideas. Other critics attempt to avoid the irony debate in another way, by locating a different genre besides the novel in which to fit Moll Flanders as a


narrative text. The most obvious choices of alternative genres are the rogue’s tale, where the hero enjoys a series of adventures with no moral synthesis, and the spiritual autobiography, where the first-person narrator represents a life specifically as it leads to conversion and a final awareness of God. Critics have made a case for each of these genres for Moll Flanders. Besides the problematics implicit in any such categorization scheme, however, the difficulty with fitting Moll Flanders into either of these two genres is that one has to consider the whole novel and not just one aspect of it. To do that, the reader must find a way to categorize Moll Flanders as both a rogue’s tale and a spiritual autobiography, and these two genres in their fundamental properties cannot be combined. As a narrator, Moll relates experiences of whoring and stealing in the spirit of the rogue’s tale, with a sense of pride and adventure and little or no remorse. She then forces each episode into the context of a spiritual autobiography by moralizing on her experience and proclaiming what she should have, and eventually did, learn from it. As Robert H. Bell points out, with her materialistic style, Moll does not have a language for conversion.35 As a result, when she interprets her “immoral” experiences moralistically, she does not (and indeed cannot) transform them into spiritual experiences; she succeeds only in undermining their fun. The moral lessons that Moll attaches to her life experiences prevent them from being entirely roguish and keep Moll Flanders from fitting the genre of “rogue’s tale.” Likewise, Moll’s narrational representation of metaphysical rewards in terms of materialistic gains still preserves the unrepentant “roguish” quality of her adventures and, as Bell notes, turns her “spiritual autobiography” into a parody, rather than an example, of that genre.36 If read as a first-person novel, Moll Flanders presents no such difficulties. It is perfectly within character for Moll to make use of the clichés of moral discourse for her own purposes and to appreciate them for their built-in credibility as well as their rhetorical value. For Moll, words are synonymous with truth, particularly if they can be packaged neatly into proverbs or delivered with sufficient melodrama. In this sense, language provides the foundation of her moral consciousness as character and as narrator. Through Moll’s narration, the novel performs the idea of moral discourse as a linguistic phenomenon and demonstrates the power of language to create morality in connection with fictional events. Metafictionally, then, Moll’s narration functions to show that morality in literature is largely a rhetorical construct of language and that attaching predictable moral commentary to fictional experience does not make that commentary “true.” Instead, the authorized morality in Moll Flanders is revealed

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through what the narrator does not say, in the social realities that the fiction enacts. Whatever Defoe’s intentions, his actual text insists that for the novel moral meaning is dependent on experience, not the other way around. This dictum may be counter to neoclassic literary assumptions, but it is fully consistent with assumptions of genre. I do not mean to suggest that with Moll Flanders Defoe deliberately introduced narrative techniques into the novel genre or that he consciously conceived a new genre with reader response in mind. The point is that an emphasis on rhetoric on all levels of the narrative produces this effect and that in assigning genre, it is the effect that matters. I believe it most likely, in fact, that Defoe originally conceived Moll Flanders in the mode of a satire. Since the rhetorical devices common to satire may also function as narrative techniques in the novel genre to challenge convention on the level of text, Defoe’s use of these devices identifies Moll Flanders as both a satire and a semiotic novel.37 In particular, Defoe’s diegetic emphasis on his narrator’s rhetorical strategies and his use of moral rhetoric deliberately to vex moral issues—techniques that distinguish Moll Flanders as semiotic in the modernist/postmodernist sense—is one of the primary characteristics of eighteenth-century satire. Dustin Griffin argues in his “reintroduction” to satiric theory that the notion of eighteenth-century satire as a “neatly articulated homiletic discourse” designed to reform the world by reminding it to “avoid pride, avoid excess, control passion, use reason” is deceptively simplistic. He concludes that such codified moral concepts would be so elementary and obvious to the eighteenthcentury reader that they hardly required the convolutions of the satiric form to rearticulate them.38 Instead, Griffin treats moral ideas as the “raw material” and concentrates on the “play and display” surface activity of the satire as the primary rhetorical text. Along with other recent theorists such as Charles Pullen, he highlights the distinction between “ornamental speech,” which calls attention to itself as a textual performance, and “persuasive speech,” which implicitly elicits a definitive course of action. “More often than we have acknowledged,” he asserts, “satire makes use of ornamental rhetoric.”39 Griffin argues that poststructuralist linguistic maneuvers such as word play, imitated speech, and rhetorical gamesmanship—precisely the kind of deliberate textual devices that pervade the narrative text of Moll Flanders— have always been used in satire to call moral discourse into question, and he points to ornamental speech as the site of these interrogatory transactions. Griffin adds that the eighteenth-century satirist also frequently challenged conventional morality by holding the “idealized self ” up to


ridicule and that much of the activity occurs on the level of text. A prominent ruse for this kind of investigation was employing a fictional voice, or satiric mask, as a narrative device to strip moral discourse of its pretense and, in the process, to subject conventional language systems to moral scrutiny. This is precisely the role I believe Defoe intended for Moll. In traditional satire, the satiric “persona” is portrayed as a naive, well-meaning character, trapped in a system of social or political discourse that he is not personally equipped to evaluate, and the satirist uses this voice to expose the corrupting effects of institutionalized discourse, while not necessarily targeting the institution itself. Despite its personal voice, the satiric mask in eighteenth-century satire is always, according to Pullen, conceived as a textual construct, an example of ornamental rather than persuasive rhetoric. Because it is the discourse, not the persona, that is being ridiculed, the character of the “mask” need not be consistent, but, except in cases of identifiable rhetorical maneuvers, the discursive style of that character must be.40 The most famous eighteenth-century mask or persona is, of course, the Swiftian narrator, but Defoe also frequently made use of this narrative device in his own satiric work, and it would not be out of line for him to employ it in Moll Flanders.41 Indeed, Defoe was a prolific pamphleteer, having produced over sixtyfive of these mostly satiric essays before his death, and it was as a pamphleteer rather than as a novelist that he was primarily known during his lifetime. The stylistic strategy of the pamphlet was to present an argument in fictional form. Paula Backscheider points out in her study of Defoe as a pamphleteer that pamphlet writers often included narrational devices such as fictional dialogues, visions, parody, personae, and mock speeches in performing their political ideas. Both writer and audience, moreover, were also acutely conscious of stylistic strategies in connection with rhetorical effects. “Changes of tense and syntax,” Backscheider says, “became clues to interpretation and subtle shifts in the level of diction signaled changes in relationship to reader or in point of view.”42 In contrast to Watt, who implies Defoe had no talent in this area, Backscheider insists that Defoe showed remarkable control of argument and diction in his pamphlets. He also displayed a notable talent for satiric irony, which he revealed primarily through deliberate contradictions in his own arguments and those of his fictional narrators.43 The subject of institutionalized language was in fact often the primary object of his satire. J. A. Downie claims that the main reason Defoe failed to make the irony clear in his most famous pamphlet, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, was that his strategy was to duplicate the real language of the

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High Church, which he wanted to sound authentic in connection with extremist political ideas.44 In devising this pamphlet, Defoe had, as he does in Moll Flanders, two readers in mind—the High Church members, whom he intended to believe the argument, and the Dissenters, who were supposed to recognize the technique behind the satire and appreciate the dangers and hypocrisy of High Church discourse. “He regarded it as ironic principally because he did not mean what the pamphlet said,” Downie explains. “The plan for the extermination of the Dissenters was not Defoe’s but the logical conclusion of the rhetoric of the High Church writers.”45 If it was characteristic of Defoe’s satiric writing to associate, through different levels of narrative, High Church discourse with corrupt political ambitions, certainly it is not too much of a stretch to imagine him reversing that tactic in Moll Flanders and exposing the insidious effects of the language of the new mercantilism by attaching materialistic terms incongruously to narrative representations of morality and love. Another satiric technique used in conjunction with the “mask” in satire is a sudden shift in language style to indicate, in contrast to the views of the persona, the alternative proposed by the author of the text. The most famous example of this technique occurs in “A Modest Proposal” when, after announcing, “Let no man speak to me of other expedients,” the narrator drops out of character and adopts a language of conscience, offering a list of credible, moral solutions to the problem of poverty in Ireland and suggesting that the government’s failure to remedy the crisis heretofore had been caused by viewing it in economic rather than moral terms.46 In this and other satires, the point of the author’s argument is provided not within the material of the satire but through linguistic shifts from one style of discourse to another on the ornamental level of text. Defoe uses this same technique to propose his own moral views in Moll Flanders. Specifically, he introduces in the conversion episode at Newgate Prison an alternative language system, one that is both reliably moral and identifiably novelistic.47 In this section, Moll’s narrational discourse suddenly changes from an imposed rhetoric of materialistic moralism to a genuine “working out” of her private, independent moral thinking, a style that exists in this episode alone and is not sustained beyond it. The persistent theme of the Newgate narrative is Moll’s struggle to find words to convey a true impression of her feelings about being in prison—the degradation, thoughts of her own imminent death, and, more unusual, her response to the suffering of other prisoners. The quality of language in the narration itself thus becomes the primary focus of her narration as well as the vehicle for revealing the quality of her experience there. Moll’s repen-


tance is portrayed not so much as a religious conversion as it is a selfanalytical process, an attempt to determine, in what sometimes comes remarkably close to a stream-of-consciousness narrative style, why she could not genuinely repent at the moment when it was absolutely necessary that she do so. The realization she repeatedly comes to is that, given the limitations of her materialistic vocabulary, she does not know what “repentance” means. She has to abandon easy phrasing and conventional moral jargon if she is ever to achieve an understanding of the word and, through that understanding, attain the thing itself. In revealing Moll’s inability to repent as a problem of language, Defoe simultaneously proposes an alternative to the slick, self-congratulatory rhetoric of the marketplace that has heretofore dominated the novel. He demonstrates inadequacy of commercialized language for addressing not only the private but also the social and cultural issues elicited by Moll’s imprisonment. In addition, as Moll struggles toward a real understanding of her situation, her discourse moves narrationally from moral commentary to spontaneous, unscripted interpretations that reveal a desire to communicate with readers instead of manipulating them with moral platitudes. This is made explicit when, in representing the final epiphanic moment of achieving true repentance, Moll suddenly interrupts her narrative to address her readers directly. Her style in this passage is conspicuously awkward and self-consciously sincere: I AM not capable of reading Lectures of Instruction to any Body, but I relate this in the very manner in which things then appear’d to me, as far as I am able, but infinitely short of the lively impressions which they made on my Soul at that time; indeed, those Impressions are not to be explain’d by words, or if they are I am not Mistress of Words enough to express them; It must be the Work of every sober Reader to make just Reflections on them, as their own Circumstances may direct; and this is what every one at some time or other may feel something of; I mean a clearer Sight into things to come than they had here, and a dark view of their own Concern in them. (287–88) By admitting that she cannot communicate what she is experiencing, Moll acknowledges at least momentarily the impossibility of accurately generalizing from that experience or of transforming it into reliable moral dictum. Instead, Moll asks for empathy, and another distinction of the novel as a genre is its implicit appeal to reader empathy as a way of conveying meaning out of life experience. Particularly important is that this narrational performance is dramatized literally as a “woman’s” discourse and

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that it contrasts with the patriarchal styles of narrative realism and with the “novel as argument” associated with the rest of Moll’s narration. Although only momentary, the “woman’s” narrative enacted in this one episode precipitates the particular style of “woman’s” discourse that is identified in other chapters of this study. A combination of passion and intellect infused into the narrative voice, it is designed to represent, in different ways, a shared new concept of narration for the novel as genre. Watt points out that while the Newgate episode appears to represent sincere moral transformation, it does not provide terms of moral closure for the fiction. The “sincerity of her reformation is never put to the acid test of sacrificing material for moral good,” he claims, because immediately following this episode Moll goes back to her usual dishonest way of doing business, and the novel retains its disconnected anecdotal structure to the end. My response is that this episodic open-endedness connects Moll Flanders structurally to the genre of satire and also provides its narratological coherence as a novel. Griffin explains that one identifying characteristic of satire as genre is the openness of its ending. Without formal closure, he says, the reader’s attention is drawn to rhetorical configurations performed in the text and not to the progression of its narrative to a positive moral statement at the end: A rhetoric of inquiry and provocation enables us to see more clearly that satire is often an “open” rather than a “closed” form, that it is concerned rather to enquire, explore, or unsettle than to declare, sum up, or conclude. Elements of playfulness and performance likewise shift our attention from satire’s ostensible end to its means. “End,” like “open” and “closed,” here refer to the satirist’s rhetorical purpose. But they can also point to formal features, to what happens at the “end” of that satire.48 At the conclusion of Moll Flanders, Moll is clearly still up to her old tricks—negotiating first-class treatment on the deportation voyage; writing a letter to her blind husband/brother, expressing “tender, kind things” about their son, knowing that this son would be the one to actually read it; diverting the attention of her transported husband so he won’t be aware of the existence of another husband until after that husband is dead—and showing off in her narration all the rhetorical techniques behind these accomplishments. Moll’s repentance finally as only rhetorical, however, fits in with the stylistic and thematic concerns of the overall text. Rather than “closing off the novel” in a morally satisfying way, the continued emphasis on rhetorical strategies in the story and the storytelling of the


novel emphasizes, as Griffin says, the discourse of “playfulness and performance” that dominates the narrational text of the whole book. It also implicitly questions the necessity of conventional forms of closure in structuring a literary text. By adhering to the traditions of satire, the ending of Moll Flanders provides structural coherence to the narrative of Moll Flanders consistent too with its genre as novel. According to Gérard Genette, a defining trait of the autodiegetic novel, such as Moll Flanders, is that the narrating character is situated in the same place narratologically at the beginning of the story as at the end, since the narrative itself is retrospective and the character has presumably lived through all the events of the fiction before beginning the narrative about them.49 Moll’s narration fits this pattern. At the end of the novel, her moral repentance is an entirely rhetorical act, and this is exactly how she makes use of it from the beginning of the book. Therefore, while the fiction may not achieve final coherence through the credible realization of moral plot, the narration that tells the story structurally does cohere.50 The “persona” in a satire can also be employed rhetorically in a doublenarrative role, both as a credible narrator and as an object of ridicule. In Tale of a Tub, for example, Swift trusts his speaker to deliver the allegorical satire on religion, while elsewhere in the text that same narrator, the selfprofessed embodiment of the modern author, is used as the target for the author’s satiric attack on modern literature. This narrational technique is also used in Moll Flanders, and it accounts for another way that the rhetorical strategies of satire work to create a novel out of the text. For the most part, Moll’s naive adoption of the language of practical commercialism works as satire to explore metaethically the discursive influence of the new mercantilism. In other places, though, Moll’s narrative analysis of the position of women in that society is rendered in discourse which, while equally practical, is also completely credible and not satiric at all. If we consider the savvy with which Moll talks of manipulating the banker in order to get the best possible “deal” in marriage and compare this with the authenticity and reliability of her social commentary on the same general subject in another part of the book, the juxtaposition of satiric with the novelistic as a double-narrative technique becomes clear. Describing her response to the banker, Moll comments: I PLAY’D with this Lover, as an Angler does with a Trout: I found I had him fast on the Hook, so I jested with his new Proposal; and put him off; I told him he knew little of me, and bad him enquire about

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me; I let him also go Home with me to my Lodging, tho’ I would not ask him to go in, for I told him it was not Decent. IN SHORT, I ventur’d to avoid signing a Contract of Marriage, and the Reason why I did it, was because the Lady that had invited me to go with her into Lancashire insisted so positively upon it, and promised me such good Fortune, and such fine things there, that I was very tempted to go and try; perhaps, said I, I may mend myself very much, and then I made no scruple in my thoughts, of quitting my honest Citizen, whom I was not so much in Love with as not to leave him for a Richer. (140–41) Although it speaks to the same principle, Moll’s discourse on the subject of women taking responsibility for their fates in marriage, detailed in small part in the following passage, is narrationally very different in effect. Although it also takes a practical approach to marriage, this passage is marked not by the logic of materialism but by the language of intelligent, independent thinking: No Man of common Sense will value a Woman the less for giving up herself at the first Attack, or for not accepting his Proposal without enquiring into his Person or Character; on the contrary, he must think her the weakest of all Creatures in the World, as the Rate of Men now goes. In short, he must have a very contemptible Opinion of her capacities that, having but one Cast for her life, shall cast that Life away at once, and make Matrimony, like Death, be a Leap in the Dark. (75) Although Moll’s narrative in the first passage portrays her as the object of a satire on eighteenth-century mercantile discourse, in the second passage she becomes the reliable narrator, exploring and representing the real position of women in that same social world. Since sweeping social representations were characteristically the topics of the early novel, Moll’s credibility in this area in effect makes her discourse novelistic as well. Interestingly, Moll’s credible, novelistic representation of women occurs only in her discussion of their social position; in other words, only of women as “other” to the cultural power of men. When Moll narrates her great feelings of passion for her husbands (“I would have gone with him thro’ all the world, if I had beg’d my bread”) or, more obviously, her children, her narrative discourse is so extreme, so incongruous, and so inconsistent with her usual practicality that it pegs itself as a rhetorical perfor-


mance in the same mode as her materialistic style, just of a different order. Because her reliability as narrator is associated with her woman’s role as “other,” and not with her sense of self as a female (wife and mother), Moll’s “novelistic” narrative aligns itself with Kristeva’s definition of “woman’s” speech as oppositional discourse according to the pattern that I am exploring in this book. In this mode, Moll Flanders’s “woman’s” narration introduces reliable, narrative principles for the novel, in direct contrast to the narrative practices of established genres, including paradoxically the satire. G. A. Starr’s study of Moll Flanders as a spiritual autobiography points to a dichotomy central to Defoe’s narrative intentions. Starr argues that although Defoe is rigorous in condemning Moll’s behavior, he encourages the reader to respond sympathetically to her narration, to appreciate the humanity of her character through the way she presents her life. Although he himself does not use the term, Starr thereby recognizes in the narrational character of Moll a kind of “novelist,” working in contrast to and in conjunction with the spiritual text of her book to create a credible fiction.51 Indeed, Moll characteristically demonstrates narrative traits that make her story a “novel” as anyone would define the genre.52 She has excellent insight into other people’s characters and occasional insight into her own. She is very aware of her ulterior motives—is, in fact, fascinated by them— and scrupulously honest about her misbehavior as courtesan and thief. Her impulse is to see her life experience in general terms, to expand its parameters to include the ideas it suggests, and she certainly recognizes the importance of relating her experience to the experience of others. Throughout her narrative, she is constantly alert to the expectations of her readers, even if she misinterprets what those expectations are, and in the spirit of nineteenth-century character/narrator, she genuinely wants to do what is “right” as a narrator, albeit with no real understanding of what that actually means. Beyond these traits, she obviously has a lively sense of humor, a talent for telling stories, and an acute sensitivity to language and the ability to make it work for her. Nevertheless, Watt’s assessment is that as a narrative text, Moll Flanders lacks the coherent structure of a strong chronological plotline, the consistent moral authority and satisfactory moral closure of the conventional realistic novel; it offers no “objective” and consistent psychological portrait of its narrator, nor does it portray the kinds of events that engage the imagination of reader in dramatic action. These claims seem to me to be perfectly correct and should not in themselves be subject, as they have relentlessly been, to critical debate. When

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Watt concludes, however, that on the grounds of these narrative characteristics, Moll Flanders is not a “novel,” he is by generic standards flatly wrong. Although it was probably Defoe’s intention with Moll Flanders to produce a fictionalized satire, his attempt resulted in the first semiotic novel in the history of English literature. As first-person narrator, Moll focuses her story on episodes of rhetoric, rather than action, and her own character is developed in the fiction primarily through the rhetorical style in which she tells her experiences, rather than through what she actually says or what her actions say about her. The emphasis on the narrator’s rhetorical strategies, as character and as storyteller, makes self-conscious narrative technique implicit to the fiction as well as to the narrational text. In anticipation of the modernist semiotics, recognizing that technique is made an essential part of reading the book. Moreover, Defoe’s thematic focus on women as socially marginal to the male power structure identifies Moll Flanders as a woman narrator who speaks outside and against social conventions, in keeping with Kristeva’s representation of “woman” as a discursive concept. This translates metafictionally into a narrative that defines itself as “other” to established patriarchal literary conventions, creating a link between the novel’s semiotic achievement and the use of a woman’s narrative voice. Moll Flanders thus marks itself as the first in a series of works in the evolutionary history of the British novel where an author invents a woman narrator explicitly for the purposes of performing a new novel in stylistic contrast to established modes of genre. It is, therefore, the first of those novels to be examined in this book.

A Woman’s Rhetoric of Ethics and Genre in Clarissa · 51

2 ^&

Her Authoritative Text A Woman’s Rhetoric of Ethics and Genre in Clarissa

Clarissa explores issues of genre on the level of text in a way that implicitly continues the narrative paradigm initiated by Moll Flanders. Like Defoe, Richardson builds into his narrational scheme a rhetorical opposition between the new “novelistic” discourse, articulated by the female narrator, and the patriarchal language systems of more traditional and popular literary genres that infiltrate the narrative as parodies of those types of narrative texts. Unlike Defoe, however, Richardson literalizes this duality by juxtaposing a woman’s narration with that of a male character to create an explicitly gendered structural dialogic between novelistic narration and exaggerations of conventional literary styles. The narrative discourse of the novel as realistic genre is represented in the quality and concerns of Clarissa’s letters, while the clichés of traditional literary genres, and, more pervasively, of popular sentimental fiction are performed and parodied in the rhetoric of Lovelace’s narrational prose. As novel, Clarissa’s narrative incorporates social and cultural issues that are excluded by Lovelace’s literary linguistic play. Clarissa’s narrative also adopts a discourse of personal and social ethics, associated epistemologically with the novel genre, which contrasts with the parody of the extreme villainy identified with Lovelace and the “sentimental” generic mode. Clarissa is thereby granted narrative authority in the novel, not because her character is morally superior but because her rhetoric is credited by both novel and reader over the “male” rhetorical text. This reading aligns itself with other recent criticism of Clarissa in shifting discussion away from the letters as spontaneous discourse and reconceiving the narrative as a collection of self-consciously written texts. In direct opposition to traditional interpretations such as Ian Watt’s,1 most analyses of Clarissa now treat its epistolary narratives not as psychological studies but as rhetorical arguments. These arguments consist of public rather than private discourse and represent organized thinking rather than

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unguarded states of mind. Along with a change in focus, the revised approach to narrative issues in Clarissa elicits new questions about “authority” in the text. If epistolary narratives are designed as arguments, what privileges one character’s narration over another? In other words, what determines who wins the debate? The answer, according to recent narrative evaluations, resides entirely with the reader. Following John Preston’s lead, major studies of Clarissa by Terry Castle, John Gibson, William Beatty Warner, Tom Keymer, and Madeleine Kahn all contend that because it juxtaposes different rhetorical positions by different characters, mostly without external commentary, the epistolary novel is precluded from authorial orchestration.2 Richardson is unable to credit one text over another, and we are confronted with what Castle calls a “cacophony” of voices, none of which is privileged by the text.3 It is up to the individual reader, they conclude, to decide which character’s rhetoric the novel will endorse and, on that basis, what the novel “means.” Meaning is further complicated by the contexts that each outside reader brings to the novel, and as a result, issues of narrative authority will differ depending on the life experience of the person reading the book. “[C]onfronting the same textual material—which like any sign system is ultimately arbitrary in significance—readers organize it differently, according to their different psychological, social, and cultural expectations,” Castle explains. “Readers produce meaning for the text: out of many possibilities, a reader will construct one, around the text, so to speak.”4 According to current narrative theories of discourse in Clarissa, the “real” reader, rather than Richardson’s “implied” reader or the fictional narratee, is the audience for the letters rhetorically represented in the novel and the one who organizes and determines their values for the book.5 The movement away from psychology of character and toward the rhetoric of discourse as the site for narrative analysis is an important step not only for Clarissa and the epistolary novel but also, as the previous chapter demonstrates, for all narratives of the first-person mode. The reader’s role in the production of the literary text has also gone largely unrecognized in critical discussions of early novels, and analysis of this phenomenon adds a significant new dimension to the critical discourse on narrative issues in these works. Put into practice, however, viewing Clarissa as an anarchy of written texts results in criticism that is methodologically not very new and that leads to conclusions about reader response that may be completely inconsistent with the way the novel actually reads. Castle speaks, in effect, for the other recent critics when she explicitly stresses


hermeneutics in her interpretation of Clarissa’s narrative and points to the story represented by the different narrations as the issue of credibility in the text. Her position is that we must decide whose version of events is the most compelling to us and on that basis determine the “meaning” of the work. Because this approach often results in reversing the fictional hierarchies that the novel appears to endorse, it could be said to deconstruct the text; this leads Castle and those who share her methodology to refer to recent narrative criticism of Clarissa as “deconstructionist.” As the following passage makes clear, however, the deconstructive object of this narrative criticism is the fiction, not the narrative text. Castle writes: This conflict of discourses embodied by the text complicates the reader’s role in several ways. The pressure of multiple constructions within Clarissa enforces on us, first of all, a pervasive sense of the subjective nature of meaning itself—both with regard to the text and to the world. By proposing alternate accounts of the same putatively “real” phenomena, Clarissa constantly shifts attention away from the phenomena, to the account-making process, to the way readers organize significance. . . . Within the fictional world “reality” is continuously inscribed and reinscribed by individual interpreters. Confronting this dissolution of claritas, the replacement of a single socalled objective narrative by a multiplicity of interpretive events, we are made conscious in turn of our own subjectivity, the arbitrariness of the ways we try to make sense out of contradictory accounts—in short, of what Barthes has called the productive nature of our reading.6 Although she aligns herself with Barthes, Castle’s emphasis is on hermeneusis and event, not on language. As a result, she is not deconstructing language systems, as he does, but is simply proposing the viability of alternative interpretations of the story. Because she conceives the various narrative texts as arguments, moreover, Castle’s reading is propelled by logocentric concerns about which narrative is substantively more plausible to the reader and, implicitly, a preconceived idea about who, politically and culturally, that reader is. Her analysis of Clarissa consists of pointing out what the letters say and discussing why particular versions of “reality” are and are not credible given what happens in the story and the conditions of society during the time it historically takes place; this yields a reading of the novel more concerned with theme than it is with narrative text.7 All the arguments that claim to deconstruct Clarissa seem to take the same analytical approach. Critics make decisions about which character’s

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narration has more legitimacy within the context of the “world” (internal and external) of the fiction and demonstrate with close reading why those decisions are valid. Text is replaced by story; and events are treated as if they were “real” and all epistolary interpretations discursively equal. This confusion of text with story also leads to further claims by Castle and others that because Lovelace admits to forging some of the letters to and from Clarissa, he may have forged others; therefore, all the letters represented in the novel are inherently suspect, creating complete nullification of narrative authority in the text.8 From a narratological standpoint, however, this is a nonargument. The reproduction of forged letters is part of Lovelace’s text, not Clarissa’s, and it has little if no effect on the discourse of her narratives or those of other characters. Moreover, since Lovelace is a fictional character, he is not capable of tampering, undiscovered, with texts. He is, as Castle also wants to assert, only a “text” himself. The methodological aim of recent narrative analyses of Clarissa is not, then, to deconstruct language systems or to examine discourse but to construct a hermeneutic reading of the novel at odds with interpretative assumptions usually made about the book. Specifically, the target of recent narrative criticism has been the privileging of Clarissa’s character in the novel so as to call into question the moral precepts that her discourse ultimately asserts for the work. Exposing the calculated rhetoric of Clarissa’s letters and pointing out that her own self-interested “take” on events is no more credible than Lovelace’s transfers narrative authority from Clarissa to the reader, expands the hermeneutic scope of the text, and makes the novel accessible to new readings. I have no argument with reader response criticism that broadens the parameters of the novel. Besides expanding the book hermeneutically, assigning meaning to the real reader opens it up to narrational issues and contexts beyond those elicited by the storytelling, and in so doing allows for narrative discussions such as my own, which extend to ideas beyond the confines of the book. My objection is to the assumption that in granting the reader the primary role of producing meaning for the novel, Clarissa must be sacrificed as the voice of authority in the text. Although the decision to open up the novel is a positive one, the result of devaluing Clarissa’s narrative authority is to replace one novel with another instead of enlarging the existing text. The elevation of Lovelace to the status of tragic hero in Clarissa, for example, is hardly new; Richardson himself, as later editions make clear, was well aware of the popularity of this response to his villain. Still, it takes on disturbing nuances when the interest shifts from the psychology of Lovelace’s character to the credibil-


ity of his discourse, particularly his rhetorical interpretation of events. Critical assertions that Clarissa’s version of her abduction is no more “authoritative” than Lovelace’s leads to Terry Eagleton’s legitimate observation that Warner’s “fashionably deconstructionist” reading, rather than equalizing all discourse, condemns Clarissa and sides with her rapist. Eagleton suggests that looking only to the language used to interpret events as a basis for evaluating the events themselves not only “deconstructs” the moral values of the novel but promotes an extremely twisted epistemology and distorted worldview. “It seems logical,” he says, “that a contemporary deconstructionist should find Lovelace the hero and Clarissa the villain, without allowing a little matter like rape to modify his judgment.”9 The same “logic” would imply that the arguments of Clarissa’s relatives that she should marry a man she finds revolting are on their face just as valid as hers are against it, because both parties accept the premise that parental authority is paramount and both address the issue in rhetorical texts. Why is it, then, that in her interactions with Lovelace and with her relatives, Clarissa is invariably deemed by readers to be right? Why, regardless of the alternatives, is Clarissa’s still the authoritative voice in this text? Because her narrative discourse, as discourse, grants her that authority. Narrative authority is a vexed issue in Clarissa only when discourse is, as it should be in hermeneutic readings, contextualized by the fiction and the culture referred to by the fiction. The very legitimate point made by Castle and Kahn (and to a lesser extent the male critics mentioned earlier) is that as an aristocrat and a man in seventeenth-century England Lovelace has all the power in the story and that as a woman within the same historic context Clarissa has none. Despite the rhetorical force of her discourse, they say, Clarissa’s narrative can therefore never be deemed authoritative because its force is only rhetorical; it has no legitimacy beyond the written text. As Castle observes: The excruciating situation Clarissa dramatizes is that a rhetorical system is not “powerful” unless grounded in political power. Clarissa’s “Story” everywhere lacks underlying authority. It is without social and material force. Hence it remains a fragmentary, futile utterance subject to the radical incursions of a more potent collective rhetoric—the patriarchal discourse of the Harlowes and Lovelace.10 Implicit in Castle’s thesis is the essential paradox of Clarissa, that its heroine speaks for the author and yet has no power to affect the action in the author’s fiction; and this discrepancy between narration and event does

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reflect our experience of reading the novel. It is indeed painful to witness Clarissa’s eloquent declarations concerning what treatment she will and will not accept from her brother and from Lovelace and at the same time know, from the events related in the story, that as a woman she has no influence over their plans for her. Still, this dichotomy between Clarissa’s narrative eloquence and its lack of power to affect action in the novel is an issue relevant to the story, not to the question of authority in the narrative text. Castle’s analysis refers only to the reliability of Clarissa’s discourse in the material contexts supplied by the fiction. It applies solely to the relations between Clarissa’s character and the male characters in the novel and the issues hermeneutically revealed by those relations. For the readers of the novel—the very readers to whom Castle and others grant narrative authority—Clarissa’s discourse is in itself completely credible and supports its own claims for narrative authority. We believe Clarissa because her discourse is “right,” even while acknowledging that as a woman she lacks the power to compel other characters in the story to act by it. The connection between Clarissa’s discourse and her position as woman in the events of the fiction is matter for thematic analysis rather than narratological study. This does not mean, however, that removed from the story, discussions of narrative discourse as discourse are completely unattached to issues of gender. Quite the contrary, gender is the foundation of the novel’s narrational structure and its metafictional design, much as it is in Moll Flanders. In her generic study of the epistolary narrative, Elizabeth J. MacArthur argues that Peter Brooks and other theorists who dislike the epistolary novel do so precisely because they are applying the stable, authoritative criteria of the nineteenth century to an unstable, spatial, self-consciously rhetorical and subjective narrative medium.11 She maintains that the eighteenth century, “with its interrogative attitude towards received structures of thought and power,” was more interested in deconstructing the social, political, and moral codes that charecterize nineteenth-century literature than it was in producing them. She proposes, as I do in chapter 1, that generic criteria based on nineteenth-century realism are inadequate for evaluating novels with disconnecting, juxtapositional structural schemes. Interestingly, although she does not acknowledge a connection, the vague theoretical terms that MacArthur adopts to describe the open structure of the epistolary novel—“energy” and “desire”—are the very words Kristeva uses to describe the jouissance of the semiotic, identified in critical paradigms with the “woman’s” text. Likewise the adjectives by which MacArthur identifies the narrative structure of conventional realism—


“closed,” “fixed,” stabilized,” and “inevitable”—resonate with Kristeva’s concept of the symbolic, associated with those patriarchal language systems that the semiotic functions strategically to transgress. In other words, as an epistolary narrative, Clarissa defines itself narratologically as a “woman’s” novel, positioned in direct contrast to patriarchal conventions of narrative and phallogocentric structures of discourse, including those associated with the novel genre itself.12 In Moll Flanders, the use of a woman character as narrator literalizes this paradigm. Using a woman narrator, Defoe implicitly privileges the woman’s style of narration over the conventions being undermined by the text and thereby metafictionally performs the reversal of gendered hierarchies that the semiotic/symbolic paradigm as theory represents. In Clarissa the same process is made explicit through the gendered opposition of Clarissa’s and Lovelace’s discursive texts. Despite claims of “deconstructionist” critics that the reader must consider a polyphony of rhetorical voices in constructing meaning for Clarissa, their arguments inevitably focus only on the letters of Lovelace and Clarissa because these two discourses represent the only independent narrations in the book. As a letter writer, Anna Howe provides commentary and reaction, but her discourse is mostly dependent on Clarissa’s and her narration reads primarily as an extension of Clarissa’s “woman’s” text. The notes from Clarissa’s relatives are for the most part embedded in Clarissa’s letters to Anna and offered by Clarissa to support her own rhetorical argument. By including these other letters in her narrative, Clarissa sets her “woman’s” discursive authority in opposition to fixed dictates of “male” (or male-influenced) texts, which, although they argue in substance against Lovelace, essentially adopt his style of authoritarian discourse. Belford also writes discursively in the mode of Lovelace, though with him the connection is literary authoritarianism rather than cultural assumptions of patriarchal power. Even at the end when he ostensibly represents her interests, Belford imposes Lovelace’s style of narration on Clarissa and in so doing effectively obliterates her “woman’s” voice from the text. As the controlling discourses of the novel, the letters of Clarissa and Lovelace run strictly parallel to each other, and with minor exception, they never interact. These two gendered styles of narrative are represented, therefore, as autonomous language systems. Together they produce a dialogical narrative scheme that, in terms of structure, is formally balanced. Despite this balance, only one of the two narratives represents the authoritative discourse in the book, and that is Clarissa’s. Unlike Lovelace’s narrative, which consists primarily of clichés bor-

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rowed from other literary genres, Clarissa’s narration is inherently novelistic. In other words, it is essentially analytical, grounded in realism and, until the rape, always in process. As part of an ongoing effort to inform their rhetorical positions, the letters are propelled by Clarissa’s need to understand herself and other people and to decipher what is really going on in her world beyond the text—this in contrast to Lovelace’s transformation of himself and others into literary characters and his obsession with prescripted plots. Both Clarissa’s and Lovelace’s narrational scopes are completely solipsistic. Despite their limited focus, Clarissa’s letters give discursive context to the larger political, economic, and cultural issues that frame her narrative and precipitate her epistles to Anna, thereby aligning her narrative with the realism of the novel by generating social themes. As Castle and others insist, the letters of Clarissa and Lovelace are both portrayed as self-consciously rhetorical texts. Clarissa’s arguments, however, are genuinely rhetorical. They are written for the purpose of persuading others to accept the logic of her reasoning and the validity of her course of action. Out of this need to make others believe her, Clarissa works for a level of eloquence that is as rhetorically compelling to the reader of the novel as it is to the fictional readers of her prose (her relatives often refer to the need to guard themselves against her talents in this area). As “novelistic” narrative, her rhetoric is aimed at influencing her reader’s response to the experience portrayed in the text and at making credible her themes of injustice. Lovelace’s prose, on the other hand, is fashioned as a performance of argument, rather than a genuine act of persuasion. In the convention of neoclassic literature, it assumes its own authority and therefore is stylistically concerned not with credibility but with the dynamics of its own art. Lovelace’s rhetoric is all drama, style, and flourish, and as attractive as that may be to the reader of the novel, his letters never achieve the eloquence that characterizes, and privileges, Clarissa’s novelistic text.13 Outlining his plots against Clarissa to Belford, Lovelace quotes and mimics lyric poetry, scripts his own melodramas, and builds his narrative out of derisive imitations of specific variations of these larger categories of genre. As a conglomeration of borrowed literary discourses, Lovelace’s narration thus calls attention to itself as discursively inauthentic and derivative. It also attaches these same qualities to the literary genres it plunders, objectifying them and parodying their distinctive styles. In other words, Lovelace effectively proclaims himself king of the carnival in the Bakhtinian sense. By making fun of and disassembling the language systems of established literary genres, his narrative parody “decrowns” the “sacred texts” and replaces them with new forms of order.14 Murray L.


Brown proposes that the underlying intention behind Lovelace’s usurpation of other genres is to assert his own personal authority over all modes of discourse and to control the responses of his audience by manipulating them into scripted “literary” behavior: “Lovelace’s ‘pyrotechnics’ range to include as many literary genres as he can inclusively command, misuse, and subvert—all with the expressed intention of eliciting predictable fictional and irrational responses in his primary reader, Belford, as well as among his numerous players/victims.”15 Brown argues that Lovelace’s derisive attitude, not Richardson’s, undermines the authority of established literary genres in Clarissa, and he concludes that because it associates itself with the villain, this act of literary subversion is something that the novel actually positions itself against: “Richardson depends on our ability to recognize the misuse of generic appointments,” he projects, explaining the interaction of reader and text in this stratagem, “and he thereby promotes interpretation by forcing our condemnation of all Lovelace’s subversive readings and constructions.”16 According to Brown, by exposing Lovelace’s “pyrotechnics,” Clarissa, the novel, effectively rescues the idea of literary genre from Lovelace’s carnival; it reinstitutes the legitimacy of all language systems he has subjected to ridicule and restores the normal hierarchical relations between literature and reader. My position is that Lovelace’s irreverent game playing with conventions of established literary genres represents itself not as something to be condemned but as the only redeeming feature of his narrative. His comedic talents in debunking the stylistic pretenses of high literature are so attractive that they seem, uncomfortably, to mitigate (in the mode of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert) what he actually says. Moreover, literary parody, although associated with Lovelace’s discourse, is not dependent on Lovelace’s personal machinations to effect it; it pervades the entire novel both within and without his scope of influence whenever other literary genres are stylistically rendered in the text. Margaret Rose theorizes that once generic parody occurs in a work of fiction then all intertextual discourse represented in the narrative will be read parodically, whether intended that way or not, and indeed this is the case with Clarissa.17 The effect of Lovelace’s subversive language play is to objectify all established literary discourse depicted in the novel and to reduce it to parody even when, as it often is with Lovelace and other characters, that discourse is offered seriously. One only has to point to Clarissa’s rendition of “Ode to Wisdom” in the spirit of parody to appreciate the comic influence of Lovelace’s derisive stylistic wordplay on representations of other genres in this novel, whether he himself produces them or not.18 Rather than cen-

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suring Lovelace for his subversion of other literary genres, Clarissa effectively participates in that performance. As I discuss in my introduction, the parodying of high literature was, according to Bakhtin, a systemic feature of the early novel as genre. Writers worked parodies of other genres into the narratives of their fictions to contextualize their own work as “literature” and, at the same time, to showcase the originality of the novel in contrast to the predictability of established literary forms. During its earliest eras of concentrated selfdefinition, the novel also turned parodically on itself; and in the eighteenth century, criticism of other “novels” became, according to Linda Hutcheon and others, a recognizable part of the diegetic process of the novel form.19 Bakhtin claims that a common target of this generic parody was the “dominant or fashionable novels” of the time—the adventure romance, the Baroque novel, and the sentimental novel—specific “variations” on the novel that had become synonymous with the concept of the “novel” as a genre. The motive behind the parody of these popular books was to replace them textually, in the same work, with a more comprehensive generic idea of the novel as a narrative form.20 Richardson participates in this subversive metafictional activity by constructing, through the whole of Lovelace’s narration, a parody of the sentimental novel and contrasting that parodic narrative with Clarissa’s “novelistic” text. In this way, Clarissa effectively ridicules sentimental conventions and promotes, in its stead, a new “realism” as paradigmatic for the novel genre. The irony is, of course, that for most critics, Clarissa is itself a prime example of the “novel of sentiment,” and there have been a number of recent studies on the ways that Clarissa reflects the social and cultural dynamics associated with that genre.21 Without refuting this categorization, I contend that Clarissa also parodies the sentimental novel and, in doing so, defines itself in contrast to that generic form. The root cause and effects of this contradiction in genre classification are deeply gendered in the text. While Lovelace’s subversions of literary high genre are, as Brown points out, mostly “piecemeal,” creating a tapestry of assorted generic mimicry and wordplay, the conventions of the sentimental novel interweave and structure his entire narrative. His dastardly plots and the way he portrays himself as the classic villain and Clarissa as the damsel in distress work to define Lovelace’s “story” as stereotypical of the contrived novel of sentiment. This sentimental melodrama is simultaneously rendered as satiric parody for the novel by the exaggerated, arcane “literary” diction he uses to proffer his villainous schemes and the self-consciously diabolical flourishes he gives to his rhetorical prose. An overall structural duality is


thereby built for Clarissa out of the juxtaposition of sentimental fiction, represented by Lovelace’s exaggerated “male” narrative, and the new novel, performed by Clarissa’s credible “woman’s” novelistic style. Through this duality, the novel sets male against female discourse while it emphatically privileges the woman’s nonparodic, nonsentimentalized text.22 A defining characteristic of the epistolary narrative is a structure that is spatial rather than temporal, or chronological, in design.23 In Clarissa, this spatial structure divides the novel into consecutive but textually interacting parts. It represents itself narratologically as a metafictional opposition of competing literary genres that dominate the narrational text of different sections of the book. By this model, Clarissa’s authoritative narrative controls the initial discursive sequence of the novel. This first series of letters, describing the circumstances of Clarissa’s forced engagement to Solmes and disputes with her family, constitutes the first narrative movement of the novel and is made up almost entirely of Clarissa’s letters to and responses from Anna Howe; with limited exception, all other narratives are included as texts embedded in Clarissa’s letters. This continues until the point when Clarissa escapes the Harlowes with Lovelace, which is also the point where Lovelace’s letters to Belford begin to take control of the narrative. Although Clarissa’s voice still makes itself heard, the narrational context for her writing shifts at that stage to Lovelace’s sentimental text, which predominates until after the rape when Belford takes primary responsibility for narrating Clarissa’s story. Once that happens, Clarissa relinquishes any meaningful narrational role, and the novel becomes a monological exchange of literary sentimentality between male characters. The ending, which recounts Clarissa’s death primarily by means of Belford’s narrative, imposes a temporal scheme onto the novel—as if all the preceding events have been leading to this point—and through its inherent melodrama and its moral closure casts all the events of the fiction into a sentimental literary mold. In creating the ending he does for his characters, Richardson, like Lovelace, turns Clarissa into the kind of sentimental novel that its own narration has been consistently representing as parody on the level of text. In other words, the concluding movement of Clarissa works to categorize the novel as sentimental fiction within a larger narrative context that explicitly ridicules that generic form. This very contradiction emphasizes an underlying metafictional argument that is essentially gendered. The symbolic of predictable moral closure imposed by Richardson, as a male novelist, appears intrusive and inconsistent with the semiotic structure of its

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open-ended spatial design.24 The obvious discrepancy between its antisentimental1 narrative dialogic and the monological sentimentality inflicted on the fiction at the end transforms Clarissa, on one level, into a self-parody of the male-authored text. Working against Richardson’s “male” insistence on codified sentimental closure is the discursive representation of the “woman’s” novel that opens the narrative text. This narrative argues just as forcefully, and far more convincingly, for realistic discourse as the defining narrative mode of the book. Because a discourse of realism dominates the first section of the novel, where Clarissa’s letters constitute the primary narrative, a larger spatial dialectic is built between the beginning and the end of the novel that structurally frames the whole of the narrative text. Clarissa’s “woman’s” opening is juxtaposed against the patriarchal moral ending. This fixed frame reflects the textualized gendered positions performed dialogically between Clarissa and Lovelace throughout the novel on the subject of the novel as form. Rather than categorically defining Clarissa as “sentimental” fiction, Richardson’s ending contributes to the book’s more pervasive narrative and structural dialogic and its gendered metafictional scheme. In one way or another, most recent narrative criticism of Clarissa identifies the letters of Clarissa and Lovelace as gendered narratives posed in opposition to one another. This criticism does not refer to the contrast in discourse but to the way each character’s narration positions itself on issues of gender elicited by the fiction of the book.25 Patricia Meyer Spacks, for example, recognizes a narrative differentiation between Lovelace’s “plots” (emblems of his “insistent maleness”) and Clarissa’s “stories,” and these terms aptly identify the point of difference between their discursive literary styles.26 But when Spacks makes this distinction, she is not discussing narrative dynamics, only categorizing the rhetorical strategies used by Clarissa and Lovelace in an ongoing fight for domination in the fiction. She describes their modes of discourse as “the implements of power by which Richardson’s characters wage their sexual battle,” and this thematic reading of narration as gendered is inherently problematic. To assume, on the one hand, that Clarissa is consciously writing as a woman in opposition to the aggressive acts described in male narratives is to grant her prescient knowledge of Lovelace’s letters, which she has never seen and whose plots she does not fully recognize until the end of the book. To claim, on the other, that Richardson is using her letters, without her cooperation, as thematic weapons against male values that Lovelace represents is to remove the issue of deliberate rhetorical strategy from discussions of Clarissa’s discourse and to focus instead on Richardson’s


underlying thematic designs. Moreover, if Clarissa wins the battle of the sexes, as Spacks says she does, hers is a moral victory unrelated to gender. Castle and others make clear that Clarissa has no power against male authority in affecting the turn of events against her, so this is not a war she can win on that plane. Examining Clarissa’s letters as genre discourse, rather than as arguments for issues elicited by the fiction, shifts attention away from transient, thematically gendered dualisms to the larger concepts that frame those ideas. This approach to Clarissa’s narrative, I believe, grants her authority in the novel and empowers “woman’s” discourse in ways that a thematic reading of the novel cannot. When Richardson creates a structural, narratological opposition between Clarissa and Lovelace, he also orchestrates, on a purely textual level, a discussion about what kind of literature—and, more precisely, what kind of novel—is best suited to exploring thematic ideas, including issues of politics, society, and culture. From the beginning he assigns authoritative discourse to the woman. In this way, the novel suggests that the qualities that characterize the female style of writing and thinking are those which can most credibly represent the world beyond the fiction, and authority in representation is a form of political power, no matter what the discursive field. Even granting the importance of historical context, Clarissa’s continuing authority as “woman” over the discourse and values of the novel is clearly more meaningful from a feminist standpoint than her lack of authority in the limited fiction of the tale. As a gendered construct, the difference between Clarissa’s and Lovelace’s motives for writing points to larger, more comprehensive differences in genre, and these differences are represented stylistically by their separate texts. Jonathan Loesberg argues that for Lovelace, writing is conceived as a form of aggressive “action.”27 Lovelace, that is, uses his narrative to push through and rhetorically justify his schemes, and his language is devised to represent “real” experience only in terms of how it fulfills, or fails to fulfill, his personal designs. As “events,” Lovelace’s narrative reflects the convention of “male” literature found both in the sentimental novel and in classic adventure tales. It presents itself as a series of prescripted actions, which it recounts with authoritative commentary but with none of the detailed analysis that generally accompanies events in the psychologically realistic novel. By contrast, Clarissa uses her writing as a mode of analysis to clarify her own position in regard to experience by recreating that experience in coherent, organized terms. Clarissa’s writing is rhetorically sophisticated, and it self-consciously follows a chronology of

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events. But in its attempt to attach meaning to experience, it also represents itself as unfinished and in process—a vehicle for working through the changing “meanings” of changing experience rather than for simply depicting, from her own point of view, the fixed nature of events themselves. Her narration thereby enacts, as Lovelace’s discourse cannot, the relationship that Castle and others claim real readers have with Clarissa as a rhetorical text; it “shifts attention away from the phenomena, to the account-making process, to the way readers organize significance.” While Lovelace’s discourse objectifies language systems with the intent to deconstruct and devalue them, Clarissa uses language as a way of objectifying experience. Her purpose is not so much to comprehend the final “truth” of what has happened but rhetorically to reconstruct that experience in a “nonsubjective” way in order to explore its meaning for herself and her reader. Objectifying experience to create fields of interpretation is also characteristic of the novel genre, and it represents a more positive relationship of writer to language and language to reader than Lovelace’s linguistic objectifications do.28 As analysis, Clarissa’s text requires a style of language that is narratologically coherent and that subordinates itself to the process of thinking and the real nature of the event being described. The result is psychological realism for Clarissa’s narrative, which effectively carries over into the text of the novel as a whole. It also works to define Clarissa as a novel in the generic sense that Clarissa’s realistic discourse represents. If Lovelace is attractive as a character, for example, it is because his villainous plots and discourses occur within a context of psychological complexity provided almost entirely by Clarissa’s speculations about him before we ever read his letters. Unlike Lovelace, who objectifies Clarissa sexually as woman and demonstrates no interest in her subjective self, Clarissa devotes a great deal of narrative attention to analyzing Lovelace’s psychology. Although her fascination with his motives and behavior surfaces under various guises in many of her letters, she devotes one relatively long narrative to evaluating Lovelace in terms of his psychological “pros and cons,” and the complexity of this analysis infiltrates the narrative of the whole novel to create a compelling realistic character for him in the larger text.29 Her analysis reveals what she considers to be Lovelace’s genuinely positive traits—his courage, generosity, and willingness to admit his faults. But, more important, it portrays Lovelace as multifaceted and unpredictable: “Sometimes we have both thought him one of the most undesigning merely witty men we ever knew; at other times one of the deepest men we ever conversed


with. So that when in one visit we have imagined we fathomed him, in the next he has made us ready to give him up as impenetrable” (1:295). The speculative psychological complexity that Clarissa explores for several pages extends to our reading of Lovelace’s own stereotypically diabolical and single-faceted narrative, making him a far more attractive and interesting villain than he would otherwise be if left to his own narration. By contrast, Lovelace offers no interpretation of Clarissa’s psychology and expresses no interest in her beyond his immediate plans. The complexity of Clarissa’s character is revealed primarily through her own direct self-analysis and through the “character” of her narration—the originality and the intelligence of her reasoning; her evaluation of other people; and the spirit and startling candor of her recorded interchanges with Solmes, her siblings, and then Lovelace. There is, moreover, much about Clarissa’s character, as it reveals itself in her narrational discourse, that superficially resembles Lovelace’s. She is quick to recognize situational ironies and is a wonderful mimic; she also reacts with sarcasm when she feels criticized by others, including Anna. These attributes humanize her portrayal as a stereotypical literary “heroine” provided by Lovelace and later Belford and prevent her character from being annihilated by their monological “male” texts. When we compare Clarissa’s novelistic interest in Lovelace with his portrait of her, a clear dichotomy emerges between the two narratives that is metafictional, gendered, and ultimately comic in effect. It exposes, and simultaneously satirizes, the limitations of literary conventions in the representation of character. It also diminishes the credibility and likability of Lovelace as a narrator who rhetorically uses Clarissa as a device for making fun of those conventions in his text. The only instance in which Lovelace portrays Clarissa in detail occurs in one of his earliest letters when he suddenly interrupts his narrative to offer an evaluation of her character in terms of its “native elegance.” His representation is obviously not an analysis of Clarissa but rather an objectification and blatant parody of the language of physical description that one might find of a woman in a badly written novel of sentiment. The portrait, which goes on for several pages, reduces both the sentimental genre and its subject to ridicule: Her wax-like flesh (for, after all, flesh and blood I think she is) by its delicacy and firmness, answers for the soundness of her health. Thou hast often heard me launch out in praise of her complexion. I never in my life2 beheld a skin so illustriously fair. The Lily and the driven

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Snow it is nonsense to talk of: her Lawn and her Laces one might, indeed, compare to those: But what a whited wall would a woman appear to be, who had a complexion which would justify such unnatural comparisons? But this Lady is all alive, all glowing, all charming flesh and blood, yet so clear, that every meandering vein is to be seen in all the lovely parts of her which custom permits to be visible. (3:27–28) Three long paragraphs of detailed, self-consciously arcane fashion commentary follow: “Her morning gown was a pale primrose-coloured paduasoy: The cuffs and robbings curiously embroidered by the fingers of this ever charming Arachne in a running pattern of violets and their leaves, the light in the flowers silver; gold the leaves” (28). Lovelace then scripts his own melodrama, one that unabashedly distorts Clarissa’s behavior and vulgarizes her appearance in order to further his parody of sentimental literature. Describing Clarissa’s initial reaction to his unexpected appearance in the garden of Harlowe Place, he writes: She trembled: Nor knew she how to support the agitations of a heart she had never found so ungovernable. She was even fainting, when I clasped her in my supporting arms. What a precious moment That! How near, how sweetly near, the throbbing partners! (3:29) Thus, Lovelace’s insistent play with the stylistic conventions of literary genre and his mimicry of sentimentalized diction (“the throbbing partners!”) prevent the reader, and presumably Lovelace himself, from considering Clarissa’s psychology and their mutual interactions from his focalized point of view. His representation of her character is largely dependent not on what he “sees” but on whatever language system or literary genre he wishes to denigrate in referring to her.30 Lovelace’s antic diction also serves, in contrast, to empower Clarissa’s genuinely analytical discourse and to grant it authority. The first two volumes of the novel establish a continuum of credible narration through the narrative exchanges of Clarissa and Anna, both of whom essentially adopt the same realistic worldview and express it in the same lively, accessibly prosaic, analytical style. The following passage from the letter by Clarissa that immediately precedes Lovelace’s first letter to Belford demonstrates in capsulated form some of the primary characteristics of Clarissa’s rhetorical prose. These include not only reliable analytical discourse but an acute awareness of the function of style in representing “truth” in her text. She begins the sequence by describing her opinion of Lovelace in point-


edly logical terms, thereby distancing herself from him in her prose and emphasizing stylistically her main contention that had she been left to her own calm powers of perception, she would have discovered Lovelace’s failings and dismissed him of her own accord. He has talents, indeed: But those talents, and his personal advantages, have been snares to him. It is plain they have. And this shews, that, weighted in an equal balance, he would be found greatly wanting. Had my friends confided as they did at first, in that discretion which they do not accuse me of being defective in, I dare say I should have found him out: And then should have been as resolute to dismiss him as I was to dismiss others, and as I am never to have Mr. Solmes. (1: 208–9) Her disinterested analysis is then counterbalanced by a performatively “spontaneous” outburst, which is nevertheless eloquent in its passion and self-consciously parallel in its rhetorical structure. This abrupt change in style is clearly designed, and punctuated, to reflect the force of her integrity—in implicit contrast, presumably, to those who distrust her judgment: Oh that they did but know my heart!—It shall sooner burst, than voluntarily, uncompelled, undriven, dictate a measure that shall cast a slur either upon Them, or upon my Sex. Before returning to the narrative of events, she demonstrates a playful awareness of the letter’s apparently disjunctive structural design, which she describes as a kind of textual performance of the actual chaos going on around her: Excuse me, my dear friend, for these grave soliloquies, as I may call them. How have I run from reflection to reflection! But the occasion is recent!—They are all in commotion below upon it! Clarissa’s narrative style functions rhetorically here to duplicate, intensify, and validate the substance of her argument. It performatively authenticates her way of thinking and, as rhetoric, works to persuade others of the sincerity and “rightness” of her point of view. The line that opens Lovelace’s letter, following this one of Clarissa’s, demonstrates in startling contrast the lack of meaningful communicative function behind his self-consciously stylized prose. The jarring introduction of high diction (“In vain dost thou and thy compeers press me to go to town”) immediately marks his narration as a mode of discourse amused by

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the incongruity of its own style, rather than a system of rhetoric making conscious use of sentence structure to affect meaning (210). The “editor’s” footnote to this opening, moreover, adds a sinister cast. It explains that Lovelace and Belford have agreed that any “freedoms” could be taken in the subjects discussed between them, no matter how depraved those subjects might be, as long as they are represented in the “Roman” style. This footnote in itself provides a satiric commentary on eighteenth-century hierarchical theories of poetic diction, much in the same spirit as the poems of Swift and Pope (“A Description of a City Shower,” for example, or “The Rape of the Lock”), which demonstrate the comic inconsistency between high diction and ordinary experience, but it also explicitly identifies Lovelace’s exaggerated literary diction as corrupt, a device for legitimizing debased thoughts and actions by draping them in a transparently poetical style. In this way, Lovelace’s stylistic rendering of the language of established genres becomes complicit in his role as villain in the melodrama he is creating. As a parody of the language of sentimentalized villainy, his self-consciously stylized use of language denotes an ethical degeneration of narrative discourse that infiltrates his letters and undermines the spirit of parodic fun that would otherwise characterize his narrational text. Worked into the textual dialogic of the novel is, then, an epistemological duality which is also generic, and gendered, in scope. In contrast to Lovelace’s antiethical posturings, Clarissa’s discourse is built out of a rhetoric of credible ethics, a distinction which, I believe, also aligns her narrative with novel as genre and which further grants her letters authority over the larger narrational text. The legitimacy of this authority depends, however, upon our differentiating between “ethical” and “moral” discourse, both of which establish competing claims for privilege in the book. Adam Zachary Newton, who has done important theoretical work in this area, points out that unlike “moral” discourse, which defines itself as deontological and fixed, “ethical” discourse is self-exploratory, inherently dialogical, and vitally attached to experience.31 For the postmodern reader, Clarissa’s moral commentary—her endorsement of parental authority in the face of abuse and her allegorical monologues at the end of the novel on the religious significance of her own death—is probably not authoritative in the novel, if in fact it ever was. It represents instead an objectified language system, fixed and self-consciously alien to the experience depicted by the text. As such, it also subjects itself, in the same way that Moll Flanders’s moral discourse does, to our deconstructive scrutiny. By contrast, the discourse of ethics rhetorically represented in Clarissa’s evalua-


tions of her own and others’ behavior—in the narrative of her own text and as her discourse infiltrates Lovelace’s narrative in his renditions of her speech—is epistemologically sound. As opposed to the codified systems of “authority” claimed by Lovelace, the Harlowes, and even Clarissa in the end, it is shaped by the experience it speaks to; and it is thereby sanctioned by the novel that produces that experience, regardless of who is reading the book. The privileging of ethics, as distinct from imposed morality, is also arguably the defining epistemological language system for the novel genre. Certainly it separates the early novel from other pre-twentiethcentury genres of literary prose. In this sense, the rhetoric of ethics that characterizes Clarissa’s letters early in the novel further reflects the generic distinctions also represented by her narrative. Newton says that unlike “moral” codes, which stand on their own monologic authority, ethical discourse is inherently dialogical, opposing itself, explicitly or implicitly, to other kinds of discourse.32 In other words, for speech to be deemed linguistically “ethical,” it must position itself against discourse that is transparently not ethical, including the discursive imposition of moral absolutes for the purposes of effecting personal gain. Part of Richardson’s strategy in authenticating Clarissa’s perspective in the first movement of the novel is to inscribe autonomous and contrary arguments into the text of her narration. By including the actual letters from her relatives in Clarissa’s letters to Anna, Richardson foregrounds, dialogically, the rightness of her ethical position in resisting the decision to have her marry Solmes—in explicit conjunction with arguments for the family’s rights to insist upon it morally. Many of the embedded texts are as rhetorically persuasive as Clarissa’s own. Their logic is predicated, however, on a codified moral assumption that the adult woman owes absolute obedience to parental authority. This authority, the letters make clear, exists only by virtue of patriarchal convention and is exercised by those in a position to wield it as a way of achieving their own personal goals of money and prestige. In her exchanges with her brother, James, Clarissa identifies the motivation and openly challenges his right to assert the principle of filial duty in order to subordinate her will to his. She does not contest the principle or the materialism connected to it but argues only against his dictating to her on the grounds of parental authority when, in fact, he is not in a position to claim that privilege. All the charges she levels against James could, however, as easily be made against the patriarchal principle of parental authority itself. The pettiness of their exchanges (“You will do this;” “You can’t make me”) reflects the nature of parental patriarchy and the level of

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discourse that its authority engenders. Moreover, the intertextual juxtaposition of Clarissa’s narrative with James’s reveals in a very direct way the unethical nature of his patriarchal discourse as an institutionalized language system. James’s writings to Clarissa are exaggeratedly dictatorial and mean-spirited, and being an “equal,” Clarissa can address his bullying in overtly ethical terms: “If I do not find a brother in you, you shall have a sister in me.” By asserting a right of authority to which he is not entitled, James thereby provides Clarissa with an alternative argument, one which allows her to attack the patriarchal foundations of parental privilege without attacking the principle itself. With her elders, Clarissa is forced to navigate the field more carefully. She accepts as absolute the premise of parental authority and conceives of no alternative “right,” as she does with her brother, which might undermine that premise and challenge the imposition of the patriarchal moral system that is setting the terms for discourse.33 Anna Howe, a surrogate for the real reader, expresses her disgust at Clarissa’s relatives for their behavior and overtly contests the codes that allow for parental tyranny. Yet Clarissa herself remains so committed to a line of rhetoric that admits the validity of these codes that she chides Anna for responding with the very indignation that her letters, and those she embeds in her narrative, implicitly call for. Because she assumes the legitimacy of her “parents” (father and uncles) to claim authority over her, she must convince them through a logic unrelated to that authority to accept her decision not to marry Solmes, and she must do so in rhetorical terms that do not challenge their right of privilege. Ironically, it is these rhetorical maneuvers which grant Clarissa’s discourse ethical authority over the letters embedded in her text. Her offers to relinquish her inheritance entirely to her father and to live the single life are eloquent in their “reasonableness.” What makes these alternatives “ethical” is that they are rhetorically constructed in such a way as to assert her rights to dignity and self-determination without disparaging her family’s claims to her allegiance. Placed in contrast to this discourse, the embedded letters are discursively unethical because the absolute “moral” codes they assert are employed openly and unapologetically for the sake of garnering money and social position. This flagrant valuative contradiction in terms ironically pits morals against ethics in a single rhetorical formation, versions of which infiltrate their arguments. Moreover, because these “other” arguments are included in Clarissa’s letters to Anna, they assert authority over Clarissa within her contesting narrative, and in that way are narratively


subordinate to hers. Whatever concessions she might make to her father’s authority, Clarissa is clearly making rhetorical use of her family’s letters to privilege her position in the dispute, and Richardson collaborates in this strategy by making Clarissa’s arguments, in contrast to those embedded in her text, sound “right.” Despite the power that her male relatives have over her life in the fiction, in the larger narrational text Clarissa’s voice is authoritative over theirs. The issues elicited by Clarissa’s intertextual narrative, including the commodification of family relations and the manipulation of moral precepts for economic gain, thereby acknowledge a historical context for the novel, even if the letters themselves do not. In particular, the redistribution of wealth and power occurring with England’s economic transformation in the eighteenth century clearly changed the nature of relationships between men and women, and this dynamic is illustrated and thoroughly discussed in the exchanges between Clarissa and Anna. Both Clarissa and her mother inherited independent fortunes and are in large part responsible for the family’s social and economic status. Both not only relinquish their economic independence to Mr. Harlowe but also accept the legitimacy of the discourse of subjectivity that compels them, without reason, to do so. Clarissa’s right to reclaim the money she turned over to her father’s management is the pervasive underlying issue of the dialogue between Clarissa and Anna in the early letters. This, in turn, becomes a thematic trope in the novel for the reasonableness of women in opposing a system of collective patriarchy that is losing its base of financial power over them. Anna insists that Clarissa legally fight her father to regain management of her inheritance and thereby achieve personal and financial independence. Clarissa’s commitment to a rival code of filial duty will not permit her to go that far. Still, her own vital, analytical narration implicitly resists the imposition of moralistic platitudes that emerge from that code and infiltrate her writing (“I had rather, a vast deal, to have reason to think others unkind, than that they should have any to think me undutiful”). This creates an intertextual dialogic within Clarissa’s own narrative that implicitly privileges her independent discourse. This dialogic also contests the validity of imposed paternalistic language systems and the outmoded principles of patriarchy they function to preserve. Clarissa does give voice to the injustice of her mother’s unquestioned obedience to her father and overtly questions the logic of his authority over her given her contribution to his financial status. On this subject, she is able rhetorically to foreground the contradictory values complicit in

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assumptions of paternalistic authority over women (which is in fact “parental” in nature) without the discourse of parental rights coming into play: What at present most concerns me is the peace of my mama’s mind! How can the husband of such a wife (a good man too—But oh! This prerogative of manhood!) be so posi-tive, so unpersuade-able, to one who has brought into the family, which they know so well the value of that methinks they should value her the more for their sake! They do indeed value her; but I am sorry to say, she has purchased that value by her compliances; yet has merit for which she ought to be venerated, prudence which ought of itself to be trusted and conformed to in everything. (1:89–90) When she transfers the focus of her narration from herself to her mother, Clarissa effectively displaces and intellectualizes the subject of women’s economic and ethical rights. She makes the discussion thematic instead of personal, enabling her narrative to represent itself rhetorically as “novelistic” rather than introverted in scope. Because Clarissa and Anna are educated, articulate women, intellectually curious about the subjects they are discussing, their discourse is almost always inherently and explicitly thematic in this way. Social and cultural contexts are thereby an integral part of the discursive identity of the “Clarissa” section of the larger narrative text. The contexts for Lovelace’s narrative, on the other hand, consist entirely of his own self-invented fictions, deliberately positioned against what is “real” outside his text. As versions of nonrealistic literary genres, such as adventure tales and romance, Lovelace’s plots elicit themes that are insulated from materialist issues, attaching themselves instead to clichés of romantic deceit and abuse of power in matters of love. In Lovelace’s section of the novel, Clarissa’s narrative analysis of larger, implicitly social ideas is transformed into ethical statements against Lovelace’s personal behavior—“You know not the value of the heart you have insulted! Nor can you conceive how much my soul despises your meanness”—recorded by Lovelace in the form of an oppositional dialogue to his own self-serving lies. Although Clarissa’s discourse retains its ethical authority in Lovelace’s narrative, its impact is drastically reduced to the level of performance in someone else’s fiction, which has no outside social context. Her letters to Anna throughout this section of the novel largely account for events already narrated by Lovelace, events that the reader knows were plotted by him. Her analyses of those events and of her relationship with Lovelace,


even though ethically privileged, lose some force when the reader is aware, as Clarissa is not, of the contrived nature of the “reality” she is referencing. As Terry Castle suggests, Clarissa’s obsessive need to understand, objectify, and create meaning out of her personal experience makes her particularly susceptible to complete immersion in Lovelace’s dubious scripts. “Her will to ‘make sense,’” Castle notes, “leads her further into trouble: she is everywhere poignantly susceptible to those various deceitful texts— both literal and figurative—‘written’ and presented to her by Lovelace, ‘the author of her suffering.’”34 Flagrantly antimoralistic, the “Rake’s Creed” nevertheless provides Lovelace a fixed code to justify his manipulation of Clarissa in much the same way as established moral dicta allowed the Harlowes to legitimize their abusive control of her.35 Both systems are tied to class, the Harlowes’ to middle-class materialism and Lovelace’s to an insulated aristocracy and outmoded literary tradition. Both are represented in the novel as systems of institutionalized discourse employed by men to assert and validate their power over women.36 Clarissa’s verbal resistance to Lovelace’s machinations (“I am above you man”) textually creates, as it does in exchanges with her brother, a clear dialectic of ethical versus unethical codes, but this very symmetry traps her dualistically in a mode of discourse that does not provide the language for escape. In framing her dialogues with Lovelace, Clarissa essentially adopts the generic vocabulary of his fiction and limits the scope of her arguments to issues connected with his “literary” villainy, even providing him on occasion with the language he can later use to oppress her. In the end, it is Clarissa’s willingness to be authored by Lovelace’s sentimental text that causes her, despite her own intellectual convictions, to accept the role as “fallen woman” after the rape and to commit self-sacrificial suicide (morbidly in keeping with the script) as a result.37 The rape of Clarissa costs both her and Lovelace their positions as independent narrative agents for the novel. Although he continues to correspond with Belford as before, Lovelace relinquishes the primary role of narrator to Belford, who has also taken control of Clarissa’s story. Lovelace’s own writing loses much of its sophistication and parodic play after the rape and becomes a starkly villainous and crazed response to the events described by Belford. As a result, Lovelace no longer represents an important dialogical position within the larger narrative but is reduced to the role of villain in a sentimental melodrama that is now beyond his invention. The full impact of the rape on Clarissa’s narration is, in turn, dramatized performatively in her first letter to Anna afterwards. This text is filled with what appears to be a series of disheveled false starts to other letters—

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to Lovelace, Arabella, and several admonishing ones to herself—reflecting the confusion of her own disheveled mind and portraying an inability, as a result of that confusion, to narrate in her usual analytic way (“The world has killed my head”).38 This hodgepodge of rejected passages can also be seen as an imitation of the narrative code she has inherited from Lovelace gone completely mad. It consists of a collection of jumbled literary imitations, posed in various identifiably generic styles—including allegory, prosaic narrative, and lyric poetry scattered in verses in various directions all over the page—which represent themselves as parody out of narrative control. Ironically, Lovelace, who has always depended on such stylistic play with high literatures to relate his amorous plotting, also does not have the language to narrate the rape and instead relies on simple prose to convey the seriousness of what he has done: “The affair is over. Clarissa lives.” The inability of both Clarissa and Lovelace to find a style of discourse to describe the rape is what leads them eventually to abandon their previous narrative roles. Both narratives are turned over to Belford, who personally transforms Clarissa into a conventional novel of sentiment, in which rape is always portrayed euphemistically and interpreted as moral cliché. Belford adopts the same “male” sentimentalist narrative discourse as Lovelace, but without the playfulness, the irony, or the deliberate parody that characterized and, for metafictional purposes, validated Lovelace’s narrational text. He also imposes a conventional moralistic discourse on Clarissa’s experience that undermines her “novelistic” narrative. When he steps in as surrogate for Clarissa, Belford claims her narrative authority for the novel. His reporting of Clarissa’s carefully scripted and protracted suicide thereby officially transforms the novel into a classic tearjerker and Clarissa’s “narration” into a male-authored text. Clarissa has shown herself more than capable of authoring herself as the sentimental heroine. Early in the novel, she often re-creates for Anna scenes of melodrama with her parents in that literary genre: “Oh my papa!—my dear papa, said I, falling upon my knees at the door—admit your child to your presence!—Let me but plead my cause at your feet!—Oh reprobate not thus your distressed daughter!” But these representations are flatly contradicted by her intelligence and skill as a narrator who is obviously using sentimentalized self-scripting as a rhetorical device for the purposes of a larger argument. As the final word for the novel, Richardson allows a male narrator to “write” Clarissa and, in effect, to “authorize” her transformation from independent narrator into the heroine of a sentimental morality tale.39


Clarissa’s narrative impulse after the rape is to write to Lovelace’s family to find out what really happened after her abduction, to deconstruct the plots made against her, and to tell the truth of her story to his relatives. When she personally exposes Lovelace’s fiction to a larger social context, Clarissa momentarily claims authority over his discourse and deromanticizes his sentimentalized text. Working against this achievement as a possible endpoint for the fiction is Richardson’s “male” determination to impose a more conventional style of closure on the novel. In the absence of a woman’s narrative voice, the interaction of Belford’s sentimental reporting with Lovelace’s villainous response creates a very fixed and predictable dialectic point of moral closure, one that is symbolic and entirely “male.”40 Juxtaposed to this ending is the narrative movement that begins the novel, which sets up a dialectical structure to counter the linear progression imposed by Richardson’s sentimentality at the end. The gendered dialogic implicit in this binary structure privileges woman’s discourse and, simultaneously, the novelistic discourse that the early narrative represents. In contrast to the monologic correspondence of Lovelace and Belford, the opening movement of the novel consists of a written dialogue between two women, who, in the absence of male correspondents, converse freely and openly across a wide variety of discursive ideas. Like Defoe in Moll Flanders, Richardson demonstrates through this sequence that talk is the province of women and that dialogue is the major threat to monologic systems of patriarchy. This principle pervades the narrative in the first two volumes of the novel, which describe Clarissa’s confrontations with patriarchal privilege. Clarissa’s narrative portrays her mother and even her sister as entirely willing to talk, and she devotes a great deal of space in her letters to recording the reasoning processes of their direct dialogues. By contrast, she paints her father and brother as characteristically inarticulate. They issue orders and refuse to engage in the discussions that Clarissa craves because, in their own words, even the exercise of discourse on the part of the woman undermines the show of absolute authority that is their only basis for controlling her. Moreover, unlike Belford, whose correspondence is mostly absent from Lovelace’s narrative, Anna’s letters form a vital part of Clarissa’s “woman’s” text. The discursive intimacy and likethinking between the two women results in a narration that is dynamic, reliably analytical, and authentic. Intertextually, the relationship of Anna and Clarissa serves to define what is and is not “woman’s” discourse for the novel. Because she speaks openly against patriarchal tyranny, Anna represents herself discursively as “feminist” in a political sense that Clarissa is not; and since Clarissa’s let-

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ters represent the primary narrational discourse of this first section of the novel, Richardson suggests that “woman’s” narration is not a system of discourse that is female in an essentialist way.41 Together, Clarissa and Anna represent “woman’s” narration as fundamentally dialogical, interacting with other narrative voices and juxtaposed against other narrative texts.42 It is realistically complex, credible, analytical, and socially thematic, and it promotes an epistemology that is ethical rather than traditionally moral in scope. “Woman’s” discourse in Clarissa represents the discourse of the “novel,” in both its particular and its generic sense. Although recent narrative studies of Clarissa argue that Clarissa’s lack of power as a woman in the story disempowers her narration, the opposite is actually the case. Male characters may assert control over Clarissa in the events of the fiction, but Clarissa’s “woman’s” discourse grants her authority over the larger narrative. In contrast to the “male” narrative parodies of other generic forms, the first movement of Clarissa textually demonstrates the concept that a woman’s way of thinking and writing is the most effective mode of narration for any form of discourse in any genre. In other words, with this reading, women both empower and are empowered by the evolution of the novel—far more than feminist hermeneutic readings of the early canon have allowed.

Toward a Woman’s Discourse of Dialogue in Jane Eyre · 77

3

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Finding a Voice Toward a Woman’s Discourse of Dialogue in Jane Eyre

Although the popularity of Jane Eyre as a subject for feminist criticism has in large part been due to its employment of a female first-person narrator, very little critical attention has been paid to the dynamics of its “woman’s” narration. An early exception is Janet Freeman’s “Speech and Silence in Jane Eyre,” which traces the movement of the narrative entirely in terms of Jane’s personal struggle for a strong, independent, dominant, “social” mode of utterance. Freeman sees the novel ending at the point where Jane achieves such verbal authority over the world of the fiction that she is now in position effectively to narrate the book: “With the gift of speech, Jane is also given her story, for as she comes to understand the power of human utterance to represent human reality, so she is enabled to tell her life, to say to us, in effect, listen to my word, Reader—for the truth is in them.”1 The assertion that Jane’s personal evolution is primarily verbal is crucial to an understanding of narrative patterns in this novel, and it points to important thematic possibilities that might otherwise go unrecognized. However, because Freeman adopts Gérard Genette’s axiom on narrative convergence, which states that the existence of the narrative voice is entirely dependent on the verbal evolution of the protagonist, she closes off the novel to ideas beyond those suggested by the protagonist’s own narrated life. According to Genette’s paradigm, once the protagonist grows into her role as narrator, the novel both ends and begins; thus, the structure of the narrative itself functions to provide absolute closure by creating a fictional world that is at once entirely self-involved and intrinsically finalized.2 Critics who assume this premise in regard to Jane Eyre effectively finalize its text. They insulate the fiction and limit discussion of narrative to its role in advancing the plot and promoting thematic issues suggested by the plot. They also unwittingly preserve the symbolic structures of traditional narratology, which, like symbolic structures in literature, tend to be closed and fixed.3

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Recent interest in female subjectivity has focused more attention on gendered issues of narrative and has led to some important feminist narratological studies of Jane Eyre that implicitly complicate the rigidity of Genette’s paradigm. The first critic to introduce feminist narratology to the study of Jane Eyre was Rosemarie Bodenheimer.4 Like Freeman, Bodenheimer traces the progress of Jane’s speech out of a voice of passion and into a social voice that can effectively narrate; however, she also argues that the narration itself simultaneously contests the reliability of this progress by creating a gap between Jane’s self-restrained narrative commentary and the passionate “truth” that the reader sees dramatized in the events themselves. In addition, she looks at the various literary genres incorporated into the novel and discusses how they work to destabilize the narrative.5 In Fictions of Authority, Susan Lanser traces the origins of Jane Eyre back to an identifiably “female” genre, the “governess tale.” Lanser points out that unlike the conventional governess tale, in which the narrator’s authority is “contingent on submission to an implicit overvoice,” Jane is narrated by the fully empowered voice of a woman, engaged in a retrospective act that approves of, rather than condemns, her narrated life. This undermining of established conventions of “female” genre and the variations on the relationship of narrator to protagonist within that genre identifies Jane Eyre as a feminist novel and Lanser’s treatment of it as a feminist narratological reading.6 Robyn Warhol also deconstructs relations between embedded literary genres in Jane Eyre to produce a feminist narratological system of doubled perspectives in the “telling” modes of the narrative, Gothic and realism. She recognizes the conventional distinction between narrator and focalizor in autodiegetic narration but argues that in both Jane Eyre and Villette, Brontë deliberately sets these narrative perspectives against each other by assigning each mode to a different literary genre. Warhol does not simply acknowledge the ways that Brontë undermines the Gothic by providing realistic explanations for “supernatural” phenomena. She also demonstrates the tensions created by Jane’s narrating the story simultaneously in these two opposing genres—the young Jane focalizing a scene as Gothic and the mature narrator simultaneously framing, ordering, and evaluating in the mode of generic realism. Warhol’s reading of Jane Eyre’s narrative thereby subverts established patriarchal systems of narrative in two ways. As she notes, the self-conflicting doubling of genres built into Brontë’s narratives contests established conventions of intertextual unity that is characteristic of Victorian literature, and by analyzing Brontë’s subversive activity in terms of “textualized” double-


ness, Warhol herself undermines the rigidity of structures categorized by patriarchal narrative convention in theories such as Genette’s.7 At the same time, like virtually all narrational criticism written on Jane Eyre, feminist narratologists retain the premise that the narration is entirely provided by the character as she looks back retrospectively over her life.8 With Genette, these critics distinguish between the “narrating ‘I’” and the “narrated ‘I’” (the character narrating and the character focalizing), but do not consider issues of narrative on any level other than storytelling.9 This assumption produces what Genette calls the built-in paradox of all retrospective narrating, that while story time moves, narrative time remains static, effectively finalizing the narrative “word” of the fiction before the novel even starts: “The narrator’s present, which on almost every page we find mingled with the hero’s various pasts,” Genette mandates, “is a single movement without progression.”10 In the foreword to his Narrative Discourse Revisited, Genette briefly regrets that he did not pay more attention in his original study to distinctions between the character narrating and the text itself, admitting that a narrative consists of many levels of discourse, not simply that of the storytelling.11 What Genette still does not acknowledge—and feminist narratological criticism has also not yet systemically recognized—is how completely this oversight undermines his own principles of time and narration. Acknowledging different levels in the narration can reveal transformations in narrative time that profoundly vex those narratological structures of autodiegetic storytelling that work to self-enclose the book. In my view, the most striking characteristic of the narrative discourse in Jane Eyre is that, contrary to Genette’s autodiegetic paradigm, it does enact a progression, one entirely separate from, if parallel to, the verbal progression of the protagonist. Just as Jane, the character, struggles psychologically and rhetorically to establish her own best voice as an individual—the voice that will best communicate her thoughts and feelings and, ultimately, her life—so the narrative itself acts out textually the separate struggle of the novel as literary form to establish its own best voice as a genre. I see the best voice of both the character and the novel to be in Brontë’s view a “woman’s” voice. For the novel, this means a “woman’s” voice as Kristeva would define it, conceived in a spirit of dialogue and set in direct contrast to prevailing patriarchal modes of discourse.12 As rhetorical underargument, the narrative discourse of Jane Eyre goes through three progressive stages. These correspond roughly to progressive stages in the protagonist’s struggle to achieve her own voice but occur

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on a separate level of text. The first stage of discourse—running through Jane’s experiences at Gateshead and Lowood—acts out, independently of the story, a parodic rebellion against established forms of discourse in the conventional, essentially “male” novel: the narrative of the Gateshead section parodies the style of the sentimental novel, assumed by male authors to be a “woman’s” discourse and used by them to attract a largely female audience, while the narrative in the transition from Lowood to Thornfield parodies the style of the classical novel in the more directly patriarchal tradition of Fielding and Thackeray. The second stage of discourse—beginning with Jane’s inner acknowledgment of love for Rochester and running through her flight from Thornfield—dramatizes a narrative for the novel form that is straightforward, honest, discursive (what Freeman and Bodenheimer see developing at the end of the story when Jane evolves into her role as narrator), a voice of passion translated by intellect, a “woman’s” voice, which, Brontë suggests, is itself an improvement over earlier forms but is not in itself the best voice for the genre. The third and final stage of discourse—starting with Jane’s stay at Morehouse and running through to the end of the book—intrinsically suggests a new voice for the novel: This is still a woman’s voice but one engaged in a dialogue—a genuine, mutually controlled interplay of feelings and ideas between novel and reader. This final stage of the narrative progression corresponds to the final stage of Jane’s verbal progression as a character, which in my view culminates when she achieves a state of ongoing undissembled dialogue with Rochester (not as other critics would have it, when she achieves verbal mastery over him). Character and narration do converge at the end of the novel but from separate strands and without integration. By this model, the evolution of the narrative does not depend on the state of Jane’s personal psychological and verbal development but instead grows into a voice capable of dialogical confrontations with other narrative voices. Since this is the state where the evolution of the narrative line both ends and begins, it does in its own way duplicate the basic structure Genette conceives for the autodiegetic novel, but it also opens up the book in ways that his particular paradigm does not allow. Because the development of the textual narrative is toward a state of ongoing dialogue, the narrative structure of Jane Eyre does not work to self-enclose the novel by building its beginnings into some final utterance; instead, the voice of the narration ends as argument and pure potential, and Jane’s personal struggle to find her own voice—thematically, structurally, and narratively the core of the novel—opens up to contexts beyond the microcosm of the fiction.


Bakhtin argues that narrative discourse in a novel often associates itself textually in specific places with the voices of specific characters, each representing a different kind of generic language performed in what he calls a “character zone.” As textual elements of the narrative, these zones of discourse operate independently of the fiction in a larger context by enacting the ways in which a novel’s dominant “language system” interacts dialogically with the language systems of other novels or other speech or artistic genres.13 In Jane Eyre, the character zones of narrative discourse are aligned with the different stages in Jane’s personal struggle to find her own speaking voice, and these stages, structured both spatially and temporally in the novel, associate themselves textually with geographical sites in the work. My procedure will be to trace the gradations of the plot that occur with each change in location and discuss how the transformation of Jane’s private voice at each place is repeated as a metafictional underargument in discourse parallel to but separate from her growth in the story. Built into the discourse of the first stage of the narrative progression of Jane Eyre are clear instances of literary parody, where Brontë, by momentarily adopting different forms of alien language and established narrative techniques, carries on, without direct intrusion, a dialogical argument about the impropriety of conventional styles of narrative for the work she is currently producing. A letter to her publishers in 1848 indicates that Brontë felt very strongly that established conventions for the novel were inconsistent with her own view of “Truth” and human life and that “having something of my own to say” involved to a large extent consciously rebelling against established forms of language and style: The standard heroes and heroines of novels are personages in whom I could never from childhood upwards take an interest, believe to be natural, or wish to imitate. Were I obliged to copy these characters I would simply not write at all. Were I obliged to copy any former novelist, even the greatest, even Scott, in anything, I would not write. Unless I have something of my own to say, and a way of my own to say it in, I have no business to publish. Unless I can look beyond the greatest Masters, and study Nature herself, I have no right to paint. Unless I can have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent.14 Literary historians as diverse as Bakhtin, Harry Levin, and Linda Hutcheon all point out that the dialogical parodying of established literary

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genres has been part of the novelistic tradition, going back to Cervantes, as a way of rejecting established principles of narrative and, in conjunction, introducing new forms of structure and discourse. By the nineteenth century, the realistic novel had become conventional enough, Bakhtin suggests, to be the primary object of parody for novelists entering the field and wanting to redefine the genre. He writes, for example, of Brontë’s immediate predecessors: Literary parody understood in the narrow sense plays a fundamental role in the way language is structured in Fielding, Smollett and Sterne (the Richardsonian novel is parodied by the first two, and almost all contemporary novel-types are parodied by Sterne). Literary parody serves to distance the author still further from language, to complicate still further his relationship to the literary language of his time, especially in the novel’s own territory. The novelistic discourse dominating a given epoch is itself turned into an object and itself becomes a means for refracting new authorial intentions.15 When, in Jane Eyre, Brontë parodies conventional forms of narrative as a way of discrediting them, she is acting on recent and established tradition in the novel. By working parody into the early sections of the narrative only, she also tropes her private efforts to write her “own” novel by having her narration reject old forms in favor of a new voice that emerges in later stages of the narrative text. The first target of parody played out textually in the narrative discourse and simultaneously enacted in the fiction is the conventional, bathetic sentimental novel.16 Jane Eyre begins when it does, apparently, because its opening episode constitutes the first time young Jane speaks out against her oppressors, precipitating the first major events of her life of which she is conscious. Lashing out at John Reed causes her to be locked up in the red-room, and telling Mrs. Reed how unjustly she has been treated and, moreover, threatening to tell others about her harsh treatment lead to expulsion to the Lowood school. Jane’s speech in this early section, while crucial to her verbal development, is rudimentary and ineffectual because her voice is thoroughly governed by passion and geared toward venting emotion rather than communicating it and persuading others to believe it. The same might be said for the quality of language and style of much of the discourse of the first narrational phase of the novel. In this phase, Brontë often incorporates a form of rhetorical exaggeration into the texture of the narrative discourse and dialogue and, in so doing, makes an implicit statement about the limitations of all literary discourse that is designed primar-


ily to dramatize and elicit emotion. As Jane announces to Mrs. Reed how she will tell her tale in the future, her words are undermined by a powerful yet comic strain of melodrama, similar to that which might be found in conventional works of sentimental fiction: “You think that I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back—roughly and violently thrust me back—into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony: though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, ‘Have mercy! Have mercy aunt Reed!’ And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me— knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad; hard-hearted. You are deceitful!”17 This same quality of diction is worked into the early narrative discourse, to similar effect, in some of the adult Jane’s commentary. Concluding the experience in the red-room, for example, is the interjection: “Yes, Mrs. Reed, to you I owe some fearful pangs of mental suffering. But I ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did: while rending my heartstrings, you thought you were only uprooting my bad propensities” (19). The awkward mixing of melodrama, biblical paraphrasing, and pedantic psycho-jargon (“uprooting my bad propensities”) is transparently bad writing, and it suggests more than anything else Brontë’s play on the kind of language stereotypical of the conventional novel of sensibility. In direct contrast to the exaggerated passion that distinguishes the discourse in the Gateshead section of the novel, the linguistic emphasis in the Lowood and early Thornfield episodes is on discourse as an instrument of self-conscious restraint of passion. Many critics see this turnabout in speaking style as an entirely positive development for Jane’s character, arguing that the most important step in her evolution into narrator occurs at Lowood when, under the instruction of Miss Temple and Helen Burns, she suddenly realizes, as she herself puts it, that speech “restrained and simplified” sounds “more credible” (83). This stage of her speaking life, Bodenheimer claims, “marks the socialization of Jane’s narrative style; the moment when she realizes the power of conscious control over sequence, diction, and tone.”18 It seems to me, however, that Jane is always at her most eloquent when she cares the least about how she is speaking—in her first declarations of love to Rochester, her inner speech in deciding to leave Rochester, her arguments with St. John Rivers—and at her most

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uncommunicative when she tends to think most about it. While Jane never adopts Helen Burns’s philosophy of quiet forbearance, for example, her early dialogues with Rochester do suggest that she was impressed with how effectively commonsense phrasing and biblical axioms protected Helen from the force of uncomfortable feelings and put a stop to Jane’s own attempts at impassioned debate. The relationship between Jane and Rochester is forged in speech, and it is primarily Jane’s new restrained style of speaking that allows her parity with, and even superiority to, Rochester in their exchanges. The real dynamics of the dialogue, though, consist of Rochester struggling, by tricks of speech, to get Jane to agree to a course of action she would never knowingly take and of Jane resisting by adopting Helen-like proverbs, which carry built-in unassailable respectability and which protect her from conversations she admits are “out of my depth” (168).19 The result is that while Jane and Rochester exchange words and even subliminal feelings, there is little real communication going on, and the consequences for both are severe. Although the self-imposition of verbal restraint might seem a logical antidote to the earlier melodrama, the adoption of this style is no final remedy for Jane. Along the same lines, the object of parody in the discourse of the narrative undergoes a generic shift in this second sequence, from the novel of sensibility to the more respectable “great” novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where, in reaction to the melodramatic discourse of the sentimental novel, credibility is achieved through the adoption of formal conventions of narrative restraint. Coinciding with her character’s decision to leave Lowood, Jane, the narrator, openly assumes her responsibilities as “author” of the text. Brontë uses this occasion to parody the intrusion of direct “authorial” commentary into the narrative discourse as a formal convention and characterizing feature of the classical novel. The effect of such narrative intrusions, she demonstrates, is to restrain the reader by discouraging full involvement in the fiction of the tale. Chapter 10 begins, in the tradition of Fielding and Thackeray, with a formal authorial explanation of the structural design of the book: Hitherto I have recorded in detail the events of my insignificant existence: to the first ten years of my life I have given almost as many chapters. But this is not to be a regular autobiography: I am bound only to invoke memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest; therefore I now pass a space of eight years almost in silence: a few lines only are necessary to keep up the links of connection. (98)


The opening of book 2 of Tom Jones, in fact, contains a remarkably similar passage. Distinguishing his strategy from the “newspaper” style of other “histories,” the narrator says: “Now it is our purpose, in the ensuing pages, to pursue a contrary method. When any extraordinary scene represents itself (as we trust will be the case), we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our readers; but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy of his notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history, but shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of time totally unobserved.”20 Although Jane is always self-consciously aware of her own authority as narrator, at no other point in the novel does this authority articulate itself overtly, in the Fieldingesque way, as the power to predetermine the significance (or insignificance) of events to her text. Brontë’s parodic opening to chapter 10 is actually multitargeted. It mimics the disruptive intrusion of the implied author and the apparent assumption, popular in early novels, that an understanding of a novel’s structural components is crucial to a reader’s appreciation of the work. Its parody also dialogically exposes and thereby takes issue with the traditional idea that event should be the organizing principle of a novel at all. This point of dissension becomes emphatic over the course of the narrative as the focus on Jane’s feelings and interpretations as well as the use of interior and exterior dialogue take precedence over the portrayal of external dramatic action. The practice of opening chapters with parodies of other narrative styles is, in fact, a common stylistic device in the early novel. Fielding opens an early chapter of Tom Jones by parodying, with a nonsensical description of Sophia in exaggerated pastoral diction, the “ornamental” language of “those idle romances” he had criticized more directly in the chapter immediately before.21 Thackeray, to whom Jane Eyre is dedicated, does the same sort of thing in “The Night Attack” opening to chapter 6 in Vanity Fair, “trying out” and rejecting first a melodramatic approach and then a “genteel rose-water” approach to an episode.22 By adopting the specific satiric technique of the kind of novel she herself is parodying in the text, Brontë further emphasizes her own dialogical intentions for Jane Eyre. Chapter 11 opens similarly to chapter 10 but with a long paragraph of description and authorial instructions on how we should read it: A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play: and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the “George Inn” at Millcote, with such large figured

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papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints; including a portrait of George the Third, and another of the Prince of Wales, and a representation of the death of Wolfe. All this is visible to you by the light of the oil-lamp hanging from the ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my cloak and bonnet; my muff and umbrella lie on the table, and I am warming away the numbness and chill contracted by sixteen hours’ exposure to the rawness of an October day; I left Lowton at four o’clock a.m., and the Millcote clock is now just striking eight. (112) Genette says that two distinct functional modes of physical description evolved by the end of the nineteenth century. One mode, characterizing works in the “classical” literary tradition (this would include the novels of Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and a great deal of Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, and Eliot), is functionally decorative—“a recreational pause in the narrative, carrying out a purely esthetic role, like that of sculpture in a classical building”23—and it is this kind of style that Brontë parodies in this passage. The parody is emphasized by Jane’s reference to her autobiography as a “novel” and by the fact that the physical scene she insists we “must fancy” is left deliberately, comically, vague. The point is, of course, that there is no reason in the world why we should visualize this room. While its very ordinariness might have been used to underscore Jane’s feelings of alienation, Jane as narrator obviously does not recognize that possibility, and the inn itself, unlike other places in the story, has no importance of its own. The second function of description, according to Genette, is “both explanatory and symbolic.” In this mode, description becomes a vital part of the exposition of the discourse, which it was not in the classical style, so that the narrative element is itself emphasized. This is clearly the level on which description evolves throughout the rest of Jane Eyre. There is probably no other instance of purely decorative description in the entire book, and certainly none deliberately pointed out as such by conventional “authorial” interruption. Instead, the symbolic function of all description becomes progressively more pronounced, along with the sophistication and identifying personality of the narrative voice. Parody, according to Gilbert and Gubar, was not only used by early novelists to ridicule outmoded generic conventions; it was also one of the primary subversive tactics of nineteenth-century women writers against prevailing male representations of women in literature.24 With this in mind, I would say that Brontë’s parodies in the early chapters of Jane Eyre are not aimed


so much at established narrative conventions in general as they are at the established patriarchal attitudes that underlie those conventions and determine what was acceptable for narration in the novel. Brontë’s imitations of the novel of sensibility in the Gateshead chapters implicitly challenge the phallogocentric assumption that unrestrained sentimentality is inherently a woman’s discourse and the only sort of writing a largely female audience wants to read. The parody at the end of the Lowood section then demonstrates, and her letters confirm, that she also believed the novel had erroneously achieved its credibility as a genre by adopting conventions of narration with strong, stereotypically “masculine” traits. These traits included well-polished diction, restraint of feeling, an emphasis on action, physical detail, and external event, and a strong, seemingly objective, often directly interposing “authorial” narrative command—in other words, traits producing a voice that spoke “like a man.” In satirizing this voice in the Lowood-to-Thornfield episodes, Brontë was obviously not attacking the male novelist per se but was exposing dialogically the limitations of a dominant mode of discourse that had become a standard for determining good narration. Traditionally, the “great” novels, by both men and women, implicitly disdained discursive expressions of feeling in narration and in fact achieved credibility by building formal restraints against passion into its narrative voice. Brontë considered this particular formal convention distinctly antifeminist. Her criticism of Jane Austen, for example, was directly based on what she saw as a characteristically high-handed rejection of passion (“that stormy Sisterhood”) in favor of established patriarchal conventions of narrative distancing and an emphasis on physical over emotional detail. “Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet,” Brontë writes of Austen in a well-known letter to W. S. Williams. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores; she no more, with her mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man, with bodily vision, sees the heart in his heaving breast. Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman, if this be heresy—I cannot help it. If I said it to some people (Lewes for instance) they would accuse me of advocating exaggerated heroics, but I am not afraid of your falling into such vulgar error.25

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Brontë feels compelled to defend herself at the end of this passage from accusations that she might be advocating a return to “exaggerated heroics” as a female alternative to Austen’s restrained, masculine style. Her argument is not with male writers (or male-influenced writers) but with the patrilinear conventions, classic and sentimental, that women writers had inherited. Kristeva argues that a “woman’s” voice in narration is not determined by the sex of its author or narrator, nor can it be defined discursively by an alternative “female” language system. However, once a writer of either sex challenges standard phallogocentric conventions of discourse, he or she creates a “woman’s” voice, identifiable not by its substance but by its difference.26 The “woman’s” voice in the narrative of Jane Eyre emerges in the second phase in direct opposition to both the sentimental and the “restrained” classical styles of discourse that are parodied in the first phase. This voice conscientiously resists melodrama (“exaggerated heroics”), but it also works to achieve credibility by not excluding passion from its discourse. Indeed, it demonstrates a strong willingness to convey through the narration feelings that are a natural part of the events of the story being narrated. Although it is not an essentialist female voice, it is associated with a woman’s narrative discourse; and in that sense it represents itself as feminist. To assert her own voice, both as character and as narrator, Jane must cast off the self-imposed restraints that have prevented her from realizing the full force of her feelings and, at least on one level, to recapture the passion that distinguished her voice as a child. This casting-off process is performed dramatically, and permanently, for the character and concurrently for the narrative discourse, when Jane looks at Rochester on his return to Thornfield and inwardly acknowledges for the first time, as they occur, her genuine feelings for him. The language of Jane’s acknowledgment is rendered in the form of direct inner speech, thereby signalizing a change for both character and narration. It expresses the full force of the passion felt by the character at the time and the narrator in retrospect, but it also works to contain that passion, preventing melodrama, through a strain of dispassionate analysis that accompanies but does not replace (as it would with Austen) the free expression of the feelings being narratively described: “He is not to them what he is to me,” I thought: “he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine;—I am sure he is,—I feel akin to him,— I understand the language of his countenance and movements;


though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. Did I say, a few days since, that I had nothing to do with him but to receive my salary at his hands? Did I forbid myself to think of him in any other light than as a paymaster? Blasphemy against nature! Every good, true, vigorous feeling that I have, gathers impulsively around him. I know I must conceal my sentiments; I must smother hope; I must remember that he cannot care much for me. . . . I must then repeat continually that we are for ever sundered;— and yet, while I breathe and think I must love him.” (219–20)27 The strong emphasis on both thought and feeling in the substance of this monologue and in the grammar of the speech (“brain and heart,” “while I breathe and think”) represents what is most valuable in Jane’s relationship with Rochester. It also epitomizes the immediate inner voice of her character. And inner voice becomes the primary mode of the novel’s narrative discourse in its second phase. Discourse of this kind is all but nonexistent in the first narrative phase, and in retrospect its absence is crucial to earlier parodies because it highlights the major point of difference between Brontë’s idea of effective discursive narrating and that of conventional novel forms. In the Gateshead section, where Jane’s immediate responses are purely emotional, the suggestion of simultaneous mature analysis on her part would naturally be out of place, and this works to the benefit of the author’s textual satire on sentimental fiction. As the narrator remarks, “Children can feel, but they cannot analyze their feelings” (23). Narrative commentary in the early chapters is therefore phrased as hindsight, often in the voice of the wise and chastened narrator looking back, in easy imitation of narrative commentary in the novel of sensibility. When it is functioning as parody, as in the passage cited earlier where the adult Jane proclaims her forgiveness to Mrs. Reed about the incident in the red-room, or even when it is straightforwardly universal, as in the statement about children cited above, narrative commentary in the early episodes is generally axiomatic or trite. It underscores and adds to the melodrama of the event rather than making sense of it and giving it shape. At the same time, the distance between the voice of the character (Jane as a child) and the voice of the narration (often an exaggeratedly “wise” adult observer) is especially pronounced. This occurs in direct contrast to the postparodic phase of the discourse, where the exposition of immediate thoughts and feelings of the adult protagonist reduces the distance between character and narrator and thus also lessens

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the distance between text and reader by minimizing the show of the narrative line. At the end of the Lowood section, as Jane becomes an adult and we are made privy to her immediate thinking, Brontë makes it comically clear that the restraints that the character has placed on her own verbal style in an effort to make her speech sound credible have, in effect, made her incapable of direct and honest self-analysis. This inhibition of character also lends itself to narrative parody directed at the “classical” novel form. If Jane feels called to action, she listens for an “outside” voice to tell her what to do. The first time this occurs is when she decides she must leave Lowood and looks out the window at the outside world for inspiration. The ensuing exchange between Jane’s own thinking voice and the one she hears from the “outside” is at first stirring as when feeling repulsed in her request of a new “liberty,” she exclaims, “grant me a new servitude!” (101); but this inside-outside monologue quickly evolves into the ridiculous as the issues and the uncertainties become more mundane.28 “You must inclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a cover directed to the Editor of the Herald,” Jane’s “other” voice advises her when she expresses confusion about how to look for a new job; “you must put it, the first opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed to J. E. at the post-office there: you can go and inquire in about a week after you have sent your letter, if any are come, and act accordingly” (103). While Jane may have, as some critics contend, learned from Miss Temple a new “social” discourse, this exchange demonstrates that she has also learned not to trust her own powers of articulation but to look to “other” voices for proper phrasing of what she thinks and feels. In the context of parody, Jane’s predicament at this stage effectively allegorizes for the novel form the possibility that immediate vital analysis of event in narration is impossible when passion is prohibited and discourse is determined by preexisting conventions of narrative restraint. As in the Gateshead section, the parody acted out textually in this episode, in contrast to the second phase of the narrative to come, strongly emphasizes the distance between fiction and narration; this time just when Jane is at her most repressed as a character, the narration, in satirizing that same quality in the novel form, is at its most self-consciously playful. After Jane has achieved a strong, eloquent inner voice, the final step in her progression toward her role as narrator is to learn to communicate that voice to other people, the one skill vital to effective narration. Freeman sees this step occurring at the end of the novel when, she says, Jane


achieves a level of social discourse that will enable her to tell her story with honesty, credibility, and control. This achievement, Freeman argues, transforms Jane into the narrator of her own tale and, in the process, merges fiction with narration at the end of the book.29 As both the fiction and the narration make clear, however, narrative communication in this novel is not simply the ability to tell a convincing, “true” story. Brontë deliberately calls attention to Jane’s exemplary storytelling abilities long before the end of the novel, specifically in the episode where Jane narrates to Rochester the incident of the torn veil.30 Not only is Jane’s rendition forceful, honest, and self-consciously formalized—complete with “preface” and “tale”—but Brontë has her deliver it to Rochester and the reader simultaneously. This has the effect of momentarily obliterating the distance between the narrative discourse and the fiction so that they do absolutely converge. Genette explains that this deliberate mixing of narrative levels (what he calls “narrative metalepsis”) works specifically to give the sense of “double-temporality of the story and narrating . . . as if the narrating were contemporaneous with the story.”31 By adopting this narrative mode, the scene provides momentary dramatization of what some critics assume is occurring at the end of the novel when Jane evolves into her role as narrator, and her two roles, protagonist and narrator, naturally become one. With this episode Brontë emphasizes that Jane has achieved her ability to narrate discursively before the point when her character and her voice have fully evolved. She thereby demonstrates through the fiction and the narration simultaneously that effective storytelling is not the end point for this novel or for the novel as a form. As the subsequent development of the story and the narration show, still missing from Jane’s discourse is the dialogue between narrator and audience that Brontë clearly considered essential to good narrating. When Jane finishes her story about the veil, Rochester deliberately misinterprets it for her, and Jane willingly, if somewhat uncomfortably, accepts his interpretation as she has accepted all his “explanations,” and the reader is left hanging. Despite its technical, emotional, and analytical proficiency, Jane’s narration in this episode has failed. For most narrative critics, the sign that Jane has reached the status of narrator at the end of the story is that she literally becomes “narrator” to Rochester in his blindness and takes control of the dynamics of their dialogue, determining what he will and will not be allowed to hear. But Jane has accomplished this kind of verbal control long before the close of the book. The dialogue between Jane and Rochester throughout the period of their engagement is, with only limited exception, contrived; and even al-

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lowing for Rochester’s concealments, Jane is clearly the one in charge of the contriving. After her spontaneous impassioned declaration of love in the garden, Jane very consciously reinstitutes her strategy of self-protective banter with Rochester—“like Sheherazade,” Freeman says, “to keep herself safe” from his ardor32—and this style of speech, no less for being deliberate, continues to prevent important communication between them. Because we are privy to Jane’s real thinking (her mortification, for example, at Rochester’s efforts to dress her up “like a doll” and the strong threat she feels this poses to her independence), we are encouraged to recognize a distance, even a tension, between Jane’s discourse as narrator and her dialogue as character at this point in the text. This distancing is dramatized most poignantly, this time painfully, in the final scene between Jane and Rochester after their aborted wedding. In that scene Rochester finally tells Jane the truth about his life and the events leading up to the ceremony, his motive being to arouse her sympathies and persuade her to live with him without being legally married. Jane’s response to Rochester’s confession and to his attempts to get her to stay is also articulated in the narrative in the form of impassioned logic. In conjunction with Rochester’s own enflamed rhetoric, her narrative discourse simulates the language of genuine dialogue, effectively dramatizing the kind of energy that is instilled into the narration when it is rendered in that form. The problem is that Jane’s side of the conversation, while intuitively reasoned and forcefully convincing (“I care for myself!”), is conducted entirely within her own mind; the words she actually utters to Rochester are still borrowed from Helen Burns: “One instant, Jane. Give one glance to my horrible life when you are gone. All happiness will be torn away with you. What then is left? For a wife I have but the maniac upstairs: as well might you refer me to some corpse in yonder churchyard. What shall I do, Jane? Where to turn for a companion and for some hope?” “Do as I do: trust in God and yourself. Believe in heaven. Hope to meet again there.” “Then you will not yield?” “No.” “Then you condemn me to live wretched and to die accursed?” His voice rose. “I advise you to live sinless; and I wish you to die tranquil.” “Then you snatch love and innocence from me? You fling me back on lust for a passion—vice for an occupation?”


“Mr. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp it for myself. We were born to strive and endure—you as well as I; do so. You will forget me long before I forget you.” (278–79) This passage dramatizes the marked separation between the discourse of Jane’s inner voice and the platitudes she adopts to protect herself from emotional interaction with Rochester. On the level of narrative, the dichotomy between her two voices simultaneously performs in a textualized way the insufficiency of any narration that is purely discursive and only reflective of inner dynamics, narration that does not involve the genuine interaction between narrator and audience. Only in her talks with St. John Rivers, after she has separated from Rochester and the patterns of speech they have adopted, does Jane begin instinctively and without reservation to communicate her thinking “voice” aloud. Rochester’s attempt to persuade Jane to live with him without marriage is, of course, repeated when St. John engages in his campaign to talk her into a marriage without love, but this time there is no imposed separation of narration and dialogue. Although Jane does a great deal of thinking about the proposal on her own, her private arguments are enriched and revitalized by thrashing them out with St. John and responding aloud to his immediate tactics of persuasion. While Jane’s private thinking is impressive, her arguments with St. John achieve greater energy and power and an eloquence that could not exist outside of the form of dialogue. Take, for example, this very brief exchange when Jane offers to accompany St. John in his missionary work but not as his wife: “Seek one elsewhere than in me, St. John: seek one fitted to you.” “One fitted to my purpose, you mean—fitted to my vocation. Again I tell you it is not the insignificant private individual—the mere man, with the man’s selfish senses—I wish to mate; it is the missionary.” “And I will give the missionary my energies—It is all he wants— but not myself: that would be only adding the husk and shell to the kernel. For them he has no use: I retain them.” “You cannot—you ought not. Do you think God will be satisfied with half an obligation? Will he accept a mutilated sacrifice? It is the cause of God I advocate: it is under His standard I enlist you. I cannot accept on His behalf a divided allegiance. It must be entire.” “Oh! I will give my heart to God,” I said. “You do not want it.” (518–19)

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In contrast to her interaction with Rochester, where Jane depends upon cliché to disengage her from the terms of his argument, the force of her discourse in this passage is achieved primarily through its own strong and balanced response to St. John’s particular lines of dialogue and to his rhetorical mixture of fervor and calculated logic. The emotional finality of Jane’s last statement here (a statement that is not so final that she cannot imagine a rejoinder in the sudden silence of St. John) is preceded by her self-consciously rhetorical analogy of “adding husk and shell to the kernel.” It is through the discourse of dialogue, even more than through straight, discursive, narrative self-analysis, that the reader experiences the fullest and most direct understanding of the passion Jane is feeling. Concurrently, we see that passion contained and structured by the strategies of logical argument imposed by Jane’s own vital need to persuade.33 The capacity to communicate real thinking through dialogue, with all its inherent reasoning and feeling, leads to and eventually defines Jane’s ideal relationship with Rochester, a more important and receptive audience than St. John Rivers, as it develops at the end of the story and, by implication, beyond. “We talk, I believe, all day long; to talk to each other is but a more audible thinking.” Jane, as narrator, says in the present tense. “All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result” (576). Of course, to some extent we have to take Jane’s narrative word for this because in the discourse acted out between them Jane does still edit her speech, this time for Rochester’s protection, not her own. Most of the critics who evaluate Jane Eyre’s narrative argue that Jane’s taking control of the verbal interaction between herself and Rochester at the end is evidence of her final emergence into her role as narrator. Specifically they single out the moment when she decides not to tell Rochester that she heard him call out to her as the moment when character and narrative voice finally converge.34 As I have already noted, however, Jane has always been able to exert control over Rochester with her speech; this is a pattern that actually has to be overcome for real dialogue to exist between them. I therefore view the scene of their final reunion as a progressive disintegration of a mutual habit of verbal sparring and distancing, not as its final culmination in Jane’s favor. Despite Jane’s determination “to touch no deep-thrilling chord—to open no fresh well of emotion in his heart” (559), Rochester will not let her put him off with banter and word games. After her alarming failure to “cheer” Rochester by making him jealous of St. John Rivers, Jane is forced rather clumsily to blurt out the truth and openly declare, in direct dialogue with him, her genuine thoughts and feelings. This, in turn, leads


Rochester to confide his story of spiritual conversion, ending with his agonized calling out to her in the night. The fact that Jane makes “no disclosure in return” (573) to this one instance of Rochester’s confidence for fear of causing him more pain hardly establishes a pattern of secrecy for the relationship. The evolution of the entire scene is toward communication (albeit thoughtful communication) on both sides, not toward narrative concealment. We can trust Jane’s assessment as narrator that this is a marriage best characterized by open dialogue, that for these characters beyond the text, “to talk to each other is but a more audible form of thinking” (576). A mark of the transition between the second and third narrative phases of the novel—that is, between a narration that is purely discursive and one that is engaged in dialogue—occurs during the scene between Jane and Rochester just before Jane leaves Thornfield. Jane at this juncture inwardly argues against her inner voices, which advise her to give in to Rochester on the grounds that “no one in the world cares for you” (279). This means that at the very moment she is not engaging in genuine argument with Rochester, she is interacting dialogically with her own inner voices. Later, when Jane has reached the stage of reasoning aloud in dialogue, she tells St. John Rivers in answer to his proposal that she hears “no voice counseling or cheering” (355). When she finally does hear a voice, it is not her own inner voice but Rochester’s real voice across the miles that speaks to her and to which she immediately responds, including the very pragmatic question, “Where are you?” The transformation of the stages of Jane’s inner voice thereby coincides with and textually performs the narrational movement of the novel from parody, when Jane’s voices tell her how to go about looking for a job, to interior discourse to a state of ongoing dialogue. The three-stage progression is also literally realized in the narrative text by the clear evolution of Jane’s direct “authorial” appeals to the “reader,” an evolution that reflects her increasing desire to communicate rather than simply “narrate” her tale. The earliest addresses, coinciding with Jane’s arrival at Lowood, are either self-consciously stilted and superfluous (as in the wordy, almost comical first description of Miss Temple on 52–53) or overtly defensive. They call attention to themselves as authorial intrusions and thereby emphasize the distance between narrator and reader. When, in the midst of her flight from Thornfield, Jane makes her moving appeal to the reader, her discourse has such exaggerated poignancy that it appears to blend in with the general pathos of the scene: “Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never

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shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love” (411). While the emotional diction of this appeal is theatrical and distracting, the intent is to draw the reader into the story without disrupting the continuity of the tale and to rhetorically initiate and thereby perform a more “genuine” narrator-reader contact. By the end of the novel, the simple statement “Reader, I married him” (574) achieves the same end without the attendant melodrama and represents the full achievement of the progression of the narrative discourse into its own best narrative voice. This one sentence communicates the event with passion (and passion without hysteria), and it depends for its power and effectiveness not on its own discursive language but on a full understanding on the part of the reader. This is narrative discourse conceived as dialogue. The general progression of the narrator’s open interaction with her “reader” therefore serves to dramatize, in explicit form, the idea of narrating as dialogue that Brontë saw as crucial to the novel’s narrative voice. For the purpose of explicit contrast to the earlier parodies, this voice is momentarily dramatized in the narrative when Jane describes her return to Thornfield and her first view of its ruins in metaphorical rather than discursive prose. Her story, which tells of a lover stealing upon his mistress sleeping on a riverbank, lifting her veil, and discovering that she is dead, conveys the full intensity of her own feelings for Thornfield and the shock and horror of coming upon its ruins, without the inherently false-sounding emotionalism that would inevitably have resulted if she had expressed the same passions in the form of direct discourse.35 Brontë does not want to suggest that the language of a novel should always be self-consciously metaphoric. The fact that this passage is introduced with a very formal “Hear an illustration reader,” rather than being worked into the general texture of the narrative line, confirms this point. Instead, she uses the story-metaphor symbolically and dialogically to assert, in opposition to the narrative conventions parodied earlier, that the responsibility of narration in a novel goes beyond the creation of character, action, and the sequence of events, to include the forceful, nondiscursive communication of the feeling that makes up the inner life of the tale. By directly enjoining the reader to participate in the analogy, to work out the metaphor and apply it to the situation she wants to communicate and so help to conceive the narration, Jane as narrator explicitly enacts Brontë’s authorial desire for a narrative discourse that creates dialogue between reader and text.


Brontë’s final narrational and fictional emphases on dialogue in Jane Eyre argue that full communication, rather than telling, should be the vital component of the novelistic narrative act. Her earlier textual parodies of patriarchal narrative strategies in the first phase of the discourse appear in retrospect to be pointed specifically at conventions of narration conceived not to communicate but simply to tell. Indeed, telling may well be Brontë’s definition of male discourse as type. Sentimental narration, the patriarchal version of woman’s speech, wallows in the telling of its own emotion at the expense of credible fiction. Classical narration, in response, represents the reverse—a determination to hold back the expression of passion, to tell the story and offer attendant, single-voiced authorial commentary with conscious narrational restraint, thereby presumably giving credibility to the fiction and to the genre. For Brontë, in contrast, good narration is inherently a dialogue, a “woman’s” voice of passion and thoughtful analysis that opens itself up fully to rejoinder and response from other kinds of narrative voices. In Jane Eyre, the separate development of a narrative line to explore this idea, which coincides but does not absolutely converge with a similar movement in the evolution of the voice of the protagonist, creates open-ended dialogue for Jane Eyre, a dialogue self-reflectively about the voice of good narration in the novel as form. Critics who adopt Genette’s paradigm identify the goal of Jane’s verbal development as the ability to tell her own story, one that takes her back to the beginning of the story she has just written. By defining her finished discourse as social, they thereby suggest that Brontë’s idea of “social” narration, and by implication her idea of a good novel, is that which creates a credible, convincing autonomous social world within the bounds of the fiction and, coincidentally, within the structure of a self-generating narrative line. At the time Jane Eyre was written, however, social discourse had a much wider connotation. Direct narrative exposition on issues of cultural, literary, and political concern to the novelist were an integral part of the overall design, so that narration often functioned to take the novel beyond the thematic world of character and plot. While Brontë may have argued with many of the conventions of the classical novel, she would not, I think, have wanted to discredit the broadness of its narrative scope. Her own desire for narration that expands to include a discourse of passion, her abhorrence for the miniature self-enclosed worlds of Jane Austen’s novels, and the fact that Jane Eyre is dedicated to Thackeray, whose narration is often overtly political and socially conscious, confirm her appreciation of the “larger” view. As a metaphor for Brontë’s expansive vision in Jane Eyre, critics have

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often cited Jane’s “tower” monologue, a discourse distinguished by Virginia Woolf’s reference to it in A Room of One’s Own as an example of the anger that mars women’s writing.36 When Jane first visits the rooftop at Thornfield and longs for the chance to broaden her experience, Brontë uses Jane’s visual and emotional perspectives to discourse in her own voice on the general lot of women in society. In doing so, she invites comparison to the authorial interruptions of the classical novel, which she parodies only a few pages earlier. Although Brontë puts her own feminist commentary into the mouth of her fictional narrator, she does little, as Woolf complains, to disguise the fact that these are her own sentiments delivered from an authorial point of view. The narrator’s main assertion that women everywhere are forced to “confine themselves to making puddings and mending stockings, to playing the piano and embroidering bags” (96) is inconsistent with Jane’s life experience and not at all reflective of her immediate state of mind. While the views expressed by the narrator in this episode are clearly authorial, however, they are also performative; they are not presented reportorially, separately from and superior to the story, in the direct voice of some omniscient narrational “author,” as were the narrator’s earlier “authorial” directives delivered in the voice of parody. This episode indicates that the “novel” for Brontë was not a closed fictional world locked in a circle of an entirely self-referential system of narration, but a kind of open dialogue—an exchange between author, novel, and reader on important issues of mutual concern. Gilbert and Gubar claim that the subversive activity of the Victorian woman writer was characteristically “a strategy born of fear and dis-ease.” In contrast to the male author who used parody and other subversive weapons unabashedly to debunk the authority of established convention “so that he may triumph by founding a new order,” they contend, “women did not so much rebel against the prevailing aesthetic as feel guilty about their inability to conform to it.”37 Arguably, as Lanser demonstrates in her Fictions of Authority, Brontë is a popular figure in feminist criticism (including Gilbert and Gubar’s) because she blatantly contradicts this historical generalization. The autodiegetic narrative text of Jane Eyre far more closely resembles Sidonie Smith’s analysis of the woman’s autobiography, which, although written from the margins, grants woman “the discursive authority to interpret herself publicly in a patriarchal culture and androcentric genre that have written stories of woman for her, thereby fictionalizing and effectively silencing her.” By openly claiming their own narrational authority, Smith argues, women writing their own lives in their own


ways changed the rules of “autobiography.” They shifted the boundaries that marginalized women’s voices and transformed the autobiographical genre “so that there is neither margin nor center.”38 I believe that this was also Brontë’s ambition in Jane Eyre, but in a different sense. She represents “woman’s” voice as a generic voice of intellect and passion, as a textual discourse in dialogue with other textual voices. By building into her narrative text a “discussion” of this concept, Brontë proposes a new voice for the novel. This voice is represented as “woman’s,” but in a nonessentialist way; it does not privilege gender but functions to vex those distinctions between margin and center that have historically defined women’s place in literature. The story of Jane Eyre itself may well act out a woman’s personal evolution into a narrator with a “social” voice that can effectively relate the story she has just finished telling, as Genette and those who implicitly adopt his circular paradigm would have it. But through the evolution of discourse on another level of text, the narration defines a “woman’s” narrative that is far more expansive. It is a voice engaged dialogically with other narrative voices. It is a voice that ends in a state of potentiality, not in its own beginnings.

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4 ^&

Ideology, Ethics, and Voice Privileging the Woman’s Mode in Bleak House

Most narrational criticism of Bleak House presumes, explicitly or implicitly, that its dual narrative structure is a gendered construct, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that only one of the two narrators is identified by sex. A widely shared assumption is that Dickens employs a bifurcated narrational scheme in order to expose the social corruption that invades both the public (male) and the private (female) spheres. By assigning each of these areas to a narrator whose discourse is implicitly gendered, he also explores cultural expectations that attach themselves ideologically along gender lines to the “personalities” behind the voices doing the narrating. Esther’s hesitant, insecure, often contradictory and self-consciously “unknowing” narrative pose represents in style and substance the muted voice and compliant posture of women in Victorian England. In contrast, the sarcastic, often angry, and authoritative voice of the third-person narrator both reflects and performs the hegemonic position of the nineteenth-century “male” in literature and in society.1 In this chapter I, too, examine the double-narrational frame of Bleak House as an opposition of male and female discourses, but I analyze that opposition as a gendered issue of genre, not sexual ideology. I am concerned not with what the narration says about men and women but rather with the structural juxtaposition of discourses that speak as a gendered construct to the issue of narrative voice and the development of the novel as form. I treat the alternation of narrative voices as a critical dialogic and examine how, textually and performatively, mode of voice affects the representation of ideological issues in the text. My intention is not to refute criticism that establishes a sexual duality as the narrative structure of Bleak House, for I am working on a different plane of analysis. Instead, I offer a gendered narratological reading which, in conjunction with such interpretive criticism, complicates and expands the ways that ideological issues are represented by the narrative text.

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While the first-person mode is assigned to a fictional narrator, the third-person narrative articulates itself as authorial in voice and scope. The discursive style of this “male” narration actually begins in the author’s preface, which Dickens uses ostensibly to explain some of the circumstances surrounding the production of the novel, including how he might have incorporated, if he chose, specific real-life incidents into the text. These “clarifications,” however, are also conceived as satire designed to ridicule the legal system targeted by the third-person narrator in the fiction, and they do so in that narrator’s style. The preface is thereby performative in at least two ways. Dickens makes fun of the same institutions he is satirizing in the novel, and he identifies the narrator who delivers that satire in the novel discursively with his own authorial voice. Moreover, the sarcasm and elaborate social satire embedded in the preface and in the style of the third-person narrator are reminiscent of the broad authorial social satire that characterizes most of the narration of Dickens’s earlier fiction. Merritt Moseley explicitly identifies the third-person narrator of Bleak House with the narrators of all of Dickens’s “old novels”—“that is, those with omniscient narrators, multiple plots, generous exposition, and so on.”2 He argues that Esther’s story is therefore intended not as an autonomous narrative but as one “interpolated” into the master narrative as an embedded text. I agree that the “male” narrative of Bleak House is a rendition of Dickens’s usual patriarchal style. I believe, however, that its juxtaposition with Esther’s fully autonomous first-person narration foregrounds that style as male and calls it into question on the level of text. Esther’s narration continues the experimentation with first-person narrative that Dickens initiates in David Copperfield, the novel published just before Bleak House, but does so with a significant difference. While David Copperfield employs the autodiegetic voice of a character looking back over his life in an effort to explain his own past behavior, Esther does not. David contextualizes the social world and thereby elicits social themes explicitly in connection with the evolution of his character. Esther, however, makes clear that her “assignment” as narrator is not to reflect back over her life but to recount events as she witnessed them so as to contribute to a larger story of which her experience is only a part. She realizes almost from the beginning that the story she is telling is unavoidably her own: “It seems curious to me to be obliged to write all this about myself! As if this narrative were the narrative of my life.” But her narrational gaze is primarily directed outward, and her personal history is ostensibly employed to establish point of view. She positions herself in her narrative as an “observer” of the society around her; she does not portray

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that society in relation to her own focalized life, and the reader is not called upon to fill in the gaps of her story with thematic interpretations that are implied but not part of her personal retrospective moral scheme.3 With Esther’s narrative, Dickens juxtaposes against the hegemonic, authoritative narrations of his own earlier novels the narrative voice of a woman, who performs the same sorts of rhetorical maneuvers as his traditional narrator but in the first-person form. In privileging Esther’s narrative, he is not advocating exclusive use of the homodiegetic (or internal) mode of narration. He is suggesting that the qualities associated with that voice are those most conducive to producing a novelistic text. By its structural scheme, Bleak House thereby continues the pattern of the other novels examined in this study. It represents through a woman’s narration “new” discursive possibilities for the novel as a genre, and it does so in direct contrast to conventional patriarchal narrative forms, in this case the author’s own. Others have made the case that in writing Bleak House, Dickens purposely wanted to associate his first-person narration conceptually with the discourse of a woman, specifically in response to the female narrator in Jane Eyre. Although Dickens denied ever reading that novel, critics have pointed out many specific, unavoidable parallels between the personal backgrounds of the two heroines. Lisa Jadwin maintains that the representation of Esther as a submissive female, insecure in her narrational role, was conceived as a hostile reaction to Brontë’s portrayal of Jane’s strong and forthright narrative consciousness,4 but Anny Sadrin disagrees. She argues that given Dickens’s positive correspondence with women writers at that time, in connection with his managing Household Words, more likely Bleak House “was connived in a spirit of experimentation and sympathy” with what Brontë was doing with narrative in Jane Eyre.5 Whatever Dickens had in mind for Esther’s narrational personality, I agree with Sadrin that her narrative functions in new and positive ways. Certainly the same kinds of narrative issues that Brontë addresses with her first-person text—including its positioning as “woman’s” discourse in relation to patriarchal conventions of narrating—are enacted in Esther’s narration in Bleak House. Unlike Brontë, Dickens resists instilling into his first-person female narrator personal traits that might affect how she represents characters and events in her text. The qualities that distinguish Esther’s narrative from the third-person narration are connected not to her character but to the objectification of narratological issues associated with her first-person


narrative mode. Instead of using Esther’s narration to demonstrate such homodiegetic narrational features as internal focalization, subjectivity, and personal representation of time, Dickens foregrounds these elements as “topics” by making Esther’s narration as impersonal as possible. In this way, Esther’s narrative becomes, on a textual level, a theoretical discussion, rather than a representation, of how first-person techniques create realism in the novel. In Bleak House Dickens constructs in dialogical juxtaposition two different modes of representing the same social ideology. Representing the world ideologically was, for Dickens, the primary thematic function of the novel as genre. In foregrounding the issue of “person” in Esther’s narrative, Dickens shows how the homodiegetic mode inherently dialogizes issues of ideology and ethics, producing realism in the novel by destabilizing its political and epistemological themes. In direct contrast, the third-person heterodiegetic narrative foregrounds Dickensian social satire, isolating and exaggerating satiric rhetoric self-consciously as rhetoric to create a narrational performance of authorial hegemony that inherently defictionalizes the text. The result of formally separating the novel’s political satire from its storytelling narratives is that, for the purposes of defining genre, Esther’s storytelling is implicitly privileged. Through the objectification of first-person techniques, Dickens demonstrates that the politicizing of fiction is more credibly represented—no matter what mode of voice is used—as story rather than as authoritative treatise, and he does so in gendered, dialogical terms. At the end of the novel, Dickens tries to reestablish patriarchy by redefining Esther’s voice as stereotypically and self-referentially “female” and imposing onto the woman’s narrative the conventional ending of the Victorian novel. This attempt to undermine the credibility of “woman’s” narration, however, only further subjugates the patriarchal discourse of narrative to the authority of the feminized text. As in the previous chapters, my reading of Bleak House is grounded in Bakhtin’s theory that the historical evolution of the novel genre includes a pattern of incorporating parodies of other novels in a narrative text so as to introduce, by way of contrast, new narrational concepts of the novel as form. Not only does this parodic tradition serve to create a sense of generic coherence by intertextually reproducing different novel types in one narrative, but it also makes “self-criticism” an integral part of the novel’s evolutionary history and its identity as a genre. As Bakhtin observes, “This ability of the novel to criticize itself is a remarkable feature of this everdeveloping genre . . . the novel—its texts as well as the theory connected

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with it—emerges consciously and unambiguously as a genre that is both critical and self-critical, one fated to revise the fundamental concepts of literariness and poeticalness dominant at the time.”6 In Bleak House such inherent “self-criticism” is made literal. When Dickens explicitly contrasts conventional, hegemonic, dictatorial narration of his own earlier novels with Esther’s more personal and novelistic approach, he foregrounds, within the narrative text, criticism of his own signature style. In opposition to the “real” voice of the first-person narrator, the third-person discourse sounds so exaggeratedly authoritarian and artificially literary that it represents itself as a parody of omniscient authorial narrator established in the classic tradition by Fielding, Thackeray, and—yes—Dickens. The result of the dialogical opposition created through the dual narrative on the subject of generic discourse is, as in Clarissa, a self-parody of the male-authored text. Because the strategy of using a dual narrative structure is so unusual both for Dickens and for the nineteenth-century novel, the juxtaposition of narrative modes—emphasized even more self-consciously by the change in verb tense that occurs with each change in voice—calls attention to itself as technique. Recognizing the novel’s diegetic processes thereby becomes an integral part of the experience of reading the novel. Even more than the other works examined in this book, then, Bleak House overtly performs Linda Hutcheon’s definition of metafiction, “fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity.”7 More to the point, by emphasizing a contrast in modes of narrating, its narrative illustrates a particular type of metafictional activity identified by Hutcheon as “a specific demand upon the reader, a demand for recognition of a new code, for a more open reading that entails a parodic synthesis of back- and fore-grounded elements.”8 By alternating not only narrators but technical forms of narration—tense, voice, mode—Bleak House directs the reader to the narratological elements of its metafictional diegetic processes. These processes are, in turn, organized according to the gender oppositions that bifurcate the novel. Although, narratologically, language systems do not align themselves with one sex or the other, they still may enact the strategic paradigm that I see operating in the other novels examined in this study. By performing Kristeva’s concept of “woman’s” discourse as one that challenges patriarchal conventions of narrative, Esther’s narrative functions metafictionally with the “male” text to create an opposition of narrational modes represented textually as gendered constructs.9 In effect,


the narrative structure of Bleak House creates a dynamic in which firstperson discourse confronts narrative conventions performed in and through Dickens’s traditional third-person narrative, and it does so in terms of male and female voices. Although identified with the feminine, Esther’s narration thus articulates itself strategically not as essentialist female speech but as marginalized “other” to patriarchal forms of discourse. In conjunction with the other narration, it creates a “dialogue” between narrational language systems, conducted entirely on the level of rhetorical texts and separate from the telling of the story. Examining the dialogic of narrative voice in Bleak House as a textual construct necessarily involves grappling with its narratological terms. In her role as first-person narrator, Esther acknowledges that despite her best efforts to look beyond herself, her narrative is nonetheless always about her; and this notion reflects on the other narrative in the book as well. Genette theorizes that all narration is inherently first-person. He reasons that since narrators always speak in their own voices even when they are not characters in the stories, there is technically no such thing as a thirdperson narrative voice.10 This technicality is especially applicable to Dickens’s representation of the “male” narrator in Bleak House. Despite its pose of impersonality, this voice blatantly exhibits distinctly human attitudes—sarcasm, humor, even anger—toward the world it portrays. Indeed, more than anything else, its “male” narrative relies on the impact of a strong personal voice to achieve credibility in the text. For the same reason, it is difficult, as well as cumbersome, to label this voice “heterodiegetic,” Genette’s term for a narrator positioned outside the story. The “male” narrator clearly has an emotional stake in what he narrates, and his involvement infiltrates and in some sense defines the world represented by his text. As a result, he functions more homodiegetically than he does heterodiegetically in relation to the story and to the social culture he explores. Likewise, this narrator cannot legitimately be labeled “omniscient,” because he is locked into the present tense and makes a point of speculating, rather than reporting, about what characters are thinking or what their motives might be. Actually, Esther’s retrospective narrating might more accurately be described as “omniscient.”11 Despite her concealments and protestations of ignorance, she already knows everything that happens in her story before she tells it. Although the terminology relating to the “male” narrator in Bleak House is slippery, I nevertheless will refer to him as the “third-person narrator,” or I will identify his voice as “patriarchal.” For the purposes of my own argument, the latter term is

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preferable, since it assumes a dialogical and parodic contraposition to Esther’s “woman’s” discourse in the larger text. Like Bakhtin, Hutcheon regards the parodying of other novels as a defining characteristic of the novel genre. She suggests, however, that the aim of that parody was often more comparative than it was hostile. Hutcheon notes that the prefix para, as well as meaning “against,” can also be translated from the Greek as “beside,” so that when two narrations are intertextually compared even parodically, “there is a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of contrast.”12 This distinction is especially useful in analyzing the narrative duality in Bleak House. Because the patriarchal narrator is represented as a recognizable literary language system, any exaggeration and play within its style can easily be read as parody. With Esther’s narration, stylistic quirks are more likely to be attributed to her character than her mode of narration and do not therefore appear to represent themselves as parody of a literary style. Saundra K. Young argues convincingly that the patriarchal narrator in Bleak House has “no voice for eloquence except the artificial, which sounds ineloquent.”13 Unlike Esther, who narrates as a person, she says, the third-person narrator consists only of language and is only rhetorical, so he lacks the credibility of a genuinely voiced appeal to be believed. Narratologically, however, both narrations are made up only of language and both necessarily function as rhetorical constructs in the novel. Since Dickens develops his dual narrative as an opposition of two modes of discourse, Esther’s narration, besides articulating a personal voice, represents a language system. As such, her discourse may also subject itself, as it eventually does, to parody. In their discursive oppositions, the relationship between voices in Bleak House is therefore less hostile than it is dialogically interactive. Represented as novelistic, experimental, and “new,” Esther’s narrative discourse is privileged over the patriarchal narration in the book, but the contrasts between two narratives are organized in terms of their similar ideological ambitions rather than their differences. It is the rhetorical coordination between the narratives that grounds my analysis of their texts. In both narratives, the serious disintegration of social institutions is portrayed stylistically as the corruption of the language systems associated with those institutions, creating a polyphony of ideological “voices” that infiltrate them.14 The style of polyphony and the effects on its representation of social themes, however, differ with the mode of narration. Although the ideological types that inhabit Esther’s narration (Mr. Guppy, Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Pardiggle, Mr. Skimpole, Mr. Turveydrop, for example)


are no less exaggerated than those represented in the other narrative, the polyphony engendered by these characters is more credible as fiction because of the way it is focalized through the first-person narrational mode. With his focalizing strategies, Dickens transforms Esther’s satire into literary realism and thereby privileges her chapters as the more novelistic of the two narrational texts. Most critics tend to confuse Esther’s first-person style of narration with the way she portrays herself as a character in the fiction or as a “person” telling a story. This has led them to condemn her narrating as sentimental, falsely humble, and coyly self-serving (a means of repeating the good opinions of others). Variations of these same character traits have also encouraged “apologist” critics to set Esther up as an ideological icon, an archetype of the Victorian woman, voicing a culture as well as a personality. By this reading, Esther’s “woman’s” role necessitates a pretense of stereotypically “female” narrational poses, which implicitly subordinates her narration to the more powerful “male” narrator in the dual scheme of the book. Textually, however, a reverse dynamic also operates. Esther’s narrative demonstrates that the “first-person” storyteller (no matter what narrational form of voice is actually used) is the best voice for achieving “realism” in the novel, particularly in contrast to authoritative, hegemonic “male” modes of satire characterizing Dickens’s earlier works. Narratological readings of texts do not ignore the existence of personal character traits but consider them only in terms of how they create a general style of discourse. In this case the effects are minimal. While Esther may interrupt her story occasionally to comment in her own voice on her problems in narrating, these interruptions do not reflect stylistically on the manner in which she constructs her text. Whatever her stated insecurities about her role as narrator, Esther’s narrating style is disinterested and strong. The influence of her “character” on her narrative in Bleak House is from my point of view, then, less personal than it is narratological. In contrast to most homodiegetic narrators, Esther does not impose her personal psychology on the way she renders the world. She does, however, make the issue of first-person focalization an intrinsic part of her narrative, distinguishing it from the third-person patriarchal text. With rare exception, Esther’s presentation of exaggerated characters is notably nonjudgmental. She assumes a reporter’s relationship to the circumstances she relays and objectifies ideological speech as generic text rather than as an occasion for first-person analysis. In that way, Esther’s narrative is, in one sense, just as “third-person” in function as the patriar-

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chal narration is. Unlike the patriarchal narrator, who observes panoramically in the present tense, Esther operates more in the mode of the narrator of free indirect discourse—retrospectively reporting, editing, and providing transitions between ideological representations, but allowing other voices autonomy in her text.15 Because she is reporting on her “real” experience with the characters she portrays, however, her narrating serves as a medium that negotiates the distance between the satiric and the novelistic in a way unavailable to the other narrator. By inserting the parodied dialogue of other voices into episodes of Esther’s own story, Dickens makes discourse ideologically satirical primarily by the manner in which a scene is internally focalized. For example, it is Esther’s comic description of the utter disarray she witnessed at the Jellyby house (“Richard told us that he had washed his hands in a pie-dish and that they had found a kettle on his dressing-table”) that transforms Mrs. Jellyby’s otherwise innocuous speech about her commitment to the cause of the “family” in Africa into satire: “You find me, my dears,” said Mrs. Jellyby, snuffing the two candles in tin candlesticks, which made the room taste strongly of hot tallow (the fire had gone out, and there was nothing in the grate but ashes, a bundle of wood, and a poker), “you find me, my dears, as usual, very busy; but that you will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence with public bodies and with private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species all over the country. I am happy to say it is advancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.”16 Unlike the speech assigned to ideological figures in the other narrative, Mrs. Jellyby’s language may be read as an indication of her personality as well as her ideological “theme.” This becomes even clearer later in the novel when, in connection with Caddy’s wedding, Mrs. Jellyby’s “character” as disinterested parent emerges independently of her dedication to extrafamilial causes in Africa. In Esther’s narrative, Dickens allows a character’s ideological discourse to stand by itself; Esther’s contextualizing of that speech into the fiction produces both satire and literary realism for the novel. Elsewhere, Esther’s own discourse as a character functions to create the social satire of her narrative text. In the following exchange between


Esther and Mrs. Pardiggle’s children, who have just been lauded by their mother for voluntarily sacrificing their allowances for her “mission,” meaning is achieved though Esther’s interaction with the children but also through the interplay between her focalizing character and her retrospective narrative voice: I am very fond of being confided in by children and am happy in being usually favored in that respect, but on this occasion it gave me great uneasiness. As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, with the manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me on the ground that his pocket-money was “boned” from him. On my pointing out the impropriety of the word, especially in connection with his parent (for he added sulkily “By her!”), he pinched me and said, “Oh then! Now! Who are you! You wouldn’t like it, I think? What does she make a sham for, and pretend to give me money, and take it away again? Why do you call it my allowance, and never let me spend it?” These exasperating questions so inflamed his mind and the minds of Oswald and Francis that they all pinched me at once, and in a dreadfully expert way: screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I could hardly forbear crying out. Felix, at the same time, stamped on my toes. And the Bond of Joy, who on account of always having the whole of his little income anticipated stood in fact pledged to abstain from cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we passed a pastry-cook’s shop, that he terrified me by becoming purple. I never under-went so much, both in body and mind, in the course of a walk with young people as from these unnaturally constrained children, when they paid me the compliment of being natural. (105) Contrary to those who maintain that Esther’s narrative voice is weak and ineffectual, particularly in contrast to the other narration in the book, these kinds of descriptions show her fully capable of authorial wit and sarcasm and, as the last sentence makes clear, an awareness of the satiric issues involved in her text. Because the immediate scene is portrayed through Esther’s internal focalization, and because Esther is a credibly realistic character, her role in the scene produces “realism” out of its satirical situation. The result is less a political commentary than it is thematic fiction. In direct contrast to Esther, who interacts both as character and narrator with the ideological voices she portrays, the patriarchal narrator builds parodies of language systems directly into his narrative line, obliterating

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the autonomy of these other “voices” in his text.17 The result, as the following comic description of Sir Leicester’s circle makes clear, is a pure political satire. No mediating focalizor is present in the scene to connect, by virtue of his presence, the parodic discourse “novelistically” to a larger story: Then there is my Lord Boodle, of considerable reputation with his party, who has known what office is and who tells Sir Leicester Dedlock with much gravity, after dinner, that he really does not see to what the present age is tending. A debate is not what a debate used to be; the House is not what the House used to be: even a Cabinet is not what it formerly was. He perceives with astonishment, that supposing the present government to be overthrown, the limited choice of the Crown, in the formation of a new ministry, would lie between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle—supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle? (160–61) The narrative in this passage is delivered with open sarcasm, as opposed to Esther’s similar portrayals of broad ideological types. With Esther’s narration, the objectification of discourse implicitly exposes cultural institutions to ridicule. Ridicule is not, however, an element of her narrative style. Instead, it is provided by the author in his parody of these institutions as autonomous language systems. Esther herself does not make fun of ideologies she portrays; her deadpan humor results from her way of reporting the absurdity around her without analyzing it from her own point of view. In contrast, as this passage indicates, ridicule is built into the discourse of the patriarchal narrator, and there is no focalizing character present to transform the satiric into the “novelistic.” The satire of the passage, moreover, has less to do with the narrative presentation of parliamentary ineffectualness than it does with Dickens’s own play with names. In that way, its humor is portrayed as authorial rather than fictional, making it didactic—particularly in contrast to the more novelistic satire of Esther’s narrative text. One could, of course, argue that the scope of the third-person narrative is far more expansive, the institutions it describes are more estab-


lished, and the stakes are higher than what is represented in Esther’s narration, so the satire needs to be represented more authoritatively. Certainly if we compare the two passages cited earlier, the subject of parliamentary politics is far weightier than the misuse of a child’s allowance or even a mother’s benign neglect. Narratology, however, does not recognize the import and the scope of a discourse in determining the effects of its rhetorical strategies. The care with which Esther draws out her satiric scenes and organizes and responds to the “stories” of satirized ideas is, I believe, rhetorically far more effective than “Coodle-Doodle” imitation satirizing an outmoded aristocratic parliament. Esther’s satire may also appear less important because her narrative includes women as its primary targets. If women seem less significant than men as ideological figures, however, this is only because their social discourses are not, in themselves, under direct attack, and satire in this novel is represented most viciously in the form of parody. The male lawyers, judges, and politicians portrayed in both narratives are condemned as corrupt because they manipulate institutionalized language systems to obscure and thereby participate in social corruption. Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, by contrast, are satirized for being women of societal good works. Their speech is ridiculed as the discourse of women of that type, but it is not itself represented parodically as evil. Dickens may have a grievance against women who would neglect home and family to save Borrioboola-Gha, but he does not allow Esther to represent that grievance with the kind of moral outrage that would equate it with the real corruption portrayed in the book. Because the satiric play emerges from the way that Esther renders speech within the context of her own story, the effect is much closer to dramatic comedy than it is to formal satire. With this strategy, Dickens again privileges Esther’s “woman’s” narrative as genre discourse, precisely because her female subjects are treated less heavy-handedly than the ideologically male targets of the other narrative text. Coupled with the fact that with limited exception women in Bleak House are portrayed as so much stronger and more articulate than the men—indeed the disintegration of “male” authority is a major theme fictionally and, with the privileging of Esther’s narrative, metafictionally in this novel—it seems unlikely that it was Dickens’s intent to minimize the importance of women, and a woman’s narration, by placing them in Esther’s part of the book.18 Intermixed with the satiric polyphony of the patriarchal text is the voice of the narrator himself, who comments authorially and nonsatirically (if with a strong measure of irony) on the subjects of social injustice illus-

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trated in his part of the novel. As the passage below demonstrates, the discourse of the narrator’s direct commentary is no less excessive than the discourses of the ideologies he ridicules. Rather than producing parody, though, the hyperbole of the narrator’s private diction creates the authority of his point of view. The result is a compelling picture of urban poverty and political neglect, but it is a picture so generalized that its message is “told” rather than shown. Instead of interacting with other voices, as Esther does, the narrator positions his own discourse outside of the story. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years—though born expressly to do it. (220) As narrator, Esther also offers straightforward commentary against the social institutions targeted by the novel. She does so, however, by providing opportunities for characters like Caddy and Mr. Gridley, victims of social injustice, to tell their own stories in their own voices in her text. In this way, Esther’s narrative offers direct commentary against societal evils, as the patriarchal narrator does, but in the form of fictional narratives, not authorial statements. The commentary of Mr. Gridley, particularly, is just as authoritative as the third-person narrator’s, but it represents itself as part of the larger fictional polyphony of the novel and therefore as inherently open to “discussion” with other voices and with other stories. Through its metadiegetic narrators, Esther’s text suggests an alternative to Dickensian moral commentary, a way to formulate a discourse of ethics as a dialogic for the novel form. Like most Victorian novels, Bleak House explores a “right” code of ethics in connection with its ideological themes. Both gendered narratives advocate compassion toward others, whatever their circumstances, and both abhor institutionalized systems, materialist and linguistic, that obscure the spirit of that code. In contrast to the monolithic moral position assumed by the patriarchal narration in its own direct commentary and satire, Esther’s narration suggests that such epistemology is more credibly articulated in the novel through a first-person relationship between the


fiction and the narrative text.19 This position is supported by Adam Zachary Newton’s theory of narrative ethics, which argues that the narrative representations of ethical values in fiction are, by nature, “interactive rather than legislative.” Newton’s concept is based on the distinction he makes between narration that is “ethical” and that which represents itself as “moral.” Because moral discourse assumes the a priori validity of its own truth, it is by definition monological, and an assertion of his own moral “right” characterizes the epistemological style of the patriarchal narrator in Bleak House. According to Newton, ethical discourse, on the other hand, infiltrates narrative in the form of a dialogic, an interaction between “narrator and listener, author and character, or reader and text.”20 This kind of dialogical activity is inherent in Esther’s “woman’s” narrational form. Because ethical issues are focalized through her fictional character, epistemological “truths” are destabilized; and the relationships between author, narrator, character, and reader are by virtue of that destabilization made less absolute and more complex than in the other narrative. Although Esther’s first-person narrative style is not self-consciously “feminine,” her mode of representing a code of ethics also distinguishes her from Dickens’s other first-person narrators, both of whom are male. According to Genette, when the hero of a novel is also its narrator, the narrator distinguishes himself from the hero not only in narrational time but also in epistemological understanding, and this distinction creates an attitude of moral superiority in the narrator toward himself as character. In autodiegetic narrative the “narrating I” is separated from the “narrated I,” Genette asserts, “by a difference in age and experience that authorizes the former to treat the latter with a sort of condescending or ironic superiority. . . . [T]he narrator does not simply know more, empirically than the hero; he knows in the absolute sense, he understands the Truth.”21 While Genette’s theory applies to the narrations of David Copperfield and Pip, it does not at all describe Esther’s. David and Pip grow into moral and philosophical positions that they impose retroactively in the form of narrative commentary on the experiences they relate. Thus they determine for their narratees how past events should be interpreted, creating an epistemological split between the narrator and the focalizing character and producing a moralizing narrative posture much like the “male” narrator’s in Bleak House. The implied reader is encouraged to look through gaps in the narrative commentary to other issues elicited by the fiction but not incorporated into the narrator’s epistemological scheme. This expands thematic issues in the text beyond those defined by the narrator looking back, but it

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also separates narrator from reader rather than creating interaction between them. In contrast, the value system built into Esther’s first-person narrative coordinates fiction and narrative instead of separating them and produces a more direct interaction between narrator and reader. As narrator, Esther does not prescribe a code of ethics employed retrospectively to chastise her character’s past personal behavior. Her character adopts that code from the beginning, and by focalizing her experiences through it, Dickens creates ethical narrative out of the text. In this sense, Esther’s narrative much more closely resembles the “woman’s” narration in Jane Eyre than it does in Dickens’s own first-person novels. The reader participates in what the narrative is doing to produce a system of values, rather than responding to what the narrator says about morally interpreting the fiction of the book. As her story progresses, Esther becomes more overtly critical of the behavior of other characters, but the kinds of judgments she makes are different from those imposed by the third-person narrator on the satiric figures in his sections of the book. Her narrational comments are consistent with a code of ethics that has been part of her characterization since the beginning, and they are directed at specific characters in regard to their treatment of others and not to their ideological roles. Harold Skimpole, identified with Esther’s part of the novel, clearly functions as an allegorical figure; but Esther, as narrator, is not aware of this. When she finally speaks out as narrator against Skimpole and summarily dismisses him from her text (“As it so happened that I never saw Mr. Skimpole again, I may at once finish what I know of his history”), she does so on serious ethical grounds stemming from his personal treatment of Richard and Jo, not for what he represents ideologically in the larger book. In contrast, the patriarchal narrative represents itself as less novelistic not only because it is so dictatorial but also, ironically, because it is so playful. Except for those few instances when the narrator discourses in his own monologic voice on the evils of urban society, moral issues are represented almost entirely in the form of social satire rendered as discursive parody in his text. This keeps the narrative perpetually tongue-in-cheek and effectively limits the kind of meaningful personal interaction between reader, narrator, and author that Newman identifies with ethical discourse in a fictionalized text. It is also consistent with the kind of narrational play that infiltrates every aspect of the patriarchal narrative text. As with Lovelace’s narration in Clarissa, the male narrative of Bleak House shows itself off as discourse preoccupied with language, self-con-


sciously “aware” of its own parodic play,22 and a primary object of parody is, as it also is with Lovelace, the language of other literatures. Through the third-person narrative, literary parody commingles linguistically with the parodies of social discourses to become part of the ideological satire of the novel. In this capacity, the most exaggerated parody can be found in the mock heroic diction that surrounds Sir Leicester and his politically irrelevant aristocratic set, but generic wordplay infiltrates the entire narrative, satirizing such disparate literary styles as epic and lyric poetry, traditional forms of drama, newspapers, and detective fiction. The parodied genres are not simply employed to make fun of other literatures but are objectified through the text as modes of discourse incongruously at odds with the society they are called upon to portray, a dynamic that is established in the opening sequence of the novel. Although the first chapter has been thoroughly analyzed as the key to Dickens’ thematic intentions in Bleak House, it also offers a paradigm for his discursive play with language in the third-person narrative text, including a blueprint for the parody of literary genres. The chapter begins in the style of a set direction (“London, Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn”) precipitating a “dramatic” exchange between the chancellor and Mr. Tangle performed in the generic style of Restoration comedy. The disparity between the subject of the scene and the generic language used to describe it initiates a pattern of incongruity between sign and signifier that becomes the mode of objectifying literary discourse parodically in the text. Likewise, the image of the fog, which recurs as metaphor throughout the novel, is introduced in the second paragraph of this first chapter in the form of “poetic” sentence fragments, rhythmically imitative, in part, of Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.” This is the first of many instances of metaphoric play that distinguishes the discourse of the third-person narrator. Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs argue that the characteristic use of metaphor in the patriarchal narrative “not only transforms what is outside it, but also controls it,” thereby identifying metaphor with the “male” authoritarianism of that text.23 In the initial sequence, the symbolic imposition of the fog as an organizing device also performs the way that language functions as trope to generalize, rather than particularize, “reality” in a literary text. The

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more frequent use of simile in Esther’s narrative, in contrast, particularizes narrational imagery to prosaic effect: “We could not help noticing that her dress didn’t nearly meet up in the back and that the open space was railed across with a lattice-work of stay-lace—like a summer-house.” While comically less momentous than the metaphorical discourse that characterizes the patriarchal narrative, these descriptions contribute to the novelistic identity of her narrational text. Esther’s narrative also satirizes established literary genre, but it does so more substantively in the form of fictional voice and character, rather than as narrational wordplay. Skimpole, for example, clearly represents in character and discourse the excesses of the Romantic poet. His ideological limitations are occasionally rendered in stylized imitations of Romantic verse: “We will not call such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind, an orphan. She is the child of the universe.” It is not so much his literary language that Esther’s narrative satirizes, however, but what Bakhtin would call the larger “belief system” contained in Skimpole’s generic discourse. Modeled on poet-essayist Leigh Hunt, Skimpole speaks at great length and with amusing accuracy in an exaggerated version of Romantic philosophy, and this is used to define the judgments that the novel makes against him.24 As a character, he displays a “Romantic” lack of responsibility to anyone but himself and, more particularly, personifies the “antiethical,” as Esther’s narrative has defined it, in his noblesse oblige dealings with the working class and, more sinisterly, Richard and Jo. All of these traits reflect substantively and negatively on the validity of Romantic literary principles, particularly in contrast to contemporary Victorian values, creating a rhetorically complex satire when those principles are applied to real life, but they also contribute to character juxtapositions and plot developments in the fiction independent of that satire. Unlike the patriarchal narrator, Esther herself does not engage in the parodying of other literatures—that would be out of character for her—yet literary parody does play a major part in the fictionalizing of her text. Dickens demonstrates through Esther’s narration the ability of the novel to perform parodically without involving the narrator directly and therefore without seriously disturbing the mimetic credibility of her narrative tale. The primary rhetorical features of the patriarchal narrative, in contrast, imitate those of the satire as genre—invective, irony, ridicule, travesty, burlesque, and wordplay—and deliberately detract from rather than contribute to mimesis in the novel, privileging politics over story in the text.25 The stylistic miscellany that characterizes the “third-person” narrative in


Bleak House leads Chiara Briganti, among others, to view its discourse as experimental, “a sense of fragmentation which we have come to recognize as one of the unmistakable traits of modern and post-modern fiction.”26 In the following passage, Hochman and Wachs implicitly make clear, however, that the seemingly “modernist” characteristics of the narrative are actually more in keeping with the rhetorical elements of classic satire than they are innovations in fictional technique: One of the salient characteristics is . . . the refusal (or inability) to define boundaries, either for itself or its discourse. Hence it cannot, as Esther can, emerge from the text as an articulated being, with firm boundaries in space and time. Instead, it reverberates freely to elements that are excluded from the careful formalization of Esther’s existence. These things include narcissism, magic, vision, vindictiveness, rage, and an imaginative reaching for some conception of a better world, side by side with aching consciousness of the intractability of the “real” world.27 Taken out of context, the elements of formal satire adopted by the thirdperson narrator (“narcissism, magic, vision, vindictiveness, rage, and imagination reaching for some conception of a better world”) could be seen to produce an ironic gender reversal of écriture feminine, similar to what I see happening in Moll Flanders. Because it confines itself so completely to the rhetoric of invective satire, and because this satire is contrasted with the novelistic discourse and “careful formalization” that characterizes Esther’s text, the rhetoric of the patriarchal narrative does not function as experimental discourse. Instead, it performs yet another textual parody of a formal literary genre; and in that role, it is portrayed as inadequate for representing the “real” world as the novel as genre can. As a political cartoonist of sorts, the patriarchal narrator presents his “fiction” as a series of isolated satiric vignettes, designed to supplant rather than augment the novel’s story line. The focus of these vignettes is very often the language play employed in describing the action, and this language play, in turn, produces parody that may or may not relate to the material subject of the satire. The following passage, for instance, burlesques the behavior of a self-important beadle at Nemo’s coroner’s inquest in a sketch that is completely irrelevant to the account of the proceedings themselves. Moreover, the point of the scene is not so much to satirize the behavior of the beadle as it is to lampoon the rhetoric of newspapers:

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The beadle is very careful that two gentlemen not very neat about the cuffs and buttons (for whose accommodation he has provided a special little table near the Coroner, in the Harmonic Meeting Room) should see all that is to be seen. For they are the public chroniclers of such inquiries by the line; and he is not superior to the universal human infirmity, but hopes to read in print what “Mooney, the active and intelligent beadle of the district,” said and did and even aspires to see the name of Mooney as familiarly and patronisingly mentioned as the name of the Hangman is, according to the latest examples. (146–47) This narrative emphasis on peripheral events as sites for parodic play further dramatizes the fact that the “assignment” of the third-person narrator is not, like Esther’s, to develop his part of the story but produce a political satire. The eye of the narrative is not on the fiction but on the rhetoric of the text. In contrast, one of the most frequent criticisms of the first-person narration in Bleak House is just how little Esther, for her part, “knows” about the workings of her narrative text. Her failure to analyze the people and situations she describes, coupled with her repeated assertions that she does not understand her subjects or her role as narrator, has provided the premise for most of the criticism against her. Speaking for a number of his contemporaries, Bert G. Horback wrote in 1983 that “Esther does present a serious problem. Not only doesn’t she know anything yet about the world; worse, she doesn’t know why she is writing or what she is supposed to be writing about. If ever in the history of fiction we have seen an incompetent narrator, Esther is it.”28 More recent narrational criticism of Bleak House, though, tends to see conscious rhetorical implications in Esther’s posture of incompetence toward her own narrating, and most of these implications are associated in some way with her sex. Barbara Gottfried, Chiara Briganti, Suzanne Graver, Audry Jaffe, and Anny Sadrin identify Esther’s insistence on her own ineffectiveness as a narrator with subversive positions often assumed by Victorian women to undermine patriarchal authority while pretending to conform to it.29 Lynette Felber sees these rhetorical strategies as more proactively feminist and narratological and makes a compelling case for Esther’s narrative as écriture feminine.30 Without disputing any of these arguments, I suggest that the narrational attention Esther pays to the subject of knowing in her “woman’s” narrative text, whatever subversive strategies might be involved, is also a way of foregrounding the issue of subjectivity in the novel as a genre. While Esther’s


narration is not psychologically subjective, it is concerned with the fact of its own subjectivity in the same way that the third-person narrative is concerned with the fact of its own rhetorical style. The patriarchal narrative actually expresses its “feelings” far more emphatically than Esther does. Still, as a discourse constitutionally unattached to “person,” it cannot explore the issue of narrational subjectivity as Esther’s narration can. Unlike Clarissa and Jane Eyre, Esther offers almost no analysis of her own feelings or her subjective response to the events she describes. In contrast to Dickens’s other first-person narrators, including David Copperfield and Pip, she does not try to impose subjectivity on the narrative, nor is the novel interested in her psychological reasons for not trying, even if some critics are.31 From the beginning, however, Esther expresses curiosity about her own role as narrator and, as many have observed, takes a strong narratological interest in her own lack of understanding of the situations she relates. The convoluted sentence structure through which Esther articulates her narrative strategy (“I write down these opinions not because I believe that this or any other thing was so because I thought so, but only because I did think so and I want to be quite candid about all I thought and did”) suggests that her narration is as textually self-conscious about its own processes as the third-person narrator's is about his. However much Esther worries aloud about the degree to which her point of view might affect the representation of events she relates, there is no evidence in the text that her subjectivity as character affects the story in any significant way at all. The commentary stands alone as a kind of self-interrogating critical theory, not as a key to translating her text. Metafictionally, Esther’s theoretical preoccupation with her own subjectivity objectifies the issue for both narratives and functionally empowers Esther as a textual “voice” in the novel because of, rather than in spite of, her disempowered narrational pose. When Esther objectifies the concepts of focalization and subjectivity in her text, she foregrounds the essential elements of the first-person narrative mode and, like the third-person narrator, makes diegesis a recognizable part of her narrative. In this context, Esther’s narrative also works in conjunction with the patriarchal narrative to objectify “time” as a narratological issue in the book. The present-tense verbal forms that characterize and, to some extent, define the style of the patriarchal narrative function to deconstruct the novel generically as a novel through the way they structure time in the text. Although the present tense theoretically denotes immediacy and real time, the reader is accustomed to retrospective past tense narrating in a work of fiction. The present tense therefore calls at-

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tention to itself as technique and detracts from the realism of a scene. In this narrative it also tends to universalize, rather than particularize, action and in that way to work against mimesis in the events it relates. Conversely, Esther’s narrative observes strict chronology (every new section of her story begins where it left off before being interrupted by the other narrator), and her consistent and reliable use of the past tense promotes realism in her narration. Michael Kearns notes that the way both narratives order events implicitly privileges Esther’s sections of the novel and also answers critics who view her storytelling as narratologically ineffectual: “Esther’s handling of time is in general as competent as her handling of description. Her chronology is consistently linear and is organized around significant events rather than around calendars and clocks, in sharp contrast to the chronology of the present-tense narration.”32 This opposition of chronology and metaphor, as a gendered narrative device for organizing time, is performed metafictionally through the abrupt transitions, or lack of transitions, that occur when the narration changes hands. Set immediately against the beginnings and ends of Esther’s sections, which invariably stress chronology and event, are the vague, tropological presentations of “time” that characteristically begin and end the third-person sections (“The rain is ever falling—drip, drip, drip—by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-pavement, the Ghost’s Walk”). These stylistic contrasts effectively frame both narratives and consequently foreground issues of narrative time as juxtapositional in the book. Coinciding with the stylistic contrast of narrational time is the gradual convergence of the two narratives into a single novelistic text. This has prompted critics to note a positive transformation in Esther’s narration in the latter part of the novel, one that precipitates an abdication of the thirdperson narrational authority in the novel to her improved narrating style. Kearns points to evidence that suggests Esther’s narrational consciousness has evolved over the course of the novel, and he attributes this evolution to the growth of understanding that occurs in the process of telling her story (he calls this “time-writing story”). Certainly with a more conventional autodiegetic narrator, this performative theory might well hold true. But Esther does not come to any startling psychological revelations over the course of her narrative; indeed, her narrative is not focused on her psychology at all. Thus, Kearns’s assertion that “the important events in writing-time story are the discoveries about the past that occur in the narrative present”33 does not apply to Esther and cannot account for the changes that take place narratologically in her text. Instead, the transformation of Esther’s narrative is represented as an entirely textual phe-


nomenon, played out at the level of discourse and distinct from any fictional supposition that Esther is “actually” writing her tale. Along these lines, in an implicit reversal of Genette’s dictum concerning narrative time in the autodiegetic novel, Joseph Sawicki argues that although Esther’s character remains essentially the same (“simple, weak, and passive”), her narrative progresses in rhetorical sophistication over the latter part of the novel because her storytelling improves. Sawicki maintains that the changes in Esther’s narrative as she becomes “more expert and confident” as a storyteller undermine the thematic values established by the patriarchal narrator, deprivileging his narrative and shifting authority to her.34 While I contend that the two narrators have always shared the same basic thematic values, I agree that there are significant signs of rhetorical transformation in Esther’s narrative text—independent of her character but specifically coinciding with the onset of her illness35—and that her way of representing those common themes takes over the novel even before the patriarchal narrator disappears from the narrative text. The first indication that Esther’s narrative has become dominant in the novel is structural. When Esther ends her section of the narration in chapter 31 with the exclamation, “For I cannot see you, Charley; I am blind,” she effectively takes control of the novel. The reader is completely hooked into the suspense of Esther’s story, and this implicitly makes that story the novel’s primary organizational text. The patriarchal narrative that follows is virtually framed by Esther’s narrative and becomes a kind of filler between installments of her drama. Immediately thereafter, a transformation in the style of Esther’s narrative suggests a textual self-consciousness of novelistic technique that further grants her discourse authority in the larger text. Following the melodramatic scene in the park when she finds out that Lady Dedlock is her mother (“I cannot say what was in my whirling thoughts”), Esther lists her emotional responses to what she sees as an irredeemably shameful situation, and she does so with her usual reporter’s observational objectivity: “These are the real feelings that I had.” When she then describes in the same reportorial fashion her first view of her mother’s house at Chesney Wold, a new sophistication emerges in her narrational style. The emotions that are objectified in the list of her own feelings fuse into her description of the house associated with her mother. This fusion creates a profound metaphorical representation of the dignity and pain that characterize and conjoin the feelings of both women: I did not dare to linger or to look up, but I passed before the terrace garden with its fragrant odours, and its broad walks, and its well-kept

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beds and smooth turf; and I saw how beautiful and grave it was and how the old stone balustrades and parapets, and wide flights of shallow steps, were seamed by time and weather; and how the trained moss and ivy grew about them, and around the old stone pedestal of the sun-dial; and I heard the fountain falling. (514) One discursive sign that Esther is “growing” as a narrator is that her prose becomes more comprehensively metaphorical—in the rhetorical style of the third-person narrator. The moment of degeneration for the third-person narrator occurs, in turn, as Esther becomes for the purposes of his satire complicit in his larger metaphor of social contamination. In his final direct address to the reader, the patriarchal narrator foretells the “revenge” that Jo’s disease will spread physically and metaphorically into the upper classes—the same disease that has disfigured Esther—and his discourse is particularly venomous in pitting “Tom’s-All-Alone” against the class with which Esther, through her mother and her engagement to Jarndyce, is now aligned: There is not a drop of Tom’s corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream (in which chemists on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say Nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom’s slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high. Verily, what with the tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge. (627–28) The virulent metaphorical discourse of the passage above, which presumes to speak with sarcasm against the segregated privileged classes, actually articulates more dramatically the unbridgeable distance of the narrative from the disenfranchised poor that it presumes to represent (“Verily, what with the tainting, plundering, and spoiling”). In the process, it asserts its absolute inability to speak with credibility for that class and culture. When he implicitly condemns Esther as symbolizing the reclusiveness of her class, the patriarchal narrator also implicitly condemns himself. According to the narrative immediately preceding this passage, the crime for which the upper classes deserve contamination by the lower classes is, ironically, the “mighty speech-making there has been, both in


and out of parliament,” concerning how the poor “shall be got right”; and this is a charge that could equally apply to the narrator’s own text. Earlier in the novel, he attempts to speak directly for Jo, adopting Jo’s subjectivity and speculating about what it must be like to be poor and illiterate in urban London from Jo’s point of view. Due to the narrator’s own public school diction and metaphoric thinking, the narrative does not produce a voice for Jo, but rather constructs a literary voice to represent him; and this voice effectively obliterates Jo’s cultural identity in the process of speaking for it: “It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows!” (220–21). In fact, the style of the narrative that speculates what it is “like to be Jo” is hardly discernible from that which describes Sir Leicester’s inner struggles with gout chronicled two pages before. The result is that the ideological discourse of the third-person narrative, when it seriously addresses issues of poverty and class oppression, becomes itself a parody of the upper-class “do-gooder” rhetoric (similar, I might suggest, to Mrs. Jellyby’s). Because of this parodic status, the third-person narrator eventually must relinquish authority over the novel in order for it to become a novel. With the final assertion that “Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to somebody’s theory but nobody’s practice,” the narrative implicitly acknowledges the failure of its “theory” to speak practically for Jo and to “fix” his world through its satire.36 Esther is even less equipped than the third-person narrator to address the social problems of poverty and to speak to those issues in her own voice. Although the focus of her narrative moves her closer to Jo as the novel progresses, Esther’s relationship to the story she tells is defined by her class, and this makes her as incapable as the third-person narrator of imagining what it is “like to be Jo” or of representing his world in her text. Earlier in the novel, Esther’s description of the poverty surrounding the death of Jenny’s baby is so stilted and her speculating about the poor is so clichéd that her discourse sounds like a parody of a bad romance novel rather than credible, novelistic prose. Her narrative discourse in this area never progresses beyond this stage: I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side

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of such people is almost hidden except from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God. (109) When Esther’s narrative assumes authority over the novel, it is not because her ideological representation of urban life is more “realistic” than that of the patriarchal narrator—quite the contrary. It does demonstrate, however, that a “first-person” narrative (whatever the actual mode of voice) is no less capable of representing that world in a novel than the authorial voice of Dickensian satire is. It also acknowledges the possibility that with its subjectivity, focalization, and interaction with other “real” voices, the “first-person” narrator has a better chance narratologically of credibly dramatizing ideological issues in the novel than the broad voice of social satire does. Despite a final privileging of “woman’s” discourse, Dickens, like Richardson, manages to reassert patriarchy at the end of his book. He does this by rejecting his own discursive definitions of gender and by imposing a conventional patriarchal conclusion on Esther’s “woman’s” narrational text. Instead of a final affirmation of the realism over the rhetoric of satire as the best voice for the novel, the book ends in a reaffirmation of artificial literary convention, patriarchal in form: the heroine marries the “right man,” all characters are accounted for, and all loose ends are tied up “for the best.” A transformation of the “woman’s” voice into the voice of the conventional female also occurs in the narrative text of the final chapter. When at the very end of the novel, Esther focuses entirely on herself, her discourse can be read as a parody of the limited scope of first-person narrational form; and this parody is, in turn, troped as the self-reflecting superficiality of stereotypical “female” speech. Esther’s girlish speculation on the possibility of her own beauty—discourse which calls attention to itself as discourse when the thought is cut off in midsentence—dramatizes the severity of loss to the novel when broad Dickensian social satire is replaced by the “personal” narrative and “male” political discourse with the concerns of a woman’s text. In itself, this parody is perfectly in keeping with the gendered dynamics of the novel’s bifurcated narrative. According to Kristeva, the act of revolutionizing language in a literary text is often performed in terms of a metaphorical paradigm whereby a discursively subversive semiotic challenges symbolic language systems on the level of text.37 Once the semiotic, associated with woman’s discourse as “other,” overcomes the symbolic, represented as the patriarchal generic norm, the new discourse must itself be challenged; this is how language systems are revitalized and remain in


flux. The parodying of Esther’s first-person narration at the end of Bleak House is consistent with this paradigm. In the end it puts her “woman’s” mode of discourse under the same satiric scrutiny that the patriarchal discourse has endured from the beginning, and it keeps the dialogic between them still in play. But when Dickens parodies Esther’s discourse in the last sequence of the novel (where she and Allan discuss her looks), he changes the working definition of woman. Throughout the novel, Esther’s “woman’s” narration has not been feminized in an essentialist way but has represented itself as “other” to Dickens’ usual style of discourse. The change in the status and style of her “woman’s” discourse in the novel into the stereotypical “female” is therefore significant. It reasserts the privileging of the male narrator by contradicting the novel’s own gendered narratology—much as Richardson does at the end of Clarissa when he transforms Clarissa’s “woman’s” narrative into a work of conventional sentimental melodrama. As in Clarissa, the male author manipulates the ending to produce a “male” text. Throughout most of the novel, Bleak House structures itself as a gendered dialogic, with a “male” narrative juxtaposed with a “woman’s” narrative to produce a textual discussion on the issue of narrative mode. Since dialogical narration is associated in this novel with Esther’s “woman’s” text, Bleak House itself can be read as a “woman’s” novel— “other” to the nineteenth-century convention of the single, hegemonic narrational voice. Once the dialogic collapses and only the “woman’s” voice remains, Bleak House no longer represents itself as “other” but as a conventional novel, with the usual Victorian ending and the relegation of the female narrator to a proper female role. If by this strategy Dickens intends to deconstruct Esther’s narrative authority at the same time he appears to grant it—thereby preserving the male hegemony in relation to the novel as genre—his own purpose is deconstructed in the act.38 As Lynette Felber points out, the lack of closure contained in Esther’s last, unfinished sentence creates a form of écriture feminine for the novel as a whole, and Esther successfully resists the conventions of narrational closure that the author tries to impose on her narrative in the final chapter: “A major feature of Esther’s closure as a feminine narrative is that it is openended at the same time that it would seem to embody the authority of the terminal position in the novel,” Felber writes.39 By granting Esther’s narrative final authority and then ending the novel in a “nonconventional” way, Dickens eventually does endorse the “woman’s” narration as “other,” in direct defiance of patriarchal conventions of realism that he imposes in the last chapter of the book. The function of the “woman’s” narrative in

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contesting symbolic systems is performed, rather than contradicted, in the mini-drama contained in the final utterance of the novel. By giving Esther the last word and putting that last word in an uncomfortably enigmatic sentence fragment, Dickens authorizes her “woman’s” discourse in exactly the same terms that women’s narratives are authorized in the other works examined in this study. He privileges her unfinished, in-flux “woman’s” narrative over all teleological “male” texts and subtexts—including and especially his own.

Woman and Polyphony in Mrs. Dalloway · 127

5 ^&

Performing Texts Woman and Polyphony in Mrs. Dalloway

In June 1923, when she was planning Mrs. Dalloway (then called The Hours), Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, “I took up this book with a kind of idea that I might say something about my writing.”1 In fact, during the twenty months before Mrs. Dalloway was published, Woolf was increasingly concerned—some have said obsessed—with saying something publicly in many forms about her own writing, usually in the context of and in opposition to the work of others, particularly other “groups.” In May 1924, she delivered “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” to the Heretics at Cambridge, attacking not only the limitations of Edwardian novelists like Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells but also, in the form of an “explanation,” the excesses of Eliot and Joyce so as to highlight by contrast what she herself thought literature should now be trying to do.2 In April 1925, shortly after “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” appeared in print, she published The Common Reader, her first collection of critical essays, including the much-anthologized “Modern Fiction,” which, like “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” conceptualized her vision of the novel specifically in contrast to the novels of the Edwardians as well as to the work of Joyce. It was at this time, too, that she was forging a personal and professional friendship with T. S. Eliot. Their association was sparked by a great deal of critical discussion, notably differences between Romantic and contemporary poetry and, more extensively, their conflicting views about Ulysses, which they were both reading at the time.3 Moreover, in 1923 the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press published The Waste Land, which brought Eliot to critical prominence, just as Ulysses was doing for Joyce.4 Coinciding with her numerous revisions of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” her reading of Ulysses and The Waste Land, and her discussions with Eliot, Woolf’s main project between 1923 and 1925 was writing Mrs. Dalloway. Even more significantly, her diary entries show how closely her time and attention were divided between Mrs. Dalloway and her compila-

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tion of The Common Reader. They were published just three weeks apart, only five months after “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” came out in print. These two writing projects, in particular, could almost be considered one ongoing enterprise, with similar deadlines and similar underlying rhetorical ends. Both define Woolf’s own concept of the novel as generic form in contrast to established conventions of modern literature. While many have pointed to Mrs. Dalloway as the most compact and accessible fictional illustration of Woolf’s theory of novel writing, my thesis is that this novel literally says something about that theory. It says it perceptibly and dialogically in the form of a rhetorical underargument, built into the narrative discourse, that places Woolf’s conception of the novel in direct textual opposition to renditions of contemporary and traditional literary forms. In other words, the narrational discourse of Mrs. Dalloway literally performs the tenets of a genre theory that its author was conceptualizing and articulating critically at the time she was writing it. As with my readings of earlier novels, I ground my analysis of Mrs. Dalloway in Bakhtin’s assertion that historically systemic to the novel as genre is the textual incorporation of literary parody into the language of the narrative on a level completely distinct from the narrational telling of the story itself. In this way the dialogical confrontation of different forms of literary genre becomes a rhetorical device for the questioning of literary convention and, by way of stylistic contrast, for introducing new forms without interfering with the fiction of the book. By Bakhtin’s theory, the oppositions between new and conventional literary language embedded in the narrational text of a novel enact not mere linguistic or narrational differences but a confrontation of entirely different belief systems concerning the representational values of literary language and how it should function in a text—the very issue dominated Woolf’s critical thinking at the time she was writing Mrs. Dalloway. Bakhtin writes, The narrator’s story or the story of the posited author is structured against the background of normal literary language, the expected literary horizon. Every moment of the story has a conscious relationship with this normal language and its belief system, is in fact set against them, and set against them dialogically: one point of view opposed to another, one evaluation opposed to another, one accent opposed to another (i.e., they are not contrasted as two abstractly linguistic phenomena). This interaction, this dialogic tension between two languages and two belief systems, permits authorial in-


tentions to be realized in such a way that we can acutely sense their presence at every point in the work.5 According to Bakhtin, the objectification of language, which creates on a textual level the dialogizing of different belief systems, foregrounds not only a heteroglossia of conflicting social, political, and cultural voices (as his theory is most often applied) but also the literary language in which voice itself is fictionally represented, and has been represented, in the novel genre. An explicit discussion about literary language itself, then, becomes part of the underlying heteroglossia of the work. In the historical tradition of the other novels discussed in this book, the narrative discourse of Mrs. Dalloway is rich with this kind of literary heteroglossia. It objectifies through imitation and parody Woolf’s own philosophical differences with modern/Romantic and Edwardian literary convention as well as with the experimentations of closer contemporaries like Joyce and Eliot. Built into the text of the early narrative of the novel are three parodies of literary metaphor, each one representing a stage in the evolution of language within the modern literary tradition.6 These parodies are then consciously gendered, incorporated into the textual dynamics of the narrational discourse of the two main male characters, Septimus Smith and Peter Walsh, and set against the “woman’s” narrational text associated with Clarissa Dalloway. Through this opposition, Woolf creates a subtextual critical argument juxtaposing her own version of privileged discourse, which she explicitly represents as “woman’s,” against conventionally privileged patriarchal discourse, which she renders parodically and tangibly as “male.” The interchange of literary voices is foregrounded in the narrational character zones of the three major characters, each zone representing one or more variations of a different kind of genre discourse. This discourse presents itself structurally as an independent textual debate that not only reflects the kinds of comparative critical thinking Woolf was engaged in while writing the novel but also is explicitly gendered. The language of the narration that surrounds the character, in other words, resonates with a particular “voice” of literature, a voice that is identified, in the fiction and in the rhetorical underargument, as either male or female, canonical or “new.” The discourse surrounding Septimus Smith objectifies conventions of discourse for poetry, Romantic and Eliotic. The discourse surrounding Peter Walsh objectifies specific contemporary narrational conventions in the novel, Edwardian and Joycian. And the discourse sur-

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rounding Clarissa Dalloway, in contrast to both, represents Woolf’s own vision of radial, lyrical narration in the novel, integrating poetry and prose as she envisioned the “new novel” would do. Because most of the narrating of Mrs. Dalloway is in the mode of free indirect discourse, the narration surrounding each character is rendered in the voice of that particular character. But because the third-person narration persists no matter whose point of view is being reflected (there is always a mediating narrator present), the basic level of narration remains constant throughout, creating polyvocal narration and, in turn, heteroglossia within the texture of a single narrative fabric.7 Although the polyvocality built into the narrational line of Mrs. Dalloway does correspond to the voices of specific characters in the story, the genre discourse that surrounds the characters operates independently of the story in which they take part. The foregrounded discourse acts out the author’s critical genre philosophy solely within the progression of the narrative text, separate from the acting out of the fiction. The novel’s position in regard to the various discourses that create narrative polyphony is not neutral, however; it reflects a valuative attitude toward the character doing the focalizing and toward the literary discourse embedded in the focalizing process.8 Dorrit Cohn explains that one significant feature of free indirect discourse (or what she calls “narrated monologue”) is that the character whose discourse is represented is also implicitly judged, in the absence of direct narrative commentary, by the quality of the narrative voice assigned to that character. “[N]o matter how ‘impersonal’ the tone of the text that surrounds them, narrated monologues themselves tend to commit the narrator to attitudes of sympathy or irony,” she writes. “Precisely because they cast the language of a subjective mind into the grammar of objective narration, they amplify emotional notes, but also throw into ironic relief all false notes struck by a figural mind.”9 In discussing this narrative mode in Mrs. Dalloway, Ben Wang further notes that since all characters are constructs, any attitude of irony toward a particular character would logically not be toward the subjective person of that character but toward the idea(s) suggested by the characterization.10 My own conclusion is that on a purely textual level such irony would almost have to render itself in the form of parody, objectifying with an attitude the discourse that identifies itself with a character’s “idea.” It is only through an exaggeration of discourse that the narrative attitude can manifest itself without direct narrational intrusion. The surface narration of Mrs. Dalloway clearly contains thematic parodies of targeted social dis-


courses, particularly through the language associated with minor characters like Dr. Bradshaw, Lady Bruton, Miss Kilman, and Hugh Whitbread. At the same time, the textual dynamics of the novel enact, independent of that social satire, parodies of kinds of narrational discourse. These parodies are posed in contrast to Clarissa’s implicitly approved “woman’s” discourse in order to create a very biased underargument on the subject of narrational discourse itself. In identifying a separate rhetorical, textual dialogic in the narrative of Mrs. Dalloway, my intention is not to present it as a reading (or even as a deliberate misreading) of the whole novel and its narration. Every point that I offer about this underargument is legitimately contradicted by important critical analyses of the major line of narration of the fiction, all of which see the narrative impulse behind Mrs. Dalloway to be an effort to unify, not juxtapose, the various disparate elements of the book, to show life in terms of what Woolf called “a single thread.” Rather than assuming their juxtaposition, for example, most critics note the strong similarities among the three major characters, particularly Clarissa and Septimus. Jean O. Love claims that all three characters share a “preexistent unity” that permeates the narrative of the whole novel.11 Reuben Brower and J. Hillis Miller, among others, identify Woolf’s use of recurrent metaphor, including the metaphors I contrast below, as the major method by which she attempts to create narratively a single, unified whole, and James Naremore and Geoffrey Hartman point to the novel’s “seamless” structural design as its primary narrative feature, contradicting my assertion that narration patterns distinctly change according to which of the three major characters is focalized.12 I do not disagree with any of them. What I am arguing for is the existence of an underlying narrative strategy, one that calls attention to itself and which, in conjunction with the narrative that unifies the novel, simultaneously “disunifies” it. Recent criticism by Edward Bishop and Pamela Caughie on the unifying tactics in Mrs. Dalloway points explicitly to the exhibitionism of these tactics to argue that the reader’s awareness of technique is essential to Woolf’s textual strategy.13 Caughie asserts that the linguistic, structural, and symbolic devices used to create a sense of unity are experienced by the reader both as effects and as technical constructs. She demonstrates how Woolf builds into her unification strategy an emphasis on technique as technique and how this strategy becomes implicit in the act of reading the book. Clearly, the foregrounding of the processes by which unification is achieved has to undermine the “seamless” quality of the narrative itself,

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disrupting textual effects of unification by calling attention to the ways in which those effects are achieved. Linda Hutcheon identifies what she calls this “narcissistic narrative” or “process made visible” as characteristic of high modernist fiction. She argues that a reading of narrative technique into the fiction is not a deconstructive activity, as earlier critics would have it, but an integral part of the representational function of the narrative in modernist (and postmodernist) texts.14 This is precisely the point that I am making about the textual metafictional underargument in Mrs. Dalloway. While this subtext functions narrationally to represent specific kinds of discourse, it also calls attention to itself as argument. In this way, it works to disunify the larger narrative. It builds into the surface representation of unity between characters an underlying representational opposition between them. The narrative itself is thereby “modernized” or deromanticized. Along with a pervading sense of unity, Woolf creates “that sneer, that contrast” which she believed characterized modern life and which she envisioned for the novel as form. Before narrational character zones are formally identified, the autonomy, dialogizing, and subject matter of the author’s rhetorical underargument are established textually as Woolf introduces the specific kinds of established literary language that will later be represented and targeted as patriarchal, embodied as “male.” This occurs in an opening movement where, by working imitation and parody of metaphor from three literary perspectives into her narrational prose, she dramatizes the serious limitations of the major types of literary symbols that are conventional in modern literature. The narrational emphasis on symbol rather than character in this first sequence is self-evident. As the focus of attention on Clarissa’s morning walk shifts from the flowers in Mrs. Pym’s shop to the motor car traveling down Bond Street to the aeroplane writing letters in the sky, these objects become the organizing factors of the narrative. In the process, the dialogical underargument focuses on the historic transformation of the “literary symbol” from Romantic metaphorical expression of private experience to Edwardian social emblem to Eliotic language device, the three major types of metaphor that Woolf saw dominating modernist poetics at the time. Heteroglossia is achieved in this opening sequence by the contrasting styles of narrating that surround each symbol in the text. Flowers, apt trope for representing Romantic metaphor, are the first objects of focalization in the opening movement of the narrative. The discourse surrounding the description of the flowers in this progression is drafted in self-consciously Romantic language and rendered in a single


long paragraph with two distinct grammatical sequences, each performing a separate rhetorical point.15 Here and in the sequences that follow, the focalized object, rather than the focalizing agent, determines the quality of narration. Although Clarissa Dalloway serves as both focalizor and focalized in this paragraph—since the narrative is focused on her and it is largely her point of view that limits the scope of the third-person narration—the poetic discourse contained here is distinguishable from the kind of Woolfian lyricism usually associated with Clarissa’s privileged narrational zone. While Woolf’s obvious fondness for the Romantic makes her portrayal of its writing here more an imitation than a parody, she is still treating Romantic discourse dialogically. The paragraph begins with the statement “There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilacs; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises.” This immediately establishes flowers as the object of focalization that will determine the quality of the discourse to follow. The next sentence can with some license be read with the deliberate cadence of a poem, one that combines contemporary diction with Romantic sensibility, in imitation of modern poetry in the Romantic tradition: “Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half-closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness.” Narratologically, this sentence also serves to instill a momentary confusion in focalization, which has heretofore been solely and unambiguously assigned to Mrs. Dalloway; we are not certain how much of this is Mrs. Dalloway’s viewpoint and how much Miss Pym’s. This blurring of point of view itself dramatizes metaphorically the symbolic capacity of the flowers to promote intimacy between two people, momentarily to fuse perspective and in this way connect two corresponding consciousnesses, which might also be said to define Romantic metaphor as kind. The next sentence consists of a brisk, prosaic modern simile (“And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked”) followed by a final long sentence of exaggeratedly Romantic diction. The modern transition sentence, deliberately framed in metaphorical form, calls attention to the contrast in language between the modern and Romantic at the same time that it offers a kind of parodic imitation of contemporary poetry that seeks to combine

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the two styles, paradoxically establishing as both dialogical and representational its relationship with the discourse that follows: [A]nd all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses. (13) In this passage, Woolf imitates the style and spirit of Romantic discourse by fusing the excessively pretty description of flowers with Mrs. Dalloway’s imaginative response to them. This textual imitation is rendered as self-contained description, a space of respite from the momentum of the story line (such as it is) and complexities of narrative consciousness. Woolf may thereby be suggesting metafictionally as part of her underargument that despite its beauty and intrinsic, self-defined value, Romantic poetry has become for modern readers a kind of purely linguistical phenomenon, lovely and comforting but of little or no substantive connection to the events of their personal lives and internal evaluations. In “The Narrow Bridge of Art,” an essay published just two years after Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf does in fact talk directly about the incapacity of Romantic poetry to assimilate and be assimilated by the modern mind: Feelings which used to come single and separate do so no longer. Beauty is part ugliness; amusement part disgust; pleasure part pain. Emotions which used to enter the mind whole are now broken up on the threshold. . . . But the emotion that Keats felt when he heard the song of the nightingale is one and entire, though it passes from joy in beauty to sorrow at the unhappiness of human fate. He makes no contrast. In his poem sorrow is the shadow which accompanies beauty. In the modern mind beauty is accompanied not by its shadow but by its opposite. The modern poet talks of the nightingale who sings “jug jug to dirty ears.”16 (Note the direct reference to line 103 of The Waste Land.) Although Woolf’s complaint about Romantic poetry depends upon a Romantic oversimplification of it—in fact, her description of the “modern mind” best describes Blake’s dialectic of contrary states—her point is to


assert an essential incongruity between Romantic poetry and modernism based on the definitional limitations of Romantic metaphor. She goes on to suggest, as T. S. Eliot does, that the modern mind is too unempathetic to understand and modern life is too diverse to be understood in the language of recurrent poetic symbol, which as word-trope is constitutionally incapable of containing the prosaic discourse that makes up the modern social consciousness: “Thus when we ask poetry to express this discord, this incongruity, this sneer, this contrast, this curiosity, the quick, queer emotions which are bred in small separate rooms, the wide general ideas which civilization teaches, she cannot move quickly enough, simply enough, or broadly enough to do it. Her accent is too marked; her manner too emphatic.”17 Woolf’s call for a level of discourse designed to appeal to a larger, essentially disintegrated social audience was, in a sense, answered by contemporary Edwardian writers, whose work she describes in her criticism as being definitionally “social” in style and scope. The problem with the Edwardians as she saw it, though, was that their literature was inherently too social, too preoccupied with superficial (“materialistic”) objects and emotions, to be constitutionally capable of addressing, as Romantic poetry could, the “life or spirit, truth or reality, this the essential thing” that was also vital to the modern experience. This assessment spurs her parody of Edwardian literature in the second movement of the opening sequence of Mrs. Dalloway. Unlike the flowers, the motor car that suddenly attracts Mrs. Dalloway’s attention gets its symbolic value not from its own aesthetics or its link to poetic tradition but from its power to unite momentarily the various people looking at it, people who communally, if separately, speculate about the person inside and what the car might “mean.” With the change in symbol as focalized object, the narrative language also changes from an imitation of Romantic writing to a dialogical parody of the Edwardian literary style. The transformation of the narrative discourse from the Romantic to the Edwardian is again made subtly, if very self-consciously, within the space of a single paragraph (14). It begins with a prosaic statement (“Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other”), establishing an everyday “modern” context for the discourse to follow. This same sentence, however, abruptly, incongruously, and absurdly segues into exaggeratedly poetic diction reminiscent of Woolf’s earlier imitation of the Romantic style: “passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s

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sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly.” In this way, the sentence reminds us dialogically, through a contrast in the language that comprises it, of the essential incongruity between Romantic diction and the prosaic reality of modern city life. At the same time, by introducing the motor car in this overtly “poetic” way and by attributing to it, or the rumors about it, the unifying power of traditional Romantic metaphor (“upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly”), the narrative endows the modern motor car with symbolic status that would not, as it would with flowers, seem intrinsically appropriate to it. Once that status is established, the discourse of the transition paragraph makes a final abrupt generic shift, this time to a parody of Edwardian social discourse, which Woolf renders here as a form of jingoism.18 This parody, also set in direct dialogical contrast to the imitation of Romantic discourse, dramatizes rhetorically and performatively the serious disintegration of language that can occur when Romantic metaphor (too personal, broad, and incongruous though it may be) is transformed into social cliché, which Woolf points out elsewhere is a consequence of the emerging Edwardian literary view. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew. (14) The private, intuitive, symbolic interaction instigated by the flowers in Mrs. Pym’s shop is replaced in this passage by the assumption that metaphor is a kind of emblem that must stand for something meaningful; the communal effort that brings all the disparate people together is merely guessing what that meaning might be. At this point, the narrative briefly introduces Septimus Smith, who, while he responds to the motor car symbolically, is incapable of interpreting it in the healthy communal spirit of the others looking on. The narrative text then continues—in direct contrast to Septimus’s discourse—its parody of Edwardian cliché: But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England,


of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known! (16) No single character’s point of view is being expressed. The language cannot be attributed to Clarissa Dalloway, nor can the voice be located with some anonymous onlooker as much of the novel’s early narrational discourse can; rather, the passage has the posture and the authority of a mediating, “omniscient” narration. Critics have pointed out the distinctly idiosyncratic voice of the outside narrator on those few occasions when it does speak.19 Here we see that this voice is capable of humor, irony, and sarcasm, which is of course what parody involves. One function of the rhetorical pose of the narration in dramatizing its underlying argument is, then, to give the novel its sense of play. By assigning the foregrounded narrational parody to the point of view of the outside narrator, Woolf also points out that this type of language play is, if not authorial, at least authoritative, part of its legitimate social commentary.20 Woolf’s parody of Edwardian literary language, and dialogically its literary belief system, immediately calls to mind her thesis statement in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which sets her view of the novel against that of her Edwardian contemporaries: “I believe that all novels . . . deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire that the form of the novels, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.”21 This statement, in conjunction with the parody of the motor car in this opening sequence of Mrs. Dalloway, suggests that although Edwardian literature does fulfill a “social” unifying function (it brings together dissociated elements of society by inspiring a common response), it fails to touch or to reflect the modern consciousness. Due to its inability and unwillingness to portray or engage the modern mind, it makes life superficial and interpretation a guessing game. “That is what I mean by saying that the Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use,” Woolf writes in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” “They have laid enormous stress on the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.”22 In speculating who might be in the motor car, even Mrs. Dalloway can only come up with the obvious: “It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dallo-

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way, coming out of Mulberry’s with her flowers; the Queen. And for a second she wore a look of extreme dignity standing by the flower shop in the sunlight while the car passed at a foot’s pace, with its blinds drawn. The Queen going to some hospital; the Queen opening some bazaar, thought Clarissa” (16–17). In contrast to the spiritual and linguistic beauty of her unconscious interpretive interaction with the flowers, Clarissa’s response to the motor car actually deflates its symbolic impact and at the same time reduces her own status as interpretive consciousness. To change the modern mind, Woolf suggests, literature must somehow be made more actively to engage modern thinking. This is, of course, also the point behind Eliot’s insistence in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) that contemporary literature be “difficult”: “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into his meaning.”23 But while Woolf obviously agreed with Eliot’s depiction of the complex needs of modern civilization and his call for literature to respond to and challenge those needs, she also strongly disagreed, at least in theory, about the need for literature to be “more allusive, more indirect” (in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she translates this as “obscure”). Particularly, she would argue with Eliot’s view of poetry as language dislocated into meaning. It is this point which is parodied dialogically next in this opening sequence of Mrs. Dalloway. The transition in the object of focalization from the motor car to the skywriting—the literal dislocating of language into the sky—is abrupt and, because of its placement, unpleasantly jarring. Woolf ends her parody of Edwardian literature with a paragraph that implies, by its style and its spirit, that the very clichéd sentimentality that characterizes Edwardian literature does somehow make it capable of reaching, in a limited but important way, the heart of the prosaic modern consciousness. On seeing the car, she writes: Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed quite suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing—poor women waiting to see the Queen go past—poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War—tut-tut—actually had tears in his eyes. A breeze floating ever so warmly down the Mall through the thin trees, past the bronze heroes, lifted some flap flying in the Brit-


ish breast of Mr. Bowley and he raised his hat as the car turned into the Mall and held it high as the car approached; and let the poor mothers of Pimlico press close to him, and stood very upright. The car came on. (19–20) The short paragraph that follows contrasts with this one so sharply that the progression out of the Edwardian and into the modern, as it is acted out in the transformation of the discourse, appears less progressive than violent and rude: “Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky!” (20). The quality of this narrational intrusion neatly parallels Woolf’s critical assessment of Eliot in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” where she indicates that the root problem with his linguistic innovations might best be summarized (and, for the purposes of her essay, forgiven) as youthful bad manners.24 “Again with the obscurity of Mr. Eliot,” she notes: I think Mr. Eliot has written some of the loveliest lines in modern poetry. But how intolerant he is of the old usages and politeness of society—respect for the weak, consideration for the dull! As I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book.25 The crowd’s response to the obscurity of the skywriting (rendered as in the prose passage in terms of language dislocated into air) is virtually the same as it was to the more obvious symbolism of the motor car. Although the language of interpretation is dramatically, humorously different, the collective interpretive impulse is still to guess at meaning, which is the only response the metaphor will allow: “Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up. “Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchly, like a sleep-walker. (20) The gibberish of these responses on one level, of course, contrasts diametrically with the stale, patriotic clichés that the motor car invokes (al-

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though with both the onlookers exhibit the same soulful satisfaction with their own explications), but neither works to engage the mind in the way that both Woolf and Eliot separately thought modern metaphor should. By having the whole crowd endeavoring, as individuals, to read the letters in the sky, Woolf allegorizes a modern communal effort to make sense of dislocated language, the point of metaphor that Eliot himself advocates; as parody, however, this allegory also emphasizes Woolf’s critical complaint against Eliot. After all the speculating, when the word TOFFEE finally emerges as definitive, one can only echo Woolf’s assessment of both Joyce’s and Eliot’s linguistic innovations: “But what a waste of energy!”26 Since Mrs. Dalloway herself does not witness the skywriting—it is given over to named but unknown onlookers—the focalized viewpoint, which had been humanized by our understanding of her, is itself dispersed and abstracted just as the symbol is. In this way Woolf emphasizes that Eliotic poetry, while appealing to the human intellect in a manner that Edwardian literature does not, equally fails to address the human consciousness. Like Edwardian literature, it suffers the loss of the Romantic.27 Immediately after this initial sequence, Woolf transfers the locus of her genre parody from static literary symbol to a narrational discourse reflecting the consciousness of specific individual characters. In the process, the parody itself, while still entirely textual, becomes more “humanized,” more sympathetic. Hutcheon asserts, in general terms, that when parody occurs intertextually—even if the intention is to supplant one text with the other—the relationship between the two embodied texts does not by definition have to be a hostile one. If a writer parodies prevailing literary convention in order to introduce a new narrative form, the specific strategy grants legitimacy to the new form by placing it, literally, in juxtaposition with established literary style. The new style of narrative forces itself into the realm of established literary tradition, and this, in effect, validates both the new text and the tradition that now contains it.28 Since the practice of intertextual parody is itself an established technique in the novel, adopting this particular narrative stratagem also reinforces the integrity of the parodied text. It sets it up as a reputable model for comparison and thereby preserves its historical importance. (Consider, for example, what Woolf has done for Bennett.) “Even in mocking, parody reinforces; in formal terms, it inscribes the mocked conventions onto itself, thereby guaranteeing their continued existence,” Hutcheon concludes. “It is in this sense that parody is the custodian of the artistic legacy, defining not only where art is, but where it has come from.”29 This same communal spirit charac-


terizes and is performed by the rhetorical underargument of Mrs. Dalloway. Through discourse associated with characters of whom she is essentially fond, Woolf parodies literary conventions that she also values. She thereby demonstrates that her rhetorical ambition is not to ridicule but to emphasize, in comic and dramatic fashion, the incompatibility of those conventions with the new configurations of the “modern mind.” The narrative in the opening parodic sequence, for example, enacts the serious and sad possibility that Romanticism has become an anachronism in modernist poetics. This occurs primarily through the transitionary role of Septimus Smith—a character who personally, thematically, and textually embodies the Romantic idea.30 The introduction of Septimus occurs just as the narrational focus shifts from Mrs. Pym’s shop to the backfiring of the motor car. The peculiar incongruity of his response to that event and to the skywriting that follows dramatizes almost allegorically the absolute inability of the Romantic imagination to cope with the conditions of modern metaphor. In both cases, Septimus, in a parody of the Romantic sensibility, personalizes the symbolic implications of the focalized object. He does this most emphatically with the motor car, as he substantiates the metaphor by taking himself to be the symbol everyone is looking at: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at . . . ?” (21). His response to the skywriting, however, is to assume the organic capacity of the symbol itself to embody and through its beauty communicate a real, substantive truth—in other words, to literalize the Keatsian ideal. Obviously the absurdity and the humor of this depend upon our awareness that the aeroplane writing which Septimus is romanticizing is actually vulgar advertising, a point emphasized fictionally and textually by the dialogical placement of his internal discourse against the others’ guessing at the letters in the sky: So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible clarity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks. (41–42)

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The inability of the Romantic imagination to respond to the modern metaphor as language device is dramatized in Septimus’s simple dismissal of the significance of the “actual words” of the skywriting as unimportant to his symbolic experience. In this context, the repetition of the word beauty, the definitive word, one could say, of Romantic philosophy, serves dialogically to contrast the larger symbolic value of language in the Romantic tradition with the immediate, localized use of language in contemporary modernist works. The next time focalization shifts to Septimus, his discourse represents a textual fusion of Romantic and modernist poetry that heretofore had been strictly contrasted. In this way, the literary discourse associated with Septimus comes to encompass all poetry, not just alienated Romanticism; the Romantic and modernist are still juxtaposed but within Septimus’s own narrational zone.31 Woolf also becomes more obvious in her parodying of poetry as a genre by including implicit and direct allusions to real Romantic and modernist poetry: He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music should be made visible was a discovery) and became an anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shepherd boy’s piping (That’s an old man playing a penny whistle by the public-house, he muttered) which, as the boy stood still came bubbling from his pipe, and then, as he climbed higher, made its exquisite plaint while the traffic passed beneath. This boy’s elegy is played among the traffic, thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up into the snows, and roses hang about him—the thick red roses which grow on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself. The music stopped. He has his penny, he reasoned it out, and has gone on to the next public-house. (68) Here the two styles are conjoined through the interweaving of Romantic allusion with modern diction and urban experience at the same time that the pronounced contrast in level of diction keeps them textually and dialogically juxtaposed. Roses, traditionally and in this novel a metaphor for Romantic metaphor, “grew through his flesh,” literalizing under the guise of Septimus’s psychosis the Romantic synthesis of man and nature. This


image is then juxtaposed to music “clanging against the rocks,” a strong reference, particularly in view of the first sentence of the next paragraph, to the opening movement of the section “What the Thunder Said” of The Waste Land. Next, out of the sounds of traffic comes the shepherd’s piping (a phrase that in the context of genre discourse might well suggest Blake’s “Introduction to the Songs of Innocence,” where the birth of poetry is defined in those terms), which then evolves into the music of a “penny whistle by the public-house.” Although the repetitive emphasis is on the piping and the roses, these are, in Septimus’s conscious mind, metered and integrated into the sounds and sights of present-day London, creating a single textual whole, capsulated in the sentence “This boy’s elegy is played among the traffic, thought Septimus.” In fact, the evolution of the passage into this sentence could be seen to demonstrate Woolf’s view of the process by which metaphor in modernist poetry is technically conceived. If this is the case, we must also note that the final statement is not actually metaphoric in style. The “boy’s elegy” and the “traffic” do not compare but are simply independent elements of the same sentence, and this suggests the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of truly integrating modern prosaic diction into poetic form. Immediately after this, Woolf alternates paragraphs of modern and Romantic genre discourse, posing them in more direct dialogical opposition to each other but still implicitly conjoining them as “poetry” within Septimus’s personal narrational zone (68–70). The first paragraph begins with Septimus alluding to himself as a “drowned sailor on a rock,” an unavoidable reference to the drowned Phoenician Sailor of The Waste Land. The entire paragraph, in fact, is written in imitation of the Eliotic short, flat cadence: “I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest still; he begged.” The next paragraph imitates, by contrast, the self-consciously pretty diction, strong alliteration, and glorification of nature that characterize Romantic poetry: “To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out.” The paragraph ends with a direct reference to Keats: “[A]ll of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.” The next paragraph is Rezia saying simply, “It is time,” the abruptness and phrasing of which evokes The Waste Land’s “HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME.” (Septimus explicates the words of her statement as, ironically, “an immortal ode to Time”). In joining the

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Romantic with the Eliotic in this one character zone, Woolf identifies Septimus’s discourse progressively as artistically representing the whole genre of poetry, which is juxtaposed in the underargument to the whole genre of the novel. The dialogical opposition established between Romantic poetic diction and the diction of modern prose brings with it the peculiar implication that because of the irreconcilability of these two language systems within the modern consciousness, the viability of poetry as genre could, and perhaps should, be reexamined. In fact, Woolf’s thesis proclamation in “The Narrow Bridge of Art” is that given the conflicting, prosaic conditions of modern civilization and special complex needs and demands of the modern mind, poetry may no longer serve a legitimate function as an independent genre and may eventually be overcome, even “devoured,” by the novel as form: “Thus we are brought to reflect whether poetry is capable of the task which we are now setting her. It may be that the emotions sketched in such rude outline and imputed to the modern mind submit more readily to prose than to poetry.”32 She concedes (as she dramatizes in Holmes’s and Bradshaw’s attempts to “normalize” Septimus) that the transformation of poetry to prose will not be without cost: But can prose, we may ask, adequate though it is to deal with the common and the complex—can prose say the simple things which are so tremendous? Give the sudden emotions which are so surprising? Can it chant the elegy, or hymn the love, or shriek in terror, or praise the rose, the nightingale, or the beauty of the night? Can it leap at one spring at the heart of its subject as the poet does? I think not. That is the penalty it pays for having dispensed with the incantation and the mystery, with rhyme and metre.33 The fault too may be that the world no longer provides fresh images adequate for expressing feeling through poetry. When Septimus tries to respond to his wife’s misery, he is inhibited at least in part by the prosaic quality of his own metaphor coined from modern life—“Far away he heard her sobbing; he heard it accurately, he noticed it distinctly; he compared it to a piston thumping. But he felt nothing” (90). This represents yet another argument against the feasibility of transforming the Romantic into modernist poetry in the Eliotic mode. As Septimus himself comes to conclude that the capacity to feel is somehow dependent on the quality of language available for expressing it, his narrational discourse, though still characteristically inflated, begins to


achieve some of the authorial legitimacy heretofore implicitly privileged only to Mrs. Dalloway. Septimus’s psychotic perception that he is being destroyed by human nature, personified by Dr. Holmes, is actually repeated and confirmed by the “omniscient” narrator in its prominent three-page diatribe on proportion and conversion that appears alongside, and in some sense within, the same narrational zone.34 In its extended discourse, the “omniscient” narrator refers directly to Septimus in relation to his victimization by Holmes or Bradshaw twice as “the drowned sailor” and once as “the poet of the immortal ode,” thus confirming metafictionally that his personal destruction at the hands of the society’s newly established orthodoxy is also implicitly the destruction of poetry. Septimus also picks up the sarcasm of the outside narrator (“‘One of Holmes’ homes?’ sneered Septimus”), thereby achieving for himself a reliability of tone as well as viewpoint. Thus despite his personal neuroses, Septimus now becomes a parallel locus in the novel for an authorially reliable point of view. This legitimacy follows him into his final appearance, where he tries to normalize himself and his discourse by recasting (in the spirit of Mrs. Dalloway) his poetic vision into a renewed appreciation for prosaic things: “Why then rage and prophesy? Why fly scourged and outcast? Why be made to tremble and sob by the clouds? Why seek truths and deliver messages when Rezia sat sticking pins into the front of her dress, and Mrs. Peters was in Hull?” (142). The absolute irreconcilability of the last part of the last sentence with the diction and drama that come before it textually demonstrates, however, the impossibility of Septimus, and coincidentally of poetry, of ever self-transforming in this way; in the end, the novel suggests on different levels that both must inevitably self-destruct. If Septimus’s discourse (and his suicide) rhetorically insists that, try as it might, poetry cannot by its nature incorporate the “prose” of modern life, Clarissa’s discourse confirms that prose (in this case, metafictionally, the novel) has the capacity, and perhaps the obligation, to absorb the style and subject matter of poetry. “We have come to forget,” Woolf says of novelists in “The Narrow Bridge of Art,” “that a large and important part of life consists in our emotions toward such things as roses and nightingales, the dawn, the sunset, life, death and fate.”35 There is no question that, in contrast to Septimus’s viewpoint, Clarissa’s is inherently “realistic,” in both the personal and the literary sense of the term: “[W]hat she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab” (9). This view determines the quality of the diction of her internal and her external perspectives,

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both of which are conceived and narrationally expressed in concrete, physical, “realistic” detail. But there is also much about Clarissa’s narrative discourse that is essentially poetic—its lyricism, of course, but also its formal structuring scheme. Like Septimus, Clarissa feels from the beginning somehow romantically disembodied (“this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing— nothing at all”), but unlike him, she does not personalize her surroundings or assume herself to be the focus of all outside phenomena (“She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown”). Her narrative thereby dramatizes simultaneously both the transcendence of Romantic poetry and the “impersonality,” in the Eliotic sense, of modernist poetry without an identifiable split. Moreover, when Clarissa “narrates” internally about the past at Bourton, the structure of her narrative is radial rather than chronological; it centers on her memory of Sally Seton and “splashes” outward from there.36 Although her thinking is represented in prose and does tell a coherent story, the structure of her narrative is metaphoric rather than metonymic, as David Lodge distinguishes the terms, aligning itself formally more with poetry than with conventional prose narratives. As metaphor, events in Clarissa’s narrative function not as sequential parts of a larger whole but as comparisons and contrasts to other events, just as characters function in comparison and contrast to other characters—duplicating the basic structural pattern of Mrs. Dalloway.37 Nothing besides the title overtly indicates that Clarissa’s internal discourse is privileged in this novel, but the structure of her narrative does thereby achieve special metafictional status in relation to the whole book. In fact, when Virginia Woolf describes her critical vision of the “future” novel, she does so in concrete terms that also describe Clarissa’s style of internal discourse and, therefore, the particular discourse and structure of her dialogical narrational zone in Mrs. Dalloway: “It will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. It will be read, not acted.”38 Critics have thoroughly noted the lyricism that characterizes the narrative style of Mrs. Dalloway. My own point is that the kind of lyricism described by Woolf above—the combination of poetry and prose that she envisioned for the discourse of the novel as form—is not, as most critics suggest, continuous throughout the book. It appears only when Clarissa herself is the focalizing agent or on the rare occasion when other characters, notably Peter Walsh, internally reproduce her same style of discourse by momen-


tarily adopting, very explicitly, Clarissa’s particular disinterested frame of mind. The most sustained version of this “new” discourse is incorporated and rhetorically dramatized in Clarissa’s three-page, one-paragraph metered “attic” soliloquy. The paragraph begins: She put the pad on the hall table. She began to go slowly upstairs, with her hand on the bannisters, as if she had left a party, where now this friend now that had flashed back her face, her voice; had shut the door and gone out and stood alone, a single figure against the appalling night, or rather, to be accurate, against the stare of this matterof-fact June morning; soft with the glow of rose petals for some, she knew, and felt it, as she paused by the open staircase window which let in blinds flapping, dogs barking, let in, she thought, feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless, the grinding, blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out of the window, out of her body and brain which now failed, since Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. (30–31) Except for a brief introduction, the passage is one long sentence incorporating various levels of intensity and diction, presented with the cadence of poetry. Woolf uses this same technique in her critical genre theory when she mixes different kinds of discourse (poetic, prosaic, philosophical) and renders them all as one long statement, so as to dramatize stylistically the unique capacity of the novel to do the same thing. More important for the purpose of my argument, we can see how the variance in the level of Clarissa’s diction here differs from the variances built into the discourse of Septimus’s narrational zone. The “appalling night” is not placed in dialogical opposition to “this matter-of-fact June day” but is used to describe the day as Clarissa was feeling it—the cliché of “appalling night” being perfectly phrased to reflect the intensity of her mood and her momentary feelings of self-indulgence and melodrama. “Rose petals” do not juxtapose themselves to “blinds flapping, dogs barking” but describe her earlier perception of the day (attributed to “some”) now disturbed literally and figuratively by the intrusion of prosaic reality. And it is not linguistically nor realistically incongruous that Clarissa should feel herself “suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless” because Lady Bruton, “whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her”; this is precisely reflective of the level of jealousy, guilt, and self-pity that Clarissa is, reasonably or not, feeling about Richard and the luncheon at the moment. In

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direct dialogical contrast to Septimus’s internal monologues, where these same two styles of discourse function only as textual contrasts, here the Romantic and the modern function metaphorically, one phrase adding to and modifying the other. This way they work cooperatively to posit simultaneously, through the placement of language, an independent reality and Clarissa’s feelings about reality—thereby incorporating poetry into prose, just as Woolf envisioned for the “new novel” form.39 Recent debates on Woolf’s feminism have called particular attention to the ways in which her aesthetic principles are represented in gendered terms in her criticism, her novels, even her diaries.40 Much of this analysis is designed to demonstrate an argument for Woolf’s style as subversively and politically feminist. But critics have also turned to Woolf’s writing about literature to argue for her use of gender distinctions in identifying her own aesthetics in contrast to recognizably canonical forms. In A Room of One’s Own, for example, Woolf not only explicitly designates staid and stable literary conventions as being literally and figuratively “male,” setting them against the new evolving aesthetics of “woman’s” writing, but she also ultimately tropes this “male” discourse very specifically as Edwardian. As a result, she establishes a critical distinction that is more historical than it is biologically gendered.41 Susan Lanser points out that in essays like “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” Woolf’s target is not only Edwardian literary convention but also male modernism (only male authors are mentioned “smashing and crashing”). This, she says, demonstrates that canonical modernism was for Woolf also a “masculine enterprise”; both the Edwardian and the modernist represented the phallogocentric in the novel form.42 In Mrs. Dalloway this conjoining of Edwardianism and established modernism into the realm of patriarchy is dramatized dialogically and parodically for the novel genre in the narrational zone of Peter Walsh. More specifically, as underargument, Peter’s discourse is designed to contrast with Clarissa’s revision of Septimus’s narrational zone. In juxtaposition to Clarissa’s discourse, both Edwardian and Joycian novels suffer as narratives primarily because their prose fails to be “poetic” in Clarissa’s metaphorical way. With Joyce, Woolf says critically, the deficiency lies mostly in the limitations of his narrative scope and point of view. He cannot represent life metaphorically because his narrational discourse is so exclusively “centered in a self” that it cannot compare to anything outside that self. She attributes this fault indirectly to his technique: “Is it the method that inhibits the creative power?” she asks rhetorically in “Mod-


ern Fiction.” “Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centered in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond?”43 As a personality, Peter Walsh is characteristically self-centered, and this egoism, of the adolescent variety that Woolf attributes both to Joyce himself and to his fiction, infiltrates the narrative discourse of Peter’s character zone.44 When she renders Peter’s dream of the “solitary traveler,” Woolf most clearly imitates, as parody, Joyce’s use of third-person free indirect discourse. Specifically she mimics the narration surrounding Stephen Dedalus in the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses, and through this imitation she dramatizes what she saw as the essential difference between Joyce’s style of narrational discourse and her own.45 First, Stephen’s narrative: Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets. The cold doomed room of the tower waits. Through the barbicans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their blind bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer. Call: no answer. He lifted his feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon’s midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore’s tempting flood.46 One could say about this passage (as Woolf undoubtedly would) that its style appears poetic mainly because its sense is so difficult and so inaccessible to prosaic understanding. The beauty of the language, the mixing of levels of diction, the description of nature and the reference to the larger soul all suggest Woolf’s own lyrical narration. The deliberate coding of sense and diction to the character’s private scheme of thinking, however, focuses the discourse inward and directs our interpretive energies to translating the language of Stephen’s insulated mind so as to penetrate it alone. In other words, the discourse sounds universal, but it does not take one beyond the isolated “self.” The same language, style, and perspective characterize the discourse of Peter Walsh’s dream of the “solitary traveler.”47 This sequence momen-

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tarily depersonalizes Peter’s overtly self-referential discourse and point of view. It suggests ironically that Woolf considered Joyce’s mode of narration, despite its direct access to the “self,” to be inherently distancing and impersonal in effect: Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveler and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty now) as a shape that might be sucked out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands compassion, comprehension, absolution. (57). This passage not only is stylistically similar to the passage from Ulysses but it also contrasts with the style of Clarissa’s “attic” monologue. Although both Woolf passages appear self-consciously modernistic, they are not modernistic in the same way. Clarissa’s thoughts and emotions are expressed in terms of and grounded in concrete objects such as blinds flapping, dogs barking, Lady Bruton’s parties. Her discourse is therefore inherently metaphorical in style and form. The discourse surrounding Peter is phrased on the level of abstraction. Concrete comparisons are not built into his internal narrative, which means that its texture is not metaphorical as hers is. Woolf would say that poetry is missing from his prose. A contrast can also be made between this “solitary traveler” passage and Peter’s usual point of view and style of discourse. Rather than transforming life into modernist abstraction, Peter’s discourse most often serves to conventionalize it, a parody of the Edwardian literature that Woolf critically condemned. As Peter follows the young girl down the street, his fantasies are humorously ordinary—“Was she, he wondered, as she moved, respectable?”—and his scripts clichéd: “‘Come and have an ice,’ he would say, and she would answer, perfectly simply, ‘Oh yes’” (53). More pointedly, his observations about London, in contrast to the discourse of Clarissa’s observations on her own parallel walk, are often phrased in the same nationalistic jargon parodied in the opening sequence of the novel. For the purposes of the textual dialogic, this codes his narrational discourse as unmistakably Edwardian: “Admirable butlers, tawny chow dogs, halls laid in black and white lozenges with white blinds blowing, Peter saw


through the opened door and approved of. A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season; civilisation” (55). In many ways, Peter’s narrational discourse not only imitates the style of the Edwardian novel. It also performs Woolf’s arguments against narrative conventions of realism in the novel as generic form. Peter’s classical Edwardian sentimentality, his constant refrain about being or not being in love, overpersonalizes the discourse of “feeling” in his narrational zone of the novel, limiting its subject matter to the relationships between men and women.48 As parody, Peter’s internal narrative about his past at Bourton, very much the same in substance as Clarissa’s narrative but framed generically as a conventional tale of spurned love, illustrates Woolf’s critical complaint about linear narrative structure in the traditional, realistic novel. Unlike Clarissa’s “radial” narration of the same events, the structure of Peter’s narrative is conspicuously, self-consciously chronological in sequence, leading to a point of absolute closure at the end, a closure reinforced by its obvious melodrama: “‘Clarissa!’ he cried. ‘Clarissa!’ But she never came back. It was over. He went away that night. He never saw her again” (164). The artificiality of this closure, and by implication of the tidy sequence leading up to it, is textually and fictionally exposed several pages later when Peter reflects on how Clarissa behaved the “last time he was over” (178). The melodramatic ending of his story about Bourton is contradicted by the later facts of the case, for he did “see her again,” probably several times over the years. Another quality of Clarissa’s internal monologues that is conspicuously missing from Peter’s discourse (and by association the conventional realistic novel) is her impulse to invent credible and coherent metaphysical interpretations out of real-life experience. Deborah Guth recognizes this distinction in Clarissa’s response to Septimus’s suicide in particular and is seriously troubled by the novel’s endorsement of Clarissa’s metaphysical “revision” of his final act. Guth’s charge against Clarissa, and simultaneously against Woolf who implicitly validates Clarissa’s visions, is that when she derives meaning from the experiences of others, she reinvents those experiences into her own fictions and denies them their separate “realities.” The glaring discrepancy between Septimus’s pathetic plunge and Peter’s smug approval as the ambulance carries him off (“the triumphs of civilization”) serves to make Clarissa’s vision of meaning appear an act of spiritual acknowledgment, a true resurrection of Septimus from the oblivion to which he has been whisked. Similarly

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her denunciation of the converters, Holmes and Bradshaw, blurs the fact that she frees Septimus from their meanings only to impose her own. On another level, Woolf’s own use of external incident primarily as a catalyst for inner associative flow (a clear proclamation of subservience) and her technique of linking separate lives through simple mood or image pave the way for a climactic vision that bears little relation to the events it purports to interpret and legitimize: Clarissa’s sense of total identity with an unknown man. Finally, through her construction of this penultimate scene, Woolf herself appears to endorse the trans-subjective “truth” of her heroine’s vision. The lyrical intensity of the passage, the depersonalized rendering and absence of distancing devices twined with Peter’s affirmation of visionary triumph at the close of the novel all point in this direction.49 I quote Guth’s objection in its entirety because it encapsulates a larger contemporary critical grievance against literary modernism in general: the tendency of modernist epistemology to be rendered as subjective and metaphysical, achieving credibility from the intensity of its poetics, not from the representation of ethical codes. Whatever problems Guth and other critics have with modernist representations of truth as subjective and linguistic, however, Woolf herself embraced this concept and was very much an innovative part of its tradition. In Mrs. Dalloway, she performs the subjective “processing” of truth only in Clarissa’s discursive zone; it is conspicuously absent from the other narrational sites.50 On the level of generic underargument, Clarissa’s internal monologues represent Woolf’s vision of a new kind epistemological narrating, for this novel and for the novel genre, in dialogical contrast to other modernist forms. Her vision is not represented as a revisioning of the real experiences of others into metaphysical abstraction. Instead, it is performed as an empathetic process, whereby Clarissa achieves meaning for her own experience by transforming vague metaphysical concepts into concrete metaphorical terms. Admittedly, when Clarissa first hears of Septimus’s suicide, the only way she can internalize and thereby realize its magnitude within the context of her party is imaginatively to go through the fall herself, in a sense to turn his experience into her own: “Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay


with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness” (184). When she processes this literal identification into metaphysics, her “reading” of the experience is predictably absolute and trite, blotting out the details of the experience as “other” and obliterating rather than interpreting Septimus’s act: “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death” (184). As the scene progresses, however, Clarissa manages to transcend generalization by sequencing out of identification into a grammar of suppositions about his actual separate experience. With this transition Clarissa and her narrative move away from monolithic subjectivity into a state of speculative disinterest, one that produces a remarkably accurate summary of the events leading up to Septimus’s suicide: Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing your soul, that was it—if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that? (184–85) Guth argues that when Septimus jumps from the window, his final act is not “visionary,” as Clarissa translates it, but executed in “short spasmodic thoughts of panic.” However, Septimus clearly does see his action as symbolic, and therefore visionary, and he expresses this when he shouts out, “I’ll give it you!” As a character, Septimus is obviously not likely to analyze internally in clear and compelling argument, as Clarissa does above, exactly what motivates him to kill himself, nor “as one of the poets and thinkers” is he willing or able to do so. When Clarissa puts into prose what Septimus cannot describe in his own symbolic vocabulary and state of mind, she is doing interpretative service to his poetic discourse. Her discourse does not achieve the symbolic force, however, nor does it resound metaphysically as Septimus’s “I’ll give it you!” until she recasts its prose into a discourse of metaphor. The imaginative and discursive process by which Clarissa achieves metaphysical metaphor is not by projecting similarities between her life and experience and Septimus’, thereby usurping his experience and recast-

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ing it as hers. Instead, she articulates the fundamental differences between them, so that it is not his experience she is interpreting but her own: Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. But that young man had killed himself. (185) The sequence of this paragraph is from the larger metaphysical identity with Septimus, expressed in those vague metaphysical terms that actually obscure the metaphysic, to a recognition of the thing that distinguished her experience from his—the “immeasurable delight” of her everyday life. This revised metaphysic, rendered in more precise metaphorical imagery (“rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another”), is then expanded in the next paragraph: It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between people’s shoulders at dinner, seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window. This amalgamation of various levels of imagery in this passage—the one book on the shelf, the shock of delight at sunrise and sunset, the sky seen between people’s shoulders at dinner—achieves out of its stylistics the intensity of Romantic poetry as well as the credibility of modern prose. This conjunction creates an epistemological “realism” out of the process of Clarissa’s metaphysical thinking. The quality of disinterest at the heart of this process is then dramatized metaphorically in the next paragraph when she re-creates out of Septimus’s symbolic action a new “literary” symbol, one that ensues from the whole process of this interpretive sequence. It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she


looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! The old lady had put out her light! The whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. (185–86) The woman in the room opposite, with whom Clarissa had once identified in her own bleak loneliness, achieves larger metaphysical status when she reappears, literally and figuratively, in connection with Septimus’s suicide. This new symbol, emerging out of the process of Clarissa’s metaphysical interpretation of Septimus’s final act and perceived from a gaze of disinterest, is presented textually with the same rhythmic cadences and lyrical imagery of the previous sequence; at the same time, it commingles stylistically all the disparate elements of her discursive mind—the party downstairs, the suicide, the symbolic phrases repeated in various contexts in her and others’ internal monologues—giving metaphorical unity, at least at the level of text, to her own larger internal experience and to the novel as a whole. The symbolic figure emerging out of the process of Clarissa’s metaphysics into metaphor is revised out of the image of a man (Septimus) into that of the woman (in the room opposite). The textual construct of the “new novel” is again represented in explicitly gendered form. Gendered oppositions are still more problematic when they are articulated as theory in Woolf’s nonfiction prose. The obvious discrepancy between Woolf’s aesthetic vision of a “woman’s sentence” and her insistence that all good writing should be androgynous has always been particularly

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disturbing to critics.51 Lately, however, analysis of this contradiction seeks not so much to explain as to deconstruct it, and this new approach reveals interesting possibilities for the underargument of Mrs. Dalloway.52 Summarizing recent critical thinking, John Mepham suggests that when Woolf defines male and female in connection with literature, she is not making a biologically determined distinction but is defining “culturally differentiated constructions.” So when she proposes “androgyny,” she is not advocating a merging of the male and female but is insisting on the difference between them.53 Women writers are, he says, forced to be bilingual, to think and write both as women and as members of the established patriarchal order. This means that for Woolf, women’s writing is by necessity “androgynous,” separate from the male order of literature and culture while at the same time containing it.54 Along the same lines, Makiko Minow-Pinkney sees A Room of One’s Own as, in effect, a rewriting of “Modern Fiction.” She identifies the two elements of “androgyny” as distinguishing two generations of writers, not as a unified literary construct.55 The argument against Woolf’s use of biologically determined gender categories in her critical theory of androgyny is compelling. As essentialist oppositions, the absolutes Woolf determines between male and female in her explanation of the two parts of the androgynous mind represent the worst sort of conventional stereotyping. The female mind, on the one hand, is too emotional, too angry, too caught up with injustices to create good writing; the male mind, on the other, is too cold and impersonal to produce writing that is accessible to women. As critical metaphor, however, the merging of these categories into one produces a concept not of true androgyny but, paradoxically, of a working definition of Woolf’s authentic “woman’s sentence.”56 For Woolf, as for Brontë, “woman’s” writing was a discourse of analytical feeling, a disinterested but intense exploration of the recesses of self in relation to the world at large. This fits the description of androgyny as Woolf defines it in A Room of One’s Own, and it produces a discourse much like Clarissa’s.57 Woolf’s concept of “male” writing, then, was not actually part of her androgynous vision. It was conceived as a critically gendered metaphor for “woman’s writing,” or androgyny, to be set against. As Woolf says in her review of Dorothy Richardson’s novel The Tunnel: So “him and her” are cut out, and with them goes the odd deliberate business: the chapters that lead up and the chapters that lead down; the characters who are always characteristic; the scenes that are passionate and the scenes that are humorous; the elaborate construction


of reality; the conception that shapes and surrounds the whole. All these things are cast away, and there is left, denuded, unsheltered, unbegun and unfinished, the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, the small sensitive lump of matter, half transparent and half opaque, which endlessly reflects and distorts the variegated procession, and is, we are bidden to believe, the source beneath the surface, the very oyster within the shell.58 The emphasis on androgyny in both the Richardson review and A Room of One’s Own strongly suggests that for Woolf “woman’s writing” in the novel was not explicitly gendered for female use but representative of a new subversive style of narrating. It was available to novelists of both genders as an alternative to conventional, patriarchal forms.59 Indeed, unlike Septimus, toward the end of Mrs. Dalloway Peter does unconsciously change his style of internal discourse to achieve a level very near parity with Clarissa’s own narrational prose. This happens the last time he is extensively focalized, when he momentarily sees the world impersonally, solely in terms of its separateness and the “beauty” of its concrete, prosaic detail:60 It was not beauty pure and simple—Bedford Place leading into Russell Square. It was straightness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life. (163) Since Peter is given the “last word” of the novel (“It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”), the possibility that a permanent transformation has occurred in the quality of his discourse and the scope of his point of view is particularly important. It expands what might otherwise have sounded, in his male voice, like absolute closure to the fiction. As a conclusion to the novel’s underargument, it also dramatizes Woolf’s larger theoretical point—a point confirmed metafictionally in the openness of the ending— that the traditional novel as form, unlike traditional and modern forms of poetry, can still intrinsically evolve. Through the evolution of Peter’s narrative style, Woolf enacts the movement in Kristeva’s theoretical, strategic

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paradigm whereby the jouissance of the semiotic, usually identified with women’s discourse, overcomes the stasis of the symbolic and becomes the normative narrative text. Because this suggestion of transformation ends the novel, Mrs. Dalloway concludes in a state of openness and desire, associated with the semiotic. In Peter’s narrative voice it also textually represents the moment of convergence of the woman’s narrative voice with the male’s—in the spirit of androgyny that Woolf conceived for the novel genre.

The Function of Woman’s Narrative in The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover · 159

6 ^&

Recovering the Modernist Lawrence The Function of Woman’s Narrative in The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover

One of the major issues confronting scholars of D. H. Lawrence today is the general lack of respect given his work by the academy at large and by modernists and feminist scholars in particular. While Lawrence is clearly and comfortably ranked as a major writer in the forefront of the modern British novel, he is rarely treated as an important modernist in the tradition of Joyce and Woolf, and his doctrinal and fictional representations of women have for over a decade reduced his reputation to a status well beneath contempt in most feminist critical circles.1 The fault, it has always seemed to me, lies with Lawrence’s celebrity as the “dark priest” philosopher, established in the 1950s and 1960s, which is still flourishing and still largely determining the trajectory of most Lawrentian scholarship. Underlying this dominant view is the assumption that Lawrence uses elements of fiction to act out or speak directly to some larger metaphysical system of thought. This premise places him in conflict with the tradition of modernist poetics, where the linguistic strategies work to exclude philosophically didactic readings of text, and also with most feminisms, which condemn the metaphysical representations of women that monolithic philosophical readings of Lawrence must produce. What interests me for the purposes of this study is the possibility of a more immediate connection between the intensity of Lawrence’s antifeminist reputation and his rejection from the modernist canon, one that is not dependent on assumptions of scholarship but can be located at the level of text. In this regard I am struck by the manifest lack of attention paid to issues of narration in Lawrence’s fiction, particularly in light of the vast amount afforded the novels of his major contemporaries.2 Since most modernist authors shared the conviction that a novel’s philosophical designs be expressed structurally and narratologically, rather than directly and didactically, one cannot ignore issues of narrative in Lawrence’s novels

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without separating him from the field. His frequent use of female focalizors and women’s voices in the language of narration to articulate the meaning of the text obviously goes unrecognized if narrative technique is not scrutinized, and it is through their narrative functions that women in Lawrence manage to transcend metaphysical representations to take on important novelistic roles. Even granting that metaphysics are more at the heart of the Lawrentian novel than they are of the classic modernist text, the paucity of criticism on strategies for narrating epistemology in Lawrence’s fiction is startling, particularly within the context of early twentieth-century British modernism. Although there has always been fascination with metaphysical language in connection with Lawrentian philosophy, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways that Lawrence uses that language to create a novel.3 Recently this neglect has been remedied by a small number of critics who have applied Bakhtinian principles of polyphony to Lawrentian texts (as they have been applied, for example, to Joyce and Faulkner), and thereby aligned him with modernist strategies of narration and form. These analyses have served implicitly to reevaluate his representations of women, who, as characters posed in philosophical discussions with Lawrentian heroes, take an active part in the dialogics of the novels’ narrational debates. By Bakhtin’s theory, Lawrence represents metaphysic through narrative oppositions, which infiltrate every aspect of the novel— structure, style, dialogue, and characterization. By interacting with each other in various combinations on a purely textual level, these oppositions create open-ended, unfinalized, philosophical “discussion” in the novel without authorial intrusion or philosophical didacticism. David Lodge, Avrom Fleishman, and Wayne Booth have produced the major Bakhtinian readings of Lawrence, and all agree that one of his best and most neglected achievements as a novelist is his ability to portray metaphysics in the form of a dialogic, be it as double-voiced narrative discourse or as the actual exchanges between characters. These critics are thus able to acknowledge Lawrence’s philosophical thinking both as reliable doctrine and as process within the context of the living experience of the fiction.4 Particularly striking is the fact that Lawrence frequently uses women, narratologically and as characters, to pose his metaphysics as arguments in process, to present them in this dialogical way. Contrary to most feminist critics, I have always believed that Lawrence empowers women by giving them major roles in the narrations and so, at least in theory, granting them importance in determining meaning in the fiction of the novels. Never-


theless, it is clear to me that Lawrence’s use of women’s narrative texts to create gendered dialogics differs considerably from the writers whose works are examined in earlier chapters. Even though he may empower women by giving them voice, in most cases this voice is not strong enough to compensate for their representational, and narrational, roles as subservient to the Lawrentian heroes, who speak more for Lawrence in the books. In previous chapters I trace how the writer’s ambition for “woman’s” voice is effectively to challenge male discourse with a view to replacing it with something new, thereby representing through woman’s narration the process by which language itself is revolutionized. The model for this is Kristeva’s construct of the semiotic, a paradigm she sees operating so characteristically and systemically in the modern novel that it could almost be viewed as quintessential to the definition of modernist form. For Kristeva, semiotics, associated with though not exclusive to “woman,” represents the jouissance of a prelanguage state. This state is represented linguistically in the modernist novel in the form of genotext, a system of language operating on a purely textual level that is self-consciously revolutionary and metaphorical in style and scope. With genotext, sign and signifier are one; a word does not function to explicate an idea but the idea is contained within language and between words, much as in poetry. The phenotext, on the other hand, is the conventional narrative that encloses the genotext, giving it coherence and structure as a novel. The phenotext, usually associated with the “symbolic” or male, is also found to varying degrees in modernist literature, particularly in the frequent use of third-person free indirect mode of narration. According to Kristeva, the extent to which the phenotext is submerged in the narrative determines just how “modernist” and revolutionary the work is considered to be.5 To my mind, Lawrence’s novels unquestionably fit the Kristevan model. Some of the most interesting work being done on Lawrence recently is in the area of language, and there have been a number of fascinating and convincing studies on his epistemological representation of ideas as destabilizing metaphors in both his fiction and his critical prose.6 But with Lawrence, unlike Joyce and Woolf, these metaphors are worked into and in many instances buried in the novels by strong, chronological plotlines and authoritative narrative commentary. Phenotext thereby dominates over genotext, privileging patriarchal hegemonic narrative structures rather than the metaphoric language operating within them. More important, the genotext of the Lawrentian novel is invariably asso-

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ciated with the male. Moll Flanders, Clarissa, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Mrs. Dalloway all privilege woman’s discourse precisely because it subverts, and is shown to subvert, patriarchal forms of narration. In the gendered dialogics of Lawrence’s novels, the role of women’s discourse is functionally very different. While Lawrentian metaphysical language certainly challenges established language conventions for the novel as genre, within the actual fiction this “new” discourse is represented as authoritarian and is articulated by the Lawrentian hero. Questioned and criticized perhaps, it still remains essentially untouched by the discourse of women that attempts to subvert it. The voice of a woman in “dialogue” with a man is used as a way of interrogating a fixed set of Lawrentian revolutionary beliefs. By discoursing only on the level of and in the context of those beliefs, however, women inherently acknowledge their basic legitimacy as foundations for truth. Because the “new” language Lawrence introduces to the novel is portrayed as authoritarian rather than subversive, distinctions are made between him and his contemporaries that exclude him from the identifiably modernist movement to revolutionize language. This being the case, the narratological relations he establishes between men and women may be responsible for both the trajectory of feminist criticism against him and for his critical positioning outside the canon of high modernism, where “new” language strategies are usually represented in terms of the semiotic (or “female”) in a text. If we reduce his novels to their basic narratological and structural patterns, a clear dichotomy emerges. We can see just how closely Lawrence does, in fact, align himself narratologically with the larger modernist movement.7 At the same time, we can also see that this alignment is undermined in most cases by his metaphysical constructs of women in fictional and narrational roles. One characteristic of the modernist novel is the dialogizing of metaphysics through the juxtaposition of internal monologues. Voiced by characters with differing metaphysical perspectives, these interior monologues function intertextually to create epistemology that is nonauthoritative, unresolved, and continually interactive. Lawrence, contrary to his reputation, also conceived metaphysics in the modernist sense as epistemology in process, and he shared with his contemporaries the strategies for performing this idea dialogically in his work. In fact, the dialogizing of epistemologies in the Lawrentian novel is often literalized in the form of direct arguments between men and women, suggesting that women play an important role in keeping metaphysic in flux. Both Lodge and Booth focus


on Women in Love in their separate Bakhtinian readings of Lawrence, specifically the privileged exchanges between Birkin and Ursula, precisely because so much of the text consists of these gendered dialogues. Both critics, however, base their analyses on the assumption that the epistemological debates between these two characters are equal and, implicitly, that parity between genders creates the dynamics of epistemological process in the text. I believe that our experience of reading these dialogues does not support this interpretation. The narratological pattern of epistemological argument between Birkin and Ursula—as complex as the actual discussions may be—is decidedly monological: Birkin explains how he feels, how he experiences the world metaphysically, and Ursula tells him why he cannot and should not feel that way. This is a pattern that pervades both their direct dialogue and the narrative discourse and that reflects their separate meditations.8 Because neither side “wins” the debates and the disagreements do not overpower what is fundamentally in accord between them, it appears as if Lawrence were creating an equal metaphysical dialogic in the opposition between man and woman. But the only reason that metaphysic remains in flux is that Birkin stays open to new possibilities of interpreting the world and that he is able to resist Ursula’s attempts to finalize his thinking. Lodge points to the ending of Women in Love to demonstrate how Lawrence’s use of the dialogic (metaphysic rendered as dialogue) opens up the novel by leaving it doctrinally still in flux. For me, the passage reconfirms the opposite—Birkin’s openness in the face of closure imposed by Ursula, a pattern established throughout the novel, now extending beyond the text: “You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you?” “It seems as if I can’t,” he said. ‘Yet I wanted it.” “You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,” she said. “I don’t believe that,” he answered.9 Ending Women in Love on a note of unresolved dialogue may well, as Lodge maintains, leave the fiction open-ended, “still continuing,” but it does not do the same thing for the metaphysic. Lawrence’s suggestion in this concluding passage is that as Birkin’s experience changes so may the convictions he expresses here; in other words, his ideas are still in flux because he phrases his final conviction in that way: “It seems as if I can’t,” “I wanted it,” “I don’t believe that.” There is no suggestion, however, that Ursula, on her side of the argument, might also be “right.” Since Ursula is left finalizing (“You can’t,” “It’s false, impossible”) what Birkin is still ex-

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ploring, the dialogue is not equal, according to Lawrentian epistemology, and it does not function as an equal exchange to expand dialogically the metaphysic of the work. Lawrence’s critically neglected experimentation with dialogical spatial structures, structures built out of the narrational oppositions embedded in the text, is another strategy that closely aligns him both with Bakhtin and with modernist innovations in form. Like many of his contemporaries, Lawrence wrote primarily in the form of third-person free indirect discourse. The narration for the most part is not omniscient but represents the narrational voices of specific characters rendered in third-person, not first-person, form. By this mode, while there is a single narrative line running throughout the novel, it is formed by different narratives interacting dialogically within the texture of the overall narration. All of Lawrence’s major novels, like a surprising number of other modernist works, are formally divided into sections focalized by one or two characters. The internal voices of these focalizors function to determine the narrational language and the metaphysics of their particular sections. Intertextually, each discursive section contributes, in turn, to the larger metaphysical discussion of the novel by interacting dialogically with the narrative voices and consciousnesses dominating the other sections of the book.10 It is through this narrational interaction that the novel’s discourse is made dynamic and diversified and whereby spatial, polyphonic structure is created. The difference between Lawrence’s representation of structural metaphysics and his contemporaries’, however, is that with Lawrence these structures exist in conjunction with strong chronological plot sequences that are not found characteristically in Woolf and Joyce. These chronological sequences create competing temporal structures out of the events of the fiction, obscuring the less evident spatial frames. At the same time, the absolute metaphysical representations of women that often function to create epistemological structure in Lawrence also work to fix meaning in a way that is anathema to most modernist conceptions of fluid, dynamic form. The latter point is perhaps most apparent in Sons and Lovers, where the development of Paul Morel’s consciousness is linked metaphysically to his relationship with two women, each representing for him one of two dualistic ideas that are also reflected in the narrative style of the novel. Rather than adopting a polyphonic narrative structure as he does in later novels, Lawrence limits focalization, after some initial confusion, almost entirely to Paul. The polyphony comes in as Paul interacts with the two women,


who instigate different kinds of discourse in relation to his narrational zone and, consequently, create dialogical structure for the novel. The style and quality of language of narration in the first half of the novel (the “Miriam” section) contrasts dramatically with that of the second half (the “Clara” section), reflecting Paul’s assessments, his interaction, and his ultimate confrontation with each woman. The narrative voice of the “Miriam” section, whether or not it comes directly from Paul’s thinking, tends to be abstract and dogmatic, in keeping with Paul’s conception of Miriam as bodiless, as pure idea. We find, for example, such “objective” narrative commentary as the simple description of Walter Morel, that he had “denied the God in him.”11 The direct, uninterrupted dialogue between Paul and Miriam is phrased, even at its most personal, as the impersonal exchange of absolute, abstract ideas and metaphysical accusations. Their dialogue is often rendered in what Gérard Genette terms “pseudoiterative” form—“she would ask,” “she would ponder”—a technique that serves to make general even direct, concrete discourse. Conversely, the second half of the novel parallels Paul’s conception of Clara as a physical being, all body, “all woman there in the dark.” There is much more immediate dialogue on immediate private issues in the “Clara” narrative than there is in the “Miriam” section and almost no discourse between characters on abstract philosophical concerns. In contrast to the first half, the narrative of the second half of the novel, in keeping with Paul’s view of Clara, is marked by a vitality of physical description of character, landscape, and sexual experience, and more attention to conventional lines of plot. The style of narrative reflecting Clara’s “idea” juxtaposes dialogically with the style reflecting Miriam’s, then, to create a structural argument on the subject of metaphysical representation itself. While the duality built into the portrayal of the two women determines the duality of the narrative structure of the novel, their epistemological functions are fully demarcated by the male protagonist.12 It is Paul who establishes and then confronts the limitations of the metaphysical absolutes he has decided each woman embodies for him, absolutes he eventually finds stifling because they finalize the terms of his own evolving consciousness. Although both women complain about his insistence on finalizing them—indeed, from their sides, this is the issue of confrontation between them—Paul’s position, in both the fiction and the narrative, is for the reader authoritative, the one sanctioned by this novel. Because we recognize that Paul, as Lawrentian hero, is evolving experientially and metaphysically and because Lawrence through Paul’s perspective does not

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allow the women to evolve beyond the binary positions that have been constructed for them, Paul’s metaphysical discourse comes to represent the “new” language and the preferred language system for the novel as a whole. As characters, the women serve to interrogate Paul’s Lawrentian metaphysic at each stage of his development, and this criticism infiltrates the narrative discourse of the text; still, once Paul moves beyond that stage, each is deemed limited and subversive (by Paul and the novel) and eventually both are summarily dismissed.13 There is one area of structural representation where Lawrence fits not only into the modernist canon but also into the historical pattern of woman’s discourse explored in this book—that is the critical discourse embedded in the narrational system of two of his novels on the subject of the novel as genre. Linda Hutcheon maintains that the major theoretical epistemology explored on some level in all modernist fiction is a metafictional one.14 Because so many modern British novelists were fundamentally concerned with issues of language and genre and so many of them published essays calling for a revisioning of the novel form, an underlying discussion on the subject of the “new” novel is often built into the narrative structures through systems of stylistic oppositions performed on the level of text. Lawrence fits squarely within this modernist tradition. Besides writing prolifically on issues of language and genre in his nonfiction prose, Lawrence also performs and, in a sense, argues for critical positions in his novels. He does this by creating oppositions between kinds of language that infiltrate the narrations of texts to create dialogical debate on the subject of novelistic language itself. In The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, this critical discussion is systematic and pervasive, and it forms the governing metaphysical structure of the works. Study of Thomas Hardy, one of the more direct mines of Lawrentian critical theory, points to structure as the place for establishing the metaphysic of a novel: Because the novel is a microcosm, and because man in viewing the universe must view it in light of a theory, therefore every novel must have the background or the structural skeleton of some being, some metaphysic. But the metaphysic must always subserve the artistic purpose beyond the artist’s conscious aim. Otherwise the novel becomes a treatise.15 As this passage makes clear, the governing structural metaphysic of a novel cannot, by Lawrentian theory, be one that is also acted out in its fiction


(“otherwise the novel becomes a treatise”). In fact, a crucial element of Lawrence’s philosophy of the novel is that worked into its system of metaphysics must be the mechanism for undermining that system and contesting its validity as doctrine. “Yet every work of art adheres to some system of morality,” he also says in Thomas Hardy. “But if it be really a work of art, it must contain the essential criticism of the morality to which it adheres. And hence the antinomy, hence the conflict necessary to every tragical conception.”16 When this “antinomy” is performed narrationally as part of an underlying dialogical textual discussion on the novel as genre, the role of women, which for Lawrence always consists of interrogating and contesting epistemology, becomes integral to the ongoing metaphysical development of the text. In The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, women not only control a significant portion of the narrative discourse, but with their discourse they challenge established language systems represented by and through the major male characters. In this way, the women’s voices define, on a textual level, the valuative terms of the governing metaphysical structures of the works. Ursula Brangwen’s narrational discourse, which dominates the entire second half of The Rainbow, performs a “new” kind of language for the modern novel in direct contrast to, and confrontation with, the narrational language of the first half of the book. Ironically, much of the contested language in the first section of the novel actually represents the kind of experiential discourse usually associated with Lawrence himself. When the narration shifts in the second half to the “new” language system performed in the voice of a woman, Lawrence actually questions, in the form of gendered narrative, the relevance of his own authoritarian epistemology of language for the modern novel. Lady Chatterley’s Lover also divides itself structurally and narratologically into two sections, one dominated by Clifford Chatterley and the other by Oliver Mellors. The character primarily responsible for transmitting and thereby implicitly judging that male discourse, however, is Constance Chatterley. In an interesting gender reversal of Paul Morel’s metaphysical determinations of the women in Sons and Lovers, Connie’s discourse reveals the limitations of literary language associated with and performed by the major male characters of the novel, one of whom, as in The Rainbow, clearly speaks for Lawrence’s own deeply held convictions about the quality of language in the novel genre. With The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence therefore uses women’s discourse in the same fashion and to the same end as the other novelists I examine in this study. Women’s narrations provide “essential

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criticism” to patriarchal language systems, including Lawrence’s own, and this linguistical act of “revolution” creates an independent dialogical discussion on the level of text about new possibilities for the novel genre. Particularly interesting about The Rainbow in this light is that Lawrence wrote it in conjunction with his Study of Thomas Hardy, a work that investigates the place of the novel as genre in relation to a larger system of metaphysics and establishes the novel as a metaphysical concern. Robert Langbaum points out, unfortunately without explanation, that the Study of Thomas Hardy “provides the skeletal structure” of the final version of The Rainbow, a statement that paraphrases Lawrence’s description of metaphysic as “structural skeleton” in the Study itself. Langbaum maintains that the Study of Thomas Hardy was written so that Lawrence could “better understand himself as a novelist, to understand where he comes from and where he is going.”17 This same exploratory impulse to place the novel as a genre then becomes the structural metaphysic of The Rainbow, which is the specific novel to emerge immediately out of that larger theoretical investigation. The Rainbow can be read epistemologically and metafictionally as Lawrence’s effort to explore through his own novel the evolution of the novel as genre, where it comes from and where it is going, into its current form. Lawrence develops this theme entirely within narrational oppositions performed on the level of text. In this way, he creates a metafictional underargument in the novel that remains distinct from thematic issues raised by the fiction of the book. As he does with other novels, Lawrence establishes a structural blueprint for The Rainbow in its opening pages—in this case, along gender lines. The essentialist categories of gender that begin The Rainbow are what many readers justifiably find disturbing and didactic when viewed as allegorical statements of Lawrentian philosophy that are then played out in the story.18 As metafictional paradigms, however, the same generalizations, devoid of gender allegory and largely independent of the fiction, become not only palatable but functionally critical. They determine the dynamics of the style of narration that textually create the dialogical structure of the novel. Men are described as living life as pure experience—“It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved and opened its furrows to them, that the wind blew to dry the wet wheat, and set the young ears of corn wheeling freshly round about . . . their senses full fed, their faces always turned to the heat of the blood, staring into the sun, dazed with looking towards the source of generation, unable to turn around”19—and narration of the first section, dominated by Tom Brangwen, might be seen


metafictionally as performing this experiential “male” style of being and, concurrently, Lawrence’s own belief in a language that subordinates itself to the felt quality of experience in the novel form. Women, on the other hand, are in these opening pages generalized and thus represented as experience consciously conceived and uttered, and the second half of the novel, dominated narrationally by Ursula, can be seen metafictionally to perform the more modernist view of language that is conscious of itself and its role in representing the larger world: “The women were different. . . . [They] looked out from the heated blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen” (10). Between the Tom and Ursula sections is the part devoted to the marriage and narrative perspective of Will and Anna, who together and in opposition to each other focus this basic gendered dialectic onto intellectualized issues of sex and religion. One function of this intervening section, I believe, is to distinguish this style of discourse from Ursula’s, to confirm that a consciousness of language in relation to life is not the sort of abstract, intellectualized performance that Lawrence might have perceived in the linguistic strategies of his contemporaries, particularly Joyce. These three major narrational agencies—Tom, Will and Anna, and Ursula—create various bistructural metafictional combinations operating either in conjunction with or in opposition to one another to make up the dynamic, spatial design of The Rainbow. In the first half of the book, the “Will and Anna” narrative works in opposition to the narrative of the “Tom” section just before, one “arguing” for pure experience and the other for dogma. This duality is, in a way, resolved in the Ursula section that comprises the second half, where concrete, particularized experience is itself intellectually evaluated, consciously and artistically. At the same time, with both Tom and Lydia and Will and Anna, man and woman live in direct opposition to each other, with each couple creating a metaphysical duality that eventually resolves itself in a “third state” of sexual union and procreation. This kind of resolution is unavailable to Ursula because the conditions of modern industrialism and the new opportunities and roles for women make such reconciliation incongruous. Thus the first half of the novel, consisting of a kind of Blakean dialectic enacted separately and differently by both couples, is set off against the Ursula section, where such resolution cannot take place. The dialectic enacted by the men and women of the previous generations is thereby transformed into an unre-

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solved dialogic for Ursula and, in turn, for the structure of the novel as a whole. The metafictional argument implicit in this final structural movement into the dialogical is that this is the same course the novel must take if it is to be artistically and epistemologically viable in modern times. This is the argument that is implicitly performed and illustrated by the modernist dialogical structure of The Rainbow itself. The first structural movement is determined narratologically by Tom Brangwen. Although not always attributed directly to him, the discourse of the narrative reflects the qualities, and the limitations, of his personal point of view. Tom is from the beginning depicted as someone who feels life deeply but is incapable of articulating that feeling or conceptualizing what he thinks or believes. Unlike Ursula, who with full adolescent vigor investigates and interrogates every complexity of every life experience she encounters, Tom is described as having a “complete inability to attend to a question put without suggestion” (18). The narrative texture characterizing the “Tom” section of the novel, when he is focalized and/or the focalizing agent, is, by reflection, generally obtuse—dominated stylistically by short declarative sentences, statements of facts without analysis, simplistically broad metaphysical questions, and little or no dialogue or concrete physical description. In the following passage, for example, the narration rendering the simplicity of Tom’s analysis of his marriage to Lydia, including a very basic understanding of his own deep fears, creates a metaphysic within the narrative style of the novel that is primal and uncomplicated as well: He realised with a sharp pang that she belonged to him, and he to her. He realized that he lived by her. Did he own her? Was she here for ever? Or might she go away? She was not really his, it was not a real marriage, this marriage between them. She might go away. He did not feel like a master, husband, father of her children. She belonged elsewhere. Any moment, she might be gone. And he was ever drawn to her, drawn after her, with ever-raging, ever-unsatisfied desire. He must turn home, wherever his steps were taking him, always to her, and he could never quite reach her, he could never quite be satisfied, never be at peace, because she might go away. (58) Tom distinguishes himself from the other male Brangwens by his desire to intuit a larger metaphysical explanation of his own life experience. As the passage indicates, however, his efforts are thwarted and his narrational perspective prevented from fully realizing that metaphysic because he is


unable to intellectualize even the possibilities of what his experience might mean. The relationships, events, and feelings portrayed by the narrative in his section of the novel are more obliquely unfathomable than they might otherwise be, because the focalizing agent is constitutionally unable to interpret them speculatively with sophistication or clarity. A duality built into the texture of this section suggests that Lawrence wants to identify the vague, experiential narrative discourse associated with Tom as “male,” for the style of narration changes when Lydia is introduced into the novel. With Lydia, Lawrence brings into the narrative more concrete description, and whenever the narrative perspective shifts to Lydia’s consciousness, he allows the reinstitution from the opening of the novel of poetry into the prose. The paragraphs reflecting Lydia’s “woman’s” thinking are generally longer, and her feelings are revealed metaphorically rather than bluntly and obtusely. Under Lydia’s gaze, the narrative focus is momentarily on the real, recognizable, detailed natural world rather than simple thoughts and events: Summer came, the moors were tangled with harebells like water in the ruts of the roads, the heather came rosy under the skies, setting the whole world awake. And she was uneasy. She went past the gorse bushes shrinking from their presence, she stepped into the heather as into a quickening bath that almost hurt. Her fingers moved over the clasped fingers of the child, she heard the anxious voice of the baby, as it tried to make her talk, distraught. (51–52) Even within the narrative texture of this first section, then, Lawrence builds a metafictional opposition between men and women that will come to determine the larger stylistic structure of the book. The narrational discourse that reflects Lydia’s thinking enacts the process whereby experience is artistically transformed into literature, a process that is explored and dramatized more fully in the Ursula half of the book. As with Anna in the next section of the novel, however, Lydia no longer influences narrative language and perspective in this section once she gets married and starts bearing children—as if for the women in these earlier generations the act of procreation naturally replaces, or displaces, the conceptually creative impulse that expresses itself in words—so her stylistic contribution to the narration here is short-lived. Throughout most of the “Tom” section, Lawrence endeavors through his narrational style to emphasize that pure, inarticulate experience cannot and perhaps should not be artistically conceptualized or consciously articulated and analyzed; and he does

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this, with some notable exceptions, by keeping the focus as enigmatic and general as possible. The introduction of Will Brangwen into the novel shifts the narrative focus from Tom and Lydia first to Anna, then to Anna and Will. In “Girlhood of Anna Brangwen,” which serves as a structural transition, Lawrence builds opposition into the narrational style by paralleling young Anna’s experience, actual and subjective, with Tom’s. For example, both Tom and Anna as adolescents feel similar kinds of frustrations and alienation at school and evaluate internally in the same self-defensive way. Anna’s response, however, infiltrates into the narrative as an abstract, formalized, metaphysical mode of thinking and articulating—albeit a childish one—that strongly contrasts with the kind of narrational discourse describing young Tom as in the following passage on his problems with others at school: But when it came to mental things then he was at a disadvantage. He was at their mercy. He was a fool. He had not the power to controvert even the most stupid argument, so that he was forced to admit things he did not in the least believe. And having admitted them, he did not know whether he believed them or not; he rather thought he did. (17) Metaphysical complexity is built into the discourse of “Tom’s” narrative largely through his inability to analyze metaphysically. He simply represents the situation as it is, allowing contradictions implicit in his own feelings to stand unresolved. In young “Anna’s” narrative, these natural complexities are replaced by larger, formally metaphysical, abstract questions (all implicitly answered) and fierce, definitive judgments against those on the other side: She never felt quite sure of herself whether she were wrong, or whether the others were wrong. She had not done her lessons: well, she did not see any reason why she should do her lessons, if she did not want to. Was there some occult reason why she should? Were these people, schoolmistresses, representatives of some mystic Right, some Higher Good? They seemed to think so themselves. But she could not for her life see why a woman should bully and insult her because she did not know thirty lines of ‘As You Like It.’ After all, what did it matter if she knew them or not? Nothing could persuade her that it was of the slightest importance. (95)


Through these parallel responses, the basic differences between Tom and Anna reveal themselves metaphysically as a “dialogue” built into the narrative style of the novel. The “woman’s” narrational discourse not only contrasts textually with the male’s. It also articulates itself as discourse that interrogates and contests established values rather than allowing itself (as Tom’s discourse in some sense does) to be determined by them. Tom is explicitly contrasted with Anna, as character and as narrative focalizor, not only by his inability but also his unwillingness to try to conceive and articulate formally what his experience might mean. His refusal to conceptualize verbally identifies “talk” as her province and further emphasizes the gendered duality between them: “Sometimes Anna talked to her father. She tried to discuss people, she wanted to know what was meant. But her father became uneasy. He did not want to have things dragged into consciousness. Only out of consideration for her he listened” (99). Yet at Anna’s wedding, the point at which he turns Anna over to Will and, in effect, the narrative perspective over to the new couple, Tom is very insistent about articulating publicly the meaning of his abstract doctrine of marriage, the metaphysic that has evolved out of his own experience and, consequently, the metaphysic of the novel to this point. Lawrence gives several pages to Tom’s speaking endeavor. “For the first time in his life,” the narrative points out explicitly, “he must spread himself wordily” (128). Although the actual discourse of Tom’s philosophy of marriage is simplistically phrased and made awkward by constant audience interruptions, it is also conceived and articulated as a system of greater metaphysics—“‘If we’ve got to be Angels,’ went on Tom Brangwen, haranguing the company at large, ‘and if there is no such thing as a man nor a woman amongst them, then it seems to me as a married couple makes one Angel’” (129). This reflects a strong determination to comprehend his own experience in metaphysical form before surrendering point of view to the next generation. It is as if Tom, and the novel itself, must speak personal experience as doctrine in order to depersonalize it and thereby make the metaphysic of pure experience, in the form of dialogue, a dialogical part of the greater whole. In immediate contrast to the epistemology of primal experience governing the first section of the novel, the metaphysical preoccupation of the second section, once Anna marries Will, is represented largely in terms of abstract, intellectualized oppositions that are implicitly gendered, with each side deliberating constantly, inwardly and aloud, about the way things should be. He wants her to be possessed by him; she wants to pos-

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sess herself. He wants religion to be mystical and inarticulate; she wants it to be what she can see. The narration of this section, because it repeats and reflects the abstract metaphysical thinking of these characters, is also predominantly abstract in style. This style is illustrated and in some sense performed within the fiction of the novel by the direct discourse between the characters on the subject of abstract ideas. In this sample exchange over a book of religious prints, Anna and Will articulate their basic, intuitive beliefs about life in the form of oppositional dialogue on the subject of Christianity. In the process, they displace their private, unconscious metaphysics into argument in a way that could never have occurred between Tom and Lydia in the fiction of the first section of the novel, where thinking (and dialogue) are, in the Lawrentian sense, experientially conveyed. Ironically, this gendered dialogue, unlike the debates between Birkin and Ursula in Women in Love, is truly dialogical, because author and novel endorse neither side: “I do think they’re loathsome,” she cried. “What?” he said, surprised, abstracted. “Those bodies with slits in them, posing to be worshipped.” “You see, it means the Sacraments, the Bread,” he said slowly. “Does it!” she cried. “Then it’s worse. I don’t want to see your chest slit, nor to eat your dead body, even if you offer it to me. Can’t you see it’s horrible?” “It isn’t me, it’s Christ.” “What if it is, it’s you! And it’s horrible, you wallowing in your own dead body, and thinking of eating it in the Sacrament.” “You’ve to take it for what it means.” “It means your human body put up to be slit and killed and then worshipped—what else?” They lapsed into silence. His soul grew angry and aloof. (149–50) What is remarkable about this passage in terms of its role in the larger structural opposition of the book is that it fictionally performs a direct dialogue between the metaphysics of the first two sections of the novel at the same time that it structurally represents only one side of that duality. Although Anna articulates her point of view in the form of abstract debate, in pointed contrast to the experiential style of indirect discourse in the “Tom” section of the novel, she actually speaks directly for that experiential way of perceiving and interpreting in this particular argument in opposition to the abstracting and symbolizing of experience directly promulgated by Will. Thus Will and Anna, as characters in the fiction, make


personal, dialogical, and unresolved the metafictional issues that are static, dialectical, and absolute in the larger structure of the novel—creating a dynamic tension between fiction and structure in the total metaphysics of the book. This formal interaction of fiction and structure, in turn, itself dramatizes metafictionally the more precise terms of Lawrence’s critical theory of form. In the Study of Thomas Hardy he writes: The adherence to a metaphysic does not necessarily give artistic form. Indeed the over-strong adherence to a metaphysic usually destroys any possibility of artistic form. Artistic form is a revelation of the two principles of Love and Law in a state of conflict and yet reconciled: pure motion struggling against and yet reconciled with the Spirit: active force meeting and overcoming and yet not overcoming inertia. It is the conjunction of the two which makes form. And since the two must always meet under fresh conditions, form must always be different. Each work of art has its own form, which has no relation to any other form.20 Lawrence establishes that metaphysic in the novel genre is realized not only through dialogical oppositions in narrative structure but also in a concurrent oppositional relationship between the stasis of that structure and the dynamics of the fiction it envelops. This theory, rendered textually in the metaphysical arguments between Will and Anna, is also represented structurally in the juxtapositioning of their section to the “Tom” section of the book. The first half of The Rainbow, which encompasses the first two narrational parts of the novel, ends with the death of Tom in the flood—death by drowning being a familiar modernist symbol to indicate the overcoming of the old by new life. The second half begins with Lydia talking to Ursula, discoursing to her on the subject of relations between men and women, so that in effect woman is turning the narrative over to woman in the transitional phase of the structural metaphysic of this book. In light of this transition, the metaphysical debates between Will and Anna in the second section (as well as the narrational differences between Tom and Lydia in the first) enforce the idea that the greater metafictional dichotomy of this novel is based on and articulated by an opposition of gender. Earlier, Lydia explicitly perceives that her life experience with Tom will require her to create for herself, and implicitly for him, a new form: “She would have to begin again, to find a new being, a new form, to respond to that blind, insistent figure standing over her” (39). In The Rainbow the

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thematic evolution of life out of old patterns into modernity is represented fictionally and narrationally in terms of the evolution of a particular woman, Ursula, into a new form for herself, for this novel and, representationally, for the novel genre. Ursula’s narrative consciousness takes over almost exactly, to the page, halfway through the book, setting her “woman’s” narration in direct dialogical opposition to the first two sections. Metafictionally, then, Lawrence is deliberately using woman’s narrative point of view to suggest that the “new form” for the novel is one set in implicit contrast to existing patriarchal conventions of genre—including, by implication, his own.21 Although the first two sections of The Rainbow are obviously exploring within the form of a novel larger dualistic epistemological concerns, the narrational styles of both sections together contribute to a lack of the novelistic in the texture of the first half of the book that the “Ursula” narrative of the second half, in contrast, provides. Anna as a child, in keeping with her metafictional role as “woman,” has a wonderfully original sense of language and a talent for inventing words: “We don’t live with you,” she bellows at Tom. “You—you’re—you’re a bomakle” (67). Young Ursula, however, is described as having a fascination with the larger relations between words and things. Her intuitively metaphorical way of conceiving language, which inherently formalizes words as literature in this half of the novel, becomes increasingly conscious as she matures. An adolescent infatuation with the wording of her own saying, “If I were the moon I know where I would fall down,” demonstrates how deliberately Ursula’s internal prose stresses the formal connection between feeling, trope, and grammar: “It meant so much to her that sentence. She put into it all the anguish of her youth and young passion and yearning” (308–9). This metaphorical sense of language brings into the narration a firm grounding of metaphysics in the language of the concrete world. In addition, it produces a new linguistical realism for the novel that contrasts markedly with narrative texture of the first half. In contrast to both the obtuse vocabulary of intuition dominating the “Tom” section and the language of the intellectual abstraction characterizing the “Will and Anna” section, for Ursula and concurrently for her narrative, “words must have a weekday meaning, since words were weekday stuff. Let them speak now: let them bespeak themselves in weekday terms. The vision should translate itself into weekday terms” (264). Ursula’s narrative consciousness transforms the structural metaphysic from a dialectical opposition between two static belief systems into a selfgenerating dialogic continually in flux. As a person, she has an intuitive


honesty that causes her constantly to evaluate her own character in relation to life as she experiences it; and this self-evaluation carries over into the narration, in contrast to the earlier sections, as narration constantly questioning itself. She also habitually interrogates her own moral experience and the lessons she has inherited or been taught. This inquiry, perhaps because of her better education and world experience, is conducted on a level of complexity heretofore absent from the narration, allowing for full, complex exploration of those experiences and beliefs for the whole book. When Ursula thinks about Christianity in connection to her own experiential, “weekday” life, her internal discourse is conducted on the same terms as the argument between Will and Anna cited earlier. But in place of the straightforward dualistic argument between her parents, where one is repelled by the other for humanizing religion or for symbolizing it, Ursula’s meditative discourse subsumes both sides. It actually reshapes the strict binary terms of their opposition into a private, ontological, unresolved personal struggle: The passion rose in her, for Christ, for the gathering under the wings of security and warmth. But how did it apply to the week-day world? What could it mean, but that Christ should clasp her to his breast, as a mother clasps her child? And Oh, for Christ, for him who could hold her to his breast and lose her there! Oh for the breast of Man, where she should have refuge and bliss for ever! All her sense quivered with passionate yearning. Vaguely she knew that Christ meant something else: that in the vision-world He spoke of Jerusalem, something that did not exist in the everyday world. It was not houses and factories He would hold in His bosom: nor householders nor factory-workers nor poor people: but something that had no part in the week-day world, nor seen nor touched with week-day hands and eyes. Yet she must have it in week-day terms—she must. . . . So she craved for the breast of the Son of Man, to lie there. And she was ashamed in her soul, ashamed. For whereas Christ spoke for the Vision to answer, she answered from the week-day fact. It was a betrayal, a transference of meaning, for the vision world, to the matter-of-fact world. So she was ashamed of her religious ecstasy, and dreaded lest anyone should see it. (265–66) Because Ursula is alone in her metaphysical debates, her language, logic, and scope are not limited by rhetorical terms of argument. As a result, her meditations achieve an originality of self-generating thought and expres-

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sion not possible in the intellectualized debates between her parents. This quality pervades the narrative of much of her section of the book and creates within a single polysemous field a self-questioning epistemological discourse that is both experientially and intellectually complex. We are also aware throughout her section that Ursula herself is always in process, always developing. While the earlier narrative focalizors come to “realizations” about their marriages and themselves, these discoveries are rendered in the form of final epiphanies, stratified in the novel through the symbol of the rainbow. There is no sense of ongoing development in the minds of these characters, nor in consequence of their narrational points of view. As metafiction, Ursula’s constant questioning and challenging of her own epistemological absolutes in the light of her real-life experience, conversely, reflects and enacts narratologically Lawrence’s own conviction that the fiction (or life) of a novel should always relate to its own governing philosophy in that interrogatory way. Ursula, moreover, is described from the beginning, specifically in contrast to Gudrun, as “the one for realities”; and the narrative of her half of the novel reflects her keen appreciation and awareness of life’s realism. With Ursula’s narrative consciousness, specific social ideological concerns are introduced into the text—including the modern educational system, industrialism, women’s rights, and the evils of war—all explored directly in the fiction in terms of Ursula’s real experience, not simply expounded upon in her focalized mind and consciousness. At the same time, the narrative notes: “It pleased her also to know that in the East one must use hyperbole, or else remain unheard; because the Eastern man must see a thing swelling to fill all heaven, or dwindled to a mere nothing, before he is suitably impressed. She immediately sympathised with this Eastern mind” (258). Social and cultural issues are explored ideologically throughout her narrative in the mode of conventional realism (consider the description of her teaching experience in Ilkeston, for example); but Ursula is also given free reign to rant and rave inwardly, with typical adolescent intensity and self-contradiction, about her own developing unrooted metaphysical and ideological beliefs. Certainly Ursula’s personal metaphysics, as well as her political ideas about the social world at large, mirror Lawrence’s own. Because the presentation of her metaphysical beliefs is so melodramatic, so changeable, so self-contradictory, however, her narration manages to resist the didacticism that might destroy this novel metafictionally as a “novel” in the generic sense that Lawrence critically defines the form. Whenever political


ideology is overtly addressed by Ursula in characteristically Lawrentian terms, it is always expressed Socratically in the form of dialogue with another character—for example, Ursula’s argument with Skrebensky on the evils of democracy and monied aristocracy (426–28) where she clearly adopts both Lawrence’s personal political beliefs and his rhetorical style. In this section of the novel, formal Lawrentian philosophy is presented as developmental and changeable, or else it is rendered in the form of a fictional dialogue between Ursula and someone with a contrary point of view; it is never articulated didactically as authorial dogma within the narrational fabric of the book. In fact, the melodrama and self-contradiction implicit in the doctrinal absolutes built into Ursula’s own developing metaphysical consciousness actually allow the narrative to laugh at the intensity of those beliefs and thereby further to undermine their validity as doctrine. For example, Ursula’s dramatic moment of clarity as she looks at life under the microscope in Dr. Frankenstone’s laboratory (a setting that emphasizes the joke) sparks this exclamatory epiphany: “Suddenly she had passed away into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. . . . Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity” (409). Moments later, after she is suddenly reunited with Skrebensky, Ursula realizes with equal force and hyperbole a new epiphany, one that unconsciously but explicitly and absolutely contradicts the first: “She was no mere Ursula Brangwen. She was Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order. All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to individuality?” (412). Ursula’s flagrant, nonapologetic contradicting of her own absolutes is very reminiscent of Lawrence’s rhetorical strategy in his critical prose. This strategy used in both places, I believe, deliberately to argue against the metaphysical validity of “absolutes” in life and literature.22 When Lawrence undermines the credibility of Ursula’s metaphysics by mocking their intensity in this narrational way, he also parodies retrospectively the intensity of the metaphysics expressed internally and externally as doctrine in the first half of the novel. Indeed, through Ursula, Lawrence dramatizes parodically the possibility that his own metaphysics, enacted mostly in the “Tom” section, are themselves incongruous to modern life and by association to the modern novel that must reflect that life. After Tom decides to marry Lydia, he knows intuitively and absolutely by instinct, blood-consciousness if you will, that even though she barely knows him she will accept him as her husband; and not surprisingly she does. “He

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was a long time resolving definitely to ask her to marry him. And he knew, if he asked her, she must really acquiesce. She must, it could not be otherwise. . . . ‘Yes I want to,’ she said impersonally, looking at him with candid, newly-opened eyes, opened now with supreme truth” (40, 44). The reliability of the metaphysic built into the language of this implicit exchange is seriously undermined as epistemological doctrine by a similar situation in the second half of the novel. When Anthony asks Ursula, without any previous romantic or sexual contact, to marry him and come live on the farm, the absurdity of such a marriage ever actually coming to pass for the modern generation is patently clear in Ursula’s response, which, as rendered, almost directly mocks the earlier scene: She realised with something like terror that she was going to accept this. She was inevitably going to accept him. His hand was reaching out to the gate before them. She stood still. His hand was hard and brown and final. She seemed to be in the grip of some insult. “I couldn’t,” she answered involuntarily. (386) This comparison suggests both metaphysically and metafictionally that because the culture has changed, the novel itself cannot convey “real” experience as intuitive and communication as nonverbal and still remain credible as literature. In fact, to attempt to represent life in this manner may risk making the novel form itself obsolete, even ridiculous. What Lawrence believes in and loves philosophically, his faith in the vital inarticulateness of living experience, paradoxically may no longer work for the novel as a “living” form.23 The sexual union through marriage that resolved, and in the process opened up, the relationships in the first half of The Rainbow is portrayed in the second half as a form of absolute closure that would be impossible for Ursula and metafictionally for the kind of novel she implicitly narrates. (In fact, when Lawrence is “finished” metaphysically with characters like Winifred Ingers and Skrebensky, he deliberately marries them off.) As Ursula sees Skrebensky in the final stages of their affair, “he seemed added up, finished. She knew him all around, not on any side did he lead into the unknown. Poignant, almost passionate appreciation she felt for him, but none of the dreadful wonder, none of the rich fear, the connection with the unknown, or the reverence of love” (438–9). This sentiment could as well express the metaphysical relationship of the second half of The Rainbow to the first, and it points to the end of the novel, which, rather than finalizing the story line, actually works to prevent fictional and structural closure.


The final paragraph reinstitutes the symbol of the rainbow, this time represented through the vision of a woman alone. The governing trope now encompasses the whole industrial world, instead of simply a man and a woman and child. The ending thereby opens up the symbol, and the novel, to a newer, physically more expansive reality of life—in direct contrast to its structural function of closing off the relationships of the earlier couples. The quality of language describing this new symbol is transparently ugly and unfixed (“the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still”), especially in contrast to its earlier manifestations, linguistically undermining the legitimacy of symbolic resolution itself. More important, by representing dualistically both the decay and the “new germination” of the evolving industrial world, the final paragraph contrasts dramatically and directly with the lovely, coherent pastoral representation of Marsh farm that begins the book. This creates a spatial, dialectical relationship between the beginning and the end of the novel that itself prevents closure. Because this dialectic frames and can therefore never be resolved within the structure of this novel, the duality between the two represented worlds is transformed into an ongoing state of dialogue. It produces for the fiction an overall structural metaphysic in dialogical form that can best be described as modernist. Lawrence designs a similar metafictional structure for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, dividing the novel into two opposing sections, each performing on a textual level a different system of language to create a larger “bilingual” stylistic argument on the theoretical subject of the novel itself. What distinguishes this metafictional frame from the one constructed in The Rainbow is that the basic stylistic opposition is represented by the two main male characters, with the narrational discourses of these men transmitted primarily through the narrational consciousness of a woman. The function of woman’s discourse in the narrative is, as a result, far more problematic than it is in The Rainbow. Both the parodied language and the “new” language that replaces it are essentially male constructs, and the woman’s narrational role on one level is simply to provide a smooth transition from one style to the other by delivering them both in a single narrative voice. As in his other novels, however, Lawrence also conceives the “woman” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover as the one who questions and contests male values, and as in The Rainbow, when the woman is the narrational agent and the subject is the value of language, the metaphysic becomes language questioning itself. The primary, if not the only, way this kind of interrogation

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can occur on a textual level is as parody, and it is through Connie’s “woman’s” narration that parody in both sections is conveyed. Unlike the other novels in this study, then, woman’s narrational discourse in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whatever the author’s intentions, works simultaneously to transmit and to ridicule both linguistic convention and the novel’s own regenerative language system. Connie’s narrative discourse exposes and parodies both the “conventional” novel and the “new” novel that seek to supplant it, each of which is represented in this novel as “male.” Lawrence establishes a structural blueprint for Lady Chatterley’s Lover very deliberately about a third of the way into the book, when he interrupts Connie’s timid introspection about Mrs. Bolton’s gossip to discourse in his own voice on the novel as genre: After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of fine respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally pure. Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels.24 Because the narration so consistently confines itself to the perspective of individual characters, this intrusion of the author’s own voice, juxtaposing two sides of a critical duality and interjected at a point where it would naturally suggest certain parallels within the work itself, is disruptive. Yet on the basis of this structurally awkward interruption, Lawrence determines for us the basic metafictional structure of this novel, deliberately italicized in the text as “passional” versus “conventional.” He divides the book into two consecutive parts, one represented by Clifford and the other


by Mellors, with the chapter that includes this authorial interruption providing a rough breaking point. If Clifford Chatterley immediately provides a reliable personification of the “conventional” novel, we are keyed to accept Mellors as the embodiment of its “passional” alternative. It is Connie, in turn, who transcends Clifford’s world to fulfill herself in the world of Mellors, and in that way her experience closely parallels the promise of the living novel: In completing the transition from Clifford to Mellors, her sympathies are, indeed, led into new places, “in recoil from things gone dead.” The opposition between the “conventional” and the “passional” novel, as represented by these two characters, is in turn, concurrently reflected in an opposition of stylistic narrative patterns that change from the first movement of the book to the second. The narrative developed in the first part of the novel emphasizes the same quality of language and tone that Clifford himself might have used in his stories, implicitly illustrating and at the same time parodying the limitations of Clifford’s artistic style. Conversely, the narrative developed in the second part reflects the character of Mellors and represents in all its textual elements the “passional” novel that Lawrence clearly prefers. As a writer, Clifford feels somehow compelled to express himself in metaphor, a compulsion that infiltrates the narrative associated with him in the novel. Clifford’s particular brand of metaphor, however, is not one where the concrete attaches itself to the abstract to make a concept visible. Instead, it is one that imposes figurative values on a notion of concrete experience which is for him only a mental abstraction. In his conversation with Connie about the nature of marriage, for example, Clifford reduces what sounds like Lawrentian metaphysics into debilitating simile in order to justify his wife’s conceiving a child outside of a marriage that is per force without sex: “The long, slow, enduring thing—that’s what we live by—not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another. That is the real secret of marriage, not sex: at least, not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange the sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist: since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.” (44; emphasis added) The jarring, inappropriate simile that Clifford comes up with to minimize the physical part of the intimacy he just so eloquently described creates

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instead an irrevocable incongruity between metaphor and the experience it is used to represent. Not only does the cliché effectively invalidate the sincerity of the metaphysical language that precedes it, but the vitality of sex, which to Lawrence is the most vital of life experiences, is also effectively eliminated by the trope. The thematic preoccupation with figurative reduction in the “Clifford” section is simultaneously performed in his part of the novel in the style of the narrative prose as Lawrence reproduces, and at the same time effectively parodies, the extremes of “conventional” metaphor by working the same “ready-made words and phrases” directly into the narration. The narrator says, for example, of Clifford’s life and literary ambitions—and this is delivered from Connie’s perspective, not Clifford’s: “It was no good being really good and getting left with it. It seemed as if most of the ‘really good’ men just missed the bus. After all you only lived one life: and if you missed the bus, you were just left on the pavement, along with the rest of the failures” (63). Not only is the metaphysic packaged metaphorically in terms of “missing the bus,” but the cliché is stretched to its limits, leaving the subject—with just one life to live—standing on the pavement as well. More significantly, Lawrence begins the novel with a curious list of sententious aphorisms: Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. (5) Thus he establishes an immediate paradigm for narrative patterns in the first part of the book. Convenient cliché replaces vital metaphor within the fabric of the narrative itself, so that the text reflects, at the same time that it fictionally creates, the tired, “conventional” spirit of Clifford’s world. The narrative prose of the “Mellors” section of the novel is also heavily metaphorical. Lawrence depends completely on the use of metaphor, in fact, to articulate what he wants to emphasize as essentially inarticulate experience; and this specific use of metaphor becomes the genotext for the novel as a whole. Unlike the figurative prose that governs the “Clifford” section, where one experience is merely represented in terms of another that is more common, the metaphors characterizing the “Mellors” section have a narrative function because they create meanings that do not otherwise exist.25 Take, for example, the experience of Connie’s first orgasm:


Then as he began to move in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her, rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite, and melting her all molten inside. (133) The immediate experience depicted is itself built out of the amalgamation of separate similes, whose meaning is entirely defined by the specific, concrete experience they serve to represent. The unity of metaphors that give meaning to the whole experience, in turn, comes not from the aptness of phrase, or the comparison of the entire experience to another more common one, but from a commingling of sound and sensation, lending coherence, through repetition and onomatopoeia, to the single experience it represents. There is immediacy about the style here, as if it were struggling to come up with just the right comparisons for communicating this single, isolated moment as it is happening. The metaphors that evolve out of this linguistic performance are not—like Clifford’s “going to the dentist”—ones that could as easily be applied to any other experience. The reader is able to share Connie’s experience only through an effort to assimilate the language used to convey it. The metaphors are not common enough to allow us automatically to identify with what Connie is feeling, nor do they allow for the exchanging of Connie’s experience with one that is already familiar. In this part of the novel, as in the “Clifford” section, it is primarily through Connie’s consciousness that the textual metaphors are created, not the male character’s whose metaphysic they represent. It is therefore surprising that the importance of Connie’s position has been so consistently overlooked by critics and that she has in effect become for many the symbol for Lawrence’s characteristic reduction of women to meaningless, subordinate roles. Since much of the narrative of both sections is focused on her thinking, Connie fundamentally determines the quality of the narrational discourse in the text. Michael Squires argues, moreover, that Lawrence’s deliberate schematization of Connie’s inner struggles also creates the narrative patterns that determine epistemological plotting for the book. He points out that the movement of the fiction in all three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover occurs as Lawrence “pushes” Connie toward realizations. This technique defers meaning and keeps metaphysic in a state of perpetual development: Lawrence, placing Connie at the center of each dilemma, shapes his narrative segments so that they lead ordinarily to realizations and

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then to a new dilemma out of which still other realizations can emerge. One might say that Lawrence began his novel less with ideas to embody than with a female character and a method of discovery.26 One “method of discovery,” Squires says, is Connie’s constant questioning of male characters in the form of dialogue, forcing them to articulate what they believe in and what they stand for and in the process bringing important metaphysical issues out into the open for the text.27 I would add that since both Clifford and Mellors are so categorical in their belief systems and so dogmatic in the language used to convey them, this technique also reveals the fixity of their opposing metaphysical representations. Simultaneously, it shows Connie’s epistemological thinking, moving between and beyond them, as always in flux. Connie’s function in representing the sexual metaphysic of Lady Chatterley’ Lover is far more problematic. Julian Moynahan conveys all the degrading implications of the standard reading of her character when he writes appreciatively in the 1960s about Connie’s responsibilities as a woman in a metaphysical role: Her only qualification for the role of heroine is a capacity to come alive in the body, to become awakened instinctually, and to be “at one with a man’s life.” But of course this is the only qualification demanded. Connie’s lack of distinction is all to the good if we agree that her reorientation in life is enacted convincingly, since then her success holds out a promise to us all.28 Thirty years later, Tony Pinkney echoes the same kind of debilitating symbolic analysis when he claims contemptuously that Connie’s anus “enjoys the good fortune of elevation to mythic status in the course of the novel.”29 This reductionist view of Connie’s role in defining the sexual metaphysic persists, in one form or another, in most of the criticism of Lady Chatterley’s Lover today. I would agree that if her only part in determining the novel’s sexual metaphysic is simply to act it out, Connie’s position is untenable and the book suffers irreparably for it. No feminist could value a work of fiction that insists on the legitimacy of its own metaphysics and at the same time achieves metaphysical meaning by reducing the central female character to a totally subservient sexual role. I believe, however, that an understanding of the effects of woman’s narrational responsibilities in this novel and a Bakhtinian reading of narrative patterns from one part of the book to the next undercut the damage done by Lawrence’s representation of Connie’s


sexual consciousness in the Mellors part of the novel as they also revise and redefine the sexual metaphysic for the work as a whole. If we closely compare Connie’s narrational role in Mellors’s section to her narrational role in Clifford’s, we will recognize similar patterns of focalization. These produce a binary structure for the novel that is metaphysically dialogical rather than monological in its narrative scheme. With only occasional exceptions, the narrative voice and perspective of the first part of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is limited to Connie. In introducing the novel, Lawrence follows his list of homilies with the statement that “[t]his was more or less Constance Chatterley’s position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she realised that one must live and learn” (5). So it is actually Connie’s language, not Clifford’s, that determines the narration in this first section. Because she is so strongly influenced linguistically by Clifford, Connie’s interior discourse does function effectively to dramatize the “conventional” language system that his section represents. Still, because it is not her language that she uses but his, a distance is implicitly established between the words of the text and the “speaker” who thinks them. The language itself is thereby objectified in the narration; and the language system, which resembles Lawrence’s definition of the “conventional” novel, parodies the conventional novel form. Early on, Connie sees herself in dissociative terms as the fictional heroine of a conventional story, the sort that Clifford probably wrote: “The oak-leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadow or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything—no touch, no contact!” (18). Her personal evolution depends to a large extent on recognizing the stranglehold that Clifford’s conventional scripting has on her thinking, how his language influences her view of life. In the passage cited earlier, Clifford describes the two of them as “interwoven in a marriage,” and this image of “weaving” asserts itself whenever he talks about their married life. (Connie also describes Clifford’s stories as “endless spinning of webs of yarn.”) When Mrs. Bolton arrives to take care of Clifford, Connie sees it as a release, not only from the daily burden of looking after him but also from the bonds of marriage as Clifford’s metaphor has defined them: “It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, til they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly subtly, she was unraveling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, by breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear” (83). The first positive step Connie takes toward linguistic

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independence is, then, to adopt one of Clifford’s favorite, most oppressive metaphors and mentally, consciously, and deliberately to disassemble it. Emerging out of this deconstructive process comes what Squires would call an even more important “push” toward realization for Connie and for the quality of narration that reflects her meditations. She develops a conscious malice toward Clifford for imposing his archaic style on the linguistics of her creative imagination and way of focalizing the world. Connie has always found the impersonality of Clifford’s figurative values vaguely discomforting—when he describes the importance of having a child as adding “a link on a chain,” the narrator comments that “Connie was not keen on chains, but she said nothing” (43). That uneasiness then turns into positive rage when she recognizes how his language has been oppressing her. The effect of this anger on the narration is that the parody of Clifford’s language, which required Connie’s unconscious objectification of his conventional language system, is replaced by satire and the sarcasm of direct attack.30 “She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno’s eyelids and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life! They did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases sucking all the life-sap out of living things” (93). Walking alone in the woods, Connie plays with the concept of “unravished,” and bitterly rejecting Clifford’s easy phrasing and convenient quotation, she insists on all the possible deconstructive connotations of the word. “Unravished! The whole world was ravished. . . . Some things can’t be ravished. You can’t ravish a can of sardines. . . ! . . . Ravished! How ravished one could be without ever being touched! Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions” (94). Because Connie no longer unconsciously reproduces and thereby objectifies Clifford’s language in her thinking process, narrative parody all but disappears in regard to Clifford in the second part of the book. Still, this does not necessarily mean an end to parody in the novel. Linda Hutcheon and Margaret A. Rose, both examining theories of parody in connection with metafiction, stress the importance of the reader in the parodic process, particularly in parodies of literary texts.31 If an author imitates another style of writing in order to introduce, by way of contrast, a new narrational form, the reader must recognize the parody as parody or the comparison cannot occur. In this connection, Rose explores the ways in which an author’s preferred language system might actually parody itself as literary discourse at the same time that it provides the primary means for conveying the truth of event and meaning in a work of fiction. In response to Gilbert Ryle, who argues that logically words can-


not simultaneously represent themselves as credible and also as objects of ridicule, Rose counters that the act of reading parody always involves responding to language on two levels, as object and as vehicle. There is no reason, she says, why this double reading cannot occur even when the language under scrutiny is associated with the author of the text.32 She points out that once parody is introduced metafictionally, then all the writing in that work is under suspicion, including the author’s own. The writer who parodies another text does so in the guise of a reader of that text, insinuating the process of parodic reading into the whole of the work containing the parody. As a result, the reader who objectifies the privileged language of a novel, just as the author has encouraged objectification of outmoded language systems, may well find parody where it was not specifically intended. Certainly, the evolution of metaphor out of cliché and into genotext from Clifford’s section of the book to Mellors’s was designed as a positive evolution for the narration of the novel, just as Connie’s personal evolution out of sexual and linguistical deadness with Clifford into renewed life with Mellors was conceived as a positive development for her character. But in the area of sexual representation, the reader can simply no longer read the narration as Lawrence intended it. For us, the rendition of Connie’s consciousness that describes her sexual experiences with Mellors sounds so unacceptably sexist, so exaggeratedly Lawrentian, that it parallels and contrasts with her thinking in the “Clifford” section rather than transcends it. More important, the text supports this interpretation. The metaphoric language that describes Connie’s sexual response to Mellors is clearly imposed on that experience. The words are not presented as if they were actually going through her mind but are attributed by the narration to her experience and, indirectly, to her way of perceiving that experience. As a result, although the narrative is rendered as subjective, Connie again represents a system of language that is not actually her own. This again produces a distance between her and a style of discourse that is not hers, which again produces parody. With his sexual discourse, Lawrence thus creates a spatially equal dualistic narrative in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Rather than positioning Mellors’s part of the narrative as monologically superior to Clifford’s, he juxtaposes parodies of the “conventional” with parodies of the “passional” to create, on a textual level, a genuine dialogical structure for the book. If we look at the narrative cited earlier describing Connie’s first orgasm with Mellors, the “flapping” and “lapping” and “overlapping” sound ridiculous as spontaneous responses to a first real passion, no less ridiculous

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in fact than Clifford’s description of sex as “going to the dentist.” In effect, both passages make fun of their own imagery, the only real difference being that the object of parody in the “Mellors” section is “passional” language and with Clifford it is literary cliché. More closely parallel still is a later scene, where Lawrence renders Connie’s most intense orgasm, her most complete awareness of herself as a sexual being, in the precise metaphorical terms of a tidal wave. The ludicrousness of this passage for the contemporary reader is in the awareness that a sexual cliché has been made passionate by hyperbolic language (including some painful punning). In that sense, the passage actually duplicates the style of the conventional romance novel of the sort that Clifford himself might have produced. Although attributed to Connie, the language of this passage does not reproduce her conscious thinking. Instead, it reflects through her perspective the language system that the “Mellors” section represents: And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling in its dark, numb mass. Oh, and far down inside her the depths parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-traveling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder from the centre of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, touching her lower, and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, and heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palatable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself, away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasma was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman. (174) Later in the novel Lawrence implicitly satirizes Clifford’s use in a letter of exactly the same sea analogy to encapsulate his life with Connie, and he criticizes it precisely because it is so neat, so absolute, and all-encompassing (266–67). For the same reasons, this passage unavoidably satirizes itself—providing an exaggeratedly “passional” dialogic to Clifford’s exaggeratedly “conventional” linguistic style. In both The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of the patriarchal language systems interrogated, contested, and parodied by woman’s narrational discourse is Lawrence’s own. According to Kristeva’s metaphorical paradigm, and my own thesis as well, the function of the semiotic, or


“women’s,” discourse in literature is to challenge patriarchal convention, or symbolic, language systems on the level of text. But Kristeva also points out that once the semiotic becomes the privileged language system in a text, replacing the symbolic discourse it is contesting, that revolutionary system itself becomes “symbolic” and must, in turn, be challenged by a new semiotic. It is this idea that Lawrence effectively performs in these two novels. Because “woman’s” narrative discourse challenges, on a fundamental level, the validity of his own regenerative language system, Lawrence acknowledges, through this voice, his place in the larger, constantly evolving process of revolutionizing language. We may assume that Lawrence did not intend his language of regeneration to be ridiculed by the narrational discourse of women in ways the novels would appear to endorse. Still, the necessity for language to be constantly renewing itself was a principle Lawrence believed in and performed in all his novels, though usually through the narrative consciousnesses of his primary, mostly male characters. Bakhtin maintains that in literary carnival, where one language system parodies and supplants another, every language system is open to parody, even the usurper’s own. “Everything has its parody, its laughing aspect,” he says, “for everything is reborn and renewed through death.”33 Lawrence’s willingness to make his epistemologies explicit also makes their language systems vulnerable to this kind of carnivalistic play. Through the use of woman’s narration, Lawrence reveals the “laughing aspect” of his own deeply held metaphysical beliefs. In the process, his novels argue for a constant regenerating of the novel as genre, if in a way that would have certainly surprised him.

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Conclusion

Given the current orientation of feminist studies, it might be argued that in this book I am making assumptions about feminism and about history that are not relevant, or even ethical, to explorations of woman’s place in the historical evolution of the novel. As early as 1986 Alice Jardine, proponent and translator of French poststructuralism, was insisting that to “choose an attitude toward interpretation—and therefore to language— these days is to choose more than just an attitude: it is to choose a politics of reading, it is to choose an ethics of reading.”1 She equally insists that the politics of feminist reading, even of narratological issues, should concern itself with the politics of feminism. Rita Felski takes this a step further, asserting even more emphatically in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics that as long as narrative language functions in literature to represent important cultural and political realities which “can profoundly influence individual and cultural self-understanding in the sphere of everyday life,” it is unconscionable for any narrative approach calling itself feminist to confine its focus to textual dynamics or, more seriously, to literature as “a self-referential and metalinguistic system.”2 Certainly the manner in which language is employed overtly to represent women in a text and the way it has been used to disempower women thematically and, therefore, culturally are crucial to historical study of the novel as a genre. But the history of the novel is also a history of language evolving into and within a new generic mode, and the way that language looks at itself in that role has profound and positive feminist implications. By my reading of narrative texts, the function of women’s discourse, as it performs a voice and a system of ethical priorities for the novel as a genre, is politically vital to the evolution of the novel form. It continually asserts the privileging of women’s way of conceiving and articulating social “reality,” and it does so within and against the discourse of the conventionally

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prescribed, and most often corrupt, patriarchal social systems dominant at the time. Nevertheless, the position of much feminist criticism today would exclude such a reading as not only ahistorical and apolitical but also antifeminist. Felski has most fully articulated the thinking behind this stance; in fact, it is the thesis of her book. I want, therefore, to end by examining the premises of Felski’s argument against metalinguistic feminisms, specifically to expose the logistical problematics inherent in her larger objections. The purpose of this conclusion is not simply to justify my own critical reading. I also want to affirm the importance of metalinguistic inquiry as a viable feminist methodology and to invite more open, multileveled feminist readings of literary narrative texts. Because she defines language study as aesthetics and poststructuralist activity as only symbolic, Felski does not recognize that examining metafictional discourse is an effective method for revealing the “levels of mediation between literary and social domains” that she insists should be the province of feminist criticism. Her argument depends on an oversimplification of poststructuralistic feminist critical strategies and metalinguistical approaches, and it demonstrates a reluctance to be creative with theoretical paradigms, especially those available for recognizing dynamic patterns of language in a text. My using Kristeva’s semiotic/symbolic linguistic model as a method for analyzing textual dynamics need not mean, as Felski implies, simply translating the entire narrative into those dualistic terms and identifying experimental stylistics in the text. Kristeva herself recognizes the activity of the semiotic challenging the symbolic as metaphorical and strategic, not representational in purpose and effect. Analyzing how a “woman’s” narration enacts new and powerful possibilities for discourse, and examining how those dynamics contest, implicitly or explicitly, established narrational conventions for the novel creates a prime “site for the struggle over meaning” (Felski’s definition of a feminist text), particularly in conjunction with materialist readings. When poststructuralist dualisms are treated as dialogic discourse, they produce the basis for concrete narratological analysis. As a textual approach, feminist narratology does not concern itself with thematic interpretation, but it can provide new contexts for the social, cultural, and ethical values embedded within the language of the narrative, language that vitally affects the ways that feminist issues in a work are hermeneutically discussed. Felski also speaks for many other feminist critics when she argues that focusing on discursive activity at the level of text prevents meaningful evaluation of the female subjectivity because it diverts attention from the

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ways that the “female” constructs itself and toward the words used to communicate the process of self-construction: [T]he literary text needs to be seen as one important site for the struggle over meaning through the formation of narratives which articulate women’s changing concerns and self-perceptions. Writing should be grasped in this context as a special practice which relates meaning rather than merely communicating it; feminist literature does not reveal an already given female identity, but is itself involved in the construction of this self as a cultural reality.3 Literary representations of women’s subjectivity, however, are not designed for the purpose of relating what was “actually” felt or perceived; and it is, after all, language that creates the rhetoric of the female “self” in a woman’s narrative text. Fictional narratives are made of language, and their concerns are primarily rhetorical—how to convince the reader that the representation is credible and, if the goal is political, how to guide the reader to respond in a certain way. Analyzing these rhetorical strategies can only add to our understanding of “the construction of this self as cultural reality,” which is, as Felski suggests with her wording, a consciously rhetorical act. Gayatri Spivak points out that subjectivity is itself formed by language, and the only way to process subjectivity in or out of a literary text is to analyze the systems of language used to articulate it: “We know no world that is not organized as language—languages that we cannot possess, for we are operated by those languages as well. The category of language then embraces the categories of the world and consciousness even as it is determined by them.”4 To exclude feminist criticism that examines the process of languages, then, advocates an incomplete approach to the discussion of subjectivity in a text. The larger problem with Felski’s argument against feminist language criticism is not her theory of what feminist criticism should do but rather her absolute definition of what feminist criticism is. “My definition of feminist literature,” she says, “. . . is intended to encompass all those texts that reveal a critical awareness of women’s subordinate position and of gender as a problematic category.”5 I contend that an analysis of literature which positions itself only in terms of woman’s subordinated cultural position actually has the effect of deproblematizing issues of gender in a text and, as I discuss in my introduction, it can limit a “woman’s” narrative to themes of subordination and abuse. When, however, we examine women’s narrations as discourse, particularly in relation to established language

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systems that have become atrophied and made meaningless from overuse, we empower women, culturally and linguistically. This narrational empowerment is every bit as “real” as the fictional representation of woman’s subjectivity in a cultural role, and it has the added advantage of genuinely problematizing issues of gender in a text. Even when women’s narrations are used, as in my study, to address issues of genre rather than culture, the superiority of the discourse—as it is assigned by authors to women—impacts on women’s cultural representations as well. If the purpose of feminist criticism is to effect change in the way that women’s texts are read and thereby the way that women are culturally perceived, recognizing the genuine power of women’s narratives and the rhetorical impact of women’s discourse on the “institution” of literature has much to contribute to that process. Especially as the academy becomes more invested in gendered issues of ethnicity and sexuality and less comfortable with theories of feminism in isolation from cultural contexts, feminist scholarship can and should become more flexible in its own self-definitions and expansive in its range. Although Anglo American feminisms have always embraced historical and representational modes of interpretation, they have also tended to exclude, out of hand, “marginalized” feminist methodologies, particularly those that situate their readings in the language of a text. This strikes against feminism at its origins, which were built out of recognizing women’s marginality and resisting efforts to create distinctions that separate and therefore diminish us. The future of feminist studies may very well depend upon our concerted efforts to maintain, as Bette London says, “our internal difference—to insist on the difference within and between women, within and between feminisms.”6 It is in this spirit that I have constructed this book.

Notes

Introduction 1. Gayle Greene, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Greene compares the feminist metafiction that emerged in the late twentieth century to early twentieth-century modernist self-reflectiveness. The feminist metafiction Greene describes, however, is postmodern because, she says, feminist writers already regarded modernist literature as integral to the tradition they were confronting: “Growing out of a sense of the unprecedentedness of contemporary experience, feminist fiction seeks new forms to express change, which is why it is often—like Modernist fiction—self-reflexive,” she writes. “As with Modernism, the sense of discontinuity with the past produces an interest in the past, an interrogation of the literary and critical tradition. But by this time Modernist texts have themselves become part of the tradition that is being critiqued” (36). 2. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996). Doody prefaces her book with this statement about the historical evolution of the novel as a genre: “If I assert the interconnectedness of a history, and boldly venture to treat an admittedly protean form as if constantly visible from century to century, I do not mean that that is the only way to treat the subject. It merely seems necessary that now somebody should do so, in order to help us to see the range of surviving forest and not merely the individual tree, or, at best, small groves” (xvii). In deference to Doody, who has done such important work in conceptualizing a theory of evolution for the novel and who is annoyed that this evolution is usually made synonymous with the history of the British novel, I will point out that I am treating the British novel as the British novel, not as the novel from the beginning of its form. 3. In The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), Bakhtin defines a “character zone” as narrative discourse that is associated in specific places with the voice of a specific character, but which on a separate level represents a kind of generic language. As a textual element of the narrative, a character zone may represent a novel’s dominant language system interacting dialogically with alien language systems from other novels or artistic genres performed as literary discourse in other character zones in the same text (320).

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Notes to Pages 3–5

4. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 6, 308–9. 5. Julia Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined,” trans. Marilyn A. August, New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981) 137–38. 6. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 57–58. 7. Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text,” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern M. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986) 103–31. 8. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 183. 9. In the foreword to Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), Gérard Genette acknowledges that he should have paid more attention in his original study to the multiple levels of discourse that can exist in a narrative, and he uses Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism and polyphony as examples of the kinds of narrative activity that he should not have left out. In this way, Genette acknowledges Bakhtin’s importance to the field of narratology (11). 10. In their introduction to A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), editors Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow suggest, in fact, that textual readings of Bakhtin in feminist terms are, by definition, virtually impossible. Poststructuralist analyses that recognize subversive feminist linguistic strategies using Bakhtin’s dialogics, they point out, depend upon binary oppositions between male and female that work against Bakhtinian principles of polyphony; and even the concept of carnival on a textual level cannot be used in a feminist way, because it assumes the preservation of the established “patriarchal system” after the (female) linguistical insurrection has been contained. The only possible way to use Bakhtin in feminist criticism, they conclude, is to take his theories beyond language and into the social contexts that produce that language: “Feminist dialogics is more than a rhetorical criticism. It is a way of assessing not only our voices as women but our whole way of acting in a world that is at once our own and someone else’s. . . . It is a way of living, an ethics as well as an epistemology” (xiii). By my understanding, when you shift the emphasis from genres of discourse to “ways of acting in the world,” you are no longer concerned with Bakhtin, and if you apply those assumptions to literature, you are not reading narratologically. In her more recent Bakhtinian study, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), Josephine Donovan also claims that “Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic is . . . more a matter of thematics than structure” (31), which is how she treats it in her text. 11. Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 65–69. 12. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1985) 155. Kristeva refers not to Bakhtin but to “Volosoinov,” a name Moi confirms is “now considered to be a cover” for Bakhtin (180). 13. In “Pursuing Controversy: Kristeva’s Split Subject, Bakhtin’s Many-Tongued World,” Argumentation and Advocacy 28 (1991), Margaret Zulich argues that Kristeva

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used Bakhtin as a way to redefine structuralist/narratological methodologies to suit her own “political” linguistics agenda: “Kristeva explicitly appropriates Bakhtin’s dialogic perspective in her own theory of the speaking subject. In so doing, she transposes Bakhtin’s contextualist heterogeneity into a structuralist psychoanalytic frame of reference in order to revolutionize from within certain structuralist theories of subjectivity and discourse” (92). In “Rerouting Kristeva: From Pessimism to Parody,” Textual Practice 6 (1992), Pam Morris maintains that Kristeva’s endorsement of Bakhtin’s concept of carnival and his theories of parody in her early work provide “the basis for a political theory of language and subjects which is open to the processes of history and change” (31–46). 14. Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” Dialogic Imagination 48. In “Discourse in the Novel,” he writes in a similar vein about the representations of narrative voice: “Diversity of voices and heteroglossia enter the novel and organize themselves within it into a structured artistic system. This constitutes the distinguishing feature of the novel as genre” (Dialogic Imagination 300). 15. “There exists a group of artistic-speech phenomena that has long attracted the attention of both literary scholars and linguists. By their very nature these phenomena exceed the limits of linguistics; that is, they are metalinguistic. These phenomena are: stylization, parody, skaz [oral-sounding narrative], and dialogue (compositionally expressed dialogue, broken down into rejoinders). “All these phenomena, despite very real differences among them, share one common trait: discourse in them has a twofold direction—it is directed both toward the referential object of speech, as in ordinary speech, and toward another’s discourse, toward someone else’s speech. If we do not recognize the existence of this second context of someone else’s speech and begin to perceive stylization or parody in the same way ordinary speech is perceived, that is, as speech directed only at its referential object, then we will not grasp these phenomena in their essence: stylization will be taken for style, parody simply for a poor work of art” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 185). 16. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 314. 17. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin writes, for example, about parody as a language system, that the “depth of parody may also vary: One can parody merely superficial verbal forms, but one can also parody the very deepest principles governing another’s discourse” (194). See further discussion below. 18. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 309. 19. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 193–94. 20. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985) 36. 21. In Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Claire Kahane makes the same claim for metafictional representations of women in the late Victorian/ early modernist novel. 22. Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the EighteenthCentury English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) 54. 23. See, e.g., Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Writing and

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Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Showalter asserts that poststructuralist feminism “describes a Utopian possibility rather than a literary practice” (16). 24. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 21–106. In my summary, I am not considering the psychoanalytic complexities of Lacan’s theory, because I want to use it as a structural paradigm, a model for what seems to me to occur in the early novel with the use of women’s narrative voices. In “Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva,” The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), Domna K. Stanton offers a very interesting and articulate reading of the psychoanalytic processes of this theory as metaphor in Kristeva (165–66). 25. Pam Morris also perceives Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic/symbol in terms of a Bakhtinian dialogic (“Rerouting Kristeva” 36–42). 26. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language 68. 27. Kristeva, like Freud, envisions the pre-Oedipal mother associated with the semiotic as embracing both masculinity and femininity. But it is the mother who, at least metaphorically, organizes the chora so that it is artistically visible as form. This explains why the semiotic is associated with woman—not representationally but in terms of the impulse to organize (Revolution in Poetic Language 27). For further explanation, see Moi 164–65. 28. Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined” 137–38. 29. Moi 164. 30. In Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), Diana Fuss identifies the essentialism/constructionism debate as the point of difference between materialist and poststructuralist conceptions of “woman.” Materialist feminisms, she says, conceive of the female as biologically determined, whereas poststructuralists (she looks at Derrida and Lacan) see “woman” as a social construct. I am not entering into that debate here. Instead, by adopting Kristeva concept of “woman” as “other,” I am working with “woman” in relation to generic discourse that is not defined as female at all. Thus, when I talk throughout the book about women’s narratives as nonessentialist, I am not adopting an alternative constructionist view, but rather am addressing textually inscribed narrative strategy organized by gender. I do, however, agree with Fuss’s contention that all definitions of “woman,” including Kristeva’s, are fundamentally essentialist, no matter how theoretically opposed they are to that concept. The sign, “woman,” carries with it connotations of the female sex, whatever else it is used to signify. I go even further and argue that by using women narrators to introduce new concepts of the novel as genre, authors were articulating those new concepts in the voice of a female, even if they were not proposing a female style of discourse. In that way, they effectively privilege women’s discourses over men’s in their texts. 31. Molly Hite, in The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 6.


32. Nelli Diengott, “Narratology and Feminism,” Style 22 (1988): 42–51. Perhaps because she feels the integrity of her discipline threatened by Lanser’s proposal, Diengott’s response is disturbingly condescending. A less hostile, more balanced appeal for the relevance and importance of narratology as an independent methodology comes from Mieke Bal, a narratologist in sympathy with feminist issues. She articulates the dilemma and the “challenge” of narratology today as a desire to be flexible, useful to all sorts of political and cultural investigations of literature, but still without sacrificing its methodology to the ethics of those other concerns. She ends up reemphasizing value of narratology in conjunction with other avenues of inquiry; she also proposes that its greatest value might be in applications to other genres of “text,” especially works of art. “The Point of Narratology,” Poetics Today 11 (1990): 727–53 (esp. 727–30). 33. For a summary of this critical debate, see Kathy Mezei, “Contextualizing Feminist Narratology,” in her introduction to Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 1– 20. 34. Susan S. Lanser, “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” Style 20 (1986): 345. 35. Most of the essays in Mezei’s collection are provocative readings of women’s texts, and only a few extend narrative beyond the bounds of narratology to account for thematically feminist interpretations of works. A recent, potentially important feminist narratological study of the female narration in the early novel is more seriously affected by the loopholes currently implicit in the methodology. In Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), Alison A. Case, identifying her work as “feminist narratology,” explores what she sees as a pattern in the early British novel whereby fictional narratives are consistently plotted in predictably gendered terms. Case’s thesis, however, rests on an assumption often made in feminist “narratological” criticism that runs counter to the principles of narratology itself. “Although it may be analytically useful to make a distinction between the narrating self and the narrated self,” Case writes, “the fact that they share the same I keeps them closely intertwined for the reader” (11). This statement, which contradicts the crucial narratological distinction between character narrating and character focalizing, inevitably results in criticism that psychoanalyzes narrators as characters, not as narrative discourses or texts, and that repeats events told by those narrators in the context of their psychology. In the case of canonical literature, what results is often already well covered in other critical works. 36. Susan S. Lanser, “Shifting the Paradigm: Feminism and Narratology,” Style 22 (1988): 55. 37. See esp. Robyn Warhol, Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989) and “Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Villette,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 39 (1996): 858. 38. Warhol, Gendered Interventions 6. 39. In Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid

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Laurier University Press, 1980), Linda Hutcheon also identifies reader-to-text interaction as a defining characteristic of metafiction (27). 40. Throughout the book, whenever I state that discourses or narrators “discuss,” I do not mean that an explicit discussion takes place. Rather, I refer to the implicit textual dialogical interaction that occurs as underargument between or among discourses. 41. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the British Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) and Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 42. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); vol. 2, Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and vol. 3, Letters from the Front (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Rosalind Miles, The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), and Marilyn L. Williamson’s Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650–1750 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990) share the premise that women’s literature historically occupies a place separate from the “masculine novel tradition” (Miles ix). More recently Catherine Gallagher in Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and Donovan in Women and the Rise of the Novel conceive this separate place explicitly in historical terms of social economics. 43. Case 110. Chapter 1. Satire and the Woman’s Text: The Novel as Argument in Moll Flanders 1. Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel, the issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12 (2000) dedicated to Watt after his death, contains a number of essays critical of Watt’s approach to genre, but none addresses his arguments concerning genre and narrative. 2. McKeon 1–4. 3. An exception is recent “deconstructionist” criticism of Clarissa, discussed in the following chapter. 4. Michael M. Boardman, Defoe and the Uses of Narrative (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983) 108–31; Gary Hentzl, “Holes in the Heart: Moll Flanders, Roxana, and the ‘Agreeable Crime,’” Boundary 2 18 (1991): 176–77; Selwyn Jackson, “Distance and the Communication Model,” Journal of Narrative Technique 17 (1987): 225–36; Larry Langford, “Retelling Moll’s Story: The Editor’s Preface to Moll Flanders,” Journal of Narrative Technique 22 (1992): 164–79; Steven C. Michael, “Thinking Parables: What Moll Flanders Does Not Say,” ELH 63 (1996): 367–95.


5. Robert H. Bell, “Moll’s Grace Abounding,” Genre 8 (1975): 267–82; E. Anthony James, Daniel Defoe’s Many Voices: A Rhetorical Study of Prose Style and Literary Method (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1972) 201–29; Maximillian Novak, “Defoe’s ‘Indifferent Monitor’: The Complexity of Moll Flanders,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1970): 350–65; and John J. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) 94–144. 6. Although he doesn’t mention it by name, Watt was most likely responding directly to Dorothy Van Ghent’s more recent discussion on Defoe’s technical mastery of irony in Moll Flanders in The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Rinehart, 1953), published just four years before his. 7. Watt 99. 8. Watt 131. 9. In my introduction, I explain how I use Kristeva’s feminist variations on Lacan’s semiotic and symbolic as a paradigm for gendered oppositions performed on the level of text in narrative discourse in and for the novel as genre. 10. Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) 24. 11. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 5. 12. Ian A. Bell, Defoe’s Fiction (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1985) 141–42. Throughout this chapter, I will be distinguishing between Moll as narrator and Moll as character. When I refer to Moll’s character, then, I am referring to her own role in the story. 13. Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined” 134–38. 14. Considerations of the strategies behind Defoe’s portrayal of Moll Flanders as “unwomanly” generally involve cultural concerns. In “Matriarch Mirror: Women and Capital in Moll Flanders,” PMLA 97 (1982), Lois Chaber points to the fact that women in the eighteenth century were not allowed to own property or encouraged to initiate money-making schemes; therefore, she says, Defoe was deliberate in isolating Moll’s materialist achievements as “not a woman’s success” so he could examine effects of patriarchal mercantilism out of the usual context (222). Likewise, in “Aggression, Femininity, and Irony in Moll Flanders,” Literature and Psychology 22 (1972), Curt Hartog claims that Moll is portrayed as a woman so that Defoe can advocate aggression in the marketplace without really seeming to, since women do not usually have a role there. He adds that simultaneously Moll presents herself as stereotypically female and that being a woman makes her more sympathetic to the reader and therefore more ambivalent in her criminal role. “But if Moll strikes us as less than feminine perhaps, even masculine,” he says, “she nevertheless claims the conventional cultural responses towards women” (126). 15. Watt 113. Ira Konigsberg agrees with Watt. In Narrative Technique in the English Novel: Defoe to Austen (Hampton, Conn.: Archon Books, 1985), he maintains that the conscious use of the first-person narrator as a narrative device postdates Defoe and would not therefore have been an option for him. As a result, he concludes, there is “no clear ‘handle’” for an ironic interpretation of the book (33). Conversely, in “The Origins of Defoe’s First-Person Narrative Technique: An Overlooked Aspect of the Rise of the Novel,” Journal of Narrative Technique 6 (1976), Melinda Snow targets Watt’s failure to recognize

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the importance of the first-person narrative method as the key to his misreading of Defoe, particularly Defoe’s debt to late seventeenth-century scientific writing (175). In “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography,” Genre 6 (1973), Leo Braudy insists that the “first person is so obviously a conscious style in Defoe’s works that it is difficult to believe that it was chosen only for moral reasons” (80), and he adds that if Defoe’s narrators seem inconsistent as characters, this is primarily because they “find unlimited possibility for self-definition” (82). 16. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin discusses this distinction between author and narrator as double-voiced discourse (314). Regarding Moll Flanders, Robert Bell points out that while the author of a real autobiography wants the narrative to be believed, the author of a fictional autobiography frequently does not and “invites—and may even demand—an ironic perspective upon the character he has created” (272). 17. For a detailed definition of the narratological implications and types of gaps, see Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983) 127–29. 18. See Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) 263. 19. Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) 23. All references in my text to Moll Flanders are to this edition. 20. See note 47. 21. Watt 100. 22. Watt was probably responding to Van Ghent’s assertion that these episodes are held together by a “complex system of ironies,” which, she claims, makes Moll Flanders a “coherent and significant work of art” (36). Boardman agrees with Watt that there is no coherent structure to Moll Flanders because its episodic design is fragmented and disjunctive and because “no clear authorial intention emerges from these episodes.” However, he also argues, in effect, that Moll’s narrative efforts to force a moral link between the episodes makes the book inadvertently ironic (108–31). 23. Watt 108. 24. Watt 111. 25. E. Anthony James offers an excellent analysis of how stylistic elements in Moll’s narrative reflect her character and life experience (211–29). 26. McKeon 199–205. For a fuller discussion of the political, historical, and philosophical forces surrounding the commercialization of moral discourse see James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–1789, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1993) 69–96. 27. These critics include Van Ghent; Konigsberg; Ian Bell; and Brean Hammond, “Repentance: Solution to the Clash of Moralities in Moll Flanders,” English Studies 61 (1989): 329. 28. Alison Case makes the same claim. Her argument is that by implicitly attributing the moral commentary to the “editor,” Defoe strips Moll, as a woman, of all narrative authority in the book and reduces her to the status of a mere “witness” to the events in her own life (19–20).


29. Langford 175. 30. Although Langford’s argument is very useful in providing a new discursive reading of the relationship of preface to text, his insertion of an alternative moral intention to the one articulated in the preface adopts the conventional tack that the moral position expressed in the preface is the key to the novel’s ironic structure. It also assumes that Defoe actually mapped out an elaborate double narrative strategy in devising his fiction in this book, which seems to me doubtful. I also question whether Defoe would take the anticommercialist position that Langford claims Moll Flanders is specifically designed to reveal. 31. Henry Fielding uses the first chapter of Tom Jones to establish in a performative fashion the importance of the interrelationship of the reader and text, constructing a metaphor in the voice of the narrator, who presents himself as a tavern keeper and the reader as the customer approving or disapproving of the bill of fare. The importance of the reader, then, was integral to the earliest conception of the eighteenth-century novel beyond Defoe; yet at no point in this fictional “preface,” or in the preface to Joseph Andrews, where he defines the terms of novel as genre, does Fielding encourage reader participation in the morality of the tale. 32. For compact and coherent explanation of these terms as I am using them, see Rimmon-Kenan 86–89, 103–5. 33. Jackson suggests that Defoe actually assigns this response to the reader: “[T]he text is taken to be full of ironic clues which indicate that the role of the implied reader is to avoid being taken captive by Moll’s powerful personality and persuasive strategies to the point where he loses his standards of moral judgment” (229). 34. In The Art of Satire (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), David Worcester calls this technique “irony of inversion,” a tactic of satire, where the author turns praise into blame. The context for Moll’s tirade against neglectful mothers is her own attempt to place her child in a responsible home. This reminds the reader that she is actually giving up that child so the man she intends to marry does not find out she has “married” someone else during their engagement and that, in fact, she has abandoned all her numerous children to the dubious care of others. 35. Robert Bell 278–79. 36. Robert Bell 275. 37. In this study, I define a novel as semiotic when its narrative functions to challenge, rather than represent, conventional modes of narration. 38. Dustin H. Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994) 37–38. 39. Griffin 71. See also Charles Pullen, “‘The Greatest Art Is to Hide Art’: Satire and Style in Jonathan Swift,” Satire in the Eighteenth Century, ed. J. D. Browning (New York: Garland, 1983) 77. 40. For fuller discussion of satiric persona as textual device, see Pullen 70–82. 41. Ian Bell’s description of Moll’s character as narrator sounds like the perfect representation of a satiric persona. He writes that “her most idiosyncratic feature as a criminal narrator is her lack of guile, and her credulity, which is a kind of unworldliness very much at odds with her aggressive criminality. Rather as some people may be tone

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deaf or colour blind, Moll seems to be morally insensitive to her own behavior” (143). Along these lines, in “The Experience of Error: Ironic Entrapment in Augustan Narrative Satire,” Papers in Language and Literature 18 (1982), John H. O’Neil identifies Moll with the satiric device of narrative entrapment. By O’Neil’s theory, the reader naturally identifies with Moll as a first-person narrator and is therefore forced to identify with her “errors” as a character once they become clear. “We readers, because of our identification with the character, accept his mistaken judgments. When the error is revealed, we discover with a shock that we are guilty of the same fault as the speaker. We may not have committed his act, but we have given it our tacit assent” (279–80). O’Neil suggests that there is some specific point in the narrative where we are suddenly aware that Moll is not what she seems: “Is it possible, we begin to ask ourselves, that this woman is selfdeceived, that she does not know herself ?” This in effect confuses Moll’s narratee with Defoe’s implied reader, who I think we can agree is on to Moll pretty much from the start. Still, entrapping the reader in the materialist discourse of Moll’s narrative is very likely one of Defoe’s satiric strategies. 42. Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986) 43. 43. Backscheider 50. Novak also points out that Defoe’s “contemporaries recognized that his ‘peculiar Talen[t]’ lay in presenting effective arguments through the use of irony, satire and fiction” and that this should be “obvious enough to anyone who has studied the numerous, grudging compliments given him by his enemies” (“Defoe’s ‘Indifferent Monitor,’” 350). See also Novak’s case for Defoe as an ironist in The Uses of Irony: Papers on Defoe and Swift Read at a Clark Library Seminar, April 2, 1966 (Los Angeles: William Andrew Clark Memorial Library, 1966). 44. Braudy relates a similar instance: “From 1715–1724, after the Hanoverian Succession had brought the Whigs into power and Harley and Bolingbroke were out, Defoe made some kind of deal with the Whig government by which he would write most of Dromer’s Newsletter and later Mist’s Weekly Journal as if they were continuing their previously pro-Tory point of view, when in fact he was supporting Whig policies” (86). 45. J. A. Downie, “Defoe’s Shortest Way with Dissenters: Irony, Intention, and ReaderResponse,” Prose Studies 9 (1986): 126. 46. Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal,” The Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William Bowman Piper (New York: Norton, 1973) 508–9. 47. In “Conscious Irony in Moll Flanders: Facts and Problems,” College English 26 (1964), Maximillian Novak insists that the Newgate episode is not portrayed ironically (198–204). Hentzl also feels that this scene was clearly intended to be taken seriously, since it “conforms to the pattern of conversion scenes in Defoe’s other writings” (193). 48. Griffin 95. 49. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) 226. 50. For a catalog and discussion of all the different types of endings as they relate to the beginning and middle of novel texts, see Marianna Torgovnick’s introduction to Closure in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) 13–14. These endings


include what she calls “circularity,” the “parallelism,” and “incompletion,” any and all of which could be used to describe the form of structural closure used in Moll Flanders. 51. G. A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) 111–64. 52. Ian Bell argues that unlike Robinson Crusoe, Moll is very aware of her presentation of her own life as an “imaginative reconstruction” (139). Along the same lines, Novak notes that Moll is “extraordinarily playful in her use of language” and that when she explicitly points out the disparity between what she calls something and what it actually is, Defoe is making clear his “narrator’s own awareness” of the fiction of her text (“Defoe’s ‘Indifferent Monitor,’” 354). Chapter 2. Her Authoritative Text: A Woman’s Rhetoric of Ethics and Genre in Clarissa 1. Watt 208–38. Watt describes the epistolary narrative as expressing “the inward and subjective nature of the dramatic conflict involved” (29). 2. John Preston, The Created Self: The Reader’s Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1970); William Beatty Warner, Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Terry Castle, Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson’s “Clarissa” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Kahn 132–50; and Tom Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Most recent narrative criticism also assumes that the letters in Clarissa, including Clarissa’s own, are rhetorical constructs. See esp. Andrew Scheiber, “‘Between Me and Myself ’: Writing as Strategy and Theme in Clarissa,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 496–509; Andrew Gibson, Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to Beckett (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Nicholas Hudson, “Arts of Seduction and the Rhetoric of Clarissa,” Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990): 25–43; Richard Hannaford, “Playing Her Dead Hand: Clarissa’s Posthumous Letters,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35 (1993): 79–102; and Scott Paul Gordon, “Disinterested Selves: Clarissa and the Tactics of Sentimentalism,” ELH 64 (1997): 473–502. 3. Castle 21. 4. Castle 51. 5. For compact and coherent explanation of these terms as I am using them, see Rimmon-Kenan 86–89, 103–5. 6. Castle 27–28. 7. In her chapter “Interrupting ‘Miss Clary,’” for example, Castle analyzes the first narrative movement of the novel, which covers the relations of Clarissa with her family, as if everything that Clarissa says is “true.” Rather than pointing to the different narratives in this section as equally legitimate “texts,” (a “cacophony of voices”), she treats Clarissa’s letters as, in effect, extradiegetic narratives and the other texts as supporting materials. In great detail, Castle repeats Clarissa’s descriptions of scenes with her family and analyzes the abuse she suffers in their attempts to silence her. Clarissa’s character is

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open to judgment in this analysis, but her narrative is not, and the theme of discourse for the most part attaches itself to plot. Castle’s theoretical suppositions are extremely interesting and provocative and her observations on Clarissa and Lovelace (in particular) as writers compelling, but because of the hermeneutic premise behind her theory of reader response, her close analysis of the novel, like that of the other “deconstructionist” critics of Clarissa, is less a deconstructive reading than a formalist one. 8. Castle 160–61 9. Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Basil Blackford, 1982) 66. 10. Castle 24–25. Despite Kahn’s insistence that “we need to distinguish between the activity of internal fictional readers and external ones,” she also claims that for both sets of readers, Clarissa’s “every word is devalued by the female body from which it issues” (133–34). 11. Elizabeth J. MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 12. In her expert analysis of the “shaping principles” operating on many levels in Clarissa, Christina Marsden Gillis, The Paradox of Privacy: Epistolary Form in Clarissa (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984), also conceives the epistolary narrative as positioning itself structurally in contrast to conventional plotting, “spatial design against temporal” (5). 13. Watt proclaims Richardson, rather than Defoe, the “founder of the British novel” (171). That Richardson saw himself in this innovative role is revealed in his letter to Aaron Hill, where he states that his motive in writing Pamela was to “introduce a new Species of Writing.” See The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, vol. 1 (London: R. Phillips, 1804) lxxiii–lxxiv. Critics often cite this statement in referring to Clarissa as well. Castle and Hudson are particularly interested in the way that the narration of Clarissa addresses issues of the novel as a genre, with Hudson arguing that Richardson actually used Lovelace’s rhetorical strategies metafictionally to represent his own techniques as “novelist” in the text. 14. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 122–27. 15. Murray L. Brown, “Authorship and Generic Exploitation: Why Lovelace Must Fear Clarissa,” Studies in the Novel 30 (1998): 248. Castle contends that Lovelace’s use of the languages of literary genre “to determine the melodramatic poses he strikes for Clarissa” is simply part of a larger pattern involving “his willingness to let linguistic formulas in general shape his attitude towards others” (85). 16. Brown 256. 17. Margaret A. Rose, Parody//Metafiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1979) 81–83. 18. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life, vol. 2 (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1930) 53–56. All references in my text are to the Shakespeare Head edition. 19. See esp. Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 9–10, and Theory of Parody 35. 20. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 6.


21. The most extensive and deliberate of these are Michael Bell’s The Sentiment of Reality: Truth of Feeling in the European Novel (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983) 13–39, and Ann Jessie Van Sant’s Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 60–82. Both The Sentiment of Reality and Barbara M. Benedict’s Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994) offer insight into the historical and philosophic origins of sentimental fiction and provide useful definitions of the genre. In Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), Laurie Langbauer constructs a feminist theory of the early sentimental Romance novel that could easily, and legitimately, accommodate Clarissa. 22. Although he does not recognize parody, Hudson argues in the same vein that Richardson used Lovelace’s narrative to expose “the values and techniques of the licentious popular literature” he blamed for corrupting social morals and hoped, by discrediting the genre of romantic fiction, to establish his “new Species of Writing” in its place (26–27). 23. Gillis and MacArthur both provide extensive discussion of spatial structuring as generic to the epistolary narrative mode. 24. This distinction may well appear to be sleight of hand. It is one thing to juxtapose the discourses of two narrators in a single text and quite another to create a structural distinction between Richardson’s “male-authored” text and Clarissa’s “woman’s” narrative, since obviously Richardson wrote the entire novel. According to Kahn, however, textual conflicts between the male author and his female narrator are common in eighteenth-century novels adopting this mode of narration. Kahn argues that Richardson allows Clarissa to “speak for him” only because he determines that she will eventually be “silenced” and that he can regain and ultimately assert his own “male” authority over the entire text at the end of the book (143). 25. The best and most recent study devoted entirely to the interconnection of narrative and gender in Richardson’s novels, Tassie Gwilliam’s Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), reinforces this critical pattern by defining the opposing gendered narratives in the novel as entirely essentialist in form. Gwilliam writes: “Clarissa and Lovelace do not simply represent femininity and masculinity—each is seen as extraordinary in relation to others of his or her own gender. For both of them and for the novel that contains them, gender is a central category; each character defines himself or herself and the other in terms of gender and in terms of sexual difference” (58). Forty years earlier, Watt also described the structural divisions in Clarissa’s narrative as “an expression of the dichotomisation of the sexual roles which is at the heart of Richardson’s subject” (209). 26. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 63. 27. Jonathan Loesberg, “Allegory and Narrative in Clarissa,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 15 (1981): 45. 28. Eagleton argues that because Clarissa represents experiences coherently and “exerts the fullest possible control over her meanings,” her writing must be categorized as

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“masculine.” In contrast, the undisciplined theatrics, wild digressions, and often disorganized sentence structures that characterize Lovelace’s prose would classify his writing as “feminine.” This dichotomy, Eagleton concludes, is the great “paradox” of Clarissa’s dualistic narrative scheme (52–54). One wonders whether Eagleton had a specific female author in mind when he describes woman’s writing as generically “mercurial, diffuse, exuberant” (like Lovelace’s) or whether he is uncharacteristically premising his paradox on the worst sort of female stereotyping. Over the course of my study, I have found that both Clarissa and Lovelace produce writing fully consistent with self-consciously gendered narratives in other novels. 29. See 1:289–302. Focusing on the double meaning of the word character, Gibson uses this letter to launch a compelling argument that in Clarissa, character in both the moral and psychological senses of the term is an entirely rhetorical construct (51–53). 30. In “Irony, Storytelling, and the Conflict of Interpretations in Clarissa,” ELH 53 (1986), Donald R. Wehrs argues in the same vein that Lovelace seeks to gain control over Clarissa in his narrative by reducing “her beliefs about herself to devastating irony.” He sees this process occurring throughout the last two-thirds of the novel, from the point that Lovelace takes over the narrational text. Unlike many other deconstructionist critics, Wehrs recognizes that the reader’s response to the narration is not the same as it is to the fiction and that the real irony of the novel is that the reader sees through Lovelace’s narrative stratagem and judges Lovelace ironically instead of his intended victim (771). 31. Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 5. 32. Newton 12. Scheiber skillfully articulates this dialogic for Clarissa as contesting “paradigms of language” between Lovelace (and, I would add, the Harlowes) and Clarissa: “Lovelace’s crude, code-governed determinism, which asserts the tyranny of convention, verbal and otherwise, over individual consciousness; and Clarissa’s individual employment of the Word as the creative voice, inexhaustible in its power to challenge and subvert conforming usages.” Scheiber claims further that this dualism represented for Richardson the larger conflict of epistemological paradigms dominating his century in England: “on the one hand, the lingering feudal order of emblematic, socially authorized meaning, with its intricate hierarchy of manners and relations; and on the other, an insurgent democratic individualism, which asserted the primacy of personal experience and reflection as criteria for belief and action” (507). 33. Perhaps because he reads Clarissa as both narrator and the morally sanctioned heroine of a sentimental novel, Michael Bell inverts this claim, arguing that Clarissa’s family is trapped in the system of her discourse for the same reasons that I see her trapped in theirs: “There can be no neutral presentation,” he writes of Clarissa’s rhetorical style, “and, however crude and self-revealing in themselves, the remarks of Clarissa’s family reflect the response of many readers to parts of this novel, and to sentimentalist literature more generally, that we are being subjected to an overwhelming moral pressure against which there is no appeal” (Sentiment of Reality 36). 34. Castle 23.


35. Scheiber suggests that because it is set in opposition to Lovelace’s (and, I would add, the Harlowes’) “significations,” Clarissa’s discourse defines itself as a “rival code, a subversive discourse,” thereby, in effect, institutionalizing its own system of ethics for the novel and beyond (500). 36. In The Courtship Novel, 1740–1820 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), Katherine Sobba Green argues that Lovelace and Clarissa are both “trapped” in the Harlowes’ “patriarchal paradigm” because the same patterns of abuse that the Harlowes inflict on Clarissa in the first part of the novel are inevitably repeated by Lovelace in the second part (54). The implication that Lovelace is himself the victim of inherited patriarchal codes of behavior toward women and therefore also the victim of his own tyrannical treatment of Clarissa is troubling but undoubtedly valid. The codified discourse employed by Lovelace in his tyranny is, in any case, obviously very different from that of the Harlowes. 37. As Hudson says, “[I]ronically, the person who is convinced that Lovelace has executed a coherent plot is Clarissa” (31). 38. Keymer points out the ways that this narrative represents the complete undermining of Clarissa’s sense of herself as writer and, I would add, as “novelist” after the rape. Clarissa not only loses her powers of analysis but also her faith in the reliability of that analysis as process for extracting “meaning” out of experience: “Her failure to reduce her experience the linear arrangements of prose occurs simultaneously with a radical questioning of subjectivity as an organizing principle,” Keymer writes. “Having recognized the resistance of the world to ‘connected and particular’ rendition, she then makes the logical step of questioning the subjective basis on which her constructions of it have previously been founded” (224). 39. In one contrary argument, Warner contends that Belford’s taking over of Clarissa’s narrative, rather than masculating her discourse, emasculates Belford: “Belford endows Clarissa—the art object—with so much energy, beauty, and spirituality (with so much of his own power) that he becomes impotent” (45). In another, Donnalee Frega, Speaking in Hunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in Clarissa (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), maintains that the silencing of Clarissa and her role as martyred subject in Belford’s narrative provides her with a more powerful discourse in the novel than she had when she was a primary letter writer: “I wish to suggest that Clarissa’s starvation is not a repudiation of language or a displacement of power, as Castle suggests, but, rather, a powerful and erotic (if dangerous) form of discourse. Clarissa becomes an authoritative voice as she suffers, chastising and reforming all around her, directing and managing her resources as she could not have done as a well-nourished healthy woman” (4). 40. In his study of the Novels of the 1740s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), Jerry C. Beasley provides a very “male” reading of Clarissa as sentimental romance, arguing that Richardson refines the romance genre in his novels (presumably as a way of defeminizing them) to “focus narrowly on the moral dimensions of the book.” Beasley describes the conventional endings of sentimental novels as a conjunction of morality and romance, where “love and a happy marriage signify the rewards due to the

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virtuous at the end of a moral struggle, and marriage is seen as the earthly state nearest to heavenly bliss.” Beasley, who evidently reads the novel entirely in terms of its ending, declares that Clarissa concludes true to form, “for the heroine goes as ‘bride’ to her ‘marriage’ in heaven” (37). 41. In Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), Christine Roulston points out that Anna’s consistently feminist response to Clarissa’s letters has the effect of gendering their correspondence and, more important, of encouraging us to read Clarissa’s narrative in gendered terms: “What Anna also reveals is that gendered writing leads to gendered reading of writing. Anna perceives writing as a feminine occupation, which takes place indoors and which functions as a substitute for physical action. For her, writing is always defined by gender, and, in this sense is never a neutral act of communication” (34). 42. Because they are grounded in the same system of values, Anna’s arguments with Clarissa, Keymer notes, effectually produce a narrative that is inherently self-interrogating. Although Keymer does not recognize this deconstructive activity as gendered nor does he distinguish Anna and Clarissa’s intertextual narrative from other narrations in the book, his analysis does describe the dynamics of “woman’s” discourse in Clarissa and its place in the history of the novel as genre: “Anna is a friendly examiner but an examiner nonetheless, and her responses enable Richardson to incorporate in the text sustained and explicit interrogation of its own main narrative (an innovation that sets Clarissa apart from the majority of epistolary novels, and makes it unique in Richardson’s own work)” (45). Chapter 3. Finding a Voice: Toward a Woman’s Discourse of Dialogue in Jane Eyre 1. Janet Freeman, “Speech and Silence in Jane Eyre,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 24 (1984): 699. 2. Genette, Narrative Discourse 226. 3. The serious consequences that can occur in criticism that implicitly, and necessarily, adopts this fixed narratological paradigm are evident in one of the earliest and most cited studies of narrative structure in Jane Eyre. In “The Unpoetic Compromise: On the Relation between Private Vision and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction,” Society and Self in the Novel, ed. Mark Schorer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), G. Armour Craig traces the movement of the narrative in terms of “gradation of glory” in the moral development of Jane’s character, which culminates in her final reunion with Rochester when she consciously decides not to tell him that she heard him call out for her. In that moment, Craig says, Jane achieves a level of private moral consciousness as a character that puts her beyond social discourse and makes her no longer functional as narrator. This creates closure for both story and narration— “The heroine has narrated herself into silence, and the novel must end” (38). When Craig locates the voice of the narration entirely with the protagonist, who as narrator presents herself from beginning to end as an adult relating retrospectively the events of her early life, he must by implication also adopt Genette’s paradigm that the character


be in a strong position to narrate by the end of the book. By Craig’s own account, however, when Jane, the character, converges with Jane, the narrator who is about to begin the story, she does so at a time when that character in her moral superiority is incapable of the kind of social discourse necessary for producing such a book; the story we have just read, then, is one that logically could not have been told. 4. “Jane Eyre in Search of Her Story,” Papers on Language and Literature 16 (1980): 387–402. I particularly want to recognize Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s contribution to feminist narratological readings of Jane Eyre because in the earlier published version of this chapter, when my thinking about feminist narratological theory was relatively new, I fear I oversimplified her position; in aligning her reading categorically with Freeman’s, I missed the narratological complexities of her reading of the text. 5. For other intergeneric readings of Jane Eyre, see Robert B. Heilman, “Charlotte Brontë’s New Gothic,” From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958) 118–32; and Jerome Beaty, “Jane Eyre and Genre,” Genre 10 (1977): 619–54, and “Jane-Eyre Cubed: The Three Dimensions of the Text,” Narrative 4 (1996): 74–93. 6. Susan S. Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) 176–93. 7. Warhol, “Double Gender.” 8. In Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires use Jane Eyre as an example of how to distinguish between the “narrator” and the “narrated subject” in an autodiegetic novel, where the two might otherwise appear to be the same. In applying their distinction to Jane Eyre, however, Cohan and Shires identify the “narrating Jane” as simply the fully developed adult version of the “focalizing young Jane.” For them, in keeping with Genette’s theory, the voice of the character Jane progressively develops over the course of the novel until she reaches the stage of becoming the narrator. The voice of the narration is absolutely identical to the voice of the character, except that it is now mature and, for the purposes of the fiction, finalized. 9. An interesting variation is Carla Kaplan’s “Girl Talk: Jane Eyre and the Romance of Women’s Narration,” Novel 30 (1996): 5–32. Kaplan argues that the narrative movement of Jane Eyre repeats the protagonist’s search for her “ideal audience” but does not represent it. According to Kaplan, the ideal audience for Jane is not another character but the reader of her text—the only one to whom Jane can completely confide. Unlike Freeman and other critics adopting Genette’s structural paradigm, Kaplan argues that Jane’s success in finding the audience for her speech cannot occur at the end of the fiction and is still ongoing when the novel begins. Thus Kaplan distinguishes, as Bodenheimer does, between the novel’s “external” and “internal” narrative. Both Kaplan and Bodenheimer, however, discuss “narrative” only in terms of Jane telling her story. 10. Genette, Narrative Discourse 223. Carolyn Williams in “Closing the Book: The Intertextual End of Jane Eyre,” Victorian Connections, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989) and Peter Allan Dale, “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Tale Half-Told’: The Disruption of Narrative Structure in Jane Eyre,” Modern Language

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Quarterly 47 (1986) trace binary movements that implicitly undermine the linear structures endorsed by traditional narratology. Williams argues that Jane’s story proceeds “antithetically” rather than progressively (60–87), and Dale identifies an unresolved dichotomy between the religious structure, “the dominant one in the narrative,” and the romantic structure, assumed by the reader to be paramount (108–29). Both see the irreconcilability of the novel’s structural ambiguities realized at the end, when Jane turns the “last word” of the narrative over to St. John Rivers instead of closing the novel herself, thus leaving her own narration open and unfixed. Both, however, treat narrative and storytelling as synonymous and recognize no other level of narrational activity in the book. 11. Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited 11. 12. A version of this chapter was previously published as “Finding a Voice: Towards a Woman’s Discourse of Dialogue in the Narration of Jane Eyre,” Studies in the Novel 23 (1991): 218–36. 13. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 320. 14. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence, vol. 2 (1933; reprint, Oxford: B. Blackwell, Shakespeare Head Press, 1980) 255. 15. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 309. 16. Along the same lines, in Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), Margaret Homans argues that Brontë recognized the Gothic as a man’s conception of a female genre, one in which “women are relegated in romantic myths of subjectivity and transcendence.” Brontë’s authorial antagonism toward this symbolic placement of women within this literature, Homans contends, is evident in the way she undermines the Gothic possibilities in the novel at the same time that she makes full dramatic use of them. 17. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) 38. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text. 18. Bodenheimer 391. 19. For a close, convincing analysis of these dynamics, see Freeman 693–97. 20. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Oxford: Wesleyan University Press, 1975) 76. 21. Fielding 154–55. 22. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (New York: Garland, 1989) 43–46. (This opening was eliminated in serialization.) 23. Gérard Genette, Figures in Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 135. 24. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 80. 25. Wise and Symington 3:99. 26. Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined.” My introduction discusses this theory in more detail. 27. In Charlotte Brontë: Style in the Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), Margot Peters recognizes this same duality built into the grammar of Brontë’s


prose. Peters notes that Brontë’s preference for high-intensity adverbs has the effect of impassioning her sentences, proving that “to Charlotte Brontë both the action and its object are eclipsed in importance by the way an act is performed—its duration, its intensity, its manner” (23). At the same time, she says, Brontë’s sentence structure effectively contains and structures the intensity of emotion created by adverbial phrases: “While the adverb lends an emotive quality to Brontë’s prose, this quality is countered—checked, bridled, and disciplined—by barriers of semicolons, colons, and periods. Sentence structure enforces a stringency that the adverb frequently denies, and tension is generated from these conflicting parts” (43). Although there is no adverbial play in this passage, the overuse of different forms of final punctuation marks does have the effect of containing the passion actually articulated in the speech. 28. In The Cover of the Mask: The Autobiographers in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1982), Annette Tromly suggests that comedy is implicit even in Jane’s dramatic appeal for servitude: “Jane does not recognize her own need to elevate even domestic employment into something of romance. ‘A new servitude’ is hardly a phrase that describes the normal existence of most maids and governesses: only Cinderella would find life so intense” (49). 29. Freeman 698. 30. For a close, competent analysis of this scene and what it shows about Jane as a storyteller, see Bodenheimer 398–400. 31. Genette, Narrative Discourse 23. 32. Freeman 695. 33. Not coincidentally, St. John Rivers is also the only complex, fully developed adversarial character in the novel. Jane’s portraits of early villains in the first narrative sequence—the four Reeds, Mr. Brocklehurst—are all painted with a very broad brush, in keeping with the exaggerated point of view of a child and with the stereotypical characterization of evil in the sentimental novel. The portrayal of Blanche Ingram in the second phase of the narrative is in itself no less brutal, but it is made more complex by Jane’s immediate narrative analysis of Blanche’s behavior toward and interaction with Rochester as well as by the honesty of Jane’s exploration into her own immediate response to their relationship. Legitimate dialogue, however, requires two equal partners. As a result, St. John Rivers, in contrast to these earlier characters, is developed as a complete person, with a distinct psychology and pattern of speech, one who cannot be comfortably categorized. 34. These include Bodenheimer, Freeman, Tromly, and Carla Kaplan but also, by implication, all feminist critics who see Jane in control of Rochester at the end of the novel. 35. Inga-Stina Ewbanks’s assessment of this passage does not agree with mine. In Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as Early Victorian Female Novelists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), she argues that although the narrator’s analogy of the sleeping lover may be formally functional, “the effect of the image remains a dilution, rather than a concentration, of the impact on us of Jane’s shock. It suggests what other parts of the novel confirm, that Charlotte’s language only becomes truly imaginative when she is working on a mind in an agony of passion” (183, emphasis

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mine). It seems to me that the melodramatic language of Ewbanks’s own generalization is out of keeping with the style of the narrative in most of Jane Eyre and that her statement approves for Brontë the kind of narrative that is deliberately parodied in the opening chapters of the novel, the kind that Brontë was trying to get away from in her work. 36. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Harcourt, Brace, 1929) 68–70. In “Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism,” Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn (New York: Methuen, 1985), Cora Kaplan suggests that Virginia Woolf ’s criticism of this speech is grounded in her own limited social vision and her “own anxieties about subjectivity, class, sexuality, and culture” (173). Kaplan herself claims that Brontë’s narrational observation that “millions are in revolt” constitutes a radical means of associating the politics of gender with the mass social rebellions that characterized the times: “In 1847, on the eve of the second great wave of modern revolution, it was a dangerous statement to make” (171). Although Kaplan concedes that Brontë’s anger had its source in misrepresentations of women rather than any empathy with larger social and class movements and complains that Brontë was unable to sustain her radicalism beyond this one moment in the narrative, still her reading confirms the larger dimensions of narrative scope in this text. 37. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 74–75. 38. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 45–59. Chapter 4. Ideology, Ethics, and Voice: Privileging the Woman’s Mode in Bleak House 1. Interesting variations on this thesis can be found, for example, in Carol A. Senf, “Bleak House: Dickens, Esther, and the Androgynous Mind,” Victorian Newsletter 64 (1983): 21–26; Virginia Blain, “Double Vision and the Double Standard in Bleak House: A Feminist Perspective,” Literature and History 11 (1985): 31–46; Suzanne Graver, “Writing in a ‘Womanly’ Way and the Double Vision of Bleak House,” Dickens Quarterly 4 (1987): 3–15; Martin A. Danahay, “Housekeeping and Hegemony in Bleak House,” Studies in the Novel 23 (1991): 416–31; and Barbara Gottfried, “Household Arrangements and the Patriarchal Order in Bleak House,” Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (1994): 1–17. 2. Merritt Moseley, “The Ontology of Esther’s Narrative in Bleak House,” South Atlantic Review 50 (1985): 35. 3. In “The Monstrous Actress: Esther Summerson’s Spectral Name,” Dickens Studies Annual 19 (1990), Chiara Briganti makes a similar point, adding that unlike David and Pip, who use the past as a way of clarifying the present, “Esther attempts to bury it” (213). 4. Lisa Jadwin, in “‘Caricatured, Not Faithfully Rendered’: Bleak House as a Revision of Jane Eyre,” Modern Language Studies 26 (1996), traces specific similarities and argues that by “incorporating large portions of Jane Eyre’s narrative structure and plot, Bleak House substitutes feminine submissiveness for proto-feminist rebellion at a variety of levels” (112–13).


5. Anny Sadrin, “Charlotte Dickens: The Female Narrator of Bleak House,” Dickens Quarterly 9 (1992): 50. 6. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 6 and 10. 7. Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 1. 8. Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 25. 9. Kristeva’s concept of “woman’s” discourse as other is discussed more fully in my introduction. 10. Genette, Narrative Discourse 244. 11. Graham Daldry, Charles Dickens and the Form of the Novel: Fiction and Narrative in Dickens’ Work (London: Croom Helm, 1987) 129–34; Philip Collins, “Some Narrative Devices in Bleak House,” Dickens Studies Annual 19 (1990): 131–34; and Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 130, discuss the issue of omniscience in relation to the two narrators in Bleak House. 12. For a fuller explanation of Hutcheon’s concept, see my introduction. 13. Saundra K. Young, “Uneasy Relations: Possibilities for Eloquence in Bleak House,” Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1980): 74. 14. John Fenstermaker, “Language Abuse in Bleak House: The First Monthly Installment,” Victorian Literature and Society: Essays Presented to Richard D. Altick, ed. James R. Kincaid and Albert J. Kuhn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984) 240–57; Barbara Gottfried, “Fathers and Suitors: Narrative of Desire in Bleak House,” Dickens Studies Annual 19 (1990): 162–203; and Richard T. Gaughan, “‘Their Places Are a Blank’: The Two Narrators in Bleak House,” Dickens Studies Annual 21 (1992): 79–96 all discuss the effects of institutional polyphony in Bleak House. 15. In “Types of Subjective Narration in the Novels of Dickens,” English Language Notes 18 (1980), Robert W. Duncan observes that Dickens often made use of “free indirect discourse” as a way of organizing narrative: “For Dickens it not only contributed an intimacy and reality to the narration, but also afforded the opportunity to achieve ironies and ambiguities by manipulating a mixture of direct and subjective reporting” (36). This description could easily apply to Esther’s style of narration as well. 16. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Oxford University Press, 1948) 37. All references in my text to Bleak House are to this edition. 17. In Gendered Interventions, Robyn Warhol looks at different ways that the thirdperson narrative in Bleak House is “invaded” by other voices (150–52). 18. In “The Agitating Women,” Dickensian 69 (1973), Ellen Moers claims that “the masculine world of Bleak House has fatally slowed down, while the feminine world is alarmingly speeding up” (21). The representation of this phenomenon in the novel, she says, reflects the ambivalence of Dickens’s response to social feminism. 19. My argument is that in Bleak House Dickens conceives first-person narrative in larger terms than simply the person who is narrating; it may equally apply to heterodiegetic narrators adopting first-person techniques. 20. Newton 13. 21. Genette, Narrative Discourse 252–53. 22. Saundra Young offers a detailed and ingenious discussion of this rhetorical play,

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particularly in contrast to Esther’s “truth-telling” narrative. She points out the irony that critics also identify in the dual narrative of Clarissa and Lovelace and that while the woman’s style may be privileged, the other narrative is much more fun: “Thus the narrative strategy of Bleak House poses a problem for the reader. One of its voices is wholly rhetorical, artificial, fluid as words. At the same time, this voice is wonderfully engaging, comic, dynamic. The other narrator, Esther, is serious, mimetic, and sincere. However, largely because of the contrast between her earnest efforts to tell her own story and the vivacity of the rhetorical narrator’s play with language, Esther’s narrative seems constrained and limited to the reader” (77). 23. Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs, Dickens: The Orphan Condition (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999) 104. 24. In The Companion to Bleak House (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988) 68–73, Susan Shatto outlines the specific references to Leigh Hunt in Skimpole’s characterization. 25. For chapter-by-chapter definitions of all these formal elements, see Worcester. 26. Briganti 226. 27. Hochman and Wachs 101. 28. Bert G. Horback, “The Other Portion of Bleak House,” The Changing World of Charles Dickens, ed. Robert Giddings (London: Vision Press, 1983) 183. Much more recently, and for the same reasons, Jadwin asserts that Esther was Dickens’s “most notorious aesthetic failure” (113). 29. Gottfried, “Household Arrangements” 4; Briganti 206; Graver 4; Jaffe 20; and Sadrin 49–51. 30. Lynette Felber, “‘Delightfully Irregular’: Esther’s Nascent Écriture Feminine in Bleak House,” Victorian Newsletter 85 (1994): 13–20. 31. Alex Zwerdling, “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated,” PMLA 88 (1973): 429–39, and Paul Eggert, “The Real Esther Summerson,” Dickens Studies Newsletter 11 (1980): 74–81 are the most cited psychological studies of Esther as narrator. In “‘I’ll Follow the Other’: Tracing the (M)other in Bleak House,” Dickens Studies Annual 19 (1990), Marcia Renee Goodman argues that Esther’s reticence in relation to her own narration can be identified as stereotypically “female” or “male”: “Reading Esther as a woman would take us to her insecurity about speaking, to, that is, the issue of her right to her own authority. Reading Esther as a man, on the other hand, highlights her ambivalence about sharing her inner self because of the fears that she will either be rejected, or just as awful, accepted but encompassed, merged with another” (152). 32. Michael Kearns, “‘But I Cried Very Much’: Esther Summerson as Narrator,” Dickens Quarterly 1 (1984): 125. 33. Kearns 123. 34. Joseph Sawicki, “‘The Mere Truth Won’t Do’: Esther as Narrator in Bleak House,” Journal of Narrative Technique 17 (1987): 209–23. 35. Daldry also identifies Esther’s illness as the point where her character achieves for the narrative a new measure of authority because it coincides with the point at which she discovers her real identity (78). 36. Hochman and Wachs come to a similar conclusion: “What characterizes the voice not only is its inability to be or to do anything, but also its inability to envision


anything substantive outside the narrow range of its drastically curtailed inner life. It careens exuberantly within its discourse, appropriating, in a manner of speaking, all of Dickens’s comic and rhetorical powers for its own needs. In the end, however, it cannot escape the constraints of its unconditional orphan plight” (111). 37. A more comprehensive explanation of this paradigm, as I use it throughout this study, can be found in my introduction. 38. Suzanne Graver (12) and Joseph Sawicki (219) both discuss in different ways how Esther’s narrative deconstructs itself and its values in the ending that Dickens provides her. 39. Felber 18. Chapter 5. Performing Texts: Woman and Polyphony in Mrs. Dalloway 1. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953) 55. 2. Quentin Bell claims that “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” was “as near as she came to a manifesto”: Virginia Woolf: A Biography, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) 104. In “The Whole Contention between Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf, Revisited,” Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottleib (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1983), Beth Rigel Daugherty notes how much the intensity behind this “manifesto” can be attributed to her response to Arnold Bennett: “No matter how sensitive Virginia Woolf may have been in private, she was not in the habit of answering her critics in public. Thus, when she reacts to Arnold Bennett’s seemingly mild criticism of her characters in Jacob’s Room by publishing one version of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” three times, revising it to present to a women’s college at Cambridge, and then publishing the revision three times, her reaction is called excessive” (269). 3. After initially declaring Ulysses revolutionary, Woolf professed to hating it—for reasons frequently repeated in her diary entries of this period. 4. A sentence about the inaccessibility of its language from a derogatory review is cited in Woolf ’s Reading Notebooks of that year. In “Mrs. Dalloway and T. S. Eliot’s Personal Wasteland,” Journal of Modern Literature 10 (1983), Erwin R. Steinberg argues, in fact, that the personal history of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway closely parallels Eliot’s own (3–25). 5. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 314. 6. Note that throughout 1923 Woolf was “working vigorously” on Freshwater, a satiric drama on and textual parody of Victorian writers. In her diary for July 8, Woolf refers to the fact that she was writing this play simultaneously with Mrs. Dalloway; therefore, she was obviously thinking and writing in the mode of literary parody at the very time she was composing the novel. 7. In “Textual Functions of Free Indirect Discourse in the Novel of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf,” Revue Romaine de Linguistique 26 (1981), Stefan Oltean offers a thorough analysis of free indirect discourse as it works as a polyvocal device in the narrating of the fiction of Mrs. Dalloway (534–57). For an analysis of FID as a feminist narrational technique, see Kathy Mezei, “Who Is Speaking Here? Free Indirect Discourse, Gender,

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and Authority in Emma, Howard’s End, and Mrs. Dalloway,” Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 66–92. 8. Daniel Ferrer would disagree. In Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (New York: Routledge, 1990), he maintains that because free indirect discourse is represented as the act of a single narrator, who chooses to limit “him/herself to reporting the thoughts of a single character,” all the different voices are projected equally “on the same plane,” thereby representing an ideal heteroglossia (18). Like Ferrer, Lanser agrees that Woolf’s particular use of the mode of free indirect discourse levels the playing field but argues that it does so only because all the characters demonstrate “a semantically common voice,” creating “a single if shared subjectivity.” Unlike Ferrer, she concludes that this narrative strategy does not therefore create genuine heteroglossia but instead disguises the “covert authority” of a single narrative voice, and that in fact Woolf’s mode of narration is just as hegemonic as that more overtly employed in patriarchal tradition of the intrusively authoritative narrator (Fictions of Authority 104). 9. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 117. 10. Ben Wang, “‘I’ on the Run: Crisis of Identity in Mrs. Dalloway,” Modern Fiction Studies 38 (1992): 178. 11. Jean O. Love, Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) 155. 12. James Naremore, The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) (“seamless” is Naremore’s term); J. Hillis Miller, “Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead,” Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Reuben Brower, “Something Central Which Permeated Mrs. Dalloway,” and Geoffrey Hartman, “Virginia’s Webb,” both in Modern Critical Views: Virginia Woolf, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986). More recently, in her study of its poetics, Stella McNichol declares in Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction (London: Routledge Press, 1990) that Mrs. Dalloway is a “completely unified novel.” In Unifying Strategies in Virginia Woolf ’s Experimental Fiction (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1985), Adrian Velicu provides a detailed identification and analysis of unifying techniques in Woolf ’s major novels. 13. Edward Bishop, “Writing, Speech, and Silence in Mrs. Dalloway,” English Studies in Canada 12 (1986): 397–423; Pamela Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) 75. In “Split Perspective: Types of Incongruity in Mrs. Dalloway,” Papers of Language and Literature 22 (1986), Herbert Marder analyzes “types of incongruity” on all levels of Mrs. Dalloway, “to display the contradictions rather than to resolve them” (56). 14. Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 5, 6. 15. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981) 13. All references in my text to Mrs. Dalloway are to this edition. 16. Virginia Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art,” Granite and Rainbow (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958) 16.


17. Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art” 17. 18. The narrative continues, clearly tongue-in-cheek, in like manner: “Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s Street. Tall men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tail-coats and their white slips and their hair raked back who, for reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window of Brooks’s with their hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale light of the immortal presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa Dalloway” (18). 19. In this context, Naremore identifies the outside narrative voice as belonging to Virginia Woolf herself (92). In “Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway,” The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983), Elizabeth Abel agrees, claiming that in her extended “lecture on Proportion and Conversion,” Woolf “appears to denounce in her own voice the twin evils of contemporary civilization” (182). Given Woolf ’s strong critical complaints against authors who use their fictional narrations to deliver in their own disguised voices personal, ideological concerns, I feel a little uncomfortable with this kind of assertion. Undoubtedly, however, Woolf at least shared the viewpoints (and indeed the tone of voice) of her mediating narrator in Mrs. Dalloway. I am intrigued by John Mepham’s suggestion in “Mourning and Modernism,” Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (London: Vision Press, 1983), that here Woolf is, in fact, satirizing the patriarchal convention of the intrusive authoritarian narrative voice with her authorial narrative commentary, while at the same time she is also making use of that parody to deliver her own real authorial views (140). Mezei agrees that “this particular discourse mimics the language of patriarchy” (“Who Is Speaking Here?” 84). In Authorial Divinity in the Twentieth Century: Omniscient Narration in Woolf, Hemingway, and Others (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), Barbara K. Olson examines patterns in Woolf ’s sporadic use of the omniscient narrating in her texts (64–99). 20. This point is reinforced by the many instances of irony, sarcasm, and punning built into the narration of the fiction as when, for example, describing the occasion of Doris Kilman’s religious conversion the narrator notes: “Bitter and burning, Miss Kilman had turned into a church two years and three months ago” (124). 21. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” “The Captain’s Death Bed” and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950) 102. 22. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 112. 23. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975) 65. 24. Earlier in this essay, she describes the entire “Georgian” movement in precisely these terms: “At the present moment we are suffering, not from decay, but from having no code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship. The literary convention of the time is so artificial—you have to talk about the weather and nothing but the weather throughout the entire visit—

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that, naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society” (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 115). 25. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 116. 26. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 116. The fact that the skywriting is clearly an advertisement also suggests that Woolf may have considered the innovations of her contemporaries to be at least a little gimmicky. This is in part confirmed by her first reaction on finishing Ulysses, recorded in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1977–84): “The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts” (2:199). 27. Here I paraphrase the “inadvertently” symbolic discourse of Mrs. Dempster, a character who appears only once in the novel and may well represent, in the context of the opening sequence, a dramatized urban class version of the “modern mind.” “Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash m’dear. For really, what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been no mere matter of roses, and what was more, let me tell you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to change her lot with any woman’s in Kentish Town! But, she implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses” (27). 28. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 35. 29. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 75. 30. Septimus’s sense of being connected (literally) to nature, his assumption that he is at the center of life and that through him the union of man, nature, and the universe is realized, his vision of the outside world as inherently symbolic (while still recognizing its separate, physical reality), his conviction that only he knows the “truth” of things and that he must write these truths down and pass them on to the world—all identify his character in a very exaggerated way as stereotypically, “literarily” Romantic. 31. Although “focalization” as narrative mood is usually distinguished from “discourse,” in this novel, with this kind of reading, the two are obviously vitally interdependent. Genette makes this exception when “the object signified (narrated) be itself language” as it is in my analysis (Narrative Discourse 164). 32. Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art” 17–18. 33. Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art” 20 34. The narrator personifies these evils in the figure of Sir William Bradshaw, a more powerful version of Holmes, who not coincidentally is identified here with his large motor car, the symbol that replaced flowers in the opening sequence of the novel. 35. Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art” 19. 36. She wrote in response to a letter from Jacques Ravat, who had described the effects of some words as being like stones thrown into water. Ravat wrote, “There are splashes in the outer air in every direction, and under the surface waves that follow one another into dark and forgotten corners” (Quentin Bell 106). Woolf applies his idea to structure: “In fact I rather think you’ve broached some of the problems of the writer’s too, who are trying to catch and consolidate and consummate (whatever the word is for making literature) those splashes of yours; for the falsity of the past (by which I mean


Bennett, Galsworthy and so on) is precisely I think that they adhere to the formal railway of the sentence, for its convenience, never reflecting that people don’t and never did feel or think or dream for a second in that way; but all over the place in your way.” The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977–82) 135–36. Abel makes a case for the novel’s radial narration as a distinctly female narrative structure, specifically in contrast to the epic structure in Ulysses (164). Woolf ’s comments about “Bennett, Galsworthy and so on” would appear to corroborate her point. Note this, too, in connection with the analysis of Peter Walsh’s linear narration in the next section of this chapter. 37. For a full discussion the difference between metaphoric and metonymic structuring, see David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). Lodge’s use of these terms reverses their positions in most feminist critical theory. There the word metonymy is used to describe the open structure associated with the jouissance of the female narrative while metaphor is associated with the closed structure of the symbolic “male” narrative paradigm. I believe, however, that the reversal of terms is really a matter of semantics. As poetic trope, metaphor more accurately describes Clarissa’s radial narrative and metonymy (used by Lodge as a synonym for synecdoche) the style of conventional linear narration parodied in the text. In her analysis of women’s poetics, Jeanne Kammer makes the same distinction in “The Art of Silence and the Forms of Women’s Poetry.” In Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), she contrasts the conventional understanding of trope as “epiphor” with the women’s use of metaphor as “diaphor.” Epiphor, which defines something intangible in terms of a more accessible image (“my luv is a red, red rose”), “sets in motion a primarily linear process of concretion to abstraction.” Diaphor, on the other hand, creates metaphoric meaning by juxtaposing two or more unrelated images: “Rooted in the associational properties of the subconscious mind its movement is not necessarily linear and does not require syntactic support.” Kammer argues that diaphor also characterizes modernist poetics in general (156–57). 38. Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art” 18. 39. In The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), Patricia Ondek Laurence explores the ways in which Woolf represents “silence” discursively in her novels and in so doing how she stylistically “interrogates the nature of the novel and the literary.” Laurence identifies the language of silence, that is, the discourse that goes on internally while the subject is not speaking, as “woman’s” discourse. She does so in explicit contrast to value placed on actual talk and phrase-making by men (“presence mastered”) that characterizes the realism of the conventional patriarchal novel (1–42). 40. More to the point, these debates suggest that Woolf was reconceiving what those gendered terms might be. In “A Woman’s Writer’s Diary: Virginia Woolf Revisited,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 12 (1989), Harriet Blodgett argues that given Woolf ’s aesthetics, “the fully improvisational, ideally unselfconscious, mode of the di-

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ary,” the form most often associated with women, was actually “antipathetic” to her. Instead, she says, Woolf “writes with active awareness of herself as a diarist and the diary as a literary form to be mastered.” According to Blodgett, Woolf ’s obvious consciousness of language structure and form in her diaries reveals a “gendered sense of herself ” as a writer that simultaneously suggests a new sense of what “gendered as a writer” might mean (57–61). In Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), Lyn Pykett makes the same point more fully, arguing that in “her deliberations of her own writing practice in her diaries, and more especially in her analyses of the current state of fiction and her prognostications on its future in her reviews and essays, Woolf constantly focused on the connections between gender and writing. She discussed writing in gendered terms, and, on occasion (although by no means consistently), asserted a belief in the necessity to engender a new kind of fiction by gendering writing differently” (91). 41. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 101–2. 42. Lanser, Fictions of Authority 103. In their discussion of her poetics, Gilbert and Gubar also include Joyce and Eliot as part of the phallocentric authority that Woolf confronted as a novelist and that she addressed in her critical prose (The War of the Words 236). 43. “Modern Fiction,” The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925) 215. 44. The following description of Joyce’s narrative posturing in Ulysses recorded in Woolf ’s diary could (with a very slight adjustment in the age) also perfectly characterize Peter: “I am reminded all the time of some callow school boy, say like Henry Lamb, full of wit and powers, but so self-conscious & egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him, & stern ones merely annoyed; & one day hope he’ll grow out of it; but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely” (Diary of Virginia Woolf 2:199). 45. In “The Ulysses Connection: Clarissa Dalloway’s Bloomsday,” Studies in the Novel 34 (1989), Harvena Richter argues that Woolf may well have believed that in sections of Ulysses Joyce was parodying her (307). 46. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Modern Library, 1961) 44. 47. Although all the critics who treat this passage recognize its unique departure from the usual discourse of Mrs. Dalloway, their responses differ widely and are often contradictory. Reuben Brower contends that the passage, like others in the book, is simply “verbally inert matter,” something Woolf could easily and better have done without (18). Pamela J. Transue, in Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), describes it as vital, representing stylistically a kind of “metalanguage” for the structure of the novel, uniting “all time—past, present, future—in harmony of simultaneity” (94). James Naremore wonders, “To what extent does the solitary traveler represent Peter Walsh and to what extent is he simply an archetypal male sleeper?” (99, emphasis mine), and Abel sees it as a “representation of a transpersonal longing for a cosmic female/maternal/natural presence” (182). Along those lines, Gilbert and Gubar interpret the solitary traveler in symbolic terms as the male confronted with “the female enigma” (Letters from the Front 24), a trope that Judy


Little also endorses but in satirically heroic terms. In Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark, and Feminism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), Little writes, “In this comically grandiose vision, an adventurer contends with mythical landscapes in order to find himself in the arms of a feminized ideal” (202). Contrasting my reading, Nancy Armstrong sees the passage as a kind of metafictional enactment of Woolf ’s own critical vision of narration in the “new” novel. Comparing it to the narrative tirade on proportion and conversion and calling both “authorial intrusions,” she says in “A Language of One’s Own: Communication-Modeling Systems in Mrs. Dalloway,” Language and Style 16 (1983) that “this seemingly gratuitous passage is similarly calculated to destroy the common linguistic ground between author and reader long enjoyed by the novel-reading public” and that it represents for Woolf “the language of art” (356). 48. This reflects one of Woolf ’s major grievances against the conventional realistic novel: “The psychological novelist has been too prone to limit psychology to the psychology of personal intercourse; we long sometimes to escape from the incessant, the remorseless analysis of falling in love and falling out of love, what Tom feels for Judith and Judith does or does not altogether feel for Tom. We long for some more impersonal relationship. We long for ideas, for dreams, for imaginations, for poetry (“The Narrow Bridge of Art” 19). 49. Deborah Guth, “What a Lark! What a Plunge! Fiction as Self-Evasion in Mrs. Dalloway,” Modern Language Review 84 (1989): 24. 50. As Elizabeth Dodd points out in “‘On the Floor of the Mind’: Sentence Shape and Rhythm in Mrs. Dalloway,” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 36 (1995), although Septimus certainly responds to the world metaphysically, he is unable to make sense of what he sees, overwhelmed by the “poetry” of his own thinking: “Because Septimus Smith’s emotional and intellectual life is fundamentally different from the other characters’, his thoughts do not follow [the] same pattern, instead following a pattern in which the thoughts begin in abruptness and then build to emotional and rhythmic climaxes which Septimus is apparently unable to interrupt” (279). 51. A summary of the terms of this critical debate can be found in Pykett 108 52. For explicitly deconstructionist arguments on this issue, see Mepham “Mourning and Modernism” 198, and Moi 13–14. Moi, in fact, argues that Woolf herself conceived androgyny as a deconstructive trope. 53. On the issue of woman as cultural construct in Woolf ’s critical aesthetic scheme, see also Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) 32–33, and Pykett 84–85. 54. John Mepham, Virginia Woolf (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) 71. 55. Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987) 4–5. 56. In Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), Rachel Bowlby also points to the logic of this interpretation of androgyny as “female” according to Woolf ’s own definitions: “For the fusion of the ‘two ways of knowing’ would itself have to be considered an example of feminine ‘togetherness.’ Masculinity as

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‘apartness’ would necessarily lose its separate identity in being brought together with femininity as ‘togetherness’” (42). 57. In Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf ’s Writing Practice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), Sue Roe remarks that notes Woolf wrote on the first page of the first draft of Mrs. Dalloway “testify to her attempts to define a female aesthetic in her description of a woman’s voice.” “Woman’s voice,” as Woolf describes it in this marginalia in obvious reference to Clarissa, is “a vibration in the core of sound so that each word, or note, comes fluttering, alive, yet with some reluctance to inflict its vitality, some grief for the past which holds it back, some impulse nevertheless to glide into recess of the heart” (194–95). 58. Review of Dorothy M. Richardson’s 1919 novel The Tunnel, reprinted in Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979) 189. It was in describing Richardson’s style that Woolf first defined “woman’s sentence.” 59. Gilbert and Gubar, who usually resist nonessentialist notions of “woman,” also contend that Woolf uses the term “woman’s sentence” not to propose a new female language system but to revise a “woman’s relation” to patriarchal sentence structures, identifiable with but not exclusive to the speech patterns of men: “In fact we want to argue that, when in A Room of One’s Own she elaborates upon her dream of the woman writer Mary Carmichael, Woolf at least half-consciously means that her fictive Mary has triumphed not by creating a new sentence-as-grammatical unit but by overturning the sentence-as-definitive-judgment, the sentence-as-decree-or-interdiction, by which woman has been kept from feeling that she can be in full command of language” (The War of the Words 230). 60. In Refiguring Modernism, vol. 2, Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), Bonnie Kime Scott points out that what distinguishes Clarissa from Peter most is “her tendency to notice routine things as exceptional—a capacity to use the present that is missing from Peter.” It is precisely this distinction which is obliterated in this one section toward the end of the book (5). Chapter 6. Recovering the Modernist Lawrence: The Function of Woman’s Narrative in The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover 1. In “Equality Puzzle: Lawrence and Feminism,” Rethinking Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990), Janet Baron offers a useful summary of the history of feminist animosity toward Lawrence (12–22). 2. A notable exception is Diane S. Bonds, Language and the Self in D. H. Lawrence (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987). John Russell, Style in Modern British Fiction Studies in Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Lewis, and Green (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 43–88; John Haegert, “D. H. Lawrence and the Aesthetics of Transgression,” Modern Philology 88 (1990): 2–25; and Michael Squires, The Creation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) and more recently, “D. H. Lawrence’s Narrators, Sources of Knowledge, and the Problem of Coher-


ence,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 3 (1995): 469–91, analyze the narrative techniques Lawrence uses to achieve his specific effects. The special Mr. Noon issue of the D. H. Lawrence Review 20 (1988) includes two essays on narrative metafiction in that novel, Phillip Sicker’s “Surgery for the Novel: Lawrence’s Mr. Noon and the ‘Gentle Reader’” 191–207, and Maria Aline Ferreira, “Mr. Noon: The Reader in the Text” 209–21. Lydia Blanchard also offers a valuable study of Lawrence’s narrational and structuring techniques in her “‘Reading Out’ a ‘New Novel’: Lawrence’s Experimentations with Story and Discourse in Mr. Noon,” Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence, ed. Dennis Jackson and Fleda Brown Jackson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988) 110–17. 3. There have been a number of recent conference papers exploring issues of language and metaphor in Lawrence in ways that revise concepts of realism, and I see this as a positive new direction for Lawrence studies. The most significant analysis of Lawrence’s ontology of language is Michael Bell’s D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). In The Subterfuge of Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), Michael Ragussis offers a compelling analysis of “speech and art speech” in Women in Love (172–97). 4. Wayne Booth, “Confessions of a Lukewarm Lawrentian,” The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Michael Squires and Keith Cushman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) 9–27; Avrom Fleishman, “He Do the Polis in Different Voices: Lawrence’s Later Style,” D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration, ed. Peter Balbert and Phillip L. Marcus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) 162–79, and “Lawrence and Bakhtin: Where Pluralism Ends and Dialogism Begins,” Rethinking Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990) 109–20; and David Lodge, “Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin: D. H. Lawrence and Dialogic Fiction,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 29 (1985): 16–32. 5. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language 86–89. 6. A great deal of work has been done in this area by Gerald Doherty in “White Mythologies: D. H. Lawrence and the Deconstructive Turn,” Criticism 26 (1987): 477– 96; “The Dialectic of Space in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers,” Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993): 327–43; and “The Art of Leaping: Metaphor Unbound in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.” Style 26 (1992): 50–65. See also Patricia Hagen, “The Metaphoric Foundations of Lawrence’s ‘Dark Knowledge,’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29 (1987): 365–76; and Joan Douglas Peters, “Lawrence’s Genre Theory: Rhetoric as Idea,” Style 34 (2000): 36–51. 7. Bonds, in fact, utterly rejects the common notion that Lawrence and Joyce “represent antithetical poles of modernism,” and she does so on the basis of their shared use of narrative systems of language and form. The idea of antithesis, she argues, “becomes less tenable once one acknowledges that Lawrence’s writings are in some ways as profoundly shaped as Joyce’s by an awareness of the power of the linguistic system that enmeshes them both” (5). 8. Both Ragussis and Balbert also define Ursula’s metaphysical position in the novel as a “female corrective” (Balbert’s phrase) to Birkin’s inflated ideologies and vocabulary, but they see this as positive feature of the novel. Balbert uses this interpretative position

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specifically to refute feminist complaints about her characterization in a metaphysical role. I would argue against the validity of any metaphysic in which a woman functions only in relation to a man, even if it is discursively to challenge him, and I would say that this has to be bad for the novel if it pretends to be otherwise. I would also argue that Ursula’s “corrective” is merely temporary, calling attention to the revolutionary in Birkin rather than providing a reputable alternative. Her position is never endorsed over his. See Ragussis 177–85, and Peter Balbert, “Ursula Brangwen and ‘The Essential Criticism’: The Female Corrective in Women in Love,” Studies in the Novel 17 (1985): 267–85, reprinted in his D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989) 85–108. 9. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 481. 10. As with my reading of earlier novels, I am deliberately disassembling narratological distinctions between “focalization” and “discourse,” which in my textual reading are vitally interconnected. 11. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 88. 12. In “The Dialectic of Space in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers,” Doherty also sees the narrative of Sons and Lovers as “spatialized” through a dialectical structural opposition between Miriam and Clara related to language and metaphor. He assumes, however, that this metaphysical opposition is authorially determined and metaphysically real and that Paul, caught between the two women, becomes “the site at which these opposed movements clash and collide,” rather than the one who creates and then rejects their absolutes (330). 13. Bonds, Louis L. Martz, and Daniel R. Schwartz all recognize a shift in the narrational attitude toward Miriam in the second part of the book. All three claim that in the first part, the narrator presents a relatively objective portrait of Miriam at the same time that it records Paul’s separate assessment of her character. In the second part of the novel, they say, the narrator then colludes with Paul in defining the limitations of her character. Whereas Martz and Schwartz see this shift as deliberate and effective, Bonds recognizes it as a problem in the novel, and I obviously agree. Only Bonds recognizes this same collusion occurring in the narrative representation of Clara. None of them sees it occurring with Miriam in the first part of the novel, and none recognizes the cause as Paul’s progressively defined role as focalizor for the novel. See Louis L. Martz, “Portrait of Miriam: A Study in the Design of Sons and Lovers,” Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence, ed. Dennis Jackson and Fleda Brown Jasckon (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988) 47– 68; Daniel R. Schwartz, “Speaking of Paul Morel: Voice, Unity, and Meaning in Sons and Lovers,” Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 255–77; and Bonds 29–52. 14. Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 5, 6. 15. D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking Press, 1936) 479. 16. Lawrence, Hardy 476.


17. Robert Langbaum, “Lawrence and Hardy,” D. H. Lawrence and Tradition, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 70. 18. Bonds offers a more detailed reading of the language of this opening (53–56). 19. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 10–11. All references to The Rainbow are to the Cambridge edition. 20. Lawrence, Hardy 477. 21. In her excellent introduction to The Rainbow (London: Penguin Books, 1995), Anne Fernihough sees Ursula’s ontological role as “woman” in the novel as defined metaphysically in symbolic opposition to “man.” She argues that when Lawrence wrote his final draft of The Rainbow, at the end of World War I, he envisioned society as “masculinism run riot,” a state that could only be saved by what she calls a “feminization of culture.” For Fernihough, Ursula represents a latter-day “female messiah,” enacting this process of redemption in the book. At the same time, she notes, Lawrence also believed that “woman” brings industrialization and technology into the “fallen men’s world” and that a relationship of confrontation in place of man’s intrinsic balance with nature. To Fernihough, this is a role that Ursula also clearly performs. “This apparent paradox, whereby women signify both development and decline,” she contends, “is responsible for many of the interpretive difficulties posed by The Rainbow” (xiv–xvi). I am not concerned in this study with Lawrence’s philosophical systems of gendered metaphysics, nor do I like them. Still, the paradox that Fernihough sees Ursula performing in The Rainbow would seem to be yet another way that “woman” functions in a positive way to destabilize epistemological absolutes in Lawrence’s works. 22. For a fuller discussion of this rhetorical strategy in Lawrence’s nonfiction prose, see Peters’s “Rhetoric as Idea” and M. Elizabeth Wallace, “The Circling Hawk: Philosophy of Knowledge in Polanyi and Lawrence,” The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Michael Squires and Keith Cushman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) 103–20. 23. Though neither would go this far, Bonds and Wayne Templeton both see Ursula’s role in The Rainbow to refute, or at the very least interrogate, the values represented in the first part of the book, and both point to the importance of her ability to articulate difference as crucial to this role. See Bonds 63–65, and Wayne Templeton, States of Estrangement: The Novels of D. H. Lawrence, 1912–1917 (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1989) 113, 133. 24. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 101. All references in my text to Lady Chatterley’s Lover are to the Cambridge edition. 25. For a fuller theoretical discussion of Lawrence’s use of metaphor in this capacity, see Doherty, “Metaphor and Mental Disturbance: The Case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Style 30 (1996): 113–29 and Hagan. 26. Squires, Creation 142. 27. Squires, Creation 112–13. 28. Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D. H. Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963) 161. Balbert’s sexism is a little more subtle

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but no less disturbing when he makes virtually the same point in refuting feminist charges against her character in its sexual role: “The antagonism many feminists feel about Lawrence’s portrait of Ursula Brangwen in Women in Love is exceeded by their anger at his claims for the sexual rebirth of Connie Chatterley,” he writes. “And just as these critics undervalue the essential criticism Ursula supplies for Birkin’s cherished beliefs, so do they often not admire—or even acknowledge—the real target that informs Lawrence’s characterization of Lady Chatterley: her gradual acceptance and ultimate understanding of Mellors’s brand of loving suggests the full extent of Lawrence’s disgust with what he disparagingly calls the ‘modern’ notions of sexuality and commitment popular in the 1920s” (D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination 133–34). See also note 8 in this text referring to Balbert’s similar reading of Women in Love. 29. Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence and Modernism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990) 139. 30. In A Theory of Parody, Hutcheon distinguishes satire from parody in much the same way. Satire, she says targets the language of social institutions overtly in order to ridicule it. Parody, on the other hand, focuses on language as language, reproducing a specific language system in an alien context and appearing to accept rather than disparage its codes (43). 31. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 32–34; Rose 62. 32. Rose 81–83. 33. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 127. Conclusion 1. Alice Jardine, “Opaque Texts and Transparent Contexts: The Political Difference of Julia Kristeva,” The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 97. 2. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 7. 3. Felski 78. 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988) 77–78. 5. Felski 14. 6. Bette London, “Guerrilla in Petticoats or Sans-Culotte? Virginia Woolf and the Future of Feminist Criticism,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 21 (1991): 27.

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Index

Abel, Elizabeth, 121n.19, 223n.36, 224n.47 Armstrong, Nancy, 225n.47 Atwood, Margaret, 1 Austen, Jane, 86, 87–88 Backscheider, Paula, 43 Bal, Mieke, 201n.32 Balbert, Peter, 227–28n.8, 229–30n.28 Bakhtin, Mikhail (M. M.), 3, 4–5, 9, 14, 116, 128–29, 160, 163, 164, 186, 198n.10, 198n.12; and carnival, 7–8, 58, 59, 191, 198n.10, 198n.13; and “character zones,” 3, 6, 81, 129–30, 132, 197n.3; and the dialogic, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 26, 27, 34, 51, 57, 62, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 80, 81, 85, 87, 95, 96, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 112, 113, 125, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 173, 174, 175, 176, 181, 187, 189, 190, 193, 198n.9, 198n.10, 198n.13, 200n.25, 202n.40; and double-voiced discourse, 6, 14, 160, 204n.16; as narratologist, 5, 14, 198n.9, 198n.13, 199n.14; and parody, 6–7, 25– 26, 60, 81–82, 103–4, 106, 129, 199n.17; and polyphony, 5, 57, 106–7, 111, 112, 127, 130, 160, 166, 198n.9, 198n.10, 217n.14; and poststructuralism, 4–6 Barthes, Roland, 4, 53 Beaty, Jerome, 213n.5 Bell, Ian, 204n.27, 205n.41, 207n.52 Bell, Michael, 209n.21, 210n.33, 227n.3

Bell, Quentin, 219n.2 Bell, Robert H., 22, 41, 204n.16, Bennedict, Barbara, 209n.21 Bennett, Arnold, 127, 140, 219n.2, 222– 23n.36 Bishop, Edward, 131 Blain, Virginia, 216n.1 Blake, William, 134, 143 Blanchard, Lydia, 227n.2 Bleak House, 16, 100–26, 162; Esther’s narrative in, 101–3, 105, 106–9, 111, 112–14, 116, 118–22, 123–26, 216n.3, 218n.31, 218n.35, 219n.38; ethics and, 100, 112–14, 116; ideology and, 100, 103, 106–12, 114, 115, 116, 123, 124; male/female discourse in, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 125, 216n.1; polyphony in, 106–7, 111, 112, 217n.14, 217n.17; satire in, 101, 103, 107–12, 114, 115, 116, 117–18, 122, 123, 124, 125; thirdperson (patriarchal) narrative in, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105–6, 109–10, 111–12, 114–15, 116–18, 119–20, 122–23, 218– 19n.36 Blodgett, Harriet, 223–24n.40 Boardman, Michael, 22, 204n.22 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 78, 213n.4, 213n.9, 215n.30, 215n.34 Bonds, Diane S., 226n.2, 227n.7, 228n.13, 229n.23 Booth, Wayne, 160, 162–63 Bowlby, Rachel, 225–26n.56 Braudy, Leo, 204n.15 Briganti, Chiara, 117, 118, 216n.3

244 ·

Index

Brontë, Charlotte, 156; Jane Eyre, 16, 77–99, 162, (see also Jane Eyre); letters of, 81, 87 Brooks, Peter, 56 Brower, Reuben, 131, 224n.47 Brown, Murray L., 58–59, 60 Case, Alison A., 19–20, 201n.35, 204n.28 Castle, Terry, 52, 53, 54, 55–56, 58, 63, 64, 73, 207n.7, 208n.13, 208n.15, 211n.39 Caughie, Pamela, 131 Cervantes, Miguel de, 82 Chaber, Lois, 203n.14 Cixous, Heléne, 10 Clarissa, 15, 51–76, 162; Clarissa’s narrative in, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57–58, 60, 61–63, 63–65, 66–67, 68–74, 75, 76, 209n.24, 209–10n.28, 210n.32, 210n.33, 211n.35, 211n.38; Belford’s narrative in, 57, 61, 65, 73–75, 211n.39; “deconstructionist” readings of, 53–55, 57, 207–8n.7, 210n.30; ethical/moral discourse in, 68–73; Lovelace’s narrative in, 51, 54, 57–60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65–66, 67–68, 69, 72, 73,74, 208n.15; narrative authority in, 51–52, 54–59, 63, 66, 68–72, 74–78; sentimental novel and, 15, 51, 60–62, 63, 65–66, 68, 73, 74, 75, 209n.21, 210n.33, 211–12n.40; structural dialogic of, 51, 57, 61–62, 63, 75, 209n.23, 209n.24, 209n.25, 211n.36 Cohan, Steven and Linda M. Shires, 213n.8 Cohn, Dorrit, 130 Collins, Philip, 217n.11 Craig, G. Armour, 212n.3 Daldrey, Graham, 217n.11, 218n.35 Dale, Peter Allan, 213–14n.10 Danahay, Martin, 216n.1 Daugherty, Beth Rigel, 219n.2 Defoe, Daniel, Moll Flanders, 22–50, 51, (see also Moll Flanders); as pamphleteer, 43; Roxana, 27, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, 43 Dickens, Charles, 86, 104; Bleak House, 16, 100–26, 162, (see also Bleak House); David Copperfield, 101, 113, 119; Great Expectations, 113, 119; Household Words, 102

Diengott, Nelli, 12, 13, 201n.32 Dodd, Elizabeth, 225n.50 Doherty, Gerald, 227n.6, 228n.12, 229n.25 Donovan, Josephine, 198n.10, 202n.42 Doodie, Margaret Anne, 2, 197n.2 Drabble, Margaret, 1 Duncan, Robert W., 217n.15 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 225n.53 Eagleton, Terry, 55, 209–10n.28 Edwardians, 127, 135 Eggert, Paul, 218n. 31 Eliot, George, 86 Eliot, T. S., 2–3, 17, 127, 129, 134, 135, 138, 139–40, 219n.4, 224n.42 Ethical vs. Moral Discourse, 68–71, 73, 112–14, 211n.35 Ewbank, Inga-Stina, 215–16n.35 Faulkner, William, 160 Felber, Lynette, 118, 125 Felski, Rita, 192–95 Feminist metafiction, 1–2, 16, 17, 18–19. See also Metafiction Feminist narratology, 11, 12–14, 78–79, 193, 201n.32, 201n.33, 201n.35, 213n.4, 214n.16 Fenstermaker, John, 217n.14 Fernihough, Anne, 229n.21 Ferreira, Maria Aline, 227n.2 Ferrer, Daniel, 220n.8 Fielding, Henry, 37, 80, 82, 85, 86, 104, 205n.31 Fleishman, Avrom, 160 Foley, Barbara, 19 Forster, E. M., 23, 24 Freeman, Janet, 77, 78, 90–91, 92, 213n.9, 215n.34 Frega, Donnalee, 211n.39 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 200n.27 Galsworthy, John, 127, 222–23n.36 Gaughan, Richard T., 217n.14 Genette, Gérard, 14, 47, 77–79, 80, 86, 91, 97, 99, 105, 113, 121, 165, 198n.9, 212– 13n.3, 213n.8, 213n.9, 222n.31

Index · 245 Gibson, Andrew, 207n.2, 210n.29 Gilbert, Sandra, 19, 86, 98, 224n.42, 224n.47, 226n.59 Gillis, Christina Marsden, 208n.12, 209n.23 Goodman, Marcia Renee, 218n.31 Gottfried, Barbara, 118, 216n.1, 217n.14 Graver, Suzanne, 118, 216n.1, 219n.38 Green, Katherine Sobba, 211n.36 Greene, Gayle, 1, 197n.1 Griffin, Dustin, 42, 46, 47 Godwin, Gayle, 1 Gordon, Scott Paul, 207n.2 Gubar, Susan, 19, 86, 98, 224n.42, 224n.47, 226n.59 Guth, Deborah, 151–53 Gwilliam, Tassie, 209n.25 Haegert, John, 226n.2 Hagan, Patricia, 227n.6, 229n.25 Hammond, Brean, 204n.27 Hannaford, Richard, 207n.2 Hartman, Geoffrey, 131 Hartog, Curt, 203n.14 Heilman, Robert B., 213n.5 Hentzl, Gary, 22, 206n.47 Hite, Molly, 11 Hochman, Baruch, 115, 117, 218–19n.36 Hohne, Karen, 198n.10 Homans, Margaret, 214n.16 Horbach, Bert G., 118 Hudson, Nicholas, 207n.2, 208n.13, 209n.22, 211n.37 Hutcheon, Linda, 7, 60, 81, 104, 106, 132, 140, 166, 188, 208n.19, 230n.30 Irigaray, Luce, 108 Irony, 7, 22, 23, 27, 28, 36–38, 40, 43–44, 74, 111, 113, 116, 130, 137, 204n.16, 204n.22, 205n.34, 206n.43, 210n.30, 217n.15, 221n.20 Jackson, Selwyn, 22, 205n.33 Jadwin, Lisa, 102, 216n.4, 218n.28 Jaffe, Audry, 118, 217n.11 James, E. Anthony, 22, 204n.25 Jane Eyre, 16, 77–99, 162, 216n.4; classical

novel and, 80, 83–88, 90, 97, 98; direct address in, 95–96; discourse of dialogue in, 16, 80, 92–95, 97, 99; narrative structure in, 77, 79–81, 82, 84–85, 94, 97, 212n.3; and the patriarchal, 78–79, 80, 87, 94, 97; sentimental novel and, 80, 82–83, 84, 87, 88, 89–90, 97, 213n.33; “social” discourse in, 77, 78, 83, 90, 95, 97, 99; “woman’s” voice in, 16, 79, 80, 81, 88–89, 97, 99 Jardin, Alice, 192 Jong, Erica, 1 Joyce, James, 10, 17, 127, 129, 140, 149– 50, 159, 160, 161, 164, 219n.3, 222n.26, 224n.42, 224n.44, 224n.45, 227n.7 Kahane, Claire, 199n.21 Kahn, Madeleine, 7–9, 52, 55, 208n.10, 209n.24 Kaplan, Carla, 211n.9, 215n.34 Kaplan, Cora, 216n.36 Kammer, Jeanne, 223n.37 Kearns, Michael, 120 Keats, John, 134, 141, 143 Kernan, Alvin, 25 Keymer, Tom, 53, 211n.38, 212n.42 Konigsberg, Ira, 203n.15, 204n.27 Kristeva, Julia: and Bakhtin, 3, 5, 14, 198– 99n.13, 200n.25; and genotext/phenotext, 161, 184, 189; and intertextuality, 5, 14; and semiotic/symbolic discourse, 3, 9–11, 26, 56–57, 124–25, 157–58, 161, 190–91, 193, 200n.24, 200n.25, 200n.27, 203n.9, 205n.37; woman’s voice as “other,” 3, 10– 11, 26–27, 49, 50, 79, 88, 104, 125, 200n.30, 217n.9 Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Clifford section of, 167, 183–84, 185, 187–88, 189, 190; Connie’s narrative in, 167, 183, 184, 185–88, 189–90, 229–30n.28; Mellors’s section of, 167, 183, 184–85; metaphysics in, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186–90; structural pattern of, 167–68, 181–83, 185–86, 189 Langbauer, Laurie, 209n.21 Langford, Larry, 22, 37–38, 205n.30

246 ·

Index

Lanser, Susan, 12, 13, 78, 98, 148, 220n.8 Laurence, Margaret, 1 Laurence, Patricia Ondek, 223n.39 Lawrence, D. H., 7, 226–27n.8; and Bakhtin, 160, 163–64; critical prose of, 179, 229n.22; feminism and, 159– 62, 226n.1; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 17, 166, 167, 181–90; metaphysics in, 160, 162; as modernist, 159, 162, 164; The Rainbow, 17, 166, 167, 168–81, 190; Sons and Lovers, 164–66, 168, 228n.12, 228n.13; structure in, 164–66, 175, 228n.12, 228n.13; Study of Thomas Hardy, 166–67, 168, 175; Women in Love, 163–64, 174, 227–28n.8 Lessing, Doris, 1 Levin, Harry, 81 Little, Judy, 224–25n.47 Lodge, David, 160, 162–63, 223n.37 Lolita, 59 London, Bette, 195 Love, Jean O., 131 MacArthur, Elizabeth J., 56–57, 209n.23 Mansfield Park, 18 Marder, Herbert, 220n.13 Martz, Louis L., 228n.13 McGann, Jerome, 213–14n.10 McKeon, Michael, 19, 22, 36 McNichol, Stella, 220n.12 Mepham, John, 156, 221n.19, 225n.52 Metafiction (see also Feminist metafiction), 1, 3, 4, 8, 17, 19, 166, 193, 197n.1, 199n.21, 227n.2; in Bleak House, 104, 111, 119, 120; in Clarissa, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 74; in Jane Eyre, 81; in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 166, 181, 188–89; in Moll Flanders 26, 30, 34, 35, 41, 50; in Mrs. Dalloway, 128, 132, 134, 145, 146, 157; in The Rainbow, 166, 168, 170, 171, 175, 176, 178, 180 Mezei, Kathy, 12, 201n.33, 201n.35, 219– 20n.7, 221n.19 Michael, Steven C., 22 Middlemarch, 18 Miles, Rosalind, 202

Miller, J. Hillis, 131 Minow-Pinkney, Makiko, 156 “Modest Proposal,” 44 Moers, Ellen, 217n.18 Moi, Toril, 5, 11, 225n.52 Moll Flanders, 15, 22–50, 56, 162; commercial discourse in, 36, 45, 47, 48, 203n.14, 204n.26; genre and, 23–27, 29, 30, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40–41, 42, 45–6, 47, 49–50; irony in, 23, 27, 28, 36–38, 40, 43–44, 204n.22, 205n.34, 206n. 47; Moll’s narrative in, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32–36, 38, 39–40, 41, 44–46, 47–50, 203n.9, 204n.25, 207n.52; moral discourse in, 25, 27, 28, 30, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 44– 46, 47, 204n.28; neoclassicism and, 39, 42; preface of, 36–39, 204n.28, 205n.30, 205n.35; as satire, 25, 26, 35, 36, 42–48, 50, 205n. 34; satiric mask in, 23, 25, 26, 43–49, 205n.40, 205–6n.41; as semiotic novel, 24, 25, 39, 42, 50; structure of, 23, 24, 25–26, 31, 32, 34, 29–30, 31, 46– 47, 49, 204n.22 Morris, Pam, 199n.13, 200n.25 Moseley, Merritt, 101 Moynahan, Julian, 186 Mrs. Dalloway, 17, 127–58, 162; Edwardian discourse in, 129, 132, 135–39, 148, 150–51, 211n.18; Eliotic discourse in, 129, 132, 139–40, 143–44, 145; heteroglossia in, 129, 130, 132, 220n.8; Joycian discourse in 129, 140, 148–50; metaphysics in, 151–55, 225n.50; modernist poetics in, 132, 141, 142–44, 146, 148, 150, 152; “new” novel in, 129, 130, 146–47, 150, 152–55; rhetorical underargument in, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 141, 144, 148, 152, 156, 157; Romantic poetics in, 129, 132–36, 140, 141, 142–45, 146, 148, 154, 222n.30; structure of, 129, 131,146, 151, 200n.12, 222–23n.36, 223n.37 Naremore, James, 131, 221n.19, 224n.47 Narrative: autodiegetic, 47, 79, 80, 113, 120, 121, 213n.8, 213n.9; direct ad-

Index · 247 dress, 39, 45, 95–96, 122; écriture feminine, 3, 117, 118, 125; epistolary, 15, 51–54, 56–57, 61, 207n.1, 208n.12; extradiegetic, 207n.7; first-person, 16, 24, 27, 30, 32, 40, 41, 50, 52, 77, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 112–13, 114, 118, 119, 124–25, 203–4n.15, 204n.16, 217n.19; focalization, 16, 18, 66, 78, 79, 102, 103, 107–10, 113–14, 119, 124, 130, 131, 133, 135, 138, 140, 141, 142, 146, 157, 160, 164, 170, 170, 171, 173, 178, 187, 188, 222n.31, 228n.10; free indirect discourse, 108, 130, 149, 164, 217n.15, 219–20n.7, 220n.8, 222n.31; gaps, 27, 39, 78, 102, 113, 204n.17; heterodiegetic, 18, 103, 105; homodiegetic, 102, 103, 107, 217n. 19; implied reader, 39, 40, 52, 113, 205n.33, 206n.41, 228n.10, 217n.19; metadiegetic, 112; metaethics, 47; metalepsis, 91; metalinguistics, 5–7, 192, 199n.13; narratee, 39, 52, 113, 206n.41; omniscient, 98, 101, 104, 105, 137, 145, 164, 217n.11, 221n.19; pseudoiterative, 165; subjectivity, 16, 17, 53, 56, 64, 78, 103, 118–19, 123, 124, 130, 152, 153, 172, 189, 193–94, 195; tense, 43, 94, 104, 105, 108, 119–20; time, 79, 103, 119–21 Narrative authority, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 24, 49, 51–52, 54–59, 63, 66, 68–72, 74–78, 85, 98, 100, 102, 103, 111, 112, 118,120–24, 125–26, 137, 161, 165, 195 Newton, Adam Zachary, 68–69, 113 Novak, Maximillian, 22, 206n.43, 206n.47 Novel, evolution of 2–3, 7, 50, 197n.2, Novelistic discourse, 2, 3, 16, 18, 25, 31, 44, 47–50, 51, 58, 60, 61, 65, 72, 74, 75, 81, 97, 102, 104, 108, 110, 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 166, 176, 211n.38 Olson, Barbara K., 221n.19 Oltean, Stefan, 219n.7 O’Neil, John H., 206 Parody, 2, 3, 6–7, 8, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 191, 199n.17, 230n.30; in Bleak House, 104,

106, 108–12, 115–16, 117, 118, 123, 124, 125; in Clarissa, 51, 58–61, 65, 66, 68, 73, 74, 76, 209n.22; in Jane Eyre, 80, 81– 87, 88, 89, 90, 95, 96, 97, 98, 216n.35; in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 181, 182–84, 188–90; in Moll Flanders, 25–26, 31, 35– 36, 37, 38, 41, 43; in Mrs. Dalloway, 128, 129, 130–31, 132–44, 149–51, 221n.19; in The Rainbow, 179, 80 Peters, Joan Douglas, 227n.6, 229n.22 Peters, Margaret, 214–15n.27 Pinkney, Tony, 186 Pope, Alexander, 68 Preston, John, 52 Proust, Marcel, 10 Pullen, Charles, 42, 43, 205n.39, 205n.40 Pykett, Lyn, 224n.40, 225n.51, 225n.53 Ragussis, Michael, 227n.3, 227–28n.8 Rainbow, The, 190; Anna’s narrative in, 171, 172–74, 176; Lydia’s narrative in, 171, 175; metaphysics in, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181; structural pattern of, 167, 168–69, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 181; Tom’s narrative in, 168, 169, 170–73, 174, 175, 176, 179–80; Ursula’s narrative in, 167, 169, 170, 171, 175, 176–80, 229n.21, 229n.23; Will and Anna’s narrative in, 169, 173–75, 176, 177 Ravat, Jacques, 222–23n.36 Reader response, 14, 20; in Bleak House, 101–2, 104, 113, 114, 119–20, 121; in Clarissa, 52–53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 64, 66, 68, 208n.10, 210n.30; in Moll Flanders, 23, 27, 28, 32–33, 34, 38–40, 42, 205n.31, 205n.33, 206n.41; in Jane Eyre, 80, 89–90, 94, 95–96; in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 185, 188, 189–90; in Mrs. Dalloway, 131; in The Rainbow, 168 Realism, 16, 17, 18, 227n.3; in Bleak House, 107, 108, 109, 120, 124, 125; in Clarissa, 56, 58, 60, 62–64, 72, 208n.13, 210n.29; in Jane Eyre, 78; in Moll Flanders, 23, 24, 26, 38, 46; in Mrs. Dalloway, 151, 154, 225n.48; in The Rainbow, 176, 178

248 ·

Index

Rhetoric, 4, 5, 194, 195; in Bleak House, 16, 102, 103, 105, 106, 111, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 217–18n. 22; in Clarissa, 15–16, 51–52, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74; in Jane Eyre, 79, 82, 92, 94, 96; in Moll Flanders 15, 23, 25, 26, 27–30, 31, 32, 33–36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48–49, 50; in Mrs. Dalloway, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 141, 145, 147; in The Rainbow, 179, 229n.22 Richardson, Samuel, 124, 125, 208n.13, 209n.29; Clarissa, 37, 51–76, 125, 207n.2, (see also Clarissa); Letters, 208n.13 Richetti, John, 22 Richter, Harvena, 224n.45 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 204n.17, 205n.32, 207n.5 Roe, Sue, 226n.57 Rogue’s tale, 41 Rose, Margaret, 59, 188–89 Roulston, Christine, 212n.41 Ryle, Gilbert, 188–89 Russell, John, 226n.2 Sadrin, Annie, 102, 118 Sambrook, James, 204n.26 Satire, 15, 16, 22, 23, 24–26, 35–36, 38, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 101, 103, 107,108–11, 116–18, 122, 123, 124, 130, 182, 205n.34, 206n.43, 230n.30 Sawicki, Joseph, 121, 219n.38 Scheiber, Andrew, 207n.2, 210n.32, 211n.35 Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg, 204 Schwartz, Daniel, 228n.13 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 226n.60 Senf, Carol A., 216n.1 Shatto, Susan, 218n.24 Showalter, Elaine, 19, 199–200n.23 Sicker, Phillip, 227n.2 Smith Sidonie, 98–99 Smollett, Tobias, 82, 86 Snow, Melinda, 203–4n.15 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 62 Spencer, Jane, 202n.42

Spiritual autobiography, 41, 49 Spivak, Gayatri, 194 Squires, Michael, 185–86, 188, 226n.2 Stanton, Domna K., 200n.24 Starr, G. A., 49 Steinberg, Erwin R., 219n.4 Sterne, Laurence, 82, 86 Swift, Jonathan, 68 Tale of a Tub, 47 Templeton, Wayne, 229n.23 Tennyson, Alfred, 115 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 80, 85, 86, 104 Torgovnick, Marianna, 206n.50 Transue, Pamela J., 224n.47 Tristram Shandy, 30 Tromley, Annette, 215n.28, 215n.34 Van Ghent, Dorothy, 203n.6, 204n.22, 204n.27 Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 209n.21 Velicu, Adrian, 220n.12 Wachs, Ilja, 115, 218–19n.36 Wallace, M. Elizabeth, 229n.22 Wang, Ben, 130 Warhol, Robyn, 13–14, 78–79, 217n.17 Warner, William Beatty, 52, 211n.39 Watt, Ian, 15, 19, 22–24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 39, 43, 46, 49–50, 51, 202n.1, 203n.6, 204n.22, 207n.1, 207n.25, 208n.13, 209n.25 Wehrs, Donald R., 210n.30 Wells, H. G., 127 Williams, Carolyn, 213–14n.10 Williamson, Marilyn L., 202n. 42 “Woman’s” discourse, 9, 11, 14, 15, 18, 161, 162, 192, 194, 200n.30; in Bleak House, 102, 103, 106, 107, 114, 124–26, 162; in Clarissa, 75–76, 162, 212n.41, 212n.42; in Jane Eyre, 16, 77, 79, 80, 87, 88, 89–90, 97; in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 167; in D. H. Lawrence, 162, 190–91; in Moll Flanders, 23, 26, 34, 45–46, 162; in Mrs. Dalloway, 131, 156, 157, 162, 223n.

Index · 249 39, 223–34n.40, 226n.57, 226n.59; in The Rainbow, 167 “Woman’s” narrative text, 13, 14, 27, 57, 102, 103, 160–61 Woolf, Virginia, 159, 161, 164; androgyny, 155–57, 225n.51, 225n.52, 225n.53, 225– 26n.56; The Common Reader, 127–28; diaries of, 127, 222n.26, 224n.44; and Dorothy Richardson’s The Tunnel, 156– 57, 226n.58; Freshwater, 219n.6; The Hours, 127; letters of, 222–23n.36; “Modern Fiction,” 127, 148–49; and Moll Flanders, 23, 24; “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.

Brown,” 127, 128, 137, 138, 139, 140, 148, 219n.2, 221–22n.24; Mrs. Dalloway, 17, 127–58, 162; “Narrow Bridge of Art,” 134, 144, 145, 225n.48; and A Room of One’s Own, 98, 148, 156–57 Worcester, David, 205n.34 Wussow, Helen, 198n.10 Wuthering Heights, 18 Young, Saundra K., 106, 217–18n.22 Zulich, Margaret, 198–99n.13 Zwerdling, Alex, 218n.31

Joan Douglas Peters is an associate professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She specializes in narratology and the novel.

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